Our current President’s ongoing tone-deafness is going to cause him some problems.

First it was insulting all of us gun-clinging Jesus freaks in the heartland in front of a bunch of poshes at a San Francisco fund-raiser.

Then, it was throwing hautesy tautesy parties at the White House as he warned the rest of us to expect soup lines in our near future (in its own way, worse than Carter’s “malaise” moment).

But now?  He’s cheesing off the military.

Careful, Barry O.

(I should check to see if that “hundred days of poems” are starting to sound depressed).

For reasons too complicated yet mundane to go into, I wound up getting about 90 minutes worth of sleep on Wednesday night.

I checked the temperature as I waited for the bus; 31 degrees.

My plan: to throw my bike on the bus, and take a leisurely ride home in the afternoon, when it was (much) warmer.

And then the bus – running, for whatever reason, a minute or two early – went sailing past.

I did the math in my fatigue-fogged head; wait half an hour for the next bus and be fifteen minutes late for work, or jump on my bike and go for it, taking the short, but less-scenic and more-dangerous route (via Frogtown rather than Summit Avenue) to work, and be there before the next bus even got to my stop.

So I jumped on and started riding.

Now, remember – I said I was “fatigue-fogged”.

While it wasn’t windy, biking creates its own breeze, ergo its own wind chill.  And that was fine; I was wearing a sweatshirt and a ocuple of T’s.

But no gloves.

By the time I got a mile, to about Victoria, I was feeling it; I’d forgotten how badly hands can hurt when they’re cold.  I thought, alternately, about waiting for the bus (which was still close to half an hour away) or turning around and heading home, either to get gloves or to wait for the bus.

But I kept pedaling as I pondered, stopping at the odd stop sign to flex and rub my hands, before I resumed the pothole slalom that is Minnehaha Avenue through Frogtown.

End result: I made it, generally fine but with hands curled into frozen claws.  A long, hot shower in the office locker room cured most ills, though.

And so it’s time to get ready for another go-around!

…nd are concerned about where your tax money goes (and that is, or should be, a non-partisan thing), then this is the time of the year you should be paying attention.

In Saint Paul, we have a de facto fifth layer of government, the “Community Councils”.  Each of Saint Pauls’ 17 historic neighborhoods has one.  They’re elected from “the community”; we’ll get back to that.

Here’s how they matter; the city’s planning and zoning gets carried out through these councils; they work with the Met Council to help develop the neighborhood components of the Council’s Regional Plan; they spend the city’s community development money.

And oy, what they spend it on.  Here in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood, they’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on “traffic calming”; rebuilding curbs to constrict traffic, building round abouts, and putting up quirky, “Sprockets”-caliber bits of art designed to confuse people into driving more slowly.  Dumb though that is, it’s merely a waste of money.  The Coalition’s other plan to “calm” traffic is, as part of the Central Corridor light rail plan, to cut University Avenue down to one lane of traffic in either direction along the light rail route – sort of like Minneapolis did along Fifth Street by Government Center.  This will make the booming (but unfashionably “big box”) Midway Center a nightmare to get into and out of; even worse, it’ll gut and flense the miles of small, largely Asian and afro-American businesses that’ve eked out a place along Uni over the past two decades.  The various community councils have long had a vision; to turn every unfashionably declasse district into a pedestrian-friendly faux French Quarter with Thai restaurants and (organic, free-trade) coffee shops and book stores where beret-clad Macalester-spawned Current-listening hipsters take the train or bus to shop, wander, and muse.

Also to make driving impossible.

At any rate, here’s where you come in.

Elections for many of Saint Pauls’ community councils are coming up in May.  If I recall correctly, most of the councils will have some open seats.

And it’s important that people of conscience – responsible, tax-paying, hard-working people who respect property rights and free enterprise and who don’t want to use petty political power to change society in their own stunted image – run for these boards.

Part of it’s for today; the councils’ current plans are bone-chillingly stupid.  And the means by which they secure these plans would make Rod Blagojevich blanche.  Some of the councils are mere potemkin shell organizations for small cliques of community organizers and activists who do all the actual decision making.  Others might as well be DFL front organizations, as the small group of Republican activists who won the Highland Park community council found in 2006 (along with all the incompetence they uncovered).

Part of it is for tomorrow.  These councils serve as training grounds and grooming schools for the DFL activists and future politicians that are choking the life from this city.

The hard part; community councils are pretty boring.

Boring, but important.  The worst possible combination for ADD sufferers like me.

But it’s vital that people of conscience – not exclusively a GOP trait – get out and run for these councils.  Just as important, it’s important that every person who favors responsible government (or pseudo-government) gets out and votes in these elections, and votes for the right people.  These elections are pretty sparsely attended; a couple of votes in every zone (most councils are divided into zones, each zone electing a board member) is more than enough to tip theelection.

There’ll be more on this later.

…without a teleprompter.

That is all.

You know who you are.

I’m not a Michele Bachmann “apologist”.

I’m a “supporter”. 

There’s a difference.

That is all.

This bit of audio just came through to the NARN Newsroom:

BIDEN: “I love Saint Cloud State graduates!  Every time I walk into a convenience store in Delaware, I see a few of them buying Slim Jims and Red Bull, talking about how much they threw up after drinking last weekend!”

Really!  I’m being truthy!

…to have Johnny Roosh on the staff for many reasons…

…not the least of which is “on days like today, this blog’ll have some output”.

Personal, family and work-related stuff going on today; posting will be light until, likely, the afternoon.

A Japanese fleet attacks Pearl Harbor, sinking much of the US battle fleet.  They also seize the Philippines and much of the East Indies.

But they miss the aircraft carriers – which lead a devastating riposte at the head of a US response fuelled by America’s unparalleled economic and idustrial might that drives the Japanese back to home waters and, eventually, vanquish them.

History?

Well, sure.  But it’s also the plot of a work of “fiction” – the 1925 cult classic The Great Pacific War by Hector Bywater.  The book lacked some of the technological changes that affected the war that followed half a generation later – but it got the broad strokes right.

It was, of course, a work of fiction, albeit prescient.  On the other side of the world, it was a work of non-fiction, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, released about the same time, that had people around the world going “If only we’d paid attention” – long after it was too late to do anything about it.

You have the opportunity to do what the readers of The Great Pacific War and Mein Kampf couldn’t, this Saturday on the Northern Alliance Radio Network; see into our future and, maybe, given a certain amount of wisdom and a lot of energy, change things.

Ed and I will be talking with Ezra Levant about his battle with the Alberta “Human Rights Commission“, and its’ portents for Western civilization.

And unlike so much punditry about the collapse of the civilization we so treasure, it’s coming to you while you can still do something about it.

Tune in.  Listen.  Be outraged.

Let that outrage turn into something else.

I gotta confess; I had never watched a full episode of The Colbert Report, until last night.

And that’ll be the last.

Good Lord, what a waste of time.

Note to everyone involved; you don’t need to parody conservative talking heads.  That’s what Glenn Beck is for.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name

A month ago I wrote that Obama was having trouble filling his commerce post: I Will Not Go Down With This Ship

It turns out Treasury is having the same issue – there aren’t enough democrats desperate enough to have That Won on their resume.

The fact that Treasury is having trouble staffing its upper 14 appointments below Geithner means that people in the know about Obama’s economic policies are running scared. They don’t want to get involved, even if they have hungered after those plum jobs their whole lives. That tells you what the savviest Democrats are thinking.

Why? Policy.

Even the Europeans are resisting hyper-deficits, because Europe always has that memory of the 1920s and 30s: hyperinflation, unemployment, crushing poverty and despair, followed by Hitler and Stalin. They are refusing to follow Obama down that road. If the dollar crashes, they don’t want the euro to go down with it.

When the socialistic economies of Europe think Obama’s policies are too far left…

Washington Democrats are having panic attacks. They know you can’t turn the country on a dime; either you end up shafting the economy and lose the House in 2010, or you get slapped in the face by Putin or Ahmadinejad and also lose the House in 2010.

The American people still haven’t quite figured this guy out, probably because they can’t believe their eyes and ears.

What – we didn’t warn you about his far-left associations? You didn’t get the Che Guevara memo? You didn’t take an inventory of the few times he voted as Senator?

The saner Left is beginning to worry out loud. Yes, Nancy the Eternally Youthful really believes she is “saving the Planet,” but her House members are seeing their numbers tanking, and they have to start running this year to get re-elected next year.  Harry Reid is one of the nastiest characters in DC, but he is a survivor. Somebody is going to hit the brakes, and then an almighty struggle will break out on the Left.

The nations largest economy and sole superpower is now a lady in waiting for her savior – the saner left.

Harry Reid?

This might be a good time to panic.

…or at least sweep out a corner in the basement and start looking for sales on canned goods.

The Worst President Ever visits the White House to brief the National Security Adviser of the future Worst President Ever.

Tomorrow, a Mr. Madoff with be visiting the White House to advise the Treasury Secretary.

Stay tuned!

…but wouldn’t want to be compared to one, and certainly not by a woman (it sort of refers to one’s manhood, and not favorably, if you know what I mean).

Barack Obama even needs a teleprompter to get mad.

…but he always looks good doing it.

As he watches the fury of ordinary Americans bubble up at those who continue to plunder our economy, he should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”

At the White House on Monday, the president read reporters some tough talk from the teleprompter about the chuckleheads at A.I.G., accusing them of “recklessness and greed.”

But it was his own boiled carrots who acted shocked at bonuses that they should have known were coming, and should have dismantled before handing A.I.G. another $30 billion two weeks ago.

I don’t have a ton of time today to put my usual snark on this…but it’s a pretty good take on the veneer that is our President and his Cabinet, who have apparently been caught by this whole AIG debacle with their pants down (pun intended).

For the first time since last fall’s election, Democrats and the Obama administration are backpedaling furiously on an issue easily understood by financially strapped taxpayers: $165 million in bonuses paid out at bailed-out AIG.

Gone are the days when they could merely bludgeon the Bush administration and promise to seek bipartisan solutions to the nation’s economic problems.

Now, in control of the White House and Congress, they are struggling to come up with an explanation for what no one in either party seems moved to defend.

But is it all Obama’s fault? Of course not.

While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, [Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.)] added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. The provision, now called “the Dodd Amendment” by the Obama Administration provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” — which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.

And of course no one knew AIG was going to pay out millions in bonuses until they paid out millions in bonuses, right?

For months, the Obama administration and members of Congress have known that insurance giant AIG was getting ready to pay huge bonuses while living off government bailouts. It wasn’t until the money was flowing and news was trickling out to the public that official Washington rose up in anger and vowed to yank the money back.

Boiled Carrots. Yum.

I can’t remember the last time I picked up the City Pages.

The alma mater of the likes of James Lileks and Steve “Mister Furious” Perry, the Pages  – which was sort of a wannabe Village Voice even before the VV’s parent company bought the freebie ‘zine out some decade and a half ago – were once a formidable journalistic operation.  Under Perry, the paper did a lot good, solid reporting; they especially shone at doing the long-form, in depth reporting that the dailies had been de-emphasizing even before the industry’s current woes.

But lately?  Not only do I not pick up the paper from the bins on the street, I don’t even check the website anymore.  Indeed, I don’t even go to the CP’s RSS feed.

Well, OK.  Every week or two I’ll skim the RSS feeds; it’s the lowest possible impact on my day.

And I usually regret it.

Last week, Sun Country Airlines – the Twin Cities-based former charter line which has been trying for a little over a decade to make a go of daily service – announced that they were making changes to their service, including some new destinations.

Bear in mind, Sun Country’s had a bunch of strikes against them; they branched out from the lucrative charter business just in time for the airline industry to go through its huge spasm of contraction.  They had the same fuel price problems, and “nobody’s travelling due to the recession” problems that every other airline’s had.

And then they got bought by alleged ponzi artist Tom Petters.

To their credit, Sun Country had enough business savvy to survive the collapse of Petters’ empire.  And last week, in an attempt to emerge from the situation, they announced some new destinations to try to keep the financial pipeline flowing.

Emily Kaiser takes up the story from her – words fail – uniquely trival perspective:

We were sitting on the edge of our seats today when Sun Country airlines said they would be announcing a new destination from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. We had our eyes on warm weather wonders like Mexico, Puerto Rico, more California.

[Because when Sun Country is figuring out how to survive and keep its hundreds of employees working, “what can we do to attract a bunch of wage serfs from broke “alternative” newspapers” was the first question they answered.  But we digress. – Ed.]

They even had a big announcement out at the Mall of America like this was going to blow all of us away.

Drum roll please…. They are now flying to Branson, Mo.

Wait, what?

Wait what, what?

They’re going to start flying to where people with actual money are going, and where not every airline currently flies.  Because while

More from the FOX:

    

Branson is the 27th city served by Sun Country out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul hub.

The airline will fly to the popular tourist destination Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays and will feature a $79 one-way* introductory fare. Sun Country offers the only non-stop service to Branson out of the Twin Cities.

The Star Tribune tried to look on the bright side. It’s a good wholesome place for losers:

“Losers” with money to spend are something that smart businesspeople call “Winners”. 

For years, Branson has been a popular tourist attraction, with a wholesome lineup of musical acts as a counterbalance to the excesses of Las Vegas.

Among Branson’s offerings of late: ’50s at the Hop, the Oak Ridge Boys and Sunday Gospel Jubilee. “The addition of Branson is a positive step for Sun Country’s future,” said Stan Gadek, chairman and CEO of Sun Country.

We beg to differ. Boring and tarnishing the airline’s image as a carrier that actually brings you to fun and warm places.

Er, Emily?  They still fly to Ixtapa, Cancun, St. Maarten, South Padre, Cozumel, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta…

…all the places they’ve always taken the bobbleheaded children of excessive privilege to marinade their brains in overpriced Sex On The Beaches and ponder why the grownup world is so mean.

I’ve taken my shots at Dems’ “Get Out The Vote” efforts, in that they tend to be not so much educational (as have been the GOP GOTV efforts I’ve seen) as logistical.  Democrat GOTV efforts were wonderfully summed up by the delightfully dissociative Jennifer Vogel in her classic article, “F*CK THE SUBURBS”, in some dismal little Seattle freebiezine a few years ago:

A poll volunteer approached and embarked upon a lengthy explanation. The African woman interrupted. “Kerry,” she said loudly. “I want Kerry.” That was that.

To sum it up: teach a [fill in the label of choice] the name you want filled in, tell them what that name is going to give them, and send them to the polls.

Which is fine, where “fine” equals “legal”. But is it what our democracy is supposed to be striving for?

The franchise is a vital part of democracy – but not as an end unto itself.  It’s supposed to be the first step in a process that leads to good, publicly-minded people of whatever party being sent downtown, or to Saint Paul, or to Washington.

And if the only thing people know about the process is a name and a list of programs, then that’s what the people are going to send off to run your city, county, state or nation.

So while I proposed yesterday to have an all-day national three-for-one happy hour on election day, to keep idiots away from the polls, a little consideration (and spending Saint Patricks Day in downtown Saint Paul, among the raving-drunk pseudo-Oirish reminding me how awful and ugly a drunk populace is), leads me to a better idea.

It’s time to reinstitute the poll test.

In order to vote, everyone should get at least a “D”on a test to make sure they’ve been paying attention to their city, state, and world. The test is non-partisan, gender/race/culture blind, and only makes sure people are actually paying attention to what their government is and how it’s supposed to work.

Here’s an example:

1. Who is your city’s current mayor?  [If the mayor’s race is on the ballot (or any races below, for that matter) it’d be omitted]
2. Does your city have a council, a commission, or a manager?
3. What ward [precinct, city council district, whatever] do you live in?
4. Who is your current city council representative?
5. What county do you live in?
6. Who is your current County Commission representative?
7. Who is the Governor?
8. Who is your State Representative?
9. Who is your State Senator?
10. Name at least four of your state’s constitutional offices and/or officers? (Hint:  Governor [fill in the governor] is one of them).
11. What are the three branches of our State and Federal government?
12. What Congressional District do you live in?
13. Who is your current congressional representative?
14. How many Senators does your state send to the United States Senate?  If guessing, get as close as possible to the actual number without going over.
15. Name as many of your state’s current US Senators as possible.
16. Name at least four cabinet departments or members:  (hint: Secretary of State is one example).
17. Who is the current President of the United States?

Now, should anyone who can’t get at least 60% of these questions correct even be voting?

No, I think that’s the kind of thing a citizen should be able to know to take part in our democracy.  I mean, why should people vote for the control off offices and institutions they don’t understand?

Liberals will respond “That’s Racist!”  Liberals also say “that’s racist” when their pad thai comes to them undercooked or when they get a parking ticket.  What they’re really saying is that “our factory schools – the ones that kids outside the ruling class go to, the ones we want to mandate everyone go to, especially all those minorities, don’t teach the basic of citizenship” – in other words, who’s the racist, here?

…in the way it reported politics, you’d see congressmen like Daniel Inouye…:

“From the standpoint of the Congress, there’s only so much that we can absorb and do at one time,” Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Appropriations Committee

…or Evan Bayh…:

“Everybody has to bring something to the table,” said Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a leader of a 15-member caucus of conservative and centrist Democrats. “That doesn’t mean that you have to postpone your aspirations forever. But until we’re through this crisis and growth has resumed, there’s going to be some belt-tightening that’s necessary.”

…or Jim “Sgt. Friday” Webb…:

“You are going to see some [slowing of Obama’s agenda] happen naturally,” said Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), explaining that some of Obama’s agenda — such as climate change — may fall by the wayside because there’s not enough support for it, not because it’s too much to tackle.“This isn’t going to be an automatic ‘yes’ vote for a lot of people,” Webb added.

…getting the sort of saturation coverage on the Sunday morning methane-fests that Chuck Hagel (and for that matter, John McCain, before he became a threat) got.

Because, y’know, they’re the responsible Democrats.  The ones disregarding the party line to reach across the aisle and get things done, whatever the cost!

Let me know when you see that saturation coverage, k?

Took the steed out for a spin last night.

Dayum, that felt good.

A little cold to ride it in to work this morning – I don’t quite trust the roads yet – but tomorrow morning is a definite possibility.

…but not to That One That Won, comrade.

The captain of the USS Jimmy Carter II is painting opponents to his plans to Socialize America with a broad brush as if Republicans are the villains in pointing out the flaws in his plans for the bankrupting of America Federal budget.

President Barack Obama said he won’t scale back his plans to revamp the health-care and education systems in his proposed $3.6 trillion budget and challenged Republican critics to do more than “just say no.”

They should say “Thank You.”

Thank you Mr. Obama for demonstrating to America so quickly and efficiently why we don’t usually have Democrats in power during an economic crisis and thereby restoring America’s short memory.

Thank you Mr. Obama for making George W. Bush look like a fiscal conservative by comparison.

Thank you for making me forget about my athlete’s foot fungus by starting my hair on fire.

Obama, gearing up for a fight in Congress over his fiscal 2010 spending blueprint, met privately with the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees before issuing a public rebuttal to Republicans who have criticized his plan as including too much spending at a time when deficits are ballooning.

Silly Republicans. You picked a fine time to grow some cojones. Quit worrying so much about fiscal responsibility and living within our means and focusing on the crisis at hand rather than thirty years of pent-up liberalism.

“‘Just say no’ is the right advice to give your teenagers about drugs. It is not an acceptable response” to economic policies “proposed by the other party,”

…unless their timing is monumentally assenine and most Americans are against them.

“The American people sent us here to get things done and at this moment of enormous challenge, they are watching and waiting for us to lead,” he said.

…and they will be waiting a long time it appears. Picking up where the last liberal majority left off is not leadership – especially given the current environment.

I think our junior President might be surprised to find that those “things to get done” didn’t include a much larger government, policies that amount to kicking the can further down the path and a crippling national debt.

So stay out of the way Republicans. It’s Barack and his posse’s turn to screw our kids.

It’s close.  So close I can almost taste the road salt splashing in my face.

Bike commuting season seems to be darn near here.

I didn’t start until mid-June in 2007, because that was the earliest I could get my bike working.

Last year, I was raring to go on April 1 – but the weather, you may recall, didn’t start cooperating until the third week in April; we even had a snowstorm in the second week of the month.  Still and all, it was a great biking season for me; from April 20-somethingth until early October.  It felt great.

This year?  The ice is mostly off the roads; the daytime highs are in the forties and fifties.  The morning lows are still a tad chilly, and it looks like we’re in for a four-or-five day rainy stretch starting this weekend…

…but I don’t know that I care.  The bike’s in the shop for a tune-up as we speak; with any luck, I’ll tee up this year’s biking season Thursday morning.  And if the weather doesn’t totally close in, the weekend looks like a gorgeous one to kick off with a ride out to The Patriot, one of my favorite weekend diversions last year.

Just saying – I’m pretty excited about this.

Spend a hundred hears arguing about the stupid hamfistedness of most anti-trust legislation?

Crickets.

But let an institution that supports liberal politicans feel the pain, and suddenly every liberal demigogue is a hardened free marketeer:

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, released by Pelosi’s office late Monday, the San Francisco Democrat asked the department to weigh the public benefit of saving The Chronicle and other papers from closure against the agency’s antitrust mission to guard against anti-competitive behavior.”We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect,” Pelosi wrote.

Deep down inside, I think this statement is hilarious; the American people “expect” that newspapers will buff Nancy Pelosi’s toenails for her.  It’s one of the reasons they’re voting with their feet; it’s one of the reasons conservative talk radio is thriving as newspapers are dying.

And I wonder if some congressional bureaucrat was going for laughs when he or she named this subcommittee (emphasis added):

The speaker said the issue of newspapers’ survival and antitrust law will be the subject of a hearing soon before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, chaired by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga.

Some yuks just come to you.

Why do I suspect the committee’s recommendation will be “while we’re trying to clamp socialism’s lumpen gray veil down over the the rest of the country, we need to make sure reflexively liberal-leaning institutions get the blessings of free enterprise”.

If you have health insurance, you know about Coordination of Benefits; if you have a family and have a spouse or partner who might have health insurance, your plan wants to get their plan to chip in for part of the costs.  It’s understandable…

…when treating run of the mill illnesses.

The Administration wants to extend this idea to veterans; he wants the Veterans Administration to coordinate benefits with veterans’ civilian healthcare providers to help pay for care of vets’ service-related conditions.

The commander of the American Legion is not amused:

It became apparent during our discussion today that the President intends to move forward with this unreasonable plan,” said Commander David K. Rehbein of The American Legion. “He says he is looking to generate $540-million by this method, but refused to hear arguments about the moral and government-avowed obligations that would be compromised by it.”The Commander, clearly angered as he emerged from the session said, “This reimbursement plan would be inconsistent with the mandate ‘ to care for him who shall have borne the battle’ given that the United States government sent members of the armed forces into harm’s way, and not private insurance companies. I say again that The American Legion does not and will not support any plan that seeks to bill a veteran for treatment of a service connected disability at the very agency that was created to treat the unique need of America’s veterans!”

I’m a tax hawk, who is all about finding ways to cut government spending and privatize government functions.

I also believe in restricting government to the places and functions that it’s supposed to be dealing with.

One of those – one of the few, really – is defense.

And so while I’ve mercilessly mocked those stupid “happy to pay for a better Minnesota” signs, and am very penurious about taxes as matter of principle, taxes related to defense, and to taking care of those who volunteer to defend this country (especially their service-related injuries) are among the very few I’ll pay without a whole lot of pushback.

It’s a stupid plan.

And I’m trying to picture what would have happened if a Republican administration would have suggested it.  Thousands of addlepated leftybloggers would launch “Why Does The President Hate Veterans” posts; Jon Stewart would snark and smirk; Anderson Cooper would furrow his brow and scowl.

But now that it’s The One?

Writing in a blog at the Strib about the Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston breakup, DJ Leary is aghast at the depravity of his fellow citizens – or at least that segment that leaves comments with Strib stories- saying it  dishonors our democracy:

The reaction from anonymous online newspaper readers, including startribune.com and others throughout the country, and in thousands of public comments everywhere on the internet, has been loathsome. These comments demand that I seek a word that will convey “toxic” in stronger terms to communicate my outrage, disappointment, and disillusionment. How about “pernicious,” or perhaps “septic,” or better yet “venomous.”

Yeah, Mr. Leary, people are stupid – and for whatever reason, it seems the Strib’s comment section is worse than most, competing with the comments cesspools at Democrat Underground and Daily Kos; people almost dumb enough to write for Minnesota Progressive Project.

I am truly aghast to see how we have dishonored ourselves as a society when it comes to the public discourse between people of contradictory opinions on politics and public issues.

I’m not one of those people who whinges about how “politics has never been dirtier than it is today”; that’s absurd (and usually brought up to try to squeedge us into parting with more free speech rights).

And yet I don’t recall in my lifetime a time when the rules of common decency were so quickly suspended, not only because people disagreed with someone’s politics, but because someone disagreed with someone’s parents’ politics.

I’ve never cautioned anybody about holding anything back in his or her communication with a person actually engaged in the public arena. After all, when you put yourself out there, you knowingly wear a huge sign labeling yourself as a target for public abuse. It comes with the territory and I’ve always thought of it as one of the strengths of our democracy. If people like me feel our opinions are so god-awfully important that we’re willing to force them on the general public by publishing and circulating them, then we have no right to expect a social barrier that would silence opposing opinion.

Leary’s right about that, of course – for
The debate about who’s public and who is private is a byzantine exercise, of course – but the more accessible debate is over the depravity of our public society.  Reading the comment section at the Strib or too many leftyblogs (and the Freep, sure) is like watching Idiocracy (a great movie, until that moment when you almost wonder if it’s a documentary rather than a comedy).  It’s funny – until you realize that these peoples’ votes count the same as yours do.

And you start to realize why “democracy” in the founding fathers’ time was a little more selective than it is today.  The founding fathers believed that democracy was too fragile and precious a thing to be trusted to the eighteenth-century anscestors of monster-truck rally fans, fight club members and contestants on “Shot At Love With Tila Tequila”.

And while the standards of the day excluded a lot of the wrong people – blacks, non-landowners and, Shakespeare’s Sister notwithstanding, women – for the wrong reasons, when you look at things like the Strib’s comment section, it’s tempting to wonder if some sort of test isn’t in order to be allowed to vote.

What kind of test, though?  Race, gender and property are out, and should be.  Even “intelligence” is a stupid measure; plenty of people with less-than-spectacular IQ scores are perfectly fine human beings who opinions deserve to be counted.

No, the real questions are a) how do you test for moral depravity, and b) while it’s wrong and illegal to actively exclude people from voting, how does society subtly convince them not to take part in our democracy?

I think instituting a national, three for one happy hour during polling hours on election day would actually serve a patriotic duty to democracy.  Let the bars toss in open ultimate fighting, free lap dances, wet t-shirt mud wrestling, and live talk-back to the Ed Schultz show, and you’d have a perfectly capable filter, not to keep the depraved out of the voting process, but to allow them to voluntarily keep themselves out of it.

Whaddya think?

…and, of course, apropos nothing; when one writes that one has “pwn3ed” someone “again”, it implies that one has “pwn3ed” that person in the first place, ever.

If that’s not in evidence, then the whole statement is rather silly.

Unless I’m falling behind on my just-behind-the-curve pseudo-hipster lingo, and “pwn3ed” now means “made that person think I was a gabbling cretin”.  Then you’d be accurate.

Again, apropos nothing.

That is all.

Eric Black reports on the Project for Excellence in Journalism report on the State of the News Media.

It’s an ugly report – you can read the details at MinnPost.  Black’s conclusion:

I heard PEJ chief Tom Rosenstiel (disclosure: Tom and I went to college together less than one century ago; he’s a nice guy) on the radio today say that he doesn’t believe the day when a major American city will have no newspaper is imminent. I agree with that (although what’s happening in Detroit, where you can only get home delivery three days a week is frightening). The papers that have been folding are in two-newspaper towns.

So far.

Again, read the whole article.
On a quasi-unrelated note, I noticed that I haven’t gone to the Strib for blog fodder in quite some time now…

As much fun as I have dinging on Garrison Keillor (I mean, it did put this blog on the map), I gotta confess, I do love A Prairie Home Companion. I listen to it as often as I can, usually live (because, due no doubt to copyright issues, the only part you can actually get via podcast is the “News from Lake Wobegone” segment; it’s good, but it’s not the whole show.

Still, the show has its downsides – parts that make me tune out.

So, due to popular demand, I present – A Prairie Home Report Card: the top and bottom five things about APHC:

The Five Persistent Questions A Prairie Home Companion Gets Wrong: 

5. Keillor’s Relentless Upsucking To The Dems: Goes without saying; just wanted to get it out of the way.
4. The Guy With The Knock-Knock Joke Song Every Year: Ka-nock, Ka-knock. Who’s there?  Tawanna.  Tawanna who? Tawanna eat a Beretta when I hear this song!
3. Garrison Keillor Trying To Sing Harmony With Opera Singers: What did the sage once say about ordering a tuna sandwich at a steak joint?

2. BeBopAReeBop Rhubarb Pie: Perhaps it’s because I have a viscerally bad reaction to the term BeBopAReeBop from childhood – but please, for the love of almighty Vishnu, give this bit a rest.
1. Pat Donohue’s Songs: Donohue’s a great guitar player.  But do we need to have a different fake “blues” song about the mundanities of Minnesota life every episode?

OK, there’s the yang.  Now, the yin:
The Five Things About A Prairie Home Companion That Are Strong, Good Looking and Above Average:

5. Fred Newman’s Sound Effects: I do know, basically, how he does it – but it’s still friggin’ amazing.
4. Real Lives Of The Cowboys: Better than Guy Noir.  And that takes some doing.
3. News From Lake Wobegon: Whatever Keillor’s other flaws, he’s got small-town Scandinavian-America dialled in.  And even though he’s been doing the same bit, really, for almost forty years, it still never gets old to me.

2. The English Major: Yes, it cuts too close to home.  Who cares?
1. The Ketchup Advisory Board: Funniest fake commercials ever. Funnier even than the Bud Light “Real American Heroes” spots.

That should settle any issues.

Growing up, I dreamed – among a few other things – of being a news reporter.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing not every dream comes true.

But I digress.

One of my “role models”, of sorts, was “Joe Rossi”, a character played by Robert Walden from the Lou Grant TV series.  One of the things about “Rossi” that I remember admiring, and to which I aspired, was fanatical detachment from everything – groups, people, society – supported by a hard-bitten cynicism about just about everything else.  “Rossi” went overboard, of course; never voted, never joined any groups, never did anything that’d compromise this detachment (which was sent up in a memorable episode in which the rest of the staff, in an orgy of chain-yanking, signed Rossi up for every organization they could – the AARP, the NRA, severel political parties, the AAA…

OK, it was  TV show – but that was one of the things (supported by my later experience and a little formal education in the field) that I carried with me through my brief, fruitless career as a reporter; reporters should have a healthy skepticism about everything.
Including reporters.

And I suspect most reporters would agree – at least as a platitude.

That needs, of course, to be combined with ravenous curiosity (which was one part of the craft that I did get right), including the ability to question ones’ own gaps and, dare I say, preconceptions.  We’ll come back to that.

“Skepticism”, of course, has its limits.  Reporters are human; they follow baseball teams, they read books, they vote – they have preferences.  None of them – not even “Joe Rossi” – attains their perfect ideals, whatever thepy are. So it’s not a surprise that, among other sins, reporters are just as big a bunch of fanboys as the rest of us, when you get down to it.  Or so it’d seem, seeing the coverage of Seymour Hersh’s appearance last week at the U of M, as partof the U’s “Great Conversations” program.

I didn’t go – I don’t think the “U” is especially aggressive about inviting non-believers to these things, but I have no idea, honestly.

But it was all over the place; Hersh dropped a few “bombs” (as reported by the local media, who did attend in droves) that got picked up by the big leftymedia.

More on that angle in a bit.

Eric Black of the MinnPost was there:

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Heady stuff!

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Of course, when it comes to “covert executive assassination squads”, you don’t have to do a lot of “dwelling” for the story to grab attention, do you?

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

Hersh, who is most famous (recently) for releasing the Abu Ghraib story (which the Army had been investigating, and which CBS was sitting on at government request) must be complimented for his focus on “empiricism”.

You might be too, if you’d had enough of your claims – apparently the less-“empirical” ones – turn out to be complete squibs.  I’ll direct you to this story from two years ago; Hersh claimed (amid a flurry of publicity) that US Special Forces were operating in Iran, preparatory to a US invasion.  It’s a claim that’d seem to have fallen down the memory hole; I have read no accounts of any of the journalists present at this or any other appearance questioning Hersh about it.
So perhaps it’s a good thing he’s waiting.  Except for the whole “Dropping the bomb in a talk at the U of M” bit.

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

Or, in Mondale’s case, were intimately involved in causing the crises.

Again, I digress.

Black continues:

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Viethnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

Nothing like working a relentlessly friendly room.

That’s not a digression.

We’re getting into the interesting stuff here:

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

And we’ll wait for the evidence on that.

I’m not saying I doubt it, necessarily – it’s just that I hope Mr. Hersh isn’t too busy waiting for the invasion of Iran to show us the evidence.  Someday.

Now, here we get into the part of the story where it might have been useful to have some journalists in the room with Mr. Hersh:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

Let’s take a brief time-out here.

Re-read Hersh’s explanation of JSOC.  Assuming Black is reporting his words accurately (and I’ve expressed my complete confidence in the honest of Eric Black’s reporting in the past), Hersh explains JSOC as if…:

1. He expects nobody has heard of it (probably not an unfair assumption, given his audience)
2. He wants people to believe that its status is something unique, sinister, and unique to the Bush Administration.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Joint Special Operations Command was established so that key, vital, high-risk special operations – hostage rescues, counterterrorist missions and the like – could take place without the paralyzing overburden of the military’s bureaucracy and its effects on these types of operations.

And it reports to the Executive Branch – the Secretary of Defense – rather than Congress; of course, the entire Executive Branch reports to the Executive Branch!  But JSOC is isolated from much of the miltiary’s bureaucracy; it does things that need to be done without bringing 535 other commanders into the chain of command.  JSOC reports to the Secretary of Defense, and thence to the President and Congress.

This chain of command – directly to the highest ranks of power – was established  after an infamous military disaster caused by, among other things, interservice bureaucracy, and micromanagment by civilian officials.

The disaster was “Desert One”.  And the order to create JSOC came from President Jimmy Carter.  The boss of Hersh’s fellow guest on the panel, former Vice President
Walter Mondale.

A roomful of journalists might have known that.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

And I’m sure we’ll wait for evidence of the “executions”, in Hersh’s book, upcoming in a year or so.

But barring that “evidence”, there’s a point of order here:  the military doesn’t have to clear its operations with ambassadors or the CIA!  The military doesn’t report to either of them!

There’s no question that JSOC – the umbrella for the US’ clandestine military, including the Joint Special Operations Detachment Delta (“Delta Force”) and the Navy’s DEVGRU (formerly “Seal Team Six”) – does things that aren’t supposed to see the light of day.  And some of these things are by their very nature controversial.  Mark Bowden chronicled the Clinton-era use of JSOC troops to track and kill Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar; one wonders where the chorus of demands for constitutional due process were back then?

It’s not an idle question for any democracy; in the UK during “The Troubles”, Britain’s Special Air Service – the unit that “Delta” and many of the world’s other special forces are modeled after – garnered decades of controversy in its clandestine surveillance and, in some cases, direct action against the IRA.  While Britain’s constitution recognizes a closer relationship between the military and civil authority than we have in the US – something that helped spawn our tradition of Posse Comitatus, in fact – it’s the sort of thing that a free society needs to watch out for and be aware of.

But, until we get Hersh’s “evidence”, really, all we have is innuendo
A roomful of journalists might have known this, and asked Hersh to square his account with history and, while we’re at it, JSOC’s stated organization, oversight structure and (since it can be reasonably assumed Walter Mondale was there) three-decade-long mission.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Really?

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has found that there’s nothing illegal about what Bush sent JSOC to do?  Distasteful to modern, urban, urbane, small-l-liberal (and usually big-l-Liberal) products of the university system, perhaps, but not illegal?  Indeed, necessary under the circumstances – just as Jimmy Carter found when he plugged the whole thing in three decades ago?

A roomful of journalists might not have known this – but, armed by the skepticism that I and probably not a few of them used to think was a key part of the trade, you’d have thought someone might have asked.

A roomful of star-struck hero worshippers?  Not so much.

Am I being unfair in characterizing the room – people paralyzed, if not by Walter Mondale’s suffocating gravitas, by Hershs’ reputation as, as Black put it…:

…the best-known investigative reporter of his generation…

…as a bunch of star-struck fanboys? Who are acting like the shrimp-league lefty commenter on Marty Owings’ show last weekend whose entire line was “who are you to question Sy Hersh?”

Maybe.

But just as someone has to question the government – and its servants, like JSOC – someone needs to subject Seymour Hersh to some skepticism, too.

And I’m sure that roomful of Journalists will do just that.

After Hersh gets done covering that invasion of Iran he warned us about.