Every year on February 6th I do a tongue-in-cheek “Reagan’s Birthday” celebration.  Oh, we do do a special dinner at home, and I do talk about the Cold War, the demise of which President Reagan was the primary architect.  But that’s just being a good parent.

And while I make noise about wanting to make Reagan’s Birthday (formerly “Reaganmas”) a national holiday – c’mon.  Even Reagan wouldn’t want that. 

The tongue, in every case, is lodged firmly in cheek.

Because people who treat their leaders like subjects of cultish adoration?  They’re just plain wierd:

Wondering what to give a presidential candidate on his birthday? Minnesota supporters of Barack Obama are celebrating their guy’s 47th birthday today with “house parties” across the state.

As I sit trying to write this, a lot of snarky comebacks suggest themselves. 

None of them are any better than the vision of the “events” themselves.

…that Rush Limbaugh’s nationally-syndicated radio program debuted.

To me, in 1988, it wasn’t a good thing; Limbaugh (and the contemporaneous euthanasia of the “Fairness” Doctrine) not only changed the content and tenor of talk radio (and saved the AM band in the process) but changed the business model as well. Up until 1988, talk radio was an expensive format; instead of hiring a couple of disc jockeys and sitting them down with a stack of records (on tape cartridge, in those days), you had to hire people who could talk about whatever the subject was, and put ’em in a studio; the audience before Limbaugh, lulled by the enforced mediocrity of “Fairness”-doctrine-era radio, was either smallish or, in the case of middle-of-the-road talk giants like WCCO, interested mainly in farm markets, temperatures and scores. And to staff those shows, smaller talk stations had to hire someone; sometimes, it was a 25 year old kid who’d had a graveyard shift show in Saint Paul who’d come to Santa Rosa or Columbus or New Bedford and work mid-days or evenings for $20,000 a year.

But Limbaugh changed that. His program was free; it cost the stations nothing. Limbaugh paid his salary, his tiny staff, the uplink fees, and covered it with advertising. Suddenly, stations had access to a big-budget, major-market air talent, and he was not only free, but his controversial, entertaining, funny program brought in gargantuan ratings. Which, for a smaller station, literally meant money for nothing.

Which didn’t do a lot of good for the career prospects of that 25 year old kid from Saint Paul. But it did turn talk radio into something nobody had dreamed about before then.

Any station could now be a talk station – which, for AM stations, was the life ring they n eeded. When I worked in radio in the eighties, there was serious talk about decommissioning the entire AM band; when I worked at KSTP-AM, it was the poor cousin of the Hubbard Broadcasting machine (including Channel 5 and KS95). The station was on the block, for a ludicrous price, and couldn’t get a taker.

Suddenly, Limbaugh made these underpowered, undervalued stations into money machines; hundreds of AM stations that had been ekeing out a terrible income playing country or oldies or polkas started carrying Limbaugh, sometimes several times a day via tape delay. And the money poured in – to the stations and to Limbaugh. When I went back to KSTP for my one-night fill-in gig for Bob Davis, I talked with my old friend, the late Joe Hansen, who was producing Jason Lewis at the time. The station, the former poor cousin, was “carrying the rest of Hubbard”, said Hansen.

A month or so ago, Zev Chafets did perhaps the essential profile on Limbaugh, in the NYTimes Magazine.

At 57, he is an American icon, although his fans and critics don’t agree on precisely what he is iconic for. I’ve heard him compared to Mark Twain and Jackie Gleason, the Founding Fathers and Father Coughlin. Serious people have called him a serial liar and a moral philosopher, a partisan hack and a public intellectual, nothing more than a radio windbag and nothing less than the heart of the Republican Party.

One thing is certain: Limbaugh has been a partisan force for two decades. In 1994, he was so influential in the Republican Congressional landslide that the grateful winners made him an honorary member of the G.O.P. freshman class. He moved not only voters, but the party itself. “Rush talked about the ‘Contract With America’ before there was a ‘Contract With America,’ ” Karl Rove told me. “He helped set the agenda.”

What Rush was was a voice to people who’d not had one; the masses of Middle Americans who consumed American media culture, but really weren’t part of it. TV, newspapers, NPR and traditional talk radio, all of them based on the coast, driven by the dominant, Northeastern culture, had very little to do with the lives of most of Middle America, and cared even less.

And then, along came Limbaugh. He gave that huge mass of people something that resonated.

“Yeah”, say the detractors, “racist sexist lies!”

Well, no. He gave them a voice in New York, who didn’t so much shout back at the lumpen masses of the media establishment, but cut their knees out from under them with humor, biting satire, and something that they just weren’t used to; articulate opposition.

His success has vexed his detractors for a solid generation, now; they’ve tried many times to meet and beat him in the free market, with Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower and Air America and Nova M. And all failed, to the point where the American left is next going to try to resort to government bullying to shut up conservative talk radio.

They missed the point, of course:

When we met he was on the verge of signing a new eight-year contract with his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks. He estimated that it would bring in about $38 million a year. To sweeten the deal, he said he was also getting a nine-figure signing bonus. (A representative from Premiere would not confirm the deal.) “Do you know what bought me all this?” he asked, waving his hand in the general direction of his prosperity. “Not my political ideas. Conservatism didn’t buy this house. First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”

And for all that, the part that most inspires me is this:

Limbaugh was a failure almost as long as he has been a success. And although he is now an apostle of sunshine (“having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” he crows on his show), he spent many years trying to convince his family — and himself — that he wasn’t wasting his life…Limbaugh drifted from job to job…In the mid-’80s he took a job in the front office of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. He was making $12,000 a year, and he almost quit to take a more lucrative job as a potato-chip distributor. “They were offering $35,000,” he told me. “That sounded like a lot of money.”

“But what”, ask his detractors, “does this say about our society? That all the dumb people are listening to Limbaugh?”

Well, the simple answer is, they’re not. As most multi-issue movement conservatives can tell you, conservatism takes more thought than liberalism. And Limbaugh’s audience bears this out (emphasis added):

Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners. The study found that “readers of newsmagazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR and viewers of the Daily Show and C-SPAN are also much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.”

Read the whole (nine-online-page!) article, perhaps the best thing I’ve ever seen in writing about Rush.

And happy anniversary, Rush! Your new contract means the NARN has eight years to get its act really humming!

(Brad Carlson also writes on the anniversary, and Jen O’Hara not only gathers scads of great tributes from others, but writes a wonderful one of her own).

Yesterday morning, I had a special project going on.

Can’t talk about that just yet.  Maybe in a couple weeks.

But afterwards, I went to what might have been a Twin Cities first; a group of Twin Cities Second Amendment supporters met at the Lake Harriet bandshell…

…for a picnic.

Of course, most of the crowd of around thirty – over-21 Minnesotans with clean criminal records, no record of drug or alcohol abuse, mental illness or incipient violence, and every one of whom had passed skills courses – was armed.  Indeed, as Minnesota’s carry permit isn’t a “concealed carry” permit, but a “carry” permit (most people carry concealed out of tact and to avoid standing out in the crowd to anyone who is planning mischief), probably over half of them were carrying openly, with pistols holstered at the hip. 

It was probably the safest picnic shelter in Minneapolis.

I didn’t know about the event until Sunday morning.  I didn’t know what to expect…

…well, yes.  I did know what to expect, in the sense that I do know many of the people involved (although I did meet a few new ones), and that there’d be nothing weird going on in the picnic shelter, other than the sort of particularly intense discussion you get when David Gross, Joe Olson and John Caile get into a room at the same time.

But being that the shelter was at the top of Lake Harriet, where Harriet Parkway comes together with several bike, skate and walking paths by the boat yard, the bandshell itself (there was a jazz concert going on) and the north Harriet beach, and on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, made it one of the busiest places in one of the most liberal cities in America.  I expected some wierdness to break out among bystandards and passersby.

I eyed the crowd pretty carefully; while many people walking past the shelter did abrupt double-takes when they saw that half of the picnickers were strapped, we didn’t seem to generate a cone of fear around us.  Indeed, I only saw one Park cop drive by and look things over (and then drive off), and, eventually, a woman who walked up and asked why so many people had pistols.  She got a courteous, friendly explanation, as well as a couple of carry permits for explanation’s sake. 

It was a lot of fun.  We’ll have to do it again sometime. 

Maybe in Rice Park?

At his best, Michael Yon is among the best journalists around, in the classical sense of the term.

This piece – about an American, pseudonymously “Charlie” – journeying up the Irrawaddy River in defiance of the Burmese junta’s ban on foreigners after Cyclone Nargis, which killed hundreds of thousands and exposed the corruption, cruelty and incompetence of the Burmese government – hit me where I live.

The local people, even the monks, expressed open hatred for the government of Myanmar. The people wanted guns as badly as they wanted shelter. They had no idea what to do with the guns, yet Charlie was deeply moved by the robust character of these people, to whom democracy and freedom were not cynical conceits argued over coffee or crumpets, but ideals for which these simple denizens of the river yearned, believing deep in their hearts that the United States of America could bring change to this far-off corner of the world. They hoped that the U.S. would swoop in and bring justice to the Irrawaddy by deposing the Myanmar military regime. But these hopes would be dashed by real-politik and shifting geo-strategic priorities. Something about the universality of man’s desires occurred to Charlie, how, he thought, we all want the same things—freedom, dignity, a chance to make our own way in this world. Between village visits and dodging patrols he would sit quietly on the bow of the boat and ruminate under the same night sky full of stars that had witnessed men struggle through folly, fiasco, and victory in the pursuit of these very ideas.

This quote smacked me right in the gut when I read it. It resonated on so many levels, both low (this is why the Second Amendment is a right “of the people”, and don’t you ever forget it) and high – this is what America, and the small-d democratic ideal that founded us and, at our best, binds us together, means to those looking at us from outside who really know what it is not to be free. Ignore the eurotrash; douse the stench of Berkeley from your nose; take those breathless articles about America’s supposedly diminished stature in this world and wipe your bottom with them on the hottest day possible, too good for them as it is.

The quote sums up why we’re here.

Naturally, you need to read the whole thing.

The MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour is coming up tomorrow at Billy’s:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Yesterday, I wrote about a party that an email discussion forum threw, which had some interesting results.

Once or twice a year for the past four years, we at the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers throw a party (stay tuned).

Now, the MOB tends to be center-right bloggers. It’s not entirely true – there are bloggers from around the spectrum, and some totally non-political bloggers as well on the MOBRoll. But for whatever reason, while the group has eschewed politics (indeed, tends to avoid politics at our parties completely), the membership is mostly center-right.

It’s not for lack of trying. Pinky swear.

Every time we throw a party I send more email invites to liberals than to conservatives, and I have the “sent” file to prove it. I send dozens of invites to local leftybloggers, media personalities, politicians of both parties.

Most don’t respond at all.

Some send “I gotta wash my hair”-caliber responses. I’m looking at you, Paul Demko.

A few, strangely, reacted with anger, writing bulgy-veined, teeth-clenched, splittle-o-licious rants about how conservatives were no fun. We’ll come back to them tomorrow.

And a few – Robin and Scott Steven Marty, Chuck Olson and (his girlfriend, whose name eludes me at the moment), Bob Collins (not a liberal pol, per se, but if you lay down with Keillor you’ll get up with snooty elitist fleas) and a few others actually bit the bullet and showed up. And we had a decent time. And – just like at the E-Democracy party I wrote about yesterday – it became just a tad harder to rip on them. Oh, their politics and policies and, eventually, employers were still a parade of material. But they weren’t just a bunch of facile labels anymore. There was a human behind the labels.

My neighbor Flash, who writes Centrisity, did something similar. For a couple of summers, he graciously hosted “Drinking Moderately” – a play on “Drinking Liberally” (which is a national chain of events where liberals gather where they’re told to drink and talk politics) – where he’d invite conservative, liberal, and who-gives-a-crap bloggers to his garage and his always-open kegerator to talk…

…whatever.

And, just like the MOB parties, it was a good time. Largely because there was free beer (thanks, Flash!)…

…but also because I got to meet the likes of Chris Dykstra and the MNPublius guys and – are we detecting a pattern here? – see that they were actual people, as opposed to labels. And, I’d like to think, vice versa.

Oh, it didn’t always work. There were a few attendees who remained bloated, irascible jagoffs and/or mirthless, spiteful harpies, and it showed. But as a rule, the experiment was a pretty cool one. Retroactive kudos to Flash.

———-

I’ve taken to enjoying this sort of exchange – when it works, anway. It can be interesting, talking with “the enemy” and, once in a while, listening to see what you can learn.

I actively seek this sort of engagement – partly because I’m a curious guy, partly because I love a good debate. A few months back, I sent a bunch of invites to appear on the NARN to a bunch of local DFL politicians. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I knew most of them wouldn’t respond – more on that tomorrow. And the prime motivator, naturally, was to highlight Andy Birkey’s ridiculous double standard, calling out Michele Bachmann for avoiding liberal media so many area liberal pols are utter cowards at facing polite but probing dissent.

Still, it’s a fact – our interviews with Eric Black, Dane Smith and RT Rybak are among my favorite episodes of the NARN show. Not that anyone convinced anyone, but have some discord in one another’s echo chambers can be good for the brain, once in a while.

On occasion, I also like appearing on Radio Free Nation, a BlogTalkRadio show hosted by Saint Paul’s Marty Owings. I’m the token conservative, normally, going at it with a couple of liberals, black activists, a couple of Ronulans, and the odd “anarchist”. And I learn things.

Of course, some of those “things” are “people are weird”, but in fact it can be interesting, getting outside ones own political safe zone, if only because the stretching and pulling makes your own beliefs stronger (or, alternately, changes them. Which is how I became a conservative in the first place).

But not everyone sees it that way. To some, that idea is a threat.

More on that tomorrow.

First, the plug:

It’s the first Minnesota Democrats Exposed/MNPublius Happy Hour, at Billy’s on Grand. Hope to see you there.

———-

Of course, it’s not all beer and pretzels.

A very smart man – a teacher of mine who’d served in Vietnam – explained the “why” of basic training.  “The goal” he said “is to teach you to dehumanize your enemy”; to see the enemy not as a human being, but as a “Jap” or a “Kraut” or a “Gook” or whomever the enemy of the day is, a not-quite-human thing who doesn’t rate the consideration a human does.  Someone you can kill not only with impunity, but with your country’s approval.

In Citizen Soldiers, Steven Ambrose described the moments when GIs in World War II started seeing the enemy as human – as people who really weren’t all that different from them (notwithstanding the whole “supported a regime that started a war that brought them to Europe” bit).

It was a huge moment for everyone involved.

———-

Years and years ago – when I first got a computer, actually, back before “the web” was the common synonym for the Internet – I got involved in an “E-Democracy” email discussion group on Minnesota Politics.

Traditionally, online discussion groups tend to fall into one of two categories, each with its own set of pathologies:

1. Unmoderated Free For Alls: These tended to start with a bang, and rapidly descend into anarchy. “Inhibition” is one of the first casualties of online communication, and for some people that reads “license to act like you’d never act in person”. These people are drawn to unmoderated free for alls as a place to vent…whatever – anger, ire or immature, juvenile urge to call people names. The signal to noise ratio on these sorts of forums usually drops to 0 quickly, as the people who were interested in the actual subject at hand wandered away to more interesting pastures.
2. Overmoderated Gulags: These forums kill the discussion to protect it; moderators enforce rules at some level or another. These rules can be elaborate and legalistic (some forums have posted rules, human moderators and formal, pseudolegal appeals processes) or arbitrary and capricious (the forum’s “owner” bans anyone who displeases him/her).

In the early days, the E-Democracy forums trended toward “1”, above. And it was fairly predictable stuff. They were (then as today) dominated by DFLers and Greens. I was, in fact, invited to join the forum by the chairman of the state Libertarian party (to which I then belonged) to help even things up a little bit; at the time, there were maybe two Republicans, two Libertarians, and dozens and dozens of DFL/Green/”Reform”-future IndyVentura party members (and a couple of typically-irritating Young Socialists).

And it was wild and wooly. Both sides All three or four or five sides tore into each other like hungry sharks.  I ripped into “liberals” with gleeful abandon, and they ripped back.  Because there’s nothing in Minnesota Politics that we detested more than each other.

And then the forum’s management threw a party.

We met at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis.  We brought brats and beer (and tofu, natch) and chips, and sat down at picnic tables…

…and talked baseball and street cleaning and movies and just a tiny little dab of politics.

I wrote in my wrapup on the forum the next day that it was just a tiny bit harder to flame on people that I’d met in person.  That I’d actually met as humans, rather than as mere brain-damaged big-government-coddling tax-and-spend liberal drones.  And a few of them wrote as well, saying they could maybe be a little more tolerant of uncaring, selfish conservatives now that they’d actually met some of us – something they didn’t do much of in real life.

It made an impression.

Oh, it only lasted so long, of course.  Soon a few of us (myself, you’ll be shocked to know, included) indulged in a few petty flames for old time’s sake.   Other just never “got” the whole “the other guy is human too” bit.  But things got, and stayed, just a tad more civil, because people got to see each other as just a tad less a collection of labels and more as people who believed what they did for their own reasons, but didn’t exist in vacuums.

Today, the email discussion group is pretty much an anachronism (and “E-Democracy” has decayed into a sad joke); blogs pretty much gutted their reason for existence.  Everyone can write anything they want; blogs that are nothing but mindless flames tend to get ignored over time (or turn into Democratic Underground).

But the same pattern holds just as true; people see those across the aisles as labels to attack, pathologies to identify, threats to be counterattacked.

And just like E-Democracy 13 years ago, some of us thought – “Maybe the answer is a party”.

More tomorrow.

I’m not Catholic.  I never will be.  I have my theological reasons.

I have nothing against Catholicism or Catholics. Many of my best friends, and some of my relatives, are Catholic.  I agree with John Paul II – there are many paths to salvation.  I don’t believe Catholicism is a detour on the road to salvation. 

As it happens, I’m Presbyterian.  The theology of the Presbyterian Church just makes more sense to me (even though the actions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA’s non-clerical governing body on temporal issues frequently don’t).  I believe strongly in its focus on scripture, its mix of justification by faith with strong encouragement of putting ones’ faith into action, its governance, John Knox’s founding beliefs on the relationship between government and the faithful (hint:  it strongly influenced how this country was founded), and many, many other things.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t things I respect about Catholicism – indeed, as a newly-minted conservative in the mid-eighties, Pope John Paul II’s example was downright inspirational.

But given a choice between…:

1. starting a pressure group within the Catholic Church – say, “Catholics for Justification By Faith Without Eschewing Works, An Attitude of Judging Civil Authority By Its Record On Being Good Versus Evil, and An Elected Church Governing Hierarchy”, and spending decades/centuries duking it out with a church that is based on theologically inimicable principles, or…
2. …joining a church that actually practiced these things…

…the choice seemed fairly simple (presuming one doesn’t live merely to fight fruitless battles the end of which one will never see).

Which is why I see things like this:

Saying they don’t want to go back in the closet, gay and lesbian Catholics and their supporters took their annual prayer service celebrating gay pride outdoors Wednesday night…About 100 people marched from the parking lot to the front of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis, where they celebrated a [GLBT prayer service] officials from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis had banned from the church itself.

I’m totally with ’em about not going back into the closet.

But…well…

Lucia Engelhardt, 2, was helping her sister Anna, 9, carry a sign reading “Gay love is not a mortal sin.”

I may or may not agree on that count.  I’m pretty “live and let live” on these sorts of things.

But to the Catholic Church, the way of the gay is a mortal sin.  And changing the Catholic Church is like changing the orbit of the planet.

Their 7-year-old sister, Ingrid, also carried a sign supporting gays in the Catholic Church.

“We’re here to support our gay friends,” said their mother, Stephanie Vagle. “And to show our displeasure with the Catholic Church over this issue,” their father, Bill Englehardt, quickly added.

So here’s a question; if you disagree so completely with the Catholic Church over something that the Church itself is so adamant about not changing, why stay Catholic?

Why not leave?

Why not find a church that reflects your beliefs?  It’s an ancient, honorable thing;  the Armenian and Coptic and Chaldean and Indian and finally the Greek Churches left over creeds and doctrines and, I dunno, the heights of miter caps for all I remember.  We Protestants left over all manner of things, and have collected half a billion unforced turnovers since then.  The Episcopals seceded over the whole “my king beats your pope” thing.

Just saying – it’d be nothing new.

I’m genuinely curious – for the second day in a row, as it happens; why stay in a church whose beliefs are so inimicable to you?

Is it the incense?  The nuns?  The tradition?

Someone explain it, please.

I was out biking on the new Midtown Greenway yesterday.  Let’s leave aside for a moment the free-marketeer objections to the project (an old rail-bed through South Minneapolis has been converted, essentially, to a bike superhighway from the Mississippi all the way to Saint Louis Park, connecting to trails that’ll take you all the way out to Lake Minnetonka.  It wasn’t the first gorgeous weekend of the year – but it was the first hot weekend.

And as you get closer to Uptown Minneapolis, you see that key sign that it’s summer in the city; women skating, biking and running in the sort of clothes that make the jihadis want to blow us up.  The kind of thing that makes cultural conservatives shake their heads – or, in some cases, turn them.

What was I thinking about?

1. The damn headwind.
2. All those babes.

And somewhere near the bottom of the list – in the six billions, somewhere – I wondered “what does Susan Lenfestey think about all this?”

But sometimes it just comes to you.  Like, when you open the Strib. Susan Lenfestey is always good for inducing head-slapping cognitive mal-de-mer.

Never moreso than when she “tackles” the popular culture problems that are a direct result of her generation’s overweening self-absorption by bleating “well, wait a minute…”, as in yesterday’s column in the Strib, in which she tries to mix the cultural mores of the libertine boomers of her youth, and the cultural imams that many of the most doctrinaire boomers have become.
It got hot, y’see…

And they took off their clothes.Not entirely, mind you — this remains a fairly modest and Lutheran kind of place — but they took off more than anyone my age might have once imagined. We used to blush at the sight of women’s undies hanging on the line, and now grown women jog and cycle and power-walk in what looks to me like the spandex long-line girdles and cross-your-heart bras that we rejected decades ago. 

And, being Minnesotans with a lot of sugar, corn and dairy in our past, and a lot of fast food in our present, there’s more flesh being squeezed out of these girdles than into them. Victoria’s Secret it’s not.

There’s a part of me that thinks this is great — no one cares anymore about body image, and they’re free to, well, let it all hang out. And surely there’s a sort of gender equality in this recreational neonudity. If men can whip off their shirts and let the summer breeze riffle through the hair on their chests, why can’t women do the same? OK, through their breasts. 

The other half of me thinks that this is a culture gone amok. Somebody somewhere is going to point out that this excessive dermal display is the fault of narcissistic baby-boomin’ feminists like me, who liberated our bosoms in the ’60s from the Wagnerian cone breasts of the ’50s. Trust me, like so much of what we did then, jogging in spandex girdles is not where we thought this was going. (But hey, think about all that organic food.)

Nor did we who believe in gender equality intend this to be a license to the fashion industry to market slutwear to prepubescent girls, and bondagewear to their big sisters.

Susan Lenfestey is speaking for the collective “we” – the entire baby boom (or at least that part of it that is only now (if we accept Lenfestey as that collective “we”, and why not?) discovering the law of unintended consequences?

Or to put it another way – discovering that we – the conservatives – were right?

If geezers like bicycling in padded crotch spandex, so be it. Mick Jagger looks silly now, too. It’s the sleazewear being marketed to girls and young women, and the women who buy into it, that makes me sorry for how far we’ve come — and how backwards we’ve gone. I have no quibble with joyous nudity and the impulse to undress in the balmy air. In Seattle there’s a naked bicycle parade on the summer solstice, and hundreds of men, women and children paint their bodies, yes, naked bodies, in the most creative and clownish ways, and it’s about as sexually stimulating as, well, watching grannies’ bloomers blowing on the line. But it sure is fun.

(IT BUUUUUURNS US!)

It’s the coy couture of faux-sexuality, the contrived message of availability printed, literally, across the behinds and breasts of young women that makes me wonder how we wound up so far off the mark.

In other words, “we” are going to eat this cake, and still have it.  “We” are going to commoditize sexuality, trivialize or medicalize its consequences – but don’t you dare offend my feminist sensibilities when the inevitable consequences come home to roost?”  And they were inevitable – as everyone who knows jack about economics knows that all other things being equal, if you make something cheaper, you make it more ubiquitous – and the demand for sex and sexuality is infinite and inelastic.

But just to show you we’ve come full circle:

And it’s the baring of so much of our intimate body parts that makes more modest countries regard us as a culture run amok.

So “Susan Lenfestey’s generation” has gone from tittering at the social mores and concerns of conservative clergy…

…to furrowing their brows and nodding at the cultural critique of people who force women to wear burquas, and whose hands are spattered with the blood of the gays they’ve stoned and the pregnant teenagers they’ve lynched?

“You’ve” come a long way, Susan.

McCain came to town.

I didn’t have an invite.

But reading the leftymedia’s contortions on the subject is probably almost as much fun anyway. It ranged, as usual, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Or at least from the groaningly obvious and cliche-driven to the moderately interesting.

For the former, we turn to former City Pages writer GR Anderson at the MNPost – who uncovered a real scoop:

Shocker! McCain’s visit to bring out the wealthy, protestors

GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s visit to the Hilton in downtown Minneapolis for a fundraiser this afternoon promises to be a moneyed affair: To qualify to be on the host committee, McCain’s web site says, “individuals or couples must raise or contribute $20,000.” For the less fortunate, “tickets for the Photo Opportunity & Dinner are $2,300 per person. Tickets for the Main Reception and Dinner are $1,000 per person.”

Right. As opposed to those Democrat fundraiser$, where $your $pocket $change will get you in?

Who says the economy is bad?

(I don’t have an exhaustive list, but I do know that the MNPost and the Minnesoros Independent will be calling it “Bad” until 18 months after the recovery is generally accepted as undeniable, or Barack Obama’s inauguration, whichever comes first. But I digress).

Seriously – does GR Anderson think that big-buck fundraisers are a Republican franchise?

Eric Black’s article was more interesting – or at least a little less predictable:

Senator McCain. Welcome to Minnesota. Thank you for your service. My question is about the occupation of Iraq.

I agree that some Democrats have tried to have a little too much fun with your “100 years in Iraq” quote a while back. I take you at your word that you didn’t mean 100 more years resembling the last five — 100 years of steady U.S. casualties. In explaining what you really meant, you have said that it would be fine with you if U.S. troops had a long-term presence in Iraq, like the troops have had in Germany, Japan and Korea.

Well, we’re off to a good start. That’s more honest than most of Black’s colleagues have been with that question.

Many Americans may think that sounds fine. I’m not so sure. No other country has huge military installations around the world.

But that’s a fairly recent development – not so long ago, plenty of other countries maintained genuine empires; Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and even Belgium had or have imperial possessions within my lifetime and, incidentally, Eric Black’s.

It’s not only expensive, but it smacks of imperialism.

Let’s touch on both of those assertions.

It “smacks” of imperialism, because it is – sort of – and always has been. And yet unlike every single other imperial power in history, our “imperialism” has left behind largely functional, largely democratic countries; Germany, Japan and South Korea are world leaders and, at least by their previous standards, incredibly liberal in that small-“l” way that even I approve of.

And the “expense” has to be based on costs and benefits – indeed, Black touches on that concept later, so we’ll come back to it. The “expense” of any “imperial” entanglement has to be judged against the benefits; the Cold War, for example, has to be gauged against the general good of having contained the Soviets until they collapsed.

Ask yourself how the U.S. — specifically the McCain administration — would view it if another powerful country — let’s say China for the sake of illustration — toppled the government of our neighbors — let’s say Mexico, and said that one of its goals was to leave behind a Mexican government that would be an ally of China. Let’s say China did install a Mexican government friendly to China and then reached a deal with its puppet government for a permanent military base close to our borders in order to protect what China declared to be its “vital interests” in the Americas. And then let’s say China announced that it would be fine if the bases were there for 100 years. My hunch is, the McCain administration wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t tolerate it, would view it as a threat and an act of aggression against the United States and a statement of China’s intent to dominate our hemisphere. Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.

Black is right – sort of. The Monroe Doctrine has pretty much been established policy, one we’ve enforced for almost 200 years.

Of course, the analogy makes Iran – a murderous dictatorship that has been in a de facto state of war with us for my entire adult lifetime – the moral equal of the United States.  Is that a dock  you wanna walk down, Eric Black?

There is, of course, another difference; China has not secured UN resolutions condemning our human rights abuses, our acts of war against China and their allies, our pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction and our defiance of previous agreements caused by our previous aggression.  We don’t pose a threat to China and the rest of the world.

The parallel, Mr. Black, really isn’t there.

And I know – your analogy doesn’t depend on the parallel, necessarily. But let’s just say that some of Mr. Black’s audience doesn’t know this.

Of course, the USA is not just any country. We are the world’s only superpower. How we use that position is essential to how the rest of the world views us as we try to repair some of the damage that President Bush — and the Iraq misadventure — have done to the our image in the world.

Actually, Mr. Black, Iraq has very little to do with the world’s “elites'” views of us. There’s another entire post brewing on that subject – but suffice to say that Europe’s opinion-class have never much cared for us (except when we’ve saved them from, say, Hitler or post-war starvation) and they never really will. The left’s conceit that Europeans will generally love the US once this “misadventure” is over are, at best, wishful thinking and utterly ahistorical.

I know I’m making more assertions than posing questions here, but the question is: If, as you hope, U.S. troops will be in Iraq for 100 years, what will that do to the perception that the U.S. seeks to dominate Middle East?

A “perception” that the left and media (pardon the redundancy) are trying to reinforce in every reference to the subject?

Your reference to the long-term U.S. troop presence in Germany, Japan and Korea is designed to illustrate that U.S. troops can be present in foreign bases without facing daily combat or casualties. My question is: How soon and at what cost in blood and treasure do you believe that the situation in Iraq — specifically the situation regarding the safety and normalcy of U.S. troops in Iraq — will resemble the situations in Germany, Japan and Korea?

I can answer that for Sen. McCain; “when the sentient terrorists realize that their chances of achieving their goals aren’t worth their lives”.

And Germany, Japan and Korea are bad examples (although to a nation of people who are largely ignorant of history, they may be the best we can do). The Philippines and El Salvador are better ones; insurgencies that died off (literally and metaphorically) as the result of an extended, judicious combination of military and civil action. It took six years for the Philippines’ insurgency to tail off a century ago; El Salvador is fairly recent history. Neither accomplishment was achieved without pain; both had the good luck to be either too early or too obscure for the attentions of the modern-day American media.

It’s wonderful that the level of violence in Iraq has fallen over recent months. But more than 200 U.S. troops, and a much larger number of Iraqis, have been killed in the less than half-year of 2008 so far.

Context counts, though. The number has been falling for a year, is at its lowest level of the war so far, and seems for the moment to be continuing to fall. Everyone from Petraeus to Michael Yon says to expect a counterattack to try to influence the election, and that’s reasonable. But if the violence continues to drop, the Iraqi government continues to improve (I notice you haven’t written, Mr. Black, about the fact that the Maliki government has quietly achieved most of the 18 criteria for recognizing Iraq as a legitimate government that the Dems were howling about last year), as Al Quaeda continues to be killed off (again, the MNPost is silent), it seems reasonable to believe things will tail off over the course of years rather than decades.

I hope, as you do, that the number continues to drop and soon gets close to zero. I assume we agree that the reasons for the decline in violence are several and complex and, as Gen. Petraeus said, “fragile” and “reversible.” Do you agree, “fragile” and “reversible?”

I agree with the General that it’s best not to be overconfident – but that while the fragility is a function of a difficult Iraqi situation, the progress will “reverse” only because of decisions made in Washington DC.

I suspect we may disagree, but I believe that there is no likely benefit to ordinary Americans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq that will outweigh the costs already incurred.

Those costs are already incurred and we can’t get them back. But decisions about war, including the future policy in Iraq, cannot and should not be shielded from the logic of cost/benefit analysis.

OK.  Let’s look those costs and benefits over:

Costs:  4,000-odd dead American troops, hundreds of billions of dollars.  (I’m not going to count “international goodwill”, becuase for the most part that is mercurial and cultural and if it hadn’t tanked over the Iraq war, it would have over soccer rules or trade balance or Susan Lucci’s Daytime Emmy or whatever they Euros are always whinging about whenever we’re not disposing of their genocidal dictators for them).

Benefits: Iran is firmly counterbalanced.  In a few years, the countries of the Middle East will very likely have a safe, stable neighbor against whom the people can find their own dictatorships and medieval baronies sorely wanting.  We have a base to contest Iran’s control of – I stress this – two thirds of the world’s currently-working oil reserves, which may be of much more importance to the third world and developing nations like China and India than to us.  Absent a serious US presence and counterbalance on the ground, Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz more or less at will (indeed, has been building for a decade and a half a force capable to doing that, with North Korean and Chinese anti-ship missiles and Russian submarines), with terrible effects on the US economy and potentially cataclysmic effects on the developing world.

You can, of course, easily reply that there are never any guarantees in war except that it will be bloody and awful. I agree. It’s one reason we should not get into unnecessary wars. But seriously, given the entire regional and historical context in which Iraq sits, what is your level of confidence — and how can you convince skeptical listeners to share your confidence — that the situation of U.S. troops in Iraq will resemble the situation in Germany within 20 years? Or, I don’t know, why not make it 100?

That’s easy.  There’s a zero percent chance that Iraq will ever resemble any of those countries.  Unlike Germany, its two primary religious factions are still in a low-level war (as opposed to “500 years ago”).  Unlike Japan and Korea, Iraq is ethically as well as religiously heterodox.  Unlike Germany and Japan, there was no clean, legal end to a conventional war, after which the people of both countries pretty much toed the occupier’s line. 

What we can hope for, and have worked for, is that Iraq will turn into the best Iraq it can be.

So I called this “Question for Eric Black”, didn’t I?  Here’s the question, then:  Given continued improvement on the ground, and assuming that over the course of the next year or two the insurgency dies off to a fairly background-level problem, and that the US involvement starts to draw down (as Gen. Petraeus has said) to a small garrison of mostly civil affairs and special forces troops over the course of the next 2-5 years, what do you think Iraq is most likely to turn into.  What do you think, given the above (and the above seems not all that unreasonable these days), are the best, worst and most likely cases for Iraqi civil society over the next decade or two?

Take it away.

…but I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for an activist, Marine-veteran judge if this case goes to trial.

James Walsh at the Strib pays tribute to a woman who got through college, despite having been pregnant twice by ninth grade:

There is something about Jennifer Banks that erases doubt.

Perhaps it’s her clear and steady gaze, the way she never looks away as she talks about her past — or her future. Or is it her voice? Calm and matter-of-fact when she says she never doubted herself. Talk to Jennifer Banks for just a little while, and you see what so many others who have met and helped her have seen: Determination to achieve.

Banks graduated last month with a two-year degree in radiography from the College of St. Catherine. Two days later, Hennepin County Medical Center hired her.

In this season of graduations, Banks stands out because she reached this goal after she gave birth to her first son at 14 and another at 15. She moved to Minnesota from Arkansas as a pregnant ninth-grader.

Her own parents sent her away to find better schools and, perhaps, a better life here.

So congratulations – sincerely – to Jennifer Banks. There’s no denying that she’s accomplished a lot. And stories like hers are certainly an encouragement.

Unfortunately – and we’re going to open the focus up Ms. Banks to all of society, here – situations like Jennifer Banks’s are a silver lining on a very dark cloud; the epidemic of fatherless families in our society.

J Roosh links us to this rather bone-chilling article about the future of the American family by Walter Williams:

It is now common to meet young people in our big city schools, foster-care homes and juvenile centers who do not know their dads. Most of those children have come face-to-face with their father at some point; but most have little regular contact with the man, or have any faith that he loves or cares about them.

When fatherless young people are encouraged to write about their lives, they tell heartbreaking stories about feeling like “throwaway people.” In the privacy of the written page, their hard, emotional shells crack open to reveal the uncertainty that comes from not knowing if their father has any interest in them. The stories are like letters to unknown dads – some filled with imaginary scenes about what it might be like to have a dad who comes home and puts his arm around you or plays with you.

You don’t need me to tell you it’s an epidemic:

The extent of the problem is clear. The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is 38%. Among white children, 28% are now born to a single mother; among Hispanic children it is 50% and reaches a chilling, disorienting peak of 71% for black children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, nearly a quarter of America’s white children (22%) do not have any male in their homes; nearly a third (31%) of Hispanic children and over half of black children (56%) are fatherless.

This represents a dramatic shift in American life. In the early 1960s, only 2.3% of white children and 24% of black children were born to a single mom. Having a dad, in short, is now a privilege, a ticket to middle-class status on par with getting into a good college.

The odds increase for a child’s success with the psychological and financial stability rooted in having two parents.

And yet society as a whole actively fights this notion. Not just the usual targets – “urban” culture and rap music with is misogynistic themes and “bitches” and “hos” and bump and run approach to sex; not just Hollywood, which has been increasingly portraying fathers as a useful lifestyle accessory that glamorous starlets might or might not keep about the house (on and off camera), on top of a generation of movies that depict sex as something that magically stops at “fun” and avoids the whole “baby” thing.

It also includes a welfare system that systematically devalues fatherhood (the DFL might as well refer to the family as “womenandtheirchildren” for all the times that the likes of Ellen Anderson refer to the concept), giving fatherless families more welfare benefits and actively encouraging them to make themselves scarce.

So congratulations, Jennifer Banks. I hope a lot of people follow your example. I just hope society learns a different lesson altogether.

MLP at Casual Sundays notes:

I keep trying but I can’t come up with an analogy that’s as stupid as

You can’t drill your way out of high oil prices

And she really did try.  Read the post; there’s a lot of effort there.

A: Under “Single-Payer Healthcare”, whatever the state wants to pay for it – and then, only if you don’t step out of line.

Kathy from Cake-Eater Chronicles – a cancer survivor (who quite memorably documented her struggle in one of the better bits of blogging I’ve ever read) and who thus has Absolute Moral Authority – writes about yet another atrocity of the British socialized system. She quotes the London Daily Mail:

{…}Mrs O’Boyle, 64, had been receiving state-funded treatment – including chemotherapy – for colon cancer.

But when she took cetuximab, a drug which promised to extend her life but is not available on the NHS, her health trust made her start paying for her care.

{…}Mrs O’Boyle, an NHS occupational therapist, is believed to be the first person to die after being denied free care because of ‘co-payment’, where a patient tops up treatment by paying privately for extra drugs.

Got that? She paid for a drug on her own, which was outside what the state wanted to allow her to have.

No, that’s not out-of-context paranoia; that is, indeed, exactly the government’s policy:

Co-payment was blocked last year by Health Secretary Alan Johnson because he claimed it would create a two-tier Health Service.

Bureaucracy? Sure (emphasis mine)!

However, her consultant recommended-Cetuximab, which could extend her life. But it is available on the NHS only in Scotland, not in England and Wales.

Kathy:

Nice, huh? A lifetime of taxes to pay for a health care system that actually employed this woman and her husband, only to be betrayed in the end because she was willing to pay out of pocket for a few more months on this Earth. She wasn’t looking for a cure. She knew that was beyond her. She was simply looking for a palliative treatment which could extend her life a bit. Just a bit.

She was asked, “How badly do you want to live?” And she replied that she wanted just a few more months with her family. She paid the price for a drug that wasn’t available under universal healthcare, and she did it gladly, only to be smacked with a frozen mackerel in the end. Her actions would create a “two tier” health care system, and that, apparently, cannot be allowed, because that would mean she wasn’t receiving lowest common denominator health care, like everyone else does with the NHS, and the NHS cannot stand that. She thought she had the right to choose what her healthcare was worth to her, and that she wasn’t going to be penalized for her decision. One would suspect, with universal healthcare, that that would be a reasonable assumption. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

You could say the “good news” is that at least it’s just over there.

Well, this fall ain’t looking so good:

And yet this atrocious system is what some people would have us install here in the US. This is what some people want because their health insurance premiums are too high, and they would prefer not to have to pay them, but would rather let the government run things. It’s tidier in theory, but absolutely disgusting in practice.

Again, how badly do you want to live?

…

Governments with nationalized healthcare systems don’t want to give their citizens a choice. Patients are blackmailed, ultimately, into going with the lowest common denominator treatment if the the choice is between that or nothing at all because they don’t have spare millions on hand to pay for private care.

The political is the personal to Kathy – and many others in our country:

I know I harp on rather a lot about my cancer experience, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned what Dr. Academic told me one time, about what my treatment would have been if I lived in Italy. During the course of the staging controversy, we were told by my original oncologist that I would have to undergo three treatments of chemotherapy, instead of the six I’d been told originally. The reason for this was that a new study had come out, advocating three treatments for women with my stage of ovarian cancer, instead of six, because they hadn’t been able to find any added benefit, when contrasted with the risks, to the extra three treatments. However, when I was transferred over to Dr. Academic, he said, if I had to have treatment (which he wasn’t sure about at that point in time because of the evidence he had in front of him) I would have to have the dreaded six treatments, because he didn’t think the study the original oncologist had quoted was a very good study on the whole—and he would know, as he was on the board of the organization which published the study. He said that the group members had been polled and over ninety percent of them hadn’t thought it a good study, either—and weren’t going to use it as a treatment recommendation. He said that the reason for this disconnect was that to make the study’s results all the more powerful, they had let in to the statistical pool ovarian cancer diagnoses from places like Italy and Japan, for example, and Dr. Academic scoffed at their inclusion. He said their participation had ruined the study—because they hadn’t followed the protocol precisely, as in, the surgeries hadn’t been completed in the proscribed manner and as a result, had skewed the results. He said, after he’d dropped this bomb, that if I’d been living in Italy, with my cancer, all they would have done was the surgery. After all, that meant I would have a 70% survival rate for five years, which is nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you look at the statistics for things like pancreatic cancer, which has a 2% survival rate. But with a round of “precaution” chemo, just to make sure everything was cleaned out, my five year survival rate was boosted to 93%.

Which would you rather have?

Of course, when you’re talking nationalized healthcare (“Managed Care” run by the government), it’s the wrong question; “what’s it worth to the state authorities” is the first question.

Quite frankly, this is the difference between recurring and not—and if ovarian cancer recurs, well, that’s what the cause of death will be. It’s sad, but it’s true. So the goal, for women like me, is to make sure at the start that we have the best chances possible NOT to recur. That means a standardized protocol of precaution chemo. This is the standard of care here in the US. But not in Italy. How many Italian women, who were diagnosed with my stage of ovarian cancer, have recurred, and received, ultimately, a death sentence, because their government was too cheap to give them precautionary treatment in the first place?

And as we see with the O’Boyle case, the second is “does it interfere with government policy?”

Because, having worked in the industry, I can see the malthusian logic (if also the mechanistic inhumanity) behind “care management” decisions – but not the policy of forbidding people from paying for their own care, an act whose message is “not only is your life worth exactly what we say it is in terms of actual care, but it’s worth even less in terms of public policy”.

And that is inhuman.

Susan Sarandon?  Please call Alec Baldwin’s travel agent in re your plans.

Baldwin fell short on some promises in the past four years, and he could use the love.

To:  David Brauer, committed liberal and writer for the MNPost

From: Mitch Berg, critical reader

Re:  Because you say so, that’s why

Mr. Brauer,

Who wrote the following (no fair peeking!)

“I’m talking, of course, about the Internet, which is a terrific learning tool. For example, a couple years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved. See, at that age the kids are sponges!” Source: Al Franken, Playboy, January 2000

###

“At first I thought it was my imagination, but when Dr. DeVine escorted me into the virtual reality room, she seemed to be coming on to me. She allowed her bodacious breasts to brush against my face as shelowered me into the prototype of the Virtu-Screw 2000. ‘How does that feel?’ she cooed. I didn’t know if she was referring to the Naugahyde bucket seat or to the two erect nipples pushing through her white lab coat and nearly poking my eyes out.

Then Dr. DeVine placed the Virtu-Screw helmet over my head. Sitting in the pitch dark, I felt slightly vulnerable but also excited. Sheasked me which setting I wanted. Since I’ve been married 23 years, I naturally chose ‘blow job.’ My chair abruptly tilted backward, and I ‘felt’ my pants being unzipped. If I hadn’t known I was sitting in the most state-of-the-art virtual reality sex machine, I would have sworn that a real woman’s hand had pulled my cock from my pants.

My nervousness disappeared, and I sat back and enjoyed the amazingly realistic cyber job. It was every bit as good as the last real blow job I had gotten 23 years earlier-if not better-because when I shot my wad, the virtual mouth swallowed.” Source: Al Franken, Playboy, January 2000

###

“I found myself extremely attracted to the vulnerable side of this sexy scientist, and when I offered to comfort her, she accepted, kissing me full on the lips and inserting her tongue into my mouth and moving it around suggestively. Then she reached down and started rubbing my crotch, and within just five or ten minutes my cock was again hard and ready for action.

That’s when Dr. DeVine took my hand in her other hand, and said, ‘If you think VRS is the future, wait until you see this.’

While still rubbing my crotch, Dr. DeVine led me through the Future wing to the Sexbot room. Once inside I was surprised to see a vinyl blowup doll wearing crotchless panties.

Dr. DeVine explained that the blow-up doll was the prototype for the Sexbot, and scientists at the IPS keep her around to remind themselves just how far they have come and how far they have to go.

And indeed they do have a long way to go. The most current Sexbot prototype, Connie, while quite attractive, has moving parts made of plastic and metal alloys and is considered quite dangerous. In fact, as a futurist, Dr. DeVine believes that the first Sexbots to hit the market will result in class-action suits filed by severely injured men.

That’s why Dr. DeVine urged me to forgo Connie and introduced me to Wilhelmina, a beautiful young German-born researcher who, while human, more closely approximates the Sexbot of the 22nd century. Wilhelmina escorted me to a private room with a bed and removed her clothes.If this is what Sexbots will look like a hundred years from now, I envy my great-great-grandsons. We made passionate love for two or three minutes before being joined by Dr. DeVine, who wanted to make the point that Sexbots will be used for threesomes.

I could describe the incredible sex the three of us had, but this is a piece of journalism about the future of pornography and not one of those cheesy letters from a horny reader. Suffice it to say that everyone came several times, except me, who came only once.”

Was it:

a) Senate Candidate Al Franken, or

b) Conservative archpundit William F. Buckley

If you answered “b”, Mr. Brauer, it explains a lot about this piece.

Note, Mr. Brauer; it’s not the appearance.  It’s the output.

As it were.

That is all.

Representative Michele Bachmann (MN6), noted archconservative and immigration hawk, notes this story from Belgium (via the NYTimes, a quote from which starts the excerpt):

Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women

BRUSSELS—On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes…

…She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself…“It’s not my role to set off bombs—that’s ridiculous,” she said in a rare interview. “I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”

Ms. El Aroud has not only made a name for herself among devotees of radical forums where she broadcasts her message of hatred toward the West.

Bachmann – who sounds a bit testy, like entering the world of blogging has caused her to let down her guard: 

This kind of s**t drives me bonkers—Ms. El Aroud hates the West? That’s grand. Whatever—that’s her right. Hell, there are some things I hate about the West. But if you hate the West so much, Ms. El Aroud, then what the f**k out are you doing in the West? Go. You’re not nailed you to the floor in Belgium. Let’s make a deal: You were born in Morocco. So you go back to Morocco and we’ll bring someone over that actually wants to live in the West. Perhaps a Moroccan lesbian. But if you long to live under sharia (you say you do), then maybe you should pick a s**thole country somewhere—Saudia Arabia, Nigeria, Gambia, Iran—where Islamists hold power and go and f**king live and blog from there.

Wow. I’m not used to that kind of direct language from Rep. Bachmann.  I’m kind of shocked. 

Still, she goes on.

But here’s the detail that really made my head explode:

That system often has been lenient toward her. She was detained last December with 13 others in what the authorities suspected was a plot to free a convicted terrorist from prison and to launch an attack in Brussels…. Now, even as Ms. El Aroud remains under constant surveillance, she is back home rallying militants on her main Internet forum and collecting more than $1,100 a month in government unemployment benefits.

Belgium, for crying out loud, you’re paying this woman unemployment benefits so that she can sit in her apartments and encourage people to blow up Belgians? Are you out of your minds?

One might wonder.

Of course, being that Rep. Bachmann is something of a paleoconservative, the only real surprise in the above is that she came to the defense of the “Moroccan Lesbian”. 

Well, dog bites man, I guess.

CORRECTION:  I can’t believe I bobbled this; the author was not famed social conservative Representative Michele Bachmann, but in fact überliberal gay sex-advice columnist and non-Bush-fan Dan Savage.

Who’d have thunk – Savage gets it.  Just goes to show you.

I regret any inconvience caused by this misunderstanding.

Saint Thomas University – the Twin Cities’ main and most prestigious Catholic university – just can’t win for losing.

For years, they sell their Catholic soul to try to appeal to the urban, big-money, soft-left crowd they apparently seek.  And what does it get them, according to the City Pages?
I mean, if they try to act Catholic and all?

For Tara Borton, choosing a place to volunteer over the summer for school credit was a no-brainer. The first-year student at the University of St. Thomas School of Law was interested in women’s issues, so she decided to donate her time to Planned Parenthood.

“I’d volunteered there when I lived in Florida,” Borton explains. “I wanted to get involved again.”

It’s a “no-brainer” to do something that the Catholic Church explicitly deems non-Catholic?

Apparently.

But Borton’s choice, hardly worth a second glance at most schools, has become the latest political controversy to roil the University of St. Thomas. Last summer, St. Thomas infamously disinvited Archbishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on campus for fears that his Palestinian-friendly remarks would offend Jews. Shortly thereafter, a deal with Allina Hospitals & Clinics to set up a medical school fell through amid whispers that St. Thomas’s Catholic views would be incompatible with standard medical training on sexual and reproductive health.

Ahem – aren’t we missing a controversy?

I digress:

The latest controversy has forced St. Thomas’s law school to weigh its secular, prestige-oriented ambitions, underlined by its recent ascension to third-tier status in the influential U.S. News & World Report rankings, against the pressure to hew to the Catholic Church’s doctrinaire leadership, reinforced by Pope Benedict’s stern speech to Catholic educators during his recent visit to America.

I dunno.  Somehow, other Catholic institutions manage to make the list. Have they all tossed the whole “church” thing overboard?

The current fracas was set in motion earlier this month, when Borton sought permission to meet her public service requirements by spending the summer working for Planned Parenthood. All students are required to complete 50 hours of volunteer service—anything from pro bono legal work for the poor to building houses for Habitat for Humanity—in an effort to encourage them to serve the needy.

And naturally, Saint Thomas told Borton she couldn’t work for Planned Parenthood at all – right?

Following standard procedure, Borton took her request to the Public Service Board, a student-run committee charged with lining up volunteer opportunities and deciding which projects are worthy of students’ time. Last Monday, after a tense, hour-long deliberation, the board issued its decision: In a 10-4 vote, it ruled that Borton could work at Planned Parenthood on cancer treatment, adoption services, and sexually transmitted disease testing, but would have to refrain from any volunteer work involving contraception or abortion.

Ah.  So Borton actually got to work for Planned Parenthood, in other words?   In a way that didn’t contravene the rules the Catholic church that runs St. Thomas, and of which Borton was certainly aware when she applied?

Oh, of course not.  This is Saint Thomas; the place where the administration of  President Father “Havana Denny” Dease screws up in the secular and ecclesiastical veins – picking and choosing both the First Amendment  rights and  the ecclesiastical rules that will apply to his students.

Within hours, Dean Thomas Mengler’s email inbox was flooded with dozens of angry emails from faculty, students, and alumni. The messages shared a common question: How can St. Thomas, as a Catholic institution, lend volunteer support to Planned Parenthood, a notorious facilitator of abortions?

Mengler acted swiftly. In an open letter he sent out the next day, before the board’s decision had been publicly announced, the dean overruled the vote.

But wait!

But his edict was muddied by school bylaws, which don’t explicitly grant the dean authority to overrule the Public Service Board without a grievance from the volunteer in question. By claiming that authority, Mengler angered a large contingent of students. Though the school is hunkered down for final exams, 80 students found time to sign an open letter challenging the dean’s authority.”A vocal minority of students and faculty were allowed to overturn a decision by a representative student body without a formal appeals process,” the students wrote. “Law school has taught us to be proud of living in a democracy where people—right or wrong—are allowed their day in court and their opportunity to be heard. Ours has been denied.”

Note to Fr. Dease and Saint Thomas; if you shoot yourself in the foot repeatedly, consider switching from a machine gun to a revolver.

Years ago, my first good technical writing job was for a company that was contracting with Nabisco to produce computer-based training for a “bag in a box” line in Portland, Oregon.

The OSHA regulations for people on those lines were pretty strict; no jewelry; hair nets (and beard next, if you had enough beard); no loose clothing that could get caught in things.

And things, there were. Chain pulleys for the bucket conveyor that hauled the Cheez Nips and Wheat Thins from the conveyor belt (that hauled them from the bakery) to the scales, which had dozens of flipping, clanking lids and doors opening and closing every second, pouring product into bags; the pawls and arms and rotating cams of the machine that stuck the bags into the boxes; the pulleys and steel rods that shoved the boxes into packing crates for shipment.

(Oddly, there was no rule against grabbing a snack from the bucket conveyor).

While the plant followed all the usual rules and regs, I could see where wearing loose, flow-y clothing could cause a problem, opening Nabisco up to a world of liability (and the hapless worker to a lifetime without a finger, arm or head).

So I hear these stories…:

A group of Muslim workers allege they were fired by a New Brighton tortilla factory for refusing to wear uniforms that they say were immodest by Islamic standards.

Six Somali women claim they were ordered by a manager to wear pants and shirts to work instead of their traditional Islamic clothing of loose-fitting skirts and scarves, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil liberties group that is representing the women.

The women have filed a religious discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“For these women, wearing tight-fitting pants is like being naked,” said Valerie Shirley, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota chapter of CAIR. “It’s simply not an option.”

…and wonder – with no desire to be ethnically insensitive, mind you – “perhaps, ladies, there are fields you just shouldn’t seek jobs in? Jobs like oil-rig worker and Alaska crab fisherman and, perhaps, working in a food plant with (presumably) lots of equipment that long ago pushed the OSHA to ban, like, long flowing clothing in the workplace?”

It was almost a quarter of a century ago when an overzealous (in retrospect) county attorney, Kathleen Morris, offered an arrested sex offender a deal if he started naming names, and ended up indicting dozens people in Jordan Minnesota – a small farm town that’s since become an exurb, southwest of Minneapolis – in what turned out to be a Crucible-like witchhunt on the basis of a jailhouse snitch and testimony from children that turned out to be conjured up from imagination.

Lives and reputations were destroyed.  Lawyers made millions.  Antonin Scalia cited the case in Maryland Vs. Craig as an example of how vital the sixth amendment right to question ones’ accuser is in protecting the innocent – in the Jordan case, protecting them from overzealous prosecutors and dubious investigative techniques.

You’d think the bureaucracy would learn.

Well, no.  You would not, if you knew how government works.  A state appeals court has overturned the seizure of the children from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints compound:

The Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the state failed to show the youngsters were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action.

It was not clear when the children — now scattered in foster homes across the state — might be returned to their parents. The ruling gave a lower-court judge 10 days to release the youngsters from custody, but the state could appeal to the Texas Supreme Court and block that.

The decision in one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history was a humiliating defeat for the state Child Protective Services agency. It was hailed as vindication by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who claimed they were being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

Now if the FCLS broke any laws – and some of the allegations look pretty seriously – then let’s look forward to some serious consequences.

Child-protection officials argued that five girls at the ranch had become pregnant at 15 and 16 and that the sect pushed underage girls into marriage and sex with older men and groomed boys to enter into such unions when they grew up.

But we have due process for a reason:

But the appeals court said the state acted too hastily in sweeping up all the children and taking them away on an emergency basis without going to court first.

“Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse … there is no evidence that this danger is ‘immediate’ or ‘urgent’,” the court said.

“Evidence that children raised in this particular environment may someday have their physical health and safety threatened is not evidence that the danger is imminent enough to warrant invoking the extreme measure of immediate removal.”

The court said the state failed to show that any more than five of the teenage girls were being sexually abused, and offered no evidence of sexual or physical abuse against the other children. Half the youngsters taken from the ranch were 5 or younger. Only a few dozen are teenage girls

 Of course, the stories of child protective services’ officers jumping into cases too zealously – and there are many – are balanced by the stories of CPS officials not working fast enough. 

Molly Priesmeyer in the Minnesoros Monitor today:

What if Hillary Clinton said, ‘I don’t want your racist votes?’  In CNN exit polls conducting last night in Kentucky, about 21 percent of voters said race played a factor in their decision. Nine out of 10 of those voted for Clinton, according to the exit polls….David Gergen discusses the data…and  begs an important question: “What if Hillary Clinton were to say, ‘If you want to vote against him because he’s black, I don’t want your vote?'”…now would be a time to address the fact that, if anything, the contentious campaigns have served to make obvious the country’s long-suffering ills caused by racism and sexism.

Wow.  Molly Priesmeyer opposes racism…

…after she wallowed in it!   Ms. Priesmeyer in the City Pages, 2005:

Is it really white in here, or is it just me?…En route to the Power Line/Center of the American Experiment Dan Rather retirement party, I rode in an elevator filled with white men in suits…These were received with hale-fellow-well-met white-guy laughter that abruptly stopped when the elevator doors opened to reveal a group of young black men in Roc-A-Wear gear who were apparently not attending the same event. Then the elevator doors closed and took the bunch of us back to 1952 for an event that felt like a dinner at a segregated country club in the days when Perry Como ruled the airwaves…That’s not exactly correct: Inside, I spotted a total of three non-caucasians, and one of them was hunched behind a television camera recording the event for history’s sake.

Wow.  What if all three candidates said “we don’t want your racist votes?”   

David “Media Ueber Alles” Brauer read the State Department of Education’s report on Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy, and sees NO-tink, NO-think!:

The bottom line, to me, is that Kersten’s overarching concern — illegal Islamic education — is largely unfounded. TIZA’s problems come down to one 30-minute Friday break and changing after-school busing.

Things worth fixing? Definitely. A massively overblown controversy? Definitely.

Scott Johnson at Powerline begs to differ.

Yesterday the department issued its findings in the investigation prompted by Kersten’s columns. The Star Tribune reports on the findings in “State orders charter school to correct 2 areas tied to Islam.” The findings vindicate Kersten’s reportage, ordering the school to reform its practices concerning its weekly Friday prayer service and its extension of the school day. The department found that both of these practices crossed the line. (The department also found that the school’s Monday-Thursday prayer services were student-led and therefore permissible. The department does not understand applicable constitutional law in this area.)

Beyond that?

The department discussed the “after-school” Muslim Studies program run by the Muslim American Society/Minnesota, the state chapter of the national offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. MAS/Minnesota owns the building in which TIZA operates, runs a mosque in the building, and provides religious instruction at the end of the day. The department asserts that the Muslim Studies program is fee-based and voluntary. Zaman purports to be unable to provide statistics concerning enrollment in the Muslim Studies program. Zaman is not only the TIZA principal, however, he is also an officer of MAS/Minnesota. Who is kidding whom? The Minnesota Department of Education’s investigation is of the kind perfected by Inspector Clouseau.

So is Scott being overpunctilious?  Is David Brauer ingenuously taking the word of a state agency at face value (as long as it’s not Carol Molnau’s MNDoT)?  We’ll see.

Now, I don’t personally have a problem with this; I think that religious groups should  be able to start charter schools – subject to state law.  Is the Department of Education following applicable law?  I’m no lawyer – and either is David Brauer.

But Scott is…

Brauer, however, hasn’t written about this bit here yet…:

KSTP Eyewitness News sent a reporter and crew out to TIZA to get a reaction to the Minnesota Department of Education findings from Zaman. KSTP reports that its crew crew was attacked by Zaman and another school official. Its cameraman was injured while wrestling with Zaman and his sidekick over the camera. In the video of the KSTP report, Zaman goes right for the cameraman’s camera. Where is Clouseau’s servant Kato when you need him? And what is it that Zaman does not want Minnesotans to see?

We called Greiling a thug when the Star Tribune posted her letter to the editor calling on the Star Tribune to fire her. In Greiling’s case, the use of the term was metaphorical. Zaman is the real deal.

So it would seem.

My little-known evil twin Jed writes:

When Mitch and I were kids, our teachers used to tell us – threatening the President, even as a  joke, was a bad idea; the Secret Service was always watching for these things.  Our fourth grade teacher, Miss Walburn, told us the story about the kid who’d written a joking threat to President Nixon, and gotten a visit from the Secret Service.   

Last Sunday I watched Family Guy.  It was the episode where Stewie takes over the world, and Lois sets out to kill him.

The “climactic” scene is a battle between the two in the Oval Office.  In one scene, Lois, firing a Minigun a la Jesse Ventura in Predator, chases Stewie with a stream of bullets along a wall of presidential portraits, leaving a stream of bullet holes in the pics of the last seven or eight presidents, as the “camera” “pans” along.

Then the shot stops when we get to George W. Bush’s portrait, with two or three holes in it.  Lois stops, pauses, and fires a long burst that obliterates the portrait. 

Now, while I am second only to Mitch in my support for real freedom of speech, isn’t this sort of scene covered by some kind of law?  Couldn’t the Secret Service grab Seth McFarlane just for a little?  Maybe rough him up for a while?  Knock out a few teeth with a tire iron or something?

I mean, remembering the vapors the media got over even the most trivial “threat” against Clinton, and the conspiracy-mongering they do and the “climates of hate” they find – nothing?

Just a question for your readers, Mitch.

There’s a reason we call him my “evil twin”, of course. I don’t necessarily endorse everything Jed says. 

Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros Monitor takes umbrage at the Minnesota Family Council’s response to the Legslture’s Sex Ed bill:

Part of the Family Council’s objections to a comprehensive sex education bill is that it would teach teens about certain sex acts and the risks inherent in those acts. The group opposes sex education that includes anal sex and anal-oral sex — a point it makes clear in its robo-calls. However, the bill itself would not mandate the teaching of these sex acts, only the teaching of “medically accurate and age-appropriate” sexual health information with curriculum decisions left to parents and school boards.

Which is either a complete explanation or a lie-by-omission.  Any socially-conservative parent in the public school system knows that “leaving decisions about these things that are left to parents and school boards”  is shorthand for “the Legislature will open the door, and the School Board meetings will be bum-rushed with activists who’ll ram through whatever it is they want”.

So the MFC responded with a phone message campaign.  Birkey notes…:

But, in its zeal to have the bill defeated, the Family Council in all likelihood inadvertently taught a few kids a little bit about anal and anal-oral sex. A colleague of mine shared a story she heard at her son’s soccer game last week. A local parent’s teenager picked up the phone and got an earful about anal sex from the Minnesota Family Council.

In fact the Family Council’s tirade about anal sex is left on answering machines and voicemails if no one picks up — answering machines and voicemails that children often check for messages.

Ow.

How dare  the Minnesota Family Council send a phone message that a small film of students might hear with information that is utterly morally objectionable…

…before the Minnesota Federation of Teachers – those noted experts on parenting and sexuality – can recite it to captive audiences of students.

Shudder.

Nope.  No comment at all.

Nope, they’re not mine.

(Via Jim @ AntiStrib)

Minutes from this morning’s meeting:

———-

LEADER: Attention! The moment we’ve been awaiting is at hand!

VARIOUS OTHER BUFFALO: Sssssssh!

LEADER: After centuries of being put down by the two-legs, and the humiliation of having North Dakota State University in Fargo co-opt our species name as a mascot …

MANY BUFFALO: (hissssssssss!)

LEADER: …against our will, we are finally to get our due! This morning, I’m told a “Tom Elko” – a two-leg who writes for the Minnesota Monitor, who goes with our interests at heart – is set to blow the horns off of the two-legger conspiracy to keep the buffalo down!

(Much enthusiastic stomping of hooves)

RRRRUUHHHNXXH (a buffalo): Leader? Is this the same “Minnesota Monitor” that ridiculed their would-be leader’s teeth? Or that didn’t know that guns are already legal in two-leggers’ “bars”?

LEADER: Yes! We have set up this computer to show the story when it comes across on the two-legs’ “Inter Net”. Grffffrnx, hit the button to view the “Web Page”.

GRFFFFRNX (another buffalo, albeit less handsome): By your leave!

(Grffffrnx the buffalo clumsily clicks a huge “mouse” button. The Minnesota Monitor story loads)

(not actual size)
(Crestfallen dismay)

GGGRRRRRNHX (Another buffalo): My god! After all these years, they write a story about the two-leg bastards in Fargo – and they put up the wrong logo?

RRRRRRHRRRRRRH: (a short, pugnacious buffalo)  Pffft.  Anything west of Saint Louis Park might as well be Uzbekistan to these two-legs!

AAAAAAXHHHXXXXXHHH (a buffallette, something of a sex symbol at the BADL if I may be so bold): Noooo! To try to generate sympathy for us, they show a picture of another cursed two-leg?  The logo of the University of North Dakota, as opposed to North Dakota State, the purported subject of the two leggers’ story?

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHRN (a frumpy-looking middle-aged female buffalo):  Omigod, it gets worse!  Look what he wrote:  “NDSU has frequently been criticized for its “Fighting Sioux” nickname and its Native American logo.”  Don’t these two-legs proof-read anything?

 RRRRRRHRRRRRRH: Look!  He also writes “This latest incident comes the same week NDSU sorority Gamma Phi was put on “temporary social probation”…They have THE WRONG INSTITUTION!

LEADER: (Silent for a moment, choking back tears): Stupid…stupid speciesist two-leg bastards!

And…scene.