Here’s how the media world has turned around in the past twenty years; when I worked for Hubbard Broadcasting, from 1985 to 1987, it was a big honkin’ player in the local media scene, with a market value of around $400 million dollars.

Today, Hubbard is valued around a billion dollars – and is a “ma and pa shop” in the great media scheme of things.

Their flagship TV station, Channel 5, has taken its ratings lumps – but it’d seem they’ve done something right.  They were pretty universally acclaimed as having the best coverage of the bridge collapse last week.

Sarah Janecek, writing last  week, sums up the plaudits:

KSTP TV started reporting on the bridge in its Wednesday six p.m. newscast with the first live chopper shot at 6:22. The station stayed on the air covering the story live for the next 25 hours straight. I cannot begin to calculate what that cost. Never mind the costs of the employee overtime, or the expense of keeping helicopters live in the air for 13 hours straight, there were no commercials. None. The first commercial break was a short one during last night’s ten p.m. newscast.

Old man Hubbard, himself, was in the news room Wednesday night, observing his hard working news team. At no time was cost an issue in terms of coverage. He just let his team run, and run, they did.

Janecek also be-kudoes the local citizen journalist community.  Check it out.

The Freedom Dogs bum-rushed Keith Ellison’s “town hall meeting” last night, proving that they are a one-blog right-wing conspiracy.

Read the reports from Mike Mannske and Diamond Dog.

Mannske:

 I had no trouble finding the meeting place; you could make out the confluence of “Impeach Bush” signs on Google Earth.

DD:

The sheer hatred and venom coming from these folk was unbelievable. One leftist after another stood on a soapbox trying to “out radical” the previous speaker. I would say that Rick Hanson of Military Families Speak Out was perhaps the most hateful of all. According to Mr. Hanson, our “kids” in Iraq understand that their lives have been reduced to less than nothing as they are killed in Mr. Bush’s war as intentional victims.

These are the people we’ll be meeting out on the streets of Saint Paul next year.

Great job, Dogs.

…because unlike certain over-the-hill Metro columnists, I’m not going to pretend to be an engineer, but…

Engineers think they might have possibly found egg on Nick Coleman, Elwyn Tinklenburg, Alice Hausman, Amy Klobuchar and Wreck Chupke’s faces a possible clue as to what might have brought down the 35W River Bridge:

Opening a new window into last week’s fatal bridge collapse, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that one of its areas of inquiry involves the design of steel connecting plates known as gusset plates; the material makeup of those plates; and the loads and stresses they bore.

Hours later, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters said the NTSB indicated that the stress on the bridge’s gusset plates may have been a factor in the bridge collapse and that one possible stress may have been the weight of construction equipment and materials on the bridge.

A mistake on the drawing board?

Wow – that would have nothing to do with the gas tax, would it?

Again – it’s way too soon to tell; this is nowhere close to a conclusion.

But if it is, Nick Coleman is going to have some ‘splainin’ to do.

The groundswell is growing; Minnesotans don’t want the DFL to hijack last week’s tragedy to ram through a shopping list of their pork projects.

57% of Minnesotans aren’t buying it.  I’ve heard some lefties respond to this poll “of course people oppose a new tax; you need to ask them what the tax is for!”   Perhaps – but then, I suspect nobody will ask the citizens of this state what they really want out of a “special session”, either;

Leo “Psychmeister” Pusatieri issues the call (I add the emphases):

There appears to be a substantial number of Republican lawmakers who are seeing the call for raising the state gas tax to be what it is– an opportunistic ploy by DFL lawmakers to ramrod a political agenda by exploiting a tragedy that had absolutely nothing to do with either the presence of or absence of a tax increase. While they certainly see the need to prioritize and ensure the safety of bridges and other infrastructure, they are likewise acknowledging that the answer lies not in an additional burden on Minnesota taxpayers, but rather on a good, old-fashioned prioritization of allocation of resources.

The bottom line is that neither a special session nor a tax increase is required to prevent what happened on the I-35 W bridge from happening elsewhere.

A phone call or email (Pawlenty@state.mn.us) to Governor Pawlenty’s office will go a long way toward ensuring that the solution to the bridge and infrastructure issue is a prudent, effective measure, rather than a knee-jerk tax-and-spend reaction.

There’s your links.  Get on it.

Leo also points us to essential posts on the subject from:

• Strom: “I see a backlash coming, a la Wellstone Memorial”
• Gross:  “this poll clearly indicates that people want to see a solution-oriented legislature. They want to drive across safe bridges. This isn’t a poll that says we can afford inaction. This is a great opportunity for Gov. Pawlenty and the House GOP leadership to show Minnesotans their common sense approach to solving problems.”
• Aplikowski:  “it is almost like the people who support the currently elected crop in St. Paul (and lash out at those of us who disagree with and question their authority) are completely out of touch with the reality of Minnesotans.”
• Gary Miller: “Raising taxes would be nothing short of admitting complicity in the 35W tragedy.  How this fact is lost of the Governor, who has left the door open to a gas tax increase, defies credulity”
• Michael Brodkorb: “Of the 38% that support a gas tax increase, 47% think it should be raised less than 5 cents.”

Read ’em all.

But call or email the governor first.

Like most MOB blogs, I’ve made a bit of a sub-career of ripping on the hapless Nick Coleman. 

Last week’s two vile, politicized, uninformed, illiterate, hateful columns about the bridge collapse (1 and 2) were the nadir of a career with very few high points. 

But Roosh – from RooshFive – shows what would be possible, if Coleman’s editors merely trusted him less and forced him to take some input (or cut the crap and replaced Coleman).

It ends…:

All the more reason to find ourselves reassured and in awe, and so proud of the heroes of late – both professional and civilian, that have shown our entire country how great a place the Twin Cities of Minnesota are to live and work

…but you should read the whole thing.

I’ve not written a lot about the war in Iraq lately. 

Mainly because I haven’t had much to say that many other commentators – Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, Bill Ardolino and many others – haven’t said much, much better. 

Partly because I needed to learn a few things.  Do some reading.  Figure out what I thought about things.

The Administration – largely the Pentagon, I think – screwed up mightily between 2004 and 2006.  They lived down, I think, to the classic stereotype; they fought their previous war over again.

Things have changed, so far this year.  The “Surge” – with its focus on the kind of classic counterinsurgency warfare, and its straying away from the mania for “Force Protection” that sprang up in the wake of the bombings at the Beirut Embassy, the Khobar Towers and the Mogadishu “Black Hawk Down” skirmish, seem to have fundamentally changed things on the ground in Iraq, and even in the theatre that reallly matters; in Washington, and even in the Fallujah of American life, the media.  The chanting of the lefty droogs that “the war is un-winnable” and that “we’ve already lost” are starting to seem as quaint and naive as the Administration’s predictions that the occupation would be a cakewalk seemed two years ago.

Suffice to say that while the Administration was wrong and made mistakes, the Democrats are farther-off-base, and want us to make vastly bigger ones.

I was going to post those pieces this week – but the bridge collapse and its aftermath are of more immediate impact, here and now; that, and events in the US and in Iraq keep overtaking what I write. 

But I’ll be posting the articles next week, with an aim toward having a rational discussion about the issue.

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Katie at Yucky Salad had a revelation at her 20th…

…you’re kidding, right?  Katie?  20th?  No way. 

Anyway, Katie at Yucky Salad had a revelation at her “20th” high school reunion:

Last Saturday was my 20th high school reunion.

20th? Never! It can’t possibly have been twenty years; you don’t look a day over, um, over …well you look just perfectly acceptable for a woman your age. You really do, I’m not just saying that.

Flatterer.

Twas was a blast. A blast, I tell you! The last one was really fun, too, but the fact that we’re all older and wiser now also means we’re all just more willing to cut loose and have fun. I got there late and the open bar (open bar: veddy veddy dangerous) was juuuuust about to close, but thanks to the deep generosity of my fellow classmates and their seemingly endless supply of drink tickets, I still managed to guzzle my body weight in chardonnay. Is there anything more cliche than an almost 40-year old woman from the ‘burbs tanked on white wine? I think not, but I care not, either. And that, my friends, is what separates us from the apes.

After a week of Nick Coleman acting like a junior engineer, I’d wondered if anything did anymore.

Happy Birthday, Bun!

Andrew Sullivan is my blogfather; it was reading his original blog back in early February of 2002 that prompted me to start Shot In The Dark. 

I stopped reading Sully about the time that Gay Marriage became the Most Important Issue Ever to him. 

But a decidedly non-conservative friend of mine sent me this piece, in which Sullivan asks conservatives which of (what he deems, largely correctly I think, to be) the ten overarching first principles of conservatism to which they adhere.

He follows the piece with a poll asking for people to check off which of the principles they adhere to.  Of course, that’s way too simplistic – the deeper answers are much more interesting, I think.

So let’s try it both ways.  I took the poll.  And I’m going to try to go for the real answers, too:

SULLIVAN:  The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. … A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.

• MB: I don’t know how a conservative can claim to be a conservative without believing this in some sense.  This presupposes that a society “governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor” would be a small-l liberal democracy, of course; I can’t quite pin the concepts of “enduring moral order” with benevolent dictatorship, for example, together.

SULLIVAN:  The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. … Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.

• MB: Personally?  No.  I’m not.  In terms of a conservative society? I think there’s something to this.  But if you know me, you know that beyond my religious beliefs and my conviction that the Bears are the greatest football team every to walk the planet, that’s totally not me.

SULLIVAN:  Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. … The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

• MB: I agree, to a point.  But if one follows that to its logical conclusion, the next Thomas Jefferson or James Madison – and it seems reasonable that the human race hasn’t spent all of its eternal ration of genius – is pretty well hosed, right?

SULLIVAN:  Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. … Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. …

• MB: This is absolutely true, to the point of stereotype.  The true conservative is ever mindful that unintended consequences bedevil all “top-down” attempts to perfect this world.

SULLIVAN:  The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

• MB: This, again, is absolutely true. Humans must be equal in the eyes of the law (not just courts, but in legislation – but that’s one of the courts’ legitimate jobs); all attempts to make individuals equal to each other in terms of merit and potential by legal or social fiat is madness.

SULLIVAN:  Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. … All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. … The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.

• MB: I’m not sure how anyone can read any history and disagree with this.

SULLIVAN:  Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.

• MB: Someone tell Cy Thao.  This is an absolute.  Property makes liberty tenable.

SULLIVAN:  Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. … In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. … If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction—why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.

• MB: To a liberal, “it takes a village to raise a child” – a noxiously-authoritarian ideal.  To a conservative, society is “a free association of equals” – the very basis of a liberal (small-l) democracy. 

SULLIVAN:  The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. … It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. … A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

• MB: This one got me thinking; “Tension” is a good word.  Authoritarian absolutism is anathema to most of us; libertarian absolutism is naive at best.  I pull hard to the libertarian side (you can take guy out of the Party, but you can’t take…), but the need for prudent, reasonable authority creates a conflict.  And that conflict is an inherently good thing, and it is best that it remain constant; if we “settle” the question, one way or the other, it’ll be a bad thing.  The resolution should not be the goal; the argument should be eternal.

SULLIVAN:  Permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. … He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise.

• MB: It’s one of the great themes of the past 100 years.  And again, the conflict between the two should be the goal.  I think to most real conservatives it is; “conservatives” who don’t recognize change render their beliefs irrelevant, eventually – but permanence, especially in things like moral order, is what makes progress humanly tenable.

So I think I’ve got eight complete agreements, a “mostly” and a “continuity for ye, but not for me”. 

So leave a comment, already.

Number 1:  When the engineers finally release their report about what actually caused the 35W Bridge Collapse, a lot of regional lefties – Elwyn Tinklenberg, Rep. Alice Hausman, Nick Coleman and others among them – are going to owe the Governor, Lt. Gov/Transportation Commissioner Molnau, the Taxpayers’ League and the “hold the line on taxes” crowd – a lot of apologies for a lot of defamation.

Number 2: None of them will actually give those apologies.

That is all.

We’ll check back on this when the report comes back…

…of this past few weeks – in the news and in my own life – I managed to neglect one of the biggest stories of the year in Minnesota; the Red Bulls are home.   The First Brigade of the 34th Infantry Division – capping off a busy decade for the 34th, a National Guard division – got back from Iraq recently amid a well-deserved flurry of coverage. 

Kelly at Patriette chronicled the welcome-home of her own soldier – her husband – as well as some of the jitters after being apart over a year.

 Anyway – Welcome back, all.  And good job. 

King smacks a bad puppy:

My contention thus far is that dogs use explanations to give their readers the impression that they know that which they cannot yet really know. Attempting to connect dots of a rare event at this stage is highly premature.

The puppy – the not-exceptionally-astute author of the City Pages’ “Best Leftyblog of 2006” (see: “Damnation by Faint Praise”) “Cucking Stool” – took a thwack at King’s economic analysis of the Bridge collapse. 

Read the whole thing.  Ask yourself “have I checked my tire pressure since I got to work?”  Then send the whole thing to Nick Coleman.

Phred Phelps knows what caused the 35W Bridge to collapse…:

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to stage protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.

Oh, Phelps is coming to Minnesota.

In a press release issued the day after the bridge collapse, the church called for protests at the funerals and outlined its feelings about the relationship between God’s plan and the sins of Minneapolis and Minnesota, which it calls the “land of the Sodomite damned.”

If any Patriot Riders are involved in this and are organizing anything, please drop me a line. 

UPDATE:  D’oh!  The Patriot Riders won’t be showing up; they exist to honor veterans.

Fair enough.

Anyone else?

Last week, I joined a ton of MOB blogs in bringing you Sisyphus’ eyewitness account of the bridge collapse.

Yesterday, I heard from a friend of mine in New York (not Angryclown, for those of you who keep track of these things) who had an old fraternity brother on the same boat, who managed to liveblog the whole thing (scroll down to August 1)…

…and who would seem to be a co-worker of Sisyphus’.  And, as it happens, someone I’ve met.

Mikey gets the “immediacy” award, while Sisyphus has the narrative. 

Nihilist:

…if Don Shelby is all seeing, all knowing and all powerful and all good (as he insinuates), why does he allow bad things like this to occur?

I cried out “why”?  Don answered “Why Not?”

Now it’s two national polls that show support for the Iraq war not just increasing, but for the first time in a while showing that more Americans think our presence does good than harm. 

My big notice of a sea change?  Last week on the Chris Matthews exercise in self-adoration and puffery program, a panel of mainstream media types – including noted foreign policy expert hot, drop-dead cute redhead reporter babe Kelly O’Donnell – agreed with the premise that it’d be a huge mistake to cut and run (which made Matthews explode a pyre of preserved meat apoplectic).

I’ll be writing a lot more about this next week.

It was Friday, August 7, 1987.  The big day: I’d been working at my freelance writing job for two weeks, and was getting paid in another week. 

And I’d gotten my final unemployment check!

And the party I’d started planning when I got the job was finally happening. 

I’d invited most of my friends in the Twin Cities; my roommates had added quite a few of their own – because, let’s face it, what’s  a party without people?

Then as now, I loved going to parties; but I’d never thrown one before.  Indeed, other than MOB parties, I’ve never thrown another (not to say I won’t – but that’s a subject for another thread).  So I went through some internal calculus, and tried to figure out what made for a great late-summer party.  I came up with:

1. Alcohol
2. A grill

It was a scorcher – probably in the mid-nineties, humid as hell.  I ran to Big Top Liquors – then as now, the booze lynchpin of the neighborhood – and figured, what the heck, I’d grab two 30-packs of Strohs.  Oh, make it three. 

Then, to Rainbow, for a couple of pounds of beef, cheese, charcoal, brats, onions, buns…

…and then, home.

People started showing up around sixish.  First came Liz’ boyfriend, and some of my late-KSTP friends.  Then my pal Rich.  Then some of Liz’ co-workers from a group home in Minnepolis.  Then the guys from my band.  Then more of Liz’ co-workers.  Then still more of them. 

The party started out so well. 

For the first four or five hours, it was wonderful; good company, good conversation given a great shove down a beer-soaked slip-n-slide, good food (I was, and remain, a great grillmeister) – just a memorably good time. 

By about tennish, people were gathered on both porches, cooling off, enjoying things.  People had nice buzzes going on; roommates’ co-workers, and I think one of my band-mates, started slipping away to the upstairs bedrooms in various combinations.  Everyone was enjoying themselves.  Even me – although I had long lost track of how many Strohs I’d sucked down in the August heat.  Still – it was a great party.

Twenty years later, I’m still not sure exactly where it went wrong. 

I think it was around ten that a couple of Liz’ co-workers’ friends showed up.  One of them, a fellow who resembled a genetic melding of Jeffrey Dahmer and Zeljko Ivanek, walked in, grabbed a beer, and came out to the porch, scowling.  Then heckling people – my friends, my band-mades, and eventually me.  And then getting really abusive; “You really shuck.  Thish izh a sh**y party.  You’re shtupid”.

I took one of Liz’ co-workers – the one who’d brought the guy – aside.  “Who izh thish moron?” I asked.  He apparently was an off-duty corrections officer from the Stillwater Penitentiary.  “Could you tell him to mellow out a little?”

Well, he tried.  It didn’t stick.

I don’t honestly remember, twenty years later, what came first – me standing in his face and saying – not yelling, I am fairly sure – “You’re standing on my porch, at my party, drinking my beer, and insulting my friends?  What am I missing here?”, him saying “I think you’re a faggot”, or me promising to strangle him with his own intestines.  His pal intervened about the time I was picking up a piece of scrap wood off the porch.  They left.

Which isn’t to say the party ended.  Just that it got kinda weird.  Almost like the evening’s gestalt got turned 90 degrees.  Which, by the way, also felt like the temperature around midnight.  Conversations that had been friendly turned…well, not “confrontational”.  Everyone was still having fun.  But the near-brawl had lent the evening an edge that it hadn’t had, and didn’t need.  And there were some other little scuffles; one of Liz’s co-workers girlfriends hooked up with a differnet co-worker; animosity ensued.  And one of my other roommate Brenda’s boyfriends ran into another of them.  (It could have been worse; she was stringing three along at the time).  An undercurrent of ugly started creeping into the evening. 

And of course, everyone kept right on drinking. Some of the co-workers had brought plenty more beer and booze.  Now, I’ve never really been a heavy drinker – except for a stretch after my college graduation, I have rarely had more than 2-3 drinks in a sitting in my life.  I’m sure I was well past a dozen beers by midnight.   Well past. 

Damn.  It felt good to be working again!

I think it was like 4:30AM when Liz’ boyfriend decided to make one last hamburger. He grabbed a chunk of the beef…

…that had been sitting on the counter since 6PM, in the sweltering evening, in the even-more-sweltering kitchen, molded a patty, and tossed it on the grill. 

I think it was about 5:30AM when he chundered phosphorescent green spew all over the kitchen.  And dining room.  And stairway to the bathroom.  And he wasn’t done.  Oh, nosireee. 

It was about then that I passed out. 

———-

Casey, my other guitar player, woke me up at about 8AM.  His car, a mid-seventies Toyota, had no starter, and needed a push-start to get him and Bill, my drummer, home.  We staggered outside – it was already scorching hot – and gave the car a shove down Fry Street (the irony wasn’t lost on me even then), a block or so, until it caught. 

I staggered back to the house, sweating toxic goo, feeling queasier by the step. 

I got in the back door.  My foot skidded on some leftover phosphorescent green chunder.  I felt my stomach jumping up, like one of those videos of a mid-fifties ejector seat firing off; I ran upstairs to the bathroom, and…

…well, you know.

My head felt like it’d been bored out with a grain auger.  Every muscle in my simultaneously ached and rioted to eject more stuff from me, from whatever end was available.  I lived in a universe of sour and ugly.

Liz staggered into the bathroom.  “Telephone!”, she yelled, before clomping back to bed. 

I crawled to the phone.  “Hullo?” I groaned, sounding very, very sick even to myself.

“Hi, Mitch!  It’s your mom!  Have a rough night?”

I stayed on the couch, sweating and praying for either rain or death, all day.  And then most of Sunday cleaning. 

It was June 27th when we noticed that Jeff Fecke of the Minnesota Monitor was playing fast and loose with the rules of journalism (to say nothing of blogging).

It was July 2nd when we noted that there was at the very least a strong appearance of plagiarism on the part of this “journalist” whose publication is funded by liberals with deep pockets and which has gone as far as hiring former Strib reporter Eric Black to burnish its reportation as a “journalistic” endeavor. 

We noted, correctly, that despite their own self-published “Code of Ethics” that bids them to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly”, there’s been nary a peep from the “New Journalists” at the Minnesota Monitor explaining, much less admitting to, these problems.

Their “code” seems to be entirely based on denying responsibility for their “mistakes”.

So when will the “Monitor” follow its own code of ethics?  Or are they above all that?

I’m not asking because I expect an answer, of course.  They won’t.  I just want reinforce the salient point in the minds of the Twin Cities’ online news consumer; the credibility, ethics and talent in the regional online alternative news market is overwhelmingly congregated on the right.

(more…)

I pilloried – justifiably – Obie’s saber-rattling over Pakistan – but Taranto notes that at least there’s some good news in Obama’s flub:

As a candidate recently pilloried by fellow Democrats as a foreign policy naïf, Mr. Obama’s remarks may be no more than an effort to don a Mike Dukakis helmet. And given the Senator’s consistent opposition to the war in Iraq, it may seem peculiar that he should now propose invading a nuclear-armed Muslim country–all the more so since Mr. Obama let slip Thursday in an interview that as President he would rule out the use of nuclear weapons “in any circumstance.”

But in a primary contest where Democrats seem to vie with one another for the title of who will pull out of Iraq the fastest, Mr. Obama’s speech is at least a recognition that he’d be willing to use military force somewhere. It’s also a reminder to antiwar Democratic voters that the terror threat won’t vanish when the Bush Administration does, and that U.S. soldiers will have to be put in harm’s way again.

Mr. Obama:  Pakistani WMDs most definitely do exist.  And what a wonderful way to radicalize not only Musharraf’s society, but to re-radicalize Pakistan’s intelligence service, which was until recently overrun with Wahhabi sympathizers and actively aided (and, no doubt, in many quarters still aids) Al-Quaeda.

Still…:

Too bad, then, that Mr. Obama instantly squandered an opportunity for seriousness by insisting that Iraq is “the wrong battlefield” in the war on terror. In case he hasn’t noticed, Iraq today is the main battlefield where U.S. forces are confronting, and killing, al Qaeda on a daily basis. And GIs don’t have to invade another country to do it.

The best news about Obie’s jape, of course, is it shows that being “anti-war” is losing at least some of its cachet on the left – at least, in responsible quarters on the left: 

Still, Mr. Obama’s willingness to draw appropriate conclusions from realities in Pakistan stands in refreshing contrast to his Democratic opponents. Tragic as a premature withdrawal from Iraq would be, it would be compounded if Democrats draw the lesson never again to use or threaten force abroad. By distancing himself from his party’s pacifist wing, Mr. Obama is growing up as a candidate.

Worth a read.

And then read Victor Davis Hanson’s detailed takedown of our newly hawkish überliberal.

I’ve been collecting emails and other material about the chronic mess that is the Minnesota Department of Transportation.  There’ll be a much bigger post on this issue later on this week.

In the meantime, Sarah Janecek starts digging into the rathole:

The bridge collapse–in what’s sure to be an excruciatingly painful process–will put the spotlight on what anyone who has worked in Minnesota transportation policy has known for decades: the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is a mess. No one administration or political party is to blame. The Rudy Perpich (DFL) Administration (1982-1990), the Arne Carlson (R) Administration (1990-1998), the Jesse Ventura (I) Administration (1998-2002) and the Tim Pawlenty (R) Administration (2002-to present) have all made the same call. There are other, sexier things to fund rather than existing infrastructure and that’s what’s happened.

That, as they say, is just the beginning. 

Read the whole thing.

In other Bridge-related news, Wog has some theories about the collapse.  Some make you go “hmm”, some make you go “hmph”, and all of them are better than anything Nick Coleman’s come up with…

Dunwoody – a Minneapolis private technical school – offers a huge reward to one of last week’s heroes:

If school bus evacuator Jeremy Hernandez wants to resume learning auto mechanics at Dunwoody College of Technology, he can do so without charge.

The Minneapolis school made that offer to Hernandez’s family Saturday

School spokesman Dave Jarzyna said the school was bombarded with phone calls from the public, after word got out that Hernandez couldn’t afford to continue attending.

“Universally they said we need to do something for this guy,” Jarzyna said.

“We’re going to make sure that if he wants to come to Dunwoody, he’ll have the resources to do that,” Jarzyna said. Hernanedez, 20, could not be reached immediately for comment.

“The ball’s in his court and we’re hoping to hear from him,” Jarzyna said.

Of course, this sort of thing is great PR for Dunwoody; it warms up a spot in the press’ and public’s hearts for the place.

Just like now. 

Well played, to all concerned…

UPDATE:  Ed notes that you can contribute to Dunwoody’s scholarship program here.  It’d be a great way to say “thanks” for saying thanks.

Michael Brodkorb said it best in his headline:  PAWLENTY HATER NICK COLEMAN HITS NEW LOW.

First came his first, deeply stupid column on Friday, which blamed the “No New Taxes” pledge for the disaster as rescuers were still frantically combing the wreckage for survivors, roughly 12 18 months before the NTSB actually expects to know what actually happened.

Then, his – I’ll be charitable – scabrous and incoherent appearance on MSNBC.

And now, Saturday’s column, an apologia for the politicizing of this tragedy, and an attempt to seize “moral authority” on behalf of the likes of Coleman – fact-free politically-motivated ranters – from people who actually stayed awake in math class, went to engineering instead of J school, and actually have to deal in facts and science for a living.

The column distills everything that make Nick Coleman America’s worst working columnist into a melange of gutless lying that is almost too depressing to fisk; indeed, I’ve almost given up critiqueing Coleman, since under normal circumstances he’s become an irrelevant self-parody.

But people are dead, and this – I’m done being charitable – gutless illiterate habitual-liar political hack is trying to use this catastrophe to bully the ill-informed into accepting his deeply, abidingly stupid politics.

According to the pundits, the president’s response to the disaster at our end of the Mississippi is an effort to be seen as more compassionate than he appeared in 2005, when he just looked out the window of Air Force One after the levees broke in New Orleans.

Minnesotans will welcome the president. We need presidents to be comforters, and leaders, at times such as this…But let’s not pretend his visit isn’t all about politics, too.

Everything about this disaster — except the heroic efforts to rescue and recover the victims — has been steeped in politics. And the most calculated political effort has been the posturing and spinning by public officials trying to act commanding while making sure they don’t get pinned with responsibility for the collapse.

Alternate – and as it happens, factual – explanation:  They’re working their asses off to get ahead of the lies that people like Nick Coleman are telling about the situation; lies that are contradicted in Coleman’s own paper; lies that can only be aimed at swaying the gullible and ill-informed (i.e., Nick Coleman’s entire audience) into taking a desired action at the polls.

If you think everyone should play nice about it, you are living in Pollyanna Land. We are in a bare-knuckled political brawl in this country, and the government is in the hands of government haters who want to starve it or, in the alleged belief of presidential ally Grover Norquist, want to “drown it.”

You can’t drown government. It is people who drown.

Again, Coleman lies.  Not only does nobody this side of Ron Paul seriously discuss dismantling government, but one of the things tha so irritated wahabbi-DFLers like Coleman before this tragedy was their “myopic” focus on…roads and bridges, as opposed to boondoggles like the Ventura Trolley.

Friday, the Taxpayers League — the heart of the No New Taxes beast — called on us not to point fingers. They probably disconnected their phone and took down their sign, too.

Actually, sources tell me they were inundated with hateful calls, likely as not from people inflamed by ignorant  moral vermin like Nick Coleman.  Unlike Nick Coleman, the Taxpayers League took the phone calls, and responded.  Try calling Nick Coleman sometimes; he may sound like a stroke victim (no offense to stroke victims or, for that matter, vermin), but he can sure dish out the verbal abuse.  I have the voicemail tapes to prove it.

No New Taxes is not a slogan that works anymore.

We wouldn’t know, would we?  Remember – this bridge was first drawing red flags under the Moe Ventura Administration, when the DFL was spending the surplus like a crack whore with a stolen Gold Card.

That means don’t blame the people in charge for letting 140,000 vehicles a day — 1.7 every second –cross a bridge that wasn’t fit for traffic.

And again, Coleman is not just a gutless, cynical liar, but an illiterate, ignorant one too.  He repeats the lie that the “50” rating implied a “50-50” chance that the bridge was going to collapse, or that it wasn’t fit to be driven on.  His own paper iterated that, in fact, it was a rating; a rating that caused a response (more inspections, more scrutiny, and a focus on the year 2020, when the bridge was scheduled for major reconstruction or repair).  These were decisions made by engineers, people who deal in fact, calculation and empirical conclusions.  The opposite of Nick Coleman.

No one knew it might fall? Give us a break. What do you need? They were talking about bolting plates on it to keep it up. Maybe duct tape was next.

Nick, you lying, illiterate numbnuts:  You state this (“bolting plates”) like it’s some kind of anomaly.  That’s how you maintain bridges – indeed, any big steel-girder construction – when you have neither the option nor the need to take the whole shebang out of service.

And, in the opinion of engineers who do this for a living and for whom it is a matter of empirical science rather than ill-informed opinion, they didn’t need to take it out of service.

If they were wrong, it was not a matter of insufficient money.

The rest of Coleman’s paper doesn’t seem to have a problem getting that fact out there.

Why does Coleman?

Bottom line: It fell.

At least he got one fact right.

Is it political to be angry about that? So be it. Everything is politics. Politics is not a dirty word by itself. Politics builds bridges and schools and hospitals. And politics can make them fall down.

Catch that?

It sums up the problem with people like Nick Coleman.  “Politics” doesn’t “build” anything.  It decides how things like taxes are gathered, and how government budgets are spent.  Since we live in a “democracy”, that process is going to be bumptious and imperfect.  Perhaps Coleman would prefer a dictatorship?

But politics doesn’t build anything; engineers, ironworkers, carpenters and masons do.

And barring the odd war here and there, it doesn’t “destroy” anything either:  wear and tear does.  Time does.  “Acts of God” do.  Traffic does.  Design flaws and construction errors and undetected flaws in material do.   More often, confluences of all of the above do; the Titanic wasn’t sunk by an iceberg or a design shortcoming (un-capped watertight compartments) or faulty assumptions (that only three compartments would vent to the sea) or misplaced arrogance (doing flank speed at night in an ice field); it was the combination of all of them that doomed the ship.

Likewise, it’s every bit as likely that some combination of material flaws or deterioration combined with decades of heavy use and occasional abuse, construction practices, heat, weight of traffic, and undetected material faults caused this catastrophe as it was the nonexistant “lack of money”.

When Pawlenty vetoed the transportation bill in May, “Commissioner” Molnau was beside him, smiling. Dear, Minnesota. A transportation commissioner who grins while her department is being knifed is not a transportation commissioner.

Could we please follow this logic into the newsroom?  A “journalist” who makes s**t up as he goes along isn’t a “journalist”.

Now, a bridge has fallen and people are dead. The buck has to stop somewhere. Molnau was in China when it happened. She probably kissed the Minnesota turf when she got back. Because a Chinese transportation commissioner whose bridge collapsed might lose her head.

And a columnist who gang-rapes fact to chase a further his politics should certainly not be working in a town that values “fact”.

Jay Reding also guts Coleman like a fish.

I remember late in the afternoon on 9/11, talking with my pal and neighbor Flash at the end of America’s longest day in two generations.  He glumly predicted 20,000 dead.  I was more “optimistic”; given it was New York, I figured thousands would be late to the office, stuck in the subway, whatever.  I looked at the bright side, and figured 15,000 dead. 

Both of us, along with millions of other Americans, were astounded, and thankful to be very wrong.

I had the same reaction last week.

———-

I’m always gratefully astounded by two things;  humans’ ability to survive, and the average person’s ability to rise to the occasion, no matter what the occasion is, and how confounding the “experts” continuously find that to be.

Not everyone accepts human resiliance and intelligence as a given, of course.  Reading official disaster-planning documents, it’s fairly clear that officialdom thinks the average citizen is a helpless sheeple, unable to deal with, much less react to, crisis without government “experts” on hand to do their thinking for them.  While that’s mostly a high level phenomenon, it extends down to all-too-many “first responders” as well, although I like to think they’re in the minority. 

The fact is that, in every major disaster in which people were cut off from “authorities” and “experts”, the average American is perfectly capable of reacting appropriately to the situation.  Examples range far and wide; from the appropriate reactions of thousands of individual carry permit holders who’ve thwarted crime without inflicting carnage (confounding many prominent lefties, confirming most conservatives’ beliefs) to the people in the Twin Towers who, on 9/11, managed to convince themselves to ignore the announcements telling them to stay in their offices and await rescule, to organize themselves, and to get themselves to safety in an orderly evacuation that bordered on the miraculous, to the “kids” on that schoolbus, perched on the edge of the abyss last Wednesday, who stepped up and got their charges to safety without the aid of anyone with a badge.

And while after every catastrophe, the “experts” quickly give up hope of finding survivors in, say, buried rubble within three days of the disaster, nearly every such declaration, it seems, is followed by a story of someone being pulled, alive, from the rubble days later, after surviving on runoff and hope for an impossible time.

As I watched and heard the initial news coverage of the 35W Bridge collapse last week – with stories of dozens of cars in the water, memories of sitting in eight lanes of stopped traffic on the deck in mind, and the jagged concrete and flames front and center – I and most everyone I knew silently braced for dozens and dozens of dead. 

Humans’ sometimes-miraculous resiliency – aided by some fortuitous physics – stepped in.  Thank God:

Although the final death toll is still unknown, doctors and safety experts say that a combination of factors, from physics to shock absorbers, probably helped cushion the blow for those plunging from the bridge in their vehicles.

In general, they say, the cars and the bridge itself helped absorb some of the impact that would have killed someone free-falling from that height.

“I would say over two-thirds of the people walked away,” said Dr. Marc Conterato, an emergency room physician at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, who was at the site. “Believe me, the human body can absorb a lot of trauma.”

Watching the immense cloud of spray and spume thrown up by the falling structure, falling 20-30 feet below the plummeting roadbed, gives you some clue; the web of girders sluicing into the water and then plowing into the riverbed surely absorbed a lot of the impact; the flat roadbed beneath many of the cars must have spread out the energy of the impact over a large enough area to make things more survivable than they appeared at first glance – not just to us gathered around our TVs, but to the experts as well:

“I figured we’d probably have a couple of hundred injured, and 25 or 50 fatalities,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency doctor and disaster coordinator at Hennepin County Medical Center.

I don’t think anyone minds being wrong about that.

Writing about the President’s visit on Saturday to the site of the 35W River Bridge collapse, Jeff Fecke of the Minnesota Monitor wrote:

Bush will be in town Saturday to survey the damage caused by the deadly collapse of the bridge, and to attend the Republican Party’s summer meeting, which is being held in Minneapolis.

Michael Brodkorb left two comments:

Have you confirmed with the White House that Bush is speaking at the Summer RNC meeting?  Have you confirmed this with the RNC? I haven’t seen this reported anywhere. 

[and…]

According to my source, the meeting has adjourned. President Bush did not attend the meeting, nor was he ever scheduled to attend the meeting.

The President landed in the Twin Cities (I watched it on TV) around 9:30, and got to downtown Minnepolis within the following hour; the RNC had reportedly adjourned about the time the President landed.

So – Jeff Fecke?  Where did you get this little tidbit?

To be fair – we have no indication that the statement was plagiarized, per se.

But what is the source of this apparently utterly-fallacious statement?

…that failed Air America host-ette Randee Rhodez took the same pro-forma shot at Governor Pawlenty that every single other liberal pundit, activist and media figure (and instant civil engineer) has taken this past few days…:

What you’re watching, should have the chyron underneath, instead of it saying Governor Tim Pawlenty, or news conference on bridge collapse, or recovery or whatever, you know what it should say underneath there? ‘Your tax cuts at work!’ That’s what it should say.

…as I am to hear that she’s still on the air at all.

Who knew?