Shot In The Dark

All Atwitter

The leftyblogs are giggling like schoolgirls about the new CBS poll that supposedly show the Adminsitration's numbers way, way off.

Naturally, there may be more to the story:

In its classic "fair and balanced" tradition, CBS slanted in favor of Democrats its poll that found Bush has a 34 percent approval rating and a 59 percent disapproval rating, an all-time high for a CBS poll.

On the bottom of the PDF version of the poll (page 18) it says how many Democrats versus Republicans were contacted.

"Total Republicans" contacted: 272 unweighted and 289 weighted.

"Total Democrats" contacted: 409 unweighted and 381 weighted.

"Total Independents" contacted: 337 unweighted and 348 weighted.

Brent Baker also noted how CBS failed to highlight a key portion of its poll on the Feb. 27 "CBS Evening News." 66 percent of respondents thought the media devoted "too much time" to Cheney's hunting accident.

Fake but accurate! Only (it might seem) without the accurate part.

As usual.

Deutsch Für "Karma"

The upper ranks of the Analysis wing of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to agency critics, are occupied by people who graduated from universities in the late sixties through the mid-seventies, the height of the counterculture. Many were "inspired" to careers in "public service" by the likes of John F. Kennedy. Following the template set by Bill Donovan, father of the CIA (leader of the OSS during WWII), most were recruited from Ivy League campuses - never accused of excessive conservative hotbed-idity.

They cut their teeth in the intelligence analysis and leadership business in a Washington, DC run by people scarcely a generation removed from Donovan, but vastly descended from him; people who played the bureaucratic game for keeps.

Of course, they grew to preside over an intelligence agency that muffed the North Vietnamese 1975 Offensive, fall of the Shah, the spread of communism through Africa and Latin America, the fall of Nicaragua, the deployment of Soviet combat troops to Cuba, the rise of Khomeini, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of Marcos (Reagan had to field that fumble - and fortunately ran it back for a touchdown), the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR (it appears that Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope may have bypassed the CIA for their destabilization missions), the onset and denouement of the Russian Coup, the deterioration of post-Tito Yugoslavia, Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Iraqi WMD production, and the growth and planning of Al Quaeda. But they certainly got the tactics of bureaucratic turf war down cold.

And then there's Germany.

This Guardian article follows up on a recent NYT story tracing German Intelligence's involvement in the liberation of Iraq.

I have a theory.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (the BND, Federal Intelligence Service) cut its teeth in the Cold War; West Germany, the Bundesrepublik, was the front line in more than just metaphor. Warsaw Pact intelligence services criscrossed the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany, the anglicization of Bundesrepublic Deutschland, West Germany's official name), gathering information on their next potential enemy, and funding pro-communist groups to weaken the nation's resolve either politically (the German Communist Party, the Social Democrats, and the Greens were all accused of getting funding from the USSR in one degree or another) or otherwise (so were the Baader-Meinhof gang).

German governments whipsawed all over the place during the Cold War, from leftists (Willi Brandt) to relative conservatives (Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl); German policy occasionally wobbled all over the place (selling submarines to Israel but coddling the PLO; decrying proliferation and dictatorship but selling technology to the likes of Iraq; building one of the West's best armies in the sixties and seventies, but unable to respond to a civil war practically on their doorstep in the nineties; standing firm against the USSR, but trading with Cuba). But through it all, one thing stayed steady (from what I've read, and heard from friends familiar with the situation); the BND, like the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces), remembered their friends in the US.

I'm not sure if that's what's behind this story - but I would not be surprised if residual back-channel loyalties to old ideological and practical friends is as much a factor in the BND as it is in the CIA:

The US military study is explicit about Germany's role. It says: "The US obtained the sketch on Feb 03. The overlay [plastic sheet] was provided in February to the German Intel LNO [liaison officer] in Qatar, who provided it to DIA's [the Defence Intelligence Agency's] rep in Centcom Forward... DIA forwarded it to Centcom J2 [the intelligence division] in Feb."

Note: The DIA. Not the CIA. They (if my thesis is correct) know who their friends are.

The revelation undermines a German official report last week intended to end the controversy. That report said German agents had provided some intelligence, but suggested that it was very limited and dealt mainly with humanitarian and religious sites at risk from US air raids.

Parliamentary opposition parties - Communists, Greens and the centre-right Free Democrats - held talks yesterday on whether to launch a joint investigation of the New York Times report.

Joerg Van Essen, the Free Democrats' chief whip, said: "We have the impression that they helped the Americans and the English more than they told us, and more than their official policy was."

Wow. An intelligence service that ideologically opposes their leadership?

Who'da thunk it?

Elmar Brok, a German Christian Democrat who chairs the European parliament's foreign affairs committee, said that if the report turned out to be true, questions would have to be raised about the German secret services' honesty. He said: "I hope it's not true because then the credibility of Schröder and [Joschka] Fischer [the foreign minister at the time of the war] would be totally destroyed."

This is an interesting quote.

The CDU is the party of current Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel. They are, by German standards, conservative, and certainly more pro-American than the SDP (Sozialdemokraten, Gerhard Schröder's left-wing Social Democrats) or the Grüne (Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's Greens). One might suspect Herr Brok is crying crocodile tears over the damage the revelations might cause Schröder and Fischer.

What does this mean? I'm theorizing here: It means that at least a part of Europe is pushing back against the dark night, against the soothing oblivion that is swallowing the continent as we speak. It means that a part of the German bureaucracy remembers who brung 'em to the dance (and kept that smelly Russian from raping them in the parking lot).

I could be wrong. It happens.

But if I'm right, I'm officially tickled pink.

Bits and Pieces

Leonard Cohen has always been one of those artists that I noddingly enjoy - but not to the point where I've developed a lifelong obsession.

Still, reading his biography, I was fascinated by this bit here:

War is an enduring theme of Cohen's work which in his earlier songs, as indeed in his early life, he approached ambivalently. In "Field Commander Cohen" he (perhaps metaphorically) imagines himself as a soldier/spy socializing with Fidel Castro in Cuba, where he had actually lived at the height of US–Cuba tensions in 1961—allegedly sporting Che Guevara-style beard and military fatigues. This song was actually written immediately following Cohen's front-line stint with the Israeli air force, the "fighting in Egypt" documented in an (again perhaps metaphorical) passage of "Night Comes On:" In 1973, Cohen, who had travelled to Jerusalem to sign up on the Israeli side in the 1973 war with Egypt, had instead been assigned to a USO-style entertainer tour of front-line tank emplacements in the Sinai Desert, at one of which he both came under fire and reportedly shared cognac with an unlikely self-professed fan, then-General Ariel Sharon. Claiming ambivalence from the start about the causes of the conflict, Cohen eventually left, disillusioned with combat by encounters with captured and wounded enemy troops.

His recent politics continue a lifelong predilection for the underdog, the "beautiful loser," whether the WWII French resister of Anna Marly and Hy Zaret's The Partisan (which he covered) or the royalist of his own "The Old Revolution," although Cohen's fascination with war is often as metaphor for more explicitly cultural and personal issues, as in New Skin for the Old Ceremony, by this measure his most "militant" album.

That's my favorite part about the internet; like my little Sheila-esque trip through writing about White Soul the other night, it gives one so much fuel for these serendipitous side-tracks.

When Norway Saved The World

It was 63 years ago this evening that Norwegian commandoes ended the nuclear arms race in Europe.

The German nuclear weapons effort, unable to produce a graphite-moderated reaction like the US effort that had just achieved fruition at the University of Chicago (the precursor of the Manhattan Project) had opted to use "Heavy Water", an isotope of water used to help control the fission of uranium atoms. There was one facility in occupied Europe that was capable of producing militarily-useful quantities of Heavy Water - the Vemork hydroelectric plant near Rjukan, Norway.

After earlier attempts to insert British agents and commandoes failed (with many casualties), a group of ten Norwegians from Norway's exile military, who had trained at Britain's commando school in Scotland, parachuted into Norway in the winter of '42-'43.

The night of the 27th, the Norwegians crossed the freezing Maan river, snuck up an unguarded railroad cut, shimmied through a cable tunnel, and sometime after midnight placed demolition charges that destroyed the plant's irreplaceable electrolysis equipment and permanently shut down heavy water production at the plant.

Six of the commandos escaped by skiing 240 miles to Sweden; the other four remained in Norway to continue working with the underground, including the mission nearly a year later, on February 20, 1944, to blow up a ferry boat carrying the last of Vemork's reserve of heavy water.

Britain's Special Operations Executive called the raid the most successful sabotage operation of World War II. Although researchers later discovered that the German nuclear effort was in no danger of producing a functional bomb for quite some time (or as Howard Dean would say, "Germany was never any danger", and Kos would insist that "The US's goal was supposedly to free the continent, and like President Roosevelt didn't say anything about WMDs"), the Vemork raid is one of the most inspirational stories of men acting againt impossible odds, ever.

Contest!

Two of the following snarks are completely made up, with the explicit intent of satirizing mocking people who, say, write letters to the Strib or write overheated leftyblogs.

One of the three is legit. Can you guess which one?

Here goes:

1. A German fighter pilot, captured in a raid over England in 1942, escaped from a Canadian POW camp in 1944. He found his way onto a ship that took him to Latin America, where he found a German embassy, and was smuggled back to Germany. Thus, the entire Allied war effort was invalidated; one POW escaped!
2. A convicted gangster escaped from a maximum security prison, rendering moot the entire three-generation-long war on organized crime.
3. The prisoners at Policharki Prison in Afghanistan have revolted and now control one wing of the infamous prison.

   Isn't Afghanistan the war we've already won?

Click on the extended section for the answer, and your shot at the prize!

The answer is #3, from local leftyblog Norwegianity.

The prize? The realization that, since the mainstream, Kos/Dean wing of the Democrat party's logic isn't a whole lot more advanced than this, they part is nowhere near ready to be entrusted with national security.

(Via KAR

NARN Today

Big schedule today:
12PM: Jeremy Zilber, author of "Why Mommy is a Democrat".
2:00 Bill Gilles from CFACT will be talking about the student-fees issue at the U.
2:30-45 We'll have Karen Efrem from Edwatch re: Mental Health Screening for children.

King is off on assignment today, but he'll be replaced by Generalissimo Duane Patterson, from the Hugh Hewitt show.

Flaming Ember

One of my favorite one-hit wonders has always been "Westbound Number Nine" by classic white soul group "The Flaming Ember", an 1971 one-shot that I just love.

I've been hearing that song for, oh, 25 years now. And I've never known jack about the band...

...until last night,when I spent some time working on a Wikipedia article that led me to try to write a piece on the band...

...which led me to this wonderful interview with former band members Mike Plunk and Jim Bugnel.

Talking about the band's heyday, when they were a bunch of white boys from Detroit being managed by Motown legends Holland, Dozier and Holland:

Well I'll tell you, when we were with Ric Tic Records, we got a lot of recognition from the black recording industry. George Clinton was a friend of ours and he wrote "Hey Mama Whatcha Got Good for Daddy." We were also doing the music tracks for other artists so we had a reputation for being a funky group. The black people were well aware of us, so when we played the 20 Grand for the first time, the place was packed with superstar artists and record people. We were well received and got a standing ovation. We met Joe Louis who came with Wilson of Wilson sports equipment, and a few of The Temptations were there, along with other Motown and Ric Tic artists. I remember, after doing our show, I was walking down the center isle and a lady sitting at the bar stopped me and said that we were really great and I said, "Thank you very much." Then when I got to the end of the bar, the owner asked if I knew who that was that stopped me and I said no. He said that it was Dionne Warwick. What a compliment.

I love this stuff.

Fiendishly Clever

Observation: The Strib, when they publish a conservative's letter to the editor at all, will usually publish precisely one letter in the mail section. It has seemed to me that that letter was frequently chosen for caricaturic effect; the right-wing letter-writer was frequently inarticulate, enraged, and from what we'd call the "tinfoil hat" community; in short, many conservative letters to the editor seem to be chosen to detract rather than advance the conservative case in an argument, not to mention unbalance the argument to the left.

But - as Kool Aid Report's long and endlessly-stocked "Moron Mail" segment shows us - the Strib manages to pick more than their share of the "insufficiently gifted" from the other side, as today's missive from David Garland of Minneapolis shows us.

By the way, I should point out that I really, really detest people trying to co-opt the likes of Martin Luther King, Lincoln, Jefferson and the like for moronic points.

Churchill is another one. For me, a big one.

Garland writes:

In the middle of World War II, his country locked in a real war with a real "evil empire," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote in a telegram:

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government."

You know where this is going, right?

Of course, Bush Derangement syndrome comes with some side effects, one of which would seem to be complete ignorance of history (although to be fair that might be less "complete ignorance" and more "never knew it to begin with"). Churchill got away with unilateral executive actions that would have had people like Mr. Garland coughing up his skull in horror. Think invading Iraq was uncalled-for? Churchill had actively set in motion the invasion of Norway, and failed only because Hitler beat him to it!

Imprisoning people without charge? German spies in Britain - German or British - were hanged after summary trials (usually after their value as information had been thoroughly wrung out; British counterintelligence routinely monitored (without warrant!) people suspected of spying). Domestic spying? Every piece of mail coming in and out of Britain (as with the US) was opened and read.

Due process? Churchill favored skipping the Nuremberg trials, holding a tribunal with a specification of charges, and executing the Nazi leadership summarily and without ceremony. He may have been right.

Debacles? Churchill was one of history's great statesmen and leaders, but he couldn't plan his way out of a paper bag militarily; he was the architect of Britain's debacle in the Dardanelles in World War II, as well as the miserably-planned campaign in Norway in 1940 (which started as an invasion force and, through pure good timing, served as a relief force - before becoming a defeated force).

So the parallels between Winston Churchill and the fever swamps delusions about Bush are in some ways closer than even the fever swamp would like to think.

The differences, of course, are striking - to those not in the swamp, anyway. Churchill took extreme measures to fight tyranny, and left a free state and a free Europe.

Leaving aside the abject ignorance of the likes of Mr. Garland, though, the big difference remains: Churchill was no apologist for tyranny. And he'd stub his cigar out on the foreheads of the likes of Mr. Garland for his "logic".

George W. Bush was not yet born when Churchill wrote those words, but for once he seems to have taken a lesson from history. From the wrong side. His "war on terrorism," which will probably see victory about the same time as we win the wars on drugs and crime, promises to construct the foundation of a new totalitarian government.

I'd love to have seen the likes of David Garland in 1942. And again in 1950.

The Peasants Are Revolting. And Sexist.

Gary Miller at KvM on A-Klo's graceless playing of the gender card:

Ms. Klobuchar — in an appearance on MPR this morning – said “if those [southern] states can do it [elect a woman senator], we can.” The obvious implication is that if those if “those” southern rubes can overcome their ignorance, certainly enlightened [blue] Minnesota can do the same.

We take a backseat to no one in our admiration for Ms. Klobuchar’s political skills. When delivering a prepared stump speech, few can rouse the rabble as effectively. In studio she can often times come across as one of the best and brightest. But when provided with a more extemporaneous forum, we have taken note of Klobuchar’s tendency to reveal the condescending attitude so prevalent among those of her political persuasion. Today’s MPR appearance is another such example.

Note to all DFLers; that whole "If you don't [fund, vote for or disapprove of] our pet [cause or candidate], we'll just be a cold [Alabama, Omaha, or whatever other token for "not as enlightened as we think we are"]" is hardly a way to garner favor; many of us come from those places, and have noticed that Minnesotans, especially mainstream DFLers, aren't anything to holler about in the "brains" or "enlightenment" department, either.

G-d Hates Jags

What if we got together a group of open-minded, freedom-loving people who believe in civil discourse, and got them together...

...to go out and machine-gun jagoffs who protest at military funerals?

On her way into the church where the funeral was to be held for her 23-year-old son Thursday morning, Deirdre Ostlund approached six men and women waving signs against gays and America and told them in a cold fury: "I'm Andrew's mother, and I want you to know you are truly hateful people."

As Ostlund turned away, Shirley Phelps-Roper taunted her: "Adulterer! You can't admit you sent your own child to hell! If she does not heed this warning, she will look up from hell with him."

Her small group continued to sing "God hates America."

No, we can't machine-gun them.

Regrettably, one must meet bad noxious and abusive speech with good - or at least, in context, better - speech:

But across barricades, crime-scene tape and police officers, 20 flag-waving men and women countered with the original, "God bless America, land that I love ... "

Note to all concerned; just what hte family needs.

Not that the protagonists care:

This ritual, unfolding across the nation outside military funerals, arrived in Anoka on Thursday an hour before the funeral for Cpl. Andrew Kemple, who died in Iraq Feb. 12.

The six are members of a church in Topeka, Kan., that espouses the belief that God is killing American soldiers because they fought for a country that tolerates homosexuality.

One might think that if G-d were that upset about it, He might be able to send messengers who weren't complete morons.

Chilling Effect

Katherine Kersten on the local DFLMedia's stifling of dissent:

The members of Minnesota Families United, a grass-roots group made up mostly of the relatives of soldiers who have died in Iraq or are serving there, welcome debate on the war. Marine Lt. Col. Bob Stephenson of Woodbury is the group's co-chairman. When he returned from Iraq in March 2005, he was shocked at what he viewed as inaccurate and overly negative media coverage of the war. But Stephenson took it in stride. He says he put his life on the line in Iraq precisely to protect freedom of speech.

So he is baffled by the reaction of the DFL Party and some in the media to a TV ad about the war in which he recently appeared. The DFL has branded the ad "un-American, untruthful and a lie." The DFL isn't bothering to present its version of the facts in an ad of its own. Instead, party chairman Brian Melendez launched a campaign to silence Stephenson and others who appeared in the ad. He demanded that the ad be pulled from the airwaves, so Minnesotans couldn't hear its message and make up their minds themselves.

Question for all you DFLers out there: Why not let Minnesotans buy time on Minnesota media, and let Minnesotans make up their own minds?

Don't answer "they're supported by out-of-state interests"; so are all of your causes. When you've renounced George Soros and MoveOn and Barbra Streisand, and when your per-capita contribution drops below that of MN-GOP campaigns (it's well above, last I checked), you might have a leg to stand on.

And as Kersten notes, the DFL has slammed the ads, without countering them.

What is that little weasel Melendez afraid of?

Darth Kling Is Displeased

When liberals turn on liberals, the results are...

...funny.

Bill Kling is sueing Algore's cable network for trademark infringement.

And as you read the story, look for the this year's nominee for Most Ominatopaeic Name Ever:

A suit filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota claims that Current TV LLC, based in San Francisco, is interfering with the trademark of MPR's music station the Current -- broadcast locally on 89.3 and 88.7 FM, but also transmitted via the Internet.

MPR estimates that 37 percent of the Current's listeners are from outside Minnesota, including many abroad, said Communications Director Jennifer Syltie Johnson.

Current TV, co-founded by Gore, is a cable/satellite channel and website (www.currenttv.com) featuring alternative news and "citizen journalism" by amateurs who send in their news and videos. It is geared to a young audience often turned off by traditional media.

The suit, filed Feb. 2, says the channel changed its name from INdTV last April -- four months after MPR applied to trademark "The Current," and 2½ months after it launched the station. MPR attorney Ernest Grumbles said the name was protected as soon as it was used for commercial purposes.

In a statement, Current TV said more than 300 U.S. businesses use the word "current" in their names. "We know of no consumers who confuse us with Minnesota Public Radio, and we can't imagine that anybody ever would."

Maybe I'll change the blog's name to "The Current", just for the free publicity.

Any Port In A Storm

Remember last month? When Algore was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (the nation that gives Al Quaeda much of its funding), condemning the Administration's "racial profiling?"

Now, the Dems are attacking the "port deal" because...the company that wants to buy the rights to manage the ports (not security; not navy bases) is from a profiled nation.

The Strib spouts their usual blather:

None of this, of course, really gets into the first class xenophobia and, in some instances, flat-out bigotry on display here. While most Middle Eastern men do wear dishdashas and ghoutras, and this makes them look all alike, really and truly, you should be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys by now.

So as usual, the Strib is attacking...

...er, wait a minute. The Strib got it...right?

Kathy notes in re the villains:

The UAE is a liberalized country in the Middle East that we want to be associated with. It is in their best interests to foil Al-Qaeda as much as we would. They buy arms from us. They have some of the most innovative examples of free trade going on. Their oil runs out in 2010 and their leaders have done their best to make sure there is an economy for their people when this unhappy event occurs. They did this to make sure radical Islam did not gain a foothold within their country. To lump the UAE in with Saudi Arabia---which has done precisely the opposite in terms of building an infrastructure, liberalizing trade, and encouraging education---or Syria, or any number of repressive Arab countries is the worst of mistakes not only because it's a political boo-boo, but because it threatens our national security down the road by taking chickenhawk potshots at an ally who's done nothing but help us in the War on Terror. ory/264100.html
On the suddenly hot issue of American ports being managed by a United Arab Emirates company, everyone needs to chill. It's fine if Congress wants more time to look at this deal (although Congress' record on the issue of port security is itself scandalous), but most of what has been raised in protest seems, as President Bush said, more than a little xenophobic toward anything Arab.

As Michael Medved noted, there are 360 ports in the US. Over 100 of them are run by foreign companies, from the UK, Denmark, Singapore, and Red China.

No security risk there - right, Democrats?

UPDATE: Jay Reding adds:

The UAE is hardly a hotbed of anti-Americanism, it’s been a staunch ally in the war on terrorism, and is one of the most modern Arab countries on the planet. Yes, they don’t recognize Israel, and some of the 9/11 hijackers were UAE residents. Then again, many on American college campuses don’t recognize Israel, and Marin County, California producted “Taliban Johnny” Walker Lindh, and outside of Ann Coulter, no one is saying that we should bomb Marin County. There is more than a touch of chauvinism involved here.

He adds:

If we’re going to win this war, we can’t treat every moderate Muslim like he’s a suicide-belt wearing resident of East Durkadurkistan.

UPDATE II: I got an email from Moonbeam Birkenstock, self-described peace activist from Minneapolis:

I bet Bush is lying about WMD in East Durkidurkistan, too.

Carry Permit Holder Saves Cop

From Louisiana, yet another case of a cop's life being saved by a n armed citizen.

Scenario: Cop stops pulls over a motorist who breaks into a funeral procession. Motorist attacks cop. Armed, legally permitted citizen responds:

Perry Stevens fired four shots into Temple's torso. Officer Harrison had already fired one shot into Temple's abdomen. With Temple still struggling with the officer, Perry continued to advance toward the scuffle.

"He again orders Mr. Temple to stop what he was doing and get off the officer. Those commands are ignored and he fires a fifth shot and that hits his head. The incident is over with, and as you know, Mr. Temple is dead."

Police are calling the shooting death justified. Perry Stevens has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Col. Phares would not give out any more details relating to the shooting. Both Phares and Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff stopped short of crediting Stevens with saving the officer's life. LeDuff says the entire incident is unfortunate.

A pack, not a herd.

From Your Fingertips To My...Er, Fingertips

Commenter "angryclown" says:

By the way, I'm on pins and needles waiting to read about your trip to the dry cleaner. If you're lucky, you can catch somebody picking up a jacket made of cashmere or some other politically significant fabric.

In the interest of fully serving my readers, Angryclown's wish is my command.

The other day I went to the dry cleaners. A fiftysomething couple wearing matching free-range alpaca riot jackets with "WHAT WOULD WELLSTONE DO" emblazoned on the back were upbraiding the clerk - a 19 year old single mother who was trying to work her way through school to become a nurse.

"You FOOL", the woman bellowed, as her husband cowered in the corner covering his ears, "you bought baby food at Wal-Mart! You are an unwitting tool of the patriarchal pro-war Halliburtonesque running-dog clacque! I'm reporting you to my good friend Jay Benanav! You will never do lunch in this town again!"

I asked if I might slip through and pick up my suit. The woman, veins bulging from her organic face, spun on the heels of her earth shoes. "YOU! A...White male! Give me reparations right now, or I'll have Chris Coleman come down here personally and impound your car!"

The two of them left the building and drove off in their waiting Volvo.

"Wow", I said, turning to the girl behind the counter. "What brought that on?"

"I just said that we couldn't dry-clean a muumuu that was made of hemp, and that there was no such thing as organic, free-range cleaning fluid..."

Other requested scenarios will follow as time permits.

Kids' Heads Checked While U Wait

The Minnesota Legislature is looking into a proposal to have all Minnesota childrens' mental health checked at least once before preschool.

As usual, Matt Abe at MERN is on the case:

Mental health screening is subjective and inaccurate in children. Diagnoses very often reflect simple behavioral issues or "politically incorrect" attitudes and values. Powerful medications with serious side effects are almost always used as the treatment. Using drugs to control behavior is dangerous and wrong, especially when study after study has shown these drugs to be ineffective and dangerous. Prescriptions for psychotropic drugs for children have increased by 300% in ten years!

As has, naturally, funding for public school "special ed" programs to "deal" with the issues that the screening is designed to uncover. Remember; while school district funding in Minnesota average somewhere around $10,000 per student (higher in the Metro, lower outstate), when the "special ed" label is slapped on, the average funding rises to $30,000 per student, regardless of the "Mental Illness" associated with the child.

Much, much more on this in some upcoming posts.

You can learn more about this issue at an evening sponsored by EdWatch, "The Dangers of Universal Mental Health Screening Legislation in Minnesota," 6:30 p.m., Thursday, March 2, 2006 at the Green Mill Restaurant in Plymouth. The speaker will be Dr. Karen Effrem, M.D.

Read the rest of Matt's post for details.

Again - I've only begun with this topic.

School Days

Via Red, here's another of those addictive memes.

This time, it's High School.

Here we go:

1) Where did you graduate from and what year?
Jamestown High School, 1981.

2) did u have school pride?
I had pride in my school's geeks. I sort of rebelled against the athletic department when, while trying to divide up my after-school schedule, the basketball coach asked if I wanted to be a basketball player or a "Drama Fag". Naturally, being me, I wanted to play hoops and do the play (although I was a much better actor than center); his attitude pissed me off so much I swore off all team sports. I was a cynical, involuntary spectator at the "pep rallies". But when the competition one-act play or the speech team kicked butt, I was obnoxious in my enthusiasm.

3) Was your prom a night to remember?
Yeah, sort of. Prom would be a lot more fun if everyone weren't constantly harping on how it was supposed to be one of the most special nights of your life.

4) Do you own all 4 Yearbooks?
We only had three - ninth grade was considered Junior High. I still just have Sophomore and Senior year in the house. I'd love to find Junior.

5) What was the worst trouble you ever got into?
Getting into trouble was rarely an option; Dad taught at the school, and had a supernatural ability to see anything irregular, usually before I'd even thought about it. Oh, I came reeeeally close, once, to getting into huge trouble - a story I'll save for another time - but all's well that ends well.

6) What kind of people did you hang out with?
I was the anti-clique animal. I hung out with everyone - jocks, geeks, motorheads, brains, druggies, drama club...the only crowd that I never really, er, cliqued with were the cheerleaders. Pity.

7) What was your number 1 choice of College in HS?
Never really thought a lot about it. It really didn't matter to me at the time; I'd been pretty much bred to be a high school teacher, and it doesn't really matter where you go if that's what you're going to be. I was also thinking about joining the Army anyway, so it was going to matter. Things got decided my senior year, when my mother got a job at the local college, which meant about an 80% tuition break. So I never really "chose" college; circumstances led me there.

8) what radio station did u rock out to?
KQWB ("Q98!") in Fargo. Back in the seventies and eighties, Q98 played everything; the playlist was the sort of eclectic joy you can't find today; everything from mainstream hard rock (Judas Priest) to great Minneapolis punk (it was the first time I heard The Replacements, the Suicide Commandos and Husker Du), to the Clash. They were the only radio station around that actually played cuts from Springsteen's non-radio-friendly Nebraska. Also WLS in Chicago, and (in junior high) KFYR in Bismark. In fact, I taught myself guitar by ear largely by listening to KFYR's "Torrid Twenty" as I did my homework; as a song I liked came up, I'd pick up my guitar and try to figure out the chords.

9) Were you involved in any organizations or clubs?
Too many. Hoops in ninth grade. Drama all four years. Speech in 11th and 12th grade (won state championships both years), debate in 10th (hated it). Student council my senior year. German club eighth through tenth (won the state German Scrabble championship in tenth grade!). I played guitar in the Stage Band from 10 through 12th grade.

10) What were your favorite classes in high school?
Drama, Creative Writing, and my dad's Speech class. Also summer school; I took it all three years. Biology, Writing/American Lit (with my Dad) and Government. I did it partly because the summer school teachers were usually better (they wanted to be there), partly because I wanted to graduate early (a policy they discontinued my junior year, to my outrage), and partly because a lot of my friends were there for the same reason. A small group of us - Bob Martin, Dwight Rexin and Dove Boe - took summer school every year; we had a lot of fun together.

11) Who was your big crush in Highschool?
I had a fairly debilitating crush my sophomore year; everyone who needs to know about it, does.

And the summer before my senior year, oddly enough, I got thoroughly smitten by the cousin of an occasional commenter in this space. Nothing came of that, either.

12) Would you say you've changed a lot since highschool?
I'm not quite the same self-absorbed douchebag I was back then, I hope.

13) What do you miss the most about it?
The kids I was closest with. And there were a lot of them; it was a small town, so the kids were a lot more closely-knit than those at the schools my kids go to. My "must-see" list at reunions is very long and very diverse; everyone from "Mad Dog" Grenz (my oldest pal in the world) through Pennie Werth. College was such a let-down after that.

14) Your worst memory of HS?
Junior year; I'd just had a huge fight with Phyllis Willey, the principal cellist in the orchestra (I was #2). I liked Phyllis, of course - we'd been friends for years. I'd been meaning to apologize for my part in the fight. That morning, I walked into the radio station on the way to school (I was at KEYJ at this point) and heard that she'd been killed the previous evening in a car accident. That was total gut shot.

15) Did you have a car?
Pffft. Not 'til my junior year of college.

16) What were your school colors?
Blue and white, for the Blue Jays.

17) Who were your fav. teachers?
My dad, Mr. Barkus (music), Mrs. Smith (creative writing), Mr. Davidson (drama), Ms. Kaitfors (gym).

18) Did you own a cell phone in highschool?
My family had a single, rotary-dial phone that had been built to last in the sixties; when I graduated, we still owned the first phone I remember seeing as a child. I didn't use a cell phone until I was at KSTP in 1986 ($2 a minute!).

19) Did you leave campus for lunch?
Most days I had noon classes; I brownbagged probably 3-4 days a week from ninth grade on. Sometimes I'd run home (we lived four blocks from school) or, if I was especially lucky, my grandma's place (one block east); best lunch ever.

20) If so, where was your fav. place to go eat?
Grandma's. Or the bakery on Main Street - their Poboy sandwich rocked.

21) Were you always late to class?
Never. Not once that I can recall.

22) Did you ever have to stay for Saturday School?
Didn't have it. Detention was after school.

23) Did you ever ditch?
For starters, I never heard it called "ditching" or "cutting" until I was in college. It was "Skipping". And no, not officially. Our senior year, we could "sign out" of Photography class to go shoot pictures around town. This was basically glorified skipping; Jon Ketterling and David Kostick and I used to sign out and run to the bakery or McDonald's (which we didn't get one of until I was 16). But it was legal. Otherwise? Never. My dad would have detected it by listening to the ground and hearing my vibrations outside the building.

24) What kind of Job did u have?
9th grade: Paper route.
10th grade: Worked for a stretch at Buffalo Candy and Tobacco, a warehouse.
11th/12th grade: KEYJ Radio. Best highschool job ever.

25) When it comes time for the reunion will you be there?
As I noted above, JHS '81 was a fairly close-knit class (60+% came back for the 20 year reunion). I'd travel through hell, crawl across broken glass, and french-kiss Helen Thomas to get to my class' reunions.

26) Do you wish you were still in high school?
No. Sometimes I wish more of it were in me, though.

Conundrum

As a straight male, I broadly disapprove of (and am bored stiff by) figure skating. Its various judging scandals confirm the impression that it's not a sport, and barely an art form, but more a form of diplomacy.

And skaters - locally as well as on the international level - are dysfunctional prima-donnas at a level that'd make gymnasts and rappers thankful for the comparison.

However - as a matter of principle - I find that I must approve of Sasha Cohen on many, many levels.

That is all.

Schizo Nation?

South Korean youth seem to draw no distinction between Washington and Pyongyang:

Nearly half of South Korean youths who will be old enough to vote in the country's next elections say Seoul should side with North Korea if the United States attacks the communist nation, according to a poll released Wednesday.

At the same time, 40.7 percent of the 1,000 young people surveyed said Seoul should remain neutral in the event of hostilities between Washington and Pyongyang, according to the poll by The Korea Times and Hankook Ilbo dailies. Only 11.6 percent said the South should back its longtime U.S. ally.

In the West, people seem to follow Churchill's dictum; a person who's not a liberal at 20 has no heart; a person who's not conservative at 40 has no brain.

Ever since I was in high school, South Korean students have been rioting against the US, and in support of the North. And yet by the time they reach adulthood, they join a society that is largely allied with the US.

Any ROK sociologists out there?

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXV

It was Friday, February 21, 1986. A friend of mine from college invited me - along with a couple of other college friends - to her place in the South 'burbs for dinner.

It'd been a long day. Oh, who am I kidding - it'd been a long winter. My car, the '73 Malibu, got really bad mileage in the winter; I figured it got something like eight miles per gallon; gas sucked up a quarter of my budget.

Something had to give.

There were four of us, three women and I. I'd graduated from college with two of them the previous spring. The other had been in our freshman class, and dropped out, and re-started our senior year, and dropped out again. We all lived in the Twin Cities; one was a programmer, one was a substitute teacher, and the other worked as a janitor in an office building downtown.

Dinner: homemade pizza. The crust was made from Bisquick. Picture Pizza Waffles at Denny's, if they make such a thing (and Denny's is about the only contender I can think of).

Then, we cut to the chase; they were going to rent a house in South Minneapolis. And they wondered if I'd be interested in moving in.

I laughed. I guess it made some sense; what house full of women wouldn't want to have a 6'5" guy with a couple of firearms in the hizzy? I was used to being the token guy; I had worked at a Waldenbooks in college where I was the only male employee; I noticed soon enough that I was the only person on the crew who changed light bulbs, or stocked and dusted the upper shelves. Any book that got sold from the upper shelves left a vacant spot until my next shift.

But it sounded like a possibility.

Especially when they mentioned the rent; it was a four-bedroom house that went for $700 per month. Programmer's sister was going to be joining us, shortly; there'd be five of us.

The downside; the girls wanted the bedrooms. I was going to get the half-finished (paneled) south half of the basement.

Upside; my share of the rent would be $140 per month; $52 per month less than I was paying for my half of the dingy little apartment I'd been in since November. That was a lot of groceries; maybe even the occasional night out, in case I ever needed a night out.

We were going to check the place out tomorrow.

Til then - Bisquick Pizza!

By the way, I've long since lost track of janitor and substitute teacher. However, I ran into programmer's sister and bro-in-law, as luck would have it, a couple of weeks ago.

After you live someplace long enough, I guess it's inevitable you're going to start running into people again...

Attention, Stalkers

Chad has given you a big hand:

You were in the right lane on Highway 62 just before the point where it intersects with Highway 100 traveling eastbound in a Ford Taurus with a Strib bias Mr. Yuck decal and an AM1280 The Patriot bumper sticker at about 5:37pm yesterday.

Great. Now you know who's bizarre, obsessive commenters know what to look for. {{shudder}}

The weird part was, I did notice something, like a person waving, out of the corner of my eye last night - but didn't recognize Chad or his car.

I was - no joking, here - too fascinated by Hugh's President's Day special...

Coleman Discovers Buh-LAW-gers

Scott Johnson with an interesting point about the two columns "Non-Monkey" Nick Coleman has written about the Gold Star Families' ad campaign:

And what of the Minneapolis Star Tribune? Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman has now devoted two hysterical columns to condemnations of the advertisements. Coleman's first column made a basic error of fact as a result of its reliance on a far-left Web site and cited the testimony of a Kerry delegate to the 2004 Democratic convention as a "nonpartisan" source. (John fisked the column here.)

Coleman's second column fastened on "the Delores Kesterson issue" -- attacking the Gold Star Families ad for presenting the stepmother of Erik Kesterson in lieu of his mother. For this bizarre point Coleman relied without attribution on his friend "Hesiod"at Daily Kos. Coleman overlooked fellow St. Paulite Merilee Carlson -- the genuine biological mother of Michael Carlson -- in this rant.

Oh, Coleman overlooked a lot.

Coleman - he of the "well-developed baloney detector" that has generated so much mirth this past year or so - based his "sourcing" on (as Scott noted) a Kossack named "Hesiod".

We've run into Hesiod before on this blog.

In fact, we've run into him quite a bit. Feel free to flip through some of the lad's greatest hits on this space.

And then remember - he is Nick Coleman's source.

Nick is a "journalist"; his experience, "baloney detector" and all of the fabled checks and balances of the media - of the Star/Tribune - have brought you this: the rantings of one of the most deranged of the fever swamp bloggers, delivered straight and unchecked to your computer by Nick Coleman, Ace Journalist.

Rocketman has more, as does Trunk.

OK, mainstream media defenders out there (and you pop up in my comment section contantly) - it's your turn. Defend Coleman from:

• ...the charge that he is acting in league with the DFL
• ...that he's given up any rational claim to credibility by passing off, uncritically, the rantings of "Hesiod" as news?

Did Coleman decide to go out on a bah-LAWG, perhaps by trying out that Google contraption on the Internets, trip across Hesiod's piece, and run with it? That would be an "innocent" mistake - and make Coleman of no more value as an information source than a ba-LAWG-er.

Or was Coleman fed the Hesiod piece by someone? Someone at the DFL? Someone from a PAC or Soft-Money group that opposes the ads? It'd explain how something as half-assed as Hesiod's piece would slip past Coleman's "Baloney Detector" - but it'd be because Coleman is a stooge of the DFL or its minions.

Or is there another explanation?

Feel perfectly free to let us know.

Practicing Cultural Sensitivity

The Religious Policeman, a fascinating Saudi expat blog, covers a Saudi response to the Cartoon Crisis:

Meanwhile, in a strange land far away, someone has had A GOOD IDEA.

The ******-based Foundation for Increasing Islamic Awareness Among Foreign Communities has announced that it will publish a book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in Danish and distribute it in Denmark and other European countries.

So what's going to happen is, that after boycotting their butter and Lego and so on, and trashing their embassies, and threatening their journalists with beheading, and generally lecturing them like naughty teenagers, we are going to send them a load of Mohammad biographies. Oh, how the simple citizens of Denmark will welcome such generosity! I can see them now, out on the streets, wiping the tears of gratitude from their eyes, as the lorries trundle into their town squares and deliver these little bundles of Islamic piety! How will they be able to contain their joy? It'll be the best thing that happened to them since Hitler came to town!

Read the whole hilarious, chilling thing.

It Must All Be Lies

Via Irish Pennants, this this WaPo piece on the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment's tour in Iraq is a fascinating look at how some Coalition units are adapting to the counterinsurgency war:

When the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment moved into northwest Iraq last May, it faced a mess. Just as Fallujah had become a major staging point for attacks into Baghdad, Tall Afar was being used as a base to send suicide bombers and other attackers 40 miles east into Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq.

Instead of staging a major raid into the city for suspects and then moving back to operating bases, McMaster said he took a sharply different tack, spending months making preparatory moves before attacking the entrenched insurgents in Tall Afar. That indirect approach demonstrated tactical patience, a key to effectively battling an insurgency and a skill that doesn't come easily to the U.S. military.

McMaster had his unit bolster the security operation along the Syrian border, in an effort to cut off support and reinforcements coming into Iraq. He also sought to eliminate havens in the desert, beginning in June with a move against the remote desert town of Biaj, which had become a way station and training and outfitting post for fighters infiltrating from Syria. As he made the move, he brought Iraqi troops with him.

Immediately after taking Biaj, Iraqi forces set up a small patrol base there for U.S. troops. "This was the first 'clear and hold,' " McMaster recalled in an interview in his plywood office just southwest of Tall Afar. State Department officials heard about this move and briefed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A month later, she mentioned it in her congressional testimony.

All of it is lies, of course, according to Nick Coleman. But if you suspend disbelief for a moment, it's a fascinating read.

Onward:

One of the keys to winning a counterinsurgency is to treat prisoners well. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment polled all detainees on how they were treated and interviewed some about their political views.

"The best way to find out about your own detainee facility is to ask the 'customer,' " said Maj. Jay Gallivan, the regiment's operations officer. Some Iraqis told the Americans why they were angry with the U.S. military presence. None of the soldiers from the unit have been charged with abuse during the regiment's current tour in Iraq, McMaster said.

In late summer, McMaster started receiving greater cooperation from Sunni leaders who had been sympathetic to the insurgency. One reason, according to U.S. military intelligence analysts, was that some insurgents were unhappy with foreign allies who seemed determined to start a civil war.

Another was that McMaster was willing to admit that U.S. forces have made mistakes in Iraq. "We understand why you fight," McMaster recalled telling Sunni Arab leaders with ties to the insurgency.

"When the Americans first came, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china," he said. "But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights." The concession helped break down barriers of communication, he said, and made Iraqis willing to listen to his belief that the time for resistance had ended.

Read the whole thing.

Picking and Choosing

I haven't fisked Nick Coleman in a long time.

Reading last Fridays piece - an on-cue attack on the pro-Iraq War ads that might appear to the cynical to be perfectly coordinated with the DFL's larger attack on the ads (stated for the benefit of those of you who still distinguish between the Strib's op/ed pages and the DFL), it's pretty clear that it's not because Coleman has gotten any better. Last Friday's effort was perhaps the most despicable, disingenuous, bias-flecked piece of unpaid DFL propaganda he's ever written:

Another pro-war ad is getting a trial run on some Twin Cities TV stations, repackaging the same deceptions that I deconstructed last Sunday [...and that the Strib won't display any more -- Ed]. The first ad was bad enough, but the newest installment in this expensive effort to shore up support for the war in Iraq is not honest about a mother's grief.

Wow.

What happened? Did they hire an actress, like those gawdawful MPAAT ads last fall, the ones that repackaged junk science to the gullible?

What is this alleged deception?

Ad No. 2 began airing Wednesday and features the mothers and fathers of four dead soldiers. The final mother figure in the ad tells the camera: "We have to finish this job to remember Erik's sacrifice, and all of the other fallen heroes." She is identified as M. J. Kesterson, and many viewers will assume she is the mother of Chief Warrant Officer Erik Kesterson, 29, a helicopter pilot killed in 2003 who figures prominently in the ad.

But she's not his mom.

M.J. Kesterson is married to Erik's father, who also appears in the ad, and she's Erik's stepmother.

Nick: Did you ask [PiPress columnist] Laura Billings about what being a step-parent means?

You know - your own childrens' stepmother?

Or any step-parent?

I've been one, Nick. I've helped raise someone else's son. Do you think there's any less involvement in time, effort and love? Oh, it's different than having your own (and I have a couple of them, too), but you still care about them deeply, and worry about them intensely when they go off into the world.

And you get infuriated when dim little bulbs like Nick Coleman act like it doesn't count.

Of course, the fury hasn't started yet:

His mother is Dolores Kesterson, and the distinction is important because Dolores Kesterson is opposed to a war in which she believes her son died to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist and to avenge 9/11, which was not connected to Iraq.

Now, let's recap for a moment:

• Coleman is pumping up the activities of Kesterton's mother - for no other apparent reason than she's anti-war.
• He's just written off the step-mother's motivations
• Worst of all, the father rates as barely a footnote to Coleman. Why? Because of his beliefs? Because Coleman is yet another media figure who treats fathers as a useless appendage to the family? (And why might that be?)
• The Kestertons, by Coleman's own (furtive) admission, are one of four sets of parents in the ad. What of the other three sets of parents, Nick? They rate no mention - why? Because none of them are Bush critics?
• And let's not forget the final point: Kesterton himself was an adult and a volunteer.

Coleman continues:

Dolores, who is a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, voiced her opposition when she was granted a brief meeting with President Bush in 2004 and gave Bush a letter in which she wrote: "The label 'Iraqi Freedom' doesn't work for me. Iraq is not free. It is occupied, and now, after all the loss of life on both sides, they don't want us there."

So let's get this straight: An ad expressing the beliefs of the majority of military people and their parents is "cynical lies", while a small splinter group is automatically credible?

For those of you new to fisking Nick Coleman, it might still seem maddeningly obtuse, I suppose. I guess I'm used to it by now:

Bush didn't want to hear it. Neither did a soft-money group called Progress for America, which raised almost $40 million for the Bush campaign in 2004 and is spending half a million dollars or more here to test whether pro-war propaganda can stop the slide in public support for the war (the latest CNN/USA Today Poll shows 56 percent of Americans oppose the war).

Did you catch that?

56 percent.

Unmentioned by Coleman, he of the finely tuned "baloney detector": That number would seem to be up in recent months - the media was crowing about support for the war being under 50%, not long ago.

Question: Given that, as well as the synchronicity of Coleman's piece with the DFL's media assault on the ads, who is the propagandist here?

I could tell you more about Progress for America and "Astro-turfing" (artificially created "grass-roots" politics) if the Washington-based group had answered e-mailed requests for information.

No, Nick. I'd be much more interested in your telling us why you are calling PfA (and their step-mothers, fathers, and pro-war parents "astro-turf", but giving "Gold Star Parents For Peace" full credence - not to mention keeping mum about the obvious coordination of your column with the DFL's propaganda offensive.

Because after a year of claiming you're not the DFL's monkey, it's obvious that you're flinging blue poo on command. Don't believe it? Check out the DFL memo over on KvM; note the similarities; note, indeed, the bits that seem to be almost the same words.

Let's pause for a second.

My intent here is to expose the agitprop tactics of a political group campaigning on the bodies of fallen soldiers in a transparent attempt to cover the war's lies. It is not my desire to discount the grief of the families -- including the stepmothers -- of the 2,274 soldiers who have died following orders.

Buy you've just discounted the grief of the three sets of (apparent) bio-parents, one father, and one stepmother who don't conform to your prejudices, or to your transparent attempt to propagandize against the war.

Folks who would do that kind of despicable thing are the folks who attacked Cindy Sheehan as a "tragedy pimp" and mocked her grief over the loss of her soldier son, Casey.

Words nearly fail me here. Perhaps Coleman is incapable of distinguishing that the vast majority of Sheehan's critics attack her disingenuity in being used as tool of pro-Democrat groups - I have yet to see a single credible pro-administration pundit "attack" Sheehan's grief in any way.

But it's Coleman that is spitting on the grief of parents, by devalueing - ignoring - the parents whose beliefs don't match his.

Americans are divided about this war. But there are patriots on all sides of the debate and there are many families, including those in mourning, praying for an end to it.

True. And irrelevant.

This isn't about patriotism. This is about mainstream media gasbags and party hacks picking and choosing the grief they'll dignify, in the service of the political agenda they cynically package as "journalism".

This is about the media's disingenuous picking and choosing which big-money supported groups they'll label as "plucky, grassroots underdogs" - Gold Star Parents, MoveOn, MPAAT - and which ones they'll label "astroturf", rightly or wrongly, iin support of their own political agenda.

These cynical ads ignore that. They exploit the fallen and are a disservice to the troops. More than that, they are lies.

But as we've sen above, the only "lies", obfuscations and shimmyings about the truth are Coleman's.

(Check out Brian's take or MDE's bit and Foot's sideswipe on the same column)

(And the Nihilist has the most economical response to Coleman's column; Nihilist turns Coleman into a pink mist. Read it. Forward it to "friends" who think Coleman is anything but a sad joke).

Note to the Mainstream Media

To: Mainstream Media
From: Mitch Berg, Schmuck
Re: The Upcoming Week

Media,

According to Drudge, you are going to be spending another week covering the Cheney Shooting non-story.

If the nation's top magazines have the pulse of the country -- get ready for another exhaustive week of exhaustive Cheney shooting coverage!

This just in... Both TIME and NEWSWEEK are planning high impact covers of Cheney for newsstands starting tomorrow, with each magazine rolling out top staff bylines and thousands of words on the hunting incident: TIME: With deep reporting by John Cloud, Mike Allen and Matthew Cooper/ Washington, Cathy Booth Thomas and Patricia Kilday Hart/ Austin, and Hilary Hylton. NEWSWEEK urgently brings in its big investigative guns: Evan Thomas, Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Carol Rust in Texas.

Another week of overpaid, overstuffed shirts and talking heads bitching about Cheney bypassing them on the story.

Another week of the insular-to-the-point-of-inbred world of the Washington Press Corps whinging about the Administration they hate, treating them like people who hate the Administration ought to be treated.

Another week of a Mainstream Media that hasn't been part of this country's "mainstream" since the early sixties, pulling farther out of it.

In summary: Thanks! Feel free to do another week or two, while you're at it!

You Know Who You Are

You were at the front of a line of about eight people (or groups, including a guy with a couple of toddlers) at a Dunn Brothers on the Saint Paul side of the river. You and your husband - you in your alpaca jacket, he in his Patagonia vest and his fisherman's cap - were buying a bag of coffee. One bag.

Although your demeanor and vocabulary both fairly screamed "Mid-level Social Services Bureaucrat" or "Education Department Adjunct Professor", today you were slumming as chemists and lawyers.

"But how much darker than the Brazilian is this?"

"What sort of acidic taste? Acidy like the Salvadoran at Caribou, or acidy like the Free Trade Guatemalan at Starbucks?"

"Was it harvested by free-trade workers, or was it harvested and planted by free-trade workers? Were the people who shipped and handled it unionized? I mean, every step of the way? Papers, please?"

"What is the periodic table value of this strain of coffee atom?"

The toddlers a couple of spots in line back were getting more and more toddlery. The old man in front of me appeared to be in physical pain from standing and waiting for you to interrogate the high school kid behind the counter, who didn't look old enough to drink coffee anyway.

Note to both of you: You are the reason the Democratic Party is going down.

That is all.

(Acknowledge in advance: Some commenter or another will inevitably chime in "How do you know they were Democrats?" Pffft; no Republican would dress or groom themselves like that; also, roiling waves of granola wafted from these people.

And if they didn't drive a prim Volvo or a rusty, oil-smoke-belching Subaru plastered with stickers, then I'll sent Chris Coleman a valentine's card.

Bin Laden's Latest: A Response

To: Usama Bin Laden
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Resolution

Mr. Bin Laden, you have vowed not be be captured alive.

At last, something on which I agree with you.

Quagmire!

Rambix and the Red Star has become one of my essential MOB blog reads lately. The blog is on a mission - expose the crime wave in Minneapolis that the Star/Tribune can't seem to bother with.

Today's piece covers a bunch of crimes you will never hear about in the Strib (or from R.T. Rybak's website), as well as the effectiveness of "Zero Tolerance" weapons policies in the Minneapolis schools (of which much more later).

Shouldn't You Be In France?

Says Alec Baldwin on the Huffpo:

Cheney is a terrorist. He terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately. Who ever thought Harry Whittington would be the answer to America's prayers.

What?

Whittington's going to expunge the collective recollection of Alec Baldwin butchering the memory of Jimmy Doolittle in Pearl Harbor?

Must Be Rove

Paul Hackett - former Marine major, Iraq war veteran - is running for the Senate as a Democrat.

Well, he was, anyway. He was an outsider, and he didn't fit the new, Mad How/Daily Kos-friendly vision of the Democratic Party.

And that just couldn't be tolerated...

Hackett, an Iraq War combat veteran, was hailed last summer as just the kind of “fighting Democrat” the party needed to reinvigorate its base and end its years in the congressional wilderness. After narrowly losing a race for Congress in a lopsidedly Republican district outside Cincinnati last August, the telegenic veteran—famous for dissing President Bush as a “chickenhawk” and “sonuvabitch” while on the stump—was courted heavily by Democratic leaders, including Sens. Charles Schumer and Harry Reid, to take on [Senator Mike] DeWine. But no sooner did Hackett enter the Senate race last October than Brown announced his candidacy for Senate, reversing an earlier decision he had made to stay out of the race.

With Brown, a party insider, on board, the Democratic establishment quickly began pulling away from the fiery Hackett. Schumer, after having wooed him in August, called again in October. “Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive,” Hackett told me at the time. “But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do.” Hackett, a maverick who relishes the fight, decided to buck the Beltway insiders, and stay in the race.

Now, we know Hackett was no insider, and not a typical Democrat in many ways.

In many others, of course, he fits the new, Begala/O'Donnell/Carvile/Kos template to a T:

Hackett’s scorching rhetoric earned him notoriety and cash on the campaign trail. He declared that people who opposed gay marriage were “un-American.” He said the Republican party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said “aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden.” Bloggers loved him, donors ponied up...

One blogger, anyway.

Now, I'm not going to yap about media bias in this piece; it's in Mother Jones, for crying out loud.

But this next bit...:

Swift boats soon appeared on the horizon. A whisper campaign started: Hackett committed war crimes in Iraq—and there were photos. “The first rumor that I heard was probably a month and a half ago,” Dave Lane, chair of the Clermont County Democratic Party, told me the day after Hackett pulled out of the race. “I heard it more than once that someone was distributing photos of Paul in Iraq with Iraqi war casualties with captions or suggestions that Paul had committed some sort of atrocities. Who did it? I have no idea. It sounds like a Republican M.O. to me, but I have no proof of that. But if it was someone on my side of the fence, I have a real problem with that. I have a hard time believing that a Democrat would do that to another Democrat.”

In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. “I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true?” demanded the Senate minority leader. “No sir,” replied Hackett. To drive home his point, Hackett traveled to Washington to show Reid’s staff the photo in question. Hackett declined to send me the photo, but he insists that it shows another Marine—not Hackett—unloading a sealed body bag from a truck. “There was nothing disrespectful or unprofessional,” he insists. “That was a photo of a Marine doing his job. If you don’t like what they’re doing, don’t send Marines into war.”

"Sounds like a Republican MO?"

Help! I'm being victimized!

Because Paul Begala and Laurence O'Donnell fight by Marquis of Queensbury rules, right?

NARN Today!

Join the NARN today, 11AM-3PM, at the White Bear Lake Superstore. Great Deals, great times!

Here's the Google Map.

John, Brian and Chad will be weaving their magical web from 11 to 1. After that, King, Ed and Mitch will, er, drive it home.

Rumor has it John's long-unrequited love for that Cadillac convertible might finally come to fruition...

Baa Baa Baa

It's been covered elsewhere in the alternative media; the U of Washington Student Senate has rejected building a memorial to U of W alum and World War II hero Gregory "Pappy" Boyington.

The University of Washington's student senate rejected a memorial for alumnus Gregory "Pappy" Boyington of "Black Sheep Squadron" fame amid concerns a military hero who shot down enemy planes was not the right kind of person to represent the school.

Student senator Jill Edwards, according to minutes of the student government's meeting last week, said she "didn't believe a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."

Ashley Miller, another senator, argued "many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men."

Senate member Karl Smith amended the resolution to eliminate a clause that said Boyington "was credited with destroying 26 enemy aircraft, tying the record for most aircraft destroyed by a pilot in American Uniform," for which he was awarded the Navy Cross.

Smith, according to the minutes, said "the resolution should commend Colonel Boyington's service, not his killing of others."

Good lord. Who spawns these morons?

Here's why they should honor Boyington; coming from humble beginnings, we went to school and got an engineering degree. He joined the Marine Corps via ROTC, then left to serve in the American Volunteer Group, aka the Flying Tigers, a group of American mercenary pilots fighting against the Japanese in China. Then, after coming back to the States, resuming duty in the USMC, leading his squadron against the Japanese, and tying Joe Foss' kill record, he was shot down - and spent the rest of the war surviving the hell of the Japanese POW camp system.

He came back, struggled with alcoholism, recovered (at least, according to many accounts including Boyington's own), and lived until 1988. He was no saint - the guy had issues - but he was a hero every bit as much because of what he survived as who he killed.

In other words, the kind of role model that our spoiled, dissipate, entitlement-craving college students could use, in a lot of ways.

MOBalanche!

Doug Bass has done a formidable job with MOBANGE! - the Minnesota Organization of Blogs' aggregator.

Kudos, Doug. You could have a career as a programmer...

Night Writer Is One!

Wish a happy first birthday to The Night Writer!

2004 and early 2005 was a great year for blogs...

Woeful Imbalance

As the media gorges itself on "sports" like snowboarding and ice skating, Mark Yost (guest-blogging over with Fishsticks) tackles the Winter Olympics' finest sport.

Although he's got one thing wrong; I can not only XC ski, but I can bench-press Strom.

Well, Margaret anyway.

Interview With A Baby

Katie from Yucky Salad compares the plights of Harry Whittington and Sean Preston Spears-Federline in this interview.

While Whittington's got it bad enough, Katie gives the nod to the baby:

"Please. You lived 78 years before you found yourself on the business end of the veep's bad aim, I'm 4 months old and I've already had to listen to "Ya'll Ain't Ready" 3000 times. Everyone's up in arms because I was in the front seat?? I got news for you, I'm just glad I didn't have to actually drive the damn car this time. Boo hoo, Cheney took a wild shot at some Quail. Wake me up when your mom's breakfast is a shot of Wild Turkey."

This is one of those things where I worry that Katie isn't making up enough stuff.

Words Fail

Hugh tries to interview Helen Thomas.

I listened, dumbfounded.

Chad did a little better.

It was like listening to a Kos komment thread.

Beyond that, what can I say?

Benzos and Hos

Syl Jones on the marketing of gangsta culture:

Sad to say, instead of achieving what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once called "the Beloved Community," the pernicious fantasy of gangsta rap now projects the universal image of a besotted community. Who would ever have imagined that in 2006, as we bury Coretta Scott King, the struggle for civil rights in America has become, in part, a battle against the debasement of our sisters by African-Americans who peddle the Pornography Option?

I know one thing: if Martin, Malcolm, Medgar and the others were alive today, they would be protesting the trivialization of three centuries of black cultural accomplishments, speaking out against the sexualizing of black society, calling for an end to the idiotic "He disrespected me" epidemic of violence.

Read the whole thing; Jones has had the occasional good column lately.

Oh, not as good as it could have been; Jones resists making the logical jump, to assailing the government policies and that create the huge pool of consumers (black and white) who find this sort of garbage attractive.

But it's a start.

Blast De Los Past

I was shocked to find this during a routine vanity-googling session last night; it's a website for a recording studio:

Here's an incomplete list of bands and musicians that have recorded at Mirror Image Studios over the past twenty years.

And, waaaay down the list:

Mitch Berg

I almost laughed coffee out my nose. My band (Joe Public, which was called ourselves until a Philadelphia R&B band of the same name got on the Top 40) recorded, dubbed and mixed five songs in 20 hours of recording time. The entire set of sessions cost us around $300, which was our entire budget.

And yes, everyone was there in 1988. The funny part for me is seeing that Ron Parker (the long-haired guy in the middle), former lead singer of classic Twin Cities band "The F**k*ng S**t Biscuits", is working on a book - and the book looks like something I'm gonna need.

Things Afoot

I'm sitting on, if not the biggest story in the history of this blog, at least the most involved one.

And I can't publish a damn thing about it. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, maybe a year from now. Not sure yet.

But I get to start figuring it all out in about an hour here.

Stay tuned.

Decay

What happened to Spencer's Gifts?

I don't hang out in malls much - and I don't recall having been in a Spencer's more than a couple of times, ever, the most recently being probably ten years ago. As I recall, it was a place to buy fairly innocuous gifts, novelties, toys - a place to find a joy buzzer or a

Until the other night. My daughter dragged me into the Spencer's at Rosedale.

Ho Lee Cow. I felt like she's dragged me into the old Maharaja's on West Seventh. The stupidly filthy mixed freely with the gratuitously moronically obscene in a melange that made Hot Topic feel like The Gap. The "Peeing Calvin" stickers actually stood out as the classiest thing in the inventory.

When did Spencer's turn into a one-stop novelty shop for a**holes?

I guess my biggest hope is that it's a really bad market-based decision - that there's not really a market for idiots who want to buy obscene t-shirts and bumper stickers.

I got a bad feeling about this.

Is Doctor Neil Clark Warren In The House?

Kristine Holmgren latest screed in the Strib ("Beware words of love in a land of deception") could be viewed as more of the same vacuous, leftycoddly twaddle that she usually writes.

It could also be viewed as a cry for help.

Or maybe...just maybe...it could be viewed as something potentially positive. That is, rather than being dismissed as either the Goebbelsy recitation of DFL tropes, or a strangled plea for more boom-boom disguised as a political screed from a person whose jobs and public persona frown on the former and utter lack of analytical skill preclude the latter, it can be seen as the beginning of something new, something potentially beautiful.

So with that in mind, let's rewrite Rev./Ms. Holmgren's screed in the form of a personals ad.

Let's get started:

Curvy, Middle-Aged Creative seeking fixer-upper:

He was easy to love. Middle-aged, gray and craggy, his face was lined with laughter, experience. And I thought I saw something else as well.

Must share my love of facile labels and self-absorbed cultural references:

His smile projected an irresistible knee-jerk honesty. When I looked at him, I saw my soulmate -- another baby boomer with a hunger for truth, justice and the American way.

Me: Feet planted firmly in clouds

From the first day I saw him, I knew he was a champion. I marveled at how my Valentine flattened the mendacity of colleagues at the office. He was a fearless soldier of sincerity, a warrior in the battle against the reckless lies of the sometimes silly employer we then served.

And just a little cheap...

And so when he offered to buy me a Valentine martini, I thought the gods were delivering me to bliss.

I was easy to get.

...and prone to falling for easy-to-swallow lines...

He told me he loved me on our first date, and I believed him. I believed everything he said.

My eyes were unforgettable. No one had skin as soft as mine, teeth as white, arms as welcoming, kisses as warm. He'd searched for me for more than 30 years. I was his treasure, his sweet, blue-eyed girl.

So I will think of him today, as I watch my coworkers open cards attached to bouquets of red roses.

I will remember the plans he made for us. Paris in May. Biking Lake Superior in July.

And I will remember the lesson I learned. I am easily deceived, and I live in a land of deception. .

...but only when it comes to romance! Honest! When it comes to politics, nosirreebob! I'm dead-on! When it comes to romance, I'm a regular Tara Reid - but you can still trust my keen understanding of politics and my stringent digging past the sound bites and slogans!

Bill Clinton did not have sex with that woman. George W. Bush had evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Richard Nixon was not a crook. .

Although I'm a bit of a drama queen with a curious facility to weave facile orthodoxy into the most mundane stories:

With lies as grand as this, how can I punish tiny lies like his? It is not easy to be true.

Simple, decent people assault us with tidy, well-considered lies each day. The check is in the mail. Your call will be answered in the order it was received. It was nice meeting you. James Frey is a great memoirist.

We'll keep your résumé on file. The war in Iraq can be won.

You must also get the little facts straight, just like I do:

Samuel Alioto [sic] has no opinion on Roe vs. Wade.

And maybe, just maybe, you should have a tiny little taste for the kinky

Now, this won't hurt a bit..

You: Knee must jerk on command.

No photo, no response.

Kristine Holmgren is an ordained Presbyterian pastor and writer. .

But on the upside, impotent rage makes a wonderful companion.

Send any inquiries to:

Personals
Staff Lounge
Star Tribune
425 Portland Avenue
Crime-Free Minneapolis, MN 55555

Best of luck, Kris. Should be the start of big things for ya.

Don't say I never did any favors for you.

Orthodoxy

I think we need to codify an exemption in "Godwin's Law" - the widely-misunderstood internet aphorism that claims any argument on the Internet will evenually involve someone comparing their opponents to Nazis, noting that generally that is a losing proposition.

Peter Hutchinson's piece in the Strib shows us that while comparisons to Hitler are tired and usually abusive, Joseph Goebbels still has a lot to teach us.

Goebbels, of course, codified the "Big Lie" theory of public relations; if you repeat a lie often enough, people will think it's the truth. This is, of course, more sinister than the Big Mistake ("toxic cannibal mutants are roaming flood-ravaged New Orleans! Film at 11"). No, this is when a government or media organ systematically sets out to define truth by repetition rather than fact.

Ipse Hutchinson. You can read the whole thing - but I wanted to focus on a couple of his points which are slipping into Minnesota left/media (pardon the redundancy) orthodoxy:

Don't make any pledges -- the last one did not work out so well.

Really?

Based on...what?

The pledge drew a line in the sand, demanding (on the part of a slim majority of Minnesotans who were and are sick of the nannystatus quo) change in the way Minnesota's government perceives its relationship with the people; are we a free association of equals, or are we a bunch of ripe sucks whose only purpose in life is to feed the rapacious maw of the mother state, to which we owe all?

Most of the Republican state Representatives who lost their seats in 2004 had broken the pledge.

No, indeed; the only problem with the pledge was that Pawlenty started backing off of it. Perhaps there were political reasons to do so. Maybe. There were also political reasons for Ronald Reagan not to demand that Gorbachev "tear down the wall"; there were political reasons for Rudy Giuliani to reach an accord with the New York bureaucracy and city unions against whom he'd declared war.

Remember; when Pawlenty took office, he inherited a $4 billion deficit from the profligate Ventura, a deficit the "experts" (cue the obligatory Larry Jacobs quote) said couldn't be fixed. This past three years haven't been pretty - for anyone on Capitol Hill - but by any rational measure Pawlenty has the job nearly done.

Which brings us to...:

Don't raise the "turnaround" in the state budget. If you do, others will jump in to remind Minnesotans that you helped create the mess in the first place, used accounting gimmicks to make things look better than they actually were, borrowed billions from schools and the tobacco fund, and don't intend to pay it all back. It leaves people wondering whether they can believe you or any politician.

Well, duh. Nobody should believe any politician. Or rather, they should "trust but verify", even for the good guys like Pawlenty.

Did Pawlenty use some "gimmicks"? Pfft. The tobacco fund was legalized extortion; the schools' budget hasn't shrunk, merely grown more slowly than the MFT wanted.

The DFL used gimmicks, of course - the most pernicious of which, regarding temporary surpluses as the basis for more permanent spending, are what really got the state into the mess of 2002; through the cha-cha nineties, Carlson and then Ventura (and their DFL legislative counterparts) repeatedly turned surplus after surplus, for the most part, into more permanent spending, mostly for entitlements.

Where does Peter Hutchinson - or anyhone at the Strib - talk about this?

Let me know when you find it.

Ask Not Why It Circles The Drain...

...in this case, Geena Davis' "Commander in Chief", whose ratings are off 40% since its ballyhooed debut.

No, just rejoice that it is.

The networks and the critics are making up excuses for the show's collapse; an inexperienced initial producer (replaced by Steven Bochco, whose record lately isn't much grounds for "hope", either - has he had a hit since NYPD Blue? Like, fifteen years ago?), behind-the-scenes turmoil, and (let's just say) a bit of decay in the show's quality:

Recent storylines have included an angry war vet holding Air Force One hostage, the president's kids throwing a wild party in the White House and the First Gentleman considering a job as baseball commissioner, all of which feel about as believable as a Larry the Cable Guy presidency.

Alternate explanation: people between the coasts bought the notion of the Democratic party spawning another Truman or JFK once, with West Wing. After a year of Howard Dean running the party, and Kos moving into position as its official voice, maybe the fiction is wearing thin.

59 Factoids And One Unwarranted Conclusion (That Will Give Certain Commenters The Vapors)

As an odd little side note; I'll occasionally post little tidbits about my life and my past. Little, scarcely consequential things - I play ten musical instruments, I speak a couple of languages, I used to occasionally busk for beer money, I'm a Springsteen fan, I'm the best conservative among anyone I know) that, for some inexplicable reason, cause certain readers and commenters to leave increasingly strident (dare I say, "Peebish") comments disputing or at least heckling the statement. Something about these little factoids seem to act on these commenters like red banners affect bulls; he/she/they charge (through the virtual bull ring of my comment section), gets skewered, charges again, etc, etc.

So in the interest of flushing this behavior by pure catharsis, I present virtually every factoid about myself I could think of in one sitting. Hopefully the exercise will cause these commenters to realize the error of their ways and the futility of their reasoning, assuming there's any of that going on.

This will borrow from the example set by my blog friend Sheila O'Malley in her wonderful "74 Facts And One Lie"; in that spirit, I entitle this piece "59 Factoids and One Unwarranted Conclusion".

Onward:

1. I get around in a couple of languages; I took seven years of German (three in high school, four in college), one each of Latin and Spanish.
2. I also figured out how to get around in Holland and France to the point where nobody ever made me out as a Yank if I didn’t want ‘em to.
3. I have wanted to learn Russian for years – but at the moment, I’m leaning toward Polish. I’d also kill to learn Vietnamese.
4. I have a BA in English, and I minored in History, Computer Science and German. I also had enough classes in Music and Theatre to get minors, but the credits were almost all performance and stagecraft, so it didn’t pan out. Yes, I was crazy in college; I averaged over 20 credits a semester. I also slept like four hours a night.
5. While in Europe, I snuck into the Netherlands illegally. It’s a long story.
6. In a perfect world, I'd be (among a few other things) a full time language geek. My senior linguistics project? A study on the differences in dialect, accent and vocabulary between the Dakotas, Montana and Minnesota. And yes, there is a difference in accent. Minnesotans talk more through their nose, while people from the Dakotas' accents are generally throatier. I attributed it to the difference in anscestors; Minnesotans had more scandinavians (more nasal) while the Dakotas are more German and Slavic (along with Scandinavians).
7. I get around, or have gotten around, on ten musical instruments; cello, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards (mostly badly – everything I need to know, I learned from Benmont Tench and Danny Federici - and I’m terribly out of practice for now), harmonica, mandolin (rusty), pennywhistle (rustier), curan (a Turkish instrument for which I can’t find strings at the moment) and bagpipes.
8. Pedal steel is next.
9. I used to play the bars around the Twin Cities. The First Avenue main room was the peak of it all; the Cabooze, the Uptown, the Seventh Street Entry and the 400 Bar were all great. McCready’s, the Terminal and Mr. B’s on University were not. Worst of all, of course, had to be Fernando’s on Lake Street, a dive that was TRYING to become a music destination, but just sucked horribly in every possible way. There is a post to be written about playing ‘nando’s.
10. I used to busk. Not a lot – a couple of times in Europe in ’83, and a few times with the guys from my band in ’87. It was fun, though I can’t say I’d like to do it for a living. The story from the other day - the cops busting a sax player I was busking with - was utterly true, even if fairly short on denouement.
11. I'm happy that I can use a word like denouement in a sentence and still look like a badass.
12. I’ve never had a job that involved handling food. Never been a waiter, never worked at McDonald’s – nothing.
13. Well, not before the food was eaten, anyway. In college I worked for a summer as a bellhop at a Holiday Inn in North Dakota, which involved cleaning the pool, serving as night maid, setting up/tearing down banquet rooms, bouncing at the lounge, tossing bums out of the pool shower, and one glorious Sunday morning, cleaning up a sewer break.
14. I have not had a week off from work that didn’t involve job hunting (being out of work with two kids is no vacation) or house painting since 1987.
15. Although I grew up in the public schools (my maternal grandparents and my father were all public school teachers), I ended up attending Catholic schools for six month via a weird chain of events. The experience left me not especially impressed with Catholic schools. Your mileage – especially all of you who send your kids to catholic schools – may certainly vary. I’m just saying.
16. My parents could both be fairly described as Democrats; Dad the more moderate of the two. As a result, I grew up pretty much believing in liberalism.
17. As noted at several points in this blog, Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech started my journey from left to right.
18. Yes, I do believe that former liberals make the best conservatives. Ronald Reagan? Helloooo?
19. I am on my third career.
20. My first career was radio. I started when I was 16 years old (as noted elsewhere) at KEYJ in Jamestown, ND. Since then I worked at KQDJ, KDAK, KQDJ again (different management), KSTP-AM, KDWB AM/FM, WDGY-AM, KFAI, and now WWTC (AM1280).
21. KDAK and WDGY were country/western stations. While working there, I learned the immutable law of country music; when it's bad, it's horrible; when it's mediocre, it's horrible; when it's good, it's pretty amazing. That was where I became an Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell and Willie Nelson fan.
22. To the best of my knowledge, in 1986 I was the youngest major-market political talk show host in the business. I wasn't very good at it, but it was a lot of fun.
23. Which is good, because the most money I ever earned in a year in my radio career was around $12,000.
24. That was if I was lucky enough to be working at a station. Which had its gaps, let’s just say. To pay the bills, I worked for a stretch – like, three years – as a nightclub DJ. I spent some of that time working in more R’nB oriented bars, including a few with a sizeable rap audience. So I learned first how to beat-mix (mix two records together so that you barely know the song has changed, and the beat just goes on) and then how to scratch, cut and do a bunch of the other funky rap turntable stuff. I even played behind a couple of (amateur) rappers back in the day. At one point, I was known as the best bald, white, father-of-two rap DJ in the Twin Cities.
25. Celebs who came to my bars: Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (Mermaid, 1989); a couple of Minnesota Vikings (Eddie Webster's, 1990), Belinda Carlisle (KDWB Beach Party, St. Paul Civic Center, 1989; I know, it's not a bar. Take it up with Ms. Carlisle); a guy who was famous for looking just like Prince, only about a foot too tall, Mermaid, 1988-2001.
26. One day, around the time I left the nightclub racket, I was walking down a street with a friend of mine – let’s call that friend “Tim Wonderbread”. Another guy – a short, afro-American guy in a starter jacket – walked up to us, and looked like he was paying attention to us. Tim tensed up. “Hey”, said the black guy, “You was the MC at the Mermaid?” “Yep”. “Yo!”, he replied, shaking our hands. “You were the flyest MC around!”. Tim almost had a heart attack.
27. I have worked for 36 different companies in the past 20 years on a level that paid my family’s bills. Most were short-hop contract jobs; I’m on my fourth full-time permanent job since 1995.
28. I left radio – the first time – in 1993, about the time my youngest was born and making $12K a year ceased to be an option.
29. I became a technical writer.
30. Technical writing is an incredibly detailed field, which usually involves cleaning up other peoples’ messes. Those happen to be things I’m fundamentally temperamentally unsuited to do. That said, tech writing was fairly good to me.
31. Nowadays, am a User Interface Designer. Not a “Website designer” – I don’t do graphics, and I don’t make things look cool or cute. I make software of all kinds usable. It’s a pretty arcane field, which is just the way I like it; if it were easier to explain, it’d be easier to do, and then I wouldn’t make as much money. So you really don’t need to know any more, now, do you?
32. I taught myself how to do the job. Completely. I met a guy who was doing more or less what I’m doing now at Cray Research – he had just built a Usability testing lab – and put two and two together; “Hm – I can use the same basic skills I use as a technical writer, but get more money, more respect, and not be bored out of my skull? Where do I sign up?” It took me four years of self-education and constant insinuation of the practice into one project or another until I got a real job in the field, but I did it.
33. I like my gig quite a bit. I’m designing a customer portal for a HUGE system for a very large company. The challenge is, yes, immense. I love it. Oh, if I could have a full-time job as a talk show host or a film director or run a recording studio, I’d do it – but since those are all firmly in the realm of fantasy I’ll stick with what I have for now.
34. A former boss of mine once called me “The Highlander”, because I’ve done a zillion things and you have to cut my head off to kill me.
35. Or so I hope.
36. I believe Christ is my lord and savior.
37. Perforce, I believe in an omniscient God.
38. While I believe in God with all my heart, I have little empirical evidence that atheists exist.
39. I don't happen to think evolution takes away from either the existence of God or the glory of his creation one iota. In fact, the endless intricacies of evolution to me glorify God in a way that saying "It all happened in seven days, like it or lump it" never could. Which, indeed, speaks more eloquently of God - the infinitely variegated creation that surrounds us all, or the Dewey Decimal category of a book written about it all over the course of a couple of thousand years?
40. I met my ex-wife in a really sleazy bar.
41. It wasn’t what you’re thinking; I was the DJ, she was a waitress. For ex-spouses, we get along moderately well.
42. I probably just jinxed things.
43. I’ve been single for six years. In that time, I’ve had at least a first date with 92 different women; yes, I kept track. Most of them were first dates and nothing else. But it’s enough that I periodically run into one or another of them, out and about the town, which thankfully hasn’t led to too many awkward scenes yet. A few – OK, quite a few – were “Dates from Hell”. Haven’t run across any of them yet. I write this knowing that writing it will make it inevitable.
44. Part of the reason, as I’ve noted elsewhere in this blog, I love blind dates. The vast majority of my “first dates” - and one fourth date, don't ask - have been blind ones. And going to just about every one of them has felt like walking down the stairs on Christmas morning, wondering what was waiting under the tree. Of course, the vast majority of the dates were akin to getting hand-knit socks from great-aunt Alice – but hope always sprang eternal.
46. I don’t believe in Karma.
47. I do believe that what goes around comes around.
48. I have immense respect for Dennis Prager. His Happiness Hour is among the coolest things on radio today. However, he's wrong about the Death Penalty.
49. By the way, I support the death penalty in every possible way.
50. Except one; the likelihood (indeed, inevitability) of executing the innocent. The state-sanctioned judicial killing of an innocent person - even one - is a moral crime that can perhaps be rationalized by earthly logic, but I have to believe can not be by any higher law or reasoning, as long as a viable alternative exists. Life without parole is viable.
51. "But what if the lifer escapes?" isn't a valid question, and doesn't derail my thesis. In fact, I know of a case of a man who escaped from Death Row twice; once in the eighties, when he got out of a gas station rest room while in transit (he was on the lam for five months), and again a few years back. When the courts determined via DNA evidence that he couldn't have committed the murder for which he was sentenced in the first place. Ooops.
52. My greatest ambition is to leave a word or saying to the English language.
53. My contender for “saying” is “The guy who said ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ never had to bet his life on it”. Pass it around and credit it, please.
54. I got into blogging because I got tired of not having an outlet for my inner strident screedmeister.
55. It seems to bother JB Doubtless when bloggers mention their traffic. So I won’t say a word. A picture says a thousand of ‘em:

    

    
    While I firmly believe in maintaining a sense of grounded humility in all things, I also believe in yanking the chains of those who yank mine. My traffic, at the moment, is clipping nicely along. Does it mean, perforce, that I am? That's the fun part; I don't care, and dont' need to know!
    

56. And it feels pretty darn cool being able to play every part in the band.
    
57. And getting around in a couple of languages to the point that almost nobody makes me out as a Yank if I don’t want ‘em to
    
58. And yes, us reformed Democrats are the rockinest conservatives.
    
59. For those who think “Oh, you think all of this stuff makes you cool?”, uh, no. The fact that I am who I am makes me cool (or uncool. Or both). The rest of it is just the cherry on top of the sundae.
    
60. I care deeply about what people think about any of this.

That is all.

Built On Sand?

There was a demonstration outside the embattled house at 14 East Jasmine in Saint Paul today, as the owners, neighborhood activists and the City of Saint Paul traded claims and counterclaims...

...including some claims traded via the media. The Pioneer Press covered the story this morning:

From the outside, the Jessamine Avenue home appears to be in decent shape. Paul Shoemaker, who represents [owner Julian] Jayasuriya and may ask a judge to stop the demolition, said there is no point in tearing it down. Every time Jayasuriya does work on the house, the city changes what it wants done, he added.

"It's gotten to the point where it's become a contest of wills," Shoemaker said.

The city says it has given the owners numerous chances over the years to correct problems but that the house remains dangerous. Video taken Monday morning seems to support the claim. For example, it shows a hydraulic jack that is tilted noticeably to one side as it holds up a basement beam used to support the first floor.

Let's stop right there.

If you've followed the conversation on the Saint Paul Issues Forum, the pattern has gone something like this:

1. The city will make a claim about the house's condition
2. One of original owner Nancy Osterman's advocates will shoot the claim down

This has been a consistent pattern over topic after topic; the paper trail leading to condemnation (responded to with allegations of improper activities and violation of due process on the Housing Inspectors' part); the house's appearance (most of is neighbors look worse); the inspector's report (assailed by a truth in housing inspection that painted a better picture); the lack of power and heat (the City ordered them turned off), the possible spottiness of the internal repairs (contested, point by point, by people with at least feasible-looking but as yet unverified credentials) and so on, leading to this morning's PiPress report. The report reads, in my opinion, like the latest shopping list of city allegations.

On the Saint Paul Issues forum, William McGaughey - who has written on landlord/city relations for Watchdog - contested the "wobbly hydraulic jack" claim:

What we saw were two screw jacks supporting a beam in a crawl space at the front of the house. Evidently, this had been an addition to the main part of the house. The jacks, which were not hydraulic, did not appear to be tilted to one side (although I suppose it's possible to position the video cameras to give that appearance.) One of our people crawled into the space to take a closer look. The jacks were solidly placed on stable foundations. They did not tilt. Also, the main part of the house was firmly supported by permanent wood pillars.

In short, that statement in the Pioneer Press reflects an evident campaign of misinformation by the city. We took our own pictures and have our own witnesses. So the city can't count on erasing the evidence if the house is demolished. There are also expert witnesses who have given the house's foundation a clean bill of health.

The PiPress goes on to quote a "neighborhood activist":

[Neighborhood activist Linda] Jungwirth also said the house nearly blew up in 2004. She was walking by, smelled gas near the house and called Xcel Energy.

"About an hour later, there's five fire trucks, there's Xcel; they cordoned off the street," she said. "That basically set off, 'Why are we letting it sit here like this?' "

Unmentioned in the Pioneer Press piece; what did Xcel find? Was this a fluke, a symptom of neglect? Was is the sort of thing that warrants tearing down a house whose "perfectly good" status is the subject of considerable - not to say frenzied - debate as we speak?

And how does Linda Jungwirth's word become dispositive? While I'm sympathetic with people who want cleaner neighborhoods (and people in that part of the North End have their work cut out for them; put bluntly, the neighborhood is largely a wretched toilet, clogged with houses that give "distressed pieces of crap" a bad name), Jungwirth's claims - and the city's - are not scrutinized in the least.

But it's worth noting that Linda Jungwirth is not just a random neighborhood "activist"; she's a part time employee of Ramsey County Commissioner Janice Rettman, and active in city planning and zoning issues, with some background in pressuring government to intervene in neighborhood housing (PDF File).

Why did the Pioneer Press' reporter not feel it was important that the seemingly random resident and "activist" is in fact a well-placed insider to the local housing and zoning process?

Fact is, every neighborhood has someone like Ms. Jungwirth seems to be (and by the way, as I've never knowingly met Ms. Jungwirth, this is not a commentary on her personality); the kind who loves hanging out at city zoning meetings, quibbling over the arcana of codes and easements and variances, seeking a better world through more regulation; no stranger to power (works for government, for crying out loud) and not afraid to call in markers when needed. Does Linda Jungwirth have more mojo with local Councilman Lee Helgen than the average citizen? Or is Jungwirth a sock puppet witness, wrapped up and given to the PiPress' reporter with a big bow around her head to grease the skids of a story that essentially reprints the city's position verbatim?

Again, I'll await facts. But the city's story - and the Pioneer Press' - give me little assurance in and of themselves of the city's integrity.

Taking The High Road

According to Drudge, the Dems' new strategy involves pure name-calling:

The quote underneath the Gingrich photo reads “In His Own Words: Gingrich’s Solution To Childhood Obesity: ‘Turn off the TV, cut the fatty diet and get exercise.’ [AP, 2/8/06]”

The ten Republicans picked by the Democrat Party include: Sen. George Allen (R-VA), Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), Gingrich, Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NY), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Gov. George Pataki (R-NY) and Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA).

One Republican strategist who had seen the opposition research packets said: 'We should expect nothing less then name-calling and referring to one’s political opponents as ‘fat’ from Howard Dean’s Democrat Party.'

Is this really a Rove plant?

Read Kos for a day and tell me if this seems out of character...

Protest Too Much

Thomas Radke made it to the protest at the Army Recruiting Center in Minneapolis last week. He sent a report:

Just a brief note to let you know that only two of the "anti-protesters"
showed up at the Lake/Lyndale intersection but...

There was perhaps 25 of the lefties standing around on the 4 corners; I
stood in front of the most prominent group and unfurled my big American
flag, waving it in their faces. That really pissed them off! An older
woman stood her ground opposite my corner waving her small American flag
as well and chanted "SUPPORT THE TROOPS".

Many, many cars driving by honked at us, pointing to the flag and giving
the thumbs up sign. I do believe the lefties were angry that we spoiled
the exclusiveness of their gathering.

Kudos, Tom. Wish I coulda made it.

I mean, if I were like most lefty activists and didn't have (or need) a day job, it'd be another thing...

Helping Nicolle

Swiftee is on a mission. The mission's name is Nicolle Birch.

Swiftee's impressed - which, I'm here to tell you, isn't easy:

Once in awhile you run across a kid who blows every pre-conceived notion you've ever had about today's kids right out of the water.

I am extremely privileged to have an acquaintance with such a youngster...
Although she and her dad live modestly on his SSI and VA benefits (he's a disabled Vietnam Vet), she proves the lie behind the public schools "free and reduced lunch" canard every day...Nicolle is a straight "A" student..as in maintaining a 4.0 average throughout her schooling type straight "A". When she's not hitting the books for herself, she helps her classmates hit theirs as a student tutor after school.

And on most Saturdays you can find Nicolle at the library doing some free-lance tutoring; no I'm not kidding.

He quotes Ms. Birch:

My name is Nicolle Birch and I am a sophomore at Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights. I have been nominated to represent my school and the state at the National Young Leaders Conference to be held this summer in Washington, D.C.

The Conference brings high school students from around the country who have demonstrated academic achievement as well as leadership abilities to participate in an interactive program of the inner workings of the nation’s government...
Imagine if you have been given this opportunity for a life-changing experience when you were in high school and were unable to participate for lack of funds. That is why I am writing to you today.

My participation in the Conference depends on whether I can raise $2,185 for tuition and $450 for the plane ticket to and from the Conference.

Swiftee again:

What Nicolle failed to mention is that just 350 students are selected to attend this conference nationwide.

As I mentioned, her dad is a disabled vet. He cannot come up with this on his own, and although he wasn't really pleased, he has allowed me to make this bleg on behalf of his daughter.

I wish you could all meet this young woman in person because you'd have your wallets out before you knew what you were doing, but that's not possible.

So I'm asking you please, pull out your wallets anyway.

The Birch's don't have internet access, so please send Nicolle a hard copy check at the following address:

Nicolle Birch
c/o Paul Birch
697 Stryker Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55107

Good luck, Nicolle. I'll see what I can squeeze out here...

Not To Code

Quick: Which of these properties is going to get torn down on Wednesday, if the city of Saint Paul gets its way??

This one?

Or this one?

Or this one?

Watchdog now:
http://watchdog-news.com/politics-as-usual/14-east-jasmine-saint-paul.htm

If you guessed the second one - the one with a presentable exterior, and by most accounts (and according to these photos, an interior to match - you must be a Saint Paul city employee.

The story is long and complicated - but this piece in the Watchdog purports to tell the tale; picking through this discussion on the St. Paul E-Democracy forum.

Long story short:

1. According to the property owners, the previous owner, Nancy Osterman (who sold the property to another party, and is re-purchasing on a contract for deed), the Saint Paul police wanted her to work as an informant on a drug case.
2. Osterman says the police raided the house - accompanied by a city building inspector.
3. The building inspector declared the house unfit for human habitation
4. According to Osterman, she was then told to sell the house to a city building inspector for $40,000, or face city-ordered demolition. The house is apparently valued at considerably more than that.
5. A city councilman said that the owners defaulted on some performance bonds, so tough rocks, the law is the law is the law
6. The owner noted that $60,000 had been put into the property, and posted the photos (see the Watchdog piece)
7. A city inspector wrote, claiming that the place was unfit for human habitation, because the power and water were off
8. A handyman who claims knowledge of the story noted that the water and heat were off because the city had ordered them turned off

...and so on, and so on.

There's a protest planned for tomorrow at the house, at 14 East Jasmine, at 1PM to protest the demolition. According to the current owner of record (with whom I spoke on Saturday), they are working on getting a restraining order.

Disclaimers: Watchdog tends toward the, er, overheated. I'm withholding judgement - but watching carefully.

News Flash

Murphy's law doesn't exempt political leaders.

Fearless prediction: The left's orgiastic howling over this issue will result in improved poll numbers for the Administration.

And a surge in NRA hunting safety registrations...

Kannitverstann

Heather from Dooce and her husband are over in the Netherlands.

Heather is talking about her run-ins with the Dutch language. Now, I get around in Dutch; I speak German moderately fluently and I get around OK in English (note to JB Doubtless; yes, improbable as it seems, I do speak two languages); reading Dutch is pretty simple if you speak German, and if you kind of mushmouth your way through both while speaking, you get somewhere close to Dutch. Or at least that's what did when I was over there. I got along fairly well; by the end of my second day in the Netherlands (back in '83) I was taking care of most of my daily business in Dutch, without many problems.

I said "without many".

The night after I landed, a couple of friends and I went out for dinner. We stepped into a little cafe, took a table, and looked at the menu.

One of the guys said he wanted "A quarter chicken". I scanned the menu; I saw an item, Kippelviertjes.

Now, I knew "Kippel" was Dutch for Chicken. I knew that the German word for "Quarter" is Viertel, and that the suffix -tjes is sort of a diminuitive in Dutch. So I figured that was the way to go; I ordered Kippelviertjes for my friend.

Ten minutes later, out came the 'tron with a heaping plate of...

...sauteed chicken livers.

Foreign languages can be so...foreign.

There were, however, no more culinary malfunctions.

Smackdown

Check out Scott Johnson's preview of his upcoming debate with the Strib's Eric Black at the Tocqueville Center.

If I'm not mistaken, Scott's going to be joining us tomorrow on the NARN to discuss the event. Tune in!

Kanye 3:16: "The Career Bell Curve That Goes Up, Eventually Comes Down"

Yanking Christians' chains must be good business.

Rapper Kanye West says he should be a character in a revised Bible.

Cocky rap star KANYE WEST is calling for a revised edition of THE BIBLE, because he thinks he should be a character in it.

The JESUS WALKS hitmaker, who picked up three Grammy Awards last night (08FEB06), feels sure he'd be "a griot" (West African storyteller) in a modern Bible.

By the same logic I should be...

...a rapper.

FLOG YOURSELF (Mathers/Berg)

[ominous guitar chords on the beat]

[spoken]

look, if you were a moderately talented middle class black guy,
thrust into the limelight by an immense tragedy, would you push the publicity to an absurd level?
Or would you just let it slip?

Yo

[rapping]

He's in the clover, sales are up, but no crossover
There's suits waiting after the gigs, label pigs
He's nervous, but acts impervious he looks calm and ready
To take out, but he needs a breakout
Then comes a hurricane, and his meager fame
cause the powers that be, to put out the call for he
He's walking, on stage with Mike Myers, talking
He needs attention, camera up, on, bloah!
"Bush hate Black People", Oh, all you sheeple
Oh, there goes Kanya, a weeble
He's wobbling, but he won't fall down that easy
No, he'll stand by it , his industry needs a boost
It puts him on the news
He knows that, but the cruise
is so short that he knows
When he goes back to his mansion that's when it's
Back to the lab again yo
This publicity
He better think of another scam and hope it ain't shizzy

[Chorus:]
He better flog himself in the media, the TV
He's got it, he better never let stop, yo
He only gets one shot, can not let the image go
This credulity comes once in a lifetime yo,

He better flog himself in the media, the TV
He's got it, he better never let stop, yo
He only gets one shot, can not let the image go
This credulity comes once in a lifetime yo, you better,

Rolling Stone came calling, he left 'em laughing, bawling
Anti-administraiton sh*t to be scrawling
Make him Christ, up on the cover, a crucified brotha,
A normal star is boring, but the crown of thorns is pure whoring
It only grows harder, the suits want their mammon
News cycle is over, these suits is all on him
Coast to coast news, he's known as the loose cannon
Need a fix, God only knows
sales don't grow on their own, he's no Marshall
He goes home and knows his fame's only partial
And he knows he's a ho, who needs his next splash
He's so 2005, he needs an '06 smash
They moved on to the next rapper who says
He's Chuck Simmins' son, his stash
So the next plot unfolds
He's a book in the Bible, God can't sue for libel,
but the industry goes on
Da da dum da dum da da

[Chorus:]
He better flog himself in the media, the TV
He's got it, he better never let stop, yo
He only gets one shot, can not let the image go
This credulity comes once in a lifetime yo,

He better flog himself in the media, the TV
He's got it, he better never let stop, yo
He only gets one shot, can not let the image go
This credulity comes once in a lifetime yo,

Payola

In a move that might partially explain why music radio is so crappy these days, the FCC is in the midst of its' widest-ranging payola investigation in years, perhaps ever:

Hundreds of radio stations are under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission in the payola scandal rocking the music industry, ABC has learned.

"The FCC staff is working with voluminous evidence right now. It's a complicated and wide-ranging investigation." FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein told ABC News in an exclusive interview.

Traditional payola - supplying cash, drugs and perks to disk jockeys in exchange for more airplay - is basically a dead issue in an era where playlists are set by corporate offices. So that's where the payola allegedly goes:

"This is potentially the most wide spread and flagrant violation of FCC rules in the history of American broadcasting," Adelstein said. "We've never seen evidence of such a systematic betrayal of the responsibility of broadcasters."...In the modern version, the money goes to the bottom line of the radio stations and the conglomerates that own them, according to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

"We have people in suits coming in with documents rather than cash payments under the table to a DJ," Spitzer told ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross.

Question, Mr. Spitzer: Was one of those people in suits Ethan Coen? Did the money to the conglomerate's bottom line come from Gloria Wise?

I digress:

Several of the largest radio conglomerates in America — the corporate owners of FM radio stations across the nation — are within the scope of the FCC probe, which was triggered by the two year long pay-for-play investigation by Spitzer and was first reported on by ABC News.

As noted in previous mentions of this investigation, payola would explain Jennifer Lopez' continued singing career.

Good thing talk radio is beyond that.

Or is it? It'd certainly explain why Glenn Beck has a career in syndicated radio.

Hypothetically, of course.

Abramoff - Not Just For Republicans Anymore

Reid lies down with dogs, wakes up with fleas.

Pricey fleas:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid wrote at least four letters helpful to Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff, and the senator's staff regularly had contact with the disgraced lobbyist's team about legislation affecting other clients.

The activities _ detailed in billing records and correspondence obtained by The Associated Press _ are far more extensive than previously disclosed. They occurred over three years as Reid collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff's firm, lobbying partners and clients.

Any bets on how long it takes the media to declare Abramoff a non-scandal and "move on"?

Amy Klobuchar's Pants On Fire

KvM catches A-Klo in a lie:

In a debate this weekend Amy Klobuchar claimed that Mark Kennedy voted against raising funding for the C.O.P.S. (Community Oriented Policing Services) program. She’s even sending out an email with a video link of the exchange. The problem is that Kenendy did no such thing. Here’s the video link (H/T: Polinaut)

Here are the facts.

They are indeed damning; KvM has several posts on the topic; by the end of today's posting, Gary pimp-slaps A-Klo's campaign.

Read the whole series.

And What's Up With Airline Peanuts?

So I walked into a coffee shop this morning, and saw the little glass jar full of "Biscotti".

I took a year each of Latin and Spanish in high school, and am kind of a language geek anyway, so - after probably fifteen years of seeing that word - I wondered what was the deal.

It's Italian, right? And in Italian, you end many/most plural nouns with "i": Carabinieri, Polizzi, Antipasti and so on. So, presumably, "Biscotti" is "Two or more Bis...er, Biscotto? Biscotta? Biscott?

What is the singular of Biscotti? And why do people ask for "a Biscotti?" That's like asking for "a hot dogs" or "a newspapers"; in Italian, you all sound like The Rookie's impressions of Clem Haskin.

PaulaCorettapalooza

Jay Reding - long one of my favorite regional blogs, and a guy who deserves ten times the traffic he gets - is getting double the traffic he doesn't deserve via a well-deserved Instalanche today...

...re a post about the Coretta Scott King funeral that rates both traffic and discussion.

Shades of Paulapalooza:

The Democrats are learning from the worst of the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration. One would think given that they were on the other side that they would do better. Then again the sad state of American politics makes me think that the idea of being able to put partisanship aside for one gorram moment is just too much to ask of some people these days.

Coretta Scott King was the wife of one of the greatest leaders of the previous century, a man who transformed American society for the better. She herself was a great and dignified woman. She deserved a better send-off than that.

Read the whole thing, if you could, please.

Grats, Jay!

Long Lost

Speaking of the SD63 Chili Dinner...

...it was about twenty years ago that I met the sister and brother in law of a college friend of mine (one of a couple of college friends with whom I'd eventually wind up sharing a house in south Minneapolis - but all of that's a subject for an upcoming "It Was Twenty Years Ago..." installment). They - Brian and Paula - were a young couple with a nifty little pre-war bungalow down in the forties on Oakland Avenue. They had a daughter; she was about a eighteen months when we met. When I met the baby, I did what I usually do when babies look at me; I stuck my finger in my ear, and twisted it, sticking my tongue in and out as I did it - like it was a crank for moving my tongue. I earned Brian and Paula's everlasting ire when the baby started doing it back; every time the baby saw me, she's get a wide grin and start sticking her tongue out, over and over.

Time went on. I moved on to other manic roommate situations. I lost touch with Brian and Paula and their daughter in about 1987.

Fast forward to last night at the chili feed. I noticed a couple; a fortyish guy, his wife, and a woman, apparently their daughter. The mother rang a bell; not a big bell, one of those tiny little bells that you put on one of those little toy reindeer in those tiny Christmas dioramas...

...but I digress. They looked as if they knew me. [Shudder].

After the speech, they came up to the head table. "I'm Brian Bergs" (note the "s" at the end; obviously no relation), he said, and it all came rushing back. Brian, his wife Paula and...

...the baby, who just turned 21. And is a committed Young Republican; Brian and Paula done good.

Oh, and Paula's sister, my old college friend? Her daughter (again, someone I last saw as a terrible two) is a ninth-grade girls hoops phenom, just like mom.

There are times it feels like this blog pays me a million dollars a year.

Chili Reception

I had a great time speaking at annual Senate District 63 Chili Dinner and Fundraiser.

Full disclosure for McCain/Feingold purposes: I was paid a bowl of delicious vegetarian chili for my efforts.

Congressman and Senate candidate Mark Kennedy kicked off the event. He has to be rated "most improved" as a public speaker; it was an excellent talk. I'm looking forward to the campaign.

The district had invited a small panel of bloggers to speak at the event. Jerry "I was MDE for a day!" Plagge and Andy Aplikowski both spoke on their own perspectives on blogging (Gary Miller had to cancel, unfortunately); I followed up with my own take on things. It was a great audience - it's hard not to feel like you're going over well with a crowd like that!

Of course, the event was about fundraising (they had to have done well) and meeting their candidates for the House and Senate candidates; Ed Field (whose award of the "Golden French Fry" award to his DFL opponent, Dan Larson, whose main campaign platform seems to be suing fast food restaurants nearly stole the show), Vern Wilcox, and Dave Alvarado. Jerry Plagge and the other excellent GOPbloggers in Minneapolis will give that race the coverage that will elude the majors.

In fact, that's one of the things that has been fun about this past year; while Minneapolis' GOP is a definite underdog, there've been some excellent grass-roots blogging efforts that should drive some interesting developments in Minneapolis, over time. But that's a subject for another post, which you can expect soon...

...hopefullly sooner than later in 63; the retirement of Jane Ranum will leave a rare lack of DFL incumbent in a Minneapolis district.

Misdirected

Disclosure: I was a reporter for a while. Mostly free-lance. Not very successful. Not a career, more of a "make money now" kind of thing. I'd not call myself a journalist, and I never did, even before "journalism" had a better rep than "used car salesman" or "personal injury lawyer".

And one of the more nagging jobs, as I recall, was trying to get information out of government.

So - duly noted, it's a tough job.

With that out of the way, Kate Parry, the PR Flak "Readers' Representative" for the Strib, fluffs the training staff:

Because few citizens have the time or know-how to exert pressure on government to open up, this is a major responsibility of journalists, and it's getting harder all the time.

That's why on Tuesday dozens of Star Tribune journalists will put down their phones and notebooks for a while to attend training on freedom of information issues. The goal is to be ready to do battle on your behalf to get to information that is supposed to be public anyway.

In a year that's seen the NYTimes (probably) illegally leak details of US intelligence operations, while ignoring details about what's going on in Iraq that can't be easily reported from Green Zone hotels, that's an interesting statement. A paper that has tiptoed very lightly around the Burkett Memo scandal, and ignored the Eason Jordan scandal (indeed, provided a smokescreen against the story) should have its commitment to "informing the public" questioned.

Freedom of information is so important to all of us -- citizen and journalist alike -- that it's the first topic being addressed in a massive training program the Star Tribune is launching this year. Although we've had training here from time to time before, this is the first time journalists will be required to attend several training events during the year, choosing from a sizable menu of course offerings. That's good news -- both for journalists who will have access to top-notch speakers and seminars, and for readers who will enjoy the results in the quality of writing, reporting, photography, design and editing that go into the Star Tribune.

Better news would be the likes of Kate Parry addressing the endless, corrosive influence of ideological hacks like Jim Boyd on the product the paper puts out.

An influence whose very existence Parry poo-poohs.

Like, Totally Bummer

Irritating, relentlessly left-of-center icon "Rock The Vote" is circling the drain:

...as it moves into its 16th year, Rock the Vote itself is being rocked by crisis.

Saddled with about $700,000 in debt, the group has cut its staff from more than 20 people in 2004 to just two today. Its president, who left last summer amid disagreement about the organization's direction, has yet to be replaced. And last month, Rock the Vote was sued for the second time in just eight months.

It's a story that reads a lot like the Air America saga; a bunch of kids with lots of wonk cred and ideological chops, trying to run a business.

Worth a read.

Stuck In The Middle

Today's Strib interviews Minnesota Moslems about The Satanic Cartoons.

I feel for them, in a lot of ways, at least for the Moslems that are genuinely trying to assimilate into American and Minnesotan political, economic and (as far as Islam permits) cultural life. It has to be difficult.

And as to seeing your faith ridiculed - well, welcome to America, folks. Christians take it not only from the g-dless commies in the media and the academy (since when is Pat Robertson the voice of American Christianity?), but we get it from other denominations within our own faith. You Moslems might need a thicker skin.

But this bit caught my attention:

"Even freedom of expression has its limits," [Hassan Mohamud, imam at St. Paul's Al-Taqwa] said. "It is not all right under the Constitution to incite dangerous violence. That happened here."

Well, no, Mr. Mohamud. Imams in Saudi Arabia dug up a bunch of four-month-old cartoons, the natural shelf-life to inflame of which had long since expired, and re-published them, aimed at an audience of...inflamable Moslems!

He said he'd ask the U.S. media two questions: "Why not measure the damage you can cause before you publish?" And: "Why are the insulting or controversial things published always about Muslims?"

Partly because Moslems - some, not all, and not representing all - have done some insulting and controversial things. Like deny the Holocaust, crash planes into our buildings, and laboriously justify suicide bombings and filmed beheadings.

That being said, I wonder whose image, taken overall, is worse in the press; Moslems, or conservative Christians?

Out In The Street

I did a little busking here and there; over in Europe, I'd play guitar on the street (in Basel and Koln) for beer money, and in Minneapolis, back in the eighties, for grocery money.

On night, my drummer, his brother the saxophonist and I were playing Uptown, trying to make a buck or two. A Minneapolis cop drove by - and squealed to a stop in front of us. They jumped out, hauled the sax player out into the street, and after a moment or two's conversation, threw him roughly into the back of the squad. They held him downtown for a couple of hours, letting him go without much comment or any charges. We came out of the evening with about six dollars and a broken sax reed.

So I always admired the buskers who did it for real, like some of the people in this Strib slideshow.

My only quibble? They missed the interesting ones; the old guy who plays congas on Nicollet every noon, and the fella who plays cello (and plays it very well) under the Snelling/Como underpass during the State Fair (and in the skyway much of the rest of the year); they've become, more or less, local institutions. I'd love to see more on buskers like them, before the Minneapolis City Council drives them all out of the city.

Mutually-Assured Insensitivity

Iran launches a contest to find and publish a dozen cartoons lampooning the Holocaust:

IRAN'S largest selling newspaper announced today it was holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
"It will be an international cartoon contest about the Holocaust," said Farid Mortazavi, the graphics editor for Hamshahri newspaper - which is published by Teheran's conservative municipality.

He said the plan was to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression.

"The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons," he said.

One wonders what the Iranian regime expects. Mobs of Danish Jews roaming the streets of Cobenhaven, looting stores and burning the Iranian embassy?

Panels of solemn Hassidim demanding the execution of the cartoonists?

Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prompted international anger when he dismissed the systematic slaughter by the Nazis of mainland Europe's Jews as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel.

Sort of like the myth of the Shah?

Mr Blair also said Mr Ahmadinejad "should come and see the evidence of the Holocaust himself in the countries of Europe", to which Iran responded by saying it was willing to send a team of "independent investigators".

Stupid as that sounds, part of me would like to see that; a bunch of bearded, turbaned Clousouabads meandering about Yad Vashem or Auschwitz or Majdanek or the Holocaust Museum; "Er, nothing here, Mahmood. Next?"

It'd be the Baghdad Bob moment of the century.

(Via Lileks)

Let Me Get This Straight

In light of the growing carnage in relation to the Danish cartoons, I was interested in seeing New Mexico's "moderate" Democrat governor, Bill Richardson, on Today this morning.

He said (among other things) that the whole thing is related to Iraq. No invasion of Iraq? No pillaging of western embassies.

Simple.

So let's see if I have this straight:

1. The Danes published the offending cartoons last October. There was some anger expressed at the time - and then the storm blew over.
2. The Hadj season came to the Moslem world.
3. The Saudi government - corrupt, incompetent, and unable to control the theft, rapine and carnage among the mobs of hadji, suddenly (through their state-run media) start running story upon story upon story about the desecration of Islam four months ago
4. Mobs - conveniently well-stocked with Danish flags - take to the streets. "Saudi Arabia has always been at war with Denmark, Achmed".

So let's get this straight, Governor Richardson; if we'd not liberated Iraq, Saudi Arabia would be a competent country, and the Hadj wouldn't be an annual bloodbath and graft orgy?

Reagan's Birthday

Ronald Reagan was born 95 years ago today.

I try to explain to people - especially my kids - what Reagan meant. When I was my daughter's age, Jimmy Carter gave the "malaise" speech. When I was their age, I was looking ahead to a lifetime of accepting that the world could be blown to smithereens on thirty minutes' notice, in a nation that was, as Merle Haggard put it, "rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell". Hostages in Iran; the Middle East controlled by despots (to whom we sent a shocking amount of money); a dismal time and place.

Of course, the left's orthodoxy was still firmly imprinted in my brain in 1980; I believed that Reagan was at best an uncaring patrician curmudgeon; at worst, his attitude toward the Russians was going to get us all killed. I was three weeks too young to vote in 1980 - but if I had, I wouldn't have voted for Reagan. (I also would have ditched Carter, and voted John Anderson, a "moderate" Republican that would have made Arne Carlson blanche).

Well, the propaganda hasn't changed. But the world sure has.

Reagan didn't bring down the USSR - but he catalyzed the events and inspired the people that did. He didn't bring back the economy singlehandedly - but he extinguished the malaise of the mind and the crushing impediments of the tax code that had held it at bay. He didn't relaunch democracy around the world - but he left a nation in his wake that believed it could be done.

He was a "dumb guy" - said his critics - who was smarter than his critics.

I'm a speech geek, of course. And Reagan was the last great American political orator. His "A Time For Choosing, the Challenger disaster speech, his speech at Pointe Du Hoc, and of course the Brandenberg Gate speech are just the highest points of a career full of the greatest speeches in American history.

Reagan changed the world. "But into what?", some lefties will snark.

A much better place than I grew up in.

The wall is gone.

The missile silos that dotted the northern plains are largely gone - unneeded in a world with only one superpower:

Oh, the descendants of the same midgets that cast their stones at Reagan twenty years ago will be carrying on the work of their parents.

Y'know - the parents that voted for Jimmy Carter, and are trying to do it again.

Happy Birthday, Ronald Reagan.

Bluster

Jay Reding also takes a baseball bat to Duncan "Atrios" Black's curious, misplaced bellicosity.

Black:

s a nuclear Iran really a threat to us? Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn’t mutually assured destruction, it’s you f*ck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!

Cicero weeps.

Reding:

That’s all fine and well, unless you happen to be in the city that gets nuked. Or have relatives in the city that gets nuked. Or work in travel, for an airline, or any of the other hundreds of industries that would be effected by such a devastating event.

Black is exhibiting something I’ve noticed somewhat frequently with the far left. The left gets criticized for being weak on issues of defense and national security, and quite rightly so on the merits. Their response is usually with a statement of Rambo-esque bluster like the one above - what a Freudian might call “overcompensation”.

Read Jay's whole post.

Black's comment highlights a problem with the left's approach to foreign policy in general, above and beyond the war on terror. Metaphorically, they "Support the Troops" (most of them do, anyway), just as the bumper sticker says; they just oppose the mission. Expanded to the whole war, the left is all in favor of a safe United States; they just oppose doing anything useful about ensuring we achieve it until nuclear war is the only option.

Friedan

Betty Friedan passed away Saturday at age 85.

Jay Reding writes:

:

Friedan was never hostile to traditional values, but believed that those values needed to treat women as equal players in society - an egalitarian notion that led her to focus on specific and measurable goals in combating inequality and injustice. Many of the advances that women have made have been because of her work.

Obviously, I don’t see eye-to-eye with everything in her philosophy, but there is no doubt that Friedan’s work legitimately made things better for women in this country, and she helped define mainstream feminism without succumbing to radicalism.

Friedan's legacy, "equity feminism", the struggle for equality for women, was a vital one - and one that today's mainstream feminists, obsessed with building up women as a separate, victimized power bloc - should re-learn something about.

Posted by Mitch at 06:18 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXIV

I'd been in the Twin Cities for a little over three months, going on four, on Thursday, February 6, 1986.

When I'd moved to the Cities, I'd had a short checklist of to-dos:

1. Get a job I liked. Check. While I was making exceedingly lousy money at KSTP-AM, producing the afternoon show with Don Vogel was better than a dream come true; it was a dream I didn't even know I'd had. I got paid (not well, but paid) to be juvenline five hours a day.
2. Find a cool girlfriend. No luck there - but it didn't matter, I was far too much a workaholic to care about such things. Much.
3. Start a band, become a rock star. No, not really a "rock star", just a local/regional personality in the music biz, someone who could write and record stuff, play out locally, just do music.

I was going to work on that tonight.

Since the day I'd moved to the Cities, I'd been scanning the "Musicians Wanted" column in the City Pages' weekly want ads. I'd been to a few "auditions":

• One ad sought a guitar player for an original/cover band. They talked a good game on the phone, but something seemed "off". I trekked out to northeast-suburban White Bear Lake, where I met...a couple of high school kids. We played "Immigrant Song" and the inevitable "Sweet Emotion". And that was it . Nobody knew any of the same songs; they didn't know any Clash or Springsteen or Sex Pistols or Ramones; I knew no Metallica or Iron Maiden or Anthrax; I knew one Judas Priest song ("Living After Midnight", from 1980's "British Steel"; their knowledge of the Halford/Tipton oeuvre started with "You Got Another Thing Coming", about the point where I, the purist, cried "Sell-out"). I tried playing them a few of my originals; my Joe Grushecky-like bar-rock didn't much mesh with their desire to be "Spinal Tap" but less funny.
• A very gay guy who wanted to be Bono. I went to his place to talk music one Sunday afternoon. Now, I don't want to say I'd just fallen off the turnip truck - but I pretty much had. I was, at age 23, just starting to figure out what was up with the guys in my high school plays who sat around the piano after practice singing show tunes, and who were all the girls' best friends. In four years of college in North Dakota, I'd known exactly one person who called himself "gay" - more about that when this series continues into the fall of '86. The Bono wannabe - and when I say "Bono wannabe", I don't mean he looked like Bono (more like Bruno Kirby with excessive skin oil) or sang like him (not even karaoke-quality), just desperately loved Bono and his music - had an apartment off Loring Park that was stuffed with framed posters of David Bowie and Marlon Brando and Morrissey (not that one, this one). I didn't know much about gay people, but I recognized stereotypes when I saw them. Speaking of which, he played no instruments. As mentioned already, he was an atrocioius singer. What he did was write. Constantly. He was a regular at the First Avenue, the club from the movie Purple Rain; he sat at a table in the balcony, drank house wine, and filled notebooks full of lyrics. I looked at them; they were the sort of self-absorbed (I'd hate to say "whiny") free verse that'd make Sylvia Plath tell him to pull himself together and grow a pair. I passed.
• A keyboardist, drummer and bass player who lived in a warehouse downtown. I went to the audition, hauling my guitar, amp and harmonica, wearing my army-surplus jacket, through the battered bare-drywall hallways that reeked of cigarettes, cheap wine and urine, up the open-sided freight elevator, and to the fourth floor unit where the guys lived. Three guys that looked like Duran Duran opened the door. An hour of dismal synth-pop later, I grabbed my gear and left.

And so on. I probably did a dozen "auditions" in the first three months.

This night? Back to the dingy, badly-lit, dilapidated blocks of decrepit warehouses that were still about five years away from being called "The Warehouse District".

I wheeled my old Chevy up Washington Avenue, past strib clubs and empty, seedy storefronts, to Third Avenue. I parked on a dingy street in front of a boarded-up, grafitti-covered building, and walked into the warehouse (leaving my guitar and amp locked in the trunk; I'd been warned about guys getting jumped and losing their gear in these places, and I wanted to check out the digs before I hauled my precious gear into the building), as newspapers blew past me and a drunk staggered down the cross street, kicking a can past vacant doorways.

I went up a rattling freight elevator to the fourth floor, then across creaking, timber floors to a door. The band inside were...a bunch of guys. They'd been playing out for years; they'd even played the First Avenue main stage. They had a few thousand dollars worth of gear, a rehearsal space with a small tab and a view of downtown (even though it smelled of spilled Mad Dog and rodent droppings) and an untold toll on their livers...and not a whole lot else.

I forget the details of the "audition"; it went well, but I suspect the band wanted what most bands that audition for new members wanted; someone who could play really well, and wanted to play someone else's music, and not agitate to play any of their own music, and do it for next to no money for the foreseeable future. We all looked onward. I don't think I saw any of them again.

But I saw the room again. In the summer of '04, I worked for a company in the same, precise space, on the fourth floor of a renovated warehouse near the Monte Carlo bar and restaurant. The Warehouse District is a destination today; the ratty, deserted warehouses are full of trendy restaurants and chi-chi bars and lofts that go for six figures, and office space like the one that occupied what had been the ratty, putrid rehearsal space; the dirty windows were now sunny expanses of thermal glass with a view of downtown that cried "Jing! Jing!"; the dingy flooring, stained dark by decades of machinery oil and hobo vomit, was now blond and clean and had that fussy trendy air about it. The decrepitude on the street outside was carefully controlled - more for atmosphere than anything.

The old rehearsal space, like at least one of the guys who'd rehearsed there, shucked its air of studied rattiness and learned how to earn a living, somewhere along the way.

Things I Hate From The Depths Of My Soul

There aren't many...:

1. Viva La Bam - I can't even define exactly why I hate this show. How to choose: the casual nihilism? The glorification of loud, obnoxious moronism - not the joshing, exuberant, almost endearing cretinism of Jackass, but the mind-dulling vacuity of the aggressively, crassly stupid? Something else? I don't know. All I do know is that the next time I see one of those "Skateboarding Isn't A Crime" bumper stickers, I'm drawing "Yet" on it with a permanent marker.
2. Beverages that add kiwi and/or mango to other perfectly edible fruit flavors.
3. The Ring.
4. Tattoos visible above the neckline.
5. The vast majority of tattoos not visible above the neckline. There are exceptions. They are rare.
6. Trucker caps on non-truckers.
7. Seed caps on non-seeds.
8. People calling themselves "Move On" who can't.

That is all.

For What It' Worth

Today is the fourth anniversary of this blog.

I'm always envious of bloggers like the Powerguys and Ed, who started off on a mission from posting number one; they can tell you exactly the day and time they had their millionth visitor, or in the Powerguys' case their ten millionth. I do the math in my head; I've been getting 50-60 thousand visitors a month for almost two years now - I must be somewhere over a million, right?

Who knows. Fun as it would be to know that, that's not why this blog started.

"Shot In The Dark" started as one of those sudden impulses that are often years in the making. I got my first taste of being an (underpaid) pundit at KSTP-AM, on my old overnight talk show in the late eighties. After that, I didn't get to do a lot of punditry - marriage and babies sort of took care of that for me for a couple of years - but in the mid-nineties, as I found the Internet, I got involved in a couple of political email discussion groups. For a while there, I contributed a lot. There were always rules, of course - and moderators who were driven more by their agenda than by desire for a conversation - so I quit. And yet that inner screedmongering unbidden pundit still needed an outlet of some kind...

About that time, I read a piece in Time Magazine referring to "Blogs"; it referred to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, and gave the address for Blogger.com. That night, after the kids were asleep, I opened the blog for business. I was fully ready to write to an audience of one for as long as it lasted.

I remember watching my traffic meter in those first several months - thrilling when someone else would read it, maybe 2-3 times a day! As we rolled up to the '02 elections, I was up to maybe 10-20 visitors a day - until, inexplicably, Instapundit linked to these two "lutefisks" of Garrison Keillor, and this bit of lefty hatemongering over the course of a couple of weeks. Three straight 10,000 hit days...

...that raised my traffic from 20 a day into the 2-300 range.

My audience - like the blogosphere itself - has grown another order of magnitude since then. I put a lot of time into this blog - I get up most mornings at 5AM and write until 6-ish, most days. But I get a lot more back; it's given me, through a thoroughly improbably chain of events, a re-entree into my life's first love, talk radio; it's brought me the first social life I've had since the late eighties; it's gotten me in touch with long-lost friends; it's much more than an outlet for my internal screedmonger.

So while acknowledging that I'd still be writing this blog if my audience were still just me and the odd random passerby, I'd like to thank you all for joining me here; the 20 of you that go waaaaay back to the beginning, the 200 of you who stopped by every day this time three years ago, and the 3,000 of you who read this site every day today - all of you. Thanks.

How's That Again?

Don't get me wrong. Ed is one of my favorite bloggers, as well as my NARN colleague.

And I'll freely admit he knows more about football than I. That's not saying much; I don't think I've watched an entire football game, kickoff to checkered flag or whatever they use to end a game, since the 1986 Super Bowl (Go Bears!).

But I do know some things. So when Ed says things like:

Everyone knows that Pittsburgh lives and dies each week with their beloved Steelers, more so than with any of their other professional teams

...I figure it's from the stress of putting out a top-flight blog.

Pittsburgh loves its football, true. More than Chicago, where Da Bears have been part of the city's fabric for almost 80 years?

More, especially, than Green Bay, where The Pack - a sole vestige of an era when baseball ruled, when college football was the football everyone actually watched, and the NFL was a struggling newcomer with teams in many small and mid-sized cities, more akin to the CBA than the financial and marketing juggernaut it is today - are the only thing going in a city whose only other exports are (if memory serves) bulk filth and ground fish meal?

Think about it, Ed...

I will handicap tomorrow's Super Bowl the way I always do; by rating the bands from the respective cities.

Seattle: Jimi Hendrix, Heart, Nirvana, Pearl Jam.

Pittsburgh: The Iron City Houserockers.

Since the rating is by sales and not by who are my favorites, Seattle probably wins.

Sorry, Ed. The record sales tell the tale.

(Unless, as frequently happens, they don't. Remember, to me the Super Bowl means one thing; four weeks 'til pitchers report for spring training).

This Could Be Good

Via KvM, some potentially amazing news: Justice Stevens may intend to retire during a GOP administration:

Stevens has not made any formal announcement regarding his retirement, nor is he known to be in poor health. But he is 85 years old, and rumor has it that he hopes to have his replacement named by a Republican president.

“The buzz in Washington is that Stevens was appointed by a Republican president and he considers himself one that plans to retire under a Republican president,” Gary Marx, executive director of the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, told NewsMax.

On the one hand, it's Newsmax.

On the other, it's plausible; Steven is, between age and health, the most likely judge to leave next.

After the political quagmire the left got itself into over Alito, a conservative replacement for the overtly liberal Stevens would be the Battle of Berlin, politically speaking.

Happy Birthday!

It was a rainy, foggy night 13 years ago. I'd just gotten home from one of my worst-ever 'tween-career jobs (skip tracer for a student loan servicer; $7 per hour). Things were rough; a company had just stiffed me for nearly $2,000 in contracting fees (my first attempt at being a contract technical writer) - money that was supposed to catch up our rent and NSP bills. Stress? We were soaking in it.

My in-laws at the time had taken my wife at the time to a checkup and to watch Bun, who was about 18 months old at the time.

As they brought her up the sidewalk, the contractions started; we drove through the fog to United Hospital, and just after midnight on the fourth - after what, with a Nubain (R) epidural even my ex conceded was a very easy delivery - Zam came into the world. The delivery was the first relatively easy thing with him (he was two weeks late), and it would be one of the last.

I went home later that day to find eviction and power shutoff notices. I also heard that the company that had stiffed me had closed its doors.

But Zam's arrival was a harbinger of better things. Two weeks after he was born, I got a better temp job. Two weeks after that, my first *real* good job - a technical writing contract gig in Eden Prairie that gave me my first year of income over $20,000. We saved the house, kept the power on, and lived happily...

...well, we did OK.

Though he is the classic Scandinavian boy, Zam has never subscribed to Scandinavian passive-aggressiveness. Straight to the heart of things for Zam. Favorite story: when he was two or three, and we were teaching him about God and prayer, we came home one night. It was late, on a clear winter night full of stars even in the middle of the city. As he toddled up the sidewalk, he looked up at the sky, and must have figured he needed something settled.

"God! Hey, God!", he yelled. He's always been the one to cut to the chase.

Happy 13th Birthday, Zam.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah - if memory serves, it's also the First Mate's birthday. Stop by Ed's place and send your best wishes!

When Making Plans Next Week...

(Bumped up from 2/3)

Make sure you attend the 14th Annual Senate District 63 Chili Dinner fundraiser. The theme: "Blogosphere: Exposing Liberal Media Bias".

And - here's the fun part - the featured speakers are Jerry "Shawn Towle Thinks I'm MDE" Plagge of the SD63 Blog, Andy "Triple A" Aplikowski of Residual Forces, Gary Miller of Kennedy Vs. The Machine, and yours truly.

It's at the Southwest Community Church, at 54th and Humboldt in south Minneapolis, Tuesday night at 6:30.

See you there!

Ledeen On NARN

Join the NARN this Saturday, 11AM to 3PM on AM1280 The Patriot.

The Fraters and Rocket will of course be doing something or other pretty cool during the 11-1 slot - tune in to Fraters for the details.

Then, at 2PM, Captain, King and I will be interviewing Michael Ledeen on the situation in Iran.

Tune in tomorrow on the Northern Alliance!

Beneath Contempt

The Army chief of staff and a group of his generals are lining up against...

...well, we'll get to that.

The flap relates to a cartoon in the WaPo:

The cartoon, which was published January 29, showed a heavily bandaged soldier with no arms or legs.

At his side, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dressed as a doctor, says: "I'm listing your condition as battle hardened."

The flap:

US military chiefs expressed outrage over a "reprehensible" Washington Post cartoon which used a soldier who has lost his arms and legs in battle to portray the state of US military readiness.

"We're all very upset about that," General Peter Schoomaker, the army chief of staff told reporters.

Schoomaker and the other military chiefs took the unusual step of signing a a joint letter to the Washington Post blasting the cartoon by...

Wait. Any guesses?

OK - here goes:

...Tom Toles, the newspaper's editorial cartoonist.

Toles described himself as a "liberal tempered by time" . I'd hate to see the raw version.

Crying Wolf

It was about ten years ago that I went through "sexual harassment training" for the first time.

The basic rule: If someone thought they were being harassed, they were being harassed.

Which is one thing. The corollary, of course, was that if someone thought that you were harassing them, you were basically guilty until proven innocent.

Sexual harassment - the real kind, where peoples' careers and safety are jeopardized - is a problem, and very, very wrong to boot. Nobody's excusing that (and I resent the fact that I have to disclaim that, against the inevitable "Berg supports harassment!" comment).

Debra J. Saunders' piece in today's Strib notes the non-shocking observation that it's worse on campus:

a new study by the American Association of University Women found that "nearly two-thirds of college students experience sexual harassment at some point during college." When you consider what the AAUW's definition of sexual harassment is -- "unwanted or unwelcome sexual behavior that interferes with your life" -- it is surprising that the percentage is so low. The study even lists "sexual comments, jokes, gestures or looks" as "examples of different types of sexual harassment."

As the Philadelphia-based group FIRE -- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education -- noted in a press release, the AAUW's definition risks "trivializing actual harassment." Samantha Harris of FIRE noted, "If I were someone who experienced real harassment, I wouldn't want to be lumped in with people who heard a bad joke."

I worried ten years ago that trivialization was the least of the problems; abuse was a bigger worry:

FIRE is afraid that universities will use ratcheted-up sexual harassment rules to stifle free speech. Ditto O'Connor, who noted, "It would take all the fun out of life, if you couldn't have conversations."

Harris noted, "Harassment policies are frequently used to suppress any speech that someone might find offensive." William Paterson University of New Jersey reprimanded a graduate student and employee who sent an e-mail to a professor in which he objected to a movie about two aging lesbians -- he called them "perversions" -- after the professor complained that she felt threatened by the e-mail. In December, after FIRE got involved, the school revoked the reprimand -- but the reprimand never should have happened.

Laws and rules like these follow free-market rules in that when you make an opening, people will flock to fill it:

The AAUW study even listed someone calling you "gay or lesbian" to be sexual harassment, if the words are unwanted. This should scare you: 57 percent of students polled want their college to set up an Internet site where they can make anonymous accusations of sexual harassment. This reinforces the strong sense I get that the AAUW doesn't think students have an obligation to fend for themselves.

But perhaps the scariest part of the piece?

Years ago, Saturday Night did a sketch about a politically correct game show. The show starred one of the nameless comedic red-shirts that were on the show at the time (this was the season before the Will Farrell/Cheri Oteri/Molly Shannon era started) and guest-host Shannon Doherty (remember her?).

Doherty's character, dressed in lefty-school poverty chic, was introduced as a "Victimology studies" major.

"Ha ha ha", I thought. "Victimology studies. What a capable satire of the overweening institutionalized panic of the chattering classes in academia! Wotta bunch of jokers!"

Saunders:

One sophomore noted, "There's a guy in all my classes who consistently touches me in a sexual way that I really don't appreciate." What is her major? Victimhood.

Campus political correctness; where satire is reality.

UPDATE: While I can't make it up fast enough, I apparently also have altered perceptions at 6AM. Saunders' "Victimhood" crack was apparently satiric.

Well, for now.

Handed Down

Fun bit of family trivia; I had the same fourth-grade teacher as my Dad. I think it was her last (long-overdue) year of teaching - but by golly, we shared a teacher.

Of course, that was nothing new for Dad; he taught for the better part of 40 years; nearly everyone in my hometown had him in class, or their parents, or their children. Dad even reported a couple of parent-child combinations over the years.

Although he theoretically taught long enough to see a grandparent/parent/child combination, it never happened.

But St. Johns football coach John Gagliardi is.

Now, at 79, the legendary St. John's University coach is about to reach what could be a singular milestone.

This fall, for the first time in his career and maybe the first time in the career of any college football coach, Gagliardi will get the chance to coach the grandson of one of his former players.

Bobby Klint, an all-state defensive back from Totino Grace High School in Fridley, committed to play for St. John's nearly 50 years after his grandfather, Felix Mannella, starred for the Johnnies in Collegeville, Minn.

Very cool.

102

Today would have been my grandmother's 102nd birthday.

I was blessed with growing up four blocks from my grandmother, Bea Berg, 'til age 17. She was the classic Scandinavian grandma - the best cook ever (sorry, Mom, you're a close second), and struck a perfect balance between spoiling and teaching all of her son's kids.

There was a lot more to her, though; she ran a photography studio for the better part of 30 years, much of it by herself after her husband and my grandfather, Oscar, died in the early forties, leaving just her and Dad. Photography was her trade - as I've noted elsewhere, Grandma was involved in producing this upper-midwestern institution in her youth.

I was in my mid-teens before I knew that Grandma had had something to do with the photograph which hung in nearly every household I grew up around, and is indeed Minnesota's State Painting (a misnomer; it's a hand-colored photo).

Getting Colder...

Saint Paul's new mayor, Jay Benanav Chris Coleman, dons chicken suit and races about City Hall claiming the sky is falling - and signing a law demanding the sky stay up:

Minnesota's warmest winter since 1895 has melted ice sculptures, canceled ice-fishing tournaments and prompted plenty of griping from outdoor enthusiasts unable to skate or ski cross-country.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman sees it as global warming hitting home, and he's using his political clout to do something. In his first major policy initiative since taking office a month ago, he made good on a campaign pledge by signing a climate-protection agreement Wednesday.

It gets worse:

The agreement will require the city, by 2012, to reduce pollution from cars and power plants to 1990 levels. What the city must do to get there will be hammered out in the next six months.

In 1990, Saint Paul was in the midst of an extended doldrum, after decades of neosoc administrations (Jim Scheibel and George Latimer). If pollution was lower in 1990, it was because the city was a lot more run-down and depressed then than after 12 years of rule by actual adults.

Note to Chris Coleman: I love Saint Paul. But you're doing your darnedest to create a city I don't want to live in. Keep up the good work, bigfella.

Just Remember...

...that Monday is the annual Reagan's Birthday celebration.

Living in Minnesota as many of my readers do, surrounded by the nattering descendants of history's great midgets (Carter, Mondale, yadda yadda), who are in a temporary ascendant, it's important to focus on what could be. Reagan's Birthday should help with that.

Special celebration plans coming later this week.

When The Bottom Falls Out

It was just a shade over three years ago that the contract I was working on got un-funded in mid-recession. I spent five months with no work at all, and five more with just subsistence work - 40-60 hours a month. I had two kids, and my bills never stopped. A few people dropped a few bucks in my Honor System drop box; it meant the world to me (and a couple weeks' groceries, too). Little things mean a lot when you're up against it.

"Stop The ACLU" notes that Brian from Iowa Voice is in some dire straits:

Back in December, just before Christmas, I was fired from my job due to a change in management. I managed to land a new job that was to start right after Christmas, but it was with a guy who was going to open a restaurant and he needed to remodel it. It’s now a full month later, and he’s not ready. I am still out of a job.

I’m seriously overdue with my bills. My home phone and cell phone were shut off today. My electric bill is due today, and will probably be shut off tomorrow or soon after.

My internet is overdue, too, and will probably be shut down this week. That means I won’t be able to blog and, worse yet, I won’t be able to finish my college studies (I’m taking a course on Computer Network Management, so I can change careers).

My gas bill is overdue (in Iowa, though, I think there’s a law that says they can’t shut that off during the winter.).

My house payment is due tomorrow.

I have a wife and two kids. My wife is a substitute teacher, but they rarely call. Now they won’t be able to at all.

Please help if you can.

It's All Simple, Really

Perhaps you've heard; Moslems are upset at a group of Danish cartoonists who violated Islamic law by drawing pictures of Mohammed:

The Islamic World has shown no signs of giving up hope that “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” calling for a boycott of all Danish and Norwegian products following the publication of 12 insulting cartoons of Prophet Mohammed.

Misha at the Rottweiler thinks he knows why:

he reason that it’s forbidden in Islam to create a likeness of Muhammed is that Muhammed is afraid that Jack Bauer will recognize him.

The Story Of The Century

On Monday, as news of news anchor Bob Woodward and cameraman Doug Vogt's injury in an IED explosion swept the media, I watched as Katie Couric became - I'm not exaggerating - all choked up at the story.

Two guys. And they lived.

I sat, dumbfounded. Here were a couple of guys who volunteered to go to Iraq - not even on orders, but to advance their careers - and were paid very well to do so (many times the salary of the soldiers and Marines around them). They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they lived to tell the tale.

And yet there Couric was, seeming to barely choke back tears. Today led each of their two hours with the Woodward/Vogt story.

I thought "how is this going to play among the troops?"

The answer: not especially well.

In Iraq, and throughout the military, there is sympathy and concern for anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, but there is also this question:

"Why do you think this is such a huge story?" wrote an officer stationed in Baqubah, Iraq, Monday via e-mail. "It's a bit stunning to us over here how absolutely dominant the story is on every network and front page. I mean, you'd think we lost the entire 1st Marine Division or something.

"There's a lot of grumbling from guys at all ranks about it. That's a really impolite and impolitic thing to say ... but it's what you would hear over here."..."The point that is currently being made (is that) that press folks are more important than mere military folks," a senior military officer told UPI Tuesday...It's not quite as simple as that, of course. Military personnel often express frustration that the media harps on military casualty reports at the expense of what they consider their successes in Iraq.

However, as it promoted its story on Woodruff and Vogt Monday evening, the local ABC News affiliate in Washington showed a montage of exploding vehicles in Iraq -- footage culled largely from insurgents, who videotape the attacks and post them on Web sites to advertise or magnify their successes.

It doesn't get serious until one of their own gets hurt?

I've wondered that for a long time; in 1979, the media didn't get serious about covering the Sandinista Revolution until a journalist was killed by a Guardia Nacional soldier. Suddenly, it seemed, the media lost whatever perceived neutrality they'd had on the subject; Somoza was a baaad man, all of a sudden (which was true, although Somoza was small potatoes in the tyrant department).

Not that the media has much perspective as it is - but the Woodward incident can't help.

Condolences

Scott "Scrappleface" Ott pays homage to his grandmother, who passed away in the last day:

Jessica McMaster gave up her career, surrendered much of her pension, and walked away from a comfortable lifestyle in a handsome apartment to move to an old house in the country and take care of four boys. Without her sacrifice, and that of her husband James McMaster, 84, these boys were candidates for foster care or an orphanage. Thanks to their love, these boys are now… an airline pilot, a university professor, a construction worker and a Christian children’s camp director (who happens to write satire).

All the best to Scott and his family.

SOTU: Moments of the Night

I caught the State of the Union address last night at the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts, along with Michael Medved and a couple hundred of my closest friends.

Best on-screen moment: George Bush referenced the failure of his social security initiative. The Democrats start baying at the moon like a bunch
of Italian soccer hooligans. Then the President dropped the other shoe; "The job still isn't done". It deflated the Democrat wing of the house, and drew a huge cheer in the audience.

Offscreen moment: But not as big as the cheer that erupted when Shep Smith announced that Cindy Sheehan had been arrested (later we learned she'd merely been "detained") for trying to unfurl a banner in the House gallery. I'd heard her on the radio as I was driving to Hopkins; every time I hear her, I get the inescapable impression that she sounds like a valley girl.

Honorable mention: the camera caught Hillary! looking like she was in the midst of demanding her servants re-wax her studded corset.

It was a solid, and much-needed, performance by the President.