Can’t shut ’em up with reason, or in the marketplace?

Sic the government on ’em!

The speaker of the House made it clear to me and more than forty of my colleagues yesterday that a bill by Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) to outlaw the “Fairness Doctrine” (which a liberal administration could use to silence Rush Limbaugh, other radio talk show hosts and much of the new alternative media) would not see the light of day in Congress during ’08. In ruling out a vote on Pence’s proposed Broadcaster’s Freedom Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-CA.) also signaled her strong support for revival of the “Fairness Doctrine” — which would require radio station owners to provide equal time to radio commentary when it is requested.

And that?  That was the good news!

“Do you personally support revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine?’” I asked.

“Yes,” the speaker replied, without hesitation

Let’s dispense with a myth here:  “The Fairness Doctrine” is about making the public airwaves public again”: Oh, goody.  Then we’ll also bring federal sanctions against the imbalances in the print media?  Academia (especially public academia)?

It’s a simple lie:

Experts say that the “Fairness Doctrine,” which was ended under the Reagan Administration, would put a major burden on small radio stations in providing equal time to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters, who are a potent political force. Rather than engage in the costly practice of providing that time, the experts conclude, many stations would simply not carry Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other talk show hosts who are likely to generate demands for equal time.

Let’s remember a couple of things:

1. Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Ingraham, Medved, Bennett and Savage are free to radio stations.  No radio station pays a nickel to carry their programs.
2. If  they are forced  by law to “balance”  the likes of Limbaugh and company, most stations will do what they did before 1987:  punt.  They’ll avoid politics altogether; they’ll broadcast the bland teleshrink or blander, crypto-liberal MPR-Lite pap like Owen Span and Larry King.  Or they’ll pick up on the biggest trend in talk radio in 1985-86 – “Brokered Talk”, selling airtime to real estate agents and investment advisors and nutrition supplement dealers.  That’s the way talk was headed up until the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.
3. Or they can look for successful free “liberal” talk to fill out their requirements under the Fairness Doctrine.Um, yeah.  Good luck with that.

This is a coup against the First Amendment.  There is no other explanation.

(Which isn’t to say that I don’t want my left-of-center readers to try to provide one.  Expect a spirited response).

Tomorrow, sometime very shortly after 9AM Central Time, the Supreme Court will issue its decision in the Heller case, the most important Second Amendment case in history, one which will likely define this nation’s approach to one of our civil liberties as defined in the Bill of Rights for the unforeseeable future.

To say I’m looking forward to this is an understatement; I have had four different posts written against this day – with differing ledes for four different permutations of results – for over a month now, the faster to get a piece up and posted when the word finally comes down from on high.

I am, as they say, loaded for bear.  So to speak.  Every possible contingency but one is accounted for.

I said “but one”.  Someone has gone and scheduled a meeting tomorrow morning.

At 9AM. 

Far from my office.

And no, it’s not going to get re-scheduled.  It depends on the presence of a number of people who routinely block entire days off of their schedules, to avoid getting overbooked. 

You might be thinking “take your laptop with!”   Nice try – but naturally, I’ll be presenting a number of design alternatives to assembled management from several divisions, via overhead projector; it’d hardly do to have SCOTUSBlog and my blog editor page open as I talked to the gathered multitude.

So, like Dr. Cox in the “NBA Final” episode of Scrubs, I’m going to discharge my duties with my usual excellence, and then race like a crazed man back to my digs, avoiding all water-cooler conversation until I get back online, to figure out exactly what to post.

(The alternative – predict the result and the time of its release, and set it to post before I go to the meeting – might lend itself to endless jocularity in the all-too-likely event that I predict something, like perhaps the number of pro and con justices or, perhaps, the actual verdict, wrongly.  But I think I’ll let y’all get your yuks elsewhere, thanks).

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog reports that Heller is not on the agenda for today. We should know shortly if tomorrow will be the last day the court will be issuing opinions for this term.

I’ll be up early again.

UPDATE: Chief Justice Roberts has announced that the court will issue all remaining opinions tomorrow.

So tomorrow it is.

The Supreme Court has seven opinions remaining for this term. Heller is the big one. Today’s session starts at 10AM Eastern/9AM Central.

While I’ll be at work, I’ll keeping an eye on the results. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  So far the best place for results seems to be the SCOTUSBlog’s liveblog of today’s session; it’s an auto-updating panel that’ll be at the top of one of my monitors all day.

Seven minutes into the session, they’ve upheld the Exxon Valdez award, and granted a death-row inmate a third hearing.  Fingers crossed.

UPDATE 0912 CT:  Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog notes there’s one more opinion to go.

UPDATE 0916:  The court ruled in Giles v. California, but Goldstein notes that at least one more decision is in the chute.  Stay tuned.

The Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” notes the various demonstration permits that’ve been issued for the upcoming Republican National Convention.

This one was interesting:

True Blue Minnesota was among the lottery winners. The group plans to stage anti-RNC events at Triangle Park on each day of the convention. According to Andrew Hine, one of the principal organizers of the gathering, they intend to utilize a 20×27 foot television screen to communicate their message. “It’s part digital billboard and part drive-in movie theater,” Hine says.

We have a preview of True Blue Minnesota’s video screen right here:

And here, the crowd, in their True Blue uniforms:

It’ll be a fun convention!

(What? You think I’m overestimating the tendency of lefties to think like a mindless herd? Sadly, no.)

(UPDATE:  I mean, No!  Really, Really No!)

I was going to write about this bit here – about local gay Catholic groups complaining about Archbishop Nienstedt’s cracking down on LGBT services at a liberal local parish.

Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, however, beat me to it with a huge headstart pointing out correctly that…:

To put it in terms a journalism school graduate might appreciate, the Catholic Church not hosting a Gay Pride event is dog bites man. It happens every day.

Now, a Catholic parish hosting these events, as apparently St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis has been doing so for the past several years, is man bites dog (i.e., an unusual, infrequent event more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence).

Reasonably speaking, that is what should have been covered the past few years. Maybe some shock headlines, “Catholic Parish Hosting Gay Pride Event” followed by quotes from founders of obscure pressure groups for traditional values accusing the organizers of spiritual violence and Christophobic hatred.

Of course, the local agenda-media coverage – Grow at the MNPost, Andy Birkey in the Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” – took the “man biting dog” angle with dreary predictability and impeccable punctuality.

…the most thoroughly dishonest portrayal comes from the new media. Here are excerpts from Doug Grow at the website MinnPost.

Remember when it was OK for Catholics to pray with gays and lesbians?

Be careful whom you pray for…Apparently with a straight face, McGrath said that this isn’t some new crackdown because Archbishop John Nienstedt is now in charge. Recently retired Archibishop Harry Flynn would have cracked down on this, too, had he known of it, McGrath said. Maybe…Many are saddened and angry ? but probably not surprised.

There’s got to be an award for reporting this awful. (A Pulitzer maybe?) Of course, this dispute has absolutely nothing to do with who you pray with or who you pray for. The Church encourages gay activists to attend Mass (sans sacraments, as with anyone in a state of mortal sin) and practically requires Catholics to pray for all those in mortal sin. At his age and experience, Grow should know this. In fact, comments testifying to these facts were in the article he linked to. But he ignores that, misrepresents the issue entirely, questions the integrity of the Church spokesman, and casts his favored actors as oppressed victims. Not bad for a couple of paragraph’s work.

The big question:  When did Doug Grow turn into Nick Coleman?

Grow is a former columnist for the Star Tribune. The only silver lining here is realizing he’s now at an online liberal ghetto like MinnPost, instead of working the monopoly newspaper in town. His ability to confuse the issue and demonize his political enemies in the public’s imagination is now severely limited. Let’s be thankful for small favors.

Andy Birkey?  This is your future!

Charlie Quimby wonders just how much experience counts for.  He’s not completely impressed:

But McCain’s “experience” is subject to some skepticism.

First, there’s the tour as POW. Hard to match, and certainly impossible to criticize. But can we be frank here? Serving five-plus years in a North Vietnamese hellhole has less to do with running the country than installing tail lights on Chevy Malibus has to do with preparing someone to run General Motors. Street cred to the max, but relevant experience?

Now, Charlie, that’s a strawman in a black pajama-fabric uniform carrying an AK47 and a copy of the Little Red Book.

Nobody says that being a POW counts as government experience.

But it is a sign that Mac is a person of unshakeable integrity.  Compare and contrast:

1. After years of barbaric torture, one of our candidates was offered an early release by the NVA.  He refused to be freed ahead of his comrades.
2. After weeks of criticism, one of our candidates cut loose a man he’d described as his “spiritual mentor” in his first book.

You, as always, be the judge.

Then, stringing out his Naval career, a post-service whirlwind courtship of Arizona money and its attendant House seat, leading to succeeding Barry Goldwater as Senator.

And this is bad – or even atypical in Senate-level politics – why?

Early in his Senate career, McCain gained valuable experience as a waterboy for Arizona S&L crook Charles Keating, Jr. McCain’s image as a reformer and straight talker got manufactured soon after.

And, absent party grudges and partisanship, wouldn’t that be considered a good thing under most circumstances?  Someone who aqcuires a nasty smudge spends the rest of his career trying to be Mister Clean?

(As opposed to creating “MoveOn.org”, “Fight the Smears”, or engaging in a media effort to turn “swift-boating” into a pejorative verb)

But it’s “experience”  that’s going to be the siren song for moderates and fearful liberals. McCain will keep us safe. He’ll be tough with dictators and terrorists. He has… like, all this, you know, experience.

Now, Charlie, I’m sure the scare quotes count as an argument among the “Daily Show” set, but really – what exactly are you impeaching about a multi-decade political career that’s seen him embraced and ostracized on both sides of the aisle?

Paul Schmelzer in the Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” gets it wrong, I suspect:

In the political theater of national nominating conventions, one aspect tends to get left out: the political theater of regular citizens.

I have a hunch that the “political theater” of “regular citizens” who just love love love to post their opinions – no matter how obtuse, deranged or deluded – will not be getting “left out”.

Indeed, a friend of mine closely connected to the organizing committee tells me that they estimate there’ll be at least one left-leaning “citizens video journalism” group for every individual delegate, should they choose to divide their “labor” that way.

Rumors that the Twin Cities has implemented a program to train the homeless and recent parolees to work as barristas and clerks at “Hot Topic” are at present unconfirmed.

This pic from the Daily Digital is pretty amazing:

The Daily Digital’s been covering the construction of the new 35W Bridge since the beginning.  It’s been interesting all along; from the beginnings, watching the casting yards and other infrastructure getting built, through all the work to get the piers and foundations and approaches done. 

And above it all, this last few weeks – as the actual span has virtually leaped across the river – have been just amazing.

Yesterday, King wrote (in re the death of George Carlin):

…for those of us who were early teens around 1972, George Carlin was the guy that gave you the “seven words you can never say on television”, which when played on your crappy stereo in your bedroom caused howls of laughter and a furtive look out the door to see if Mom had heard those words…Gone now, a reminder of how time marches past as much as my teen now being in his twenties, and my Littlest starting high school in a few months. What humor will she hear that makes her giggle as much as Al Sleet?

I was (and, actually, am) a tad younger than King – but it got me thinking; what comedy did my little crowd listen to, back then?

Here’s what I remember:

1. Cheech and Chong, Los Cochinos:  I can still recite large swathes of “Pedro and Man at the Drive-In”, “Sergeant Stadenko”, and “Basketball Jones”.  As gloriously puerile as it got.
2. Robin Williams, Throbbing Python of Love:  Recorded somewhere between “Mork and Mindy” and Williams’ ascent to superstardom, I remember furtively listening to it at one of my friends’ houses; I think Elizabeth Edwards owned it, which would have totally scandalized her father.  (I could be wrong about that.  The ownership, I mean; Mr. Edwards would have been mortified).  I can still recite most of “Elmer Fudd sings Bruce Springsteen” (“I’m dwiving in yoah caah/I turn on the wadio…and when we kiss…oooh…Fiiiwe”).
3. Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album: Most of us of the “we love Monty Python” set didn’t know, yet, that the album was a toss-off – literally, as the title said, to punch a contractual ticket.  I doubt we would have cared.  I and my geek friends still can recite “Traffic Lights”, “Never Be Rude To An Arab”, “Finland”, “John Denver Being Strangled” and most of the rest of the record by heart. 
4. Steven Wright, I Have A Pony: This was in college, obviously – my senior year, if memory serves (and it serves less and less these days).  And the album itself was almost as anticlimactic as one of Wright’s jokes; most of us, weaning ourselves on his regular Letterman appearances, knew most of his material (“sometimes I like to fill the bathtub up, and turn on the shower, and pretend I’m in a submarine that’s been hit”) by heart before the album made it to North Dakota.
5. And of course, Class Clown by George Carlin:  This one filtered down to us only via a few of our cooler classmates who had much cooler older brothers and sisters. 

OK – your turn…

Bob Collins at NewsCut commented on a letter to the editor in the Strib that aroused his ire. Collins’ comments – or, should I say, his sources – are a bit troubling as well.

Collins:

Are Midwesterners simply better than people in other parts of the country? Do we work harder? Are we less reliant on others for help when we need it? Are our values more aligned with the American ethic?

Being a good conservative, I tend to think more in terms of individuals than of groups, classes or communities. And while like a lot of Midwesterners I have had in my life a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the nation’s media’s big-city-centeredness, I have stopped believing that nobility and ignobility are regional, class or community virtues. New Yorkers on 9/11, for example, behaved like…well, humans.

And Midwesterners are perfectly capable of ignoble behavior under stress.

But we’ll come back to that.

Today’s Star Tribune “letter of the day” seems to think so. Writer Jeffrey Seyfert of Farmington compares Hurricane Katrina in 2004 with the flooding in Iowa and sections of Minnesota last week.

There is historic flooding involving five Midwestern states; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Where are the news anchors reporting from the bridges asking where is the federal government and when are they coming to the rescue, as they did back during Hurricane Katrina?

The reason you don’t see them is it doesn’t fit the template. It doesn’t fit the template that the federal government is supposed to be omnipresent in our lives and that self-reliance and self-responsibility are mere clichés of days long ago.

The difference is our fellow Midwesterners are picking themselves off the ground, brushing themselves off, and getting to work. Their first instinct is not to blame government; their first instinct is to help each other out and try to put their lives back together.

The letter ignores that, naturally, there’ll be plenty of federal help in the recovery (and I don’t doubt for a minute that the Strib letters editor knew that when they picked the letter over many no-doubt more reasonable-sounding ones for publication).

But there is a communitarian streak in small-town America; borne from isolation and impoverished German and Scandinavian ancestry, on the good side it does mean that these small, integral communities, mostly with roots going back generations, are able to pull together in a crisis pretty seamlessly. (On the flip side, it means they’re pretty suffocating, hidebound places to live, which is why a lot of people – like me – leave ’em).

Just as there is a communitarian streak in small towns in the deep south, whatever their ethnicity. Traditions of community and family bring people together when there’s a problem.

And what does more than anything else in this country to destroy family and disrupt community?

We’ll come back to that.

Syefert’s letter could be dismissed if it weren’t for the fact it’s part of a growing chorus in the Midwest: black people got help in 2004, and the mostly white Midwesterns can’t catch a break.

I will speak at the risk of being accused of projecting my beliefs into a letter written by someone I don’t know (and as we’ll see shortly, I’m not the only one projecting, here); I think it’s fair to say that Midwesterners aren’t saying “black people got help” so much as “the media and punditry racialized New Orleans to create national hysteria over the disaster, turning it into a fundamentally racial issue, partly for political gain, partly to shame the nation into paying to rebuild the place. On the other hand, the coverage of the floods in the Midwest is, well, just another day’s news”.

Let’s not forget that Katrina was racialized by Al Sharpton, by Kanye West, by Ray “Chocolate City” Nagin. The media took up the story to use as a cudgel against the Administration (after carefully scrubbing out Nagin and Kathleen Blanco’s incompetence, and the fact that FEMA has been a disaster waiting to happen since the seventies).

I think there’s a certain amount of wishing, on the part of people who haven’t had their hip waders off in a week and are sore from sandbagging, for just a little hysteria sending goodwill their way.

Speaking of projection, Collins cites a ChiTrib article. I’m going to emphasize one passage for us to come back to later:

Today, the Chicago Tribune profiled the growing sentiment in the Heartland:

“Where is all the fundraising that Katrina victims had?” Ben Creelman asked, a disgusted tone seeping into his voice. “Is it because we’re not from the Deep South? Is it because we’re from the Midwest?”

Creelman didn’t put it in so many words, but his message was clear. The poor, mostly African American residents of New Orleans’ 9th Ward inspired a charitable outpouring not seen since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The flooded farms of the central Midwest, meanwhile, just can’t catch a break.

It gets worse. One man, sandbagging in Columbus Junction, Iowa said “even the Hispanics” were sandbagging, while pointing out that African Americans weren’t.

So – based on statements by two people in a Midwestern disaster area, the writer detects a “growing trend?”

I’ll allow that this might be writer David Greising’s first trip outside Chicago, but I’ve got two bits of news for him:

1. Redneck insularity exists
2. It – and its analogues – exist everywhere. Some call it racism; I call it “we-ism“.

I suggest – strongly – that it’s no more a “Growing Trend” than tribalism and ethnic insularity, both of which trace back to times when humans travelled in packs of hunter-gatherers and fought other packs for prime berry patches.

I might also suggest that, as Katrina was an excuse to find racism inherent at all levels of the system, that David Greising is looking for that seemy, David-Lynch-y underbelly to the Midwest that just about everyone in the media seems to think is lying in wait out there.

As for the government’s response, one difference in the Midwest is that there was one. At least $2 billion in federal aid is expected in the flooded area. Gov. Pawlenty toured Mower, Houston and Freeborn counties last week, declared it a disaster area, and triggered a review for FEMA help.
President Bush toured the area last week and promised plenty of federal help.

True enough.

But let’s get back to the notion of communitarianism, of multigenerational communities (rural, urban, or suburban for that matter) that just get up and do things when they need to be done. While the govenrment is going to help the farmers in the Midwest just as (Greising’s claims notwithstanding) they did in New Orleans, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look into the role of generations of government programs breaking down those very traits.

Thousands of acres of farmland has been lost to crops this year, and disaster payments to farmers will help cushion some of the blow.

Of course, the people of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois showed a resiliency in their crisis. Their recovery, however, was a team effort.

As most things are.

But to take the word of two tired, angry sandbaggers and a letter writer in the Strib as signs of a trend is…

…well, one of those parlor games journalists at all levels play.

I merely suggest there’s a lot less there than meets Bob Collins’ and David Greising’s eyes.

Last night after work, I went to the “No Primate Pets” rally at the XCel Energy Center. Of course, the X only holds around 20,000 people with the floors entirely opened to an SRO crowd; as I walked up to the press box, I saw crowds standing eight abreast all the way up Fifth Street, circling around the Travellers building, and over to the Saint Hotel, waiting patiently as the doors closed on a full house. Some waved signs – “Keep oar Monkeez in the White Haus”, “Primates Make Bad Mates” and so on – as they trudged over to Kellogg Boulevard to watch the proceedings on the Jumbotron.

Inside, a tripartisan coalition of Ellen Anderson, Brian Sullivan and Dean Barkley (wearing a “Will Advise Your Administration For Food” T-shirt) led the crowd in a mass “chant-in” on behalf of apes around the world; former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel provided interstitial music, keynoting his set with a newly-rewritten “Don’t Shock The Monkey”.

And when former Governor Jesse Ventura – perhaps the most respected man in Minnestoa politics today – took the stand and bellowed “No primates for…um…pets”, the building shook, as the 20,000 voices inside, and at least as many outside, joined their voices as one to demand that Congress ban monkeys as pets.

No, really! Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros Monitor Independent says that Minnesotans are really, really fired up about this issue!

“Michele Bachmann is out of step with Minnesota citizens who want common-sense animal welfare policies and want their communities protected from dangerous attacks and diseases,” Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund said in a press release Thursday.

Ah. Well, if the Humane Society – AKA “the voice of Minnesota” – says it’s so…

Bachmann – Minnesota’s Sixth District congresswoman, who excites more unthinking hysteria than any other politician in Minnesota (indeed, some have called her “The Katherine Kersten of Politics”) voted against the bill, doncha see. And if Rep. Bachmann – who won her office in 2006, a famously bad year for Republicans, by the biggest margin of victory in any seriously-contested race with her rigorously conservative message – votes against something, well, most Minnesotans just have to be for it.

Right?

Of course, we don’t know why Bachmann voted against the bill – not from Birkey’s story, certainly.

Perhaps monkeys as pets are not rightfully a federal issue, and that Rep. Bachmann was correct in voting against it? Perhaps?

The Minnesoros Monitor Independent’s spiral into self-parody continues.

To: Rep. Ellison

From: Mitch Berg, mere citizen

Re: Your campaign.

Rep. Ellison:

Conventional “wisdom” has it that the Fifth CD is a shoo-in for you. That the district hasn’t voted for a Republican since before the War of 1812. That Republicans in the Fifth should just fold up shop and either leave the district, or abandon their tattered conservative principles and link arms and march together with the DFL towards glorious future! (or at least shut up and quit talking about things that make Tics sad and dyspeptic with cognitive dissonance).

So I read this report from last Saturday’s Juneteenth parade…:

On another front in the Juneteenth event of Saturday, there was a parade. Barb Davis White participated by making an appearance, riding in the parade. Interestingly, there was no sign of Congressman Ellison until someone phoned him to report that his opponent was in the Juneteenth parade. I’m told by my sources that this seems to be a trend with Mr. Ellison. He is not so keen on campaigning hard, but will do so when he has to make a showing, lest it be said that he doesn’t care.

…and I say “good on ya, Rep. Ellison! Show your confidence in your people! They voted for you once – they have to vote for you again! (although beware – the “Open Card” laws you support actually pertain only to union elections, not congressional ones. So far, anyway).

To go out and actually work for your the peoples’ seat would be to diminish the magnitude of your majestic mandate.

So take the summer off. What – people think Barb Davis White is going to give you a run for your money? That’s all of that “going out into the neighborhood and talking with people about education, taxes and crime” malarkey is going to overcome the ineluctible forces of history that propelled you, Keith Ellison, Man of Destiny, to the forefront of American politics?

Pshaw, sez I. Pshaw, indeed.

Kick back, Rep. Ellison. Relax. Life’s good.

Steven Karlson at Cold Spring Shops – the best blog in the business that is simultaneously about economics and railroads (on a totally geeky level – as if Sheila O’Malley got onto a jag of reading about locomotives and rolling stock) notes a book lamenting the dying art of diagramming sentences:

 Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Digramming Sentences, the direct object of Book Review N^o. 19, makes that case. Perhaps it’s a lost art in part because the main title parses as DOG \ SISTER BERNADETTE’S \ BARKING. Author Kitty Burns Flory enjoyed showing off her skills to Sister Bernadette. She also demonstrated other methods of modelling sentence structure, some of which were less intuitive than the manual according to Sister Bernadette and John E. Warriner. A passage that refers to a model called a tree diagram notes (p. 138)

These are considered more complete and, according to a friend of mine who teaches them, easier: traditional diagrams not only distort the original word order of a sentence, but, as I’ve mentioned, can also be insanely complex even when they’re dealing with a relatively ordinary sentence.

Never mind some of the constructions of poets and novelist, see chapter 4. And perhaps the method does not help distinguish sensible from incoherent writing. Quickly: diagram “Farmer Bill Dies in House.” (See p. 61). If it did, perhaps we could ask Congress to use a diagramming method as part of crafting legislation. Try this.

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

Does that prepositional phrase “in restraint of trade or commerce” attach to “conspiracy” or to all three of “contract, combination, conspiracy”? Would the Supreme Court have an easier time discerning the Intent Of Congress with sentence diagrams in the Congressional Record?

Dunno, but the whole Heller case could be settled with a pretty simple diagramming of the text of the Second Amendment.

But I digress. 

Back in college I – as the most-identifiable English major in my senior class, a writing tutor, and the editor of the college paper – was approached on cold January evening by a group of Business majors who were struggling with their BizLaw class (the “Physical Chemistry” of the business degree, the rocks on which many a Biz career were dashed).

“Mitch?”  What does this sentence…“, they said, pointing to a two-column-inch swath of text highlighted in yellow in their Business Law textbook – the most-accepted undergrad BizLaw textbook in the country at the time “…mean?”

And I sat for half an hour, attempting to diagram it several different ways…

…before realizing – and confirming my friends’ suspicions – that the sentence/paragraph literally meant nothing. 

I’m going to do a rare bit of mid-day writing to point to this bit here, which – presuming it’s accurate, and the author Tom Goldstein takes pains to temper our enthusiasm – could be excellent news for Real Americans (emphasis added):

It does look exceptionally likely that Justice Scalia is writing the principal opinion for the Court in Heller – the D.C. guns case. That is the only opinion remaining from the sitting and he is the only member of the Court not to have written a majority opinion from the sitting. There is no indication that he lost a majority from March. His only dissent from the sitting is for two Justices in Indiana v. Edwards. So, that’s a good sign for advocates of a strong individual rights conception of the Second Amendment and a bad sign for D.C.

There are signs the Supreme Court is going to release its ruling Wednesday.

Allahpundit notes:

What’s strange is that, per O’Shea, there’s likely to be a majority on the threshold question but then all kinds of splits within the court on the subsidiary questions — and Scalia, being more of an absolutist on this issue, is unlikely to represent the majority on all or most of those subsidiary questions. Roberts himself, or Kennedy, would seem to be a better bet. Is that a hint that maybe the Court’s not going to reach those subsidiary questions at all, and will content itself with a simple ruling on the individual rights issue?

I’m loathe to indulge in exuberance of any sort, hence won’t speculate “perhaps the absolutists will win on all the subsidiary questions”. It’s never that easy.

Mike O’Shea has another fascinating possibility:

If D.C.’s handgun ban is held unconstitutional in Heller (as it should be), the city of Chicago’s essentially identical ban on handguns will offer a prime target for a test case designed to present the issue of Second Amendment incorporation. A lower court that considers the issue in light of the Supreme Court’s post-1960 “selective incorporation” precedents will have a very difficult time avoiding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, at least in some form, against state and local governments. The only way lower courts might be able to avoid that conclusion is by cleaving to nineteenth century Supreme Court opinions like Presser v. Illinois and U.S. v. Cruikshank that declined to incorporate the Second Amendment, just as the Court at that time declined to incorporate the other provisions of the Bill of Rights. The Court repeatedly rejected this approach during the twentieth century.

I’ll be watching the SCOTUS wire bright and early tomorrow.

UPDATE:  Apparently Allahpundit had the wrong date for the next session in his copy; change to fit reality.

Along with Carnivore from TvM, I expected – indeed, hoped for – a decision from the Supremes on the Heller case today.

It’s not to be, although the wire says the SCOTUS has announced they’re going to announce some verdicts later on this week.

Carnivore is being sober about it all:

I had always believed June 23 would be the Heller decision date despite a false start two weeks ago which instead found the Court granting habeas corpus to foreign terrorists. So in Heller, as a worst case, we can expect the Court to grant the right to keep and bear arms to foreign born terrorists.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

John Hinderaker at Powerline notes that even the NYTimes is noticing; mainstream media coverage of Iraq is in freefall.

John concludes:

The conclusion of the Times piece is revealing, too:

Journalists at all three American television networks with evening newscasts expressed worries that their news organizations would withdraw from the Iraqi capital after the November presidential election. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid offending their employers.

It’s interesting that the journalists themselves link their employers’ interest in Iraq to the election. I think it’s fair to say that the mainstream media’s interest in Iraq has always been driven largely by the opportunity to spin events there in a way that advances a political agenda. Remember al Qaqaa? That story dominated the news for a week before the 2004 Presidential election. It was a story of great importance, however, only as long as it could be used to help John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. Once the election was over, al Qaqaa was never heard of again. With hindsight, that episode might be taken as a paradigm of far too much of the mainstream media’s coverage of the war.

So the bad news is that the mainstream media is, for whatever reason (and I’m neither rushing nor shying away from ascribing cynical, political motives to this) is losing interest in covering Iraq.

The good news?  The mainstream media is losing interest in covering Iraq.  Since we can not trust the MSM to be evenhanded in its coverage, it’s just as well that our troops can do their jobs without a malignant buzzard on their backs.

Oh, of course it’d be good if the media did manage to get the good news out – but that’d only bolster the case of the “stay the course” candidate.

And we couldn’t have that.

Let’s see – Obama’s gotten Castro, Qaddafi, Hamas…

…and now, Kim Jong-Il?

The Chosun Sinbo, the mouthpiece of North Korea’s Japanese front organization Chongryon and often for the North Korean regime itself, has announced its preference for Obama over McCain, whom it calls “a variant of Bush” and “nothing better than a scarecrow of neoconservatives,” which is a bit odd considering that the Bush Administration’s giveaway diplomacy is better for Kim Jong Il than even Clinton’s awful performance.

The blogger – from the “One Free Korea” blog, heretofore unknown to me – throws in a key caveat (I’ve added emphasis):

The Republicans’ efforts to capitalize on the Hamas endorsement made me slightly squeamish, because there are separate issues here that shouldn’t be mixed. It isn’t fair for anyone to imply, based on an unwanted endorsement, that a candidate in any way supports the endorsing entity’s ideology or actions. It is fair to ask whether the endorsement suggests that the endorsing entity knows something about the candidate. Why would Hamas or Kim Jong Il both believe that if Obama is elected, his policies would mean boom times for evildoers? Are they wrong?

I don’t want to presume that Obama solicits or appreciates the endorsement of these dictators – no more than I appreciate the usual howler-monkeys on the left drawing significance from some right-fringe wackjob endorsing a GOP candidate.

But what do these dictators know that Obama’s supporters – especially the ones who aren’t sporting “Che” paraphernalia – don’t?
(Via CW)

I was out biking on the new Midtown Greenway yesterday.  Let’s leave aside for a moment the free-marketeer objections to the project (an old rail-bed through South Minneapolis has been converted, essentially, to a bike superhighway from the Mississippi all the way to Saint Louis Park, connecting to trails that’ll take you all the way out to Lake Minnetonka.  It wasn’t the first gorgeous weekend of the year – but it was the first hot weekend.

And as you get closer to Uptown Minneapolis, you see that key sign that it’s summer in the city; women skating, biking and running in the sort of clothes that make the jihadis want to blow us up.  The kind of thing that makes cultural conservatives shake their heads – or, in some cases, turn them.

What was I thinking about?

1. The damn headwind.
2. All those babes.

And somewhere near the bottom of the list – in the six billions, somewhere – I wondered “what does Susan Lenfestey think about all this?”

But sometimes it just comes to you.  Like, when you open the Strib. Susan Lenfestey is always good for inducing head-slapping cognitive mal-de-mer.

Never moreso than when she “tackles” the popular culture problems that are a direct result of her generation’s overweening self-absorption by bleating “well, wait a minute…”, as in yesterday’s column in the Strib, in which she tries to mix the cultural mores of the libertine boomers of her youth, and the cultural imams that many of the most doctrinaire boomers have become.
It got hot, y’see…

And they took off their clothes.Not entirely, mind you — this remains a fairly modest and Lutheran kind of place — but they took off more than anyone my age might have once imagined. We used to blush at the sight of women’s undies hanging on the line, and now grown women jog and cycle and power-walk in what looks to me like the spandex long-line girdles and cross-your-heart bras that we rejected decades ago. 

And, being Minnesotans with a lot of sugar, corn and dairy in our past, and a lot of fast food in our present, there’s more flesh being squeezed out of these girdles than into them. Victoria’s Secret it’s not.

There’s a part of me that thinks this is great — no one cares anymore about body image, and they’re free to, well, let it all hang out. And surely there’s a sort of gender equality in this recreational neonudity. If men can whip off their shirts and let the summer breeze riffle through the hair on their chests, why can’t women do the same? OK, through their breasts. 

The other half of me thinks that this is a culture gone amok. Somebody somewhere is going to point out that this excessive dermal display is the fault of narcissistic baby-boomin’ feminists like me, who liberated our bosoms in the ’60s from the Wagnerian cone breasts of the ’50s. Trust me, like so much of what we did then, jogging in spandex girdles is not where we thought this was going. (But hey, think about all that organic food.)

Nor did we who believe in gender equality intend this to be a license to the fashion industry to market slutwear to prepubescent girls, and bondagewear to their big sisters.

Susan Lenfestey is speaking for the collective “we” – the entire baby boom (or at least that part of it that is only now (if we accept Lenfestey as that collective “we”, and why not?) discovering the law of unintended consequences?

Or to put it another way – discovering that we – the conservatives – were right?

If geezers like bicycling in padded crotch spandex, so be it. Mick Jagger looks silly now, too. It’s the sleazewear being marketed to girls and young women, and the women who buy into it, that makes me sorry for how far we’ve come — and how backwards we’ve gone. I have no quibble with joyous nudity and the impulse to undress in the balmy air. In Seattle there’s a naked bicycle parade on the summer solstice, and hundreds of men, women and children paint their bodies, yes, naked bodies, in the most creative and clownish ways, and it’s about as sexually stimulating as, well, watching grannies’ bloomers blowing on the line. But it sure is fun.

(IT BUUUUUURNS US!)

It’s the coy couture of faux-sexuality, the contrived message of availability printed, literally, across the behinds and breasts of young women that makes me wonder how we wound up so far off the mark.

In other words, “we” are going to eat this cake, and still have it.  “We” are going to commoditize sexuality, trivialize or medicalize its consequences – but don’t you dare offend my feminist sensibilities when the inevitable consequences come home to roost?”  And they were inevitable – as everyone who knows jack about economics knows that all other things being equal, if you make something cheaper, you make it more ubiquitous – and the demand for sex and sexuality is infinite and inelastic.

But just to show you we’ve come full circle:

And it’s the baring of so much of our intimate body parts that makes more modest countries regard us as a culture run amok.

So “Susan Lenfestey’s generation” has gone from tittering at the social mores and concerns of conservative clergy…

…to furrowing their brows and nodding at the cultural critique of people who force women to wear burquas, and whose hands are spattered with the blood of the gays they’ve stoned and the pregnant teenagers they’ve lynched?

“You’ve” come a long way, Susan.

George Carlin, dead at 71:

Jeff Abraham says Carlin went into St. John’s Health Center on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain. Carlin died at 5:55 p.m. PDT. He was 71.Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. It was announced Tuesday that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Carllin – on cassette and eight-track tapes, on school road trips – was my first exposure to edgy comedy.  In the late seventies, he was pretty vogue.  And then, in the early eighties, I saw an HBO retrospective on Carlin’s very, very long career – his road from fairly “straight” comedian to “counterculture” icon, and realizing how very, very good the guy was.  Angry and dyspeptic, to be sure – but amazingly funny.
Of course, one of his bits was a useful mnemonic for me:

The dean of counterculture comedians, Carlin constantly pushed the envelop with his jokes, particularly with a routine called “The Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV.”

I remember seeing Carlin performing in the early-mid nineties, and thinking “this is kinda sad” – it was like he’d lost his comedic mojo somewhere along the way.  But when he was on, he was surely on.

Sh*t,, T***, P**s, F**k, ***t, C********r, M**********r.  Now I’m sad.

Pauline Kael, the late New Yorker movie critic, was the master of the pithy, scathing review.

Finally, from beyond the grave (he says with visions of Frank Marino/Jimi Hendrix coursing through his head), the reviewing mojo is passed…

…to Gary Miller, who gives what could be called a “lukehellish” review to Showtime’s Californication:

After watching Duchovny’s character Hank Moody fornicate you want to beat him up. You want to break off one of his molars at the gum line. You want to sodomize him with a wooden plunger and make him thank you for it. You want to make him wear wool socks, drag his feat across some berber, and touch a door knob. Californication had me asking what day it was that God made David Duchovny and why couldn’t he have rested on that day also. I put it back in the little red envelope after 2 miserable episodes.

I’d never watch it on basic principle (not because of the subject matter so much as I boycott even once-removed Red Hot Chili Peppers references). But now, I’ll really not watch it.

And it’s a double-shot of musical birthdays, today; I had no idea until I started writing this. Anyway – today is also Nils Lofgren’s birthday. He’s 57, not that you could tell.

He’s most famous, at least among the latest generation or two of music fans, as the virtuoso third guitarist in the E Street Band.

And that’s cool; Lofgren added a depth of texture and skill that Springsteen’s put to great use in the last 24 years, leaving his mark on some of Springsteen’s best work in the past couple of decades; the blistering solo in “Tunnel of Love” (and throughout the rest of the album named after the song), the broad, crunchy slide rhythm work on “The Rising”, and much, much more.

But it also short-changes the music-listening public. I was a Lofgren fan long before he joined the E Street Band before the Born In The USA tour.

Part of the draw is that he is, as Dave Marsh memorably put it, America’s great unknown rock and roller. His pre-Springsteen stuff – “No Mercy“, “Beggar’s Day”, “Keith Don’t Go“, “Night Fades Away”, “Cry Tough” – was sometimes eclectic, and always featured out-of-scale amazing guitar work, but at the end of the day it was always great old-school rock and roll; he resisted the currents of the seventies and the eighties pretty successfully (other than the regrettable I Came To Dance, a “Miss You”-derived foray into disco of which the less said the better) and still sounded fresh and vital.

Part of it, for me as a guitar player, is that his style is just so damn inscrutable. Unlike most guitar players, he fingerpicks – which is quite common among folkies and country players, but very rare among rockers. Unlike the best-known electric fingerpickers, like Richard Thompson and Mark Knopfler, he uses steel fingerspicks – think prosthetic steel fingernails that you slip onto your fingers – which he uses to for a hard, sharp, brilliant attack. And the part that I find the most vexing and thrilling is his ability to get, at will, the most intense pick harmonics (there’s no way to explain it to non-guitarists, although the solo that starts about 4:30 into this video of his most famous solo has a ton of ’em) of anyone who ever picked up a Strat. Trying to copy Lofgren – his style, his tone, his idiosyncracies – is the only thing in the world more vexing and yet fascinating than trying to copy Richard Thompson.

So happy birthday, Nils Lofgren, and many more.

PROLOGUE:  I wrote the Lofgren piece (next) last August, and this one last January – and didn’t notice until a few weeks ago that they happened to fall on the same day.  I smell a big joint party coming up!

Anyway – onward and upward!

———-

Pick your list of the best drummers in the history of rock and roll.

Let’s leave out the ensemble drummers for a moment – Charlie Watts and Max Weinberg, both amazing drummers, largely because they fit so perfectly into a role within a larger band.

Let’s also leave out the loose cannons, the drummers who exploded into mercurial blasts of brilliance in bands that had plenty of room for lots of flashy drumming. Keith Moon jumps to the front of the list, of course, but Johnny Badanjak of the Detroit Wheels leads a long list of people right behind him. Great drummers, all of ’em.

Anyway, let’s forget about ’em.

Of course, I suppose you could have a catetory for crappy drummers like Vinnie “Mad Dog” Lopez, but that’d be just pointless.

The next category is the “Masters of Technique”; the people who’ve mastered the art and science of drumming.

Ask every single guy who grew up in middle America listening to 8 tracks and cassette tapes, and the top of the list is always Neal Peart of Rush. And Peart is, obviously, an amazing technical drummer. I’ve never seen Rush live, but I’ve seen a few concert videos, and to me watching Peart play is like watching a music grad student’s master’s performance, almost like it’s designed to be academically pure and perfect for a panel of judges who’ll decide if he gets to graduate (which, of course, he does, because in the world of Rock and Roll he is the biggest example of this kind of drummer.

That leaves the final category – the Chameleons. It should go without saying that the best session drummers – like Taylor Hawkins and Michael Bland – fit in here; they have to be stylistic chameleons, changing to match any of a zillion different styles on the drop of a hat, depending on who’s paying their bills. Can anyone imagine Keith Moon backing, say, Christina Aguilera? Well, it might be fun – but I mean plausibly? Of course not. And yet a great session drummer can go from a session with an R&B band over to a session with a bunch of punks – see Michael Bland’s career with Prince and Soul Asylum – and do it convincingly.

Among the very, very best of this lot s perhaps the most amazing drummer I have actually ever seen (indeed, met in person).

Mark Brzezicki, session drummer extraordinaire, turns 51 today.

Born in London, the son of a Polish refugee who’d flown in the RAF’s Polish Air Force in Exile during World War II, Brzezicki played on a virtual soundtrack of all that was the best and most memorable in music in the very late seventies and early eighties. Working as “Rhythm for Hire”, he and future Big Country bassist Tony Butler played as session men on an amazing variety of British music of the era, culminating in Pete Townsend’s great solo albums of the era, Empty Glass, All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, and White City. The two of them arguably fit Townsend’s style, and drove him to do better work, than any rhythm section since the death of Keith Moon.

They also backed Simon Townsend – Pete’s much younger brother – on his much-underrated first album, Sweet Sound, as well as some of his later stuff. More on this in a bit.

And of course, Big Country.

In Big Country, Brzezicki’s drumming ranged from the restrained and delicate (“Chance” was a great example) to baroque with explosive overtones (“Wonderland“, “Steeltown“, although you’ll have to take my word for it that the studio version is much better), to martial and thunderous (“Where the Rose Is Sown“), Brzezicki was the glue that tied all of Stuart Adamson’s ambitions together.

Brzezicki went on to record a ton of session work; he and Butler worked on Roger Daltrey’s best solo album, Under a Raging Moon (along Big Country’s second guitarist Bruce Watson), The Cult’s classics “She Sells Sanctuary” and “Love Removal Machine”, and a slew of others.

I met Brzezicki in 1990, at – of all places – the Cabooze in Minneapolis. He was backing old friend and bandmate Simon Townsend, as the opening act for former Grand Funk Railroad singer Mark Farner on, of all things, a Christian music tour. Townsend’s mid-career material was Inspirational, but not especially inspiring, if you catch my drift; suffice to say, I was there to see Brzezicki. And he didn’t disappoint; restrained as he needed to be, with flashes of brilliance on cue, delivered with perfect timing.

I met Brzezicki “backstage” – actually the Cabooze’s backyard, where he was packing up his gear after Townsend’s set, while Farner was stinking up the joint. He was tired – he’d left it all out onstage – but personable, modest in the way that people who are damn good and know it and have nothing to prove to anyone anymore usually are. We chatted for (if memory serves) about five minutes as he wrapped up his stuff, talking about Big Country ephemera (the band was on hiatus, after the disaster of Peace In Our Time, before the stylistically triumphal but commercially iffy return of Buffalo Skinners a few years later) and the other session projects he was working on.

He turned down a beer – but he gave me a set of his sticks to give to my drummer.

Anyway. Happy Birthday, Brrrr.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you an extra-special broadcast – live from the Minnesota Street Rod Association party at the State Fairgrounds! Come on out and join us:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad and Brian will help John eye up the Jaguars and Bentleys from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will be checking out the top fuel from 1-3.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will be checking over the sensible, economically-feasible cars from 3-5.

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.

And don’t forget the David Strom Show, with David Strom and Margaret Martin and the bird-friendly Prius, from 9-11!

Leo Pusatieri is one of the local MOB bloggers you need to be reading regularly, both at his main gig, Psychmeister’s Ice Palace, and his other project, the one he started in his capacity as the father of a son in the Army who did a tour in Iraq, Murtha Must Go.

MMG today runs a lengthy piece by Darryl Sharratt, father of Marine Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, one of the eight Marines accused in the so-called “Haditha Massacre”.  Excoriated by a media that was in the bag for the anti-war movement and just dying to find a new generation of My Lais and a new crop of Lieutenant Calleys for a new generation, tossed under the bus by the left, railroaded (alleges Mr. Sharratt) by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and personally and severally defamed by Representative John Murtha, these eight Marines have, one by one, been absolved of any role in the crime – but are still seeking justice.

Mr. Sharratt indicts…well, just about everyone –  the media, the NCIS, and Rep. Murtha – for their role in creating a hysterical rush to judgment for purely political reasons.

Well worth a read.  So read it.