Shot In The Dark

Anti-Americanism Of Convenience

Victor Davis Hanson on the convenient anti-Americanism of the international "elite".

It didn't start with Indra "Middle Finger" Nooyi:

The anti-Americanism that we frequently see and hear, then, is often a plaything of the international elite — a corporate grandee, a leisured athlete, or a refined novelist who flies in and out of the West, counts on its globalizing appendages for wealth, and then mocks those who make it all possible — but never to the point that their own actions would logically follow their rhetoric and thus cost them so dearly.

We might expect that a chagrined Ms. Nooyi would resign from Pepsi since it is the glossy fingernail of the American middle finger that apparently so bothers her. We pray that Mr. Khan will stay among the mobs and rioters of the madrassas and mosques he stirred up. Perhaps novelist Roy can write in an indigenous Indian language, peddle her books at home, and thereby disinvest from this hegemonic system that drives her to fury.

Granted, Roy and Nooyi and Khan come from a place that owes nothing to the US (other than repated disaster relief and immense famine aid during a time when the likes of Paul Ehrlich insisted that India was essentially doomed).

But how about Europe? A place that owes us a blood debt?

Then there is the director of anti-American films from Denmark, Lars von Trier, who whined, “Mr. Bush is an a**hole. So much in Denmark is American. . . America fills about 60 per cent of my brain. So, in fact, I am American. But I can't go there to vote and I can't change anything, because I am from a small country. So that is why I make films about America.”

Memo to poor head-pounding Mr. von Trier: There is no compelling reason to have anything American in your country — except in the past to expel German invaders you either could not or would not keep out. Simply stop buying American. Don’t watch American movies. Admonish not us, but your own leaders to get out of NATO, pronto — the faster the better. Deny entry to all American troops — and tourists. Embrace the EU. It’s bigger and more populous than the U.S. Create an all-EU defense force. Go for it all!

Above all, be sure that your films are not marketed through any global organization that is either American-financed, directed, or substantiates a Westernized hegemony in the promulgation of intellectual property. Perhaps there are plenty of Danes who would see your films about Denmark at home — and that might cleanse your brain of what you hate, if make you a little less money.

It all seems so simple.

Things I Just Can't Figure Out

Put a musical instrument in front of me, and I can figure out how to crank out a tune sooner than later.

Put me in a foreign country, and I will figure out how to get around in the local language, at least enough to get around and eat and get beer.

But this kind of thing?:

peaking of short-stack play, my final hand was a good example, I think, of doing the right thing and losing anyway. From behind the short stack (and considerably shorter than anyone else at the table,) I held a Q-middle card. I flopped to a pair of Queens, and immediately went all in.

The guy who followed me in had a huge stack and a 5-K in the pocket...he had flopped to a pair of 5's.

Now, I admit that the look of dread when he saw my Queen was immensely gratifying to me.

And the King that appeared on the River was immensely gratifying to him. Aaaaah, if only if only.

Best hand of the night was another short-stack play. Got dealt an AK off-suit and stuck around through the flop, then saw a huge scare card (I think it was a good straight draw) on the turn which nobody bet on, and went all-in. Two guys followed me and I immediately blurted out, "I lose." But they didn't have anything either - I won with an Ace high! Woo-hoo! Takin' chips!

Lost. Completely lost.

Whoah

"Whuppin'" was the five thousandth post on this blog since February 5, 2002!

Don't ask me to summarize them all...

Memorial Day

We're off to observe memorial day today.

We may try to stop by my kids' grandfather's grave, in the northwest 'burbs. My ex father-in-law Al fought in World War II, as a gunner's mate on the USS Collette. I tell his story (and that of his brother, who was killed when his destroyer was torpedoed) in this post from last December.

Then, off to a park to be determined later, for a barbecue. I have to try to get there early enough to find a grill - my old Smokey Joe disappeared a while ago. I should probably just buy another...anyway, I have some steaks and potato salad and all the other goodies, so it'll be a fun picnic, after which I think we'll rent a canoe and take a tour around some local lake or another.

Have a great Memorial Day. I won't nag you to remember what the day's about - I assume most of my readers know this already.

Whuppin'

A couple of weeks back, when Norm Coleman and George Galloway went mano a mano in the Senate, some of the more credulous elements of the left claimed a Galloway victory.

"Time will tell", I replied.

Time, I think, is telling; Clinton Taylor shows how one blogger may have caught Galloway in a bit of perjury:

During the hearing (which, though not released by the Senate, has been transcribed here), Senator Norm Coleman pressed Mr. Galloway about his links to Saddam crony, Oil-for-Food beneficiary, and super-rich businessman Fawaz Zureikat, who was a major donor to Mr. Galloway's Mariam Appeal charity. Did Galloway know Zureikat was trading oil for Saddam? Mr. Galloway responded that

Not only did I know that, but I told everyone about it. I emblazoned it in our literature, on our Web site, precisely so that people like you could not later credibly question my bona fides in that regard. So I did better than that. I never asked him if he was trading in oil. I knew he was a big trader with Iraq, and I told everybody about it.

On his website? Well, the Mariam Appeal site (www.Mariamappeal.com) is long gone, the domain name snapped up by Internet squatters, so we'll just have to take Mr. Galloway's word for it, right?

Not quite. There's this nifty thing called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (here), which takes "snapshots" of websites over time. It works a little like Google's vast searchable cache, sending out an automated "webcrawler" that remembers the HTML code of the sites it encounters. Brand-new blogger George Gooding at Seixon.com used it to find the snapshots of the old Mariam Appeal site and verify whether Zureikat's identity was, in fact, emblazoned thereon.

Gooding's report says of the July 2001 snapshot "...at this point in time, there is absolutely no mention of Mr. Zureikat or any other donors to the organization at all." Zureikat does make an appearance on the Mariam Appeal site, however. He was named as a contact within the National Mobilization Committee on Defense of Iraq (NMCDI) for the "Rebuilding Baghdad Library" book drive. There is no mention made of his business relationship with Iraq. (This page was not there on April 1, 2001, but was there on a subsequent snapshot taken the next day. So we know when Zureikat's name was added to Mariam Appeal's site.)

Why does it matter?

WHY SHOULD WE CARE about Mr. Galloway's website said about Mr., er, Chairman Zureikat? Because by identifying Mr. Zureikat as a beneficiary of, rather than a donor to, the Mariam Appeal's charity, it looks like Galloway knew how shady his true relationship with Zureikat was, so he tried to disguise it.

But when confronted about this by Senator Coleman, Mr. Galloway switched his story again, claiming that he had been completely open all along. George Gooding, the blogger, suspects that Galloway may have underestimated the long memory of the Internet and figured that this prevarication would pass undetected.

Posted by Mitch at 10:00 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Beware of Rabid Partisans Bearing Nonpartisanship

Lori Sturdevant starts Sunday's column:

For sparing you a harangue about how excessive partisanship gets in the way of governing at the statehouse, credit my teenage daughter.

Sturdevant goes on to deliver a thoroughly partisan harangue about partisanship. Presumably her daughter had nothing to do with it.

Sturdevant:

This realist says it's past time for the people who sit in seats of power in St. Paul to get used to the partisan divide, and find ways to function over, under, around or through it.

Most of Minnesota's lawmaking practices arose when one party dominated, and developed when the state's two parties were similar in outlook. Unless those practices are adapted to today's red/blue reality, not a lot of governing -- or rather, not a lot of good governing -- is going to happen. (Witness what happened last year, and the year before, and the year before that.)

Right. No partisan harangue there.

Presumably Sturdevant's definition of "good governing" is the same as Bishop Flynn's.

So, rather than scold about stubborn partisanship, this column humbly offers several suggestions that might help 201 stubbornly partisan legislators get past politics, to governing:

• Committee membership should more accurately reflect the partisan composition of each chamber. The 68 GOP/66 DFL split in the House this year should have meant, for example, that the 38-member Ways and Means Committee had a 20/18 partisan split. Instead, it's 22/16.

Great! Let's do the same in the Senate! That'd mean some of the Metrocrat-controlled committees should be run by more moderate, responsible outstate DFLers.

Brilliant!

• No freshmen members, and few sophomores, should serve on the committees that craft the big budget bills. That's an old rule that lapsed for reasons that had nothing to do with governing well. It assured that the legislators who oversee the budget have a measure of political security in their districts, and a better-than-rookie sense of state stewardship.

In other words, we want politicians to "go native" before they get onto the budget business; in Lori Sturdevant's world, they should become career politicians, in love with perks and power and being in government, before they start writing checks.

• Committee chairs should be under orders from caucus leaders not to bring to the floor big spending bills that lack minority support within their committees. That rule would have kept off the Senate floor a DFL-backed tax bill that last week could muster only a miserable 12 votes in the House.

Sounds good, right?

And we'd limit this to "spending bills" precisely how? Because the "minority support" clause is a cudgel that could be used to keep a lot of divisive legislation at bay.

• House leaders should allow amendments to increase the size of spending bills during floor debates. Since the GOP took over in 1999, the House (but not the Senate) has adopted a Washington-style budgeting process that imposes spending ceilings for the big bills before they are assembled. Once the cap is set, amendments to enlarge those bills with general-fund money are ruled out of order, without debate.

As a result, it's hard for working majorities that cross party lines to put their imprint on spending bills. It's widely known, for example, that a bipartisan majority of the House's 134 members would vote for a cigarette tax increase in lieu of any number of spending cuts, if given the chance. But the chance has been denied.

Good.

The working majority that voted for a gas tax increase on May 12 got its way because the gas tax flows into the state's highway fund, not the general fund. That put it out of reach of the spending rule. The 10 defections from GOP orthodoxy on that bill showed what might have been possible with a few other bills, had the rule not been in force.

All the more reason to keep it in force.

Minnesota's legislative history is one of endless larceny against the taxpayer. Any rule that stays the hungry happyfingers of the legislature - especially those of legislators that grow to "love their jobs" - is a good thing.

Make these changes, and the big bills the House and Senate send to conference committees might not be poles apart, as several of this year's bills are. Instead of stark red and blue, the bills might arrive in varying shades of purple, and be easier to blend.

The problem is, when red and Minnesota blue "blend", it turns green. And a thin majority of us are sick to death of it.

That might not be enough to keep one other partisan -- the one in the governor's office -- from getting in the way of responsible governing.

But when the governor is the impediment to good government, it's much more obvious to voters than is a roadblock in House or Senate ranks.

Where "good government" means "paying for government at whatever cost is demanded."

When Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed the transportation bill on Thursday, he took his opposition to reasonable tax increases to a new level of public awareness.

He made himself the first guy who'll come to mind the next time a traffic-jammed Minnesotan curses the politicians for neglecting this state's roads and transit.

Sturdevant's newfound concern for the motorist is touching, but seriously. Cry us a river. The last time the DFL controlled things, they let the road system go to hell while pouring money into the light rail boondoggle.

The governor is out of the reach of procedural reform -- but he's not out of the reach of the voters.

Right.

The voters that sent him to Saint Paul largely on the strength of a no new taxes pledge.

And I'm sure in Lori Sturdevant's rarified little world, where "good governance" is a synonym for keeping government in the chips at all cost, the voters won't do it again - and she'll be surprised in that special, Pauline Kael-like way.

Issues

I'm wired to try to find solutions to things, especially when the "thing" is "nasty disputes between people".

For example, I'm pretty much disposed to believe that reasonable people should be able to reach reasonable solutions to the issues that divide us.

Few issues divide us as Americans more than abortion. I oppose it, but it's not my marquee issue. I can see some of the arguments for abortion - the medical ones, anyway. And I think ,sometimes, in unguarded moments, "maybe rational people can reach a rational compromise".

Then I read cretins like this, writing smug, self-satisfied tripe like this, and realize that there are fewer rational people out there than I'd hoped for.

Leaving The Left

Cigarette Smoking Man, from "Cancer World" (which is, by the way, one of my favorite unknown local blogs) has piece by Keith Thompson on "Leaving The Left". CSM notes:

This article deserves more than just a link and a passing blogstyle attaboy. It deserves a full length copy-paste plagiarization because I want to make sure people read it. It captures about 99% of why I myself can't swill the same political Kool-Aide as my fellow punk rockers and porn fans today:

So go go read the article, already.

It starts:

Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Read the whole thing.

Saad Story

The Detroit Free Press goes inside the tangled story of the Saad nomination and, potentially, filibuster.

No matter where he ends up, Saad, 56, of Oakland County, has been on one long, strange trip.

Although not one of Bush's most contentious judicial nominations -- that role has been reserved for Priscilla Owen of Texas and Janice Rogers Brown of California -- Saad is easily the most longstanding. He was first picked for the federal bench by Former President George Bush in 1992, then by George W. Bush in 2001, 2003 and again this year.

Most of that time since 2001 has been spent waiting to see whether his nomination would be approved or scuttled in negotiations, on issues mostly unrelated to Saad, among the White House, Senate Republicans and Michigan's two Democratic U.S. Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow.

Also waiting nearly as long have been three other Michigan nominees to the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati: U.S. District Judge David McKeague of Lansing, state Appeals Court Judge Richard Griffin of Traverse City and Wayne County Circuit Judge Susan Neilson.

But Saad is the only one of the previously filibustered nominees to have almost scuttled his own hopes by mistakenly sending a scathing e-mail of Stabenow's alleged gamesmanship on his nomination. To her.

Two weeks ago, he was again briefly vaulted to the forefront of news reports on the fight over Bush's nominees when Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate's top Democrat, spoke on the floor about "a problem" in Saad's FBI background file that made him an obvious filibuster target.

An interesting, and frustrating, read.

(Via former Saad clerk and my longstanding electronic acquaintance Geoff Brown)

Death Toll

( I first posted this on Wednesday, May 25. I'm bumping it to the weekend; please leave your observations in the comments).

There's a spirited discussion going on in comment thread on the fallout of the smoking ban.

In the thread, a commenter notes that the Park Tavern in Bloomington - a long-time institution in Bloomington, as I understand it - has apparently closed.

Another commenter - from the American Lung Association of Minnesota - notes correctly that "bars closed before the smoking ban". However, it could be fairly pointed out that since bars and restaurants operate on very tight margins, the smoking ban and the attendant drop in traffic (which is, by many anecdotal reports, severe to catastrophic) will only make those margins tighter, and untenable for many, many more bars.

So let's try to figure this out. If you're a bar owner or employee in the Twin Cities, or know someone who is, leave me a comment; how is business doing? I'd like to take the temperature of the local bar scene and cut through both sides' propaganda.

Leave a comment!

I'll start. Word has it Gabby's, a longtime Northeast Minneapolis joint, has laid off half of its staff.

More?

UPDATE May 28: I'm bumping this ahead, as I head out to check some places.

I'll report tomorrow; you all do the same, y'hear?

On The Road

We'll be at White Bear Lake Superstore today - on Highway 61, between County E and County F, for the show today.

We'll be talking about the week that was, as well as interviewing Katherine Kersten.

If you're in the market for a car, of course, Paul Ruben and the guys'd love to see you there. If I were in the market, I'd certainly be shopping there (and in another year, who knows?)

An Immodest Proposal

Wonder of wonders, I actually had a decent discussion a few weeks ago in comment thread over at New Patriot re a post on Norm Coleman's mano a mano with George Galloway in the Senate.

The discussion was largely about the ineptitude and impotence of the United Nations. One of my main points was that the UN, when it comes to peacekeeping, is in general fairly useless, and in some cases worse than impotent - for example, Srebrenica and the Congo in the sixties. The only UN military operations that have ever succeeded - East Timor and Kosovo - did so mainly because competent military powers (Australia and the US, respectively) made it known that the UN would not be leading their troops into battle. Other military engagements have ended less-than-completely due to UN interference - Korea and the first Iraq war being examples.

Dykstra's response, to paraphrase, was "but they do so much good humanitarian work".

Let's accept for a moment that organizations like the World Health Organization, UNICEF and so on actually do a good job - by no means an iron-clad assumption, if you read Diplomad's rage-inducing narrative from the scene of last winter's tsunami, where the UN's incompetence at acute crisis relief was on large-scale display, but let's run with it for now.

So why lard up the good work they do (yeah, yeah) with the trappings of a world government?

Would UNICEF's work be any less useful or valid if it were merely a huge NGO? Does the UN bureaucracy and the trappings of its alleged mission help the WHO make the world any healthier?

Liberals: What would we lose if we disbanded the UN, saving the bits and pieces that aren't completely useless (or actively malignant)? Give the IMF, the WHO, UNICEF and so on an independent existence, keep their current staff and budget, disband the Security Council and get the UN out of the military business forever?

How would the world be any worse off? For that matter, why would the world and the people who rely on the UN's humanitarian bureaucracy not be better off?

This Is Not Scrappleface

It's not Iowahawk. It's not even a Kim Du Toit parody.

Brit doctors want to ban long kitchen knives:

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

Let's recap:

1. Britain banned nearly all civilian gun ownership in the late eighties.
2. Violent crime skyrocketed; half of all burglaries are of occupied dwellings (nearly quintuple the American rate) and assaults - with knives, clubs, and (by the way) illegally-owned guns boomed.

None of this seems particularly...new, does it?

Hey, look - they even got "experts"!

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.

The researchers said a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault - but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs.

And there's just no way thugs will switch to truncheons, clubs and brass knuckles - or illegal knives and guns, natch. Uh-uh.

And I'll ask chefs for self-defense advice about the time I ask a cop how to do a perfect Creme Brulee.

Knife wound
Kitchen knives can inflict appalling wounds.

As do clubs, garbage cans, bricks, and socks full of rocks.

Where does the BBC go for advice? The authoritarian/totalitarian past!

French laws in the 17th century decreed that the tips of table and street knives be ground smooth.

A century later, forks and blunt-ended table knives were introduced in the UK in an effort to reduce injuries during arguments in public eating houses.

Hey, they already have laws!

Home Office spokesperson said there were already extensive restrictions in place to control the sale and possession of knives.

"The law already prohibits the possession of offensive weapons in a public place, and the possession of knives in public without good reason or lawful authority, with the exception of a folding pocket knife with a blade not exceeding three inches.

"Offensive weapons are defined as any weapon designed or adapted to cause injury, or intended by the person possessing them to do so.

"An individual has to demonstrate that he had good reason to possess a knife, for example for fishing, other sporting purposes or as part of his profession (e.g. a chef) in a public place.

"The manufacture, sale and importation of 17 bladed, pointed and other offensive weapons have been banned, in addition to flick knives and gravity knives."

A spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: "ACPO supports any move to reduce the number of knife related incidents, however, it is important to consider the practicalities of enforcing such changes."

Yeah - like it'll look ridiculous, and eventually backfire completely.

Day Of Appeals

Two things:

• Captain Ed is running a logo contest for his "Not One Dime" drive - his push to "make our voices heard at the RNC by withholding donations to the NRSC until the GOP caucus improves its leadership in the Senate and starts acting like a majority party." Break out your Photoshop and go to it.

  Also - today's the last day of my Laptop Bleg. I'm looking to replace my recently-deceased laptop. So if you like "Shot In The Dark", your support - even a buck or two - will be very sincerely appreciated.

  Thanks. As you were.

  Posted by Mitch at 08:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Noted In Passing

I didn't think I was going to make it to Keegans last night, but a last-minute development got me there at...well, the last minute.

I ended up teaming up with Marcus Aurelius from The Attic, Jordan from The MAWB Squad,. and Barry from...well, he doesn't have a blog, so I'm at a loss as to how to describe him.

I didn't feel especially confident as the game wound to a close, and stepped out on the patio for a bit. I figured Jordan was yanking our chains when she came out and told us to get back in the bar, because we'd won.

I guess Jo doesn't yank chains. We won!

It was a fun win, too - partly because everyone had a part, all four of us coming with answers that stumped the other three, and partly because, well, beating the Fraters is always gratifying.

I stopped by the Frats' table later on; Chad the Elder looked a bit like Vince Lombardi dressing down a group of linemen that had dropped a block. I didn't bother them.

I'll have to try to get back to defend the title next week; the Fraters are always good when playing comeback ball.

This Surprised Me

I love digital cameras, largely because I never remember to take film to be developed. I download the picture, and, poof, it's done. But I'm not much of a photographer; I got an "A" in my high school photography class mainly because I didn't accidentally kill myself in the darkroom; it had nothing to do with photographic talent.

My daughter, on the other hand, seems to have inherited something of my grandparents' skill in the area. And she loves film, probably for the same reasons I prefer vinyl records to CDs.

So I always figured eventually film cameras would find the same niche that vinyl music has today; the province of the epicurean, the artist and the pro.

I was wrong, apparently.

The prospect of digital cameras completely replacing their film counterparts, once taken for granted, may be fading fast.

The price and complexity of digital cameras, and competition from cell-phone cameras, have some predicting that unit sales of digital cameras will begin to decline as soon as 2007 and that future digital camera purchases will be largely to replace existing models.

Christopher Chute, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., believes that only about 55 percent of U.S. households will ever own a stand-alone digital camera.

I have a fairly cheapo little digital camera that works...modestly well. I'll be impressed when digital SLRs drop into the same range where you can now find a film SLR...

Linked To Partisanship

In Nick Coleman's snide little sideswipe at bloggers yesterday, he sniffed:

The guest list was dominated by self-described "new media" activists whose reliably partisan views have earned them links on the home page of the Minnesota Republican Party.

Damn. Busted. Our views are "reliably partisan", and so we get linked by the GOP.

I guess we don't qualify as objective!

So let's look over at DFLers.org, the official blog of the Minnesota DFL party. Who gets linked?

The Star-Tribune! Along with a bunch of other "reliably partisan" bloggers (Blogumentary, BushOut.TV, Centrisity, Chris Dykstra, Civil Liberties Watch, Mark Dayton Blog, MN Republican Watch, Minnesota Progress, Minnesota Politics, Moderate Left, Twin Cities Babelogue)!

What's the point? Just this - that for Nick Coleman, "morning drive" "host" at the local FrankenNet affiliate to call himself an "objective" "journalist" (as if that itself is not a contradiction in terms) is not as comical as any of us NARN bloggers trying to plead objectivity; it's more ludicrous. None of us have ever made bones about our point of view; Coleman flits about behind the thin fiction of having been a "journalist" to allege objectivity.

We're honest. He should try it.

By the way, DFLers.com staff; you list the "Fargo Forum" under "Minnesota Media". Technically, Fargo is in this state called "North Dakota". It's found waaaay west of Lyndale Avenue. Look it up.

Thanks to commenter "Knowledge Worker", from yesterday's thread on the subject, for noticing.

Unaccountably...

...this bit of news slipped past me.

Governor Pawlenty signed the Minnesota Personal Protection Act into law on Tuesday. It went back into effect yesterday.

Take that, Maoists!

As soon as I get my tax refund, I'm in.

Compassion

Katherine Kersten, the Strib's new token conservative, and her new column are finally up and running in the Strib.

And she's off to a great start, bringing what promises to be a healthy, long-overdue dollop of reason and common sense to a columnist roster that has ranged from Doug Grow's mild hectoring to Kim Ode's incongruity to whatever it is that Nick Coleman does.

Her first column gets the party started right.

She tackles Archbishop Flynn's rant last week against our status as merely a very highly taxed state:

According to the Federation of Tax Administrators, Minnesota ranked sixth among states in the per capita burden of state and local taxes in 2002, the latest year for which figures are available.

If the archbishop is right, the best way to show our compassion would be to become No. 1 -- the highest-taxed state in the nation. This might make some of us feel good. But I suspect it would be the worst thing to do if we really want to help poor Minnesotans.

Let's take an example: If the proposition that high taxes benefit the poor is correct, the luxury boat tax that Congress passed in 1990 was the perfect tax. It sought to raise revenue by targeting only the richest Americans, who could well afford to pay, and slapping a 10 percent tax on fancy boats.

Problem was, the rich didn't pay the tax. They just went to the Bahamas to buy their boats. But the tax devastated the domestic boat-building industry. Tens of thousands of working-class people -- shipyard workers, carpenters, janitors at boat stores -- were thrown out of work. Congress hastily repealed the tax.

The lawmakers who proposed the luxury boat tax may well have been motivated by compassion. Unfortunately, reality trumped wishful thinking. In the end, these officials hurt the very people they intended to help.

Read on.

Wanderlust

I moved here almost 20 years ago, for much the same reasons James Lileks did; to get out of North Dakota.

And I love Saint Paul. I really do - there's a lot to love about the Twin Cities. And it's a good thing, because I am basically here for the next six years, whether I like it or not. So like it I shall.

But Lileks' column today certainly hits a chord.

James is getting restless with living here as long has he has:

It’s an odd feeling, and I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. I have identified with this place for so long it feels like treason to leave, and there’s something dangerous in disengaging long before you actually go. I love my home, I love my job, I love belonging here, and I love this place, but it’s trying my patience. And to be frank, it feels like it’s done with me, too. This is hard to describe. But. Having internalized down to the molecular level a sense of this place’s history, it has come to seem like a fool’s conceit, a love song to indifferent bricks. I mean, so I care about conservation of the Baker Building. So what? Is this what I’m going to do for the rest of my life – walk downtown twice a week, look up at the old friends, and say “yep, you used to be Dayton’s, but now you’re not, and the old Radisson was there, but now there’s a new Radisson. How about that.”

I haven't done quite the job of internalizing that James has - but it's getting there, especially on my side of the river.

Somewhere in the back of my head the idea Minneapolis day is four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in the late summer, when all the friendly spirits assemble. The ladies in sensible dresses coming out of Powers with a new pair of shoes, the men in hats stretching in the Donaldson’s tower and wondering if they should drive down to the strip this weekend, maybe catch a game at the Met; the janitor over the WCCO studio swabbing the floor so it shines when Cedric Adams comes in for his broadcast, the lonely guy heading into the Gopher to kill time before the bus takes him out of town, the secretaries at the Bridgeman’s having a malt before heading home on the trolley to tiny flats in Uptown. I can wave but they don’t wave back. Ungrateful shades! I see the town in terms many wouldn’t recognize – either the history long vanished my own history no one would know, or particularly care about. In New York or Chicago or any other large city there’s so much history you can explore it forever, but sometimes it feels like there’s not enough here to keep me going forward. Every place I go is thick with history, and half of it’s meaningless, the result of the inevitable accretion of tracing the same route for too many years. The history that actually means something is a phantom, and somewhat of a bother. What would it be like to live somewhere and not see what had been there before?

I left Fargo for a reason, after all.

And maybe it's just the fact that I'm 42 and bored to tears with some key chunks of my life, but I'm starting to see some of those reasons again.

Here, of course, James and I diverge:

But of course you’re running away from yourself when you do something like this, right? Well, no. Wherever you go, there you are. But at least in Arizona, you’re warmer, and CRIMINEY JUDAS I’m tired of being cold all the time. You oughtn't be cold in May. I walk outside to the gazebo – can’t sit down, the seats are wet – and I can see my breath. Which is nice, because it means I’m alive. But still.OK, I've loved the weather this spring. It appeals to my inner scotsman. Rain and clouds make me feel less guilty about working indoors.

Still:

All I know is that I’m coming to the end of a line, somehow...I really do love it there. Everytime I go to Arizona I think: yes, sir, this is for me. So I have a project. A five year project. I have to reconnect; clear the decks; remember why I love it here and make it work. If in five years I discover that the Minneapolis I love is a thing of fiction made of old photos and postcards, it’s time to till the soil. When I came back here the thought that I’d drive these streets as an old man was a comfort, and it may well end up so. It’s also possible I end up braking into a skid on some March sleet and get broadsided as I pass through Lake Street for the 95,933rd and final time, and my last thought will be: so much sun you could have had. So much sun.

Er, ixnay on Arizona for me.

But every time I go to Chicago or New York, the wheels start turning.

Again, I love it here - for a lot of reasons. And I have six years to think about it, no matter what.

Posted by Mitch at 07:48 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

Protest Too Much

As a general rule, I've always thought broadening initiative and referendum excessively was a lousy idea. There's a reason that we're a Republic, one that elects representatives to handle the minutuiae of government rather; it protects the rights of political minorities, for starters.

But there are upsides to referendum as well. One key reason Switzerland has been the most sensibly-run, prosperous nation in Europe for the past few hundred years is their plebiscitory form of democracy; it's very easy to refer bills, especially spending bills, for a popular vote. Thus, the big spending socialist dreams of the liberal northern cantons are pulled back to earth by the conservative southern cantons' more sensible residents, meaning that while Switzerland's government is relatively intrusive (for reasons as much cultural as political), it's traditionally vastly less so (at least in terms of legislative fiat) than other European governments.

Which has got to scare the Star/Tribune.

The Strib's editorial this morning describes the issues and problems with I and R - and their argument makes a certain amount of sense.

Then it ends with a whimper:

Instead of having to spend money on both elections and lobbying to get their way, I & R allows elections alone to do the job. It eliminates the middleman.

Unfortunately, it also eliminates the expertise the middlemen and -women of the Legislature develop. It eliminates their deliberation, the openness of their procedural structures, and their collective judgment. That's a whale of a lot to lose.

Openness of their procedural structures?

Maybe if you get paid to follow the "procedural structures", they're "open".

And while there are some genuine experts among the "middlemen", I could handle a whole lot less of it on some issues; Wes Skoglund's on gun control, Ellen Anderson and Phyllis Kahn's on domestic and family court law, and so on.

It would be a shame if a bad patch of gridlock made Minnesotans think I & R would be better

Actually, the best thing about properly-applied I and R is that it would tend to induce gridlock, at least as far as "progressive" big government goes. Which is actually a reason to adopt it.

The ease with which such far-reaching legislation can be wrapped in misleading slogans and sold to the public explains I & R's appeal to well-heeled advocates of change.

Does the irony escape anyone - the Strib's well-heeled publishers, using a misleading slogan, disparage "well-heeled" dissidents' misleading slogans.

Clairvoyants!

Meeting celebrities - show-biz, media, especially politics - is the highlight of my life.

It comes mainly from having grown up out in the boondocks. My friends and I would sit up at night, reading magazines and newspapers and watching the TV, and think "Wow. Our pathetic lives would be validated if we could only schmooze...no, forget that, if we could even meet any of these people".

Mayors, starlets, barroom rockers, legislators, columnists - whomever. It doesn't matter. I love to meeting them, and will do almost anything so that I can.

Why?

Because fundamentally, I find myself validated only when I bask in the reflected glow of others' glory.

And if you believe that, you should be a Nick Coleman fan.

I criticize Nick Coleman a lot. This column sort of shows you why.

He's writing - a week after the fact - about last week's reception at the Governor's Mansion.

Thirty-two years in this business and I have been inside the Minnesota governor's residence only once, when Gov. Rudy Perpich ranted to the press about how the old dump needed fixing up and led us to a bucket in the attic that had been placed beneath a leaky ceiling for a photo opportunity.

I'm not complaining. I try to avoid the corridors of power on Summit Avenue. That creepy mansion puts a hex on people.

If bloggers were smart, they'd stay away, too.

Let's come back to that later.

Last Saturday, Mark Brunswick - who wrote the excellent Two Years In Iraq blog last spring - wrote about the confab at the mansion:

Some members of the new media found out this week that they like the old idea of schmoozing with people in power.

On the one hand, a few of the bloggers present seemed...well, not so much "starstruck" as "adulatory". Pawlenty's a natural politician, and a great host; he's good at getting people to like him. It's part of the reason he's the governor.

But it struck me as a galloping overreach on Brunswick's part to assume that we, as a group, enjoyed "schmoozing with people in power". I can't speak for the likes of John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson and King Banaian, who regularly hobnob among people with clout; speaking for myself, I enjoy schmoozing with everyone, power be damned. I have no less fun talking with bikers at a dive, people in line at Rainbow or my neighbors than I did with the Governor or Dan McElroy, his chief of staff. I do a lot of it, and not because it's my job.

Brunswick's line, unfortunately, put an air of cynicism to it that it didn't warrant. Which is fine, except that Coleman takes it and runs with it.

Straight into a tree, as it happens:

The latest goofy situation came last week when the current occupant, Tim Pawlenty, hosted a reception for the right-wing blog fraternity.

The guest list was dominated by self-described "new media" activists whose reliably partisan views have earned them links on the home page of the Minnesota Republican Party.

Well, blow me down. Sure enough, there I am. I don't recall ever being asked about it, but it makes perfect sense, I guess.

I don't care who the governor plays gin rummy with. The problem is that state law says the mansion -- "the people's house" -- is for ceremonial purposes, not partisan ones. So it is notable when a governor -- one mentioned as a contender for higher office -- invites spear carriers to make nice with him at the people's house.

Did you read this and picture Little Nick Coleman in elementary school, in the restroom, smirking at one of the other little boys; "You didn't wash your hands! I'm telling Sister Bertha!"

Coleman, naturally, doesn't favor us with a reference to the "state law" in question. The problem with the law is that it's so legalistic; if it mentions "partisan" activities, I'd say it's even money that it means "Official GOP or DFL activities"; you can't set up tables in the solarium to stuff envelopes.

While we're all partisan - with a small "p" - it was far from an official GOP activity. Coleman would have you believe that it was; it'd be, I'll be charitable, a mistaken view.

Coleman talked with Kelli Gorr, program director at WJON in Saint Cloud - the WCCO of lake country:

"I'll stand as the one person who would not be considered right-wing," said Gorr, who broadcast a talk show from the governor's reception room in St. Paul on the day of the reception, but who took pains to present a politically balanced program. "The spin was that they [the governor's staff] wanted to reach new media able to disseminate information quickly and to say thank you to the nontraditional media. That was the spin. But if you call it most definitely right-wing, you're not off base."

Can't slip a thing past Kelli Gorr; the bloggers were Republicans.

So the questions are:

• Do some of the bloggers sound star-struck? Maybe. There's all kinds of people out there.
• Does it mean bloggers are partisan? Duh. I'm a Republican. Deal with it.
• Does it mean that bloggers are less independent? Good question. I have in general been a Pawlenty supporter, although I've strongly disagreed with him on gambling, transit policy, education policy, and state casinos, and wish to hold his feet in the fire about taxes. I'm a supporter - he earned it - but he could blow it, still. Am I an independent? Figure that for yourself - but I don't think I qualify as any less independent than, say, a columnist who parlays his "independent", "non-monkey" opinion into a job at an Air America affiliate, which is hardly a sign of rigorous independence, by the way.

Coleman ends with a "warning":

Be careful, bloggers. I've seen it happen before.

The mansion plays tricks on big egos. Once you glimpse yourself in a gilded mirror, you start to believe your own stuff.

Yeah. We've seen that before:

I am a professional journalist...I have been a reporter longer than most bloggers have been alive...But here's what really makes bloggers mad: I know stuff...I have reported from almost every county in the state, I have covered murders, floods, tornadoes, World Series and six governors...I have an ear trained to detect baloney....

Is it really "knowing stuff" when you're "believing your own" "stuff"?

And do we call this - the act of schmoozing yourself, being star-struck with your own presence, "Autoschmoozotic?"

Up In Flames

The night Saint Paul's smoking ban went into effect, the ringleaders of the smoke ban effort celebrated at Tavern On Grand, one of my personal favorite Saint Paul eateries.

Ironically - according to Swiftee...

Well, I'll let him tell the story.

Tom:

As I wrote earlier, many Saint Paul pubs and eateries are suffering mightily due to the smoking ban in force in Ramsey County. One of the hard hit resturaunts mentioned in an article in the SP Avenues weekly newspaper is the Glockenspiel German resturaunt located on W. 7th.

Evidently, owner Mary Wildmo has come to reap the benefits of her decision and has decided that retreat is sometimes the better part of valor.

Tom quotes from the E-Democracy Saint Paul discussion list:

For those of you following the Ramsey County smoking restrictions, Glockenspiel has applied for and received a provisional waiver to allow smoking. So, when looking for smoke free drinking and dining in St. Paul, this one is out.

Jeanne Weigum, Breathing easy in Merriam Park

Merriam Park. Heh. Where else?

Tom gives us the who's who:

You may remember that Jeanne is a driving force against the right of owners to conduct their businesses as they will. Flush from her partial victory, Jeanne et. al. is already preparing to restrict the actions of people in apartments..but it looks like she may have counted her chickens before they had hatched.

Not only has the Glockenspiel gone back up in "flames", her flagship, her trophy; the venue she hand picked to host her post ban gloat is following suit:

Posted 24 May 2005 20:26 by Jeanne Weigum

Bummer and a half. I am just going over the list from the County on which restaurants/bars have been granted smoking waivers. Since the list is not alphabetical, it is pretty easy to miss things. But, bottom line, now if you want a smoke-free fish sandwich, don't bother with Tavern on Grand.

Apparently they are attempting to increase their booze sales so they will qualify for a one year waiver. In the mean time, they have 6 months to smoke smoke smoke those cigarettes.

Jeanne Weigum, Crying in my beer in Merriam Park

Perhaps the problem Jeanne, is that you're crying in a Merriam Park beer instead of one sitting on the bar of the Tavern on Grand.

Swiftee and I go back along way with Jeanne Weigum - we were among the conservatives that the various E-Democracy list managers suspended pretty much to a number back in the days before blogging gave us an outlet outside the hive.

Like so many of these crusades "for our own good", the unintended consequences were...well, unintended. Honest:

Remember, these are the people who absolutely guaranteed that non-smokers would be pouring into bars and pubs when the smokers were removed. I can't count the number of editorials I've read by smug anti-business mavens proclaiming their unmitigated ecstasy now that they could "attend a smoke free live music show and have a beer in smoke free bars".

Of course, bars that can't get waivers - which is most of 'em in Hennepin County, and the vast majority in Ramsey - are sucking pond water right now. Many bars have laid off staff, and some are teetering on the brink of collapse - bars are always a low margin business.

Speaking of health benefits and costs - I wonder if anyone has calculated the health costs of the stress involved in the layoffs in the hospitality industry?

I mean, for being the "party of the working stiff", the Volvo Liberals that brought us the smoking ban sure seem cavalier about waitresses, bartenders and barbacks...

Late Start

Crazy morning here in the Berg household.

The word for the day is "Clairvoyant"; more later.

By the way, response to my bleg - blog begging - to defray the cost of a new used laptop has been great. I'm only going to run the bleg another couple of days; if you like the blog, I'd appreciate any spare change you might see fit to drop off.

Thanks. More later today.

Selective Indignation

Mark Yost has a pre-Memorial Day time-on-target barrage aimed at the major media.

Re the current re-flap over the death of Pat Tillman:

The story of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who joined the Army Rangers and was killed in Afghanistan, resurfaced over the weekend, with allegations from his parents that the military "lied" to them about his death. I'll forgive Tillman's grief-stricken parents, but not the reporters who continue to flog this non-story.

According to the solons in the press, the Army covered up the circumstances around Tillman's death because it needed a hero to boost recruiting and justify the war. A more forgiving — and reasonable — explanation is that it's sometimes hard to immediately sort out exactly what happened in a firefight in the mountains of Afghanistan.

War is confusing - although the mainstream media seems to doubt that.

What's ironic is that if anyone's to blame for lionizing Pat Tillman, it's the media. Before the spent brass had time to cool, Tillman's tale was the top story in the 24-hour news cycle and remained so for a week. Furthermore, the Army reported the details of his death after a thorough investigation. This fact wasn't reported until the eighth paragraph of the 10-paragraph Washington Post story that ran in Monday's Pioneer Press.

You might ask "so?"

Now rewind to 1993 and the widely reported firefight in downtown Mogadishu. Among the dead were Delta Force operators Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, both posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by Oxford's most famous Vietnam-era scholar. What wasn't widely reported were the details of the White House ceremony.

Herb Shugart, father of the Medal of Honor recipient, blamed President Bill Clinton for his son's death, told him he was a disgrace, and refused to shake his hand. Why? Because theater commanders in Somalia had requested armor and were denied by Clinton and his defense secretary, former Wisconsin congressman Les Aspin. The reason? It wouldn't be viewed well; the U.S. would be seen as escalating the conflict.

Why wasn't this widely reported? Clearly the media's admiration for Clinton and his policies took precedence over what should have been a very real news story.

One needed to wait for the book "Black Hawk Down" to get any of that story.

Yost - a veteran - closes:

What's perhaps worst of all is the underlying tone of the media's spin on the Pat Tillman story. Namely, that if he was killed by friendly fire, he was somehow less heroic. This is especially despicable because they're besmirching Tillman to score points in their ideological battle with President Bush over the efficacy of the war against terrorism.

This is all illustrative of how the media just don't get it when it comes to the military. Pat Tillman, along with everyone else who puts on the uniform — be they Rangers, cooks, mechanics or nurses — are heroes just for showing up.

Indeed.

The Freep

Via the MAWB, I see that my note to Frist is now a Free Republic thread.

As it happens, this is the first time I've ever been to Free Republic; I have no, zero idea how my post got there...

...but it's pretty cool. Thanks, whomever it was.

Huh?

So one moment, Nick "DFL Monkey" Coleman calls the Northern Alliance "Pawlenty's lapdogs" or some such...

...and the next moment, he's reaching for the hand lotion because we pretty universally ripped his cigarette tax proposal.

Um...

I keep picturing his audience - the part that's not conservative bloggers listening for laughing points - sitting in their tattered armchairs in their ramblers in Richfield, surrounded by their cats, snacking from a big bowl of lead-based paint chips that flaked off their walls...

The Excrescence Strikes Back

It's worse than I thought, according to Rocketman:

Now the Republicans are treating the execrable Robert Byrd like a hero! Unbelievable. What a low moment. "We have kept the Republic," Byrd says. I think I'm going to be sick.

This keeps getting worse.

The Deal Is Rotten

A few of my commenters - and not a few bloggers - have suggested that yesterdays' abdication of power by Bill Frist was really a good deal, if you think about it.

I've thought about it.

Nope. Still awful.

Here's the problem:

1. The deal has a built-in loophole; the Senate can still filibuster if a nominee has ethical problems. So how much do you want to bet that the Democrats find "ethical problems" with every single Supreme Court nominee? The Dems have been practicing doing exactly that for four years, now; in their 2+2=7 world, they've convinced a good chunk of the American people that Priscilla Owen is an extremist, that Janice Rogers Brown is an anti-minority Auntie Tom. Before that, they convinced a whole lot of intellectual thinmints that Clarence Thomas was a lothario. In the age of Carville, what do you think they'll trot out against every single nominee to fill the Rehnquist seat?
2. "But wait! We still have the nuclear option!" No, we really don't. For starters, Frist and McConnell showed that they are perfectly willing to parlay advantage into disadvantage. And now, with this awful "compromise", the seven turncoats' power will zoom (at least temporarily) as the the partisan media lionize them. We're going to need to install some Senate leadership that realizes it is the majority, and that they were elected not to preserve and protect Senate tradition (which is in this case largely illusory) but the Constitution; that they were sent not to preserve "comity", but to enact the agenda for which they were sent to DC. If they can't remember that, they need to be thrown out.

The Senate Democrats have done the impossible; they have figured out how to govern as a majority even when they're not.

God help this country if they ever become a majority again.

The RINO Cancer

Last night in a fit of ire, I wrote a letter to Bill Frist: "You Suck". Then I went to bed. I figured sleeping on it would help.

Nah. It didn't help.

As several of my very astute commenters noted, the problem isn't just Frist. McCain, Warner, Graham, Chaffee, Collins, Snowe, and DeWine are the real problem here; they are of a piece with a problem we've been fighting in Minnesota for a GOP generation, the cancer of the RINO.

In Minnesota, the RINOs had an excuse - Battered Spouse Syndrome. Republicans had been beaten so much and so often, they could perhaps be forgiven for going along to get along. Not any more, certainly, which is why we're engaged in the exact same fight here in Minnesota today.

But in the nation at large, since Reagan first began excising the Rockefeller Republican gestalt from the party 25 years ago, there is no excuse for people like McCain, Warner, DeWine and Graham to stab their party in the back; we are the majority, and could very well be for a good while here!

I entitled this post "The RINO Cancer". Reasonable people can disagree about things. But if you were sent to Washington as a Republican, then you should get behind your party on things like this - that, or join the Democrats, or run as an independent.

I've heard all the excuses; "preserving senate comity" (We don't pay you to preserve comity; we sent you to the Senate to do your job), "it's for the good of the nation" (We the voters will decide that at election time, if you don't mind. In fact, we thought we had - when a big chunk of the Senate ran for office on this precise issue), and so on.

Not good enough.

Speaking of elections, Thorley Winston commented:

Senator DeWine (R-OH) - up for reelection in 2006
Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) - up for reelection in 2006
Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) - up for reelection in 2006
Senator John Warner (R-VA) - up for reelection in 2008
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) - up for reelection in 2008
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) - up for reelection in 2008
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) - up for reelection in 2010

Turning out the three in '06 will be a good project; Snowe and Chafee will be no big loss, they vote Democrat too often anyway; they're a step shy of Jim Jeffords in the best of times.

Of course, McConnell showed himself to be the most flaccid "whip" in recent history yesterday. If he's a whip, we need to trade up to a baseball bat.

Frist, of course, must go as Majority Leader. Sooner than later.

More later.

Note To Bill Frist: You Suck

To: Bill Frist, US Senate.
From: Mitch Berg, Schmuck Citizen and pissed-off former GOP contributor
Re: Your Infinite Cretinism

Senator Frist,

Mitch Berg here. You probably don't know who I am; I'm a typical schmuck. I write a blog, and I try to pitch in on GOP activities around Minnesota.

And on behalf of the entire GOP, I'm having a hard time seeing an upside to this deal right now. At first - and second, and tenth - glance, it looks like you've sold out your party.

No, not just the party; not just the assembly of suits and climbers and hangers-on that no doubt surrounds you at work every day. No, I'm talking about all of us who busted our asses overcoming a full-court media press (and continue to do so), and gave of our time and money until it hurt - hurt our wallets, our families, our relationships, our equilibrium. We gave them all with enthusiasm because we knew what was at stake; a whole generation of Supreme Court decisions.

So we gave. And you took.

And today, you looked us all in the face, and spat.

Reading Michelle and John and Ed, I'm about as depressed as I can be.

We won you a majority, pinhead. What the hell good is it? You think the Democrats are going to abide by your little gentleman's agreement? You got conned. You entered into an agreement with a Klansman, a drunk machine hack and a party bag man. You are the Neville Chamberlain of my generation.

I don't believe in Karma, but I believe what goes around comes around. And I guess you demonstrate it, Frist. The Democrats elect a pinhead doctor to lead their party - I guess it's only fair we did, too.

Thank God for Tom Delay. The least you could do is make it hard for the Dems to neutralize you, rather than walking off the cliff into the kool-aid vat on your own.

Captain Ed is right. Not one more dime. You have made me ashamed to be a Republican.

Oh, I'll bounce back. We all will - most of us, anyway. We'll have to. Because you showed us today - the grass roots have got to do it for themselves; we'll get no help from hamsters like you.

Sincerely - go back to medicine.

Mitch Berg
Saint Paul.

UPDATE 10:48: I toned down one bit of, er, slightly overheated rhetoric from last night.

But just one.

UPDATE 1:51: I can see why all the fuss about the Freepers. All the overwrought, semi-literate people with no lives...

...and that's just the lefty hecklers!

UPDATE 16:46 27 May: I reserve the right to gratuitously edit the comments of the more pinheaded anonymous commenters.

Sin Of Commission?

I'm going to draw a parallel here, on both sides of the aisle.

Hugh Hewitt draws our attention to John Leo's excellent piece on the Newsweek flap as well as the fallout - much of it from Hugh's interview with Terry Moran last week - about antimilitary biases in the media.

Let's connect it to education.

Leo says:

[T]he focus ought to be on whether the news media are predisposed to make certain kinds of mistakes and, if so, what to do about it. The disdain that so many reporters have for the military (or for police, the FBI, conservative Christians, or right-to-lifers) frames the way that errors and bogus stories tend to occur. The antimilitary mentality makes atrocity stories easier to publish, even when they are untrue. The classic example is CNN's false 1998 story that the U.S. military knowingly dropped nerve gas on Americans during the Vietnam War. On the other hand, brutal treatment of dissenters by Fidel Castro tends to be softened or omitted in the American press because so many journalists still see him as the romanticized figure from their youth in the 1960s.

Bingo.

And as King and I among others have been talking about for years, there are few departments on campus more relentlessly, dogmatically left of center than Education.

So is it reasonable to think that teachers - who for a generation have come from the most rigorously, vigorously leftist departments in higher ed, and graduated into jobs controlled by one of the most reliably left-of-center unions in existence - might accept left-wing indoctrination and the minimization of dissenting views without even thinking about it, as Leo sees in the media?

It's a question I'd love to ask the public ed system's most passional proponents. Of course, when you ask such questions and get inflammatory strawmen for answers, it bids one to think one might be onto something. Hewitt's interview with Moran was a rich vein of such straw. Money quote from Moran:

If you notice what I said was, do you think it's appropriate, from that podium, speaking for the president of the United States, to instruct an American magazine as to how to go about its business. And what I was trying to do was draw a line that Scott McClellan agreed with. If you notice later on that you're absolutely right. It's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report. I was just trying to draw that line, that there may be things which are right for the media to do, but that I think that whether you are liberal or conservative, you don't want the government telling the media to do.

Of course, nobody, least of all the Administration was telling the press what to do - merely criticizing the job they do now, which is, the last I checked, our First Amendment right.

In the same vein was Michael Boucher's response to my post the other day on the idiotic exercise in masturbatory pseudojournalism story on the Teenage Republicans' troll for stories of left-wing indoctrination and suppression of non-left opinions in schools, the flap that led to his Strib op-ed that I tackled last week:

It is unfortunate that you support collecting Dossiers on private citizens.

This guy's teaching "critical thinking" to your children.

It's the "when did you stop beating your wife?" of the 21st century, assigning some nefarious, outrageous, authoritarian intent to the civic, civil act of paying attention to who's teaching our kids, and what, as Moran assigned it to the act of criticizing the media. Given that Boucher is a teacher and president of a Social Studies teachers association, I have to ask; I've long felt that the public schools' claims that they want "involved parents" to be mere lip service, more about baking cupcakes for the bake sale than actually impinging on what is taught.

Which is, indeed, what I'm promoting; paying attention to what your kids are being taught. I welcome the teachers with whom I (and, at the moment, my kids) disagree but who present rational arguments and engender critical thinking. This is a good thing and, by the way, not what I'm attacking; it also seems to be beyond the intellectual capacity or pedagogic background of too many teachers I've run into. (And it should go without saying, the teachers who are maliciously doctrinaire are a whole 'nother thing).

Leo's conclusion as re the media:

He's right, of course, and the remedy is in scrutiny of every antimilitary/anti-Christian/anti-police story that appears. Many are necessary and accurate exercises in reporting, but many are not. For years those stories in the latter category went unrebuked. The blogopshere has ended the free pass system for axe-grinding in print. And that's a very good thing.

In print - and in the classroom.

While You Weren't Paying Attention

Over the past week, we've seen a number of instances of media figures, from the Strib Editorial Board to the intellectual midgets on FrankenNet to leftybloggers to, now, the WaPo take up the cry; the "fake but accurate" "Killian memos" at the heart of last year's Rather controversy have "never been conclusively proven false".

Powerline dispenses with that notion.

Note to leftybloggers: Let's do try not to come back to this again, shall we?

Open Letter to Governor Pawlenty

Governor,

I'm Mitch Berg. We met last week, finally.

I gotta confess, I started as a lukewarm supporter in '02; I thought (as I still think) that you were one of the very best stump speakers in Minnesota politics, and that counts for a lot with me. But I thought for a long time that you owed too many debts to the "moderate" wing of the state party - the wing that feels that if we don't get the DFL angry at us, they won't hurt us. It worried me.

I became a genuine Pawlenty partisan after the '02 convention, when it was clear that the challenge of Brian Sullivan had pulled you to the right. At that point, you became the best possible candidate; very electable and acceptably conservative.

Your chorus of critics are like a pack of feral chihuahuas; they seek weakness, and swarm it.

Like here.

The Strib headline is slugged Editorial: Pawlenty bends/Stay tuned, and hope for more. "Hope". It's a funny word to put to it, "hope", that most volatile and tenuous of human emotions, pinned on...

...taxes, those most stultifying smotherers of initiative, of the independent human spirit.

The pack of chuhuahuas is smelling weakness; they see a member of the herd of prey (whatever kind of prey chihuahuas have) slowing down, weakening.

Of course, they have a different word for it:

Let not the best display of gubernatorial leadership Minnesota has yet seen from Gov. Tim Pawlenty be sullied by a fuss over semantics. If he's willing to collect an additional 75 cents on each pack of cigarettes sold in this state, and spend that money on health care and schools, he can call it "squatski" for all we care.

Taxes are leadership?

No. Governor Pawlenty, I don't know if you made it to Rudy Giuliani's speech at the Center of the American Experiment last Thursday. Have Brian McLung get you a transcript or a video or something. Rudy spoke about leadership in exactly this situation; the virtue, indeed the imperative, of having a vision and sticking with it as the pack of feral chihuahuas bay at the moon; "taxes! taxes! taxes!".

Their mission; raise taxes by any means necessary. Keep government fat 'n happy at all costs.

You have taken an eminently sensible path through this morass so far, largely - mostly - because you have exercised leadership on this issue. You've needed to; you face a mass of entitlement-mongers so used to getting their way that now, like an alcoholic denied a bump for the road, they're getting nasty. Personal. Very, very ugly.

Let's run with the addict simile for a moment.

Addicts are the world's best con men/women. Their instinctual grift runs the full gamut of emotion; from loud, flailing physical abuse to subtle sweet-talking. An addict is good-cop/bad-cop in one body.

So, too the addict. And what is the bi-partisan big-government establishment in this state if not a huge, addicted homunculus that's been crashing in the taxpayers' basement for the past thirty years, cleaning out our cupboards and liquor cabinets and bank accounts at random, threatening and cajoling and sweet-talking, whatever it takes to stay on the couch and keep their monkey fed?

(heh. Monkey).

No new taxes, Governor Pawlenty. That's what tipped me toward supporting you in '02. It's the centerpiece of your administration.

Stay the course. Lead.

The Bleg

My old laptop died. I'm not burying it yet - I'm going to hope for some miracle in technology or a lucky break on EBay will turn up something.

But for now, I'm afraid the old laptop is toast.

So for the first and only time in the blog's history (not counting when I was unemployed), I'm going to bleg. I have my eye on a couple of used laptops - things in the $500 range. Of course, like everyone I have a lot of domestic fiscal priorities that eclipse that for the moment.

So I'll pull a Sullivan; if you enjoy this blog, please consider popping a couple of bucks into the Amazon link on the right (or, naturally, here. Every nickel that goes through my Amazon donation box will go toward Shot In The Dark's new mobile HQ. If it defrays a few bucks from the cost of the laptop, cool. If it turns out to be enough to buy a Titanium G5 - well, I'll still buy the used laptop and give the rest to charity, although I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Unlike Sullivan, I won't take a month off from blogging after the drive is over.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE 5/23: $100 so far! Thank you all very, very much. This is great, and a huge help.

I'm a Compassionate Guy

I was driving around yesterday, and I inadvertently caught about three minutes of a rerun of the Coleman "program". It was the day he was ripping, in his clumsy-puppy way, the bloggers' visit to the Governor's mansion.

It was a lot of the same bla bla bla - but one thing he kept mentioning that's popped up in his previous references to the Northern Alliance and the MOB: "they're bullies".

Bullies.

Wow.

So we - the NARN bloggers, a bunch of schlemiel middle managers and technogeeks and professors and a couple of lawyers, who blog in our pajamas in our basements to audiences that come to our blogs purely of their own volition, for (largely) no money whatsoever, purely for the love of working out our First Amendment muscles without the backing of any corporations or publishers or much of anything else, are...

...bullies?

Nick Coleman - who works for one of the largest media conglomerates in Minnesota, scion of a political and media family ("connect the dots!"), a man who's not above leaving the dangling semi-threat in private email to his detractors, a man at the "sharp end" of a radio network backed by some of the biggest, most powerful financiers out there, a man who publicly claims to be 6 feet and 200 pounds and to know how to use a hockey stick and proclaims an affinity for the boyos and yobs that wear violence like Babs Carlson wears MuuMuus - thinks we're bullies?

[Bullwinkle on]

Guess I don't know my own strength!

[Bullwinkle off]

By the way, oddly enough, he talked for a bit about the stadium - which he opposes. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess. But as part of his transition from whining about the blogger reception to stadiums, he muttered "The ba-LOG-gers support the stadium!"

Really?

Show me where any NARN blogger has said any such thing, Nick.

Either he doesn't even care when he's lying anymore, or he assumes his audience is too dumb to know the difference.

I choose "All of the above".

Paying A Debt

Company B of the 141st Combat Engineer Battalion was my hometown National Guard unit when I was growing up. Many of the local guys were in the company, and toward the end of high school many more of my friends joined up. B of the 141 was a descendant of companies from Jamestown that had served in the Spanish-American war, World Wars I and II and Korea.

B/141 spent over a year in Iraq, losing two men, including Phil Brown, son and nephew of some family friends.

This morning's Strib has a coda to their Iraq story that you need to read.

The widow of a friend B Company made in Iraq has come to North Dakota:

Late Friday night, his widow and seven children stepped off a plane in Fargo, where soldiers of Company B, 141st Engineer Combat Battalion, mustered again to welcome the family to a new home.

Specialist April Rohrer cried with joy as she rushed into the arms of the slight Iraqi woman she last saw in a remote village near Tikrit.

Each woman had news for the other.

"Remember this guy?" Rohrer asked, and Mrs. M smiled and nodded at Specialist Paul Rohrer.

"We got married!" April Rohrer said.

She then touched the cheeks of children whose cuts, ailments and bruises she had tended as a medic.

And she saw for the first time Mrs. M's seventh child, a girl born four weeks ago, three months after her father's assassination by insurgents.

Mrs. M handed the baby to April Rohrer and told her, through tears and an interpreter: "Her name is April."

Through the interpreter, [Sergeant First Class] Beckert had several long talks with Mr. M as the rest of the platoon savored respites from the tension of patrols.

"He told me he had been a wealthy man under Saddam, working security at a big grain terminal. But a relative had said something bad about Saddam and was punished, and Mr. M lost his job and was thrown into prison, too. He was tortured there -- at the Abu Ghraib prison. He was freed from Abu Ghraib by us."Wow. I'd never heard that Iraqis were torured at Abu Ghraib...by other Iraqis. Who knew?

"I didn't see a soldier or a CIA guy or anything like that when I looked at him. I saw a father and a friend. He liked us very much, and they were our family away from home.

"We told him a number of times to stop doing what he was doing. The intelligence work was helpful to us, but we worried about him."

The platoon wasn't far from Mr. M's home on Jan. 16 when gunshots sounded from over a ridge, out of view.

"We hunkered down, but we couldn't tell where the shots came from," Wilz said.

The attackers "pulled Mr. M from his truck and shot him in the arms and legs, head and chest," Beckert said.

"They made his 11-year-old son get out of the truck and watch. They wanted his son to see: 'You help the Americans, this is what's going to happen to you.' "

The battalion, as well as Lutheran Social Services, are helping them settle in Fargo.

Read the whole thing.

Woo Hoo!

I'm blogging live from Granite City Brew Pub in Saint Cloud, at the MOB party.

Fun!

Too much fun, in fact, to spend any more of it blogging. I'll catch you all up later!

Where's The News?

How's this for timely - the Strib, in a piece by Mark Brunswick, covered last Tuesday's reception at the Governor's Mansion.

On Saturday morning.

No, that's actually the best part.

Brunswick wrote:

Some members of the new media found out this week that they like the old idea of schmoozing with people in power.

And Brunswick knows this how?

I talked with Brian "Saint Paul" Ward and Captain Ed on the show today - none of us got a call from Mark Brunswick. He knows what "ideas" we "Like?"

He's a reporter and he's clairvoyant!

A group associated with the largely conservative Northern Alliance group of bloggers and radio commentators

"Largely" conservative?

The NARN are all conservatives. The MOB actually is largely, but emphatically not exclusively, conservative - but never mind, it's just the readership that's getting half the story.

McClung said those invited were culled from groups associated with the local conservative blog Powerline, which received acclaim for its role criticizing CBS' now-debunked report on memos related to President Bush's National Guard service. McClung said there was no intent to exclude local bloggers who might be critical of Pawlenty or have more left-leaning or progressive points of view.

Although even if there were, what'd be the problem? Do you think Mark Dayton or Howard Dean or, for that matter, Anders Gyllenhall invite hostile opinions to their semi-official get-togethers?

Here's a funny bit:

Reviews of the get-together were universally positive.

The posting on the blog Kennedy vs. The Machine, for instance, made no bones about its enthusiasm over Pawlenty's invitation to those of a particular political bent, ensuring that it is likely to pay dividends.

"The governor -- or someone on his staff -- is to be commended for fostering goodwill among the center-right blogging community," the posting said. "These are the folks who will provide cover during the looming special legislative session during which Pawlenty's 'no new tax' pledge will be put to the test like never before."

Captain Ed at the blog Captain's Quarters was among many who commented favorably on Pawlenty's potential as a candidate for national office.

"If you like to handicap presidential primary candidates, I'd suggest including Tim Pawlenty in your calculations," he posted afterward, remarking as well about being struck by Pawlenty's "youth and fitness."

Interesting choice of quotes, from among the many quotes by all the blogs present. No, really - interesting.

It's almost like a local columnist and amateur "talk host" whose stock in trade is making "gay" jokes about anyone who criticizes him might have had a word with Mr. Brunswick.

Want a good laugh?

At least one nonconservative blogger wasn't surprised by the invitation list -- and by who was not included.

The owner of Mnleftyliberal accused the local conservative blogs of getting caught up in the heady world of digital age punditry.

"These bloggers are so intent on being the next Powerline, they are willing to jump on it, hiding behind the fact they are not 'real news' or their anonymity," said the owner, who identifies himself only as Trillin.

Now, Mark Brunswick didn't try to contact me - and my email is pretty readily available on my site. My phone numbers isn't rocket science, and there are people at the Strib who have it in their rolodex; a simple Lexus/Nexis shows that Eric Black talked with me not three months ago.

Nobody talked with King, Ed, the Powerguys, the Fraters - nobody. Even though all of us, every one, are a model of accessibility. Yet who do they talk with?

"Trillin"? Huh-whaa? With all due respect, MNLeftyliberal, while a perfectly noble effort, is not exactly a well-known regional blog, and if you'd ask 100 bloggers who is the biggest expert on the regional blog scene, I doubt "Trillin" would get a mention. And - I know this is a fine point - he's also anonymous!

By the way, I have no interest in being Powerline; as Rocket Man himself noted, all of the NARN bloggers have our own niches. The NARN guys - John, Scott, Chad, Brian, Atomizer, King, Ed - are all good friends of mine after this past year; we all cover our own beats, and enjoy it. While I'd love a piece of Powerline's ad revenue, "Shot" is what "Shot" is.

And all you had to do was ask, Mark.

The cost of the event was less than $200, McClung said. After a reporter inquired about the event, McClung said Pawlenty decided to pay the tab out of his own pocket. McClung said the event turned out well for Pawlenty.

"A reporter" inquired, huh?

A reporter who's nobody's monkey, perhaps? One who makes a living writing about trifles, rather than news?

Because "a bunch of bloggers", guys exercising their first amendment rights to write freely, "meeting with the governor" is a lot of things, but it's not news.

Just gimme a call sometime, Mark. You might get the story, such as it is, correct next time.

We know how important that is to you guys.

And by the way, thanks, Governor, for picking up the tab. I'll get the next one - although it'll probably have to wait until you're out of office.

Hopefully in January of 2017.

Crack For The Chatty Soul

Via Red and Right Thinking Girl, the weekly survey.

Oh, don't look at me that way. They're fun, in a wierd kind of way.

1. What is the best way to die?

I'm hoping for "Shot in the back by a jealous husband when I'm 95", but I'll settle for the way my grandmother died; in her sleep, more or less unexpectedly, after a great evening with her children.

2. What's the worst way to die?

Too many contenders; buried, drowning, bla bla bla.

I guess "in vain" is one that stands out.

3. What do you hope to hear God say when you reach Heaven?

"Mr. Berg, just this once I'm gonna let you slide through..."

4. True or False: What goes up must come down.

I'll bite into that when I see my stress level heading southward.

5. What are you wearing? (That's got to be the cheesiest and most asked question on the net.)

My favorite black jeans, my favorite black shirt.

6. What songs are you into these days?

• The Clash, Death Or Glory: I've been playing that one over and over and over lately.
• The new Aimee Mann song.
• Men Without Women, Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul
• For some reason, a whole lot of Allison Krause.

7. What are you doing this weekend?

Early Saturday: Mow the lawn, do some show prep.
Noon: Do the show.
Four-ish: Head up to Saint Cloud for the MOB Party.
Sunday: Church, then probably start digging up the part of the yard I want to build a patio on later this summer.

8. Tell RTG readers something about yourself that you want us to know.

I miss having babies/toddlers. I love my kids - 12 and 13 now - but I get so wistful around the little ones. As much as I'm looking forward to being done with parenting, there are times I miss it soooo bad.

9. Parker Grace is now 15 weeks old.
Ibid.

Enjoy every moment of it.

10. Can you keep a secret?

Rigidly.

11. How often did you work out this week and what did you do?

I've been kind of a slob this week; I took a few walks, and do my morning pushups. That's about it.

12. Tell me an irrational fear that you have.

When my kids stand near a railing by a dropoff - scenic overlooks, bridges, etc. I get incredibly nervous - like, nothing I've ever felt in my life. I don't want to keep them from looking over the endge, but for whatever reason I feel like either the railing will give way, or that my son will start goofing around or their center of gravity is high enough that they can tip over. It's almost crippling, until I get them away from that edge.

13. What's the most important news story this week?

The NARN meeing Governor Pawlenty!

14. If you could be another person for a day (not a real person, more like a character), who would you be? What's the name, what does this person do and why do you want to be this person?

Tough one. I'm pretty wrapped up being me, for better or worse.

My name would be Thomas Paine Smyth, an independently wealthy but otherwise nondescript fella who made a good-sized fortune through semi-shady means, then dropped out of the rat race to become a free-lance modern-day Don Quixote, roaming the world looking for lost causes to redeem via whatever means - quirky genius, judiciously-applied carefully-focused violence. Sort of a cross between Batman, the Equalizer and McGyver, he's have a girl in every port and would leave the odd $1000 dollar tip.

15. Tell me a blatant lie.

Sure, I believe in soulmates.

The Beer Truck

I catch about thirty seconds of Nick Coleman's radio "program" about twice a week.

This morning's bit was sort of interesting. Over the show's out-ramp, he issued a correction for saying "Kennedy Versus the Machine" was an anonymous hatchetblog (very good, given that all three names are clearly visible on the blog), in re Thursday's comical rant about our soiree at the Governor's on Tuesday.

Then he said (paraphrasing closely) "This is the modern version of backing the bus up to the bar to get free beer to all the thugs, before they go out to beat people up".

Catch that, everyone?

To Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star/Tribune (never forget that), exercising your First Amendment right to free speech is the same as being a thug!

Nick Coleman is the morning drive host for Minnesota's Air Amateur America affiliate. He is a columnist for the Star/Tribune.

Is this what both of these institutions think? That speaking one's mind via one's blog is the same as being a bag man, a boyo, a thug smacking down dissenters for some ward boss?

Does the Star/Tribune want this point of view representing them to the public?

Anders Gyllenhaal, would you care to elaborate? Does the fact that your star columnist says such things (on the radio show that he only got because of his position at your newspaper) embarass you?

Because I'm embarassed for you.

Tempest In A Toilet

Certain hysterical elements of the local left and crypto-left think they have found a story.

They're half right. There's a story there - but not the one they think they have.

Let's see if I can get the timeline down:

1. A while ago, a member of the Teenage Republicans, after talking with either Michele Bachmann or someone on her staff, posted a request for peoples' stories about the stifling of academic dissent in high schools. Senator Bachmann, of course, is sponsoring a version of David Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights - which, of course, pertains to colleges.
2. While the piece was on the website, members of the Teachers' Union apparently reported the site to various activists, including Michael Boucher (allegedly from school computers, while on school time), the Perrier-drinking leader of the Minnesota Council of Social Studies.
3. Boucher wrote a clankingly awful op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the subject, although I can spare you having to read it again by summing it all up; education system fine, Bachmann bad, there's no problem here, move along.
4. In the midst of the "Crisis", someone from Senator Bachmann's staff left a comment in the Senator's name my original post - which gave a hefty case of the vapors to some of our more perspective-challenged local bloggers, as if that's not standard practice during the last week of the farging legislative session...
5. Somewhere along the way, the Bachmann site removed the request, and Senator Bachmann distanced herself from the Teenage Republicans; there was, by all rational accounts, a miscommunication - Bachmann's bill has nothing to do with high schools (and by less rational accounts, apparently, either a right-wing conspiracy took hold or the Bachmann campaign fled to Brazil. It's hard to tell - the Dump Bachmann site deals in breathless inference and implied conspiracy in a way that'd make a Freeper yak up his skull).

So who said who could put what on who's website? Who told whom to take what off of where? Who told who what, and when, and why, and how?

Jeez. Who cares? I feel like I'm in a junior high study hall, listening to the girls in the back gossiping about who said what to whom, and when, and why, and "that Michele is such a bitch"...

To the extent that there's a "story" here, there are really only two issues of any interest to the non-obsessive:

• The Strib published Michael Boucher's original editorial - fact-challenged as it was. When Senator Bachmann asked to be allowed to print a response, the Strib's editors limited her (sources close to the Senator tell me) to half the length of Boucher's diatribe. So the Senator wrote a response that fit within the limit - but was forced to remove a sentence saying that Boucher's claims were false because - again, this is from a source close to Bachmann's office - Boucher's piece was based on the Teenage Republicans' site, which included false information about the Academic Bill of Rights. In other words, "wrong but accurate". Close enough for Strib work, apparently. Boucher can say anything he wants - he read it on the Internet, so it must be true! But Senator Bachmann's response is censored, so as to...what? Not make the Strib's "fact checkers" feel bad?
• I think the Teenage Republicans' original premise - collecting stories about academic bias in the high schools - is valid in and of itself. I applaud them for asking, and would support any efforts on their part to continue gathering their stories.

Mob Connections

King has the deets on tomorrow's Minnesota Organization of Bloggers meeting at the Granite City brew pub in Saint Cloud, our first outstate MOB event.

There'll be a bunch of bloggers you know there - King, Saint and I from the NARN, plus a few MOB bloggers we know about.

But my main goal for the evening is to have the world's first live-blogged blog going live. That's right - we're going to take someone's laptop and, via the Granite City's wi-fi, get some innocent bystander with an interest in writing and no outlet to start a blog, then and there. The miracle of blog life, for all to see!

As Chad explains, attending a MOB event is one of the most key entry requirements for the MOB.

Hope to see you there!

Um, Preparing for, Um, a Thenate Run

Um, comedian and failed, er...um....talk show hotht Al...Franken purchathed a townhouthe in Minneapolith.

The Thtrib thayth:

By year's end, comedian Al Franken will be a Minnesotan again, taking a big step toward possibly running for the U. S. Senate seat held by Norm Coleman.

"It's one of the thingth I need to do if I dethide to make a run," Franken thaid from his current home in New York. "I haven't made the dethision yet, but if I do, I'll have to have been living in Minnethota a while."

Franken, 53, said he and his wife, Frannie, bought a townhouthe in a new development on the edge of downtown Minneapolith late last month.

He plans to shuttle between his two homes between now and the beginning of 2006, when he also plans to relocate hith daily three-hour radio show broadcatht on the liberal Air America network to Minnethota.

"I haven't figured out the detailth or the thtaffing yet," Franken thaid.

I thuthpect "Kuhbey" ith interethted.

Thuffering Thuccotash - Thenator Thtuart Thmalley!

The Pause That Enrages

Much of the blogosphere is up in arms over Pepsico's CFO Indra Nooyi's remarks at Columbia Business School.

I say "Welcome to the party, slowpokes".

I'm not one of those people who thinks all roads lead back to the Second Amendment - but when it comes to corporate contributions, you can tell a lot about a company by its political donations. Pepsico has been supporting Sarah Brady's various organizations to the tune of $50,000 a year for quite some time.

So while I don't believe in grandiloquent boycotts, really, I've also quietly avoided Pepsi products (not that I drink that much pop anyway), and even subsidiaries (I'll drive a few extra miles to find a Taco John's or a local indy pizzeria rather than go to Taco Bell or Pizza Hut) for the past decade or so.

I see no reason to change.

Frikkin' Giuliani!

Connect this dot.

I attended last night's annual dinner at the Center of the American Experiment, as a guest of the always-gracious John Hinderaker. The guest of honor and keynote speaker was former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. I sat at a table with the Hinderakers, Captain Ed and King Banaian.

Giuliani was up to his reputation as a great speaker. He spoke for about 40 minutes on the subject of leadership - or more importantly, the idea that leadership isn't about popularity, it's about vision. He peppered the speech with examples from his own administration in New York - how he followed a vision to simultaneously reduce taxes and crime and the welfare rolls, while attacking the stultifying bureaucracy and parochialism of the New York establishment. Amid invocations of Reagan, Giuliani's message; leadership is about having a vision, whether a popular one or not, and sticking to it no matter how the lilliputians hack at your ankles.

And I sat, and listened - and hoped that the word got to the Minnesota GOP. I think Governor Pawlenty gets it; the local media is as irate about his "No Taxes" pledge as the NYTimes was about "Broken Windows" and "ComStat" and Reykjavik and the Pershing missiles, but he's stood his ground.

Right message. Right place. Right time.

Connect The Dots

DFL Party Monkey Columnist Nick Coleman is constantly telling people, in regard to the "right wing daisy chain noise machine", to "Cuhnnuhct thuh duhts". When you remove the "Fargo"-ish voice timbre, he's saying "Connect The Dots".

Late last night, I woke up and asked myself "what if a real journalist actually were to connect the dots? What would they find?"

So I decided to do it.

First, I had to figure out what "the dots" were.

I found them:

Here's what they mean:
1. The AM1280 The Patriot Studio
2. My house.
3. The Governor's mansion.
4. Where the bodies are buried.
5. State GOP headquarters. Or the capitol. They're close to the same thing, I guess, these days.
6. Craig Westover's house.
7. Mark Yost's house.
8. What happened to #8? Karl Rove did it!
9. Washington Square bar and grill, a favored hangout of the NARN.
10. Bogus Doug's place.
11. David Strom's house.
12. King Banaian's place.
13. Jo, from the MAWB squad.
14. Edina, where everyone's a rich Republican.
15. Koscielski's gun shop.
16. The U of Saint Thomas, where Ann Coulter and the Campus Conservatives nearly brought traditional liberal Minnesota to its knees.
17. Doolittle's in Eagan, where the NARN plots its nefarious deeds during its top-secret planning meetings.

Now, what happens when you connect them all?

Cuhnnuhcting thuh...er, connecting the dots shows us (as labelled on the map), a fairly distinct trunk two tusks, and a couple of huge floppy ears.

That's right. When you connect the dots, the Twin Cities inner Republican is revealed!

Next week; is it a Daisy Chain, or more of a cluster hug?

Challenged

I listened to Hugh Hewitt interviewing ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran on his show on Wednesday night.

Now, kudos to Moran, who's certainly a journalist of some heft, for appearing in the lion's den - not only on a conservative show, but with Hewitt, who is (no brownnosing intended) one of most formidable combinations of intelligence and journalistic experience in conservative talk. Wretchard and Major Mike have both written excellent reviews already...

...but the part that caught me short was that, as sharp as Moran is, he just didn't have non-straw responses to so many of Hugh's arguments. It's a pattern that's repeated in so many contexts when the unwashed masses challenged journalists.

Bear in mind that the US is about the only place in the world where journos think of themselves as High Priests of Knowledge, keepers of the sacred flame of the truth, something that can not be entrusted to heathen philistines. It's a notion that runs counter to the way the media works in many other countries; in the UK, reporters are usually people who've flopped at something else; Fleet Street is not a holy of holies. It's an image that the media carefully burnished during its golden age, from the days of Murrow and Pearson and Anderson and Cronkite. And it's an image that's starting to fall apart like a cheap office chair beneath them; Americans don't hold journos in the same esteem as they used to.

The arrogance of the huge media - the Dan Rathers and Mary Mapeses that have floated the accounts of so much the blogosphere this past year - is a big part of it. Equally important, though, is something I knew to an extent during my brief career in news media, and which has become more apparent as the talent pool has become more stretched; journalists aren't geniuses.

I'm not saying they're dumb. Far from it; a good journalist is a jack of many intellectual trades. He or she has to be; there's a lot of explaining to do. But he or she is also a master of none.

And defending themselves logically is one of the trades they see to have trouble with, if Moran is any indication of the media at large. As capable as he was, some of his answers are indicative of a bigger issue.

On the issue of McClellan's press conference, Moran said (and I add emphasis):

I disagree with that interpretation. What I, in fact, agree with the substance of what Scott McClellan was saying, that it would be a good thing for Newsweek to come out try to undo some of the damage that was done by its report. If you notice what I said was, do you think it's appropriate, from that podium, speaking for the president of the United States, to instruct an American magazine as to how to go about its business. And what I was trying to do was draw a line that Scott McClellan agreed with. If you notice later on that you're absolutely right. It's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report. I was just trying to draw that line, that there may be things which are right for the media to do, but that I think that whether you are liberal or conservative, you don't want the government telling the media to do.

Right.

Right?

Wrong. McClellan and the White House weren't telling the media what to do. Just suggesting something they could do.

But the strawman - which needlessly inflames the argument, by the way - is not an uncommon one when you're arguing with a journalist.

Here's another one:

Hewitt: ...I know demagoguery when I hear it. That's not.

Terry Moran: But you practice it.

HH: I do not practice it. I practice good journalism, which is to represent I'm no better than any other American citizen. As a journalist, I don't have...

TM: You're no better than any other American citizen?

"Weren't you one of us?"

Talk with a journalist sometime. Start getting into what they see as their mission.

They - many of them - honestly believe that unless you've been to J-School (or at least worked in the business) then you really aren't qualified to tell the story.

Back to Hewitt:

HH: Terry, wait. Time out. Where do you get this, don't want any kind of challenge to the president they support. They're just sick and tired of journalists with big heads and little resumes, acting like they know how the world works. Let me read you from Major K...

TM: Hugh, can I ask you a question? When was the last time you were in Iraq?

This isn't just a journalist's dodge, but it's a common one. It's a first cousin of "I know stuff". "I've covered city council meetings! I've paid dues!" Unstated; how it is that working in an industry sanctifies your story in the absence of any visible evidence that you know anything or, in some cases, are telling the truth.

Mom and Dad can get out of a discussion by saying "Because I'm the Parent! That's Why!". For reporters? Not so much.

Star Trippers

So a bunch of us NARN guys got invited to meet with the Governor on Tuesday - all the members of the Northern Alliance of Blogs, plus John, Doug and Gary from Kennedy Versus The Machine, and the guys from Patriot Blog.

Nobody, naturally, was more surprised than I was. I've been blogging for (counts in head) 39 months now; I started back when people thought "blog" was something that Nick Coleman had after a bag of chalupas and a couple of double Gilbeys on the rocks. It amazes me, frankly, that this little hobby has developed to this point. Which is not to say that I haven't put in some time; I've written well over a million words in this blog.

So when a bunch of newbies - however much I like their blogs - start grousing about not getting invited to soirees like this, I gotta say; keep your perspective, kids. I can remember when blogging was a lonely hobby, back in the days before we were on the hotline from Karl Rove; back before the money flowed like Garrison Keillor's bile after another Republican win; back before bloggers went everywhere surrounded by hot chicks.

But hang in there, guys, for I say your day will come; sometime when we toast Nick Coleman's next exit from radio.

Which can't be that far away.

Freedom Wins; Criminals Lose

The House passed the Minnesota Personal Protection Act yesterday. Oddly, even though the GOP has about a dozen fewer seats than they did it 2003, the MPPA lost only two votes from the last vote on the subject, passing 86-47.
Several DFL amendments to bar permitholders from liquor establishments and to consider tighter licensing standards after incidents such as that at Nye's were handily defeated.

So were all other attempts to alter the bill, including one that would have allowed churches, mosques and synagogues to declare all their property off-limits to firearms.Naturally, Saruman and his orcs the antis, rejected yet again by a vote of the people's elected representatives, are going to try to ram their will down the state's throat in court:

While the new measure corrects the constitutional problem that invalidated the entire 2003 law -- its passage in a bill embracing more than one subject -- it apparently remains vulnerable to at least one other court challenge based on churches' claims of religious freedom.

In March 2004, Hennepin County District Judge Marilyn Brown Rosenbaum ruled that, regardless of the law, churches may bar guns from all of their property, including parking lots and rental facilities. She said parts of the law impinge on religious beliefs and "constitutional rights to worship and rights of conscience."

David Lillehaug, attorney for a group of churches in that case, said he will be back before Rosenbaum within days seeking an extension of her order.

I don't know that I have a huge problem with this - although you can bet when the next church massacre happens, it'll be at a posted church. "Gun Free Zones" just don't work. I know that if my church posts its property, I'll take myself, my time and my offering elsewhere.

"You're going back to court and you're going to pay for it," Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, told House supporters of the law Wednesday. Calling the measure "the most radical concealed-carry bill in the country," he noted that 12 other states with similar laws ban firearms in churches.

Paymar is either lying for effect, or is completely ignorant on the issue (I vote "b)). Vermont and Alaska require no permit to carry a concealed handgun (as was the case in Minnesota before 1974. You'll recall perhaps how many law-abiding citizens, driven mad by freedom, went on shooting sprees back then).

There are some new provisions to the law, which the Governor will sign, possibly today:• Property owners could bar guns with either a sign or an oral warning, not both. [This is a good change, actually, and quashes one of the few legitimately confusing parts of the original bill]

• Off-duty police officers could take guns to schools and other restricted locales. [Cool. Now, how about teachers?]

• State officials, not private groups, would control certification of handgun trainers. [This, however, is potentially bad - and will require constant scrutiny.]

• Permitholders would have to tell police officers they meet whether they are armed. [I'll need to look up specifics on this part]

• Courts reviewing a sheriff's denial of a permit could consider an alleged crime of which the applicant was acquitted. [Again, this will require scrutiny.]

• Registered sex offenders would be banned from carrying guns, even with a permit. [Hm. I thought they already were...]So. Time to get myself into a class.

News Flash: Hollywood Doesn't Get Christians

Via David at the Monkeys, Jonah Goldberg on Law and Order's latest anti-faith faux pas:

But the most recent episode of NBC’s doddering Law & Order series is where I draw the line. The episode tells the story of a racist who committed murder nine years ago but who, in shame and remorse, subsequently found Jesus and was born again. In the nine years since he dedicated himself to Christ, he has led an exemplary life. But his guilt is discovered, and he decides to confess and show true contrition.

So far, so good, right? I’m sure the writers and producers thought they were being eminently fair to all sides. They even showed Jack McCoy (played by Sam Waterston) stunned beyond words that a born-again Christian could be so sincere. In one scene I swear he made the same face my old basset hound would make when I tried to feed him a grape: total and complete incomprehension. His assistant even confessed she goes to church regularly and knows decent born-agains herself.

But this was all grace on the cheap. The rest of the storyline was festooned with nasty — and dishonest — shots. For example, as McCoy and his assistants work to bring the murderer to justice, the shadowy forces of the Christian right seek to have him absolved of all accountability for his crime because he’d accepted Jesus as his personal savior.

Right. Because Christianity is all about avoiding responsibility for your actions. Right?

Regardless, the very idea that evangelical Christians would argue that being born again absolves you in this life for the consequences of your crimes is nonsense, plucked whole cloth in a fit of ignorance. But the complete, outrageous implausibility of the episode’s plot wasn’t the most infuriating part. Several times, various characters opine that the Christians’ legal tactics might work given “what’s happening in this country right now.” I half expected Pat Robertson to burst through McCoy’s office spraying holy water screaming, “Exorcist”-style, “The power of Christ compels you!”

Read the whole thing.

I remember Law and Order...

Hmm...

Via Red and Beth, I took this quiz on...worldview, I think.

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. Cultural Creative 75% Modernist 44% Postmodernist 44% Idealist 44% Fundamentalist 25% Existentialist 13% Romanticist 13% Materialist 0% What is Your World View? (corrected...hopefully) created with QuizFarm.com

Not sure that I buy it - I don't shy away from organized religion in the least, and in fact I embrace it (although frequently quarrel with its organizers).

It's better than most online tests, anyway.

Now I Feel Safer

You're not 21 until 8AM the morning after. The Senate say so!

The legislation to combat the so-called "power hour," between midnight and closing time on a person's 21st birthday, was included as part of a Senate bill making a number of changes to regulations governing the liquor sales.

"This issue is real; we have had a number of young people die from alcohol poisoning under these circumstances," said Sen. Rod Skoe, DFL-Clearbrook.

"A number?"

Last year, 21-year-old Jason Reinhardt died of alcohol poisoning on his birthday after leaving a Moorhead bar with his fraternity brothers. His blood-alcohol content was 0.36 percent.

OK, one death is too many.

I'm sure this law will prevent people from bringing a bottle (21 shots worth) of liquor home for the ceremony.

Ten Million Acres Of Blah

One thing I noticed when I moved to the Twin Cities: suburbs all looked the same.

They're all beige, white, or some other innocuous color; not only does a trip through Maple Grove feel like a drive through cubeland, but it also seems identical to Lakeville, Woodbury, Burnsville or Eden Prairie.

The Strib notes the subject today:

In fact, "builder beige" has become such a norm that people comment on models that deviate from it, according to Woodbury builder and developer Todd Bjerstedt, president of Todd Allen Homes.

But homeowners, too, help create the tone-on-tone palette in many communities. And increasingly, they're getting veto power over their neighbors' color choices, as more developments are regulated by associations and covenants.

Beige blockSteve RiceStar TribuneCovenants are only part of the monochromatic story, however. Even homeowners with the freedom to choose anything on the color wheel usually opt for soft, light neutrals.

Why so much beige?

Read the article.

As harrowing as the inner city can be to a Republican, this quote alone almost makes it worthwhile, to avoid having neighbors like this:

The palette in Joyce Dueffert's Shakopee neighborhood is dominated by similar shades of beige and off-white. "I like beige," she said. "It's a neutral color, it won't show dirt as easily, and it's been popular for many years and will continue to be."

While Dueffert thinks homeowners should be free to make their own color choices, she's glad her neighborhood has some uniformity. "If I were to see a house painted red, white and blue, that's fine out in the country, but not in a neighborhood like this," she said. "It would stick out."

Oh, dear. Can't have any of that out-sticking, can we?

Anyone want to bet that Ms. Dueffert is a DFLer?

Hentoff On Brown

Nat Hentoff takes on the Times in re Janice Rogers Brown.

Editorials in The New York Times are the plenary voice of that newspaper. Accordingly, editorial writers should be as accountable as the Times' reporters—when the editorial sages ignore the facts in a story and deeply sully someone's reputation. [Got that, Jim Boyd?]

A reckless case in point is the first editorial in the April 28 edition, "Leading With the Women," in which Justice Janice Rogers Brown is unequivocally described as "an extreme right-wing ideologue." Moreover, the editorial adds, "Justice Brown [a member of the California Supreme Court]—a black woman raised in segregated Alabama—is a consistent enemy of minorities."

Read the whole thing.

Our Evening With The Governor

I should mention that the NARN guys - John and Scott from Powerline, King from SCSU Scholars, Cap'n Ed, Warrior Monk from Spitbull, the Fraters' Saint, Elder, JB and Atomizer, as well as Bogus Doug, John from First Ring, Gary from KvM, and a few other bloggers I'm no doubt forgetting, plus a couple of outstate talk radio people - were invited to a reception with Governor Pawlenty at the Governor's Mansion last night.

We got the guided tour from the Governor, and had a great time talking with him, as well as his loqacious Chief of Staff Dan McElroy, his communications aide-de-camp Tom Webster, his press enforcer Brian McClung, and the rest of the staff.

John at KvM has an excellent recap with an interesting observation:

McElroy was patient as the KvM team quizzed him about a certain presidential nomination contest already in it’s opening salvos. The CoS stayed on message by saying there were no such plans. He referenced Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s far ranging travels and said if Pawlenty was thinking about making a run he would already be on the road a good deal more. He insisted that his boss is single-minded in his efforts to reform education and increase the quality of life of Minnesotans. I observed to McElroy that sounded an awful lot like another Republican governor circa 1998.

McElroy smiled and politely excused himself to the next group of well-wishers.

The evening was a complete success - except for the part where Elder got really, really hammered (his tie was dangling in someone's drink for a while), broke the Ralphie doll, and asked the Governor to put it back together.

Fortunately, the Governor was up to the task.

Thanks to all involved!

Brenarlo Predicts

Brenarlo, from "Taking Back North Dakota", predicts:

My prediction is that Sen. Conrad will side with the GOP, as will other "red-state" Democrats (i.e. Nelson, Nelson, Baucas) on cloture and Owens and Brown will be confirmed, with Sen. Conrad voting "nay." The Democrats (including Conrad) will decide to filibuster other nominees. Frist will then drop the bomb and the constitutional option will win with a vote of 51-50, with Sen. Conrad voting with his party.

Then, when Sen. Conrad is campaigning in 2006, he'll run ads saying that he was a "moderate" with Sen. McCain (everyone loves McCain - except conservatives). He'll then say that he was a "moderate" who helped President Bush get a couple nominees confirmed, but he and his new buddy McCain decided that neither extreme should prevail, even though the constitutional option isn't extreme.

Look for a lot of Blue senators in Red states to try the Daschle Option. The Daschle Option turns Margaret Martin's maxim on its ear; "Vote Liberal, Act Conservative (or at least "moderate")."

Brenarlo also has interesting observations about the Fargo Forum, which is sort of the Strib of the Dakotas. Worth a read, especially as we continue toward '06.

Be Cruel To Your School

A couple of kids at Moundsview High (a north suburb of the Twin Cities) have developed a mod of a first-person shooter game...

...set in Moundsview High School:

Mounds View High School senior Jordan Everhart remembered talking last year to his friend and fellow senior, Pat Glynn, about a video game Glynn wanted to create.

It would be a modification ("mod") of Counter-Strike, a "first-person-shooter" game that Everhart and Glynn and their friends played regularly.

First-person-shooter games are so named because the objective is to shoot targets -- zombies, terrorists, aliens or other menaces -- and the viewpoint is through a shooter's eyes.

But in Glynn's game, there would be a twist. The targets would be hunted in the hallways and stairwells of Mounds View High School.

"We just thought it would be sweet because it's my school," Everhart said. "It's a place you know. If you set [a game] at the Capitol, well, who knows anything about the Capitol? Who has been there? No one."

Brief tangent: I've been there - and I think an FPS set at the Capitol that included zombie staffers, Legislators and media figures, might be a humongous seller.

Especially if you did fifty state editions.

But I digress.

Back to the article:

Glynn began to make his game earlier this schoolyear. Initially, he had thought about making a counterterrorism or zombie-hunting game. But recently, he said, he has reconsidered. Now, he intends to make it a "nonviolent" game where the guns are replaced with Nerf guns and the ammunition is replaced with Nerf balls.

"It's not violent," he said.

"It's very fun. The whole thing is about Mounds View pride," Glynn said about his game, which he calls Mounds View Source.

Wow. Shooting nerf gunsin school. What could be the problem?

There's always a problem:

Roxanne Cunningham, Glynn's computer teacher at Mounds View with whom he talked about the game, said she discussed its implications -- the symbolism of the gun, its setting within a high school -- with Glynn as he worked on it.

"I brought up those issues from an educator's point of view. We really did talk about that: How is this going to affect the way people look at his game?" she said.

It's worth noting, Cunningham said, that no one would die in the game. It's simply a matter of winning or losing points.

Sort of like "tag".

Let's make another digression here: Video games, especially First Person Shooters, have been under the 'scope since the first big rash of school shootings, back in the nineties. Many of the shooters were big FPS fans. Now, I don't play FPSes as a rule - they tend to act like arcade games, and I vastly prefer games like the Combat Mission series of tactics games - but when I hear people talking about the affinity of juvenile spree-killers for First Person Shooters, I feel an urge to stand on a balcony and shout "Correlation does not equal causation!". Does an incipient killer develop the urge to kill because he plays FPS games, or does he love FPS games because he's an incipient killer?

What do you think?

The school's principal, Julie Wikelius, didn't know about the game until she was contacted last week for this story. She said she isn't convinced that the distinction between a virtual Nerf gun and a bullet-shooting gun makes a difference.

"I think there is a disconnect there: How are we defining nonviolent?" she said. "That's something that as a staff we need to work on a little bit more."

I started typing something bitterly snarky, one of those "you let your kids go to a school run by a woman who can't tell the conceptual and moral difference between a Nerf Gun and a Desert Eagle?"

And the more I think about it, the more appropriate the snark seems. "How are we defining non-violent?"

Let's see if this question helps your definition: Do you see a Dylan Harris playing a game involving shooting Nerf guns?

Can you imagine a spree-killer cutting his figurative teeth on a game that, like the Nerf Gun itself, is a glorified game of tag?

All snarking aside the lack of moral, conceptual, rhetorical, ethical and practical clarity is the most depressing thing I've read all day.

Mobbed Up

As we get closer to this weekend's Minnesota Organization of Bloggers outstate Road Show in Saint Cloud this weekend, I figure it's time to turn whatever little spotlight my humble blog shines on some of my favorite MOB blogs.

The MOB, for those of you who aren't Minnesota bloggers, is a thoroughly informal group of bloggers. The group's only agenda is social; to get bloggers together, eat, drink and be geeky. The "organization" is built around a couple of annual get-togethers in the Twin Cities and, as we're starting this weekend, some outstate shindigs as well. Unlike some of the other local blogging shindigs, it's utterly ecumenical; the MOB includes people from all over the political spectrum. Although most of the constituent blogs are probably right of center, that's just a matter of how the local blog scene is, or so it seems.

Anyway, the link bar for the MOB is on the right gutter of my blog, and you should read 'em all, one way or another.

But I figured I'd give a shout out to some of the MOB blogs I've been reading most regularly .

First Ring - A couple of excellent writers, covering a plethora of topics very, very well. A daily read.

Cathy In The Wright - Her home life is a lot funnier than mine - or so it seems from reading her blog...

Kool Aid Report - Like Scrappleface with tire irons. Like Powerline on meth. Like Nihilist without the black background.

Kennedy Vs. The Machine - A blog with a mission - obviously - and if there's any justice, one they'll accomplish. One of the best blogs going for Minnesota politics.

Pair O' Dice - As subtle as a frying pan to the forehead. But if you know Swiftee, I suspect he'd take that as a compliment.

Bogus Gold - Very eclectic: political commentary, plus perhaps the finest info on growing tomatoes available today.

Wog's Blog - A funny, pithy blog about alcoholism, DUI, and daily life.

What If - Tends to veer off into some really interesting tangent topics that I'd never think about veering into otherwise.

I could probably list more - and no doubt will. But suffice to say that if you're looking for some new blogs to graze on, a skim down the MOB Blogroll to the right is worth a few moments.

Note to Duane Patterson

Via whomever runs this blog, I found this piece on Laleh Seddigh, the first Iranian woman auto racer and, now, Iranian national racing champion.

Pardon the Powerline-like swerve into cheesecake:

Says the Times:

Ms. Seddigh is the oldest of four children. When she was 13, her father taught her to drive on weekends in a park on the outskirts of Tehran. At 23, she began racing miniature race cars that had more in common with go-carts. She also entered three-day cross-country car rallies, in which she had to change her own tires and make her own repairs. "I had to do everything by myself," she said, "because my navigator was a girl as well."

THE opportunity to compete against the boys came last year, when a new president took over at the Iranian racing federation who was open to allowing a woman to enter the men's races. There has been a lot of jealous grumbling from many of the male drivers, Ms. Seddigh said, but others, like Saeed Arabian, Iran's previous national champion and now her driving coach, are proud of what she has achieved.

With all respect due to NASCAR fanatic Duane Patterson, this beats the tar out of NASCAR.

Well, maybe not as far as racing goes. Work with me here.

Desperate Measures

Someone - we don't know who - used the mass-email form on the Concealed Carry Reform Now website to send a threatening email to members of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

On the eve of a crucial vote to reinstate a law allowing more people to carry guns in public, House members received e-mails threatening harassment and blackmail if they voted against the bill Wednesday.

"We will send people to your homes to harass you, and look in your windows,'' said the message sent Tuesday. "If that does not work, we have information on you, and your family, and we will use it in any way shape or form to get our bill passed.''

Although the e-mail was sent to all 134 House members, the message seemed aimed at the 55 DFLers who have either voted against the bill in the past or are new to the House and don't have a record on the issue.

You never know.

I'd say the odds are much better than even that it was an opponent of the bill, trying to discredit other bill supporters.

That's an opportunity the antis can't pass up:

Democratic Rep. Nora Slawik of Maplewood said she and several other Democrats identified on a "harassment list'' in the e-mail pressed to postpone the vote while the investigation was underway.

"If it has to be delayed until next year, so be it,'' said Slawik, who added that she's been deluged with e-mails from supporters of the gun legislation. "It puts a cloud over the bill. There's enough tension around the bill without having this layer of concern added.''

Sorry, Norah. The only real tension around the bill is in the minds of metro DFLers who realize that the re-passage is a slap in their agenda's face.

As Joel Rosenberg - in whose name the fraudulent emails were sent - noted on his blog, the authorities are involved:

The FBI was also investigating and discussing the matter with U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger's office, bureau spokesman Paul McCabe said.

I hope they find whomever it was, and toss him in the same cell as the moron who shot the bouncer.

Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now, the group that fought hardest for passage of the 2003 gun laws, also denied any involvement in the message. Olson said the group plans to sue whoever was behind the e-mails because he said his group's reputation was smeared.

"I'll bet you $10 it's an anti-gun person behind this,'' he said. "None of our people are this stupid.''

I believe Olson is correct. And I won't quite take the bet, not without a spread; this issue is intensely emotional for a lot of people on the pro side as well as the obvious emotion of the antis (which makes up their only case). Not everybody deals with that sort of thing perfectly. While the vast majority of concealed carry supporters are rational, smarter-than-average and as responsible as the day is long, CCRN also has 20,000-odd supporters; it'd be beggaring the law of averages if there weren't someone out there who might get a tad overwrought.

But like I said, I'm not taking the bet, either.

Private Data

In today's Strib, Kevin Duschere reveals that Zachary Ourada, the Nye's shooter, was a permit holder:

The homicide, Minneapolis' 18th of the year, has drawn special attention because Ourada is believed to be the first Minnesota gun permit holder charged with murder since the state's 2003 permit-to-carry law went into effect. The law required sheriffs to issue permits to people trained to use a pistol safely and not prohibited from owning firearms.

Two questions:

• Concealed Carry permit data is supposed (under the new law, and presumably under the pre-2003 law that is in force until the Legislature passes the MPPA again, probably later this week) to be private. Ourada has a post-2003 permit, but I am unsure if the data on post-2003 permits was/is private under the pre-2003 law. Anyone? I can recall seeing stories about other people, before 2003, who had problems with their carry permits. Long question short: Is this data supposed to be getting splashed about the media? Lawyers?
• How did Kevin Duschere of the Strib get this information?

I'll be asking about this all up and down the food chain. Feel free to leave any info you have in the comments.

UPDATE: A high-ranking figure at Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota wrote me offline with an answer:

All PERSONAL data about permit holders is indeed private (jusy like your medical records), but it is NOT the MCPPA that makes it so; it is a statute that is part of the Data Privacy Act. The affect is that antigun groups cannot get lists of names and addresses of permit holders to publish in their newsletters, etc.

However, once a permit holder is charged with a crime, he/she is now part of the criminal justice system, and LIMITED information may be made available to the public via law enforcement (whether or not the accused had a permit, where issued, tec. but NOT personal data such as address, etc.)

Upon adjudication of the case, if the person is convicted, his/her record is now PUBLIC record, and available to just about anyone.

The purpose of this system is to prevent wholesale "fishing expeditions" yet allow information about those who have been actually charged and convicted of crimes.

Bottom line: your data is private, but the antigun types' claim that "we can't find out if permit holders commit crimes" is false.

In other words, "It depends".

Make Mine Colt

Among the Twin Cities media, I'd imagine about 10% of the reporters, producers and editors know any more about firearms than what you can see in a Tarantino movie.

Mark Yost is an extreme exception; a (I'm told) former Marine, he's covered the firearms beat for other publications, and is a committed shooter.

His piece in today's PiPress, "Praise The Lord and Pass the Ammunition", is notable not so much for what it says - some of us have been writing this stuff for years - as for where it says it. To my knowledge, this is the first time an in-house columnist in the Twin Cities has ever known his head from his tush when it came to firearms and gun laws, much less told the absolute shining truth about both.

Yost:

Arguably the greatest good done Friday was in deleting several amendments to MPPA that went squarely against the core principles that once guided this country. One amendment would have barred permit holders from taking weapons into universities; another would have allowed cities to ban guns in their buildings and parks. While both sound sensible, there's one small thing standing in their way: the U.S. Constitution.

Among the core tenets of the Constitution that have been thrown over the side in favor of political expediency is the fundamental belief that the Constitution grants — or limits — specific, enumerated powers to the government. The Constitution, at least as it was originally written and intended, places no limits whatsoever on personal behavior. Somewhere along the way, that idea got lost.

And, with any luck, this bill will be a part of getting that idea back.

Yost continues on one of the most visible manifestations of the bill:

That's why I don't have a problem with private businesses putting up signs that say they ban guns; they're fully within their right to do that (Of course, it's also an open invitation to robbers, but that's their problem).

The Senate also deleted language that would have barred permit holders from taking guns into churches. Again, this is as it should be. Churches are private entities; the government has no authority to tell them who or what they can let into their sanctuaries. So while the amendments to the MPPA might have felt like the right thing to do, constitutionally they couldn't have been more wrong.

Exactly.

I have been very parsimonious about patronizing posted businesses in the past two years; unless I really need something, I go to a non-posted store, pretty religiously, and I urge you to do the same. And any church that makes a sanctimonious point about disarming its parishioners is a church that likely foments a lot of other objectionable crap, and is one I'll take pains not to attend. But like Mark says, it's their right.

The piece also tosses a few commonsense brickbats at the ignorance of some area legislators:

it also looks like Minnesota's effort to pass its own assault-weapon ban — to replace the equally misguided federal law that thankfully expired in September — is going nowhere. Section 1 of SF1946 lists the usual litany of mean-looking weapons: the AK-47, MAC-10, Uzi and AR-15.

The AR-15 is my favorite because it perfectly illustrates the illogic of this legislation. The AR-15 fires the same bullet at the same muzzle velocity at the same rate of fire as the Ruger Mini-14. More important, a Ruger Mini-14 was used in the shooting of Edina police officer Michael Blood during a November 2000 bank robbery.

So why is the AR-15 on the list and the Ruger isn't? Because it looks scarier.

This lunacy is made clearer when you consider that assault weapons are used in a minuscule number of crimes. This is apparently news to Sen. Satveer Chaudhary, sponsor of the assault-weapon ban.

"Law enforcement often encounters these weapons," he told me. "Assault weapons in general are the gun of choice for criminals."

Sorry, Senator, but guns aren't the weapon of choice in assaults. According to 2003 Minnesota BCA statistics, guns were used in 1,140 urban aggravated assaults. Knives were used in 1,592, "other weapons" in 1,553, and hands and feet in 1,883. So if the Senate and the numerically challenged Million Moms — who wrote the Minnesota assault-weapon legislation — really want to make a difference, they'll start a movement to cut off the hands and feet of repeat violent offenders. Banning assault weapons will have little effect.

Read the whole thing, and try to see if there's another paper in town that has the nerve to tell the truth.

It Had to Happen Someday

A permit holder shot the bouncer at Nye's.

A Minneapolis man fatally shot restaurant doorman Billy Walsh four times in the back after the suspect had been tossed out and pestered Walsh to get back in, according to criminal charges filed Monday.

Zachary Ourada, 26, was charged with second-degree murder in Walsh's death following the shooting Thursday night outside Nye's Polonaise Room, a northeast Minneapolis supper club and lounge.

The homicide, Minneapolis' 18th of the year, has drawn special attention because Ourada is believed to be the first Minnesota gun permit holder charged with murder since the state's 2003 permit-to-carry law went into effect. The law required sheriffs to issue permits to people trained to use a pistol safely and not prohibited from owning firearms.

Prediction: Ourada was carrying illegally long before he got the permit.

But I digress:

"I think this is a wake-up call to legislators, and I hope they will take another look," said Rebecca Thoman, executive director of Citizens for a Safer Minnesota. "Putting more guns out there results in more deaths and injuries. ... How many instances is it going to take until there are enough?"

Good question, Rebecca; how many crimes deterred will it take until "there are enough" to shut you the hell up? How many states will need to pass this law without significant problems before you take your checkbook and switch to saving baby seals or something?

Said Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, the bill's Senate sponsor: "I don't think it proves problems with the law. I think it proves that someone got [a permit] who shouldn't have gotten one."

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN: Ourada should get the book thrown at him. Hard. Many times.

WHAT WILL PROBABLY HAPPEN: The Hennepin County District Attorney's office will quietly plead out the gun violation in exchange for a deal; gun violations are an easy throwaway for use in plea-bargains (the Ramsey County attorney's office, which has a strict gun felony law, had as of a few years ago never used it, pleading it away in every single case). HenCo Attorney Amy Klobuchar will use the issue to rile up her base in Minneapolis, but remain vewy vewy quiet about it as she campaigns outstate for Senate, knowing that it's a complete loser for her.

Oh, and Zack? Your "be in the same room or side of the street as Mitch" privileges are permanently revoked.

Smoked Out

Tom Swift - blogger, political gadfly and Dave Thune's worst nightmare - has been following the progress of the smoking ban.

Oh, who are we kidding? Everyone knows it's been a disaster for bars.

Mike Lee, a manager at the iconic Lexington resturaunt on Grand Ave. is quoted as saying:

" The smoking ban has definately hurt our business."

"Our main dining room and our private party room are doing fine, but the bar, where we offer a full menu has been suffering at lunch when lobbists and legislators stop in, and late night when people used to come in for a brandy and a cigar or cigarette."

Driscoll notes that before the ban, the Lex's bar was always full until 11:30, or later but now Lee says "Now the bar is empty at 9:30, even on a Sunday night."

Up the street at Dixies on Grand, things are even worse.

"Business is down quite" a bit said owner John Wolf. "People can smoke on the patio during warm weather, but it's going to be bad this winter." "I'm not panicking yet, but I'm not hearing good things from anybody who's gone smoke free"

Wow. It's not like everyone wasn't predicting this, right?

Costello's Bar & Grill on Selby, which the wife and I visited last night and enjoyed the "No Thune" sticker prominently displayed on the door, has seen a large upswell in business. The bartender told us that Dave Thune's daughter and her boyfriend used to work there, but left after tha ban took effect.

Evidently they don't share the owners sense of humor.

Over in Minneapolis, where there are no exemptions possible, the story notes that Gabby's in Nord East has laid off 50% of their staff while the nearby Dubliner Pub on University in St. Paul is booming.

Private property rights advocates should be heartened by this news. Fact's are hard things to ignore and the facts are that this intrusion into our right to do as we please on private property is killing the hospitality business in the Twin Cities.

Well, naturally, not everyone:

Jeanne Weigum, the president and harpy-in-charge of the Association for Non-Smokers Rights isn't shedding any tears. Weigum and her crew, along with city council buffoon Dave Thune were largely responsible for the ban's enactment. Weigum is quoted as saying, "People will just have to adjust." "The buggy whip went out with the horse and carriage too, that's jsut the way it goes."

I found the next comment somewhat pleasing in a very vindictive way. One of the few resturaunts to support a smoking ban was the Tavern on Grand. In fact Weigum and Co. made a very public pilgrimage there to celabrate their victory, but evidently haven't made good on their promises to dine out more often now that they can find smoke free venues.

Oy, there's a blast from the past. Jeanne Weigum, one of the pack of überlefties from the old Minnesota Politics discussion forum; when Paul Wellstone yelled "jump", Jeanne Weigum replied "Off what?"

But at least the Ramsey County bars that can get exemptions are doing well. Read Swiftee.

The Sacrament of "Look At Meeeeee!"

The "Narcissism Monologues" incident at Winona High School a few weeks back - in which a group of high school kids learned learned that combining a facile, skin-deep interest in gender feminism with an adolescent desire to draw huge attention to oneself meant big press - was an interesting prologue to yesterday's face-off between the local Catholic hierarchy, who were trying to run a service wherein people could observe and celebrate their faith in Christ...

... and wearers of the "Rainbow Sash", who would seem to the casual observer to be primarily interested in worshipping sexuality.

Let me start by saying that I have no problem with anyone's sexuality - although as a frantically-busy parent of two who only dimly remembers what "sexuality" is all about you may have to pardon me if I don't take time out to celebrate yours, whatever it is. I may be the most pro-gay-rights conservative Christian you will ever meet.

I am also not Catholic, for reasons that are pretty well-considered - which is subject for a post that may well never get written - and have no bearing on the story anyway.

Furthermore, I know that there are people who object to the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality, and wish the stance changed. My own denomination, the Presbyterians, is having its own high-level catfight on the issue, one of many that make Presbyterian Church session, presbytery and General Assembly meetings such dicey things these days. And in a sense, I'm as sympathetic with them as I am with, for example, pharmacists that refuse to dispense birth control pills; feel free to dissent, but don't be surprised at the consequences if your act of conscience puts you in conflict with the establishment.

In other words, if you fight the law, don't snivel if the law wins.

Alternately, don't be surprised if your theatrics make the people you're trying to win over think you're a self-aggrandizing, self-righteous prig, and your cause a magnet for same. I'm speaking hypothetically.

Anyway - I saw this story today:

More than 150 members of the Rainbow Sash Alliance were sent away from communion empty-handed at the Cathedral of St. Paul on Pentecost Sunday...But instead of a communion wafer, each sash-wearing worshiper received a blessing from the priests conducting the mass.

And why the conflict?

Wearing rainbow-colored sashes, members of the group sought to take part in the eucharist to celebrate what they called the God-given sexuality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics.

Now, I've attended exactly seven Catholic masses in my life, and Reformation aside, I have to imagine they're not a whole lot different than a Protestant service inasmuch as people are attending for a lot of reasons, from simple fellowship in Christian faith to a need to attend to serious, even wrenching issues - illness, spiritual crisis, emotional duress, whatever.

My tolerance for dissent aside, if I were in one of those sanctuaries on Sunday morning, my reaction might have been "how dare you hijack this service toward what are, let's be honest, your temporal political ends."

Did someone mention self-righteous theatrics?

The worshipers returned to their seats and stood, cupped hands outstretched, for the remainder of the service.

No. No no no.

Ditch the sash, and take up the rules of the church with the people who set the rules of the church (or do what us Protestants did, and build a better theological mousetrap, if you will). You're not at a Cracker Barrel protesting rumors they discriminate against gays. You're not in third-period History, waving a trite button in peoples' faces as a brave stand against all the oppression against women that, er, goes on in our society. You're not at Pride. You're in a room where people are dealing with life and death; you're in a room where people who may or may not know what the hell you're on about come to set aside the temporal and deal with the eternal.

Keep your sashes - and your pietistic, self-righteous outstretched hands - out of the sanctuary. In the sanctuary, during worship, is not the place - unless your own vanity has so anaesthatized your sense of right and wrong that nothing this side of a funeral is truly sacred anymore.

Archdiocese spokesman Dennis McGrath said the church's denial of communion had nothing to do with sexuality. Had they removed their sashes, he said, the Rainbow Alliance worshipers would have been given communion along with the rest of the congregation.

"It's about using the most sacred and profound part of our faith as a protest," McGrath said. "The eucharist is not the Washington Monument, where you can stage a demonstration.

"We have no litmus test for communion," McGrath said. "It's very painful for the archbishop and very painful for the church to deny the sacraments, but they [the protesters] are setting the ground rules."..."I wish they would have kept it out of the church," said Kathleen Herkenhoff of St. Paul. "Whatever they do, however they live, is between them and God.

"I just wish they would have come to mass for Jesus, not for themselves."

Was that what they did?

It's probably not for me to say - but their actions had a couple of the hallmarks of the vanity protest:

Singing the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome," the sash-wearers filed into the cathedral just before noon. After the service, they repeated the song from the front steps of the church.

If he were alive, Martin Luther King would puke chunks.

"Pentecost is traditionally a celebration of the gifts of the spirit," McNeill said. "On this day when we celebrate the gifts of the spirit, it is appropriate to celebrate our sexuality. God made us this way."

God made me loud and stubborn, a good marksman, a dang fine guitar player and adequate bagpiper, able to spit with extreme precision at ranges of up to 10 feet, and - might I add - very much a heterosexual. Yet I "celebrate" none of these in church; to do so is to impose each of these on people in a place and at a time that is not about "celebrating" you or your characteristics.

Wilde: "All that Economics is Soooo Complicated..."

I listened to about the first two minutes of the Wild Wendy Wendy Wilde show on the local FrankenNet affiliate.

Oy, oy, oy indeed.

The topic was the Taxpayers' League's current radio ad campaign against tax hikes.

Wilde put some of her keen grasp of economics on display. Or, to be fair, perhaps it was a keen display of her knowledge of her audience's ignorance.

Or maybe both.

Anyway - Wilde said (and I'm closely paraphrasing, since I don't have a recorder in my car):

...back before the permanent tax cuts [when Minnesota cut the marginal state income tax rate down to somewhere near middle class levels], Minnesota had great job growth! Since the tax cuts...where are the jobs?"

Jeez, Wendy. There might have been a little terrorist attack in there somewhere? Which might have led to the popping of the Clinton Bubble? Remember any of that?

Any of it?

Or do you remember the fact that Minnesota rode out the last recession a whole lot better than the early nineties' recession?

No?

At the beginning of the show, Wilde said "I guess the pressure of having a radio station in town calling his bluff must be getting to him!".

While I doubt that Pawlenty pays any attention to the local FrankenNet affiliate, one wonders if Ms. Wilde is capable of enough reason to note the irony.

Say What You Will...

...about Rathergate - but at least nobody died when Mary Mapes blew a story:

Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.

And while not everyone in the media likes bloggers all that much, when was the last time John Hinderaker did this:

On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

Speaking Of Strict Mistresses

Doug Grow has a hilarious piece on the DFL's Minneapolis City Convention, which was apparently organized like a Sicilian lutefisk dinner:

By 11:18, Higgins had Fifth Warders and Seventh Warders on the move. By this time, she also had shortened her message.

"Everybody stop talking but me!" she screamed.

By 11:28, the city convention was called to (sort of) order.

Party leaders were declaring that the poor planning really wasn't poor planning at all. The mess was created because DFL delegates are so excited by the party that they arrived at the convention in record numbers.

It's a good bet the party dis-organizers solved that problem for future years. A lot of people who showed up filled with enthusiasm Saturday will never want to return.

But this little crack here - Grow, on Linda Higgins' attempts to re-organize the convention around the lack of adequate seating - had me wondering:

Higgins had sort of a Republican answer to the question.

"You're going to move because that's what we've decided!" she yelled into her microphone.

Can't say as I've ever heard a Republican wrap herself in the cloak of the community to buffer her inner authoritarian. But what do I know?

By the way, the DFL endorsed Peter McLaughlin for Mayor of Minneapolis, over sitting mayor R.T. Rybak. I imagine the DFL endorsement is worth as much in Minneapolis as it is in Saint Paul (i.e., the "Kiss of Death")

CORRECTION: There was apparently no endorsement. Rumors that Mr. McLaughlin paid voters to not give him the "death" endorsement have not been substantiated.

Frau Ranum, Strict Mistress

Among the wierder things that came out of last week's debates on the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, according to Joel Rosenberg, was:

the Jane Ranum Bondage amendments (which would have allowed any cop or security guard to handcuff any permit holder for their own entertainment)

In other words, Ranum wanted to allow cops to be able to handcuff permit-holders while they checked for rap sheets, whether there was any wrongdoing involved or not.

Wierd.

Wonder what prompted that?

Steyn On Bolton

Mark Steyn on the Bolton nomination:

John Bolton's sin is to have spoken the truth about the international system rather than the myths to which photo-oppers like the Canadian prime minister defer. As a consequence, he's being treated like a container of Western aid being processed by Indonesian customs. Customs Inspector Joe Biden and Junior Clerk Voinovich spent two months trying to come up with reasons why Bolton's paperwork is inadequate and demanding to know why he hasn't filled out his RU1-2. An RU1-2 is the official international bureaucrat's form reassuring the global community that he'll continue to peddle all the polite fictions, no matter how self-evidently risible they are. John Bolton isn't one, too. That's why we need him.

The thing that puzzles me the most about the people who think we must defer to the UN, and by no means insult its (risible) affect on the world; do they not see what a joke the organization has always been? Do they not read history - Dag Hammarskjold's effect on, among other things, the Congo crisis was on balance worse than useless, among many other UN disasters.

What is the actual problem with Bolton?

Besides the whole "acceptable to conservatives" thing?

Open Letter to the Target Store in Arden Hills, MN

My daughter, Bun, takes after me in a lot of ways. Of my two kids, she's probably the closest to me in terms of looks, attitude, overall gestalt...

...with one huge exception. She got her clothing-shopping chops from her Mom.

For example, for me the act of picking out a pair of pants involves finding a pair on the shelf that looks cool and whose numbers match the numbers I've memorized (finally) for my own size, and tossing them in the cart, and leaving the store.

For Bun, as with her mother, it involves an endless process of taking two or three pairs of pants at a time and going to the fitting room, where it takes at least ten minutes per pair to try on, evaluate, and get mentally psyched for the next trip to the pants rack for the next couple of pairs.

Now, being a guy, I hate hate hate hate hate shopping (except at Guitar Center or Bill's Gun Shop or Barnes and Noble). That hatred has honed my shopping instincts to a fine sheen; I can buy a week's groceries for a family of three in about ten minutes; a trip to Target for me usually involves about five minutes worth of carefully-choreographed economy of motion worthy of an SAS hostage-rescue raid.

Which leaves a minimum of forty minutes of waiting for Bun to finish trying pants on.

Which was one of the reasons I used to love coming to your particular Target, because alone among Targets anywhere around here, you have a little couch outside the fitting rooms.

Er...had a little couch. It's gone now.

Anyway, as I was saying, a guy used to be able to kick back after ten gruelling minutes of shopping and relax a bit as he waited for his daughter to to through whatever the hell ritual every female in the farging world does in those farging changing rooms.

But, again, it's gone now.

Like my admiration for your store. Bastards.

Pride and Fear

America is a nation of immigrants. Saint Paul has been an immigrants city more than most, at least in the Midwest.

And no immigrants stories affect me more than those of the thousands of H'mong who settled in the Twin Cities. The H'mong - the older of them, anyway - served on the payroll of the CIA against the Viet Cong. The weapons they were issued were the first tools they'd seen that didn't have their roots in the Stone Age.

After the war, the Vietnamese embarked on a campaign of brutal retribution - and many H'mong fled the country. The US government accepted them as refugees by the thousands. Many settled in California, but Saint Paul drew the second-greatest concentration of the new immigrants.

They've made an impact on the Twin Cities; Saint Paul schools are crowded with H'mong kids. And while many H'mong are thriving, some have had a hard time jumping from a life that was unchanged over perhaps the past thousand years to life in the frenzied first world.

If there's a group of people the US owes something to, it's the H'mong.

And so stories like this always get to me:

On Saturday afternoon, relief and pride spread over the Lee family. After the long year's absence, Cpl. Moua Lee arrived home.

More than 50 relatives were waiting for him at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport holding a "Welcome Home, Moua!" banner, American flags and Marine flags.

When Moua walked into the group's embrace, the relatives grew silent, many holding back tears.

"Thank God you made it home," Chue whispered, sobbing and holding her son tight. Moua hugged his father and then his wife. And for the first time, he held and kissed his baby son, Timmathy.

An uncle shook his hand and said, "Thank you." A stranger waiting on a bench saw his uniform and simply applauded.

The story is an amazing one.

Remeber - the H'mong went through hell before they came here. After the US bugged out of Vietnam, the Vietnamese government went after the H'mong; there are allegations that the Vietnamese dropped mustard gas on H'mong villages.

The older H'mong, whose memories of war are only 25-30 years in the past, can be forgiven for hoping their children never have to go there.

And yet the children of immigrants do:

Watching their children go off to fight probably produces different reactions in parents who have experienced war than it does in other parents, said Frederic Medway, a professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina.

Some get more anxious, realizing how precious life is once they've seen death, said Medway, who specializes in family separation. Others might feel more secure in some ways, knowing firsthand what their son or daughter might be going through, he said.

And some refugees are proud when their children join the military. If they led troops in their homeland, they might see military service as honorable for their children, said John Borden, associate director of the International Institute of Minnesota, a resettlement agency...Immigrants also join for more typical reasons, such as money for college, work experience and travel.

Many immigrant parents convey to their children a sense of gratitude toward the United States, said Ben Johnson, director of the Immigration Policy Center for the American Immigration Law Foundation in Washington, D.C. "It's not surprising to me that many of their children would have a sense of patriotism and duty that would cause them to look toward the military," he said.

"In my case, it's to repay," said Ahmed Shukri, an Ethiopian refugee who came to the United States via Somalia 26 years ago. He said he joined the Army after earning a GED, a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. "I was brought here by strangers. ... These people gave me food, they gave me housing. The question was 'Why are they so nice to me?' I want to be gracious enough to give something back."

The piece, by the Strib's Pam Louwagie, is an excellent one, and a must-read.

Mauvelous

After a couple-of-day dalliance as "Mauve", the Kool Aid Report - one of my favorite MOB blogs - is Kool Aid Report again.

Whew.

Toast

It had to happen.

It's actually a lot better than the Huffpo - not that we couldn't predict that.

(Via my neighbor, Peter Hoh, who should be doing a blog, dagnabbit)

MPPA Passes - Redux

Joel Rosenberg was at the Senate today, and passed commentary out to his blog via phone. I couldn't read the posts as they happened - my employer blocks LiveJournal - but I've been catching up.

A couple of points:

Senator Dean Johnson's aide came out, after that, and rather imperially demanded that we send our thanks to the Senator for keeping his word. I think that's only fair -- you'll find him at 651.296.3826, or right here. Please do call and email him; I just did, myself.

I just left a message, thanking Johnson and all outstate DFLers.

There's some really good news:

The Senate removed all of the silly amendments that came out of Skogie's Crime committee. No fingerprinting; no governments telling you that you can't protect yourself in a park; the same reasonable alcohol limit that we had no trouble living with. A whole barrage of silly amendments were voted down, and a couple passed that were just plain repetitive. (New language repeats the existing language that you've got to show your permit to a cop who asks to see it; it's ambiguous as to what -- if anything -- the penalty might be if you don't, say, because you've left your permit and your handgun at home. Not to worry.)

It could be worse.

Of course, there are reasons to be cautious:

The only thing I'm concerned about -- and we'll be discussing this, at length, over the next few days -- are the implications of letting the DPS be the gatekeeper for civilian carry permit training. On the good side, their validation system has been working quite well; on the minus side, one of the reasons it's been working is that NRA- or AACFI-certified instructors weren't required to submit to it. All in all, I think this is a definite win.

As Joel points out, it was a bigger win than even some of the more exuberant among us had hoped for - 44 votes. Joel predicted 43; my own semi-informed count said 40 or so. The 2003 vote was 37 in favor; 34 were needed to pass.

Best part? It's better than 2-1 in favor. I'd call that a mandate.

The House is next. It should be less of a white-knuckle ride.

MPPA PASSES!

Within the past half hour, the Minnesota Senate passed the Minnesota Personal Protection Act - again.

The elected representatives of the people of Minnesota passed the bill by a 44-21 margin - seven votes more than in 2003, when the bill passed into law the first time.

The law was in full effect for 15 months in Minnesota, before a group of well-heeled suburban liberals led by former US Attorney David Lillehaug hijacked the law via a well-placed suit brought before a pet judge. The judge worded his ruling veeery carefully - to the point of sheer brilliance - which made the appeal a difficult (and ultimately unsuccessful) one.

Senator Pat Pariseau, and Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota, did the right thing; rather than going straight to the legal system, like astroturf organizations like "Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota" do for these things, she/they did it the hard way, one vote at a time, the same way they got the original bill passed after eight years of fanatical resistance from the Metro DFL.

The right of criminals in Minnesota to practice their trade unmolested just took a big hit, again, today.

Thank God.

It's at this point that I have to give a shout-out to some not-so-usual suspects: the DFL.

No, not the metrocrats, like Wes "Lying Sack of Filth" Skoglund (averse as I am to namecalling, Skoglund is the exception; he's spent a decade slandering the law-abiding, honest gun owner, and earned my undying emnity), Jane Ranum and Matt Entenza. May their longstanding distrust, even slander, of the law-abiding be remembered for the rest of their political lives, if justice exists.

No, I'm talking about the DFL that represents the grass roots of this state, the outstate Senators that have more than a passing familiarity with common sense; the ones that can read numbers, like "in fifteen months, the MPPA recorded no problems, at at least one crime deterred that was directly attributable to an MPPA; like 28 states have passed Shall Issue laws in the past 22 years, and none have repealed them (outside of the odd legal challenge in New Mexico, Missouri and here); that such laws have been an unmitigated success everywhere they've been tried.

25 months ago, when the bill first passed into law, and awash in long-denied joy at what I'd believed nearly impossible only five years before, I quoted at full length the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom". Overzealous? Irrational exuberance? Certainly.

I think we've all earned it.

Especially Pat Pariseau, for whom my mere "thanks" seems hardly enough. She is a profile in political courage, and a case study in raw perseverence. God Bless Pat Pariseau.

UPDATE: First major media coverage (that I could find): Patrick Condon of the Associated Press, whose wrapup of the debate practically oozes sorrow, and sympathy for the metrocrats; I've added the emphases:

Gun control advocates in the Senate got an opportunity they were denied two years ago, as they tried - but ultimately failed - to set stricter limits on who can carry a handgun in public as their fellow lawmakers voted to revive a court-overturned 2003 gun permit law.

"I will not be silenced on this bill and I will not hesitate to point out what a terrible bill it is," said Sen. Wes Skoglund, DFL-Minneapolis, even as a bipartisan group of senators methodically rejected multiple efforts to create more gun-free zones, limits on who can carry guns and deeper background checks on permit applicants.

After hours of debate the Senate voted 44-21 for the handgun bill, a duplicate of the 2003 act that courts struck down because of the flawed method lawmakers used to pass it. At the time, supporters of the bill attached it to an unrelated measure, robbing opponents of the chance to make changes they sought.

Is Mr. Condon ignorant, or is he biased?

These and other questions as we continue.

Sour Grapes, Forever

I remember when radio had no great import in life.

Oh, that's not entirely true. When I started in radio, it was a place you went for baseball games, for local news (back in the days when most radio stations had a newsman puttering away in a back corner, somewhere), for the weather and the time, and background noise.

Even talk radio - which, in rural North Dakota back then was mainly ghostly-sounded transmissions from big cities caught on the skip on clear nights, people like Larry King and other long-forgotten voices talking to the insomniacs and the drunks after bar closing - was a fairly neutral thing, pretty much just background noise.

We didn't get public radio in Jamestown North Dakota until I was in college (unless you count CBW in Winnipeg, which was what my Mom pretty well locked the radio on to until KDSU in Fargo upped its signal enough to be heard). I had other things on my mind, and didn't listen much - but I was alternately wowed and bored stiff; the breadth and depth of topics covered, even in a lowly newscast, was as astounding as the bored pretentiousness of the people presenting it.

I moved to the Twin Cities, and started working in talk radio - ironically, the much-maligned (and unlamented) "Fairness Doctrine" was responsible for putting me, a 23-year-old kid with much zeal and little talent, on the air as the station's only conservative; they needed someone to balance the station's three soft-left daytime hosts. In the days of the Fairness Doctrine and before Limbaugh, talk radio was much as it had always been; a place for cranks and the lonely and gluttons for punishment.

Which brings us to Garrison Keillor's poison-pen screed to the talk radio world.

Keillor:

I am old enough to be nostalgic about radio, having grown up when it was a stately medium...I am rather fond of radio as it is today, full of oddities and exceptions. It is an unmanageable medium. Management is at work trying to format things, but reality keeps breaking through the bars. You twiddle the dial, and in the midst of the clamor and blare and rackety commercials you find a human being speaking to you in a way that intrigues you and lifts your spirits, such as a few weeks ago when a man spoke about his mother, in Houston, who as she was dying of lung cancer made a video for her severely retarded daughter to watch in years to come, which the daughter does not watch, being too retarded to comprehend death, which in itself is a mercy. It was very graceful, a fellow American telling a story unlike all the other stories. Pretty amazing. And all the more so for showing up on a dial full of blathering idiots and jackhammer music.

Y'see, I could almost learn to like this Garrison Keillor. He enjoys the same things I do, at least at a conceptual level; Radio, being a essentially a do-it-yourselfer's medium (despite the big radio conglomerates on the one hand, and big corporate Public Radio on the other, trying to homogenize it in their own images) is a wonderland of things to discover, if you dig around a bit.

In fact, I can identify with this bit here:

My taste is catholic; I don't go looking for people like me (earnest liberal English majors) [Or earnest conservative ones! - Ed.]. I am a fan of the preachers on little AM stations in early morning and late at night who sit in a tiny studio in Alabama or Tennessee and patiently explain the imminence of the Second Coming--I grew up with good preaching, and it is an art that, unlike anything I find in theaters, has the power to shake me to my toes. And gospel music is glorious beyond words. I love the mavericks and freethinkers and obsessives who inhabit the low-power FM stations--the feminist bluegrass show, the all-Sinatra show, the Yiddish vaudeville show. Once, on the Merritt Parkway heading for New York, I came upon The American Atheist Hour, the sheer tedium of which was wildly entertaining--there's nobody so humorless as a devout atheist.

True.

Also wonderful - radio you can't understand. No, not Nick Coleman - I'm talking about foreign language radio. Whether listening to Chicago's Polish stations, or the Twin Cities' various Spanish-language outlets, or KFAI's Cambodian and H'mong and Vietnamese and Somali programs, it's always fascinating, trying to divine bits and pieces of stray English along with tone and delivery to figure out what the various immigrant communities are really thinking.

And there's nothing quite like pulling in a rugged little indy station on the skip while driving across the prairie late at night, playing something that you've never heard before and will never hear again - ethereal little moments that you remember more for their feel than for what you heard.

This much, I'm on board with. Which is disconcerting.

Fortunately, Keillor gets back to familiar ground:

I love the great artists of public radio who simulate spontaneity so beautifully they almost fool me--Terry Gross, Ira Glass, the Car Talk brothers--all carefully edited and shaped, but big as life on the radio, smarter than hell, cooler than cucumbers.

Maybe I'm jaded. Or maybe I spent enough time working with the nuts and bolts and technique of audio production. Either way, though, Gross and the Tappet Brothers remind me of Milli Vanilli; highly-manufactured product designed and marketed with painstaking care to fit a niche, edited to within a shred of its life to expunge all sense of originality and spontaneity.

Simulated spontaneity? The only thing simulated on these shows is breath and blood.

I love the good-neighbor small-town radio of bake sales and Rotary meetings and Krazy Daze and livestock reports and Barb calling in to report that Pookie was found and thanks to everybody who was on the lookout for her. Good-neighbor radio used to be everywhere and was especially big in big cities--WGN in Chicago, WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul, WOR in New York, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, KSL in Salt Lake City--where avuncular men chatted about fishing and home repair and other everyday things and Library Week was observed and there was live coverage of a tornado or a plane crash and on summer nights you heard the ball game. Meanwhile lawn mowers were sold and skin cream and dairy goods and flights to Acapulco.

I started at a station like that. A 1,000 watt station that "produced" one-hour newscasts at 7AM, 8AM, Noon and 5PM, and reported Jamestown Fire Department calls (brought to you by Moran Insurance!), and covered not only all the Jamestown High School hoops games, but all the Medina and Kensal games as well (sponsored by Knetter Medina Cheese!).

It's a shame that medium is gone - or, more accurately, shifted elsewhere.

The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing.

That, indeed, is a jarring sight. I didn't set foot in a radio station from August of 1992 (when I left WDGY, a station that ran almost exactly like KEYJ had run in 1979) until March of 2003, when the NARN show started on AM1280. I felt like Rip Van Winkel; no cart decks, no reel to reel tape, no cassettes - just computers and ethernet and ISDN and boxes blinking and screens flashing and things that, geek though I am in my current career, were as foreign to me as the IBM PC must have been to my father, ten years ago.

They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.

After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and Internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.

Well, one can hope.

People like Tommy Mischke, a nighttime guy on a right-wing station in St. Paul [Hah! He thinks KSTP is "right-wing"! - Ed.] and a free spirit who gets into wonderful stream-of-consciousness harangues and meditations that are a joy to listen to compared with the teeth-grinding that goes on around him.

Wow. Who'da thunk it - Keillor and I agree on something else!

Not that it can last:

Not that teeth-grinders are to be disparaged: I enjoy, in small doses, the over-the-top right-wingers who have leaked into AM radio on all sides in the past twenty years. They are evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Sigh.

And things were going so well.

Garry! We are the country you love. We are dissent. We are the raw nerves of 51% of your fellow citizens - the ones that you and your network look down their noses at, the ones that bring out your inner dyspeptic!

I suppose I could be personally hurt by being called an "evil, cynical bastard", but, as always, consider the source. Behind Keillor's facade of gentility, humor and cornpone, he's known as one of the most ruthless, exploitive employers in town; obsequious to his superiors, tyrannical to his employees, devoid of social skills to strangers - the very opposite of all he claims to exalt.

Ye shall know the cynical bastards by their actions.

And now that their man is re-elected and they have nice majorities in the House and Senate, they are hunters in search of diminishing prey. There just aren't many of us liberals worth banging away at, but God bless them, they keep on coming.

Au contraire, Garr. I don't know that we're any more interested in "banging away at" liberals than you are in converting conservatives. Talk radio isn't a missionary - it's sunday school.

But no mind. He's on a roll. The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. He's actually right.

Sort of.

Conservative talk radio filled - and fills - a vaccuum, supplying a nexus to a community that had none before. The left has, for at least my entire lifetime, had places where their community passed on their tribal stories; colleges, unions, the mainstream media, not the least of which is National (and Minnesota) Public Radio, places where the left-of-center can go to listen to and talk with others just like them; where people can celebrate the diversity of listening to, thinking like, and being in tune with other people just like them.

Alan Dershowitz once scolded the Harvard faculty (possibly apocryphally): "Your idea of diversity is someone with black skin or wearing a skirt, who think just like you".

Conservative talk radio justifiably makes no claims to being excessively diverse. Either should Public Radio, whose audience - lilywhite, middle-class, college-educated to a fault - is if anything vastly more homogenous than Talk Radio's, which at least mixes blue collar workers, entrepreneurs and well-off professionals.

Did I mention Keillor was a cynical, evil bastard? Well, I was being hyperbolic, but this next bit...:

Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time.

Although it is what National Public Radio is all about, anyway.

I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed,

Which, incidentally, is more or less the same role talk radio plays in the conservative movement!

...but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness.

...which is odd, coming from a man who has created a self-perpetuating radio product which, enjoy it weekly though I do, is as predictable and homogenized as the playlist at "HOT ROCKIN' 95.5FM!".

I don't need someone to tell me that George W. Bush is a deceitful, corrupt, clever and destructive man--that's pretty clear on the face of it.

That's right. What I'd like is a couple of former Prairie Home Companion employees to come on MPR and talk about what a deceitful, corrupt, spiteful, arrogant, socially-challenged, personally ugly man Garrison Keillor is.

That would surprise!

What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful. Or you find three women in a studio yakking rapid-fire about the Pitt-Aniston divorce and the Michael Jackson trial and the botoxing of various stars and who wore what to the Oscars. It's not my world, and I like peering into it. The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. And then you succumb to weakness and tune in to the geezer station and there's Roy Orbison singing "Dream Baby" and you join Roy on the chorus, one of the Roylettes.

Well, hey, Garr. Pop on out to a NARN show some weekend. You'll have a ball.

I don't worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up.

You know when you're standing at a bus stop, or in the produce section of the grocery store, and you dimly notice something's not quite right? And that sense transforms into a person, someone obviously troubled and disturbed, someone whose eyes have the burning fierceness of the person troubled by sounds only they can hear, ideas only they have? And that person walks up to you and starts talking to you, quietly, in a conspiratorial voice, trying to let you in on the little secret they have - but only so far, of course, or at least only for the half-life of the idea, which keeps changing, shifting too fast even for the burning-eyed stranger to keep track of?

And maybe for the first couple of times, when you were a teenager or twentysomething, you tried to engage that person in conversation; you didn't know what you were up against, or you genuinely cared, or thought you could do some good. Experience eventually taught you; there was no point to it. They had their idea, and nothing could change it.

So too with Keillor's hatred for all things and people to the right of Paul Wellstone. It's dug in there, solid to the point of pathology, hot to the point of religious zeal, too broad to find a vulnerable flank of reason.

Why bother? It's a world where all people are caricatures, fitting broadly into two camps; People who think Ira Glass is a genius, and people who vote Republican.

The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics.

But then, the same is true of all radio, whether it's an oldies station or a slapdash conservative weekend show or the "Good Neighbor", for that matter. But in Garrison Keillor's world, only public radio and its sympathizers get the dignity of human breadth and depth.

That's why public radio is growing by leaps and bounds. It is hospitable to scholars of all stripes and to travelers who have returned from the vast, unimaginable world with stories to tell. Out here in the heartland, we live for visitors like those. We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something.

If I had a demented uncle, he'd probably say "Public Radio is growing by leaps and bounds", too.

Relax, bigfella. Work on the inner Garry for a while. It needs a lot more help than conservative talk radio and its audience do.

Today's The Day?

Today is very likely the day the Minnesota Personal Protection Act will be debated on the floor of the Senate.

Keep your calls to your Senators going. As far as this session goes, today is likely for all the marbles.

One of the problems is the number of poison-pill amendments that the likes of Wes "Lying Sack Of Filth" Skoglund attached to the bill in committee. There should be enough votes to remove the amendments - but again, you need to be contacting your Senator.

Joel Rosenberg discusses one of the amendments:

Right now, the argument -- offstage, although very noisy -- is over fingerprinting of permit applicants. For those who have ever, say, been in the military, it's unnecessary (all military folks are fingerprinted). For those who have never been so much as accused of a crime, it's insulting.

Me, I don't much care, on a personal basis -- I've offered to let Senator Steve Kelley fingerprint me, if he's willing to (quite literally) get his hands dirty doing so (he's yet to either take me up on the offer or decline it; I've made the same offer to Skogie, via Senator Kelly) -- but I very much do care about the precedent of fingerprinting people simply because they wish to exercise a right. If we're going to fingerprint people, let's start with those wishing to exercise a privilege: apply for a drivers license, receive welfare or get a government job of any sort, hold a Realtor's or Series 6 license, serve in the legislature or on any town or city council, etc., etc.

And then, after that, let's talk about fingerprinting people simply because they want to exercise their rights.

What do you think the DFL would say if we fingerprinted the homeless? People seeking abortions? People signing up for social services?

None of those are spelled out in the Constitution.

I wish I could be there for the hearings today.

The "M" Word

When lefties start pleading "McCarthy", you know they're out of ideas.

George Galloway would seem to be out of ideas.

A day after Sen. Norm Coleman implicated a member of Parliament in a U.N. oil-for-food scheme, the British legislator shot back Thursday in a cross-Atlantic exchange of words.

The legislator, George Galloway, likened Coleman to the late U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a characterization that sets the scene for a televised confrontation on Capitol Hill Tuesday, one that could further raise the Minnesota Republican's profile.

Coleman, of course, has led the Senate in investigating the Oil For Food scam - to his everlasting credit - and seems, to the casual, non-lawyer observer, to have is facts together.

We shall, indeed, see.

Coleman already has gained international attention for calling on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to resign as a result of the oil-for-food scandal.

The latest showdown began Wednesday when the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations, which Coleman chairs, released a report accusing Galloway and former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua of accepting vouchers for millions of barrels of Iraqi oil -- which could then be resold at immense profit -- in exchange for their support of Saddam Hussein's regime.

This, of course, is consistent with the evidence Claudia Rosett has been producing for the past year or so.

Galloway, who was expelled from Britain's Labor Party in 2003 for urging British soldiers not to fight in Iraq, responded by calling Coleman's panel a "lickspittle Republican committee, acting on the wishes of George Bush." He also likened Coleman to the late senator and anti-Communist crusader McCarthy.

Lickspittle.

That's gotta hurt.

Note to all of you that support the UN: forget about Bolton. The UN's friends will do it more harm than its detractors, at this rate.

Read the whole thing.

Condi: Fourteenth Amendment, Front And Center

Condi comes out swinging for the Second Amendment - and the contructionist view thereof - via the Fourteenth.

Flashback: After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan roamed the old South, taking out its revenge on hapless freedmen who crossed their paths...

...except in a case in the Galveston, Texas area, where a group of blacks who'd served in the Union Army's "colored" regiments, and who'd remained armed, gave the Klan an ugly, bloody nose. The Texas state government promptly tried to pass a law banning posession of guns by blacks - a motivation not unlike that behind most modern gun control laws.

This was one of many cases that led to the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Condi's motivation, however, is much more personal

Rice:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recalling how her father took up arms to defend fellow blacks from racist whites in the segregated South, said Wednesday the constitutional right of Americans to own guns is as important as their rights to free speech and religion.

In an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," Rice said she came to that view from personal experience. She said her father, a black minister, and his friends armed themselves to defended the black community in Birmingham, Ala., against the White Knight Riders in 1962 and 1963. She said if local authorities had had lists of registered weapons, she did not think her father and other blacks would have been able to defend themselves.

Wow. Mr. Rice must have been one of those people that Wes "Lying Sack of Filth" Skoglund is worried about having peeping in his windows. Right?

Rice said the Founding Fathers understood "there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Ala., when, in fact, the police weren't going to protect you."

"I also don't think we get to pick and choose from the Constitution," she said in the interview, which was taped for airing Wednesday night. "The Second Amendment is as important as the First Amendment."

A Secretary of State commenting about the Second Amendment?

Hm. It's almost as if she's setting up bona fides on domestic policy for...

...for something.

Cool.

This Time, Really Mark Your Calendars

The first-ever Minnesota Organization of Bloggers "Road Show"is coming up a week from Saturday, in Saint Cloud.

We're hoping to do for outstate (or at least west-central Minnesota) blogging what the MOB parties in the Twin Cities have done for bloggers in the southeast part of the state; provide a venue for people to get together and talk about things other than politics and blogging!

King has the details.

Mitch Berg: Scenemaker

As Molly Priesmeyer notes in "Blotter", her City Pages-owned Babelogue blog, in re the HuffPo:

The Huffington Post has also garnered itself a celeb-style nickname: Huffpo.

She links to this post, from the Chris Meserole's Democratic Vista blog, as the cite for the nick. Note the timestamp: 10:54PM last Tuesday.

But I submit for your approval that it was none other than myself - a lowly Republican blogger in flyover land - who actually coined the term, nearly a day and a half before Meserole.

The Northern Alliance Blogs. We set the standard in political blogging, blog radio, blog alliances (the MOB, the biggest and best blog alliance in the business), and now in defining vacuous celebrity culture.

Have your people call our people.

Smearers, Smear Thyselves

I fully expect that my kids could very easily wind up completely different from my own politics. After all, all three of the grandparents I remember were solid Republicans, while both of my parents are Democrats. Anything can happen. Such is life.

But for now, for whatever reason, my kids tag along with my Republican politics. Unlike me at their ages, they're pretty dang bright.

And, like good young conservatives, they have a strong market motive; I pay them a buck a piece to bring home bits of biased or indoctrinative literature they get at schools. Let's say they've bought quite a bit of pop at Superamerica because of their schools.

In a more sinister vein, the stories they tell me - the way historical and current events are presented to them - tell me that a lot of their teachers, especially social studies and humanities teachers, are thoroughly biased to the left. Not to say they teach an agenda, per se - but that views not blessed by the left get very short shrift.

In sixth grade, my daughter (whose teacher at the time was a Green who went into a morbid depression when Wellstone died, but was otherwise a good teacher) reported being taken to an assembly on the brink of the invasion of Iraq. A group of students from Hamline University had just returned from a tour intended to train them as unwitting shills of the Iraqi information ministry of Iraq, and gave a presentation that might as well have come from Baghdad Bob or the UN; "the embargo has killed 100,000 Iraqi children, Iraq is a sovereign nation, let the inspectors do their jobs...", that kind of thing.

My daughter, bless her spunky little heart, got in the students' faces - and, to her credit, probably knew more about the first Iraq war than they did. She was basically ignored.

At any rate - yes, there is a slant to the left in the high schools today.

Michael Boucher writes a thoroughly, drearily predictable op-ed in this morning's Strib. Boucher is described as "...a social studies teacher at South High School in Minneapolis, [and] president of the Minnesota Council of Social Studies."

So it's possible he's capable of giving the topic at hand a fair presentation.

I said "Possible".

His op-ed regards an effort by State Sen. Michele Bachmann to solicit stories of discrimination from teenage Republicans in the state. There's her first mistake; she should come to the parents.

Boucher:

Like many of us, I get a lot of e-mail and most of it goes in the trash, but one piece I recently received chilled me to the bone. It begins with the benign statement, "Senate Assistant Minority Leader Michele Bachmann is working on a project that may help us all learn and participate in democracy more freely."

"Excellent!" I thought to myself. Getting kids more involved in politics is great. Students' eyes too often glaze over when delving into the details of government, but once they get a taste of how it actually works, they become better citizens and students. It is especially hard to get them to care about local and state government, even though that is where they have the most effective voice.

Which is, presumably, why the schools are so enamored with busing students en masse to rallies at the capitol on behalf of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.

But I digress:

"As Teenage Republicans, I'm sure that many of you have had trouble or conflict in your schools in regards to your teachers or administrators not looking favorably towards your conservative view points. These days it seems that anyone who expresses an opinion, or philosophical belief that differs from the pro diversity, pro homosexual, pro environment, or anti-war crowd of High School, often faces countless roadblocks when trying to express their views or form student-led clubs."

Here I lost my enthusiasm. The e-mail, available on the Teenage Republicans website, goes on to suggest that high school teachers and administrators are seething with anti-conservatism and that Bachmann is the champion of the underclass. It says that instead of educating students to think, Minnesota schools are instead guilty of "indoctrination" and that complicit administrators allow this to happen in order to avoid "controversy."

"Indoctrination means the intentional teaching of something in a way sought to persuade one to think a certain way," the e-mail continues.

Brief aside; let's see if Boucher actually responds to the accusations of "indoctrination". Note that I didn't say "Bachmann's charges of indoctrination"; Senator Bachmann is hardly the first to bring these charges.

Back to Boucher:

I was annoyed with the characterization of teachers and schools, but attacks on the integrity of teachers and the quality of our schools are today's standard fare for local politicians hoping to make a splash on the national stage.

Question: Are they inaccurate?

The text continues, "In the classroom, you may have had an incident or two where you had a teacher that has been outright biased against conservative thinking. Maybe it is a science teacher who openly bashes President Bush, or maybe a history teacher who spends weeks on the hippie movement, but runs out of time to talk about Ronald Reagan and the end of the cold war."

Incident or two?

How about my son's fifth grade teacher, who visibly fulminated against Bush? Who said Bush was going to be bad for the poor, and Kerry would be better for schools and families?

Or one of my daughter's teachers, who pondered in class whether the Minnesota Personal Protection Act and the right to carry concealed weapons was in part responsible for the Red Lake Massacre (ignoring, of course, that the MPPA was in legal limbo at the time).

Or my daughter's current history teacher, who is constantly slipping in anti-Bush barbs (Scene: two quarrelling students. "You two dont' need to start a war. Like Bush did") during class.

Or the teacher that passed out "Code Pink" buttons in class, at about the time of both the invasions of Iraq and the passage of the 2003 Concealed Carry bill?

Or the anti-Republican propaganda that is constantly being passed out at school events, asking parents to support Democrat school board members and legislators on school funding issues, and recruiting students to come to rallies for more school funding.

It's everywhere.

"It's not just the teachers", says my daughter (an eighth grader at a Saint Paul junior high school). "The students do it, too - always saying "Bush Sucks" and that kind of thing. You can tell they get it from the teachers, though...they say it like during class, and the teachers will nod and stuff. They dont' get in trouble for it; the teachers don't tell them to stop, whereas the first time a student (me being usually the only one) says something in Bush's defense, the teachers will say "that's enough, let's move on with something else, let's go on to another topic", yadda yadda".

My daughter, by the way, has discovered two Republican teachers at her school. Both of them approached her covertly, in the lunchroom or while waiting for the bus, as if she were a spy and they were potential defectors; very covert and hush-hush. Like they didn't want their co-workers to know they were Republicans.

Why on earth would that be?

I can go on. And, no doubt, I will.

Bachmann is a proponent of the "Academic Bill of Rights." This document, available on studentsforacademicfreedom.org, is a nationwide effort to ferret out "bias" in academic institutions. The movement, begun in 2003 by David Horowitz, has gained some footing in state governments and significant opposition from academics around the country.

While I don't necessarily support the ABOR in its current form, there is no rational question that academics from kindergarten through college is the province of the left - and that while most teachers have a strong enough ethical sense to avoid imposing their beliefs on their students, there are enough exceptions (and enough power-grubbing, agenda-driven administrators and board members) to create a problem.

Back to Boucher:

As I read along, it was the next section that made my blood run cold: "She [Bachmann] will be putting together a scrapbook of stories from all across the state. If you have experienced any kind of social or academic injustice at your school, or know some one who has, even if it is just a small story, send it to Michelle Bachmann at sen.michele.bachmann@senate.mn."

It "makes his blood run cold"?

He's a social studies teacher, but the notion that other people might be exercising their rights to free speech and assembly "makes his blood run cold"?

Huh?

What the senator plans to do with her "scrapbook" is unclear, but the lessons of McCarthyism ring in my ears. Are teachers to be dragged before her and blacklisted if they refuse to cooperate?

(Remember my daughter's two Republican teachers? Boucher is bouching about McCarthyism against Democrats, but...oh, you know what I'm getting at)

Will they be sent to Reeducation Camps by teenagers waving "The Conscience of a Conservative" to study the Reagan Revolution? Of course not. There is no youth revolution going on in America. But if state Sen. Bachmann becomes U.S. Rep. Bachmann, undoubtedly this "scrapbook" will make its way to Washington and be used against Minnesota citizens.

"Undoubtedly?"

Well, speaking only for myself, if a hypothetical Representative Bachmann wanted to use her scrapbook to illuminate the bias, indoctrination, and frankly abuse of power that is going on in too many classrooms, it's about damn time!

Because in Michael Boucher's world (I'm assuming here, but I think it's a safe and comfortable assumption), there is only one thing conservatives do. It's his stereotype.

Speaking of stereotypes:

I am sure many of Minnesota's excellent, selfless and tireless educators will find themselves in Bachmann's crucible, smeared with vulgar references for her political gain. I submit, that in order to balance her efforts, students and parents from around the state also send her the stories of excellence, high standards and dedication that they see from teachers every day.

Well, fine, but then that's what the Minnesota Federation of Teachers is supposed to be doing. Right?

Oh, wait. To the MFT, all teachers are exactly the same; all for one, one for all, merit pay is bad, there are no bad teachers, only bad management. Gotcha.

Of course there are excellent teachers. It's a crassly manipulative strawman to say that anyone's denying that - which of course puts Boucher in perfect step with the Strib editorial board and most of their columnists.

No, Bachmann's goal is both fairly narrow, laudable, and long overdue.

Mark Your Calendars

It's rare indeed that the Strib writes a sensible, institutional-voice editorial. But while I admit that I tend to focus more on the egregiously stupid things they write, there's a reason for that; they write so much of it.

But never let it be said I don't actually read the stuff. Because today's editorial makes some sense.

I said some.

The House has, predictably, taken a get-tough approach to sex criminals; life without parole for first and second-degree sexual assault, 20-year terms for second offenses at lower levels, and much more.

The Strib responds:

The price tag of that approach -- seven new prisons to hold a doubled prison population -- should make Minnesotans swallow hard. A lot of sensible crime control could be bought for far less cost -- something members of the Minnesota Senate seem to realize. Their bipartisan measure steers clear of mandatory minimums in favor of a more nuanced approach that recognizes not all sex offenders present the same peril. As chief sponsors Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis, and Tom Neuville, R-Northfield, argue, only a few sex offenders require lifetime incarceration. Many can be helped by treatment of the psychiatric and addictive illnesses that spurred on their crimes; once released, most can be well-supervised by intensive probation and high-tech monitoring tactics.

Seizing upon those facts, Ranum and Neuville have come up with what Minnesota has needed all along: a system that responds to sexual offenders economically and strategically -- assuring that the dangerous remain in custody and that the treatable get the assistance and supervision they need to return to the community without incident. The Senate bill may not be quite as flashy as locking up an entire class of wrongdoers, but it's cheaper and safer. The conferees now considering the bills should embrace the smart Senate approach.

The devil is in some of the details, of course; treatment's effectiveness is wildly variable, and high tech monitoring can be spoofed. And I'm normally loathe to encourage Jane Ranum.

But the Strib's point is a useful one; although Minnesota, especially greater Minnesota, is still howling mad over the rape and murder of Dru Sjodin, which itself followed a string of other cases, sex offenders and their crimes are a broad subject; we could save a lot of money and grief with a less overbroad approach.

Am I wrong?

Deathbed Boogie

John Zogby issues a plateful of platitudes on Huffpo - but ends with an interesting (and possibly unintentional) challenge [1]:

Here's my challenge to my fellow bloggers: comb this country and find me a Democratic idea that is new and that works.

Of course, the "fellow bloggers" he's talking about are the dilettantes that prowl the Huffpo; they would have a hard time "combing" any part of the country east of Vegas and west of the Hudson.

However, that's where I am - and I never want it said that I'm not the kind of guy that will help out a failed pollster with a silly, overbroad [1] rhetorical question.

So; Democrats? What are the new ideas? [2]

[1] Look at that line. Isn't it the kind of thing you see brand-new bloggers writing when they think they need a big finish, but can't think of one?

[2] By the way - I dispute the rationality of the mania for "new ideas". When it comes to politics, all the best ideas are old ones; life, liberty, happiness. Free association of equals. The government governs best that governs least. You know the drill.

Anyway - go to it!

Rosario On Vick

Ruben Rosario has perhaps the best testimonial I've yet seen for Sergeant Jerry Vick, the Saint Paul officer killed in the line of duty last week.

Rosario interviews the prostitutes whose local industry Vick monitored.

The calls streamed in and the tears flowed easily Friday at the St. Paul office of Breaking Free, a place as much gripped by shock and sorrow over the slaying of Sgt. Gerald Vick as any other in the city.

"He gave me hope," one caller sobbed.

"He acknowledged me as a human being, a woman," another said.

The two calls came from jail. They came from women readily labeled and dismissed as hookers or whores — two words the 16-year police veteran considered offensive and had erased from his heart and mind.

"You can understand the measure, the impact of this man, when the people he arrested are calling to express their sorrow," Vednita Carter, Breaking Free's director, said as she welcomed more mourners into the group's two-story home on University Avenue. "He cared. He understood the difference between prostitution and prostituted women. I don't think there will be another like him."

Calls from jail. I don't suspect officers on the street crime detail get many of those.

"To me, it was as if Jesus himself was taken away from us," Doris Johnson, a group case manager, said during an afternoon meeting to plan a memorial and candlelight vigil for the fallen officer. "In a sense, he was angelic."

Vick dedicated the past three years to rescuing women and locking up pimps — perhaps the most unheralded, seediest and least glamorous line of police work. It is a frustrating job that historically had been considered a low police priority, except for the occasional passionate lone wolf.

That view changed somewhat locally with the discovery and dismantling six years ago of a Minneapolis-based juvenile prostitution ring, the largest ever prosecuted by the federal government....I can say that he surely did save my life," said Jola Zeller, 20, of White Bear Lake. Zeller, a recovered crack- and meth-addicted former runaway, entered prostitution at 16. She hooked up with a smooth-talking but abusive St. Paul pimp who worked her "24/7."

Vick put the guy away for a long time; read Rosario's piece for the details.

What Made Minnesota?

To the left, the debate of Minnesota's future can be summed up (or at least crudely stereotyped) by the signs on the laws promising the owner is "Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota"; by purple-faced columnists intoning that the "Wingnuts" want to "turn Minnesota into Alabama"; that it was the Hubert Humphrey-era ideal of the essentially monobloc state government that engineered Minnesota's economic boom from the forties through the present via a combination of aggressive government intervention, public-private partnership between the state and the state's biggest (non-government) employers, and a legislature that got in line behind Minnesota's softcore socialism, GOP and DFL, because everyone agreed that it was the best way to get things done. The story concludes with the articles of faith that Minnesota out-produces, out-grows, out-educates and out-serves its neighbors because, naturally, of that philosophy. We should all, in short, be "Happy to Pay For A Better Minnesota".

I read a quote the other day - it was about compulsory education, but I think it applies here: "The greatest triumph of [Minnesota's softcore socialism] is that nobody can imagine doing it any other way".

I have some questions.

First: Do I have this straight?

1. Minnesota became a state in 1858; settled largely by Germans and Scandinavians (with sizeable Irish and French populations in what would become the Twin Cities), it was agricultural, isolated, and largely poor.
2. The state was blessed with immense resources; agriculture, dairy and timber first, inexhaustable water-power on the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers to run the grain and lumber mills, and then immense reserves of taconite iron ore
3. Along with the resources, the state also had immense transportation; the Mississippi River and its tributaries (the Minnesota bringing crops, the St. Croix bringing lumber), the railroads that came to and were eventually headquartered in the Twin Cities, and of course an outlet to the Great Lakes through a natural harbor that was turned into a world-class cargo terminal at Duluth.
4. The combination of resources and transportation made the Twin Cities the financial and business center of the upper midwest; Minneapolis and Saint Paul attracted resources, raw material, revenue and talent from the Dakotas, Iowa, Western Wisconsin and even Nebraska and eastern Montana, in the same way that the Mississipi River attracted runoff from the same area.
5. Because of the resources, transportation and geographic positioning, large businesses sprang up in the Twin Cities; Burlington Northern, Daytons, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Cargill, General Mills, Pillsbury, all huge companies that drew on the proximity to resources and market access to create empires.
6. In the meantime, the Land Grant university program of the late 1800s, which created state universities across the recently-settled West, combined with the Twin Cities' financial, social and commercial position to make the University of Minnesota system large, well-funded, and influential.

So by about 1920-ish, Minnesota looked like this:

• The Twin Cities, home to many large, successful businesses, as well as the seat of government and higher education.
• Outstate, home to lumber, shipping, agriculture, and a lot of poor and working-class people working in each of the industries.

Then came the depression. The radicalization of the labor union movement and rural politics (as seen in the descendants of the 1890's Grangers like the Non-Partisan League and other populist groups) combined with the communitarian heritage of the dominant Scandinavian culture () to create a political movement that we now call the DFL, embracing the New Deal in microcosm - especially in its attempt to harness the power of Minnesota's big businesses. The leaders of the business community played along, for whatever reason; politics. convenience, fear of potential consequences, whatever.

Then came World War II; immense demand for steel brought work to the Iron Range; the Twin Cities' railroads, agribusiness, ammunition and emerging technology businesses rapidly expanded to fill immense needs (aided by hordes of university graduates provided by the university system that had been developed over the previous several generations), and spawned a generation of high-tech giants, Honeywell, CDC, FMC and Sperry, who prospered during the Cold War (building among them nuclear triggers, computers, naval gun turrets, submarine sonar and myriad other things that seem like relics today). After the war, the booming consumer economy built thriving service industries - Dayton/Hudson, the Saint Paul companies, Northwest Mutual Life, Prudential, and a group of regional banks that took advantage of the proximity of the Federal Reserve.

It was somewhere during the early sixties that Minnesota ceased to be a Republican state.

So let's see if I have this straight: before Minnesota became a high-tax, "high-service" state, Minnesota's urban core was prosperous, while its rural outskirts were subject to the same cycles as agriculture, timber and mining everywhere else in the country.

Since the end of World War II, Minnesota has both prospered, and adapted a high-tax, high-service, high-intervention government model compared with three of its four surrounding states. Minnesota is also historically more prosperous because of the presence of the Twin Cities and the diversified, resilient, regional center it represents, and because of the confluence of resources and facilities that made it that way. Other states have adopted similar models - with varying results.

Since the end of WWII, other parts of the country have adopted lower-tax, lower-service, lower-intervention models of government - again, with varying results.

So - given the advantages with which Minnesota started the game compared with the rest of the upper midwest, is it either fair or accurate to say that Minnesota owes its relative economic prosperity and resilience to its high-tax, high-service, high-intervention model of government/business interaction? Or, given that (as I hold above) nearly if not all the ingredients for that prosperity existed before that model was adopted, could it be that rejecting the high-tax, high-service model (while retaining the excellent and vital university system) would have done more good in the long run?

Those who bleat that we are but a tax cut away from being "a Cold Omaha" - why is Omaha Omaha? What made Fargo or Des Moines or Sioux City into what they are? Taxes? Or the ineluctable forces of the market acting on the place, the people, the resources, the technology and the national policy of the times when each was founded, and have acted on their respective growths and fortunes ever since?

Because if Montgomery, Alabama were at the nexus of agriculture, transportation, technology and workforce (and had been on the right side in the Civil War), they could be the ones whose monkey columnists would be poo-poohing their local punditry, scolding that a tax hike could "make us into a humid Bloomington".

God Will Leave The Room

I figured that if I waited long enough, the HuffPo would eventually have one piece worth reading. In and among the various starlets giving each other rhetorical french-kisses, there's an excellent piece from Quincy Jones on the problem with Michael Jackson.

The piece is called "God Will Walk Out of the Room".

It got me to thinking about fame and massive success and about how some people can handle it -- and how for others it can be the most destructive thing in the world.

It got me to thinking about Michael -- and how difficult it is to watch what’s going on with him now.

Jones concludes his piece with something that Ms. Huffington herself ought to remember:

If you believe that you deserve all that money and adulation, that’s a problem. If you believe you don’t deserve it, that’s also a problem. And if you don’t understand this, you’re in trouble.

I’ve been in the business 57 years and I’ve seen it over and over again. It’s all about trusting a higher power; believing in divinity. It’s about cause and manifestation. Cause being God’s job, manifestation clearly being our job. The moment success leads you to say, “I’ll take it from here, God,” God’s reply will be, “Be my guest.” And God will walk out of the room.

The only way to navigate that road is to have humility and grace.

Those are the two cardinal rules. You must approach creativity with humility and have grace when you’re blessed with success.

Could be a fine epitaph for the HuffPo, or Air America, or (fill in venture here) one of these days.

The Final Mile

Minnesota's concealed carry law - in a version that should pass even the most anal-retentive legal muster - should be coming to the floor of the State Senate any day now. Keep the phone calls and letters coming.

There was a rally last Saturday, a very successful one given the rain. Joel Rosenberg was there, and says it was successful, allowing for the rain:

We had a good turnout, and the antis didn't even bother with a counter-demonstration this time. I think they know it's going to re-pass, and that it's going to continue to not cause any trouble.

And, besides, they couldn't bus in a bunch of schoolchildren -- at local school district expense, as they did last time -- it being a Saturday. Besides, maybe they remember what happened last time. (A few of the kids came over and talked to us, and found out that we were both willing to listen, and to share some information that had carefully been kept from them.)

I've found that to be true for much of the last decade on this debate; not only can many people who are neutral to mildly-against the bill be switched over given the actual facts (which are never presented in the media, but (as I found the day the original bill passed), many of the antis don't even know their own case that well.

And I love this bit:

And, without the antis there, there was no visible Capitol police presence, a more-than-subtle hint that the Capitol cops know that the risk of violence is proportionate to the presence of hysterical antis, not permit holders. It's not the permit holders they have to worry about -- it's the self-styled peace lovers who are, well, kind of erratic at times.

Speaking of irrationality and incipient violence - has anyone discussed this with Wes "Lying Sack of Filth" Skoglund lately?`

The Instant Vacation

This story makes me wonder - have students cracked the code?

If an elementary school boy wants a day off, he makes a gun shape with his fingers. Bingo - suspension.

If you want serious time off - no problem. Make an anonymous threat:

A series of threats reportedly from students at Clearwater Middle School in Waconia has led the school district to cancel classes at all four of its schools. One of the threats included a list of students' names.

Baview and Southview elementary schools, Clearwater Middle School and Waconia Senior High School will be closed today.

Channel 11 says the entire Waconia school system is shut down.

The threats at Clearwater Middle School began with scribbles in a bathroom that included threats about guns. Two notes that listed students names were later mailed to the school, according to broadcast reports.

The FBI is investigating the threats, which include a hit list with specific names of students, KSTP-TV reported.

Am I the only one who can picture a couple of precocious Waconia ninth-graders chortling away in one of their parents' basements, playing X-box and giggling about the scam they put over on those morons in the school administration? About all the fuss they've caused?

"It's even better than the time we painted genitals on the water tower!"

Look What Followed Me Home

Local collector wins battle with the Navy:

It's taken six years and a special act of Congress, but an aircraft mechanic from Princeton, Minn., is the undisputed owner of a rare World War II Corsair fighter plane that he salvaged 15 years ago from a North Carolina swamp.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis in Minneapolis approved a settlement that ends a lawsuit filed a year ago by the U.S. Justice Department against Lex Cralley. The lawsuit was the climax of an escalating battle of wills that had been going on since 1999 between the 50-year-old Northwest Airlines mechanic and the U.S. Navy.

And what does he get to keep? Only the second-coolest airplane of World War II - A Chance-Vought F4U Corsair:

"It remains a piece of naval aviation history to be shared," said Cralley, whose dream is to restore the plane to flying condition — something that will take many years and millions of dollars, according to aviation history experts. It's estimated that fewer than 25 Corsairs still are flying......And the Navy was particularly interested in the remnants of the plane in Cralley's shed. Military aviation enthusiasts say it's the only Corsair of its kind known to exist.

Specifically, it's a Corsair that was manufactured by the Brewster Aeronautical Corp. of Long Island, N.Y., after the original manufacturer, the Chance Vought Aircraft Corp. of Stratford, Conn., became overwhelmed by the wartime demand for new planes.

Brewster, which no longer exists, built 735 Corsairs — Cralley's was the 119th — compared to more than 12,000 F4U Corsairs built by Vought, which is now headquartered in Dallas.

It literally took an Act Of Congress to get the Navy to give in on this - with Norm Coleman introducing the Senate bill.

No Place Like Home

I caught about a minute of the Nick Coleman show this morning.

After meandering through a couple of different conversational threads, he started talking about Minnesota's upcoming sequicentennial. In the midst of talking about the state's anniversary, he said:

Twuh thuhsuhnd Eight - whun huhpfuhlly wuh cuhn see thuh wuhngnuhts uhn thuhr uhxcuhrts, huhding buhck to thuhr wuhngnuht vuhlluhges, thuhr fuhn-DAY-shuhns. Yuh know, thuh POW-uhrluhn guys, thuhr nuht evuhn fruhm Muhnuhsuhta. Thuhr fruhm Nuhrth Duhkuhta, Suth Duhkuhta...thuh thuhnk Muhnusuhta is EEST-Duhkuhtuh... [1]

Nah, Nick. We pay the same taxes as you do (probably more), we do more to build this state than you do, and we have a lot more to be proud of than you do; we'll own this state by '08.

And let's not forget, the Dakotas have figured out how to build a better education system (test scores equal to those of Minnesota's kids) on vastly less money, in a state with much lower per capita income. (Don't start arguing Dakotas with me, Nick. I know stuff).

And who's going to put us on that oxcart? I mean, people who don't have the cojones to answer a simple email certainly aren't going to pull that one off.

I think we'll do just fine here in our Twin Cities.

[1] Rough translation: "Two Thousand Eight - when hopefully we can see the wingnuts on their oxcarts, going back to their wingnut villages, their foun-DAY-tions. You know, the POWerline guys, they're not even from Minnesota. They're from North Dakota, South Dakota...they think Minnesota is EAST Dakota...

Gratitude

While at the undisclosed location last Saturday, the PiPress' Mark Yost gave me a heads-up about an article he was working on - a piece about a Dakota County man, a native of the UK, who has spent the last couple of decades on a couple of unusual missions; painting, and finding airmen missing in action from World War II.

The article is in today's PiPress, and it's a great read.

Every so often, you run across someone who makes your life seem infinitely small and unimportant. I'd count Bryan Moon, whose World War II paintings are on display in St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly's office, among that group, although that would probably greatly embarrass this humble man.

His selfless accomplishments are particularly relevant because Sunday was the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. And that's where Moon's tale begins.

In 1940, he was 11 years old, living in Southampton on the English coast. The Nazis firebombed his house and his family lived in an Anderson shelter — a corrugated tin hut covered with dirt — for two years. He and a friend often sat and watched American bombers take off from a local airfield. And thus began a lifelong love of aviation and an admiration for the Americans.

Read the whole thing - it's an amazing story.

More later.

Just What They Told Us

The PiPress has the events surrounding the Vick shooting.

An outdoor surveillance camera helped St. Paul police confirm they had both suspects sought in the fatal shooting of undercover vice Sgt. Gerald Vick in a dark alley near an East Side bar early Friday.

Harry Jerome Evans, 32, and Antonio Alexander Kelly, 27, both of St. Paul, initially denied involvement and the videotape did not show the actual shooting.

But Saturday night, Kelly contacted investigators from the Ramsey County jail and said he wanted to talk.

On Monday, prosecutors charged Evans with first-degree murder of a peace officer. Kelly had named him as the triggerman.

The fatal incident began, Kelly claimed, because two men — Vick and his vice squad partner — confronted Kelly about urinating on the outside back wall of Erick's Bar, 949 E. Seventh St.

Read the whole thing.

Funeral For A Policeman

Cop killings always expose a city's rawest nerves.

If the killer or killers remain at large, whatever community that thinks it's the city's "usual suspects" finds itself on the wrong end of a lot of suspicion - usually unwarranted.

Since the Police and the Fire Department are the city's most visible manifestations, it's a whack at the city's identity; if a city's cops aren't safe, how can anyone else be?

And when the funeral comes around, you can learn a lot about the city by the policeman's funeral.

Since I've lived in the Twin Cities, this is the fifth funeral (that I can remember) of a policeman killed in the line of duty. The execution of Jerry Haaf at a pizza joint on Lake Street in Minneapolis in the late eighties set about a five-year-long ordeal of civic bloodletting and chest-pounding that in many ways seems still to be playing out. The killing of officer Melissa Schmidt in 2002 unleashed a storm of recrimination from community activists. I lived in Minneapolis a couple of times - and while there are a lot of good cops in Minneapolis, the department was run for many years with a very Darrel Gates-like philosophy; it's "us versus them" for too many in the MPD. So the city and their cops don't identify with each other to nearly the extent they seem to here in Saint Paul.

"Community policing" remains the big fad - or development, if you prefer - in law enforcement; as far as I recall (which means "20 years") that's the way it's always been done in Saint Paul (which hasn't always a good thing). The department and the citizens in Saint Paul tend to get along very well.

So today is the visitation, and tomorrow is the funeral for Sergeant Jerry Vick. For the first time in 11 years, the bagpipes will lead the cortege and the masses of patrol cars, lights blazing, through the streets of the East Side. Thousands will turn out to view the procession - hopefully including me. The whole city will slow down, sit back, and take a deep, mournful breath before moving on.

Here are the vitals:

• Today: A public visitation for Sgt. Gerald Vick will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. at Bradshaw Funeral Home, 1078 Rice St., St. Paul.

• Wednesday: Funeral services at noon at Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church, 1669 N. Arcade St., at Hwy. 61 and Larpenteur Avenue in St. Paul

• A college fund has been established for Vick's children. Donations to the Sgt. Jerry Vick Memorial Fund are being accepted at City and County Credit Union, 144 E. 11th St., St. Paul, MN 55101.

• A limited number of posters displaying Sgt. Vick's badge are available for pickup at 367 Grove St., St. Paul.

• E-mail condolences are being accepted at SPPD-Memorial@ci.stpaul.mn.us.

Please help out with the memorial fund for the kids; Vick left two of them, as well as his wife.

The Pre-Post "Post" Post

Nikki Finke declares the Huffpo DOA:

What her bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out.

Of course, only the fawning mainstream media didn’t see this coming; instead, The New York Times, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times et al. were too busy breathlessly reporting Arianna’s big plans and bons mots to bother to do any reporting.

As Elder noted over at Fraters, the whole big-lefty approach to alternative media - from Soros' bankrolling of the likes of Atrios and Oliver Willis, to the whole concept behind Air America (radio of and by the "elites", but served up for a caricature of the slavering morons that the left imagines are the conservative talk radio audience), to...

...well, the Huffpo.

Forgive them, these bleating blowhards on Arianna’s blog, because they know not what they do. Not Seinfeld has-been Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her untalented TV-hyphenate husband, Brad Hall, making unfunny shtick of the anti-gay-marriage movement. Not has-been director Mike Nichols, using the forum to parade his high school grasp of U.S. history by mentioning “de Tocqueville” and “Dr. King” in the same paragraph. Not has-been brat-packer John Cusack, penning the 459,308th remembrance of Hunter Thompson for the sole purpose of letting the world know that the actor scored an invite to the writer’s intimate memorial service. Still, the celebs aren’t to blame here, because they made the bad mistake of allowing Arianna to sweet-talk them into believing that they had something to say in the first place. (“I was very moved, for example, by what Mike Nichols sent,” Huffington told Newsweek. “It was just such a beautiful expression of his thinking.” Arianna must have been swooning over the fact that Nichols is married to Diane Sawyer, because it can’t possibly be over the director’s bombastic blog b.s.)

They’re all lambs to the slaughter, — baa, baa, baa, suddenly standing for baad, baad, baad — led by a shameless shepherdess whose only interest in the Hollywood flock in the first place is their ability to secure yet another headline for Huffington.

In the great tradition of Air America, the money trail is...fuzzy.

Huffington approached five major players to ante up....Huffington asked DreamWorks SKG partner David Geffen, All in the Family producer Norman Lear, Endeavor Agency partner Ari Emanuel, Pulp Fiction producer Laurence Bender and Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s wife, Laurie...Sources tell me that, of the five, only Bender and David expressed real interest, and, lo and behold, Laurie David shows up on the home page butt-cheek-to-butt-cheek (though beneath) all the blogging celebs, journalists and Dubya speechwriters. Emanuel wanted no involvement, period. Lear “didn’t put any money into it,” his spokeswoman told me. “If he’s got something to say, he might participate, but he’s got no plans right now.” But Huffington almost sabotaged her still relatively recent friendship with Geffen over it.

“The reality is that she is running around with a lot of names not only in terms of bloggers and so-called investors. And a lot of it is a little bit of a shell game,” a source told me pre-launch. “You know the standard game. You call someone and say, ‘I’ve got X committed for X amount of money.’ That’s what she did with David. He was not aware that she’s using his name as an investor.” I’m told that, once Geffen was alerted, his people had to speak to Huffington and “straighten it out.”

But not only is Geffen not an investor, he’s not even a blogger....a source close to Geffen said to me, “He sends me two-word e-mails. He’s not going to write a blog for her or anyone.”

The lefty approach to alternative media continues to confound. Follow the template:

• Take what should, by all rights, be a dirt-cheap medium - talk radio and the blogosphere.
• Get Huge money involved ("cuhnnuhct thuh duhts", indeed)...
• To pay for Huge names (from non-alternative fields) and their huge egoes; ponying up for big-name (but modest-talent) names like Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, rather than following the Limbaugh model of finding a talented but lesser-known broadcaster with some actual audience-building talent
• Pay through the nose for the kind of exposure that conservatives in the alt-media traditionally get the hard way - by winning readers and listeners over, one at a time.
• Pay constant obeisance to Hollywood and the non-merited elites. Remember when Air America rolled out? The Garofalo, Winstad and Marty Kaplan shows were all heavily geared toward "Hollywood's views" on the news. They pay, the play, I guess...
• Wonder why it doesn't stick?

Take some advice, Arianna. Go to Blogspot. Start "Arianna's Joint". Start writing. See if anyone cares about what you say on its own merits. Maybe show up at Keegans to talk with people who can actually do the job.

Get back to us in a year.

Truth To Former Power

George W. Bush, to the left, has crossed the line from "village idiot" (who keeps plastering them in elections) into the realm of "G-dless apostate" - the g-d in this case being the left's deity in chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

First it was Social Security - about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree.

Now, it's Yalta, Roosevelt's deal with the devil, almost literally.

The more reasonable voices on the left ask if victory in World War II would have been possible without Yalta; it's of a piece with many other imponderables about the war (could Stalin have held on without Lend-Lease and the threat of a second front drawing away a third of Hitler's army?). The less-reasonable voices on the left fret that Bush is starting another Cold War - ironically, since so many of them backed the loser in the real Cold War.

Eastern Europeans? Well, they know the truth.

Simple fact: Whether you call it unavoidable realpolitik or a betrayal of convenience or national naievete over Stalin's real nature, Yalta condemned a hundred million people to fifty years...no, fifty more years of brutal, genodidal dictatorship. While the lefty media has the vapors over Bush's apostasy, Bush is right to condemn the results of Yalta on the people of the Baltic States and the rest of the former Eastern Bloc.

But my question is this...

When Ronald Reagan declared the USSR the Evil Empire and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down the wall", the left sniggered; the "Second World" was here to stay, insisted the likes of Galbraith and Talbott.

When the US set about trying to free Afghanistan, the left huffed and puffed about the impossibility and pointlessness of it all, of the rage upcoming in the Arab Street.

When the US invaded Iraq, the left fretted and phumphered and changed the subject, and wondered if the Arab world was ready for democracy.

When the Lebanese and Egyptians and other Arabs took to the streets to demand democracy, the dogmatic left stumbled and spun and dug frantically for the dark cloud behind the silver lining.

And now that a US president is admitting that a man that killed 60 million human beings might not have been a wonderful ally, the orthodox left is acting like their teenager farted in church.

How many more dictators does the left have to lose their shirts on before they get the point?

Right To Know?

Via the Dogs, I saw Tony Snow's work-over of North Dakota's senator Byron Dorgan's attempt to cover up IRS abuses.

Snow:

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh insisted on the appointment of an Independent Counsel in 1995 after learning that then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros shuttled payments to his mistress without reporting them to the IRS. Once the news went public, Cisneros resigned from office, his previously promising political career in tatters. He later admitted to a misdemeanor and paid a fine of $10,000. President Clinton pardoned him in 2001.

Dorgan’s bill would shut down the 10-year probe conducted by Independent Counsel David Barrett’s investigation, but it would add something unprecedented in the case of special or independent counsels: it would prevent the publication of the counsel’s report on the case. A decade’s worth of investigations — sworn testimony, documentation of alleged abuses, grand-jury proceedings, etc. — would vanish without a trace.

Why?

Snow summarizes Dorgan's case

A Dorgan press release summarizes the senator’s case for quashing the report: “The Independent Counsel was appointed ten years ago, but has failed to file a report and continues to spend millions of dollars, despite the fact that the subject long ago resigned from office, pled guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a $10,000 fine, and received a presidential pardon.”

The argument has unmistakable appeal, especially since Barrett has gotten less bang for the buck than any previous independent counsel (one conviction for $20 million dollars).

But there's more to it than that:

This gets us to the heart of the issue: Senators Dorgan, Kerry and Durbin have been lured into sponsoring a cover-up of what could be a hair-raising case of governmental malfeasance. As the Journal noted, “abuse of the taxing power is about as serious as corruption can get in our democracy.”

One would assume that senators of any party not only would want to know more about allegations of this sort, but would insist on going after agents responsible for such a breach of the public trust, especially if the bad actors worked for the IRS, Justice Department or the White House. After all, once a federal agency decides to engage in political chicanery, it’s not likely to stop just because an administration changes.

Whatever abuses Barrett may have found in the Clinton era very well could persist into this administration, only with a pro-Republican tilt. Yet, the sponsors of the midnight amendment have adopted the Sgt. Shultz defense: They know nothing — and they want the American public clothed in ignorance as well.

Read the whole thing. And if you're a North Dakota voter, you might want to give your Senator a call; Snow conveniently includes Dorgan's office phone.

The Hometown That Dare Not Speak It's Name

The Strib's Tony Kennedy writes a piece on the home neighborhood of the two "men" who killed Sergeant Jerry Vick last week in Saint Paul.

It's interesting.

Harry Jerome Evans Jr., 32, left the streets of K-Town for St. Paul in 1998 or 1999, said Michelle Greene, his first cousin. She said he was a year or two out of prison and wanted to find a job and a place of his own...Harry Evans Jr. last visited his family on Gladys Street in K-Town during Christmas 2003, bringing with him a girlfriend and their newborn baby.

The hard-boiled conservative who lives in the inner city and whose house still has two of its three bullet holes from a drug-related drive-by shooting cries "Baloney! He came up here because there's great welfare benefits and the criminal justice system is notoriously lax".

The media critic in me wonders how selective or inadvertently omissive Kennedy has to be to show Evans as just a regular guy whose life spun out of control, and why we're getting this bid from the Strib to humanize a person who just killed one of our cops.

And a part of me wants the rest of the story:

Ella Greene said Harry Evans' father, Harry Sr., died in a freak swimming pool accident while in the Marine Corps when Harry Jr. was 5 or 6. He was raised by his mother, Beatrice, who died in the mid-1990s, when Evans was serving time in prison for attempted murder and attempted armed robbery. Michelle Greene said she thought the prison sentence had to do with an assault on a pizza delivery man or the driver of an ice cream truck that took place in the neighborhood.

Georgia Evans said Harry was escorted from prison in handcuffs to see his dead mother at the funeral home. He wasn't allowed to attend the funeral, she said.

Michelle remembered that he found a good-paying temporary job when he left prison in the late 1990s, moving in with them on Gladys Street. She said he bought an Audi 5000 automobile and would let her drive it.

It may be just me, but I don't think I've seen coverage of Sgt. Vick's life in this sort of depth yet.

Stop me if I'm wrong.

UPDATE: I've been stopped.

And let me elaborate a bit; when I say "I want to see the rest of the story", I mean the whole rest of the story:

• They come from a crappy neighborhood and a dicey background. The article does a commendable job of explaining this. Now - what led them to Minnesota? To Saint Paul? A simple "I want a new, better life?" Or is the old theory, that the Twin Cities' combination of generous welfare benefits, skimpy prosecution and a large urban welfare warehouse makes for a fertile market for petty hoods?
• It's almost become a media cliche - the friends and relatives of a heinous perp intoning "He is pretty much a regular guy, I can't believe he did this..." - even though their friend/relative has a rap sheet. Is it denial - which would be natural and understandable, by the way? Did the perps have a secret double life as small-time hoods?
• One story has it that the killers didn't know Vick was a policeman. So - why did these two men, described by their friends and relatives as people who they'd never picture doing what they did, leave the first altercation on Friday morning, then circle back in the dark to confront and kill a complete stranger, whether a cop or not?

Let me reiterate, to be perfectly clear in my motivations; let's do indeed humanize the killers. Because it was indeed not a couple of androids that shot Jerry Vick - it was a couple of humans whose lives went, for whatever reason, horribly awry.

I'm not of the "get over it" crowd that so dominates conservative social science - the crowd that thinks that taking responsibility for one's life and pulling one up by one's bootstraps is the universal panacaea to all of life's, and the world's, problems. Life is messy, sometimes. One can not always control the curveballs life throws one.

So what is it that makes a couple of humans - born with no more malicious intent than any other babies - end up on a dingy street at 2AM to blow away a complete stranger? A childhood spent without a father? Growing up in an urban welfare warehouse, in a dominant culture that fears young urban blacks but also can't show them a better idea, and with a secondary, urban culture that denigrates education and devalues fatherhood, and glorifies illegitimate parenting and crime? Mental illness? Addiction? Boredom?

Keep going.

Posted Up

Arianna Huffington's new Designer Blog, The Huffington Post, is up.

Most of the pre-debut snarking was fairly accurate - it's a haven for Hollywood-left dilettantes, for the most part.

But the initial post brought back a long national nightmare.

Reasonable people can disagree on who was the best "Weekend Update" anchor on Saturday Night Live. I personally believe it was Dennis Miller (and in fact the years Dennis Miller and Phil Hartman were on the cast were the series' best years), but I can accept testimony that it may have been Chevy Chase or Norm MacDonald.

But there can be no doubt as to the worst "anchor" to ever sit in America's first fake news desk's anchor chair; Brad Hall. Yes, I know - it's a narrow, almost invisible gap between Hall and the abysmal, abortive team of Brian Doyle-Murray and Mary Gross, but Hall wins the "honors" for his stint at the end of the Dick Ebersol years of the early eighties.

I'd asked myself over the years, "whatever happened to Brad Hall", hoping that the rumors he'd been caught in a DEA drug sweep and was doing hard time at a federal pen in Nevada were true. But no, in fact, he's not only married to Julia-Louis Dreyfus, but he's co-posting with the missus in the inaugural day of the HuffPo.

So the good news is he's not still doing time in Nevada. The bad news is that his blog writing isn't any better than his fake news delivery; trite, snarky, sloganeering...

...maybe he should write for Kos?

Snark and Hiding

The eternal time-waster C.J., the Twin Cities' excuse for a gossip columnist, "reports" on a curious incident at Minneapolis City Hall.

Kris Patrow is a former reporter for KSTP-TV, Channel 5 in the Twin Cities.

CJ writes:

"I've been treated better at a riot," former KSTP-TV reporter Kris Patrow said Thursday. To Minneapolis City Council Member Gary Schiff, it seemed more like a laugh riot. But both agree that sparks flew when Patrow tried to interview [Minneapolis City Council member Gary] Schiff over a gun- shop issue.

So far so good. Right?

Patrow said she now works for Mercury Group, a Washington, D.C., production house. Beyond that, she doesn't want to say much. Friends of hers alerted me to her encounter with Schiff. It happened Thursday after Patrow sat through a lengthy zzzzzzzzzoning and planning committee meeting waiting to interview Schiff. The Mercury Group touts the National Rifle Association (NRA) as one of its clients.

Schiff takes up the story here. "I survived an incident with a hit person for the NRA," he laughed Friday. "She comes up to me with this startled look in her eyes and says, We want to interview you. Usually journalists are not so startled and don't act like that.

So Gary Schiff is a politician and a mind-reader. Who knew?

"What about?" asked Schiff. "And she goes, This gun shop on Chicago Avenue."

Schiff said he agreed to step out in the hall and do the interview. "Her very first question was so biased and opinionated it became clear right away she's not a journalist," he said. "I go, 'Who are you working for?' She tells me she was hired by the NRA to do a piece for their web page. I'm like, 'Oh, no, no. no.' " He could barely stop laughing long enough to finish the story.

And the question was...?

Y'see, it'd be interesting to know what the actual question was. It's not like bias and opinion disqualify a "journalist's" question from consideration: if you caught the last couple of presidential press conferences ("Why don't you apologize for your screwups, Mr. President?"), they're pretty much de rigeur.

And it doesn't take a journalist to know that Gary Schiff is an enemy of the law-abiding gun owner. He's been involved in the demi-legal lynch mob trying to close down Mark Koscielski's gun shop in south Minneapolis for quite some time now. An actual "journalist" might have pointed that out. The NRA - or whomever - didn't pick Schiff at random. One would think some questions were in order.

Schiff was absolutely loquacious as he recalled explaining to Patrow, " 'You're not a journalist.' That became about a 10-minute conversation on how she was no longer a journalist."

Someone who claimed to be an eyewitness e-mailed that Patrow was crying because Schiff was rude to her.

"No longer a journalist". Because she's not working for a major news outlet? Interesting. Wonder if Gary Schiff would care to elaborate.

And even if working for a company that lists the NRA as a client makes Patrow more of a PR flak than a reporter - so what? Don't the people have a right to know what Schiff has been doing? Don't the citizens of Minneapolis have a right to know what drives his efforts?

But to Schiff, apparently his own record on issues isn't the issue:

I was smiling. I was cordial and saying, 'Kris, now come on. If you see a journalist, send them my way, Kris.' She was like, Why won't you comment? 'I said, 'I will to any legitimate journalist who happens to want an interview.'

"Anybody with a camera crew thinks they can chase people down and demand an interview. No, you can't. It was like a Jon Stewart moment; like fake news. That was what I thought: What would Jon Stewart do? So surreal. She was hired by the NRA, posing as if she's doing a news story. What is happening to journalism?"

Sorry, Gary Schiff. You were having more of a Dan Rather moment.

The people have a right to know. Anyone who relates a story to other people is a "journalist".

Now, if Gary Schiff really means to say he'll only talk with representatives from the partisan mainstream media rather than indies who are honest about their motivations, he should probably say so.

I plan on following up on this.

Another Minnesota Poll

A Minnesota Poll that happens to support exactly what the DFL and their minions in the Twin Cities media want?

Who'da thunk it?

Shockingly, the Minnesota Poll shows that Minnesotans favor protecting their pet programs by compelling other people to pay for them

Most Minnesotans would balance the state budget through a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and fee increases, and most also support raising money for the state through a new casino at the Canterbury Park racetrack, a new Minnesota Poll has found.

The poll also found that if Minnesota must raise revenue, a boost in the price of cigarettes and a tax increase on the state's wealthiest residents are the favorite choices.

Unreported: A poll of wealthy gambling addicts who smoked more than two packs of cigarettes a day shows nearly universal support for taxing poor teetotalers.

The poll of 832 Minnesota adults from April 30 to May 4 found that a slight majority, 53 percent, would balance the state budget through a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and fee increases. But 39 percent side with Gov. Tim Pawlenty in opposing any statewide tax increases, up from the 30 percent who took that position in January.

According to the Minnesota Poll, Governor Moe replaced Governor Skip Humphrey, and Walter Mondale is our junior senator.

Seriously - this blog (and especially Powerline have made great sport over the years of hammering the ludicrous, almost random level of accuracy in the Minnesota Poll; if the poll says the margin for raising taxes is 53-39, figure it's closer to 47-45. That guess is both completely unsubstantiated and something I'll completely stand behind.

Assuming the state chose to seek new revenue, 29 percent would most prefer to raise the state's cigarette tax, which now ranks 37th in the nation. The most common proposal at the Legislature in recent years has been for a $1-per-pack increase.

Another 28 percent would raise income taxes on the wealthiest Minnesotans.

Gambling expansion was a distant third among revenue raisers at 19 percent, followed by 9 percent who favored expanding the sales tax to untaxed goods and services.

Other results: 2.2% were Metro Transit users who favored raising the gas tax to $2/gallon. .64% were Orthodox Jews who supported taxing those worthless reform meshugahs. 0.44% were members of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, who favored "taxing whitey's a** back to the stone age".

In reading about this next guy, I have to wonder - is there a casting agency in the Cities somewhere that finds examples of "Republicans" who are also conveniently pro-tax, pro-choice, anti-gun and pro-big-government to feed to media figures for these sorts of stories?

Dan Monson, who owns a pet shop in Robbinsdale, said the state needs more money and should get it from the rich. "It's the old cop-out, I suppose," Monson said with a chuckle. "Raise the taxes on the people who have the most. ... I just think everybody should pay their fair share." [

"Unlike me. I'm paying my share. Have you seen my taxes? Criminy. No, we should sock it to the rich - meaning people who make more than I do. While I, myself, am definitely paying my fair share, people who make more than me certainly are not. I'm sure of this." --Ed]

Monson, who said he tends to vote Republican [!!!], said his least favorite vehicle for raising additional state funds is any expansion of gambling. "The poor hurt the most because of a casino. They always feel they're going to get rich, and they spend more than they should."

"Tax the rich, because the poor are too stupid and that'd make me feel bad"?

House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, said that while polls "have their place," legislators can see consequences that individual citizens sometimes overlook. "I see significant opposition to increasing tax burdens, but not as great as the support for a combination approach. That's something to consider. But I suspect that if people knew the House was prepared to increase spending by about $2 billion, that would change the flavor of the response."

Well, of course we have no idea what the poll questions were.

It'd be interesting to ask the same respondents "If you had to raise your own taxes 5% to pay for the new DFL budget, would you?"

Any guesses on how this poll would have turned out?

Sviggum said he was not surprised that the top three choices for increasing revenue were the cigarette tax, a tax on the wealthy and gambling. "The choice is always to tax somebody else," he said.

But Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, said he sees more at work than a simple desire to tax someone else. As budget cuts have begun to take a toll on schools, he said, "this is translating for people into, 'My child's getting cheated.' That's where people draw the line."

Of course, they should draw the line at asking "why are other people in a position to "cheat" my child", but that's another thread.

I Bet This Never Happens to Dartmouth Grads

I graduated from a little college in the middle of nowhere. I went there for good reasons, or so I thought at the time; the price was right (Mom worked there for a couple of years, which gave me a huge tuition break), there were a few programs that were pretty good, and it was probably the path of least resistance for a kid that really didn't do the grade chase in high school.

That being said, the place is kinda obscure. And the eighties were not kind to the school, which in the year after I graduated came within a day of having to lock its doors and send the kids home. It's bounced back nicely since then, nearly doubling its enrollment - but the mid-eighties were a rough time at my college. The stress of the time - shady administrators, some dubious faculty, and the sense that we could all be locked out of our dorms at any time - made for a less-than-optimal college experience.

The stress probably cut down on some of the traditional college activities, like "making friends you'll keep for the rest of your life", which is a big part of the reason for going to a bigger, more prominent, more expensive school; friends when you're 21 become contacts when you're 40. Let's just say I've got great contacts if I want to move back to small-town North Dakota. Which, God bless the place, I do not.

Upshot being that while I stay in contact with a lot of my high school classmates (Jamestown High School 1981 was a pretty close-knit bunch, as high school classes go, and I genuinely look forward to reunions), my college classmates are pretty much an afterthought (although more on this in a later post).

Actually, it's worse than that. In most cases, hearing from them is something I dread.

No, it's nothing personal. It's just business, as Don Corleone would say.

The business, as it happens, is always multi-level marketing.

I got another one the other day - a call from a long-lost classmate (we hadn't spoken since Ronald Reagan's second term) with whom I'd not been particularly close at the time, and who just wanted to reconnect...

...and, by the way, discuss a great new business opportunity.

Cue primal scream of frustration.

I'm at the point where it's principals be damned; I'm going to tell the kids "do whatever you have to to get into a Northwestern or a Michigan or an Ivy League place, just so you never have to go through the hassle of trying to disengage from a deep, meaningful conversation about Herbalife or Amway or whatever Amway's online division was, or NuSkin or TruSkin or Liquid Void or Mary Kay" or whatever the hell they're pushing these days.

Open letter to all classmates; I am not interested in being a regional distributor for anything, ever. No, ever. Thank you.

That is all.

Hail Bureaucrats!

Mark Yost wrote a piece in the PiPress assailing the state's Public Employee unions for their lawsuit against the state, which opposes the use of prison labor on state jobs.

It was indeed a pithy piece:

If you've driven Minnesota's highways during the summer, you're familiar with the hard-working, altruistic public servants the union is defending. There's usually five or six of them standing around drinking coffee, ogling the buxom flag girl in short shorts, while the one college kid on the crew works his tail off and you inch your way through the egregiously misnamed "work zone." It's ironic, but true, that state employees are probably the one group that make prisoners look sympathetic.

State offices — particularly licensing bureaus — seem to attract people who do little work, are slow about it when they do, nasty about it when you don't kiss their pinky ring, and seem to never go away.

The piece isn't a slam on state or unionized employees as much as it is against the culture of entitlement that so many of these people seem to have developed.

They seem to have responded.

May 4, 2005

TO: St. Paul Pioneer Press

FROM: Eliot Seide,
Executive Director – AFSCME Minnesota Council 5, AFL-CIO

Dear Pioneer Press :

Mr. Yost's raging rant against state employees, airline mechanics, teachers, and unions is one of the most repulsive, inaccurate, and disgusting diatribes that I have ever seen. His personal and stereotypical attack meant to dehumanize and demean Minnesota 's hard-working state employees, airline mechanics, and teachers is beneath contempt.

Diatribe? It was more of a jape.

But we digress:

Perhaps Mr.Yost should have joined me at the Workers' Memorial Day event that was held at DOT offices in Roseville last week to commemorate those Department of Transportation employees who have died on the job maintaining Minnesota 's roads and bridges. There have been 29 DOT employees killed doing Minnesota 's work. Twenty of those everyday heroes were AFSCME members. Maybe Mr. Yost should have talked to the widow of our latest casualty, a Transportation Specialist who, last year, died in the line of duty, as she recounted his life, a life worth living in the service of others, something that neither Mr. Yost or the Taxpayers' League understands or respects.

So many strawmen and just-plain-wrong facts, so little time.

DOT workers are killed on the job all the time. It's a tragedy, indeed. But isn't calling the deaths "in the line of duty" just a tad overdramatic? We use that description when servicepeople and police are killed - because their "duty" compels them to go into dangerous places to defend their country and fight crime.

But OK, let's not quibble; every worker that's killed in traffic accidents on the job is a tragedy. However, look at the union website; Elliot Seide splashes the picture of him talking with the widow of an accident victim above his shrill, petty response to Yost. Seide exploits the tragedy of others to support what is, essentially, a suit to try to strongarm the state into firing the convicts and hiring union labor to clean the highways.

This is reprehensible.

Yost, by the way, served in the US Marine Corps, so I'd suspect he's noddingly familiar with "service". Someone should pass the word to Mr. Seide; check your facts.

Onward:

For at least twenty years, the Department of Transportation and the Union have cooperated on various efforts to appropriately and responsibly use Sentence-to-Serve crews. This cooperation has been non–partisan and survived through Democratic, Republican, and Independent administrations. The two main criteria have always been to make sure that no permanent, law abiding, taxpaying full-time breadwinners were displaced or replaced by prison labor, and that the safety and security of the driving public were not compromised.

And I think you'll notice that Yost wasn't calling for any changes in either of these.

But this administration has deliberately chosen not to meet and confer with the Union and instead chose to act arrogantly and arbitrarily to ignore the professionals who deliver services and to sacrifice public safety for their own public relations needs.

Er, the lawsuit would seem to seek to fire the convicts - who have been cleaning Minnesota's highways for a long time - and replace them with new union positions (stop me if I'm wrong here).

How much sympathy will the Minnesota taxpayer - whose kids' schools are being starved at the classroom level by a rapacious teacher's union and administrators who are cynically shorting the programs that most directly affect the taxpayers - have for paying fourteen times more to have their highways cleaned?

Noted in advance: not all state workers are indolent martinets. But neither Mark Yost or I are the first to observe that state and government employ seems to draw a lot of:

• people who thrive on lording petty authority over "customers", from clerks at state offices to the agents of county Child Support offices
• people whose vocational goal is to have a secure grip on the same chair for an entire career, no matter what

Most of us in the private sector don't have either of those as options (although it happens); it's not unreasonable to expect the taxpayer to blanche at the thought of being compelled to fund more of either.

We, the people of Minnesota and the United States, are concerned that prison labor in China undermines trade agreements and makes American manufacturing non-competitive.

Read that last bit very carefully; this union official is equating Minnesota's prison work program - a reward for good time, and a key part of the notion of "rehabilitation" - with slave labor.

With Minnesota prisoners doing not only garbage pick-up but commercial printing, light textile industrial production, and production of mylar party balloons (with Mickey and Minnie logos), work that could be done by Minnesotans in our ever diminishing manufacturing sector, shouldn't every Minnesotan want a little light on this growing convict industry? After all, the job you save may be your own.

Yost has the goods on MINNCOR; the simple fact is, such jobs would not go to Minnesotans still imprudent enough to have hung their hats in the manufacturing industry; they'd be in Mexico, China, or elsewhere farther down the world's market.

Minnesota's state workforce (the 13th leanest in the nation) is your neighbors, your friends, your family. They plow and maintain your roads, keep your lakes stocked, protect you from fraud at the gas pump, help your kids get registered for higher education and keep your higher education buildings clean and safe, take care of those with developmental disabilities and mental illness, protect the public from the states most violent criminals and predators, and make sure you have fair and free elections - to name just a few things they do. They deserve your respect and your thanks.

With all due respect, thanks.

Now, quit slacking off on the job, quit acting like the world revolves around the petty regulations you enforce with such zeal-yet-ennui, and quit digging for more reasons to raise taxes.

And most of all, quit demonizing those among us who seek to hold you - and more importantly, your legislative and bureaucratic masters - accountable for the money you extract from us.

Maybe you should call Mr. Yost, your state representative, and the Governor and tell them that. Or better yet, since Mr. Yost is so fond of prison labor, he should know that prisoners love to write and have plenty of time to do so. Maybe a prisoner could replace him as Associate Editor of the Pioneer Press. Just a thought...

Careful, Mr. Seide. There's a of prisoners who are adept at getting money from people who don't want to give it up.

Perhaps they could run AFSCME Council Five.

Just a thought...

The Noise-Machine Daisy-Chain

Certain local columnists who claim not to be monkeys of the Minnesota DFL - but who are, anyway - are constantly intoning "Cuhnuhct Thuh Duhts!" (Connect the dots) with the local NeoconWingnutHowlermonkeyNoisemachineDaisychain; they believe, and have written in their columns, that there is a direct chain of command spreading down from Karl Rove through the big conservative think tanks, downward through Talk Radio, and thence to the conservative blogosphere.

Jeez, wouldn't that be cool? Never having to dig for material, and having some big sugardaddy pay me huge money to blog (like George Soros does for Atrios and Oliver Willis)?

Well, the whole thing is a hallucination; I suppose if you're a leftymedia figure it's easier to think "it's a big conspiracy" than "people think we suck" and "a bunch of amateurs are fact checking our asses and we're not coming across so well".

So the "Daisy Chain" is a fantasy; the conservative blogosphere is a "noise machine" in the same way that a mass of Portuguese Man-o-War is a "fleet".

That being said, if one of the big lefty whiners - say, Brian "Who's Brian Lambert" Lambert or Nick the Monkey - had been at Undisclosed Location #2 on Saturday night, they'd have probably tossed a hernia.

The Kentucky Derby party on Saturday included a veritable...well, daisy chain of the local alt-media:

• Mark Yost (plus Leslie and George, who is well on his way toward becoming a conservative media figure in his own right) and Craig Westover of the PiPress
• Joe Olson and John Caile of Concealed Carry Reform Now!
• David Strom, Margaret Martin and Jordan Mason from the Taxpayers' League
• Saint Paul, Elder and Atomizer from Fraters
• John "Policy Guy" LaPlante and Mrs. Policy Guy
• About fifteen other people.
• A big bag of money from Karl Rove

Rumors of photos are so far unsubstantiated.

NARN Today

We're going to be live at the White Bear Lake Supertore today. We're interviewing Katie Kieffer of the St. Thomas Campus Republicans about the Ann Coulter flap, and then Brian Andserson, author of South Park Conservatives.

Join us, either on AM1280, or on our Web Stream, or just come on out and see us. And buy a car, if the mood strikes.

In Praise of the Typecast

Red linked to this post - a revisionist look at William Shatner. And it's a darn fine one.

And it got me to thinking; how many excellent actors have gotten their careers hijacked by roles that make them successes - and then typecast them forever?

I'm not the tireless cataloguer of film facts that Red is - far from it. But growing up watching (or, largely, eschewing) junk TV as I did, there are a few stories that amazed me.

Remember Gomer Pyle, USMC? Yeah, Jim Nabors had a bit of a singing and acting career before "Gomer"...

...but one year, watching late night TV during college, I saw A Town Without Pity, a movie about the court-martial of a couple of GIs accused of rape in post-war Germany. And I noticed Frank Sutton, who played Sergeant Carter. And he was very, very good. IMDB shows his career was mostly soap operas and "B" TV, and his bio indicates he was a typical C-list journeyman actor - but then that's what kept a lot of actors (including William Shatner, DeForrest Kelly, Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan) in the chips back then. And now.

As a child, there were few things I hated worse than getting immunization shots. One of them was The Munsters. Some of you are no doubt going to write protesting your love for the show; please, live in your own memories, you're entitled to them. But I hated hated hated the Munsters, even as a kid. And Gwynne was involved in worse - Car 54 Where Are You and Sergeant Bilko, yet more shows that bored me then and depress me now.

So when I got into college, I was amazed when my drama professor showed me pictures she'd taken in the '50s, showing Gwynne as a highly-respected, classically-trained Shakespearean stage actor.

So OK, Alexandra. I'll give Shatner a break...

Profile In Courage, Institutional Arrogance

The shooting of Sgt. Vick brought back a number of the events from Saint Paul's last police shooting.

One of the events in the 1994 shooting was the story of Lyle Granlund. The lifelong eastsider was a hero that day - almost completely unsung outside the Police Department.

His heroic story has a dark side, though, if you live in Ramsey County.

I interviewed Granlund for a pro-Second-Amendment publication in late 1994. Ruben Rosario of the PiPress revisited the story last year, a few months after Granlund died of a heart attack.

Rosario:

Retired St. Paul cop Rennie Renteria, a 25-year veteran who worked alongside Ryan and considered the rookie cop a son, did just that last week at Lyle Granlund's burial site.

"That was the worst day of my life, but I'll never forget what he did,'' Renteria said of the man who, 10 years ago today, witnessed the aftermath of Ryan's cold-blooded execution, shot at the cop killer's getaway vehicle and then helped administer CPR to the mortally wounded 26-year-old officer. "He was a true hero, even if he never felt like one, and he became a member of the police family that day.''

To call Lyle Granlund an expert marksman would be to call Jimi Hendrix a pretty good guitarist. This is not just descriptive hyperbole; it's important, later in the story, which resumes with Rosario; I've added some emphasis in the middle of this bit. Note it mentally, we'll come back to it.

Responding to gunshots, Granlund looked out the window and saw Guy Harvey Baker, a 26-year-old drifter from Iowa and a combat veteran, standing near Ryan's body before getting into a car.

He pondered taking Baker out, but feared getting in trouble for firing his gun and taking a human life. Instead, he aimed and punched two quarter-size holes at the bottom corner of the windshield on the passenger side. Baker, who apparently had thoughts of heading toward a nearby Interstate 94 ramp for a quick escape, was forced to change directions toward a residential neighborhood.

Hoping to mark the car so police could identify it, Granlund fired a third shot from his 9-mm pistol that shattered the back window as Baker fled. He then rushed to Ryan's aid, along with two arriving cops and a hospital nurse who hopped off a bus. Police later captured Baker, who is now serving a life prison sentence.

But wracked by guilt and lament, Granlund did not sleep for a week, fell into a state of depression and lost 8 pounds. No charges were filed against him.

Rosario left out two small, but vital, points here:

First: When Granlund fired, Baker was taking aim at a woman who was standing, apparently shocked, on the steps of a nearby apartment. The shots diverted Baker's attention from what could have been a third murder.

Second: I interviewed Granlund, a few months after the shooting; as he related the story to me, it was more than just a generalized fear of prosecution, as Rosario related it; he was in fact specifically afraid that the Ramsey County Attorney's office would prosecute him for "taking the law into his own hands" and shooting Baker. The County Attorney - Tom Foley at the time - had a long history of ferocious prosecution of citizens who tried to defend themselves with firearms.

And in fact the County Attorney's office ran an active, aggressive, and according to Granlund angry and arrogant investigation, digging up everything they could to try to pin an indictment of some kind on Granlund...

...until the police stepped in:

In fact, he received a commendation from the Police Department. And if he thought deep down that many officers held anything against him, he was wrong..."

In fact, while the County Attorney was carrying out its investigation, policemen started visiting Granlund, expressing their gratitude; one lieutenant left him his force tie pin as a token of gratitude, a gesture that Granlund appreciated deeply when we spoke. In fact, according to Granlund at the time, it was the actions of then-chief Bill Finney that finally called the County Attorney's dogs off; Finney declared that Granlund was a hero, and that the CA's office would get no help trying to railroad the man from the Department.

One reason? The man knew what he was doing. I mentioned above - the guy was an expert marksman. When the police interviewed him about his shooting, Granlund told them that he intended to scare Baker and mark the car. He then proceeded to tell the investigators exactly where in the vehicle they'd find his bullets. And he was correct. Remember - he was firing under stress at a moving vehicle, with a pistol, at a range of around 100 yards - and yet he placed his three shots (all he had time to load) exactly on target, putting two bullets into the dashboard and one through the back window (which, indeed, helped the police find Baker later in the day). This was clearly no reckless act.

Granlund told me at the time that he had no doubt he could have killed Baker. And yet it was the fear of retribution from a County Attorney's office that was as bent on suppressing the citizen's right to self-defense as it was to put away a murderer that diverted Granlund's fire from Baker's head to his dashboard.

That realization haunted Granlund the rest of his life:

"They were and have been just phenomenal,'' says [Granlund's son] Erik, who added that a steady line of cops from across the city stopped by his father's home in the first few weeks after the slayings to shake his hand and thank him for what he did.

"Lyle was a gentle, soft-spoken man with a gentle demeanor,'' says Renteria, who over the years visited Granlund and tried to repeatedly assure him that his actions were understandable. "Lyle's life had changed after that terrible day and seen what most of the officers will never witness — the death of a young police officer."

Remember Lyle Granlund and his deeds - the life he saved, the life he tried in vain to save - when Wes "Lying Sack of Filth" Skoglund and Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota repeat their bilge about the dangers of the law-abiding gun owner.

Remember Lyle Granlund and the fear of institutional, ideological retribution that kept him from killing the man who went on to kill Officer Tim Jones.

And remember him when you remember Sgt. Vick and all the other SPPD officers who've fallen in the line of duty as the city absorbs this terrible event; they both emblemize a community that, for all its warts, basically works - where citizens respect their police, and the police regard the citizens with less of the "us vs. them" attitude that so taints police-community relations elsewhere.

For all its warts, they all make me glad I live in Saint Paul.

Cop Killing In Saint Paul

Someone once called Saint Paul "fifteen small towns with one mayor".

And like a lot of small towns, the police in Saint Paul are generally well-regarded by most people, and it's a particular shock when something bad happens to them.

Sergeant Gerald Vick, a 15 year veteran of the force, was shot early this morning while on Vice squad duty. He was shot by a couple of men in an alley behind an East Side bar.

The shooters are still at large.

Updates in the extended entry.

UPDATE: The Strib says two suspects are in custody.

The shooting happened not far at all from the site of Saint Paul's last police shooting. In 1994, Officer Ron Ryan Jr. was shot in the parking lot of a nearby church, around half a mile west (as I recall) from last night's crime scene; later in the day, the suspect, Guy Harvey Baker, shot Officer Tim Jones and his police dog, Laser, near a fish shack a little east of the alley where Sgt. Vick was murdered.

UPDATE II: Vick was decorated for saving a young girl from a fire in 1991. Ironically, Ron Ryan had also received a commendation for helping save several children in a house fire.

UPDATE III: What Elder said.

Survey

I can't resist these kinds of things, to my endless chagrin

(via Red)

1. If you were a writer, what kinds of books would you write?

I've started a bunch of books; history, trashy action-adventure, even a self-help book. Someday...

2. Do you expect to ever be famous in your lifetime? If yes, what do you expect to be famous for?

Not really, but if it happens it'll probably be something in radio.

3. Say something liberal.

"The Constitution is a living, breathing document. Hell, it even has feelings. It needs to change".

Oh, seriously? Hm: We should abolish elementary school.

4. Say something conservative.

Enlightened self-interest is the ultimate regulator.

5. What did you dream about last night?

I rarely remember dreams.

6. What have you read this week? Include everything: magazines, emails, blogs, books, etc.

Innumerable blogs, hundreds of emails, Reagan In His Own Hand, USN&WR, Wellington's Sharpshooters (history of the Royal Green Jackets), food labels.

7. Tell me about your worst date ever.

Someone I'd met online, and things seemed really promising. We met at Chang O'Hara's (note: every date I've ever had at Chang's has been a disaster. Ditto Fern's). Normally I can keep a conversation with a rock going for an hour, but after 25 minutes, I was running on fumes. Finally, I punted. "Sorry - I usually do better than this..." "Sorry", she said, "It's probably my fault...", and launched into a story about her most recent ex-boyfriend. With whom she'd broken up several times. It was a dismal, dysfunctional sounding situation - and l sat and listened for half an hour, until she stopped. And teared up. "I'm sorry", she said, "I have to go", and she ran out of the bar, jumped into her car, and drove away crying. Rumor from a mutual acquaintance was she got back together with the guy. Or something like that.

8. Name three of your bad habits and three of your good habits.

Bad:
I procrastinate.
I worry.
I twist my hair when I'm nervous or idle.

Good:
I blog every day.
I'm a good listener.
I can't think of any more.

9. Tell me something you're very proud of.

The kids. And the way the NARN has worked out.

10. Give me a piece of wisdom that I should pass on to Parker Grace (who is now twelve weeks old).

I've got ten things right here. Hope they help.

Training The Business Process Consultants of the Future!

Because of some odd quirk in my school's tradition, I couldn't get on the speech team until I was a junior in high school. So I spent a year on the debate team.

Jay Kisch and I kicked tush at "novice" level; I knew a thing or two about talking to people, and Jay, of course, could talk an ethically-strict pharmacist out of his birth control pills. And we were both good at building a case, which helped.

Then, for one tourney in Fargo, they moved us up to Varsity. Neither of us had ever seen a varsity debate, but I figured since we were like 9-0 at Novice, we were probably ready.

In our first match, we ran up against two guys from Shanley High, in Fargo (the state's big catholic high school). One guy looked like Screech from Saved By The Bell. The other guy looked even Screechier. I presented our case.

Then Screechier took the podium. When he was told to start, he jumped into action like a verbal greyhound out of the rhetorical gate, talking very fast, but in an adenoidal, droning monotone. Where the content of most debates washed over you like waves on the beach, Screechier was a water cannon. He prattled happily along as Jay and I scrambled to find data and also stay awake. Their strategy seemed to be to toss so much data into play that we couldn't respond to it all, ceding points by default. It worked.

At the end of the debate, the judge gave them stellar points for their case - enh, whatever - but also...perfect speaker points! Jay and I were stunned; if you went to Hyde Park or a bowling alley or on the air or anywhere talking like Screech and Screechier, you'd be more likely to get a dangling wedgie in the rest room than to "win" the debate! And yet, that's what the system rewarded.

So I'm reading the criticism of the new SAT test's essay section with keen interest.

The SAT's new writing test -- an essay that students must complete in 25 minutes -- was supposed to add new rigor to the multiple-choice college admissions process. But now there is growing criticism that students are not rewarded for how well they write, but how long they write. According to a New York Times story, an MIT professor has found that the more words a student wrote on the test, the higher their score. And factual errors don't lower a student's score.

In addition, a recent report by the National Council of Teachers of English wonders whether the test, and another administered by the ACT, has the potential to "compromise student writers and undermine longstanding efforts to improve writing instruction in the nation's schools."

I thought this part was funny, in a grim kind of way (emphasis added):

But Mark Davison, director of the University of Minnesota's Office of Educational Accountability said that testing writing is a good idea.

"It's one of the skills that kids use most often when they get to college," he said.

And testing what amounts to a first draft is valid, he said. After all, most professors judge writing by the product, not the process.

And rewarding length makes some sense, Davison said. The best essays tend to be longer because students include more facts and elaboration to back up their main point.

"These tests have limitations. People should be aware of that," Davison said. "But you can't write a real good essay that's real short."

Funny, isn't it? The bureaucrat endorses a test that seems tailor-made to reinforce writing like bureaucrats...

Read the whole thing.

To Be In Pittsburgh

Long-time "Shot" reader Dave from Ohligarchy writes:

The city of Pittsburgh will hold a "full-scale terrorism simulation" inside the park. Attendance is not only free, but those who show up to participate get a "goodie bag":

So far, so good.

Then, the clincher:

On top of the goodies, the volunteer victims will be treated to a concert featuring (among others) Mitch Berg's favorite Pittsburgh-based rocker:

Before the City of Pittsburgh ignites a full-scale terrorism simulation to test the capabilities of its local emergency responders, live entertainment will be provided in the ballpark by Donnie Iris, Joe Grushecky and B.E. Taylor starting at noon.

I would expect Mitch to show up, being the concerned citizen and Joe Grushecky fan that he us,

Dang skippy! I'm gonna book that flight...

...but I understand that he already has a regular Saturday afternoon gig that prevents him from attending.

Oh, crap.

Bummer, that.

Well, give my regards to Joe, and have a good drill, but get out alive!

Questions

For the purposes of argument:

Pharmacists have a legal duty to fill doctors' prescriptions (and, their employers might add, to not turn away legal business). Their own moral qualms about the prescriptions have no place in the equation. Right?

OK. So - corporate officers have a legal, fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Yet corporations sometimes skirt or pummel the law. Many of the same people who castigate pharmacists for resisting a legal duty on moral grounds are the ones who lionize corporate whistleblowers whose ethics harm the shareholders they are legally bound to protect.

Perhaps a better example: soldiers have a legal duty to fulfill the terms of their enlistment contract. Yet as we've seen in the news this past year, some servicepeople, after joining the military with full awareness of what militaries do (and, often, after taking their full share of pay and benefits from their services), develop conscientious objections about serving. Some desert - some of them directly to a welcoming media. Many of the people who castigate the pharmacist for standing up for his/her ethics are the same ones that hold up "conscientious" deserters as heroes.

If I were Atrios or Oliver Willis, I'd entitle this post "Why Do All Leftists Hate The Truth And Love Hypocrisy". I'll be a tad less inflammatory and simply ask; is it just me, or is there an inconsistency here? Does the "Conscience" and "Ethics" you're willing to hear out depend entirely on its politics?

Just curious. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Technology Improving Life

Finally - a Twin Cities Pinball Database website.

Thank you, ye sprites and angels of technology. This is technology I can use!

(Via Girl Friday)

Too Honest?

Laura Billings is a triple threat.

In one column, she shows:

1. Why we need bloggers
2. Why European newspapers are better
3. Why Mattel Corporation needs to get back to work perfecting their lagging Barbie (TM) Doll technology.

She says:

...there are some things America doesn't do nearly as well as Great Britain, which today provides a beautiful vision of what our election process could be.

Which is, indeed, a hellish vision - if you apply it to America.

I'm not celebrating the outcome, which analysts were predicting to be a third-term victory for Labor and their leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has proven to be almost as Teflon-coated as his current peer across the pond. But rather the process itself, the culture of the campaign, which seems so much more civilized than our own that you almost wish they could come over and colonize us again.

And what is it that makes Billings pine for the simplicity of Brit elections?

You see, in England, when live audiences are invited to attend a campaign appearance they are selected not for their loyalty and enthusiasm for a candidate, but are instead chosen by independent producers who screen them for how hostile and well-informed they are. This makes for rather good television, as candidates are routinely forced from their scripts and made to sweat under the lights.

The British prefer television programs to the television ads that characterize our race. While Bush and Kerry and company spent a record $600 million on TV and radio ads in 2004, each candidate in England was limited to just five ads, 2½ minutes each, that were each aired just once before today's election.

In other words, she wants a campaign where the news media has an even more disproportionate influence over opinion than they do here; audiences selected by "independent" (riiight) producers, candidates' messages limited to what the media - the Beeb (which lies about its biases) and the newspapers (which are at least honest about theirs, unlike Ms. Billings and most of the US media) decide to pass on.

And we know how well that works, right? How honest and unbiased the media are?

Tell you what, Laura Billings: We can do that, if you don't mind getting the American media to drop its pretenses (as have the British media) and admit, honestly, their institutional orientations.

While we're waiting on that...

And while they may engage in the same attack-style politics that have characterized our elections, they keep things a bit simpler. For instance, when critics said Blair had caved in to leftist interests, the complaint was about something everyone can understand — a ban on fox hunting — rather than something complicated like stem cell research, which no one can understand, least of all politicians.

"Gosh, all that science is sooo hard! Can't we stick with more quick-hit right and wrong black and white issues and "news of the wierd" trivial dreck, the kind of stuff I can crank a column out of before my first cup of coffee?"

Remember; Professional Journalists are better than bloggers (or as Nick Coleman calls them, "ba-LAW-gers") because they know stuff.

British scandals, fueled by a media whose rapaciousness makes ours look subdued, dwarf ours in sheer prurience and lunacy.

The very best thing about the British election? It lasts just 30 days from start to finish.

So why are ours so long?

It's not like the news media that feeds Laura Billings wants it that way - that it was stirring the pot for the 2006 elections by November 4, 2004 - is it?

Brevity may be the soul of wit, as Shakespeare once wrote. But it also sounds like a great blessing to British voters.

It'd be a real boon to us PiPress readers...

Where Things Stand

Joel Rosenberg remains the best place to get information about the goings-on in the Legislature re the voting on the Personal Protection act.

And there's a lot of information to get, these days.

The bill will be going to the floor soon, very possibly next week; it'll get through committee. It'll probably be larded down with killer amendments; Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota is hailing a bunch of poison-pill amendments that various committees added on.

Don't let it faze you. These committees, controlled by the Metrocrats (especially Wes "Lying Sack of Filth" Skogland), are the fantasy-based left's last hope against this bill.

But there are enough votes on the floor of the Senate to not only pass the bill, but to remove any silly, pointless amendments. We need 34 to pass the bill - it had 37 votes in 2003; Joel Rosenberg thinks we might have 40 this time, maybe more. Oddly, the DFL (outside the metrocrats) may have a stronger interest in passing the bill than the GOP; the issue is a proven vote-getter for Republicans, and a known loser for the DFL, which lost a few vital outstate seats over concealed carry in 2000 and 2002.

The more the merrier. We want to win this...

...No. Strike that. We want to body-slam this issue so hard that even a pinhead like Wes Skoglund - lost in a fantasy world where lawful concealed carry permit holders will stalk the streets, peeping in his windows and firing randomly into houses - gets the picture.

With that in mind, Rosenberg has compiled the "Magnificent Seven" - the seven outstate DFLers that are on the fence or leaning very slightly one way or the other:

* 20 DFL Kubly, Gary W. (651) 296-5094 ; in the plus column. He's sent at least one solid, friendly, well-reasoned email to a reform supporter who sent him a very polite, firm, and well-reasoned email. (Consider this more than a hint.)

*8 DFL Lourey, Becky (651) 296-0293 ; in the leaning plus column. She voted against the law in 2003, but has seen that the sky didn't fall. Please make that point to her -- she should be much more comfortable with it, and so should her district.

*45 DFL Rest, Ann H. (651) 296-2889 ; keeping her cards close to her vest, but I think she'll vote for it, as long as there's some language that lets churches ban carry with whatever language they want. Is her vote worth that? I'd say yes, but I won't second-guess Pat Pariseau.

*46 DFL Scheid, Linda 651.296.8869 ; on the bubble -- please target her with friendly, firm, polite, calm, reasoned phone calls. Be nice, but be clear: when we're talking about the MCPPA, we're talking about SF 2259 with the upcoming Pariseau amendments, and no others.

*13 DFL Johnson, Dean E. (651) 296-3826 ; he'll vote for it.

*2 DFL Skoe, Rod (651) 296-4196 ; he's in. Send a thankyou, and make it clear that you understand that being in support of the PPA means being in support of the Pariseau amendments on the floor, and voting against the barrage of other amendments intended to weaken the law

*1 DFL Stumpf, LeRoy A. 651.296.8660 ; he's in. Same as with Skoe.

Please give these Senators a call. Be polite. Tell them you support the MPPA (SF2259), and that you'd appreciate them voting not only to pass the bill, but to strip out all but Pat Pariseau's amendments.

I called them all already.

We can have this done by next week, and erase Minnesota's patriarchal, racist 1974 carry permit law for good.

B-Day Stands for Barb Day

Happy Birthday to my little sister, Barb, out in Billings. She turns 29 for like the ninth or tenth time today.

And I still wanna know where you stashed all the airplanes from my model of the USS Midway, dagnabbit!

Hissy

Nick Coleman turns his keen journalistic eye on the PiPress (HT: Fraters), naming Mark Yost the "Wingnut of the Week".

Note to Mark: It's not as big a deal as you might think.

The funny parts? While he was talking with Brian "Who's Brian Lambert?" Lambert on his "program" today, Coleman:

• ...yammered on for a few minutes about how he'd love to give out Yost's office number - but it's not published in the paper. Duh, Nick - don't you have a source at the PiPress? I thought you "knew stuff?"
• ...chuckled as Lambert (a onetime unofficial DFL shill who's become an official DFL shill, finally) said "Well, [Yost] is getting what he wants. He's got you talking about him...". Er, yeah; a mention on a morning show with about a half point audience share is a real career-builder. More people hear Yost on a Thursday night at Keegan's than on a week of Coleman's "program".

Hey, where's Kuhbi? Without the lad's prepubescent chirp, we get nothing but Coleman's voice, the aural equivalent of wet peat moss.

Well, for the forty seconds I stay tuned in anyway.

14:58...14:59...

The Coalition military and the battered Iraqis are, bit by bit, wearing out the insurgents; the fulcrum of democratic revolution in the Middle East has sworn in (however chaotically) a cabinet. North Korea might have nuclear weapons capable of reaching much of the US west of the Rockies very shortly. The Senate is filibustering the President's judicial nominees. Social Security is careening toward insolvency.

What does the US need?

A one-freaking-hour prime time special on whether a failed contestant on America's shark-jumpingest show, American Idol, got jiggy with America's most shark-jumped pop star, Paula Abdul.

An ABC News special on competitor Fox's hit series "American Idol" will report a former contestant's claim that he had a sexual relationship with judge Paula Abdul while on the talent show, ABC News said Tuesday.

[INSERT QUIP INDICATING CONTEMPT FOR THE FRIVOLITY OF ABC "NEWS" AND THEIR "NEWS JUDGEMENT". GOOD THING THEY'RE NOT RUN BY BLOGGERS OR ANYTHING.]

"So she was like, 'You got to have better song choices, and I want to help you do that. I want to look out after you like, like, I'm your mom,'" Clark told "Primetime Live," according to an excerpt released by ABC News.

"And then she was like, "Well, more like your sister." And I was like, 'OK, cool, cool' ... And then she was like, "Well, maybe more like your special friend,'" Clark told the news show.

Oh, I can't bla bla bla bla bla.

Intervention

Humans, and their institutions, measure success and failure in many different ways, for many different activities.

Let's say, for a moment, that you're having a social occasion - a dinner party, for example.

There are ways to measure success and failure for things like this. Success might be measured in terms of, say, "great conversation was had by all, and everyone had a wonderful time". Complete, stupendous success might be all that plus "Jay and Emily fixed Eric up with Jennifer, and they hit it off wonderfully, and Alan ran into Stephanie, whose company is looking for exactly what Alan does, and fixed him up with an interview on Monday, and we all wound up singing old Rolling Stones songs on the karaoke until 3AM...".

You get the picture.

Failure, of course, is obvious, too - "Everyone kept to themselves and Nicole and Ted got into a fight to boot, and everyone left by 10".

A party that ends with people calling the police, of course, is really bad.

So what if you need the police to force people to come to your party in the first place? Along with the full weight of the county attorney's office?

If your party needed that kind of official coercion to get started, it'd be fair to call the party "vastly worse than an abject failure."

Right?

So what does it say about the public school system when it needs to have an arm of the county attorney's office to force kids to attend school, under penalty of draconian legal sanction?

What does it say about a school system that greets visitors in the school lobbies with a poster: "Be here on time, every day! IT'S THE LAW!"

Welcome to North Korea?

No. Welcome to Saint Paul.

This piece, of course, is the flip side of the piece I wrote two weeks ago, advocating the abolition of elementary school. The question is, just how bad for students is elementary school?

A health hazard?

What can you say about an institution that needs to

• drug nearly six million of its inmates students so that they can get along in class? Seriously - what would society say about a company that required a quarter of its workers to go on mood-altering drugs to make it to work every day? That's what the school system does! And it's doing more every year; Ritalin production has increased seven-fold in the past decade.
• Requires an expensive, highly-empowered arm of government law-enforcement, employing people to hold the legal sword of Damocles over those who can't, or won't, adapt to the system and can't afford to get out, in order to enforce the government's "compulsory education" laws?

I'm not saying I have a whole lot of answers. I am saying that I'm looking for any rational, objective evidence that sending kids below the age of 12 to the schools we send them to - places that regard "education" like an intellectual assembly line, where assembly line workers teachers bolt on new pieces of knowledge at various, pre-determined (by the government!) points on the line - is any better for them in the long (or even short!) run than not doing it.

And I'm starting to seriously regret having had to have done it with my own kids in the first place.

Blanks

The concealed carry debate is proceeding; in fact, it may well make it to the floor yet this session, where it has votes to pass.

Naturally, and suddenly, and not a little bit predictably, the media is all about alternatives.

Self-defense classes, for example - invariably, unarmed self-defense:

Women shudder at the thought of being attacked. They rarely want to talk about it.

But last week, about 20 women did just that and more, gathering in the wrestling room at Lakeville High School for a defensive tactics class designed just for them.

Lakeville police officer Sandy Thoeny said her class was a beginning step for women determined to take control of their own safety.

"Women automatically think this is the end all, be all. That this is going to solve all of my problems," she said. "And that's not necessarily the case.

"This is just giving you tools and helping you build confidence in yourself."

And confidence is a very good thing.

But what are they teaching these women to be confident of?

Well, when roaming the mean streets of Lakeville, these women will learn some useful things:

Officer Kevin O'Neill, who assisted Thoeny by playing the part of an attacker, said three things must be present for a crime to occur: desire, ability and opportunity.

Self-defense is about limiting opportunities for criminals by being aware, by being assertive, and by avoiding potentially dangerous situations, he said.

"There's no more Minnesota nice," O'Neill said. "It's not about being friendly. It's about being smart. You can't apply logic to someone who is acting irrational."

So far, so good.

Thoeny, O'Neill and Police Chief Steve Strachan peppered the two-hour class with observations and advice, including "don't hesitate,"decide whether to fight the attacker or run" and "stay calm."

A lot of attackers are not expecting a fight, they said.

"The thought of sticking your finger in someone's eye is horrible, but if you are going to do it, do it all the way," Strachan said.

Again, useful stuff.

As far as it goes.

The first scenario involved an attacker approaching us from the front. We were told to yell "Get Away," or "No," when they got close. Then we were taught how to grab the attacker's shoulders and drive our knee into his midsection.

When it was my turn, my heart started beating a mile a minute. I don't remember what I yelled. I only remember grabbing the attacker's neck instead of his shoulders and slamming my knee into his midsection, which was protected by a huge pad that he held in front of him. After three kicks, I was shaking, but I wasn't scared.

Unmentioned: According to the US Department of Justice, someone who resists a potentially lethal attack - an assault, armed robbery, mugging, attempted rape or kidnapping - via unarmed means such as this is about a fourth as likely to end up dead as someone who doesn't resist at all.

But someone who resists with lethal force - i.e. a handgun - is about a seventh as likely to end up dead.

The reporter continued:

I was surprised by several things during the class, including how fast an attack happens, how off-balance I was after initially getting away from the attacker, and how quickly I lost my train of thought and forgot what I was supposed to do.

But by the third or fourth simulated attack, I started trying to think one step ahead of the attacker. I tried to remember that the last thing an attacker is expecting is a fight.

And it's here that so many of these classes let their subjects down.

Oh, don't get me wrong; teaching women to be more alert, to be aware of the situation around them, and to resist by whatever means they're able is a good thing. No question about it.

But what about when the attacker doesn't oblige? When the "lethal elbow" misses, or the attacker is so high they might not feel a taser, much less a knee to the breadbasket?

When someone is truly impaired - through mental illness or recreational chemicals - it's truly amazing how much physical abuse they can take before they even feel it, much less break off the attack. I remember a bar I worked in, back in the late eighties/early nineties. One of the bouncers, off duty at the time, came back into the building after a booze and meth jag. A tough guy under normal circumstances, he was well-nigh invincible that night; bouncers and the patrons (and a lone DJ) used fists, pool cues and everything short of hollow-charge munitions to stop him, to no avail; the North Saint Paul police went through pretty much their entire non-lethal arsenal before he succumbed to batons and a barrage of tasers.

Not to impugn the Lakeville Ladies' newfound self-confidence, but I'm not sure an elbow to the solar plexus would have done the job.

Did they discuss the option of concealed carry? I'm guessing not.

Horny Dilemma

The whole flap over pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control which we touched on yesterday was, as one commenter noted, not necessarily one of immediate blacks and whites.

On the one hand, I do completely support the pharmacists involved in their right to conscientiously object to things they find morally objectionable. The left responds "Hahahaha! People are going to have sex anyway! Everybody does it! Nobody finds it morally objectionable in the real world!", which is of course baked wind; many people abstain from sex outside of marriage, many more don't but have qualms about it ranging from open regret to a quiet sense that they know it's not exactly what they ought to do...

...and it's irrelevant, because Luke Francl's increasingly strident comments aside, it's not about the people who want to buy the birth control; it's about the pharmacists and their sense of morals and ethics. Just because "most of society" believes something doesn't make it, in and of itself, right; "most of" American society acquiesced in some degree or another with slavery and Jim Crow; German society endorsed the Holocaust; a majority of people in some quarters hailed Mao and Stalin, even in the US. Those who swam against the grain were persecuted for their beliefs, and are hailed as heroes today (However; if, say, a pharmacist's conscience were to drive them to stock, unilaterally, a series of "CHIMPY BUSHITLER!!!" bumperstickers in their store's magazine rack, and someone were to object, you know damned well you lefties would say "Suck it up and take it, wingnuts! Dissent is patriotic!").

Of course, nobody is hailing the pharmacists involved in this story as heroes. Not even me, really. I think the pharmacies involved would be perfectly within their rights to fire the pharmacists involved; that, indeed, is often the price of conscience.

I also think that pharmacies would be well within their rights to set blanket policies on these issues. I can hear the radio ads now:

CVS in Woodbury, for all your recreational sex birth control needs! No questions asked!"

Or...

Nortenson Drug in Burnsville. The family drugstore that doesn't serve the prurient! Liberty, not Libertinism!

I suspect they'd both draw a market.

My problem with the left - as voiced by the New Patriot - is this sense of "how dare that pharmacist not fill that prescription!" Go to another pharmacist! Tell the manager. Take your money elsewhere! That is the beauty of that "free market" that all us conservatives are always on about, the one you guys are trying to destroy! (haha, I'm a kidder. I kid).

Because if I were to walk into a drugstore and a druggist were to refuse to sell me...condoms, or ammunition, or "Maxim" Magazine, or whatever, depending on their moral outlook, I'd damn sure let them know I didn't appreciate it.

One question I got in the comments yesterday, from a liberal I know to an extent, wondered "I'd be curious to know just how far apart we are in valueing and balancing personal liberty, privacy, the free market, and the public good." That's easy; personal liberty and the public good are both served by a free market; the morality-driven pharmacist will probably be able to find a job someplace, and those that want the products they won't sell can still get them. As to privacy - I don't know any system of pharmacological ethics that would allow any leeway on violating a customer's privacy.

However; if, say, a pharmacist's conscience were to drive them to stock, unilaterally, a series of "CHIMPY BUSHITLER!!!" bumperstickers in their store's magazine rack, and someone were to object, you know damned well you lefties would say "Suck it up and take it, wingnuts! Dissent is patriotic!".

And finally, to the people who wrote to comment that their wives/significant others take the pill for non-birth-control reasons, and would be irate if any pharmacist objected; so would I. So you should.

And Your First Clue Was...?

From today's Coleman column:

I remember when cops were too busy to be tax collectors.

Huh?

Cops and courts have always been tax collectors. Since the first weasel-faced bureaucrat first invented the "Fine", and since bureaucrats we called "nobles" started needing to wrench money from the fyrds, villeins, knaves and burghers ("Happy To Pay For A Better Phoenecia, So I Don't Get Drawn And Quartered As An Example"), cops have been the long arm of the treasury.

So exactly how far back does Nick Coleman remember? Or, conversely, not?

Let's not call this kind of thing a surcharge. Let's call it by its real name: a rip-off.

Could it be that Coleman, through the most back-door of means, is finally getting it?

Let's see:

Regressive taxes disguised as user fees, assessments and surcharges fall most heavily on families whose budgets are stretched to the breaking point while politicians crow about cutting taxes.

All taxes always fall most heavily on someone or another; sales taxes on those who buy, income taxes on those who earn, property taxes on those with property.

Could it be that Nick is becoming a libertarian?

Guys 'n Chicks

Red and Michele have a meme going on.

In it, they list:

• "Guy" movies they, as women, love
• "Chick" flicks they don't like
• Movies they, as hardened, cynical, unfeeling, soulless people tend to break down in tears while watching.

I'm going to turn the first two around.

"Chick" movies that I, a guy, love:

• Kieslawski's Three Colors Trilogy.
• Eternal Sunshine
• The Unbearable Longness of Screening Lightness of Being
• Oh, sure - When Harry Met Sally. What the hell. But not Sleepless in Seattle. Oh, hell no.

"Guy flicks" that I, a guy, do not like

I have yet to enjoy a Vin Diesel movie.

The whole Porky's series.

Any Stallone movie after First Blood, except maybe Copland.

Die Hard III - but then, nobody liked that one.

Von Ryan's Express - I read too many real POW escape movies to enjoy that one.

Kelly's Heroes - Nope. Just...nope. I mean, cool tanks and all but...nope.Movies that I, as a hardened, cynical, unfeeling, soulless person tend to break down in tears while watching

• The Dirty Dozen

Hope that helps.

Posted by Mitch at 12:15 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

It Just Doesn't Seem That Complicated

In what the local hysterical left is calling "an assault on birth control", some local pharmacists are refusing to sell birth control on moral grounds.

I'm not sure what the code of ethics for pharmacists includes; I wonder whether selling people non-essential products fits into it. And no matter how much you value your love life, birth control is non-essential; you won't die.

Which isn't to say that you - we - shouldn't be able to buy it. But there is no ethical reason to require pharmacists to sell products to which they are ethically opposed.

Let's go over the left's argument - and by "the left", I mean Luke Francl of the NewPats.

He says:

Birth control is not a controversial issue.

Well, not among Luke and his circle. Nor, for that matter, among me and mine, particularly. But Luke is either intensely myopic or intentionally obtuse if he thinks that it's not controversial for significant parts of society, and for the pharmacists that come from those parts.

Neither is sex outside of marriage.

Again, take your pick - myopia or obtusion. For some, it's not controversial. For others, it's a controversy we live with for whatever reason. For others, it's a definite issue. And nothing prevents those for whom it's an issue from becoming pharmacists.

Nor should it.

Almost everyone uses birth control.

Just because a majority practices something that the minority considers wrong doesn't mean that the minority has to acquiesce.

By Luke's logic, since "almost everyone" thinks gay marriage is wrong (by a 70-30 margin in last November's referenda), it's really not a controversy at all.

As for the abstinence brigade, ye shall know them by their leaders...

He links to the White House website there, apparently by way of saying "smirkinchimp had sex before marriage! HYPOCRITE", or so I presume, as if that invalidates anything...

Get with the program, pharmacists. If you didn't want to dispense (proscribed, legal, ordinary, commonly-used) drugs, you shouldn't have gone to pharmacy school.

I suspect rather few pharmacists went to pharmacy school to dispense birth control.

We live in a pluralistic society. That's one of our strengths. Not everyone agrees with everyone else, but everyone has to get along with each other. If you work in the public's service, you have to serve the public. All the public.

Where to begin?

To start with, pharmacies aren't a "public service". They're a business. They're a business that serves the public, indeed - but not in the same sense that government does, within a framework of laws. Pharmacies are businesses. If the business' policy is to sell birth control on demand and their pharmacist violates policy, then she's in trouble. If the pharmacy's policy is to defer to individual pharmacists and their beliefs, then see a different pharmacist, or go to a different pharmacy.

That's how the free market is supposed to work - which, I suppose, is why so many leftybloggers are so confused.

Whew

Well, I have a computer working at home again.

Sort of.

Computers are like this for me; every year or two, I have to do some major maintenance or repair on one computer or another, during which I become quite the expert.

Then for the next year or two, things run hunky-dory, and I forget everything I'd taught myself in my last bout of enforced geekdom.

Anyway, posting should be more or less normal now. I think.

Sitting Ducks

In a much more serious vein...

The other day my daughter came home from school. "We had a practice lockdown today".

Lockdown? Sounds like the kids are in the slammer (see my "Abolish Grade School" post).

Now, the person in me who can't solve every damn thing, the person who grew up in a teacher's family, and who really doesn't have a lot in the way of non-public school options right now hopes that there's a rational reason for this sort of response to an emergency - and by "emergency", I mean "wacko with a gun moving through the hallways, shooting people". Maybe locking the doors and keeping the kids - and their unarmed teachers - penned up in their rooms until help arrives is the right idea. But after Red Lake, my enthusiasm for that answer is pretty feeble. Is telling kids and teachers - the ones that can, anyway - to make a break for cover any worse an idea than ordering them to sit behind easily-splintered doors, at the sufferance of the psycho that is stalking the hallway with a gun?

A few years back, right after 9/11 when doom impended around every corner, I asked a school administrator "what would you do if you got word that a chemical or radiological bomb had gone off in downtown Saint Paul". The answer was feeble in the extreme; I, a mere civilian, know vastly more about surviving such attacks than these administrators to whom I entrust my kids every day (heart firmly in throat). I have little faith that things have gotten any better.

Dangerously Spicy?

Schools are in a conundrum.

While they are not allowed to do anything that would mortally inconvenience actual mass-murderers, like allow guards (much less teachers) to come to school armed, they are allowed to criminalize mentioning, even via gesture, the tools of the mass murderer's trade.

And of course, they're allowed to panic at will.

A 911 call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped up into Marshall Junior High School.

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos. It was wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

"I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," school Principal Diana Russell said.

Fortunately, school security and teachers are allowed to carry concealed donuts; against food-bearing assailants, they are prepared.

Elephant In Your Living Room

The NYTimes cover the activity of Ken Tomlinson, a Republican who currently chairs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Tomlinson has done the unthinkable; try to convince the hear-no-bias, see-no-bias, speak-no-bias world of PTV that the mainstream of our culture considers them biased to the point of irrelevance.

Mr. Tomlinson said that he was striving for balance and had no desire to impose a political point of view on programming, explaining that his efforts are intended to help public broadcasting distinguish itself in a 500-channel universe and gain financial and political support.

"My goal here is to see programming that satisfies a broad constituency," he said, adding, "I'm not after removing shows or tampering internally with shows."

But he has repeatedly criticized public television programs as too liberal overall, and said in the interview, "I frankly feel at PBS headquarters there is a tone deafness to issues of tone and balance."

Naturally, the Public Broadcasting establishment is going to push back:

Pat Mitchell, president and chief executive of PBS, who has sparred with Mr. Tomlinson privately but till now has not challenged him publicly, disputed the accusation of bias and was critical of some of his actions.

"I believe there has been no chilling effect, but I do think there have been instances of attempts to influence content from a political perspective that I do not consider appropriate," Ms. Mitchell, who plans to step down when her contract expires next year, said Friday.

In other words, "Leave us alone with all your kvetching about 'balance'".

I should start a pool, perhaps one to pay out money for the person to predict the first leftyblog that uses "McCarthyite", "Fascist" or "Goebbels" in reference to Tomlinson.

The UnSecular Activities Committee

Anti-religious bigotry is the new McCarthyism.

The usual suspects are gathered in New York to...well, let's just read the story:

NEW YORK -- Secular humanists and leftist activists convened here over the weekend to strategize how to counter what they contend is a growing political threat from Christian conservatives.

Surely we're talking about a bunch of extremist wackoes, right? International ANSWER? Chomsky Youth?

The Open Center, founded 21 years ago, played host to the two-day conference at City College of New York called "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right."
People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group that opposes religion in the public square, co-sponsored the conference, which drew about 500 participants.

Oy. That's not good.

And I'm sure the rhetoric is very rational and measured:

"This may be the darkest time in our history," said Bob Edgar, general secretary of the left-leaning National Council of Churches and former six-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania. "The religious right have been systematically working at this for 40 years. The question is, where is the religious left?"...The United States is "not yet a theocracy," Joan Bokaer, founder of TheocracyWatch.org, said Friday night, but she argued that "the United States is beginning to fit the model of a reconstructed America."

It's interesting learning the language of the new anti-faith McCarthyites:

Speakers outlined such concepts -- others would say conspiracy theories -- as Christian reconstructionism and dominionism to a crowd that Mr. White said does "not understand the further reaches of religion."
Dominionism is the theory that the account in Genesis in which God gave man dominion over the earth has become a political teaching advocating that Christians gain and hold power. Christian reconstructionism is the theory that Christian conservatives intend to impose Old Testament law in America.

Call it "Protocols of the Elders of Evangelism". Read the whole thing, and be prepared to be depressed.

And This Surprises Precisely Whom?

Abdulgate rocks Hollywood:

FOX executives have declined to answer any and all questions posed by ABCNEWS regarding claims AMERICA IDOL judge Paula Abdul personally "coached" a favorite contestant and then tried to cover up the breach, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

I bet Sheila is ecstatic!

Paging Dr. Faust

Key fact of trying to do business in the Twin Cities - at least, business in any of the areas that run afoul of the Twin Cities' libertine-yet-prudish sense of public morality - is that you can't win.

No. Not at all.

In an unusual twist on metro-area smoking bans, a few Ramsey County eating and drinking spots are being forced to decide between going smoke-free or going liquor-free.

At least three White Bear Lake establishments received exemptions from the county smoking ban when they showed that more than half of their revenues come from liquor sales. But that put them in violation of a local liquor ordinance that requires them to sell more food than booze.

The dilemma leaves them with a choice: give up their smoking exemption or give up their liquor license.

It's a no-brainer, said Jim McArdle, part owner of JJ's Bierstube, who had hoped to keep attracting smokers to his bar.

"Honestly, it will be more prudent for me to keep my liquor license," he said. "I've been put into a Catch-22. I guess I'll go no-smoking."

It's been interesting, talking with bar owners and anti-ban activists; bar owners are angry, and the inevitable search for work-arounds to the ban has begun. Cops seem exceedingly disinterested in enforcing the ban, which is a good start...

...until, of course, the ban zealots begin more closely emulating MADD, and demanding ever-more vigilance.

Count on it.

(And by the way, I have no dog in this fight; I've never smoked, beyond perhaps a couple of cigars a year, and having worked in smoky bars, I don't miss the smoke much. But that should not be the county's business...)

Blackout?

The Saint Paul DFL endorsed Chris Coleman to run for mayor of Saint Paul:

Former St. Paul City Council Member Chris Coleman earned the DFL endorsement for St. Paul mayor on Saturday, defeating Ramsey County Commissioner Rafael Ortega to take on Mayor Randy Kelly.

Kelly, who broke with Democrats in endorsing George W. Bush last fall, has been a great mayor for Saint Paul, keeping Norm Coleman's tax policies in place and keeping city bureaucracy under control, compared to Minneapolis. He's earned the endorsement of the Saint Paul and Minneapolis police federations.

On the other hand, Chris Coleman is the brother of Star/Tribune columnist Nick Coleman. Having Chris in office would at least serve to force Nick to abstain from writing about Saint Paul politics - right? Conflict of interest? For the St. Paul school board, the party endorsed John Brodrick and Elona Street-Stewart, both incumbents, and Tom Goldstein.Which should serve to keep the school board in its current state, as the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Saint Paul DFL.

But I almost did a spit-take when I saw John Brodrick - until I realized he was not the same as Richard Broderick, Green Party candidate for the board in '03 and one of the most deeply bizarre candidates for office since Harley McClain (now there is a trivia question for you...)

Call to Action

Friday and Saturday were the days for anger.

Today is the day to turn that anger into something else.

We had an illuminating talk with Joel Rosenberg, concealed carry activist, trainer and author, on the NARN show last Saturday. Truth be told, I should probably apologize to the rest of the guys in the studio; so animated was I over the subject of Dean Johnson's seeming double-cross of Steve Sviggum and the Star/Tribune's egregious lying, I practically turned the first half hour of the show into a monologue.

The situation, in the short term, is difficult but - and Rosenberg did a lot to help me get my bearings back on this - far from impossible, maybe even 50-50 this session.

If you're an MPPA supporter, you need to get to Joel's site, as well as to call your Senator (and especially Dean Johnson) with a polite, reasoned message:

• The Personal Protection Act passed via a vote of the people's elected representatives two years ago.
• The law, in over a year in effect, caused no problems whatsoever.
• This is the same precise experience had in each of the nearly three dozen other states that have adopted shall-issue laws - and none have ever repealed one.

The Senate Democrats' plan is to bottle this bill up in Metrocrat-controlled committees so that it dies in this session - the exact way it did in every session from '97 to '02, even though it had all the votes it needed to pass (as indeed it does now, in both houses, by a significant margin).

Let's get cranking. We have a democracy to save.

Blah

Both computers in the house are complete blotto. The laptop power supply won't take a charge from the AC adapter, and I think the desktop box's OS kernel is corrupted by all the viruses my kids let onto the system.

Posting may be slow for a few days.