My “Fiver” homey Bovious tells me I sorta kinda made the big time:

The Iron City Houserockers were Pittsburgh’s entry in the Heartland Rock Sweepstakes that occured after the success of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. They had literate lyrics, tough rock and roll backing, and clear-eyed vision. Led by Joe Grushecky, a special ed teacher by day, produced by Miami Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band, and possessed of tunes like “Junior’s Bar” (youtube), they seemed poised to hit the big time, but it never quite happened, which is the music audience’s loss.

They link (beginning of the graf) to a tribute site I designed almost five years ago to the Houserockers (aka “the greatest band you never heard of, unless you’re occasional commenters Don or DaveInPgh”) – a band whose only fan west of Chicago, ever, may have been me. Not that that stopped me.

I’ve gotta get some of that on the Ipod, now…

The Bison trampled the GoGos yesterday:

NDSU rushed for 394 yards (including a school-record 263 by Tyler Roehl), rolled up 585 total yards and had an edge in time of possession of nearly 14 minutes.

The final score could have been even worse if not for two missed field goals, a turnover that led to a touchdown and a roughing-the-passer penalty that led to another touchdown.

Life is very, very good.

One of the great saws of counterinsurgency warfare is to get – via guile, show of strength, cash under the table, influence-peddling or expression of naked self-interest – the locals to do the fighting for you.  And the war on terror is nothing if not the biggest counterinsurgency war in history, with a fair chunk of the world as the battlefield.
One of the BDS-addled left’s great straw-warhorses in the war so far has been “why invade Iraq when Pakistan is the real enemy?”

Of course, it’s not – and Pakistan is certainly a society that is dealing with a very difficult problem with Islamic radicalism, and elements in Pakistani society certainly are most definitely enemies to the US.  But there’s a better-than-fair case to be made that there’s a majority in Pakistan – one that enjoys the material benefits of the post-seventh-century world – that can be eventually turned against the terrorist and the radicals among whom they hide.

And it looks like Pakistan is going to take a whack at it:

An all-out battle for control of Pakistan’s restive North and South Waziristan is about to commence between the Pakistani military and the Taliban and al-Qaeda adherents who have made these tribal areas their own.

According to a top Pakistani security official who spoke to Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, the goal this time is to pacify the Waziristans once and for all. All previous military operations – usually spurred by intelligence provided by the Western coalition – have had limited objectives, aimed at specific bases or sanctuaries or blocking the cross-border movement of guerrillas. Now the military is going for broke to break the back of the Taliban and a-Qaeda in Pakistan and reclaim the entire area.

Question:  Granted, Pakistan had to take some action after the attempt on Benazir Bhutto that killed over 130.  But do you think that if the war in Iraq and Afghanistan were going badly – that if actual defeat were anywhere in the cards – that the supremely pragmatic Musharraf would expend the political and social capital required for an offensive like this is being portrayed?

(Presuming, of course, that it takes places as described in the usually-reliable Asia Times)?

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I The Opening Act The First Team – John, Brian and Chad – will shoo the Stroms from the studio and kick things off from 11-1. During this time, by the way, I’ll be at JK Thompson Building and Remodeling’s “open house” in Roseville.
  I’ll be at 946 County Road “B” between Lexington and Victoria. We’ve got all sorts of cool Patriot swag, plus you can check out the Thompsons’ awesome work. At a time when your home’s gotta stand out to sell (or when it might even be better to just remodel and enjoy where you’re at), it might be just what you need!
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will be in next, from 1-3.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will talk Minnesota trash after that until 5PM.So join us on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, 11AM-5PM Central on AM1280 The Patriot, and at Townhall.com!

So git on in here and listen up!

Michelle Malkin points us to an LATimes story that…

…digs into Hillary’s finances and uncovers more mysterious Chinatown donors with dilapidated addresses in NYC and jobs unlikely to put them in the position of maxing out campaign contributions. They include dishwashers, waiters, contributors who deny making contributions, and another who “admitted to lacking the legal-resident status required for giving campaign money.” And more:

Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown…

…Of 74 residents of New York’s Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment.

Will Hillary accuse the Times reporters of “stalking” now?

Obviously, the LATimes is a racist conservative tool.

I like the use of the adjective “ephemeral:”

Like many who traveled this path, most of the Chinese reported as contributing to Clinton’s campaign have never voted. Many speak little or no English. Some seem to lead such ephemeral lives that neighbors say they’ve never heard of them.

Predictions: Hillary will come out swinging at the Times, her Asian-American acolytes will accuse the paper of racism and ethnic bigotry, and those “ephemeral” donors will never be found.

I suggest one of Chicago’s cemetaries.

Minneapolis cops find some unusual swag: 

Officers dispatched to recover an ATM machine found by a Housing Inspector during an inspection of a foreclosed home. Car 21 responded and processed the ATM which had been pried open.

Or maybe it’s teenagers.  Like mine. 

…if I should buy this piece of real estate as a very, very, very relaxing vacation home…

The Missile Base consists of 57 acres of real estate. The center secured portion of the property is protected by the original barbed-wire-topped chainlink fence. There is a paved road leading into the property with dual entry gates.
Above ground is the original 40 X 100 shop building, two concrete targeting structures, two manufactured homes, two 8 X 8 X 40 storage containers, and the silo tops of the three missile silos, two antenna silos, one entry portal and a few other misc structures.

…or a safeguard against a Hillary Clinton adminstration…: 

Below ground is a huge complex consisting of 16 buildings and thousands of feet of connecting tunnels. The major underground structures are:

• Three – 160′ Tall Missile Silos
• Three – 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings
• Three – Fuel Terminal Buildings
• Two – 6 story Antenna Silos
• One Air Intake/Filtration Building
• One 100′ diameter Control Dome Building
• One 125′ diameter Power Dome Building
• One – 6 story Entry Portal Building

and a few other misc buildings and areas.

Decisions, decisions.

(more…)

You could see this coming.

After St. Thomas disinvited Desmond Tutu (at the behest of its president, Father “Havana Denny” Dease, who certainly should be a laughinstock), you could count the hours until some lefty claimed that there was a culture of intimidation against liberal speakers on campuses.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein brings a note of reality to the discussion:

I agree with Smith when he criticizes the University of St. Thomas, an institution I very much respect, for its original decision, several months ago, to disinvite South African Bishop Desmond Tutu from speaking on campus. Well-intended and solicitous to the Jewish community as that move might have been, it nevertheless was unprincipled, dim and hugely counterproductive, and university President Dennis Dease was right, of course, to recently reverse field and reinvite Tutu.

But at the risk of framing this issue excessively in ideological terms, there was at least a subtle implication in Smith’s column that scholars and speakers on the left such as Tutu are generally treated by colleges and universities no worse than their counterparts on the right; that all different kinds academics and activists are abused and censored equally. Yet no way is this true.

For example, was there any left-leaning commencement speaker this past spring who was treated as abysmally as Republican Sen. John McCain was by graduating boars at the New School in New York? Or who on the liberal side of the aisle in recent years has needed police protection to get in and out of lecture halls as frequently as conservative writer David Horowitz?

And as for retrieved invitations, I know of no one other than Linda Chavez — in the supposedly open-minded 1980s — who was told by a college president in New York City, “If you insist on speaking, I can’t guarantee your safety.”But you invited me, or at least members of your faculty did,” she said in amazement, before being escorted from the building by bodyguards for a waiting car — but getting punched anyway.

Multicultural mavens frequently went batty at the thought of Chavez (a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission during the Reagan administration) speaking on their campuses, as she just wasn’t their style of minority. The president of the University of Northern Colorado, for instance, disinvited her after students rallied against her scheduled appearance. And then (you’ll love this one), instead of apologizing to Chavez, he apologized to the students for the “grossly insensitive” invitation in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

Annie Lennox abandons stage in the face of a guy in a gas mask:

BOULDER, Colorado (October 18, 2007) – Popular singer Annie Lennox fled the stage when a man wearing a gas mask and cape appeared in the crowd towards the end of her set at Macky Auditorium on Tuesday.

Lennox spotted the man approaching the stage, tossed her microphone to the ground, and ducked backstage without saying a word to the audience. She describes the incident as “really freakish and disturbing” on her Blog.

To be fair to the guy, I thought the same thing about the video she did for “Sexcrime”

To paraphrase the Everly Bros and Linda Ronstadt – I’ve been cheated, been mistreated; in addition, I’ve been put down and (coincidentally) pushed ’round; I almost hesitate to add that I’ve been lied to and made blue. With a nod to Stephen Stills, I’ve been aro-o-o-ound the world, looking for that…girl (I think Stills is singing “Mormon”, but I’m sure that’s wrong) .While I have not been (a la Charlene) to Nice or the Isles of Greece, with their attendant yachts and champagne I have had shotgunned Summit on a pontoon boat on Minnetonka. With apologies to Ms. Smyth and Messrs. Lennon and McCartney, I’m neither a warrior nor an eggman. But I will lay claim the high-and-low-searching Seeker of Pete Townsend fame.

And the thing I seek at the moment is one bit of knowledge. To wit: what does “Pwn3d” mean? I’m assuming it’s the past tense regular verb form of “Pwn” (To Pwn. I Pwn, you pwn, he/she/it pwns…), which only highlights the limitations of grammar for analyzing intent.

Anyway – while I have no idea what the state of “pwn” means, it’s been brought to my attention that I apparently am…it. Whatever it is.
Searching for clues (or, alternatively, “clw3z”), I went to my email, where I saw a note from a correspondent:

He notes that his predecessor at *giggle* Screw went on to the NY times…

And he went on to….

…get fired from the 4th most-read freebie rag in Minneapolis.

It’s becoming clear.

Pwn: v. to be proven less pathetic than the subject of ones’ narrative.

I think I know all I need to now.

And with this, all discussion of “cartoonist” Ken Avidor is over. Turn out the lights.

CORRECTION:  Everly Bros, not Buddy Holly.  Blah.

(more…)

The Venezuelan monument to child-murdering thug and lefty collegiate hero Che Guevara was destroyed:

A glass monument to revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara was shot up and destroyed less than two weeks after it was unveiled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government.

Images of the 8-foot-tall glass plate bearing Guevara’s image, now toppled and shattered, were shown Friday on state television, which said the entire country “repudiated” the vandalism.

The monument on an Andean mountain highway near the city of Merida was unveiled Oct. 8 by Vice President Jorge Rodriguez and Cuba’s ambassador to Venezuela to mark the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s death.

While Venezuela “repudiates” the “vandalism”, this blog applauds it, and offers the vandals (upon confirmation) a beer while in Saint Paul.

China Mulls Communist Branch for Space

China might not have a permanent presence in space yet, but the country’s rocket men are already thinking about setting up a Communist Party branch in the outer reaches.

Around these parts, we call it the “Minneapolis Green Party”.

As they teach (I’m told) in law school: “When the law is against you, argue facts.  When the facts are against you, argue law.  When both are against you, argue like hell”.

The blogging corollary might be “when the facts make you look like an idiot and your every attempt at a response looks like a more-and-more desperate attempt to change the subject because the entire world is starting to think you’re a giggly self-absorbed little jagoff, you should quit before you get too far behind, if it’s not already too late”.

Which, with Foot on the case, it pretty much already is.

(more…)

Happy Birthday to Teh Mayer!

You’ve heard the debate about SCHIP. The Dems want to take a program originally intended to subsidize health care for legitimately poor kids (originally passed by Republicans, if I recall correctly) and expand it to cover children whose families could not pass (or flunk) any legitimate means test for the subsidy under current law. In other words, they want to do what they always do with entitlements – expand them far beyond their original intent, to addict more of our society to government assistance of one kind or another. The Republicans, true to principle, have fought back against the creeping socialization of healthcare smarting after November and leery about their prospects next year, have been acquiescing in depressing numbers. The President, fortunately, has pushed back by vetoing the bill. Most Americans support the President on this veto.
Which is, I suspect, why Congressman Walz is standing to post in the spin machine:

SCHIP was created 10 years ago to help provide health care for children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance. The program is economical — it needs less than $3.50 a day to cover a child — and cost-effective, because children who have access to routine preventive care from a family doctor don’t have to rely on emergency rooms for their medical care.

That is, of course, the boilerplate about the program – boilerplate that got it passed in a Republican Congress. I have nothing to add that better commentators haven’t already hammered on…

…except this next bit.

I believe these concerns, such as those expressed just a few days ago in these pages by my colleague Rep. Michele Bachmann are overblown.Some have expressed concerns that, under this program, wealthy parents will enroll their children in SCHIP instead of providing them with private health insurance. But if these concerns were well-founded, then private insurance companies would be leading the charge against an expansion of SCHIP. Instead, they are among its strongest supporters.

Walz either never passed Economics 101, or things none of the rest of you did.

Picture yourself as a healthcare company (and I’ve worked for them a couple of times – so while I claim no extra-special insight, I’m not the idiot Walz seems to need us all to be). Your choice:

• Engage in the scrum of the market, advertising and selling and servicing insurance to people the old-fashioned way – by having to convince them to give you their money for your products and services, with all of the ups and downs that attend working in the free market
• Letting government do your selling for you, and cashing their checks.

What’s not to like?

As, indeed, Walz notes:

Under SCHIP’s public-private partnership, private health-care plans work with individual states to cover uninsured children. That is why this legislation has been endorsed by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association. In other words, SCHIP is as good for America’s health-care industry as it is for keeping America’s kids healthy.

Where “good” equals “conveniently remunerative”.

Minneapolis lefties (ACORN, in this case) want to freeze foreclosures in the city:

An advocacy group has started a campaign calling on the Minneapolis City Council to support a three-month voluntary freeze on foreclosures in the city to give some borrowers more breathing room.

The proposal by the local chapter of Minnesota ACORN, a community advocacy group, would target loans made by the 25 largest subprime lenders to owner-occupants. Subprime lenders typically offer less favorable terms to borrowers whose credit record disqualifies them for conventional loans.

ACORN turned to the City Council after getting turned down by the Hennepin County Board. ACORN also will talk to St. Paul officials.

Will they ever learn – “buyer protection” legislation makes it impossible to be a buyer?  I’m no economist (paging King Banaian!), but if you gut the lenders’ recourses for dealing with bad loans, all you do is prevent all lending?

Remember five years ago, when the last of the Ventura-era legislatures (controlled by the DFL) passed “buyer protection”  legislation against insurance companies, and made it nearly impossible to buy homeowners’ insurance?

There seems to be just a whiff of sanity in Minneapolis, at least:

Just three of the 13 council members — Gary Schiff, Don Samuels and Cam Gordon –have spoken in support of the proposal. Council President Barb Johnson said she isn’t sure how the proposal will fare in the full council.

It’s Minneapolis.  I call it a tossup.

I’m a pretty normal guy. I’m 44, I live in an old house in Saint Paul with a couple kids, two cats and a dog. I drive a four-door but I’d rather bike. I like good beer, play guitar and a slew of other instruments, have the odd date, meet my friends at Keegans’ when I can – you know. Pretty normal stuff.

Of course, when I was 16 I started working in radio. Now, working part-time at a station in North Dakota is the laxest possible definition of “public figure” that can exist in nature – but even then and there (and over my next years, as my career took me to the Twin Cities), some of the wierdness that attends “public” life caught up with me. The anti-semitic calls and threats (although I’m not remotely Jewish, the “Berg” name irks some); the occasional lonely person with weird ideas, the people who can’t take disagreement in stride – I’ve been through ’em all. And I’ve pretty much ignored them. Because they’re pretty much idiots.

Over the last few years, I’ve duked it out with the people who run the “Dump Bachmann” blog. I don’t pay ’em a lot of attention – with their fevered tone and breathless conspiracy-mongering and seeing spies in the bushes, they’re like a homegrown Democrat Underground, and pretty much a laughingstock among real bloggers and media. They’re the kinds of thing best ignored (except for Michele Bachmann; knowing that such a bunch of tinfoil-hatted whoopdidoos were stalking her, I’m fairly convinced, was worth at least a point in Bachmann’s victory last November – the best showing by a Republican on the top rail of results.

So at worst, they’re a mixed blessing. As a rule.

I’ve also pretty much dismissed Ken Weiner, AKA “Ken Avidor”. I dismiss him because he’s pretty dismissable. A former art director at a pr0n mag even other pr0n merchants giggle at with derision, it’s not hard to see why even Tom Swift has better cartooning chops.

A while ago – before the September 15 counterprotest I helped organize with the folks at True North – I got an anonymous email from someone at a Google IP address:

Crazy Ken Avidor is planning upon coming to your counter protest with his cameras, specifically to get pictures of you. I know this on a first hand basis. He’s a f*cking moron, don’t give him any fodder.

I responded at the time – if you want to talk to me, just ask. I’ll take on all comers, because – depending on who you are and what your motivations are – I either have no trouble talking across ideological divides (hence I had a great time talking on MPR and with Chuck Olson in the past few months), or I’m just plain smarter than you and dealing with your arguments is child’s play (certain other adversaries that shall remain nameless), which is kinda sad considering I’m really no great shakes in the “brain” department myself.

But no matter; Avidor showed up, camera in hand (I’d left), and posted this little brain fart.

Now, nobody’s under any obligation to ask “hey, mind if I film you”, although it’s generally considered good form by reputable videographers and journalists. Which Avidor, of course, is not.

Last week, Avidor posted the “big scoop” – that I have been known to edit Wikipedia entries. This is, of course, something that’s pretty publicly available. Avidor leapt about like a poo-flinging monkey yapping about the fact that I’ve written, in the past, about the likes of Ed Morrissey, Hugh Hewitt, and the Northern Alliance – without bothering to actually note if anything I wrote was wrong or anything, of course, or whether any of that Wiki editing took place in a men’s room at the airport.

I’m always inclined to ignore this kind of obsessive niggling; I let it go the way of the rantings of the dissociative guy at the back of the bus who skipped his meds.

Fortunately, Learned Foot at Kool Aid Report has not been so inclined. He’s showed, so far this week, that Avidor observe a curious double-standard about his Wiki obsessions, that he handles criticism with all the grace of Marie Antoinette, he lied about the responses (one needn’t “have a cow” to crush a target as trivially simple as Avidor) and tried to ignore it all when Foot busted him, and concluded with some advice:

I wonder if Blogger Berg and Blogger Swiftee are considering swearing out a restraining order yet. This guy is obviously unstable.

This last was over this bit – in which Avidor crosses the line from “demented idiot” to “borderline stalker”, apparently hiding in the bushes and (unlike Michele Bachmann) actually spying and taking pictures of people.

The obvious response is – nothing. Let him slither through the bushes with his little camera. I’ve done nothing in my life that I can’t take in front of the whole world (like, say, work at a pr0n magazine and participate in the victimization of women). I’ve run into people like Avidor before, and they’re nothing to worry about – they don’t have the balls or the brains to do anything but slither about and heckle impotently (just check out the traffic on the DU post. I doubt Avidor has the capacity to be embarassed).

So let me know when he does something that rises to the level of “would matter to vertebrates”.

…there may never be a better cover song than the Four Tops version of “Walk Away Renee”. 

That is all.

Joel Rosenberg with the latest on the Treptow case.

Whatever can be said about the Anoka County Attorney’s office — and I think, in this case, that’s rather a lot, and none of it terribly flattering — they’re certainly not engaging in a rush to judgment.  Tectonic plates move faster than Robert M.A. Johnson’s office has on this — and, unshockingly, they don’t have a reputation for slothlike slow-motion in other criminal cases.  Paul Young, the assistant county attorney assigned to make this — to prosecute this case, does not have a reputation for requiring time-lapse photography to see him move.

Other news?  Finally, after quite literally months of no contact with law enforcement — not so much as a single telephone call from Dave Westberg, the Coon Rapids detective who claimed to be intensively investigating this back in June, nor one from the Anoka County sheriff’s office, nor the Anoka County Attorney’s office — Rebecca and Martin Treptow have been informed that they’ll be called to testify in front of the Grand Jury.

Read the whole thing, natch.

On October 23 – next Tuesday – the Saint Paul School Board is going to hear yet another attempt by a group of well-connected “youth” “anti-war” “activists” to get the Board to bar military recruiters from Saint Paul campuses.

A little bird sent me their internal email:

NOTE: The “adult” peace and justice movements MUST stand in solidarity with our youth who are challenging the militarization of their schools!!!

That, of course, is hilarious stuff.

At the last meeting I attended, the “anti-war” group included perhaps three high school kids, and well over a dozen adults and/or college kids. 

“Standing in Solidarity?”  They’re standing in substitution!

But I digress: 

 So far, the StPaul School Board has IGNORED YOUTH VOICES on the issue of military recruiters being given free rein.

Actually, they’ve given the YOUTH VOICES attempt after attempt to sway the Board – largely because at least two members of the board, Ann Carrol and Tom Goldstein, seem to more or less favor the idea of barring recruiters from the campuses, career fairs and so on. 

Which, if the author of this email is any indication, might actually benefit the military:

 Too many of our kids are being CHANNELED into the military–especially youth of color & low-income youth in inner cities & rural areas are being TARGETED by recruiters.

Largely because they, traditionally, join the volunteer military in vastly greater numbers than the white, upper-middle-class children of liberal parents – the ones that make up groups like these. 

They are offered NO OTHER CHOICES–NO trade schools or apprenticeships, NO help going to college–just “join the army”.

 Really?

So when you go to a “career day” or a “college fair” at a high school, it’s a chimera – nothing but booth after booth of military recruiters stretching from wall to wall?

High school kids?  Anyone know about this?

Lydia Howell, host/producer of CATALYST:politics & culture on KFAI Radio

Hm.  Big charges. 

Worth looking into.

Jay Reding – a public affairs blogger who should get ten times his traffic (whatever he gets now) – has relaunched Jay Reding.com after recovering from some technical glitches.

That’s the good news.

The merely-fair-to-middlin’ news? 

There’s also an incredibly geeky and equally obscure sci-fi reference somewhere in this template. See if you can find it…

Homey don’t play ‘dat.

But welcome back, Jay.  We got a ton of work to do.

Celebrities and the cultural clamor they bring are pretty foreign to the Twin Cities.  And most of the people that’ve passed for “celebs” around here in the past twenty years have been pretty low-key; Prince is sequestered in his estate in Chanhassen when he’s not in LA; a few Hollywood B-listers live in Stillwater precisely to lay low (not that Emilio Estevez needs to lay all that much lower); most of the musicians that mattered moved to New York or LA or Austin years ago (and the rest aren’t doing much music anymore). The biggest celebrity I’ve run into lately, except via the radio show, is Josh Hartnett’s mom, who was a guidance counselor at one of my kids’ schools.

Oh, and…well, there’s one more, although Ed doesn’t quite tell the story:

Living in Minneapolis and traveling mostly to DC or Orange County, though, I haven’t seen any that I recall. So I was a little surprised to see Steve Tyler of Aerosmith coming through the security checkpoint with me here in Reno. It took me a couple of moments to be sure of it, but it’s pretty difficult to confuse him with anyone else.

Many of the women in the terminal were also pleasantly surprised to see him as well. They called out greetings to him, ignoring the woman with whom he was traveling. After a few minutes of that, I can imagine it gets old for both Tyler and his companion. He’s still somewhere in my terminal as I write this, but people have returned to the slot machines and have left the pair alone.

“I can imagine…”.  Hah.

Hanging out with Ed in the Twin Cities is like partying with Lindsay Lohan.  Everyone knows the guy.  Which is great when you want to jump the ropeline at Doolittle’s after the show, but the paparazzi’ll kill you eventually.

At least, if Twin Cities’ college student Andrea Jackley, as evidenced in this Strib op-ed, is any evidence.

Last Friday, former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The award denotes a shared effort in diagnosing (and proving) global warming and bringing the pending environmental disaster to the attention of the world as one of the greatest challenges ever known to the human race.

And/or denotes the most amazing marketing effort for totalitarianism in the history of the world…

Nobel prizes are not meant to be political,

The Nobel Peace Prize nearly pure, distilled politics.

but nevertheless speak volumes [AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAGH! – Ed.] in terms of public opinion.

Among Norwegian academics? Perhaps.

And this year, as it always does, the award spurred controversy. Is the Norwegian Nobel Committee trying to criticize the Bush administration and its policies? Not really.

Hm.  Interesting conclusion.  Care to elaborate?  I’d like to see the carefully-honed reasoning that led to this rather sweeping – and groaningly implausible – observation.

Are they trying to tell us what to think?

Well yes, actually. The committee made its message quite clear: “By awarding the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby reduce the threat to the security of mankind,” said Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjøs.

In other words, the Nobel academics have decided what’s good for the rest of us, and want to do their bit to give an American patrician carte blanche to run the nation and the world.

No, Andrea.  Nothing political about that.

As a full-time college student burdened by two jobs, I’m completely immersed in my own busy life. I’m not sure what I was wearing yesterday, let alone what’s going on in the steadily changing world of politics.

[Aside:  So naturally, the Strib gives you an op-ed slot.  I guess it’s no worse than Susan Lenfestey]

But in an America deeply, and quite publicly, divided by issues ranging from war to health care to — of course — climate change, I am acutely aware of the floundering patriotism, national pride and participation of younger generations. But can you blame us?

As a group?  No.  Just about every generation – at least, the generations anyone notices (mine, a demographic shadow, slipped through while everyone else was barbering about the Baby Boomers) – goes through a bout of narcissism, solipsism, and self-adulation; a period where it is the center of the world (and for the Baby Boomers, it’s never ended).

There is a constant deluge of reports in the media about how poorly the world thinks of Americans and how often our government lies to us…The past six years have done immeasurable harm to our nation’s foreign relations.

Which is why Sweden and Austria are swamped with immigrants, and lines of Indian and Saudi and Dutch are queued up to go to schools, apply for our jobs, and raise their families in Norway.

In a world becoming more and more closely linked on a daily basis, economically and socially, a cavalier and autocratic attitude is a luxury not even a superpower can afford. Contrary to what some of our politicians may think, America is no longer the stag leading the herd as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Ding.

And so Ms. Jackley would prefer a leader who would, like Jimmy Carter, lead America to become a Big Sweden.

But then there’s Al, who has catapulted to almost movie-star status with his Oscars, who has appealed to the masses with giant outdoor concerts featuring acts like U2 and given his whacky, tree-hugging notions about the environment credibility. He’s all of the things college students love.

You just wanna put him in a bong and ingest the guy.  Or maybe kick him around like a hackey sack.

Seriously – what does this say about “young people” today, assuming Ms. Jackley’s right?  That the most important things in a leader are:

• They’re kinda like really cool rock stars
• The rest of the world loves them
• Oh, yeah – and all that “crushing democracy on behalf of a deeply controversial and far-from-proven theory” thing.

If Algore isn’t available, maybe Brad Pitt or Leo Decaprio could run.  Because they’re just dreamy, and they’re also interchangeable non-American in outlook!

More important, he’s an established, world-renowned figure with a fresh Nobel Peace Prize in his hands. That makes him something the rest of the world can love, too.

And goodness knows we need to get the rest of the world’s approval!

Gore is exactly what this country needs. He can appeal to younger generations and give us reason to get up and vote, and perhaps feel proud of our country again.

Andrea Jackley – people whose entire concept of politics and of this nation is as shallow and facile as yours shouldn’t be voting.  Indeed, you appear, from this glimpse into your personality, to be a prime example of why “get out the vote” efforts harm this nation.

He is someone who might be able to repair some of the damage to America’s reputation. He is someone who will, at the very least, start the ball rolling on energy independence and alternative sources. He is someone who will give us the leadership we’ve been craving. We need him desperately.

I desperately need an Advil.

…as a matter of fact, I do noodle about the odd Wikipedia article. 

I mean, all you had to do was ask.

…that internet cartooning in the Twin Cities was dead – I’m proven wrong!