John Mellencamp on yesterday’s KQ Morning Show, talking about why the US prospered so much during the Baby Boom’s childhood:

(paraphrasing very closely)

During World War II, we bombed everyone else back to the Stone Age!  That’s why we prospered!  There was no competition!

Ah, Coogs.  Silly, silly Coogs.  We did it, huh?  If the US hadn’t been so damn trigger happy, World War II would have worked out for everyone?

Ah, well.  We’ll always have Scarecrow and Lonesome Jubilee.

Schmuck.

I wrote this letter to my senator, Ellen Anderson (DFL, District 66), about her deeply-misguided vote on capping Charter Schools:

Senator Anderson,

I’m Mitch Berg.   I’m a constituent of yours.  And while I’m not only a Republican, a talk show host (at AM1280), a conservative blogger (www.shotinthedark.info) and a member of Concealed Carry Reform Now, I’ll have you know that you are (but for Randy Kelly and Norm Coleman) the only DFLer I’ve voted for in the past 20 years (once, and based entirely on your constituent service record; while I agree with you on nearly nothing, you are indeed excellent at that).

However, I need to talk about your vote on capping Charter Schools.  Since you have spent so much of your political career as an advocate for children, I urge you to reconsider your very intensely misguided vote.

I pulled both of my children out of the Saint Paul Public Schools last year; with my daughter, they were merely incompetent.  With my son, I’d call the situation more akin to child abuse. 

I enrolled them both in charter schools.  Freed from the absurd, Helleresque approach of the public schools, both have blossomed – my daughter’s GPA zoomed from 1.2 to 3.4 in one semester. 

I’m like a shocking number of parents who, disgusted by the institutional inertia of the public schools (many of them immigrants and minorities, for whom good education is a pathway out of poverty) have seceded from the public schools FOR OUR CHILDREN’S EDUCATIONAL, INTELLECTUAL SURVIVAL.

I would *like* you to reconsider and renounce your vote on this subject.  Absent that fantasy, I’d like to know your rationale for this vote. 

I think I do, actually – you, like most of the DFL, are utterly beholden to the teacher’s union.  Your assistant said it might have had something to do with “oversight”, which is absurd, since nearly no public school would survive according the standards that charters must meet!

At any rate, I look forward to hearing from you and/or your staff.

Mitchell Berg
Minnehaha at Pascal. 

I’ll keep you posted.

Learned Foot beats the Minnesota Money Monitor – a local lefty rentablog that used to share quarters with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America”, but has no connection with ’em, nosirreebob, and which responds to all criticism or questioning by either a) giggling and changing the subject or b) calling their attacker a “hack” and giggling and changing the subject – like Mohammed Ali beating Joe Bugner.

Read it and weep for the local lefty rentablog community.

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”. 

Bluesfest leaves Duluth.

Why?  Because Duluth’s crypto-Maoist government wants to squeeze blood from a turnip, natch:

Organizers of Duluth’s Bayfront Blues Festival say they’re choosing a new site to avoid losing thousands of dollars in revenue to the city.

The festival has been held in Duluth near Lake Superior for the past 18 summers.

But festival officials say they’ll name a new site by week’s end.

Duluth officials have been asking for a larger cut of ticket sales, control of beer sales, as well as an exhaustive audit of the festival’s accounting.

Festival attorneys say the city’s demands would cost an additional $48,000 this year.

Bergson – who may be Minnesota’s wackiest neosoc mayor – smells untapped small change:

Duluth Mayor Herb Bergson’s staff estimates that festival President Chris Mackey may owe the city at least $30,000 in back taxes and ticket fees. Bergson has requested all the festival’s accounting records.

How much real revenue – sales taxes, hotel taxes, and other revenue gained from having people actually come to Duluth and spend money – is Bergson whizzing away?

On Saturday, Washington Senator and embarassment Patty Murray delivered the response to President Bush’s address on Saturday:

Senator Patty Murray said the nation needs a new direction in Iraq, “not more of the same failures.”…She blamed “Senate Republicans and a president who stubbornly refused to listen” for blocking a Democratic plan to narrow the mission in Iraq. The Senate rejected a measure this week that called for a withdrawal to begin within 120 days.

Thank goodness.

Nothing quite like giving the enemy a date on which they can operate with impunity. Nothing like telling the Iraqis – the majority – that want the insurgents removed or killed that it’s time to shut up if you want to be alive 130 days from now.

Democrats: Still not ready to run a nation.

We’ll be talking again with the Minnesota contingent at A Gathering of Eagles – the counter-protest in Washington tomorrow.

Here’s a little taste of what and who they’ll be facing:

 

Via Smash, thence via Michelle Malkin

Check out the GOE website.  Help out, even if you’re not on the bus to go to DC today.

Like I wish I were.

I could hardly care less that Keith Ellison is Moslem.   Oh, I think he’s going to be a terrible representative – as, indeed, pretty much any dogmoleftist will be – but his faith really has nothing to do with it.
This, however, could be useful:

Now, two months in office, the Minnesota Democrat plans to meet with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top State Department officials to talk about showcasing his story as part of their public diplomacy efforts in the Muslim world.

“Hey, my country first. We can work out our political differences later,” said Ellison, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. “I’ve said I’m willing to do whatever I can to make some friends for America.”

Adding to the cachet he’s built since taking his oath of office on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, Ellison has been profiled three times by the State Department’s overseas press bureau.

I’m not so sure that he’s “adding to his cachet” as he is “finding something he’s useful at”.  A little bird in Washington tells me Ellison and his staff are developing a reputation for being “less gifted” than most other staffs. 

But let’s leave that aside for now.  Good for Representative Ellison.  This is the sort of thing I and many other conservatives – people who believe that there is a moderate wing to Islam – have been wanting Moslems, especially leading American Moslems, to do.

On Monday he did a Voice of America interview from his office, where an American flag was placed conspicuously behind his desk for the cameras.

He’s scheduled to follow up on Thursday in a teleconference with Karen Hughes, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy. The White House has asked that the teleconference promote American values and confront ideological support for terrorism around the world.

I haven’t seen any other comment on this – and while I’m sure there’s an ulterior motive behind it, whatever.  So let me be the first to say it; kudos to you, Rep. Ellison.

Nutroots tell Nevada Democrats “jump”. Nevada Democrats respond “off what?”

The Nevada State Democratic Party is pulling out of a controversial presidential debate scheduled for Aug. 14 in Reno and co-hosted by Fox News, according to a letter released late Friday from state party chairman Tom Collins and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev).

The letter said Nevada Democrats had entered into the agreement with Fox, despite strong opposition from Democratic activist groups such as MoveOn.org, as a way of finding “new ways to talk to new people.”

But it’s all over now; MoveOn can’t abide presenting the Dem message through any but democrat-beholden friendly media.

Good!

Keep preaching to the choir!

Can you imagine if the Republicans limited themselves to friendly media? If we eschewed ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, the AP…?

Keep it this up, Dems!

Debra Saunders dings on Algore – and, more importantly, the “carbon neutrality” cult in Hollywood:

I used to figure that rich sinners, who bought “indulgences” from the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, would be ashamed of the bargain that other churchgoers looked upon with scorn and derision.

But lo, on Academy Awards night, the stars were quite impressed with themselves for participating in a “carbon-neutral” event. Cozy up to the Natural Resources Defense Council, and all those private flights, limo rides and multiple homes disappear. Almost like special effects.

I know that the word on many readers’ lips is: hypocrisy.

For those in Hollywood who esteem themselves as “leaders” in society’s fight to save itself (see also George Clooney’s speech at last year’s Oscarpalooza), one of the first principles of leadership is “never ask someone else to do what you’re not willing to do yourself”.

But the real issue is that the most effective spokesman for global warming apparently doesn’t think he has to show personal leadership by curbing his energy consumption. The same goes for [California’s SUV-driving Senator and “environmentalist” Diane] Feinstein and [California’s SUV-driving Governor and “environmentalist” Arnold] Schwarzenegger, who are happy to push for laws that make other people cut their emissions, but are far too affluent to cut back themselves.

“With the future so open to doubt,” Gore wrote in his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,”we routinely choose to indulge our own generation at the expense of all who will follow.”

Now Gore has a spokesperson who explains his indulgence — er, offset — policy. And it apparently doesn’t matter that Gore’s behavior signals to global-warming agnostics (like me), and to global-warming believers, that the climate situation must not be that dire after all.

“Carbon neutrality” is to environmentalism was Scientology is to faith: a fabulist’s way of buying peace of mind.

When I see any of their motorcades switching to Priuses – er, Prii? – then maybe I’ll pay attention.

Being “carbon neutral” isn’t cutting carbon output; it’s playing a shell game that you hope everyone is too stupid to figure out.

The Silkypony campaign is mortally insulted by Ann Coulter:

Can you help us raise $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” this week to keep this campaign charging ahead and fight back against the politics of bigotry?

Bigotry? Why, what would the Silkypony campaign know about bigotry? (via RWV)

King from SCSUScholars notes a bill that should be getting more attention…:

The story tells of a man who built two additions to his property against the regulations of the county zoning ordinance. When he was told he had violated the ordinance, he asked for a waiver from the zoning board, which turned him down. The normal recourse for this is to file suit against the zoning board. But Rep. Tom Rukavina of Virginia authored HF495, which reads in full:

The St. Louis County Board of Adjustment shall issue a variance to any applicant who requests a variance from St. Louis County Zoning Ordinance 46, article IV, sections 3.01 and 3.03, if the property at issue is located in Government Lot 1, Section 35, Township 56, Range 17, and if the request for variance was previously denied at a meeting of the St. Louis County Board of Adjustment on December 19, 2006.

Thats pretty particular to his childhood friends property.

…but seemingly isn’t – outside of the blogs.

Read the whole thing.  Give DFL stalward Rukavina a call.

Tom Vilsack bails out of the Prez race.

Vilsack left office in January and traveled through states holding early tests of strength, but he attracted neither the attention nor the campaign cash of his top tier rivals — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and John Edwards.

In the most recent financial documents, Vilsack reported raising more than $1.1 million in the last seven weeks of 2006 but only had around $396,000 cash in the bank. Some campaign finance experts contend the candidates will need $20 million by June 2007.

Vilsack’s decision still leaves a crowded field of eight Democrats dominated by Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

The best I could say about Tom Vilsack was that “he’d suck less as a president than Hillary! or Obama – but I’d be lying.  Vilsack’s moderate credentials were forged.

Still, the farther left the field drifts, the better.

As it happens, I’ve worked in a number of fields where women tend to earn more than men.

I spent five years as a technical writer – a field that had been dominated by women (since it started as a “promotion” from secretarial work, back in the 1940’s). Traditionally, women out-earned and out-ranked men in the field, because individually, they’d been doing it longer. Eventually, I – individually – earned more than many individual female technical writers. And sooner than later I moved out, because let’s face it, technical writing bored me stiff. Sheesh.

I’m reminded of this when I see stories like this one, about “women’s groups” pushing for “equal pay” at the capitol:

Equal pay laws that apply to state and local governments would be extended to private contractors doing business with the state, under a proposal outlined Monday by leaders of womens advocacy groups.

After years of efforts under gender equity laws, or “comparable worth” initiatives, women in state and local government now earn 97 cents for every dollar men make, said Patty Tanji, president of the Pay Equity Coalition of Minnesota.

Meanwhile, in the overall workforce, the gender gap lags behind at about 75 cents for women, Tanji said. While the proposal would apply to only the 1,800 companies that do business with the state, “its a step in the right direction,” she said.

It absolutely infuriates me that the press still repeats that soggy old statistic verbatim, when commanded to, by whatever special interest wants to wave it around. Women at large make less money, because they traditionally tend to get less education, go into lower-paying fields (the standard gender cliches would be social work versus engineering), and – the big clinker – tend to take years off from their careers to have and raise children. This slows promotions and raises – and, according at least to Warren Farrell, lengthens their lives, but we digress.

Who should get more money for a job in a fair world, all other things being equal – someone who’s been on the job for ten years without a break, or someone who took a couple of years off in the middle of those ten years to have and raise kids?

Note that I was gender-neutral, there; what if the woman worked for ten years straight, and the guy stayed home for two years? Is there any rational reason the guy should earn the same money as the woman?

Why?

A spokesman for the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce said pay equity mandates are unnecessary. Tom Hesse said studies have shown that the gender gap in pay is due mostly to factors not related to discrimination.

“When you take into consideration the difference in occupations that men and women choose, and length of time on the job, there really is no wage gap,” he said.

Which is, in fact, the truth.

Which makes sense when you realize that this really isn’t about equal pay for anyone.

The pay equity proposal was one of more than a dozen being supported by leaders of womens groups at the State Capitol on Monday.

Dubbing their effort “Presidents on Presidents Day,” the presidents or top officials of more than 22 womens groups said they are coalescing at the Legislature [while I’ve said a lot of bad things about politicians, even I don’t believe  they’ve done anything to deserve that – Ed.] to push for: increasing womens pay and workforce flexibility, providing health insurance to an estimated 343,000 uncovered Minnesotans, reducing violence against women, and providing improved health care and more affordable birth control and family planning services.

It’s about feminizing poverty and collecting a lot of markers from the DFL.

i’m tempted to tune in for this interview with Amanda Marcotte and Melissa MacEwan, scheduled for 10AM central this morning.

My hunch; comfortable among what they assume is the friendly confines of a sympathetic medium (BlogTalkRadio is largely a left-of-center stronghold), they’ll be, um, candid.

I’ll download it later…

Learned Foot gives Mandy Marcotte – and everyone who thinks that shrill shrew was a “strong woman” – the kiss-off they have coming:

The point is, I doubt Your Little Amanda can be accurately described as a “strong woman.” For, I can’t help but notice that in your view, being a “strong woman” entails little more than exhibiting an in-your-face attitude and slavishly towing the Identity Feminism (as opposed to Equality Feminism) line. The like minded womyn and the dickless turds who try and ingratiate themselves to said womyn (and do please give up the act – it’s not going to get you laid) lap it up.

I see this Marcotte weasel held up as some sort of example of what a “strong woman” looks like, and then I look at my wife: her hair falling out from the chemo; constantly queasy; unable to sleep some nights, and on the nights she is able to sleep, it takes all the energy she can muster to get out of bed. When she is able to get vertical, she has to tend to two extremely hyper children. Yet, at the end of the day, she’s still able to joke about her hair.

Strengthwise, to any rational human being, the two aren’t even close.

Give Marcotte and her “admirers” time.  Maybe they’ll figure it out. 

Maybe.

Little Miss Attila on Marcotte:

Actually, deep down I feel sorry for Amanda Marcotte—in the same way I felt sorry for Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, and Washingtonienne two years ago or whenever: when I was young and did stupid things only a handful of people knew about them.

Now it seems that whenever a young woman behaves like an idiot, everyone knows about it. Forever.

It’s sympathy speaking, though…:

And of course I relate to young Marcotte: the shrill feminism, the all-yang-no-yin personality. The hyper-emotionalism, and its corrosive effect on her writing.

I was like that. Still am, in a lot of ways. But to the degree that I’ve grown up at all, I’m glad I was able to do it out of the public spotlight.

If blogging has done one thing, it’s given idiots, defectives and the grossly immature a forum for making those adolescent mistakes in front of millions.

Although I’d be amazed if Marcotte’s not north of 35. 

Leftybloggers served up the idea of trying to rat out Bill Donohue – the outspoken Catholic anti-defamation activist with the Catholic League who went a long way toward ensuring Mandy Marcotte’s “resignation” from the Silkypony campaign – to the IRS for alleged violations of non-profit organization tax law.

Learned Foot returns the serve with a 100mph slam to the backhand side.  Foot – an actual lawyer – presents a bit of actual law, showing that Donohue and the Catholic League were well within the League’s mission – and, hence, non-profit tax laws – in attacking Marcotte’s hate-drenched writing.

Foot concludes:

Notably absent from any of these statements – incendiary and rage-flecked as they were – was any mention on how people should vote. If anyone would like to take the leap from the “bad press” Donahue is trying to lay on Edwards for hiring these freaks to intervening into a political campaign, I still have a nice big stack of “independently produced” left-wing campaign literature foisted on me through the mail last year by some 501(c)(3) organizations whose own tax exempt status would be in peril given that same standard.

Oh, but I’m sure those were somehow different.

It always is.

But let’s see how many leftybloggers fall for it, anyway…

The wages of frivolity are lunacy.  Minnesota is starting to pay the piper for our neighbors’ little brainfart last November. 

If you missed NARN III “The Final Word” last Saturday, the first (3-4PM) hour was one of the best hours of radio that the NARN has ever done (Podcast should be available shortly).

Michael and King spent most of the hour running down a list of some of the worst bills our newly-DFL-dominated legislature has on the docket.  They range from the ridiculous (Phyllis Kahn wants the state to force De La Salle High to shield light from their new football field from the neighbors; Phillis Kahn, as it happens, is one of the neighbors) to the chilling (sex ed for kindergartners, sending state bureaucrats to visit new parents to check up on things and start addicting them orient them to available state programs).

They’re taking a straw poll for the Most Ridiculous Bill.  Follow the link, and vote.

And then call your legislator and tell him/her that you are not amused.

Amanda Marcotte has apparently resigned from the Edwards campaign.

Malkin links to a number of bloggers who’ve had a very low profile, to date; liberal Christian bloggers.  One such is “Faithful Progressive” from the “Christian Alliance for Progress” blog, who writes:

Little has been written (at least as far as I have seen), about the need for blogs on the left to demonstrate more respect for the majority of Americans who are religious. We have made that point at least five times in widely linked posts. These two posts in particular generated a lot of debate:1.)An Open Letter to Liberal Bloggers; 2.)I’m Not Sick of Atrios or Digby: Building a Team Means Religious and Secular Liberals Hearing Each Other Out. But most of the responses were hostile and the debate generated more heat than light.

No shock, that last bit there.  Crossing the nutroots is a good way to get your comment section pumped full of hot, black, sickly bile.

Rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke – a local long-time leftyblogger who spent the last campaign season on the payroll of an organization that has never made its finances public (to my knowledge) but that shares office space, agendas and talking points with George Soros’ Media Matters for America – has been working overtime to rationalize Marcotte.

No, rationalizing is the right word.  After spending most of the last week saying “Oh yeah? Your bigots are worse than our bigots! (Note to Jeff: Bill Donohue doesn’t work for a presidential campaign, and never will):

I don’t believe Amanda’s characteristically blunt comments crossed a line, and I certainly don’t believe that one angry line in an angry essay is proof of anti-Catholic bias.  It may be a sign that one strongly disagrees with the Catholic Church, but those are not the same thing, and in a pluralistic society cannot be the same thing; if we are not free to criticize other religions we are not free to practice our own.  Amanda didn’t say Catholics were evil, or weak-willed, or (as my Grandmother was once taught) that they drink the blood of newborn babies.  That’s anti-Catholic bigotry.  Show me where Amanda wrote that, and we’ll talk.

Strawman, of course.  She never wrote that.  She’s spent most of her misbegotten, splittle-flecked career panting about what idiots Christians are; yapping about “godbags”; gargling about how pro-life Catholics just want to create more titheing Catholics. Her entire body of work is suffused with a contempt for christians and Christianity that only the willfully obtuse, or someone who has an interest in obfuscation, or just someone whose entire worldview is slanted that way, could miss.

And while Fecke spent several posts focusing on talking points about one Bill Donohue – a Catholic writer/editor with a way for agitating anti-Catholics – the fact is that Donohue’s anti-Catholicism was just one noxious weed in her boquet.

If you have faith in anything higher than Al Gore, Amanda Marcotte has a problem with you.

Don’t want to call it bigotry?   Fine . Amanda Marcotte has some really sick attitudes about people of faith.

Does she have the right to criticize religion?  Sure.  She can do it any way she wants; she’s chosen to do it in a hateful, cliche-sodden, degrading, insulting way.

That’s her right!

But rights have consequences.  Insult, degrade and hate people, and they have a right to call you on it.

It’s that part that the nutroots seem to have trouble with; rights with consequences.

Barack Obama digs at Australia, via Scott Johnson:

Australian Prime Minister John Howard criticized Obama’s call for immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. When Obama was asked to respond, he declined simply to express respectful disagreement with a loyal American ally. Instead he insulted Australia’s contribution to the war effort, belittling the 1,600 Australian troops in Iraq. He said that if Australia was so dedicated, maybe it should raise its contribution to 20,000.

Obama not only insulted our ally, he formulated the insult in the inelegant fashion of an intellectual thug. CNN reports that Obama said if the Australian prime minister was “ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq,” he needs to send another 20,000 Australians to the war. “Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric,” Obama said.

Not as empty as Obama’s.  Australia doesn’t have 20,000 combat troops.  The 1,600 men they currently have in Iraq are a very large share of their active military. 

Please, Democrats;  nominate this hamster. 

I’m all about tackling the big questions.

For example:  Why do people build even numbers of urinals in men’s rooms?

Follow along here:  If men are following proper men’s room etiquette, they NEVER stand at adjoining urinals (unless there are dividers present – and there never, ever are).  Proper etiquette requires one to leave at least a one-urinal gap between you and the next guy over. 

Picture a men’s room with, say, three urinals – 1, 2 and 3.  Ideally, one guy will take 1, and another can use 3, while 2 will remain fallow, as it were, serving as the “no-man’s land” between the two.  (Only the hopelessly gauche, when entering a men’s room, will use #2 barring an emergency; to do so would render 1 and 3 unusable). 

So let’s say you have a men’s room with four urinals, 1 through 4.  Only two can ever be occupied – 1 and 3, or 2 and 4.  In effect, one urinal is wasted, since no more than two men can ever use the setup at a given time.  Better to either tear one out, or build another. 

The logical conclusion is that there is never a reason to build a men’s room with exactly two urinals; one will always be unoccupied, barring emergencies; men with class will either use an unoccupied stall or just grit their teeth and think of walking through Death Valley rather than use the adjacent urinal.  It is, in effect, wasted resources and effort to install two urinals.

Architects?  Please see to this.

Barnett on the epidemic of vacuity that’s paralyzed leftyblogs from day one; today, my old kicktoy Ollie Willis:

There actually is a lot of interesting stuff in the left wing blogs. But some of the left-wing blogs serve as a vehicle for their authors to prove their ignoramus bona fides on an almost daily basis. I call this the Oliver Willis School of Blogging. For a wonderful example of this art form, check out Oliver’s mini-post regarding his indifference to the death of Barbaro. Ollie scolds, “The idea that so much ink is being spilt over a horse just kind of appals (sic) me.”

Of course, all bloggers are entitled to their opinions, even when they’re ill-informed or intemperately expressed. What is unfathomable is why a campaign would hire a person who delights in gratuitously causing offense as its representative.

Like so many of us, Barnett tackles Mandy Marcotte:

Amanda Marcotte, the blogresss from Pandagon that Edwards hired, happens to be one of the worst of the lot. In fairness to Oliver who actually comes across as a nice albeit not particularly talented guy, Marcotte is a bitter, angry person who thrives on offering offensive and obtuse observations. Her now infamous post from just days before the Edwards campaign hired her shows Marcotte at her “best”:

The funny part is that none of it is a surprise.

I went through a phase a few years back where I read leftyblogs with an eye partly turned to criticism, and partly to ridicule; there was plenty of grist for both mills.

And then I gave it up.  The vast majority of leftyblogs, with precious few exceptions – even among the big ones – were puerile, sophomoric, pointless…just plain dumb. I found that if I wanted, for whatever reason, a leftyblogger’s perspective, I was better off going with one of the less-stupid, less-insane locals, like Powerliberal or Flash or even the New Patriot Collective For Make Better Distribution of Information for Glorious DFL.  We have knocked heads for years – but they, along with many (albeit not all) local leftybloggers do a much better product than the deranged Kos, the Peter-Principled Atrios, the dumb Ollie Willis, and the angry-funny-without-the-funny Jesus General.

And especially Pandagon.  Although they had the occasional reason to exist when giggly fratboys Ezra “John” Klein and Jesse “Ringo” Taylor ran the show, once the blog turned into a collective, it became essentially a “Kos” wannabee; all of the heat, less of whatever pittance of light “Kos” emits.

One of the band of intellectual midgets that inherited Pandagon from Taylor and Klein was Amanda Marcotte, a fatuous screechblogger with a record of giggly bigotry and purple-faced religious hatred who was recently hired as the Edwards campaign’s official blogger.

Leftybloggers are closing ranks around their own:

I suspect that they are trying to tear her down because they are justifiably afraid that she will excel at her new job.

Um, no.  Actually, I hope every liberal candidate hires a screechblogger; they will provide us a treasure trove of material for the next couple of years (or until they get fired for embarassing their bosses, which would seem likely, sooner than later, in Marcotte’s case). 

How likely?  This bit here is making the rounds:

One thing I vow here and now–you motherf**kers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will f**k without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it.

At the considerable risk of sounding catty, I don’t think I’m going to be needing to “stop” anything.

But I digress:

 Toss and turn, you mean, jealous motherf**kers. I’m not going to be “punished” with babies. Which makes all your efforts a failure. Some non-procreating women escaped. So give up now. You’ll never catch all of us. Give up now.

It’s not that I want to “catch” anyone, least of all Ms. Marcotte.  Enjoy your life, whatever it may be, by all means!  It’s just that I’m thinking John Edwards isn’t going to be picking up a whole lot of red-state action with that kind of vibe going out on his frequency.

Leftybloggers – some of them – have a curious sense of what’s really important. 

Along with disparaging her on the most ridiculously inane grounds (E.g. “She uses profanity! Holy f**king s**t!”)…

I’ve noticed that from quite a few leftybloggers, big and small, find profanity to be a symbol of accomplishment; with some, the attitude seems “Woo hoo! Let’s see you godbags keep up with this profanity game, m****r******g d****e**g s*****ni-eating s****s!”, as if fluency with profanity is a sign of…anything?  I remember one fairly vacuous former local leftyblogger, writing about an even more vacuous local leftyblogger; “he might drive the wingnuts crazy with the swears!”.  Welcome to fourth grade!

I’ve lived around Chicagoans long enough to say with absolute assurance; I can swear more fluently than any leftyblogger (who’s not from Chicago and also brain-dead).  I don’t take especial pride in it; profanity merely substitutes shock for thought.  Which, with some people, is the only rhetorical tool in the belt.

Including, according to everything I’ve seen, Amanda Marcotte.

I love the lede in this story about the word of rumors of a possibility of Al Franken’s long-awaited (hahaha) announcement  of his impending candidacy:

Comedian and national radio commentator Al Franken will run for the U.S. Senate in 2008, according to a source with Minnesotas Democratic congressional delegation.

“Comedian and talk show host”?

Uh, yeah.  And now, bar-band guitarist and English major Mitch Berg will respond.

Franken told a Democratic congressman days ago that he intends to run for the seat now held by Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, a high-ranking staffer of the delegation member confirmed Wednesday.

The staffer declined to be identified or directly quoted for fear of ruining the relationship between the congressman and Franken.

Riiiiiight.

Additionally, a senior Democratic official from Minnesota told the Associated Press on Wednesday that Franken also told her of his intentions. That official, who did not want to be identified because Franken has not made an announcement, said the discussion was recent.

For the moment, at least, those close to Franken officially are remaining mum.

No, those close to Franken are doing his bidding, firing off semi-official trial balloons to a compliant, nudging-and-winking local media that is already at least partly in the bag for him.