Alfonso Rodriguez the death penalty for the 2003 kidnapping, rape and murder of Dru Sjodin.

“Today is the most difficult day of my life,” U.S. District Judge Ralph Erickson said this morning in handing down the sentence.

He rejected a motion for a new trial.

Rodriguez abducted Sjodin in November 2003 from the parking lot of a mall in Grand Forks, N.D. Her body was found about six months later by a ravine near Crookston, Minn.

The case was tried in federal court because state lines were crossed when the crime was committed, which is why Rodriguez was eligible for the death penalty. Neither North Dakota nor Minnesota allow the death penalty in state prosecutions.

Rodriguez, 53, could be on death row for several years as appeals are made by his attorneys.

Sjodin was a native of Pequot Lakes, Minn.

While, as I’ve mentioned, I oppose the death penalty for one and only one reason – the systemic inevitability of eventually executing the wrong person – suffice to say I don’t think Rodriguez has any claim to be convicted in error. 

I won’t be celebrating his execution, but I won’t picket it, either.

Much on my mind lately.
And this too.

I know.  I’m having  a Sheila-like obsession over this twenty-year old concert vid.

Sisyphus, from City-Pages (R)-endorsed Nihilist in Golf Pants, notes:

Whenever the mercury dips below zero here in Minnesota, two things are certain:
1. Minnesotans will whine about the cold
2. Mitch Berg, of Jamestown North Dakota, will mock said Minnesotans for being weather wimps on his blog and radio show

Dang skippy.

Now, Sisyphus trumps up some bogus “evidence” of his claim that southern Minnesota is warmer than North Dakota; cooking the case with all the grace of the Broward-County Democratic Party, he takes temperatures from Saint Cloud (which, given that city’s inferiority complex, are probably cooked to begin with), and ignores wind-chill (note to Minnesota conservatives, or City-Pages-endorsed “conservatives”:  pull your collective head out of Joe Soucheray’s butt.  Wind chill is cold, if it’s real wind and not these dulcid little south Minnesota breezes you’re talking about).

So let’s settle this the right way. 

If you are a North Dakota native transplated to the Twin Cities:  Compare and contrast.  Where did you genuinely feel colder, there or here?

If you’re a Twin Citian or Southern Minnesotan transplanted to NoDak:  Ditto. 

I’m talking southern Minnesota, here, not Embarass or Hinkley or International Falls. 

Sound off.  What’s colder? 

Kermit from Anti-Strib reflects the rage so many of us have over the Kruger murder case in Waseca.

Michael Zabawa claimed to have shot three members of a Waseca family with a shotgun. By accident.

Kermit isn’t convinced:

Accidentally? You F’ing sub-human!!! Every shotgun I have ever seen has either an over-under or side by side barrel. You crack them to put more shells in, or you pump them to load more from the magazine.
The only accident was your mother carrying you to term you Piece. Of. Shit.

Lets all say his name again. Michael S. Zabawa.

Are there sub-humans living here, among us? Is it possible that we are not all equal in the sight of God and each other? Some people do not deserve to live. We will be keeping Michael in prison for twenty ot thirty years. Then he gets to go free.

Alec Kruger will still be dead. He was thirteen.

State pen inmates please note the name.

Barnett on the epidemic of vacuity that’s paralyzed leftyblogs from day one; today, my old kicktoy Ollie Willis:

There actually is a lot of interesting stuff in the left wing blogs. But some of the left-wing blogs serve as a vehicle for their authors to prove their ignoramus bona fides on an almost daily basis. I call this the Oliver Willis School of Blogging. For a wonderful example of this art form, check out Oliver’s mini-post regarding his indifference to the death of Barbaro. Ollie scolds, “The idea that so much ink is being spilt over a horse just kind of appals (sic) me.”

Of course, all bloggers are entitled to their opinions, even when they’re ill-informed or intemperately expressed. What is unfathomable is why a campaign would hire a person who delights in gratuitously causing offense as its representative.

Like so many of us, Barnett tackles Mandy Marcotte:

Amanda Marcotte, the blogresss from Pandagon that Edwards hired, happens to be one of the worst of the lot. In fairness to Oliver who actually comes across as a nice albeit not particularly talented guy, Marcotte is a bitter, angry person who thrives on offering offensive and obtuse observations. Her now infamous post from just days before the Edwards campaign hired her shows Marcotte at her “best”:

The funny part is that none of it is a surprise.

I went through a phase a few years back where I read leftyblogs with an eye partly turned to criticism, and partly to ridicule; there was plenty of grist for both mills.

And then I gave it up.  The vast majority of leftyblogs, with precious few exceptions – even among the big ones – were puerile, sophomoric, pointless…just plain dumb. I found that if I wanted, for whatever reason, a leftyblogger’s perspective, I was better off going with one of the less-stupid, less-insane locals, like Powerliberal or Flash or even the New Patriot Collective For Make Better Distribution of Information for Glorious DFL.  We have knocked heads for years – but they, along with many (albeit not all) local leftybloggers do a much better product than the deranged Kos, the Peter-Principled Atrios, the dumb Ollie Willis, and the angry-funny-without-the-funny Jesus General.

And especially Pandagon.  Although they had the occasional reason to exist when giggly fratboys Ezra “John” Klein and Jesse “Ringo” Taylor ran the show, once the blog turned into a collective, it became essentially a “Kos” wannabee; all of the heat, less of whatever pittance of light “Kos” emits.

One of the band of intellectual midgets that inherited Pandagon from Taylor and Klein was Amanda Marcotte, a fatuous screechblogger with a record of giggly bigotry and purple-faced religious hatred who was recently hired as the Edwards campaign’s official blogger.

Leftybloggers are closing ranks around their own:

I suspect that they are trying to tear her down because they are justifiably afraid that she will excel at her new job.

Um, no.  Actually, I hope every liberal candidate hires a screechblogger; they will provide us a treasure trove of material for the next couple of years (or until they get fired for embarassing their bosses, which would seem likely, sooner than later, in Marcotte’s case). 

How likely?  This bit here is making the rounds:

One thing I vow here and now–you motherf**kers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will f**k without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it.

At the considerable risk of sounding catty, I don’t think I’m going to be needing to “stop” anything.

But I digress:

 Toss and turn, you mean, jealous motherf**kers. I’m not going to be “punished” with babies. Which makes all your efforts a failure. Some non-procreating women escaped. So give up now. You’ll never catch all of us. Give up now.

It’s not that I want to “catch” anyone, least of all Ms. Marcotte.  Enjoy your life, whatever it may be, by all means!  It’s just that I’m thinking John Edwards isn’t going to be picking up a whole lot of red-state action with that kind of vibe going out on his frequency.

Leftybloggers – some of them – have a curious sense of what’s really important. 

Along with disparaging her on the most ridiculously inane grounds (E.g. “She uses profanity! Holy f**king s**t!”)…

I’ve noticed that from quite a few leftybloggers, big and small, find profanity to be a symbol of accomplishment; with some, the attitude seems “Woo hoo! Let’s see you godbags keep up with this profanity game, m****r******g d****e**g s*****ni-eating s****s!”, as if fluency with profanity is a sign of…anything?  I remember one fairly vacuous former local leftyblogger, writing about an even more vacuous local leftyblogger; “he might drive the wingnuts crazy with the swears!”.  Welcome to fourth grade!

I’ve lived around Chicagoans long enough to say with absolute assurance; I can swear more fluently than any leftyblogger (who’s not from Chicago and also brain-dead).  I don’t take especial pride in it; profanity merely substitutes shock for thought.  Which, with some people, is the only rhetorical tool in the belt.

Including, according to everything I’ve seen, Amanda Marcotte.

Little Miss Attila tackles the untackleable.

Thorley Winston, in another thread, asks:

Mitch, could we get a “24″ thread?

Dammit, I’m in the middle of an issue containment problem, and I have to sync my content manager!  I’ll need at least two minutes.

Dammit!

You may comment on 24 when ready.

It’s Reagan’s Birthday today:

I’ll be taking the kids out tonight, talking a little bit about what Reagan’s presidency meant to their future (all of it good), as well as the lies that their schools have told about the era, and what to tell to the teachers who will no doubt diss merrily away.

Oh, yeah – and jellybeans at work!

Happy Reagan’s Birthday, America!

(more…)

Weekend talk show needs new producer:

Mitch I thought this story might have been about you after the Bears game!

Man arrested for ATM urination
Drunk man arrested for urine attack on cashpoint.

Must know when to refocus on things like “two weeks until pitchers and catchers report for spring training”.

(more…)

Chad the Elder:

When one is suffering the ill effects of a serious cold, it can be a veritable hell. How bad was my return home yesterday?

So bad that I passed on my traditional layover beer at Narita.

So bad that the kindly Northwest flight attendant who brought me cups of hot tea throughout the Tokyo to Minneapolis flight was moved to ask, “Are you as miserable as you look?”

Inspecting myself later in the planes bathroom mirror, I had to agree with her assessment.

Get well soon, Chad.  We need to talk epidemiology on Saturday.

Via Ecker, we have a blogger whose wife has found a great cure for blogger’s block:

In an effort to encourage me to revive this blog, my wife has imposed this “No blog, No sex” rule. The rule is simple: I am supposed to blog at least once a week in exchange for love-making…

Note to self and other bloggers:  Date only non-writers.

Two of my favorite regional conservative bloggers take up sides on Giuliani:

Jay Reding:

If Giuliani can moderate his position and speak in the language that social conservatives understand, I don’t necessarily think that there will be a huge backlash against him from social conservatives. Social conservatives aren’t going to hand the White House to a John Edwards or a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama just because they have some issues with Giuliani. Even though some social conservatives might stay home, Giuliani can pick up the libertarian-leaning Republicans, fiscal conservatives, and moderates who abandoned the GOP in the 2006 cycle. So long as there’s more of them then there are Republicans who would never consider Giuliani, he is still very much in the game.

Assuming Giuliani doesn’t flame out sometime in the next year or so which, admittedly, is always a possibility he has a strong chance at picking up the nomination. He’s going to have to have a road-to-Damascus moment on the Second Amendment, but he’s got the time to do so. Giuliani’s greatest asset is that he exudes a sense of leadership — when he’s in the room, there’s no doubt that he’s in charge.

On the other hand, TvM’s Jeff Kouba:

If Giuliani does not unequivocably state he believes abortion is wrong because it ends an unborn human life, period, I don’t see Giuliani ever winning over conservatives on this one.

Giuliani would have to hope he seems tough enough on matters of terrorism and national security for conservatives to give abortion a back seat in the list of priorities.

And the trouble with that is the country is becoming weary of war, with seemingly little obvious progress in Iraq. Conservatives may be prone to want to turn their attentions back home, wash their hands of the world, and focus again on domestic issues. If so, Giuliani will have a tough run for the party’s nomination.

I’m still nowhere close to figuring this one out. 

This article about the battle against speeding in st. Paul and other cities.

Concerned about speeding motorists on St. Paul’s Raymond Avenue, members of a St. Anthony Park neighborhood task force …were putting the final touches on the request [for help with curbing speeding] when they got word that a woman and her two children had been hit by a car while crossing Raymond near an elementary school.

The accident…sent the woman to the hospital.

 Sounds dangerous.  And near a school, no less!

So what’s the official response from the school itself – and the principal, who’s charged with seeing to her students’ safety?

Andrea Dahms, the principal at St. Anthony Park Elementary, so mistrusted drivers on that stretch that two years ago she removed the school’s student crossing guard at Raymond and Gordon Avenues. That’s the same intersection where the woman and her children were recently injured.

That’s right – stop warning people on the dangerous street to watch for kids, because it’s too dangerous?

And these are the people that are educating the kids?

Cathy In The Wright:

But hey…you know it’s a great birthday when someone ends up with barf in their hair.

She also has a special guest from overseas.

It was fourteen years ago yesterday that Zam came into the world; two weeks late, crabby from being covered in a head-to-toe rash, and with  the biggest gopher cheeks in the history of babydom.

Zam has never been the oblique one.  When he was three years old, we were teaching him about prayer.  Late one clear summer night, as we were walking into the house from the car, he stopped in the middle of the lawn.  “GOD!  HEY, GOD!” he yelled.

He’s still kind of that way.

Happy birthday (a day late in blog terms) Zam!

Ed and I had a great conversation about the ’08 GOP race on the show Saturday. I think we are in similar places.

For both of us, seeing Rudy Giuliani speaking in ’05 at the Center of the American Experiment was a bit of an epiphany; Rudy has something that is sorely lacking from too many in the GOP, especially on the short list; leadership.

Giuliani isn’t a conservative true believer; he’s very weak on abortion and the Second Amendment. But if you’re a conservative, abortion is best handled by the states, and as long as the President refrains from turning the BATF loose on the people and pushing to repeal the Second Amendment, I can look at other issues more seriously. Indeed, the most important way the President interfaces with either of these issues is via the judges he nominates to the federal and Supreme Courts.

And it’s there that Ed got some good news:

On the Federal judiciary I would want judges who are strict constructionists because I am. I’m a lawyer. I’ve argued cases in the Supreme Court. I’ve argued cases in the Court of Appeals in different parts of the country. I have a very, very strong view that for this country to work, for our freedoms to be protected, judges have to interpret not invent the Constitution. Otherwise you end up, when judges invent the constitution, with your liberties being hurt. Because legislatures get to make those decisions and the legislature in South Carolina might make that decision one way and the legislature in California a different one. And that’s part of our freedom and when that’s taken away from you that’s terrible.

This, combined with the pragmatic desire to have a leader running for the White House, has given Giuliani a surprisingly good start.

I am still undecided. I was impressed with Romney last week, and Giuliani is on my short list. McCain isn’t – he has a lot of forgiveness to grovel for.

It was five years ago today that I first posted on this blog.

When I started this thing up, I never expected to find an audience. And for eight months, I was right – I averaged under ten visits a day, in those days when most people thought “blogging” was something that happened after cheap beer and burritos.

Things evolved nicely from there, of course. This blog – and blogging – has taken me from being a cranky single dad and frustrated former pundit writing about the Minnesota legislature in his home office to…well, more or less the same thing, but with a much bigger audience!

And I’ve loved just about every minute of it.

Marty Andrade – celebrated his third blog anniversary this past Thursday – had a superb observation:

It’s hard to maintain a blog for a long period of time. It even looks like that at least in the United States blogging is starting to plateau as more people abandon their blogs. Blogging done right can be very rewarding, but if one focuses too much on traffic and linking and puts their expectations too high they won’t be blogging long. There’s sort of a Zen to blogging, you become a good blogger once you let go of you worldly wants.

Marty’s very right. I sometimes ask myself – would I still enjoy this if my readership dropped back to two a day? Or if, worse, the City Pages endorsed me?

Yes. To the first one, anyway.

…even as I recall either of these bands…

…and how much fun I had with both of ’em – gulp – 25 years ago.

I can’t get enough of this version of my favorite-ever Motown song.

Before I get started, let me just point out that these are the kinds of pansies I have to share a studio with:

Never fear, the subzero Twin Cities temperatures will not affect the broadcast. We scoff at the bitterly cold weather and will recognize it only for evidence that perhaps Al Gore is not qualified for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cold? In NoDak, we would consider wearing shirts in this weather.

Sheesh.

But the Volume I team redeem themselves a bit:

The highlight of todays show promises to be our guest in the noon hour. The eminent historian Max Boot joins us. He is foreign affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, occasional verbal sparring partner with VDH, and the author of a fascinating new book: War Made New – Technology, Warfare and the Course of History 1500 to Today. Insightful book review here. Well discuss the effect of revolutions in warfare on world history and what that may mean for us in the future as we progress further into and beyond the Information Age.

Now that – as long as they don’t sit and mewl like frightened kittens about the weather – will be worth a listen!

On Volume II, Ed and I will talk about the news of the week, while the Final Word guys will, I’m sure, be interviewing Al Franken or someone.

UPDATE:  Oh, say it isn’t so, Ed…

If my grandmother were alive, she’d be 102 today. 

I grew up four blocks from Grandma Bea, in Jamestown, until she died in October of my senior year of high school.

In this piece, on what would have been her 100th birthday, I wrote about her claim to fame.  It’s still a fun story.

In 1940, everyone – everyone – predicted Sammy Baugh’s Washington Redskins were going to beat the Chicago Bears in the NFL Championship game.

Of course, the final result was the Bears dishing out a legendary 73-0 drubbing, a victory that set the stage for the defeat of Naziism.

I thought about trying to dredge up some of that 66-year-old Karma, and picking something like…:

Bears 255 (241 of them defensive)

Clots 13

But I finally opted to play it a little more serious.  After all, with the war on terror hinging on the balance, and America at the beginning of at least two dark years, it’d hardly behoove me to be excessively glib.

Of course, predications are dangerous, in the sense that some dolt will always hang onto them, and if you’re wrong, dance about like a poo-flinging monkey and wave your light-hearted, non-important prediction in your face like botched brain surgery.  Or, in other words, not dangerous at all.

So, while acknowledging in advance that I neither follow football nor, my Bears fandom notwithstanding, do I especially care about it, please take the following prediction – vital to humanity as it is that I be correct – with a block of salt.

Nonetheless, I’ll stand by it for all it’s worth.  Which isn’t much.  But rest assure that if I win, my tune will change.  As it always does when I win.

Bears 42

Clots 17.

As it is written, so shall it evermore be.

I listen, occasionally, to Michael Savage for about the same reasons I occasionally listen to Steve Vai.  The material itself bores me stiff, but the sheer technique is fascinating.

Savage has mastered the art of pushing listeners’ buttons; he is a virtuoso of manipulative talk-radio technique.  And, like any virtuoso, watching them riffing can get pretty dull after you watch the same arpeggio for a while.

So I don’t listen much anymore.

But this view into life behind the scenes on the Savage show…:

 Kicking off hour three of last night’s live broadcast, Savage dropped the “F-bomb” onto unsuspecting affiliates from coast- to- coast.

While some sharp- eared station board operators may have kept the offending words from reaching the airwaves, it’s highly likely that most were unable to catch it.

…is interesting, if only because it’s so much like a day at the NARN with Chad, Brian and King.

(And you can tell Brian Maloney’s been in the bigs too long; he thinks most of Savage’s stations have actual live board operators…)

Of late, it’s become important to some lefties to try to debunk – 30-odd years after the event – the notion that anti-war protesters ever spat upon returning Vietnam vets.

Jack Shafer in Slate continues what is, apparently, a crusade for him:

The myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran refuses to die. Despite Jerry Lembcke’s debunking book from 1998, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, and my best efforts to publicize his work, the press continues to repeat the fables as fact.

Earlier this month, Newsweek resuscitated the vet-spit myth in a dual profile of John McCain and Chuck Hagel. Newsweek reports: “Returning GIs were sometimes jeered and even spat upon in airports; they learned to change quickly into civilian clothes.”

Nexis teems with such allegations of spat-upon vets and even includes testimonials by those who claim to have been gobbed upon. But Lembcke—a Vietnam vet himself—cites his own research and that of other academics to assert that he has never uncovered a single news story documenting such an incident.

Lembke’s book asserts that, since he never uncovered a news story about veterans getting spat upon, it must never have happened – that it’s all an urban legend.
It’s possible.

It’s also a very odd standard of evidence; presence in the news media is the threshold of truth.

Lembcke writes:

If spitting on veterans had occurred all that frequently, surely some veteran or soldier would have called it to the attention of the press at the time. … Indeed, we would imagine that news reporters would have been camping in the lobby of the San Francisco airport, cameras in hand, just waiting for a chance to record the real thing—if, that is, they had any reason to believe that such incidents might occur.

Maybe. Quite possible, in fact. Urban legends do take on lives of their own.

But let’s tackle Lembke’s – and Shafer’s – assertions; that…:

1. …if it didn’t pop up in Lexis/Nexis, it probably never happened
2. …some intrepid reporter would surely have been camping out waiting to verify the story

Picture the scenario; you’re just back from ‘Nam. You’ve spent the past year slogging through jungle, dodging booby traps, getting into firefights at “inside-the-phonebooth” range, patrolling and ambushing and sitting up at night watching for infiltrators. Then you fly home. Some fly-eaten piece of vermin spits at or on you. What are you going to do? Go to the police, much less a news reporter? In those circumstances, does it occur to you to take official action over spit?

As to the media of the day – the idea that an old school editor would assign anyone to stake out the airport looking for people spitting on people beggars my imagination, but I suppose anything’s possible.

But as I said, it’s entirely possible that the spit stories are urban legends. To dismiss the claims (as so many leftybloggers are curiously racing to do today) ignores the reason urban legends occur in the first place.

Then, starting around 1980, members of the Vietnam War generation began sharing the tales, which Lembcke calls “urban myths.” As with most urban myths, the details of the spat-upon vets vary slightly from telling to telling, while the basic story remains the same. The protester almost always ambushes the soldier in an airport (not uncommonly the San Francisco airport), after he’s just flown back to the states from Asia. The soiled soldier either slinks away or does nothing.

I love the scare italics around “ambushes”; you’re a pencil-necked, drug-addled piece of yippie vermin; you’re going to cruise around the airport carrying a “Will Spit On Vets For Patchouli” sign, chasing after guys who’ve spent the last year fighting a war?

Yippies were dumb, but they weren’t suicidal. They weren’t going to all that trouble dodging the draft just to get their brains beaten in by some Marine who’d had a bad week.

But I digress. Urban legends happen for a reason. They often reflect some underlying part of a society’s, or group’s, zeitgeist.

I remember clearly as if it were yesterday the news coverage of some “peace” activist shortly before the Vietnam POWs came home. “They were never tortured! You can see,they’re all in great condition!”, she blathered. And yes, the hippies and protesters attacked soldiers as individuals as well as an institution.

And those critics – those who slandered those who fought – went on to positions of great power…:

Call it “rhetorical spit”. 

Even if no single yippie ever actually spat on a returning veteran, the figurative spitting – the endless “babykiller” references and John Kerry’s “Jinjiss Kahn” references being good places to start – would provide fertile, understandable ground for a more direct-sounding “legend”.