…but he doesn’t write about it.

At least not on Nick Coleman | Unbound and Unbowed blog, which is also Unupdated.

For October 20:

1. Find a new design template for the blog. Check.  Looks cool so far, fits my basic design requirements (I’m a usability guy), shouldn’t tax my limited CSS knowledge too badly and yet can be customized fairly easily.
2. Get my server password figured out so I can actually get onto my server to do the fix.  Check.  I’ve gotten to be on a first-name basis with tech support at my hosting provider, so that helps.
3. Get all the various collaterals I need – images, ads, etc – together in once place to get the job done – Incomplete.  But that’s OK.  It’s an iterative project, as we say in the IT business.  However, unlike most “iterative projects”, it’ll get done…
4. Find four or five hours of free time to get the job done – Not Started.  Epic fail there.

Soon, though.  Very soon. It’s an “iterative project”, as we say in the IT racket.

Unlike most “iterative projects”, it’ll actually get done.

For a few years now, people have been asking “when the heck is Katie Kieffer going to start doing a blog?”

And by jinky, Kieffer – “the Laura Ingraham of Saint Thomas” –  finally is!

And she’s writing from a slightly different perspective than the typical conservative blogger.

Worth a read!

He couldn’t beat the buh-LAW-ggers…

…so he joined them.

The subhead says he’s “unbound and unbowed”.

This oughtta be good for a yuk or two.

Tired of investing your hard-earned ad dollar in skeezy bloggers that just get you in trouble with the feds?

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.

Note that I have never once given a distorted review of a product or service.

(Or an undistorted one, for that matter.  How the heck does one get that kind of business, anyway?)

The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

Heh.  Heh heh.  Heh heh heh heh.

The commission also said advertisers featuring testimonials that claim dramatic results cannot hide behind disclaimers that the results aren’t typical.

The FTC said its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final guidelines, which had been expected.

Here at Shot In The Dark, we’re not especially worried; we’ve never made a nickel for anything that wasn’t either clearly an advertisement or strictly disclosed.

Not that Doug, Roosh and I aren’t willing to try.  Just saying – we don’t need no steeking FTC to tell us our ethics.

Try us!

Daily Kos traffic is off by about 2/3 since the election (granted, “off” from 80 million visits a month to a still-pretty-immense 20-plus million)…

…while conservative front-runner Hot Air (cohosted by my radio partner Ed Morrissey, and at whose double-A farm club “The Greenroom” I write):  up sharply – to the point where it’s the first conservative site to pull ahead of Kos in many, many years.

Could it be that people are purging the kool-aid?

And so do I.

Time to pry open the hatch on that memory hole and start shoveling fast.

The Event:  While bowling, David Strom knocked down all but the 8 and 9 pin, and then – improbably – picked up the spare.

The Shorter Shot In The Dark: David Strom rolled a spare.

The Shorter True North: David Strom rolled a spare. (Comment on this post over at Shot In The Dark)

The Shorter Scott Johnson: In a scene reminiscent of the pandemonium after Jimi Hendrix’ tour de force at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, our good friend David Strom did to the pins what he’s spent a career doing to the opponents of Milton Friedman.

The Shorter Dump Bachmann: I bet it was actually Michele Bachmann dressed in a Strom suit.  Developing… 

The Shorter MNPost: We asked U of Minnesota Political Science professor Larry Jacobs to put Strom’s score in context for us…

The Shorter Ed Morrissey: David Strom rolled a spare – but he shouldn’t pin his hopes on a career as a bowler.

The Shorter Minnesota Progressive Project: David Strom knocked down 17 pens, just like Chimpy McBushitler knocked down teh Twin Towers.

The Shorter Lori Sturdevant: David Strom rolled a spare. Elmer Anderson, a real Minnesota Republican, would have left a few pins for Democrats to pick up.

The Shorter Dusty Trice: David Strom attacks mob!

I try – oh, Lord, I try – to be civil.  To exercise the better me.  To disagree without being disagreeable.  I try to let the better me shine through as much as I can. I truly do.

But when the subject is The Minnesota Tragedy of Spyrchaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project, it’s truly difficult.  Because the MToSPPP writers whose entire oeuvre isn’t dim-witted lying or disingeuous babble…

…are just so very, very, very, very dumb.  A writer called “Mark My Words” wrote this piece, about a bit of anti-gay graffiti in Washington County:

Imagine getting up in the morning, grabbing your coffee thermos and heading for the garage ready for work.  You hit the door-opener, and you back your sedan out and mindlessly hit the clicker to close the garage-door.  And while you’re in reverse, aiming your trunk-lid into traffic on your country-lane, you realize that this has been spray-painted in giant-sized green letter across 13 feet on the front of your house:

 

HIV AIDS gay help

Right?!  

Welcome to Ross Sveback’s world.

I’d say “read the whole thing”, but I’m not sure if your next of kin might not sue me for endangering your sanity.

No, it’s not the piece itself, which is a fairly rote recitation of the facts of a case the WashCo Sheriff is looking into.

No.  It’s the title.  “Homophobic Vandalism hits in Bachmann Country“.

Not one word connecting the vandalism (which, incidentally, I condemn) to Minnesota’s most conservative representative.

Not one bit of evidence that indicates the graffiti was politically-related at all. 

Bachmann’s opponents are to derangement what Nicole Ritchie is to “vacuous”.

UPDATE: I’m going to recap what commenter Thorley Winston said; the correct response to this crime is to condemn the act of vandalism without qualification. And I do. I hope they catch the little twerp – and I’d suspect Rep. Bachmann does, too.

Just a hunch, but I’m comfortable with it.

…a better definition of “moderate” than h the one MLP at Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry provided…:

When your house is under seige by the barbarians, a moderate is the guy who says “Fine.  Bar the doors.  But we’re leaving the windows open.”

I’ve been blogging for seven and a half years; I was a couple of years ahead of the “fad” curve, for once in my life.

And when it comes to political blogs, I think the various blog cultures reflect their owners.  Liberals, being primarily herd creatures, are very hierarchical in their blogging; if you follow a lot of leftyblogs (and I do), you can almost see the memes starting with Kos and Atrios and the Huffpo, and work their way down through the ranks (and I use the term “ranks” intentionally).  Conservatives, being basically decentralized (one could almost say “rudderless”, at times in the past half-decade) have approach blogging in a much less organized way – but the underlying current among conservative blogs has been less to serve as a political engine than as a form of “samizdat” alternative media to outflank what conservatives perceive (correctly) to be the bias and in-the-bag nature of the mainstream media.  That is, of course, a much more scattered approach.

And for people who make their living at this, it’s a distinction that matters.

Of course, the mainstream media is the last group of people that can really understand that, but when organizations like CNN try to write about the subject:

“While it is obvious the progressive blogosphere is superior, we are being out-organized on Twitter,” said Gina Cooper, a blogger who helped organize Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of online liberal activists that met last week in Pittsburgh. “There is some catching up to do on the progressive side.”

It took me a moment push  my skull back into my head when I read that – but once I did, it made sense, in context (where “context” means “with the parameters of the discussion shoved into a nearly meaningless corner”).  Liberal bloggins is superior, as a medium for delivering votes to Democrats.  Until the likes of the Center for “Independent” Media and other “Progressive” groups started pouring money into leftyblogging, either directly or via providing cushy full-time blogging jobs for leading leftybloggers, the lefty blogosphere was a morass of banal, unfocused, Bush-deranged rage.  With money and leadership, the leftysphere became a tightly focused array of banal, Bush-deranged rage aimed at raising money and turning out voters.

Of course, in the leftyphere focuses on opinion and organization, not on serious analysis or reporting.  There is no leftyblog analog to, say, Powerline’s shredding of Dan Rather’s hit piece on President Bush’s Air National Guard record.

But viewed purely as organizing?  The piece has a point.  For conservatives, the blogosphere is largely a replacement for the morning newspaper. Most of us are not fundemantally politcal people – we want government out of our lives, not at the center.  So keeping our “organizing” down to 140 characters or less makes perfectly good sense.

Of course, being CNN, there has to be a certain aspect of “they have now idea what they’re talking about” endemic in the piece: 

“Twitter is a news funnel,” she said. “Conservatives are very tightly knit and getting their message out very well.”

“Conservatives are tightly knit?”  That, of course, is madness.  At this juncture in American history, “conservative” is about as meaningful as, say, “caucasian”; just as any descriptor that covers everything from Icelandic people to Berbers, from Slavs to Spaniards is basically so broad as to be meaningless, so “conservative” is today.  Any label that covers the fiscal moderate but evangelical pro-life Mike Huckabee and the tax and immigration hawk Tom Tancredo, or the fiscal conservative but socially pragrmatic Tim Pawlenty, lacks a certain degree of focus.

But the piece has a point; whatever conservatives lack these days in terms of ideological congruency, we are (finally) making up, after two slack cycles, in paying attention and waking up and smelling the coffee and getting out and into politics again, not because of but in spite of the leadership we’ve had – or lacked – in the past six years or so.

And – hopefully – realizing that no matter what your key issue, having any conservative in office, even a conservative that is imperfect on your pet issue, is going to be a better bet than having even the “best ” (hypothetical) Democrat.

The conservative twittersphere is more than adequate – as the article notes – in saying “show up” and “send money”.  As to the “why?”

Well, for that we still have the long-form blog.  And at that, the CNN piece notwithstanding, the conservative blogosphere still excels alone.

Congrats to Sergeant Tom – aka Flash’s eldest son – on completing his hitch in the Marines.

As of last Friday, my son has completed his service with the United States Marine Corps. He currently is attend Engineering classes in Southern California. I hope he will find some time in his busy schedule to come home and visit his family.

I remember Tom from about age 12, of course – my stepson used to babysit him and Flash’s other two boys.  That was a very long time ago; I last saw Tom about 18 months ago.  A hitch in the Green Machine certainly turned him into a grownup.  I literally had not seen him since he was in junior high.  And there he was, on my front steps, looking like…a Marine sergeant!

And he had quite the career; he made Sergeant in under five years, which in a Corps not known for overpromoting is quite an achievement.  He did a tour in Anbar, as well as steaming all sorts of roundy-rounds in the Mediterranean.

Anyway – congrats, Tom, and good luck in your post service life!

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I have a thing for biting off big, long-form projects – multipart series that take months, even years, to get through.  My “Twenty Years Ago Today” series, which is currently somewhere north of 110 episodes, is just the most egregious example.

Blogs are an addiction, and the monkey’s been pummeling me for a long time.

Most telling part?  If Roosh, Doug and I got hit by a bus tomorrow, there’d be material popping up periodically on this blog – stuff I’ve already written – until sometime well into 2012. 

At the moment, it’s mostly a few series that I’ve actually been writing for a long, long time.

1. We’re coming up on the seventieth anniversary of World War II.  Indeed, we’re four weeks away from the anniversary of the invasion of Poland, which made it all official.  I have a long series of posts about the invasions of each of the nations that started out the war – Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and finally France – and the historical myths about each of them.  The stuff fascinates me – which is, indeed, all that matters, although if it fascinates you, that’s fine, too.
2. We’re close to the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most amazing periods of music in western pop music history.  I’ll be commemorating the thirtieth anniversaries of a couple dozen albums that set off the entire era. 
3. And – late-breaking news, here – I got wrapped up the other night in thinking about how much mainstream music from the seventies, which I hated hated hated when I was a kid, that I’m listening to now and thinking “dang, it wasn’t that bad”.  I might hit that one pretty quick, here, once a week or so, kinda like my “Stuff I Am Supposed To Love/Hate, but Can’t Stand/Love” series.

And the kicker is, both of those series are largely already written. 

Now, if only I had something stacked for tomorrow, already, so I could sleep in…

The bad news:  “Bogus Doug” Williams is shutting down Bogus Gold.

Which is a bit of a whack upside the local blog scene’s head.  BoGo has always been a great place for high-quality writing that doesn’t always mine the same topics, over and over again. 

He’s got the same reasons an awful lot of solobloggers have for backing out:

Surveying the scene now it’s a lot different than it was. It looks to me like the era of the small personality driven “boutique” blog, covering all the topics that may interest an individual blogger of no particular celebrity, is coming to an end.

This may not be an entirely bad thing. The ending of this particular blog era seems to stem from the availability of so many more options for doing that sort of thing than used to exist. You no longer need to set up your own personal blog to share all your interests and thoughts with the world. There’s Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other new social media which are better designed around individual personalities, and do a much better job connecting you to people who may care about what you have to say. I’ve tried them out myself, and while they don’t seem to suit me as well as a good old blog, I can definitely see their appeal and suitability for the things they’re made for.

This is a long way of saying I’ve decided to shut down this blog.

OK – the good news?  Doug will be blogging here at Shot In The Dark.  I made Doug the same offer I made Johnny Roosh about a year ago; “it’d be a shame to see you not blogging; do whatever you want at Shot, whenever you want.  Once a month, once a day, whatever”.  I’m happy to say Doug accepted.

I guess that means we need a staff meeting…

While the news from the rest of the economy remains dicey, Associate Executive Publisher Johnny Roosh and I are proud to announce that Shot In The Dark is increasing our headcount of unpaid writers by 50%.

Starting Monday, look for another “new” writer – actually a familiar face – at Shot In The Dark.

With the entry of my “evil” twin brother Jed into the world of low-end didactic cartooning,the hue and cry has been overwhelming; we need a contest.

Who, indeed, is the best blogger/cartoonist in the Twin Cities?

For years, it’s been generally recognized that Tom “Swiftee” Swift- auteur  of “Life In The Dumpster” -has been the dean of Twin Cities blog cartoonists. “LITD” has long combined trenchant satiric observation with the sort of gritty anti-style that only the best cartoonists can master.

But much has changed since “Dumpster” earned its first accolades.  Ken “Avidor” Weiner continues his prolific output under various names, some not even made public.  Tiger Lilly, from the Night Writer blog, has driven minimalism to its far edge.  Joe “Learned Foot’ Tucci from Kool Aid Report made “Fleen” – a story of a loveable family of prickly cyphers – into a local tradition before perversely pulling it from circulation.  And I gotta say, I think my twin bro is an up-and-comer.  (We’ll leave Dan Lacey from Faithmouse out of it for now; in contrast with the rest of the list, he’s an actual professional and recognized artist).

So who’s the best?

We’ll let you decide!

First – the nominees:
Nomination 1:  Tom Swift

Few artists make “crudity” – in style, technique and content – a tool in and of itself like Tom “Swiftee” Swift.

The cartoons – done in Microsoft Paint, usually with no more than a thumb and index finger – and intended tolook crude, slapdash and half-finished, as if Swift is commenting on the overproduced, over-colored, over-stylized, self-consciously “Retro” stylings of too many underground cartoons.

Nomination 2:  Fleen

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci’s “Fleen”, set in a fictional void amidst a larger void, is an ironic commentary on the overly-structured pointillism of most “post-modern” cartoons.

Tucci’s been praised for his style – deftly suggesting dynamism and motion even though his characters remain superficially motionless, as if daring one to keep up.  It reminds one of the great Danish neo-structuralist cartoons from the sixties through the early eighties.

It’s edgy stuff; some wondered if it didn’t take too much out of Tucci for it to continue, when he pulled his Bill Watterson-like retirement from cartooning last year.
Nomination 3:  Planet Terry

This strip is drawn by my twin brother Jed, who says “my aim is to convey everything – love, hate, rage, sex, laughter – with as little effort as possible”.
e

Some criticize his work as derivative and excessively inky.  You be the judge.
Nominee 4: Anorexics Inaneymous

The sine qua non of minmalism, AI – drawn by “Tiger Lily” from Night Writer – is a deft commentary on life in the 21st century.

Minimal as it is, the strip conveys deftly conveys an amazing range of feeling.
Nominee 5:  Bicyclopolis

Ken “Avidor’ Weiner draws Bicyclopolis.

Looking as if it was cribbed from a 1977 issue of High Times, Bicyclopolis depicts (apparently) a fictional world where peoples’ hands are frozen into grotesque parodies of…I dunno, ham carved into hand shapes.  Which is a searing commentary on man’s inhumanity to cartoon hands.

It’s a tough decision, folks.  Which is why I’m fobbing it off on all of you.

Who is the best online cartoonist in the Twin Cities?

UPDATE:  And that’s a wrap:

Congratulations to all the contestants – because in the world of Twin Cities blog cartooning, just showing up makes you a winner!

Except Jed.

I told you so, JedHead.

Mommy always liked you better.

Seems pretty accurate to me.

It’s on the internet, so it must be true.

UPDATE:  By jinkies, I think they’ve seen my comment section!

There is no blogger in MInnesota who has had a greater impact on Minnesota politics than Michael Brodkorb.

Michael’s a friend, a former NARN colleague, and one of the sharpest political minds I know.

And Minnesota Democrats Exposed has been both a juggernaut and a lightning rod for the past five years or so; it’s been a powerful force for transparency in Minnesota govenment; it’s broken more stories about DFL malfeasance than, I think, both the dailies and all the TV stations put together.  Naturally, it’s drawn ten blogs’ fair share of ire from the local left; the smart lefties know Michael’s a sharp, canny opponent; the rest of them just bay at the moon until they soil themselves, and then go put up a post on Minnesota Progressive Project.

Michael has written, by his count, 7,000 posts (it’s amazing how it adds up, isn’t it?) – and he says he only regrets one of them:

There is one post that has never really fit into the focus of my blog, one post that never felt right, one post I wish I hadn’t posted on Minnesota Democrats Exposed. In almost 5 years of blogging, I have never issued an apology – until now.Back on January 4, 2008, I published a post awarding Drew Emmer with the first ever first-ever Minnesota Democrats Exposed Man Not In The Arena Award and Mitch Berg an “honorable mention.” Click here to read the back-story and the post-post commentary.

Drew and Mitch are both my friends and I should have picked up the phone to contact them with my frustrations. I should have sent a private e-mail and both of them would have politely responded and we could have had a respectful and production conversation. But I instead chose to publish a smart-ass post, and in the process wasn’t respectful to either Drew and Mitch. It was a jerky thing to do to my friends. As hard-working, principled conservatives, they both deserved better than to labeled as “do-nothings” and I want to publicly apologize to both Drew and Mitch for this post of January 4, 2008.

Well, I do appreciate it – but it was never necessary.  While I disagreed with Michael’s original point – everyone’s got a right to an opinion, although the opinions of those who do and deliver count for more – I took it as a challenge; less talk, more rock.  And I figure among people who are on the same team, those sorts of things have to – and, honestly, had better – be treated that way.
Anyway – today’s Michael’s last day at MDE.  The intellectual imbalance facing Twin Cities’ leftybloggers will fade from “absurd” to merely “hopeless”.

And best of luck, Michael!

SCENE: A Very Special  Place.  Four people – two women (GRACE and “PHOENIX”) and two men (TOM and BIFF) – are sitting around a table.

GRACE:  “God, I hate George W. Bush”.

PHOENIX: “Me too”

TOM: “Me too,too”.

BIFF: “You do know that he’s not President anymore.  Right?”

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: “Never mind”.

[The four people peck away at keyboards]

PHOENIX: “Wanna see what I wrote about the elections in Iran and the dirty neocon plot?”

THE OTHER THREE: “Sure”

PHOENIX (reads aloud):

“the neoconservatives and their allies in the news media were already hammering away at [the notion that negotiating with an illegitimate government is impossible] within minutes of the announced results.

“However, the fact that there are massive opposition-led protests and that the opposition is quite Westernized-looking — as our TV networks have been showing us over the past twenty-four hours — works against the neocon plan to garner American support for nuking Iran until it glows. The neocons want us to think of the Iranians as subhumans with whom we have nothing in common and who therefore deserve a fiery death. It’s actually harder for them to sell that POV when our TV screens are showing us people who would not look at all out of place in any American town or city.”

GRACE: “Yaaaaay!  When the world finds out the Neocon Air Force is going to nuke Iran, just like they nuked the World Trade Center…”

TOM and PHOENIX: “Hisssssss!”

BIFF: “Er, there is no “neocon air force”.

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: “I mean, if the “neocons” were going to nuke Iran, wouldn’t they have done it when they, y’know, had power?”

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: “For that matter, I’m not aware of a “neocon” policy on Iran – Bush certainly had none – other than Michael Ledeen’s.  And Ledeen’s ideas involved peaceful destabilization of the mullahs by supporting the trade unions and other peaceful dissident groups, in recognition of the fact that a good majority of Iran’s people would be happy to rejoin the west and lay off the damn theocracy.

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: Stop me if I’m wrong, but I’m at a loss to think of a single credible “neocon” who’s advocated “nuking” a largely friendly country because of the mullahs.

TOM:  “Why do you hate the troops?”

GRACE: “CHIMPY!  CHiMPY MCBUSHITLER!”

NURSE RATCHED [opens window and yells]: “OK, everyone…”

PHOENIX [turns]: “Nurse Ratched! Biff is being naughty!”

RATCHED: “that’s nice, Phoenix.  Time for your meds”.

[The four stand up and get in line at the window]

[AND…SCENE]

I was shocked to read over at Casual Sundays about the turmoil in MLP’s life:

I have strayed.

I have been unfaithful.

I have lusted after that which was not mine.

I have coveted.

I wasn’t looking for trouble.  I wasn’t unsatisfied with my choices. I was happy!  I never thought I’d be the type…I didn’t know!

I didn’t know.

Forgive me.

Read the whole sordid, cathartic story over at CSwMC.

Ed landed a great “get” on the Northern Alliance Volume II show today; Patrick “Patterico” Frey, of Patterico’s Pontifications, talking about the run-in with Bill O’Reilly.

A brief run-down of the flap:

1. Thursday, O’Reilly slagged on Hot Air – Michelle Malkin’s blog, for which my radio colleague Ed Morrissey writes – for making a scabrous posting.
2. Michelle, Ed and Allahpundit noted that the “posting” in question was actually a comment; something that Hot Air doen’t regulate or supervise a whole lot more strictly than I do.
3. O’Reilly went on “The Factor” and issued a wussy non-apology, saying in essence “OK, I reported it wrong, but Hot Air should police their comments as rigously as I police mine.
4. Patterico signed up for a membershp ($5 a month – yes, you have to pay to leave a comment at O’Reilly’s website), and published a slew of scabrous, “unpoliced” comments.
5. Patterico’s membership was terminated.

Patterico’s conclusion, via Ed?

Did Patterico get a high-five from the Factor for his intrepid work in pointing out hateful comments?  Not exactly:

I wish I could share today’s “BillOReilly.com blog posting” . . . but my membership has been terminated …

Oh, wait. I just reviewed the Terms and Conditions again, and I believe I have found the relevant language: “4. Do not expose Bill O’Reilly as a rank hypocrite.”

Note to O’Reilly; take your “No Integrity Zone” and go over to the other guys once and for all.  You’re not a conservative; you’re a populist gasbag who would throw the Reagan Legacy and the Rights of Man under the bus to give you an extra point in the PPMs.
Go.  Please.

By the way, feel free to check in on Monday at Townhall.com for the podcast of today’s show.  Patterico is at the end of Hour 2, but it was a good show from beginning to end, and you could do a lot worse than add it to your weekly podcast diet.

I’ve been doing this blog for over seven years.  I’ve written somewhere north of 10,000 posts in that time.  Most of them are gone and forgotten – it’s an ephemeral medium – but I have a few favorites.

And so do other people. I have a few posts I’ve written through the years that still get the occasional commenter, years after they were written; they turn up prominently on Google, so they have a bit of a life of their own. Posts about Plain Layne, Bill Frist, Ann Nelson (North Dakota’s sole 9/11 victim), Kathleen Soliah, the Vikings Sex Cruise and Garrison Keillor still draw hits.

Brad Carlson has has a bit of a brush with this phenomenon.  Here’s now it starts:

I am still receiving comments on a post I put together last month. In that one, all I did was cut and paste an e-mail I received from AM 1500 KSTP where they announced the dismissal of talk show host Bob Davis.But the one which really takes the cake is a post where I made a throwaway comment about a long forgotten former Twin Cities sportscaster.

Read the post and see how it ends.

Gary Gross notes that the polls are starting to relent a little for the GOP nationally. He quotes a Rasmussen Poll:

For just the second time in more than five years of daily or weekly tracking, Republicans now lead Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 41% would vote for their district’s Republican candidate while 38% would choose the Democrat. Thirty-one percent (31%) of conservative Democrats said they would vote for their district’s Republican candidate.

Gross:

I don’t doubt that that last sentence is giving Democratic strategists gray hair. Though there’s no doubt that we’ll see fluctuations between now and Election Day 2010, there’s also no doubt that the Democrats have misread the electorate. The Democrats’ misreading the election results has helped put the GOP in better shape than we’ve been in a long time.

Yes, but there’s an asterisk there.  We’ll come back to that.

I credit the change in the generic ballot to three things: President Obama’s radical agenda, President Obama’s arrogance and the House Republicans’ principled stand against Obama’s radical agenda. Obama’s radical agenda has given conservatives something to fight against while the House Republicans’ principled stance against that agenda is giving conservatives something to fight for.

Obama’s agenda is a factor.  Congress adds the arrogance and the agenda, one that I think is going to turn out to be a drag on Obama.  And the House GOP’s battle has been a blessing.

But so far all that gives us is something to campaign against.  Until the GOP has something to campaign for – a positive message – the good news cup is only half full.

On the positive side – it can’t be that hard to craft a positive message when the executive branch is so amateurish and naive (Obama’s tongue-kiss of Hugo Chavez did not play well in middle America) and Congress is so gigantistic and arrogant.

On the negative side: I don’t know that we have anything close to a standard-bearer for that message yet.

Only seventeen months ’til the next elections!

ApplePieMom is the mother of a recently-deployed serviceman, and the proprietor of a new, eponymous, blog that is probably already on Janet Napolitano’s watch list.

And she wants to see red on Friday:

Very soon, you will see a great many people wearing red every Friday. The reason? Americans who support our troops used to be called red-blooded Americans, and are also acknowledged as the “silent” majority. While we receive precious little media coverage that gives voice to this position, we are showing our
 love for our troops, our country and our homeland in record breaking numbers. When asking a soldier, “What can we do to make things better for you?” the first answer is, “We need your support and your prayers.” Americans, like you, me, and many of our friends, simply want to recognize that the vast majority of us want to offer this support. Our idea of showing solidarity and support for our troops, starts this Friday by wearing something red and continues each and every Friday, sending a visual message that they may see or hear about overseas.

I suppose it’s more tactful than a “kill ’em all and let G-d sort ’em out” T-shirt.

Please help me get the word out: if every one of us will share this message with acquaintances, co-workers, friends, and family, I have no doubt it will not be long before the USA is covered in red on Fridays. It will let our troops know the “silent” majority is on their side more than they realize. Let’s lead this visual effort, silently, respectfully, and with dignity, just by wearing something RED FRIDAY.

Count me in.

It’s been almost four years since I codified the various “Berg’s Laws” in one convenient place.

It’s high time I updated things.

Berg’s First Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary – “No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the President’s justifications for the War in Iraq at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive”

Berg’s Corollary to Bissonnette’s Law – (Whenever someone introduces an “Old West” analogy into a discussion on civilian firearms ownership, the person can be presumed to be covering for absolute ignorance on the subject). Corollary: Whenever anyone says “people who favor guns are compensating for something, ifyaknowwhatImean”, know what they mean only in the most academic possible sense.

Berg’s Third Law of Human Resilience – After any disaster, whenever government and the media declare “there can not be any more survivors, and this is now a recovery operation”, they will be wrong.

Berg’s Fourth Law of Media/Sports Inversion – The Vikings will be contenders until the moment the local media actually believes they will be contenders. At that moment – be it pre-season or Week 12 – the season will fall irredeemably apart.

Berg’s Fifth Law of Historical Illteracy – 99% of the invocations of Godwin’s Law are done by 1% of the online population. Corollary: That 1% understands .000001% of the history required for a literate invocation of Godwin’s Law.

Berg’s Sixth Law of writing a Blog in a city full of people with dubious senses of Humor – To every joke, there is an equal and opposite inappropriately petulant reaction.

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Blogging – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.