To: Molly Priesmeyer, Rent-a-Blogger and Snark-Minx

From:  Mitch Berg, Unpaid Hack

Re:  John McCain’s Teeth.

Ms. P,

 I realized that I said that I’d try to contact you the next time I had a question about your coverage of an event.  And since the Sorosphere is suddenly all afroth over the state of Senator McCain’s teeth (that’s why we go to the Sorosphere; all that cogent analysis!), it’d be a good time to ask you…

…except your email address doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the MNMon’s (really, really badly-designed) site.

Sorry.  Pinky swear, I tried!

So anyway, here’s my question:  When you copy and paste a line that 5,000 other leftybloggers write:

If bloggers are saying one thing about John McCain this week it’s that the 71-year-old has some serious grit. Of course, that grit comes in the form of McCain Mouth, a deformity that apparently causes teeth to look like a mess of yellowed and contorted Chiclets. Today, BuzzFeed.com has picked up on the mouth meme, turning McCain’s piano-key chompers into an official phenomenon.

The consensus? “They’re old.”

Well, not nearly as old as the Senator is. 

Because – you do realize this, don’t you, Ms. Priesmeyer? – Senator McCain had a bunch of his teeth broken off at the gumline while he was being held as a POW.  Which, of course, can set a guy up for a whole lifetime o’ dental hurt. 

But you didn’t know that – right?  If you’d known that, you’d never, ever have written such a deeply, disturbingly dumb piece.  Right? 

Seriously – please plead ignorance. I’d like to know that even the MNMon has a level below which even they won’t sink – although reason tells me my faith is probably misplaced.

While looks are an easy and lame target,

[Being more mature than he used the be, the writer bites his tongue at the too-easy retort, knowing he’s a better person for it] 

 it’s at least refreshing to see McCain’s teeth get a razzing (though, unfortunately, not a cleaning). It gets a little tiring listening to the same sexist cries that Hillary Clinton is just too ugly to be president. Hatin’ on the looks of all the candidates? Now that’s equality!

No, that’s just stupid and sophomoric.  Dinging Senator Clinton on her looks is stupid and sexist.  Ripping Senator McCain for the appearance of a mouth that had the living sh*t beaten out of it by NVA goons is its own punishment, at least among people with consciences.

Glad to see Steve Perry’s bringing some professionalism to the good ol’ MNMon!

UPDATE:  Brodkorb is even less-amused:

This is really disgusting attack on Senator McCain and Minnesota Monitor should be embarrassed

Michael has more faith in Steve Perry than I do. 

UPDATED UPDATE: I’m gratified to see that the lefties in Brodkorb’s comment section are even more cheesed-off than the rest of us. 

RE-UPDATED UPDATE:  Mo’N @ Jo’T has the photoshop of the day.

UP-UPDATED UP-UPDATE:  I never actually put Minnesota Monitor on my blogroll, so I can’t remove it in a fit of pique.  I’m considering adding it for about five minutes, so I can gas it. 

Ideas?

I crawled through the mud, a G3K carbine in one hand, a handful of slimy, suspect topsoil in the other, as the rain poured down.  The corner of a spare magazine cut into my hipbone as I slithered over a small clump of rocks, and back into a small coulee that led me up the slimy, festering hillside.

The ridge above the airfield at Tuzla was dotted with trees, most of them blasted bare by years of shelling and mortar fire from the Bosnian and Serb sides alike. With only scrubby, ugly shrubs to hold the soil in place, the hillside was slowly eroding down into the valley below.  It was as ugly a place as I’d seen – recently.

BANG.  A loud rifle report split the rain-drenched quiet ahead of me.  “Back on the ball, Mitch“. 

I looked down the ridge to the tarmac 1000 meters away, and my mission was re-clarified; the C130 transport plane, with the crowd of troops and civilians huddled behind a Humvee behind it, pinned down by sniper fire.  Fire from the snipers I was hunting.

Down on the tarmac, I saw a man in camouflage make a run for a dugout by the runway; a couple of SVD sniper rifles, unseen in the scrub not far in front of me, barked almost simultaneously, again and again. The man zigzagged between the geysers of mud that the 7.62mm shots spewed into the air as he dove, head-first, into a slit trench.  He made it, miraculously.

“This is Stain Six…” an out-of-breath-sounding voice yelled over the radio, “Vulture and Vulture Chick are pinned down on the tarmac. We need to get the snipers…”

The snipers’ rifles cracked again, and the voice cut off a second later.  Stain Six – the Secret Service mission leader – was pinned down hard.

I had to find the snipers, and I had to find ’em fast. I was hoping my backup would get there soon.

“Golfball Two One” crackled over the radio, in a thick scandinavian accent – Gohlfboll Turr Vonn. It was Sergeant Janssen, leader of the Danish squad that was my backup, “this is Golfball Tree Two. Ve’re pinned down. Ve can’t help“.

Crap. My backup was backed up. I was on my own.

I crawled through a shallow depression behind the wreckage of an old Serb T-55 tank whose turret had blown off and sat on its roof twenty feet away – and saw my target. Two Serb snipers, they and their long, menacing-looking rifles swathed in ghillie netting, taking their aim. Another man, serving as their spotter, peered into binoculars, muttering in guttural, clipped Serb.

One of them fired a shot, the report echoing across the valley as I used the noise to cover my movement.  I slowly crawled around the rear bogey of the wrecked tank, sizing up the Serb position. Something wasn’t..quite…right…the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I looked around, my senses heightened by enough adrenaline to restart Keith Richards’ heart…

…there. In the woods – another Serb, covering the snipers’ rear, his AK47 at the ready, turning…

…toward me.

Our eyes locked. For a split second, we hesitated. I was quicker; my first round caught his AK47 right in the receiver, sending shards of stock and metal slicing into him, slamming his rifle into his stomach like Mike Tyson in his prime. He grunted in pain as he fell behind a log, his rifle twisted and useless.

The snipers and spotter turned, alarmed. The spotter lifted a WWII-vintage MP40 “Burp Gun” toward me as I spun; instinctively, I double-tapped him with two more rounds. He dropped out of sight over the lip of the hill, his peaked Serb army-pattern cap flipping crazily through the air, as I turned to the sniper on the right. Two more shots finished that business. The other sniper, overcome with panic as he tried to turn his bulky SVD toward me, rolled over the lip of the hill, chased by two more rounds that dug up big divots where his chest had been a thousandth of a second earlier, rolling out of sight.  I dove for the lip of the hill, to make sure he didn’t come back up, when every muscle from my butt to my neck clenched tight at the jarring racket of Sergeant Janssen’s squad’s MG3 machine gun, sounding like a jackhammer set to “puree”. They’d got him.

And suddenly, the hill was secure.

I ducked back behind the wrecked tank and grabbed my radio. “Golfball Two One…”, I started…

…and caught the end of another transmission. “…Jaguars eencomeeng; ten secohnds. Ten secohnds. Ten secohnds” a voice in a French accent repeated, seeming oddly disconnected.

Crap. They called in air support!

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the glint off the canopy of the French Jaguar fighter-bomber, and a yellow flash…

…which I didn’t have time to process. I leaped instinctively toward the first hole I could see, diving into a shell crater just as the air around me was rent by the impact of a dozen 2.75 inch rockets, their detonations joining together like ripping metal, thousands of steel fragments lacing the air above my boots in a maelstrom of angry metal that drowned out the French jet roaring overhead.

I poked my rifle out of the crater as the smoke roiled around me. Under cover of the smoke, the radio squawked “Vulture and Vulture Chick are safe. Good job, all”.

“Sergeant Janssen“, I thought, peering over the edge of the crater and down the hill, teeth clenched in fear…

…which relaxed when I saw Sergeant Janssen and his eight squaddies; they’d ducked, too. Janssen waved. “Indskrænkette fransker!” he yelled.

I slithered down the slope to his position. “Er der en anden skrive i Fransker?” The squaddies laughed – as much from my atrocious Danish as from the release of tension – and, after they shook off the concussion and the close call, formed up to continue their patrol up the ridge.

Me? I walked back to the base. I safed my rifle as I got to the cut through the barbed wire around the Ukrainian position, waving to the Ukranian UN troops that guarded the perimeter.  One of the privates manning a machine-gun gave me a thumbs-up; they’d been taking fire from the snipers, too.  I returned the gesture as I walked toward the cluster of huts that was the Ukranian enclave, on my way back to the US area.

Their company sergeant-major, Yevgenii Batiukh, a crusty fortysomething who was hard-boiled enough a soldier to make R. Lee Ermey’s “Gunnery Sergeant Hartman” in Full Metal Jacket look like Andy Dick, who’d spent more time in Afghanistan than some Afghans I’d known, stepped out from behind a quonset hut, holding a bottle.

“Доброе утро, Михаил Павлович”, he grunted, his never-smiling face nodding approval.

” Добрbl Джин, сержант батюх”, I nodded back.  The faint outline of a grin creased his leathery jawline.

“В снайпера исчезла, и вашим “первой леди” была в состоянии ходить из самолета в аэропорт!”, he said, with the lift of an eyebrow and a quizzical, ironic smirk that seemed incongruous on his hawk-like sergeant-major face.  Batiukh poured shots of slivovitz into two tin, Russian-pattern canteen cups, and handed me one.  “Как ЧТО происходит?”, he said, eyeing the G3 that hung from its jungle sling around my shoulder.

I grinned back as I slammed the shot. “Я не знаю! Действительно!”.

“поп!”, he said, drawing his finger across his throat, smiling fully this time.

We shared a laugh, and I left him, walking back to my hooch, a converted Serb bureaucrat’s office, looking forward to clearing a couple days’ buildup of mud and worse off of me.

I unlocked and opened the door…and stopped short. Something wasn’t as I left it.  My hand instinctively reached toward my pistol, and I checked out the corners of the room.

I relaxed second later, as I noticed a silk blouse lying on the floor.

I cocked an eyebrow, and walked toward the back room. A pair of jeans hung from the doorknob. I opened the door.

“Hi, Hon”, Marisa said seductively, covers pulled up around her neck. “How’s your day?”

“Rough one”, I grinned, feeling not so rough at all.

She took a bottle of Croatian merlot, poured a glass, and dipped her finger in, licking it suggestively as she set it back on the chair. “I heard the First Lady and Chelsea had a hard time getting out of their plane today”.

I grinned. “Yeah, I heard that, too. Hey, aren’t you supposed to be filming?”, I said as I cleared my rifle’s action and reached to turn down the light.

“I had a day off.  And it looks like you’ve been a…dirty boy…”

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: I’m informed that video footage shows I was actually working as a technical writer at at a retail shelf space brokering company during Hillary and Chelsea’s trip to Tuzla, was not in fact a freelance “minder”, did not interact with the Ukranian or Danish armies – indeed, have never been to Bosnia – and had no involvement with Ms. Tomei.

I guess I miswrote…

My bad.

The news has gotten around – the Vets For Freedom Heroes Tour, a nationwide bus tour of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, was scheduled to appear in Forest Lake to speak at Flake’s High School, alma mater of Pete Hegseth, one of the group’s leaders.

The FLHS principal cancelled the appearance.  Reports indicate the district folded to pressure from anti-war groups, mostly from outside the district.  There’s apparently more news about to break on this story, and True North is covering it.

Chief at TN writes:

Why would I thank the far left for this infringement on free speech? Well I guess that already answers it. They have shown once again who wants freedom of speech to be practiced. Rather than offering to have their own anti-military forum, say on the following week, these people pitch their point until the school concedes to banning these fine young vets tell their story. Nice work.

Why? because once again it gives far more press to Pete Hegseth and his VFF effort. He has already been on the top of the Democrat Underground, Michale Moore’s site, several of the metro area radio shows, and it would be a safe guess, he will be on many national radio and TV shows before the day is over.

So instead of talking to 150 students, a handful of teachers and perhaps some parents, the VFF message is getting broadcast all across the nation for free.

Re-create 68? Yes, please.

There is nothing the Twin Cities’ far-left fears more than other peoples’ freedom of speech.  Eventually, it’s going to cost them. 

Jason Lewis had/has a liner in his promo reel. It goes a little something like…:

“Let’s have an intelligent conversation; Jason will talk, you listen”.

That’s what I think about when I hear most people who are calling for a “dialog about race” in this county.

Dialog.

I don’t know that that word means what they think it means.

———-

I don’t go to Jeff Fecke to take the cultural barometer of this nation. I go to Jeff Fecke for howlingly overwrought conclusions; I go looking for checks that his logic and knowledge can’t cash.

And he wrote a doozy the other day:

In general, if you ever find yourself saying, “I’m not a racist,” you’re a racist.

I rubbed my eyes, thinking perhaps it was the fatigue playing tricks on my eyes.

Alas, no:

The same holds true for a variety of hatreds, of course. “I’m not a sexist” is evidence one is sexist; “I’m not homophobic” proof that one hates gays. Those people who truly have no internalized misogyny, racism, or homophobia are few and far between, and those most likely to be good allies to those groups are also the most likely to be aware of their own shortcomings.

Apparently I’m a purple female rhinoceros who walks along the ceiling, having dislaimed each of those as well as affirming the power of gravity.

It’s easy to bag on Jeff Fecke for these kinds of “conclusions” – and it deserves bagging; it’s a simplistic, hamfisted answer to a very complex question. The problem is, this is a symptom (albeit a not-very-challenging one) of something that plagues nearly every attempt to have a “dialog” across ideological lines with the left, whether the issue is man-made global warming, gender, or race.

They frame the argument to not merely favor their side, but to paint disagreement as base, benighted and depraved.

Which makes for a fun rhetorical game (Fecke was reportedly a college-level debater, so one might suspect that’s the goal), but – and I say this as someone who’s been cut down to size for substituting “rhetorical games” for “communication” enough times to know better – it makes for lousy dialog, if indeed “dialog” is what you want.

And of course, “dialog” is not what most of the parties to this “discussion” want. They want it no more than Jason Lewis wants an even conversation – and at least Lewis’ liner is funny.

There’s nothing funny about the way the “dialog on race” is being framed.  No “dialog” exists while one side assumes the other is depraved until proven depraved.
———-

I’m going to start out with a very broad statement: “Isms” are part of the human condition. All people are conditioned to favor people who are like them, and to suspect people who are different from them, whether tangibly (skin color, language, accent, smell, dress) or subtly (class, education, geography). Many white people get uneasy around many black people, sure, but that’s an easy one. Middle-class white people get uneasy around mullet-headed bikers; New Yorkers sneer down their noses at Arklahoma accents; light-skinned blacks disdain darker blacks (or so said Spike Lee); farmers roll their eyes at people in suits and ties and clipped city accents and manners.

This is true across every culture on this planet.

In many of those cultures, that suspicion is codified in the language. In many languages, the word for “Human” varies, depending on how closely-related or situated the subject is to the speaker; for “humans” whose tribe is closer to that of the speaker, it’s a fairly benign or amiable term; the farther afield the subject, the less-benign and more derogatory the term will get.

To say “everyone’s a racist” is itself simplistic; it would be fairer and more accurate to say “we are all we-ists”; all of us, black or female or suburban or mentally ill or urban or atheist, are more comfortable around people who are like us.  And every single one of us practices “profiling”, whether you’re a black couple “profiling” some agressive drunk rednecks, or a Xhosa turning on a Bantu in anger, or Molly Priesmeyer “profiling” white males, or even the stereotypical white middle-class guy sizing up…anyone else.

What matters, of course, is how we deal with this bit of human programming.

So far, so good?

———-

Let’s take a moment and launch a pre-emptive strike on a liberal cliche or two. I’ll ask my conservative homies to indulge what might sound to some of them (mistakenly) like heresy.

The effects of racism didn’t end in 1865 – or 1964, for that matter.

And I’m not just talking about the racism of low expectations that is inherent in the welfare system to which so many Americans have been induced to addiction, a system that’s perpetuated any number of “isms” by making something that is completely counterintuitive to most humans – subsidizing poverty, in order to make misery and disenfranchisement a viable lifestyle. By subsidizing poverty to enable people to say in it for generation after generation, racism and classism and dozens of other corrosive “isms” are given an environment to see to their own permanence.

But most of us – the conservatives, at least – know about both of those already. But that’s a post-1964 mistake.

There’s one bit of racism that’s gone back 400 years, and is alive and well today – the devaluation of the black male. Black males – fathers – were sold off pretty much at will, as befitted what what considered property at the time. They were shipped around like cattle, worked to death, killed without the benefit of legal protection – it’s not a new story to anyone, is it? African-American society built on the matriarchal nature of many African societies, and became even more so; fathers were a transient thing.

During the Jim Crow years, of course, black men could be discriminated against, attacked, lynched with impunity. Worst of all,  we really haven’t learned much since the end of Jim Crow. Black men, to the welfare system, are pretty much expendable; “families” without fathers get better benefits. Add to that an educational system that systematically fails blacks, a welfare system more concerned with its own self-perpetuation than in helping people find the self-respect (as opposed to “self-esteem”) that it takes to break the cycle, and an urban popular culture that plays into the nihilistic devaluation of the African-American male…

…between all that, America doesn’t need to “invent HIV”, as Jeremiah Wright famously claimed, to screw up African-Americans. 

So we’ve established in advance; racism exists, and it’s a pretty normal, albeit lamentable, human condition.

———-

So you want a dialog about race?

OK. So in the next installment, let’s talk. Or at least I’ll give you, the audience, my monologue. You can respond any way you’d like.

Oh, yeah – Fecke’s wrong. If you say you’re not a racist, it means you’re not. Or you are. Or somewhere in between – somewhere in that immense continuum between “hating people who are different than you” and “not really recognizing differences at all”. All generalizations are false.

Except that one.

Don’t look at me – Blogthings said it, not I:

In A Just World, You’d Be In Charge

While not everyone realizes it, you are the kind of person the world needs to have, not merely in a position of influence, but completely in charge.   While some need brutality to rise to the top, the force of your personality more than suffices. You radiate a light of your own. Some think you are love.

My watch was running a bit slow.

Fortunately, there’s another hint Algore might run.  So I was able to reset my watch.

Oh, yeah – go, Al.  Whooie.

Whatever.

Zubaz – the uniform of every sleazy bar-trash jagoff in the late eighties and early nineties – is, um, gaaaah, back:

The Minnesota creation grew into such a worldwide fad that they could be found everywhere from the sidelines of NFL games and NBA arenas to the wilds of Antarctica.

So it is not surprising that a new buzz is building over the return of the wildly outrageous pants, which since November are being sold on the Internet by the same two Minnesota weightlifters who created them in their Roseville gym in 1988.

“It’s really pretty simpl

Note to pop culture: if you want to exhume “the eighties”, do it with the first half of the decade. The second half sucked.

“Peaceful” “Street Theater” protesters interrupt an Easter Mass in Chicago:

Six Iraq war protesters disrupted an Easter Mass on Sunday, shouting and squirting fake blood on themselves and parishioners in a packed auditorium.

Three men and three women startled the crowd during Cardinal Francis George’s homily, yelling “Even the Pope calls for peace” as they were removed from the Mass by security guards and ushers.

Why are these morons not doing the same thing in mosques, demanding an end to terrorism, female circumcision, the murder of gays, stoning of women pregnant out of wedlock…?

The solipsism and self-absorption of the “anti-war” left never ceases to astound.

Andy Birkey at the MinMon notes:

Have Michele Bachmann’s media gaffes and extreme conservative views [closed circuit to Birkey; are there any other kind? Or does the MNMon’s software prepend “extreme” to every instance of “conservative” in everyone’s copy? – Ed] driven her to speak mainly to conservative and Christian-right news outlets? Bachmann’s media appearances since her election create the impression of a member of Congress who is shy when not among friends, and perhaps a campaign that is concerned about what happens when a nonconservative microphone or camera is pointed in her direction.

Or – here’s another suggestion – someone who recognized what a hatchet job the regional media has been pulling on her for her entire political career?

Just a suggestion.

But that’s not the point of this post. Let’s try something new: let’s ask the same question in reverse.

How many regional liberal pols will do appearances outside the cozy, comfy club of the region’s reliably lefty-coddling mainstream media? (For a good laugh, check further down in Birkey’s piece – he calls WCCO and MPR and Almanac “mainstream”. [Closed circuit to Andy, again; Ed Morrissey and I are closer to the “mainstream” than either of those outlets – Ed]).

Andy notes that the Congresswoman has not responded to the Monitor’s many requests for interviews; perhaps Birkey feels the Monitor is “mainstream”. Whatever – it probably stands to reason that much of the regional dead-tree media has been asking for interviews. In that context, Birkey’s question is a good one.

Fair enough.

I wonder how well the shoe works on the other foot?

How many of Minnesota’s legions of DFL politicians, media figures and other eminementos feel like manning up and mixing it up with the conservative alt-media?

Birkey, or someone like him, will no doubt complain “it’s a lousy comparison! The NARN is bunch of “out” conservatives”. Actually, it’s a cop-out on two counts; at least we, unlike most the the Twin Cities’ mainstream media (to say nothing of the Monitor) are up-front about our biases; more importantly, Ed and I do fair, up-front interviews; we don’t ambush people (you know who you’re talking to), we don’t snip out bits of interview to engineer into a mutated context after the fact. We are, in short, the most honest interviewers in the Twin Cities media by a long, long way.

I’ll be sending out emails to a list of regional liberal personalities, asking them to appear on the Northern Alliance Volume II or, failing that, do an email interview with yours truly for this blog. The list includes:

1. Senator Amy Klobuchar (why is it so hard to find an email address on her campaign website?)
2. Senate candidate Al Franken (sent!)
3. Rep. Keith Ellison (left a voicemail and an email)
4. Rep. Betty McCollum (her office’s email processor seems to be mucked up; I left a message with her local press assistant)
5. Minneapolis mayor RT Rybak (Email sent).
6. “Growth and Justice” poobah Joel Kramer (email sent)

I’ll post the answers in this space when they come back.

(Kudos to the thin film of local left-leaners who do mix it up with the good guys; Eric Black, DFL chair Brian Melendez, and…well, that’s about it. On the other hand, brickbats to Nick Coleman, who responded to my request for an interview by demanding a $1,000 donation to a Saint Paul school).

Great idea, Andy!

The boilerplate for my email appears below the fold.

(more…)

The NYTimes reports on the use of sexual blackmail in the Citizenship and Immigration Services division of the Homeland Security department.

The calls from the agent started three days later. He hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a private meeting. And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not realizing that she was recording everything on the cellphone in her purse.

“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”

She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.

The agent is being prosecuted. 

No one knows how widespread sexual blackmail is, but the case echoes other instances of sexual coercion that have surfaced in recent years, including agents criminally charged in Atlanta, Miami and Santa Ana, Calif. And it raises broader questions about the system’s vulnerability to corruption at a time when millions of noncitizens live in a kind of legal no-man’s land, increasingly fearful of seeking the law’s protection.

The upside?  When the Dems ram single-payer healthcare down our throats, these same people will be running the healthcare system!

Oh, wait, that’s a downside.

Quote A:

“I think it’s simplistic and naive to say people can spend their money better than the government.”

Quote B:

“When you guys win, you get to keep your money. When we win, we take your money.”

Quote C:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

No peeking – which quote was by:

1. Charles Townsend, Brit parliamentarian who believed Americans should be happy to pay for a better UK,
2. DFL Senate majority leader Larry Pogemiller
3. St. Paul legislator Cy Thao

Bonus question: What’s the difference, really?

A few more terms of DFL control and every Minnesotan will be required to wear diapers.

(Quotes via Roosh, Gross and I)

Syl Jones tries to jam words into Barack Obama’s mouth – and, by extension, into everyone’s head.

Somewhere in the middle of Barack Obama’s speech about race in America, one can imagine him thinking, “I’m tiptoeing through a minefield and my feet haven’t been blown off.” Yet, that is. There’s still time.

After all, the comments by his pastor Jeremiah Wright have been characterized as anti-American,

I suppose there’s a bright side to inventing HIV to keep the Third World down?

and Obama himself has been cleverly linked to those comments.

Mr. Jones:  if I spent twenty years in a church where George Gordon Winrod was the minister (and know Jones is old enough to get that reference), do you think one would need to be unreasonable, much less “clever’, to “link” me to racism and anti-semitism?

But let’s cut to the ventriloquism:

From a political point of view, Obama hit the ball out of the park with a sweeping, personal indictment of racial politics in what will be remembered in the black community as The Speech. He sought to communicate his unique perspective as an interracial American and to do so honestly, hoping that his listeners and his critics would engage as adults.

But here’s what Obama couldn’t and didn’t say, because his political viability hung in the balance. Think of these as the redacted remarks from the junior senator from Illinois:

And think of my responses as the heckling that Obama’s redacted thoughts Syl Jones’ projections deserve.

“Why am I being asked to justify the comments of a man who is free, as is any American, to say what he wishes, to express his unique point of view?

“You” aren’t.  “You”‘re being asked to spell out how much impact the caustically-racist beliefs of “your” former spiritual advisor have had on “you”, by people who also have that same right.

“How many of you have relatives — not pastors but members of your immediate family — who use the N word, who disparage blacks, Hispanics and Asians with regularity?

“You” mean using terms like “ice people?”

Not me.  Not a single one.

“Were you running for president, would you be expected to repudiate your grandmother or your crazy uncle or even your father for making what you might consider to be racist remarks? I don’t think so.

How many of “you” would have publicly hailed that crazy uncle as “your”spiritual advisor, and made him a part of “your” presidential campaign?

“Why is Jeremiah Wright being condemned for essentially repeating the beliefs that millions around the world have expressed: that America is fundamentally racist?

Because America is not fundamentally racist.

Or let me put it another way; all of humanity is fundamentally racist.  Many if not most of the world’s languages have racism codified into them; they have many words for “human”, of descending value, depending on how close to the speaker’s town, tribe or nation the “human” hails. And given that racism is a fundamentally human condition, can Jeremiah Wright or Syl-Jones-via-Obama name a single significant, racially heterogenous country in the world that has done more to expunge racism from its public life?  That’s fought a civil war, the bloodiest war in its history, whose causes all linked back, directly or indirectly, to racism?  That’s so completely politically transformed itself (over the past sixty years) to try to repudiate racism?

I’m sure any book Jeremiah Wright could use to look up the answer is too soggy with splittle to be of much help.

But how about you, Senator Obama Syl?

What is it about ‘fundamentally racist’ that you do not understand? A nation that has consistently denied people of color equal opportunity, that uses antiquated laws to enforce unequal justice between offenders based on race, that incarcerates a huge percentage of black men, that even puts them to death in far greater proportions than white men — a nation such as this is indeed fundamentally racist, and the fact that so many of you refuse to understand this shows how ignorant you really are.

What is it about “made cataclysmic efforts to atone for that history”, “show me the consistent denial of opportunity to people of color in the past twenty years, and I’ll show you an endangered species, socially, legally and politically”, “even black commentators with any integrity note the corrosive effects of popular culture, government “aid” (and, yes, 400 years of devaluing the black male) and its manifestation in black-on-black crime” that you do not understand?

“Why isn’t it enough that I have come before you as a man and said that I want to bring us all together, and that I have shown you my own personal values time and time again?

Blame “your” fellow travellers, who’ve gone over the social lives of every single conservative candidate in my lifetime with fine-toothed combs looking for dirt…

…that they didn’t credit in their books!  That they didn’t call their “personal spiritual advisors”!  That were not their spiritual avatars!

I did not call the Clinton campaign racist when they attempted to belittle me and my candidacy as ‘a fairy tale.’

If “Fairy tale” is racist, perhaps the problem is that people like Jeremiah Wright, Syl Jones and Jesse Jackson have stripped the term of all meaning?

I have stuck to the issues

Huh?

“I suspect that even if I am elected president, what I actually do will never be enough, because the dead weight of those who are determined to win at any cost — whether through racist invective or personal smear campaigns — will bring this country down to its lowest common denominator. The truth is, even if I am ready to be president, America may not be ready for me.

“America” – part of it, anyway – suspects that “you” aren’t ready for prime time, that behind “your” moderate rhetoric beats the heart of a far-left Chicago ward heeler (since goodness knows there’s not much else back there), and – worst of all, that bringing that up is going to have your water-carriers, like Syl Jones, calling us “racists”, when all we are doing is subjecting you to the same scrutiny any other politician gets – and, in this age, deserves.

“If we were having an adult discussion about race, and if the majority of you listening were able to accept the diversity of views that exist on this subject, I wouldn’t need to say any of this.

And if “you” could accept genuine “diversity of views”, “you” wouldn’t be stupid enough to be putting this condescending internal monologue out there.

I would be judged on my merits as a man, without the persistent reading of tea leaves to which I have been subjected.

Then it’s “you” that are the racist, Syl  Senator Obama.  “Your” merits as a man are scarcely up for debate – I’ve seen not a single credible commentator attack you, personally.  Your merits as a candidate for president are completely fair game.  “Your” choices in spiritual advisors are what’s being questioned, here, and if “you” think it’s any different for a white candidate, the “you” are the one that’s not ready for a mature dialog.

That in itself is a sign of the systemic racism against which I am swimming in an attempt to change the course of the nation.”

And that, itself, is a sign that “you” are the one that’s hiding behind the most convenient possible definition of racism.

But Obama didn’t say this.

Good for him.  He’s too smart for that.

May you and yours have a blessed Easter.

The NARN is taking the day off. We’ll be running “best of” broadcasts today, which means pretty much any episode but the “Funky Chicken” interview is fair game. What’ll ya get? We dunno.

The Northern Alliance Radio Network  – Chad, John, Brian, Ed, King, Michael and I – wishes you and yours a happy and blessed Easter.  We’ll be back next week to continue polarizing the political discourse.

Over at the MinMon, Andy Birkey writes:

Have Michele Bachmann’s media gaffes and extreme conservative views driven her to speak mainly to conservative and Christian-right news outlets?

Leave aside that in the MNMon’s world, all conservative views would seem, judging by their copy, to be “extreme”.  Never mind.

Birkey’s article introduced an interesting question.

More on Monday.

Rasmussen says that the Obama/Clinton lock on Minnesota is fading a bit:

In Minnesota, the latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows Barack Obama leading John McCain 47% to 43%. The election poll also shows McCain essentially even with Hillary Clinton, leading her by a statistically insignificant 47% to 46%.

Obama leads McCain by eight points among women but trails by a single point among men. Clinton leads McCain by twelve among women but trails by seventeen among men.

Obama leads McCain by fourteen points among unaffiliated voters while McCain leads Clinton by nine among those same voters.

McCain is viewed favorably by 58% of Minnesota voters. Fifty-seven percent (57%) say the same about Obama while 50% have a favorable opinion of Clinton. Compared to a month ago, Obama’s favorables are down seven, McCain’s ratings have fallen four points, and Clinton is down one.

Rasmussen has downupgraded Minnesota from “Likely Democratic” to “Leaning Demcoratic”.

Just keep tugging on that rope.

In like a lion, out…

Winter storm warning posted until 7 pm, meaning treacherous travel is imminent/happening now…most of southern MN, including Hennepin, Scott, Dakota and Carver co.

High probability of 3-6″ in the metro area by Friday evening, the most southern suburbs, where a few towns may see 5-8″ slush, less than 2″ far north metro

Second disturbance dropping southward across Minnesota may spark another inch or two of slush Saturday PM….Sunday should be the sunnier day…most of the (new) snow melts by Monday

…like a cold, wet lion.

Today’s Hot Gear Friday (with a nod to Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday”) is the Hamer Standard.

They say that, when it comes to people of the opposite (or, for some of us I guess, same) sex, we’re attracted to people we find “exotic” – different than those we grew up around.

I saw this first-hand a few years back. I grew up in North Dakota, where tall, blond, Northern-European-descended women are as common as wheat – like Minnesota, only more so. I worked with a guy on a project, an Italian from Newark named Vito. He’d fly in to the Twin Cities to work on a project – and as we’d walk about downtown from one meeting to another, he’d be in a constant froth; “Gawd, Mitch, I should move out here. How do you get any work done with all these tall gorgeous blondes around here?”

“Enh”, I said, remembering when I’d been flown out to the east coast, and spent a couple of days wandering about all bobbleheaded over all of the non-blond, non-tall, non-north-European women.

So if you’ve noticed that I’ve been focusing a lot on big, dense-bodied guitars – the Les Paul, the Yamaha SG2000, and today’s special, the Hamer Sunburst – then you catch the drift of the anecdote above. I’ve been playing light guitars for thirty years now. Fenders, like my old Jazzmaster, tend to be relatively lightly-built (although as Pete Townsend found to his chagrin, lightness can be deceiving – the Strat is nearly un-smashable; it can serve as an axe, as long as all you want to chop up is amplifiers), with fairly high actions. My other electric – a mid-seventies Ibanez SG – is a fairly light little thing. Sweet tone, sure (having a Seymore Duncan “Jeff Beck” pickup down by the bridge forgives a lot of sins), but that light build doesn’t retain vibrations…

…like an armored beast like the Hamer. Playing a Sunburst is to playing my Jazz like driving an M1 Abrams is to driving a dune buggy; both serve their purposes; one feels very different than the other.

And the Sunburst is right up there on my “things I wanna buy when I get an unexpected windfall” list…

Kathleen “Sarah Jane Olson” Soliah, convicted Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist and former Highland Park DFL stalwart and cause celebre, has been released on parole:

Kathleen Soliah, a former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, was released on parole this week from a California women’s prison after serving about six years behind bars for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

The white-haired convict, who has changed her name to Sara Jane Olson, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison. Like most California inmates, Soliah earned credit against her sentence for working while in prison. She served on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, prison officials said.

The 61-year-old Soliah, who was released Monday, must now serve a three-year parole, although prison officials declined to provide the conditions of her release.

In the Soliah camp, there’s never been any doubt as to who the real victim was. And it’s not Myrna Opsahl:

Soliah’s attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, said, “We’re thrilled she’s out and can return to her family. For someone who was not a danger or a threat to society, it was six years too long.”

Saner heads prevailed, at trial and today:

Los Angeles police see Soliah in far harsher light.

She “attempted to murder LAPD officers by bombing two police cars,” said Tim Sands, president of the Police Protective League, which represents the city’s 9,300 rank-and-file officers. “She needs to serve her full time in prison for these crimes and does not deserve time off for working in prison. Criminals who attempt to murder police officers should not be able to escape justice simply because they have good lawyers.”…Soliah pleaded guilty to two charges of possessing a destructive device with the intent to murder and also struck a deal in a separate case, in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating in a Sacramento bank robbery where another SLA member killed [customer Myrna Opsahl]. For the murder conviction, she received a one-year sentence. For the botched bombings, Soliah initially was sentenced to five years and four months, but that term was extended to 12 years by a state prison board after the board designated her a serious offender.

I filled in Myrna Opsahl‘s name. The media has troubling tendency to leave here as an anonymous statistic; she was, in fact, a 42 year old mother of four. Indeed, everyone involved, including Soliah’s family, seem to refuse to grant Myrna Opsahl the dignity of having ever existed, much less accept responsibility for her murder.

Last June, Tara McKelvey interviewed Soliah’s husband and daughter, Fred and Emily Peterson. Nary a word of responsibility, of wonder about the life of the woman whose life Soliah helped bring to a gruesome, horrible end, of acknowledgement that Soliah was facing justice (and a fairly benign version of justice at that) for having done something wrong – the evil of destroying one life and family, and actively conniving to destroy more. No – since she’d been a “good person” since her years of bomb-making and bank-robbing and wanton gunfire, they, and their supporters, thought it was all an even trade.
Fred Peterson tried to turn it into a David Lynch screenplay:

“You know, The Fugitive Becomes a Soccer Mom. They’re all stereotypical images of deceit. None of that applies when you’re just living a life and raising kids. People would say to me, ‘How could you accommodate such a depraved criminal mind? How can you live with the knowledge of what happened in the past?’ It captures the American psychodrama. But it was not real.”

I’ll bet the family of Myrna Opsahl begs to differ.

(Via Ed at Hot Air)

It was Monday, March 21, 1988. It was a chilly, sloppy morning that was fixing to turn into springtime, sooner or later.

Mark and Bill, the bassist and drummer respectively in my former band, were the youngest two brothers of a big, brawling Irish-Catholic family of eight – five brothers and three sisters. All eight of them were reliably left-of-center (more accurately, socialist) on every issue; they were also blazingly smart, articulate people; although only the two oldest brothers had gone to college, all eight of them were among the best-read people I’d ever met in my life; Bill – a tenth-grade dropout – was better-read than most Masters’ candidates in literature that I’ve met; his knowledge of James Joyce is rivalled by only one person I know.

And after our various band practices, we usually adjourned to glorious hours-long discussions of politics, literature, and history, that usually ended around 2AM and left everyone wanting more. Naturally, they all knew I’d been a conservative talk show host – it was fairly safe to say I was the only conservative pundit in the Twin Cities music scene at the time. So the debates were pretty intense – but fun.

One of the issues we disagreed about the most strongly was gun control. Neil – the brother just older than Mark, who had lived in New York and was a competitive weightlifter when he wasn’t working his day job (as a mover) was the most vigorously anti-gun; “if you’re a man, you shouldn’t need a gun”, he’d say – and usually change the subject when I responded “so what if you’re a 75 year old man? Or a 90 pound woman? Or a guy in a wheelchair”.

Mark didn’t like guns because of some legal issues in his teenage years; it was a legal matter, so he abstained pretty intensely.

Bill, the drummer? Well, with him the debate was largely philosophical and intellectual.

Until today.

———-

The phone rang at 8AM. It was Bill.

“Mitch? You gotta help me buy a gun”.

He related the story; he’d been mugged the night before. Some thug had made off with about $300 in cash. That followed a breakin that’d happened a few months earlier that had netted a TV and some cheap stereo gear (and thankfully none of the musical instruments in the basement).

Bill had had enough. Although he knew Minnesota’s concealed-carry law at the time would never grant him a permit to carry in public, he wanted to secure his home – and secure it but good.

I picked him up around 10. We drove to Richfield Gun and Pawn.

He made a beeline to the store’s large, well-trafficked Assault Rifle section, and started eyeing a Norinco AK47.

I tactfully talked him away from it; for home defense, either a shotgun or a handgun were a much better idea.

I directed him toward a really nifty 12 gauge riot gun. We walked toward the counter…

…and he saw the SKS carbine. It was like a magnetic attraction.

“Bill”, I said, trying to nag him out of it. But between the firepower (semi-automatic, ten round stripper clip-fed magazine) and the price (about $100 at the time), it…well, “sent the message” he wanted sent.

I talked him into buying a box of soft-point rounds (the better for shooting indoors) along with a couple of boxes of cheap Egyptian hardball, and we drove out to Bill’s Gun Range in Robbinsdale. We set up on the line, I walked him through the safety rules (it’s always loaded), and he fired the first shots of his life, busting off five shots at a paper target.

And he came up smiling. My first convert.

Another true believer.

I had created a monster, as events turned out – but in a good way.

A Philadelphia restauranteur enforces an “English Only” rule in his establishment – and, against all odds, isn’t in jail!

The owner of a famous cheesesteak shop did not discriminate when he posted signs asking customers to speak English, a city panel ruled Wednesday.In a 2-1 vote, a Commission on Human Relations panel found that two signs at Geno’s Steaks telling customers, “This is America: WHEN ORDERING ‘PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH,'” do not violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance.

Is it because it’s the right thing, or because English speakers are a protected minority?

Shop owner Joe Vento has said he posted the signs in October 2005 because of concerns over immigration reform and an increasing number of people in the area who could not order in English.

Go read it.

I’m sure Lori Sturdevant is going to write  a column just like this.  Real soon here.  Honest.

————-

Joe Bodell at the Monitor reports that the DFL has taken the long knives to a couple of their moderates!

There were no embarrassing scandals or ugly fights at the House District 58 convention last weekend, but, still, two longtime incumbents — Reps. Joe Mullery in 58A and Willie Dominguez in 58B — walked away without getting the official nod from their own party. Instead, activists in 58B chose Bobbie Joe Champion, and Wellstone Action staffer and Minneapolis School Board Member Peggy Flanagan forced Mullery to a no-endorsement, kicking off a primary race.

Responsible, middle-of-the-road DFLers in the district wondered why the DFL’s purity police wants them removed from the party.

Well, no.  Sturdevant won’t write any such thing, because to the Twin Cities leftymedia, only Democrats get to act partisan.

The course of the Minnesota Monitor has been an interesting one.

The MNMon is, and has always been, a bald-faced propaganda site, funded by “liberals with deep pockets” – after a year of official denials and stalling huffing and puffing, Eric Black admitted that there was some George Soros money in the mix.

When they started under original editor Robin “Rew” Marty, the Mon had a recent-college-grad-ish earnestness about it; it was a genial, sloppy production prone to dumb mistakes, but they seemed at least to mean well and to try, in most cases, to do a credible job. Paul Schmelzer, former “Media” reporter and one of the Mon’s few genuinely good writer/reporters, took over as editor (seemingly briefly), around the time Eric Black jumped from the Strib and classed up the joint for a bit; for a few months, the Monitor’s material was a source for discussion rather than derision.

And then, about the time Black bailed to go to the MNPost, they hired former City Pages editor and Daily Mold blogger Steve Perry. I and a fair chunk of the the local RealAmericansphere has been scratching our heads watching the hilarity ever since. Perry seems to have brought over a bunch of the City Pages less stellar exiles, and changed the site’s focus from semi-original reporting to screechy polemics seemingly copied word for word from pressure-group press releases and topped off with a dollop of shrill, giggly, usually ignorant commentary.

In other words – Soros et al have finally hired a genuine, respected journalist to run the Monitor – and he’s basically turned it into a rantblog.
If it were a good blog-with-a-different-name-and-lots-of-money, there’s at least a chance someone could have written something better than this comically-bad piece by Heather Maartens “Anna Pratt” on the Heller case.

The scare strikeout is (like, let’s face it, all scare strikeouts) very much on purpose; there is nothing about this piece (like the Monitor’s “coverage” of Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill), that doesn’t look like it wasn’t directly cribbed from a Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota press release.

When is a right right and when is a right… wrong? In this case, when does one’s “right to bear arms” also trespass on the rights of others?

This could only be written by someone who has not the faintest clue about this nation’s moral, intellectual, political or social history. It’s a symptom of this nation’s catastrophic ignorance about the humanities of our own history.
The answer is “Rights don’t trample on other peoples’ rights”. Your right – or Anna Pratt’s right – to free speech doesn’t trample mine. I have no right not to be offended or nauseated by someone else’s speech – but I do have the right to respond with better speech. Not that it takes much.

The law-abiding, responsible exercise of your God-given rights, by the very nature of “Rights” (as opposed to “privileges” and “entitlements”) can not “trample” anyone else’s rights.

Rights have responsibilities and limitations; we have free speech, but we may not yell “I’m lighting my farts” in a crowded theater; we may worship freely, but if your poisonous snake kills someone’s child, you might have some ‘splaining to do. Abusing ones’ right to keep and bear arms has serious consequences; ironically, it’s the Second Amendment movement that’s moved to make those consequences more sure and severe, while the anti-gun left has steadily sapped them.

But I digress.

I’m talking about the Supreme Court controversy regarding the constitutionality of the handgun law in Washington, D.C., where nary a gun is allowed, excepting those of police officers.On Tuesday, March 18, arguments for and against Washington D.C.’s handgun ban were presented in a federal appeals court.

Ms. Pratt? That “Federal Appeals Court” is called the “Supreme Court of the United States”.

I never, ever thought I’d say this, but…go ask Jeff Fecke how to read and fact-check your stuff? OK?

This comes after a lower court’s 2-1 vote last year took issue with the ban.

On the other hand, the “lower court” was a US Circuit Court of Appeals, which isn’t really all that “lower” by court standards.

Now, to be fair, I’m not sure if Anna Pratt (like Dan Haugen and Andy Birkey before her) is completely oblivious to the actual law and history involved, or if she’s just cribbing off a press release from Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota (whose ignorance of law and history is a matter of documented record) – but while the flubs above might be a result of bad reporting and fact-checking, the below is just plain made up from whole cloth.

That would reverse nearly 70 years of legal precedent.

And there’s the tell; this “article” is cribbed from CS“S”M.

Teaching moment, Anna: there is not 70 years of legal precedent. There is one case, US V. Miller, from 1939, which is open to widely-varying interpretations, which has only been mentioned in five subsequent cases, and which is notable in that neither the defendants nor their lawyers were actually able to show up at the SCOTUS hearing. To claim Miller is a clear precedent is the sort of wishful thinking that most of us shy away from, and that Heather Martens takes as her stock in trade.

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which hasn’t gotten such play since 1791, states, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”Heather Martens, president of Citizens for a Safer Minnesota (CSM), which lobbies for a public-health approach to prevent gun deaths and injuries, asserted in an email that a decision favoring the right to carry guns could “set off a deluge of legal actions across the country challenging every gun regulation there is, no matter how reasonable.”

Let’s take Heather Martens at her word – which, given that virtually everything she’s ever said on the subject has been a lie, is a bit of a gift.

So what?

The laws – as Pratt herself notes further down in the crib article – are doing no good anyway! Why not challenge them?

CSM is part of the Protect Minnesota campaign, a coalition of gun owners and non-gun owners alike, who are working to ensure background checks for gun purchases and safe gun use.

The “Protect Minnesota campaign” – like every anti-gun group in Minnesota, includign the “Million Mom March”, which might muster five or six “moms” for a protest these days – is an astroturf, checkbook advocacy group, and any Potemkin “gun owners” that are part of it are sock puppets, pets kept on the leash by “groups” like this.

Across the state, gun deaths and injuries are on the rise, according to campaign information.

Well, that sounds bad, doesn’t it?

Of course, it’s utterly meaningless; the deaths and injuries are being caused by criminals. And the Constitution doesn’t protect criminal activity!

But the Constitution would seem to be the least of Martens‘ Pratt’s concerns:

The Supreme Court debate recycles an old issue and as such, it is standing in the way of resolving firearm-related violence.

BAD Supreme Court! Get out of the way and quit interpreting the constitution!

Attention, Anna Pratt – “recycling old issues” is what the SCOTUS does!
I’m not sure who Anna Pratt is – but if Steve “Mister Furious” Perry’s goal is to turn the Minnesota Monitor into the dumbest rantblog in the state, she’s gonna be a great help!

CORRECTION: Foot pointed out that I, too, got a level of jurisprudence wrong. Fixed it. Suppose Anna Pratt will do the same?

First things first. My dad, Bruce Berg, has a book coming out in the next week or so. I think it’s called “Heard It Now And Then”, and it’s an anthology of his best guest editorials from his 25 year archive of material for North Dakota Public Radio.

And I was surprised to learn that it’s actually his fifth book. Common Grounds, his first, is probably the best-known; his history of Jamestown’s old ball park touches heavily on the glory years of North Dakota amateur baseball, when the league was a stop on the Negro League circuit. In one fabled story, a team of North Dakota all-stars – half of them Negro League stars like Satchel Paige and company, the other half locals – swept the Major League All-Stars, who were passing through by train on their way to Japan for an exhibition series. It’s all in there. Anyway, he’s had others; Writer’s Block, which is a sort of combination geneology and collection of peoples’ reminiscences about the city’s history a collection of his Jamestown Sun columns, and a novel (whose name eludes me, and is self-published so it doesn’t show up on Google).

So congrats, Dad!

In news that may or may not be related, Dad’s asked me (as well as my brother and sister, among others) to write and send him things we remember about the city. I’m not sure if this is for another book project, or just for his own edification – either way is just fine.

But, appearances notwithstanding, I don’t have a lot of time for writing stuff; my “me” time is usually from 5:00 to 6:15AM every morning.

So in the interest of simplifying my life and doing the job, I’m going to add them into the blog, here. They’ll be posted under the category “Five Ate For Owe Won”. If you’re not into Mitch Berg’s self-indulgent reminiscences (or if you’re just a joyless harpy), just scroll on down.

I do, however, invite Jamestown people (you know who you are) to leave comments, elaborations, or what-have-you. (I will most likely be much more ruthless than normal about excising off-topic or dumb comments).

So there you go!

Derb on the gathering wave of revulsion over China’s behavior:

All sort of other ideas for embarrassing the ChiCom gangsters are buzzing around. Some are suggesting, for example, that athletes simply not show up for the opening ceremonies…There is also the idea, which I rather like, that an entire national team might shave their heads the night before the ceremony to show solidarity with Tibetan monks and nuns, the bravest and most persecuted of Tibetan patriots.

And he notes that this is unfamiliar territory for Beijing:

At the Olympics, the Maoists will be dealing with free people from free nations, and there is only so much they can do to control them. It’s not clear they understand this. They’ve been living for decades in a bubble of unchallenged power, and are not very imaginative.

And this is important. While societies and markets are instinctively adaptible, governments are not. People coloring outside the officially-approved lines is hard for these systems to deal with. A simple thing like “conservatives voting conservative” has flummoxed the Minnesota DFL and Media (pardon the redundancy) for over 20 years; the Chinese, obviously, could have it much worse.

And speaking of the market:

The opportunities for embarrassment are endless, and the prospect of it very delicious to anyone who loves liberty. Personally, I hope their stinking Olympics is a huge fiasco, and I see encouraging signs it may be.

On the one hand, Derb is right; Communism is just not good at making big things happen. On the other hand, the American media has a huge investment in presenting a spectacle – not a news story. I don’t anticipate much light being shown on the cockroaches.

Now, if the attendees include bloggers?