Shot In The Dark

A Sea Of Palms In An Ocean Of Snow

First Ringer has an excellent piece on the Pennsylvania Senate race over at KVM.

Which, while I encourage you to read KVM as well as his own excellent The First Ring blog, is not something I'd normally link.

However, the title and first line grabbed me:

When the Heat’s On, I Went Down
In a Big Country, the race in Steeltown is king.

Not just a quote from Big Country, one of my favorite bands - but from Steeltown, one of my ten favorite albums of all time.

Cool.

Soon To Be A Disney-Channel Movie

Florida teen travels to Iraq for extra credit:

Maybe it was the time the taxi dumped him at the Iraq-Kuwait border, leaving him alone in the middle of the desert. Or when he drew a crowd at a Baghdad food stand after using an Arabic phrase book to order. Or the moment a Kuwaiti cab driver almost punched him in the face when he balked at the $100 fare.

But at some point, Farris Hassan, a 16-year-old from Florida, realized that traveling to Iraq by himself was not the safest thing he could have done with his Christmas vacation.

And he didn't even tell his parents.

Hassan's dangerous adventure winds down with the 101st Airborne delivering the Fort Lauderdale teen to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which had been on the lookout for him and promises to see him back to the United States this weekend.

It was for an assignment on "immersion journalism".

Keep all books on meth addiction away from the kid.

Plea

Over on Fraters, someone's looking for one of those REAGAN! stickers done up to look like one of those green WELLSTONE! stickers.

Please read the piece and write if you can help.

And if you're unsuccessful, may I suggest one of these?

I Bet Halliburton Paid For It

The Chicago Tribune does the unthinkable: questions the left's talking points about Bush's case for war in Iraq.

On Nov. 20, the Tribune began an inquest: We set out to assess the Bush administration's arguments for war in Iraq. We have weighed each of those nine arguments against the findings of subsequent official investigations by the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee and others. We predicted that this exercise would distress the smug and self-assured--those who have unquestioningly supported, or opposed, this war.

The matrix below summarizes findings from the resulting nine editorials. We have tried to bring order to a national debate that has flared for almost three years. Our intent was to help Tribune readers judge the case for war--based not on who shouts loudest, but on what actually was said and what happened.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Especially interesting is this part on their conclusions about Bush's "WMD" case:

There was no need for the administration to rely on risky intelligence to chronicle many of Iraq's other sins. In putting so much emphasis on illicit weaponry, the White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed.

This synchs up nicely with Berg's Law about Liberal Iraq Commentary:

No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the President's justifications for the War in Iraq at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive

Anyway, read the whole ChiTrib piece. It's excellent, no matter what side of the debate you're on.

Thank Goodness For The .08 Limit

The overarching wisdom of Minnesota finally adopting the .08 blood alcolhol limit as the standard for driving while intoxicated was proven in spades yesterday on I-94 in Minneapolis.

A driver, who tested .082, merely a hair over the new legal limit (!) - was caught after driving the wrong way down I94, hitting a woman's car, and causing all sorts of havoc:

Related Content

State Patrol Capt. Tom Fraser had a pretty solid checklist of what went right and wrong when a driver wreaked five minutes of havoc Thursday morning for motorists on two metro interstates.

The driver going the wrong way down Interstate Hwy. 94 in Minneapolis while very drunk and hitting a woman’s car was bad. But fortunately she wasn’t seriously injured. A good Samaritan followed the driver and played a role in helping the State Patrol arrest him in a timely manner. That was definitely a positive.

The driver and his passenger also had a pound of marijuana in the vehicle.

But I digress: this story shows the absolute need for the .08 limit:

A portable breath test showed the driver’s alcohol level at 0.24 percent, three times the limit for driving, Bammert said. A blood test also was given, Fraser said.

That's ri...er...huh?

.24?

Yeah. .24. But this weekend will be Minnesota's first New Years holiday as the last state to adopt the .08 standard, a level that will not make the roads one iota safer (most drunk driving accident are caused by people who test way over .1%), but will certainly serve to refill county coffers, creating a brand new class of criminals that, conveniently, will be paying counties a lot of money for the crime of being caught with a fairly benign amount of alcohol in their systems.

Let me put it this way: someone please show me any verifiable statistics (Mothers Against Drunk Driving stats don't count) that indicate people driving between a .08 and a .1 cause accidents in anywhere near the proportion of their numbers on the road.

Point: I drink very little. I drive drunk even less (as in, not for probably 18 years now) (Counterpoint: It irritates me to have to constantly qualify these things; "I oppose property forfeiture laws - but I'm not a drug dealer, just so's we're clear on that".

Hobby On Steroids

Chuck Olson is one of my short list of favorite leftybloggers. Oh, his blog Blogumentary is a snarkfest, and goodness knows I would never descend to snarking...

...let me start over. Chuck did the blog documentary Blogumentary, and has a role in some interesting projects: New Patriot, one of the less-sucky local leftyblogs; Minnesota Stories, the biggest/best Minnesota videoblog that I'm aware of (of which more shortly), and finally MNSpeak, the essential Minnesota blog aggregator. Downside: Chuck uses the word "Totally" way too much. Upside: He and his girlfriend Lorika are occasionally found at our blogger and trivia soirees at Keegans, and are genuinely cool people, even though they're totally...er, very wrong about most things political.

He left a comment in this thread:

if any of you guys has a video camera and isn't afraid to use it, please submit a short video to Minnesota Stories. if can be a slice of life, interesting interview or personal story, or even a political rant. for some reason it's hard to find video with a conservative bent -- i would welcome it.

Hmmmm.

I've thought about expanding this blog in one direction or another for a long time. Podcasting is a natural venue for me; I've been doing one form of audio production or another since I was a teenager, and I enjoy it a lot. I need to figure out what's wrong with my laptop, and then figure out how the whole 'pod thing is done in terms of code on the site. My blog goal for this year is to try a podcast. Now, I've heard other peoples' podcasts; Lileks' podcasts are wonderful, as one might expect from someone who brought us the legendary Diner and is perfectionistic enough to edit his home movies - monthly. The guy's a closet producer/editor. This is a good thing for doing audio. There's a time commitment, of course, to doing good audio production - and while I was by no means a great audio producer/engineer back when I did it for a living, I'm blessed and handicapped by the fact that if I do it, I really don't want the output to suck. And it takes time - something I don't have a lot of to spare.

Chuck is talking about videoblogging. I've done video - behind the camera, as an editor, producer and technical director on one cable access production or another, long ago. I have no style; I'm a gearhead, blessed with an ability to figure out how to work other peoples' expensive equipment. But if I absorbed two things, they are...:

• Video is Not Cheap - Cameras cost money - and are pretty much the bare minimum to do videoblogging (unless you do entirely captures of other peoples' video - which is both ethically dicey and also incurs some expenses). No, video people - I've heard you when you say you can get a camera for "...under $1,000" or "...not much over $500" or whatever cameras cost these days (I occasionally scope them out when I'm at Best Buy, for much the same reason that I occasionally saunter through Downtown Jaguar; it's fun to dream). Nothing out of two digits is "cheap"; the $500 I'd spend on a camera is 2-3 months' groceries, a chunk of a mortgage payment, a big chunk of a kid's college fund, a bunch of car insurance (my daughter will be 15 this summer - ugh) and G-d only knows what else. And then there's editing - cheaper nowadays online, but the editing apps usually (but not always) cost money. Money makes the world go around - and sometimes makes it stop, too. And as if that weren't enough...
• Video Eats Time - The old maxim was "for every minute of end product, assume an hour of editing". I'll admit it's an old maxim - I last worked in video in '89 - and that may have changed over time. And there certainly are shortcuts - I used to be good at "editing in the camera", choosing shots very, very carefully so they'd need the minimum of cutting and rearranging later. But the fact remains that doing video takes a ton of time; time to shoot ones footage, more time to edit it into something you'd want people to see. Now, the beauty of traditional blogging - the kind I'm doing now - is that there's almost no overhead; the time I spend writing is pretty much all there is to it. On top of my regular day, with the day job, taking care of two kids, taking care of the house, practicing an instrument or two, and a fair number of the kids and my extracurriculars, the blog's saving grace is that I can do it between 5 and 6:30 in the morning. I might be able to squeeze in a monthly podcast; I have a hard time figuring out how I'd fit in the time to shoot, much less produce, a videoblog.

Which is a shame, because it looks like a cool idea. I'd love to do video; there are a lot of things to be done out there, and I think I could do 'em. I'd just have to let another part of my day go to hell...

As to Chuck's comment - that there's not a lot of video coming from conservatives - that's interesting. I'll withhold the usual snark ("We have jobs!" Nossirree, no snarking here. Won't say it) and simply speculate (that's all it is) that most people who are drawn to the level of passionate activism for conservatism that'd lead them to things like punditry and blogging came up through fields that don't reinforce the sort of artistic sensibility that one'd need to do a good video or audio blog (Lileks is a bad example; he came late to the right; so am I, by the way); conservatives tend to grow up in environments and evolve in fields that...well, foster conservatism (!), fields that (I'm admittedly generalizing here) value left-brain analytical skills over right-brain expressive talents. It is (I don't think I'm too far out of line here) part of the reason you find so few conservative painters and coffee-shop owners and social workers, and so relatively few liberal engineers and financial analysts and actuaries. All generalizations, of course, are false; I'm a conservative who, in a perfect world, would be writing and recording music and would drop everything to get an MA in film if I could (which I can't); I know liberal analysts; again, it's a generalization.

So Chuck: I'd love to do videoblogging. Get back to me in about five years, when my kids are up and out of the house...

Foursies

Via Red, another meme. After a few of these, I start to feel like an outtake from High Fidelity, but so it goes.

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
1) Remedial English tutor
2) Stagehand
3) Spotlight operator for Molly Hatchet
4) Overnight talk show host.

FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER
1) Casablanca
2) This Is Spinal Tap
3) A Bridge Too Far
4) Better Off Dead

FOUR BOOKS YOU COULD READ AGAIN & AGAIN
1) Theodore Rex
2) Crime and Punishment
3) Hunt for Red October
4) Escape from Sobibor.

FOUR CITIES/PLACES YOU'VE LIVED IN
1) Jamestown, ND
2) Carrington, ND
3) Minneapolis, MN
4) Saint Paul, MN. And that's it.

FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH
1) Most Extreme Elimination Challenge
2) Veronica Mars
3) Dog, Bounty Hunter
4) Cops

FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION
1) Europe (UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France and Germany)
2) Chicago
3) Seattle
4) The North Shore of Lake Superior

FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY
Dozens, but...
1) Fraters
2) Yucky Salad With Bones (on the chance that she's updated things)
3) KAR FAR
4) The Sheila Variations.

FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS
1) Turkish
2) An honest-to-pete Chicago-style Polish, with kraut, peppers, onions and mustard.
3) Margarita Pizza
4) Mexican

FOUR PLACES YOU'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
1) Edinborough Castle
2) Boulder
3) Manhattan
4) The North Shore

That'll do for now.

Crosshairs on the Easter Bunny

Via Savage Republican, a story that I knew was only a matter of time; a teacher slags Santa in front of a group of elementary school kids:

Theresa Farrisi stood in for (Jamey) Schaeffer’s regular music teacher one day last week. One of her assignments was to read Clement C. Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” to a first-grade class at Lickdale Elementary School.
“The poem has great literary value, but it goes against my conscience to teach something which I know to be false to children, who are impressionable,” said Farrisi, 43, of Myerstown. “It’s a story. I taught it as a story. There’s no real person called Santa Claus living at the North Pole.”...[Jamey] Schaeffer got off the school bus later that day, dragging her backpack in the mud, tears in her angry little eyes.“She yelled at me, ‘Why did you lie?’” recalled Jamey’s mother, Elizabeth. “‘Why didn’t you tell me Santa Claus died?’”...“The teacher stopped reading and told us no one comes down the chimney,” Jamey said, curling into a ball on the couch, bracing her chin on her knees, her voice shrinking away like melting ice cream. “She said our parents buy the presents, not Santa.”

Any best on whether Farrisi has children? Anyone? Anyone?

Funny part is, I know people like this; fortysomething, "child-free" (I really really most sincerely hate that term) people who still know exactly how kids should be raised, and think it abhorrent that kids believe in Santa Claus past, say, age seven. They tend also - in my admittedly anecdotal experience which I nevertheless believe to be universal - to be joyless drones in person.

Again, just my two cents worth.

Story Of The Year

Kool Aid Report Flava Aid Report is polling for the top Minnesota Organization of Bloggers news stories of 2005. Go and vote.

Among the condenders:

• Bogus Doug spills martini on keyboard; Hillarity ensues
• The commencement of open hostilities between Mitch "City Boy" Berg and JB "Redneck" Doubtless [MITCH ADDS: Which is pretty funny, considering I'm from North Dakota and JB is from like Orono or Excelsior or someplace like that]
• LearnedFoot passed over twice for Supreme Court nomination
• Sisyphus' reaps windfall from purchase of Halliburton stock
• Dumb leftyblogger actually believes that Sisyphus reaped windfall from purchase of Halliburton stock [MITCH ADDS: This was on my short list]
• Brian "St. Paul" Ward contemplates standing in a long line for a free burrito [MITCH ADDS: Human drama at its finest]
• Topsy turvey MOB mayoral election results in a dark horse winner and the liberation of Kevin Ecker
• Ryan Rhodes' "ginormous" poop
• Governor snubs funny bloggers [MITCH ADDS: ...and invites the best anyway.]
• James Lileks discovered to be moonlighting as Bob Balaban
• Entire MOB commemorated wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald; Titanic sinking anniversary goes unobserved as Gordon Lightfoot failed to write song about it [MITCH ADDS: Well, that and it being like the thirtieth anniversary and all. And Titanic being way overexposed and a sucky movie. Although Kevin Kling did a play based on the Fitz. Which brings up a question - is Kevin Kling any relation to Bill "I Will Control Public Media Worldwide" Kling? That might explain why Kevin is the official Twin Cities playwrite of MPR. Just asking. Leave a comment if you know. ]

Vote! We're burning daylight!

Defensive

I'm not sure what has me the most jazzed; the fact that the Bears have won the NFC North title, or that they have the #1 defense in the NFL

Yeah, yeah, save the heckling; the NFC North is the weakest conference in the game, and Da Bearss didn't have the toughest schedule in the league all in all.

But still:

The Bears allowed fewer than 10 points in their sixth straight home game, the longest such streak in the NFL since Green Bay held all seven of its opponents to single digits in 1935.

The Bears yielded just 61 points in eight home games this season, the fewest by an NFL team since the 16-game schedule was instituted in 1978.

The Bears finished 7-1 at home for the fifth time, following 1986, 1988, 1990 and 2001. Their only perfect 8-0 record at home occurred in the 1985 Super Bowl season.

Don't get me wrong; in my schedule, something's gotta give, and that something is TV sports. Never watch it. Ever.

But there's something oddly reassuruing about Da Bearss being a defensive juggernaut. Even during their nadir - the Abe Gibron years of the early seventies, even before the ugly days when their leading rusher was QB Bobby Douglas (in 1973, Wes Montgomery led the team 230-odd yards - for the season), the sun rose in the east, and only constants were death, taxes and Da Bearss defense. When I was a kid and still had sports heroes, they were the Bears' 'backers Dick Butkus and Doug Buffone, who still dealt the defensive hurt no matter how feebly the offense performed. Watching the Bears back then was a character building experience: from the team's record, one learned to delay gratification; from the offense, to not put one's faith in management; and from the defense, the greatest of life's lessons - persevere, hit high and hard, persevere some more, a good "war face" solves a lot of problems, and persevere even more.

As I do every year, I predict the Bears will win the Super Bowl this year. And next year, and every year after that. I've been right once, and I'm sure I will be again.

Dead On Arrival

I heard Willie Clark this morning.

Let's get back to that.

KSTP's announced new lineup marks the latest installment in KSTP-AM's swing toward the mushy center.

The word from inside KSTP-AM for the past half a decade has been that Ginny Morris - the Hubbard family scion that controls the station, company org charts notwithstanding - has always been uncomfortable with the "conservative" talk label (even though it was conservative talk that pulled the station from 2-point land in the Arbitron ratings, made KSTP-AM the cash cow of the Hubbard empire, and ultimately has enabled Hubbard to remain an independant entity in a broadcast industry that has been consolidating for over a decade). Morris has always wanted, say the sources, to be more of a "community" station, like the WCCO of yore; more local chat and sports and apolitical talk, less confrontation and risk of alienating the (large) percentage of the local population that disagrees with the dominant talkradio paradigm. It's the same theory that led Morris to plunk millions of dollars into Hubbard's FM107 "chick talk" operation - the theory that women just don't want to talk politics (or, judging by 107's ratings, much of anything else).

The theory posited last summer by the likes of Clear Channel on a national scale, and by KSTP locally, was that conservative talk's glory days are behind it - and KSTP's rough summer quarter (along with a dicey quarter for AM1280, where I do a show on the weekends for those of you who haven't heard) seemed, briefly, to bear that out.

Of course, the latest numbers show KSTP and the Patriot up (and AM950 back down, and flirting with dropping under the dreaded one-point mark), and Clear Channel is building its new talk operation around Rush Limbaugh (their scheduled point-counterpoint afternoon show notwithstanding), and all three major talkers have been bidding over the past year and a half for Jason Lewis' long-awaited return; not a bad demand curve, for a genre that's dying on the vine, huh?

OK, where were we?

Oh, yeah. Willie Clark.

Now, I think he just started here in the last week or so, after moving here from Sioux City. And it can take a while for a host to develop chemistry with his time slot, support staff (Pat Reusse, Kenny Olson, etc) and audience. Also, I caught less than an hour this morning; jumping from a small market like Sioux City to the #16 market in the country is also a bit of culture shock; all of the qualifications are duly noted.

That said: He's like Dave Lee, without the edginess.

KSTP-AM has managed to kill two birds with one stone; it's knocked itself out of contention in the morning race and returned to the old Hubbard tradition of having unlistenably bland morning shows. Bob Davis was the first listenable morning show at KSTP-AM since it went talk in 1980, barring the first year or so of Barbara Carlson and any time Bob Yates may have spent as a morning guy.

Again, allowing that Clark could grow into the slot and become a huge success, my first impression is that he makes me long for the glory days of Mike Edwards in the Morning.

The Politics of Someday

On a local political discussion forum, a DFL activist and school-board member or member-elect wrote about a comment I'd made about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

Spot the leaps of faith:

[People should not] rely on the statement that "the results after nearly three years are resoundingly good...The alleged "results" to which Mitch will refer won't be from an independent study...ince I don't have the time to engage in the kind of public sparring
that Mitch and I did with this issue several years ago (in part because some
of the people like me who worked against conceal carry are not subscribed to this listserv), I'll simply point to who the real winners were in the so-called "grass roots" effort that led to the passage of the law: that would be the gun manufacturers. Mitch will undoubtedly talk about how the gun manufacturers had absolutely no influence on this issue in Minnesota, but I suspect some day when sanity prevails around gun issues, we'll become
privy to the internal communications and other strategies that were used to
help create fear, gain passage of these laws in state after state, and ultimately lead to more and more sales of guns..Someday soon, hopefully, the politics will swing the other way, such that the interests of the overwhelming number of Americans who oppose such efforts to allow more guns in public will be accurately represented in the laws that govern firearms and their safety.

In other words: "I have no evidence, any evidence you produce will be ickypoopy, your side is insane, my side is bigger even though I have no electoral or demographic evidence to prove it, there's a conspiracy but I can't prove it, and eventually The South my side is going to win anyway, and I can't hear you, nya nya nya..."

In other words, the evidence that there's a huge mass of Americans who support draconian gun control - like Ted Kennedy's evidence of Homeland Security thuggishness, like the climate of conservative hate evidenced by the wave of other fake hate crimes, like the legal case against the NSA wiretapping of communications between captured Al Quaeda capos and their American accomplices, like the memos from the anonymous source that were roundly debunked but are still "fake but accurate" - the proof is coming. Any day now. Really.

The dog ate their homework.

The check is in the mail.

Another Lefty Hoax

Via KVM, I caught this piece by James Taranto:

It’s Mao or Never

“The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for ‘The Little Red Book’ by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story,” reports the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass.:

The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.

Among those who fell for the story, as we noted Friday, was Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who cited it in a Boston Globe op-ed piece (though he claimed the book in question was “the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Manifesto”). According to a Globe news story on the hoax, the Globe interviewed the shifty student–whose request for anonymity both papers have respected even though he lied to them–”but decided not to write a story about his assertion, because of doubts about its veracity.”

Ted Kennedy used this story to condemn the administration in a Boston Glob op-ed last week.

Informed that the report was yet another lefty hoax, Kennedy's people responded:

Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, said last night that the senator cited ‘’public reports” in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy’s broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.

"Fake but Accurate", as Gary at KVM notes.

Add it to the list of fake hate crimes sweeping liberal campuses nationwide.

Hey - any news on that Paul Mirecki investigation? People are still waiting.

Note to lefties: With the advent of blogs, faking hate crimes is pretty dicey business.

The Poles Remain

Poland's new, relatively conservative government will keep its troops in Iraq for another year:

Poland's government says it has taken the "very difficult decision" to extend its military deployment in Iraq until the end of 2006.

The new conservative government's decision reverses the previous leftist administration's plan to pull troops out in early 2006.

Poland, a staunch ally of the US, has about 1,500 troops stationed in Iraq.

It is the fifth biggest foreign contingent in Iraq, after the US, Britain, South Korea and Italy.

The move partly reflects the slow drift in Polish politics, from the leftist bloc that paralyzed it for much of the Nineties to a more rightward (by European standards) tilt today, and partly shows Poland's desire to be taken seriously as a political, military and economic force in Europe. Polish jokes aside (and jokes about Polish sloth and military incompetence were largely German inventions, Poland being to Germany what Iowa is to Minnesota). The Polish military has become, by many standards, among the best in NATO.

Contingents from other nations - Ukraine and Bulgaria this past week - have reached the ends of their commitments and left, while others like Japan and South Korea have drawn their forces down.

Source: the BBC

Why care?

Because in 1992, a year after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the potemkin organization by which the USSR controlled Eastern Europe, Tom Brokaw declared at the end of a story about the new Polish democracy's economic teething pains "It seems that Poland's experiment with free enterprise has been a failure".

This, of course, nine years before they claimed that our invasion of Afghanistan could not succeed, 11 years before they declared that a US liberation of Iraq would cost 50,000 American lives and lead to Stalingrad-style fighting that would level Baghdad, and 13 years before they declared that Democracy was impossible in Iraq (but, to be fair, it wasn't long after they'd declared that Nicaragua was hunky-dory, but that democracy could never come to El Salvador).

I've joked that the Minnesota Vikings' fortunes are inversely related to Tom Barnard's attitude about them. So, it would seem, for nations; their odds of succeeding are inversely proportionate to the American Media's opinion of them.

Lah Di Friggin' Da

Brady Averill of the PiPress looks ahead to blogs' potential impact on the '06 campaign.

She misses the most important point of all.

Averill kicks off with an ironic aside:

"There are some right-wing blogs that even if you tried to have a conversation with them, it's essentially a bunch of frat guys having a party and doing a beer dance,'' said Michael McIntee, producer for the Inside Minnesota Politics blog and podcast. "And that's not useful; it's pretty much making noise."

This from Mike McIntee, who launched a specious attempt at a lawsuit to try to flip the identity of Minnesota Democrats Exposed. Just saying, Brady, that you could pick slightly more-credible sources on the subject.

But I digress. Mr. Averill hits the MSM anti-blog talking point, citing Larry Jacobs, who must have a full-time gig answering media questions; he seems to be the only person on any local reporter's rolodex...:

People who possess strong political beliefs are able to read "almost exclusively from information sources that support their already existing views," said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study for Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.
Partisan blogs might help people on the fence decide whom to vote for, said Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. But they're not about to change minds, especially when the readers go to blogs with similar views.

...which is the usual snif that you get from academics and the MSM - and as usual, misses the point.

Blogs may not change anyone's mind (or they may; I've had my mind changed on at least one issue by bloggers); it's irrelevant. Where blogs excel - and where they'll matter in the '06 campaign - is at informing, empowering and mobilizing. Blogs pass on information that the even talkradio, much less the MSM, won't touch; they empower the citizen to own the issues; they are a direct conduit to activate the people that the larger "elite" media don't bother with.

Blogs may not change any minds - but they will catalyze energy.

Rex Sorgatz, creator of the mnspeak.com online forum, said a significant number of the political blogs listed on his Web site are "intrinsically partisan." He said he doesn't have anything against those blogs, but he's "not sure those kinds of blogs are going to change anything in the world."

Powerline, Charles Johnson and the Free Republic - as partisan as one gets - brought down Dan Rather.

Kos notched Trent Lott.

Captain Ed will have played a role in bringing down Canada's liberal government.

Ukranian bloggers - many of them partisan - played a pivotal part in the Orange Revolution.

Rex Sorgatz may not change the world, but he's hardly the final word.

And did you think we could get through an article about blogs without the traditional grump about "no editors?" Hah!

Along with partisanship, credibility is another problem for blogs.
There's nothing in the First Amendment about the need for an editor. Bloggers can write anything they want; they can spout fact or fiction.
Jacobs advises readers to beware: "There's no gatekeeping here."

The popularity of blogs is a symptom of the peoples' growing distrust of the "gatekeepers", and perhaps of the diminishing need for them.

Big question: who picks sources for these articles, anyway? Gary Miller of KVM got a quote, but beyond that - Jim McIntee of the ethically-dubious Inside Minnesota Politics, which gets around 30 visits a day, and even at the height of its' suit-crazy peak was averaging 60 a day? MN Republican Watch, with all of 13 incoming links and a backlog of niggling inside-politics gossip to tittler about? No, there's nothing wrong with low-to-mid-traffic blogs; many of my favorite blogs clock 100-300 visits a day - but does Mr. Averill expect to get sweeping insight into the world of blogs from what looks like a random collection of obscure writers (says Mitch, noting that he is himself an obscure writer)? To say nothing of Larry Jacobs, who is about as credible on blogs as I am on cooking?

Sort of like asking "Pulse" magazine for a sweeping insight about the Chicago Tribune, isn't it?

Ms. Averill: Hang in there.

Wouldja Believe...?

Just the other day, I was thinking about the '87 World Series, and wondering whatever happened to various members of the team - including Jeff Reardon.

Sorry I asked:

Former major league pitcher Jeff Reardon was arrested Monday on charges he robbed a jewelry store.

Reardon, 50, walked into Hamilton Jewelers at the Gardens Mall about 11:50 a.m. Monday and handed an employee a note that said he had a gun and the store was being robbed, according to the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department.

Reardon fled the store with an undisclosed amount of cash. Police found him at a nearby restaurant, recovered the stolen money and charged him with armed robbery.

That's going to hurt his Earned Robbery Average.

Bummer.

Black Septemberfest

I had high hopes for Steven Spielberg's Munich, which purports (in its trailers) to tell the story of Israel's response to the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.

Scott Johnson in Powerline points to a NYSun piece by Mitch Webber, a Harvard law student.

Read it all, of course - but the key point to me is here:

Spielberg and [screenwriter Tony] Kushner end up glorifying Jewish victims, but deploring those who would keep Jews from becoming victims. Their sense of Jewish tragedy blinds them to the possibility of Jewish heroism.

This is a dichotomy that paralyzes the American left - of which Spielberg is a paying member - on so many levels:

• They support the troops - but revile the mission to which they are committed
• They sympathize with victims - but refuse to discomfit the victimizers, whether on the streets of America's cities, the United Nations, or in the capitols where tyrants hold sway.
• They wage war on poverty - by endlessly subsidizing it, guaranteeing its survival.
• And in Munich, Spielberg rebukes violence - committed against killers of the innocent.

As Webber notes, Spielberg fails to mention the Germans' shameful record - not only the gross imcompetence during the hostage-taking itself (which they've rectified over the intervening decades - the Germans' hostage-rescue troops are among the world's best) but in letting the terrorists go on dubious technicalities and with much suppressed evidence.

The real story of Munich - the incident, not the movie - was that after German released the surviving Black September terrorists within months of the massacre, showing Israel that justice was only for killers of non-Jews, the Mossad tracked down and killed all but one (or, say some sources, three) of them (One, Ali Hassan Salameh, bought eight years of survival when an inexperienced second-string Mossad team killed an innocent Arab waiter in Lillehammer, Norway - a case of mistaken identity that led to the arrest of five agents. Salameh had an unfortunate encounter with a Mossad car bomb in Beirut in 1981).

The real lesson of Munich is one that 48% of America has yet to take to heart; when terrorists are stalking you, it's best to ignore what the Germans - or any other Europeans - think about you. Their motives are at heart as inimical to ours as they are to Israel's.

Christmas Buzzkill???

Cathy in the Wright, in a post from last Friday, ran through some reasons Christmas just didn't feel quite right; the unseasonably-warm weather played a part, of course.

And then...:

Or maybe it's because I heard some contemporary Christian singer butcher "Angels We Have Heard On High" so badly that I couldn't shake the mental image of Jesus crawling back up on the cross and yelling, "They're not quite ready yet, Dad."

I heard a disturbing amount of that this season.

And after seeing their damn ad on TV all this past month, I'd love to have been at this pitch meeting:

SUIT #1: "The Trans-Siberian Orchestra? What's that? Balalaikas and Mukluks?

SUIT #2: "No, no! Er...think Mannheim Steamroller crossed with Whitesnake!"

And yet Christmas goes on.

Deafening Silence

I'm a divorced parent with two kids; I'm also blessed with a good career and an education I got before I got married. Life isn't bad at all.

But sometimes I ponder what a harrowing thing life must be for kids - and I do mean kids, ages 15 or even younger up through their mid-twenties, who get pregnant and have kids without being married, and frequently (usually) without any significant involvement by the father in the child's life.

Kids are difficult - so education, serious job training, and a chance to earn serious money are generally out. But for all that, the kids are deprived, too; trying to raise a kid when you're not done raising yourself is statistically a fraught job.

And you have to figure the kids are going to come out if the experience with some problems.

Well - everyone but the Strib figures, anyway, as Mitch Pearlstein of the Center of the American Experiment notes:

The nonmarital birth rate for Hennepin County as a whole in 2003 was 29.9: 22.9 percent for Asians; 54.2 percent for Hispanics, and 83.4 percent for American Indians. These numbers are also informative in the matter of income and other differences between and among groups.

Now imagine just a single group, one in which an excruciating 44 percent of all young men between ages 18 and 30 were arrested in a recent year (1999). Given the often catastrophic effects of police records on future earnings, marital prospects and other facets of life, is it realistic to believe that members of such a group, on average, will wind up doing nearly as well as their statewide neighbors? Of course not, again, is only the answer.

And yet...

This is true by definition. Nonetheless, there isn't a single acknowledgment of this statistical fact of life in the Star Tribune's Opinion Exchange package on income, racial and other sobering gaps in the Twin Cities (Dec. 18).

The first and much larger number above (78.6 percent) refers to the percentage of "live births to unmarried women" among African-Americans in Hennepin County in 2003. The second number (15.9 percent) refers to the percentage of such births to white residents the same year.

Hugely disparate data like these would seem to suggest that out-of-wedlock births and the evaporation of marriage are profound problems, and that if we have any hope of reducing income and other chasms between whites and communities of color in Minnesota, we must address all causes foursquare, including these. Yet how many times do you think the word "marriage" or anything akin to it appeared in the editorial and two columns? Not once.

I've always wondered why unwed parenthood - an economic and social drag on all of society, but especially the hispanic, black, and (above all) Native American communities, is so "hands-off" to the left and the media?

(The cynic in me has the answer, of course; because unwed juvenile parents are a natural, life-long constituency for government "services", which means they're essentially captive voters; as their children are likely to repeat the same pathologies, they are a great investment for big government in the long term).

Simple Luxury

I'm enjoying perhaps one of life's simplest pleasures; a paid day off.

Because Christmas fell on a Sunday, my company gave us today as a company holiday. So I'm sitting here basically without a lot to do...

...if you don't count backed-up housework.

And some world news.

Are You Ready For Some Disorientation?

Monday Night Football is leaving ABC.

Sort of like the Rockettes leaving radio city.

Merry Christmas

I'd just like to take a moment this Christmas Eve to wish everyone, everywhere, a Merry Christmas, full of love, the whole joy and meaning of the season.

Pray for (and help) the refugees from the Gulf Coast, that they can find themselves at home again, whereever "home" becomes.

And of course, pray for peace on earth.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXI

It was Christmas Eve, 1985. I'd been working at KSTP-AM for a week.

The bad news: it was a part-time job that started at $3.35 an hour.

The good news: I'd managed to find a mid-day board-operator shift that the Executive Producer, Rob Pendelton, was working. "Why should a highly-skilled executive like yourself be working the board?" I asked; Rob agreed, which gave me two more hours a day.

My budget was looking like it was working out like this:

• Half of my money was going to my rent.
• A further quarter was going to my commute - from south Minneapolis to Maplewood, northeast of Saint Paul. As the weather got colder, my car's mileage got worse; during one cold snap that first winter, I figured that I was getting about 8mpg.
• The rest of the budget - $100 a month - was for me.

I was so stoked!

I worked through the day - Vogel had a fill-in, as I recall. The snow started around mid-day; it was cold, and it began snowing heavily.

At the end of the day, the guest host took off like a shot. It was 6PM, and dark, and the only people left in the studio were producer Dave Elvin, newscaster Cathy Wurzer (yes, that Cathy Wurzer) and me.

I went out to start my car. Nothing. Zip. Not even a click.

I went back into the studio and started calling garages from the Yellow Pages (handicapped by my ignorance of the geography of the area; I had no idea what 'burbs to look in, or for that matter that I was probably a mile from Saint Paul, or for that matter any idea of what part of Saint Paul was where). Nobody was available - or the ones that were cost a lost more than I could afford on Christmas Eve.

Dave offered to drive me home, and Rob Pendelton could give me a ride to work the next day, Christmas.

I took him up on it. Dave dropped me off at my apartment in a slushy, white-coated South Minneapolis, and I went inside.

My roommate was visiting family in Wisconsin for Christmas, so I had the place to myself. For that matter, I had South Minneapolis to myself; there was no traffic on Minnehaha Avenue to speak of.

I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza - at $3, a bit of a splurge - and a couple of beers (Stroh's, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I'd gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of 'em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).

By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope's mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me...

By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for "Gab Line", a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt' know about their seedy reputation). "Only 10 cents a minute". I dialled in.

There were two people on the line; a very drunk-sounding black woman who'd just moved up from Chicago, and a guy who sounded like he'd lost all his teeth and could neither pronounce nor enunciate. I don't remember what the conversation was about - and with a drunk and a guy who in retrospect was probably a meth addict, does it matter? - but it killed half an hour and $3, yet another big splurge on this red-letter Chrismas Eve.

I hung up and sat down on the couch, playing guitar for a bit, thinking about things.

Downside: I was nearly-broke, I was alone as I could be on Christmas Eve, and my car was an inert lump of rotting metal in a parking lot in Maplewood.

Upside: Things were moving, finally. I had a job - I knew that I could get a job, that I wasn't completely unemployable and worthless - and I knew that I could get by for a while. I enjoyed the job, as crappy as the pay was. And after the holiday, I could approach the whole music thing with a clear mind and, now that I was employed (more or less), some mental energy.

All in all, not bad.

Legal Grounds

From Radioblogger, a transcript of Hugh Hewitt's interview with U of Chicago Law professor Cass Sunstein - constitutional law expert and self-described liberal and non-Bush tool:

If the Congress authorizes the president to use force, a pretty natural incident of that is to engage in surveillance. So if there's on the battlefield some communication between Taliban and al Qaeda, the president can monitor that. If al Qaeda calls the United States, the president can probably monitor that, too, as part of waging against al Qaeda.

HH: Very good. Part two of your analysis...If...whether or not the AUMF does, does the Constitution give the president inherent authority to do what he did?

CS: That's less clear, but there's a very strong argument the president does have that authority. All the lower courts that have investigated the issue have so said. So as part of the president's power as executive, there's a strong argument that he can monitor conversations from overseas, especially if they're al Qaeda communications in the aftermath of 9/11.

As noted in previous posts, there is some complexity to this issue - and Sunstein notes it. Read the whole thing.

Dumb Idea

Consumer "activists" are pressing Congress to mandate "a la carte" pricing for cable television.

Note to activists - stop "advocating" for me on this one, please. OK?

Don't get me wrong - bundling is irritating. I have to buy eight channels I don't want to get "Discovery", for example, and couple more for "Comedy Central".

Tom Readmond of the Media Freedom Project takes the Cable industry's side in today's Strib:

Imagine if the government were to mandate that newspaper publishers had to produce an entertainment-section-free version of the paper, as well as versions tailor-made for subscribers who don't want stocks, sports, and so on.

In the end, you might end up with a paper free of the "Source" section -- but you might also end up paying $6 for your daily paper.

Readmond goes on to note that bundling is the norm, not an exception, in marketing.

He misses the real problem, of course; local cable systems always operate as a government-chartered monopoly within an area. They place prices where they want to because, really, what else are you going to do?

As long as cable companies have an effective monopoly on bringing reliable, relatively inexpensive programming to your TV set, there's no real market-driven reason for them to change.

So what's the answer? Allowing telephone and internet companies to start using their pipelines for provide programming along with their regular services? That is, of course, the answer - which is why cable companies have been fighting that natural, market-based reform (which responds to a market need that cable companies themselves are creating).

Worst case: Government forces cable companies to provide a la carte pricing - but regulates alternate programming.

Next-worst case: Government forces cable companies to provide a la carte - but doesn't regulate internet and phone companies' efforts. This will eventually drive a huge shakeout in the cable industry, as cable companies, saddled with huge infrastructure, can't compete.

Best case: Leave it all alone. The programming you're getting on cable now will be available through a couple of alternate channels soon - which will, in turn, eventually force the cable companies to respond with the individual-channel pricing we all want anyway.

Settle down, "activists". On this issue, we're better off without you.

Overpowered By Cat

I found this bit in Broken Nails, a Saint Paul leftyblog that, I am pleased to say, doesn't suck.

According to the PiPress' "City Hall Scoop" blog, my cat beat me.

In last month's Saint Paul School Board election, the Scoop reported on the writ-ein votes that were counted:

Other multi-vote candidates included:

Jesse Ventura, former governor
Elizabeth Dickinson, green party mayoral contender
Margaret Lovejoy, school board contender eliminated in primary
Nosemarie Berg, pet cat of conservative blogger Mitch Berg
Randy Kelly, incumbent mayor
Bugs Bunny
George Bush

Further down the list:

These contenders each got one vote:

Local politicos:
George Latimer, former mayor
Billy Dinkel, Kelly campaign staffer
Anne Harris, County board candidate
John Marshall, City Council aide
John Manning, Ayd Mill Road opening opponent
Eve Stein, former City Council candidate
Don Luna, former city clerk
Ella Thayer, former City Council secretary
John Choi, lobbyist
Robert McClain, former City Council candidate
Tyrone Terrill, city Human Rights director
Tom Conlon, school board member
Ted Davis, public relations guy
Roy Magnuson, teachers union activist
Jim McDonough, Ramsey County Commissioner
Paula Maccabee, former City Council member
Sean Dunn, Expo Elementary teacher and husband of Ward 5 council aide Jennifer Dunn
Mitch Berg, conservative blogger
Matt Reinartz, former City Council aide
Cathie Hartnett, one time Congressional contender

Other one-vote names of note included:

Entertainment:
Frank Black, Pixies frontman
Garrison Keillor, radio host

"The Simpsons":
Otto the Busdriver
Edna Crabapple
Homer Simpson

"Sesame Street" characters:
Ernie
Bert
Oscar the Grouch

Radio personalities:
Joe Soucheray
Al Franken

The late:
Charles Schulz, cartoonist
Carl Sagan, astronomer
Paul Wellstone, U.S. senator
Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel
John Gregory Murray, Archbishop of St. Paul from 1931 to 1956
Fulton J. Sheen, Archbishop of Peoria and candidate for sainthood

Sports:
Brad Johnson, Vikings quarterback
Mike Tice, Vikings coach
Matt Birk, Vikings lineman
Lew Ford, Twins outfielder

Other:
Oven Mitt
Captain Crunch
Un Chien Andalou (1929 French surrealist film by Luis Bunuel)
Sponge Bob
James Bond
Subcomandante Marcos
Illinois U.S. Sen. Barak Obama
Former U.S. Sen. Dean Barkley
Adolf Hitler
Dr. Frankenstein
"Saten"
Pedro

So my cat beat Wellstone, Keillor, Barkley and Hitler - and I tied 'em.

Could be worse!

My cat thanks her loyal public.

(By the way - while I did write Noser in - it's a tactic to ensure my ballot gets counted, which it seems it did - I guarantee you I did not write my own name on the ballot)

Attention, Linguistic Death Squad: Your Orders Are In

Elder (and Katie) want to excise at least one idiomatic saying from the English language - or at least the version used on the blogosphere:

I think there's something that we can all agree on: the use of the term "slippery slope" has gotten completely out of hand. The overuse of the phrase has pretty much stripped it of any real meaning that it once had.

The problem is that just about anything can be described as a "slippery slope" if you stretch the definition enough. Parties of all political persuasions are guilty of pulling out this tired cliché on just about any issue that comes up. Enough is enough.

Oh, Elder (and Katie) - you are sooo just scratching the surface.

Englilsh - and the blogosphere - groan from overload with such linguistic road apples.

Let's put together our linguistic dead pool, shall we?

In calling out this list, I fully admit my culpability in having used some of them in the past. The destruction of the offending phrases is part of my penitence.

My suggestions (along with Elder's apt "Slippery Slope"):

• "Pot, Meet Kettle" - The saying, a play on the ancient "That's the pot calling the kettle black", was cute the first time it was used - during the siege of Constantinople. Enough.
• "...(Something is a) Rote Recitation of Talking Points" - Truism of human nature: your own side is always a scintillating breaking of new ground; your opposition is always dull, thuggish, unimaginative, lumpen, gray, ignoble, and sent from some (usually) evil overlord higher up in the enemy's grand conspiracy. Duly noted. You don't have to say it. No, really.
• "[Karl Rove/George Soros/Pat Robertson/whomever] yanked their leash - See above.
• "[George Bush/Bill Clinton/Mark Kennedy/Michele Bachmann] is the worst [president/congressman/representative] ever!" - All absolutes are always false. There is always someone worse than whomever is the object of your ire, even assuming you're right (which most of you are not, anyway).
  
• "[Pick your political campaign] was the nastiest ever!" - If there was no gunfire in the streets (it's happened), if nobody died in a brawl or a duel (Andrew Jackson's various campaigns), if nobody's family was massacred in their isolated farmhouse (The Kansas war of 1859-1860), then no - it was not the nastiest campaign in history.

Others?

It's A Wonderful Life

Personal quirk: I always love Christmas.

It's hard to do sometimes, but I make damn sure I always love it.

There's an old Hungarian saying: "the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are". That saying percolates through a lot of other wisdom; Dennis Prager's "The best way to be happy is to act happy" (I'm paraphrasing); Laura Schlesinger's "the best way to save a relationship gone sour is to live like it hasn't gone sour" (again, paraphrasing).

Christmas can be a stressful time. And yet I consciously refuse to let it feel that way - because if you can't hold this season sacred (figuratively and theologically), then what can you?

There are times - chasing from store to store looking for the right thing, seeing my checking account balance plummet, wrestling with trees (which is my least-favorite part of the season) - that it's hard to keep this in mind. But keep it in mind I do - consciously repeating "It's Christmas" at times, which actually helps a lot.

Upshot; for the past several years, Christmas, even with all its' stresses and pace and petty irritations - has been a wonderful thing.

As I hope it is for all of you. Last year I took a week off for Christmas, to go visit my family in North Dakota. I'm not doing that this year - not a formal break or anything - but posting will be light and possibly nonexistant through the weekend. But in case we don't talk about it - I hope you have a Merry Christmas (Chanukkah, Ramadan, solstice, or day of sluggardly football-watching), and one that you're glad you had.

Name This Quote

Quick: Who said this?

"The Department of Justice believes -- and the case law supports -- that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the president may, as he has done, delegate this authority to the attorney general,"

Like, Oh, My, Gawad! What dictatorial, anti-civil liberty troll said this?

According to this morning's WashTimes:

Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick said in 1994 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Damn that George W. Bush! Squashing civil liberties six years before he took office!

Look: the law, including the Constitution, allows the President a good deal of leeway (subject to a good deal of post-facto oversight, at worst) to act in the interest of national security.

In conducting the wiretabs that were the subject of the current flap, here's the question for those of you who are currently experienceing the vapors: Is there a reasonable chance that an American citizen who was found in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Blackberry might, just might, meet the threshold of "probably cause" for which FISA would issue a search warrant? Leave aside the timing for a moment; part of the Administration's case is that there was no time to get a FISA warrant for the communications

It's About Time

Andrea Mitchell on the Today show this morning:

Americans are worried about too much government intrusion into their civil liberties.

The story, naturally, was about the Wiretap "scandal", and it was pretty much wrong...

...but it was the remark itself that caught my attention.

Really? Suddenly, Americans are worried about their civil liberties?

Where were they in 1994, when Bill Clinton signed a Crime Bill that enabled massive wiretapping, imposed pointless-yet-draconian gun restrictions, instituted property forfeiture laws and limited citizens' right to sue the government?

Were the people concerned in 2000, when Bill Clinton's Counterterrorism Act added further wiretap powers and executive power to attack peaceful fundraising for groups with any remote terror connection (hello, Irish!)?

Or was it that the media didn't feel those concerns until now?

Remember in the 1990's, when Democrats thought libertarians, small or large "L", were like flat-earthers?

Welcome to the party, American Left and Media (pardon the redundancy); it's about time.

Smile

Minneapoliis "Photocop" program is going to court today.

"Photocop" is a robot radar/camera combination that shoots pictures of red-light runners, and mails them a ticket.

While I don't run red lights - I err on the side of caution to an extent that visibly irritates the occasional other driver in traffic, who are also idiots - this program is an abomination, and if there is any justice the judge will terminate it and order the equipment smelted.

Fundamentally Wrong

Gotta give props to Mr. "Clever Sponge" of the local snarkblog "Clever Peasantry"; he knows his Korean food.

Beyond that? Feh.

He wrote last week about my post on the ugly relationship between "fundamentalists" and the media, academy, and the left.

And wrote. And wrote.

Now, Mr. Sponge is never one to go lightly on the mildly-insulting snark (he's like a slightly-less-Calvinistic "PB"); behind that, the post includes a mildly-interesting history of the term and theology of "fundamentalism". Interesting, as far as it goes.

As a response to my own post? Not so much:

OK, on to the main point...What is so offensive about Mitch's post is that he throws out a largely undefined term (fundamentalism) as a straw man whipping boy for a political faction (lib'ruls [Could you lefties please declare a moratorium on using the term "librul" when you're at a loss for how to show contempt for conservatives? It's kinda played out - Ed.] /Hollywood/elitists) that he doesn't like.

Buncombe, of course, although one must ask if Mr. Sponge knows what "Strawman" means.

My post (read it yourself) addressed the knee-jerk prejudice that "fundamentalist" Christians receive from the usual suspects in our society; whatever the definition and history of the term and the movement, it changes nothing; "Fundies" are the object of massive bigotry from, yep, Hollywood - which is the intellectual center of gravity for the left.

Upon doing so, he immediately veers the debate away from any theological underpinnings that may or may not serve as some source of contention for disagreements between groups.

Mr. Sponge is completely off the rails, because there is no theological disagreement between "fundies" - or any other type of Christians - and the Usual Suspects! The debate is social; Hollywood or the left or for that matter Paul Mirecki couldn't care less about the theology of fundamentalism; I doubt you'd find among the mass of caustic, defamatory, bigoted portrayals of "fundamentalists" in the media, Hollywood and elsewhere a single explication of the theology involved!

The debate immediately becomes about self-chosen identity and he quickly claims to be part of the group that truly holds the truth; or, as he put it, the "basics".

Now Mr. Sponge is just making stuff up. There was nothing, explicit or implied, about being "part of the group that holds the truth".

This is a game of brands; identities based on nothing more than acceptance. Laws and rituals are not required for admission. All you need to do is accept the fact that Hollywood, lib'ruls and elitists are bad and they think that "fundies" are stupid.

This is the old argument used by that group known as "everyone's first spouse"; Oh, suuuure. I AAAAAALWAYS forget to put the toilet seat down!". You don't have to "accept" that the Usual Suspects are anything to watch TV or movies or the evening news to see the constant disparagement that "fundamentalists" receive.

Sure we use religious symbols when we frame our political desires and plans, but we never really get around to talking about theology and its implications on public policy and culture.

No, that would be an interesting discussion.

But that's not the one I started.

Slammed

David Strom on Governor Pawlenty's loss in court over the "Health Impact Fee":

According to the Ramsey County Court, the administrator for the settlement, the answer is that the state violated that agreement and must refund the money collected.

The air is thick with irony.

First of all, it was the smokers who got reamed, and they won’t see a dime of this money. I assume it will be rebated back to the distributors, who will pocket it, as is their right.

Secondly, as far as I can tell, while this ruling strikes down the HIF on cigarettes, the so-called "other tobacco products" (OTP) will still be subject to the increased fee. So cigars and snuff, for instance, still have to suffer under a 100% increase in their taxes, while cigarettes will go back down to prior levels. Of course, cigarettes are by far the most dangerous of these products, although studies show that smokers already more than pay their fair share in taxes.

Thirdly, the democrats are right on this point: Pawlenty is in this mess because he wanted to avoid using the word "tax," so he invented out of thin air this "Health Impact Fee," which violates the contract with the tobacco companies, and still took the heat for raising taxes. Lose, lose, lose!!!

Fourthly, Pawlenty is flirting with completely destroying his reputation as a conservative. Rather than admitting this was a mistake and taking a (very) temporary hit to his pride, he is apparantly considering violating the constitution again by trying to impose this fee on his own.

It wasn't one of Pawlenty's better moment.

New Jack Analysis

Chad the Elder:

If Bobby Brown was President (shudder), he might justify the NSA wiretapping in song, "I don't need commission, make my own decisions. That's my prerogative."

Hm.

And if rapper Ice Cube were Bobby Brown's press secretary, he could respond to Helen Thomas or Cindy Sheehan or Maureen Dowd...:

A B***h iz a B**h,
whether poor or rich (word up!)
I'm talking the exact same pitch!
Not the title "b***h", nor applied to all women.
(But all women got a little b***h in 'em.
It's like a disease that plagues their character,
plagueing the women of America,
and it starts with the letter "b",
makes a girl like that think she's badder than me.
See, some get mad, and some just bear it,
but yo, if the shoe fits, wear it.
It makes 'em go deaf in the ear, that's why
when you say "hi", she don't say "hi".
Are you the type that thinks you're too damn fly?
B***h eat s**t and die!
Ice Cube coming at [Ms. Thomas/Sheehan/Dowd] at a crazy pitch,
I think a b**tch iz a b***h.

That is, of course, only if Ice Cube were Press Secretary in a Bobby Brown-led White House.

Or "White Hizzy", as the case may be.

Wiretap Roundup

Michelle Malkin posts an encyclopedic roundup of legal support for the Administration in the NSA wiretap story.

Read 'em - especially if you're of the "the President had no right...school of thought - and take a moment to absorb it.

Now, go back and look carefully through the Times article. The reporters who have been so assiduously working on the story for at least a year couldn't find a single, non-anonymous expert in national security and the law to come up with the kind of informed analysis that took legal and counterterrorism bloggers three days to research and post.

Your mission is clear.

Talked Out

As we've noted earlier, there's a big shake-up in the local talk radio market. From the top:

• Clear Channel is flipping its Cool Jazz station, 100.3 FM, to an all-talk format.
• As part of this, they exercised their prerogative of ownership, and claimed Rush Limbaugh for the new station once his current pact with KSTP-AM is up.
• KSTP has released a new schedule that looks like it has a shelf life of about eight months; Kris Krok's contract has a few months left (and lousy ratings), Sean Hannity will be going to Clear Channel in the fall of '06, and Tom Mischke in late-afternoon drive stands out like a Brooks Brothers suit at a Cradle of Filth concert.

Now, Paul Demko at City Pages confirms a story I've been sitting on for a week: KTLK, the new Clear Channel station, has its afternoon drive planned:

Local politicos Brian Lambert and Sarah Janecek are the latest additions to the programming lineup for Clear Channel Radio's new FM talk station, KTLK-FM (100.3). The pair will host a weekday show when the station launches next month.

Let me be the first to say it: the show will go out of the gate with three strikes against it.

Strike One: Talent.

Sarah Janecek is a friend of mine. She also has some radio experience; frankly, I think a Sarah Janecek Show would be a good bet in its own right. If I had a radio station, I'd air her.

However, Janecek will have a handicap right out of the gate; her co-host. I know Brian Lambert, of course; long before he brought comical new meaning to the term "liberal bias" during his hitch as broadcast critic at the Pioneer Press, he worked for the late Twin Cities Reader as a media crit. Several times, in that capacity, one program director or another tried him out on the air; one of my first days at KSTP-AM saw Lambert trying to fill in for Don Vogel; the results were excruciating. OK, it was 20 years ago - but none of his broacast efforts since then have been a whole lot better; his brief stint as TV critic on Channel Five reminded me of Sam Malone trying to be a sportscaster; his time as a weekly sidekick on the late, unlamented Nick Coleman show (anyone remember that?) on the local Air America affiliate (or that?) showed that he's developed into someone who can snark along to someone else's lead; he's a capable heckler, which is damning with faint praise.

So let's just say that Lambert's a "developing" radio talent.

Strike Two: The Concept.

Janecek:

"For a long time I've thought that a person who is right of center, moi, and a person who is left of center, Brian, would make a good talk radio team," says Janecek, co-publisher of the Politics in Minnesota news service.

First things first; anything is possible. Twenty years ago, almost anyone would have poo-poohed the notion that talk radio would be a conservative medium. Anything can happen.

Problem is, the "Odd Couple" format has been tried. CNN's "Crossfire" was a groundbreaking experiment when it aired twenty years ago. Back when it starred a couple of genuinely intelligent people who actually had something to say, and could surprise the audience once in a while (like the original cast, Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden), it could be interesting. So it could work, under the right circumstances.

And you don't want to say "nobody else is doing it", because twenty years ago, hardly anyone was doing puerile shock-radio above the local level; today, Howard Stern is just the foremost practitioner of a multi-billion dollar genre.

But look around the country; name a political "Odd Couple" that's remotely successful. Can you?

No. And the limitations of radio militate against such shows. Radio has limited bandwidth, when it comes to perception and cognition; a voice on a tinny speaker is pretty much all you have to go by. What prompts you to listen to that tinny voice?

It takes something you can sink your teeth into; something that provokes a visceral, emotional reaction. The most successful talk hosts pre-Limbaugh (Morton Downey Jr., Joe Pyne, Tom Leykis, Bob Grant) usually pushed the anger button, back in the days when the "Fairness Doctrine" meant politics had to be approached obliquely. The most successful hosts since then - Limbaugh, Hannity, Medved, Bennett, Ingraham - have had their own coherent messages (need I explain?) that the audience could sink their teeth into, pro or con.

On "Odd Couple" shows, the message skitters back and forth, depending on the whims and debating skills of the hosts (Hannity and Colmes, I think, only succeeds because Sean Hannity so completely dominates Colmes; it could as easily be called Sean Hannity and a Hockey Puck); there is no coherent message; it's just a couple of people arguing. And most of the audience is perfectly capable of doing that themselves.

Strike Three: The Mix

Leave aside the individuals involved, or the concept they're working with, for just a moment. Sarah Janecek is female; Lambert is a guy.

Strike three.

In this englightened, PC age, it's considered nekulturny to say so - but on the radio, men and women just don't mix.

Yes, men and women can interview each other - the host-guest relationship is different than host-host. And yes, some of the most successful teams in radio are mixed-gender; Howard Stern/Robin Quivers, Tom Barnard/Teri Traen, Janeane Garofalo/Sam Seder, and others. What do they have in common? The odd-gender-out character goes along with the dominant character in the show; Teri Traen is female, but has developed the ability to work in a locker room totally aimed at 25-50-year-old guys. Ditto Robin Quivers.

But men and women acting as equals in a head-to-head argument-based format never works. Part of it is the "unified message" issue that brought us "Strike Two". Part of it is invisible to the audience; men and women's styles of argument and means of dealing with each others' styles almost always cause problems behind the scenes. It's not inevitable, but it's prevalent.

Not that I don't wish Sarah Janecek the best of luck; I just think the concept is fundamentally flawed.

Which is a great opportunity for the Patriot and Hugh Hewitt, if they play the card right.

More on that later.

"The Spy Wore Jammies"

"Top Secret Agent" Valerie Plame poses in her pajamas.

Or perhaps it's actually a ChiCom camouflage uniform for units stationed in linenware stores, that the CIA got through classified means?

Or perhaps she's been spying on a ring of Serb spies who're using a chain of Glamour Shots (R) outlets as their cover?

I Shall Remain Timeless

How limp were Time's choices for "Persons of the Year" - Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, his wife Melinda, and rock star/free-lance lobbyist Bono?

Especially compared with the people that did change the world - the citizens of Iraq, Lebanon and Ukraine, who ushered various degrees of thug and dictator out of power this past year, the most sweeping spread of democracy since the fall of The Wall?

Michelle Malkin says it well:

Time is so out of touch that none of these historic revolutionaries--Purple, Cedar, and Orange--were recognized in its "People Who Mattered" section. Instead, the magazine singles out the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Hillary Clinton mimic Geena Davis, lying Joe Wilson and his wife, race-card rapper Kanye West, and teen golfer Michelle Wie--and devotes space to a 9-photo spread of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

Lame. Just lame.

Worse than lame; the word you want is "desperate". Time, panicked that any credit go to a policy that they've opposed from the word "go", picked three people whose greatest work is either behind them (Bill Gates), not their own (Melinda Gates), or essentially an appeal for international accounting tricks (Bono), however noble the intent (be advised I'm a big U2 fan).

The cult of the year? Political Correctness. For the 20th straight year.

Flash: Katrina Killed Whitey, Too

Hurricane Katrina's casualties were not disporportionately black or poor, says the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Of the 380 bodies from New Orleans that have been formally identified, a moderately disproportionate number are white. New Orleans' population was 28% white, yet 33% of the identified victims in the city are white and 67% black.

"The affected population is more multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural than one might discern from national media reports," said Richard Campanella, a Tulane University geographer who has studied which parts of the city were hit the worst by flooding. His research showed that predominantly white districts in the city were almost as likely to flood as predominantly black ones.

Campanella said he was not surprised at the even distribution of bodies between the city's poorer and more affluent neighborhoods. He noted that 70% of the identified Katrina victims in New Orleans were older than 60, frequently lifelong residents who had ridden out other hurricanes and refused to evacuate. Elderly people are more likely to be wealthier and to live in wealthier neighborhoods.

Look for an irate Anderson Cooper to report this story this evening.

Or not.

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today...

Rachel Irene from My Opera Life (as far as I know the only blog about opera in the MOB, at least until JB Doubtless decides to clue us in on his hidden life) wrote about Händel's Messiah the other day...

...which reminded me that it was 25 years ago today that I played in Messiah, at a production at Dickinson State College, in western North Dakota. I played cello; although it was amateur, DSC paid meals and hotel bills for out-of-town participants (and honestly, how many cellists could there have been in Dickinson, ND?)

Yes, I remember the date. It was that incredible an experience.

I'm Shocked. Shocked, I Tell You!

A group of academics, after bringing their expertise to bear on the issue, have concluded...

...something every rational person has known for twenty years; the media tilts to the left:

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.

The hell you say!

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Must be those conservative academics' right-wing bias...

The Party Found Us

If you didn't make it to last Saturday's Minnesota Organization of Bloggers (MOB) party - you should have! It was a great time!

I took a break from my usual assumed role of making sure everyone met everyone else to sit at a table and talk with whomever passed by. The change was noted, but hopefully wasn't a big deal; I had a blast, and it looked like most everyone else did, too.

I'll pass on comments from other bloggers as the day goes on...

Question

One of the favorite tropes of the left (and some less-gifted elements of the right) in re the war in Iraq is that we made a huge mistake disbanding the Iraqi Army after the war.

Let's dispense with that forever, shall we?

Saddam's Iraqi Army combined the main features of two bad systems. Along with the vast majority of its equipment, Hussein's Army borrowed the USSR's system of leadership; a large officer corps selected more for loyalty than for competence, leading massed levies of draftee troops directly (that is, without the corps of long-service non-commissioned officers that take care of most of the day-to-day leadership and preserve most of the technical and low-level tactical expertise in Western armies).

And from the Arab tradition - indeed, from the tradition of the army of most of the world's dictators - Hussein took the basics of making sure the military was not a two-edged sword that could come back to bite him. Officers that become too popular with the troops were purged; Shi'a areas were patrolled by Sunni and Kurd troops, while Sunni areas had Shi'a and Kurd units (all led, of course, by demonstrably loyal officers); the Mukhabarat secret police and its huge network of informers prowled the barracks and officers' messes for signs of disloyalty. In the meantime, Hussein built a large, competing military, the Republican Guard, who like Hitler's SS and the Soviet MVD troops were selected for loyalty and trained and equipped as an elite - at least partly to defend the regime against the rest of the military, in extremis. Also, loyal officers were rewarded with the sort of perks that senior members of any dictatorial regime can expect; they benefitted from massive corruption. A fat and happy general who knows where the gravy train comes from is a general who's less likely to participate in a coup.

In short, there was nothing about Hussein's military that was in any way compatible with existing in a Democracy.

We've been through this before, of course; after World War II, the German Wehrmacht and the Japanese military were disbanded; when both countries began rebuilding militaries during the 1950's, it was only after their traditional officer castes had been neutralized or assimilated into the notion of democracy.

Keeping the Hussein-era Iraqi military would have meant keeping an institution with a vested interest in carrying out a coup against any future government.

And even if we were willing to accept that risk, there's the ineluctible fact that no Arab army (in the pan-arabist era of the past 100 years) has ever won a war. Zero. Hussein's military fought Iran to a bloody draw in the eighties' war of attrition. Lonely Israel clobbered Egypt, Syria, and various combinations of Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and other Arab nations four times in 25 years (I know what you're going to say; "what about the Omani Army in the Radfan campaign in the sixties and seventies? Good point - it was a counterinsurgency war - but the Omani Army was operating mainly as an adjunct of the British Army, with which Oman has maintained close military as well as diplomatic relations for almost 200 years; elite British forces like the SAS, the Parachute Regiment and tthe Royal Marines did most of the knife-point fighting in the Radfan; also, because of the British influence, the Omani military is easily the least Arabic of the Arab militaries. But thanks for asking). Why reinforce - or even adopt - a tradition of abject failure when rebuilding the Iraqi military from scratch (especially given what we knew about the insurgency in the spring and summer of 2003) was by all rational accounts the better option (assuming we took seriously the notion of a democratic Iraq?)

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (and the two days before) Part XX

It was Wednesday, December 18, 1985.

I'd spent the long weekend in Jamestown, hanging out with friends and my family, catching up with the few friends I still had in Jamestown, just relaxing - satisfied at least to know that finally had a job to come back to - of which more later).

I went to a dance at the college on Friday night, caught up with a few people (including this person, who took over the college paper from me, if memory serves). It was a kick to tell people I had a job, even if I hadn't started yet.

Sunday, I headed back to the Cities. I drove to Fargo, had dinner with a friend of mine who was still at North Dakota State, and set back out on '94 to the East. Over dinnertime, a snowstorm caught up with me; visibility dropped to 1/4 mile. Which wasn't bad, until a semi would pass on the left; the slipstream whipped up enough snow to make it feel like driving inside a ping pong ball. Time after time - two or three dozen times on the trip - I gripped the steering wheel and kept the car pointed as straight as I could, hoping the road would still be under me when I gout out the other side. Luckily, it always was - but compared to Thursday's three hour jaunt, it took the better part of five and a half hours go to from Fargo to Minneapolis.

I spent Monday and Tuesday the 16th and 17th knocking around town, enjoying that most glorious of feelings; having a job, but not needing to be there yet.

Finally, it was the 18th; I showed up at the station at 12:30 in the afternoon. I met Dave Elvin, Don Vogel's producer. He took half an hour to explain the arcane art of talk show phone screening while we waited for the cab to bring Don to the station.

"By the way", said Dave, "I should explain; Don is blind". This brought some twists to the job; beyond answering the phone and screening out boring, repetitive and dull callers, I was supposed to pass the next caller to Don through the "talkback" into his headphones, preferably right around the time he needed them.

Don showed up around 1 to begin the daily ritual. Tapping his cane in front of him, jovially bitching about the cold, he made his way back through the "hall" between the backup transmitter and the studio equipment stack, back to the talk studio. I'd grown up working at stations with spartan appointments; KSTP-AM, in its old studio on Highway 61, felt like working in a submarine; cramped, equipment everywhere, some rooms actually with waffleplate floors and steel stairs.

Dave led me into the studio - a cramped little room, maybe 12 by 5, with a glass window along the long side that looked into the control room. There were three seats with microphones along a desk in front of the window. Don sat at the host's seat, with an ancient push-button telephone controller and a large, gray steel braille machine.

Don sat down heavily. "Sorry I'm late, gentlemen. I was at the bank. The woman behind the window was..." Don switched into a John Houseman accent "...an idiot. A moron".

I spoke up. "I've been having trouble with my bank, too."

Dave turned to me. "What bank's that?"

"The S**t P**s F**k Bank".

Don broke up laughing, with the gusto that so many native Chicagoans bring to laughing about scatology. "I think you're going to fit in just fine!"

The rest of the meeting was taken up with Dave and I tossing out topic ideas, and Don knocking most of them down. Finally we settled on some things - a few newspaper articles and magazine pieces Dave had come across. The last half hour involved dictating the ledes of the articles, and things like the weather forecast, to Don, who typed them out in braille and arranged them on the desk in front of him.

Then, Dave took me into the control room. I sat down at a little chair wedged between Dave's control panel and the glass wall of the studio, with a five-line telephone and a microphone. "Just answer the phone, screen them, write down the ones we want to take, and pass them through to Don", Dave instructed as ABC News played on the monitor overhead and a large man who looked for all the world like Tip O'Neill ambled heavily into the studio. "Mitch, this is John MacDougall", Dave announced. "News Guy".

Mac flipped his glasses down his gin-blossomed nose. "You're Don's new screener?" he asked in a crotchety-sounding baritone, glaring over his glasses frames.

"And here we go". Dave at the control board fired off the theme song.

I don't remember much about that first show - it was the same as most of the subsequenct 13 months' worth of shows that Don, Dave, John MacDougall, sports guys Bruce Gordon and Mark Boyle and I did; juvenile banter, heckling, mocking and ridicule of the news and the people in it.

I do remember that about a minute into the show - before Mac had finished the newscast - line 1 on the phone lit up. I picked up; "Don Vogel Show".

"We are not of this world" said a raspy, geriatric-sounding voice. "We are of the infinite world".

I hesitated. "Excuse me?"

"Stanley Hubbard is the devil! He will be sent to hell with all the other evil sinners!"

My first call was an insane crank.

I knew I was going to love this job.

Moment of Agreement

Oddly, for a couple of rock-ribbed conservatives, JB Doubtless (of Fraters Libertas and occasionally Nihilist) and I disagree about a thing or two. Especially where it comes to music and pop culture in general. I aspire to the cultural omnipathy that the likes of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and the other classical liberals revered; JB thinks Archie Bunker was a friggin' commie libertine.

But even in the world of music, we can find some common cause; the music of Allison Krause:

I just heard a song called "A Reason For It All" by Allision [sic] Krause and Union Station during lunch and was blown away by it's beauty.

Krause is an amazing talent, perhaps the only woman in country that could ever wrench my heart away from Emmylou Harris, Kathy Mattea, Dolly Parton or Holly Dunn.

And Union Station's not too shabby as a band, either.

So JB? When you're done lecturing me about the real state of the neighborhood I've lived in for a dozen years, let me be the first to day; good call.

Wacht Am Rhein

It was 61 years ago today that the Battle of the Bulge began.

Hitler's last offensive in the West managed to fool all of the western intelligence services. Launched in an isolated part of the Ardennes forest near the intersection of Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg, along nearly the same route Germany had used in 1914 and 1940, the offensive was intended to cut through a thinly-defended piece of the front (held by units either new to combat or exhausted by too much of it), punch through the hilly, forested region and out onto the Belgian plain to take the primary Allied port of Antwerp, and split the US and Free French forces in France from the British, Canadian and Polish troops in Belgium and Holland.

You've read the stories, of course (maybe): General "Tony" MacAuliffe's reply of "Nuts" to a German demand that his 101st Airborne Division surrender the key junction of Bastogne; the less well-known story of General Bob Hasbrouck's brigade of the 7th Armored Division, fighting a mobile, run 'n gun defense while heavily outnumbered and with tanks that were in most ways inferior to the Germans', slowing the German process through the equally-important junction at St. Vith; Lieutenant Lyle Bouck's 18-man platoon of scouts holding off 3,000 German paratroopers (assigned to clear the way for the German SS Panzer spearhead under Joachim Peiper; think Randy Moss at the peak of his career, only in tanks) for 12 hours, killing hundreds and setting the spearhead's progress back nearly a day.

But for all that, it was a big shock for the US; although it's doubtful the German offensive could have achieved its goal (Allied power, especially in the air, was too great; Germany's fuel and equipment reserves too small). Still, one wonders what the likes of Joe Biden would say had they been in power back then: two thirds of the 106th Infantry Division, cut off in the Schnee Eiffel mountains, surrendered; over 8,000 GIs were marched from their first battle directly to POW stockades. Other units were decimated; 19,000 GIs died in the Bulge (over 50,000 more were wounded, captured, or are still missing in action), in a battle where the German attack lasted a week, and the American counterattack maybe a month more. The battle actually threw the US Army in Europe into a manpower crisis; the replacement depots ran out of men. Men stripped from administrative and logistics units, as well as half-trained replacements, were thrown into infantry units - and even tanks (Stephen Ambrose in Citizen Soldiers relates the story of 85 new replacements tossed into 17 Sherman tanks with only a few hours' orientation, and sent to the front; a German tank ambushed the column, wiping out all 17 of the tanks in a few minutes). The situation got so bad that Dwight Eisenhower, overruling his chief of staff for Personnel, ordered the unthinkable; forming black troops from labor, supply and maintenance units into infantry squads and platoons (10 to 40 men, rather than the previous battalions and regiments of 800 to 3,000 men) and sending them into combat directly alongside white troops, without taking the time to form them into larger all-black units led by Southern officers as the Army had done since the Civil War.

Do some reading on the Battle of the Bulge; it's an amazing episode. (Do not under any circumstances watch the movie of the same name, starring Henry Fonda; easily one of the worst war movies ever made).

The Party Finds You!

Almost last call!

Tomorrow afternoon/evening is the fourth semiannual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers party! If you're a blog fan, a blogger, want to learn about blogging, want to start a blog (there's always someone at these parties with a laptop running; I'm sure they'd be happy to help you get a blog set up), or just want to hang out with a bunch of very fun people, this will be the event of the season.

Join us at Keegans tomorrow! The party starts around 5, and goes until Dementee goes and gets the cops called in.

Dude, Where's My Policy?

I'm not sure what is the funniest thing about this morning's WaPo piece by Dan Balz on Nancy Pelosi essentially punting on her party's splintering over Iraq: the fact that she can not get her caucus onto the same page...:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday that Democrats should not seek a unified position on an exit strategy in Iraq, calling the war a matter of individual conscience and saying differing positions within the caucus are a source of strength for the party.

Pelosi said Democrats will produce an issue agenda for the 2006 elections but it will not include a position on Iraq. There is consensus within the party that President Bush has mismanaged the war and that a new course is needed, but House Democrats should be free to take individual positions, she sad.

"There is no one Democratic voice . . . and there is no one Democratic position," Pelosi said in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors.

...or that the WaPo is bending so far backwards to spin it as a positive, right down to the piece's title, Pelosi Hails Democrats' Diverse War Stances.

Democrats: "Diverse Stances".

Republicans: "Fragmenting into dozens of pieces".

Seriously; the media is carping itself to laryngitis over the rough autumn Bush has had so far - but at the end of the day Pelosi's Democrats are even more fragmented than the post-DeLay GOP. At the risk of being premature, it seems like the GOP managed to snatch victory from the jaws of PR incompetence and turn Murtha's showboating stunt into at least a minor victory.

Leisure

As 2002 started - about a month after I started this blog - the dotcom I worked for began its slide to oblivion, eliminating a bunch of jobs in early March, including mine. For almost four years, every job I've had has been a contracting position; every gig has been working on a specific project, ranging from a couple of days to, in one case, a year.

Now, to clarify; even when I had "permanent" jobs with companies that included paid vacation time, I never really took a "vacation"; when I was changing careers (and still married) most of my jobs were contracting; when my kids were little, and especially during and after my divorce (my kids were 6 and 8 at the time), most of my PTO and "Vacation" time went to watching sick kids during their various childhood diseases. For years, if I got paid vacation at all, I was lucky to sneak in a couple of long weekends a year, usually for a Christmas trip back to North Dakota and a brief Fourth of July getaway or two. In fact, since 1987 I've taken exactly one full week off from work (periods of unemployment don't count; they are no vacation; if anything, I work harder when I'm job-hunting, if only because I spend more of the day thinking about it); I spent it painting the house, back in 1995.

We'll see if we can start fixing that; today is my last workday as a contractor; I start as a full-timer on Monday. Among the benefits: 401K, health insurance (thinking about that HSA I've been writing about all these years) - and vacation.

And it's occurred to me; in my adult, working life, I've never really taken a vacation. None. Oh, I've done the odd weekend getaway, and I've driven to visit my parents, and the kids and I took one long weekend in Chicago once - but that's it. And as that occurred to me, I realized that I don't know if I know how to take a vacation. Like, leave work behind and just immerse myself in...not working? I need to find a website on "how to disconnect your brain and learn to take time off". I'm serious; I haven't a clue. Oh, I'll learn; I'll throw myself into it, if need be. But - I'm serious, here - it's going to be hard for me to learn how to use vacation time!

Does this ever happen to you?

Dilemma

Trying to figure out what's the best part about Michael Yon winning the Best Media/Journalist Blog award in the '05 Weblog Awards; the fact that his excellent, groundbreaking blog won...

...or that it won by clobbering James Wolcott by a 3:1 margin.

Win? Clobber? Win. Clobber.

Clobber.

Priorities

In Iraq, the nation - including a heavy turnout of Sunni, the Iraqis we've been worrying about all along - just had a parliamentary election. It was by all rational accounts (gitouttahere, Joe Biden) a rousing success.

What's on front page of the Strib online? "Das Booty", the Vikings Sex Cruise.

Wait - maybe the World section...er, a story about new standards at Oxford University (a Sunni-focused story is currently #3 in line).

The Strib: trivializing the earth-shaking for over 100 years!

MOB Thyself

Another reminder: the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers (MOB) party is coming up Saturday evening, at Keegans Irish Pub in Northeast Minneapolis. The party starts at 5PM, and lasts until J.B. Doubtless climbs up on the bar and sings "Hungry Heart".

If you're a blogger, we'd love to meet you. If you're a MOBster, we need to meet you (because attending a MOB party is a key part of showing the world that the MOB isn't just a pathetic link-whoring assembly like the Southern California Association of Bloggers (SCAB). If you just want to meet some of your favorite bloggers in the area, we'd LOVE to have you there.

An RSVP isn't necessary, but nice to have. Drop us a line at "party -at the address - northernallianceradio (and then add a dot, and then) com.

We're currently well over 70 RSVPs, and given last-minute drop-ins I expect a GREAT turnout, probably the biggest ever. Hope to see you there.

What's In A Word?

The word for today is "Fundamentalist".

The Paul Mirecki incident - on top of about twenty years of pondering the relationship between Christians and the world, and between Christians themselves, started me wondering. What, really, is a fundamentalist (or, as they're known to the chattering classes, a "fundie")?

The media delivers the term with a nudge and a wink, at best - "Fundamentalist" is a code word for "ignorant yahoo" in a good chunk of the media, and that's just the "objective" "news" media. In the "entertainment" media, "Fundamentalists" seem almost invariably to be portrayed as Stepford-y caricatures - neat haircuts and plaid pants on the outside, seething hatreds and psychoses and, always, always uncanny hypocrisies on the inside.

I saw "Moral Orel - the Best Christmas Ever" on Adult Swim the other night - well, part of it anyway - ironically, it was the Worst Christmas Special Ever. That it was desperately unfunny was the least of it; it's "satire" of a "Fundie" family was marinated in the kind hate that reminded me of Nazi caricatures of Jews during the thirties.

Hollywood dares not insult Arabs or Moslems by portraying them as villains or aggressors - note Hollywood's bowdlerization of Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears, replacing Arab fundamentalist villains with neo-Nazis, who are ironically not a "clear and present danger" to this country or, for that matter, a factor in Clancy's book. Fundamentalists (and their close relatives, the devout, observant Catholic) are, however, a safe vessel for every sickness, perversion or psychosis that Hollywood can dream up.

So what is a "Fundamentalist"?

I guess I am.

I mean, the fundamentals of the protestant faith are acceptance that Christ is your Lord and Savior (and stow the pseudo-theological nitpicking; with that acceptance comes a duty to act like that matters in the way you carry on with your life).

I worship in the Presbyterian Church, in spite of much galloping idiocy on the part of the Church's temporal governing body, because of all the Christian denominations it seems to lard the message of the Bible up with less extra-biblical overburden (it's bureaucracy doesn't declare itself holy, and refrains from tacking bits and pieces onto the canon of belief), stretchy interpretation (pre-destination and election, which seem to invalidate any rational reason for faith or need for redemption and its attendant acceptance of Christ and rejection of the World, are out) or overemphasis on one facet of faith combined with neglect of others (exclusive focus on the viscerality of the Holy Spirit combined with ignorance of the intellectual study of the Father and of the commitment and sacrifice of the Son, as a convenient example).

(Please note: Comments advancing particular Christian theologies, or focusing on nitpicking my view of my own church's tenets, will be deleted with extreme prejudice. Expressing my own beliefs is not, and should not be taken as, a slight on your own beliefs, or an invitation to tell me why yours are so very much better. I'm specifically disinviting theological dick-measuring. Start your own blog, go forth, and convert the world on your own nickel).

Your mileage may vary - but if "fundamentals" means "basics", I guess I'm a "fundie".

Of course, the term as used in the media and Hollywood isn't about theological taxonomy - it's a stereotype, a code word for "people we think are weird and really don't like much".

So I guess the only response I have to the likes of Mirecki and his type - the people that fulminate against "fundies" (and all the other synonym code words, like "Radical Christian Right", which has grown well beyond describing the few genuine radical Christians to mean "everyone who's a Christian and a conservative, and doesn't hide it") - is to assume their not a lot different than the rednecks I used to know who couldn't refer to people different than them as anything but n****rs, s***s, g**ks and so on; people who aren't bright enough to actually think about dissent, and have to resort to stereotypes and bigotry.

Bob Grant

The legendary Bob Grant is leaving WOR in New York.

Who is he, and why should you care?

You likely don't know, and you needn't care.

But if you've been a fan of talk radio since about 1987, you have absorbed some of his influence.

Grant is a New York talk radio legend who helped invent talk radio as we know it today. Brian Maloney has the story, picking up about the time I got into the business:

Prior to Grant, most radio talk shows (with the possible exception of Long John Nebel and Joe Pyne) moved at a snail's pace. There were big long introductions and deep "exploration" of topics. It was boring for an audience that liked radio in sound bites. Grant would take call after call, cutting off anyone who dragged on. Even if you hated his current caller, you'd stay with him because you knew it would be over soon and someone else would be on.

I started in talk radio just before the twilight of the "Fairness Doctrine", when Larry King, Michael Jackson (the British one, but not the British one that writes about beer) and the like dominated syndicated talk. King was a throwback - his current CNN show is a fairly accurate, i fmuch more predictable, rendition of his old radio show; varied but not eclectic, tart but not acerbic, cranky but not edgy, politically apathetic but not apolitical. The rest were mostly worse; Jackson and Owen Span made NPR sound exciting; it was the golden age of self-help radio, where "golden" equals "please kill me", the heyday of Sally Jesse Raphael and Harvey Ruben and Bruce Williams.

Political talk was both straitjacketed by the "Fairness Doctrine", and about as "fair" as the mainstream media at large; Tom Leykis brought the same rigorous sense of integrity to the left that Morton Downey brought to the right; both were to politics what Howard Stern is to humor (not that that's totally a bad thing).

Grant was to political talk radio what MTV was to music; he did politics for people with short attention spans; he opened up the air to everyone; he pissed in everyone's Wheaties in return.

Maloney:

He was incredibly entertaining, in part, because he was more than willing to tell off callers. That played incredibly well in New York. I don't think Grant was ever syndication material because that approach irked a lot of out of town listeners.

He used to fill in for ABC Radio's nightside program on occasion (I've forgotten who did the show; it probably says something that I remember Grant the fill-in, but have forgotten the actual host). I have to confess; I wasn't a huge fan. I'm still not; I found his style manipulative and addicted to the facile cheap shot. His manipulation and cheap-shottiness made him a legend and, I'd bet, a pretty wealthy guy - but it wasn't what I wanted to be when I grew up, either.

Still, he had a huge role in making talk radio what it is today - for better or worse. Mostly better.

A Month's Worth Of Material...

...is in the current American Enterprise magazine.

And I'm going to blog about a bunch of it. But there's too much good stuff here not to share it.

So read it!

Milestone?

"The New Lineup" was the 6,000th post on this blog.

What really blows my mind is that my 5,000th post was last May 30th; I've done a thousand in six months.

I need a life, don't I?

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and reading!

The Pole

Today is the 96th anniversary of Roald Amundsen reaching the South Pole 35 days ahead of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott.

In typical Scandinavian style, the mission went fairly smoothly and uneventfully; in typical Victorian style, Scott and his whole crew died under miserable and romantic circumstances.

The story of the race to the South Pole is a fascinating one; during the "Heroic Age" of polar exploration, there was an unstated assumption that the first explorer to get to a piece of wilderness had a sense of "ownership" of further exploration in the area, which set off a rivalry between Scott, Amundsen, and (one of my personal heroes) Ernest Shackelton that had personal and nationalist overtones.

I'll remember this, by the way, during this afternoon's snow-clogged rush hour.

The New Lineup

Someone sent me a copy of KSTP's purported new lineup (apparently from the KSTP Insider newsletter, so it's nothing especially covert).

(UPDATE: Duh. It's in the friggin' Strib. Blah. Although Dementee at KAR stomps all over the Strib's piece on the subject).

Notwithstanding, there are a few surprises here.

Here's the lineup:

5:30 am - 9:00 am Willie Clark
9:00 am - 11:50am Bob Davis
11:50 - 12:05 pm Paul Harvey news
12:05 pm - 2:00 pm Rosenbaum and O'Connell
2:00 pm - 5:30 pm Garage Logic
5:30 pm - 7:30 pm Mischke
7:30 pm - 10:00 pm Krok Talk
10:00 pm - Midnight Hannity (until August when his show will be live
on KTLK).

Hmmm.

I don't know Willie Clark; a quick Google shows a Willie Clark doing mornings at Sioux City, Iowa's conservative talk station, but I'm not sure it's the same guy (and if so, congrats to Mr. Clark on the big break. Don't blow it).

Moving Davis to mid-mornings is an odd move, but I think Davis can work fairly well anywhere.

Pushing Rosenbaum and O'Connell to fill two hours of the slot Limbaugh is deserting is a fair-to-middling patch job (they'd have done better to ditch O'Connell); it is a sign of KSTP's swing to the center, I think.

Moving Soucheray back to 2PM, but stretching him to 3.5 hours, is a good move; with Limbaugh's departure, Souch is the franchise. And the extra half hour leading in to Mischke is a good move - trying to do something KSTP hasn't managed since Jason Lewis left, holding numbers through the evening rush, dinnertime and early prime-time.

Putting Mischke in from 5:30-7:30 is a gamble; putting something different from the talk radio norm in the slot to try to hold onto any momentum Soucheray musters. I hope it works; I always associate Mischke and his ingenious show with late nights; will the late drive-time audience bite on something that's not wall-to-wall politics or music? I wish Tom well.

Krok? I have to figure the station is just burning off the last couple months of his contract.

Absent from the list; Jason Lewis. Two sources of mine had him returning to KSTP, or at least in advanced negotiations. Assuming this release isn't a diversionary sock puppet (hey, radio is for paranoids!), it'd seem the reports were in error.

It's going to be an interesting winter in Twin Cities talk radio.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XIX

It was Friday, December 14, 1985.

After my interview at KSTP earlier in the week, I'd decided I could stand a long weekend. It'd been almost two months of constant interviewing, scrimping, trying to figure out ways to parlay my fairly limited job experience (a couple of years at three radio stations, along with stints as a stagehand, remedial English tutor, bellhop/banquet setup, roofing and siding, landscaping, and...er, my paper route, basically) and, when all else failed, waiting. The kind of waiting you do when you're hoping for something, but not really expecting it.

A look in the papers showed there was plenty of work for security guards and waiters; I gave myself three more weeks, until after New Years.

And I figured I'd take a long weekend. I might not get another for a while.

Yesterday - December 13, a Thursday - I drove back to North Dakota. Now, a couple of friends and I - friends of mine from college who'd hailed from the Cities but went to college in North Dakota - had a bit of a competition; who could make it from the cities to Jamestown in the fewest road hours? We had a consistent speed course marked out; one end was the 694/River bridge, and the other was the easternmost of Jamestown's three exits on I94. Jeff Sisk had the current record, 4 hours and 30 minutes for the 335 mile course.

I left a message for Rob Pendelton at KSTP (he'd told me to call Thursday), and then set out in my old Malibu - with 175,000 miles on it, and an outer door panel flapping in the wind from salt damage - around 1 or 2PM, after allowing myself the rare luxury of sleeping in until ninish (I may have been an unemployed bum, but I was a bum with a ton of self-discipline; I was up and on the phone by 8AM every single weekday during those two months)...

...and I punched it. I kept it around 75 in Minnesota, keeping a keen eye out for cops (of whom I saw none), making it from The Bridge to the Red River in a shade over three hours. Then, once I got through Fargo's traffic and go-slow zone, it was out onto the open prairie.

Back then, North Dakotans had a custom; if it was daylight and they passed a cop or a trooper in daylight, they'd flip on their lights and keep them on for a few miles, to warn oncoming traffic. If it was broad daylight and you saw lights? Dial it back (I don't know if this still happens, because I pretty much drive close to the speed limit these days, and the limit has gone up from 55 to 70 on the open freeway, which is just fine by me). Once I got past the West Fargo exits headed west, the lights were out. I punched it up to 85. 23 year olds are immortal, of course; thinking back, the thought of pushing that rotting old jalopy with its rattly bearings and flapping door panels and iffy tires past 40 makes me blanche. But I kept it over 80 all the way to Jamestown, except for a stretch near Casselton, when the oncoming lights came on; I passed the trooper doing a perfect 55, two miles later.

It was a cold day out - probably a bit below zero. The air had the beginnings of that crystalline quality it gets when it's very cold - once you got to the Red River Valley with its pool-table topography, you could see forever. The clouds were high and piled on top of each other, just like the day I'd moved to the Cities, almost two months earlier. And as I nosed out onto the prairie, the sun was just starting to dip below the horizon. I was treated to one of nature's most glorious spectacles - a sunset on a cold day. Yellow, then pinkish-orange, then a glorious red as the light dipped below the long, gently undulating horizon to the west.

Finally - sixish, I think, around dinner time - I made it back to Jamestown. I spent the evening at some friends' dorm room up at the college - Rich Larson and Scott Massine, I think - and hung out with a few of the people I'd known who still remembered me from the year before.

"So you're still down in the Cities!", Scott said. "Wow. My mom said you'd have given up and moved back by now!"

Looking back, that was one of the things that always pissed me off about the place. "You might move elsewhere, but you'll be back. It's a big, ugly world out there, it'll eat you alive. Just like [fill in name of high school basketball star who'd gone to Fargo or Denver or Minneapolis or Boston or Des Moines, and moved back after a year or five]; he just decided the big city was too crazy for him. " The unstated coda: "And so will you!"

I fulminated on that one for a while. Slights like that made a lot more difference to me back then.

The next morning, at my Mom and Dad's place, I had breakfast, relaxed a bit - and, almost as an afterthought, made a call to the Cities, to KSTP-AM, to follow up from yesterday's call.

"Yes, Mitch - we were wondering if you'd like to start next Tuesday?"

I figured I would, yes, thanks.

So maybe I wouldn't come crawling back to Jamestown just yet. "In your face", I thought as a silent message to Scott's mom.

Men: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Via Peg at What If?, I found this piece by Selwyn Duke at Ameircan Thinker, "The Dehumanizing of Men."

There's nothing new here - if you've been following this sort of thing - but in our PC age, it's amazingly galling:

While flying on Qantas Airlines, New Zealander Mark Worsley was asked to change his seat. You see, the airline viewed him as a threat to the child seated next to him. What was Mr. Worsley’s crime? Was he on a sex-offenders database? Far from it.

The shipping manager and father of two-year-old twins was the victim of a blanket policy, adopted by Qantas and Air New Zealand, whereby they prohibit all men from sitting next to children traveling alone. Said a shocked Worsley,

“At the time I was so gobsmacked that I moved. I was so embarrassed and just stewed on it for the entire flight.”

Now, Duke notes that businesses have a right to adopt policies, even stupid ones, for the "protection" of their customers.

But he notices an odd inconsistency:

Now, what these statists imply is true enough, most sex-offenders are men. But it’s also true that virtually all the terrorists who currently bedevil Western civilization are Muslim and that certain minorities commit an inordinate percentage of crime. Yet, I can’t imagine liberal bureaucrats rubber-stamping policies designed to minimize crime that visited discrimination upon them. Why, we’re told that we can’t even subject Moslems to greater scrutiny at airports.

So, while this is not a policy I would institute under any circumstances, it isn’t its wrongheadedness itself that angers me. No, in fact, as I was pondering my feelings (as opposed to my thoughts) on the issue, I realized something. If this policy were embraced within the context of a society unencumbered by the insane and inane sickness of political-correctness, a civilization wherein group differences were recognized, acknowledged and factored into policy across-the-board, my attitude would be markedly different. Sure, I would still think it stupid, but I’d be able to laugh it off as just so much foolishness. I can’t do that now, though, because evident in this situation is hypocrisy, the acceptance of an unjust double-standard and discrimination of a most invidious sort.

This invidiousness is of course endemic in our society; when half the population is guilty until proven innocent (of potential sexual assault, of being the lesser parent in divorce court, not to mention every variety of domestic violence) without regard to the fact that the percentage of males Quantas is worried about is a tiny fraction of the percentages of other identifiable groups that could be similarly profiled (leaving out, for a moment, the morality and ethics of profiling in the first place) should be enough to get half the population up in arms.

Obsession Therapy

Back at a radio job in the late eighties/early nineties, I worked with a guy who was obsessed - I use that term in all its full psychological glory - with Debbie Gibson.

The guy - let's call him "Tom" - was about my age (late twenties at the time) and was a low-level gopher at the station (which shall remain unnamed); although he'd gone to Brown Institute for radio, like most Brownies, he was a part-time guy who worked at, I think, a WalMart for his regular income.

But while his radio career was small (and destined to grow smaller, and eventually vanish, like that of most people in his position back then), his love for Debbie Gibson was huge. Gibson - the three-hit-wonder pop tart who scored in 1987 with "Only In My Dreams", had a one-year run of superstardom in the radio and music market at the height of a particularly malignant surge of teen-idolism (which also included Tiffany, New Kids on the Block, Boyz 2 Men, Color Me Badd and many, many more). By 1990, the Gibson train was pulling out of the station...

...but not to Tom. In his heart, she was still a superstar. The superstar. He talked about her all the time. One of the few visitors to his house (yes, as a matter of fact, he did live with his mother) said that his room was plastered with her posters and photos. He played her music in the production room after his shift. He waited at the record store for her new releases.

In the winter of 1991, word came from managment that Deb was going to come to the station on the publicity tour for her next (direct-to-landfill, as it happened) album.

Long story short: The big day came. Tom showed up - with a $400 set of earrings that he'd bought. He came to work two hours early, waited outside the studio - and as she left to be whisked to the airport to continue her tour, walked up to her in the hallway and pressed the little box into her hands. Then he walked away.

And that was that.

Tom's first love didn't really happen - obviously. And Tom, wherever you are, might want to count your blessings.

Stanley Williams: Picking And Choosing

Ed has more or less summed up what I think about capital punishment in re the Tookie Williams case. It's an issue on which I'm deeply ambivalent, of course, as I've said many times in this space; I'd gladly pull the switch on 90% of the people on Death Row myself, but until we can guarantee that the innocent are not executed, there is no justification to risk it. As a believer in limited government, the notion that the government can be granted an acceptable percentage of innocent people to kill outweighs any justice we gain from executing the guilty, given that a reversible and equally effective option is available.

Captain Ed also posts an email from an LA prosecutor which makes an eloquent case for capital punishment.

But something stuck in my craw (ouch) from the letter, which I quote from Ed's site:

It seems to me that it isn't enough to say that the people of California could have simply chosen to keep a killer like Tookie locked up forever. Getting rid of the death penalty means that we have to also consider the foreseeable consequences of guaranteeing criminals that they can kill as many innocent people as they want, for whatever reason at all, without even facing the theoretical possibility of placing their own lives at risk.

California is one of a tiny handful of states that places severe restrictions on private carry of concealed handguns by demonstrably law-abiding citizens. Tookie Wilson's crimes occurred at the height of America's mania for gun control, in the early eighties, the low-ebb of Second Amendment rights in the US, when California "led" the way (as they do today) along with New York, Chicago and DC in disarming the law-abiding public. Wilson's "Crips" gang flourished in America's inner cities, which tend to be the places with the toughest laws against gun ownership and carry by the law-abiding citizen.

How much trouble would we have saved had one of Wilson's victims dropped the hammer on "Tookie" long before his depredations landed him on Death Row and in the spotlight of America's vacuous celebrity Death Row Dollies? If the Crips faced what Ed's attorney correspondent called "theoretical possibility of placing their own lives at risk" every time they tried to prey on a citizen, a block, a neighborhood? If their next drive-by shooting were interrupted by a hail of gunfire from the neighbors, and their charred car were left at the corner as a warning to future scum? (I'm getting that Christmas feeling).

Because while Ed's correspondent makes some excellent points, it's a fact that America's hardest-core criminals, when interviewed over a decade ago, noted that they feared the "theoretical possibility of placing their own lives at risk" at the hands of armed homeowners vastly more than the cops; a needle at San Quentin 25 years later didn't even enter into the picture.

As If On Cue

If there's one thing you can count on, it's Syl Jones - playwrite, consultant, and Strib columnist - parrotting some assortment of ultra-left bromides or another as he takes his gratuitous racists swipes at whitey.

So too with today's column on the execution of Crips founder Tookie Wilson. When the chips are down, you can count on Jones to swing toward the mushy left:

If all goes well, Stanley (Tookie) Williams, co-creator of the infamous Crips gang (a k a Avenue Babies, Cribs and Cripples) turned children's book author, will be dead by the time you read this.

See?

Er...wait. Hold on. Something's wrong here.

I mean...

It is fashionable to decry the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment, as barbaric and even medieval. This is part of modern society's unfortunate propensity to delay or completely obliterate the laws of natural consequences. Endless pleadings -- sickness, extenuating circumstances, born under a bad sign and the devil made me do it -- benefit lawyers and civil libertarians in search of new causes. It makes suckers of the rest of us. Where is Ramsey Clark when you really need him? In Iraq defending another "innocent" named Saddam Hussein, or surely he'd be in Sacramento pleading for Tookie.

Things are flying around the room at random...:

For every cold-blooded, unrepentant killer like Stanley Williams on death row, there are individuals in prison who were framed by racist police, denied a competent defense and who might even be exonerated by DNA evidence. Robert Clark, falsely imprisoned for 20-some years in Georgia for a rape he did not commit, is one such man. He and others like him deserve our attention, our compassion and our assistance.

Not Williams, whose real legacy includes not only the deaths of four innocent people but also the creation of a virulent movement that is partially responsible for the genocide of two generations of young black and Latino Americans. He may never rest in peace. But he should be given the opportunity to do so.

I'm all disoriented now.

Read the whole thing, while I go and try to figure this out.

Syl Jones writes a column that makes sense...Syl Jones writes a column that makes sense...Syl Jones writes a column that makes sense...Syl Jones writes a column that makes sense...

I need coffee.

What's In A Word, Part II

The NRO asks, in the wake of John McCain's grandstanding, "what is torture":

The root of this confusion is the absence of an agreed-upon definition of terms. Everyone knows that "torture" is illegal, banned under the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT). The U.S. is a signatory to that treaty. The administration maintains that, as a matter of policy, it also applies CAT's other prohibition, against "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" (CID), to its handling of detainees overseas.

So, what is torture? Under CAT and U.S. law, it is the infliction of "severe pain or suffering." Bush critics like to ignore the word "severe" and pretend that subjecting a detainee to any pain is torture. It is not. While most people instinctively know what they consider torture — fingernails pulled out, electric shocks, beatings — defining what rises to the level of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is a trickier question.

That is all the more reason for Congress to define which practices it finds acceptable and which it doesn't. But all the McCain amendment does is apply the CID prohibition to our actions overseas, which the administration — at least by its own lights — is already doing.

Read the whole thing.

Try to find any references to sleep deprivation or MREs.

Lenfestation, Part III: "We're Above All That"

The nice thing about Sue Lenfestey, Minnesota writer without portfolio, is that she's a boundless font of material.

The not-so-nice thing is that she has a job in the media at all.

You know - the media that takes itself and its credibility so seriously. Like the Star-Tribune.

Nick Coleman (remember him?) should be thankful for Lenfestey; but for her, he'd be the undisputed worst writer in the Twin Cities media. Lenfestey is lazier, more smug, and has even fewer redeeming qualities than the Nonmonkey; Susan Lenfestey couldn't write this if her life depended on it, for example.

But I have to hand it to her; if I could make money by recycling rants from the Daily Kos and the Janeane Garofalo show, I'd probably take a stab at it. It must be like pennies from heaven.

Lenfestey:

As this administration bungles from one disaster to another, our president urges us not to look back at how we were bamboozled into this holy hell of a war, but to look ahead to the plan for victory -- as if there were one.

Bamboozled?

You mean, the one the entire Congress voted on? The one where they saw the same intelligence the President (and Tony Blair, for that matter) saw?

The one where even that noted right-wing tool, the New Yorker (Nicholas Lemann, in this case) noted:

In his State of the Union address, President Bush offered at least four justifications, none of them overlapping: the cruelty of Saddam against his own people; his flouting of treaties and United Nations Security Council resolutions; the military threat that he poses to his neighbors; and his ties to terrorists in general and to Al Qaeda in particular. In addition, Bush hinted at the possibility that Saddam might attack the United States or enable someone else to do so. There are so many reasons for going to war floating around—at least some of which, taken alone, either are nothing new or do not seem to point to Iraq specifically as the obvious place to wage it—that those inclined to suspect the motives of the Administration have plenty of material with which to argue that it is being disingenuous.

The war that 403 Representatives, including all but three Democrats, voted to continue just last month when called upon to vote on Rep. Murtha's "cut and run" plan?

I was about to write "The problem with Lenfestey is that she speaks in vague, inflammatory generalities"; seeing things like this...:

And we are urged to be more moderate in our criticism, more civil in our discourse. But that presumes that we have a moderate and civil government, and anyone with one eye open knows we don't.

...reinforces the point (ah, the old "anyone with one eye open agrees with me!" gambit! I know when I'm beaten!).

But then it gets worse; she tries to write about specifics!:

Seymour Hersh, the most tenacious war reporter of our generation [In a just universe, Sy Hersh would be working as Michael Yon's pedicurist. Sy Hersh wasn't fit to carry the late Steven Vincent's backpack -- Ed.], writes about the little-covered air war in Iraq. Unlike the Vietnam War, in which the military gave daily accounts of the air strikes, there is no such reporting in this war.

Why would that be?

Because it's hard to embed a reporter in a single-seat aircraft?

Or because as good and difficult a job as pilots do, the hard fighting in this war is on the ground?

Just a hunch...?

In the 2004 siege of Fallujah, for instance, bombing raids were conducted day and night for three weeks.

One wonders if Lenfestey has any idea what she means when she writes this.

Ms. Lenfestey: you're facing a building full of enemies (in your case, say it's a building full of Republicans); they want to kill you, and don't mind dying in the process. What's better - to go in and tangle with them yourself, face to face, hand to hand? Or point a laser at the building and call in an F-18 and indulge them wholesale?

Alternate question: Why the moral indignation? Do you even know?

More alarming, Hersh reports on the administration's plan for drawing down American troops by backing up the barely functional Iraqi Army with American air strikes. According to Hersh, military commanders oppose this scenario because it leaves the Iraqi ground forces able to call in sophisticated laser-guided bombs to targets that the pilots can't verify. With old feuds to be settled and the likelihood of a civil war, American bombs, they say, will hit increasingly indiscriminate targets.

So do you want a pullout or don't you?

Or do you merely advocate leaving while the Iraqi army is still "barely functional?"

• The story broke that the U.S. military had been paying "journalists" -- in fact military operatives and an American public relations firm -- to write articles favorable to the U.S. mission in Iraq and place them in Iraqi newspapers as if they were independent news stories.

In a related article, Susan Lenfestey - a "journalist" whose only "writing" experience would seem to be writing overheated lefty screeds like, er, this article and a couple of dozen identical ones - somehow keeps getting work, too.

Let's see, secret American gulags in countries known for their squishy laws on, um -- interrogation, the disgrace of Abu Ghraib and our administration's refusal to disavow torture, and now this mockery of a free press.

The woman is irony-proof.

Three words, Lenfestey: "Fake But Accurate".

Who's the mockery?

Speaking of mockery, I'm not done with Lenfestey yet

• A memo leaked to the Washington Post revealed the heavy-handed politicizing of the Justice Department under Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Although Justice Department lawyers and staff unanimously concluded that the Tom DeLay-inspired 2003 Texas redistricting plan, which diluted black and Hispanic votes to assure a Republican majority in the Texas congressional delegation, violated the Voting Rights Act, they were overruled. High-ranking Justice Department officials ordered them not to discuss the case and quashed the release of the recently leaked 73-page memo. The same officials then approved the plan, and Texas picked up five Republican congressional seats in the 2004 election.

Renault: "I'm shocked, shocked, to hear that gerrymandering has been going on in Texas..."

Flunky: "The representatives from California and New York are on the phone, sir..."

Renault: "Ah, show them in".

The worst thing, to Lenfestey? Not that you couldn't tell from the rest of her "body of work", but being polite to all those ickypoopy conservatives just makes her skin crawl:

While it's true that the Democratic leadership should remain civil and do a better job of spelling out a constructive agenda, the rest of us, especially the media, cannot afford to be moderate, or polite.

I repeat: Fake But Accurate.

Five Weird Things

Sheila's got another meme (via Joan) that I have to try.

How does it go? Just explain five weird things about yourself.

I think I can find five:

1. When I notice I've stepped on a crack in the sidewalk with one foot, I'm compelled to step on the next one with the other foot.
2. If my mind isn't frenetically occupied with other stuff, I find myself making words out of the initials of any sentence I'm hearing or saying (Immifowos, ifmmwootioasihos!); over the years, this habit has developed its own syntax and grammar; occasionally, I'll interpret passages of TV or radio shows into this "language" in real-time, like one of those instant interpreters at the UN (Oty, thhdiosag; oiipot,ors,itlirt,l1otiiatUN!)
3. If I am walking down the sidewalk and notice two expansion joints crossing in a "T" shape, and I'm not walking with someone, I'm compelled to try to spit right at the junction. I've been doing it so long, I've actually gotten to the point where I'll hit it most of the time.
4. I love fruit in all its many forms - but fruit bagels are just wrong.
5. When I see plane taking off, I instantly say a silent prayer that everyone on board gets where they're going. Haven't had one of them crash yet.

Five is probably plenty.

Coming Soon To The Daily Kos Comment Section

Mice with a difference:

Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in San Diego, the researchers created the mice by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse into the brains of 14-day-old rodent fetuses.

Melt This Down, Sucka

Chad the Elder on the key difference between Mary "The Dragon" Mapes and John "Saint George" Hinderaker:

Of course the manner in which Power Line dealt with the Schiavo memo story and the way that Mapes has dealt with the TANG story are almost polar opposites. Once it became apparent that the Schiavo memo was not a Democratic dirty trick, the Power Lines boys accepted the facts as they were and moved on. Mapes meanwhile, continues to stubbornly cling to evidence and a storyline long ago rejected by reasonable, clear-thinking people.

Read Chad's whole piece, as well as the Powerline piece he links, in re the Mapes/Hinderaker face-off on a Fargo talk radio station.

Next up in the mainstream media's arsenal:

1. Falling on the floor, plugging ears, chanting "I Can't Hear Yoooo" loudly.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XVIII

Wednesday, December 12, 1985. I'd turned 23 the day before. Winter had struck, a warmish October yielding to a wet, chilly, snowy November that included a bit of a blizzard the previous weekend. I'd driven to a band audition in White Bear Lake, from an ad in the City Pages. The ad said they - a bass player and a drummer - wanted to start a good rock and roll band with some room for originals. The ad didn't say they were a couple of high school kids playing in their mom's basement. As the blizzard formed, I drove out to White Bear - it might as well have been Wisconsin - slogged through "Immigrant Song" and "Sweet Emotion" and a little very uninspired jamming, and then picked my way home through near-zero visibility (my car nearly bottomed out - in the middle of 35W!), cold, tired, crabby, and out a couple of bucks on gas that needn't have been burned in the first place.

I'd been in the Twin Cities almost two months, and with the exception of Wednesday (today!) and my interview at KSTP-AM, I really didn't have a thing going on. My resolution was to find a job - any job, no matter how crappy, just to pay the bills, if I didn't have something else by New Years.

I also resolved that I was going to go back to Jamestown for a long weekend, starting tomorrow, December 13.

But first things first; the interview.

I drove out to KSTP; successfully, this time. I was ushered into the kitchen area - same as my previous interview. I met Rob Pendelton, the "Executive Producer", at the time a 31 year old guy who looked like he'd be more comfortable in sandals and shorts, with a laid-back attitude to match; we went through the basics of the job (I'd be a call screener; minimum wage; three hours a day plus the two-hour production meeting; no guarantees of going anywhere). I nodded enthusiastically, smiled, and kept my eye contact without flinching; I'd learned! By this point, I didn't care; anything was better than nothing.

Then, I met with David Elvin, the producer for a guy named Don Vogel.

We chatted for a bit. The cast of the Vogel Show had just had a minor local "hit" in the novelty song market, "Like A Roving Coach"; I'd caught it on the show the previous week as I was doing my "research", listening to the program; it was Don's take on Lou Holtz scramming for Notre Dame (done in Don's impeccable Bob Dylan impression). "Yep, I heard it", I allowed. "I do a lot of music; I play guitar".

That brightened Dave up a bit. "Cool! I kind of suck on guitar..."

The interview went uphill fast from there - and for the first time since I'd moved to the city, after umpteen interviews, I was finally starting to smell paydirt.

Where "paydirt" is $3.35 an hour.

But no matter. I drove home feeling an exhilaration that had long deserted me, at least on the job-hunting front. Maybe this can work after all.

I got home and started thinking about the trip back to North Dakota. Or as I put it in my mind as I thought about it, "home". I was acutely aware that NoDak was still the home base.

It was fading, but still there.

It was getting cold out.

Married To The MOB

Reservations continue to pour in for this coming Saturday's Minnesota Organization of Bloggers (MOB) Party. The party is this Saturday at Keegans, starting at 5PM.

I'm counting 68 RSVPs so far - and these things always draw more people at the last minute.

Speaking of RSVPs, do us a favor and send an email to:
party at the email address
northernallianceradio (add a dot here) com.

Hope to see you there!

Questions For Mirecki

Mike Adams tries to interview Paul Mirecki, the Kansas University religion professor known for his bigotry against "fundies". This is from an email Adams sent to Mirecki after his alleged beating at the hands of "fundies", and shortly before his resignation from Kansas University's religious studies department

Money section:

Q: You told a reporter earlier this week that you were also struck with a metal object? What did the object look like? How did you know it was metal as opposed to wood, for example? Did you see it?

A: No comment.

Q: After the police arrived at the hospital around 6:40 A.M., you claimed that one of the white males that allegedly attacked you was wearing a red visor and wool gloves. Is that correct?

A: No comment.

Q: Was it cold in Kansas the morning you were allegedly attacked by the side of the road?

A: No comment.

Q: How could you discern the color of the attacker’s visor given that the sun did not rise in Lawrence, Kansas until 7:27 on the morning of the alleged attacks?

A: No comment.

Q: Why was the attacker wearing a visor, which protects one from the sun – and, certainly, not the cold – given that it was not sunny but cold at the time of the alleged attack?

A: No comment.

Q: What do you say to those who suspect you have fabricated these charges in order to promote bigotry against Christians?

A: No comment.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

Let me be clear for those of you not gifted with excessive reading comprehension: I'd like to hope that an ostensibly responsible university professor wouldn't fake his own attack - not that we can assume anything anymore; there seems to be a wave of academics who think that ethics are secondary to message. I'd hope that if someone - "fundy" or not - attacked Mirecki that law enforcement would find them and throw the book at them.

However, I think - and I think Adams must suspect - that where there's smoke, there's fire; Adams asks some interesting questions, ones that (from the sound of it) the police are also asking.

I'm going to wait until we hear something substantial, of course, before jumping to conclusions unwarranted by evidence. Because goodness knows that accepting things purely on faith with no empirical evidence would be wrong, wouldn't it?

What's In A Word, Redux

The GOP strikes back.

Finally.

The "White Flag" ads, trumpeting Howard Dean and John "Our Troops are Terrorists" Kerry's remarks, are on the way.

Democrats aren't happy (note Dean's attempt to crabwalk away a couple of posts ago):

A Democratic strategist who had the web ad described to her said, “This is way over the top but we have no one to blame but Dean, Kerry and others who continue to pander to the anti-war activists within our party.”

The good guys? Another story, natch:

One Republican strategist familiar with the ad said, “The Democrats, especially Howard Dean have a way of trying to turn the tables and say ‘that’s not what I meant’ – its just those ‘evil Republicans’ This video will make them crazy – it reinforces what they really believe with what they actually said – and that is devastating for the Democratic Party.”

That's the nice thing, when you have an administration that is so agonizingly slow off the mark when it comes to PR: having Howard Dean in the opposite camp makes comebacks a lot easier.

You couldn't pay for material like he and Kerry provided this past week.

What's In A Word

I heard Howard Dean on NPR the other day.

Closely paraphrasing: "We're not fighting terrorists. We're fighting insurgents".

In other words, they're just rebelling against the central authority, not really trying to impose their political will via terror.

Let's see if we can get this straight here: when they blow up car-bombs at the western media's center of gravity, when they kidnap and murder western civilians, when they send videos that bypass the Iraqi free media and go directly to Al-Jazeera (which is aimed as much at the west as anywhere), that assaults the Iraqi central, democratically-elected authority precisely how?

And using what? Terror?

It's part of a concerted attempt to muddy the rhetorical waters - because it's only in muddy waters that their case makes any sense. "An American pull-out wouldn't let terrorists run free! Just "insurgents"! A whole 'nother thing! Honest! And we can reinforce the Iraqis with those 135,000 "moderate Moslem" troops I mentioned during the campaign..."

...oh, wait.

Howard Dean and the Democrat Party's logic on the War on Terror; from the Land of Phantom Soldiers.

Kennedy Swings

Good to see GOP Congressman and Senatorial candidate Mark Kennedy coming out swinging against the DFLers running against him.

He asks the question that, in the wake of Murtha, all of us need to be asking all of them:

Kennedy fired off a news release late Thursday accusing his would-be opponents of ducking on whether they support Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean's recent statement that "the idea that the war is going to be won" is "just plain wrong."

Although all three voiced gradations of support for withdrawal in a Star Tribune article on Thursday, "once again they managed to slip through the cracks without answering the question: Do the Democrats running for the Senate agree with the leader of their party Howard Dean that the war can't be won?"

Remember the Murtha vote - the 403-3 vote against Murtha's "immediate withdrawal" bleat?

Said Pat Shortridge, Kennedy's campaign manager: "The Democrats refuse to answer the simple question about DNC chairman Howard Dean because they're afraid to alienate the extreme MoveOn.org crowd that dominates their party."

The same MoveOn.org crowd that, farther up in the same article, spells out their agenda: "Moveon.org, a national liberal group with a strong presence in Minnesota, collected signatures on the Nicollet Mall on Thursday for a petition that demands that Republicans produce a plan for withdrawing from Iraq. "

So what does Dean say?

Dean said Thursday his assertion was reported "a little out of context," saying Democrats believe a new U.S. strategy is needed to succeed in Iraq.

A "new strategy".

MoveOn and Murtha have spent the last couple of weeks defining that "new strategy"; it's called "pulling out".

Is Dean backing away now? Has the show of pusillanimity in Congress (which will be compaign gold next fall) and Bush's newfound pugnacity (echoed by his late jump in the polls) spooked them?

Bush In Town

The President is in town today.

Yes, I got a call. No, I could not manage a grand for admission. Not that I'd have had the time today anyway.

Other people? Well, they have all sorts of time on their hands:

DFL Senate candidates, party leaders, liberal organizations and peace groups have been outdoing each other to stage creative protest efforts or to make policy statements.

Moveon.org, a national liberal group with a strong presence in Minnesota, collected signatures on the Nicollet Mall on Thursday for a petition that demands that Republicans produce a plan for withdrawing from Iraq.

Sigh.

Sigh again.

Someone explain to me exactly why this proposal - giving the enemy a big red-letter day to circle on their calendar - isn't of direct assistance to the terrorists?

Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar, a DFL U.S. Senate candidate, went to the University of Minnesota on Thursday and collected what she called "Reality Checks" for Kennedy -- statements signed by students protesting Kennedy's votes for budget cuts that include student loan programs.

The loans and the massive government grant programs are, of course, why college is too expensive to afford in the first place - but then, Amy Klobuchar is a DFLer; she doesn't need to know anything about economics.

Welcome to Never-Neverland, Mr. President.

Schultz

A group of sub-human vermin claims to have executed Ron Schultz:

The Islamic Army in Iraq said it had killed "the American security consultant for the Housing Ministry," after the United States failed to respond to its demand of the release of Iraqi prisoners.

A video issued by the group was broadcast Tuesday on Al-Jazeera showing the hostage _ identified as Ronald Schulz, 40, an industrial electrician from Alaska _ sitting with his hands tied behind his back.

The group Thursday blamed President Bush for failing to respond to its demands.

Hell is too good for such scum.

Hope they die among pigs. God bless whatever soldier, Marine or Iraqi who puts a grenade up the perps' asses.

("But for G-d's sake, don't deprive them of sleep, feed them MREs or pantomime flushing their precious fecking Korans!")

Last Call

Ugh.

OK. I'm supposed to be somewhere tonight. Some event. If you're involved, you know who you are and where it is.

Please email or comment.

"Funny" comments will be deleted if I'm in a good mood, mutilated otherwise.

And I'm not in a good mood.

Hostage

One of the latest hostages in Iraq is from my hometown, Jamestown, ND:

There wasn't much to Ron Schulz when he reported for the track team at Jamestown High School 25 years ago.

Not much except grit.

"Oh, he was a short kid, and slight," said Russ Schmeichel, who still coaches the school's track and cross country teams.

He was quiet, too, a reserved farm kid who followed a much more outgoing older brother into sports and other activities. "He wasn't the most talented athlete I had, but he was one of the hardest-working," Schmeichel said.

I didn't know Ron well - I knew his brother better. Schmeichel was my seventh-grade gym teacher (of which the less said the better). As a point in passing, I know every single person referenced in this article, including mayor Charlie Kourajian (brother of a friend of King Banaian's; small towns are the smallest world of all):

"Devastating," said Mayor Charlie Kourajian, who went to the high school Wednesday to look up Schulz's pictures in the 1983 Bluejay yearbook. "We already lost one boy to the war," he said, referring to Specialist Philip Brown, 21, a National Guard soldier who was killed last year. "And now this. It's getting pretty close."

Pray for Ron.

And I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I pray for a flaming, cold death for the kidnappers. That's probably not my better self speaking, but it's true.

Terrorized

I caught Dave "Mao Tse" Thune on the KARE11 morning show today, in re the citywide smoking ban proposal in Saint Paul.

"I don't blame them for being scared...they're being terrorized by thesmoking industry", he said.

No, Mao Dave; they're being terrorized by the thought that their businesses, and the huge investment these bar owners have made in them, are going to get run out of business by a group of plush-bottom yoohoos at Saint Paul's City Hall who have never run a business, wouldn't know how to if you held a gun to their head (shush, Jay Benanav, your "Private Sector CEO" gig was a pseudogovernmental patronage plum and you know it), and have never needed to ponder the whole notion of "unintended consequences".

Dismal

Katie on the Today show Wednesday morning, in re the Zawahiri tape: "The fact that this was produced by Al Quaeda's in-house production unit shows how sophisticated they are".

I sat, dumbstruck, for a moment.

Then I, the Production Unit of the Northern Alliance, went to work, here at my undisclosed location in Blogistan, with a video camera and a laptop, smiling at my extreme sophistication.

I don't watch Today much; by 7AM, I'm in the thick of getting kids on their buses. And I don't know any conservative who's under any illusions that Today is a balanced source of news; Katie Couric in particular is a shill for the left's smuggest impulses.

But today seemed...worse? More blatant? Dumber? Anyway, different than earlier run-ins with Today.

Whenever the leftymedia wants to try to seem serious about defense and the war, they trot out retired general Barry McCaffrey. Perhaps this is a good sign: perhaps Bush's PR "blitz" of this past week is starting to have an effect on how the media sees the public's perception of things; rather than play to raw regurgitation of leftover Vietnam-War-era tropes, it's sounding like they're trying to build a pseudo-military case for withdrawal (while slipping all sorts of Post-Vietnam-era code phrases into the message). This morning was no exception.

Matt Lauer interviewed McCaffrey about the Zawahiri tape mentioned above; Today was visibly panting about the "significance" of the tape (wherein Zawahiri - gasp - tells Al Quaeda to start attacking Americans in Iraq!)

Lauer put a herculean effort into leading McCaffrey into thinking the tape is a morale hit to the troops on the ground in Iraq; three straight times, he tried to edge the retired general into saying some permutation of "this tape is going to be a gut-shot to morale" or some such.

Then:

Lauer: "Should commanders lose their jobs over the screwups in Iraq?" Do troops on the ground think someone should pay for this?

McCaffrey: "One would think Rumsfeld would be held accountable for this?"

Lauer: "Do you think [comnanders] want Rumsfeld held accountable?"

McCaffrey "...I think most [field grade officers] have a lot of loyalty toward the civilian leadership...

Lauer: "Do you think Rumsfeld will hold onto his job?"

...followed, again, by a couple of attempts of Lauer's part to get McCaffrey to say in as many words that he wants Rumsfeld fired. McCaffrey danced around it - he mentioned "accountability" several times - but never quite took the bait, at least not in a form that NBC could put on the Evening News in the form of a "call from Barry McCaffrey for Rumsfeld's resignation" tonight.

Needless to say, it was never mentioned that McCaffrey was an office-holder under the Clinton administration, and will likely be one in any future Democrat administration.

Barry McCaffrey is like a human spray-can of gravitas that the frat boys of the Democratic Party can spray around the dingy apartment of their military policy to cover up the smell of their own rotting ideas.

Thursday Night

Since I've been having computer problems again, I will need to go through this somewhat embarassing procedure one more time:

I have an event at which I'm supposed to be tomorrow evening. I remember some of the basics - the city it's in, the type of event it is, that sort of thing - but I can not find the specifics.

If someone involved in the event could please leave a comment or (better yet) drop me a line (you have my email address, since you sent me a reminder...just before my laptop packed up), I'd be much obliged.

Thanks, and I'll hope to hear from you!

MOB Rules Redux, Again!

RSVPs are pouring in for the MOB party at Keegans, Saturday, December 17 from 5PM until it's done. We're well over 40 confirmed attendees so far. It's going to be a lot of fun, I can tell already.

If you're a blogger, a blog reader, someone interested in blogs, or just out for a fun evening, see us there!

And, once again, it'd be great if you'd RSVP at:

party
(at the address)
northernallianceradio
(with a dot)
com

Drop a line!

Deep In The Heart Of Ugly

Some of my best friends don't believe in God. I personally find atheism utterly intellectually untenable - but with those friends of mine who are atheist, there's usually an unstated foundation of respect and tolerance behind the disagreement.

I've known quite a few other atheists who are far from friends. In some cases, the relationship is usually based on the comic relief they provide me; the universe isn't big enough for them and an all-knowing, all-seeing God.

In other cases, it's more a scientific venture; it's interesting observing someone who's carried his/her disagreement with religion and carried it over to full-blown bigotry toward and hatred of people of faith.

King reports on an alleged attack on a professor in Kansas known for his assaults on fundamentalist Christianity:

Somebody has gone and beaten Paul Mirecki this morning, and there's no doubt the left will try to link this to his criticism of "fundies" needing to be "slapped in their big fat faces". Those doing the linkage would do well to remember the definition of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" and wait for more information. Whoever hit the guy needs to be tossed in jail, and then brought out and beaten by those of us who think it stupid to arm this radical-masquerading-as-academic with sympathy.

Waiting for information is a good idea. Of course, if true the law should and will hopefully throw the book at the (conveniently-stereotypical redneck) "fundies" who carried out the alleged assault. I'll await proof...

...especially given the small cottage industry in faked hate crimes sweeping American campuses and, in some cases, the academy itself.

The depressing part? Reading the rank, naked bigotry oozing between (and within) the lines of the comments sections of some of the prominent atheist-leaning blogs who've written on the subject. Change the names and subjects, and you'd swear you were on an Al Quaeda or Klan site.

That's Why It's So Cold

My neighbor Peter emailed me:

Subject: hell froze over
Headers: Show All Headers
Yep, hell froze over. There's some guy on MPR talking about how Reagan ranks among our greatest presidents.

Look for Hillary! to threaten to "start bombing Iran in five minutes" sometime before 2008.

The Limits Of Endurance

Back in the bad old days - 1988 to about 1992 - I worked as a nightclub DJ. I worked for a DJ service that jobbed me out to a lot of bars. Some wer fun; the old "George Is In Fridley", on the Minneapolis/Fridley line, was like working a mob joint, but in all the good ways; Papa George, the 70-something patriarch of a huge Greek family that owned a string of bars and restaurants around the Twin Cities, would come in and sit at a long table between the restaurant area and the dance floor. His kids and their spouses or sigothers would sit in descending order of age outward from him (when they weren't busy running the kitchen or the bar); Papa George would eat his dinner and make business decisions as his "kids" - in their twenties through forties - scurried around as Papa's and the business demands warranted. They loved me there, by the way - even though my service didnt' job me out there for long, my money was never any good at the bar; oldest son Tony liked my style, I guess.

I think I worked something like two dozen different bars altogether; most of them were snoozy little veneer and naugahyde joints attached to bowling alleys in third-tier suburbs with nearly interchangeable names; Whispers; Mingles; Strutters; Shooters; Jams; Sh'Booms; Wallaby's; Webster's; of course, the immortal Mermaid. I've forgotten a bunch of others; there are times I'll walk through a hotel or drive by a bowling alley or dumpy roadhouse in some third-tier burb and do a double-take; "I jocked here a couple of times!".

A lot of the bars were kind of rough; some catered to bikers, most to bowlers, and all of them to drinkers. And something happens when you let morons loose around drunks; they do stupid crap.

The Mermaid was bad, back in the day, to say the least; the management of the downstairs nightclub (as distinct from the upstairs sports bar and restaurant) wanted both worlds; the loaded the back half of the bar with pool tables and did two-for-ones and happy hour freebies until 10PM to bring in the rednecks (and in they were brought, in droves); for them, I played lots of rock and roll. After 10, of course, they wanted the brothers from North Minneapolis and Columbia Heights to come in; they were always a great party, always ordering top-rail drinks and - this part seemed to elude most of the pool-hall crowd in back - dancing, which kept the women from bolting for the door at 10:01. (That, in fact, was my greatest strength as a DJ: I knew how to beat-mix rock into R'nB in order to seduce the rednecks into staying until 10:20-ish, when they'd peer through their Budweiser haze and notice that there were tons of hot babes hanging around, and decide to stay for full-price drinks and at least a long shot of hooking up with some bar skeeze. But I digress). Downside of this strategy, of course, is that rednecks and the stylin' brothas don't always mix; many nights I'd be working a full, packed, raucus dance floor and some redneck would stagger over to the booth; "When are ya gonna play some white people's music?", he'd slur. "You mean like Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry?", I'd respond. "Yeah. Er...Heyyyy!". Often as not, I'd see that same soused redneck taking a swing at someone later in the evening, and watch him being carried out the door by four of the neckless bouncers that made the Mermaid such a lousy place to be a drunk moron.

And a good place to be a DJ, in its own sleazy way.

But the worst bar of all?

I ask, because JB Doubtless is talking city vs. suburbs again, citing but not naming me, I guess, in talking about a shooting outside the Quest (a mostly R'nB bar in downtown Minneapolis that started out as Prince's old "Glam Slam" club in 1989 or so).

JB:

So all in all just another example of the wonderful culture that us lame, non-urban living types miss out on. I'm not sure if any of the various promoters of the joy of urban life actually attended this important cultural event, but I'm sure they were there in spirit.

Yeah, JB - come to think of it, I think there's an ordinance in Minneapolis requiring everyone to attend rap shows at the Quest.

But worry not, JB; living in the far exurbs doesn't mean you have to miss anything. The worst bar, most violent, depraved bar I ever worked at - by a long, long shot - was a modest, unassuming little bar (which shall remain nameless, since the owner is a genuinely good guy whose business I'd hate to hurt, and who still owns the joint) out in the once-far, once-barren exurb of Rosemount. I worked there, rotating with other bars, for the better part of a couple of years.

The most dangerous bar ever.

The job, when DJing, is to keep the women on the floor. Not to play listening music for people sitting and drinking - because people who are dancing buy a lot more drinks than people who aren't.

So it wasn't unusual, on a chilly winter Friday or Saturday night, to have a floor full of south-suburban twentysomething girls and, sometimes, their boyfriends, out on the floor, enjoying Prince and Cameo and the Time and the other dance music of the day - and have a bunch of snowmobilers barge into the joint, reeking of cheap brandy and vomit, and demand instant gratification.

"Yeew ain't never gonna get nobody on no floor playing this n***er sh*t" was the usual introduction. Where'd you get the Arklahoma accent, you greasy f*ck? You're from Farmington!, I'd think as I told 'em "We'll get some rock and roll in here soon".

Usually that was good enough; I'm 6'5, I can project assurance fairly well.

But it wasn't always enough. Some nights they wanted their country - or Foghat, or polka, or whatever afflicted their sodden fancies - now. The bar's bouncers usually doubled as the bar's waitresses, so I (or whomever from the service I worked for) was usually pretty much on my/our own. Threats? (Yeew git this hyar n***er sh*t off 'n play sum whot peeples mewsic, or ah'll see you outside afterwerds!) Abuse? ("Ah bit yew ur a faygget! That's raht, sweetheart, I get yeeew lahk boys!" Brandished fists? Brandished bats? Par for the course.

Usually, the problem limited itself; the snowmobilers/bikers/whatever would get into a fight on their own, which usually brought the cops.

But of all the bars I ever worked at, it was this bar, deep in the far 'burbs, that put two of my company's DJs in the hospital; one with a stab wound from a drunken redneck lout who wanted his Billy Ray Cyrus Now, G******it!, and one who got his head dribbled off the plexiglass border around the DJ booth half a dozen times, broke his nose and nearly fractured his skull, because he didn't get a Prince song off the turntable immediately.

The moral of the story? Drunk morons are everywhere; it doesn't matter if they wear Starter jackets and bling, or Harley jackets and tobacco-stained teeth; all drunk, belligerent morons are trash for whom being kicked in the head repeatedly is too good.

It Takes A Hero?

The nation was mired in a war whose unpopularity was a matter of question. The media stood firmly on the "anti" side, having declared the war "unwinnable" in the midst of the greatest military victory of the war, in a battle that broke the back of the enemy's ability to carry out any cohesive offensive operations for the next five years.

From the political mire sprang a man - a war hero - to "tell the truth" to the American people, and to lead them out of the quagmire. As a war hero, of course, his record was above question; one must not bash on war heroes. And so he led a party that espoused a policy that, though it was decisively repudiated at the polls, snuck in through the back door; pull out of the war; turn it immediately over to the locals; retain the ability to return to the war "if needed"; turn a blind eye to the outside forces supporting the enemy; plug the ears and shut the eyes and shout "Lalalalalalala" when warned of the consequences.

Representative Murtha? No, George McGovern, whose candidacy for predident in 1972 served as a referendum on middle America's views on the war in Iraq just a surely as the 2004 election did for the War on Terror, and whose policy was strikingly (and not at all coincidentally) similar to that of Howard Dean and John Murtha: pull out immediately (surrender with honor, if you will); retain a putative option to return (that everyone knows will never be used, for the same lack of political will that led to the pullout in the first place, not to mention the blow that would strike the military); draw specious distinctions between the types of enemy one faced.

Remember that? We retained the same "over the horizon" capability to return to Vietnam after 1973 that the likes of Murtha and Dean favor today. Wonderful plan, that; putatively figure on sending American servicemen to pay a second time for land they've already liberated.

History hasn't assigned George McGovern (and, especially, his followers) his responsibility for what happened; because of the abandonment and the complete collapse of political support for the Thieu government in Congress, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia all fell; millions died in the Killing Fields and the re-education camps; the H'Mong were chased - and in some cases, gassed - out of their mountain homes, with staggering casualties and massive dislocation.

The same precise legacy awaits Dean (I'm not going to mention Murtha; he's a Potemkin figure, a sock-puppet with the hands of Mad How and Pelosi and Kerry and probably George Soros controlling his every statement).

And you know that a lot of Democrats know this. Democrat congresspeople have constituents who served in Vietnam, who remember the left's betrayal of not only the South Vietnamese but of their own fallen comrades; it's why all but three Democrats in the House scampered away from John Murtha's resolution when it was called to an inconvenient on-the-record vote last month.

So all you Dems who haven't completely drunk the koolaid; how do you feel about this resurrection of the most noxious of Democrat party legacies?

MOB Rules IV

Remember - the winter Minnesota Organization of Blogs (MOB) Party is coming up a week from this coming Saturday.

We have almost 40 RSVPs so far, which is about 20 ahead of the pace for the January 2005 winter party, which drew over 100 bloggers, fans, friends and interested parties.

Interested in coming to the party? You don't need to RSVP, strictly speaking, but it'd be cool to get a rough headcount.

Write to us at:

party
at the address
northernallianceradio
(dot)
com

The party starts at 5PM, and goes until they drag Atomizer from the bar. Which could be sometime Monday.

Drop a line, and we'll see you there!

The Rammer

Ramsey Clark - former "Attorney General" of the United States - has, as is his frequent wont, flown to the defense of another dictator, in this case Saddam Hussein.

In the trial's most recent session, Clark criticized the Iraqi court as having been set up by the United States.

One wonders if he's ever attacked the Supreme Courts of Japan or Germany? Or the Japanese Diet (parliament)?

In related news, perhaps we've reached a tipping point in Iraq coverage: not only did I hear a piece on NPR yesterday about Ramsey Clark that mentioned the intense embarassment he brings to many on the left (former Vietnam uberprotester Todd Gitlin condemned Clark on the air) but this morning I heard one of their little "up close and personal" pieces by an Iraqi reporter who told of - heavens to murgatroid! - the climate of fear in Iraq. The one before the liberation, no less!

On the other hand, perhaps we have not. I watched Chris Wallace's show on Fox on Sunday morning; Mara Liasson and Juan Williams, both NPR personalities (Liasson is officially a reporter) were still bloviating about how the lack of vast caches of WMDs invalidated the whole liberation.

The more things change...

Hmmmm

Right Wing News has the results of its fourth annual "Best Warblogger" awards.

As an aside - perhaps it's a sign of how the blogosphere has evolved that very few of the listed are overtly "War blogs", to the point where RWN actually disclaims the results:

I told the judges not to get hung up on whether someone was a "warblogger" or not.

At any rate, I thought this couplet of results was interesting:

Most Annoying Left-Of-Center Blogger

Honorable Mention: The Huffinton Post (No blogger specified) (4)
Honorable Mention:Juan Cole from Informed Comment(4)
Honorable Mention:Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon (3 For AM + 2 For Pandragon) (5) [Actually, everyone from Pandagon was annoying - Ed]
Honorable Mention: Andrew Sullivan from The Daily Dish (10)
3) Oliver Willis (11) [It's really amazing; Willis has gone, in three years, from being a fairly interesting blog - I used to blogroll him - into relative nonentity status; turning into George Soros' kept man probably killed whatever appeal the blog might have once had - Ed.]
2) Atrios from Eschaton(13)
1) Markos Moulitsas Zúniga from Daily Kos (23)

Most Annoying Right-Of-Center Blogger

3) Stop The ACLU (3)
3) INDC Journal (3)
2) Hugh Hewitt (4)
1) Andrew Sullivan from The Daily Dish (13)

So Sullivan - who is my blogfather - is in the top five on both the left and the right?

By the way, NARN colleague Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters scored high in both original reporting and #3 on the "Best Blog Overall" list.

'Grats, Ed!

Call Ramsey Clark

You're out driving. It's seven on a Saturday evening, and as you pull up at a stoplight, you see a police car in your rear-view mirror. You think nothing of it; you have a clean record, as far as you know.

But sure enough, after the light turns green and you go half a block, the whoopie lights come on. You pull over, and produce your license, and sit, and wait. Then, the officer comes back to your car and asks if you were aware you had three outstanding warrants for your arrest.

You're flabbergasted. You had no idea. The officer takes you back to his car, and has you sit in the back seat. Turns out you had a parking ticket over a year ago - you either forgot about it, or it blew off your windshield before you could get it, you don't know which, because it was over a friggin' year ago. Since you never paid the fine, your license was suspended. How did you miss that? Who knows.

It doesn't matter. Downtown you go.

After you get to the downtown station, you're handcuffed and moved to the holding tank, where you sit for an hour or so among the drunks, petty thieves and other assorted petty criminals that are awaiting processing. Finally, you are booked; fingerprinted, mug shots, the whole works. And you're led to a cell in the lockup.

Hungry? Too bad - the jail serves "dinner" at 4PM. It's much cheaper that way, serving "dinner" before the nighttime rush.

You ask to make your phone call. "You don't have a PIN number yet", says the khaki, relishing every word. Inmates need to have a PIN number, y'see, to make their phone call.

Eventually, a "Court Officer" - he looks like a junior assistant county attorney who hasn't scored enough brownie points with the County Attorney to ditch this job yet - comes to the cell next door. The guy, you near, has been caught breaking into someone's garage. He was caught red-handed with a bunch of garden tools and motor oil. But it's his first offense, and there's only one charge, so he's released "on his own recognizance". "Wow", you think; if a burglar gets OR'ed, certainly you and your measly parking ticket will be on your way shortly. The "court officer" makes his way to your cell. He looks over his clipboard. "Sorry", he says. "Three warrants; not elegible". Next door, a guy who was brought in for punching someone at a bar is OR'ed.

An hour or so later, the khaki comes back with your PIN. You get your phone call; you call a friend to come and throw your bail. You get a busy signal. Too bad. That's your phone call. No more until tomorrow.

You spend a cold, fitful night, listening to fellow inmates vomiting, flushing the steel toilets, yelling at the khakis; you can't sleep.

The next day - Sunday - you're exhausted. You're worried about getting out of jail in time to get to work on Monday. Too bad, the khakis sneer. Not their problem.

You're exhausted. You're a regular schmuck - your only exposure to the law was in ninth-grade civics class. You're disoriented. You've got a distinct feeling you're being kept in the dark about your rights; after all, you've got three warrants out for you, which apparently makes you a bigger flight risk than an accused burglar or someone who punched someone out in a bar. You have no idea what to do. (Nobody explains that you can use your call to get hold of a bail bondsman; why should they? What do you think the khakis are, lawyers?)

This fictional story is brought up to ask the question; if you'd been accused of giving information to terrorists rather than booting a ticket, would Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch be proclaiming the hunger, exhaustion and uncertainty - all carried out very deliberately on the county's part - to be "torture?"

Just curious.

Someone's Getting Desperate

There's a certain over-heated, takes-herself-way-too-seriously blogger who must be desperate for hits; she's taking more broad little swipes at me.

Oh, I'm not going to link to her; some of you know who I'm talking about; the rest of you are better off not knowing.

(Although if you hit my search box and type "ethically-challenged", you'll see several references to her).

Two bits of advice to Ms. Desperate:

1. Try posting your stuff all over a bunch of email forums (whoops - you've been doing that for years)
2. Quit focusing on publicizing yourself; develop some perspective

Happy Holidays.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XVII

December 4, 1985. A Wednesday.

I was closing in on two months in the Twin Cities. No job yet - no real nibbles, really.

A job as a technical writer at a local defense-related contractor flared briefly in November - and flamed out as the company imposed a hiring freeze that lasted the better part of a decade. I ended up working in tech writing - starting in 1993. But that would wait.

And wait.

And wait.

I'd been to a bunch of band auditions. I figured the best way to get into the music scene was to get into a band that was sort of, kind of, like what I wanted to do.

My first audition was sometime in mid-November, after I'd moved into my apartment in South Minneapolis. It was in a warehouse on and Washington Avenue North. I parked my car in a trash-strewn dirt lot abutting a railroad track, and hauled my gear - my guitar and amp - up a cement stairway onto a ratty loading dock that smelled of grease and urine. A bum was passed out in a neighboring doorway. I took a ricket freight elevator up to a drafty room that smelled like rodent droppings with a couple of hanging 110 volt outlets and fist holes in the wallboard, in a warren of similar little spaces housing small bands and wheezing artists. The audition? A couple of synth-pop dweebs from Woodbury-via-The Wedge. Dreadful music, worse "audition". Hated it. I only bring it up, really, as a way of noting that I walked by that same building about a year ago. It's been renovated into lofts that start around $375,000; the building next door where the drunk was passed out is a chi-chi office block. I barely recognized the place.

The other event was "Today", Wednesday. After a bunch of tries, I got a hold of Rob Pendelton at KSTP-AM. "Sorry, I've been so busy - but we have a job working as a screener for the..." I didn't catch the host's name. "We'd like you to come in for an interview next Wednesday".

I accepted, naturally. The bank account was in free fall. My goal; if I didn't have a job I actually wanted by New Years, I was going to take the first security job that I could get.

Crazy Day

Very busy today. Light to nonexistant posting until noon.

Try to maintain.

Vultures On The Scraps Of Fortune

Let's flash back, if you will, to two years ago.

The DFL predicted, in full facial-vein-bulging fury, that combining the Ventura Deficit ($4.5 billion dollars at the time) with Pawlenty's "New New Taxes" pledge was irresponsible, and would plunge the state into ruin.

They were wrong, of course, as all of us tax hawks predicted; as the economy has improved, so has the state's revenue picture.

The forecast is positive: The state budget is projected to be back in the black by $1 billion after four years of red ink.

Even more certain, with a major state election year ahead in 2006, is an intensified political debate over what the numbers really mean and who was responsible for what.

Prediction: Look for the DFL to find some way to claim that raising taxes spurred the economy.

Similarly, look for them to disavow the notion that Jesse Ventura's profligacy in converting the temporary surpluses of the '90's into permanent spending had anything to do with the crisis in the first place.

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty and DFLers began sparring on those points as soon as news of the projected surplus broke.

The state Finance Department projected a $701 million surplus for 2006-07, in addition to $317 million already banked from fiscal 2005, which ended in June.

Pawlenty said the swing from the $4.5 billion deficit projected shortly after he was elected to Wednesday's projected surplus had been a "heavy lift," and represented "the biggest financial turnaround in the state's history."

True, of course:

DFLers, however, were quick to point out that all of what they dubbed the "so-called surplus" was already committed to repaying money the state had borrowed from school districts during leaner times.

"Minnesota has a surplus only because its bills haven't been paid," said House Minority Leader Matt Entenza, DFL-St. Paul. "And Minnesotans at home have no surplus in their wallets."

Huh.

And I presume Matt Entenza wants to keep it that way?

Any measure of fiscal balance, he said, was achieved at the expense of higher college tuitions, underfunded K-12 schools, higher fees and more Minnesotans turned away from state help with health care.

Questions nobody in the media will ask:

• Why shouldn't college students pay more of their tuition?
• Are K-12 schools "underfunded" in terms of being unable to operate, or in terms of keeping up with the teachers union's and the Admininstrative/Industrial complex's demands?
• Minnesota provides more health care per capita than any state between Illinois and California. What, precisely, is Matt Entenza looking for?

Oh, I'm afraid to hear the answer for that...

MOB Rules IV

It's that time of year again.

The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is having its' fourth semiannual Blog party.

If you're a blogger, a blog fan, or just someone who likes to get out and have a good time with fun, smart, funny people, join us Saturday, December 17, at Keegans Irish Pub, across from Surdyk's at University and Hennepin in Northeast Minneapolis.

We'll start the party around 5PM, and go until we're done.

Itinerary for the evening: The usual great time.

Do us a favor: If you plan to be there, RSVP at the following email address:

party
at
northernallianceradio
dot
com

The RSVP is just so we can have a head-count.

Again - it's not just for bloggers. If you're a blog reader, are thinking about starting a blog, or just looking for a night out (that ends early enough to spell your babysitter at a reasonable hour, or get to the next party on the agenda!), we'd love to meet you.

Everyone Take A Deep Breath

Yesterday, Kennedy Vs. The Machine discovered that their old archives had been hacked:

We checked our email this afternoon to find several notes from friends informing us that a blog called MN Publius — which champions the Amy Klobuchar for Senate campaign — has seemingly deleted the archives and manipulated content at our previous blog domain Dayton v. Kennedy (you may click on the link in our side bar to view). Dayton v. Kennedy, you may recall, was highlighted in several national publications including the Wall Street Journal, National Journal and New Republic and was hosted on Blogger, a property of Google. As you might imagine, it was not pleasant having months of work destroyed. Presumably sometime this afternoon, based on their giggly post, Publius erased 7 months of archives and replaced our post which redirected readers from our old blog to this one:

The start of a knock-down, drag-out scandal?

Enh. Probably not. While I've never had the greatest of regard for MNPublius as a blog - ironically, I posted about them for the first time yesterday - they apparently have an explanation:

Today I discovered that the old Dayton v. Kennedy blogger account had gone unused for such a period that it was up for grabs by anyone with a blogger account. In what I thought would amount to little more than a practical joke, I claimed the up-for-grabs site and put up a post ridiculing the Dayton v. Kennedy blog. What I did not realize is that in doing so the archives would be removed from the site. For this I am truly sorry...To Doug, Andy, First Ringer, and yes, even Gary, I apologize for this mess. It was not intended to be anything more than a friendly jest. My intentions were innocent but the consequences were unfortunate.

In the attached comments it's noted that one of the MNPub's writers has tried to reconstruct KVM's archives from the Google cache.

Hopefully, that's that.

It's been an interesting week in Minnesota blogging, starting with Inside Minnesota Politics' pseudo-legal gamesmanship, ending (?) with this.

It'll be good to have an actual race to write about.