Happy Birthday to Teh Mayer!

I’m a pretty normal guy. I’m 44, I live in an old house in Saint Paul with a couple kids, two cats and a dog. I drive a four-door but I’d rather bike. I like good beer, play guitar and a slew of other instruments, have the odd date, meet my friends at Keegans’ when I can – you know. Pretty normal stuff.

Of course, when I was 16 I started working in radio. Now, working part-time at a station in North Dakota is the laxest possible definition of “public figure” that can exist in nature – but even then and there (and over my next years, as my career took me to the Twin Cities), some of the wierdness that attends “public” life caught up with me. The anti-semitic calls and threats (although I’m not remotely Jewish, the “Berg” name irks some); the occasional lonely person with weird ideas, the people who can’t take disagreement in stride – I’ve been through ’em all. And I’ve pretty much ignored them. Because they’re pretty much idiots.

Over the last few years, I’ve duked it out with the people who run the “Dump Bachmann” blog. I don’t pay ’em a lot of attention – with their fevered tone and breathless conspiracy-mongering and seeing spies in the bushes, they’re like a homegrown Democrat Underground, and pretty much a laughingstock among real bloggers and media. They’re the kinds of thing best ignored (except for Michele Bachmann; knowing that such a bunch of tinfoil-hatted whoopdidoos were stalking her, I’m fairly convinced, was worth at least a point in Bachmann’s victory last November – the best showing by a Republican on the top rail of results.

So at worst, they’re a mixed blessing. As a rule.

I’ve also pretty much dismissed Ken Weiner, AKA “Ken Avidor”. I dismiss him because he’s pretty dismissable. A former art director at a pr0n mag even other pr0n merchants giggle at with derision, it’s not hard to see why even Tom Swift has better cartooning chops.

A while ago – before the September 15 counterprotest I helped organize with the folks at True North – I got an anonymous email from someone at a Google IP address:

Crazy Ken Avidor is planning upon coming to your counter protest with his cameras, specifically to get pictures of you. I know this on a first hand basis. He’s a f*cking moron, don’t give him any fodder.

I responded at the time – if you want to talk to me, just ask. I’ll take on all comers, because – depending on who you are and what your motivations are – I either have no trouble talking across ideological divides (hence I had a great time talking on MPR and with Chuck Olson in the past few months), or I’m just plain smarter than you and dealing with your arguments is child’s play (certain other adversaries that shall remain nameless), which is kinda sad considering I’m really no great shakes in the “brain” department myself.

But no matter; Avidor showed up, camera in hand (I’d left), and posted this little brain fart.

Now, nobody’s under any obligation to ask “hey, mind if I film you”, although it’s generally considered good form by reputable videographers and journalists. Which Avidor, of course, is not.

Last week, Avidor posted the “big scoop” – that I have been known to edit Wikipedia entries. This is, of course, something that’s pretty publicly available. Avidor leapt about like a poo-flinging monkey yapping about the fact that I’ve written, in the past, about the likes of Ed Morrissey, Hugh Hewitt, and the Northern Alliance – without bothering to actually note if anything I wrote was wrong or anything, of course, or whether any of that Wiki editing took place in a men’s room at the airport.

I’m always inclined to ignore this kind of obsessive niggling; I let it go the way of the rantings of the dissociative guy at the back of the bus who skipped his meds.

Fortunately, Learned Foot at Kool Aid Report has not been so inclined. He’s showed, so far this week, that Avidor observe a curious double-standard about his Wiki obsessions, that he handles criticism with all the grace of Marie Antoinette, he lied about the responses (one needn’t “have a cow” to crush a target as trivially simple as Avidor) and tried to ignore it all when Foot busted him, and concluded with some advice:

I wonder if Blogger Berg and Blogger Swiftee are considering swearing out a restraining order yet. This guy is obviously unstable.

This last was over this bit – in which Avidor crosses the line from “demented idiot” to “borderline stalker”, apparently hiding in the bushes and (unlike Michele Bachmann) actually spying and taking pictures of people.

The obvious response is – nothing. Let him slither through the bushes with his little camera. I’ve done nothing in my life that I can’t take in front of the whole world (like, say, work at a pr0n magazine and participate in the victimization of women). I’ve run into people like Avidor before, and they’re nothing to worry about – they don’t have the balls or the brains to do anything but slither about and heckle impotently (just check out the traffic on the DU post. I doubt Avidor has the capacity to be embarassed).

So let me know when he does something that rises to the level of “would matter to vertebrates”.

Jay Reding – a public affairs blogger who should get ten times his traffic (whatever he gets now) – has relaunched Jay Reding.com after recovering from some technical glitches.

That’s the good news.

The merely-fair-to-middlin’ news? 

There’s also an incredibly geeky and equally obscure sci-fi reference somewhere in this template. See if you can find it…

Homey don’t play ‘dat.

But welcome back, Jay.  We got a ton of work to do.

Celebrities and the cultural clamor they bring are pretty foreign to the Twin Cities.  And most of the people that’ve passed for “celebs” around here in the past twenty years have been pretty low-key; Prince is sequestered in his estate in Chanhassen when he’s not in LA; a few Hollywood B-listers live in Stillwater precisely to lay low (not that Emilio Estevez needs to lay all that much lower); most of the musicians that mattered moved to New York or LA or Austin years ago (and the rest aren’t doing much music anymore). The biggest celebrity I’ve run into lately, except via the radio show, is Josh Hartnett’s mom, who was a guidance counselor at one of my kids’ schools.

Oh, and…well, there’s one more, although Ed doesn’t quite tell the story:

Living in Minneapolis and traveling mostly to DC or Orange County, though, I haven’t seen any that I recall. So I was a little surprised to see Steve Tyler of Aerosmith coming through the security checkpoint with me here in Reno. It took me a couple of moments to be sure of it, but it’s pretty difficult to confuse him with anyone else.

Many of the women in the terminal were also pleasantly surprised to see him as well. They called out greetings to him, ignoring the woman with whom he was traveling. After a few minutes of that, I can imagine it gets old for both Tyler and his companion. He’s still somewhere in my terminal as I write this, but people have returned to the slot machines and have left the pair alone.

“I can imagine…”.  Hah.

Hanging out with Ed in the Twin Cities is like partying with Lindsay Lohan.  Everyone knows the guy.  Which is great when you want to jump the ropeline at Doolittle’s after the show, but the paparazzi’ll kill you eventually.

…that internet cartooning in the Twin Cities was dead – I’m proven wrong!

…apparently hangs on my every word, writing and utterance.

Thanks, Crayola Boy!  Maybe someday someone’ll give a rat’s ass about what you “write”/”draw”/whatever!

Dream a little dream, little fella!

Hurry on back, Jay.

Paul Schmelzer – the MinMon’s best reporter (Eric Black seems to be more of an independent than a staffer, hence the distinction) – notes the larger story behind the flap that surfaced in this post:

No hat tips from the Strib: Big ups to City Pages for last week’s bona fide scoop on the University of St. Thomas/Desmond Tutu flap. It’s spawned reports on blogs and in the corporate media alike, but CP staffer Paul Demko isn’t feeling the love. He says the Star Tribune “simply stole the scoop” without crediting the altweekly and has been emailing blogs to get its props. If it makes you feel better, CP, it happens to us all the time.

Why, yes.

It’s really pretty common.

If Red – she of the hilarious, manifold obsessions – and this person were to meet…:

A convent, 20 miles away from my house, with their own llamas. They harvest the wool. They spin the wool. They dye the wool. Then they sell the yarn. THEY SELL THE YARN!!! Nun spun wool, I couldn’t make this sh*t up if I tried! Well, I made up the name, because “nun spun wool” is just too perfect of a name…but that’s another story.

ANYWAY, so earlier this week I gave a shout out to the good nuns at the convent. You can’t just send them and e-mail. You have to actually call. I hate talking on the phone. I HATE calling people on the phone. It goes back to my fear of ordering pizza. But I overcame my fear for the yarn. For the sake of the yarn folks. The lady I talked to (Sr. Schwarzenflugenflagenfluagel or something like that) told me she only had a little in stock because she spins it up as they need it, but that she could spin me some if she knew what I wanted.

SHE IS GOING TO CUSTOM SPIN MY YARN!!! I’m thinking at this point that it’s going to be like a bajamillion dollars or something. Nope, they sell it by the ounce, and it’s only $2.00 an ounce. Which makes me feel like a drug dealer…with nuns…and yarn…but like a drug dealer nonetheless.

All of this to say, yesterday I went out to the convent and hung out with the head spinner. Not the HEAD spinner. The head SPINNER. You have to put the right emphasis on the right word. She let me play with the llamas. She let me touch ALL of the wool. She showed me the whole process and I got a back stage tour of the convent. It totally rocked. I bought all of the yarn she had on hand, and ordered enough to keep her busy until the second coming of Christ.

As I was leaving I asked her if she ever taught people how to spin. She said they have retreats every year, but this year they didn’t have a place to do it so she didn’t know if it was going to happen. I volunteered my house. She accepted my offer. So in January I’m going to have a house full of nuns who will teach me how to spin my own yarn. I’m so freeking excited I could actually spit back at the llamas!!!!

I know I’ve joked about becoming a nun at various points in my life. But had I known there was a convent where they played with llamas and knit and spun yarn all day I would have likely followed through with it by now.

…would the combined levels of obsession open a rift in the time/space continuum that would alter the state of matter?

Just curious.

Leo Pusatieri – whose son recently got back from Iraq – has been on top of the Army’s attempt to short the returning “Red Bulls” on educational benefits.

And he’s got an update:

After raising a stink with Minnesota Representative Dettmer, Congressman Bachmann’s office, Senator Norm Coleman’s office, the Minnesota Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and the United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs, I believe that the ball is truly starting to roll…

Read the whole thing.

Andy Aplikowki – of Residual Forces and True North – has had a death in the family.

Condolences, hopes/prayers/karmic invocations and the whole works to the MOB Mayor’s family.

(Via KAR)

Do you see reporting like this in the Sorosphere?

Or this?

I think not.

So why did Eric Black – the dean of Minnesota political reporters – jump on what turned out to be the Media Matters bandwagon on the phony “Rush Limbaugh Insults the Troops” fiction?

Honest mistake, fueled by (admitted) bias?  Too much writing, not enough analyzing?  Leash being yanked?

Kouba at TVM wonders too:

Last Friday on his website, Eric Black had a post where he passed along, with an uncritical eye, the blast from Media Matters about its trumped up attack of Rush Limbaugh. Worse, in the second paragraph he referred to Jeff Fecke’s musings on the matter. A bit like Theodosius declaring Alaric an authority on Roman culture. [Two minute penalty; piling on! Not inaccurate – just piling on – Ed.]
The post made me raise at least 1.5 eyebrows, for Mr. Black is smart enough not to accept at face value a broadside against Republicans from a partisan outfit like Media Matters.

That the anti-war Left would grasp at such a weak excuse to try and take some attention away from MoveOn’s blunder with its smear of Gen. Petraeus should be a clue they need a telescope to see the moral high ground.

And…

Mr. Black is too experienced a journalist to carry water for Media Matters, and now that he’s waded out into the blogosphere, this episode should highlight the fact there are creatures swimming around with sharp teeth that don’t play as fair as he does.

Black wrote a correction – sort of:

The essence of Limbaugh’s defense/rebuttal (which he delivered, in high dudgeon on the next day’s show after the Media Matters piece had led to Limbaugh being criticized by several congressmen and senators) is that the full text of the show in which he used the term “phony soldiers” proves that he was referring to only one soldier, Jesse MacBeth, who actually was a phony.

MacBeth claimed to have been an Army Ranger, an Iraq vet, and to have witnessed atrocities. But all of those statements were lies. MacBeth stands convicted of making false statements.

Media Matters original piece attacking Limbaugh made no reference to MacBeth or to the possibility that Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” remark had been a reference to MacBeth. Limbaugh argues that any fair-minded person listening to the whole broadcast would have understood that he was referring to MacBeth and that Media Matters is guilty of a willful smear.

With an asterisk:

Here’s problem #1:

“Phony soldiers” occurs during a Limbaugh exchange with a caller. The caller complains that the media:

“never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.”

That’s when Limbaugh interjects “the phony soldiers.” At that moment, it certainly seems that both he and the caller are referring to soldiers and veterans who oppose the war. Jesse MacBeth has not been mentioned and is not part of the context.

Yeah, talk radio’s a funny thing. It’s always your rough draft, your first take (unless you’re on NPR, doing one of their highly scripted shows).  If one is sympathetically inclined toward Limbaugh, one will probably assume he meant the slew of soldiers thrown up in front of the media by one anti-war group or another that later turned out to by phony.  If not, you might assume he’s talking about all anti-war soldiers.

But when one thinks of (and refers to) Media Matters as a “media watchdog group” rather than a “leftist propaganda mill”, it’s a pretty big chink in your chain of informational evidence.

It’d be interesting to have Mr. Black on the show again; we have a lot to talk about…

The amusement value of the “Dump Bachmann” “blog” (“the blog that did more than any other to send Michele Bachmann to Congress”), wore out long, long ago.  All the thing is really good for these days is seeing which of Eva Young’s pack of remedial writers and “artists” will get arrested for stalking first.  She’s pretty much reduced to nonsensically prattling “MOB parrot!  MOB parrot!” in response to criticism – ironically, a bit like a trained parrot (and just you watch, it’ll be her big “response” to this, too!)

But occasionally, the ongoing train wreck emits a more-than-normally piercing squeal.

 Karl Bremer – an occasional writer and more-occasional subject on the Dump – has long been known for being a big, big talker who pours forth boundless aggression from the safety of his keyboard.  

And in the Dump’s comment section, he slanders Drew Emmer.

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.

Bremer’s a class act!

Oh, relax.  When I say “slander”, it’s only in the ethical sense of the term; Drew’s public enough a figure to entitle him to take all sorts of morally-retarded abuse with no legal recourse. 

The real point, of course, is that Bremer is a big part of the Dump Bachmann clicque – both the blog itself and the little clacque of crazed zealots that rails away in the Sixth District (among others).  He is the face of the Anti-Bachmann crowd.

Will Eva Young condemn this homophobic slander and condemn her buddy Bremer?  Or will she erase the comment and pretend she and her blog are ethical? 

I’m prone to carrying out little experiments on my kids.

For their own good, of course.

For instance, when my kids were in first and third grades, my son’s reading scores were lagging a bit.  So late that May, about the time school let out, the TV broke.

No, really.  It did.  And I pled poverty, and let it sit unused all summer long, until late September.  The kids had nothing to do all summer but play and read.  And the kids’ reading scores improved; Bun went back to school reading at a ninth grade level, and Zam was way ahead of his level, too. 

So the following summer, the TV broke again.  OK, this time it “broke” – a cable broke, and rather than replace it I pled poverty again, and let it sit for four more months.  The reading scores improved quite a bit again.

Late last spring, my laptop and the family’s desktop broke down almost simultaneously.  Part of the problem was gross overuse; the kids were just online too damn much.  So I let ’em stay broke again.  And it was a generally good experiment.

But it kinda played hell on my blogging.  For the last three or four months, I’ve been blogging at coffee shops, libraries, and on the occasional break at work. 

Well, no more.  I got a computer put together last night.  And was able to actually blog at home for the first time in quite a long time, quite a long time, quite a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. 

My output today probably was your first clue, though…

WTF?  [*]

Get back on the horse, man.  There’s work to be done.

(more…)

…analysis like this on NPR!

The sun rose in the east this morning.

An abbreviated list:

1. Tom Jones fans sitting back, scratching their chins, and saying “Engelbert Humperdinck really is a talented guy.
2. Hugh Hewitt pronouncing a four-syllable name right on the first try.
3. Me staying awake long enough to turn the dial away from the “Willie and Jay” show
4. Scarlet Johannson and Kate Winslet getting into a knife fight over me.
5. Mark “Look At Me, I’m A Union Goon!” Gisleson, proprietor of the most profane, scatological (and sixth-most unintentionally funny) blog in the local Sorosphere, lecturing me about manners and propriety.  Oops. 
6. A worse movie than Little Nicky.

That is all.

Two points:

1) When this chick says:

Please put Mitch Berg in charge of all candidate selection and planning for your party’s run for the 3rd.

…cut the girl some slack.  She’s a Democrat and a Soros employee; she’s used to having orders handed down from above and carrying them out on command.  She assumes we’d do things the same way.  Right sentiment, wrong party.

And…

2) Resist the temptation:

If you do, I’ll bake you cookies…

She’s, like, pregnant.  The cookies will be something like Spam Cilantro Fudge Snickerdoodles or something like that. 

Question:  If a leftyblogger says a unicorn is standing next to you, and then declares himself “reality-based”, should you saddle up for a magical ride through the starry skies?

Mark Gisleson continues to try to turn my comments about conservatives and demonstrations into something they’re not. 

Too much stuff to fisk (now), but this bit in particular was interesting:

Mitch says there won’t be much in the way of counterprotesters at the RNC next year because “conservatives” just aren’t into groups. Funny, they sure used to turn out in record numbers for George Bush, but then “conservatives” love to be lied to. Over and over again.

Now, do we really think Mark Gisleson can’t tell the difference between going to a campaign rally – an energizing gathering of people whose company one generally enjoys, toward a mutual end (no matter what your party or who your candidate) – and standing on a sidewalk waving a hand-made sign as an endless procession of not-too-literate droogs slouches past chanting gibberish and oozing self-righteousness? 

No, I know it’s possible.  I’m just asking.

…and in a very close-fought race, we have a near-upset in the running for the Twin Cities Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog!

As of tally time, the results were:

1. Minnesota Monitor (25 votes)
2. Impeccable Liberal Credentials (23 votes)
3. Susan Lenfestey’s “Clothesline” Blog (19 votes)
4. Dump Bachmann (15 votes)
5. MNBlue (8 votes)
6. Norwegianity (7 votes)
7. Cucking Stool (1 vote, apprently from a remorseful City Pages staffer on a vendetta)
8. MNPact and Across the Great Divide (tie, 0 votes)

It was an exciting dash to the finish, but apparently “pretentious propagandablog funded by liberals with deep pockets that uses their “ethics statement” for toilet paper” trumps “deep political thoughts of left-leaning pr0n stars” by just a tetch.

Congrats to the winners!  And to everyone else – hang in there.  Next year is just 51 weeks away!

Mark Gisleson of Norwegianity, apparently bummed about finishing way out of the big money in the Unintentionally Funny Leftyblog contest (despite years of dedicated striving from colleague MNob, would would definitely be a contender in the Individual category, if I had the bandwidth to present such a contest) apparently didn’t like this line, from a post last week about conservatives and protesting…:

 Conservatives are like sharks; any one of us is a match for dozens of liberals, and our very presence at marches or school board meetings or community council elections provokes unreasoning fear, panic, irrationality and an “end justifies the means” mentality.

He responded:

The first graf is the award-winner [for some hypothetical “unintentionally funny conservative blogger” contest – of which more below], the latter is the clip and save for next year to see if he’s still using this excuse for the pitiful wingnut counterprotester presence at the RNC.

He was talking about this quote from me:

 So I have neither the illusion of nor the desire to try to get thousands of conservatives out into the street next year for the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul. But I do want to get dozens out on the street, and spotted around the city’s various choke points, with cameras and video and laptops and wireless cards, to make sure that the “demonstrators” are held accountable to the world for the actions of their, er, less-restrained fellows.

 Of course, Gisleson misses the point; if he could see the point, he’d be a conservative.

Nobody – least of all me – is under any impression that conservatives will ever clog the streets of Saint Paul, waving signs and carring papier-mache puppets and chanting like a bunch of lobotomized droogs.  That’s the left’s monopoly, and y’all are welcome to it.  We cannot “fail” to spark a mass movement “in the street” at the convention, because there is not the faintest intention to try to create one.

Never has been!

Never will be!

The real intentions?  They’re hidden (apparently) in plain sight, in one post or another here and on True North, for whatever it may be worth to you.

So read again.  And focus.  Belay your dreams of bobbing down Kellogg Boulevard inside a giant Cheney head puppet for a few moments. 

Leave the goalposts alone.

Today’s the last day of voting in the “Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog Contest“.  Get your votes in today for the final tally tomorrow. 

And maybe the contest to date shows that I’m getting all my bad predictions out of my system before the election.  The blogs I thought would be the front-runners – Norwegianity, MNBlue and Cucking Tool – are coming up nerf.

In the meantime, Minnesota Monitor has held their early lead over expected frontrunner, Susan Lenfestey’s “Clothesline” – but “Impeccable Liberal Credentials”, a real dark horse, has come from nowhere to race into second place.

Get your votes in.  The fate of the world is riding on them.

Gary Miller at TvM is a little down in the dumps over the Ramstad retirement:

Jim Ramstad is the embodiment of everything I loathe about RINOs.  He is an SOB but he’s OUR SOB and losing Ramstad would almost certainly mean losing this “first ring” seat. 

I’m not quite as down on Ramstad as Gary; day in and day out, he did usually vote with the good guys; the American Conservative Union rated him a feeble but not-catastrophic 68% (equal to Norm Coleman, better than John McCain), while at least one lefty source isn’t exactly scattering palm fronds in his path.  Of course, he screwed the conservative pooch on many vital issues; he first earned my ire by voting for Clinton’s 1994 “Crime Bill”, a greater impingement on civil liberty than anything the Bush Adminstration has even suggested in the left’s most paranoid delusions.  In balance, he’s generally on the right side (compared to Minnesota’s DFLers), but frustratingly unreliable.

Of course, we’d like to shoot for better than “sucks less”:

Congressional majorities are comprised of true believers and heretics.  Congressman Ramstad is a card-carrying member of the latter but his departure would make it that much more difficult to regain the Speaker’s gavel in the next few election cycles. 

The obvious answer, of course, is to win the Third District for a conservative.

Gary’s stablemate First Ringer is on the case with the best wrapup of potential candidates I’ve seen yet.

Look for more – much more – on TrueNorth, where this race is going to be one of the big priorities for the next year.

And someone tell Gary to cheer up.  This is an opportunity.