Gore Vidal – Vietnam Truther! (Emphasis added by me)

And what about Mr. McCain? Disaster. Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?

Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s what he tells us.

Why would you doubt him? He’s a graduate of Annapolis. I know a lot of the Annapolis breed. Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.

So what does that have to do with the U.S. Naval Academy down in Annapolis? The service universities keep track of each other, that’s all. They have views about each other. And they are very aware of social class and eventually money, since they usually marry it.

Ah. It’s all about the frat you were in!

Remember – Gore Vidal is a serious commentator.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad, John and Brian will do their thing from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is out on assignment – so I will be on from 1-3. James Lileks will join me somewhere along the way; stay tuned!
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King joins Michael 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, from 9-11!

(Title:  Johnny)

Tim Russert dead at 58 of an out-of-the-blue heart attack:

Russert was recording voiceovers for Sunday’s “Meet the Press” program when he collapsed, the network said. He and his family had recently returned from Italy, where they celebrated the graduation of Russert’s son, Luke, from Boston College.

No further details were immediately available.

While Russert’s politics were rarely in question, he differed from so many of the hamsters that clog TV news (and news in general) today by having a facility for detaching himself from the story, and actually acting for the good of the story itself. NBC’s initial obit for Russert sums up Russert’s sadly-rare approach:

Of his background as a Democratic political operative, Russert said, “My views are not important.”

“Lawrence Spivak, who founded ‘Meet the Press,’ told me before he died that the job of the host is to learn as much as you can about your guest’s positions and take the other side,” he said in a 2007 interview with Time magazine. “And to do that in a persistent and civil way. And that’s what I try to do every Sunday.”

And, as a fire-breathing Republican speaking of a former Democrat operative, it is a sincere compliment when I say Russert did it well. 

In this dismal season for the media, he will be missed.

First things first:  I’m a free market guy.

One of the arguments I’ve been having for years with my tax-hawk friends is over mass transit.  These friends – David Strom, among others – argue correctly that transit, especially light rail, is a money pit.  And as of the last time anyone checked, they were; a $2 fare on the Ventura Trolley covered about 1/3 of the cost of the ride (which is a relative bargain; Seattle’s new monorail system, after you divide the capital costs across all riders, would have a fair market value of $90 a ride!).  Our bus system wasn’t much better.

And yet…

The numbers that do exist for calculating the cost-effectiveness of transit were run back when gas was around $2 a gallon, and ridership was commensurately lower.  Which isn’t the case now, as a lot of people – being good capitalists in their home budgeting if not necessarily at the polls – start to run their own personal numbers.
John “With an H” Stewart at Night Rider has been crunching the numbers for his daily commute from a southeast ‘burb to downtown Minneapolis, calculating the same tradeoffs we all make…:

Total time to get to the lot: 15 minutes; distance 8 miles (compared to a 12-14 mile drive to downtown Minneapolis, depending on the route I take). The Park & Ride, however, may more accurately be described as a “Park & Walk” as I had about a quarter of a mile jaunt to the depot from my vehicle. I got to the station as a train was pulling up, but the credit card reader on the ticket machine wasn’t working. By the time I’d made a couple of attempts and finally resorted to sliding a fiver into the machine and getting my change (oh, so that’s what they’re doing with all those Sacajawea $1 coins) the train had pulled out. I waited 8 minutes for the next one and it took another 22 minutes to get to my stop downtown. From there I walked the four blocks to my office. Portal-to-portal, it took just under an hour. Driving to work in rush hour takes 40-45 minutes unless there’s bad weather or a traffic accident. The LRT also runs every 7 – 10 minutes during the “rush” hours (roughly 6 – 9 a.m. and 3 – 7 p.m.) so there’s not too much of a time penalty for “missing” a ride.

And time will help John, and anyone else, refine the approach; having a “swipe as you go” Metrocard helps bypass the notoriously balky credit card readers (the ones in New York are worse…); finding the right park and ride helps a lot, too.

Steward:

How about mileage? Four miles one way isn’t much of a savings in distance, but that equals 8 miles a day. Since my truck gets 16 miles per gallon, that’s a gallon of gas every two days, or 2.5 gallons in a typical work week. At $4 gallon, that’s $10!

As for other costs, I pay just under $80 a month to park downtown, but this will be going up an as yet undetermined amount at the end of the year when my employer stops subsidizing the cost. I can get a Metropass through my employer for $39. So, that’s about a $40 a month savings for “infrastructure”, plus $10 a week on gas. The net result is that for an extra 30 minutes a day in total transit time I could save $80 a month.

I ran the same numbers almost two years ago, when after most of a decade and a half of commuting to jobs in the southwest and northwest ‘burbs, I managed to score a gig in Saint Paul proper.  The math broke down fairly easily; driving was no biggie (12 miles a day = 3-4 gallons a week – but downtown Saint Paul Parking within a distance that would make the combine drive and walk shorter than a bus ride was at least $100.  The bus that picks up on my corner drops me at my office’s back door – and I get the Metropass for $39 pre-tax dollars, which really means $26.  Biking saves me no money or time, but I love it, so who cares? Anyway, that’s about a $125/month savings; nothing to sneeze at.

Yeah, I know the LRT is heavily subsidized by the State, so the fares are not a true reflection of the actual cost to operate it, but since my tax dollars are already going to support the choo-choo, perhaps I can feel as if I’m getting a little of my money back.

That’s how I rationalize it as well.

Still, transit’s bad numbers might need to get re-jiggered:

• Revenues have got to be up.
• Of course, so are costs.
• On the other hand, eventually the capital costs of the light rail lines will amortize, making the cost-per-ride a lot more manageable.
• On the other other hand, the Central Corridor, which will run over a billion when it’s over (even assuming the ghastly planning flubs get worked around on the relative cheap) is going to take a long time to amortize.
• The great rail wild-card is Commuter Rail – the North Star line from Big Lake to the Cities, and the long-proposed Red Rocks line from Hastings through Shorewood and then through the downtowns.  Either line is relatively cheap compared to the Ventura Trolley (to say nothing of the Central Corridor obscenity) since they use existing rail lines and right of way, leased from existing freight carriers.  I’ve seen calculations that show that, if the Met Council resists the temptation to spent a gajillion dollars on stations, and buys used rolling stock, either line could actually be self-supporting in a fairly short time.  On the one hand, the Met can withstand no such temptation; on the other, Northstar’s money pit status was calculated back when they figured 6,000 riders a day; I suspect the numbers of northwest-burbs-to-the-cities drivers will rise these days.

Stewart:

Other trade-offs: not as much opportunity to listen to my favorite radio programs, but more time to read; being perceived as an enviro-weenie when I’m really a rank capitalist;

That’s actually the fun part; realizing that while you silently mock the granola-chomping, perfume-eschewing greenies around you are doing it for pseudo-religious expiation, you’re totally in it for the money.

It’s why I still yell “You should be ashamed of yourselves, you gas-guzzling planet-killers” at Prius drivers.

As I pass them on the left.

Thirty-odd years ago, the movie A Bridge Too Far generated a movie-ratings controversy; a character, a 101st Airborne lieutenant, gets shot in the head by a German sniper.  James Caan picks up the lieutenant and loads him into the jeep, appearing lifeless; the audience briefly saw a smear of blood covering half the looey’s face. 

“Too gory”, was the response from many not-that-far-off-the-mainstream groups.

Today?  Leave aside the gore of everything from Alien Versus Predator and Saving Private Ryan; a “PG13” movie will include drinking, drug references, and the sort of peek-a-boo, almost-sex references that would have gotten a movie a serious “R” when I was a kid, and furthermore all you little bastards get off my lawn.

But just when you wonder if there’s any point to having standards at all anymore, we see that someone is drawing that line in the sand and taking a stand:

The cigar-puffing General Thaddeus Ross is a bad guy, all right. So bad that leading medical organizations think that the Incredible Hulk should be rated “R.”

No, it’s not the violence and mayhem Gen. Ross inspires in his quest to capture Hulk that draws objections. It’s his cigar.

Rumors that the filmmakers tried to defuse the controversy by having a stripper use the cigar for something else – safeguarding the PG13 – are reported to be unfounded.

It was Monday, June 13, 1988.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day. The first, pleasant hint of what was going to turn out to be a long, hot summer was seeping into the air.

Although we didn’t have a band going at the time, Bill the Drummer and I stayed friends. I’d occasionally drive over to the Band House to jam with one group of musicians or another, which was usually a great excuse to hang out at one of the bars in the area; Mondays were three-for-ones at Lyle’s (long before it was a hipster hangout); Wednesdays, we’d cadge $.50 drinks from girls at Ladies Night at the Uptown; Tuesdays were usually great nights to see and be seen at the CC Club and its a-friggin-mazing jukebox.

Monday was my night off from jocking. The service loved me; they had me working six nights a week. Typical; the job I loved, I couldn’t get arrested in. The job I hated, I was a raging success.

Life sucked.

Well, no. Not so much “sucked”, as “was very frustrating”.

And there’s nothing to blow away sucky frustration like a day at the range. Which is what I called up Bill to arrange, around 10AM.

———-

They say the most arrogant, rude, snooty, overly “enthusiastic” New Yorkers (or artists, or San Franciscans, or Greenies, or whatever) are the ones who come to it as adults. I don’t know that the same holds true for shooters – but Bill the Drummer would have been evidence of it.

Since his episode the previous spring – where he’d gotten mugged, and asked me to help him get into shooting – he’d become quite the gunny. Blessed with a $90/month rent payment, no car, almost no real bills and a job that paid decent tips, he had some disposable income (in that “living on a mattress in a converted three-season porch” kind of way). And for the previous couple of months, he’d spent it on shootin’ iron. He’d picked up…:

• An Enfield No. 4 Mk 1 – the classic British military rifle of the forties and fifties.
• A Colt M1911A1 – his father’s, from the war.
• A Walther P38 – one his father had brought home from the war. Like the Colt, I think he was happy one of his kids wanted to take it off his hands. Like a lot of combat veterans, he was deeply ambivalent about firearms.
• A Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum – a blued beauty with a five inch barrel.

I loaded up my car around lunchtime with my own arsenal – my Ljungmann (a WWII vintage Swedish rifle), my Remington Nylon .22, and my latest toy, a little .22 automatic pistol – and drove to Bill’s to load up his entire armory. Then it was off to Richfield Gun and Pawn for a grocery bag full of ammo, cleaning fluid and earplugs. Then, off to the range – “Moon Valley”, on the border between Eden Prairie and Chanhassen.

Of course, it took me nearly forty minutes to sort out the inscrutable maze of roads where 169, 494, Flying Cloud, Valley View and 212 all come together – a morass of concrete the bedevils me today, even after having worked at eight companies within three miles of that area in the past fifteen years – but eventually we got there.

———-

There are few better stress-relievers in life than sitting at the range on a gorgeous day, busting off caps. None of the better ones can be done without a person of the opposite sex along (or, y’know, the same, if you’re wired that way. Vive l’difference).

Part of it is the intensity of it all; you have to have your mind switched on, even when you’re just taking your spot on the line. If you don’t know that one dumb slipup can kill you, or someone else, you shouldn’t be there.

And shooting itself – the concentration, minding your breathing and the tension in your fingers and all the other factors – is all-engrossing, when you’re trying to hit a bulls-eye 200 yards away.

And it’s visceral. The sound of metal on metal and the implacable resistance as you pull the bolt carrier against the tension of the bolt return spring when you rack a round; the kick-to-the gut of the reports around you as other guns fire; the buildup of tension, the direct kick back to the shoulder (or the crease of your hand, with a pistol; the feeling of wrestling against the forces of physics to stay on target to get your next shot off quickly (if that’s what you’re trying to do); the smell of burned powder and hot oil and scorched brass, the taste of smoke – it consumes, and sometimes abuses, all five senses.

And the company is…well, interesting. Moon Valley catered to hard-core hunters, for the most part – guys from the third-tier ‘burbs who hailed from out back originally, who came in to zero their sights and practice up a little point shooting before they took to the field. They looked askance at some of the non-hunters – a guy who brought in an AK drew a scolding from the rangemaster when he busted off thirty rounds in a big hurry. The crowd wasn’t “gun nuts” – it was mostly marksmen.

And Bill and I. Although to be fair, after a little practice we were doing pretty well. I was hitting in the ring at 200 yards pretty nicely (20 years later, they all seem like the ten ring; grade my recollections accordingly).

———-

We hung out for 2-3 hours. We shot everything. I didn’t like the .44 Magnum one bit. And the P38 just felt wrong, and the SKS was kind of unpleasant. But I loved the Enfield – and my Ljungmann was a total hoot – a sweet-shooting darling of a rifle.

Finally, we ran out of ammo. We loaded up, and drove over to the Lyon’s Tap for what were, in their day, just about the best burgers ‘n cheap beer in the metro.

I dropped Bill and his arsenal off at the Band House, and drove home. 

Wyatt was waving goodbye to Teresa as I lugged my cases out of the car and into the house.  I hauled my guns up to my room, and taped a particulary impressive grouping to my bedroom door just for the fun of it. 

I grabbed my bike and turned around to take a little evening spin around Como as Allison – a petite, very underage blond that Wyatt kept letting into the various bars he bounced at – knocked at the front door. 

“Is Wyatt here?”

I rode until long, long after dark.

In order:

1. Rolling down Shep…Oh, sure, seeing my kids born.  That’s a given, right?
2. Rolling down Shepard Road from Ford Road down the gorge of the Mississippi River all the way to Sibley [*], with a howling tailwind behind you all the way, on one of the most beautiful mornings of the year.
   
   This’d be the view from Crosby Park, which is about 100 feet below the bike path.  Bear in mind, this is not the country; this is in the middle of Saint Paul, probably a few hundred yards south of the West End residential neighborhood.     

     So gorgeous that even I, a notoriously blase Scando-American who was also in mid-bike-ride, involuntarily went “Oh, wooooow” several times.

3. Driving your enemies before you and hearing the lamentation of his women.
4. Pretty much everything else.

That is all.

UPDATE:  Natually, no – that is not all.  What was this morning a screaming tailwind is, at the end of the work day, a howling headwind. 

Oh, well.  It was a great start to the day…

(more…)

The first were built in 1907. The last were manufactured in the late thirties. They were among the British Commonwealth’s standard rifles until the late fifties,

In the hands of the “Old Contemptibles” – Britain’s tiny force of regulars in 1914 – they held off massed waves of Germans during the original blitz through Belgium. They fought at The Somme, Passchendaele, Second Marne, Dunkirk, Narvik, El Alamein, the Bramaputra and Cassino, Sword and Gold and Juno beaches, all the way across France and Belgium and Holland and Korea and the Suez.

A refinement of an 1888 design that had been tried and found wanting during the Boer War, Irish and Indian and South African reservists carried them well into the seventies and early eighties. After the AK47, they were the most common weapon in the hands of the mujahedin in Afghanistan early in their jihad against the Soviets. It’s still seen in the hands of reservists and policemen throughout south asia.

The SMLE reminded me of Winston Churchill; pug-nosed, but a smooth operator. I fired one at a range in 1988 (and a few more times thereafter). It was the rifle equivalent of an aged single-malt on a mahogany table; old-school in that way that all the great antiques are. The short-throw bolt action, worn down after goodness-knows how many people cranked it over the years (its receiver was stamped sometime in the late twenties, as I recall) was the fastest, smoothest turnbolt I personally have ever fired.

(Note: No, this is not the one I shot. I just pulled it off the net).

There were 14 million of them made (possibly including the “modernized” versions, the Mark IV and Mark V, from the forties and fifties).  Back in ’88, they were running for under $100. Yet another deep lifelong regret.

As P.J. O’Rourke once said, life is full of ironies, if you’re stupid.

So let’s look beyond a few ironies:

• That someone who writes for the Huffington Post can call someone – anyone – a “political mercenary”.
• That someone writing on the Huffpo can yap about “orchestrated smear campaigns”.
• That same person can call anyone – in this case Fox News – a “mouthpiece” for…well, anything.
• That anyone on the left – the group that seethes with condescension and much worse for any ethnic or social minority that doesn’t hew to the lefty path – can call anyone a racist with a straight face.

Again – we’re looking beyond each of these. Andy Ostroy is…well, like most everyone who writes for the HuffPo – some level of lefty apparatchik or another.

But – assuming he’s not yanking something or another from whole cloth – he might have a point:

Have the right-wing media mercenaries over at Fox News lost their fucking minds?

[Did I mention Ostroy is a classy lad?  No?  Good].

During a discussion Wednesday between commentators Michelle Malkin and Megyn Kelly on whether Republican attacks on Michelle Obama have been too harsh, the following banner ran across the bottom of the screen:

OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA!

This blatantly racist, unconscionable remark is an outrage.

If that is indeed what happened, then it is an outrage.  And incredibly stupid.  Michele Obama is a prickly woman with a millenarian streak about her – and we’ve talked about this and the dangers it provides democracy in the past.

But “Babymama?”

Bad network.  Bad.  No donut.

Sheesh.

and is part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to incite America’s bigoted dumbasses

Hm.  Carefully orchestrated?

Leaving aside the very high likelihood that it was just some overworked, underpaid, twentysomething numbnuts working the Chyron who wrote the offending crawler (anyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom, can I get an amen?) – does anyone seriously think that any such “careful orchestration” would escape serious inquiry (meaning:  other than Andy Ostroy or Grace Kelly)?

Fox is nothing more than a shameless, unapologetic mouthpiece for the ruthless Republican attack-machine

He must be an “investigative journalist”, too.

At any rate – there are so many things to criticize Michele Obama over.  This is not one of them.

Never mind that the models used to predict it can’t even retroactively predict the past; forget that the “universal consensus” on the topic doesn’t exist.

In the religion of Manmade Global Global Warming, everything that happens proves the hypothesis – and everything that doesn’t happen proves the hypothesis.

Including the tragedies that, horrible as they are, are a pretty normal part of life on the Great Plains:

The evidence for the consequences of global warming is appearing with alarming frequency. This morning’s headlines are filled with tales of deadly weather: “At least four people were killed and about 40 injured when a tornado tore through a Boy Scout camp in western Iowa on Wednesday night”

Scumbags.

Brodkorb notes a Robin Marty post at MN Campaign Report:

This post from MN Campaign Report is so insensitive and extreme:

“If God took out New Orleans because of the homosexuals, why’d he go after the boyscout camp? (Note: I can make fun of it because my cousin was there [he’s fine], your mileage may vary).” Source: MN Campaign Report, June 12, 2008

Er, sorry, Robin, but no, you can’t; having a cousin there doesn’t buy you a pass on this one.

The notion that anyone would say G*d “went after” either place “because of” gays, scouts, or anything else is as noxious to most Christians as the events themselves were horrifying.

The difference? I don’t know a single credible conservative commentator who didn’t slap their head in transferred embarassment at the whole “Katrina was a punishment for gays” thing. The impossibly vast majority of us are very loathe to try to tell our Creator what his motivations are.

Being the optimistic sort that I am, I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that the post was really just random characters her baby pecked, inadvertently and yet miraculously, into the keyboard. Or perhaps Rew is woozy from spit-up fumes. I’ve been there and seen what it can do; perhaps that is an example of one’s brain on eau de garf.

The interesting part, I suspect, is going to be seeing which leftybloggers leap to MCR’s defense, and their rationalizations for trying to turn this on my friend and radio colleague Brodkorb. That is going to be fun to watch.

UPDATE: Of course, Gary’s right:

Robin’s faux paus does not reveal a black soul — only a misbegotten lampoon.

And I sincerely hope nobody reads my post to imply anything more than that, as well!

I work in the software business.  I end up having to stay current on a lot of trends in software. 

So, it seems, to people in the news business, according to the folks at MPR’s “In The Loop”, who are apparently all atwitter about…er, Twitter:

Now, given my very limited experience with Twitter, I’d count myself in that latter category. But from what I do know, the program is no savior. What really impresses me though, has nothing to do with “tweeting” at all . . . it’s that in a newsroom, where for a long time people have played it safe, measured all the risks before making a move . . . these folks were now congratulating us for trying a chaotic experiment with uncertain results. That’s a big deal.

In the media business right now, no one really knows what web application or social networking trend will be the one to bring us into the digital future. But one thing’s for sure, without the right attitude about taking chances, you’ll quickly be left behind.

I gotta confess; I have not the faintest idea what Twitter is for.  Oh, I know it lets you post one-liner entries pretty much constantly through the day – as if  any of us needed more on-line time-suckage.  Robin Marty at Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” used it, rather innovatively I thought, to report from the DFL convention (most DFL ideas fit into one line, so it was a natural). 

I’ve heard “Twitter” called “Microblogging” – which strikes this macroblogger as really, really pointless.

Worse – I tried to check out the website.  Perhaps I was having a bad day, but I hadn’t the faintest clue what I was supposed to do, or what the purpose of the whole exercise was, or how it was that I was supposed to get the little microblogged pellets of wisdom out into the ether.

So perhaps this is one trend that will, as the Loopers say, “leave me behind”, more or less like VRML, Webvan.com, Pets.com, PowerAgent, Flooz.com,  Go.com and Gather.com, for better or worse, did. 

Google ranks things  by how many things link to them – especially linking to the exact search phrase.  For example, if you type “Polish Sausage” into Google, you get posts sorted as follows:

1. Posts written on the Daily Kos and Huffington Post that reference Polish Sausage
2. Posts where the link was in the phrase “Polish Sausage”, sorted in descending order of number of links
3. Every other post on the subject, again sorted in descending order of number of links.

With that in mind, Patterico wants to make sure the word gets out that Barack Obama Sucks:

Barack Obama sucks.

Barack Obama sucks because he will appoint terrible judges.

Barack Obama sucks because he will make John Edwards the A.G., and Slow Joe Biden the Secretary of State.

Barack Obama sucks because he will seek to pass big-government programs.

Barack Obama sucks because he will cut and run in Iraq, risking civil war in that country.

Barack Obama sucks because he reneges on his promises.

Barack Obama sucks because he has surrounded himself with bad people.

Barack Obama sucks.

My goal is to make sure anyone who uses Google to confirm their belief that Barack Obama sucks, will find this post and join the choir.

So if you want to know why Barack Obama Sucks, run over to Patterico.

Kimberly and Frederick Kagan in the Wall Street Journal on the current status of the war in Iraq:

Conclusion (emphasis added by me):

The war is not over. Enemy groups are reforming, rearming and preparing new attacks. Al Qaeda in Iraq will conduct spectacular attacks in 2008 wherever it can. Special Groups and their JAM affiliates will probably reconstitute within a few months and launch new offensives timed to influence both the American and Iraqi elections in the fall.

And for all its progress and success, the ISF is not yet able to stand on its own. Coalition forces continue to play key support roles, maintaining stability and security in cleared but threatened areas, and serving as impartial and honest brokers between Iraqi groups working toward reconciliation.

But success is in sight. Compared with the seemingly insurmountable obstacles already overcome, the remaining challenges in Iraq are eminently solvable – if we continue to pursue a determined strategy that builds on success rather than throwing our accomplishments away. No one in December 2006 could have imagined how far we would have come in 18 months. Having come this far, we must see this critical effort through to the end.

Read the whole thing.  Draw your own conclusions.

Lord Nick tries his hand at geography and analogy in his drive-by on Rep. Kucinich’s (D-Land of Faeries and Unicorns) articles of impeachment:

On the same day that articles of impeachment against George W. Bush were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, a North Dakota sheriff reported that high winds had caused cows to “fly.”

Funny. I thought we’d see pigs.

There are two eternal constants here:

1. It is always windy in North Dakota. This time of year, it blows from west to east.
2. Except when Nick Coleman faces west and talks.

Back to Nick:

Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 by a Republican Congress (led by horn dogs whose own peccadilloes soon came to light) for lying to a grand jury about his relationship with a White House intern.

(Koff).

(Koff koff koff koff).

(Koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff).

(Ah KOFF koff koff hack hack koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff (deep breath) koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff hack hack HACK koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff (Deeeeeep breath) koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff).

Whew.

(Koff koff).

Don’t know where that coughing attack came from. That was a bad one.

Ten years later, a Democratic Congress has failed to impeach George W. Bush for lying the country into a bloody and unnecessary war, undermining civil liberties and employing torture.

And ten later, Nick “I’m Not A DFL Monkey” Coleman still can’t tell the difference between a president getting jobbed and a president doing his job.

So much for change.

Indeed.

I’m done with this garbage.

If this had only happened a week earlier, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer might be running for Senate today.

Happy to say that of all the dumb corporate concepts I’ve worked for, I’ve never latched on with any on this list, from which I’ll excerpt a couple:

1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com

Oh, there’s more.

So tonight the two-part finale of Top Chef kicks off. 

My grand unification theory for Bravo “reality” series is, at best, on life support.  The theory is that each of these shows’ final threes must include:

• An arrogant SOB
• A cute chick
• A hypertalented, usually gay, guy.

It usually makes for a decent dramatic triangle; the guy everyone loves to hate, every girl’s best pal, and someone to keep the fellas tuned in. 

So this year, we have:

• Richard, the hypertalented and not remotely arrogant straight guy.
• Stephanie, an extremely talented chef (she and Richard, if memory serves, won the most eliminations) albeit not Casey-Thompson-level eye candy.
• Lisa, the mercurial, lesbian whose cooking during the show was seemingly hit-and-miss (she was a regular on the “chopping block” all season long), who beat out Antonia (who had, if memory serves, won several quickfires and a couple of eliminations, and who’d never been on the chopping block) in a really questionable call.

I’m gonna give my theory another season before I officially retire it.

Over the past few years – perhaps because he’s been eying national office – Barack Obama has been cleaning up his act on guns.

It’s not a huge surprise; guns have been a third rail for the Dems for about a decade.  The ’94 “Crime Bill”, with its draconian, capricious intrusions into the rights of the law-abiding gun owner, mobilized the long-sleeping giant of the NRA, whose membership soared through the roof.  The gun owner was a very significant part of the Gingrich Revolution (and was probably what put Rod Grams over the top against Ann Wynia that year).  ’94 was the year Minnesota’s Gun Owner’s Civil Rights Alliance (and its child, Concealed Carry Reform Now) hit their stride, and began the most successful bit of grassroots politics in recent Minnesota history – the ten year battle of the common, bipartisan, law-abiding citizen against the soulless bureaucrat, the snivelling elitist, and the racist pettifoggers who’d bedeviled them. It’s been one victory after another since then – and if the SCOTUS’ Heller decision breaks the right way later this month, the best may yet be to come.

Against this backdrop, of course Obama is going to make nice.

Given his past history, according to James Taranto, it’s probably good that we work our butts off to keep it that way.

Back in April, columnist Robert Novak noted that Barack Obama was performing a “dance” on the topic of gun rights:

Obama, disagreeing with the D.C. government and gun control advocates, declares that the Second Amendment’s “right of the people to keep and bear arms” applies to individuals, not just the “well regulated militia” in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts that this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local “common sense” restrictions on firearms.

The government of the District of Columbia is defending a gun ban before the Supreme Court, with a decision expected this month.

Now, I don’t mind if a guy changes his mind – in the right direction.

Of course, that which flips might eventully flop, when it becomes expedient.

As, for Obama, it once was:

The National Rifle Association Web site has a list of those “common sense” restrictions Obama has favored. One of them caught the eye of blogger David Hardy:

Barack Obama supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park, which would eliminate almost every gun store in America.

…Five miles? As Hardy notes, the effect of this would be to “eliminate almost every gun store in America.”…

…The proposal Obama endorsed in 1999 would have banned gun stores within five miles, or 26,400 feet, of a school. Imagine the same maps with each of those circles 10 miles across. Gun stores would be permitted only in the most remote rural areas–and only if there is also no park within five miles.

The Defender article also reported that Obama proposed “to make it a felony for a gun owner whose firearm was stolen from his residence which causes harm to another person if that weapon was not securely stored in that home.”

The point, of course, is to save the flip, prevent the flop:

To be sure, these are positions Obama took as a state legislator. It is unlikely that he would stand by them today, and even unlikelier that Congress would enact them. But it does lead one to think that Obama’s instinct is to trash, rather than protect, the Constitution.

It’s all back there somewhere.

Alec Baldwin – who broke his promise in 2004 to move to France or Canada or Angola or whereever – has all sorts of reasons for voting for Al Franken against Norm Coleman this fall:

Norm Coleman, a former Democrat who had the unusual luck to run against a retirement-age Walter Mondale in order to fill the seat vacated by the tragic death of Paul Wellstone, is busy digging up clips of Franken’s old SNL and other satirical work in order to dirty him up for their Minnesota US Senate race.

Well, yeah!  I mean, it’s the only thing he’s done for his entire career, and all.

Onward:

Let’s make one thing crystal clear. Paul Wellstone was a great man. His death stunned and saddened progressives around the world. I stood next to Paul at a fundraiser in Minneapolis two weeks prior to his plane crash. Paul’s career was everything one could want to emulate in public service. He was smart, decent and brave. Paul could never be replaced. Ever.

Yes, yes, we all missed Wellstone, gotcha.

But why vote for Franken over Coleman?

But to fill that seat with a hack like Coleman? I can see states like Texas having not one but two hack Senators. People who never propose or cosponsor any significant legislation while in office. People like Hutchinson and Cornyn, who are the worst type of go-along-to-get-along lackey for the Bush administration. People who view their role as doing anything to preserve their own power and who never have an original or courageous idea while in office.

OK, so we have ad-homina against an entire state and a couple of Senators…

…but why would I vote for Al Franken over Norm Coleman? 

But Minnesota?

Coleman becoming a US Senator from that great state was a travesty. Now the time has come to correct that mistake. Coleman, who makes Mitt Romney look like a visionary, is so far from the best that state has to offer, it is unbelievable to imagine that he is even in the running for reelection.

So – a slur against a highly-accomplished former governor, and a hopelessly-broad generalization about what Minnesota “has to offer” – got it.

But…why vote for Franken? 

 An uninformed and weak-willed apologist for this awful administration is being challenged by one of the best progressive minds of his generation.

Ah, OK!  Now we’re getting someplace – information about Franken!

Let’s look and see: 

I don’t care how much ribald and salty humor he has dished out during is entertainment career.

And I agree!

But, Alec, my question remains – why should I vote for him? 

Judge Al Franken by what he stands as today: a searingly intelligent and abundantly caring son of Minnesota who has returned home to attempt to lend his voice to our nation’s political discourse on the most formal of levels. No blogging. No books. No comedy sketches. Putting his career and his opinions on the line on behalf of serving the people of Minnesota.

But Alec?  He has no public record, other than his entertainment career!  His “searing intelligence” to date has been expressed solely via his blog, his books, his sketches, his standup, his failed Air America show!  So as he “puts his career on the line”, that is all we simple plebeians have by which to judge him!

Well, that and the impassioned assurances of Alec Baldwin, a fellow who stars in a TV show and lied about moving to France.

So I’ll ask again – why should I, a mere Minnesota citizen, vote for Al Franken?

And what does Coleman do? He trots out old SNL material to grade one of show business’ most respected satirists and judge him as insensitive or inappropriate.

Well, Coleman has a right to an opinion, right?

As do Senator Amy Klobuchar and Congresswoman Betty McCollum, a couple of other “searingly intelligent progressives” who already represent Minnesota, and who would seem to be more critical of candidate Franken than any of us conservatives!

And again – his show biz career is the only basis we have for judging him!

So I’ll ask again – why would, should or could I vote fo Al Franken?

Voters of Minnesota, your choice could not be simpler. Coleman is a pathetic hack who will do as little as possible in a US Senate office other than cover his own ass and protect his power.

So another ad-hominem… 

Meanwhile, Al Franken is everything you could hope for in a candidate to represent your state in the world’s most august deliberative body. Smart, caring, brave. That’s the choice.

So my “choice” is “ad-hominem” versus a vague assurance that someone with no public record whatsoever is just doubleplus swell! 

But I keep trying to find out, Alec – How is his intelligence, his caring, his “bravery” expressed?  Other than his showbiz career, I mean?

 Mitt Romney light. Or a return to someone special in the US Senate from the great state of Minnesota.

Maybe it’s the audacious hope.

Of course, that IS good enough for a good chunk of the Minnesota electorate.

At any rate, Alec Baldwin; while I’m generally loathe to cop Laura Ingraham’s line – shut up and act.

And I don’t mean like in Nadine, either. 

To: The NBA

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Alleged Rigging

Dear Sirs and Madames,

As long as you are (alleged to be) going to the trouble of rigging your games, could you please rig them to be interesting?

That is all.

Mitch Berg

Just to set the stage for the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which should be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Check this out:

Wow. Lookit all those guns – most of them fully-automatic weapons. And that ain’t the half of ’em.

Here’s the other half:

Not just fully-automatic weapons by the dozen! Not just big ones – two M2HB .50 caliber machine guns, another with the WWII aerial barrel, Russian and German water-cooled Maxims, and a Pearl-Harbor-vintage Browning water-cooled M1 .50, an even dozen Tommy guns, and a few AK-series that seem downright prosaic in comparison – but a flamethrower.

Why, with all those machine guns, this guy must have killed hundreds of people out in the street!

Well, no. It’s the gun collection of the late Charlton Heston, who never killed a guy that didn’t come back to life for the second take.

I’m wondering if the estate will lend it to the MOB for “MOB Day At the Range”, coming soon to a firing range near you?

Chris Steller actually touches on something useful in this piece in the Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” from last week on the overuse of the analogy “…the Saudi Arabia of [something]“:

Back in March, a Minnesota Monitor survey found the phrase becoming so commonplace it bordered on cliche. The list of places that various media outlets had recently nicknamed “The Saudi Arabia of [one alternative energy source or another]” included: Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, California, Nebraska, Arizona, New Jersey, Texas, Martha’s Vineyard, Quebec, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Inner Mongolia, Australia and even Saudi Arabia.

So far, so good.

Steller ties this into the fact that North Dakota’s deep oil reserves – the “Bakken Formation”, a two-mile-deep pool that is as difficult to extract from (lying beneath, sulfur-rich and thereby highly flammable lignite coal deposits, which tend to burst into unextinguishable flame from the friction of drilling) as is it huge – are being called the “Saudi Arabia of…” – well, you know.

Again – so far so good.

And then…:

Now comes a handsome spread in the June 6 Star Tribune (pictured) via Bloomberg News that puts an old spin on this new cliche, announcing that North Dakota is “the new Saudi Arabia of oil.” Billionaires from Texas, Oklahoma and other places that have oil know-how and big hats are finally finding ways to get at a thin layer of oil 10,000 feet down…Bloomberg’s story comes with a fashion-forward photo of two aspiring NoDak oil moguls from Minneapolis (pictured) in fine duds, minus the hats. Strangely, the Strib gave short shrift to hometown heroes Mike Reger and Ryan Gilbertson, chopping a Saudi Arabia-sized chunk of text from the Bloomberg copy.

The picture in question (emphasis added):

Maybe the Strib cut the material because the local boys’ colorful approach hewed a hue too close to that of some other local boys who got suspended from school this week when their fondness for “The Dukes of Hazzard” extended to waving Confederate flags in the parking lot at Bloomington Kennedy High School.

“Maybe?”

Leave aside the obvious First Amendment issues in the Bloomington Kennedy case (where a couple of yahoos got suspended from school for waving a confederate flag around the school parking lot; the display was stupid, offensive and disruptive; the school was well within its rights to suspend the lads, just as they should with every student wearing a Che Guevara shirt) (But won’t); “Maybe” the two guys in the picture are guilty, by an association too flimsy to actually make it to print anywhere but Steller’s article?

No, really…:

The missing Bloomberg money quote (from Gilbertson): “We’re both cowboy-boot-wearing, country-music-listening, gun-toting sons o’ bitches.”

So, genius Chris Steller: what part of that sentence is associated with slavery? With the Civil War? The cowboy boots? The C’nW? Guns?
Is it come combination of any two of the three that associates them with waving a symbol of slavery around? Chris – I’m a shooter, and I worked as a C’nW DJ at a slew of radio stations,and love Emmylou Harris! So am I a slavery sympathizer (“SlaveSymp?”) by association?

Or do you think everyone in a red state basically yearns for the good old days, circa 1855? 

Do you have any reason to defame Messrs. Reger and Gilbertson, other than “maybe” your own hatred for your pet red state stereotypes?

Please elaborate, Chris Steller!  Do you have some insight into the Strib’s copy editing that the rest of us know nothing about?   Spill it!

I’m starting to understand why the Monitor changed its name. It needed a clean slate.

I’m going to join with Patterico in urging a little restraint in the claims of anti-semitism on “BarackObama.com”.

Oh, make no mistake about it – Obama is going to draw a lot of anti-semites to his campaign.  Anti-semitism is a key tenet of the radical American left.

But BarackObama.com is pretty much open to all.

How open?

This open.

When you earn your living by trying to explain things to other people, one of the first lessons you learn is “try to use language your subject can understand – language that is accessible to the person you’re trying to expain to”.

I try to apply this lesson to the rest of my life.

Molly “Is It White In Here” Priesmeyer seems to have drawn the “real estate” beat for the Minnesoros Monitor “Independent”.  This despite the fact that her understanding of key real estate concepts like “equity” seems to be just a tad suspect…

…but that’s OK.  We’re all about the teaching today.

In a piece that came out in the  Monitor “Independent” last week, she wrote about Governor Pawlenty’s  veto of the Floyd Olson-style  foreclosure moratorium (emphasis added):

But the homeowners suffering with subprime or negative amortization loans are offered no recourse — including a simple deferment period that still required payments — because, according to Gov. Pawlenty, helping homeowners renegotiate loan terms would make credit more difficult to obtain.

Ms. Priesmeyer states that as if she finds it implausible – which brings up two possibilities:

1. She is actively trying to disinform the Monitor “Independent” reader,
2. She doesn’t know any better.

You know good ol’ pollyanna Mitch; I’ll assume it’s really #2.

So I’ll try to explain this concept – the notion of unintended consequences of government action – in a language Molly Priesmeyer might understand.

“So, like, remember when you lent your totally cute feedbag purse to Ashley, your roommate from Saint Olaf/Macalester/Carlton/wherever it was you did your undergrad?  The documentary filmmaker and telemarketer? And on Monday when you wanted it back, she said she didn’t, like, have it with her?”

“And you gave her another week, because the purse is, like, totally cute, but then you like needed it?  And you met her at “Drink” and like asked her, and she totally said she’d bring it to Chino on Monday?”

“And then on Monday, she totally flaked, and said she’d have it for you on Friday?  And you’re like “Byatch, I need my purse?”, but you totally gave her til Friday?”

“And on Friday, you met her, and of course she flaked again.  And you were totally pissed.  But Ashley had brought Justin, this guy from St. Thomas that she buys X from, and he was like totally cute wearing Roc-A-Wear, which is normally kinda  poser on a white boy, but Justin was kinda hot in that bad-boy kind of way…”

“…anyway, Justin said that Ashley would bring the purse back when she could, and quit bugging her or he’d, like, totally slash it up.”

“So like, totally, how likely are you to ever lend Ashley anything again?”

“Like, doyy”.

A guy’s gotta try.