Governor Pawlenty vetoes the Mass Transit Subsidy Act “Transportation Bill“.

Republicans, consider yourself on notice. Screw the governor on this, and the regional alt-media will be on you like lobbyists on a Gold Card.

And we forget nothing.

Over at True North, Gary Gross writes:

This sets up an override showdown that’s likely to start Monday. The House DFL did tons of armtwisting yesterday but still couldn’t gather the 90 votes needed to override Gov. Pawlenty’s promised veto. I’m higly doubtful that they’ll be able to get the extra vote needed to override in the House.

As usual, Steve Murphy, this blogger’s best ‘Senate friend’, provided this quote:

Sen. Steve Murphy, the Red Wing DFLer who authored the bill, said the package creates jobs, fixes bridges with structural problems and provides funding for road safety.

“This is serious business,” said Murphy, DFL-Red Wing. “Lives are at stake, and in greater Minnesota hundreds of lives are at stake.”

When Al Gore left the national stage, I worried that there’d be a dearth of liberal hyperbole. At the time, I didn’t know that Steve Murphy existed. It’s obvious that Sen. Murphy more than adequately makes up for Algore’s hyperbolic rants. His quote insinuates that the GOP alternative bill wouldn’t address the needs that the DFL bill does. That’s arrogance in the first degree. It’s also wildly inaccurate.

Watch for them to claim the bill woulda prevented the crash in Cottonwood, next.

How that the NYTimes has endorsed and slimed JMac within precisely a month (note to Brian Maloney – everyone predicted this), it’s time to sort out exactly what they were thinking.
Ed notes the Times’ response to the disintegration of their story:

John McCain then holds a very polite and rather subdued press conference to deny all of the Times’ unsubstantiated gossip. How does the New York Times report this? With unbelievable hysteria:

Later in the day, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers leveled harsh criticism at The New York Times in what appeared to be a deliberate campaign strategy to wage a war with the newspaper. Mr. McCain is deeply distrusted by conservatives on a number of issues, not least because of his rapport with the news media, but he could find common ground with them in attacking a newspaper that many conservatives revile as a left-wing publication.“It was something that you would see in the National Enquirer, not in The New York Times,” said Steve Schmidt, a former counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney who is now a top campaign adviser to Mr. McCain.

Oh,please! First, the Times published a scurrilous and poorly-sourced story that even gossip rags would have rejected, and they have the nerve to accuse McCain of declaring war? Has Bill Keller lost his mind?

Keller hasn’t lost his mind. He’s just started running the Times like a leftyblog!

• Big accusations, proof be damned
• When busted – slime the accusers.  Invent “vast conspiracies”, allege motivations not in evidence (“waging war”?), or just plain name-calling (participating in the left’s ongoing effort to turn “swiftboat” into a pejorative, even thought the Swift Boat Veterans ate Kerry’s lunch)

On the bright side, all you Times subscribers – you can now switch to the Huffpo.  It’s cheaper.

Today’s Hot Gear Friday feature (with a nod to Anti-Strib’s Hot Chick Friday only with, like, gear instead of chicks – although please, guys – Barbara Eden? Yeep) is the Browning HP35.

A first-cousin of the legendary Colt M1911A1, this 1935 design was the standard pistol of most British Commonwealth armies from the end of World War II (it was served with Britain’s paratroopers and commandos during the war), and the standard sidearm of the SAS’ hostage rescue teams until, reportedly, quite recently.

I never much liked 9mm handguns – but the Hi-Power is perhaps the one handgun in the world that fits my hand perfectly and points like no other I’ve ever shot, including the M1911. They’re not cheap, these days, but ooooh nellie, I tell ya – one of these next tax refunds…

On Wednesday, I related a rumor that the Coleman administration planned to institute a supplemental sales tax during the week of the GOP Convention.

My City Council representative in the Fourth Ward is Russ Stark. I agree with him, as I did with his predecessor Jay Benanav, about .003% of the time on actual issues – but I’ll give credit where it’s due; I emailed him yesterday morning about the rumor of the Spite Tax, and I got a reply from his staffer within two hours, and from Stark himself an hour or two later. Whatever my disagreements with Stark on policy, I’ll give him points for constituent service so far (as, to be fair – to me – I did in turn with Benanav, whose staff was unfailingly courteous, even knowing as they did that I was a pretty harsh critic of their boss).

As I haven’t heard any specifics of such a proposal, only rumors, I’m
going to inquire further about this. I can’t see how you could
temporarily raise the tax rate for these items even if you wanted to.

While the idea of a Spite Tax against Republican conventiongoers doesn’t seem entirely out of character for an administration and council that is dominated by ultra-liberals that actually passed a resolution welcoming demonstrators, the rumor doesn’t entirely pass the stink test, either.

I’ll keep you posted.

…not even David Cassidy in his prime had fans that were this friggin’ bizarre:

Yes, just a day before a debate in Texas, Sen. Barack Obama has a head cold.

And about a half-hour into a speech here, the Illinois Democrat announced that he had to take a quick break. “Gotta blow my nose here for a second,” Obama said.

Out came a Kleenex (or perhaps it was a hankie), and he wiped his nose.

The near-capacity audience at the Reunion Arena, which his campaign said totaled 17,000, broke out in a slightly awkward applause.

Heaven help Western Civilization if he comes down with jock itch on the trail.

…to Sheila, whose personal plans are taking a big swerve:

Mr. Macedonia-Obama Man has emailed me. Here is what he writes:

You know … I was going to ask you to marry me, but now that I have found out how snarky you can be … the wedding is off!

I bet it was really Christo.

An emailer wrote me yesterday, wondering (at that point) if the driver in the tragic bus crash in Cottonwood, MN, who’d given a Hispanic name at her arrest – was an illegal alien.

I’m always loathe to assume that; most Latin-Americans are perfectly legal.  And I don’t want to succumb to bashing illegal immigrants for every ill that faces this country, since the precedents for that sort of thing in the past 100 years are pretty bad.

But of course, it’d seem the emailer was right.   Lassie at True North relates the Fox9 story:

Fox Nine News confirmed late this afternoon what many have suspected, but some local media still aren’t noting:

Authorities have confirmed that the driver of the van that struck the school bus that killed 4 students on Tuesday is an illegal alien.

Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement are checking to see where she came from and how long she’s been in Minnesota. FOX 9 has also learned that the name she gave to police, Alainiss Morales, is an alias.

A memorial fund is set up:

Memorial Fund for Families of Bus Crash Victims
United Southwest Bank
P.O. Box 288
Cottonwood, MN 56229

As Michelle Malkin noted, open borders and sanctuary cities have bloody consequences. Contact your legislators.

Of course, perfectly-legal Americans also commit stupid crimes with cars; thousands of Americans die every year, most of them killed by other legal Americans (or themselves) via any variety of stupid traffic tricks.

But it was an illegal alien who had the accident in Cottonwood.  And there are four families who might not be dealing with their childrens’ deaths if one of those illegals had been kept out of the US today.

Second law of the major media when covering politics; the Republican that acts the most like a Democrat (and gives the best interviews) gets treated well.

First law:  When that Republican actually has to compete with a Democrat, disregard the Second Law.

As I predicted the moment Mac became the front-runner, the Times has broken out the slime against McCain.  Read it for yourself; past the resurrection of “The Keating Five” as an issue, it’s thin gruel as smear jobs go.

Especially given what Ed notes:

Well, you have to read past the rehash of the Keating Five scandal of the mid-1980s, past a strange accusation involving McCain’s use of direct flights from Washington to Phoenix, and past his crusade to clean up Washington through the BCRA (which I adamantly opposed and still do) to get to the Slimes’ sourcing. It turns out that they talked to two anonymous former staffers — neither of whom allege that the relationship actually became romantic — and who describe themselves as disgruntled.

Great sourcing there, guys. Way to corroborate a non-story. I guess Lucy Ramirez must have been hard to find this time around.

Gateway Pundit adds:

f there was ever a moment that clarifies the grotesque bias of the media leading New York Times it is this moment.
Their fair-haired Republican is the front runner for President. And, suddenly after years of kissie-kissie there appears a Maverick hit piece.
The love affair is over.
Done.

And, there’s only one way for the Maverick to bring back that loving feeling…

…Lose in November.

That, indeed, is the Prime Directive of media coverage of Republicans; the only good one is a retired one.

UPDATE AND BUMP:  Via Ed – the Times report appears to be baked wind.  John Weaver – a former top Mac aide – states to the WaPo:

“The New York Times asked for a formal interview and I said no and asked for written questions. The Times knew of my meeting with Ms. Iseman, from sources they didn’t identify to me, and asked me about that meeting. I did not inform Senator McCain that I asked for a meeting with Ms. Iseman.

Her comments, which had gotten back to some of us, that she had strong ties to the Commerce Committee and his staff were wrong and harmful and I so informed her and asked her to stop with these comments and to not be involved in the campaign. Nothing more and nothing less.

I responded to the Times on the record about a meeting they already knew about. The campaign received a copy of my response to the Times the same day, which was in late December.

In other words, Ms. Iseman’s claims – the basis for the most “damning” part of the Times’ story – was a bit of influence-peddling gone awry.

Ed:

Iseman had bragged about her connections to the committee in order to expand her client list. Weaver heard about it and told her to knock it off, or she’d get frozen out. Lobbyists collect clients by making themselves appear influential, and apparently Iseman got a little too hyperbolic about her connections.

That’s the extent of the supposed “intervention” — and the Times knew it.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Times – the unofficial paper of record of the party of Marc Rich, of Harry Thomasson, of Senator and Mrs. Daschle – respond to this.  To say nothing of the babbling hordes of the Sorosphere.

As people stay home and watch DVDs on big-honkin’-screen TVs, the low-budget second-run movie house is gradually going the way of the eight-track.

The latest to spiral down the drain – the Rosevillie 4.

And that hurts:

Tuesday night movies at Roseville 4 Theatre — where the usual $2 admission is cut in half — will be gone soon because the theater is closing to accommodate the planned expansion of the adjacent Rainbow Foods grocery store.

Its exit — expected as early as March 31 — will leave one bargain theater in the east metro as the standard price of seeing a movie tops $8.

Owners of the Roseville 4 couldn’t find a new location that offered enough space at lease rates they could afford, said theater manager Barb Guetschoff. “I have a lot of customers who are really angry,” she said.

I’d be one of ’em.  The Roseville was always the kind of place where a guy could afford to take the kids, and maybe a few of their friends, to see a movie for under $20, with the concessions – or sneak away for a cheap, low-impact evening out.

Blah.

I’ve commented in the past about the futility of bureaucratic approaches to spree killers like last week’s tragic – and preventable – shooting at Northern Illinois University.

My comments have been largely caustic, because the bureaucratic solutions – “lockdowns”, communications (NIU, like Virginia Tech, sent out emails to students). My attitude about bureaucratic responses is a matter of record.

Joe Olson – professor of law at Hamline University and the avatar of Minnesota’s second amendment movement – has a more systematic approach.

Oh, no worries – the conclusions are exactly the same:

As the latest cycle moves to the planning phase — Connecticut hopes to have its latest reactive conference on school safety in March — expect efforts to focus on measures that will be as effective in stopping armed killers as the NIU e-mails were. It won’t dawn on conferees that rampages don’t occur at state police barracks, National Guard armories or military bases. Cowardly killers are nuts, but they’re not crazy enough to go where their victims might be armed.

Acknowledging that would require policymakers and educators to admit gun control in America has been wrong-headed, lethally so. So rather than consider conceal-carry laws for professors, ROTC students and others with gun training, they will reaffirm their no-gun policies, take “meaningful action to prevent gun violence” that doesn’t rise to the level of window-dressing and declare the nation’s campuses safe again. Until the next “disturbed individual” goes on a rampage.

Read, as they say, the whole goldurn thing.

Kouba, after sitting through a very, very long Obamatory, ponders:

Abraham asked God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if 10 righteous people could be found there, and that after talking God down from fifty. I’d bet my lunch money you couldn’t find 10 people in that audience who really know what Obama’s health care “plan” is. I’d bet most of those people assume that when Obama talks about Guaranteed eligibility, Comprehensive benefits, Affordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles, they think they won’t notice much change in their own health care, they just assume it will be cheaper. Somehow. On the way to the billing office, they’ll just stop by the money tree and pick off a few fresh, ripe bills.

I’ve wondered that about the mile-wide, inch-deep nature of awareness on the left in the past (as in this 2003 encounter with a Code Pink crone who was passionately denouncing the concealed carry bill – about which she knew absolutely nothing).

I wonder what an hour on the street in front of an Obamevent would tell us?

No, I don’t really wonder at all.

Saint Paul – unable to balance its budget without getting an eternal subsidy from the parts of the state that aren’t saddled with bills from decades of Tic management – is a perennial financial mess.

The Republican National Convention, coming to town in September, should be a financial windfall for an awful lot of regional – not just Saint Paul – merchants, restauranteurs and hoteliers.  Saint Paul’s city government certainly doesn’t mind the extra traffic coming to town, although we know where the Gang of Five’s hearts really are.

But I digress.  With the “Gang of Five” in office, the RNC would also seem to be a big ripe suck for a city administration that never saw a tax it didn’t like.

St. Paulicy, as usual, has the story:

The plan is apparently to increase the food and/or drink tax during the time of the RNC convention.  While Mayor Coleman’s heart will be in Denver – he realizes there will be a lot of fat cats and big wallets right here in the Capitol City when the RNC rolls into town.

As the city looks at a tight budget, SPicy can imagine how this idea emerged.

“We really don’t like the RNC – but there are plenty of rich Republicans.  Like us Democrats, they like to drink too.  They like to eat, albeit better than we do.  And since there is not a lot in the way of an expanded tax base in Saint Paul – the city really needs to find some more money.”

Bingo

St. Paul raises the drink and food tax just for the week of the convention.  When the evil Republicans leave – things go back to normal.  What’s left behind is free money.  It’s clean and easy.  No one gets hurt – and the GOP won’t miss the extra ½ percent.

On the one hand, but for a few demonstrably Republican-friendly restauranteurs and bar owners in Saint Paul, I’d be tempted to try to find a way to direct delegates and their money elsewhere in the metro for their dining and lodging needs (and, ironically and hilariously, leave the city’s overtaxed hotels and food to the media and the protesters).

On the other, it’s a great warning about what awaits this nation should the Tics win in November.  Everyone who’s not a ward of the state is a target of the state!

Peg Kaplan read Nickeled and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, too.  And she liked it about as much as I did:

While I would never argue that people who earn hourly wages at Wal-Mart, fill orders at Wendy’s or clean rooms at Hampton Inn don’t have serious struggles, Ms. Ehrenreich’s book was a joke.  Part of her undercover stint took place in my hometown, Minneapolis.  Thus, it was easy to see that the author didn’t really want to be successful.  She never tried to improve her positions, get superior housing, bargain for better anything at all.  She was surly and rude to most with whom she met – be it co-workers, superiors or clerks where she was trying to find decent but inexpensive housing. 

Beyond that?  My problem with Ehrenreich’s book was that while she may have had some minimum wage jobs, she actually lived like an upper-middle-class person who’d put on a “poor” costume and was acting, as Peg noted, like a cartoon of a disadvantaged person.  Her conclusions were already set; there was never any doubt about the outcome of her experiment, and if there HAD been, her cartoonish, central-casting “poor person” behavior pretty well scuppered it. 

Which, in addition to being a pretty risible approach to a serious issue, was kind of insulting.  Early in my marriage, my wife-at-the-time and I got by on very little money, scrimped and pinched pennies and, eventually, found the opportunity to get ahead; the notion that a pampered foof like Ehrenreich thought her cartoonish experiences emblematic was nauseating.

I bring this up because Peg points us to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor, about a recent college grad who tried Ehrenreich’s experiment, in reverse:

Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., [Adam Shepard] intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading “Nickel and Dimed,” in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

He tells his story in “Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.” The book, he says, is a testament to what ordinary Americans can achieve.

Read the whole thing?  Sure, why not? 

(Via Peg at What If?)

Andy Aplikowski gets the scoop of the week, over at RezFor and True North.

The DFL plying Republicans to try to get them to override another gubernatorial tax-bill veto:

I followed a tip this evening down to Monte Carlo in downtown Minneapolis. I was told that Republican Reps. Bud Heidgerken (R) 13A & Dean Urdahl (R) 18B had dinner date with Democrat Speaker of the House Margaret Kelliher. I had earlier hinted at some detective work for the evening over at True North and lo and behold, my source was correct. There was a 3rd man who was there who I think I recognized as a possible legislator, but I am not sure, it could have been an aide, although he arrived between Urdahl & Heidgerken and when Kelliher got there.

Dinner at 7:30PM ….. well truth be told, Kelliher was a little behind time and arrived at 7:44, the boys were early.

Monte Carlo is a rather fancy establishment and the meeting was in one of the private rooms in the rear of the restaurant out of sight. My girlfriend came along on the outing. We had a meal and desert. Our tab with tip was just over $100 with 2 drinks per. No doubt the combined per diems for Bud, Dean, and Maggie were more than enough to cover their cost.

No word on whether Andy’s girlfriend paid the tab – although with this kind of scoop, hell, I’d have paid for ’em both.

I digress. Andy continues:

While we were waiting for them to arrive, I got an email from someone at the Capitol.

Andy –

Not sure who gave you your info, but here is some more accurate people to list on who is thinking of overriding the Governor.

1) Remove Abeler. He isn’t doing it. You can call his office and find out.
2) Add the following people to your list. Again, if you call/email any of them and ask, I believe each refuses to sign the veto pledge.
– Neil Peterson
– Pat Garafalo
– Larry Howes
– Mike Beard
– Dennis Ozment C
all /email anyone of them and they should confirm this unless they’ve changed their mind.

I can do one better on calling and asking if they have signed it, and let my readers know that as of 5 PM only 5 of the 49 Republicans have signed the Veto Protection Pledge and there was reported (to me) to be no Caucus pressure to do so. Also in regards to Abler, the person close to him I spoke with earlier was unable to confirm if they would support the override if the Metro Wide sales tax was removed, which was his main sticking point of initial support.

All kidding aside, great work, Andy.

And if you are a conservative in a district represented by a Republican, you need to get on the phone today and light a fire under their butts. Call, Twist arms. Put the pressure on.

For all the lumps Governor Pawlenty takes from conservatives for one stance or another (mostly wrongly, I think), in this case he’s doing what we conservatives demanded of him six years ago.

It’s time for actual conservatives to step up and cover his back with the legislature as best we can. Call. Email. Hell, storm into their offices in a fury, for all I care – but get the word across.

And as to you, in the GOP caucus? Get with the program! If you want to become a third party in this state, just keep on betraying conservative principle!

Chad the Elder, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward and JB Doubtless – rock-ribbed conservatives, Catholics and Republicans all – team up to write a scathing, but unsurprising, review of Sicko, Micheal Moore’s paeon to socialized heath care.

The three, in a rare team posting, take on Moore’s take on Cuba’s system with timing that is, given the events of the day, eerie.  Moore lauds Cuba in Sicko.  The Fraters lads?  Well…:

Fidel Castro’s island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to “give them the same care they’d give Cuban citizens.” Then he adds, dramatically: “And they did.”

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, “imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus”). What Moore doesn’t mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of “health tourism” — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that’s unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this “medical apartheid.” And in a 2004 article in Canada’s National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, “Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here.”

They also shred France…:

Moore’s most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks’ vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who’s reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he’s finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can’t have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can’t.

…and Canada…:

In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called “Dead Meat,” by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore’s movie would have you believe don’t exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he’d contacted: “As of today,” she says, “it’s a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation.”

It’s a scathing indictment.  Too bad it was written by a bunch of rock-ribbed conservatives.  You expect them to rip on Moore and on socialized medicine.

UPDATE:  Doh.  The piece was actually written by uber-liberal MTV “News” anchor and former Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder.

Not sure how I mixed that up.

Castro is resigning.

Good news, to be sure.  But, as Val Prieto points out, he’s walking out on his own time, according to his own plan, rather than being chased from Havana by a crowd of his subjects carrying guns in one hand and copies of the Constitution in the other:

I certainly don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, there is, after all, a little bit of happiness buried deep down inside because of the news, but, at the risk of sounding cliche, this is a tempest in a teacup.

We’re going to hear hopes that this is the beginning of change in Cuba. We’re going to hear arguments for the lifting of the embargo. We’re going to hear wishy washy eulogies and praise for the bearded bastard. We’re gonna hear a lot of crap today and in the next few days. Cuba experts will be coming out of the woodwork with their own particular theories and there will most certainly be editorials galore.

But at this point, it’s not a 1989 situation – where the edifice of the Communist dictatorship was smashed to pieces by an irresistible popular uprising, where attempts to control the crash ended either peacefully but decisively (Poland, Czechoslovakia) or in a hail of gunfire (Romania).

At this moment, Cuba’s change of government is a controlled crash; Castro’s had the year-plus since his illness became public knowledge to arrange an orderly transfer of power to Raoul, and to ensure that all the loose ends – like popular anger – are controlled for.

There is going to be much ado about new “freedoms” in Cuba and “changes” in policy and what not. Some are going to point to these as proof of raul’s willingness for change. But, you know what? Freedom doesnt come piecemeal. The few crumbs this “new and improved” castro regime will toss down to the Cuban people will do little to stay any true hunger for freedom.

The day there is real change in Cuba – and not a carefully choreographed one – will be the day when every single Cuban on the island is allowed to know who Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet is. When every Cuban is allowed to know exactly and truthfully why he, and so many like him, have been rotting away in putrid jail cells for years.

For fifty years, the Cuban people have been physically, mentally, spiritually, ideologically, culturally and emotionally emasculated. Today’s news is just another snip in a surreptitiously planned and meticulously orchestrated surgery.

The best we can hope for at this point?  Surgery sometimes goes awry.   Sometimes transplants get rejected.  Bad news in most cases.

Good for Cuba, in this case.

Hang in there, Val and company.

Humans have a deep-seated need to belong to something bigger.

And I’m not just talking about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, here. Bear with me – Ed and I were talking about this on the show on Saturday, and I’ve got this urge to elaborate. And we know how ugly that can get…

———-

For most of history, that “something bigger” has meant “higher powers” and “eternity” – the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, Valhalla, Nirvana, whatever. Organized religion, for much of human history, has focused (or, depending on the religion and your point of view, exploited) that human need, for good (hope, charity, Haendel and Bach) or ill. Religion is a hot topic, one way or another, for most of the organized world’s people.

And part of being “part of something bigger” also means “being against something bigger and badder and on the other side”; to Christians, it’s evil in its many forms, from Satan to temptation to what-have-you.

After the left claimed God was Dead in the late 19th century, that human impetus didn’t go away, of course. People have exploited that human desire even as they denied the Higher Power that had been its focus.

Marxism replaced God with ineluctible forces of history. Lenin turned that academic notion into a pseud-messianic crusade, an overarching “something bigger” that subsumed all of Russian (and, to his warped little mind, world) society. Stalin, a former Orthodox seminarian with a keen understanding of how people work, expanded his cult of personality to Messianic proportions – lessons the likes of Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, Idi Amin and Pol Pot (himself a former Buddhist monk) exploited. And of course, they replaced Evil with a variety of enemies – class enemies, countries, anti-cults, whomever.
Hitler learned from Lenin’s mistakes, and did him one better; rather than banning God and the thousands of years of communal tradition His worship brings along, he co-opted it. An atheist, he wrapped himself and his party in the traditions of German Lutheranism and the mythology of German Catholicism, and – more importantly – the overarching German notion of Volk. This concept is a hard one to explain to Americans – I minored in German, and I’m only familiar with its outer edges – but it’s an idea at the nexus of the German land, language and history; Blut und Boden (“Blood and Territory”) is a phrase as familiar to students of Volk as “Domini et filii et spiritus sanctus is to Catholics, something with a meaning far beyond the literal to the adherent. Volk goes well beyond folklore and tradition, and was a sort of meta-religious link to Germany’s pagan past, underpinning German life and faith and culture the way paganism is just behind the surface of Latin, African and Caribbean Catholicism.

And so rather than having to spend time and energy vanquishing thousands of years of folk tradition and religious teaching, all Hitler had to do was take advantage of it.

Volk aided Hitler in putting a Big Evil – Judaism – in front of the people, as well; the Volk tradition viewed life on the land as inherently more noble and valuable than life in the towns; it viewed town and city life as corrupt and ignoble. And it associated Jews with city life, and at its extremes blamed them for its ills and corruption. The Lutheran Church in Germany drew heavily on Volk tradition and mythology, while the Catholic Church of the day added its own level of anti-Semitism which, again, was ripe for Hitler’s picking in Germany and especially Poland.

But in all cases, in the USSR and Red China and Nazi Germany and to similar extents in fascist countries everywhere, there were Big Enemies to replace the ones they’d abolished.

———-

Ed and I talked about Michelle Obama’s “Save the Nation’s Soul” speech on the Northern Alliance show last weekend (the podcast should be up soon). We called out this statement of Mrs. Obama’s:

And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it hasn’t gotten better for regular folks. ….

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Ed’s response on the show was similar to what he wrote on his blog:

But it’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I’d look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I’ll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I’m not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

And my first reaction was similar; “Step off, ‘Chel.  My soul is between Christ and I”.

But it’s really a lot worse than rude presumption.  It’s not just that government is a lousy place to go for moral repair.  It’s that when govenrment tries to serve as a national soul, things break and people get hurt.
Fortunately, Jonah Goldberg just wrote an entire book on the subject, and the reaction to the book sparked a really great blog,  on which he writes;

Many of the tropes of a political religion/liberal fascism are evident. He exalts unity as it’s own reward. His talk of starting new and starting over often sounds like more than merely “turning the page” on the Bush-Clinton years. It sounds a bit like starting at Year Zero.

Which was the hallmark of Lenin and Mao; the past had to be wiped away (and its practitioners, real or imagined, sent to gulags) before the future could really get underway.

But what I find most intriguing is his rhetoric of destiny and “choseness.” He often makes it sound like he has been selected by forces of providence or God or simply history for this moment. He is, in Oprah’s words, “The One.” But even more interesting, he tells voters they are the ones. “This is it,” Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.” That’s pretty oracular stuff.

And…:

Such a vision is comforting because it plays upon man’s inherent desire to belong, to be protected by his fellow man and his community. “Strength in numbers” is the narcotic of all populists, the logic of all “people powered movements” as leftwing bloggers like to say (though for reasons that defy easy analysis, the left has mastered the art of casting itself as the voice of the dissidents against the oppressive, stultifying “herd mentality” even as it places the group at the top of its hierarchy of political aesthetics). This is the motivating passion behind the fascist quest for order.

Sometimes it sounds like Obama wants to talk about God’s plan when he’s talking about his own campaign for a New Order. But most times, you can see that he wants to stay on the secular side of the divide — where his white base resides — but without giving up the prophetic vision. He wants to persuade his followers, and perhaps himself, that he is elect, but he cannot do so without religious language.

There’s much more, and you should just go read it.

I get leery of the likes of Mike Huckabee (note: not “Huckajesus”.  Just…no.  Don’t) and his rhetoric – but invoking ones’ personal, transparently-visible, well-known faith (anyone who thinks Christianity has a secret agenda has been sleeping for the past 2000 years) into the White House is both limted by the Constitution and mediated by the fact that it is completely open and transparent.  Most importantly, it’s a very different thing than turning the state into its own pseudo-religion.

The latest talking point among the paranoid left in the Twin Cities is that the Saint Paul Police Department – a union operation in the third-most-liberal city in the nation’s fourth-most-liberal state – is secretly out to brutally squash leftist dissent at this September’s Republican National Convention in Saint Paul.

The local Sorosphere can be expected to, and forgiven for, doing what they’re paid to do – push lefty talking points. And Andy Birkey at the MinMon does his bit, expanding on a bit of lefty hysteria that’s been making the rounds lately:

St. Paul Police Department is requesting 230 Tasers to outfit the all of the department’s officers with the electroshock weapon, Fox 9 News reports. The SPPD will purchase the Tasers with $210,000 collected from drug raids. The St. Paul City Council will have to approve the purchase.

The purchase is expected to arrive in St. Paul just in time for the Republican National Convention prompting media speculation that the weapons are being purchased specifically for the convention. When asked by Fox 9 News whether the police will use the weapon at the convention particularly against protesters, police spokester Tom Walsh said, “Our hope is that no one will have to use any degree of force. If it becomes necessary, will that be one of the tools available to them? I suppose that’s safe to say.”

Now, the conceit among the local fringe-left is that the SPPDs is going to act as a tool of Karl Rove:

We need more of these lethal weapons when the wild and crazy protesters come to exercise their 1st Amendment Right to free speech.

Now, that’s the kind of rubbish we’ve come to expect from the local fringe left – the City government is bending over backwards, if not a little further, to make protesters welcome (in some quarters, more welcome than the delegates themselves).  The tasers are for when the “anarkids” – the trust-fund fops that are promising violence in Saint Paul next September – get violent and won’t respond to a regular arrest, but the cops don’t want to over-escalate.

If one assumes that the critics of the SPPD are completely irrational, of course, you might assume that they’re unaware of what tasers are for.

Tasers – used legally – are a step in the escalation to dealing with a violent suspect that needs to be restrained for the public’s and, often, their own safety.  They are used when the police need a relatively safe means to subdue and restrain a violent suspect, and simple holds and hand-to-hand techiques won’t work.  It is both less violent than other means (of which more in a bit), and vastly less indiscriminate.

So let’s say some of you get your wish, and the SPPD doesn’t have tasers.  What then?

Here’s what.

When (not if) someone gets violent, without tasers, the police will have to resort to…:

• Billy clubs and riot batons – which are  much more violent than tasers, vastly more prone   to cause injury, and a propaganda coup for the wackjobs.

• Pepper Spray, which is both less reliable at subduing people, and much more indiscriminate.

• Pepperball and beanbag rounds, and  “Baton” rounds, which are high-impact  “non-lethal” founds fired from shotguns and/or 37mm/40mm grenade launchers, respectively.  They hit their target like Mohammed Ali in his prime,   knocking them down quite violently.  They are vastly more likely to injure their target than  tasers.  Worse, they involve firearms, which are a psychological crossing of the Rubicon   that any sensible police department would like  to avoid.
• Clouds of tear gas applied via hand grenades, grenade launchers and so on.  An area weapon, it’d make huge parts of downtown Saint Paul un-usable until the clouds of irritant dispersed, and be both a nuisance and health hazard to everyone in the city downwind, and a potent propaganda symbol for the anarchists and the entire fringe left.

So if it’s safety you’re concerned about, you should SUPPORT the purchase of the tasers.  I’d be willing to chalk the opposition to tasers up to ignorance…

…but underestimating ones’ opponent is a fool’s game.

Insert the obligtatory “I support free speech, and the right of the peaceful protester, bla bla bla” here. And let’s be honest – neither I nor any other Republican is afraid of any of the violence these screeching little weasels are planning, since ANY Republican is an even match for 20 lefties in ANY kind of scrap, rhetorical or otherwise (and this forum is evidence of it).

But let’s not be stupid; there is a significant faction among the demonstrators that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the safety of the protesters.  They WANT a riot.  They WANT the psychological images of tear gas and grenade launchers and cops in riot gear.   They WANT to reap the propaganda bounty of an indiscriminate, violent response to their provocations (as they did with the Critical Mass riot last year).

Tasers enable a measured response to small acts of unreasoning, illegal activity.

And that’s just not crazy enough to suit the demonstrators’ purposes.  They want to provoke a massive, polarizing response.

You can practically see the genitals tingling when some of these fops talk about the violence – indeed, as we noted last week, some of their actions seem calculated to provoke panic reactions – the panic that will play into the propaganda plans of those who seem bent on provoking a riot.

I’m sure Andy Birkey doesn’t want that. 

Some of the rest of them? Well…

I, and some of my friends, got a jolt of perverse satisfaction on the news last year that the Israelis had apparently bombed a Syrian target that, according to some reports, was a nuclear weapons production site.  Some rumors say that North Korean technicians were on the site, and among the casualties.

Bummer.

And now, a car bomb in Damascus, of all places, has erased terror leader Imad Mughniyeh.  Youssef Ibrahim at PJM writes:

Celebrating a car bomb is not the politically correct thing to do.

Yet there is something deeply satisfying about the assassination of Islamofascist terror master Imad Mughniyeh before the stroke of midnight the other day in the central command post of Islamofascist movements inside Damascus, Syria.

Whoever planned it scored a blow so hard, so disturbing, it brought the secret services of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah all together into Syria’s capital where they are now trying to figure out what happened.

For the benefit of the lefties who think Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a victim of US arrogance and the real victim of the war on terror, you’ll have to rationalize a few things out of your minds to truly mourn the death of Mughniyeh (quoting Ibrahim) – he’s “a killer of hundreds of Americans including Marines, CIA folks and diplomats, a man whose reach wrecked a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires as well an American oil workers’ housing complex in Saudi Arabia”, not to mention the terror against Lebanese reformers for the past decade or three.  Not to say they won’t make that rationalization, but it might be a speed bump, no?

Ibrahim notes the poetic justice of the occasion:

The Islamofascist association is right to be upset. This is the sort of thing that can spread. For years car bombs made in Damascus have blown up Lebanese nationalists starting in 2005 with a spectacular murder of a Prime Minister and 22 others. He was followed to the grave by scores of Lebanese other victims, parliamentarians, journalists, civil servants and army generals at regular intervals, plus a three month war with ”Fattah Al Islam” a Syrian-trained Islamofascist Palestinian group sent to wage war in Lebanon’s refugee camps last year.

For President Bashar Assad the Damascus call last week was the first time he got return postage. Now new vistas open along with— macabre as it is— a new path, namely that bombings are a game good guys can play too, and very close to where President Assad lives and plans his.

I don’t know who did the job – indeed, given the mercurial nature of terrorist allegiances, it could have been a “friend”, although you’ll forgive me for hoping it was the good guys.

Any port in a storm, as they say…

The source is lost to history – perhaps the National Lampoon back when it was remotely funny – but one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, a spoof of Blackwell’s “Worst Dressed” list from almost 30 years ago went a little something like this…:

I’ve just discovered the REAL worst-dressed people! Those “boat people” – why, it looks like they’re wearing RAGS! And the people in trailer courts in the Appalachians – who dresses these people?

I thought of that when I read Laura McKenna on the Times’ latest “Green Mom Trend” puff piece/paeon-to-product-placement. She notes quite sensibly…:

The greenest people are totally unhip and unlikely to be photographed for the Times or a glossy magazine. They’re still wearing their clothes from twenty years ago. They aren’t keeping their home spa-worthy clean. No need to worry about polluting the air with chemicals, if you aren’t dusting every five minutes. They aren’t constantly renovating their kitchens and bathrooms, all of which uses enormous amounts of energy and resources; they are still living with the Formica numbers from the 70s. They aren’t jetting off to Europe to browse the Paris markets; they go bowling in the next town over. They aren’t constantly shopping for new things and tossing out the old things.

This is some poetry in all of this. Grandma with the Hummels has a smaller carbon footprint by doing absolutely nothing than the wealthy do-gooder in the Range Rover attending the NRDC fundraiser.

Finally, I can feel good about my own kitchen, a fairly depressing seventies relic. “It’s ugly, but it’s green!”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make a dent in global warming. But to do it, you need a serious, non-cosmetic, un-cool, and un-trendy change in lifestyle and habits. And frankly there’s no need to make a big fuss about it, get preachy or show off to others how environmentally correct you are. Excessive non-consumption aimed at impressing one’s friends and neighbors is just as annoying – and as conspicuous – as consumption.

As McKenna points out – to the Times, two of their friend’s neighbors seem to make a “trend” – but she’s right.

My mom had an unexpectedly-long layover yesterday on her way from DC to Minot (“America’s Vacationland”), so Bun and I went out to the airport (Zam was out with friends) to visit for a bit.

We were sitting in the terminal lobby by the baggage check, when I saw a guy guy holding one of those signs that drivers hold up to get their incoming fares’ attention. The name on the sign was “Mr. Roarke”.

And before I could catch myself, I thought:

“Well, isn’t that nice! He finally gets a vacation! And I always wondered if he’d get so sick of his island paradise that he’d actually come to Minneapolis in February for a break?”

“And by the way – does Tattoo yell “Bozz! Da ground! Da ground!” when the plane slips through the overcast?”

I shook the thought off, and continued visiting with Mom.

Peter Bronson of the Cincinnati Enquirer took the Ohio concealed carry class. And he notices something I’ve seen from at least the few journalists who’ve bothered to learn the topic:

From what I can tell, legal concealed carry is nothing like the anti-gun crowd made it sound when Kentucky and Ohio passed laws in 1999 and 2004. There are no cowboys. No wild shootouts. No blood in the gutters, as gun-banners predicted. Just law-abiding adults who want to exercise their Second Amendment right to self-defense.

And this one – a lesson that’d seem to have eluded most of Minnesota’s remaining concealed carry opponents:

If every gun owner took a class like this, we’d all be safer. But meth-heads, crack junkies and street muggers don’t take classes. They don’t get permits or certificates like the one Lengle gave me Sunday. They just grab a “nine” and use it against defenseless victims.

(Via Rosenberg)

Gavin from Superior, Wisconsin writes:

Greetings from the shadow of the Bong Bridge!

It took a while before I realized Gavin wasn’t making some obscure counterculture reference, but was talking about the Richard Bong Bridge, named after a Superior native who is also America’s top fighter ace of all time.

I digress:

I see that some joyless, socially-retarded, shrieking harpy, “Tild”, wrote that your “Twenty Years Ago Today” series is “excruciatingly tedious”, although she copped to never having actually read any of them.

Well, to be clear, “Tild” doesn’t actually shriek. Literally, anyway.

How can she say that about something she’s never read?

For starters, I doubt she’s never read it. Twin Cities lefties think that if you admit you’ve been in the same room as a conservative, people will think you have cooties. Leftybloggers are to reading rightyblogs as regular folks are to reading “People” magazine; everyone does it, but nobody admits it. It reminds one of something from 1984, where everyone made sure to recite exactly the facts the party told them to recite, no matter how patently it reversed what they’d been told the day before.

And the simple fact is, outside of a thin scree of competent writers, most leftybloggers wouldn’t know how to write a coherent sentence on a level deeper than reflexive scatology or “Why does Bush hate the troops” if they didn’t have Minnesota’s center-right bloggers to emulate.
Still, a jaunt through a typical assortment of the misanthropic twaddle that passes for the “Sorosphere” in the Twin Cities will tell you that to most Twin Cities leftybloggers, actually knowing the subject matter, where it diverges from the talking points they get from the Daily Kos or the Huffpo is considered a handicap. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, “I’m not a leftyblogger, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about”.

Anyway, I write “Twenty Years Ago Today” for me, and maybe, someday, my kids. If you enjoy it – and favorable comments and emails outnumber the others about 50-1 (and the minority tend to be douchebags anyway) – then that’s fine. If not, your web browser has things called “scroll bars” and a “back button” (ask a conservative blogger if you don’t know how to use them) that can help prevent the “excruciating tedium” of reading something that I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think about in the first place!

And that, as they say, is all.

Whenever I refer to John McCain’s “American Conservative Union” (ACU) rating (lifetime: 82:  2006:  65), I almost always disclaim it “for those of you who believe in these things”.  While I support the ACU on most issues (duh), trying to cram someone’s stances into a simple 1-3 digit number is at best unclear, and at worst very, very misleading.

Such numbers can make useful guidelines, of course; your gut can tell you that John Kyl (97) is a better conservative than Jim Ramstad (68), who is in turn better than Dennis Kucinich (who cares).

But as Kouba notes over at TVM, there’s much more to Mac and his rating than just the number:

Just so we know what went into that rating, I looked up McCain’s votes on the issues the ACU used to make up its rating for 2006. Here is the list of the 25 issues the ACU used. Here are the Senate roll call votes for 2006.

He helpfully provides them all, in convenient table form (which I lift wholesale from his post):

Jeff notes some of the nuances to at least a few of the votes that oppose the ACU, and concludes:

There are press releases addressing other votes here, and if you’re interested, you could go find out why McCain voted the way he did. I think by going through the votes, we’d find we may not always agree, but at least he had his reasons, reasons that had more substance than “I wanted to please my buddy Ted Kennedy.”

Indeed, the overall rating is relatively useless for parsing what Mac is really about.

So let me totally geek out, here, and break the votes above into categories that actually mean something.  Let me geek out even further by adding my own choices in some or all of the categories, where they might differ from those of the ACU.

Judiciary

Of course, only one of the roll call votes in the ACU’s list really addresses the Judiciary, an issue on which Mac has his legitimate conservative detractors.  But still:

100% of one vote is hardly dispositive – and I remain to be convinced that he’s not going to buddy up to the left on SCOTUS and Federal bench nominations. 

So convince me!

Fiscal

I put an asterisk on the Tax Reconciliation vote; McCain’s “no” was, reportedly, due to the Dems and the Administration breaking their word on spending caps.  I made the “fiscal” rating a 75% for that reason.

Economic

Granted, it’s an assortment of three bills that covers the waterfront.  But if we’re using the ACU’s sample as the gospel (and I don’t), it’s instructive.

Immigration

Well, we knew that was gonna be a problem, didn’t we?

Social Issues

There are a couple of issues here where I differ from the ACU, and alter Mac’s score accordingly:

It’s a composite score, for me – I differ from the ACU strongly on the gay marriage amendment, don’t much care about the Native Hawaiian government (but it sounds wrong), and would need to know the specifics of the Embryonic Stem Cell bill.

And finally…:

Foreign Policy

Kouba notes the “nuances” of the Iran Sanctions bill in his post, which you really need to read.

Is it an adequate measure of Mac’s acceptability to conservatives?  No. 

Are six numbers better than one? 

I think so.

Lighting rarely strikes twice in the same place.  

Six times?

There’s been a bit an epidemic of the temporary vapors at Obama rallies – people’ve been fainting dead away. 

Six times.

Six campaign stops.

Six fainting incidents, within view of the stage.

Six very similar responses from Barack Obama.

Oh, see for yourself.