Another one from Red:

List some of your favorite words:

• Dulcid
• Numbnuts (gotta go with Red on that one)
• Strumpet
• Hoedown

What’s your favorite maxim or proverb?

I’ll do two:

• “Who Dares Wins”.  I know, it’s more of a motto (the British SAS), but I love it. 
• “The best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.  It’s a Hungarian saying (I learned it in a bio of photographer Robert Capa), and it doesn’t just apply to wealth; change it to happiness, or love, or so many other desirable but elusive things.

What’s your favorite quotation?

Just one? 

As if.

• “Madam, tomorrow I will be sober, and  you will still be ugly” (attributed to Winston Churchill)
• “Tear Down This Wall”.  Reagan, of course.  Yes, a favorite.  You had to be there (and by “there”, I mean “growing up 20 miles from a missile silo”).  Still chokes me up.

What’s your favorite first line of a novel?

I don’t remember first lines!.

Give an example of a piece of description that’s really pleased you in your reading lately:

I don’t have the book handy, so I can’t transcribe the quote, but many of Rybakov’s descriptions in Children of the Arbat – an evening in a remote Siberian village, a night out in Moscow in the ’30s, and especially the mundane inner workings of Stalin’s mind – were riveting.

Which five writers do you particularly admire for their use of language?

• Tolstoy.  Wrong language, but big whoop.
• Hemingway.  Don’t care what anyone says.
• PJ O’Rourke.  Yes.   I mean it.
• Dickens. 
• James Joyce.  Joyce is like Steve Vai to me; I don’t always “get” (or care for) either, but I’m amazed at what they do with their “instrument”.

And are there writers whose style you really dislike?

I used to work in a Waldenbooks.  I have forgotten more horrible writing than most people will ever read.

What’s the key to really fine writing, in your opinion?

• Say it, don’t write it.  I don’t like reading someone who is trying to show you what an artiste he or she is at wordcraft.  Good writing should be unobtrusive. 
• Great writing, on the other hand, should sneak up on you; you shouldn’t realize it’s great until you’ve gotten past it – and then it should smack you over the head. 
• Great writing doesn’t condescend.  Which leaves out a lot of modern fiction writers. 
• Basically, any writing that makes you forget you’re reading.  That can be all over the place, as Red notes; Oliver Twist qualifies, and so does The Hunt for Red October. 

Wow.  It’s been a while!

Last week, I wrote that conservative activists are tired; as Gary Miller wrote, they’ve been ridden hard and put away wet for five straight election cycles now.  It puts a strain on people, their finances, their families, their real lives.

My article sounded downbeat.  It probably was. 

Of course, I knew there was more to come.  The good news and the bad news: the future of this state once again depends on it.  We’ve seen exactly how stark this state’s choice is; the last legislative session, the DFL’s “your money or your life” hysteria, the bridge collapse and DFL’s schizophrenic response (lurching drunkenly from demanding more money to trying to indict Tim Pawlenty for murder), the miasma of Minneapolis show the mistake the voters made.  And like the morning after a dumb one-night-stand, the state is starting to wake up to the mistake it made last November.

My job – our job – is to make them want to chew their arm off rather than wake them up for the next session.

In my homage to the “Class of ’04” – the raft of great bloggers that got into the racket about this time  three years ago – I noted that this city is blessed with the most vibrant, intelligent, on-the-ball center-right blogging community anywhere in the country.  Anywhere in the blogosphere.  And like most groups of conservatives, it is an organic, self-forming, un-directed mass – a free association of equals.

And so it should stay.

But as we approach yet another “Must Kick Ass” election, we – the Upper Midwest’s center right, freedom-loving, hard-working, blog-for-the-love-of-blogging independent alternative media – need to roust ourselves from our weary hibernation.  And maybe focus just a bit.

Because this year, there is more Ass to kick than ever.

And like Bill Millin on Sword Beach, a group of us are going to start moving toward the breach. 

More – much more – on that next week.

Charlie Quimby thinks he caught Chad the Elder in a flub, and accordingly does an endzone happy dance:

Chad the Elder — who kindly nominated this blog for Mitch Berg’s Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog Contest [note to self – Doh!  I knew I’d flaked on something this week] — loves the toll road connecting Denver with Denver International Airport. He praises the E-470’s “wide-open, hassle free ride” and friendly attendants:

I have to believe that these attendants are not state employees and if that is the case, they–and the E-470–make a powerful argument for further privatization of our highways and byways.

Chad is right about the road, but he confuses efficient service with privatization.

We’ll allow Charlie his happy dance.  It’s not gonna last long.  

The E-470 was built and is run by a public authority composed of the municipalities bordering the road; the authority’s transportation role is similar to Minnesota’s Met Council’s. It not only charges a toll; operations are partly financed by vehicle registration fees.

If that doesn’t burst his bubble, the highway has been designed to allow for the addition of multi-use paths and, in the median, future mass transit.

OK.  That’s enough. 

The E-470 is indeed an interesting road, one I’ve driven many times (when I worked for a company that flew me back and forth to Denver a zillion times).  It shows that government, given boundless resources and an  open-ended mandate (especially as a small part of a larger money-pit boondoggle, the Denver International Airport project), can occasionally duplicate the benefits of private-sector service, market-orientation and usability. 

They say “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.  I suppose the corollary might be “government transportation projects that work well are indistinguishable from private sector operations, to Minnesotans”.

Chad may have been unfamiliar with it because, naturally, a project like the E-470 is something Minnesota wouldn’t touch with a 500-foot surveyor’s tape.  Minnesota’s left-of-center dominant class wouldn’t dream of financing capital projects with user fees, preferring instead the “we’re all in it together/happy to pay for a better Minnesota” madness that’s gotten us to where we’re at now.   They don’t want toll roads, to say nothing of privatization.  When Minnesota embarked on a tiny, tentative experiment with tolls – opening the hidously-expensive, grossly-underused I394 “Sane Lane” carpool and bus lane to toll-paying drivers – the nattering classes reacted as if Tim Pawlenty had ordered the Young Republicans to machine-gun a food shelf. 

Here, we don’t “have to believe” anything. We may be funny, but we’re factual.

SMART-ASS ANSWER:  Tell it to Jeff. 

NORMAL ANSWER:  Then let’s start building tollways!

Brian Maloney – talk host, Cap’n Ed’s golf buddy and one-time NARN guest – notes that talk-radio legend Bob Grant is returning to WOR.

Grant was one of the few conservative talkers who got his start back during the days of the original “Fairness Doctrine”.  Of course, he worked in New York, a market that was big enough that a big-enough station could actually afford to air overtly partisan programming in absolute, “Doctrine”-kosher balance.  Medium-to-smaller stations avoided the hassle and kept their programming straight down the boring middle; as I’ve related, my own talk alma mater, KSTP-AM, only aired me because I convinced my boss, Scott Meier, that putting a conservative on the air could help head off complaints about Geoff Charles’ left-leaning style come renewal time.

Oh, yeah – he’s 78. 

About which Maloney wrote the best point in his piece on the subject:

In the big picture, talk radio is still failing terribly at building the next generation of talkers who can move it forward. As it now stands, the medium appears to be milking its oldest hosts until their final days.

Well, I blame Limbaugh.

Back when I got into the biz, talk hosts progressed through the business more or less like everyone else in radio – disc jockeys, play-by-play guys, programmers, news reporters – did; they started in small markets, worked their way up through larger and larger markets, and if they had the talent and the drive and maybe were just-plain dysfunctional enough, they might eventually make it to the Bigs.

Then – simultaneously with the death of the “Fairness” Doctrine – came the proliferation of relatively cheap satellite technology and bandwidth.  And with that  came programming – also prolific, and cheap.

Like, free.  Rush Limbaugh didn’t charge his affiliates to air his program; he reserved a spot or two in each commercial break for his own advertising, which his own sales staff sold.  Limbaugh lived off the ad revenue; the affiliates got a major-market mid-day host, and a damn good one, for free. 

Which meant that small talk stations in New Bedford, Framingham and Fall River Massachussets and Aurora Illinois and Santa Rosa California and Hammond Indiana didn’t have to spend $20K a year to hire (to pick a random example) a 25 year old kid with a graveyard shift show under his belt to run the mid-day show anymore. 

Most of the big local hosts – the Jason Lewises and Joe Soucherays and even Tom Mischkes, in Twin Cities’ terms – had at least a toe-hold in the business before the onslaught of free satellite programming.  The few excecptions – Dan Conry, for example – are exceptions precisely because of this phenomenon.  There really is no “talent pipeline” in talk radio anymore.  Seriously – if I got a wild hair and decided to try to get back into the business, even assuming I could get hired somewhere, I have no idea what station out there could anymore.

It’s that way pretty much throughout the business.

So Maloney is right to ask:

When they are gone, does radio’s most important format simply shut down?

Well, money will find a way – and talk radio is nothing if not a money machine.

But it’s kinda sad to realize that the closest we’ve seen to a “talent pipeline” in talk radio in the last decade involved Kris Krok going from KSTP (Twin Cities) to WSB (Atlanta). 

That’s a pipeline of a different sort altogether. 

Matt Abe at North Star Liberty reminds us that…:

This Friday, August 24th at 6:00 pm, the Teenage Republicans of Minnesota (TAR) will hold a state meeting at the Edina Community Center to talk about the pitfalls of communism.

Ananh Saenvilay spent most of his life under a communist government in Laos. He witnessed first hand how communist governments strip away the rights and freedoms we Americans take for granted…Senator Rudy Boschwitz will speak about his service with President Ronald Reagan…[and Reagan’s] clear goal of stopping the rapid spread of communism and restoring worldwide freedom through democracy and individual rights.

Almost sounds like a retro thing, dinnit?

Except it’s not; Marxism is alive and well and being peddled to our kids.  Oh, it’s being marketed differently…:

For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions—and power. So students learn to identify “insurgent” or “militant” groups with the populations they purport to represent. A few years ago, a peace organization called Transcend equated the demands of the Basque terrorist group ETA with “the desires of the Basque people”—as if a “people” were a monolithic group for whom a band of murderous thugs could presume to speak. The complaints that Transcend made about the Spanish government’s “blockade positions”—its refusal to cave to terrorist demands—and the Spanish media’s lack of “objectivity”—their refusal to take a middle position between Spanish society and ETA terrorists—are standard Peace Racket fare. Similarly, during Saddam’s dictatorship, “peace scholars” wrote as if Iraq were equivalent to Saddam and the Baath party, entirely removing from the picture the Shiites and Kurds whom Saddam’s regime subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered.

The recipes for peace that flow from such thinking seem designed not only to buttress oppression but to create more of it. For if democracies consistently followed the Peace Racket’s recommendations, what they’d eventually reap would be the kind of peace found today in Havana or Pyongyang.

Read the whole thing.

And remember – the schools (even an awful lot of private schools) give the “peace racket” not only full credence, but full and un-answered, unbalanced access to your children.

A Canadian government scheme to promote hybrid cars is…

…accelerating sales of pickup trucks:

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government exempted pickup trucks when it unveiled its so-called eco-AUTO program in March because it said many people use them for work. It argued that makes them more of a need than a transportation choice. The government’s program promises rebates of up to $2,000 to buyers of certain fuel-efficient vehicles and slaps an excise tax of up to $4,000 on the biggest gas guzzlers – typically SUVs or sports cars.

The exemption has pushed consumers thinking of buying an SUV to pick a pickup instead, said Dennis DesRosiers, president of the consultancy and a harsh critic of Ottawa’s green-car program.

“Leave a loophole and consumers and dealers will exploit it,” Mr. DesRosiers said. “Why doesn’t the federal government just admit that this whole thing has been a fiasco from day one and is not working?”

Er…because they’d have to re-evaluate the notion of trying to enact social change via tinkering with the economy, and that’d drive them screaming from the room in terror?

(Via Blair)

I’ve always admired brain surgeons and constitutional lawyers.

So over the weekend, at a ceremony attended by friends and loved ones, I had both the Medical Doctor and Doctor of Laws degrees bestowed on me. 

My parents were so proud; at last, I can start making something of myself. 

But the celebration was short-lived.  There is so much work to do; cranial aneurisms to heal; rights to defend. 

As if that weren’t enough, I grabbed a Ph. D in psychology – because I figure I can help people solve their lifes’ issues much more effectively if I’m properly credentialed.  And my certification as a Mechanical Engineer also came through; what with all the bridges and stuff to rebuild, I figure I got some more time to set aside on my calendar.

Whew!

———-

Oh, you’re probably wondering about all those fuddy-duddy “licensing bodies”, and whether or not they’d actually grant (or allow the granting of) the degrees to someone who took one semester of college biology, has never taken a law class, whose entire background in psychology is watching two episodes of “Doctor Phil”, and who hated math class with a purple passion?

Licensing, scheissensing.  I am a brain surgeon/lawyer/psychologist/mechanical engineer.

I have willed it to be so.

———-

While I am all of those things, one thing I’m not is Catholic.  Nothing against Catholicism, of course; I believe Pope John Paul II agreed with the German Lutherans, finally, that the road to salvation as a Christian can be made clear to people through Catholic, Protestant, or heck, even Orthodox teachings.  I mean, for crying out loud, we’re all on the same team – right?

I’m a Presbyterian.  I don’t always agree with the Presbyterian Church in the USA’s governing General Assembly’s decisions, but the General Assembly doesn’t claim (in Presbyterian governance, indeed, can’t claim) to have authority over what the Bible – the revealed word of God – really means, either, so I can ignore them at my eternal leisure.  Nothing the GA decides or believes has anything to do with my eternal life; they move the money around, install or remove people, and set larger, temporal goals for the church – as an administrative and governing, rather than theological body.

And as I’ve noted in this space in the past, a number of Presbyterian ministers have been very important figures in my life; Revs. Bill King, Mick Burns and Jim Jacobson stand out, of course, as people who had an immense, permanent affect on how I lived my life, but there have been many others.  All of them married, some of them women.  Which is, of course, no-go among Catholics. 

Ordaining women – or gays, or gay women for that matter – is neither a positive nor a negative, in my book.  I do understand Catholics’ theological injunction against it (as well as the history of exceptions to that injunction).  But – and here’s a rather important caveat – it’s their church! The Vatican sets the rules, whether they’re right or wrong.  Just like those paternalistic blowhards at the State Medical and psychological licensing authorities, or at the Bar Association, or the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, they decide what the standards are for inclusion.

And, rightly or wrongly (in that great sense that none of us will really discover the answers for until we’ve finally gotten into the afterlife), the Vatican says “nyet” to women behind the altar.

I might disagree.  I might even make a case for why women should be ordained.

But while I might declare myself, or some woman, to be a Roman Catholic Priest, the people who actually get to decide who is or is not a Roman Catholic Priest might take umbrage – as, in theory, the Minnesota Bar, Medical and Psych Licensing boards and the ASME might do as well. 

“So what?”

———-

Well, the Minnesota Monitor’s coverage of the recent “ordination” of a couple of female “priests” approaches the issue with about the same gravity as I do being a Doctor, Lawyer, Psychogist or Engineer.

And there are really two ways to approach this story – via the “Mitch Is An Engineer”-like triteness that’d allow people to make such a unilateral declaration, and via the “coverage” it’s gotten from the local Sorosphere. 

Let’s look at Andy Birkey’s story in the MinMon:

Two women were ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church at an event in Minneapolis last weekend. The ordination of Judith McKloskey and Alice Marie Iaquinta marked their addition to the approximately 60 other women who have been ordained nationwide. The Vatican, the Catholic Church’s highest authority, does not recognize the ordination of women into the priesthood, and in Iaquinta’s case, the ordination could result in excommunication.

The West Bend, Wis., woman’s ordination has raised the ire of the Catholic Church in that region. Archdiocese of Milwaukee Communications Director Kathleen Hohl told WTMJ, an NBC affiliate in Milwaukee that they will turn Iaquinta’s information over to the Vatican.

“It is our duty and obligation to forward this information to the Vatican for consideration,” said Hohl.

First with the trite.  While I’m not unsympathetic with the notion of female clergy, I’m also not a Catholic, much less one of the Bishops, Cardinals or Popes that makes these sorts of decisions for the Catholic Church.  They make the rules (in the Catholic Church, at any rate).  So – if the church’s rules say “guys only”, and your drive to see women (or gays, or married people or whatever) ordained is more important than your membership in that church, why be a Catholic at all?  There are many Protestant denominations that will welcome one.  Or why not be intellectually honest and cast your lot with a secessionist American Catholic movement, and show the Vatican who’s really boss?

And saying “women used to be priests” is hardly a convincing argument.  Appealing to what is, after all, ancient history (and disputed history at that) is a dumb justification; things change.  “It used to be legal” could be used to justify polygamy, slavery, burning at the stake, infanticide, suttee, honor killing…and while ordaining women is nothing like any of those horrors, it’s also – ahem – not the way the body that governs that church does things anymore. 

Now let’s turn to Birkey’s article.  I obviously disagree with him on most every political issue, but he’s not a bad writer. 

But this article?  The women weren’t “ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church”, as Birkey claimed in his lede.  They may have consecrated themselves to serve God in the way they felt called upon to do so.  They may have even been ordained into some ideo-theological construct that may eventually morph into the long-promised American Catholic Church (“All of the contraception, none of the guilt!  Now with female priests”).  They may even legitimately be considered “protesters” against the Catholic injunction against female priests. 

But, unless the Vatican rammed through a rule change when I wasn’t looking (which I rarely am, but on the other hand the Vatican rarely “rams” anything through), they are most assurely not “ordained catholic priests”.

Now, as I said, Andy’s not a bad writer.  But this piece showcases the perils of viewing “news” and “journalism” through an entirely partisan lens.  Birkey’s main issue is gay rights.  The Catholic Church is a lightning rod for gay activism, as it is the mainstream church that has moved the least toward accomodation (barring many American evangelical denominations – but gay activists don’t seem to be trying to win over the Southern Baptists all that hard, either).  The Catholics draw, as a result, all sorts of protests, both crude (paintings of the Virgin Mary done in dung) and fairly sophisticated (activists like McKloskey and Iaquinta and their attempt to co-opt and/or skirt the church’s rules).  And Birkey’s story plays into that, in ways obvious enough to cause one to smack one’s head.  Classic example – for Andy Birkey to say they were “ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church” can be seen as either “wishful thinking” or “serving as the womens’ PR agent”.  McKloskey and Iaquinta were no more “ordained into the Roman Catholic Church” than I was “admitted to the bar” for claiming that I was a lawyer. 

So Birkey’s story turned, in its lede, served as a vehicle for McKloskey and Iaquinta’s wishes – we could call it “propaganda”, in the strictest and least-prejudicial sense of the term. 

Which is his right as a partisan activist writer, to be sure, but it is to “journalism” as I am to brain surgery, engineering, psychology and the law, and as Judith McKloskey and Alice Marie Iaquinta are to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

To:  Saint Paul City Council

From:  Mitch Berg, mere taxpayer and member of the city’s Republican minority

Re:  Priorities

Ladies and Gentlemen:

A few days ago, on a Saint Paul Politics email discussion group, Council President Dave Thune wrote:

We have an assembly permit ordinance but our city attorney says it would be unconstitutional if challenged. I’d like to get that out of the way before we run into trouble with it. it was enacted to attempt to protect planned parenthood from demonstrators.

On Monday morning I had a brief, interesting conversation with Mr. Henderson of the City Attorney’s Civil Division.  He says it’s the City Attorney’s opinion that the city’s permit ordinance is fine, as-is. 

I also spoke with Chuck Samuelson of the ACLU-MN.  He didn’t know of any proposed changes (and goodness knows they’d be interested). 

I freely admit this could be a matter of my own confusion, but…Which ordinance were you referring to, Mr. Thune? 

And whom at the City Attorney’s office would be the go-to person on this issue?  I’d especially like to know, for as-close-to-the-record-as-I-can-get, why a measure that was hunky dory when applied to peaceful pro-life demonstrators is now in your own words
possibly “unconstitutional” and a matter of grave concern when all of the far-left council’s pals are coming to town.

Councilman Thune also wrote:

Our other committee is working on a “demonstrators guide to the galaxy”  not the real title but is sounds cool).  They will be figuring out how to get info out to non-delegates as to housing, communication, emergency services, etc.

So exactly who at the city is working on this?  How much city money is being spent to make protesters comfortable?  This, in a city that spent the entire legislative session bitching about how broke it was due to Aid to Local Government “cuts”? 

We have to look at a bunch of logistical things like – where buises or cars can
pick people up after marching, porta-potties, water, first aide, etc.

Is it normally the city’s job to provide transportation, sanitation, water and healthcare to protesters?  If the MCCL were to bring thousands of people to town to picket, say, a Planned Parenthood convention, how many porta-potties would the city put out for them?  Or, as I suspect, would they be told to arrange all of that for themselves, at their own expense?

Our position – supported by police is that demonstrators must be within sight
and sound of delegates. Shuffling folks away to a remote site is not an option.

Speaking of the police – could any of you comment about the friction in these organizing stages between Saint Paul (with its police department which, while, excellent, is politically beholden to the far-left City Council) and Ramsey County, whose sheriff, Bob Fletcher, is one of few quasi-Republican elected officials in the county?  It seems like the city is trying to inject itself into as much of the planning as possible, to try to insulate protesters from Sheriff Fletcher’s attention. 

Comment?

We hopefully have a large labor organization asking for the use of harriet island for the entire week. this would then become the “peace island” – rest
area, lost and found, communications, medics, connections for housing, evening entertainment and such. This may provoke a fight over a free speech group having the island instead of dignitaries or parties for media but it’ll be a good one.  I expect the council will have to override our permit process. if this is challenged by anyone we could have a charter crisis over whether the
council can unilaterally do it.

So the city – or actually, the far-left-of-center, labor-and-radical-beholden City Council which Councilman Thune leads – is willing to risk a constitutional crisis, and the attendant legal bills, to ensure that cronies of the City Council have full access to Harriet Island, one of the city’s premier park properties?

We don’t have a next meeting scheduled but I’m meeting with our council
research staff next week or so to start planning subsequent work sessions.
Included have been the lawyers guild, MCLU, electeds, police, parks, emergency
communications and others.  Any suggestions for things needing to be worked out are welcome.

Yeah, esteemed councilpeople, I have some suggestions.  How much money and effort is the city expending on “welcoming protesters”?  Who in the city’s government is leading this effort (whatever the effort is)?

It seems to the not-so-casual observer that…:

• The city is bending over further than backwards   to accomodate protesters.  Which, to an extent,  is fine; I am a demonstrably more-libertarian person than anyone you’re likely to know.  But…
• The city is also bending over backwards to avoid offending those among the protesters that are quite vocally planning, at the least, aggressive mischief.
• Finally – far from penning up the protesters, it’d seem that the city’s vision for the convention is to keep the delegates and party workers confined into a tiny corridor.  Not that that fazes me – I’ll be spending most of the week out among the “protesters”, documenting,  photographing, interviewing, filming…you know the drill.

Anyway, thanks in advance for your responses.  I’m sure they’ll be forthcoming.

Mitch Berg
The Midway

UPDATE:  Council President Thune has said that he was mistaken – the city attorney didn’t tell him the city’s Permit Ordinance needed to be changed. 

My other questions stand. 

While the “Linguistic Hit List” is a regular feature on this blog, it’s time for me to widen my focus.  To creep my scope. 

To take on things above and beyond language, wrestle them to the ground, mark them for execution, try and convict and sentence them, and strap ’em into Ol’ Sparky. 

Today’s docket:  Aphorisms that must die:

“Live Without Regrets!” – If you have no regrets, then you really didn’t risk all that terribly much, now, did you?  Either that, or you don’t care about the slopover.

To “Live without regret” either implies that one has won every one of life’s battles (impossible) or that the consequences of the losses (rare as they may have been) were so utterly bearable that not a single peep of remorse, “what-if” or blurp of retrospective anger has ever crossed one’s mind,  that the consequences really didn’t matter that much, and that they didn’t affect anyone else in any way. 

Let me be clear – this is different than accepting and forgiving oneself for the failures, mis-steps and regrets, and making any amends needed to anyone else affected, of course – but in my humble experience, most of the people who claim to “live without regrets” either haven’t thought about it all that hard, or are solopsistic to the point that they don’t recognize the effects their failures, mis-steps and mistakes have on themselves or others, no matter what they might have been.

“Live Like Every Day Is Your Last” – Well, every day can indeed be just that – and one day, one of them will be, for all of us.  But there are a couple of problems with this aphorism.  Isn’t it just as narrow, self-defeating and self-limiting to focus ones’ life on permanently “living on the edge” as it is to live every day fearing the end? 

Doesn’t this injunction to “suck the marrow from every day” tend not only to leave one without any remaining marrow on the next day of the thousands that bless most lives, but also lend a kind of frantic, treadmill-y-ness to daily life?  Like, if you go bungee-jumping on the day that (one can have no way of knowing is) 12,448 days before one actually ends up dying, don’t you have to come up with something even edgier on Checkout Minus 12,447?  And so on, and so forth (assuming that the edginess doesn’t itself kill you, perhaps in a fit of XtRe3m cordless bungeeing)?  Doesn’t that lead one, necessarily (and providing one doesn’t actually die terribly soon) to become jaded with the whole notion of “living every day like it’s your last”, which indeed contradicts the original sentiment? 

And is a life of inherently less value, less “lived”, if one spends the the day before one checks out blogging, working the job one work to pay for ones’ kids’ food and house, watching Scrubs with ones’ daughter, and talking with a high school pal on the phone than if one climbed the IDS Tower freehand?

And why?

“I’m Spiritual, But I’m Not Religious” – I’m trying to figure out what would have happened back in college if I’d said “I believe in learning, but I don’t believe in study groups, the library or reading books at all”, as if being with a group of like-minded people actually, in and of itself, detracts from ones’ search for spiritual enlightenment. 

No, I know – there are churches, clergy and congregations that don’t help much, that can even interfere with one’s search for God or Truth or Satori or whatever it is you’re looking for, but those are usually individual, situational things.  So what is it, supposedly, about the act of meeting other people who have chosen freely to seek their enlightenment roughly the same way as you are seeking the same that, in and of itself, hinders that search?

More as my memory warrants.

The forces of attraction and repulsion are skittering back and forth almost at random, for me at least, in contemplating this bit of news:

Actress-comedian Janeane Garofalo, an outspoken liberal, is set to co-star on the conservative-leaning real-time drama, whose co-creator/executive producer Joel Surnow jokingly describes himself as a “right-wing nut job.”

On the one hand, how could it be worse than Day Six (short of hiring Suzanne Sommers to run CTU)?

On the other…

does not compute

Atheists can’t be trusted with political power.  Indeed, they must be suppressed because they are intellectual descendants of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot – atheists who murdered among them at least 55,000,000 people.  It is by these people and their legacies that atheism must be judged, and judged without mercy.

Thus, atheism must be excised from public life.  It should be regarded as the sick aberration it is.  The souls of 55,000,000 dead demand it.

(more…)

Biking in the rain is a challenge.

Some of the challenges I was ready for; that brief moment when you hit your brakes, and it actually feels like you’re speeding up (it’s an illusion, of course; your body expects to slow down, and it doesn’t, at least not as quickly as you think you will) is old hat to me.

And while this summer is my first real experience at bike commuting, I was ready for the big challenge.

Let me explain.

When you bike on a wet surface, your tires throw off water in a plane directly out from the center of the tire.  This is especially true on thin little road-bike tires like mine, which come to a pretty fine peak (to cut down on rolling resistance); you can actually see water sheeting off and flying into the air in an almost-plumb-straight line.

Now, if you don’t have fenders (and I don’t), that water’s gotta go somewhere; that somewhere is a fat, wet, sloppy line from your butt to your neck, straight up your back.

But I rode to work, secure in knowing that a hot shower and a change or two of dry clothes (one in my backpack, another stowed in my cube just in case) awaited me.

But as I wheeled down the busy street, I came up behind a couple of the guys I’ve noticed before (see Item #4 in this post); guys riding in their dress shirts and khakis.

And, but for the windbreaker one of them wore, that’s exactly how they were dressed this morning.  No back fender.  Big sloppy muddy wet skid mark up the back of their khakis and dress shirt.

They pulled into the government office building, and – presumably – went to work.  Skid mark and all?

I don’t know.  I really just don’t know.

Let’s switch to Jeopardy mode for a bit:

ANSWER: “We Can’t Win”.

QUESTION: Choose from the following:

1. “What did the left say about Vietnam?”
2. “What did the left say about El Salvador?”
3. “What did the left say about Afghanistan until the (real) Northern Alliance and the Special Forces rode into Kandahar?”
4. “What does the medialeft (I conflate media and left on purpose, since in reality they’ve pretty much conflated themselves) assure us about Iraq at every opportunity?”

The answer, if you’re a discerning news consumer, is “all of the above, and then some”.

———-

“Iraq is un-winnable”.

That is one of the left’s great current conceits. It’s only as true as the nation wants to make it, of course; all wars are winnable (or at least loseable by the other guy) – Finland beat the Soviets, at least in regulation time, in 1940 (sudden death overtime brought the Finns a limited defeat and the Soviets a very costly “victory”); British, on the other hand, conquered most of the globe with a laughably-small force; the Colonies beat the British with even less; Britain in turn held out alone against Hitler. Of course, listing these wars like that oversimplifies the issues; each of them, “impossible” as they were by conventional measures, happened for reason that make perfect sense in retrospect.

But the upshot is that there is no such thing as an “unwinnable war”. Of course, all wars can be lost.

The distinction is important, especially when you look at the history of counterinsurgencies.

I remember the NARN’s interview with Steven Vincent, the freelance journalist who made such a name for himself covering Iraq, alone and without a net (and was eventually murdered on his second tour in the country, by criminals in Basra). In our final interview with him – the last interview he gave before leaving for Iraq the second time – we talked about the differences between the approach in the American and British-controlled regions of Iraq. The American zone was, true to “Neocon” dogma, taking the all-or-nothing route; full civil democracy, the whole enchilada, immediately. The British, drawing on centuries of experience ruling huge swathes of the world and immense native populations with a tiny military and civil servant cadre, had a different approach. They made deals with unsavory people to observe, rat out and countervail other unsavory people. They co-opted one group of thugs to smack down another group of thugs. They used, even exploited, criminal disorder to their larger goal – keeping relative order in their sector. Until recently, it worked -very arguably (Vincent was murdered in Basra, along with many other people, after all). They also kept their troops out among the Iraqis of the region, intermingling, buying their supplies locally, walking around without helmets or body armor (unless events demanded them) – and until recently, when the Brits announced their intention to start withdrawing, Basra was relatively peaceful compared to the miasma of Baghdad and Anbar.

They’ve done this – winning “unwinnable” counterinsurgency wars – before. In India from the 1600s through WWII, in the pre-Revolutionary American west, and South Africa in 1900, in Borneo and Malaysia and Aden and Oman in the sixties and seventies, the Brits learned the blocking and tackling of winning insurgencies: isolate the insurgents from the locals by being among the locals, by winning civilian hearts and minds, by co-opting other elements of the local society against the insurgents (including cultivating “friendly”, if often conventionally-unsavory, warlords, in the hopes of taming them when the crisis wanes – as, indeed, they did), and, when and if needed, following the isolated insurgent into the wilderness and hunting him down and killing him, using the minimal British force possible (and relying heavily on the locals to do the dirty work; British history is crowded with colorful characters who went overseas and “went native” leading indigenous troops in the service of the King; the British special forces, the SAS and SBS, are directly descended from such characters).

As Vincent noted, that approach is foreign to modern Americans (and when I say “modern”, it’s because the distinction is important, as we’ll see in a bit); neocons demand “democracy now”; liberals pine for the moral clarity of World War II and, like Jimmy Carter, get queasy at the thought of associating with, even supporting, unsavory, often thuggish, frequently deeply ugly people to defeat people who are not, to the outside observer, a whole lot different.

And when I say the approach is “foreign to Americans”, I mean “Americans who don’t follow this nation’s history, especially”.

Lost in the palaver about the Iraq War – and the inevitable Vietnam comparisons that the left leans on to the exclusion of most rational thought when the thought of war, especially counterinsurgency war, comes up – is that a hundred years ago, the United States was the master of small wars against small, asymmetric groups of insurgents. In winning the American West against the Indians, and then in our first “imperial” wars – the Philippines in the early 1900s, Nicaragua in the ’20s and ”30s, and several others in between and beyond (up through El Salvador in the ’80s), the US won wars the way the British won the same kinds of wars all across their empire for hundreds of years, from India in the 1600s through Aden and Northern Ireland in the seventies (as related by everyone from Robert Kaplan and Max Boot to Robert Nagl:

1. Keep our troops out among the natives – even in tiny numbers, the act of showing a presence among the civilians makes a huge difference in…
2. …Cutting the guerillas off from the people. Make it impossible for the insurgents to get supplies, recruits and support (and, commensurately, to exert control through coercion and terror).
3. Co-opt and exploit local institutions to help you with #2 first – and then build new institutions. This drives liberals (and, it must be fairly said, neoconservatives) crazy; surely, they reason, imposing democracy and human rights immediately must be a better thing – right? Like most ideals, it’s not always true, of course. It was a former Ranger – who’d spent a few years training for this exact kind of warfare – who introduced me to the saying “perfect is the enemy of good enough”. In many parts of the world, the only human right that matters right now is the right to not get blown up, beheaded, shot or gang-raped. Once those are taken care of, one can worry about the more finesseful rights of man.
4. Build up the local institutions that work. Liberals – and some neoconservatives – grouse about this because it involves “picking and choosing warlords”.

It’s nothing new; we did it in the Philippines in 1900 to great effect; the desert Southwest wasn’t subdued by columns of blue-jacketed cavalry, but by small teams of Apache renegades led by tiny cadres of soldiers on long, unsupported pushes through the desert that made it impossible for the Mescaleros to carry on a regular life in the US. More recently, in El Salvador in the ’80s – a great, and successful, example of this kind of war which was also judged “un-winnable” by the mainstream left and media – there was a choice; between left-wing death squads, and right-wing death squads. The US (and the Special Forces that did the work) chose to support the right-wing death squads, on the assumption (correct, as it turned out) that they would eventually be easier to co-opt, fold into the regular military, and eventually teach the basics of human rights. The solution in El Salvador was messy, imperfect – and remains light-years better than it was during the days of unchecked insurgency, leaving the nation a functional, if imperfect, democracy. Another example – many times in Imperial Grunts Kaplan notes US Special Forces (“Green Berets”) in Afghanistan remarking that their mission is to make the locals – the Afghan Army, as well as the local warlords’ militias – look good. The goal, of course, is to build the stability that’s needed, not just for democracy to take hold (if indeed it can or will), but to deny Afghanistan to the terrorists as a safe haven again.

The good news? Once you get through the job of making the population safe from the insurgents, it can – indeed, say many of the subjects in Imperial Grunts, should – be done with many fewer troops than we currently have in Iraq.

So who screwed up?

And why are the Democrats wrong?

Oh, heck – I guess I’ll make this three parts.

Kerry from Smoothing Plane has the same reaction to the term “closure” that I do; it’s terribly overused, and totally wrong.

Especially as the last bodies are recovered from the Mississippi:

“Families will get closure…”, “Closure…”, “Another body pulled….closure”. Will billboards be pulled onto the roofs of buildings, “Got closure?”…? Relatives and families of the dead will not get closure; they will learn what happened to their missing father, son, mother or daughter. The palpable empty nothing of not knowing will untangle into dense, light cannot escape its gravity grief…All language less than rituals of grief for the dead shame and banish grief, as if it were some drooling cripple, muttering shattered curses, from whom we look away, masquerading the stone in the stomach.

I don’t know what kind of traffic Kerry Hogan gets, but he should get more. 

UPDATE:  The last body was found just after I wrote this.  May God – or the Great Spirit or Karma or random physiology or whatever you choose to believe in – bring peace to the families. 

Over the weekend, the Strib seemed to all but declare “low taxes” the culprit behind the bridge collapse.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writes for the Center of the American Experiment:

But for any connection to hold, at least one of the following conditions would have to be true, when not a single one is.

It would have to be demonstrated, for instance, that decisions by the Minnesota Department of Transportation about what to do about the bridge — whether to repair it, how to repair it, when to repair it — were made on the basis of what such steps might cost. But I know of no evidence that money played any role in determining what state officials or anyone else did or didn’t do in maintaining the bridge.

Likewise, to draw any suspect connection between the collapse and the consistent preference of large numbers of Minnesotans to hold the line on taxes, one would have to assume that inspectors and other officials charged with protecting and serving allowed anything other than their professionalism to determine how they gauged the sturdiness and fragility of the state’s infrastructure. Without a morsel of evidence that any of them compromised their integrity, it’s slanderous to imply that any of them did.

And then, of course, even if Pawlenty broke his no-tax pledge 20 minutes after taking office in 2003, and even if MnDOT’s budget doubled in a single bound, does anyone really believe that federal, state and local bureaucracies would have moved fast enough so that anything other than maybe talking about a new 35W bridge would have happened by now?

Oh, and I have a fearless prediction; last week’s City Pages did a long, meandering, utterly speculative assignment of blame to everyone from the Governor to David Strom.  Absent from Anderson and Demko’s list:  “The design of the bridge itself”. 

That’s where my money is…

Mark Steyn on the casualties of “tolerance” in Newark:

America has a high murder rate: Murdering people is definitely one of the jobs Americans can do. But that’s what ties young Malvo to Jose Carranza: He’s just another killer let loose in this country to kill Americans by the bureaucracy’s boundless sensitivity toward the “undocumented.” Will the Newark murders change anything? Will there be an Ioefemi Hightower Act of Congress like the Matthew Shepard Act passed by the House of Representatives? No. Three thousand people died Sept. 11, 2001, in an act of murder facilitated by the illegal-immigration support structures in this country, and, if that didn’t rouse Americans to action, another trio of victims seems unlikely to tip the scales. As Michelle Malkin documented in her book “Invasion,” four of the killers boarded the plane with photo ID obtained through the “undocumented worker” network at the 7-Eleven in Falls Church, Va. That’s to say, officialdom’s tolerance of the illegal immigration shadow-state enabled 9/11. And what did we do? Not only did we not shut it down, we enshrined the shadow-state’s charade as part of the new tough post-slaughter security procedures.

I have flown exactly once since 9/11 – and the security struck me, the rankest of amateurs, as pretty useless:

Go take a flight from Newark Airport. The TSA guy will ask for your driver’s license, glance at the name and picture, and hand it back to you. Feel safer? The terrorists could pass that test, and the morning of 9/11 they did: 19 foreign “visitors” had, between them, 63 valid U.S. driver’s licenses. Did government agencies then make it harder to obtain lawful photo ID? No. Since 9/11, the likes of Maryland and New Mexico have joined those states that issue legal driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

As always with Steyn – read the whole thing.

It was a huge weekend for my NARN friends and colleagues.

The Brodkorbs welcomed twin daughters Abigail and Elizabeth on Saturday…

…on the same day that Brian and Rachel at long last tied the knot!

Congrats to all.  It was a great weekend.

I’m splitting this into two parts; once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. I have a few things to establish before I get into my post proper.

———-

Statement: Administration 2, Demcrats/media 1.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

For those of you who think I never pay the Demcrats a complement, stand by to have your preconceptions gutted like fish: they got one (and only one) thing right about the Iraq war. I think we are getting to the point where we can fight the war with a much smaller commitment of troops in Iraq. Indeed, we might even be to the point where it might be beneficial to the conduct of the war itself.

Oh, of course the Democrats are wrong about the reasons, meaning and execution of this idea.

But again, we’ll come back to that.

———-

There’s an old saw among those who follow military history…

…and even moreso among those who casually watch people who follow military history: that nations and their militaries always prepare for the last war.

So, it seems, do social movements.

Reading Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan a few months back – about the time some Democrats were pushing for a reinstatement of the draft – I saw an interesting parallel.

Kaplan chronicled the complaints of US Special Forces and Marines in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia and the Philippines that the “Big Army” (and Big Navy and Big Air Force to boot) had taken over control of operations in these countries. The problem, they told Kaplan, was that the generals who run the “Big Army” cut their leadership teeth “fighting” America’s last, least-ambiguously successful war – the Cold War (and more ambiguous successes like Grenada and Desert Storm) – who were led in their militarily formative years by men whose main mission was to avoid costly debacles like Vietnam or Mogadishu. The Cold War, of course, was a throwback to the great mass industrial wars of the 20th Century, WWI and WWII; high-tech, involving mass armies maneuvering in mass formations on a global scale, with the survival of entire nations, societies, systems, even the world itself at stake. The US military built at huge expense during that period became unstoppable in its major mission; to decimate phalanxes of tanks bulldozing across the East German border with high-tech tanks, helicopters, jets and artillery that could fight 24/7 in all weather; to interdict fleets of Soviet submarines intent on gutting sea communications with Europe reminiscent of the U-boat wolfpacks with a fleet of over a hundred impossibly-complex hunter-killer submarines; to secure the air over Europe against skies dark with MiGs with technological marvels like the F-15, the Stealth fighter and the AMRAAM missile. It might be fairly argued that just as the US military fought Vietnam wrongly – trying to treat a counterinsurgency war as a mass national crusade – that the Pentagon spent a few years fighting Afghanistan and Iraq the wrong way; trying to bring a Cold-War-era mass army to places more suited to…something else.

On the other hand, the left is also fighting its last wars. Plural.

Vietnam, of course, was the last war of the part of the left led by the likes of Kos and Air America – the reflexive “America Last” crowd. But as powerful and influential as they are in the Democrat party (and moreso in Minnesota’s DFL), they’re not really the most interesting current to examine.

The last unambiguously successful war of the Left was World War II. Led by FDR and Truman, it was the last truly national war; the last one that involved our entire society. More importantly, it was the last (and, in a sense, the first) war in our history to be morally unambiguous. For the first, and probably last, time in history, the good guys (if you leave out that whole “Stalin” thing) wore white (or olive-drab) hats, while the bad guys wore black coal-scuttle helmets. It was a war that paralleled the New Deal and much of how statist liberalism operates; registering and inducting entire swathes of society; imposing an all-encompassing order on the nation’s life; a war in which the individual was subsumed to the national will, in war as in the economy. And of course, like the lefty ideal for so many things (which is realized in so few things), it was…well, not exactly “clean”, but certainly well-defined. It had a definite end; troops marching thirty-abreast down the Champs D’Elysees, Hitler dead in a bunker, a surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, done deal, no sticky entanglements.

Which, of course, is one of the reasons they are chanting “this war has lasted longer than World War II”. It’s the only model of success they have, when it comes to defending this nation.

And there’s a clarity – to the left – in looking back at Vietnam (from their perspective, at least); to the left, Vietnam was unambiguously wrong, inarguably unwinnable, never anything but wrong for any reason, from any perspective (easier to believe when one filters out that whole “Killing Fields” bit). In a sense, it was the anti-World War II.

The left’s dalliances with running the nation since Vietnam have been much less clear, both positively and negatively, than WWII and Vietnam. Carter’s impotent flailings at the Iranians, Clinton interventions to support humanitarian goals in Haiti, Kosovo and the Balkans, Rwanda and Somalia (although he inherited that involvement from George HW Bush) which tried to paint humanitarian happy thoughts on top of centuries-old ethnic animosities; they wound up treating unsavory people pretty much like other unsavory people without bothering to judge their differences, to very little real long-term effect (to say nothing of at least one famous, if historically minor, disaster in Mogadishu).

So there are, really, four different world views (certainly more than that, really, but I’m going to limit things to the big four) duking it out over the War on Terror right now:

1. The fringe (and ascendant) far left, which sees all war as unambiguously wrong.
2. The “mainstream” left, which waxes nostalgic for its own finest hour, the unambiguous moral correctness of wars like WWII, down to the level of even replicating their methods.
3. The Administration, which after 9/11 embraced a Wilsonian, almost utopian view of the vitality of exporting democracy, seeing this as an unambiguously good thing.
4. The Pentagon, caught between its pre-1991 status quo as a force designed to fight a huge, high-tech conventional war, its 1992-to-9/10/2001 imperative to “transform” into…something (after 2000, into a force to back up the “neocon” Wilsonian doctrine; before that, to get small fast so Clinton could cash the “Peace Dividend”), and finally after 9/11 the leader in the War on Terror

And of course, the fifth force, the one whose present Kaplan chronicles and whose history Max Boot explored; our “Unconventional Warfare” community, visible in the news today in the guise of General Petraeus and his return to nuts ‘n bolts counterinsurgency warfare, but which has been tinkering with the means to fight exactly this kind of war for half a century, frequently against bitter opposition from the “Cold War” “Big” military.

We’ll come back to that tomorrow.

Actually the Friday Five via Pianomomsicle, but who’s counting?

1. What were your after-school hours usually like when you were in high school? Usually play practice, speech team meetings, occasionally working at the radio station.  Thursday nights were Stage Band practice.  My senior year, we’d spend a couple of nights at the Gallager brothers’ dad’s garage, practicing.
2. What are the first moments like when you finally get home after a long day? Park the bike, take a quick shower, start something for dinner, usually flip on Scrubs. 
3. Where do your thoughts normally turn after the December/January holidays have passed? Usually, trying to figure out how to enjoy winter.  I like winter, although even for a winter guy like me February and March can get mighty long in Minnesota.
4. When did you last allow someone to cut in front of you in line? Getting on the elevator about five minutes ago.
5. What are you going to do right after you finish answering these questions? Get on my bike, ride to work.

The other day, I wrote about the odd double standard the city of Saint Paul observes when it comes to civil liberties; a law that was enacted to protect Planned Parenthood on Ford Parkway is, according to City Council prez Dave Thune’s channelling of the City Attorney, possibly unconstitutional.

Just like, y’know, a bunch of us actual civil libertarians – the ones that cared about civil liberties before John Ashkkkroft was sworn into office – said at the time. “Oh, Pshaw” responded Saint Paul’s liberals at the time – until (in their opinion) it was their ox hypothetically being gored.

Tom Swift covers Thune’s statement much more thoroughly:

imagine your city leaders publicly announcing their readiness to spark a “charter crises” to do it.

I expect the council will have to override our permit process. ifthis is challenged by anyone we could have a charter crisis over whether thecouncil can unilaterally do it.

A city’s charter is its constitution.

What Thune is saying is that he is prepared to attack the founding document of the city he was elected to protect and to serve. He is telling us that he puts his own political agenda ahead of the law.

He is telling us that he puts the best interests and wishes of those constituents that do not wish to have their homes, lives and livelihoods put in jeopardy second to those of the constituents who will be providing the havoc.

If you think I am overstating the facts, or that I am reading intentions into Thune’s words that do not exist I encourage you to read the following paragraph very carefully.

I am counting on mutual cooperation from local free speech folks and cityofficials to not only advance the speech part but also to protect the residentsand small businesses here in my downtown area ward from chaos or danger. So farour city atty has been great and police very calm. the ramsey county sheriff’soffice is not in any lead planning role. The MCLU and Lawyers Guild have beengreat in keeping this in play by their presence as well as opinions.

dave

city council

ward 2

“So far our city atty has been great and police very calm. the ramsey county sheriff’s
office is not in any lead planning role.”

People who do not live in St. Paul, or who are not familiar with the city might not know that the police officers union (and the fire fighters union) is heavily invested in the left wing politics that dominate the place.

I’m not suggesting that they do not catch Democrat shop lifters, but what Thune is suggesting to the chaos crew is that the police department is playing ball with them.

The bed-wetters and fair-weather civil libertarians of the St. Paul DFL are terrified, of course, of Sheriff Fletcher; he’s rumored to be somewhere right of center – probably the only elected official in Ramsey County to qualify as “Center” – and is thus the target of an incessant smear campaign from lefty politicians and activists in the county.

Thune assures me in an offline communication that he’s committed to lawful, peaceful demonstrations, and claims to have opposed the ordinance in question when it first went on the books (I’d have to check that out) – but the question remains, why is this ordinance suddenly receiving attention from the City Government?

Where was the MCLU when it was the rights of law-abiding anti-abortion protesters who were being squashed?

Where were Dave Thune and Randy Helgen and Jay Benanav and the rest of the crypto-Maoists on the City Council when it was a bunch of mere pro-lifers who faced jail time for expressing their views, in accordance with their First Amendment rights…

…that the rest of the USA honors?

I’ll be asking the City Attorney tomorrow, personally.  Anyone want to place odds on whether I get a call back?

A special editon today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I  – John and Chad, clad in tuxes, will do their show, and then race for Brian’s wedding.  Catch it from 11-1. 
• Volume II – Brian and his fiance have a future as program directors; they obviously scheduled their wedding to knock Ed and I off the air.  We’ll be at the wedding, at an undisclosed location, possibly a flower-strewn field on the banks of the Mississippi, followed by the reception at the Midway Applebees (Nihilist in Golf Pants was in charge).  But King and a galaxy of guest stars will cover for us next, from 1-3. 
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King stays on the air with yet more guest stars, as Michael will be out on, er, family business.  Catch the Minnesota beeyotch-slappin’ fun, 3-5PM.

So join us on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, 11AM-5PM Central on AM1280 The Patriot, and at Townhall.com!

And don’t forget – we’re a week away from the NARN’s State Fair Gala!

I should take this opportunity to point out that not only did I continue my summer-long dominance at Keegans’ Thursday Night Trivia (I’m 4/4 so far this summer), but for the first time I brought daughter Bun down to Keegans’ (subject to their rules for underage attendees, of course) for dinner and…

…yep.  Victory. 

It wasn’t pretty – 16 points was the winning score – but hair-splitting is for also-rans.

On the same discussion about the GOP Convention discussed below, someone piped up (I add emphasis):

I’m glad to see thorough attention being paid to this issue, too.  My
greatest fear is, especially since public funding for law-enforcement is
still looking for a father, that the Republicans will bring their own
police force and call it “privatization”.  I think it’s a legitimate
concern that the GOP  will deputize one of their private armies, like
Blackwater, Inc., and we’ll have vans with tinted windows carting off
protest leaders for extraordinary rendition to South Dakota.  Someone
convince me I’m just paranoid.

I’m not sure anyone can.

Margaret Martin, over at Minneapolis Crime Watch, notes the ongoing furor over in Minnesota’s most dangerous city about Mayor Rybak’s failure to hire more police officers.

Last week, it was the police federation – granted, hardly an action against their own interests, but still.

And now, the most unlikely union of all (I add emphasis):

Today another challenge was issued to the Mayor. This time in a joint press release from the Independence Party and Republican Party of the 5th Congressional District. The chairs of both organizations attended a meeting last night where police coverage was a key topic of discussion.

The release takes Mayor Rybak to task for not living up to one of his campaign promises and for not putting a priority on public safety.

We support the police federation in their campaign to bring more cops to Minneapolis . We believe that the mayor’s first priority should be to keep the promise he made one year ago. The city’s police department should be restored to 893 sworn officers, the number of officers that existed just four years ago, before the city’s drastic cuts to police department staffing. Even though the mayor promised to restore the department to 893 officers, and the city council budgeted the funds to achieve that commitment, we now stand 50 officers short of the goal. By year end, with no plans to hire additional officers, the department is likely to be at least 65 officers short of the goal.

It appears from the release that the mayor once again leaned heavily on the “but they cut LGA” crutch. This is a cop out (no pun intended) by the mayor. True, LGA was cut in 2003, but there have not been cuts since. The truth is that the mayor and the city council have deemed public safety a lower priority than other budget items, or they could have simply shifted funds from those projects into public safety. On top of that, LGA is well above earlier years which had greater coverage and the police budget was a higher percentage of the overall city budget.

Read the whole thing.

When the MNGOP and the “Independence Party” (think “DFL Lite”) team up on a DFL mayor, you know things are getting hairy.

Saint Paul City Council prez Dave Thune, writing in a Saint Paul politics email discussion forum (emphasis added) about the city’s preparations for the 2008 Republican National Convention – specifically, the planning that’ll allow demonstrators within earshot of the convo itself:

> We have an assembly permit ordinance but our city
> attorney says it would be unconstitutional if
> challenged. I’d like to get that out of the way
> before we run into trouble with it. it was enacted
> to attempt to protect planned parenthood from
> demonstrators. 

Wow. 

So the Saint Paul City Council…:

1. Came up with a law to bar protesters from the front of the Planned Parenthood clinic on Ford Parkway, which…
2. …the City Attorney now, it just happens, notes is probably unconstitutional, just in time to welcome thousands of white, upper-middle-class liberal demonstrators to the city next year.

Show of hands from everyone who had that whole “constitutionality” thing figured out years ago?

Saint Paul – where your freedom is inversely proportional to your political distance from the Gang of Four.

(more…)