1. If your blog name is “Bill Dung” – change it.

More to come.

The good news: Here’s an excellent article on one of the jobs I do, the “Usability Expert” (technically, I do two – I am also the “Interaction Designer” – although the two jobs really bleed into each other pretty heavily).

The ‘bad” news: It’s in German. Which isn’t a problem for me, but very well may be für euch.

The other good news: Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we have the Google translation thingie, which renders the German article into English.

The bad news:  There’s a reason I used the term “render” rather than “translate”.  It reads like something from Engrish.com.

I had a piece in the hopper this morning in which I was going to ask “I wonder how long it’s going to be before a DFLer tries to make “domestic tranquility” an issue in the Minnesota Senate race?”

It didn’t quite make the cut this morning (7AM, my cutoff time for morning blogging, came too dang early).  And it’s a shame, since I just knew this was going to happen…

…yep, the ink on Franken’s Rochester hotel tab is barely dry, and suddenly his minions are on the case!

From the 3rd Hour of [Fast Eddie Schultz’s Friday] show.

On the Al Franken scandals:

“This is all to just lather up the right, to shake down the Democrats, to make Norm Coleman look like he’s an altar boy, which he is not. And that is a story that the right wing media in Minnesota will never do. You know, Norm likes to chase the skirt, you know, there’s no doubt about that. Anybody wanna counter me on that? Anybody in the media want to write an editorial about what an altar boy Norm Coleman is? Any right wing talkers in Minnesota want to tell us what an upstanding, wonderful, highly moral guy Norm Coleman is? Come on! Let’s get it on!”

Schultz spent significant time in the 3rd hour of his show on Friday coming to the defense of Al Franken.

Of course he did. 

It’s been an open secret forever in Saint Paul and Minnesota politics; Norm and his wife have a rather unconventional marriage.  Schultz is being disingenuous if he claims this is some big revelation (or, equally likely, the dim little bulb inside his thick little head hasn’t quite quite figured it out yet, and his prime directive, “blow hard first, ask questions later”, is in control). 

And Franken is to be complemented; he’s been married to Franny for thirty-something years.  Kudos.

But since when did the party of “MoveOn.org” – an organization founded ten years ago to cajole the American people into ignoring the legal perjury (and, incidentally, marital infidelity) of a middle-aged lothario in the White House – care about such things?

It was made abundantly clear a decade ago; the Democrats wanted us to consider politicians solely on the issues. 

Wasn’t that what it was all about? 

So if Fast Eddie and his smarter colleagues in the trenches (that’s called “damning with faint praise”) want to try to ding Norm on the issues, go for it; Senator Coleman does have the advantage/liability of actually having a record to criticize.

Unlike Candidate Franken. 

The Minnesota Monitor – the two-year-old lefty flak site supported by the “Center for Independent Media”, which initially set up shop in space shared with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America”, and is currently floated by a bevy of lefty organizations, has rebranded itself The Minnesota Independent. Was it because of a desire to put their past – dubious ethics, shoddy, giggly fratboy/sororitychick-level reporting, plunging traffic [or merely stagnant; the source was unclear on exactly how slow things were, over there], their long dissembling masquerade as an “independent” operation until the truth leaked out – behind them?

I’m inclined to think not; the changes seem to be all cosmetic (of which more below); all but one of the Center for Independent Media’s operations are now named “…Independent”, though.

On the upside: The new design is better. Forget politics for a moment. The graphics are different, sure – but big whoop.  I’m a usability guy; graphics are for kIdZ with Photoshop. But give credit where it’s due; the site’s overall interaction design is a huge improvement (and I am pretty remorselessly clinical about this sort of thing, since income trumps politics every time). And the old, frustrating, utterly opaque comment engine seems to have been finally, unlamentedly flushed. I presume the new one is better, but I don’t know; I haven’t left a comment yet. Either has anyone else in a while, from the looks of it.

Unchanged; the staff, the relentless sunshine-up-the-trousers DFL flakkery, and of course the “Code of Ethics“.

Anyway – welcome to the big world, “MinnIndy“.

Japanese man rams vehicle into crowded shopping area, comes out swinging a knife:

The lunchtime violence in the Akihabara district, a popular electronics and video game area, sent thousands of people fleeing.

Whew. Good thing civilians can’t defend themselves, or all hell could have broken loose!

The assault, which occurred on the seventh anniversary of a mass stabbing at a Japanese elementary school, was the latest in a series of knife attacks that have stoked fears of rising violent crime in Japan.

At the risk of being redundant, – whew. Good thing civilians can’t defend themselves, or goodness knows what would have happened!

A 25-year-old man, Tomohiro Kato, was arrested with blood on his face.

“The suspect told police that he came to Akihabara to kill people,” said Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

“He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything,” Akaogi said.

Wow. It would have been such a shame if an innocent, law-abiding civilian had been able to indulge his wish before killing seven innocent people.

Close call!

(Note: This incident provided as a preview of life under a Democrat-dominated government).

Mark Steyn lets a little air out of the Obama balloon.

He notes – correctly? – that Obama’s phenemonon is a media-driven event:

“I felt this thrill going up my leg,” said MSNBC’s Chris Matthews after one of the senator’s speeches. “I mean, I don’t have that too often.” Au contraire, Chris and the rest of the gang seem to be getting the old tingle up the thigh hairs on a nightly basis. If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for more than six months, see your doctor.

Out there in the voting booths, however, Democrat legs stayed admirably unthrilled. The more the media told Hillary she was toast, and she should get the hell out of it and let Obama romp to victory, the more Democrats insisted on voting for her. The more the media insisted Barack was inevitable, the less inclined the voters were to get with the program. On the strength of Chris Matthews’ vibrating calves, Sen. Obama raised a ton of money – over $300 million – and massively outspent Sen. Clinton, but he didn’t really get any bang for his buck. In the end, he crawled over the finish line. The Obama Express came a-hurtlin’ down the track at 2 miles an hour.

…and continues the Manhattan-Project-level effort to sanity-check his rhetoric:

“I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations…I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … . This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation.”

It’s a good thing he’s facing it with “profound humility,” isn’t it? Because otherwise who knows what he’d be saying. But mark it in your calendars: June 3, 2008 – the long-awaited day, after 232 years, that America began to provide care for the sick. Just a small test program: 47 attendees of the Obama speech were taken to hospital and treated for nausea. Everyone else came away thrilled that the Obamessiah was going to heal the planet and reverse the rise of the oceans: When Barack wants to walk on the water, he doesn’t want to have to use a stepladder to get up on it.

There are generally two reactions to this kind of policy proposal. The first was exemplified by the Atlantic Monthly’s Marc Ambinder:

“What a different emotional register from John McCain’s; Obama seems on the verge of tears; the enormous crowd in the Xcel Center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.”

The second reaction boils down to: “‘Heal the planet’? Is this guy nuts?” To be honest I prefer a republic whose citizenry can muster no greater enthusiasm for their candidate than “stilted cheers” to one in which the crowd wants to hoist the nominee onto their shoulders for promising to lower ocean levels within his first term. As for coming together “to remake this great nation,” if it’s so great, why do we have to remake it?

Read, naturally, the whole thing.

Ed and I briefly discussed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the public-facing statements on Iraq before the invasion were substantiated by intelligence.

We briefly noted the myriad glossings-over and omissions that the majority party – the Democrats –  wrote into the report.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline kicked off a detailed, multi-part analysis of the report on Saturday. In concluding the first of several parts, Paul notes:

Committee Democrats attempt to finesse the fact that Democratic Senators as a group gave shorter shrift than the administration to the dissents contained in the NIE not only by limiting the report to statements by administration officials, but also by making misleading claims about congressional access to intelligence. They assert that members of Congress did not have the same ready access to intelligence as did senior executive branch policymakers. In fact, however, all of the intelligence analyzed in the Committee report was fully and readily available to members of Congress. Some of it was actually provided to members of Congress in closed hearings. Much of the remainder, including the NIEs, was widely disseminated to members.

Committee Democrats claim, though, that the NIE on Iraqi WMD was published “mere days” before Congress was scheduled to vote on the war resolution. Again, the Dems are attempting to mislead. The NIE in question was published nearly two weeks before the vote. Moreover, its key assessments had been presented to members of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees a month before the vote. Nor were these judgments new – numerous intelligence assessments had reached identical or similar judgments months earlier.

In any case, Senators Rockefeller, Dodd, Kerry, and the others (including Senators Clinton and Edwards) cannot defend statements they made about WMD following publication of the NIE on the grounds that they didn’t have enough time to study the document. If that were true, and it is not, they shouldn’t have opined on the issue, much less affirmatively claimed that there was no debate, as Dodd and Kerry (but not the administration) did.

Most irritating – the report, in giving massive weight to what were dissenting views within the international view (dissents that the noted Congressional Democrats largely didn’t accept until it became politically expedient), endorses a sort of “gotcha” politics, in which every dissent from the majority view that might in the future be born out can be retroactively applied to every decision made with good faith according to the then-prevailing view.

For political gain, of course.

Keep following Paul’s analysis.

Both the major dailies proclaim “Franken apologizes, accepts nomination” (Strib, PiPress); slightly different words; same sanitized message.

On the other hand, he didn’t – and even if he did, one prominent DFL feminist isn’t’ amused.

Keith Ellison (F – MN CD5) speaking at the “Media Reform” conference last week in Minneapolis: “We need a strong, diverse media”. “The problem is, you don’t have enough actors out there making sure the people know what’s going on…if[the people] get a diverse diet of news, they’ll make the right decision!”

Wow. Sounds like a good start, huh? And it’d seem like he’s gotten his wish! In a media market where anyone can set up their own outlet, where 2,000 radio stations carry talk radio, where scads of community newspapers and small radio stations (like Minneapolis’ KFAI) carry a dizzying variety of viewpoints, we sure must have that “diverse diet”.

Sadly, it was not to be.   Ellison tacitly called for the censorship of talk radio (the word seems to have gone out to to lefty minions refer to it as “hate radio” at every turn), a shutdown of Fox News, and – most incredibly of all – government subsidy of traditional, lefty-friendly newspapers (9:33 in this video).

Oh, yeah – and listen to the bit at 3:30 and tell me the whole “Media Reform” conference wasn’t a partisan Nuremberg rally.

Other howlers:

• Conservative “Think tanks” have “studios” from whence they “pump out our message” to “our media people” via “hate radio?”
• Ellison calls for speech rationing (4:30)
• claimed that Reagan raised taxes (5:40)
• claims America is an “imperial power” (7:24)
• says illegal immigration isn’t the problem – merely “trade agreements that turn people against each other!” (13:00)

Watch the whole thing.  For extra laughs, check out the crowd; as Scott Johnson notes, “Note the tepid audience response to Ellison’s inquiry at 8:00 regarding the employment status of the assembled multitude.”

Even George Soros can’t employ every leftymedia shill.
(Via Lassie and Charles)

Ed notes that he and the First Mate spent three and a half hours on the tarmac before their flight got cancelled.

They got to Cali eventually, anyway.

Not a great reference for Northwest Airlines.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad, John and Brian will do their thing from 11-1. They’ll be interviewing Peter Schweitzer, author of Makers and Takers, talking about all the myriad, empirically-measured ways that conservatives are better, nicer, more generous people than liberals. No, it’s in a book, it’s for real.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will be on from 1-3. I’ll be interviewing Doug Hester of Northern Muckraker about Ramco Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s curious pattern of non-renewals for legal carry permits.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King joins Michael from 3-5. We’ll see if Michael’s been able to escape the DFL convention yet.

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 h/t Harry)

Question:  “What are two people divided by a common language three common languages?

(Norm should, too, although he’s voted generally correctly over the past seven years).

Senator Klobuchar:

I know you’re busy – too busy to respond to your consituents, indeed! – but I think you oughtta make time for this offer from Michael Yon:

One of the biggest problems with the Iraq War is that politics has frequently triumphed over truth.  For instance, we went into Iraq with shoddy intelligence (at best), no reconstruction plan, and perhaps half as many troops as were required.  We refused to admit that an insurgency was growing, until the country collapsed into anarchy and civil war.  Now the truth is that Iraq is showing real progress on many fronts:  Al Qaeda is being defeated and violence is down and continuing to decrease.  As a result, the militias have lost their reason for existence and are getting beaten back or co-opted.  Shia, Sunni and Kurds are coming together — although with various stresses — under the national government.

Oh, and…:

 If progress continues at this rate, it is very possible that before 2008 is out, we can finally say “the war has ended.”

Yon is no administration ass-kisser, a fact that got him banned from the Hannity show; he’s always told it like it was.

 Whatever we do in Iraq from here forward, we must strive to make better decisions than those made between 2003 and 2006.  And one way to achieve that is by making certain that our civilian leaders are fully informed.  All three candidates for President are extremely intelligent, but that doesn’t mean that all three are tracking the truth on the ground in Iraq.  Anyone who wants to be President of the United States needs to see Iraq without the distorting lenses of the media or partisan politics.  I would be honored to visit Iraq with Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain or any of their Senate colleagues.

I hereby offer to accompany any Senator to Iraq, whether they are pro-or anti-war, Democrat or Republican.  I will make this offer personally to a few select Senators as well.  Our conversations during the visit would be on- or off-record, as they wish.

Senator Klobuchar; you’d really show yourself to be a leader if you took Yon up on this.

Our civilian leaders need to make decisions based on the best information available.  The only way to learn what is really going on in Iraq is to go there and listen to our ground commanders, who know what they are doing.  Generals Petraeus and Odierno have years of experience in Iraq, and vast knowledge of our efforts there.  But the young soldiers who have done multiple tours in Iraq also have unique and invaluable perspectives as well.  These young soldiers have personally witnessed the trajectory of the war shift dramatically, and can articulate those changes in concrete and specific terms.  It doesn’t matter if a soldier is only twenty-something.  If he or she spent two or three years in the war, that person is likely to have valuable insights.

Take the offer, A-Klo.  While it might contradict Harry Reid’s forced pessimism…

…oh, wait.  Never mind.

MLP at Casual Sundays is back on the air.

Don’t scare us like that again.

Now go talk some sense into your sister.

It was sixty-four years ago today that the Allies started taking Western Europe back from the Nazis.

The first, inevitable step was to get past the Westwall – perhaps the most immense set of fortifications ever built, with the intention of making the beaches from Denmark to the Spanish border a bloodbath for any troops trying to cross the beaches.

In places, it worked:

In some places, the troops had to overcome the near-impossible:

And yet by the end of the day, nine allied divisions were ashore, a toehold for a bridgehead that would eventually expand, ten months later, across Western Europe.

There were troops from the US, of course, on the two western beaches…

…and farther east, beaches with Brits…

…and Scots…

And in the middle, linking the two and meeting the worst resistance other than Omaha, the Canadians:

…along with troops-in-exile from elsewhere in occupied Europe; French commandos – some of whom had spent four years in exile, and who spent the next year belying the notion that the French were cowards…:

…and Norwegians, who’d been without a homeland for four years…

…and Poles, who’d been in exile for five years and would, in some cases, remain there for forty-five more:

The world may see nothing like it again.

Anyway – thank a D-Day veteran.

America’s real quagmire deepens.

Only this time no surge is going to help it:

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier announced a military-style checkpoint yesterday to stop cars this weekend in a Northeast Washington neighborhood inundated by gun violence, saying it will help keep criminals out of the area.

Er, wait – how can this be? They have a civilian gun ban in DC!

Starting on Saturday, officers will check drivers’ identification and ask whether they have a “legitimate purpose” to be in the Trinidad area, such as going to a doctor or church or visiting friends or relatives. If not, the drivers will be turned away.

Your papers, please.

The Neighborhood Safety Zone initiative is the latest crime-fighting attempt by Lanier and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who have been under pressure from residents to stop a recent surge in violence. Last weekend was especially bloody, with seven slayings, including three in the Trinidad area.

“In certain areas, we need to go beyond the normal methods of policing,” Fenty (D) said at a news conference announcing the action. “We’re going to go into an area and completely shut it down to prevent shootings and the sale of drugs.”

“We had to destroy the city, and its residents’ civil liberties, to save them”.

The checkpoint will stop vehicles approaching the 1400 block of Montello Avenue NE…Police will search cars if they suspect the presence of guns or drugs, and will arrest people who do not cooperate, under a charge of failure to obey a police officer, officials said.

There’s a bit of a loophole:

The strategy, patterned after a similar effort conducted years ago in New York, is not airtight. There are many ways to get in and out of Trinidad, not just on the one-way Montello Avenue. And pedestrians will not be stopped, which is something critics say might render the program ineffective.

“I guess the plan is to hope criminals will not walk into neighborhoods,” said D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large). “I also suppose the plan is to take the criminal’s word for it when he or she gives the police a reason for driving into a neighborhood.”

Or – y’know – non-criminals, too?

I digress.

Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5), who represents Trinidad and other parts of Northeast Washington, said he had informal discussions with Lanier in which she had mentioned the possibility of the checkpoint announced yesterday, but he got little notice before the news conference. Civil liberties are always a concern, said Thomas, who maintained that residents are so concerned about violence that they will be willing to give the latest program a try.

“I think the general consensus is that we have to do something because people live in fear,” he said. “What would you rather have?” he asked. “A positive pattern of [police] checking things . . . or these folks who come into the community and wreak havoc?”

Ironically, the DC Metro trains already run on time.

I caught this piece on Wednesday in the MNPost – a hagiographic look back at former Minnesota Premier Governor Floyd B. Olson by “Iric Nathanson”:

In 1933, a governor moved boldly to halt foreclosures

As expected, Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would have deferred foreclosure proceedings for up to a year for some homeowners victimized by predatory loans. During this year’s legislative session, the Republican governor signaled his displeasure with the foreclosure measure, claiming that it would discourage lenders from making new home loans in this state.

The bill’s chief authors, Sen. Ellen Anderson and Rep. Jim Davnie, argued that their proposal would help 12,000 Minnesotans in danger of losing their homes as the wave of foreclosures continues to gain momentum in 2008.

Anderson and Davnie, both DFLers, maintained that action was needed this year to deal with foreclosures that are approaching rates not seen since the Great Depression.

Back then, Minnesota’s governor was willing to take decisive action to help struggling families hold on to their homes and farms.

I thought about responding – but as with all things economic, I figured I’d just wait and paste King’s response:

This from the same governor who once said that same year “I do not believe there can be any economic security for the common man or woman in this country until and unless the key industries of the United States are taken over by the government.” (Geo. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson, University of Minnesota Press, p. 149.) Olson had also acted to depress farms by, for example, offering the previous year to use the state militia to prevent the “export” of farm crops to the rest of the country, if other farm states would join in. (They didn’t.)

Indeed, while many neighboring states were hit as hard or worse by the depression, and some reacted with various degrees of government intervention, most shied away from the whole “trampling on the law” bit.

Back to King:

It’s hard to imagine why anyone thinks that, when all discussion turns to a credit crunch, violating the property rights of creditors will make more credit flow. Unless you intend to seize the property itself. A propos today, this column by Jerry Bowyer makes a similar point. The bill vetoed makes banks a target, after which nothing else really matters.

Nothing?

Nobody told Nathanson:

Olson’s bold move at the start of his second term would do much to embellish his reputation as an activist governor who used the powers of his office to combat the economic and social devastation caused by the Great Depression in Minnesota.

Time – and a war – erased many of the unintended consequences of Olson’s actions. Minnesota’s activist DFL clacque probably won’t be so lucky.

It’s Gary Miller’s birthday!

40 years ago Robert F. Kennedy exited this world nearly the same moment I entered it.

The world suffered a big net loss.

Nevertheless, on this milestone birthday, I am grateful for the many friends I have discovered since beginning this blog almost 4 years ago:  John Swon, Jeff Kouba, Doug Williams, Andy Aplikowski, Barry Casselman, Pat Shortridge, Jerry Plagge, Mitch Berg, Bob Collins, Congressman Kennedy, Carol Cooper and many others.

The pleasure is all ours.

And here’s to 40 more!

Oh, heck.  Take 60 or 70.  They’re small.

Emily at X Pespective – a high school principal – went to a funeral for a former student killed in an unspecified crime.  And she pondered:

According to stats from 2004-06, black students in MN are currently graduating at a rate of 62%. Antoine did graduate, as did all the boys I knew who were at his memorial today.

What did that get him? Or the rest of them? Two had gone on to college, but neither is going back. The rest – not so much.

Two assertions here, just to set the stage:

1. Violence in the city is a result of a whole big slew of social pathologies – poverty, drug abuse, crime, and above all the disintegration of the family – that, after forty years of government intervention, have gotten worse rather than better.
2. The whole rationale for compulsory education in the first place was to recitify damaging social pathologies (which, in the late 1800s, were “immigrants’ socialist ideals”)

By that measure, the experiment at public education has failed.  To be fair, I don’t know that our society could give schools enough power to “save” kids from the damage wrought by generations of subsidized poverty; I doubt society would want to live with the consequences of giving any part of government that much power.

(/libertarian tangent)

Overall, MN is down to an 85% graduation rate, though 91% of the state’s current workforce has graduated from high school. Why the drop? Why are kids opting not to finish? What does the diploma offer them that they can’t get without it? What does it guarantee?

All good questions – but Emily missed one.  Looking at Minnesota’s overall graduation rate is misleading; outstate rates are higher; indeed, the smaller the school, the higher the graduation rate.  The metro is dragging the state’s numbers down hard.

Why the drop – why are kids not finishing school?  Because in a society where poverty is subsidized, where hard work within “the system” is derided, where almost none of the cultural role models is a poster-child for getting an education, what is the motivation to finish school?

What does the diploma offer or guarantee?  Nothing.  Nor should it guarantee anything, except that the bearer is literate and capable of functioning in our society – and with today’s high school education, that’s a bit of a crapshoot.  I’m not even talking in terms of conservative bromides about ultraliberal educational academics and PC mandates; I think notion of the value of the high school diploma is a holdover from an era when the diploma was a rarity.  Today, while its an assumption for much of productive society, the notion that it has value beyond that is, I think, an obsolete idea.

How to fix or replace it?

Well, that’s a longer article.

It’s at times like this that I am most diligent about separating my Conservatism – which is what I believe, politically speaking – with the Republican Party, which is the group I associate with to try to forward conservatism.

Because it’s going to be a bad year for the GOP. I predict that while Barack Obama is potentially very vulnerable, it’s going to be another bloodbath in Congress; if the Dems end up with less than 80-85 seats in the Senate and 350 in the House, they should hang it up.

The GOP – the party, not the conservative movement for which it is wrongly considered synonymous by the too many in the media and the sorosphere – squandered a stupendous amount of intellectual and politlcal capital in the past eight years. On behalf of all of us Forbes/Kemp 2000 supporters – we told you so.

Watch closely for the media – especially the paid-off media of the left – to start declaring conservatism dead, after a gunfight to which conservatism wasn’t invited.

Oh, yeah – and conservatism’s been “dead”, according to one pundit or another, a few times in my lifetime. Goldwater’s loss killed it. Richard “I’m a Keynesian!” Nixon supposedly stuck it in a hospice. Stagflation robbed its grave. Bush I gave it a docile, neoliberal veneer. George Will has declared it dead every couple of years, if I remember right. Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council ideas showed it obsolete (at least until the ’93 Inauguration).

Dane Smith is one of the good ones – but in this piece over at Growth and Justice, he comments on the inevitable tide of “Conservatism Is Dead” articles by wondering if conservatism is actually dead:

There’s a temptation in the punditry business to attach too much meaning to the present, to excitedly say “never before,” and to declare the “fall of” and “death of” this or that. And in my time I’ve seen too many premature pronouncements _ of the death of God, of the decline and fall of liberalism, and even the end of history _ to get too excited.

Smith then excitedly says “never before” and declares the fall, end and death of conservatism.

But George Packer in the latest New Yorker has written an eminently readable treatise about “The Fall of Conservatism.’’ It was referenced in a Star Tribune editorial Saturday about the Minnesota Republican Party’s state convention, and the Packer piece promises to be prime grist for the mill this summer.

Packer quotes conservatives themselves who fear that the movement is out of ideas and intellectually fatigued and he draws some amazing admissions out of Patrick Buchanan about how Republicans consciously and aggressively exploited southern white fury over the civil rights movements to build their counter-attack in the late 1960s. Packer also does a good job sketching out broader and more defensible non-economic motivations for the rise of conservatism: concerns about “the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young and the insults to national pride.’’ I’ve always maintained that “liberalism” got to be a dirty word because of “free love” and drugs and flag-burning and goofy dalliances with Marxism, not because of its efforts to alleviate poverty and social problems and gross inequalities in wealth and income.

Which means that a generation of drug-snarfing, free-loving, flag-burning, post-marxist libertines has grown to majority and is now in control of the wheels of corporate, academic and political power. Their children are now middle-class parents. People can still be outraged – but the threshold has zoomed upward. What once were vices are now habits.

Smith’s Minnesota roots start showing below:

And Packer gets closest to explaining the conservatives’ strategic mistake when he cites David Brooks’ analysis about how conservatives overreached with their hostility to government. “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American…People want something melioristic, they want government to do things.’’

There are two ways to answer that; the cynical way (“people want government to do things for them, and to give them stuff), and the idealistic way (my favorite cliche-in-the-making; government is a tug of war between the “state is my mother” crowd and the “abolish everything but the military and the courts” crowd; it’s for damn sure the far-left’s fringe won’t stop pulling until we have mandatory abortion and are living in eco-friendly yurts arranged along rail lines, so we pull the other way for all we’re worth).

This notion that there is some negotiated settlement to this pull – that the leaders of the left will meet the leaders of the right (whoever they are) and reach a gentlemans’ agreement that provides just the right amount of services, and leave us with just the right amount of government intervention, so we can all move forward is…

…a conceit of the group of which Smith is president. Growth and Justice is built around the wonky notion that

I, for one, will pull.

And in the end, because of a very contradictory conservative view of government as limitless when it comes to security and national defense, conservatives after almost 30 years of dominance “hadn’t made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality.’’

I’m surprised that someone like Smith would write that first sentence.  If your nation is not secure – and by “Secure” we mean “enemies afraid to try to kill us”, not “teachers paid so well they don’t go into insurance sales” – then what, indeed, is the point of having a nation; why have a government at all?

Packer goes on to quote conservative David Frum as saying that “smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance.’’

True.

It never was.

Government does so much to mess up this country besides just “being big”.  Taxes sap our economic vitality; entitlements drain our prosperity and our drive; appeasement of those who’d kill us gets more of us killed; campaign finance reform and “Fairness Doctrines” and excessive taxation and banning smoking in bars and cars and homes and gun control gut our liberties; government policies that foster illegal immigration sap our culture; a shoddy, PC-based education system based more on punching political tickets and perpetuating its budget than on teaching our kids to be literate, capable citizens capable of thinking about issues like this one is worse than useless.

Every one of those issues are byproducts of big, unresponsive government-for-it’s-own-sake.

I don’t want conservatism to fall or die, anymore than I want yin to wipe out yang or night to eclipse day. And it doesn’t matter what I think because conservatism and the great ideas it stands for _ individual and market freedoms, personal responsibility, family values, respect for the past, and religious convictions _ will and should always be with us as we try to build a better world. I just think conservatism needs to return to the healthy accommodation its adherents used to have for other principles _ equality of opportunity, social justice, and a respectful faith that community and the “we” are at least as important as the individual and the “I”.

True conservatism is always about “we” – including putting those all-important limits on “we”.

And so we keep pulling.  I have a hunch that one Obama term with a Pelosi Congress will make George Packer wish he could eat his article.

UPDATE:  Oh, yeah – gotta reach a conclusion, don’t I?  Conservatism isn’t dead.  It’s just looking for better spokespeople.

AKA “The Pansification Of America”

Joseph Lord of Vienna, Maine was tired of having scumbags working over his machine shop for scrap metal, and being told the police could do nothing.

The good news:  like any real American, he did the right thing:

The owner of a machine shop where thieves stole $3,000 worth of scrap steel, iron and aluminum wasn’t going to let it happen again. After Saturday night’s theft, Joseph Lord loaded his shotgun and laid low, expecting the thieves to return. They came back on Tuesday, in broad daylight.

When Lord saw their 2008 F-250 pickup truck, he shot out its tires and windshield and blasted its radiator, Kennebec County Sheriff Randall Liberty said.

I salute you, Mr. Lord. 

The startled thieves took off on foot, but investigators quickly tracked down the truck’s operator, who will be charged with theft, Liberty said. Charges are pending against an accomplice, the sheriff said.

Now, as to the bad news?  Well, OK – you expect the county sheriff to tut-tut and urge citizens not to “take the law into their own hands”…

Liberty said he discourages the use of guns to protect property. In this case, Lord told investigators he wanted to disable the vehicle so the criminals couldn’t escape.

“I can understand the frustration that Mr. Lord must have been experiencing,” Liberty said. But, he added, “We don’t want to see anyone get hurt over property.”

(Although the odds of someone innocent being hurt had the scumbags decided to burgle Mr. Lord’s home, and someone was in the house, would have been vastly higher). 

No, the main symptom of pansification was the Yahoo News headline that came with the story:  “‘Vigilante’ gets revenge on metal shop thieves“. 

“Vigilante”.  Sheesh.

Since the partisan press holds that word over everyone who doesn’t act like a mute sheep in the face of criminal aggression is a “vigilante”, “gun nut” or “paranaoiac”, perhaps we – the Real Americans – need to take those words back.  After all, “Vigilante” in the original Latin was Vigiles – basically “neighborhood block club”. 

And congrats, Mr. Lord.  You are a great living American.

(NOTE:  I’m in a less-than-charitable mood today.  Any comments criticizing Mr. Lord will be edited for my amusement.  This is true only for this post – but it is the case.  There is no appeal).

Joe Kimball in the MNPost apparently has been taking a hit off of Lori Sturdevant’s bong.

He apparently thinks that Minnesota Republicans should  bend over and ask Senator Obama where he’s like us to kiss him:

So much for Monday’s GOP ‘welcome’ of Obama to St. Paul …
Not wanting the Democrats to get all the St. Paul headlines today…

Perhaps he expected us to send Obama – our opponent – a marching band? 

…the Republican National Convention sent out this email today:

STATEMENT FROM 2008 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION SPOKESMAN MATT BURNS ON SEN. OBAMA’S VISIT TODAY TO SAINT PAUL, MINN.:

“The Xcel Energy Center hasn’t hosted anyone who skates and flips as much as Senator Obama since the U.S. Figure Skating Championships were in town and the Minnesota Wild were eliminated from the hockey playoffs. We look forward to Senator McCain’s visit to Saint Paul in September, where he will accept our party’s nomination and offer a more substantive vision for leading America forward than the spectacle witnessed tonight.”

Why does Joe Kimball hate dissent? [*]

(more…)

I went to a fairly obscure college in rural North Dakota.  But you can’t always judge a book by its cover.

My obscure little college had hellacious recruiting chops in foreign places, like Europe, the Middle East and Chicago.  At one point, the little school of (then) 600-odd students had fifty Iranians (the hostage crisis turned into an enrollment crisis, as they all pretty much left when the crisis started).  My freshman year, we had Germans, a Kuwaiti, thirty-odd scholarship athletes from Chicago – you get the picture.

The small campus had three dorms (four if you count the one that was just for married students).  In one, four Jordanians shared a suite. 

In another dorm, a couple of Palestinian kids shared a room.

And over in the dorm I lived in my last three years of school, there were seven or eight Lebanese – Christians, in this case.  (Rumor had it that a number of Israeli kids were on the brink of attending, but there was no way to make the cafeteria kitchen kosher).

So you had in microcosm the entire Middle East problem; Arab Christians (who were allied with and supported by the Jewish Israelis), Jordanians (who had fought the Israelis and expelled the Palestinians ten short years earlier), and Palestinians.

Somehow they managed to get along with each other, even sitting in classes together without killing each other (or the poor Kuwaiti kid, a nice guy who got a stipend from the Kuwaiti government that put him in the top 5% of incomes in the city of Jamestown).  I’m willing to chalk that up to equal parts “oh, crap, if we get in trouble here we’re 4,000  miles from home” and, I’d like to think, “this is not why we’re here”.

The story is apropos not much – except that I thought about it when I read Ella Taylor’s passable City Pages review of what is apparently a passable movie (You Don’t Mess With Zohan).  The story (do I need to say it?), of a Mossad agent who retires from the business and comes to New York to work as a hair stylist, and manages to solve a microcosmic Arab/Israeli conflict in a Gotham neighborhood is…well, an Adam Sandler movie.  I’m not a movieblogger, as a rule. 

But this bit here jumped out at me:

With the Middle East returned to Hollywood’s table (albeit mostly in thrillers), Zohan is back…Score one for freedom of expression, I suppose, and pushed far enough into outrage the movie might have had something pungent to say about the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. As it is, the American way rides to the rescue: Even sworn enemies get along nicely living side by side in New York, no?

Does Ella Taylor a problem with this?

I mean, since it’s been pretty much a reality for most of the past 200 years?

Poles, Germans and Russians have not killed each other off for almost two centuries in America.  Russians have refrained from anti-Jewish pogroms; Irish and Brits have mostly stayed away from each others’ throats (except in Nick Coleman’s fervid delusions); Norwegians have largely refrained from kicking Swedish and German ass; Germans haven’t stomped on French; Hindi and Pakistanis work together; Turks go to Greek restaurants, and Japanese and Chinese generally co-exist in America; even Moslems and Jews rub elbows in most major cities.  They’ve all mostly had the good common sense to leave their squalid anscestral squabbles in the old country.

Of course we have our own to fill in the blanks; some blacks hate whitey for slavery; some whites return the favor; natives have a beef with us; Italians mix it up with blacks in Brooklyn; some Latino gangs practice ethnic cleansing against blacks in LA, where blacks and Koreans in turn mix it up. 

Maybe that’s the moral of the story; most ethnic groups come to America to forget their old anscestral squabbles, and adopt our new ones. 

God Bless America!

…that I learn as much about the law in a week on KAR JARWB than I do in a month of Harvey Birdman reruns. Or even Law and Order.

Yes, I do.

A: Under “Single-Payer Healthcare”, whatever the state wants to pay for it – and then, only if you don’t step out of line.

Kathy from Cake-Eater Chronicles – a cancer survivor (who quite memorably documented her struggle in one of the better bits of blogging I’ve ever read) and who thus has Absolute Moral Authority – writes about yet another atrocity of the British socialized system. She quotes the London Daily Mail:

{…}Mrs O’Boyle, 64, had been receiving state-funded treatment – including chemotherapy – for colon cancer.

But when she took cetuximab, a drug which promised to extend her life but is not available on the NHS, her health trust made her start paying for her care.

{…}Mrs O’Boyle, an NHS occupational therapist, is believed to be the first person to die after being denied free care because of ‘co-payment’, where a patient tops up treatment by paying privately for extra drugs.

Got that? She paid for a drug on her own, which was outside what the state wanted to allow her to have.

No, that’s not out-of-context paranoia; that is, indeed, exactly the government’s policy:

Co-payment was blocked last year by Health Secretary Alan Johnson because he claimed it would create a two-tier Health Service.

Bureaucracy? Sure (emphasis mine)!

However, her consultant recommended-Cetuximab, which could extend her life. But it is available on the NHS only in Scotland, not in England and Wales.

Kathy:

Nice, huh? A lifetime of taxes to pay for a health care system that actually employed this woman and her husband, only to be betrayed in the end because she was willing to pay out of pocket for a few more months on this Earth. She wasn’t looking for a cure. She knew that was beyond her. She was simply looking for a palliative treatment which could extend her life a bit. Just a bit.

She was asked, “How badly do you want to live?” And she replied that she wanted just a few more months with her family. She paid the price for a drug that wasn’t available under universal healthcare, and she did it gladly, only to be smacked with a frozen mackerel in the end. Her actions would create a “two tier” health care system, and that, apparently, cannot be allowed, because that would mean she wasn’t receiving lowest common denominator health care, like everyone else does with the NHS, and the NHS cannot stand that. She thought she had the right to choose what her healthcare was worth to her, and that she wasn’t going to be penalized for her decision. One would suspect, with universal healthcare, that that would be a reasonable assumption. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

You could say the “good news” is that at least it’s just over there.

Well, this fall ain’t looking so good:

And yet this atrocious system is what some people would have us install here in the US. This is what some people want because their health insurance premiums are too high, and they would prefer not to have to pay them, but would rather let the government run things. It’s tidier in theory, but absolutely disgusting in practice.

Again, how badly do you want to live?

…

Governments with nationalized healthcare systems don’t want to give their citizens a choice. Patients are blackmailed, ultimately, into going with the lowest common denominator treatment if the the choice is between that or nothing at all because they don’t have spare millions on hand to pay for private care.

The political is the personal to Kathy – and many others in our country:

I know I harp on rather a lot about my cancer experience, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned what Dr. Academic told me one time, about what my treatment would have been if I lived in Italy. During the course of the staging controversy, we were told by my original oncologist that I would have to undergo three treatments of chemotherapy, instead of the six I’d been told originally. The reason for this was that a new study had come out, advocating three treatments for women with my stage of ovarian cancer, instead of six, because they hadn’t been able to find any added benefit, when contrasted with the risks, to the extra three treatments. However, when I was transferred over to Dr. Academic, he said, if I had to have treatment (which he wasn’t sure about at that point in time because of the evidence he had in front of him) I would have to have the dreaded six treatments, because he didn’t think the study the original oncologist had quoted was a very good study on the whole—and he would know, as he was on the board of the organization which published the study. He said that the group members had been polled and over ninety percent of them hadn’t thought it a good study, either—and weren’t going to use it as a treatment recommendation. He said that the reason for this disconnect was that to make the study’s results all the more powerful, they had let in to the statistical pool ovarian cancer diagnoses from places like Italy and Japan, for example, and Dr. Academic scoffed at their inclusion. He said their participation had ruined the study—because they hadn’t followed the protocol precisely, as in, the surgeries hadn’t been completed in the proscribed manner and as a result, had skewed the results. He said, after he’d dropped this bomb, that if I’d been living in Italy, with my cancer, all they would have done was the surgery. After all, that meant I would have a 70% survival rate for five years, which is nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you look at the statistics for things like pancreatic cancer, which has a 2% survival rate. But with a round of “precaution” chemo, just to make sure everything was cleaned out, my five year survival rate was boosted to 93%.

Which would you rather have?

Of course, when you’re talking nationalized healthcare (“Managed Care” run by the government), it’s the wrong question; “what’s it worth to the state authorities” is the first question.

Quite frankly, this is the difference between recurring and not—and if ovarian cancer recurs, well, that’s what the cause of death will be. It’s sad, but it’s true. So the goal, for women like me, is to make sure at the start that we have the best chances possible NOT to recur. That means a standardized protocol of precaution chemo. This is the standard of care here in the US. But not in Italy. How many Italian women, who were diagnosed with my stage of ovarian cancer, have recurred, and received, ultimately, a death sentence, because their government was too cheap to give them precautionary treatment in the first place?

And as we see with the O’Boyle case, the second is “does it interfere with government policy?”

Because, having worked in the industry, I can see the malthusian logic (if also the mechanistic inhumanity) behind “care management” decisions – but not the policy of forbidding people from paying for their own care, an act whose message is “not only is your life worth exactly what we say it is in terms of actual care, but it’s worth even less in terms of public policy”.

And that is inhuman.