I rag endlessly on the Minnesota Monitor.  But I’ll say this: media correspondent Paul Schmelzer is very, very good at what he does. 

Vastly better, as a media-beat reporter, than the “source” of this bit from Friday, Brian Lambert, one of the Twin Cities’ media scene’s great ongoing embarassments. 

Lambert, who’s been ekeing out a living of sorts at “Rake” or “Pulse” or “Spume” or “Froth” or “Cake” or some other boutique handout ‘zine, visibly slavers for any gig that’ll get him back in the journalistic middle class.  And so it’s gotta hurt when his old rival from twenty years ago, James Lileks, came out of the turmoil at the Strib with the reins of “Buzz.com”, and a license to make it work (Lileks is an alum of the City Pages from back in the eighties; Lambert wrote for late, unlamented rival Twin Cities Reader). 

Schmelzer reports that Lambert is oh so onto something, yesirreebob:

The Rake’s Brian Lambert says what’s been on the minds of many I’ve talked with recently: How come the Star Tribune community blog Buzz.mn has become the sole domain of James Lileks, who was hired to manage it?

Not sure if Lambert and “many” that Schmelzer has “talked with recently” have heard, but Lileks is a fairly prominent blogger.

Y’know. 

“I and others never had the impression it was supposed to be a one-person rumpus room, yet another variation on ‘The Bleating Quirk,'” Lambert writes.

Brian Lambert, who loses the title of “Twin Cities’ Media’s most egregious DFL flak” only because Lori Sturdevant draws breath, dinging Lileks, the center-right blogosphere’s least political prominent blogger, for being a political one-trick pony?

I’ll let that little dollop of cheap irony fester right there for a moment. 

“Is there, as one dime-dropper told me, ‘a de facto boycott’ going on? And how did Lileks end up with an editing job officially described as requiring, ‘the consummate team player’?”

“How?”

“How” indeed! 

Because he was able to convince management that he’s, if not an “ultimate” team player, at least good enough to do the job (as, indeed, Brian Lambert has never been)?

Or is it that blasted right-wing conspiracy again?  Because we all know how very very much influence  the vast right-wing conspiracy has at the Strib.

Lambert ponders whether “Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie, the Strib’s top editors, parked Lileks there just to goose up traffic with his ‘Bleat’ readers.” If so, are they — or potential contributors at the Strib — concerned that readers of this “community journalism website” aren’t necessarily from the local community?

If so, they’d be blissfully unaware that the web is, in fact, international, and that when it comes to advertising, hits is hits; one never looks a gift audience (especially one like Lileks’ which, unlike Lambert’s, is big) in the mouth. 

 Or that many are arriving via Lileks’ personal conservative contacts? In today’s post on The Bleat, Lileks’ non-Strib blog, he praised  Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds (dubbed “the godfather of conservative blogging” by Right Wing News), “whose natural generousity has thrown boatloads of traffic to buzz.mn this week, bless his soul” and mentioned a radio segment he did with Dean Barker, conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger at Town Hall.

And so we get down to the next-to-center layer of the onion; to the likes of Lambert, the only “unbiased” media is the one where everyone explicitly shares the same biases.

The center layer, of course, is that Lambert would seem to be a jealous little fellow who deeply covets Lileks’ success which, at every step in both of their careers, has constantly outpaced his own.  Back in the eighties when they both wrote for boutique ‘zines, Lileks was the better and more successful writer.  Lileks went to DC to write for Newhouse; Lambert went to Saint Paul to write an expendable media column (which was, eventually, expended).  Lileks’ radio show was a success and remains a cult favorite; Not even Sarah Janecek could save Lambert’s latest foray into broadcast, while his earlier attempts were definitely cable-access-worthy.  And today, Lileks is working the only part of the Strib franchise that’s growing; Lambert will be selling articles to the Skyway News and the Highland Villager before too long.

Yeah.  It must be the politics.

Flash at Centrisity got one of his patented five-minute interviews with one of the less-objectionable Democrat candidates, Bill Richardson.

So read it.

In the craziness of last Friday and the weekend, I didn’t notice this bit of news – First Ringer, the Twin Cities’ blogosphere’s best political writer/analyst, of the late, lamented “First Ring” and currently with TvM, had a serious car accident last Friday. 

The Ringer was apparently released after a few hours of observation.  According to a source close to Swon, he’s receiving some ongoing medical attention.

I’d like to kick off a blogswarm of best wishes for him anyway. 

John Hinderaker at Powerline – my long-time NARN colleague – on the ironic “anti-killing” protests by Palestinians – who’ve been raised in a culture that for 40 years has been entirely formed, with the active moral connivance and financial assistance of neighboring Arab governments (who could at any time in the past four decades have absorbed the Palestinians easily into their own societies, or urged them to accept Israel’s offers of peaceful assimilation) on the premise of killing Jews and extincting Israel:

It’s a little late in the day for Palestinians to decide they’re opposed to killing. They’ve been desperately trying to sow the wind of mass murder for a couple of generations now, and if they’re finally getting concerned about reaping the whirlwind, they’ll have to look somewhere else for sympathy.

Put another way – Palestinian leadership has created a society based entirely on death (not only of Jews, mind you, but of any Palestinians who’ve espoused peace with Israel, who’ve been murdered or driven into exile).  One might be forgiven for observing that fact.

Jeff Fecke – who is to “cartooning” and “writing” what he is to “Journalism” and “Feminism”, and who is unfit to carry Hinderaker’s gym bag as a writer, thinker, or human being – assumes Hinderaker’s voice to “write“:

I really hope that a whole bunch of Palestinian children die.

Amusing side note – he constantly calls Powerline “Hacks”.

In a blogging “career” characterized by silly statements self-excused with a giggle and a wink as “snarking” (like his determination of guilt in the Duke rape case, which he excused with perhaps the most juvenile abnegation of personal responsibilty I’ve read this side of an eighth-grade TP raid, “some of us–myself included–jumped the gun in this case.  It happens.  Write enough, you’ll be wrong sometimes” – in other words, the dog ate my homework), this may be his nadir.

Anyone who can’t tell the difference between “I think a society that has trained itself to be a killing machine is ironically ill-advised to plead for peace” and “I hope the children die” needs to be sent to remedial moral grounding.

The best news?  Every dime of deep-pocketed-liberal-pressure-group money spent on Fecke’s “journalism” over at the Minnesota Monitor is a dime that won’t go toward anything remotely useful, and will give the rest of us a wealth of material. 

Moral: Carry on, moral carrion!

UPDATE:  Another NARN colleague, Michael Brodkorb at MDE, notes that Jeff has moved from petty defamation (no, not in a legal sense, yadda yadda) back to his usual turf, crummy reporting:

If you visited Minnesota Monitor in the last 24 hours, you would see a post on the front page titled “Bachmann Personal Financial Report Still Not Available.”  The post, written by the notoriously sloppy and inaccurate blogger Jeff Fecke, makes the claim that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has not filed her legally required Personal Financial Disclosure Report (PFD).   

“The Personal Financial Report for Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was still unavailable Saturday morning, one day after the House deadline for filing reports.

Bachmann was not one of the 385 representatives to file a report, nor was she one of the 52 to request an extension, according to Congressional Quarterly.” Source: Minnesota Monitor, June 16, 2007

The reality is that Bachmann’s PFD is available online.  Contrary to the reporting of Minnesota Monitor, Bachmann’s PFD report has been filed.

This is the second post that Fecke has written in the last 24 hours that will need to be corrected.  Earlier today, Fecke wrote that Congressman Tim Walz’s PFD listed two credit card debts, when Walz’s PFD actually listed three credit card debts. Fecke’s oversight did move Walz’s debt below the level of Congressman Ramstad, who Fecke claimed had the most credit card debt.  Fecke corrected the post after I pointed out his error.  

I guess when you write lots of stuff, you’re going to make mistakes – when your fundamental driving force is ideology, not accuracy. 

Or as Jeff himself might write, “Why Does Jeff Fecke Hate The Facts?”

This is what passes for a top-flight leftyblog.

Great thinkers, indeed.

(Safe for work – if you work among morons).

If intellect were gasoline, the typical top-flight leftyblog couldn’t drive a Prius around the inside of a Cheerio.

That is all.

The Times covers the ongoing immigration flap, in which the administration and several senior, superannuated senators are pushing a bill that the grassroots of both parties find clearly intolerable.

Comments by Republican senators on Thursday suggested that they were feeling the heat from conservative critics of the bill, who object to provisions offering legal status. The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in “younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.”

Senator Lott:  before talk radio, conservatives were perennial also-rans in this nation’s ongoing political discussion.  Barring the occasional miracle-worker like Ronald Reagan, conservatism didn’t become a credible mass movement until talk radio gave people like, er, you the ability to bypass the mainstream media. 

So it’s high time talk radio turned against you, Senator Lott.

Citizens of Mississippi – can we work on trading Lott in for a newer model?  Someone who’s gone a little less DC-native?

Thanks.

Another yuuuuuuge day on the NARN today.

From 11 to 1, John, Chad and Brian, AKA “Volume I”, AAKA “The Opening Act”, hold forth.  Not sure what the topic is going to be, but it’ll be good stuff.  Tune in.

Then Ed and I will be talking with Eric Black of the Strib Minnesota Monitor about journalism today, and the MinnMon tomorrow. James Lileks should also be making an appearance.

Finally, Volume III “The Final Word” with King and Michael kicks off at 3, and if I were a betting man, I’d go all in on “they’ll have some Minnesota politics insiders on the show”, although I’ve been wrong before.  (UPDATE:  Doy.  Like, Governor Pawlenty).

A few months back, while covering a John Kline town hall meeting, reporter Jeff Fecke noted that Congressman Kline…:

• didn’t actively kiss the butts of the TV news crews covering the event (although the crews were there and able to cover the event freely and without interference), and
• didn’t arrange for wireless internet to enable bloggers to liveblog the meeting.

His conclusion, over on his own blog?:

The Kline camp went into this meeting terrified of…something.  I’m not sure what.  And I think it was a huge strategic blunder.  But they were scared to death of something happening that would make John Kline look bad, and they took pains to ensure that the meeting would be as tightly controlled as possible.

Bear in mind, the tapes rolled and the bloggers typed (or took  notes) unimpeded, while Kline (gasp) stayed on message.   

So I’m wondering if the local leftyblog peanut gallery has any comment about Al Franken, who barred cameras from his speech in Rochester?

Anyone?

(I won’t hold my breath).

What is Stuart Smalley terrified of?

…to JB when credit is due.

Oh, I disagree with J about a lot of things, of course; music (stuff I like is better), politics (on the one hand, people who come to conservatism after being liberals might not be better conservatives; on the other hand, Ronald Reagan.  Case closed) and any autobiographical information that I actually put on this site (which, if it’s posted on this site and is not clearly satire, is true.  There are too many of my friends, high school and college classmates, ex-girlfriends, my kids, my parents, my aunts and uncles, old band-mates and an ex-wife reading this blog that can call “BS” if I were to say something stupid – so I don’t). 

However, he’s right; Dinosaur Junior sucked back then, and they suck now.

UPDATE:  They suck, except for their cover of Richard Thompson’s “I Misunderstood”, which benefits by being a really great song by one of the great living songwriters, something even J Mascis can’t screw up.  Even though Thompson is the world’s greatest living guitarist, and Mascis isn’t fit to carry Thompson’s gig bag.

UPDATE II:  Oh, and whatever his other faults, Mascis is best known for playing a Fender Jazzmaster, which is what I play.  So while I can’t stand his oeuvre in any way (except as noted above), us Jazzmaster guys gotta stick together. Although my Jazz is a hotrod, and his was pretty much stock.  Which I say only to point out that I am, indeed, cooler.

We’re still scheduled to have Eric Black – soon-to-be-former Strib reporter, who’s going to the Minnesota Monitor – on the show tomorrow.

It’s going to be an interesting show.  Make sure you tune in.

Colonel Joe Repya is planning on running against Norm Coleman in the primary.

Allow me to say:  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

Colonel Repya:  Don’t.  Run for State House; if I’m not mistaken, a DFLer grabbed your home district (stop me if I’m wrong), which will set you up nicely for a run for higher office.  Or you could move to the Fourth, and run against the loathsome Betty McCollum.

But against Coleman?  He’s far from the perfect conservative, but he’s WAY better than average. 

Sorry, Joe.  I can and will back you on a lot of crusades. But I gotta sit this one out.

I was reading the new and improved website for Keegans’ Pub yesterday, and I saw this interesting note:

The design is Edwardian, a style that came at the end of the Victorian era in the 1890s.

Dum di dum… 

It is authentic to Ireland and fits with the historic preservation district in which we are located.

…di dum…   

Keegan’s is the first and only Irish Pub Concept (IPC) pub in Minnesota.

 scraaaatch

Huh?  What does that mean?

Because “Irish Pubs” are to the 2000s what “Sports Bars” were in the ’80s.  Back then, everyone with a refrigerator and two TV sets was opening a “Sports Bar”.  Today, now that fads have changed, those “sports bars” bought some used church pews and stained their bars brown, put in a Guinness tap and replaced the “Motley Crue” CD with a “Pogues” CD, and celtified their name to “O’Tostengaard’s Irish Pub”, and badda bing, they’re up to date!

But I needn’t have fretted:

IPC was developed by Guinness Brewing Company as a format for authentic Irish pubs.

Aaaah!  It’s a marketing thing! 

 Although no two Irish pubs are alike, the IPC format calls for four elements to be present: Irish design and build, Irish food, Irish music and Irish staff.

Irish staff?

So this is really a make-work program for Celts?

Terry?

Word has it that one of my favorite downtown Saint Paul buildings – the Endicott/Pioneer building – has been bought by someone who intends to empty it, and lease the space to groups and organizations involved with next year’s national GOP convention.

Local DFLers are, predictably, snivelling like spoiled toddlers.

Gosh – downtown Saint Paul has a huge vacancy rate, and someone wants to come in and fill that space with paying customers, displacing whatever current customers are there to move to other office space…

…yeah.  The horror.

Note to the new owners; install water cannon.

One of my peeviest peeves is the reliance of too many churches on “contemporary” Christian music.  While one may worship God with guitars or bongos or kazoos for all I care, there is something about the sound of a huge pipe organ that is the sound of worship, of faith, of the glory of the whole thing.  Combine this with the genius of the great sacred song writers – Bach, Brahms, Handel, and so on – and then compare it with the wobbly, puerile, pale bilge that passes for “contemporary worship music” these days, and you can see why so many churches are in freefall. 

So I’m gratified to see that the traditional pipe organ is coming back:

Even as many churches ..are opting for contemporary guitars and bongo drums for their worship services, they’re also investing in one of the world’s oldest instruments. The resurgence has convinced national organ expert Michael Barone that “a new golden age for the organ” is here.

Augustana Lutheran Church in West St. Paul and Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis are among some nearby parishes to purchase new organs. And across the country, churches are installing some of the most impressive organs, which could be compared to the majestic instruments of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, Barone said.

Spiritual aspects aside, it’s fun to see this purely as a music geek.  I got to poke around in the works of a classic old pipe organ in college (as part of a keyboard tuning and repair class I took [*], and they are just fun: 

A Fritts organ built for St. Joseph Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio, fits that bill, said Barone, host of the nationally syndicated public radio show “Pipedreams.”

“The quality of the building, certainly here in the U.S., is as good as it has ever been,” Barone said. “A lot of research has gone into how the old guys were able to create the magic they did in pre-industrial times.”

Nativity’s organ, made by Cassavant Freres in Quebec, might be more modest but is nonetheless an incredible gift for the church. It cost more than $1 million to purchase and install the instrument. Parishioners Eugene and Faye Sitzmann, of St. Paul, funded the project in late 2004.

So cool.

Kenyan Economist James Shikwati sums up his view of western food aid, in an interview in Der Spiegel:

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

Why?

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

This, of course, has a parallel with much other western aid – economic, military and so on – to the Third World.  Paul Johnson in Modern Times chronicled the awful effect that western economic aid had on the Third World, spurring immense, wasteful, un-needed developments (the Aswan Dam, the Bangladeshi military, immense government works projects) that served as monuments to sitting dictators in countries that needed simple things like education and better farming practices.

Shikwati notes that the international food aid bureaucracy isn’t, at its heart, a whole lot different than the Minneapolis Public Schools:

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

He also explains the paradox – aid causes starvation, because international aid is run by groups that act just like governments and bureaucracies always act:

SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.

Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there’s a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program — which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It’s only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it’s not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa …

SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …

Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.

Which is not to say that one shouldn’t feed the hungry – merely be aware that merely sending food has unintended consequences that are hidden from you, the donor. 

The parallels with American welfare are obvious, of course; subsidizing poverty, like corporate welfare, is inherently debilitating.

It’s been a while since I won anything.

I do believe I’ll attend Keegan’s trivia night tonight.

Here’s an Atomizer’s-eye view of the pub:

I’ll hope to see you there!

The Science Museum of Minnesota is one of downtown Saint Paul’s major attractions.  Its new complex on the bluff over the Mississippi River is one of the city’s crown jewels.

The museum’s old complex, up on Wabasha and Exchange, sits half-empty (a music school bought the part east of Wabasha) since a charter school in the space closed about a year ago.

So check out the new neighbors:

The Church of Scientology has purchased the former Science Museum of Minnesota building in downtown St. Paul

Eric Rapp, a Welsh Cos. broker who marketed the space, said the church plans a major renovation of the building that once housed exhibits…The sale closed Friday…”That block will be a bright spot for St. Paul in an otherwise slow market,” Rapp said.

I always say – downtown Saint Paul just isn’t weird enough.

It was Sunday, June 14, 1987.  It was a hot, bright day, not at all unlike today. 

I’d been “on the beach”, at least as far as full-time work went, for two months.  I’d picked up a few voiceover gigs here and there – one or two a month – and written some articles for some of the Saint Paul neighborhood papers.  All in all, it was enough to pay the bills.  More or less.  My bills, fortunately, were pretty tiny; $166 a month for rent, car and car insurance together maybe about the same, and I didn’t eat much.  I figured if I brought home $350 a month, I was pretty much in the clear.  Voice-over jobs netted me $150 for two hours’ work, and every news article I sold was another $50 or $60, so if I stayed moderately busy, I could do OK. 

But doing OK wasn’t what I wanted.  I spent part of the day listening to radio and TV news shows replaying Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech from the Friday before

And I thought “Damn.  I gotta get back into talk radio NOW”.

Speaking of Lieberman…

Salina Zito writing in the Pittsburg Trib on the battle for the “Reagan Democrats”:

In 2005, Howard Dean was the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee and saddled with a party weakened after years of national losses. Determined to turn the tide, he commissioned a massive poll with Cornell Belcher aimed directly at values voters.

After poring over the polling data, Dean recognized a couple of things:

 

• First, Democrats did not speak about their faith — but they should. 
• Second, when Democrats talked about abortion, they didn’t emphasize that it should be a last resort. While Democrats needed to protect the rights of women, they also needed to talk about taking care of every child brought into the world — an aspect on which Republicans are perceived to fall short.

Dean took his poll to the party’s leadership and to labor leaders. He pointed out that while swing voters do share Democrats’ values, the party was not speaking to them in the right way.

Which is, by the way, true of both parties.  But I digress:

Dean’s mission became to link things in a way that makes it more difficult for cultural conservatives to walk away from Democrats.

The challenge for both parties is similar: dealing with the control of the primaries by the parties’ extremes. For Democrats, it is their bloggers who want out of Iraq tomorrow; for Republicans, it is the extreme pro-lifers.

One wonders what Ms. Zito means by “extreme pro-lifers”, exactly, but there’s a point there.  Some of my worst political memories involve walking into district caucus meetings where half of the crowd were there purely to introduce and pass infinite varieties of the same pro-life resolutions – not that I disagreed – and who were completely illiterate about any other issues. 

If Republicans want to win, they should remember that Reagan, as president, never let the abortion issue define what it meant to be a Republican. He was against it but he never took steps to make it harder to obtain.

That’s a tough pill for many erstwhile Reagan Conservatives to swallow; Reagan was no dogmatist on abortion or, for that matter, Second Amendment issues; he believed the right things in both cases; he just didn’t push either. 

The more each party must run to its corners and defend what mainstream America considers extreme positions, the harder it becomes to win over Reagan Democrats.

Which is the conundrum for Republicans; getting both “Reagan Democrats” and Evangelicals – both of the “must-turnouts” and “must wins” for the GOP – to play nice together.

On the one hand, Iran wants to start executing people involved in the pr0n industry.

With a 148-5 vote in favor and four abstentions, lawmakers present at the Wednesday session of the 290-seat parliament approved that “producers of pornographic works and main elements in their production are considered corruptors of the world and could be sentenced to punishment as corruptors of the world.”

The term, “corruptor of the world” is taken from the Quran, the Muslims’ holy book, and ranks among the highest on the scale of an individual’s criminal offenses. Under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, it carries a death penalty.

The “main elements” refered to in the draft include producers, directors, cameramen and actors involved in making a pornographic video.

Now, I don’t care a whole lot for pr0n; obviously this is a bit much.

Still, I could almost justify it if they’d include the producers of those gawdawful “disaster pr0n” specials on the History Channel.

I’d call it about square then.

I had wondered about fisking the new Nick Coleman column – in which he accuses Republicans of being behind a sinister cabal to gut public school sex ed, and if we really cared for kids we’d let the same public school teachers who can’t teach them math, reading or history turn around and show them how not to get pregnant when doing the wang bang diddly. 

He stated his case with his usual diplomatic tact…

 A new Gallup poll shows nearly half the country doesn’t believe in evolution (including two-thirds of Republicans), proving that the rapid stupefaction of America continues unabated.

If you don’t believe me, I have a new Minnesota sex-education law to show you. Or, rather, not to show you.

…but Wog over at Wog’s Blog noticed something else:

In reading a column in Section B of the Incredible Shrinking Star Tribune, I as struck by it’s resemblance to the screeds if Laura Billings, the best fire the Pioneer Press ever made. Well, they bribed her to quit anyway, and the readers rejoiced.

It’s some self righteous blather about troglodyte Republicans plotting to get sex education out of the schools.

The subject, the hysteria, the condescending wise ass tone, the mediocre writing and the utter boringness of the piece had Billings all over it.

The only thing Un-Billings about it was the byline, husband NickBoy.

Hmmmm.  Can we do a DNA test on a column?

Oh, and when you go to Wog’s blog (and please do – he’s sounding depressed about his traffic, and he does write a blog that deserves a helluvva lot more), wish him luck; it looks like he’s slowly edging closer to a needed liver transplant.

How’s that for a hard sell?

UPDATE:  Kouba also shreds Coleman.

…what can be better explained by experience.

When you’re a Second Amendment activist in a liberal city, you get used to the usual slurs; self-defense activists are anger-prone, compensating for something, or awash in testosterone.  The writer of this bit, a leftyblogger named “CharlieQ” from “Across the Great Divide”, has ironically subtitled his blog “Can we disagree and still build a decent world?” – but then partially answers his own question with the title of the post, “Be Sure to Check the Testosterone Levels”, regarding last weekend’s shooting of an off-duty cop by a citizen with a concealed carry permit. 

Of course, if you’ve been through any concealed carry training, you know that “testosterone” – as shorthand for “excessive emotion” – is the last thing you want involved.  Which is difficult to accomplish, given that self-defense situations tend to be rife with stress, emotion and adrenaline.  Hence, the need for training before one gets ones’ permit; for those few that had any illusions about how easy self-defense shooting is, they are quickly disabused.

Those are the facts.

“Facts” are few and far between in Mr. Q’s piece:

There’s more than one way to view the accounts about the shooting of an undercover Robbinsdale cop by a motorist. But one view certainly prevails over here.

The link is right back to my piece from the other day – and he’s right, to the extent that I have reason to believe Mr. Treptow, the alleged shooter, is probably in a fairly decent legal position right now. 

Now, I’m not sure if Mr. Q got the “information” for his piece from the initially-terrible major-media coverage (which spun Mr. Treptow as a villain, up until he was released without being arraigned or charged), or if he’s got a jones for leaving facts out of stories, but suffice to say that it’s a good thing that only 93 people a day are getting their “news” from him:

A supposedly menacing cop didn’t shoot back at someone who nailed him with three shots. And he’s the bad guy?

It’s hard to know exactly how to answer this question, because – with all due respect to “CharlieQ” – it’s a staggeringly dumb one, one I can assume is driven by a complete, if not willful, ignorance of the law.

Mr. Q omitted the fact that the cop pointed a gun at Mrs. Treptow. 

Now, as I’ve noted over and over again, there are four elements to a “self-defense” case.  I keep repeating these, because so many people (regardless of their politics) are completely unaware of them, and they really are abolutely important:

1. You can’t be a willing participant in the scuffle. 
2. You must reasonably fear death or great bodily harm.
3. You must make a reasonable effort – and “reasonable” in his case always means “a jury will buy it” – to disengage from the incident.
4. Lethal force must be reasonable under the circumstances.

The law doesn’t say “you have to let yourself or your family get shot”.  If someone points a gun at you, that is a reasonable indication someone wants to kill you, for any jury outside of San Francisco.

Was Mr. Treptow a “willing participant”?  Did he try reasonably hard to get away from the cop, given that he was in a big clunky SUV with his family (keep your “Dukes of Hazzard” fantasies to yourself)?  Was lethal force reasonably justified?  We don’t know for sure, but even if the victim weren’t a policeman, it’d very unlikely the County Attorney would have released Treptow without charging him, much less exacting bail from him if Treptow wasn’t looking pretty good on all those counts. 

I mean, think about it.

Unfortunately, with his next comment, Mr. Q shows that “thought” isn’t his long suit:

Note to Hamas: Want America on your side? Start issuing conceal and carry permits.

I try to stay civil.  I don’t throw words like “stupidest thing I’ve ever read in my life” around lightly. 

 So I won’t.  I’ll just ask Mr. Q how on earth he equates citizens with no criminal records, who’ve passed background checks and taken training classes, with people who blow up buses full of civilians?

Presumably witnesses will surface to sort out what happened, since neither party seems all that reliable.

Given that Mr. Q’s knowledge of the law is so very, very sketchy, I’ll reserve my own judgement about “reliability”. 

Especially after reading this bit…: 

Ask yourself how many times you’ve felt threatened by aggressive driving and you fantasized about having a gun. And, of course, you did absolutely nothing to provoke the other driver. Oh, and you’re not on a freeway going 70 mph. You’re on a boulevard next to a shopping center. And your wife and kids are in the car.

Probably found a way not to come to blows, right?

Yes, but then nobody’s ever pointed a gun at me or my family, either.  I’d suspect Mr. Q could say the same.

Do you see the pathology at work, here?  Mr. Q is holding Mr. Treptow – and all law-abiding civilians – to an absurd standard; to him, there is apparently no threshold of criminal behavior that’ll justify a civilian defending himself against an aggressor.

So either the undercover cop was on meth or Mr. Ex-Security Guard isn’t quite telling the whole story.

But it’s not “either/or”, because there’s a third option, one that is much more likely, given that Mr. Treptow was released without being charged after shooting an undercover cop:  he did the right thing.

But for sure, there was plenty of stupidity and testosterone at 99th and Woodward that day.

We’ll wait and see what the final findings are, here.

And we’ll see what Mr. Q has to say then.

I’m guessing “silence”.

Use bogus documents to try to impeach the President’s National Guard record during a presidential compaign?

Oh, OK.  Not good.

But insult Katie Couric?

Now Dan Rather’s gone too far!

Commenting about CBS Evening News’ freefall since Couric occupied Rather’s old seat, Gunga Dan said:

“the mistake was to try to bring the ‘Today’ show ethos to the ‘Evening News,’ and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”

Now he’s gone too far!

[CBS top suit Les] Moonves, asked about the remarks at an appearance in New York sponsored by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, called the remarks “sexist” and said he was surprised at the amount of negative coverage Couric was receiving. Couric, the first solo female news anchor, has been struggling in the ratings.

“She’s been on the air for nine months,” Moonves said. “Let’s give her a break.”

Mr. Rather:  I have a friend who has documents proving that Katie Couric never actually was on the Today Show! 

And they’re authentic!

Honest!

Lieberman:

The United States should launch military strikes against Iran if the government in Tehran does not stop supplying anti-American forces in Iraq, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday on Face The Nation.

“I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq,” Lieberman told Bob Schieffer. “And to me, that would include a strike into… over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”

The Indepedent former Democrat from Connecticut said that he was not calling for an invasion of Iran, but he did say the U.S. should target specific training camps.

“I think you could probably do a lot of it from the air, but they can’t believe that they have immunity for training and equipping people to come in and kill Americans,” Lieberman said.

How long do we tolerate Iranians indirectly (?) participating in a war against the US?

I’ve just confirmed it – Eric Black, soon-to-be-former Star/Tribune reporter and blogger, and soon to be reporter for the overtly-partisan, deep-pocketed-lefty-funded groupblog Minnesota Monitor, will be a guest on the Northern Alliance, Volume II, this coming Saturday.

Ed and I will be talking with him about the state of the Strib, his move, and – the part I’m most interested in – how “traditional” American journalism (which really isn’t all that traditional, and in fact is less than a hundred years old) is changing. 

This should be a great hour of radio.  Make sure you tune in.