Tim “Obie” O’Brien quotes Keith “Talking Hairdo” Olberman:

And you thought he was hard on Republicans

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took a break from ripping President Bush to tell the Democrats who caved on the war funding bill just what he thought of their actions. “The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the administration, in which the only things truly compromised are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends and family in Iraq.

Doomed?

Interesting to hear what my friends in the service think about that…

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions — stop the war — have traded your strength, your bargaining position and the uniform support of those who elected you for a handful of magic beans.”

Because magic beans in the form of transitory and misleading poll numbers and a national tantrum for a mandate are all you have, Keef!

From the Pauline Kael files:  Alphageek Steve Jobs demonstrates that his command of politics is equal to his savvy about marketing:

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stated that Al Gore, an Apple board member and former US vice-president, would win the presidency if he ran for election.”If he ran, there’s no question in my mind that he would be elected,” Jobs told Time magazine.

The problem? Algore is just too damn sensitive:

“But I think there’s a question in his mind, perhaps because the pain of the last election runs a lot deeper than he lets most of us see.”

I, for one, feel it; the fact that Algore is still in the news and still has his minions argling and bargling about the 2000 election is, indeed, painful.

“We have dug ourselves into a 20-foot hole, and we need somebody who knows how to build a ladder. Al’s the guy,” Jobs also told Newsweek. “Like many others, I have tried my best to convince him. So far, no luck.”

Speaking as the guy whose mercurial nature and neofundie commitment to his own knee-jerk feelings destroyed NeXT (my favorite computers ever) and nearly took Apple down the toilet, Jobs would be the expert.

A couple of notes, so that you are able to speak credibly on the issue that so many conservatives are holding against Mitt Romney:

• A “machine gun” is an “automatic weapon” (fires like a machine gun – blasting away as long as one holds the trigger) – not a “semi-automatic” weapon (fires one and only one round every time you pull the trigger).
• It’s been illegal for citizens to own automatic weapons in the US since 1934 (one of my commenters noted the legislation:  The National Firearms Act (NFA), cited as the Act of June 26, 1934, Ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236, as amended, currently codified as Chapter 53 of the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. § 5801 through 26 U.S.C. § 5872) unless they get a “Class III” license from the BATFE; these require a stringent background check, equal in most respects to a “Top Secret” security clearance.  In the 70 years this has been the case, there has been one crime committed by a Class III licensee.  It was a cop.
• The 1994 Crime Bill, with the “Assault Weapon Ban” which Romney (and apparently you) support, had nothing to do with “machine guns” – but with “assault weapons”.
• Which are not to be mistaken for “Assault Rifles”.  An “assault rifle” is a rifle capable of “selective fire” (full or semi-automatic), and fires either a small-caliber or low-power rifle round (so they don’t buck out of the shooter’s grasp when firing full-automatic).
• No, indeed, an “assault weapon” has no technical definition whatsoever recognizable to any gunsmith, armorer, or anyone else in the firearms industry.  They are, for lack of a better definition, guns that someone in Congress thought looked like Army Guns back in 1994.
• You asked yesterday on your show – what would I think about my neighbors owning “machine guns” (apparently not knowing that “machine guns” were never part of the 1994 Crime Bill’s “assault weapon” ban.  Simple answer – if my neighbor had my criminal, chemical or mental-illness record (i.e., none), I wouldn’t care if she had a machine gun, a flamethrower, or the keys to a nuclear submarine – because merely possessing a big nasty army gun doesn’t magically make a good person go bad.

Let’s try to bone up on this, Hugh.

UPDATE:  A comenter corrected me on the National Firearms Act, of 1934).

I’m trying to figure out exactly the angle to take on Lori Sturdevant’s Sunday column bemoaning the fact that our state government is working the way our Constitution says it’s supposed to. 

It must be the whole “the GOP isn’t rolling over and acting like DFLers” thing again.

I know – it’s the same story as with every Lori Sturdevant column.

But today, we’re seeing a bunch of different pathologies at work.

Is it the failure of the education system?

The liberal lobbyist was fuming. Months of hard work had been rendered fruitless by a legislative bow to a veto threat. How could the DFL Legislature have allowed the Republican governor to take charge, the way he did last week? …The civics books may claim that state government’s three branches are equal. But as Minnesotans are witnessing anew this year, in practice, the executive outguns legislative branch. Governors usually get their way.

Forgive the young lobbyist for thinking otherwise. The past four years gave her the false impression that the Capitol’s power formula is two against one…When the 2006 election put DFL majorities in both chambers and kept Gov. Tim Pawlenty in the southwest corner office, some people thought two against one was still the operative rule. They believed the DFLers had taken over.

Which is, of course, stupid.  Our system of checks and balances not “two against one”, it’s “three against three”.    

If it’s not a commentary on education, perhaps it’s merely satire gone horribly awry?

Last week’s litter of vetoed bills demonstrated otherwise. So did the concessions DFLers made before sending bills Pawlenty’s way, in vain hope of winning his signature. Gone were resident tuition for immigrant kids…[PaleoDFLer former Senate leader Roger] Moe noted that when Pawlenty boiled the session’s budget debate down to one simple question — “Isn’t 10 percent enough?” — DFLers were left to respond with what sounded like quibbles. A third of Pawlenty’s proposed 10 percent biennial spending growth is one-time money. The rest just covers inflation in things government does now. New things — mass transit, early childhood education, property tax relief that lasts — need new revenue, particularly the kind that keeps up with the state’s growth. Today’s tax base doesn’t.

The case for “failed self-parody” is strong, but hardly airtight.

How about “inability to read numbers?”

So far, none of that has fazed Pawlenty, or, evidently, Minnesotans. The governor’s most recent approval rating in the Survey USA poll is holding at a healthy 56 percent. ..The May 7 issue of the Weekly Standard magazine hailed Minnesota’s governor as “a rising star in a party that’s been knocked back on its heels” and praised his March presentation to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington…With notices like that bolstering his constitutionally bestowed authority, Pawlenty goes into this last full week of the 2007 regular session positioned to be more cocky than conciliatory.

Vetoes of tax bills actually making the Governor more popular – after an election that the likes of Sturdevant took to mean that Minnesotans really were happy to be fiscally sodomized for a “better Minnesota”? 

Why – what could that possibly mean?

Perhaps that not only is Pawlenty nancying the ever-weakening DFL majority…:

DFLers aimed all session to force the governor to choose at the end between higher taxes or inadequate school funding. But last week, he appeared to be doing the maneuvering. Pawlenty was setting DFLers up for the final choice, between property tax relief and education.

…which is forcing the DFL and Sturdevant (pardon the redundancy) to resort to old tropes:

DFL legislators may have to revert to pretty much the same game plan the skimpy Senate majority followed four years ago: Point out signs that the state’s quality of life is slipping. Put on the governor’s desk reasonable remedies. If he rejects them, demand Republican votes for bills he will sign. Then make sure voters in November 2008 know who said no to a better state.

Er, yeah, LoriDFL.  What would us mere Minnesotans – the ones who think Pawlenty is doing a damn fine job, many of whom are celebrating the Governor’s vetoes – know about this state’s “quality of life?”

Some will call that strategy capitulation. In 2004, when House DFLers gained 13 seats, they called it successful.

Right, but the DFL is the majority on whom the people get to vent their dissatisfaction now. 

And vent, I believe, we shall.

Someone tell Lori.

Since the local bought-and-paid-for “progressive” media has taken to “interviewing” selected Republican “insurgents” (purely to help political discourse in Minnesota, naturally), I figured fair was fair. I’m sending the following interview questions to Minnesota Monitor. 

Since they can trust my motivations implicitly, I’m sure I’ll get a full, thorough, ingenuous response.

Here goes:

———-

To: Minnesota Monitor Staff

From: Mitch Berg, ace reporter

Re:  Interview

I have some questions for y’all.  Please pay no attention to my five year history of rhetorically beating you guys like a baby harp seal and my known antipathy to your party’s “magazine’s” site’s underlying worldview; please disregard everything you know, and assume that I’m being utterly sincere in saying that I seek merely knowledge and enlightenment.

1. So where does your funding come from?  Since the Center for Independent Media started out sharing offices with David Brock’s attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”, in an arrangement that looked to anyone who’s ever worked in the world of business like an “incubator” deal (where an established company lends material assistance to a smaller spinoff), it’s a legitmate question that bears directly on your site’s “journalistic credibility”.
2. Ha ha.  A cutesy snark.  How precious.  OK, now a serious answer, if you please?
3. Where in your “code of ethics” is “clairvoyance” mentioned?  Because ascribing motivations in the midst of a “news story” absent any factual basis is the kind of thing MY first news boss would have given me a swirlie over.  How is it that Minnesota Monitor’s “ethics” allow this egregious faux pas?
4. What was the motivation for Fecke’s interview, if not to try to dig at the MNGOP?
5. Given the answer to #4 (and there really can only be one answer, no?), when your Jeff Fecke sent Andy Aplikowski the “interview questions”, can you possibly understand why Aplikowski – given Fecke’s track record – might have viewed it as a subject for derision rather than worthy of a serious response? 
6. Word has it the Strib’s Tim O’Brien is working on a puff piece on your side of the Aplikowski flap.   Does “Minnesota Monitor” have an O’Brien-lip-shaped groove in its institutional ass from the fawning he’s given you?
7. Do you think you’re giving Soros his money’s worth?
8. Doh!  It was a trick question!  I’m a silly boy.  OK, I’ll try again.  Who are the “Liberals with deep pockets” (that was the phrase one of you used in informal conversation) that are funding the “Center for Independent Media”?
9. The Monitor claimed that it posted Aplikowski’s interview fairly.  Aplikowski claims that you edited out a few things that were fairly critical to his position.  Tomato tomahto?  After sending Aplikowski a draft of the piece, Andy sent Fecke back some clarifications.  Fecke (says Aplikowski) picked and chose among the clarifications he posted.  True, or not? 
10. If true, how ethical do you believe this is?
11. You’ve hired a staff that consists to a great extent of people who’ve built their blogging “careers” out of snarking and japing at Republicans.  Now, those same snarkers and japers are coming to Republican “insurgents” bearing interview questions transparently designed to feed into your site’s institutional biases and to try to undercut the party we all support.  Exactly how is it you expect anyone not to try to yank your chains, as Andy et al did earlier this week?  Seriously – do you think pasting “Ace Journalist” on your foreheads makes you inherently trustworthy?  
12. In a larger sense – please state the case for taking Minnesota Monitor seriously, not just as “news” but especially in terms of granting actual trust and credibility to your reporters.  Especially for readers and interview subjects who are not part of the  “progressive” (bwahaha) audience.
13. The bloggers who punked Fecke (and the dolts who take him seriously) over his “Inteview with an Insurgent” bit view the Minnesota Monitor not as a bunch of fellow bloggers with whom to coexist, but (I think it’s fair to say) a foe to be undercut, screwed with, and eventually vanquished.  Are they wrong to do so?  Why?

That should get y’all started.

Please return this immediately, as I have a deadline.

I remember when I worked as a reporter, both on the radio and as a freelance print reporter.  Now, I was nothing to shake a stick at; I was a serviceable reporter.  Nothing more.

And part of being a serviceable journalist that could get hired to write stories was making sure that what you turned in to your editor was all facts.  Especially when I did print work – my last step before walking my copy in to the office was to call back all my sources and double-check everything I’d presented as fact – names, spellings, places, numbers, who said what to whom, everything – to remove all semblance of opinion, supposition and by-guess-and-by-gosh, to say nothing of human error, that was humanly possible. 

That was back when I was working for the most benign media in the US – the small neighborhood newspapers that dot Minneapolis, Saint Paul and the suburbs, the papers that report on neighborhood business, events, crime and the daily (or more usually weekly or monthly) parade of events on their turf, the Midway Monitor, Grand Gazette, Highland Villager, East Metro Courier and a bunch of others, all of them little tabloids that depended for their existence on getting the story right in their neighborhoods.  Accuracy was a premium, since everyone in the paper’s audience knew everyone and everything that was being written about.

The editors and publishers of these little papers knew that their survival, even more than that of the big dailies, depended on their credibility with their audience.

Credibility.  It’s a big thing, if you’re in the communication business.

———-

We conservative bloggers give the Minnesota Monitor a hard time.  As has been amply observed by many local center-right bloggers, the MinMon is supported by the “Center for Independent Media”, which until fairly recently shared offices with “Media Matters for America”.  MM4A is a George Soros-funded attack PR firm associated with an awful lot of gutless attack-flakkery; in addition to carrying on a high-profile campaign of smearing conservative commentators (often swerving into overt racism, sexism, anti-semitism and a lot of other “isms” that, were MM4A a conservative organization, wouldn’t pass unnoticed and unassailed. 

The Center for Independent Media pays a group of local bloggers a fairly fat stipend, by blogging standards, to write for the Minnesota Monitor.  One must, on the surface, give the CIM and the Monitor some points for at least trying to put up a good appearance; they bandy their “Code of Ethics” about with giggly abandon.  I think it’s fair to say that some of their “journalists” make a game effort to try to meet that “code”; an examination of Minnesota Monitor’s coverage shows that the “code” gets ignored when convenient.  And while questions have been raised about CIM’s funding, they’ve never revealed anything – although the phrase “liberals with deep pockets” has slipped out in informal conversation.

To sum it up – the Minnesota Monitor and its merry band of rentabloggers has been trying to eke out some credibility as a news source.  I think it’s fair to say that outside the motivated center-to-far-left, they’re not there yet.

Which is where this story starts.

—–

One of the Minnesota Monitor’s bloggers is Jeff Fecke.  Jeff’s been writing his “Blog of the Moderate Left” for a long, long time – almost as long as I’ve been doing this blog. I’ve never met Jeff, knowing only his online persona; I’ve sympathized with him during his divorce, and read about some of his health issues, about which he’s written quite a bit over the years (he once had a side-blog about bariatric surgery that was by far the most affecting and interesting thing he’s written).  But for the most part, Fecke is a snark-blogger in the model of fellow rentablogger Duncan “Atrios” Black; the stereotypical Fecke piece actually reads like the stereotypical Black piece:

Why Does Bush Hate The Troops?

Article says administration trying to solve vets health care crisis.

Oh yeah.  That’ll work. 

After five years of that (and yes, I know – like most three-line parodies, it’s as hamfisted as…well, an Atrios analysis piece; read Fecke’s oeuvre and judge for yourself).

To be clear and fair – I don’t believe Fecke to be a bad person in any way. I’m not getting into any personal attacks here. 

But we’re talking about journalism.  It’s nothing personal – just business.

———-

I know what you’re thinking.  “Who are you to judge, Berg?”

Who, indeed.  I’ve worn a lot of hats in my life; reporter was one of them, for a while.  This blog, of course, is not journalism, for the most part (I’ve taken my shots at it, of course).  It is a combination of things – diary, soapbox, punching bag; at the end of the day, it’s really my personal comment section for the big blog of my life.  I seek to be “fair” not as a matter of journalistic ethics – this blog (generally) is not a journalistic endeavor – but out of a personal sense that fair is the right thing to be.  And like all personal senses, it’s malleable and subject to all the usual personal vicissitudes.  I am not always fair.  But I generally strive to me.  And I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve never knowingly put anything false on this blog, outside what I believed to be fairly clear satire and parody.  While my bias is one of the reasons this blog exists, I take personal integrity seriously; the only person I’ve banned from this blog in the past two years was ejected for calling me a liar (wrongly, of course).

On the radio?  I’m honest about my biases.  And I can honestly say that I’ve never done even the most highly-charged interview (last October’s interview with the Strib’s Rochelle Olson, about her hatchet-pieces on Alan Fine, was probably the most portentious of my radio career) wanting to be unfair.  Indeed I was fair to Olson; I just paid out the rope by which I think she hung herself.

On any given issue, you can figure for yourself how fair and credible I am; your decision may be informed, well or foul, by the fact that I’m honest about my biases.  On the show as on this blog, you, the listener and reader, are the judge.  

———-

Last week, Fecke – in his capacity as a “journalist” for the Minnesota Monitor – sent Andy Aplikowski an “interview” – an email with a bunch of questions. 

Andy is an outspoken Republican, a firebrand within the party, someone who has a vision and works for it with a tirelessness that the party needs a lot more of.  Like anyone with a vision and the cojones to state it, he’s developed some detractors and enemies within the party.  It’s the detractors’ loss; the perception that political parties are full of people who fret more about internal politics than about winning elections is one of the things that kills the desire of anyone who doesn’t live for that kind of thing to get and stay involved. 

Andy’s first reflex was to delete the “request”; Fecke is a writer with a five year history (on his personal blog as well as the MNMOn) of antipathy toward Republicans, working for an outlet whose mission is to serve as a propaganda organ for the regional left.  In retrospect, it may have been the right reflex.

But Andy forwarded the email to a group of other local center-right bloggers, including me.  And in a brief burst of creativity, we concocted a number of flagrancies; a fictional groundswell for John Hinderaker to lead the MN GOP, a bunch of things that’d jump right out at a typical leftyblogger as stereotypes for the snarking, to justify much gamboling about and poo-flinging.

Learned Foot – a party to the party – sums things up fairly well:

What it was, however, was an amusing diversion; an exercise in disinformation with a rather obvious play to the preconceived prejudices of you and your audience. I mean, didn’t those references to Obama and the Imus comment seem just a little extraneous and out of context?

It was like waving our arms yelling “Yoohoo! You can play the race card here!”

Not to you people. Critical thinking jumps right out the window when you hacks see the chance to slime somebody. Hell, it never even occurred to any of you that perhaps Andy didn’t write any of those answers at all (aside from inserting typos and torturing some of the syntax to make it look more authentic).

It was a half-baked hoax – because, frankly, what’s the point of fully-baking a hoax with these people? 

———-

In writing about the whole flap, Fecke asks:

So I’ll have much more on L’affaire Aplikowski later today, but I’m still left wondering how “I know!  I’ll lie in an interview and say racist and incendiary things, and then Jeff Fecke will print them in Minnesota Monitor, and that’ll show him!” makes me look bad.

If Fecke’d stopped there, it probably wouldn’t have. 

But Fecke went on to fall into our trap, and prove our point.

Remember – being a “journalist” involves clearly separating fact from opinion – and, if you ever worked for a boss like my first one, keeping your opinion the hell out of it.

Fecke seems (to my opinion) to have a habit of inserting opinion into ostensible “journalism”; remember when he wrote with no evidence one could discern from his reporting that Representative John Kline – combat veteran, one-time carrier of the nuclear “football” and survivor of several campaigns’ worth of DFL mud-mongering – was “”terrified” of his contituents at a town hall meeting?  I wanted to jump through the monitor (and the Monitor) to ask “um, based on WHAT?”

Or how he implied without any visible evidence that the Kline campaign conspired to block his liveblogging of the meeting?  His long record of jumping to unwarranted conclusions, sometimes with very embarassing results?

Not that he stands out from the Minnesota Monitor in general; last winter, when a group of Twin Cities gay activists’ van was vandalized at Dordt College in Iowa – a fairly fundamentalist Christian school that bans gay relationships on campus – the report on the subject skimped on little facts like Dordt had invited the gay activists, and that Dordt had ordered the vandalism cleaned up by their own maintenance people.  Andy Birkey, the reporter who covered the story, left a comment about my questions a few weeks later:

I wrote the piece the night before I went on vacation, based on information from my good friend Matt Comer who was a participant in the Soulforce Equality Ride. I wrote it before media reports had come out, and did not have internet access for the following week, or I would have followed it up.

While I do – sincerely – appreciate Birkey’s clarification, my inner editor wants to ask – “so you didn’t bother to get Dordt’s story before you left on vacation?  Then why did you run the story, as incomplete and thus unfair as it was?”

Minnesota Monitor has done little to earn the trust of those who aren’t fundamentally-disposed to agree with it in the first place.  Given that Minnesota Monitor’s “reporters” have a record of omitting non-prejudicial facts about Republican, Christian and right-leaning subjects (by omission or commission), while essentially making up things to fit their preconceived hypotheses, where’s the percentage in someone like Andy Aplikowski not assuming that Fecke will screw him in the final draft?

As, indeed and predictably, he did:

I’m also left wondering who the “proper GOP leaders” Aplikowski notified were.  As far as I can tell, Andy Aplikowski is saying that the Republican Party of Minnesota authorized him to lie to the newsmedia to prove–well, something.  I didn’t know the GOP of Minnesota was in the habit of authorizing its district chairs to freely lie to people, but it’s probably good to know.

From a bald-faced hoax, Fecke – with no source other than an emailed statement from a party to the hoax, presumes a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Minnesota GOP.

Satisfying to one’s inner Bob Woodward, perhaps, but getting another source would have been a better idea.  In saying the State GOP “authorized” anything, Fecke is making things up, presuming facts nowhere in evidence (nowhere in existence) to go along with his preconceived idea. 

For while Fecke says:

I regret that I did not expect him to lie in the interview, but we rarely think ill of those lied to.  Generally, it’s the liar who looks the worst.

Except the “lie” was a trick.  And it worked.

Sad to say.  But true.

———-

Fecke does bring up one point – possibly advertently. 

For now, I’m just left shaking my head sadly.  I actually wanted to write an article that was fair to Aplikowski and the GOP, one that was not a hatchet job, but simply presented his point of view.

About a month ago, Jeff Horwich from MPR approached me about appearing on a panel in front of a live audience on the MPR program “In The Loop”.  I did my due diligence, of course – but I, a conservative talk show host, could walk into Minnesota Public Radio with a reasonable expectation that I wasn’t going to get punked.  MPR – at least their news and public affairs departments – have a reputation for being fair.  I felt I could trust MPR – and my trust was amply rewarded.  As was theirs; I did nothing to jerk them around.  I respected their integrity, and with good reason; they apparently believed there was good reason to respect mine.

Likewise, when Eric Black called me a few years ago asking for background on Powerline and the other local center-right bloggers, I believed – rightly – that what I said would be reported fairly, clearly and with no words crammed into my mouth.  I didn’t assume I’d agree with any conclusions Black drew – but I believed in Black’s integrity.

With Minnesota Monitor – a propaganda organ funded by wealthy liberals in pursuit of an agenda I find largely noxious, a website that I believe to be deeply disingenuous about its funding and motives –  there is no such trust; indeed, by employing a serial would-be clairvoyant like Fecke, the Monitor shows contempt for factual, fair reporting.

And that’s assuming Fecke is sincere about his desire to be fair, which, let’s be charitable, is yet to be determined, as Andy points out in his rejoinder to the flap (which you should read):

Fecker left out a lot of very pro-Republican content, because it did not suit his needs and fit his agenda. A paid political operative is an operative all the same. What they say is tainted by the money that pays for their words and where it appears, and it can no longer be trusted as objective. I don’t care who pays who, when a blogger takes money to blog, they obviously have sold their objectivity and credibility as well.

So if you were a rock-ribbed conservative Republican, and a Jeff Fecke with all of that journalistic baggage approached you, what would you do?

The fact that Fecke needs to assure the Minnesota Monitor reader that he’s not carrying out a hatchet job is telling, whether Fecke meant it that way or not.  With Jeff Horwich, Caroline Lowe, Eric Black, Conrad DeFiebre and any number of other solid local journalists, it wouldn’t even be a question; integrity would be assumed; Eric Black never has to assure the reader he doesn’t intend to punk his subject. 

If Minnesota Monitor wants to be taken seriously as “journalists”, they have to get to the point where they can say the same thing.  With a straight face, anyway.

———-

“So why did you do it, Berg?  Why did you go along with the other center-right bloggers in this juvenile prank?”

Because I thought it would be interesting to see what cockroaches got scared out of under the rocks.  I had no expectation that Minnesota Monitor or Jeff Fecke would change their spots.

Less still did I expect the local leftysphere would disappoint.

But more on that later. 

(more…)

The Times of London discovers that favorite slow-newsday staple of the Star-Tribune; a “flood” of several “Republicans” who are jumping over to support one Democrat or another.

And after spending the last couple of years looking at stories like that, and bumperstickers for “Sportsmen for Kerry” and such, I think it’s time to start coming up with some of our own:

• Free-Marketeers for Edwards!
• Recovering Addicts for Ted Kennedy!
• Zionists for Ellison!
• Speechwriters for Biden!
• Hussein Torture Victims for Kucinich!

More?

Hack partisan journalism!

The “Center for Independent Media” – which until recently shared office space with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America” – is setting up another paid rentablog operation in Iowa, to “cover” the caucuses.

But have no fear!  They have a code!

Like Minnesota Monitor and Colorado Confidential, the Iowa site has hired a slate of New Journalism Fellows who are being trained in investigative reporting, follow a code of ethics based on that of the Society of Professional Journalists, and are supported by journalistic mentors and editors.

That’s right, Iowa!  Trained investigators with real mentors and everything!  Who would never hide their financial support from scrutiny to see exactly how it might affect their credibility – or, for that matter, pretend as if there’s just no rational issue!  Who follow the highest standards of journalism!  Who never mix editorializing with reporting!  With editors and all!

Let the hackery begin!

So as Gary Miller notes, Rudy Giuliani didn’t exactly say, as I reported the other day, “If a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.”

So to preserve the universal stasis, Gary adds…:

That didn’t stop Senator Obama from saying Giuliani had taken the “politics of fear” to a new low.

Well, the Mayor may not have said it but I am, Senator.

If you or Ms. Rodham are elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

Any questions, beotch?

None here.

Michael Chertoff on the Dems’ mania for softpedaling the war on terror:

The impulse to minimize the threat we face is eerily reminiscent of the way America’s leaders played down the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary fanaticism in the late 1970s. That naive approach ultimately foundered on the kidnapping of our diplomats in Tehran.

A sensible strategy against Al-Qaida and others in its ideological terror network begins with recognizing the scope of the threat they pose. Al-Qaida and its ilk have a world vision that is comparable to that of historical totalitarian ideologues but adapted to the 21st-century global network.

Is this actually a war? Well, the short answer comes from our enemies. Osama bin Laden’s fatwa of Feb. 23, 1998, was a declaration of war, a self-serving accusation that America had somehow declared war on Islam, followed by a “ruling” to “kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military … in any country where it is possible to do it.”

It’s on this misapprehension, I have to hope, that the Democrats will founder in ’08. 

I’ve always been ambivalent about Rudy “Freakin'” Giuliani.  On the one hand, he’s never been a conservative in terms of his personal approach and too many of his policy initiatives.

On the other hand, he’s a genuine leader. 

And – unlike too many candidates, including all the Democrats – he understands the situation in this world – and that the Democrats’ perception of this world froze solid on 9/10:

Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.

“If any Republican is elected president —- and I think obviously I would be the best at this —- we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it,” Giuliani said.

And while “anticipate” might not have been the most judicious choice of words, the real choice – between the party that knows there’s a war going on and the one that denies it as hard as they can – couldn’t be more stark.

The former New York City mayor, currently leading in all national polls for the Republican nomination for president, said Tuesday night that America would ultimately defeat terrorism no matter which party gains the White House.

“But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?” Giuliani said. “If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer.”

“I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

Bingo.

That’s the key to the whole thing; if the Dems win, they will cede the initiative to the enemy.  And ceding the initiative is how nations lose.

He added: “The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.”

After his speech to the Rockingham County Lincoln Day Dinner, I asked him about his statements and Giuliani said flatly: “America will be safer with a Republican president.”

He’s got that going for him.

A couple of weeks ago, while “reporting” on John Kline’s town meeting – in which the congressman spent two hours answering unscreened questions from an audience that was not in any way vetted for friendliness – Jeff Fecke, “reporter” for the Minnesota Monitor (a “progressive” group blog funded by a group of deep-pocketed Washington liberals), editorialized…:

The Kline camp went into this meeting terrified of…something.  I’m not sure what. 

That’s right; after a career that’s taken him to USMC Officer Candidate School, flying choppers in Vietnam, a stint carrying the nuclear “football”, and beating an entrenched incumbent on his own turf, Ace Reporter Jeff Fecke thought Rep. John Kline (Colonel, USMC, Retired) was “terrified” of questions from a bunch of doughy, patchouli-reeking BDS victims.

So what did MinnMon have to say about this sign of abject terror – Mike Ciresi’s four-minute bump-and-flee with reporters as he announced his candidacy?

Two hours versus four minutes.  What’s he afraid of?????

Oh – they said nothing. Doyyy.

For more on Minnesota Monitor’s “journalistic ethics”, check out Foot’s evisceration piece here.

An array of Minnesota bloggers, left and right, covered Congressman John Kline’s town hall meeting last night. 

The Twin Cities’ fringe left, convinced that Kline was shunning his constituents (because his office didn’t kowtow to the demands of a group of stalkers “demonstrators” who conducted several de facto sit-ins at his office), showed up in force.  Some of the best of the Twin Cities’ conservative blog community showed up to keep an eye on the “demonstrators” (and, as it happens, the leftybloggers).

Joe Tucci of Kool Aid Report was there, and provided the first report I saw of the evening’s tempest in a teapot:

740 – Gold star Mom just [smacked down the assembled lefties]. Half the place gave here a standing O. Half did not. Guess which half sat on their asses. Watch for the footage (and why the assholes patriotic Americans that didn’t stand, didn’t applaud her son are dregs) on residual froces tomorrow.

…

815 – LIBERAL LIES!!!! Minnesota Monitor monitor sez:

Reporter [heh -ed.] Jeff Fecke has called in from the town hall meeting sponsored by Rep. John Kline (R – Minn.). Although wifi access has been enabled, [lie – it has not been enabled – we checked. -ed.] Kline’s staff has asked that there be no live blogging of the event.He asked no such thing. They merely said that the school’s wifi was off. Fecke playing loose with facts? Like that never happens.He asked no such thing. They merely said that the school’s wifi was off. Fecke playing loose with facts? Like that never happens.He asked no such thing. They merely said that the school’s wifi was off. Fecke playing loose with facts? Like that never happens.He asked no such thing. They merely said that the school’s wifi was off. Fecke playing loose with facts? Like that never happens.

He asked no such thing. They merely said that the school’s wifi was off. Fecke playing loose with facts? Like that never happens.

Curious, I ran over to Minnesota Monitor (a regional rent-a-blog supported by the Washington-based “Center for Independent Media”, which used to share office space with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America”, but which denies any connection or funding from Soros, even though I’m not aware that the group has ever responded to any questions about its funding with anything but a giggle and a change of subject) to see what the fuss was about. 

MinMon’s rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke, who wrote an otherwise fairly dispassionate account of the event, had this to say about the purported “restrictions”:

Minnesota Monitor had intended to liveblog the event.  Unfortunately, while some conservative bloggers were allowed internet access, Kline staffers informed this reporter that I would not be able to take advantage of internet access that had been offered me after inquiry with the Lakeville school district.

The Kline camp also declined to let news media hook into the auditorium audio feed, and did not allow anyone in to set up until ten minutes before the meeting was to start.

Michael Brodkorb responded by posting the rules for the event, that WiFi was not at the moment available, and that he…:

…walked into the auditorium, found a place to sit and used my Verizon Wireless Air-Card to access the Internet.  It is was not the responsibility of Lakeville South High School (the taxpayers) or Congressman Kline’s office (the taxpayers) to provide me with access to the Internet…

To prevent being scooped on future live-blogging events, I would suggest liberal bloggers buy air-cards, rather than creating conspiracy theories that  “somce conservative bloggers were allowed internet access”

And Kevin Ecker clarified:

I spoke with several members of the Kline staff and it was never related that there would be no liveblogging. Just that while the school had wifi, it wasn’t turned on. And I verified this with my laptop….which I had out, open and turned on. Plus both Joe Tucci and MDE were liveblogging next to me. Nobody questioned it. 

 Which introduces the question; when will the “journalists” – as the MinMon people claim to be – either:

• reveal the source that told them that live-blogging was “prohibited”
• elaborate on their claim of discrimination (“…some conservative bloggers were allowed…Kline staffers informed this reporter that I would not be able to take advantage of internet“)
• Admit that they cried “wolf” when they should have cried “we didn’t do our technical homework”

Note to the MinMon kids from someone who’s actually worked for a [bad] living as a reporter; nobody is required to kiss your ass just because you show up at an event claiming to be a reporter.  Getting let into events late and being barred from PA system feeds is hardly unusual, and rarely political, and never an impediment to covering a story.

And a separate note from someone who has worked for a [equally bad] living as a broadcast producer, covering news, sports and special events; your failure to have a backup plan for a technical hitch doesn’t constitute a “conspiracy”.  When you are trying to cover an event and you are relying on any form of technology to help get the story out, you must always assume that the technology will fail, and have a back-up plan.  Michael Brodkorb had a technical workaround – his Verizon card.  Other conservative bloggers took their notes and waited until after the event to upload and publish; good enough is good enough!

Grow up.

After complaining about being repressed by the injustice inherent in the system, Fecke reported that the crowd – on both sides – seemed fairly restrained and civil.   

Kevin Ecker of Eckernet was also there, and had a slightly different take:

Several moments stuck out, some of them in retrospect, some of them I know even before were going to be memorable. One in particular was when a woman got to speak and started by saying she was a Gold Star Mother. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these hippies knew the difference between a “Gold Star” mother and a “Blue Star” mother. So I knew where this was going and wow, she hit the ball out of the park with her speech, and when she was done quite a few people got up to applaud the sacrificies of her and her son. Not the lefties of course, they just sat there sulking.

Retired Lt. Col. Joe Repya…called out the lefties in the audience, declaring that they should be ashamed of themselves for not standing up and applauding for a Gold Star Mother and her deceased son.

More from Ecker, who opined…:

Somewhere in there [a woman who was a detractor of Kline’s] objected to being called unpatriotic (nobody called her that…it’s liberal talking points), and then called Kline dispicable. Kline waited until she was done and said he understood why she was upset if her patriotism was questioned, but that he also gets upset when he is called dispicable.

Fair?  Balanced?  You be the judge.

The Lady Logician from Ladies’ Logic was there, and promises both photos and a longer post.  But she notes:

Both sides were fairly equally represented. The town hall meeting was open to ALL issues so we did get a couple of intelligent questions about issues other than Iraq, but we all knew why the majority was there and the questions reflected it.We heard from the usual suspects on the left but we also got to hear from a Gold Star Mom (Merrilee Carlson) and from Powerlines Sgt Thole from Chaska. Sgt. Thole’s rep read from his 3/17 Star Tribune editorial and informed Congressman Kline that they were going to present his office first with the Appeal for Courage Petition (if you are active duty you need to check the site out).

Stay tuned; I have a hunch this is just getting rolling.  

And thanks, and good job, to Joe Tucci, Kevin Ecker, Lady Logician, Andy Aplikowski, and even Jeff Fecke.  I mean, I’d be wrong not to thank a guy for serving up a high, down-the-middle ‘tater like that…

Ryan Sager in the NYSun about the fifth birthday of the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law:

…the folks who brought us the bill known colloquially as McCain-Feingold will be taking a wildly undeserved victory lap this week. After all the big promises leading up to the passage of McCain-Feingold, one is tempted to resort to the phrase “moving the goal posts.” But, in truth, the more apt simile would be that the reformers’ arguments are like bumper bowling: So long as they roll the ball in the right direction and manage not to hit anyone in the face, they get to feel good about themselves.

Take as a prime example of the reformers’ boasting a statement put out yesterday by the Reform Institute, a non-profit group affiliated with Senator McCain of Arizona. The statement claims that BCRA has “succeeded in its objectives.” How so? It “significantly reduced the corrupting influence of campaign contributions and enhanced the participation of small donors in the process.”

This, Sager notes, is patent rubbish for a couple of reasons:

As to the first part, that corruption has been reduced, this is a simple assertion, with not a single piece of evidence to back it up. There’s a reason for that: There is no evidence. By what metric does one measure “corruption”? Mr. McCain and his crew couldn’t define it before they passed McCain-Feingold; they can’t define it now; and, thus, there’s no way to measure it.

Indeed.  The only thing McCain-Feingold was ever designed to deal with was a generalized, nonspecific distaste for “money in politics”.   McCain-Feingold merely shuffled who got the money and how.

As for the enhanced participation of small donors in the political process, here’s a question: If Messrs. McCain and Feingold took credit for water running downhill, would that mean they could slap it on their resumes? Small donors are participating more in politics because politicians are learning how to harness the Internet. So, unless Mr. McCain invented the Internet — and not Al Gore as we all learned in our civics textbooks — no one ought to be attributing this development to BCRA.

Worst of all, McCain-Feingold added a level of bureaucracy to free political speech that anyone who cares about civil liberty (I’m looking at all of you Democrats who became instant “libertarians” the moment John Ashcroft was sworn into office!) should find nauseating.

The former senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, who championed McCain-Feingold, promised that it would “help challengers reach a threshold of credibility when they want to challenge us in these races.” Putting aside the ludicrous notion that 535 incumbent politicians sat down and tried to write a piece of legislation that would make it harder to get reelected, five years later there’s no evidence electoral competition has increased. Sure, control of Congress turned over. But anyone who attributes the 2006 election to McCain-Feingold, as opposed to Bush-Cheney-Hastert-Frist, is delusional.

Strike one to Thompson, who had better back the hell away from his support for McCain-Feingold if he wants my support for President.

The people of the Fifth Congressional District sent Keith Ellison to Congress.

That’s how democracy works.

I don’t care that he was the most “progressive” candidate for the job; people have the right to vote for anyone they want.

I care not in the least that he is Moslem.  It is entirely possible that electing a Moslem to that most mainstream of American institutions, the Congress, is exactly one of the messages we need to send to Islam around the world – the ideal that in America, through work and study and peaceful (if, in Ellison’s case, often irate and prickly) coexistence with one’s fellow man, one can achieve liberty, comfort and spiritual freedom and fulfillment.  Granted, this would have been a lot more convincing had Ellison had cuddled up with the likes of CAIR, and people associated with funding terrorism, before and during the election.

I do care that Ellison, like most of the Democrat majority in Congress, is Ka danger to the long-term peace in the Middle East and, eventually, America:

The people of Fifth District sent me to Washington to end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home. On Friday, I voted to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq by voting to prohibit the building of permanent U.S. bases and setting timetables for the withdrawal of our troops. I voted to oppose the presidents policy of war without end.

Let’s be perfectly clear here; Ellison voted to opposed the president’s policy of war until the job is done.

Look – even conservatives are upset about the way much of the last few years of this war has gone.  The surge would seem to be meeting at least encouraging initial success; it seems to be answering some questions left long unanswered in Iraq (I remember one commenter in this space, grinning like a toddler who’d just made a big pants; “what do you mean, reign Moqtada Al-Sadr in?  He’s in control!  There’s nothing we can do about it!”  Sic transit gloria thug).  Why didn’t we do this two years ago?  Three years?  Suffice to say, many of us are looking for answers.

Keith Ellison and his voters aren’t among them.  They have a much simpler “solution”:

Residents of the Fifth District made the war the most important issue in the November election. For the first time since the war began in 2003, the war has an end date and Congress is confronting the president. This Congress has held over 90 oversight hearings on Iraq; the previous Congress held none. Folks who phoned and wrote their legislators, attended vigils, marched and prayed for peace made this possible.

Unlike most anti-war Democrats, Ellison may actually be right.

For most of the Democrats in Congress, my question remains – if you had such an all-fired mandate from the people to get us out of Iraq, then why haven’t you forced the issue?  Why wasn’t it in your first 100 hours, if it was such a statistical sure thing?

Because it wasn’t, of course.  American people are dissatisfied with the war.  That dissatisfaction takes many forms.  The smug plush-bottom Unitarian yoohoos I met last week at the pro-terrorism rally, the ones who wouldn’t fight if a group of thugs pointed AK47s at the crowd, want to not only bring the troops home, but discharge them from the service and pound their rifles into plowshares (which they’d use to decorate the walls of their condos, since none of them knows which end of a plow you milk a tofu cow with).

And then there are people who are deeply dissatisfied with the way the war itself is being carried out – who wondered if today’s surge, as welcome a development as it’s been, shouldn’t have been done first, rather than last.

Y’know – people like me.

People who look at statements like this, and realize that one of the two major parties can’t be trusted with the keys to the car:

Now, we must keep up the pressure to turn our country away from arrogance and death toward promise and life. This vote is only one more step toward peace.

Disengaging in Iraq would not mean peace…oh, wait.  Ellison is going to say something factual:

We have a lot of work to do to make this step meaningful.

Finally, the sweet waft of truth.

Yes, there is a lot of work to do to make the step meaningful.

First, there’s the little matter of convincing the Sunni Ba’athists and Al-Quaeda – the people who saw other peoples’ heads off – that the day after our withdrawal date isn’t a fine day to come back from Chechnya and pick up the job where they left off.

There’s the complicated bit about figuring out how not to have the parts of Iraq that aren’t  Sunni or Al Quaeda – the Shi’ites –  form immense militias for their own protection, and start ethnically-cleansing the parts where the two groups meet.  Y’know – the part we’re just starting to gain control of right now.

There’s the matter of having our departure not followed by money, toys and activists from Iran, it’s proxy Syria and, for that matter, Saudi Arabia flowing into the country to keep Iraq nice and unstable, and to take pressure off their own regimes.

Finally, there’s the ultimate bit – figuring out how to co-exist with the terrorist safe haven that Iraq would inevitably become if we pulled out before the job (killing terrorists) was done.

Given that any thought, Representative Ellison?

President Bush intends to veto this bill. His veto will be an admission that he plans to establish permanent military bases in Iraq and continue the war without end. By his veto, Bush will prove that he has no intention of letting the Iraqi people run their own country and has no intention of honoring the lives and service of the sons and daughters, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers who are fighting his war. His veto will mean that the deaths, American and Iraqi, mean little to him.

I want to save that bit there for the next election.  I want to print it on signs and wave it around outside the next batch of Ellison rallies.   This statement shows that Ellison is either an idiot, or that he’s cynical enough to think that his voters are.

When the president calls for a “clean” appropriations bill, he is asking for a blank check to continue current policy. I will absolutely oppose any “clean” appropriation bill.

Good.  You keep that up.  It’s good to have some Democrats putting their cards on the table.  Granted, most of the rest of  Pelosi’s majority doesn’t have the guts to do that – because they know the real facts behind the polls.

Americans dislike the war because they dislike not winning.  We – and I’m one of them – dislike sacrifice without result.

We also dislike sacrifice in vain.

There is still much to do. People working for peace have led us this far. Some of us disagreed on strategy this time, but I assure you I have not wavered from doing all I can to stop this war. Together, we must carry the soldiers and their families at the top of our attention at all times and demand the same from our leaders.

Great message, Rep. Ellison.

Let’s see how it plays outside the Fifth CD.

One of the great legacies of the Bush Administration is further proof that tax cuts work.  They stimulate the economy.  They put people to work.  They are a just-plain-good thing.

Now, the Bush Administration screwed up, and badly, by not cutting domestic spending.  Those of us who supported Steve Forbes up until the end of the 2000 convention are justified in going “I Told You So”.  And so we shall.  But Bush’s tax cuts have given us an economy that, by any rational measure (except Lexus/Nexus hits) is one of the best ever.

Oh, the Democrats will barber than they starve the government of revenue – which, of course, exposes the central problem with their thesis; the role of our society is not to keep government afloat first and foremost.

The Dems have that wrong – aggressively so.   And they want to “fix” that – to put government at what they call its’ rightful place in the fiscal food chain, way up front.

Jay Reding on the Dems’ plan to gut the US economy:

 To [re-raise taxes] would be to erase the millions of jobs created in the past few years, introduce a huge amount of uncertainty into the market, and ensure that businesses would delay job-creating capital investments until they know what the tax consequences of those choices would be. The Asian markets had a massive sell-off because of similar fears, and the same would happen in America if there was a credible threat of a major capital gains tax increase…However, the worst thing that could happen is for the Democrats to raise taxes, spurring another selloff and then add more to the already burdened entitlement system. That is also precisely what the Democrats want to do — which is why the President should be prepared to veto any bill that raises capital gains taxes beyond the current level.

The economic reality is that capital gains taxes are economically wasteful — they don’t generate much revenue and they hurt economic growth, reducing tax revenues in other areas. Even if a 0% capital gains rate isn’t politically acceptable, neither is a return to a time when capital gains rates were acting as an anchor on economic growth.

It’s here, again, that elections matter.  It’s here that we pay for having the likes of Amy Klobuchar and Tim Waltz in Congress; their philosophy is “government comes first”. 

Other states are moving up their primaries, so as to make them more influential in selecting the next president:

Hoping to muscle Florida into a pre-eminent role in picking next year’s Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, the state House voted Wednesday to leapfrog almost all the other states and set a Jan. 29 primary, with an option to go even earlier.

So here’s an idea:  keep our caucuses exactly where they are…

…but use them to endorse for the next presidential cycle!

That’s right!  Make Minnesota the most influential state of all by making our picks for 2012 right now!

Thanks for your consideration.

Carnivore from TvM notes:

No Democrat running for president has had anything to say about the ruling. If a Republican candidate, say a former mayor from New York, who needs help on the gun issue, would come out and actually endorse the ruling and say he would appoint judges likes those who decided the case for the majority, he would nearly guarantee picking up the Republican nomination. It would be enough to convince me and I’m to the right of Attila the Hun.

Note to Rudy (or his people):  this is not the kind of flip flop that’s going to hurt  your chances at a nomination.

Camille Paglia on women in politics:

Dianne Feinstein is far more presidential than Hillary Clinton, who alternates between smugness and defensiveness before pulling out that tiresome middle-aged .mom card. Feinstein, even when maneuvering strategically, always seems genuinely focused on the idea at hand, while Hillary isn’t really there — she’s just riffling mentally through her team’s cue cards. All politicians are actors, but Hillary’s a bad one. No audience wants to see with such crystal clarity how it’s being massaged.

The whole thing  – about Obama, Clinton and Coulter – is worth a read.  Since it’s Paglia, it’ll be a mercurial, sometimes infuriating read, but that’s just fine…

You are a gift that keeps on giving.

Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton told Democrats Tuesday the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” is back, using a phrase she once coined to describe partisan criticism…Clinton was first lady when she famously charged allegations of an affair between her then-president husband Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky were the result of a conservative conspiracy.

Again, thank you.

Keep up the great work.

…pimp-smacking Larry Jacobs – U of M professor and apparently the only “political expert” on any Twin Cities reporter’s rolodex – like fisking Lori Sturdevant, is sort of like doing finger exercises on the guitar, mandolin and cello; they’re things you do over and over again because it keeps you limber for the real fun stuff.

Eric Black – one of this city’s best reporters, and I mean that sincerely and with no hidden joke in the background – went to Jacobs to wonder why Rudy Giuliani is doing so well among conservatives.  Jacobs’ answer – the same one he gives for every surprising result from the GOP – “conservatism is dead!”

Gary Miller at TvM punts the old guy about 90 yards:

Republicans have known for years that the liberal bugaboo Ms. Rodham would be the Democratic nominee in 2008 so that does not suffice as the reason Republicans are turning to the “electable” Giuliani.  Few could mistake the fact that the Mayor is personally in favor of abortion rights and other socially liberal positions.  But what Jacobs apparently does mistake is the fact that by pledging to appoint judges in the mold of “Roberts, Alito and Thomas”, Giuliani has merited the mantle “functionally pro-life”.  In other words, a president can have his own policy preferences, but if his fidelity to the text of the constitution is paramount, he will pledge to allow such decisions to be decided by people in those laboratories of democracy we call “states”. 

Does the Mayor still have obstacles in his quest for the nomination in this regard?  Absolutely.  But for an observer of Jacobs’ supposed pedigree to miss this obvious explanation for Mayor Giuliani’s meteoric rise is an important case study on how conventional wisdom is regurgitated among the chattering class. 

To be fair, I don’t think Jacobs has done anything but regurgitate conventional wisdom in 20 years.  Why he’s still the official go-to-guy for the entire Twin Cities media is way beyond me.

As I explained last week (and was seconded by James Taranto), far from seeing a diminution of their influence, social conservatives are displaying their sophistication. 

The notion that social conservatives are mindless crowd-followers seems to enthrall the left. 

My NARN Radio colleague Ed Morrissey asks:

 If anyone has contact information for Senator Thompson, I’d love to get it.

I’m always happy to help:

City Hall

(212) 788-3000
260 Broadway,
New York, NY 10007

Gary Miller on the idea of Fred Thompson – former senator and, then, supporting actor on Law and Order – possibly running for President:

Thompson looks like a president straight out of — forgive me — central casting. His magnificent booming voice is rivaled only by his magnificent conservative voting record.

Hmmmm.

Somewhere or another, I have to find [regular commenter] Angryclown’s synopsis of every single Law and Order episode in history.

Representative Kline,

While I’m not a constituent of yours, Learned Foot is.  And I gotta go along with the Foot on this one.  He’s talking about the gabbling cretins that are continually occupying your office, demanding “dialog”, soaking up your staff’s time and polite ministrations, streetwalking in front of a carful of partisan-media johns.

I say – give ’em what they want.  Or as Foot says:

 I say do it. Hold that town hall meeting they keep demanding. Get these freaks to talk – on tape (and it wouldn’t be hard since they do tend to love the sound of their own voices). Just let them yammer on and on. And then, make sure everyone gets a chance to see them for the vacant narcissistic eliminationists they are.

Lest anyone think that Rep. Kline is dealing with rational people here, Foot excerpts a clip:

 “If Iran would drop a nuclear bomb on Israel, I would ask myself if Israel had it coming, and I would say they did.”

Represenative Kline, here’s what you should do:  have the forum.  And make sure you invite every conservative blogger you can find, especially those with video cameras.   Have a staffer bring a wireless router in from home.  Let us videotape the proceedings, and liveblog ’em, and make sure the exact nature of the creeping cretinism you and your staff face is on full display (as opposed to the gauzy, earnest soft-focus that the Strib presents them in). 

Shine the light on the cockroaches, Representative Kline.  Hell, for that opportunity, I’d take the day off from work.

Have your people call my people.

Saint Paul will be getting the 2008 GOP National Convention.

The good news:  They have selected a planner:

A federal Transportation Department official and former Republican Party operative will decide where delegates sit, how to keep the media happy and what events to stage at the 2008 Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities.

Maria Cino, who was named deputy secretary of transportation two years ago by President Bush and was his national political director in 2000, will be the Republican National Committee’s lead planner for the convention, committee spokesperson Chris Taylor said Monday.

Cino will work with the local host committee and city officials to coordinate an event that’s expected to draw more than 45,000 people — including delegates, media and visitors — to the Twin Cities…Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn, said Cino was the perfect choice to bring people together in planning the convention.

“Throughout her exemplary career, Maria Cino has been known for her ability to roll up her sleeves and get things done,” he said.

So far so good.

Of course, for the 75-odd-percent of my adopted hometown that votes DFL – and for the 5-20% of that number who could fairly be called the “lunatic fringe” – it’s all about them:

  At the first of three St. Paul forums on the convention Monday morning, officials heard concerns about limited access to downtown, protesters and taxpayer liabilities…Some, like West Side resident Gerry Berquist, said they want officials to ensure that protesters are treated fairly and that downtown business won’t be adversely affected.

“There needs to be a huge community gathering so that these questions can be asked,” he said.

Bergquist’s remarks are the tip of the iceberg.  The local left – expressing their wishes on a number of local email discussion forums and blogs – want unprecedented access to the XCel Energy Center during the convention.  Some of them want absolutely untrammelled access to not only the facility, and to the President himself, but even to the conventiongoers as they go about their daily business.  Some want to “debate” convention delegates on the street – “debates” that sound in most cases more like harassment – in order to perhaps “educate” them.  When questioned, they seem to studiously avoid references to their more deranged cohorts, as if they’re just no way an anti-Republican demonstrator will cause problems.

I have a couple of ideas in response:

• Democrats – let’s meet out on the street for a real debate.  Send your people up against the legion of right-leaning bloggers that’ll be descending on the event.  See who “educates” whom.
• While we’re so concerned about free speech (and I am in fact a bigger proponent of genuine free speech than any “liberal” I know), how about we think globally before acting locally.  Start by lifting the free speech restrictions at the St. Paul Planned Parenthood clinic.  What?  You say you can’t, because a deranged person might commit violence against some innocent customer?  Hm.  Are we seeing the disconnect yet?

Counting the hours until 9/08.