Shot In The Dark

Blog Svedanya, Rodina!

My inner Euro is Russian:

Your Inner European is Russian!

Mysterious and exotic. You've got a great balance of danger and allure.

The Sweet, Hoppy Taste of Victory

I attended Keegans' Trivia last night - and for the first time, managed to wrest the coveted trophy away from the Fraters.

On behalf of my teammates - Laura and David Hemler, Sisyphus from Nihilist in Golf Pants, and myself - I present...:

We won with 15 correct answers out of 25. The test was a tad harder than normal, since one of servers replaced Marty Newton as writer this week.

The Fraters tied for second with 14. Later, the Nihilist himself came over. "You should be ashamed of winning with 15". I think it was Laura who responded "Not as ashamed as you should be of getting second with 14..."

Nominally, we should have had 16; I had a gift-wrapped question dropped more or less in my lap - "If passing through Jamestown North Dakota [my hometown], and you encounter White Cloud, what species of animal are you talking about?"

Naturally, I've seen White Cloud, an incredibly rare albino Bison, many times. I answered "Buffalo (American Bison)".

It got marked wrong! The "correct" answer was "albino Buffalo".

Grrr. "Albino" is not a species, it's a genetic anomaly!

But Laura Hemler gave us the margin of victory, knowing (unaccountably) what year the kids from Beverly Hills 90210 graduated from high school (1993).

Huh. Who knew? I think I saw a grand total of ten minutes of the entire series.

Anyway, victory is sweet. And malty, with a hoppy "zing".

Star/Tribune Editorial Board: "2+2=5, Minnesota!"

Over the past year, the willingness of the Star-Tribune's editorial board to lie...

...no. That does not do the Strib justice. The sheer bald-faced eagerness they show in their facility at lying to the people to try to influence public opinion on their pet issues is, for lack of a better word, impressive.

In a nauseating kind of way.

Their editorial take of the DFL's legislative machinations to deny the legislative will of the people in re the Minnesota Personal Protection Act goes beyond spin, behond whitewash, beyond intentionally selective puff piece.

It's an out-and-out misrepresentation, of a piece with their behavior throughout the 11-year saga of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

The editorial begins:

Every once in a while, the world's dunderheads trip over a rock. Their best-laid plans fall to pieces, and their backroom deals get lost on the way to center stage. That's the story with this year's attempt to revive the 2003 concealed-weapons bill, struck down just weeks ago by the Minnesota Appeals Court.

Wrong already. The law - concealed carry - was not struck down. Merely the vehicle by which the law got past the Senate metrocrat's maneuvering, an omnibus bill identical in concept to those used for the vast majority of this state's spending bills.

The court scotched the law because its passage involved unlawful legislative maneuverings. Shrugging off the court's scorn...

Again, a lie.

The court did not "scorn" the substance of the law, ruling without prejudice on the actual substance of the reforms. Not even close.

House backers of the hidden-weapons plan conjured a slick new trick to slip it past a wary public and back into the statute books.

By moving for an open vote on the floors of both houses, where our openly-elected representatives could vote on the bill!

Just like they did when they passed the bill two years ago!

Pretty tricky, those Republicans!

The deal would have been sealed in a jiffy -- if only each actor had played his proper part.

But that's the problem with running the Legislature like a totalitarian regime ["Damn those totalitarian Republican bastards - wanting the Senate to vote on bills! Have they no shame?" - Ed]: Sooner or later, those in charge will run into the brick wall of human nature. Just as the gang is preparing its latest "reform" for a midnight vote, some free-thinking lawmaker gets in the way. Imagining he's operating in a democracy, he'll start wondering aloud about obscurities like "fairness" and "the public good."

"Fairness".

Like sidetracking a bill that already passed both houses of the Legislature, two years ago, on open floor votes taken by the peoples' elected representatives, and bottling it up in Senate committees, where a small minority of the legislature - the Metrocrats, all of them anti-gun jihadis whose fearmongering resides in a strange place far beyond reason or, apparently, the need to know, much less tell, the truth - can exert power far beyond their actual numbers or electoral influence. To delay and stall a bill that has been an unqualified success.

That kind of fairness. That kind of public good. That kind of "respect" for the people's wishes.

When lawmakers first passed the so-called "concealed-carry" bill back in 2003, they didn't seem to care that most Minnesotans actually opposed the plan.

According to media push-polling that stated the law's provisions so inaccurately to the point of injecting the left's prejudices into the survey. Yep.

They didn't fuss with findings from a University of Minnesota poll noting that most citizens favored granting liberal gun-carrying permits only to applicants who can prove a special need.

We didn't elect them, did we?

Neither were they worried about cutting corners and pasting the concealed-weapons measure onto an entirely unrelated bill.

Again, like the vast majority of our spending bills.

Eventually, when a pathological liar gets on a roll, they work their way so far around the subject that they come back to the truth:

Why didn't they bother, and why weren't they worried? Because their passion for the Minnesota Personal Protection Act -- as the bill was so coyly called -- actually had nothing to do with a yearning to keep Minnesotans safe. The real reason for lawmakers' abiding devotion to this bill was fear: Anyone who fought it, lawmakers knew, would become a target of progun groups like the National Rifle Association.

You bet your ass they will.

Legislators (outside the DFL-addled core of the metro) who opposed concealed carry reform fared very badly in election after election. And they knew it, which is why most outstate DFLers finally joined with the pro-reform forces. They know that, fraudulent push-polling and bought-and-paid-for studies be damned, that opposition to the bill was going to hurt them.

With voters. You know - the people the Strib is lying to.

The editorial has turned their full pathological circle, swept past a brief truth, and now heads back into bald-faced falsehood:

That's the real reason Minnesotans were saddled with this law -- and the reason they may be burdened with it yet again. The "personal-protection" arguments the plan's backers invoke are as hollow as ever. In its short Minnesota life, the concealed-weapons bill hasn't proven itself in any way valuable. It certainly hasn't made Minnesotans safer: In 2003, the state's violent-crime rate went up. And though establishing causality is tricky, common sense and hard research both suggest that concealed-carry laws don't suppress crime.

Show us the hard research, Star/Tribune.

There is none. Only feeble attempts to impugn the research of John Lott, which is of course a keystone of support for concealed carry nationwide. The vast majority of states now have "shall-issue" laws; not one has ever repealed one in a legislature; Minnesota's highly-questionable court decision is the only example of such a law being taken out of force, and it was not via the will of the people or their elected representatives.

In any case, there's no question that putting more hidden guns into more Minnesota pockets is dangerous: All sorts of research shows that a gun is far more likely to be used against its owner or his family than against an aggressor. That alone is reason to leave the suspended measure languishing in limbo.

And the Strib lies again.

The only "research" was a decade-old New England Journal of Medicine study that, quoted carefully out of context, showed that guns in the home were likely to be used against their owners, acquaintances, or families. The omitted context, of course, was that the study counted

• suicides
• "acquaintances" like fellow drug dealers, gang members - anyone the shooter "knew" in any capacity!
• Justifiable homicides, including shootings of abusive ex-significant others

...as "acquaintances" and "members of the family!

What the Strib doesn't note - and presumably doesn't know - is that if you leave out suicides, shootings in homes where there is alcohol or drug abuse, or in homes where at least one family members has a criminal record, and then incorporates the most conservative statistics on self-defense and deterrence (from the FBI), that the number of crimes deterred to every suicide, accident or wrongful shooting is upwards of 400 to 1.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is it.

If he had his way, House Speaker Steve Sviggum would propel the plan from limbo to law in a moment. But as luck would have it, this is where the rock and the dunderheads come in.

Let me take a moment's break from exposing the serial lies of this piece to ask: "Dunderheads?" Isn't this the paper that whines about the lack of civility in our discourse?

Just checking:

As he greased the skids for the speedy revival bill in the House, Sviggum struck a deal -- or thought he did -- with Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar. Likely weary ["Likely"? Really? And the Strib editorial board knows this precisely how? They can't get any of the empirical facts of this debate correct, and in a decade never once have - but they attain clairvoyance in reading Dean Johnson's motivations? Perhaps if they shared their mind-reading secrets with the rest of the newsroom, it'd benefit everyone! - Ed.] of listening to concealed-weapons claptrap, Johnson initially agreed to forgo hearings and take the House-passed bill straight to the Senate floor for a vote. But after his fellow DFLers observed that they're also "small-d democrats," Johnson had second thoughts. He told Sviggum the bill would be reviewed by a Senate committee, and that senators might well opt to amend it.

That's a crushing blow for a guy who likes his gun bill just the way it is, and who thought he had a deal. But for democracy and its millions of fans, it's a shimmering triumph.

The Star/Tribune is the worst newspaper in America. Their editorial board are the most craven liars in any position of responsibility, anywhere.

I'd invite them to appear with me on the NARN show tomorrow, where this topic will be a key point of discussion. But I know they won't have the cojones to appear.

Serial, pathological liars never, ever do.

Hate Speech

Since 9/11, we've established that one can not call dissenters from American foreign policy - even the most wacked-out dissenters, people who actively support our enemies - "Anti-American". Indeed, as the bumper sticker says, "Dissent is patriotic".

Fine.

Could we grant faith the same pass?

Oh, don't get me wrong; the left is just fine with people of faith - as long as its adherents can't be heard, much less consider their faith more important than their government. Unitarians, liberal Catholics (think Daniel Berrigan) and mushy-left Protestants are just fine, of course, but you don't have to go too far to the left - by no means to the fringe - to find anyone outspoken about the role of faith in their life and their political leanings (if they're to the right) compared to the Taliban, called Jihadis, and so on.

I started noticing during the eighties; the "cynical, hypocritical fundie minister" was a most frequent, convenient villain on TV and in the movies.
Far from passing from use, the stereotype drove much of the left in the last Presidential election. The "Jesusland" meme was the most obvious symptom, the anti-semitism rampant in the American academic left, and the continued portrayal of faith as being some sort of base, benighted aberration are just leading indicators of a simple observation; the American "elite" is developing a full-blown, Klan-level bigotry against people of faith.

Howard Kurtz in the National Review has a cutting article on the topic. Predictably, leftybloggers are not amused.

There’s a real venom on the Left against conservative Christians.

Harper’s Magazine’s May cover stories about “The Christian Right’s War On America,” frightened me, although not the way Harper’s meant them to. I fear these stories could mark the beginning of a systematic campaign of hatred directed at traditional Christians. Whether this is what Harper’s intends, I cannot say. But regardless of the intention, the effect seems clear.

The phrase “campaign of hatred” is a strong one, and I worry about amplifying an already dangerous dynamic of recrimination on both sides of the culture wars. I don’t doubt that conservatives, Christian and otherwise, are sometimes guilty of rhetorical excess.

I'd be a fool not to agree.

But Kurtz is right to add:

Yet despite what we’ve been told, the most extreme political rhetoric of our day is being directed against traditional Christians by the left.

It’s been said that James Dobson overstepped legitimate bounds when he compared activist judges to the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, that was an ill-considered remark. I hope and expect it will not be repeated. But Dobson made that comparison extemporaneously and in passing. If that misstep was such a problem, what are we to make of a cover story in Harper’s that systematically identifies conservative Christianity with fascism? According to Harper’s, conservative Christians are making “war on America.” Can you imagine the reaction to a cover story about a “war on America” by blacks, gays, Hispanics, or Jews? Then there’s Frank Rich’s April 24 New York Times op-ed comparing conservative Christians to George Wallace, segregationists, and lynch mobs.

These comparisons are both inflammatory and mistaken. Made in the name of opposing hatred, they license hatred. It was disturbing enough during the election when even the most respectable spokesmen on the left proudly proclaimed their hatred of president Bush. Out of that hatred flowed pervasive, if low-level, violence. I fear that Bush hatred is now being channeled into hatred of Christian conservatives. The process began after the election and is steadily growing worse. This hatred of conservative Christians isn’t new, but it is being fanned to a fever pitch.

For those keeping score, let's recap:

• If you support the terrorists in Iraq, who actively seek the return of fascism to a nation of 30 million? Not anti-American.
• If you believe America brought terrorism upon itself by not being sensitive enough to eliminationist sects of Islam, and by daring to succeed where most of the world has failed - Not anti-American.
• If you condone sending thugs to scare your political opponents, actively corrupt elections and actively pine for more American deaths - yep, Not anti-American.
• Believe in God more than government, believe in life over optional convenient death, and support your nation - and maybe the GOP? Not only "anti-American", but in line with the very worst of human behavior; victim of a pathology, maybe, but still beneath contempt.

Read the whole article.

You Want Angry?

How can you tell when Dean Johnson is acting as a shill for the metrocrat DFLers?

When his lips are moving.

Of course, being that Johnson is the worst public speaker since Jerry Janezich, you don't want those lips to start moving.

Johnson, the DFL leader in the Senate, broke a promise to bring the Minnesota Personal Protection Act to the floor of the Senate as a stand-alone bill:

An apparent deal to reenact Minnesota's invalidated handgun law disintegrated Thursday over a move to subject it to a Senate committee hearing.

"It's probably not going to happen now," said House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, who accused his DFL counterpart in the Senate of reneging on a handshake promise to give the measure an immediate floor vote.

Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, said he is going forward with new plans to give the bill its first hearing ever in a Senate panel. Because of opposition from fellow DFL senators, he added, if he had stuck to the earlier agreement "the bill would have died."

What that means, of course, is a return to the status quo that the Concealed Carry reform bill faced for its last four years in the legislature; more than enough votes to pass it in both houses, but bottled up in committees in the Senate that are controlled by metro-area DFL "Metrocrats" - big-state, pro-victim-disarmament, pro-criminal patsies like Ellen "Hysterical Ellen" Anderson, Matt "Every Dead Criminal Is One Less Metro DFLer" Entenza, and Wes "The Slander Machine" Skoglund.

And to them, the mission is clear; defeat concealed carry by any means necessary, fair or foul.

At issue is a 2003 law that allowed about 27,000 people to get Minnesota permits to carry firearms in public before two courts struck it down on grounds that it was unconstitutionally enacted as part of a bill that embraced more than one subject.

Pending an expected review by the Minnesota Supreme Court, the permits remain valid, but new issuances are now governed by a former law that gives police chiefs and sheriffs broad discretion to deny applicants.

And, by the way, invalidates all those "no guns in our store" signs that popped up around the metro.

Johnson said Wednesday that he had originally agreed to a swift floor vote on the bill, which is nearly identical to the 2003 law. But then he decided to let an ad hoc panel of DFL senators dominated by the measure's critics and a standing committee review the bill for possible amendments.

And that, Sviggum said, means "the bill will either not reappear or appear in a form that is unacceptable. The Senate committee process shouldn't be allowed to kill the bill."

But the Metrocrats know that that is exactly their only chance of beating the bill. Democracy must be squelched; the oligarchy of metro kingmakers, scaremongers and condo pinks are markers, being called in right about now.

Johnson said the bill would likely get even stronger support in the Senate now, following Minnesota's two years of relatively peaceful experience with liberal handgun permitting.

But Sviggum said he probably won't schedule a House floor vote on the bill under the current circumstances because it would be a waste of time. Without Johnson's earlier promise, he added, he wouldn't have authorized Wednesday's House committee meeting that advanced the bill on a 7-5 party-line vote.

Other Republicans and gun-rights advocates focused Thursday on Johnson's reversal of course.

"It's impossible to negotiate with him because you can't trust a single word he's going to say," Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now Inc. said at a State Capitol news conference where Sen. Carrie Ruud, R-Breezy Point, showed off a dance step she called "the Willmar Waffle."

Meanwhile, Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, chief Senate sponsor of the handgun bill, acknowledged that passing legislation without Senate committee hearings "may not be a good idea, but it's the only way we could get it through."

Indeed.

As long as the metro DFL has a stranglehold on the Senate committee process, the current, patriarchal, racist gun permit law will remain in force.

Johnson, however, said such hearings were necessary "so we don't find ourselves back in court like the Republicans did the last time around."

Then he lobbed another shot across the aisle: "There's one common attribute among the Republicans - anger. It cost them 13 [House] seats in the last election."

Leave aside that Johnson - a born monotone - is lying again.

Wanna know why we're angry, Dean Johnson, you vacuous shill?

This sort of thing. Statist toadies like you, playing dipsy political games with our rights - in this case, our right to defend ourselves and our families from the scum that you and your colleagues seem so queasy about inconveniencing with, y'know, a society that can actually harm them back.

You haven't seen anger, Dean Johnson.

Posted by Mitch at 06:12 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Fodors Is Calling

When I want great travelogue writing, I think of the Elder from Fraters. Natch.

This, from his trip to 'dago, may signal his impending move to the Strib's travel beat:

The worst part of vomiting is not the actual regurgitation itself, but rather the in-between phase. You've just spilled your guts into the toilet. Now you pause for a moment, grasping the side of the bowl, and gasping for breathe. Your nose is running, your eyes are tearing up, and your whole body is shaking. You can see and smell the product of your previous work. You know that your reprieve will be short lived and that there's more where that came from. And here it comes...

The law of diminishing returns also comes into play while calling Ralph on the big white phone. While the first round is not a walk in the park, it's much less painful than those that follow.

I almost feel like I'm there.

Get well soon, El.

Prager Was Right

You have to be a highly trained academic to do the really dumb stuff.

Fr. Dennis Dease is the president of Saint Thomas University in Saint Paul. He's got the vapors over last week's Ann Coulter appearance:

. It's even gone national! (Hat tip to Katie Kieffer at the St. Thomas Standard, the underground conservative paper that has to be giving Dease a blood pressure spike).

Dease, of course, has as long a history of coddling the wacko left has he does of trying to ding the right. In 2000, St. Thomas hosted a Cuban baseball team. One of the players, Mario Chaoui, defected while waiting for a plane at the Humphrey Terminal. Dease promptly asked for him to come back, and just to be safe, forbade all Saint Thomas students from aiding or sheltering the Cuban. "For their own safety", he said.

I couldn't afford to send my kids to Saint Thomas. And if I could, I wouldn't.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/05/09/cuban.baseballplayer/

Hmmmm

So Monday, I slave away for hours writing like ten posts. I get respectable traffic.

Yesterday, I kvetch about my computers falling apart, and get about `10% more hits.

Sigh.

OK. I know what sells...

Huff, Puff

The Guardian's parody of Arianna Huffington's celebrity blog will probably be better than the real thing.

Excerpts

John Hinderaker and I interviewed Senator Norm Coleman last night, as we filled in for Hugh Hewitt.

Radioblogger has the transcript.

I don't sound as dumb in print!

American Idiots

Whenever I talk about Air America's hapless Minnesota outlet, I frequently ask "are there any radio grownups in the building?"

The same question holds for the national shows; Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and the late Lizzz Winstad are all terrible hosts running awful shows.

I've never heard more than a few minutes of Randi Rhodes' show; Rhodes, who sounds a bit like Harvey Firestein, is at least a long-term radio pro who's paid some dues in the business. You'd think she'd be a little bit savvy about how you do and don't do a show.

You'd be wrong:

Government officials are reviewing a skit which aired on the network Monday evening -- a skit featuring an apparent gunshot warning to the president!

The announcer: "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

The audio production at the center of the controversy aired during opening minutes of The Randi Rhodes Show.

"What is with all the killing?" Rhodes said, laughing, after the clip aired.

Now, everyone in the business has pushed the line. Sometimes, many lines. Or course, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that threatening the president, even as a joke, is stupid.

Still, radio draws idiots (as well as quite a few brilliant people); the fact that a shock tawker like Rhodes stepped on things like this isn't remarkable.

No, the part that caught my eye was this:

AIR AMERICA President of Programming and co-COO Jon Sinton said in a release: "We regret that a produced comedy bit that was in bad taste slipped through our normal vetting process.

Vetting process?

I don't know what's more absurd; the notion that there's some internal bureaucrat at FrankenNet that "vets" production bits before they air...

...or that that same "vetting" allows an inept like Janeane Garofalo, or a genuinely insane man like Mike Malloy, on the air at all.

Last Of The Independents

Bound To Be Read Books is toast:

Bound to be Read, which advertises as "the Twin Cities' largest independent bookstore," will close its two locations in St. Paul and Albuquerque, N.M., President Julia Coyte said Wednesday.

"It's a beautiful store, and nobody's sorrier than I am," she said.

With its diversified goods, she said, "We tried a new concept in book-selling, and it just didn't work very well." Coyte opened the store on St. Paul's Grand Avenue in 2001 and the Albuquerque store in 1991; a third Bound to be Read had about a three-year run in Key Largo, Fla. "We just weren't able to change the book-buying habits of the public. It's a tough world out there."

"You can buy books everywhere -- the grocery store, Target, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, online."

I love indy bookstores. Saint Paul and the Twin Cities used to be clogged with great independent bookstores; Odegaards was the best bookstore ever. Up to and including the Ruminator, they also seemed to be run universally by people with no business sense; Odegaard was a notoriously inept businessman, and Ruminator's travails (and attempts to rectify them via his political connections) were .

However, in re: Bound To Be Read:

Coyte, of Albuquerque, is the daughter of Stanley S. Hubbard, president of Hubbard Broadcasting in St. Paul, which owns the bookstores. Her brother, Stanley E. Hubbard, broke the news to about 40 employees Wednesday in St. Paul, while Coyte told the staff of 28 in Albuquerque. The stores will close on or before July 27.

Now the Hubbards have had their ups and downs over the years (mostly ups). But when even the Hubbards financial and marketing mojo can't make a bookstore work, you know you're talking major market change.

Bummer.

The Inmates Are Running The Asylum

Minneapolis' police chief wants to curb begging.

By licensing beggars:

If Minneapolis Police Chief William McManus gets his way, the city's panhandlers will face arrest unless they're wearing a photo ID issued by the city.

Sic the Minneapolis bureaucracy on them! It's done wonders for small business in the city.

It's an idea that has been used in Dayton, Ohio, where McManus used to be chief, and a handful of other big cities as a way to curb public begging. And in some of those places, the begging badges have encountered resistance from homeless advocates.

Homeless advocates - tireless crusaders for free enterprise!

Or not. In any case; for those of you who live outside Minnesota, this is really a priceless insight into the way the Minnesota liberal mind works.

Question

Actually, several questions, for all you geeks out there:

• What is a good, preferably freebie, Linux distro that has decent plug and play compatibility and doesn't take a whole lot of sitting around prowling websites for patches and plugs and stuff? And to top it off, is most likely to work with 11.b wireless, out of the box with no monkeying around? In short, a Linux distro that is as close as possible to WinXP for ease of installation and maintenance? Because while Linux has been tempting me for years, the whole "spend half the weekend looking for the BeanUX 11.34.6.45 Kernel Patch and tweaking the .profile settings to make the printer work" school of home system admin does zippo for me. Ideas/tips? Because the WinXP has just about exhausted my patience.
• Does anyone know anyone that does repairs on laptop computers? I mean, short of BestBuy/GeekSquad, who I just don't trust (and am I right to keep them at arm's length)?
• Where the hell did I leave my XP install CD?

That is all. And thanks in advance.

Insane Day

The NARN is filling in for Hugh Hewitt today - 5-8 Central, at a Salem Affiliate near you.

Naturally, the power supply on my laptop is hosed. My desktop computer here at home - which as been the province of the kids for the past year and a half - is so riddled with viruses and spamware that it's practically useless.

More later.

Ludwig Bemelmans

Red notes that today is Ludwig Bemelmans' birthday.

Bemelmans is the author of the "Madeline" series of childrens' books. My kids both loved Madeline, both the books and the original cartoon featuring Christopher Lloyd's voice-over. My daughter used to make me sing the theme song over...

...and over...

...and over again, when she was a toddler, singing along with gusto when we got to the words she knew.

Red's got a bunch of cool biographical stuff on Bemelmans, too.

MOB Road Show

Some updates on the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers:

• There's going to be another MOB Bender in the Twin Cities, probably in early-to-mid summer. Plans are currently just getting underway.
• Plans are also moving along for the first-ever bash for outstate MOB Bloggers. The first MOB Road show might be in Saint Cloud or Mankato. In fact, you can influence that choice, by going over to SCSU Scholars and voting in King's poll for the location. Wherever it is, it'll be fun; Northern Alliance members will be in attendance, and it'll be a great way to meet some of the people who can't make it in to the traditional MOB events at Keegan's.

So hop over to the Scholars, cast your vote, and then get ready to party MOB style...

Kennedy: Celebrate Good Times, Come On!

Ted Kennedy http://www.drudgereport.com/matttd.htm

On December 4, 2003, President Bush had proclaimed to the world that the capture of Saddam Hussein brought "further assurance that the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever." The photos of Abu Ghraib made all too clear that torture continued in occupied Iraq.

Where are we a year later? Has this problem been resolved? Has the moral authority of the U.S. been restored? Have we recovered from what is perhaps the steepest and deepest fall from grace in our history?

The steepest and deepest?

Worse than slavery? Jim Crow? My Lai?

The Democrats are losing on most policy issues, and their long-term outlook is grim. They have nothing to offer.

Look for a major speech on Al QaQaa soon.

Oh, Goody.

I don't mind dressing up - for special occasions. And work is sometimes a special occasion.

But the whole notion of dressing up for work has always left me completely cold. Suits and their paraphernalia are expensive. Dressing up every day adds more mindless busy-work - ironing, dry-cleaning, bla bla bla - to keep track of in a life that's already too full of same.

So, be still my heart, American business' gift to the textile industry is regaining its infernal momentum:

Instead of buying khaki pants and golf shirts, men are snatching up pastel ties, woven shirts with French cuffs, pinstriped suit jackets and patterned pocket squares.

"We're seeing a huge resurgence in the retro look from the 1980s -- the navy blazer with khaki pants, hot-pink ties, lime-green shirts and even the lightweight V-neck sweater," said Curtis Rottweiler, visual merchandising manager at the Mall of America. "The trends have come full circle."

Like the 1980s, the comeback of the suit is at least partially driven by corporate America, which is adopting a dressier look after the casually clad 1990s.

Put another way; since American business is in a period of retrenchment after the recession, the bean-counters - the HR twinkies and "process people" and other useless mouths that spent the nineties wishing that their performance could be judged by their style sense rather than their impotence at producing anything useful - are back in charge of things. Until we have another technological leap forward that launches the producers ahead of the dead weight, I guess we're back to dressing for success, rather than actually producing something of worth.

Oh, goody.

Just 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies allow casual clothing in the workplace, according to an October 2004 survey by America's Research Group, a consumer behavior and market research firm from Charleston, S.C. That compares with 30 to 50 percent just three years ago.

And is American business doing better now than five years ago?

Grrrr.

Turn This Off, Pallie

I don't watch a lot of TV.

I even get a little snooty about it sometimes; other than the occasional Simpsons rerun, a couple epis of Veronica Mars a month, and the rare late-night exhaustion-induced bout of Family Guy, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge or Blind Date, there's really not a lot that interests me on the tube.

And if I'm out in public, I'd generally much rather talk with people than watch TV; sports bars generally leave me cold (unless the Bears are in the running or the Twins are in a pennant chase, and even then it wears thin fast), and generally if I go to a bar to watch rather than talk, it's for a band.

But if I see one of

these pinheads, I'll still haul off.

TS Eliot once said that "television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome". He is not the only one who thinks so.

From today, a group of anti-TV guerrillas, as scathing as the poet about the influence of the small screen on society, plans to liberate people from its irresistible grip. They will be using a recently launched gizmo called TV-B-Gone to take direct action against television sets in public places.

The glorified remote control, about the size of a key ring, will switch off most television sets within a 45ft radius within 60 seconds.

Here's an interesting question; where do you suppose the little self-appointed guardians of the world's intellect fall on issues of "choice" in other areas? Abortion, civilian firearms, gay marriage and smoking in public jump to mind...

The device will form the focus of TV-Turnoff Week, an annual protest against television's all-pervasive influence, which began in the US 11 years ago. Organised by the TV-Turnoff Network, White Dot and anti-consumerism group AdBusters, the protest has steadily spread to other countries including Canada and the UK.

The protesters plan to identify restaurants, pubs, bars and other public places they believe are ruined by the presence of a television.

They will then pay each one a visit and forcibly turn off their sets, leaving behind spoof menus and posters protesting about how the background hum of the television has replaced the art of conversation.

I'd pay money to see them try this in a Packer bar.

I'd pay even more money to see them forced to sit in a Packer bar with the TV off and converse with Packer fans.

(ducking)

"Television companies are facing a real problem. You go to these conferences and they're terrified about losing 'eyeballs'. The language is actually of 'capturing eyeballs'. We're offering people the chance of liberation," he says.

No, you're forcing your views on them, and on the business that's using the TV as an amenity for their customers.

The Moderate Monster

Someone told me yesterday that "Cookie Monster", the beloved glutton from Sesame Street, has moderated his habits. "He's just a monster who loves the occasional cookie, but eats fruits and vegetables most of the time," reported my correspondent.

"Baloney", I thought.

I was wrong, of course. Nothing is, apparently, too absurd to our keepers of PC orthodoxy.

Jonah Goldberg:

In fact, that's what makes this decision so hypocritical. Sesame Street normally drenches kids with "be true to yourself" pap and identity politics. In one episode, Elmo and Whoopi Goldberg (no relation) have a long talk about how they'd never want to give up, respectively, their skin or fur color because that would be changing who they are. Well, the hue of Elmo's fur is less essential to his identity than Cookie Monster's gluttony is to his. Rosita, the Hispanic Muppet, is often told not to be ashamed of her accent because that's just a part of who she is. Maybe they should ditch it, in the name of good diction. Heck, maybe the kids in wheelchairs should get up and walk next season because we're all in favor of kids being able to walk.

There's a parable here about Minnesota's "moderate" Republicans.

I'll come back to that.

UPDATE: Red adds the ultimate elegy to the late great Monster.

No Scandal Here

Taking Back North Dakota is following...

...a Clinton scandal?

According to the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal Byron Dorgan, John Kerry and Richard Durbin are trying to squash the release of a probe into Clinton Era IRS abuse. You can read it here (no registration)

"Yet now three highly partisan Democrats [Dorgan, Kerry, and Durbin] want to de-fund and prevent publication of this report. 'There is no other way to characterize this but as obstruction of justice,' a source tells us, noting that Congress has never before tried to step on an Independent Counsel investigation like this."

Read the whole thing.

Kid in Candy Store

I was at Cheapo Records last night, and saw that they have the entire Stiff Little Fingers catalogue, remastered and with a slew of bonus cuts.

I could blow a hundred bucks in less time than it's taking to write about it.

And enjoy the snot out of it.

Who Had 11 Months?

The Ventura Trolley claims its first pedestrian victim:

A man was hit and killed by a light-rail train Monday evening as he tried to run across the tracks near 26th Street and Hiawatha Avenue S. in Minneapolis, authorities said.

The northbound train had left the Lake Street station and was going about 55 miles per hour when it hit the man about 8:15 p.m., said Bob Gibbons, a spokesman for Metro Transit.

The victim's body was thrown about 30 yards by the impact.

The light-rail crossing arms were down at the time of the accident, and the train driver sounded the horn, but it did no good, Gibbons said.

He said the driver told him that the victim had stood near the tracks looking indecisive about whether to cross just before he dashed onto the tracks and was hit.

Last year, I predicted that we'd have all sorts of problems; the light rail runs right alongside pedestrian sidewalks in downtown Minneapolis; I'm not sure exactly where the trains run in South Minneapolis, but the design of the train right of way still astounds me as much as it did last year.

Dr. Robert Fisch

I'm going to take the rest of the day off from holding Nick Coleman's feet in the fire. He covered some familiar, and worthwhile, ground yesterday.

His Sunday column dealt with Dr. Robert Fisch. He's been a pediatrician in the Twin Cities, it seems, since dinosaurs roamed the earth. He was the pediatrician to both of my children; he was a wonderful doctor, a kind-hearted man with boundless patience for new parents' endless nervous questions.

And, as I learned about the time my youngest was getting potty-trained, he was a Holocaust survivor. I wrote about Fisch myself, about six months ago, when Doug Grow covered Fisch's story.

Coleman:

Robert Fisch is almost 80, a retired pediatrician with a gentle face, a firm physician's hand and a younger man's thick shock of hair. These days, he is busy talking to young people about his experiences in the Nazi Holocaust.

It left him "tattooed on the inside," and he still suffers from nightly nightmares. But his purpose is not to tell coming generations about the inhumanity of World War II. He wants to be sure they know about the humanity that survived the camps.

You can learn about the Holocaust by reading a book or watching a movie, he says. But he is a physician, and he is supposed to help heal. And that requires an understanding of the price of being fully human in a world where evil sometimes holds sway

Fisch has always been an amazing storyteller:

Of all his experiences as an 18-year-old Jew caught up in the Holocaust, the one that is most inspiring to him is the story of a few Russian soldiers whose lives were saved by German civilians after they escaped from the prison where Fisch was held.

About 2,000 Russians tried to escape. Most died at the prison wall, too weak to survive an 18-foot drop to the ground or machine-gunned by guards. Those who made it to a nearby village desperately sought help from frightened Germans whose men were at war, fighting people just like the ones at the door.

Everyone knew that Germans who helped the escapees would be shot.

"There is a knock at your door, and standing in front of you is a filthy, lice-infested person who is the same kind of person you are fighting against," Fisch says, talking to a class of students at the University of St. Thomas. "This person says, 'Help me!'

"Well? What do you do? You have to burn his clothes and bathe him and feed him and hide him. And if the German soldiers find him, you will be shot, along with your whole family.

"I must tell you that I am not sure I could do this for my friend, let alone risk my child. And this is not my friend, but my enemy. But guess what? Eight Russians were saved in that way.

"To me, that is the most amazing thing I know."

Perhaps more amazing is that Dr. Fisch is able to tell his stories to a new generation that desperately needs to know them.

Henco to Voters: "Grin and Bear It, Suckers!"

Hennepin County continues its endless battle to ram a Twins stadium down the throats of its constituents.

The latest plan for the $478 million, 42,000-seat stadium project would not require any state money. Twins owner Carl Pohlad would put up $125 million. A Hennepin County-wide sales tax of 0.15 percent -- about 3 cents on a $20 purchase -- would provide $28 million a year in financing.

But can the plan make it out of the Legislature?

Maybe it can, maybe it can't.

But if they have their way, the taxpayers of Hennepin County will have no say in the matter.

If you live in Minneapolis or anywhere in Hennepin County, the wheels are turning to, in a government sense, dine and dash:

The 2005 plan comes at a time of extraordinarily tight budgets and stretched public services.

The Minneapolis City Council has already suggested raising the city's sales tax by one-half of 1 percent [and it's already huge! - Ed.] to hire more police officers. That idea will go to a referendum, but county and Twins officials don't want residents to vote on the sales-tax increase for a stadium, saying a referendum would kill the deal.

Randy Johnson, chariman of the Henco board, was more bald-faced about it:

The chairman of the Hennepin County board says he's against a public vote on a sales tax that would help pay for a new Twins stadium in Minneapolis.

Randy Johnson said the county board was elected to make just those kinds of decisions. He said if voters don't like it, they can vote the board members out of office.

Riiight.

After a couple of years worth of taxpayer-funded PR to smooth the ruffled feathers, and after the pro-tax groups beat the dissenters about the head and shoulders with more "Happy To Pay For A Better Hennepin County" twaddle, and - this is probably more like it in Hennepin County - after Stockholm Syndrome reasserts itself.

In other words - "We know the voters will turn the idea down, so we're going to run an end-around past them, and hope the Commissioners up for election next don't take the fall..."

Oh - and do you taxpayers in the rest of the state think you're going to get off easily?

The plan as presented so far does not include a roof, but urges the state to consider paying $100 million for one. The Twins and Hennepin County have said they would build an open-air stadium if money for a roof was not available.

Baseball in Minnesota. D'ya think the roof'll come up in conversation, shortly after ground is broken?

As always, I'm glad I live in Ramsey County. For what good it'll do me.

Blink

The Democrats blink on judicial nominees.

Senate whip Mitch McConnell says the GOP has the votes to block the Dems' filibuster.

A spokesman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada promptly questioned the claim, while another Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record) of Delaware, floated a possible compromise to avert a fight that could bring the Senate to a near halt.

Snap.

This is, of course, straight out of the Clinton playbook. When you have control and are facing a tought fight, you delay, deny and destroy - in the case, delay the vote, deny that you're playing political games, and try to destroy the reputations of your opponents.

When you're on the short end of the stick? Ditto - and try to cast yourselves as the reasonable ones, which is what's behind Biden's "compromise": "Hey, we're offering them free passage on all but two. Two! What could be smoother, I asks you?"

There was no immediate response from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. But a spokesman for the Tennessee Republican reiterated that Frist planned to present Reid with a "comprehensive proposal" within a week to 10 days...Biden, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said, "I think we should compromise and say to them that we're willing to -- of the seven judges -- we'll let a number of them go through, the two most extreme not go through and put off this vote" to end the filibuster.

If that proposal involves anything but pressing ahead with the whole agenda, Frist can kiss any chance of a nomination for President goodbye. Republicans need to learn to play politics as a full-contact game, like the Dems do.

Parents Might Defend The Guy

Dan from Northern Alliance Wannabe relates this bit:

It seems that a woman in Dallas called 911 because she was having difficulty controlling her 12 year old daughter. The operator, failing to see the "emergency" in the situation, quipped:

"OK. Do you want us to come over to shoot her?"

That earned the dispatcher a reprimand, natch.

It's probably justified.

Probably.

Zero Two Mike, Embedded Blogger?

Private Ryan at Zero Two Mike Soldier is an army reservist, as well as author of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers' only genuine milblog.

There is talk (in last Friday's post) that his unit may be deploying.

The MOB's first embedded reporter?

Best of luck either way, Private.

Meltdown?

Via Swiftee at Fiskwa (his hobby gig when he's not doing Pair o' Dice), I encountered this fascinating thread at Jay Rosen's Pressthink, on Nick Coleman.

It started with a letter from Coleman himself. It sounds like Jay has had some of the same fun I had with Coleman's communications:

Coleman is now claiming his letter above was personal, intended only to start a dialogue with me. Alas, there was nothing in the letter about that. When a communiqué to my PRESSTHINK mailbox is not for publication what most people do is write "not for publication" or "personal" somewhere in it. And calling me an "academic press faker" is perhaps not the most efficient method of signaling dialogic intent.

The thread - and the attached comments - go on, and on, to about 100 postings.

At one point, before closing the discussion, Rosen notes (in response to Twin Cities leftyblogger Mark Gisleson), with emphasis added by me:

Coleman is a clown, and a professional embarrassment to the Star-Tribune. (I agree with your comparison to Churchill, by the way.) They created him and now have to deal with him. From Wednesday afternoon to Thursday evening I received 15 abusive e-mails from Coleman. I printed only the first one; the others have much richer material for his "fans" out there.

He said he was contemplating retaliation in his column, and said he would follow up with my university-- the kind of threats that the right wing crazies make when they get going on "leftist academic" this and "you liberals" that.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? From my 12/17/04 post:

...the discussion was interesting; curious phone messages, threats to slime me in his column ("I'd hate to have to write about how you cut and ran" being an excerpt)...

You should read Rosen's whole thing.

UPDATE: Jay Rosen writes to note that I originally called him Jeff Jarvis. Oddly, I called him "Rosen" for the rest of the post. Blah. Sorry.

Sorry, Jay, but in fairness, I originally wrote "James Lileks".

Il Monkey

Pink Monkeybird comments on the NARN's bumper music in a post from the other day:

I don't pretend to know how bumper music gets chosen on the Northern Alliance Radio Network. But I think I'm pretty close to accurate when I assume that the lovely and talented Mitch Berg is about as close to being dictator over this realm as Benito Mussolini was the dictator over Italy in 1937.

Far from the truth.

Bumper music has always been pretty much a gang thang. We all bring it in.

I provided a bunch of the "break beds" - the songs that play as we head up to a break. Patrick Campion - the Operations Manager at AM1280 - brought in a bunch more bumper music, mostly the "classic rock" stuff. As a general thing, I have as much control over bumpers as I do over the conversation on the show - very, very little.

Now, don't get me wrong (please forgive me for using that tired expression like a broken record), I'm not saying that Mitch's music taste sucks. At least, not all the time. I am saying that it sucks sometimes. And I'm not even saying that "sucks" is a pejorative value. I love sucky music. But just not all the time. Sometimes ya gotta throw in some cornball sucky music to level the playing field. And this is pretty much what Mitch "Il Duce" Berg does on the show. So I have no problem with him. The reason we listen to NARN is for the talk, not the bumpers.

Point of order, here; my taste in music is, in fact, the best in the world - and has rather little to do with the bumpers on the show. A real Mitch Berg Show would pinwheel between the Sex Pistols and Russian orthodox monastic music and Stax/Volt r'nb and piobareachd bagpipes, and most everything in between.

Speaking of "in between..."

Pink notes:

Once in awhile Mitch tosses me a bone. Today he played Queen's Under Pressure which was co-written by David Bowie. I'm not a Queen fan and I don't have much of a high regard for that song. Although when I hear it I generally don't run out of the room squawking like a pinkmonkeybird, as I have on occasion when Bohemian Rhapsody is aired. What makes me so haughty as to believe the Mitch gives pinkmonkeybird the least thought when he plays China Girl or Changes or Under Pressure, you ask? Because he said so, that's how.

If I were asked to choose David Bowie bumper music for the NARN (besides the above fine selections) I would choose the following;

Candidate (choose your political race), Station To Station (Europe), Always Crashing In The Same Car (taxes), Suffragette City (civil rights), Fame (Hollywood elites), The Man Who Sold The World (Kofi Annan), Moonage Daydream (pinkmonkeybird), Starman (UFOs), It's No Game (Teddy Kennedy), Up The Hill Backwards (the Democrat Party), Let's Dance (the smoking ban), Running Gun Blues (legalized carry laws), Hang Onto Yourself (the Senate), Scary Monsters (al Qaeda), Loving the Alien (Border control), I'm Afraid of Americans (anti-Americanism), "Heroes" (Berlin), Quicksand (Nazi baiting), All Saints (the pope), Battle For Britain (Tony Blair's re-election), Big Brother (moveon), Blackout (energy management), The Laughing Gnome (Nihilst In Golf Pants), Warzawa (British bloggers), Sunday (9/11/01), Cracked Actor (Tim Robbins), Dead Man Walking (Sean Penn), Aladdin Sane (Red Lake shootings), Space Oddity (NASA), Oh You Pretty Things (Abortion rights), The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell (gentrification), Amsterdam (Amsterdam), The Secret Life Of Arabia (Wahibism), Thursday's Child (Keegan's trivia), Seven (barking moonbat lefties), Young Americans (K-12 education), Sound Vision (movies), Tonight (Saturday evening events), V-2 Schneider (missile defense system), Outside (crime), Silly Boy Blue (John Kerry), Queen Bitch (Hillary), Something In The Air (the blogosphere).........

Anything can happen, PMB. It's America, where dreams come true.

Fingers Crossed

I'm always leery of businesses that harp on their "connections with the community". Such "connections", at least in the inner city, usually are made with a screechy, preachy, condescending sense of "this is what you people really need.

I'm also generally touch-and-go on the idea of government subsidizing business, especially selectively. That subsidy is especially common in Saint Paul, which is "blessed" with a third, unelected layer of pseudo-government, the "Neighborhood councils", which are essentially neighborhood-based non-profits with salaried staffs and rigid, unsurprisingly-lefty agendas; my neighborhood's "Hamline-Midway Coalition" used back-room political connections to crush an entrepreneur who started a fully-legal, code-compliant gun store in the Midway, and is currently engaged in trying to squash an again-perfectly-legal adult novelty store nearby.

With all those caveats, though, this story is one of their success stories. Andy's Garage is one of the nice perks of living in the Midway:

Andy's Garage was built with fond memories, hard work and an unusual stock offering that involved a community.

Ignorance usually isn't bliss in the business world, but it sure came in handy when Dee Traudt decided to pay $180,000 for an old service station that he would convert into a restaurant.

Five years after he and wife Sande opened Andy's Garage on University Avenue in St. Paul, Traudt not only is looking for his first dollar of profit, he's still working without a salary at the diner he left a good salaried job to build.

The Garage is an old-fashioned diner, specializing in....old-fashioned diner food. It carries it off wonderfully, for those days when you just have to have a Cali burger and a malt.

Worth a read.

Agenda!

The headline on the Strib article reads:

SUV crashes into car, killing at least two

Those bad SUVs!

The key clinker to the story, of course, comes in the lede; I add the emphasis:

At least two people died late Sunday night in south Minneapolis after a sport utility vehicle driven by someone trying to get away from police plowed into a car.

Ah. So - if you were thinking it was yet another case of an SUV, peeved at being the left's symbol for rightist excess and arrogance and perhaps high on all of the gas it sucks down, leaping into action on its own to kill the innocent, you're to be disappointed.

Empire Building?

John Fund has an interesting piece on some of the obscure minutiae of running elections - this one, one that could slip a lot of back-door regulation into elections. It's gaining steam in Congress:

With the EAC's mandate ending in October it's time lawmakers hold a debate on how it can be restructured. One option would be to make its members appointed by leaders of Congress from both parties instead of by the president, which would remove any implication that the commission had rule-making authority. Another idea would let state and local election officials elect the commission's members and turn it into a body explicitly concerned with helping states improve election procedures rather than issuing edicts.

What is clear is that the currently constituted EAC carries with it a potential for partisan abuse. Even though current law requires the commission have an equal number of Democratic and Republican commission members, it could still tilt in a clear partisan direction if an unscrupulous president decided to stack it with recess appointments just before an election. "Democrats should think of a Richard Nixon with that kind of power, and Republicans might imagine a Hillary Clinton," warns a Democratic secretary of state. Our elections are too important to on the one hand, ignore the mistakes our local officials can make. or on the other have a federal body micromanage the process from Washington.

Read the whole thing.

And watch, as you go forward, for the nastiest regulations on your freedoms to come from the most outwardly innocuous sources.

Narcissism Monologues, Redux

When writing about the little publicity grabber in Winona and her "I [heart] my Vagina" buttons yesterday, I forgot one other point.

If you wear that button in school, and people feel uncomfortable about it, the "champions of free speech" on the left will bellow until their throat lining catches fire that it's "free speech".

If you wear that same button at work, and someone feels uncomfortable, it's a sexual harassment complaint - all you have to do is make someone uncomfortable, mind you - including niggling "counseling" by the droogs from HR, and a possible lawsuit.

Different situations? OK - why?

The Narcissism Monologues

People have asked me about the Vagina Monologues controversy in Winona, where a couple of Winona High School girls (backed, natch, by the ACLU) are fighting for the girls' "right" to wear "I [heart] My Vagina" buttons in school.

Let's get back to that later. First, this distraction.

Luke Francl, at the decreasingly prolific "New Patriot" blog, says little or nothing about the Winona "controversy" itself. Merely...:

Cute high school girls who are proud of their sexuality, and not afraid to show it? And the ACLU is involved? Watch out for howls of protest from the right. Meanwhile, notice how the wingnuts shift uncomfortably in their seats.

Where to start?

• "Cute" high school girls? Would the girls' claim be any less valid if they were, say, "not cute?"
• If this is the best the ACLU can do, we must truly be in the golden age of civil liberties.
• I bet if I gave Atrios or Kos a million dollars to start calling conservatives "Fizzlebejinkers", every single leftyblogger and talk show host would refer to us as "Fizzlebejinkers" at every possible opportunity, until Kos ordered them to stop.
• Shifting in our seats? Hm. Dunno about that, Luke. I was married for ten years, I have two kids; female parts really hold no mystery to me or, I'm gathering, most of us. Put somewhat indelicately, I've seen a few vaginas in my life, from all different angles. So if I "shift in my seat", it has less to do with the word "Vagina" than with the cringe I feel at watching other peoples' self-aggrandizing hyperdramatics.

Which brings us back to the kids in Winona, and the screeching idiocy their little stunt has unleashed.

From the Strib piece:

Two Winona High School students have found themselves in hot water with school officials.

Why? Because after Carrie Rethlefsen attended a performance of the play "The Vagina Monologues" last month, she and Emily Nixon wore buttons to school that read: "I [heart] My Vagina."

"Look at Me! Meeeeeee! I've got a naughty word on my button, and I dare you to do anything about it!

School leaders said that the pin is inappropriate and that the discomfort it causes trumps the girls' right to free speech.

The school "leaders" are morons, too. Discomfort, my ass; the disruption of Ms. Rethlefsen's "look at meeeee!" stunt distract from what the school is supposed to be about; school.

But that's not the big issue.

The girls disagree. And despite repeated threats of suspension and expulsion, Rethlefsen has continued to wear her button.

"Look at Meeeeeeeeeeee!"

Let's go back to Luke Francl's jape; he referred to "Cute high school girls who are proud of their sexuality". It'd be unseemly to comment on Ms. Rethlefsen's looks (if I were 24 years younger, I'd probably go along), but her "pride in her sexuality" (like any 18 year old has any idea of what their sexuality is about) is interesting.

So school is a place to express "pride" in one's sexuality? (Let's assume that wearing a provocative button is a means of expressing "pride", rather than a way of forcing your "sexuality" on others, which is a lousy assumption, but work with me here)

Bully! Let's let everyone in school "express pride" in their "sexuality". Bring on the...:

• Buttons saying "I Have Eight Inches of Heat-Seeking Moisture Missile That [Heart] Your Vagina, Too!". It expresses no less "pride" than Ms. Rethlefsen's button, does it?
• "Life Aint' Nothing But Benzos and Ho's" T-shirts. Because who says "sexuality" has to be the conventional, upper-middle-class, alpaca-wearing, Volvo-driving academic view of the pampered classes whose idea of "exploring sexuality" is things like "Vagina Monologues"?
• Centerfolds in lockers! Because teenage boys (and some girls) should be able to express "pride" in their "sexuality", too, right? And what expresses adolescent guys' "pride" better than pics of naked chicks? No, stifle your internal Andrea Dworkin; we've established that "discomfort" in someone's showing "pride" in their "sexuality" is no reason to stifle them!
• Buttons saying:
  • I [heart] My Testicles!
  • "Will Boink For Money"
  • "Once You've Had Black, You'll Never Go Back"
  • SIT ON MY FACE!

Seems obvious, no?

I mean, it's all "self-expression". Right?

Schools - to say nothing of jobs and, while we're at it, people on the bus or in the supermarket or at the Walker or society at large - however, frequently ask that you hold off on "expressing" your "sexuality" until you're in a forum where anyone cares about it, because otherwise it's a distraction, not much different than interrupting class by expressing your "baseball-ality" by reciting box scores, or standing on the produce bin at Rainbow and expressing your pride by showing your ass to the assembled shoppers.

The girls have won support from other students and community members. [Winona's a college town, so that's no big shock - Ed.]

More than 100 students have ordered T-shirts bearing "I [heart] My Vagina" for girls and "I Support Your Vagina" for boys.

"We can't really find out what is inappropriate about it," Rethlefsen, 18, said of the button she wears to raise awareness about women's issues. "I don't think banning things like that is appropriate."

NOTE to any Winona High students: If you make a T-shirt labelled "I [Heart] Narcissistic, Self-Aggrandizing Drama Queens And Their Attention-Grabbing Stunts", send me a photo of you in class (preferably in close proximity with Ms. Rethlefsen). I'll reimburse you the cost of the T-shirt. We'll also see if the ACLU leaps to your defense.

Speaking of which:

Their case could become another test of whether high school students have the right to express their views in school. Charles Samuelson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, has offered to help the girls.

"It's political speech," he said.

Sexuality is political?

Wow. Where do I give to that 527?

NARNed Up

We're going to have a fun Northern Alliance radio program tomorrow.

After our customary first-hour week in review (and what a week it was!), we'll be talking first with Eric Holmes, who put together the stories in the book "Winning Iraq".

Then, we'll be talking with one of our favorite guests, Steven Vincent, author of "Into The Red Zone" about his solo travels through Iraq, and proprietor of "The Red Zone" blog. He's going back to Iraq in about a week, and we're going to be talking with him before he goes.

Plus the Third Hour of Mystery, and your phone calls.

Like You Couldn't See This Coming...

The Wendy's Chili Woman has been been boxed up:

The woman who claimed she found a finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili last month has been arrested, the latest twist in a bizarre case about how the 1 1/2-inch finger tip ended up in a bowl of fast food.

She'll be undergoing quite a grilling.

UPDATE: Now that the woman is in the bag, I'd like to stir the pot. Who do you think fingered her? Will her defense get a frosty reception? I'm looking for nuggets of wisdom here; where's the beef?

Bachmann: Tempest Vs. Teapot

On the same topic: First Ringer cuts through the hype with the good news and bad news for Michele Bachmann.

Below The Bottom Of The Barrel

I've been back and forth on gay marriage for the last few years. I basically support civil unions and oppose gay marriage, which means I'm more or less ambivalent about the Bachmann amendment.

However, I know that an awful lot of people whose opinions on other issues I find generally risible are howling like poop-tossing monkeys on cheap beer at the very mention of Bachmann, which means Bachmann probably has something going for her.

A local blogger who has revealed some ethical challenges on this blog wrote this yesterday:

Well it appears Michelle and her group aren't the only Wing Nuts planning events for Hitler's Birthday...

The blogger went on to list a series of KKK, American Nazi and White Supremacist group gatherings that were scheduled (on purpose in this case) for Hitler's Birthday.

When people have to resort to that kind of tripe, you know several things:

• The amendment has the votes to pass, and pass bigtime.
• It's not about rational discussion, if it ever was.

More later.

UPDATE: Commenter Jeff S. says I overreached:

- a load of people have argued against Senator Bachmann's ideas
- one person (or even a bunch, whatever) among these many say something clearly wacky
- point and howl like the monkeys you say they are
- assume this means ALL in the opposition are equally wacky and discount any arguments out of hand

I'm not sure I implied that all Bachmann's opposition were this wacko, and I have not discounted all arguments out of hand.

Let me clarify: There are reasonable points against Bachmann's policies, including a few from the right. The post I reference was not one of them.

However, I do believe that as this thing comes closer to a vote, we will see more of the personal attacks; the polling seems to show very broad, deep support for some sort of law against gay marriage (even if coupled with civil unions).

UPDATE II: [Siiiiigh]

All right. I reworded things. Hopefully I'm perfectly clear now.

Oh, Holy Christ

As much as I oppose the death penalty on principle, I not only favor it for the perp of this, perhaps the most ghastly murder I've read about recently (Warning: awful story, capable of sucker-punching your opinion of humanity in general. You've been warned)...

...but I hope Florida quickly legalizes death by stoning, burning, drawing and quartering, pickaxe, or staking out in the sun covered with honey and a thin film of viscera, in time for this animal's piece of demi-humanoid filth's penalty phase.

I hope "he" it gets shivved nice and slow in the joint. Very, very slow.

Jesus. I'm going to hurl.

Grow and Candy Don't Mix

Doug Grow is writing about guns.

Hide your valuables.

Doug Grow's column today claims that Minnesota is a "candy store for terrorists".

Another way of putting that would be "place where the Constitution hasn't been completely suspended."

The shopping trip Jerry Dhennin and Penny Sinner took on Saturday turned out to be very successful.

Dhennin, a retired Anoka County sheriff's deputy, and Sinner, a University of Minnesota grad student in public health, proved that you can buy just about anything you want in Minnesota.

The two went on a "shopping trip" on behalf of Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota, an astroturf group led by a Saint Paul anti-gun hysteric, Rebecca Thoman, which Grow refers to as "an organization devoted to sane gun restrictions". Either Grow is completely ignorant of Rebecca Thoman, or being willfully obtuse; that, or "Sane" means "absolute" in Doug Grow's world; Rebecca Thoman and her checkbook group want nothing short of a civilian gun ban, in the long run; seeing that gun control is a stiff at the polls, they're keeping their language moderate for now.

Says Grow, the two...:

were out to buy an assault rifle. Citizens for a Safer Minnesota wanted the rifle for a couple of reasons: 1) to show how available these weapons are; 2) to use the weapon as visual evidence about why it wasn't such a good idea for the feds to allow a limited ban on assault weapons to fade away in 2004.

Dhennin and Sinner had no particular weapon in mind when they went to the Education Building at the State Fairgrounds for the Minnesota Weapons Collectors Association gun show.

"A candy store for terrorists," is how Dhennin, a hunter and gun lover, [There it is, right on schedule! The left, since the days of Clinton and Wellstone, has done its damnedest to drive a wedge between hunters and owners of "ugly guns". It's pretty much de rigeur to make sure you have someone who calls themselves a hunter on board when you're writing an anti-gun screed; it's sort of like having a red-shirt guy along on Star Trek when Spock, Kirk and McCoy beamed down. - Ed.] described the weaponry available at the show.

Dhennin has been dismayed at the proliferation of assault rifles since the demise of the tepid federal ban.

"I go to these shows all the time," he said. "I'm alarmed at all of the new stuff I'm seeing. Assault rifles and handguns are out of control. I go to these shows looking for antiques. You could say I'm a gun nut. But there are gun nuts and then there are real gun nuts."

Er, yeah.

At the beginning of the piece, Grow said the two's "mission" was to "show how available these weapons are; 2) to use the weapon as visual evidence about why it wasn't such a good idea for the feds to allow a limited ban on assault weapons to fade away in 2004." What they got was a legal rifle and a legal book, and a slur at gun owners with a yen to own "ugly guns".

That's all.

Now, perhaps Grow or his two subjects could let us know if any actual crimes have been carried out by gun nuts, real or otherwise (BATF charges designed to trip up gun owners don't count).

I'll wait. I mean, I've been waiting a long time.

Here's a question for you; when the President, John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge talk about measures that actually affect terrorism but might, tangentially, possibly affect the fringes of our civil liberties, the left howls like a monkey that's gotten its testicles caught in a C-clamp (and I'll defend their right to do it!). But now, Doug Grow -the very model of a Minnesota soft-lefty - is crying "terror" (although, as we'll see later, speciously). Ironic, no?

Dhennin and Sinner didn't merely want to buy an assault rifle. They wanted to see whether they could make their purchase with no questions asked.

Licensed gun dealers must do a background check before selling customers assault rifles or handguns.

Private dealers, though, apparently don't need to bother with messy red tape. [Remember this bit here]

Dhennin and Sinner approached a so-called private dealer who was displaying a Ruger Mini 14, a .223-caliber rifle, with a fold-up stock, pistol grip and magazines with a 30-round capacity. (According to a video, a expert can go through four magazines -- 120 rounds -- in 45 seconds with this weapon.)

According to the two, the conversation with the private dealer went like this:

Dhennin: "Gotta tell you right off, ain't no way I'll pass a background check."

Dealer: "Don't worry about it."

Sinner still is surprised by the dealer's laid-back attitude.

So let us get this straight; the gun dealer broke no laws in selling a legal firearm that is involved in an infinitesimal proportion of crimes (vastly less than, oddly enough, the highly-regulated handguns!).

"He didn't ask for a name, no ID, nothing," she said.

He followed the law.

Dhennin negotiated the price down from $550 to $500 before making the purchase and moving on to what Dhennin described, tongue-in-cheek, as the gun show "library." This was a display area filled with pamphlets and literature about weaponry.

Sinner and "the librarian" had this conversation:

Sinner: "Is there a book about how to set a Ruger Mini 14 on full automatic." (Selling fully automatic assault rifles is still illegal.)

Librarian: "We can't display them but if you want one, I can dig it out."

Sinner: "Please do."

The librarian found the book -- a 52-page pamphlet on how to convert the rifle to fully automatic -- and sent Sinner and Dhennin on their way with a little warning.

"Don't be flashing this around on your way out," he said.

Again...well, let's let Doug continue:

Were any current laws violated during this shopping trip?

I called the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. I was referred to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

I called the BCA. I was referred to the attorney general's office.

I called the AG's office, which pointed out that licensing issues regarding guns are a federal matter. I was referred to the federal Bureau of Alchohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Were any laws broken when Sinner and Dhennin bought their assault rifle?

Short answer: Nope.

Well, then, there's your answer.

Let's ask and answer some more questions for Doug Grow:

• Would it be a First Amendment violation, or even a restraint of trade, to bar someone from publishing a guide to converting firearms to full-automatic? Of course.
• Is it easy or cheap to do (in the case of the Mini-14)? Not really.
• If you are not a competent gunsmith, will any law-abiding gunsmith do the job? Hell no.
• If you were to actually convert the rifle to selective-fire (semi and full-automatic - a criterion for a real "assault rifle"), and the BATF gets wind of it by any means, fair or foul, are you looking at serious time? Oh, sweet Lordy, yes, you are going down for a long, long time.
• Do you - and by "you" I mean Doug Grow, Rebecca Thoman, members of Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota, the Minnesota left, and anyone who takes Doug Grow seriously when he's writing about things touchier than snow removal complaints - suppose that terrorists have other, much safer "candy stores" for their weapons than a gun show, which is crawling with law enforcement? Say, rogue nations with huge stockpiles of real assault rifles, and money to get them through our porous borders, safely and predictably, rather than buying varmint rifles like the Mini-14, finding a competent (and reliably discreet) gunsmith, and converting it into a jury-rigged substitute for the real thing?

Grow, and Thoman, may or may not be ignorant of the actual applicable law. It's for damn sure they want you to be, though.

A postscript: There was an effort by state Sen. Satveer Chaudhary, DFL-Fridley, to have the Legislature adopt gun restrictions similar to those lost when the feds all but gave up on the idea of bans on assault weapons. But Chaudhary's bill has never received a committee hearing. It's expected to die of apathy this session.

Die of apathy?

It should be killed with malice. It's a worthless law in search of a non-problem, done by a grandstanding politician trying to suck up to an ignorant mass of voters.

Linguistics geeks unite!

I was a linguistics geek of sorts in college. Dialects always fascinated me.

American English has three main groups; Northern (mostly north of a line from the New Jersey Pine Barrens west through the northern Great Lakes states, up through Wisconsin and Minnesota, and fizzling out somewhere to the west; Midland, which is south of that line down to, roughly, the Mason-Dixon, and the Southern group. Then you get to the Great Plains and points west, where things are much more confusing.

Anyway. I took this test?...

...and got these results:

Your Linguistic Profile:

70% General American English

20% Upper Midwestern

5% Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Dixie

So I'm 70% "General"? Must be the radio background.

They didn't use a few questions that might have raised my "upper midwestern" figure a few points: "Q: What do you call a dry creekbed?", answered "Coulee", is a dead giveaway one is from the Dakotas...

By the way, let me put in the plug for my pet peeve; English is one of few languages without a second-person plural. "You" has to serve both singular and plural uses. I think it's time we cut the bull and adopted "Y'all".

UPDATE: My mother, who has lived in North Dakota, Maryland and Turkey (the country, not the fowl, although I remember some deluges of thanksgiving leftovers that verged on "living in turkey"), scored as follows:

I got 40% Yankee
25% Dixie
25% English
5% upper midwest
0 % midwestern

Go figger. I suspect the high "Yankee" score comes from having supported Kerry.

Bread and Circuses. And More Bread.

My old colleague David Cargo, an up-and-coming power-broker at the Saint Paul Bread Club, tells me this year';s Bake-Off is coming up this weekend:

Membership in the club is free and open to the public. Bread bakers with any level of experience are welcome. Membership in the club is open to anyone interested in bread.

We will meet for the bake-off on Saturday, April 23, at 3 p.m. at the St. Agnes Baking Co., 644 Olive St. in downtown Saint Paul. Entries for the bake-off (a single loaf of bread baked at home) must be present by 3:30 p.m. There are no entry fees.

Mmmmm.

Interested? David's contact information is on the site; drop him a line.

Hadn't Noticed This...

...but then, noticing this sort of thing is why Moxie makes the big bucks.

So Wierd

I registered Bun, my daughter and oldest child, for high school last night.

I remember coming to the same building, Saint Paul Central, ten years ago, when her half-brother, my stepson, was checking out high schools. She was three at the time, a tiny little hyperactive ball of obstinacy with a button nose and a stubborn streak wide enough to land a 747 on.

The obstinacy is still there; the nose is a little less buttony; she's certainly not tiny or little. Bun is 13, now, with all the facets of adolescence that make eighth grade about as beloved of parents as a tax audit. But when she's riding in the passenger seat, I can still see the outline of the little face that I used to look at as she stared down the world from the safety of the car seat just a few years ago. Er, I guess technically it was ten or eleven years ago.

Yow.

The good news is that she's looking forward to high school. Justifyably so, if memory serves; Junior High was an endless soul-sucking quagmire of boredom; the only things I really learned involved the moronic savagery of too many people, and that was just the teachers. High school was another thing altogether; after eight or nine years of being told vat I vould and vould not learn, I suddenly could shape at least part of my own course; it wasn't exactly "freedom", but it worked wonders. So, hopefully, for Bun.

The bad news: I have four years to figure out what and where I've screwed up and get some last minute fine-tuning in. Four years? I've been on software projects that didn't get finished in that kind of time.

Four. Ow. I'd better stop.

Heard in Passing

I listened to - I checked - 14 seconds of the Nick Coleman "program" this morning.

I'll try to transcribe what I heard as accurately as possible:

COLEMAN, KUHBI, ENGINEER and SOUND EFFECTS (WOODY WOODPECKER)(simultaneously): This THONKTHONKTHONK Has I anyone new heard seen HA HA HA HAAAA HA! pope him Ratzinger will talk, HA HA HA HAAAA HA! and get George HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! he the Jones was wingnuts...in a the the Hitler WING same Youth! place? NUTZZZZ...all fired up...

(FIVE SECONDS OF DEAD AIR)

Making "Big Brother" cry for Mama, indeed.

Papal Payback

I'd wondered - what is it that's turning the wacky-left against Pope Benedict? It seemed as if it were more than just being "a person of faith" - which stirs snooty condescension, generally, before actual hate.

But it came back to me.

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.

Go figure, a Catholic observing the beliefs of the Catholic Church, especially on a vital issue like abortion.

What'll they think of next?

By the way, as I recall events, Ratzinger didn't "intervene in the US election". He sent a private letter to US bishops who'd asked for guidance after receiving a number of different approaches to the whole "Catholic Politicians Who Are Pro-Abortion But Want To Wrap Themselves In Catholicism" thing. The article acts as if the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, say, spent millions of dollars on pressure groups and bought themselves legislation to stifle their opposition's voices in the media. Not that anyone would do that, right?

Of course, letting Catholics run their church their doctrine is the unforgiveable sin ("THERE'S A REASON THEY ALL WEAR RED") to the jihadis of the left.

Look for many more on the left getting the vapors over - gasp - Catholics running their church according to its own rules.

Loggerheads

Doug Grow illustrates a couple of the most irritating lefty conceits of late; "I just don't get it!"

He's talking about the pro-marriage - read "anti gay marriage" rally" - at the Capitol today:

A s is often the case, I'm perplexed.

Wednesday at the State Capitol, there will be a "Stand Together for Marriage Rally." Sponsors say they expect thousands to gather in support of the notion that marriage should be limited, by constitutional amendment, to a woman and a man.

My knee-jerk assumption: In a few years, we'll look back at events like this and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Now, I'm not entirely sold on the amendment, as-is. I'm not opposed to civil unions for gays. Truth is, I favor getting government at all levels out of the "Marriage" business, but that's a utopian ideal that'll never happen as long as there's money to be dragged out of the institution of marriage (and dissolution).

Let's count the conceits:

That assumption is based on the fact that any of us older than 30 have accepted all sorts of changes that once were hyped as potentially ruinous to the culture.

Conceit Number One: "My pet issue is on par with slavery."

We grew up being taught that women shouldn't be members of the Kiwanis Club, black men couldn't be quarterbacks, gay people shouldn't have civil rights. Then change happened. And we thrived because of it.

That gays would move out of the closet to legally binding relationships seems like natural progression.

"Legally-binding relationships?" Sure.

But I'm guessing for the vast majority of gay marriage opponents, it's not abut "legally-binding relationships"; it's about Marriage.

"Historic inevitability," is the phrase that state Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, uses to describe the phenomena of social change.

Dibble, who is gay, wants to believe that Wednesday's rally is less than it seems.

"I do believe this country has been on a constant journey to enhancing liberty," he said.

Conceit Two: "No real, rational people oppose us". And not only do many very eminently rational people oppose the idea of gay marriage, but over 2/3 of the voters do, consistently, in states as disparate as North Dakota and Oregon.

Slavery has been abolished, Dibble said. Women have won equal rights to men. Gays have won civil rights.

Conceit Three: "Opposing my belief is the same as keeping humans as property, or depriving people of the right to participate in the politica process". And yet this ssue is about definitions, in this case "what is marriage?"

If you believe "It's something that people who love each other do", then I suppose the "one guy, one gal, raise a biological familily" school of thought is perplexing indeed; and to the guy/gal/kids school, so is the "all you need is two people, gender indeterminate, who love each other" school.

Yet, he fears that this "Stand Together for Marriage" rally represents something more than a short-term social fad. He fears that cynical political and religious leaders are using fear of gays to create a political base that will have staying power.

Number Four: "It's a conspiracy". No. It's a mass movement based on a deeply-held ideal; people who believe that gay marriage cheapens marriage just as surely as slavery cheapens the ideal of liberty.

"We've seen this country stampeded before," he said.

That's Five: "Our opponents are mindless cattle, capable of being stampeded'.

I love this next part:

It doesn't take much looking to discover that this rally represents a huge constituency. Ministers ranging from Daniel Henderson, at the massive and usually apolitical Grace Church in Eden Prairie, to Bob Battle, a black pastor with civil rights roots at St. Paul's Berean Church, are lined up in support of this event.

And what does this tell Doug Grow and Scott Dibble?

Apparently not enough to disturb any of the conceits.

Habemas Papam

It's Ratzinger, reputedly an orthodox Catholic and very much one to follow in John Paul's footsteps. (Or as those paragons of cultural sensitivity and historical literacy at New Patriot refer to him, "Panzer Pope").

In related news, King County (Washington) Democrats report finding a number of uncounted Cardinals in an attic in Puyallup, Washington. They claim the number is enough to sway the election toward Cardinal Ann-Marie Finkelstein-LeClaire, a pro-choice lesbian "Moderate" from Seattle.

The Vatican noted that Ms. Finkelstein-LeClaire is actually a Unitarian, that the Roman church does not ordain women, and that her title "Free-Lance Cardinal" does not actually exist in the Roman Catholic Hierarchy.

UPDATE: Flash, in the comments, says there's a Wikipedia article on the "Panzer Cardinal" appelation. Enh, go figure; I'm a committed protestant, so reputations of the College of Cardinals are of less immediate impact on me than English Soccer scores.

Five minutes of searching Wikipedia found nothing, but a Google found this piece - apparently his detractors don't like him much. However, my apologies to "New Patriot"; as wrong as they are on most things, apparently they are not calling the new Pope a nazi.

On another forum I frequent, though, some of the participants are making more direct Nazi references, though - and a google shows that many people are assuming that Ratzinger has a Nazi past. Ratzinger's Wikipedia bio says his father was an ardent anti-Nazi, young Joseph was enrolled (apparently involuntarily) in but never attended meetings of the Hitler Youth, and he finally deserted from the Luftwaffe Flaktruppen, or anti-aircraft troops, into which he'd been drafted during the war. This, by the way, was an offense that carried a very frequently-enforced death penalty in Germany during the war. Also, I believe it unlikely a Pope that was involved in the anti-Nazi resistance (as Karol Wojtyla was) would have made an actual ex-Nazi a cardinal; again, perhaps a papal historian could set me straight on this.

Again, my apologies.

Air America: Good News, Bad News

The Good News: By any rational measure, Air America is el-flopola [1]

Of course there's bad news.

In the LATimes, Brian C. Anderson (senior editor of City Journal and the author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias)
writes about the liberal network, which "celebrated" its first anniversary a couple of weeks ago.

The liberal Air America Radio, just past its first birthday, has probably enjoyed more free publicity than any enterprise in recent history. But don't believe the hype: Air America's left-wing answer to conservative talk radio is failing, just as previous efforts to find liberal Rush Limbaughs have failed.

Wait a second, you say, didn't I read that Air America has expanded to more than 50 markets? That's true, but let's put things in perspective: Conservative pundit and former Reagan official William J. Bennett's morning talk show, launched at the same time as Air America, reaches nearly 124 markets, including 18 of the top 20...And look at Air America's ratings: They're pitifully weak, even in places where you would think they'd be strong. WLIB, its flagship in New York City, has sunk to 24th in the metro area Arbitron ratings — worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced, notes the Radio Blogger. In the liberal meccas of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Air America is doing lousier still.

As Anderson notes, this is in markets where they have all the advantages.

Almost equally important: Most of those "50 stations" or so that FrankenNet and its fans rave about are:

• Small stations with dinky signals. For example, the station in liberal hothouse Boulder, CO is (according to one source) a 1,000 watt station whose antenna is on the wrong side of the mountain from the city proper, giving it a lousy signal under perfect circumstances.
• Many, if not most, of the affiliates carry only a fraction of Air America's programming. Most stations in the Pacific time zone carry the Marc Maron show via delay, pre-empt the mid-morning show (formerly Lizzzzzz Winstead, now Winstead's former fifth wheel Rachel Maddow) for Ed Schultz, and may or may not carry Randi Rhodes or Janeane Garofalo.
• Many of the "affiliates" are part-time at most; some of them even carry conservative programs along with FrankenNet shows.
• As I pointed out last month, although Clear Channel is carrying FrankenNet in some markets, it's strictly a tactical measure; more or less like being drafted by the Vikings to be in charge of laundering jockstraps and underwear.

The Anderson piece has excellent commentary on why FrankenNet is such a stiff. Read it.

Reading the article, of course, takes you to...

The Bad News. What the left can't win via the free market, they'll try to win via the coercive power of the state:

Unable to prosper in the medium, liberals have taken to denouncing talk radio as a threat to democracy. Liberal political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, is typically venomous. Conservative talk radio represents "vicious, untreated political sewage" and "niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive," Hertzberg sneers.

If some liberals had their way, Congress would regulate political talk radio out of existence. Their logic is that scrapping Air America would be no loss if it also meant getting Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bennett off the air.

To accomplish this, New York Democratic Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey has proposed reviving the Fairness Doctrine to protect "diversity of view," and John Kerry recently sent out some signals that he too thought that might be a good idea.

Under the old Fairness Doctrine, phased out by Ronald Reagan's FCC in the late '80s, any station that broadcast a political opinion had to give equal time to opposing views. A station running, say, Hannity's show, would also have to broadcast a left-wing competitor, even if it had no listeners.

The "Fairness Doctrine" was in force when I got into talk radio - ironically, KSTP-AM put my old "Mitch Berg Show" on the air (from 2-4 AM on weekends, no less!) purely because the rest of the station's lineup ranged from mushy-left (Mike Edwards, Owen Spann, Larry King, Michael Jackson, Don Vogel) to hard left (Geoff Charles); having a conservative somewhere on the air was a good idea.

Things, obviously, have changed.

Pre-Reagan, talk radio in today's sense simply didn't exist. What station could risk it? But people listen to conservative talk because they want to, not because the post-Fairness Doctrine regulatory regime forces them to. To claim that "diversity of view" is lacking in the era of blogs and cable news, moreover, is downright silly. Complaints about fairness are really about driving out conservative viewpoints.

Sure, talk radio is partisan, sometimes overheated. But it's also a source of argument and information. Together with Fox News and the blogosphere, it has given the right a chance to break through the liberal monoculture and be heard. For that, anyone who supports spirited public debate should be grateful.

Of course, there are big chunks of the American media who do not support spirited public debate that is not under their control.

This is going to be an interesting couple of years.

[1] Hmmm. That could be a good backup strategy; rechristen the network "Al-Flopola", and market it to terrorists and their sympathizers. Don't thank me, Air America!

Today in History

The media will be hammering on the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing today. That, of course, is justifiable; the attack was once synonymous with terror in the US, in what now seems like a simpler, less threatening era when you could still collar a Timothy McVeigh and call the case solved.

It's also the 12th anniversary of the end of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, which may have had a symbolic connection to the Oklahoma City bombing.

But both of these dates obscure the most important anniversary today; it's the 62nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

The story, like most stories of the Eastern Front in World War II, remains mostly unknown in the US. Across Poland, Jews were herded into "ghettos", basically parts of cities and towns that were converted to concentration camps while the big extermination camps were under construction.

As the Germans started shipping the inmates of the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, a number of the Jews found, stole or built weapons - a few rifles, pistols and grenades, molotov cocktails and the like - and on this date in 1943, attacked the German garrison. Although the Jews were mostly untrained and badly equipped, it took weeks for the Germans to extinguish the revolt.

Very few Jews escaped the Ghetto - and only one leader (and perhaps only one participant), Marek Edelman, lives today.

It's an episode that, in this day and age, we must remember.

Open Letter to the Governor Pawlenty and the Powers That Be

Don't hold rallies at 8AM. Never.

Make no mistake about it - we conservatives, the people who put you in office, will turn out in droves for our causes. You remember, as do I, the big taxpayer rallies during the Carlson and Ventura administrations, which routinely drew 3-5,000 people...

...on a Saturday afternoon. Not on a Friday morning.

Oh, sure, we'll turn out on weekdays if our lives and civil liberties depend on it. Maybe you remember some of the various gun control hearings over the years, when despite the Metrocrats' best efforts (embargoing committee hearing times until the last minute, and changing times and locations as late as possible to make it harder for outstate citizens to participate), we'd turn out 150, 200, even 600 people for crucial hearings, almost always outnumbering the gun grabbers by a minimum of 10-1, despite their home turf advantage.

But for a routine rah-rah rally? Dude, you have to meet us halfway. Unlike so many of our opposition - the Volvo-driving, free-range alpaca-wearing, patchouli-wearing, "Happy To Bend Over To Protect The Budget Pay For A Bloated Bureaucracy Better Minnesota crowd, we work for a living. Hard. We are not lobbyists by training, nature or inclination. Even those of us who live in Saint Paul go to the Capitol only when it's time to chaperone the kids' class fieldtrip.

So why on earth not put it on a Saturday afternoon?

You got, by most counts, 200 people to the rally. Which is not bad for a Friday morning, but it certainly did cause the bad guys to titter with glee; weekday rallies are the province of the liberal wastrel, the perpetual student, the bribed school kid, the union worker with the insta-holiday, the Highland Park matron with spare time and white upper middle class guilt in equal proportion. And they had a field day, tittering about the "low turnout". Now, in their smug self-righteousness they may very well equate "can't come out to rally on a workday" with "no support for tax cuts"; their loss. But if you put the rally on a Friday morning to snag media coverage - did it work?

Criminy, Governor Pawlenty - at least play to our strengths.

How To Save Public Schools

When I hear blowhards like Nick Coleman ranting about how Republicans want to "abolish the public school system", I get a chuckle. I grew up in the public schools - Dad was a high school teacher, and a great one. As far as conservatives go, I was long in the "we can fix the public schools" camp.

Of course, a huge percentage of the biggest proponents of mandatory public school for all - Coleman, Jay Benanav, Billary Clinton, and on, and on - are either private school products or have their children in private schools.

Anyway, since I've had kids of my own, I've gotten more depressed every year with the way schools in general - but especially the public schools - do their job.

There's an obvious, and I suspect workable, solution out there. It's inexpensive, and, best of all, tens of thousands of years of human experience shows that it works.

Let's abolish elementary school.

The more I watch schools, and the more I read about the history of the public schools and the assumptions on they are built, the more convinced I am that elementary school in particular does more harm than good. I'm talking specifically about the "Sit your little butt in the chair for six hours a day and learn what we grownups tell you to learn" model of education.

Let's be blunt; Elementary School is a bad idea for several reasons.

• It's unnatural
• It turns everything about human psychology on its head.
• It's unamerican.

Let's start at the top.

----------

Let me throw out a couple of parallel ideas here:

1. Language is one of the highest-order functions of the human brain. It involves a level of logic that the most powerful computers are only able to ape in the most comical fashion. Next to learning language, things like the scientific method, critical thinking and logic are child's play, so to speak. And yet nearly every child in the world is functionally fluent in at least one language by age five, with no more help than mere untrained, uncredentialled parents, family members and friends to help. Barring profound mental and physical problems, it's nearly impossible to keep a kid from learning languages, to say nothing of every other thing that they can get their little fingers on. Reading? Pffft. Nothing to it, in comparison; it's just assigning symbols to the sounds that the child has already learned to associate with the ideas that their little brains have been busy compiling since shortly after birth. You have to wonder - if kids do that well with something as wondrously, gloriously, impenetrably complex as language with mere parents, siblings, extended family and playmates to help them, imagine how well they would do if they had experts with PhDs in cognitive development to help them...!
2. ...like they do with reading, for example. How is it that the same kids who learn one of the most complex cognitive processes known to mankind with almost no difficulty then toddle off to school and spent the next six, even twelve, years struggling and often failing the relatively simple tasks of reading, writing, adding, subtracting and simple arithmetic?

Imagine if your children were taught (by force of law, mind you!) to speak by professionals, rather than the way they've learned to speak for all of human time; imagine, further, that they were taught speech the same way they're taught reading, math and history, by being herded into a room, plunked at a table, told to LEARN SPEECH NOW and don't you dare go to the bathroom without raising your hand and getting a travel slip first. What'd happen? We'd have a boom market in speech pathology professionals, national concern about "why Johnny can't speak", academic programs dedicated to special speech problems, and demands for more money to solve our nation's speech education crisis.

Absurd, right? And yet that's exactly where we are now. Kids below age 12 would be better off out of school than in it. Note that this has nothing to do with "problem schools"; even if you leave drugs, crime, and all the other highly-publicized dangers of our time out of the picture (and if you live in the inner city, you know that you can't), and assume that all teachers are literate, caring, inspired practicioners of a noble craft, and that all administrators are boundlessly capable and unfettered by the pinheaded impedimenta of a system that, like all systems, is more concerned with self-perpetuation than mission.

Question: Where is the scientifically-valid evidence that a child who sits through six years in a classroom is any better "educated" than a child who spends six years just being a kid, learning what he or she needs, learning responsibility and reading and manners and math the way kids always have - by doing?

Start looking. I'll help you out. There really is none.

I have a few friends and acquaintances who are involved in various alternative school systems; Sudbury, Waldorf, Montessori - and more that homeschool their kids. The literature on the Sudbury system - which, essentially, lets kids learn whatever their curiosity drives them to learn, coupled with a strong dose of individual responsibility for maintaining their obligations to others - is fascinating. Nobody tells the children at a Sudbury school "now is the time we learn to read" - and yet they all do. Nobody says "You will all learn math" - but when they decide they want to learn it, they frequently learn the math that takes kids six years in a classroom, in a matter of weeks.

My homeschooling friends tell the same story; if they leave the door open for their kids' own fascination to drive them to learn...whatever, it will not only get learned, but learned at a pace that dazzles the parents, most of whom came up through the traditional public system.

----------

So what's wrong with school?

What could be wrong with an institution that:

• Strictly breaks up the day into learning time and play time, conditioning a child to know, forevermore, that learning is drudgery. Unlike all the learning they'd done so far in life, this sucks!
• Imposing an external schedule on learning. Rather than following their own rhythms and attention spans - which happen to be the ones they actually learn by - we force kids to cut short the stuff that actually benefits them, and then jam their little butts into seats, pretty much arbitrarily, to shift gears and do something completely different. It runs Setting student's mental agendas for them, telling them the subjects they "should" care about, regardless of what interests them, and when, and where.
• Setting arbitrary standards that mean nothign to students (and, judged empirically, mean even less to grownups
• Plop a kid into a system where they're at the bottom of a complex, arbitrary hierarchy - teacher's aide, teacher, principal, union, superintendant, school board - with them, pretty talk aside, at the bottom. If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to ask permission. You stand in long lines for food, water, the rest room, recess, field trips, to see the nurse, the principal, to get out of the f*****g building after the whole miserable day is over! If you don't feel like keeping your twitchy seven-year-old butt in that hard friggin' chair, you get labelled "ADHD" or "special ed". You move when the bell tells you to move; you sit when the bell tells you to sit; you repeat the process for twelve years, like an assembly line - only you're the product, with the unionized factory workers bolting on little bits of knowledge at pre-programmed points on the line, regardless of whether that's where your brain is at the moment. And you'd damn well better show up, or have an excuse that's acceptable to that arbitrary and unreasoning authority, or you will be shunted into the "bad kid" track, and even into the fascistic, niggling cousin of the criminal justice system, which will make damn sure you keep your ass in that chair, at the risk of criminalizing yourself and your parents. If such a system were applied to adults, they'd call it prison. If it were a nation, it'd be North Korea. If it were an employer, every TV station in town would be bum-rushing the place with hidden cameras. And yet that's where we send our kids.
• You are a part of a group; you travel with the group, stand on line with the group whenever you leave your chair, are punished and rewarded as a part of the group, until such time as you learn to play the paper chase game well enough for the system to reward you - not so much for your learning, as for learning to play the system to your benefit. Those kids will go far. For the rest? Labels, concerned shrugs, and eventually a resigned sigh; they fell through the cracks, even though they had so much potential.
• Your education is separated from your "real life". Even some of your crustier elders, in unguarded moments, will say it in as many words; "Wait'll you get out in the real world". School is totally unreal; the experiences and knowledge are all diluted through external filters; textbooks, teachers, state-approved curricula. The economics are diluted; it's "Free", so the children get no sense of the opportunity cost that goes into their education, nor of their responsibility toward those paying the cost (qualifying them to be DFL legislators, anyway).
• Worse, the kids' lives - and the lives of their families - are geared toward the rhythm the institution demands; up at 6:30, to school by 8, keep your hyperactive little ass in the chair until 3 with a couple of dingy, pre-approved breaks (if you behave, and if your school hasn't been swept up in the "no recess" bandwagon), get dinner eaten by 6, do two hours of homework, be in bed by 9AM to repeat the process the next day, ad infinitum, for 12 years. There's a meteor shower or an Aurora Borealis late at night? Don't wake the kids, for crying out loud, they'll be tired for their spelling test!
• Which might be worthwhile, if there were any validity to the idea that it does kids any more good than the alternative - no school at all.

The question shouldn't be "what's wrong with the system". It ought to be "what's right?"

----------

Let's go back to the "North Korea" bit.

When De Tocqueville came to the US in the early part of the 19th century, he found a population that was staggeringly literate by world standards. What was the "system?" There was none. People learned to read, write, do math, and function in society by any means necessary - at church, at community schools, from neighbors or siblings, or any way they could. They did it because, to participate in our democracy, they had to. And they did.

It's useful to note that the current model for public schools - the government monopoly with the professional teacher caste and a huge, self-feeding academy - is a product of the past 100 years or so, when people realized that in a nation awash in immigrants, we'd damned well better make sure that all our children are learning the same things. Exactly the same things, lest those filthy immigrants corrupt our society...

And so we have a system of elementary education better suited to the Department of Corrections, or the Prussian military (indeed, Horace Mann modeled many of his ideas upon the Prussian state education system, which introduced the magic element, compulsion, to the mix).

And so, in a system that purports to value individual responsibility, we send our children to "learn" in a system that systematically strips responsibility away (as long as you stay in line, you're fine!). In a system that purports to value critical thinking, we entrust our children to a system that regards the very discipline as forbidden fruit. In a nation that claims to value the integrity, choice and value of the individual, we send our kids to schools that destroy all three.

"But what about universal literacy?" It's worth noting that our society is little more functionally literate, in a practical sense, than it was 100 years ago; the ability of adults to read, write and figure has remained nearly static among adults for the past century, unbudged by changing educational theories, vast increases in education funding, and national fretting on the subject.

"But hey", comes the next response, "I came up through the system. It's not that bad". That's called "Stockholm Syndrome". You owe it to your kids to do better. Saying you "survived" six years of elementary school is hardly a recommendation; saying "I survived it, my kid sure as hell will" isn't education, it's ritualized abuse.

----------

So what exactly do we lose if we abolish elementary school? Say, start kids in school at age 12?

We gain, instantly, a generation of kids who haven't learned to equate "learning" with "misery".

We gain, over time, children who grow through their most formative years free of the distortions to their identity and self-respect that are a part of the canonical tradition of elementary school, undivided into "jocks" and "geeks" and "brains"; they could spend six or seven years as humans, rather than as parts on an assembly line.

As part of that, they would be free to develop the skills that children develop more or less naturally; to think, to analyze, to tear things apart, on their own terms, without having an adult tell them "you're wrong, do it my way" at every turn.

It goes without saying that they'd be free of the suffocating idiocy of too much of the educational/industrial complex - the rotating theories and methods and ideals that at best are just more turd-polishing, and at worst (see Carol Gilligan and the gender theorists) actively, almost maliciously harmful. They'd grow up regarding learning as both an opportunity and, most importantly, their own responsibility. Which is, we're told, the American way.

Inevitable response: "What about kids in lousy situations? Or where both parents work?"

So we take the $10K per student that we currently spend in the metro, and spend it on community centers, or daycare, or anything but elementary school. I don't care if the idea saves not a nickel over what we're already spending (although it inevitably will, in direct spending to say nothing of the social costs of our failing system); it'll be better than what we have now, even for the vulnerable kids, the poor kids from the lousy neighborhoods. What could be worse than being a poor kids from a lousy neighborhood? Being all that, and having any possible love of learning beaten out of you by age eight.

It's not just about the survival of our educational system, or even our kids. It's about the survival of our nation.

Ditch it.

Failure To Communicate

I listened, as is my occasional masochistic wont, to about a minute of the Nick Coleman "program" today on the local Air American affiliate.

Actually, it was 45 seconds in one installment, and 15 in another.

They were talking about the Taxpayers' Rally last Friday at the Capitol, with a rep from (I'm guessing here) "Billionaires for Pawlenty". More on them in a bit.

Two things jumped out at me.

First: The woman noted that Jason Lewis - former Twin Cities talk show host who was brought back to MC the event, an homage to his role in rallying the taxpayers during his annual rallies during the Carlson and Ventura administrations - noted one of the counterprotesters with a sign saying something like "Don't Take Money Away From Our Children" or some such.

Lewis, said the woman, said "But you want to take money away from my children...". Let's not ask, for the moment, whether the woman had the context correct - always a dicey assumption with these people. Her response? I'm paraphrasing closely (because, again, I don't run a recorder during Coleman's show): "In the Minnesota I grew up in, it was about our children...".

Oh, no, hon. It's not.

My children are not a communitarian project. Yes, indeed, I will watch out for your kids, and do my best to make this a safer community for them.

But when it comes to actually raising them, giving them an ethical background and sending them out into the world? Oh, hell no. My kids are not a community gig.

Her second line - during the second fifteen seconds I caught before one of "Kuhbe's" intrusive, not-really on-point sound drops sent me scurrying in cringing semi-professional horror for the presets - was funnier; "...we parody Republicans, because they're so easy to parody...".

Now, consider the scene. These dimbulbs, "Billionaires for [name GOP politician] dress up like characters from a game of Milton Bradley's Monopoly, and mince about like big bad Daddy Warbuckses from a mid-thirties Laurel and Hardy flick. It's about as on-point as dressing in wool khakis and Astrakhans and marching about DFL events as "Stalinists for Klobuchar". Apparently Republicans aren't so easy to parody that these people are able to actually do it well...

And I'd love to meet one of these people and ask "why do you suppose that the rural West and the South - with the lowest per-capita incomes in the country - voted most lopsidedly for the President in the last election, while John Kerry's highest-profile supporters were millionaires and billionaires?"

Not that I expect any answers...

Tragedy Redeemed?

Flash at Centrisity notes the real tragedy of April 15:

While the Right rallies, and shares their disdain for contributing to the betterment of society, let's not got lost on the true tragedy that should be remembered [last Friday]. At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the British ocean liner Titanic sinks into the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada. The massive ship, which carried 2,200 passengers and crew, had struck an iceberg two and half hours before.Put that in your perspective pipe and smoke it!

Good point. Because of a tragedy 93 years ago, we should be happy to shovel more of our income into the insatiable maw of the nannystate.

Heck, tomorrow is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Oklahoma City bombing. We should just sign our next paycheck over entirely.

Of course, the Washington Democrats read the above, and salvage triumph from tragedy; they just found 1,500 more King County voters.

Koering

Senator Paul Koering told the public that he was gay, last week.

And then, he went and supported putting the "Marriage Amendment" - the proposed constitutional amendment that would define marriage as involving one male, one female, no substitutions please - on the ballot.

Strom has the best bit I've seen on Koering so far:

The funny thing is, Koering supports putting the marriage amendment to the voters. I am sure this will drive opponents of the marriage amendment nuts--after all, isn't he gay, so on their side?

Obviously not. In fact, I think Koering's move is gutsy and impressive, especially given the fact that his consistency will gain him no friends with the gay community. Koering is a conservative, and his sexual preference is his private matter; frankly, I don't know how Koering would vote on the amendment, but his support of letting the voters decide is no different from supporters of Initiative and Referendum pushing the right of people they disagree with the opportunity to go to the voters with initiatives they don't like.

Kudos, Sen. Koering. I could care less about your affectional orientation (other than that I wish you well in your personal life) and I respect the principle that seems to drive you on this issue.

Brilliant Parody

I've always wanted to do a parody leftyblog.

In my mind, the character would have to be a caricature of leftyblog excess; preeningly pseudo-intellectual, haughty without justification, visibly tingly over the trappings of the urban slacker lifestyle - and above all, clogged with hatred for anything or anybody to the right of Paul Wellstone.

My over-the-top parody blogger would babble sophomoric twaddle like...:

As a rule, the right wing anywhere is thin-skinned,cowish, and not overly infatuated with genuine thought, but here our self-proclaimed lonely-voices-in-the-wilderness somehow manage to set new standards in prejudice, intellectual dishonesty, and shoddy argument. Their naivete is oceanic: they believe in so many contemporary lies that they eventually come to have faith even in the fatuous fantasy fiction that they themselves churn out each and every night. It’s an ugly spectacle, this cavalcade of unwarranted angst, these soft and comfortable men so proudly indulging their silly warrior fantasies

...as if knowing the words equalled proving the thesis, not feeling the need to give examples of any of the above. Perhaps an unsuccessful literaturge, in my parody, still awash in self-absorbed post-adolescent dramatics, but devoid of the restraint that comes from the realization that the world never really did revolve around you and your next big idea...

Wouldn't you know it; Learned Foot from Kool Aid Report already did it!

Who am I kidding? Foot wrote the parody better than I could have. He deftly incorporated every possible cliche (the character is a literary critic and works in mental health. He dresses like an extra in a Mentos ad. He prates and gabbles about his skill as a writer, which he then manifests by reciting five-dollar catchwords to cover nickel ideas - hahahaha), he makes claims that appear absurd on their face but, if you know the local conservative blog scene, you realize are intensely clever inside jokes (David Strom is the "ringleader" of the local blog scene - you'd have to show up at Keegan's on a Thursday to get this fairly pithy little jibe), and, above all, purple-faced japes at local conservative bloggers delivered with such hamfisted, leaden, style-free aping of breathless, witless self-adoration that finally, you have to realize it's unreal. But it takes a genius-level wag like Foot to carry the gag off so seamlessly.

And the little exhange between the Kool-Aiders and the parodic creation - delicious. I imagine a lot of people fell for it!

Bravo, Foot Your April Fools edtion was great, but "Kevin" the parody leftyblogger is pure genius.

Cooler Than Thou

Some people wonder how I ever became a conservative at all.

Let's start with three bits of background.

First: I've been doing music much, much longer than I've been doing politics. I started on the cello when I was 10. Since then, I've picked up the guitar, bass, drums, mandolin, harmonica, pennywhistle/recorder (pretty badly, mostly Pogues songs), keyboards (even worse), curan, and bagpipes. I've done just about every kind of music that one could expect a typical middle-American to do for fun, profit, curiosity or on a dare; classical, jazz, sacred, patriotic, folk (American, British, Continental, some Turkish), bluegrass, show tunes at a summer stock theater and in the Twin Cities theatre scene, blues, country, and of course rock and roll in all of its infinite variations - garage rock, art rock, punk, speed metal, whatever. I've played concert halls, coffee shops, bars, open stage nights, and on the streets of Minneapolis, Basel and Köln. I'm a musician, and not just any musician, but one that moved to the Twin Cities with the express intention of being the next Paul Westerberg; I wrote a few nifty songs over the years, some of which may even come to this website before too long. And yet then as now I was a Republican.

Second: I also majored in English in college (with minors in History and German, and enough credits for minors in Music and Theatre, but they were mostly performance credits). I learned to not just read literature for fun, but to analyze it for a grade, and to love doing it. And yet I'm a conservative.

Third: I'm a Bruce Springsteen fan. It's no secret, if you've read this blog over the years. But it's gotten a lot lonelier in the past year or so. While Republican rock and rollers are scarce as hen's teeth (the late Johnny Ramone and the generally uninspiring Ted Nugent are about it), Springsteen was generally a "safe" choice; he generally abjured politics, although his nakedly populist music left few illusions as to where his sympathies lay. Until last year, anyway, when he started actively campaigning for John Kerry. That was the final straw for a lot of conservatives. But I can generally let it slide, since I doubt a musician has ever influenced my politics, one way or another. So I'm still a fan.

Why should you care? That's simple. You need not.

How does it tie in with the flap over the playlist on the President's iPod? And the larger question - what is it about conservatives and art?

I'm not sure. I'll figure it out in the extended section.

It started last week, when the Fraters' J.B. Doubtless penned a fisking of the Springsteen classic "Johnny 99" (covered by a plethora of other artists including Johnny Cash, about whom no wrong may be said these days).

J.B. wrote:

I have Sirius radio and I like it. But one channel (Outlaw Country) will not stop playing perhaps one of the worst songs ever to hit vinyl: Bruce Springsteen's Johnny 99 from his much-hyped and much-heralded-by-lefty-critics album "Nebraska."

Instead of just ranting about what a bunch of garbage this song is and how it so perfectly illustrates the modern liberal, I will resort to a song fisking.

Which he did. Fisk the song, I mean. It didn't have so much to do with "the modern liberal", or for that matter the song. But we'll get to that.

Now, I won't even go into the delicious irony of a guy who calls "Afternoon Delight" a wonderful song when, indeed, the Danoff/Nivert ditty (the same people that wrote John Denver's "Country Roads") showed how close the commies came to winning in the seventies; it, along with "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks, was the perfect anthem for those days of malaise, Brady Bunch, WIN buttons and the Ford Mustang II; pleasant, deeply mediocre, and utterly forgettable. Not that pleasant mediocrity doesn't have its place; J.B. cites "Chevy Van" by Sammy John, and I see him and raise him Henry Gross' "Shannon"...

But J.B.'s review was, like a lot of conservatives' reviews of various kinds of art, pretty much a point by point scold, telling the song's character (a guy who loses his job, gets hammered, kills a store clerk, gets sentenced to death, wishes he were dead anyway) how he should have acted.

I poked a bit of gentle fun at J.B. - but the whole thing brings up a question I run into a lot when I talk about art with conservatives; what are music, literature, visual art, drama, dance and all the other kinds of art supposed to be?

Because if it's supposed to be a recitation of people doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons and getting the right results, most of Western art - literature, visual art, film, opera, drama, and of course music from the classical to today - would be very different.

Let's review some of the classics of Western art through the lens of the "Do The Right Thing" school of criticism:

• Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" - "Criminy. Enough with the hubris! Brutus and Antony - hire a friggin' lawyer and settle your grievances like normal people! You're acting like MoveOn.org here!"
  
• On The Waterfront - "Jeez, Brando - have you ever heard of the F B Freaking I?"
  
• Anna Karenina - "You slut! You freakin' skeeze! You see how much trouble you'd have saved yourself if you'd have just followed your bleepity-blank wedding vows? And we're supposed to feel sorry for you?"
  
• Iron Chef - "What's with the frou-frou presentation? Just plop the stuff on a plate while it's still hot!"
  
• Huckleberry Finn - "Look, just get Jim the Slave to the north! Stay on the river, do what you have to do, and move on!"
  
• Don Giovanni - "Well, duh! Giovanni and Leporello, if they were rational people, would repent for murdering the Commandant before he drags them to hell. Duh!"
  
• Picasso's Guernica - "OK, the Spanish Civil War is over, and if the commies had won Picasso would have never painted it. Why do we care about this painting anymore?"
  
• Moby Dick - "So Ahab would risk everyone's life because he's pissed at a whale? Where are his priorities?..."
  
• Casablanca - "Jeez, Rick. You know that giving Lazlo the letters of transit is the right thing to do. Cut the dramatics and just do it!
  
• Crime And Punishment - "Why spend a whole novel on a snooty pretentious little artiste who thought he was so superior to the people arround him that he could justify hacking his landlady to death? String him up and be done with it! Fifty pages at the most!"
  
• War And Peace - "WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING WITH DOLOKHOV, you stupid IDIOT?"
  
• Rocky - "Jeez, he's working as a knee-buster for a loan shark! If he'd just gotten his crap together and taken a computer programming course and gotten a job and some stock options, he'd be rich right now, and his nose would still be straight!"

Art, in whatever form, among many other things is about places and times and situations that you aren't in, getting inside minds other than your own. Sometimes the place is somewhere you've never been; sometimes its a different view of where you are now. Sometimes the mind is that of someone intrigueingly, frustratingly, even horrifyingly different than your own. Somtimes the situation is mundane, or glorious, or wrenchingly horrific.

Sometimes the place is the gym, and you just want something to listen to while you shoot for your target heart rate.

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The controversy - which has ripped the Northern Alliance asunder, let me tell you - took another turn early this week, when the Fraters' Atomizer quoted a Rolling Stone writer's review of...the contents of the President's iPod:

This is basically boomer rock 'n' roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It's safe, it's reliable, it's loving. What I mean to say is, it's feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it's not.

Oy. Pretty snooty, huh?

J.B., on a roll, has the President's back:

There seems to be an unstated assumption amongst this crowd that people are looking to music for wisdom, insight, guidance or political suggestion. Anything that doesn't provide that is not Important. Most normal people (who have never uttered the phrase "_________ saved me life" whatever that means) want music to sound pleasant with an occasional turn of phrase that is interesting, or to set a particular mood.

J.B. comes perilously close to the truth here, without quite hitting it.

Art, if it's any good, is about manipulation. It can be a conscious thing - George Orwell's veiled anti-Stalinism - or totally unconscious, like filling an iPod with upbeat aerobic music to take one's mind off your exertion at the gym. It can even be carefully calculated, like J.B. putting the Al Greene or Starland Vocal Band on the turntable to impress the Doubtlessette.

Art is also about conflict; about challenging yourself and others to see things around you differently. Casablanca was a ripping yarn - but it also challenged isolationism. Lord Of The Rings - the book and the movie - were pseudo-mythic fables; they also allegories about good and evil, World War I, and religious faith. Art doesn't have to make you turn on your brain - but it's a whole lot more interesting if it does.

Do "most people" want music to serve as pleasant background noise? Maybe, in the same sense that there are people who want their art to be velvet Elvi and their literature to be from Harlequin and their sculpture to be hummels and their food to be on a plate with a side of mashed potatoes. Art can be ambient audio candy, bathroom and beach reading, a nice accent to set off the color of your new couch; it can make your beloved hornier, your nights out funnier, or your mood funkier. All of it makes the here and now just a tad more pleasant. There is nothing wrong with that.

But as J.B. says; yes. Sometimes, some of us are looking to art for something else. Forget about the ones that say ""_________ saved me life" - that's a bit of post-adolescent dramatics that most people outgrow and eventually laugh as they look back on it.

Every once in a while a piece of art comes along and challenges you to...do something. Think? Explore the world? Explore your preconceptions? Ponder whether you've really considered all the possibilities? Change your political orientation?

Yes, J.B., art changed my political orientation. In my case, it was a combination of Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment and The Possessed, Solzhenitzyn's books including the fictional Animal Farm, along with a lot of non-fiction (and a lot of P.J. O'Rourke's articles) kicked off the thinking that started my slide to the right. It does cut both ways (and yes, it does make me a better conservative than someone who's always been one. Sorry).

And yeah, there are times when I'm buying exactly what J.B.'s selling; I want ear candy to make me feel...something. I play Stevie Ray to get raunchy, the Sex Pistols to psych myself up for housework, Tchaikowskii or Mahler on rainy days...

...and Springsteen?

Well, here we go.

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Springsteen wandered through a bunch of different styles early in his career; Greetings from Asbury Park's faux-Dylan, E Street Shuffle's anarchic pseudo-Manhattan R&B. On Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River, the people who didn't "get it" figured the music was all about cars, girls and driving all night. For the rest, it was about all that, plus what happens to all that when you...gasp...gotta grow up. For those of us who were there and doing that, it was pretty affecting stuff.

Then came Nebraska, which smacked of Steinbeck and O'Connor and lots of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. And for the first time, Springsteen took you on the road with people who weren't like you, who you couldn't, God willing, identify with; the down-on-his-luck schmuck in Atlantic City, the blase murderers in Nebraska, the assortment of people struggling with faith in "Reason To Believe", the cop and his disturbed wastrel brother in Highway Patrolman, and the deeply unsympathetic thug in Johnny 99.

J.B. slams Johnny 99 for focusing on the character of the killer, and tossing his victim aside like an empty beer can:

And all of the deep thinkers are supposed to think deeply about capital punishment and criminals and society and there but for the grace of God go I and Alan Alda and caring for the less fortunate--but not the innocent person that was killed by this worthless animal.

The point is, you can think whatever you want. The "Macalester crowd" can ponder what made this ostensibly normal guy do something so monstrous. Or you can react like J.B., which is as good as any. Or you can listen - and by listen, I mean not just to the song and the singer, but to the character in the story - and think "OK, the character is a deeply narcissistic person; he's destroyed his life, the clerk's (who he - not Springsteen, mind you - doesn't bother to name), his mother's, and yet all he can think about is his problems. I hope they do fry his solopsistic ass!", or whatever else you can find in there.

And you can take away from it any thing you want. Which is why "Johnny 99" is one of the greatest songs from one of the five best American records of the last 25 years, not in spite of its moral ambiguity, but because it leaves those big, ugly questions out there, for you to wrestle with.

And if you want, you can wrestle with them. Or you can put some Toto on your iPod and go biking. It's a free country.

Ye Shall Know Thy Market by Its Villains

Pious Agnostic has an observation about the new Michael Crichton book, State Of Fear:

It's a pretty good adventure story, and the ending had enough punch to give me a little frission of horror, though there are some things in this book that had me laughing out loud (and not in the good way).

But while entertainment is certainly a good reason to read this book, Crighton has another purpose for writing it: the dispellation of myths and foolishness about Global Warming.

(*spoiler alert*)

The bad guys in this book are a radical environmental group...

Whoah.

I mean, Tom Clancy's done that (Rainbow Six), but everyone expects it of Clancy...

A Tale of Dual, Interconnected yet Disparate Modalities

It's easy to do fake art criticism; stream together enough pretentious cliches, and you can get published.

It's not much harder in the soft-sciences; I'm sure most any education or psychology department could be suckered by a paper full of double-talk.

But not the hard sciences. Nossirre, they're too serious and rational.

Right?

In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.

If you love the English Language but fear its gatekeepers, read the whole thing.

Function Follows Form

The WaPo checks in with stern criticism of John Bolton, Bush's nominee for UN Ambassador.

It's heavy duty stuff, the kind of stuff that makes you say "thank goodness we have a mainstream media, and don't have to rely on bloggers.

For example:

John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, desperately needs a haircut. It does not have to be a $600 Sally Hershberger cut. Bolton simply needs the basics. Tidy the curling, unruly locks at the nape of his neck, tame the volume at the crown, reel in the wings flapping above his ears, and broker a compromise between his sand-colored mop and his snow-colored mustache.

He needs to do this, not because he should be minding the recommendations of men's fashion magazines or grooming experts but because when he settled in before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week to answer questions about his record, his philosophy and his intentions at the U.N., he looked as though he did not even have enough respect for the proceedings to bother combing his hair -- or, for that matter, straightening his tie, or wearing a shirt that did not put his neck in a chokehold. Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent mess.

And this:

Bolton sat before the committee with his tie askew. Not slightly crooked or just a hint off-center but looking like it had been knotted in the dark. The tie itself was an uninspired dark red with bright yellow stripes. It was looped tightly under the button-down collar of his pale-blue shirt -- a shirt that encircled his neck in a menacing way....His attire was not merely bland but careless. His hair was so poorly cut, it bordered on rude. Bolton might well argue that appearance has nothing to do with capabilities. But it certainly can be a measure of one's respect for the job.

That's hitting him where he lives

Pretty vital stuff, this.

From the "Where Are They Now" Department

Anyone remember the Independence Party?

In case you don't, they were Jesse Ventura's party, for those of you who think his party mattered.

They apparently still exist!

Independence Party vice chairman Jack Uldrich said Thursday he's formed an exploratory committee and is inclined to run in 2006 for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Mark Dayton.

Uldrich said he understands he will be an underdog to any of the big-name politicians seeking the Republican and Democratic nominations. And he is has no illusions that he will raise anywhere near the amount of money those candidates will have.

This is the part I love

"Really, I'm going to run a guerilla-like campaign," he said. The other candidates will "spend so much time and money hurling crap at each other that the public is going to get tired of them."

Leave aside that there has never been a crap-hurler like Jesse Ventura; I love the third-party assumption that voters really, truly abjure the "hurling" of "crap".

If people really, really didn't like the hurling of crap - if they didn't eat it up, indeed - then National Public Radio would dominate the airwaves, and Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh would be working as insurance adjusters. Jai-Alai would be the national sport, and NASCAR would be run on dirt tracks along the Alabama/Kentucky border. Vince McMahon would be a mild-mannered priest in the suburbs of Wichita.

If people disdained the "hurling" of "crap", we'd be talking about Senator Jim Gibson (to this day, the only IP candidate that it was ever worth the effort to read about), and Governor Tim "Who's Tim Penny" Penny.

Americans love crap-hurling. I think that in our passive-aggressive Scandinavian way, Minnesotans like it even more.

But I wish Mr. Uldrich the best of luck; once Ventura's faux populism evaporated (five minutes after his inauguration), the IP's base was exposed for what most of us always thought it was; DFLers who got tired of waiting their turn for endorsement. Uldrich will draw many votes from the DFL candidate for every one he draws from Mark Kennedy the GOP candidate, whoever that might be.

Best of luck, Jack "Skeet" Ulrich!

The Wireless City

A day after Minneapolis announced they are seeking to follow Philadelphia into the municipal wireless internet ("Wi-Fi") business, Saint Paul's city council votes to study the "best way" to do the same.

Says the Strib article on the subject:

St. Paul's effort to expand wireless Internet access beyond individual coffee shops, restaurants and hotels began inching ahead Wednesday when the City Council voted to study the best way to move forward.

I'm guessing one of the "best way" options was not "allow free enterprise to provide the service, and let the people who want and need it to pay for it themselves, rather than charging all citizens for it". The internet is no more a "public good" than a telephone, garbage service or heat for one's house.

Of course, it's a big piece of business that a city can incorporate as a revenue center, a budget line item, and of course a bunch of job buckets to be filled by scads of loyal public employee-union workers.

The council deferred tougher questions about how much it would cost to implement such a comprehensive network and how direct a role the city would play in providing the service.

Deferred for how long? I'm guessing "...until it's too late to make a better decision". Again, just a hunch.

Scratch Another Conspiracy

Giuliana Sgrena's story that the US Army was plotting her demise when it killed her bodyguard and wounded her took at hit:

U.S. military officials told NBC News that a joint American-Italian investigation found the soldiers acted properly in firing on a car bearing a just-freed hostage, journalist Giuliana Sgrena, and an intelligence officer, Nicola Calipari.

The car was about 130 yards from a checkpoint when the soldiers flashed their lights to get it to stop. They fired warning shots when the car was within 90 yards of the checkpoint, but at 65 yards, they used deadly force. Calipari was killed and Sgrena wounded.

Concealed Carry Fixit Bill

There's a bill in the MN Senate, SF2221, which is intended to fix a few of the issues that have caused Concealed Carry reform's problems in court.

MPPA supporters - you need to be reading Joel Rosenberg's LiveJournal daily, if not more. He is not only following the leglislation more closely than anyone I know, he's got the best analysis anywhere.

He says:

...in the Senate -- which is going to be the tough nut to crack -- it's SF2221, written by Pat Pariseau. The only change is on posting; it changes the "reasonable request" from proper posting AND an individual notification to an OR.

We have enough votes to pass it on the floor; the problem is going to be getting it to the floor. You can help.

What to do?

1. Call your State Senator; say that you want SF2221, "the MCPPA FixIt bill", passed this session. You'll find his or her phone number here. Call him or her even if you think you know what his or her position is. Call again, even if you called yesterday.

Say something like, "I'm one of Senator XXX's constituents, and I very much want the Senator's support for SF 2221, the MCPPA FixIt Bill, which needs a floor vote this session."

* If the assistant waffles -- they may or may not; depends -- ask that the Senator or an aide call you back with a commitment to vote both for the bill and on all procedural votes. Add "Even if the Senator doesn't support the bill, I hope he/she will agree that it deserves an open and honest vote."
* If you get a positive answer add, "I hope that the Senator will speak with Senator Johnson on this," whether or not the Senator is a DFLer or Republican.

2. Email me with your results, or post them here. Name of senator, time of call, what was said. Don't be afraid to keep this short; I'll understand.

3. Call Dean Johnson, the DFL Majority leader, at (651) 296-3826. Say something like "While I'm not one of Senator Johnson's constituents, he is the Majority Leader, and I want him to know that it's important that he help bring SF 2221, the MCPPA FixIt Bill, to the floor for a vote this session."

4. Email me with your results there, too.

As always: be polite, but firm. Don't yell or argue, but if there's any waffling, do politely insist that you're entitled to a commitment -- "the Senator needs to be on the record, what with elections coming up next fall." Phone calls are best; faxes are great; emails aren't nearly as good.

I've already called Dean Johnson, Steve Sviggum, and my own Senator, Ellen Anderson - who, unfortunately, is one of the key Metrocrats.

The Metrocrats - Matt Entenza, Jane Ranum, Anderson, and their leader, Wes "Lying Wad of Filth" Skoglund - know they will lose on a floor vote. They will use ever method, fair or foul, to keep that from happening; the MPPA could have passed a floor vote in 2001 and 2002, but for Roger Moe and Wes "Wouldn't Know The Truth If It Walked Into His Office With A Suitcase Full of Donations from Matt Entenza" Skoglund's maneuvering. Joel is right - we have to get their commitments, one way or another, and make sure that commitment (and those committee votes, if need be) are matters of loudly-proclaimed public record during the next round of elections.

More phone calls later this afternoon.

Dayton: Sandbagging

Powerline points out that "Senator" Mark Dayton has stepped in it again.

Our favorite powerlawyers have no idea how comically ill-informed our "senior" "Senator" is.

The Strib starts the narrative:

Nearly three weeks ago, Cpl. Travis Bruce of Rochester was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while standing watch on the roof of a Baghdad police station.

On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., sent a letter to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning the circumstances that led to Bruce's death.

In the letter, Dayton said that the day before his death Bruce told his girlfriend in a telephone call that he had been unable to obtain enough sandbags to fortify his position adequately.

"He gave his life heroically and importantly, but it's immoral for our command not to provide our soldiers with absolutely everything they need to give them maximum protection: body armor, armored vehicles, sandbags. It's immoral if our soldiers are left in any way unequipped and unprotected"

Rocket Man follows with a further quote from the Strib story, and an inference:

Bruce was killed when the rocket-propelled grenade hit a sandbag, ricocheted and exploded into a water tower, showering him with shrapnel.
On Tuesday, the day before he died, he called his girlfriend and said that he was stationed on the rooftop and increasing the height of the sandbag barricade. "He said they didn't have enough sandbags up there," she said softly.

So, the day before he was killed on the roof, Bruce said that he was "increasing the height of the sandbag barricade" because he didn't think it was high enough. No suggestion that he was unable to get his hands on enough sandbags to accomplish this task. No suggestion that there was a shortage of sandbags, only that they didn't have enough on the roof.

Dayton's crushing, demigogic ignorance goes way beyond that.

Sandbags are (all you infantry guys you there stop me if I'm wrong) protection from bullets and shell fragments. A "Rocket Propelled Grenade" (RPG) is built to direct an explosion, essentially a super-hot instant cutting torch of explosives, through up to a foot of steel armor; a solid hit on a sandbag wall will lance through several feet of sand. Sandbags, in and of themselves, are no protection (and either, for that matter, are the armored Humvees, the lack of which were nearly the downfall of the Republic before the election; they, too, are built to turn the bullets and shell fragements that cause the vast majority of casualties in every modern war). An M1 tank, or an M2/M3 personnel carrier, are both relatively safe from the RPG. For the rest of the military, the best bet is to kill the RPG gunner before they can get their bulky tube inside the 200-meter effective range.

For whatever reason, Corporal Bruce's sandbagged guard post atop the Iraqi police station had no top cover, leaving him vulnerable to the shrapnel that killed him after the RPG "...hit a sandbag, ricocheted and exploded into a water tower, showering him with shrapnel", according to the Strib account.

Note to non-Minnesotans; you just try to tell me Boxer is more stupid than Dayton.

Note to Minnesotans: I liked "Senator" Dayton better when he was evacuating his office, frankly.

Never Satisfied

Last weekend saw one of those pointless, senseless tragedies that make you stop and ponder the seeming randomness of life.

Ann Ford Nelson swerved off River Road, above the Mississippi, on Sunday, and smashed into a tree, killing herself and a 13 year old family friend.

Of course, like many random tragedies, it wasn't all that random.

St. Paul banker and civic leader Anne Ford Nelson had about twice the legal level of alcohol in her system when she lost control of her car Sunday, killing herself and a 13-year-old family friend along Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul.

Nelson's blood-alcohol level was .187 percent, according to preliminary autopsy results released Tuesday by the Ramsey County Medical Examiner's office and the St. Paul police. Minnesota's legal limit is currently .10 percent, but will drop to .08 percent on Aug. 1.

.187. Almost double the current limit, 2.25 times the new one.

I guess MADD was right. Right?

Not so fast.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is, naturally, awash in sympathy:

That's a considerable amount of alcohol in her system," said Lynne Goughler, public policy liaison for the Minnesota chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving [...and third-degree black belt in understatement - Ed].

"People need to understand the consequences of drinking and driving and they just don't," she said. "The results can often be a very devastating car crash. I don't think people realize that alcohol is still a major factor in driving deaths in Minnesota. It's not getting better; it's getting worse."

Nothing wrong with that statement. Right?

Wrong.

For starters, two decades of constant awareness-raising and relentless - some would say "superheated" - law enforcement have lowered the death rate from drunk driving considerably.

Now, traffic deaths have risen overall:

But drunk driving deaths are not only down over the past two decades, they're down sharply. Two decades of guilt-until-proven innocent, of demi-constitutional highway checkpoints, of legalized graft through property forfeiture laws, have lowered the death toll to an extent undreamed of when the effort started.

So what would MADD suggest? What might have intervened with Ms. Nelson and her young victim?

Remember; she was at a .187; that's pretty bombed.

Good thing we lowered the BAC limit to .08, huh?

Of course not. The problem is that most accidents, certainly most lethal ones, are caused by people whose BAC is well above .1, to say nothing of .08.

No, MADD's efforts won't bring Ms. Nelson and her young victim back to life. They will do two things:

• Usher a whole new class of revenue sources new criminals into the justice/industrial complex - people arrested after three or four beers, whose odds of having an accident were lower than Britney Spears' shot at celebrating a silver anniversary with Kevin Federline.
• Commensurately, the driving, social-drinking public will be in fear; fear of sudden, arbitrary criminalization over...what? Three beers rather than two?
• MADD's long term goal, a new prohibition on alcohol, will naturally be met.

Our - or MADD's - priorities are all wrong. Casting the dragnet for the most marginally-intoxicated drivers will have little effect on drunk driving fatalities. It will, however, continue to prod legislators and media types to think that MADD is "doing something useful" about drunk driving, rather than lolling about drunk on power.

Open Letter to the Senate Republicans

Does anyone recall the likes of George Mitchell or Tip O'Neill mincing around like they were afraid of a mouse under the couch, worrying about making sure their actions in Congress didn't screw them up someday when they were the minority?

Me either.

Hell no. They governed with all the supple consideration of Genghis Khan. I look at the way you hamsters are behaving, and wonder how we ever got the majority.

Get with it.

Random Inspiration

One of my life's great blessings over the past year has been Dennis Prager's "Happiness Hour". Once a week, Prager takes an hour to talk about the real physical, moral and emotional benefits and implications of making the decision to be happy in one's life. Whatever you think of Prager - I'm a fan, but not everyone is - it's one hour a week that is politically ecumenical and personnaly essential.

How essential?

Well, another essential read lately (thanks, Red) is Daniel Champion's "Popping Culture". I've linked to him before; he's in a long-running battle against cancer.

Did I say battle?

Read the piece, and then peel open the top of your head and let the overwhelming wisdom of the whole thing soak into your brain for a while.

What's Love (And Divorce) Got To Do With It?

Via Joe Carter, Dennis Prager holds forth on a non-sequitur frequently trotted out in support of gay marriage.

I might just tackle my own, while I'm at it.

First things first: I have been among the least dogmatic conservatives I know on the subject of gay marriage. At one point, probably two years ago, Andrew Sullivan had me convinced.

Of course, to me, in the utopian world where government knows its place and people truly understand each others' motives before taking action and that happening redhead down in the Commercial Credit department blows in my ear as I sit in a hot tub, it'd be a simple matter of getting government out of marriage altogether, except as a simple civil contract enforcer. If people wanted a church marriage, they'd get one, government be damned. If a church found it could theologically justify gay marriage, they could (and accept the consequences in their congregations' reactions, good and bad), or not. If an avalanche of gay marriage happened to change the actuarial tables and the amount of health and safety risk that married couples assume, companies would be free to either modify their insurance and pricing according to type of marriage, or abandon the whole "marriage benefit" altogether without risk of government forcing them to subsidize an institution unfairly, in case it's needed (emphasis added because I just know most gay-marriage proponents will read that whole sentence and ignore the last two words no matter what I do).

But the world is not a rational libertarian-conservative utopia, and that redhead in CC is not batting an eye at me, and the marriage question is between what we have and what the pro-change activists want, and we have to deal with the arguments that are actually put forth. The civil union - which I support, basically - seems a rational compromise, assuming rational compromise is what the argument is about.

Prager addresses the "straight peoples' divorces hurt marriage, too!" canard:

One reason this argument is so often made is that it appeals to the religious as well as the secular, to conservatives as well as liberals.

This is too bad, because the argument is a meaningless non sequitur.

First, while divorce ends a given marriage, it does not threaten marriage as an institution. Of course, many marriages fail and end in divorce -- while some other marriages fail and do not end in divorce -- but why does this threaten marriage as an institution?

To understand the foolishness of the argument "divorce threatens marriage," let's apply this principle to other areas of life. Let's begin with parenthood. It is undeniable that vast numbers of people fail -- and have always failed -- as parents.

Yet, no one argues that the many parents who fail to raise good children threaten the institution of parenthood. Why, then, do marriages that fail threaten the institution of marriage?...When we think of parents failing, we think of ways to improve parenting, and we discourage people from becoming parents before they are ready. Why, then, don't we do the same regarding divorce -- think of ways to improve marriages and discourage people from marrying before they are ready? Why must we radically redefine it? That redefinition is what threatens marriage

That people as individuals practice a desirable institution imperfectly isn't a knock on the institution.

Prager continues:

There is a second reason the divorce-rate-threatens-marriage argument is disingenuous: If gays marry, they will divorce at least as often as heterosexuals do. That is why the divorce issue is entirely unrelated to the question of whether we should redefine marriage...the gullible include well-intentioned religious Americans whose loathing of divorce overwhelms their critical thinking.

Leave aside the statistics that show gay relationships have a much shorter half-life than straight ones; I'd suspect that there's a highly-transient minority in the gay population that skews the longevity numbers, so let's ignore them for now. To justify the "straights get divorced!" argument, there'd have to be some sort of evidence that gay marriages would be more stable than those of straights. I've met you halfway, tossing the evidence that they'd likely be less stable on average than the status quo. Does such evidence exist? (Anecdotes of lesbian couples that've been together for 40 years are fine and mildly heart-warming, but still just anecdotal).

Read Prager's piece; it's interesting.

Another common argument; "two people who love each other should be able to marry, regardless of gender". Which would be true, if marriage really is just about attraction, affection, sex, tax and insurance benefits and the intangibles that make one person want to be with another.

And if it were just about those things, one would think - I'm positing this as a question, really - that somewhere on earth in the last 10,000, some society would have concluding same? Because while human societies can and frequently do believe, collectively, some very wacky things, and have tried many of them over the millenia, there is a certain self-regulation of behavior over time. In the last 1000 years, world societies have practiced virgin sacrifice, slavery, industrial genocide, burning at the stake, clear beer, crusade/jihad, ritual cannibalism, giving the local baron the first shot at the bride, the Five Year Plan, the Chapman Stick, boiling the convicted, manifest destiny - and, for the most part, have found it prudent to abandon each (or had their effects so debilitate their society that it couldn't thrive).

And yet, has there been a single society, anywhere, ever, that thought of "marriage" as being just a matter of "love"? Again, I'm asking.

And I'm asking because I have seen no convincing case for "marriage" being anything but a legal, moral and social framework for the family - defined as "people with kids". Exceptions exist, indeed; do exceptions change the definition?

Turning Tide?

This WaPo story on the battle in Mosul - and the attendant fall-off in attacks on US troops - illustrates the changing nature of the war in Iraq:

From inside a vacant building, Sgt. 1st Class Domingo Ruiz watched through a rifle scope as three cars stopped on the other side of the road. A man carrying a machine gun got out and began to transfer weapons into the trunk of one of the cars.

"Take him down," Ruiz told a sniper.

The sniper fired his powerful M-14 rifle and the man's head exploded, several American soldiers recalled. As he fell, more soldiers opened fire, killing at least one other insurgent. After the ambush, the Americans scooped up a piece of skull and took it back to their base as evidence of the successful mission.

The March 12 attack -- swift and brutally violent -- bore the hallmarks of operations that have made Ruiz, 39, a former Brooklyn gang member, renowned among U.S. troops in Mosul and, in many ways, a symbol of the optimism that has pervaded the military since Iraq's Jan. 30 elections.

Read the whole thing - it's a realistic but optimistic assessment of current events in a war that's been getting less and less media coverage as things get less and less grim-looking.

Indirect attacks -- generally involving mortars or rockets -- on U.S. bases fell from more than 200 a month in December to fewer than 10 in March. Although figures vary from region to region, attacks also have declined precipitously in other parts of Iraq, creating a growing belief among U.S. commanders that the insurgency is losing potency.

"We are seeing a more stable environment," said Lt. Col. Michael Gibler, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, which operates in eastern Mosul. "Have we made a turn yet? No, but we're really close to it."

Has anyone asked Michael Moore how he feels about his "Minutemen" losing their mojo?

That Sucking Sound

Conventional wisdom is that Saint Paul mayor Randy Kelly dug himself a deep, deep hole when he broke DFL ranks and endorsed President Bush in in the '04 election. Saint Paul, of course, is Democrat in the same way that Paris Hilton is vacuous.

And yet, bit by bit, things are tidying up for the mayor. First, the Saint Paul Police Federation endorsed the mayor.

Now, the Minneapolis police federation has reached across the river and done the same.

First Ringer has a lot of excellent insights into the St.Paul mayoral race so far:

Has the Coleman camp passed the point of no return? Not yet and it still may never. Coleman is the far superior general election candidate while Ortega represents the same mindset that endorsed an uber-liberal candidate in Jay Benanav in 2001 and lost (albeit very narrowly). Kelly’s Bush Baggage might be enough to sink him against any opponent, but Ortega’s progressive past isn’t a slam dunk at the November ballot box otherwise Benanav and many other DFL endorsed mayoral candidates would have won in elections past. Given the DFL’s horrible history with mayoral endorsements in St. Paul (the last endorsed candidate for mayor won in the late 80’s), Coleman might consider running in a primary in which he’d fair better. That’s most likely a step farther than he’s willing to go, although he’s done it in the past. In fact his endorsement history is probably the reason why he’s struggling against a mediocre opponent.

By the way, if you're not reading First Ring for Minnesota politics analysis, you need to.

Start Digging Through The MN State Register

Our right to defend ourselves against lethal threats to our lives was handed a further, but probably temporary, setback today as the forces of racist, patriarchal authority won a victory in the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

The Minnesota Personal Protection Act, which passed the Minnesota Legislature when appended to a bill relating to firearms laws for the Department of Natural Resources, lost on appeal today to the three-judge panel.

"It is clear that (the Personal Protection Act), which regulates firearms, contains a totally different subject matter from the regulatory provision and from the Department of Natural Resources found in'' the other bill, wrote Judge R.A. Randall.

In the state's 148-year history, only five laws have been overturned for violating the single-subject clause of the Minnesota Constitution. Lumping bills together is known as logrolling and is sometimes used to advance measures that are unpopular by pairing them with those of broader backing.

Randall said he wasn't ruling on the gun law's merits but simply interpretting the constitution.

"If the legislature deems it an impediment that perhaps one bill gets shot down on an average of once every 20 or 30 years, they, not the courts, hold the keys to amending the Minnesota Constitution and repealing the single-subject requirement,'' he wrote.

Unmentioned: the vast majority of Minnesota's laws, including nearly all of its budget bills, are passed via similar omnibus bills, many of which are connected vastly less clearly than the MPPA was with its parent bill.

Unless the high court reverses this ruling, permits will be granted under the old rules. That means authorities can determine whether a person has an occupational or safety need before giving permission to carry a gun in public.

In other words, concealed carry permits will continue to require no training, have little in the way of screening, and violation of their rights and restrictions will continue to carry vague and indeterminite consequences - but you will need to be pals with a sheriff or police chief to get one.

Stay tuned for more. Much more.

She Said, She Said

So what really did happen in that rest room in Scandia after Senator Michele Bachmann's speech?

The accounts vary - if you read the comment section for this post, you'll read several versions of it. The name-calling has started.

So, depending on who you believe, either:

• A group of Bachmann's dissidents asked a series of respectful questions, purely in the interest of dialogue. Then, after the speech, a group of them followed Bachmann into a rest room, purely to ask her a question. There was a misunderstanding, Bachmann ran out of the bathroom hysterically claiming to have been threatened/detained/accosted. It was much ado about nothing.
• A mob of howling partisans disrupted the speech. Then, when Bachmann visited the rest room after the event, a group of her hecklers followed her, tried to prevent her from leaving, etc, etc.

I have no idea. I'm trying to find some reliable sources who were there. I don't consider parties to the altercation (whatever it was) to be reliable, by the way; call me a cynic, but after a few years working in bars, I never saw anyone admit fault for a fight they'd been involved in. I've also noticed that people who are intensely self-righteous about their cause have a hard time finding fault in their own actions - and that crosses political boundaries as well.

Until I find those sources, though...

Someone claiming to have been a party to the event left a comment on my site, regarding the claims that Sen. Bachmann was detained in the rest room against her will:

It also is not uncommon for someone to absent-mindedly lean on whatever is near them while talking to someone. There was nothing further to the "hand on the doorknob" issue than that.

Could be.

But as someone who's dealt with the selfish evasion of children ("I didn't lie when I said I didn't take the money! I just didnt' stop Rick from doing it!) and the self-interested, evasive obtusion of adults ("I was reaching for the phone and your face got in the way. Try and prove anything different!"), that's the sort of response that says "methinks thou dost protest too much". Call me a cynic if you wish, but on the other hand, I know that at least one of their members is capable of boundless self-rationalization to justify her own shabby behavior, which certainly colors my perceptions of the rest of the group.

This is a tempest in a teapot, of course, largely created by a group of local leftybloggers who seem to thrive on such things, and who would seem to be trying to kill the Bachmann campaign with a thousand trivial - I could say "meaningless" - PR cuts.

Also unforgiveable, as far as I can see, is the tittering I'm hearing from Bachmann's opponents about her reaction to being (according to her perception) detained in the rest room by people who she might rightly think are hostile. A couple of points, here:

• She has gotten threats; since the issuers of the threats were the typical cowards that issue such things from the safety of anonymity, Sen. Bachmann would have had no way to judge their intentions, except that...
• You don't follow people into bathrooms with questions! Sweet Jebus, people - this is basic etiquette! It's a place where people are doing something most of western culture regards as highly personal; it's also a place with lots of hard edges and no other exits, and - this is important - it's not a place where people discuss business, even among friends! If someone followed me into the bathroom after a speech I'd given and started firing off questions, even friendly ones, I'd assume the person was at the very least socially retarded. Add in the implied coercion - the hand that just happened, wonder of wonders, to be "absent-mindedly" on the doorknob or or the person "absent-mindedly" leaning across the entryway... Go ahead. Ask a domestic abuse counselor whether such actions are innocent or not.
• Speaking of which, I'll stake my afternoon coffee money that the people involved in following Ms. Bachmann into the rest room supported the "Battered Women's Act" and other domestic violence legislation that classified exactly that sort of action as domestic abuse in the eyes of Minnesota law. I guess the parties involved were above the law or mere social refinement, though. As another commenter noted, if a group of straights had followed a gay person into the rest room for "questions", you'd be damned sure that the people tittering about Bachmann's response wouldn't have found it funny...

We'll see, as they say.

And You Thought You Were Having A Crazy Week

Wog's travails continue:

Whilst on the health topic, I heard from the Fairview University Liver Transplant "Team" that my voluminous records had been received and that the appointment for the initial evaluation will come within a month. I'm still hoping they tell me to go home 'cos I'm wasting their time -- in a good way, meaning all those novenas to St Padre Pio are working and I can keep the liver what I was borned with.

What a May it is shaping up to be! End of commitment, end of house arrest, my 49th birthday, our 24th anniversary and my parents' 50th, and a brand spanking new $690 drivers license, if I can pass the written test. Perhaps I'll choose to have it administered in Swahili to make it challenging. I best not get too cocky. With my luck the multiple choice question about how many drinks it takes to go over .08 won't include the answer, "not as many as you think."

The XR4ti is gone, but it's older brother, the luxurious Scorpio will emerge from storage and get the amount of unnaturally obsessive care and adoration, almost sexual in nature, that might get the neighbors to talking. Well, maybe they'll forget about my terrorizing their little boys by shooting up in their presence.

Give Wog a shout out to whatever deity, karmic invocation or self-tailored spiritual construct you observe.

He's going to need it when we get back to NTN trivia at Old Mex...

Deadline

Today is the deadline for the court of appeals to rule on the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. Hopefully our ten-month return to the days of patriarchal, racist, condescending contempt for the right to self-defense will end today.

Follow Joel Rosenberg's blog for the best coverage of the issue anywhere.

Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin - whose name in the past twenty years surpassed "Catherine McKinnon" as a code word for "dogmatic, unthinking identity feminism", passed away over the weekend:

To opponents she was an archetypal man-hater, killjoy and proponent of censorship, but supporters rallied to her impassioned lectures and books. Gloria Steinem, a fellow feminist, said she was one of a handful of writers each century "who help the human race to evolve".

I gotta confess, I lean toward the killjoy wing.

Unreasoning rage seemed to waft from her like a bitter haze. I never understood why - it almost seemed like there had to be something else to it, deep in the background.

Ms Dworkin's life as a political activist began early. In 1965, when she was 18, she was arrested at the US mission to the United Nations, protesting against the Vietnam war. She was sent to the New York City Women's House of Detention, where she was given a brutal internal examination.

Her testimony about the experience was reported worldwide and helped to bring public pressure to bear to close the prison. An unmarked community garden now grows where it once stood.

Yeah, that'd do it.

#1 Reason To Fly Continental

Their planes don't molt in flight.

Northwest: the David Dinkins of airlines.

So Let Me Get This Straight, Again...

This morning on Nick Coleman's "program", they were tittering about a a series of out-of-context photos of Michelle Bachman supposedly (they imagine) "hiding in the bushes" at a gay rally.

This of course being the same Nick Coleman show that sent their minion to a Center of the American Experiment dinner and a MOB trivia night "undercover?"

I have that straight, right?

Swiftee has the other story; the local moonbat left (I know I said I wouldn't use the term, but it's appropriate here) is losing it:

After having given the mob it's chance to vent, Michele saw that it was time to let the cleaning staff disinfect the meeting hall but stepped into the ladies room on her way out.

Two female mob members, their hatred not yet spent, followed the Senator into a single occupancy bathroom, blocked the door and excersized their right to physical intimidation.

One of the tenets of true extremists of all political orientations is "the end justifies the means".

More later.

How's That Again?

I listened to about 45 seconds of the Nick Coleman show this morning.

I have no idea what they were talking about. "Kuhbey", the "producer", was talking over Coleman on every other sentence; sometimes both of them and the engineer were going simultaneously; then, one or the other of them would fire off some disconnected, non-topical sound drop. At one point, there were literally four different voices going on simultaneously.

Nick! You're a major-market morning-drive radio "talent"! Grow a pair and tame your chipmunk-voiced flunky! He's killing you! You're more than capable of killing yourself!

UPDATE: Which brings up a question.

When I was a talk radio producer (KSTP-AM, 1985-87), there were really four parts to the job:

• Book guests.
• Screen phone calls - which, done properly, is a lot more complicated than just getting names and towns and slapping 'em on hold. More on that in a different post, someday.
• Sometimes, running the board (although if you're lucky there's a separate board operator to do that for you; when I was at KSTP the other producer, Dave Elvin, and I alternated on the board. I was always a terrible board operator, by the way).
• Maybe, if you're lucky, serve as a sidekick on the show. If the host likes what you do.

The Coleman "program" seems to very rarely have guests. They have almost no calls to screen, and the very few that I've heard, incredibly enough, still seem to be very poorly screened. There's a board operator. So the "producer", Kah-Bey, seems to spend most of his time as a sort of sidekick. Sometimes, that can be a good thing; "Rookie" is the highlight of most Soucheray shows, and other producers like Generalissimo Duane and Babba Booey add a lot to their respective shock-jock programs.

But Kuhbbie? He's a chipmunk-voiced kid just out of college with little sense of pacing or timing, command of the issues even more dubious than Coleman's, and seemingly very little else to do.

Not to say I begrudge him the gig; like everyone in radio, a few years of actual experience can work wonders. I'm just saying, someday if a radio grownup takes charge (assuming FrankenNet MN lasts that long), he might want to establish - I dunno, a productive role and a useful style or something.

Light? What Light?

After JB Doubtless took his debut shot at music reviewing - in last weekend's out of context mugging fisking of Bruce Springsteen's classic "Johnny 99" - I was so impressed, I asked him to come and write some reviews for "Shot In The Dark".

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

He started with Debbie Boone's classic You Light Up My Life:

So many nights I sit by my window
Waiting for someone to sing me his song
Holy Christ, you hussy! Take some responsibility for your pathetic excuse for a life! And you can't possibly be worth anything at work if you're sitting up mooning all night, now, can you?
So many dreams I kept deep inside me
Alone in the dark but now
You've come along
MORON! Sitting, putting all your hopes and identity in some guy! Gaaah!

You light up my life
You give me hope
To carry on
Why not try going to a mass once in a while, huh?
You light up my days
and fill my nights with song
Women who date musicians are just asking for it. You know it. I know it. But idiot Debbie doesn't seem to know it. I suppose we're going to have to support her lazy ass when he runs off, right? Figures.

Rollin' at sea, adrift on the water
Could it be finally I'm turning for home?
If you got a decent night's SLEEP, you be able to navigate, toots
Finally, a chance to say hey,
I love You
Never again to be all alone
So let me guess - you're in this hot, singing-all-night relationship, but you're finally getting to the point where you "love" him? You slut! Don't come crying to me when you get knocked up. Don't you dare.

It can't be wrong
When it feels so right
Oh, it sure can be wrong, toots. Very very wrong. Skank.
'Cause You
You light up my life

More JB's Music Reviews in future episodes of Shot In The Dark.

Hatch Job

"Trillin" at MN Lefty Liberal is taking its shots at Mike Hatch:

Ok, let me preface this; I don't like Mike Hatch. Well I do, but I like him as the Attorney General. He is harsh, he is abrasive, and he doesn't like to take chances.

Playing it safe doesn't work any more. Playing it safe has gotten us how many DFL governors in the last 4 elections? It cost us the State House, the US Congress, and the White House.

Most DFLers seem to be keyed in on Hatch as the Gov. candidate. However, most can't give you a reason beyond "œhe is the best we have" or "It's his turn.";

So there is the nomination, sitting out there for him to pick up like dry cleaning. Give the cashier your ticket, show some ID, and here is your nomination Mr. Hatch.

Someone on Hatch's staff has apparently taken an interest in Trillin's identity.

Read the whole thing - it covers several posts. When you have lefties angry at Hatch, the planets are truly crazy.

(Via MN Dems Exposed)

Rant Not

I try. I really do.

I try to be ecumenical, to achieve the fabled "meeting of the minds" that is supposed to accompany real intellectual well-roundedness.

But what if you hold a meeting of the minds, and nobody shows up?

Last week Luke Francl from New Patriot linked to a puerile "rant" by someone named "Athenae" (who seems to be an Atrios wannabee, down to the anonymity and the pretentious pseudo-Greek nom de plume) at a fairly vapid groupblog, "First Draft". Francl set the piece off with this:

The Power Line boys get it from both barrels in this awesome rant..."

Both barrels?"

Hm.

"Both barrels" of the rhetorical shotgun are loaded with intellectual blanks. Yes, it is a fusillade indeed.

On to the "rant".

Says "athenae"

Freedom isn't free, you miserable chickenshits. You cheer the war, you love the war, you love the troops, you support the troops. But to recognize their sacrifices would diminish your pleasure so you send the images away.

Dearest "athenae":

Can you name on soldier, sailor, airman or Marine that's died in Iraq?

Here's one:

The body of Philip “Phil” Brown, a Jamestown resident and Jamestown College student who died Saturday in Iraq, has been returned to the United States, according to his father, Richard Brown.

“We’re sorry that God took him away from us but we don’t question why things happen,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “And we are grateful to have had him on this earth for 21 years and four months.”

Phil Brown's uncles and aunts were high school classmates of mine. His other uncle was my junior high history teacher. I know his parents (albeit not very well, by small town standards). The costs of the war are indelibly real to them, and, lesser by the orders of magnitute with which I'm blessed by separation, to me as well. In my little, Republican home town, you can be pretty sure everyone remembers.

I have a son who just turned 12. He's six years away from being old enough to join the service. And I feel the twinge of fear that any parent must feel as they contemplate their children not only going off into the world, but going off into a world at war. Why the hell couldn't all this have happened when I was a teenager I (and maybe we) think, not because I have any real wish to go to war, but because I want to end the war before my children need to fight it. The way my grandparents ended World War II, so my father and I could study it rather than live it. He makes the occasional noises about wanting the join the service.

Anyway, yes. Yes, "athenae", you anonymous person who decries the "cowardice" of people whose names and characters I do know, I do remember the dead. I read their names, see the pictures, wonder about them, pray for those they left behind. All the time. They are many things to me and my family; people who loved their fellow man enough to lay down their lives for them; founts of limitless potential, cut off in the prime of life; each of them once a little boy or girl, an object of a father or mother's boundless love and hope.

Among the things they are not, however, is rhetorical clubs for the specious, cowardly and manipulative to try to bludgeon the bystander.

When I remember the dead, I also remember these dead:

And this one:

They were Kurds, among the thousands gassed at Halabja. We don't know their names. And God help us if we forget them. it was one of the most horrific acts of genocide in history; the entire thing was, reportedly, an experiment - a live-fire test, with unwitting human subjects whose only "crime" was belonging to an ethnic group that opposed Hussein.

I don't imagine "athenae" remembers Halabja; if he (or she) (or it) does, he probably assumes the US was involved, because, indeed, a fair chunk of the left does believe that the US is the root of most evil.

Or "athenae" will respond "But that's not why we attacked Iraq!!!", which is garbage on many levels. The President had four reasons for war, and human rights abuses were one.

I remember these people as well:

There are no photos of the Ma'dan, the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. 90% of the 500,000 Marsh Arabs were killed, or fled to Iran or elsewhere.

We remember them, all right. And we celebrate the fact that due to the awful sacrifice of families like Spec. Brown's, the mass grave industry in Iraq has pretty well dried up.

More people we remember:

We - and by "we", I mean soldiers like Spec. Brown - put that bunch of mass murderers out of business.

We - and this time by "we" I mean people of conscience and who are not duped by the fantasy-based community's delusions of diplomacy - know that there are many more mass-murderers in the world.

We remember her:

She was 16-year-old Ateqeh Rajabi, lynched by an "Islamic Court" from a hydraulic crane for vague, "Un-Islamic" ""acts incompatible with chastity". There are those who think we're going to have to do for the mullahs in Iran what we did for Hussein. We'll see.

And above all, we remember this:

And before the likes of "athenae" inevitably bleat "But no! Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11! Hah!", I call bullshit. Terror is terror. Like Hitler and Stalin, like Luciano and Lansky, terrorists and tyrants all work together with their left hands and stab each other with the right. There are fewer degrees of ideological, personal and financial separation between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden than there are between Kevin Bacon and I.

Back to "athenae":

You jackholes ["jackholes". Hm. Cicero weeps with envy. Perhaps the word you want is "Jackal?" - Ed] are the ones who are always bitching that the left "blames America first."

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win." - Michael Moore.

" If the U.S. wins a cheap victory, the world is in deep trouble,. Don't let them get away with it." - Noam Chomsky

Shall I go on?

You're the first to blame "the media," to blame "bias" when things don't look the way you saw them on the outside of the box.

No. We're not.

Guys like this are . The people who've been there, who've seen the situation first-hand (as "athenae" has not), and said the major media are not reporting the truth, merely the parts that fit their agenda.

Why do you now blame the photographers who bring you images of the dead and wounded, of protest, conflict?

We don't. We blame the almost-universally liberal edtorial staffs who ignore the massive progress that Iraq has made, who somehow fail to report that over 2/3 of Iraq is peaceful, that Kurdistan is probably safer than the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis. You know - the ones that are flogging a liberal agenda.

Why don't you blame the terrorists?

Er...we do?

Why don't you go wave a little flag in the face all this carnage because certainly it's exactly the item you put your finger next to on the menu. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED. LOOK AT IT. Print out every single one of those photos and paper mama's basement with them, chickenhawks. Here's your war, in all its glory. Max your credit card out, because freedom isn't free.

As the insurgency fades, they must be blowing out overstocked cliches.

I'm tired of their constant yapping about the media, especially these war reporters out in the trenches in Iraq. Do you know how many of these guys have died?

Yes, I do. Do you?

Now - do you know how many of the actual embedded reporters have earned the ire of the right-wing blogosphere?

Fewer than the number of facile, puerile cliches in the paragraph above.

They are out there every day risking their lives to bring us news about the war you started.

Um, technically Al Quaeda started it.

But you only want to listen when the news is good. Tough. Here in the real world, we take the good and the bad at the same time. If you've got real information showing the media got something wrong -- and they do, we all do sometimes -- by all means, blog it. But if you are making insinuations because you don't like the stories that are getting reported, shove it.

"Shove It". "Hey Everybody! Stop complaining! Fall in line behind the all-seeing, all-knowing high priests of knowledge! Be happy they allow you to be as informed as you are!"

Sorry, "athenae". The Media slanted the story until they couldn't slant it anymore. Now, as the insurgency dies off, they're abandoning Iraq. We are trying to hold their manicured feet in the fire. We have that right, so far.

And that's what we do; show where the media is wrong. Constantly. We'll keep doing it, by your leave.

Sanity Prevailing?

The Strib notes that Congress, in the wake of the Red Lake massacre, has broken precedent and failed to try to scapegoat the law-abiding gun owner.

The day after the Red Lake shootings, the latest of three mass killings in Minnesota and Wisconsin in recent months, a group of House Democrats fired off a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., demanding a fresh look at new gun legislation.

But gun control was not on the agenda when Congress returned last week from spring break. Top Republicans are loath to do anything that could restrict gun rights, and Democratic leaders -- still smarting from recent election reverses -- aren't eager to advertise themselves as the antigun party either.

Why?

Some of the responses were, quite frankly, idiocy:

Gun-control advocates aren't ready to concede, arguing that next-generation safety locks and futuristic gun technologies that identify users by their hand grip could have made a difference, had the gun industry embraced them.

"The gun lobby has successfully fought advances in this technology," said Peter Hamm of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "If they hadn't, we'd have the technology by now."

The Brady Campaign also took issue with incoming National Rifle Association (NRA) President Sandra Froman, who said the incident should prompt a discussion of new ways to keep children safe, including arming teachers.

Other respondents are, as they say, reality-based:

"Everything that kid did that day, practically from the moment he walked out of his bedroom, was a felony," said Joe Olson, a Hamline University law professor and president of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance. "I don't think any gun-control laws would have made a difference."

Others, lacking anything else to turn to, resort to the left's old standards:

Cultural differences also have been cited to explain why Red Lake is unlikely to become a rallying cry for a new gun-control debate. Unlike the Columbine shootings near Littleton, Colo., a white, middle-class suburb of Denver, the Red Lake Indian Reservation is a desperately poor community that has found little resonance in the culture of politics and television outside of Minnesota.

"The fact of the matter is it's Native Americans, and they're not a powerful political constituency," said David Schultz, who teaches American politics at Hamline.

Ah. So it's politics...

Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents the Red Lake area in Congress, said attempts to use the Red Lake shootings as fodder in the gun-control agenda probably would backfire on the reservation.

So votes are more important than principle to the gun-grabbing elements of the left?

Who'da thunk it?

Posted by Mitch at 04:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

In The Shadow of the Penitentiary

Last year, I wrote a post about my evolving appreciation of Bruce Springsteen's music (of which more later this week).

A puerile local blogger took a particularly dimwitted, snide whack at it.

Well, to quote Bruce himself, "I'm still there, he's all gone".

I don't know why I take such pleasure in pointing it out. But I do. I'm sure it makes me a bad person.

Point Of Order

Swiftie at Fiskwa is, thankfully, active again, whacking away at Nick Coleman's "radio show".

However, there's something I need to point out; call it a "learning experience". Tom whiffed on one minor point.

Tom wrote:

I also blundered catastrophically by assuming what a "deacon" consists of in Nick's church du jour. Nick points out that I should have picked up Webster's for a definition rather than rely on my dog-eared copy of The Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"Deacon: A third degree of the hierarchy of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, after bishop and priest."

What a mumpsumis I am!

Here I was researching schools of theology, places where guys spend years preparing themselves for ordination in answer to an ecclesiastical call, when in fact Nick was describing an office that is evidently bestowed by drawing straws among the faithful of whatever flavor of religion he happened to be practicing at the time.

Whoah, there.

The Presbyterian Church - of which I am ironically a member, and in which I have indeed been a Deacon - doesn't have monks, nuns, or generally any other full time employees other than the ministers themselves. "Deacons" are volunteers who help the minister take care of the day to day work of the church; they're usually volunteers, confirmed by congregational election (as indeed are almost all congregational business decisions in the Presbyterian Church, which runs almost all of its non-ecclesiastical business by election), who help with things like shut-in visits, assisting members of the congregation, driving the immobile to church, and so on. depending on the congregation, it can be a fairly demanding job.

(Good thing I didn't venture any guesses about how bishops are chosen...oops, there I go digressing again.)

The Presbyterian Church has no bishops. The daily operations of the Presbyterian Church are handled by a participatory democracy; congregations elect "Elders" as a sort of church board, working with the minister on church business (including hiring ministers). Elders are elected to meet as a regional "Presbytery". The Presbyteries elect further members to attend the national "General Assembly".

Which is an arrangement that tends to send Catholics into shock; 'where are the bureaucrats? Where are the buildings?" But it works - generally - for us.

And when I say "Generally", I mean "With massive imperfections, at times". While rank and file Presbyterians are famously conservative, the current General Assembly is dominated by liberal whackjobs. No moreso than the "American Catholic Bishops" or most of the Catholic parishes I see in the Metro area...

...but we digress. That's what a Deacon is. Even if Nick Coleman is one.

You Must not Think Bad Thoughts

Wog brought my attention to this bit from yesterday's Strib.

On Thursday, the Exxon store -- which bears no other name but "This Is My Station" on the marquee -- advertised regular unleaded gas for $2.11 per gallon. But a sign at the station told customers "ALL GAS DISCOUNT 10c PER GALLON," effectively dropping the price four cents below Minnesota's legal minimum price Thursday of $2.05.

"Legal minimum?

In 2001, Minnesota mandated a formula based on wholesale price, fees and taxes to determine each day a floor for gas prices that effectively prevents stations owners from selling gas below cost.

"The intent of the law was to prevent the big players from putting smaller operators out of business," Commerce Department spokesman Bruce Gordon [and my former colleague from KSTP-AM] said.

He added: "Our experience is that there are some David vs. Goliath complaints, but more David vs. David."

So to prevent small, uncompetitive gas stations from going out of business - a favor the state provides to very few other businesses - the state prevents gas stations from having price wars?

"How do you possibly give that much money away?" asked Sid Haugtvedt, whose Phillips 66 station a half-mile away advertised regular unleaded for $2.13 a gallon

They're obviously idiots. Obviously.

Read the whole thing. It gets worse.

I'll be so happy someday when Minnesota joins the free world.

Cry Censorship!

Watch for the left to start crying bloody murder over this story

General Motors Corp. has pulled its advertising from the Los Angeles Times over what it called factual errors and misrepresentations in the newspaper, a spokesman for the automaker said.

GM (Research) did not say how much it spent on advertising in the Times, one of the largest U.S. newspapers, or how long the ban would continue.

"General Motors decided this week to cease advertising in the Los Angeles Times based on strongly voiced objections from our dealers in California about factual errors and misrepresentations in the Times' editorial coverage," said GM spokesman Brian Akre on Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times, owned by newspaper publisher Tribune Co. (Research), said it was examining GM's concerns.

"We will look into any complaints GM has about inaccuracy or misrepresentation and will make any appropriate corrections," spokesman David Garcia said by e-mail.

GM did not specify what spurred it to pull its advertising, but Times auto writer Dan Neil on Wednesday published a critical column about the company's brand strategy and called on GM to "dump" Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner.

"We recognize and support the news media's freedom to report and editorialize as they see fit," Akre said. "Likewise, GM and its retailers are free to spend our advertising dollars where we see fit."

Remember when Twin Cities Federal yanked its ads from the City Pages and the Strib? The local left bayed at the moon, crying "censorship!", irregardless that it was TCF's money to spend, and nowhere does it say that companies should be forced to spend their money at news outlets that actively subvert them.

Look for more of the same.

(Via Ed

Up For Comment

I think I fixed my comments. It appears that I inadvertently saved an incredibly comprehensive blocking rule to my MT-Blacklist.

Sure kept the spam out, I tells ya.

Slippery Slope Watch

Thrown Back, by Fr. Rob Johansen (via Patterico), relates this story:

85 year-old Mae Margourik of LaGrange, Georgia, is currently being deprived of nutrition and hydration at the request of her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy. Mrs. Margourik suffered an aortic dissection 2 weeks ago and was hospitalized. Though her doctors have said that she is not terminally ill, Ms. Gaddy declared that she held medical power of attorney for Mae, and had her transferred to the LaGrange Hospice. Later investigation revealed that Ms. Gaddy did not in fact have such power of attorney. Furthermore, Mae's Living Will provides that nutrition and hydration are to be withheld only if she is comatose or vegetative. Mae is in neither condition. Neither is her condition terminal.

Furthermore, under Georgia law, if there is no power of attorney specifying a health care decisionmaker, such authority is given to the closest living relatives. Mae's brother, A. B. McLeod, and sister, Lonnie Ruth Mullinax, are both still alive and capable of making such decisions. They opposed Mae's transfer to hospice, and are fighting to save her life. But in spite of the lack of a power of attorney, and the fact that there are closer living relatives who should be given precedence by Georgia law, Ms. Gaddy sought an emergency appointment as guardian from the local probate court. The probate judge, Donald Boyd (who, I am told, is not an attorney and does not have a law degree), granted Gaddy's request, thereby giving her the power to starve and dehydrate Margourik to death, though such an action is contrary to the provisions of the living will.

"But wait!", the supporters of Michael Schiavo will say.

"This case is an obvious perversion of the law!"

Exactly. Take careful note of this, all of you who pointed to the Florida court record and proclaimed that the Terry Schiavo case was just.

Even assuming that Florida law is just and morally right, and that all the parties involved wre acting above board and that the judge was perfectly right in his rulings, this case shows what the rest of us were warning about: if you remove the presumption that when in doubt about a person's wishes you choose life, eventually there will be a case like this appears to be.

And then another.

And then many, many more.

And then Medicare, or Allina, or your grandchildren for that matter will have all the precedent it needs to start killing off patients who are too burdensome.

And that's if the law is correct.

You Can't Make It Up Fast Enough

Prologue: The left, or at least certain snide, smug elements of the left, often refer to conservatives - especially people of faith - as anti-scientific.

Like many broad statements with grains of truth, it's largely comical krep. The last thirty years has seen a cavalcade of rejections of empiricism by elements of the left-leaning academy (I've been re-reading The War On Boys, itsef a catalog of the abrogation of science in the area of gender studies, itself a prime area where lefty soft-scientists have butchered empiricism).

Enough prologue.

A few months ago, when Christo's "The Gates" opened in Central Park, a group of bloggers and blog readers got together at Red's site and wrote the most over the top, pretentious piece of academic pseudo-meta-language ever written, by way of reviewing "The Gates". We figured it could get published in one literary magazine or another.

As this article shows, we really couldn't make it up fast enough.

(Via what if?, which has become one of my favorite MOB blogs)

Key bit:

Republicans are too anti-science to become good professors. That's the essence of Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column explaining why there are so few Republican college professors.

Of course, recent events at Harvard indicate that it's the academic left that rejects science. Harvard's President Larry Summers was castigated for suggesting that politically incorrect science be conducted

The funny part:

New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal, himself an "unabashed Old Leftist," was bothered by the anti-scientific viewpoints of many left-wing humanities professors. These professors often used their French literary theories to attack science. To prove that these humanities professors actually knew nothing about real science he wrote an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" agreeing with the leftists' view of science. But as the author himself wrote, his article contained a "mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever." The article was, however, published in 1996 by the academic journal Social Text as a serious piece criticizing the scientific method. Only after it appeared did Professor Sokal reveal that his article was a parody. That such an article could get published would surprise few Republican college professors as we well understand how many leftist humanities professors both hate science and are ignorant of its workings.

The whole thing has some excellent points on leftist bias in academia, not to mention Paul Krugman's ongoing dementia.

You'll Know Them By Their Company

Learned Foot from Kool Aid Report answers an email and notes a pattern

You are a moron! Hockey is by far the best sport! The fact that not that many people care about it is proof that it appeals to more discriminating tastes, you moron. What kind of moron are you anyway? --Sy Siphus, Minneapolis.

Discriminating huh? The frozen Four will be shown on ESPN2 tonight. Let's see what other sports the discriminating viewers of the Deuce watch (times are EDT):

4:30 PM
2004 Women's Trick Shot Magic - Lee vs. Lawrence (women's billiards)

5:00 PM
2004 WPBA Classic Tour - Canadian Classic semifinals / finals (women's bowling)

7:00 PM
Frozen Four (men's college hockey)

Read the KAR dailiy.

Half the Story

Bing West was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, and co-author (with former Marine Major General Ray Smith) of The March Up, which is one of the essential histories of the Iraq War so far.

He and his son Owen - who served in Force Recon during the war - wrote this challenge to the media's conventional wisdom on war reporting in the NRO.

The media has devalued the heroism of the soldier since Vietnam, focusing instead on criminal and victims.

It wasn't always this way:

In World War II, the press were cheerleaders who shared a symbiotic relationship with the military. Gutsy warriors like Audie Murphy and "Pappy" Boyington were famous for their high kill totals. In Vietnam, the press soured on the effort, tied the troops to the policymakers and refused to laud aggressive soldiers. Instead, victims were accentuated. American prisoners of war — who were certainly brave — were the only acclaimed heroes. Rugged commando-types - just as brave - were ignored.

This was reflected in the wave of Vietnam movies that proliferated in the 1980s. In the four most popular movies - Rambo: First Blood Part II, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Casualties of War - two themes emerged: soldier as victim and soldier as criminal.

In Iraq, the most famous soldiers to emerge are PFC Jessica Lynch and PFC Lynndie England, a victim and criminal, respectively. Their public images are the offspring of Vietnam. Celebrity and cynicism have trumped achievement.

This should surprise nobody. The chattering class has been straining to find comparisons with Vietnam since the before the war began.

The Wests have some numbers:

A nation's selection of its heroes is a reflection of its values. Jihadists like Zarqawi are not idealistic agrarian reformers. We are not a nation of victims. The press ought to make a real effort to show the tough guys who fight for us.

They don't have to look far. One hundred and forty squads fought house to house in Fallujah last November. In the course of two weeks, on three separate occasions the average squad shot jihadists hiding in rooms waiting to kill an American and die. The average 19-year-old searched dozens of houses each day, knowing with certainty that he would open a door and someone would shoot at him, not once, but on three separate occasions. Fewer than one SWAT team in a hundred encounters determined suicidal shooters barricaded in a room. Our SWAT teams are dedicated and courageous and we have seen many deserved depictions of their bravery.

Let's be straight about this: we see many more depictions of such than there are actual incidents.

Surely the media can do more to bring alive for all of us the nature of the sacrifices, courage, and, yes, ferocious aggression of our troops. The strength of our martial might is in our warriors more than in our weapons. It is time we understood why they are so feared. Our riflemen are not victims; they're hunters. Audie Murphy would be proud of Carlos Gomez-Perez, Brent Morel, and Paul Ray Smith.

The whole thing is worth a read.

While I Don't...

...normally pay a shred of attention to hockey unless it serves as a metaphor for the rebirth of the spirit of America after two decades of despiriting decay...

...and in addition confess that I left North Dakota on the first ride moving east after I got out of college...

...and that I've never cared for the NCAA tournaments - of much any type...

...still, when you combine the three, all I can say is heh.

Sports

As I mentioned in a thread earlier this week, I just didn't grow up around Hockey. In the Dakotas, outside of Grand Forks, anyway, Hockey is kind of te poor cousin of winter sports; I grew up watching hoops in the winter.

But when the Sioux make it to the Final Four, I even perk up a bit. Crossing my fingers for the big game against the Minnesota GoGos tonight.

Speaking of college sports, I'm guessing this tournament would be a fun one.

Another Thursday, Another Meme

Via Red, another one of those funky "Have You Ever" memes.

Bolded answers are "Yes".

snuck out of the house - My dad was the lightest sleeper in the world. When I finally learned to get out of the house without him hearing me, it was a huge accomplishment. I could have snuck up on a rabbit from behind and grabbed it by the ears, I could move so quietly.
gotten lost in your city - When I first moved to the Twin Cities, Saint Paul was pretty confusing. I still get turned around on the West Side.
saw a shooting star
been to any other countries besides the United States - Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, the UK and Canada.
had a serious surgery
gone out in public in your pajamas
kissed a stranger/hugged a stranger - The big street party after the Twins won the '87 World Series. Kissed strangers, hugged strangers, bought drinks for strangers, the works.
been in a fist fight - In my days in bars, the fights frequently came to me.
been arrested - Once, for some overdue parking tickets.
done drugs - Actually, I've never had an illegal drug in my life.
had alcohol - Oh, yeah.
laughed and had milk/coke come out of your nose - Grape juice.
pushed all the buttons on an elevator
made out in an elevator - Oh, yeah.
slept in an elevator
swore at your parents
kicked a guy where it hurts - Loc Cit. The bars were a lousy place.
been in love - It wasn't what I'd expected.
been close to love- Ditto.
been to a casino - Playing blackjack at a Holiday Inn bar in North Dakota doesn't count..
been skydiving - I wish. Someday.
broken a bone - There are two bones in my body that, since I was a little kid, I've always been paranoid about breaking - my little finger, and my little toe. Guess what two bones I've broken in my life? Broke my little finger (and needed surgery) when I was 27, broke the little toe when I was 30.
been high - Not from drugs. Last winter when I had bronchitis, I coughed so hard I frequently got euphoric.
skinny-dipped
skipped school - Pfft. If I'd skipped school, my dad (a teacher) would have found out about it instantly. I didn't even skip classes in college.
saw a therapist
done the splits - Not within about five feet.
played spin the bottle
gotten stitches - Many, many stitches.
had an IV
drank a whole gallon of milk in one hour
bitten someone
been to Niagara Falls
gotten the chicken pox - When I was 17.
kissed a member of the opposite sex - Er...yeah.
kissed a member of the same sex - Never even been tempted to.
crashed into a friend's car
been to Japan
ridden in a taxi
been dumped - The stories I could tell.
shoplifted - Never.
been fired - Guh. I started in radio. I got fired the first time when I was 17. At eight radio stations, I only quit on my own power twice. I've never been fired for cause, ever - but aside from my radio career, I've had contracts lapse on me unexpectedly, had companies close their doors (or been laid off by companies that were going to shut down before long), and quit to get away from bosses or situations that I hated. But I've never been fired for doing anything wrong.
had a crush on someone of the same sex
stole something from your job
gone on a blind date - many, many of them. I've probably gone out with 85 different women in the last five years. Most have been blind dates. I kind of like them.
lied to a friend
had a crush on a teacher - Yep.
celebrated Mardi-Gras in New Orleans
been to Europe
slept with a co-worker - technically. My ex and I met at a bar we were working at. Does that count?
been married - @#$#@%
gotten divorced- Ibid.
had children - Two. Plus a stepson.
saw someone die - Two and a half times. I saw a car get hit by a train, killing the driver. And I saw a car smack into a motorcyclist, throwing him into a tree. Technically, he was pronounced dead at the hospital, but I don't think he made it all the way there. And I happened on a car crash on I35 one night. Two cars. I pried one door open - the people inside were hurt but OK. I went to the other car, where people were giving CPR to the driver. I don't think he made it, either.
been to Africa
driven over 400 miles in one day - Many times.
been to Canada
been to Mexico
been on a plane
seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show
thrown up in a bar
purposely set a part of yourself on fire
eaten sushi
been snowboarding
met someone in person from the internet - Several times.
been moshing at a rock show - I was a rocker, baby.
cut yourself on purpose - Not my best moment. At various moments of extreme, unbearable, irreconcilable stress, I used to do that. See "Therapy", above. It's been 12 years since I last did that.
been to a moto cross show
lost a child
gone to college
graduated from college
done hard drugs - Again, never.
taken painkillers - Oh, yeah. I'm pounding Aleve right now.
love someone or miss someone right now - I love my kids very much. They're on spring break, so I have to say that I'm glad I'm at work. If by "someone" you mean in a romantic sense? Good question.

Open Letter to GOP Junior Congressional Staff Weasels

You're young(ish). You're in DC - Dee-freaking-Cee, baybee, getting invited to all the cool bars, the best parties, hobnobbing with the "elite". You're at the center of things.

Don't be a moron.

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

Martinez, the GOP's Senate point man on the issue, said he earlier had been assured by aides that his office had nothing to do with producing the memo. "I never did an investigation, as such," he said. "I just took it for granted that we wouldn't be that stupid

Er, yeah. So did I, along with a lot of other people.

I said the fake memo was "very doubtfully a Republican product". Left unstated was "...unless that Republican is an incredible pinhead", someone who'd not only do something that trashes the rules but would seem, to even the most casual observer, to lie to one's own boss about it, trashing not only his but your own side's credibility.

Thanks for nothing, Brian (not to be misspelled "Brain") Darling.

News Flash: Driving Cab Is Difficult

If you spend a lot of time driving down Highway Five from Saint Paul toward the Mall, the Airport, or (as I did for many years) to work, eventually you'll end up stopping in at the Post Road Super America.

The store has two sets of entrances. One leads to the normal lot, where cars gas up and people walk in and buy Tic Tacs and potato chips for the road. The other leads to a large hardstand flooded with taxi cabs. The store is always crowded with taxi drivers, 24/7. My kids, friends and I call it "Ellis Island", because almost all the cabbies are recent immigrants.

Cabbing has been an entree to the American work force for a couple of generations of immigrants, now. It's a job where you need only the most rudimentary of skills, both technical (driving a car) and linguistic (finding addresses or landmarks). If you feel like getting some practice with your Russian, Polish, Arabic, Spanish or any of a couple of dozen near and far Eastern languages, it's the place to be; the cabbies are as polyglot a lot as you can find in the Twin Cities.

It's a tough job, of course, like most jobs where you have to deal with the public. Like every waitress, bartender, bellhop, busboy and cashier in the world, cabbies could probably be persuaded to believe, at least on occasion, the classic dictum of Mr. Carlton, the supremely cynical eternal patient on the old Bob Newhart Show: "People are trash."

Nick Coleman's column yesterday touched on the hard life of the airport cabbie. But the only question it raises is "Who teaches these people economics?"

Not the cabbies. The Strib columnists.

The problem, I think, is that Coleman really doesn't seem to know what he wants. Or what he wants the rest of us to do. Or...

Oh, hell. You figure it out.

Cab drivers need strong bladders.

They also need a fierce work ethic, a pile of cash and a thick skin. Nice, polite Minnesotans don't always show respect for airport cabbies -- most of whom are immigrants from Africa.

"We are part of Minnesota," says Michael Teklu, an Ethiopian who is the head of the Airport Taxi Drivers Association. "We work hard to feed our kids -- seven days a week and 12 hours a day -- and all we want is a fair living. We know Minnesotans are warm-hearted and welcoming."

Maybe. Maybe not.

No kidding. Ten minutes' listening to the Nick Coleman "Show" on the local FrankenNet affiliate will tell you that.

But I digress. So - the point of Nick's column is that cabbies are good, hard-working people who just want a chance to make ends meet. Right?

Waiting hours near toilets and concrete barriers in the middle of a holding lot surrounded by fencing, the drivers feel like prisoners. [Er, does this mean the toilets are in the middle of the holding lot? Perhaps separated from the lot and the cabbies by the concrete barriers? Or that the toilets and barriers are surrounded by fencing, as if to taunt the dougty, benighted cabbies - Ed]

"They see us like animals in the zoo," says Solomon Yigerm, one of the taxi leaders. "They are not looking at us like human beings."

Yigerm leads me to one of the toilets and shows me a label on the door. It says there must be one toilet for every 10 workers. With 600 drivers, that would mean 60 toilets. Taxi drivers have a lot of time to perform calculations.

More, apparently, than Nick Coleman has to check facts. The rule was set up for places like construction sites, where people are on-site, working 12 hours a day for months. Cabbies are driving all over the place - and "all over the place", as it happens, is where other SuperAmericas with their welcoming commodes also are.

But again, I digress. So the point of Coleman's column is that...

And when they do, the bottom line is clear: They occupy one of the bottom rungs of American society.

...and that one of the wages of being the bottom rung is that toilets are scarce?

OK. Fair point. I think.

From 1999 until late last year, the number of cabs at the airport was limited to 577. But the Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) has ended the limit and opened the taxi trade to anyone. The result has been a sharp increase in the number of drivers, accompanied by a big increase in down time and a bigger rise in tempers.

Last week, a state Senate committee approved a bill that would limit the number of cabs to 640 (the current number). The drivers, supported by members of Christ Lutheran Church, across University Avenue from the Capitol, are hopeful. But the MAC is lobbying hard against the legislation.

So the number of cabs (we don't know from Coleman's column how many drivers there are per cab) is up (although, again, Coleman doesn't tell us "up" to what); we need to restrict the numbers of cabs, and in turn of doughty, immigrant drivers who can get jobs.

MAC officials say lifting the cap has dried up an informal trade in which some licenses were transferred to other drivers who were not the holders of record.

OK. So the point is that the bureaucrats at the MAC want to keep track of the licenses?

Or that the doughty immigrants' informal trade is being killed off?

But the drivers argue that prohibiting transfers means that after investing thousands in their business, they can't recoup their investment. There are too many licenses, they say, and the waits between fares are too long. To them, it's a matter of survival.

Ah! I got it! The point is that there are too many drivers earning their livings, and that we need to cull the herd! Because apparently the drivers, and cab owners, are flocking to wait in line for no reason whatsoever, certainly nothing as prosaic as there is enough business to pay the bills. Apparently, cab owners and drivers are so stupid that they wait in line for hours for no reason whatever. They are too stupid to be on the road!

"This must be the '60s again," Teshome Idossa says, putting $15 of gas in his cab (at $2.35 a gallon, he only puts in 6.3 gallons before shutting off the pump). "You know, it is like the struggle for freedom again."

Oops. I mean, the point is that that making cabbies wait in line, staring through the fencing at toilets hidden behind concrete barriers is slavery?

I'm getting confused.

A 27-year-old from Ethiopia who has been driving for four years, Idossa is learning English and American history at a rapid pace. But he already understands Taxi Economics 101.

Idossa rents his cab for $500 a week. After gas and daily rental costs, he needs about $85 in fares to break even. He has been waiting in the holding lot since 10 a.m. It is now noon.

"They are trying to push us out of this business," he says. "I think they are saying, 'Why don't you guys just go flipping burgers for McDonald's?' "

Ah HAH! So the point is that the MAC is an oppressive, racist, socialistic construct that is destroying the livings of the doughty immigrant drivers...

...whose numbers are being whittled down by the bill in the Senate committee supported by the church across the street from the Capitol...

...where a bunch of cabbies go to church? How's that?

Let's read on. I'm sure it'll clear up.

Drivers wait in the holding area as long as two hours. When their number comes up on computer screens at the edge of the lot, they run to their vehicles like fighter jet pilots scrambling to get into the air, leaning on their horns as they zoom into another lot.

Only to wait again.

The second lot is called the staging area, and drivers often spend another half hour there before being allowed to drive "downstairs" (to ground level) at the airport's Lindbergh terminal. There, they wait a third time, in line for a fare.

The final wait may be only 10 minutes, but it's not easy, either. Until recently, drivers had to wait with their rear gates open, even when the security threat level was not high. Drivers spent the winter with blankets around their shoulders; some contracted pneumonia. Again, Solomon Yigerm shows me a label, this one on the lift gate of a taxi: It warns against leaving the gate open and states that exhaust fumes "May Cause Personal Injury."

Now we're onto something: the MAC's rules are oppressive and stupid!

Government - or pseudogovernment, anyway - doesn't operate in the best interest of the governed!

Excellent point, Nick!

"We are not in jail," says driver Tura Wedajo, who is on antibiotics for pneumonia. "But they treat us like we are in jail. If they add more taxis, a three-hour wait will be five hours." Sometimes, a driver gets a passenger who needs a long ride. But often, a passenger only wants a short trip to the Mall of America or a close part of St. Paul. The fare for a five-mile trip -- including a $2.50 airport tax -- is $13.

Do the math: You have worked three hours for just $10.50, after subtracting the airport's take. And that's before you figure your overhead: A $2,675 license fee, a $150 annual inspection fee, gas, liability insurance of $4,000 a year and repairs on your cab, which may have cost $20,000.

When your trip is over, you go back to the Post Road and get back in line. Another three-hour wait is likely.

Er, wait. That's different.

So the point is that there's a ring of businessmen - presumably evil Republicans, probably directed by David Strom - who are forcing immigrants into cabs, to wait endlessly at the airport, where they are forced to shell out gobs of cash and work for a loss on daily revenue.

But up above, Coleman says his cabbie understands economics.

So apparently...Coleman has uncovered a cab slave ring?

Am I warm? Help me, here.

So, hello, Minnesota: Stop by the Post Road SuperAmerica someday and look behind it.

You may see the people of many lands. And you may be amazed by this: That anyone wants to drive a cab in this country.

Yes. Apparently all these people left lands of oppression and starvation, to come to America, only to be forced into taxis where they sit behind barbed wire staring at toilets and demand both more and fewer jobs, even though the jobs guarantee them negative income and an early death from health problems. In the meantime, Minnesotans aren't nice, except for that mysterious church across University Avenue from the Capitol, which wants to abolish a bunch of those jobs that the immigrants need to feed their families.

Thanks! I got it now!

Ed Is Everywhere

Captain Ed, of Captain's Quarters, is bigger than Wayne Gretzky these days, at least if you're talking about Canadian politics:Edward Morrissey, 42, began posting allegations of corruption in the Canadian Liberal Party late Saturday on his Captain's Quarters blog, a web log, which he runs as a hobby.Why should anyone care?

The story involves a massive infringement of press freedom:

It defies a ban, instituted by a federal judge, Justice John Gomery, that severely limits what Canadians can publish about the investigation into allegations of money laundering and kickbacks in a government program from the 1990s. The scandal dominated national politics for a year and led to the Liberals losing their majority in the House of Commons in June. The government program aimed to undermine Quebec separatists and involved payments of $85 million to some Montreal advertising firms for little or no work.

Hearings in the case are open to the public, including the news media. However, Gomery limited news coverage of the proceedings so as not to taint potential jurors for upcoming trials involving a government bureaucrat and two advertising executives facing criminal charges

Now, the Canadian government has put a gag order on the testimony; unlike in the US, where gag orders affect only the principals in a case, the Canadian ban affects the entire Canadian news media.

Which I think is hilarious; remember when the left was wetting its pants over John Ashcroft's "assaults on freedom", and all the lefties who were yapping about wanting to move to Canada after the election?

Canadian law already allows all of the infringements on freedom that the left wrongly pinned on Ashcroft!

Congrats to Ed on becoming bigger than 'awkey Night in Canada!

There are times...

...when the fact that I watch almost no TV bugs me.

For the last two seasons, I've caught almost none of "24".

Fortunately, we have this site.

I feel better already.

This Was The Day That Was

Several projects wrapping up simultaneously.

I was SO buried. And all of that on three hours' sleep. Blah.

Tomorrow will be bigger...

Blaaaaaaaagh

Crazy day so far. More posting later in the day.

Roger's Revenge

Forget Boston. Ignore Chicago.

Cincinnati? Pffft.

North Dakota is baseball country. Or it was in the cognitive past.

As my father, Bruce Berg, related in his book, "Common Ground", there's a long history of amateur and minor-league ball in North Dakota. Little known fact - NoDak was a stop on the old Negro League circuit in the twenties and thirties. Satchell Paige played for Bismark, and most of the other old Negro League greats played for Fargo, Jamestown, Valley City or any of the other legendary teams that played along what are now I94 and I281.

The greatest moment came in 1934, when the Major League All-Stars, on their way to Japan for an exhibition series, stopped in North Dakota for a three-game stand against a hastily-assembled team of semi-pros, both Negro-leaguers and locals.

This was no slouch team of big-leaguers:

The All-Star team, managed by Connie Mack's son, Earle, was a great one with Foxx (.334, 44 homers and 130 RBIs in 1934), Heinie Manush (.349, 42 doubles, 89 RBIs), Roger "Doc" Cramer (.311, 202 hits), Pinky Higgins (.330, 37 doubles) and pitchers Rube Walberg (6 wins, 7 losses), Monte Weaver (11-15), Ted Lyons (11-13), and Earl Whitehill (14-11) .

North Dakota combined the Bismarck, Jamestown, and Valley City teams to face the big-leaguers but were weakened when Desiderato had to return to Chicago and Trouppe left for his home in St. Louis. Double Duty was also missing for the first game when he returned briefly to his home in Chicago. Luckily the pitching was bolstered when Chet Brewer of the Kansas City Monarchs was added to the team.

The Big-Leaguers arrived in Valley City for the first game and the North Dakota semipros jumped on White Sox' hurler Lyons for 11 hits and six runs in five innings and won, 6-5. Foxx, who started in professional baseball as a pitcher, hurled the last three innings for the big-leaguers and struck out six without allowing a run. Barney Brown pitched well and got the win, despite giving up homers to Cramer and Red Kress.

The two teams moved on to Jamestown and Brewer completely dominated the big-leaguers, shutting them out on four hits with six strikeouts--Manush three times. Double Duty, back from Chicago, singled twice, Steel Arm Davis belted a double and two homers, and Art Hancock added a double and two singles.

The following day at Bismarck, Duty matched up against the Washington Senator's Whitehill and North Dakota exploded for three runs in the first two innings, added four in the fifth, and four in the eighth to win, 11-3. Double Duty led the offense with a double and two singles, followed by Hancock who tripled and homered. The Big Leaguers' only runs came in the ninth inning when Duty walked two batters ahead of a Pinky Higgins home run. In all, Duty allowed eight hits and struck out three. After the blowout one Major Leaguer was reported to have remarked, "I knew there were a lot of good colored players. I just didn't know they were all in Bismarck!"

NoDak 3, Major League 0.

It was about twenty years later that Roger Maris came out of North Dakota American Legion ball to the Yankees. He went on to set the most-contested record in Major League history, his 61-homer season in 1961; he took eight more games to set the record than Babe Ruth did to hit 60 circuits.

Of course, from 1998 on the record was as porous as Nick Coleman's fact-checking; Doug Grow relates the story in today's Strib:

Between the 1998 and 2001 seasons, Maris' record was surpassed six times. The Cubs' Sammy Sosa hit more than 61 homers in three seasons. The St. Louis Cardinals' Mark McGwire hit more than 61 twice. And the San Francisco Giants' Barry Bonds set the current record, 73, in 2001.

Baseball doesn't have quite the same prominence in North Dakota life that it did 70 years go - but it's still a big deal.

Especially when you mess with Maris.

This movement to restore Maris as the record holder started a couple of weeks ago. Joel Heitkamp and a few of his pals were having a beer at the VFW club in Mantador, N.D. Their pleasant conversations about nothing important were interrupted by TV news reports about what really matters: baseball.

In particular, the subject of the reports was about appearances of big-time ball players before a U.S. House committee inquiring about steroid use. McGwire, once a baseball hero, was asked whether he had used steroids.

"My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family or myself," he told the committee.

The boys at the VFW were so furious they almost spilled their beers.

"They were telling me, 'Geez, Joel, you gotta do something,' " Heitkamp said. "They got on me pretty hard."

Heitkamp, a Democratic state senator, responded to the challenge.

Last week, he introduced the resolution in the North Dakota Senate that calls for baseball to put Maris, an honest, if never fully appreciated, man, back at the top of the single-season home run list. That resolution is expected to zip through the North Dakota House this week.

Heitkamp, who loves baseball, doesn't really expect baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to respond to the North Dakota resolution. In fact, Selig already has made it clear that baseball will not try to clean up its record book. The alleged cheaters will be allowed to hold on to some of the game's most treasured records.

"But maybe this will remind baseball that fans are concerned about integrity," Heitkamp said.

If only Bud Selig cared as much.

Roger Maris. He may have had a notional asterisk, but he was never dragged in front of Congress as party to a scandal. That's gotta count for something.

Machinations

The good news: Mark Yost at the Pioneer Press is the first major media figure in the Twin Cities who has an interest in fairly covering the debate over family court reform in Minnesota.

The bad news: There is so much work to do.

Yost's latest column describes the machinations over the various family court reform bills going on at the Capitol this session.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, there is some motion toward reform in the House. Unfortunately, the Senate is still controlled by the DFL And when it comes to family law, nobody holds more sway than the clacque of feminist fundamentalists that seem to control all famlly law legislation in the Senate; Ellen Anderson, Linda Higgins, Becky Lourey, Jane Ranum, Sandy Pappas, and Linda Berglin. These are senators for whom, if you read their literature, the family would seem to be defined as "womenandtheirchildren".

Yost:

n much of politics, where you come down on the issue depends on who your constituency is. That's clearly the case in the debate over SF630.

Proposed by Sen. Tom Neuville, SF630's key provisions would have more fairly divided the financial responsibility for children between divorcing mothers and fathers. Child support would be based on the income of both parents, not just the payee (usually the father).

Enter Sen. Linda Berglin, the powerful chair of the Finance Committee's Health and Human Services Budget Division. She introduced SF1900, which basically gutted SF630. Because of the power structure in the Senate, it was clear to Sen. Neuville early on that he would lose in a tug-of-war over competing bills.

"This is the same legislator that has stood in the way of this bill the past few times it has made it to the Senate," said Rep. Tim Mahoney, who has proposed legislation in the House to make joint physical custody the law of the land in Minnesota. "To expect her to change her habits now would be surprising."

A bit of history, here.

About ten years ago, a bill that would have reformed the way family courts enforce visitation - which would, among other things, have given non-custodial parents additional rights to enforce visitation orders - was squashed in the Senate when then-senator Andy Dawkins, husband of Ellen Anderson, killed the bill in his committee, sayng that given a choice between having children see their non-custodial parents (almost always fathers, in Minnesota and nationwide) and making sure they get their child support payments, you go with the money .

For all the opposition's palaver about children, it really is about the money - or in this case, making sure that the state's social-service bureaucracy has a ready stream of cash.

Back to 2005:

No doubt. What was surprising — or perhaps instructive — was what came out in the debate last Thursday. Sen. Berglin's aim clearly isn't fairness, but using the child-support guidelines to make up for what she sees as shortcomings in the state's social service programs for low-income single mothers.

"The purpose of the family law system is not to subsidize the public welfare system," Sen. Neuville said. "It's to be fair to both parents."

Not to mention the children.

Disclaimer: I'm a divorced father of two. My complaints are not personal; I have joint custody, and while I pay all of my kids' bills, I am not subject to a child support order. I have my kids a fair percentage of the time. I am, in short, a member of one of the most exclusive minorities in the nation.

Here's how the system works in Minnesota:

1. Divorce is a "winner take all" proposition; whoever gets custody of the kids, gets the child-support money. That support is determined by the estimated expenses involved in raising a child, without regard to the custodial parent's income.
2. Custody is, officially, determined by a list of objective criteria. In practice, those criteria are usually slanted toward women, including what amounts literally to a count of who physically spends the most hours with the kids. Judges score the evaluation like a hockey game; whoever gets the most points, gets the kids. End of story.
3. Other factors conspire against fathers.
   • For lower-income families, the welfare guidelines are set so that is is much easier for a single-parent family to qualify for benefits, and more of them. Families who approach Ramsey County Human Services at one point were routinely told that they'd be much more likely to get benefits if they filed for divorce and if the father didn't live with the family. Naturally, "not being in the home" counts against the parent that moves out, when that checklist is run. it also makes all child support payments the property of the county - so they take a very keen nterest in collecting; most County Attorney's offices in Minnesota have large, busy Child Support Enforcement divisions.
   • The domestic abuse system in Minnesota is based on the principle 'better that a thousand innocent suffer than one guilty person go free". The system makes it notoriously easy for false allegations to be filed - and domestic abuse allegations, proven or not, carry great weight in divorce proceedings, especially in the custody phase.

Yost touches on both the economics, and Berglin's cynicism:

Minnesota collected $590 million in child support last year, according to the Department of Human Services' 2004 report. About $30 million of that went to low-income mothers, according to Sen. Neuville. So Sen. Berglin is gutting a bill that would correct a decades-old, system-wide injustice in the name of 5 percent of the program's recipients. Talk about your special interest.

There's no doubt that there are low-income divorced mothers who are in dire financial straits and that in some ways the state's social services system comes up short. But to try to right those wrongs through the child-support guidelines is simply wrong — and perpetuates the long-held stereotype that noncustodial fathers are nothing but a piggy bank.

But the Berglin/Anderson/"feminist" clicque in the Senate isn't interested in disproving any stereotypes.

Read Yost's piece for the details of the negotiations. In the end:

He and Sen. Berglin are expected to lock themselves in a room later this week with foam bats and see what they can work out. But it's clear that if it makes it to the Senate floor, SF630 will be a shadow of its former self and do little to reform the system — the bill's original intent.

There is good news, of course:

More promising is HF1321, scheduled to be heard today by the House Jobs and Economic Security Committee. Sponsored by Rep. Steve Smith, with input from Rep. Mahoney and Rep. Rob Eastlund, its most important provision is for a presumption of joint physical custody. That's important because under the current system all benefits flow from the designation of "custody." That has often resulted in all-out thermonuclear war between mothers and fathers, with the most harm often done to the children. Under HF1321, joint physical custody would be the default remedy if two parents can't agree on a parenting plan or try to use "custody" as a wedge to extract more money.

"It would have a more profound effect on reducing child support than my bill," Sen. Neuville said of the House legislation. More important, if it passes, it would go to conference committee, along with SF630, and, we can hope, be melded into law.

Assuming, of course, it gets past Ellen Anderson and Linda Berglin, who stand firmly astride the path to reform, rejecting all who come their way.

Battle Is Joined

The Strib is moving up its heavy weapons in its battle with the alternative media.

That's the Strib's Mark Brunswick atop a Russian-built (what else?) T-72. Excellent blog. Poor tank.

The Northern Alliance tank is ready:

Chad's driving, with Brian directing from the glacis. I'm at the gunner's console, looking for a hot air-seeking round.

(Via Strom

Uneven, Awful, Mystifying, Terrible

John Leo has an excellent retrospective covering a lot of the reservations many of us on the right have about the Schiavo case.

The behavior of conservatives: Uneven and sometimes awful, with lots of vituperation and extreme charges. (Jeb Bush does not remind me of Pontius Pilate; I don't think it's fair to circulate rumors that Michael Schiavo was a wife-beater.) Worse were the revolutionary suggestions that the courts be ignored or defied, perhaps by sending in the National Guard to reconnect the tube. This is "by any means necessary" rhetoric of the radical left, this time let loose by angry conservatives. Where does this rhetoric lead?

I can't say this reaction astounded me; the right has its loonies, just as certainly as does the left.

The behavior of liberals: Mystifying. While conservative opinion was severely splintered, liberal opinion seemed monolithic: Let her die. Liberals usually rally to the side of vulnerable people, but not in this case. Democrats talked abstractly about procedures and rules, a reversal of familiar roles. I do not understand why liberal friends defined the issue almost solely in terms of government intruding into family matters. Liberals are famously willing to enter family affairs to defend individual rights, opposing parental-consent laws, for example. Why not here? Nonintervention is morally suspect when there is strong reason to wonder whether the decision-maker in the family has the helpless person's best interests at heart.

The left's cry of "individual" and "State's" rights was so deeply hypocritical on so many levels. They oppose individual choice in education, campaign finance, property rights and taxation, piddle on individual supremacy on parental notification and gun control, and deny the tenth-amendment rights of the states on matters like prayer in schools, abortion, and many more issues.

A few liberals broke ranks--10 members of the black caucus, for instance, plus Sen. Tom Harkin and Ralph Nader, who called the case "court-imposed homicide." But such voices were rare.

Outside Congress, where half of the House Democrats voted with the overwhelming majority of the GOP? Yes.

My suspicion is that liberal opinion was guided by smoldering resentment toward President Bush and the rising contempt for religion in general and conservative Christians in particular. We seem headed for much more conflict between religious and secular Americans.

This is both dead-on and extremely chilling.

As we saw in the comment section of this blog, to so much of the left "The court said so" is a substitute for "this is ethically, morally right".

The behavior of the news media: Terrible. "Pro-life" columnist Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice called it "the worst case of liberal media bias I've seen yet." Many stories and headlines were politically loaded. Small example of large disdain: On air, a CBS correspondent called the Florida rallies a "religious roadshow," a term unlikely to have been applied to Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights demonstrations or any other rallies meeting CBS's approval. More important, it was hard to find news that Michael Schiavo had provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife since 1994 and even blocked the use of antibiotics when Terri developed a urinary infection. And the big national newspapers claimed as a fact that Michael Schiavo's long-delayed recollection of Terri's wish to die, supported only by hearsay from Michael's brother and a sister-in-law, met the standard for "clear and convincing evidence" of consent.

As I pointed out on the NARN show and in this blog, that standard was perhaps, apparently, met to the satisfaction of a judge, according to Florida law, after a proceeding where Michael Schiavo was able to outspend and out-lawyer the Schindlers. That means while Michael Schiavo may have been able to meet the standards of Florida law, that law might need to be changed.

It did nothing of the sort, particularly with two of Terri's friends testifying the opposite. The media covered the intervention by Congress as narrowly political and unwarranted. They largely fudged the debates over whether Terri Schiavo was indeed in a persistent vegetative state and whether tube-feeding meant that Schiavo was on life support. In the Nancy Cruzan case, the Supreme Court said that tube-feeding is life support, but some ethicists and disability leaders strongly dispute that position.

And a final quote of interest, one that I've been almost literally screaming to see included in the conversation:

it means the country has yet to make up its mind on the issue of personhood and whether it is moral and just to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with grave cognitive disabilities. The following candid exchange occurred on Court TV last month in a conversation between author Wesley Smith and bioethicist Bill Allen. Smith: "Bill, do you think Terri is a person?" Allen: "No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood." Fetuses, babies, and Alzheimer's patients are only minimally aware and might not fit this definition of personhood, and so would have no claim on our protections.

Babies are, indeed, not "viable" without massive support; they are indeed not "viable" until they can go out and get a job.

I took some flak after Ms. Schiavo's death for saying "inconvenient people nationwide are watching their backs". And yet if the law would seem to be insufficient to protect the truly inconvenient, what exactly is it that the left and the media (pardon the redundancy) think is keeping us off that slippery slope that will lead us to the sort of institutionally-mandated euthanasia that the right is justly worried about?

Persona Non Grata, Eh?

For the five of you who read this blog before reading Captain Ed, the story over there is pretty amazing.

One of the big jokes after the election was all the liberals, upset over John Kerry's defeat, who expressed interest in emigrating to Canada. Joke's on them; Canada actually imposes a lot of the restrictions that the "Ascroft Libertarians" used to bleat about worrying about seeing under a Bush Administration.

Their hate speech laws would gag an Ivy League undergraduate dean. Their national gun ban is marginally less noxious than, say, New York City's.

And their press freedoms would seem to be at the sufferance of government, as well.

And that's Ed's big story.

He's been following Adscam; here are the details.

He has a source with a lead on testimony potentially damning to the officials of the ruling Liberal party. The government has imposed a gag order on the press.

Ed, unbound by Canadian press muzzle laws, published the information.

Details of the Brault testimony began cropping up on various websites yesterday after it was first posted Saturday night on a conservative American site. The blog is run by a 42-year-old call centre manager from Minneapolis, Minn., with a libertarian bent who is concerned about publication bans and restrictions on freedom of information.

In an interview yesterday, he said he understands the implications of publishing the testimony. He refuses to reveal his source but says that he has a contact who has a contact inside the Montreal room where the testimony is being given.

The publication ban does not restrict Americans from publishing or broadcasting the details of the in camera hearings. Still, the blogger joked that he isn't planning any vacations soon to Canada.

"It's an interesting story. It's fascinating," he said. "First off, I think it's a terrible thing that you guys can't publish this. This is the type of thing that a free press exists for is to hold their government accountable. ..... It should be you guys reporting this."

The fact that the testimony is now circulating on the Internet and by word of mouth calls into question the effectiveness of the publication ban, Mr. MacKay said.

This is not only an aberration of a poorly-designed system; this is in fact an inevitable result of allowing government to regulate the coverage of a state's political process.

Blog America

Has the left learned nothing from Air America's first year?

Apparently not:

In a move unlikely only because it's taken this long to happen, pundit-about-town Arianna Huffington is extending her hosting largess to the blogosphere.

This month the wannabe California governor is launching a Slate-like Web site where a cast of bigwigs, including Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), David GeffenDavid Geffen, Barry Diller, Larry DavidLarry David, Tom Freston, Ari Emanuel, Jim WiattJim Wiatt Tina Brown and Harold Evans will each have their own blog from which to spout Big Thoughts about politics.

Hot new media.

Liberals getting their asses handed to them in this new media.

Big money tries to get a batch of big names from unrelated fields together to do a bigger, better version.

Sound famililar?

Huffington wouldn't comment, but it was confirmed that a soft-launch of the Huffington Report would be up and running before the end of April.

It will be interesting to see how these honchos fare in the Wild West of the 'Net, where contentious, or even off-hand remarks are seized upon within seconds by millions and held up for debate (and often scorn) on scores of Web sites. Or even if Diller or Geffen will actually type their thoughts.

Unlike corporations, the Internet does not provide legions of publicists and spinmeisters to keep the public at bay.

Then again, Huffington is wisely confining her site mostly to politics. It's safer, after all, for liberals to bash the government than Hollywood.

I, for one, can't wait. For all of us who are weary of the endless repetition of fisking Nick Coleman, it's going to be a mother lode of fodder.

Bias? What Bias?

Learned Foot at Kool Aid report tripped upon an example of that non-existent bias from the media that is really conservative:

CBS news last night on its mini-broadcast wedged in between the 2 Final Four games (CBS finally figured out a way to get me to watch its news) Dick Roth reoported on the selection of a new pope (paraphrasing closely from memory):

With whom will the College of Cardinals replace this pope who ruled the Church with an iron fist? Will the choose someone like him or someone more moderate?

Not "many say ruled with an iron fist." Not "there were those among the (cardinals/cloth/laity) that felt the pope ruled with an iron fist". Merely "ruled the church with an iron fist".

And please describe "more moderate" for me. Should the cardinals elect a pope that will shed the Church's annoying and intrusive belief that a human fetus is exactly that: a human fetus?

The legacy of Dan Rather lives on.

It was interesting, listening to NPR's coverage of the death. If all you knew of the legacy of the Pope came from NPR, you'd think it was something like this:

1. No Gay Priests!
2.No female priests!
3. He quashed the liberation theologians
...
...
...143. Sparked the Solidarnosc uprising which led, eventually, to the fall of the Warsaw Pact and beyond that the USSR.
...
...
247. Helped end the Cold War.
...
...
638. Helped bring rapprochement between Catholicism and the Jews after centuries of bitter and sometimes horrible repression.

I'm not Catholic. My church has been admitting female ministers for at least a generation, and allowing its clergy to marry for centuries, and it hasn't hurt us theologically one jot (and the things that have hurt the Presbyterian church are not things to which American Catholics are immune), so I'm a little bumfuzzled by the Catholics' endless soul-wrenching over some of those issues.

And for that, perhaps, I can afford a more pollyannaish view of John Paul II's accomplishments.

So it's nice to be able to be a pollyanna.

Karol Wojtyla and the Jews

Karol Wojtyla, who later became the late Pope John Paul II, grew up in prewar Poland.

People today forget - or perhaps neve rknew - the anti-semitism that was ingrained in the Catholic faith for many centuries. During the middle ages, jews frequently had more economic, religious and personal freedom in the Moslem middle east than in the mostly-Catholic west. During World War II, it was remarked that many Polish Catholics would rather kill a Jew than a Nazi; Jews escaping from the Ghettos and camps in Poland faced a gauntlet of corrosively anti-semitic Poles between them and liberty, or indeed survival. Many of the Righteous Among the Nations honored at Yad Vashem are Poles that ran the double risk of death at the hands of the Germans and betrayal by their own countrymen and coreligionists.

This, from the story of Antoni Gawrylkiewicz, a Polish teenager credited with rescuing 16 Jews:

. In the words of Prof. Eliach: "Countless times he would open the entrance to our pit and throw in food during the most dangerous circumstances." When Zipporah Sonenson gave birth to a baby boy, named Hayyim, while in hiding in a stable in June 1944, Antony quickly placed him in a basket and brought him together with his father and others to a Christian family for safekeeping. As the danger of detection increased, Antoni moved his wards to a new shelter, in the village of Lebednik, leading them at night over a 5 kilometer stretch.

Suspected of hiding Jews, Antoni was apprehended by a Polish underground unit, and sustained severe beatings for refusing to disclose the presence of the hidden Jews. As a result, he remained bedridden for days, recovering from his wounds. Gawrylkiewicz also helped other Jews who came to at night begging for food, and he would share with them the food he had brought for himself while tending his herd. Travails for the rescued persons did not stop with liberation, for Yaffa's mother and baby-brother Hayyim were murdered by members of a Polish underground unit in their grandmother's house in Eishyshok. Yaffa Eliach sadly comments: "Unfortunately, Antoni was not there to save us."

Pope Pius, the wartime pontiff, was fairly useless in illuminating the Holocaust. And until Vatican II, there was considerable anti-semitic language in the Catholic liturgy.

And so Pope John Paul II's actions were of more profound import than perhaps today's American media can comprehend.

The Jerusalam Post has no such handicap in its remembrance of the late Pontiff:"The Jewish People will remember John Paul II as someone who courageously stood up and put an end to an historic injustice when he officially disavowed the prejudices and accusations – for which our people and our faith had suffered from venomous anti-Semitism, persecutions and bloodshed – against the Jews that had multiplied in Catholic church writings and amongst its believers. He also initiated and fostered an enhanced and fruitful dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, and between Israel and the Vatican."

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom issued a statement saying that "Israel, the Jewish people and the entire world, lost today a great champion of reconciliation and brotherhood between the faiths."

"On behalf of the government and people of Israel, we extend our condolences to the Catholic Church and the flock of Pope John Paul II," Shalom said.

"This is a great loss, first and foremost for the Catholic Church and its hundreds of millions of believers, but also for humanity as a whole. I had the privilege of meeting with His Holiness twice, and I was deeply impressed by his insights and his unique humanity. The State of Israel joins all those who mourn his loss."For this alone, John Paul II was an epochal figure.

Scott Johnson's articulate elegy is along similar lines.

Phoned In

Powerline finds the Times in an amazing editing gaffe:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

On the Times' behalf - maybe they really don't know any of the late Pope's supporters...

Outrageous

Some lefty moonbats hijacked The Kool Aid Report.

They even took me on:

:C'mon Mitch you facist retard! You're just bitching cuz you don't have your own radio show with dozens of adoring listeners. Hell, you wish you had even half the game Nick does, with clever bits like "Wingnut of the Week" and reading hate-mail in a British accent.

I'll bet you even wish you were a real Irishman like Coleman. What kind of name is "Berg" anyway? Mongolian? Maybe we should just call you "Ghengis Berg" from now on.

Oooh. Someone's gonna pay.

Pay, I tell you.

My Lunch With Sid

Sid Lashkowitz is an old acquaintance of mine - we did some stuff in an improv group back in the nineties. He's an assistant district attorney from Long Island. We had lunch yesterday, and talked about the Schiavo case.

Here's the transcript:

MITCH BERG: So my question is, is Florida law right - from the standards of ethics and justice - in the Schiavo case.

SID LASCHKOWITZ: Well, it's all on the record. Read the record.

MB: Yeah, I know, but the problem is, the record only shows what a court decided about existing law. Laws have flaws. Judges make mistakes.

SL: But they decide according to the law. Read the record.

MB: Yeah, but they get hemorrhoids, their wives yap at them about things on the way to work and they get distracted, they're human, they have prejudices...

SL: Well, it's all on the record. Read the record.

MB: The court didn't "rule" on whether there might be flaws in existing Florida law, though...

SL: What are you, an idiot? Everything you need to know about this case is in the record!

MB: Really? The court ruled, on philosophical grounds, on the ethics of the laws that were applied in this case?

SL: You obviously are a retard.

MB: Mommy? No, seriously, are you saying the courts did rule on the philosophical and ethical questions involved?

SL: Courts rule on the law.

MB: In other words, no?

SL: It's in the record. You can either read the record, or live in your little made-up universe. Are you going to finish those fries?

MB: Help yourself. Again, I'm not quibbling about the record, I'm saying that my real question is "is the law right".

SL: Do you or don't you believe in the rule of law? Or should we just allow people to decide things on the fly by themselves?

MB: I'm not talking about anarchy or renouncing the rule of law, I'm talking about a philosophical and ethical debate over whether the law is right. I'm talking about looking for a deeper truth...

SL: All truth is in the record.

MB: Hell, forget the "truth" for a moment. As a voter and citizen, I am asking if the law is *right*, morally and ethically.

SL: That's what judges are for.

MB: Ai yi yi. OK, then, different question: You're a lawyer...

SL: Read the record.

MB: ...I know, so you know as well as I do that if a party to a case has a problem getting information into the record and the "Finding of facts" in the initial case, they're pretty much screwed forever - the "finding of facts" isn't subject to appeal unless you get a de novo trial, and those are rare. Now, the quality of the lawyer you have has a huge effect on the "facts" that get "found". That's why OJ is a free man today. So what about the story that the Schindlers had a pro bono lawyer who made major, but non-appealable, mistakes...

SL: This soup is awful.

MB: ...that's why I ordered the sushi. And Michael Schindler had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of representation. So even the "facts" that were "Found" might well reflect less of the truth than they do the respective talents of the lawyers.

SL: Chimpy chimpy Bushitler Halliburton.

MB: Check, please?

More later.

Sixty Years Ago Today

Sixty years ago this morning, the last great battle of World War II began, as US troops went ashore on Okinawa

Although Iwo Jima and Normandy justifiably are remembered as symbols of sacrifice and perseverence, Okinawa was an incredibly brutal campaign. Okinawa, unlike the many previous island battles, took place on an island the Japanese considered a part of metropolitan Japan, much as if someone were to invade Hawaii:

The battle of Okinawa proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. Thirty-four allied ships and craft of all types had been sunk, mostly by kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft damaged. The fleet had lost 763 aircraft. Total American casualties in the operation numbered over 12,000 killed [including nearly 5,000 Navy dead and almost 8,000 Marine and Army dead] and 36,000 wounded. Navy casualties were tremendous, with a ratio of one killed for one wounded as compared to a one to five ratio for the Marine Corps.

That part doesn't get much play today - the kamikaze offensive was incredibly effective.

American losses at Okinawa were so heavy as to illicite Congressional calls for an investigation into the conduct of the military commanders.

Sounds familiar, huh?

Not surprisingly, the cost of this battle, in terms of lives, time, and material, weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan just six weeks later.

My late ex father-in-law was on a destroyer off Okinawa, where they shot down at least one inbound kamikaze as well as two torpedo-bombers who tried to pick the ship off while on radar picket duty - an incredibly dangerous job for destroyers during the battle.

So remember Okinawa today.

Digital Killed the Optical Star

I hate CDs.

When the compact disk first came out about 20 years ago, my neighbor - a German jazz fan (let me be clear - he was a German who was a fan of jazz. "German jazz" is a contradiction in terms, like "Japanese funk" or "Interesting Wendy Wilde show") who was ecstatic; the prospect of music being recorded, mastered and distributed digitally was a dream come true for this teutonic tone shark.

I listened to the first DDD CD - and was horrified. So cold. So harsh in its perfection. So...teutonic.

Part of it we can chalk up to an industry that hadn't yet learned the art of recording for the new medium. Recording is every bit as much an art as is writing and performing music; the art hadn't yet caught up with the technology.

And now that it has, I still can't stand the CD. Part of it is the fraud the industry perpetrated to foist them on us; they charge more for a product that costs much less to produce than vinyl or the execrable cassette, and the old assurances that CDs would never skip were baked wind from the word go.

No, it's that while the CD is very clear and has immense fidelity, it sounds cold and digital and teutonic in a way that vinyl never did.

There IS an upside, of course; as the technology matured, it brought high-quality recording technology down to a price that was unthinkable 20 years ago; I can do multi-track audio recording and editing on my laptop using freeware that, in the analog world, would have required a tape deck that either cost tens of thousands of dollars (for the deck alone, to say nothing of supporting equipment and a studio), or over $100/hour to rent - and with a degree of reliability that didn't exist 20 years ago.

But at the end of the day, the point is that CDs just. Don't. Sound. As. Good as vinyl.

So too now with photography.

Joe Kimball reports that Shutterbug, a Grand Avenue (Saint Paul) photography shop, is shutting down.

Shutterbug on Grand, an old-fashioned film-developing lab that has been an institution on Grand Avenue, closed Thursday, victim of a sea change in the way we take photos.

"Digital killed us, it killed the industry," said Shutterbug co-owner Debra LaFontaine. "People in America are addicted to new technology.

Photogrpaphy runs in m family - my grandparents, Oscar and Bea Berg, ran a photography studio for probably 35 years, between them. They did it the old-fashioned way, of course; Grandma even hand-colored photographs, back in the day, still the only way to assure the permanence of your colors.

(Family trivia aside: Grandma was involved in the taking and development of this classic photo, well-known to all midwestern protestants:

(Image from the "Grace By Edstrom site, from whom you should buy a copy of this classic photo right now)

End of digression.

The shop's owner says:

"I know how the livery station guy felt at the turn of the 20th century."

No doubt.

Digital photography is in an awkward stage; it's certainly convenient (I hate taking film to the store), but the price point for technology that is truly near to equal in quality to analog photography is still very high. Reading Glenn Reynolds' paeons to "affordable" cameras that are over $1000 is particularly galling , when you can still get an excellent analog 35mm camera for under $200.

And even then, digital suffers from the same problem the CD did and does; it's a cold, digital technology. There was an art to putting light to film that can be aped in Photoshop, but not (to my knowledge) on the camera itself. My daughter - who seems to have inherited the photography gene - even notices it; she specifically wanted an analog camera rather than a digital. (Note to self: Good girl).

There may come a time when I learn to tolerate the foibles of digital photography. I'm sure it will happen. But it's been 20 years, and I'm stil not to that point with the CD yet.

Oh. Please. Yes.

The NARN is getting a new neighbor:

Franken, who has said he plans a U.S. Senate run from Minnesota, confirmed Tuesday that he'd purchased a house in Minneapolis and plans to start broadcasting his show from the Twin Cities as early as January.

In a separate interview, co-host Lanpher was mum about a potential return to the Twin Cities -- but that appears unlikely, since she's working on a new project for the network.

Welcome to the Twin Cities, Al.

We'll be waiting.