Sowing Seed Upon Cement

A couple of people have asked me about the Democrat ads in my ad bar.

"Why do you accept their ads? Why do you take their money?"

I figure that it's a nice chunk of change that'll not convince a single one of my readers, and won't go to anything that a rational Democrat would find at all useful.

Plus it's paying my Christmas book budget...

Hope Looms

If spare time permits, I'm going to convert this blog at long last to WordPress tomorrow or Monday. Comments will be re-enabled. Life will be good.

Keep your fingers crossed...

If The GOP Nationwide...

...were to tap into the energy, enthusiasm we heard from candidates, activists and partisans on the show today, we'd get 90 seats in the Senate on Tuesday.

Of course, hearing Patty Wetterling's new ad (audio and transcript) should put a little spring in Republicans' steps.

Continue reading "If The GOP Nationwide..."

Hatch Blows His Lid

Mike Hatch calls a reporter a "whore" for pressing him on Judi Dutcher's E-85 flub:

Hatch’s anger overflowed during a Thursday morning telephone interview.

A Forum Communications reporter asked Hatch about Dutcher’s knowledge of ethanol and why she wasn’t available to discuss the issue. Hatch abruptly ended the interview with: “You’re nothing more than a Republican whore. Goodbye.” He then hung up.

Television crews following the Duluth native Thursday reported other sharp comments when reporters pressed him for response to Dutcher’s comments.

Yeah, goodness knows he only likes the reporters who are whores for the DFL.

Can you see this moron trying to run Minnesota?

Symptomatic

Reading the exchanges among local bloggers - especially leftybloggers - regarding Michele Bachmann's overt, "out" evanglical Christianity, I'm reminded of exactly how wide the gulf in perception between people of faith and people of unfaith (people who for whatever reason disdain or detest faith) is.

Years ago, I was working as a legal document coder - reading documents obtained through the discovery process, assigning each page a code, and creating a database record for that code indicating exactly what, if anything, notable appeared on the page. The suit involved a group of government, citizens and non-profit groups litigating against a power company over cost overruns on a nuclear power plant project in the Carolinas.

Most of the other coders were people just out of law school, getting some experience as they looked for clerk or firm gigs. But not all of us. One of the other coders was a girl named Megan, just out of Macalester, working for a summer before starting grad school at - you might have guessed it - the Humphrey Institute. Quiet, pleasant, sort of cute - and, of course, seethingly liberal.

Most of the project was...gut-wrenchingly tedious. I probably spent ten days coding "Release for Test" reports for seismically-rated pipe hangers. A week after that, I was given a pile of papers...that were photocopies of the first file of pipe hanger test release reports, taken from a different office. And so I coded them all again.

Not zesty.

But occasionally you'd get surprises - little snips of things that'd make things interesting. Photocopies of napkins with sketches on them (which, being an NRC-regulated project, were duly filed away), expense reports for very dubious claims...

...and, one day, a letter from a fella with a confession.

This guy was an engineer who'd worked on the project in the late seventies. And he'd dipped his hands into the cookie jar, somehow wheedling about $3,000 worth of money out of various petty cash and expense accounts. He didn't get caught...

...by anyone official. But somewhere along the way, after leaving the project, he'd had a religious experience. As part of this, he felt the need to repent and atone for his sins.

And so, in the mid-eighties, he sent a letter to the company, along with a check for every penny he'd taken, and an apology.

The letter was accompanied by attachments from various accountants showing exactly how difficult it was to find a bucket in the accounting system to put "money returned through acts of conscience".

When us coders found things that were interesting, we'd occasionally read them out to our fellow coders. I read the guy's letter. It got a few laughs.

Megan giggled with derision. "That's disgusting", she chuckled, as if someone had mooned her.

Disgusting?

I prodded Megan (quietly, tactfully and briefly) on her reaction. The notion that anyone would attribute an act of remorse to religious faith, she felt, was...out of character for Christians?

I really couldn't follow up after that.

To this day, it still confuses me.

I Have To Wonder

Five protesters were arrested yesterday at a protest at the Mexican consulate in Saint Paul.

Five people were arrested at the Oaxaca Solidarity demonstration this morning at the Mexican Consulate. We do not currently know what they are being charged with or where they are being held. The demonstration was peaceful and nobody enterd the consulate. One person was arrested for leading chants, and another for taking pictures. Two of the people were arrested while trying to follow the cops' order to disperse. The fifth was arrested apparently for having a knife (that wasn't out) in his possession, though this is unclear. If you know the name of the person with the knife or the person taking photographs, please contact me at mk (at) [some liberal jagblog].

I'm as big an advocate of free speech as anyone; as a conservative in Saint Paul, one has to be watchful of one's liberties.

But I'd love to know the real story behind these arrests. I've I've noticed anything about left-wing protesters, it's that they have a very self-indulgent sense of ethics; my favorite example was during the Gulf War protests at the U of M in 1991. In an incident captured by a TV crew, a group of Young Republicans carrying out a peaceful protest was spat on and doused with red paint by a crowd of patchouli-reeking, fly-eaten peace creeps. Years later, I discussed the incident with a lefty who claimed to be there; he insisted that the Young Republicans had attacked.

Supporters are currently at the Ramsey County Jail (100 11th St E, St Paul) which is the place we assume they'll be taken to. Nobody has been booked yet, and the cops are telling us it will be a few hours before there's any information.

5 Arrested at Oaxaca Solidarity Demonstration
Five people were arrested at the Oaxaca Solidarity demonstration this morning at the Mexican Consulate. We do not currently know what they are being charged with or where they are being held. The demonstration was peaceful and nobody enterd the consulate. One person was arrested for leading chants, and another for taking pictures. Two of the people were arrested while trying to follow the cops' order to disperse. The fifth was arrested apparently for having a knife (that wasn't out) in his possession, though this is unclear. If you know the name of the person with the knife or the person taking photographs, please contact me at mk (at) thejackpine.org.

Supporters are currently at the Ramsey County Jail (100 11th St E, St Paul) which is the place we assume they'll be taken to. Nobody has been booked yet, and the cops are telling us it will be a few hours before there's any information.

We are asking people to call the local Mexican Consulate (651-771-5494), the Ramsey County Jail (651-266-9350), and the national embassy (202-736-1000).

If people are not released, we will put a call out later for a jail solidarity action this evening. Stay tuned.

The demonstration itself was about 35 people. When we tried to enter the consulate they locked the doors and told us that though it was a public place they could refuse entry for any reason. People using the consulate for its "intended purposes" were allowed in. There were about 7 squad cars present and a paddy wagon.

I'm Not Sure...

...if Tom Mischke can survive this.

But I'll hope he can.

In Recent Days...

...I have come to more deeply appreciate the timeless wisdom of Randy Newman.

Continue reading "In Recent Days..."

Why Do Democrats Hate The Troops?

Everyone else is posting it. Why not me?

By the way, Jeff Fecke - who gets paid to blog by a Democrat pressure group! - responded to my post about his notion that John Kerry really just doesn't matter that much:(Note: All you readers who may have yet to read Jeff: sometimes, Jeff gets it in his head that he's qualified to condescend. I usually let him go on that; after all, he gets paid to blog, and I'm one of those benighted slobs who just does it for fun).

We live in a four-dimensional universe. Three of those dimensions are spatial–the x, y, and z axes. The fourth dimension is called “time.”

Now here’s where things get tricky. You can move any direction in space, but time moves only in one direction–from “the past” to “the future,” and always at the same rate (one second per second). Things that happen “in the past” are not, in fact, “happening now.” They “happened then.”

(Another note, gentle reader: Jeff frequently uses 83 words to say what he could have said in four and preserving the requisite derisive, snarky attitude that all the paid leftybloggers - Atrios, Ollie Willis, the Powerliberals and Jeff - affect. I like "Kerry is sooooo 2004". But I digress - or as Jeff might have written, "I've yawed and pitched away on the X and Y axes of this conversation, if conversations had geometric coordinates, and isn't George Bush a dummy anyway?")

John Kerry is not the Democratic presidential candidate. He was, in 2004, in the past. He ran a pretty lackluster campaign typified by his inability to explain himself clearly–much like his botched joke of Monday, in fact.

In 2006, he is not running for any political office. He’s the junior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and because of his past run, he’s got a bit more standing in the Democratic party than, say, Mark Dayton or Herb Kohl.

(Another note, gentle reader; while Jeff says I'm trying to "put him in a box", the simple fact is that Jeff remains free to rhetorically romp and play - who, indeed, am I, an unpaid peasant-blogger, to pretend I can "box" Fecke? No, Jeff - your party boxes you. John Kerry typifies the condescending, preening arrogance of too much of the establishment left; even if his remark was taken out of context (like Demcrats have any right to complain!), hatred of the military isn't far below the surface in the party as a whole or Kerry in particular. The Winter Soldier testimony showed it, and Kerry's given us no reason to reconsider).

But again, I digress:

But he’s not the President of the United States. He actually lost in 2004. And while I still would vote for him, believing that it’s better to have a president who says dumb things than a president who does dumb things, he’s no more a spokesman for all Democrats than Bob Dole is for all Republicans.

And here you see the old-world craftsmanship that you can only get from a blogger who's paid for his craft; Jeff has built a strawman with almost-Amish polish and finish.

But nobody said Kerry was anyone's spokesman; merely that he's an important, leading Democrat, and that he did something really, really stupid, and you can scuttle away from him if you want (indeed, you did - although it took most of the Democrat world a day and the creeping realization that America, like the Minnesota reservists in the picture above, are laughing at you, not with you before they did), but the fact remains that he is a significant player in Democrat politics, one of the most powerful men in Washington, and a whooole lot of people (all of them on your side) very much care what he has to say.

Which is dumb enough to wind one up in...Massachusetts.

Continue reading "Why Do Democrats Hate The Troops?"

The Battle Continues

Minnesota Concealed Carry Reform Now has released its 2006 Voter Guide.

The guide - as noted in an offline email by the person who sent it - is a good guide, in general, but it's got problems. It would seem that everyone who didn't return MN-CCRN's questionnaire got an "F" with an asterisk (Derek Brigham - say it ain't so!).

For once, the major-party Governor tickets are generally acceptable: Pawlenty and Molnau are both "A"-rated candidates, while Mike Hatch rates a generous but not-excessive "B" for his legal support of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act after its legal detour in 2004-05. The emailer notes, though, that Judi Dutcher (if anything, an emptier skirt than Amy Klobuchar) is a founding member of the "Repeal Conceal Steering Committee" -- and a more virulent, hysterical opponent of carry reform and self-defense rights would be hard to find." Not that there was any danger of my supporting Hatch at all (on non-Second-Amendment grounds), but if you're a common-sense Democrat, you need to keep this in mind.

Read the whole guide; if you're a Minnesota Second Amendment activist, the battle's not over. A Democrat takeover could endanger the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

Yet another reason not to stay home on Tuesday.

Win, Lose or Draw

Jerry Plagge, proprietor of the SD63 blog (which is, by the way, the most-improved local blog of 2006) on the kerfuffle among a group of local center-right bloggers.

Some - "Gary and Jules from KvM and on the other you have LearnedFoot (KAR), AAA (Residual Forces), Dan Stover (NARN Wannabe), Chief Dog (Freedom Dogs) and Doug at Bogus Gold" - have been endorsing Tammy Lee, the former liberal Democrat who's running on the Ventura Independence "Party" ticket, largely on the basis of demographics; Lee, running center-left, could in theory soak up enough votes to keep Ellison out of Congress (and as lame and DFL-lite as the Ventura Independence "Party" is, she would be a less-awful Congressman than Ellison).

Jerry disagrees:

With all due respect to my friend and occasional camping and drinking buddy Gary Miller, what are you thinking?

Or is it me? Are my assumptions that far off base? Is my math wrong?

Gary and I had a healthy exchange of thoughts and ideas via email on this topic Tuesday. Sadly, I was unable to convince him and we ended the exchange with a little wager.

Closed circuit to Gary, after Alan's finishes ahead of Tammy Lee, you can bring my six pack of August Shell's Schmaltz Alt or German Pale Ale to the Mark Kennedy victory party on election night.

To the rest of you, stick with Alan Fine!

I think Jerry is on to one thing that a lot of people - very smart people at that - unaccountably keep missing: the Independence Party is a sham. It's the last gurgling remnants of the Ventura phenomenon, itself a gurgling afterbelch of the "Perot Revolution". I'll bet (although I won't bet anything) that Fine at least doubles Lee's total.

Read the whole thing.

"Kerry Never Mattered, Winston"

Jeff Fecke of BlogOModLeft says "no big deal - he's only our presidential candidate":

Bad, John Kerry! Bad!

I, for one, am outraged that anyone still cares what John Kerry has to say.

But 48% of you did - some of you still think he won the election.

So which is it?

Damaged Premium Goods

John Kerry changed his travel plans.

Hopefully his "joke" will still attend today's rallies.

Bummer - the anti-Kerry protest woulda been fun to attend.

Those Dumb Soldiers

Hugh has the best wrapup of Kerry's "Soldiers are dumb" gaffe and its broader historical context:

Kerry reminded people that the war against the war has been underway since mid-2003, and that the Democrats have never taken the many opportunities to try and rally around the effort to reconstruct a free Iraq but at every turn have demanded an exit on some sort of rushed and arbitrary timetable. They disparaged the effort to push elections forward, then the effort to form a government, and now that government's effort to rule and unite. The enemy has been watching, and has calculated that they only way they can win is by waiting out America ---just as the North Vietnamese did.

Today Kerry also reminded all Americans of the deep, anti-military bias that has infected the left since Vietnam, and through the left, the MSM. In a flash all the anti-military rhetoric that began in the late '60s and built through 9/11 was back on the front shelf. (Donna Shalala's on Vietnam veterans: “not our best and brightest." Clinton Assistant Secretary of the Army Sara Lister: ""The Marines are extremists. Wherever you have extremists, you've got some risks of total disconnection with society. And that's a little dangerous." Michael Moore's portrait of the recruits in his bit of agitprop.)

But let's take Kerry's explanation - "it was a joke gone awry" - at face value.

He was joking. So what?

If a politican told a racially-caustic joke - with very overt intent strictly to amuse, unlike Kerry's flub - would it be a defense? "It all depends on what the definition of the word n****r is?"

Rubbish. Kerry's not a standup comedian who gets paid to rankle. He's a politician. And like any politician, almost by definition, he plays to his audience. You don't tell Jewish jokes (beyond the most innocuous) if you're speaking at the B'nai B'rith. You don't rip the Huskies in Duluth.

And while you'd never dig on the intelligence and motivations of the troops at Fort Benning, you might do it - tell "a joke" about it - among a crowd of friends. Among people who believe as you do.

So sure - it's a joke.

And the fact that you thought it was safe to tell at all tells us more than your botched delivery ever could.

Marching Together Toward The Bright Future

If it weren't for Doug Grow, Lori Sturdevant would be the most tried-and-true DFL flak in the Strib's band of columnists.

If you're from out of state, or if you haven't been following Minnesota politics for long, you have to realize something; Minnesota missed the Reagan Revolution by a solid twenty years. After the defeats in 1958, 1964 and 1974, the Republican party - eviscerated at the polls - raced to the center like a whipped dog (just as Bill Clinton, who spent most of 1993 and 1994 swinging leftward, ran to the right after his drubbing in the Gingrich Revolt). As a result, in 1960, 1968 and 1976 the GOP fielded candidates and platforms that were functionally indistinguishable from "moderate" Democrats. It took serious leadership - Ronald Reagan - for the party's lesser minds and hearts to coalesce around a vision that pushed the party and the nation forward.

In Minnesota, of course, it was far worse. From the fifties through the nineties, as tax revenues from the cha-cha growth in the Minnesota economy floated incredible tax revenues and Minnesota's combination of Scandinavian communitarianism, urban unionism and white guilt led to a system of pseudo-Swedish neo-socialism that, as long as the economy was booming, kept paying out the swag. Minnesotans, addicted to the swag, kept returning DFLers to office - and creating Republicans who weren't much better. Arne Carlson was indistinguishable from a center-left DFLer; he taxed and spent with the worst of them.

It wasn't until the nineties that Minnesotans, groaning under the weight of a tax burden far out of proportion to what we got; booming crime rates in the cities and outstate (the late eighties and early nineties were even worse than today in Minneapolis), schools that achieved less and less but paid their unions more and more, a welfare state that was ballooning out of control. And they started looking at - and voting for - conservatives.

And the left and media (pardon the redundancy) reacted like stuck cats - as if having competition in the marketplace of ideas was a bigger crime to liberals than competition in the real marketplace. As if the notion of having to defend what they'd done unopposed for forty years were a crushing burden.

Because to the DFL/Media, the "good old days" was when they never had to defend their ideas.

Lori Sturdevant, superannuated old-school DFL flak that she is, pines for the placid old days when the DFL was ruler for life, in today's column:

I've junked "Minnesota's Eroding Middle Ground." That's the title of the service club speech about Minnesota politics that I've used for about four years. I'm seeing signs that Minnesota's political middle may be adding acreage this fall -- and in a way that might outlast this year's campaign.

On behalf of Minnesota's service clubs, thank you.

What signs? Take two young Minnesota House candidates, Ryan Winkler and John Berns, who coincidentally appeared for back-to-back interviews with the editorial staff a few weeks back. Both are attorneys. Winkler, 30, is a DFLer running in a DFL-tilting seat in St. Louis Park and Golden Valley. Berns, 34, is a Republican running for a Lake Minnetonka area seat that's been in Republican hands since, roughly, the Civil War.

Since both have reason to play to their partisan bases, I figured I'd hear the usual run of polar-opposite positions from each of them.

Winkler, I thought, would push for more spending up and down the budget, and hint at tax increases for businesses or the rich to pay for it. I guessed that Berns, who works for Gov. Tim Pawlenty, would come across as a clone of the GOP governor, and toss the word "accountability" into every other sentence, as Pawlenty did in 2002.

Not so. Winkler was the accountability guy. "That's not a Republican word," he said. "I'm most interested in rebuilding the public's trust that government can provide services efficiently and well." He says he'll push for more accurate and standardized measurement of the effectiveness of the things government does, and be a hawk on junking those things that aren't cost-effective.

Berns was ushered into our conference room right afterward, sat down, and immediately began talking about his desire to increase education spending.

"Everybody agrees the schools need more money," he said. That's not only true in his suburban district, where class sizes are swelling. Berns said it's also true in the inner city, where lagging student achievement is an urgent state concern. That was his word -- "urgency."

This reminds me of Nick Coleman's classic "The Suburbs are Burning" column, where he cherrypicked the one house on Lake Minnetonka with an anti-Bush sign on the lawn, and extrapolated from their talking points a a booming brushfire revolt against the GOP in the affluent western subs.

So a couple of candidates in the suburbs are running toward the middle? Um, yeah - that's what suburbs are designed for. While the 'burbs are GOP strongholds, they are also a manifestation of Minnesota's old, communitarian past; where Minneapolis used to achieve a uniform quality of life, schools and assuaged guilt by government pressure and hectoring, the 'burbs do it by social pressure and pseudogovernmental legalism. The 'burbs are a safe middle - including, in many cases, politically.

And let's face it - this is a metro full of middle-level bureaucrats, professors, social service apparatchiks, mid-level lawyers, teachers - and they are as likely to live in places like Minnetonka as anyone else, and more likely to vote DFL, or to drag a good republican to the middle.

Which is where things like...:

Where will the money come from? "I'm not taking any option off the table," Berns said. "I haven't made any promises or signed any pledges."

That would be a reference to the now-infamous "no new taxes" pledge foisted into Minnesota politics by the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and its national umbrella, Americans for Tax Reform. When Pawlenty took the pledge and boxed himself in with it in 2002, he was far from alone. The league lists 44 incumbent legislators, some of them DFLers, as oath-takers sometime in the not-so-distant past.

The list of brand-new signers is much shorter this year than four years ago. And, though you'd never know it from the Americans for Tax Reform website, a number of Minnesota's previous signers want off the list now.

Um, yeah.

Lots of Republicans - George Will included - distanced themselves from Reagan while he was in office. Were they right?

Um.

Most politicians are whores on the battlefield and generals in the bedroom. It's the rare leader that actually takes a stance on principle and makes it stick; Ronald Reagan, Paul Wellstone, Michele Bachmann, Rod Grams, Newt Gingrich, Jesse Jackson - whatever you think of their policies and beliefs, there's no mistaking them, and you'll never see any of them muffling or backing and filling around them.

It's people like them that make the difference, for better (Reagan, Grams, Bachmann) or worse. And it's people like Arne Carlson, or for that matter Messrs. Winkler and Burns, who run for the comfy, mushy center rather than take the big risks in service of the big principle.

Which suits Sturdevant just fine:

What's encouraging is that the move to the middle I'm detecting is coming from both sides. That means that no matter which party controls the Capitol in January, or how the two parties divvy up the chambers, chances are better than they've been in the last four years that Minnesotans can celebrate a productive, on-time finish to the legislative session come May 21.

Oh, yeah. That's important. Better government through more laws.

When everyone "agrees", it makes government "efficient" - and "efficient" government is the worst thing in the world. It is the peace of death; without disagreement, without a lively scrum in the marketplace of ideas boxing ring of political ideology, the status quo - crappy schools, arrogant sinecurist public sector apparatchiks, geometrically-booming entitlements, boundless taxes - will go unchallenged.

Which, again, suits Lori Sturdevant just fine, too.

Meanwhile, I need a new speech title. How about "The 2006 Election: Reclaiming Minnesota's Middle Ground?" I'll keep the question mark attached -- for now.

Good.

Because if I - and any Minnesotan who cares about Minnesota - have my way, it'll be back.

Competition is not a dirty word. Making people - especially people like Sturdevant, who seem to believe that the DFL and their ideas have a divine right to rule this state - actually defend their ideas to the people - is a good thing.

Someone tell Sturdevant.

Return to HTML Hell

My comments, obviously, are hosed.

On the upside? They're spam-proof.

My choice:

1. Fix the comments
2. Finally convert the blog over to WordPress.

I think I'm going to spend the time and do the conversion.

Monday will tell...

My Least Favorite Time Of The Year

I hate Halloween.

I mean, when I was a kid and young enough for trick-or-treating, it was fine. And when my kids were between 2 and maybe 8-10 years old, it was kind of fun, in that "remember this forever" kind of way.

But now, Halloween is just a grind; find some damn candy, get something for the kids to wear for their Halloween parties, drive around, stress stress stress...

It's everything that the stereotype says is wrong with Christmas, for crying out loud!

Make It Stop!

Does that make me a Halloween scrooge? Well, humbug it is!

Strib: "Hey! There Was A Reformation!"

The Strib notes last week's media-induced farce over Michnele Bachmann's putative (and false) believe that the Pope is the antichrist:

The labyrinthine doctrine of a theologically conservative Lutheran denomination has wound its way into the Sixth District congressional campaign

Well, let's be honest; here's what really happened:

1. A bunch of liberal bloggers dredged up a baked rumor based on long-obsolesced theological antagonism left over from the Reformation. The Strib even notes it, if only obliquely: "Liberal blogs are abuzz with claims that the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the parent of Bachmann's church, holds that the pope is the antichrist...The issue surfaced on the Internet last week at www. faithfuldemocrats.com,". And as we all know, if you read it in a liberal blog, it must be true.
2. So the story, as the Strib says, "got a mention on Saturday's Star Tribune opinion page". What do you suppose the odds were?
3. Made it into last weekend's WCCO debates; as the Strib said, "[it] was the subject of a weekend debate question that WCCO-TV's Pat Kessler put to Bachmann". Again, let's try to be honest here; Kessler stated it as fact, even turning to Wetterling and saying "Assuming this story is true...", keeping the non-theological non-issue in play, allowing Wetterling to exploit it to her benefit before an unwitting audience, and forever dispelling any notion that Kessler, once a great political reporter, is a whole lot better or less biased than Doug Grow or Lori Sturdevant.

Y'see, major media figures, we had this thing called The Reformation, starting about 600 years ago. Protestants split from Catholics, wars were fought, hundreds of years of prejudices and bigotries and animosities formed...

...and eventually faded.

To the point where someone like a Michele Bachmann, a devout evangelical Protestant, can say something like...:

Bachmann replied, "That's a false statement. ... It's abhorrent, religious bigotry. I love Catholics, I'm a Christian, and my church does not believe that the pope is the antichrist. That's absolutely false. ... I welcome and have as part of our family many Catholic members as well."

...rather than "what, you're going to vote for a Papist, who takes orders from Rome?", as she might have had to have said 100 years ago in order to not get shunned by her own church.

But Catholics United for the Common Good, an online group based in Massachusetts, demanded that Bachmann denounce any association of the pope with the antichrist.

Really, CLUCG? You'd like it if Bachmann denounce what she, in the paragraph I cited above, denounced?

Tell ya what, CLUCG: has your group denounced Catholicism's long-standing anti-semitism, which was firmly-engrained enough in Catholicism to remain part of the liturgy until the sixties? A strain that caused many devoutly-Catholic Poles to hate the conquering Nazis less than their Jewish neighbors?

No?

Why?

Because the Catholic Church as a whole distanced itself from that historical crime? Because it is not what the Church believes today? Because Pope John Paul spent much of his career reconciling Catholicism with the Jews?

If anything, Catholics and Protestant have been working longer to heal their rifts - and nowhere longer than in the US, where Protestant/Catholic (and Christian/Jewish) rivalry is mainly a matter of private-school football and rantings of the occasional sect of lunatics.

So if I asked you, CLUCG, to denounce that part of the Catholic Church's history, you might reply "that's all been dealt with!". And you'd be right.

We Protestants are protestants for a reason; there are certain areas of Christian theology on which we differ from the Catholics (as they differ from the Orthodox). They are matters of doctrine, not causes for war - at least among non-fringe commentators. As Bachmann notes, she and her church join the vast, vast majority of Protestant Christians in happily co-existing with Catholics.

So why is this an issue?

Because many in the media are no less zealous in their hatred of and fear for Bachmann - and the very notion of evangelicals in society, to say nothing of government - than these freaks - and no less ignorant about what Christians of all stripes really believe.

Of Passing Interest

Ynyuk nyuk)

So who is that team that's choking halfway through the season?

Empty purple seats were abundant with more than 10 minutes remaining. Backup quarterback Brooks Bollinger had replaced starter Brad Johnson. The New England Patriots were still rolling down the field with their rarely used shotgun offense, as if they needed to work on a few more things before the regular season began.

This was no exhibition, however. The Vikings absorbed their worst home loss in five seasons, a complete 31-7 thrashing from the Patriots.

Doh. Bummer.

But - wait? Who is that team that's still undefeated atop the NFC North?

Could it be this team of plucky underdogs?

Er...underursines?

Why, yes - I believe it could be!

Continue reading "Of Passing Interest"

When I Was 16

...this was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Complete with the "1" at the bottom of my Les Paul.

Or for me, maybe an "8".

I'd probably wrench my arm if I tried to windmill like that anymore.

I Don't Believe In Karma

But I do believe that what goes around comes around.

Apropos nothing in particular.

We're Number 291! Or 345!

Saint Paul comes in #291 on the list of the safest cities in the US according to the NYTimes.

Amy Klobuchar's Minneapolis comes in at 345 - behind stereotypically crime-ridden cities like Philadelphia (#343) and, funniest of all, Houston (#325), the city that Minneapolis liberals tut-tut about turning into if they don't repel the Republican agenda. Minneapolis comes in only five spots ahead of Newark, NJ (#350), and eight ahead of Washington DC (#353).

Detroit can rejoice; the Motor City came in at #370, one ahead of last-place Saint Louis.

Zzzzzz: Strib Crowns A-Klo

Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

Surprising nobody, the Strib endorses A-Klo for U.S. Senate.

The timing is clearly right for Amy Klobuchar. Long recognized as a rising political talent, Klobuchar has come into her own during this year's high-profile campaign to replace fellow DFLer Mark Dayton in the U.S. Senate.

No, really. The Strib says so. It must be true.

Her message is spot on, her competence is manifest and her direct, upbeat and outgoing personality seems equally comfortable in every small town, suburb and city in Minnesota. The Star Tribune recommends Amy Klobuchar's election on Nov. 7.

Her message is standard-issue DFL, Minneapolis' crime rates and catch-and-releast policy call her competence into harsh dispute, and she has the personality of a politician.

Had Kennedy been campaigning from the private sector or a state-level post, it would be easier to listen to him argue, as he did recently on "Meet the Press," that we can't "TiVo and play replays" on Iraq, that the focus should only be forward. But Kennedy and his fellow members of Congress have yet to be held accountable for their credulous backing of the president, even in light of ever-emerging evidence that the White House misread the situation and misled the public from day one of this shameful war. Kennedy's recent acknowledgment that mistakes have been made seems more a desperate campaign move than evidence of serious rethinking, given that he still supports current administration policy.

Against which we have...

Klobuchar argues for acknowledging reality -- i.e. that "this really is a civil war, sectarian civil war. There is terrorism there. But to solve this, it's going to be a diplomatic and political solution."

Hennepin County attorney since 1999, Klobuchar has spent the past several years focusing on crime and running a large prosecutorial office.

And run it badly, using its various tools for appeasing special interests and self-promotion as a stepping stone to higher office from day one.

Nevertheless, she offers informed opinions on U.S. policy both at home and abroad

Screeeeeeeeech

Informed opinions?

She said we should pull US troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, ready to come racing back if the situation goes south.

In whose world is this "well-informed"? Afghanistan makes a lousy base for starters - what sense does it make to leave a place and "plan" to take it back later?

Why, that makes as much sense as continually releasing convicted criminals to the streets on probation, to re-commit crime after crime!

Are we seeing a pattern, here?

The whole thing reads like...

...I was going to say "PR copy", and it does read like that. But more than that - its like the Strib editors are writing about a friend, not a politician. Almost like it's the daughter of their old pal and drinking buddy.

For whose political career the Strib has been carrying water for the better part of a decade.