Shot In The Dark

Location, Location, Location

The Strib notes that one of the people sueing them, has already been sued by the Strib.

Paragraph One:

An executive with a firm that accused the Star Tribune of dumping unsold papers in order to inflate circulation numbers was sued by the newspaper in April for not paying his bills.

Paragraphs Seven and Eight:

At least one analyst said the existence of a prior legal claim against one of the parties in the case raises doubts about the credibility of his claims.

"It does make you wonder about his motive," said William Bird, a media analyst with Smith Barney Citigroup.

Graf thirteen of fifteen:

Hendrickson said Star Tribune circulation incentive programs encouraged distributors to dump extra newspapers or give them away rather than return them to the newspaper. The practice, he said, boosted the Star Tribune's official circulation numbers because the unread papers were counted as paid circulation.

Submitted without comment.

Chronology

We in the Northern Alliance take a goodly deal of pride in the work we do - re-afflicting the afflicted, immediating the media - and we have a lot of fun doing it.

But as re: Janeane Garofalo's second-hand bleg for misguided liberals nationwide to subscribe to the Strib, the Fraters throw down with a claim today:

"Right wing nuts assaulting the Star Tribune" may as well be the official motto for Fraters Libertas. It's part of our mission statement. Our whole raison d'etre, if you will. Hell, it's even sculpted into the frieze over the main entrance of the sprawling FL World Headquarters (good thing that consultant talked us out of "Freedom is slavery").

We were right wing nuts before right wing nuts were cool. And we were assaulting the Strib before assaulting the Strib was cool. We're the pathfinders on this particular mission. The tip of the spear. The first wave on the beach.

They have been doing it a long time. And they have raised it to an art form.

But let's see whose footsteps were the first on the moon - or in this case, pressed ham:

The first Fraters article criticizing the Strib was dated March 8, 2002.

The first Powerline whack at the Dingy Gray Lady of Portland - the first one that actually criticized the paper - July 20, 2002.

Meanwhile, over at lowly little Shot In The Dark - when did I start criticizing the Strib?

February 6 - Reaganmas - 2002.

Blazing trails so you don't have to...

File Under "Things Mitch Won't Be Doing"

Hollywood comes to Saint Paul.

Yaaaawwwwwn.

Who cares whether Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, director Robert Altman and other film royalty were on hand Wednesday when filming on the movie "Prairie Home Companion" commenced. Outside St. Paul's Fitzgerald Theater, one name and one name only mattered -- Lindsay Lohan..."I'm praying that we see her," said Smith, who had been next door at Central Towers visiting her grandma.

"I'll probably freak out," said Wald. "She's such a nice girl."

The sometimes bored, sometimes bemused crowd ranged from a handful to maybe a couple of dozen.

It's like this: "Here I am, a regular schmuck from flyover land. Your life is worth so infinitely much more than mine that I'll be happy to spend irreplaceable hours of my life waiting on exchange street to watch you brush by."

I'll pass.

Oh, Please, Dear Lord, I'll Be Good The Rest Of My Life...

Note to all leftybloggers: Keep this talk up:

Everywhere I go the last couple of days, people are dropping it in casual conversation: "Bush is going to be impeached."

Please, Democrats. Do it. Do it now.

I'll even send money to help the impeachment effort.

Please do it. Your time is now. Fight the power! Go for it, lefties!

File Under "Damnation By Faint Praise"

Janeane Garofalo's show blog comes out in support of the Strib.

The Star Tribuune [sic] in Minnesota has one of the toughest editorial boards in the country.

Where "tough" equals "invincibly leftist, irredeemably elitist, and mortally arrogant" (although to be fair, hiring Doug Tice and Katherine Kersten were baby steps in the right direction). Tough, indeed.

They have been early critics of the Bush fiasco.

Someone - probably me - should go back and find all of the predictions the Strib Editorial Board made for the Bush Administration. It'd be funny - although the fact is the research would be redundant.

They recently came out in support of Durbin and his remarks on torture. Despite the fact that Durbin backed down, we should show our love.

In other words, the Strib was "wrong but accurate?"

As if Anders Gyllenhall doesn't have enough problems. Getting an endorsement from Janeane Garofalo is about a notch better than getting one from Mike Malloy, which is in turn about the same as getting one from the schizophrenic lady at the bus stop.

Shutdown?

Look, State Employees - and I know there are a few of you who read this blog - I feel for ya. I really do.

I've never worked for the government in my life. Never even had the opportunity, had I wanted to. Come to think about it, I've only applied for one government job in my life (two if you count MPR).

No, I'm a private sector guy. I work "at will", no union. I have a defined-contribution pension (that's still rebuilding after a divorce and after 2003), spotty and declining benefits, and no assurance that I'm going to have a job next week.

In the past two years, I've had four months of complete unemployment, five more months of gross underemployment (40-60 hours of freelance contract work a month), a one-month scramble between jobs (ameliorated by plenty of freelance work on the fly - for which I got paid 45 days later), an unplanned interruption in the job (which turned out to be only two days, but still...) - and nobody knows what next week will bring.

So you state employees will be out, if at all, a few days or weeks (and vacation pay, which I don't get, will cover a chunk of that). Inconvenient at best, a hassle, maybe a hardship for some. Par for the course for most of the people who pay your salaries.

That's what I thought.

Then I saw the actual scope of the "shutdown".

Courtesy of the Strib, here's what's staying open:

ADMINISTRATIVE

• Payroll and administrative services for retained staff and security for all state property.

BENEFITS/SERVICES

• Processing claims for unemployment insurance; injured workers' compensation; Social Security disability payments; cash, child care and food assistance; adoption assistance payments; government health plans and payments to many Medical Assistance providers.

• Health and welfare programs such as guardianship services, senior ombudsman, birth and death certificates; Women, Infants and Children; senior nutrition and home-delivered meals, Emergency Food Assistance Program, toxicology help line and HIV/AIDS services.

• Residential and outpatient facilities for veterans, the elderly, mentally ill, chemically dependent, developmentally disabled, deaf, deaf/blind, hard of hearing, and sexual predators.

LICENSING

• License renewals for accountants, architects, behavioral health therapists, boiler operators, building contractors, chiropractors, drivers (commercial and regular), electricians, health professionals, insurance agents, lawyers, nursing homes, plumbers, real estate agents and social workers.

• New licenses for boiler operators, dentists, doctors, environmental professionals, lawyers, teachers and school administrators.

PUBLIC SAFETY

• Operations of State Patrol, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, state fire marshal; Stillwater lift bridge, highway ramp meters and toll lanes; aeronautic navigation and pilot weather systems; Gopher One buried cable and pipeline information service; Agriculture Department's nuclear and agricultural chemical emergency response; biological control and soybean rust programs; farmers market nutrition program.

• Monitoring and control of air quality, toxic waste sites, disease outbreaks, invasive species of exotic plant diseases and pests.

• Enforcement of laws governing hunting, fishing, boating, wetlands and vehicles.

• Department of Natural Resources firearms and vehicle safety training, fire suppression, flood and dam safety and hatchery and tree nursery maintenance.

REGULATION

• Disciplinary actions against dentists, doctors, lawyers and nursing homes.

• Inspections of dairy products, grain, fruits, meat, seed potatoes, vegetables; drug researchers, drug wholesalers, home health-care facilities, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies; boilers, car dealers, carnivals, electrical wiring, elevators, high-pressure piping, manufactured homes, new buildings, pipelines, plumbing, swimming pools, well-drillers; municipal water systems, school buses.

• Regulation of child labor; commercial livestock feed, livestock weighing, truck weights; workplace safety.

• Investigation of suspected cases of rabies and foreign animal diseases; highway crashes and fatalities; complaints about health professionals, nursing homes and other health facilities; complaints against lawyers and veterinarians.

RECREATION

• Minnesota Zoo: fully staffed and operating.

SCHOOLS

• Continued funding for most state education aids, including charter schools, Head Start, special ed and breakfast, lunch and milk programs; Preparatory Assistance Summer School at the Faribault Academies for the Deaf and Blind continues as scheduled.

TRANSPORTATION

• Construction of 200 state highway projects, plus new headquarters buildings in St. Paul for the departments of agriculture, health and human services.

• Metro Transit and other transit services for at least one month; Metro Mobility for the disabled for the duration of a shutdown.

OTHER

• Housing Finance Agency, Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Agency.

Wow. I didn't even know that Minnesota employed seed potato inspectors, much less that a court would consider them an essential service.

And the Minnesota Zoo? Essential? I mean, beyond feeding the animals? I love the Zoo and all, but...?

In contrast, here's what'll close:

BENEFITS/SERVICES • MinnesotaCare will not take new enrollments in the state health plan for the working poor.

• Injured and displaced workers will lose state call-in, vocational and rehabilitation services. Similar services for the blind also suspended.

FUNDING

• No farm loans through the Rural Finance Agency and applications for Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program farmland set-asides.

• No funding for libraries, early childhood programs, adult education, local public health agencies, environmental grants and loans for businesses, individuals, nonprofits and units of government.

LICENSING

• New driver's licenses won't be issued, and driver testing suspended. Most new professional licenses won't be available, either.

• No permits for air and water quality and most oversize-overweight truck loads, except for construction equipment and load hauling at highway projects.

OTHER

• No enforcement of minimum wage, prevailing wage and overtime laws, along with routine workplace safety inspections.

• Arts Board, Barber and Cosmetology Examiners Board, Dietetics and Nutrition Practice Board, Disability Council, Environmental Assistance, Explore Minnesota Tourism, Mediation Services, Ombudsperson for Families, Physical Therapy Board, Public Utilities Commission, Water and Soil Resources Board, Workers Compensation Court of Appeals.

PUBLIC SAFETY

• No traffic information via message boards, radio broadcasts, video feeds and the Internet.

• No gasoline pump inspection and implementation of state 2 percent biodiesel requirement.

RECREATION

• State parks, picnic areas and campsites, except for Soudan Underground Laboratory support staff. A bill that could keep all parks open may be acted upon today.

• Most highway rest areas, some of which close as early as today. Eight rest areas operated by other parties will remain open.

• No public tours of the governor's residence today.

Is it just me, or is this the lowest-impact "Shutdown" in history?

News reports say the "shutdown" will affect 16,000 employees. Drastic?

I checked out this report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor; Minnesota employs 50,000 people in executive branch offices alone! The "Shutdown" will affect less than 1/3 of state employees!

The report has a few interesting asides:

Lower-skill jobs in state employment pay relatively more than comparable private sector jobs, and higher-skill jobs pay relatively less.

And

...As a group, state employees are paid more than private sector employees because the state workforce contains a higher concentration of professional workers and a lower concentration of sales, craft, and assembly-line positions.

Here's a part I thought was interesting:

Minnesota paid its state employees higher salaries in 1998 than most of the 24 states participating in a widely used salary survey. Minnesota's salaries ranked in the upper third of participating states for 87 of 107 comparable positions, and Minnesota paid the highest salary of all participating states for 21 positions. Minnesota salaries were above the average paid by a subset of Midwestern states for over 80 percent of the positions.

We don't know how this compares with cost of living in the other surveyed states, which would be an interesting survey.

But perhaps those "Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota" lawn signs should read "Happy For You To Pay Me To Make Minnesota Better. For Me", I guess.

Color Me Amazed

So the other day someone told me they'd seen one of my What Would Reagan Do? bumperstickers.

Backstory: I set up my CafePress merchandise account over two years ago - and haven't checked into it since. As far as I'd known, not one item ever got sold.

So after hearing about my sticker, I checked back.

Whoah. I've moved a few. Like, 11 in the past year or so!

Amazingly - and in full proof that I'm a complete idiot - I hadn't updated the sticker with my new URL.

Well, it's all updated and ready for the holiday season. Help yourself!

Before The Apocalypse

Steve Sviggum advised Minnesotans to get mentally ready for a government shutdown:

"Citizens, like legislators, have to prepare themselves mentally,'' said Sviggum, R-Kenyon. "It's not the right thing to do, it's not a good thing to do but you don't want to be just shocked by what is going to happen tomorrow night either.''

Shocked by:

1. ...having to pee before you get out on the highway?
2. ...having to find a Wal-Mart parking lot to camp in, because you can't pitch your camper in a state park?
3. ...having to find alternate sources for non-essential state services...
4. ...assuming you can find any, since the courts determined that not only were state-run nursing homes and the State Patrol and most entitlement payments essential, but so were courts, state colleges, and the legislature.So what exactly is the impact going to be on you, the average Minnesotan?

   Anyone?

   Posted by Mitch at 06:16 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

The President's Speech

The legion of the predictably, perpetually concerned have their undies in a knot over the 9/11 references in the President's speech last night.

Andrew McCarthy eats them for breakfast in this bruising NRO piece.

Key bit:

If the president is guilty of anything, it's not that he's dwelling on 9/11 enough. It's that the administration has not done a good enough job of probing and underscoring the nexus between the Saddam regime and al Qaeda. It is absolutely appropriate, it is vital, for him to stress that connection. This is still the war on terror, and Iraq, where the terrorists are still arrayed against us, remains a big part of that equation.

And not just because every jihadist with an AK-47 and a prayer rug has made his way there since we invaded. No, it’s because Saddam made Iraq their cozy place to land long before that. They are fighting effectively there because they’ve been invited to dig in for years.

The president needs to be talking about Saddam and terror because that’s what will get their attention in Damascus and Teheran. It’s not about the great experiment in democratization — as helpful as it would be to establish a healthy political culture in that part of the world. It’s about making our enemies know we are coming for them if they abet and harbor and promote and plan with the people who are trying to kill us.

On that score, nobody should worry about anything the Times or David Gergen or Senator Reid has to say about all this until they have some straight answers on questions like these. What does the “nothing whatsoever” crowd have to say about...:

McCarthy goes on to document twenty separate pieces of evidence - a "preponderance of evidence" - of links between Al Quaeda and Hussein.

Which leads to another post I'll hope to get to tomorrow...

And Your Point, Please?

I'll admit it; Nick Coleman writes an occasional good column. He also writes, natch, some complete howlers, defamatory tripe that in a perfect world would be included in a journalism textbook under the "what not to do" section.

And then there are some, like today's outing, that just confound the reader.

What, exactly, is he aiming at?

No pun intended.

Coleman:

David and Susan asked me not to tell you their last name because they are afraid Minneapolis will follow them: They were recently enjoying a stroll with their young sons when bullets started flying and they had to dive for cover, hitting the sidewalk so hard that the whole family got bruises.

There is worse happening.

Last week, Darius Housch, 13, was sleeping in his family's living room beside his 3-year-old brother when a bullet came through the side of the house and hit him in the shoulder.

Ugh.

Back in the mid-eighties, when gang violence in Minneapolis was just getting started, a Minneapolis cop told me the safest place to be during a gang dustup is the target. This was after an incident where a group of gang members stood across a northside street from each other, blazing away and hitting precisely none of their targets - but hit a boy in an upstairs apartment half a block away, a solid 45 degrees off the line of fire, paralyzing him as I recall.

But do not be alarmed, people. Most bullets miss in Minneapolis, and even when they hit, the kill rate is low. Halfway through the year, 200 people have been shot (1.1 a day), but only 30 have died. Never fear.

As Mayor R.T. Rybak said last week, "Minneapolis is a safe city for those not involved in high-risk lifestyles."

Lifestyles such as sleeping or going for a walk.

I just...

...I dunno. I have read the column three times now, and I still don't know what he's getting at.

Is it a swack at Rybak? Because Rybank was statistically correct; the vast majority of the killings in Minneapolis (and Saint Paul) are of people involved in the drug trade, the gangs that support it, or its customers. Or, of course, people who have the misfortune to live 45 degrees off their line of fire. I'm one of them, by the way - in 1998, a couple of punks rattled off fifteen rounds from a .22 automatic (pausing to reload) at another drug-dealing punk directly in front of my house, late one night. The fusillade broke a window, hold my porch and my attic wall, and, as it happens, not the target.

So is the column sympathetic with those of us who live in the inner city and want to stay here? Who want to take back our streets (our streets from the scum who are shooting each other the innocent with impunity?

Well, no - you can't get upset at the shooters, because then Coleman will call you a racist.

Not everyone wants to stay the course:

David and Susan have cut back on their high-risk behavior by leaving Minneapolis. They moved to a suburb last week after surviving the April shoot'em-up near their home on the 3700 block of Park Avenue S. It was a sunny afternoon and they were walking with their boys, ages 10 and 4 (the little one was riding a trike), when gang-bangers across the street opened fire on a passing car, in line with them. Bullets flew overhead as the frightened family hit the pavement.

"I grabbed the 4-year-old while my husband grabbed the 10-year-old," Susan says. "The kids were screaming. These guys [the shooters] didn't care who was in the way. We lived in the neighborhood for eight years and worked really hard to make it nice. We were block club leaders and yadda, yadda.

"But the gangs aren't leaving and their presence is unacceptable. I wish we could have stayed. But with kids? Are you nuts? We had gunshots all the time, and what's sad is when you have a 10-year-old who knows what a gunshot sounds like. I didn't even feel it was safe to mow the lawn."

Maybe lawn mowing is one of those "high-risk lifestyles" the mayor was saying can get you shot. Like sleeping.

Ah. So they moved. But if they took their kids out of the Minneapolis Public Schools, were they racists, too?

If you choose to resist the scum, of course, by trying to deter their violence with the potential for a hot lead riposte? You're a baaaad person.

So - you don't dare resist the scum for fear of being denigrated as a gun-loving wingnut. You don't dare criticize the banger scum, for fear of being called a racist. You don't dare leave the city, for fear of being called a lilywhite suburban neocon wingnut.

What can a law-abiding Minneapolitan do?

WALK FOR PEACE

At 4:30 p.m. Friday, neighborhood groups plan to hold a "Rally and Walk for Peace and Justice" on the block where Darius was shot, gathering near the corner of 27th Street and 14th Avenue S. and marching to Lake and Chicago. Call 952-996-6490 for information.

Marching for peace.

That'll show the bangers.

By the way - isn't that an Edina or Eden Prairie phone number?

Best Rhythm Part

OK, since we had so much fun yesterday with solos, let's go esoteric.

Steve Gigl prompts the question - what is the best "riff" in rock history?

Not a solo - but a signature rhythm guitar part. The classic definition of "riff" is "Smoke On The Water" by Deep Purple. Don't know the song? The hell. It's the song everyone knows on guitar: "Dum dum daaa, dum dum DA DAAA, dum dum daaaaa, daa daaaaa..." By this, I mean riffs that stand on their own, as famous as the songs they're in (or nearly so), parts of even non-musicians' musical vocabularies.

OK. So - best riffs?

My nominees:

AC/DC, It's A Long Way To The Top - One chord. Your dog could play it. But he couldn't play it like Malcolm Young, whose guitar has the most glorious tone in the history of rhythm guitar.

Led Zep, Good Times Bad Times - Gloriously excessive. This is the tricked-out Hummer with rotating wheel rims of the riff world.

Eddie Cochran, Summertime Blues -

Metallica, Fuel - Yeah, I know; all you Metallica fans put down your pitchforks and torches. Of all the Metallica I've heard, this is the one that's stuck with me.

The Kinks, Destroyer - It's like a Kinks tribute to a Kinks riff.

J. Geils, Ain't Nothin' But A Houseparty - Duh.

Carry on.

Your Chance To Be A Pro

Two Northern League (league of unaffiliated Single-A teams that includes the Saint Paul Saints) minor-league baseball teams play part of their game via X-Box:

The first two innings of the July 16th game between the Kansas City T-Bones and the Schaumburg Flyers will be played virtually.

Equipped with Microsoft Xbox game controllers instead of baseball gloves and bats, two video gamers will climb into recliner chairs around home plate at CommunityAmerica Ballpark and slug it out on the park’s 16- by 24-foot video screen.

Their scores from playing two innings of MVP Baseball 2005 on an Xbox will stand when the T-Bones and Flyers take the field to finish the last seven innings of the game.

So all you thirty-fiftysomethings who thought your chance at baseball stardom was long gone? Think again.

A cool byproduct of this story is that I haven't followed the Northern League (beyond the odd Saints game) in a while. The League seems to have prospered; it's up to twelve teams, in mid-size markets. Unfortunately, the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks aren't among them; it was a cool name for a team.

Story via Daniel Champion, who is undergoing a rough spot in his cancer treatment; prayers for Dan are eagerly solicited.

Justice, Poetic?

Just desserts to be served in New Hampshire in the aftermath of the Kelo decision?

Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land.

Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner.

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home.

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

Wow. Wouldn't that be ironic?

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

And New Hampshire is just flaky enough for this to happen.

In theory.

Clements' plan is to raise investment capital from wealthy pro-liberty investors and draw up architectural plans. These plans would then be used to raise investment capital for the project. Clements hopes that regular customers of the hotel might include supporters of the Institute For Justice and participants in the Free State Project among others.

Is it too early to reserve a room?

The Perfect Solo

I started thinking about this earlier: What are examples of the perfect guitar solo?

By perfect, I don't necessarily mean "blisteringly fast"; I'm talking less about blazing displays of technique than about solos that are the perfect emotional and stylistic counterpoints to the songs they're in (hence teutonic speed machines like Yngwie Malmsteen are disqualified). I'm not talking riffs, either; Zep's "Black Dog" (among many others), Clapton's "The Core", Dire Straits' "Sultans..." and "Romeo And Juliet" are all based on cool riffs, but that's not a solo. And I'm talking in the rock and roll era and genre, broadly, here; keep your Joe Pass bootlegs to yourselves for now...

OK. So discuss.

My nominees:

• Dave Ham's solo on Badfinger's" Baby Blue"; it's one of the most gorgeous, perfectly-fitting eight bars in the history of music.
• Elliot Easton's on "Bye Bye Love" by the Cars - Flashy yet almost too tight to breathe. Just a thrill.
• Eddie Van Halen's on "Running With The Devil". It's only like ten notes, mostly, but it's absolutely thrilling.
• David Gilmour on "Mother". Yes, I don't like Pink Floyd much at all. I've said it, I've taken my abuse for it. But I've also said I love David Gilmour's guitar playing - I probably sound more like him than anyone - and "Mother" is the most gorgeous thing he's ever played. Eight bars of cathartic wonder bursting from Roger Waters' miasmic nightmare like a spring shower over Gary, Indiana on a muggy day.
• Johnny Ramone on "Blitzkrieg Bop" - One note, ffity-six-odd times. Perfect.
• Steve Morse, "All I Really Wanted"). I think it's actually a Kansas song. Yeah, I know - Kansas was everything that was wrong with seventies arena rock. But "AIEW"'s solo was almost mathematically perfect, beautiful in a symmetric, classical sense. I haven't heard the song in twenty years, and I can still hum (or play) the whole solo note for note.
• Richard Thompson on Shoot Out The Lights - A song about slowly losing your mind, with an out-of-mind solo to go with it. As surreally disjointed as a conversation with a schizohrenic on a bus.
• Springsteen, Jungleland - Chuck Berry meets Phil Spector; sixteen bars of absolute joyous release. Maybe my favorite single moment in all of Springsteen's recorded career.

OK. Nominations are open.

But make 'em good.

Glories, Beads, Etc

Red and NormNorm did it. Certainly I must.

I love high school reunions. At least, my high school reunions. My class - Jamestown ND High School, 1981 - was a particularly close-knit bunch, even by rural standards; I think we got 70% of the class back for the 10th reunion, and about the same for the 20th. I always look forward to them, and I always am glad I went. Some of my classmates are absolutely inspirations (most of them in a positive way).

I love Dave Ham's guitar solo on Badfinger's Baby Blue; it's probably the most perfectly-realized guitar solo ever. (Runners-up; Elliot Easton's solo in "Bye Bye Love", Eddie Van Halen's on "Running With The Devil", David Gilmour on "Mother", Johnny Ramone on "Blitzkrieg Bop" and Steve Morse in "All I Really Wanted"). There's another whole post there.

I am crazy for anything lime. Lime tastes like happiness. Except gimlets. Gimlets taste like someone broke a car battery in your mouth.

As I've written before - I love blind dates. I mean, every blind date has infinite possibilities. As it happens, it usually means "infinite possibilities for disappointment, rejection or humiliation", but work with me here. No, I don't always like the way they turn out, but I like the general anticipation involved in meeting someone new.

I really love the vista that opens up as you go west of Casselton on I-94 in North Dakota, where the land changes from the pool-table flatness of the Red River Valley to the rolling drift prairie. The land is a minimalistic line drawing, interrupted by tiny details - wildflowers, a few fenceposts, the occasional farm in the distance. The sky, of course, is more spectacular than any mountain range. And on a clear night, the stars above and the widely-scattered farmhouse lights blend together in the dark, giving you the feeling that you're cruising through space. The occasional small town even looks like a passing galaxy. I always figured I could make a billion dollars flying people up from Berkeley to Fargo, having them drop acid, and taking them on a night-time bus tour of eastern North Dakota.

I hate to admit it, but I love doing talk radio again. There's a certain adrenaline buzz to not only being on the air, but having to fill time with the force of one's personality (as opposed to playing music) that doesn't happen anywhere else. It's a two-edged sword, of course - radio is a mistress that parties with you until noon the next day, whispers sweet nothings in your ear as she picks your pocket and hands your ATM card to her cousin Hammerhead, and then cleans out your bank account as she has a gang of thugs beat you to a pulp and toss you in a dumpster behind a Tires Plus in Richfield, hung-over and bloody and wondering what you have to do to get another date. And yet doing the NARN show is genuinely one of the highlights of my week, which might be evidence of how pathetic my week is, but still, I enjoy it a lot. I'm exceedingly thankful for the opportunity that the show has been.

I love Lake Josephine, a lake in the middle of Roseville, just north of Saint Paul and a ten-minute drive from my house. A week ago last Sunday I took my son there, around dusk, and sat and built a sand castle as the sun set on one of the most perfect evenings I can ever remember in Minnesota, and I thought about what a treasure that lake has always been; as fun and wet as any of the big Minneapolis lakes, without the crowds and the traffic.

I think it's cool that my son still gives me a big hug goodbye in the morning. I know it can't last long, which is why I pay more attention to it, I think.

I love the city of Saint Paul. I mean, I've talked for years about how it has all the advantages of Minneapolis plus a city government with some common sense, how I love the neighborhoods, yadda yadda. But the town itself just feels right to me, and that's coming from a guy who never really feels right anywhere.

I love the fact that there are still people out there who can tell the story of the Holocaust from first-hand experience. The Nazi inner circle is all gone, but they're still here. Cool.

I like looking at the kids' faces and being able to trace how they've developed over time - and how they've stayed the same since they were babies.

I REALLY love the fact that if anyone should refer to this post as "navel-gazing", I have the ability to make a photoshop of them gazing at...well, let's just say I'll let 'em off at navel-gazing if they're very lucky and they beg.

And I love having a social life, attenuated as it is, for the first time in about fifteen years.

That should do it for now.

Ten Seconds

I've found it necessary in the past few weeks to clear my mind of petty distractions. I've spent less time reading lefty blogs. I've stopped reading some websites whose reward-to-garbage ratio is too low. And it occurred to me that I had not listened to even one second of the Nick Coleman "show" in nearly four weeks.

So I flipped over their on my way from the gym this morning.

Paraphrasing closely: "...people like Howard Dean and Dick Durbin tell the truth, and are attacked by all the incipient fascisti..."

"Incipient Fascisti?" Did he get that term from one of his barbershops?

I'm presuming he's talking about blogs (Coleman: "Ba-laaaawgs"), since the major media has given Durbin a complete pass, and treated Dean's rantings as curiosity from a spunky maverick rather than the tell-tale sign of a mass party that is drifting to the lunatic extreme.

I wonder - would Nick Coleman tell that to anyone's face?

Hell - could he pronounce it twice?

Gaaaaah

Too too much burning the candle at both ends.

No, actually I just threw the candle into a campfire. It's that bad.

More posting later today. Until then, check out my good friend The Head of Alfredo Garcia, over at Kool Aid Report. He's feeling much better.

Attention, Boutique Writers!

The City Pages, for those of you from out of town, is the local freebie lifestyle handout.

It features some excellent reporting - at its best, as good as and sometimes better than the dailies serve up. Call that "sublime".

Of course, the bulk of the paper (not counting the ads for escort services, bars and gablines) is devoted to endless rehashing of this years' model of garage band, and reviews that range from the pretentious and overwrought to the pretentous but fairly good. Let's call that part "ridiculous".

And then there's their blog, the "Blotter", the latest repackaging of "Babelogue", the big blog that, 'til now, couldn't. "Blotter" features some excellent writers - Paul Demko and Brad Zellar - and some others who serve more as comic relief.

Mike Mosdale - well, he never made much of an impression on me, and the one he left was "Might as well read MoveOn.org press releases and cut out the middleman.

On the upside - he noticed my humble blog. On the downside, his head is jammed in his agenda to the shoulder.

He writes in re my piece about the Kelo decision:

A lot of conservative bloggers whipped themselves into a lather over yesterday's Supreme Court decision upholding the right of government to seize private property to make way for shopping malls, office parks or any other development project that strikes the fancy of an ambitious city planner.

Among other things. Many other things.

But why quibble so far?

Naturally, much of the rhetoric was overheated. Shot in the Dark's Mitch Berg shrieked that the court's "five liberal members gang raped property rights" and than blathered on with a reference about "the Ba'athists here at home we have to mop up."

Yeah, that's the nice thing about having a blog; nobody to enforce their temperament on me.

Powerline's Scott Johnson, striking a somewhat more restrained tone, complained about the court's "accommodation of governmental power over individual rights." Meanwhile, his colleague John Hinderaker was moved to harrumph: "I don't see how the ideological lineup could be clearer. If you care about property rights, vote for conservatives."

Strangely enough, I found myself in agreement with many of the sentiments expressed by these tiresome gasbags. [Which, for a boutique writer, isn't bad - Ed.] Kelo v New London is an outrageous decision. It will enrich big corporations, powerul developers and real estate interests; it will result in little people getting screwed out of their homes. In other words, it a decision that ensures more business-as-usual.

And he's right - as far as he goes.

"As far as he goes" meaning in this case "as far as his agenda allows him". Let's look further:

But I do wish someone on the right would own up to their favorite president's sordid history in regards to exactly this practice. Bush made the bulk of his personal future (as general partner with Texas Rangers) thanks to an eminent domain land grab and massive public subsidy that was used to build the Ballpark at Arlington.

Hm. Mike? I know that Nick Coleman ascribes a lot of power to us NARN bloggers, but honestly, we have pretty limited control over things that happened over a decade ago in another state. But OK, for propriety's sake - Bad president. No donut.

Now, shall we grow up? Because once Mike Mosedale's woody for Bush-whacking has subsided, really, eminent domain is a tool of the establishment - and the establishment isn't partisan so much as it is a subscriber to the realpolitik of keeping itself, er, established.

So while the left is in a froth over putative GOP fatcats profiting from eminent domain, it's been a tool of the left for fifty solid years; the skids of the Urban Renewal social engineering movement, a fundamentally statist (ergo un-conservative) movement that condemned whole neighborhoods to build freeways (destroying Minneapolis' Phillips and St. Paul's Rondo and West End and North End 'hoods) and acres of dreary moderne office buildings (Minneapolis' Gateway neighborhood) and crypto-Bauhaus corridors (Saint Paul's Cedar Avenue), were greased with Eminent Domain.

Of course, the urban alternative media has only the most cursory knowledge (if any) of the massive pre-emptions and takings in the rural west, in the interest of wildlife and wetland mitigation, irrigation projects, conservation project and the whole array of "government knows best" ideas.

Eminent Domain - and its first cousin, Tax Increment Financing, which does for money what Eminent Domain does for land - are just as much the province of the DFL machine in Minneapolis on behalf of Target and the Twins, or the heavily DFL City of Richfield on behalf of Best Buy, as it is in Shoreview or Woodbury or Eden Prairie. The Establishment is just as much Vance Opperman as it is Bill Cooper.

So my question to the starboard bloggers: Where's the outrage?

Screw outrage. That's for boutique writers who are slumming on fake blogs.

I'll spend my time trying to figure out how to take back some of the legislative ground whose loss led us to this point.

Care to join us, Mike Mosedale? I mean if Mark Gisleson and I can agree on something like this (and it is the only thing we've ever agreed on), certainly you're not beyond hope?

Or are you just a tiresome gasbag?

Systematic Torture!

The Army is torturing people! People who have no choice but to sit there and take it!

In this case, army recruits whose drill sergeants got tired of behavior regulations:

The recruits of Echo Company stumbled off the bus for basic training at Fort Knox to the screams of red-faced drill instructors. That much was expected. But it got worse from there.

Echo Company's top drill instructor seized a recruit by the back of the neck and threw him to the ground. Other soldiers were poked, grabbed or cursed.

Once inside the barracks, Pvt. Jason Steenberger says, he was struck in the chest by the top D.I. and kicked "like a football." Andrew Soper, who has since left the Army, says he was slapped and punched in the chest by another drill instructor. Pvt. Adam Roster says he was hit in the back and slammed into a wall locker.

I'm told their Bibles, Torahs and Korans were not handed to them by white-gloved attendants chosen for their acceptability to the recruits, too!

Cry torture!

Of course, the denouement is familiar:

Eventually, four Army drill instructors and the company commander would be brought up on charges. Four have been convicted so far.

Just like the other incidents.

At Any Other Time...

Powerline informs us that there's a great opportunity for some enterprising blogger to live-blog Bob Geldof's Live8 festivities next week in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The devil, of course, is in the details - you have to be able to be away from July 3-July 7, and you have to be able to get to and from NYC on your own. It breaks my heart to say "no can do". This time.

On the one hand, the concert would be amazing (including the second-ever Sex Pistols reunion, which would be fantastic to see), and the situation outside the concert (and the G8 summit) would be a prime opportunity to observe the international professional protester set in their native habitat.

Edinburgh in the summer is a magnificent place to visit, by the way.

Blah. Next time. Maybe there'll be an Alarm reunion...

The Elephant In The Newsroom

According to Ed'nPub, the NYTimes knows it has a problem:

In a lengthy memo published the newspaper's Web site, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, announced several new policies in response to a recent report by the paper's Credibility Committee. Among them is a fresh attempt to diversify the Times' staff and viewpoints, and not in the usual racial or gender ways, but in political, religious and cultural areas as well.

The aim, he wrote, is "to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation."

Aside: It's a matter of faith among the left that we conservatives are deluded and reacting to cant from the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity when we say the mainstream press, especially the NYTimes, slants left.

Apparently the upper echelons of the NYTimes are deluded as well. Wait'll Atrios hears this.

But I digress.

The memo actually reads like exactly what many on the right have been suggesting for decades:

The point, Keller wrote, "is not that we should begin recruiting reporters and editors for their political outlook; it is part of our professional code that we keep our political views out of the paper. The point is that we want a range of experience. We have a recruiting committee that tracks promising outside candidates, and that committee has already begun to consider ways to enrich the variety of backgrounds of our reporters and editors.

"First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class."

It's not quite as good as creating a culture of honesty about bias, but it's a next-best thing.

Keller said there had already been successes, namely, the coverage of conservatives by David Kirkpatrick and Jason DeParle, and a number of recent Sunday magazine pieces. "I intend to keep pushing us in this direction," Keller declared.

He also said that he endorsed the internal committee’s recommendation "that we cover religion more extensively.... This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good
journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in."

My prediction: This, like the attempts to bring genuine ecumenical diversity to the Corporate Broadcasting, will shortly draw a flurry of protest from the fundamentalist left, claiming the media is becoming "more conservative".

Because it's not like Keller would know, would he?

Cage Match

Tim Pawlenty's move to get the House and Senate leadership into a locked cabin and not letting them (or him) out until the budget is settled is, I think, a brilliant move.

Pawlenty

"I've asked them to pack their bags and bring their toothbrushes and be prepared to stay there indefinitely until the negotiations are completed," Pawlenty said at a news conference. "No staff, no press, no lobbyists, no interest groups."

Grandstanding? Absolutely.

And a good move. What are the DFL leadership - in the middle of a state built on a Calvinist work ethic and full of people who don't brook procrastination - going to do? Counter-propose meeting at the Saint Paul Grill?

Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar was considering the trip, said his spokesman, John Pollard. House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, DFL-St. Paul, planned go to the talks, his spokesman said.

"Matt will travel anywhere, from Warroad to Worthington or anywhere in between to negotiate for health care and education funding," DFL House caucus spokesman Glen Fladeboe said today.

Truer words were never spoken.

Pawlenty made the unprecedented proposal after receiving an offer from Senate DFLers that he described as "not particularly helpful."

He described Camp Ripley, an Army base between Brainerd and Little Falls, "as a nice controlled setting," where only the five leaders will be ensconced, without lobbyists, staffers or the media. Intruders would be escorted off the grounds, Pawlenty said.

I'd call it a good comeback from his rough May, all in all.

My good friend The Head Of Alfredo Garcia has more over at Kool Aid Report.

Fisking Prager

Dennis Prager is one of my favorite talk show hosts. I've been honored to fill in for him once, on his national program, in September of 2004. It was an unforgettable experience. He's an impeccably gracious and supremely witty man, a peerless intellectual in the world of talk radio, and a genuinely inspirational public speaker.

But he's got at least one thing wrong.

In this article, from some time ago, Prager writes about the death penalty:

A couple of weeks ago, three New Hampshire prisoners, one a convicted murderer, escaped from prison. What if the murderer had murdered again? On whose hands would the victim's blood have been?

One of the most common, and surely the most persuasive, arguments against capital punishment is that the state may execute an innocent person. One reason for its effectiveness is that proponents of capital punishment often do not know how to respond to it.

And unfortunately for the proponents, Prager supplies them with nothing.

Let me iterate here - I can only find one reason to oppose capital punishment. Most of the anti-death-penalty arguments are completely specious.

But there's always the big clinker - the possibiliity (indeed probability) that the state will (and has) executed an innocent person. And that overrides all of the good reasons to execute prisoners. No contest.

That's a shame. For while the argument is emotionally compelling, it is morally and intellectually shallow.

First of all, there is almost no major social good that does not lead to the death of innocent individuals. Over a million innocent people have been killed and maimed in car accidents. Would this argue for the banning of automobiles? To those whose criterion for acceptable social policy is that not one innocent die, it should.

The difference is that driving is a voluntary act with assumed risk. Getting snatched off the street by the police, wrongly convicted and executed is not a reasonable assumed risk for members of a society.

If it were proven that a strictly enforced 40-miles-per-hour speed limit on our nation's highways would save innocent lives, should we reduce highway limits to 40 miles per hour? Should all roller coasters be shut down because some innocents get killed riding on them?

Anyone whose criterion for abolishing capital punishment is saving innocent lives should be for a 40-mile-per-hour speed limit and for abolishing roller coasters.

Prager is mixing policy and mechanics - in other words, mixing an overall, high-level concept with the nitty-gritty of the details of an issue. The policy issue: It's bad to execute innocent people. The mechanical issue; we have to keep murderers who are not sentenced to death actually in their prisons. One is an ideal - and for the credibility of our legal system, it has to be as absolute as possible - that the innocent should not be made to suffer, both on principle and as a matter of fact. The other is a standard of daily implementation; keep prisoners from escaping.

Beyond that, the speed limit and roller coasters involve the normal frictional risk of day to day life; executing the innocent involves using the entire power of the state to pervert the justice system (and abrogate the policy that executing the innocent is an evil we must avoid). There is no comparison.

The abolitionist argument that an innocent might be killed is false for a second reason. Far more innocent people have already died because we did not execute their murderers. The abolitionist has convinced himself, and a sincere but gullible public, that only a policy of capital punishment threatens innocent lives, while abolition of capital punishment threatens no innocent lives. That is entirely untrue.

And entirely absurd of Prager to claim.

I know of nobody who opposes capital punishment who doens't want to make absolutely certain that there is no possibility for the convict to get back into society - ever.

Murderers who are not executed have murdered innocent people -- usually fellow prisoners. And the very real possibility of escape from prison means that murderers threaten far more innocent lives than capital punishment does.

Well, naturally. That is pretty much the definition of murder; someone who doesn't deserve to die, does so. It's a strawman.

So here is the bottom line: If the escaped New Hampshire murderer had murdered someone, would opponents of capital punishment have acknowledged that the blood of that victim was on their hands? I doubt it. They believe that only advocates of capital punishment can have blood on their hands, when and if the state executes an innocent person. But they, the abolitionists, somehow have no blood on their hands when a convicted murderer murders an innocent.

Poppycock. That's true of the abolitionists who advocate no punishment for murderers. Let me know when you find one!

As a proponent of capital punishment, I fully acknowledge my moral responsibility for any innocent person executed by the state.

I'm sure the innocent appreciate that.

It is time that the abolitionists confronted their responsibility for every innocent already murdered and yet to be murdered by murderers who should have been executed. Or at least let them drop this false argument and state the truth: They believe murderers should never be killed.

Buncombe.

I'm a concealed carry activist. I think robbers, rapists and kidnappers should be met by a hail of gunfire from the law-abiding; they should thank their lucky stars that the police have arrived. I think the "innocent" should have teeth; they should be a pack, not a herd. I think that in an ideal world no murderers would go to death row because some brave civilian or cop shot them in the face in self-defense before they could even be arrested.

It's hoping for a bit much, of course. Convicted murderers should die; I don't care how, in prison or by lethal injection, it makes no difference. But since the option of protecting the innocent doesn't itself spring a murderer from prison (incompetent guards might, as in Prager's example - remember, policy versus mechanics), there's a moral imperative to assure the innocent is not in turn murdered by the state.

Keeping a prisoner in maximum security for 40 years costs less than 20 years of death row appeals, and it has the benefit of not killing the innocent. Ever.

Where's the moral problem?

Scratch A Myth

One problem with big cities is that a lot of really screwed-up people congregate in them.

Lorika from Secret Farm (a blogger with whom I've almost never agreed) had an ugly, sobering encounter with one of them last week. I'll let you read the account on her blog.

Best of luck to her and her neighbors finding the perp.

But there was something that popped up later in the story and the comment thread that I thought was worth a mention.

The anti-gun left offers the common cell phone as an alternative to carrying a handgun. And yet the writer of the piece noted that:

I decided I should call Chuck. I called about 5 times, once my phone said "out of area" and once "call failed" the other times I got voice mail.

Now - what if the attacker had notK driven off? If there'd been time to attempt one phone call, rather than five or six, and it failed?

Whenever the cell phone is offered as an alternative to a concealed handgun, remember this.

(And remember also that the incident involved would not have been a legitimate cause for using a handgun; one of the commenters noted:

It's funny, I had the same thought about taking advantage of conceal and carry*. I would've wanted to shoot the f***er.

Tempting as it is, that, of course, would have put the commenter in jail. That's why they have training, I guess...

Performance Art

Powerline refers us to the story of former Cubs outfielder Rick Monday, who famounsly rescued the American flag from a couple of flag burners.

After seeing the thugs douse the flag with lighter fluid, Monday reacted:

He reached them about the time they got the second match lit and were about to torch the flag. "There's a picture that I think won a Pulitzer Prize and it showed me reaching down and grabbing the flag," he said.

He was not alone in trying to protect it. Tommy Lasorda, the Dodgers third base coach at the time, ran onto the field and, as Monday laughingly recalled, was "yelling every expletive in the world." This was the same Lasorda who had tried to sign Monday to a Dodgers contract while he was still in high school in the pre-draft days.

Monday got the flag and handed it to Doug Rau, a Dodgers pitcher. That was the last Monday saw of it until a month later. The Dodgers came to Wrigley Field and Al Campanis, a Dodgers executive, presented the flag to Monday. "It's displayed very proudly in my home," he said.

Again - I think grabbing or extinguishing burning flags is a form of performance art, protected by the First Amendment.

UPDATE: Cap'n Ed remembers something I'd forgotten in the intervening 29 years, proving there is a purpose to following the Dodgers:

Watching Monday rescue the flag from two lunatics who tried to hijack a baseball game for their protest, which would have provided the perfect nadir of American morale at that time, the crowd did something no one expected. Lasorda recalled in his book that starting softly, the crowd started singing "God Bless America", completely unprompted, until all of the tens of thousands of Dodger fans had joined together to sing it. It was one of the few unscripted and spontaneous patriotic displays in our Bicentennial, and one of the most moving at any time.

Shrapnel of the Day

Crazy weekend. Home repairs await; gotta put up a porch railing. Not only have I never done this, but I think the bozo at Menard's gave me bum advice. We'll see soon enough.

Word has it that Learned Foot is taking another break over at Kool Aid Report. But my good friend "The Head of Alfredo Garcia" is filling in, so hopefully things'll work out.

I've probably listened to that $##@ Anna Nalick song, "Breathe, probably twenty times today. I'm probably up for twenty more.

Also crazy over the new Aimee Mann single. Dunno what it is about Aimee Mann; for all my affinity for punk noise, I've always loved a really great melodic hook, and nobody in music today writes hooks like Mann. I almost resent it - writing a great hook is sort of an exercise in manipulation, and Mann must be able to manipulate pirates out of their treasure. She's amazing.

I'm craving orange juice. Must go.

Unpledge Drive

Tomorrow it's time for radio's first-ever Unpledge Drive for the Strib - where we'll try to get people to drop their subscriptions to the Star/Tribune live and on the air.

Elder explains:

The rubber is meeting the road. It is time (actually it is well past time) for conservatives to break their cycle of dependency and just say no to the Star Tribune. It's not easy and there will be withdrawal pains. But the joy you feel after kicking the nasty habit more than makes up for it. It's a cleansing. liberating experience and, at the end of the day, you'll be a much better person for it. You know in your hearts that it's wrong to continue to subscribe to the Star Tribune.

Take the first step today towards a brighter future by canceling your subscription. Better yet, call in to The Northern Alliance Radio Network in the third hour tomorrow and participate in our live drive to encourage people to dump the Strib. We'll be collecting the names of people who have reached the end of the line with the Star Tribune and passing those names on directly to the paper.

Let's see those hands conservatives. Those formerly ink-stained hands that once bore the shame of your relationship with the Strib, but are now clean and free of guilt. The hands of freedom.

Show your hand tomorrow from noon-3PM Central on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, now with enough web-streaming bandwidth to keep our entire audience rockin', most of the time.

The Death Debate

Attorneys are debating the death penalty for Dru Sjodin's alleged killer:

Federal prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty if Rodriguez is convicted. He faces a trial next March in Fargo...Defense attorney Richard Ney said the federal death penalty is unconstitutional, and that prosecutors created a crime to make Rodriguez eligible for it. He said prosecutors are using Rodriguez's earlier convictions for rape, attempted rape and attempted kidnapping to make him eligible for the death penalty.

"We've created a new crime,'' said Ney, a Wichita, Kan., attorney who specialized in death penalty cases. "It is murder plus, if you will ... in effect, we have the government creating this offense.''

Rodriguez was convicted in 1974 of raping a woman at knifepoint and attempting to rape another. He was convicted in 1980 of attempted kidnapping and first-degree assault.

U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley said death penalty law is legal and prosecutors followed the proper procedures. Wrigley said all aspects of the crime must be proven before Rodriguez can be sentenced to death.

I've written before about my own dilemma; on the one hand, I oppose the death penalty on principle; on the other hand, I have a daughter, as well as my near-genetic rural instinct to protect our own (Sjodin was a native of Pequot Lakes, MN).

And the whole region will have the same conflict; the upper midwest is historically soft on the death penalty (Minnesota abolished its death penalty in 1906; North Dakota never completely abolished it, but hasn't carried out a legal execution since 1905. And yet people are mighty protective of their neighbors' kids; there just aren't that many of them up there anymore.

It'll be an interesting trial.

Enter Cowboy?

The key to the President's problems lately is that he's been acting like...a politician.

Which is a big part of the job, of course. But while talking with people at Keegans' last night, someone - probably a Frater - noted that the times the Bush Administration has done the best are the times that he's acted the most like every lefty and European's most-feared stereotype of him. Like a cowboy.

When have his numbers peaked? When he ignored his Secret Service agents' warnings and stood on the pile of rubble at the WTC. When he landed on the Lincoln. When he loosened up and blew John Kerry's Volvo doors off in the third debate.

He needs to do more of that.

And maybe he knows it:

President Bush will deliver a major address to U.S. troops and the nation about Iraq on Tuesday night from the U.S. military base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the White House said.

"This is a critical moment in Iraq," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Friday in announcing the speech. "This is a real time of testing."

The speech is much-needed. And the timing - coming after Durbin's cuddling up to the Islamofascists - is perfect. When better to show the contrast between the defeatist, America-last, "Fake But Accurate" opposition and the real thing?

Of course, I wonder about this part:

McClellan said the speech would be delivered at 8 p.m., and that the White House has asked U.S. television networks to air the address live.

What do you suppose the odds are?

Bush is expected to use the prime time speech to outline his strategy in Iraq amid increasing public doubts about the war.

McClellan said Bush will be "very specific about the way forward in Iraq."

McClellan said Americans have been "seeing disturbing images" of bloodshed in Iraq, but that the president was "confident that the American people understand the importance of succeeding in Iraq."

Here's where the confidence needs to be - in the American people's ability to resond to a leader. Reagan led a skeptical nation through one of the great games of brinksmanship in history, against the will of the combined chattering classes, and won. Rudy Giuliani, in context, may have done more with less; beating back the carnivorous bureaucracy of New York took vision and guts in epic portion.

So the President needs to get the nation focused again.

So do it.

Looking Out For The Little Guy

Orin Kerr on Clarence Thomas:

3. The next time someone insists that conservatives like Justice Thomas will do anything to defend corporate interests against the powerless — and particularly against powerless racial minorities — feel free to point them to Justice Thomas's eloquent dissenting opinion in Kelo. So much for that idea.

Where Were You When They Sent Dred Scott Back To His Owner?

The five liberal members of the Supreme Court gang-raped property rights yesterday:

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, said New London could pursue private development under the Fifth Amendment, which allows governments to take private property if the land is for public use, since the project the city has in mind promises to bring more jobs and revenue.

"Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government," Stevens wrote, adding that local officials are better positioned than federal judges to decide what's best for a community.

He was joined in his opinion by other members of the court's liberal wing — David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, as well as Reagan appointee Justice Anthony Kennedy, in noting that states are free to pass additional protections if they see fit.

The four-member liberal bloc typically has favored greater deference to cities, which historically have used the takings power for urban renewal projects.

At least eight states — Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, South Carolina and Washington — forbid the use of eminent domain for economic development unless it is to eliminate blight. Other states either expressly allow a taking for private economic purposes or have not spoken clearly to the question.

I gotta admit; maybe it's time to bring the troops home after all. We have Ba'athists here at home we need to mop up.

Note to Republicans: If you don't know how incredibly pissed-off the base is over this, then you don't deserve to run a party. This is, in its own way, a bigger, more infamous, more onerous assault than Roe Vs. Wade; without property rights, there is no democracy within which to fight for life.

Hinderaker says:

Here in Minnesota, we have had a couple of famous cases that have stretched the boundaries of "public use" at least as far as Kelo. In one instance, a block in downtown Minneapolis was condemned so that a local company could build its new corporate headquarters there. Thriving businesses who had no desire to sell out were evicted, and their buildings razed. In another instance, a Minneapolis suburb condemned a stretch along the metropolitan area's major beltway to serve as the new headquarters for Best Buy Company. This was prime real estate, which was already occupied by other profitable businesses--a major car dealer, restaurants, etc. They resisted the taking, but it was upheld.

My point is not that these decisions were correct--I have considerable sympathy for the other side--but rather that the Kelo decision shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has been following this area of the law.

There is a sense in which it is perfectly logical to say that the democratically elected branches of government are in the best position to decide what is a legitimate "public use," and the courts shouldn't second-guess those decisions. And in many contexts, we conservatives do argue that the courts should defer to legislatures and local governments. The problem here is that accepting that principle would read the relevant language out of the Fifth Amendment. If anything that a state legislature or city government calls a "public use" is, ipso facto, a public use, then the constitutional protection is gone.

The Target and Best Buy cases in Minnesota illustrate the problem; big companies with big politicians in their pockets condemn private property - homes, businesses, whatever - usually paying below market rates, and then sell the property to the big company.

Scott Johnson is on point but more succinct:

We've come along way from the time when Congress could pass, and the states could enact, a constitutional amendment reading: "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." It sounds a little rigid and extreme, doesn't it?

The lesson? It's time for all of us to get serious about property rights. In practical terms, that means all conservatives; the "Happy To Pay For a Better Minnesota" crowd doesn't know what private property is; if they did, they'd be conservatives.

What does "Getting serious about property rights" mean? For starters, prodding politicians on how they stand on legislation that would roll back the definition of "Public Use" - and keeping it up.

Much more on this.

Canadian Gas

Canadians gotta laugh too...

Via Cathy in the Wright)

Sorry, Chief - It Was The Old "Republican Who Loathes Republicans" Trick!

Earlier today, I fisked a letter to the Strib. I made a broad joke about how the easiest way to get printed in the Strib is to say "...as a Republican...", and then issue a litany of hard-left talking points.

Now, in the early years of this blog I used to routinely google Strib letter-writers; I fell out of the habit. Thorley Winston shows me that I need to get back into it:

I did some digging and there is no record of a James Glaser having any sort of affiliation with the GOP although he’s been writing political screeds up in Duluth (of the anti-Bush variety) for the Weekly Reader since at least back as far as 2001. You can read them if you like at his website or at Lew Rockwell.org:

Winston points out Glaser's site, as well as another outlet that publishes his stuff.

A Google shows not much - but his site (which is sort of a blog, kind of) shows he's one of those "Hates George Bush All The Time" Republicans we hear so much about (albeit only in the pages of the Strib and certain RINO blogs). Read his archives.

Particularly interesting, from June of 2002, was this piece, which certainly cements his GOP bona fides:

Is George Bush Now Reading Mein Kampf? by James Glaser
June 14, 2002

In 1933 Adolf Hilter did not have absolute power because he was bound by his country's democratic constitution. So Adolf worked on that. One of his first steps was to push for a decree that would allow him to put domestic laws and foreign treaties into effect without approval of the Reichstag (the German Congress). This was called the "Enabling Act"

George Bush, not quite as bold as Adolf, has been trying to achieve that same power. "Fast Track" in trade agreements is just a small step. The Patriot Act, all ready to go days after the attack on the World Trade Center was another.

Hilter used a arson fire at the Reichstag to grab more control and many say George Bush is treating September 11 the same. I don't think so, but believe that George is still looking for that one act that will allow him to really take charge. George wasn't ready in September, but now he sees that total world dominance is within his grasp.

Much like WW 2 Germany, America can now do what ever it wants with its "enemies" Take the example of Nabil Almarabh, a Boston cab driver who is now charged with entering the US illegally. This "Enemy of the State" was held from September 18 to May 22 without seeing a judge and was held in solitary confinement. Just like a Nazi war movie, only this is 2002 and America.

Question for the Strib Letters Page editor: Did you check into Glaser at all? I'd suspect not - but could it be that his background might just make his claims a little, I dunno, incredible?

Rule of thumb; if the Strib's editorial page tells you anything, it's probably either a lie or a very tortured stretching of the truth.

The Iraqi Army Meme

One of the lefty memes that's made me shake my head in mute, tired dejection has been "We were wrong to disband the Iraqi military". The meme was in full, depraved glory last night on the Hewitt show, when a caller claimed that we could have used the Hussein's Republican Guard as a police force.

< Seinfeld on > Who are these people? < / Seinfeld off>

In a totalitarian dictatorship, the military doesn't just serve the dictator - it is trained to fear him. Totalitarian societies are usually created by pitting 2-3 forces against each other, to create a balance of terror that serves the ruler. In the USSR, the Communist Party (and its private army, the MOD, selected for loyalty) was balanced against the secret police (the KGB, which had its own private army) and the Army; when one of the legs got too powerful, the other two would team up and cut it down to size. Nazi Germany was similar; the Party (and its private army, the SS, selected for loyalty and aryan purity) and the Gestapo balanced the power of the Army.

So too in Iraq, where the Army - large and powerful at its peak - was regulated by the counterbalancing forces of the Mukhabarat, or secret police, and the Ba'ath Party (with its private army, the Republican Guard, selected for - you guessed it - its loyalty). The Army isn't like a Western army; it has spent its entire existence being co-opted into compliance with a dictator; any sign of initiative, or the type of military or leadership skills that might lead to the sort of popularity that could lead eventually to the ability to carry out a coup, was quickly met with censure, shuffling to another part of the military, or (often) a list of trumped-up crimes leading to imprisonment or death.

And the Republican Guard? They were like the SS; chosen for their loyalty to the leader, equipped on a lavish scale that the regular Army could only envy. They are among the whose loyalty to Hussein and the Ba'ath party has led many of them to continue the war, long after the war itself was lost.

The parallels are clear; after World War II, the German military was beaten up terribly, but had maintained its unit cohesion; the Wehrmacht and SS could have been used to help maintain order...

...but the Allies correctly realized that within both of those institutions were the virus of the ideas that they'd spent so much blood and treasure defeating. When the new German state was allowed to start another military in the fifties, many of its men had served in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and

Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants writes about the nascent Iraqi Army - the new one:

Creating good infantry units isn't easy, but it is the easiest task in building up the Iraqi military. What's harder is building up fire support and logistics units. Expect that by January Iraqi units will be doing the lion's share of the infantry work, with the U.S. providing artillery and air support, logistical help, and advice, as well as providing emergency forces to come to the aid of Iraqi units which get in over their heads.

The Iraqi army is being created chiefly to deal with an internal threat, and it will be a year, more likely two, before it can handle that task on its own. It will take much longer before the Iraqi military can also deal with an external threat posed by Syria or (especially) Iran. A significant American presence will be required for 4-5 years at least before Iraqis can be expected to assume that responsibility.

If you've never tried to build a military from scratch - it's harder than you think. Read some history - even American history. The first Continental Army was a disaster; in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and both World Wars, the traditional American pattern of building a huge army from scratch on the fly led to immense disasters (Bull Run, the whole Cuban and Philippines campaigns, Kasserine Pass) as the US learned how to fight.

And that was with an army that fought for a contiguous, cohesive government with a stable democracy. Now, take that dynamic and apply it to a country that is literally rebuilding itself from scratch.

Give the Iraqis time. Seriously; they need it. It's a matter of life and death.

Posted by Mitch at 12:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

There Was A Time...

Julianne Shepherd of the City Pages has written a prose ode to watching the sun rising over the Atlantic from a beach on the Barrier Islands, the morning after she found she'd recovered fully from advanced cancer.

Sleater-Kinney's 2002 album, One Beat, was a "flash of clean white hope," as its opening track put it--a big-bang sparkler that reveled in singer/guitarist Corin Tucker's postpartum electricity and toiled in America's post-9/11 discomfiture. It was also the final record of the old Sleater-Kinney, the Sleater-Kinney where the friction came from within and from three separate parts, manifested by Tucker's barre chords and birdy warble butting Carrie Brownstein's clipped snarl and guitar spikes. Drummer Janet Weiss, who hits hard while singing harmonies honed in her pop band Quasi, held it together, but even on poppier albums like The Hot Rock (1999) and All Hands on the Bad One (2000), the band was still heavy on their trademark disjointedness. Always the music was informed by the warring slow burn of 1996's Call the Doctor and '97's Dig Me Out, albums made back when Tucker and Brownstein were frustrated, intelligent young exes evolving the riot grrl tradition of Olympia's Evergreen College, where the two met and formed S-K in 1994.

Quite an experience. I was awestruck...

...huhwhah? I had to read it twice before I realized the piece had nothing to do with recovery and sunrises; it's a review of Sleater-Kinney's new album!

I should mention that there was a time when I liked Sleater-Kinney.

Then I sort of stopped paying attention. Life moved on and all, y'know.

After reading this especially vacuous review, I might revert to overt hate.

I know. It's not the band's fault.

Oh, you haven't heard of Sleater-Kinney? They're an all-chick punk band from the mid-nineties that's in mid-comeback; they have a grownup publicity machine backing them now, which is why they're everywhere, on dozens of magazine covers and in every newspaper. Only a hasty marriage to Kevin Federline could make them bigger, it seems, within their incestuous retro-punk world.

Wait - I did say I used to like them, right? (Ruffle ruffle) Gadfy. Yes, I did. I used to like them, but I'm on the brink of hate.

Blame Ms. Shepherd.

-----------------------

Back when I was playing in bands in the Twin Cities, I knew the two immutable rules of the Twin Cities' music scene.

1. If you could play an instrument - sort of, at least - the road to success was paved by partying with, buying drugs for, or screwing a City Pages or (at the time) Twin Cities Reader writer.
2. If you couldn't fake it on an instrument, but you had a flair for breathless prose and lock-step trend-adherence, and spent enough time with the partying, drug-supplying or indoor sports-providing, you could make it as a City Pages or Reader music critic. For a while, anyway. Both tabloids turned over staffs as often as they turned over favored genres

.

Which is not to cast aspersions on Ms. Shepherd. I'm sure things have changed since 1989. I'm sure she got her job the old-fashioned way.

Through raw writiing talent (emphasis added):

None of this friendly separation was bad, but now that we have The Woods, Sleater-Kinney's seventh album, a fresh perspective on a 10-year-old band is like, whoa.

My sentiments exactly. Like. Whoah.

That's what I said when I read Ms. Shepherd's description of the band:

...the ladies sound as unified as if they'd linked arms (as in their inspiring, Miranda July-directed video for the 1999 single "Get Up")...seething and 50 feet tall...arcing and filling up the sky...Sleater-Kinney is the only band on earth worthy of, and experienced enough for, Led Zeppelin's reins...Monster riffs blast like surround sound...exposing Sleater-Kinney for the rock icons they are...voices are(...) cohering in the album's perpetual ebb.

Not only that, but...

...pissed and pissed about being cynical, they indict our information society and lament its attendant alienation, inside their anger as opposed to looking in on it...introducing to an island of progressives the tragedy of red states versus blue states...though despairing and even a little jaded, leaves us with a carpe-diem plea for hope...Sleater-Kinney is a dare and a promise. As Tucker sings on breakup track "Steep Air," "Who's to say I don't have wings?"

Like, whoah.

I used to think they were a pretty good band. But indeed, they have transformed from human into a form of pure energy. Sleater Kinney have become love incarnate. Indeed, excarnate.

And the reason is:

That's because Sleater-Kinney is the kind of band that fans become attached to, to the point of using the group to help narrate their lives. I moved to Portland in 1999, not long after a brief profile in Rolling Stone convinced me that if they could realize their dreams in the Pacific Northwest, so could a disenfranchised, small-town lady like me.

Another disenfranchised lady with a (presumably) paid writing gig in a major-city newspaper. Of sorts.

(By the way, Ms. Shepherd sends a shout out to J.B. Doubtless:

Special to riot grrl: You were wrong about the media blackout. For girls in suburbs and remote locales without the internet, friends, or fanzines, the mainstream coverage saved our lives.

Another special to "riot grrl": don't ever change!

The Woods is Sleater-Kinney as I'd hoped they'd become--and what I hoped to become with them: women, I guess, stronger than in youth and spitting in the face of the dictum that one must become softer, deader, and/or less political with age. And even though so much of The Woods is about rage, despondence, and disconnect--red states, blue states, [Again with the red and blue states. I wonder about the likes of Ms. Shepherd. Do her eyes bolt open while taking a dump, "I bet this would stink less if I were in a bluer state!"? Could it be that it never really leaves Ms. Shepherd's mind? More on that later - Ed.] TV, consumption--it's also a dare and a promise. The Woods is Sleater-Kinney, the greatest rock band in America, with wings.

And lasers that shoot out their eyes, apparently.

Priorities

Luke Francl at New Patriot responded to my response to his latest whack at the war.

So much to respond to - and I might even find time to do it, maybe.

But events of the past day or so make his closing statement doubly ironic:

Conservatives combine a toxic mixture of historical blindness and unlimited faith in their leaders. [Conservatism is all about strictly limited faith in leaders; the "historical blindness" crack is going to look mighty ironic in a few minutes; bear with us, here - Ed.] Mitch and his pals at Power Line show this to a fault. No amount of evidence (or lack of evidence) will ever convince them they were wrong about Iraq. [We could say the opposite with equal certainty - Ed.]...No, they'll blame liberals. Because we didn't clap hard enough.

I'd personally like to keep things out of the realm of partisan pissing matches. Some of my best friends are liberals who are good Americans. Some of my favorite interview guests and blog subjects are liberals who can see through the lefty shibboleths about the war.

But in fact, if any "blaming" of "liberals" is to be done, it'll have less to do with clapping than with the fact that too many of them were on the wrong side.

Let's talk Dick Durbin for a while.

Dick Durbin is one of the ranking Democrats in Congress. He's not the brightest light on the Christmas tree - last week he claimed the media was operating at the service of the right-wing for mentioning Howard Dean's outbursts of lunacy. It's not over.

Via Taranto, this is what he had to say about Guantanamo:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Indeed?

Urine - probably accidental, at that - on a Koran?

Making detainees - who had been captured, let us not forget, in combat against American troops in the field, and of whom the vast majority's terrorist ties have been confirmed - endure social pressure, making them feel squeamish in the presence of women? Subjecting them to interrogation techniques not a whole lot more intrusive than what police are allowed to do to interview subjects in the US?

Compared to this?

Or this?

How about...?

Do I need to go on?

(Remembmer - it's conservatives who don't remember history. Got it?)

Taranto puts it well:

We are fighting an enemy that murdered 3,000 innocent people on American soil 3 1/2 years ago and would murder millions more if given the chance--and according to Dick Durbin, our soldiers are the Nazis.

From Democrat Underground - which has claims at least to being the fringe - you could expect this.

From Michael Moore - who's mainstream but a particularly ugly branch of it - certainly.

So you want to claim that Dick Durbin is the fringe of the Democrat party?

Now, I did say that "too many liberals are on the wrong side", right?

Yep, I did. Comparing our troops with Nazis and the NKVD plays directly into the hands of those who fight against democracy in the Middle East; it gives them the same aid and comfort that Hanoi Jane gave the North Vietnamese when she posed at the seat of their antiaircraft guns and solemnly proclaimed that there was no evidence that POWs were tortured.

Whatever you think about the war, Durbin has slandered every single person in uniform.

UPDATE: Yep, I know - it's "Durbin", not "Durban". I just finished reading a very long book about the Boer War. I have Durban (D'Urban) on the brain.

Garofalo and Malloy Are Going To Talk About This For Days

I've often wondered what it takes to be a serious conspiracy-monger. What provides the motivation? Are they nuts, or is it the rest of us?

Ask Morgan Reynolds, a former Department of Labor chief economist.

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

A brief aside, and perhaps my good friend King Banaian can answer this; do economists have any institutional background in demolitions? Structural engineering? Metallurgy?

And am I the only one who notices the disconnect?

Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."

Questions:

• How is it that Mr. Reynolds, according to the UPI, is able to discern this conspiracy?
• By what evidence does he make that conclusion? The UPI doesn't seem to think that's an important point in their article.
• He commented "...from his Texas A&M office"? Did anyone ask Texas A&M's president, who says "while some faculty emeriti are allocated office space at Texas A&M, Dr. Reynolds does not have an office on the Texas A&M campus. " Got that, Sam Seder?

By the way, in an era where university administration seem to run scared of the imperial faculty, it's nice to see A&M's president, Dr. Gates, kick Reynolds to the curb:

Any statements made by Dr. Reynolds are in his capacity as a private citizen and do not represent the views of Texas A&M University. Below is a statement released yesterday by Dr. Robert M. Gates, President of Texas A&M University:

"The American people know what they saw with their own eyes on September 11, 2001. To suggest any kind of government conspiracy in the events of that day goes beyond the pale.”

I don't know what stuns me more - that a demented economist can get work, or that a Univesity president tossed him over...

See Ed Speak!

Captain Ed will be speaking at the CFACT meeting tonight.

Go see him at Coffman Union, on the East Bank campus of the U of M.

Get it. Got it? Good.

Asleep At The Switch

Joel Rosenberg tackled the same KARE11 "Investigation" that I did yesterday.

The "investigation", he finds, is as full of holes as the "8" ring after a go-around with a large-bore pistol.

I asked a number of questions yesterday, and deferred the answers until this installment; the payoffs follow.

Rosenberg notes a number of key facts about the shooting itself - the "What", "When" and "How" of the shooting - that KARE11's reporters omitted from the report:

Although you wouldn't know it from the KARE story -- [alleged shooter] Ourada...either went home or was driven somewhere to retrieve his handgun.

That's kind of important, isn't it? It's not like he was carrying, drunk (and we'll get to that in a moment) and murdered a man out of drunken irritation in a moment of irkedness. Nope. He apparently wasn't carrying, was drunk, got obnoxious, was kicked out, and went somewhere (home, perhaps; and who drove him there? The story doesn't say), while drunk, got a gun, and came back and killed the bouncer.

As we noted yesterday, when he "got obnoxious" he not only got threatening (normal with morons in bars), but used his permit as a prop for his threats, apparently waving it around like a badge (says one story).

Note to everyone: If you see anyone waving their permit around trying to threaten people, call the police. It may not be a violation of the law in and of itself, but it's extremely bad form; if someone's that big a moron, at least the action should be on record.

Back to things KARE11 missed:

Just horrible, sure. But what did his permit have to do with that? How could him not having a carry permit have prevented him getting drunk, becoming obnoxious, getting kicked out of a bar, going somewhere (home, perhaps? And, again, who drove him there?), while drunk, getting a gun, and coming back and killing the bouncer?

I dunno, either. The story doesn't tell us, probably because there was no connection between his permit and the murder.

The KARE11 piece missed an awful lot of facts.

More on that later.

Rosenberg explores a few issues that I just nodded at yesterday - the many ways that KARE11's story tacitly absolved David Lillehaug and Hennepin County sheriff Pat McGowan for some key mistakes of their own.

As re: Lillehaug:

This was left out of the story: at the time that Ourada killed Walsh, it wasn't illegal to carry while intoxicated. Honest. There was no statutory prohibition on carrying while intoxicated before the first Personal Protection Act went into effect on May 28, 2003. When, on June 12, 2004, Judge Finley overturned the MCPPA on a technicality over how it was passed, the old law (pre-2003 law) was in effect, and there was, once again, no legal prohibition against carrying while intoxicated until the day after Governor Pawlenty signed MCPPA2 back into law. That was quite literally weeks after May 12, when Ourada killed "Big Billy" Walsh...It was legal for Ourada -- and anybody else who could legally carry a handgun in public, openly or concealed, including permit holders, people without permits carrying at their homes, people without permits carrying at their places of business, people without permits carrying between their homes and places of business -- to carry while intoxicated, because the law that would have made that unlawful that had been thrown out by a court.

So many things were legal because of the tossing of the 2003 MPPA. Permits under the 1974-2002 law, which was in force from June '04 until the MPPA re-passed, were issued:

• without required training
• without systematic background checks
• On the whim of sheriffs and chiefs of police, rather than via objective criteria
• With no recourse for homeowners, business owners or anyone else to bar carriers from their property (thus creating a do-it-yourself safe zone for criminals, but hey, I'm all about free choice)
• With no statewide uniformity...

...and, as Joel notes, with no expectation that one must be sober while carrying.

Hmm... who was the lead attorney that brought that lawsuit before a judge, urging him to throw the law out? Who is the lead attorney, who -- as a byproduct of some other intention, sure -- asked the legal system to make drunk carrying lawful?

That's easy: it was David Lillehaug, who is prominently mentioned in the KARE story -- but whose role in making it lawful to carry while intoxicated is never mentioned in that story.

Again: I'm sure that wasn't his intent, but that was the effect.

And as Joel points out, it's not just a case of the unintended consequences of a lawyer winning a case for an otherwise disinterested client; Lillehaug has been (and remains) prowling the state for two years, looking for test cases, anything at all, to take to court in his zeal to disarm the law-abiding and make the streets safe for the state's thugs.

While KARE11 mentioned that Lillehaug has been an opponent of the MPPA, they spent little time elaborating. Nor, of course, did they explain why he's taking the legal route:

Now, if Lillehaug and company don't like the law as it is, and want it not only repealed, but to make carrying while intoxicated illegal, they have a simple method that they can try: they can go back to the legislature, and have one of their tame representatives (Skoglund or Slawik), say, introduce a bill that would do just that.

I know that's a lot of work, and would be very unlikely to be successful. After all, the MCPPA has worked well, and repealing it is a longshot -- they'd have to argue, in committee after committee, and then on the floor of both Senate and House, that they were right and the rest of us were wrong. And then they'd either have to persuade Governor Pawlenty not to veto their bill -- if it passed -- or a supermajority to overturn his predictable veto.

Next, Rosenberg goes after the holes in the story that let Pat McGowan drive his squad car away from culpability (emphases added):

But that's all minor, compared to the whitewash of Sheriff McGowan of Hennepin County.

The law very specifically allows a sheriff to deny a permit application if the sheriff, after an investigation that must include an electronic database search, but can be very extensive, determines that there's evidence that the applicant is "substantially likely" to be dangerous to others, or to himself, if given a carry permit. Investigating applications is, to put it simply, the sheriff's job, and as the BCA report demonstrates, he claims to have spent, from May through December 2003 alone, more than half a million dollars doing such investigations, claiming $461,957 in "labor costs." Did KARE ask him how many deputies he had working, fulltime and overtime, on fewer than three thousand permit applications, most of which required nothing more than a quick computer database search? Why not?

Apparently, they didn't ask, and let him plead poverty, despite the gold-plated costs of his program, which is even more drunken-sailor spend-happy than Ramsey County, the #2 contender.

That amounts, by the way, to $153 per permit.

Let's look at where the money goes:

• The permit application fee is $100. Now, we don't know how many permit applications Hennepin County turns down - Rosenberg notes "In Ramsey County, 3% of permits are turned down, and thus elegible to appeal.". Let's say 3% are suspicious in Henco, too. So that means for roughly 2,910 permit applications, the costs involved are the time for a department employee(s) to check the paperwork of the application (form, training certificate, driver's license, etc), make sure the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed, and tap the applicant's name into the computer to see if there's a record; usually, for people who bother to apply for a legal permit, there's nothing more involved than a parking ticket. A very generous estimate of the cost to the county: an hour, altogether. At a capitalized cost of $50 an hour, the county's way ahead on the deal - $150,000 of the $300,000 they collected.
• Of the 3% turned down - 90 applications - let's go hog wild and say that half of them hire a lawyer and take the county to court (and I doubt the ratio is that high). There, they take on an assistant county attorney, funded by 1/45 of the $150,000 left over - roughtly $3,300 per case. The cases aren't rocket science; the ACA shows the judge why the permit was denied, and how that allows the county to deny the application. Not a ton of work, even for a county attorney.

Is my math right? Maybe not - I'm winging it here. But I doubt I'm winging it as bad as Sheriff McGowan is. As Rosenberg says,

McGowan can deny as many applications as he chooses to -- it's just that, if it goes to court, he has to pay the costs of his mistakes.

And he's complaining that he has to pay the cost of his mistakes out of his half million dollar carry permit program budget? He's complaining that he has to pay for abuses of his authority out of his huge carry permit budget, funded by the fees that applicants pay?

That's outrageous, but what's more outrageous is that the KARE "investigative" team either didn't ask him about that, or didn't report his answer.

If you're a Second Amendment supporter, you'll want to read the rest of Joel's piece; it includes some actions that we all need to take to hold McGowan and KARE11 accountable for this hatchet job on both their parts.

The Shorter Mike Malloy

Mike Malloy, FrankenNet nighttime host:

(Fill in conservative name) is a Nazi. A Nazi. I know, some people say the term is overused, but I think he qualifies as a Nazi. Anyway (name)...is one of those people who's debasing the language, making words meaningless...

Submitted without comment.

From the Moronic To the Ridiculous

Kofi Annan might be in trouble after all.

The committee probing the U.N. oil-for-food program announced Tuesday it will again investigate Secretary-General Kofi Annan after an e-mail suggested he may have known more than he claimed about a multimillion-dollar U.N. contract awarded to the company that employed his son.

The e-mail describes a brief encounter in which officials from the Swiss company Cotecna Inspections S.A. discussed its bid for the contract during a summit in Paris in late 1998. Through his spokesman, Annan said he had no recollection of such a meeting.

If accurate, the e-mailed memo would contradict a major finding the Independent Inquiry Committee made in March - that there wasn't enough evidence to show that Annan knew about efforts by Cotecna, which employed his son Kojo, to win the Iraq oil-for-food contract.

We shall indeed see.

By the way...

...if keen humor was boxing, Air America Minnesota's Wild Wendy would be Jean-Pierre Coopman.

In re the Oil For Food scandal, I heard a "song" on Ms. Wilde's show the other day, "Hey Normie Coleman", done to the tune (or close enough to the tune so that my skills as a forensic musician, though taxed, were sufficient) of "Mister Postman". I'm not sure if it was "sung" by Ms. Wilde, her "producer", or if it was sent in by a tone-deaf fan with no sense of rhythm or pitch. Sounding like it was "sung" to a cheap drum machine and a '70's-era Kimball Fun Machine organ, it was pretty much the trifecta; horrible musicianship, lousy production (I think they repeated the same verse three times. That's verse, not chorus), and, as if it mattered, lousy logic (the "song" claims George Galloway is a good, honest fella and that Coleman should just call the whole thing off, although it bothers to give no reasons for it, on the off chance that the singer's voice, thread-bare, thin and tuneless, could carry such a message).

On the Dick Clarke scale of 0 to 100, I give it a zero because, incredibly, it's not even as danceable as the vile 1976 cover by the Captain and Tenille, much less the Beatles' cover or the original by the marvelous Marvelettes.

However, it does bid one to notice that it is high time the NARN got into the music business.

Stay tuned.

The Fix Is In

It's not what you know. It's who you know.

It's true in the worlds of business, politics, job-hunting. It's moreso in the world of the media.

David Lillehaug has cultivated a very broad rolodex in his years in the public eye; between his time as the US Attorney for the area and his stints as a DFL candidate, he's gotten name recognition not only among citizens, but where he really needs it, among the cognoscenti - lobbyists, opinionmakers (he apparently gets along cordially enough with David Strom to be a fairly genial regular on his radio show), the people on the shadowy edges of power, and of course the media.

And it's there that the story begins. KARE11 ran an egregiously bad "investigation" of concealed carry reform last Sunday.

he murder of 43-year-old William “Billy” Walsh re-ignited public debate about the law, whose supporters say it’s a logical extension of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

His accused killer, 26-year-old Zachary Ourada, was one of nearly 26,000 Minnesotans who received permits to carry handguns under the act, which was passed in 2003. And what happened that night at Nye’s represented what many people say is the fundamental problem with the law:

Almost anyone who hasn’t been convicted of specific violent crimes can get a permit to carry a gun in public.

The KARE11 report proceeds to get nearly everything wrong.

Joel Rosenberg eviscerates the "investigation" merely with the facts at hand. We'll come back to Rosenberg's piece in a bit.

Looking at the KARE11 piece, it seems fairly clear that they were spoon-fed much of the story by people with an axe to grind; the omissions (of convenience or ignorance) are pretty one-sided.

Where to start:

On the night of May 12, Walsh asked a patron to leave the bar. Witnesses would later tell police that Zachary Ourada, of Minneapolis, was acting intoxicated and had been harassing women.

Police say Ourada shot Walsh four times in the back, then ran toward the Mississippi River and jumped in.

When police fished Ourada out of the river and arrested him, he yelled, “I didn’t do nothin’ wrong, man! I got a permit to carry that bitch!”

Two things the story missed:

1. Ourada wasn't carrying during the altercation when he was tossed from the bar. The story's writing sounds like he was tossed to the street, turned as he drew his pistol, and unloaded on Walsh. However, he was apparently driven home by friends who hoped he'd sleep it off. Instead, he got his gun and drove back to Nye's.
2. As Rosenberg notes, carrying a gun while drunk was legal the night of the shooting - thanks to David Lillehaug:"There was no statutory prohibition on carrying while intoxicated before the first Personal Protection Act went into effect on May 28, 2003. When, on June 12, 2004, Judge Finley overturned the MCPPA on a technicality over how it was passed, the old law (pre-2003 law) was in effect, and there was, once again, no legal prohibition against carrying while intoxicated until the day after Governor Pawlenty signed MCPPA2 back into law. That was quite literally weeks after May 12, when Ourada killed "Big Billy" Walsh."

I'm sure that's not part of what Lillehaug and friends told KARE11's reporters.

Back to the KARE11 report:

Earlier that night, Snyder said Ourada had been asked to leave The Times, as well. He said Ourada was waving his permit to carry a handgun in the air and bragging about having it.

“He was showing it like a badge,” Snyder said. “Some sort of power, that’s what it gave him. He wanted people to be afraid of him because he had this.”

Note to anyone who is in a bar with someone like this; call a cop. This is not acceptable behavior.

The report turns to blind up-sucking to Lillehaug:

“When you read the (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s) report on the first year of the law, it makes your hair stand on end,” said former U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug.

The report cited by Lillehaug, who is one of the gun law’s most vocal critics, says some of the people who received permits to carry handguns under the act had been accused – and in some cases, convicted – of criminal activity.

According to the BCA report, people with convictions for domestic assault, arrests for firearms violations, and in one case, six convictions for driving while intoxicated, received permits in 2003.

We'll come back to that in a bit, when we review Joel Rosenberg's report on the piece - but it's at this point we need to ask "if this is true (and one must always qualify that when dealing with opponents of this law), why? Why aren't the sheriffs doing their job?"

“The conceal-carry proponents marketed the idea that, for two years, a lot of people had received permits and nothing had gone wrong,” David Lillehaug said. “And then, hours before the legislature re-passes the law, a permit holder is charged with murder.

“And the silence,” he said, “is just deafening.”

No, we're plenty vocal. We just don't have friends at KARE11 who'll pass our version of events, unvarnished, into their reports.

The Senate not only passed the law a few days after the Walsh shooting, they passed it by a huge margin - because the shooting had nothing to do with the carry permit law. It seems likely that if Henco Sheriff McGowan were doing his job, Ourada would never have been given a permit - but then, that's more fodder for Joel Rosenberg. We'll get to that later.

Hennepin County Sheriff Pat McGowan points out, driving while intoxicated is not a disqualifying offense. And, he says, the law does not give sheriffs and police chiefs the discretion they once had to deny permits to a people with a history of bad behavior.

“That discretion was basically eliminated out of the bill,” he said. “It’s very, very narrow on who you can deny to.”

Sen. Pariseau’s bill does allow sheriffs to deny permits if there’s a “substantial likelihood” someone will harm himself or others. And in Zachary Ourada’s case, she said she was “very disappointed, because, obviously, this is someone who shouldn’t have a permit.”

Look at those three points:

• McGowan wistfully remembers the days when his office routinely rejected nearly every application.
• Senator Pariseau explains that sheriffs do have some say in permits - they just have to have cause, unlike the old law.
• Despite this, Ourada - a man with plenty of legal problems - got a permit, even though his record fairly screamed "DO NOT ISSUE".

Why?

But Sheriff McGowan, whose office would have issued Ourada’s permit, says the cost involved in denying a permit complicates things.

“If an individual appeals to the court, and we lose the appeal, we are responsible for all the legal costs associated with that claim,” he said.

McGowan says his office is “diligent” and looks at more of a person’s background than the law requires. But he wasn’t able to elaborate on specific cases, because the law forbids him from talking about permit holders, including Ourada.

“And that’s the thing I think you in the media need to be very cautious of,” he said. “You ought not go in and try to make assumptions without knowing the facts of every single case. And unfortunately, because of the data practices law, without a court order, you’re not going to be able to get those facts.”

Clever. The law won't allow him to talk...about his office's screwup. More when we address Joel Rosenberg's post.

Although part of the answer comes in the next clip:

[The Ramsey County sheriff's office] denies permits to three percent of all applicants – more than any other county.

Fletcher says his investigators specifically look at someone’s past behavior, including every time an applicant’s name shows up in a police report.

He says someone with multiple DWIs would not be approved.

“If a person has a history of violent and disorderly behavior, the odds are they’re going to continue,” he said. “Only now they have a handgun.”

Exactly.

Now, if Ramco sheriff Bob Fletcher knows this, why doesn't Pat McGowan?

Fletcher asks for Lillehaug's Christmas present:

Fletcher, like Sheriff McGowan, said a more flexible law would save money, because the application fee of 100 dollars doesn’t come close to covering the cost of denying a permit.

“In many cases, if we appeal to court, there’s three or four thousand dollars’ worth of county attorney time, and our time, to present that in front of a judge,” he said.

A "more flexible law" in this case means a "law that gives the sheriff complete power".

As to the finances, Fletcher is padding like mad. More on this later.

Sheriff Fletcher predicts more sheriffs will try to deny more permits.

“My guess is that the Nye’s incident will be a red flag for sheriffs throughout Minnesota,” he said.

In other words, they'll do their job under the law. This is not a bad thing.

And when Zachary Ourada goes on trial for the murder of Billy Walsh, in a way, the law will be on trial, too, when the court of public opinion asks: Is the Personal Protection Act living up to its name?

And I'd like to say that once things go to court, at least the facts will prevail.

Although in Minnesota courts, I'm not that confident.

Rosenberg's piece later today.

Bloodbath With Ignominy

Although I grew up plenty liberal, there were things that began my disenchantment earlier. Jimmy Carter, sure - but before that, even back in sixth and seventh grade I thought that our abandonment of South Vietnam was a wretched display of national pusillanimity.

The phrase "Peace with Honor" struck me, even then - and more so as millions of Vietnamese left the country, a human wave that even washed up in North Dakota in some numbers - as the sort of self-justifying rationalization worthy of a not-very-bright third-grader.

It's baaaaaack.

They're exhuming the
idea again , and again.

Further proof that the left has no new ideas at all. All the thinking was done for them thirty years ago - all that remains is the picketing and the demonstrating and mounting the media campaign showing that leaving the Iraqi people to the tender mercies of the foreign terrorists and Ba'athist holdouts is really not such a bad thing; that Iraqis, silly little brown people, just don't care about democracy; that it really won't be that bad; that there as no problem in the first place.

It's well underway, of course.

Things People Are Always Asking Me

Thought I'd try and answer a few of them:

1. How about that Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes thing? - Cruise; a fine actor. Holmes; never seen her in anything. Have no clue. Overall impression; whatever their individual pathologies, the fact that a 20-something hottie is all ostensibly gaga over a crazy 42-year-old is a great step for mankind. I heartily approve.
2. Why do you always misspell "Weird"? - I took seven years of German. When you see an "ie" or an "ei" in German, it always sounds like the latter of the two letters. Therefore, it should be spelled "wierd". Plus it looks better. It makes more sense. Ergo, it can not be legit. Welcome to English.

That's all for now.

Democracy In Iraq

Steven Vincent's In the Red Zone remains an excellent blog for reading about the situation in Iraq. Vincent, author of Into the Red Zone, is a New Yorker who spent several weeks travelling about Iraq last year, alone and anonymous (under cover as a Yugoslav journalist).

He observes the new, democratically elected Majlis in Basra.

By the way, read back in the blog; Vincent is by no means a cheerleader for the war; a classic 9/11 Democrat (a self-described New York liberal) who is critical of much of the Iraq invasion (read the blog, if not the book), his observations are, and remain, fascinating.

This entry covers the first meeting of the Majlis (Mahjaless, here - arabic transliteration is a complex thing, not that Marty Newton would know...):

In truth, I don't know what to make of the Mahjaless Mahafalla. Yes, many of the 41 members are alarmingly inexperienced with democracy, in the pocket of the religious parties and possibly corrupt--but they are a legislation born from a (more or less) free election, the first in this city's history. "Think of where Germany and Japan were two years after World War II--Iraq today is further along the road to democracy," a Public Administration Adviser from the British Embassy crooned. And despite one's natural tendency to become cynical in dysfunctional Iraq, I think she's right.

In another scene, he's watching Kuwaiti TV - and the Rudy Giuliani movie comes on. Vincent links the Giuliani story to the Iraqi vision of democracy:

Ten minutes into the movie, the real-life footage began: the gaping hole in the north tower; fire erupting from the south; smoke streaming from the largest skyscraper fires in history; people on the upper floors waving white distress flags; the downward plunge of the south tower into its foundations; avalanche-like billows of white debris pouring down Vesey Street and over the spire of St. Paul's Church as the north collapsed...and for a moment, I was no longer in my hotel room, but back in New York, on the roof of our building, once again witnessing the horrible, the unimaginable, the obscene.

Upsetting, yes; but somewhat eerie, too, to watch these scenes replayed in Iraq. For, of course, the reason I was even in this Basran hotel room--the reason America and Britain forces invaded Iraq, drawing thousands of people, including myself, into this country--was the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11. Strange, too, were the words I remember the real Mayor Giuliani expressing that day--especially his awful, emotionally wrenching statement that the "loss of life today will be more than any of us can bear"--given Arabic subtitles. Did Iraqis watching this show--say, my friendly hotel staff--identify with the mayor, or with the terrorists who humbled the Great Satan? Did they cheer the law and order sheriff or the Robin Hood of the Middle East?

I can't say for sure, of course, but knowing Iraqis, my money's on Rudy. The people here desperately need--and deserve--law and order, a sense that justice can prevail against malevolent powers stalking their nation. The idea that a single man can galvanize a society to stand up to Ali Baba, be they mobsters or terrorists, and survive--unlike, it seems, the police colonel from Zubair--can only bring hope to these demoralized and suffering people. "We need leaders," a Iraqi journalist said to me over dinner last week. "But where can we find them in such a society?"

Hollywood being Hollywood, Rudy's war on crime (the same war that cleaned our block of the heroin gang that had ruled it for years) was depicted with a montage of cops rousting the homeless and squeegie men and prostitutes, scored by a ominous soundtrack that evoked thoughts of fascist thugs crushing the spirit of democracy. I had to laugh. Here in Iraq, real fascist thugs--and not the imaginings of hysterical lefists--seek to crush the spirit of democracy. Here in Iraq--where serving as a policeman is the most dangerous job in the world--people can only pray for a force that is incorruptible, efficient and effective against Saddamite psychos and bloody-thirsty jihadists. They wouldn't call a man like Giuliani a "fascist," and they certainly would not call police officers "pigs." And that's not just because they're Muslims.

Yours from the land where patriot acts, civil liberties and the war on crime are one and the same.

Vincent needs to be at least a couple-times-a-week read for everyone.

No Quarter

Get over to Radio Blogger and vote in the State Quarter contest.

Minnesota V. Colorado.

Minnesota is down by 70-odd votes. I know we can make that up today.

Myopia Isn't Free

The other day, I chided the New Patriot blog, tongue firmly in cheek (or as every leftyblog in the world woul say, I "served" them) for its low output and infrequent posting, despite having nine contributors.

Today, evidence that paucity can be a good thing:

On Saturday, a couple parked their pickup truck in front of my house. It had a prominent "Freedom Isn't Free" decal with an American flag on the back window. This is an interesting slogan, and it got me thinking. It exploits the dual meaning of "free" in English: free, as in liberty; and free, as in price. (This dual meaning has given the Free Software Foundation no end of trouble.) In this era of bumper-sticker politics, this one happens to have quite a bit of truth to it. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

So far, so good.

However, the more immediate meaning of this bumper sticker is support for the war in Iraq.

Not quite sure that follows; it's an assumption that requires a "dumpbachmann"-level presumption of motive.

And that is where I part company with the people who display it. Now that we are bogged down there, I wish every day for a quick and graceful exit. "Peace with honor" is imbued with negative connotations of Vietnam, but that's what I hope for.

In other words, Luke Francl hopes for a myth, and the extermination of legions of inconvenient brown people.

Dunno how old Luke Francl was in 1975. Me? I was 12, but paid lots of attention to the news. It didn't take a 12 year old rocket scientist to see what "peace" with "honor" led to; millions of dead, inconvenient yellow people. "Peace with honor" was a slogan, adopted because it played in Peoria better than "flight with genocide". It's a genocide - really several genocides, in Cambodia and the Central Highlands and Laos - that the left admits existed only in the most sterile, clinical possible terms to this very day.

There is now little question that Iraq posed no threat to the United States. We had Saddam contained; he had no ties to Al Qaeda; and he had no weapons of mass destruction.

Do you suppose that if we took up a collection, we could pay Kos to update his stock of memes? Because they don't get any better with age.

Form the top, take 2653: "containment" is a meaningless concept when it comes to terror, the ties with Quaeda are murky (go figure - terrorists and all), every significant government in the world believed he had WMD including the nations that supplied him with their precursors, etc, etc.

Thousands of people who would today be alive have died because the Bush administration couldn't leave well enough alone;

Couldn't leave "well enough" alone - where "well enough" equalled mass murder, children's prisons, rape camps, plastic shredders, hands pounded with hammers, tongues cut out...

...again, things that the left never really cares about; their spokesman, Michael Moore, thought pre-war Iraq no more sinister than Minneapolis on a Sunday afternoon, and believes the head-sawing thugs to be "minutemen".

Well enough.

... and that being so, still failed to plan adequately for the aftermath.

There's one of the left's great conceits; as long as you have a plan, all will be well.

The saying is "no plan survives its first contact with the enemy". It's a cliche; it became a cliche because it's so true, so often.

The only plan that matters was, and is: "depose the Hussein regime, establish democracy". Beyond that, it's all just details.

We are suffering the consequences to this day, and we will continue to suffer them for many years to come.

Right. But leave aside the fact that many of those consequences are good for a moment; we can not know what the consequences of not having acted against Hussein or especially terrorism in general would have been - although we can divine some wisdom from the fact that there have been no more significant attacks against the US in almost four years.

To the left, the obvious conclusion would seem to be "of course not! There never would have been, either!". To the rest of us, it seems possible our actions and the relative peace at home might possibly be linked.

Let's see if Luke is going to go for the trifecta:

If Saddam was no threat, there was no need to pay for our freedom from him.

Shack! A dubious assertion, based on a false assumption that was not known to have had a basis in fact in 2002-3, and the third leg of the trifecta, the fact-challenged snark:

People are paying, though. But for whose freedom?

Inconvenient brown-skinned Iraqi and Afghan people.

Do they count?

Freedom isn't free. It's also not always convenient, clear-cut or painless.

C'mon All You Travel Guides!

Dave from Ohligarchy is coming to Minnesota on vacation!

I have not determined which week I am going to be there, but I am working on what to do when I am in the area. There are a few things swimming around in my head, but if anyone from the MOB/NARN is reading this, I would be happy to solicit suggestions as to what to do with a family of six. Doug? Mitch? Cathy? The only thing that is a dead cert for this trip is a Thursday evening visit to Keegan's Pub. After all, I have been granted "diplomatic immunity" by the MAWB Squad.

Unfortunately, the Minnesota State Fair is out. Kids here go back to school that week. Anything else is under consideration. How's the Laurentian Divide this time of year?

Suggestions? Leave a comment!

End Of The Enmity

I've been amazed - but not surprised - by the depth of European emnity toward the US in the past few years. Especially their carping about the war, about Guantanamo - even if their worst accusations were true (and they seem mostly not to have been), who were they, the inventors of the Holocaust and Gulag and the concentration camp and colonialism are going to try to ding our motives and history?

And what will it take to change things?

Victor Davis Hanson argues time should take care of things.

Hanson notes that Europe is only dimly aware of China. They should be:

The Patriot Act to a European is proof of American illiberality in a way that China’s swallowing Tibet or jailing and executing dissidents is not. America’s support for Saudi Arabia is proof of our hypocrisy in not severing ties with an undemocratic government, while few care that a country with leaders who traverse the globe in Mao suits cuts any deal possible with fascists and autocrats for oil, iron ore, and food.

Yes, we are witnessing one of the great transfers of power and influence that have traditionally changed civilization itself, as money, influence, and military power are gradually inching away from Europe. And this time the shake-up is not regional but global. While scholars and economists concentrate on its economic and political dimensions, few have noticed how a new China and an increasingly vulnerable Europe will markedly change the image of the United States.

As nations come to know the Chinese, and as a ripe Europe increasingly cannot or will not defend itself, the old maligned United States will begin to look pretty good again. More important, America will not be the world’s easily caricatured sole power, but more likely the sole democratic superpower that factors in morality in addition to national interest in its treatment of others.

China is strong without morality; Europe is impotent in its ethical smugness. The buffer United States, in contrast, believes morality is not mere good intentions but the willingness and ability to translate easy idealism into hard and messy practice.

Read it all - always the case with Hanson.

Richly Deserved

Tom Maguire works Frank Rich over.

It ends with:

My suggestion to Mr. Rich and his many admirers - here is an opportunity to conform the lefty talking points a bit more closely with reality.

The beginning? Well, just read it.

Reeling?

First Ringer covered the state GOP Central Committee meeting on Saturday.

Ringer:

As tempting as it may be for the media and the dissatisfied to claim Ron Carey’s victory as a victory of the ultra conservatives over the more traditional conservatives and moderates, it simply isn’t accurate. Without question, Carey’s backbone came from the old guard Quisties and Brian Sullvanites, but the majority that won were not attracted by Carey’s campaign of platform adherence and potential carrot and stick routine with the Governor. The majority saw weakness in 2004 and were willing to do anything to avoid it again. But without Eibensteiner or the House Caucus delivering a sacrificial lamb---an appeasement to the electoral gods as it were---arguing that lessons had been learned from a year prior had little effect. Heads had to roll and a message needed to be sent. Electing Ron Carey was a “safe” wake-up given his experience and history within the party.

I dunno. So much of the leader's job is personality and leadership. Does Cary have it?

[Carey] seemed legitimately star struck and lost for words in his acceptance speech, rambling on while unintentionally insulting Mark Kennedy.

Eibensteiner's toppling is a reaction to many things - the party's disappointing showing in the '04 presidential and state legislative elections chief among them.

I had a vision of the delegates waking up on Sunday morning: "We did what? We elected who?"

Somehow Not Covered

The Strib gave near-saturation coverage to a story involving a carry permit holder killing a bouncer in Minneapolis (in a crime that had nothing to do with the permit itself - the shooter was driven home to sleep off his drunk, grabbed his gun and came back to Nye's to kill the bouncer).

And yet the Strib somehow neglected covering this story, which appeared on the local Fox affiliate (and which we see via Joel Rosenberg).

It goes a little something like this:

One person who is happy with the state's "permit to carry" law is the owner of a small hardware store in Minneapolis. A man with a gun tried to rob the manager of Camden Hardware in the 48-hundred block of Lyndale Avenue North just after 9 last night. The manager decided to fight back, and it’s not the first time.

At this hardware store in north Minneapolis, owner Andy Lange helps his customers with repairs and home improvement projects. But when it comes to bagging bad guys, Lange and his employees are more do-it-yourself. "I guess they should defend themselves but actively going out and chasing someone in the long run is probably not a good idea."

The store manager was locking up Wednesday night when he noticed a strange car parked across the street. He ran over to his truck, but before he could get there, he was met by a man with a gun pointed right at his face, demanding money. That's when the manager pulled out his own gun and started shooting.The suspect then ran back across the street, got in a vehicle and sped off.

Do you suppose Citizens for a Supine "Safer" Minnesota will even acknowledge it?

By my count, this is two or three cases of self-defense during the time the law has been in effect.

By the way,

This isn't the first time workers have foiled an attempted robbery at their store. In November of 2003, Lange and another employee ran after a suspect who robbed the store at knifepoint. They held him until police arrived. "Those people would still be out there and maybe the next person out there might have gotten shot or hurt or whatever, so it is kind of nice that things work out for the good guys."

This next bit has got to irritate the snot out of Rebecca Thoman and, I'm guessing, Susan Gaertner:

Minneapolis police say the manager does have a legal permit to carry a weapon. Investigators say no charges are expected against him because this appears to be a case of self-defense.

Bummer when peasants get all uppity, innit, Becks?

Uncovered

Via Chenkoff, some some survey results from Iraq:

As more Iraqis express confidence in their country's government, more help is needed from the international community to keep Iraq's progress on track, the general director of Iraq's National Security Agency said here today.

Samir al-Saboon addressed representatives of 68 nations gathered here for a multilateral military planners conference.

Recent polling data shows that fully two-thirds of Iraqis believe their country is headed in the right direction, Saboon said. While a poll in January showed only 11 percent of Sunni Muslims in Iraq shared that view, that percentage has since grown to 40, he said.

Though Sunnis largely didn't participate in the Transitional National Assembly election Jan. 30, that outlook has changed as well in anticipation of coming elections. Saboon, who is a Sunni, said 92 percent of eligible voters throughout Iraq and 80 percent of the country's Sunnis are likely to vote in the next election.

Read both articles - on the survey as well as Chrenkoff's long list of good news.

Bloggerism and Journalism

Wog from Wog's Blog on the journalism of blogs:

It is certainly no great insight of mine that Bloggerism is to Journalism what Pulitzer and Hearst were to Newspapering. Bigtime shake-up. I am just thrilled to be in on it in my own little way!

This post comes from my intense observation of the way the death of 17-year-old Roseville boy Marcell New has been reported.

The "big rip" on Bloggerism is that unprofessional, unregulated and sloppy reportage is figuratively tossing glowing cigarette butts on the dry forest floor of the internet on a hot windy day. There is much truth in that.

Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst would be proud.

Why?

Read the whole post - it's excellent.

Missing Pretty White Girl Syndrome

The Natalee Holloway case in Aruba is bringing up claims of racism - some of them justifiable - on Michelle Malkin's site.

Regular readers know I don't think much of unfounded race-card politicking and class warfare-ism. But I do believe that race and class play a role in elevating some of these missing girl stories above others. That is a damned shame. Robinson believes this is an indictment against American society at large. But, tellingly, he says nothing about the hypocrisy of so many diversity-preaching, social engineering champions in the MSM--who, in the end, are "greedy" profit-seekers just like all the other corporate institutions in America they regularly attack.

I'm not sure, though, how much race is a factor relative to others. Would an overweight, unattractive white girl who went missing get preference over a Tyra Banks-look-a-like?

There was a time that I'd have thought "proximity to a major media center" would have been a key factor - and I'm still not positive that it isn't in some way. Kids have been disappearing from small towns forever without a lot of attention - but the Dru Sjodin case was front-page national news for days even though it took place in isolated Grand Forks, ND. But if the Twin Cities media hadn't run the story, would it have gone anywhere?

As for class, I think it may be a significant factor not so much because of prejudice, but because of the more mundane concerns of producing 24/7 cable TV. Missing girls from broken homes may be less likely to have an army of relatives and friends who can fill airtime night after night. (Actually, I can think of a few recent, highly-publicized cases off the top of my head that undermine this argument: the Jessica Lunsford and Sarah Lunde murders).

Whatever the reasons these missing pretty white girl cases get flogged, I find the whole Missing Pretty Girl Sndrome disturbing (and that's coming from someone who works for FNC). I think we should be paying a hell of a lot more attention to Lodi and Tampa and Denver than Aruba.

I'm amazed - and the very idea smacks of equal parts idealism and cynicism - that someone hasn't come up with a "Missing Persons Network" cable channel.

Mitch-Do List

It's a typical Sunday in the Berg house. I have Anoka Flash's kids over - they spent the night, hanging out with my son.

Busy day planned:

1. Feed the kids brunch. Big pot of scrambled eggs and o'briens cooking up now (two separate pans, actually)
2. Do the dishes
3. Find the shower water valve; actually repairing the shower's going to be a job for a cool rainy day, I'm afraid.
4. Continue Flash's kids' introduction to Hayek. By September, we should be up to Buckley. By Christmas, to Reagan. By High School? Young Republicans.
5. Go to Home Depot and get more of those heavy-duty trash bags.

As you were.

First Theorem of Parody

Berg's First Theorem of Parody:

Any attempt to parody pretentious academic or critical writing will be undercut by a serious example that is even worse.

I'm looking for any evidence disproving this theory, before we promote it to law.

Anyway.

A few months back, on the occasion of Christo's "The Gates'" installation in Central Park, Sheila O'Malley, with the help of a few other bloggers, wrote a wonderful parody of arts and literary criticism.

Via Spitbull, I note that has Armavirumque (the New Criterion blog) started a similar exercise; a parodic academic treatise on the social aspects of the public restroom:

“This collection will work from the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division”

They promptly run into my First Theorem, in the form of an email from Professor Clara Greed, author of "Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets”, which they reproduce with its original capitalization:

why do you see public toilets as a joke? In the West toilets are a national disgrace, in the Far East there has been a restroom revolution and public toilets are seen as an essential and integral component of good urban design and a cultured, civilised society, A nation can be judged by its toilets.

are you afraid of admitting your corporeal humanity, and not just a cultured brain? is this why it is distasteful? everyone's got to go, so why the shame.

Professor Clara Greed
University of the West of England, Bristol
Author of 'Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets' published 2003 by Architectural Press, Elsevier, Oxford, member of the World Toilet Organisation (check their website)

The theorem is teetering on the brink of being a law.

Yeeaaaaaaaaagggggh!

The Democratic party leadership is foursquare behind Dean:

Democratic National Committee leaders embraced feisty party boss Howard Dean on Saturday and urged him to keep fighting despite a flap over his blunt comments on Republicans.

After a meeting of the DNC's 40-member executive committee at a downtown hotel, members said Dean was doing exactly what they elected him to do -- build the party in all states and aggressively challenge Republicans.

"I hope Governor Dean will remember that he didn't get elected to be a wimp," said DNC member Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a South Carolina state representative. "We have been waiting a long time for someone to stand up for Democrats."

Exactly.

Hang in there, Democrats! Stay the course!

Unclear On The Concept

It must be nice to be a leftyblog in Minnesota.

I say this objectively, without a trace of arrogance intended; the conservative bloggers in Minnesota have the traffic. More than that, they have the mojo, the buzz, the oomph, the mindshare.

And yet, whether through a (belated and inconsistent) desire for balance or via ideological kinship, the local media, academy and others flock to the leftyblogs. To paraphrase Andy Warhol - in the future, every Minnesota leftyblogger who gets fifty visits a day will eventually be a key source on blogging in a Strib story, Almanac episode or local columnist's screed.

Which is not to knock "Trillin" from Minnesota Lefty Liberal; he's distinguished from a lot of local leftybloggers by not being a scatology-obsessed wacko, ergo pretty readable.

But if I've noticed anything about leftybloggers, they're extremely meme-centered. And the biggest meme about Minnesota conservative bloggers is that "we all want to be Powerline.

Let me be succinct: No.

First, check out the dates; I've been blogging longer than Powerline. I was in talk radio in 1986, for that matter; the personality of my inner pundit was formed long before John, Paul and Ringo Scott first decided to stick it to the man.

And, honestly, read Fraters, the Scholars, or for that matter KAR, Jay Reding or First Ring and find the faintest resemblance to Powerline.

And yet the meme just chugs along, as Trillin shows us in his interview with a Louisiana academic:

Here in Minnesota, I find that many of the more conservative blogs are fixated on being the next PowerLine.com. As they are the party in power, they have no basis in dissent, and have instead become figureheads and mouthpieces for the GOP national and local parties.

Two points here. For starters, no - the GOP does not hold power in the metro, where most of us live. Most of us started our blogs in order to have a vehicle for dissent. While trying to set us (the conservative bloggers) up as a form of status quo is of a piece with the left's strategy of aligning themselves as perpetual victims, it's misleading to the point of disingenuity in the metro.

And wanting to find some way to stick it to the (lefty) Man in one's dissent doesn't make one a Powerline imitator as much as an heir to the pamphleteering tradition that drives so many of us. As such, they are focused on bringing down the opposition and their candidates to protect that power, and to do so in politics this day, dirt works. Or as those in the media put it, “if it bleeds it leads.”True, in the sense that many cliches are.

Dirt does work. So do facts. And one of the left's most self-serving, destructive memes is the "The memos were fake but accurate, Powerline/Little Green Footballs/whoever are hacks! It's all a daisy chain!".

To get to their end goal, GOP bloggers tend to have a lower threshold for their standards in my opinion.

The interview (read it) is about the standards for "sourcing" in blogs, and Trillin is vamping now. Almost all bloggers are extremely casual about their sources, left and right. Since few of us do it for a living, we put into it what we get out of it. There are exceptions - Powerline, of course, and Ed are pretty scrupulous about such things, but then both of them are able to do things on a more nearly full-time basis than most of us, and commensurately get a lot more out of it than most of us do.

So show me a leftyblog that is as punctilious about their chain of evidence as either of them? Before you answer "Yglesias and Marshall", stop a moment; both of them work full-time in wonkery (and that doesn't help the likes of Ollie Willis, Atrios and Kos, who basically blog full time and still are no more than rumor machines. The big conservative bloggers - Powerline, Ed, Charles Johnson, Malkin, pretty much name 'em - all do this as a hobby, and for the sheer love of writing, and they still out-journalist the big leftyblogs in terms of sourcing and, I must add, quality of writing.That is not to say that liberal and left wing blogs don’t do the same. There are many who will cut corners to fully exercise their right to dissent. However as a whole I believe it is a problem much more in the party that has the power then in the one that is offering political dissent.It's an...er...convenient explanation. That's a good word.

Wrong, I think, but convenient.

Discuss amongst yourselves...

Inconsistent

The Sluggin' Hatch Sisters are not, of course, the first children of a prominent Minnesota politician to get into trouble.

Tyrell Ventura served briefly as Minnesota's Billy Carter. But much more troubling was the media's - and the DFL establishment's - treatment of the Morgan Grams story. Grams was the non-custodial son of then-Senator Rod Grams, a solid conservative (and, ergo, anathema to the DFL and the local media).

Although Morgan's mother and the senator had been divorced for some time, and Grams had had very little to do with his son's upbringing (as, indeed, most non-custodial parents don't), the media treated the younger Grams' antics as front-page news.

Minnesota Democrats Exposed has more about Attorney General Hatch's activities back when Morgan Grams was on every front page in the state.

Unity

Finally, an issue we can all get behind.

Prosecuting the Laws of Physics?

I was reading this piece, in which the Michael Jackson prosecution team began celebrating a verdict that has not yet been delivered.

Leaving the whole notion of the case itself aside, I couldn't help but notice this tidbit at the end:

The prosecutor's team was first spotted making merry at the bar, and then retreated to a private dining room behind the bar that has no door.

So...did they climb a ladder and rappel through a missing ceiling tile? Is there a tunnel of some sort?

Perhaps it was some sort of life-size Zen mind teaser; "The celebration is within the room with no door, Grasshopper. If a celebration occurs where you cannot reach it, then does it exist? Think carefully..."

I'm also pondering the Sartreian implications. In a room with, as the article says, no exit (literally!), how long would the "celebration" remain a celebration before it devolved into a psychological hell of trapped, venial backstabbing that mocked in retrospect the mood that prompted the original celebration?

Is the whole paragraph, indeed, a twisted commentary on the ephemerality of joy (and, of course, pain)? Or a scold; "make sure there's a door in your heart to let the joy out, lest it turn to something else from loneliness" or some such?

I'm picturing the high-powered District Attorneys.

DA: "I'll take an Oban, neat".

Waiter: "That's very good, sir. Unfortunately, I can't serve you. There seem to be no door into your celebration".

DA: "Jeezus H. Christ, I hate technicalities. Ironic, isn't it?"

Waiter: "Yes, sir."

I need to think about this.

Vital Stats

The New Patriot blog - one of the better (read: Less comically-scurillous) leftyblogs:

In the past 30 days, 9 contributors have generated a total of 21 posts = .076 postings per contributor per day.

Mitch at Shot In The Dark - yours truly:

In the past 30 days, 157 posts = 5.23 postings per contributor per day.

5.23 divided by .076 = 68.8

There you have it. Conservatism is 68.8 times as productive as liberalism.

That is all.

Overpowered By Metaphor

I was sorting laundry a few minutes ago, when a random thought occurred to me:

If someone's a railroad or transit traffic flow engineer, and their job (literally, when stripped of all metaphorical baggage) is to make trains run, and run on time...

...and you're at a meeting, and your project involves improving the timeliness of the rolling stock, and someone asks you about your project goal...

...how do you say "My goal is to make the trains run on time" without the metaphorical overtones of the statement?

That's gotta be wierd.

From The "When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife" School of Slander

Over on the "Dumpbachmann" blog, in a piece on an upcoming appearance by loathsome human and all-purpose gay-bashing caricature Fred Phelps at Eden Prairie High School (warning - PDF flyer, definitely objectionable), Eva Young asks:

Will Michele Bachmann be in attendance at this?

Enlighten us, Eva!

Phelps is a radical anti-gay activist. He's a thug who perverts Christianity. I have yet to encounter a Republican who endorses anything about Phelps (who is, or was in fact a registered Democrat).

Does Ms. Young have some source, somewhere, that says Bachmann will attend?

Or is this just vacuous slander?

Is there an answer to this question? Or is everyone involved in "dumpbachmann" too busy murdering hitchhikers and dumping the bodies in shallow ravines? Or perhaps smashing the windows on Jewish-owned shops? (Hey, there's as much evidence of that as there is of Bachmann's sympathy with Phelps!)

Perhaps an apology is in order. Whether you support a politician or not, this sort of tripe is uncalled for.

Open Letter To the Democratic National Committee

To: National Democrats
From: Generic White Christian
Re: Your Boss

Esteemed Opponents,

There's been talk that some of you are becoming nervous about Howard Dean.

The physician and former Vermont governor has sparked a controversy over recent inflammatory remarks, including a characterization of Republicans as "a white, Christian party," and another comment in which he avowed to "hate the Republicans and everything they stand for."

Some of your politicians - Joe Biden springs to mind - have been trying to distance themselves from Mr. Dean.

So what did Joe Biden ever do for you?

Stay the course! Did Ronald Reagan's vision catch on with everyone right away? No! Fact is, you need a leader with vision! So whether that vision is a smaller, more efficient government, lower taxes leading to higher revenues, and a world free of communism, or merely a vision where your opponents are hateful stereotype trolls, you gotta stick with it!

Stay The Course!

The controversy deflected attention Thursday from a press conference called by the Democrats' top leadership, at which they had intended to discuss their legislative plans for the next few weeks.

The reporter is mistaken. Dean does capture the Democrat agenda; envy, recrimination, anger at losing what they felt to be a sinecure...

Stay The Course!

Dean became a media magnet on the campaign trail for his populist appeal, record-breaking fundraising and an infamous screaming speech following a presidential primary defeat.

Vision! Vision! Vision!

"I think a lot of (the controversy) is exactly what the Republicans want, and that's a diversion," he said.

Well, to be fair, most of us had pretty low expectations in the "rational debate" department.

Several member of his party have distanced themselves from Dean's comments, and some have even called on him to apologize for the remarks.

But the leader of House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, saw Republican opportunism in the contretemps.

"The fact is that the Republicans are trying to make a lot of hay out of Governor Dean's remarks because they are failing to meet the needs of the American people," she said at a press conference.

"If Governor Dean were not being effective, they would not be going after him so strongly," Pelosi said.

Er...

...exactly. What she said.

That Dean and Pelosi. Stick with 'em, Dems. They're gold.

Gold, I tells ya.

Signs One Needs A Life

Over the past three years, I've found that just about every nook and crannie in the Minneapolis Star/Tribune will veer into one extreme or another of lefty politics; the innocuous Kim Ode will occasionally uncork a Silent But Lefty that will gladden the spirit of Jim Klobuchar.

In fact, it's the best possible cure for blogger's block; flip through the Strib at random; Sturdevant, Coleman, Riemenschneider, the Letters, probably the classifieds all provide blog fodder.

All, that is, except the Garden Blog.

No, I actually tried.:

When making a raised bed, many organic gardening books recommend digging up the sod and reusing it to fix dead patches in the lawn. This seemed like a great idea, but the sod had other plans.

Technically, Sod is inanimate...

Sod does not roll up clean and smooth like new carpet.

Well, yeah. Some sod isn't sod at all - it's clumps of grass in dirt, and hasn't woven a strong thatch that'll roll up. It takes time and extended health to make good sod. What kind of lawn did you inherit?

It is alive, lumpy and quite determined to stay exactly where it was seeded. Our dull shovels were no match for the rocks...

Technically you should try to push the shoven into dirt, rather than rocks...

Well, you get the picture. I sorta lost my heart for the project.

So I'm proud to announce at long last - the Strib has an unfiskable feature!

Henco To Voters: "Pony Up. Forever."

So a while ago, Hennepin County's commission rammed through a stadium deal.

As the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, they solemnly promised "But we won't throw for the roof. Yet. Promise. Really."

I remember countless conversations, on and off the air; "They'll want the roof." And the pollyannas: "Noooo! No way!"

Way.

Whatever Nick Coleman's many flaws as a columnist, he's got this one right:

Anyone following this year's installment of the Let's Give All Our Money to Carl Pohlad Reality Series will be shocked -- shocked! -- by the latest wrinkle: a last-second plan to add a roof to a $500 million stadium financed by the public.

Knock me over with a feather. This pitch is so fat you can see it from the cheap seats.

If you swallow the fairy tale that the Minnesota Twins and Major League Baseball would settle for an open-air stadium in a northern city where it snows in June and September and hungry bears prowl the dumps beside the garbage burners, you and your money will soon be parted.

It might happen anyway.

Might? It's Hennepin County. It's a government body that is to sneaky taxation what Michael Jordan was to hoops.

The fix is in on the stadium, which is expected to lurch back from the Un-dead at any moment somewhere in the bowels of the State Capitol, where it has lain, moribund, on a cold slab since the start of the special session. The eyes are fluttering, legislators are sewing body parts together, and lightning bolts are flying above the generators. It's alive!

And it has a top hat.

And publishes the Strib, among other things, we might add.

Embarassment of Riches Embarassment

I was running a few errands on my way to work this morning, and I caught a few minutes of both Nick Coleman and Wild Wendy.

Nice to see that a week's break from them hasn't made them any smarter-sounding.

Coleman displayed that keen intellect we've come to love in the closing segment of his show, saying (closely paraphrasing, since I don't have a recorder in the car) that we should notice the hypocrisy of conservatives looove Ann Coulter as she "calls for Liberals to be executed"...while the wingnuts throw a fit over Howard Dean for noting that the GOP is "controlled" by "snake-handlers" who "aren't even Christian".

School's in, Nick. Not all of us regard Coulter as much more than entertainment. Where was she sitting at the last GOP convention (compared to Michael Moore at the DNC?) But Howard Dean? He's the Chairmanperson of the party whose monkey you are!

I flipped on Wild Wendy a few minutes later. She was popping a gasket over the Strib's coverage of the Hatch Grrl Riot. I couldn't figure out what was more idiotic:

• Her claim that (again, closely paraphrasing) "...in Minnesota, peoples' families are off limits". Really? Like Rod Gram's family (actually a son whose custodial parent Rod had not been in many years!) was "off limits" to the media? That kind of off limits?
• She closed by saying (or rather I turned off the radio after she said) the story was an example of (again, closely paraphrasing) "the Star/Tribune's right-wing bias"

Huh. The Strib is really right-wing.

Who knew?

What's going on here is that the local lefty establishment (tangential note to local lefties - Nick Coleman and Wild Wendy are your establishment!) is trying to create a meme - that the metro left, after four decades of control over the state, and continuing rigid, unthinking control of the Metro, the lefty media establishment want you, the "progressive", to believe that you are a beleaguered, put-upon victim!

Lefties - are you victims?

Hatch Job

Mike Hatch's daughters' trial on assault charges began yesterday in Chicago :

Boiled to its essence, the trial appears likely to lay out these scenarios, based on the testimony of the first four prosecution witnesses, all employees of the Crobar Club, where the incident occurred:

The Hatches were loud, obnoxious, arrogant, obviously drunken patrons of a club that had just shown them the door. They then profanely and repeatedly attacked the police officers who politely told them to call it a night.

Or: They had been kicked out of a club on a cold winter night, without their coats or purses, manhandled by the police for no discernible reason and then, when their high media profiles were discovered, vilified from behind the thin blue line of officer solidarity erected when police are accused of misconduct.

As a citizen, I hope the scourge of loud aggressive drunks at bars is dealt a setback.

As a parent, I hope the Hatch family gets this sorted out.

As a rank opportunist, I think that if they're found guilty, the rights to the story could be worth a buck or two. Perhaps selling to Cinemax...

Rangel's Holocaust of the Language

I worry about the English language.

In 1984, one of Big Brother's aims was to reduce language into a tool of government. Parts of the left seem to be working on that very idea.

Yesterday, I commented on Amnesty International' hijacking of gulag to misrepresent American POW camps.

Now, Charles Rangel is appropriating "Holocaust" to swipe at the President - I've added emphasis:

Top House Democrat Charles Rangel complained on Monday that the Bush administration's decision to concoct a "fraudulent" war in Iraq was as bad as "the Holocaust."

"It's the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country," Rangel told WWRL Radio's Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter. "This is just as bad as six million Jews being killed. The whole world knew it and they were quiet about it, because it wasn't their ox that was being gored."

The Harlem Democrat charged that top Bush officials "made up [their] mind to go into Iraq long before 9/11. And every one of the players who made this decision - they were part of this plan to do it. From Rumsfeld to Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, every one of them - Perle - [they were part of the] plan to put our kids in harm's way long before 9/11."

Is there anything these people won't mangle in their hatred?

Television

Television Shows I Have Never Seen
Friends
Sex In The City
Will And Grace
Dallas
Home Improvement
Beverly Hills 90210
Sopranos
Twin Peaks

"Must-See" TV Shows I've Seen Very Rarely
Seinfeld (maybe 12 times)
Frasier (twice)
Buffy (once)

TV Shows I, Perversely, Watch Whenever I Remember And Can
Simpsons
Blind Date
Most Extreme Elimination Challenge

Er...

First things first: I read Blind Cavefish a couple times a week. It's that rarest of things - a diaryblog that's fun to read.

On the one hand: Jess, from BCF, got herself into this column, complete with inadvertent Glamourshot. Kudos.

On the other hand, I'm trying to figure out the news value of a story that says, basically, "sometimes pranks are funny, but sometimes they're cruel".

Is there anyone that survived junior high that doesn't know this?

My best practical joke? I edited my college newspaper. On April Fool's day, I released an issue claiming that the college had been bought by a Kuwaiti oil sheik. Hilarity ensued - mostly at the expense of foreign exchange students unfamiliar with the institution of "April Fool"...

Pyrrhic Suit?

If you dug up my list of "things I'd tell the whole world", one thing that's missing is "inspiration for a sadistic psychotic Stephen King character". Can't say it's occurred to me to want to claim imt.

It takes all kinds, I guess:

Stephen King is the master of the macabre, and he often writes about scary women. One of his scariest was "Annie Wilkes", the unforgettable sadistic nurse played by Kathy Bates in the 1990 movie, "Misery." Now in a federal lawsuit obtained by "CJ", a freelance writer from New Jersey claims she's the real Annie.

In the lawsuit, Anne Hiltner claims "Psycho Nurse Wilkes" is a caricature based on her, and she accuses King of "invasion of privacy."

Y'know, after the odyssey of this past couple of weeks - with Freepers and DUllards and moonbats, oh, my besieging the site in recurrent waves - the whole notion of fame has taken a real hit...

What's In A Name...

...when the name is "Gulag"?

I was listening to Hugh Hewitt on the way home from work. He was interviewing a high school teacher who claimed to believe that the American POW camp system (including Guantanamo) is the equivalent of the Gulag.

It may have been the most depressing thing I've ever heard.

The Gulag, of course, was a system of camps set up by Lenin and Stalin. Over the course of forty years, between twenty and forty million people died in the Gulag.

Two dozen have died in American POW camps - not bad, considering they're full of people whose mission is to die for Allah.

The people in the American "gulag" were captured on the field of battle, fighting the US.

The inmates of the real gulag were taken from their homes in the middle of the night, or their jobs during the middle of the day. They were hauled away in Black Marias. They were interrogated, usually using means of torture that'd make an Amnesty activist or a Howard Dean fan yakk up their supper; beatings, dehydration, starvation, sleep deprivation, mock executions, smashing of hands with hammers - read Solzhenitzyn. They were packed two dozen at a time into cells built for six people. When the "interrogation" - meaningless, since so few of the inmates actually knew anything - was over, they were "sentenced", packed into boxcars and sent thousands of miles across the Soviet Union, to the frozen taiga or the desert wastes of Kazakhstan. And there, they were almost always worked to death; "Sentencing" was a formality; few ever came home.

And why were they arrested? In chronological order: For being socialists, Mensheviks, or Royalists; for being engineers; for being professors, authors and intellectuals; for being military officers, especially competent ones; for being a member of any social or professional group that Stalin felt would betray him; for having a job that a local party boss wanted for someone else; for being a member of an ethnic group Stalin felt would betray him (like the Volgadeutch whose cousins made up most of the people in my hometown, deported to Siberia in their hundreds of thousands for being ethnic Germans, mostly never to return); for your kids telling their teacher that you'd snarked about Stalin over dinner; for being a solder that had surrendered to the Nazis; for saying anything that any party apparatchik felt was a "crime against the people", a clause in the Soviet constitution that made virtually anything potentially a capital crime.

Don't know anything? Here's a good start...

The worst thing about this whole cynical enterprise (Claudia Rosett, also on Hewitt, called it a marketing exercise, for lack of a better term) is that it devalues the term "Gulag". It's a term that should rank next to Lynch Mob, Kristallnacht and Vernichtungslager as terms of existential horror and warning. In the hands of Howard Dean and Al Sharpton and Democrat Underground, I expect no better.

From Amnesty, at one point, I did.

I Make A Point...

...of never paying attention to celebrity trials.

On the day the OJ verdict was delivered, I cloistered myself (along with my co-workers) away from radios, the internet, everything. I was past not caring; I aggressively detested the whole charade to the point where I boycotted the whole thing.

Some lawyer acquaintances say they have a gut feeling the verdict will come in today on the Michael Jackson case. On the one hand, I'll also boycott the whole insipid charade.

On the other - I have a gut feeling that he's going down for at least one of the lesser charges. Not sure which, don't care to dig into it, have no emotional capital riding on the result whether I'm right or not. Just a pure, wild-hair hunch.

Discuss. If you can stomach it.

Boys Will Be...?

According to "industry insiders", the man of the future looks like this.

Say the "insiders":

Macho man is an endangered species, with today's male more likely to opt for a pink flowered shirt and swingers' clubs than the traditional role as family super-hero, fashion industry insiders say... "The masculine ideal is being completely modified. All the traditional male values of authority, infallibility, virility and strength are being completely overturned," said Pierre Francois Le Louet, the agency's managing director.

Instead today's males are turning more towards "creativity, sensitivity and multiplicity," as seen already in recent seasons on the catwalks of Paris and Milan.

I'm not sure what's more idiotic - the idea that masculinity and creativity are exclusive, or the notion that French marketeers are seeing this trend anywhere but, shall we say, the bluest of the blue areas.

"We are watching the birth of a hybrid man. ... Why not put on a pink-flowered shirt and try out a partner-swapping club?" asked Le Louet, stressing that the study had focused on men aged between 20 and 35.

Sociologists and other experts spent three months analyzing some 150 magazines and books and 146 Internet sites, as well as interviewing a dozen experts from Europe, the United States and China.

Which magazines and internet sites?

The traditional man still exists in China, Le Louet said, and "is not ready to go". But in Europe and the United States, a new species is emerging, apparently unafraid of anything.

Except, apparently, going out without exfoliating.

What could be behind this...bizarre idea?

Follow the money:

The emergence of this new male beast who wants to look and feel good, and who will also have an impact on the role of women, presages a new potentially lucrative market for the European fashion industry.

"All those labels which have adapted to this freedom of expression are on the up, all those which are too rigid will suffer in the future," Le Louet said, pointing to the growing success of sports and casual wear manufacturers.

Europe's economic downturn and stiff competition from China have left the industry -- which accounts for 7.0 percent of employment across the European Union or some 2.7 million jobs with an annual turnover of 230 billion euros -- in the doldrums.

Twee is the new black!

On the Other Hand...

...this can't be good for Kerry's future ambitions:

On the One Hand...

...I could care less about John Kerry's grades:

The transcript shows that Kerry's freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.

Under Yale's grading system in effect at the time, grades between 90 and 100 equaled an A, 80-89 a B, 70-79 a C, 60 to 69 a D, and anything below that was a failing grade. In addition to Kerry's four D's in his freshman year, he received one D in his sophomore year. He did not fail any courses.

''I always told my Dad that D stood for distinction," Kerry said yesterday in a written response to questions, noting that he has previously acknowledged that he spent a lot of time learning to fly instead of focusing on his studies.

Kerry's weak grades came despite years of education at some of the world's most elite prep schools, ranging from Fessenden School in Massachusetts to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire.

It was forty years ago. And I suspect that anyone whose personality is formed to have the drive to excel at the paper chase that early in life will probably pay for it later.

Non-issue.

What I Do

It's always interesting, trying to explain what I do for a living. Even to my employers; in the last eight years, my job titles have included:

• GUI Designer
• Usability Analyst
• Human Factors Engineer (no, I'm not an engineer - that was a subterfuge by a manager to get me out of the "tech writer" pay scale)
• Business Analyst
• Information Architect
• Human/Computer Interaction Designer

The long-winded explanation: I do the same thing to the design of a software project that a journalist does to a story; learn the who, what, when, where, why and how. Who is the user? What is she doing with the product? Where - at work, at home, in a store? How important is the product to their life, to their performance review, to their shopping experience?

The shorter explanation - when all is going well, I make software suck less.

James Lileks touches on it in today's bleat:

I downloaded a trial version of GoLive CS, and discovered that control –N, the handy command for new page, now puts up a menu that asks if I want to make a new page, a new site, a new style sheet, a new car, etc. Makes sense. Most people want to create a new site far more often than a new page. Might as well make Control-S “Shred” the document instead of save it. Control-C should Convert to Chinese instead of copy. I tell you, there are peculiarities and brain-boiling nonsensical nonintuitive shite in Adobe products that would drive me daft if I had to use them for a living.

Instead of a hobby. A joyful, merry, devil-may-care hobby. Oh, Photoshop Elements team: nice work removing the undo icon from the layer styles menu. Because no one ever wants to go back 47 steps later and undo a bevel, do they. Ever.

Adobe products rely on two things to be usable: Stockholm Syndrome (if they're the only products available to do the job, you eventually learn to work with 'em to the point where you can't imagine any other way) and Battered Spouse Syndrome (they abuse you, but you can't bring yourself to demand better). GoLive and Photoshop are classic examples of programs written by programmers for...programmers.

I mention this to give shouts out to a couple of area practicioners who blog about this arcane field pretty exclusively; Lyle "Croc-O-Lyle" Kantrovich and DeeDee DeMulling.

Could Be Worse

Democrats like to jape at the Bush healthcare plan; "Pray you don't get sick".

Berg's Corollary: Pray you don't get sick in a country with socialized medicine.

David Asman on his encounter with Britain's healthcare system:

When I covered Latin America for The Wall Street Journal, I'd visit hospitals, prisons and schools as barometers of public services in the country. Based on my Latin American scale, Queen's Square would rate somewhere in the middle. It certainly wasn't as bad as public hospitals in El Salvador, where patients often share beds. But it wasn't as nice as some of the hospitals I've seen in Buenos Aires or southern Brazil. And compared with virtually any hospital ward in the U.S., Queen's Square would fall short by a mile.

The equipment wasn't ancient, but it was often quite old. On occasion my wife and I would giggle at heart and blood-pressure monitors that were literally taped together and would come apart as they were being moved into place. The nurses and hospital technicians had become expert at jerry-rigging temporary fixes for a lot of the damaged equipment. I pitched in as best as I could with simple things, like fixing the wiring for the one TV in the ward. And I'd make frequent trips to the local pharmacies to buy extra tissues and cleaning wipes, which were always in short supply.

In fact, cleaning was my main occupation for the month we were at Queen's Square. Infections in hospitals are, of course, a problem everywhere. But in Britain, hospital-borne infections are getting out of control. At least 100,000 British patients a year are hit by hospital-acquired infections, including the penicillin-resistant "superbug" MRSA. A new study carried out by the British Health Protection Agency says that MRSA plays a part in the deaths of up to 32,000 patients every year. But even at lower numbers, Britain has the worst MRSA infection rates in Europe. It's not hard to see why.

As far as we could tell in our month at Queen's Square, the only method of keeping the floors clean was an industrious worker from the Philippines named Marcello, equipped with a mop and pail. Marcello did the best that he could. But there's only so much a single worker can do with a mop and pail against a ward full of germ-laden filth. Only a constant cleaning by me kept our little corner of the ward relatively germ-free. When my wife and I walked into Cornell University Hospital in New York after a month in England, the first thing we noticed was the floors. They were not only clean. They were shining! We were giddy with the prospect of not constantly engaging in germ warfare.

The whole thing is a scary but required read.

Must Be Summer

It's 4:20 AM. Couldn't sleep.

There's an early morning thunderstorm going on right now. Lots of lightning, mostly silent but for a low background rumbling, and a brief gout of rain that made the humid air feel tangibly cooler.

There's nothing in the world like a thunderstorm on the high plains; Minnesota storms don't compare, but I love them anyway. Hot muggy days like these last few are the only times when living in the city gets onerous; the heat bounces off the concrete and the humidity is maddeningly smothering. Storms like this do a lot to reset the table, if you will, giving the street a clean slate. You know it'll get hot and sticky and miserable again, but for right now things are cool and wet and bearable.

I'm not a summer person. Don't get me wrong, I love summer - as long as I can be outside, preferably biking. Working, cooking, cleaning - those aren't as much fun. My old house doesn't have central air, and I haven't yet re-installed the room units I bought last year - more busywork to do - and I'm just not a "hot and sweltering" kinda guy. Chilly beats sweltering 10 times out of 10.

But a few judiciously-place thunderstorms go a long way toward making things liveable.

Whew

It was the second-shortest stretch out of work I've had so far - two days. I go back to work today.

Thanks for the prayers and wishes.

And to the one challenged little person who was gloating about my being on the beach in the comment section of this and other blogs - bummer to be you!

Let's Cut The Crap, Shall We?

As evidence for the "infinite monkeys" theorem, Laura Billings has a pretty good column - in this case, in re the stadium.

One feature of the current plan is that it works more or less like this:

• Hennepin County residents will pay 3/4 of the cost of the stadium.
• The Twins will keep all the advertising, naming, skybox and other fringe revenues. The taxpayers will get none of it.

That's it.

Last week in the Legislature, Rep. Phil Krinkie and Sen. John Marty tried to even out the playing field by proposing a "Fair Stadium Funding Act" that would allow taxpayers to reclaim the same percentage of new stadium revenue that they ponied up to make it possible. Let's say the Twins make $40 million more their first season at the new place than they did at the Dome. If three-quarters of the new stadium were paid for with public funds, then three-quarters of that new revenue would go back to the public, while the remaining quarter would go back to the Twins.

It sounds fair, but as many baseball fans have instructed me in the last few weeks, baseball is not meant to be fair. Many echo the phrasings of Hennepin County commissioner and pro baseball apologist Mike Opat, who said of the bill, "In a perfect world, their scheme might work. But baseball doesn't operate in a perfect world, and it never will. The purpose of a new ballpark is to generate revenue so the team can be competitive."

That's the purpose of a new ballpark? Clearly, I need to spend more time with the rulebook.

Indeed.

In the meantime, Minnesotans might want to ask for more truth in advertising from the corporation that ultimately wins the naming bid for the new ballpark.

"If we got a ton of money for naming rights, that would be awesome — just share it with the public," says [anti-stadium-tax activist John] Knight.

If that doesn't happen, he has another suggestion:

"They can call it the Hennepin County Taxpayers Stadium, because that's what it is."As little as I support Initiative and Referendum, this is the sort of case where it would be a great thing.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

The smoking ban has been a disaster for most of the bars in the metro area; Fighting the ban.
Kyndell Harkness
Star Tribune

Wildmo hopes to woo smokers back by allowing them to puff away after the kitchen closes, taking a page from Beltrami County's smoking ordinance.

The officials there are easing into an all-out smoking ban by 2007 by allowing smoking in the northern Minnesota bars and restaurants between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m.One of the features of the Ramsey County ban is that bars can win exemptions - if they sell more liquor than food. Bar are going to interesting lengths to meet this stricture:

At the Gopher Bar in St. Paul, manager Cheri King said going smoke-free "would have destroyed us," so the owners tried to figure out how to push liquor sales ahead of food and qualify for an exemption.

County officials, however, rejected their first argument: that take-out food shouldn't be counted. "We had to try to find another scheme," King said. The plan: Close the grill at 8 p.m. instead of 10:30. "We have regular customers who order an extra beer because they want to make sure we get to keep smoking," she said.

So it's likely that we will see a rise in DUI because of the ban. What's the old liberal saw - "If it saves one life, it's worth it?" It'd be interesting to do a study on DUI deaths in Ramsey County before and after the ban; I suspect (and am mathematically unequipped to prove) that the death toll will outstrip the number of lives saved by any smoking ban, statistically speaking.

The response?

From the ban's proponents - cluelessness:

Smoking-ban advocates and local officials who spearheaded the bans are shaking their heads over Wildmo's plans to reintroduce smoking after they staged media events at each establishment.

"It just feels crummy," said Jeanne Weigum, president of the Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota. "I can't believe she felt a need to do this. We're only a month and a half into this. It's just too early to react."

It's interesting to notice the fireworks when community activists like Weigum - who are used to spending year after patient year harangueing bureaucrats and city councils to enact niggling ordinances - meet with business owners, whose livelihoods can be gutted by decisions that take hours to implement and months to undo. It's never "too early to react" when your business is at stake.

To the centurions of government muscle, though - well, power is the key:

St. Paul City Council Member Dave Thune said the "uneven playing field" that county officials created when they allowed smoking in some establishments merely satisfied some bar owners and caused problems for others. "This is what happens when you have elected officials who are weak-kneed and you have to approve a compromise," he said.

In other words, government needs to be more arrogant, more brusque, more pushy; to this mindset, government is an instrument, and they are Eddie Van Halen.

I'm wondering - what'll it take to convince these people?

Dump

Perhaps you've heard - Michele Bachman is running for Congress.

Bachmann, depending on your point of view, is either a tireless crusader for traditional conservative values, or the Spanish Inquisition. Her critics range from the fairly articulate (even among Republicans) to the beneath-contempt.

One of them, as noted in a post the other day, is the group that produces the "Dumpbachmann" blog.

The blog exists primarily to toss out dirt at Bachmann - althought oddly, for a blog entitled "Dump Bachmann", the subject for the past two days seems to have been yours truly, mostly snarky name-calling and febrile "gotchas", but whatever. The dirt is literal, in one case; they went out to a stretch of highway that Bachmann had adopted and picked up, according to a photo, four or five bags of trash. (Speaking of which - make sure you check out Swiftee's caption contest for the photo.

In my post the other day, I noted that writer Eva Young was not quite telling the whole story; she listed Karl Bremer as a "constituent" without adding that he was also a longtime DFL activist and anti-Bachmann agitator.

Today (when she wasn't calling me fourth-grade names), she called Thomas Montgomery a "constituent" of Bachmann's. Now, I know Tom Montgomery; he's my lawyer. He's a fine general practice lawyer; if you need a criminal defense, a will, a divorce or any other legal service at a reasonable price, done the right way, I highly recommend Montgomery. He's also a committed DFL activist, but a great guy and, I stress again, a crackerjack lawyer at a decent price. One thing he is not, however, is a Bachmann constituent. He lives in the Fourth CD, the last I checked. Of course, if you were a neutral voter going to the site due to the press coverage they've gotten lately, you'd never know any of that from the Dump site.

So a lot of little facts get dropped. On the one hand, it makes you wonder how punctilious they are about other stories, like the infamous restroom incident or the bushes incident; any other facts the site's producers didn't feel we needed to know?

On the other hand, it's not even the big issue.

So I have a question, and a quick survey. Read the "Dump" site. Pretend you're a voter in District Six, with a choice between Bachmann, Cherie Pierson Yecke, Phil Krinkie and so on.

Do the activities of blogs like "DumpBachmann" affect your choice, and how?

Do the activities of groups like dumpbachmann.blogspot.com make you more or less likely to vote for Michele Bachmann?
	Yes. They got me convinced! Bachmann must go!
	They make the occasional good point!
	No difference.
	I think DumpBachmann is sloppy, self-serving and uncompelling.
	With moonbats like that as enemies, I'm tempted to move to the Sixth to vote for Bachmann.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

The Theft of 9/11

Debra Burlingame is the sister of the pilot of the plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

She relates how a politically-correct pressure group has hijacked the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero:

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom" -- but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

What does this mean?

Example:

Less welcome to the Freedom Center are the actual beneficiaries of that policy. According to the New York Times, early renderings of the center's exhibit area created by its Norwegian architectural firm depicted a large mural of an Iraqi voter. That image was replaced by a photograph of Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson when the designs were made public. What does it mean that the "story of humankind's quest for freedom" doesn't include the kind that is fought for with the blood and tears of patriots? It means, I fear, that this is a freedom center which will not use the word "patriot" the way our Founding Fathers did.

It's another hijacking.

Pet Peeves

I don't have many pet peeves. I'm pretty much a live and let live kind of guy.

But there are a few things that always set my teeth on edge:

• Misusing "Apropos" - So many people think "apropos" is a synonym for "Appropriate"; "I don't think getting drunk and walking into the board meeting wearing nothing but a teddy would be apropos". Bzzzt. It means "With regard do", as in "We need to do something apropos that drunk guy who walked into the board meeting wearing lingerie".
  
• "Looser" as a noun - There's a wave of people - mostly on the left, it seems, although that may merely be because that's where I notice this ten times out of ten - that think that the adjective form of "to lose" somehow miraculously gains an extra "o": "He's such a looser". They're not referring to his bowels or morals, not that I can tell - so where does this come from?
• Mark Wheat - My first radio boss, who made it a point to hire high school kids, said "kids go through three stages; first, you can't make 'em talk. Then they get verbal diarrhea, and you can't shut 'em up. Then, if you're lucky, they settle down to 'just right'". Mr. Wheat, the 89.3 The Current afternoon personality, seems to have settled at #2, talking on and on and on and on and on...

All for now.

Apropos Radio

Fraters Libertas is running a poll - who is/are the worst guest host/s on the Hugh Hewitt show?

Vote early and daily.

Jacked

The "Jack" format - in which an FM station acts like an iPod on shuffle - is getting installed on a whole lot of stations, including 104FM in the Twin Cities. It occurs to me that a list of 104s format changes over the last twenty years would be a sort of "Museum of Radio Programming Fads".

Radio stations have for the past 25-30 years been about as spontaneous and unpredictable as assembly lines; no corporate Marketing Communications department scrutinizes material as closely as a typical large-market FM station goes over its music. When I first started in radio, the model for the "Top Forty" station was to play, literally, those forty records (and really mainly the top thirty of them) exclusively - and the top ten even more frequently.

When I worked at KDWB in the early nineties, the format involved playing playing one or two "recurrents" - top forty songs of the last year or two - an hour, and songs from the top ten three times an hour (so yes, New Kids On The Block did come up every three hours), usually an "Add" (a new song moving up the charts) or two per hour, and the top thirty the rest of the hour.

It bored me stiff - but if I'd known how boring radio was to become, I'd have treasured every moment.

I have extremely ecumenical tastes in music, so I was interested in seeing what "Jack" would program.

It is, indeed, like an iPod on "Shuffle".

Unfortunately, it's an iPod owned by a guy who's spent most of the last thirty years collecting crap.

Things I Hate

Somewhere near the mid-top of the list, I have to add "Flavored Coffee".

Nice to know at least one person feels the same.

Coconut Iced Coffee:

Ridiculously exaggerated taste analogy: It tastes like burnt flesh smeared with suntan lotion.

She's onto something.

Greetings, Illiterate Trolls!

Via the MAWB, I see that I've been blessed by a Democrat Underground thread.

Anyone familiar with Minnesota blogger Mitch Berg knows what a thin-skinned blowhard the guy is.

Wow. I didn't know I had a reputation at all!

However, anyone who can work in the same room as Captain Ed and King Banaian can hardly be "thin-skinned" and still survive.

But he seems to have outdone himself recently with his admission that he actually changes peoples' comments to his blog and then reposts them under the original commenters' names, without ever revealing that the comments have been altered.

Riiiiight.

It was only a top-of-the-page post for a day or so.

Maybe some folks want to drop by Berg's blog and leave a few comments of their own about his policies.

I'm sure it'd be the highlight of their day.

I loved this part:

Anyone else ever heard of bloggers pulling this kind of stunt? A page right out of Karl Rove's playbook.

I'm...er...speechless.

Karl Rove commands me to edit half-literate insult comments.

Oy.

So, as an FAQ for your Underground Democrat edification:

1. I love disagreement, and will never edit it in my comment section - but if all you're going to do is insult people and hide behind your anonymous handle, I'll reserve the right to delete your comment - or edit it for my amusement, purely to ridicule you. You may be able to poop on the floor at DU, but not in my blog, Chester.
2. No, I'm not the guy who discovered Rathergate.
3. I'm a former liberal. I know all your arguments better than you do.
4. Given that you hang out on DU, I probably know more about hygiene, gainful employment and life outside Mom's basement (where I have not lived since I was 21), too.
5. Conservatives may or may not be smarter than liberals as a group - I think the two are roughly equal, although they manifest intelligence in different ways - but conservatives and mainstream liberals are all smarter than DU regulars.I pity your attempts at pithy snarking (note to DU regulars: "Pithy" does not refer to "urinary") in advance.
   Posted by Mitch at 12:10 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

There But For Survival

I had to pass on an invite to participate in a conference call with Sir Bob Geldof today, to attend a job interview.

Citizen/Lt. Smash has the reviews from those that could attend.

CHARLES JOHNSON concludes, "We may have a sighting of a very rare bird, a cause that both the “left” and “right” sides of the blogosphere can support."

Wish I coulda been there...

Speaking of Hitting The Beach...

...that's what I'm doing.

My last contract gig tanked with very little warning last Friday, putting me (and a couple of other contractors) "on the beach". Today's my first day of job-hunting. Again.

On the downside, after 2003 I'd hoped never, ever to do this again.

On the upside, the market seems to be a lot better than in '03.

So if your company needs a crackerjack Information Architect/Usability Engineer/UI Business Analyst/Human Factors/Interaction Designer (all different titles for the same job), let me know. I'm a very motivated job seeker these days...

D-Day Anniversary

Today is the 61st anniversary of D-Day.

This was the view.

You don't see the crisscrossing lanes of machine gun fire, the mines, the mortars, the artillery...

Revisionist history says not to pat ourselves on the back too hard; the Russians were already fighting most of the war, and fully 2/3 of Hitler's army faced them.

Bollocks. How would they have done facing 3/3 of the Wehrmacht and SS?

And what of Western Civilization had there been no D-Day?

Thank a D-Day vet if you see one.

Asymmetric Politics

Joel Rosenberg on the asymmetrical politics that led to the passage of the concealed carry reform law:

let's look at the big picture: what we have going on here is multi-threaded activism, often coordinated at central points, but powered by the activities and convictions of individuals. In the days before the MCPPA was repassed, legislators received quite literally tens of thousands of emails via the CCRN web mailer, many more from folks emailing directly, and so many phone calls from citizen-activists that it became clear that they quite simply would have to address the issue in order to get other work done.

And, that said, it was still a small number of people involved. Hundreds and thousands, not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Sure, it was orders of magnitude more than the dozen or so that the "Citizens for a Safer Minnesota" could drum up, but it was still a small fraction of the population of Minnesota.

"But wait!", an opponent might say. "That means a minority imposes its view upon the majority!"

No, it doesn't. It means that activist minorities can matter a lot.

Just as a thought experiment, let's put together a sample Minnesota-specific survey ourselves, for a moment. Include whatever issues you care about, and then let's add a trick question.

"How do you feel about a proposal in the Minnesota legislature to require a stabilization of the cost of a certificate of indemption for a mortgage? Are you strongly opposed, slightly opposed, neutral, have no opinion, slightly in favor, or strongly in favor?"

Be interesting to see what the results are. Nobody can have a strong opinion about the underlying subject matter -- the cost of a certificate of indemption for a mortgage -- as it doesn't exist. (There is no such thing.)

But you'll still get answers, and everybody who answers other than "no opinion" is telling you something about themself, and about surveys: not everybody cares about every issue that other folks think that they ought to care about, but people will, sometimes, respond as though they care, even when they don't.

What they won't do is vote -- one way or another -- on issues that they don't care about. And they won't work on them, either.

All of which is a long way to say something simple, and maybe I should just have skipped the runup to it: on any issue, the balance of political power strongly favors the side that has the most people active on it.

Read the whole thing. And keep it in mind you represent a group of political Davids taking on a Goliath of your own.

(Are you listening, Family Court Reform activists?)

Failing Grade

I'd almost forgotten this; a group of investigative journalism students at the U of Illinois figured out who Deep Throat was, quite some time before Mark Felt was revealed as Woodward 'n Bernstein's anonymous corroborator for the Watergate story.

They guessed Fred Fielding.

Some Of The News That's Convenient To Print

Dump Michele Bachmann is a local blog that's dedicated to delivering breathless condemnations of Senator Michele Bachmann, all the time.

They've been resorting to stunts to gain publicity - like a few weeks ago, when a group of anti-Bachmann activists van gathered trash (the photo suggested that they netted three bags among half a dozen or so participants) from Bachmann's "adopted highway". (Having cleaned "adopted highways", I'm here to tell you the first cleaning in the spring always nets a huge haul, no matter what the adoptor's political affiliation), which got them into the local dailies.

Now, understand that I have no dog in the actual electoral race; I don't live in Stillwater or anywhere in District Six, where Bachmann is running for Congress. On the NARN, we're making a point of interviewing all of the serious Republican candidates for District Six. Bachmann is an excellent candidate in a field of other excellent candidates. I'd like to be a fly on the wall of that district convention.

But Bachmann has been drawing fire from the left since long before she was ever elected to office; her involvement in the Maple River Education Coalition (now EdAction) made her a lot of enemies among traditional DFL constituencies, ranging from the articulate to the sophomoric and cretinous. She's especially been a lighting rod for gay activists, having been behind a number of "traditional marriage" bills and the like.

Somewhere in between lies "dumpbachmann", a blogspot site run by gay activist and eternal publicity hound Eva Young, and which seems to be ever-more desperate to find new ways to try to impugn Bachmann.

Including convenient omission.

In a piece from last Friday, Young quotes a number of anti-Bachmann figures.

From Jesse Ventura's Commerce Commissioner Jim Bernstein:

She will manipulate, fabricate, restate, obfuscate, misrepresent, misquote, mistreat and use whatever tactic she thinks she might be able to get away with to make her point. Sen. Bachmann knows no ethical boundaries and has no discernible conscience except that whatever moves her agenda forward is acceptable because her agenda is "right" and everyone else is wrong.

That bit is particularly ironic.

While Jim Bernstein worked for the "independent" Ventura, he was and is a loyal DFLer; sources I talked to when writing this tory said he was a loyal party footsoldier and fundraiser. During the American Bankers and Insurance controversy, Bernstein's testimony played hand-in-glove with the actions of Attorney General Mike Hatch, actions that the legislative auditor found troubling.

In no way can Jim Bernstein be considered an impartial observer of politics.

She also quotes someone she terms "constituent Karl Bremer":

hen Michele Bachmann's lease is up in four years-after all, she says she's just renting the office - the voters of Senate District 52 should evict this deadbeat tenant and elect someone who at least pays the rent. - Karl Bremer, Letter to the Editor, Stillwater Gazette, March 3, 2003

"Constituent".

Hmm.

I've known of Karl Bremer for the better part of a decade. He's an irascible DFL zealot. He may be a "constituent", but he's a "constituent" who can be counted on to condemn any Republican on any pretext.

She also quotes Corbett Johnson, a person whose google search shows mostly activity in the real estate business, but who has left a number of comments on this blog that indicate he's, to put it kindly, not exactly unbiased on these issues.

Using the benign, neutral term "constituent" to describe people who are in fact activists against a party to the discussion is highly disingenuous.

Why should I care? I don't. Like I said, I don't have a dog in the race. But since "dumpbachmann" has been getting publicity lately, there's at least a fair chance that someone might trip onto the site thinking they're getting the whole unvarnished story.

Some Of The News That's Fit To Print

John Leo in USNWR on the stories that the media chose not to completely report:

As distrust of the press grows, news articles are relentlessly scrutinized for bias, but almost no one is focusing on stories that are simply ignored. For instance, a May 18 report in the Afghan newspaper Kabul Weekly said the riots that killed 17 people were not about disrespect for the Koran in American detainment camps--they were a show of force by the Taliban and another fundamentalist group, Hezb-e Eslami. "These demonstrations were organized by the Taliban and their supporters, and only some naive people joined the protesters," the newspaper said. The BBC picked up the story on May 22, but so far as I can see, it was completely ignored in American news media. If you edited, let us say, a large newspaper in Washington or New York, or a prominent newsmagazine accused of causing these famous riots, wouldn't you want to check this one out?

Much more - read it.

Bring It On

Just because John Kerry was defeated at the polls, don't think he's gone forever.

Drat the luck.

Now granted this story is from Newsmax, but according to them, John Kerry is planning to try to impeach the President.

Failed presidential candidate John Kerry said Thursday that he intends to confront Congress with a document touted by critics of President Bush as evidence that he committed impeachable crimes by falsifying evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"When I go back [to Washington] on Monday, I am going to raise the issue," Kerry said, referring to the Downing Street Memo in an interview with Massachusetts' Standard Times newspaper.

"I think it's a stunning, unbelievably simple and understandable statement of the truth and a profoundly important document that raises stunning issues here at home," the top Democrat added.

The Downing Street Memo, first reported on May 1 by the London Times, was drafted by a Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair. It is said to be minutes of a July 2002 meeting where Blair allegedly admitted that the Bush administration "fixed" Iraq intelligence to manufacture a rationale for war.

Never heard of the memo?

The British memo, however, contains no quotes from either Bush or Blair, and is notably slim on evidence implicating Bush in a WMD cover-up.

Though largely ignored in the U.S. outside of rabid anti-Bush Web sites like MichaelMoore.com, the Downing Street Memo won Sen. Kerry's endorsement in the Standard Times interview:

"It's amazing to me," the top Democrat said, "the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."

The Deanification and Moorealization of the Democrat Party continues apace.

UPDATE: Folsom James Phillips of the Monkeys notes that James Robbins has the dirt on the "memo" in question.

My conclusion, which I omitted in my caffeine-free early morning haze, is; please, Democrats. Please keep this kind of thing going. You'll be a third party by 2016.

Smoked

Tom "Swiftee" Swift was covering the smoking ban long before it was an issue on the radar.

I first heard about the impending bans - or at least, paid them attention - last year when Swiftee called the NARN show talking about Dave Thune's upcoming ordinance in the Saint Paul City Council. Like Jeremiah, he had the story and was harping on it long, long before anyone else - back when something could still have been done about it, in fact.

He notes that even the far left is ditching the bans.

Not many bloggers cover the down 'n dirty of city and school board politics like Swiftee.

Nostalgia Via King

King Banaian at SCSU Scholars took a run at my last post - and raised me a topic:

First and last songs I played with bands for money -- first was "Just What I Needed" by the Cars, and last was "Johnny B. Goode". The band had already found another bassist, so I walked the stage and played every instrument and sang it, concluding with setting the bass on fire a la Hendrix. (It was a very junky bass -- I had already sold the rest of the instruments to finance grad school.) That last was on a deck overlooking a lake for a house party with about eight boats moored off the dock with people partying.

First song I ever played for money? Hmmm. The first song my band in high school, "Blitz" - with the Gallagher Brothers and Dan Sad - ever played for money was...um...I think it was Johnny B. Goode, at a junior high dance at the Canteen in Jamestown. The last was at the Turf Club in 1996, with my last band, "the Supreme Soviet Of Love" (a name I fully intend to use again; consider it copywrited); it was either Richard Thompson's "Shoot Out The Lights" or my own "Great Northern Avenue", I can't remember.

Question to the others: Where were you when you first heard "Year of the Cat"?

Sitting in the corner of my room, switching between homework and the guitar.

Music That Makes Me Nostalgic

Sheila started it!

Some of this stuff I should have a few drinks before I admit it. It'd be an excuse...

Moody Blues - I can't stand the whole sci-fi opera angle of so much of their music. But I can't hear "Nights In White Satin" without thinking about sitting in my dad's car, out on the Bloom exit on I94 in the middle of the prairie at 1AM, hearing the "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAHHHH" in the chorus and remembering roiling with unrequited crush.

Billy Idol - Not the usual ones. "Blue Highway", from Rebel Yell, may be the ultimate song from my college years.

Big Country - I remember sitting in the dorm playing "The Crossing" over and over and over. I probably spent sixty hours over interim (my college was on a 4-1-4 plan - January was spent doing one thing, an idea that's fallen out of favor, stupidly I think) learning to play every single song on that album on guitar, conquering whatever Stuart Adamson and Bruce Watson did to make their guitars sound like bagpipes and Scottish fiddles. I hear "In A Big Country", I still feel exhilaration - and my fingers still ache...

Dire Straits, Tears For Fears - "Money For Nothing" and "Shout" were everywhere when I moved to the Twin Cities. That hot, dry autumn I drove to interview after interview to the sound of the ominous synth buildup to "Money", and drove back bellowing my anger at another failure to "Shout".

Steve Winwood - My senior year of high school, "While You See A Chance" was everywhere I turned. Including coursing through my mind as I pondered asking someone to prom. I hesitated - and literally before my eyes someone else asked her. "While you see a chance, take it... indeed.

Boston - Rock and Roll felt like samizdat books in Jamestown, North Dakota when I was in Junior High. There were two radio stations in town - one country, one mostly news and farm prices and the occasional lite top forty/oldies.

So when some of my friends' older brothers started passing down records to us, and a few of us could even afford records (vinyl albums!) of our own, actual rock and roll, it was like a whole world opened up. Boston was the first rock and roll album most of us had heard all the way through.

And of course...

Springsteen - Bruce? Well, he gets a whole category. Springsteen's written the soundtrack for so much of my life: "The Promised Land" is the best song ever written for those yearning to get out of the hometown; "Tunnel of Love" and "Human Touch" were amazing songs for watching love turn to anger turn to something worse, and praying for something to jump out and tell you how to fix it, whatever it takes. Lately, "None But The Brave" has been knocking arouund my head for hours at a time, thinking about people I used to know and places I used to be:

But oh, on a night like this,
I know that girl no longer exists.
Except for some moment in some stranger's eye
or the nameless faces in cars rushing by...

It's been on my mind a lot lately. It smacks me like a ton of bricks.

Comical

I've never cared for comic books.

I mean, I had a few when I was kid, the kinds of comic books kids buy with their allowance money when they're seven or eight years old. But by the time I was 13 or so, comics - or graphic novels, or whatever you call them - pretty much lost my interest.

And when I moved to the Twin Cities, and saw for the first time the geeky horror of the comic book store, complete with adult comic book fans and store employees that make the Comic Book Store Guy from the Simpsons look...well, pretty dang accurate, my ennui about comics was reinforced by downright distaste.

So it's with a bit of chagrin that I report that I have a favorite comic book.

I never cared for superhero stories, and the whole gothic/horror/occult/supernatural genre has always left me worse than cold.

But while waiting around in a local comic store (as my son shopped for Yu-Gi-Oh cards), I tripped upon Queen and Country, a series of comics about Her Majesty's Secret Service. The comics about Brit spies - their office politics, backgrounds and lives - are...fascinating. Engrossing.

I may end up collecting the whole series at this rate. It's just good reading. Almost enough to make me wish I could draw.

I feel so geeky now.

Sixteen Years Ago Today

Kathy at Cake Eater Chronicles on the mystery man whose stance sixteen years ago today...

riveted our attention.

This whole incident has stayed with me for sixteen years, and I'm not likely ever to forget it. But there's always one thing above and beyond all the rest that I wonder about: why didn't he drop his shopping bags? Why did he get in front of the row of tanks with them still in his hands, and why did he leave with them still in his hands? One would think that when one is about to risk one's life and limb by stepping out in front of a column of approaching tanks that one would forget all about the everyday path that had brought him to that moment. Oh, fuck the groceries, I've got bigger fish to fry. But he didn't forget about them. I would like to think that he, quite simply, had a life to lead and that the Saturday marketing was just as much a part of that life as was stepping out in front of those tanks. That this is who he was: Schmo Joe, average citizen of Beijing. That may not be the case: he may have been as surprised as everyone else that he still had the bags in his hands when all was said and done. In his haste, he may have completely forgotten about them, which is probably the more likely reason, but still...

read the whole thing...

...and juxtapose it with this piece from today's Star/Tribune piece justifying the use of Mao Zhedong's image for the new Minneapolis Public Library ad campaign.

What's a librarian to do? Having weathered budget cuts, reduced hours and laid-off staff, the Minneapolis Public Library must have been heartened when the Andrews/Birt agency generously donated an ad campaign. And now, largely because some folks have gone ballistic after seeing one part of the campaign out of context, the whole campaign is being second-guessed.

The main complaint seems to be that one of the ads uses the image of someone who did some horrible things. As the writer of a May 25 letter to the editor said, "When you invoke Mao's name and image in hopes of creating a public "buzz," you summon the ghosts of Mao's evil deeds as well."

But one doesn't have to look far in our culture to see that some folks seem to think one can make specific use of icons. In fact, the notion that imperfection should result in banishment is derided by true conservatives. For example, Peter H. Gibbon -- author of "A Call to Heroism" and a speaker at the 2003 White House Forum on history, civics and service education -- opposes the current trend of not viewing imperfect people as heroes. Whereas others would blacklist Columbus, Jefferson and even Lincoln for their shortcomings, Gibbon reminds us that all humans are flawed and that we can still admire these men for their positive qualities and outstanding achievements. In short, we can invoke these individuals for specific reasons without endorsing everything they did or thought.

Mao was "imperfect". Not all that different than Jefferson, really. Honest.

Read the ad. Judge for yourself.

Juxtapose the images; a man who risked life and groceries to vainly defend his city from tyranny, versus a man whose moral obtuseness bids him to put Mao Zhedong and Thomas Jefferson in the same moral category.

Astounding.

And happy sixteenth anniversary, Grocery Guy, whoever, whereever and however you are.

RTG Strikes Again

Via Sheila, another of Right Thinking Girl's Friday Quizzes, for those who care. (For those who don't...move along. More later).

1. Would you rather be chased by a wild boar or make out with Kirsty Alley for five minutes?

I'm guessing we're not talking the 1986 Kirstie Alley, right? Give me a handgun, and I'll try the boar. (By the way, wild boar is deeee-licious).

2. Who is your favorite US President?

Since you didn't ask "who do you think is the best" US Prez, I'll take Reagan. He affected my life the most. Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and of course Washington are crowded in a photo finish for second.

3. Describe a memory from your childhood.

I was probably less than two years old. My mom was sitting in one of those old-fashioned metal lawn chairs, talking with a couple of old ladies that lived in what must have been the backyard of the apartment we lived in when I was a tiny baby. Mom looked over at a hedgerow, and said "here, Kitty Kitty", and I remember a big black and white tabby walking over to me from the bushes.

That, as it happens, is my very earliest memory.

4. What is more important: the experience or the memory of the experience? Which do you treasure more?

Without the experience, there is no memory. Without the memory, the experience is transient and ephemeral. It's a tossup.

5. Fill in the blank: Republicans do it _______.

better.

6. Fill in the blank: Democrats do it ________.

worse.

7. Have you ever been arrested?

Back in college, my pal Rich and I were walking back to campus. We had a bag of beer. He pulled a couple out and popped one open. "Er, Rich...?" I started. "If you're going to break the law, might as well do it with style". Swayed, I opened my bottle.

Not three seconds later, the whoopie lights came on from a cop that was parked not 100 feet away. Busted. I got OR'ed, of course, the moment that I filled out the paperwork, but still.

8. Describe your looks the way somebody who was madly in love with you would describe them.

"Like Sean Connery, if I'm drunk enough. Which, come to think of it, I always was when we were dating..."

9. What have you done for entertainment this week?

Last night - trivia at Keegans. Played some guitar the other night. Playing with doing some music remixing.

10. What are you doing this weekend?

Saturday, the show. Plus more housecleaning, walking the dog, going after the weeds in the yard, and if I'm feeling lucky and ambitious, Grand Old Day.

11. What interests you? (In other words: what are your hobbies and obsessions?)

The always-fascinating evolution of my children, the great loves of my life.
Military history
Music - especially playing. I don't even own a decent stereo, but I love it all.
Talk radio, especially my little weekend show.
Wargaming (board, plus a few of the more real-world oriented computer games)
My blog

12. Describe an incident in which you demonstrated leadership.

Caught in analysis paralysis on a huge project at work. I took over, forced some people to make decisions (which came pretty unnaturally to them), and un-paralyzed things. I'm good at that.

13. Tell me a fantasy event, something you would love to see happen. It must be political in nature, and can be completely ridiculous.

The Northern Alliance breaks a story that sunders the MN DFL to its very roots, leading to a multigenerational GOP dynasty in Minnesota.

14. Free Associate:

a. Paulie Shore: Ashton Kutcher's avatar.
b. Overdraft protection. Misnomer.
c. Rent control. If we make rent illegal, only criminals will have rent.

15. Tell me at least one thing you'd like to see me write about.

RTG? More on why you're RT.

Red? Anything, but please, try to go into some depth once in a while. K?

Holocaust '05

Zimbabwe seems to be on the brink of a holocaust. The Mugabe regime is using starvation as a weapon:

Zimbabwe is about ready to explode in a nightmare mass murder, or bloody revolution. It’s not genocide this time, but democide (government killing massive numbers of its own citizens.) The Zimbabwe government, in power since the country became independent in 1980, dealt with increasing unpopularity by terrorizing political opponents, rigging elections, and paying off supporters by driving its most productive citizens (the white farmers) out of the country and stealing their property. This move made it impossible for the country to feed itself. Relief agencies sent in tons of food, but this was distributed in a punitive fashion, with anti-government areas getting less food, or none at all. Last year, the government proclaimed the food emergency over, and said it needed no more charity from foreigners. That was a face saving lie. This year, the government admitted there was a food problem, and requested 1.2 million tons of food.

But why don't the people rebel?

There hasn’t been any revolution so far because the potential rebels cannot get guns. No one is willing to arm the dissatisfied majority, and over two thirds of the population lives in poverty. The ruling party is corrupt, and hands out what wealth is available only to those that actively support it. There are no large deposits of items like diamonds or gold, that are readily converted into cash. It was that kind of money that fueled the civil wars farther north, in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Religion is not a factor either, with less than one percent of the population being Moslem. Further north, irate Moslem populations have been armed by wealthier Arab nations.

The government seems determined to starve its enemies to death, secure in the knowledge that the victims are unarmed, and the government forces have lots of guns. It’s even difficult for the rest of the world to find out what’s going on, as foreign reporters were expelled years ago, and the local press is under strict government control. This story will only get reported after the dead are buried.

No guns.

Wes Skoglund's dream come true.

It's at least one reason we have a Second Amendment.

Islamic Fundamentalist Feminism

Steven Vincent - author and favorite NARN guest - is back in Iraq, and blogging about it on In the Red Zone. It's a fascinating journey, and you need to read it.

Today's post addresses fundamentalist moslem feminism.

The whole blog is full of fascinating insights:

I mention this bit of quotidian trivia to underscore a point. To many people--obviously, Haifa's one of them--"fundamentalist Islamic feminism" is not an oxymoron. By the same token, fundamentalist Islam and modern technology are also not mutually exclusive. This is a error people make when they claim that Salafists want to "drag us back to the Medieval age." Not quite. Rather, they want to "medievalize" modernity (or perhaps vice versa), keeping their mobiles and satellite dishes and computers and Internet, while frog-marching social relations (especially those dealing with women) back a millenium or so. One fascinating aspect of Basra is that by virtue of its relative stability, you can see the tug and pull of this process at work--debit cards and feminist unions on one hand, veils and alcohol-banning Islamists on the other.

Can they co-exist? That's the next chapter of the Basran saga. Most people I know (none of them fans of fundamentalism) think the religious parties are a passing phase, that Basra's fabled liberal-mindedness and port-city sensuality will reassert itself--in other words, the values implicit in a bar-code reader (not to mention the Internet and sat-TV) will eventually sweep away the shrouds and veils, and reduce the turbanned thugs to Friday rants before dwindling congregations. I'm not sure, but I certainly know where my hopes lie. With their charm and confidence and dedication, may women like Haifa grace the Basra political scene for years to come--make-up, high-heels, fancy dresses and all.

Check it frequently.

He Saw It First

Lileks notes:

Ahem. I’m not saying it’s a brilliant line ["In the future, everyone will be Hitler for fifteen minutes"] that could only fall out my capacious head, and no disrespect intended towards Jeff, but I did coin it first. Over ten years ago, in fact. After Noriega and Saddam had been floated as Hitler wannabees (yes, Noriega. Those were the days) I paraphrased the Warhol line. The original is probably buried somewhere in Lexus / Nexus. That is all. Thank you, he said, in a tone both peevish and defensive.

Who am I to argue?

But then, he goes on to say (with emphasis added):

I also hereby claim a description of the Democrats’ fear of Bush judicial nominees as “mad, bad, and dangerous to Roe.” Wrote that in last week’s column. Thank you. That is all.

Ahem.

(I mean, I gotta take what I can get. Fame is, indeed, fleeting. In the future, everyone will be William Hung for fifteen minutes...)

Churn

As Minnesota's state government flirts with shutdown, the claws are coming out:

Long-simmering tensions between the Republican governor and DFL Attorney General Mike Hatch came to a head Thursday, with Pawlenty openly challenging Hatch's ability to represent the administration, saying that Hatch's possible gubernatorial candidacy may pose an insurmountable conflict of interest.

With all of the challenges facing his administration, Pawlenty said, "If one issue is what the administration can and can't do, our attorney can't simultaneously be our political opponent."

As, indeed, Hatch has been. Over and over.

Hatch later told reporters: "I am not representing him [Pawlenty]. We don't have a king. We represent state government."

Right. Including the adminstration!

Hatch is an elected constitutional officer, so politics is inseparable from his position (as, indeed, it is with Hatch himself, a former DFL party chair and one of the most through-and-through political people in Minnesota). But if his politics affect his abiliity to represent his clients - and the administration is one of them - isn't this a problem?

Symptom Of Decay

So many people I know on the left gaze wistfully at tokens of their various times in Europe; "I wish I were there", they whisper longingly.

I can relate. I loved the time I spent over there, and would love to go back. But I suspect we're reflecting on different things; I on the people I met and the adventures I had, they on all of those plus, I suspect (and have been told) the neo-lib nirvana that European "social democracy" has created.

Not so fast, says David Brooks:

Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people's morale, but the momentum. It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward - where expectations are high - than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back.

Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope. As Anatole Kaletsky noted in The Times of London, in continental Europe "unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 percent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 percent only once in those 14 years."

The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning any time soon.

Once it was plausible to argue that the European quality of life made up for the economic underperformance, but those arguments look more and more strained, in part because demographic trends make even the current conditions unsustainable. Europe's population is aging and shrinking. By 2040, the European median age will be around 50. Nearly a third of the population will be over 65. Public spending on retirees will have to grow by a third, sending Europe into a vicious spiral of higher taxes and less growth.

As the new mini-phenomenon of the economic refugee from Europe becomes more predominant - especially among the middle class - it'll be interesting to watch Europe for the next thirty years.

To say the least.

Education? Schooling?

There was a guy in my high school class - let's call him Dwight, for that was indeed his first name - who could reasonably be termed "obstreporous". He loved an argument. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that also basically describes me - so Dwight and I were good friends throughout high school and college.

Dwight and I - like a lot of our friends - took summer school every year. It was a good way for the motivated kid to get a lot of his/her general requirements out of the way, and in some cases get a class out of the way in six summer weeks with a teacher that was motivated enough to care about the subject, as opposed to the guy who taught it during the school year (who was a walking, talking ad for disbanding the teacher's union).

But I digress.

In "Government" class the summer before our senior year, Dwight delivered (as I recall) a report about education. It basically called for the abolition of education as we know it. "Heresy", I thought, being the child of a high school teacher and the grandson of two more.

Dwight had a line, though, that stuck with me through the years, and has in fact become the key log in the changing of my beliefs about education; "don't confuse "Education" and "Schooling", Dwight said.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

There's a line that a friend of mine quoted to me a few weeks ago that's up there with Dwight's line; I don't know who said it originally, and I'll have to paraphrase it as faithfully as I can, but the gyst is "the greatest triumph of compulsory schooling is that nobody can imagine doing it any other way".

Which brings us to Katherine Kersten's column in Sunday's Strib.

I've said it before; the more I deal with the school system (public or private), the less I think school is a place for kids under 13.

The experience of home schoolers reinforces that for me:

From the beginning, Nelson aimed to stimulate her children's thirst for knowledge and encourage independent learning. But Jessica laughs at the stereotype of home-schoolers as starved for social contact. "I was with other kids all the time," she says, "in activities like 4-H and the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies."

To supplement their curriculum, the Nelsons joined a home-school support group, 90 families strong, at the Catholic Church of St. Paul in Ham Lake. In her younger years, Jessica took art, music and phy-ed classes with this group. In junior high, she studied subjects such as British literature, Latin and Spanish through co-ops for older home-schoolers. Later, she took advantage of Minnesota's post-secondary enrollment option to study math, chemistry and English at Anoka-Ramsey Community College.

What Jessica loved most about home-schooling was the opportunity to pursue her interests avidly. Her mother puts it this way: "We didn't have to close the history book at 11:45."

For Jessica, that meant competing every year in Minnesota Public Radio's music listening contest. Her favorite activity was the Minnesota Historical Society's History Day competition, which required digging for hours through library archives. Jessica made it to the national competition in Washington, D.C., three times.

Sounds cool, huh?

"But what about poor kids, or kids whose parents can't stay at home to teach them?"

On the one hand, that misses the point; so much about home schooling - or the various models of "unschooling", like the Sudbury schools - has nothing to do with "Teaching" as just letting them learn.

On the other hand, with the money we currently waste on a system that at best truly succeeds with a tiny percentage of children, we could invest in any number of ideas that could occupy children, and (most importantly) allow them to just learn without the institutional hazing that elementary school is; community centers, parochial organizations, parent groups, whatever.

Most of these kids do well academically. Studies show that home-schoolers, as a group, score well above average on standardized achievement tests.

It's not hard to see why home-schooling succeeds. Home-schooling parents, unlike classroom teachers, can focus on exactly what their children need.

They're also free to ignore the shifting and time-consuming educational fashions of the day. (Remember the recently deceased Profile of Learning, with its fuzzy-minded "performance packages"?)

Home-schooling parents can emphasize literary classics over contemporary children's fiction, which generally features a simplistic style and a narrow, adolescent mind-set. They can nurture their children's minds and hearts free from the alienated, heavily conformist youth culture.

And, more important, they can let their kids just learn, without the mindless (and pointless) regimentation of the school day, which at best is a useless exercise in collective intergenerational hazing and at worst is counterproductive.

The whole exercise in home schools, and "unschools", is more geared to how children - and everyone, really - naturally learns best; it doesn't adjust to the kid's style and rhythm and pace, it is those things.

Education and schooling; they're very different things.

Much more on this in coming weeks.

Bleg End

My bleg for money to put toward a new laptop has been an astounding success. I thank everyone who contributed - a grand total of over $420.

I'm going to replace the link with my regular tip-jar link again tonight (probably). I just thought I'd say "Thanks" to all of you; I'm astounded, and humbled; naturally, it's yet another reason to keep doing this blog.

Not that "oodles of personal satisfaction" isn't enough, of course.

Ground Rules

Just a few notes here, for those who need the reminder:

This is my blog. I take comments, unlike many area blogs, and generally enjoy them. And I don't care how angry you are, or how vituperatively you disagree with me, I'll let you post your comment - as long as it's at least tangentially-related enough to the topic at hand as to not complete beggar reason. It's all good. Even if the comments are anonymous.

But if you post anonymously and your only aim is to insult? It's open season.

I figure, this blog is something I do for fun and enjoyment. My fun and enjoyment. If other people enjoy it - and I get 2,000 visits a day, according to my hit logs, so either somebody enjoys it or there are a lot of masochists out there - then that's wonderful.

But at the end of the day, if my enjoyment is furthered by defacing and rewriting blathering, moronic, abusive comments, then that's what's gonna happen.

That is all.

Noted in Passing

At the end of Sheila O'Malley's unauthorized biography of Dave Grohl, someone left a comment that prompted me to think...

...It's true. It's been years since I've listened to "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult and noticed anything but the cowbell.

There Once Was a Poet from Nantucket

With weary end-of-session stroke
the governor has vetoed
a measure academic, passed
by solons (some be-speedoed).

The poets in the great white north,
bereft of recognition,
sought of them one, to laureate.
A spiffy state position!

'midst locking grids and haunches kissed
(to the Governor, abhorrent).
"Cold Omaha?", T-Paw replied,
"We can benefit from the richness and diversity of all of the poets in Minnesota and recognize and embrace their work as merit and circumstances warrant".

Indeed, one wonders, why the fuss?
Good art's about the struggle!
But nay! Bill Holm (and of his ilk)
with government wish snuggle.

Said Holm (a P.L. candidate),
aroused, acerbic, unctuous:
""Mr. Pawlenty seems to think that if you keep from raising taxes, the imagination will cease to be rambunctious."

"Rambunctious"? That's what Bill Holm calls
the rhyme of institution?
Puh-leeze. Rambunctiosity's
an invariable dilution

when making Art an official act
with government approval!
(and Bill Holm's snarking well reveals
grounds for the bill's removal!)

(Elitist fop! I mean, good lord,
have you ever interviewed
to get a job? Well, here's a hint:
*Agreeable*. Not rude).

(And of your fey non-sequitur,
don't even get me started!
The gig's unpaid! No taxes due!
Read slower. Screed aborted.)

And so let slip the dogs of doom
from Crocus Hill and Kenwood!
"Fie!", Keillor cries, the doom to mourn
in every neighborhood!

And yet in humble offices,
and dens, cubes and garages,
the unheralded writer turns
and wrestles her mirages,

and tames them, without hue or cry.
And then she tames another!
This is the state of art, and I would
trade it for no other.

So stab the bill clean through the heart,
and of it speak no more.
And perks to poets? What of that?
That's what their fans are for!

Love and Cynicism

Wow. What a week it's already been.

Monday's dustup with the lead-paint-chip crowd in my comment section seems to have more or less blown over; the hordes of anonymous cranks would seem to have moved on to greener pastures, perhaps swarming someone who claimed Worf was cooler than Spock.

But one comment stuck with me; in a flash of the kind of serendipity that makes blogging so much fun, it happened to come at the right place and right time.

Yesterday, someone left a comment in one of my threads:

You support the Great and Glorious War Against Some Brown People That in No Way Was Trumped Up, right?

Of course not. I support the war against Terrorism, against dictators in whose interest terrorists work and for whose interest they support terror, against nations and people who would impart their views upon the world via terror, whether state-sponsored or delivered via dynamite vests or hijacked airliners.

Which led me to Red's piece today, an essay by Antoine Saint Exupery written in the middle of World War II.

This part seemed appropriate:

Friends in America, I would like to do you complete justice. Perhaps, someday, more or less serious disputes will arise between us. Every nation is selfish and every nation considers its selfishness sacred. Perhaps your feeling of power may, someday, lead you to seize advantages for yourselves that we consider unjust to us. Perhaps, sometime in the future, more or less violent disputes may occur between us. If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen. If therefore, at some future date, I were to inwardly reproach those American businessmen, I could never forget the high-minded war aims of your country. I shall always bear witness in the same way to your fundamental qualities. American mothers did not give their sons for the pursuit of material aims. Nor did these boys accept the idea of risking their lives for such material aims. I know - and will later tell my countrymen - that it was a spiritual crusade that led you into the war.

I have two specific proofs of this among others. Here is the first.

During this crossing in convoy, mingling as I did with your soldiers, I was inevitably a witness to the war propaganda they were fed. Any propaganda is by definition amoral, and in other to achieve its aim it makes use of any sentiment, whether noble, vulgar, or base. If the American soldiers had been sent to war merely in order to protect American interests, their propaganda would have insisted heavily on your oil wells, your rubber plantations, your threatened commercial markets. But such subjects were hardly mentioned. If war propaganda stressed other things, it was because your soldiers wanted to hear about other things. And what were they told to justify the sacrifice of their lives in their own eyes? They were told of the hostages hanged in Poland, the hostages shot in France. They were told of a new form of slavery that threatened to stifle part of humanity. Propaganda spoke to them not about themselves, but about others. They were made to feel solidarity with all humanity. The fifty thousand soldiers of this convoy were going to war, not for the citizens of the United States, but for man, for human respect, for man's freedom and greatness. The nobility of your countrymen dictated the same nobility where propaganda was concerned. If someday your peace-treaty technicians should, for material and political reasons, injure something of France, they would be betraying your true face. How could I forget the great cause for which the American people fought?

"Mais non," the detractors might have bellowed, "they are just fighting to enrich Getty Oil and Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser!"

Here's the deal; to believe that this war is about enriching Halliburton, you have to believe that the American people - the ones who are joining the military and fighting the war - are essentially stupid; that they are so mentally incapable of reasoning that they can not, on their own, divine what this war is about.

Which isn't too out of character for some detractors, but let's leave that out for the moment. The typical American soldier would seem to see an inherent nobility to the cause of freeing "those brown people" from dictators, terrorists and thugs, something similar to what Saint Exupery saw. If they didn't, they wouldn't do what they're doing. They'd stay home. They would not re-enlist (as, in fact, they are doing in record numbers overseas today), they would play no part in the whole venture.

And yet they do. One more quote from Saint Exupery:

One evening, a twenty-year-old American pilot invited me and my friends to dinner. He was tormented by a moral problem that seemed very important to him. But he was shy and couldn't make up his mind to confide his secret torment to us. We had to ply him with drink before he finally explained, blushing: "This morning I completed my twenty-fifth war mission. It was over Trieste. For an instant I was engaged with several Messerschmitt 109s. I'll do it again tomorrow and I may be shot down. You know why you are fighting. You have to save your country. But I have nothing to do with your problems in Europe. Our interests lie in the Pacific. And so if I accept the risk of being buried here, it is, I believe, in order to help you get back your country. Every man has a right to be free in his own country. But if and my compatriots help you to regain your country, will you help us in turn in the Pacific?"

We felt like hugging our young comrade! In the hour of danger, he needed reassurance for his faith in the solidarity of all humanity. I know that war is indivisible, and that a mission over Trieste indirectly serves American interests in the Pacific, but our comrade was unaware of these complications. And the next day he would accept the risks of war in order to restore our country to us. How could I forget such a testimony? How could I not be touched, even now, by the memory of this?

Friends in America, you see it seems that something new is emerging on our planet. It is true that technical progress in modern times has linked men together like a complex nervous system. The means of travel are numerous and communication is instantaneous - We are joined together materially like the cells of a single body, but this body has as yet no soul. This organism is not yet aware of its unity as a whole. The hand does not yet know that it is one with the eye . And yet it is this awareness of future unity which vaguely tormented this twenty-year-old pilot and which was already at work in him.

For the first time in the history of the world, your young men are dying in a war that - despite all its horrors - is for them an experience of love. Do not betray them. Let them dictate their peace when the time comes! Let that peace reassemble them! This war is honorable; may their spiritual faith make peace as honorable.

Experience of love, freely entered into? Or killing little brown people for Halliburton?

It's not an idle question.

Roomful of Wingnuts

Two weeks ago, the guys from the NARN and some other local bloggers met the governor at the Governor's Mansion.

The whole story has been way over-reported, with certain elements of the left getting the vapors, acting as if the GOP were using the mansion to store Saddam's WMDs or something.

Nick Coleman got into the act, writing a spittle-flecked jeremiad warning us about the dangers of rubbing shoulders with people in power. In it, he said:

"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."

Coleman went on to give a rendition of his discussion with Gorr on his "radio show". The :21 second MP3 audio clip is available right here", courtesy of King Banaian.

Now, King and I both met Ms. Gorr at the reception, struck up a conversation, and arrange for an interview on her radio station (WJON in Saint Cloud) the following Thursday. Although sources say Ms. Gorr is a Democrat, she didn't seem uncomfortable in a roomful of conservatives. In fact, she seemed to do relatively little talking with bloggers - as I recall, she spoke mostly with the other radio people in the room (and I'm not talking the NARN; she seemed to spend most of her time with a couple of ladies from some outstate stations)...

...and yet Coleman's piece, and his on-air hatchet job, makes her sound like she felt like Gary Coleman at a Klan rally. So King Banaian decided to look into it:

I heard this and thought this simply couldn't be right. I had visited with her, as did Mitch -- we ended up with an interview to help advertise MOB Road Show -- and I did not sense any of that sort of discomfort.

So I decided to investigate this and sent the clip to her and asked whether it was accurate. I got back this message.

As far as Coleman's column...he was 98% within context. The only thing I would correct was my reference to the "room" being right-wing had to do with the radio broadcast that morning (All were conservative except for WJON.) As far as the bloggers went, well Mitch and you were the first I had ever met.

That might seem a minor correction but it matters quite a bit. Coleman is specifically focused on the new media event -- a.k.a. the bloggers -- and to make his point the one quote he uses is referring to an entirely different event! She could not have said to him it was totally right-wing wingnuts as Coleman represented on the air, because she had not ever met us. If she was uncomfortable it would have been only from preconceptions of bloggers as pajamaheddin wingnuts, a preconception fueled by Coleman. I rather doubt this to be the case. I think she was in an unusual place and tried to investigate who bloggers were ... which led to the interview. And doing that means, when it comes to reporting on bloggers, Gorr has done a better job than Coleman.

At minimum -- assuming Coleman simply was confused about which part of Gorr's day she was discussing in the newspaper quote -- he's been sloppy. If he knowingly used the quote from one part of her day with the Governor to discuss another, it's dishonest. Given the experiences others have had trying to get Coleman columns fixed, it's not worth our time getting this story to the STrib. This merely serves as another item in the indictment that Coleman's columns are held to an editorial standard that remains a mystery.

I wonder - does Nick think he can just start making stuff up when he goes to the studio?

Raving

I was going to fisk Bill Moyers' latest elaborate rationalization - but Learned Foot does it first, and probably better, if a tad more scatologically.

Read it.

Making Illegality Legal

A new proposal in Richfield (a first-ring 'burb of Minneapolis) would "It would "codify" an already unwritten policy where the police do not ask the immigration status of people reporting crimes," says Jerome, author of SD63 (Senate District 63, deep in the heart of the blue first-ring suburbs), a story he's been covering.

The debate has taken a number of the usual turns, as activists have brought apparently anecdotal evidence to bear to try to not only forbid Richfield police from asking for immigration documents, but in fact to impose a $1,000 fine and tack a misdemeanor charge onto asking (which is, by the way, already against Richfield Police policy).

As to justifications? Jerome responds to one supporter's claim:

Richfield residents might be more inclined to contact police, too, with such an ordinance, [Mexican consulate representative Joyce Graciela] Stellick said.

“When an Hispanic knows who is committing a crime, who is selling drugs on a corner, and they won’t be asked about immigration status, they will be glad to share it with the police, just as you would if you had information,” she said. “As a Richfield resident, you will feel safer knowing that if you have an immigrant neighbor, he’ll look after you and call the police.”

This statement is utter nonsense. If this ordinance were to pass, do you think a person who is in this country illegally would actually be more inclined to call the police to report a crime? That is just plain silly. People who report crimes are people who have an investment in their neighborhood or community. By nature, an illegal immigrant is somewhat transient because they need to be able to move to aviod being caught (remember, they are criminals because they are breaking the law) therefore they will not be invested in the community and not as likely to report a crime.

Read the whole thing, including the linked article.