Along with my friends at True North, I’ve spent a good chunk of the last year getting primed to deal with the hordes of “anarchist” thugs – generally upper-middle-class college kids or twenty-somethings – who plan on coming to Saint Paul this fall to cause mischief.

This blog has spent lots of time and effort documenting their statements of intent, and their actions.

While I support everyone‘s right to free speech, and am perfectly willing to ascribe 90% of the things the Anarcho-fops are saying to “post-adolescent drama-addiction”, there are enough of them out there who do intend to cause serious trouble – vandalism, rioting, assault and mayhem – that I plan on doing what I can to protect my city from their depredations.

And when I’ve mentioned this in mixed-politics forums – like the “E-Democracy” Saint Paul discussion group – the resopnse, almost to a person has been an ignorant “riiiiiiight” at best, and a denial-clogged “the Republicans are just as likely to get violent” at worst.

One of the people who’s given us plenty of both was Grace Kelly of the local leftyblog MNBlue. Kelly, a 9/11 “truther”, is shocked, shocked, to notice that some of her fellow protesters are up to planning no good!

While nearly every peacemaker group has focused on elections, one small group, Protest RNC 2008 has been focussed on protesting the Republican National Convention(RNC), which is normally a good activity except this time.

(Which is a sentence that makes perfect sense except for this time)

I wrote of the importance of nonviolence and peace pledge previously. Now all groups who are participating with this group are being asked to commit to a unity pledge

Let’s be clear, here (since Grace Kelly doesn’t state it very clearly); it’s the “Protest RNC group” that’s proposing the pledge below. Kelly herself proposed a pledge – one of those “unicorn in every garage” pledges, all full of high expectations and dreamy assumptions that are the peacenik’s only useful tangible intellectual product – and is somewhat upset that the other guys’ pledge is getting more traction among the anarkids.

And – this kills me – she’s surprised that the anarkids want to pledge people to… (Kelly’s responses are in parentheses below; mine will be in square brackets):

• respect the diversity of tactics (ignore the people who state on public email lists that violence to property like throwing bricks through windows is ok

[Or on MPR, or in the Minnesota Daily, or…]

• >separate activities (please don’t stand next the person throwing bricks or you too will probably get arrested

[we’ve been through this one before; this is part of the art of psychologically priming people to help create a riot against their will]

• don’t criticize publicly (like I am doing right now, no free speech, no request for peace pledge, no request for a standard of non-violence, no openness, no transparency)

I get a kick out of this; Kelly, like many dozey peaceniks, is actually surprised that people whose intellectual and ideological roots trace back to Lenin, Mao and Stalin would actually stifle free speech.

The horror of it all! Who knew?

• don’t cooperate with police (like my pledge to point at the person throwing bricks)

Of course, Kelly’s a 9/11 Truther – so even though the intent to commit mayhem against both the city and the convention and her fellow “peaceful” protesters is right there in black and white, we all know whose fault it really is…:

Well I looked at this unity pledge and I thought, all that Bush has to do to shut down protests is join the groups protesting as “George Bush, Tactic – Iraq War and Group – US Government” and to live by the unity pledge, the protests could say nothing.

And there is more, to even sign up to go organizing meeting of the “umbrella” of groups planning for the peace protest, you have sign a pledge of endorsement – which means the group’s name can be used, basically associated with all the “diversity” of tactics used and dragged through media mud.

Gosh. D’ya think.

The Protest RNC 2008 and RNC Welcoming Committee had a “community” meeting, which I came to represent St Paul. They only collected questions and then promised to answer question later if we came to the organizing meeting.

Hm. Where have we heard this before?

Oh, yeah. From conservative bloggers who’ve been “covering” the fops for the past year.

I came to that meeting and was requested to leave because I advocate for the community, the peace pledge and non-violence. I am not “one” of the them. Exactly, I am a peacemaker. I am a member of several peacemaker groups, all of which have declined to be involved.

No kidding!

We on the right have been warning you about exactly this since the very beginning.

Many peacemaker groups have long experienced activists who know the history of people who join groups to cause difficulties. The question is what happens to groups advocating for peace, who do not have that experience. Will they unknowingly sign on and take the unity pledge? Will people’s unwillingness to question tactics of people who seem to work for the same cause get them in trouble?

Clearly we need a separate non-violent peace pledge committed group to organize a separate peaceful protest.

No, Grace. Clearly, what “you” in the “peace” movement need is to rise up and condemn those who advocate violence; you need to make them feel unwelcome in the Twin Cities. You need to actively reach out to Law Enforcement and make sure that thugs, mayhem-seekers and other degenerates get the welcome they deserve from Saint Paul.

But y’all aren’t gonna do that, aren’t you?

Because you still think “pledges” and the unicorn-in-every-garage rhetoric of the “peace” movement actually carries any weight among your movement’s degenerate wing!

Mark my words; the anarchofops are going to be here; they don’t give a shit about your motivations; they will actively seek to disrupt the convention and life in this city. They may be a tiny minority of those protesting, but they will get the vast bulk of the press coverage. They will vandalize. They will destroy. And, if some of their rhetoric is to be believed, they will attack anyone who gets in their way.

And the “peace” movement will do nothing about it, because the “peace” movement is only about taking the easy moral stands.

Which means that they are utterly worthless at either making peace or dealing with aggression.

Fops: You’re in my town, now.

When Harry Reid says “jump” in the summer, Nancy Pelosi says “off what?” in the winter:

“The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “They have not done that.”

Pelosi is depending on the raw ignorance of her own base, here; the surge was intended to kill terrorists and make it safe, or at least much, much safer, to live in Iraq. Without that, noodling about with politics is superfluous.

But, perhaps sensitive about the mess that her friends in the Bay Area are creating, she hastened to add:

The speaker hastened to add: “The troops have succeeded, God bless them.”

One has to wonder; is Nancy Pelosi that ignorant a slapnuts? Or does she merely know that her base is?
Speaker Pelosi: If the troops have succeeded, what did they succeed at? Their mission? The one you declared a “failure” just a few seconds earlier?

Oh, yeah – and while counterinsurgency is a matter of patience and subtlety, she’s wrong anyway.

I hereby coin a new term; Kersten Delusional Disorder.

I originally thought “Kersten Derangement Syndrome”, but I think KDD is a more serious pathology.

When they got the word that the Strib was going to hire a conservative columnist (to put in the stable with DFL monkeys Lori Sturdevant, Nick Coleman, Doug Grow, Kim Ode, Pat Reusse and, well, pretty much all of them short of James Lileks), the local lefty pundocracy acted like someone had proposed giving them a rectal exam with a pool cue; her addition to the staff – a lone conservative voice in a room full of people with boy and girl crushes on Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone – prompted the local Sorosphere’s most irritating conceit, the statement-as-fact that “The Strib is a conservative tool”.

Naturally, Kersten is pretty much right about everything, and is head, shoulders and ankles better than anyone else on the Strib columnist staff.

Last week, she wrote a column about Rep. Ellison’s “Department of Peace” proposal. Kersten points out the grim fact; institutional pacifism has a long record of abject failure to prevent war. She cites Norway, which, in the wake of the bloodbath of World War I joined Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and many other smaller European nations in declaring pacifism their primary line of national defense:

Norway’s commitment to what Ellison calls a “culture of peace” dates back to its founding in 1905, according to a 2006 report by Col. Karl Hanevik of the Norwegian Army. For decades, writes Hanevik, the country’s foreign policy was based on a firm belief that “international disputes should be solved via arbitration and international law.”

After World War I, Norway’s leaders placed their hopes for peace in the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, and let their military go to seed.

Norway declared neutrality when Hitler threatened in 1939.

Indeed, they officially resolved that all belligerents were equally wrong; that the Poles who were fighting for their lives, and the Brits and French who declared war in their support (but didn’t do much else) were equally as wrong as the Nazi regime that was bombing Poland’s cities.

Which is, indeed, one of the most corrosive conceits of today’s “peace” movement racket.

The country was wholly unprepared when Germany invaded on April 9, 1940…The German blitzkrieg rolled through Norway, and the king and government fled to England for safety…

Pretty thoughts didn’t work

Not only that, but the only reason King Haakon, his family and his cabinet were able to flee was because the only parts of Norway’s military that functioned as planned on that first day of the war – an ancient coastal fortress and a forty-year-old torpedo – sank the German cruiser Blücher and the German battalion that was supposed to cut off the retreat route from Oslo. And because the only squadron of Norwegian fighters that was capable of taking to the skies against the Luftwaffe broke up a German attempt to drop paratroops in the area.

Not, let us note, because of any pacifists’ actions.

Let’s make no mistake, here. Peace is something to strive for. Peace is almost always preferable to war. I said almost.

But pacifism is only tenable in a world where everyone believes in peace. Pacifists like to point out the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King as triumphs of “passive resistance”. But both of their successes depended entirely on their taking place in a context of the (general) rule of law, in areas controlled by liberal democracies who were, if not initially friendly to either of them, at least not actively disposed to kill both men and all of their followers.

So – Kersten was right.

And her critics?

Well…

AlphaBetty writes for MNBlue, the home of an endless stream of dozey conspiracy theorists and purple-faced rantmongers. And her take on Kersten indulges in the same kind of selective, self-serving, myopic ignorance that, by nature, has to be prevalent to believe in things like “Departments of Peace”.

While Ms. Alphabetty may seek “peace”, she commits violence against clarity and context:

Norway was asking for it? Katherine Kersten blames Norway’s aversion to war for Germany’s World War II invasion of that country.

Popping a bully in the nose is a limited strategy in the school yard. That’s also true in the realm of international affairs. Sometimes you fight. Sometimes you circle your defenses. Sometimes you stand together and say as a group, this will not happen here.On this last point, the citizens of occupied Norway have much to teach us.

If violence is not the path to peace, neither is passivity. In the face of brutal domination, Norwegians hung together. Risking arrest, they wore subtle symbols of solidarity, a paper clip on the lapel, a bright red hat or vest.Resisting anti-Semitism, they refused to speak German, pretending they didn’t understand a language as common in Norway at the time as English is today. In Oslo, commuters refused to sit next to Germans on the bus.Was it effective? The bus action clearly got the goat of the Deutsche(Germans). They declared it illegal to stand when seats were open. More importantly, the horrible effects of German domination, including Jewish deportation were somewhat lessened in Norway than in other occupied zones.

PShort writing at Truth v. The Machine notes that some non-establishment conservatives are getting on board with McCain:

Over the past few days, John McCain received three endorsements that will be very hard for the hard-core anti-McCain conservatives to dismiss: Gary Bauer, John Bolton, and Congressman Jeb Hensarling…When principled conservatives like these say, in effect, “despite our differences, it’s ok to get on the McCain bus,” many conservatives are going to listen.

Pat notes that Bauer, Bolton and Hensarling are hardly Beltway insiders – which at least chips away at one of Mac’s big poison pills.

When I first moved to the Twin Cities, I had a few interviews in some of Minneapolis’ older office buildings – the Sexton, the Endicott, the Grain Exchange, among others.  I was fascinated; they were like snapshots out of a Sam Spade movie, with pebbled-glass door windows and painted names and offices straight out of film noir.  I’ve often thought that if Salem Radio came calling, I’d build a studio in one of those old buidings (hello, Pioneer!).  Call it “Global Import Export”, maybe.

While I don’t agree with much I read at the Strib, it’d seem Eric Ringham has been reading some of the same stuff:

A man ought to have an office in the Grain Exchange. He ought to walk past classy architectural details on his way to work in the morning.

He ought to hear the sound of his wingtips echoing off the marble as he approaches his office.

A man ought to wear a suit and a proper hat. He ought to wear Florsheims, not Rockports. If he wants to get comfortable, he can loosen his tie and cock his hat to one side.

He ought to work for himself. Maybe as a private eye, maybe as a highly paid novelist. He shouldn’t be particular.

A man ought to have a frosted-glass door with his name etched on it. Maybe the name of his partner, too, if he has one. (When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. Not that a man should compare himself to Bogart.)

OK.  Maybe he’s reading too much of the same stuff.

But you get the idea.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I “The First Team” – King joins Chad (as John and Brian are out on assignment).  They’ll kick things off from 11-1. I’m guessing there’ll be jabbering about the Super Bowl
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is off at CPAC, so I will be doing our thing from 1-3.   Expect post-Super-Di-Duper Tuesday talk, plus interviews some some local movers and shakers; tune in!
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will talk with Ben Golnick, of the Minnesota McCain campaign.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

(Along with the Stroms, from 9-11, natch).

Paul Demko’s cover story in this week’s City Pages is the sort of stuff that the Pages do best, when they bother; cover a regional story that nobody else will bother with, and do it very, very well.

In this case, it’s a story about Saint Paul’s High Bridge over the Mississippi – its history, and its long-standing attraction to suicides:

Johnson parked her car on Cherokee Avenue and walked out onto the imposing structure, which soars some 150 feet above the roiling Mississippi River waters. At 5 a.m., the bridge was deserted—the morning commute wouldn’t start for a couple of hours yet. She could see stunning views of the city’s downtown skyline, the Cathedral of St. Paul, and the Mississippi River.

Looking down into the water, all she could see was inky blackness. It was a strangely comforting abyss. She climbed up onto the two-foot railing and clung to a lamppost. For the first time in months, her mind was empty.

Then she let go.

A great (if sobering) story, delivered with facts and humanity.  Well worth a read.

On the other hand, Matt Snyders may be the only writer on the City Pages staff too shallow, agenda-addled and uninsightful to write for Mercury Rising.  He may be to political “reporting” what Margaret Grebe was to the “Lifestyles of the Hip and Vapid” beat.

You be the judge, of course.

I didn’t even know Tourettes manifested itself in writing.

A bipartisan bloc in Congress – led by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison – is Hleading a bipartisan tidal wave of Congressional support to overturn in the Supreme Court:

Hutchison said Thursday she is filing a friend-of-the-court brief in a challenge to the laws. Fifty-five senators and 250 House members have signed the brief to be filed Thursday by her and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.

Hutchison has long opposed the district’s ban on handguns and requirement that rifles and shotguns be registered, stored unloaded and either locked or disassembled. She has sponsored legislation several times to overturn the district’s laws. Her 2004 bill passed the House, but not the Senate.

The district’s law forced her to dismantle and return to Texas her .357 Magnum she brought with her when she moved from Austin.

“In Texas, of course, the right to keep and bear arms is well-settled. In fact, when in Texas you talk about gun control, they mean using two hands,” Hutchison quipped in a speech organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

For once, “bipartisanship” doesn’t mean “everyone act like a Kool-aid guzzling statist fop”. 

Thank goodness.

(Via Carnivore at TVM, who notes “As conservatives, we want the law decided only on merits and Constitutionality, but sinced Amicus briefs are part of our process, having a majority of both houses of Congress supporting our side should’t hurt”.  Amen, Meat-eater).

On the chance that you hadn’t noticed.

I’m running around like a student loan default advisor at an Obama rally today.  Mighty busy.

Hopefully more regular in the next few days.

(more…)

A reader sent me this via email:

I missed when you started referring to Democrats as
Tics but I don’t like it. When I see you use Tics I
think of Nick Coleman using the term “Wingnuts.”
Coleman is a jerk and an idiot so I don’t like most of
what emanates from his keyboard anyway.
When he uses Wingnuts I think that he’s run out of
argument and now has to resort to insults.

To be fair, there’s a difference.

Mitt bows out.

John McCain effectively sealed the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday as chief rival suspended his faltering presidential campaign. “I must now stand aside, for our party and our country,” Romney told conservatives.

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

OK. On to “Plan B”. Mac! Don’t be taking the right wing for granted.

Hard to believe I remember this guy – whom I know as Flash’s son Tom, and whom the US Marines call Sergeant Peterson – when he was in elementary school.  My stepson Will used to “babysit” him and his brothers (Flash’s kids). 

Welcome back, Sergeant Peterson.  Looks like ya done good.

The point of the caucus system is to give party activists a voice in how the party’s business and nominations are carried out.

Of course, it lowers the definition of “party activist” so far that virtually anyone can stand up and be counted.  In the GOP, it means you spend maybe ninety minutes (sixty in my precinct) taking care of the most trivial party business possible – electing precinct officers, voting on resolutions – and, finally, the endorsement straw polls.

In the DFL, of course, it means that you can show up, cast your ballot, and go out and get a latte before The Practice is on.

But the key point is that they – and the various types of primaries that other states use to determine their party nominees – are the parties’ mechanisms of publicly selecting nominees, courting public involvement, and carrying out their public business.

The other night, as people on both sides of the aisle noted, caucuses were flooded.  On the DFL side, they were flooded with vote ‘n dash voters.  On the GOP side, caucus sites had plenty of people show up who wanted to do the same; some left in a huff when they were told they actually had to stay and conduct Republican Party business; others – many, many others – stayed and participated, in the biggest turnout in recent memory.

It’s for the vote ‘n dash voter – the people with the short attention spans who want to make a simple, black ‘n white ideological statement and get out – that the Strib comes out today:

After more than a quarter-million Minnesota voters swamped Tuesday’s DFL and GOP precinct caucuses and encountered long lines, traffic jams, makeshift ballots and other logistical headaches, some wondered Wednesday if a presidential primary might be a better way to pick candidates.

Meanwhile, numerous caucus-goers, many of them first-timers who found the process daunting and frustrating, vented on blogs and complained to party officials. Some called for a switch to primaries.

On Wednesday, two DFL legislators introduced a bill that would establish a traditional primary…That kind of reaction prompted Sens. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, and Linda Scheid, DFL-Brooklyn Park, to announce their plan to decouple the presidential contest from the caucus system by the next presidential election cycle. Their bill would allow voters to participate in a primary similar to a general election without requiring them to be involved in the caucus process now run by political parties.

Rest said party caucuses would take place at a later date. “We are always looking for ways to make participating in public life easier and more accessible,” she said.

If a presidential primary becomes law, “they can put it on the calender if they want … but it will remain a beauty contest for us,” he said.

Let’s put a cork in this deeply-stupid idea.

Over at True North, the theme is amazement.

Reading the results from caucus after caucus, the point is clear; Republicans turned out in droves. In record numbers. Numbers like nobody’s ever seen. And it wasn’t just the hordes of Ronulans that some had predicted (although they were very much in evidence).

And while people turned out for the Tic caucuses as well, there’s a difference; at DFL caucuses, people can “vote ‘n dash”, causing one DFL stalwart to note on a Saint Paul discussion group:

> On another note, what I found in our precinct, when the dust settled is that [the lopsided Obama blowout] would be reversed when you looked at who stayed to actually caucus and agree to the heavy lifting through to November.
> Listen, if we want to switch to a primary state, then that is fine. But if we’re going to be a caucus state, we should caucus and the straw polls and binding ballots should be the last order of business, not the first.
I’m afraid a large number of our National delegation will have to plug their nose* to cast their binding ballots, since there won’t be any committed supporters of the candidate that are actually delegates.

In the meantime, every single GOP vote in that crushing onslaught of turnout was from someone who stayed the distance, voted on party business and resolutions and all the stuff that normally bores those with short enough attention spans to actually need to be Tics.

I’ve been monitoring a Saint Paul Politics discussion group.

It’d seem that turnout at DFL caucuses was incredibly heavy – and the Obama vote was staggering, with blowouts even worse than the one he notched statewide.

Anecdotally, most of these new voters seemed to be fairly clueless; many of them just dropped in, cast their ballots, and left (legal in the DFL, not in the GOP, although many tried).

Further evidence of my theory that Obama is the next Jesse Ventura; he’ll draw a slew of ignorant, clueless “voters” with his vaporous, vacuous “message” who would otherwise not have the faintest idea where the polls are. It’s interesting that the raw numbers of voters dropped in 2002. with Ventura out of the race.

Which, to some, is a good thing.  But I have to ask – are uninformed, clueless “voters” good for the country?
They’re good for the DFL and the Tics, obviously; a lot of Republicans, myself included, started as Democrats until they got a clue.

Well, we’ll see.

Today would have been the 97th birthday of the greatest president of the second half (and maybe all) of the twentieth century, and almost-certainly the greatest president of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan.

I’ll try to bring some jelly beans to the office.

I thought about digging out a slew of quotes from the Great Communicator – and other blogs no doubt will. Check ’em out.

But I was reminded of the greatest testimony to Reagan as I spoke with the fella from the Caucuses at the caucuses. The man, who grew up under the Soviet system, and I spoke for a while, and as we talked about conservatism, he move the conversation over to Ronald Reagan; he testified to the reverence people all over Eastern Europe feel for the man.

The Georgian reminded me of a quote I got from a Ukrainian co-worker a few years ago. A bit of a liberal bohemian himself, he’d likely never have been a Reagan voter.

And yet when we talked politics, he solemnly noted “Ronald Reagan gave me my life”.

With that in mind, I give you this.

Happy Birthday, Gipper.

I gave a brief speech last night at the District 66 Caucus in Saint Paul.  The fun part?  I gave it to a room that was vastly more full than in previous years.  It could have been even more full, if only the large number of people who just wanted to vote and leave had stuck around.
I was also a precinct convener.  My precinct (Ward Four, Precinct 15) drew about double the people that it did four years ago, and six times as many as two years ago.  And – true to form – my district got done before anyone else!

We had a solid turnout across the board, but even more university kids.  We also had two observers, international Fulbright scholarship students from the Humphrey Institute, a fellow from Burma and another from Georgia (Tbilisi, not Atlanta), and no, he wasn’t there because he mistook “Caucuses” for “Caucasus”.

In the straw poll, Ron Paul won my precinct, with McCain a close second – but, I’m gratified to say, Romney did rather better statewide, crushing McCain by over 2-1:

While Romney racked up big numbers in the Twin Cities, the range of support for him in the state was broader. In central Minnesota, he was winning by more than a 2-1 margin over McCain in Sherburne County with two-thirds of the precincts reporting. He had a nearly 3-1 margin over McCain in Isanti County.

The Strib – which, like most of the media, thinks Mac is just peachy – sniffs:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney owes much of his Minnesota victory to the peculiarities of the state’s caucus system, which rewards candidates who have a passionate, partisan following and punishes those who don’t.

And that is completely fitting; it’s a party caucus, not a general election.  It’s a distinction that seems lost on a lot of people.

Unsurprisingly to me, Obama did very well in the Minnesota Tic primary; I’d like to have been a fly on the wall of one of their caucuses.  I wonder if they start with group calisthenics?

Truth to be told, I’d hoped to be sitting here right now, waiting to head out to caucuses, writing about either Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani. They, by a razor-thin margin, topped my short list of candidates for the nomination this year. Fred brought the conservative message; Rudy brought the leadership and the executive experience and the passion and, for all of John McCain’s palaver, the real straight talk in this campaign.

But it was not to be. Fred ran a somnambulent campaign, and Rudy miscalculated and put all his eggs in the Florida basket.

And so the race – to all intents and purposes – is down to John McCain and Mitt Romney – two men who finished very close to the top of my short list for very different reasons, but neither of whom was my top choice.

I don’t “endorse” people, because “endorsement” is something that big, influential institutions do. Dennis Prager and the National Review and even Ed Morrissey can get away wtih “endorsing” candidates. Me – a little basement pajamablogger with 2,000 daily readers? No. But I can tell you what I’m going to do and why, and hope that I convince someone – even one of my readers – to some kind of action; to come out to the caucuses for the same reasons, or even at all; to stiffen the spine of one conservative in what might be a dismal year; to drag even one more person out on a winter Tuesday night to devote it to the cause of pushing conservatism (and, of course, to convince as many of you Democrats as possible to show up for your caucuses, which are being held at the Target Center at 7PM tonight).

I’m going to caucus for Mitt Romney. And in keeping with my election-eve “100 Reasons…” tradition (from the ‘04 and ‘06 General Elections), I’m going to make a big list. Maybe not 100 reasons long – that’s more a general election thing – but there are quite a few.

So let’s get started.

1. Because Romney has more executive experience – being the person with whom the buck stops, as opposed to the legislative role of being the person that passes the bucks around – than the entire Tic field, with McCain thrown in for good measure.  Senators are like nagging passive-aggressive relatives; Governors – the good ones – are the ones that actually makes things happen.
2. For all the left’s talk of “inclusion” and “Getting things done”, Mitt is the only presidential candidate who’s actually had to reach “across the aisle” and get things done.
3. Mitt has always adapted; he’s become what he’s had to become. I commented yesterday that Romney isn’t really the kind of candidate people can get passionate about. But I think he can make a game stab at it.
4. Yes, he’s changed his mind on some things.  Like me, he’s changed them in the right direction. 
5. He has more economic common sense in his left index finger than the entire Tic slate – Madame Putin and O’Kennedy and Silkypony to boot – have in their entire focus-grouped bodies.
6. Mitt has an approach to the war that’s straight out of Max Boot and Robert Kaplan and Patrick Nagl.  He’d reinforce success – metaphorically and literally (he’d increase the size of the military – a much-needed boost). 
7. He favors and supports school choice.  Putin and Obie are in the pocket of the teachers’ union; every charter school in the country will look like the Branch Davidian compound whey they’re done.

Mitt is far from perfect.  And maybe the media’s right; maybe Mac’s got it in the bag.

So I’ll be sending Mac and his people a message tonight; there are a lot of us out there – the ones he’s been badmouthing for most of the past eight years, who will get behind him if he gets the nomination.  But tonight, he’s gotta earn it – he’s gotta meet us halfway. 

If he picks TPaw as his running mate, maybe the Governor will tell him the story of the ’02 MNGOP convention.  It’ll be a good lesson to the Senator.

To: Disney Marketing

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Thanks. Really.

To whom it may concern,
My daughter saw the trailer for “Snowbuddies”.

Talking puppies. Really?

She is on me for the DVD like stink on…well, sled dog.

Thanks again.

That is all.

Mitch Berg
Consumer

One of the frustrating things about Obama (and the thing that may well earn him the Tic nomination, if not the presidency) is the fact that he is so vaporous on the issues.  What does Obie believe, really, behind all of that rhetoric about “change”?  Well, you have to do some digging.

And Clayton Cramer has – and finds that behind Obie’s palaver, he’s lying about his approach to the Second Amendment:

It isn’t just that he supports bans on semiautomatics, and more possession and purchase restrictions. He claims that he wants more laws to keep guns out of the inner cities. Why? Does he think black people lack the sense that white people have?

The roots of gun control in America have always been racist; America’s first gun ban, in the late 1860’s in south Texas, was aimed at disarming blacks, many of whom were Union Army veterans who gave the early Klansmen a lot of nasty bloody noses.  The resurgence of gun control in the late sixties was a knee-jerk response to inner-city crime (and the RFK assassination) – and to the left and the media, “inner city” is always a PC synonym for “people of color”.

Obama may be able to triangulate on faith – but he’ll polish the turd of his anti-gun past into a perception of being gun-friendly over my dead body.  And I think I can name about four million NRA members who’ll go along with me.

Joel Rosenberg apparently got a lot of crap from cops for his coverage of the Hixon case –  in which a couple of police, responding to a bank robbery they’d been told involved a white guy, grabbed and (according to the ensuing lawsuit) “jumped-and-thumped” a black guy.  The case resulted in a big lawsuit and settlement in Hixon’s favor.

Later, Joel heard:

“I showed that to another friend of mine,” he said.  “Retired cop.”

“And?”

“He went off.  ‘Who is this bastard and why is he saying this shit?'”

“So, I said, ‘he’s right, you know.'”

“‘Yeah, but that bastard shouldn’t be saying it.'”

We get a lot of that.