Shot In The Dark

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I suppose it had to happen.

When the "Greatest Generation" were in their early forties, twenty years past their big event, the kids and the media gave them holy hell; they were squares, the "establishment" against which their hippie, babyboomer children rebelled.

And when the big bulge of the "Baby Boom" was in that same age bracket, the greed, statusmongering and avarice of the former hippies became a national cliche.

So I suppose it's inevitable that all of us seventies and eighties kids get our turn. But honestly - are "the fashions of the eighties" really the best ding they can take?

Just when you thought it was safe to give those leg warmers to a museum, they're back in style -- along with a host of other iconic pieces of 1980s fashion.
Designers such as Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Marc Jacobs seem to be saying "I love the '80s" with their updated versions of a decade many associate with ugly fashions.

Grooooan.

First of all, given that the article was written by Allie Shah - a name that can not belong to anyone over the age of 34 - it behooves me to make it clear that the fashions of the eighties were no uglier than those of any other decade.

Just more flamboyantly awful:

Anthropologie is selling cropped parachute pants, and Ragstock is advertising skinny black jeans [Note: Coooool - Ed.] for men and leg warmers for women. But perhaps the dominant '80s-inspired fashion of the moment is a pair of leggings worn under dresses and short skirts.

Of course, writers will focus on the decade's sartorial equivalents of Flock of Seagulls:

The decade that brought us oversized knit tops and jackets with shoulder pads was all about volume. From cowl necklines to dolman sleeves to blouson shirts and bubble skirts, the look was mostly full on the top and narrow at the bottom.

With the birth of MTV in 1981, music stars such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson played a huge role in setting fashion trends. Earlier in the decade, the new-wave music trend also influenced styles that are in reruns today -- skinny jeans and black-and-white striped shirts, for example.

Be advised the only item of 'eighties fashion I ever cared about were:

• Thin jeans
• Flannel shirts with the sleeves ripped off
• Army-surplus BDU jackets
• Jim McMahon's headbands. Mine said "Hubbard"

I'm going to go and crank The Kings now.

Smoke 'Em While You Got 'Em

St. Paul, 1927: The streets are thronged with partygoers of all ages and incomes. Chicago Mob money floats an endless party at the Saint Paul Hotel and the Wabasha Caves, among others. The city rarely sleeps.

St. Paul, 1947: Hard-working Saint Paul turns in early most nights - but heads out on Friday and Saturday night for a couple tots and a night out with friends.

St. Paul, 1967: Hard-working Saint Paul turns in early most nights - but heads over to Minneapolis on Friday for a couple tots and a night out with friends.

St. Paul, 1987: Saint Paul rolls up its sidewalks at 8PM, seven nights a week.

Saint Paul, 2007: Saint Paul's sidewalks, completely unused, sold to a junk dealer in Newport:

St. Paul's smoking ban will take effect Friday as scheduled after a Ramsey County judge turned back an effort by 16 St. Paul bar owners to stop its enforcement.

Judge David Higgs ruled Wednesday that St. Paul can regulate smoking in bars and restaurants, even though bar owners could suffer economically from a ban.

"We're obviously disappointed with the court's ruling," said Patrick O'Neill, a lawyer for the challengers. "It's a death sentence for some of the small, neighborhood border bars."

St. Paul, 2017: Saint Paul changes its city motto to "Minneapolis' bedroom!"

Changing Times?

Racial tension coincided with the Immigration debate to lead up to a scuffle at Phoenix-area school. Some anglo students burned a Mexican flag which some Mexican students had raised (above the US flag).

I won't say it's "nice" that someone else's flag is being burned for a change. But it's understandable.

But that wasn't the interesting thing about the story:

Organizers of last Friday’s protest that drew 20,000 people of all ages and shut down miles of 24th Street in Phoenix are gearing up for another one on April 10.

During a news conference Wednesday, they begged high school students not to join in until after school lets out.

They begged students...anything?

Beg?

Now, I'm not saying that I think the authoritarian, factory school model is any good, or makes sense. I think much of the way traditional schools operate has more to do with intergenerational ritualized hazing than anything.

But - begging students to stay in class?

When I was in school, there was no "begging"; if you tried to walk out, the principal was there to shove you right back in, or wrote you up for truancy. The assistant principal had no problem driving out to find you, tossing you in his truck, and hauling you back to school.

Begging?

It's no wonder we can't secure our borders.

Things That Make Me Laugh So Hard I Can't Stand Up

Via my daughter.

Find The Liar

Katherine Kersten hasn't had enough of the Dean Johnson flap - and neither should any of us.

Kersten:

Either the leader of the Minnesota Senate or the chief justice of the state Supreme Court is lying. That's shocking.

Here's something even more shocking: No one seems to care.

On Monday, Johnson apologized to the Senate for making an "inaccurate statement." But he did not retract his claim that a conversation about the marriage law took place. Yet everyone seems satisfied. No big deal. Case closed.

Republican Sen. Dick Day, the Senate minority leader, has said he has no desire for the Legislature to determine who is telling the truth. Gov. Tim Pawlenty calls for forgiveness.

Sorry, Governor. "Forgiveness" without knowing what one is forgiving is meaningless.

Let's get a couple of things straight. First, what's at issue here is not "spin," or "sanding off the truth," as Johnson put it. It's a simple question of fact: Did the Senate's top official discuss the marriage issue with a Supreme Court justice or not? If the answer is yes, a serious breach of ethics has occurred, undermining the integrity of both the legislative and judicial process in this state.

Second, forgiveness -- if it is warranted here -- should not take the form of a plea bargain. Forgiveness comes after the facts come out, and after the guilty party admits his misconduct and promises to amend his ways. Forgiveness is inconsistent with a claim by the accused that he has witnesses who will testify that the Supreme Court is lying.

Exactly. "Forgiveness", in this case, is premature and meaningless.

Johnson first claimed to have a commitment from our highest court about a potential future ruling. Then he denied it. He named specific justices, potentially blackening their reputations. At best, he misrepresented their remarks and repeatedly changed his story. At worst, he fabricated everything he said.

If that doesn't warrant censure, I don't know what does.

But if we want to go the forgiveness route, we must start by determining who is telling the truth. Apparently, we have witnesses who can shed light on this. Yet no one wants to hear them.

Is something else going on here that powerful people don't want us to know?

A high public official -- and maybe more than one -- has violated public trust. Yet all three branches of government, and much of the press, seem to have agreed to sweep it under the rug.

It'd be a fine opportunity for everyone at the Capitol - executive, judicial and legislative - to show the people who pay their salaries that they're an ethical body that represents the people, rather than a big club with its own set of rules that closes ranks against the rabble.

Who's lying?

Oversold?

Gay marriage is one of those issues that I could personally scarcely care less about.

Oh, I think "marriage" is a necessarily mixed-gender thing, and furthermore I think of it as a religious rather than civil or legal construct. As such, my inner libertarian thinks that civil unions are both perfectly fine and ethically obvious, and that any religious body that can theologically justify gay marriage should be able to do the job (although to do so in the Christian, Moslem, and most forms of Judaism would require a level of scriptural mangling that the inner Christian that shares space with my inner libertarian think of them more as "social clubs" than "churches").

I understand, and to an extent sympathize with, the pro-gay-marriage case; at one point, Andrew Sullivan had me more or less convinced in its merits. It didn't last, of course; further thought caused me to change my mind. I think Civil Unions are a tenable middle ground option that gives long-term committed gay couples the legal rights they should have, without changing "marriage" into something that it's not.

It's around this point that a gay marriage supporter will chime in "So it's the word marriage you're trying to protect?" Not really, but let's run with the idea for a moment; 10,000 years of human tradition have imbued certain words with meanings; "Priest" and "Veteran" and "Doctor" and "Female" are all "just words", like like "Marriage", too - many of them "words" imbued with benefits I'd love to have, to say nothing of deep symbolism - but no matter how badly I might want GI Bill benefits or an M.D.'s salary or or to have doors opened for me or to wear a miter cap, I don't get to, just because I say it should be so and that I've love the bennies, thank you very much. I can also expect them to say "why shouldn't two people who love each other be able to get married?"; because marriage isn't about love. A marriage must have it, but it's not about it. It's about having, raising and securing the future of the family.

In about half the US, gay marriage is illegal (and in many of them, so are civil unions). The reason? People oppose it. Not just the dour caricatures that proponents point to; even liberal states like Oregon and California reject the idea pretty roundly. And while the acceptance of the idea of gay marriage has grown in recent years, it's still, politically speaking, the stance of atiny minority.

Which means the spin is going to get absolutely outrageous, as this morning's Strib article shows us:

For Minnesotans, the campaign unfolding next door in Wisconsin may offer a preview of what to expect in a few months: an expensive, emotional political fight with no middle ground, and that could affect other political contests, including the governor's race.

Um...

Yeah.

Not seeing it.

Oh, it'll be expensive and emotional, all right. The emotions are justified; gays feel the bans institutionalize discrimination (and, as re Civil Unions, they may even have a point); antis are digging in to defend an institution they believe to be ordained by God, and ergo not to be tinkered with by the likes of Jane Ranum and Wes Skoglund.

But who says there's no middle ground? Supporting legal, civil unions - that give gays the legal benefits and headaches they so want, without enforcing a noxious redefinition of "marriage" onto people of faith - is a middle ground.

The answer, of course - the Strib, and the gay marriage activists whose water they're carrying, don't want there to be a middle ground. They want the issue to be framed in broad, absolute blacks and whites; you're either for gay marriage, or you're a bigot.

In Wisconsin, "we're going to have a passionate debate -- no question about that," said state Rep. Mark Gundrum, a Republican from New Berlin who sponsored the proposed ban. "This issue has gotten so big because of the incredibly aggressive push by gay activist groups. "

On the one hand, I have to hand it to the gay activist groups - well, some of them; they're doing it through the legislature, rather than the courts. They're embarking on a mission that's going to take them generations (if they succeed at all), to convince people that 10,000 years of human tradition are wrong and need to be turned on their ear.

There are vagaries, of course:

The possibility that the Wisconsin amendment could upend the lives of far more people than same-sex couples is contained in its second sentence, which states that a legal status "identical or substantially similar to marriage for unmarried couples" would no longer be recognized in Wisconsin.

Supporters say the amendment would do no such thing. But an analysis by the Wisconsin Legislative Council did not decisively land on either side of the argument over that issue.

Well, words count, words in amendments as well as words like "marriage". I don't know that the Wisconsin ban is something I'd find acceptable, based on those grounds.

On the other hand, the opponents of the Wisconsin ban are up to the task of convincing anyone:

"That second sentence is really mean-spirited [Isn't that becoming the all-purpose way of slagging a conservative ideal these days? If a cultural conservative talks in the forest and nobody hears him, is he still "mean-spirited?" - Ed.]and raises lots of questions about basic rights," said the Rev. Winton Boyd, a United Church of Christ minister in Madison who is Kleiss and Garcia [the lesbian couple who, with their daughter, are presented in the sort of relentless soft focus you can expect to see as the standard template for all media depictions of gay parents in these cases]'s pastor and formerly served Lyndale United Church of Christ in south Minneapolis. "They may have overreached by thrusting this into questions of civil rights that go way beyond gay marriage. And in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota, that still means something."

Leave aside the inevitable left-of-center provincialism; there's a point beneath the condescension and mislabeling. It's neither mean-spirited nor particularly un-Minnesotan to oppose gay marriage on the grounds that "marriage" is, by definition, a two-gender thing, but it does pay to be incredibly precise in one's writing.

Gay marriage is not the number one issue for public consideration; it is, in fact, not in my top ten.

But I, for one, am looking forward to the Minnesota legislature going on record with the issue.

Most Depressing News Day Ever?

This are the links on a single page of the Strib's online edition today:

Husband charged in St. Paul sex slavery case

Body parts found in ditch may be missing woman's

Man charged with shaking 3-year-old to death

Car chase leads to crash, arrest in St. Paul

Reward offered in horse mutilation case

Mom accepted $600 to let son be sexually abused.

Frost, MN family arrested after explosives cache found.

One of life's great lessons came on the classic old Bob Newhart Show. Mr. Carlin came into the office one day and noted a big breakthrough; he'd just discovered one of life's great truths.

BOB: "What's that?"

MR. CARLIN: "People are trash!"

At this exact moment, it's hard to argue with that timeless wisdom.

More Good News

Jill Carroll, the American reporter kidnapped almost three months ago, has been released:

American reporter Jill Carroll was set free today, nearly three months after she was kidnapped in a bloody ambush that killed her translator, police said. Her editor said she was "fine."

Police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said Carroll, 28, was handed over to the Iraqi Islamic Party office in Amiriya, western Baghdad, by an unknown group. She was later turned over to the Americans and was believed to be in the heavily fortified Green Zone, he said

I'm dying to hear the backstory.

Attencion, Immigrantes

Y'all came so close.

So close.

I am not one of those Buchanan Conservatives who fulminate for closed borders and mass deportations (indeed, few conservatives are). I support a combination of real border security and, perhaps, a form of guest worker program; a combination of things that would both secure our borders (our government's most important job, and one of its few legitimate ones) and provide a means for people who are currently illegal immigrants to move above the line, to work in this country honestly and legally, and maybe even shoot for citizenship (for those of you who want it).

(By the way, all of you who came to this country legally? Welcome, thanks for obeying our laws, and for those of you who have bought into the Democrats' line that clamping down on illegals is aimed at you, too, remember that they're wrong about that, too).

In other words, I am probably as close as any American to supporting you.

Or was.

Then I saw this:

To me, the whole thing turns on loyalty; I don't care how many people immigrate here (within some obvious limits), as long as they become Americans at some point, sooner than later. That means all of you who want to live here more than part of a generation.

Open borders are, in a world where terrorists stalk us, impragmatic; moving to America, living off the nation's bounty (even as, yes, so many of the illegals contribute to it) and yet remaining primarily Mexican, or for the reconquista of the Southwest as do some of La Raza, is worse; it is morally unacceptable.

I don't care if you come here to work - I may even break with some fellow conservatives on the issue, and encourage you to do so. Legally - crossing a secure border, filling out your paperwork, and working legally. I'm all for ya.

But if you have your kids here, if you go to school here, if you use taxpayer-funded services, there should be a simple choice; assimilate, or go back where you came from (and if the economy sucks in Mexico, then overthrow your corrupt, oligarchic government and start solving the problem at its root).

That's the line in the sand. As moderate as I probably am on this one, that's the line you can't push even me past.

And the photo above, and your loathsome demonstrations in the southwest yesterday, dig the line deeper and firmer.

This is America. Don't ever forget it.

UPDATE: Val Prieto says:

Mexicans and Mexican-Americans may very well have legitimate gripes with the government of the US, but as La Raza, the flags they are burning and flying up-side down below the Mexican flag do not speak for me. I aint Mexican, I aint Latino and I aint Hispanic. I am an American of Cuban descent. And damned proud of it.

That's what I'm talking about.

Announcement

Hencefoth, the following are forbidden to be displayed in front of the Berg household:

• Beer.
• All references to the Guinness Fairy
• Any protests that would involve people putting any of same on my porch.

That is all.

(With a sweeping hat tip to Sisyphus)

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXVI

I was getting ready to move into the house in South Minneapolis with the three women I'd known in college (and one of their sisters).

But first, there was the matter of getting out of the place I was in.

I'd agreed to let my roommate pay for a "Roommates" ad in the Strib out of my damage deposit. A stream of potential roommates came by. I only remember one.

At about this time, the U of Minnesota men's basketball program was in a bit of turmoil; one of their star players, Mitch Lee, who'd been accused of sexual misconduct, and then rape, in separate incidents that would eventually bring down coach Jim Dutcher. Lee happened to be black.

One of the potential roommates - an African American guy who worked in the athletic department at the U - came by. He looked around the place - well-situated for him, but a little small - as I packed up stuff to get ready for my move.

My roommate introduced me: "This is my current roommate, Mitch Lee..."

He stopped and caught himself, and started to stammer. Potential Roommate's eyes got a little wide, and he looked at Roommate.

"Yeah", I responded. "I get more flak about that these days".

I doubt I have that kind of timing anymore.

Giving Up The Ghost?

Speaking of which, Air America Minnesota's website has gone nearly two months without an update.

Its "In The News" section has gone almost 11 months without any changes.

It may seem unseemly, watching and cackling as the venture seems, to the semi-amateur's glance, to be spinning down the drain.

But for all the predictions that we all sat through two years ago - how Air America was going to show America and all of us knuckledragging conservatives how it's done, yadda yadda - I have to say it; it's fun to say "I told you so".

Franken: Gutless Wonder?

Al Franken is debating conservatives...

...as long as nobody is around to report on it.

Maloney reports:

Is Al Franken now avoiding potentially embarrassing debate circumstances?

Between three events which began last night and extend through early April, only in media-free surroundings has the Air America host agreed to debate a conservative.

Where reporters are allowed, the other panelists are either "progressive", or Franken's sitting it out entirely.

Wonder if you'll have to take a loyalty oath to get into his upcoming (?) Minnesota campaign appearances?

Just Mooooooove On

Gary Gross - Saint Cloud's vice-premier of blogging - has finally ditched blogspot and created a new blog, "Let Freedom Ring".

He ends his piece on the Dean Johnson flap as follows:

At this point, all I’m certain of is that the Senate Ethics Committee failed us by not doing a thorough investigation. Let’s hope that this isn’t the last we hear of this issue. Johnson’s hearing brought forth questions that demand answers.

On the way to that ending, Gary asks a number of questions that need answers, if we really value ethical government in this state.

Naturally, the Strib is beginning its campaign to sweep it all under the rug.

Ha!

Hah, I say again.

The Gulag

Sheila, as part of her odyssey through her bookshelves, reviews The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitzyn:

I think that The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most important books not only of the 20th century, but ever. It goes a long long way towards explaining the WHYS - and he does it in a way that really resonates with me. It's not just about political policies, or party politics, or power struggles - He talks a lot about psychology. The psychological pressure of the interrogations (which is immortalized so terrifyingly in Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon) - I always put myself in the positions of these people, I can't help myself. Maybe it's just natural curiosity, or maybe that's the part of me that's an actress, that doesn't just want to know facts - but wants to enter into the experience of others. And I can't help but try to imagine myself in those interrogation rooms, being questioned - and ... what on EARTH would have to happen in there to make me betray my friends? My boyfriend? My family? I can't IMAGINE. It's painful to think about, and yet somehow I can't help it. I try to imagine what circumstances would have to exist in order for this to occur.

Sheila doesn't get into politics - as, indeed, the book doesn't, since Stalin's thirty-year reighn of terror was above (or beneath) politics.

But this book was huuuuge for me, personally. Along with Modern Times by Paul Johnson, and the various P.J. O'Rourke essays that eventually became Republican Party Reptile and a few others, this book was one of the reasons I switched from being a Democrat to a Republican, twenty-odd years ago.

Read the whole thing - Sheila's review, and/or the book (which is as long as a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, although a great read).

A Very Good Thing

A few weeks ago, a regular commenter asked me what I thought about a pending federal bill that would consider blog commentary as a "campaign contribution".

Then as now, I thought it was a stupid idea. We have a First Amendment right to an opinion. It doesn't - and shouldn't - matter if other people hear or read one's opinion; this blog (to pick an example) is no more a "political contribution" than a guy dragging a soapbox down to Nicollet Mall and standing up and speaking would be.

I am, of course, rigorously clear in disclosing any payments in cash or kind I receive for political appearances and writings that are offshoots from the radio show or this blog (to date: three dinners, five alcoholic beverages, and a slice of carrot cake. Really good carrot cake), which is something the mainstream media could stand to be better at (you hear me knocking, Dan "featured speaker at DFL fundraiser" Rather?)

That being said, some people have a warped view of the First Amendment, and have been dredging up more emanating penunbras allowing them to ration free speech; Russ Feingold and (as re campaign finance) John McCain are two of them. It's good to see that the Federal Election Commission has listened to sanity and upheld the First Amendment in its latest decision on online political commentary:

The Federal Election Commission decided Monday that the nation's new campaign finance law will not apply to most political activity on the Internet.

In a 6-0 vote, the commission decided to regulate only paid political ads placed on another person's Web site.

The decision means that bloggers and online publications will not be covered by provisions of the new election law. Internet bloggers [as opposed to what - verbal bloggers? - Ed.] and individuals will therefore be able to use the Internet to attack or support federal candidates without running afoul of campaign spending and contribution limits.

More or less the way we currently can use things like "our voices" and "the radio" to attack or support the candidates.

"It's a win, win, win," Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub said, adding that the rule would satisfy concerns of campaigns, individuals and the Internet community about whether the campaign finance law applies to Internet political activity.

The FEC made the right call.

Presuming (as have some commenters on this site, and some of the less-gifted area bloggers) that speaking in favor of a party makes one a puppet of the party might make for satisfying rhetoric, but it's wrong.

Trading Up

The big news in the MOB (hat tip to Chad is former Congressman Vin Weber writing with Corey Miltimore at "Dreckless".

He's a great addition (duh), as with his latest, asking the Democrats some questions about their views on Iraq:

A real debate about Iraq should teach us something valuable about the way politicians and political parties assess that threat, and the way they would likely react to its varying manifestations in the future.

After floundering through the ’04 campaign with no intelligible message on the Iraq war, Democrats seem now to be moving toward a backward-looking analysis that says, “if we’d known there were no weapons of mass destruction, we’d have been against the war from the start.”

This rear-view mirror look allows Democrats to avoid questioning the judgment of their own leaders, many in possession of highly classified intelligence, who voted for the war, while pandering to the base of their party which was never for the war and, in truth, just wants to get out now, regardless of the consequences.

It's a dangerous spot for the Dems; as info about connections between Al Quaeda and Hussein leaks out, more nad more of the "Bush Lied" meme is getting discredited (to those who can see it; you know who I'm talking about); the Kossacks are married to a thesis that can be (and may have been) trashed without warning.

Can't Make It Up Fast Enough

I occasionally imagine bizarre circumstances, confident in the knowledge that it can never actually happen.

I get pretty imaginative.

Not this imaginative:

The tot crawled through the toy discharge chute in the Toy Chest claw machine at a Godfather's Pizza in Austin and got stuck amid all the toys.

Fire Chief Dan Wilson said it was one of the funniest things he's ever seen. Wilson was one of three people to respond to the non-emergency call. He says the boy was inside the transparent container playing, smiling and laughing and people were taking his picture with digital cameras.

Firefighters pried the door open to get the boy out.

To be fair, I suppose once Toy Story came out it was only a matter of time.

Found Again

I didn't even know there was a video for this song - "Sweet Sweet Baby" by Lone Justice, distinguished by being the best workout song ever written.

No, seriously - once the background singers kick in?

Put it this way - I'm writing as I watch the vid, and the post took me literally 1.5 seconds to write.

It's true!

Freedom Wins: Dictatorship Loses: Chapter 38

John "Policy Guy" LaPlante notifies me that Kansas has become the 36th Shall-Issue state, with the legislature overriding a gubernatorial veto:

Rep. Candy Ruff, D-Leavenworth, who promoted the bill in the House, said she immediately made three phone calls after the vote on Thursday.

One to her husband, a Leavenworth police officer who supports the concealed-firearms bill. And the two other calls went to rape victims who had contacted Ruff saying they want to carry guns to feel safer.

"People now have the right to defend themselves if they want to," said Ruff, adding she doesn't plan to get a concealed-gun permit.

"I've never had a desire to carry a concealed gun," she said. "I pushed it because two rape victims in my district asked me to."

That leaves the score as follows:

• No-issue states: 3 . Nebraska, Wisconsin and Illinois - and Wisconsin has been on the ragged brink of passing their law for a few years; a few good breaks in the Legislature will do the job. Nebraska, on the other hand, illustrates the lunacy of former MN governor Ventura's fixation with the unicameral legislature, as liberal urban interests in Omaha and Lincoln bottle up attempts at reform with the greatest of ease.
• May-Issue States: 9. California, Iowa, and a clutch of northeastern states including New York - most of which are "May, but probably won't, issue" states, except for the wealthy and well-connected; this was the system Minnesota abandoned for good in 2003.
• Shall Issue States: 36. Up from eight in 1983.
• States Without Restrictions: 2. Alaska and Vermont.

Jim Berg

Happy birthday to my little brother, Jim!

Jim was born in those days when fathers, far from being in the delivery room, were purely optional in the hospital itself. About the time Jim was born, Dad and I were watching one of the most cataclysmic events in the history of Jamestown, ND - the burning of the Gladstone Hotel, a historic old hotel dating from the 1800s that had once hosted President Roosevelt, if memory serves (and it might not). We walked downtown through a drizzle of charred newspaper falling from the sky to stand across the tracks, two blocks away, watching the old building blaze - and got home to hear the news that Jim had been born.

Not sure if Jim's had any nicknames - but the kids in the neighborhood used to call him "fuzz"; they'd line up to pat his head after Dad made him get his twice-summer-ly crew cuts . That didn't last much after first grade.

Anyway, happy birthday, Jim!

Let It Go

The Strib, still licking its wounds over 2000, beats the bushes for the abolition of the Electoral College:

But now comes a gaggle of bipartisan reformers with a cheeky idea worth considering. What if legislatures, one by one, entered their states into an interstate compact under which members would agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote? The compact would kick in only when enough states had joined it to elect a president -- that is, when a majority of the 538 electoral votes were assembled. As few as 11 states could ensure that the candidate with the most popular votes nationally would win the presidency. As a result, the Constitution and the Electoral College would stay intact, but the college's fangs would be removed.

That approach would be more democratic than current practice. Recall that Al Gore lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush despite getting a half-million more popular votes, and that Bush nearly lost the 2004 election despite getting 3 million more popular votes (a shift of only 60,000 votes in Ohio would have thrown the election to John Kerry). So, both parties have reason to fear the college's distortions.

Unfortunately, we have even more reason to fear the distortions of "Democracy" as the Strib sees it.

Remember the Washington gubernatorial vote in '04? We had a "popular vote" winner - Rossi, the Republican. Then, the Democrat machine started its endgame, forcing recount after recount after recount, until somehow or another they managed to squeedge enough votes out of the system to eke out a "victory".

Remember 2000, in Florida? When nobody was really sure how many popular votes there were in Democrat-controlled Palm Springs County, much less who voted for whom? Remember the hanging chad - when government bodies canoodled over how to divine a voter's "intent" from divots left on ballot cards?

Have they ever sorted out the shenanigans in Milwaukee?

The popular vote almost always synchs up with reality; 2004 was an aberration. But the electoral college was designed to protect the nation from the vagaries of the pure popular vote, which, as we see in may jurisdictions, is fungible and prone to, er, error.

Buck Owens

Buck Owens dead at 76:

His career was one of the most phenomenal in country music, with a string of more than 20 No. 1 records, most released from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

They were recorded with a honky-tonk twang that came to be known throughout California as the "Bakersfield Sound," named for the town 100 miles north of Los Angeles that Owens called home.

"I think the reason he was so well known and respected by a younger generation of country musicians was because he was an innovator and rebel," said Shaw, who played keyboards in Owens' band, the Buckaroos. "He did it out of the Nashville establishment. He had a raw edge."

Owens was modest when describing his aspirations.

"I'd like to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs and had a hell of a time," he said in 1992.

I worked at my first country-western gig in 1982 - and while I'd grown up hating country-western, I quickly grew to love Owens; he stood out from the cookie-cutter replicants that Music Row cranked out then (and, if you listen to K102, now):

Owens himself could be rebellious, choosing among other things to label what he did "American music" rather than country.

"I took a little heat," he once said. "People asked me, 'Isn't country music good enough for you?' "

He also criticized the syrupy arrangements of some country singers, saying "assembly-line, robot music turns me off."

After his string of hits, Owens stayed away from the recording scene for a decade, returning in 1988 to record another No. 1 record, "Streets of Bakersfield," with Dwight Yoakam.

Bummer.

Q

Go Sioux

i"m not sure which of the Nihilist crew jinxed the GoGos, but, as Sisyphus notes, the GoGos choked against Holy Cross:

8:02 PM: OVERTIME. You’ve got to be kidding me. Overtime against Holy Cross? Holy Frickin’ Cross? At this point it doesn’t really matter if they pull it out, because they will have no chance against North Dakota playing like this.

The worst thing is you just know that the vile Sioux fans in Grand Forks are loving this. I hate UND and their fans.

You just cannot let a game like this get to overtime. Harrington can turn the puck over in front of the net at anytime and lose the game no matter who you're playing.

8:19 PM: Holy Cross scores. This live blog is over.

I'm smart enough to know that my predictions are to sports what Jeff Fecke's are to politics - so I'll just say I think the UND Sioux will probably get clobbered.

In every round until the finals.

Did I say that?

DISCLAIMER: This should not be taken to imply I care about college hockey. It's just that having the Sioux in striking distance of the national championship is like having the Bears in the Super Bowl; even I get interested.

Deep, Abiding Stupidity

I meant to cover this yesterday, but both Captain Ed and Dementee beat me to the draw (which is sort of like getting scooped by both Fulton Sheen and Dog the Bounty Hunter): the city of Saint Paul's "Human Rights" komissar commissioner Tyrone Terrell ordered a banner with the Easter Bunny and Easter eggs, as well as other Easter-oriented employee decorations, removed from City Hall and all other city property.

This from a city whose school system routinely teaches about "native american spirituality" and Buddhism (although all references to Christianity and Judaism are carefully excised), and which devotes uncounted money to hold an annual "Saint Patrick's Day" parade (and doesn't apparently know that eggs and bunnies are artifacts of pagan, not Christian, observances).

For the benefit of Kathy Lantry and Tyrone Terrell, here is the relevant section of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's it.

A banner observing the existance of a season (to say nothing of artifacts posted by employees in their own workspaces and at their own expense) is not "establishing religion". It is acknowledging a holiday which people in the city celebrate.

Terrell's apparent justification for the action - that people might be offended - is ludicrous. If they're offended, then let's offend them; our society (and the "Human Rights" Mr. Terrell is supposed to commission) depend in their entirety on people being able to confront differences in things like religion, get past whatever offense they might feel, and learn to co-exist. Period. If one of my (many) Moslem co-workers put up, I dunno, an Eid banner (?), or started praying in the aisle between me and the bathroom, assuming the demonstration isn't disruptive or ostentatious, then if I am offended it is both my problem and something for me to get beyond. Nothing more.

The inmates are running the asylum.

Defending Pacifism

I've written this article before. Bear with me.

The story of the "Christian Peacemaking Teams" rescue has shown modern "christian" "pacifism" for what it is - an ideologically and morally bankrupt philosophy.

Pacifism is a fine thing - as long as the pacifist has integrity. Modern "christian" "pacifism" has largely none.

I attend the Presbyterian Church, for purely theological reasons (an alignment that has been and remains sorely tested at times). While the people in the pews at most Presbyterian churches are all over the place, and frequently as conservative as the church's reputation would have you think they were, the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly - the elected body that takes care of the church's temporal governance - is, frankly, insane. And you can see from whence they come if you walk into nearly any Presbyterian (or Lutheran, or Catholic, or Methodist...) church; people who, as P.J. O'Rourke said, have self-righteousness like some people have halitosis; people prone to making grandiloquent pronouncements about world events that are inevitably in line with the model set by the World Council of Churches 30 years ago when it cast its lot with Liberation Theology (to the point of funding religious mission supplies like rockets and explosives for leftist guerilla groups in Latin America).

There's one of those in my congregation; a crotchety septuagenarian who, during open prayers on Sunday morning, inevitably sermonizes: "Pray for the people of North Korea, who are being starved because the US Government won't send food", or for "the people of Darfur, who we are too racist to rescue" (along with prayers for "the people of New Orleans, who are being killed by Administration indifference" and an end to "the genocide of tax cuts"), that sort of thing. No mention, of course, of the stalinist government in Pyongyang or Khartoum that is making it so easy for us to achieve our nefarious ends. Naturally. The woman - like the "Christian" "Peace"making teams - is completely silent about the horrors under the Hussein regime, and was when Hussein was in power (although she prayed fervently for us to drop our sanctions...)

Moral stances are fine; to be moral, they must have integrity. "Pacifists" who only protest against perceived American abuses, and remain silent on those of totalitarian regimes around the world (at least, those of them at odds with the US) have no integrity; they are, indeed, perfect hypocrites.

If I Say My Prayers And Eat My Vegetables

The Strib notes that impeachment talk is "growing":

As Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar travels in and out of Minnesota, he says he's hearing one question over and over again: "When is Congress going to impeach this president?"

Oberstar says he's not ready to seek impeachment, but he's one of 32 House Democrats -- including two other Minnesotans, Reps. Martin Sabo and Betty McCollum -- who are promoting a bill that would create a select committee to investigate whether there's enough evidence to impeach President Bush.

Democrats are split on the issue, but as some of them intensify the impeachment buzz in Washington, Republicans have come up with a response: Bring it on.

Yes. Oh, yes, please, please do.

If the Democrats had had any actual ideas in 2000, they could have probably put Algore into office (shudder). The impeachment debacle - justified as it in many ways was - hurt the party that badly.

So yes - let's bring impeachment to the floor now. Let's get the moonbats' names on the record for '06 and '08.

In fact, we should work hard to make sure all of the Democrats' grandstanding gets brought to the floor. Locally, Senator Dean Johnson got caught lying about putative conversations with the Supreme Court about gay marriage (some call for his resignation; I say "not so fast"; Johnson, turncoat RINO and possibly the worst stump speaker in Minnesota politics today - a bar set in the picofermis above sea level by Jerry Janezich - is a goldmine for the GOP; he should be treated like a "turned" double agent and milked for all the political ammo he gives us); while gay marriage isn't my hottest-button issue (I oppose it, but favor civil unions, and who fecking cares because it's wartime, for stu's sake), this is another one that should be removed from contention as a referendum, and brought quickly to the floor for an up or down vote by the Legislature. Get the names on record.

Think nationally, act locally, to catch moonbats red-handed.

Thanks For Saving Our Lives. Now Take Your Stuff And Please Leave

Christian Peacemaker Teams finally thanked their rescuers (ya gotta scroll down):

We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet. As peacemakers who hold firm to our commitment to nonviolence, we are also deeply grateful that they fired no shots to free our colleagues.

They're pacifists, so I suppose it'd be unfair to ask if they'd be thankful they'd be if the SAS (?) had had to shoot their way through a roomful of butchers.

That, apparently, was not what happened:

Among the scant information General Lynch offered in a press briefing, he said a detainee captured Wednesday night had provided the authorities with information that guided them to the house where the three hostages were being held. The captives were found unguarded, their kidnappers having vanished, General Lynch said.

Although the example of Christ doesn't encourage bloodymindedness, I think I'd be forgiven for feeling bummed that they didn't mow down at least a few of the butchers.

This Is Good News...

MLP - wife of my alma mater's basketball coach, as luck would have it, and sister of one of my favorite MOB bloggers - has started her own blog.

It's pretty new - like, eight posts - but I like it. Please send encouragement.

Open Letter to "Christian Peacemaker Teams"

I just emailed this to "Christian Peacemaker Teams":

CPT,

My name is Mitch Berg. I'm a blogger (www.shotinthedark.info), and a radio talk show host (on WWTC-AM in Minneapolis), and a Christian who desires genuine, just peace. I was overjoyed this morning that my prayers for your three surviving missionaries were answered with their rescue.

And so on reading you statement on the rescue this morning, I have to ask you - why no word of thanks to the US and British soldiers who rescued your missionaries from Tom Fox' fate?

Why no word of thanks to the Iraqi civilians who risked their lives to bring the rescuers to your people?

I ask as a Christian (the troops and Iraqis are God's children, and every bit as valuable to God as your missionaries), and as an American (it seems an intentional slight).

I'd appreciate a response.

Mitch Berg

Their address is: peacemakers@cpt.org.

If you send an email, feel free to leave a copy in the comments.

Very Good News

A combined US/UK rescue operation has rescued three hostages in Iraq:

U.S. and British forces freed one Briton and two Canadians early Thursday in a military operation, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street earlier this month.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said the captives were rescued in the joint U.S.-British operation in rural area northwest of Baghdad, between the towns of Mishahda, 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Baghdad, and the western suburb of Abu Ghraib, 20 kilometers (12 miles) from downtown.

Many prayers have been answered this morning.

Given that Tom Fox was found tortured and shot to death two weeks ago, one wonders if the members of the pacifistic "Christian Peacemakers" group appreciate the irony that the only reason their other three people are alive is because many people, Iraqi informants and police as well as the British and US troops that enacted the rescue, risked their lives, and (likely - and hopefully) killed a number of the terrorists who likely as not planned to kill them.

UPDATE: As re that last graf, which I swear I wrote a couple of hours before I saw the Christian Peacemakers statement on the subject? Apparently not:

Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families. In the spirit of the prophetic nonviolence that motivated Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom to go to Iraq, we refuse to yield to a spirit of vengeance. We give thanks for the compassionate God who granted our friends courage and who sustained their spirits over the past months. We pray for strength and courage for ourselves so that, together, we can continue the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace.

Throughout these difficult months, we have been heartened by messages of concern for our four colleagues from all over the world. We have been especially moved by the gracious outpouring of support from Muslim brothers and sisters in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. That support continues to come to us day after day. We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?

With Tom’s death, we felt the grief of losing a beloved friend. Today, we rejoice in the release of our friends Harmeet, Jim and Norman. We continue to pray for a swift and joyful homecoming for the many Iraqis and internationals who long to be reunited with their families. We renew our commitment to work for an end to the war and the occupation of Iraq as a way to continue the witness of Tom Fox. We trust in God’s compassionate love to show us the way.

Prayers for everyone but the US and Brit troops who risked their lives to spring them, and for the Iraqis who (according to initial reports) led them to the scene.

The "Christian Peacemakers" are the sort of people you run into a few of in every non-conservative congregation in the United States; people who, in the words of P.J. O'Rourke, "have self-righteousness the way some people have halitosis".

On behalf of those of us Christians who are revolted by the smug selectiveness of the "Christian" "Peace"makers, to the US and UK troops who did the job, whomever you are - thanks.

UPDATE II: All reports I've read so far have been quiet as to the troops involved - which might be a function of it being early in the story cycle, or might be an indication that both nations' most elite hostage-rescue units (The British SAS and/or US SFOD, who are rarely to never officially credited with anything) were involved - which, if true, indicates the extremely high importance all three governments (Iraq, UK and US) attached to the rescue.

The Scotsman notes:

British forces, believed to be members of an SAS snatch squad, were involved in the major military operation in the town of Mishahda, about 20 miles north of Baghdad.

Special forces from the United States and Iraq were also part of the dramatic rescue of 74-year-old Mr Kember and his Canadian colleagues, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden.

As usual with SAS operations, one is dying to find out the details - and resigned to the fact that as with all of their operations, one is likely to wait 10-25 years before anything remotely official filters out.

Liberty Or Death

Red points out that today is the anniversary of Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech.

Since it's a Sheila post, you get all the background that you don't get in the history book. Or a graduate American History seminar.

She quotes from Paul Johnson's History of the American Peoples:

Henry got to his knees, in the posture of a manacled slave, intoning in a low but rising voice: 'Is life so dear, our peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!' He then bent to the earth with his hands still crossed, for a few seconds, and suddenly sprang to his feet, shouting, 'Give me liberty!' and flung wide his arms, paused, lowered his arms, clenched his right hand as if holding a dagger at his breast, and said in sepulchral tones: 'Or give me death!' He then beat his breast, with his hand holding the imaginary dagger.

There was silence, broken by a man listening at the open window, who shouted: "Let me be buried on this spot!'

Henry had made his point.

Read the whole thing.

The Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Perhaps you have to be a lefty to get away with saying what Christopher Hitchens said on the Hewitt show last night. They were talking about Iraq - and, most importantly, domestic reaction to the war.

The interview tripped into a point that I want to focus on for a bit.

Hitchens:

I mean, if you think it's bad now, just try and imagine what it would have been like if it had been left alone. And on that, I don't think there's any disput at all. And by the way, I've made this point in countless arguments with so-called anti-war people, many of whom are actually pro-war, but on the other side, in public and in print and on television and on radio and in universities. I've never had any of them reply to my point there.

HH: When you say pro-war but on the other side, what do you mean, Christopher Hitchens?

CH: Well, I object to people like Michael Moore for example, or Ramsey Clark being referred to as...in the New York Times as anti-war activists, or anti-war campaigners. They're not anti-war at all. For one thing, they're not pacifists, particularly not Ramsey Clark. For another, they've declared that they believe the beheaders and jihadists and the blowers up of Mosques and mutilators of women and so forth are a liberation force or an insurgency. Michael Moore even said they were the modern equivalent to the American founding fathers. So in that case, fine. George Galloway's the same. Many of them are. They're not really against the war. They're not anti-war, but on the other side in the war for civilization, and they should be called out on it and given their right name.

HH: Do you believe that there are leaders in the Democratic Party in Congress who also belong to that caucus?

CH: No, I can't say that I do think that. I mean, maybe Cynthia McKinney, who is not exactly a leader. She seems sometimes to talk in a sort of MoveOn.org manner, but no, I think that we're far from that in this case.

Bravo, Hitch.

Crying "you're questioning my patriotism!" is one of the most manipulative, rhetorically abusive strawmen the left uses. When every two-bit anti-war Democrat tosses it out when their views get criticized (and it's become a cliche that they do), it does three things: ratchet up the emotional commitment one must bring to any legitimate criticism of their views (you have to defend not only ), sidetracking the debate over the actual views (while one sorts out the whole "questioning patriotism" canard, and - worst of all - cheapens the meaning of the phrase when referring to people who really are, as Hitchens points out, not so much "anti-war" as "working for the other side", people like George Galloway and Michael "The Insurgents are the equivalent of the Founding Fathers" Moore.

The Shrewdest Move?

Remember this time about two years ago? Kerry led Bush in many (premature) polls; many leftyblogs leaped around in their cages and flung poo jumped up and down and declared that Iraq made the race Kerry's to lose.

Well, they were right as far as that went.

Today, the usual suspects are hooting and hollering about the president's statement that the next president will be the one to withdraw troops from Iraq.

I think it's a brilliant move.

If journalism is the rough draft of history, then the first draft of the chapter on the Liberation of Iraq was written before March 17, 2003 - it tipped its hand when it declared a quagmire three days into the most successful, fastest military campaign in history - and, despite the ongoing insurgency, has been wrong ever since. Iraq isn't locked in civil war (complacency would be misplaced, and the provocations are immense and horrendous, but no - no civil war), and while like any counterinsurgency war the battle is one of patience, it is far from a quagmire. The media . And while the public may indeed be growing frustrated with a war which will soon have been going longer than WWII, I think the polls that claim the President is in dire straits are as jiggered as they appeared to have been during the '04 campaign.

So why would the President defer all withdrawal talk until after his presidency?

Because he's end-running the media, and playing straight to his base - and, more importantly, to the base that'll vote for his successor.

The Republican base doesn't show up in polls to anywhere near the extent of their opposition (a simple skim through the polls leading up to the '04 election shows this) - and they are as likely to want the war over as the most kool-aid-sotted Moore-on from Berkeley or Macalester . But they're also more likely to keep the mission in mind come election time - and to vote for the party that takes it seriously.

And as Kos and Moveon.org drive, more and more, the Democrat agenda, the choice will become ever starker by 2008. This move - besides being most likely militarily inevitable, and thus reasonable - gives the GOP candidate in '08 a course to stay.

They must think it's a winner. I'd tend to agree.

White Bear Lake: The Last Frontier

Quick question for those of you who live in the Northeast 'burbs of Saint Paul: What's a good place to grab breakfast?

Leave a comment, if you could. Thanks in advance!

Uptown Down

Rambix covers Minneapolis crime like nobody else, in or out of the mainstream media.

His blog's coverage of the Zebuhr shooting - and its context, as part of an outbreak of Somali gang violence - should be required reading for everyone who wonders how a one-party city works in practice.

Grow Whines

Michael Zebuhr - the visitor from West Virginia who was shot in a robbery in Uptown Minneapolis last week - has died.

Joel Rosenberg notes Doug Grow's inevitable - and stupid - response:

Doug Grow, of the Star Tribune, weighs in with remarkable predictability. "Perverse as it was, if this crime had happened in a poor neighborhood, it wouldn't have dented the consciousness of most of us."

Oh, horseshit. Let's see . . . an innocent young person from a poor neighborhood, full of energy and promise, is killed for no vaguely good reason. Nobody would pay attention to that, right? Wrong.

Joel cites - correctly - the story of Tyesha Edwards. To which I'd add Daneisha Gillum, among others.

I got this strange idea. Instead of blaming the public for not caring, let's try blaming the criminals. And, beyond blaming, taking appropriate action to meliorate the crime problem. Much more effective than pious pronouncements about "feeling Jordan's pain."

Nah. To the Minneapolis DFL, the message is the medium.

Irrational Hubris

Once upon a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, awash in frustration over the turning tide of the battle over gun control - suggested that the best way to ban guns was to tax them out of existence. If we can't ban guns, he whinged, why not put a 1000% tax on ammunition?

In a backhanded way, it's working - at least, in America's liberal-dominated cities, according to the Strib:

In a little-noticed victory for gun control advocates in Minnesota and across the nation, the number of gun dealers in the United States has plummeted 78 percent in the past 10 years as tens of thousands of home-based dealers surrendered their federal licenses.

The drop shows how the gun debate has moved from a national stage -- where gun control advocates lost congressional battles to ban assault weapons and to sue gun manufacturers -- to local zoning boards that are creating a growing web of fees and regulations that indirectly restrict firearms sales.

This web has squeezed out nearly every gun store in the Twin Cities metro area between a pincer of zoning laws on the one hand and and administrative laws (and lawyers, and courts) basically set up to do the cities' bidding. The same assault has also crushed the network of private, home-based - and almost inevitably law-abiding - gun dealers that used to provide a market for gun sales and repairs to the law abiding urbanite.

Call it adaptation - on both sides:

"The gun control agenda has evolved from the halls of Congress and the courts," said Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association (NRA). "Now we're seeing it evolve to the micro level in local municipalities."

The main consequences, as usual, are unintended:

But what looks like welcome news to gun opponents might just have driven gun sales off the books, as fewer personal gun sales are logged, vetted and tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Whether that has led to more illegal gun trafficking is open to debate.

"Most of these guys [who are no longer licensed] were just home-based dealers who did gun shows on the weekends as a part-time job," said Mark Koscielski, who is fighting a zoning battle to hold on as the last remaining gun store in Minneapolis. "Now they revert to private collectors, so they're free to sell without federal background checks. They're private sales."Don't expect the anti-gun crowd to recognize it:

"The sharp drop in gun dealers is one of the most important -- and little noticed -- victories in the effort to reduce firearms violence in America," said Marty Langley, a policy analyst for the Violence Policy Center.

It'd be interesting to define "victory".

In the Twin Cities, the number of gun dealers has plummeted. In the meantime, crime is out of control in Minneapolis. Especially gun crime.

"It doesn't mean there are fewer guns out there to be purchased or manufactured or sold," said Hamline University law school Prof. Joseph Olson, a gun rights advocate, at the State Capitol in St. Paul.

Indeed.

While the number of private firearms has zoomed upward in the past ten years, crime has plummetted.

The article is actually a fairly good overview of the situation; the number of licensees has dropped, partly due to zoning, largely due to federal taxes and enforcement and an ongoing effort to make sure that licensees are actually in the firearms business, rather than gun collectors with superpowers.

Still, there are plenty of the former:

Among those fighting to keep a license is Koscielski, whose gun shop at Chicago Avenue S. and E. 29th Street was found to be in violation of Minneapolis zoning codes earlier this month. He says Minneapolis and St. Paul, like most major cities, "have virtually zoned out gun shops."

Mark's story is a teeth-grating tale of government excess.

More on that later.

Manly Men

Forget terrorism, socialism, wahhabism, totalitarianism...hell, forget all the -isms.

Nope. According to Ruth Marcus of the WaPo, it's men who are the problem:

I have a new theory about what's behind everything that's wrong with the Bush administration: manliness.

Well - i'ts a theory.

Marcus continues:

"Manliness" is the unapologetic title of a new book by Harvey C. Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, which makes him a species as rare as a dissenting voice in the Bush White House [Or any other White House? - Ed.]. Mansfield's thesis is that manliness, which he sums up as "confidence in the face of risk," is a misunderstood and unappreciated attribute.

As noted elsewhere in this space, this is true both while men are growing up, and after, throughout society. But I digress:

Manliness, he writes, "seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk." It entails assertiveness, even stubbornness, and craves power and action. It explains why men, naturally inclined to assert that "our policy, our party, our regime is superior," dominate in the political sphere.

Though manliness is "the quality mostly of one sex," Mansfield allows that women can be manly, too, though the sole example he can seem to come up with, and deploys time and again, is Margaret Thatcher. "Is it possible to teach women manliness and thus to become more assertive?" he wonders, but not really. "Or is that like teaching a cat to bark?" Me-ow!

Woof back, and for the most part it's true. Here's a shocker - men and women are different (exceptions exist; Margaret Thatcher was a tough, decisive executive, and Bill Clinton was a consensus-monger who felt your pain), and those differences affect not only how the different genders operate in executive roles, but whether they get elected to office at all.

More on that in a bit:

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think -- it's just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I'm sure we could work it out ["Meow?" "Um?", "excuse me?", "now, maybe you disagree?", "maybe we could work it out but...?" - OK, WaPo, spill it; "Ruth Marcus" is really Jeff Fecke, right? - Ed] -- Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it's overemployed -- nowhere more than in this administration.

Forecast calls for dim-bulb stereotypes.

Think about it this way: Is a trait exemplified by reluctance to ask directions -- "for it is out of manliness that men do not like to ask for directions when lost," Mansfield writes -- really what you want in a government deciding whether to take a country to war?

The stereotype is the stuff of comedy; men ask directions. They are just less prone to dawdling over getting airtight consensus before taking action.

This has its ups and downs, of course. But would John F. Kennedy have been better off waiting for the French and Belgians and Sudan on board before facing down Kruschev and Castro?

The undisputed manliness of the Bush White House stands in contrast to its predecessors and wannabes. If Republicans are the Daddy Party and Democrats the Mommy Party, the Clinton White House often operated like Mansfield's vision of an estrogen-fueled kaffeeklatsch...No wimpiness worries now. This is an administration headed by a cowboy boot-wearing brush-clearer, backstopped by a quail-shooting fly fisherman comfortable with long stretches of manly silence -- very "Brokeback Mountain," except this crowd considers itself too manly for such PC Hollywood fare. "I would be glad to talk about ranchin', but I haven't seen the movie," Bush told a questioner.

Balance?

There are, no doubt, comforting aspects to the manly presidency; think Bush with a bullhorn on top of the smoldering ruins of the twin towers. After a terrorist attack, no one's looking for a sensitive New Age president. Even now, being a strong leader polls at the top of qualities that voters most admire in Bush.

True. And beyond that, it's something a nation needs.

Quick: name a matriarchal society that has succeeded. Ever.

No, not a "society led by women"; Margaret Thatcher saved Britain, and Golda Meir was no slouch either.

Show me a society run by women in which the primary, dominant values were feminine? Because in fact there are matriarchal societies on this earth, societies where women run the family and where their values dominate the discourse. They are small and largely non-influential. Why?

I've asked this question in person before; the answers vary, usually something like "The patriarchy stifled it!" Well, yeah. More powerful, aggressive societies that value consensus less than decision moved in and took over.

Look at the inner city; the gangs are run by young men (uneducated ones with no moral grounding, in this case), as are the vast majority of the cops who do battle with them. The social service agencies that work to clean up the mess are run, or largely influenced, by women.

The notion that men exist to provide protection for women (personally, as a group, as a society and as a nation) rankles the "gender identity" feminists, even though (and because) the idea is an integral concept of western society, enshrined in various ways in the laws, religions and traditions of most of the world's people (and all of their successful societies).

But the manliness of the Bush White House has a darker side that has proved more curse than advantage. The prime example is the war in Iraq: the administration's assertion of the right to engage in preemptive and unilateral war; the resolute avoidance of debate about the "slam-dunk" intelligence on weapons of mass destruction; the determined lack of introspection or self-doubt about the course of the war; and the swaggering dismissal of dissenting views as the carping of those not on the team.

So vote for someone else.

Mansfieldian manliness is present as well in Bush's confident -- overconfident -- response to Hurricane Katrina (insert obligatory "Brownie" quote here).

Er - "manliness" caused Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin to drop the ball? Prompted generations of New Orleans governments to be corrupt and worthless?

And the administration's claim of almost unfettered executive power is the ultimate in manliness: how manly to conclude that Congress gave the go-ahead to ignore a law without it ever saying so; how even manlier to argue that your inherent authority as commander in chief would permit you to brush aside those bothersome congressional gnats if they tried to stop eavesdropping without a warrant

Actually, that's less a matter of "manliness" than of "Article Two of the Constitution.

And let's not forget that the "kaffee klatch"-mongering Clinton was the trailblazer when it comes to expanding wiretaps.

Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women" -- that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose.[Glib language in "support" of an unsupported conclusion? I knew it! It is Fecke! - Ed] What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.

One of the first things a male learns - if he's lucky - is that when you're faced with a bunch of bullies, self-doubt is the last thing you want to show.

Women rarely learn this (hence the popularity of women's self-defense classes, which start by teaching the attitude that most boys learn bright and early). One of the great virtues most men grew up being taught was to try to keep it that way.

Looking For Info

I sent this letter to the PR contact listed with the revenue study we discussed yesterday:

From: [my email]@shotinthedark.info
To: [city contact]@ci.minneapolis.mn.us
Subject: Media Request
Headers: Show All Headers
[Contact],

I'm Mitch Berg. I'm a host with the "Northern Alliance Radio Network" (weekends at AM1280) and I write the blog "Shot in the Dark" (www.shotinthedark.info).

I have two questions regarding the study on smoking ban revenue impacts:

1) Is there any place to see the raw data used in this study? I'm looking for
specific establishments, as well as the sources for all of the revenues used in
the study, the ownership of the establishments, and the criteria used for
including and excluding establishments.

2) Is there a contact for asking specific questions about the study -
specifically, the sources of revenue and the assumptions used in creating the
study's conclusions?

Thank you in advance.

Mitch Berg

We'll see howthis works.

Smoke Screen

The pro-smoking-ban crowd is crowing about this study (warning: PDF file), just released by the City of Minneapolis.

The study purports to show that liquor sales in the year since the Hennepin County smoking ban went into effect have gone up.

The devil (sans smoke) is in the details.

UPDATE: Fixed the link.

The amount the ban proponents are raving about is the overall increase in revenues at bars and restaurants in the Twin Cities.

The study is honest inasmuch as it notes, front and center, that the numbers:

• do not account for inflation
• are strictly revenues - not profits.

In other words, the increases in revenues are adjusted neither for inflation, nor for increases in labor costs, insurance, taxation or any other factors.

Which - to be fair - do not relate to the smoking ban. But they are...

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

The study divides Minneapolis bars into several categories:

1) Restaurants with no minimum food sales requirement. Restaurants included in this group are all located outside the downtown area and were licensed between January 1, 1975 and February 13, 1983. No regulations existed at that time to limit the amount of revenue obtained from alcohol sales relative to food sales.
2) Restaurants with a minimum of 60 percent of revenues derived from the sale of food (referred to in this report as 60-40 restaurants). These are restaurants near residential areas that were licensed after February 13, 1983.
3) Restaurants in the Downtown area.
4) Wine licensees. These restaurants are licensed to sell wine (and beer), and depending on location, are required to derive 60 percent or 70 percent of revenues from the sale of food.
5) Downtown Area Clubs. These are primarily entertainment venues.
6) Neighborhood Bars. These establishments are located in residential areas and were licensed between 1934 and 1975; they do not have a minimum food sales requirement.
7) Private Clubs. These establishments have membership requirements.
8) Hotels and Other Businesses including, bowling alleys and golf courses. A few liquor licensees were excluded from this category so as not to distort the results: the Target Center and theaters. These businesses charge an admission fee before alcoholic beverages can be purchased, and alcoholic beverages may not be available at all events.

A couple of observations, here.

For starters, the vast majority of the increase seems at first glance to be concentrated downtown - where the big growth has been in big chain establishments and the Warehouse district. Also, as far as I can see there is no control for the number of establishments being added to the city's stock of bars and restaurants. It'd be interesting to view an average of revenues per outlet across each of the categories, not to mention figures for specific bars and restaurants.

While restaurants with wine/beer licenses and restaurants whose trade was mainly in food did fairly well, "neighborhood bars" - the kinds of places that have been protesting the ban, the places that depended on smokers in the first place - suffered losses in revenues of nearly 4% (that's revenues, not profits), as did "downtown clubs", bars downtown that are not primarily restaurants.

On page six of the survey, note that revenues from the sale of alcohol, overall (combining everything on the list, is up less than 2% - right around to slightly below the rate of inflation.

Conspicuously absent from the study is a breakdown of the ownership of these establishments. Chains - which tend to be more food-based, as well as able to ameliorate losses among many outlets - might be more able to weather the losses than ma-and-pa bars (like Keegans) who make or break their futures on the profits in one location. It would be very interesting to view a breakdown of numbers between chains and local places.

But at a first cursory glance, I think I can draw three preliminary conclusions:

• The smoking ban has been a boon for the restaurant, especially (I'm inferring) the chain variety,
• It looks, at first blush, to be the immitigable curse to the ma-and-pa bar that all the opponents said it was going to be
• Smoking ban proponents who claim that this study vindicates their claims that everything post-ban will be just fine are either fooling themselves, or trying to fool you.

I'm going to see if I can find the raw data to break down the numbers by ownership type - but the "neighborhood bar" numbers strongly suggest to me that I have a point, here...

The Power Fights Back

Hah!

Perceptions

I've gotten tired of some of the grinding animus in my comment section. It can be like having an itch that doesn't stop bothering you, 24x7; eventually it gets very, very old.

Still, there's some fun stuff in there. As Swiftee noted yesterday, Swiftee wrote:

Little known fact (outside the MOB)#1: Swiftee is a member of IEEE..also the ISA.

Little known fact #2:

I keep my pocket protector filled with interesting little bits of lawyer trivia. For instance, number of google hits for "scumbag lawyer":

http://www.google">http://www.google">http://www.google (dot) com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=scumbag+lawyer+&btnG=Search

Results 1 - 10 of about 196,000 for scumbag lawyer.

Which prompted me to ask; how about other professions?

Babysitters seem to come out OK.

Teachers fare less well - 158 references, although many of them refer to Jay Bennish.

Oddly, Accountants only generate seven results.

With trepidation, I checked out my own crowd, User Interface designers. Heh.

And our partners across the aisle? Oh, this is probably harsh...

King Banaian, as expected, is nowhere to be found on a listing of scumbag professors. Priests, oddly, get about double the hits.

Bus drivers? Apparently there is just one out there.

Bloggers? 32.

The mainstream media? 130-odd journalists and 300 reporters and change...

Finally, while nurses pan out OK, doctors take some abuse - although pediatricians apparently have never descended to the level of "scumbag" anywhere on the web.

Swiftee noted, by the way, that there are apparently no references to "Scumbag Engineer" on Google.

Well, now there is!

Chef Not A Quitter

The theory: Isaac Hayes - great R'nB singer and songwriter of the '60's and '70s, and voice of "Chef" on South Park, might not have jumped. He might have been pushed, says Roger Friedman, Fox's entertainment guy:

I can tell you that Hayes is in no position to have quit anything. Contrary to news reports, the great writer, singer and musician suffered a stroke on Jan. 17. At the time it was said that he was hospitalized and suffering from exhaustion.

And to the Onion:

AV Club: They did just do an episode that made fun of your religion, Scientology. Did that bother you?

Hayes: Well, I talked to Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] about that. They didn't let me know until it was done. I said, 'Guys, you have it all wrong. We're not like that. I know that's your thing, but get your information correct, because somebody might believe that [expletive], you know?' But I understand what they're doing. I told them to take a couple of Scientology courses and understand what we do. [Laughs.]

Hmmmm.

(Via the Cake Eater)

Disconnected?

On the one hand, anti-war rallies over the weekend around the US and world fizzled:

The protests, like those held to mark each of the two previous anniversaries of the March 2003 invasion, were vigorous and peaceful but far smaller than the large-scale marches that preceded the war, despite polls showing lower public support for the war than in years past and anemic approval ratings for President Bush, himself a focus of many of the protesters.

Meaning what?

That while the president's approval numbers are no doubt way off, that perhaps the polls are just as badly jiggered as some of us have been saying? Perhaps. Time will tell.

That the insurgency's goal - of winning unwitting dupes in the US over to their side, as the North Vietnamese did 35 years ago - is failing? Again, time will tell.

In Times Square, about 1,000 anti-war protesters rallied outside a military recruiting station, demanding that troops be withdrawn from Iraq.
Police in London said 15,000 people joined a march from Parliament and Big Ben to a rally in Trafalgar Square. The anniversary last year attracted 45,000 protesters in the city.

People who attended the Minneapolis march on Saturday - that in a mong the bluest of the blue cities - said that while it was large, it was much smaller than last year's march. In the meantime, the left's shills are working their PR magic:

On March 17th's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, actor and comedian Richard Belzer claimed he is more educated about the war in Iraq than our troops who have been there. And claiming that our troops don't really know anything about the war in Iraq was not the only insult Belzer cast at the troops. (See Newsbusters.org)

"You think everyone over there is a college graduate? They're 19 and 20-year-old kids who couldn't get a job," he said disparaging the troops, to Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R Fla) on Maher's show.

In a condescending way, Belzer claimed he was much more informed than any US soldier because they don't read "twenty newspapers a day" like he apparently claims to do.

He told Representative Ros-Lehtinen that her step-son, currently serving in Iraq, isn't a "brilliant scholar about the war because he's there."

So let me get this straight: conservatives who didn't, for whatever reason, serve in the military but support the troops are "chickenhawks"...

...so then, what is an actor that never served, insults the troops, and assumes he knows more about the war than they or their families do?

I'm taking nominations for terms, here.

Boy, I bet the left just rips on Belzer...

Best. Fraters. Post. Ever.

Atomizer on Laura Billings' most recent column, in which she describes the semi-gritty, somewhat downmarket West End of Saint Paul:

This is not to say that St. Paul is cozy and small-town. We have more edge than that. The standard greeting in the neighborhood from which my husband hails is a raised middle finger.

Y'know, in about twenty years of hanging around on the West End, I don't think I was ever greeted by a raised middle finger.

No, as Atomizer notes:

Sorry to break it to you, Laura, but it ain't a neighborhood thing. A raised middle finger is everybody's standard greeting to your husband.

I'll await the invitable, upcoming tales from the mean streets of (must control laughter) Mac-Groveland.

I wonder if people have started greeting each other with The Bone on Grand Avenue? Check back with Laura in a couple of months.

Lessons Gone Unlearned

Question: What's the difference between a Radio executive and a lemming?

Answer: The executive takes his whole staff over the cliff with him.

Radio executives from coast to coast apparently drank the same koolaid that two of the Twin Cities' larger local talk stations, KSTP-AM and the new KTLK-FM, drank last summer when a spasm of "conventional wisdom" told talk-radio executives that partisan political talk was dead. Politcial talk stations (meaning conservative talk stations - liberal talk outside of NPR is pretty much a dead issue, with Air America circling the drain) took a ratings hit as the nation reacted to the end of the '04 election season the way they always react to the end of a campaign; by taking a break.

Both KTLK-FM and KSTP-AM responded to the "news" (combined with Clear Channel's excercise of their right to bring Limbaugh to their new talk property) by running up new lineups that swerved between schizoid and milquetoast - just in time to see conservative talk make a decent bounceback late in 2005.

The Twin Cities, as Brian Maloney notes, aren't the only metro seeing similarly-befuddled decision-making at their talk stations.

There are really two kinds of "wisdom" in talk radio - and really, in radio as a whole: the wisdom that comes from long-standing experience (things like "keep it moving" and "give your Station ID in and out of breaks" and "don't take breaks at the 15s"), and the "wisdom" that comes from industry consultants.

These consultants earn their keep by generating a plausible-sounding idea or concept - and sticking with it firmly enough to sell the idea to stations, which hire the consultants to help implement...whatever the idea is.

And everything about the whole "conservative radio is dead" spiel simply screams "Marketing opportunity" pitched to the trades (historically unfriendly to conservative talk) by some high-profile consultants. It's my theory, and I'll stick by it.

Maloney notes how the theory - and the wares that the consultants are peddling, if my theory is correct - violates that other variety of wisdom, in this case in on-air changes at talk stations in St. Louis and Providence:

Unlearned lesson one: unless grandfathered-in via a longstanding, loyal "heritage" audience [Read: WCCO - Ed.], talk stations need to choose a side: liberal or conservative.

Common industry knowledge for at least a decade, switching between right, left and sports shows is akin to playing classical, hip-hop and rock music on the same outlet. Audiences don't stick around.

Yet look what just happened in St Louis (via St Louis Media):

KRFT flips Wednesday ... from RadioOnline: Big League Broadcasting is launching "Talk Radio 1190," a new Talk outlet in St. Louis. Beginning tomorrow, Sports KRFT-AM will flip to a lineup of nationally syndicated talk programming, including Don Imus, Neal Boortz, Al Franken, The 2 Live Stews, Jim Cramer and Dave Ramsey. Big League also owns Sports/Talk KFNS-AM & FM (The Fan) in St. Louis.

"We are extremely excited to launch a second station in the St. Louis Market, especially with such a dynamic lineup," says VP/GM Evan Crocker. "There is something for everyone, from political talk on both ends of the spectrum to a brand new form of sports talk that brings a new level of energy to the genre. One thing is for certain - Talk Radio 1190 promises to be unpredictable and never boring."

How many Neal Boortz listeners are going to stick around for Al Franken? Or for sports and financial talk?

On the same radio station, that's at least four different formats, a recipe for disaster.

To be fair to Big League Broadcasting, that's better than Clear Channel has done with KTLK (which gyrates through milquetoast, mushy news, conservative talk (Limbaugh), "Personality", a somewhat-misguided political concept (Janecek and Lambert, either of whom would probably do a better show than the sum of their parts currently pulls off) and more personality (Conry, who can actually pull it off); by my count, that's six formats.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that too many radio execs come from the world of music radio, where it's routine to mix, if not widely-diverse genres, at least different types of stuff together; KQRS blends potty talk (Tom Barnard) with cliche classic rock and some newer stuff, for example; it's all just different flavors of the same basic genre, all of which will keep parts of the "classic rock", male, white, 25-50 year old, musical grazing audience tuned in. KDWB will mix hip-hop, power-pop, and a happytalk morning show very liberally together -and it generally works, because, again, KDWB's audience is musical grazers.

That doesn't work with talk; people tune in for talk because they have a passionate interest in the subject; it's why all-conservative stations like the Patriot keep the average listener tuned in for hours, not minutes.

So the lesson is, talk isn't like music.

Seems obvious enough, right? You'd have to be a highly-paid broadcasting consultant to be dumb enough not to know it!

Maloney:

Unlearned lesson two: if it didn't work six months ago across town, it's probably not a good idea for your station!

Providence's WHJJ-AM was a previously successful Clear Channel conservative talk station that made an ill-fated decision to go liberal with Air America programming. After bleeding nearly to death, it finally pulled the plug on most of the shows.

Instead of returning to conservative shows, however, the station went milquetoast. The result: no ratings recovery.

I'm going to be interested in seeing KTLK's and KSTP-AM's winter books.

Feet Firmly Planted In The Clouds

Don't get me wrong; I like Mona Charen. She's a fine writer, an excellent commentator, and one of the precious few conservative opinions to occasionally leak into the Star/Tribune.

But her latest column illustrates a conundrum that faces social conservatives. The piece relates to a suit by the National Center for Men that does something that, viewed properly, exposes one of the key hypocrisies of Roe V. Wade; it's trampling on equal protection.

Charen finishes the article at the point where her reasoning (and that of most social conservatives, like Laura Ingraham, who was tittering about this case the other morning) begins:

The point (and it is not one the feminists will find in their quiver) is that sexuality requires responsibility -- and that doesn't just mean using birth control. It means that if you engage in sex you have an automatic obligation to any child that may result. Prochoice women have been vociferously rejecting this responsibility for decades. It should come as no surprise that men are inclined to do the same.

Roe vs. Wade and the sexual carnival we've encouraged in this country ever since have planted the idea that men and women have some sort of constitutional right to enjoy sex without consequences. Dubay and all of those similarly situated (including women who use abortion as emergency contraception) should look into the faces of their sons and daughters and explain that it's nothing personal.

Well, yeah. No kidding. In a perfect - or even particularly good - world, that's where the argument would end; the world would be full of responsible people who treat sex with the responsibility (to say nothing of the morality) that potentially bringing a human life into the world deserves.

But that's not where we are. We live in a world where having children is a retroactive option for women - but not for men. The difference is important in many cases:

1. In cases where the father and mother agree to have and raise the child, all is fine, of course.
2. Likewise, if mother and father agree to abort the child, all is...well, not fine. Deeply wrong. But everyone's rights are equally protected (except those of the "fetus", of course [1]).
3. So when the mother wants to have the child and the father would just as soon not be tied to 18 years of child support? "Tough rocks" you might say - and as someone who takes these sorts of things very seriously, I agree, on one level. We'll come back to that.
4. In cases where the mother wants to abort the child but the father - who but for the mother's decision would be obligated to pay child support - would like to raise the child? His child? Where's the "choice?"

Which is, of course, the larger issue.

The suit is a #3:

Here are the facts: A 25-year-old computer programmer named Matt Dubay of Saginaw, Mich., was ordered by a judge to pay $500 per month in child support for a daughter he fathered with his ex-girlfriend. His contention -- and that of the National Center for Men -- is that this requirement is unconstitutional because it violates the equal protection clause.

Dubay does not dispute that he is the child's father. Rather, he claims that during the course of his relationship with the mother, he was given to understand that she could not become pregnant because of a physical condition. He insists that she knew he did not want to have children with her. The courts, he and his advocates argue, are forcing parenthood upon him in a way that they cannot do to a woman.

Charen, viewing the case through Roe-colored glasses, is not impressed:

But the gravamen of the men's complaint is unwanted fatherhood. These poor fellows who have sex with women they do not want to marry or have children with are persecuted in this Brave New World we've created. When the only frame of reference is a competition of rights, both sexes strive to outdo each other in selfishness.

Charen completely misses the point of the suit, I think.

Remember our list of four situations, above? The "Men's Rights" angle involves #3 and #4. Some, indeed, are men like Mr. Dubay, whose consequence-free tryst went awry and are unhappy about it. Social conservatives like Charen and Ingraham are - justifiably - not especially sympathetic.

But there are two reasons they should be.

First: there are many men who fit into example #4 from our list above, who are willing and able to raise the children conceived by their (and their girlfriends', or sometimes spouses') oopses. And they have no - zero, nada, bupkes - rights under current law.

Second: It's a simple fact that negative consequences help to mitigate negative behavior. It's a fact that men tend to regard divorce as a less favorable option for dealing with marital difficulties than do women (by nearly a 2/1 margin); the consequences for men are almost universally negative, certainly more negative than for women as a general rule. Allowing equal protection to men in cases like Example #4 (and, commensurately, requiring responsibility on the part of women) would add some sobering consequences to casual sex for women; it follows that at least part of the problem that vexes social conservatives would be mitigated.

This suit - odious as it seems at first to the social conservative's nose - has the promise of serving as a precedent that could start to re-establish the notion that sex has consequences, and those consequences have responsibilities, for both men and women.

What's to argue about?

Aside: Charen is also misinformed to the point of myopia on one issue:

(The NCM has other complaints, too, and it's amusing to see the tables turned. They whine, for example, that men tend to die an average of eight years earlier than women, and that the overwhelming majority of the homeless are men. True. Is it the fault of the matriarchy?)

"Whine?"

It's a fact. Men's life spans are not only eight years shorter, but the gap is entirely a product of the last 100 years (in 1900, men and women had nearly the same life expectancy).

A fair part of the discrepancy, according to Warren "Don't Call Me Perry" Farrell, is that men, in addition to working most of the most dangerous jobs (soldiers, construction workers, farmers, cops, etc), are on the wrong end of much of life's stresses; their lives are unbalanced by living up to the expectation to be good breadwinners, only to have that work turned against them when their marriages go sour because - surprise! - they work too hard; the balance of having their children around and in their lives is then ripped away from them (but not the duty to provide for them), contributing to untold stress-related health issues later in life.

So yeah, the the matriarchy might have something to do with it. Or so goes the theory.

[1] And the first person to chime in "a fetus has no rights!" will get a rhetorical wedgie, because you are being lazy and also illustrate the problem perfectly; a "fetus" may or may not be "viable" at any given moment during gestation, but left on its own, even with absolutely no medical care, it will develop into a live human being at least 2/3 of the time. It has motive and intent (and biological programming) to become human, and ignoring it amounts to clamping your ears shut and yelling "Na na I can't hear you!".

Also, the "viability" argument is a canard; a "fetus" isn't "viable" until it can hold a job and pay its rent. Neither of my children are "viable" yet.

Just saying.

And The #1 Sign Morale In Your Office Is Shot...

Happy Saint Pat's Day.

Sometime in the mid-late nineties I was working at a company that, even though it is long-defunct, shall remain nameless.

A good friend of mine - let's call him O-Dog - and I met at this company. We were both technical writers. Our boss, the company's testing manager, was - I am not making this up - functionally illiterate. She was in charge of editing our copy.

She also had her priorities. And so while I was hired to write end-user material - things like online help and user guides and so on - I ended up essentially as a glorified stenographer in requirements meetings. Dull work, and a complete waste of time, although that didn't prevent the boss from investing the job with a patina of panic; O-Dog and I were issued with pagers, which had a habit of going off whenever someone told the Boss that someone needed a requirement refined.

Most galling was the fact that the company itself was a really good place to work - for everyone but those of us who worked for the Boss. The programmers loved the place - it was a dream job for many. And it was a good place for those who were great self-starters and could push themselves to learn things and develop into skills and areas they'd not tried. In fact, I made a couple of major steps into my current career in the job - steps that the Boss resisted bitterly, feeling that I'd outflanked her to take those steps, a feeling that was, alone among every decision and assumption and statement I ever heard her make, correct. The woman was an idiot. Contacts and friends of friends tell me that she is both still in the Twin Cities and still an idiot, so she shall remain nameless.

I'd been at the company probably seven months. A number of us - O-Dog and another young programmer I'll call E-Rod - were working on a project that was one of those endeavors that just reeked doom. Although a lot of smart, talented people were working on the project, you could just tell from talking with the clients (a company from the Bay Area) that there was a layer of irrational exuberance combined with dithering on specifics that would soon become familiar to watchers of Dotcoms throughout the economy, and that things would not turn out well. I'd also run a Usability Test on the prototype of the product - excellent preparation for my current career, actually - that had shown serious disastrous catastrophic usability issues. My report made it very clear that the design was flawed, in some ways fatally.

I'd just found out that the Boss had gotten together to stuff my report into a drawer so the clients would never see it. The reason? The company had sold itself to the Client as "user interface experts"; to show the client that they were not would hardly do. The whole thing left me angry, depressed, and deeply hating the company; for a solid day, as I walked around the office, I chanted a cadence softly, under my breath:

I hate this place
I hate this place
I really, really hate this place
This place is driving me insane
this f&#*(^g place will eat my brain
I hate this place
I hate this place
I really really hate this place.

How bad was it? Co-workers occasionally caught snippets of the cadence.

O-Dog and E-Rod had had similarly bad weeks; in fact, both had (if memory serves) either given notice or were about to. We decided to go out for lunch.

We went to a local sportsbar/restaurant and ordered. The waitress - decked out in green, naturally - prodded "any green beer?"

E-Rod, whose notice was burning a hole in his manager's desk, promptly chimed in "sure!". O-Dog took about a tenth of a second to concur. Both turned to me. "No, I gotta work...".

The two of them attacked theirs with gusto when it arrived, as they poured out their litany of miseries that they were going to escape. By the time the waitress returned, I was ready for some of that myself. I figured that just...one...green...beer...couldn't hurt. Could it?

On the one hand the job-related catharsis was beneficial; it steeled my resolve to find another job and get the hell out of the Boss' group or, if need be, the company. Which led to a second beer.

And a third.

And a fourth. And a fifth. In my own defense, O-Dog and E-Rod stayed way ahead of me.

About 90 minutes into lunch, we decided to call in and tell the Boss that O-Dog's car had broken down, and that we were all waiting on a tow truck, and no, nobody needed to come and pick us up, thanks for asking.

Need eventually was. I left the company six weeks later (to a much better job). It had been the best Saint Patrick's Day ever. Or maybe the worst.

Won't be repeating it anytime soon, anyway.

Vilkommen in de Nederlande

Holland comes in for a lot of crap. Much of it is justifiable; their brand of socialism leads Europe in going bankrupt; their welfare state is more comprehensive than most, leading to the acceptance of some practices that'd make all but the most insane American leftists yak up their skulls; their social liberalism, with decriminalized marijuana and prostitution, makes a lot of Americans deeply uncomfortable (although if you've knocked around some of the more straitlaced parts of Europe, some of the raucusness of Amsterdam is a relief; you almost feel at home.

But there is much to admire about the Netherlands; they were a small-l liberal country before it was all the rage in Europe. They recognized things like civil liberties and the sanctity of the free market long before the rest of the Continent, and upheld those rights more stridently than most of their neighbors. And forget the stereotypes; in 1940, during the Blitzkrieg that swallowed up France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland, the German troops rated the Dutch as their sternest opponents on the battlefield. The Dutch exile military and underground fought very credibly. And the country learned the same lesson the Danes and Norwegians took from World War II - pacifism is only as valuable as one's paradoxical willingness to defend the peace. During the Cold War, the Dutch military earned yuks for being unionized - but the Dutch also made a point of spending the money to buy the latest, best equipment,and plenty of it (and as long as they weren't under UN control, as at their debacle at Srebrenice, they didn't have many problems). The Dutch contributed their elite Marines to the coalition in Iraq.

Of course, with the explosion of violence among Moslem immigrants (including the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh), Dutch society is in turmoil. But I'm not surprised that Dutch are the first society in Europe to take decisive action:

The camera focuses on two gay men kissing in a park. Later, a topless woman emerges from the sea and walks onto a crowded beach. For would-be immigrants to the Netherlands, this film is a test of their readiness to participate in the liberal Dutch culture.

If they can't stomach it, no need to apply.

Read the whole thing.

Of course, trying to apply the idea to the US would draw brickbats; it'd be establishing a "thought police", some would cry, and they'd be right.

But here's a question: What should immigrants to the US be expected to accept to join our society?

This is not intended to be a partisan political topic; comments that are off-topic or purely partisan will be removed if you're lucky and I'm in a good mood, mutilated for my pleasure otherwise.

Abuse of Power?

How ambiguous a statement does this seem?

“members of the Supreme Court, I know all of them. I have had a number of visits with them about our law. All of them, every one of them, including the lady who just stepped down, Kathleen Blatz, was my seatmate for four years. She was the chief justice. You know what her response was? ‘Dean, we all stand for election too, every six years.’ She said ‘We’re not going to touch it.’ That’s what she said to me.”

It's Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson of Willmar, caught on tape and related in this piece in KvM:

Pat Lopez of the Star Tribune goes into damage-control mode for DFL Majority Leader Dean Johnson who has spent much of the last 24 hours backtracking on statements made — on tape — that he had visited with multiple members of the Minnesota Supreme Court about their intentions regarding current statutes prohibiting same-sex marriage...With all due respect to the Majority Leader, his remarks were at best “poorly worded.” At worst, the Reverend Johnson is guilty of lying and intervening as a senior member of the state’s legislative branch with the Court charged with determining the constitutionality of the laws it is Johnson’s job to pass. In either case, Johnson’s remarks raise the stakes not only for federal and state-wide DFL candidates who are loathe to see same-sex marriage decided by the voters, but Johnson’s fate may itself be on the ballot this fall for the first time in many election cycles.

Fishsticks, who has covered this in the PiPress, adds:

I do not believe that Johnson is telling the truth about talking with Court members, and therefore, I don’t think it necessary or advisable to falsely defame members of the state Supreme Court with false accusations. If Johnson did talk with judges and they did say what he claims they said, then it is up to Johnson to make that statement.

Well, That Didn't Last Long

Minneapolis top cop Bill McManus leaves for San Antonio:

Police Chief Bill McManus, who came to Minneapolis saying he was ready to "bust out of the locker room and get going," decided Wednesday to get out of town after only two years on the job.

McManus, 54, flew on Wednesday to San Antonio, where he was offered and accepted the job as the city's top cop.

On April 17, he will take over a department with 1,950 officers -- more than double the size of Minneapolis. His current salary is $132,000, but in San Antonio he could make another $20,000 a year.

Rambix, who covers crime in Minneapolis like no other blogger, comments on Fox29's coverage:

Part of the segment was quite Rambix-like, as they detailed the double digit violent crime increases during his tenure.

San Antonio appeared thrilled to have him. The no confirmation yet on rumors the criminals in that city were quite happy also.

Hard to say if we can blame McManus for the crime wave; he could only play the hand he was dealt.

Which, in Minneapolis, includes a one-party city with a very weak mayor and a very strong, very left-wing city council drawn from the city's most entrenched special interests.

It doesn't look like a fun job. Good luck refilling it.

Two 34s

I grew up as...well, not much of a sports fan. But whatever interest I had in following professional sports was reserved for two teams; the Minnesota Twins whose play by play announcer Herb Carneal was the voice of summer in the upper midwest for decades - and the Chicago Bears.

Both of them were, for decades, the little franchise that couldn't. Until, in both cases (as Sean McDonnell notes in the Strib) a Number 34 came along; Puckett for the Twinks, Walter Payton for the Bears.

Beyond their common traits and dazzling stats, what made Kirby Puckett and Walter Payton so memorable was their effervescent personalities, their lifelong allegiance to their teams and their desire to perform best under pressure-packed circumstances. Puckett -- "Puck" to Minnesota Twins fans -- and Payton -- "Sweetness" to Chicago Bears followers -- made those around them better not just because of their personal accomplishments, but rather by the power of their personalities. And it's the latter that people will remember and appreciate far longer than their individual statistics.

Listen closely to those who mourn Puckett's loss, and you'll hear comments similar to those that followed Payton's death in 1999 -- phrases such as "team leader,"ever-present smile" and "infectious exuberance." Not coincidentally, all of these words are inscribed on Puckett's National Baseball Hall of Fame plaque.

Both of 'em were the stuff of movies; unlikely players who galvanized squads of B-list players to do A-list things.

And - to show you what a sports fan I'm not - after all these years, it hadn't occurred to me that they both had the same number.

Adios Cameras - For Now

Minneapolis' "Stop on Red" program - which used robot radar cameras to catch drivers running red lights - has been tossed in court:

The ruling Tuesday to shut off the cameras doesn't necessarily mean the thousands of people who have paid the $142 fine will be getting a refund, and further legal action may be needed to sort out that issue. The "Stop on Red" program, started in July, generated about $1 million in the first six months. Nearly half of that was paid to the camera company.

More than 26,000 people have received tickets under the city's Stop on Red ordinance, which presumes the owner was the driver during the offense. The owner must prove that someone else was driving to avoid a conviction.

The law violated due process afforded drivers in other Minnesota laws.\

Good riddance.

"'elp! I'm Bein' Oppressed!"

According to George Clooney, the left is "intimidated".

OK, liberals - and I know you're out there, a lot of you leave comments - what is it about conservatives exercising their first amendment rights that "intimidates" you?

I don't want to call it an "open thread", since that's such a Kos-like thing (ew) but if you're a lefty, feel free to leave a comment explaining what this "intimidation" is.

I'm dying to know.

UPDATE: The first entry is a bit of what appears to be personal thuggishness. While that is lamentable (and something I and every credible conservative I know condemns without reservation), that's not really what I'm looking for. Thuggishness is a bad thing - and if you practice it, I don't care if you're a liberal thug or a conservative one. It's illegal, and

But what I'm looking for is examples of how conservatives' legal, First Amendment free speech rights and their exercise "intimidates" liberals. Because that, indeed, is what Clooney was kvetching about.

Furious George's Fantasy Life

George Clooney is proud to be a "liberal".

No word on "delusional", "paranoid" and "overdramatic".

Clooney castigates his fellow Dems:

Too many people run away from the label. They whisper it like you'd whisper "I'm a Nazi." Like it's dirty word.

It's actually true.

I remember in 1980, when I was still more or less proud to be a liberal. I was talking with someone - Dwight Rexin, probably, one of the few kids in my high school who was an overt, articulate Republican and Reagan supporter - and saying in my best George Merrill imitation, "I AM NOT A LIBERRRALLLLL", to make sure I wasn't tarred with that whole "mindless taxmonger who also excuses genocide of little Asian people" label.

But turn away from saying "I'm a liberal" and it's like you're turning away from saying that blacks should be allowed to sit in the front of the bus, that women should be able to vote and get paid the same as a man, that McCarthy was wrong, that Vietnam was a mistake.

Or, alternately, turning away from resting on laurels that are respectively fifty, eighty-five, nonexistant, fifty and thirty years old.

And that Saddam Hussein had no ties to al-Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11.

Along with Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech, it was his pusillanimity in the face of terrorism that kicked me down the slippery slope to conservatism; statements like Clooney's (ignoring the fact that deposing Hussein never hinged on involvement in 9/11 - not an iota - assure me I made the right call, and that the Dems' big hope is to keep repeating, a la Goebbels, enough big lies to draw enough credulous dumb people to keep voting for them.

This is an incredibly polarized time (wonder how that happened?).

It probably has a lot to do with the preening hatred so many liberals - like Clooney - feel for 51% of their countrymen.

But I find that, more and more, people are trying to find things we can agree on. And, for me, one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we're all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it's not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.

What whiny, self-absorbed garbage.

For starters, part of free speech is defending your speech (not your right to speak, but the actual contents of it) against those who disagree with you. You have the right to speak freely; you do not have the right to speak without fear of being spoken against.

Oh, yeah - and I have never seen a credible right-wing commentator call any lefty speech "unpatriotic" - except for a few cases where it demonstrably wasn't.

And so what? When you're a conservative, you not only get used to dimbulb commenters calling you stupid, fundamentalist, chickenhawk, jihadi, 101st Fighting Keyboards, wishing you a lingering dealth from Alzheimers, and on, and on. You learn to ignore the idiots and defend yourself against the rest.

So no, George - nobody's called you "unpatriotic" - just a jagoff. And even if someone did - so what? Be a man and defend yourself. In your fantasy universe, liberals defend civil rights; so defend yours.

Because Clooney - long-time Hollywood star, with access to power and money and influence like few of us will ever know, seems to be a real pantywaist about criticism:

The fear of been criticized can be paralyzing.

Criticism - especially ugly, below the belt attacks - can indeed be paralyzing. Like when the conservative commentator said about a liberal who has Alzheimers "He deserves it" - well, that might be read as extremely ugly, a direct assault that could chill free speech.

Of course, it wasn't a conservative - it was George Clooney, exercising his love of free, rational discourse, three years ago, talking about Charleton Heston.

Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does
Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, "We were misled." It makes me want to shout, "Fuck you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."

Alternate explanation:

• They knew which way the voters were trending
• They, in those pre-Murtha days, remembered there were four reasons for invading Iraq; WMDs (which everyone, Democrats included, were assured by most of the world's credible intelligence services (and the CIA) existed), human rights violations, violations of UN resolutions, and links to terror (not just Al Quaeda).

Why would they pay attention to any of that?

Oh, yeah - some of them were sentient.

Bottom line: it's not merely our right to question our government, it's our duty.

I wonder - what was George Clooney saying when people were exercising their duty to question the government in the form of Clinton's lying to investigators and making up privileges, what were Clooney et al saying?

Whatever the consequences. We can't demand freedom of speech then turn around and say, But please don't say bad things about us. You gotta be a grown up and take your hits.

Koff koff koff

I am a liberal. Fire away.

OK, here goes.

How can you tell George Clooney is wrong, out of touch, and telling about one third of the truth?

His lips are moving.

Have your people call my people, George. I'll try not to intimidate you too badly.

NWA Exploits Tall People

I'm 6'5. Middle seats at most airlines are cramped for most people; for me, they make flying a wretched misery.

Northwest gives me yet another reason to teleconference or drive:

If you don't want to get stuck in the middle seat on a Northwest Airlines flight, starting today you'll be able to pay an extra $15 to get a spot on the aisle.

Let's see - wretched service, no pretzels, no pillows, surly strikeprone staff, and making you pay to not feel like you're in the black hole of Calcutta...

...Why would one take Northwest, again?

Ironies of the Reformation

Martin Luther, John Knox and Jean Calvin, March 17, at the end of the Reformation. They have happened into a Saint Patrick's Celebration to relax.

LUTHER: "Yo, it's Saint Paddy's day!"

KNOX: "Aw, maaan - after a hundred years of war, I could use a corned beef sandwich, yo!

CALVIN: Nay, while verily fuch a fandwich would not be an unfeemly pleasure, we doth not have a dispensation from our prieft...

LUTHER: "Yo, you predestinarian numbn*ts, we don't recognize priestly dispensations!

KNOX: "No kidding, dork".

LUTHER: "Sarah! I'll have a Guinny and a Corned Beef"

KNOX: "Same, but make mine a Newcastle".

CALVIN: "What is thy least pleasureable brew?"

SARAH THE WAITRESS: "Probably Stella Artois..."

CALVIN: "Then hie thee forth and bring me fuch a beer. Indeed, be it fuch a travail, bring me two, the better to double my fuffering. And a corned beef fandwich..."

KNOX (Sotto voce, to Luther): "Why does he put "f" in place of the first "s" in any word?"

LUTHER (Sotto Voce to Knox): "Don't get him started..."

MARTY NEWTON: "Here's yer corned beef and beer, gentlemen".

ALL THREE: "Yea, verily!"

(All three reformation leaders pick up their corned beef fandwiches and take a big bite...)

(...and hold their sandwiches, awkwardly...)

KNOX: "This really sucks".

LUTHER (distasteful look on face): "Oh, father, why hast thou forsaken us?"

KNOX: "It tastes like salted phlegm!"

CALVIN (smacking lips in glee): "The fuffering be extreme!"

KNOX: "Sarah? Could I toss this and get a Sish and Chipf?"

Meme Alert

If I had no politics, music, dating or radio to write about, I'd still have Sheila's memes.

Of course, since she gets most of them from other people, I suppose she could stay the same...

Anyway...

1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18 and find line 4.

"wrong, to love so deeply?"
[from Beneath a Blood Red Moon, which is a trashy vampire novel my daughter apparently left sitting on the coffee table...]

2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can, what do you find?

The left arm of the very overstuffed loveseat I'm sitting in.

3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?

Cops

4. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

My kids, playing with Photopaint in the next room.

5. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

Went grocery shopping after work.

6. Before you started this survey, what did you look at?

Sheila's version of the survey.

7. What are you wearing?

A Charlie Brown shirt and jeans.

8. Did you dream last night?

I do rarely - and did last night. Very strange dream.

9. When did you last laugh?

My son told a very funny one-liner a little bit ago. He's extremely clever.

10. What is on the walls of the room you are in?

North: Big window facing the street.

West: Picture of my grandma and her sister when they were probably about 21 or so.

South: Print of Van Gogh's "Irises".

East: Pics of my kids hanging on the wall, as well as a print of "Grace".

11. Seen anything weird lately?

Things have made altogether too much sense. Weirdest thing to me was a pic of Aretha Franklin. She's gained so much weight that she reminded me of an Edvard Munch painting of Aretha...

12. What do you think of this quiz?

I'd rather be at Keegans

13. What is the last film you saw?

I rewatched Blackhawk Down

14. If you turned a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy?

Pay off my house, go on a bit of a spree at Willie's American Guitars, and plow the rest into investments pronto.

15. Tell me something about you that I don’t know.

I was voted "Least Likely To Be Legally Allowed To Have Kids". In high school and college.

16. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt and politics, what would you do?

Cure ALS.

17. Do you like to Dance?

Who doesn't?

18. George Bush.

Second-best president of my lifetime.

19. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?

I don't have to imagine; Bun is my first child (not her real name; I'm not going to put that on the blog). Different name? I always like Corrinne.

20. Imagine your first child is a boy, what would you call him?

Had Bun been a boy, he might have been named "Stephen Raymond"; Stevie Ray Vaughan had just died...

21. Would you ever consider living abroad?

Absolutely.

22. What would you want God to say to you when you reach the pearly gates?

"I knew you could do it.

23. 4 people who must also do this theme in their journal.

Any four? Because I pick Aiman Al-Zawahiri, Marisa Tomei, Mark Knopfler and Brian Urlacher.

Next!

The Universe Taunts JB Doubtless

Woman gets beer from her kitchen faucet in Norway:

It almost seemed like a miracle to Haldis Gundersen when she turned on her kitchen faucet this weekend and found the water had turned into beer...By an improbable feat of clumsy plumbing, someone at the bar in Kristiandsund, western Norway, had accidentally hooked the beer hoses to the water pipes for Gundersen's apartment.

I'm waiting to hear a story of a guy in Scotland getting single-malt from his Water Pic.

Human Behavior

Uh oh - another government spokesperson has suggested that people take precautions against disaster - in this case, bird flu:

In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a deadly bird flu outbreak approaches the United States.

Ready or not, here it comes.

Remember what happened the last time a government official suggested that citizens might benefit by not waiting patiently to die in the event of a disaster? Weeks of material for John Stewart.

We'll wait to see, this time, of course. But sometimes I wonder if there aren't certain segments in our socity that wouldn't benefit from a catastrophe sometime before 2008.

All I'm saying is that it'd be interesting to keep an archive of what people say about bird flu now - especially those who poke fun at those who, say, urge people to stay indoors and away from the rest of the world for a period, should things get ugly - and what they might say should (heaven forbid) things do get ugly.

Purely for amusement's sake, of course.

Irrelevant?

McClatchy Media, owner of the Star Tribune, is buying Knight-Ridder, owner of the Pioneer Press, for a whole wad of money:

The deal, which is expected to be announced today, throws into doubt the future of daily newspaper competition in the Twin Cities. McClatchy could operate the Pioneer Press, shut it down or try to sell it off to another company -- and U.S. antitrust officials could have a voice in that decision.

The deal also comes as the newspaper industry is gripped by uncertainty as readers across the country have begun to drift away from printed newspapers.

In the short term, this sale is going to set media-watchers into a tizzy - but in the long term, it'll be more like the sale of Packard to Studebaker; before too long, it won't matter much.

The good news for McClatchy's Strib? It's in touch with its market.

The bad news? That market is inner-city liberals and coupon-clippers. As people discover other options (and/or quit taking freebie subscriptions to the Strib, which clutter their porches but drive up the Strib's "Circulation"), they will continue to drop the paper.

Five'll get you ten that in thirty years there'll be three newspaper companies in the US - operating out of three newsrooms, with a bunch of local stringers providing just enough "local content" to justify putting "Minneapolis" at the top of a "Star/Tribune" that's written and produced in New York and Chicago, and printed at the lowest bidder somewhere in the Twin Cities metro.

Message Girl A Hoax

The story never seemed quite right:

Since her 13-year-old daughter vanished Monday, Stella Browne says she has been getting text messages from the girl saying that someone followed her and that she woke up in a dark basement.

"Help. I'm scared. I don't know where I am," one of the text messages that Natasha Browne sent her mother said, Stella Browne told The Jersey Journal of Jersey City for Wednesday's newspapers.

And, naturally, it wasn't:

A 19-year-old man was charged Friday with having sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl who sent her mother a series of chilling text messages claiming she was being held and abused by captors.

The girl was found in New York on Thursday, three days after she disappeared, amid suspicions that she pulled a hoax.

The man, Sebastian Osario, was one of three questioned this week by Jersey City police investigating the girl's disappearance. Osario met up with the girl Monday after she cut school, but they parted ways that afternoon, authorities said.

It was a Verizon phone.

Can we charge her now?

Loonalanche

I'm not quite sure what happened, but my comment section got bumrushed yesterday. I must have stood too close to one of the entrances to the fever swamp.

Typical of the comments (although this is a blog post) was this bit that linked to me last night, charmingly entitled "Thought-deprived goon of the day" - there's that fabled liberal respect for rational discussion in action again - which, like so many of yesterday's commenters, took umbrage with a line from my post:

...Babs Streisand and Janeane Garawful and Alec Baldwin and Eddie Vedder and for that matter Bruce Springsteen are all people of average intellect (if not accomplishment) who “read an article” and want to pass it on - if we’re up to it.”

Average accomplishment?

Who the hell are you?

Someone with basic reading comprehension, for starters; I didn't think I was being especially unclear; neither Streisand nor Baldwin nor Springsteen nor Gwynneth Paltrow is a genius; all have accomplished quite a bit, in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) not being a genius.

Mr. "Iowa Liberal" continues:

And this is in service of praising Peggy Noonan? She says, “Clooney…treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors.”

Projection aside from the Noonan and her Noonan-ite “I don’t know if you liberals can understand our Reagan-ite ways” mentality, isn’t this a shoddy attempt to mask the fact that you’re trying to revive Joseph McCarthy and Clooney assembled a brilliant reminder to the public exactly what our nation realized over four decades ago?

Wow. A strawman (Noonan never mentioned "Reagan-ite ways" in even the most oblique terms, and never insulted anyone's intelligence), and a cowardly diversion into McCarthy talk (who exactly is stifling George Clooney's freedom to express his drivel? Does he take his millions-per-picture and drive home to a re-education camp? Hello?)

George Clooney is no genius. He - and his supporters - are also wrong in assuming that Hollywood is necessarily a great example to follow in race relations: Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar all right - for a role that oozed racist condescension, in a movie that was so sickeningly racist that I, personally, have never sat through an entire screening; I hate Gone With The Wind, truth be told. Jonah Goldberg writes:

Clooney wants to buy some grace on the cheap by getting credit for McDaniel's Oscar, and we might as well give it to him. But he should expect to carry some of the baggage as well. After all, while McDaniel's wonderful performance was certainly something to be proud of, the role she won it for -- an archetypal Aunt Jemima -- is hardly the sort of thing they like to encourage at the Image Awards. According to an illuminating 1999 article by Leonard Leff in the Atlantic, when McDaniel received her statue, she told the assembled Academy that she hoped she'd "always be a credit to my race."

Margaret Mitchell's book "Gone With the Wind" is hardly a staple of the progressive canon. Its black characters were either savages or servants content with being slaves. The Ku Klux Klan, meanwhile, was a "tragic necessity." Sidney Howard, charged with making a screenplay out of the book, told Mitchell that she offered "the best written darkies, I do believe, in all literature," and hoped she might help him bring them to life on the big screen.

It's the same Hollywood -that gave us Amos 'n Andy, Step'n Fetchit, Birth of a Nation. Ever seen that one? It glorifies the fecking Ku Klux Klan! And "Hollywood" regarded it as one of its greats, for decades! The "body" up to which Clooney sucked on Sunday is the same one that gave Al Jolson an Oscar for appearing in blackface.

Hollywood dealt with AIDS - after decades of portraying homosexuals as preening, prancing caricatures. Hollywood's serial westerns made untold millions in 1910-through-1960 dollars fanning the most racist possible stereotypes of Native Americans, Latin-Americans and Asians.

So is this the "out of touch" that Clooney is so proud of being?

This is the Hollywood the Fever Swamp is defending?

In The Interest Of Clarity

I got some linkage from a couple of my favorite all-snark local leftyblogs the other day.

Now, let's bear the following in mind:

1. If you mention two leftyblogs, you are generally, probably dealing with half a dozen bloggers, meaning your comment could touch on 6^2, or a total of 36 different blogs, because - here's the funny part about Minnesota leftyblogs - there really are only like 15 liberal bloggers in Minnesota. Except for Jeff Fecke, they all write for each others' blogs; in fact, since there are (without Fecke) 14 bloggers, the total number of Minnesota leftyblogs is or will soon be 14^2, or 196. That's presuming that some permutations don't repeat themselves: for example, if Mark Gisleson, Eva Young, MNob and Rew don't accidentally start two collaborative blogs among the four of them, rather than one, plus the original blogs on which each of them either write alone or in collaboration with one more more other members of that foursome, to say nothing of the blogs on which each collaborates with people not in that foursome. It's like keeping track of Dave Grohl's bands, if that helps. I know it probably doesn't.
2. It goes without saying that "leftyblogs are primarily snarkfests" is sort of like declaring that "public restrooms have lots of funny smells"; a statement so obvious as to be unneeded.
3. By the same token, picking a "favorite local leftyblog" is like picking a "favorite smell in the public restroom"; an interesting diversion, perhaps, but lacking much in payback (yes, I know that's unfair; there are a few local leftyblogs that are well-written and that I genuinely enjoy; they are significant in their solitude).

So with that in mind, I noted that both Jeff Fecke (of the BlOTMoL and, oddly, no other blog) and "Clever Sponge" (he of many local blogs, and who indeed may be less a "person" than a "concept") both jumped to the same deeply flawed conclusion.

Both responded to my piece the other day regarding Colonel Joe Repya's response to Nick Coleman's hatchet jobs on the Gold Star Family's TV ads.

I entitled the post "Absolute Moral Authority". That's probably where the problem comes in.

Step back with me through history, won't you please, to last year. Leftybloggers were leaping up and down like poo-flinging monkeys, declaring every war supporter who hadn't served in the military a "chicken hawk" (especially in the presence of a few veterans who came back and came out opposed to the war). A few months later, the phrase itself was born in reference to Cindy Sheehan, who had - with me, so far? - "Absolute moral authoritiy" according to the leftymedia in criticizing the war, the Administration and everyone who disagreed with her her supporters, because her son had been killed in Iraq.

So - and again, I'm trying to spell out the history of the "argument" here - supporters of the Administration who don't drop everything and join the military have no authority, while people who have an intimate stake in the war - through their family, especially through loss - have absolute authority.

OK. With you so far.

So Joe Repya - who has left retirement after serving in two wars, so nobody can call him a "chicken hawk" (back to this in a bit) - should have authority to speak, right? Especially as compared to Nick Coleman, a man who neither served (joked on the air, in fact, about his days as a lice-ridden, unbathed anti-war protester at the U of M, standing on the roof of a U building and giggling like a schoolgirl as protesters mixed it up below him) nor checks facts before devoting three columns to attacking the Gold Star Veterans' ads (primarily, I think, to divert attention from Brian Melendez' attempts to squelch the GSFs' right to free speech using the machinery of the DFL) - right?

I entitled the piece "Absolute Authority" as a riff on the left's and the media's assignment of same to the likes of Sheehan, even as they deny the even stronger claim to authority of the likes of Joe Repya.

Didn't seem that opaque to me. Was it?

Apparently so; Mr. Sponge wrote:

Mitch Berg anoints Joe Repya as the Supreme Being of the Universe.

Now, we've become accustomed to Mr. Sponge's sense of hyperbole (he is to rhetoric what Germans are to jazz), but, er, no. Not the "supreme being of the universe". Sponge, who has referred to Repya as a "sick mind", and who has castigated the Strib for giving Repya and war supporters too much visibility in its pages, is mistaken (or had his conclusions written before reading anything on the subject); Repya is far from the supreme being. In fact, the hierarchy of the Universe is as follows:

1. God
2. Christ
3. Mike Ditka
4. Bruce Springsteen (politics excepted)
5. Almost everyone else
6. Mike Hatch
7. Mike Malloy
8. John Wayne Gacy
9. The people who did that "Come on Barbie, Let's Go Party" song a few years back.

Clear so far?

Jeff Fecke, on the other hand, said:

Mitch Berg has declared LTC Joe Reppya (yes, that Joe Reppya) to be the most moralestest person evah.

I wondered about the appended "evah", but I'm told Jeff does the most fabulous Eva Gabor impression. However, otherwise, no - apparently, the pure cleverness of my Sheehan allegory has zigged as yet another leftyblogger zagged.

But maybe there's another explanation:

But Mitch also thinks FOX News is overrun by liberals, so his judgement isn't all that good.

Mr. Fecke is apparently huffing paint. I never said Fox was "overrun by liberals" - merely that their news coverage is a lot closer to center than the Big Three, CNN or most newspapers (thus, by comparison, appearing "conservative"; from Sacramento, Boise is "east", I guess), and that mixing their right-leaning programming (like Hannity and Colmes) with their news is misleading at best, disingenuous at worst.

Sigh.

OK, to clarify; Joe Repya's authority is not "absolute" in the metaphysical or philosophical sense.

Just more absolute than that of any of his critics.

Clearer now?

Tragedy Tomorrow...

...Food and Wine tonight!

Give 'em a call, tell 'em the Patriot sent you, and meet me tonight...

Noonan on Clooney

Peggy Noonan on the Clooney Speech:

George Clooney is Hollywood now. He is charming and beautiful and cool, but he is not Orson Welles. I know that's like saying of an artist that he's no Rembrandt, but bear with me because I have a point that I think is worth making.

Orson Welles was an artist. George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.

Clooney, of course, verges on metaphor; Babs Streisand and Janeane Garawful and Alec Baldwin and Eddie Vedder and for that matter Bruce Springsteen are all people of average intellect (if not accomplishment) who "read an article" and want to pass it on - if we're up to it.

There is, of course, a difference:

More important, Orson Welles had a canny respect for the audience while maintaining a difficult relationship with studio executives, whom he approached as if they were his intellectual and artistic inferiors. George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors. (He is not alone in this. He is only this year's example.)

And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. And so in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor the other night he instructed the audience about Hollywood's courage in making movies about AIDS, and recognizing the work of Hattie McDaniel with an Oscar.

Of course, Clooney spoke of Hollywood's "courage" in reinforcing an orthodoxy they always supported, for better or worse (and in some cases it is better, to the extent that Hollywood led the nation in mentioning AIDS and, it's worth mentioning, Communist infiltration (under Ronald Reagan's leadership of the SAG).

Other issues - islamofascism, the excessive power of government, and other less-fashionable issues? Not so much.

Atomizer Goes To The Barricades!

Atomizer relates the news that the new owners of Elvis Presley's image rights might clamp down on "unauthorized" part-time Elvi in Las Vegas.

He's none to happy about it:

I'm packing up my gold lame suit, TCB necklaces and my outrageously large gold tinted sunglasses, loading a grocery bag full of grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches and hopping on the next plane to Vegas where I'll be chaining myself to the bronze statue of the King in the lobby of the Las Vegas Hilton until Mr. Sillerman promises to leave our nation's hard working Elvii alone!!!

You gotta fight the powers that be.

(Just between us, and don't tell Atomizer I wrote this, but it'd be a fun April Fool's joke to pass the word that Bombay Gin has been bought by a Red Chinese company, which plans to infuse the recipe with tea and rename it "Shanghai Surprise"...)

NPR News Flash: 19 out of 20 Nazis Oppose Normandy Landings

An NPR report on last night's episode of The World notes that crowds are taking to the streets in Khartoum to protest a US proposal to deploy UN troops to combat the genocide in Darfur.

To a backdrop of protesters chanting "Down With US" in Arabic and (conveniently) English, correspondent Jonah Fisher noted that people seemed to be condemning the United States for its suggestion of involvement, including bits with various Sudanese Moslems professing a desire to fight the US and the UN. The report conveys the impression that there's a groundswell of anti-American fervor among Sudanese, who just want to keep a Sudanese problem as a Sudanese issue.

Unmentioned; it's the country's Moslem majority, centered in Khartoum, that is the aggressor in Darfur. Also unmentioned; the government, which has never been mistaken for nice people, is unlikely to tolerate a "demonstration" around foreign journalists that criticizes the government that is behind the mayhem.

Good thing our gatekeepers in the mainstream media are so thorough!

The Flak

Kate Parry, the rationalization machine "Readers Representative" at the Strib, tries to get cute...:

One of my favorite pieces of research so far this year...used MRI scanners to study brains of political partisans...when the partisans rejected criticism of their favorite candidate, it was an emotional rather than a reasoning response, and was accompanied by "flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers."...Here I thought those readers were angry when they fired off that e-mail, when really they were having a flare of pleasure.

...in her latest piece backing her paper's columnists.

She dodges a key point, however:

These rather extreme suggestions haven't worked very well: The Star Tribune's three metro columnists -- Doug Grow, Katherine Kersten and Nick Coleman -- remain fully employed. But beyond the fact that the tactic isn't working, readers who dismiss the views of columnists in that way risk missing out on an important opportunity to fully engage in the debate that will shape the future of Minnesota.

Oh - this is a debate?

Great! When do we get our response?

For example - this being a "debate" and all - when we catch Nick Coleman in yet another filthy lie, we get to respond. Right? I mean, with something other than a ruthlessly-edited half-paragraph "letter to the editor" with a one in a hundred chance of seeing the light of day?

Of course it's not a "debate", and when stuffed shirts like Parry call it such it is intensely irking.

Not as much as the platoon of strawmen the likes of Parry use to try to smear those who dare attack the mother paper:

Efforts to silence or weaken opposing voices mire our country in a paralyzing standoff.

You mean, like when Nick Coleman tries to get bloggers who draw blood fired from their jobs? That kind of chilling, silencing and weakening of the "debate"?

When politically active and savvy citizens approach things that way, is it any wonder our elected representatives can't seem to rise above politics, make some statesmanlike compromises and get their work done?

What an incredible crock.

Bloggers have caught the Strib's columnists - Jim Boyd, Doug Grow and especially (!) Nick Coleman in bogus facts, mythical assertions and flat-out defamation, over and over.

But we and our elected representatives are the ones with the problems?

Ms. Parry: Project much?

I try to take the mind-set of a social anthropologist: How interesting that we live in such an angry, politically divided time that those who disagree with a columnist want that person dismissed.

That's less "social anthropology" than "whining", actually. Kate Parry is shocked, shocked, that people are angry about her paper's one-sided, slanted, fact-challenged editorial slant; she turns it into the critics' problem.

Question: Doesn't that make Parry more of a "Publisher's Represenative?"

A Wine Affair

Hey, this will be fun - I'm doing my first-ever "solo" personal appearance, this coming Thursday (March 9) from 5:30 to 7:30, at "A Wine Affair, a monthly food 'n wine expo put on by the show's great friends at Three Sons Catering.

So what exactly is going on? From the event website:

Exploring some of the most innovative wines from Australia and New Zealand, and pairing with tapas from Down Under.

Be advised that, having eaten Kangaroo Jerky at the MN State Fair (during one of the Fraters' Fair Food specials), I'm here to tell you that "tapas from down under" are going to be, as Steve Irwin would say, a yuuuuuuuge imrovement!.

Now, for me, until recently "fine dining" was "a McDonald's with an indoor playland", so this is going to be a lot of fun. I hope y'all can join me there!

And if you call 612-874-0880 and tell 'em the Patriot sent you, you get 10% off, too.

Hope to see you there!

UPDATE 03/08: Sign up fast! Tickets are going!

It's Hard Out Here...

...for a mid-level user interface analyst.

UPDATE: Well, no. It's really OK.

But after three days of thinking, I had to comment on this year's "Best Song" Oscar winner, "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" by the 3-6 Mafia.

It's been Laura Ingraham's number one story since Monday, I think. Which, I think, does a huge disservice to both Laura's culture-war comrades as well as to her own audience.

The song is...how to describe it...

...how, inde...[yawn]...sorry, indeed?

How...does...odndlf....

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

[SCRATCH]

Sorry. While saying so against the backdrop of Oscar "Best Song" winners is the very definition of redundant, the song is deadly dull. It's a total nonentity.

I say this as a white guy who used to be a rap DJ (note to JB Doubtless; send all incredulous feedback here. I have liked a fair amount of rap, from old Run/DMC through the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, NWA, the DOC, De La Soul, Me Phi Me, and a bunch of others (mostly over a decade ago), so weight the comment accordingly; rap is ungawdly dull these days.

No, seriously. Not only is gangsta rap (and 3-6 Mafia are to gangstas what Vanilla Ice was to Frank Sinatra) these days is about as dangerous as "Barney", but there is nothing to distinguish "Pimp" from 99% of what you hear from every boom car on University Avenue:

• Anonymous black chick singer belting out the title line
• A bunch of central-casting "thugz" reciting cookie-cutter lyrics, identically, time after time
• Every urban music cliche, every song, all the time

Oh, and the woman who sang the title line, over...and over...and over again? When she tried to do the obligatory obligato at the end (or, as it's known among the LA posse, the Oblizzle-gizzle) (Patti Labelle, protect me from your followers)? Most comical musical moment of the year, and proof that maybe Ashley Simpson and Britney Spears are right to tape the crap in advance.

Worst part? The movie wasn't bad at all. Not great - but head, shoulders and ankles better than any rap movie since Eight Mile.

It's hard out here for a fan. Or a sorta fan.

Roots Are Showing

I went to my precinct caucus last night.

If turnout is any indication, things might be finally picking up for Saint Paul Republicans.

The last time I attended the caucuses, my precinct was represented by...me. And my son, who I brought with.

Last night, we had five people - a sixtysomething architect, a very young married couple (students across the street at Hamline) and another student. Not much - I'm sure my DFL precinct had dozens - but it's an off-year with neither senatorial nor mayoral races, so it was great to see people. Our precinct is entitled to NINE delegates - so we are all going to the District 66 Convention in April.

There's a certain shell-shock to being a Republican in my part of Saint Paul; you look at your neighbors; they seem fairly normal; then you realize they elected Chris Fecking Coleman as mayor, and (worse yet) Jay Fecking Benanav to the City Council. It's like discovering the nice couple down the street runs a meth lab, or that the little boy who delivers your copy of "Grit" is in jail for killing someone with chainsaw.

Where are you now, Brett Schundler? Saint Paul turns its lonely eyes to you...

Absolute Moral Authority

Joe Reppya - Twin Citian and now veteran of three wars, who volunteered to go back to Iraq, where he will likely be celebrating his sixtieth birthday shortly - hammers Nick Coleman:

Too bad that our veterans and Gold Star parents have to purchase ad space to get their side of the argument out. However, veterans owe Coleman a debt of gratitude for one thing: He, along with the recent statements of Minnesota DFL Party Chair Brian Melendez, exposed the real "Big Lie" the radical left and some like Coleman in the media have been saying about the war in Iraq. That "lie" started at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom: "We support the troops but not their mission."

By calling the Midwest Heroes ad "un-American, untruthful and a lie," they have proven they support neither the troops nor their mission. I suspect they never have.

I'd love to hear Coleman's response.

The Antibiotic Report

Foot over at KAR is having a rough week.

Stop by and offer your best wishes.

Unless you're a barking moonbat. That'll just aggravate him.

Another Nasty Season

It's apparently going to be another nasty hurricane season.

Mora from Babalu Blog is philosophical:

What bugs me about it is that they were right last year and the year before. I guess if fate wants you to eat mierda [Spanish for...well, Merde], you won't be able to do it in nibbles

Pa Russkiy

My sentiments exactly!

You should learn Russian You should learn Russian. You like to be able to speak to people wherever you travel if even just a little bit. You are smart enough to learn this language and have the patience to follow through with it.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Via Peg at What If?, a fellow Russian-should-learner.

Do Svedanya Rodina!

Touch 'Em All

I met Kirby Puckett one time, at some sort of media event or another back after the miserable '86 season.

I remember him saying something to the effect of "stick with us, everyone; we'll do better next year."

And in the back of my mind, the way it came across, I actually believed it.

Puckett was right, maybe beyond his own expectations. Or maybe not.

You've no doubt heard the news; a hemorraging stroke killed Puckett; his death was announced about 10 minutes ago.

Navel-gazing dime-store philosophers chatter about the almost spiritual timelessness of baseball. Puckett at the top of his game made you believe it.

There were times, living in Minnesota - the Sad Sack of sports states, the little state that traditionally couldn't - when one had to pinch oneself to realize you were in the same place and time as a player like Kirby; a Hall of Famer with the highest right-handed batting average since DiMaggio and the ability to galvanize a team of journeymen around him into one of the most successful rummage-sale franchises of its era.

Pat Reusse, at his best:

Rick Stelmaszek is the longest-serving Twins coach. He was extra tight with Puckett since they both grew up on the South Side of Chicago.

"Those 15 minutes from the end of infield until we went back down the stairs to play the game," Stelmaszek said. "That was the 'Puck Comedy Show.' He was in every corner of the clubhouse, getting guys loose.

"Twenty minutes to 7: We waited for Puck to make the announcement, 'I'm driving the bus tonight, boys. You're along for the ride.' And if it was a night when he said hop on the bus, he always came through.

"Game 6, right? Unbelievable."

Game 6, Twins-Braves, 1991 World Series.

There was more time than usual between taking infield and the first pitch. And Puckett made sure everyone in the clubhouse knew this: They could start worrying about Game 7, because he was going to take care of this one and keep the Twins alive.

"Puck had gotten us to extra innings, and then Atlanta brought in Charlie Leibrandt to pitch," Stelmaszek said. "I was down in our bullpen, and Puck was screaming at me, 'Stelly! It's over, Stelly.' And, then he hit the home run."

There was nothing quite like the feeling of being in downtown Minneapolis, the nights of the Game Sevens of both of the World Series, the ones that Jack Morris and Jeff Reardon put away but that Puck got us into through such heroics, keeping the Twinks in the match during the inevitably-hairy Game Sixes that, in hindsight, were so utterly crucial.

Puckett's departure from the game - premature, but showing a kind of class that one doesn't associate with sports anymore - led to some unplanned, unseemly twists in Puckett's life, and finally to his disappearance from the city for which he did so very much. But watching the tapes of Puck playing back in the day - on the field and on the street after both of the World Championships - one can still get the feeling that the world got a whole lot lighter, than everything was possible.

I miss that today, very badly.

God bless you, Kirby Puckett.

The Wonder of the One Hit Wonder

Premise; I love one-hit wonders and obscure music. Some of my favorite music of all time is stuff that crossed the ether to me on some lonely drive across the prairie on some lovesick night back in 1982; a ghostly, static-y hook from some AM station in Chicago or Cincinnati or Edmonton that grabbed my consciousness for a few moments, brought a flash of joy or lust or self-realization, and disappeared, never to be heard again.

In fact, it's almost better that way; sometimes when you do hear them again, it's just so...pedestrian.

Going to college in North Dakota in the early-mid '80s, before MTV came to the area, the great Friday/Saturday night ritual for those of us who didn't have either girlfriends or money to go drinking was to flop in the dorm TV lounge and watch WTBS' "Night Tracks", a three-hour program (11PM-2AM, then repeated until 5AM) that showed the latest videos. When I finally got to watch MTV, it was almost anticlimactic; "Night Tracks" was a lot more adventurous with their three hours a week than MTV was with 168, it seemed; they threw out a lot of very cool music...

...some of which I saw once, on a cold, lonely, exhausted weekend evening 20-odd years ago, and and never again.

Until now, thanks to Elder.

There are a lot of reasons to ding on Elder: his lutzes are atrocious, and his son keeps beating me at one-on-one and Horse - but after this, all is forgiven. Or not.

Youtube.com is an amazing internet resouce. Dang near any video footage you're interested in is available for your viewing pleasure.

News footage? 'awkey fights? Sure.

But of course, I went for the music videos.

The golden age of the music video was between about 1983 - when video producers figured out that point-by-point literal representation of the song was not a "plot", and that full-length shots of people playing guitar solos (or, for the most part, live concert videos) weren't really all that interesting - and probably the early nineties, when everything had officially been done.

There was a lot of experimenting going on back then; a lot of it didn't suck.

Early in rock video history, it was possible to take a really great song, slap a cheezy yet pretentious video on top of it, and basically ruin everything. Dire Straits' "Romeo and Juliet", from Moving Pictures, is one of the most acheingly lovely songs of all time (and one of the most deeply satisfying acoustic guitar songs I know). I remember the video from some lonely night back in '82 or so as being kind of cool, the one time I saw it. Boy, was I wrong; it's painfully literal, almost like watching someone pantomime the lyrics.

Of course, early tries to disconnect the concept from the lyrics didn't always work, either. "Gloria", from U2's sophomore record October, is one of the most, er, glorious songs ever; for a late-teen Christian who played rock and roll, it was the mission in three minutes, plus the closing coda is the most riveting piece of anthem in rock history. Unfortunately, video makes the song look like a trip to the Gulag - in fact, may have been a piece of "black" parody propaganda done by East German filmmakers...no, I'm making that part up. It takes way too much skill to take such a wonderful song and make it so utterly...tedious? Of course, this long-lost fave of mine shows U2 figured out the concept video, eventually. I always loved that one.

It wasn't hard to see why the best English bands didn't come from England; this and this and a ton of others

Attempts to be slick didn't always work, but sometimes crude was blazingly effective; The Sex Pistols and this gloriously lo-fi Clash home movie from some bar in New Jersey were fun finds.

I'll never figure out why the hair metal fad of the late eighties happened at all, with Hanoi Rocks (especially "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", the best bumper song in the history of talk radio) available.

Oh, yeah - and this one was part of the soundtrack of most of my Twenty Years Ago Today series...

Grr. Curse you, Elder. And thanks!

Puckett

Puckett sidelined by stroke:

Kirby Puckett was listed in critical condition early today after surgery for a stroke, and the Minnesota Twins asked fans to pray for the Hall of Fame outfielder.

Puckett, who led the Twins to two World Series championships before his career was cut short by glaucoma, was stricken Sunday at his Arizona home.

Watch your weight, check your blood pressure.

And if you're so inclined, pray for Puckett and his family.

Death Spiral

A story from late last week - Air America is three weeks away from losing its NYC affiliate, according to Brian Maloney.

Apparently WLIB has been bought by someone who wants to compete, nationally, with Air America. That's the long-term problem; in the short term, it will leave Air America without a huge chunk of its listenership:

Even if Air America somehow finds a last-ditch way to remain on the air in the nation's most important market, it will be at a tremendous disadvantage, compared to what it has had up until now.

Unlike our previous reporting [the Gloria Wise scandal], which the company could either deny or ignore, this will be impossible to spin. It's either losing WLIB or it isn't.

And we'll apparently know by the end of the month.

Read the whole thing.

Attention, Pod People

One of the questions we at the NARN get asked more than any other is "When are you guys going to start podcasting?"

The answer (other than John Hinderaker's "Powerline Radio" podcasts, which are another thing altogether) has been a long, long time coming...

...and, with any luck at all, shall be here in the coming week.

Stay tuned.

Rite of Spring

A phone message gave me advance notice of the first sign of spring in the Midway:

Spring has sprung in the Midway, I tapped my first keg of the season. Now it's time to check the schedule and see when I can have the first 'Drinking Moderately' gathering.

Who needs all that "melted snow" and "blooming plants" when you have beer?

A Little Bird...

...sent me this mass email from Air America Minnesota (Remember them? Ever since they ditched the last of their local weekday programming, I don't think I've wasted a word or a scintilla of thought on them):

Just a reminder that your precinct caucus will take place next Tuesday night. Registration starts at 6:30 pm and the caucus starts at 7:00 pm. If you would like to take some AM950 BUMPER STICKERS with you on Tuesday to put on a table, stop by the office at 11320 Valley View Road. We are on the southeast corner of 212/Valley View Road. To find out where your caucus is, just go to www.dfl.org. Thank you!

Thank you again for all your help. We really appreciate it!

I'm sure that's legal. The ethics, I think, are kind of funky.

I don't think I've ever seen "AM1280" or "Evil Talk Empire" giveaways at precinct caucuses - anyone?

Do we have the basis for a class action suit here? Anything?

Please?

Faith Is The New Gates

Dominos Pizza founder Tom Monaghan is starting a Catholic city:

For Tom Monaghan, the devout Catholic who founded Domino's Pizza and is now bankrolling most of the initial $400 million cost of the project, Ave Maria is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to spreading his own strict interpretation of Catholicism. Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values. He controls all the commercial real estate in town (along with his developing partner, Barron Collier Cos.) and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives. If forced to choose between two otherwise comparable drugstores, Barron Collier would favor the one that honored that request, says its president and CEO, Paul Marinelli. Discussing his life as a millionaire Catholic who puts his money where his faith is, Monaghan says: "I believe all of history is just one big battle between good and evil. I don't want to be on the sidelines."

The ACLU, naturally, is having the vapors, as on this Tucker Carlson interview with Florida ACLU poobah Howard Simon:

Tucker, before you jump to the quick and not very well informed conclusion that that is just anti-Catholicism, I want to tell you that it was about 10 years ago when the United States Supreme Court correctly ruled that a group of Hasidic Jews in upper New York state, in a town called Kiryas Joel, could not receive government funding because that town was organized around pervasively sectarian religious principles. And when you‘re required to conform to religious principles, that town is not fitting for governmental authority.

This is not Catholicism—this is not a story about Catholicism. It‘s a story about any religious group trying to exercise governmental power.

Except it's not; it's a corporation exercising its right (or, in Minnesota, "right") to sell land to whomever it wants to.

I'm in no danger of moving to "Ave Maria" - leaving aside that I'm a committed protestant, it's in fecking Florida, where the cockroaches fly through the fecking air, for crying out loud (in fact, I'm trying to picture the notion of a Presbyterian town; you could buy contraceptives at the pharmacy, but people would debate endlessly over the propriety of applauding at sports events, concerts and in church; every year during Black History Month, the emergency rooms would be overrun with elbow and hip sprains from people trying clap or gyrate to any form of music).

Simon's point about the Hassidic community hinged on the federal money the Hassidim received - which would not apply to Ave Maria except in the form of government services like the Post Office. Which makes me wonder why the USPS serves Utah...

The Other Charles Lindberg

I hear on the KARE11 morning news that the legislature renamed Rochester's veteran's hospital after Charles Lindberg, former US Marine Corporal and the last survivor of the group that raised the original flag on Mount Suribachi:

He's also a native of Linton, North Dakota.

Lindberg wrote a book - probably impossible to find - back in the 1960's about his experiences in the Marines and on Iwo Jima. It was in my old high school library; I'd love to find a copy.

Down The Ratlines

I've always felt it was one of the Democrat party's great weaknesses; the urban African-American base over which the party needs to maintain absolute control to survive, is up in arms over the miserable state of public education.

I've come to believe that this is the GOP's great unexploited opportunity; getting out ahead of the Dems on education, especially in the cities (and Cities) where African-American parents swing far to the right of the average urban parent on school issues - to the point where they're abandoning the public schools faster than the rest of us.

Katherine Kersten addresses this issue in yesterday's Opinion Journal.

Something momentous is happening here in the home of prairie populism: black flight. African-American families from the poorest neighborhoods are rapidly abandoning the district public schools, going to charter schools, and taking advantage of open enrollment at suburban public schools. Today, just around half of students who live in the city attend its district public schools.

As a result, Minneapolis schools are losing both raw numbers of students and "market share." In 1999-2000, district enrollment was about 48,000; this year, it's about 38,600. Enrollment projections predict only 33,400 in 2008.

Public school apologists respond "it's just the way the cities are going!".

Probably not:

A decline in the number of families moving into the district accounts for part of the loss, as does the relocation of some minority families to inner-ring suburbs. Nevertheless, enrollments are relatively stable in the leafy, well-to-do enclave of southwest Minneapolis and the city's white ethnic northeast. But in 2003-04, black enrollment was down 7.8%, or 1,565 students. In 2004-05, black enrollment dropped another 6%.

Now, I think that most of the traditional measurements for schools - test scores, especially - are pretty useless. So, in a sense, are graduation rates, which measure domestic turmoil and cultural values on education as well as the school system's effectiveness.

Still...:

Black parents have good reasons to look elsewhere. Last year, only 28% of black eighth-graders in the Minneapolis public schools passed the state's basic skills math test; 47% passed the reading test. The black graduation rate hovers around 50%, and the district's racial achievement gap remains distressingly wide.

And then there are the personal recommendations:

Louis King, a black leader who served on the Minneapolis School Board from 1996 to 2000, puts it bluntly: "Today, I can't recommend in good conscience that an African-American family send their children to the Minneapolis public schools. The facts are irrefutable: These schools are not preparing our children to compete in the world." Mr. King's advice? "The best way to get attention is not to protest, but to shop somewhere else."

With all due respect to the teachers who read this space (Flash and, incidentally, my father), it's almost as bad in Saint Paul.

Yep - my dad was a high school teacher for going on four decades. My mother's parents were also both teachers; Grandma Pat retired as a junior high English teacher, and Grampa Don taught science for a while until changing careers. So I grew up steeped in the culture of the public school. Until about ten years ago I personally was one of those Republicans who was a big public-school proponent.

So the public schools had to work mighty hard to alienate me.

They finally did it; I (and my ex-wife) have pulled my son out of the public school system; with any luck, my daughter will follow soon. More on that later.

Kersten notes the local phenomenon that's absorbing some of the refugees; the charter school system:

While about 1,620 low-income Minneapolis students attend suburban public schools, most of the fleeing minority and low-income students choose charter schools. Five years ago, 1,750 Minneapolis students attended charters; today 5,600 do. In 2000-01, 788 charter students were black; today 3,632 are. Charters are opening in the city at a record pace: up from 23 last year to 28, with 12 or so more in the pipeline.

According to the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, Minneapolis charter school enrollment is 91% minority and 84% low-income, while district enrollment is 72% minority and 67% low-income. Joe Nathan, the center's director, says that parents want strong academic programs, but also seek smaller schools and a stable teaching staff highly responsive to student needs. Charter schools offer many options. Some cater to particular ethnic communities like the Hmong or Somali; others offer "back to basics" instruction or specialize in arts or career preparation. At Harvest Preparatory School, a K-6 school that is 99% black and two-thirds low income, students wear uniforms, focus on character, and achieve substantially higher test scores than district schools with similar demographics.

The public school systems have been attacking charter schools for a long, long time; school district PR offices (school districts need PR offices?) ensure that charter school difficulties get plenty of media coverage (while, naturally, the growing catastrophe of the Minneapolis and St. Paul systems is spun to favor the all-stifling bureaucracy as much as possible).

Why? Oh, why do you figure?

Since the state doles out funds on a per-pupil basis, the student exodus has hit the district's pocketbook hard.

And the school system bureaucracy, as usual, is worthless:

The school board has promised to address parent concerns, but few observers expect real reform. Minneapolis is a one-party town, dominated by Democrats, and is currently reeling from leadership shake-ups that have resulted in three superintendents in the last few years. The district has handled budget cutbacks and school closings ineptly, leading some parents to joke bitterly about its tendency to penalize success and reward failure.

While conservatives (and some teachers) rail about the teachers unions, administrations bear a huge share of the blame.

But we'll be going more into that later. Back to politics:

The city's experience should lead such states to reconsider the benefits of expansive school choice. Conventional wisdom holds that middle-class parents take an interest in their children's education, while low-income and minority parents lack the drive and savvy necessary. The black exodus here demonstrates that, when the walls are torn down, poor, black parents will do what it takes to find the best schools for their kids.

Is anyone at the MN GOP listening?

Ketchup As Sacrament

Lileks this morning, kicking off with a "foodie" quote:

“Sharing food is with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.” M. L. K. Fisher.

Criminey. Look, I like a good meal as much as the next fellow, but it’s not some sort of sacred ritual...People have a hole in the soul-spot, and they’re going to fill it with religion, politics, art or food. Preferable a nice balanced combination of all four, but we all know someone who chose one and has no room for the other three. The people who worship food – “foodies,” to use a term that makes my skin crawl – are the least interesting zealots imaginable, because in the end it’s just grub. Well, actually, in the end end, it’s much worse. I’m all for good healthy diverse food, but the minute someone starts talking about ritual and connections and elemental truths I want to shove a Space Food Stick up their nose. Taken lightly? Ever eaten with a five-year old lately?

Or teenagers?

People who replace religion with food are indeed tiresome; the question, which variety irritates one more?:

• Aescetic foodies, the ones in their hairshirts with their macrobiotic vegan exercises in self-abnegation, who passed "holier than thou" back sometime before they went from "green and tan only" to "must be picked live from the vine".
• Jim and Tammy Bakker foodies, the ones that put their food somewhere above their mortgage as a personal priority
• Fundamentalist Foodies, the ones who reminisce about how much better is the French perspective about food ("They linger over their meals, they savor it! Lunch is a production"), or the Japanese one, or...

Read the whole thing.

Found Music

Congrats on the new IPod, Sheila! As one of your commenters noted, it'd be just wrong to indulge in coveting during the holy season.

One of your other commenters brought up a bit of deja vu, with a remark about the fun combinations of songs that come up when you're on "shuffle" mode.

Back between my first two careers, I worked as a nightclub DJ - for, like, three miserable years. One of the things I did (and did very well) was "eat-mixing". If you've been in a dance club, ever, you've probably heard it; two songs mix together so smoothly that the beat never interrupts; it feels like one long, cohesive rhythm track. Which, indeed, it is.

One day I was walking down Hennepin Avenue by the old Green Mill on 26th street, meeting a friend for lunch. It was the middle of summer, a swelteringly hot day. A convertible pulls up at the light, blasting Jody Watley's big hit, "Looking for a New Love".

As I'm about to walk into the Mill, a jeep pulls up next to the 'vert, with its top down, blasting Bad Company's "Rock And Roll Fantasy".

They were perfectly in sync, like someone was mixing a novelty record, live on the scene.

"It's all part, of my rock and roll fantasy, yeah yeah yeahhhhh....

Then, as (I'm sure) now, I was probably the only person who got it. And I used it at the club (probably the Mermaid) that night. But I also found a lot of other little accidental beat-mixed drop-ins like that.

For example: It's amazing how many R'nB songs of the past twenty years have a breakdown in the middle of exactly the right speed and beat to fit The "Mr. Ed Theme", in perfect rhythm.

Fondest Dreams; Crushed?

In the past week, the media and left have been audibly slavering over the possibility of a civil war in Iraq.

It is, indeed, the last shot at redemption for their policy; it's the only way Bush's policy can objectively "fail" in coming years.

You can hear it in Katie Couric's voice, in John Stewart's sneer, in the perfunctory way so many lefty commentators pronounce that it's already begun.

According to the WaPo, they may have jumped the gun:

In the days that followed the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine, Iraq seemed within a hair's breadth of civil war. But an aggressive U.S. and Kurdish diplomatic campaign appears for now to have coaxed the country back from open conflict between Sunni Arabs and Shiites, according to Iraqi politicians and Western diplomats speaking in interviews on Monday.

"Localized difficulties also persist, but I think, at the strategic level, this crisis -- a mosque attack leading to civil war -- is over," Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said in a telephone interview. "It was a serious crisis. I believe that Iraq came to the brink and came back."

Read the whole thing.

The Action

In re JB's abstinence from alcohol for Lent (and his challenge to the Fraters to do the same), Folsom James Phillips commented:

Good God, Mitch, whatever you do, don't give up gambling until you take the "under" on JB going without booze for 40 days. And if Atomozer [sic] tries, move to Vegas.

Heh.

But if we were in Vegas, what would the board look like?

Here at Mitch's Purely-For-Amusement Sportsbook, I have the over-unders for the Fraters' Lent Challenge:

Chad the Elder: 12 days.
Brian: 2 days.
JB: 7 days.
Atomizer: No action on that bet.

Place yer bets.

For amusement only, of course.

Southern Accents

The south takes a lot of hits here in Minnesota.

To be fair, the South deserves a few shots. Southern culture has a very violent undercurrent to it; parts of the rural south have higher murder rates than the worst inner cities; some sociologists explain that "Redneck" culture inherited the worst aspects of 1700s Anglo-Irish culture, including the penchants for duelling and brawling. The economy runs a little slow; a manager at a company in North Dakota for whom I once wrote copy as part of a college interim project explained "people up here get more done before 10AM than people in Alabama do all day" (obviously anecdotal, and take it for what it's worth - but he was hardly the only person who's said this).

And then there are those pesky education statistics.

Minnesota, of course - at least, in the cant of the Minnesota Liberal - is the polar opposite. Good economy, strong institutions, good "education scores", whatever that means (of which much more later). To them, the explanation is simple; we have high taxes.

Low taxes? Bad education, violence, lousy economy. High taxes? All is hunky-dory.

Like most truisms, the real answer is much more complex.

And complexity makes many leftybloggers sad.

Jeff Fecke of BloGoTMoL displays the sort of political egalitarianism that makes so many leftyblogs such a delightful read:

"Okay, let's see if I can explain this in itty-bitty terms so the 'wingers here get it"

Uh huh.

Jeff, whose claim to fame is being to political prediction what Nihilist is to football picks, is a pretty typical DFLer in that he doesn't like the South much:

Pretty much by any measure you want to use--social, economic, socioeconomic, education, mean income, average income, cultural, or whatnot--the South is behind the North...their divorce rate is 2-3 times that of the North...Why is it that we in the godforsaken liberal North should be so much of a better place to live? "

Yep. The South has some social issues.

Why? Well, just like the reasons Minnesota is "successful", it has very little to do with tax rates or amount of government intervention:

• Southern society evolved from 200 years of pseudo-feudal, neo-aristicratic society, with a rigid caste system that was little-disturbed by the waves of immigration that caused such upheaval - and renewal - in the North. And just as 300 years of slavery gave African Americans a cultural sense of helplessness, a devaluation of the virtues of masculinity, and little sense of initiative (something slaves rarely need) that still cripple the culture today, the same culture helped create some of the same features in white, lower-class society; by bother with education when your future (so says the culture) is wrapped up in being a sharecropper, just like your father?
• The South lost the Civil War. Not just lost, but lost badly. The South never had much in the way of industry before the Civil War (they imported most of their artillery, rifles and warships; they had a fraction of the North's railroads, manufacturing output and infrastructure); afterwards, it was even worse. So after the war, both of the South's infrastructures - its huge basis in slaves and its meagre one in manufacturing - were destroyed. More importantly, the sense of defeat mixed with the aforementioned sense of peasant helplessness to make the general sense of the place even worse.
• While the left likes to snicker about the "Bible Belt", they do so ignoring the Calvinist religious traditions, with their emphasis on hard work, that played their role in making the North, especially the Midwest, so successful compared with the South
• In the case of the far upper Midwest, the sense of Scandinavian communitarianism, contrasted with the South's neo-feudalist caste system, both helped (making more cohesive communities) and hurt (provided a springboard to the intrusive, destructive neo-socialism that co-opted and fouled the communitarianism by the 1960's).

Note that none of these involve "taxation". Communitarianism is important - and has nothing to do with government intervention.

their education level as a whole is far behind the North...

That pretty much depends on:

1. what you use to assess "education level". Test scores? Funding? Pick yer poison. All have their problems.
2. The level of prejudice and stereotype you bring to the conversation.

Southern culture, stereotypically, doesn't value education to the extent it does in the North.

Oh, and yes, there are a lot of racists and sexists and zealots there, too, more than there are up here by percentage.

Perhaps - although the most egregiously racist people I've ever met are union guys, from whatever part of the country (in fact, the most corrosively racist person I've ever personally known was a Teamster and a DFL organizer from the East Side of Saint Paul. Not that that's emblematic of al DFLers. Just saying). So I'd ask Jeff for a cite...

...and then to explain why so many middle-class blacks are moving back to the South. Is it because middle-class blacks are incompetent and don't know what they're doing.

That's nothing against Southerners generally--I'm sure many of them are nice people. But their economy sucks

Raleigh/Durham? Dallas/Fort Worth? Atlanta?

All generalizations are false.

Um, that pretty much depends on:
1) what you use to assess "education level". Test scores? Funding? Pick yer poison. All have their problems.
2) the level of prejudice and stereotype you bring to the conversation.

Just saying - "measuring" education is as dicey and agenda-driven as a Zogby poll.

Given the opportunity to live in Mississippi rent-free for life, I'd pass--because by any reasonable measure, it's a lousy place to live...But the fact is that none of the whining righties here would move there either, despite the nirvana that its low-tax, pro-God, anti-gay, pro-business, anti-welfare system should have achieved by now.

Here's a thought experiment; take a society that has a centuries-old tradition of learned helplessness and devaluation of many of the virtues you and I consider normal - hard work, egalitarianism, yadda yadda. Slap high taxes, a socialist bureaucracy and and a Minnesota-style nannystate on top of it. What do you have?

You have Nigeria. Or Louisiana.

But let's be clear; as a "whiny righty" (Jeff Fecke's gift for inappropriate generalizations has kept pace with his gift for prediction) who has spent his whole life in the North, there are reasons I'd not move to the South. I love winter. I hate humidity. I hate bugs. I don't like rednecks. The same reasons I don't live in Farmington.

But let's look at Jeff's rationale at face value. You want a stable, low-crime, cohesive society with better schools and strong social cohesion - in other words, the anti-South?

Then climb on the truck and move to the Dakotas.

North Dakota has better schools (depending, as always, on how you measure; SAT scores, standardized test scores, and graduation rates equal to or better than Minnesota's, tied with best in the nation; all of that at 40% less money per capita), lower crime, lower illegitimate birth rates, and lower unemployment (in the 6-8 major cities) than Minnesota. Fargo rode out the last recession in MUCH better shape than Minnesota.

Oh, yeah - and much lower taxes, a much less intrusive bureaucracy.

So, whiny lefties - why aren't you up there?

Because it's not about rational decision-making to the left (and I'm generalizing far beyond Jeff, here); it's about stereotypes.

Minnesota has a lot of advantages, things that have nothing to do, largely, with statism (aka Liberalism); strong work ethic, good access to natural resources, no civil war that crushed the region's social and economic development for 100 years, no social fabric that was debilitated by 200-odd years of quasi-feudal pseudo-aristrocracy before that, a Calvinistic religious tradition that emphasizes hard work and communitarianism (not statism, although we certainly adopted that in Minnesota, too), and on, and on.

Who knows where we'd be if we'd played to our strengths, and bypassed our great weakness - our stifling bureaucracy and arrogant, all-consuming public class?

Posted by Mitch at 09:01 AM | Comments (29) | TrackBack

Collapse of Dead Tree Media Alert: MoWho?

The Memphis Flyer reports on yet another mainstream media problem; they have little traction with young people:

Newspapers have to deal somehow with the loss of young readers. A former colleague, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, told me she spoke recently to college students interested in writing careers. She could understand them not knowing about Ernie Pyle and Mike Royko. But they'd never heard of Maureen Dowd, either.

In a fair and just world, the question itself would have been absurd.

Ash Wednesday Observances

I'm not Catholic (although I went to a Catholic school for six months, sort of - it's a long story), but my aescetic, pleasure-abjuring, guilt-seeking Scandinavian heritage appreciates the notion of Ash Wednesday and the Catholic Lenten tradition of giving something up for 40 days.

In the past, I've given up a number of petty pleasures and vices - swearing (several times - and it's difficult), potato chips, sugar, throttling those who irk me, that kind of thing.

Now, if you know the Fraters like I know the Fraters, you gotta know that giving up the Big "A" has gotta be hard. So the start of JB's Ash-Wednesdayan post looked like a major switch:

In past years I've given up beer.

Whoah.

I read that, and sat for a moment. That's dedication, I thought. I mean, I don't have the attachment to hooch that JB, Chad, Brian and (especially) (Especially!) (No, Especially!!!) Atomizer do - drinking has never been, as JB puts it, my "steady companion "; I routinely go weeks without a drink, months without any alcohol in the house (at the moment my stockpile is a bottle of wine that's sat unmolested atop my 'fridge for eight months, and a single lone Heineken that's been in the fridge since Christmas of 2004). The closest I come to having a debilitating vice is the blog you're reading right now.

So I was ready to whisper "good on ya, JB"...

...until I read further:

...Other times wine. I just never thought that I could make the commitment to giving up all booze--I mean, that would be crazy talk right?

[SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH]

Giving up one variety of drinking is a sacrifice?

That's like swearing off truckstop hookers, but switching to call girls to compensate! You're not one iota light in the sacrifice department - just changing the dosage and delivery!

I mean, I'm a little foggy on my Catholic practices, but does one go to one's priest and say "I went and gave up gambling! except for slots, horses, texas hold 'em, craps, sports book, blackjack, pitching pennies and playing the numbers. OK, I'm really only giving up roulette. That counts, though, right?

To be fair, JB seems to have seen the error of his ways:

Well this year JB is giving up booze. All of it.

Well, now we're talking, anyway.

This is especially hard this week since "My" band is opening for an act on Friday and we are being paid in free drinks...

To be fair, we are swerving past "genuine sacrifice" and into "existential horror", now.

And thence to "crazy talk":

So with this in mind, I would like to challenge the rest of the Fraters gang to follow JB's lead and give up the hooch this Lent. Yes, Atomizer that includes you. Think of how good that Easter martini will taste after 6 weeks of teetotalling!

Atomizer without booze? That's like Mount Doom without lava.

Best of luck, JB.

Me? Hm. What to give up?

I gotta think about this.

The Evil Tobacco Empire Strikes Back

A group of Saint Paul bars are suing the city to stop the March 31 onset of the city-wide smoking ban:

Sixteen St. Paul bar owners sued the city Tuesday, asking a judge to halt its smoking ban from taking effect March 31 because they claim the city doesn't have power to enact it.
The bar owners contend that because the St. Paul Public Health Department merged with the Ramsey County Public Health Department in 1996, the city "lacks regulatory authority" over public health issues related to smoking.

"This isn't about smoking; it's about which level of government can regulate it," said Patrick O'Neill, the attorney representing the bar owners.

It sounds like the kind of case only a lawyer could love:

St. Paul City Attorney John Choi said the city has authority in its charter, police power and the federal Clean Air Act. "There are a lot of red herrings in this lawsuit and not much legal substance," he said.

For those who don't follow Twin Cities politics: After moderate and sane mayor Randy Kelly was ushered from office on a wave of anti-Bush bigotry last November, the new mayor, Chris Coleman, signed a comprehensive smoking ban so fast that a few of the strings that Jay Benanav was using to control his hands snapped from the strain.

Prior to the council's action, the city fell under Ramsey County's less restrictive ban, which allowed smoking in bars but not restaurants.

The suit was filed by owners of DeGidio's, Mr. C's, Costello's Bar, Minnehaha Lanes, Champps of St. Paul, Lonetti's Lounge, Gabe's by the Park, Wild Tymes, Wild Onion, Fabulous Ferns, Winners Tavern, Yannarelli's Bar, the Hat Trick Lounge, the Town House, Ron's Bar and the Arcade Bar.

All of the businesses had been granted exemptions from the county smoking ban.

I suggest you patronize these places. I know I do.

Not all at once.

You know what I mean.

Reader Mail

I get a fair amount of comments on this site. Occasionally an interesting question pops up.

Reader "Joshua" - a blogger, actually, although I don't really care to dig up the URL - is a classy guy. Seriously - a genuine role model for our kids:

But seriously, AK, does it ever occur to you to give poor Mitch a reach-around when you're burrowing up his a**? He sounds like he could use it and, frankly, coming up for air every so often might do you some good too.

With that combination of class and logic, it's hard to believe he could have left this complaint:

I stopped visiting this blog visits to Planet Mitch were ultimately unrewarding. Mitch is never wrong on Planet Mitch

He is both classy and perceptive.

Am I ever wrong on "Planet Mitch" (I still prefer "Shot In The Dark")? Occasionally. Sure.

Not often, of course. The prime product of this blog is my opinion. I do some reporting, some passing on of other peoples' reporting, and some stuff that's probably more "diary" than anything. But for the most part, this is Mitch's Screed Zone.

Now - am I ever wrong? Of course. It's hard to get to 43 years old, and raise kids, and exist in the adult working world without getting a firm sense of one's own fallibility.

Naturally, the stuff of this blog - politics, music, current events, culcha - are not immune to that infallibility.

But if you think you're right and I'm wrong, here are a couple of pointers:

• Stating your point rudely, using the sort of crude scatology that in a just world would still get your mouth washed out with soap, is a lousy place to start. Not that it curdles my ears or anything; be advised that whatever you write, I've heard more clever and more shocking. That means you.
• Actually state a point. I used to teach writing. I count off for style as well as spelling. You're an adult now - stop writing like a precocious sixth grader. Just because your boss and your family coddle your shortfalls inliteracy doesn't mean I will. If you can't do it, get help. Life's too short to write like a Mississippi prison inmate.
• Rewarmed Kos "information" will be ruthlessly mutilated.

Other than that? Go to it.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXVII

It was March 1, 1986, a Saturday night.

The good news: It was payday. And after everything was taken care of, I had a couple of bucks to spare. And I figured I had a few things to celebrate.

After the offer to move into the house in South Minneapolis with the group of women, I'd checked the place out. It was a four-bedroom just off 46th Street, not far from Lake Harriett. The plan was that I'd live in the basement - a half-finished (panel walls, tile floor) room. It had an upside; lots of elbow room, and I had a bathroom more or less to myself (no mean feat, in a house with a bunch of women).

Better yet: my roommate, far from being upset that I wanted to bail out after four months, was actually happy about it; he wanted to leave Minneapolis to go back to grad school for another Masters. Journalism, this time, to go with Social Work. The timing was perfect.

I figured I could budget for a night on the town to celebrate.

My party budget; $2.50.

I walked to the Cardinal Bar, on 38th Street, where $2.50 could buy you a party.

I walked into the dingy, suffocatingly-smoky room, sat at an empty bar stool, and ordered a beer; it was 75 cents. I savored it, the first beer I'd had in a bar in quite some time.

To this day I'm not quite sure what happened next. I ended up in a conversation with the guy next to me, a DFLer who worked as a union maintenance worker. I ordered another beer, and the argument - a good-natured debate between a fortysomething union snuffy and a newly minted conservative grew, twisted and turned. We went around and around about the incentivization of sloth, the evil of the USSR, and infantilization of Minnesotans...

...until my $2.50 ran out. "Gotta go!", I said. "Thanks!"

"Siddown!", said the DFLer. "This is a fun argument." He slapped down a fiver.

I wound up arguing with him - and a few other guys - until closing time. They kept 'em coming - six beers. Or seven. Or nine. Not really sure today. I wasn't sure that night, for that matter.

I staggered home, across Hiawatha, across the tracks. It was a very cold evening, and buzz aside, I felt every shiver of it. I sloshed up Dight Avenue, thinking there might be something to that whole "arguing politics from a conservative perspective on the radio" thing. I was also thinking I was going to hit on that one chick in the sales department. I think I may have also gotten into an argument with a boxcar sitting on a siding.

Naturally, I chundered mightily when I got home; I'd become quite a lightweight in the roughly six months since I'd had more than one drink at a sitting. And the hangover the next morning? Worst. Ever.

Worse than that? I had to make it to the studio at noon to run the board and screen the calls for "Religion On The Line", "Ask The Doctor" and "Money Talk".