In 1991, my then-wife and I made $18,000.  Together.  This, with one kid the whole year, and another born in August. 

We lived in a rat-trap of a house in the Midway: three drafty bedrooms, and a foundation that let mice in in droves; the rodents gamboled about inside the walls like Britney and Lindsay on the dance floor; they’d sweep across the floors like the herds of buffalo from Dances with Wolves.  It was cheap, and it was awful.  And it was all we could afford.

From mid-1991 into mid-1993, I (and, most of the time, my wife) went to Plasma Alliance twice a week – the maximum allowed – to get money for formula and diapers.  I still have a divot at the crook of my left elbow, the “sweet spot” where they’d do the draws.  I still know the language – waiting for the Fleeb to do the stick, hoping for a fast draw so I wouldn’t get partialled, because I needed a full check – and the drill (drink LOTS of water, eat NO fat for the 12 hours before the donation, so the lipids in the plasma didn’t slow down the plasmapheresis process); with enough care, you could donate a liter of plama in less than an hour.  It was worth $45 a week, if you did everything right.

I worked, of course; I was a nightclub DJ, making maybe $50 a night for 3-5 nights a week (figure a weekly take-home around $200-250), through the beginning of 1992, working nights and (when my daughter was born) minding the baby during the day.  I also worked at a couple of radio stations for 15 hours a week – KDWB AM and FM and WDGY – for about $6 an hour; $6.50 when I got a raise.  I was choosing, at the time (and it turned out to be a bad choice) to sacrifice a lot, one might say even obsessively, to try to re-jumpstart my radio “career” (and in my own defense, I did come close; I came in second place for the Program Director job at KSTP-AM in 1991, a week before Bun was born).  When that tanked, I worked at some other awful jobs; I was an essay reader for $7 an hour (a “sweatshop for people with degrees”, one of my co-workers called it), then worked for a legal document coding company for $6 an hour.  My wife was a waitress, and then did data entry work, when the pregnancy allowed it.

In November of 1992, with my son on the way, I found a company that wanted to pay me a couple thousand dollars to write an installation manual for a database configuration system.  I quit the coding job to put all my effort into it; on Christmas Eve, they called to tell me they were stiffing me for the money that’d been earmarked for two months of rent and NSP bills. 

The day my son was born, I got eviction and power shutoff notices (and word that the company that had stiffed me had gone out of business). 

Once, money was so tight – half a week away from payday, a day away from another Plasma Hut donation – that I fixed my at-the-time wife and I a dinner of rice with sauteed onions.  It wasn’t bad.  Other staples:  fried potatoes and baloney; cube steak burgers; grilled cheese sandwiches; a zillion variations on spaghetti.  Y’know – poor people food, the kind of starchy, fatty crap that is, at least, dirt-cheap. 

But according to Mark Gisleson at Norwegianity, I know nothing about poverty, at least compared to upper-middle-class, Volvo-driving alpaca-wearing dilletante Barbara Ehrenreich:

Mitch, who I linked to earlier, ripped on Ehrenreich recently, but his criticism says more about Mitch’s failure to “grok” poverty than it does his understanding of Ehrenreich’s writings. Poverty is about having nothing. If you have an apartment or house to live in, you’re not poor by real world standards. Impoverished maybe, but not truly poor.

Yes, Mark, and gosh, we were in a discussion about the American minimum wage, a context which I didn’t figure was an entree to comparing “poverty” in America – where the “poor” overwhelmingly have roofs over their heads, TVs, refrigerators and cars – with poverty in, say, Sudan or Indonesia or Bolivia. 

I didn’t figure it needed much explanation.  On the other hand, we’re talking with someone who can say this…:

 Let’s not even get into Ehrenreich’s new topic: slavery in the United States. But, like a radically anorexic minimum wage, I guess that’s OK with Mitch too, so long as it only affects a few people, and not Mitch.

…something too stupid and casually defamatory for even Kevin McKay or Jeff Fecke to write with a straight face.  My point about she who must not be criticized Ehrenreich was in Nickled and Dimed, she approached poverty wearing the equivalent of blackface; if she approaches slavery with the same upper-middle-class preconceptions as she approached minimum-wage life, she should (but likely won’t) get laughed off the public stage.

I don’t think Mitch is malicious in this regard, just unwilling to take a hard look at what Reaganism hath wrought. “Only a tiny, shrinking minority actually works for the minimum wage”? Mitch, if only one person was getting paid minimum wage, and if that wage didn’t allow them to eat and have a roof over their heads, why would that be OK?

Gisleson mixes his questions.

The vast majority of those getting minimum wage aren’t responsible for feeding or sheltering themselves, much less anyone else; they’re teenagers working at their first jobs.  Would that be “OK?”  Absolutely. 

For the remainder – those adults who are responsible for feeding, sheltering and clothing themselves?  Well, my religion bids me to take care of the most unfortunate among us, an injunction that I take as seriously as the aggressively atheist Gisleson ridicules it.  But that’s a personal thing.

Speaking for society, I have to ask; why does an adult earn minimum wage?   

Because no employer is willing or able to pay more for the skills they bring to the market, either because the skill is of little value to employers (flipping burgers) or the market is glutted with people able to do the job (non-profit work).

So why do these adults – responsible as they are for feeding and sheltering themselves and, sometimes, others – go onto the job market with skills that are only worth the minimum wage to employers (or even less; as the minimum wage rises, Macdonalds and Burger King are moving to minimize the number of burger flippers in their restaurants; they’re switching to pre-cooked patties heated en masse in microwaves, to eliminate the need even for most of the minimum wage employees at the grill)?   

In many cases, it’s because of a physical or psychological problem; they’re not able to learn a skill that’s worth more than the minimum wage. 

In many other cases – including my own, way back when – it’s because of that hoary old conservative cliche, “bad choices” which, like so many conservative cliches, is true more often than not.  Criminal records, drug or alcohol problems, getting pregnant as a teenager, dropping out of school, or just plain dissipation – all of them get in the way of learning a skill, or even just-plain good work habits that can take a person out of the minimum wage world.   And, unfortunately, it’s not just ones’ own bad choices that’ll get you; when criminals, addicts and slackers go on to have kids, and raise them in poverty (yeah, the American version of it, bla bla bla), and pass the culture of poverty down to their families, the kids are indeed victims of those bad choices.  And yes, before the inevitable self-righteous leftyblogger points it out, society has made some bad choices as well – African-American and Indian societies are chronically dysfunctional a century and change after slavery and the extinction of native culture, respectively. 

Factor out that last bit there (I personally favor extending tribal gambling as “reparations” – perhaps we should legalize marijuana, licensing the sales to proven descendants of slaves, to continue the pattern); what is society’s obligation to insulate people from their own bad choices?  Their parents’ bad choices?

Why should anyone who works be unable to feed, shelter and clothe themselves, and I’m not even mentioning healthcare.

Because tacking a few extra dimes per hour onto a miserable paycheck isn’t going to change anything!

And more importantly, because merely “working” isn’t the point; if society subsidizes the mere act of showing up and “working” with food, shelter, clothing and healthcare, then eventually 90% of our society will be leaning against shovels (figuratively and literally) while the other 10% slaves away to pay the bills.

If society is going to subsidize anything, it should be good behavior  – staying in school, learning a skill that can eventually help someone support themselves and those for whom they’re responsible, putting down the damn bong and keeping your johnson in your pants and learning how to support oneself and, eventually, raise families that value the same thing.

Blogging is about advocacy, but I don’t understand advocacy that seeks to take from those who have the least to give. Does it bother Mitch that minimum wage workers in Hennepin county will individually pay more for the new baseball stadium than all the millionaires in Duluth put together?

Mark:  Show me where I’ve ever stumped for subidies of baseball parks.

You’ll be looking a long time.  I’ve always opposed it.

As well as, for that matter, government subsidies of all businesses; corporate welfare is just as debilitating as subsidizing poverty.

I continue to have problems with capitalists who think they sprang fully formed from Adam Smith’s forehead, and that they owe nothing to society or other workers. Right now the underpaid restaurant workers are supporting the overtime that drives our economy, feeding people who don’t have time to cook, but can’t afford to pay real prices.

This isn’t as stupid as the “slavery” crack above, but it does show exactly how “reality-based” Gisleson and his ilk are not, when he notes that… 

…to the [“]reality-based[“]: eating out shouldn’t be inexpensive, or competitive with cooking for yourself. Or do you hate all those restaurant workers that much?

Maybe Gisleson has never fed a family (I’m willing to bet on it); cooking at home is pretty much always cheaper, and can certainly be faster.

Of course, not being “reality-based”, and a mere bread-winner who’s been raising kids through thick and (at times, very) thin for the past 17 years, what would I know about “reality”, as people like Gisleson see it?

Sheila is on another of her “commonplace” rampages.

I love this one:

I have a higher and greater standard of principle [than George Washington]. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won’t.

— Mark Twain, 1871

Oh, and this one:

He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did.

— Auden on Tennyson

Just go and read ’em.  There’ll be thousands by the time she’s done.

Last week, I wrote about the benefits of actually meeting people with whom you disagree, face to face.  It tends to humanize the argument, and drag people out of the petty, stereotype based bickering that attends so much online “debate”.

For example I’ve met the likes of Chuck Olson, Luke Francl and Chris Dykstra from New Patriot; while I disagree with all of ’em on most everything, I’ve found them to be great guys and had a great time talking with ’em all.  I even met some of the giggly fratboys from MNPublius; ditto.  Nice kids; they’ll be smart when they grow up.

Another example; I met “Tild”, who, like most leftybloggers, seems to write for dozens of different leftyblogs.  She was writing for “Norwegianity”, I think, when I deduced from her writing that she was a joyless shrieking scold.  Then I met her at Flash’s place, and found that, in person, she was not joyless.

I stand sit corrected.

But meeting people and becoming acquainted with their arguments pays other dividends.  For example, last month I pointed out that I am the foremost feminist you will ever meet.  Of course, much of the local Sorosphere reacted like I’d farted in church at a Wellstone seance, and responded with great ire in various degrees of “oh, no you’re double-dog not!” 

But Tild referred to something that Mark “Labor Goon” Gisleson put on Norwegianity that went somewhere nobody else has gone; actually using science and stuff to try to attack my claim.

And I’m chagrinned.

Because for all these years I thought that feminism – especially equity feminism – was about working to make sure that women, like my daughter will one day be, don’t face discrimination because of their gender, and have all the doors open to them that their merits and innate drive can kick free.

Silly me.  It’s about how much your blog says “She” versus “He”.  According to this tool, the word “he” outnumbers the word “she” on my blog by 71% to 29%.  Go ahead, check it out!

Of course, since Tild is a leftyblogger, we have to assume that even that ludicrous context is mangled beyond recognition – and, as usual, our assumption is confirmed:

What does this ratio tell us? If you think it reveals that e.g. a site with a higher “he” count is primarily consisting of or appealing to a male audience, that’s not true; for instance, both BlogHer.org as well as AskMen.com show a higher count for “she.” Whatever correlations you might discover, they’re likely not as linear. Below are a couple of examples from different sites:

[Oh, go ahead and look!]

I should’ve figured; it’s all about superficial bean-counting!

Very well.  I’ll redouble my effort to insert feminine pronouns.

(more…)

George F Will on the other Minneapolis taxi controversy – the one that doesn’t involve Somali Moslems and alcohol:

The campaign to deny Luis Paucar his right to economic liberty illustrates the ingenuity people will invest in concocting perverse arguments for novel entitlements. This city’s taxi cartel is offering an audacious new rationalization for corporate welfare, asserting a right — a constitutional right — to revenues it would have received if the City Council had not ended the cartel that never should have existed.

That’s right – owners of Minneapolis cab licenses, who’ve benefitted immensely from government regulations artificially driving down the supply of cabs in Minneapolis, are sueing on Fifth Amendment grounds to protect a “right” to income that exists only because of government intervention!

Will tells the story of Mr. Paucar…: 

Paucar, 37, embodies the best qualities of American immigrants. He is a self-sufficient entrepreneur. And he is wielding American principles against some Americans who, in their decadent addiction to government assistance, are trying to litigate themselves to prosperity at the expense of Paucar and the public.

…who came to the Twin Cities from NYC to try to make his fortune as a cab entrepreneur.

Where he ran into “Minnesota Nice”, in the form of a government-induced scarcity; Minnesotans are apparently happy to pay extra for an artificial scarcity of taxis. 

By the time Paucar got here in 1999, 343 taxis were permitted. He wanted to launch a fleet of 15. That would have required him to find 15 license-holders willing to sell for up to $25,000 apiece…[the scarcity of taxis in Minneapolis]– and Paucar’s determination and, eventually, litigiousness; he is a real American — helped persuade the City Council members, liberals all (12 members of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, one member of the Green Party), to vote to allow 45 new cabs per year until 2010, at which point the cap will disappear.

Minneapolis’ licensees are addicted to the easy life of the regulatory beneficiary: 

In response, the cartel is asking a federal court to say the cartel’s constitutional rights have been violated. It says the cap constituted an entitlement to profits that now are being “taken” by government action.

The danger?  Beyond the stupidity of regulating something like the maximum number of cabs in the first place, I mean? 

If the licensees win, the precedent will be set; no government regulation that confers a financial benefit can ever be undone, because it’ll be a “taking”.

Will gives well-placed kudos to Mr. Paucar…

By challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor.

…but betrays provincial ignorance of Minneapolis: 

It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar came to America, a native-born rent-seeker who has been corrupted by the entitlement mentality would leave.

A good part of Minneapolis would be depopulated.

Hmmm.

A belated happy happy to Powerline, celebrated their fifth anniversary Saturday.

It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that:

• …I’ve been doing this longer than Powerline, and
• …we’ve all been doing this so long!

Happy anniversary, John, Paul, Ringo and George and Scott.

A new book about Hillary! Clinton by a former aide shows that she was ready to dump Bill over his serial affairs at one point, while he was still governor of Arkansas.

Hrmph.  Sorry to hear that.  I’m not going to jump up and down and giggle over it, and it’s not like it’s exactly big news.  He’s They’re not president anymore. 

But I thought this quote was interesting:

In the 640-page book, Bob Boorstin, who worked for Mrs Clinton when she was trying to restructure the nation’s healthcare system, blamed her for the collapse of her own plans.

“I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known,” he told Mr Bernstein. “It’s her great flaw.”

Mark Fabiani, who defended the Clintons as White House counsel, said Hillary was “so tortured by the way she’s been treated that she would do anything to get out of the situation.

“If that involved not being fully forthcoming, Mr Fabiani said she would say: ‘I have a reason for not being forthcoming.'”

Submitted without comment.

Lori Sturdevant apparently hopes that none of her readers really paid attention in high school civics class in her Sunday column in the Strib.

Six months ago, who’da thunk that Gov. Tim Pawlenty was headed for his most influential legislative session since 2003? “We were the only ones who remembered that he only got 47 percent of the vote,” sighed DFL Sen. Ann Rest the day after the 2007 Legislature went home.

Well, for this state’s good, let’s hope Ann Rest and the rest of the DFL horde keeps obsessing over that meaningless figure.   

 Far from being cowed into conciliation by the big DFL majorities in the House and Senate, the Republican governor’s near-defeat experience apparently left him rarin’ to veto any little (or big) bill he didn’t like.

Whenever the Democrats are on the ropes – as, unaccountably with their crushing majorities in both houses of the Legislature, they are at the end of the just-finished session – they turn to talk of “compromise”.

Tell us, Lori Sturdevant – when, during all their years in power (or, with the likes of Arne Carlson in office, de facto power) did the DFL “compromise” with the GOP conservatives? 

Sturdevant unleashes her wish list:

Indulge a Capitol basement-dweller in some reverse speculation. (Doesn’t that sound gentler than “second-guessing”?) Might the session have had a different outcome — or at least left a different aftertaste — if this had been the DFL strategy?

• Reduce expectations.

House DFLers had six bullet points on the “Back to Basics” to-do list that served them well during the 2006 campaign. But Pawlenty’s reelection, and the November revenue forecast of pred’near no new money after paying for inflation, should have whacked that list down to size.

Let’s call a shovel a shovel; the DFL got drunk with power before they even got the cork out of the bottle. 

It should have been clear that even if the DFLers could sneak a tax increase past the governor, it wouldn’t be big enough for a spending surge in both education and property tax relief. Further, to most Minnesotans and the governor, gas taxes are taxes too, even if they don’t flow into the general fund.

What?  The average Joe on the Minnesota Street isn’t a wonk?  The hell you say!

Rein in ambitions and pick one big, focused fight for more spending on one good cause, and DFLers then could:

• Sharpen the message, and spin it forward.

Read:  find a way to tell Minnesotans that a duck is a dog.

Pawlenty had a crisp message about growth in the coming two-year budget: “Isn’t 10 percent enough?” DFLers needed a compelling comeback. They needed to make the case that Minnesotans’ lives, or their children’s lives, would be better if the state spent more on their top priority.

And to do that, there needs to be such a case.

• Maximize common cause with the governor.

…That would let DFLers look like reasonable folks intent on breaking the gridlock that Minnesotans had grown sick of seeing. It also would have made it more difficult for Republicans to paint DFLers as radical tax-and-spenders, when the endgame came.

The mere presence of Phyllis Kahn in the House and Larry Pogemiller, Ellen Anderson, and (fill in just about any metro Senate DFLer) in the Senate makes it easy for us to paint DFLers and radical tax-and-spenders.

• Court moderate Republicans.

Despite their depleted numbers, GOP moderates held the keys to achieving the top DFL goals.

They also realize something that Lori Sturdevant apparently doesn’t: 

DFL legislators had voters with them in November.

Nope.  The GOP had voters against them.  That’s why you had spasmodic reactions like Phil Krinkie losing by 50-odd votes.   

These options are humbly offered with no promise that they would have brought the session to a more satisfying conclusion.

I wonder if Lori Sturdevant’s Memorial Day barbecue will involve shovelling bags of ten dollar bills into the fire for a “satisfying conclusion”.

After years of exhorting (in the editorial pages) the government to jack up the minimum wage, as well as trying to push city governments to adopt “living wage” standards, the Strib notes that only a tiny, shrinking minority actually works for the minimum wage:

“I was working two jobs near minimum wage,” [a high school kid working at a coffee shop]  said. “But I just quit my second job at Godfather’s Pizza to work here.”

By state law, Javalive’s owner, Ken Beck, is required to pay his employees only $5.25 an hour. But Beck has found that he needs to offer more to attract good workers in a tight market.

All the more reason to keep the economy humming, right?

Good thing the DFL tax hikes got rejected.

But I digress:

Beck isn’t alone. Only a tiny fraction of Minnesota workers would be affected by the planned increase in the federal minimum wage, which would be phased in by the summer of 2009. And the share of those affected has been dropping steadily.

“They may run out of here with $10 an hour” once tips are included, Beck said. “To a certain extent, all the hoopla about the minimum wage is a moot point. In Faribault, you couldn’t hire anybody paying it.”

In early 2006, only about one in 12 jobs in Minnesota paid less than $7.15 an hour — a dime less than the new federal minimum wage approved by Congress this week, according to a state government analysis.

The share of workers in comparable low-wage jobs in early 1998 was nearly one in five.

“Wage inflation has made the minimum wage less and less relevant,” said Steve Hine, labor market information director at the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development.

A few years back, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote “Nickeled and Dimed“, in which she spent time working at three minimum wage jobs to try to show her upper-middle-class, Volvo-driving, alpaca-wearing friends and readers exactly how awful the minimum wage life was.  As someone who was grindingly poor for a while (in 1991 my then-wife and I together made about $18,000, with one kid and another born late in the year), the book rang very phony to me; Ehrenreich didn’t live like a minimum wage worker, she lived like an upper-middle-class, Volvo-driving, alpaca-wearing, Whole-Foods-shopping liberal in a “poor person” Halloween costume.  And, phonier still, she scarcely touched on the two great truths of adult minimum wage workers:

• For the most part, they move beyond minimum wage fairly quickly, as they learn their job and develop some skills
• Those that don’t move up usually don’t due to some impairment (drugs, booze), bad choices (involvement in crime and the corrections system) or just-plain-choice (people who work at poor non-profits and marginal industries).

So after years of advocating for a non-solution to a non-problem (societally speaking), it’s nice to see the facts come out.

Finally.

Senator Norm Coleman defends last week’s attempt in the Senate to shut down the preening arrogance of the “sanctuary cities” movement – a group of cities who’ve ordered their police to stop cooperating with immigration authorities.  The “movement” includes Minneapolis and Richfield, and might expand to Saint Paul before too long. 

These “sanctuary cities,” which currently include Minneapolis, offer the perfect setting for people determined to hurt us by offering them protection from immigration-related questions. In several cities local law enforcement are forbidden from asking during their routine police work whether a person is in the United States lawfully, thereby evading their legal responsibility to report their suspicions to the federal government. Essentially, the philosophy is “don’t ask, don’t tell” — don’t ask suspects about their immigration status, so you then don’t have to tell the federal authorities about them.

Scores of law enforcement officers have chafed at the gag order. Many say they routinely come into contact with dangerous persons they know have been deported already — yet their local sanctuary policies prevent them from being able to do anything about it. A few chilling examples include Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, who was stopped and ticketed for driving without a license in Broward County, Florida, in early 2001. His visa had expired. Nobody asked, so nobody told.

These cities – universally led by left-of-center extremists – believe that their issues with immigration enforcement (all of which generally trace back to “Democrat influence peddling” and “political correctness”) trump national security. 

Just this month we saw a terror plot unfold in Fort Dix that might have been prevented sooner, had the local officials who pulled the suspects over on numerous traffic violations been able to inquire about their immigration status. Make no mistake — this is a national security issue.

For this reason, I have put forth a proposal in the Senate to simply make it clear that a police officer has a right to ask immigration-related questions of a suspect, and to report his or her suspicions to federal authorities through already established channels. The amendment will lift the gag order on our local law enforcement and make these sanctuary policies illegal. I’m not asking local cops to conduct raids; I’m just asking that they be allowed to use their good judgment.

Here’s an idea, Norm; start spreading the rumor that anti-abortion activists, televangelists and NRA members are sneaking across the border. 

You’ll see Democrat calls for fences along both borders and the coastline and no-knock raids on illegal immigrants’ households faster than you can say “Algore”. 

You’re welcome.

Thank a veteran. 

And remember those who died to protect this country. 

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Next Two Seasons

Joel,

About this time last year, I started a binge of watching the first four seasons of 24 in, essentially, a six-week bender. I just couldn’t stop watching. I got reeled in. So while I missed most of Day 5, I made this past season of 24 my first “appointment TV” in nearly 20 years.

And like most of the rest of the Bauersphere, I was – I’ll exercise my gift for understatement – bored silly with this past season.

I got to thinking about this, since the A’nE network is replaying Day One at 6AM every day.  The morning after Day Six sputtered to a scarcely-lamented end, I caught an episode from Day One; Jack was searching the first round of people trying to assassinate David Palmer; Teri Bauer was searching for Kim, along with the infamous Mr. York, ostensibly the father of Kim’s friend but really an agent of Serbian assassins out to kidnap the Bauer family for what Bauer had done to Viktor Drezen’s brother, and so on, and so forth.  Bauer was arguing with CTU, in a life-or-death battle, and arguing with his estranged wife while simultaneously defending his nation and his family.

You know – the kind of stuff we can all identify with.  Because what made Jack Bauer (and the show built around him) compelling was that for the first four Days, he dealt – on a big, life-or-death, hyper-dramatic, caffeine-stoked level – with things that matter to all of us;  loyalty to friends, to family, to something bigger; the shortcomings we all have in exercising that loyalty; the twists and turns that life (or huge shadowy terrorist conspiracies) throw in the way of that ideal.

On the other hand, after the first four hours (which were as good as anything in the first five Days), Day Six felt like West Wing with the occasional shootout – except West Wing wrote about the canoodling and cavorting about the corridors of the innermost inner circles well.  24 has never been about “watching the machinery work”; the only way the show ever made the inner circle of the White House remotely compelling was to wrap it up in a character, David Palmer, who was having the same crises Bauer was; right and wrong, good and evil, and the many very gray shades he – everyone – navigates between them.

The big problem?  Day Six had no big moral crises; no choices between family and duty; no “to execute Ryan Chappelle or not to execute Ryan Chappelle”; no hotels full of plague victims to isolate, with the moral consequences beating everyone involved over the heads.  Day Six was just…too easy.

Oh, a lot more popped up, too – a lot of comparisons where Day Six came up wanting:

Plausible Suspension of Disbelief: That six successive terrorist conspiracies erupt within a 20 minute drive from CTU Los Angeles.
Implausible Suspension of Disbelief:  That Russia would go to war over a McGuffin shaped like a sound card.

Characters I Can Care About: Teri Bauer, Diane Huxley, Tony and Michelle.  There was a sense of conflict, loyalty, gain and loss.
Characters I Can Not Care About:  Audrey Raines. Jack seems to be obsessed over a  plot device dressed as a barbie doll.

Disbelief I Can Suspend:  Jack Bauer has the president’s cell and secure office numbers on speed-dial.
Disbelief I Can Not Suspend:  The Russians can move troops from barracks into a position flanking a US base in the ‘stans in a matter of hours.
Disbelief that Beggars My Imagination:  The Powers Boothe administration faces this potential instant attack with panicky resignation (unless they’re Democrats, in which case it’s sorta plausible).

Reality I Can Watch Being Bent And Shrug, Because It’s No Big Deal:  A US submarine named the “Vickery”.  US subs are either fish, cities, states or, rarely, congresspeople who fed lotsa pork to the Navy.  And Jimmy Carter. 
Reality I Can Watch Being Bent And Shrug, Because It’s Only My Intelligence Being Insulted:  The President arranges the firing of a dummy cruise missile from a submarine on a few moments’ notice and manages to keep his entire staff and cabinet in the dark about it.

Maybe…: Kim Bauer goes from being a bratty teen to a seasoned CTU systems wonk.
No:  Wayne Palmer goes from being a bratty presidential advisor to an elected president.

Villains That Could Scare Me: Dennis Hopper as Victor Drazen (and Zeljko Ivanek as his son; I have wondered since Homicide: Life On The Street  if Ivanek maybe hadn’t done some of that in his past); Mandy and Candy the naked lesbian assassins; shadowy Balkan killbots; Fayed.
Villains That Do Not Scare Me:  James Cromwell as Evil Grampa Bauer.  “That’ll do, Jack.  That’ll do”.

Plausible Suspension of Disbelief: CTU/LA has moles, gets hacked, suffers a bombing/nerve gas attack/direct assault.
Implausible Suspension of Disbelief: CTU/LA suffers a different attack every season, and never seems to learn.

Plausible Suspension of Disbelief: The Navy keeps a vic of F-18s fully loaded with air-to-surface weapons on American soil, ready to scramble on a moment’s notice at the command of CTU.
Implausible Suspension of Disbelief:  CTU has satellites recording activities on off-shore oil rigs even before it occurs to anyone to want to surveil them.

Joel:  have your people call my people.

Cheers,

Mitch Berg

Tim “Obie” O’Brien quotes Keith “Talking Hairdo” Olberman:

And you thought he was hard on Republicans

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took a break from ripping President Bush to tell the Democrats who caved on the war funding bill just what he thought of their actions. “The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the administration, in which the only things truly compromised are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends and family in Iraq.

Doomed?

Interesting to hear what my friends in the service think about that…

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions — stop the war — have traded your strength, your bargaining position and the uniform support of those who elected you for a handful of magic beans.”

Because magic beans in the form of transitory and misleading poll numbers and a national tantrum for a mandate are all you have, Keef!

…the MNGOP would have to invent him.

Thank you, DFL voters of Northeast Minneapolis. But I feel bad. I didn’t even get you anything for Christmas.

The DFL’s mad rush to finish the session – and jam through extra tax and spending bills by whatever means necessary – drew criticism from at least one media figure; Larry Schumacher of the St. Cloud Times:

The last two hours of debate on the floor of the House of Representatives made me nauseous and angry.

I don’t know if House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Democrats’ decision to run roughshod over the GOP minority to finish on time was within the rules, but I know it was wrong.

House Republicans were stalling, running the clock out to force a special session. Many of them believed House Democrats would take the blame if the people’s work didn’t get done on time.

That was just as wrong. But Democrats’ poor clock management over the last week gave Republicans that power. They didn’t see until too late that they were never going to agree 100 percent with Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and they waited until Monday to press ahead when they could’ve been finishing up over the weekend.

Gary from Let Freedom Ring responds:

The DFL also held up the most important bills to the last second in an attempt for them to pressure GOP legislators. They gambled that they could create a chaos that would lead some GOP legislators to jump ship. They gambled wrong.

Let’s also examine the consequences of the legislation that the DFL passed:

• The DFL passed legislation that would’ve raised a big assortment of taxes to the tune of $5 billion, which would’ve killed Minnesota’s economy in a hurry.
• The DFL passed an HHS omnibus bill that will get Minnesota fined $26 million for failing to comply with federal welfare guidelines.
• The DFL passed the Dream Act before dropping it out of the Higher Education conference report. The DFL bet that Minnesotans would agree with them that we should subsidize illegal immigrants’ college tuitions. Minnesotans from all across the state told them they wouldn’t.

But Monday night’s shameful displays make me just as uneasy. For all the cynics’ desire to scapegoat our politicians for everything that’s wrong today, I think Monday night says more about us than them.

I appreciate Larry’s introspection but I’ll respectfully disagree that Monday night’s floor session says more about us than them. I put the vast majority of the blame for Monday night’s trainwreck squarely on Maggie Kelliher’s & Tony Sertich’s shoulders. And on Larry Pogemiller’s shoulders, too.

I’ll give ’em a break.

They were so used to getting their way for so long, like spoiled children, they can’t imagine anyone telling them “boo” for trying to get their way now by any means fair or foul.

I missed this (because I wasn’t blogging yesterday!) – it was John Wayne’s 100th birthday.

 And as with all things movie, Red has the post of record.

…to hear that America’s sweetheart, Lindsay Lohan, is accused of drunk driving and hoovering up enoug Bolivian Marching Powder to kick-start John Belusi’s corpse:

We just wrapped up our live, online feed of the Beverly Hills Sheriff’s Department press conference regarding Lindsay Lohan’s DUI charges and here’s what we learned:

She had coke in the car! At the presser, it was announced that narcotics were found in the car by officers at the time the vehicle was towed and impounded. You can see in X17’s video, Lindsay’s bodyguard Jaz driving the wrecked car away from the scene of the accident just after it occurred (didn’t he think to take that white powdery substance outta the glove box?!).

As many in the media had been speculating (including us), Lindsay appears to have fallen off the wagon and had done so soon after she finished her rebah program at Wonderland a couple months back. X17 photogs witness Lindsay out on almost a nightly basis and she’s not a 2am kinda girl, she regularly gets home at 5 and 6 in the morning and my personal opinion is that you usually don’t make it that far without some gas in the tank, if you know what I mean …

All of my illusions are shattered.

Nobody tell Sisyphus.

About 11 years ago – half a decade before anyone had heard of blogs – I exorcised my inner pundit on a Minnesota Politics mailing list run by E-Democracy.  The forum was dominated by orthodox and fundamentalist DFLers – indeed, I was invited to join the forum by the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Minnesota, who wanted to get some actual ideological diversity onto E-Democracy.

As you might figure, the “discussion” kicked off like most online debates; a few civil points, and then desending into heated ire; the online environment strips away a lot of social inhibitions, and it showed.

So about a year later, the list threw a party.  We met at Crosby Park in Saint Paul, with a grill and a couple of cases of beer and pop…

…and talked.  Some of the talk was about politics; most wasn’t. 

And by the end of the evening, many of the people there had a revelation; the people they were writing to, and sometimes about, weren’t cartoons; they weren’t mere collections of partisan stereotypes.  The discourse on the forum got a lot more civil; there’d be flares of ire, and newbies sometimes brought more traditional online behavior to the forum (which often subsided when they, too, attended a later party). 

It was in the news – the LATimes via Ed Morrissey, specifically – after the death of Jerry Falwell, as people began talking about the seemingly bizarre friendship between Falwell and pr0n mogul Larry Flynt. 

My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.

One of the key tenets of training, for example, a soldier, is to dehumanize the enemy; to learn (or teach someone) to regard the “enemy” as a little less human than you and the people you’re defending are.  With some enemies, of course, it’s easy; those who saw off the heads of defenseless prisoners are not really very human in any moral sense.  But the examples are everywhere of people noticing it; stories abound from World War II of GIs who’d spent months in training learning to detest the enemy (and months more in combat internalizing it) finally coming face to face with German, and finally Japanese, civilians, and realizing that while they come from very different places and in many cases had very different beliefs, they’re basically people anyway.

It’s something I’ve noticed among local blogs, as well.  Now, I’ll allow up front that people tend to be much more forgiving of gaffes and ugliness that they’re closer to agreeing with than otherwise; if we accept that Mark Gisleson and Tom Swift are opposide sides of the same coin (and in many ways, they are; both pretty much say what they want, damn the consequences), I tend to give Swiftee the benefit of a doubt that I won’t extend to Gisleson – partly because Swiftee is vastly more often right than Gisleson (1), and partly because I’m a lot more able to see whatever merit may lurk even in Swiftee’s most outrageous statements, because I’m closer to him ideologically.  And before any of you leftybloggers start sputtering and fuming and jumping up and down like I’d just declared myself the best feminist in town (though that happens to be true), remember – you all do it too.  Every one of you.

But it’s a pretty ecumenical phenomenon.  People discount those they disagree with.  But because of the way online communication works – all images you have of someone are either hyper-ideal (which is why online dating is such a minefield) or hyper-base (which is why online flame wars are so easy), and almost never real. 

I usually welcome chances to meet liberals, DFLers, whatever.  Partly because occasionally discussions pop up and I always win, but largely because it’s interesting to meet people.  Occasionally your preconceptions get popped.  Rarely are they reinforced.  Now, I’m modestly well-equipped to do that – I grew up a liberal (and yes, in case you were about to ask, it does make me a better conservative) so it’s not like I can’t maintain a conversation with most of ’em.

It’s one of the reasons we in the Northern Alliance work so hard to try to invite leftybloggers to  our various MOB parties.  Of course, some of them just don’t want to get along and would rather sit in their miserable hovels and sputter, but for the most part we’ve always had a great time getting together.

And it’s interesting; generally, I find it’s not only easier to have a decent conversation with people I’ve met, but that the interchange online becomes a lot more civilized afterwards.  Not with everyone, of course; some of the leftybloggers I’ve met have been petulant, antisocial and just plain nasty. But as a general rule, meeting people pays dividends in civility.

Not necessarily in “agreement”, of course; may the “good old days” of Republicans acting like Democrats to go along and get along rest in “Bad Idea Hell” forever (take that, Lori Sturdevant).

But sometimes it can be interesting to get past ones’ own stereotypes.

Volume I (Chad, Brian and John) and Volume II (Ed and I) are taking tomorrow off from the show.  We haven’t had a weekend off in a while; it sounds like fun.

Volume III “The Final Word”, however, has just too much material from the end of the session; King and Michael will be on the air, on schedule, tomorrow from 3-5 on AM1280 (and on the web).  They really can’t help it.

So tune in!

Some people do chutzpah well.  Others…not really.

For example – Tom Delay, getting booked for a trumped-up, politically-motivated ethics charge:

It’s like he’s daring his opponents; “go ahead.  TRY to use this at election time!”

Well played.

On the other hand, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader James Metzen – a DFLer – tries but fails during his photo after being picked up for allegedly driving while intoxicated:

(Photo via First Ringer at TvM)

At least, I hope that’s chutzpah he’s attempting.  Since he got picked up at almost twice the legal limit, I’d say it’s a toss.

At any rate; chutzpah is a gift.  People are born with it.  I’m not sure it can be created.

But if it can, Metzen needs some practice.

That is all.

The US, say some commentators, might be engaged in a black-bag operation to sabotage the Iranian nuke program.

“Industrial sabotage is a way to stop the program, without military action, without fingerprints on the operation, and really, it is ideal, if it works,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation and now Senior Fellow in Non-Proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Sources in several countries involved told CBS News that the intelligence operatives involved include former Russian nuclear scientists and Iranians living abroad. Operatives have sold Iran components with flaws that are difficult to detect, making them unstable or unusable.

 One of the good upshots of the war on terror, reputedly, is the CIA’s resurgent ability to actually do things on the ground.  They apparently may still stink at drawing high-level conclusions, but as long as the nuts ‘n bolts get done, it’s a start…

“One way to sabotage a program is to make minor modifications in some of the components Iran obtains on the black market, and because it’s a black market … you don’t know exactly who you are dealing with,” Fitzpatrick says.

Senior government representatives, who spoke to CBS News on condition that neither they nor their country be identified, pointed to the case of the exploding power supplies. Installed at the pilot enrichment facility at Natanz in April 2006 as Iran was first attempting to enrich uranium, the power supplies, used to regulate voltaage current, blew up, destroying 50 centrifuges. The head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency, Vice-President Gholamreza Aghazadeh said in January of this year that the equipment had been “manipulated.”

There is other evidence, CBS News was told, that some of the technical difficulties Iran is having in consistently running its centrifuges are the results of a concerted effort at industrial sabotage.

I’m going to watch for the first lefty to condemn this American interference.  I fully expect at least one leftyblogger to call it a civil liberties issue.  I may even take up a pool as to which one.

I don’t think I’ll have to wait long, in any case.

That’s how long it’s been since the Highland Park District Council filed its payroll taxes with the IRS or the State of Minnesota.  496 weeks, give or take a few.  Nine and a half years.

Ten years.

That’s how long it’s been since the Highland District Council has been audited.

$33,000 to $37,000. 

That’s how much the Council may owe to the IRS and the state of Minnesota in unpaid payroll tax withholding and penalties.

I attended the Highland Park Community Council meeting last night.  It was an information-only meeting, intended primarily to announce the extent (as far as is known) of the Highland Community Council’s financial problems.

For those of you who don’t live in Saint Paul – the District (or Neighborhood) councils are non-profit organizations that coordinate and administer community improvement plans, among other things.  They act as a de facto level of government; depending on the people and the neighborhoods involved, as a combination of project administrator, ward-heeler support group, chamber of commerce, complaint clearinghouse, influence mart and cash conduit.  They are the outlet for idealists, career non-profiteers, busybodies, and concerned citizens. 

The Highland Park Council has been the subject of much caterwauling among Saint Paul’s political establishment since neighborhood Republicans organized themselves enough to get two local GOP activists, Bill Poulos and Georgia Dietz, elected President and Vice President last month. 

After Poulos called the meeting to order, the first – and really only – order of business was the treasurer’s report.  The bad news took a solid 45 minutes; there really wasn’t any good news.  The council – as in, the treasurer and volunteers from the board – are still trying to sort out the mess left by a full-time paid “organizer” who apparently wasn’t much for “organizing” paperwork.  The treasurer commented that all of the Council’s financial records were piled into boxes and scattered over hell and half an acre.

The board – twenty members (President, veep, secretary and treasurer, two at-large members, twelve “grid” representatives and one each from the city’s Housing Resource Administration and the West End Business Association) – asked a whole lot of questions about the status and process of the “investigation”, the path forward, and – most interestingly…:

• Why the process was being “politicized” (even though no party affiliations had been mentioned)
• Who “leaked” the story to the Pioneer Press?

I thought it was interesting; a semi-public organization comes up way in the hole, and one of the first instincts is to blame the newcomers’ politics, and to wonder why secrecy was breached?  “What happens in the Highland District Council stays in the Highland District Council?” 

I asked.  The rep who asked about the “leak” insisted she was concerned about privacy and fairness.  The other – well, I don’t think he ever really did explain why the political party of the new members was an issue to my satisfaction.

Not only do we need to follow this – but in fact we Saint Paul Republicans need to follow the examples of the Republicans in the Highland Council, and start getting involved in this level of government. 

By the way – the whole story broke (and was so credited at the meeting) on a blog about which I was theretofore unaware (because it’s like a month old), SaintPaulicy, to my knowledge the first non-media Saint Paul political blog.  It’s well-written, has a high signal-to-noise ratio, and could well be the capitol city’s version of “MN Democrats Exposed”. 

Excellent job!

From the Pauline Kael files:  Alphageek Steve Jobs demonstrates that his command of politics is equal to his savvy about marketing:

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stated that Al Gore, an Apple board member and former US vice-president, would win the presidency if he ran for election.”If he ran, there’s no question in my mind that he would be elected,” Jobs told Time magazine.

The problem? Algore is just too damn sensitive:

“But I think there’s a question in his mind, perhaps because the pain of the last election runs a lot deeper than he lets most of us see.”

I, for one, feel it; the fact that Algore is still in the news and still has his minions argling and bargling about the 2000 election is, indeed, painful.

“We have dug ourselves into a 20-foot hole, and we need somebody who knows how to build a ladder. Al’s the guy,” Jobs also told Newsweek. “Like many others, I have tried my best to convince him. So far, no luck.”

Speaking as the guy whose mercurial nature and neofundie commitment to his own knee-jerk feelings destroyed NeXT (my favorite computers ever) and nearly took Apple down the toilet, Jobs would be the expert.

B-Hub at Yucky Salad misses record stores:

I haven’t been in a record store in over three years now. There’s no point. Who’s going to spend 18 bucks on a cd with two or three good songs when you can just buy those songs for two bucks? I don’t miss buying records, but I do miss record stores– everything about them– the people, the vibe, even the smell. I miss going into The Electric Fetus and buying something cool like “Hang Time” and having the punk rock girl ringing me up giving me an approving glance as if to say, “hmmm, maybe I mis-judged you jock-boy” and I also miss buying something like Bon Jovi and having the same punk rock girl give me a dismissive look that screamed “go date-rape a cheerleader, jock-boy”– I loved both looks and I miss them.

Truth be told, I have never really liked digital music.  Oh, it’s convenient, and it’s brought back the single which is a wonderful thing – but the CD always sounded way to clinically-clean and teutonic to me.  And ever since all three stages of recorded music (recording, mastering and playback) have gone from analog to digital, it’s all felt cold and heartless to me. 

And record stores?  I used to love the feeling you’d get when you’d talk the totally-wasted stoner behind the counter into playing some sample on the house stereo; sliding the record out, dropping the needle, the anticipation as the record rolled toward the start…

And Katie sounds off:

Bill is trying to pretend he isn’t that character from High Fidelity, and he so it that character. He’s if that character and Nick Hornby had a baby. Also, I hate that sone from Hinder so much I wish it was a rabbit so I could kill it with a shotgun.

And the crowd goes wild!

Katie also settles a bet or two:

And no, I’m not dead, I’m just in hiding.- Katie

Sure, I was worried.

One of the reasons I’m so dilatory and mercenary about following most professional sports (unless the Cubs, Twins or Bears are in the running) is that most pro and, indeed, college sports are just another commodity-based business these days.

Not that I ever really took after athletes as “role models”, although Dick Butkus taught a lot of key life lessons – but as I grew up, I realized that cynicism about sports was both amply justified and a two-way street.

So I was both surprised and gratified to read this: Joe Paterno is spanking his Penn State football team for having acted like a bunch of spoiled thugs, forcing the whole team to clean the 100,000+ seat stadium after each home game to punish about a dozen of their teammates for participating in a brawl:

We’re all going to do it, everybody,” Paterno told the Harrisburg Patriot-News after a banquet in suburban Philadelphia. “Not just the kids that were involved. ‘Cause we’re all in it together. This is a team embarrassment. I wouldn’t call it anything much other than that.”

This is easily the greatest punishment in recent collegiate history, an absolutely diabolical, telling, high-impact bit of discipline that should remind one and all that what Paterno has been doing out in State College, Pa., all these years is more than just win 363 football games, including 20 the past two seasons.

In a coaching business so full of phonies who talk character only to bend the rules, who consider the definition of discipline a player’s weight-room attendance, who wouldn’t dare pull something like this because it might hurt recruiting, here’s Joe Pa, four decades on the job and not giving a damn.

Except about what’s right.

And I loved this part:

It’s a job that usually goes to members of club sports on campus – say, rugby or crew – which do it to raise money so they can compete. Paterno said the clubs still will get the $5,000 for the job, but his guys, fresh off playing 60 minutes of major college football the day before, will do all the work starting Sunday morning.

It’s gratifiying to know that there’s one participant in the college sports industry that still has a sense of responsibility…:

“I don’t condone (the fight),” Paterno said. “Our kids were wrong.”

And across the nation college football coaches faint.

Most coaches have spent their offseason complaining about not being able to text butt-kissing messages to recruits. They no sooner would wear out their players on an off day with garbage picking than give up their country club memberships.

…and a little scary to realize you have to go to an 80-year-old throwback to an era a couple of generations back to find it.

I’m going to the Highland Park Community Council meeting this evening, at the Highland Community Center, to watch as the new, GOP-led board starts digging into…

…well, we don’t know what.  It could be years of mismanagement.  It could be (and there are indications of this) the result of a staffer who just wasn’t much for paperwork (I’m the last one to cast the first stone on that count).

The meeting is at 7PM this evening at the Highland Community Center, which is in the Highland Park Library building.

But most importantly – if Republicans ever going to make a difference in Saint Paul, it’ll be by changing things from the grass roots on up.  The victory in Highland was a good, long-overdue start.  And not just tonight, but at your ‘hood’s community council elections.

Commenter Fresch Fisch noted on Monday:

This is the spark that needs the fuel folks. If you live in St. Paul, no matter which neighborhood, you must be there. If you are a blogger, you must be there to compensate for the “under-reporting” the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Villager, and Avenues newspapers will give this story. If you are just a Republican, we need your help, SHOW UP AND GIVE US A SHOW OF SUPPORT! If you ever want Saint Paul Republicans to be competitive, well, here’s your chance. This is where it starts folks, at the grass roots level.

This is an exciting time in Saint Paul GOP circles.  Oh, we have nowhere to go but up, it’s true – but with new leadership and an upset victory under our belts, it’s high time we started climbing.  

Hope you can join us there.