The greatest South Park episode of all time: the one where they lampooned MTV’s Sweet Sixteen.

Oh, I thought lines like “Oh, it’s OK, Satan – you’re not as bad as those kids on Sweet Sixteen” were funny on principle.

Then I finally saw Sweet Sixteen. Kudos to Stone and Parker; at least I had the memories of the SPark episode to help assuage the crushing depression that watching Sweet Sixteen gave me – the creeping realization, watching those spoiled, vacuous little pigs – that “maybe the terrorists have a point after all”.

That is all.

We don’t care how you make your f*$&%^g pizza:

That’s the basic message from Mrs. Ciminieri at Totonno’s, who was finally persuaded to taste a Domino’s slice in the name of research.

“In Utah, they’re going to love it because they use ketchup and American cheese on their pizzas,” she said. “It tastes like any other pizza you get at the corner slice joint. They used the same tomatoes, the same processed cheese, the same preservatives.”

The worst pizza I had in my life was in…well, actually it was London. And then Paris. And then Amsterdam (which holds the record for the worst hamburger). But New York was in my bottom ten (as well as top three).

But Chicago still makes better pizza.

Sorry, N’yawk.

The public school system has a lot of problems.

• The goal, in this era of “No Child Left Behind”, is for students to do well on tests. That’s about it. Schools, teachers and administrators can back and fill all they want, but at the end of the day they are all just “teaching the test” – on pain of running afoul of NCLB’s “Accountability” rules. NCLB has been ta disaster.
• The biggest disaster, of course, was way public education got into the mess in the first place. The teachers’ unions take a lot of blame – justifiably – for the “dumbing down” of education. The unions, being unions, have done their best to turn education into a blue-collar factory job with white-collar accessories and workload. Detractors call the system the “Factory Model of Education”, and justly so; the system resembles an assembly line. Procedures must be followed. Parts that don’t fit the specs are removed from the production line. Speed and efficiency are essential.
• The basic model for education – sit in a desk in an airless building for six to eight hours at a shot, eat lousy food, get water only when given (infrequent) permission, learning things when someone else, a curriculum designer or teacher, deems fit – is one that works, objectively, for maybe a tenth of the population. For the rest, it’s a matter of gritting one’s teeth and toughing it out, or…not. Remember – most of what kids learn in six years of elementary school can be taught to average kids of average intelligence in a matter of weeks.
• Above all, students have to show up and sit in those damn desks. Schools are paid on a per-student, per-day basis; if Johnny doesn’t have his butt in that desk at 8:40, the school doesn’t get paid for the days that the student is absent, or even late without an excuse.

It’s hard to figure which is less of wonder – that kids see the whole charade as a waste of time, or that the schools are failing to teach more and more kids the basics every single year.

The Strib addresses the truancy “crisis” in an editorial this morning:

At North High School, almost 50 percent of the 1,300 students skipped enough school last year to be considered habitual truants. That’s the highest truancy rate in Minneapolis — not coincidentally in one of the highest crime areas in the city. Those numbers speak volumes about how important is it to intervene with early-stage truants.

Only if you presume that:

• …school figures on “truancy” are accurate. They are not. Schools consider a student who is late without a “valid excuse” three times in a semester to be “truant”. They don’t, for the record, care why the student is late without an excuse; absentminded parents forgetting to write notes, kid missed the bus, car wouldn’t start, kid not feeling well? Who cares! The kid is “truant!” Why? We’ll get to that.
• …wanting to leave the madhouse of the modern inner city school is inherently irrational. Yet in a school where the majority of students do not learn what they need in the adult world (to say nothing of things like critical thinking and the love of learning), where they go through metal detectors and practice “locking down” and are subject to a routine more in line with prison than with school, truly – what’s irrational about wanting out?

The districts respond, of course, like any bureaucracy:

Recent city and county efforts are not the first or only antitruancy programs. Both Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys’ offices have addressed the issue with some success.

Really?

Have they?

Ramsey County’s “Truancy Intervention Program” employs a group of lawyers to chase after “truant” kids – county prosecutors who should be prosecuting crimes against citizens. They spend their highly paid days chasing after kids and parents who, for whatever reason, don’t get to class (or just don’t get there on time often enough), threatening dire consequences for non-compliance.

Have they had “some success”? The program’s website explains the “success” in terms that make perfect sense to bureaucrats; butts were indeed jammed back into seats. So why does a school district need to have the full weight of the County Attorney’s office to corral kids back into their seats? Could they do it less expensively – or is the TIP basically a make-work program for less-talented county lawyers?

This isn’t rocket science: Teens who like school and feel successful there are much less likely to skip. Young people who regularly participate in activities through community, church or school are too busy to look for trouble.

But the first thing school districts cut when the budgets are cut fail to rise as fast as the union wants are the very programs that help give so many kids a reason to stay current – indeed, where so many kids learn vastly more than they do in school, if they’re at all like I was.  And – biggest madness of all – “good” schools are now demanding a positively insane amount of homework, a bit of collective lunacy that deserves its own post.

As fond as the left is of seeking “root causes” for things, you’d think they’d be interested in the “root cause” of truancy.  But I suspect the “root result” is the biggest issue to them.

Deroy Murdock on Giuliani’s shot at winning the GOP base in time for the ’98 race:

Surveys consistently demonstrate that Giuliani, not Arizona Senator John McCain, is this race’s frontrunner. It’s not even close…Among likely Republican voters polled in Michigan, McCain beat Giuliani 33 percent to 25. Rudy romped elsewhere in Strategic Vision’s November 6 survey. Giuliani outran McCain by nine points in Georgia (33 percent to 24); 19 in Florida (46 percent to 27) and Washington State (42 percent to 23); 22 in New Jersey (47 percent to 25); and 23 points in Pennsylvania (47 percent to 24). Governor Mitt Romney (R., Mass.) scored, at best, a distant third in these states…Some argue that Giuliani’s prominence in this and other polls merely reflects his high name ID. But this notion shatters beside McCain and both Clintons — three household names.

Most conservatives have their troubles with Giuliani. I do.

But they’re solveable problems – to me, anyway.

Question for conservatives; given that Rudy seems to have immense legs and that he’s right on so many conservative issues (while being dead-wrong on a few), what would it take for Rudy to make nice enough for you to vote for him in a primary?

And if he was the one that got out of the convention with the nomination, would you vote for him?

The Strib Editorial board yesterday cried crocodile tears about the tone of this state and nation’s political debate, in the form of a paeon to the healing power of Thanksgiving. The piece starts out well, as far as it goes:

The platters circled and tensions rose until some word or gesture or foregone rejoinder — invisible even afterward! — made possible a turning point, and it all turned out all right.

Remember what Tolstoy said about happy families being all alike? We might suggest that picture-book Thanksgivings are all the same, while each stress-tested celebration that ends well is a triumph of unique circumstances, proving anew the wide possibilities of peacemaking.

Indeed – what a wonderful sentiment!

And then it makes a turn that makes one wonder – Did the Strib farm this editorial out to one of their regular writers’ wives? Or does the Strib really believe this stuff?

In today’s America the distinctive flavor of political life is bitterness. It is not the depth of our differences that distinguishes this era so much as the rancor of our arguments, a thoroughgoing disrespect for opposing ideas and the people who hold them, for the weight of facts and the worth of pluralism.

But we who fashion this page want to believe that if families and friends can heal their long-nursed hostilities with the help of roast turkey and root vegetables, then there is hope for bridging the merely political disputes among the players in our newly redivided government — and among the partisans who put them there.

We want to believe that the elections just past have created the possibility of a turning point, a chance to change not only the course of the nation but the tone of its conversations.

We want to believe that people who can shelve seething resentment for the sake of getting through a holiday meal with their families can do the same in service of healing for our country. Don’t you?

Year after difficult year, the lesson of Thanksgiving is that all of us bring our faults and imperfections, our personal burdens of blame, to the feast table. If we behave ourselves and give others the benefit of our doubts, we may just leave it with a helping of grace.

Ah.  So we can expect the Strib to take a step back and recognize that conservative Republicans believe what we do for a reason, and quit referrring to every conservative as a “divisive” “extremist”?

We can expect the Strib to report the whole story, even if telling the whole truth exonerates Republicans?

Sorry, Strib editors.  I don’t believe a word of it.

The sub-head on today’s piece on the Ventura Independence Party reads:

The third party’s dismal results on Nov. 7 are prompting a reassessment of the way it appeals to independent-minded voters.

Mark Brunswick – the Strib’s political writer who did the piece – knows better than this (and shows us so, later in the piece).  There is nothing “Independent” about the Independence Party.

Independent voters remain a relatively small bloc of the electorate, and even they are not a reliable source of support for IP candidates.

The week before the election, the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found that hard-core independents make up one in 10 Minnesota voters.

And exit polling showed that Peter Hutchinson, the gubernatorial candidate of the Independence Party, captured only 12 percent of the independents.

“Independence” was never what the Ventura Independence Party was about. After Ross Perot and before Jesse Ventura, the party drew the customary, embarassing 1-2% that the likes of the Libertarians and Greens drew in significant elections. Once Perot left the scene, the party was taken over by mushy-middle DFLers like Dean Barkley and Tim Penny – wonky Democrats who made “moderation” their big stump talking point, with about as much success as it always has.

Then along came Ventura, who won the governor’s race for the same reason Minnesotans run from hot saunas into cold lakes, or snowmobile through the dark while hammered, or root eternally for the Vikings despite their record – because it’s our nature to do dumb things for the fun of it.

Of course, you’d have to have been dumb enough to be a mainstream media figure to be fooled by the inner workings of the Ventura Administration, which was essentially Ventura’s irascible “personality”, with Dean Barkley and Tim Penny pulling Ventura’s  strings on all things policy-related.  It’s why Ventura ran – and won – on a promise of returning the entire budget surplus to the taxpayers, but governed on a wonky, picayune formula that divided the surplus up among puny refunds and spending.  Lots and lots of spending, which turned into a huge deficit when the economy recessed in the early ’00s.

DFL-Lite.

With Ventura gone, the party is back to its roots; wonks.  People who say things like “good government” with chipper earnestness, believing that government solves problems and that if you just twiddle the knobs enough eventually everything will work just fine.

The IP is like the AV Club for people with Poli Sci degrees who had to get real jobs after college.  Nobody is fooled.
Well, almost nobody:

While some idealize independents as more serious about politics than party adherents, in reality they tend to be less informed, less likely to vote and less interested in politics, said Kathryn Pearson, assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.

“These are not the people who constitute an active, viable party,” she said.

Pearson added that today’s partisan polarization makes it less likely that people will back a third-party candidate if they see it as a wasted vote.

So when people involved in the IP say things like…:

“There has been in the past a presumption among the Independence Party that we can simply state a good idea and people will flock to it. We know that presumption is wrong, but we have been slow to adapt,” wrote Peter Tharaldson, the party’s Fifth Congressional District chairman, in a rough draft of a position paper on the party’s future.

IP state chairman Jim Moore acknowledged that voter support for the party this year was weaker than hoped.

“Minnesota voters chose to remain on the teeter-totter that is the Democratic and Republican two-party system,” Moore said. “At a minimum, we can hold them accountable, but the reason why we’re in this is to win and show Minnesota a better way of governing. Flat out, we didn’t convince enough people that we could do that this time around.”

…I have to wonder if even the the IP’s tiny film of partisans even believes this crap anymore?  The IP’s showing in governor races drops by a little over half in each election.
The Independence Party needs a celebrity.  A big celebrity with huge name recognition and a big mouth with lots of big-sounding but very shallow ideas to appeal to people who really don’t think about politics all that hard, like boat fees and license tabs, but who’s willing to govern as a marionette for Tim Penny, Dean Barkley and Peter Hutchinson.

I’m thinking an appeal to Madonna, Tim Robbins or Michael Moore might work.

It was four years ago, during this blog’s first Thanksgiving, that I wrote what is still my favorite Thanksgiving post, one that reads like one of my “Twenty Years Ago Today” posts (indeed, probably served as the prototype for that endless series of mine).

So rather than write a whole lot, I’m just going to quote a chunk of it, a look back at my first Thanksgiving in the Twin Cities.

I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years – the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in ’87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in ’88, crazy in love in ’89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in ’90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in ’91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in ’92, in a new house in ’93…wondering how long my marriage would last in ’98, being able to answer the question “not long at all” in ’99…

…and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad…well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there’s the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I’d better get on with it.

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

The following year, of course, was 2003 – one of the most harrowing years of my life. So I’m thankful things got better – much better.

I’m thankful today for:

• A new job, starting in a week and a half, which may be the one I’ve been hoping to find all these years.
• The little editing job I picked up last week, which will mean a nice extra chunk of change coming in in January.
• The show. I’ve perhaps gotten a bit spoiled; after years of pining for that little piece of myself I lost when I got blasted out of talk radio nearly 20 years ago, I simply revel in having it back, if only for a day a week.
• All the people in my life. You know who you are.
• Above all, my family – Bun and Zam, with all their maddening teenagerisms and budding eccentricities.

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving.

…the Stephanie Miller Show the first time I heard it…

…when it was called the Laura Ingraham Show.

Seriously. Same sound effects.  Same drops.  Same production style.  Same basic idea.

Laura should be getting royalties.

Rumors that Air America might be on the ragged brink of folding are making their way around the business.

I have to credit this little pan full of heaven to my ex-mother-in-law.  It’s “corn pudding” – basically a corn casserole, served as a side dish, as a substitute or (if you love your corn and stuffing as much as I do) supplement to stuffing (and you can have my corn pudding or my stuffing when you pry them from my cold, dead, carbo-bloated fingers).

I’ll be churning this out by the panful tomorrow.  The kids and I will no doubt fight over it:

Corn Pudding

1 large can  whole kernel corn, undrained
1 large can creamed corn
1 8 oz carton sour cream/yogurt
1/2 C melted butter
1 pkg Jiffy cornbread mix.

pour into buttered 8″ casserole or cake pan

bake 45 min at 350

top with grated cheddar cheese and bake 15 more min

if you do not want cheese topping bake the pudding for a total of 60 minute

The rest of Thanksgiving dinner?  I wised up and ordered the turkey and all the fixings from Kowalski’s this year.  Mmm Mmm Good!

The other day, I castigated the Strib’s editorial board for its dubious command of history.

What do you suppose the odds are that I’d have to do it again?  This time the offender is Syl Jones, the man who combines Lori Sturdevant’s keen evenhandedness, Nick Coleman’s writing chops, and Aaron McGruder’s sharp-eyed rejection of racial cliches.

He’s just as good when it comes to history!  This time, he’s comparing the President’s proposed “exit strategy” with our departure from Vietnam:

But there is something else afoot here. The folks who brought you “peace with honor” in Vietnam, officially proclaimed in January of 1973 by Republican President Richard Nixon, are also preparing to make a similar phony declaration in Iraq.

If you don’t remember that original declaration, all you need to understand is that our government’s goal during the war was to prevent the fall of Vietnam into Communist hands. Not only did we fail to do so but our 12-year presence there also inflamed a generation of Communists who subsequently slaughtered millions of their own people.

For starters, Syl, the Communists never needed to be “inflamed” to slaughter their own people.  Or did you ever read about any of this?

While the United States may not be directly responsible for the atrocities committed after it departed, anyone except the most partisan observer would be forced to admit that the whole enterprise could be blamed on a form of faulty intelligence: the domino theory.

No, Syl.  The fact that we got involved in a conventional land war in Asia could be blamed on the Domino Theory.  The fact that we got into it with hundreds of thousands of conventional troops is blamed on John F. Kennedy’s need for an easy PR win after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs.  But the Killing Fields?  That happened because we left – and broke our promise to return if things got bad.

Speaking of “things getting bad”, how are Syl Jones’ thought processes working these days?

Developed primarily by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the domino theory was a racist canard that stemmed directly from Dulles’ days as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. In that capacity, he traveled the world with John D. Rockefeller in an effort to convince his boss that the nonwhite populations of the world were growing too rapidly and must be contained.

Just re-read that graf a few times and let it sink in.  Syl Jones thinks that containing communism meant containing non-white people.

(No.  That would have been Margaret Sanger‘s thing).

But unlike Vietnam, where the Communists had little desire to kill Americans outside their borders, the militant Islamic insurgency is determined to end American hegemony everywhere. Peace with honor will therefore prove to be impossible in Iraq. To end this war, the American people will unfortunately be forced to face dishonor in the extreme, with little hope of ever finding peace.

That, or seeing this thing through.

So, Syl – you join me in rejecting the Democrats’ call for a fast, PR-slathered withdrawal?

From the latest Nick Coleman column:

Spare me the hate mail. I’m cool with the Lord. But I still love that old sing-along, “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love.” It doesn’t say “by our self-righteousness.”

*cough cough cough cough*

Wow. I…

cough cough Cough koff koff.

Whew. Sorry. I was having trouble swallowing that statement.

Oh, and I love the column’s title: “Another Minnesota Culture Warrior Forgets How To Make Minnesota Nice”.

Note to the Twin Cities Democrat Mainstream Media; could we, at long last, please retire that phrase?

I’m scanning down the list of possible events in my life, sorted in order of likelihood. I finally got to the very bottom:

#6,784,777,653 – Re-animating the dead with my smile
#6,784,777,654 – Me pitching a called third strike against A-Rod

#6,784,777,655 – Staying up to watch Joey reruns

#6,784,777,656 – Setting off the heat death of the universe via chain of events started by my sipping a cup of hot chocolate

#6,784,777,657 – Voting for Alice Hausman.

And at the very bottom of the list:

#6,784,777,658 – Ever buying anything from CompUSA.

It’s right there on the list!

Sharkbait from Anti-Strib comments on the expansion in number of Minnesota House committees under the new DFL regime:

You’d better hand on to your wallet…because I am sure that all of these committees will find new ways to spend your hard earned money!

Read the list in Bait’s post; each of those committees is eyeing your wallet.

Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical.

Michael Richards’ Krama’ culpa trudges on:

Michael Richards said Monday he spewed racial epithets during a stand-up comedy routine because he lost his cool while being heckled and not because he’s a bigot.

“For me to be at a comedy club and flip out and say this crap, I’m deeply, deeply sorry,” the former “Seinfeld” co-star said during a satellite appearance for David Letterman’s “Late Show.”

“I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this,” Richards said, his tone becoming angry and frustrated as he defended himself in a clip from the show played on CBS before “Late Show” aired Monday night.

I think it closes the circle.  Long before Seinfeld, Richards was desperately un-funny on the old ABC Fridays SNL knockoff.  He was the least funny part of Seinfeld. And he’s apparently a terrible standup.

We can be done with this, now – right?

The Strib editorial board tries to lecture the President on history – and proves they’ve never read any.

They’re jabbering about Bush’s visit to Hanoi. Bush made a remark that was an oversimplification, perhaps, when applied to Vietnam…:

My first reaction is history has a long march to it, and societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good,” Bush said. The lesson for Iraq, he said, is that, “It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful and that is an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate.” Then he added, “We’ll succeed, unless we quit.”

…with its customary, presumptive sniffing and phumphering:

Fortunately the diplomats at the conference were much too polite to guffaw Bush out of the room, though that last statement was a complete misrepresentation of what has happened in Vietnam. In a nutshell, Vietnam succeeded after and arguably because we quit.

The editors go in one sentence from helicopters on the embassy roof to a Vietnam that’s recovering and flirting with capitalism.

And about those 25 pesky years in between? Killing fields (which were in Cambodia, but part of the larger war, and part of the same panicked, Democrat-led US abandonment)? Boat people? Re-education camps? Piles of bodies?

Not, apparently, part of the Star/Tribune’s institutional memory – nor that of the Democrats, who refused to acknowledge their existence three decades ago; the inevitable results of a “cut and run” policy by any name.

American-Vietnam relations warmed only after Clinton got Americans to accept, grudgingly at the time (and Republicans were the biggest grudgers), that we needed to move on from the defeat we’d suffered in Indochina.

Republicans begrudged ignoring the defeat (that killed 50,000+ Americans) while Democrats wallowed in it, making it the key to their “foreign policy” to this day.

And perhaps in their spittle-flecked anti-Bush fervor they forgot that the Vietnamese, who suffered hundreds of thousands of dead, may not have been thrilled with the idea either.

If there’s a lesson in Vietnam for American policy in Iraq, it’s that the United States must be able to recognize the lost cause staring it in the face, deal with it and move on.

And if there’s a lesson in Vietnam for Democrats and the Strib editorial board (pardon the redundancy), it’s that the United States bails out with a job half-done, it’s no worse than (allegedly) going into a war for all the wrong reasons. It’s not “planning for the peace”, to put it in Democrat terms.

So when he spoke in Hanoi, Bush was a little bit right: Vietnam does offer lessons for Iraq. But the lessons it offers are far different from those Bush, in his ahistorical fashion, sought to concoct.

And far different than the Strib chose to selectively present.

I don’t necessarily believe that the Star/Tribune’s news editors sit around looking for ways to boost the DFL. I think the DFL is their only frame of reference when it comes to personal and institutional worldviews; they are like extras in Pauline Kael’s classics response to news of Nixon’s 1972 victory, “none of my friends voted for him!“.

Lori Sturdevant, on the other hand, exceeds even Doug Grow in her rank partisanship. Sunday’s column is full of the sort of grating, presumptive self-adulation that Sturdevant took to new personal heights in this past election.

I’m going to skip most of it, because honestly I can probably paste in parts from every other Sturdevant column I’ve ever fisked over the past 57 months and get the same effect. I can almost write the stereotype Sturdevant column, in fact:

Minnesotans love their government. Minnesotans NEED their government. Government is as much a part of the Minnesota character as breathing and passive-aggression. A few Republicans want to change that – but there’s hope we can roll back the tide and keep government…er, Minnesota happy.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating that much.

But here’s the part that frosts me (and this is really from Sturdevant’s column):

Those polled said in heartening numbers that they still think Minnesotans can solve their shared problems. But they are increasingly skeptical about using what has historically been a powerful tool for doing so — state government. Minnesotans need reasons to believe in their government again — and if this governor and Legislature are going to provide them, they need to keep this season’s spirit alive.

“Minnesotans need reasons to believe in their government again”…or else what? Minnesota has minuscule unemployment, a better-educated, healthier and often-happier population than almost anywhere in the nation…what’s to fix?
Government is not the vehicle of our hopes and dreams, much less the solution to our problems. Government is an employee – a lazy, arrogant one that the rules only allow us to fire every so many years.

Sturdevant is fantasizing about a “golden age” of Minnesota politics, where Republicans and Democrats “got along” and “cooperated” to enact a vision of government…

…that was purely the DFL’s. Sturdevant moons and fawns over an era where the Republicans were too gutted out – by the FDR era, by the era of Big Government it spawned, and ultimately by Watergate – to do anything but. An era – and “spirit” – that gave us huge, arrogant government with boundless appetite, and a populace that had been so sotted with the material rewards of keeping the status quo in power than it didn’t care – until the bills started coming due.

Things have changed. Minnesotans are starting – at 40-years’-long last – to take responsibility for their lives, and for regulating government’s role in them. November 7 was a hiccup along the way – the next decade will show it.

And Lori Sturdevant and her ilk will be there, no doubt, in ten years’ time, kvetching about those damn conservatives, not playing along with the people of Minnesota the DFL.

It’s been a while, but I got this one from Red:

Words that always look misspelled to me:

Sergeant, Weird, cemetery

Words I enjoy saying:

buncombe, barrage, scabrous, hamster, bollocks, vacuous, lambaste, donnybrook.

Words I enjoy hearing:

“You were right all along”, “On the house!”,

Abbreviations I dislike:

“nbr” for “number”, “etc”.

Proper nouns I enjoy:

Phuket, Bannockburn, Ouistreham, Zap, Amelie,

Words I associate with happiness:

guitar, vacation, talk show (I know, a phrase. So sue me).
Words I always misspell:

Weird, Vacuum (whaddya mean there’s only one “c”?).

Words I enjoy spelling correctly, every time:

Sphygmomanometer.

Words that, though I love their meaning, I’m too embarrassed to say out loud:

Can’t think of any.

Words I can never remember the meaning of no matter how many times I look them up:

Syllogism, Teleology.

Words that sound like what they mean:

goulash, leprosy, abortion, phlegm, vellum, invincible, velvet.

Words that sound like something other than what they mean:

Enervating. Gets me every time.

What are some of your favorite words?

ethereal, ether, fart, guffaw, chard, talus, scree, chum, warm.

Your least favorite?

Nubbin, Tomkat, Bebop (and Bebopareebop), boogie.

Background: At the end of the Cold War – nearly 20 years after the institution of the all-volunteer military – the US Army had a total of 18 divisions (plus ten more from the National Guard, for a total of 28 combat divisions). To this you could add enough sailors in the Navy to man nearly 600 ships, and about 30-40% more combat aircraft than today.
They were all volunteers. And that was with a population that was tens of millions smaller than it is today. This was down, of course, from the 110-odd divisions in World War II (largely draftees) or the two-dozen-odd divisions, about a third of them conscripts, with which the US Army went to war in 1964 in Vietnam.

Summary: With a much smaller population, this nation has sustained a much larger military – proportionally and in absolute numbers – than it does today (where the US Army has 10 regular and 8 National Guard divisions).

Fast-forward to today.

I’ve been reading “Death Ground”, by Colonel Daniel P. Bolger. It’s a book about the least-glamorous part of the US military, and the part that, as it happens, actually wins the wars – the Army and Marine infantry, the guys about whom B.H. Liddell-Hart wrote, “You can keep your atom bombs, your tanks and your airplanes: you’ll still have to have some little guy with a rifle and bayonet who winkles the other b*****d out of his foxhole and gets him to sign the Peace Treaty.”

Throughout history, the infantry have accomplished their mission in one of three ways:

1. Upon finding and “closing with” the enemy, the generals keep tossing infantry at them until the enemy finally caves in. It sounds wasteful – and it is. It’s the way infantry fighting is done when you don’t have the time and resources to take a 16-25 year old kid and turn him into a highly trained, skilled warrior, the kind who can make up in brains what he lacks in numbers. It’s how the Union fought the Civil War. It’s how most of the world’s armies fought World War I (with two exceptions – we’ll come back to that later), including the US. It’s how the Russians fought World War II. It’s how the North Koreans and Red Chinese fought the Korean War. It’s how Iran fought Iraq. It’s costly, charging a ghastly toll in blood. It’s how most draftee armies though history have fought.
2. If you have the technology, when your low-skilled, usually-draftee infantrymen “close with” the enemy you can back the infantry up with overwhelming firepower. It’s how the US infantry won World War II; the infantry (who, in World War II, were the guys who the Navy, the Army Air Corps, the Airborne, the Marines, the Armored Corps and the Artillery all passed on) would close with the enemy – and when the fight got stiff, would hunker down and call in the artillery and air support to blast the enemy until he was killed or wounded, ran away, or lost their minds. The infantry would then slog through the rubble, clean up the resistance, and move to the next strongpoint. It’s the way fighting is done when you don’t have the time or will to train a bunch of draftees into professional warriors – but you do value their lives enough to come up with a better alternative to #1, above. It works OK in a conventional war – its how the US won World War II; it’s how we fought Korea to a stalemate with very few troops; it’s always been how Israel, for one, defended itself. As we found in Vietnam, and as Israel found in “Operation Peace for Galilee” in the eighties, t’s a terrible way to fight guerrillas; bombs and rockets and artillery shells are terrible at winning the hearts and minds of any unaligned civilians in the area.
3. Finally – if you have the time and the inclination – you train your infantry to be highly-skilled at the art of closing with the enemy, outmaneuvering him, out-fighting him, stunning him with the violence and mobility of your attack, and cowing him into surrender, flight, or immobility that leads to his demise at your army’s leisure. It’s how the Romans, at the height of the Legion system, fought. It’s how the British Army started World War I – of which more later. It’s how the German Stosstruppen – the original “Commandos” – responded to the bloodbath of World War I. It’s how Canada fought World War II (Canada had a draft – but only volunteers served in combat. Canada’s army – especially their infantry – had a great reputation in World War II). It’s how the US Marines, Airborne and Rangers, and the British Paras and Commandos – picked, highly-trained volunteers – fought in World War II. And it’s how the US Army has treated its infantry since the end of the Draft; by treating the Infantry in all its types (mechanized, airborne, air assault, light and Ranger, as well as the Marines) as a picked, highy-trained elite, highly skilled at the art of outthinking, outmaneuvering and out-fighting the enemy (while still having the raw might of the tanks, artillery and Air Force on call, as needed). It is a philosophy that trades skill for raw numbers or brute force (as to the raw numbers – the US Army and Marines have between them about 100,000 infantrymen. That’s half the number of people who work for the US Postal service).

As Bolger points out, the US Army followed #2, above, during World War II, on the philosophy that it was easier to bomb and shell the enemy into submission than to train draftees to fight as highly skilled professional infantry, something that takes not only years, but a huge culture change. As Bolger also points out, #3 is the only way to fight guerrillas among people you wish to make your friends.

Like, Iraq.

So why is Chuck Rangel trying to reinstate the draft?

Rangel, incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said he worried the military was being strained by its overseas commitments.

“If we’re going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can’t do that without a draft,” Rangel said.

Of course, draftee armies are the worst way to fight counterinsurgency wars. Taking a scared 18 year old kid who’d rather be skateboarding or in college or working at K-Mart and giving him a gun and tossing him into combat sometimes works – if your nation’s surivival is at stake, or if you back that scared kid up with enough firepower to devastate anyone who stands in his path. Remember – we tried that in Vietnam.

But the US Army and Marine infantry are, today, to a man a group of volunteers, people who’ve chosen to devote between three and 30 years of their lives to learning the fine, horrific art of moving close to the enemy and killing, wounding or capturing him – with the added wrinkle of doing it with enough “finesse” to avoid killing and destroying everything around the enemy, to boot. This is an important wrinkle; we learned the hard way in Vietnam how vital it was.

So why does Rangel want to mess this up?

He said having a draft would not necessarily mean everyone called to duty would have to serve. Instead, “young people (would) commit themselves to a couple of years in service to this great republic, whether it’s our seaports, our airports, in schools, in hospitals,” with a promise of educational benefits at the end of service.

Ah. It’s a social program, then.

Make no mistake about this; the draft would, at best, dilute the fighting edge of the US armed forces – the Infantry – into a force that’s vastly less capable of fighting the types of wars the US is most likely to face today.

Ah. And could that be Rangel’s motive…?

The November 7 elections  are going to have some unintended consequences in this state.

Among the worst – and one that some of us who follow these things predicted – is the fallout from the election of vacuous political-party-boy Mark Ritchie to the Secretary of State’s office.

Ritchie – whose sole notable political experiences are “serving” as a bureaucrat and running the pressure group whose sole accomplishment was plastering those annoying “November 2” bumper stickers on the backs of rusty Subarus and gaunt Volvos nationwide – has big plans, apparently, for Minnesota elections.

Big, liberal-benefitting plans.

Which is, naturally, why the Strib loves them:

Tim Pawlenty might not appreciate being likened to Bill Clinton. But the Republican governor has at least this much in common with the former Democratic president: He was just elected for a second time by a plurality, not a majority. In Minnesota in 2002 and 2006, as in the presidential elections in 1992 and 1996, a third-party candidacy kept the winning vote total below 50 percent.

That’s not an ideal outcome — for the winner or the state. Clinton’s experience attests to as much. Throughout his presidency, he was denigrated by his partisan opponents as a less-than-legitimate occupant of the White House. Those election results emboldened those who sought to unseat him via impeachment in 1998.

But – the Strib’s editorial board should know this – the impeachment had nothing to do with Clinton’s lack of mandate, but rather his dishonesty; the weakness his lack of mandate granted his administration benefitted the country as a whole, in those prewar days when gridlock was a good thing that forced Clinton to abandon the social dabbling of his first two years.

In other words, the system worked.  A divided nation was led by a weak administration, and a Congress that was mandated (in ’94) to oppose his would-be excesses.  It benefitted everyone…

…except those who believe that government should operate as an efficient, well-oiled law-production machine.  To them, the notion that the “efficiency” of government might be hobbled by the electoral system is an aberration.

And an opportunity to accrete more power to government – for government’s (and your) own good, dammit!:

But one thing may have been gained: a growing recognition that Minnesota would benefit from a different voting system. Ideally, it would be one that allows as many candidates to run for high office as this state’s tradition of easy ballot access permits, but that still gives the winner claim to majority support. The vote-by-number balloting method known as instant runoff voting fits the bill

Where “the bill” means “a recipe to make government more powerful and less responsive to the voters, at any rate.

But the Strib – mooning and panting at the thought of a chance for “Better Government” (read: more power lodged in Saint Paul) will waterboard all logic:

But the results of last week’s election were only minutes old when DFL voices began tagging Pawlenty as the “46.7 percent governor.” Any claim to a voter mandate Pawlenty might have made was immediately undercut. Any chance for the 53-plus percent of voters who preferred another candidate to coalesce and redirect state policies was lost too.

Let’s strive for accuracy, here:  The 53-plus percent who didn’t vote for Pawlenty didn’t vote for “another candidate”.  They voted for one of half a dozen other candidates; mostly Mike Hatch, but a pathetic few for Peter Hutchinson, a scraggly flotsam for Ken Pentel, and others for Libertarians, Constitution Partiers, and a small gaggle of other mini-parties.

Some of the ills big-party loyalists attribute to the rise and persistence of the Independence and Green parties are misplaced. More accurately, they are consequences of multiparty contests being decided by a plurality-take-all voting system.

And, more accurately still, they are not “ills” at all.  They are how the system works, and it is good that it does so.  The wishes of the voters are counted in a 1:1 ratio with the votes they cast.  And if your party can’t gain a majority – if it can’t convince people that one of the most successful governors in America today, a governor who erased an “un-fixable” $4 billion deficit, isn’t a better choice than the pettifogging, temper-addled little Napoleon-complex poster child that the other party put forth – then not only will that governor’s party deserve to govern without a mandate, but the people of Minnesota will get a gridlocked, mandate-free government.  People get the government they deserve.

Unless the Strib has its way.  Then it’ll get the best government that an incomprehensibly-complex, computer-validated formula can give them.

Instant runoff voting would present those same candidates with an incentive to reach outside their parties’ ideological cores. Victory in close multicandidate elections would require a blend of first and second-choice votes. A narrowly partisan campaign would not get the second-choice votes needed for victory.

In other words, it’d drive the state’s government toward the mushy, dim middle.  Which is no choice at all.  The Strib doesn’t seem to credit the Minnesota voter with a lot of intelligence – easy to do in a state where Mark Ritchie and Rebecca Otto beat vastly-superior incumbents, but not really a spirit in which Democracy can thrive.

Last week, Minneapolis voters approved a switch to instant runoff voting for the next city election, in 2009. That exercise should be seen as a pilot project for the whole state.

Between now and then, the Legislature should give instant runoff a thorough hearing, and direct the next secretary of state, Mark Ritchie (an instant runoff voting supporter), to make preliminary plans for a switch. If the system serves Minneapolis well in 2009, it should be ready for the whole state in 2010.

“Give it a hearing, and direct Ritchie to make the switch”?   Wow – sounds like a fair process!

This is madness for a couple of non-partisan reasons.  For starters, a “Test” in Minneapolis would be completely meaningless; Minneapolis is to all intents and purposes a one-party town (Greens have a power base, but Greens, for all their kvetching, are just ultraorthadox DFLers).  Minnesota is another story.

And does anyone else catch the absurd double-standard?  A newspaper that bitched and moaned endlessly about the perils of electronic vote tabulation (as long as they were perceived to benefit Republicans – somehow, Diebold isn’t a threat to democracy these days) is suddenly ready to place full faith into a system that depends entirely on utterly-untested froo-froo technology?

This is a power grab for the left and their apologists, frustrated that the game is too close, these days, for the system to keep them in power.  They want to fix that.

It needs to be stopped.

A few weeks back, Minneapolitans elected racist dolt Chris Stewart to their School Board. The Strib, expending a new-found effort to report some of the the inconvenient facts about liberal politicians, notes that Stewart ran a blog that trafficked in racist japes.

There are people more qualified than I to excoriate this dolt. But I thought these two bits from the Strib story were interesting.

At one point, Stewart notes:

Stewart said he deeply regretted being at the center of a racial controversy, but he challenged his critics to look honestly at race relations in Minneapolis, using Keith Ellison as an example. Ellison, a black and a Muslim, was elected Nov. 7 to Congress from the Fifth District.

“Keith Ellison did everything we were told to do as kids,” Stewart said. “He got an advanced education, he got married, he had kids. Yet he’s reduced to his color and his religion.

“I see it as naked racism.”

Ellison was “reduced to his color and his religion” – and sent to Washington, to boot.

But let’s leave out that whole “he’s a member of Congress, now”, bit. Who “reduced” him to his color? And how? (Oh, the City Pages reduced the race to a matter of color, all right – count the number of times “white” turns up in this bit about the Apostate Heritic Ventura Independence Vote Suck Party)

Anyone?

The Strib noted elsewhere in the story – with no apparent irony intended – that Stewart also said:

The postings include… references to the “gelded quality” of black executives who speak precise white English.

Consorting with terror supporters is apparently less a problem to this hamster than speaking English.

Finally, this moral gelding moron whines:

“If you’ve written stuff and other people have written with you, does that discount you from political service?” Stewart said. “If the stuff is potent, does that discount you from participating in democracy?”

Of course not. But if your “potent” “stuff” is grossly offensive, it might make people think you can’t be trusted with elective office.

I suppose that pointing that out makes me a “racist”, too.

Ed writing from LA, with emphasis added:

and the first fun thing I did was surprise the First Mate with a convertible for our rental car.

In related news: I plan on “surprising” my daughter for Christmas with “The Collected Speeches of Winston Churchill”. I’m sure she’ll love it – and if she doesnt’, I’ll take it off her hands…

Big day on the radio today.

First – from 11-12, I’m still co-hosting the LuAnn Walters Show on AM1570, The Patriot II. It’s one hour of talk on alternatives in education, as well as things you can do to make your experience in your current school system less aggravating (or harmful). Not to take anything away from the Volume I guys, but if you get a moment, tune in!

Ed’s off on assignment this weekend, so I’m going to be hosting Volume II all by myself this week. Well, not really; two of my favorite guests are going to be in the studio with me. In the 1PM hour we’ll be talking with Joel Rosenberg. The subject; how the Second Amendment rights crowd fared in the election nationwide and here in Minnesota.

Then at 2PM, James Lileks will be in the studio for an hour of whatever grabs us. Hope you can tune in – or give us a call.

It’s going to be one of those days that makes me happy to be back in talk radio!

I saw the City Pages cover “Story” about the GOP non-victory party – basically a printed liveblog.

On the one hand, it was a potpourri of fiskable blather.

On the other hand, fisking dumb newspaper articles in a town like Minneapolis is like throwing spitballs at Mormons in Provo; it’s not very challenging, and eventually the mind yearns for other things.

But it did need to get thrashed. So thank goodness for Learned Foot, who did the job.

“Highlight”:

1600: I continue to be looked down upon, condescended to, and ignored by every person in the building. It sucks to be so unhip, what with me having children and refusing to wear non-prescription eyeglasses and all.

Read the whole thing.

Of course, some parts of the CP “article” fisk themselves. Given the City Pages’ record of seeing what they want to see (or, according to some reports, what their editors want them to see) when in rooms full of Republicans, it’s perhaps no surprise that this fella turned up:

8:35 p.m.: In the Navigators bar on the hotel’s ground floor, a group of five revelers expounds on race relations. “There’s a difference,” explains one of them. “It depends on what kind of blacks you’re talking about. There’s the light-skinned blacks and the dark-skinned blacks. And they’re different. But you can’t just say that.”

I doubt that these five “revelers” said any such thing, any more than this happened:

And Sen. Michele Bachmann offered praise for blogger Mitch Berg: “You’re my hero!” she exclaimed, while hugging him from behind.

Paul Demko and G.R. Anderson; while I have no doubt that some Republican, somewhere, might have said such a thing, I have my doubts that any at the Sheraton last Tuesday said it to either of you (Got a tape?) – and in any case, so waht? The most toxic, noxious, xenophobic racist I have ever met face to face in my life was a DFL organizer. No, no tapes, although I could provide an eyewitness or two from among those who knew him. Do we write this person off as a dolt, or do we use him to titter about what a bunch of ignorant racists the DFL are?

Well, y’all have pretty well made that choice. But how about the rest of you?

UPDATE AND BUMP:  Gary Miller is less accomodating:

Bull.  Shit.

Norman Lear could not have concocted a more bogus “conservative” archetype.  Demko and Anderson spend a grand total of 5 minutes outside the Sheraton ballroom (for a quick cocktail, apparently) and just happen to stumble across five young jackboots plotting some sort of apartheid-like “homelands” based on skin pigmentation?

In my 20+ years of involvement with conservative politics I have never stumbled across even one such hateful conversation.  Indeed, it is my experience that conservatives are markedly less fixated on matters of race than are our opponents.  But we are invited to believe by Messrs. Anderson and Demko that such parlays are commonplace where conservatives congregate.

It has been twelve years since the GOP endured a drubbing like they did last Tuesday so Anderson and Demko can be forgiven the mirth and schadenfreude bleeding through their chronicles.

What they can not be forgiven is making stuff up.  There is little doubt in my mind that is exactly what was done in this shameful potboiler.

Given the CP’s record of making sh*t up about Republicans, I’m going to amend my earlier request for that tape.