I’ve long held that “Codes of Journalistic Ethics” aren’t ethics codes in the sense that laypeople understand, but merely frameworks to allow journalists to justify bad behavior.

Likewise, National Public Radio’s “On The Media” seems to exist primarily to give a big, fat “attaboy” to liberal bias in the media.

Over the weekend, OTM host Bob Garfield did an interview (of sorts) with one of the editors of the Wikileaks website. Wikileaks oozed its way into Minnesota political life this past week by publishing…well, we’ll get back to that.

From OTM’s website:

The site Wikileaks posts leaked documents from anonymous whistleblowers worldwide, even if those documents pose a danger or could potentially lead to loss of life. Julian Assange, the site’s investigations editor, explains why Wikileaks publishes almost anything it receives.

The story (which you should listen to, if you haven’t already) mentions the Coleman incident – Garfield notes that the “whistleblowing” involved revealing the names and other personal data of 52,000 people – but focuses more on Wikileaks’ version of “journalism”.

The interview with Mr. Assange focuses mainly on Wikileaks’ perceived justification for broadcasting leaks, as well as for doing it largely anonymously.  That is, of course, a subject for an upper-division J-school seminar.

But Garfield missed the question that I suspect a lot of people would love to ask Mr. Assange:

“Mr. Assange:  Imagine if you will a story about a serial rapist.  The story mentions the serial rapist, but focuses entirely on identifying the rapist’s victims and digging up personal dirt about them.  Is that good journalism?”

“Of course not.  Now – since Wikileaks claims to be “journalism”, tell me; if the “story” your “whistleblower” claimed to have uncovered was the security bobble with Coleman’s website, why were the identies of the 50,000-odd victims any more relevant than the identies of the rape victims?”

“Of course  you can’t answer that question.  Because for all you talk about being true journalists, you’re nothing but a bunch of ideology-driven intellectual vandals, hiding behind a label that you only recognize the most self-serving, solopsistic aspects of”.

That would have made it a good story.

Worries about the Administration’s competence are metastasizing across party lines:

The tag of incompetence is powerful precisely because it is a nondenominational rebuke, even when it yields a partisan result. It became the strongest argument against the GOP hammerlock on Washington and, over two elections, gave Democrats their turn at total control.But already feelings of doubt are rising again. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were never held in high regard, so doubts about their motives and abilities are not surprising.

What matters more is the growing concern about Obama and his team. The longest campaign in presidential history is being followed by a very short honeymoon.

Imagine Hurricane Katrina – only across the entire economy and nation!

Polls show that most people like Obama, but they increasingly don’t like his policies. The vast spending hikes and plans for more are provoking the most concern, with 82% telling a Gallup survey they are worried about the deficit and 69% worried about the rapid growth of government under Obama. Most expect their own taxes will go up as a result, despite the President’s promises to the contrary.

None other than Warren Buffet, an Obama supporter, has called the administration’s message on the economy “muddled.” Even China says it is worried about its investments in American Treasury bonds. Ouch.

Note to Liberals: be less concerned about those who may or may not hope Obama (or his long-term goals, sure) fail.  Be more concerned over whether he’s going to be an epic failure.

In the months leading up to inauguration, I said – tongue firmly in cheek – that I thought Obama could be the worst president of my adult lifetime on inauguration day.  While I was joking, this past six weeks can’t make his supporters feel all that confident.

Ron Silver has passed away at 62.

Silver was a capable actor who became, arguably, more famous for bucking Hollywood’s dominant liberalism after 9/11, fighting a war of conscience that consumed his acting career but brought him new appreciation from a different breed of fans.

Little did anyone know until very recently that, as Roger L. Simon notes, that battle was just a piker. Silver has had stomach cancer for several years:

Somewhere around a year ago we were having breakfast in New York. He wasn’t looking good, hair thin from chemo, sallow complexion, etc. His energy, however, as always, was spectacularly high and he was filled with plans for his new Sirius radio show. But something was wrong. It wasn’t just the cancer, but it was related to the cancer. Ron was, above all things, an actor, a fantastic actor. And the cancer made him unable to do that work. He told me he had just been offered the lead in Coriolanus at the Long Wharf, but didn’t think he could do it. He would be too tired with his illnes to play a Shakespeare lead. His artistic work was all over for him. It was the one time in all the recent years I saw him on the edge of tears.

I’m starting to cry myself as I type this, so I’m going to shut up. What a great man.

Simon’ll be back with more.

It’s been a little over a week since the MOB Party.

One of the upsides of these parties is that you get to meet all kinds of great people – many of them bloggers.

Downside?  At the moment, “Blogrolling.com”, the site where the MOB “Management” maintains the MOB blogroll, is having trouble.  We’ve been unable to add new blogs to the MOBRoll for a while.

So to hold us a bit while we wait to see if Blogrolling unfuzzles itself, I’d like to introduce you to a couple of blogs that should  be on the MOBroll (and will be, ASAP):

• AmbulanceDriver, run by a longtime friend of this blog (who might need to remain anonymous while he works out some legal issues – am I right, D?).  Lots of great healthcare policy stuff mixed in with many days in the life of, well, an ambulance driver.
• Conservative Cravings: This blog, and the blogger, were new to me when we met at the MOB party.  Check it out regularly!
• Joel Rosenberg is also writing for Windypundit these days.

If I missed you, let me know!

Next Saturday on NARN Volume 2, we’ll be interviewing Ezra Levant. The former publisher of Canada‘s Western Standard, Levant was hounded by Canada’s PC police (they literally are that, in Canada) over…

…well, tune in.

 If you care about free speech, this will be a must-listen interview.

Next Saturday on the Northern Alliance Radio Network!

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM:

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I continue our mission next, from 1-3. You can expect we’ll be talking about Kathleen Soliah, the ongoing trainwreck of the Obama Administration,and what it says about Obama-era American society that Jon Stewart is the closest the mainstream media can come to a financial journalist.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King will be dishing the economic smack from 3-5.
• And don’t forget, our long-time colleagues David Strom and Margaret Martin lead things off on the David Strom Show from 9-11AM!

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream)
• Podcast at Townhall (usually uploaded by Monday morning).
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!

Join us!

(Title: Minutemen)

The Obama Administration apparently now thinks the economy isn’t going to revert to subsistence farming and roving gangs of thugs led by carnivorous warlords.

But I got to thinking; what if he’s wrong?

What Hot Gear are you, fellow American, going to need to get through a real crisis – not the kind Rahm Emanuel doesn’t want to waste, but the kind that’ll have Rahm Emanuel heading to Camp David with a company of Marines and a truckful of MRE’s?

Here at Shot In The Dark’s “Hot Gear” Department, you ask, we’ll answer.

If the balloon really goes up, there are three categories of Hot Gear we’ll cover:

• Defensive Firearms
• Working Firearms
• Guitars

Other equipment – farming, security, milling, and other gear – is outside my immediate expertise; there are other blogs available for this.  “Hot Gear Friday” is, and has always, been about guns and guitars.
Without further ado, let’s get down to business.

Defensive Firearms

There are really three categories of survival firearms:  a close-defense shotgun, a pistol capable of both stopping a threat and being concealeable enough not to be a visible threat, and a big honking battle rifle.

For pistols, the “sexy” points these days go to the big German/Swiss guns, the Heckler and Koch USP (left) and the SIG 22x-series (R) automatics:

Both are excellent firearms.  But for my money, I’ll stick with the good ol’ Colt M1911:

Any of them are big, reliable manstoppers; if faced with a pack of roving cannibal looters, any of them will get you out of a jam.

Of course, any mention of defensive handguns invokes the inevitable argument between automatic shooters and revolver fans.  And while under normal circumstances – i.e., today, with a functioning police department and a civil society that values human life – six rounds should be plenty.  In a time of complete economic and social collapse?  It’s not for nothing the Tutsi saying “it’s always the seventh through 12th looters that get you” has been burned into the consciences of anyone who has one; the seven rounds (plus one in the pipe) of the Colt, or the 15+1 of the SIG or H&K, make the difference between life and death when the only backup you can call is you.

For shotguns?  Remember – a sporting shotgun works in times when you can take a broken feed ramp up to Cavellas when it’s convenient.  When you have a houseful of angry looters to deal with, though, reliability is king.

Which should lead you to the Remington 870 slide-action.   Ubiquitous, time-tested, and rugged as week-old pizza crust, the 870 covers a lot of territory, from hard-core close-defense shredder to utility piece:

Stick with cylinder bores, and if you can, get the barrel cut down; you don’t need a tight pattern for a room-cleaning heater.  The folding stock and pistol grips look cool and aid concealability, but if you’re not a constant 12-gauge shooter, the pistol grip increases the felt recoil.  Just get one and start practicing; worry about the furniture later.

Finally, the question that really gets the wonks spitting tacks: which assault rifle to pick.

Note that the question is not “whether”; it’s “which”.  Despite the best efforts of the gun controllers, there are many excellent choices out there.  The Belgian FN-FAL and the Italian BM59 are excellent, but rare and somewhat pricey choices:

The Springfield M1A – the civilian version of the M14 – is also an excellent choice…

…although you have to be very careful you buy one with a genuine Springfield receiver; many M1As were built in the seventies (during the last economic panic) with badly-welded knockoff Garand receivers; bad idea.

But for the upper midwest, with its wild extremes of weather, the standout choice is the Heckler and Koch HK91.

It’s spendy, and out of production, but incredibly rugged.  The best testimony for those of us in the frozen north? The Norwegian Army uses a variant, the AG3, and is in little danger of replacing it any time soon; when the weather is awful, the G3/HK91 platform is without equal.

(Budget shopping secret; if you prowl through Shotgun News you can find Spanish CETME Model Cs – the weapon from which the G3/HK91 was derived – at a decent price)

You’ll note I stuck with 7.62x51mm rifles, eschewing 5.56x45mm; I figure since most of us will be defending our homes and neighborhoods from marauders, the 5.56’s main advantages, light weight allowing you to carry bigger loads of ammo, aren’t as important.

Of course, while the various AK and SKS-series derivatives are highly overrated in terms of hitting power and tend to be woefully inaccurate, they are inexpensive and ubiquitous.  If they’re all you can get, by all means, do; it can’t hurt to have one around as spare.  I recommend Bulgarian AKs, or if all else fails the Chinese SKS

And it should go without saying that the M1 Garand – relatively inexpensive, available everywhere, and sporting the old but powerful 30.06 cartridge – is way more than merely useful:

It saved Western Civilization during World War II; it can save you this time, too.  Just lay in a big supply of the troublesome eight-round en bloc clips.
At the end of the day, the key isn’t so much which one, but that you have one.  Because if the economy is as bad as the Minnesoros “Independent” seems to say it’s going to be, you’ll need something to keep your food supply safe from “progressive taxes” imposed by those who weren’t so foresightful.

Working Firearms

Things get a little more nebulous here – but suffice to say, a working battery is different from a self-defense battery; while your defensive guns need to be high-capacity, lethal and utterly reliable, with your working battery’s main features are flexibility and economy; killing varmints and putting “targets of opportunity” on the table with minimum expenditure are the bellwethers.

There are many choices – but a good working battery should have at least a good .22 rifle. .22 Long Rifle rimfire rounds are cheap, so you can lay in a HUGE stockpile, and against small varmints and less-determined enemies it’s a good caliber.  There are innumerable good examples; the Ruger 10/22 and Remington Nylon 66 are both excellent semi-auto .22s.  But for pure reliability, it’s hard to top the Savage Mark II; it’s a turnbolt, so there are very few moving parts, and the action is simple, rugged,and foolproof.

To that, I’d add a good large-frame working revolver.  Revolvers beat autos as working guns, since they operate just fine with any kind of load, from hot factory loads to crap your brother in law loads in his basement; you can keep shotshells in a couple of chambers for squirrels or birds, wadcutters in a couple more for nastier varmints, and Glasers in a couple more in case a couple of famished conceptual artists decide you’d make a fine pot roast; I recommend something in a .45 Long Colt (11.43x32mm), which is a little lower-pressure than a .44 magnum, and easier to reload.  I like the Ruger Redhawk…:

…but there are many excellent pieces using this excellent, versatile, reliable caliber.
Guitars

The bitch of it is, complete economic meltdown means no electric power, which means no electic guitars.  You’re best off finding some protected closet, out of the light, putting some Dampits in there (and checking them periodically) to keep them from drying out, and holding onto them for better times.

So what’s the best guitar for a complete societal breakdown?  Some wags suggest a Dobro.

It seems tempting to opt for one of the classic metal guitars with the internal resonator cones – because of their extra volume, and because their metal bodies afford extra protection from small-caliber gunfire and make a better close-range defensive weapon – but the resonator cones are hard to replace under primitive conditions; unless you the foresight to stock spare parts, you could be stuck with a big metal box.

Beyond that, really, it’s a matter of personal preference; some theorize a good dreadnought-body guitar might have lower string tension…

…lowering breakage and reducing demand on your stockpile of spare strings (but lay in as many as you can afford anyway).   At any rate, your choice in guitars isn’t all that differnet from your choice in assault rifles; find something rugged, well-built, that is as unlikely as humanly possible to break down when you need it.

There.  You should be ready now.

(Except for that whole “Food Supply” thing).

UPDATE:  Oh, good lord.

OK, I’ll break it down, for those of you dumb enough to read “Minnesota Progressive Report” (aka “Minnesota Short Bus”, among people of all parties with brains in their heads); the piece is tongue in cheek; a sendup of all the gloom and doomers out there (including in the local blogosphere). 

Oh, it’s true – it is the duty of every real, law-abiding American to own and become proficient with a firearm.  Of that, there’s no rational doubt.

But, um, yeah.  “Satire”. 

Criminy.

St. Paul Police say they’d just as soon Kathleen Soliah stay in California after her upcoming parole.

Cali agrees (I add emphasis):

“The police officers on both ends of this case are united in their opposition to Ms. Soliah’s attempt to once again run away from her crimes,” said LAPPL President Paul Weber. “Governor Schwarzenegger has the power to stop her this time, and we are asking that he exercise that power.”

“Returning Soliah to the same neighborhood that harbored her during her 24-year flight from justice is hardly conducive to strict parole monitoring,” St. Paul Police Federation President Dave Titus wrote in his letter to the governor. “When Soliah has paid her entire debt to California, then and only then, should she be allowed to live where she chooses. Making parole convenient for the perpetrator is a travesty of justice.”

In 1975, Olson, as part of radical group SLA, participated in two failed pipe-bomb attempts on Los Angeles Police squad cars and a bank robbery in which one person was killed.

Let nobody forget – that “one person” was 42 year old Myrna Opsahl.   Soliah’s “Symbionese Liberation Army murdered the mother of four in utter cold blood – Opsahl was in the wrong place at the wrong time – on April 21, 1974.

In [Patricia] Hearst’s account, Olson later asks Emily Harris, who had been listening to radio reports, “How’s the woman who was shot?”

“Oh, she’s dead,” replied Emily Harris, airily. “But it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor. He was at the hospital where they brought her.”

Hearst says that Bill Harris mocked Opsahl’s death, referring to her as “good, old Myrna” and congratulated the robbers for having committed a “gas chamber” offense.

It was two years ago Tara McKelvey profiled Soliah’s family here in the Twin Cities in Marie Claire. They still think Soliah is the victim.

In a way, I hope California lets her come back. Having their revolutionary hero among them would certainly bring out the true colors of an embarassingly-large chunk of the St. Paul DFL.

Via A Democracy

…when a smug, preening, pseudo-Ivy-league prettyboy who has convinced a generation of bobbleheads that snark is news and who couldn’t tie his shoes without a couple of writers and producers working the angles for him…

…is the closest thing we have to a financial journalist these days:

Jon Stewart hammered Jim Cramer and his network, CNBC, in their anticipated face-off on “The Daily Show,” repeatedly chastising the “Mad Money” host for putting entertainment above journalism.”I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a … game,” Stewart told Cramer, adding in an expletive during the show’s Thursday taping. The episode was scheduled to air at 11 p.m. EDT on Comedy Central.

Outside conservative talkradio, anyway.

At least this White House objected to the UN’s chief nag calling the uS – which pays a vastly disproportionate share of the UN’s bills – a “deadbeat”:

White House objected Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s description of the United States as a “deadbeat” donor to the world body.Ban used the phrase Wednesday during a private meeting with lawmakers at the Capitol, one day after he met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

Note to Mr. Ban: then try to collect on his, little fella.

That’s right.  Slink back to New York and write a resolution or something.

 Compare and contrast:

A) Liberal pro-“choice” blogger voluntarily posts ultrasounds of her “fetus” (now a toddler, and congrats, by the way) on blog.  Conservative blogger heists photo for (tasteless, but valid) satiric purposes.  Liberal bloggers declare world coming to end, demand answers, wonder why people don’t respect others’ privacy.

B) Liberal group “finds security hole” – and, oops, releases scads of private information along with a manifesto declaring that no, “Wikileaks” doesn’t give a rat’s ass that they’re involuntarily splashing information that a bunch of eeeeevul Republican donors had intended to be private all over hell and half an acre? Liberal bloggers declare “can’t you all take a joke?  It’s for your own good” (and “suck it, stoopid ReThugliCons, it’s all your fault anyway – which we normally call “Blaming the victims”).

It’s hard to run a civil society when one side’s idea of “civil” is “we can do whatever we can tell ourselves is OK”.

Are the situations the same? Of course not.  Show me any of the Coleman donors who put their credit card numbers out there in public and said “don’t you dare do anything with this!”.

The lesson from this:  if it’s a Republican candidate or donor, all rules of basic decency are suspended.

What’s the news here: the lefties hacked Norm Coleman’s donor database and published it,.or that they are trying to wrap themselves in a mantle of phony righteousness for doin it?

John Hinderaker notes:

It’s impossible to say whether Wikileaks hacked Coleman’s site and is now making the information public out of frustration at lack of publicity, or whether a different Democratic Party group did the hacking and passed the information off to Wikileaks to be illegally disseminated. I replied to Wikileaks’ email asking for a name and telephone number and saying that I would like to interview them; needless to say, I didn’t get a response. Like so many leftists, they prefer to hide behind a cloak of anonymity.

Which is no surprise to any of us who’ve dealt with these people, ever.

A week or two after the liberal hacking of Coleman’s site took place, I got a notice from my bank that my credit card numbers had been stolen and patently improper charges were being rung up. As a result I had to cancel that credit card and get a new one. I didn’t know it at the time, but it appears that in all probability, I was one of the victims of the Democrats’ hacking of Coleman’s web site.

Just another day in contemporary American politics. Liberals break the law, violate their opponents’ privacy, either commit or facilitate theft, and meanwhile assure the rest of us that they did all of this because of their moral superiority.

Lefties are claiming that it wasn’t a hack; Paul Schmelzer at the Minnesoros “Independent” carries out his paymasters’ will, tells us “2+2=”orange””:

the database was not revealed by hackers, according to IT professional Adria Richards, who was the first to share news of the unprotected file in late January.

“It’s not hacking,” she said. “I didn’t use any hacking tools. A browser was my tool.”

Richards said she discovered the database by entering normcoleman.com, into OpenDNS’ cache-check tool, which gave her an IP address where the Web site lived.

Simply copying that address into a Firefox browser revealed the Web site directories for colemanforsenate.com.

Richards didn’t download the database herself, but she posted a screen capture of what she’d found online after she made the discovery.  An IT consultant  for 10 years, she published her findings on her blog to educate others about the risks of improperly managed websites, she said.

“All you needed was a Web browser,” she said. “It’s like I walked over to Norm Coleman’s house and saw his door was open, took a photo of the open door and posted it on the Internet.”

Ah.  So the Democrats didn’t have to work especially hard to get the information and puiblish it.  That excuses everything!

Attention, ethically-challenged liberals and Minnesoros “Independent” staff (pardon the redundancy): if someone leaves the door to their house unlocked,and you walk inside, take out all their wife’s underwear and put it on and leave the building, you are still a thief and a cross-dresser, even if the door wasn’t locked!

Most of us know this.  The rest?

They’re anonymous leftybloggers, obviously.

Conservative Utah is the happiest place in the country:

WASHINGTON – Looking for happiness — it’s family-friendly communities for some, tropical paradise or the rugged West for others. A survey of Americans’ well-being, conducted by Gallup in partnership with Healthways and America’s Health Insurance Plans, gives high marks to Utah, which boasts lots of outdoor recreation for its youthful population.

Oh, it’s not just a red-state thing:

In general, highest well-being scores came from states in the West while the lowest were concentrated in the South.

Still – combine this with the facts that conservatives have better senses of humor and have better sex lives, and – well, a pattern is forming here, isn’t it?

Afghanistan, to the lefties, has always been “the good war”.

As I noted a couple of years ago, the left really has only two templates for “good wars”:

1. Vietnam – a war that was a disaster for the nation (to say nothing of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians), but a boon to the Dems, giving them a ready-made popular movement, a unifying theme, and (at the time) immense popular traction.
2. World War II – America’s last socialist war; the last war we will ever have have (God willing) that was fought by the entire country; a war that actually worked the way the New Deal was supposed to have worked, with an all-wise, all-knowing government mobilizing all of this nation’s people and means of production (via a central plan) toward a common goal.

Of course, one led to the other; World War II, fought by immense levies of draftees (backed, in the US’ case, by immense firepower and industrial and herculean ogistic capability) slamming into other such levies in epic battles, was exactly the wrong model for fighting in Vietnam; winning over the “hearts and minds” of a people indisposed to take either side without any overarching reason (i.e., their and their families’ survival) isn’t well served by carpet-bombing and “search and destroy” patrols by foreign troops who don’t want to be there, who don’t speak the language, who only want to vaporize anything that might prevent them from getting the hell out of there.

Vaporizing Germans and Japanese and going home worked in WWII,where the battle for the German and Japanese heart and mind was an entirely separate operation from the battle to destroy their governments; it worked incredibly badly in a war where we had to do a sales job as well as win a battle, since locals were all nominally part of the “friendly” government, albeit riven with guerrillas, to begin with.
All the lessons we needed to win in Vietnam – and later, Iraq – were found in the Philippines, about a century ago.  Of course, the Philippines and Iraq were two wars the liberals hate.

But Afghanistan was a war that most (not all) liberals supported; even Bruce Springsteen, of all people, supported President Bush’s effort (and caught a lot of flak from, believe it or not, the left). And so with a new liberal President, they’re more or less obliged to try to win this thing.

And, as Michael Yon notes, while Iraq is swerving toward a success (that Obama seems determined to scupper), TAfghanistan is shaping up very badly at the moment:

Today we have an American President and Secretary of Defense who have essentially kicked, prodded and begged our allies to get more serious about Afghanistan, but mostly to no avail. And so 17,000 more American troops are kissing their loved ones goodbye, many of them for the last time in their lives, and heading into Afghanistan. Per capita combat deaths probably will be higher in Afghanistan this year than for any year in Iraq. The situation is very serious for the relatively few soldiers fighting there. Some are in combat every day and night.The AfPak war began more than seven years ago. It is fair to ask why are we sending more U.S. troops today. After all, we’ve had plenty of time to build an army and police. If drive-by journalists listen to some of the commanders on the ground, they might come back with reports that all is okay, and that the Afghan army is coming along nicely, and that certain writers are exaggerating. I’ve had those same briefings from commanders. Just as in 2004 Iraq, I believe that Americans and Europeans have been deceived by their governments.

Yon – a former “Green Beret” – notes what Robert Kaplan noticed in the book Imperial Grunts; we’re fighting the wrong war in Afghanistan, and ignoring the lessons of good ocunterinsurgency:

I’ve asked many key officers why we are not using our Special Forces (specifically Green Berets) in a more robust fashion to train Afghan forces. The stock answers coming from the Green Beret world – from ranking officers anyway – is that they are taking a serious role in training Afghan forces. But the words are inconsistent with my observations. The reality is that the Green Berets – the only outfit in the U.S. military who are so excellently suited to put the Afghan army into hyperdrive – are mostly operating with small groups of Afghans doing what appears to be Colorado mule deer hunts in the mountains of Afghanistan. Special Forces A-teams are particularly well suited to train large numbers of people, but are not doing so.

What we are doing is sending tens of thousands more regular troops to stomp about a country that,quite legitimately, might be getting tired of seeing us around.

Read the whole thing.

Leave it to an economist to emit understatement so monumental as to be particularly humorous.

Several economists have said the stimulus package will not meet the administration’s goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year because the final package was smaller than expected and contained several provisions that they say are unlikely to be particularly effective.

…which is to say our misguided federal government is going to keep borrowing and spending; not because it will prove to be “particularly effective,” rather because that’s what liberals do.

Sort of reminds of the old saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Dutch Supreme Court finds that insulting Islam doesn’t libel individual Moslems:

In a victory for freedom of speech the Dutch Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who stuck a poster in his window with the text: ‘Stop the tumour that is called Islam’. The court ruled the man did not insult muslims by insulting the religion of islam.

Just when I thought the whole world was going nuts.

Speaking of which; the NARN “Headliners” broadcast is scheduling a rather prominent free-speech figure for an upcoming show.  Stay tuned to this space.

Just a couple of random points, given without any real reason.

Really.

1. I don’t control who writes at True North.  I am part of the eight-member ruling Junta that makes those calls.  I have never made a unilateral decision of any kind – over content, design, direction, naming – at True North, much less one over removing a post or a writer.  Not once.  Ever.
2. If there’s a person anywhere who has less power at True North, it’s my friend and former NARN colleague Michael Brodkorb from Minnesota Democrats Exposed.  Michael has never been involved with the inner workings at True North. Never.

So anyone who says that “Michael Brodkorb and Mitch Berg teamed up…” to do anything at True North is – I’ll be diplomatic, since that’s what I do – mistaken the first time they say it.  I’m willing to set ’em straight.

A second time?  That’s just making stuff up.

Again, I’m just speaking hypothetically.  It came to me in a dream.

That’s is all.

UPDATE:  Since Politics In Minnesota opted to feature the post that I’m answering with this article, I might as well say it; I’m responding to an inaccurate contention by Col. Joe Repya over at Eagle’s Nest.  It’s related to a flap that happened last winter, which I fully and accurately explained in this posting on True North.

I’m also disappointed that Col. Repya felt the need to resort to name-calling – especially inasmuch as calling me an apologist for the MNGOP establishment is just plain absurd.

Michael Brodkorb’s a friend of mine; but it’s also a matter of record that we’ve disagreed strenuously over quite a few things. But facts are facts; Brodkorb makes no editorial decisions at True North, and never has.

One is entitled to his own opinion, not one’s own facts. 

Jeepers, Paul – grow a couple will ‘ya?

Sometimes it’s the footnotes in music history that are the most fun.

Today is Bruce Watson’s 48th birthday.

“Bruce who?”

Look, people – aren’t you the same folks who asked “Tony who?” when I celebrated Tony Butler’s birthday last month?  C’mon.  Do I have to do all the work here?

Bruce Watson, people.  The second guitarist of Scotland’s greatest rock band, Big Country.

Unless you’re a huge Scottish-rock buff, you probably have only the vaguest idea of who Watson is, much less why he mattered (or, for that matter, that none of the members of Big Country, the most Scottish band in rock, where actually born in Scotland; Watson hails originally from Timmins, Ontario).  And he’s only tenuously in the business anymore; word has it he works as a materials tester in a shipyard.

But he certainly mattered.

Going back to the dawn of the rock and roll era, the dominant style on the electric guitar was one variety or another of amped-up blues or folk style; from Jim Burton’s country-blues twang to Jimmy Page’s nordic-blues stomp to George Harrison’s pop reading to Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic blues noodling to Eric Clapton’s clean, surgical…um, blues.  Most of the major guitarists, and styles of guitarists, were one kind of take-off or another on the blues, from Eddie Van Halen’s explosive, technocratic virtuosity to Ted Nugent’s obnoxious flailing to Lindsay Buckingham’s Harrison-on-Quaalude vibe to…

…well, fill in your favorite.  And of course there were exceptions.  But that’s what they were – outliers from the norm.

Somewhere in the seventies – maybe going back as far as Lou Reed – a new approach started burbling up, using the electric guitar less as a prime, driving motif as in the blues, and more as atmosphere; it relied (on its surface) less on sheer technical chops and power, and more on sound, interaction, and sound processing.  While blues guitar was “classical”, the newer style was…impressionistic?

I’ll leave the similes to the professionals.

But somewhere in there, about the time I was first picking up the instrument, guitarists like Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine (of Television) started turning guitar parts into dense, complexly-interwoven textures more than driving themes, solos and rhythm tracks.  The Edge (of U2) and Pete Burchill (of Simple Minds) made their stomp-boxes – the delay, chorus, flange, distortion and other special effects lines – perhaps the focus of their styles, rather than decoration on the virtuosity of their finger work.

And Adamson and Watson wound the two together as tightly as any couple of guitarists ever have.

Where electric guitarists had traditionally strummed or picked their rhythm parts – or, like Pete Townsend or Malcolm Young, bashed them out with primal aggression – Adamson and Watson patiently built simple patterns, one-and-two-string figures that complemented and wove in and out through each other.  They layered them using ingenious, but low-key, special effects – using the “E-Bow” electronic tone device to simulate Scots fiddles, pushing and equalizing their amps to imitate bagpipes.  And that was just the recognizable stuff; Adamson and Watson tweaked their guitar/effect/amp chains to coax sounds that didn’t sound like anything, but felt like something – like dread, winter, anger, longing…

…oh, how do you explain tone?  You don’t.  You just play it, and hope it comes across. And it did for me, surely; when Big Country’s The Crossing came out during my sophomore year of college, I spent days curled up in my dorm, trying to figure out what those guys were doing.

So happy birthday, Bruce Watson.  And thanks – not only for the years of inspiration, but for all the puzzles I’m still working on.

The notion that NBC is talking about blurring the line between ads and “content” to meaninglessness…:

NBC Digital’s Cameron Death speaks to Media Post about the future of NBC’s product.

“There’s a challenge and an opportunity within the next two years, where the brand can become the content,” he said.

That sounds like the creation of some very long commercials.

…or that I got the news from Justine Bateman’s Twitter feed.

Just as people who move to New York from elsewhere become the most preening, arrogant New Yorkers, some of us who come to conservatism from liberalism are the most vituperative about our rejection of vast swathes of our former beliefs.

So I don’t give liberals a whole lot of credence on economics.

Still, it can be useful to see what they’re telling themselves.

Jeff Rosenberg shut down “Twin Cities Daily Liberal” to join “MNPublius” last week.  Congrats to both Jeff and the MNPublii; one hopes the hire was accompanied by  Aaron Landry being perp-walked from the MNPublius office as jeering onlookers pelt him with rocks and garbage.

But I digress.

Jeff’s a good guy, and he’s made the odd good point in his oeuvre – but Emperor’s Clothes-watchers should perk up at this bit from MNPub yesterday, titled “Under Obama, the stock market is stabilizing“.

Of course it’s “stabilizing”.  As long as companies still produce things that people need to buy, some companies will retain some value, and that value will be reflected in the equity market for their stocks.  Until this nation resorts to being a subsistence-farming economy with a barter currency system, companies will be worth something.

Yes, I know conservatives say the stock market is experiencing a catastrophic collapse under Obama, but they also said the fundamentals of the economy were strong under Bush.

And both are true.  If the former were not true, the market would, tautologically, not be off 43% in the past year; if the latter weren’t fact, there’d be no talk of recovery, no matter who to thank.  “Strong fundamentals” – a capable workforce, a currency capable of supporting commerce, management that can find and exploit opportunity – are the reason that 70-90% of us are not subsistence farmers, as our anscestors were 100-300 years ago, and why we’re unlikely to revert to that, even now.

You have to take conservative arguments with a grain of salt.

(Although not due to anything you’ll read here – but I digress.  Ed.)

The truth is that, in Obama’s first six weeks, the market’s volatility has decreased, and though the declines of the Bush economy haven’t stopped, they haven’t become worse, either.

That’s because, short of complete monetary collapse and reversion to barter and subsistence farming – in short, as long as there’s a market out there – then there is a bottom.  Where is that bottom?  As a theoretical matter, when the market capitalization of publicly-traded companies is equal to their physical and financial assets; when the combined value of alll the hundreds of millions of shares of 3M stock, for example, is the same as the value of 3M’s buildings, computers, inventory and bank accounts – presuming that any of those things have worth at all (again with the “forestalling monetary collapse and not heading to the woods with your rifle and your bag of oat seeds”).  The real bottom, presuming the fundamentals of the economy are strong enough to see us into a recovery, is somewhere north of that, depending on the  potential investors see or, paradoxically, less than that for companies that have no future.

The trouble is that conservatives and the media like to use charts like this, which ignore even the recent past [courtesy of Media Matters]:

The trouble is that liberals use charts from Media Matters.  Let’s break it down:

But the truth looks more like the chart below. Under Bush, the Dow Jones lost 6,000 points, or about 43 percent of its value, from its peak in 2007. That includes about 3,000 points lost since September 2008. Under Obama, the Dow has continued to slide, but it is only down about 1,000 points since its low during the Bush administration.

Which makes sense, until you get into the “why” of it all.

The first 3,000 was the impact of the collapse of the housing bubble.  No question about it: it was a financial catastrophe.  And while the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans did try to beat back some of the governmental idiocy that subsidized the inflation of the bubble in the first place (the systematic socialization of risk and privatization of reward – read “distortion of the free market” – that allowed the bubble to grow and put Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac on the hook to clean up when it popped), there’s plenty of blame to go around; the failure of the Bush Administration to expend the political capitol needed to turn the idiocy back; the Dems complete ignorance of the issue going back to 1998, when the Clinton Administration started instituting the policies that led us to disaster, and so on.

That’s 3,000 points over a little over a year; figure about 250 points a month.

Which, by many accounts (and let’s be honest; if you put 100 economists into a room, you’ll get 175 theories) pretty much covered the correction from the housing bubble.

Then, from September – in the waning months of the Bush Administration, when it became pretty clear that Obama and his socialist, interventionist policies were going to hold sway, and when the (frankly) spendthrift Bush Administration did its level best under Henry Paulson to speed the transition to government funding of the whole mess, the market justifiably reacted – through January, the market shed another couple thousand points. That’s around 400 points a month, depending on where you demarcate your starting and finish lines.

And in the past 45 days, the market has reacted to Obama’s his full-throttle power-dive into a socialist command economy, his tax-hiking, and (I think it’s fair to say) indications of his administration’s incompetence, and burned through over 1,000 points, speeding to what may or may not (the coming weeks will tell us) be close to the Dow’s hard bottom.

You do the math; that’s a 401K-shredding 600-point-per-month pace.

So yes, Jeff – while “sloughing off all value to the point where the market is down to not much above asset value” is a form of “stabilization” (in the same sense that a crashing airplane doesn’t get much below ground level, provided the ground below the plane doesn’t open beneath it and swallow the plane up whole), Obama has “stabilized” the market.

By your leave, we’ve had enough of this kind of “stability”; we’d like him to stop before he “stabilizes” healthcare, home values, Americans’ net worth, and our foreign policy.

By your leave.

CORRECTION: TC Daily Liberal, not MN Liberal Report.  To be fair, Twin Cities leftyblogs sorta run together after a while. MNBlue, MNSpeak, MN Liberal Report, Daily Liberal, Powerliberal, PowerMonkey, Daily Monkey, MNObserver, MNObsessive, MNCompulsive…who’da thunk “branding” was the one thing Mark Gisleson (“Norwegianity”) would excel at?

Chas Freeman withdraws from the bid for chair at the National Intelligence Council:

“Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed.  Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret.”

Ed Driscoll notes:

Freeman has been under fire for quite some time, though the White House has had little to say on the matter.

It’s Limbaugh’s fault, obviously.

I have a theory; a hunch is a better moniker, that our economic recovery will germinate from a small and isolated seed of confidence. To paraphrase, extrapolate and else wise apply the teachings of a favorite advisor and author of mine, Nick Murray, our economic recovery’s timing is unknowable, it’s manifestation inevitable.

We can undeniably trace the origins of our current crisis to a seed delivered to the fertile soil of our economy via a turd laid by liberal Democrats of the Carter era, and germinated by the blue thumbs of the Clinton era. My hunch is that our nation’s, and in turn the world’s economies will be restored in much the same way.

That seed however, will be seemingly small and insignificant in its time but will retrospectively be shown to be the beginning of the end of the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

I could be; probably am wrong – but this morning I read this…

Stocks Post Best Rally of 2009 on Improving Citigroup Outlook

Citigroup Inc. said it was having its best quarter since 2007, spurring speculation the worst of the banking crisis is over. Treasuries fell, while oil and copper gained.

and this…

US Consumer Confidence Edges Up in March

…it occurred to me that this is a very large, visible bank exhibiting a rare and precious commodity of late: profits and optimism and at the same time consumer confidence exhibits a slight, if temporary uptick.

Now don’t be fooled for a moment into thinking that our nation’s financial crisis is going to vanish overnight. Rather, be prepared for multiple fits and starts – to reuse the President’s recent and widely panned phraseology – but I believe, even if this is not that seed, a future forensic analysis of our inevitable recovery will reveal an initial catalyst such as we have seen today.

An ever-so-slight restoration of confidence will lead to a loosening of lending and spending which at the same time will allow real estate and the financial markets to establish their lows in earnest.

An excruciatingly slow, uneven but evident march to recovery will ensue.

And the World will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Or…

…none of the above is coming and we’re all screwed.

I suffer from Optimism, despite all it’s flaws and blind spots, so I’m going with the former.

…for now.

Four years ago, I and most thinking Americans had a field day, roundly ridiculing a couple of risible strains of “liberal” whinging:

• Stars who claimed they’d “move to France” if George W. Bush won the election.
• Vacuous lefty blog-gerbils who yapped about the Blue States seceding from the union and joining to form “The United States of Canada”, and leaving the red-voting “Jesusland” states to themselves (I had particular fun with this, as well as pointing out the political and historical illiteracy of the idea; most of Canada west of Ontario is as red as Montana).  I had extra-special fun with these morons.
• Acres of “He’s Not My President” bumper stickers.

These were many of the same people, by the way, who tearfully demanded that conservatives “stop questioning their patriotism”, by the way.

But I digress.  The vacuous snivelling hamsters got their president finally.

It’s the other side I’m concerned about now.

We got a call on the show last Saturday from a guy who’s question echoed one I’d heard from not a few people on blogs, on Twitter, and around about in recent months – itself a reprise of something I heard a lot back in the seventies and, just a bit, in the early nineties.

“When should we stop talking and start the active resistance?”

I often ask these people – why?

“It’s never been worse than this!”

I’m starting to lose patience with some of them.

Whenever anyone says anything is “the worst ever”, they’re almost always wrong.  They almost always really mean “the worst I’ve seen”.

Politics is not the dirtiest and nastiest it’s ever been (that’d be the Jackson/Adams contest in 1828, or any election where the Hearst papers uncorked their smear machine); this is not the worst unemployment since World War II (not even close, not yet)…

…and if you’re a freedom-loving American, the Obama administration is shaping up to be a bad one, perhaps a horrible one.  But it’s by no means the worst we’ve seen on any count.

Spending?  Roosevelt’s New Deal was worse.  So far.

Gun control?  While Obama’s record is bad, he hasn’t done anything yet; Democrats from FDR through Clinton all took their swipes at the Second Amendment, from Roosevelt’s prohibitory taxes on automatic weapons (which eliminated gang warfare!) to Clinton’s “1994 Crime Bill”, which did for many less-fashionable liberties what Bigfoot does to junked cars.

Civil Liberties?  Three words; J. Edgar Hoover.  FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ got away with things that’d make any of the ofay gerbils that were protesting George W. Bush’s “Abuses” gag up their skulls.  Nixon invoked executive orders that gathered unprecedented “emergency” powers unto the executive – which has had libertarians chattering amongst themselves for almost forty years.  Obama bears watching; the Dems in Congress bear even more of it.  But so far, the threats are minimal (while still intolerable).

Repackaging vacuity as “change” and “audacity?”  OK, there Obama’s in a league of his own.

Overall demoralization of the parts of this country that matter?  The seventies were worse.  They had everything we have today and more – instability, out-of-control government, the Middle East going nuts, stagflation, Jimmy Carter – and a nation that was coming off of Vietnam, which, if you don’t remember it (and I only do through the prism of a 12 year old’s memory) was the most demoralizing thing to happen to this nation since the mid-thirties.  I don’t know if anyone ever ran the numbers, but Carter’s “Malaise Speech” must have prompted more population-wide suicides than any other single event in American history (shaddap about Oberlin undergrads popping too many Valium after Kerry lost).

And even that wasn’t the worst it’s gotten.  In my father’s lifetime – well within my grandparents’ early adult lives – there were those in the mainstream who seriously considered socialism, communism, even pre-war Naziism viable models with much from which we could learn, even much to emulate for our own good.  There were those in positions of great power who actively sought to incorporate “the best” of these ideologies into our own.

The point being that, so far, the Obama Administration isn’t the worst thing our constitution, our economy and our society has faced – yet.  And while the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the Founding Fathers well-recognized the possibility that Americans might need to throw off another tyranny someday, this isn’t it.

Not yet.

It’s a big government, and it’s getting bigger.  It’s a not-ready-for-prime-time government, run by a lot of very canny people who buffaloed a lot of our nation’s not-too-bright with a lot of breezy platitudes, and which rode to office on an almost-but-not-quite-unprecedented wave of discontent with the status quo.  It’s a government full of poltroons and ideological three-card-monte sharks.  But it’s not a communist dictatorship.

It was elected, for better or worse.  And we have three years and eight months to make the case that it should be thrown out of office and – this is the important part – nobody’s changing that.

If they do?  Well, get back to me then; it’ll be then you should think about putting on the camo and grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods.

Until then?  It’s still America.

As Douglas Adams said, “Don’t Panic”.

At the MOB last weekend, the Minnesota blogosphere got to meet another of a very small, elite group; Saint Paul Republican bloggers.  Fresch Fisch made his public debut.

And oy, does this city need him.

He notes that some Democrats are upset at Mayor Coleman.  Not over soaring taxes and eroding services, mind you.

For having allowed Republicans into Saint Paul:

It’s gotta be tough to be Mayor Chris Coleman these days. The political right has never been fond of the man, and now, neither is the hard core left.A new website My Mayor is Cheating on Me is bound to have the folks loyal to Mr. Coleman all up in a fuss!

And it’s gotta be a bad time to be DFL mayor; when there’s no more blood in the turnip, the turnips get upset when you squeeze ’em too hard…

First, being a DFL’er when there is no money to spend, either at the state or local level. Just think of having to run for office and not being able to promise more stuff so everyone will vote for you.

Second, being a DFL mayor and inviting those darn Republicans to town! Just think, Karl Rove was in our town!

Then, accommodating all the leftist “protesters” before the convention and then having the gall to stop them from damaging public and private property! Hey, that’s my city you are damaging!

Mayor Coleman has tough times ahead.

Maybe, although the “My Mayor…” blog isn’t what’s gonna do it. It’s a typical lefty smearblog; anonymous, gutless, scrubbed clean of any traceable information…

…except writing style.

I have a hunch I know who it is.  No proof, so I’m not gonna go on about it.  But there are a few hints.

At any rate, Mayor Coleman has plenty to worry about.  I doubt this blog is it.