For Christmas, Red has one of my favorites.

It’s probably illegal.  So send me a cease and desist.

YouTube – A Charlie Brown Christmas (full length).

Merry Christmas.

It was Christmas Eve, 1986. Life was pretty dang good, I reflected as I drove north on Cedar Avenue, the lights of downtown shimmering in the distance.

It had been a long day. I had been feasting like a vulture on all the board shifts nobody else wanted to work that day; I screened calls for the Mike Edward morning show, ran the board for Geoff Charles, the mid-day syndies (Owen Span and Michael Jackson), the Vogel Show (Don did a special Christmas show), and was planning on running again from 10AM to 6PM the next day, for a bit of extra money. I was learning to love holidays largely as a revenue booster – I had worked pretty much every holiday in the past year.

After the Vogel show got off the air, I started on my evening’s plans. I’d gotten a few invitations – to a couple of my roommates’ families places, and to one of my coworkers’ families house. I stopped by an evening church service, and then off to Edina (hors d’oeuvre and eggnog), Bloomington (a vodka sour and swedish meatballs) and South Minneapolis (dinner, cheesecake). By the end of the night, I was full, comfy, and pretty darn happy.
Things had changed a lot since Christmas of ’85, my first in the cities:

I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza – at $3, a bit of a splurge – and a couple of beers (Stroh’s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I’d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of ’em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).

By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope’s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me…

By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for “Gab Line”, a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt’ know about their seedy reputation). “Only 10 cents a minute”. I dialled in.

I did what I usually did on night like this; took a drive. I did a turn around Lake Harriett, then Calhoun, and finally Lake of the Isles. It was crisp and cold, but not brutal that night.

I pulled over at Thomas Beach. The lake was frozen, and I had the whole place to myself.  I walked across the street, to the frozen sand, and perched on a bench to look over the city skyline gleaming in the distance.   It had been a pretty busy year, and I had a ton to be thankful for. I’d made some good progress on at least some of my life’s big goals. My “career” in talk radio – a business I’d barely known existed a year earlier – was going well beyond anything I’d dreamed. My band was going to be debuting in four days – we were so ready for that! And the girlfriend thing…well, we’d work on that soon enough.
It’d been a great year. The next year, I thought, could be a whole lot better.

The first and last annual Susapalooza – our group parody of Twin Cities professional child of the sixties Susan Lenfestey – is switching into its big finale.

Voting begins tomorrow.

Here’s what you do: Read the various entries.  Voting starts the morning of Christmas Eve. Winner will be announced on New Years’ day!

The contendas:

• Yossarian, “Dashed Dreams“
• Learned Foot, “Christmas Torment“
• Marty Andrade, “Rapid Transit To Hell“
• Dan S., “Conservatives’ Slinky Hatred“
• Riverdan, “Sylvia Plath Was Such A Pollyanna“
• Lassie, “Waterboard My Heart“
• Dave, “Waxy Yellow Buildup Of My Life“
• Yossarian (Second entry): “Reflections of Misery“
• Swiftee, “The Dove Of My Spirit Has Crashed Into The Tower Of My Misery“
• Yossarian (Third Entry): “Dungeonmaster Of My Soul“
• ak, “I Am Woman, Hear Me Shriek“
• zestro, “Echoes Of The Dead“

Come on back any time between December 24 and December 31.

Ed and I (not to  mention King, Michael, John, Brian, Elder, and I presume Strommie and Margaret) are taking the day off today.

But make sure you tune in – or better yet, join Ed and I in person – next week for our first broadcast of the new year at White Bear Lake Superstore.  We always have a lot of fun out there, and as always, in you’re in the market for a car, you’re nuts if you go elsewhere.

(Yes, I know – next weekend is still 2006.  But as far as I’m concerned, it’s a whole new year for the NARN)

I support the death penalty in every possible way – except one . We’ve been through this before.  Ed and I talked about this a few weeks ago on the show, on the news that Missouri, California and Florida have enacted moritoria on the death penalty; we’re both unusual among conservatives in opposing the death penalty,  for reasons as different as we are.
One of those reasons is  not the welfare of the killers.  And it’s this misplaced soft-heartedness that animates this Strib editorial.

In California and Missouri, federal judges have ruled that the states’ procedures for putting inmates to death with lethal injections violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush has suspended executions after it took 34 apparently painful minutes for an inmate to die; the needle that was to feed a three-drug mix into his bloodstream missed his veins and instead pushed the drugs into soft tissue. Face it: Killing people humanely is all but impossible, and that’s a good reason to stop the practice entirely.

No, not really.  The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment – the British colonists were as creative when it came to executing the condemned, burning and piling rocks on and drawing and quartering with the glee of little boys killing ripping the wings off moths; the founding fathers realized that a judicial system needed to remove gratuitous emotion from the legal system.

That executions get botched on occasion means that humans are fallible (and that the doctors that removed themselves from the death penalty system for hippocratic reasons are buying their peace of mind with the pain of the condemned prisoner whose injection is carried out by a less-qualified technician)k, not that the death penalty is wrong in and of itself.

…perhaps the American public is ready to accept that “humane executions” are a contradiction in terms and that the time has come finally to end this barbaric practice.

I really doubt it.  I think a lot of Americans would be happy to kill child killers Chinese-style, with a single bullet to the back of the head; humane, and emotionally gratifying.

Supporters of capital punishment ask why all the concern over the pain inmates feel when they are put to death. After all, they say, it’s less pain than the convicted murderers inflicted on their victims.

Indeed, but is that a justification anyone should take seriously? They inflicted great pain on their victims so we’re free to inflict pain on them? What does that make us?

Human.

Therein lies the central point, which death-penalty advocates frequently miss: At its heart, the capital punishment debate isn’t really about those put to death and whether they are comfortable. It’s about the American public and the values it desires to uphold, which play a large role in shaping society’s behavior. A society that kills people who kill people debases itself by cheapening life.

I must inevitably choke on the irony of a newspaper that supports abortion on demand making a statement like that.

No, there is one reason and one reason only that the death penalty is wrong – the inevitability of killing the innocent at some point or another, which would be vastly crueller than a botched injection; it kills an innocent person, and ensures the guilty will never pay for the crime.

I have no problem killing the right person.  The Eighth Amendment means we need to keep emotion and untrammelled vengeance out of the process.  That executions are botched is not a black mark on the death penalty, but a sign we need better executioners.

But since we can never guarantee with absolute 100% certitude that we’ve got the right person strapped to the gurney – and I do believe that the ethical case to accept nothing less than 100% is airtight – it should be a moot point.

[Note: Originally published 12/20/06, updated and bumped forward]

Via Foot, I notice that Susan Lenfestey has a blog, featuring her own particular brand of…

…well, what do we call it? Spittle-flecked ranting? Paranoid delusion? Serving as a mindless streetwalker for the party line?

Whatever it is, it deserves our encouragement, because freedom of speech and argumentation is a treasure to be cultivated because it’s fun to watch puffed-up, self-important “children of the sixties” make asses of themselves, their beliefs and their generation.

So I’m going to do what needs to be done: I’m going to sponsor a contest, the First And Last Annual Susapalooza. Here’s how it works:

1. Write a paragraph of the most over-the-top Susan Lenfesty parody. Borrow, er, liberally from her blog – but out-lenfestey her in every possible way.
2. Leave the paragraph in the comment section of this post. I’ll keep pushing it to the top of the schedule.
3. On December 25, I’ll post the finalists, along with an online poll to vote for the “winner”.
4. On New Years Eve, we’ll announce the “winner”.

The “winner” gets a beverage of his/her choice from me, and maybe some other piece of NARN/SITD swag. Probably.
So puff up your self-righteous, vein-popping indignation. Whip your petulant depression to a fine fever. Sniff down your nose at your fellow citizen.

It’s art, dammit.

Update and Bump 12/21: Lenfestey isn’t pleased with this contest:

I’ve been described by some local lads (who blog under phony names [Really? Someone named “Lenfestey” digs at my name?] and remind me of the pimple-pussed boys I used to see playing war games in the Dungeons and Dragons emporium on Lake Street a long, long time ago) as a depressive, “sucking on the tailpipe of my Prius.” In my dreams! The Prius part. Sucking on the tailpipe, not so much. Read on.

They call me other things as well, which is curious to me, seeing as I’m such a little piece of fluff in the big lint screen of opinions. What a funny waste of their time.

No, Susan, you’re right; your depressive, angry yet self-adoring, precious, arrested-adolescent little opinions are a fart in the cosmic wind. True. But by dint of your social connections, they get printed, seemingly no questions asked, in the Strib. Hundreds of worthy writers go unpublished, while your whiny, kvetching sore-loser snivelling jumps to the head of the line.

It’s like the crazy lady who was constantly yelling about those Damned Ukrainians at the bus stop over by Phoenix Games (where pimply lads of all ages play wargames and, horror of horrors, enjoy themselves) got her own show on CNBC.

By itself, it doesn’t beget a response in polite company. When it’s elevated far beyond where it deserves to be, it deserves satire.

Update and Bump 12/22: Last weekday for submissions! Post will be open for entries all weekend, though – so put that Christmas shopping off until you’ve lenfested this post with your best parody!

Update and Bump 12/23: OK . One more day! Competition is going to be fierce!

A. S. Hamrah, in and amid the de regeur Bush bashing, stumbles upon a couple of truths
in an editorial in today’s Strib:

From mainstream actioners such as “Casino Royale” and “Apocalypto” to horror cut-’em-ups such as “Saw III” and “Turistas” (itself a retread of 2005’s breakout torture hit “Hostel”), the kind of entertainment referred to as “torture porn” combines the mise-en-scene of Abu Ghraib with screenwriting evocative of reports from Camp X-Ray.

In reviewing the torture hits, critics take pains to tell readers that these movies are somehow about our collective fears of confinement and mutilation, about confronting some kind of ultimate evil that kicks us in the crotch before it cuts off our head and sends it tumbling down the stairs, punishing us for our desires.

But if we’re confronting our fears, we’re sure doing it exuberantly. The ingeniously imagineered punishment devices in these movies, along with their chummy torture-chamber repartee and quick recoveries from pain and abuse, aren’t so much about the fear of torture as they are about the joy of it — and its necessity. Torture is a duty that filmmakers, like Tom Sawyer painting the fence, have convinced us is a lot of fun.

Um no, A. S., not a duty.  A pornographic profit center.

(As Abu Ghraib was, indeed, for the “news” media). 

Bloomington has the Mall of America.

But New York has the Megarestroom, in Times Square.

Sheila, um, “visited” it.

There is a small stage over to one side (it keeps getting worse) – and standing on the stage is a guy in blue and white (what a surprise), wearing huge furry brown bear claws … and he is dancing. Not even with all that much heart or conviction. He’s just up there. Dancing. Trying to maintain SOME of his dignity. He has props up there, in case anyone wants to join him. And yes, people wanted to join him.

I hated the human race even more.

On the downside, the poopblogging title has been snatched away from the Twin Cities.

On the upside – read it.

l…liked Donald Trump much…

…but I’m willing to cut him a lot of slack after this.

In March of 1984, during “Spring Break”, I was on tour with the Jamestown College Concert Choir.  The annual tour was a big fundraising junket that involved cramming 70 college kids into two buses and caravanning around the US, staying with host families and eating at church potlucks and usually givine 12-13 concerts in ten days.  Those trips, every “spring”, were the first times in my life I’d left North Dakota or Minnesota, and the first times I’d been in cities larger than Fargo. 

The highlight of the trip was always the one “Free Day”, usually at the apex of the tour – and usually more like a manic half-day; the demands of fund-raising often led to a morning or evening gig on our “Free Day”, but no matter; we got to spend a day off the bus, and the college even sprang for a hotel (although usually four to a room – but it beat dealing with host families).  In three years, I’d seen Washington, Seattle (and in 1985 I’d see Phoenix)…

 …and now Denver.

Five of us – Kris Erickson, Ray Zentz, Ellen Aafedt and her boyfriend Tom Krohn and I (2nd soprano, bass, 1st soprano, tenor and baritone, respectively) – without much else to do took off walking in downtown Denver.  It felt like a pleasant enough day; warm (in the ’30s), so we all wore light jackets, and didn’t bother with hats or gloves. 

We put in miles.  We wandered down Colfax far from downtown, into a slightly seedier neighborhood.  The snow came down a little heavier as we stopped into a bakery to grab lunch, and then a pawn shop (where I bought a lockblade knife and a copy of Warren Zevon’s Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School  for a buck); it seemed like a pleasant little snow shower.

We took the bus back to the hotel, and started cleaning up for our evening plans (going out to a restaurant and drinking a lot) when someone turned on the TV. 

“BLIZZARD PARALYZES DENVER”, the graphics screamed, as the anchors voiced over footage of endless rows of stalled cars amid the pleasant little snow shower.

We looked at each other, shrugged, and went out into a city reeling from inches of snow.

I think of that day every time I see that Denver is, yet again, shut down by a blizzard. 

Holiday travelers stranded by a blizzard that paralyzed Colorado’s biggest cities lined up at ticket counters in Denver’s snowbound airport Thursday only to learn they wouldn’t be going anywhere for another day.

Is it just me, or is Denver to blizzards what trailer parks are to tornados?

Katherine Kersten notes:

[atheist author Sam] Harris even has a decorated tree in his living room. Dawkins explains why. Christmas, he says, has long since ceased to be a religious festival in America. “Understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance,” he adds, “I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”

When an outspoken atheist such as Dawkins says “Merry Christmas,” we may be reaching a consensus. American popular culture has appropriated Christmas, as it has Thanksgiving, and drained it of religious meaning.

Not in my house, Sam.

But read the rest of Kersten’s piece anyway.

Back when I built model airplanes/ships/cars/tanks pretty obsessively, one of the best parts was reading the Japenese translations on some of the imported kids. Hasegawa kits were particularly fun, with malaprops enough to make Yogi Berra and Jessica Simpson vow to quit their evil ways.

But for all that, it’s nice to know some things never change. Via Croc-o-Lyle – one of the best Usability and User-Centered Design blogs around – the Japanese safety manual for the Wii.

Like every Twin Citian under the age of 70, I wasn’t listening to Willy Clark yesterday morning.  In fact, like an awful lot of Twin Cities radio listeners, I haven’t listened to KSTP since Mischke moved to the middle of the working day and Bob Davis moved to late mornings.  As in, not at all. 

Nada.  Zip. 

Seriously.  KSTP-AM is my radio alma mater, and I haven’t hit its preset on my car radio since Rush Limbaugh changed stations.  Not once.

But I digress.  A little bird told me that Willy Clark was talking about me yesterday.  To be fair, I needed that little bird, because I didn’t know Willy Clark was even still on the air (and, looking back, I see that we’ve gotta be up to about contract time here…).  Anyway, he wasn’t happy:

A mention of SITD came up around the 8:30 mark.  Kenny Olson was Googling reviews of the show, they came across yours (Kenny read his description, something about a smug, talentless punk) and Willy characterized the guy that wrote that as an unemployed loser who can’t get hired in radio, or something like that.  

Oh, my.  Aren’t we feisty?  Wouldn’t Willy Clark be much more – I dunno, listenable if he took some of that feistiness and used it to sound like he wasn’t on NyQuil on the air?

Willy Clark:  I am employed; very well-employed, as it happens (details never shared online).  As to being a loser – well, I’m no “morning guy at KSTP”, but I do OK. 

But the ultimate question, Wills, is not “can Mitch get hired in radio”; I did in the past, and I have the best unpaid gig in the business right now.  But I don’t work in radio anymore.  Other challenges called – challenges that don’t involve stroking the egoes of or supplying coke to program directors.

No, the real question is “Could Willy Clark get a job outside of radio?”

And “Will he be able to, soon?”

Don’t know if they podcast those things, but if you can get the audio, might make for a good NARN drop.

Good point. 

If anyone taped the Willy Clark show…

…no, I’m being serious here.  If there are any dedicated Willy fans who…

…Hey!  Quit giggling!  I’m trying to run a blog…

Oh, forget it.

The Strib is up in arms over out-of-state contributions to this past election.

Unions piling on in favor of DFLers? Teachers’ union money flooding districts and squashing all dissent? George Soros? Liberal pressure groups paying the freight for friendly bloggers?

Pfft. Get serious. Of course it’s a Republican private citizen!

A Houston homebuilder who helped finance the Swift Boat veterans campaign against former presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 was the primary bankroller of a Minnesota group that ran a harsh advertising blitz against Mike Hatch, the unsuccessful DFL candidate for governor this fall.

A spokesman for the group, the Minnesota chapter of A Stronger America, said Tuesday that Bob Perry contributed two-thirds of the $750,000 that was spent on TV ads and direct mail.

“I received a call from A Stronger America in Washington, which is where the bank account was held, informing me that a half a million dollars was wired into the account,” said Joe Weber, a spokesman for the Minnesota chapter. “At which point we sprung into action.”…It also allowed the group to mount an extensive television campaign that it otherwise might not have been able to muster.

Now, check out this next bit:

Some of the ads accused Hatch of two decades of “intimidation, arrogance and abuse of power,” and asserted that he was under investigation for “influence peddling” in a dispute with a judge.

Perry had helped finance the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

What was that investigation? What are those allegations of intimidation and abuse (which have been rebounding around among Minnesota politics insiders for as long as I’ve been following the subject – along with allegations that the Strib has always played softball with the Attorney General)?

There were other connections between that SwMinnesota Monitoift Boat campaign and the efforts against Hatch. A Stronger America-Minnesota is registered in Minnesota with an Alexandria, Va., address. Hatch said before the election that he discovered that an insurance-industry backed group, Americans for Job Security, shared the same address.

(Side note: Before the election, I noted, correctly, that Minnesota Monitor, a local lefty site, was funded by a group that “shares an address” with Media Matters, George Soros’ PR agency. “Not fair!” cried the local leftybloggers who were being paid by the group that “shares” that address; “don’t believe what your eyes tell you – Minnesota Monitor isn’t a George Soros joint!”. But for Mike Hatch, “sharing an address” is apparently dispositive.

Hatch said Tuesday the election was over, and it was time to move on.”But the lesson learned is that the disclosure laws need to be updated so that people know who is participating in a campaign,” he said. “The way our laws are currently structured, you don’t find out until after the election.”

Well, there he has a point. Dislosure needs to be immediate…

…combined with repeal of our other, ludicrous campaign finance laws.

Watching David “The Lori Sturdevant Of The Beltway” Gregory providing audio campaign collateral for “interviewing” John Kerry this morning on Today.

And I can’t confirm this, but I think Gregory has his head so far up Kerry’s butt that he actually signed off the piece from within Kerry’s esophagus.

The Zuckers meet the ISG.

Learned Foot beat me fair and square in the race to fisk the latest Susan Lenfestey column in the Strib.

Which is sort of like saying “Learned Foot beat me to the pool of suppurating runoff from that roadkill deer, and he brought a champagne flute”, but victory is victory.

Nonetheless, I’ll have to tackle Lenfestey’s column myself, whenever my self-esteem drops low enough that I need to see someone who makes me feel better in comparison.

Virtually everyting that any Minnesotan has ever done is the subject of some memorial or another.

And yet the biggest single event of most of our lifetimes – the event that’s touched the most of us, for the better – goes unmemorialized.

Minnesotans; it is time to build the Cold War Memorial.

Think about it; the tools that brought the end the the Cold War (under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, after America threw off the moldy, defeatist political hairshirt of the Carter years) have been largely discarded, and are availble for a song (often for $1, you haul).

Think of it; we could get a Lafayette class ballistic missile submarine…

or one of these babies…

…and park it on the Capitol Mall as a monument to the greatest war never fought!

And on a memorial wall surrounding it, we could carve the names of the six million Minnesotans not killed in the Cold War!

Let’s get on this!

I wonder which is more strange; that today, December 19, it’s been 34 years since man was last on the moon…

…or that so few people remember the mission – Apollo 17 – that flew it:

Crew members were Eugene Cernan, commander; Ron Evans, command module pilot; and Harrison Schmitt, lunar module pilot.

The landing site for this mission was on the southeastern rim of the Mare Serenitatis, in the southwestern Montes Taurus. This was a dark mantle between three high, steep massifs, in an area known as the Taurus-Littrow region. Pre-mission photographs showed boulders deposited along the bases of the mountains, which could provide bedrock samples. The area also contained a landslide, several impact craters, and some dark craters which could be volcanic.

It seems strange to me that nobody on our society under the age of probably 37-38 could actually remember man on the moon.

It’s a good thing Lori Sturdevant is a columnist, and doesn’t work in a field where she needs to be insightful or accurate.

Sturdevant – the most reliable operator in a regional media that serves as the DFL’s PR agency – finds this blazing insight while writing about the economy:

All it took for the “too-few-workers” lament to return were a solid recovery from recession,

That’s right; Lori Sturdevant has realized that when companies aren’t laying off workers, they need workers.

She gets paid for this.

Sure enough, “workforce” is back on top as the No. 1 “drag on economic growth” in Minnesota. That’s according to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s latest findings from a year of interviewing 797 business owners around the state. Worker issues beat out lousy transportation and — amazingly — high taxes, which have fallen to Gripe No. 3…Availability and quality of trained workers are “the No. 1 issue for our members. How do we ensure that we’ll have a workforce that can do the job?”

Welcome back to the right question, bizfolk. Hope you stay with it this time.

Lori.  Bubbie.  Why do you suppose taxes have fallen to number three?

Because we’ve had four years of holding the line on taxes.  Which played a disproportionate role in solving the recession.  Which has led to skilled workers (unaccountably including myself) being in demand again.

Did I mention Lori Sturdevant gets paid for this?

Educators, economists and crystal-ball gazers long have been saying that the most serious long-term threat to this state’s prosperity isn’t uncompetitively high taxes. Minnesota has had a higher-than-average tax burden for decades, and thrived with it.

No, Lori.  History is replete with examples of cities, states and nations that were sunk by high taxes.  Minnesota has thrived in spite of high taxes, as we’ve noted in the past; we’ve had certain advantages that have helped us survive the profligacy of a couple of generations’ worth of tax and spend DFL governments.

The greater competitive risk is that this still-small, climatologically challenged state won’t be able to raise, attract and educate enough of the brainpower workers that 21st-century businesses need.

Minnesota’s Private College Research Foundation has been clanging that alarm for years. It predicted in 2004 that by 2010, Minnesota won’t produce enough college grads to replace retirees and meet employers’ expansion needs. By 2017, new college grads won’t be numerous enough to replace the retirees, let alone keep up with business growth.

That forecast appears to be on target. Already last year, the state Chamber of Commerce said, nearly two out of five outstate employers and a fourth of metro ones had trouble finding specialty skilled workers.

So what would be the sensible course to take?  Would it be…:

• Crediting business for their training efforts – which make sense in any case, if they’d like to stay in business in the first place?
• Using the school system we already have to try to inculcate in students the sense that they need to develop the kind of mental agility and planning ability it takes to pick a career path from the many that are opening (and begging for workers) that best fit their talents?

No.  In Lori Sturdevant’s world, like always, it comes back to government:

“Other states are taking action on this problem, creating special training at local colleges and universities for larger employers, and/or bringing basic technical skills to high school students. … Minnesota could lose these companies and these jobs if it cannot find a solution,” warns the Chamber’s just-released “Grow Minnesota!” annual report.

Such matters appear to be moving up on the legislative agendas being set in executive suites and boardrooms. Last week, the state Chamber of Commerce decided that at the 2007 Legislature, it will support increased funding for the University of Minnesota and the MnSCU systems…Other CEOs are lining up smartly in favor of more student aid and incentives for college-prep work by at-risk high school kids, as urged by the private colleges.

In other words – business wants the state to help them out of the jam by sponsoring yet another big-dollar program which is both a handout to business and to the higher-education industry and unions.  And since Minnesota does such a lousy job educating K-12 students, they will likely need to.

When higher ed was taking a beating at the Capitol in 2002 and 2003, the biz lobby seemed too busy fending off proposed tax increases to care. Competitiveness was their mantra then. It can be still. But its meaning needs to shift from “no new taxes” to “beef up education.”

Where “beef up education” equals “keep tossing money at the educational-industrial complex that already squanders so much of this state’s wealth”.

Sorry, Lori.  This state spends more than enough to educate good workers.  Most of it is wasted.  More money won’t help.  Better to give it directly to the businesses and let them teach the kids.

It’d be more honest.

The View is to TV what Susan Lenfestey is to “writing”.

Which is great for people like us:

Joy Behar was met with boos and gasps from The Views studio audience when she described Donald Rumsfeld as “Hitlerlike”. FBLA is a little surprised that Behar actually knew Hitler, and more surprised that the Views audience knows who Rumsfeld is. Or maybe theyre just sick of the Hitler simile–when everyones like Hitler, no one is.

Joy Behar: like Christmas in December.

To:  “Long-Suffering” Jay Larson, Promotions Director, AM1280 “The Patriot”

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Promotions Ideas  

Jay,

Let’s not do this.  I don’t care what JB Doubtless and Brodkorb say.  It can’t end well.

Regards and happy holidays, 

Mitch Berg, NARN

When you remember that 37% of Minnesotans had a collective brownie moment and elected a professional wrestler (who was even dumber than the initial desciption would have you think) as governor, things like this just aren’t funny anymore.

(Via KVM)

It’s official – I made the big time!

Congratulations! You are the Time magazine “Person of the Year.”

Talk to my agent.

(Many have responded – as lamely as I did, in fact – to Time’s even lamer selection.  And then there’s Sisyphus, who is actually funny).