In a sense, I’m loathe to run this contest – it’ll necessarily drive some traffic to a bunch of blogs I really don’t like all that much. 

Still, the truth must be told It’s Friday and I need a good laugh.

What are the Twin Cities’ unintentionally funniest leftyblogs and leftybloggers?

I’m not talking about the thin film of TC leftybloggers that are actually fairly sharp thinkers and good writers.  And there are a few of ’em out there, although you have to look hard to find ’em.  (I’ve credited a few of them in this space before, so don’t come yapping at me now). 

No, I’m looking for the ones that are so overwrought they shoot steam out their ears; the ones so far gone in conspiracy theory that they make great party reading; the ones we laugh at, not with. 

I’ll take nominations the rest of today and maybe tomorrow, and run the “real” poll on Monday morning. 

History calls, ladies and gentlemen!

Question:  Where did this come from:

Is this the first signs of the City Pages rightward turn? CP attacks Al Franken in what they claim is “a lighthearted story not meant to be a huge expose.” This is a perfect example of conservative framing: Al Franken should not be considered a serious candidate, we have anecdotal evidence that you should take at face value.  

Was it:  

1. Scrappleface, impersonating a rabid paranoid leftyblogger?
2. Dementee, impersonating a rabid not-too-bright leftyblogger?
3. Sisyphus, impersonating a rabid bipolar off-her-meds leftyblogger?
4. Ryan Rhodes, impersonating a seriously impacted leftyblogger?

Of course, the answer is “None of the Above”.  It’s from “MNBlue”, a piece entitled “First signs of the City Pages rightward turn?”  (Via MDE)

The world of competition is crowded with legendary rivalries; Man U and Arsenal; Chicago and Green Bay; the Beatles and the Four Seasons; Turkey and Greece; Tastes Great and Less Filling. 

But perhaps the most crowded, intense competition there is is the “Twin Cities’ Unintentionally Funniest Leftyblog” competition.

We may need to have a formal poll, one of these days, to pick a “winner”. 

MNBlue, though, has to make the short list.  Peopled by the likes of the permanently-shrieking longtime Saint Paul DFL dynastician and blood pressure patient Andy “Disarm the Law-Abiding!” Driscoll, the audibly-doddering conspiracy wacko Grace “the troops are a bunch of thugs” Kelly, and “The Big E” (where “E” apparently stands for “Easily Mocked”), it gives Sue Lenfestey and Cucky Stool runs for their money. 

Poll. 

Hmmm.

I smell a contest coming!

In one of the funniest recent episodes of South Park, Stan’s little brother Ike’s kindergarten teacher seduces the toddler, gets caught, and, in a press conference before the trial, declares to be sorry, and that “…I am an alcoholic”. 

The crowd of reporters, cops and specators nod their heads, and eventually cheer the woman as she goes to rehab. 

It was funny (in South Park’s sick little way) – and pretty dead-on. 

As it were. 

But we’ll get back to that.

———-

Domestic abuse, of course, is no joke.  People get killed.  Although research shows that men and women are about equally likely to initiate domestic violence, women are more-usually injured or killed in these incidents.  Nobody is denying that. 

And it’s galling to have to make sure I’m understood on that point, since if I don’t some moron will pipe up “ah, so you condone domestic violence”.  Far from it.  But pointing out, for example, that women commit any violence, much less initiate their fair share of it, inflames some of this issue’s dogmatists.  And when  you start trying to address some of the problems in the system itself, some of them get downright apoplectic.

Those problems are pretty serious, though:

• In Minnesota, much of the funding to deal with domestic abuse is allocated according to the “Battered Womens’ Act”, a piece of legislation that, in effect, legally ignores abuse of men, and covers its eyes and plugs its ears and screams “nya nya nya I can’t hear you” when one tries (legally) to address the issue. 
• Some studies estimate that as many as half of domestic abuse allegations are brought immediately before and during divorce proceedings, and that as many as half of those are fake; charging domestic abuse is the “Nuclear Option” in custody battles; the allegation alone is frequently an insurmountable trump card.

Abuse is wrong.  And so is abuse of abuse.

———-

The issue became front-page news last fall…

…well, no.  “The issue” barely made a dent in last fall’s Strib pre-election hatchet job on Alan Fine. The Strib reported that Fine, who was running against DFLer Keith Ellison for the Fifth District congressional seat, had been arrested for domestic abuse in 1994.  The report ran at the top of Page A-1, naturally.  When Scott Johnson at Powerline brought up that there was never any physical evidence against Fine, and that he’d been released, never charged, and that eventually Fine’s ex-wife lost custody of their son to Fine – for domestic abuse! – the Strib carried Fine’s response.  On Page B7.

The Strib, acting as an organ of Keith Ellison’s campaign, used society’s partly-justified myopia about domestic abuse to put ill-informed votes in Keith Ellison’s column – votes that, in the long run, he scarcely needed, but wrong is wrong.

———-

All of that is a lot of background to a really sad, pathetic story; that of Mary Winkler, who was released from jail after serving a little over two months, after being convicted of shooting her husband in the back with a 12 gauge shotgun as he lay in bed.

Her defense?  Abuse, of course.

She then packed her three young daughters, ages 8, 6 and 1, in the family car and drove to Alabama, where she was taken into custody the following day.

During her trial in April, she claimed that she had been abused by her husband, with whom she had appeared to have an ideal marriage. She claimed not to remember getting the shotgun from a closet in their bedroom nor discharging it.

Winkler said that her husband, mortally wounded, rolled off the bed and asked her, “Why?” She said she told him she was sorry.

She was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder, but on April 19, after eight hours of deliberation, the jury found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter. On June 8, she was sentenced to 210 days in prison, with credit given for 143 days she had spent in jail the previous year before making bail. The judge allowed her to spend 60 of the remaining 67 days of her sentence in a mental health facility.

She was not, of course, a person with a long record of being abused.  Indeed, there was no record at all.  Not one domestic abuse call to their house.  Not one shred of physical evidence; not a single bruise, not a single scratch that Mrs. Winkler herself even saw fit to put on the record with a visit to a single doctor. 

Matthew Winkler was a minister at the Fourth Street Church of Christ, a denomination that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible, including Saint Paul’s teaching that women should be submissive to their husbands.

Mary Winkler’s attorneys claimed that she was beaten by her husband. She said at her trial that he made her watch pornographic videos and wear “slutty” outfits for sex. She said he was controlling and criticized her constantly.

Leave aside the alleged beatings – of which there was apparently no evidence, physical or documentary, whatsoever – for a moment.  All Mrs. Winkler’s other allegations are grounds for, perhaps, examining one’s theology, having a long talk with hubby about one’s bedroom practices, and calling a family therapist or a divorce lawyer. 

Not 12-gauge justice.

Let’s re-iterate; at no time did Mrs. Winkler introduce any evidence that she was “abused” in any sense that’d be recognized, at all, by women and men who do get beaten, punched, stabbed, slapped, burned and kicked every day in this country. She would seem to have introduced no evidence that would have convicted her late husband of any form of domestic battery, were he alive to participate.

None.

No, she introduced a pair of high heels – PG-13-rated strappy “FM” shoes that wouldn’t draw a second glance at all-ages night at any Twin Cities nightclub as evidence of the late Reverend Winkler’s untrammeled perversion. 

The defense responded:

At the time of the killing, the couple had been having arguments about their finances. Prosecutors introduced evidence that Mary Winkler had gotten involved in an online Nigerian check-kiting fraud and had written checks for thousands of dollars. That, the prosecution argued, was the real source of the friction in the marriage.

We’ll probably never know, of course, the real truth of what happened in the Winkler marriage (other than “nothing that Mrs. Winkler managed to bring to any official attention, in a society that meets abused women much, much more than halfway, and that is indeed biased, perhaps justifiably so, toward excessive caution in matters of domestic violence”).   We’ll never know, it’s likely, whether Mr. Winkler did anything that, in a rational universe, would justify having his insides turned to Innard Hash with a 12-gauge blast through the back as he slept (and please bear in mind that I am an advocate for the rights of genuinely-abused people to resist violence with lethal force, and for giving them the means to do so via the Minnesota Personal Protection Act), or whether he was a “controlling” jerk with some “quirks” who was too horny and “kinky” for his wife’s tastes.  It merely seems that the only evidence introduced at trial pointed toward the latter.

Apparently those are now capital crimes in Tennessee.  If you’re a husband, anyway.

Abuse – the real thing, genuine violence – is absolutely wrong.  And this ruling cheapens and devalues the meaning of the term for all the people out there who are suffering from the real thing, day in and day out, no matter what the Winkler’s situation was.

I’ll pray for the daughters.  Especially if their mother ends up getting custody. 

A few weeks back, I noted that, as his “campaign” continued, Barack Obama looked less and less ready for prime time.

And now, others are jumping on board.

It’s not like there’s not oodles of evidence. 

Caricaturists!  Think back on the glory days of “Bush is Dum” japery, and let your pens run red-hot!

Caricaturists?

Yo?

Speaking of which; if Terry Keegan’s Thursday Night Trivia ever asks “What are the words to the Dutch National Anthem”, I’m totally covered:

Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ick, van Duitsen blut!

Den Vaterland getrouwe, bleif ick tot in den doet.

Een Prinze van Oranjen bleif ick, vrij onverveert.

Den Konink van Hispanjen heb ick alltijd gheert!

And no, I didn’t effing Google it, either. I had to learn it 25 years ago. I can still sing the baritone harmony part, to say nothing of the words, from memory.

Bring it on, Keegan.

A Dutch politician, leading perhaps more with his heart and his rage, takes on militant Islam at its’ heart – and maybe more:

Writing in Dutch daily De Volkskrant on Wednesday, [Dutch parliamentarian Geert] Wilders said: “Ban this wretched book just like Mein Kampf is banned. Send a signal … to Islamists that the Koran can never, ever be used in our country as an excuse or inspiration for violence.”

Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in 1925, outlines the future Nazi dictator’s racist ideology. It has been banned from sale in the Netherlands since the end of World War Two.

No, I don’t ever advocate banning books.  Indeed, I recommend reading things like Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries, just so one knows what one is up against.  I’m planning on finding a Koran someday soon, here, in fact.

But back to the story:  while I don’t endorse Wilders’ solution, it’s a sign – along with the rebounding electoral fortunes of the CDU in Germany and the Sarkozy victory in France – that maybe, just maybe, Europe is starting to get serious about defending its culture in the face of a “multicultural” assault.

Wilders, whose new party won nine seats out of the 150 in parliament in last November’s elections, is well known for his firebrand remarks on Islam.

He has warned of a “tsunami of Islamisation” in a country home to 1 million Muslims, and has lived under heavy protection since receiving death threats from Islamist militants in 2004.

Wilders said an attack over the weekend by two Moroccans and a Somali on a young Iranian-born politician who heads a Dutch group for “ex-Muslims” had spurred him to write.

The attack on Ehsan Jami, 22, caused an outcry in the Netherlands, where the November 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker critical of Islam, by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim militant led to an anti-Muslim backlash and exposed social tensions.

I’m a lot less worried about the Dutch than about much of the rest of Europe; the Dutch still have a sense of nationalism; they are among few people in Europe that actually treat their National Anthem the way Americans do.  That means little in and of itself, but it’s a hint that maybe the Dutch will give up their national identity a little more dearly than some of the rest of the continent.

(Via Miss O’Hara)

Ed notes an Agence France Presse story in which a woman notes that her house was mercilessly shot to hell by American troops, and has the bullets to prove it.

Any potential Crime Scene Investigators wanna take a, er, “shot” at this one (without cheating and looking at Ed’s wrapup of posts by bloggers that figured it out?)

UPDATE:  Given AFP’s record (i.e., as bad as the American mainstream media’s) on these sorts of things, I had to check.

Kudo’s to AFP’s crack fact-checkers; at least they’re American 5.56x45mm rounds.  I figured it was even money they’d be 7.62x39mm…

It’s been a hard year for a lot of conservative activists – including bloggers.

Remember, especially in Minnesota, the GOP relies on volunteers to do most of its grunt-level organizing, sign-posting, call-banking and door-knocking – the stuff for which the DFL pays a small army of “activists”. 

And each and every campaign in recent memory – 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 – has been a “Make Or Break” campaign for the Minnesota GOP; in each election, Minnesota flirted with purplehood; Minnesota’s legacy as a big-L “liberal” state hung in the balance, and held on by a thread. 

For Minnesota’s conservative volunteers, for four straight election cycles, it was “just one more big push”.  And they delivered; they turned out in droves; they worked countless hours; like the patriots that won this country’s independence, they devoted hours and weeks of their lived for the pure love of the cause; the Democrats’ paid help, like a horde of Hessians, showed up because that’s where the money was. 

And they worked wonders.  They got the word out.  But for the Ventura fluke, they’d have gotten Norm Coleman into the governor’s mansion in 1998; they contributed mightily to his performance against Wellstone, before the late Senator’s death; they almost pulled off what a generation ago would have been unthinkable – putting Minnesota in the Red column, twice. 

And they’re tired.  Some of them are very, very burned out.  I’ve talked with some of them, men and women with families and day jobs and lives, who’ve put all of them to some degree aside every two years for going on a decade now. 

And some of them don’t know that they can do it again.

It’s similar among bloggers.  The “Class of ’04” – the surge of center-right blogs and writers that kicked off during the ’04 campaign – was, and remains, the most dynamic group of political bloggers in the US.  But you could feel a collective fatigue, in some ways, after the ’06 elections.  Many of the ’04 blogs went dormant; some of the bloggers flamed out (although the MOB’s attrition is lower, I suspect, than for just about any other group of 100-odd blogs you can find); others, tired of having to churn stuff out every day, dropped their own blogs to join one the big superblogs (Freedom Dogs, Anti-Strib, TvM) that are positioned to be so very important in this next go-round.  I know I took a step back from politics for a while after the election, and I’m still not entirely back into it.

Yet.

But that’s going to have to change.  There’s a new election season coming up, and it’s going to be huge – even without  the Republican National Convention and the hordes of mischievous pranksters following it to Saint Paul next September.  It’s going to be a donnybrook, on the state and federal levels, here in Minnesota.  The Presidential context will once again have Minnesota teetering on the brink of Red and Blue, and our ten electoral votes are mighty tempting to both parties.  The Senate race will be the dirtiest in Minnesota history, and the ACORN volunteers will be floating down our streets on waves of George Soros’ money.  In Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty stood athwart the flood of DFL tax-‘n-spend proposals like the Finns at Suomussalmi, outfoxing and outmaneuvering his bovine, lumpen enemies and their “All Your Money Is Ours!” platform.  The Dems’ majority in the House is built on sand, with a bunch of seats held by DFLers who won by paper-thin margins in traditionally-GOP-leaning districts; expect them to pour on the money, the dirt, and the media play to keep it that way. 

So the GOP is going to have to call on the things that really make it a contender in this next election; its’ strength in the parts of this state that actually pay the way; its volunteers that make it competitive everywhere; and finally, the alternative media, blogs and talk radio.

Who’s going to pull that all together?

Well, stay tuned.

In the past few years, as the nation has slowly and ineffectually come to grips with the illegal immigration problem, several left-of-center cities have, with a flurry of misplace self-righteousness, enacted “sanctuary city” laws, instructing their police not to check the immigration status of people they contacted on other police matters.  “We don’t pay our police to be immigration officers” was a common quote from the various officials involved – introducing the question “do we pay you to be child support enforcers or collections officers for the car insurance industry?”, or, more on-point, “aren’t laws laws, to be enforced pretty much across the board?”

At any rate, I’m sure you’ve heard the news – the three college students executed in Newark were allegedly shot by a man who’d been picked up on another crime – but not held, since Newark was one of the self-righteous cities that was above all of that persecution:

Jose Carranza, an illegal immigrant from Peru, was indicted twice this year: 31 counts surrounding the alleged sexual assault of a child, and nine stemming from a bar fight

It’s been over two months since that afternoon in June when – depending on who you believe – either:

• an irresponsible citizen who should never have been given a carry permit (under a law that should never have passed!) freaked out and shot a mild-mannered undercover cop who may have been acting a bit aggressively, or
• a citizen, thrust into a situation no man should have to face when a stranger who’d been behaving in a threatening manner pulled up beside him when he was boxed in at a light, and pointed a gun at his wife, pulled his legally-permitted handgun and shot the aggressor – who turned out to be an undercover cop who was stretching the prerogatives of his badge all out of shape.

You recall the situation (and if you don’t, here’s a partial list of my coverage); the citizen, Martin Treptow, an out-of-work security guard with a legal carry permit, was taken into custody (absolutely normal in these situations, even if there’s not a cop involved) – and then promptly released without charge, and without his carry permit even being suspended (absolutely abnormal in these situations).

And since then…silence.  Nothing.  Zilch.  Indeed, as Joel Rosenberg and Andrew Rothman noted in Joel’s blog and in a couple of appearances on the NARN, less than nothing; the official silence has the appearance of a coverup, amid allegations (from sources with knowlege of the case and of the officer involved) that the cop behaved very improperly. 

Joel has the latest – and while it doesn’t read like a lot is happening, read closely:

[Anoka County Attorney] Robert M. A. Johnson…has empaneled a grand jury in the Treptow case.

What will be a secret — and is unlikely to leak directly — is what exactly will happen inside the grand jury room; by law, such proceedings are secret, and leak only sometimes.

That said, there are some things that are clear at this point:

1. There’s no legal need for a grand jury. If Johnson wanted to indict somebody in this, he could do it without a grand jury.

2. There may be a political use for a grand jury. Prosecutors can use grand juries to investigate complex cases — and this one isn’t that. The investigation was complete within days of the incident; all the witnesses that the Coon Rapids/Anoka authorities wanted to interview, and who were cooperative, had talked to the cops within hours, or a very few days, of the attack.

But a prosecutor can use a grand jury to indict a politically-difficult-to-indict defendant, or as an excuse for not indicting anybody. There’s an old saying: a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

As Joel points out, Johnson is not politically vulnerable.  So the question is, which potential indictment is the political hot-potato?  Treptow, or “Officer Friendly”?

I am not a lawyer, but I strongly suspect that if Treptow were remotely vulnerable to being charged under the circumstances, he’d have been charged long ago.  Self-defense shooting is a tricky legal tightrope, with more legal pitfalls than dating LaToya Jackson; if someone’s going to screw up, it’s probably (I suspect) going to be obvious enough that a “hereditary” (see Joel’s explanation) county attorney isn’t going to worry about losing political capital.

But indicting a cop? 

Hm.

Joel continues (and I add emphasis):

A prosecutor can also carefully not present enough evidence to persuade a grand jury to indict anybody, and use that as an excuse — say, if the defendant is a public employee whose indictment would be politically embarrassing. “Hey; it wasn’t my fault. The grand jury refused to do anything.”

Finally:  

It’s not quite a guarantee, but it’s a very safe bet that Martin Treptow won’t be indicted. I wouldn’t be utterly surprised, though, if Rebecca Treptow was called in front of the grand jury — that would be, as far as I know, the first time that anybody involved in law enforcement would have so much as made any effort whatsoever to interview her since June 7.

(Yup, you read that right: the highly professional law enforcement professionals of the Coon Rapids PD, the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office, and the Anoka County Attorney’s office made, as far as I know, no attempt whatsoever to interview the key witness in more than two months of their “investigation.”  They certainly made no attempt to talk to her within the first month.  Gee, I wonder why . . . .)

Read the whole thing. 

CORRECTION:  Afternoon, not evening.

…and no hyperdramatic conspiracy-mongering jagoffs were there to hear it, would it exist?

9/11/07

GENERAL STRIKE

THIS SEPTEMBER 11TH:  NO WORK, NO SCHOOL, NO SHOPPING.

HIT THE STREETS.

Wow.  Sounds like a big deal…

…er, wait.  Maybe not:

Get Cindy Sheehan, World Can’t Wait and other anti-war voices on board…

This strike is meant to be as broad as possible. We need people like this to get involved. Please use any means you can to approach these people, respectfully of course, and encourage them to get on board. How could Cindy Sheehan refuse a call for a General Strike against Torture, Lies, and Tyranny!? And remember, this is a broad-based, decentralized call, no one is in charge, no one issue takes precedence. This for all the people across this country who are fed up and ready to do something powerful in the name of decency, truth, and legitimate government.

I bet the meeting went something like this:

MUFFY CARLETON-BURFLINGER: “Order!  Order, everyone!  Moonrabbit, will you please give the invocation?”

MOONRABBIT WELLSTONE HARFANGER: “Our wellstone, who art in herven, hallowed be thy legacy.  Thy agenda come, thy will be done, in Minneapolis as it is in Washington.  Give us this day are daily latte, and forgive us our lack of zeal, as we tolerate those who don’t think the government was behind 9/11 [muffled grunts of affirmation] .  And lead us not into the presence of Limbaugh, and deliver us from Bush, for thine is the non-patriarchal commune, and the collective power, and the inclusive glory, forever, a-women!”

IAN MICAH BLOTNIK:  “Attention, comrades!  The General Strike website is launching Monday!”

MC-B:  “Excellent!  And Cindy Sheehan’s on board?”

IMB:  “Er…Huh?”

MC-B:  “Sheehan.  Cindy.  Anti-war activist.  You were supposed to get her on board with the General Strike before the site launched…”

IMB: “Um, no, Muffy, I was so not.  I was working on the website, dee-duh-deee.  It was someone else’s job”.

MC-B:  (Sighs wearily).  “OK.  Um…was it you?” (points to…)

HUNTER PETERSON-PETERSON-TORSTENGAARD-PETERSON:  “Like, um, no!  I had a victimization studies final I had to, totally, like, prep for”. 

MC-B:  “Who took the minutes from the last meeting?  Joshua?”

JOSHUA MICAH LENFESTEY-BENANAV:  “Um, that’s Joshua-Micah, hello?”

MC-B:  “Yeah, like, whatevs, did you take the minutes?”

JML-B:  “Like minute-taking is totally fascist.  I didn’t like do it”. 

MC-B: (Signs, wearilier) “OK, like, totally, like, this sucks.  What are we gonna do?”

HP-P-T-P:  “We could totally blame Pawlenty for failing to fund organization classes for high school kids!”

MC-B: “That, like, like, like, like, like, is a good idea”.

JML-B: “But, like, didn’t we all go to private schools?”

HP-P-T-P:  “What’s the difference?”

MC-B: “Oh, like, I’ll totally write something.  Cyndi will come through for us!”

ALL: “Cyndi!”

(Meeting adjourns as website launches, drawing ten billion hits on the Daily Kos).

To them, it’s a general strike. 

To me, it’s a day with ten fewer oil-belching Subarus on the road.

UPDATE:  I got a ticket from the grammar police.  But I won’t say where.

If there’s a Minnesota politics “expert” whose shelf-life is more expired than Larry Jacobs, the U of M PoliSci prof who is cited in virtually every story about politics (or so it seems) in the Minnesota mainstream media, it’s gotta be Wy Spano.  Spano turns up everywhere, on every panel (or, again, so it seems), doing for panel discussions what Lori Sturdevant does for the Columns page; gurgitating DFL talking points.

Which would be one thing if he weren’t an intellectual thug…

…well, let’s let Margaret take over the story over at Anti-Strib:

David did the political panel on Almanac this past Friday. If you didn’t see it, the panel had most of the usual suspects: Ember Reichgott-Junge, Fritz Knaacht, Wy Spano and David. The panel quickly devolved into Wy vs. David, with Wy trying to make the argument that the bridge collapsed because maintenance was underfunded and the Taxpayers League (David and his rich friends) had ruined the state. Wy spouted that the no longer were Minnesotans going to believe the Taxpayers League and that basically the bridge collapse showed that the battle was over and conservative arguments had lost. The on-camera debate continued largely civilly although Wy continued to butt in and talk over David, but that’s his style so nothing really new there. What the viewers didn’t really see what the shouting match that developed after the segment was over. Interestingly, neither the producers, nor Erik Eskola told them to shut up, except for an initial “quiet on the set” when Cathy Wurzer began the index file question segment. There was shouting and hand waving so loud that I, sitting on the bleachers couldn’t hear the question (a weekly bit of Minnesota trivia for those of you who never watch the show). Cathy was clearly distracted and you can see an occasional silhouette moving around behind the strategically placed vase full of sunflowers.

I will have to summarize the “discussion” that took place after the cameras stopped rolling because there was a lot of noise. David pointed out that the Stillwater Bridge is in worse shape than the I-35W bridge was and Wy started shouting that David was a “liar” and a “know nothing” and that the “know nothings had been winning” but now “they” were going to take back the state.” It was quite the scene, reminiscent of Nikita’s Kruschev’s “we will bury you” speech. Or the Wellstone memorial.

They apparently think everyone will be deaf before the engineers finally come out and say the bridge collapsed due to things that wouldn’t have been affected by any more spending. 

It may be their only hope, in fact.

UPDATE:  In my haste, I missed the link the first time. 

My friend Beeeej is going to be doing a mega bike-a-thon.  It’s for a very good cause:

Six years ago, less than a year after I moved to New York City to be closer to my parents, my mother was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. None of us really knew at the time what that meant; we knew that leukemia was a form of blood cancer, but we didn’t know her prognosis, or even really that there were different kinds of the disease. I’ll write more about CLL in later entries, but for now suffice to say we knew her life would change.

We have been very fortunate, far more fortunate than many families of leukemia patients, in that my mother’s life hasn’t changed all that much; she has remained relatively healthy. CLL can remain relatively inactive – or at least advance very, very slowly – for several years, and with Mom it has done just that. As I said, it’s been six years – and she’s not only still with us, she’s still in pretty good health, and hasn’t had to undergo any kind of medical treatment. Not everybody is so lucky, and so we count every day with her as a blessing.

What does that have to do with Tucson?

Tonight I spent a couple of hours at the registration and kick-off for the New York City chapter of Team in Training. “TNT” is an arm of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, through which ordinary people sign up to do extraordinary things to raise money for the Society’s programs – medical research, government lobbying, patient services, and all the other things that are desperately needed in the fight against blood cancers. TNT members spend months training to run a marathon, bike/swim/run a triathlon, or bike a “century,” and they use the event as a catalyst to raise money from their friends and family.

And tonight I committed myself to spend the next six months training, so that I can ride my bike in “El Tour de Tucson” – one hundred and nine miles in and around the city of Tucson, Arizona in one day, November 17, 2007.

I hope you’ll check in with me often over the next six [now more like three!] months. It should be an interesting ride.

I know Beeeej would appreciate any help people can spare toward his goal of raising almost $11K to help combat Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, I imagine he’d appreciate it.

As would, y’know, all the rest of the CLL patients.

I’m going to try to chip loose a few bucks, and I hope you can too.

Ed and I talked about Ellen Goodman’s intensely stupid wrapup from Yearly Kos (Motto:  “If you’re not irate to the point of incontinence, you’re probably a spy”) in which she lamented the supposed dearth of female bloggers, on the show last Saturday. 

Nevertheless, there is another, less flattering way in which broadband has followed broadcast and the liberal political bloggers mimic the conservative talk-show hosts. The chief messengers are overwhelmingly men — white men, even angry white men.

I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the “coed” mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.
…
Next year, Yearly Kos will undergo a name change. The assembly of progressive bloggers will call themselves Netroots Nation. But when will the members of these netroots look more like the nation?

The answers, of course, are head-smackingly obvious to anyone who doesn’t depend on Media Matters for their talking points; when non-whites and non-males want to. 

Because setting up a blog is probably easier than subscribing to the typical newspaper.  In fact, I’ll let you prove it to yourself.  Anyone who’s interested – especially you ladies out there – go to one of these sites (like this one if you’re right-of-center, or this one no matter what you are) and go to town.

From that point on?  It’s entirely up to you!  The blogosphere doesn’t care (indeed, needn’t know, and frequently has no idea) if you’re white, black, female, hispanic, gay, or even human. Indeed, many of the best conservative bloggers are, counter to the left’s inherently paternalistic stereotypes, women:  Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks, La Shawn Barber, and the list goes on and on.  Good female leftybloggers are much rarer – hysterical scolds are more the norm – but they do exist. 

But we’ll come back to that.

Jeff Kouba notes the blazingly obvious in a way that eludes Ellen Goodman (with my emphasis added):

Hard to imagine anything more wide open than the blogosphere. There’s no gatekeeper standing there with an iron rod ready to beat back any woman who aspires to enter.

Women have just as much opportunity as men to wade out into the Sea of Bytes and try and carve out an audience for themselves.

And Jeff notes…:

The blogsophere is both a seductive angel and a cruel mistress. It is fair and not fair. It rewards talent, or loses it in the shuffle…Maybe female bloggers (I refuse to use “women” as an adjective) do experience abuse in ways that men don’t. Just ask Michelle Malkin. But to allow oneself to be cowed and driven away by sickos, maladroits, cowards, misogynists and neanderthals is a choice one makes for oneself.

One can sure invite abuse when you write a blog – or, indeed, put yourself out there in any way at all.  I remember getting anti-semitic death threats twenty years ago at KSTP-AM (although I’m as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger; this was two years after Alan Berg was murdered in Denver, so it wasn’t entirely an academic issue to me (“Gosh, Mitch, why do you support “shall issue” laws?”).  And while I’ve done OK since the blog started, I’ve drawn my share of drooling moral incontinents to my comment section (never moreso than when Democratic Underground, Jesus General or the Freep linked to me, although most of the real persistent jagoffs came from another pack of delusional hysterics. 

Threatening anyone for what they say, or believe, is a loathsome thing, and should be punished to the full extent of both the law and society’s ability to inflict shame.  It doesn’t matter who the sender or receiver are.  Period.  If it were in my power to find out and punish (or at least humiliate) someone who sent a threatening email to, say, the shrieking hysterics at Shakespeare’s Sister, I’d do it as quickly as I would for someone threatening Michelle Malkin.  There is no compromise there.

Speaking of shrieking hysterics, MNob – a woman who writes for pretty much every leftyblog in the Twin Cities sorosphere, and who is reputed to be a lawyer, although I know I’m not paying her for legal advice, ever – tried to take Kouba to what passes for “task”, in her little world, writing this time at “Yowling From The Fencepost“:

Shorter Jeff Kouba: “Why, no, I’ve never received anonymous email with images of my face photoshopped onto a mutilated and ejaculate-covered corpse with my home address posted below. Why do you ask?”

So to sum up the “logic” of MNob’s “keen” “legal” mind:

• Kouba: the blogosphere is a meritocracy.
• MNob: But some women get threatened!  Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Even a strawman can get blog space for free at blogspot, I guess.

I don’t go to any leftyblogger for cool, incisive logic, least of all any blog that’d publish MNob – but sometimes, one has an academic craving to try to follow these “ideas” to their conclusions.

The blogsphere is (putatively) a male preserve, BUT there is no barrier to entry to anyone so there’s no real reason for this, BUT some slimebags send abusive emails to some female bloggers.  So – what do we do?  Create a DFL-like quota system? 

Aren’t women “tough” enough to handle the scrum of political blogging?  Clearly not true – Michelle Malkin, the Anchoress, Ann Althouse, Little Miss Attila, Mary Katherine Ham, Baldilocks and La Shawn Barber all give much better than they get. 

Besides reveling in misplaced victimhood, what would MNob suggest?  An affirmative action program for under-blogged womyn?  A non-profit that teaches women and minorities how to blog (oh, wait, we already have that)?  A “Fairness Doctrine” and a set of “Speech Codes” to “level the playing field?”

Or is it just more fun to complain about the thin little fringe of a***ipes, politics irrelevant, whose anonymity gives them cover to say and do things they’d never dare in person? 

Sort of like a lot of anonymous bloggers, come to think of it?

Hugh cites Randy Elrod’s prediction when Fred Thompson will drop his announcement…:

Fred Thompson will announce his bid for the Presidency on Labor Day at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee.

And then, things will get fun!

In a sense, I owe Garrison Keillor a debt of gratitude. It was my serial fiskings of his sniffing, haughty, holier-than-thou poison pen attack on Norm Coleman and his supporters (here and here) back in 2002 that drew the attention of the likes of Instapundit, and put this blog on the map, way back when.

But, like fisking Nick Coleman and pointing out that Lori Sturdevant is a DFL flak, it gets first repetitive, and then just a bit depressing.

Which is why I’m so happy Jeff Kouba stepped up to gut-punch Keillor’s latest exercise in sniffing self-adoration:

In true form, it didn’t take this Cynicism badge holder long to get around to mentioning the Current Occupant. He can twist anything to use as club with which to beat President Bush, even the already twisted steel girders of a fallen bridge. No human tragedy is so awful it can’t be used to sneer at one’s political opponents.

The Current Occupant came to view the wreckage and to express, in that intense and aimless way of his, his hopes for a better life for us. And then, having raised our hopes, he did not resign from office after all.

Sigh. I’m sure the grieving families of those lost in the collapse will find a few moments of comfort in the snarks written at the dead’s expense. Sometimes I think Keillor’s jawbone could slay a thousand Philistines.

Your tax dollars at work, as they say.

Kevin Ecker went a rule-enactment jag that’d make Phyllis Kahn titter with glee.

Although Ecker’s rules make sense.

I liked this one…:

New Rule: Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn’t make you spiritual. It’s right above the crack of your ass. And it translates to “beef with broccoli.” The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren’t pregnant. You’re not spiritual. You’re just high.

Hooo, yeah.

Read ’em all.

I was at the Cub store by 60th and Nicollet in South Minneapolis, and I met my old friend Joshua-Micah Cohen-Tostengaard. 

Josh has been a lifelong Democrat; the guy bleeds blue.  He has impeccable DFL credentials.  And he’s bugged.

“I am a Democrat”, Josh said, “but I hate the DFL and the national Democratic Party.  I’ve voted for every Democratic presidential, Senate, Congress, Gubernatorial, State Constitutional and Legislative office, every election, ever.  But I’m not going to anymore”.

I asked him why?

“Because while I have always been a good, dues-paying liberal Democrat, I have found that I just can’t abide my party’s policies!  Although I’ve been a card-carrying liberal my whole life, I cannot stand the left’s stances on gun control – I own an AK47 and am carrying a Desert Eagle in my cargo pocket right now!  I’m very pro-life, and find my party’s stances on all abortion issues to be noxious.  I support my party, but I find their drive to disengage from Iraq – indeed, to cut and run – to be horrendous.  And while I revere the legacy of Hubert Humphrey and Fritz Mondale, I think the party’s high-tax, low-growth, punish achievement policies are going to kill this state.:

 ” I think Local Government Aid is a subsidy of failure.  I applaud my party’s record on welfare, but I think that aid should be closely tied to work.  While I believe in my party’s history as a supporter of immigration, I support English as a national language, and believe that the border should be closed, immediately.  Oh, while I support my party on transportation issues, I think every cent spent on trains and buses is a complete waste.”

Was that all?

“Yes.  Well, there’s one more thing; while I support my party’s historical legacy, I think David Strom and Phil Krinkie and their “no new taxes” pledge issued exactly the call this state needs, no matter what the DFL party as a whole says”. 

“So”, Josh concluded, “I’m a Democrat.  But what my party has become, nauseates me.  I can’t support them, since they oppose everything I, as a Democrat, believe”. 

It was an interesting conversation.

(more…)

While the left barbers endlessly about the alleged venality and hatefulness of right-wing groups, it would seem all the genuine hate-based violence in this country is coming…

…from the left.  Via the LA Weekly, a fascinating, and eye-opening, story about the nascence of a violent animal-rights “movement” whose ends, to it, justify the means:

On Sunday, June 24, just that kind of person struck. Rosenbaum, a highly regarded pediatric ophthalmologist who had been regularly harassed by animal-rights activists for his research work with cats and rhesus monkeys at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, noticed a device underneath his luxury sedan. The bomb squad was dispatched to the scene and hauled away a makeshift — but deadly — explosive. A faulty fuse was the only reason it didn’t go off.

Three days later, the so-called Animal Liberation Brigade sent a typo-riddled “communiqué” to the North American Animal Liberation Press Office in Los Angeles. It was posted on the NAALPO Web site:

Read the whole thing.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I The Opening Act The First Team – John, Brian and Chad – will  kick things off from 11-1.  They’ll talk, among much else, with JunkScience.com founder and publisher, Steven Milloy.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I’ll will be in next, from 1-3.  We’ll be talking with Tammy Nerby, a comedian doing a benefit for Soldiers’ Angels that we’d like you to know about. 
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will talk Minnesota trash after that until 5PM.  I’m guessing the backlash against the DFL’s ghoulish push to hold a special session devoted to exacting yet more tax revenue in the name of the still-unsolved bridge collapse will top their agenda.

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

…is that Chris Coleman might be getting a serious challenger in the next mayoral race. 

The Coleman Administration, according to Saint Paulicy, has bobbled a key bit of union-relations; SPicy relates a meeting between the Mayor’s staff and union officials that lasted, reportedly, one minute:

Union leaders spent little time getting to the issue at hand and opened the meeting with a pointed question about Mayor Coleman’s willingness to discuss “outsourcing” (SPicy had always wondered what happened to Compete Saint Paul).  New Deputy Mayor Mulholland apparently tried evade a direct answers to the question.  And as quickly as the meeting started – the leadership from Laborers Local 132 walked out the door.

One trip around the clock for the second hand and they had heard enough.
Unfortunately it doesn’t take sixty seconds to understand the options left for unions in how they deal with the Coleman administration. 

The bad news?  The challenger will likely be to Coleman’s left.   

SPicy now believes that when a challenger for the Mayor emerges to his political left – there will be a receptive group of union members ready to take up the cause.

That’s right, world; in the world of Saint Paul politics, Chris Coleman is the middle.

According to this survey (via Sheila), I’m totally down with Gryffindor:

GRYFFINDOR:
[x ] You’ve never done drugs.
[x ] You have a lot of friends.
[x ] You get along with everyone.
[ ] You love football.
[x ] You love baseball.
[x ] You’re into writing and art
[ x] One of your favourite music genre is rock.
[ x] You believe in “innocent until proven guilty” theory.
[ ] One of your favourite colors is red or gold.
[x ] Good grades at school.
[x ] One of the worst things you can do is lie.
[x ] You plan on going to college.
TOTAL: 10

HUFFLEPUFF:
[ ]You’re content with mostly everything in your life right now.
[x] You laugh a lot.
[ ] You like to follow trends.
[ ] Politics suck.
[x] You love to swim
[ ] Water polo is awesome.
[ ] Pink is one of your favourite colours.
[x] Black is morbid & depressing.
[x] You’re an optimist.
[ ] You’re very emotional.
[ ] You believe in going steady at a young age.
[ ] You haven’t made fun of anyone this month.
[x ] Loyalty is the MOST important thing in a relationship.
TOTAL: 5

RAVENCLAW:
[ ] You’re depressed to a certain extent.
[x ] You love to read.
[x ] You appreciate theatre & arts.
[ ] Sports suck.
[x] Hate is completely unneeded.
[ ] Indie is one of your favourite genre of music.
[x] Every once in a while you have little anger outbursts.
[ ] Lying is sometimes okay.
[ ] Blue is one of your favourite colours.
[ ] Knowledge is the key to power
[ ] Sarcasm is the best kind of humour
[ ] People should know what they’re talking about before they talk.
TOTAL: 4

SLYTHERIN:
[ ]There’s at least one person you hate.
[ ] Basketball is a good sport.
[ ] Football is amazing.
[ ] Black is a cool color.
[ ] You’ve lied about something serious
[ ] You’re a very deep person
[ ] You are not very loyal.
[ ] You like heavy metal.
[ ] You make school seem more important than it is.
[ ] You’re scared to grow up.
[ ] Anger is one of your primary feelings.
[x] You have trust issues.
[ ] Guilty until proven innocent.
Total: 1

Not sure what significance that has, but if it means I get to hang out with Alan Rickman, I’m cool with it.

I’m closing in on two months of biking to work nearly every morning.

It’s having some effect on me:

• A couple of people who never pay me compliments said it looks like I’ve lost some weight.
• Now that my morning kicks off with a death-defying dice with some of Minnesota’s worst drivers, I don’t need as much coffee as I used to.
• A couple of my favorite work shirts – which were on the brink of “tight” last May – aren’t.
• While my legs aren’t the tree-trunk-like instruments of tempered death that they were 20-25 years ago, when I was biking 20-30 miles a day every day, they’re coming right along.

But the best part of all…

There’s one big hill I have to surmount on the way home every night.

Day One:  I made it about a third of the way up, and then wound up walking my bike the rest of the way up, huffing and puffing.

Week Two:  I made it to the top – weaving back and forth (to lower the slope) in low gear – and sat at the stoplight at the top, huffing and puffing and drinking water, for a minute or two before I got started again.

Two Weeks Ago: Made it to the top in low gear, but in a fairly straight line – and sat at the stoplight at the top for a moment to catch my breath and water up before I got on the road again.

Yesterday:  Got to the top, rolled through the green light and continued on my way, not especially winded.

It’s going to stink when school starts again.

From Pianomomsicle – a local blog that I wish were a lot more prolific – I loved this bit:

So tonight i was looking for my old “Adoration” part, and found it and the piano part. i thought it might be fun to revisit it on violin, so i pulled my dear violin out again. And i opened it, and it wasn’t something hateful at all. It was my beloved Merrick (yes I named it) and it was looking back at me like “Why have you forsaken me?” And i played Adoration on it, and despite my very rusty technique, especially my horrible vibrato, IT still played as pure and true as it could. And i apologized to it afterwards. And will continue to play it, so i can get back up to feeling like my vibrato doesn’t sound like a beginner and my shifting doesn’t sound like sliding again. And i feel like a more complete person. The piano part is so pretty, and i was able to play it without much pausing, and that will be great. But the real victor was my relationship with my violin. i think the reason i hated it was because maybe i thought it was taking away from my piano playing, but now that i am known as a piano player, playing violin again has brought back memories and made me realize it’s wonderful. Maybe being with something 20+ hours/week makes you forget about its good qualities or something. You could probably relate that to marriage, too. Well, after coming back to it, i definitely don’t want to let it go.

I point it out partly because of the story at the top – how she became a violinist in the first place – and largely because re-discovering things you used to love had been a big theme for me lately…

…no, not quite.  I should have said “rediscovering things with which I used to have deeply-dysfunctional, codependent relationships, and trying to do it right this time” has been a big theme for me lately. 

My old cello needs a ton of work – so I don’t get to play much lately.  But a few weeks ago I went into a store, and sat down and tried a cello.  A nice one.  I started playing a few old things I’d memorized maybe 25 years ago – some little Küffner etude that I used to do as a warmup exercise – and it felt like the sound was shaking something way deep in my brain.  I kept on going, playing more old stuff, feeling deliriously comfortable, like the vibration of the instrument was a drug.

Damn.  Fun.  Gotta do that again sometime.

Anyway.  Talk radio?  Biking?  I’ve been doing that kind of thing a lot lately.

Lesser “feminists” than I are bragging about their “performance” on yet another blog toy.

Since I am, in fact, the Twin Cities’ blogosphere’s best feminist, I figured I should take a shot at this:

You Are 107% Feminist

You are better than a “total feminist”. This doesn’t mean you’re a man hater (in fact, the odds are about 50-50 you are a man) – indeed, you realize that the antiquated notion of ginned-up intergender strife is an anachronism that both genders need to get past for eveyone’s good.    You believe that not only should men and women be treated equally, but that the identity-feminist notion of eternal female victimhood is a corrosive, crippling pathology that needs to be stricken from world feminism. It’s a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.