Oliver Stone’s next project?

Oh, was there really any suspense at all?

Stoned, the famed director who brought us the Bio on fifo now plans on making another Bio on fifo’s pimp, Hugo Chavez. Read it here.

Yep all those “progressive” mother jones, huffington post, daily kos, readers can watch another movie starring their idol from caracas.

I’m waiting for Stone’s hagiography of Mao.

…so that we can load it up with the most useless projects we can devise…but we’ll call them “Infrastructure,” and taxpayers will look the other way.

From a couple posts ago…

“We understand that we’ve got to provide a blood infusion to the patient right now to make sure that the patient is stabilized. And that means that we can’t worry short term about the deficit. We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving,” he said.

Let’s dissect what Mr. Jimmy just said. We have to make sure to print and/or borrow so much money that the economy will have to get better?

Obama’s words rang out like a dog whistle for liberals everywhere.

And not surprisingly, the term “Infrastructure” gained a new, broader meaning.

On Monday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors went to Capitol Hill to ask for a handout, or as they put it: “We are reporting that in 427 cities of all sizes in all regions of the country, a total of 11,391 infrastructure projects (emphasis mine-JR) are ‘ready to go.’ These projects represent an infrastructure investment of $73,163,299,303 that would be capable of producing an estimated 847,641 jobs in 2009 and 2010.”

…it turns out $73 Billion is “capable” of producing 847,641 temporary jobs.

A wish list that is 11,391 projects strong! What vital infrastructure projects would cash-strapped taxpayers get for their $73 billion? Here’s a sampling:

– Hercules, Calif., wants $2.5 million in hard-earned taxpayer money for a “Waterfront Duck Pond Park,” and another $200,000 for a dog park.

– Euless, Texas, wants $15 million for the Midway Park Family Life Center, which, you’ll be glad to note, includes both a senior center and aquatic facility.

– Natchez, Miss., “needs” a new $9.5 million sports complex “which would allow our city to host major regional and national sports tournaments.”

– Henderson, Nev., is asking for $20 million to help “develop a 60 acre multi-use sports field complex.”

– Brigham City, Utah, wants $15 million for a sports park.

– Arlington, Texas, needs $4 million to expand its tennis center.

It’s a simple fact. Liberals can not be trusted with the nation’s checkbook. In a time of world financial crisis, their solution is to spend more taxpayer money on even more useless pork.

The government does have a role to play: stimulate the economy by creating incentives for growth, incentives that will be permanent, paid for by cutting government down to size. But liberals would entertain that notion. Liberals seek to justify and extend government largess, not reduce it to it’s rightful weight.

Instead of stimulating the economy, Barack Obama and his faithful liberal lunatics in Congress aspire to become the economy.

When I grew up, “Heroes” were people like…:

• Ernest Shackleton: In 1916, Shackleton was on an Antarctic expedition when his ship, HMS Endurance, was trapped, and then crushed, in pack ice.  There was no radio on the Endurance, so the crew of twenty-odd men were as on their own as could be, sort of like Gilligan’s Island, except stuck on an ice floe instead of a tropical paradise.  Shackelton managed to keep his entire crew alive on the ice (and then on a barren plug of rock in the South Atlantic, to which they rowed and sailed in open lifeboats for several days) for two years, living on penguins and seal meat.  And when after those two years the crew was fading fast, he led three other men in a canvas-covered lifeboat with a jury-rigged sail on an 800-mile voyage, across a South Atlantic that makes the Barents Sea in Dangerous Catch look like Lake Calhoun during a summer squall, using simple hand-held navigational instruments, to South Georgia Island, which with its tiny whaling station was the nearest civilization.  An error of so much as a single degree in navigating in the storm in the wet boat with the sextant, chronometer and map would have left the men hopelessly lost – and yet they found South Georgia.  And then climbed a mountain across the middle of the island to get help.  That’s a hero.
• Stanislaus Schmajzner:  A Jewish teenager who’d been arrested by the Nazis, Schmajzner was taken to the Sobibor extermination camp (like Auschwitz, only less famous).  There, he lied about having a trade, falsely claiming to be a cobbler, a lie that saved his life (the German guards at the camp needed a cobbler; Jews without needed trades went to the gas chambers).  The inmates, watching the slaughter around them (over a quarter of a million died at Sobibor) realized that the only hope for any of them to die with dignity, much less survive, was to rise up, try to kill their guards and, if they survived, make a run for the woods.  Schmajzner showed an ingenuity at camouflage and smuggling (among many other of the inmates in on the plot) that was of immense help to the Jews.  Finally, the Jews launched their rebellion, killing enough guards to make it through the gate (as the surviving guards machine-gunned them without mercy).  Perhaps a couple of hundred made it to the woods; maybe thirty, including Schmajzner, survived the war.  Schmajzher emigrated to Brazil, eventually, but spent the rest of his life educating people about the Holocaust.  That’s a hero.
• Donald Ruhl:  Donald Who?  Sadly, that’s right.  Donald Ruhl was a 21 year old Private First Class in the US Marines from Columbus, Montana.  He was a combat veteran – he’d fought in the brutal compaign on Bougainville, earlier in the war.  He landed with the rest of the 28th Marine Regiment (Fifth Marine Division) on Iwo Jima in the winter of 1945.  On the second day of the battle, on the approaches to Mount Suribachi…well, I’ll let his Congressional Medal of Honor citation do the talking:  “[Ruhl] crawled with his platoon guide to the top of a Japanese bunker to bring fire to bear on enemy troops located on the far side of the bunker, suddenly a hostile grenade landed between the two Marines. Instantly Private First Class Ruhl called a warning to his fellow Marine and dived on the deadly missile, absorbing the full impact of the shattering explosion in his own body and protecting all within range from the danger of flying fragments although he might easily have dropped from his position on the edge of the bunker to the ground below.”  That, too, is a hero.

Those, I believe, are heroes.

Grace Kelly – who helped make the old MNBlue such a disgrace that it had to merge with Joe Bodell’s bad-but-not-quite-as-disgraceful Minnesota Campaign Report to form the Minnesota “Progressive” Project blog, writes:

Around this holiday season, I like to say “Thank You” to people who serve unnoticed. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor party has many people who work so hard to create better communities and better government. This is mostly volunteer work with a few underpaid jobs.These are the everyday heroes!

That sure brings “meaning” to the term “everyday heroes”. 

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci – who, by Grace’s generous definition of “hero” certainly is one, except that he’s not a DFLer – grants these heroes what is, for heroes in our society (at least, the ones that don’t dash into burning buildings to save others, or volunteer to leave their families for a year to defend Code Pink from being rounded up and beheaded) the ultimate recognition; being immortalized in one of those Budweier “Real American Heroes” spots. 

Go read it.  It’s enough to make you want…

…to…

…sing:

DEEP THROATED NARRATOR: Shot In The Dark presents…Real DFL Heroes

OVERWROUGHT MULLETED SINGER: ♫ Real DFL heeeeroooooes ♫

NARRATOR: Today we salute YOU, Mr. Paid Leftyblogger!!

OMS: ♫ Mizz Anonymously-Paid Leftyblogger!!♫

NARRATOR: While the rest of the world goes on with their lives, you devote yourself to the eternal quest; finding an original way to try to photoshop Michele Bachmann…

OMS: ♫ “Ain’t that woman cra-zeee?”♫

NARRATOR: When questioned about your funding, you respond the way  your group always has; “Soros?  Who’s George Soros?”

OMS: ♫ Never heaaard of him!♫

NARRATOR: But at the end of the day, you’re the one who Twin Cities lefties can count on to break the monopoly of the conservative Star/Tribune, and tell the truth!

OMS: ♫ Pawlenty lied and people died! ♫

NARRATOR: So pop open a Corona, Mister Anonymously-Paid Leftyblogger! Because at the end of the day, when Media Matters says “Jump”, someone has to answer “Off What?”

OMS: ♫ Mister Anonymously-Paid Leftyblogger♫

NARRATOR: Shot In The Dark, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

[Hee Haw on] Saaaa-LUTE![/Hee Haw off].

Not a dry eye in the place, I tells ya.

Barack Obama is denying involvement in the Senate Seat Auction perpetrated by Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois.

…and I believe him. Sort of.

I also believe that Barack knows this sort of thing runs rampant in Chicago. I believe Barack Obama had to know this interchange would ensue despite his lack of direct involvement. This is in no way proof of Obama’s involvement. At best, a thin and dotted line can be drawn based on the Governor’s expectation that Barack Obama would become involved vis a vis his influence, if not financially. From the wiretaps…

The governor discusses with his staff the possibility of getting a high-paying position with an organization called “Change to Win,” connected to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He would take the seat after resigning as governor. A “three-way deal” is discussed. He would choose the person they believe is Mr. Obama’s preferred candidate — “Senate Candidate 1″ — and the President-elect, they said, would find a way to influence someone to give him the Change to Win post.

The governor knows that Mr. Obama wants “Senate Candidate 1″ for the seat but complains “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.” In another call, the governor asks advisers if they think Mr. Obama can get Warren Buffet and others to put up $10 to $15 million for a foundation he could head.

If this drama were playing out in Arizona with Senator McCain’s Senate Seat, the media would be going ballistic over this fiasco. In Illinois, this is de rigeur, as evidenced by the FBI initiating surveillance in October.

We may be in for a series of controversies with an Obama administration as clearly “That One” has suffered from an association problem his entire political career and he may have other debts to pay.

He learned well. Obama is a product of the most corrupt political system in America. He has heretofore exhibited little reluctance to associate with scum if it serves his greater ambitions. Having realized them, he may well regret what represents a clear pattern of poor decision-making. As Momma always said, be careful who you hang out with.

As it stands, the media honeymoon may be over for their lovechild Barack Obama as this stuff makes for great ratings. As more details emerge, we may find the President-Elect in hot water.

…hopefully not.

As much as the GOP would have savored an opportunity like this during the campaign, the economy needs our government’s full attention, even if they haven’t a clue how to fix it. We don’t need another Clintonistic national distraction.

Sarah Palin’s biggest drawback – and this was amply confirmed after months of reading the mainstream and left-media – was that she didn’t win over any of the movement liberals who were never going to vote for a Republican anyway.

Her greatest strength – and this is something that the mainstream media would have a hard time catching – was that she reminded an awful lot of people between the Adirondacks and the Sierra Madres of people like them.

And – just as with Ronald Reagan – talking about (or to) “people just like people between the Adirondacks and the Sierra Madres” in front of the media is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Camille Paglia – no conservative,she – on Dick Cavett’s drive-by sliming of Palin (emphasis added):

However, Cavett’s piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her “frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences.” He called her “the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High,” “one who seems to have no first language.” I will pass over Cavett’s sniggering dismissal of “soccer moms” as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

Although it’s certainly worth discussing, since it would be a real slap at the feminist movement, if movement feminists actually cared about their purported goals.

Onward:

I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?

Leaving slang aside, there are a bunch of major linguistic groups in this country. For Dick Cavett (or, satirically, Tina Fey) to make someone’s American-English dialect a “qualification” to serve is…

…like, wack, dude.

Two bits of news from talk radio that tie into a larger industry-wide trend.

Brain Maloney notes that Citadel Radio – one of the chains of broadcasters that has led the way in trying to jam left-leaning programming down the listeners throats, and largely failing (judging by their stock, which has gone from a solid hold to a penny stock in the past two years), is running the pointless Joe Scarborough and the execrable Mika Brezinski on their flagship station WABC in New York.

Maloney:

In fact, the decision to insert MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski into WABC’s midmorning slot is exactly how Citadel – ABC Radio got into this mess in the first place.Since the ill-fated merger of [Citadel and the old ABC Radio], Citadel’s upper management has struggled to grasp news-talk and what drives listenership. Instead of learning more about this highly-successful medium’s audience characteristics, CEO Farid Suleman has compelled stations to comply with a series of increasingly-bizarre programming edicts, of which this is merely the latest.

It’s nothing new, of course.  Since the aftermath of the 2004 elections, a lot of high-power consultants – the ones whom Rush Limbaugh caught by surprise – have been saying “conservative talk is dead”, and doing their best to prove it by killing off the stations they program.

This is manifested in ways small (the ongoing morphing of KSTP-AM into WCCO) and, in WABC’s case, big:

[Suleman’s] latest fiasco debuted yesterday, made possible by the recent removal of longtime WABC honcho Phil Boyce. One longtime major market radio programmer who monitored the broadcast told your Radio Equalizer that it “sounds like a train wreck on the air. Maybe this is the making of a new horror movie: When CEOs Program.” He further called it “just MSNBC on the radio.”

Without a skilled programming coach to guide Joe and Mika, both rank amateurs when it comes to talk radio, the program lacked focus. It skipped around haphazardly between topics and guests, which included MSNBC insiders such as David Gregory and Tom Brokaw.

Perhaps Suleman knows something we don’t.

Perhaps Harry Reid tipped him off that the Fairness Doctrine will not only be re-enacted immediately after inauguration, but enforced brutally, and it’s best to get ahead of the curve by filling your lineup with innocuous center-left talking heads who won’t offend the new regime and its mass of informants (who will be the engine driving the Doctrine).

In a related matter: while KSTP-AM has been floating aimlessly down this road for years, since the departure of Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis, programming innocuous hamsters like Willie and Jay, innocuous drive-time sportstalk with Matt Thomas, and mostly-apolitical social-curmudgeon with a thin veneer of “crusty reactionary” Joe Soucheray, who has been doing the same show to the same audience for (counts in his head) around fifteen years.

Now, “TBD” is replacing Mischke in the noon-2pm slot.  Yesterday, TBD was Jim Souhan, sports reporter at the Strib.  It was a bit of deja vu, going back to the days when KSTP seemed to think that any newspaper reporter could run a talk show; Nick Coleman, Catherine Lanpher, Jim Klobuchar and scads of other Strib and PiPress reporters and sportswriters paraded through the studio (including, to be fair, James Lileks).

Deja vu, also, in that it was just plain awful – like most newspaper (and TV) people are when they try talk radio.  It wandered aimlessly.  It skimmed past stories without giving anyone (in the forty-five or so minutes I wasted) a reason to pay it any attention.

It sounded, I thought, like pre-1987 talk radio.

I’m just gonna let that hang there for a while.

…I was shocked, shocked, to find this:

What is this world coming to?

Perhaps you’ve heard – Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is under arrest for, essentially, trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacant former Senate seat:

A 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich, a Democrat, was intercepted on court-authorized wiretaps during the last month conspiring to sell or trade Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife. At various times, in exchange for the Senate appointment, Blagojevich discussed obtaining:

A substantial salary for himself at a either a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions;

Placing his wife on paid corporate boards where he speculated she might garner as much as $150,000 a year;

Promises of campaign funds – including cash up front; and

A cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself.

Expect the leftyblogosphere to spend a lot of time updating the gentle reader on Mark Foley, Larry Craig and Duke Cunningham.

It’ll be an interesting question for the next one-to-four years; did Barack Obama escape Chicago Democrat politics, or did he bring ’em all to DC?

Since I was a boy I have had a fascination with cars. I made them with my Legos. We’d set four folding chairs in the yard and imagine we were on road trips. My neighborhood buddy and I sketched countless pictures of them. Always set in action, with smoking rear wheels, quarter panels repleat with flames and pipes and vents and the requisite jack job on the back with over sized rear wheels.

…and always decidedly American.

When I was a kid, imports were “Jap Crap.”

It didn’t matter that my Dad’s brand new company car, a then downsized 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was a gutless piece of crap with a V6 that was as smooth and as powerful as a coffee grinder and paint that came from the factory looking like it had already baked in the sun for a few years.

No one considered the Japanese playas yet.

My first car was a used 1973 Ford Pinto Squire Wagon, with yes, you guessed it, the woody decals and plastic “wood” trim down the flanks. $1,100; borrowed from the bank. What a piece of shit that car was…but it was mine all mine.

Lucky for me, girls didn’t seem to care if your car was cool. It was enough that you had one.

(more…)

It’s long been a truism of American government; when some government figure calls for a “war on…” something that is not an enemy nation that is trying to kill us – see “war on poverty”, “war on drugs”, “war on illiteracy”, and so on – it never works.  “War” is a pretty specific human condition, prone to – indeed, built on – profligate waste of money and, worse, blood, as well as the suspension of reason, liberty and often questioning to complete a mission which, at the end of the day, had better be worth all of those sacrifices.  Smart people don’t use it.
To paraphrase William Tecumseh Sherman, “War is hell on political rhetoric”.

Perhaps it’s time to start retiring another term of expedient political rhetoric with similar prejudice; the ‘czar’:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touted the notion of a “car czar” Tuesday to supervise an auto industry bailout, saying Big Three executives haven’t adapted well to changing conditions.

Does Pelosi really mean “czar” – an omnipotent  hereditary ruler  who had license not only to rule absolutely, but  the means to do so without any due process, often resorting to blood-curdling cruelty?

Well, we’re talking Pelosi so – sorta:

As United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger voiced fresh confidence that an accommodation will be reached on a $15 billion bailout bill, Pelosi told interviewers it’s more critical than ever that change in Detroit be forced.

As long as that “forced change” cleans up the auto industry the way twenty years of “drug czars” have eradicated drugs and reclaimed our inner cities from organized crime, it’s all OK, right?

Background:  I’ve always supported the Boy Scouts,especially in their long-running battle against politically-correct oppressors.  And I still do.

But this story, by Doug Hester at Northern Muckraker, will provoke some thought.

Doug – as he narrates in the post – was molested by his scoutmaster, years ago, in a case that got some local publicity.  Worse – the Boy Scouts of America reacted no better than the Catholic Church did to its own responses to its own sex abuse scandals.

Read the post for the details – it’s a long post, and a good one.

But Doug didn’t write me to publicize his past.  It’s the present he’s talking about.  He’s at the BSA’s headquarters in Texas today, protesting against the Boy Scouts for their response to his and other scandals:

Why am I going public with this? Three main reasons:

1. I no longer feel overwhelming shame or personal embarrassment about disclosing the circumstances of what has happened to me, as I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide;

2. The BSA’s heartless lack of responsibility and total absence of scruples has angered me, and

3. The incredibly brave telling of their own sexual abuse histories by such people as wide receiver Laveranues Coles of the New York Jets has inspired me to do what I can to help fight further such acts and their cover-ups, as well as seek redress for victims like myself who are already permanently scarred.

To that end, I would consider it a personal favor if the regular readers here would support my efforts by calling Mr. Mazzuca at 972-580-2000 and expressing disappointment with the way that victims of sexual abuse by leaders in his organization have been treated both in the past and quite recently, and urging him to make even a token attempt at offering these permanently damaged people a way to regain at least a small part of what was stolen from them, in an effort to make their lives a little easier and more complete.

Additionally, I would very much appreciate it if people would publicize my quest through word of mouth, email, blog posts or any other means available to them. Furthermore, if anyone has direct knowledge of any other victims of sexual abuse at the hands of the Boy Scouts, please direct them to me, and reassure them that I will treat their personal information with the utmost confidentiality.

Once again, interested people can also follow my efforts to reach a resolution to this issue at The Boy Scouts Don’t Care.

There are plenty of people who’ve had their lives immeasurably changed for the better by Scouting.  But while every group will draw its “bad apples”, larger organizations – not just the Scouts, but the police and other official bodies – need to learn how to handle this kind of thing.

And Doug’s story is a compelling one, and well worth a read.

NYT argues GM engineered its own downfall

Ten years before Chrysler introduced the world to minivans, General Motors had already developed its own version. Toyota sold the Prius at a loss for years before it became popular while GM leased a fleet of electric EV1s for three years before deciding it would never turn a profit. Honda and Toyota both sold small, efficient vehicles for decades even though their sales were relatively small and profits less than stellar. Meanwhile, GM spent billions to establish Saturn to compete with small import cars, only to let the brand go five years with no new products.

At least that’s the way this New York Times story looks at GM’s recent history.

They should know… 

Tribune (Almost) Toast, New York Times Next?

More startling over the past year has been the collapse of the New York Times (NYT). The New York Times Company has a $400 million debt payment due in five months, and management has not yet explained how it plans to meet this. The company is nearly out of cash, its operations are now burning cash, and its attempts to sell assets have, so far, been unsuccessful.

My my. What ever (sniff sniff) would we do without the New York Times?

I’m bummed to hear that T.D. “Tommy” Mischke has gotten whacked at KSTP-AM.

I’m not, of course, surprised.  More on that below.

David Brauer:

I called Mischke Saturday morning and he was gracious, diplomatic and cautious. “I want to be able to talk about it, but I need a little time before I can,” he said.

No doubt.  Mischke’s career with Hubbard has been a blessing for all of us who’ve loved his show over the years.  But in this day and age it was also a pretty unlikely gift, I think, to Mischke himself.  I have a hunch (an unqualified one, but I’m confident in it) that he knows it.

Brauer gets this part wrong, though.

He began as Don Vogel’s sidekick in 1992…

 Nope.  He started in 1986.  At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking by it.

———-

Back when I was screening calls for Don Vogel, we had a regular caller – “The Phantom Caller“.  He’d call in and give a different pseudonym, sometimes a couple of times a week, sometimes with a little gap in between.  I quickly figured out his voice; I’d cue Don that I thought the “Phantom Caller” was on the line; Don would go to him quickly; he was a huge fan.  Mischke may have known how many times he left Don in stitches and gasping with laughter on the air; he probably didn’t know how many times he incapacitated all of us in the control room as well.

Tom had some ingenious moments; I have a cassette of some of the great Phantom Caller bits from Vogel’s first go-around at KSTP, and it’s still hilarious stuff, each of them a finely-honed little gem of writing delivered with the kind of voices that Mischke has made famous for the past decade and a half.  The best moment of all?  One blustery, rainy fall day, we took the Vogel show on the road, to a display window in the old “Powers” store in downtown Minneapolis (it’s long gone, of course; it was on one of the blocks where Gaviidae Common sits today, if memory serves).  As I stood outside with a microphone looking for comments from the assembled multitude (which was gratifyingly large for that era of KSTP shows), a guy came dashing up Sixth Street in a yellow unitard with a red cape and a mask.  He plunged into the center of the crowd, saying not a word, but handing out little one-page, handwritten humorous blurbettes – each completely unique.  He handed ’em out until he ran out – maybe twenty seconds – and then ran off to a car that waited with (as I recall) a getaway driver down the street.  We spent the next segment having people read their own personalized Phantom Caller (and, I guess, Handbiller) bits live on the air. 

It was not long after this that I actually met “The Phantom Caller”.  Back during the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, talk radio was a financial gulag.  The listeners were older and not all that well-off; the audiences at KSTP were a fraction of what they’d be a few short years later after Limbaugh resuscitated the format.  As a result, I – like a lot of entry-level talk station employees – freelanced like a madman to make ends meet.  One of my many side gigs involved doing freelance writing for a slew of Saint Paul neighborhood papers (which, at that time, was a steadier source of income than trying to freelance for the dailies – if not quite as “glamorous”).  Two of them were “The Highland Villager” and “The Grand Avenue Gazette” – both edited by one Mike Mischke.

One day I drove down to their offices in Highland to turn in a story before I drove out to the station.  Mike looked my copy over as we traded some small talk about the Vogel show – and then looked up. 

“By the way, I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but my brother Tommy is the Phantom Caller”. 

It all clicked. 

I did, as a matter of fact, sit on that factoid until the last show of Don’s first hitch at KSTP, back in January of 1987. 

I listened to Mischke for much of his career at KSTP, although I regrettably couldn’t listen much after he moved to days, a few years ago. 

Tom’s more than a host, of course; he’s also a neighbor.  He coached my (our, actually) kids’ softball team a few years back; I run into him periodically at the neighborhood coffee shop or the grocery store.  He actually remembers me, which is kind of a kick, and not really surprising.

———-

Mischke’s show was a genuine original; all the right people liked him (Garrison Keillor had him on Prairie Home Companion as a musical guest a few years back – Tom is, of course, a very talented pianist and harmonical player).  But like a lot of genuine originals in any art form (and Mischke’s radio was a sort of art form – and I say this while stressing that radio as a whole is a craft), the art depended on having a patron to shield the artist from the spikes and deadfalls of the open market.

That someone, so rumor always had it, was Ginny Morris, one of the granddaughters of Stanley Hubbard the Elder, the founder of Hubbard Broadcasting (and one of the great pioneers of American broadcasting in his own right) and the person who really pulls the strings on the radio side at Hubbard.  Ms. Morris – so the rumors in the industry had it, at least when I was paying attention to them – kept Mischke on the payroll, and on the air, for many long years when there was no explicit market demand for a free-form, eccentric stream-of-consciousness show like his.  As talk radio morphed into what it is today – a venue for partisan anger, humor and information – Mischke was an outlier who, I think it’s fair to say, could only exist in the market with the aid of someone who really really wanted him to exist.

And like anyone with a cult following, his cult can’t imagine life without him.  David Brauer – himself a former KSTP-AM morning guy and someone for whom the radio market could not find a place – does what many of Mischke’s biggest (or at least most-prominent) fans do; sneer down their rhetorically-patrician noses at the hoi-polloi that just didn’t get it:

Expect a torrent of outrage; for 17 years, Mischke has been a genuine, funny, decent presence in a commercial-radio landscape filled with haters and bloviators.

If a conservative talk show host orders a pizza in the woods and David Brauer or Garrison Keillor or Nick Coleman isn’t there to hear it, is he still hateful?

Seriously – do Mischke’s more exceptionalistic fans seriously believe that Tom was a higher life form that suffered the fools with whom he was forced (by some unthinking, lumpen fate) to associate out of the goodness of his own sainted heart?

No.  Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura Schlesinger and all of the other “haters and bloviators” during the station’s golden age that, as it happens, coincided with Mischke’s career as a headliner, gave KSTP-AM the opportunity to give Mischke his opportunity.  “Hate and bloviation” (AKA “opinion that dissents from Garrison Keillor and David Brauer and Steve Perry and the rest of the Twin Cities’ closely-held media elite) allowed KSTP to run a show like Mischke’s – a show that earned the station a lot of high-end mindshare but never (so the rumor mill has it) got the numbers that would have allowed it to survive purely on the merits of its own market share.

Limbaugh and Jason Lewis carried Mischke – not the other way around.

In the past few years, KSTP-AM embarked (this is my opinion, but I’ll stand by it) on a suicide dive, following the opinions of some pretty dubious consultants who never much liked the conservative talk phenomenon; the shows that pulled KSTP-AM out of palookaville fifteen and twenty years ago, Limbaugh and Jason Lewis (along with Joe Soucheray, who still delivers the numbers although he’s been doing essentially the same show every day since Bob Dole was a candidate, not a pitchman) got away without much overt gnashing and wailing on KSTP’s part.  That, combined with the drastic drop in ad revenue tied to the economic slowdown, is making life pretty dismal (according to the rumor mill as well as the news of layoffs at Channel Five) over at Hubbard.

So what’s next for Tom?  Tom’s always audibly chafed at life in corporate America, even the indulgent, “Lord of the Flies” version of it that Hubbard seemed to have provided him for the past sixteen years; he’s always been able to not only string together a living, but do it with style. 

It’s happening all over the business.  All of radio is hitting an epic revenue trough.  There is almost no part of radio that isn’t being gutted by the combined onslaught of the IPod, satellite radio, the proliferation of media.

Except conservative talk, of course. 

For better or worse. 

———-

Me?  I hope his goodwill with Garrison Keillor pays off for him.  I think he’d be an excellent addition to some part of Keillor’s little empire (although Tom might find Keillor a much less understanding or tolerable boss than Ginny Morris); I think having TD alongside Tim Russell and Sue Scott would be genius.

[Conflict of interest note; Konrad hired me at KSTP in the mid-’90s; he was a very supportive boss. Tommy was a very supportive colleague.]

[Conflict of interest note of my own:  I also used to work with Konrad, at KDWB in the early ’90s.  In 1991, KSTP-AM interviewed for a new program director; Steve and I were the final two.  Steve got the job, partly because he’s a very talented guy who deserved a job, and partly because the consultant who was being paid to bend Ginny Morris’ ear was convinced that political talk was dead, and that Limbaugh was a success not because he was conservative, but because he was breezy and irreverent.  In his world, Jason Lewis and Sean Hannity and, for that matter, the Northern Alliance had no future – but Turi Rider was a creative genius.  I disagreed; Steve got the job.  Would KSTP-AM be better-off today had I gotten the gig?  Maybe, maybe not.

But at my third interview, whilst discussing the point with the consultant who, it was clear, was going to make the call, and feeling like I was losing the point, I figured I’d toss out a favor to an old friend.

“If you like funny radio…have you ever heard of a guy named Don Vogel?  I hear he just got fired in Milwaukee”. 

“I think I have is tape somewhere”, said the consultant.  “I haven’t really listened to it”. 

“Give it a listen”, I said. 

It wasn’t long after that that Vogel came back to KSTP-AM (along with not a few of the products from a number of my answers to the question “what would you do if you were the program director”).  And then they hired Mischke, first as the producer and then his sidekick.

(Don on left, Tom on right, and the listener who owns the photo in the middle).

Make what you will of it.  Just saying.

Anyway – best of luck, Tom.

BUN (my daughter) sitting looking on at monitor as I write:  “Oh, my God: in this picture…

…Obama looks just like a black Richard Nixon!”

Discuss.

Liberals are Lupset that Obama, mirabile dictu, is actually acting pragmatic now that he’s in office:

Even supporters make clear they’re on the lookout for backsliding. “There’s a concern that he keep his basic promises and people are going to watch him,” said Roger Hickey, a co-founder of Campaign for America’s Future.Obama insists he hasn’t abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left’s bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won’t enact the tax.

Obama’s pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he’s struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he’ll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama’s post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democrats even more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama’s says that on his first day in office he will begin to “design a plan for a responsible drawdown,” as he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. Obama has also filled his national security positions with supporters of the Iraq war: Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize force in Iraq, as his secretary of state; and President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, continuing in the same role.

Why, it’s almost as if Obama harnessed the immense frantic manic normally-aimless energy of the left to get into office…

…and then is tacking to the center because he has to be a grownup now.

But the kids are still angry:

“There don’t seem to be any liberals in Obama’s cabinet,” writes John Aravosis, the editor of Americablog.com. “What does all of this mean for Obama’s policies, and just as important, Obama Supreme Court announcements?”

“Actually, it reminds me a bit of the campaign, at least the beginning and the middle, when the Obama campaign didn’t seem particularly interested in reaching out to progressives,” Aravosis continues. “Once they realized that in order to win they needed to marshal everyone on their side, the reaching out began. I hope we’re not seeing a similar ‘we can do it alone’ approach in the transition team.”

It’s almost like some of ’em get it – without knowing it…:

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?”

Simple fact, Chris – one that I suspect Obama (and/or his staff) are smart enough to see:  the American people might express manic dissatisfaction with one Administration or another (including the sitting administration, which is actually center-left on spending), but at the end of the day the American people are center-right conservatives.

We just don’t always vote that way.

Yet.

Cy Thao – a state senator from Saint Paul – earned what (in a just world) would be a footnote in history two years ago, when he summed up the true meaning of socialist/fabian statist/Big-L “Liberal” government as concisely as anyone in history:

When you guys win, you get to keep your money.

When we win, we take your money

Cy Thao (DFL St. Paul), 2007

Seriously – this is Bartlett’s-grade stuff.

Yesterday, on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Tom Brokaw gave The Interview That Will Live In Infamy, on Meet The Press.

Money quote (among many – this one closely paraphrased from memory):

BROKAW: “Whoy nault teik thus ulpurtoonitty tull raise thul taxes un gaaaus to fower dullars uh gaullon, luyeek peopull wurr prupared tull pay?”

Literal Translation:  “Why not take this opportunity to raise the taxes on gas to $4/gallon, like people were prepared to pay”.

Ethical Translation, from Condo-Pink Limo-Liberal to English:  “Neither of us have paid for gas in years, and if you jacked the income tax to levels that even choked the Swedes to death I’ll still be netting seven figures; why not sit down at the great Drum Stool of Power in the White House and imitate Keith Moon?”

Unless it’s my pork!

Barack Obama on “Meet the Press:”

“What we need to do is examine: What are the projects where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck? How are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected?

“You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.”

Yeah! All Pork will now emanate from the White House.

“We are not going to simply write a bunch of checks and let them be spent without some very clear criteria as to how this money is going to benefit the overall economy and put people back to work. We’re not going to be making decisions on projects simply based on politics and — and lobbying.”

You know, like I did when I was a Senator.

“It makes no sense for us to shovel more money into the problem if you have not seen an auto industry that is committed to restructuring — restructuring that, frankly, should have been done 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” he told reporters.

“It makes no sense for us to shovel more money into the [economy] if you have not seen a [Federal Government] that is committed to restructuring — restructuring that, frankly, should have been done 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” he [should have] told reporters.

Despite the nation’s massive debt, Obama said he won’t be focusing on building a balanced budget at the start of his administration.

…or the middle of his administration.

…or the end of his administration.

“We understand that we’ve got to provide a blood infusion to the patient right now to make sure that the patient is stabilized. And that means that we can’t worry short term about the deficit. We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving,” he said.

Let’s dissect what Mr. Jimmy just said. We have to make sure to print and/or borrow so much money that the economy will have to get better?

“But the overall thrust is going to be that 95 percent of working families are going to get a tax cut and the wealthiest Americans … are going to give up a little bit more,” Obama said.

Over 30% of Americans already have a zero federal income tax liability. Ah, there’s the problem, Mr. Oprahma sir.

You can’t do math.

Since Barack Obama’s entry into the presidential horserace, and especially since the election, the number of legitimate reader comments winding up in my “moderation queue” – the place where my blog’s publishing software stacks up comments that have “questionable content” – has skyrocketed.

Now, if you include links in your comments, your comment automatically winds up in this blog’s moderation queue; many/most “spam” comments include links in an attempt to crank someone‘s traffic up.

But lately, there’ve been more link-less comments ending up in moderation – indeed, quite a few.

It has a lot to do with the fact that the economic philosophy that many on the right would accuse the President-Elect of espousing – socialism – has embedded within it the name of a rather common anti-impotence drug that is the subject of a hell of a lot of spam.  It’s one of the good-sized list of keywords that my blog filters just to make sure the comment is legit.
So if you plan to write comments about “socialists” and so on, either don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t get published until the next time I get online…

…or call it something like “fabian statism”.

Thanks.  That is all.

They say you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps, or in this case, appoints. President-Elect Barack Obama may acknowledge his lack of executive or business experience but will he recruit to reinforce these deficits?

Not as of yet.

Where are the advocates for businesspeople and investors in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration? So far, not one of his cabinet appointments, especially those dealing with the economy, has any significant business experience, and there is little to be seen on the résumés of the likely candidates for as-yet-unfilled positions.

Some might argue that the business background of key members of the Bush administration — from the president himself to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — did no good for the economy.

But going to the other extreme — totally ignoring experience in how the business world works — is unlikely to be good for the country as a whole or for investors. This is particularly true for the senior economic-policy team.

The Obama economic team so far is dominated by academics with no real-life experience, from his choices for Treasury secretary to chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to secretary of commerce.

If the business community was overrepresented in the Bush administration, it looks to be underrepresented in the incoming Obama administration.

As they say, stupid is as stupid does. If Barack Obama is to be judged by his selections thus far, the economy and the business community that represents its only hope for recovery will soon be in the hands of a cadre of theorists and academicians that won’t have a clue about what to do with it.

Worse yet, and I fear more likely, is that Obama’s economic team may actually think they know what to.

Obama’s campaign monologue displayed a remarkable dearth of any understanding of basic economics and a veiled disdain for business and capitalism. Joe the Plumber made headlines for this very fact. Obama’s most recent appeal, to create the largest welfare program in the history of America under the guise of “investment” and “job creation” is a patent example of liberal lunacy and may be the undoing of what is left of America’s economy.

You can’t creat jobs by taking more money from taxpayers.

Obama will apparently not be governing as close to the center as the media had been reporting, as recently as this past week.

A liberal only has one lever to pull and Obama plans on pulling it with all his might.

Infect everyone else.

The unions are largely to blame for a crisis that it appears will cost taxpayers between $15 and $25 Billion but not for the reason you think.

Even if a deal for a $15-billion to $17-billion preliminary bailout comes together this weekend to keep carmakers afloat into 2009, they will continue to be dogged by their most significant competitive disadvantage: a high-priced, unionized workforce.

And yet there is nothing inherently unsustainable about employing a high-priced, unionized workforce. The crisis of Detroit’s wage bill is entirely relative. Specifically, their labor costs far exceed the low-cost, nonunion American workforce at the U.S.-based, foreign-owned plants of competitors Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Subaru.

If the UAW really is to blame at all, then, it is because of the union’s utter failure to unionize any of the transplants. What has the UAW been doing all these years? Isn’t it the responsibility of any good union to protect union employers from competitive labor disadvantages by organizing wall to wall, throughout the industry? How could it have left these transplants unorganized? As is now clear, when the UAW exposed the Big Three to insurmountable competitive disadvantages, it cut its own throat.

The UAW is to blame for the Big Three Crisis. Not because they sucked the Big Three dry. Because they didn’t suck everyone dry.

Foreign automotive manufacturing transplants here in America produce some of the highest quality cars in the world, subject to the same safety and emissions regulations as the Big Three, and historically with some of the most satisfied workers in the industry. Honda has and Toyota will soon export product from here.

They’ve proven it can be done profitably; in America with Americans, and without the UAW.

What is being posited here is not a foreign concept (no pun intended). Force successful automakers to drag the dead weight of the failed strategies of the Big Three.

Mr. Obama calls it “spreading the wealth.”

I call it Socialism.

I’m not sure now who has the bigger ego. Oprah Winfrey or Barack Oprahma?

BEVERLY HILLS (AP) — Although Oprah Winfrey worked hard on Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign, she never considered going to work for the president-elect’s administration, the talk show host said Friday.

“I have a few full-time jobs already and a few full-time commitments, you know — contractual commitments that say I have to be where I am,” Winfrey told AP Television. “So, it never ever occurred to me, not even occurred to me.”

Winfrey said she would stay put, even if the president-elect came calling.

And he hasn’t.

The article didn’t once mention that Obama in fact had her in mind or that there was even speculation. There’s a lot of real news out there boys. Why don’t you get out there and get it.

Steve “Mister Furious” Perry is out at the Minnesoros “Independent”, says David Brauer: 

This is the other shoe dropping after MnIndy’s parent, Center for Independent Media, announced last month that the staff was being pared, freelance budget eliminated, and editing centralized in Washington, D.C.

“Independent” media with “centralized” editing!

CIM, a nonprofit, has been under fire locally for badgering its staff to, in the words of ex-freelancer Britt Robson, run “stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

That ran counter to Perry’s “pox-on-all-power” ethos honed to a knife’s edge during his many years as City Pages’ editor.

While Learned Foot is right – Perry did a lot more poxing the right than the left over the years, and there was a reason he worked for a left-leaning group and was in charge of an assembly of committed lefties that – I’ll give him that much. 

Under Perry, City Pages overtook the Twin Cities Reader as the top local alt-weekly; [although the Reader’s complete demise in 1991 may have helped that – Ed.] since his February hiring, MnIndy’s traffic has soared, as this chart demonstrates. It was definitely a team effort — reaching a high point during the Republican National Convention — but Perry hired several members of that team.

And the world thanks him for keeping Karl Bremer in the headlines.  (Whooee).

Update II: A Perry ex-colleague asks whether Perry’s Daily Mole will make a comeback. From the looks of the cute 404 message, not imminently.

With ad budgets drying up and (who are we kidding) the political need for lefty propaganda sites diminished (for the next year or so, anyway), I can’t imagine a worse time to try to re-establish something like the Daily Mold, at least if “earning a living” is an issue.

Does Perry have enough friends at the MNPost to make a go of it?  Would he take a gig there if offered?  What else is in the wings for Mister Furious?

Oh, well.  All the best, Perry. 

For those days when Swiftee and Anti-Strib are just too damn oblique and tactful, Cigar Mike at Babalu gets specific:

They don’t want to admit it. They like to say things are more dangerous here today than they were pre 9/11, but the fact is they are so full of caca that they will come up with some other inane argument (stolen from Noam Chomsky) to say something to the contrary. They’re tearing down their Obama altars since they are pissed that not enough “progressives” have been appointed to the cabinet, and will continue to blame Bush for everything including the festering sores on their bodies.

If only Mike would learn to open up and express himself.

Mike, of course, directs us to Peggy Noonan, who is – well, less obstreporous, but makes a similar point:

She notes:

This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.

To some extent both sides have to swim through weed-choked hypothetical ponds – Bush’s critics will be right, to some extent, in saying “you can’t know what might have happened!”.

But we know what did not happened – the thing that has happened to countries that tried to steer a “moderate” course on the issue – nations like India and Indonesia, who’ve been pummeled by terror strikes since 9/11. 

The thing that everyone sincerely believed would happen, inevitably, about this time seven years ago.

If Obama does as well, it’ll largely be due to Bush’s efforts, unpopular as they turned out to be (in 51% of the US, at least temporarily).

Berg: “What is a headline reading “Gregoire Offers Recount Advice to Franken“?”

Trebek:  “Correct!  And you control the board…”

Washington governor Gregoire – who won after perhaps the dirtiest recount in US history – tells Franken:

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) knows all about close races and recounts, and she recently offered her advice to the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nominee in the protracted Minnesota Senate race.

“I told him, don’t let [Republicans] market that something is wrong with the recount,” Gregoire said Tuesday, reflecting on her personal call to Franken. “Don’t let that happen. Recounts happen in America.”

Edited for brevity: “Declare yourself the victim first!”

…Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?

Barack Obama is already deflecting…this is going to be a long four years for everyone if our fears of his emptysuitedness manifest themselves.

All Americans should hope that Obama grows some, and fast. What America needs now is not the rhetoric and campaign promises that landed Obama in the White House on the backs of millions of people that think he is going to save them from their rightful obligations.

Otherwise, the office of President will be of no more value to America than the mock, ego-driven farce that is the “Office of the President-Elect.”

Democrats are growing impatient with President-elect Barack Obama’s refusal to inject himself in the major economic crises confronting the country. Obama has sidestepped some policy questions by saying there is only one president at a time. But the dodge is wearing thin.

He’s going to have to be more assertive than he’s been,” House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., told consumer advocates Thursday.

Frank, who has been dealing with both the bailout of the financial industry and a proposed rescue of Detroit automakers, said Obama needs to play a more significant role on economic issues.

Could there be someone less qualified than Beans ‘n Frank to deal with this crisis? Yes. Barack Obama. At least Barney Frank knows how it happened on account of his personal culpability and corruption. Not only was he at ground zero, he lit the fuse.

Obama did stress that a significant component of the fund should be used to reduce the number of foreclosures. But he did not specify a particular remedy.

Not so fast, Mr. Jimmy. You might want to consider the effect of that on your soon-to-be-plummeting approval rating.

Many Americans are outraged that their money is being spent to rescue irresponsible mortgage borrowers. Still, that probably won’t stop government officials.

There are a lot of hard-working, responsible people out there, many of whom voted for you Mr. Oprah, who are dead set against bailing out those that took imprudent risk at the expense of those that saved and lived below their means.

Insert leadership here.

What America needs is a President that tells America the truth. Government can no longer cover your six if you make bad decisions. It can’t and it won’t. It’s the only intelligent thing Jesse Ventura ever said.

Based on some of BHO’s cabinet choices, I am guardedly optimistic that he in fact is weighing his options and that he truly wants to do what is best for America, within the limiting realm of his ideology; but the forces of opposition, Frank, Reid, Pelosi et al, are very strong.

And soon, may not even be on his team (which may be a good thing).

“That One” spent two years telling us “Yes We Can.” Now it’s time to tell us “No We Can’t.”