Shot In The Dark

Schiavo

Terri Schiavo passed away within the past hour or so:

Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman whose 15 years connected to a feeding tube sparked an epic legal battle that went all the way to the White House and Congress, died Thursday, 13 days after the tube was removed, her husband's attorney said. She was 41.

Schiavo died at the Pinellas Park hospice where she lay for years while her husband and her parents fought over her fate in the nation's longest, most bitter right-to-die dispute.

Her death was confirmed to The Associated Press by Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos, and announced to reporters outside her hospice by a family adviser.

Inconvenient people nationwide are watching their backs today.

The Chrenkoff Poll

Chrenkoff has the results of a survey on Iraq's immediate future, taken at Najaf University. Bear in mind that Najaf is the center of Shi'ite fundamentalism in Iraq; taking a poll on democracy there is like Move On doing push-polling in Salt Lake City.

It found:

"62% of those polled said they wanted Islam to be one of the sources of the constitution.

"38% wanted Islam to be the only source for the Iraqi constitution.

"49% support a federal government.

"50% support allowing those who boycotted the election to have input in writing the constitution.

"63% support the multi national forces staying in Iraq for the current time.

"85% expect the new transitional government to succeed in its goals.

"78% expect the new national assembly to successfully write a constitution by the dead line.

"1% said they expect civil war to break out."

Read the whole thing.

Brunswick In Iraq

Via Strom, I found Mark Brunswick's excellent (albeit institutional and very new) Two years in Iraq blog.

It's pretty new, but it's worth a regular read.

Brunswick knows his audience:

The PX at Camp Cuervo, where a Montevideo-based Minnesota National Guard unit is stationed in Iraq, has a sign on its doors that would be heralded as an advancement by Minnesota’s handgun permit supporters. No soldier is allowed in the store without a weapon, by order of the camp commander.

Check it out; hopefully he'll keep updating it.

Oy

According to Russian researchers, spanking is a regular miracle cure:

It may sound a bit kinky but everything from depression to alcoholism can be cured with a beating on the bare bottom, scientists claim.

Spanking is more effective than exercise at keeping the blues at bay, say Russian researchers who carried out tests on caning.

They recommend that people receive 30 weekly sessions of 60 of the best. High levels of pain make the body produce endorphins or 'happy chemicals' and this leads to feelings of euphoria.

Endorphins also boost the immune system, release sex hormones and reduce appetite.

In a related move, Phyllis Kahn has introduced a bill in the Minnesota House that would reclassify dominatrices as healthcare workers.

(Via Miss O'Hara)

Say Cheese

One of my most enduring memories of 2003 - when I spent much of the year unemployed - was hitting the classifieds and job leads hard, bright and early every morning. Frequently, the TV would be tuned into the Disney Channel. And for whatever reason, nearyl every morning they'd play that Kraft "Cheesasaurus Rex" commercial. Rex is a guitar-playing cheese-orange dinosaur, and the jingle is a, um, cheesy pop trifle that is implanted in my brain to the point of being a frequent ear-worm.

It's Chee-sa-saurus Rex

I still hear it, and it still takes me back to those dingy, desperate mornings.

So I finally googled it. Wow. Some people take that stupid ad seriously, to the point of treating it like serious social commentary.

I've never actualy seen the commercial, and wouldn't know the dinosaur if it smacked me in the head...

Smoking Bans

The Twin Cities' push to make life better through more laws continues apace, as metro cities ban smoking in bars.

The ban is having its desired effect among the populace:

Smoker Blake Drussendorf laughs.

"We just ran over from Minneapolis to get away from the Minneapolis scene to come over here," he says, his cigarette nearly down to the filter. "We got here just five minutes ago."

He finishes it before the bartender has to say anything.

"What can we do?" Drussendorf says. "We're not in charge.

Which is, indeed, what these laws are all about; showing the peasants who's the boss. "We can ban your voluntary petty vices, which take place with your own adult consent, in public places that nobody is required to go to - just try to stop us!

Ramsey County, being vastly more sensible than Hennepin (motto: "Better life through more law!") has at least given bars a means of exempting themselves from the ban:

Bars where liquor sales account for more than 50 percent of net sales. Restaurants may set up separate bar areas if they are closed off from eating areas, have a separate liquor license and have a separate ventilation system.

I'm guessing the HVAC sales community was behind the ban.

Anyway - here are the exempted bars. To be exempted, a bar's "liquor sales account for more than 50 percent of net sales."

This is anectdotal, but when I was working in bars, it always seemed lie the heaviest smokers were also the heaviest drinkers. So what we have here is this; Ramsey County ensures that the die-hard smokers, and possibly heaviest drinkers, must go to drink and smoke where no food is available, ensuring they get drunk faster and stay drunk longer, guaranteeing more driving while intoxicated. Naturally, that means more revenue for...none other than Ramsey County.

I've never smoked in my life, other than the very rare cigar. I won't miss smoke in bars (although I'm rarely in them).

But this is a stupid government trend, in a metro area that has led the nation in stupid government trends.

A Pack, Not A Herd

It was just a quiet day in Israel.

And then:

In April 1984, three terrorists opened fire with automatic rifles and began throwing hand grenades at the busiest intersection in West Jerusalem. As the Los Angeles Times reported, "One of the attackers was killed in a hail of answering fire from the owners and customers of nearby shops." A wild firefight broke out with Israelis and the two remaining terrorists exchanges flurries of bullets until the police arrived and captured the terrorists. Fourteen people were wounded, and it was possible that in the chaos, some of the Israelis were accidentally wounded by "friendly fire." [116] But at the end of the day, no Israelis were dead, but one terrorist was, a superb result compared with what happens when victims are defenseless.

The next day, the surviving terrorists were presented to the media. They explained that they had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowded areas, fleeing before the police arrived. One terrorist complained indignantly that his bosses had not told him that Israeli citizens carry guns. [117]

On another quiet day:

A Palestinian opened fire with a submachine gun at a bus stop near the port of Ashod today, killing one Israeli and wounding four before being shot to death by bystanders, officials said...
National police spokesman Erich Bar-Chen said today's attacker, who was armed with an Uzi submachine guns, was shot and killed by a civilian and a soldier who were at the bus stop and hitchhiking post used by soldiers. Ashod is 15 miles south of Tel Aviv and 15 miles north of the Gaza Strip. [118]

When terrorists - villains less inscrutable but just as evil as Jeffrey Wiese - began targeting Israeli school children in the seventies, Israel responded by allowing, and in some cases requiring, Israeli teachers to be armed while in school, and especially on field trips.

So, one week after the Red Lake massacre, while the state's landed punditry carries on its endless wailing looking for answers, Mark Yost at the PiPress goes one better; He proposes a solution:

What can we do to keep this from happening next time? How about arming security guards, as well as a handful of administrators and teachers who volunteer to be properly trained?

But Mark, savvy fella that he is, knows his market:

I can hear the gasps echoing from Mac-Groveland to Crocus Hill. But if we think any legislation is going to stop the next Jeff Weise, we're fooling ourselves. Indeed, the idea that with the right legislation and an unlimited pot of money we can take the risk out of any of life's endeavors is simply wrong...As distasteful as the idea may be to some, we need to be honest and admit that only one thing would have stopped Weise: a security guard, administrator or teacher, properly trained, and armed with a gun.

It seems like an idea worthy of discussion. Right?

This is Minnesota. Our left isn't that bright.

Rebecca Thoman, president (and practically the only member) of Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota, is up in arms, as it were. See if you can find any thread of logic in the group's Thoman's response:

As if the tragedy at Red Lake High School isn't bad enough, the gun lobby suggests that we solve the problem with more guns, arming everyone from school security guards to the janitors. But do we really want our children to grow up in a war zone?

"As if" the massacre "...weren't bad enough?" You mean, the very suggestion that we make our school children and staff anything other than fish in a barrel would be worse than last week's butchery?

And given a choice between my children growing up in a war zone and dying in an abattoir, I'd think the choice would be clear.

But then, clarity is not one of Rebecca Thoman's strengths

The same level of thinking that brought Minnesota Concealed-carry [...and its' attendant complete lack of any problems - Ed.] would now have us bringing loaded weapons into our schools. The debate has been happening in other states. Arizona is considering arming teachers. Utah already allows teachers to carry loaded handguns.

And if you were planning to kill a school full of students, where would you rather go?

If we are to retain any semblance of civil society, citizens must realize that a powerful political force is at play. We must stand up to the interests that define safety as citizens living in armed compounds.

...and embrace the interests that define "safety" as sitting and waiting in a classroom as the sound of the shooting draws closer, as the glass on the door breaks, as the lock flicks open, and as the madman draws his bead on your chest, knowing that he's going to be in biiiiiiig trouble when the County Attorney gets done with him.

You know. The safety of the heifer as it walks down that long narrow chute.

The gun industry creates the problem of too many guns, then solves the problem with more guns. It may be a winning strategy for selling their product, but it is damaging to civility and democracy.

Right.

But having students spying on each other, looking for signs of any perceived, potentially "dangrous" deviance, like listening to Slipknot or wearing black clothes and excessive eye shadow - that is civil! Suspending little boys from class for making gun shapes and playing Army on the playground - way to teach democracy!

Sorry, Rebecca Thoman. Civility and Democracy are greatly enhanced by making life more dangerous for those who'd deprive us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and less tenuous for the innocent among us.

Question: Do Rebecca Thoman and Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota know who the bad guys are?

And if one showed her the scenarios of Red Lake or Columbine on the one hand, and Ashod on the other, which would bother her (and her followers, assuming there are any) more?

Diggers

Via Chrenkoff, this fascinating story about the Australian war effort:

A nice perspective from the southern end of the Coalition of the Willing, as 450 Australian infantrymen are preparing to deploy to work with the British and the Japanese forces on securing and reconstructing the southern Iraq:

"Roger Noble, the battle-hardened commander of 450 troops who will leave soon for Iraq, has a problem. 'More of my soldiers want to go than are going. They are pushing at the doors,' he says. "The blokes that are going are as happy as Larry [Australian colloquialism for "very happy"] - they are keen to go and do the job.'

"Why would anybody want to leave Australia for Iraq's desert, an inhospitable place where temperatures can reach 50 degrees [Celsius! - Think 122 degrees F - Ed.], fierce sandstorms turn day into night and terrorists may try to blow you up?

Why indeed?

I mean, isn't this Halliburton's war?

A digger - Australian soldier, although the term may be archaic - responds:

"Lance Corporal Jason Lane says he would have been disappointed if he had not been selected to go because he sees himself as a professional soldier and 'it's what we do... and those who consider themselves professional see going to Iraq as their duty in much the same away as a doctor sees it as his or her duty to treat patients'...

" 'Many people in the defence force consider themselves patriots - there's a strong patriotic element in the defence force today,' he says. 'When I joined in the early 1990s it wasn't so visible. But now there is a sense of pride in what we have achieved in East Timor and Iraq. And people want to be part of that. In sporting analogy it's being on the winning team'...

"Trooper Clint Gordon, 20, says he is thrilled to be going because he set himself a goal years ago to serve his country, just as his great-grandfather did in the First World War and other family members since. 'It's all about being proud to be on an Australian team,' he says. 'I'm wearing the Australian colours and I'm serving my country. It's what I have always wanted to do.'

"Steven Nightingall, 38, made a dramatic lifestyle change four years ago when he quit working as a solicitor in Melbourne and joined the army. Now a lance corporal, he says he would have been disappointed if he had missed Iraq. 'It's like being a professional rugby player - you don't want to sit on the bench,' he says. 'It's good to be going overseas together to do what we are trained to do.'

"Private Benton Hyde, 20, from Wollongong, says he 'can't wait' to go. 'It's what I joined the army for,' he says. 'I've only been a soldier for 12 months but I have worked hard. It's exciting to go over there with your mates to help out the people of another country so they can get back to controlling themselves'."

Thanks, guys!

Chrenkoff makes an observation I've seen elsewhere in re: American troops:

As an aside, it seems that often more than their governments, and certainly more than their fellow countrymen and women, the soldier of all nations are the ones keenest on staying in Iraq and doing their job. I remember reading report of the Spanish soldiers being angry and ashamed at being withdrawn by their government; I know that the Polish troops are very happy with their deployment, too, and if it was up to the Polish top brass they would be staying in Iraq indefinitely. On the positive side of things: I'd rather stick with the principle of the civilian control of the military and not vice versa.

Very true.

But the fact is if a war is going badly, its the soldiers - eventually - who will tell you so.

She Knows Stuff

WCCO-TV (Channel 4 in the Twin Cities) is publishing a number of "blogs" on its station website.

Crime-beat reporter Caroline Lowe does the best one.

It's an institutional blog, with all that implies - it's upated weekly rather than several times a day - but it's worth a read.

This piece on the Best Steak House shootings and the restaurant involved is good reading.

So Caroline! Come to the next MOB party!

Things I Like But Probably Shouldn't.

When it comes to some of life's most important things, I have pretty rigid, unbending standards.

Sometimes they flex and bend anyway.

To wit:

1. Kelly Clarkson - Yes, I hate American Idol. And when on AI, she was like all the other AI winners - a cookie-cutter Celene Dion wannabe. And yet beyond the standard-issue laser voice with tungsten-clad pipes, she's come up with - take note of this, all you AI contenders - at least a few songs that don't suck.
2. A Bridge Too Far: A very underrated war movie.
3. "Captain Jack", Billy Joel. I can't stand Billy Joel. But I can't get enough Captain Jack. Maybe it's because it's Joel's Springsteeniest song - that counts for a lot. Whatever - it's a great tune.
4. Veronica Mars - it's on the UPN, so it was up to my daughter to get me hooked. But it's a crisply-written noir-via-Buffy that's funny and usually engrossing; the title character is a high school girl channelilng Sam Spade. It's fun.
5. Ryan Cabrera - my daughter brought the CD home. Now, teenypop is usually pretty revolting. But within that context, it was actually not half bad.
6. Prairie Home Companion - Keillor is Keillor, but the show is funny, and the musical guests, from Richard Thompson to the Minnesota Orchestra, are often amazing.

UPDATE: Flash commented:

How did I miss this the first time:

""like all the other AI winners - a cookie-cutter Celene Dion wannabe""

To be clear:
Ruben Studdard = Celene Dion wannabe

Now that is funny!

Let's be clear here; I'm talking conceptually and musically, not physically. Nobody would mistake Dion and Studdard (well, frequent commenter Slash might, if a court somewhere had ever declared they were the same thing), but musically they are cut from the same cloth; diesel-powered, stump-pullingly powerful voices singing interchangeable power ballads.

Things I Hate But I'm Supposed To Like

I can sit and listen to fingernails scraping on chalkboards all day long. Presuming one can find a chalkboard anymore.

But there are other things where I'm not so lucky.

Here they are:

1. The word "bloggy". I have an instinctive revulsion to this term. Not sure why. Especially "Bloggy Goodness". Puke. Again, no idea where it comes from, it's just there.
2. American Idol. Once you get past the campy, sadistic, Schadenfreudy fun of watching some of the world's most inept singers getting shredded on camera, it's on to...what? Finding out who's going to be the next Celene Dion. Everyone's got badonkadonk pipes - and yet they all sound not only the same, but dull dull dull. Yick.
3. Friends. I never saw it when it was on the air. I've seen it maybe twice since it kacked. Don't do nuthin fo me, man.
4. KFAN. I like sports, and I like talk radio. But somehow when you put the two together, you get the worst of both worlds; the mindless self-absorption of athletes, the pointillistic obsession with trivia of the superfreak fan, combined with the basest, most idiotic facets of talk radio. In KFAN's defense, I've heard worse sports stations. File that under "Damning with faint praise".
5. Kelly's Heroes: I love war movies. Can't stand Kelly's Heroes. Anachronism can be fun - but in this case, is not.
6. P.J. Harvey
7. Radiohead
8. Pro Football. Yawn. Unless the Bears are in contention, it's just something that eats up air time between the World Series and Spring Training.
9. Tapping the rim or inside of a spoon with the rim or tip of another spoon. This is to me what chalkboard fingernails are to everyone else; it can bring me to the edge of chundering.
10. Martina McBride - she seems like Shania Twain without the rugged sense of iconoclastic integrity.
11. Maroon Five.
12. So very, very much of Randy Newman's work. I know - he's a genius, he's funny, bla bla bla. He bores me stiff, except when he's making me cringe (remember Cop Rock?)
13. Sixties camp TV classics; The Brady Bunch, the Munsters, Gilligan's Island, and especially the Addams Family.
14. Film remakes of same.
15. Spongebob Squarepants. Hate it hate it hate it.
16. For that matter, Scooby Doo - old, new, in-between or revival, it's all depressing.

Who's Splintering, Anyway?

Last week, the leftyblogs were all atwitter; "The Schiavo case is going to splinter the right!"

This despite the fact that while almost all Republicans voted for the emergency review legislation, the Democrats were almost evenly split.

And now, as Jesse Jackson has to his everlasting credit split with the Democrat majority, word comes out that nearly half of the the Congressional Black Caucus broke with party leadership on the bill.

Who's tearing apart at the seams?

Heavy Metal Birthday

On this date in 1911, the Colt M1911 .45 caliber automatic pistol became the standard sidearm for the US Army.

The weapon originated in response to problems encountered by American units fighting Moro insurgents during the Philippine-American War in which the then-standard .38 caliber (9.65 mm) revolver was found to be unsuitable for the rigors of jungle warfare, particularly in terms of stopping power. The Army briefly reverted to the .45 Long Colt revolvers which had been standard during the last decades of the 19th Century; the slower, heavier bullet was found to be more effective against charging tribesmen. An Ordnance Board, headed by John T. Thompson, concluded that a .45 caliber (11.4 mm) semi-automatic weapon would be most appropriate, and took bids from six firearms manufacturing companies in 1906.

Of the six designs submitted, two were selected for field testing in 1907, one of them being Colt's model, which Browning had basically modified to government specifications from an earlier autoloading .38 caliber (~9.65 mm) design of his. A series of field tests was designed to decide between the two finalists (the other being a design by Arthur Savage) and the Colt passed with flying colors, firing 6,000 rounds non-stop, a record at the time. The soundness of design is also borne out in its longevity of service (over 70 years).

Still the best.

Solutions

Red Lake tribal chairman Floyd Jourdain's son has been arrested for conspiracy in the Red Lake massacre:

One of the sources, who spoke on the condition his name not be used, said Jourdain and Weise exchanged e-mails that discussed Weise's intent to go on a shooting rampage at the school. Other teenagers who were in e-mail contact with Weise also could face charges in the coming days...

...One source with knowledge of the case said the alleged e-mails between Jourdain and Weise took place days and weeks before the shooting, and involved discussions in which Weise - and perhaps others - expressed an intent to commit an act of violence at the school.

I'm no expert, but I don't think that a new building or more assemblies would done a lot of good.

Visitors In The Night. Or Whenever.

Peter Swanson at Swanblog has been getting visitors.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

For the last couple of days, the left has been all atwitter about the case of Tom DeLay's father. "Hypocrisy", they giggle as they grin like toddlers that just made a good pants.

Two crucial differences:

1. The senior DeLay was on a ventilator, unable to breathe on his own.
2. There was apparently no dispute in the family about the senior DeLay's wishes in the event, even without a living will. There is obviously a dispute among the family in Ms. Schiavo's case.

Do yourselves a favor. Drop it.

The Wonders Bush Hath Wrought

In 1980, most Democrats were firmly Keynesian, and thought that it was government's place to spend in deficit. Today, they are all budget hawks. Hawks, I tells ya (except, of course, in places like Minnesota where spending is actually being cut, wonder of wonders).

In 1983, most liberals thought the Soviet Union was here to stay. Today, they all knew it was doomed all along, yessirreebob.

In 2000, most Democrats thought "Libertarians" were mouth-breathing gun nuts who never trimmed their long, shaggy beards. They thought "strict constructionism" was an intestinal disorder, and the "Federalist Papers" were something you rolled to make a spliff. The Clinton drug, crime and terrorism bills were the most noxious assaults on liberty in my lifetime. But the minute John Ashcroft was nominated, they all became fierce civil libertarians. At least as long as it didn't involve religion, political speech or guns, anyway.

In 2002, most Democrats associated "States Rights" with confederate flags and pointy hoods. They sent SWAT teams with gay abandon on trumped up chargest after wackoes in the woods, cultists in their hide-outs, and, in a shameful episode, a little boy. With the Schiavo case, suddenly they're all about enumeration of powers.

Who knows. They might soon figure that the Bill of Rights has ten amendments.

Fascists! Fascists!

It's a nightmare scenario; frustrated by their failure in the courts, and prodded by powerful special interests, an executive-branch official shops for tame judges and executive fiats to support a flawed policy that most Americans oppose - and, stymied, finally results to pseudo-legal force to get its way.

Politicians, cynically looking out for their own careers, abandoned constitutional principle and their own ethics

In Florida, natch.

Remember Elian Gonzales?

Elian was plucked from the ocean off the coast of Florida on Thanksgiving Day 1999. after his mother died in an ill-fated attempt to bring him to freedom. Before he became a political football and Fidel Castro demanded his return, the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted him immigration "parole," which gave him the right to live in the U.S. for one year until his status was determined. Because Elian was underage, his fate would therefore be decided by local family courts. On Dec. 1, the INS issued a statement saying, "Although the INS has no role in the family custody decision process, we have discussed the case with the State of Florida officials who have confirmed that the issue of legal custody must be decided by its state court."

Seems pretty clear-cut, huh?

Then the Clinton administration reversed course after protests from the Castro regime reached a fever pitch. On Dec. 9, the INS declared its previous position "a mistake" and said that state courts would not have jurisdiction in Elian's case. They claimed that because Elain was taken directly to a hospital he was therefore never formally paroled into the U.S.--even though he was then turned over to his Miami relatives rather than the INS. "Technically, he was not paroled in the usual sense," said a Justice Department spokesman. But she could come up with no previous case in which a Cuban refugee had had his parole revoked and then had the INS move to return him to Cuba.

In other words, the INS bent over backwards to find a tortured rationalization to enact - or rather, reverse - their policy, rules be damned. Naturally, they deployed a horde of lawyers to reinforce the point; 2+2 equalled five, and anyone who disagreed was insane to boot.

But it quickly became clear that was the INS's intent. Over the Christmas holidays the agency dispatched agents to Cuba to interview Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. After the interview, Mr. Gonzalez told reporters the agents and an accompanying U.S. diplomat had assured him Elian would be returned. The Clinton administration disputed those statements, although one of the government officials later privately acknowledged they had been made. Nonetheless, INS bureaucrats in Washington quickly determined that a man who had abandoned Elian and his mom for another woman was a "fit parent" who could "properly care for the child in Cuba." No public consideration was given to the fact that his father, a member of the Communist Party, might have been coerced.

Ironically, the Clinton Administration - which oversaw a raft of legislation at the federal and state levels that were disastrous for divorced, non-custodial fathers in America, struck a huge blow for blackguards who happened to live in countries whose dictators had a talent for leading weak presidents around by the nose.

"But what were everyone's real wishes?"

If a state court had been allowed to hear the custody case, INS officials would not have been able to testify as to what Mr. Gonzalez told them to support his claim because it would have been hearsay. He would have had to come to the U.S. to testify on his own, subject to cross-examination. Even if the state court had granted him custody, it would have had to decide whether it was in the child's best interest to be returned to Cuba.

That's what Judge Rosa Rodriguez of Florida Family Court, complying with the original INS ruling, tried to do when she ruled in early January 2000 that her court had jurisdiction over the boy and gave Elian's great-uncle legal authority to represent him. Her order contravened an INS ruling that only Elian's father could speak for the boy and that he should be immediately returned to Cuba. Attorney General Janet Reno than promptly declared that Judge Rodriguez's ruling had "no force or effect." At the same time, INS officials assured reporters that under no circumstances did they intend to seize Elian by force.

Those dirty executive branch bastards, defying the courts!

Pay careful attention to this bit:

The stalemate continued for another three months. On Thursday, April 20, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals--the same court that rejected the pleas of Terri Schiavo's parents last week--turned down the Justice Department's request to order Elian removed from the home of his Miami relatives. Moreover, the court expressed serious doubts about the Justice Department's reading of both the law and its own regulations, adding that Elian had made a "substantial case on the merits" of his claim. It further established a record that Elain, "although a young child, has expressed a wish that he not be returned to Cuba."

Remember how your lefty acquaintances poo-poohed the 11th Circuit's opinion? I have a small clacque of koolaid-addled lefty acquaintances; remember their hooting and yammering during the Elian episode is one of the most depressing episodes of the whole depressing Clinton era.

They are, naturally, the same people who are declaring the 11th Circuit the fount of all wisdom today in the Schiavo case.

Of course, the rule of law is just for peasants:

The Reno Justice Department acted the next day to short-circuit a legal process that was clearly going against it. On Good Friday evening, after all courts had closed for the day, the department obtained a "search" warrant from a night-duty magistrate who was not familiar with the case, submitting a supporting affidavit that seriously distorted the facts. Armed with that dubious warrant, the INS's helmeted officers, assault rifles at the ready, burst into the home of Elian's relatives and snatched the screaming boy from a bedroom closet. Many local bystanders were tear-gassed even though they did nothing to block the raid.

Elian was quickly returned to Cuba; because he was never able to meet with his lawyers a scheduled May 11 asylum hearing on his case in Atlanta became moot.

Fascism! Fascism!

The rule of law. Heck, I guess we should be glad that it's back in fashion among the left.

Posted by Mitch at 04:40 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

All Shook Up

Steven Vincent, author of "Into The Red Zone" (in which he toured Iraq, solo, for several fascinating months) continues to write the wonderful In The Red Zone" blog.

He notes a number of new memes in the Middle East:

We are witnessing the genesis of two momentous memes. The first is women + eroticism + sexual freedom = democracy. This was one of the daemons that infused rock and roll (before Sgt. Pepper killed it) with such infernal energy and exploded into the Sexual Revolution 40 years ago. Message to the Middle East: hold on tight, folks. You're on the edge of something deep and wild.

Until the Arab Beatles ruin it all?

OK, seriously; although victorian society did pretty well, all in all (economically and socially), that was within the context of a West that was already liberal and largely democratic to at least some extent.

The fact that this is going on at all in the Arab world is a wonder.

And there's more:

The other is the end of the Iraq War. I know I'm anticipating, and there are certain to be disappointments to come. But a meme is not a prediction. It is in part the formulation of a general consensus--ijma', for you Islamic scholars out there--that, if adopted, germinates, spreads, infects and inspires, eventually forming the way we view reality. Does the way we view reality determine reality? I'll leave that to better minds than mine to hash out. I should add, though, that meme-wise, not only is the Iraq War ending--but, Juan Cole and Daily Kos and Moveon and CODEPINK notwithstanding, the good guys evidently won.

The meme to push now: Islamofascism is ludicrous, pathetic, contemptible and worse, no fun. It's so, like, yesterday, so looo-ser. Why follow the teachings of some bearded boogeyman who looks like his face would crack if he laughed, when you can party in downtown Beirut with the "Babes of Democracy"? Perhaps we should break out the old slogans and offer them to the Middle East - you know: "Make love, not war" and "War is not good for children and other living things"? How about: "Make a World at Peace, not a World in Pieces?" Just a thought.

Haven't the Arabs suffered enough?

Democracy (not to mention babes): Good.

Regurgitated sixties: Bad.

But really, you have to ask yourself, how can your basic theocratic regime run by sexually repressed and repressive mujtahids survive when it faces problems like these acts of widespread sinfulness taking place at Iranian celebrations of Ashura? Doesn't anyone recall that Mohammad maintained at least 14 wives and innumerable slave girls (at least one of whom he "visited" each night)--and that beautiful women and perfume were the Prophet's (pbuh) particular passions? And doesn't the situation in Iran today seem like America in, oh, say, 1954? (Having been in Iran in 2000, I vouch for that observation.) Yes, yes! I see him now! Striding across the plains of Persepolis, oud in one hand, a copy of Rumi in the other, curling that insouciant lip and swiveling them slender hips--ladies and gentlemen, the Persian Elvis!

Read the whole thing.

Good Advice For Everyone

Rocket Man advises:

So if you find yourself all alone in a railway station with a guy who has a really, really long ring finger, run.

Well, duh.

Regeln über Alles

I have an apparently long-running argument with a long-standing acquaintance on the Schiavo case.

My acquantance, a lawyer, seems to believe that since the courts have decided, the entire burden of determining what is right and wrong in the greater scheme of things is satisfied. The laws, drafted and ratified by imperfect men, have had their various letters met; nothing else matters.

Steyn must have had the same argument with someone:

A couple of decades back, north of the border, it was discovered that some overzealous types in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been surreptitiously burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. The prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, shrugged off the controversy and blithely remarked that, if people were so upset by the Mounties illegally burning down barns, perhaps he'd make the burning of barns by Mounties legal. As the columnist George Jonas commented:

''It seemed not to occur to him that it isn't wrong to burn down barns because it's illegal, but it's illegal to burn down barns because it's wrong. Like other statist politicians, Mr. Trudeau . . . either didn't see, or resented, that right and wrong are only reflected by the laws, not determined by them.''

For a significant chunk of our society - the part that either rejects the notion of a right and wrong devolving from anything higher than the courts (and, maybe, the legislature), it's hard to recognize the distinction. That, indeed, may be the crux of the culture skirmish we're seeing in the Schiavo case.

Never mind that the memories of his wife's wishes that were seared seared into Michael Schiavo's memory took seven years to resurface (by which time Schiavo was connected to a feeding tube).

Never mind the court decisions that became the basis of facts on which all future appeals rested may have been, like so many court cases, less a matter of "finding the truth" than of one side having better lawyers than the other; Michael Schiavo had hundreds of thousands to spend on attorneys, while the Schindlers had an inexperience pro bono lawyer. Ask anyone who's ever gotten divorced on the cheap; any mistakes in the initial trial will dog you forever.

Never mind. The courts have spoken.

As we reiterated on the show last weekend, it's no longer a matter of rejecting what the courts held; it's a matter of changing Florida law.

And who knows - maybe Minnesota law, too.

Waiting For That Cold Omaha

Minnesota is a destination for the kind of people that keep an area prosperous:

"I knew I'd like this city," Hattie Dambroski said recently in her St. Paul apartment. "I didn't know I'd fall in love with it."

It sounds like an ad campaign. But it's just a soft-spoken biologist speaking on a sunny spring afternoon, slightly bemused by the attachment a native Cheesehead can begin to feel after just a few months in Minnesota.

Dambroski is just the kind of person the U.S. Census Bureau will have in mind today when it announces that Minnesota is now the No. 1 state in the nation in highest percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and has moved into the top 10 in its share of adults with college degrees.

The precise rankings are less important, said state demographer Tom Gillaspy, than the evidence that a "cold state at the end of the road" is still managing to attract the bright young minds that are key to a region's future prosperity...Midwest states know that's nothing to take for granted. Michigan has struggled, for instance, and so has Iowa, which drew nationwide headlines this winter for a proposal that would have offered young people tax incentives to live there.

Apparently they haven't heard that Governor Pawlenty's tax cuts have made this a "Cold Omaha", or that our mass-transit would shame Fargo.

Silly smart people.

Conundrum Watch, Fact Check

I listened to Wild Wendy for a couple of minutes this morning on the local FrankenNet affiliate.

Remember three months ago, after the tsunami? When the President busied himself with, oh, I dunno, practical, useful responses like diverting a navy Task Force and a Marine Ampbibious Unit en route to Iraq to the scene? The left sniggered; "how insensitive"; rather, said they, that he'd swept to the nearest camera with a dramatic flourish and issued a Clintonesque "message" displaying his sorrow, anguish and sympathy.

So this morning, on the subject of Governor Pawlenty's day of remembrance for the victims of the Red Lake shootings, she demanded that the Governor "get off his big holy butt" (?) and "do something". Now bear in mind that in the past week, elements of the local left were in a snit that he hadn't literally dropped everything and led the SWAT team in a moment of anguished silence before entering the building. No, now the fully appropriate remembrance that he is able to do as governor is the problem.

It's almost like there's nothing a conservative can do to make these people happy! Go Figger!

In the 90-odd seconds I could stomach Wilde - as inept a talk host as this market's seen since Jim Klobuchar graced the airwaves - I gathered that these were her suggestions for that action:

• Spend More Time Learning To Spot Kids With Issues: She squawked (I'm closely paraphrasing - I have yet to install a digital recorder in my car) "These kids get one assembly a year to teach them what to look for...". What, so we're supposed to take even more already-overstretched class time to try to turn kids into amateur psychologists? Not to mention to teach our already-overwrought, hyperdramatic, emotionally hormone-addled teenagers to spy on each other's emotional states? Even kids aren't this stupid.
• Pony Up!: Again, paraphrasing: "The governor ought to cough up some money so they can get the new school they so desperately need". Ah. A new building - no, more funding will solve the problem? Remember what Columbine looked like? The school was a suburban palace of a building, funded by absolutely luxuriant local taxes by a community that wanted a kick-ass school. And yet "Columbine" is now a canonical synonym for "school massacre".

An interesting look into the thought process of the local left - where "interesting" equals "flipped back to MPR after 90 seconds".

I Got To Thinking

Which is always dangerous.

Ten years ago, I bought my first decent computer - a Pentium 100 with 32MB of RAM and a 1GB hard drive. It cost $2,000, without the monitor. At about that time, I also bought my first-ever foil two-pack of pain-killer from a convenience store. It cost $1.50.

Over the weekend, I was pricing some new desktop boxes at GNS. Athlon 2.8G chips, 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive for around $550.

I also bought a two-pill foil pack of Aleve this morning. Again, $1,50.

And I got to thinking; if over the counter pain relievers had followed the same technology to price curve that the Personal Computer has, my $1.50 would have gotten me 46 tablets of painkiller - or, alternately, that same two-pack would cost nine cents.

Just saying.

"NooooooooooooOOOO SMOking...In Heaven"

Bob Casey, the Minnesota Twins' first and only Public Address announcer in the 44 years of their existence, has passed away.

His style was inimitable, and legendary:

Casey had a definite style -- what that style was, well, that was up for interpretation. Many viewed him as the master of mispronunciations. Dustan Mohr? Dustin Hoffman. Otis Nixon? Amos Otis. Nomar Garciaparra? Garcia Parra.

"That was part of Bob's charm and style," Twins president Dave St. Peter said. "I used to kid him that some of those he did on purpose."

...

Not every gig was successful. Casey announced Vikings games from 1961 to '63, and claimed that he was fired soon after one incident:

A referee threw a penalty flag on the New York Giants. Casey asked Halsey Hall, whom he had hired to help him follow the game, to ask what the flag was for. Hall didn't know, so Casey winged it.

"The old man said, 'The Giants have been penalized 15 yards for an illegitimate man on the field,' " Mike Casey said. "He just made it up."

Twins games will not be the same.

Maybe the Twins should hire Tom Mischke.

Minimum Rage

I remember minimum wage.

Oh, sure - in high school, I made $2.90 an hour. And my first 'real' job out of college, interning at KSTP-AM, paid $3.35 - this, back when my rent was $110 a month, was something of a livable wage. Sort of.

I've flirted with awful money over the years. When I left nightclubs, I worked for $7 an hour as an essay grader, and $6.50 as a document coder. This, with two kids and another one on the way.

All of this apropos the Strib's biennial shamefest on the Minimum Wage.

First, the qualified kudo; unlike many stories on the subject, the Strib's piece provides counterpoint of its own...:

Consider Peggy Rasmussen, who has owned the 55-seat Countryside Cafe in Medina on the outskirts of the metro area for 30 years. Her 22 workers serve breakfast and lunch. With no alcohol, the cafe is far from a high-margin business.

Rasmussen provides health insurance to help reduce employee turnover and pays those who bus tables $6.50 an hour, dishwashers between $7 and $8 an hour and cooks from $10 to $13.50 an hour. Waitresses and waiters receive the $5.15 minimum, but can take home more than $100 in tips on busy weekends.

Increasing the minimum wage, she said, could cost her business about $20,000 in raises. "People say: 'Just raise the prices and it will all work out,' but working-class people will only pay so much," said Rasmussen, who has testified against raising the minimum wage at the state Capitol. "Smaller places up north who can't afford to come down and speak on the issue would be devastated."

...which is, I suspect, the first many minimum wage activists have heard about this side of the subject.

The untold story on the minimum wage; anyone who's not a recent high school or college graduate, and is past the mid-twenties, who is still earning minimum wage is probably operating under some sort of constraint, usually self-imposed; they dropped out of high school, they have a criminal record or some sort of psychological or chemical impairment, or they simply avoided learning any job skills that are marketable for more than the minimum.

Example: we learn that Sonny Benettie, the main subject of the story, is in his mid-fifties. He has issues.

In many ways, Benettie is already devastated. He has no permanent address and hops between friends' couches.

"Affordable living is out of the question when you're making six bucks an hour," he said.

Benettie grew up in rural Mississippi, served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and has lived in the Twin Cities for 25 years. He has been a dishwasher at a local college and worked for various hauling companies over the years.

When his ex-wife lost her sales job because of a department store closing in the late-1990s, "the bills piled up sky-high" and so did the tension. He was convicted of fifth-degree domestic assault in 2001 and spent a year in prison in Faribault. With a felony on his record, a steady job is hard to find.

Kristina Diamond, a coordinator at Labor Ready, says Benettie is one of their hardest-working and most reliable day laborers and gets strong evaluations from the companies using their service.

A chunk of the money he earns is garnished to provide child support. When there's no work and he falls behind on those payments, his driver's license can get revoked -- miring him in a downward spiral.

Benettie said shame, guilt and disappointment in himself keep him from visiting his daughter as much as he'd like.

"It's very painful to have a 9-year-old and not be financially able to ... do the things she'd like to do," he said. "Rather than letting her down, you just don't call or go over. It's painful, very painful."

Y'see, there's a great story here; the domestic abuse industry creates a lot of ex-felons in this state - it's a scandalously easy system to get sucked into. The familyl court system pretty much chews up low-skilled, low-income guys like Benettie and spits them out; the child support system takes what it wants and leaves, for men like Benettie, very little at the end of the day; there's an underclass of men in Minnesota that can never get dug out of poverty, no matter how hard they work (as, indeed, Benettie seems to). Assuming Benettie's ex-wife has a similar story, the welfare system is probably involved, and there's a system there that needs to have a light flipped on, working hand-in-glove with the child support system while actively encouraging dependence on it. There are four different systems that need exposing!

But the Strib doesn't tell any of those stories. It tells the story of the minimum wage - which won't even serve as a band-aid for any of the systems that do need fixing. Our education system turns out low-skilled people, or an amazing number of dropouts; they have children they can't afford, frequently as teenagers before they've learned any marketable skills; the women trying and failing to earn enough money to raise families on the kinds of jobs they can get with "teenage mom" skills; going on welfare to make ends meet; child support chasing down the fathers - frequently barely employable themselves - and garnishing much, sometimes nearly all, of the income to reimburse welfare; who go on to raise children who know nothing but the system they grew up under, who grow up to repeat the cycle.

Oh well. Maybe someday.

Doug from Bogus Gold has an excellent point or two in his post on the subject.

How Many Times...

...has the left declared, in a welter of news stories, that a GOP stand on a social issue was going to splinter the party and kill us at the polls?

Abortion. Gay Marriage. Social Security. Tax Cuts. Schiavo. And on and on.

Question: How many times has the GOP's holding the line on social issues actually harmed it at the polls?

More Marches

Residents of tiny Bahrain, a Gulf oil sheikdom, are marching for reform.

Language Geeks: Ua Mau Blog Post

I don't believe I've ever encountered an anglo fluent in Tahitian before.

Cigarette Smoking Man from Cancer World not only claims to be, but gives a lesson.

Cool stuff.

(And for those who were wondering, CSM also answers the question "Whatever Happened to Punky Brewster?"

Heart Over Mind

From what I've seen - and I'll admit up front that I haven't seen enough, and wouldn't know what to do with much of what I saw if I did see it - I doubt that even if they fed or hydrated Terri Schiavo today, she'd ever get back to normal. For that matter, I doubt it would have made much difference even if this past week would never have happened. I suspect that Schiavo's brain damage is too severe, now, for her to ever regain "consciousness" under any circumstances. Not to say that some intervention in years past might not have helped. I don't know.

What I do know is that the most irritating thing about this case is the people who substitute their ideology or worldview for fact.

Deacon from Powerline has an excellent post on that exact subject this morning.

Key points:

There are also important scientific questions of fact that many are answering through ideology. These include whether or to what extent Terri feels pain and, more generally, what her state of consciousness is. As John Podhoretz notes, when scientific rationalists look at Terri, they tend to see a vegetable in a horrible state from which death would be a welcome relief. When those on the other side look at her, they see something more substantial. However, as neurologist Kenneth Gross argues in today's Washington Times questions about what Terri feels and about her state of consciousness are essentially unanswerable on the basis of today's science. Thus, it is understandable that people resolve them based on their world view.

Two separate channes of irritation here: those who say Schiavo is "just a vegetable", that she's "already dead", have subscribed to the conceit which, in this situation (and I suspect most situations) is a leftist conceit; that life equals intellect equals life. Worse are those who say that the effects of dehydration and starvation will be lost on someone in Schiavo's state; they're blowing smoke up their own skirts to make themselves feel better because we do not know.

But Deacon hits the part that makes me real mad:

Less understandable, except as a matter of pathology, is the way some on the ideological left are viewing the matter. I'm referring to what Peggy Noonan calls "the bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people." As Noonan notes, the likes of the Democratic Underground and James Carville can scarcely contain their glee that attempts to prevent Terri from death through de-hydration have failed. Why? Maybe they have "fallen half in love with death," as Noonan suggests? Or maybe they are just frustrated by losing elections, seeing the tide turn in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East (must Terri die for Bush's "sins"?), etc. Whatever the case, it makes for a sad and sorry spectacle.

Note the double standard; the GOP is "exploiting" Schiavo by trying to intervene (although the congressional intervention was bipartisan), but the opposition feels perfectly fine jumping for joy as Schiavo starves and dehydrates; it's a victory for them, after all.

Like Lileks on Laughing Gas

As much as I love reading Lileks, I can much more readily identify with Heather Armstrong's version of domestic life.

The Fantasy Life of "Air America Minnesota"

I checked out the (relatively) new website for the local Air America affiliate.

Back on Presidents' Day, when I reviewed the Coleman "show", I asked, more or less rhetorically, if there were any radio grownups in the building.

The question isn't rhetorical any more.

I looked at their "advertising" page.

It starts with a bunch of standard radio advertising boilerplate, the kind of thing every radio sales guy will tell you.

Then the fun begins:

· There’s a saying in radio, “People don’t LISTEN to News/Talk radio – instead, they USE it.”

I thought for a moment - the saying must have come up sometime after I first left the business, in 1992.

Ah-hah! But then it should pop up on the web. I mean, if it's a "saying" in radio, it must pop up somewhere. Right?

So Right?

Back to the ad site:

· Hosts. Trusted. Known. Credible. Believed.

Nick Coleman.

Wild Wendy.

Say no more.

Air America works for Business

Hm.

You can hear the business acumen.

Consider the profile of the Air America listener in New York

· 25-54 . . .Unlike the traditional AM radio listener

Hu-whah?

I grew up in AM Radio. I was in talk radio before it was cool. And the core audience for talk has always, always been the 25-54 age groups.

· Educated, professional earning high income . . . Unlike the traditional AM radio listener

Stop it, you're killing me.

Again, the talk radio audience - both the conservative one and the pre-Limbaugh general talk audiences - have always been well-educated people in their peak earning years.

Judging by the demographics at AM1280, the conservative audience is even moreso; there's a lot of people out there who do very, very well.

What are these hamsters talking about?

· Spectacular ratings successes (like the early days of Rush).

· Portland, San Diego, New York #1 in 25-54 Adults

Half-true. Half baked wind.

Check the links above. KPOJ in Portland, Oregon got off to a respectable start, moving up to #8 in the market, and getting respectable numbers in the demographic they're shooting for. But the two "conservative" talkers, #1 and #4 KEX and KXL, both trouned KPOJ, and together get 2.5 times the numbers overall. Also note that Clear Channel owns both KEX and KPOJ; Air America exists in Portland to fill out Clear Channel's hand, no more.

Still, by Air America standards Portland is the big success. San Diego's KLSD gets respectable numbers by AA standards, but is still the #18 station overall, and fourth-ranked among talk stations. Like Portland, KLSD is under the same corporate roof as KOGO-AM, which is again the #1 station the market, and, yet again, a fellow Clear Channel property.

This is important. Air America's proponents have been crowing that this penetration into Clear Channel territory is great news for the network - and to an extent, it is. But it's not because Air America is, itself, a winning product on its own terms; in the cases of Portland and San Diego, it's so that Clear Channel can protect its talk powerhouses (who broadcast Limbaugh, Hannity and the like) from attack from the left. Not political attack, mind you, but commercial and ratings attack; if Rush Limbaugh is getting a ten share and Al Franken's got a 1.5, and you selling both, you're selling 11.5 points worth of ad clout; it all goes to Clear Channel's bottom line. It's strategy, not ideology.

But let's leave strategy aside for a moment and concentrate on Air America Minnesota's website claims. While I don't have demographic numbers handy, it seems reasonable that if the Limbaugh affiliates in both cities (ownership notwithstanding) are clobbering the Air America affiliates, and both are ostensibly going for the same demographic - people 25-54 - then there are two possibilities; Air America is not the #1 station among 25-54 year olds in Portland or San Diego, or one of the two stations is drawing a different group than the "Air America Minnesota" website claims.

Now, on to New York's WLIB. It's ranked #22 in the market overall, and it's the #3 talk station, behind WABC and WOR, both of whom are shooting for the same market as WLIB. Is it likely that WLIB beats two of the biggest talk powerhouses in the country - stations with vastly more signal and more polished programming - in the race for the coveted 25-54 age bracket?

You call it.

I'm not going to say the website is "lying" to potential advertisers, per se. I'm just saying that while there may be a way for those numbers to add up, I'm not seeing it.

Now, let's turn to what sales guys call the "call to action":

What's this mean to you?

· Loyalty - the station is a Cause. People have arrived at our offices, to "volunteer". [Well, to be fair, any time you do a talk show, "people" (two or more persons!) will "show up" looking to help out. Some of them are cool, interesting people. Some of them are hangers-on. Some are angling to get into the business the hard way. Some, we politely call "stalkers". Some just dig being around the stuff. It's all - well, mostly - good. Now that I've been fair, I'll be snarky; many Minnesota Liberals are so clogged with hatred that if you tell them kittens were created by Karl Rove, you'll get dead-serious alpaca-clad, Volvo-driving matrons and patchouli-drenched, Birkenstock-shod, piercing-studded college kids in smoke-belching Subarus turning up with lacross bats and meatgrinders. And if I were advertising, I'd be REALLY leery of "causes". Causes are built around emotions, and emotions fade. Like your business' prospects if you sink too much money into them - Ed]

· Businesses have called asking to "underwrite" [Hm. First: Then someone's not doing their job. Someone needs to tell "businesses" that this is not public radio. Second: as I noted on my President's Day audiofisking, they seem to be having trouble converting those potential "underwriters" into advertisers; half of their spot-load was network spots they had to play to pre-empt Marc Maron or Lizzzz Winstad or whomever. Most of the remainder were institutional sponsors - the Mdewankanton Sioux, Chrysalis, various trade unions - whose support is both incongruous (What, the Carpenters' Union is going to get members or business here?) and, seemingly, purely ideological. The few local business spots sounded - what's the word? Lonely? That's close - Ed.]

· Just like Public Radio – the listeners patronize the underwriters/sponsors. [Assuming you have either - Ed.]

That means - potential customers, loyal, with above average spendable income. [If all assumptions hold true (and I hope by this point in the screed I've convinced you that many of them might not), that's true. But I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of their audience demographics - their per-capita income, education, etc - and comparing them with those of conservative talk radio (I'll be waiting a long time). The website tries to slur the education and economics of the conservative talk audience; fair enough, it's sales. But think about this; when I was at KSTP-AM in 1985-87, it was the poor cousin of the Hubbard empire. Today, the AM station carries KS95-FM AND Channel Five, with PLENTY of money left over. This does not happen when you're audience lives in trailers. How is Air America doing? We don't know yet - Ed.]

Here in the Twin Cities, at last count, AM1280 The Patriot had quadruple the ratings that the FrankenNet affiliate has - with a worse signal and only three local shows.

Let's check back on this in six months.

Operation Overload

There's just too much going on.

1. Three projects singing right along at work, all coming to a head right about...now.
2. Getting ready for Easter
3. Got a show to do tomorrow
4. I have a ton of material regarding the Family Court reform bills that are (or, possibly, aren't) working their way through the legislature, begging to be blogged about
5. There's a David Foster Wallace piece in the Atlantic on talk radio that is - how do I put this - a work of staggering genius. I have to digest it and write about it next week
6. A have a slew of blogging to do on a bunch of local and regional issues that have gotten short shrift lately
7. Plus tons of blogging about the left's incipient about-face on Iraq
8. Plus some off-line stuff that would bore you stiff
9. As opposed to the spring cleaning I have coming up, which I'm sure is a thrill a minute.

I need a double weekend to catch up.

M-I-T-to the C ta the H, Keeping It Real fo ma Homies

Gizoogle is my favorite translator program, or at least the one I have the most fun using.

A sample.

But not only can you translate your own stuff - you can translate your friends, more friends (you may need to scroll down a bit), or even your opponents.

Via Lizzearned F to the Double O to tha T.

I Thought The Deadlines Were Getting Closer...

Tsunami shortens days:

NASA scientists say the undersea quake at Sumatra, the fourth-strongest ever experienced on the planet, was strong enough to disrupt the Earth's rotation and shaved 2.68 microseconds from the length of a day.

Must...Shut...Up...

I made it to Keegans last night for the trivia challenge. I teamed with Laura and David Hemler...

...and, as usual, came in second.

It's uncanny. Every trivia challenge, I come in second, usually because I reverse one of my guesses (or worse, prevail on someone else to reverse their guess).

Two weeks ago, when Fraters ran the challenge, my team was two points shy of the perfect score. Last night, it was one question - and it was one that Laura Hemler got right, and that I inveigled her and David to change.

Just remember, people; your first guess is always best.

And for all of you that may partner with me at Keegans in the future - listen to me for the first ten seconds after the question; then shut me out. Anything after ten seconds is of no value.

Mike Hatch, American Bankers and the Media - Part 5

Let's say they found evidence that, say, John Ashcroft had worked behind the SEC's back to broker a deal to allow ENRON to avoid the public stigma of paying a fine for their transgressions, in exchange for a large donation to, say, the National Rifle Association. Do you suppose it'd get thorough, vigorous coverage? Perhaps assigned to one of the Star-Tribune's excellent reporters, or even a small team, with a simple brief; find everything there is to find?

So why did the local media cover the American Bankers story the way they did?

Second Hand News
No matter how big the newspaper, there are never enough local writers to fill the whole daily issue. Almost every newspaper, in addition to using press services like the AP and Reuters, will rerun articles from other, especially major, newspapers.

The Minneapolis Star/Tribune reruns a lot of NY Times articles. I checked a six-day assortment of issues, from June 20 to June 25, 2003. Counting the A Section, Metro, Business and Variety (I ignored the Sports section), the Star/Tribune ran a total of 21 stories with New York Times bylines (among many others from the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and of course several press services) in those six days. 17 of these articles ran in the A section - articles on topics ranging from Canadian prescription drugs to British soldiers being killed by terrorists in Basra to the fate of Saddam Hussein.

This is, say local sources who closely follow the news, a fairly typical week - a local source close to this story who follows the local press very closely estimates the Star/Tribune runs two dozen stories from the NY Times in a given week.

On May 11, 2003 the front page of the New York Times included an article [currently in the paper's paid-access database] entitled "Strong-Arm Shaking of Charities Raises Ethics Qualms", by Stephanie Strom. The article, which spotlighted a troubling trend among some state attorneys-general to force their own appointees onto the boards of non-profits and charities, fingered Hatch in particular as an egregious example - the article included a photo of Hatch (captioned "Attorney General Mike Hatch of Minnesota has conducted several high-profile investigations of nonprofit health care organizations"). Among the article's findings:

No other attorney general has drawn more attention for such appointments than Mike Hatch of Minnesota, who as conducted two high-profile investigations of nonprofit health care organizations accused of profligate spending and lax board oversight.

In 2001, Mr. Hatch reached a settlement with one, Allina Health System, that resulted in it spinning off operations to a new subsidiary company, Medica Health Plans. He then selected eight "special administrators" as Medica's board of directors, and the court signed off on them the next day.

Four of the appointees had been contributors to Mr. Hatch's campaigns. Theodore Deikel, a multimillionaire businessman [and official at Petters group, which recently bought Fingerhut] whom Mr. Hatch named as chairman of the Medica board, had been host of a fund-raising event for Mr. Hatch two weeks before his appointment. Mr. Deikel and his wife, Beverly, had also contributed $500 each to Mr. Hatch's political campaigns, and three of his four children contributed $1,000 apiece, the maximum allowed under Minnesota law.

Asked whether those contributions and the contributions of other Medica appointees posed a conflict of interest, Mr. Hatch said, "It could, but I don't think it does".

The story was of immediate local interest; the Star-Tribune routinely runs stories about issues with much less direct local impact.

So why didn't the Star-Tribune run this article, which happened to be critical of Mike Hatch?

Local Play

I searched the newspapers' online archives, as well as the story records of the major local news-gathering TV stations and MPR. I found the following stories (leaving out editorials and op-eds):

Star-Tribune:

A June 12 piece by Conrad DeFiebre which noted the perceived illegality of Hatch's proposal, and commented on this contradictions between Hatch's and Wilson's testimony to the Legislative Auditors.

A May 23 piece by David Phelps (no longer available online without charge) that noted the basic findings of the Auditor's report, including a second-paragraph note that the report found Hatch's activities questionable.

That, it seems, was it.

Pioneer Press

After the original March 5 story by Hank Shaw and Tim Huber, which we've already discussed, the Pioneer Press ran the following:

• A March 6 piece by Hank Shaw, with American Bankers' response to the allegations
• A March 7 piece by Hank Shaw about the call for the Auditor probe,
• an accompanying editorial saying the probe would be a very good thing indeed
• A March 8 Hank Shaw story noting that Minnesota law may have prohibited the donation from American Bankers (as already noted in Part 2 of this story)
• A March 13 story from Bill Salisbury which notes the broad outline of the story; the conflicting accounts of Mike Hatch and Glenn Wilson, Wilson's comment that he didn't believe the $3.5 million donation to charity was legal, and so on. But Salisbury also says "Hatch says he learned about the campaign contributions last fall from Ron Jerich, a longtime political ally and lobbyist who had just been hired by American Bankers. Jerich received the thank-you letter from state GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner and gave a copy to Hatch." This, clearly, contradicts even Hatch's own testimony on the subject, and begs the question; where was Salisbury getting the story from? Since the only people who'd have known any details of the letter's path once it left the GOP office, up until Hatch's testimony to the Legislative Auditor, were in Hatch's office, one wonders to what extent Salisbury was being used by Hatch to impart his spin on the story.
• A March 14 piece by Hank Shaw on proposed legislation to make roundabout corporate contributions (like American Bankers' donations to the RNSEC and Democratic Governor's Conference) illegal.
• A May 23 piece by Hank Shaw about the auditor's report.
• A companion May 23 editorial about the Auditor's report.
• A June 12 piece by Hank Shaw about the Senate hearings, which, alone among his pieces on this story, at least noted the inconsistencies in the various stories.
• June 20 Op-Eds from Mike Hatch. Hatch's piece is curious - in one paragraph, he essentially admits to pursuing an illegal settlement: "After becoming aware of the contributions, I told American Bankers that the contributions were wrong and could constitute a quid pro quo if the company settled for less than it had offered prior to making the contributions." Note that this doesn't jibe with what he told the Legislative Auditors in his deposition, where no mention of impropriety is made. His editorial continues: "I told the company to renew the August offer and it did, except that it wanted the money paid to a charity so that the payment was not disclosed as a fine to other states. Since the offer was oral, I wanted it immediately made to an official of the Pawlenty administration, Commissioner Wilson, and I wanted witnesses to the offer. Since I had just completed a mental health meeting with two insurance executives, I asked them to attend the meeting where the offer was made."

  Later in the piece, he says "I don't believe my request to the two executives was a ruse or deceptive. I told them that American Bankers wanted to offer $3.5 million to a charity. I don't believe I am required to tell them that such a settlement cannot be permitted under the law." [Emphasis added].

  Hatch ends the editorial with this: "My mistake wasn't in inviting two insurance executives to the meeting with Commissioner Wilson. My mistake was not to make a record of the meeting. I knew that American Bankers was corrupt. I did not know, however, that the Commerce Department was as well."

• Another June 20 op-ed, from Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles. Nobles asks some questions that might have been more normally expected to have been asked by the news media: "The attorney general testified that he knew that settlement money from American Bankers could not be contributed to the charity because he knew such a diversion would be illegal. So, why were the representatives of the charity invited (and not informed about the legal problem)?" Nobles finished by saying "If you do not know — or accept — that the Attorney General Hatch was being deceptive on Jan. 8, you can reasonably conclude he broke the law. But if you accept — as I do — that he was being deceptive, you would conclude as I did that the attorney general's actions were disturbing, but not illegal."
• A July 1 editorial by Senator David Haan, a member of the Legislative Audit Commission. The money quote: "It is unconscionable that Hatch, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the state, should continue to recklessly and irresponsibly assert allegations of corruption that are without basis in fact."

Minnesota Public Radio

A search of MPR's news archives showed two stories:

• A March 10 piece by Michael Khoo about Jim Bernstein's testimony to the Senate Commerce and Utilities committee.
  A March 12 piece by Michael Khoo which essentially carried Mike Hatch's allegations verbatim. Khoo did do a fair job of presenting the counterarguments - American Bankers counsel Tim Thornton's denial that there was a settlement, as well as Wilson's initial response - as they were known at that time. However, MPR seems not to have followed up on the story.

A search of the other news outlets - Channels 4, 5 and 11 - showed that none of the TV or radio correspondents did much but report on the happenings at hearings and pass on the comments of the principals.

Questions

So, among everyone in the Twin Cities media, why didn't one single reporter ask:

• Why did Mike Hatch, by his own admission (in his Pioneer Press editorial) not have a record made of his conversation on January 8 with Glenn Wilson? This was, as everyone knows, a legally-touchy area, flirting with the edges of state law. I have yet to meet a lawyer, much less as accomplished a lawyer as Hatch, who wouldn't have made sure such conversations, if above-board, were on the record. Why the exception in this case?
  Why, indeed, would Mike Hatch have made an offer that skirted the edge of the law in the first place?
• Hatch, in his testimony to the Legislative Auditor and in his editorial in the Pioneer Press, says that he brought up the notion of settling the case with the $3.5 million contribution to charity to show that the company was willing to settle for $3.5 million. Leave aside the obvious appearance of impropriety for a moment - why did Mike Hatch put his client (on legal matters), Glenn Wilson, in that sort of a predicament?
• Why, indeed, has no reporter asked Mike Hatch why he asked Glenn Wilson to a meeting that was, at least according to some sources, a "Setup" and an "Ambush"? There is at least credible evidence that Wilson was invited, alone, to a "meet and greet", not expecting to be asked to settle a complex legal issue.
• Why did not one single reporter in the Twin Cities media note Ron Jerich's long, friendly relationship with Mike Hatch?
• Why did not one single reporter in the Twin Cities inquire into how Mike Hatch actually got the letter from Ron Jerich? In early press reports, Jerich "gave" the letter to Hatch, while in Hatch's deposition under oath to the Legislative Auditor, it appeared (in a comical sequence) that he took it, ostensibly without Jerich's knowledge.
• Why did the Minneapolis Star-Tribune devote (by my search) exactly two articles to this story?
• The final settlement and consent decree between American Bankers and the Department of Commerce was signed on February 24, 2003. By Ron Eibensteiner's account, the unnamed reporter called him in late February - almost immediately after the settlement was signed. The reporter had the form letter from Ron Eibensteiner to American Bankers in his possession, and knew the details of the consent decree - at a time when the knowledge of the details of the case was limited to a small number of people at the Department of Commerce, American Bankers, and the Attorney General's office. The first Pioneer Press story on the subject ran March 5. How did the story get to the reporters that fast? Why doesn't this seem odd to anyone in the local media? Nobody would comment on the first conclusion to jump to mind - that Mike Hatch fed the story directly to the media for his own political benefit, against Tim Pawlenty. On other stories in the past few months (the Gang Strike Force, the Sexual Predators), it has been argued he's done the same.
• Why does the Star-Tribune go so easy on Mike Hatch? They ignored the NYTimes' March 11 story featuring Hatch, and they seemed to all but ignore the entire American Bankers flap.
• In a partisan, political vein - does anyone think that once the appearance of impropriety surfaced (as, indeed, it briefly did for Glenn Wilson), a Republican Attorney General would have gotten away with such light scrutiny from the local press?

Observations

You don't have to talk to a lot of people - mostly but not universally Republicans - to hear that the Star/Tribune has a Pro-Hatch bias. It's one of those ephemeral concepts - it's impossible to "prove." But the Star/Tribune left the story pretty much alone.

The Pioneer Press, on the other hand, ran a total of 14 stories and editorials on the subject. They generally followed the theme of the March 5 story - that this was a straight-up issue of low-grade political corruption on the part of the Pawlenty administration. There were eight articles and editorials during the first two weeks after they broke the story. But once the Legislative Auditor's report came out - and raised serious questions about the paper's original premise - the coverage petered out, with only two more stories, an editorial, and three op-eds.

I'm not going to say "The Star/Tribune wants to protect Mike Hatch from criticism", or "The Pioneer Press had their conclusions handed to them straight from the Attorney General's office." That would be unsupportable, and impugn the integrity of some excellent reporters. I'm not going to do that.

But it seems that, when the story was still playing as "Hatch Good, Corruption Bad", the story got a lot more media play than when it turned into a subtler game, that involved explaining to the readers that Mike Hatch may have proposed an illegal settlement, and used his connection with Ron Jerich to spin the incident to embarass the Pawlenty Administration.

Once it turned out that there was plenty of impropriety to spread around, the story disappeared. As we've seen, the story deserved more.

No Comment

During the course of this story, I got comments, information, and questions answered either on the record or on background from quite a number of people. I sought, but as the final installment of this story is written did not get, comments from several key players in this story: Ron Jerich, figures at American Bankers, HealthPartners, Blue Cross, the Attorney General's office and officials of the Minnesota DFL party.

I also have received no response to questions about this story from reporters at the Star-Tribune or the Pioneer Press (except for one reporter, whose response was more or less analogous to "kiss my ass").

As this is a blog, I will run any comments I receive from any of this story's principals.

Trip Through History

1974: Watergate was going to be the death of the Republican Party.

1980: The Moral Majority was going to be the end of the Republican Party.

1982: Reagan's "extremism" and defecit spending was going kill the Republican Party.

1988: The battle between the moderates and conservatives was going to be the death of the Republican Party.

1992: Intervention in the Balkans was going to kill the Republican party.

1994: Its opposition to the Crime Bill, to Hillary!Care and its allegiance to the NRA was going to kill the GOP dead.

1995: The squabbling over the government shutdown was going to rip the GOP apart.

1996: The Buchanan/Dole battle was going to tear the GOP limb from limb.

1998: Impeachment was going to render the Republicans a laughinstock for the foreseeable future.

1999: The soul-searching over the Balkans was going to make the GOP self-destruct.

2000: The McCain/Bush battle was going to rend the GOP asunder.

2002: The battle over gay marriage was going to make the Republians erupt in internecine war.

2003: The budget was going to cause the GOP to eat their own.

2005: The Terry Schiavo case is going to self-destruct the Republican Party.

2006: ???

The Republicans. We're too busy winning to die.

UPDATE: Did you notice how fast this "Schiavo=conservative crackup" meme spread? It went from nowhere on Monday to everywhere yesterday.

Another Victory for Gun Control

The security guard killed at Red Lake last week, Derrick Brun, apparently tried his best to delay Jeff Wiese.

Brun, a former Red Lake police officer, was certainly qualified to carry a firearm. But he couldn't; federal law prohibits guns within 1000 feet of schools, except when carried by law enforcement - which Brun was not, at the time of the massacre.

So the only weapon he had with which to face Wiese was his size and his personality. It was apparently enough to delay Wiese for a bit, perhaps saving lives. But it cost Brun's life.

The Strib has the story:

A security guard who survived the shootings at Red Lake High School described a frenzied scramble to warn students and credited a fellow security guard with saving lives at the cost of his own.

In an interview Wednesday, surviving guard LeeAnn Grant said co-worker Derrick Brun ignored her pleas to run and instead rose from his desk to confront Jeff Weise, the 16-year-old shooter.

"Derrick saved my life," Grant said. "He didn't even look scared. He didn't look worried. He knew what he was going to do."

Grant's wasn't the first eyewitness account of the shootings Monday. But it was among the most vivid, and it gave the first picture of Brun's heroism.

Grant said that she and Brun, 28, were working at the school doors that day, as usual. Three of the four doors were locked; the unlocked door funneled students through a metal detector.

Wiese fired two rounds from his shotgun into the air, then came through the door as Ms. Grant ran to pass the word:

"He walked in and fired another shot, and I was telling Derrick, 'Come on, let's go, let's go, Derrick, run, we need to save these kids, we need to do something.' And I radioed in ... 'There's a guy coming in the school and he's shooting and he has a gun.'

"Derrick just sat there at his desk. ... He didn't look scared. He didn't look surprised. ... He just kept staring at Jeff. I kept hollering for him to come with me. He wouldn't come, he just stayed there."

The noise drew some students toward the front doors, Grant said. "I start yelling at them, 'Run! There's a guy with a gun here! Just run!' And then I took off to try to protect them," she said. "I turned back a little bit, and you could see Derrick kind of getting up, going right toward Jeff. And then I heard two shots again."

Other witness accounts indicate that's when Brun was killed.

So - all the guns within 1000 feet of the school were in the hands of a kid bent on murder and suicide.

Is this what the gun controllers really wanted?

By the way, I've always wondered about this:

Once alerted of trouble, teachers locked the classroom doors, as they were trained, Grant said.

This strikes me as akin to the pre-9/11 advice for dealing with hijackers; don't fight, you'll make 'em angry.

In an era where too many school shooters think school is a roach hotel - they'll check in, but they have no intention of checking out - is it really a good idea to keep the prey locked in with the predator?

Midway, Kursk, El Alamein, The Atlantic, the Election - Part II

Austin Bay on his evidence that we're beating the insurgency.

He discusses an observation made while on active duty in Iraq, in the Joint Operations Center.

Bay describes a bank of monitors in a headquaters:

In the upper right-hand corner of one panel, Fox News flickered silently -- and for the record, occasionally CNN or Al Jazeera would flicker there, as well. Beneath Fox ran my favorite channel, live imagery from a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle circling somewhere over Iraq.

The biggest display, that morning and every morning, was a spooling date-time list describing scores of military and police actions undertaken over the last dozen hours, The succinct, acronym-packed reports flowed like haikus of violence: "0331: 1/5 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division, arrests suspects after Iraqi police stop car"; "0335 USMC vicinity Fallujah engaged by RPG, returned fire. No casualties."

The spool spun on and on, and I remember thinking: "I know we're winning. We're winning because -- in the big picture -- all the opposition (Saddam's thugs and Zarqawi's Al Qaeda) has to offer is the tyranny of the past. But the drop-by-drop police blotter perspective obscures that."

Bay observes how the glut of information may have obsured the real story - at least, for the media:

Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, widespread violence destroying Iraq. But that was a false impression. Every day, coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq, and if the "insurgents" were lucky they blew up one. However, flash the flames of that one rig on CNN and, "Oh my God, America can't stop these guys," is the impression left in Boise and Beijing.

Another key observation:

Saddam's thugs and Zarqawi's klan were actually weak enemies -- "brittle" is the word I used to describe them at a senior planning meeting. Their local power was based on intimidation -- killing by car bomb, murdering in the street. Their strategic power was based solely on selling the false impression of nationwide quagmire -- selling post-Saddam Iraq as a dysfunctional failed-state, rather than an emerging democracy .

It used to be the military that got criticized for "fighting the last war" - but it looks like in this case it's the media that's a war or two behind:

In World War II, destroying Nazi divisions and taking islands from the Japanese provided hard yardsticks to gauge military success. Irregular warfare rarely offers such a clarifying quantitative measure. Over the summer of 2004, I had the benefit of anecdotal measures. Iraqis I talked to would tell me they intended to vote in the January elections.

The elections would be "the big island," the defining moment in the post-Saddam political struggle, and it would be the Iraqi people providing the public yardstick.

That's precisely what happened. The Jan. 30 election provided the broad and deep perspective the police blotter obscures: This is a war of liberty against tyranny, and it's a war we are winning.

Read the whole thing.

I restate my prediction; you'll know the war is won when the left starts trying to either claim credit for it, or claim that democratization in the Middle East was inevitable.

Soon.

Money Money Money

Paul Demko at Babelogue reviews a David Foster Wallace piece in the Atlantic about political talk radio.

Most of the piece touches on the way talk radio advertising exploits the relative intimacy of the host-audience relationship. It's true - advertisers use that through a hierarchy of deliveries, each using more of the capital from that relationship, and each costing a bit more than the other. Live reads - where a host reads a spot live, or even works it into the program content - are more effective than recorded spots. Endorsements - "Hi, I'm Mitch Berg for Gibson Guitars..." - are the most effective (or at least exploitive of the relationship, assuming it's a good one) and expensive of all, and especially treasured by the hosts (who get a direct fee payment for each live read).

Demko wonders about something he heard on KSTP.

Demko:

Now what caught my attention about this excerpt is a recurring segment I've noticed locally on the Ron Rosenbaum & Mark O'Connell Show (of which I'm generally a huge fan). They seem to have taken this corporate whoring to a whole new extreme. Every Wednesday morning during the show they devote an entire segment to speaking with the proprietor of Abbot Travel. The hosts simply ask Mr. Abbot Travel (I can't recall his name right now) to reveal all the incredible deals that his company's currently offering to snow-suffering Minnesotans. There's no attempt at editorial justification. Just a roughly-ten-minute Q & A in which the guy gets to unapologetically shill for his company. It's nothing but a very lengthy commercial segment masquerading as user-friendly news.

I'm not pretending that talk-radio is anything but a money-making venture designed to generate profits for the corporations that own stations. But this strikes me as a particularly shameless manifestation of the phenomenon.

Shameless? Nah. There've been variations on this since radio was a novelty. Every so often, some salesman convinces some program director and/or host that a segment of "infomercial" would be both good programming and a nice moneymaker (including probably a fee to the hosts). If the audience is prone to spending money on travel, it can be worthwhile for everyone. If not, it'll cause tune-out, hurting both the show and the advertiser.

They could try it on the NARN as a test control...

Exactly how much does Abbot Travel pay for this privilege? And why would anyone (other than talk-radio obsessed losers like me) listen?

I wonder about that, too. The search for money is endless in radio, and sometimes it warps executives' perceptions. After KSTP fired me and most of my colleagues in the late '80s, the station put on an on-air auction - basically two hours of advertising combined with the non-stop thrill of listening to people call in to ask quesitons about products. It was pure moneymaking for the station - although it helped send the station into a ratings spiral that only Limbaugh saved it from.

How's Rosenbaum and O'Connor's numbers been lately?

Kill The Messenger

More Zero Tolerance in action; a principal suspends a student who caught her breaking the law:

Smoking within 25 feet of a school is illegal in Rhode Island. Eliazar Velasquez, a sophomore at Central High School in the Providence Public School District, took pictures of Principal Elaine Elmagno smoking just outside an open school door. Elmagno suspended him indefinitely last Friday.

"I walked right by her and acted like I was leaving as she was lighting up her cigarette and I hid behind the wall," said Eliazar Velasquez, who was suspended. "And I just stuck the camera out behind the wall and that's how I got the shots of her smoking."

Velasquez took the pictures of his principal...and posted them on an Internet Web site to show others the principal he calls a "hypocrite."

Elmagno was suspended for harassing and slandering the principal and for being disruptive influence.

Zero Inteligence - the site dedicated to exposing the idiocy of Zero Tolerance laws - posts links to the parties involved in this moronic suspension.

Mike Hatch, American Bankers and the Twin Cities Media - Part 4

Part 4: "Confusing, deceptive, inappropriate, inconsiderate"

Once you get past the January 6 meeting, things get confusing.

In February, Patrick Nelson (Deputy Commerce Commissioner) finally negotiated a settlement with American Bankers. There would be a $200,000 fine, and a $1.8 million reimbursement for investigative expenses.

According to the Attorney General's office, the machinery set in motion by American Bankers' donation to the Republicans (but, apparently, not the one made to the Democrats) led to a huge reduction of the settlement - from the $3.5 million agreed to in the summer of 2002.

But according to sources at the Commerce Department that are familiar with the inner workings of this story, Commissioner Wilson felt that, since American Bankers had backed out of the original settlement on August 7, the next stop would be trial. The source says that, rather than waste Commerce Department resources on a trial, the Department would be better off settling for a lower amount, while still exacting a fine, as opposed to a gift to charity (which would not be listed as a fine).

The Media Chimes In

At some point after the settlement was finally reached - in late February or early March of 2003 - Ron Eibensteiner got a call from "a reporter". He wouldn't say which one.

"He asked me if I'd gotten a check from American Bankers", says Eibensteiner, who say he denied getting the check. "The reporter told me he had a copy of the thank you letter for the check", says Eibensteiner. "I asked him to fax me a copy - he wouldn't do it".

Eibensteiner continued "the reporter asked me if I knew Ron Jerich. I said no".

According to Eibensteiner, he then had a staffer find a copy of the letter in the outgoing correspondence file. "I called the reporter, and clarified our process" - the process by which checks are sent to the RNSEC office, and generate an automatic form letter to the donor.

On March 5, 2003, the Pioneer Press ran the first story on the subject. The article relied heavily on statements by Jim Bernstein, the former Commerce commissioner.

After the story ran, Eibensteiner says, he got a call from another reporter. "He was howling with laughter", says Eibensteiner. "He had a copy of the letter. He asked me, do you know who this [Ron Jerich] is? Ron Jerich is a friend of Mike Hatch!".

"It was a clear setup from the start", Eibensteiner says. "Hatch tried to blackmail [Glenn Wilson] with my letter. The whole thing was contrived between Hatch and Jerich, to play in case Tim Pawlenty won the election".

As this is written, nobody involved with the Pioneer Press story has responded to my request for comment.

The Audit
On March 10 and 12, the Senate Commerce and Utilities Committee held hearings on the brouhaha, hearing testimony from Bernstein, Hatch and Wilson. They referred the matter to the Legislative Auditor.

On March 14, Governor Pawlenty and the legislative leadership (Republican House speaker Steve Sviggum and Senate Minority leader Dick Day, and DFL House Minority leader Matt Entenza and Senate majority leader John Hottinger) also sent a letter to Jim Nobles at the Legislative Auditors Office, requesting an audit of the settlement.

The Audit Report was released on May 21, 2003. It's 33 pages (plus about fifty pages of appendices) that reads like...well, an audit report. But it reached some interesting conclusions. It agrees with Hatch's assertions that American Bankers had reached an agreement "in principle" with Bernstein, and that the company opted for a political approach. It found no evidence that the Department of Commerce had had contact with Ron Jerich after January 8 that might have influenced the settlement. It also was bothered by the lack of publicity for the settlement until after the story broke in the media.

The report also concludes that Hatch's actions in this case were not illegal, but were troubling nonetheless.

The report was concerned that the Attorney General apparently presented an illegal settlement to Wilson.

"Attorney General Hatch told us that on January 8, 2003, he was he was fully aware that it was not legally possible for American Bankers to make a contribution to to a charity as part of a settlement, but he did not disclose that fact to those attending the January 8, meeting. According to Attorney General Hatch's testimony to us, he did not make more of the he legal problem associated with a charitable contribution from American Bankers Insurance because he wanted to get the proposal "on the table" . And he said he invited Mr. Neimeic (sic) and Ms. Brainerd to the meeting with Commissioner Wilson and Mr. Jerich so there would be "witnesses" that an offer had been made.

The Legislative Auditor found this troubling. While Hatch presented this in his testimony as merely presenting the offer, saying "Lawyers are like realtors", he said in his testimony to the Auditor, and "All offers have got to be presented to the client. It was important to me that they make their offer to the client immediately. I wanted to get the bar set", the legislative auditor noted the Attorney General is not a neutral agent. According to his own statements, he was aware that the "charity" proposal was illegal under Minnesota law (which, the Auditor noted in his report, forbids state officials from even pursuing such arrangements).

The Audit Report also noted the impropriety of inviting Commissioner Wilson to the January 8, alone and unprepared for anything but a "meet and greet", for such a complex matter.

Finally, the report noted with little comment the Attorney General's claim to have taken the letter from Ron Jerich during the October 5th lit drop, except that the evidence tended to support Ron Eibensteiner's statements, that the check was sent to the RNSEC (as per Minnesota law) and that the letter was an automatic form letter. Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles noted in a phone interview that the letter was quite obviously a form letter. "Form letters have a certain generality, with details interspersed", said Nobles. "In the report, we characterized the letter as a form letter, and I concur with that. The letter had no specificity."

Questions

Mike Hatch says that he invited Dick Niemiec and Mary Brainerd - representing Blue Cross and HealthPartners, both major players in mental health care in Minnesota - to the January 8 meeting to serve as witnesses to the deal. So if what was going to be presented required "witnesses", why did the Attorney General call the meeting a "meet and greet" to Commissioner Wilson? Why did he not tell Wilson that "witnesses" were going to be necessary?

And indeed, wouldn't a "witness" from either the Attorney General's Office or the Department of Commerce - or both - have been more appropriate than bringing in people who happened to be from two organizations that would benefit from the proposed illegal settlement?

Coda

Ron Eibensteiner met Attorney General Hatch at former Senator Bob Lessard's annual fish fry - a bit of a Minnesota government institution, by most accounts. The fish fry happened sometime after the story broke in the media.

According to Eibensteiner, he approached Hatch about the brouhaha - especially the form letter. Eibensteiner says Hatch smiled and answered:

"Welcome to Politics in Minnesota, Ron."

Where Credit Is Due

Never let it be said I can't be objective.

As much as I smack on Nick Coleman, his column on Sunday was an excellent one. It's the sort of thing a "local columnist" should be writing. Kudos to Coleman.

We will resume normal antagonism when Coleman...er, reverts to form.

That is all.

Jenningsgate?

Powerline has an extensive summary of the current "Talking Points Memo" controversy; a memo re the Schiavo controversy was circulated among the Senate in a form that broke Senate rules, and ABC among others are hammering the story hard.

The problem? It's very doubtfully a Republican product.

Rocketman:

The memo has three possible origins. The first possibility is that it was created by a low-level Republican staffer. This seems possible, but highly unlikely. Only a very dim-witted staffer would 1) copy word for word from the Traditional Values site, 2) get the Senate bill number wrong, 3) make a number of silly errors, including misspelling Mrs. Schiavo's name as "Teri," and 4) mix comments about political advantage into a "talking points" memo. Moreover, the Post and ABC have tried to create the impression that the memo is an official, high-level Republican strategy document. It clearly is not that.

The second possibility is that the memo was created by a lobbying group, presumably the Traditional Values Coalition, since most of the content of the memo comes word for word from their web site. But the controversial political observations--"the pro-life base will be excited," etc.--are inappropriate for an organization like the Coalition. They sound as if they are written from the internal perspective of the Republican party ("this is a tough issue for Democrats").

The third possibility is that the memo is a Democratic dirty trick. At the moment, that looks most likely. It is easy to picture how the document could have been constructed. A Democratic staffer wants to put in some language that will sound authentic for a Republican memo. What does he do? He steals four paragraphs from the Coalition's web site. Then he adds the explosive political observations which are the whole point of the exercise--weirdly out of place in a "talking points" memo, but good politics for the Democrats.

This is going to be a fun one to watch. Tune in to the NARN this weekend; no doubt we'll be going over this story in great detail.

A Reason To Get HBO

I don't do movie channels. Hell, I barely do cable.

But I may have to find a way to make it happen later this month. HBO is running a documentary on FrankenNet Air America.

The liberal talk network - which is slowly falling apart under the strain of huge bills and a network of generally-anemic stations that generally run only a small fraction of the programming - got off to a horrible start nearly a year ago, saddled with allegedly fraudulent management and a terrible business plan.

According to Drudge:

HBO is set to air a behind the scenes look at the launching of liberal radio network AIR AMERICA.

The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained a director's cut of LEFT OF THE DIAL, a grossly entertaining docu-drama of life on the other side of the AIR AMERICA microphone.

The doubts. The lies. The bounced checks. The heartbreak.

The viewer is taken upclose to witness the ugly business of media ambition.

Even in the best of circumstances, radio is like sausage; you like the final product, but you don't wanna know how it's made. The business is sordid enough to gag an R&B manager.

But FrankenNet was worse than most:

The main character, Evan Cohen, founding chairman and main investor, is depicted as a complete fraud.

The documentary shows Cohen arriving in the middle of night at AIR AMERICA offices to sign over the company and disappear again, but not before lying about how many ads have been sold and how much money is the bank [zero].

Of course, watching the smug, arrogant "air talent" in action will be half the fun:

The film captures AIR AMERICA staff first learning about the Chicago and LA nightmare by reading a DRUDGE REPORT exclusive on their computers.

It shows midday host Al Franken at a staff meeting being told there is no money left, hilariously, just moments after ranting about George Bush's ethics...Host Janeane Garofalo looks suicidal in nearly ever scene which she appears.

"What am I going to do, just ramble on and on," panics stand-up-comic-morning-drive-host Marc Maron, as he deals with the reality of becoming a talkshow host.

To be ever-so-fair, Maron's show has developed better than most FrankenNet shows. To be honest, it had a long way to go from the beginning.

The HBO crew is told to shut down their cameras -- but they don't -- and the 'We're Broke!' meeting is filmed raw.

Of course, for someone who has one toe back in the business, seeing how other people do radio is always interesting. I can't imagine working at an operation where this scene could take place:

LEFT OF THE DIAL shows an angry meeting of the writing staff being told how money was deducted from their checks to pay for health care -- but the money was never paid to the HMO and they were never covered!

Writing Staff. That kills me. A staff - to write.

Enter the one person in the building with commercial radio background:

But every drama must have a hero: Enter Randi Rhodes.

Highlight. The camera captures pm drive Rhodes in her classic PMS mood, but this time at home, in her newly rented NYC apartment.

Wearing a leopard-spotted robe, bra-less, smoking and crying "I'm so f**ckign lost," the relocated Floridian steals the show.

Talking to herself in the bedroom mirror, Rhodes whispers "You can do this."

She bemoans throughout how she is not being featured in any AIR AMERICA press. "No CNN. No USATODAY. No YAHOO wire story." How she is the only one hired at AIR AMERICA that's even been on radio before.

When she attempts to introduce herself to director Michael Moore [rushing out of a Franken Radio interview], Rhodes quickly realizes he does not even know who she is.

I can't stand Rhodes' show - it doesn't air in the Twin Cities, to the best of my knowledge - but I think I like her already.

Stay tuned.

On Patrol

Rusten Currie is in Iraq, and writes one of the best stories I've seen about a typical patrol in the Sunni Triangle.

Worth a read.

Right To Keep And Bear Arms

Everyone knows civilian ownership of assault rifles is a bad thing.

Oh, yes.:

Ordinary Iraqis rarely strike back at the insurgents who terrorize their country. But just before noon Tuesday, a carpenter named Dhiya saw a troop of masked gunmen with grenades coming toward his shop and decided he had had enough.
.
As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhiya and his young relatives shouldered their own AK-47s and opened fire, the police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived. Two of Dhiya's young nephews and a bystander were wounded, the police said.

We attacked them before they attacked us," said Dhiya, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, in a brief exchange at his shop a few hours after the battle. He did not give his last name. "We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen. I am waiting for the rest of them to come and we will show them."
.
It was the first time that private citizens are known to have retaliated successfully against insurgents. There have been anecdotal reports of residents' shooting at attackers after a bombing or assassination.

More power to them.

Myth of Power

"Brenarlo" does the excellent "Taking Back North Dakota" blog, dedicated (for the time being) to unseating North Dakota's powerful senator, Kent Conrad.

Conrad, along with Byron Dorgan, is a Democrat, and a liberal one at that. As mentioned in this blog before, North Dakota's three electoral votes are behind only Utah in terms of safety for the GOP. And yet year after year North Dakota returns the likes of Dorgan and Conrad (and South Dakota, Peterson and until recently Daschle) to Congress.

The theory is, farmers want their piece of the pork - in this case, the farm bills that are so important in putatively keeping so many farmers afloat. Democrats bring home the pork with style.

Brenarlo questions the logic:

A myth exists in North Dakota that we should keep electing our representatives back to Washington because they are "powerful" players in the Beltway. They sit atop of "powerful" committees. They are senior members of Congress. They can "bring home the bacon" so to speak. When they talk, the President listens. So I ask my fellow North Dakotans why aren't we looking at their records instead of their status?

I suggest because pork trumps record. Or to put it somewhat less cynically, self-interest trumps ideology. North Dakota's farmers, being inherently conservative, vote for Repubican presidents; strong defense and conservative national policy on most issues are winners among the farm community...

...until the farm bills are debated. Suddenly, the farmers of the Great Plains are as statist as the most goggle-brained AFSCME cheerleader.

So when Brenarlo notes...:

Senator Conrad is on the "powerful" Senate Finance and Budget Committees. He is widely respected in the Senate, but what good does a "powerful" senator from ND do in Washington if he votes for higher taxes every time the issue comes up? What good does a "powerful" senator from ND do in Washington when he constantly blasts President Bush for the budget deficits while voting against a balanced budget constitutional amendment?

...I have to agree...

...and ask, knowing the farmers of my hometown as I do, "will it matter?"

Of course it can. Farmers are engaged in their own self-interest, but they're not completely lost to it; Daschle's defeat shows it can be done.

Now, Tom Daschle did a lot to scupper himself; cozying up to Michael Moore was only the tip of is iceberg of two-facedness. Is Conrad that bad?

Maybe, says Brenarlo, noting aspects of Conrad's voting record - but that's a lot more subtle than Daschle was.

Read the blog often. It's going to be an interesting campaign.

The Less Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

While Minneapolis' famous First Avenue thrashes and flounders, Saint Paul's Turf Club keeps chugging along:

One of the Twin Cities' best-loved music venues, the Turf Club in St. Paul, could soon have a new owner but probably won't change its tune.

Mark Johnson, whose family has owned the 70-year-old Midway-area bar since 1969, has entered into a contract to sell it to Tom Scanlon, owner of the nearby Dubliner Pub. The sale could happen within a month, pending the resolution of several issues, including licensing approval from the city.

That last sentence is enough to make any St. Paulite's blood run icy; Saint Paul's neighborhood activists oppose licensing anything louder than a meditation center and bigger than a phone booth. Anything that has to do with fun, they protest.

But barring that, this is great news. The Turf is one of the classic old-school bars; in the eighties, it was the kids of place where old drunks hung out all day drinking 75 cent drafts, and danced to polka music all weekend. In the nineties, it became a rock and roll club, but kept a lot of its old thirties and forties ambience. It was the last place I played a gig with a band (and the first place I'd like to play again, someday), and it's one of my favorite rooms in town to play.

Good news for Saint Paul.

Barring any more of those accursed neighborhood activists.

Mike Hatch, American Bankers and The Media - Part 3

I'm re-running my series on Mike Hatch and the American Bankers controversy, first published in the summer of '03. The story is back in the news - if below the fold - due to the continued prosecution of State GOP chair Ron Eibensteiner.

Part 3: The Meeting

After a tumultuous campaign season, Tim Pawlenty was elected governor of Minnesota in November of 2002. He appointed Glenn Wilson to the post of Commerce Commissioner. Wilson's main experience was in the mortgage industry - Ronald Reagan had appointed him president of the Government National Mortgage Association ("Ginny Mae") in 1985.

On January 6, Tim Pawlenty was inaugurated, and his cabinet (including Wilson) were sworn in.

The January 6 Meeting

After the inauguration, according to the transcript of Attorney General Hatch's deposition to the Legislative Auditor as well as the auditor's report [warning - big PDF file], he had dinner at the Oceanaire (a restaurant in the Minneapolis Hyatt).

Hatch described the meeting in his testimony to the auditor:

So we met at the Oceanaire. It's Jerich, some guy named Harry at American Bankers [Harry Bassett, Senior Vice President of Government Relations for American Bankers] and myself. He makes the offer exactly like the August 7th settlement, except they said the three and a half goes to chairty. I said fine, I want this presented to the Commissioner immediately. Because I wanted to get it on the table. I wanted to get the bar set. I met on January 8, I believe it was the 8th, it was on a Wednesday. I told them, I wanted either Jerich or Thornton in my office at 11:00 on January 8th, whatever the Wednesday is, to make that offer. I wanted the offer on the table...

This set the stage for the January 8th meeting between Hatch and Wilson that we'll get to in a moment here.

Such settlement are, of course, illegal under state law. The legislative auditor noted this in their report:

We were asked to examine the Attorney General’s actions because state law prohibits a diversion of settlement money to a charity (Appendix M). Moreover, Minn. Stat. §16A.151, Subd. 1(b) makes it illegal for state officials—including the attorney general—to even "pursue" such a diversion. The key provision of law says:

(b) A state official [defined to include the attorney general] may not commence, pursue, or settle litigation, or settle a matter that could have resulted in litigation, in a manner that would result in money being distributed to a person or entity other than the state.

How serious was this illegal proposal? Apparently, according to the Auditor's Report, seriously enough to report:

Attorney General Hatch reportedly told people attending a task force on mental health access that he might have a donor for the Community Behavioral Health Trust Fund. The Attorney General asked Dick Niemiec, a senior vice president at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, and Mary Brainerd, Chief Executive Officer of HealthPartners to come back to his office to discuss the possible donation to the trust fund with the new commissioner of Commerce.

So - according to the Auditor on the case, Hatch convened a meeting among a couple of people who would be key stakeholders in a diversion of American Bankers' fine to charity, broached the idea, and then walked over to his office to meet with Glenn Wilson.

The January 8 Meeting - Wilson meets Hatch

On January 8, Glenn Wilson had been in office for two days. According to a source familiar with the issue, Wilson had gotten a call on January 7 from Hatch, calling a meeting for the eighth. The meeting was supposed to be "primarily a meet and greet", according to the source, as well as a letter from Ken Wolf (Commerce Department Reliability Administrator) to Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles, dated June 18, 2003 - "On January 7, 2003, the day before the January 8, 2003 meeting between Commissioner Wilson and Attorney General Hatch, Commissioner Wilson told me that he was going to meet with Mr. Hatch. I asked the nature of the meeting and he said he was invited over for a courtesy visit to meet Mr. Hatch".

But according to the source, there were some indications that Wilson had no idea this meeting was to be anything but a "meet and greet" between two men that hadn't worked together before; Wilson, who reads with glasses, left his reading glasses at his office. And when officials go to meetings with substantive issues on the table, they very often take associates, or at least notebooks. Wilson took neither, according to my source. He went alone.

According to the source, "It was a setup".

Hatch presented to Wilson the proposal - the $3.5 million dollar settlement would go to a charity for the mentally ill (the "Community Mental Health Trust") According to the source, Wilson asked if it was a "done deal", and Hatch replied that it was one of the options on the table.

At that point, says my source, Dick Niemiec (an official from Blue Cross) and Mary Brainerd (from HealthPartners) were brought into the meeting. Wilson, says the source, thought they'd been brought in to endorse the contribution. Ron Jerich also entered the meeting - it was the first time Jerich and Wilson had met, according to my source.

According to my source, the entire meeting took about twenty minutes. Wilson went back to his office, and told members of his senior staff "I can't believe this." My source tells me that Wilson felt befuddled by the situation - he had no familiarity with American Bankers Insurance, or the issues involved, and he wondered "why should I be able to choose where the money [from the settlement] goes?" The deal was presented to Wilson, says my source, as "Zero to the taxpayer, $3.5 million to a charitable entity that Hatch was arguably the inventor of," alluding to the Attorney General's propensity for installing his own people on the boards of non-profits with which his office becomes involved (which we'll discuss in next Wednesday's installment).

Although my source spoke on background, the details of his account are corroborated by the letter from Ken Wolf.

Mr. Wilson frowned and said, "I was set up." I asked what he meant by that. He repeated his previous comment to me that it was just supposed to be a courtesy visit. However, he told me Mr. Hatch called other people into his office to present an offer of a settlement of $3.5 million to go to some charity to settle some case that the Department had outstanding against some insurance company.

Commissioner Wilson was taken by surprise by the issue and returned to his office to investigate the situation. He told me he didn't yet know his lines of authority. However, he clearly stated that he felt it was inappropriate for the Attorney General, the Commissioner, or any other individual to decide what charity should be the recipient of settlement money. He felt any fines or penalties should go to the general fund.

The Meeting - according to Hatch

Hatch described the meeting in his deposition to the Legislative Auditor's office:

I invite Dick Niemiec of Blue Cross, and Mary Brainerd of HealthPartners. I tell everybody, you know what? This company is about to make a three and a half million dollar offer. They want to give it to a charity. Maybe they can give it to this group [the mental health charity]. What a fine thing. I tell these two, come along to the meeting. I'll introduce you to the new commissioner, who is their regulator. And so they come to the meeting. I make them wait in the lobby. By that time Jerich is there, pursuant to our discussion, and so he's there. Those two are there. They are in in the lobby. I go into the meeting with Wilson and Chief Deputy Eiden [Kris Eiden, deputy Attorney General and a former law partner of Hatch's]. She gets the letter. She kept the letter. Gives him a copy of the letter. He's reading the letter. I go over the mischief. I go over the whole nine yards what I've explained to you. This thing is bad. They tried to influence the [pauses] this proceeding by contributing to both the Democrats and Republican Candidates. You are going to get hit by political people on this thing. You make damn well and sure you don't cave in to it. This is extraordinarily unusual. This is not a good company. It's disreputable. You don't want to start off with this kind of a case.

Jerich enters the picture again. He had asked [pauses] I said that Jerich, representing American Bankers, was in the lobby. They are going to make an offer along the lines of August 7th, except that it goes to a charitable organization. I also told him that there were two executives from insurance companies that propbably have two thirds of the health care in this state. That he's going to be very much involved in because health care is a huge issue in this state. And we had a mental health problem in this state. If it's okay, I would like to introduce you to the two of them and then they can tell you want they're doing in mental health. SO I bring them in. They spend ten minutes to saying that they are doing mental health and what a fine thing. I bring in Jerich and I tell Jerich, okay, make your presentation. He makes the presentation along the lines of August 7th. He agrees. It's the same thing as August 7th, except for it goes to a charity and wouldn't that be great. And you two over there, what a fine charity you've got if it could go there. Kick 'em all out, so now we're getting to noon. The meeting is going over. I tell the commissioner to meet with our lawyers. That you can't [pause] there's a problem here. There's a fly in the ointment, and that is it can't be done to a charity. But talk [pause] My recommendation was that he talk to the political people and tell them up front what he can't do. Tell them about our conversation. And that our lawyers will brief ou with regard to what can and cannot be done with this money. He then leaves the meeting. The Legislative Auditor noticed the inconsistency between the two accounts - one of their findings read:

We received conflicting and irreconcilable testimony on whether Attorney General Hatch told Commissioner Wilson on January 8, 2003, about the campaign contribution American Bankers Insurance made to the Republican Party.

And noted:

Asked whether Attorney General Hatch discussed a campaign contribution from American Bankers to the Republican Party or showed him a letter from Mr. Eibensteiner to Mr. Jerich, Commissioner Wilson said: "I don’t believe that happened." Asked whether he was sure it did not happen, he said: "It didn’t happen." Asked whether it was possible that the conversation occurred as Attorney General Hatch described it, but that it did not register on him, Commissioner Wilson said: "I don’t believe so." Asked if he could reconcile his recollection and testimony about the meeting with that of Attorney General Hatch, Commissioner Wilson said: "No, sir.".

Questions

• So what did Wilson know, and when did he know it?
• Did Hatch show Wilson the form letter from Eibensteiner at the January 8 meeting, or not?
• Was it an Ambush?
• Did Hatch call Niemiec and Brainerd to the meeting because, as he said, he wanted them to meet the man responsible for regulating them - as he confronted the same man with the letter from Eibensteiner? Or was it to nail down the specifics of the contribution to the Community Mental Health Trust?
• And did the Commerce Department actually give American Bankers a better deal based on their contribution to the national party?
• Why is Attorney General Mike Hatch bringing his client, Commerce Commissioner Glenn Wilson, into a meeting with a representative of his client's adversary (Jerich, representing American Bankers) and presenting allegedly incriminating evidence about the Client (Wilson) without (Wilson says) informing the Client about it first?

We'll talk about all of this in Monday's installment.

[Previous - The Check]
[Next - "Confusing, deceptive, inappropriate, inconsiderate"]

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I Can't Feel Bad

Wog chronicles his latest travails over at Wog's Blog.

The story would make a great book, honestly.

More from Red Lake

More details about the Red Lake massacre and 17 year old killer Jeff Weise are coming out.

He was the type of character with someone from both sides of the cultural divide to dig into:

one of a Native American who described himself as a "NativeNazi" and who other students said was regularly picked on for his odd behavior.

Here's a question: Do you suppose this next bit will make it into the Strib's coverage?

Red Lake Fire Director Roman Stately identified the shooter’s grandfather as Daryl Lussier, a longtime officer with the Red Lake Police Department, and said Lussier’s guns may have been used in the shootings.

Stately said Weise had two handguns and a shotgun. The teen reportedly drove up to the school in his grandfather's squad car.

So the fact that the weapons used were all police weapons - does that get into the Strib?

Prediction: 50-50 it makes the Strib's general coverage. 0% that it gets into any of the opinion columns or unsigned editorials.

This part caught my attention:

Student Reggie Graves said he was watching a movie about Shakespeare in class Monday when he heard Weise blast his way past the metal detector.

Then, in a nearby classroom, he heard Weise say something to his friend Ryan: “He asked Ryan if he believed in God,” Graves said. “And then he shot him.”

That, of course, was what one of the Columbine killers reportedly asked one of his victims.

Final note: I wonder if this case will get the attention that Columbine got? Columbine had the great advantage of featuring kids just like the kids of the news executives that decide what gets covered. It's very easy for "dispassionate" journalists to humanize victims who are just like them. Can they do the same for the victims in a dirt-poor community far from the media spotlight?

Little Green Smackdown

As noted in Powerline yesterday, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has responded to last week's insipid op-ed by Tamara Baker in the Strib:

In a March 19 counterpoint ("Article on blogs should have said more on political divide"), Tamara Baker made a bald-faced lie: "[Eric] Black's article also didn't mention "Little Green Footballs," a right-wing blog whose founder, Charles Johnson, claims that he and not John Hinderaker's PowerLineBlog was the first to lead the charge against Dan Rather last fall."

I have never written or said anything like this. In fact, in my posts about Rathergate on the day the story broke, I very clearly credited Power Line and "Buckhead" at Free Republic.

Charles - a self-described 9/11 Democrat who has become a lighting rod for the loony left - demands an apology from the Strib.

Note to Charles; good luck with that. The Strib's not big on admitting mistakes.

Speaking of the Strib's mistakes, let's look at the rest of the Tamara Baker piece.

Leaving aside her abject flub of the Rathergate timeline, Baker's piece can only be described as a flight of fancy:

Eric Black's March 9 article on blogging was interesting, but incomplete.

For one thing, it focused on the local Republican bloggers,

Largely because they were the ones that brought down Dan Rather. The piece was contemporaneous with the Center of the American Experiment's party in honor of Rather's exit.

But there's more:

... but didn't name any of the liberal blogs like DailyKos and Eschaton, which have been around a lot longer and which still, despite their not getting as much mainstream-press publicity as the righties, get more readers than the righties.

Both of those blogs get a lot more attention than they deserve. Where Powerline and the better conservative blogs provide analysis, investigation and commentary, Kos and Eschaton provide snarks, scatology and talking points. There is no comparison, except in terms of traffic. How do we explain the traffic? Go figure.

Then, go figure this:

The big thing left out, though Black hinted at it with his mention of right-wing blogs hounding the Star Tribune, is that the right and left halves of the blogging world have very different goals.

As Garance Franke-Ruta noted in a recent American Prospect, "The targets of the liberal blogosphere are conservative activists; the target of the conservative blogosphere is the free and independent press itself, just as it has been for conservative activists since the '60s."

Franke-Ruta's incoherent rant was pretty well gutted by Powerline's Deacon:

I'm not aware of any conservative blogger (or other conservative, for that matter) who questions the right of MSM outlets to exercise free and independent judgment in reporting the news. Here's the way it works -- the MSM has the right to report the news as it sees fit; bloggers and others have the right to report what they take to be inaccuracies and bias on the part of the MSM; the public has the right to sort it all out. In short, the conservative blogosphere is targeting bias and inaccuracy in the MSM, not the MSM itself (or its freedom and independence). And the left, one hopes, is targeting bias and inaccuracy on the part of the conservative blogsophere and other conservative media, not conservatives themselves.

Neither Baker nor Franke-Ruta can show a coherent, serious example of such a goal (barring yuks like the NARN's josh pledge to bring down the Strib).

But as you read Baker's piece, you have to wonder what she means by "independent press":

David Brock, a former conservative activist who now runs a media-watchdog group called Media Matters for America, agrees with Franke-Ruta that Republicans' ultimate aim is the destruction of all objective reporting, so that they can say whatever they want, true or not, and get away with it: "Their explicit goal is to get us to the point where there are blue [state] facts and red [state] facts."

Now, why didn't Baker mention that Media Matters is bankrolled by George Soros?

Why didn't she mention - why didn't the Strib require her to include the fact, indeed - that Duncan "Atrios" Black of "Eschaton" and Oliver Willis, two of the biggest liberal bloggers, are direct employees of Media Matters?

Or that all the major leftybloggers are directly beholden to major lefty institutions (Matt Yglesias at the Prospect, Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, Kos as a consultant to Howard Dean and many other liberal politicians, and Black and Willis by Soros)?

Because passing this bit of information along to the Strib's readers might have helped them put this bit of slander...:

In other words, Republicans for decades have wanted to control the press much as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler did, by attacking and attempting to discredit independent journalism, and for them blogs are just the latest tool in their war.

...into context.

Of course, the whole story is the last thing Tamara Black and the Strib's editorial board want the public to get.

Red Lake

Yesterday's tragedy at the Red Lake Indian Reservation high school is a horror indeed:

A teenage boy opened fire inside the local high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation on Monday, killing seven people before turning the gun on himself.

The boy, identified by a law enforcement official, a school employee and two students as Jeff Weise, 17, apparently shot and killed his grandfather -- a Red Lake police officer -- and his grandfather's girlfriend before heading to the school in his grandfather's Red Lake squad car, sources said Monday night.

Seven school children dead (eight with the shooter) in a town of under 5,000 people. In proportion to the size of the communities, that'd be like eighty dead at Columbine, or 250 at a Minneapolis school. And in a small town like Red Lake, that's a big piece of the future of the town and the reservation dead.

And that doesn't even address the individual human tragedy in each of those families, for whom I urge you all to pray or do whatever you do.

Which is all that belongs "above the fold"

Now that we're below the fold...

You can almost count the seconds until the Twin Cities' commentators, the Colemans and Sturdevants and Perrys, not to mention the insta-authorities like Rebecca Thoman, start to blame "the bloody guns".

And yet Red Lake High School is a monument to things done exactly the way they wanted it.

By federal law, schools and the 1000 yard bubbe around them are gun-free zones; the law-abiding are legally disarmed. Schools - Red Lake, Cold Spring/Rokori, Columbine, wherever - are little pieces of DC or Chicago, places where one is safe purely at the sufferance of the authorities. School shootings are a refutation of the leftist ideal of gun control, not a symptom begging for more of it.

I keep returning to the story of the Pearl, Mississippi shooting in 1997. The incident, which left two dead, was ended by an assistant principal, Joel Myrick, who had his national guard pistol stored "illegally" in his car, less than a thousand feet from the school. ith the gun, he was able to apprehend Luke Woodham, the shooter.

Cesare Beccaria, the Italian noble and criminologist much admired by Thomas Jefferson, said:

Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?

Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.

There have been dozens of school shootings and other lethal assaults in the past decade. Saying "more restrictive gun laws would do no good" isn't a guess or a wish; the schools have the laws already. Schools are exactly as people like Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota want all of society to be; disarmed by law.

As usual, it's the damned criminals and psychos that keep messing things up.

Mike Hatch, American Bankers and the Media, Part 2

I'm reprinting the entire five-part series I did in the summer of 2003 on Mike Hatch and the American Bankers story, one installment every day.

Next week, I'll revisit the story. By the way - if you have any inside knowledge of this story, feel free to drop me a line. The more the merrier.

Part 2: The Check

The law in Minnesota is about as clear as laws ever are; corporations may not make contributions to political campaigns in the state.

Corporate money can go to the national parties.  From there, depending on who  you ask, the money either is launched into a random void from which it may or may not ever come back to Minnesota, or it comes directly back to the state after going through the formality of a trip to the national headquarters. Both the Republicans and the Democrats have organizations that exist to take corporate contributions, and filter them back to the states.  Technically, there is no way to know if the money from any given corporate contribution will ever get to the candidate that the donor intended. One source calls the law "legal money-laundering". The upshot is this; direct corporate donations, bad.  Donations through the national office that are sent anonymously back to the state campaigns, good.

The Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC) is the national GOP body that accepts state contributions and recirculates them to state campaigns.

The Strategy

It's clear that American Bankers had adopted the strategy of "going political", as Attorney General Hatch calls it.  The Legislative Auditor's Report notes that it "found evidence to support the Attorney General’s assertion that, in August 2002, American Bankers Insurance employed a "political strategy" to help the company resolve its regulatory problems with the State of Minnesota".  In a telephone interview found in the report, the company's general counsel, Jerome Atkinson, said:

When… Governor Ventura announced he wasn’t running for reelection, my view was, let’s do what we can to ensure that Commissioner Bernstein goes with him. And take our chances on whomever the next commissioner is going to be, because it can’t be any worse than trying to negotiate a settlement on this matter. You know, our view wasn’t, you know, we wanted to influence the outcome of the settlement. It was to get a reasonable mind... [and] to talk to this person about this deal. The fact that it was Republican or Democrat, we didn’t care [as long as] it wasn’t Bernstein.

Tim Thornton, American Bankers' local counsel, also noted:

I regarded Mr. Bernstein as a bully populist who lost sight of what was in the interest of the regulated community and the consumers of the state of Minnesota for his own self-aggrandizement. And almost anybody in the commissioner’s office would have been an easier person to settle with than Mr. Bernstein.

Depending on who you ask, the "Political Tack" supplemented or supplanted the company's negotiation and litigation strategies during the late summer of 2002. "As tawdry as it seems, this is not illegal" a source at the capitol tells me, "and, in fact, is business as usual in the political world."

Part of the strategy, of course, involved hiring lobbyist Ron Jerich

The Caller

Ron Eibensteiner is the chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party

One of the main responsibilities in leading the party is raising funds When someone wants to donate money - especially a lot of money - to the Minnesota GOP, he's the go-to guy. In 2002, after the Republican state convention endorsed Tim Pawlenty to run for governor, Eibensteiner was doing a lot of it. "After the endorsement and during the Pawlenty campaign, I got a lot of calls from people who wanted to help - people who wanted to volunteer wit the campaign, and people who wanted to contribute," says Eibensteiner. I told my staff, corporate contributions are illegal. People can give to the Republican National State Elections Committee.In August of 2002, says Eibensteiner, someone began calling the state GOP office, wanting to make a donation to the Pawlenty campaign "This guy calls, and says he wants to give $15,000 to Pawlenty.  He says "I want to make a corporate contribution "We said "No, you can't do that!" says Eibensteiner. "My staff tells me this guy keeps insisting; We gave him the address for the RNSEC. But when the check came, it was addressed to the Minnesota Republican Party."  After that, Eibensteiner says, staffers sent the $10,000 check to the RNSEC office in Washington. And that's it!", Eibensteiner concluded.

The "guy," according to Eibensteiner, was Ron Jerich.

The Other Check

At about this time, another check is sent to the Democratic Party, from American Bankers, arranged by Ron Jerich.

According to sources at the state DFL who spoke off the record, no check was received. Attempts to reach DFL officials for on-the-record comment went unanswered. The apparently went directly to the national Democratic party, in accordance with state law.

The Letter

When a check is received at the GOP's office, on Cedar Street in downtown Saint Paul, the details are entered into a computer. The computer then generates a "thank you" form letter. The staff periodically brings a stack of these letters to Ron Eibensteiner. He signs them

"I sign thousands of them!" Eibensteiner exclaims, in the tone of a guy who knows the meaning of writers' cramp. A copy of the letter is among the appendices to the Legislative Auditor's Report.  It includes two marginal notes, in Eibensteiner's looping script, and a postscript at the bottom: "P.S. Since we're not sure who to thank at American Bankers Insurance, if you would do that on our behalf, I would appreciate it"

According to Eibensteiner, the postscript was added by a staff member. "We never talked with them. We never dealt with them. We didn't have their address, no phone number - no nothing! That's it!"

Eibensteiner signed the letter. "This all took place in a split second!".

The letter was mailed to the lobbyist that arranged the payment - Ron Jerich.

Jerich

Ron Jerich is a registered lobbyist. He's best known, sources tell me, for working with DFL candidates, although he works both sides of the aisle.

He is not an "issues" guy", says a source at the Capitol who knows Jerich well. He is a behind-the-scenes player with extensive connections. His specialty is getting folks together.

By all accounts, including Federal Election Commission records, Jerich is fairly ecumenical - he'll work with anyone. "He is a Democrat and works mostly with the DFL but has several Republican friends, including me", says the capital source. The source also noted that "Mike Hatch was one of his closest friends". Jerich has worked for Hatch in the past. Sources also claim that Jerich and Hatch own a condominium together in Naples Florida - a claim that Hatch's press secretary Leslie Sandberg says is completely false.

On Saturday, October 5 (according to Attorney General Hatch's testimony to the Legislative Auditor's office), Hatch went to Ron Jerich's house (note: this is transcribed from the testimony transcript. Errors in spelling of names are transcribed directly. Ellipsis means I've taken out some garbled, conversational text).

That morning, I went over the Ron Jerich's home. He was acting as a host for a number of people who were door knocking for ... Senator [Jim] Metzen, and Representative Pugh. And when you do these door knocks, you show up and they hand you a map and a bunch of literature, and you drive out and knock on doors...And usually beforehand, the host...or hostess will have coffee and orange juice and some donuts. And which Val Jerich [Ron Jerich's wife] did have, what I recall was quite a spread.

In other words, a fairly typical campaign-season literature drop. Hatch continues, from the transcript.

And I was drinking coffee, talking to Ron Jerich, and noticed...We were in his office talking. And there was a bust of Ronald Regan (sic) on his desk. And I said, gee, that's an interesting bust. Why have you got Ronald Regan (sic)? And he said he just got it from the Republican Party for a ten thousand dollar contribution. I asked him why were you making a ten thousand dollar contribution, and he said that he had been retained by American Bankers Insurance Company. That they wanted to get involved in Minnesota. And that they wanted to make contributions to the Moe campaign and to the Pawlenty campaign. He had indicated that he had contacted Tim Commers... and I said, well, who made the contributions. And he said, the company. I said, well, what do you mean, the company? I mean, was it an officer of the company? Was it you? How did you...? And he said no, the company made the contributions. I said, well, how did they do that? And he said...and I said, more out of curiosity, how did you make a corporate contribution?

Hatch continues, talking about campaign law:

I had been chair of a political party. This was news to me. And he that, well, he called Tim Commers, who was the campaign chairman o the Pawlenty campaign, and Vic Moore, who was...I don't think he was active on the campaign, but certainly a close associate of Roger Moe. And he had commented that Commers knew how to get it done. He told them where to send the contribution, but that the Moe campaign really didn't know how to do it, because they cut a check and he sent it to the DFL party and they refused it. And he said they really screwed up. They don't know how to take corporate contributions. And I'm thinking the whole time, what the hell is going on here? ...So how does the Republican Party send you a bust if you send corporate contributions to the Pawlenty campaign?

The letter returns:

And he hands me this letter. Pulls a letter out of a desk and hands it to me and it's a letter from Ron Ebensteiner (sic), who is the chairman for the state Republican Party. So now I'm trying to figure out how does the state Republican party send a thank you letter when it was a contribution to Commers?...I'm looking at this and I"m thinking, this doesn't make sense. The letter itself says it's from American Bankers, because there is a note at the bottom saying let me know who I should thank at America Bankers. And then I look at it, you know. I'm just kind of reading it and trying to figure out what this is all about. And it says it's to the Republican National State Committee.

Hatch acts:

I take the letter. [Emphasis added] Do the door knock that day. I mean, I'm tring to figure out what's going on here. This is troubling to me. I know that mischief is afoot here. I know why American Bankers is doing this. I don't think Jerich did. He wouldn't have told me if he...I mean, they knew. I mean, it's not any secret my feeling about many insurance companies, and it's not secret what I think about a company like American Bankers. And I really don't think he knew.

Hatch took Ron Jerich's letter from Ron Eibensteiner. Accounts differ as to whether Hatch took it with or without Jerich's permission, or active connivance. According to the Legislative Auditor's report:

Mr. Jerich acknowledged that he showed Attorney General Hatch and others who had come to the "door knocking" event the letter from Mr. Eibensteiner. However, he said that the letter subsequently disappeared, and he didn’t know who took it.

Sources close to this story with personal knowledge of Hatch and Jerich's relationship, however, say that it's "equally likely" that Jerich gave Hatch the letter. Jerich did not respond to several attempts to reach him for his comment.

In any case, that was the last anyone heard of the check, at least publicly, until after the inauguration of Tim Pawlenty.

On Election Eve

So, let's recap what happened between the beginning of August and October 5, 2002:

• American Bankers retains Ron Jerich.
  
• The company withdraws from negotiations with the Commerce Department.
  
• Ron Jerich sends checks to the Minnesota GOP and the Democratic National Committee. The Minnesota GOP forwards their check to the RNSEC.
  
• The check's receipt generates a form letter, which Ron Eibensteiner signs.
  O
• ne fine October morning, Mike Hatch happens to start discussing the subject with Ron Jerich. He reads the form letter from Ron Eibensteiner, and, depending on whose account you're reading, either palms the letter or Jerich slips it to him under the table. This letter forms the basis for much of the future brouhaha on this case.

November, 2002

In November, Tim Pawlenty won the gubernatorial election. He appointed Glenn Wilson, a mortgage banker who'd been president of Ginny Mae in the eighties, as his Commerce Commissioner.

This takes us to January 6, 2003 - Inauguration Day for the Pawlenty Administration, and, according to Mike Hatch, the day a new plan was hatched to deal with American Bankers Insurance.

[Previous - Part 1: If a Settlement Falls In The Woods, And Nobody Signs It...]

Mike Hatch, American Bankers and the Media: Part 1

Nearly two years ago, the Mower County attorney brought a misdemeanor campaign finance charge against State GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner.

Since this story is back in the news, I'm going to exhume the five-part series I did on the entire controversy, back in June and July of 2003.

I will reprint the series, one part per day, during this week. Next week, I'll update the story, revisiting some of my sources and following up some of the key questions left behind two years ago.

Part 1: If a Settlement Falls In The Forest, and Nobody Hears It...

A source close to the story says "Make no mistake, American Bankers was a bad player. Everyone acknowledges that."

American Bankers Insurance (which was originally two companies, American Bankers Insurance Company of Florida and American Bankers Life Assurance Company of Florida) was an insurance company that dealt in several niche insurance markets, including Accidental Death and Dismemberment coverage. The company was acquired by Fortis, Inc., a company based in Europe, in 1999.

They solicited customers from mailing lists bought from lenders like Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp., Fleet Mortgage Group, Household Financial Services and The Money Store.

And in the nineties, their business practices left something to be desired, according to Minnesota insurance regulators. The state of Minnesota cited American Bankers Insurance four times between 1993 and 1998 for a variety of regulatory problems. (American Bankers Insurance is also the subject of at least one class action suit related to
overcharging for insurance).

This story starts with one of those actions.

In May of 1998, regulatory officials from 43 states began a cooperative "market conduct examination" of American Bankers Insurance, with Minnesota, Kentucky and Maryland taking the lead roles. In these types of investigations, say sources close to the story, the various participating states take on different portions of the investigation. Each state then relies on the work done by the other states in pursuing the overall action.

As a result, American Bankers agreed to a settlement with the 43 participating states on November 23, 1998, to settle the regulatory violations. American Bankers agreed, according to documents related to the case, to pay a sanction of up to $15 million, and to change its rates and forms subject to a compliance plan to be worked out with the states. The company distributed $12 million among the states involved in the action. Minnesota's share came to $688,776 - the largest fine ever charged an insurance company in Minnesota at the time. The settlement withheld the other $3 million pending a "reexamination"; to be held after a year. The settlement would be paid if the company was not found to be complying with its end of the deal.

The company failed the reexamination, according to a November 2000 report issued by the Maryland Insurance Department, and American Bankers Insurance agreed to pay the $3 million deferred penalty. Minnesota's share came to about $67,000.

In the two years since the initial settlement, the executive branch in Minnesota had changed.

Enter Bernstein

By this time, Jesse Ventura was governor of Minnesota. Ventura's second Commerce Commissioner, James Bernstein, a longtime DFL party activst, was appointed in April of 1999. He presided over an investigation of American Bankers Insurance.

On February 5, 2002, Bernstein filed charges with the Office of Administrative Hearings - the state agency that supplies Administrative Law Judges to hear contested Administrative Law cases - against American Bankers.
That same day, Bernstein held a press conference. According to the report from the Twin Cities Business Journal:

Bernstein charged...that the two insurers have repeatedly violated Minnesota insurance laws and have issued illegal insurance policies to more than 200,000 Minnesota residents. The companies are also charged with failing to provide information to the department.

James Sykes, an Atlanta-based spokesman for the insurance companies, said the charges were without merit.

Bernstein said he would seek a fine of at least $10 million, and to bar the company from doing business in Minnesota. This would have been one of the largest fines in the history of the insurance business, had it been imposed.

While the Commerce Department was leading the effort, the Attorney General's office was involved. The Attorney General's office provided lawyers and legal expertise to help the Commerce Departent proceed with the case. According to Attorney General Hatch's testimony to the Legislative Auditor:

We do the legal work, we try to stay out of the policy, at least at the line level. [The Attorney General's office attorneys] would not be getting into policy matters...we've had a policy since '99, if there's a lawsuit, only the agency is on the pleadings"

Up until August of 2002, according to the record, this was the extent of the Attorney General's Office's involvement.

The Settlement. Or Not.

Negotiations proceeded through the summer. Letters included in the Legislative Auditor's report show:

• A May 23 letter from Assistant Attorney General Michael Tostengard to Tim Thornton, an attorney from the Minneapolis firm Briggs and Norton, who was representing American Bankers, laying out the terms of the settlement.
• A June 20 fax/letter from Thornton, outlining his understanding of the terms. It includes an amusing apology for Thornton's delay in responding - remodelers had gotten a late start on his house.
• A July 3 letter from LaVasseur to Thornton, with a funny, collegial aside about the remodelling - "Remember, if you start having problems with the project, we also regulate residential builders and remodelers" - that noted in a more serious vein that Thornton had missed Tostengard's deadline to accept the terms, but adding that the Commerce Department still wanted to settle out of court.

The State and American Bankers were, by all accounts, in basic agreement on all points but one by early summer; American Bankers wanted to keep the settlement secret.

All this led up to a meeting on August 7, 2002, between Hatch, his deputies (Tostengard and Steven Warch), Commerce Commissioner Bernstein, Thornton, and Jerome Atkinson, a lawyer from American Bankers.

Thornton and Atkinson told Hatch that American Bankers wanted to back out of the deal.

By his own description from the deposition transcript, Hatch was dumbfounded. "I said I think what you're doing is you are trying to run out the clock here. and it was clear to me, I mean...the administration was about to change. By that time, the Governor [Ventura] had indicated he wasn't going to run again. And that's my assumption was what was going on is that they were running out the clock."

But there were two hitches with the settlement. First: the settlement may or may not have actually been a settlement. Second: it was election season.

On the first point, there is disagreement. A source in the Attorney General's office is clear about the Attorney General's office's opinion - the agreement had been printed up, and the agreement was a done deal, as Attorney General Hatch said in his deposition to the Legislative Auditor on April 15, 2003,

There was an issue as to whether or not it was a done deal. We had all the terms done. And there is some law that if two lawyers agree, then they've got authority, it's a done deal. In fact, I was involved in a case involving that. The clients can't pull out afterwards...The lawyer gives an oral
agreement. It's done. It's never been done with the State. It would have been in bad taste, and I don't think we'd push that. But clearly, in my mind, it was a done deal.

But Commissioner Wilson disagrees. In a May 16, 2003 letter to Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles, Wilson says:

It is not accurate to say that the State and American Bankers had agreed “in principle” to settle for $3.5 million in August 2002. An agreement in principle is one where the parties have specifically or generally agreed on all essential terms and will then proceed to nail down the details, generally in a definitive document. Here an essential term – secrecy or public disclosure – had not been agreed upon and the parties had fundamentally different positions on that issue so there was no agreement in principle.

If I agree to sell you my business for cash and a secured note and we agree on the price and the terms, but we disagree on what security shall support the note we do not have an agreement in principle. If we agree, however, that the security will be one of three specific items (but leave for later agreement as to which one) we have an agreement in principle although we do not yet have a legally binding contract. In August 2002 the State and American Bankers were in the first situation, not the second. This is an important point. This writer’s view is that in February 2003 Commissioner Wilson and American Bankers did have an agreement in principle before the consent order was signed because they had agreed on all essential terms, but at no point

Prior to that point had any such agreement ever been reached between the State and American Bankers. Indeed, I think one of the reasons for all the confusion here is that some of the players — Commissioner Bernstein comes to mind – do not understand this legal point. (I thought Gary LaVasseur [former Deputy Commerce Commissioner, currently Director of Enforcement] touched on it in his testimony and explained it well.)

So "when is a settlement really a settlement?" might be a valid question.

But on the second point, there is no argument. By August of 2002, the gubernatorial election campaigns were in full swing. The polling at the time was too close to call; opinion polls in July showed a three-way dead heat between Independence Party nominee Tim Penny, DFLer Roger Moe and eventual winner, Republican Tim
Pawlenty. A new commerce commissioner was a distinct possibility. American Bankers and their attorneys apparently liked the odds that the new commissioner might give American Bankers a better deal. So,
as Attorney General Hatch described it, the company "went "political". While the legal discussion returned to the procedural ping-pong match after the abortive August 7 meeting, the story moved into the political arena.

When companies want to get things done politically, they hire specialists, or "lobbyists".

In early August of 2002, American Bankers Insurance retained Ron Jerich, an Eagan-based lobbyist.

[Next Part 2 - The Check]

Preying On The Gullible

If I have a weakness, it's that I will take any opportunity I can to prey on the gullible.

Now, keep in mind this is purely for entertainment purposes. I don't con people (occasional streeeeeetching of my resume earlier in my career aside).

But if I'm in just the wrong mood, and I sense just the right amount of credulity...well, I'm only human.

I got it from my dad.

Of course, it was usually an educational thing with Dad. I remember the best one of all; one day, we all filed into our American Lit class (one of the three classes where I had my dad as teacher). He had a stack of computer printouts. Back in 1979, computer printouts were both fairly rare, and usually implied some sort of official status to the information they were on.

He handed them out to us. Each had our name, and a number.

Dad explained, once we all got our sheets, that in the interest of more efficiently using scarce post-secondary education resources the government had been collating our test scores, grades, and other indicators for years. They were going to start channelling kids toward where they were best suited. Our class, '81, was going to be the pilot program.

If students had a 90 or better, they'd be channelled toward the colleges and universities. They were headed toward the elite; government, medical or law schools, the officer corps in the military, upper management, whatever.

Scores from 70 to 89 were slated for tech school or junior college. They were going to go on the be the bureaucrats, the foremen and middle managers, the non-commissioned officers and so on.

Anyone from 69 on down was headed for a life in the fields, running equipment, digging ditches, the enlisted ranks.

Naturally, almost everyone in the class was in the mid sixties.

Some kids, thinking they were on their way toward medical school, broke down in tears. Others got angry.

Naturally, it was a hoax, intended to teach the kids something about discrimination. It may have been the best lesson I've seen on the subject.

Me? I do it just for fun.

My favorites so far? Hard to choose:

1. Bored sick of hearing drunk tell their hunting stories back when I was a club disc jockey, I started talking about the ultimate hunting season; North Dakota's Hand to Hand Moose season. An annual lottery, I told them, chose five hunters who'd be allowed to go into the Turtle Mountains to hunt deer with a knife. Blades had to be under five inches. Several of the hunters solemnly nodded their heads and said they'd heard of the season, and one came back a few weeks later and said he'd written North Dakota Fish and Game to get into the lottery.
2. Bored with talk about other nation's revolutionary traditions, I spun a long yarn to a college crowd about my great grandparents and their families' roles in the Norwegian revolution. Great Grampa Jarl liberated the Swedish concentration camp at Sjonafjonet, doncha know, while his brother led the assault on the swedish city of Goteborg in one of the world's first Armored Cars, in 1905, at which point Swedish king Bjorn capitulated, giving Norway its independence.
3. At a party shortly after I graduated from college, I told my sister's roommate that during World War II the US was so short of metal, they made nickles out of compressed ham. She nodded her head - and the following semester, while talking about WWII, she said as much to the professor. The professor stopped, jaw agape, and asked where in the world she'd heard that. "Mitch Berg" she said. The professor apparently nodded, groaned, muttered "figures", (he'd been my minor advisor), and after holding his head wearily in his hands for a few minutes, set her straight.

So just watch it.

Life is a Metaphor for Metaphor

Lileks is, of course, the best writer currently working in the Twin Cities.

James is a few years older than me, but a tad newer to the Dad thing; Gnat is 4.5 years old, while mine are 13 and 12.

Sometimes it really shows. And I hope it stays that way.

Being a single parent sort of twists and perverts a lot of the emotions of parenthood. Your memories of the kids' toddler years are warped by the stress of the marriage falling apart. The divorce itself is a perversion of life; years of pseudo-legal tactical maneuvering, followed by months of ambient terror as the meatgrinder of the family court process gets underway, interspersed with moments of abject terror. Particularly for men, there's an impression that your children are weapons that can be turned against you at best, and great loves of your life that can be arbitrarily ripped out of your life at the whims of people you either hate or whose jurisdiction you have no choice but to observe at worst.

And when that's over, there's the endless grind; cooking, cleaning, discipline, strange friends, arguing about rooms and messes and homework and grades. You know you love 'em, but you get to the point where you treasure the days off, you feel, as much as the Kodak moments.

At the last Jasperwood party, my date (herself a single mother with three kids) and I were enjoying a rare night off from our broods. We talked briefly with Lileks about our kids; you can tell that the investment in Gnat that you read in the column is very genuine.

And as my date and I left, I thought "Man. What must that be like?" It's like seeing a couple that 's been married for forty years and still seems like newlyweds, all atwitter for each other. How do they do that?

I'm probably a lot like most parents; I love my kids dearly, and they are a never-ending marvel. They also suck the energy out of me; when they were little toddler wind-ups that would buzz constantly from 6AM until 10PM, I used to dream of their lethargic, disconnected teenage years, someday, a mirage that seemed just out of reach (although I was living it; I have a stepson, my ex's son from her first marriage, who was a teenager at the time; the second time through is no easier, I'm here to testify). It never happens, of course. The diapers and wall drawings are replaced by sibling squabbling and school trouble and a thousand little tugs and nags.

And yet...

James' column last Friday was a little nugget of distilled wisdom, loaded into a slingshot and bounced off of my thick skull.

Best to think yourself as a playing card on a kid’s bike frame; don’t think about the speed at which the wheel is turning, just be grateful each time a spoke picks you up.

Of course, the spokes have beaten the card down to a bare half. But he's right. It really doesn't get any better.

When Hacks Unite

Mike Hatch, Ron Eibensteiner and the American Bankers and Insurance case are back in the news:

The Minnesota Supreme Court revealed Thursday it won't hear an appeal from Republican Party chairman Ron Eibensteiner, who is fighting gross misdemeanor charges in a campaign contribution case stemming from the 2002 governor's election.

It appears that Eibensteiner's case is bound for trial unless he can reach an agreement before then. He was indicted in Mower County in October 2003 over his role in a Florida insurance company's illegal contribution intended to help Tim Pawlenty's campaign.

Mower County Judge Fred W. Wellmann dismissed the case last April, but it was reinstated in December by the Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court's denial of the appeal was made Tuesday but not posted on the court's Web site until Thursday.

Eibensteiner has denied wrongdoing and questioned whether politics led to the charges. He wasn't immediately available for comment and his attorney didn't return a phone message.

To the best of my knowledge, I covered this case in greater depth than any single news outlet, back in the summer of '03. I've changed domains since then, and the files will take some reconstruction.

Suffice to say, you're not getting the whole story from the Twin Cities media, to say nothing of the leftyblogs.

I'll try to reconstruct all the HTML later today, and re-post all the files.

Death By Dehydration

Atomizer has a harrowing piece on the effects of death by starvation and dehydration - which is what the pro-death crowd has in mind for Terry Schiavo.

Give Us Your Tired Ethnic Dustups...

Laura Billings, from Thursday's column, on being married to a guy who beats you over the head with "Irish":

I was married on St. Patrick's Day eve. The hymn was Irish. Yeats wrote the poem. Little girls in ivory and green dresses danced to a ceil band of fiddles and flutes. Whiskey flowed.

Hey! That's kinda neat. Sounds like a cool wedding.

Also, you learn not to mention your British ancestors.

Ooof! That's kinda sick!

Note: Keep your squalid anscestral hatreds at home, boyo. Most of our anscestors moved here to leave those putrid squabblings back in the old - that's Old - country.

So, in theory, did all of yours. Er, theirs.

Let's not have any more of this, shall we?

Did you know...

...that sending your child to a charter school - a school set up with its own board, funded by a portion of each student's tax-funded allotment of education dollars - is the same as sending them to a Madrass, the ultra-fundamentalist Moslem schools that teach hatred for Jews and the West?

It's the same as teaching them to "strap on a backpack" full of explosives?

That's what Nick Coleman said on his show this morning, discussing Bill Cooper's involvement in an organization that sponsors several "Core Knowledge"-based charter schools. Charter schools have become popular in Minnesota as an alternative to the public school system; hence, public school advocates hate them.

So, to Nick Coleman: Charter School = Madrass. Charter school student = terrorist.

I bring it up not because I think Coleman's message will have any impact - I think the station could get better numbers running an online auction. I bring it up because if Nick Coleman is saying it - he being the trained, pliant monkey of any number of special interests that have his ear - then it is no doubt the official view of someone in the Educational/Industrial Complex.

And that is amazing.

So - all of you lefties who are revolted by conservatives who call dissent unpatriotic; what say you all about Nick Coleman (and the lefty establishment for which he serves as a fairly transparent talking head) comparing dissent from the government school system with terrorism?

This oughtta be good.

School Daze

I had to try this one. It's from the Spinster via Jess.

Thinking of myself back then is...hilarious. Or sad, depending on my mood.

What year was it?
1978-1981

What were your three favorite bands (performers)?
The Who
Springsteen
The Clash

What was your favorite outfit?
Blue flannel shirt over a maroon T-shirt, sans or avec sleeves. Jeans. Army boots. This was three years before Big Country, mind you.

What was up with your hair?
For the first half of high school, I was in an endless battle with my father to have my hair long. Not Duane Allman long, mind you, I was talking Elliot Eastman or Jeff Beck long. It was a lousy idea, of course - my hair was naturally extremely oily, so wearing my hear long was a constant disaster (as my junior yearbook picture captured at its greasy nadir). In my junior year, I had the barber give me a National Guard haircut - and I got so many kudos from the grrls at school, I kept it.

Who were your best friends?
Nuke, Rich, Dwight Rexin, Jay Kisch, and the guys from my band, of whom more next.

What did you do after school?
Play practice, speech team meetings, band practice. The "Band" was "Blitz", featuring the Gallagher Brothers (Mitch and Ron) on guitar and drums, Dan Sad on bass, and me playing guitar. We were a garage band - but what a garage. The Gallaghers' dad restored old cars for a hobby; the garage was nicer than some apartments I've had over the years. Oh, the band was a lot of fun too; a couple of our gigs are among my favorite memories from that time of my life. Mitch Gallagner promised to burn a couple of cassettes of our old gigs onto CD at our 20th reunion, 3.6 years ago. Yo, Gallagher - how's it coming?

Where did you work?
10th grade, I had a paper route, and worked at a candy and tobacco warehouse. 11th grade, KEYJ radio. 12th grade, couldn't find a job to speak of.

Did you take the bus?
I lived four blocks from school. It was a very easy walk. My dad (who taught at the school) and I used to walk to my grandma's place for lunch a couple of times a week - she lived about a block from school. Lunch hours have never been better.

Who did you have a crush on?
I had so many crushes back then. I was cursed by my innate shyness, which rendered me unable to act on most of them - and my knack for ONLY acting on the ones that were doomed from the start. It was a crummy trait that I carried well into adulthood.

Did you fight with your parents?
Yeah, but I can't remember about what. Must have been grades and my band. I think I remember getting into a fight about music - that's a shock, huh?

Who did you have a CELEBRITY crush on?
Chrissy Hynde, circa the first two Pretenders albums.

Did you smoke cigarettes?
Never. Not only that, but all throughout high school, I had exactly one beer. Afterwards, I bought like three packs of Certs, broke them up and swizzled them around in my mouth for half an hour; so convinced was I of my father's sensory omniscience.

Did you lug all of your books around in your backpack all day because you were too nervous to find your locker?
Backpacks were not "in" back then. Either were tote bags. I remember hauling hella brutal armloads of books around in a pile. And once, in 11th grade, hauling mine and Laurie Fritz' books, when she had a broken leg. Scary thing is, I wasn't even trying to impress her...

Did you have a clique?
My clicque was the "un-clique". Most of us were guys and girls who eschewed clicques, but had friends among all the clicques - jocks, motorheads, cheerleaders, brainiacs, burnouts, drama people, nerds - we moved among them all (except the cheerleaders).

Did you have "The Max" like Zach, Kelly, and Slater?
My parents never let me do the roller rink. The closest we ever had to a building like that (as opposed to Shale Beach, out at the Island at Jamestown Reservoir) was the Pizza Hut on Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue in Jamestown. We had a ritual back then, Rich and Nuke and I; we'd get up at 6AM, go running, drink nothing but Coke (to get the stomach acid going), then hit the Pizza Hut noon buffet like three carnivorous tornadoes. Layne Poseley would keep refilling our beverages (this in the days before free refills were de rigeur), and we'd just eat and eat and eat... I think our record was twenty slices, six large Mountain Dews, and half a dozen pieces of Garlic Bread. Each. Then we'd drive out to Shale Beach and hang out for the rest of the afternoon.

Admit it, were you popular?
Nope. I wasn't unpopular, but I was hardly "in". I didn't get invites to any of Alicia Collins' or Kathy Helgaas' parties, anyhoo.

Who did you want to be just like?
Mick Jones. The one from the Clash, not Foreigner. Actually, people used to say I came across like James Honeyman-Scott (the Pretenders' first, amazing lead guitar player), down to the point of even having a passing resemblance back in high school. I'm not sure if that was a good thing - it took Honeyman-Scott a lot of smack and coke to achieve that look, and I got it naturally...

What did you want to be when you grew up?
A writer. Probably a news writer, more than anything.

Where did you think you'd be at the age you are now?
I never thought that far ahead. Seriously; when I was 18, I had no conception of myself past, say, 25.

How Can You Tell...

...when Nick Coleman is spreading BS about guns and gun control?

Answer: His fingers are moving over the keyboard.

It was sometime in the late eighties, I think, when Nick Coleman left the TV beat and, with much ballyhoo, took up the general columnist role. As a TV reporter, he was loopy but innocuous - think Brian Lambert, only his political bias was more subtle than the bludgeoning shillelagh we used to get from Lambert.

One of his earlier columns dealt with assault rifles. It was a lame recitation of talking points filtered through a platoon of highly-trained strawmen. It was laughable, except it was pretty much a distillation (or "aping") of the media-at-large's official boilerplate on the subject.

Nice to see some things never change.

He went to the Thirty Five Thousand Million Mom March demonstration at the Cathedral the other day:

There were a million moms at the Cathedral of St. Paul Tuesday.

Minus 999,979.

Five years ago, the moms could have taken a run at a million. But five years ago is a long time, when you are talking about politics.

Five years ago, the Million Mom March turned out thousands against guns in St. Paul and then, on a beautiful Mother's Day in May of 2000, assembled three-quarters of a million strong in Washington, D.C., to demand that the nation's lawmakers put an end to the carnage.

The Los Angeles Times estimated it as more like 150,000, and the Park Service said at the time it was more like 40,000. So - does Nick Coleman really have a baloney detector, or does he just turn it off when he's getting his talking points straight from Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota?

It looked like they even had a chance. But that was then. Before 9/11, before President Bush let the ban on assault rifles lapse, [and yet violent crime continues to drop!- Ed.] before a government agency warned that terrorists can buy weapons easier than they can get on airplanes, before the National Rifle Association bought Congress. Before we stopped giving a rip.

"We" stopped giving a "rip" because like the villagers in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", a majority of people - in Minnesota and elsewhere - realized that the anti-gun movement was largely discredited.

And what does Nick Coleman think - that terrorists are going to walk into Bill's Gun Shop in Lilydale and pick up a crate of SKSes? That there's any shortage of fully automatic assault rifles and submachine guns on the black market - they've been arming drug gangs for decades.

On Tuesday, the remnants of the million moms [Heh heh - Ed.] mustered around the country to jog our conscience about the daily mayhem, the 82 Americans who are shot to death each day, including eight kids under 18 years old.

Unmentioned: Most of those "82" killed every day are suicides or casualties of the drug war. Most of the eight kids killed are teenagers involved in the drug trade. Tragic, absolutely. The fault of the law-abiding gun owner? Hardly.

But those are the sort of facts that routinely escape Nick Coleman's baloney detector, too...

...when the bell started tolling in St. Paul, only 21 "moms" had shown up, including a couple of priests and a few stragglers who joined the somber assembly during the 15 minutes it took to ring 82 times.

"We have thousands of members and friends," [Yeeeeah. Thousands...no, TENS of thousands! Yeah, that's the ticket! - Ed] said Million Mom organizer Mary Heller, who nevertheless seemed chagrined at the turnout. "And we're still fighting for the same thing we have been fighting for the last five years -- sensible gun laws."

One thing Heller and the other moms wanted me to help them make clear is that they are not "anti-gun." Instead, they stressed, they are "anti-gun violence."

OK. Point noted. But the victory goes to the gunslingers: If not even the mothers can come right out and say they hate the bloody guns, then it is clear: The bloody guns have won.

No. The battle will be won when the likes of Mary Heller, and Rebecca Thoman, and Matt Entenza and Chuck Schumer and Wes "Lying Sack" Skoglund admit there's a difference - a vital, crucial one - between a gun in the hands of a law-abiding citizen and one used by a criminal. All of them, and their minions in the press, refuse to acknowledge the difference; until they do, the "bloody liars" are still in play.

How long do you suppose we'll have to wait until that distinction is violated in this column?

In the previous few days, a criminal suspect shot an Atlanta judge and three others to death. In Milwaukee, an armed churchgoer took the lives of his pastor and six others and then turned the gun on himself. And in Minneapolis, a security system was installed in the Hennepin County Government Center in an effort to stave off another courthouse shooting like the one that took a life two years ago. And all of this while a Minneapolis restaurant was just reopening after a week spent cleaning up the gore following a shooting incident that killed two customers.

Wow, that didn't take long at all.

In most of those cases except possibly the Milwaukee case, the shooter was someone who by law had no right to have a gun; in no case would they have qualified for a concealed carry permit in Minnesota.

Coleman laments that even the gun-grabbers don't call themselves gun-grabbers anymore. Come to think of it - he's right. Rebecca Thoman! Call a spade a spade! Show your stripes, as Nick would have you do! See what it gets you!

Still, only 21 came to the cathedral, and not a single TV station showed up.

You'd think that trying to rein in the guns would be a popular cause at a time like this. But you'd be wrong. Today, we don't care about stopping gun violence. Today, we discuss what kind of handgun best suits your mood and complements your outfit.

[Sigh].

Yes. The decision is exactly that trivial.

Americans don't have the will to put the guns away. We are a gun-toting, gun-loving, gun-happy bunch. With blood on our hands.

Gosh. Nick's getting so used to libel, he doesn't even know when he's doing it anymore.

"We" do not have blood on our hands. Criminals, the insane, the suicidal - they all do. We do not.

More than 150,000 Americans have been shot to death since those million moms went to Washington in 2000, including more than 16,000 kids.

The rate among kids is nowhere near that figure.

The kill rates have been falling somewhat since the moms first marched, but some of the improvement is due to the morbid fact that big-city emergency rooms have gotten better -- through experience -- at saving people who are bleeding to death.

Possible - although Coleman doesn't cite any evidence. Perhaps he "knows stuff", but would it kill him to pass on a source once in a while?

Before the cathedral bell started counting the daily dead, the moms visited the State Capitol, just down John Ireland Boulevard from the cathedral, to give little bells to the politicians and ask them to join them on the cathedral steps at noon. The politicians were very polite. Some even said they might stick their heads out the door of the Capitol at noon just to see if they could hear the death knell.

None made it to the cathedral.

Good. They've learned their lesson; participating in this sort of squalid grandstanding on company time costs them votes.

I'm feeling better already.

America has made up its mind: Eighty-two people with their guts and their brains blown out every day is the price we are willing to pay for ... what?

Yet another question that needs elaboration.

It depends on which 82 people we're talking about. Since half of them are likely suicides - I'm far from indifferent. Perhaps some of those priests need to be out working the flock to find the depressed before they fall off the edge.

The drug dealers that make up a fair chunk of the rest of those 82, most of them killed by other drug dealers? None have asked me to talk them out of their chosen trade (note to any budding drug dealers reading this space: QUIT WORKING IN THE DRUG TRADE. YOU'LL DIE. It ain't much, but I'm doing my best.

Do I feel sorry for the 2-5 cases of self-defense shootings per day? Hell no. Every innocent victim that defends him/herself via the justifiable use of lethal force (by law, almost always in situations where death, rape, abduction or grievous injury are the alternative) is a victory.

Accidents? I fully favor training gun owners; I've never advised anyone to buy a gun without taking training. The school system should allow the NRA's juvenile gun safety program into the schools; it's by far the best available, and kids who've been trained in how to respond when they see a gun are vastly less likely to hurt themselves or others.

Care to join me in this initiative, Nick Coleman? I'll donate money for books to Maxfield School, and you can help me launch the gun safety program. Deal?

Conrad is the New Daschle?

My home state of North Dakota is a strange one.

On the one hand, it's voted Republican pretty consistently since statehood. Its three electoral votes are among the safest known for any GOP nominee.

On the other hand, North Dakota has for the past twenty years elected some incongruously liberal congresspeople, including its two current senators, Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad.

Why? I have my theories; the Democrats bring in the pork on the farm bill, the one issue where the most rock-ribbed Republican farmers become socialists. And they are two of the most Senators in Washington today - giving North Dakota a measure of political clout that it is surely not used to.

The '06 election is going to be a crazy one back in NoDak; word has it that John Hoeven, the state's very popular governor, is going to take a whack at Kent Conrad's senate seat. The GOP nationally thinks Conrad is vulnerable; against Hoeven, he might be. It'll be interesting to watch; farmers, and the Farmer's Union, are pretty savvy about politics when it comes to knowing who'll put the pork on the table; all that seniority will be hard to part with. But if South Dakota could do it...

It'll be a fun election to watch.

Brenarlo, a fellow expat, writes Taking Back North Dakota, a blog I'll be following for the next couple of years.

Presumption of Fairness

I talked with Representative Rob Eastlund yesterday. Eastlund represents District 17A, the Cambridge/Isanti area in the far north Metro.

According to Eastlund - sponsor of HF1191, which if enacted would create a presumption of joint physical custody in divorce cases in Minnesota, barring some pressing, defined reason to give one parent full custody - the House Civil Law Comittee yesterday came up with a compromise bill that essentially amalgamated the three bills that were heard yesterday.

It's sort of a bizarre conflation - Eastlund said as much himself. Like most things in politics, it's bad news and good news.

The committee outcome means two things:

• Presumption of Joint Custody is alive - so far.
• The new, combined bill now has to get through the Health Policy and Finance committee.

This is the sort of place where family court reforms have foundered in the past - when the money comes into the picture.

Child Support is a cash cow for the state. The various counties recoup welfare costs for single-parent families via the child support system; if there is a presumption of joint physical custody, with the concomitant lower child support collections, there will be that much less money to be recouped. Child support is a de facto tax on low-income divorced parents (usually fathers).

And enforcing Child Support orders is a big make-work program for an awful lot of bureaucrats. It's an activity that adds to the manpower - read "empires" - of a lot of county attorney's offices.

It impacts income, personnel and power - the three things that every bureaucrat craves more than food, sex and life itself.

If this issue matters to you, you need to get on the phone or write letters to the committee members. This is where the going will no doubt get difficult.

We're trying to book Rep. Eastlund on the Northern Alliance in the near future.

Kiss This, I'm Oirish

Patrick Belton is actually Irish.

Not "Oirish".

The distinction?

Plenty!

Belton is not crazy about the Saint Paddy's revelry in America.

It's not so much Irish as Oirish - that depiction of Paddy the tireless vaudeville employee, setting down his green beer and praties only momentarily to brawl with his shillelagh, or mutter semanticisms never heard in Ireland save from Americans imagining they are communicating with the locals. While of late New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have wisely rid themselves of parades featuring all other ethnic stereotypes, come mid-March and drunken, pugnacious leprechauns appear go leor on Broadway. Equally odd, to hear most pubgoers of the nuclear superpower talk over their green Miller Genuine Drafts, one could be forgiven for imagining that the peoples of England and Ireland were still fervently at war, or that the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square somehow still advertised that Irish need not apply. The story of how we got to this amusing state of affairs wends through Latin-scented ecclesial disputes; to Shakespeare, an Empire, and vaudeville; and a mysterious Britannic cleric whose writings provide one of our few glimpse of Britain in the century after the first Empire on which the sun never set extricated itself from its imperial commitments west of the Channel.

Read the whole thing.

For me? It's enough to note that the bagpipes that will be prowling the streets of the Twin Cities today are entirely Scottish.

Oh, the Irish call them "Celtic War Pipes", but that's purely a Dublin Chamber of Commerce thing. Real Irish pipes - the Uillean pipes you saw on Titanic that are power by bellows rather than lung power - aren't the kind of thing you follow into battle, boyo.

However, I may just make it to Keegans tonight anyway...

Infinite Degrees of Separation

Ever wish you could hold forth on the connections between bands like Jack Black and John Cusack in Hi Fidelity?

Well, I do anyway.

BandToBand.com : Hot Rockin! is amazing. Click any two artists, and the system shows you the degrees of separation between the bands.

Seriously. I tried the Eagles and Black Flag, and it found a connection.

On the one hand, it's very cool.

On the other, there seem to be a few albums that everyone in the world played on.

Worth a further look.

Yes, I'm crushingly busy today.

Kiss Me. I'm Norwegian and Scottish

On the one hand, St. Patrick's Day in Saint Paul is a lot of fun. A very Irish city, half of Saint Paul takes the day off and wanders the streets, hammered out of its mind, all day today. Bagpipes keen through the streets, green beer flows like the River Liffey, and the sour tang of vomit wafts on the breeze after about suppertime.

On the other hand, there's been kind of an overdose of all things Celtic lately. The music is everywhere, those damned celtic thorn tattos have become white trash chic...

...and Irish Pubs have become for the 2000s what Sports Bars were for the 1980's. Twenty years ago, everyone with a fridge, two TVs and a beer licence was starting a sports bar. Today; remove the TVs, take a gallon of dark brown stain to all the woodwork, add some high-back uncushioned booths (recycled church pews work well), serve Guinness and tack an "o" in front of the name, and fein begorrah, you're an Irish Pub!

Now, I love places like Keegans, partly because they got the "look" right - but mainly because they got the "Feel" down. Keegans is its own social circle, a scene unto itself, a place where everone does know your name; it's a genuinely fun place to be, at least as much because of the people as the decor. With that kind of atmosphere, you could make an Applebee's feel like an "Irish Pub".

But is it too much to hope for, that perhaps the "Irish" fad has peaked? That we can get some diversity in our monuments to Bacchus? Maybe we could look forward to some intrepid entrepreneur starting, say, a Australian bar, or a Scottish pub, maybe one of those Japanese joints where fake salarymen get super-hammered and sing karaoke?

Famlaw Blogs?

As you may have noticed from the post below, I have a bit of an interest in Minnesota's family law system.

Not in the same way most divorced fathers do, thankfully. I have joint custody of my kids. Things work out fairly well.

But I know that every time I write about the subject, I get an outpouring of stories - and a lot of the anger and fear and rage that accompanies them.

So does anyone know of any good Family Law blogs out there? I'm looking for blogs written by people with an interest in reforming the system, rather than complaining about the way things are.

Any pointers?

Hearings

Three bills are having public hearings today at the Capitol, each of them aimed at reforming Minnesota's family court system.

Two of them are good bills that need to be passed.

One of them is a biased mess.

Read on.

Two of the bills - HF779 and HF1191 - are attempts to reform the "winner take all" nature of Minnesota divorce law.

Currently, contested divorces in Minnesota work like this:

1. The courts presume the best interest of the children is served by giving primary custody to the primary caregiver, which is almost always the mother. This, in over 90% of contested divorces, means that there will be a "custodial parent" - almost always the mother - and a "noncustodial parent", almost always the father. Overturning this presumption is extremely difficult - in some jurisdictions, nearly impossible, due to the bias inherent in the system, including much anti-male bias on the part of the county social service bureaucracies that handle most of the child custody evaluations.
2. There is usually a presumption of "joint legal custody", meaning both parents have nominal say over decisions like medical treatment, schools, religion and such. In practice, though, it means that the custodial parent essentially calls all the shots, and the noncustodial parent has got to like it or lump it.
3. Except, of course, as regards Child Support. The noncustodial parent is charged with paying a fixed amount (subject to alteration, usually upward, at the request of the custodial parent with very little recourse) until the children are 18.

Alternate arrangements - joint custody, for example - require parents to negotiate a non-judicial settlement to the divorce. This is hardly a bad idea - I'm here to testify it's vastly preferable to letting a judge decide.

These bills, however, would do several very important things. Foremost, both would create a presumption on the part of the courts that joint physical custody was in the best interest of the minor children of the divorcing couple; it would be up to one parent or the other to prove that such a presumption would not be in the kids' best interest; the bills also spell out what "best interest" (a legal term of art with specific meaning in family court) shall mean in the future, a meaning that is focused more on the well-being of the children than the current, winner-take-all version. The benefits of such a presumption - and of wider use of Joint Physical Custody - are many, at least for the kids.

The idea has its detractors, of course. On the left, the National Organization of Women attacks the idea. The attacks are specious, of course, most of them strawmen claiming the presumption would keep women involved with abusive men - but proveable abuse is clearly not in childrens' best interest, and would change the court's presumption! (NOW, of course, doesn't want to inconvenience women by forcing them to prove claims of abuse). Most of NOW's attacks come down to not wanting to inconvenience women after divorce with having to bother with maintaining their childrens' relationship with their fathers, or (!) with dealing with the lower child support payments that come with joint custody.

Conservatives, unfortunately, aren't much better on this issue than the most rabid feminists. Part of it is that way too many conservatives believe that raising kids is the pure province of mothers, which is shortsighted and developmentally unsound. A bigger impetus, of course, is the conservative push to make divorce harder to get - which is, in a sense, a good idea, although not nearly the panacaea that the Christian Right thinks it is. And conservatives should note that states that presume for joint custody - or make joint custody easier to obtain - have lower divorce rates than "winner take all" states. That is the goal, right?

Joint custody's big "drawback" is that it requires parents to cooperate with each other, in the best interest of their children. That is, of course, inconvenient for a couple that has spent years developing deep-seated hatreds for and fear of each other. The current system, the presumption of sole custody, allows those hatreds and fears to be institutionalized in the parents' relationship in perpetuity - and forces the kids to abide by them for the rest of their childhoods. The presumption of joint custody requires parents, absent any legal reason to presume otherwise, to act like adults, to get over their differences, to grow up and get on with the important business, raising their kids.

Having been able to negotiate a joint custody settlement with my ex-wife was probably one of the best things that could have happened with my own kids. The fact that the State of Minnesota doesn't actively promote this option is purely barbaric.

The other bill, HF 1321, on the other hand, is an abomination. Authored by Steve Smith of Mound, the bill primarily exists to place a de facto tax on non-custodial parents (a 10% "service fee" on child support payments), includes much anti-male bias, will render the Joint Custody bills moot, and make negotiated settlements more difficult to arrange - which will increase litigation, which benefits attorneys (which Smith, naturally, is). It is supported by the "womenandtheirchildren" wing of the DFL - but it's a stupid bill that would reinforce already stupid policy. It needs to be knocked down and lit on fire, but defeat in committee would suffice.

More to come.

Protest Too Much

The local far-left is going to be out in "force" this coming weekend.

Pro-Hussein demonstrators will gather in (if memory serves) Loring Park and near the Capitol to express their regret for the end of juvenile prisons, institutional gang-rape, and thousands of bodies dumped into mass graves.

The pro-rape, pro-genocide demonstrations will be taking place during the Northern Alliance broadcast this weekend. We'll have team coverage on the scene. If you can't be there and involved with one of the counterprotests (assuming you're so inclined, and I know that not all of my readers are), tune in and join us.

UPDATE: I removed "Moonbat" from the post. It is inflammatory, which doesn't bother me as such, but it inflames without any reason attached to it. It's no better than the morons who chant "wingnut" everytime they refer to conservatives.

I do indeed believe the demonstrators are marching in support of dictators and thugs. I should keep my criticisms to the specifics, and leave the name calling to people more attuned to such.

Real Friends, Blog Friends

Big Dan Champion writes "Popping Culture", an excellent blog by any measure.

He's also in the midst of - from the sound of it - a grueling round of chemotherapy for cancer.

He writes in this wonderful post about the "blogfriends" who've been with him while he's been homebound during his chemo, in this case Sheila "Red" O'Malley from The Sheila Variations, itself one of my favorite daily reads.

It touches on a lot of subjects I've been wanting to dive into for a long time, and does it better than I could have.

Dan wrote:

Is it possible for one of your best friends to be someone you've never met, or someone who is only partially aware of that you exist?

Of course, it was possible when I was a kid. Sherlock Holmes and the kid from Danny, the Champion of the World were dear friends, and they don't, in the strictest sense, exist. Still, as an only child with the nearest neighbors over a quarter mile away (and the nearest kids my age miles after that), all those fiction novel characters were my best friends.

When I was a kid - there were no kids my age in my neighborhood until I was eight - I could sort of relate, although I tended toward non-fiction.

But it as later - in my thirties, really - when I really understood both isolation and the phenomenon Dan describes. For a long time, my social life degenerated down to work and kids. And nothing else. Not that that didn't fill up the days - I was hardly alone!

We'll get back to this.

We sort of get to know people, real and fictional, by their actions, their words, moral stances, how disclosive they are, how open they seem, and a million other unspoken or subliminal signals that we pick up on and latch on to in our minds.

In the case of real persons, either authors or bloggers or whatever, we imagine ourselves connecting with what we find attractive about them, in the same way that I wanted to be Holmes' sidekick or the way I wanted to be Spider-Man because of, not despite, his real human problems.

Remember the Plain Layne crisis?

While I doubt Odin Soli specifically set out to plumb that exact human phenomonon, his blog - and the emotional turmoil that wracked so many people during the story's denouement. People out there are dying for some sort of connection.

I think that a less-rational, more needy, even psychotic mind turns this into something unhealthy sometimes, in the way Hinkley did after watching Jodie Foster on the screen enough times. He connected with her perceived traits, then psychotically assigned traits to her that only existed in his mind.

We all know desperate, obsessive bloggers whose whole existence is wrapped around getting rises out of other people.

But that's not what Dan's about:

Still, if you read someone enough, you can get to know them on some real level. After reading Dave Barry columns for years, I think I have a fair sense of how Dave might react in certain situations, and I find myself able to adapt my own humor to the positive ways he creates humor himself. I think, as we all do, that Dave and I would be great friends. Of course, in reality, we might not have two words to say, but it is the illusion that matters sometimes.

I say all that to say that since I've been homebound with cancer, Sheila of The Sheila Variations has been one of my best friends while probably just barely knowing I exist. She occasionally links to Popping Culture and sometimes posts messages here, but like everyone, she has her own set of friends and her own world in which to exist.

Still, her writing is unfailingly disclosive and she cares about a number of things that are important to me. That disclosiveness makes her an easy read, even when she's on a deep topic.

Sheila is exceptional that way.

For this 36-year old, trapped in a house for months now by a body that is literally trying to kill me, knowing I can point my browser to Sheila's website and unfailingly find something intelligent or humorous or heartwrenching or nostalgia-inducing has been a gift, and even if she never knew I existed, I would count her as one of my best friends of the last several months.

And really, it works both ways. Maybe these are my last days, and I'm taking a new friend into eternity. Maybe Sheila reads this and sees the incredible healing power that just writing honestly and personally can give. Maybe I live another 50 years and forget all about The Sheila Variations. Still, she was part of this part of the journey, part of the team that's working to keep me alive, whether they know it or not.

For starters, I'll urge all of you who are so inclined to pray for Dan. I don't know him from adam, either - but he writes a wonderful blog.

And it's an interesting point; I've made some great friends via this blog. Some I've managed to actually meet; my real, non-electronic social life has bounced way back as a result of this blog and the people I've met.

And beyond that, I've gotten to know a huge number of other people, if only by what they write. Beyond the whole political muckraking thing, which was and remains the main attraction to blogging, the social aspects are a never-ending wonder.

J'Accuse!

I called on my keen investigative instincts over the weekend to try to run down this statement from Molly Priesmeyer's Babelogue hatchet piece on the Center of the American Experiment's skin tone and cooking:

Michele Bachmann offered praise for blogger Mitch Berg: "You're my hero!" she exclaimed, while hugging him from behind.

Nobody can recall Senator Bachmann "hugging" me "from behind".

Nobody I've interviewed in the past several days can recall this actually happening.

The ramifications of this piece of the story are bigger than Ms. Priesmeyer no doubt believes. Senator Bachmann is a candidate for federal office. I am a public figure - a larger figure in local broadcasting than, say, Nick Coleman. Just because a reporter's subjects are in the public eye doesn't exempt them from the demands of accuracy. Ms. Priesmeyer may be accustomed to reporting on the canoodlings of local musicians while hanging out at garbage can parties in the Wedge, but she's in the big little league, now. We must demand better of our freebie handout media.

So I demand that Ms. Priesmeyer either produce evidence of this "hug" from "behind", or apologize. I also demand a retraction in "Babelogue".

Where is the justice?

I'll let slide the implication that I now or at any time in the past two decades have practiced golf. Chalk it up to experience.

UPDATE AND BUMP: It's been five days. Still no apology or retraction.

What kind of world is this, where journalists can get away with this kind of hatchetry?

what, indeed?

The C Mob

Beckett Wynand is starting a U of M analogue to the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers: I’m starting a new student group at the U of M – the Campus of Minnesota Organization of Bloggers. Or C-MOB, for short

Well…I’m not really starting a new organization, I’m just renaming an old one….yet, I digress…

I’m sending an invite out to every ‘blogger’ (Or allies of bloggers) at the U of M. Anyone who wants to help get this group off the ground E-mail me.......well, go to his site and read the rest for yourself!

And good luck, CMOBsters! Stop by Keegans!

When you're 21, I mean...

(Via Marty Andrade)

Sign Of The Times

Another flag burning in Iraq.

A Jordanian flag this time, being burned for Jordan's support of the insurgents.

Cry quagmire!

UPDATE: Commenter Slash noticed something that I, on my weatherbeaten monitor at home, did not; as Powerline also notes, the flag is not a legit Jordanian flag, which has a seven-pointed star. It instead has a Star of David.

Idiots burning flags. Go figure.

Via Power Line.

I See Pink, Part II

My monitor is still showing all white pixels as a noisy, hot pink.

The text on my blog editor is still grayish-black.

Which means the contrast is not only very low (lower still because the pink bleeds heavily into the black) but very tiring to read.

Which is why I'm having as many troubles with typos on the blog lately. It is literally hard to see most of them.

Two weeks 'til I take the laptop in...

Paper Armies

I cited a NYTimes piece the other day about liberal bloggers starting a series of conference calls with the major media.

One of the subjects - Bob Fertik of conspiracy site Democrats.com - responds today.

For those of us who've come to regard Democrats.com as a journey through the fever swamp via Kafka, the piece doesn't disappoint.

Fertik:

At the final session of the conference, called the "Great Debate" between the mainstream media and the blogosphere, I noted the amazing growth of the blogosphere over the past year, and predicted bloggers would score a TKO over the mainstream media in the coming year.

History already judged; Powerline did it.

Fertik looks a gift horse in the mouth:

The Times article below is bizarre. It initially appears to be a straightforward article about a progressive innovation in bringing the work of investigative bloggers to the mainstream media - although it somehow manages not to mention the name of our effort (BlogCall.org). In the middle, it quotes kind words from a mainstream reporter and even a rightwing blogger.

Both of whom were overly solicitous - I'd actually say "comically restrained" - but we'll get to that later.

But the article is driven by the presumption that conservatives "own" the blogosphere and set its standards of quality, relevance, and influence. Doesn't anyone remember how many stories Matt Drudge has gotten utterly and farcically wrong - including Bill Clinton's black love child and John Kerry's intern affair?

It's true. The conservative wing of the 'sphere does set that standard, and that's even with Drudge's celebrated flights of fancy (which are more than matched by those of Democratic Underground, not to mention Democrats.com). More later.

And it drives completely off the cliff when it quotes FreeRepublic.com - a borderline criminal site whose members engage in the Internet equivalent of terrorism ("denial of service" attacks, including attacks on Democrats.com) and fantasize about the murder of people they disagree with - including journalists. If there was a progressive site remotely like this, it would have been shut down by Karl Rove's Homeland Security department long ago.

I refute Fertik with...Fertik himself. Democrats.com is that site - with the exception that unlike the Freep, it's run by party insiders like Fertik himself.

Odd that Fertik refers to "fantasy". Remember this?

" … alert: possible bush/republican coup: sen. wellstone assassinated … u.s. senator paul wellstone killed in mysterious plane crash right before pivotal, ‘too-close-to-call’ election, just like mel carnahan in 2000 ….

"remember how just before congress was going to vote on signing away our constitutional rights to the usa patriot act, how mail laced with anthrax was sent to members of congress ….

"remember how the nazis set the german parliament building (reichstag) on fire ….

"this is it, folks. We need to mobilize *IMMEDIATELY* … against a potenital [sic] republican fascist assault …. "

Democrats.com, unusually for a blog, doesn't keep archives. Perhaps Karl Rove had them confiscated.

With material like this, I don't wonder why Fertik wants the past forgotten, though:

According to DEBKAfile analysts, these seven anomalies point to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner.

After his last audiotaped message was delivered and aired over al Arabiya TV on Sunday November 16, on the occasion of Ramadan, Saddam was seized, possibly with the connivance of his own men, and held in that hole in Adwar for three weeks or more, which would have accounted for his appearance and condition. Meanwhile, his captors bargained for the $25 m prize the Americans promised for information leading to his capture alive or dead. The negotiations were mediated by Jalal Talabani’s Kurdish PUK militia."

Fertik, ironically, spends much of the article attacking Free Republic. Democrats.com is, indeed, analogous to the worst of Free Republic's reputation. Fertik notes:

Powerlineblog.com is "a force to be reckoned with"? In whose opinion? Is this hot air from Mirengoff or the considered opinion of the New York Times? Surely the reader is entitled to clarity on this point. For the record, Powerlineblog.com is just a footnote in the Rathergate story, as compiled by dKosopedia.

That's right - in Bob Fertik's special little world, Powerline is a footnote - but Kos, whose only mention of Rathergate was exhaustive "proof" that the documents were legit (because the TANG orderly room could have had a top of the line typesetting machine, doncha know!), is the dispositive source!

Analogous? Yep. Freepers are constantly ginning up stuff like this:

Here's a brief synopsis of the "Mighty Wurlitzer": rightwing blogcrap goes directly from Drudge (and newer rightwing blogs like LittleGreenFootballs) to Rush to FOX and then spills over into the mainstream media via rightwingers like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, Bob Novak and Paula Zahn on CNN, George Will on ABC, Will and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, David Brooks in the NY Times, and their many allies.

Strike that. Freepers aren't that imaginative. From Drudge to the Media, via Buchanan? Hey, wasn't Pat Buchanan the shooter that brought down Wellstone's plane?

Copy it down, folks; they're still not archiving!

Let's talk about relative quality, here. Quick; name a story from a lefty blog in the past year. This is especially important if you are not a blogger.

I am, of course - but the only stories I can remember from leftyblogs in the past year are:

• Kos' "Screw 'em" story, spitting on the graves of four Americans killed by a mob in Iraq.
• Kos' "dispositive proof" that the Rathergate dox were legit.
• Atrios' story entitled "Why does Bush hate the troops"
• The 482 other Atrios stories with the same title
• A couple of Josh Marshall scoops that never materialized
• Regionally, the City Pages blog's call for armed revolution if Bush won
• Jeff Fecke calling the election for John Kerry
• Locally, Anoka Flash's kegerator.

I'm biased - but I challenge any non-blogger, especially non-conservatives, to do better!

The fact that Bob Fertik's sham conference call - which may not have even drawn a whole lot of reporters in the first place - got a sympathetic treatment in the NYTimes at all indicates that the mainstream media is bending over backwards to give leftyblogs a legitimacy they do not deserve. We see it all over the place: when KARE11 did its piece on Powerline, for "balance", it dredged up "niA More Perfect Union", a local soft-left blog so perfect it hasn't needed updating in two months (or, indeed, in the month before the piece aired!). Or when Powerline appeared on "Almanac" around New Years, and were counterbalanced by...The NewPats?

With all due respect to the NewPats - do you see how hard the media, locally and nationally, has to dig to find any leftyblogs? When embarassments like Democrats.com, Oliver Willis, the giggly fratboys at Pandagon and the incoherent Jeralyn Merritt are the best they can do, one wonders whether the barrel has a bottom.

By the way - does anyone who's followed Powerline and the Northern Alliance's battle with the Strib this past year find this next 'graf gleefully ironic?

A credible publication would have given us the opportunity to respond. Instead, at the end we're given unsolicited advice from the Freeper, who dismisses our serious, methodical, and thoroughly-document work as nothing but conspiracy theorizing.

In Bob Fertik's special little world, where Wellstone was assassinated, the Times lets their subjects respond in print and in their own hand and Powerline is a bit player, I suppose Democrats.com is the very definition of responsible journalism.

This Is Rich

After the Hariri assassination, Lebanese took to the streets in the thousands. The lefty media and major leftyblogs were silent.

Then, last week, the Hezbollah thugocrats drew half a million - maybe - which cause a number of lefty commentators to soil their knickers and declare Bush's foreign policy a disaster yet again. Although according to Claudia Rosett, the pro-thug demonstrators cleared out the moment the rally proper was over, while the democracy protesters have made an endless party of the event.

Today, the pro-democracy the pro-democracy demonstrators are back, in bigger numbers and with greater motivation.

Not a word on any of the big leftyblogs as I write this.

Imagine.

Half Krocked

I've long held that J.B. Doubtless of Fraters could do Chris Krok's show better than Krok could.

The resemblance breaks down when it comes to writing. J.B.'s better.

David Strom toasts Krok's op-ed in the Strib.

Now frankly I don't mind Chris taking a shot at me, but I was pretty ticked to see that he either intentionally or not completely and utterly missed the point of my piece...My piece was not an argument to outlaw gambling in Minnesota, or even to prevent the private expansion of gambling in the state. Rather, I argued that anyone suggesting that the state getting into the casino business would be a way to get access to easy money is simply wrong on the facts. All the evidence suggests that the costs of gambling far exceed the benefits.

Krok simply ignores my point, and claims that I was trying to restrict his freedom to gamble in the same way that anti-smoking activists are attacking freedoms today, or the prohibitionists attacked alcohol....I never suggested that gambling should be banned to help or save problem gamblers; rather, I stated the provable FACT that the economic and social costs of gambling far outweigh the financial benefits being touted as reasons to build a casino. ...I ask: who, besides Chris Krok, ever said anything about banning anything? Arguing against a straw man isn't too difficult...

Weak, Chris, very weak. Wanna debate?

Y'see, there's the problem - when radio stations start employing "conservative" talk hosts who don't understand conservatism.

I'm Going To Start A Sham 69 Tribute Band Next Door To Him

For the record, I don't own a leaf blower. I'll never buy one. It's just another power tool - and power tools are built to break. I don't like power mowers, snowblowers, weed trimmers - largely because in my hands, they all become metal slag in my garage. Doesn't matter how I keep 'em lubed, oil changed, whatever - they all break within a use or two.

However, if I lived next door to this guy, I'd be out on my sidewalk on Saturday morning running a leaf blower while I play my bagpipes and the electric guitar:

When he began his quest for a quieter, cleaner city months ago, little did Stephen Rueff know he'd run into throngs of people who believe they have a right to bear leaf blowers.

But oh, they're out there, legions who think that the roar of the leaf blower is the sound of liberty.

No, that's the sound of the P-51 Mustang and the M-4 Sherman.

And anything that drowns out the sounds of people like this.

The Twin Cities are are clogged with the type; people who think we'd all be so much better if we all just did everything their way.

"It's pretty interesting," Rueff said. "There are people who don't accept the notion of a greater good. They don't see that what happens on their own property impacts their neighbor."

I don't know Mr. Reuff. But I have a vision of neighbors, sick to death of Reuff's constant mewlilng about the self-serving "common good", taking up the oboe, snowmobiling, skeet shooting...

Reuff is the south Minneapolis man who started a crusade to try to get Minneapolis to follow the lead of about 250 other U.S. cities and ban leaf blowers.

He'd also seem to be a regular subject for Doug Grow, oddly enough.

When his efforts first were reported back in November, Rueff became fodder for conservative talk radio. He was seen as another of those wild-eyed, tender-eared progressives who has no appreciation for personal rights, property rights, or the rights to make noise and blow dust.

Ah. It's about politics!

No, more than that...

This harsh tone surprised him.

For starters, he loves to have conversations with people who disagree with him. But nobody on the radio programs bothered to give him a call. (Hey, why converse when you can rant?)

...it's Talk Radio's fault!

"Left or right, if you just hang out with people who agree with you, it doesn't do much good," Rueff said. "It seems like we have a lot of frustrated people who like only screaming and yelling together. It must make them feel better."

"...when you can just trot off to City Hall and try to bring the full weight of government in to settle the argument for you!"

Still, he knows where his bread is buttered:

Although he will work to pass the partial leaf blower ban, Zimmermann said he believes there are worse sounds in the Minneapolis air.

"Maybe those leaf blowers help drown out the sounds of that bad punk rock music," he said.

Rueff, naturally, is involved in a different genre.

I suppose once the leaf blower thing is done, all you rockers out there'd better watch your backs...

Victimization Pages

I opened up my inbox this morning to see that Megan Cubbingford, reporter for "Fungus" magazine (a local independent 'zine about local independent rock) infiltrated the Patriot Forum with Dennis Prager last night.

A little bird sent me the copy from her article on the subject.

Is It Just Me, Or Is It Conservative Here?

I attended the "Patriot" forum, put on by the local brownshirt monkey station, AM980 The Patriot Choice, last night.

I noticed that the crowd of about 2,000 was entirely white; where were all the people of color? The only people of color besides the few in the crowd were at the hotel, doing the jobs that had no doubt been forced upon them. The group was very racist, and jobbist too.

The social hour outside the dining room was full of hale-and-well-met exchanges of business cards and golf invitations, the kind of thing white people do when nobody is around to raise their social conscience.

I think a white Republican woman senator stuck her tongue in David Strom's ear from behind while reciting the "No New Taxes" pledge.

The entree was chicken romaine. Where was the food for people who prefer beef, hmmm? Or for vegans? The gathering was foodist, and meatist to boot.

The speakers all spoke. Where was the ASL interpreter? I'll bet if there were any Deaf-Americans out in three car garage land, there'd have been one! The meeting was clearly hearingist. Also, I met not a single person from my alma mater, Saint Catherine's, at this very anti-Catherine-ist event.

Dennis Prager spoke largely about Judaism and Christianity. What about the pagans? The rally was very faithist.

After the event, I snuck down to the Hilton bar, and saw a group of these white males (and a white female who was no doubt feeling the coercion inherent in the patriarchy) smoking cigars and drinking mixed racist mixed drinks like they were at some sort of country club. I went out on the street with the commoners, the hotel employees on their smoke breaks. And I revelled in their unintelligible Chihuahuan Spanish, and their convivial laughter as they looked at me, and as the smoke from my clove cigarettes wafted their way in the wind (which whipped around the building as if it were evading a white fascist border patrolman!) they started coughing violently, as if shedding the foul air of the fascists' party, and speaking sharply to me in their noble tongue - "No mas clove smoke", they said, which I think is idiomatic Spanish for "no more rich whiteys!".

Stay strong, my brothers and sisters!

I'm trying to book Ms. Cubbingford on the next NARN broadcast. I'll keep you posted.

Nope. No Liberal Media Here

From yesterday's NYTimes, we learn that leftyblogs feel they don't get no respect.

So what are they doing about it?

ven as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists...While there is no way to know precisely who dialed in, reporters from news organizations including CBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC and The National Journal asked for a call-in number, according to one participant.

A telephone conference call.

I've been a conservative blogger for three years. I've hung out with some of the biggest in the business. And oy, have we interacted with the press.

And I have yet to meet a conservative blogger who can "call a conference call" with the major media. Get defamed? Sure. Set up a conference call? Fuhgettaboutit.

And the "blog" involved?

The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.

Hah! Our old friends, Democrats.com! A Democrat hate site for people without the attention span for Democratic Underground.

And they're onboard with the wackiest theory of all; that the media are really conservative, and they're being frozen out:

Mr. Fertik maintains that the blurring of boundaries has benefited left-wing bloggers less than their adversaries on the right, saying that reports posted on conservative blogs more easily make the jump to the main news media. "The way we perceive it," he said, "is that right-wing bloggers are able to invent stories, get them out on Drudge, get them on Rush Limbaugh, get them on Fox, and pretty soon that spills over into the mainstream media. We, the progressives, we don't have that kind of network to work with."

Right. Bloggers have a hotline to Rush Limbaugh. Because Limbaugh respects bloggers.

Who are these hamsters?

By the way, liberal bloggers haven't had the same success for a number of reasons, most important being most of them stink. Few liberal bloggers can write, have a sense of humor, or know how to research a story. I'm talking about the bigs, here. Read Atrios, or Ollie Willis, or Kos, or the giggly fratboys at Pandagon; all any of them do is channel the impotent rage of their isolated, frothing readership. Yes, there are exceptions - although continued blogging seems to be eroding the work of even good writers like Matt Yglesias and Josh Marsall.

Paul "Deacon" Mirengoff from Powerline notes in the story:

[Mirengoff] disputed the idea that conservative bloggers had greater success in getting their stories spread by mainstream reporters. "The left just thinks we're getting a free ride and the mainstream media are just eating out of our hand," he said. "That's just not the case."

He added that he would be curious to see what happened with the conference call effort. "It never would've occurred to me," he said. "It seems a reasonable thing to do and if it works, we might copy it.

But that's Powerline.

Remember - Democrats.com makes "Talon News" look like the Times of London. And yet the wackjobs who run the site have instant phone access to the serious media.

Talon news may have gotten into the White House to talk with Joel Lockhart - but they never got an audience with anyone that mattered in the media. And they were no worse a source of news than, say, Democrats.com.

Nope. No bias there.

Dour Hour

North Dakota excels at a lot of things; my native state's high school students get better SAT scores than any other state; the school system's performance is also a good as Minnesota's vaunted system, and at about 2/3 of the budget per student.

But the state doesn't excel at a few other things - like having much to do on a weekend night for a bunch of 20-somethings. I don't know that they kept statistics on this sort of thing back when I was in college, but I think most of us suspected that our state led the nation in binge-drinking among college students, then as now. If you didn't have a significant other, and didn't care for weekend-long Dungeons and Dragons (TM) marathons, there wasn't much to do but drink.

It's a serious problem; college students in the midwest cause immense harm to themselves and their communities with their booze-fueled antics - or at least, I know my classmates and I did.

I'm not familiar with the "Power Hour", where one's classmates supposedly take a 20 year old to a bar precisely at midnight when he or she turns 21, and line up 21 shots or other drinks before closing time. But legislators in several states are proposing laws that would push the "official" 21st birthday back to 8AM.

The traditional power hour most new 21-year-olds celebrate could soon come to an end.

A new bill introduced in the Minnesota House last week would prohibit 21-year-olds from drinking at midnight on their birthdays. Individuals would have to wait until 8 a.m. instead.

The chief author of the bill, Rep. Morrie Lanning, R-Moorhead, said the purpose is to prevent deaths because of excessive drinking of alcohol by young adults.

For starters, I'm not sure that "most" 21 year olds do the power hour; my "power hour" involved dashing from a party over to a nearby bar to grab a beer at midnight (and then noticing to my alarm that the clocks at the party were way fast, and it was still 11:55 when I got my beer).

But while I may or may not know birthday customs, I do know a thing or two about bars. I spent four miserable years spinning records a one redneck bowling bar or meat market dive or another.

In Minnesota, under existing dramshop laws, bars are not allowed to keep pouring drinks down people's throats. In theory (and by law), bartenders and servers are supposed to keep an eye on how many drinks their customers are getting; customers aren't supposed to stockpile drinks at their tables, or have more than about a drink or two per customer at a table at a given time. While not every cocktail waitress or bartender is infinitely conscientious, the fact is that a bartender or waitress job usually covers more than an eight hour window. On the other hand, all of these bills would, essentially, prevent a kid from legally ordering a drink for precisely that - eight hours.

So the birthday parties move to the homes, dorms and apartments, where the rituals are even more stupid, and where nobody is legally obliged to say "whoah". Or the party moves to sometime after 8AM the next day, where the kid drinks the same 21 shots (from the same bar that is currently dumb enough to bring 21 shots to the same person in one or two hours).

This situation is already covered by existing laws. It's not covered perfectly - but then, either is the "phenomenon" of the Power Hour.

Blessings Of The Reformation, Part I

Nihilist in Golf Pants is running for Pope [1]. More power to him; I'm a Presbyterian, and I'm likely to stay that way - partly because we had a Reformation for damned (oops) good reasons, and partly because I've heard a rumor of a conservative Presbyterian congregation organizing in Saint Paul.

Nihilist is, however, running on a platform calling for sweeping, commonsensical (mostly, I think - although not being Catholic, I wouldn't know, really) reforms for the Catholic Church.

Chad the Elder has some feedback, including some additional suggestions. This one caught my eye.:

Insist that priests learn how to write and deliver good homilies. As I've mentioned before, I believe that the homily is the most important part of the Mass. The priest has your attention for ten to fifteen minutes and he needs to make it count. Those rote, recycled homilies that bore you to tears while saying nothing have to be stopped. Parishioners should have a chance to grade their priests on a variety of subjects in yearly surveys. Those failing to live up to expectations on homilies could be given extra training and advice on how to do it right. I'm fortunate in that the priest at my church delivers the goods in this area. But I've sat through enough crappy homilies to know that he is the exception rather than the rule.

We've tripped on one of the big reasons I've remained a Presbyterian, whatever the problems in the denomination.

I've been to a few masses over the years - and maybe I've just gotten unlucky, but I think Chad should perhaps put some oomph in that recommendation; the homilies have been painful in nearly every case. Catholics aren't alone - my family attended a Lutheran church until I was about 11, and I remember those sermons being drainingly dull (as have been the vast majority of the Lutheran sermons I've listened to since then).

My dad was a speech teacher, and I joke occasionally that he must have moved us to the Presbyterian church because the speakers were better. It was a joke - but over the years, I've wondered if it wasn't true, as well, that the Presbyterians seem to put a premium on really good, engaging sermons delivered competently; Presbyterian pastors seem to win on speaker points as well as content [2], from what I've seen.

I mean, it couldn't hurt - and while the Presbyterian Church (at least at the national level) can be pretty wacky-left, it's no worse than most non-Saint-Agnes catholic parishes in the Twin Cities that I've seen...

[1] Please, please, no angry letters. I know that only Cardinals are elegible. I know John Paul II is still alive. I admire John Paul II as perhaps no previous pope, so I'm in no hurry for a new one, even as I observe that the Pope really has no theological affect on me, personally.

[2] Again, please, no angry emails. You have your beliefs, I have mine. Let's leave the kneecapping to our coreligionists overseas.

Strike Against Sanity

A UAW local in Detroit which abuts a Marine Reserve armory, and which has allowed reservists to park on the union lot for years during off-hours, has barred non-UAW-built cars, and cars sporting Bush stickers, from the lot:

For a number of years now, dozens of Marine reservists have been thankful to park in the UAW's lot for weekend training with no problem at all - until now.

Marines at nearby Marine Corps Reserve Center say on Tuesday morning, the director of security at the UAW told them that while they support the troops, Marines driving foreign vehicles or sporting a President George Bush bumper sticker were no longer welcome to park there.

Miss O'Hara, from Detroit, responds:

I'll tell you what - this is enough to make me swear off UAW-built cars and buy a Mazda or Nissan just to spit in your pathetic, dastardly faces. And I will fill it with Dubya and Reagan goodies and park it in front of your door while blasting Rush Limbaugh and passing out homemade cookies to those Marines.

And you don't mess with O'Hara.

Mmmm. Cookies.

Whitewash

Over at the City Pages - our local freebie lifestyle handout - they seem to start young writers out on the "Facile Stereotype" beat.

Molly Priesmeyer is the CP writer perhaps best known to us in the NARN. She appeared at our January "MOB" party, and she also showed up at last Wednesday's Center of the American Experiment party.

Judging by this bit on the CP's house blog, Twin Cities Babelogue, Ms. Priesmeyer is still in the middle of the training program.

Priesmeyer has had a bit of a career writing as (a Google search shows) mostly a music critic for a bunch of the local twentysomething lifestyle boutique freebies.

Before we start going over her Babelogue post, let me drop a couple of observations:

• Back when I was a freelance writer, as well as radio producer and guitar player in a bunch of local bands, I got to know a lot of writers for the local twentysomething freebie boutique 'zines. The writers were a very diverse lot; some came from the U, while others were from Macalester, St. Thomas, Hamline, Carlton or St. Olaf. Liberalism went without saying.
• All hated the suburbs to a fault; nearly all grew up in the suburbs, or equally-lilywhite small towns, originally.
• In years of hanging out with such writers, pitching stories to their editors, running into them at bars, and tangling with them in this blog or around town, I have yet to meet a single one that is not as white as the driven dandruff. If there is an example of a non-white writer at any of these 'zines, it doesn't change the point; I'd say that the environment at these 'zines is whiter than a country club. Although I don't know - I've never been to a country club. The staffs of these 'zines are whiter than any GOP caucus I've ever attended
• The typical Republican will interact as a peer or associate with a wider variety of races than any City Pages (or other lifestyle 'zine) writer.
• Priesmeyer notes in her piece that there were "Three non-caucasians" at the event; that was three more than I have ever met writing for the City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, Pulse, Rake, Cake, and every single other freebie boutique 'zine in my own memory..
• I have not played golf in 25 years, since high school gym class. I live in the city.

Priesmeyer writes:

Is it really white in here, or is it just me?

Answer: Priesmeyer is, indeed, caucasian. Her hair and clothing scream "Saint Olaf [or Dinkytown, or Macalester] via The Wedge".

Why would her clothing and hairstyle be important? Read on.

En route to the Power Line/Center of the American Experiment Dan Rather retirement party, I rode in an elevator filled with white men in suits who made observations like "I can't wait" and "This oughtta be good." These were received with hale-fellow-well-met white-guy laughter that abruptly stopped when the elevator doors opened to reveal a group of young black men in Roc-A-Wear gear who were apparently not attending the same event. Then the elevator doors closed and took the bunch of us back to 1952 for an event that felt like a dinner at a segregated country club in the days when Perry Como ruled the airwaves.

The "white guys" reactions - assuming they happened as written - were not a whole lot different than those I've seen from people very similar to Ms. Priesmeyer when surprised by groups of bikers or aggressive rednecks.

And what does Ms. Priesmeyer notice about the black guys? The brand of their clothes! It's of a piece with the shallowness of the rest of her observations, which amount to a checklist of mealy-left stereotypes. Golf. Three car garages. White entered via hotkey.

What of the black men? Their ages? Their speech? Their actions? Was there anything about them besides that shallowest of features, their clothing labels, that the reader could divine from Priesmeyer's piece?

Of course not. Like the white people that Priesmeyer sat among (and matched) in the CAE dinner, they are mere props, used purely as symbols in a story that was, by all appearances, written long before Ms. Priesmeyer left her apartment Wednesday night.

That’s not exactly correct: Inside, I spotted a total of three non-caucasians, and one of them was hunched behind a television camera recording the event for history's sake.

Actually, it was C-SPAN.

Just the facts, ma'am.

Over a paltry buffet ($35 for iceberg lettuce and cruddy bow-tie pasta?),

Since we're wallowing in stereotypes - whining about the food at a buffet for a fundraiser for a non-profit is a characteristic of upper-middle-class kids from three-car garage land.

But again, I'm sure that's a stereotype.

Rather's farewell, however, included a moving tribute to September 11, which pretty much killed any hooting ovation.

There was never a hooting ovation, at least not before the final signoff (and that was more a round of joyous applause). I observed the vast majority of the crowd was more interested in the conversation than the newscast. The show was barely audible until the last segment.

(Don't you just hate it when public figures exploit 9/11 for their own ends?

Actually, it did bother me when Rather wrapped imself in the 9/11 victims, the troops in Iraq, and the Tsunami victims, yes. His final broadcast was the first time I'd seen footage of the collapse of the WTC on CBS in years - they didn't even show that footage on the anniversary of the attacks. For Dan Rather's retirement, they trot it out? CBS dropped the tsunami story the moment it wasn't sexy enough for ratings, and Dan Rather was little short of an enemy of democracy for the Iraqi people. But for his signoff - which was forced by his and his news division's own politically-motivated dishonesty - suddenly we break out those searing images?

Yeah, it did bother me.

"Courage" might have gotten the biggest laughs, but "hero" was the watchword of the night. "You guys are just heroes," one woman from the Center of the American Experiment told the Power Line and Fraters bloggers. And Sen. Michele Bachmann offered praise for blogger Mitch Berg: "You're my hero!" she exclaimed, while hugging him from behind. Apparently, "hero" now means anyone who savages the president's many detractors. Then again, this is 1952, and those commie bastards deserve it.

Neither I nor any of the guys I spoke with recalls Senator Bachmann "...hugging me from behind". I'm a single guy. I remember these things.

And is Priesmeyer seriously comparing the bloggers present - a bunch of middle aged family guys with full-time jobs and mortgages and kids to raise, who write a bit in their limited free time (and still write more, and better, than the likes of Priesmeyer or Nick Coleman), people like Rocket and Trunk and, by the way, me - with the House Unamerican Activities Committee? With a megalomaniac Senator who used the full weight of the US government to (let's take the lefty canonical tale of the events at face value for now) squash the reputations, livelihoods and lives of innocent people for political gain?

I had no idea I was such a big cheese!

Sorry, Molly. You're going to be on the "facile stereotype" beat for a while longer.

Ed noticed the McCarthy angle, too:

Here we have an event that was open to anyone who wanted to buy a ticket, held in a public place with plenty of notice, and obviously used no particular barriers to entry other than a ticket-taker. The issue of the evening had nothing to do with race. Dan Rather, obviously, is white. So is Les Moonves, Sumner Redstone, Mary Mapes, Bill Burkett, and everyone associated with the topic. The only person talking about race in relation to the Rathergate debacle appear to be Molly Preismeyer -- which says a hell of a lot more about Molly's state of mind than anyone else's. It also reveals the character of Babelogue that they would reprint such a transparent smear, such a vulgar non-sequitur, such disgusting tripe.

As for the McCarthyism, accusing a roomful of people of being racists without providing the least bit of evidence for such except a headcount at a well-publicized event that was open to anyone with $35 (as Preismeyer's own presence demonstrates) is a sterling example of the practice. Preismeyer and City Pages prove themselves to be disciples of McCarthy in their smear of political opponents with unsubstantiated and vile allegations. If they consider themselves journalists, they are deluding themselves. The City Pages has sunk to the level of parody, except no one's laughing at their hatred.

But then, the City Pages are a place where the editor thinks the Strib is conservative, a place where the blogmaster openly called for armed revolution if Bush won the election, a place that linked to a site that showed a flash animation of Michele Bachmann dancing with Hitler to support an article about te candidate.

Maybe it's time for the City Pages to declare intellectual bankruptcy.

One Of The Cool Things...

...about blogging in the long term is seeing how other blogs develop.

There are a few blogs in the MOB (I single the MOB out because I'm most familiar with them over the long term) whose quality - indeed, whose basic writing style has improved the point of night and day over the past year.

Not naming names. Just saying. Practice does, indeed, make perfect better.

Anniversary

Tune in tomorrow for a very special anniversary broadcast of the Northern Alliance Radio Network. We'll be talking with dozens of our closest friends, playing some highlights from the past year, and of course taking your calls.

Tune in tomorrow, noon-3PM on AM1280 The Patriot!

Paranoia Strikes...Shallow

I've been softpedalling the fisking of Nick Coleman's Strib column lately, partly to leave material for other local bloggers, partly because the exercise starts to feel almost ritualistic after a while. Answer the faulty facts; debunk the inflammatory statement; illuminate the illogical leap; undercut the ponderous finish; break for breakfast. Yawn.

But I read this bit this morning, and figured it was worth a quick pass.

Coleman is "reporting" about the shootings in North Minneapolis. If you aren't from the Twin Cities - or are a particularly myopic columnist - North Minneapolis is one of the two or three most blighted, crime-ridden neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. Two generations of "Urban Renewal", freeway construction, and welfare-state warehousing of the poor have devastated the North Side (along with Phillips in South Minneapolis, and a fair chunk of central Saint Paul.

This next graf appears near the end of the piece - which theretofore seemed to stay somewhere within shouting distance of sane. I add emphases:

People who have vested interests in keeping mentions of a crisis down to a low whisper don't like loose talk in which "Minneapolis" and "Iraq" are used in the same sentence. Others, who are the enemies of the inner city, point smugly to blood in a restaurant as proof that the city is a lost cause. Both approaches leave the city at risk.

Only one paragraph - and yet a whole world of fisking.

• "Vested Interests" in keeping talk about North Minneapolis to a whisper? Really? What "vested" interest is Coleman suggesting? That there is a segment of society that benefits from crime in North Minneapolis? What, is Halliburton trying to build a pipeline down Plymouth Avenue? Perhaps the ace reporter could elaborate.
• "Crisis"? Crisis implies some sort of acute explosion in the situation. North Minneapolis, sorry to say, has been a hellhole for decades. When I moved to the Twin Cities, it was a combat zone. When my old colleague, the late John McDougal, covered it for Channel Five in the late sixties, it was a tough, dangerous neighborhood - the only time McDougal ever carried a gun on the job, he said. When my ex-father-in-law was growing up there, it was gangland. And the Best Steak House shooting, as brutal and senseless as it was, was hardly the first - or the hundredth - such murder on the North Side in recent memory. I remember in the mid-eighties, when Minneapolis was first getting introduced to west-coast-style gangs, talking with the cops that had to respond to the first of the city's senseless, moronic gang shootings. Those were the days when it seemed that the safest place to be during a gang fight was the shooter's target, and the most dangerous was the innocent bystander, 45 degrees off the putative line of fire. I remember a pre-teen boy sitting in an apartment half a block to the side of a pointless gang shootout getting shot and paralyzed while sitting and watching TV. The question, then, is at what point does a "crisis" become the state of being? Because North Minneapolis must be there.
• "Minneapolis and Iraq in the same sentence?" Huh? What lunacy is this? North Minneapolis is stricken with dead-ender holdouts of a deposed, genocidal regime? Sharon Sayles-Belton's die-hard supporters won't let the last mayoral election go? How on earth does this doddering fool draw this kind of parallel?
• "Enemies of the city?" As if people don't have a right to look at a social experiment gone horribly wrong and say "I don't want this?" We do have that right, don't we?

It's not an idle question to me. While Nick Coleman sits making smug pronouncements from his upscale Crocus Hill neighborhood, I live in the Midway. I've patched bullet holes in my walls (three of them, from a scary night in 1998), chased thieves, staked out my alleys and taken down license plates with my neighbors, and on one horrible night about eight years ago, held my kids and answered their frightened questions when the news of the murder of a toddler in a gang-related shooting, scant blocks from our house, came on the TV.

Enemies of the city? No, Nick. That's people like you; people who want to condemn city residents to the same miserable schools, the same dehumanizing entitlement machine, the same racism of low expectations that has given us the North Side and Phillips and Frogtown that we have today.

Wish You Coulda Been There

Fraters' trivia night at Keegans was a blast last night.

And almost mortally frustrating.

Babysitting issues being what they are, appearances at Thursday night trivia are pretty rare these days (c'mon, end of school year!), but I was able to make it happen last night. The crowd was great; we had dozens of people (I didn't bother counting this time), a who's who of the local alternative media. We got to meet a bunch of new bloggers - too many to recall the names, truth be told - and from all over the place politically (Anoka Flash from Centrisity and Robin from Powerliberal joined the party, too).

Now, you've probably heard about the "MOB" - the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, our informal, politically-ecumenical, mainly social group of regional bloggers. Last night was funny; half the people in the bar were referring to each other by cryptic monikers: Fishsticks, Flash, Elder, Nihilist, Sisyphus, Saint Kate - that the MOB names made the whole place feel like a mob bar. Note to anyone wanting to start a blog called "Jimmy the Weasel" or "Tony the Bull" - Merry Christmas. Your mission is clear.

Did I mention frustration? Er, yeah. I teamed up with Sisyphus, Fishsticks and the Policy Guy, and we got a perfect score...

...until we started second-guessing ourselves and changed two first guesses - both of which would have been correct, and left us tied for the win, had we left well enough alone.

What else?

I'm told that Nick Coleman sent Kuhbi, his "producer", "undercover" again. I didn't listen to Coleman's "show" today, but apparently Kuhbi (or maybe it was the other guy) was talking about the event.

Look, kids; I know it probably gives you that feeling of danger that you probably feel you need in your life, feeling like a KGB agent loose in the West or something; the feeling that you're putting something over on the "big cheeses" probably makes Nick reach for his hand lotion, I'm sure. And I'm sure your "audience" eats up your stories, whatever they are.

But honestly, kids; why not introduce yourself? Flash and Robin did, and they both walked out alive. We know Nick Coleman doesn't have the cojones to go face to face with the people he defames so regularly - but if either of you has a pair, why not say "hi"?

Because the nice thing about having it all - the social and media momentum, better writers and writing, better radio shows - is that we can afford to be magnanimous.

We might even buy you a drink, if you're old enough.

Barring Any Major Catastrophes...

...and I know better than to do that...

...but I'm going to try to make it to Keegan's tonight for the Fraters' trivia night.

I'll be watching to see if Marty "Wayne" Newton gets sweet payback.

Drama Queens

I caught a few minutes of the Nick Coleman "Show" this morning.

Apparently "Kuhbi", the show's "producer", "snuck" into the "61st Minute" party last night. I caught a few minutes of his debriefing with Coleman and guest Brian "Who's Brian Lambert?" Lambert.

For starters - what's with the cloak and dagger nonsense? Be a man and tell people who you are and where you're from. I guarantee you, the crowd at the CAE is a lot more civil than...well, a room full of Nick Colemans. Colemen. Whatever.

Beyond that?

Elder heard a bit more, and wrote me in a private correspondence:

"Mitch's name also came up (Coleman seems to think that you're a government employee-sounds like a slam dunk libel case to me)"

Well, that'd be that crack fact-checking that Coleman is known for. I've never worked for government, and at least in my current occupational field, I couldn't if I wanted to (and I don't).

"Kuhbi" sneered at one point that "the waitstaff had been told to make themselves scarce when John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson were speaking.

Well, there's a shock. I used to set up banquets for a hotel; the waitstaff at any banquet facility with any class at all always stays clear of the banquet floor during the speeches. "Kuhbi" and Coleman spun it as a class warfare issue; oddly, they were correct. It showed that neither of them has ever worked in the banquet or hospitality businesses, and are completely out of touch with the life of the service sector.

"Kuhbi" had one other line that I thought was funny; he was apparently going to ask a question, but moderator Mitch Perlstein cut the question session off at 7PM sharp. He was apparently going to try to get the Powerguys to "admit" that they were trying to bring the mainstream media down - but then, he knew what the real answer was. Of course they were going to try to do that! OK, "Kuhbi"; please show where Powerline, or indeed any Northern Alliance blog, has ever said any such thing (with any intent other than satire)? Yes, Kuhbi - that'll take some research skills - five seconds on Google, for starters. Get back to me when you've found it. I won't hold my breath; the statement and sentiment don't exist. Yeah, I know - you earn your "living" by spreading uncomprehending alarm among those dim enough to take your "show" seriously, so who needs facts?.

As to the rest of the bit - and I listened to about five minutes, which was about six too many - one wonders exactly if Coleman is a liar, or merely has lousy reading comprehension. He spouted to Lambert (I'm paraphrasing closely here - I didn't have a recorder in my car) that what people don't realize is that these people aren't the middle-of-the-road; they're partisan activists!

Duh.

I mean...

Duh.

Again - would one of these hamsters please show us where Powerline or any Northern Alliance blog claimed to be anything other than committed conservatives? (Hint: King Banaian swerves toward libertarian on occasion. I'm getting tired of doing your homework for you, guys).

Anyway, "Kuhbi", next time you're at an event where the NARN is in attendance, stop by and say hi. You know - the way I do when I'm at DFL events. We don't bite; ask the various liberal members of the MOB. Hell, stop by Keegan's! You might learn a thing or two. Facts, even.

Goodness knows working with Coleman isn't teaching you much.

Snap Back To Reality

People wonder why conservatives have a problem with McCain. He's every liberal's favorite Republican (except for here in Minnesota, where the distinction is held by Elmer Anderson, who embodies everything liberals want from a Minnesota Republican; he's pro-tax, and he's dead).

I once figured that the left wouldn't twig to the crushing blow to democracy that the McCain-Feingold law is, until it came back to roost on them.

"Lorika", a contributor at "New Patriot", seems to have swerved perilously close to a blinding flash of epiphany:

Usually I have great respect for McCain, and it seems he would be against this, I just don't understand how he can be on the wrong side of this issue. Very disappointing.

Only if you've been under a rock for the past five years (or getting your news from Atrios, pardon the redundancy).

McCain-Feingold was designed precisely to silence dissent and protect incumbency. It was spawned at a time when the media and the left had their alpaca undies in a knot over "attack ads" taken out with so-called "soft money" by the likes of the NRA. They were a powerful vehicle for getting minority views onto the public radar - in those pre-blog days, they were really the only way for the politically-out-of-favor to be heard. Band together. Raise funds. Produce and take out an ad. McCain-Feingold was designed from the beginning to stifle that sort of popular speech.

And when McCain-Feingold was written, "blog" was something you did after drinking "Old Milwaukee" and eating a few gas-station burritos.

Today, though, blogging is the most powerful vehicle for getting minority/nonestablishment views before the public.

Since McCain's record for the past five years is about nothing but stifling non-establishment voices (and make no mistake, whatever his quarrels with the conservatives in the GOP he is establishment).

Why would anyone think blogs would be any different in John McCain's mind?

Rather Not

I went to the Center for the American Experiment's 61st Minute party last night.

I sat at the AM1280 table with Patrick Campion, Jay Larson, Saint Paul, Sarah Janecek, and a bunch of other conservative bon vivants; I actually caught almost none of the broadcast itself.

Patrick Ruffini did:

In one breath, he recalled racist epithets hurled his way by the most odious white supremacists, and with a clever twist of phrase, we are then shown images of the word "liberal" arrayed menacingly on anti-Rather web sites. The parallel drawn is clear:

"I remember the first time someone accused me of being an 'N' lover. There was a lot of that during the '60s when I covered the civil rights movement," says Rather. "Then you move forward from civil rights to the Vietnam War. 'We're gonna hang a sign around you which calls you some bad name: anti-military, anti-American, anti-war.'"

Then, Watergate happened, and Rather says that "was the first time I began to hear the word liberal as an epithet thrown my way."

What a cheap trick. Does Rather thinks he gets a free pass on the TANG story because he was on the right side of civil rights in the '60s, or because he harbors the illusion that his critics today are the same as his critics back then? If so, Rather is even more out of it than I thought.

Watch the mainstream media to start portraying Rather's news twilight as a portrait in courage; I half expect Nick Coleman to trot out the "defending the observatory from the pitchfork-wielding peasants" analogy again.

Everybody Get In Line

I was digging through the archives the other day, and I found a 1955 issue of the City Pages (they haven't yet put their pre-web archives online - I had to trascribe the below by hand).

It featured a cover story by Gustav Anderssen that featured an interview with Bobby Joe DuPray, a Democratic Party heavyweight and Assistant Grand Kleagle of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan. The headline:

“They talk about freedom and values, but those New Dealers really don't believe in representative government.”

DuPray was lamenting the rise of the "liberals" in the southern Democratic Party.

GA: So what do you think about your party today?

BJD: I don't know how many times I talked to [the late forme Louisiana governor] Billie Ray Clampett about this. Drove by Billy Ray's yard last fall, and all you'd see were signs with "Jew Lover" scrawled over Truman's name. I'd say, "Billy Ray, have you given up on the Democratic Party?" And he'd say, "Of course not. This is all evolutionary." Right now we've got what looks to be colored-lovin', or if you look at it nationally, a North and East Democratic party. We've got an antiwhite, anti-establishment party--well, selectively anti-establishment, obviously.

Even if they say lofty things like "equality" or whatever it is they say, they don't mean it. I've told (Grand Dragon) Toby Beauregard that. You know, when he was talking about running for the Senate, I said, "You know, Toby, I'm not in the district, but what I remember from your campaign is no burning crosses." I've known Jonny Lee Bodine since two days after his kids were forced to go to school with colored kids. And I think it was necessary to run that kind of a campaign. And even though he said they weren't his ads, they were from the Democratic National Committee.

GA: This is the focus on winning elections, the electoral process, that you're talking about.

BJD: Right, and the same thing is going to go on more. Destroying white people and tearing down the white race and whatnot. They'll wrap it in things like "the constitution." There are ways to package miscegenation that work, but it's still against the revealed word of the Almighty!.

GA: Isn't it a basic tenet of good white governance that you reserve the right to change your mind? The Eisenhower administration is very good at sticking to their side of a particular issue, but is that good governance?

BJD: In my view, the problem is a chief executive who will never acknowledge a mistake, an error, or a fault. Pretenting that letting coloreds go to school with white kids is not leadership. Leadership is not just success winning the seat of the president. [1]

Pretty crazy, right? Don't you just want to tell Mr. DuPray to get over it, the Democrats have changed?

Of course it's going on for real right now.

The interview above is fake, by the way. But the next one isn't.

The City Pages' G. R. Anderson interviews former Minnesota senator Dave Durenberger.

If you're not from Minnesota, let me try to put some context to this: Remember what the GOP was like up through the Gerald Ford years? From the end of the New Deal until the rise of Reagan, Republicans were basically Democrats with better suits. It was the age of Rockefeller, of Richard "I am a Keynesian" Nixon, an era when Goldwater and Buckley were exiles even within the GOP. Reagan changed all that...

...except in Minnesota. The Republicans (they renamed themselves the "Independent Republican" party after Watergate, an identity they kept until the "Contract with America" and a rising conservative wing made it safe(r) to be a Republican) assumed more or less the same role through the eighties and nineties that the national party had during its time in the electoral wilderness. The IR had some success; in 1978, it took the governor's office and both Senate seats. Don't let it fool you; the IR in those years was only slightly less profligate, less big-state centered, than the DFL. James Lileks once joked on the air that during the 1990 gubernatorial election Minnesotans had a choice between the pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-intervention, pro-tax-increase candidate, and the Democrat.

Things are different today; Republicans present a genuine alternative to the DFL.

That really seems to bother the local left.

It's become a minor cottage industry here in Minnesota, since 2002; reporters fan out through greater Minnesota, dredging up old politicians from the IR days to tut-tut at the shape of the new Republican party.

G.R. Anderson, judging by his recent work, he seems to be assigned to the "scurrilous anti-conservative hatchet piece" beat that used to be owned by Michael Welch. Here's the trick; read the article, and try to see who oozes more condescension, Durenberger or Anderson.

On the changing role of the MNGOP:

[Durenberger]: The Republicans have never been the majority party, in my lifetime. Even when we've had conservative majorities in the state--we had a conservative Senate in Minnesota from the founding of the state until 1970--we had a minority complex. But the common bond was a respect for the role of government in building a society in the broadest sense. It wasn't the negatives that drive the electoral process today.

Unmentioned; the government mixed up its "role in building a society" with "authority". State government started seeing Minnesotans' earnings as state property first, income second.

And you're right, Mr. Durenberger; I don't want government "building a society". I want government to enforce the laws while the free association of equals we call society builds society. See the difference?

Arrogance is rather off-putting.

Back to Durenberger:

We are, as a state, traditionally both conservative and liberal. "Progressive" is a word that's often laid on top of something like that. There had always been this tradition in the public policy I was a part of to add some advantage to the disadvantaged in Minnesota. Whether that was rural people needing access to markets, or all poor and minority kids needing access to schools. Or the whole movement toward identifying mental health in health care policy. We started that movement here. We didn't do it just by talking about it.

Unmentioned: Most conservative Minnesotans appreciate that. However, it's the little things - like paying the third-highest taxes in the nation while our schools decay around our kids, or look at a state government that gobbled up a decade of surpluses (read: overtaxation) and tacked them onto permanent spending, regardless of economic cycles (did the 1999 legislature really think the economy was never going to turn down? That people couldn't maintain that level of spending forever? Of course they did; when Minnsotans' unemployment started rising after 2000, the state and its employee unions turned the screws harder!

I don't know how many times I talked to [the late former governor] Elmer Andersen about this. Drove by Elmer's yard last fall, and all you'd see were signs with Bush X'ed out. I'd say, "Elmer, have you given up on the Republican Party?" And he'd say, "Of course not. This is all evolutionary." Right now we've got what looks to be an exurban, or if you look at it nationally, a south and west party. We've got an antigovernment party--well, selectively antigovernment, obviously.

Durenberger states this like it's a bad thing. Or rather, mis-states it. I'm pretty familiar with conservatives in Minnesota - and it'd be fairer to say that we want accountability and reason from our government; we don't want to keep feeding them blank checks.

There's more. More article, I mean. Not more patience to keep reading it.

Earth to Anderson, Nick Coleman, Dave Durenberger and the assembled DFL: The GOP has changed. Get over it!

[1] No, it's not real.

UPDATE: I got some emails and a comment - people seem to be missing my disclaimer. The City Pages "1955 interview" is satirical fiction, and the City Pages started in (I think) the early '80s.

Swarm Rules

Peter Swanson, at the excellent but all-too-infrequently-updated Swanblog, has an angle on the yesterday Strib's article on bloggers.

The Strib piece included the obligatory tut-tut that the major media always issues about bloggers; lack said:

But blogs do provide a potential end run around the traditional "gatekeeper" role of professional journalists..

Swanson:

It is one thing to ask that a reporter be reassigned to a different beat during an election. It is quite another to interfere with a civilian journalist's day job in retaliation for something he writes on his blog. That is what happened when both the Nick Coleman and the City Pages went after Scott "Big Trunk" Johnson's employer (which is my employer, too). They took a look at the time stamp on posts and decided that he was blogging during work hours. This, they rationalized, justified their attacks on his day job. At the time of the controversy (coffee break-gate?), I asked Scott where and when the City Pages reporter called him. He replied that he got the call at work, at around 5pm. So to prove that Scott was engaging in politics when he should have been working, the reporter calls him AT THE OFFICE. It is true that waiting until typical quitting time is better than calling during the day, but the fact that he was still at the office sort of undercuts the whole slacker accusation.

I addressed the myopia behind the Coleman and the City Pages' "deadtreeswarm" two months ago.

But Swanson adds history and the Strib's longer-term context:

The attempted swarm by the MSM against Powerline does not compare to the successful swarm against Dan Cohen. The excellent book by Elliot Rothenberg on this landmark U.S. Supreme Court case describes the Captain Ahab-like pursuit of Cohen by Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow. Cohen's crime was to reveal public arrest records about a state-wide candidate in the 1982 election in Minnesota. Ah, the quaint old days before the Smoking Gun. His other crime was relying on a promise of confidentiality from both the Strib and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Abandoned by the Republican party and fired from his advertising job, Cohen finally landed on his feet at the University of Minnesota. Once Doug Grow found out, the Strib turned up the heat and Cohen was forced out of his new job. So much for the MSM being the bulwark against unfair "swarms."

Although President Bush doesn't need me to defend him, the "fake, but true" National Guard story is also an example of an unfair swarm. I am often guilty of writing about something a day or two after it is in the news (better late than never). But 60 Minutes II takes the cake for writing about a story almost four years into his presidency, concerning events 30 years ago.

And the conclusion:

In the incidents mentioned above, and many others (including this post), the blogosphere is the cure for unfair swarming and groupthink.

To be fair to Eric Black, the danger of the droogswarm is real; the Dailiy Kos sent its hordes of slobbering netzombies against Powerline not a month ago (and yes, I'm sure there's a right wing blog out there that has done the same thing, although I'm not aware of anything quite analogous).

The question "what is a journalist" is an important one. It's worth a separate post. Hopefully tomorrow.

Wright: Contractual Obligations

Red passed on a comment she got after her memoriam to Teresa Wright, taken from her contract with MGM's Sam Goldwyn (excepted from the Guardian's excellent obit:

The New York-born Wright's arrival in Hollywood caused a stir, not because of her star power but because of an unprecedented clause Samuel Goldwyn agreed to write into her contract.

It said that she "shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: in shorts; playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at the turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf."

How many people on the brink of stardom today would have the chutzpah to cut that kind of deal?

I need to see more of Wright's movies.

Everyone Wants Blood

With Rather out of the way, we bloggers are constantly asked - who's next?

Paul Demko on the City Pages Babelogue sees chum in the water:

Gina La Force, director of the St. Paul Public Library system, has resigned. Dedicated readers of this blog will recall that I first demanded Ms. La Force's ouster less than a month ago.

Frankly I can't recall why it was of paramount importance that she be removed from her post. But now I see that she's Canadian! Do we really want our childrens' reading selections being dictated by a foreigner? Particularly one from a country with citizens who insist on speaking French? And what kind of name is La Force anyway? Bon voyage Ms. La Force!

With a name like La Force, she'd be banned from most Saint Paul Public Schools.

Er...good job, Paul?

Dancing While Black Rock Burns

I'll be at the Center for the American Experiment's Special Dinner Forum tonight, in honor of Dan Rather's last broadcast.

As the CAX says:

It will NOT be a coincidence that dinner will begin a half-hour before a large-screen showing of Dan Rather's final broadcast as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," and that Scott and John's farewell remarks (so to speak) will follow immediately afterwards.

In addition to talking about the "60 Minutes II" scandal, they will reflect more broadly on what their experience "illustrates about the power of the Internet as a medium of information and the foiling of the dinosaurs of Big Media."

Hope to see you there.

Whole Lotta Facts

"Mike", commenting on my earlier post on Eric Black's piece in the Strib, asks:

Black claims that Trent Lott's fall from grace came about when major media picked up the story "only after it had been promoted on liberal blogs". While I'm sure that they were all over the story (I was oblivious to blogs at that point), I have seen Hugh, LGF, and other "conservative" sites also claim to have had their collective hand in that affair. So can it be credited solely to the liberal blogs, as Black does in his article?

The implication, whether Black intends it or not, is that the righties brought down Rather, to the protestations of the lefties, and the roles were simply reversed during the Lott situation. But if, in fact, big time conservative sites were joining in the chorus to have Lott held accountable - well, that would have been nice for the reader to know, don't you think?

Let's check it out.

Black says of the Lott affair:

Remarks by Sen. Trent Lott that critics considered racist and that got him dumped as Senate majority leader in 2002 became a major media story only after it had been promoted on liberal blogs.

It seems like a reasonable simplification - but it swerves into oversimplification. Powerline wrote:

on December 9, 2002:

While I would have been happy to hear Lott explain what "problems" he was referring to, the reality is that, given the history of the Dixiecrat movement, no explanation could save Lott's comment from being incomprehensibly stupid. It is hard to avoid the image of Lott as a Dr. Strangelove who has to be restrained from blurting out what he really thinks. Lott has not been an especially effective Senate leader, and I wouldn't be sorry to see him go. This incident confirms that he doesn't have the good sense necessary to be Majority Leader. The biggest downside to replacing him, I think, is that it will give credence to the liberal theory that Republicans are closet racists. So far, Lott's blunder hasn't drawn as much fire as one might have expected. But this is sure to change, and I am afraid Lott and the Republican Party will bleed slowly until he is replaced.

Powerline also linked, via Instapundit, to C-Span's video of the damning speech, as well as Steven Hayes' article in the Spectator denouncing Lott.

For my minimal part (this blog was getting about 100 visitors a day at that time), I linked to many bigger /a>, national writers on the subject, as did many conservative bloggers.

It was hardly a purely left-wing party.

Posted by Mitch at 04:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Quiz for Nick Coleman

Chad the Elder notes something he heard on the Nick Coleman "show" this morning:

He likes to portray himself as a bit of a history buff and was claiming that "wing-nuts" have no regard for history. He was also discussing the Mexican American War which, in his words, was a "an awful war fought in the 1830s."

Nick - quick question for you.

What was the decisive battle of the Mexican-American war?

1. The Alamo (1836)
2. San Jacinto (1836)
3. Goliad (1836)
4. Mocedades (1836)

Answers in the extended section.

If you answered 1, 2 or 3, you must be a Strib columnist. All three battles were part of the "Texas War of Independence", from 1831-36.

The Mexican-American War was 1846-48.

If you answered 4, you are confused enough to be a Strib columnist, and historically illiterate enough to be a major leftyblogger; Mocedades was not a battle, but rather a Spanish pop singer of the 1960's.

Let Me Elaborate

On the occasion of Dan Rather's final broadcast, Eric Black of the Strib has a piece in today's paper on the role of bloggers in regional politics.

Powerline writes about it, too, and is highly critical. Black mentioned Hugh Hewitt's reserving a domain, "swarmthestrib.com", with the mission of"...scrutiniz[ing] the Star Tribune in a bloggish tactic called "swarming...". The Powerguys respond:

We've regularly devoted ourselves to criticism of the Star Tribune over the past three years. And we've actually -- not hypothetically -- been personally attacked -- mugged -- both on the news and editorial pages of the Star Tribune in the past six months, but Black doesn't get around to mentioning that, which might provide a fuller context for his discussion of the "bloggish" tactic of "swarming."

As to my two cents - well, read on.

I had a brief conversation with Black on Monday afternoon, and am quoted in the piece.

Black notes:

Radio host Hugh Hewitt recently announced on HughHewitt.com that he had reserved the Web address "swarmingthestrib.com" and proposed that bloggers from across the country agree to jointly post "a daily digest of commentary on the lapses in objectivity and the flights of lefty fancy that the paper daily indulges."

Star Tribune Editor Anders Gyllenhaal said it was clear from Hewitt's posting that he doesn't read the paper, but he said the editors welcome constructive criticism. "If someone can find a new way of enlightening readers, then my attitude is: the more the merrier," Gyllenhaal said.

It's fairly clear that Gyllenhaal doesn't listen to Hewitt; Hugh has a pretty well-developed network of people feeding him information, even if he doesn't read the Strib.

As to the new website - well, that was the crux of our conversation. Back to Black:

Mitch Berg, a Twin Cities-based blogger (shotinthedark.info) said the local allies of Hewitt, known as the Northern Alliance, have decided that there is already so much Star Tribune criticism being posted by local bloggers -- notably on anti-strib.blogspot.com -- that "there's no need to start a formal site to do this."

Let me elaborate on this.

I thought about Hugh's idea really hard. I like the idea. As a blogger, I've certainly spent a lot of time beating on the Strib - fact-checking stories that needed it, fisking columnists, providing a missing countervailing perspective on many stories, and even occasionally complementing the Strib's reporting. I've been one of a big swarm of internet pamphleteers, using whatever expertise I have to bite off a little corner of the task of holding the Star/Tribune accountable. Alone, I'm not much. But together with the dozens of regional bloggers, big and small, that make up one of the country's most fertile blogging communities, we do provide an alternative.

But taking on a whole new site, fully dedicated to swarming the Strib would involve devoting a lot of time to making sure that everything the site put out was airtight. If I blogged for a living - if I had a sugadaddy like George Soros, like so many leftybloggers do - then it'd be no problem. I'd be happy to help run a site that gathered together the far-flung expertises of dozens of bloggers, made sure that the material beat the Strib at its own game (was fact-checked and credible enough to stand behind) and aimed at the Strib. I think it'd be a worthwhile venture; frankly, I think the Twin Cities need such a venture. If someone out there wants to sponsor it to the point where I can quit my day job, let me know.

Because I wouldn't want it to be done half-right. The Strib - as an institution, as opposed to a newsroom - needs to be swarmed, for its own good as well as the state's. There are certainly excellent reporters at the Strib - Eric Black is one of them - but the Star/Tribune's institutional voice is biased far to the left of center, elitist (in a way that wears the populism of the likes of the likes of Floyd Olson like an ill-fitting T-shirt - the slogans are there, but they're stretched way out of shape) and frequently arrogant to a fault. And to credibly counter that, with the voice of one single blog (as opposed to the dozens, maybe hundreds that assail the Strib every time they screw the pooch today) would not only be a lot of work (not that I mind that), but would contradict the great strength of blogs; the huge, decentralized mass of discontiguous talents and expertises that countervails the "high priests of knowledge" model the mainstream media represent; the constantly-changing marketplace of information, and the informal, market-driven rising and falling levels of credibility of the various sources; the amorphous, intangible web of thought and effort that the major media can't ignore, can't poo-pooh, and can't seem to beat.

I'd love to be involved in a "Swarm the Strib" organization. In fact, I already am.

Rotenberg

U of M chief counsel Mark Rotenberg has thrown his hat into the ring for the '06 Senate race:

He is the third Democrat to file papers, although none have said they are running for sure for the seat being vacated by Sen. Mark Dayton in 2006. Rotenberg said in a news release Monday that he'll take several weeks to make that decision.

Rotenberg said he wants to see how his party and the state's residents respond to a "fresh new face among Democrats.''

Rotenberg has served as Minnesota's general counsel since 1992. To date, his political activity has been behind the scenes, such as his 2004 role as a Minnesota leader in Sen. Joe Lieberman's presidential campaign.

For those of you not from Minnesota, here's how it works in the DFL:

1. A huge gaggle of politicos express their interest, and campaign like mad.
2. The DFL will closely query each of them as to whether they'll abide by the endorsement process. Some wil so pledge, others will earn the ire of longtime DFL activists by remaining silent.
3. At the party caucuses and conventions - which are run according to a byzantine system that apportions votes proportionally among special interest sub-caucuses - a nominee emerges; the nominee is usually a long-time party activist with frequently dubious name recognition outside the party. For example, in 2000 the nominee for Senate was Jerry Janezich, a bar owner and painfully inarticulate speaker from Grand Rapids.
4. Then, the primaries happen - and the DFL candidate with the most money and public recognition (at least, outside the party) wins. In 2000, Mark Dayton crushed the endorsed Janezich.
5. Frequently, both will go on to the general election.
6. In most cases (at least for high-profile races), the unendorsed candidate will mop the floor with the endorsed one.

The DFL endorsement, some joke, is the kiss of death, even in a state where the DFL still has a slight electoral edge.

It's not quite a prediction yet, but it's a pattern. And great fun to watch.

Mass Libel

Here's the article as pulished on the Air America website - word for word, link for link (screenshot in the extended section:

Anger in Italy, Bulgaria Over Latest U.S. Shootings

The U.S. is trigger happy, Allies say. The U.S. Army unit that killed Italian agent had been accused of raping Iraqi women.

First: There's nothing about rape in either story.

Second: A unit accused of rape? A platoon of 40, company of 160, battalion of 700...all accused of rape?

Does Air America know what it's talking about?

Click for full-size display.

Flaking Away

Forty-nine weeks ago, when FrankenNet went on the air, I predicted that one of the high-profile hosts would bail within the year. Of course, I predicted it would be Chuck D, but...

Lizz Winstead has apparently obliged me.

Lizz Winstead, one of the original programmers for Air America Radio and co-host of the network’s mid-morning show Unfiltered (9 a.m. to Noon), has exited the liberal radio network.

No reason for her departure was given. In a prepared statement, the network said, "We plan to take the show in a different direction."

That's usually radio code for "we're tap-dancing like crazy".

Winstead, the comedian who co-created Comedy Central's Daily Show, has been with the network since its debut last March. Winstead's current co-hosts, Rapper Chuck D and Kirk Cameron Rachel Maddow are still on the air.

Winstead's show was FrankenNet's least popular shows; most stations in the western half of the country pre-empted it to run Franken live. I've heard it once or twice; it's horrible, and Winstead is most of the reason why. Comedians tend to make lousy talk show hosts.

Skates In Hell

Babelogue notes that the Strib is on the brink of hiring a conservative columnist.

The field is apparently down to local Republican/center-right pundits-at-large Katherine Kersten and Sarah Janecek.

Says the City Pages piece:

Is the move a concession to all the paper's right-wing critics, who have been especially noisy in recent months? One Strib staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity doubts that was much of a factor: "I think it's market-driven. Whether it's Gyllenhaal, California, or Moyer [behind the move], I think they're responding to a feeling that we're missing out in the suburban areas because we don't connect there politically."

Where "don't connect" equals "are perceived as actively hostile".

I'm rooting for Sarah.

There is no word on when an announcement will be made.

UPDATE: King informs me that Kersten is no long with the Center. I changed the story accordingly.

RIP Teresa Wright

Teresa Wright is dead at age 86.

"Teresa who?"

Take a seat.

Newday has the story:

Teresa Wright, the willowy actress who starred opposite Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando and won a supporting Academy Award in 1942 for "Mrs. Miniver," has died. She was 86.

Wright died Sunday of a heart attack at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, her daughter, Mary-Kelly Busch, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Wright's career skyrocketed after her first film, "The Little Foxes," which brought her an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress of 1941. The following year she was honored with two nominations: lead actress as the wife of Lou Gehrig in "The Pride of the Yankees" and supporting actress as Greer Garson's daughter-in-law in the wartime saga "Mrs. Miniver."

She also starred in three other classics: Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" in 1943; Brando's first film, "The Men," in 1950; and the multiple Oscar winner "The Best Years of Our Lives" in 1946.

That's her in "Best Years Of Our Lives", on the left. It's the essential post-World-War II movie; one of the last great films of the studio system, and one of Wiliam Wyler's best.

I've always been a huuuuuuuge Teresa Wright fan. I don't know exactly why - I'm not very literate about my appreciation for actors. But I never saw her in a role that didn't affect me in some way - especially "Best Years..." and "Miniver". Sheila O'Malley is articulate about these things, fortunately:

What I like about Teresa Wright is that she seemed to have one of the most necessary qualities for any long career: self-knowledge. And it shows up in her performances. She's a great example of that - other actresses (or actors) may get talked into doing things they feel isn't right for them, may get big heads from flattery ("Of course you're as beautiful as Lana Turner!!", etc.), and because of all this - make grave judgments in error, in terms of how their image is managed, or what projects they appear in. Teresa Wright was usually well cast, and a lot of that has to do with her self-knowledge. She knew what she could do, and what she shouldn't attempt.

I always thought of her as an American Ingrid Bergman, in many ways;a versatile, talented actress, lovely in a quiet but captivating way.

Reel Classics has a wonderful bio, and Newsday has the obit of record so far:

Wright's lovely face, quiet manner and dramatic skill made her a popular leading actress in the 1940s and early '50s. She appeared opposite Cooper in "The Pride of the Yankees" and "Casanova Brown," Robert Mitchum in "Pursued," David Niven in "Enchantment," Lew Ayres in "The Capture" and Cornel Wilde in "California Conquest."

She had a personal style that also stood out, in an era of studio players:

From the beginning of her Hollywood career, Wright displayed an independence that rankled her boss, the imperious Hollywood producer, Sam Goldwyn. Goldwyn fired her in 1948, claiming she was "uncooperative" for refusing to go to New York to publicize one of her films.

The actress expressed no regret about losing her $5,000-a-week contract. She claimed illness and added: "The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. ... We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children."

Wright stood out as an anomaly in a Hollywood era when glamour was demanded of actresses. She appeared on-screen as the dutiful daughter and supportive wife, never the seductress.

"I'm just not the glamour type," she admitted in a 1950 interview. "Glamour girls are born, not made. And the real ones can be glamorous even if they don't wear magnificent clothes. I'll bet Lana Turner would look glamorous in anything."

When a studio asked her to pose for "cheesecake" -- the term for photos in bathing suits or other scanty attire -- she declined.

"I argued that I didn't have any of the attributes to pose for cheesecake," she said. "I said I would have to make good on my acting ability, which was the only attribute I could offer."

I'm at a loss for anything else to say.

One Small Step For Bobbleheads

Team Vatsaas has pictures of Ralphie's trip into space.

Via Fraters, who have the whole Ralphie history here, for those who don't know yet...

Blah, District Four Style

Betty McCollum, my "representative" in Congress, bowed out of the Senate race.

Unfortunately, it wasn't accompanied by a retirement from politics.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said Monday that she will not run for Minnesota's open U.S. Senate seat in 2006 but that she will seek a fourth term to the U.S. House.

McCollum, who represents Minnesota's Fourth District, had been considering a Senate bid after Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton announced last month that he would not run for a second term next year.

"After much personal reflection I have decided to continue serving my Fourth District constituents and fighting for Minnesota families in Congress," she said in a statement.

She added: "In the future I will likely explore other political opportunities, but for now I have a job that I love."

McCollum, 50, made her announcement only three days after another House member -- Republican Rep. Gil Gutknecht -- said he would not run.

McCollum is a rising star in national Democratic circles; she has the potential to be the Barbara Boxer of the House.

When Illiterates Go Political!

Tim Blair notes:

It isn’t Rove’s people they must fear; it’s his delicious tenderloin steaks.

Read the piece to see why...

Another Reason I Prefer Saint Paul

Joe Kimball's column notes something I saw last fall - the eagles are back on the Saint Paul riverfront.

M ore bald eagles are roosting on the Mississippi River near downtown St. Paul than river folks can ever recall.

Houseboat resident Anne Hunt saw a dozen perched early Wednesday in the area between the dock for the Padelford excursion boats and the University of Minnesota's Centennial Showboat. In other years, the most she has seen was five or six at a time....Jim Kosmo of the Padelford fleet saw 11 eagles perched in a cottonwood tree near his office one day, and then 14 in the area the next. "Madeline, the office cat, is afraid to go outside" he said.

I work near the riverfront, and the wildlife in Crosby Park is pretty amazing these days.

Sometimes scary, too. I was driving up the cliff from the riverfront into the Highland Park neighborhood during our last snowstorm. A deer pranced across the street in front of me. This is three miles from my house, deep in the middle of Saint Paul. Maybe the deer can drive off the raccoons in my neighborhood...

Pretty cool, anyway...

TREBEK: "Chopped Baby Corn On Veggie Pizza"

BERG: "How do you know the company cafeteria is a bit overzealous about recycling the salad bar produce?"

Beautiful Despair

There wasn't a lot of music in my house growing up. Dad had learned one song on the piano back during WWII, and was hailed by one of his fellow English teachers as the world's most tone-deaf singer. Mom had a few albums; I think the family's whole music collection fit into the top-loading LP drawer on our console Hi-Fi (which I believe is still in my father's house, serving as a table for photographs and vases.

In retrospect, it's probably amazing that I'm the musician I am. As far as I know, I'm the only musician in recent family history. My first instrument was cello, at age 10. After that came guitar, and so on. I ransacked my aunt's old '45 collection at my grandparents' house in Bismark, finding a treasure trove of early-sixties wonder, from the novelly dreary ("Eve of Destruction") to the drearily novel ("Winchester Cathedral"), to the glorious (a bunch of Crystals singles and a stack of Four Tops, Four Seasons, Beatles...)

But while one didn't grow up in the Berg family with a keen sense of what music was good, one certainly got the idea about what was not.

Country/Western.

While my dad was short on the music gene, he certainly did (and still does, and does yet again) write. I remember when I was probably in fifth grade, he wrote a bunch of comically bogus country western lyrics and sent them to an address from some ad in a magazine. Sure enough, he got a letter back from Nashville, saying he was (if I remember) a future star, and they'd be happy to manage him and record his demo - for a price, naturally.

There were two radio stations in town, the "everything local" station (where I started my radio career, much later) and the country station. Given the choice, unless there was local news we usually listened to Canadian Public Radio (we didn't get an NPR affiliate in that part of North Dakota until the mid-eighties).

So the only background I had in country music was ridicule, until I was around 19. Then, I got my first job working at a country station, at KDAK in Carrington, ND.

It didn't completely stop the ridicule; I was into Springsteen and the Clash, then as now, and listened with a very critical ear. I learned that 99% of country music was controlled, then as now, by a tiny coterie of executives on Music Row in Nashville. In 1982, the race was on to clone the next Alabama or Kenny Rogers pop-crossover clone (or the next 250); George Strait and Randy Travis (and their 500 inferior clones) were the closest you could find to traditional country on the Nashville Top 100; the Judds were an unknown, scary breakaway sect, and Emmylou Harris was an apostate bluegrass crusader who didn't seem to tumble the way Nashville blew.

And yet I discovered that the remaining 1% included a lot of wonderful music; Harris, Strait, the old Outlaws (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Jessi Coulter), Johnny Cash (yes, 89.3 The Current crowd, I was into him 20 years before the rest of you hYpStRz), Roseanne Cash (whose Seven Year Ache not only included the wondrous title cut, but a honky-tonk cover of Tom Petty's "Hometown Blues"; a good Petty cover is a clear channel to my heart)...

...and, behind a lot of it, Cash's husband, Rodney Crowell. He wrote much of Seven Year Ache as well as some of the best country of the eighties, nineties and now, and remains one of America's best songwriters in any genre, ever.

Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer (not of KSTP-AM) had a fantastic piece last week about Crowell, written to an audience that presumably has no idea who he is or what he's done.

A couple of excerpts from a very long interview you need to read:

Beautiful Despair. The great country-and-western singer-songwriter, Rodney Crowell, was passing through town on a bitter cold February day, and I got a chance to talk to him about "beautiful despair," which is also the title of a song on his forthcoming album, The Outsider.

He’s one of the masters of that singular emotion, that elusive, seductive, mournful and redemptive state of mind that is beautiful despair, and after he got back from a photo shoot out on the frozen North Fork, I met him in his room at the Parker Meridien.

You know Rodney Crowell, right? Author of one of the two or three greatest country-and-western songs ever written, in my opinion—"’Til I Gain Control Again"—along with countless other classics. You know him if you read this column, since I’ve spoken about him in my ceaseless (but probably doomed) attempts to get Northern intellectuals to recognize how good the writing in country-and-western songs actually is, at its best. How, if you detach yourself from conventional hierarchies of genre, some of the best American writing of any kind is being done in that form.

And—I guess it’s impossible not to mention—you probably know him as well as the ex-husband of Rosanne Cash, another genius of beautiful despair. He was the producer on some of her most beautifully intense works. (Listen to Seven Year Ache and weep.)

And you know beautiful despair, don’t you? Is there anyone who doesn’t? You’ve felt it, even if you haven’t named it that. It’s not depression; it’s not mere melancholy, lovely as melancholy can be. It’s something both sentimental and spiritual. You know it, for instance, if the sentimentally spiritual novels of Graham Greene are as much a guilty pleasure for you as they are for me. (They’re about "guilty pleasure," come to think of it. Or guilt and pleasure. As are most country-and-western songs.)

Rosenbaum compares Crowell with Graham Greene (calling Greene the "country songwriter of Northeastern Catholic intellectuals", or some such), and elaborates:

I thought of a Graham Greene character that Christopher Hitchens mentions as a bit over-obvious: Dr. Czinner. "There are some turns where I will spin": There are some turns, Graham Greene might say, despite (or because of) our best intentions, where we will sin. We will become Dr. Czinner. Now I understand why I’m drawn to both writers: despair over unworthiness.

And then he tells me something remarkable: the explicitly spiritual origin of his sensibility. He told me about the way he grew up in a family of Pentecostalists. "Two cuts away from snake handlers," is the way he put it. And that his mother would fall down in church and start speaking in tongues. And how "the pastor would go over to her, lean down, put his hand on her forehead and translate" the unintelligible words pouring out of her into what he said was a message from God.

I thought of this when Rodney Crowell was talking about songwriting, how some songs came to him whole from another realm and he just wrote them down. Translated something from the realm of the unintelligible to something beautifully, sometimes spiritually intelligible. One song, he told me, came to him complete in a dream, and "I only changed one word."

And this bit here, which illustrates so beautifully the art of writing a song - how tightly you have to compress meaning to fit the strictures of the meter and the music:

The high point of our discussion of songwriting had to do with a single word in one of his best-known hits, "Shame on the Moon."

If you know the song at all, you probably know it—as I did for a long time—from the Bob Seger cover. You remember: "Blame it on midnight / Shame on the moon." But I hadn’t heard it as a Rodney Crowell song until I listened to a version from one of his early albums and finally paid attention to more than "Blame it on midnight / Shame on the moon." In fact, it’s one of his best, believe me.

It’s one of his best, but he can’t stand to hear it—in fact, he refuses to sing it. It’s not about Bob Seger; he liked Bob Seger’s version, he said. He likes the song, he said. Except for one word—one word he feels, as a songwriter, that he failed to get right, and this has ruined the song for him forever.

Or has it? I asked what word, and he said it was in the last stanza.

But first he told me the origin of the song—an origin which perhaps has put a curse on it for him. "I started writing that when I was watching coverage of the Jim Jones thing," he told me. "The Jim Jones thing": the now almost forgotten mass suicide in Guyana of some 900 disciples of the charismatic psychotic preacher, Jim Jones. The sad victims whose main legacy now is a somehow wildly inappropriate catch phrase: "They took the Kool-Aid."

The song doesn’t seem to reflect the tragedy explicitly. But it does seem to have something to do with the inability to know, to really know another human being.

One verse, for instance, about what it’s like being "inside a woman’s heart" concludes:

Some men go crazy,

Some men go slow,

Some men know just what they want,

Some men never go.

But it’s the final verse, a word in the last line, that drives him crazy:

’Cause until you’ve been beside a man

You don’t know who he knows.

Who he knows. That’s what bothers him: "who he knows." He feels it was dashed off and doesn’t mean anything and that it fails, that it undercuts the entire song with its mediocrity. Unusual for an artist to feel that strongly about one of his most successful songs. The beautiful despair of a writer who can’t call his flawed creation back. But he’s told singer-songwriter friends that if they can come up with a better line than that, they can use it.

"But nobody has," he says.

Read it. And if you don't know Crowell's work - your mission is clear.

Will The Last Critic Turn The Lights Out?

First, it was Hillary Clinton [1], who drew brickbats from the MoveOn crowd for breaking ranks with the far left on the war.

Then, on the Sunday talkies, Ted Kennedy and Bill Richardson both credited the President's policies in the Middle East with the explosion of democratic agitation in the region.

Now, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, heretofore no friend of the President, says:

The other noted political scientist who has been vindicated in recent weeks is George W. Bush. Across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—and probably Europe and Asia as well—people are nervously asking themselves a question: "Could he possibly have been right?" The short answer is yes. Whether or not Bush deserves credit for everything that is happening in the Middle East, he has been fundamentally right about some big things.

We're getting somewhere.

Zakaria notes something that has to drive the elite media insane:

People have often wished that the president had traveled more over the years. But Bush's capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be related to his relative ignorance of the region. Had he traveled to the Middle East and seen its many dysfunctions, he might have been disheartened. Freed from looking at the day-to-day realities, Bush maintained a vision of what the region could look like.

...in other words, ignorance is wisdom. That's gotta be a finger in the eye of the Paul Krugmans (Krugmen?) and all the other assembled PhDs clogging the Beltway.

Zakaria correctly sounds a note of caution:

But therein lies the danger. It is easier to imagine liberal democracy than to achieve it. Ronald Reagan imagined a Soviet Union that was politically and economically free. Twenty years later, except for the Baltic states, not one country of the former Soviet Union has achieved that. There have been more than 50 elections in Africa in the past 15 years—some as moving as those in Iraq, had we bothered to notice them—but only a few of those countries can be described as free. Haiti has had elections and American intervention, and still has foreign troops stationed there. Yet only a few of these elections have led to successful and free societies.

Every country, culture and people yearns for freedom. But building real, sustainable democracy with rights and protections is complex. In Lebanon, for example, the absence of Syria will not mean the presence of a stable democracy. It was the collapse of Lebanon's internal political order that triggered the Syrian intervention in 1976. That problem will have to be solved, even after Syrian forces go home. In Iraq, the end of the old order has produced growing tendencies toward separatism and intolerance. Building democracy takes patience, deep and specific knowledge and, most important, the ability to partner with the locals.

Bear in mind that the showcase elections in Haiti, South Africa and Zimbabwe were not accompanied by a number of the other things necessary for a liberal democracy; property rights and the rule of law. South Africa retained one of the worst aspects of apartheid, the socialist system under which the blacks (but not the capitalist whites) lived; Zimbabwe is ruled by a man, not laws. Haiti has perhaps the worst combination; a social slave mentality that exalts petty authority, combined with an oligarchical economy and no legal system at all.

Will Iraq, Lebanon and the rest be any different? Lebanon, after all, was a fairly prosperous, moderately democratic nation until 1976, when its internal stresses (and some external ones imposed upon it) tore it apart; those stresses have been driven underground by Syrians on the ground and Israelis above it.

My theory: Lebanon will have trouble until the Ba'athists are gone in Syria. And in Iraq, Islam will help; Iraqis are fairly literate, secularized people, but the moderate Shi'ite and (absent Ba'athist politics) Sunni Islam provides them the same framework of civilization that Christianity provided the early Americans.

It's a theory...

[1] And by "first", I mean "after most Republicans".

UPDATE: Yep. I know. Zakaria is more of a barometer than a buoy. He's flip-flopped on this war, and on the wisdom of the war on terror, more than John Kerry.

But the fact that he - and Hillary, and Splash Kennedy and Bill "Two Choppers" Richardson - are blowing the right way is interesting, to say the least.

Shot of Sanity

Anyone who follows Wog can follow the lunacy of the American drunk driving industry.

Understand, drunk driving is wrong. Don't do it. People who are repeatedly caught with astronomical Blood Alcohol Levels should not be allowed on the road.

But have the laws gone too far? Driven by neo-temperance jihadi organizations like MADD, whose unstated goal would seem to reintroduce prohibition, the states have outdone themselves vying for the title "hardest on drunk drivers".

Unfortunately, you don't need to be drunk to be caught up in the dragnet.

And I'm not just talking about the absurd .08 BAC level, either.

Today's Strib has a story with good news and bad news. On the one hand, the Minnesota Supreme Court is going to hear a case about some egregious excesses of Minnesota's drunk driving laws.

On the other hand - it got to the Minnesota Supreme Court in the first place.

The case:

Responding to public outcry about drunken-driving carnage, legislators have for decades toughened state laws to get drunks off the roads.

But the state Supreme Court will hear arguments today about whether the laws have gone too far by taking away licenses of drivers suspected of being drunk before judges ever hear the cases. In fact, even if a driver is later acquitted of driving while impaired, the license revocation may stay on the driver's record and be treated as a conviction.

The case could affect more than 30,000 people each year in Minnesota who lose their licenses because officers suspect they were driving drunk.

The case involves a former Apple Valley woman, Patricia Fedziuk, whose license was revoked for more than two months. She was never convicted of drunken driving and was taking a mood stabilizer when she was stopped in Lakeville in October 2003.

Adios, license. This, of course, is a result of the "implied consent" law; Says the article, "Nicknamed "revoke now, ask questions later," the law is based on the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right. A license is granted with the tacit understanding that any driver stopped on suspicion of impaired driving agrees to take any test requested and to forfeit his or her license if the test is refused, attorneys said."

However, the defendant Fedziuk took the breathalyzer and blood tests, testing positive for the mood stabilizing drug - which is legal.

So the scorecard so far: Innocent woman. No drunk driving, period, but a revocation on her record, which drives up insurance rates to absurd rates - insurance companies count it the same as a DUI conviction.

Of course, to the bureaucrats whose job security is reinforced by such laws, innocence is no defense:

The case disturbs those who have sought stricter drunken-driving laws to safeguard the roadways.

"What about the innocent families driving down the freeways trying to get to Thanksgiving dinner at the grandma's house?" asked Tim Leslie, assistant commissioner of the Public Safety Department.

What, Mr. Leslie? The Tryptophan might make father sluggish behind the wheel, get him pulled over, and bring yet more fines into the public coffers?

Seriously - of what danger are the innocent to the mythical, convenient and rhetorically cloying family in the example?

Fortunately, there is some sanity in the legal system;

Dakota County Chief Judge Richard Spicer found that the case exemplified how drunken-driving laws permitting license revocations violate due process rights. "The Legislature has obviously overstepped its bounds, and it is incumbent upon the judiciary to step in and declare this prehearing revocation procedure unconstitutional," ..."The courts have been warning the Legislature for the past decade that continued erosion of the process due drivers in the implied consent arena will render the statute unconstitutional," Spicer wrote.

By the way - when the right jumps up and down on the ACLU, I usually am among the quietest. Sure, they champion corrosive causes in absurd cases, and ignore fundamental non-lefty civil liberties (they were quiet about the gun-control issue from the beginning until today), but who else is going to take up the cause of the wrongly-accused (indeed, wrongly-convicted) drunk driver?

Making someone who was acquitted of drunken driving take further action to clear his or her record is not fair, said Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Minnesota. "The burden should be on the [state]," he said.

I'll be following this one.

NARN Live!

Join us tomorrow at the NARN - live at White Bear Lake Superstore!

We'll be appearing from noon-3PM at the NARN's official favorite car dealership, taking the news of the week, giving away cool AM1280 and NARN swag, and helping the staff sell Pontiacs, GMCs, and Hyundais. They have great deals - so if spring has you thinking of getting into a new ride, it's the place to be!

White Bear Lake Superstore is on Highway 61, between County Roads E and F, in White Bear Lake.

Hope to see you there!

Spring In The Midway - Part II

There are many signs of the changing season here in the Midway.

The first week of May, of course, marks the annual ten-day blooming of my little magnolia bush. The prettiest smell I know, all in all - but by then, really, there's no suspense.

Sometime before that all the co-eds at Hamline University don shorts - that's a good sign.

Spring training - ditto.

But the annual center of the social season along Minnehaha is the annual tapping of Anoka Flash's kegerator.

Adios winter!

Life of George

Gerard Baker in the Times of London refers to The Life of Brian in assessing the growing realization that Bush and Company were right.

Life of Brian references are always a good start.

Confronted with this awkward turn of events, Reg’s angry successors are asking their cohorts: “What have the Americans ever done for us?” “Well, they did get rid of the Taleban in Afghanistan. ’Orrible bunch, they were.”

“All right, the Taleban, I grant you.”

“Then there was Iraq. Knocked off one of the nastiest dictators who ever lived and gave the whole nation a chance to pick its own rulers.”

“Yeah, all right. Fair enough. I didn’t like Saddam.”

“Libya gave up its nuclear weapons.”

“And then there’s Syria. Thousands of people on the streets of Lebanon. Syrians look like they’re pulling out.”

“I just heard Egypt’s going to hold free presidential elections for the first time. And Saudi Arabia just held elections too.”

“The Palestinians and the Israelis are talking again and they say there’s a real chance of peace this time.”

“All right, all right. But apart from liberating 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, undermining dictatorships throughout the Arab world, spreading freedom and self-determination in the broader Middle East and moving the Palestinians and the Israelis towards a real chance of ending their centuries-long war, what have the Americans ever done for us?”

It's been interesting, these last few weeks, watching the left's case against Iraq and the Bush doctrine collapse, even among some of the Administration's most formerly strident critics.

Baker notes:

It was always the express goal of the Bush Administration to change the regime in Baghdad, precisely because of the opportunities for democracy it would open up in the rest of the Arab world. George Bush understands the simple but historically demonstrable thesis that freedom is not only the most basic of human rights, but also the best way to ensure that nations do not go to war with each other.

In a speech one month before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Mr Bush laid out the strategy: “The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”

I doubt that anybody, even the most prescient in the Bush Administration or at 10 Downing Street, thought the progress we are now seeing would come as quickly as it has.

It'll be interesting to see if that's how it goes into the history books. Judging by how my kids' history books devalue the role of Reagan and Thatcher in the fall of the USSR, I'm not hopeful.

Bulldozing Hyde Park

So if I drag a box into downtown Minneapolis with the aim of standing up, speaking out, and convincing people to vote my way, will the FEC send a team of accountants and lawyers to monitor the speech?

There's not much I can add to Ed's evisceration of the Federal Election Commission's absurd proposal to regulate political speech on the internet per the McCain/Feingold law.

From Ed's open letter to Congress:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

We may debate about the effect of unregulated cash on our electoral system, but if this new FEC effort comes to pass, the only people debating will be the corporate-owned media and the politicians. The rest of us will have been effectively bound and gagged, unable to contribute in any way thanks to the efforts of those who fear their own constituents. You can be assured that none of us in the blogosphere will fail to recognize those who do not act to defend our rights to free and unfettered political speech, and regardless of political party, none of us will rest until those voices of repression are stripped of office by the voters they hold in such low regard.

When McCain/Feingold was first proposed, "blog" still meant something that happened after cheap beer and gas-station burritos. It was aimed at the "grass-roots" media of its day - groups not part of the media that produced their own commercials, like the NRA and AARP among many others. There was still a yawning gap separating personal opinion and speech that could actually affect elections.

Things have changed.

Question: since blogs are essentially personal, written "speech", which may or may not draw an audience depending on the merit of the material and standards of the audience, someone please tell me what separates McCain/Feingold regulations on blogs and, by extension, on someone dragging a soapbox (and a city demonstration permit) onto the corner of Hennepin and Seventh, standing up and giving a political speech?

Or of any group of demonstrators, of any political leaning?

This is what the right was warning about, years ago, with "Campaign Finance Reform"; the FEC seems to be acting to preserve the major media monopoly on the dissemination of political thought (via their exemption from McCain/Feingold).

A Little Bird Told Me

On yesterday's "Nick Coleman" "Show", Coleman apparently and allegedly said that State Senator Michele Bachmann was a "lesbian".

According to the little bird, this was stated as a pejorative. Little Bird, a source that makes a point of listenng to Coleman daily to catalog the depths of the name-calling, hatred and other amateur-shock-jock hijinks, told me Coleman said Bachmann's putative antipathy toward gays was because of a supposed gay relationship-gone-wrong in college.

Did anybody perchance tape this broadcast?

Nick - word to the wise. You gotta be careful about these things, or the Twin Cities' resident, uninvited guardian of all references to gayness will be on you like lunacy on Ventura...

...oh, wait. She's saying nothing, because Coleman is giving her the one thing she treasures more than justice for gays; publicity. A perusal of all of her (constantly-updated) websites shows no mention of this incident.

Gosh. There's a shock.

Speaking of which - anyone ever notice how much gay-bashing goes on on the Coleman show? When I liveblogged a Coleman show, there was like ten minutes of non-stop tittering about gays, followed by a half-assed disclamer.

This is to be expected. A month into his show, Coleman must realize that his audience is smaller than the NARN's (that's gotta smart - a bunch of hobby jocks who do a freebie weekend show outdraw the mighty Coleman, in both share and, I suspect, absolute numbers), that this is what his career has come to, and that he's not only working at an Amateur Hour, he's not keeping up with the rest of his class. A show whose audience is probably mostly conservatives looking for stuff to fisk (and who will never give a nickel to any of his advertisers, to the extent that he has any).

What does he have in response? Name-calling. Tittering away at gay jokes with a couple of adenoidal chuzzlewits who aren't fit to carry Terry Griffin's gig bag. Defaming people he disagrees with.

Senator Bachmann should get a tape of Coleman's remarks yesterday. If Coleman had the cojones, he'd send one. Gotta stand behind what you say.

Naturally, I said "If".

UPDATE: Flash makes half a good point. In the original posting, I said Coleman's audience was "MOB members". I meant conservative MOB members, of course - the MOB is, in fact, ecumenical. I've changed the post accordingly

Statistics You Can Use

Number of lines from Shot In The Dark that appear in a "Nick Coleman Show" promo: 1 ("Gerbil of the Apocalypse")

Number of lines from a Nick Coleman "Show" or "Column" that will ever appear in a NARN promo: 0.

That is all.

So Far, But Yet So Close

Elder says:

Is there a more annoying commercial currently befouling the television screens of America than the demonically inspired ad for Burger King's Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch? The bastages behind it have forever soiled The Big Rock Candy Mountain for me.

Actually, the first time I saw it I laughed uncontrollably. That, unfortunately, was 2000 viewings ago.

However, it's irrelevant; I have a hard time eating BK. I caught food poisoning at a (long-since-torn-down) BK in 1985, and to this day I usually feel nauseous driving past the stores.

And the notion of bacon, cheddar, and ranch dressing on a bun does nothing for me.

But I dig the ad.

In small doses.

Embarassment of Quotation Riches

Luke Francl of New Patriot declared this Coleman bit his "quote of the day" yesterday:

Nick Coleman: "South St. Paul to Tim Pawlenty: You need to win reelection in 2006 or the right wing will dump you faster than a male prostitute who somehow got White House press credentials.

Hm. So that's the quote.

Of the day.

Hm.

Well, in the interest of bringing people together through the universal language of humor, I figured I'd exhume a few other bon mots[1] by the left's favorite funnyman.

"Stillwater to Michele Bachmann; you need to quit acting like a big cheese or your political futures are will be like the girl from Abu Ghraib".

"Saint Paul to David Strom: You'd better quit complaining about taxes, or the next time you come to Archie's barbershop on West Seventh will be like Iran Contra."

"Mendota Heights to the Minnesota Organization of Ba-log-gers: Stop trying to bring down the Strib or your basements will become as smelly as Enron."

Thanks. I"ll be here 'til Tuesday.

It does explain Janeane Garofalo's contnuing popularity.

[1] The last three Coleman quotes are made up.

Sharing the Joy

Learned Foot, from one of my favorite MOB blogs "The Kool Aid Report", has declared a fiskwah on the Nick Coleman radio show.

This is great - it could be the next big drinking game. For that matter, we could make it a spectator sport - get a group of wags to gather in a room and listen to a recording of the Coleman show. We could heckle it live, MST3K style, repackage it as a radio show, and get better numbers than Coleman himself (although word has it Josh Arnold gets better numbers than Coleman himself).

Keep up the great work, everyone. The grand MOB conspiracy to dominate local media is accelerating.

Understatement of the Year

I missed David Horowitz's speech in Minneapolis yeaterday, but the Strib covered it.

Sort of.

A national movement that supporters say protects college students from indoctrination by college professors but opponents say stifles debate made its way to Minnesota on Wednesday when two legislators proposed legislation that they call the "Academic Bill of Rights."

Sen. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, and Rep. Ray Vandeveer, R-Forest Lake, said their bill would require the state's publicly funded colleges and universities to adopt policies that would mandate that professors not use their classrooms to promote their personal political or ideological beliefs. It also says that students would not be punished for disagreeing with their instructors' politics.

The piece, by Mark Brunswick, doesn't actually link to the Academic Bill of Rights. Read it for yourself, you decide.

I did. I see neither a problem nor anything that can be "enforced" in any way (other than abjuring the destruction of books and other materials).

Naturally, there is another side:

Critics of such measures, including the American Association of University Professors, have said the bills could stifle debate and questioned whether its supporters had ulterior motives, such as wanting more conservative professors.

Oh, my.

Debate is already stifled. If you're a conservative student, especially in humanities, arts or soft sciences, your point of view is already under constant attack on most campuses.

And if the goal is to get more conservatives on campus - or, more accurately, to break the left-to-neo-Marxist stranglehold on so many academic departments.

Michael Livingston, president of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said he has heard the classroom horror stories anecdotally but believes they are rare occurrences at best.

"I find this very puzzling because it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist," Livingston said. "The purpose of college professors is to help students think. We help them by presenting divergent perspectives. Sometimes we believe those perspectives, but a lot of times we don't. We just need to present our students with perspectives so they can think them through and understand them."

I know it wasn't like that with a significant part of my professors, even 20 years ago.

Students - how about today?

Bet Raised

Bush pushed a big pile of chips into the Lebanese pot today:

President Bush (news - web sites) on Wednesday demanded in blunt terms that Syria get out of Lebanon, saying the free world is in agreement that Damascus' authority over the political affairs of its neighbor must end now.

He applauded the strong message sent to Syria when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) and French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier held a joint news conference on London on Tuesday.

"Both of them stood up and said loud and clear to Syria, `You get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish," Bush said during an appearance at a community college in Maryland to tout his job training programs.

The world, Bush said, "is speaking with one voice when it comes to making sure that democracy has a chance to flourish in Lebanon."

For all the left's caterwauling about Bush's recklessness in Iraq (largely either fictional or second-guessing what amounted to mistakes), Bush is a fairly cautious president when it comes to foreign policy. He doesn't play the cards he doesn't have to, and has never shown them too early (vide the liberation of Iraq, which only happened after 18 months of constant diplomatic maneuvering at a generally much more relaxed level than this past month's frenetic gyrations in Lebanon and Syria).

This big a demand, this early in the game? And in junction with the French?

There's something else going on.

Take Care Of The Big Things

Yesterday's post on the future of Syria drew some interesting discussion.

Make no mistake - I think that the removal of Syria from Lebanon, and the eventual (or sudden, for that matter) fall of Assad can only be good things.

Flynt Leverett in the Times, though, sounds a few cautionary notes.

Does the Bush administration understand that for the foreseeable future, any political order in Lebanon that reflects, as the White House put it, the "country's diversity," will include an important role for Hezbollah? Does the administration feel confident about containing Hezbollah without on-the-ground Syrian management and with the group's sole external guide an increasingly hard-line Iran? Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's national security adviser recently said that an overly precipitous Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could pose a threat to Israel.

Lebanese history is indeed crazy stuff. Lebanon was for a time the most stable, prosperous Arab Mediterranean nation. Then, under pressure from the Palestinians and the Syrians, and with internal rifts (between the Christian Phalangists and the Arabs, mostly), the nation dissolved into fifteen years of civil war, an anarchic time when groups like Hezbollah set up massive training camps that launched endless raids against Israel. The civil war ended only when the Syrians essentially imposed control over the country.

Leverett continues:

As Syria retrenches in Lebanon, the United States should use the issue to leverage improved Syrian behavior on issues that arguably matter more to American interests in the region, like Syrian support for insurgents in Iraq and for terrorist activity against Israel. Syria's decision to effect the turnover of Saddam Hussein's half brother and other Iraqi Baathists did not come primarily in response to American jawboning over Iraq. Rather, it was prompted by Syria's interest in deflecting the mounting criticism of its role in Lebanon.

The Bush administration can elicit more sustained improvements in Syrian behavior on Iraq and terrorism by using the threat of intensified criticism of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon - including Security Council action - as a badly needed stick in the repertoire of policy options toward Syria. Washington should also not be afraid to spell out for Mr. Assad the carrots it would offer in return for greater cooperation. In so doing, President Bush could more effectively pursue some of his most important objectives for the region while tangibly improving the lives of ordinary Lebanese.

Sounds reasonable? Hard to say. As Jonah Goldberg says, it seems suspciously Arabist, and seems to put a rather small premium on "improvements in Syrian behavior on Iraq" - an end to Syrian aid to the people who are blowing up Iraqis and Americans - in favor of giving Bashar al-Assad a soft landing.

David Ignatius of the WaPo sounds a similar cautionary note:

We are now watching a glorious catastrophe take place in the Middle East. The old system that had looked so stable is ripping apart, with each beam pulling another down as it falls. The sudden stress that produced the catastrophe was the American invasion of Iraq two years ago. But this Arab power structure has been rotting at the joints for a generation. The real force that's bringing it down is public anger...But catastrophic change is dangerous, even when it's bringing down a system people detest. This is not a time for U.S. triumphalism, or for gloating and lecturing to the Arabs. That kind of arrogance got us into trouble in Iraq during the first year of occupation. It was only when Iraqis began to take control of their own destinies that this project began to go right. The same rule holds for Lebanon, Egypt and the rest. America can help by keeping on the pressure, but it's their revolution.

There are two replies to this: Sincere Mitch and Cynical Mitch.

Cynical Mitch - Mr. Ignatius, you say US triumphalism "got us into trouble in Iraq". I think there may have been some help from the Ba'ath holdouts and a little help from Syria and Iran. And when you say "the real force that's bringing [Arab autarchy] down is public anger", and that it's all been rotting for generations, you echo the post-hoc tush-covering of a generation of liberal reporters who claimed that the seeds of the fall of the USSR were there all along - Really! - without acknowledging that the anger had always been there, and had been for 70 a ticket to the Gulag; it took external pressure to make that anger something productive, rather than something that drove four generations of Russians to the bottle, and that is driving a generation of Arabs into the streets of Tel Aviv wearing dynamite vests.

Sincere Mitch - Gotta go with Cynical Me on this one.

Goldberg adds:

I get the larger argument about how you need to let these revolutionary processes play out and the smaller issues end up fixing themselves. Remember all of the concerns about why we should slow things down, keep Ukraine in the Soviet Union etc, when the Wall came down? I'm open to the idea that the same thing is happening here, but I'd like to see the argument spelled out better on this issue.

I get the larger argument about how you need to let these revolutionary processes play out and the smaller issues end up fixing themselves. Remember all of the concerns about why we should slow things down, keep Ukraine in the Soviet Union etc, when the Wall came down? I'm open to the idea that the same thing is happening here, but I'd like to see the argument spelled out better on this issue. Very true. Remember all the "moderates" who appealed that we should give the Politburo a nice three-point landing, and retard the disintegration of the USSR?

They were wrong then, of course. Are they wrong now? As Goldberg says, we don't know enough.

I Certainly Applaud The Initiative...

...as evinced in the title of this blog.

But you can certainly shoot for higher than that, Dan...

Welcome to the scrum!

The "V" Word

The Guardian is Britain's wacky-left broadsheet. By wacky-left, of course I'm referring to overall outlook; they're a newspaper of some prestige, with some solid reporting. Being a European paper, they are honest about their political leanings - which are far enough left to hire Markos "Kos" Moulitsas as a columnist.

They have also had what is by American lefty standards a disconcerting honest streak.

They're admitting the unthinkable; Bush and Blair were right.

This leaves opponents of the Iraq war in a tricky position, even if the PM is not about to rub our faces in the fact. Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented. What should we say now?

First, we ought to admit that the dark cloud of the Iraq war may have carried a silver lining. We can still argue that the war was wrong-headed, illegal, deceitful and too costly of human lives - and that its most important gain, the removal of Saddam, could have been achieved by other means. But we should be big enough to concede that it could yet have at least one good outcome.

Second, we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan and arguably code for the installation of malleable regimes. Put starkly, we cannot let ourselves fall into the trap of opposing democracy in the Middle East simply because Bush and Blair are calling for it. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is not your friend.

The lefty two-step program for dealing with being bested by those you consider your inferiors:

1. Admit the consequences really weren't that bad.
2. Claim credit for the good part.

Keep your eyes peeled for #2.

UPDATE: Rick from the Centrist Coalition informs me that the Guardian is a broadsheet, not a tabloid. Hm. Coulda swore...but I changed it in the copy above.

WWLD?

I got a few comments about yesterday's post on the City Pages' hatchet job against Michele Bachmann.

I referred to a pullquote in which somone referred to Conservative Christians as "Flat Earthers". Someone calling himself "Jeff S." said:

"Flat-earther"... well since she seems to have no clue about evolution and teaching actual science and clings to articles of faith that fly in the face of evidence, yeah, I think that fits just fine.

It's not really clear what Mr. S is talking about here. Evolution? Perhaps, but if you want to be completely empirical Evolution has holes in it big enough to drive Intelligent Design through; an allegorical view of the Bible and the theory of Evolution are not especially incongruent.

Or is it the fact that Bachmann is an "out" Christian that cheeses him off? A fair chunk of the loony left regards religion the same way that some of the far social right used to think of homosexuality; something to be kept in the closet, if not actually supressed.

In any case, I've seen nothing from Sen. Bachmann herself regarding the "teaching of science". Does Mr. S have any specifics, or is he merely reiterating DFL shrieking points?

Someone named "Corbett Johnson" wrote:

I am sixty years old, happily married and have one son who is thirteen. I am terrified by the direction people like Senator Michelle Bachman are trying to take this state and this country.

Terrified? Wow - disagreement doesn't set well with everyone, I guess...

What would Abraham Lincoln think of our party today?

Abraham Lincoln drew a line in the sand - and went to war over it. He stuck his neck out - far out - on an issue that was if anything vastly more divisive than abortion (that'd be slavery), and took a stance that actively alienated a a huge part of the electorate (even in the North) by emancipating the slaves in 1863. Then he implemented that social change by force of arms, and laid the political groundwork to have it enshrined in the Constitution, even after his death.

Abraham Lincoln was no warm and fuzzy "uniter" - he was the animalmotha grandpappy of all dividers. Without people who can and will risk the brickbats (and in the case of Lincoln, assassin's bullets) that accompany division, the big jobs don't get done. Ever. Whatever you think about Bachmann - and not everyone even on the right is sold on her, and I'm withholding my own endorsement until 2006, for what little that's worth - she is no callow lemming. Is she in the mold of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, or Dubya - someone willing to risk her entire political future for principles bigger than her? We'll find out.

I am embarassed by the positions taken by Senator Bachman...

Name one.

Seriously, Corbett - what is one position that "embarasses" you? That she's on the "non-PC" side of the gay marriage issue? Or that she's a key player in a take-no-prisoners group of educational reformers? Or perhaps that she doesn't hide her faith under a brown paper bag in her public life, like Minnesota politicians in our passive-aggressive little Scandinavian state are supposed to, unless they're pious liberals like David Lillehaug?

Here's the part about Corbett's comment that bothered me the most:

If we all could tone things down and calmly look at the isues [sic] I believe Senator Bachman's views would finally be seen for what they are and in the light of day she would have to go away.

How dare you assume that anyone isn't "calmly looking at the issues." What are you, omnisicient and clairvoyant? You don't know how people have appraised their issues. In my experience, conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, are if anything better informed about most issues than the general public.

Pandering to the fears of uniformed people is not Christian.

Again, how dare you - collectively as well as Corbett Johnson - assume that disagreement equals misinformation, that only your side really knows what's going on.

Jesus never said, " Come unto me, some of you." We need to get serious about real issues.

Education? Defense? Social Security? Those are real issues.

Again, I stress - I have neither made up my mind about the District Six race, nor will it be especially material if I do - I live in CD4. I disagree with Michele Bachmann about a few things, and agree with probably many more.

But among the shrieking points of the opposition, the only real themes I can find are:

1. She's an "out" Christian
2. She opposes Gay Marriage
3. She wants to take a club to Education Minnesota and the ongoing federalization of education
4. She's a conservative.That, and some scurrilous character assassination on the part of a lot of single-issue zealots.

   No?

   Posted by Mitch at 06:48 PM | Comments (47) | TrackBack

Jackboots On Sunset Strip!

I caught one minute of the Nick Coleman show today.

"Arnold [Schwarzenegger] has become a bit of a...DICtator! Kind of like Jesse...Ventura, only without the charm.."

Dictator.

Given reasoning like this, I think we need to revisit Coleman's oeuvre. Perhaps when he had his famous hissy that Maxfield school didn't have enough books...maybe he thought "Books" meant something else? Ducks? Boxes? Dogs?

It could be just a form of dyslexia. "Maxfield has no dogs on the shelves." Hey, it makes as much sense as any other explanation.

I could have been reading Coleman wrong all these years.

Yeah. That's it.

Stealing Liberal

At the beginning of "Rattle and Hum", as the Edge plays the intro riff to "Helter Skelter", Bono yells "Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We're here to steal it back!"

Dean Esmay reminds me - it's time we did the same thing with the word "Liberal".

One of my war cries for the last couple of years has been, "The Left isn't Liberal!" Most people look at me like I'm daft when I say that, but many so-called "right-wingers," who are actually quite liberal themselves, know exactly what I mean.

If you look at any decent dictionary, you'll find that "liberal" is generally defined as the American Heritage dictionary defines it:

1) Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.

2) Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded

Read the whole thing.

Note of Caution

The triumphal procession seems to have started. Mark Steyn declares " The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled", while
Hitch has declared the "Arab Street" dead - at least in for use as a rhetorical club against the west.

The more I think about it, I'm not so sure.

Don't get me wrong; I'm praying for democracy in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iran, and the rest of the Middle East.

But remember - Syria is controlled by Ba'athists. They've watched the demise of their Ba'ath cousins in Iraq. A decade ago, you can bet they saw the fall of the Eastern Bloc. I'd suspect that Ceaucescu's end made an impression.

As we've seen in Fallujah, the Ba'athists are not big on relinquishing power without a fight.

Nor are most dictators. So while the weak Bashar Al-Assad dithers with the notion of weakening his position in Lebanon, the west wonders who really is in power in Syria. In most such dictatorships, power is a delicate balance between the party, the secret police and the military. Which of the three least wants to see itself lined up against the wall by some future, hypothetical Syrian democratic court?

Dictators can't afford to be seen as weak; not so much by the people as by the troika that holds them up in power.

I got to thinking about this the other day. We saw this happening several times during the Cold War. In Hungary and Poland in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland in 1980 - pro-liberalization protests broke out, and in most cases were brutally subdued.

We all recall the fall of the Wall, and watching the USSR disintegrate. Not all of us remember that not even Gorbachev could afford to leave the helm without a fight. Remember the Vilnius TV station? The Soviets stormed the station when the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) tried to assert its independence. Gorbachev and the Politburo realized that to to allow even one "republic", even a tiny one like any of the Baltics (which had their own histories - they were independent nations from 1918 until 1940) to flake away would open the floodgates. As, indeed, happened.

Now, if Gorbachev - with his international image and a fair assurance that his landing would not involve a case of 9mm flu - wasn't above fighting to forestall democracy, what of the Syrian Ba'athists, who like their Iraqi cousins have nothing to lose, who would likely be torn to pieces by the people they've slaughtered over the decades?

I'll believe the'll leave Lebanon peacefully when I see it, and hope I'm wrong.

Good News for Bachmann and Yecke

Jeff Fecke has good news for GOP District Six candidates Michele Bachmann and Cheri Pierson Yecke:

Per Flash. My recommendation to Patty Wetterling: don't. Run again in the 6th, where you'll be facing either archconservative Cheri Pierson Yecke or arch-archconservative Michele Bachmann. You've got a great shot of not only beating, but destroying those candidates (even in a lean-right district like the 6th).

Now, Jeff's a fine guy, but he's the guy who picked Kerry to win (except for the time when he wrote him off for the nomination, which in effect sealed Howard Dean and Wes Clark's fates), but only after declaring Wesley Clark would win, which he had to do because his first choice, after picking someone else (Mad How? Edwards? I forget, and don't want to look), tanked.

Congrats Ms. Pierson Yecke. Or Bachmann.