Sheila gets nominated for the coolest awards.

So go and vote for her, already.

Now that Kathy is apparently doing well, you need to divert some of whatever your worldview calls for – prayers, karmic imprecations or best wishes – to Tim Blair, who has just started a battle with cancer

Put me down for a ton of each, just so as to not miss any bets.

I try to be civil. Yes, indeed, I do.

But sometimes, it’s totally wasted.

To wit: Every time I try to figure out what are the most irredeemably stupid leftyblogs, I get to a short list; “Mercury Rising”, “Jesus General”, Atrios, “Clotting Stool” all hold places of honor…

…but at the top of the list is always “Shakespeare’s Sister”, a collection of the most vacuous, whiniest bloggers this side of Ken “Ned Luddington” Weiner.

And among the whole pack of defectives, “Space Cowboy” has to be…what’s the word?

The dumbest. The dumbest of the lot.

I know I’ve read things dumber than Space Cowboy’s drive-by of the President’s visit to Yad Vashem, but for the sake of my outlook on humanity, I don’t like to dwell on them.

It was only just yesterday when Olmert Pile thought that Bush is a wise man full of Yale and Harvard infused wisdom. Here’s a closer look at that wisdom, as exhibited by our man of the hour during a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial:

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said. […]

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.

[At this point, I guess I should take small solace that Mr. Cowboy hasn’t accused the President of bombing Auschwitz instead of finding Bin Laden. Oh, don’t worry – historical myopia almost as stupid follows. I digress].

“I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe,” Bush said.

I really don’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure that Bush realizes that had the US bombed the camp, the people of whose adhesion to religion he’s so enamored [why does Mr. Cowboy have a problem with that? – Ed.] would be stone dead. Bush doesn’t seem to be aware that there were survivors at Auschwitz; is he really saying to the survivors that they should’ve been killed for the greater good of “disrupting service” at the camp?

One wonders only briefly if Mr. Cowboy has read anything on the subject at all. Briefly, I say – lefties that have read history are rarer than All Star Wrestling fans who can recite James Joyce.

While nearly everyone that was in the camps ended up “stone cold dead”, as Mr. Sensitive Cowboy puts it, anyway, there were survivors. And, nearly to a person, they said (after the war) that they hoped we’d bomb not just the railhead, but the “showers” and crematoria, right amid the camps. In those days before GPS and laser-guided bombs, a bombing raid leveled everything within miles of a target in a rolling cascade of destruction. And yet in account after account – Elie Wiesel’s is the most famous (“we didn’t fear death – at least, not that death”); other resports come to us from the Black Book of Nazi atrocities, from British Sergeant John Coward, an escaped POW who infiltrated Auschwitz and brought out intelligence and served as a witness at Nuremberg; from accounts related at the Holocaust Museum – a shocking number of inmates reported that they’d have preferred a death from an Allied bomb, if the same raid took out the gas chambers and crematoria, to what they knew probably awaited them.

And it’s completely irrelevant, because it’s not what Bush was talking about. At our remove from the events – 62 years after Auschwitz was liberated – it should be fairly obvious to the thinking sentient person that Bush was talking about the larger concept of Roosevelt bombing the Auschwitz/Birkenau complex, as opposed to weighing operational options in preparation for setting up an Air Targeting Order.

Bush wasn’t sending targets to the Air Force; he was apologizing in effect for President Roosevelt’s inaction on the camps.
Speaking of “thinking people”, Mr. Cowboy tries to put a “thinking guy” costume on…

A true thinking man, the kind that really has wisdom, might have opined that the bombing of the roads and supply lines surrounding the camp would’ve been a great way to start.

Which was, indeed, what the President was saying.

Would it have stopped the killing? Definitely not. And neither would have Bush’s vision of bombing the whole thing.

Which is, of course, a scabrous lie… .

But the former could’ve netted more survivors. Sure, it’s speculation..

…the sort of ghoulish monday-morning quarterbacking that would get a guy kicked out of Source Games on Warhammer night for being “too weird”.
Also, ignorant as hell. At the Holocaust Museum, and in the many books written about Franklin Roosevelt’s policies on the extermination camps, you can see letters from Jewish leaders fairly begging FDR to bomb the camps, regardless of the loss of life among the inmates, to prevent further, future industrial murders.

Ghoulish, horrible stuff, the stuff of Sophie’s Choice come to real life, the notion of sacrificing hundreds or thousands of ones’ fellows and coreligionists to save hundreds of thousands more.

But speculation requires a reflective thought process and reasoning. All you have to do is watch any Bush presser footage to know, unequivocally, that he does not possess skill one.

Well, let’s be fair, Mr. Cowboy; you had your mind made up about that a long time ago, didn’t you?

President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Friday

Let me know when the press orgy begins about Bush showing weak emotion.

“Weak emotion?”

Mr. Cowboy. You greasy little f*ckstick and wannabe Vulcan. I dare you to visit the Holocaust Museum, or Yad Vashem, and not come away emotionally wracked. I’m as dour and Scandinavian as they come, and by the time I got to the third floor of the Holocaust Memorial, I was biting my lip bloody. Many people – many in yarmulkes, many not – wept openly at the horror of what they saw. Some – my stepson was one – had to drop out of the tour. It’s just too much.

And any of them, from the President on down to the every visitor that takes the horror related at the Museum or Yad Vashem in, is a better person than you.

And I’ll tell you in person.

Why, what a rediculos bunch of hepocretecal loosers!

Developing. . . . .

So we’ve determined a few things so far in this series:

1. It can be frustrating, being a conservative in the city.
2. Tossing “warm body” candidates out there to take their shots at Congress, State Legislative and city/county offices can feel pretty futile.
3. It’s largely because the Democraticicicicic party has spent several generations and four decades patiently insinuating itself into every facet of urban life.  The entire infrastructure of the city is tied up in the DFL; many of the inhabitants of both cities are either government employees or – after several generations of using the city as a warehouse for the poor or an unloading point for immigrants – beholden to the government.  (It’s not entirely a bad, or at least malicious, thing; Bruce Vento was instrumental in bringing the H’mong from refugee camps in Thailand to Saint Paul.  Did the late congressman do it to earn the loyalty of thousands of future voters?  It was Bruce Vento, for crying out loud; he didn’t scratch his nose if it didn’t benefit the party.  But no sane person begrudges the H’mong their place in America; they earned it, and, if you leave out the whole “patronage” thing, it was perhaps Vento’s greatest achievement). 

So how do we – Republicans who live in the city, and/or Republicans who know this state’ll never be a “red” state until we can at least contest Saint Paul and Minneapolis – start to put the city in play?

There are a couple of options:

1. Wait for a Ronald Reagan or a Brett Schundler.  You might be waiting a long time.
2. Keep throwing candidates at offices they’ll never win, barring a visit from a Democraticicicic-seeking virus that leaves the entire DFL electorate flat on its back on election day.
3. Start building some real grass roots in the cities.

We’ll talk about #3 on Monday.

Over at True North, Swiftee assails the Minnesota Monitor’s (and its parent body, the Center for Independent Media’s) claims of “independence”.

As does this piece by Danny Glover at the Beltway Blogroll:

I don’t have a problem with [partisanship and political principle in journalism], and I’m perfectly fine with both existing within the new media order — so long as people are transparent and honest with readers about their partisan leanings and their principles.

I don’t believe that’s entirely the case here.

I think that’s been the issue most of us on the right have had with the Monitor and the CIM since its inception; not that it’s a rent-a-blog, but that it’s been opaque to the point of disingenuity about both its funding and its mission.

Glover:

The folks behind the center clearly understand “independent” to mean something different than most politically informed Americans, and Morley was transparent about defining the term as he understands it. But casting as independent a Washington-oriented publication that admittedly is not politically independent, of both party and philosophy, is still misleading…calling the new publication The Washington Progressive and its parent the Center For Progressive Media would be far more truthful. Why run from the political terminology the operation embraces?

That’s bothered me; it seems as if the Center and the Monitor have tried to have their cake and eat it too – publishing explicitly “progressive” content, while trying to camouflage the motivation.

The Center for Independent Media has a worthwhile mission, and people with competing worldviews should consider organizing similar efforts to train the next generation of journalists. Anyone who reports the news with what Morley calls a “moral perspective,” regardless of what that perspective is, needs to pursue “rigorous adherence to the highest standards of journalism.”

Unfortunately, the center’s word choice, something endemic to sound journalism, does not rise to those standards.

Read all three pieces.

Special election in Senate District 25 today.

It’s cold out there; bad weather usually favors Republicans.  Ray Cox would seem to be a serious favorite anyway, but after the last round of elections, it’d be fun to wad a DFLer up like used kleenex and toss him under the bus.  Electorally speaking, of course.

I’ve been going to GOP precinct cauci and district conventions in Saint Paul for nigh on 20 years now. The ritual is always the same. There are only small variations.

In good years for Republicans – say, 1994, 1998 or 2002 – the GOP “Basic Political Organizational Unit” (BPOU – the lowest level of GOP organization) and City party conventions will whip up some enthusiasm for candidates for the House, Senate and City Council; money will be raised; impassioned speeches will be given; “this could be the year!”. Delegates will be elected that will go to the Congressional District (MN4, in this case) convention, who will in turn endorse a candidate for US House.

And on the first Tuesday in November, the candidates will all lose by 20 points.

On the other hand, during bad years for Republicans – 1996, 2006 – the City, BPOU and CD conventions will start with somber speeches about how the inner-city districts have to try to at least make a showing, to draw away some spending from the safer GOP districts out in the ‘burbs; to fight the good, futile fight, in other words. And the candidates – usually long-time party functionaries – will be endorsed, to put a warm body in a place on the ballot. And they’ll campaign, either with great enthusiasm (Obi Sium, the CD4 US House candidate last year, or Alan Fine over in CD5), or they’ll put in a dilatory showing of the flag.

They’ll lose by 30 or 40 points.

And yet, as I’ve said over and over again, the inner city is positively clogged with people who should be conservatives:

• African-American parents, for whom the failure of the inner-city schools to help make their kids competitive is a finger in the eye, an insult added to the injury of 400 years of slavery and racism in this nation, and who should know that the DFL stands foursquare behind the foetid status quo.
• Asian residents, whose commitment to free enterprise did what two generations of government programs couldn’t; saved inner-city Saint Paul.
• Legal immigrants, who are – according to polls – increasingly opposed to coddling illegal immigration.
• Hispanic residents who see that the DFL piddles on their Catholic/Evangelical social conservatism.
• Anyone who can see that three generations of “city as DFL social laboratory” have made parts of Minneapolis among the poorest, most dangerous inner-city enclaves in America.
• Oh, yeah – and all of us Republicans. And you might never know it, but we’re one of the biggest minorities in Saint Paul; 28% of the city registers GOP – and if the party could ever field a serious candidate, a fair chunk of the DFLers who are growing tired of the Tax ‘n Spend claque that has City Hall under its boot might be convinceable, too.

This, indeed, has worked for Republicans; Brett Shundler spent years as mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, running on a platform of security, fiscal discipline, low taxes and common sense – in a city that’s even more hamstrung with Democrat tradition than the Twin Cities (6% registered GOP), and with a state Republican party that’s worth even less than Minnesota’s for supporting conservatives anywhere, much less in the inner city.

So why not here?

Why, indeed, is “inner city Minnesota GOP” almost as big a synonym for frustration as “Vikings in the Super Bowl?”

Chalk it up to infrastructure.

No, not bridges and roads…well, actually, yes – the political equivalent of bridges and roads and fixing potholes.

Bear with me, here.

The DFL has spent three generations or more in complete, unquestioned power in inner Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Over those decades, the DFL has insinuated itself into every aspect of life; it runs the schools; it controls the city councils (shut up about the Greens, already – they are indistinguishable on the streeet); they control the planning, zoning and spending apparatuses; they control the public employees unions that run the schools, the administrations, the civil service, the public works departments, even the police and fire deparments and libraries. DFL is a de facto synonym for civic life and, in many ways, day to day non-political life as well. You can literally not not make contact with the DFL or a DFL-controlled organization in some part of your day to day life in the inner city.

You can literally count the elected Republicans in Saint Paul on one hand – School Board member Tom Conlon – and get four fingers’ change.

This complete control of all political and civic life in the city has several effects which stunt the city as well as the opposition:

• The city’s residents are disproportionately employed by DFL-linked unions; AFSCME, MAPE, Education Minnesota and the various Teamsters and AFL/CIO bodies are very disproportionately represented among residenets and voters – and those unions are all but subsidiaries of the DFL.
• Even non-political residents are in constant contact with the apparatus of DFL power and control. This is important both for showing people what “the norm” is, as well as giving the DFL an audience that doesn’t know better than to question the DFL’s claims as to what’ll happen to government “services” if they ever lose power.
• The DFL controls the entire revenue stream; the government that levies the taxes, the administration that collects them, the council that budgets the money, the district councils and schools and departments that do the spending, all are controlled by DFL sinecures.

Every aspect of life in Minneapolis and Saint Paul – family and personal as well as civic and political life – has contact with the DFL.

And so, every couple of years when the GOP throws “warm bodies” and “sacrificial lambs” at the entrenched DFL bureaucracies, it’s not unlike the British and French marching across No Man’s land into the teeth of machine guns entrenched in bomb-and-bullet-proof concrete pillboxes; it’s a slaughter, and everyone knows it will be even before they climb out of the trench or leave the BPOU/CD meeting.

So how is that going to change?

More tomorrow.

…congratulations to Ben from Hammerschawing and Mall Diva from Nightwriter on their recent engagement announcement of courtship.

They’re a cute couple…

…if you tape a piece of paper over Ben’s side of the picture, anyway.  Lucky is the guy who can “marry up”.

On the other hand, be careful, kids. Strom is lurking.

UPDATE:  Not engaged yet; courting, as the father of the bride notes in the comments.  I plead fatigue on first reading.  I’m not so familiar with this particular institution. 

While the Shooties are the premier local blog award ceremony, Dave Mindeman of MnpACTed! is making a game effort at mining the same material from the left. 

And I always love crashing other peoples’ parties.

…it is hard to look at 2007 in a very positive light. Despite a very hopeful election swing in the 2006 cycle, we still:

A. Have Iraq stretching out indefinitely.

“…and, damn the luck, improving”

B. Couldn’t get any substantial Congressional legislative changes through.

That’s because, despite the fact that the DFL/Democrats won a bunch of elections, all they got at the end of the day was a bunch of Democrats. 

C. Despite big majorities in the Minnesota State Houses, we didn’t get any major legislation outside of a “Pawlenty” approved environmental package.

Ibid. 

D. A Bridge fell down.

 And that’s a political story…how?

(Oh, I kid.  I’m a kidder.  Everything’s political these days). 

E. And we have a deficit looming….again.

Damn those economic cycles!  They make all those spending increases so untenable! We oughtta pass a law!

10. Rep. Marty Seifert — The question about Seifert is… can he make a point without props? Master of the one-liner and the NO vote, Seifert has managed to maneuver his little minority caucus into a potent obstructive force when coupled with Pawlenty’s veto pen. Unfortunately obstruction is all he does — issues of transportation, health care, property taxes, education…. nothing gets accomplished. Seifert is the master of doing nothing — and he does it oh, so well.

Which is, as it happens, about the only option left to him when he’s the leader of a party that’s in an almost-prohibitive minority.  (For now).

In other words, he’s a Republican doing the job his voters sent him to Saint Paul to do.

And Democrats just hate it when Republicans act like Republicans, and work toward Republican agendas. 

8. SOS Mark Ritchie — Well, well, looks like we are going bi-partisan this year. Ritchie let his ambition get in the way of….smart politics. Always looking for another way to raise money, Ritchie ventured into the forbidden territory of mixing campaign funding with his government job. He truly made Brodkorb’s job way too easy.

Well, to be fair, Ritchie made it easy for all of us.  And, lest anyone forget, some of us predicted this.

Still, in spite of his transgression, Kiffmeyer was far worse.

 Because she sold, er, what?  To whom?

Any ol’ time here.

7. Sen. Dick Day — …Funny how Dastardly Dick hardly ever mentioned immigration during his Senate career

In case the writer hasn’t noticed, Minnesota doesn’t have much of a border with Mexico, nor much immigration enforcement responsibility.

I’m not sure what Day’s position has been, traditionally, on “Sanctuary Cities” or using state resources to enforce immigration laws, but I’m gonna guess neither does the author.

Just a hunch.

6. Rep. John Kline — I have been trying to figure out what it is, John Kline does all day. He takes all of his foreign policy votes from White House memos.

Which was, to be fair, one of the points he was elected on. 

He doesn’t hold any district meetings for constituents.

Really? 

And now he won’t sponsor any 2nd Congressional District funding projects.

Which, inasmuch as he attacked “pork” and “earmarks” in his campaign, in a campaign where the GOP base was audibly disgusted by porkmongering Republicans, is a good thing. 

We could stick any mannequin in a uniform up there in Washington and accomplish the same thing. Gasp! You don’t suppose……

…that he’s really Betty McCollum?  No, I don’t!

5. Minnesota Majority/Tracy Eberly — …Eberly’s screed about Native Americans titled “Dirt Worshipping Heathens” got a lot of attention and was generally condemned on all sides of the spectrum. It is still on the “Anti-Strib” blog, although some comments have been added to “explain” it somewhat.

15:38 and counting. 

Then there is Minnesota Majority, a new right wing group promoting their idea of “values”, which had this on their website:

“Black women, for a variety of reasons, are more prone to underweight babies than are Caucasian and Asian women. It is not surprising that Sweden has a lower infant mortality rate, or that Japan has a longer life expectancy than the United States does. They are nearly racially pure: we are not.”

You won’t find the “racially pure” reference any more; they softened the language but the underlying innuendo remains.

The only “innuendo” is that someone at the MNMajority needs to buy a thesaurus; leave out the waterboarding of context, and they were pretty clearly shooting for “Homogenous”, not “minority-free and all-white”.   

Racism is simply not acceptable in any forum.

And digging to create it where it wasn’t intended is right behind it.

4. Tim Pawlenty — Pawlenty’s veto pen has put Minnesota in a quandry.

Also a quandary – although probably not the one the author intends. 

Without new revenue…. education, health care, and especially tranportation issues… are not keeping up with the need.

Or, alternately, the “need” is being inflated well beyond this state’s means. 

Pawlenty is waiting for the next economic boom to fix it for him but his policies are reducing jobs and economic activity…

A statement that is simply too obtuse to even bother fisking. 

 .creating deficits and uncertainty. He and the legislature have opposite agendas which is not conducive to compromise.

Lori Sturdevant?  What have you done with Dave Minderman?

The DFL has never worked toward compromise.  The DFL works toward enacting its agenda, no exceptions; their idea of “compromise” is to get GOP politicians to acquiesce.  And the fact that Pawlenty and at least part of the new generation of GOP leadership won’t knuckle under to the browbeating is scaring them silly. 

3. Michael Brodkorb — The MDE (Minnesota Democrats Exposed) blogger was #1 last year but moved down this year because his act is getting a little old…Still the main stream media picks up on this stuff and makes everybody comment on it…. so Brodkorb gets his wish. Throw enough mud and some of it is bound to stick.

Alternately – keep eating the DFL’s lunch, and eventually the DFL is going to come home very hungry at supper time.

We have a tie for #1 this year. Couldn’t figure out who was worse, so they will share the “honor”:

T-1: Michele Bachmann: The evangelical and right wing darling lived up to her unpredictable description in 2007. From the Presidential kiss to the “secret” plan for Iraq from Iran,

Which has been less secret lately, since the Iranians have been getting caught all over Iraq moving weapons and Special Forces more efficiently than rush hour on 494. 

Bachmann found her way into the news over and over. She has been less controversial lately because she has kept her comments to herself, but she has let her votes do the talking. Votes against SCHIP and for the Iraq War dominate her partisan outlook.

Which, let us not forget, was what she promised in her campaign.  

To an even better assortment for ’08!

 Paul Schmelzer took understandable, mild umbrage over the “Shootie” award I gave the Minnesota Monitor yesterday. 

He might not be entirely wrong.  But we’ll get back to that.

Let’s go waaaay back to the spring of ’06.

Back before the Minnesota Monitor even started publishing, I got a tip from a source that said the “Center for Independent Media”, a group that “rented” office space from the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America, was going to be funding “grassroots citizen media” outlets, and was looking for reliably liberal bloggers to write for them.  So – going back to the summer/fall of 2006 – I and quite a number of center-right bloggers, in the interest of clarity, started asking the Monitor and its management (at that time, Robin “Rew” Marty of Powerliberal) where the money came from – who, indeed, were the “liberals with deep pockets” that were fronting the Monitor writers’ “stipends”?

For the better part of a year, “we” asked, and asked, and asked again.  The Monitor, when it responded at all, said that, appearances aside, the Hungarian-born currency speculator and leftymedia sugardaddy had nothing, nothing to do with the Center for Independent Media or the Minnesota Monitor.   We asked the Monitor’s editor; I emailed the Center for Independent Media and asked directly.  The CIM didn’t respond at all.  Robin Marty went further:

To clarify, the Center for Independent Media is not receiving funding from Media Matters.  The only financial arrangement they have is to rent office space.

Cleverly, carefully worded. 

Except “Media Matters” wasn’t the crux of the debate; money from George Soros was.  Robin’s response was that if one didn’t see an armored car labelled “Soros International”  unloading bags of currency labelled “Media Matters” at the CIM offices, it didn’t count! 

Never mind that many – especially Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci at Kool Aid Report and this blog’s regular commenter Master of None – did the digging and found the links.  The Monitor’s party line, and the line from its supporters, remained unchanged.

And so – given that the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results each time, we moved on, mostly; we took shots at the obloquy and apparent disingenuity of the denials, but figured there were bigger fish to fry.  The Monitor’s critics assumed the site was a “Soros” (among many others) front; its supporters stomped their feet and demanded to see the photos of that armored car and those bags of money.

And then, Eric Black went and admitted it all. 

Now, I have been unstinting in my regard for Paul Schmelzer and his work at the Monitor.  In a region that’s become accustomed to the likes of Brian Lambert as a media “reporter”, Schmelzer has done a great job; he’s head and possibly shoulders above the pack at the Monitor (in some cases, toss in knees or ankles).  He took over as editor in August.  I think he’s done a decent job – and I freely admit in deference to Schmelzer and his predecessor, Robin Marty, that I could certainly not run a big group-blog like the Monitor.

Schmelzer has noted – in private email to me and in this comment thread in the Monitor, that nobody since August has asked him about the Monitor’s funding, and that he’s being up-front about it.

Which, to be fair to Schmelzer, is true; most of us had given up and settled into our beliefs, pro and con, on the subject. 

So Schmelzer is correct in that he is being open about the Monitor and CIM’s funding, albeit under intense questioning from Tom Swift (see the comment section).

But there is plenty of history here.  Kudos to Schmelzer for being up-front about it – but, to be fair (to us), it’s not like it didn’t take well over a year of trying, accompanied by a lot of rhetorical abuse and tittering from the Monitor and its defenders, to get to this point.

Does it matter?  On the one hand, not really.  I mean, I don’t begrudge the Monitor’s staff their paychecks; if you love to do something (and blogging is rarely more than a labor of love), it can be mighty nice to see some payback.  And if George Soros or any other fatcats with deep pockets want to spend their kids’ inheritance on propaganda organs – well, it’s their money!  I know I’d jump on a check from Richard Mellon Scaife or the Heritage Foundation with both feet.  I’d also disclose, completely and immediately, the fact that I had gotten the check, rather than tapdancing and misdirecting and denying the source of my support – I’d just as soon let the reader accurately and completely know, and let them assign or deduct credibility accordingly. 

Just as most of us have done with the Monitor.

It’s not that complicated.  Or shouldn’t have been, at least.

 PS:  My wise old grandpa always told me “don’t listen to lectures about “embarassment” from people who seem unable to feel it themselves”. 

Words to live by!

The inner cities have their issues. If you’re in Minnesota and reading this, you know about them; you’ve either fled them, are paying for them via your taxes, or are – like me – living among them.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are taxed half to death; Minneapolis’ crime rate has fallen from brutally-high to merely ridiculously-high, with a murder rate higher than New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco.  Higher, indeed, – ironically, given how Minneapolis’ political, academic and media elites sniff at them – than Mobile, Omaha (twice as high!), Tampa, Jacksonville, higher in fact than all of the major cities in Texas but one (and only slightly off Houston’s pace).  Only marginally lower than Chicago. (Saint Paul’s is quite low by major-city standards – 60% lower than Minneapolis – a testament to Saint Paul’s excellent police department, strong neighborhoods, and at least a couple of relatively sane administrations).

The cities are addicts; their drug is money. Nearly four decades ago, the “Minnesota Miracle” enacted the idea of “Local Government Aid”, which as the DFL’s stranglehold on the inner cities accelerated turned into an eternal subsidy of DFL inner-city policy by the parts of the state that actually pay their way. Governor Pawlenty’s cuts in LGA acted the same way as cutting off the heroin acts on a jonesing junkie; the addict went crazy. The body couldn’t get along without the drug; the drug had incorporated itself into the body’s chemistry. City governments had been providing “services” far beyond what their eroding tax based could provide, even as their left-leftward-moving policies drove more and more of the tax base out of the cities themselves. When LGA cuts forced cities to pass the “service” costs directly to their own tax bases, and the cities were forced to pay their own bills – well, you’ve read the headlines and the op-ed pages, right?

And yet, election after election, the DFL stranglehold over the inner city not only deepens, but gets more and more radical; Greens now have a solid foothold in Minneapolis; Saint Paul’s “Gang of Four” ultra-liberal councilpeople is now a Gang of Five. Policies that were madness thirty years ago are commonplaces today.

How did it get this way?

90% of politics is local. And the DFL understood this from the very beginning, and over the past fifty years has extended its reach into every corner of life in the Cities.

Is there hope?

More tomorrow.

Happy New Year! 

And you know what that means, right?  Yepper, it’s time for the Shooties!

The Shooties have been an annual tradition here at Shot In The Dark for…well, a year, now. The Shooties stand watch over the regional media, alternative media, and political scene, ready to skewer the obnoxious, pretentious, and dumb (and, occasionally, reward the meritorious).

Technical awards were given out at a ceremony at Keegans’ last October.

So, with no further ado, let’s get on with the show!

The Baghdad Bob Award for Holding On To An Absurd Fiction Long Past The Point Of Pathetic: This award goes to the Minnesota Monitor. For the entire year of their existence, they denied – or, more accurately, refused to comment on, and declared all speculation “paranoid” – their relationship with George Soros’ attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”, saying that there was no reason whatsoever to assume that just because the Monitor’s parent group, the ironically-named “Center for Independent Media”, shared offices with MM4A early in its organizational life, that there was any relationship between the CIM and the left-supporting billionaire.

Until former Strib reporter Erik Black put the qibosh on the “silly” “nonsense”-ical “attack” meme by…confirming it, as he was departing CIM employ and decamping to the MinnPost.

The Daniel Pearl Profiles in Journalistic Courage Award: This year, we award this award to none other than ace “journalist” Jeff Fecke, of the Soros joint Minnesota Monitor, in what will be the first of several awards this year.

While trying to “cover” a John Kline town hall meeting he claimed that that Congressman Kline’s staff had barred him from liveblogging – but then turned around and allowed a group of conservative bloggers to blog away unhindered. He wrote

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

Like a lawnmower going over a gopher, Michael Brodkorb and Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci ripped Fecke’s claim of discrimination to shreds; Brodkorb even scanned and posted the forum’s rules.

Perception remained reality at the MinMoneyitor.

The “Let’s Go Find All The Narrow-Minded Bigots – and Lynch Them” Award for Even-Handed, Detached “Journalism” – Phil Krinkie was a famous tax hawk in the State House for many years. He’s also a great guy – funny, jovial, reasonable, a great ambassador for fiscal conservatism. Lori Sturdevant is a DFL hack whose every column is a bit of “unpaid” flakkery for the left in this state; not only does she never deviate from the party line, she usually is right in line with whatever transient strategy is in current effect. So when she wrote about a conversation with Krinkie, after reciting the entire catalog of DFL talking points about Krinkie, she added “Notice how much more reasonable a zealot can sound when chatting with an old classmate than when performing on the stump?”

There’s reason to believe she wasn’t even trying to be ironic.

The “This Is London” Plaque for Creative “Journalistic” Cribbing – Over the summer, the Minnesota Monitor’s Jeff Fecke got busted for low-grade plagiarism, shoddy attribution, and trying to bluster his way out of being busted for these mistakes with a creative edit or two. His only response? “On the advice of my editor, I have no comment”. Which was pretty much Fecke’s response to every question about his work with the Monitor last year.

The Richard M. Nixon Award for Ethics – Busted for numerous ethical lapses, the Minnesota Monitor – which came into existence trumpeting its “Code of Ethics“, which tells its practicioners to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly” – didn’t really admit or correct much of anything.

The Joe Isuzu Trophy – This award is given to those who talk a huuuuuge game, and delivery a tiiiiiiiny one.

And the “winner” this year is Minnesota “MNob” Observer, a lawyer apparently licensed to practice law in Minnesota and who writes for about sixty regional leftyblogs, whose analysis of the Olson v. Brodkorb summary judgement, er, flunked with dishonors.

The Minnesota Monitor “Do As We Say, Not As We Do” Award For Grating Hypocrisy – Karl Bremer – dyspeptic anti-Michele Bachmann obsessive from Stillwater – made huge waves when, mirabile dictu, nearly every left-leaning regional website simultaneously tripped onto a month-old, native-American-bashing post at “Anti-Strib”. And while Anti-Strib got ripped pretty soundly by the local Sorosphere (and, let’s not forget, a fair chunk of the regional dextrosphere), there was deafening silence about a comment Bremer himself left on a post at “Dump Bachmann“:

I thought I saw the name Drew Emmer among those arrested with Larry Craig for cruising MSP airport bathrooms for anonymous sex. I could be wrong, but Emmer’s behavior and comments seem oddly similar in both form and content to Craig’s.

There was never a comment from anyone involved in The [decreasingly relevant] Dump, or any other leftyblog outlet, about Bremer’s slander.

Being the darling of the local Sorosphere means not needing basic ethics.

The “Howard Dean” Trophy For Leaving Liberals Screaming and Sputtering: Every year for the last, oh, two years or so, the City Pages – the occasionally brilliant but always reliably hip-“counterculture”-lefty local “alternative” freebie ‘zine – gives two “Best Blog” awards. The “Best Liberal Blog” is generally stridently, constantly political (“MNVolved”, I think, in ’06, although it didn’t survive much beyond the award, and “Clucking Stool” in ’07); the “Best Conservative Blog” has been the one that talks the least about politics. In ’06 it was Nihilist in Golf Pants, and the award seems to have gutted the spirit of the once-prolific stalwarts. But in ’07, the “award” went to Dan Lacey of “Faithmouse”. Perhaps trying to avoid the City Pages “Best New Band” jinx (the “winners” inevitably break up) Lacey turned around and sold the “award” on EBay. It drew sputtering from the usual assortment of left-leaning waxy yellow blogbuildup, but who cared? The quietest blog smackdown of the year, it was also by far the best.

And finally, the big kahuna, the award that started it all:

The Charles Townsend Award – In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies’ protests against the Stamp Act, said:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

And this year’s winner is: a triple play!

• Alice “The Phantom” Hausman and Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg, for declaring the Gas Tax the culprit in the 35W Bridge Disaster even before the bubbles had stopped rising from the submerged cars.
• Nick “the Engineer” Coleman, for going on national TV to blame the disaster on Republican tax policy, three days after the collapse, while the NTSB was still unpacking its bags.

Positively loathsome.

And that’s it for this year’s edition of the Shooties! So until next year, thanks for stopping by, and remember – if you’re in the media, the alt-media, or regional politics, and your head is tightly jammed where the sun doesn’t shine, I’ll be busily writing down the details!

Bogus Doug is blogging again.

Welcome back, Doug!

(Via Tracy)

I used to make a concerted effort to read leftyblogs.  I did it for the same reason that I read things like Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries or Steal This Book – to know what the enemy believes, what motives him/her, to get an insight into how they think.

Lately?  Not so much.  Reading most leftybloggers is like listening to 14-year-olds argue.

Jane Hamsher – from “Firedoglake”, which, since the demise of “Pandagon” has been the “Norwegianity” of the national leftyblog scene – walks out onto rhetorical thin ice and starts doing a Dutch clog dance:

 Take, for example, supermodels. When you meet them you’re usually struck with the impression that something’s not quite right about them, and after a while it dawns on you that you’ve never met anyone quite this stupid who is so convinced that every word they utter is dripping with peerless insight…

[Really, Jane?  You meet a lot of supermodels?] 

Chris Rock has a whole routine about “model smart,” which basically means being smart enough not to walk out in the middle of traffic and get hit by a car. Which pretty much sums it up.

Er…indeed.

Let’s take a step back.  After the ’72 election, Pauline Kael is famously (and probably apocryphally) supposed to have exclaimed “How could Nixon have won?  Nobody I know voted for him!”

Apocryphal as that may have been, there’s a teaching moment there; someone whose entire world revolves around one region, social circle or professional clacque might just lack the perspective to comment coherently outside that circle.  It’s why Appalachian junk dealers are illiterate about nouvelle cuisine, and why Pauline Kael didn’t know any Nixon voters. 

And, I suspect, it might explain a lot – somewhat ironically, as it happens – about Ms. Hamsher:

Rush Limbaugh has a self-awareness problem.

It’s one you commonly see in celebrities — they form their self-image based on what those around them think, but those people are frequently responding to some combination of factors that may have nothing at all to do with who they are.

It explains a lot about the likes of Arianna Huffington and Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn, to be sure…

Anyway, now we have Rush Limbaugh. He’s been putting out the message on behalf of the GOP to millions of the AM radio faithful so long he thinks he’s one of them, a “man of the people,” or as he likes to say, “part of the Cape Girardeau [Missouri]-Middle America axis.”

But Rush is no such thing. Unless his audience is composed of a lot more people making $35 million a year than I’m aware of, he’s an ugly weld spot between the corporatists and the rank-and-file within the party.

Let’s mark that idea – “Limbaugh is out of touch with the rank and file of the GOP” – for later use.  File it under “Jane Hamsher drops Acid” if you’d like – that, or show me that there are enough “corporatists” – as in, 20-odd-million – to make Limbaugh the biggest name in radio.

Hamsher invokes the “Sista Soulja” moment the Hucker is trying to create with Limbaugh:

 Huckabee knows that audience rather better than Rush does, at least the Southern contingent, and given the fact that the GOP has become largely a regional party, that’s a significant portion of Rush’s base.

That brings up a couple of interesting questions:

1. Does Huckabee “know” southern conservatives?  Given that he’s basically a pro-life, pro-NRA nannystater – basically Bill Clinton with some ethics?  (My guess:  exactly as well  as he needs to to win elections in famously-schizophrenic Arkansas)
2. Do Republicans know exactly how right Hamsher is about that “regional party” thing?  (The GOP is a regional party; it represents the “region” west of the Hudson, east of the Sierra Madre, and outside of Chicago).
3. How does Limbaugh manage to dominate political radio, what with his audience being only “corporatists” and all?
4. Does Jane Hamsher know more conservatives than Rush Limbaugh knows liberals?  (I’d suspect not just “no”, but “hell no”). 

Back to Hamsher:

Which is why Huck’s attack-by-proxie [sic] (“a DC based Huckabee ally”) is so spot-on, and amusing:

“Honestly, because Rush doesn’t think for himself. That’s not necessarily a slap because he’s not paid to be a thinker—he’s an entertainer. I can’t remember the last time that he has veered from the talking points from the DC/Manhattan chattering class. If they were praising Huckabee, he would be too.”

Chicken and egg, Ms. Hamsher.  If Huckabee were a conservative, you bet they’d be praising him!

But he’s not.

Rush rebounded by basically calling Huckabee a stupid hick:

He called the attacks “Clintonian” and accused Huckabee’s campaign of “trying to dumb down conservatism in order to get it to conform with his record.”

Given the region’s cultural persecution complex — not exactly a wise move.

Help me, here:  “conservatism” and “dumb” are southern-specific?

Who’s insulting southern culture?

More importantly – does Jane Hamsher think she’s equipped to serve as a cultural arbiter?

Exhibit A:

As a veteran spewer of right-wing talking points, Rush thinks he’s well aware of what’s going on here, and capable of combatting it with his usual armaments. He retorts by projecting onto Huckabee motivations that legislate the game he perceives himself as playing:

“Armaments?”  “Legislate?”  And what the hell does that last sentence mean, anyway?

“What was somewhat stunning about all this is that NO ONE in the GOP field, including advisers and staff, could possibly misread my 19-plus-year career the way Gov. Huckabee’s D.C. supporter did,” Limbaugh said. “Whoever said those things was essentially repeating the Democrat mantra of all these years: that I am just an entertainer, not an independent thinker, part of the Wall Street/D.C. axis. If it was someone on Gov. Huckabee’s staff or support team, it was just silly, uninformed and thus curious.”

Yeah except it isn’t a left/right PR game this time around, Rush. You’re taking arrows in the back.

Really?

An unnamed Hucker supporter took a specious – and just-plain-dumb – dig at Limbaugh; he/she wrote a rhetorical check that reality just won’t cash.

To wit:

Rush is betting that his listeners will see him as “part of the Cape Girardeau [Missouri]-Middle America axis.” The GOP elite have told him to take down Huckabee, and his ego is so engorged with money and seven years of right wing hegemony he thinks he can win that battle. He doesn’t see the weld spot preparing to crack.

Could someone please send me a nickel for every time the left has said Limbaugh was “out of touch” with Republicans, or that his support was all built on sand?

That’s just…model smart.

And Jane Hamsher thinks some (anonymous) Huckabee staffer speaks for the GOP rank and file, nationwide, more than the one person who, along with Ronald Reagan, made conservatism a genuine mass movement?  A man who goes on the air daily and by the end of the day has reached 20 million people – 19,990,000 of whom likely will be back the next day?

That’s just…leftyblogger smart.

(more…)

Leo “Psychmeister” Pusatieri’s father is gravely ill.  Leo’s at the hospital in Chicago right now.

Prayers, best wishes, or whatever your personal worldview calls for would be greately appreciated. 

Eric Black and his “Black Ink” blog are picking up and moving over to MinnPost.com – but not without leaving an answer we’ve been looking for for a very long time – something I asked him (in his interview on the NARN last March, when he left the Strib), as well as every other Minnesota Monitor staffer with whom I ever came in contact (emphasis added):

I’ve always meant to write piece titled “Who Pays Me?” Never got around to it. But if I had, I would have said that I was working under a contract with the Center for Independent Media (CIM), a Wasington-based non-profit, which is the parent organization of the Monitor and three other similar state-based sites. And I would have said that the silly attack meme of some conservative bloggers that the Monitor was staffed by George Soros sock puppets was nonsense.

“Nonsense” – meaning there was no truth to the claim that George Soros backed the Center for Independent Media (which, at the risk of repeating myself, started life in offices sublet from Soros’ attack-PR firm Media Matters for America).  Right?

Because that’s what “nonsense” and “silly attack meme” mean.  Right?   

Soros’ foundation is one of several that contribute to the CIM so I guess I have some Soros money in my checking account,

Er…OK.  So the “silly” “nonsense” claim was actually true, then?

And do you think that if, say, Powerline or Ed Morrissey or I got so much as a nickel of money from Halliburton, or Richard Mellon Scaife or Rupert Murdoch, that the crack staffs of the MinnPost or Minnesota Monitor or or the Daily Mold would let it pass?

Black adds:

but I was never asked, pressured or even encouraged to promote any particular point of view and the same goes for the Monitor’s other writers.

Sounds good, right? 

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci of Kool Aid Report, who drew my attention to the piece, notes a hole in that idea big enough to drive the entire MinnPost office through:

Say your house has a mouse infestation. And further assume that you are an old-timey sort that doesn’t believe in exterminators or mouse traps. So instead, you buy a cat.

Do you have to tell a cat to go hunt the mice?

 Of course not. 

I always get a kick out of commenters who accuse me of “parroting GOP talking points”.  There is no C-list blogger in the Twin Cities who is farther off the Republican party’s official radar than I am.  I don’t get invites to the press conferences.  I get press releases only intermittently, and usually from campaigns – rarely if ever from the party proper. 

And yet I’m a conservative, almost-always Republican blogger.  Not because I’m on a payroll, but because I believe in the ideals of the GOP and the Conservative movement.  Nobody pays me to do it (outside the odd advertiser) – I do it because it’s what I believe.

So if some right-leaning sugardaddy group of right leaning sugardaddies wanted to come to town and pay a bunch of bloggers to generate propaganda, I have a six-year-deep clip file to put in front of them. 

Every member of the Minnesota Monitor was recruited because they are a reliable, left-leaning voice.  They are paid their “stipends” (at one point, $1,500 a month – unheard of for most E-list bloggers) because they will deliver what is expected of them.  The notion that any of them are going to go maverick and turn into low-tax, pro-defense, law-and-order conservatives on the Monitor‘s dime is absurd.  Eric Black retains some plausible deniability, here, but I think he’s made his actual sympathies pretty clear (as is his right!) since he left the Strib; one suspects, for example, that had Doug Tice left the Strib, the Monitor/CIM would not have have come calling.  Conservative bloggers need not have applied to the Center for Independent Media.

Tucci continues:

And it bears mentioning here in a non-parenthetical paragraph that this is the very first time anywhere in the year and change history of MinniMoni that anyone connected with that website has admitted as much. Why?

“Why”, indeed, on a couple of levels.

For over a year, MinMon’s management and staff reacted in every possible way to questions about the CIM’s backing – every way save one.  They obfuscated.  They misdirected.  They changed the subject.  They threw out cutesy tangents and scampered away.  Their supporters denied any Soros connection, ever more vehemently.  And yet it was true all along (not that there was any doubt or mystery to the question).

And why does Black admit it (couched in an attack on the “silly” but true “attack” meme) as he’s cleaning out his desk?

UPDATE:  Welcome Cap’n Ed’s readers, and any Instapundit readers that’ve leaked through this far into the story!

I’d like to direct you to Learned Foot, who was on this several hours before I was, and in three years of blogging hasn’t had an Instalanche (remember them?); a Ed-a-lanche and a secondary Instalanche can’t be a bad way to roll into the holidays, though.

Andrew Sullivan is my blogfather, as I’ve noted in many, many places.  I started Shot In The Dark hours after reading “The Dish” for the first time, inspired by his take (at the time) on events and by the newfound technology that allowed any schlump with an internet connection to hang out a shingle as a pundit.

And while I’ve become estranged from my blogfather, as his true, not-very-conservative (or, rather, “conservative” that bears no relation to my own flavor of the movement) beliefs took over his presentation – I’ve honestly read The Daily Dish maybe twice in the last four years – I’ve always kept that notion in the back of my head; he’s this blog’s Dad.

And now, I’m done.  Sullivan shows us he’s working for the other side, in his rationalization for “endorsing” Ron Paul:  

I admire McCain in so many ways. He is the adult in the field, he is attuned to the issue of climate change in a way no other Republican is, he is a genuine war hero and a patriot, and he bravely and rightly opposed the disastrous occupation policies of the Bush administration in Iraq. The surge is no panacea for Iraq; but it has enabled the United States to lose the war without losing face. And that, in the end, is why I admire McCain but nonetheless have to favor Paul over McCain. Because on the critical issue of our time – the great question of the last six years – Paul has been proven right and McCain wrong. And I say that as someone who once passionately supported McCain’s position on the war but who cannot pretend any longer that it makes sense.

Read the whole thing, if only to pound a stake through the heart of whatever admiration you may once have had for the guy.

Learned Foot apparently wants you to Photoshop photos of Chris Daughtry with some IBM employee.

No, I don’t totally get it either.

MLP gives us underserved “Yucky Salad” readers some good-ish news – her sister Katie (YSw/B’s auteur) has gotten her column at the Chicago Tribune renewed.

And MLP gives us an idea of how the meeting with the ChiTrib management might go:

Her plan for the meeting this afternoon is thus; show up in a pinstriped suit, hair secured in a bun with a pencil stuck through it and glasses perched seriously upon the tip of her nose.  During the course of the meeting, the glasses will come off.  Soon after, the pencil comes out of the bun and the hair comes down.  By the end of the meeting, she rips open her button down shirt to reveal a lacy camisole, exlaiming “Is it just me, or is it hot in here?”

We’ll look for an update on that.

Katie Kieffer writes to note that the St. Thomas Register has Latest E an online edition,  Katie (and her sister, current editor Amy) has been fighting the good fight at St. Thomas for the past four years.
They don’t get a heck of a lot of support from St. Thomas – while the school is not the most hidebound liberal campus in town, it’s still hardly conservative-friendly.

And they’re fund-raising, too.  So if you have a couple of bucks to spare for intellectual freedom on campus, they’d love to hear from you.

As you’re no doubt well aware, True North – my other blog – deleted a contributor yesterday for plagiarism.

True North took immediate action.  Unlike other local blogs with printed codes of ethics, we actually acted…ethically, when an ethical infraction surfaced.

Some of the usual lefty suspects jumped up and down like poo-flinging howler monkeys, of course (ironically, of course, in Eva Young’s case, given her habit of copying and pasting entire comment threads).

But dig a little further; the post that Eva links to in the post above is…well, still more irony.

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci from KAR also noticed, and dug a little further; it’d seem former pr0n industry temp worker and Eva’s pal and fellow obsessive blogger copy-and-paster Ken “Avidor” Weiner is on ethically ironic ground in commenting on the Seventh Son (emphasis added):

Weiner stole some pics from our good friend Ben’s blog. Ben, in a comment section (the cowardly Weiner supplies no email address), politely asked Weiner to take the pictures down. Weiner, displaying the class he become known for, deleted Ben’s comments, restricted outsiders from commenting, and promised to keep stealing the intellectual property of others.

Coward.

Do these people actually have ethics? 

You can read Ben’s post about this here.

What makes Avidor-Weiner’s actions especially laughable, is that immediately above the first post containing stolen material flagged by Ben, is a post ripping on a plagiarism flap at True North (captured in beautiful haiku here).

 Yet another “prominent” leftyblogger (or at least one who is cited with breathless credulity by the local Sorosphere) is caught with his ethical pants down.  So what will their side do about it?

Will Blogger Copy-and-Paster Young continue to breathlessly support Ken “Avidor” Weiner, thief and coward?

Tucci notes that the “rules” have morphed a bit…

With the explosion of online publishing, things are now a little bit different. Instead of the old way of asking permission before using someone else’s property, now it’s pretty much the norm to take first and ask for forgiveness later. I think that’s a fair trade off and efficient way of doing things.

…and the problem we face: 

I don’t think anyone with an iota of class or integrity would refuse to take down a picture posted on his or her blog if the owner of that picture asked. In fact I have obliged such a complaint in the past. It’s called class. It’s called respecting the rights and the property of others.

I’ve honored such requests as well.

It’s that “class” and “integrity” bit.  Or at least “not being a juvenile”.

(more…)

Andy “AAA” Aplikowski writes over at True North:

We have just been informed that one of our Contributors has been lifting content from other blogs.

The Seventh Son is a guy I know, and I did vouch for him to be here at True North. I just talked to him and informed him of the matter. It sounds like he is guilty of laziness and not knowing blog etiquette, but I will let him defend himself. I have no tolerance for people who take credit for others’ hard work, whether through stupidity or laziness. And together with the Nucleus here at True North we came to a decision.

We’ve removed The Seventh Son as a Contributor, and pulled down all of his posts.

We can’t tolerate that sort of thing.  And while Andy may be right – there might be extenuating issues of misunderstanding – ignorance of the rules is really no excuse.

Conservative bloggers; we don’t publish “codes of ethics”, but we follow ’em anyway.

UDPATE: Seventh Son fesses up and leaves the ring:

That being said, I have gone to posts, linked to articles from those posts, and cut and pasted some of these articles to my blog. My fault here is not properly acknowledging the original post as I should have.

Some of my blogger friends made me aware of this controversy today, for which I sincerely apologize. So I have asked them to remove links to my blog and I will let this be my final post.

It’s sad, of course.  Sorry it came to this.

But right is right.

When I think “scary”, I think Richard Broderick, the former Green Party St. Paul School Board candidate who wanted, quite overtly, to turn the Saint Paul public schools into Green Party indoctrination centers.  Y’know – the kind of thing over which lefties get their undies in a knot when the subject is “the existence of faith” or “patriotism”.
And sometimes I wonder – what is that little fella doing these days?

And then I get my answer – being a bigger tvetch than even Susan Lenfestey.

That is all.

We’ve taken our shots at liberal bumper stickers in recent years.

Dr. Emil from Atomic Trousers has taken the logical next step; a top ten (?) list.

To wit (with some post-facto nominations of my own):

“COEXIST” (spelled out with various religious symbols) – If some of the followers of the religion represented by the crescent moon “c” on your cute little bumper sticker would stop hijacking planes and blowing up buildings, coexisting would be a little easier.

“Honorable” mention in this category: “My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma”.  That’s right, oil-belching Subaru-driving earth-granny, the fact that you don’t attend a “church” with other “believers” does make you “better than me”.  Or whatever.

“A PBS Mind In a FOX News World” – This particular bumper sticker is positively oozing with smugness. “God, I can’t stand being surrounded by these Wal-Mart-shopping, NASCAR-watching, deer-hunting troglodytes. How can these country-fried rubes allow themselves to be spoon-fed White House talking points from Bill O’Reilly? They must not be smart enough to enjoy watching some dusty old Brits mumble through a clunky drama on PBS like I am.”

 As if Bill Moyers isn’t the left’s high-gloss Bill O’Reilly (or, for that matter, that Bill O is a “conservative” in the first place).

“Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live” – The airheads with this little chestnut on their bumpers are confusing simple wordplay with incredible profundity. This bumper sticker sounds really deep until you realize that a.) it doesn’t mean a damn thing and b.) the dork in your office who asks if you’re workin’ hard or hardly workin’ is making an equally clever play on words.

And when all of us tax-paying, charity-donating first worlders move to yurts and revert to tending cattle and hunting and gathering, who is going to help those who can’t “simply live”, simply, live?  Without western (read: First-World) charity, whither Gambia? 

(…)

“Pro-Child, Pro-Choice” – I’m for the kids, but I’m also for aborting them willy-nilly too. This bumper sticker has the intellectual consistency of “Pro-Ants, Pro-Raid.”

• A close runner-up in the worst abortion-related bumper sticker goes to “Against Abortion? Don’t Have One.” (Against Robbery? Don’t Rob People!)

(…)
“Defy Corporate Domination” – I spotted this gem on the rusty bumper of a Honda Civic on November 8th. Chances are you have never heard of Honda, but its a small automobile-making co-op based out of Mazomanie.

(…) 

“Peace Through Music.” – Trouble in the Sudan, you say? Send in State Street’s bongo-playing hippies. They’ll calm things down. Al-Qaeda insurgents wreaking havoc in Iraq? I’m sure Mr. Johnson’s fourth-hour band class can get in there and straighten things out.

A few nominations of my own:

“You Can Not Simultaneously Prepare for Peace and for War” – This quote, attributed to Einstein, ignores the fact that Einstein had to flee for his life from a continent that largely “prepared for peace” after World War I, in the face of a belief that repudiated “peace”, and ran to a nation that did prepare (belatedly) for war.  Better sticker idea; “Preparing for peace without preparing to defend it is worse than meaningless”.