…on my right (where else) side bar, the Minnesota Association of Scholars is sponsoring a blitz of showings of Indoctrinate – U at the Oak Street Cinema, starting this evening:

The Minnesota Association of Scholars is delighted to bring to the Twin Cities Evan Coyne Maloney’s stunning new documentary about politics in America’s college classrooms: Indoctrinate-U.

“A terrific must-see,” National Review
“Alarming and funny,” The New York Post
“A gripping hour and a half,” Instapundit.com

Whether your politics leans Left, Right, or Center, you should be worried about any inclination on the part of colleges and universities to deprive students, especially undergrads, of the even-handed presentation of all viewpoints regarding critical social, political, and economic issues. For it’s vigorous debate about the full range of ideas that will produce what’s best for society.

Come join us for
• The Opening-Night Gala
• Any of Fifteen Public Screenings
• Lecture/Discussions on Education versus Indoctrination

I’m hoping I can swing it – it’s supposed to be great.

Two recent, heavy-handed anti-war films turned into IEDs at the box office:

Both “In the Valley of Elah” and, more recently, “Rendition” drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn’t bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s wider war on terror.

“Rendition,” which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed $4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A re-release of “The Nightmare Before Christmas” beat it, and it’s 14 years old.

Both of these movies received intense media coverage and slaving critical praise – as, predictably, will pretty much any movie that attacks the idea of the war.

Is America looking for a feel-good hit, or is the movie-going public just not buying it?

On the one hand, Channing Crowder isn’t the crown jewel in America’s geography education crown:

Maybe he was joking, but gregarious Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder confessed today he didn’t know until Tuesday that people spoke English in London.

Crowder, a former Florida Gator and Atlanta native, apparently isn’t sure where the plane is headed when it takes off this afternoon for Sunday’s game against the New York Giants in Wembley Stadium.

“I couldn’t find London on a map if they didn’t have the names of the countries,” Crowder said. “I swear to God. I don’t know what nothing is. I know Italy looks like a boot. I learned that.

Downside:  Not good.  It’s a good thing he has a career in sports.

Upside:  If he gets injured and has to retire, he might have a career as a Democratic Party staffer.

So the Twinks made it to Game Seven.

I can’t say that I expected much.

I went to a party that night, at an upstairs duplex near Franklin and Pleasant, in South Minneapolis.  There were maybe a dozen of us – my pal Rich, my guitar player Casey, another guitar player and expat from Jamestown, Mike, and a slew of people I didn’t even know then, much less now.

And I’ll never forget the action – in the [fill in inning], when [fill in player] caught that [what kind of hit] at the [foul line/warning track], or when pitcher [pitcher’s name] caught [batter] in a [type of pitch], or the grand finale, when [play by play announcer] almost [vocal condition] as [Twin] got a [type of play] against [a Cardinal] as [one of the managers].

OK.  I’ve never cared much for sports trivia.  The main thing I remember is, as the game ground toward the end, and the Twins remained in the chase, feeling light-headed – almost high, with the communal excitement of the moment. 

I remember the final call – the immortalized pileup at home plate…

 …and running out onto the street and practically jogging all the way downtown, up Nicollet, seeing downtown glowing in the distance, feeling the crowd converging downtown as much as hearing it.

It was a gorgeous night; a little cool, but perfect.

I got downtown toward 11 or so; I lost the other people somewhere around Ichiban, and wandered around on my own; above 11th Street, the crowd was Calcutta-like. 

What did I do for the next six hours?

• Had a beer at the Little Wagon.  Or three or four.  I can’t remember.
• Watched as about 100 people piled onto a moving fire truck that was trying to get through the crowd on Hennepin.  Unfortunately, it was trying to get to an actual fire, as the driver kept yelling over the PA system.
• Took a bunch of beers that people were handing out from coolers in the street.  Passed most of them on.  Was too happy to be drunk.
• Felt, rather than heard, the noise on the street as tens or hundreds of thousands of people teemed through the streets.
• Talked about the odds of someone actually burning a police car with a couple of yobs from Brooklyn Center. 
• Made out with some girl by the entrance of the Plymouth Building.  No, really.  Musta seemed like a good idea at the time.  This, I do not believe, has ever happened again.
• Wandered down Hennepin at 5AM back toward my car, with a group of random other people, warm and snug in the cameraderie and good will that wafted through the every corner of the Cities for that night at the next couple of days.

I made it home around 5:30AM, with three conclusions:

• I’d never see another night like that as long as I lived in the Twin Cities.
• I needed to kickstart my life.
• I should have gotten the number of the girl at the Plymouth Building.

It was five years ago today that Paul Wellstone’s plane crashed, killing his wife, daughter, some campaign aides, and the flight crew.

I remember it very well, of course; I was working at a contracting job and listening to my radio in the headphones when I got the word (and posted something immediately).

Of course, the tragedy provoked both a political fistfight in getting ready for the upcoming Senate election – and an outpouring of angst, occasional paranoia, some surprising reaches across the aisle, and a bit of electoral sturm und drang, “Paulapalooza”, that may have altered history the exact opposite of the way intended (as well as helping to put this blog on the map):

If you don’t live here, it’s hard to describe. Maybe it’s like this elsewhere in the country. All I know is, it’s totally on the sleeve of this state, and showed in spades last night. It’s something that started as a vague sense of unease seven years ago, when I first started becoming active in politics in Minnesota. It grew to a more coherent notion in 2000. It whacked me over the head when the mob booed the assembled Republican senators.

Hatred of Republicans is part of the majority, *mainstream* DFL culture in Minnesota.

Not dislike. Not disagreement. Hate.

You see it in bits of day to day life in this state: women theatrically holding their noses when talking about Republican candidates at the coffee shop; people who put “No Republicans Need Apply” at the top of personal ads; a mob of 15,000 mainstream, work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy Minnesotans baying at the moon at the recognition of Republicans.

I’m not one of those Republicans who will ridicule Democrats for continuing to mourn Wellstone; indeed, many dear friends of mine, liberals mostly, had good reason to admire the guy.  I’m still lamenting the too-early demise of Keith Moon – I’m not the one to talk. 

Still, the death (and Paulapalooza) highlighted the corrosion of the part of civil life in this state that Wellstone didn’t control in the DFL.

The Night Writer notes that political correctness is hardly new:

It’s the birthday of poet E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894), who became interested in communism as a young man and traveled to Russia to see it firsthand. He was horrified to find the theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to even talk to each other in public. Everyone was miserable. Cummings went home and wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante’s Inferno.

His view of communism was not popular in the literary world at the time, and magazines suddenly began refusing to publish his work. For the next two decades, he had a hard time publishing his books, and he got terrible reviews when he did. Critics thought his exotic arrangements of words on the page were silly, and they said he wrote like an adolescent. Then, in 1952, his friend Archibald MacLeish got Cummings a temporary post at Harvard, giving a series of lectures. Instead of standing behind the lectern, Cummings sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him.

It resonates today, of course:

Today our theaters and museums (and Nobel nominating committees) are full of propaganda and things such as so-called Fairness Doctrines and Hate Crimes proposals still try to make people afraid to talk to one another. And if your views aren’t acceptable to the gatekeepers at the Ivory Towers you won’t get invited or, if you do, you get food thrown on you.

Of course, to be fair, liberal commentators speaking at conservative universities face a phalanx of the same kind of hatred.

CORRECTION:  My bad – they don’t!

I’m way, way stoked to note that not only is Marah – one of the best bands you’ve never heard – still together and touring (having escaped the “acoustic due” ghetto that used to seem so hip, and now just screams “can’t afford to haul a band around”), but they also have a new album coming out soon.

Note to Serge and David Bielanko; tour the friggin’ Midwest.

That is all.

This morning, commenter Angryclown noted in my piece on  my travels:

 Respectively, Mitch’s imagined Berg for America 2008 electoral map and the nations that would continue to have diplomatic relations with the U.S. under a Berg administration.

So I thought – I do tend to make a decent first impression on people.  So let’s say that that first impression COULD be turned into electoral gold; that if I run for president, every state I’ve ever visited would fall for my charms and give me an electoral plurality. 

I counted ’em up:

Mitch: 315

Non-Mitch: 223

I think the GOP’s choice is clear.

(Or, if we don’t count Nebraska, which I merely drove through, you can transfer five points.  But I think the ‘huskers are pretty sharp people, so let’s not go crazy here…)

It was Saturday, September 24, 1987.

The Twins, against all odds, had gone from the AL cellar in ’86, through an improbable rally to carry them to the AL Pennant.

When it comes to sports, I’m like one of those Jewish people who never goes to Synogogue, drinks, eats non-kosher food if he feels like it, dates goyim, but hangs on to the “Jewish” heritage. I enjoy certain sports (baseball) and teams (the Bears, the Cubs, the Twinks) just on principle, because I like saying it, and because it brings me occasional insight or the occasional stray shaving of pleasure.

And like anyone who’d ever been anywhere near Minnesota sports, I’d learned to rely on the insights, since the pleasure was pretty sparse. With the Bergmanian pessimism that lies behind most Scandinavian life, I figured the ’87 Twins would, eventually, flop.

So with the Twins down 3-2 going into Game Six, I figured it was basically all over – that we were set up for a classic Minnesota “close but no cigar” at the final wire. I figured I’d forstall the disappointment and take in a movie.

I drove to the Roseville – then as now, a “dollar” theatre. As I parked in the lot by the Rainbow Foods, I flipped on WCCO…

…as Carneal (or John Gordon or whomever the F) set up the call – Ken Dayley or some other pitcher from the “who the hell was he” list pitching to Herbie. It was, of course, the grand slam that became one of the big highlights of Kent Hrbek’s career. I sat in the car and listened, grinning like a hummel, totally missing my show.

As the game ended with a big, surprising Twins win, I figured they’d choke tomorrow – but it’d be fun while it lasted.

UPDATE:  Yeah, I got your emails/comments.  In response, feel free to check the post for evidence of how little I care about sports trivia.

I mean, that was fairly clear, no?

Michael Yon is pissed.

Yon’s been in Iraq covering the war as a freelance embed for almost three years now.  As a rigid independent – unbeholden to either the administration or the media’s agenda – he’s not ever been a shill for the Administration.

It was Yon’s intensely critical reporting during the worst days of the pre-surge war of attrition that reportedly got him eighty-sixed from the Sean Hannity show. The Administration will no doubt not be thrilled about Yon’s current prognosis for Afghanistan.

But today, he turns his scathing pen from bumbling generals and crusty Command Sergeants Major to…his fellow reporters.

All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car…No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news. The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our soldiers two possible roles: either “victim caught in the crossfire” or “referee between warring parties.” Neither, rightly, is tolerable to the American or British public.

Whatever your views on the war – right, wrong, iies, campaign to safeguard the nation – it’d take “Joe Isuzu”-level intellectual dishonesty to not figure out that things have changed, largely for the better, in Iraq in the past ten months.

And yet the media are still stuck in Abu Ghraib mode.  The other night, MPR’s lead story was about a squabble between the Army and the Iraqi Interior Ministry about civilian casualties in a disputed firefight, complete with unctuous sarcasm from the reporter during the Army’s side of the story.

Did I mention he’s no cheerleader?

I came to Iraq in December 2004 specifically because friends in the military had been telling me about the disconnect between the situation on the ground and the media coverage about it. This is partly why I have remained focused enough on this problem to write about it dozens of times, beginning with an early dispatch about how many news reports “from” Iraq are generated . Later I described the expensive and exasperating embed process that makes long-term on-the-ground reporting next to impossible for most small or medium media outlets, and just plain impossible for most freelancers and independents.

I’ve written about the small and petty ways the military’s Public Affairs Offices can sour even the most earnestly and positively-inclined reporters. I’ve written about how the military’s entire approach to media has failed utterly to serve both the particular mission in Iraq and the greater cause of an informed and vibrant democracy. I’ve written about reporters who got the story right, about those who got it all wrong, and also about those whose reports, good or bad, never saw the light of day.

But the villain in this report sits in a corner office on Broadway:

But it wasn’t until I spent that week back in the States that I realized how bad things have gotten. I believe we are witnessing a conspiracy of coincidences conflating to exert an incomprehensibly destructive force on the free press system that we largely take for granted. The fact that the week in question also happened to be when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were delivering their reports to Congress makes me wonder if things are actually worse than I’ve assessed, and I returned to Iraq sadly convinced that General Petraeus now has to deal from a deck clearly stacked against him in both America and Iraq.

Clearly, a majority of Americans believe the current set of outdated fallacies passed around mainstream media like watered down drinks at happy hour. Why wouldn’t they? The cloned copy they get comes from the same sources that list the specials at the local grocery store, and the hours and locations of polling places for town elections. These same news sources print obituaries and birth announcements, give play-by-play for local high school sports, and chronicle all the painful details of the latest celebrity to fall from grace.

And, finally, he’s got a plan, and needs your help.

So read the whole thing, and warm up your phone and keyboard.

The essential David Warren on Bhutto:

Out of the bloody mess in Karachi — hundreds killed and maimed in Al Qaeda’s latest effort to gain power through psychopathic violence and intimidation — comes a kind of order. The position of Benazir Bhutto — the seemingly perpetual once and future prime minister of Pakistan — has been immensely enhanced by the failure of the blasts to kill her. If she can remain alive, she now has an unprecedented and almost miraculous opportunity to pull Pakistan together, and inspire her people to fight against their worst enemy in the world — not “Hindu India,” nor “Imperialist America,” but the Islamists who are feeding on the country’s entrails.

Should this – getting on-the-fence Pakistan heavily involved in fighting the war on terror, especially the part that’s based on their territory – work out, it’d be a key point in the war on terror.

The story – Bhutto, a famous, and famously-corrupt, woman elected by a popular vote but removed by a military coup that led to the also-corrupt Musharraf, who has nonetheless been a key, if “nuanced”, ally in the war on terror, and then returning to power – is an amazing one.

The power-sharing agreement Mrs Bhutto’s agents have apparently hashed out with President Musharraf’s agents must certainly be vague, and constitutionally incomprehensible. That is because it is founded only on necessity — a principle that trumps all constitutional law. Pakistan’s surprisingly independent supreme court may throw spanners in Musharraf’s recent “re-election,” or in the deal to withdraw corruption charges against Mrs Bhutto and her husband (that were themselves presented in a corrupt way). But for all their self-regard, the country’s nit-picking lawyers and judges are now more likely to realize what is at stake if they try to stand in the way of necessity.

Mrs Bhutto, and not President Musharraf, has the mass appeal, without which, at this moment, no politician or general in Pakistan has a chance against the whirlwind.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. And, as I’ve been urging for years, make sure you read Warren every week.

Is Rochelle Olson’s reward for sliming Alan Fine to be moved over to the celebrity gossip beat?

Oh, probably not. But this story seems at first blush to be yanked from an episode of Dallas.

Actually, it’s a pretty interesting story…:

What started as a lawsuit about rich people behaving badly at the Wayzata Country Club has turned into a judicial snit fit and become the talk of Twin Cities legal bigwigs.

The case has the elements of a prime time soap: name-calling, money, extramarital sex, public betrayal and humiliation. Now comes the new twist: judicial fury.

It involves DFL financier Vance Opperman and one of the cattiest lawsuits this layperson has ever read about…

…is that neither this map…

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…nor this one…:

create your personalized map of europe or check out our Barcelona travel guide

…has appreciably changed in recent years.

Just saying.

It was October 23, 1987. A Friday night.

My big diversion from the grind of job-hunting came on Friday nights. I’d go to “Phoenix Games”, a store on Lake between Bryant and Colfax (which, astoundingly, still exists), around six-ish to do “Naval Gaming”; groups of guys (and occasional gals) would recreate historical naval battles, or do hypothetical ones, on the shop floor with little lead minatures simulating ships from the sail era, World Wars I and II, and occasionally modern-day battles.

After the evening’s activities, after the shop closed – usually around midnight – some of us would adjourn to the Embers on 26th and Hennepin for a late-night snack.

———-

A quick aside that might seem utterly irrelevant, but whose relevance will become clear later.

Back in high school, I acted in a lot of school plays. I enjoyed trying to be someone else; it was more interesting than being me.

But I digress. There was a small group of guys who were “best pals” with all the girls – James, Charlie and Brad [*]; they’d sit with them before and after play practice and belt out show tunes and talk about clothes and…

…and I didn’t really think twice about it. Charlie was a talented artist; Brad was a great musician; James was on the Speech team with me. I thought they had terrible taste in music, a fair flair for clothing, and were perfectly fine guys. No big whoop.

I was probably well into college before I put two and two together. And then yawned. In the couple of years intervening between high school and college, gay guys had gone from being a fairly threatening mystery – not unusual in small towns at the time – to pretty much a non-issue.

I couldn’t stand show tunes, but otherwise, their sexuality – and that of any other gay people – was a whole lot less important than trying to do something with my own.

Which, I occasionally mused in frustration, was probably a good reason to quit hanging around at Phoenix on Friday nights.

———-

It was about 2AM, and time to pay the tab. I walked to the front of the restaurant and grabbed a fiver to pay for my Coke and slice of pie…

…and ran into Charlie , the would-be comic book artist.  I noticed him, first, before I noticed the clothing; He was wearing black leather chaps, a vest, a harness-y thing that looked like lederhosen, some sort of black leather speedo thing, topped off with a black leather Greek fisherman’s cap.

Charlie noticed me pretty much simultaneously.  And I was gratified in the split second before I spoke that he looked just about as awkward as I must have.

“Hey, Charlie!”

“Hey, Mitch”.

How to follow up, when you’re talking to an old high school pal who’s standing there in S&M gear?

“So how ya doing?”

“Great”

“Still working at…” the restaurant where he’d been waiting tables the previous year, according to a mutual friend.

“Yeah!  And are you still in radio?”

“Nah, I’m freelancing”.

I smiled and nodded.  So did he.

“Hey, great seeing you!”

“Yeah, nice running into you!”, he responded, pointing sotto voce to the three other leather clad guys who were walking away to sit at a table.

“A friend of yours?”, one of the other gamers asked, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

There’d been a time when I’d probably have smacked the guy for suggesting it.

“Yeah, ol’ high school bud”, I responded, turning to talk with the hostess.

(more…)

Over at Nihilist In Golf Pants, the Cynical Viking Fan has had enough:

When in the Course of a football season it becomes necessary for one fan to dissolve the fanatical bands which have connected him with an NFL team, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that he should declare the causes which impel him to the separation.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all teams are created equal, that they are endowed by the NFL with the same salary cap. That to enjoy Sunday afternoon, I turn on the TV and cheer my favorite of these NFL teams. That when my team sucketh so bad as to be destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the Fan to alter or abolish his allegiance to it, and to institute a new favorite among the NFL teams, so long as that team is not the Green Bay Packers. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world…I therefore, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of my intentions, do, in the name and by Authority of the good Fans of the NFL, solemnly publish and declare, That this Fan is, and of Right ought to be Free of and independent, that I am Absolved of all Allegiance to the Minnesota Vikings, and that all fandom connection between myself and the Vikings, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and independent fan of the NFL I have the full Power to root for any non-Packer NFL team of my choosing. – And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, I pledge my Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor. Cynical Vikings Guy

Fair-weather fans are smart fans.

…the days until a leftyblogger actually addresses the facts of a Katherine Kersten column, rather than just blurting out facile, juvenile ad-hominem.

Two of her recent columns have drawn the ire of the not-too-smartosphere (here and here)

I’ll start the count at one day right now, based on these two (obtuse and selectively ignorant) posts bits of blog discharge.

We’ll start with obtuse; Matt Snyders, who seems to be on a mission to rhetorically peck at Kersten’s ankles, writes:

Depending on what kind of reactionary observer you ask, these individuals had it coming because they a) blocked traffic, b) taunted police in mysterious ways that the MPD has so far been unable to describe, c) are bourgeois hipsters and bourgeois hipsters deserve to be beaten, g*d damn it!, or d) some combination of all of the above.

Actually, there’s an option “d”, one that I suspect is the real answer that Matt Snyders (and the entire CP staff) dare not whisper:  Critical Mass are patsies for other people.

This topic comes up for discussion again a month-and-a-half later for two reasons: first, the resident she-jackal at the Strib  [She-jackal?  I feel like I’m reading a screed by some Campus Maoist – Ed.] has had a field day with the incident, penning two columns in the past three weeks on her newfound bogeymen. Check ’em out here and here. You won’t be disappointed. (“Minneapolis isn’t the only place where the Mass mob has strong-armed the police and City Hall,” it wrote on October 8, presumably with a straight face.)

One ad-hominem (ad-feminem?), two giggly but unsupported inferences…zero actual beef.  I mean – would Snyders at least let us knuckle-draggers in on where Kersten might be wrong?

Secondly, Critical Mass supporters launched a website earlier this week in order to “support the victims of the police violence and brutality” and to “help resist the remaining charges that are being leveled against 4 individual participants so that the cops and the city can save face and have someone to blame for their misconduct.”

Well, that should settle it then.

Look – as I wrote before, as a guy who dices it out with Twin Cities drivers on my bike at  least a couple of days a week (having the kids back in school cuts down on my biking time), I’m not unsympathetic to at least the part of Critical Mass’ agenda related to raising awareness about bikers.  But Snyders doesn’t apparently feel it necessary to show the reader where Kersten is supposedly wrong about Critical Mass.  Perhaps the CP staff knows that their audience is going to reach the conclusion they want no matter what they write – it’s nothing new. Or maybe Snyders needs to work on writing to an actual point, lest he be regarded as “the worst writer in the Twin Cities’ altmedia since the legendary Margaret Grebe”.

You be the judge.

Oh, it gets worse. This’d be the guy from “mobjectivist”, which if you want to get nit-picky about philosphy might be too-telling a name after all:

Trying to understand her obsession over bicyclists, I think the StarTribune columnist, Katherine Kersten, has tried to frame and conflate other recent Critical Mass events with the sanctioned ride.

Well, actually, she wrote about the ride that turned into a riot.  Remember that? 

 And another local assbag blogger, [“Assbag”? Mommy?  Is that you?  – Ed.] thinks it has something to do with prepping “greens” for bad behavior when the RNC comes into town next year. I guess what better way to practice intimidating conservatives than a bunch of bicyclists roaming the streets?

Prepping greens?

Where on earth did the “writer” get that?

Look, numbnuts “WHT” – I could care less about “Critical Mass”.  Indeed, I bike, so if they have something in mind to actually get drivers to stop knocking us off, more power to ’em.  Indeed, friends of mine ride with ’em.  And as far as “intimidation” goes, most of them are from Minneapolis, and if they ever crossed the river they’d need me to help them get out alive.

But if either of y’all have any ideas about facts that Kersten supposedly got wrong, sound off, m’kay?

(And “Needing someplace to refer to her as a snaggled-tooth witch” isnt’ even warm).

So – one day and counting!

Most Americans approved of giving government a lot of extra power after the onset of the crisis.  We gave the power on the assumption that the government would operate with integrity.  Being composed of humans with imperfections (and, being careerists and politicians, perhaps more imperfections than most), some of them took more than they were supposed to.

The crisis – well, that’s the trick, of course:  the Red Scare, the Kennedy Assassinations (both), Watergate, the Stockton Massacre, the Crack Epidemic…

…oh, yeah – and 9/11.  The responses, in the wrong hands, led to untrammelled power in the hands of J Edgar Hoover, immense CIA abuses and the Gun Control Act of 1968, a special prosecutor law with inordinate power, the 1994 Crime Bill and 1996 Counterterrorism Act…

…and the Patriot Act, which gives the government powers it may well need to fight the war on terror, and gives unethical law enforcement and intelligence peopleimmense opportunities for abuse, as Patterico relates:

First, it is true that, as the anonymous source told the New York Sun, there is information that “could jeopardize the safety of certain individuals” — namely, the ages of Higazy’s family members, and the fact that his brother has arthritis. But I don’t really think that this information is that significant — or that its omission would provide a significant roadblock to security officials determined to harm Higazy’s family members.

The other thing you notice is, I believe, far more significant — which is why I put it in bold type. Namely, you have an FBI agent who admits that he threatened to ensure that a suspect’s family would be tortured by a foreign government.

Somehow, I think that’s the reason the information was submitted under seal.

The ethics of power depend on the integrity of government’s agents.  Which, like any other people, takes constant scrutiny.

Oh, read the whole thing.

A Robbinsdale Police Department officer is the protagonist in the Treptow case, which (as we’ve been noting without resolution since last June, was started when the officer allegedly kicked off a road rage incident that ended with Martin Treptow apparnently shooting him in self defense).

So I got a chuckle when Joel Rosenberg noted:

Believe it or not, the Robbinsdale PD has been participating in HEAT, the “Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic” program…

Submitted without comment.

…I actually was mildly encouraged by this bit here.

I said “mildly”.

People are starting to use the word in polite company – victory.

Michael Ledeen in the WSJ:

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

Reconsider – or move the goalposts. Or frantically rewrite history.

In Fallujah, enlisted marines have complained to an officer of my acquaintance: “There’s nobody to shoot here, sir. If it’s just going to be building schools and hospitals, that’s what the Army is for, isn’t it?” Throughout the area, Sunni sheikhs have joined the Marines to drive out al Qaeda, and this template has spread to Diyala Province, and even to many neighborhoods in Baghdad itself, where Shiites are fighting their erstwhile heroes in the Mahdi Army.

The Mahdi Army – the group that not six months ago some said posed an insurmountable obstacle to any meaningful peace between the sects in Iraq.

I’ve written about this change in the war before – here and here and here. As a mere history buff, I can be ignored at the reader’s leisure – indeed, I encourage you, the reader, to take this career civilian and history geek’s writings about warfare with an appropriate block of salt, and read the people who do know.

Things have improved all over the coalition:

British troops are on their way out of Basra, and it was widely expected that Iranian-backed Shiite militias would impose a brutal domination of the city, That hasn’t happened. Lt. Col. Patrick Sanders, stationed near Basra, confirmed that violence in Basra has dropped precipitously in recent weeks. He gives most of the credit to the work of Iraqi soldiers and police.

And on the political battlefield:

As evidence of success mounts, skeptics often say that while military operations have gone well, there is still no sign of political movement to bind up the bloody wounds in the Iraqi body politic. Recent events suggest otherwise. Just a few days ago, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of and presumed successor to the country’s most important Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, went to Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, to meet with Sunni sheikhs. The act, and his words, were amazing. “Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen,” he said. “Today, we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis.”

Mr. Hakim’s call for national unity mirrors last month’s pilgrimage to Najaf, the epicenter of Iraqi Shiism, by Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni. There he visited Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite cleric. The visit symbolically endorsed Mr. Sistani’s role as the most authoritative religious figure in Iraq. Mr. Hashemi has also been working closely with Mr. Hakim’s people, as well as with the Kurds. Elsewhere, similar efforts at ecumenical healing proceed rapidly. As Robert McFarlane reported in these pages, Baghdad’s Anglican Canon, Andrew White, has organized meetings of leading Iraqi Christian, Sunni and Shiite clerics, all of whom called for nation-wide reconciliation.

And on the street:

The Iraqi people seem to be turning against the terrorists, even against those who have been in cahoots with the terror masters in Tehran. As Col. Sanders puts it, “while we were down in Basra, an awful lot of the violence against us was enabled, sponsored and equipped by. . . Iran. [But] what has united a lot of the militias was a sense of Iraqi nationalism, and they resent interference by Iran.”

You do need to read the whole thing – since the mainstream media will likely not hint at any of it until the Democrats have figured out how to spin the results to their electoral benefit.

Of course, it’s bad form to talk too soon – and the military is making a point of avoiding the “V” word. And so will I.

But Ledeen hits hard on the “core values” of fighting a counterinsurgency war:

The turnaround took place because we started to defeat the terrorists, at a time that roughly coincides with the surge. There is a tendency to treat the surge as a mere increase in numbers, but its most important component was the change in doctrine. Instead of keeping too many of our soldiers off the battlefield in remote and heavily fortified mega-bases, we put them into the field. Instead of reacting to the terrorists’ initiatives, we went after them. No longer were we going to maintain the polite fiction that we were in Iraq to train the locals so that they could fight the war. Instead, we aggressively engaged our enemies. It was at that point that the Iraqi people placed their decisive bet.

Read it and use it.

NRO notes the corrosive racism in the left’s attacks on Bobby Jindal, who won the Louisiana governor’s race last week:

After “progressive” racists spent months trying to use his ethnicity against him, I think it’s a feather in Jindal’s cap that everyone talks about it now. Something, by the way, to remember next time you see the Left run for the moral high ground on perceived “racism” — as though it meant something to them beyond their party’s political success. It wasn’t just the Louisiana Democratic Party, but also self-styled “progressive” bloggers, writers and message-board posters who used Jindal’s race against him during this campaign.

There’s nothing ‘progressive’ about being liberal.

Ask Linda Chavez.

Socks the cat prop is back in the news:

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

On the one hand, Sock should be thankful not to have ended up like Vince Foster, whose head Hillary personally stuffed into a civil war relic cannon and fired across the Potomac (or so I remember the story) [1].

On the other – what does this tell us about Hillary!?

Clinton has been boosting her prospects in the past week with some homespun references to her gender as part of a series of events with the theme Women Changing America, during which she chatted girlfriend-to-girlfriend and mom-to-mom with female voters.The softening of Clinton’s image seems to be working. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, predicts that up to a quarter of Republican women will vote for her. She leads Democratic rivals in the polls by 26 points and is scooping up more donations to her war chest from Wall Street and defence contractors than any candidate from either party – an unmistakable indicator of who they think will win in 2008.

Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”

Flanagan’s article, headed No Girlfriend of Mine, points out that Clinton wrote a crowd-pleas-ing book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets, in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his “toy mouse” did the White House “become a home”.

Someday, campaign to install our first cyborg female president will be taught as a case study in marketing classes worldwide.

(more…)

While America seems – according to some observers, for this election cycle – to be flirting with “moderate, center” (i.e. “liberal with the patchouli temporarily showered off”) politics, it’s fun to see that much of Europe is drifting, by their standards, to the right. Merkel, Sarkozy…

…and the Swiss. Traditionally Europe’s most “conservative” nation (where “conservative” means “resistant to change”, due to a plebiscitory system of democracy that refers most vital issues to popular vote), they’ve been flirting with the left for a bit here – a flirtation that seems to have slowed with the last election:

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) is set to consolidate its position as the alpine nation’s most popular grouping in a parliamentary election on Sunday, outstripping its rivals after a provocative campaign…According to the last opinion poll conducted before the election, the People’s Party are expected to win 27.3 percent of the vote, a slight increase over 2003 when they raced to the top of the polls amid accusations of xenophobia.

The SVP has again run a controversial campaign calling for the extradition of foreigners who commit serious crimes. It has been criticised by opponents and has ruffled the usually smooth waters of Switzerland’s consensus-based politics.

This last paragraph betrays a certain ignorance of Swiss politics. Switzerland is an intensely federal country; it also joins some very disparate groups – the fairly wealthy Germans in the north, the relatively poor French and Italians in the south and west – in a functioning democracy, largely by making the process of initiative and referendum extremely easy, and by constitutionally relegating an amazing amount of legislative power to the “Cantons” (states). As a result, a general consensus forms. Which is not to say that politics don’t occasionally get bumptious (by the nation’s stolid standards).

Did someone say trouble?

Opposition to the SVP’s campaign, which used posters calling for the “black sheep” of Swiss society to be booted out, spilled over into a rare outburst of violence on the streets of Berne earlier this month when police and left-wing activists clashed.

Wow. Left-wingers getting violent when they don’t get their way? Shocking, I know.

At any rate – Europe’s rejection of the far left this past few years has been heartening.  Or at least conservatives should take heart -because it was about immigration:

A nationalist party rode an anti-immigrant wave Sunday to the best showing of any party in parliamentary elections since World War I, while the Greens made gains by appealing to environmental concerns, according to projections.

In one of the most bitter political campaigns in memory in this usually tolerant Alpine nation, the Swiss People’s Party called for a law to throw out entire immigrant families if a child violates national laws.

Now, while I’m reaching for a parallel here – that American conservatives can take heart that immigration is a hot enough issue to gain them traction – let’s correct this news report; while the Swiss have a strong sense of liberty (they have a relatively laissez-faire system of government by Euro standards, and also the most liberal gun laws on the continent), they also have a very strong sense of civil order and civic cohesion.  They are “tolerant” in the same way a small town on the Great Plains is tolerant – to the point where you breach those senses.  Then, things change fast.

But I digress.

One day, this woman will be considered a great pioneer; sort of like Rosa Parks or John Paul Jones:

She was fined and got a suspended jail sentence, but Mona Shaw says she has no regrets about using a hammer to vent her frustration at a cable company.

“I stand by my actions even more so after getting all these telephone calls and hearing other people’s complaints,” she told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.

Mrs. Shaw:  I’ll add my own.  Everything described below rings totally true to me and, I’ll wager, most Comcast customers:

Shaw, 75, and her husband, Don, say they had an appointment in August for a Comcast technician to come to their Bristow home to install the company’s heavily advertised Triple Play phone, Internet and cable service.

The Shaws say no one came all day, and the technician who showed up two days later left without finishing the setup. Two days after that, Comcast cut off all their service.

Once, during one of my experiments (the TV “broke” for the summer, in a successful effort to spur my kids to read more), I tried to turn off the Cable.  Not, mind you, my Comcast internet – a distinction about which I was painstakingly clear.  “We just need to put a filter on your line so that the internet will work without the cable”.  Whatever.
After waiting a week, a Comcast contractor showed up, fiddled with the box out back, and split.  The internet didn’t work. It took ten days for another contractor to show up – and he botched the job.  I called the company, and told yet another indifferent “customer account executive” that I’d prefer if they’d send actual Comcast techs this time.  It took Comcast another day or so to actually make everything work.

That, if you believe my friends who have Comcast, has been a fairly average timeline and number of visits.

Back to Ms. Shaw:

At the Comcast office in Manassas later that day, they waited for a manager for two hours before being told the manager had left for the day, the Shaws say.

Shaw, a churchgoing secretary of the local AARP branch, returned the next Monday – with a hammer.

“I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor … and I went to hit the telephone,” Shaw said. “I figured, ‘Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.”’

While I must on principle eschew this sort of violence and vandalism, and point out that the court system was right to impose consequences, I’ll bet the sentence was a lot lower than it might have been.

Because if there were even one Comcast customer on that jury, it might have been an acquittal.

All

Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, disputes Shaw’s version of its customer service record and calls Shaw’s hammer fit on Aug. 20 an “inappropriate situation.”

In absolute terms?  Of course.

In that discombobulated nether world of the Comcast customer?

IMF protest in DC turns bloody.

You can expect to see some of these thugs in Saint Paul next September.