HBO is going to make a movie about the Duke lacrosse case:

Variety, an entertainment industry magazine, reported that HBO plans a movie from the book “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case,” which was written by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.

The movie would explore the dynamics of racism and class that made the case a national story, Variety reported.

Yes, I just bet that the movie will star racism and classism.

This one, I have to see.

If conservatives aren’t being obligingly bigoted, frame ’em!

A group of seven GW students sent an e-mail to The Hatchet late Tuesday night admitting to hanging hundreds of controversial posters around campus early Monday morning.

The students – Adam Kokesh, freshman Yong Kwon, senior Brian Tierney, freshman Ned Goodwin, Maxine Nwigwe, Lara Masri and Amal Rammah – said their motives were misinterpreted. Students for Conservativo-Facism Awareness hung the posters in opposition to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, an event being held beginning Oct. 22.

Kokesh, a graduate student and Iraq War veteran, gained celebrity over the past year because of his vocal opposition to the war. Nwigwe and Rammah are also graduate students.

In related Saint Paul news – on the local politics discussion boards, some of the lefty commentators have been going to amazing lengths to try to show that any violence that breaks out at the GOP convention next year is equally likely to be from right wing agents provocateurs.

They were conveniently short on actual incidents.

Gisleson from Norwegianity starts out on the beam…:

The Strib is doing an instant (i.e., bullshit) poll on “Can campuses reject some speakers and still respect free speech and academic freedom? Desmond Tutu was not invited to speak at the University of St. Thomas, apparently because of some past statements.”

Because, of course, matters of integrity and principle are best decided by unscientific polls, which is why the vote is currently deadlocked even though this is, morally, and open and shut case.

True.  Although I don’t know that anyone, even the Strib, is pretending to “decide” this issue so much as “troll public opinion”. 

But then he swerves into the bridge abutment:

Desmond Tutu is not a terrorist. He is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Yes.  And as we all know, being a Nobel Peace Prize winner means you could never be a terrorist (or even a worthless dictator-coddling thug, or merely utterly useless).

And seriously – who’s called Tutu a terrorist?  Anyone?

Or is this just another straw-peace-prize-winning-man?

Last spring, I wrote about the allegations that former St. Paul School Board president, and at that time sitting member, Al Oertwig, had used a computer at a local university library to view kiddie pr0n.

The Saint Paul Police have, at long last, officially cleared Oertwig of any wrongdoing.

Police have cleared former St. Paul school board member Al Oertwig of looking at child pornography at a university library computer, though the investigation concluded there was adult porn on the computer.

Oertwig, who had been St. Paul’s longest-serving school board member, resigned in the midst of the investigation, which began in the spring. Oertwig faces no criminal charges.

A St. Paul police sergeant filed his final report on the matter Thursday, closing the case and declaring the allegations unfounded.

From the beginning, Oertwig proclaimed his innocence in the child porn allegation but said he stepped down to avoid a distraction for the district.

“You see now it’s been closed. There was nothing there,” Oertwig, 62, said Monday. “There is no child pornography involved, and it is time to focus on my lifelong career on the school board.”

While I disagreed with Oertwig vocally and intensely on many issues – indeed, nearly every possible issue – it is good to see that he’s been cleared of this charge.

The word Chad is looking for is “carbonated battery drippings”. 

Paul Schmelzer – the MinMon’s best reporter (Eric Black seems to be more of an independent than a staffer, hence the distinction) – notes the larger story behind the flap that surfaced in this post:

No hat tips from the Strib: Big ups to City Pages for last week’s bona fide scoop on the University of St. Thomas/Desmond Tutu flap. It’s spawned reports on blogs and in the corporate media alike, but CP staffer Paul Demko isn’t feeling the love. He says the Star Tribune “simply stole the scoop” without crediting the altweekly and has been emailing blogs to get its props. If it makes you feel better, CP, it happens to us all the time.

Why, yes.

It’s really pretty common.

I pondered writing a piece about Barack Obama’s thunderous evangelism over the weekend. 

I really couldn’t come up with anything much more profound than “So all of you people who dinged on Bush for “violating the separation of church and state” – here y’go!  Prove you’re not a bunch of callow hypocrites!”.

Nah.  It feels like running up the same stairs, over and over, after a while, trying to write about the hypocrisy of the leftymedia.  And there are better people to tackle that sort of argument.

Like Kouba:

I say good for [Obama and his faith]. But it wasn’t more than a nanosecond or two before I thought back to Michele Bachmann’s appearance at the Living Word church a year ago. Her remarks kicked up a cloud of dust as her opponents howled about the separation of church and state, and the dangers of Theocracy.

In their endorsement of Patty Wetterling, the Star Tribune said this:

Bachmann has campaigned on broad strokes of low taxes and patriotic ideals. But her career in the Minnesota Senate was built on the narrowest of agendas, chiefly injecting her religious values into the public sphere. Her recent testimony to a Brooklyn Park congregation that God called her to run for Congress — and win — is an embarrassment, and despite her polish, she is surprisingly shallow on national issues.

An embarrassment. Uh-huh. Well, I now sit back and await a Strib editorial decrying Obama’s remarks this weekend as an embarrassment.

Waiting, waiting…. still waiting…

Bring a sleeping bag. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for people being open – indeed, enthusiastic – about their faith. 

I’d just like all the Obama supporters (and Hillary! supporters) who dinged Bush, Bachmann and any other conservative for exactly the same things that Obama said to take a step forward and ‘splain themselves.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but notice this.

If Red – she of the hilarious, manifold obsessions – and this person were to meet…:

A convent, 20 miles away from my house, with their own llamas. They harvest the wool. They spin the wool. They dye the wool. Then they sell the yarn. THEY SELL THE YARN!!! Nun spun wool, I couldn’t make this sh*t up if I tried! Well, I made up the name, because “nun spun wool” is just too perfect of a name…but that’s another story.

ANYWAY, so earlier this week I gave a shout out to the good nuns at the convent. You can’t just send them and e-mail. You have to actually call. I hate talking on the phone. I HATE calling people on the phone. It goes back to my fear of ordering pizza. But I overcame my fear for the yarn. For the sake of the yarn folks. The lady I talked to (Sr. Schwarzenflugenflagenfluagel or something like that) told me she only had a little in stock because she spins it up as they need it, but that she could spin me some if she knew what I wanted.

SHE IS GOING TO CUSTOM SPIN MY YARN!!! I’m thinking at this point that it’s going to be like a bajamillion dollars or something. Nope, they sell it by the ounce, and it’s only $2.00 an ounce. Which makes me feel like a drug dealer…with nuns…and yarn…but like a drug dealer nonetheless.

All of this to say, yesterday I went out to the convent and hung out with the head spinner. Not the HEAD spinner. The head SPINNER. You have to put the right emphasis on the right word. She let me play with the llamas. She let me touch ALL of the wool. She showed me the whole process and I got a back stage tour of the convent. It totally rocked. I bought all of the yarn she had on hand, and ordered enough to keep her busy until the second coming of Christ.

As I was leaving I asked her if she ever taught people how to spin. She said they have retreats every year, but this year they didn’t have a place to do it so she didn’t know if it was going to happen. I volunteered my house. She accepted my offer. So in January I’m going to have a house full of nuns who will teach me how to spin my own yarn. I’m so freeking excited I could actually spit back at the llamas!!!!

I know I’ve joked about becoming a nun at various points in my life. But had I known there was a convent where they played with llamas and knit and spun yarn all day I would have likely followed through with it by now.

…would the combined levels of obsession open a rift in the time/space continuum that would alter the state of matter?

Just curious.

Leo Pusatieri – whose son recently got back from Iraq – has been on top of the Army’s attempt to short the returning “Red Bulls” on educational benefits.

And he’s got an update:

After raising a stink with Minnesota Representative Dettmer, Congressman Bachmann’s office, Senator Norm Coleman’s office, the Minnesota Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and the United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs, I believe that the ball is truly starting to roll…

Read the whole thing.

Yes, I watched it about 500 times over the weekend.

Not sure why.

Andy Aplikowki – of Residual Forces and True North – has had a death in the family.

Condolences, hopes/prayers/karmic invocations and the whole works to the MOB Mayor’s family.

(Via KAR)

I’m a relatively rare critter; a conservative who lives in the inner city.  We’ve discussed this before in this blog; there are a lot of things I like about living in Saint Paul.  And there are a lot of things about life in the ‘burbs that I dislike enough to have made the decision fairly simple. 

For me.

On the other hand, I can see why people live in the subs.  And – unlike both liberal new-urbanist utopians who want to change land-use policy to force people back into the city, and urban hipsters who hate the ‘burbs with a diamond-like intensity, and conservatives who want to chide all of us inner-city conservatives out into identical beige houses with nosy neighbors who piss and moan about the length of your grass – I figure “let people live and thrive wherever they want”.  I’m the last person who’s going to force people to do anything, except leave my house if they’re not invited.

Of course, being a conservative, even though I love Saint Paul (but largely detest its government), I find myself duking it out with a lot of “New Urbanist” twaddle (which should be no surprise, given so many of my neighbors are New Urban Twaddlists). 

For those of you who don’t follow the argument – the ideal of the New Urbanists is that the endless expansion of the cities is a bad thing, that a denser, more communitarian society is a better thing, that “sprawl” is the source of many ills, from environmental degradation to obesity to neoconservatism, and that we’d be better off as a society if more of us lived in high-density urban cores, sharing infrastructure and riding together on the bus and smelling each others’ cooking together and sharing “public space”, the better to get to know and love and live with each other.  Or something like that.   

Of course, part of the problem is that many of the so-called “benefits” of state-driven (as opposed to market-driven) “New Urbanism” – like the crime-reducing effects of “eyes on the street” in high-density housing – are buncombe.

But underneath it all was something that really got me wondering; why did New Urbanists adopt the city they did – the traditional Industrial Age city, with a defined “downtown” where most of the people worked, with closely-aligned industrial districts, to both of which people commuted by industrial mass-transit – as its model?  That type of city is a very new development in human society.  They developed in an era – and in the great scheme of things, it’s a very short era – when all of the things you needed for the kind of prosperity that could support a major city,  capital, infrastructure and information, were very centralized. 

Before the advent of mass capital and mass transit, cities developed differently; if you look at cities that first flourished before, say, 1835, they’re very different than later cities (and in the US, all of the major cities, including New York, really took off around or after 1800).  London, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin – the great cities of old Western Europe – didn’t really have a “downtown”, per se; there were certainly districts that drew the most attention – but before the Industrial revolution, they were very decentralized things (except for political power, of course); all of them still show the vestiges of their origins.  Particularly, in the era before mass transit, different crafts would coalesce around different neighborhoods in such cities; London and Paris and Basel and Amsterdam had streets and alleys and neighborhoods where the various artisans – goldsmiths, tinsmiths, bagel makers, butchers, brewers, coopers, boatbuilders, wheelrights, and every other kind of trade would live and work (and other merchants – carters and peddlers – would haul the products to other neighborhoods to try to sell for a profit). 

The industrial revolution changed that, moving the mass economy from a distributed peasant-and-artisan system to a centralized, capital-driven system with factories, central banks, and centralized information gathering and distribution.  Which coincided with the development of cities in America, giving most of them the tradition layout of a downtown (where the businesses, banks, government offices and newspapers were), some industrial and warehouse districts (where stuff got built and shipped), and clusters of residential neighborhoods where the entrepreneurs, management and workers lived, and from which they commuted to the downtown and industrial areas via mass transit – railroads, streetcars, subways, whatever.

It’s at about this point that history stopped, for the New Urbanists. 

Of course, that model of industry peaked between 40 and 100 years ago.  After World War II, the car, the TV and the telephone made it possible for people to live farther and farther out from the city core and still have big-city jobs (and connections to big-city things like “culture” and “information”).  That, combined with the native American desire for “elbow room” and a population of men and women that had just spent the best years of their lives living in barracks and riding on troop trains and being jammed into the holds of troop ships, led to the ‘burbs.

Ironically, it’s the New Urbanists who fit the caricature of the conservative – “standing astride history, yelling “stop” – when it comes to how cities work.  They want the world to roll back to about 1900, when cities had dense cores and sparse burbs, and people rode about on streetcars because it was the only practical way to get from, say, 42nd and Nicollet down to the Grain Exchange or the Milwaukee Road yards.

But events would seem to be passing them by – so it seemed to me.  And it’s always good to get some confirmation on this.

I spent a fascinating 53 minutes last night listening to this bit (warning – audio file) by  Joel Kotkin, author of “The City Everywhere: Urbanism in the 21st Century”, a critical look at the errors that drive new urbanism.

A potpourri of his points:

• There’s a reason that 95% of urban growth is on the periphery
• Nationwide, suburbs are evolving in a way similar to Hopkins (an old standalone small town that was engulfed in the ’60’s by the Minneapolis metropolis, but kept and is re-establishing its own identity as a city) or Maple Grove (which is building an ersatz urban core and identity of its own) or Bloomington (which has turned the Mall of America into a de facto downtown complete with city offices and services.
• America’s growth is being led by immigrants – and middle class immigrants are flocking to the ‘burbs.
• At the same time as this happens, the old-school cities – Boston, New York, San Francisco – have become too expensive for everyone but the wealthy; the middle class simply can’t afford to live on Manhattan or Georgetown or Nob Hill.  Cities, if current patterns hold, will eventually be white upper middle class enclaves interspersed with impoverished ghettoes.
• The urban sprawl issue will eventually be a non-issue, as the ‘burbs and exurbs (think Forest Lake) and the urban-fringe countryside (think Elko/New Prague) will start to develop as stand-alone urban areas of their own.
• Urban real estate developers who think that baby boomers are going to desert their suburban manses to live in condos downtown have “drunk the koolaid”.

The whole thing is a fascinating listen. 

Brian linked us to this excellent list of the 25 most miserable sports moments in Minnesota history.

And I figured – why not try to help y’all? Let’s try to move on, here!

I looked ’em over. And while 25 is a nice satisfying number, let’s face it; there’s plenty of flab here.

For starters, we can eliminated all the hockey “tragedies”, because, let’s face it, who cares? That lops off six of them to start with – almost 25% less wallowing in misery.

I also whacked all Gophers results because, let’s face it, they’re on our tax dime, they should be getting an education, and I didn’t go to school there anyway. Five non-hockey results – you’re 20% happier!
The ’70 Super Bowl? Cry me a friggin’ river; how many teams have never been to one? My beloved Bears are 50-50, and they waited 20 years to get to the big game. Man up, pansies.

I also whacked the ’99 NFC Championship game, because everyone with half a brain predicted the Vikes would choke. Y’know how I knew? Because Tom Barnard actually got on the Vikes’ bandwagon. Whenever Barnard gets on the bandwagon, the team is doomed. I predicted it the moment I heard Barnard make his prediction. It was over from that moment on. My heart went right on.

23. January 13, 1974 – Miami 24, Vikings 7 (Super Bowl VIII)
Miami won the coin toss (as Bud Grant later said, perhaps the turning point of the game), then scored on its first two possessions, running the Vikings out of Houston. Once again, the Vikings had made it all the way to football’s grandest stage, and failed.

22. September 28, 1984 – Cleveland 11, Twins 10
Part of the famous 1984 Twins collapse, when the team went into the final week of the season tied for the AL West lead, then lost six straight to end the season. This one was the day after the famous Jamie Quirk game, when Ron Davis gave up a two-out, ninth-inning home run to Quirk to lose to the Indians, in what was Quirk’s only hit that season. The Twins took a 9-0 lead in this one, then gave up seven in the seventh, followed by Ron Davis losing for the second time in as many days in the bottom of the ninth and killing any title hopes for Minnesota.

20. January 9, 1977 – Oakland 32, Vikings 14 (Super Bowl XI)
Completing the quadfecta, Fran Tarkenton threw two interceptions in the red zone, and Brent McClanahan fumbled on his way into the end zone, robbing Minnesota of points it desperately needed. It was the Vikings’ fourth Super loss in a seven-year span, a shocking total that has yet to be softened with a win.

18. January 12, 1975 – Pittsburgh 16, Vikings 6 (Super Bowl IX)
The Vikings missed a field goal, took a safety after a fumble in their own end zone, fumbled on the Steelers’ 5-yard line, lost an interception in the Steelers’ end zone… is there a pattern emerging here? Minnesota’s only points came on a blocked punt, and even then, they missed the extra point. The offense ended the day with a zero on the board and a grand total of 117 yards in the book, their third Super Bowl failure and their second in two years.

17. October 1, 1967 – Boston 5, Twins 3
The Twins went into Boston needing one win in a two-game series to clinch the AL pennant, but a seventh-inning homer by Carl Yastrzemski put that one out of reach. On Sunday, with the pennant in the balance, the Twins took a 2-0 lead going into the bottom of the sixth. Dean Chance – who won twenty that year – gave up four singles and a fielder’s choice, Minnesota went behind 5-2, and couldn’t close the gap farther than 5-3. The Twins lost the final three games that year, when one win in any of them would have at least tied them for the title, and one win in the last two would have given them the pennant and the World Series berth.

11. October 6, 2004 – New York 7, Twins 6 (Game 2, ALDS)
Torii Hunter homered in the top of the 12th to give the Twins a 6-5 lead, putting Minnesota on the verge of heading back to Minneapolis with a 2-0 series lead. But Joe Nathan, entering his third inning of work, walked Miguel Cairo and Derek Jeter, then allowed a double to A-Rod and a sacrifice fly from Hideki Matsui to lose it. It was always an uphill battle to beat the Yankees, and so this one felt like Ivan Drago coming off the canvas to knock Rocky out for good.

10. October 9, 2004 – New York 6, Twins 5 (Game 4, ALDS)
The Twins, fighting to keep the series alive for a fifth and deciding game, led 5-1 with just six outs to go. Enter super-setup guy Juan Rincon. Five batters later, Ruben Sierra was circling the bases with a game-tying three-run homer; the Yankees would win it in the 11th when Kyle Lohse wild-pitched A-Rod home. Another Ivan Drago moment, and the occasion of the famous Juan Rincon quote, “Nobody wants to be in my pants right now.”

8. October 13, 2002 – Anaheim 13, Twins 5 (Game 5, ALCS)
Struggling uphill against a red-hot Angels team, the Twins took a 5-3 lead into the bottom of the seventh, hoping to send the series back to Minnesota for games 6 and 7. And then…here’s the Anaheim seventh: single, single, homer, single, single, single, walk, strikeout, single, wild pitch, single, single, hit by pitch, RBI groundout, strikeout. 10 runs, 10 hits, no errors. The Twins did just enough to give us hope, then Adam F***ing Kennedy trod on us all.

6. January 17, 1988 – Washington 17, Vikings 10 (1987 NFC Championship Game)
:56 left in the game, the Vikings had the ball on the Redskins’ 6, with fourth down and four yards to go. Wade Wilson found Darrin Nelson open in the flat – he was open, he could have waltzed in! – but Nelson dropped the pass. Washington ran out the clock, and that was the end of Minnesota’s run.

5. January 14, 2001 – New York Giants 41, Vikings 0 (2000 NFC Championship Game)
The Giants took the ball and scored. The Vikings fumbled the ensuing kickoff. The Giants scored again. It was 14-0 before the offense even got on the field. It was 34-0 at halftime. Daunte Culpepper threw three interceptions, Randy Moss yelled at everybody, and it eventually ended 41-0, an absolute butt-kicking when Vikings fans were hoping against hope to avenge the pain from just two years earlier.

3. December 28, 2003 – Arizona 18, Vikings 17
Minnesota began the year 6-0, then slumped, but had a chance to make the playoffs with a victory over the Cardinals. The Vikings led 17-6, then gave up a touchdown, failed to recover the ensuing onside kick, then took a bogus pass interference call with the game almost over. With the Vikings now up 17-12, it came down to the final play of the game, with Arizona quarterback Josh McCown heaving the ball into the end zone. Cardinals receiver Nate Poole caught the pass, but was going to land out of bounds; however, he made contact with a Vikings defender, and the referees, inconceivably, ruled that Poole had been pushed out and the catch would stand. Replays showed Poole would not have come down in bounds, but the play was un-reviewable; thirty-eight years to the day from the Drew Pearson game, the Vikings were again out of the playoffs thanks to inept officiating.

Bill Simmons called the game the worst regular-season loss in NFL history, and prompted Vikings radio guy Paul Allen’s famous call (SCREAMING the whole time): “Here it is, the season’s on the line, two receivers left and right. McCown, takes the snap, he steps up, he’s all by himself, fires into the end zone… CAUGHT! (anguished scream) TOUCHDOWN! NOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOO!”

Back to Simmons, for the final commentary: ” More importantly, that was the fourth Stomach Punch game for the Vikes in less than 30 years. Even the Sox didn’t have that many over that same span. And yet you would never see a documentary about Vikings fans, a passionate group who have to rank among the most tortured fans in sports.”

2. December 28, 1975 – Dallas 17, Vikings 14 (NFC Divisional Playoff)
Perhaps the greatest of all of the Bud Grant Vikings teams, and it was defeated by blatant pass interference. Trailing 14-10, Dallas drove to midfield, then Roger Staubach launched a pass downfield for Drew Pearson, who pushed Vikings cornerback Nate Wright to the ground, then caught the ball on his hip – his hip! – and waltzed into the end zone. This play coined the term “Hail Mary,” and – I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here – was the worst call by an official in the history of organized team sports. The ’75 Vikings were the NFL’s best team, and could have been the team to end the team’s Super curse. Instead, we got a new football term, and more heartache.

Now, that’s not 25 events – that’s only 12!

Which is a whole lot better, isn’t it?

And not nearly as bad as being a Bears or Cubs fan, is it?

Suck it up.

(Via Saint @ Fraters)

…without lots of photos and the ability to indulge a major obsession?

As usual, ask Sheila.

I have spent most of the past four months biking to and from work.  I’ve loved it; it’s a great way to kick off the morning; a little fresh air, a vigorous workout, a few existential threats to focus the mind. 

But since the kids have been to school, it’s been more of a twice a week pleasure that I snatch if everything goes well with getting kids up and to school; if it’s warm enough for Bun to bike, and Zam actually gets out the door and walking or skateboarding on time. 

When I can’t bike, I usually take the bus.  But that stinks during the school year, since there are exactly three options for the bus that runs down my street; one that I can catch and get to work half an hour early, if everyone is out the door and moving five minutes ahead of normal, which I make about 10% of the time; one that gets me to work in plenty of time (even to stop at the coffee shop), if everything goes well, which is about 80%; one that gets me there 10 minutes late.  Or I drive, and pay for parking.

This isn’t really intended to be a trip through my domestic life; there’s a point here.  Whenever I hear urban transit activists extol the virtues of biking to work or mass transit as viable options, I try to find out; do they have kids? 

Anecdotally, most seem not to.  And it shows. 

On a regional politics discussion forum, one of the contributors frequently posts reviews of the various bus rides and routes she takes, taking some pride in her ability to get to places in (relatively) little time.  Which makes for interesting reading, and even more interesting speculation; if she took an hour and forty minutes to get from her house to a job, using three transfers, how would get get a kid to a doctor appointment?  How would she pick her kid up if he/she got sick at school?  How does she get home in time to help out with homework?

Simple.  She doesn’t.  No kids in the picture.

I’m not saying that none of the New Urban utopianists don’t have any answers.  I’m just completely bumfuzzled to think of what they’d be.

Paul Demko wrote me:

Hey Mitch,

I was going to leave a comment on the blog, but it seems you have to login or somesuch.

Yeah.  Notice how little spam I have here lately?

But a couple of things: CP broke this story and it would be nice if you linked to the piece by Matt Snyders rather than the strib (which simply stole it without attribution).

Duly noted.

Secondly where has Tutu compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Hitler’s treatment of jews? You allude to this, but don’t point to any source. I’ve seen this assertion elsewhere, but am  yet to see any proof of it. I’m not saying it’s inaccurate, but i’m curious to see some proof.

This piece in Ha’aretz is as good a recap as I’ve seen – showing both the ambiguity of Tutu’s statement, and the lack of forgiveness of ambiguity that many Jews feel about the issue.

This looks more like an ad than a news story…:

BankIntroductions.com, a Canadian company that specializes in global banking strategies and currency consulting, is advising clients that the amero may be the currency of North America within the next 10 years.

“The amero would compete against other regional currency blocks,” BankIntroductions.com says. “At present, with the Canadian dollar approaching par, more talk for an amero currency unit will become popular in Canada.”

File that under “jumping while the jumping is good?”

The company says that with the successful implementation of NAFTA, “the one dragging component for the amero will be Mexico, but in time this will change.”

Since there’s a case in current events for a strong Canadian dollar (it’s strong, duh), the “Amero” is plausible, if not believable.

But Mexico not dragging the rest of the continent? Without massive immigration reform forcing Mexico to reform itself from top to bottom?

When unicorns prance along the top of the fence.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I The Opening Act The First Team – John, Brian and Chad – or some combination thereof – will seize the reins and kick things off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will be in next, from 1-3.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will do the Minnesota voodoo they do 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!

Do you see reporting like this in the Sorosphere?

Or this?

I think not.

MDE reports that Rich Stanek isn’t going to run for Jim Ramstad’s 3rd CD seat.

Stanek, the Henco sheriff, would have made a great congressional representative – but would have had to spend a lot of time and effort fighting off recycled palaver over his past racist remarks and actions (for which he’s worked harder than anyone I know if in the public eye to atone, and for which even the crypto-maoist City Pages has (grudgingly) declared him rehabilitated – not that any of that matters to the local media).

He leaves behind a decent field of solid conservatives.

More – much, much more – on this race over the next 11 months.

Seven posts this morning. Granted, two (the X-wing and the Twenty Years Ago bit) were written over the weekend and banked for today, but that’s still five (other than this one).

All in about 90 minutes.

I do love having a computer in the house again.

Ed points us to this story, where a bunch of BDS-addled cretins counterprotested…

…a bunch of daycare kids:

“What an opportunity this is for our children,” center director Liz Burkhard said while herding children ages 4 to 6 into a compact, orderly row behind the yellow police tape lining Stony Battery at Church Street.

One group of protesters quickly descended on the happy cluster, however, chanting and singing their own songs to drown out the children’s voices.

“Stop brainwashing children to support a president who doesn’t deserve our support,” one man yelled through a bullhorn.

Now, let’s reiterate: I’m a greater proponent of free speech than any of my critics.  Always.

But this story touches on something in a piece I’m writing for Monday, about the self-centered narcissism that’s behind so many “protesters” – how their ends justify their means, no matter who they crap on in the process.

Ed said:

When children greet a President, they’re not endorsing policy or campaigning for his vote. They sang because of the office, not the person. Whomever would scream at children through bullhorns to promote their own hatred and obsession really needs some psychiatric care. Can you imagine how these children felt when a group of adults descended on them, screaming and shouting through bullhorns?

Scared out of their minds, I bet.

But no matter; to the BDS-addled “protester”, it’s all about them.  As Katherine Kersten pointed out earlier this week, indeed, it’s a pathology of some academic interest:

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements…In his psychological studies of ’60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism — the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.

Not surprisingly, Lichter says, protesters often latched onto high-sounding motives to justify their self-absorbed actions. “You can’t take expressions of love for humanity at face value,” he explains. “They can serve as cover for aggressive feelings and tendencies.

“It’s all about meeeeeeeeeeeeee”

Scumbags.

So why did Eric Black – the dean of Minnesota political reporters – jump on what turned out to be the Media Matters bandwagon on the phony “Rush Limbaugh Insults the Troops” fiction?

Honest mistake, fueled by (admitted) bias?  Too much writing, not enough analyzing?  Leash being yanked?

Kouba at TVM wonders too:

Last Friday on his website, Eric Black had a post where he passed along, with an uncritical eye, the blast from Media Matters about its trumped up attack of Rush Limbaugh. Worse, in the second paragraph he referred to Jeff Fecke’s musings on the matter. A bit like Theodosius declaring Alaric an authority on Roman culture. [Two minute penalty; piling on! Not inaccurate – just piling on – Ed.]
The post made me raise at least 1.5 eyebrows, for Mr. Black is smart enough not to accept at face value a broadside against Republicans from a partisan outfit like Media Matters.

That the anti-war Left would grasp at such a weak excuse to try and take some attention away from MoveOn’s blunder with its smear of Gen. Petraeus should be a clue they need a telescope to see the moral high ground.

And…

Mr. Black is too experienced a journalist to carry water for Media Matters, and now that he’s waded out into the blogosphere, this episode should highlight the fact there are creatures swimming around with sharp teeth that don’t play as fair as he does.

Black wrote a correction – sort of:

The essence of Limbaugh’s defense/rebuttal (which he delivered, in high dudgeon on the next day’s show after the Media Matters piece had led to Limbaugh being criticized by several congressmen and senators) is that the full text of the show in which he used the term “phony soldiers” proves that he was referring to only one soldier, Jesse MacBeth, who actually was a phony.

MacBeth claimed to have been an Army Ranger, an Iraq vet, and to have witnessed atrocities. But all of those statements were lies. MacBeth stands convicted of making false statements.

Media Matters original piece attacking Limbaugh made no reference to MacBeth or to the possibility that Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” remark had been a reference to MacBeth. Limbaugh argues that any fair-minded person listening to the whole broadcast would have understood that he was referring to MacBeth and that Media Matters is guilty of a willful smear.

With an asterisk:

Here’s problem #1:

“Phony soldiers” occurs during a Limbaugh exchange with a caller. The caller complains that the media:

“never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.”

That’s when Limbaugh interjects “the phony soldiers.” At that moment, it certainly seems that both he and the caller are referring to soldiers and veterans who oppose the war. Jesse MacBeth has not been mentioned and is not part of the context.

Yeah, talk radio’s a funny thing. It’s always your rough draft, your first take (unless you’re on NPR, doing one of their highly scripted shows).  If one is sympathetically inclined toward Limbaugh, one will probably assume he meant the slew of soldiers thrown up in front of the media by one anti-war group or another that later turned out to by phony.  If not, you might assume he’s talking about all anti-war soldiers.

But when one thinks of (and refers to) Media Matters as a “media watchdog group” rather than a “leftist propaganda mill”, it’s a pretty big chink in your chain of informational evidence.

It’d be interesting to have Mr. Black on the show again; we have a lot to talk about…

Fascism in America took a shot to the gut last year, when the DC Circuit struck down Washington DC’s gun ban on Second Amendment grounds.

Now, the SCOTUS may take up the appeal.

See if you can tell what side the AP’s on?

Both sides uneasy: Deep inside Washington’s police headquarters is a library with floor-to-ceiling racks displaying 1,700 guns, from a World War II-era rifle to rows of automatic pistols.

Most of the weapons, used now for forensic research, were seized under a 31-year-old law in the nation’s capital that bars handgun ownership for nearly everyone except law enforcement.

But that ban was struck down by a federal appeals court this year, and now the District of Columbia is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in.

The writer doesn’t favor us with an explanation of what the stacks of guns seized from criminals have to do with the constitutional rights of the law-abiding, of course.

The writer is also historically illiterate:

A far-reaching case: The case represents the first time a federal appeals court struck down a gun-control law on the ground that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to own guns. Up to now, courts have generally interpreted the amendment to protect only the collective right of states to maintain militias.

This is either misleading or ignorant.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment very rarely at all – certainly not enough to say the court has “generally” done anything.  The most recent significant case was US v Miller in 1939, which set a precedent that was tortured into a “collective rights” interpretation over the past forty years.  Before that, other than US v. Cruikshank and Presser v. Illinois, in 1876 and the 1880’s (neither of which were collective rights interpretations!), the whole “individual vs. collective” thing was not even apparently a point of discussion; people apparently knew that rights “of the people” – like the First, Tenth as well as the Second – referred to the people.

If it takes the case, the Supreme Court could issue its first direct ruling on the Second Amendment in 70 years, solidifying some of the nation’s toughest gun-control laws or exposing them to a torrent of new challenges.

“It will be the biggest ruling on the Second Amendment ever,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “You get nervous when you see something with far-reaching implications.”

And one might hope they have reason to be nervous.  As even liberal  legal scholars abandon the collective rights fiction, and even the liberal media starts to let facts seep into what they’d heretofore covered with press releases from the “Brady Campaign”, gun control has been losing even more traction.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), which believes it might have an advantage with a conservative-leaning high court, also is uneasy.

“I’d rather be on our side than on their side, given the chances, but there is always a ‘but,’ ” said Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president.

D.C. officials say they expect to learn by early November whether the Supreme Court will take the case.

Yet another reason why Bush, for all his many faults, will leave a good legacy; he may have started to restore sanity to the Supreme Court.