Shot In The Dark

How To P**s Off A Liberal

I got this from an email forum about Saint Paul politics that I occasionally frequent:

> Yesterday I was cutting down the remaining
> perennials at the garden at Summit and Mississippi
> River Blvd. A group of about a dozen ROTC members
> from St. Thomas ran by chanting a cadence.
>
> I was offended and appalled by their chant: "Put a
> gun in my hand: I am a killing man: I am a stabbing
> man: I am a drinking man."
>
> I would love to hear other people's reaction and
> suggestions.

I reacted, all right.

Thank God they're still training soldiers to be soldiers.

ROTC trains soldiers (sailors, airmen, marines), not social workers. Part of the job is hardening the young men and women to be ready to do something that does NOT come naturally to ANY human, much less most
Americans; being willing to pull the trigger before the enemy kills you or your comrade.

And since it's "officer" training corps, it is not just training people to shoot (and live under unnatural privation, give up huge swathes of their civil liberties and be ready to risk their lives on little notice); it's training them to *lead other*
teenage wastrels to do the same. Ever wonder how the mopey, half-educated, good-for-nothing teenager you see hanging out at the arcade or vomiting in your bushes on Friday night turns, inside a year, into someone one can trust not only maneuvering a $50 million dollar jet around a flight deck, or conning a
billion-dollar submarine, or stalking a terrorist hideout through the dark...

...but knowing, instinctively, how to kill the terrorists and *avoid* shooting the wrong people - in other words, having the ability to not only kill or be killed, but to exercise intensely deep ethical reasoning at the drop of a hat?

Because they have leaders who are able to teach them those lessons *by example*. [1]

And how do you train someone to defend a democracy, while simultaneously being a member of a military, an institution so fundamentally undemocratic that our founding fathers distrusted the very notion more deeply than any other inheritance from Britain?

You create an "elite", a warrior class that is, paradoxically, both a part of our society and yet removed from it; a society dedicated to things that the rest of our society either can't do (blow things up) or regards as mawkish or declasse (dedication to Duty, Honor and Country).

While I won't reveal the name of the person who asked the question, she is in fact a local leftist activist who is a key player in, among other things, Saint Paul's smoking ban.

Note to the original writer and her sympathizers (you know who you are): Given all the revolting caterwauling to which we're subjected by the Twin Cities' hard left, all the specious antiwar protests and other juvenile noise pollution that
constantly infest this city, I'd suggest a little toleration toward those who are defending your right to complain about cadets and their chanting.

Call it "embracing diversity".

[1] Yes, veterans, I know; it's the NCOs who do most of that. So sue me.

Two Steps Back

Sisyphus from Nihilist twigged me to this story; an attempt to get a Senate resolution congratulating Bruce Springsteen on (or a few months after) the thirtieth anniversary of Born To Run was tabled in the Senate.

Bruce Springsteen famously was "born in the USA," but he's getting scorned in the U.S. Senate.

An effort by New Jersey's two Democratic senators to honor the veteran rocker was shot down Friday by Republicans who are apparently still miffed a year after the Boss lent his voice to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

"Apparently miffed". Great reporting there.

Lautenberg said he couldn't understand why anyone would object to the resolution.

"Even if the Republicans don't like (Springsteen's) tunes, I would hope they appreciated his contributions to American culture," Lautenberg said.

Well, Springsteen's record sales and concert receipts over the past thirty years show that a lot of us, politics aside, do.

But as staunchly as I've defended Springsteen on this site on the basis of his music - almost none of which, historically, has been political - I'll back the Senate Republicans on this one.

(It'd be nice, though, if they'd have such attacks of spine over things like, oh, I dunno, resolutions to monitor the Administration's conduct of the war. You know, things that matter).

Corzine said he, Lautenberg and other Americans appreciated Springsteen's contributions to American culture.

"We'll never surrender looking for ways to honor our local hero who made it big in this land of hopes and dreams," Corzine said.

After four years of being held up without a gun by Corzine's high-tax, liberal-machine politics, I promise I'll sing a New York City Serenade if he is paraded through the backstreets of this hard land in a (Jackson) cage, forever; DC will be a lucky town indeed. If brains were weather forecasts, Corzine's would be "Empty Sky". But don't lose heart; from every factory or secret garden in Nebraska to the streets of Philadelphia, Corzine's reputation is going down into the fire. Perhaps he'll see the light of day.

Question for "Insufficiently-Gifted" Leftybloggers

Since when did every instance of a right-of-center blogger expressing frustration, anger, pique or emotion of any kind become a "meltdown"?

Jerich Throws Hatch Under Bus?

Katherin Kersten writes about Ron Eibensteiner's acquittal last week at the show trial in Olmstead/Mower County.

The piece revisits an old friend of ours.

Kersten:

Ron Jerich, a Minnesota lobbyist with DFL ties, was at his home in Mendota Heights in October 2002 as the election season was reaching fever pitch. Jerich was waiting to go door to door for DFL candidates with 20 volunteers. He had no idea that he was about to become a pawn in what he considers an attempt by Minnesota's top legal officer to target political opponents.

Get those last three words. "Target political opponents".

Two years ago, the origin and disposition of this letter was an open question; Jerich didn't return several requests for comment when I wrote about the check and the fabled letter. From the Legislative Auditor's report on the investigation, here's Mike Hatch's testimony; it was October of 2002, and Hatch was at Ron Jerich's house during a lit drop for a DFL legislative candidate:

And [Jerich] hands me this letter. Pulls a letter out of a desk and hands it to me and it's a letter from Ron Ebensteiner (sic), who is the chairman for the state Republican Party. So now I'm trying to figure out how does the state Republican party send a thank you letter when it was a contribution to Commers?...I'm looking at this and I"m thinking, this doesn't make sense. The letter itself says it's from American Bankers, because there is a note at the bottom saying let me know who I should thank at America Bankers. And then I look at it, you know. I'm just kind of reading it and trying to figure out what this is all about. And it says it's to the Republican National State Committee...I take the letter. [Emphasis added] Do the door knock that day. I mean, I'm tring to figure out what's going on here. This is troubling to me. I know that mischief is afoot here. I know why American Bankers is doing this. I don't think Jerich did. He wouldn't have told me if he...I mean, they knew. I mean, it's not any secret my feeling about many insurance companies, and it's not secret what I think about a company like American Bankers. And I really don't think he knew.

At the time, the question was open, and debated among those who cared about the whole incident; did Hatch swipe the letter from Jerich, or did he palm it with Jerich's active connivance?

The LAO reported:

LMr. Jerich acknowledged that he showed Attorney General Hatch and others who had come to the "door knocking" event the letter from Mr. Eibensteiner. However, he said that the letter subsequently disappeared, and he didn’t know who took it.On the other hand, Hatch and Jerich are long-time friends and political associates. Sources close to the story at the time disagreed on the "given" vs. "stolen" scenarios.

Three years later, and in the wake of the Eibensteiner trial, Jerich is talking. Kersten:

"Mike's eyes lit up," Jerich says. "I couldn't understand his interest. He knew I raised money for both political parties, and Eibensteiner's letter was a simple thank you." Jerich thought nothing more about the letter until later that evening, when he searched all over but couldn't find it. It wasn't until months later, Jerich says, when Hatch publicly admitted taking the letter, that "it dawned on me that Mike had taken the letter when I wasn't looking."

Last week, Hatch spokeswoman Leslie Sandberg said Jerich gave the letter to Hatch.

Which is, unsurprisingly, what Sandberg told me in June 2003.

About five months later, Hatch's office provided the letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, according to Hatch's own testimony. It served as the basis for a story suggesting that Eibensteiner might have broken campaign finance laws and that the administration of Tim Pawlenty -- by then the new governor (and Hatch's political rival) -- may have entered into a sweetheart deal in settling charges against Jerich's corporate client, a Florida insurance company.

At a subsequent state Senate committee hearing in March 2003, Hatch testified that he had shown the letter to state Commerce Commissioner Glenn Wilson and urged him to avoid such a settlement, though Wilson vigorously denied this. A legislative auditor's probe in May found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Pawlenty administration, though it did criticize aspects of the settlement. Meanwhile, the report pronounced some of Hatch's behavior in connection with the case "troubling."

Unmentioned in Kersten's column; the extreme ethical squishiness of Hatch's contact with Glenn Wilson, the fact that Hatch's proposed settlement was illegal under Minnesota state law, and that the Legislative Auditor criticized the means by which Hatch sprung the settlement on Wilson.

Which brings us to the show trial:

Some months after this, Jerich's purloined letter surfaced again, becoming the principal evidence in a criminal case against Eibensteiner.

The case featured many curious elements. Its venue was Mower County, something of a DFL stronghold along the Iowa border. "Mower County was targeted as the venue of the complaint," says Bill Mauzy, Eibensteiner's attorney, "and the presentation to the grand jury was results-oriented for an indictment against the insurance company and the Republican Eibensteiner."Read the rest of Kersten's column.

If you're a DFLer, it should make you stop and think about who leads your party.

If you're GOP, you need to dig in for the next gubernatorial election; it's going to be ugly. The Eibensteiner Show Trial shows us what's at stake.

Posted by Mitch at 12:12 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Racists Within

We've noted in this space in the past that the most dangerous thing to be in the whole world is a moderate Arab. It's been true for eighty years now; when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - a man whose anti-semitism drew him into allegiance with Adolph Hitler - began his campaign against the Jews of Palestine, the first victims were Arabs who advocated and practiced moderation toward their Jewish neighbors. These Arabs were harassed, abused, even killed in droves, even before any campaigns against the Jews started. With any extremist campaign, one must make sure one's base is solid; nothing leaches the substance from a base like examples of people who break the mold, who act outside the box the extremists want to build. Nothing angers, or endangers, a true believer like an apostate.

So too with the extreme left in America.

There are plenty of columnists and conservative pundits that draw the ire of the
American left, especially in the bumptuous world of the blogosphere. But none draw the ire of the extreme left like the pundits that should, they think, belong to them.

Ann Coulter is one. Oh, she's plenty combative, sometimes excessively so. And some of her hyperbole, as treated in the media, overshadows the fact that she's usually right. But aggressively hyperbolic conservative pundits are a dime a dozen; it's stock in trade in talk radio, the blogosphere and in the press. But to the hard left, women - especially young women who are more aggressively female than, say, Phyllis Schlafly - are supposed to be left of center; Coulter (and Laura Ingraham, and Monica Crowley) are worse than mere conservatives, they're apostates, and much more vitiperation befalls them than any comparable conservative white male pundit.

Ditto black conservatives; Larry Elder takes vastly more abuse than comparable white male conservatives.

Of course, Michelle Malkin gets the bifecta; young, Asian, female, a market that Democrats just don't want to have getting uppity. In fact, the Democrats have reason to worry; Philipino immigrants have been identified as swinging to the right, endangering Democrat hegemony in particular in Hawaii, once one of the safest blue states.

And so the left froths over Malkin as over few other columnists, attacking her in many cases with a crudity that frequently doesn't merely "border" on overt racism. The fact that she's got the guts to tackle the tough issues - her defense of the WWII internment of Japanese Americans, with which I don't entirely agree, even though the case is brought with a much firmer intellectual grounding than many equivalent cases from the left (the "Bush Lied" meme, any number of unwritten constitutional penumbras, etc) - is certainly chum in the water for, at best, a vigorous discussion, and at worst, spittle-flecked personal attacks.

Unfortunately, far too much of the left responds with the latter.

Captain Ed responds today to some of the more unseemly fixations among Malkin's detractors. And so does Malkin, responding to the attacks on her and, especially, her husband:

The racist and sexist "yellow woman doing a white man's job" knock is a tiresome old attack from impotent liberals that I've tolerated a long time. It is pathetic that I have to sit here and tell you that my ideas, my politics, and my intellectual capital are mine and mine alone in response to cowardly attacks from misogynistic moonbats with Asian whore fixations. My IQ, free will, skin color, eye shape, productivity, sincerity, and integrity are routinely ridiculed or questioned because I happen to be a minority conservative woman. As a public figure, I am willing to take these insults, but I cannot tolerate the smearing of my loved ones. Because I have always been open and proud about his support for my career, my husband has taken endless, hate-filled abuse from my critics. His Jewish heritage, his decision to be a stay-at-home dad, and even his looks, are the subject of brutal mockery.

Certain among the less-intellectually-gifted elements of the left will no doubt jump on this; I predict "meltdown" and "tantrum" will pop up a few times in the mainstream media, even though Malkin's piece is (per usual) neither.

But Michelle is right; her detractors can't meet her, day by day, in face to face argument (the odd legitimate point against internment aside); that they're reduced to the kind of garbage she writes about is emblematic.

And all too predictable.

Because the notion of intelligent black, asian, gay, female and/or hispanic conservatives taking hold has to be the left's biggest nightmare.

Market Forces

In his book The Psychology of Everyday Things, Don Norman - who's more or less the father of user-centered design - tells a story about a university that was building some new real estate, and wanted to figure out where to put the paths and sidewalks. The faculty and administration was deadlocked; everyone had an opinion - and you know what they say about opinions...

Finally, someone (I don't remember who from the story, I haven't time to look it up, and it doesn't matter for purposes of his post anyway) suggested just planting grass everywhere and leaving it for a year - and then putting cement on the footpaths in the grass. It (so the story goes) worked.

I thought of this because as I waited for a green light where Lyndale Avenue turns left onto Oak Grove - near the Walker, the Guthrie, the 510 Groveland and other up-market destinations in Minneapolis - there is a grass strip on the median where some beggar or another almost always stands.

And the path in the grass along the left-turn lane was not only worn down to the dirt, but was in fact a muddy trench a couple of inches deep.

Must be a hot spot for 'em.

Proud To Be An American

My Northern Alliance colleague JB Doubtless, in quoting a song by country/pop duo Big and Rich, says that conservatives should be listening to Country/Western music.

Well, what would I know - I only worked at three c&w stations over the years, including a brief stint as a Music Director of sorts. I learned to like plenty of C&W, and ignore the rest.

Just as I do every other genre of music, from classical to techno.

But, driven by JB's challenge, I figured it was time to revisit the message of country western; JB has thrown the gauntlet, forthrightly decrying the anti-American messages he sees in popular/rock and roll music (and in movies, on TV, and on ingredient lists in cookbooks as far as I can tell), so I figured it was only fair that I rise to the challenge.

Since Messrs. Big and Rich responsed to a market demand by putting the de rigeur paeon to US troops on their latest album, they seemed to be a good place to start. I opted to begin by examining the messages - fully liminal ones, mind you - in their 2004 classic "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy".

Waiting to have my patriotism affirmed, I began listening and reading.

The song begins:

Well, I walk into the room
Passing out hundred dollar bills
And it kills and it thrills like the horns on my Silverado grill

Whoah, nellie.

Now, I grew up in North Dakota, around the line where Wheat Country turns into Cattle Country. I knew a fair number of real cowboys in my day; one of my pals as a child spent some years in the pro rodeo circuit; one of my best friends from high school lived on a ranch. Tossing hunnibears around and driving around in a $40K pickup with tasteless grill ornaments would have been anathema to any real cowboy I ever met, who were if anything the most all-business people I ever met in my life.

But who does that sound like? Messrs. Big and Rich sound a lot more like Old Dirty Bastard and his posse; I don't know about you, but I'm more likely to link profligacy, tastelessness (embodied in a worship of "bling", of which horns on the grill of a Silverado is certainly a country-fried cousin) and other such behavior with a hip-hop artist, or some tastless seventies British glam-rock star, than anything any real middle-American would recognize.

Onward:

And I buy the bar a double round of crown
And everybody's getting down Drunkenness, and the inability to really enjoy life without a huge buzz on. Sounds more Russian than American to me - Ed.
An' this town ain't never gonna be the same.

(Chorus:)
Cause I saddle up my horse
and I ride into the city
I make a lot of noise
Cause the girls
They are so pretty
Riding up and down Broadway
on my old stud Leroy
And the girls say
Save a horse, ride a cowboy.
Everybody says
Save a horse, Ride a cowboy

So in a drunken stupor, our Hip-Hop emulating, Communist-sympathizing "cowboy" opts to ride a horse into town. If there's any tackier, more self-absorbed display of enviro-wackoism than a smoke-belching Subaru plastered with "Greenpeace" stickers, it's a drunken, cash-flinging fop holding up traffic as he meanders down the arterial on a fly-eaten, horsesh*t-spewing nag, oblivious to the world; in fact, the casual disregard for the traffic hazard bespeaks a self-absorption worthy of an anti-smoking activist.

Well I don't give a dang about nothing

See? Totally self-absorbed - with the nihilistic brio of a Macalester anthropology undergrad.

And as to the whole injunction to "ride a cowboy" - well, it's either a paeon to mass transit, or a call to mindless promiscuity, neither of which should be acceptable to real conservatives.

I'm singing and Bling- Blanging
While the girls are drinking
Long necks down! More glorification of substance abuse; Messrs. Big and Rich may as well be Jimi Hendrix at this point - Ed
And I wouldn't trade ol' Leroy
or my Chevrolet for your Escalade (Nor could they, the way they throw their money around. Not that such lushes should be allowed to drive anyway. Is this the best America has to offer? - Ed.))
Or your freak parade

Uh-huh. A guy who throws around hundreds and rides a horse through town, presumably slurring and barfing all the way, is calling whom a freak?

I'm the only John Wayne left in this town

Riiiight. The Duke - Mr. All-American - wouldn't wipe an ostentatious, hip-hop impersonating, drunken lout like this off of his boots.

(Spoken:)
I'm a thourough-bred
that's what she said
in the back of my truck bed (Could he be encouraging mindless promiscuity? He's no better than Hollywood!)
As I was gettin' buzzed on suds (More alcoholism!)
Out on some back country road.
We where flying high (Now with the drug abuse? Country Western my foot - this is more like Jefferson Airplane circa 1969! A few more years of this "pro-American" fare and the terrorist might just decide we've had enough; destroying us would be redundant, we'll have all turned into the drunken, money-whoring, syphilitic wretches they already think we are!))
Fining, whine, having ourselves a good and rich time
And I was going, just about as far as she'd let me go.
But her evaluation
of my cowboy reputation ("Hey, Trisha - I'm going to score with that drunk, broke guy in the back of a pickup truck!")
Had me begging for salvation
all night long
So I took her out kicking frogs (All this, and mindless cruelty too? If I were a drunk pseudo-conservative chick, I'd do him!
Introduced her to my old bird dog
And sang her every Wilie Nelson song I could think of

And we made love

So let's run down the list: the morals and ethics of the Wu-Tang Crew via John Bonham; life displayed as a delusional, dissipate, drunken orgy.

Yeah. I'm proud to be an American.

Better that your kids listen to the Sex Pistols, I think. At least the lousy moral lessons were displayed as lousy moral lessons ("Jenny" from Birmingham, in the song "Bodies", at least saw some consequences for her debauchery. I'm guessing Messrs. Big and Rich are too drunk to even wear a friggin' condom, much less give a rat's ass about the illegitimacy that their glorification of drunken fornication promotes).

Should conservatives listen to this entitlement-mongering, morally-depraved buncombe, much less exalt it as a role model for the good conservative life?

"Well, Jeannie Sue got pregnant by some drunken, horse-riding lout after a Big and Rich concert - but at least they support the troops!" Sorry, JB. Swing and a miss.

Maybe I'll make it a feature; "Morally-depraved Country Song of the Week".

I could be doing it a long time.

"I'll Take Improbable Jobs' for $600, Alex"

Gail Rosenblum on the "Sex And So Much More" shindig at the convention center:

A lot of skin. A lot of hooting. But they promised educational and erotic. Eroticism is subtle. This was a freight train. I think a lot of local businesses on the tamer end stayed away, unsure of what the heck this was. So what you had were the usual suspects. Adult video and toy stores mostly. One of the signs said, "Spank Me," and I wanted to shout: "I'd like to!"

Pity low-key sexuality educator Candy Hadsall. She was trying to hold a seminar on couples' intimacy and love, but she was drowned out by announcements for the "Fake Orgasm Contest."

I'm not sure what astounds me the most; that the Strib is covering what is basically a mid-level trade show (What next - a reporter covering the Pampered Chef convention?) or that the Strib employs Gail Rosenblum as a full-time "relationship reporter".

Because that's got to be a fun beat to explain on one's resume. Although having this in one's clip file...:

One of the signs said, "Spank Me," and I wanted to shout: "I'd like to!"

...would have to present problems of its own...

NARN Today

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network we'll discuss the flap over the war, Bush striking back, and talk with Chad the Elder about his trip to China.

We'll also be talking with Minnesotans for Fair Elections about the move to repeal "non-partisan" elections.

That, and (who knows) some surprise guests!

That's noon-3PM on AM1280 the Patriot - or on the web at the NARN website!

District 4 25th Anniversary Dinner/Fundraiser

I MCed the 25th annual Fourth CD dinner party, silent auction, loud auction and social hour tonight. Had a lot of fun meeting the good folks in the Fourth (as well as State Auditor Pat Anderson, Rep. Phil Krinkie, Senator Mady Reider, and everyone else.

Great dinner (thanks, Fourth CD!), and a great time.

Thanks again!

A Couple Dozen Theses

It worked for Martin Luther, it could work for me.

Besides, on this very, very busy day, it beats actually looking for stuff to write about.

Here goes:

1. The volume with which one accuses another of being a "chickenhawk" is in inverse proportion to the degree about which one cares about the military under any other circumstances.
2. Chunky peanut butter is better.
3. The number and vituperation of one's bumper stickers are in inverse proportion to ones literacy on any given topic.
4. That Bush didn't lie about the intelligence estimates leading up to the Iraq War is no longer in any rational question; he did not. The only remaining battle is to see how many people will believe the "Bush Lied" lie, and to what degree it will drive them.
5. The mainstream media is, at this moment in history, irredeemably biased to the left.
6. Today's mainstream, "Billboard Top Forty" "Country/Western" is to Country/Western as N*Sync is to Rhythm and Blues.
7. The only way to fix that bias will not be to tear down "the media", but to get them to dispense with the myth of objectivity that has grown up around the journalistic trade in the past eighty years or so.
8. If Michael Savage and Ann Coulter didn't exist, the left would have to create them.
9. The right will never really be the majority party in this nation until it makes a near-majority showing in the major cities.
10. In particular, the "culture war" will not be won until the places from which culture comes - the major cities where the media are - have conservative constituencies big enough to influence elections.
11. Conservatives can do this; Brett Schundler proved it, in a place (Jersey City) that leans every bit as urban-left as the Twin Cities do.
12. Furthermore, many of the constituencies that make urban areas so hard-left are the ones that should be voting to the right; nobody is more concerned with the decline of american Education than inner-city blacks; nobody is more socially conservative than Hispanic Catholics; nobody is more free-enterprise than Asians. These groups' lean to the left, in those contexts, makes no sense.
13. The leadership of each of those constituencies knows it, deep down in their DNA - which is why they reserve such intense vituperation for apostate blacks, Latinos and Asians that leave "the plantation" as it were; each one is potentially the first drip through the dam.
14. America has a great tradition of taking its ethnic contributions and improving them to the point where they become our own; jazz, pizza, baseball, football, and on and on. However, until American mass-market beer stops tasting like fizzy weak battery acid and more like beer, it will be a blog on our national character.
15. The only racial reparations we should make should be voluntary and through the free market. The "reparations" we're "paying" the Native Amerians - through a near-exclusive gambling franchise - are a great model to follow. We should give another such franchise to documented descendants of slaves; perhaps legalized pot would do the trick.
16. At least half of SUV drivers do so because they're crappy drivers, and need the truck-like bulk of the vehicle to safeguard themselves from their own incompetence.
17. It takes more brain power to be a conservative than a liberal. I didn't say "intelligence", I said brain power, mental effort, thought.
18. As much as the national left insists that the left's crimes against civility are "no worse" than those on the right, nobody can show me an example of conservative commentators and pundits piling on a lefty pundit in the same way as their pundits pile on, say, Michelle Malkin.
19. In fact, the left will refuse to recognize it, because they (as a group, if not as individuals - the broad brush does indeed skip many of you lefties) justify it; to them, conservatives are exempt from the rules of civility (especially minority and female conservatives; Malkin hit the bifecta).
20. Dominos is not pizza
21. Jazz started generally sucking once it left the popular domain and became "high art".
22. It started sucking worse when it became mainly the preserve of the academic musician.
23. In fact, when any art form is swallowed up by academe, it ceases to be a genuinely vital form
24. There is nothing about the bibllical story of creation which is inimical to the theory of evolution, if one views the Genesis story as allegory.
25. Which, indeed, isn't correct, unless one is to assume that by "creating man in his image" it follows that the Almighty Father is a 5'10' guy with fallen arches, a receding hairline and a bad case of gas, rather than an entity"possessing intelligence".
26. Speaking of evolution; if the fundamentalist left didn't have the Kansas Board of Education, they'd have to make one up.
27. We are winning the War In Iraq.
28. This will be realized in the following order:
    1. The terrorist leaderships
    2. The US military
    3. The US population (red states only)
    4. The rest of the US
    5. The Media
    6. Ted Kennedy
29. Air American paranoid-left nightside talk host Mike Malloy is actually a conservative who couldn't get a job under his normal identity; he created the "Malloy" character to stand out from the crowd. He's basically a Fast Eddie Schultz, but much more diabolically clever.
30. In the wake of the Tomlinson "scandal", the left's conceit that National Public Radio is utterly non-partisan will get louder, yet more hollow.
31. Speaking of hollow claims of non-partisanship - Ira Glass will eventually morph into one huge adenoid.
32. Speaking of Ira Glass - Sarah Vowell's really voice is perfectly normal. I think she adopts her nasal, dripping-with-retro-nerdiness voice to stand out from the pack of dry, snooty, haven't-had-a-bowel-movement-in-eight-days female voices that clog (unfortunate choice of words, perhaps) National Public Radio. In its own perverse way, it works.
33. All of you who try to concoct materialistic indicators of political alignment - (e.g. "Liberals drive Fords/own cats, conservatives drive GMC/own dogs); please get lives. I drive a Ford, have a dog and a cat. Wanna question my credentials?
34. Those of you who answer "yes" have either too much time on your hands, or, in these parlous days, too little on your minds.
35. The greatest non-religious axioms in the world:
    • "The easiest way to become wealthy [or, by extension, happy, involved in one's relationship, or solid in one's faith] is to behave/appear as if one already is" (Hungarian saying)
    • "Who Dares Wins" (Motto of the British Special Air Service regiment)
    • "There's No Such Thing as 'Too Far'"" [Ferris Bueller's Day Off]
36. The unexamined life may or may not be worth living, but the unchallenged assumption is certainly not worth having.
37. That's not just a bromide; to be truly worthwhile as a conservative, one must "know the enemy", which means truly understanding what liberals are about (to pick an example for no particular reason).
38. For those who answer "No, I don't! I know everything I need to right now!" - well, some things just parody themselves.
39. That being said - in two years of looking, I have yet to find a local/regional lefty blog that can hold my attention for more than a couple of days (with the obvious exception of Flash, who's at least a homey in the 'hood, and whose blog I have to plug to ensure continued retroactive kid-watching. So go read it)
40. Ruling out art because of the artist's politics (at least, art that isn't overtly political) is the same as voting for politicians based on their taste in modern dance. The latter sounds moronic - why isn't the first?
41. That being said: Judged on purely conservative political grounds, Bruce Springsteen's The Rising was the best rock and roll album of 2002. Hands down. No rational argument is possible. Leave out all non-recorded subtext, and what was the album about? Faith. Strength. Selflessness. Giving of oneself for one's fellow man. Hope. Family. Comrades in arms (or fire axes, anyway). On this point, any argument is specious.
42. For that matter; whenever a conservative pundit starts yakking about what sort of music conservatives "should" listen to, one really needs to stick with:
    • Bach
    • Tchaikowskii (Pyotr, not Bram)
    • Händel
    Of this, there is not much legitimate question. (On the other hand, Ravel, Chopin and any 12-tone composer probably belongs to the left of center - but I like 'em anyway.
43. Except for 12-tone. Blech.
44. On a totally non-political front; if the Heavenly Father had a human voice, it'd sound a lot like Emmylou Harris.
45. The child custody/child support system is the greatest legal travesty in the United States today. It is, figuratively speaking, an endless Abu Ghraib that affects millions rather than dozens.
46. Yes, I know - Abu Ghraib similes are almost invariably specious, and I use them very sparingly. Consider the previous thesis accordingly.
47. A conservative blogger's overall worth is in inverse proportion to how many liberal bloggers call the blogger a "Hack" or "Party Shill".
48. The "indictments" of Tom Delay and Ron Eibensteiner were nearly identical; specious, done with full knowledge that they were of no legal value, but done as further shots in the PR war; the Democrats are banking on the notion that the average citizen can't tell the difference between "indictment" and "conviction".
49. One of the Law And Order series will include a storyline about a Republican politician who killed someone in a situation eerily similar to the left's version of the Delay story.
50. In fact, to reflect Dick Wolf's disdain for the right, it will no doubt appear on SVU.
51. In the past fifteen years, we've sat through the commercial resurrection of both Johnny Cash and Tony Bennet among society's hYp$tRz. I'd love to find some really unlikely old star/group and find some way to launch them back into the hip mainstream. Candidates:
    • The Lettermen
    • Charley Pride
    • Charley Dore
    • Peter Noonan
    Then, all of us who are in on the joke will have a great laugh at the expense of the soul-patched, patchouli-drenched, horrible-prices-and-lousy-service-at-Chino-Latino-enduring scene-drones and their boyfriends.
52. Britney Spears is probably going to be the Elizabeth Taylor of the 21st Century.
53. If we're lucky, though, she'll take more after Garbo.
54. Larry King did this sort of thing first, and probably much better.
55. If everyone followed along with Oliver Willis' reading list, the terrorist single-celled organisms will win.
56. There was a time, I think, when Americans of all political stripes knew there were just some things one didn't play politics with. I think that's mostly lost. I could say it's mostly lost on the left - and you know I probably think it deep down inside - but I'm not going to say it.
57. Inedible "foods" include mayonnaise, any jello that includes vegetable material, and scrapple in all of its forms.
58. In addition, if the Heavenly Father had intended bagels to have fruit in them,. he's have never invented Onions, Garlic or Rock Salt. Get real, people.
59. However, in whatever form, Bagels are better than donuts.
60. I have to wonder; if Martin Luther were a blogger, do you supposed he'd have had 950 theses?
61. If Ryan Rhodes had led the Reformation rather than Martin Luther, would we be talking about 95 Feces today?
62. Question: Has John Kerry spoken out about the riots in France yet? Anything? Bueller?
63. There's this woman who must shop at my local Rainbow every time I go there. I've never seen her, just her car. But I know she's a woman; her car is plastered, Deaniac-like, with Wiccan bumper stickers; "My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma", "God, Protect Me From Your Followers", that sort of things. I want to create my own line of stickers; "Gaia, please protect some of your followers from choking on their own sense of smug self-satisfaction".
64. What lightweight, low-impact, westernized bite-size Hinduist/Taoist transcendentalism was to the Sixties, and "Est" was to the Seventies, Unitarianism was to the eighties, lightweight, low-impact, westernized bite-size "Native American Spirituality" was to the nineties - lightweight, low-impact, westernized bite-size Buddhism-via-Hollywood is to the 2000's, so far. Since Kabballa and Scientology have both devolved into self-caricatures, I doubt either will take a place at the center of America's fad-spirituality scene. What other options are open to America's excessively-wealthy, spiritually-destitute, terminally-fad-obsessed class? Suggestions?
65. Given a choice of being stranded on a desert island with Pat Robertson, Al-Zarquawi and any of Minnesota's leading evangelical atheists (I'm thinking in cable access and/or blog terms, here), I'd probably take Robertson or Zarquawi. They'd be, respectively, less smug and irritating on the one hand, and more interesting conversation and less likely to drive me to homicidal rage on the other, in that order.
66. Here's part of the problem; much of the left seems to think "God Bless America" is a demand. It's not.
67. Queen and Country - still the coolest. That's a "Graphic Novel" series, not the story of a drag diva who develops an appreciation of Merle Haggard.

Back to more regular blogging on Monday.

Odd Request

I'm supposed to speak tomorrow at a local event.

My laptop is back in the shop, along with all the information.

If you're with the event, you have my details. Please email me just to make sure I have everything right.

Spoof comments based on this posting will be cheerfully mutilated.

Awful Enormity

My alarm went off late, the laundry was messed up, and I have an all-day meeting today.

Blogging will be light, unless I get a noon break of some sort.

Tonight, of course, is the Michael Reagan event at the Minneapolis Hilton. Hope to see you there!

No Sex Please, We're From Minnesota

I heard the ads for the upcoming "Sex And So Much More" show (which starts today at the Minneapolis Convention Center) as I was driving to work the other day. The ads went out of their way to sound...not quite "tame". "Classy", something that you wouldn't have found on the old Block E. Words like "Inspiring" and "clean" popped up more than once.

"Hm. Classy, clean and inspiring", I thought, "something you might not have found on the old Block E or the Faust".

Then, the ad mentioned its special keynote speaker...

...Ron Jeremy.

[scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatch]

Kind of like hiring Barry Bonds to lead a "Pitch, Hit and Run" sportsmanship event.

Revenge of the Nekulturny, Part II

Hi, "Human Resources" "professionals". Remember me?

Because I remember you.

You had your little three year run. Oh, yeah. Fifty, a hundred, five hundred resumes for every job. Desperate job-seekers willing to do damn near anything to land a gig. Management who had spent the nineties ignoring you and going directly to the market to find people, suddenly re-discovered the need for a cutoff to keep the hungry mobs from besieging their offices.

But things seem to be turning. I've been getting, on average, two cold-calls from recruiters a day - a very late-nineties pace. And management is going directly out and finding people, again.

Pretty soon, you fear, it'll be back to the bad old days; trying to justify your existence with "time management" seminars and ever-more-byzantine benefits selection processes and, finally, the end-stage - begging people to show up for Sexual Harassment training.

Tell you what; I'll send you a resume. You can file it and forget about it, just for old time's sake.

Don't say I never did anything for ya.

That is all.

Write the Hennepin County Board

A commenter asked that I post the email address to the Hennepin County board, to faciliate your complaints about the smoking ban quagmire.

board.clerk@co.hennepin.mn.us

Please write. Be polite, but let 'em know what a disaster this misbegotten ban has become.

And, if you don't mind, leave a comment telling us what you told Henco.

Can Take No More

A group of ideologue activists, using borderline-fraudulent information, drive government leadership into an unpopular action that, months later, has been an unmitigated disaster.

But far from admitting their mistakes, the dogmatists - still lying about their information - press onward, demanding the government pour more treasure into the insanity - and wreck more lives in the process.

I'm talking, of course, about the smoking ban.

Fraters published a letter to Hennepin County from Terry Keegan, publican of Keegans Irish Pub, easily the finest of the horde of Irish joints that clog the Cities today.

The letter is damning - and scary.

Keegan notes:

For the first three months of 2005, our sales were up 8% over the same months in 2004. For the most recent three months our sales are down 7.5% compared to the same months in 2004. That is a swing of 15.5%. Although our percentage decrease is smaller than some, it represents the difference between profit and loss.

As it has for many, many local bars. The anti-smoke zealots whinge in return "That's all anecdotal! You can't prooooooooove that the ban had anything to do with the closings!"

Buncombe. We're seeing the greatest wave of bar closings since Prohibition. Since the economy is doing well, and bars in non-ban cities seem to be doing business as usual if not better...hm. What could be the problem? What, oh what, could be causing all these bars in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties to dry up?

"It ain't the ban, and you can't prove that it is!", chirp the antis.

Keegan:

We have not had a profitable month since April, and the trend is downward. October 2005 was 17% down from October 2004. Cold weather will only accelerate the trend as smokers will be less willing to smoke outside. Hence, they will go to locations where they can smoke inside.

There are a few things that the antis didn't think about: Given a choice between preserving their addiction by driving two extra miles or challenging their addiction, 99% of addicts will take the ride 99% of the time (I'm being conservative). And when a smoker goes elsewhere, he/she isn't just taking his own business; non-smoking boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses and friends go with 'em; who wants to harsh the party by confronting a smoker's addiction? Nobody. Smokers are a minority - but their presence in a bar comes with a multiplier.

But in their little world, they didn't need to think about such things, because in the world of the zealot, the jihadi, the True Believer, technicalities are for peasants; they only get in the way of the Vision. The Vision, in this case, is a place where nobody smokes around them (but they keep buying their cigarettes, so the taxes keep funding their pet programs).

Keegan:

You may be interested to know that we have four fewer employees than we had in March. That translates into unemployment claims and other county benifits.

Nonsense! Jeanne Weigum and the Lung Association Guy are Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota!

Or happy to make the rest of us do it, anyway...

It appears that St. Paul is encouraging Hennepin County to stay the course with the promise that St. Paul will enact a total smoking ban. It seems to me that promises from St. Paul and Ramsey County were broken last year. Regardless of what St. Paul does or does not do, for Northeast Minneapolis the real problem is Anoka County, just two miles north of us.

One final thought: The argument that non smokers will flock to our restaurants now that we are non smoking is totally bogus. Where are they?

Silly person. They never existed. Or, more likely, stricken with the law of unintended consequences, the ban's proponents didn't realize that smokers are a multiplier, a driver of peoples' bar-going habits in the same way that vegetarians drive an office's lunch-ordering practices.

Please act.

That's what got us into this mess.

How about it, ban advocates? How is it that you can rationalize this ban in the face of the evidence of the suffering you (and only you) are causing?

Chad reminds us that the email address to provide feedback to the county board is:

board.clerk@co.hennepin.mn.us

Should Surprise Nobody

A Mauer County jury took less time to acquit former state GOP chair Ron Eibensteiner of any wrongdoing than it took to write and file the story about the event, most likely.

Former GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner was acquitted Tuesday on charges he helped steer an illegal campaign contribution into state Republican coffers in 2002.

The jury deliberated less than three hours before finding Eibensteiner not guilty on four gross misdemeanor charges of violating state campaign finance laws.

Well, no kidding.

On this blog, two and a half years ago, we examined the speciousness of the charges against Eibensteiner, Pawlenty's Commerce Department head, and the GOP; the whole five-part piece is located below...:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Eibensteiner:

"This was a total waste of time and expenses on the part of the state to be prosecuting me for this," Eibensteiner said from his car after the verdict. "Of course I'm vindicated because there was never anything there to begin with."

The Strib piece quotes the DFL/media's orthodox explanation of the genesis of the case:

The main evidence in the case was a letter with Eibensteiner's signature that was sent to an American Bankers lobbyist, thanking him for the contribution.

"You decide. Use your God-given common sense, to decide if that letter was not a solicitation," Gray told jurors. "He's not asking for life support, ladies and gentlemen. He's asking for money."

Eibensteiner said the letter was a form letter, one of thousands he signed.

Eibensteiner's attorney Bill Mauzy countered that prosecutors failed to prove Eibensteiner guilty of the charges he faced. He said Eibensteiner inadvertently signed a thank-you note to American Bankers lobbyist Ron Jerich.

The bald-faced nature of the scam practically screams out from the legislative auditor's report, linked in my piece.

The whole "case" presaged, of course, Ronnie Earle's half-assed prosecution of Tom Delay - and for more or less the same reasons; to bog down in quasi-legal impedimenta people they couldn't beat at the polls.

Insert Miracle?

There's a classic cartoon that appeared (if memory serves) in the New Yorker. A pair of mathematicians stand in front of a chalkboard; on the left third of the chalkboard, a dense mass of equations and calculations; on the right third, another close-packed mass of math. In the center, a big cloud; "Insert Miracle Here". "I can see one problem", says one mathematician to the other.

========

Absolutes - rigid, black and white definitions - have a place in philosophy, ethics, and morals. Usually.

At least in theory.

Because while most people willingly go along with certain absolutes - murder, theft, lying and adultery are absolutely wrong, to give one's life to save another is absolutely good (provided one is not dying to enable, say, a suicide bomber at a kindergarten), misapplication of absolutes - and especially assuming absolute right for what is at the end of the day one's own opinion - leaves on on squishier ground. In such cases, the absolute is either a hothouse creation of one who lives purely in the abstract, or the plaything of the deluded.

The other day, the NARN's old friend Vox Day wrote:

However, these despicable actions should come as a surprise only to the ignorant - who are clearly the great majority - since only an ignoramus or a fool would voluntarily pass his children through the pagan fires of the public schools.

Well, that's absolutely right. Except for all the ways it's not.

Bear with me here.

First, let me pre-empt the inevitable snorting from the right (coming, inevitably, from people who've never had their assumptions in this area tested); I'm to the right of all of you; I'm probably to the right of Vox, in an ideal world (and it's the ideal world, indeed, that we're speaking about here). The court decisions that spawned Vox's article need to be not just fought in court, but resisted tooth and nail by parents.

But at the end of the day, the problems are deeper than any number of court decisions, and by no means limited to public schools. Don't come yapping to me about your Catholic Schools or your private academies; the best way to "save" education is to abolish it. In a perfect world, we'd be rid of all compulsory education, through at least sixth grade, and probably through age 16. There is no empirical, peer-reviewed evidence that a child who is allowed to run rampant and learn whatever his or her motivations drive him or her toward for six or ten or twelve years will arrive at age 12 or 16 or 18 any worse off than a (obviously hypothetical) child who starts out with the same intelligence, home support and motivations who's been run through a factory school system - Public, Catholic or any other - for the same period. The factory school system - public, catholic, parochial or otherwise - is never any better than a form of institutional hazing. The greatest achievement of the advocates of compulsory education is convincing the whole world that sitting in a room and being led by the nose through a pre-approved curriculum was the only way a child could be educated - or for that matter, that "Schooling" equals "Education" in the firs tplace.

Think about it; the most complex task a child ever learns - learning their native language - is something that all but a vanishingly-tiny percentage of children learn, and learn fluently, by age five. After learning a language from, literally, nothing, everything else - calculus, painting, physics, comparitive literature, investments, chemistry, music, bookkeeping - are all child's play. And yet the relatively simple task of reading - assigning sounds and meanings to symbols on a page, a task that most children can accomplish on their own or with minimal help from relatives, friends, or whomever is handy - stymies more and more children every year. Simple fact; for all the money our society has poured into compulsory education (and the parallel private education system) in the roughly 100 years (give or take, depending on region and so on), the level of functional literacy has stayed about the same. In other words, for all the trillions of dollars (after inflation) we've spent on compulsory (and private) education, we've really gotten nothing in terms of spreading literacy, math fluency or ability to write that people weren't getting for themselves, one way or another, before the system was imposed.

Simple observation: Nearly every child would be better served by spending their days at home, or in their yards, at the church, in the community center or the library, in the garage tearing apart engines or in the basement studying how bugs do their thing, than sitting in a school for six or seven hours a day, being told what to learn, where to go, what do do and when to do it. While proponents of the system claim that such an approach is needed to teach kids "responsibility", it in fact does the opposite; breaks children like horses or new inmates to the notion of supreme, unquestionable authority (above and beyond, indeed, that of their parents; Mom and Dad can merely spank you, while the school can send cops with cruisers and guns!), which in effect teaches them to abdicate personal responsibility - that virtue among virtues in the conservative world - in favor of meek subservience in the face of almighty power (even more so outside the public system). The notion of "School Choice" - God bless its proponents - against such a fact is merely a band-aid on a suppurating infection (to say nothing of such feel-good bromides as "school accountability", which is closely related to holding a financial audit on the iceberg that sank the Titanic).

So there are the bona fides: I'm more opposed to the current system than the average bear.

That is, of course, in my world of absolutes. In the world I actually live in, my kids attend the public school system. I have all the usual misgivings any conservative parent should have in sending their kids off to the factory school system (and I don't care if that system is public, Catholic, parochial or what-have-you, it almost universally uses the techniques of the factory to process its little product;s the public school system offers some further challenges, of course); there are, however, no real options. Seceding from the school system requires resources that I don't have, in terms of time (I'm a single parent; home schooling is not an option, barring an unforeseen Powerball win) or money (none of your business, but suffice to say that biting off an extra $3-10K per kid isn't an option right now).

So, like most parents in my situation, I make the best of a bad situation. I tricked the kids into enjoying reading for its own sake, unplugging the TV for a couple of summers to help them see it as something other than yet another f*****g class assignment (it worked), teaching them trying to teach them the values and morals that they don't get (or worse, are actively squelched) during the school day (hey, my daughter's a Young Republican!), and even trying to let 'em know that it's OK to look at some of the absurdities of school - like those of any bureaucracy - with a sense of humor, hopefully enough to enable the some of the slights and injuries of the factory schools to slide off without doing too much damage, hopefully not so much that they become too cynical to play "the game" well enough for their own good. God knows I've gotten cynical about the whole thing. Just to let them know someone else sees the absurdity, I pay them a buck a pop for any piece of lefty indoctrination they bring home from school (Soucheray's got nothing on me); the kids chip eagerly into the task of digging into and criticizing the bias, which at the end of the day is a good start.

Think we don't know public schools are (let's round off the edges on Vox's hyperbole) in serious trouble? Think again. Think the alternatives are as simple as the hyperbole? Think yet again.

If I had my druthers, I'd yank both my kids out of school - any school - tomorrow, and let 'em spend the next 4-6 years just learning for its own sake.

But the Ramsey County Attorney's office maintains an entire office full of pawns in Susan Gaertner's little empire lawyers to make sure none of us parents get uppity, and to make sure that we stifle kids' natural, commonsense urge to stay the hell out of those stinking prisons, waving threats of legal action and God Gaertner knows what else, over those who don't have their kids' asses parked in their desks at 8AM, day in, day out. (If a system were worth anything, you wouldn't think you'd need the full force of government to make people realize it...)

Now, Vox Day has a right to his opinion. Goodness knows I agree with most of 'em. But things like the above are worse than useless for the huge number of parents - the majority, I suspect - who have neither the time to secede from the public school system on their own, nor the resources to buy their way into an alternate system.

The ultimatum Vox gives isn't a whole lot more useful than the equation at the beginning of this post; there's some interesting food for thought, but at the end of the day it all depends on someone, somehow, "inserting a miracle" into the equation. The miracle - whether it involves an improbable abolition of compulsory education or an equally-unlikely financial windfall simultaneously springing tens of millions of families, whose heads were suddenly overcome with the good sense to give a rat's ass about the rot in the public schools, is one of those things that lives in the realm of most theatrical, theoretical absolutes when they are let loose in the real world; the province of the impractical, the self-absorbed, the self-satisfied, and the deluded.

They Use Bullets, Too

Note to the American left:

• Explosives - hand grenades, artillery shells, missile warheads - are made of chemicals.
• Bullets are made using chemicals, and are propelled by an explosion of other chemicals.
• The plastic flexi-cuffs that are put on apprehended terrorists are made of...you guessed it, chemicals.

However, despite the literal presence of the word "Chemical" in each of the above points, none of the points is in any way related to "Chemical Warfare".

One of the things that combatants in action will try to do to give themselves an edge over their opponents (along with trying to kill them) is to try to keep the enemy from seeing them. Usually, things like trees and buildings and dark and the curvature of the earth and trenches and tunnels do the job - but there are times when portable visual obstructions - smoke screens - are also useful. So much the better - at certain times, in certain situations - if that portable obstacle is also lethal.

Enter "White Phosphorus", which is the latin term for giving the lefty anti-war fringe the vapors:

Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah last November. But they denied an Italian television news report that the spontaneously flammable material was used against civilians.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said that while white phosphorous is most frequently used to mark targets or obscure a position, it was used at times in Fallujah as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.

"It was not used against civilians," Venable said.

The left, predictably, is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the military would actually kill people who are killing Americans and anti-terrorist Iraqis (the piece is entitled "We have gone beyond the pale"; one wonders if the author knows exactly what a 7.62x39R rifle round or the explosion of a hollow-charge (RPG7) round on the other side of a barrier do to the human body, and if that's "beyond" any "pales", too?

White Phosphorus, like Land Mines, is one of those things for which nobody can see a need - unless they've had to bet their lives on it...

Note To Bill Frist: You Still Suck

To: Bill Frist, Gerbil
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Moronic Capitulation

Sen. Frist,

I haven't had a lot of time for you since your abject, stupid capitulation on the judicial nominees. That was bad - but nobody died.

Today's cretinous capitulation is worse; it can only encourage those who would kill our servicepeople (to say nothing of the Iraqis who have been fighting for their freedom).

The hamsters on the other side of the aisle have been carping about "another Vietnam" since roughly 11AM on 9/11/01. Of course, the problem in Vietnam wasn't the war - we won every significant battle - but the fact that we turn and ran and left the South Vietnamese to their fate, after a long series of erosions of the national will to beat the Communists, each of which emboldened a foe that had lost the ability to carry out significant offensive action during the Tet Offensive (another battle we won, but the media declared lost).

I hope that the House - made of sterner, more zealous conservative stuff as they are - have the sense to strip this provision from the bill in conference committee. In fact (are you reading this, Ramstad and Kennedy and Gutknecht and Kline and Peterson?), they had better, for the good of our servicepeople and the entire mission...

...something you have clearly lost sight of.

If you can't keep your caucus on message, then please turn things over to someone who can.

Senate: Let Terrorists Set Their Own Goal Dates

The Senate slammed the door shut on the Dem notion of forcing a pull-out from Iraq.

The 50-38 vote wasn't entirely on party lines: Lincoln Chafee voted for the bill, while Pryor (AR), Lieberman (CT)(!), both Nelsons (FL and NE), and North Dakota's Kent Conrad (scuttling at least briefly away from Red-State Liberal status in the last year before his re-election bid; Byron Dorgan voted for the bill) nixed the bill.

Minnesota's duo broke predictably along party lines.

ANALYSIS: Good. Thank God. However you stand on the war, you have to realize that there can be nothing dumber than giving a well-financed group of terrorists an iron-clad "All Clear" date.

Don't you?

UPDATE: Yep. Lieberman's from Connecticut, not Jersey.

I was busy planning a vacation at the time, I guess.

Department of Desperately Stupid Ideas

Why resist the UN's drive to gobble up the Internet?

Let the National Taxpayers Union count the ways.

The story discusses the UN's drive to absorb the current addressing authority - currently run by a series of non-profits based in the US - into the United Nations bureaucracy.

So if it ain't broke, why fix it?

[National Taxpayers' Union spokesperson Kristina] Rasmussen's study traces the push for a government-dominated online environment to the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), created by the UN in response to detractors of the current, US-based International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN). As the author notes, the advertised reasons for this proposal - increasing access and receiving global input -seem to be masking some less noble motives and outcomes:

-- Censorship. Despite having made a declaration of support for freedom of speech, many WGIG members come from nations that severely curtail this right; China, for example, has one of the most restrictive and sophisticated Internet control mechanisms in the world. Just as other UN bodies have been "co-opted" by non- democratic governments, "an 'International Internet Commission' chaired by China might not be far off," Rasmussen observed.

-- Taxes. Since the Internet's infancy the UN has crafted detailed proposals to tax online traffic. Rasmussen calculates that one 1999 plan for a "bit tax," adjusted for today's number of Internet users, would raise 12 trillion dollars this year - roughly equal to America's Gross Domestic Product. Even less ambitious money-raising models such as the independent, Switzerland-based "Digital Solidarity Fund" could feasibly be transformed into future collectors of compulsory Internet taxes and fees.

-- Bureaucratic Corruption. Given recent oil-for-food scandals, UN-style Internet agencies would present the inherent risk of "giving ruling members of regimes in the developing world shiny new computers rather than furnishing the poor with Internet access," Rasmussen said.

OK, all you UN defenders; what's the upside here?

Friggin' Weathermen

It was supposed to snow cats and dogs last night.

Which would be fine; my company has a fairly spiffy work-from-home policy.

But it didn't snow. It's merely raining, so it'd be bad form to work from home, especially because y company has platoons of management flying in for a meeting today. So rather than being able to just tell my people "I'm working at home", and settling in for a morning of working at home, I will probably have to butt my way through traffic (which is, because of the rain, awful), and slog through a day's worth of meetings, and THEN take a look outside to see if the heavens are collapsing in a slushy cataract...

The Minnesota Poll, Zogby and Ipsos must hire former weathermen to do their predictions.

O'Rourke's Birthday

P.J.O'Rourke is (if memory serves) 58 today.

I like O'Rourke a lot. No, not in the way Sheila does:

I wish I could go on a date with him. There. I've said it. I know he's married, but I've got a big ol' intellectual crushy-crush on PJ O'Rourke and I always have.

No, for me it skews more toward the political.

When I was 20-ish, I was pretty much a liberal (if not necesarily a Democrat). Four authors changed that; in my mind as I evolved, Paul Johnson buried "liberalism" (meaning in this case statism) in reams of history; Dostoevski exposed its contradictions; Solzhenitzyn drowned it in the blood of its victims...

...and O'Rourke threw brickbats at it until whatever was left of it fled from my expanding little brain. The essays that became Republican Party Reptile translated Hayek into terms a 21-year-old mook could not only understand and laugh at, but live with.

So happy birthday, P.J. O'Rourke. Here's to another 58 years of turning mushy-headed kids into mushy-headed kids with political common sense.

Discomblugulated

Blogging has been a bit light the last couple of days. My laptop is down again, plus the desktop has a kid-related issue.

So blogging is more or less catch-as-catch can for the moment.

I should have this fixed and be back to my usual compulsive pace by mid-week. Probably.

Disarmed

Whenever one ponders life in the DFL-throttled Twin Cities, one must always shrug with scandinavian resignation; it could always be worse.

San Francisco's city government is considering a proposal to ban guns in the city:

San Francisco supervisors want voters to approve a sweeping handgun ban that would prohibit almost everyone except law enforcement officers, security guards and military members from possessing firearms in the city.

The measure, which will appear on the municipal ballot next year, would bar residents from keeping guns in their homes or businesses, Bill Barnes, an aide to Supervisor Chris Daly, said Wednesday. It would also prohibit the sale, manufacturing and distribution of handguns and ammunition in San Francisco, as well as the transfer of gun licenses.

George Orwell, call your office - an aide to assemblybeing Chris Daly gave one of the rationalizations for the proposal (I'll add the emphasis):

"The hope is twofold, that officers will have an opportunity to interact with folks and if they have a handgun, that will be reason enough to confiscate it," he said. "Second, we know that for even law-abiding folks who own guns, the rates of suicide and mortality are substantially higher. So while just perceived to be a crime thing, we think there is a wide benefit to limiting the number of guns in the city."

"Interact".

When a gun is involved, police "interact" with people only one way; at gunpoint. This proposal isn't far from a license to bash down peoples' doors and take their firearms.

One wonders how many of these same city councilbeings are mortified at the "infringements of civil liberties" in the Patriot Act?

The NRA, thank goodness, is
San Francisco on its way to court.

The most galling thing about the bill? Like the symbolic legalization of gay marriage a while back, it's another symbolic stunt by San Francisco's showboating mayor Gavin Newsome.

And as such, it can only encourage people of like mind here in the Twin Cities, the people who've crawled out from under myriad rocks to try to get their neighbors to behave as they'd like (using the full power of government to get their way); the "Damn the Unintended Consequences" crowd.

Distinction Without A Difference

Doug Grow thinks he's seeing a corpse. It's really a vampire.

With the re-election of R.T. Rybak, Grow - as close to the official voice of the DFL as exists as Minneapolis (compared to Grow, Nick Coleman really isn't a DFL monkey!) - declares the "old" DFL dead:

To a dirge-like version of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," the old DFL plodded out of relevance -- to use a 1960s term -- Tuesday night in the Minneapolis mayor's race.

Peter McLaughlin and his supporters are the '60s turned gray. McLaughlin had a noble liberal background, he had an all-star lineup of the DFL's old guard supporting him and he had big labor.

And they all sank like a stone. McLaughlin got just 37 percent of the vote against R.T. Rybak, the incumbent mayor who obviously has won over just about everyone -- except the old guard.

And by "Old guard" we mean...

Former Council Members Jackie Cherryhomes, Tony Scallon and Joan Campbell...

Pretty much the whole rogue's gallery of Minneapolis' recent DFL history.

But what exactly does this mean?

For those of you who've never been in Minneapolis, let me show you the differences:

• Old DFL - High taxes, High "Services", excessive government intervention in the market, massive special interest patronage.
• High taxes (packaged as civic duties), High "Services" (packaged as gifts from a loving government), excessive government intervention in the market (sold to the public as entitlements), massive special interest patronage.

It's really just a different Younger Old Boys and Womyn's Club, with a slightly newer PR package.

And in Saint Paul...well, more later.

These Colors Don't Run

Briain "Saint Paul" Ward addresses my piece from yesterday about why I live in the city.

I gave ten reasons. In my haste, I forgot a couple.

Brian chose to peck at this point, quoting a bit from a scary episode about seven years ago:

I've patched bullet holes in my walls (three of them, from a scary night in 1998), chased thieves, staked out my alleys and taken down license plates with my neighbors, and on one horrible night about eight years ago, held my kids and answered their frightened questions when the news of the murder of a toddler in a gang-related shooting, scant blocks from our house, came on the TV.

Remember, Mitch considers this a "very nice" part of the Midway. And I believe his only experience living in the suburbs was crashing on various couches while he was between apartments several years ago. To exceed the accounts above, all I can say is that must have been one hell of a violent couple of weeks in Burnsville.

Enh.

I'm still here. The kid that did the shooting isn't.

But this raises several larger points.

If the GOP is ever going to really take over Minnesota, we have to conquer the cities. It can be done; Brett Schundler became mayor in Jersey City, a place even more depressingly Democrat than Saint Paul. And I doubt that his area party leadership was any less blinkeredly pro-suburban than, say, the Fourth District's. And yet he did it, and was (surprise, surprise) a stunning success.

But is that ever going happen if Republicans like Brian "France" Ward run for the hills when the going gets tough?

And while my neighborhood is about as placid as it gets these days - and has been pretty much ever since the incident Brian cherry-picked above - I have to ask; what kind of example does it set for your your children (not Clinton's "the children", that meaningless agglomeration, but for one's own children) if one packs up and runs like a scared kitten at the first sign of trouble? Would the West have ever gotten settled?

I know. Everyone's different. Some of us are lower tolerances for cognitive dissonance and for trouble than others. When D-Day comes some of us are wired to grouse "EU-rope? Who needs to liberate those cheese-eating bath-ignoring socialist pansies? So we can have all kinds of French films and German music and Belgian waffles - all that stuff is just garbage, and there's nothing you can say about it. The good ol' USA is all we need!" and get their grandparents to pull strings with their Senator to get a cushy job with a Navy public relations unit in Maine, while some of us are wired to run down the ramp, take the bluff, wipe the blood off the knives at the end of the day, and do it all over the next day, until the world is free.

Free world, vs. baked wind from Maine. Your choice.

That is all.

Do You Know The Way To Center?

I'm involved - mostly as a bemused lurker - in a Saint Paul Politics email discussion group. Now, from my perspective - as a Republican in a largely moderate-DFL city with a large, overly-influential radical element that thinks Paul Wellstone is center, it's not a surprise that I am far to the right of the norm in this forum. The forum, mostly DFL and leftist party activists, is somewhere to the left of Chris Coleman, and much of it embraced the Green Party candidacy of Elizabeth Dickinson. A large number of participants think the Pioneer Press is "too conservative"; a smaller number think the same of the Strib, although there is a greater sense of comfort with the Strib among the participants.

Now, it's true - from Sacramento, Boise is way east. And in the Saint Paul Politics forum, I'm a fire-breathing right-winger (although to some of the members any dissent from the right is too much. The discussion was about Mark Yost, by the way, although from the spittle-flecked tone you'd think I'd advocated executing abortionists; these are your neighbors, people!).

Tantrums from entitlement-surfers aside, though, the discussion brings up an interesting question: What is the center these days?

Before the '04 election, at least one study suggested that in terms of general attitudes of the electorate, center-right outlets like Fox News, Drudge and the more-mainstream talk radio (Limbaugh, Hewitt, Medved, Hannity) were closer to the "center" than, say, CBS or NPR (I can't find the reference, but it doesn't matter that much just now).

The question - which Dennis Prager asked his audience yesterday - is an interesting one; what is the "Center" in America today? Is it a mean - the place where everyone's position averages out by sheer weight of numbers? Or is it a median, the midpoint between International ANSWER and Michael Savage?

Neither, of course, and such a calculation would be meaningless, because for every person there are shades of gray between the poles on each issue (except for the woman I link to above, for whom politics would seem to be a black and white, good vs. evil issue - but I digress).

So here's my question: For each of the following issues, write in my comment section where you think "the center" is. I'll list the issues, and then I'll write my opinions (and, largely for my own edification, where I think i fall from the greater American "center", wherever that is).

• Gay Marriage
• Gun Control
• Iraq
• The War on Terror, at Home
• School Choice and Vouchers
• Abortion
• Taxes
• Campaign Finance Reform
• School prayer

OK, take it away.

My take follows:

Mitch and the Center).

• Gay Marriage - I think this is one of those issues where most of middle-america knows what they believe - marriage is for men and women - but it's not a big deal, either. I suspect "the center" supports civil unions for purposes of equal protection. I think I actually am the center on this issue.
• Gun Control - On this issue, the train has left the station. I suspect "the center" varies in their opinions about firearms as implements - but mostly agrees that the law-abiding citizen is plenty responsible enough, and that gun bans are ineffective at best.
• Iraq - I think "the center" is eminently sober in its appraisal of Iraq. 2,000 is a lot of people killed in action (at least by modern American standards); I think they also realize that we've accomplished a lot.
• The War on Terror, at Home - Good question. No idea, here. I suspect it's an issue that polarizes the left and right, and leaves most of the center more or less unmoved. I am personally more libertarian that some on the right,.
• School Choice and Vouchers - To paraphase a quote I don't entirely remember; the greatest success of the advocates of compulsory education and the factory school system is that nobody can imagine teaching kids any other way. I think the "Center" believes the current system is troubled but fixable. I am obviously far to the right of cetner.
• Abortion - I suspect "the center" finds the idea distasteful, and doesn't accept that a fetus isn't human until it is born, but is unwilling to ban the procedure for a variety of reasons. I'm obviously somewhat to the right of this.
• Taxes - No idea. Americans like to keep their money, but spend other peoples'. I'm obviously to the right of center.
• Campaign Finance Reform - I think "the center" is phenomenally gullible on this issue, and has been convinced that "Money is bad", in and of itself. I'm obviously to the right, and horrified of that fact.

Have at it.

The Nihilist City

Nihilist gets some email that sounds off on cities vs. 'burbs.

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Source of Raw Power

Rambling Ryan Rhodes performs a rare, complicated double-fisking; the Coleman Brothers.

Highlight, with Coleman (Nick) in italics:

It may seem unfair outside St. Paul that Kelly's endorsement of President Bush sank his campaign, but this is not a game we are playing in this country and, in the minds of most St. Paul voters, Kelly voted himself off the island.

Yep, in Minnesota, voters go to the polls, look at a man who did a good job the past four years, is arguably a good and decent man and. . . vote in an entirely green candidate based entirely on the incumbent's endorsement of the sitting President. It makes me wonder if, should Coleman decree that St. Paul citizens must wear their pants backwards, they may actually do just that (at least those who voted for Coleman).

Oh, Ryan. You have no idea.

And The Angels In Heaven Rejoiced

Hugh makes the long-awaited announcement:

If you are a regular listener, you will notice that I have retired Canned Heat from the top-of-each hour's intro music.

Our father in heaven: Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.

If You Repeat A Lie Often Enough...

I almost laughed coffee up my nose when I read Scott Johnson's take on Bill Ardolino's dissection of excerpts of Mary Mapes' upcoming book.

Mapes (emphasis added by me):

On Web sites such as Powerline, INDC Journal, Allahpundit, and Spacetownusa, the bravehearts of the blogging world worked anonymously...

Johnson:

On September 9, 2004, as now, our home page "about us" link took readers to our names, capsule biographies, photographs and telephone numbers.

Ms. Mapes: Rumors that bloggers work in their underwear are also "Fake but Accurate", in the same sense as your Guard memos...

PBS: "Fathers; Guilty Until Proven Innocent"

Fatherhood doesn't catch a lot of breaks.

The courts routinely dismiss its importance, denying fathers custody or, often, meaningful visitation as a matter of course.

Politicians? Quick - go through the campaign literature of many "feminist" politicians, and see how many times the phrase "women and their children" pops up. (Answer: Many. It should almost be a word on its own; womenandtheirchildren).

And the media?

Wendy McElroy of IFeminists notes that the "Fair, balanced, unbiased" PBS is in a brouhaha right now over the issue:

Dr. Scott Loeliger says the producers of the show ignored extensive court findings, records and testimony that he claims prove it was his ex-wife, and not he, who abused their daughter and her half-sister.

Loeliger, a medical doctor in Northern California, says he provided documentation of the mother’s abuse to a co-producer of the show, "Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories," six months before it aired, and that his pleas to have his case removed from the show were ignored.

Aired by PBS on Oct. 20, the much-publicized documentary presents "children and battered mothers [who] tell their stories of abuse at home and continued trauma within the courts," which allegedly return children to abusive parents.

A spokeswoman for PBS, Director of Corporate Communications Jan McNamara, says the accuracy of "Breaking the Silence" is under "official review."

Part of the issue is the notion of "Parental Alienation Syndrome", the idea that one parent can over time turn a child against the other parent. McElroy notes:

Critics of the fathers' rights movement and "Breaking the Silence" contend that PAS does not exist as a valid psychiatric syndrome.

...which is true, in the sense that North America did not once exist as a "valid continent" according to European geographers. But as we've seen in this blog, it happens. In fact, given the extent to which political correctness has infiltrated science - and the extent to which psychology isn't a science, one might wonder if there's another reason PAS isn't "recognized".

In an article entitled "PBS Declares War on Dads", [Radio host Glenn] Sacks not only disputed the premise of the documentary -- that courts assign custody to abusive fathers -- but also its use of statistics. PBS has reportedly received over 6,000 protest calls, emails and letters.

Women's rights organizations have launched a counter-effort. The National Organization for Women advised their membership to send emails of support to PBS, noting, "Your emails are especially important, as we know that PBS is being flooded with emails from bogus 'fathers' rights' activists opposing the airing of the film."NOW, by the way, thinks all fathers rights groups are "bogus", because they consider the very concept of father's rights bogus. To put this in perspective, NOW opposes laws that would require family courts to presume that Joint Physical Custody is the best situation for children - because it's inconvenient for women and keeps children with abusive men (since they presume most men are abusive).

The documentary's ultimate credibility may hinge on one question: does it incorrectly portray Amina's mother as an heroic mom instead of a child abuser?

Loeliger's argument that he and the mother have been misrepresented has precedent. Loeliger says he first learned of the accusations of his abuse through a Jan. 20, 2005 Davis Enterprise article titled "Teen Turns Tug-of-War Lessons Into Message." It claimed that Loeliger had verbally and physically abused his daughter.

On April 5, the Enterprise published a retraction and an apology to Loeliger, stating that the story "contained many factual inaccuracies."

The stakes on a comparable apology from PBS are high.

Read the whole thing.

I'm trying to book McElroy on the NARN. This issue is a vital one for the future of our society...

...as we'll discuss later.

Glenn Sacks, by the way, has a harrowing article on Parental Alienation Syndrome:

In it the filmmakers label PAS "junk science" and assert that it "has been used in countless cases by abusive fathers to gain custody of their children" by falsely accusing the mothers of PAS.

Despite the film's claims, research shows that parental alienation is a common facet of divorce or separation. For example, a longitudinal study published by the American Bar Association in 2003 followed 700 "high conflict" divorce cases over a 12 year period and found that elements of PAS were present in the vast majority of them.

The most extreme examples of PAS are the false allegations of sexual abuse which are often used for advantage in custody cases. Canadian Senator Anne Cools, a prominent feminist who led Canada's battered women's shelter movement during the 1970s, labels this tactic "the heart of darkness." She says:

"I've studied this extensively and I've placed on the Canadian Senate record 52 cases where there was a finding that the accusations were false, and there are countless more. Studies have shown that under these circumstances false accusations far outnumber truthful ones."

Read that whole thing, too.

(Via email from Lady Logician at Savage Republican)

The Winds Of November Came Stealing

It was thirty years ago today the "Edmund Fitzgerald" was reported missing.

From the Strib of the day:

A cargo ship with 35 crew members was reported missing Monday night in treacherous waters in Lake Superior, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The 729-foot Edmund Fitzgerald was last heard from at about 7:30 p.m. about 15 miles north of Whitefish Point near Sault Ste. Marie off the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, officials said...The coast guard in Duluth said that a 1,800-foot seagoing buoy tender, the Woodrush, left Duluth last night to search for the Fitzgerald. He said a coast guard tugboat, the Nawgatuck, departed Sault Ste. Marie in the search. Also, he said, airplanes from an air force base in Michigan joined in the search. An Oglebay-Norton spokesman said shortly before midnight that “we haven’t given up hope yet.”

A coast guard spokesman said bad weather had plagued the search. “The seas are so bad,” he said, “it’s almost hazardous for a boat to go out tonight.”

Waves in the area were reported at 25 feet high. They were accompanied by winds gusting to 75 miles per hour, the coast guard said.

It's interesting how, of the hundreds of sinkings on Lake Superior, the Fitzgerald is the one that's passed into legend. If memory serves (and we have help, here), it was the biggest ship ever lost on Superior, but by no means the biggest loss of life.

Maybe it was the era. As the Strib writer points out:

New York City was on the financial rocks. Karen Ann Quinlan was on a respirator. Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme was on trial, accused of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Movie buffs were flocking to the Downtown Mann to see Redford and Dunaway in “Three Days of the Condor.” Pot roast cost 79 cents a pound at Penny’s Super Markets, a Northland Bantam hockey stick cost $1.29 at Holiday Village, and a brand-new AMC Gremlin would set you back $2,889.

The sinking was never conclusively solved.

It happened at a time that was the nadir of modern American history. Perhaps it's emblematic - a mighty ship built at the height of Eisenhower's wave of optimism would, a year after Watergate and right in the midst of Stagflation and the WIN buttons and the AMC Matador, set sail and turn into the wind and...fall apart. Disappear. Give up the ghost and just sink.

Indulge my English major's penchant for drawing parallels - but sea stories reflect the times, I think. The USS Maddox's story, a pure Cold War concoction by guys in white shirts and skinny ties and crew cuts, perfect for the Johnson Administration. Ditto the Pueblo and Nixon; secretive, no answers, something just not quite right. The USS Cole - ambushed by terrorists that the administration at the time didn't want to admit were a big enough problem to act on.

And what better story for the Ford/Carter years?

Resistance Addict

A commenter in a thread yesterday about the election recapped a question that Brian "Saint Paul" Ward asked over the weekend - what's the big deal about living in the city?

I get the question a lot from conservative and Republican friends; the inner city is indeed a liberal cesspool, in many ways. Why don't you move to the 'burbs, Mitch?

Let me count the ways. Or, in classic Top Ten list form, let me count them down.

10. The Market - Like any good capitalist, I like a good deal for my money. I bought my house - an 1891 four-square in a very nice part of the Midway - for about half of what I'd have paid for the same square footage in, say, Eagan. As a good conservative, I like a great value for my housing dollar. In Saint Paul, I got it.

9. Centralization - If I were to move to Minnetonka, you can bet that my job would tank and my next gig would be in Woodbury. Living in the Midway - the center of the whole metro, in many ways - the changing job geography is less a problem.

8. Döner - Within four blocks of my house are three great Korean joints, an amazing Turkish cafe, a bodega, an Ethiopian hole in the wall, a place that serves a decent cup of coffee, a very cool record shop - all of them a five minute walk or a one-minute drive away. Given the choice between that and driving 20 minutes to get to Applebee's - well, it's really not a choice at all.

7. Suburban Schools Suck, Too - Look, I've checked 'em out. A nicer facility doesn't necessarily mean one's kids are getting a better education. Inner city schools have problems, many of which are amenable to being solved by pain-in-the-ass parents; other problems require more radical solutions than even suburban districts can handle.

6. Covenants - No, you may not specify what color I paint my property.

5. Suburbs Fill Me With a Soul-Crushing Ennui - I'm sorry - I know it's a liberal cliche, groaning about the mindless homogeneity of the 'burbs and exalting the urban thrum of the city - but for me it's true. So friggin' sue me...whoops, there's another of those suburban affectations!

4. Massive Passive Aggression - Twin Cities' burbs exalt the most obnoxious trait of the Scandinavian character; the passive-aggressive, passively-controlling, busybody neighborhood boss. Is your grass getting a little shaggy, there? Whose car is that in your driveway, huh? Hey, could yoiu water your azaleas a little more, so they match mine?

3. Criminals Are Breakable - I've had fewer crime problems in my house in the Midway than during any of my stays in the 'burbs. A concerted neighborhood response to crime usually does a lot of good. And a handgun or shotgun will fix any leakers. (It should go without saying that an urban gun ban would be pretty intolerable).

2. It's The Only Home My Kids Know, and It's Not A Bad One - Both my kids were born in St. Paul. The house we're in is the only one either of them remembers. One of my key values is providing my kids a home, not an escalating series of investment properties to park their stuff in. Someplace where they can develop their own sense of place - and have that place be more than some anonymous cul-de-sac. Where we're at is where that is, and I'm gonna make it work.

1. It's My City - It's where I've spent 17 of the last 20 years. If the forces of history are on conservatism's side, then certainly they favor me as well. I'm a patient guy - but nobody, nobody, pushes me out of my home. If it's me on the one side, and the entire Volvo-driving alpaca-wearing Saint Paul DFL on the other, one of us is leaving the fight on a slab. And I'm going to take a few of 'em with me in the process, at the very least. (Figuratively speaking).

Not saying it'll never happen; but if it ever happens, it'll be after a fight that leaves me too exhausted to prune my rhododendrons. Buck up, neighbors; you asked for it.

The Old "Invisible Platform" Trick!

Driving home last night, heard Mayor-elect Coleman talking on MPR:

"This campaign never was about George Bush"

Followed, inevitably, by about forty seconds of:

Bush lies bla bla Bush/Pawlenty plan to gut cities bla bla bla Bush bla bla bla radical right bla bla

And so on.

Note to Coleman, his supporters, and the entire world: Yes, it was.

(Swiftee noticed it too)

Note to Mayor-elect Coleman: You're going to need to come up with a whooooole lot more than "I didn't endorse Bush!" and "I'm going to listen and cooperate...".

By the way, who were those gerbils serving as "anlalysts" on MPR last night? Worst. Analysis. Ever.

Commandment 11: Unbunch Thy Undies

It's a week after the most holy of Minnesota holidays - Saint Wellstone's Day - and while the caterwauling was relatively muted in most quarters, some of it stuck out.

Mark Gisleson of Norwegianity, in his perfect world, would apparently have none of us say the name of hte Sainted Senator in vain, much less criticize his person, persona or works, peace be unto him.

Let's look at this post and see what I'm talking about.

Gisleson attacks Katherine Kersten's remarks on the anniversary of Paulapalooza, the memorial service which was "hijacked" into a campaign rally.

P.S. Kersten still has to apologize for her remarks, or — if I outlive her — I will piss on her grave. She deserves no more respect than she gives, and she has gone out of her way to earn a lot of disrespect from the left, and from real journalists who studied real journalism (before landing crappy jobs working for Republican publishers who hand out plum assignments to partisan hacks).

But Kersten has less to apologize for than some.

Gisleson then lists a number of quotes from right-of-center pundits big and small and, eventually, smallest, dredging up an old post of mine on the subject of Wellstone as a public speaker:

Whatever Wellstones virtues, he was an amazingly irritating public speaker. His voice reminded me of Richard Simmons, and his style did nothing to alter that perception. At his worst – like at the last DFL convention – he was a nightmare; shrieking, bellowing, pulling out every cheap device to rouse the rabble, waving his arms like (sorry about the unfortunate comparison) Lenin at the Train Station. It worked for him, of course – he was nothing if not a live wire.

It didn’t work for Kahn. — Mitch Berg, Shot in the Dark

So what's to "apologize" for? Again - it was a critique of Wellstone's speaking style.

Gisleson followed up the list:

Hardly the only sinners, but certainly some of the most hateful of the bunch.

Wow. If a conservative read his grocery list in the woods, and no liberal were there to hear it, would it still be "hateful?"

Grow up, lefties. It's a professional critique.

I used to speak for a living. My father taught speech for a living. I study great public speeches; I'm a Churchillophile based on his record of oratory alone. To use a Colemanism, I Know Stuff when it comes to speaking.

And, regardless of politics, Paul Wellstone was a very iffy public speaker. Oh, when he was relatively calm and relaxed, he was passable. On the radio? Sucked chunks through a straw, although he had an affable enough manner and he communicated that he just didn't take it all that seriously, which was mildly endearing.

But when Wellstone got jacked up into full spittle-flecking, arm-waving fury, he was unlistenable. Unwatchable. Terrible. His voice - not a natural speaker's voice under the best conditions - constricted into a strangled, nagging croak that was downright painful. If you shared every iota of his passion for the subject at hand one could overlook it - but the man at his worst was a truly awful, ridiculous stage presence.

Note to the beatifiers: This is not an assault on his character, his personhood or his worth as a human being. It's a critique of his public speaking style, from someone with a right to an opinion. I attack with justifiable glee his legislative record and the things for which he stood and, with authority, the style he exhibited on the stump - que sera, it's politics, deal with it. Disagreement and criticism is not the same as hate!

Do try to keep it in perspective, mkay?

I recommend a good laxative.

My Day At The Polls

It was short election for me. There were three people in my polling station (not counting the five election staffers) when I showed up at 8:30.

I voted for Randy Kelly, naturally. In a just universe, populated by rational people, he'd be the mayor-re-elect tomorrow. This is Saint Paul, though...

The only other race on the ballot was the Saint Paul school board. One can vote for three names, but I only voted for Lori Windels, the sole Republican on a ticket otherwise clogged with the same old DFL, Educational/Industrial Complex apologists that have given us a half-billion dollar school district that sucks down over $10K in tax dollars per student and...grrrr. I get angry just thinking about that quagmire.

I also wrote in a name: "Nosemarie Berg". It's the family's cat. I always write in a family pet in some race or another, usually an unopposed judge race or one where I don't like any of the options (vide any time Alice "The Phantom" Hausman runs unopposed). I do this so that I can check the election results later to make sure my ballot got counted; if there's a vote for "Nosemarie Berg", I know that at least my ballot got into the hopper.

My Neighbors Scare Me

As I left my polling station this morning, I saw a guy standing at the corner of Snelling and University, holding a sign.

He looked - well, basically interchangeable with a hundred thousand other left-of-center guys in the Metro; fortyish, thin almost to the point of gaunt, neatly-trimmed gray beard framing a crimped, worried face with darting, ferret-like eyes, well-dressed (Columbia rain jacket, tan khaki pants, dress shoes). The kind of guy one sees all the time supervising the clerks at the unemployment office, hand-clipping the prairie grass around the lovingly-maintained "Wellstone!" sign on his front yard, or driving his Volvo to the Whole Foods store (to which his emaciated, prematurely-gray, witch-haired wife of eight years insists he go, even though he'd save a bundle of money at Rainbow).

He held a large (4x4 foot) sign:

Defeat Bush
Reject Kelly
Redeem Saint Paul

"Redeem?"

Like, "Redeem" the sins of the fallen? In a religious sense? Over an endorsement that 51% of the nation agreed with?

Saint Paul; Come for the history. Stay for the DFL Jihadis.

Alan Who?

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek on a different presidential speech:

In the closing statement, Alda gives an eloquent defense of freedom, the power of individuals to solve problems via markets, and the importance of limited government as envisioned by the Founders as a way to keep confidence in government doing what it should.

There were a few missteps here and there, but overall, it was the best defense of limited government I've heard from a candidate since Reagan. It figures, as a friend pointed out, Alda and Reagan are both actors.

Of course, the whole thing was a live version of the West Wing. But what I found interesting was how little they chose to caricature the Republican's views, at least in the part I saw. He wasn't a "compassionate conservative." And he wasn't a heartless monster. He was about as Jeffersonian as you could imagine. Whoever gets the Republican nomination the next time around ought to hire whoever wrote Alda's lines.

I have to wonder; I haven't watched West Wing in...well, I watched exactly two episodes all the way through. The writing was crisp, well-done, comically ill-informed (on military matters, certainly) and marinated in a sickly-sweet Clinton sauce.

Have they - or the network - come to realize that America is growing more conservative than they are, and that they are in danger of losing their market?

In fact, I have to wonder - as apparently Russell does - if they're not trying to run to the President's right:

It would be even nicer to have a candidate to choose from who actually believed those lines as well.

Hm. Show the American people an unattainably-Jeffersonian ideal as part of an effort to split the GOP. Very interesting...

Don't say us Forbes guys didn't warn you all...

Urge To...Scream

I had a LONG post almost done just now, comparing the Francofada to the Petrograd Revolution of 1905.

I got up to run to the bathroom.

My son sat down at my laptop to squeeze in a quick game of Runescape before his bus came...

...you know where this is going, dont' you?

Terrier Vs. Gerbil

It's election day in the Twin Cities - and in no city is the choice starker than in Saint Paul, where we have a choice between a mayor who's accomplished much in four years...

...and a vacuous hamster who's accomplished nearly nothing, and whose brain has a "For Rent" sign tacked on, ready to be occupied by whatever interest group or power bloc seems in control at the time.

This time, it's the coalition of special interests that run Saint Paul - the unions, especially teachers and public employees, and government affiliated trades.

And beneath the blandishments about more spending and feelgood bromides about involvement and engagement, Coleman has really only one concrete campaign plank:

In an hourlong debate on Minnesota Public Radio's "Midday" show, Kelly and Coleman took swings at familiar topics: taxes and fees, crime, a "second shift" of programs at libraries and recreation centers, a new stadium for the Minnesota Twins and Kelly's 2004 endorsement of President Bush.

"I respectfully suggest that that endorsement has not much to do with this city, and I would hope that people would take a look at what we've done and what we want to do," Kelly said.

Countered Coleman: "The mayor's relationships with those two individuals [President Bush and Gov. Tim Pawlenty] is an important question for people to ask, and it is a sound reflection where the mayor's priorities and values are."

Yes. Yes they are.

Values like "Shunning political expediency in favor of what's right".

Values like "doing a tough job, damn the political consequences".

Things that are foreign to Chris Coleman, special interest yes-man.

I'm praying for a miracle.

Stanching The Bleeding

Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman's article in todays WSJ is an essential read for those of us who not only value freedom of speech on the Internet, but who are suspicious of unelected international "governments".

He addresses the UN move to seize control of the Internet:

There is no rational justification for politicizing Internet governance within a U.N. framework. The chairman of the WSIS Internet Governance Subcommittee himself recently affirmed that existing Internet governance arrangements "have worked effectively to make the Internet the highly robust, dynamic and geographically diverse medium it is today, with the private sector taking the lead in day-to-day operations, and with innovation and value creation at the edges."

Nor is there a rational basis for the anti-U.S. resentment driving the proposal. The history of the U.S. government's Internet involvement has been one of relinquishing control. Rooted in a Defense Department project of the 1960s, the Internet was transferred to civilian hands and then opened to commerce by the National Science Foundation in 1995. Three years later, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers assumed governance responsibility under Department of Commerce oversight. Icann, with its international work force and active Governmental Advisory Committee, is scheduled to be fully privatized next year. Privatization, not politicization, is the right Internet governance regime.

Coleman needs to be complimented - by people on both sides of the aisle, as it happens - for taking the lead on this issue - although it's more vital for those of us on the right, who so heavily depend on the Internet to outflank the mainstream media.

Coleman concludes:

Allowing Internet governance to be politicized under U.N. auspices would raise a variety of dangers. First, it is wantonly irresponsible to tolerate any expansion of the U.N.'s portfolio before that abysmally managed and sometimes-corrupt institution undertakes sweeping, overdue reform. It would be equal folly to let Icann be displaced by the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union, a regulatory redoubt for those state telephone monopolies most threatened by the voice over Internet protocol revolution.

Also, as we expand the global digital economy, the stability and reliability of the Internet becomes a matter of security. Technical minutiae have profound implications for competition and trade, democratization, free expression and access to information, privacy and intellectual-property protection.

Responding to the present danger, I have initiated a Sense of the Senate Resolution that supports the four governance principles articulated by the administration on June 30:

• Preservation of the security and stability of the Internet domain name and addressing system (DNS).

• Recognition of the legitimate interest of governments in managing their own country code top-level domains.

• Support for Icann [an almost-privatized Internet naming convention] as the appropriate technical manager of the Internet DNS.

• Participation in continuing dialogue on Internet governance, with continued support for market-based approaches toward, and private-sector leadership of, its further evolution

Say what you will about US hegemony in other areas - I generally but not universally think it's a good thing - but I have yet to see a rational argument for UN control of the Internet.

Small Town, Small School, Big Bureaucracy

The collapse of the inner city school system gets a lot of coverage (although almost none of it will come anywhere near the true cause of the problem of blue-city schools).

The disappearance of the small town school is at least equal in terms of the threat it poses.

I remember my father - a retired teacher with nearly four decades in the classroom whom nobody has ever mistaken for a Republican - complaining as the school district in Jamestown (population 15,000, which makes it an inner-city by North Dakota standards) made room for more and more administrators, bureaucrats, and programs - with the accompanying erosion of focus on teaching the basics. (Dad, if you see it differently, leave a comment to set me and the readers straight).

In an article in today's NRO, Dennis Boyles at NRO discusses the future of the small school. It's all the stuff Dad complained about, only much bigger.

Boyles discusses the phenomenon Dad noticed:

The schools that remained came eventually to mirror the schools in bigger towns and cities...The schools in Kansas, Nebraska and elsewhere in the Midwest have been inflated by the decades-long liberal impulse to make them into government facilities that provide an endless array of social services and loopy programs, none of which have beans to do with math and reading but all of which bloat the cost of "education" without actually educating anybody. While local efforts are often made to infuse schools with the excellence good teachers in small classrooms can provide, modern schools built to satisfy the whims of city and suburban folk just can't be supported by small towns like Burr Oak. The result: schools are forced to close, usually on the grounds of financial expediency, and towns die.

Now, I'm not one who fusses about "the basics" excessively - I think there are kids, and not a minority, who learn more about critical thought, and whose minds are better expanded, by studying languages and art and auto body repair and music than by getting endless reading and math crammed down their reluctant throats - but the point applies, nonetheless.

The answer? Maybe...choice?

The state's new conservative commissioner of education, Bob Corkins, explained to me that reconsidering the state's charter-school laws and other policies might stimulate municipal imaginations and help small towns do what Tipton did and come up with a model for the kind of small, rural school that can work. "We should try to...give them choices and alternatives," he told me. The goal, he said, should be to find something "that isn't like these schools we have today."

In this, he seems to have found an unexpected ally in one of his chief nemeses, Mark Tallman, the advocacy director of the Kansas Association of School Boards. "There may be alternatives," Tallman agreed. "But...let's see if [the school boards] can think outside the box."

Republican legislators seem ready to help. "I think there are a number of us open to finding new solutions," said state Rep. Kathe Decker, who chairs the legislature's education committee, and the majority leader of the Kansas house, Clay Aurand of tiny Courtland, told me he's got some ideas. The problem was nobody was asking him what they were. "You'd think they'd want the help," he said.

Charter schools on the plains, vouchers in the inner city - it seems like the best answer for education is to kill "Education" - the "Educational/Industrial Complex" if you will.

Read Boyles' piece. Discuss. More later.

Get Out The Vote

In Saint Paul, sure.

But also in this week's edition of Generalissimo Duane's Blog Of The Week competition. The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers' own "Peace Like A River" has an excellent entry in this week's competition. Make sure you get out and vote early and often. Jeff Kouba is an excellent writer, and his blog has become a must-read within the MOB.

In a related matter, it's come to my attention that a group called the "Southern California Alliance of Bloggers" - an unfortunate name, given their acronym - wants to skew the voting:

Well, the So Cal Alliance is way better than that other alliance...called Minnesota Organization of Bloggers ...you know those chilly little Minnesotian's with frost on their noses who have only won blog of the week twice!

Ah. The old "We're Way Better" argument. Hard to argue with that.

I should translate into Californian for any SCAB members who can read are reading this: Dude: the MOB is like more tubular than the SCAB. And, like, you don't need no apostrophe to make "Minnesotans", like, plural. Dude.

Thanks.

Now go vote for PLAR.

Dalai Lama Opens Can of Whoopass

Well, not exactly. But as First Ringer notes, the Dalai Lama came out in support of the Just War doctrine at an appearance last week:

The allied victory in World War II "saved Western civilization," and conflicts fought in Korea and Vietnam were honorable from a moral standpoint, the 14th Dalai Lama said in answer to questions.

But he ruled out armed struggle for Tibet's grievances with the Chinese government.

"In the case of Tibet versus China, violence is almost like suicide," the Dalai Lama said. "If violence, then bloodshed. Bloodshed means more casualties among the Chinese and, again, more hatred."...Asked about the US-led invasion of
Iraq, he said it would take a few years before it becomes clear whether the US military action was the right course of action.

The First Ringer added:

More than a few of the campus liberals in attendance probably left feeling like their heads had just been on a swivel after hearing the living icon of peaceful resolution not only say that some wars could be moral but that Korea and Vietnam were as well. For many, about the only thing that could have made such a question and answer session worse is if the Dalai Lama whipped out a cowboy hat and said ”bring it on” in reference to Iraq.

Read both articles.

The Suicide of Saint Paul

Tom Swift gave a Saint Paul history lesson last week:

During the tenure of Norm Coleman we enjoyed unprecedented progress in Saint Paul. Anyone who lives anywhere near W. 7th street cannot deny that Coleman's vision and hard work turned that dingy, moribund thoroughfare into a veritable showpiece of prosperity.

The brownfields that made up the north shores of the Mississippi river recieved the pre-planning that resulted in the rehabilitation and construction that one sees under the Smith Street Bridge. The exodus of the downtown was stopped, construction of unique and eye pleasing condominiums were completed.

And all done while maintaining a budget with a zero percent rate of growth.

Sounds pretty cool, huh?

Of course, the latest Minnesota Poll shows Kelly down by almost forty points in Saint Paul as we head into tomorrow's election. Let's see - we have unprecedented prosperity, a city that's rebounded in many ways from the malaise of the Latimer/Scheibel years (although there's room for improvement), with crime at a fraction of Minneapolis' rate.

No, the biggest problem in Saint Paul has been a public health issue; progressive left-wing Saint Paul DFLers have been dropping dead of coronary arrests from the incessant anger at Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly's apostasy and, by the way, success.

It's been a lousy decade-and-change for Saint Paul's radical left, since they last ran things. Oh, they've controlled the City Council, with a heavy, alpaca-clad hand - but they've been consistently faced down by a couple of strong, principled mayors who ran political rings around them.

Barring a miracle (a miracle I'm praying for), it could be all over tomorrow. And for the "progressives", the Jay Benanav wing of the St. Paul DFL? Swiftee continues:

But the good times are just around the corner for them now.

The city council is filled with just such frustrated socialists who no doubt have reams of special interest projects awaiting black hole funding. The election of Chris Coleman will be greeted with wild approbation from the likes of Progressive Minnesota and it’s spider web network of allies.

Coleman himself is a non-factor.

Chris Coleman is a milquetoast candidate who greeted his departure from the city council two years ago by saying that at least he wouldn’t have to “fake interest, while staying awake” at council meetings.

Hell, now he won’t even have to feign the slightest interest in what happens at those meetings, which is of course what the gang of four are counting on…oh, the party is on.

I’m happy about this because people tend to get comfortable after ten years of prosperity and peace. They’ve forgotten the double digit tax increases of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

A few years of socialist intervention is needed to refresh Saint Paul’s collective memories…and refreshed they will be.

I'm afraid so.

The long, dark night of radical DFL hegemony were lousy years in Saint Paul; Frogtown rivalled North Minneapolis for drugs and violence; University Avenue was a disgrace; downtown was collapsing, West Seventh was undergoing a long and painful recovery from having been gutted to make way for 35E years earlier; the Saint Paul I moved to in 1987 had huge problems.

Saint Paul today is doing much better - but has a problem that may dwarf all the troubles of the Machine Years; the city is controlled by a brace of DFL machine hacks who are supported by phalanx of people - government employees, teachers, union workers - whose extent of political awareness ends at slogans; the slogans they're being fed begin and end with "Randy Kelly Endorsed George W. Bush".

Who needs to worry about a healthy city - we have an apostate to punish!

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XV

It was Monday, November 4, 1985.

I haven't posted much about the week and a half since my (I later learned) fateful encounter with Tom Myhre. There's really just not much material. The days after the demonstration were a blur; a long, beige blur. Most of the time, I sat at my host's kitchen table, poring over want ads, making phone calls, bundling resumes into envelopes. Noon, if I was lucky, meant a trip to the post office to mail a couple of rap sheets out. But nothing much came back.

After my initial flurry, there weren't many job interviews, although not for lack of trying. I remember the occasional foray out onto the freeways, whose pace and idiosyncrasies I was slowly starting to figure out.

The thing I most remember from the next ten days was music; while the actual goings-on of that week and a half are lost to mundane, beige history, I can remember the songs I heard on the radio, each associated with some thing or activity or place or feeling: "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits, which I heard for the first time ever on WLOL-FM with Hines and Berglund as I turned out onto 494 for my first rush hour; "Shout" by Tears for Fears, driving down Cedar Avenue, dejected after another loser job interview; "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister, in the background after my host left for work and I started getting down to business; "I Just Died In Your Arms" by, er, Cutting Crew, in the same chair six hours later after probably a dozen phone calls and a few abortive conversations with disinterested hiring managers who'd no doubt heard from plenty of unqualified college grads already that day; "If You Love Somebody" by the newly Police-free Sting, as I sat and stared at MTV and wondered how Sting had gone from the great Police frontman to being perhaps the blandest presence in pop music; last, and worst, "We Built This City", which was everywhere - on MTV, on all the top-forty stations, at gas stations, everywhere. Hearing it, I wondered if the Cold War were perhaps lost after all; the notion that in 1985 a video director would think twenty seconds of footage of Craig Chaquico playing a guitar solo compelling struck me as oddly East German. I shivered and moved on.

There had really only been two big events: On Wednesday, November 30, I got a call back from Bruce Huff, the executive producer at KSTP, asking me in for an interview on Monday. And on Friday, November 1, I moved from the couch in Burnsville to an apartment on 37th and Minnehaha in South Minneapolis. The move, natch, was no big shakes; all my stuff fit in the back seat, with probably enough room left over for a passenger or two, if I'd needed. The guitars, of course, rode in front with me. It took me two trips to get my stuff stowed in my room, followed by a trip to a ratty mattress surplus joint on Lake Street, where thirty (of my rapidly-dwindling store of) dollars got me a single mattress, no box. I took it home, flopped it on the floor, and took a nap.

That night, of course, came the first big culture shock. There was a little hole-in-the-wall bar across the street, "Jimmy's Steaks and Spirits". I walked across Minnehaha for my first big one-beer night out - and figured there was no better way to break in my new place than to store my first six-pack in my first fridge. I flagged down the bartender. "Could I get a six to go?"

He laughed and kept moving.

Huh? "Do you do off-sale?"

He looked at me like I'd asked for an oil change. Asking for a six-pack to go - the great North Dakota after-bar-trip tradition - was illegal?

Friggin' nannystate, I thought as I paid my $1.75 tab and left.

The interview was scheduled for Monday at 3PM. I got a nice, early start - which was a good thing, since true to my rapidly-developing tradition of incompetence at navigating in the 'burbs, I got lost, taking Highway 36 to Snelling (AKA "MN 51") instead of Highway 61. 51, 61, what's the difference, right?

But I regrouped, got to the interview on time, and was escorted back to talk with a woman, Jean, who was the producer for a guy named Geoff Charles. Geoff wasn't there, so Jean - a thirtyfivish redhead with a manner that could charitably called "flinty", took over. The job she described - call screener for Charles - was a new one. While I'd prided myself on having done just about everything one could do in a radio station, talk radio was a whole new animal for me.

The interview went well, but not spectacularly. I walked out of the station telling myself you said you were done with radio. This interview probably makes it official. I didn't expect I'd gotten the job.

A phone call from Jean a couple of days later confirmed this. I pretty much gave up on the idea of radio - especially talk radio, which just didn't look like my thing. No big.

I hunkered down for a long-term search.

The Eternal Cloudiness of the Caffeine-Free Mind

Got off the elevator in cubeland this morning. Made the turn down the hall. Walked past the usual office doors, with a mild feeling of unease. Something just wasn't right.

The offices to my right and cubes to my left looked right - but they didn't feel right.

I walked down past the eight doors I've come to expect over the last - holy cow, almost two months! - and saw a supply closet.

I looked around.

Wrong floor.

I checked; at least I was in the right building.

Groaaan

It's been a long week. Much stuff going on. Not much energy on the Mitch front in the morning, during my customary 5-6:30AM blogging time.

I have another "Twenty Years Ago Today..." coming sometime today, along with a challenge from King, and much more.

Right now, I'm in my equally-customary maelstrom of morning kid/bus/homework stuff. More later.

Bork on Alito

Robert Bork on Sam Alito.

Key section:

overturning Roe v. Wade should be the sine qua non of a respectable jurisprudence. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito will hear a lot about stability in the law, the virtues of stare decisis, and the reliance many women have placed on that decision. The obtrusive fact is that constitutional law has never been stable. Precedent counts for less in constitutional law than elsewhere for the very good reason that the legislature can correct the Court’s mistake in interpreting a statute, but the Court is final when it invokes the Constitution and only the Court can correct its own mistakes. For that reason, many justices have made the point that what controls is the Constitution itself, not what the Court has said about it in the past. Cases like Roe, that some will claim must not be disturbed, were themselves repudiations of prior understandings of the Constitution.

If judgments about the prudence of overruling are invoked, the justices should take note of the fact that Roe lies at the center of the bitter polarization of much of American society. In countries where the issue is decided democratically, no such intense animus exists. Compromises are worked out and each side knows that it is free to continue the public debate in hope of doing better next time.

That's the thing I've wondered about for years; if Roe had never happened (or if it were reversed) and the states took over the issue, as they should, what would both sides give up on the issue?

Because it's clear that in a truly democratic system that both life and "choice" have enough of a constituency to keep their view at the table; neither side can extinguish the other (at least in most states; I could see Massachusetts and Utah moving to one extreme or the other).

Because I don't see either extreme giving ground gracefully.

The New McCarthyism

Deroy Murdock on the ongoing offensive against conservative belief buried in the politicization - call it the Wellstonization - of Rosa Parks' funeral.

hen the late Rosa Parks was laid to rest Wednesday at Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery, Americans also paid their last respects to the brand of civil-rights activism that she embodied. By refusing to yield her seat to a white man in the front of a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus on December 1, 1955, Parks (who died October 24 at age 92) both launched and epitomized a dignified, determined fight against hardened bigotry. It spread from the ultimately successful, 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, to sit-ins at Whites-Only lunch counters, to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s signature on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In just eight and a half years, Parks, King, Medgar Evers, Bayard Rustin, and other civil-rights pioneers killed and buried Jim Crow by being serious, self-respecting citizens who challenged their countrymen to supersede real, palpable racism and achieve true equality for all Americans. Their victory was one of this nation’s finest hours.

Compare the grace and magnanimity of their struggle with the behavior of today’s civil-rights activists and their liberal, Democratic allies. As black Americans run the State Department, Time-Warner, Merrill-Lynch, and even Interpol, today’s charlatans promiscuously play the race card, not as the rarely deployed, ultimate defense against ethnic bias, but as the first response to any inconvenience that anyone of color might perceive. Rather than appeal for unity and calm to overcome bigotry, today’s racial arsonists spray lighter fluid on the nation’s still-cooling embers of ethnic animus. Instead of conserving their energies to fight genuine hatred when it makes an increasingly rare appearance, today’s race-obsessed liberals see prejudice as often as the white rays of the morning sun scatter the black shadows of the night.

"Jim Crow" is the new "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party...".

Read the whole thing.

Let Met Get This Straight...

So Paris - capitol of France, the nation John Kerry wanted us to be more like - is is paralyzed by moslem riots - and the media is fairly silent:

Rampaging youths shot at police and firefighters Thursday after burning car dealerships and public buses and hurling rocks at commuter trains, as eight days of riots over poor conditions in Paris-area housing projects spread to 20 towns.

Youths ignored an appeal for calm from President Jacques Chirac, whose government worked feverishly to fend off a political crisis amid criticism that it has ignored problems in neighborhoods heavily populated by first- and second-generation North African and Muslim immigrants.

In the meantime, the mostly-non-existant rioting in New Orleans got wall-to-wall coverage and a sputtering Anchor Ken Anderson Cooper.

So do nonexistent poor Americans count for more than real moslems?

Almost As Bad As Those Crazy Conservatives

Pro-dictatorship protestors in San Francisco show off their intellectual firepower by throwing molotov cocktails.

I'm looking for some example of conservative protesters initiating violence - because, obviously, if I think the radical left has a more violent streak than the right, I'm deluded.

Oh, bomb-tossing conservatives? Where, oh where, are you?

Strib: Dog Protests Man!

The Strib covers covers yesterday's pro-dictatorship protests at the U of M:

More than 1,000 students, many of them from 40 Twin Cities-area high schools, joined Worrall -- some risking parental punishment or school discipline -- to protest the war in Iraq and the presence of military recruiters on campus. Organized by Youth Against War and Racism and the larger Socialist Alternative, the rally began at Coffman before weaving through campus and stopping traffic along several blocks of Washington Avenue before ending up in front of the Army and Navy recruiting offices on Washington at Oak Street.

Of course, some wonder about the timing and zeal:

Will Marean, a University of Minnesota student, carried a sign that read: "Get your [behind] Back to Class!" He said he suspects that much of the group's youthful zeal had to do with taking a day off from school rather than concern about the war.

Hm. Could there be any evidence for this assertion?

Remember the big demonstration in Saint Paul a few weeks ago? It got breathless, credulous publicity all over the local media, and at local high schools (I have sources). It was also on a Saturday.

I looked around when I was there. The only school aged children I saw there was my son - and he was with the good guys.

Fireworks Over Bismarck!

Red points out something I'd forgotten long ago; November 2 is the 116th anniversary of statehood for North and South Dakota.

She write, of course, one of the loveliest homages to my home state that I've ever read.

Snippet that I just love:

Silence covered the plains (this was the real calm before the storm, turns out - when everything came to a sudden sharp stop ... took a breath ... and then the heavens opened up) ... and in that silence, we heard a sound. Something that, to be honest, I've only heard in movies.

The thundering sound of horses hooves ... galloping horses ... the galloping sound of MANY horses ...

It has got to be one of the most exciting sounds I've ever heard in my life. Even though I've only heard that sound in movies, when it came to my ears, there was a rush of familiarity, and love, and knowing: Yes. That is that sound. I know that sound. Something in my DNA knows that sound intimately. It was thrilling.

We were on the edge of a large dip in the land, a bit off the trail, and the sound came from far below. We walked over to the edge, in the middle of the eerie stillness, all the grass suddenly straight, still, motionless, and looked out over the dip in the land. And there we saw them - we had only heard about them and heard that it was rare to get a glimpse of them - but there they were - a herd of wild horses, racing along the bottom of the plain in a massive herd. There were about 20 of them, galloping like mad things, freaking out because of the storm ... their manes and tails flying, their hooves churning up the dirt ... neighing and whinnying in alarm, bucking and kicking and running ...

I have never seen anything so beautiful, so moving, so unbelievable in my life.

They were fierce, savage, a bit scary, almost mythical. I've seen wild horses like that in my dreams. My fantasies.

Read, naturally, the whole thing. Sometimes I think you have to be a non-native to really appreciate the place (see Kathleen Norris).

Anyway - Happy Birthday, NoDak! (And SoDak, too, I guess).

Ant America, Grasshopper America

There was a time when Americans - at least in stereotype, but then many stereotypes exist because they occur just often enough to be accepted as, well, stereotypes - were a self-reliant people. Of course, the black 'n white liberal representation and mocking of this stereotype as "a bunch of (tee hee) rugged individualists" is inaccurate; frontiersmen and settlers depended on their communities as much as their own pluck and gumption.

But it was a fact of life; before there was an all-seeing, all-knowing bureaucracy to backstop citizens against life's twists and turns and nature's onslaughts, people had to keep a weather eye out, and be ready to fend for themselves if things got rough. It was a matter of life and death.

Along about forty years ago, that started changing.

I think it started about forty years ago - when the chattering classes started tittering at the people who'd built fallout shelters during the fifties and sixties. "Paranoid", they clucked.

In the seventies and eighties, the left worked overtime trying to paint those who opted to defend their homes, families and property with firearms as a fevered aberration, sick and paranoid and worse. It didn't work, of course, outside of a few enclaves on the coast and a few tony left-leaning 'burbs - but they tried.

After the Anthrax scare of a few years ago, FEMA advised people in high-risk areas to think about stockpiling plastic sheeting and duct tape, to build "Safe Rooms" against possible chemical or radiological attack. The chattering classes had a gleeful field day - "Plastic SHEETing! Against a DIRty bomb!" - ignoring the fact that it was indeed a simple measure that, in a pinch, could mean the difference between life and death (in this case a thrashing, horrible death from chemicals, or a slow, painful one from radiation poisoning, or a slower one still from lung cancer caused by aspirating a piece of radioactive material that a piece of plastic and a strip of duct tape could have easily turned away). And as the lefties used to bleat, if one life is saved, isn't it good enough?

Watch for the left to start tittering about Michael Chertoff's interview yesterday with the AP, in which he urged people to...

...prepare.

That was all.

Two months of hurricanes ravaging the Gulf Coast should prove that people need to make preparations so emergency officials can focus on those who are poor, elderly or otherwise can't help themselves, Chertoff said.

"For those people who say, 'Well, I can take care of myself no matter what, I don't have to prepare,' there is an altruistic element — that to the extent that they are a burden on government services, that takes away from what's available to help those who can't help themselves," Chertoff said. "That is a matter of civic virtue."

Chertoff's comments mark a new stage in Homeland Security's "Ready" campaign — which was widely ridiculed two years ago for urging homeowners to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting to safeguard their homes against a chemical or biological attack.

Here's a good general rule of thumb to follow: if you are listening to someone who titters about this sort of thing, ask them directly; "what do you know about this? How did you learn what you know?"

If they respond "Well, duh! I mean, plastic sheeting? Jugs of water in the basement? Puh-leeeeeze", then do yourself a favor; Kill them. And their families.

Because if you listen to them, that could very well be what they will do for you and yours.

(DISCLAIMER: The above was intended as hyperbole. This blog DOES NOT ADVOCATE KILLING LEFT WING MORONS. Although I could sold of covert chemical sterilization.

(No, that was also hyperbole, and not to be taken seriously).Now, Chertoff said, the department plans to reach out to school students to carry the preparedness messages home to their parents. Additionally, Homeland Security and the Ad Council launched a newspaper and radio campaign Monday pitched at small businesses to develop disaster plans for workplaces.Just watch; the left will - will - oppose any plan to spread disaster preparedness information through the schools.

Oh, wait - they already are:

But Dr. Vincent Ferrandino, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, cautioned against using the schools as messenger except "when it's absolutely necessary, and we consider it an issue of national importance."

"Schools need to be a place where important issues are discussed," Ferrandino said. "But we need to be careful that we don't use the schools constantly for everybody's latest and greatest new idea."

Right. Because goodness knows that the schools don't waste any classroom time with passing on useless, trite effluvia (he says, remembering the day his stepson spent two hours in an assembly to commemorate the life and impact of Selena).

Which brings up an idea for a post - but I'll get back to you all on that.

Whether the public will listen, however, is another matter.

Even with a week's notice of Hurricane Wilma, many Floridians failed to evacuate areas the storm flooded or to stock up on food, water and other essentials. The cavalier attitude prompted Republican Gov.
Jeb Bush to scold constituents, noting that people who sought relief from Wilma "had ample time to prepare."

"It isn't that hard to get 72 hours' worth of food and water," Bush said last week.

It isn't. Gov. Bush is correct.

But it's not something to which Americans are conditioned. Oh, people on the Great Plains put blankets and candles and bags of candy bars in their trunks when driving out of town in the winter, and the Mormons (forget theology for a moment) make a literal religious point about preparedness (Mormon families are supposed to stockpile at least a year's food), both admirable traits - and both as rare as hen's teeth in society at large.

"Even something like Katrina — where everybody watched that unfold and understood what those poor folks were going through — as compelling as that was, we're all busy people. And how long does it stick if you don't get reminded again and again and again?" [a FEMA official] said.

Well, my long layoff in '03 helped. I usually have a solid week's worth of canned or dry food in the house; one never knows when it'll come in handy even in non-emergencies.

Pitching the preparedness campaign to school children could be successful, he said, noting the fire prevention and anti-smoking programs that targeted students.

"The great lesson of all of these events is interdependence," Chertoff said. "We're all dependent on everybody else. Everybody has their role to play, and if people fail in their role, it's going to have a cascading effect."

That, actually, was a great lesson of 9/11; Americans aren't stupid, and when there's a crisis, most of them will step up and pull on reserves they (and society at large) didn't know they had.

Of course, it's a lot easier to draw on reserves of grit and pluck when you have enough food and water to keep your family at least comfortable while things are getting back to normal.

I know. Pretty uncool.

Behind Closed Doors

J-Po at the Corner on the closed door session:

I think the Democratic move today in the Senate is politically canny. In the past five days, Democrats have seen the political momentum shifting the president's way with shocking speed. They don't know what to do about the inspired Alito nomination, which they almost certainly can't filibuster.

Oh, yeah - and Bush's approval rating jumped six points, and is trending up.

In other words, all that krowing was premature:

And what do they have going for them right now but Scooter-gate? So by pulling this unprecedented maneuver with Section 21, they're staging a counterassault against the president's effort to change the political story of the moment. This is the sort of thing to make the Huffington Puffington people shriek with happiness and the Kossians to chortle with joy

The Dems' fortunes have taken a swing this week - thank goodness. But it's not all blue skies for the good guys:

And unfortunately, what the GOP has to respond to the maneuver is Bill Frist, who's a great and noble human being but a stinko political leader.

Doesn't it always seem to come back to Frist's inability to drive his caucus?

Since Miers is out of the way, maybe we could find a way to squeese Frist out, too?

Just a thought.

Free Speech: Get The Lead Out

Doug has the news on a very important bill:

I just got off the phone with Rep. Mark Kennedy's office regarding H. R. 1606, a bill he is co-sponsoring and which should be of great interest to bloggers of all political affiliations. The bill is intended:

To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to exclude communications over the Internet from the definition of public communication.

Near as I can tell (I have some research left to do), this is intended as at very least a step in the direction of freeing political bloggers from the prospect of federal regulation under the aegis of McCain-Feingold.

My note to my representative:

Rep. McCollum,

I would like to urge you to vote *for* H. R. 1606, which would exempt the alternate media - especially bloggers - from the restrictions of the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law.

I am watching this very, very closely.

Please contact your representatives; the vote should happen by this evening.

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

Been feeling a tad under the weather, and way too busy.

And what's better for that than another meme, via Red, Kathy and the Butchers?

This time it's "The Average American".

Statistically, the following are things associated with the "Average American":

• Eats peanut butter at least once a week - that one's totally feast or famine; I won't touch it for months, then burn through a bottle in a week.
• Prefers smooth peanut butter over chunky - You will eat whatever kind of peanut butter I put in front of you! No, I guess there are times when I'm in the mood for smoove, but chunky is still the best.
• Can name all Three Stooges - Ted, Harry and Nancy.

  OK, really? Moe, Larry, Shemp, Joe, Curly, Curly Joe.

• Lives within a 20-minute drive of a Wal-Mart - Thanks to the Waltons' inspired scavenging - gobbling up a failed K-Mart on University - if I stand on the gas I can get to my Walmart in under two minutes.
• Eats at McDonald’s at least once a year - Although it increasingly grosses me out, yes, I do.
• Takes a shower for approximately 10.4 minutes a day - TEN MINUTES? What are you people - made of spare time? Holy cow.
• Never sings in the showerI constantly sing in the shower. As Red says,

  ...it's well known that EVERYBODY sounds like Celine Dion or Bono in the shower.

  Outside the shower, I'm doing well to do a good Johnny Rotten. In the shower, I can carry off Robert Plant flawlessly.
• Lives in a house, not an apartment or condominium - Check.
• Has a home valued between $100,000 and $300,000 - Thanks to the Twin Cities housing boom, yes.
• Has fired a gun - Many, many guns. My favorites: The M-1 Garand, the Ljungmann (a WWII-era Swedish army rifle), a match-grade M-1911A1, an H&K HK91, and, one memorable afternoon, an M3 Grease Gun. I'm way overdue for another trip to the range.
• Is between 5 feet and 6 feet tall- I'm 6'5.
• Weighs 135 to 205 pounds - I'm a bit over that.
• Is between the ages of 18 and 53 - For another 11 years or so.
• Believes gambling is an acceptable entertainment option - Occasional flukes aside, I just don't "get" gambling. Tossing perfectly good money away? Why not just douse it in airplane glue and burn it - it looks cooler! Of course, my exception during the '80's was the horse track, when I was producing Sports Talk out at Canterbury Downs. I had a system where I never came back less than three for two, usually two for one. I also never staked more than $20, because I never had more than $20...
• Grew up within 50 miles of current home - More like 350.

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