Shot in the Dark

Month: March 2007

  • NARN Today

    Flying solo today – Ed’s home with the First Mate. First hour – Connecting Reagan with the British sailors’ controversy. Second – more Saint Paul school banning recruiters!

  • At About This Moment…

    …26 years ago, I was unloading a bass amp from a pickup truck outside Jamestown High School.  The school’s stage band had just played a noon-hour gig at a Rotary Club meeting, and was coming back to school.  It was a warm, pleasant March day, my senior year of high school, and I really wasn’t…

  • Sgt. Neil Duncan – Benefit

    The story: Army Sgt. Neil Duncan, from Maple Grove, MN, was severely injured in Afghanistan on December 5, 2005 when an improvised explosive device (IED) ripped through his Humvee. Neil was seriously wounded as a result of the explosion. He lost both of his legs, shattered his jaw, broke his elbow and hand, and sustained…

  • It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XLVIII

    Jazzed from the weekend – great first date, moved into a cool new place, word that my band would be opening for “Hanover Fist” at the Entry, my interview with Ernst Zündel was the best (and infuriating and controversial) I’d ever done – I drove to work on Monday morning, March 30, 1987.  I was…

  • Insult To Injury To More Insult

    A few years back, in response to the “epidemic” of “deadbeat dads”, a slew of government agencies embarked on a raft of programs to teach fathers “how to be responsible” as parents. The goal? Well, no, it wasn’t some warm ‘n fuzzy desire to make sure every kid grew up with warm memories of Dad.…

  • Happy To Cut The Crap For A Better Minnesota

    Gary Gross provides the whole world a public service, enshrining this remark by Saint Paul DFL legislator Cy Thao – an ultraliberal H’mong solon – for all posterity: Today, at a committee hearing, Cy Thao told Steve “When you guys win, you get to keep your money. When we win, we take your money.” This…

  • Stupid Celebrity Watch

    John Mellencamp on yesterday’s KQ Morning Show, talking about why the US prospered so much during the Baby Boom’s childhood: (paraphrasing very closely) During World War II, we bombed everyone else back to the Stone Age!  That’s why we prospered!  There was no competition! Ah, Coogs.  Silly, silly Coogs.  We did it, huh?  If the US…

  • It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XLVII

    It was Sunday, March 29, 1987. It had been the best month of my life. The month had started with our production of the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament.  KSTP-AM was the flagship station for a statewide network; Mark Boyle called the games; Bruce Gordon was down on the benches and in the locker…

  • GI Joe Goes GOP?

    Word has it Colonel Joe Repya is going to run for State GOP Chair. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Joe Repya is announcing a run for the state Republic Party Chairman. Repya tells KNSI news the reason why he’s running is the state needs leadership and the downward trend of losing Republican seats needs to stop. Repya…

  • Has Anyone Seen Ryan Rhodes?

    Because  I’m thinking he’s in big trouble: A Scottish company has been slammed for inviting customers to “send a poo” to an Englishman on St George’s Day. Edinburgh-based firm PostaPoo.com is selling plastic “realistic poo” to send to “your favourite (or least favourite) Englishman” to mark April 23. Customers are given the choice between human…

  • Good Thing It’s Friday

    If it weren’t Friday today, I swear, I’d walk down to the High Bridge and just end it all right now. Thank goodness it’s Friday, though.

  • Gwynne Dwyer Is Unclear On The Concept

    Gwynne Dwyer, a reporter-without-portfolio living in the UK, shows that he learned foreign policy the same place everyone on the left seems to have learned it. His thesis, after quoting an American officer who noted that American rules of engagement would have allowed our sailors and Marines to have fought back: Just as well that it…

  • Little Joys of Urban Life: A Tale of Two Lunchtimes

    March 27, 2006:  Walk down the long, beige hall of the long, beige McOfficePlex in the beige western suburb, to the beige break room, to nuke a can of soup that was, if memory serves, beige (corn chowder).   Sit at cube, listen to the hum of the HVAC, dream of having oxygen in my brain,…

  • Fireworks

    Couldn’t make it to last night’s Saint Paul School Board meeting. Swiftee could, though (I’m adding my own emphasis here).  Board member Tom Goldstein spoke at length about his objections to the presence of military recruiters on school property; he barely made an effort to conceal his contempt for the two US Navy Master Chief…

  • Lie Down With Dogs

    My daughter’s charter school – like many urban charter schools – is run by rabid Democrats. This doesn’t faze me. In picking a school, I care as little about the teachers’ personal politics as I do about their taste in music. Institutional politics is another thing altogether – but the institution’s politics, while institutional (and…

  • My Letter to Senator Ellen Anderson

    I wrote this letter to my senator, Ellen Anderson (DFL, District 66), about her deeply-misguided vote on capping Charter Schools: Senator Anderson, I’m Mitch Berg.   I’m a constituent of yours.  And while I’m not only a Republican, a talk show host (at AM1280), a conservative blogger (www.shotinthedark.info) and a member of Concealed Carry Reform Now,…

  • Fight The Power

    As I discussed with the St. Paul School Board’s Tom Conlon last weekend on the NARN, elements on the board want to restrict access to St. Paul students on the part of military recruiters. Swiftee – a longtime gadfly of the board – is leading everyone interested in speaking out against this move at this…

  • This Is Your Terrorist. This Is Your Terrorist On Stress.

    Leftyblog “Needlenose” wrote about Arkanasas Democrat Mark Pryor’s dim-bulb “Double-dog secret withdrawal date” (secrecy guaranteed because, y’know, we’re only going to tell Congress and the Iraqi Government) – the same one I wrote about earlier. The Nose’s comment:  Sen. Pryor, here’s a secret for you: The “enemy” is already biding their time and waiting for us…

  • Baby, Even The Pwn3ed Hacks Get Lucky Sometimes

    Learned Foot beats the Minnesota Money Monitor – a local lefty rentablog that used to share quarters with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America”, but has no connection with ’em, nosirreebob, and which responds to all criticism or questioning by either a) giggling and changing the subject or b) calling their attacker a “hack” and…

  • March 27, 1968

    It was the biggest news in my then five-year-old life; the big, hulking old Gladstone Hotel, the architectural lynchpin of the north end of Jamestown’s downtown (the part north of the tracks), an old hotel dating from the 1880’s that had hosted presidents and foreign royalty, had caught fire.  I knew it had to be…

  • The Loathsome Anniversary

    Ryan Sager in the NYSun about the fifth birthday of the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law: …the folks who brought us the bill known colloquially as McCain-Feingold will be taking a wildly undeserved victory lap this week. After all the big promises leading up to the passage of McCain-Feingold, one is tempted to resort to the…

  • Double Dog Idea

    One of the reasons Republicans oppose setting a withdrawal date is that it’ll give terrorists a date to scrawl into their Franklin Covey planners; “Lay Low Until Today!”. They can lay low, hang out in Pakistan, sell naan bread and read “female knee” pr0n until the day after that date, and then go back to…

  • Terrorists: Rep. Ellison Has Scheduled An Appointment For You

    The people of the Fifth Congressional District sent Keith Ellison to Congress. That’s how democracy works. I don’t care that he was the most “progressive” candidate for the job; people have the right to vote for anyone they want. I care not in the least that he is Moslem.  It is entirely possible that electing…

  • Sign The Terrorists Have Won

     A German judge cites the Quran in handing down a verdict: A German judge has stirred a storm of protest here by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim wife’s request for a fast-track divorce on the ground that her husband beat her. In a remarkable ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim…

  • I Don’t Wanna Go Off On A Rant, Here, But…

    Dennis Miller – one of my five all-time favorite comics – starts his latest venture, a radio talk show, today (coincidentally, just in time for the re-christening of AM1570, the Patriot’s sister station, as the “Talk of the West Metro”.  Miller appears from 9-noon on 1570).  Good news? Maybe.  I’ve commented in the past about…