Shot In The Dark

Original Thinking!

I almost yakked up my skull when I heardthis story on Weekend Edition this morning:

Environmentalists concerned over global warming are considering a radical idea: Nuclear power as an acceptable way of making electricity. Unlike electricity from burning coal and gas, nuclear power doesn't produce the greenhouse gases that warm the atmosphere.

Oh.

Like we conservatives have been saying for a quarter century, y'mean?

Great "discovery", there, "environmentalists".

Lying Liars and the Democrat Party That Endorses Them

Margaret Martin on two new DFL ads chock-full of lies:

Case #1: Patty Wetterling’s ad on Michele Bachmann’s position on a national sales tax. The ad says Bachmann supports it. She doesn’t. One of the Bachmann’s chief positions is to scrap the current Federal tax code. She was a tax attorney who once worked for the IRS so she should know. She has said she would consider a national sales tax as an alternative. Wetterling’s Ad makes it sound as if Bachmann supports a National Sales Tax ON TOP OF our current federal taxes...Which is better? That’s up for debate, which is what Bachmann wants. The independence party candidate actually advocates the Fair Tax so maybe Patty is confused. She wouldn’t comment. Eric Black agrees that the ad is wrong.

I'm convinced; the DFL has gone into Goebbels mode; tell enough big lies often enough that the ill-informed will eventually accept them as truth. It's about the only thing Wetterling has.

Case #2: Amy Klobochar’s ad making it sound as if her name is synonymous with the jail cell door clanging shut. The most surprising part is a sequence with Tyesha Edwards’ Parents saying how Amy put their daughter’s killers "behind bars." It ends with the mother saying "Mark Kennedy you should be ashamed of yourself." A very effective statement. But it isn’t true. A bunch of gang members shot up the street on the day Tyesha died. One of the indiscriminate bullets fired went through the wall of her house and killed her as she was sitting at the dining room table doing her homework. In the end, all the gangbangers pled guilty to lesser offenses. More importantly, as part of the plea arrangment they didn’t have to testify against eachother which also limited the prosecution. Amy’s office agreed to these pleas. ...to anyone living in Minneapolis who remembers this case, it doesn’t seem like Tyesha got anything like justice. Why her parents are getting in front of a camera to thank Amy is anyone’s guess. I only remember that they weren’t happy at the time with the outcome of the process.

Amy Klobuchar's Minneapolis is a place where kids are in grave danger, thanks to her catch and release, plea-bargain-anything-to-avoid-a-trial approach to prosecution.

Beneath contempt.

Improbable

Elder on last night's Twins game, and local hero Joe Mauer's...er, dare I say Puckett-like tying homer.

Your Tax Dollars In Action

Swiftee on all that bleeding-edge biology going on at U of M Morris.

A Redder Shade of Purple

RCP notes it - putting the '08 GOP convo in Saint Paul might be not just part of an ongoing attempt to flip the upper Midwest to the GOP, but could also take T-Paw's act national:

But the big enchilada for the GOP is Minnesota. The Bush-Cheney ticket won 46% in Minnesota in 2000 and 48% in 2004. Governor Tim Pawlenty faces a tough reelection battle this year, but he's generally believed to have a slight edge. Assuming Mr. Pawlenty can take care of business this fall and remain reasonably popular through the summer of 2008, the 45-year old-will almost certainly be near the top of the short list for the eventual GOP Veep nominee.

Republican wins in the Midwest trio of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa would essentially force Democrats to have to flip both crucial battleground states of Florida and Ohio -- unless they were to make major inroads in the southwest quartet of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona (with 29 electoral votes).

And those inroads could happen. The four big western states are suffering from Vermont syndrome; fundamentally conservative states being overrun by refugees from the high taxes, high crime and inflated prices of their neo-socialist hellhole home states of New York and Massachusetts and/or California as the case may be (who nonetheless want to create the bureaucracies and tax structures that made their home states such messes to begin with...)

By the way, this is part of the fruit of the huge effort the MNGOP put into the '04 campaign (and the increased GOP vote tallies that resulted). In these sorts of things, patience is a virtue, and reward are played out over four to twelve year periods.

(Via Gary at KVM)

A Year Late

Where was this President Bush a year ago?

President Bush suggested Thursday that Democrats don't have the stomach to fight the war on terror, battling back in the election-season clamor over administration intelligence showing terrorism spreading.

"Five years after 9/11, the worst attack on the American homeland in our history, Democrats offer nothing but criticism and obstruction and endless second-guessing," Bush said at a Republican fundraiser.

"The party of FDR and the party of Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run," Bush told a convention-center audience of over 2,000 people. The event put $2.5 million in the campaign accounts of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and the state GOP.

Democrats immediately disputed the charge that they would hold back in the anti-terror battle.

The President is kicking donkey ass this past few weeks.

Where was this President Bush when it came time to nominate Supreme Court justices? When it was time to fight for social security reform? When the war effort needed to be defended against a full-court media press?

Well, better late than never.

UPDATE: Greetings, Daou Report readers!

Playing Politics?

Todays' Strib Editorial on the Interrogation Bill recycles the usual talking points; on the notion of "coddling" terrorists:

Perhaps Hastert means coddle folks like the hapless, innocent Canadian who was shanghaied by U.S. officials and sent off to Syria for a few months of softening up, then released with a "Never mind."

Um, no, Strib. I think Hastert, Bush, and every other American who cares about security is concerned about coddling Ramsi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the masterminds of 9/11.

I was about to write "Does the Strib editorial board know the difference?", but I erased it. Too inflammatory. Or so I thought.

But I've been carrying on an email correspondent with a moonbat who has about the same point of view as the Strib editoral board; she can't imagine that some of the accused terrorists are really, really, very very bad people.

By the Hastert definition, authorities also coddled Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. because, though he was sentenced to death for killing Dru Sjodin, he also was provided the presumption of innocence and fair treatment written into our laws and Constitution.

And this proves it - I should have asked if the Strib knows the difference between an citizen who was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced for an offense against Ameircan criminal laws, and a group of foreigners who were captured in the service of an extranational terrorist organization while trying to attack the US. Dealing with this is not as a rule the province of US criminal law!

The idealist thinks the Strib editors are merely stupid. The cynic thinks they're exercising the Goebbels playbook; repeat a big lie until the soft-minded and ill-informed believe it.

Almost Too Hard to Watch

I'd never actually seen this, Warren Zevon's last vid, for "Keep Me In Your Heart

I do miss Warren Zevon.

Blaming The Ember For Not Blazing

In my various spiritual journeys, the depression that dared not speak its name was the one I felt in the most intensely "spiritual" churches - the ones where God the Father (the authoritative aspects of faith) and God the Son (redemption and forgiveness) took a backseat to God the Holy Spirit. Churches that treated faith, it seemed, as a glorified seance, treating the faithful as a group of mediums for channeling the spirit of God.

While I respect that view of faith (as I do most - there's a part in me that's always felt a little uneasy around...not the Spirit of God, but people who focus on it to the seeming exclusion of all else in faith.

Its nadir was when I attended a service where my ex-nephew-in-law was giving his first sermon at a (redacted) congregation in the west 'burbs. The sermon, essentially, accused everyone who didn't speak...nay, orate magnificently in tongues of being just not quite Christian enough. Then, the main minister started his spiel, and the whole congregation started chattering away in tongues, racing for the front of the church and piling onto a rugby scrum of hand-laying - leaving my ex, the kids and I back in the pews.

To me, though, the tongue-speaking seemed anxious, almost panicky; "The minister just said that if the Spirit isnt' coursing through you, you got a problem; I'd better get things going here!", or so it seemed.

All in all, profoundly depressing - and something I couldn't really talk about much.

So I'm glad someone else does. Via Katie's Beer (an excellent MOB blog), I found The Internet Monk, who had the same experience only, as a former minister, moreso:

Want to make me feel bad? Sure you do.

Here’s how you do it. Drop me back into my revivalistic roots and leave me there for an hour. I’ll feel bad. And I’ll feel bad about feeling bad. The guilt levels will rise. Aisle walking tendencies, long dormant, will reappear. Misery about all my failures as a minister and as a Christian will soon overwhelm me. I won’t kick the dog, but I may look like the dog that was kicked.

Why? It’s hard to say, except that revivalism is a huge part of me from days when I had little choice about what I was hearing, seeing and experiencing as a Christian. There are aspects of my basic mental framework around the idea of God, what he asks of me and how I relate to him that are going to be forever trapped in a Baptist revival meeting and in the rhetoric of revivalism.

Revivalism, in my life, is a version of Christianity that continually stresses my own failure- and our corporate failure- to adequately submit to God, surrender to God, serve God or pray to God. It is this failure that accounts for the deadness of churches, a lack of “victorious living,” and, of course, the failure of millions to come to Christ in a spiritual awakening/revival movement.

Revivalism seeks to remedy this by emotional appeals: emotionally manipulative preaching and music. Spiritual warfare scenarios. The constant creation of “breakthroughs” that are dependent upon my response, especially in church and in the public invitation.

Revivalistic evangelism sends this guilt-ridden, emotionally manipulated Christian out- hopefully in a state of being “on fire”- to confront the lost with the claims of Christianity, heavily-laced with guilt and emotionalism designed to get “decisions” from the lost. Those who are adept at this- and all true Christians should aspire to be so- are “soul winners” whose hands are clean of the blood of the lost around them.

Revival evangelism; revival appeals to Christians for surrender; revivalistic invitationalism: get me near it, and it’s still there in me and with me.

And I hate it. I really, really hate it. When I am forced to go to events that are part of the world of Southern Baptist revivalism, I’m torn up inside. My mind is overrun with thoughts that God wants me to relate to him in revivalistic ways. And, of course, for the past almost 20 years, I’ve been on a journey away from this, and I believe I am finding a home beyond revivalism and the manipulations of my childhood and youth.

What parts of reformation Christianity, post-evangelicalism and my current faith journey are helping me find the Good News of Jesus beyond revivalism?

I’m greatly assured by the fact that God is sovereign, and is unfolding a redemptive plan for all of history.

I rejoice that I am part of this plan, both as a sinner and as a follower of Jesus.

I praise the Lord that his invitation to me is from Jesus, through the Holy Spirit and in the Gospel.

I am greatly confident that my prayers, while being part of God’s plan, are not the cause of success or failure in the cause of Christ.

Let us worship the one who can do, does and will do far more than we could ever ask or think!

Let us rejoice that the invitation to pray to the Lord is a joyful, not an oppressive invitation.

Read the whole thing.

Oversight Exposed

Via Norwegianity, I see, I've committed an oversight:

..here's more from Joe Bodell on Brodkorb's monumental hypocrisy, Spotty on factotums, Patrick (multiple posts which is only fitting since he was incomprehensibly savaged by Brodkorb last week over absolutely nothing at all), REW (new post at Power Liberal), AG at Truth Surfer, and Mitch (and I've got to say that the rightwing bloggers aren't exactly leaping to Michael's defense — you can hardly find Brodkorb's name at Powerline and the current front pages at Fraters, SCSU Scholars, Captain's Quarters, Spitbull and Hugh Hewitt have nothing on Brodkorb's woes — or successes).

Well, the bigger right-wing blogs aren't the insular quote-passing circle-jerk that so many of the yappier local leftyblogs are...

...but Gisleson's right. I haven't been writing heavily about Brodkorb's latest flap with the local leftyblog crowd. Michael - my new NARN colleague, as well as a blogger who needs no introduction around these parts - scarcely needs my help. He beats his opponents like a bongo drum, and breaks nary a sweat. Oh, he has indeed become a lightning rod for the local left; among bloggers, he is Gulliver, with madding little hordes of wee Lilliputian leftybloggers niggling over...

...his income, and whether it means MDE is "independent" or not.

Robin from Powerliberal writes in the MNMon:

With a background in opposition research gained in his years as Research Director of the Republican Party of Minnesota, Brodkorb has been able to parlay his skills and contacts into a consulting job that has been referred to in the Pioneer Press as "part-time researcher,"and in other venues as a simple part-time consultant. According to FEC reports, the Kennedy campaign considers him a "Press Consultant." With no clear definition available of what his position as researcher/consultant/press aide is, it seems easier to examine what it is not.

According to Brodkorb himself, it is not a position that involves his personal blog Minnesota Democrats Exposed. In his announcement about accepting the position with the campaign, he stated, "I am not now, nor have I ever been paid to blog." He wrote that it is his responsibility to ensure that running his site did not conflict with his consulting position, and vise versa.

The ultimate responsibility lies with each individual blogger to ensure they operate their blog without an inherent conflict of interest. As I am a Republican operative who exposes Minnesota Democrats, I am continually aware of my responsibility to disclose any conflict that could tarnish the effectiveness of my blog.

The over-all content of Minnesota Democrats Exposed will not change, but to ensure transparency you may notice a small drop in my coverage of the U.S. Senate race.

Instead, his coverage of the Senate race almost doubled, with nearly 70 posts in the three months since Brodkorb joined the campaign, in comparison to fewer than 40 posts on the race in the preceding three months, a period that included both the Republican and DFL endorsement conventions.

Um, so what?

Before I discovered YouTube, I wrote almost nothing about old music videos. Now, I do one or two a week. The difference? Interest combined with access. It's what he does, both for a living and an avocation.

Michael earns a living at political research - and discloses that fact. Since the facts are disclosed, the reader can make his/her own mind up about his "independence". I don't read Mike to witness his blazing independence from the GOP; I read it because he eats the DFLs lunch daily.

But how much does "independence" matter? Does it depend on the subject?

Robin asks:

Exactly how much does a "part-time press consultant" cost? According to FEC reports, $4500 per month, although a call to Brodkorb confirmed that his pay is actually $4583 monthly. On even a full-time schedule, this would come to more than $25 per hour. This amount is higher than all but four Kennedy campaign members, including, incidentally, Mark Kennedy's own (presumably full-time) campaign press secretary. This is also more than the monthly pay for all but three of DFL senate candidate Amy Klobuchar's staff.

When a journalist publishes a story, they do so under a newspaper, magazine, or foundation's mast. Everyone knows who is paying the journalist for that story, and most journalists are bound by a code of ethics. While analysts and commentators are free to embellish or take sides, journalists are expected to filter out or identify source bias in their accounts. Any reporter covering a "Michael Brodkorb story" should feel obliged to reveal to their audience that Brodkorb is a paid functionary on the Mark Kennedy U.S. Senate campaign.

A few quick questions here.

First - to any reporters out there - even without the disclosures of income from campaigns, how many of you have the faintest doubt about Michael Brodkorb's political affiliiations? Please post your answers - pseudonymously if you'd like, or via email if you'd prefer. But how many of you reporters out there have ever used Michael Brodkorb as a source without knowing either his financial underpinning or his allegiances?

Robin Marty from Powerliberal asks about Brodkorb's financial links to Kennedy's campaign. OK, fair enough.

Last summer, I got an email by mistake from the "Center for Independent Media" , about a program to pay Minnesota leftybloggers ("They've decided that Minnesota would be a great place for their next pilot program and are in the process of hiring a state coordinator", said the email) to write.

The Center for Independent Media is, of course, affiliated with ("rents space" from, in the receptionist's words) Media Matters, the Soros-funded lefty flakkery.

Now, Robin from Powerliberal took on the job as the coordinator, and took the check as well.

Robin stated:

I am happy to let everyone know that I have just turned in my contract, and I am now officially taking on the role of State Coordinator for the Center For Independent Media's New Journalism Pilot Program. In this role I will be working with other Fellows doing training, mentoring, and providing other forms of support.

I have also been hired on as a Fellow as well as the coordinator, and look forward the myriad of ways this will lead to producing democrat wins up and down the ballot in Minnesota this November.

Now, I congratulated Robin when I heard about this at one of Flash's "Drinking Moderately" parties last summer. And the congratulations were genuine; she'll do as good a job as she can given the quality of the left's blogs in this area (see under "turd-polishing").

But here's a question for you: I present for your review Robin's disclaimer. :

Robin Marty is a participant in the Center for Independent Media New Journalism Pilot Program. However, all of the statements, opinions, policies, and views expressed on this site are solely Robin Marty's.

Right.

And this differs from Michael Brodkorb's almost-precisely-identical claim exactly how?

And this:

This web site is not a production of the Center, and the Center does not support or endorse any of the contents on this site.

OK. And Michael Brodkorb can make exactly the same claim, with exactly the same justification.

What is the difference?

The amount of money? The source and destination? The amount of distress it causes you and your friends?

I'm just a simple conservative caveman. Help me out here.

Because it seems like the Twin Cities' leftyblog clacque is setting itself a nice, cozy double-standard.

Manic Depressive

I'm going to let y'all read a bit from the screenplay and shooting script I've written for the upcoming movie "Newspaper Newlyweds", the big Hollywood blockbuster that was optioned from the Fraters award-winning [*] series.

This scene visits Nick Coleman and columnnist-wife Laura Billings at home.

BILLINGS: "You like this?"

COLEMAN: "Oooh, yeah. That's hot."

BILLINGS: "Hot, huh?" (sly grin)

COLEMAN: "Yeah. Hot. Like the circle of hell Karl Rove is going to be sent to when justice is finally served"

BILLINGS: (Nonplussed): "Huh?"

COLEMAN: "Sorry, baby. Where were we?"

BILLINGS: "Do you like it when I do...this?"

COLEMAN: "Not as much as some rich fatcat likes Bush's discriminatory tax cuts for the rich..."

BILLINGS: "Nick..."

COLEMAN: "...or as much as Halliburton likes the fact that Bush lied to go to war and the nation is falling apart..."

BILLINGS: "NICK!"

COLEMAN: "Huh?"

BILLINGS: "You're doing it again!"

COLEMAN: "Doing what?"

BILLINGS: (regaining enough composure to coo seductively) "Talking about politics when I am trying to..."

COLEMAN: "Did you pay the Dayton's bill?"

The good news? The preceding is fiction.

The bad news? It's not the last fiction in this piece.

The worse news? Given the way Coleman writes about the region's big story this week - the Twins getting into the playoffs - I have to qualify the first bit of good news. We just don't know.

Let's join him - and, in so doing, let's ring the "Bell of Speciousness" every time Coleman slips in a pointless political reference:

October is often a time of surprises.

In election years, those surprises are often bad, and rumors are flying that we might be in store for another one [Ding!].

Wow. Cool!

But in the autumns when baseball breaks free from the demands of its grasping owners [Ding!] to win the hearts of people on this prairie, October surprises are a beautiful thing.

We could have beauty on tap this October.

Against all odds -- a dreadful start, the death of Kirby Puckett and a strong-arm effort to put a new baseball stadium on the shoulders of taxpayers [Ding! - although I agree in this case] -- the Minnesota Twins are in the playoffs.

Which means I will shut up, for now, about the new stadium. Because being in the playoffs trumps everything else.

Well, for maybe a paragraph...There are no Republicans or Democrats in the playoffs. No St. Paul or Minneapolis. No city or suburbs. No rich or poor. No white or black.Although if there is any such split to be found - no matter how tortured the logic to find it - Coleman's the man to dig it up. But I digress.

There is just us and our team. And we stand against everything that is NOT us and our team: Against the Yankees or the Athletics or the Tigers, against the National League, against the rest of the country. And against the oncoming dark and cold of a winter that will have to wait until the playoffs are over...There is a lot of baseball to be played, but Game 7 of the World Series, if it comes to that, won't happen until Oct. 29. And if it is played at the Dome, we not only will be lucky, we will be grateful for that ugly roof.

The average low on Oct. 29 in the Twin Cities is 35 degrees, barely enough to thaw the frost off the pumpkin. And while it might warm up to the low 50s (the average high for that day, over the past three decades), you should pray that you will need your long johns before the Twins hang up their mitts.

Just imagining the apple crisp chill of a late October night when baseball is still being played in Minnesota should lift your spirits. The Twins may not get that far -- after all, they are just one of eight teams in the playoffs.

But if they should end up in their fourth World Series, this will be one of those autumns we remember all our lives.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day - and Nick Coleman gets the occasional thing right. If and as the Twins progress through the playoffs, I'll write about some of the insanity that swept the Cities back in '87 and '91. They were two of the most amazing times of my life - and I wasn't even one of the million people who claim to have been one of the 60,000 people in the Dome on Game Six or Game Seven, either year...

By the end of October, Minnesotans hunker down, check the furnace and put the frozen hoses away in the eternal hope of finding one more spring, one more chance at bat. Having the Twins still playing in October feels like a taste of something so rare in this life that it feels like a preview of the next.

So, bring it on. We have the M&M boys, Mauer and Morneau, we have Johan and Boof-da, we have a shot and we have all winter to savor it.

Indeed

Let other people in other places worry about the other October Surprises that might be lurking[Ding!]. Political blogs are buzzing that Karl Rove has promised one [Ding!] in time to change the November elections, and the gloom-and-doom crowd is speculating it might be anything from another tax cut to a preemptive attack on Iran. [Ding!]

Wow - Nick Coleman has gone, in two years, from "bloggers are hobby hacks" to giving them prominent placement in his column.

But unless it is Armageddon, it can wait until November.

The Twins are in the playoffs, again. The air is full of expectation and hope. October is on its way, and a small-market team with small expectations is riding a wave of fans who rarely get this excited about anything that doesn't have a walleye on the other end of the line.

So let October come, and let it bring surprise [Ding!. But please don't wake us until it's over.

Promise.

[*] No, not really

The System Is Broken

Another school shooting; a man invades a school, systematically takes six girls hostage, and eventually kills one and then himself, while the SWAT team is working its way toward him.

Good thing schools are gun-free zones, or who knows what could have happened!

Students said the bearded suspect wore a dark blue hooded sweat shirt and a camouflage backpack. The sheriff said the man claimed to have a bomb in the backpack and threatened to set it off. The man was also toting a handgun.

Tom Grigg said his 16-year-old son, Cassidy, was in a classroom when the man walked in, fired a gun and began telling some students to leave and others — all girls — to stay.

"He stood them up at the blackboard," Grigg said. "He hand-picked the ones he wanted to get out."

The gunman told Cassidy to leave, but he said he wanted to stay with the girls, Grigg said.

"The guy flipped him around and put the gun in his face and said, 'It would be in your best interest to leave,"' Grigg said.

The most maddening part? That schools' responses to this sort of thing is to make sure all the targets students sit in nice orderly rows for the attacker:

Students described a chaotic scene inside after the intercom announced "code white" and everyone was told to stay in their classrooms.

The high school and a nearby middle school were soon evacuated. Jefferson County authorities — who also handled the attack at Columbine — sent a bomb squad and SWAT team to the high school.

Oh, that SWAT team. I don't endorse all of the linked articles conclusions - it takes a few leaps I'm not willing to follow - but as far as the benefits of sitting in nice orderly rows waiting for SWAT and hoping you don't die - well, "hope" is not a plan, especially when SWAT is not guaranteed to be much of a plan either. I've added emphasis here and there:

On April 20, 1999 students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a shooting spree in Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. By the time the two ended their massacre by committing suicide, 12 students and one teacher were dead or mortally wounded. Dave Sanders bled to death because the police took nearly four hours to reach the room he was in - even though students had placed a large sign announcing "One Bleeding to Death" in the window.

The first police officer on the scene exchanged fire with Harris and Klebold. Shortly after noon, police radioed that they needed to be resupplied with ammunition. It arrived in the form of almost 800 policemen, enough to form eight SWAT teams from five jurisdictions. Eventually, the on-site commander sent 50 members into the school.

Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone explained: "We had initial people there right away, but we couldn't get in. We were way outgunned." Jefferson County SWAT team commander Terry Manwaring concurred: "I just knew the killers were better armed and equipped than we were." SWAT teams made no effort to confront the killers in action; instead they devoted their efforts to frisking students and marching them out of the building with their hand on their heads.

The police response was paralyzed by concerns for officer safety. A spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department said: "We had no idea who was a victim and who was a suspect. And a dead police officer would not be able to help anyone." Don Kraemer of the Lakewood SWAT team explained: "If we went in and tried to take the them and got shot then we would be part of the problem. We're supposed to bring order to chaos, not add to chaos."

Now, it's hard to blame a cop for not wanting to get killed by some lunatic; I second that idea.

But if you have a room full of targets children who locked in a building with one or more killers, and the plan is predicated on waiting for the police, and the police plan is predicated on not actually going in to help, then what is the point?

It's time to drop the absurd restriction against teachers getting concealed carry permits. And it's time to come up with a better plan for what to do with students.

Want to be crushingly depressed? Ask your school's officials what their plans are for dealing with, say, a chemical accident upwind of their facility. Or a multiple-shooter attack like Columbine.

But remember, I warned you. You'll be depressed.

More on that later.

Convention!

Only two years until the '08 GOP Convo in Saint Paul:

When national Republicans came to town, they were feted at the new Walker Art Center, were taken for a cruise on the Mississippi by media mogul Stan Hubbard, vice president of Hubbard Broadcasting, were taken on a tour through both cities and were courted by the two Democratic mayors.

When national Democrats came to town, it was Pawlenty and Sen. Coleman's turn. In April, the mayors submitted bids simultaneously for the Democratic and Republican conventions.

By summer, talk had turned serious on both sides. Minneapolis and St. Paul had survived several cuts and were among the final contenders.

I'm hoping the NARN will be there.

Or at least rest of the guys. Me? I wanna be out on the street, covering the moonbats and protesters.

A convo, right in the heart of Franken's base? Ooooh, this is going to be fun!

Disclosures

Michael Brodkorb is Minnesota leftybloggers' favorite target - largely because he eats their, and their party's lunch so regularly they're starting to see their own ribs.

And Mike is beset by Lilliputians:

I'll fight a disclosure war with the liberal blogosphere any day of the week. I've got nothing to hide - do you?

Read the whole story, follow the links, make up your mind.

Down This Road Before

If you're not from Minneapolis, you might have heard of the crime wave that's been sweeping the city - or the fact that Minneapolis' crime has been high for a city its' size for quite some time.

You might not have heard why.

Minneapolis has a "weak mayor, strong council" system; the City Council has much more power than in, say, Saint Paul (Minneapolis has obliged the system by electing a series of very weak mayors - Don Fraser, Sharon Sayles-Belton and now R.T. Rybak).

As a result, things like picking a police chief are inevitably a matter of building painstaking consensus from councilors who, while inevitably rigorously left of center, represent areas and values as diverse as posh Linden Hills, the twitchy West Bank, blue-collar Northeast (outside the newly-boho lower part of the 'hood) and crime-riddled Near North. Which is why the city has had to go outside - to New York for Tony Bouza, Suffolk County (NY) for Bob Olson, and Dayton for Bill McManus. The local special interests develop, it seems, long dossiers on all local cops; by the time they get to senior command level, being squeaky clean (from the special interests' points of view) would be superhuman.

As, indeed, it may have been for Tim Dolan, the latest nominee, who lost a vote at the city's Police/Community Relations Council 10-6:

The concerns were raised about the death of Dominic Felder, who police said died during a struggle after he threatened to kill a neighbor.

The Police Community Relations Council (PCRC) members were concerned that co-chairs of the group had been given information on the shooting that Felder's relatives hadn't yet been told.

Also driving Tuesday's developments was a dispute about how many times Felder was shot.

The family believes that Felder was shot seven times, and Clyde Bellecourt, co-chairman of the PCRC, told community leaders that Dolan said Felder was shot seven times.

However, Dolan disputed that account, saying he told the co-chairmen of the PCRC that Felder had seven wounds, which could include more than one wound per shot. He said that the department is still investigating whether all seven shots fired in the struggle struck Felder. The Hennepin County medical examiner's office has said only that Felder died after being shot multiple times.

On Tuesday night, a spokesman for Rybak said the mayor feels pretty confident that he has enough support to get Dolan through for the full council vote. A majority of council members have informally thrown their support to Dolan.

But at least one of the Executive Committee members said Tuesday that the PCRC's move raises concern.

"The vote is clearly not a good sign," said Council Member Cam Gordon, who remains undecided on Dolan. "The PCRC is an important group."

Cities embody something of the character of their residents. Minneapolis has that Scandinavian passive-aggressive thing in spades.

Men Without Women

YouTube has justified its existence.

I have three favorite albums of the rock and roll era; Springsteen's Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The Who's Who's Next...

...and one you've never heard of; Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul's Men Without Women.

Oh, you probably know "Little Steven" - a nom de plume of "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, AKA Silvio Dante of The Sopranos, and the host of "Little Steven's Underground Garage, which is just about the only listenable music radio out there.

Van Zandt left the E Street Band in 1982 to kick off a solo career - and he kicked it off in style with his debut album, "Men Without Women". An homage to Stax/Volt soul, it made Time Magazine's ten best albums of 1982 (back when Jay Cox was Time's rock critic - hence, they weren't a complete joke). Raw, unrestrained, impassioned - one of the just-plain-best albums ever made.

The album was recorded in one day by gathering the band around in a big circle in the studio. And what a band; former Young Rascals Dino Danelli on drums and Felix Cavaliere on keys, Plasmatic Jean Bouvoir (the black guy in the white mohawk) on bass, and the horn section from the Asbury Jukes (now largely absorbed by the Max Weinberg 7, with E-Streeters Weinberg, Danny Federici, Gary Tallent and Roy Bittan helping out on drums, organ, bass and keys in the studio, and guest shots from Clarence Clemons, J.T. Bowen and Gary "U.S." Bonds on backing vocals.

The money Van Zandt saved on recording, he spent on...well, not a video. A full-length feature movie. He shot tons of footage - with no script. He soon realized that he had tons of footage - but no plot, no story, really no movie. He's stated he'd never ever release this movie, which has been something of a legend among the album's tiny coterie of fans.

And for the past 24 years, there's been a rumor - that there was one video released for the album, for one of the album's most wonderful cuts, "Forever", a song that made it to #40 on the Billboard Top 40, and stayed there for a week. And in a quarter century, I've never seen it.

Until Youtube.

Warning; the transfer is really bad. The whole thing is recorded fast, so the pitch is higher than on the original, and the video warbles in spots, taking the pitch up and down in wide swoops. The transfer is so bad, you can't tell if all the herky-jerky stops and starts are technical difficulties or that irritating early-eighties stop-action thing they did it vids (see Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend").

But it's "Forever", so who cares?

As a bonus, I found a better-quality vid of Van Zandt doing the gospel-tinged "'Til The Good Is Gone" with his old band, the Jukes, sharing vocals with Southside Johnny.

There was, of course, bad news; Van Zandt really only had one good album in him. The follow-up, Voice of America was a big disappointment, trading the Stax/Volt R'nB in for really dreary, overproduced garage-rock (you think it's an oxymoron? You're right!), and the raw passion about the trials of everyday life with screeds about Reagan and Thatcher and the Argentine Junta. The next three - Freedom No Compromise, Revolution and Born Again Savage, were worse, delving into poorly-done worldbeat and dance music but keeping the screeching lefty politics.

But for one glorious moment...

I have to get Men Without Women on CD.

Note To Our Texas Readers

Texas readers: don't believe the hype.

Because you are most definitely getting hyped, what with our former governor Jesse Ventura campaigning for Kinky Friedman:

If Jesse could do it, why not Kinky?

Distilled to its essence, that's the animating rationale behind Friedman's run for Texas governor, eight years after Ventura "shocked the world" (his words) by winning Minnesota's governorship.

Both kicked off candidacies that were widely derided as vanity campaigns. Both were initially dismissed as non-politicians who had near-universal name recognition, yet were given no chance of winning.

Now, just as Minnesotans were sold a bill of goods about Jesse Ventura, so were non-Minnesotans. We in Minnesota realized it when we saw Ventura cranking up spending, spending the surplus, and french-kissing liberal DFL leader Roger Moe in several straight legislative sessions.

Now, people like Limbaugh believed the hype for years - the idea that Ventura was really a libertarian populist with pseudo-conservative roots. Barring a few bits of political veneer (puffy rhetoric about legalizing prostitution, cutting vehicle and boat fees), it was crap, of course; Ventura was a sock puppet for a small cabal of "neolibs" - a couple of DFLers who were just a tad too moderate to fit into the Minnesota Demcratic Farmer Labor party of John Marty, Paul Wellstone and Becky Lourey.

And who were the members of that little ring of mushy pseudolefties? Former congressman Tim Penny, and...

...Dean Barkley, the architect of Ventura's improbable victory, and adman Bill Hillsman, creator of the rule-breaking campaign ads for Ventura and the late Paul Wellstone.

Penny and Barkley pulled the strings. Ventura talked.

For Texas' sake, my Texan friends - don't buy it. Walk away.

Dose Of Thunder

JB Doubtless, in his usual formtries to ding on Paul Westerberg - former leader of The Replacements, one of the Twin Cities' great musical exports - and their fans, one of whom I most certainly was:

I'm sure that some of Westerberg's hardcore fans, still desperately clinging to the long past glory days of teen angst and rebellion, will denounce this effort and brand Westerberg with the dreaded scarlet "S" as in sellout. Personally, I applaud his decision to dip his toe into the pond of mainstream entertainment and introduce his skilled songwriting to a whole new generation. Rather than continuing the Quixote pursuit of "breaking through" and bringing "my music" to the masses, as so many would-be rock stars do well past the age when they should know better, Westerberg is taking a realistic approach and recognizing that while this may not be exactly the future he dreamed of back in the heyday of the Minneapolis music scene, it ain't a bad way to make a living.

I was never one of those who ragged on the 'mats for "selling out" after their got their major label deal; Tim, their big-label debut, was their best album, and anyone who rags on someone who figures out how to do something they love for a living is someone who one doesn't need as a fan .

I was going to try to figure out a response to Elder, but one of Elder's own readers did it better:

the Replacements were unique. Husker Du was adound. Didn't move me like them. Fear, The Exploited, Black Flag, Soul Asylum, Dead Kennedys, name any loud fast band you want...I went to the shows, and the only thing that moved me was the Replacements. I wasn't into it because Rolling Stone had given their record 4 or 5 stars. I was into it because they were the Rock n Roll equivalent of James Dean.

Why did (does) James Dean speak to youth? Because, in his own words, "In this fist I have Marlon Brando saying 'F*** You,' and in this fist I have Montgomery Clift saying 'Love me.'"

The Replacements played loud and fast and hard, but they had a vulnerability, one they rarely showed on stage. But since you knew it was there, you understood it in the noise.

It's been 21 years since I've heard Tim. It still connects with me, not because it's "angry" - I have piles of "angry" records and tapes around the house that I rarely listen to - but because Paul Westerberg is an amazing songwriter, and at their best the 'mats were the greatest garage band in history. And that's a great thing.

UPDATE: I got an email and checked again; it was Chad the Elder, not JB Doubtless. I regret the curmudgeon-watching error.

Booyah

Jim Souhan:

Somehow, the Twins of Jason Tyner, Dennys Reyes and Boof Bonser made it to the playoffs.

Everyone who loves baseball played with skill and passion -- everyone who loves a good story -- should have synchronized their cork popping with the Twins late Monday night.

I love autumn when the Twins are in the chase...

When I Was A Kid...

...and living in North Dakota (where Vikings fans are, if anything, more obnoxious than they are in the Metro), yesterday's game would have kept me deliriously happy for most of the week.

And it still does.

I predict the Bears will take it all this year. Naturally, I've predicted it every year since I was about five. Unlike all you Vikes fans, I've been right once...

Speaking of Vikes fans, I thought this bit was interesting; the Strib's coverage of the game took time and space out to ponder some basic team-character issues:

If teams are best judged by their reaction to adversity, the Vikings have some work to do before they can ascend to the NFL's elite.

On the one hand, Richardson provided a necessary emotional pickup. Center Matt Birk stood tall as well, taking the blame for a fumbled exchange between quarterback Brad Johnson and running back Chester Taylor in the fourth quarter.

The play put the Bears in position to score the winning touchdown, a 24-yard pass from Rex Grossman to Rashied Davis with 1 minute, 53 seconds remaining.

On the other hand, several players inexplicably took time from their postgame routine to complain about a full-page photo of Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher in Sunday morning's Star Tribune. Although the accompanying story chronicled the Vikings' progress on defense -- and, most important, had nothing to do with the outcome of the game -- some Vikings took offense that Urlacher was the visual emphasis.

Hey, publicity is money.

Leftybloggers: "Ethics Are For Peasants!"

There's a famous, possibly apocryphal story in which Winston Churchill, attending a cocktail party in the 1930s, got very drunk. A woman accosted him.

"Sir, you are drunk!"

Churchill, appraising her, responded "“Yes Madame, I am drunk. You, on the other hand, are ugly. Tomorrow I will be sober; but you will still be ugly.”

We'll come back to that in a few minutes here.

===========

Among my many jobs in college, I worked at a Holiday Inn. A really crappy Holiday Inn that eventually had its franchise removed because it was such a lousy excuse for a Holiday Inn - but I digress.

I was a "Bell Hop", which at that particular hotel meant I set up tables, chairs and arrangements for banquets, changed the sign out front, drove the airport van, cleaned up messes, cleaned the pool and jacuzzi, provided after-hours maid and room service, made new keys, hauled beer and ice to the bar, fixed faulty air conditioners, chased bums out of the pool shower, bounced at the bar, and occasionally even hopped bells hauled bags.

And among the things I was taught was, in the event someone checked in with no intent to check out but on a gurney (as happens in hotels sometimes, although it never happened on my watch), how to jimmy the doors and pick the locks.

As a result, while I'm far from a master thief and am very out of practice (like, I haven't had to jimmy a door in about fifteen years), I can get through some doors, and I can often (not always, but often) tell which doors provide better security than others.

So if you, innocent homeowner, happen to leave your new plasma-screen TV in your living room, and your door doesn't provide adequate security, then you really have only yourself to blame if I waltz in and kype your TV. Right?

For that matter, if you or one of your kids screws up and leaves the door unlocked, or leaves a first-floor window open (or even just unlocked), really, it's your problem if someone like me waltzes in off the street and makes off with your stuff.

It's not my fault at all, right?

Well, of course it is. Leaving your doors open is dumb, but theft is a crime - even if you do make it easy for the thieves.

Even, for that matter, if you leave the door on your house wide open?

All by way of saying - if you live near a Twin Cities leftyblogger, you might want to double-deadbolt your doors, buy an attack dog, and booby-trap your valuables. If you don't, well, anything that happens is your fault. At least, according to some of them.

===============

Before I go on, let me make one thing clear: I think the Mark Kennedy campaign will do a lot better by showing the people what an empty skirt Amy Klobuchar is, than by yakking that a dim-bulb local leftyblogger went tapdancing through his consultant's ill-secured website, found confidential information, and passed it directly on to A-Klo's campaign. The average Minnesotan could hardly care less, and the Kennedy campaign has limited time to get its message across against a full-court media press.

But I'm not Mark Kennedy's campaign. I can spend my only resource - time - any way I want.

And the troubling part about this whole moronic flap is that a whole bunch of Twin Cities' leftybloggers seem to have a strange idea of what "ethics" is. They've leapt to the defense of Noah Kunin, the giggly fratboy who started the whole flap by:

1. Going to Kennedy's consultant's web site
2. Seeing that there was a "password" blank on the page - something that tells most rational people "if you don't have business here, please go away".
3. Entering 18 different passwords before getting access to a yet-unreleased Kennedy ad
4. Passing the ad promptly (but apparently completely at random, and with no collusion, no sirree bob, from the A-Klo campaign) to an A-Klo staffer (apparently just to show how technologically un-savvy Kennedy's consultant is, rather than to actually steal intellectual property or anything

The response from so many - too many - among the Twin Cities' sinistrosphere?

There are two:

1. "It's what all the kids are doing these days!"
2. "Conservatives aren't big enough geeks!"

Let's talk about 'em both.

===================

One local leftyblogger - Chuck Olsen, I think, a guy I personally know not to be an idiot - said:

""Kunin's foray into the website reflects an ethic of discovery among the Internet generation. "When you come from a computer or an Internet background, there's this attitude of 'Let's see what we can find,' " Olsen said. "It's not like hacking. It's just the way things work on the Web."...

Put another way, part of the "internet generation" has no respect for other peoples' privacy - which I think is fascinating, coming from a group that has been shrieking like stuck cats at the notion that the NSA might eavesdrop on cell phone calls to the US where there is probable cause to believe there's a terrorist making the call, and think the notion of wanting a teenager's parents to know she's having an abortion is an intolerable assault on privacy. Now, maybe it's true - some kidz today really, really like the challenge of playing little security games on the internet.

Some people love the "ethic of fisticuffs", picking fights and punching people out. It's called "assault". Other people like "ethic of theft", the mano-a-mano rush of pilfing goodies from stores; some killjoys call it "shoplifting".

Somewhere, there's probably a group of people who enjoy the "ethic of body waste", the challenge of dumping little jars of urine into peoples' drinks. I don't even want to know what the charge would be, but I feel confident that there is one, no matter how much someone might enjoy that "ethic".

Of course, your right to enjoy hitting me, stealing from me, poisoning me and looking at my stuff ends where my nose, store, food and online stuff begin.

==============

The other "justification" seems, to some of the dimmer leftybloggers, to be "because I can!".

Most offices have a refrigerator where brown-baggers keep their lunches and snacks. And most of the offices will have one person who figures if it's in the 'fridge, it's fair game; he or she will help him/herself to anything in the fridge. It's not "illegal", per se, it's just the kind of petty wrong that most people are just plain beyond.

The term for this person is "assh*le".

On Saturday, Swiftee noticed in a comment thread on local leftyblog "New Patriot" that a little fella named Jason Heiser had found the Northern Alliance's "private" show blog. :

This whole Mark Kennedy "website hacking" imbroglio reminds me: progressives really have the edge on these reactionary dimwits when it comes to technology.

This was surely a wake-up.

I mean, it's just that after all these years of figuring that life's greatest joys were things like curing disease, comforting the afflicted, creating deathless art, learning to coax or wrench emotion from a musical instrument, making love, raising children, finding grace, seeking enlightenment, spreading good Karma or feeling the presence of God, I was mistaken; it's really futzing around with security settings on web servers!

But I digress. What was it that got Jason so exercised?

Witness the Northern Alliance Radio Network's super top secret private blog.

Heiser posts a link to the show's internal blog - where the Northern Alliance plans out its weekly broadcasts and special events.

Now, Jason flatters himself; there never was anything "super top secret" about the blog. Frankly, we figured that nobody would ever care to find the internal scheduleblog of a simple little weekend radio show. So in a way I feel a bit jazzed that this simple exercise has brought such fulfillment (misguided and inflated as it is) to the life of Jason Heiser.

You're welcome, Wargames!

OMFG, did I just br8k th3 l@w?!

OMFG?

Br8k th3 l@w? Well, you showed y0uR @ d0rK, anyway. K3wL! A/S/L? But, J@s0n H3]$3R, if you had a policy of leaving the door on your apartment (or mommy's basement, as the case may be) unlocked, it would still be illegal for me to walk in and take a look around.

Nah, you didn't break the law - because, like a dummy, I didn't put any sort of security on the NARN private site, since I never figured anyone outside the show would be pathetic enough to care.

But Noah Kunin didn't plow into an unpublicized but open site. He tried 18 different passwords to get past a "password" page, before finding an ineffective, easily-guessed password.

Like the guy who walks past a house and sees a plasma-screen TV behind a door with a cheap lock and helps himself, like the gal who kypes her co-worker's pizza, Noah Kunin was confronted with an obstacle that wasn't big enough to keep him honest - but was big enough to tell any reasonable, ethical grownup that "This is not your stuff. This is my stuff. Don't go here". Unlike the burglar or office assh*le, we don't have a handy name for what he did.

One of Heiser's beeves seems to be that conservatives, owing to the presumption that they don't live and breathe software security, have it coming.

I guess it's OK. I asked for this document, and the server gave it to me. If my access to the NARN's "private" blog were truly illegal, the server would have given me a response code of "401 Unauthorized" or "403 Forbidden."

[Yawn]. Sure. Whatever.

Except that when Jason says...

The same is true for Kennedy's website. It's a publicly accessible website; Kennedy staffers tried to hide confidential information behind a bush in plain view of the entire world. Now they're trying to cover their technical incompetence with specious bluster.

Let's assume Jason's right - that Kennedy's staff "tried to hide confidential information...in plain view". Putting a cheap lock on a crappy door doesn't exonerate the burglar. If I leave my plasma-screen TV on the lawn, it's still mine, not yours. While it may be incumbent on Kennedy's staff to use better security, that failure doesn't take anything away from the ethical depravity of assuming that everything you can reach is fair game, any more than stuffing your pockets with stuff off the shelves is OK as long as you get away with it.

Well, to most of us, anyway. Apparently, according to Jason Heiser, the ends justify the means. If you get away with it, it's OK.

Which is par for the course from the current American whacko left: Chuck Schumer's staff started it all last year by hoovering up Michael Steele's credit report, believing - as Jason seems to - that as long as you can get away with it (and the target is an apostate!), it's OK.

Most of society, of course, disagrees.

For Jason Heiser's eyes only:

To paraphrase Churchill: I am guilty as charged. When I should have been seeking enlightenment through software security, I was busy comforting the afflicted, creating deathless (to me) art, learning to coax or wrench emotion from a musical instrument, making love, raising children, finding grace, seeking enlightenment, spreading good Karma, rocking the blog world, doing my best to build a better nation, and feeling the presence of God. I gotta admit it; you may be morally bankrupt, but you do know security!

Except that I can pick up security in a couple of days - at which time you'll still be...

...well, you know where this ends.

Maybe. I guess I shouldn't assume.

That's what got me - and Mark Kennedy's consultant - in trouble in the first place.

Above And Beyond The Call: SFC Paul R. Smith

Today the MOB is paying our respects to the memory of Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith - the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner in the War on Terror. Today would have been Sergeant Smith's birthday.

In the movie The Caine Mutiny, Jose Ferrer plays Lt. Barney Greenwald, a JAG lawyer engaged to defend a group of Ivy Leaguers-turned-naval officers at the court-martial over the eponymous mutiny.

Greenwald wins the case - but gives the gents a piece of his mind:

When I was studying law, and Mr. Keefer here was writing his stories, and you, Willie, were tearing up the playing fields of dear old Princeton, who was standing guard over this fat, dumb, happy country of ours, eh? Not us. Oh, no! We knew you couldn't make any money in the service. So who did the dirty work for us? Queeg did!

I thought about that when I read this excellent piece on Smith in the St. Petersburg Times:

To his men, Smith was like a character in the old war movies they had watched as kids, an infuriating, by-the-book taskmaster they called the "Morale Nazi."...Smith earned his sergeant's stripes and became a stern teacher determined to prepare his men for war - something he had seen and they hadn't.

The men did not appreciate his methods.

They didn't like Smith's reaction the day he discovered a soldier had not packed correctly for a training mission. Smith made the entire platoon unpack and start again.

They thought Smith went too far when, during an inspection, he found a screw missing from a soldier's helmet. Smith called the platoon back for reinspection. It lasted until nearly 10 p.m.

"If you f--d up, everybody f--d up," said Cpl. Daniel Medrano. "Teamwork was everything to him."

Smith was obsessed with keeping weapons spotless - "freaking crazy about it," according to Medrano. Smith would push a Q-tip into rifle barrels, looking for dirt.

Not the kind of guy most of us could relate to, right?

Not the kind of guy Paris Hilton will bat her eyes at. Not the kind of guy that a lot of Americans appreciate having to deal with, maybe...

In Kosovo in 2001, Medrano and others urged Smith to lighten up.

Smith snapped at them: "What are you going to do when the enemy is in front of you and your weapon isn't clean? The reason for all this is I've been to a place where it matters."

"We would joke that we're going to go to war, and then we can say we've been in a place where it matters," Medrano, 27, recalled..."He would come home and say, "They hate me. I know they are talking about me,"' Birgit said. "But Paul knew sooner or later they would understand why he was tough on them."

...but the kind of guy I'd like my son to have for a Platoon Sergeant if he ever joins the serivce.

He won the Medal of Honor posthumously for holding off an Iraqi attack that threatened to overwhelm a nearby aid station, among other units. In the fog of war, Smiths's platoon of combat engineers was left alone. Sgt. Smith responded:

Smith climbed into the gunner's hatch. He stood behind the big machine gun, the upper half of his body exposed, the lower half protected by the armored vehicle. He started blasting away.

"Keep me loaded," he shouted to Seaman. Whenever the 100-round ammunition belt that fed the machine gun was about to run out, Seaman reached down for another.

Whenever Smith stopped firing so Seaman could reload, fire from the Iraqis would pick up.

From the hole in the wall, Sgt. Keller could see Smith and waved for him to get out of the courtyard. Word had it that Bradleys were on their way.

Smith motioned back: "No."

"I knew why he wouldn't leave," Keller said. Without Smith's machine gun, "there was no firepower out there."

Keller took off running in search of the Bradley. He came across one up on the road, about 100 yards away, and confronted the men inside. "What are you doing? You need to be out there," Keller said.

The response from one of the Bradley crewmen - something like, "No, there's friendlies out there" - confused Keller.

He ran back to the courtyard, to a scene right out of Hollywood.

Smith was atop the 113 shooting toward the gate, over the wall, at the tower.

"He was firing, firing, firing - reloading - firing, firing, firing," said Sgt. Robert Nowack, 37. "It was like a director saying, "I want you to look intense."'

The sight reminded Pfc. Pace of To Hell and Back, the film about the WWII exploits of Army 2nd Lt. Audie Murphy, who climbed onto a burning tank, manned a .50-caliber machine gun and mowed down dozens of attacking Germans.

Murphy was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1945.

Smith left behind a wife, a son and a stepdaughter, and a story that needs to be remembered when odds are long and the situation is dire.

America is lucky to have had S1C Smith - even if much of the nation doesn't know it.

Other stories about S1C Smith today from Ed, Andy, Brian from The Attic, and of course Derek from Freedom Dogs, who organized this observance.

UPDATE: MN Ed Reform and Swiftee - who, if memory serves, is a Navy vet himself.

What Do You Suppose The Odds Were?

The Humphrey Institute Poll, says the Strib, shows A-Klo up by 14 points.

This is the same Humphrey Institute that turned one of their events into a Klobuchar media love-fest, and used its' staff to physically coerce Mark Kennedy's campaign staffers. The same Humphrey Institute that was run for many years by Arvonne Fraser, as frenzied a liberal jihadist as this city has seen.

This, right on the heels of another predictably absurd Minnesota Poll which shows Democrats ahead (or in the case of Mike Hatch, in the race) by a predictably absurd margin.

Both polls, mirabile dictu, are (or will, if previous patterns hold true, and they will) ludicrously skewed to the left, and remain so after years of clear, plain evidence that the polls are, by conventional definition, broken.

And both polls are released at a crucial moment in the campaign; when the fundraising for the final push reaches a fever pitch, especially for the GOP, who have to overcome waves of DFL sugardaddies and a full-court press by a media that is (why kid ourselves) completely in the bag for the DFL.

So let's be honest, shall we? These polls - which have gotten saturation play in the Metro media this past few weeks - exist not to gauge public opinion, but to depress Republican fundraising and stymie Republican turnout.

If it were not true, something would have been done to fix the consistently-wrong Minnesota Poll methodology years ago. But year in, year out, nothing changes except the ever-less-probable-sounding logical gymnastics the Strib must resort to to reassure the public they're not, in the face of all rational evidence.

Death

The rigorously consistent moralist in me opposes the death penalty for one reason only; the likelihood of killing the innocent.

The father in me - especially the part that is father to my daughter - is telling that moralist to shut the hell up now that Alphonso Rodriguez got the death penalty for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Dru Sjodin:

The verdict was delivered shortly before 11 a.m. Jurors had been deliberating since Wednesday.

A sentencing hearing has been set for Jan. 5

In closing arguments, defense attorney Richard Ney asked jurors for mercy, stating that killing Rodriguez would mean putting to death someone who suffered sexual abuse as a child and who possibly received brain damage because of exposure to toxic farm chemicals.

U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley said aggravating factors, including past sexual assaults committed by Rodriguez and the manner in which Sjodin was killed, demanded the death sentence.

The type of killing, indeed, would have made it impossible for me to be a juror. I'm inflamed now just thinking about it, to the point where the death penalty seems too damn good.

A press conference with Wrigley and members of Sjodin’s family was held today shortly after the verdict was read.

“In the end, we believe there is justice,” Wrigley said after acknowledging the “difficult work of the jury.”

That sentiment was echoed by Sjodin’s mother, Linda Walker.

“Quite honestly, I don’t even know how to wrap myself around all that has taken place in our lives,” Walker said.

“Dru’s voice was heard today,” she said...Dru Sjodin’s father, Allan, said he and other family members would have been equally satisfied with a sentence of life in prison.

“For Dru’s sake, this needed to happen,” he said.

Chris Lang, who was Dru Sjodin’s boyfriend at the time she disappeared, also spoke at the press conference.

“Do not forget her. Celebrate her life. She was beautiful. She was wonderful,” Lang said.

Yet to be seen; how North Dakota, whose last execution was in 1905, carries on with the sentence. To the best of my recollection, the North Dakota State Penitentiary doesn't have a death row.

18 Speed Bumps?

Flash from Centrisity on the Ad-gate campaign:

Noah Comes Clean
Just saw Noah from Blanked-Out as the mystery blogger on 'CCO. He insists it was an open link not requiring password access.

Maybe, and then again maybe not:

Kunin posted an explanation of the incident on his blog, www.blanked-out.com.

He said he simply typed one name on the agency's website and was directed to a page containing the Kennedy ad.

That's not what happened, said Dan Allen of Scott Howell & Co., the Dallas-based agency handling Kennedy advertising.

"He tried more than a dozen names -- 18 in all," Allen said. "The fact that he was trying other names proves [Kunin's explanation] to be false. It's a password-protected, secure site."

But a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor suggested Kunin might have done nothing more than bypass a "speed bump." That's Web-speak for a password that exists not to bar entry to people, but to keep spammers and robotic Webcrawlers from tying up the site. Speed-bump passwords often are simple and not up to stringent security standards.

"Passwords can serve many functions and come in many forms," said Minneapolis attorney Paul Luehr, who has been hired by Kunin's legal defense team to assess the incident independently. "That can make the facts of a specific case more ambiguous."

What's crystal clear is the political fallout from the incident. On Thursday, state GOP chairman Ron Carey called the acquisition of the commercial by the Klobuchar campaign unethical and demanded that the candidate answer more questions about how it happened.

The blog in question - Noah Kunin's "Blanked Out" - seems to have, er, blanked out.

Read Flash's comment section - and, most likely, every other Twin Cities sinistroblog - to see the most amazing example of groupspin ever.

UPDATE: Blanked out still exists. Noah Kunin has issued a sort of non-apology, to the wrong people:

I would like to begin by apologizing to the Klobuchar campaign for placing the organization under inappropriate scrutiny and diverting the public from the issues that are important in this campaign.

Noah is too hard on himself.

Crime - and politicians' associations with it - is the big issue in this campaign. Amy Klobuchar's inability to deal with Minneapolis' crime wave; Keith Ellison's coddling of cop-killers and terrorists like Assata Shakur and Kathleen Soliah; now, apparently, their abetting of illegal hacking into campaign websites - crime is the issue.

This campaign should be about the issues that are important to Minnesotans. This is not one of those issues.

But having politicians with ethics is, as the Strib repeatedly reminded us when Rod Grams was in the midst of a post-marital relationship - something that had no effect on his value as a Senator.

Unlike A-Klo's ineptitude as a county attorney, her deep political ties to vested special interests (devaluing the voices of average Minnesotans), and Keith Ellison's ties to CAIR and Louis Farrakhan.

Several days ago, after Mark Kennedy’s campaign launched the first negative campaign ad against Amy Klobuchar, I decided to research Kennedy’s media consultant, Scott Howell. This research led me to the website of Scott Howell’s consulting company. Several of Scott Howell’s previous political ads for his clients were no longer on this website, nor were they on the websites of his clients.

While searching for political ads, I clicked on a link titled ‘netview,’ which then brought me to another webpage. No other information was requested. I therefore typed in the name ‘Allen.’ Nothing more, nothing less. This redirected me to a webpage containing three pieces of information. Kennedy for Senate, a date, and a hyperlink. Upon clicking the hyperlink, I was directed to the aforementioned political advertisement. At no point in this process did I circumvent or misrepresent myself. The website containing this ad can be accessed by anyone online. It is possible to directly go to this website. It is in no way secured.

There are, to say the least, two sides to this story. Maybe more than two. A commenter below, John Gall, put it well:

I can't believe there is even debate about whether this is illegal. As I mentioned on another blog, if my house has cheap locks and you have an easy time breaking in your still breaking the law by removing property from the premises. In fact even if my doors are wide open your breaking the law. The very fact that a website asks for a password should have solved this debate. The term "speedbumps" is crap, if you aren't authorized to enter hacking your way in and being successful doesn't make it right or legal.

DFL: "Ethics are for peasants".

UPDATE 2: Marty Andrade shows us the page that Noah went through.

He asks the rhetorical question: "If you attempt to "search" for something 18 times on the following website...", showing a page that asks, plainly and simply, for a password.

I design software for a living. Asking for a password is not an especially ambiguous request.

Proof

Here's now Minnesota's concealed carry permit law worked from 1974 to 2003: If you were friends with your sheriff or police chief, you got your permit. This led to some amazing abuses - people with extensive criminal records but who had friends in high places got permits; people who'd been victimized, abused, attacked, and robbed went begging. It was possible - indeed, the norm - to get a concealed carry permit and not know anything about the law and rules of self-defense.

Today, the law works like this: If you're 21, pass a skills course and a background check (which shows no record of violent crime, violent mental illness or substance abuse), pony up the fee, and your local law-enforcement don't have verifiable, objective evidence that you're a ticking time-bomb, the Sheriff must issue you a permit.

Now, read this story, in which Ramsey County (Saint Paul) Sheriff Bob Fletcher is trying to revoke a permit for a person about whom some nasty history has emerged:

At the urging of then-St. Paul Police Chief Bill Finney, Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher in 2004 issued a gun permit to a friend of Finney's despite the man having a "criminal history," Fletcher said Thursday.

The disclosure is contained in a letter Fletcher sent last week seeking the return of the gun permit, which had been issued to Aaron Walter Foster Sr., a longtime friend of Finney's.

This, of course, used to be enough to get the permit in the first place.

Now - watch the anti-gun crowd (those that are left after the three years of pretty much unimpeachable success for the Minnesota Personal Protection Act) try to paint this issue as a problem with the new law.

We also see that Minnesota's news reporters haven't gotten much better about reporting the specifics of the carry law:

Minnesota law allows a permit except when an applicant has no gun training, is mentally ill or is a convicted felon.

The law places the burden of proof for rejecting permits on law enforcement, and gives them certain objective, empirical, easily verifiable grounds to do so.

Under the law, Fletcher said, he has discretion to deny gun permits if he thinks someone is a danger to the public, which he did in Foster's case. He said he reconsidered after Finney vouched for Foster.

"We trusted Bill Finney's judgment, and as it turned out his judgment was terrible," said Fletcher.

"He doesn't trust me, so why would he overrule his own judgment based on something from me?" Finney asked Thursday.

Why, oh, why indeed, would Sheriff Fletcher override his own judgement on the word from Finney, the former Saint Paul Police Chief and possible DFL candidate for political office?

Professional courtesy?

Fletcher said he decided to revoke the gun permit last week because of new information he received about Foster, including suspicions about his possible involvement in the 1981 Maplewood death.

Read the story - and watch for the inevitable crowing from Minnesota's astroturf anti-gun activists.

One Of The Great Injustices...

Is that the Cranberries succeeded vastly beyond their meager talent...

...while In Tua Nua languished in obscurity.

Citgo?

While the likes of Al Sharpton may slip Hugo Chavez a little tongue, religious figures in Venezuela are less enthusiastic:

Cardinal Castillo accused Chavez of despotism and called him a "paranoid dictator." Chavez, in turn, has blasted the cardinal, calling him a "bandit" who has "the devil in him." Last month, Chavez said: "The Catholic hierarchy never gets tired of attacking this government, this revolution." In the past Chavez has compared himself favorably with Jesus Christ and has called the country's bishops elitist and out-of-touch "devils."

The bishops also rejected attempts to discredit and mistreat those who express opposing views in political matters, saying "all persons and institutions have the right to believe according to their own convictions; such a right must be maintained and respected in any democratic society."

They also acknowledged the difficult period which the country is facing, and they encouraged Cardinal Castillo to continue "carrying out his mission of proclaiming the beatitudes and denouncing everything that harms fraternity, coexistence, freedom, justice and peace."

In semi-related news, I only learned yesterday that CITGO is owned by...Venezuela.

This fact hasn't escaped the screechy-left community; our old friend Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams (which, protestations aside, is as close to an official voice of the current mainstream left as any I've found) says:

Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.

And tell your friends.

Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call him "the Anti-Bush."

Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela -- not Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. There are 14,000 Citgo gas stations in the US. (Click here http://www.citgo.com/CITGOLocator/StoreLocator.jsp to find one near you.) By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.

Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does, Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor in Venezuela.

Which buys populist cover, naturally, for widespread corruption.

I don't normally go in for boycotts - in this case, plenty of American businessmen who have nothing to do with Chavez would get hurt long before Chavez' government felt the pinch, and that wouldn't faze Chavez one bit.

And I rarely go to Citgo anyway - the stores tend to be dirty and scuzzy and their prices are usually a few cents above other options nearby.

But whenever temptation strikes, this'll certainly keep me going elsewhere...

Those Mysterious, Nonexistent Last-Minute Republicans

Earlier this week, I rhetorically questioned Rob Daves, the apparently-hapless Strib exec who runs Minnesota's favorite form of comedy, the Minnesota Poll.

Today, Scott Johnson does the same, only with actual numbers and stuff (emphasis mine):

Daves explains the mysteriously appearing Republican voters that traditionally make it to the polls in defiance of the Star Tribune's final published pre-election polls as an empirically verifiable closing "Republican surge." For some reason, it is a "surge" that generally is not demonstrated by polls other than the Minnesota Poll. In the comments section of the Daves interview, reader Mark Liveringhouse outlines all of the
other polls over time for the 2004 race showing Bush with 47-48 percent of the vote versus the 41 percent at which the Minnesota Poll had him pegged. He then pulled the exit polling from the 2004 election that shows, contrary to Daves's asertion, that late deciding voters broke for Kerry

Read the whole thing.

And then, if you're so inclined, please try to undercut the statement "The Minnesota Poll is a propaganda tool (witting or not) of the DFL).

My Obsessions: Paleontology

One of my obsessions has always been paleontology - the study of how humans evolved into what we are today.

So I'm fascinated by this story about the discovery of one of the world's oldest fossil humans.

The skull, discovered in Ethopia, apparently still has hair attached:

Amazing.

Yes, I know it was sophomoric.

Attack The Healthy Tissue

Amy Klobuchar's Minneapolis is becoming more dangerous; crime is up drastically this year over previous years.

And crime does disproportionally hit lower-income people, both as victims and as participants.

So what does the city do?

Turn the screws on low-income homeowners, especially on the trouble North Side:

It's about 6:30 a.m. on a hot July morning when Harold Middleton starts looking for involuntary customers. Middleton doesn't use that term, "involuntary customers." It comes from the business plan devised by his bosses at the Minneapolis Department of Regulatory Services and it describes violators of the city's housing code. These days, that typically means residents of the North Side, where Middleton and his co-workers have been swarming the streets.

After a quick smoke in the big, empty parking lot at the Bean Scene, a coffee shop on West Broadway and Penn avenues, Middleton settles into the air-conditioned comfort of his office—a city-issued Chevy Malibu. He reaches into the big plastic bin in the back seat and extracts a thick stack of files. He then sorts the papers by address and affixes them to his clipboard.

The strategy?

In the view of the initiative's biggest boosters, among them mayor R.T. Rybak and Fifth Ward councilman Don Samuels, the sweeps aren't just about maintaining the housing stock. They argue that tougher standards on property can help restore social order and, in so doing, stem the rising tide of crime that is now swamping the North Side.

Middleton does not make such grand arguments. He is mindful that enforcement can come at a steep cost, especially for poor homeowners. The soaring foreclosure rate on the North Side is already the highest in the city. Middleton sees evidence of that every day as he makes his rounds: emptied-out homes with lawns that look like wheat fields. He knows additional financial burdens—in the form of a new roof or paint job or personal crisis—can push low-income homeowners beyond their limits.

"You got a lot of people here living on the edge," he says. "I get calls where people tell me, 'I don't have the property anymore. It belongs to the bank now.' And sometimes people know they're going to lose it, so they just walk away"...the eagerness with which Minneapolis is now pursing code enforcement on the North Side does raise a question: Is that chipped paint on the garage on Knox Avenue contributing to North Side crime—or just the municipal coffers?

I'll take "b".

There are a whoooole lot of great blog posts waiting to be written (not to mention opportunities for bloggers) in covering Minneapolis and Saint Pauls' sometimes fuzzy war on "problem housing" and not-so-posh landlords.

(Via Ademocracy)

How Long Do You Suppose...

...it will be until he gets booked...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called President Bush "the devil" in a speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, making the sign of the cross in a dramatic gesture and accusing him of "talking as if he owned the world."

The fiery speech by the leftist leader, one of the Bush's staunchest critics abroad, was harsher in tone than that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who sparred with Bush the previous day over Tehran's disputed nuclear program but avoided any personal insults....

...on the John Stewart show?

Essense of Bull

Eric Black in Big Question:

Was told that the task formerly known as “homework” would no longer be designated by that term because of the negative connotations it carries.

New term for the task formerly known as homework: “Celebration of Learning.”

Ugh.

Good News For Prisons

The Minnesota "Poll" shows that Minnesotans want more funding for roads:

Voters like the idea of changing the state constitution to channel more money to roads and transit, but support is hampered by the confusing language that will appear on the ballot, the Minnesota Poll finds.

Bad news for roads...

Straight Priorities

The budget - strained by ever-more spending demands - is reeling. Crime is on an uptick - overshadowed by the miasma of Amy Klobuchar's Minneapolis, but still unsettling. City infrastructure needs a ton of work.

So what does the Saint Paul City Council work on?

Fighting the plague of individual cigarettes:

City Council President Kathy Lantry, sponsor of the ordinance introduced Wednesday, said she has received multiple complaints from her constituents that the majority of single cigarettes sold are bought by minors.

She said research shows that communities where individual cigarettes are peddled have higher smoking rates among young people.

"I get a lot of complaints in my office," she said at Wednesday's meeting.

Let me guess - it was the same researchers (and complainers) that led the city to ban smoking in bars. Right?

The Empirical Record Must Be Wrong!

Swiftee points us to a series of comments at MDE from someone purporting to be a former college associate of Keith Ellison's, who is apprently trying to "cow the voters" with actual facts:

I was the editor who published Keith’s articles and follow-up pieces. I’m also a moderate Democrat: I like Keith’s platform.

I KNEW Keith back then.

Keith didn’t “keep a distance” from the Nation of Islam: he was in chin-deep...He even boycotted a Jewish-Black dialog group created in response to his speakers and writings, except to show up for five minutes and yell at me...Stokley Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) — a speaker Keith sponsored, stood with, and enthusiastically supported — was asked what position women should have in the black-right’s movement.

His answer: “prone.” ...Keith WAS an active member of a hate group. That’s not filth: that’s history...If David Duke was the front-runner in Minneapolis his past associations would be filthy, but also highly germane to his worthiness as a candidate. Keith’s in the same position.

Just like David Duke couldn’t say “ignore my past: concentrate on the positive” neither should Keith be able to.

Strangely, I think if there is any racist behavior being exhibited it’s by Keith’s supporters. Minnesota Democrats seem to be either infantalizing Keith or condoning his past behavior. Either position is indefensible and the former definitely stinks of the same bigoted charges Keith’s supporters are fast to throw around.

It is depressing as a moderate democrat to witness what is happening.

Let's assume Olenik is who he says he is (and a quick Google of his associations with the MNDaily, the U of M, and possibly more makes it seem likely enough), and ask the questions:

• Why do the major Minnesota media think these facts about Ellison's past aren't important? Remember - Rod Grams' son's escapades - over which Senator Grams had no control at all - were front-page news in the Twin Cities. But Keith Ellison's years-long involvement in a hate group is not?
• How is it "racist" and "bigoted" to related objective, true facts to the wider audience? Are black, moslem candidates immune from criticism?
• Finally, I'll reiterate the question I asked Jeff Fecke below: what is the Twin Cities right "doing" "to" Ellison? Ellison is the one who joined the hate group; we're just speaking truth to would-be power.

Have at it, sinistrospherians.

Lileks 73, Olberman 0

Just read it, and ponder the tragedy of a nation that gives Keith Olberman a responsible job.

True Islam

The title of today's Strib editorial demands that we "Stop Caricaturing Islam?

It should go without saying that the Strib Editorial Board should heed its own advice.

Why, we are led to wonder, does the world conspire so tirelessly to make an honest appreciation of Islam impossible? Now it's Pope Benedict XVI and Islamic hotheads who are doing their best to malign one of the world's great religions.

Benedict, hotheads. Hotheads, Benedict.

How is it that the Strib finds moral equivalence between the two?

The pope started it during a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he once was on the faculty. His speech was a reflection on the place of reason in Christianity.

To set up the speech (as in, "I was reminded of this recently by ..."), he used a quotation from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor. The emperor, peeved at a long-running Ottoman siege of Constantinople (unsuccessful), lectured his Persian correspondent at one point that the prophet Mohammed's teachings offered "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Benedict's was an ill-fitting, gratuitous slap at Islam dressed up as an entry point for a lecture on reason.

Huh?

Have you read the Pope's speech?

To force a faith on someone by threat of violence is to abnegate reason (as well as deeply, intensely immoral by any rational measure). Forget the specific faiths for a moment; if any fraction of the Mormon or Methodist churches were to elicit conversions - any conversions - at gunpoint, do you think the Strib would be so accomodating?

Islam is entirely absent from the remainder of his address. He might have chosen dozens of more apt and less inflammatory points of departure; this appears to have been deliberate provocation.

Yes, but he didn't. He made a point - one that a reasonable person might disagree with (even if it's the Pope; we had a Reformation over that sort of thing, once upon a time).

Of course, "reasonable people" aren't the issue, here:

Whereupon some Islamic hotheads took to burning buildings, attacking people and, in a now tiresome, worn tirade, pledging to convert every human being to Islam or lop off their heads. Someone should sit the hotheads down, read them a few of the outrageous statements individual Muslim leaders have made in recent years about Christianity or Judaism ... and suggest they gauge the relative heat of the pope's words. They need also to see the idiocy of responding to accusations of Islamic violence with, well, threats of Islamic violence.

[slap head]

EUREKA!

That's it!

One wonders, sometimes, if the Strib misses the real lesson on purpose:

If God, Allah, Adonai were a schoolteacher, he'd send Pope Benedict to one corner and the hotheads to another. Then he'd lecture on the real Islam. Perhaps he'd use Ulug'bek as an example. Ulug'bek was a 15th century Afghan prince and one of the world's great astronomers. He believed passionately in knowledge and built wonderful madrassahs open to both men and women (you can find a photo gallery of perhaps the greatest of his madrassahs, Samarkand's exquisite Registan, online at www.startribune.com/opinion).

Unfortunately, his passion was his undoing: Ulug'bek was assassinated in 1449 by Muslim extremists who took issue with his love of math and science. But then, and now, he represents true Islam.

Really?

Because then, as now, you have an example of a reasonable Moslem man being murdered by extremist reactionary thugs You don't have to go back to the fifteenth century to find this pattern, either. It's as recent as today's headlines.

In the 1920's, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - who went on to become a friend of Hitler - was concerned about the number of Jews migrating to Palestine. He embarked on a campaign of intimidating and killing...

...moderate, accomodationist Moslems. Because to the Moslem extremist, it's the accomodationist and the moderate and the "man of reason" that is the first obstacle. And so today in much of the Palestinian and Lebanese worlds, the "moderate" factions...live in America. Because back where they come from, the "moderate" Moslems get roughed up, disenfranchised, murdered.

People like Ulug'bek, getting just what Ulug'bek got.

Let Me Get This Straight

Republicans tell the inconvenient truth about Keith Ellison; Democrats say it's cowing the voters.

So what is this? Or this?

This?

UPDATE: Democrats threw oreos at Michael Steele, but they didn't hit him with them.

So maybe the morons are learning...

I Suppose The Pope...

...is going to get yelled about about this, too.

Smells Like Truth...

...because I read it on the Internets:

A new survey of Democratic voters indicates that in a hypothetical match-up between Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and former presidential nominee John Kerry, most Democrats would choose suicide over either candidate.

The poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, shows Mr. Kerry drawing 21%, Sen. Clinton 18%, and various forms of suicide 61%.

Well, it's no more fake than the Minnesota poll...

About Time

Bill Frist wakes up and smells the electoral coffee?:

"It's time to secure the border with Mexico," Majority Leader Bill Frist said last night before filing the parliamentary motions to force the House-passed bill onto the Senate floor in a final effort to get a major immigration bill on the president's desk before the elections.

I'd like to credit someone in the GOP - Rove, Frist, whomever - for engineering this to take advantage of the GOP's advantage in homestretch campaigning. I'd like to think that this, along with Bush's counteroffensive of the past few weeks, is the riposte from a couple of months of political rope-a-dope.

But I don't have that much faith in Frist.

Danger! Danger!

Madonna plans to do her stupid crucifiction stunt on national TV:

In the show, Madonna, wearing a gittered crown of thorns, descends on a suspended mirrored, disco ball-type cross singing her hit 'Live To Tell.'

Expect rioting Christians to loot and pillage record stores. Masked Christian gunmen might even kidnap and behead a Maverick Records A&R man.

The Sharia Fairness Doctrine

Brian Maloney reports on CAIR's pressure tactics to stifle talk-radio criticism of Moslems:

CAIR has targeted talkers at ABC and Clear Channel stations over the past year, having an especially easy time mowing over executives at the former.

In fact, it's fair to say that CAIR monitors talk radio across the country, looking for anything it can use to fan the flames.

The ABC Radio flap, based on comments about Islam made by WMAL / Washington host Michael Graham, resulted in his termination. Earlier this year, top- rated morning host Bill Handel nearly lost his position at KFI / Los Angeles after a similar incident.

What were the transgressions? Graham was fired for saying "We are at war with a terrorist organization named Islam”. Handel came under pressure for a pointed radio sketch criticizing Islam:

"Muhammad": Article One, Section One: All legislative powers are herein granted and shall be vested in Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, who will personally see to it that personal freedom and civil rights be set back 1,000 years.

Section Two: Death to the Jews, death to the Jews, death to the Jews.

Section Three: The House of Representatives shall be composed of [unintelligible] of American-hating terrorists who shall conduct a war of attrition for one thousand years or until the infidel is eradicated from the planet entirely, whichever comes first.

Tasteless? Maybe, but no worse than Christians get every day in this country.

But that's not my point.

Remember last week, when the local leftybloggers were whinging about all of the Republicans' "bigoted" "attempt" to "cow" Ellison supporters in the DFL primary? Attempts that were never actually documented, mind you?

This is CAIR, and it is cowing, intimidating, censoring American discourse.

CAIR supports Keith Ellison. If elected, Keith Ellison will owe CAIR a marker.

How do you expect that debt is going to be repaid?

The Big Joke

How do you put lipstick on a pig?

Eric Black tries.

Eric Black's "The Big Question" blog is one of the Strib's better efforts. In the latest post, Black interviews Rob Daves, the Strib staffer who runs the Strib's always-comical "Minnesota Poll".

You know - the poll that predicted Skip Humphrey and Roger Moe would be our governors, and that Ann Wynia and Walter Mondale would be our senators.

Black asks about those pesky allegations of gross incompetence and rampant pro-DFL bias (Black's questions in italics):

3. Republicans have mocked your Senate poll result. Kennedy aide Heidi Frederickson said it belongs on the comics page. Both the Minnesota GOP and the Kennedy campaign put out press releases alleging not only that the poll was ridiculous, but that it was a deliberate attempt to affect the election. How do you respond to that?

It’s been a long-held custom - since the 1700s, actually - for partisans to criticize polls that aren’t favorable to their candidate. [Especially when that poll is not only consistently slanted toward one party, even when the other party repeatedly wins. Or so one might think - because I'm not aware of another poll that's inaccuracies are so, oddly, predictable.] But the accusation of some sort of conspiracy to affect the election is ridiculous. We poll using standard, proven methods of sampling, questionnaire construction and analysis. Then we print the results. That’s it, pure and simple.

Well, that settles it, doesn't it!

So why does the "proven methodology" that, in the hands of other pollsters, at least delivers inconsistent, varied mistakes, yield such consisten results?

I work for the folks who print the news, not the editorial page editor who’s in the business of trying to change opinions.

In terms of lines on an organizational chart, that might be true.

In terms of how news is actually produced, that is transparent rubbish. The bias in the Strib's news coverage - or, rather, the omissions from the Strib's coverage - perfectly reflects the "Editorial page's" direction, and always have; the Strib's news pages run the most absurd stories about Republicans to death (Morgan Grams, anyone?) while Twin Cities bloggers have shown how stories that might reflect badly on Amy Klobuchar, Keith Ellison, Mark Dayton, Paul Wellstone and so on never see the light of day, Strib-wise. I showed myself how, once a pro-Mike-Hatch story turned ugly for the Attorney-General, the Strib and PiPress spiked it for good.

So the divide between editorial and news at the Strib doesn't seem all that divisive, to the mere consumer of news.

Back to Black:

4. As you know, the Republicans have been complaining about your polls for years. In 2004, they even called for you to be fired. Obviously, it isn’t just based on this latest poll but on a long-standing Republican complaint that the Minnesota Poll routinely understates Republican support. And they have a table of numbers that they say proves the pattern. Do you dispute their numbers? Do you dispute the pattern? How do you respond?

I saw that table a couple of years ago, and thought that someone must have a lot of time on their hands, Eric. [Ah. And they sit in their basements in their pajamas, too, right? Do these news people ever figure out that some of us just have a lot of passion and indignation on our hands?] But after I looked at it, it was clear that there were a couple of things going on. One is that they use faulty information. [The jokes here are too obvious. Fill them in yourself]

Our past practice has been to poll the week before the election and publish those results on the Sunday before the election. In the early- to mid-1990s, it became clear that there was a shift toward the Republican candidate in the waning hours before the election. So we started doing tracking polls the two or three days just before the election, then publishing a chart on Wednesday after the election showing how things changed. Why after the election? Editors didn’t want to appear as if they were influencing the election by publishing close to Election Day, as the national polling organizations do.

In 2002 - which is one of the elections the Minnesota Poll’s critics point to - our poll taken the week before the election and published on Sunday did, in fact, show a Walter Mondale lead. But the tracking poll, done on Sunday and Monday and published the day after the election, showed a dead heat at 45 percent for Mondale and 45 percent for Norm Coleman.

In 2004 I convinced the editors to publish right up to Election Day. And yep, the critics are right: Our poll published Sunday before Election Day showed a big Kerry lead - 8 points. But our tracking poll published online Monday night and in the paper on Election Day showed a shift to a 4-point Kerry lead - the conservative shift I mentioned; Kerry won by 3.5 points. (And FYI, those who keep up with such things found that the Minnesota Poll was one of the most accurate in the nation; check out www.surveyusa.com/Scorecards/2004PresGovSenOnly.xls)

So if the Minnesota Poll consistently shows a "last-minute surge" of conservative voters - a surge that no other polling organization consistently or widely shows, what does it mean?

Do us conservatives gather every two years and hide in the woods and snicker and giggle and underreport ourselves to the Strib's pollsters (but not Harris or Gallup or Quinnipiac or Ipsos or Rasmussen), and then go racing to the polls and vote for winning GOP candidates and then gather at Keegans for yet another big laugh at the "Minnesota Poll"?

Or is the "Minnesota Poll's" methodology fatally flawed toward underreporting conservatives?

So which poll results should that chart cite? I think it should be the one done closest to Election Day that shows how voters shift at the last minute toward the more conservative candidates. My guess is that the chart doesn’t reflect those numbers, just the ones that make the Republicans’ point about bias.

My "guess" is a little more pointed, inasmuch as Daves' explanation leans toward proving the critics' point.

The DFL-slanted polls in the months before the election serve the DFL - which reflects the Strib's editorial bias.

The magically-"accurate" last-minute polls are cover to provide the Strib some veneer of "accuracy".

Seems like a conspiracy theory, doesn't it?

Then why, in election after election, has the poll done nothing to correct this "error" in their polling? I don't know of any pollsters (besides Zogby) who sit by complacently, year after year, allowing their polls to continue displaying patently, ridiculously inaccurate information without raising serious questions about their own methodology.

Those are the two things: We’ve seen solid, empirical evidence that there’s a conservative shift in the electorate in the days immediately before the election, and we’ve seen that the poll’s final, final numbers often are ignored.

Is the "evidence" "empirical?" There's been an experiment with a fixed control sample?

That's not "empirical". It's "wishful".

Let's see how big the magical conservative surge is this time.

Can't Make It Up Fast Enough

In Amy Klobuchar's Minneapolis, a guy can get arrested 110 times...

...and the county is looking for public input to try to keep the guy in the joint.

Rambix:

Stayed sentences, probation, 110 arrests - are there no consequences in Hennepin County? And Ms. Klobuchar is running on her public safety record? Who's running the show here?

The DFL, naturally.

"But wait", says DFLer, "it's also the judge's fault". Right. And who appoints or elects the judges in Hennepin county?

Huh

I think she means it, too.

I Know Stuff

Among the stuff I know is the very, very basics of investigative journalism.

So I was down at the Ramsey County Registry of Deeds the other day, looking for a lead - any lead - for a story I'm trying to figure out.

After hours of looking, though I asked the lady at the desk. And she told me - unaccountably - that the Registry of Deeds doesn't record Faustian Contracts (and that "eternal souls" are not considered legal tender for contractual purposes).

So I regret to report that I still have no idea how "Sterling" got a daytime job at KSTP.

But I'll keep working on it.

Storytelling

Oddly, one of the more compelling 9/11 memorials comes from humor-zine McSweeney's, "Welcoming Remarks Made at a Literary Reading, 9/25/01", by John Hodgman.

Selected notable quote:

I have heard a lot recently about the role of writing, song, music, painting, in the tragic blank space in our souls that this event has left behind. Of course, this preoccupation is largely a result of an unconscious bias of the media. If pig farmers had as much currency with NPR as literary novelists, we would be hearing just as much about the healing power of bacon.

Read the whole thing...

The Uppity Republican

Alan Fine was the kind of Republican that every Democrat likes the most.

He's moderate; no flaming conservative, he. He's an academic. And best of all, he faces very long odds of winning.

So it's downright safe for a card-waving DFLer to get along with, even like, a guy like Fine.

Until he starts getting uppity, anyway.

Doug Grow discovered this last week:

This new Alan Fine suddenly can't say the name "Keith Ellison" without saying the name "Louis Farrakhan."

When I told him I was stunned at the tone of his statement, he said, "It's just because you like Keith Ellison."True," I said. "But I liked who I thought you were, too."You're painting me too quickly," Fine said. "Let me assure you, the Alan Fine you met is genuine."

I'm a Republican who spent years being mistaken for a Democrat, so I've been there. "You seem so much like me, says the Democrat questioning you. "How can you believe this stuff that I don't if you seem like me?

The answer, of course, is that Alan Fine probably realizes that since the local media won't spread the word about Ellison's beliefs - his years-long alliance with the Nations of Islam (which, contrary to Doug Grow's newspaper's reports ran from 1989 to at least 1997), his acceptance of support from the terrorist-apologist, anti-semitic Council on American-Islamic Relations, his coddling of cop-killers like Assata Shakur (and cop-killer wannabees like DFL darling Kathless Soliah) - to say nothing of his seeming belief that ethics are for other people - then it's his job to do it.

And outflanking the media is something that, in the Minnesota where Doug Grow cut his teeth, the pre-Reagan era in Republican politics were the GOP, victims since the forties of a sort of political Stockholm Syndrome, just wasn't done. Republicans, according to the great Minnesota Myth, were supposed to basically agree with the DFL!

And if they don't? Well, naturally, they're nekulturny. Bigots, says Grow!

I've received hate mail from lonely bigots with a gentler tone than your statement," I said. "Did you really write this statement yourself?"

I've said in the past that Doug Grow is all but a paid organ of the DFL. It was hyperbole - but with the above, you'd never know it. We have the full range of pro-Ellison talking points, as if from a checklist:

• If you question Ellison's feeble explanations, you're a bigot.
• Real Live Librul Joooz! support Ellison! As if one can't find all sorts of Jews who practice politics that undercut Jewish interests...
• If you questions Ellison's feeble explanations, you're a bigot!

Grow continues:

Fine didn't really answer the question.

"I'm just talking about his pattern of behavior over time," he said.

And then he was off again, talking about Farrakhan, the controversial Nation of Islam leader, and how "these people hate whites and Jews."

I suppose all this was especially stunning because a few hours before Fine issued his statement, I had been at what turned out to be Ellison's victory celebration Tuesday night. The Blue Nile restaurant on Franklin Avenue was jammed with people of every imaginable background shaking hands, hugging and dancing while anxiously awaiting results of the vote.

In 27 years in this city, I'd never seen a more diverse gathering.

Never?

Really? The most diverse ever?

I sincerely doubt that.

And diverse how? Genuine diversity? Or the kind of diversity Alan Dershowitz famously decried at Harvard, where the word meant "...someone with dark skin or in a skirt who thinks just like you"?

Could someone in that "diverse" crowd have silenced qualms about little things like hastily-buried traces of antisemitism, the same way that feminists tranquilized their "beliefs" when they were told to close ranks behind Bill Clinton?

"This looks like the face of the Fifth District," Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said of the event.

Right. A district that might give Pol Pot 60% of the ballot, if only the DFL endorsed him.

Seriously - as long as someone pastes the "progressive" label on themselves, what won't the Minneapolis DFL support?

Alan Fine is doing what the Strib won't; trying to make sure the voters get the whole story.

Attention, Cable Industry

Could we please knock off with those stupid spots that claim the Cable industry - the industry that locks up entire metro areas in unbreakable monopolies, charges exhorbitant rates, resists a la carte packaging like the Black Death and takes four days to make a repair (and then three more weeks to get the repair right) - started as "a ragtag group of dreamers?"

I can imagine a "ragtag group of dreamers" trying to get financing...

Pack It In, Hatch

The latest Minnesota Poll shows Mike Hatch and Governor Tim Pawlenty tied:

Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Attorney General Mike Hatch are entering the fall campaign facing an electorate evenly divided on their candidacies for governor, according to the latest Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.

Of course, according to the Strib Minnesota Poll, we sent Ann Wynia to the Senate in 1992, picked Skip Humphrey for governor in 1998, and Fritz Mondale to the senate and Roger Moe as governor in 2002. Simple fact; you need to give Republicans an extra 6-9 points over whatever the Minnesota Poll says.

It it's so unreliable, it's actually reliable.

The Pawlenty campaign awaits the truly big news; Jeff Fecke's prediction. They're praying he gives Hatch the nod...

A Couple of Questions for Tim "Not The Author" O'Brien

"Blog House", the Strib's weekly DFL puff piece disguised as a column about blogs, pulled off a first last Friday; it quoted this blog.

Which brings up all sorts of interesting questions.

O'Brien was writing about the aftermath of last Tuesday's primary, and Keith Ellison's victory in the Fifth CD:

It was politics closer to home that had local bloggers engaged this week. Keith Ellison's win in the Fifth Congressional District's DFL primary dismayed Republicans, to say the least.

Dismayed?

Hm. By way of support, he quoted CH from Cold Hearted Truth:

..."America will have its very first Muslim serving in Congress. Not just any Muslim, but one with very strong ties to the Nation of Islam and a history of alleged racial and religious bigotry. ... He is also known to have offered support for Sharif Willis (a local leader of the gang called the Vice Lords). ... In spite of all this ... Ellison won the bid and will be the Democrat on the ticket. Short of a miracle he will represent his district in the United States congress. ... God bless America."

And yours truly:

Mitch Berg at Shot in the Dark (5) agreed. "Keith Ellison -- supporter of cop-killers, unapologetic Kathleen Soliah fan, and a person whose past includes episodes that, if mirrored to a candidate on the right, would have provoked a media frenzy -- wins the MN CD5 primary."

Now help me out here; where's the "dismay"?

Oh, I think Ellison is a terrible candidate. Leave aside the fact that he supports Kathleen Soliah, that he backs cop killers, and of course he's lied (with the active connivance of the Strib) about his past. The best things anyone on the left can come up with to defend him is "The's the most progressive candidate..." - which is bad enough.

But there's not a jot of "dismay" anywhere in my heart. This race is a :can't lose" for me; if Alan Fine pulls off the biggest upset in American electoral history and wins, life is good. If Ellison wins, I'm guaranteed two years of Grade-A material, the kind of thing that people usually have to move to Barbara Boxer or Nancy Pelosi's turf to write about (and the stuff Wellstone would've been great for, had blogs really taken off while he was alive).

So Tim "Not The Author" O'Brien, where on earth did you get "dismay" from anything I've said? Do you have a source that had my swimming in the bottom of a glass somewhere, groaning about the spectre of an Ellison victory? You certainly never called me or anyone I know to confirm my "dismay", like a journalist is supposed to do. Or did you - to pick a reason out of the clear blue sky - say it because your story was written long ago, and you could have picked any conservative blogger's statement and fit it in there?

O'Brien goes on to quote some insignificant leftyblogger ("Phoenix Woman" from "Mercury Rising". Tim - how long did you have to surf to find this flake?) who gritted her teeth and shouted...:

Tough, said a jubilant Phoenix Woman at Mercury Rising (6). "The Republicans weren't allowed to control the outcome. They wanted to cow the Democrats into staying away from a black man and a practicing Muslim. They failed."

Wow. I had no idea we were so all-powerful.

Quick, "Phoenix Woman" and Tim O'Brien; show me one significant conservative effort to "cow" anyone. (And "Failure" was never an option, no matter what GOP's motivation: the DFL could nominate John Gotti or Fidel Castro or Ed Gein in the Fifth CD, and he's win by 20%. Fifth District DFLers are to voting as Pavlov's Dog was to drool).

You can't show any such example, of course. Except in the sense that's become more and more clear lately - where, to liberals, anything a conservative says and does is some variety of "hate" or another. In the world of the Twin Cities left, any Republican activity, thought, speech or action is by definition a form of oppression or hate. Question: If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and "Phoenix Woman" ant Tim O'Brien aren't there to hear it, is it still "hate"?

Bring on Ellison. He'll join with R.T. Rybak in making Minneapolis more a laughingstock than it already is. Not because he's black and Muslim, but because he's "progressive", and because eventually he's going to have to pay back his debts to those who got him here. And that's going to be fun to write about.

It's Bad Enough...

...when calling someone a "bigot" is the last refuge of a weak argument against dissent from your position.

It's worse when it's the first.

Low Point?

Those of us who've been interested in military history for a long time recall the exploits of the Israeli military; their victories against vastly larger enemies in 1948 and 1956, their dashing pre-emptive gutting of an imminent Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi attack in 1967, and their dramatic come-from-behind victory in 1973 (after a brilliant armored counterstroke left the Egyptian army cut off in the Sinai).

So I remember being puzzled when I read predictions in the late eighties that the Israeli military was likely to decay and lose a lot of its edge.

And then, after 1980's "Operation Peace in Galilee", there have been a couple of generations of Israeli soldiers and especially officers and non-commissioned officers who've joined the service (almost all Israeli men serve three years in the regular military and then in the reserves until their late forties) and served out their military careers without having a war to fight. And that's a difficult thing for a military made up entirely of draftees to deal with.

I figured "can't happen".

It apparently can. The Israeli military is in disarray after the summer's very difficult campaign against Hezb'allah:

Colonel Amnon Eshel, head of the seventh brigade, reportedly complained that his immediate boss, General Gal Hirsh, was "completely cut off from realities on the ground" as his badly-prepared men battled to counter Hezbollah rockets.

Halutz "severely reprimanded" Eshel for disrespecting the military hierarchy and suspended him from promotion for two years, an army spokesman told AFP.

The latest incident, revealed two days after General Udi Adam resigned, underscored the level of disarray in the military.

The war left 162 Israelis dead and failed to achieve either main objectives of retrieving two soldiers captured by Hezbollah in a raid on July 12 or halting the guerrillas' barrage of more than 4,000 rocket attacks on the north.

It will be interesting seeing what the Israelis do. Other nations, faced with their nations' defense changing from "dealing with an overwhelming conventional attack" to "fighting unconventional wars", have abandoned the notion of the all-draftee or "National service" (everyone serves - militaries like those of Switzerland and Israel) army in favor of the smaller, all-professional military like the US has...

...and which many on the left want to revert to a draftee force, precisely because such forces have a hard time fighting wars like the one we, and Israel, currently face.

I've Said It Before

I've said it before - there are times I'm glad my first career was radio.

Let's flash waaaay back. I got whacked from my first radio job when I was...18, I think. Not for cause, by the way - new management sorta cleaned out a lot of people.

Anyway, I learned bright and early that loyalty to an employer is a quaint relic to an earlier era, and that you are only as secure as your ability to stay current is effective.

Which is why I feel sorry for people who grew up in the manufacturing business, especially union guys who came up through their careers assuming that they'd be wearing a butt-shaped groove in their cafeteria seat over the course of an uninterrupted 40 year career, without ever having to learn anything to stay current:

Ford Motor Co. said Friday that it plans to cut 10,000 more salaried jobs, offer buyouts to all hourly workers and shut down two more plants as part of a dramatic restructuring plan designed to rein in expenses and restore the struggling automaker to profitability.

Sorry, Ford guys.

But speaking as a guy whose first career has shrunk drastically - moreso than auto manufacturing, if memory serves - and whose second career is considered an optional nicety by most companies, all I can tell you is that if you're settling in for a lifetime union gig as a stamp operator somewhere, take some time between fishing trips and snowmobiling to take, say, a CNC or tool-and-die class or something.

You are, in the end, only as secure as you are marketable.

And even then life can get pretty dicey.

All About Dino

Sinatra? Martin? Crosby? Johnny Carson? Cary Grant?

Meh.

Or so I used to think.

When I was a kid in the very late sixties and the seventies, a lot of people who'd been big stars from the late forties through the mid-sixties were still very much in their prime, or shortly enough past it that they still had prime time specials and Christmas shows and did regular guest shots on The Tonight Show.

And, since they were the stuff that my parents watched, I figured they had to be desperately, groaningly uncool.

Dean Martin, obviously, was one of them. I caught onto the caricature, even as a kid; the dissipated, constantly-hammered playboy schtick that irritated me (growing up as I was among furiously sober Scandinavians).

Of course there was more to the story. Or so I'd figured. But as usual, it's one of Sheila's extended blasts of biographical writing that's teaching me how much more.

As in today's extended riff on Martin, which goes into enough detail to make Joe Tucci blanche and beg for mercy from the greatest concentration of Martiniana anywher e on the web.

Is "Martiniana" a word?

Anyway, it's a great read...

NYPD: The Law Is An Ass

Via Joel Rosenberg, a handicapped woman shoots an attacker with a concealed handgun:

A 56-year-old woman was leaving her building in her wheelchair, her only company the small dog perched on her lap.

Her attacker came from behind, the police said, and there was no one else around. But this attempted robbery had an ending unlike many others. As it turns out, the would-be victim, Margaret Johnson, has a permit to carry a .357 handgun — and she carries it often.

The mugging ended seconds after it began, the police said, when Ms. Johnson pulled out her gun and shot her attacker in his arm. Last night, the man accused of the attempted mugging, Deron Johnson, 45, was in stable condition at Harlem Hospital Center with a gunshot wound to his elbow, the police said. He was under protective custody and is facing a robbery charge, the police said.

Ms. Johnson, who was treated at a local hospital and later released, said she suffered bruises to her neck and arm. “I’m tired, I’m really tired,” she said as she sat in her apartment last night, wearing a tan baseball cap and appearing rattled. “He tried to mug me, so I shot him.”

Trained observers will note: the story takes place in New York - a city where the law-abiding citizen needs a permit to have a gun at home, and can only get a carry permit via connections, fame or bribery.

Rosenberg notes that the "home" permit in New York is very, very circumscribed:

She had a "premises permit," which allows her to keep her gun in her home and transport it, on one or two specified days in the week, to the range for target practice -- but it must be carried unloaded, in a locked case, with any ammunition in a separate locked case.

Ms. Johnson's story, according to the Times?:

Yesterday, as is often the case, friends said, Ms. Johnson had her small bichon with her, and was going to a nearby firing range.

So - with a hostile guy directly in her face, confined to her wheelchair, she unlocked the case for her revolver, and the case for her ammunition, and flipped open the cylinder and stuck at least one round into the chamber at 10 o'clock, and shot her attacker, who was still apparently at close range, apparently either hypnotized by the woman's blazing speed or a closet gun nut who wanted to admire the pistol's new nickel-plate job?

Unlikely.

Rosenberg:

But the cops have near dead-bang cold on carrying without a permit -- a felony in NYC. (She's got a permit, but it doesn't cover the activity that she actually was engaging in.) And what do they do?

They turn into the last-but-one-scene in Casablanca, more or less. "Mrs. Johnson has shot Mr. [no relation] Johnson. Arrest him."

Well, good for them. Really...when the application of the law would be so obviously unjust in this entirely predictable sort of circumstance, that law is an ass, and ought to be change.

Here, there and everywhere.

The Sacred Herd

There is no more sacred cow in local budgets than libraries.

At least, that's what local politicians would like you to think.

Minneapolis is going through the same flailing spasms that Saint Paul did a few years back over a plan to pare back the number of libraries in the city.

Under pressure to balance the 2007 budget, the city's Library Board scheduled five public meetings starting today to gauge the opinion of library patrons.

They're being asked to choose the best of the worst situations, said Colin Hamilton, executive director of the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library.

"I think all of these options are terrifying," Hamilton said.

Under two of the three budget-balancing proposals, the Roosevelt, Southeast and Webber Park branches would close Jan. 1.

Hint to Minneapolis residents: think a minute.

Libraries are to cities what teachers are to schools:

• They are the symbol of the43 benificent good of each institution.
• They are what their respective institutions regard as sacrosanct, the most important thing they deliver to their constituents...at least, while the speeches are being made.
• Then, when budgets "get tight", they are the first thing put on the chopping block. Why? Because they're the part of the city government that everyone sees, everyone uses, everyone loves. It ratchets up the emotions more than, say, threatening to lay off people in Health and Family Support, or some of the school district's plethora of middle managers, or STD programs, or cutting back on soft-skill consultants at the school district, or some other program that most people never see.

No. The whole point is to hit you, the city resident and taxpayer, where you live - by chopping away at the one city (or school) expenditure that doesn't pull you over, tax you, write tickets for the weeds in your alley, stand around holding a shovel as you wait to drive past, or sit in endless meetings to determine consensus on a process for determining consensus for a process to determine a mandate for meeting processes.

And when they've scared you - no, when they've bullied you into acquiescing, then all will go back to more or less normal - except you, the taxpayer, will have been trained. Don't get uppity when it comes to taxes, or mother city's gonna take your library away!

But not, of course, the mayor's police car, or the school superintendant's car allowance. An institution's gotta have its priorities.

Beyond Uninformed

Smartie from Powerliberal on Michael Medved's answer to a question he didn't really hear:

I didn't hear the question, only Medved saying "the outcry over your movie goes to show that the Left in this country is opposed to free speech." I listened for another twenty minutes and it never got better from there. Nice job, Patriot. Trivializing our shared horror of the events of that day to increase your market share? You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Harry Reid and Dick "Turban" Durbin, as noted last week:

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

Harry Reid and Dick Durbin are trivializing the institutions that the terrorists attacked on 9/11 - our liberties. They are the ones that'd castrate the First Amendment to safeguard...what? Bill Clinton's dubious legacy?

Medved was right.

Ellison Akbar!

Keith Ellison - supporter of cop-killers, unapologetic Kathleen Soliah fan, and a person whose past includes episodes that, if mirrored to a candidate on the right, would have provoked a media frenzy - wins the MN CD5 primary:

"Let's be honest, we faced some tough days, but we never got negative," Ellison continued. "And we proved that you can win an election by going positive and staying positive. We know that negative campaigning has its effects, but it doesn't enhance our humanity, it does not build bridges, it builds walls."

Well, to be fair, it helps to be in a district where the DFL could nominate a set of wind-up chattering teeth and draw 60%...

We In The Twin Cities...

...are not the only people saddled with dilettantes for mayors.

Duluth certainly didn't escape. The US Coast Guard conducts periodic live-fire training with machine guns in temporary "safety zones" on the Lake.

Guns? Oh, my...:

"I'm outraged. ... I would think the public is outraged,'' [Duluth mayor Herb] Bergson said at a hastily called news conference Tuesday afternoon.

The question, of course, is as much about bureaucratic turfmongering as it is about big bad guns and the military:

The Coast Guard last month proposed establishing 34 permanent live-fire training zones across the Great Lakes, including three in Lake Superior. The zones would be closed to the public only during the drills. Currently, temporary zones are created for each drill. The safety zones combined would encompass 2,376 square miles, or 2.5 percent of the Great Lakes' 94,488 square miles.

That proposal was put on hold for 60 days after Minnesota and Wisconsin congressmen complained that neither their offices, the public nor the media were given proper notice.

Lanier said Tuesday that creation of the permanent zones was put on hold, but live-fire training was not, and that there are no plans to suspend exercises during the public discussion on creating the training zones.

"We need to do the necessary training to conduct our missions of maritime safety, homeland security and national defense. ... We never intended to say that we were putting training on hold,'' Lanier said.

I loved this bit:

The mayor said he opposes all live-fire training on the Great Lakes. He said the shooting should be done on land at police ranges where lead is controlled.

Yes, genius, except they're the Coast Guard, and they have to learn to shoot on the water, which is very, very different from shooting on a range on dry, stable land.

I take it all back. R. T. Rybak isn't the dumbest mayor in Minnesota.

Well, OK. He is. But still, Bergson's a piece of work.

Ed At Mac

My radio comrade Ed Morrissey did a little shindig at Macalester College in St. Paul on Monday night.

Ed did a good job, and was, as usual, gracious about his hosts:

I'm glad to report back that no one got devoured tonight and that the evening went very well indeed. As most people guessed, the audience and the panel were (for the most part) highly opposed to my point of view. However, they all treated me rather graciously, even if they did not agree with me on almost anything I said -- save for my remarks about democracy, at least as it applied in the United States.

I won't get into the nitty-gritty of the debating positions. I don't think they would be surprising on either side to CQ readers, and I didn't hear anything tonight I hadn't read before in the Independent and Rolling Stone. (For that matter, they didn't hear anything from me that they hadn't read in the Weekly Standard -- which I hope they read, anyway.) I think all of us made an effort to keep the forum from descending into a tit-for-tat sniping session, and with one silly exception regarding my use of the phrase "one man, one vote", all succeeded.

It is, indeed, good form to be gracious to one's hosts. Had I done the presentation, I would certainly strive to do no less.

But I was not the guest, but a mere audience member, so I'm under no such restriction; Ed's opponents were a joke.

Well, most of them. Phil Steger, a St. Olaf (?) professor and director of "Friends for a Non-Violent World", was articulate and intelligent. He, like most "Peace at all costs" advocates, was (to my perspective) very myopic. In his intro, he spoke very movingly about the questions he got from Iraqi friends during his many pre-war trips to Hussein's nation. I wanted - badly - to ask how many of his friends were Kurds, or Marsh Arabs? How many had had to watch their spouses raped, their parents fed into plastic shredders? How many of his Iraqi friends had had relatives just vanish? That said, he did a generally good job - although, like most "Peace at any cost" activists he is in dubious command of many facts outside his rather rarified ken. Example: asked how to best carry out the war, he responded with an example of a British officer of "The Scottish Battalion" who directed his troops to take extraordinary risks to safeguard civilians during the Brits' counterinsurgency campaign in Yemen in the sixties. Problem: There has never, in the history of the British Army, been a unit with the proper name "The Scottish Battalion". More importantly, the doctrine Steger described did exist, after a fashion; the Brits wrote the book on counterinsurgency operations, and it involved what is by American regular army standards an extraordinary emphasis on the winning of civilian hearts and minds. The real story is a lot more complex - and interesting - than the one-dimensional platitude Steger presented and, to be fair, probably didn't know how to present better.

Less worth the effort was Lou Ellingson, a retired Navy captain and Vietnam Swift boat veteran. While the fact of his service in Vietnam is noted and appreciated, he added little to the argument but 1) "war is bad"-type platitudes and 2) plenty of Bush-bashing snarks (which the audience - largely Volvo-driving, alpaca-wearing ex-hippies and smugly furious Mac kids - guffawed at as if on cue.

Worst of all was Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, U. of St. Thomas Peace and Justice Studies professor. The event - and, I'd suspect, his chair at St. Thomas - seemed to be his platform for gushing conspiracy theories. I tried to record some of them, but the "voice memo" feature on my cheap cell phone didn't work. I'll paraphrase: "We didn't go into Iraq for WMDs. We went there to give American corporations control of the oil". The guy would embarass Michael Moore. If you send your kids to Saint Thomas, tens of thousands of your (and other parents') dollars a year go to this person.

The shorter Phil Steger: "War hurts people. There's never an excuse for it . We need to teach our military to be non-violent".

The shorter Jack Ellingson: "I was in Vietnam. We need to pull out of Iraq, but President Nixon - er, ooops, Bush, ha ha ha - won't let us!"

The shorter Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer: "There's ample documentary evidence - oh, look, there's hardly any time, here! But trust me on this one! - that the war was planned at Halliburton's world headquarters."

So well done, Ed. If I were up there, the temptation to start openly mocking the likes of Nelson-Pallmeyer - as hilarious a caricature of the worst excesses of the soft-humanities academy as I've seen - would have been overwhelming.

It's All Our Fault

Saint Paul held a 9/11 observance yesterday.

Here are Mayor Chris Coleman's remarks, as prepared for delivery:

Five years ago, on the evening of September 11th, I thought back to Robert Kennedy's comments following the death of Martin Luther King and his quotation from Aeschylus:

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

I wondered then what the events of that day would teach us and what path our country would follow in response to the great tragedy.

In the months and years that followed, with the unforgettable pain lodged in our hearts, I had hope that this horror would have caused the opposite of what the terrorists sought.

I hoped that instead of diminishing this great nation, it would strengthen us and help us form new allies where previously there had been
enemies.

In the five years since the tragic events of September 11th, what wisdom has the awful grace taught us?

At times, I fear that we are no wiser than before the attacks.

Well, some of us certainly aren't.

We'll come back to that.

I hear politicians use the events to justify everything from shopping to military build-up.

I hear them tell us that we were attacked because the terrorists hate our freedom - as if this simplicity of thought can prevent another attack.

I don't believe I've ever heard it portrayed as a cause-effect relationship. But again, more later...:

I hear many quotes from Hebrew and Christian scriptures, but too few acknowledgments that God calls us to seek peace and Christ taught us to love our enemy.

In Romans, we our taught: "Be not overcome with evil, but overcome
evil with good."

In honor of over 3000 innocent lives, let us overcome the evil of those
who sought to destroy us with good.

Let us seek new friendships and understanding with people of every nation.

Let us turn our swords into plowshares and sow the seeds of peace across the globe.

Let us seek to prevent another tragedy not simply through military strength but through strength of character.

Let us show our enemies that the true greatness of this nation is our love for one another.

When we choose this path, the awful grace of September 11th will truly have made us wise.

The fact that we "love one another" enough to have built a democracy in which Germans and French, Poles and Jews, Christians and Moslems not only co-exist but maintain a civil democracy is both a sign of our wisdom - greater in its way than that of any other nation on earth - and the part about us that the attackers (who remain unnamed throughout the speech) do in fact hate.

But the overarching message from Mayor Chris Coleman is this: It's our fault.

Don't blame me. I didn't vote for this hamster.

Question for Conspiracy Theorists

If the Bush Administration was ingenious enough to sneak tons of explosives into the World Trade Center to bring it down in a controlled implosion...

...then why didn't they plant a couple of WMDs in Iraq just to make things look right? A used Russian nuke or a couple of trucks full of Korean war surplus Mustard gas would have done the trick, right?

Just curious.

Pick Your Parallels Carefully

Dealing with stock-issue lefties is sort of like handling four-year-olds. A four-year-old will keep begging for candy long after it's quite clear Dad and Mom are not going to cave in. And a not-that-bright lefty will keep with a line of talking points long after the points' shelf-life has expired.

Which brings us to Eileen Biernat's letter to the editor in today's Strib:

Imagine that there was a break-in at your home and your family was killed. The police knew who did it and assured you that they wouldn't rest until he was captured.

Actually, the thugs who put three bullet holes in my house in 1998 got a pretty perfunctory response from the cops. But I'm not digressing, here; we'll come back to the example in a bit.

Now imagine, five years later, the police tell you they have some good news and some bad news. The good is they captured a guy, bad in his own right, but who had nothing to do with the attack on your family. The bad news is your family's killer is still out there and promising another attack on you and your loved ones.

Would you be relieved?

If I found out that someone who'd killed a bunch of other families was in the jug and waiting on a date with a needle (or even a shiv) I think I'd take some comfort, yes.

Where is our bad guy? Where is Osama Bin Laden? He's the guy who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and while it's nice that Saddam Hussein is out of power, it would also be nice if the government kept its promise to get the guy responsible for nearly 3,000 murders five years ago.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got the wrong guy. Where's Osama Bin Laden?

Ms. Biernat, at least try to stick with your own example. We got a guy that killed hundreds of thousands, and paid for terrorists who killed thousands more in Israel and elsewhere.

There are six billion people on this earth. Care to play "where's Waldo" with one guy among that crowd? More to the point, there are 1.2 billion Moslems, of which maybe 120 million have some sympathy with Bin Laden; figure several million of them will be sympathetic enough to actively assist him. So, Eileen Biernat; how hard to you think it is, finding one guy among several million people who want him not to be found?

We have murderers on the Ten Most Wanted list who went on the lam when I was in high school. The FBI implicitly promised to find Donald Webb. Why have they let us down? And remember, Webb is among a population of 300 million that largely wants him caught.

Finding people who don't want to be found - especially people who not only don't want to be caught, especially when they are phenomenally wealthy - isn't as simple as stomping your feet like a four year old. Like Eileen Biernat is doing.

Oh, and the guys who shot my house (they were shooting at a kid who'd horned in on their drug turf who lived two doors down and was walking by at the time)? The cops never really did anything at all.

But I did. I chased their car for a couple of miles one afternoon. They never showed up again. I'd like to think it's because they realized at least one neighborhood resident was not going to wait for the cops to deal with 'em.

Y'know. As opposed to cutting and running.

Chief Dolan

The good news: Minneapolis is trying to promote from within for a police chief; Mayor Rybak has nominated Tim Dolan for the job:

Dolan, 51, has long been considered the frontrunner for the job and has run the department since Bill McManus left in April to become police chief in San Antonio.

After decades of going to outsiders - like the disastrous New Yorkers Tony Bouza and Bob Olson, and Bill McManus, the former Dayton chief who only tolerated two years of Minneapolis' schizoid City Council before scramming for San Antonio - finally, an insider.

It can't hurt.

Of course there's bad news!:

Rybak will need at least seven council votes to confirm Dolan's nomination. So far, an informal poll showed he has at least five supporters on the council.

Another five members are undecided on issues ranging from community relations to being strong and direct with a powerful police union. Two council members, Ralph Remington and Scott Benson, said they would not vote for Dolan.

Remington called the selection process for chief "secretive and perfunctory."The process is flawed; therefore the selection is flawed," he said, adding that the city missed a chance to nominate a black. He said that such a candidate could make an impact in a community wracked by violence. Forty-four people have been killed in Minneapolis this year.

Minneapolis' weak-mayor system, combined with a City Council that is both very strong and terminally-beholden to special interests, is a formidable obstacle for any candidate who's not both supernaturally tough on crime and doesn't have superhuman social and political sensitivity.

Minneapolis will not get a "perfect" police chief (by City Council standards) until science not only learns how to build androids, but build them by committee.

One of 2,996

I wasn't invited to be part of the 2,996 project - the project to ensure that some blogger, somewhere, wrote a memoriam to each of 9/11's victims (nobody ever invites me to be part of these things. I feel like I'm in high school again).

And I see that the woman who's assigned to write about the only 9/11 victim of whom I have any personal knowledge hasn't posted anything in over a month.

So if it please the court; I'll do a little something in memory of Ann Nicole Nelson, to my knowledge the only North Dakota native to die on 9/11.

A native of Stanley, North Dakota, Nelson went to Carlton College in Minnesota, and then worked for Dain Rauscher as a financial analyst in Minneapolis and Chicago before taking a job with Cantor Fitzgerald.

From the bio on Ann's memorial page:

She placed great value on education and believed that all the world was a classroom. This led her to travel throughout this country as well as many others. She loved and enjoyed people, embraced diversity, and felt that we all have much to learn from each other. Ann established college funds for many of her young relatives and friends. She attended Stanley Public School, Stanley, ND; Campus School in Minot, ND; Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, WI; and Carleton College in Northfield, MN. She also studied at Cambridge in England and spent a semester on a study tour throughout China. She recently spent time in Peru, Norway, and Ireland.

Ann was born on Syttende Mai and loved to celebrate holidays and special occasions with her friends. her birthday party sometimes lasted for a week. Ann enjoyed all sports and participated in a variety of events including skiing, golf, tennis and soccer.

Dan Barry at the New York Times followed up with Ann's mother, and wrote a poignant, sometimes funny, often wrenching piece about Ann's mother, Jenette, opening Ann's laptop years after 9/11, and finding a list of Ann's personal goals.

11. Never be ashamed of who I am.

"Ann was in many environments where being a girl from North Dakota may not have been the most sophisticated label to wear," Mrs. Nelson says, recalling that her daughter had traveled to China and to Peru, and had worked in the high-powered environments of Chicago and New York.

Even so, Ann always conveyed pride in who she was, who her parents were and where they came from though never in a boastful way. "It's an important point about her personality," her mother says.

As a parent myself, this part killed me:

24. Remember birthdays!!!!

Birthdays loomed large in Ann's life. She would celebrate her birthday not for a day, but for a week in part because her father's birthday came the very next day, in part because she was proud to have been born on Norwegian Independence Day which is May 17, today.
"Ann would have been 35," says Mr. Nelson, who turns 65 tomorrow.

Her death Stanley, North Dakota hard. If America is the shining city on the hill, rural North Dakota is the room in the basement of a modest rambler in that shining city that nobody every gets down to. But Ann, by all accounts, was like a lot of us who fled the prairie for bigger, brighter, noisier places - but kept a big piece of it in her heart, and did everyone proud in the process.

Read the memorial page. Remember.

9/11

In the past, I've written long screeds about the 9/11 anniversary.

This year? 40-odd percent of the nation thinks we need to cut and run from Iraq. Too many think that "war on terror" means "perp-walking Bin Laden".

For many of us - on the right as well as the left - the ideal seems to be that if we arrest or kill Bin Laden (lefties) or break the back of international Islamofascist terror (the right), the world will morph back into 1999. Wretchard at Belmont Club is more realistic - and depressing:

If I had to find one word to represent the mood five years after September the 11th it would be resignation. Whatever the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have signified, they did not, as some on the Left might think, represent experiences which foreshadow a return to the 1990s. What they have proved is that the cracks in the world run too deep for anyone to predict where they may lead. Mark Steyn writing in the Chicago Sun Times looks around and finds that the combination of commercial globalization and cultural fragmentation has led, not as its admirers predicted, to a world joining hands but to a planet of tribes united only in their ability to watch, hate and destroy each other.

And 9/11 - and even less so the War on Terror - didn't start that process. It was the symptom of the larger disease, one that people were predicting back in the late seventies; the Third World War would be the North versus the South.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. 9/11 - the attack on all of us (!), the tragedy, the loss - all of that should, and needs to be, above politics.

But the response? In this deeply split nation, the response is irredeemably intertwined with politics. And about half the nation, according to the polls, has it completely wrong.

So as we reach another anniversary, I suspect more and more that it'll take another 9/11 - only more serious - to really make the American people take this seriously.

I'm hoping not, and am crossing my fingers hoping that my faith gets redeemed.

But it's not an auspicious anniversary, all in all.

UPDATE: Lileks puts it better:

I’ll tell you this: if I ran Time magazine, I wouldn’t have run a cover story titled “What We’ve Lost.”

What We’ve Done, perhaps. Who We Are. Why We Fight. What They Want. But “What We’ve Lost”?

I expected many things five years ago, but an epitaph in the face of survival wasn’t among them. Of course, when you recall the post 9 /11 cover "Why They Hate Us," you do have a nice set of bookends. Forgive me if I've little time to reread the tomes bracketed between those sentiments. Today is what it is. Tomorrow, however, requires our attention.

And tomorrow will get it.

Electric Landlady

One of music's great injustices is that Kirsty MacColl - a British singer best known in the US for writing Tracy Ullman's one hit and helping introduce the Pogues to America - was a wonderful singer and a great songwriter.

She was killed in a controversial scuba diving accident in Mexico in 2000.

She's one of the best female pop singers ever - and one who always came up a day late or a dollar short in finding the big, big time. A strike derailed distribution of her first album as the BBC was playing it to death; label bankruptcies stalled her later on. She was on the brink of wide recognition a third time when she died.

And of course, her flirtation with stardom was largely a pre-video thing - it's hard to find much video presence from her.

So it was fun - and a little sad - to find this little number, a vid for her second single, the hilarious "Terry", from 1980.

YouTube - Kirsty MacColl - Terry

Apropos not much. I just miss music being fun, sometimes...

I'm Probably Going To Go...

...to Ed's speech at Macalester tonight - he'll be the only pro-war speaker on a panel of four, and if I and some other NARN/CQ fans don't show up he'll also likely be the only one in the entire room on the anti-appeasement, anti-cut-and-run, anti-dictatorship side of the debate (let the lefties now shout "but wait, we do not support dictators!". Perhaps, but if you do nothing tangible to unseat them, or at least make their lives as profoundly uncomfortable as possible - especially if your putative policies stand in contrast with those who do - then it in effect gives the dictator a shred a hope. We don't like this. Do we?)

I'll report on it later.

Oh, Please. Please. Please.

If I promise to eat my vegetables and say my prayers, can it please be true?

"I haven't completely ruled out running for president again in the future but I don't expect to," Gore said before the Sunday night premiere of "An Inconvenient Truth."

"I offer the explanation not as an effort to be coy or clever. It's just the internal shifting of gears after being in politics almost 30 years. I hate to grind the gears," he added.

Please, Al. Run.

Run, Al, Run!

SlAcKrZ

I love this (below the fold).

Some language possibly NSFW.

YouTube - Mac Spoof: Portability

The Madness Spreads

A little while ago, I was talking with a liberal about the war in Iraq. He, she or it conveyed a belief that Iraq was better off under the rule of Hussein that it is today.

I asked he, she or it if that was what he/she/it really meant - that Iraqis were better off when they were obliged to be meek vassals of a brutal kleptocracy, reciting rote Ba'athist slogans during the day and huddling in their homes at night, hoping the Mukhabarat didn't come knocking to take them on a one-way journey to a date with a drill to the eyes or knees, or a plastic-shredder, or a shallow grave in the middle of the desert; where minorities were gassed from the air or lined up and shot in their hundreds; back in the days before good, civil Iraqis had the right to shoot back at their tormenters.

"Yep", said he, she or it. Better to be meek subjects whose existance hangs on the sufferance of a dictator than to be combatants for a future any of us - Republican or Democrat - could consider without throwing up.

It was profoundly depressing to hear - but I wrote it off to he/she/it being hammered on Koolaid.

But if if that's the case, it's apparently a systemic problem:

[West Virginia Democrat senator John D.] Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'"

Does Rockefeller stands by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?

"Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."

Democrats: forgiving dictatorship overseas, promoting it at home.

What's not to like?

Not Exactly Confirming That "Journalists Are Held To A High Standard" Schtick

Tim "Not The Author" O'Brien in a Blog House post about Michael Brodkorb's role in the DFL's internecine squabbling over the fifth CD, in referring to Sycophant, according to Merriam-Webster:

Latin sycophanta slanderer, swindler, from Greek sykophantEs slanderer, from sykon fig + phainein to show

Tim "Not The Author" O'Brien is a "journalist", at a newspaper that trumpets its' superiority over bloggers based on its resources in "gatekeeping" and "editing" and "fact-checking" (which are, by the way, nearly non-existant at the Strib, as a matter of organizational fact), and their supposed commitment to journalistic ethics and "accuracy".

And if he's a "trained" "journalist", he certainly knows that words have meanings, and that they matter.

"Sycophant" has a deeply negative connotation (confirmed by its definition); its synonyms include:

yes-man; hanger-on, leech, parasite, sponge, sponger; henchman, lackey, minion, satellite, slave, stooge; admirer, cultist, devotee, enthusiast, fan, groveler (or groveller), idolater (or idolator), worshipper (or worshiper), zealot; adherent, convert, disciple, follower, partisan, pupil, votary

Is Gary M. Miller any of these things? I will let the reader be the judge...

...but what we're really judging here is Tim "Not The Author" O'Brien, and the word he chooses to describe the bloggers that are part of his beat.

So I'm wondering: has he ever called the always-reliable kids from MNPublius "yes-m[e]n; hanger[s]-on or leech[es]? Has Rew - a paid operative of a left-leaning flakery - a "parasite, sponge, sponger or henchman"? Or referred to Mark Gisleson, who turned his entire blog over to Ford Bell (reportedly for money - as opposed to Miller, who does his blog for free) as "lackey, minion, satellite, slave, stooge", or Jeff Fecke as an " admirer, cultist, devotee, enthusiast, fan, groveler (or groveller), idolater (or idolator), worshipper (or worshiper), zealot; adherent, convert, disciple, follower, partisan, pupil, votary..."

No?

Why?

Does he know something we don't?

Or might it be something else?

UPDATE: Gisleson got no money. My bad. I apologize for not confirming that before writing it.

And - let me make this clearer (or make it clear in the first place): my examples (MNPublius, Gisleson, Rew and Fecke) were chosen not to highlight any behavior on any of their parts, but to illustrate Tim "Not The Author" O'Brien's gross gaffe in tone (for a "journalist").

I apologize for not stating that clearly, and most of all for the factual error.

MOB Party Redux

Had a great time at the MOB party last night. I didn't go around recording names - but we had a solid turnout, and (more importantly) a blast meeting everyone.

I'll post a rundown of blogs covering the party later today.

There Are Some Things...

...from my twenties that are impossible to explain to my kids.

Or this:

NARN Today, MOB Tonight

Today, Ed and I are doing the NARN from 1-3. King and Michael Brodkorb take over after 3PM. Chad and Brian are on now.

But the big news is tonight's MOB party. Join us tonight at Keegans around sevenish for the third annual MOB Summerpalooza!

Attention, Ashcroft Libertarians!

You know who you are; you're one of those people who thought Libertarians were quaintly silly, and that libertarian beliefs were vaguely off.

Then John Ashcroft was sworn in as Attorney General, and suddenly you were...well, not a Randian, but you certainly obsessed about civil liberties (well, some civil liberties, anyway - not the declasse ones. Just the important ones, like the right to suspend crucifixes in urine and download pr0n at the public library and abortion).

But let's grant for the moment that you are all champions of civil liberties, keenly sensitive to the blowing of the chill winds that creak the rafters of liberty. You look at community restrictions on downloading pr0n in libraries and see stormtroopers in the press room at the NYTimes; you encounter the Ten Commandments in a courthouse and see Christian imams packing infidels off to camps in Idaho. Fine.

What do you make of this?:

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

So: two of the most powerful men in the US Senate are invoking the Communications Act...as if the Communications Act overrides the First Amendment? And over a program that, even if it were slanted toward Conservatives and the administration - and much of the buzz about the pre-broadcast versions of the show indicate it's just as hard on the Bush administration as it was on Clinton - would be very nearly a first in television history? So what if it did look at events from a conservative persepctive? Editorial perspective, even overtly political, is legal and protected - a fact that's made Michael Moore and Al Franken very rich men.

But Reid and Durban want to threaten networks for criticizing Bill Clinton (not to mention bringing back the "Fairness Doctrine", which would extinguish with a pen stroke that pesky conservative media that keeps getting the way of the Great March of Progress)?

Is this making any of you Ashcroft Libertarians take notice yet?

No Facts At All

I was going to fisk the recent NYTimes editorial last Tuesday about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act...

...but Joel Rosenberg already strangled the article with its' own innards.

The piece - by Verlyn Klinkenborg - may have the lowest fact-to-length ratio of any editorial I've ever read, anywhere. It may indeed be so bad that I'll end up fisking it myself...

...but read Joel's take first.

The Plan Proceeds

If you've followed this blog for any time at all, you know that one of my life's ambitions is to leave a word, catchphrase or saying to the English language.

I have two contenders:

• Whomever said "the pen is mightier than the sword" never had to bet his life on it...
• ...and one which at long last I've seen in public:

  So, we were told and it was reported in the press that the problem was with SMS and that SMS customers wouldn't be able to deploy the patch, but the patch worked fine. Turns out the problem wasn't with SMS, but was with the MBSA and ITMU tools. Wait, what's this? ITMU is actually a tool within SMS! Why not just say, "Hey, the problem was with SMS", why the doublespeak? In the words of my friend Mitch Berg, "Your misdirection is as subtle and skillful as a German funk band"

It's fun when a plan comes together.

What If A War Began, and Nobody Remembered The Attack?

There's going to be a 9/11 memorial ceremony in Saint Paul:

FEATURING A PERFORMANCE BY SPCO MUSICIANS

On September 11, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the City of St.
Paul will present a 30-minute lunch-hour event at Landmark Center
commemorating the five-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman will host, members of The Saint
Paul Chamber Orchestra will perform, and St. Paul’s Poet Laureate,
Carol Connolly, will give a reading of her choosing. [Any bets on that one?]

The event will take place at 12:15 p.m. The event will not be ticketed
and is free and open to the public.

The idea behind the event came from Mayor Coleman, who wished to
provide an opportunity for reflection and meditation on the tragedy of
September 11 for those who live and work in St. Paul.

Event Information
Monday, September 11, 2006, 12:15-12:45 p.m.
Landmark Center, Saint Paul
Participants:
Mayor Chris Coleman
Members of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Carol Connolly, City of St. Paul Poet Laureate
Musical program includes:
Barber Adagio
Bach Air on a G string [Merry Christmas, Learned Foot]

The general public may call the SPCO ticket hotline at 651.291.1144
with questions.

The Censorship Doctrine

Reading about the flap over ABC's caving in to pressure from former Clintonistas, it's hard not to worry just a tad about the future of democracy.

For starters, let's drop the comparisons with The Reagans; conservatives were up in arms about that miniseries because it was factually inaccurate.

And factual inaccuracies - no matter now niggling, even in docu-dramas produced by the infinitely well-meaning - rankle everyone who has an ox to gore.

But the Clintonistas' line is that Bill Clinton's administration was anything but worthless in combatting terrorism during the nineties. One of their big beefs is that the miniseries shows Clinton was indecisive to the point of worthless - which understandably rankles the former president (via Gandelman:

Clinton pointedly refuted several fictionalized scenes that he claims insinuate he was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to care about bin Laden and that a top adviser pulled the plug on CIA operatives who were just moments away from bagging the terror master, according to a letter to ABC boss Bob Iger obtained by The Post.

Except that it's not "fiction" (via KAR:

THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM was buzzing. It was fall 1998 and the National
Security Council (NSC) and the "intelligence community" were tracking the whereabouts of
Osama bin Laden, the shadowy mastermind of terrorist attacks on American targets overseas.

"They've successfully triangulated his location," yelled a "Sit Room" watch stander. "We've got him."

Beneath the West Wing of the White House, behind a vaulted steel door, the Sit Room
staff sprang into action. The watch officer notified National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, "Sir, we've located bin Laden. We have a two-hour window to strike."

Characteristic of the Clinton administration, the weapons of choice would be Tomahawk
missiles. No clandestine "snatch" by our Special Operations Forces. No penetrating bombers or high-speed fighter aircraft flown by our Air Force and Navy forces. No risk of losing American lives.

Berger ambled down the stairwell and entered the Sit Room. He picked up the phone at
one of the busy controller consoles and called the president. Amazingly, President Clinton was
not available. Berger tried again and again. Bin Laden was within striking distance. The window of opportunity was closing fast. The plan of attack was set and the Tomahawk crews were ready.

For about an hour Berger couldn't get the commander in chief on the line. Though the president was always accompanied by military aides and the Secret Service, he was somehow unavailable. Berger stalked the Sit Room, anxious and impatient.

Finally, the president accepted Berger's call. There was discussion, there were
pauses - and no decision. The president wanted to talk with his secretaries of defense and state.

He wanted to study the issue further. Berger was forced to wait. The clock was ticking. The
president eventually called back. He was still indecisive. He wanted more discussion. Berger
alternated between phone calls and watching the clock.

The NSC watch officer was convinced we had the right target. The intelligence sources
were conclusive. The president, however, wanted a guaranteed hit or nothing at all.
This time, it was nothing at all. We didn't pull the trigger. We "studied" the issue until it was too late - the window of opportunity closed. Al-Qaeda's spiritual and organizational leader slipped through the noose.

I suspect the extreme reaction of the Senate Democrats is based on the sudden recogntion that the fall campaign will be waged on the single issue of which party is serious about national security. The president's demand for action on key fronts yesterday has clearly thrown the Dems into disarray as they realize that the American electorate will not reward more fecklessness on the part of Democrats. Now arrives a major television event that exposes the specifics of Democrtaic-era "stewardship" of national security, and they are in a frenzy to do whatever it takes to keep that memory down the memory hole.

Like Gandelman and John Fund, I'm uneasy with the whole notion of the "Docudrama" - dramatizations of documentary events. But the "fictionalizations" of the events dramatized in the miniseries seem (at first, unviewed glance) not to bear on the facts drawn from the 9/11 Commission report so much as use a minor convenience of dramatic licence. Would it bother me were I a Clinton supporter? No - but the point would still stand. As the 9/11 commission noted:

Lieutenant General William Boykin, the current deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence and a founding member of Delta Force, told us that "opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding."

I'd have preferred that the miniseries took no such liberties - but the liberties do not undercut the larger conclusion that the Clinton Adminstration...:

• built the "wall" between CIA and FBI
• Let Bin Laden go untouched several times
• Reacted ineffectually to repeated terrorist strikes - the '93 World Trade Center bombing, the Khobar Towers, the Embassy bombings and the USS Cole.

But a flap over a miniseries is nothing compared to what this portends for conservatives if Democrats take over the White House - and the Federal Communications Commission. John Kerry and Howard Dean have both expressed a willingness to reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine" - which would gut conservative broadcast media, the backbone of modern conservative activism - with a swipe of the pen and doing for Democrats by executive fiat what they couldn't do via the free market; stifling conservative dissent.

They've shown their willingness in this flap to go through back-channels and call in markers with network executives (as opposed to taking their case to the American people - a people who rejected the Democrats on exactly such grounds two years ago). Who knows what they'll do to take, and hold, power?

It's About Time

The President makes the war the big issue again:

So I'm -- today I'm asking Congress to pass legislation that will clarify the rules for our personnel fighting the war on terror. First, I am asking Congress to list the specific recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies.

Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act, our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Third, I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts, in U.S. courts. The men and women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs.

The need for this legislation is urgent. We need to ensure that those questioning terrorists can continue to do everything within the limits of the law to get information that can save American lives.

It's essential - sort of - to the war on terror.

So why not do this years ago? Not sure - chalk it up as one of the Administration's many mistakes - but it certainly makes great campaign-fodder.

Assuming the Republicans in the Senate can run with it - and given the performance of the likes of Senators Graham, McCain and so on this past year, I have little confidence of that.

Still, this is what we've needed to do for years. Terrorists - take note, liberals - are not criminals, or (according to the Geneva Convention) prisoners of war:

In international conflicts, guerrillas must distinguish themselves from the civilian population if they are preparing or engaged in an attack. At a minimum, guerrillas must carry their arms openly. (Protocol I, Art. 44, Sec. 3)

Under the earlier Geneva Conventions, which are more widely recognized, a guerrilla army must have a well-defined chain of command, be clearly distinguishable from the civilian population, carry arms openly and observe the laws of war. (Convention III, Art. 4, Sec. 2)

In the case of an internal conflict, combatants must show humane treatment to civilians and enemies who have been wounded or who have surrendered. Murder, hostage-taking and extrajudicial executions are all forbidden. (Convention I, Art. 3)

So - take note, Ashcroft Libertarians - the terrorists are neither prisoners of war (they don't fit any legal definition of "soldier"), nor legal guerrillas (they are completely covert) nor criminals (they are combatants against which the US has been fighting a war, not an investigation). They can, under cover of the law, be lined up and summarily shot upon capture - but we're not going to do that.

Let's get the votes on the record.

What say y'all, Democrats? Care to show you're not the party of craven appeasement?

Says Westover...

...about Mark Kennedy...:

I really want to like this guy, especially given the DFL alternative. But he’s got to stop trying to have it both ways -- talking conservative while walking to the left. The proposed reforms in this release create more, not less, federal involvement in education.

Read the whole thing.

MOB Rules

Don't forget - this coming Saturday night is the third annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Summerpalooza.

We'll be getting together at Keegan's at around seven-ish, and going until the party is over.

We will not be talking politics. We will be talking. Lots. It's always a great time.

A veritable "Who's Who" of Twin Cities (and metro) bloggers, media people and politicos have RSVPed, and we'd like to see you there, too. Bloggers, blog readers, would-be bloggers, stalkers, pretty much everyone is invited.

Hope to see you there!

The Space-Time Continuum Rips

Hilton busted for DUI:

Celebrity Paris Hilton was arrested and charged with driving under the influence early Thursday after driving erratically and failing a field sobriety test, police said.

The lawyer's take?

At the time of her arrest, Hilton was driving home from a charity event where she had one drink, Mintz told AP.

She had spent the day shooting a music video for her new album, AP reported. The driving under the influence symptoms were "probably the result of an empty stomach and working all day and being fatigued," Mintz said.

Sisyphus will be shocked.

Posted by Mitch at 07:15 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

I Had Never Seen This

These kinds of stories amaze me:

The Pacocha, a 312-foot former U.S. Navy attack submarine, had been accidentally rammed by a 412-ton Japanese fishing boat shortly after sunset on Aug. 26, about three miles from the port of Callao, eight miles northwest of Lima.

Within seven minutes the submarine, which carried more than 50 sailors and officers, sank 137 feet to the Pacific floor.

Gomez recalled the absolute darkness, broken by brilliant flashes of sparks from short-circuiting control panels, as the vessel made its rapid descent.

In the waters above, three officers and 23 sailors who had managed to abandon ship formed floating circles in the frigid water and waited for rescue. But before help arrived, three crewmen were separated from the rest. Their bodies were never found.

And from there - something that I never quite knew was possible:

Over the next several hours, Gomez and 21 others formed small groups and in succession crammed into the tiny chamber, similar to a torpedo tube, sealed themselves from the craft and allowed water in to equalize pressure with the ocean.

Then they shot up, breaking the Pacific's surface, gasping and screaming from pain.

Worth a read...

Dead Pom Bounce

Cricket, says the BBC, is making a big comeback in...

...the US.

The game - completely inscrutable to Yanks raised on baseball as well as lesser sports like football, basketball and hockey - was once America's primary sport:

Today, thanks to a huge influx of immigrants from India, Pakistan and the West Indies, cricket is bouncing back.

There are 29 leagues nationwide, with an estimated 700 clubs and 50,000 active cricketers. As well as traditional bastions like Philadelphia and New York, where Mayor Bloomberg recently announced a $1.5m investment for a purpose built pitch in Queens, cricket is now being played in such unlikely places as Dallas, Texas, and Wichita, Kansas.

A cigar to you if you just knew this next bit was coming...:

In Los Angeles, a team called Compton Homies & Popz uses cricket to teach "boyz from the hood" old-fashioned virtues like discipline and manners.

Next stop, polo.

The story's subject - a West Indian from Atlanta named Des Lewis - has a dream:

So can cricket do what soccer has done, and once again become a contender in the US?

A student I met at a charity game in Atlanta was more than a little sceptical. "It's way too complicated for Americans," he said. "And too slow."

But that doesn't stop Des Lewis from dreaming.

"My dream is to get a piece of property," he told me, as the sun began to set over Georgia.

"Twenty acres or so. And build a proper cricket field. With a real pavilion."

Tell him to have his people call the Minnesota state legislature.

Coming Soon - Non-Lame Content!

It's been a crushing week. Starting a new gig, plus a new school year kicking off - so while like a lot of insecure mid-level bloggers I hardly dare take a Lileks or Sullivan-level "hiatus", let's just say we're having a couple of off-days here.

Hoping to get my new WordPress-generated site up and going this weekend.

You Know Who You Are

It was 5PM at the Superamerica on Snelling at Englewood.

The little old SA with the cramped corner parking lot was as busy as the deck of an aircraft carrier, with cars slipping around each other with mere feet to spare, cooperating in that peculiar way Saint Paul drivers do to get around in our narrow-streeted city.

And then you came in, with your Dodge Ram (the one with the hood like a '34 Dusenberg). You pulled into the lot. And you decided you had to "combat park" - to back your truck into a perpendicular parking spot so you could drive out faster, later.

Your truck seemed to take up half the lot as it seesawed back and forth, trying to line itself up to back into the narrow little spot by the door. Your gyrations kept quite a few drivers stuck at their pumps while you went back...and forth...never quite leaving enough room for anyone to get past. Others, trying to leave, were stranded in their spots in front of the store. And still others - myself included - were backed up onto Engelwood and Snelling, waiting for the drivers who were sitting at the pumps and at the parking spots to be able to move.

It took you four solid back-and-forth tries to get your behemoth jiggered into place, leaving about a dozen drivers - each in the same kind of hurry you were - thinking, I'd guess, about knicking your gleaming candy-apple-red barge just a little on their way out.

I Give Up

Either my Spam Blocker blocks all posts, or it blocks people from posting at all, or it blocks almost no spam.

Curse you, Jay Allen!

The Patron Saint of NARN

I wasn't even aware of this guy's story - but in an era where anchors are blow-dried products of endless market research-driven selection, the 1967 tale is almost refreshing:

The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists was threatening a strike, but the networks evidently didn’t take the union’s threat seriously. Then, the strike was called. The news broadcasters — including Walter Cronkite and his CBS News substitutes — walked out.

Who did CBS have waiting in the wings?

No one.

Whom did they tell to sit in Mr. Cronkite’s chair?

Arnold Zenker.

I wonder if a name like Arnold Zenker would even get on the credits today...

Mr. Zenker was a network programming middle manager who had come up through business affairs. He was a pleasant-enough looking fellow of 28, with an earnest suit of clothing and thick-framed glasses.

The bosses at CBS looked around their offices at what was available to them, which apparently wasn’t much, and, with deadline approaching, they asked Mr. Zenker if he would mind delivering the news to the nation.

Mr. Zenker said that if they wanted him to, he would. (Before that day, he had never in his life appeared on television.) And for 13 evenings, as the union remained on strike, Arnold Zenker was Walter Cronkite.

Zenker's story is funny - until the network has to follow up, which is where it turns into a particularly graceless story of institutional boobery.

Not Cronkite, however:

[Cronkite] looked toward the camera and, in that familiar, perfectly modulated cadence, said to America:

“Good evening. This is Walter Cronkite, sitting in for Arnold Zenker.”

A Change Is Gonna Come

Finally got WordPress installed.

Now, to start what will no doubt be a laborious conversion and migration process...

No Big Loss

Miller Brewing busted giving $30K to a group that demonstrated in favor of illegal immigrants:

In March, Miller Brewing--pressured by illegal alien activists incensed over the company PAC's past donation to leading pro-immigration enforcement proponent GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner, author of HR. 4337--issued the following statement gleefully publicized by Hispanic groups and media:

In productive discussions held yesterday, we agreed to:
1) Provide assistance to community efforts to reach out to specific members of the Senate and business associations in Washington D.C.
2) Make a clear public statement regarding our opposition to HR 4437 and our desire for appropriate immigration reform that provides adequate protection for the rights of undocumented immigrants.
3) Place print advertisements in Chicago and Milwaukee media stating our opposition to HR 4437.
4) Work with the organizations to explore opportunities for community-based partnerships with a particular focus on scholarships for undocumented students.

The declaration was issued by Nehl Horton, Senior Vice President, Communications and Government Affairs, Miller Brewing Company.

Of course, a boycott would be irrelevant - most Miller products taste like I'd imagine rodent urine tastes like.

But still.

Croy-key!

Steve Irwin killed by a stingray.

Do not try this at home.

Fair Chance of Rain

The NARN broadcast at the MN State Fair had its traditional wet sendoff. We always wind up with one rainy day at the Fair, and this was it. Usually the rainstorms at the fair are the warm, windy summer thunderstorms; today was more of a cold, wet, Highland drizzle giving way to a frigid downpour. It must be autumn.

Of course, the East Coast has been getting the real weather - and nobody writes about weather like Sheila, who went to the shore to watch the storm surf:

The wind was intense. The sky was grey and dramatic - it was like you could almost picture the sweeping curve of the entire storm as if you were looking at a satellite picture, only from below. You could sense the longness of the arms of the storm, the scope of it. The noise of the waves and the wind and the crashing was so loud that people had to shout to be heard. The ocean was coming across to me as a living organism, bubbling, boiling over, heaving beneath that crashing white foam. I love the ocean in all its moods, but I love it in its stormy mood the best.

Gotta confess, I feel the same way about the prairie.

Just Saw World Trade Center

I take back everything bad I ever said about Oliver Stone.

You Could Have a Steak at Manny's...

...or you could eat used cat litter.

Just saying, the choice is yours.

Fingers Crossed

The Strib on Armitage: "I know you are but what am I?".

No, really:

To hear Bush administration defenders tell it, news that Richard Armitage was the original source of the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA work means the entire Plamegate tempest was a whole lot of nothing. That spin should be a tough sell, if folks pay attention to the facts.

But very easy if you pay attention to the real facts.

Armitage is a former Navy officer who served with distinction in various high-ranking defense and diplomatic posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Yeah, but he let Valerie Plame's name slip.

In chitchat at the end of a conversation with newspaper columnist Robert Novak in 2003, while deputy secretary of state, Armitage let slip that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, worked at the CIA. Armitage apparently did not know Plame's CIA work was undercover and classified.

So there you go, administration supporters say: There was no conspiracy to "out" Plame as part of a plan to "get" Wilson. So far as Armitage goes, that makes sense. He appears to have made a foolish, forgivable mistake, though why he remained silent about it is mystifying.

Only if you assume the "mistake" was "foolish", and have "forgiven" it in advance.

Armitage is a long-time foe of the administration - one of the left-of-center ideologues who clog the State Department and the CIA.

But Armitage's error does not lift the thick layer of Plame-related gunk from the reputations of White House adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney and his ex-chief of staff, Lewis Libby. While Armitage had no anti-Wilson ax to grind, they did.

Right - a justifiable one.

And while Armitage may have had no bone with Wilson, he certainly did with the Adminsitration - a fact the Strib chooses to ignore.

In fact, Armitage learned about Plame's CIA association from a memo written in response to a request from Cheney's office for information about Wilson. The White House's "get Wilson" effort was already underway. Armitage's slip offered them an opportunity of which they made maximum use.

So?

Wilson - an employee of the Executive Branch - screwed the Executive Branch. He wrote one thing in his report to the CIA, and then contradicted it in his NYTimes OpEd.

Novak needed confirmation of Armitage's information. He got it from Rove. Between them, Rove and Libby peddled the story to various Washington reporters, insinuating that Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger to investigate possible Iraq purchases of uranium was a junket arranged by his wife -- and that Wilson was a has-been showboat who just wanted a free trip to Africa, where he had worked as a U.S. diplomat.

Right, but not as a weapons inspector!

Wilson had zero background in tracking down illegal weapons and materiel shipments!

Wilson may be a showboat, but he is also an experienced African hand who was sent on a legitimate mission by the CIA (not by his wife), and convincingly disproved the Niger-Iraq uranium stories central to the Bush case for war

Except that he did no such thing.

The Strib has had its' collective mind made up about Bush and this war since long before Bush allegedly pre-sold himself on invading Iraq.

ChickenVictim

Paul Hackett - Iraq veteran, liberal, and darling of the BDS-afflicted netroots - called former Pentagon spokesman Dan Senor, a child of a Holocaust survivor, a Nazi:

"Last night, appearing with former Iraq-based Pentagon spokesman Dan Senor on the O’Reilly Factor, Hackett proved that in Charles Johnson’s memorable phrase, for Hackett and his ilk there “are still depths to plum.” During the conversation, apropos of nothing, Hackett referred to Senor as “Herr Senor” and “the Unterfuhrer.” A bewildered Senor could only ask, “Are you talking about me?”

Hot Air has it.

"Unterführer" would seem to be a corruption of one of many Nazi SS office ranks; it literally executive officer or adjutant. Of course, calling Senor such a thing in English would make no sense - while saying it in German gets Hackett's point across perfectly.

During Hackett's talk, he also reprised the "chickenhawk" meme. The meme hasn't been working (mainly because its targets largely have ignored the bait) - so the left's bile-merchants are having to sink lower and lower to get a rise.

Of course, the mainstream media have ignored the story.

So let's get this straight - malaprop references to "macaca" are signs of unfitness for office (and subject of breathless coverage), while calling someone a Nazi in as many words isn't?

I'm waiting to see how the Dems' apologists - who have perfectly rational explanations spins out of this one.