Kermit was there.

Well, he tried, anway, once he got the “invite”:

Friday came and went.  Naught but crickets.  No “reminder” call.  Sunday at 7:00?  Silence.  7:15?  Nada.  7:30?  Ronery, I’m so ronery.

 Other people got the call.  I’ve read some details already at places like Powerline.  I think I have now experienced what national healthcare will really be like.  I have been subjected to Health Care Town Hall Rationing.  And I’m not the only one.  Even though I was invited, gosh darn it, there just was not enough resources to serve everyone.

Death panel?  No, town hall access panel.  Amy pulled the plug on me. 

Without even a painkiller?

That’s cold.

There was no more dismal period in any genre of American music than country music’s ordeal from about 1975 to about 1990.

Pushed by Big Nashville’s urge to cash in on the big money in pop music, “crossover” was the watchword and goal and driving force behind Nashville’s main efforts during that whole stretch of time.  Some country artists – Kenny Rogers and Eddie Rabbit and Barbara Mandrell and a whole lot of equally-forgettable tripe – existed purely to capitalize on the trend.  The trend swallowed up years from the careers of some otherwise great country artists; who knows what could happen if Dolly Parton could get the years back that she spent trying to be a pop star?

And some of the best country music of the era – indeed, some of the genre’s only music of the era that anyone has reason to remember – was specifically done as a reaction to that whole noxious trend; “The Outlaws”, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams Junior, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell and a few others who stuck to and extended on country’s twangy roots, were about the only products of the era worth remembering.

Lee Greenwood was very much in the former group.

Is he country?  Is he Vegas?  Is he new wave?  He’d just as soon you not worry about it!

Having worked in Country radio a few times – in 1982 and 1984 and 1991-92 – I can remember what an utterly dismal thing country was, in that wretched era before Garth Brooks and Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam and Holly Dunn and the whole crowd of “back to the roots” singers paradoxically made country a colossal success by dragging it “backward” twenty years.  Lee Greenwood had been one of the big offenders, doing treacly, overproduced glop whose only connection with “country” was a little arklahoma twang in his voice and, of course, a relentless tugging on the heartland’s heartstrings.

Which is what gave us “God Bless the USA“.

And make no mistake about it; “GBTUSA” has everything that made Lee Greenwood such a lowlight of “country” music for that entire dismal period of time; lots of violins, but nary a fiddle to be found; electric guitars, but none of them pedal steel; lots of vocals, but the most generic voice imaginable.  That cloying sense that the song is trying hard to push every button you have.

Perversely, though?  It works.

Well, maybe not for you.  Indeed, as John Edwards once said whilst running between a hair appointment and a date with his mistress, there are two Americas; one that hates “God Bless The USA” and is mildly creeped out by everything it stands for, and another that may or may not be silently amused by the song, but still gets a thrill in its heart from all of its glorious, mawkish sentiment.

And it is gloriously, over the top mawkish; if your heartstrings aren’t rated for 2000 points of pull, they will snap like Nancy Pelosi’s facial muscles when someone pops a paper bag behind her.

But aside from being perhaps a perfect lab experiment showing the absolute limits of emotional button-pushing in song, the song has been adopted – intentionally or not – by that second America, as a sort of huge, glowing middle finger aimed at the first one.  Because when Greenwood and his background singers – it could be the Red Army Choir, for crying out loud – wind up and attack that last big finish, it challenges you not to say “Yes, Chauncey Boston-Cosmopolitan, the idea of America transcends its problems; the promise of this experiment supercedes its mistakes; it is a concept deserving of loyalty for its own sake; we are a shining city on the hill, and we are the best attempt at a nation that this world has ever seen, viewed objectively and ethically.  You have the right to disagree – but in the meantime, shut your impotent babbling pseudointellectual piehole, because I’m gonna sing and wave the flag for a moment”.

A symptom of obstinate, unthinking jingoism?  A thud-witted rejection of the reflexive dialecticism that “educated” Americans are supposed to embrace (and which many do, most of them with little more literacy than the most jingoistic redneck), that believes to every good there must be an equal yet opposite evil?

Perhaps.

But let me say in response that there ain’t no doubt I love this land.  And, in conclusion, God Bless the USA.  Or, as the kids today say, “America; F*** Yeah”.

Whoosh.  Dang, I’m stoked. 

There. I believe I settled that.

If you converted all the critical plaudits Radiohead has gotten over the past fifteen years or so into liquid form, and poured them into all the world’s supertankers, then an awful lot of supertanker crews would be frantically bailing their overloaded vessels out to keep the keels off the harbor floors.

Now, I’ve been around music a long time. I’ve listened to a lot of it.  I’m about as openminded as it gets.  I dig music on two levels; on the one hand, there’s music that grabs me in the liver, that connects with me emotionally right where I live and breathe.  It’s the stuff I wear on my sleeve in this blog – stuff like Springsteen and Tchaikowski and Emmylou Harris and Richard Thompson and Prince and the Clash and Gustav Mahler and Sam and Dave and piobaireachd and Iris Dement and the Iron City Houserockers and middle-period Public Enemy and the Black Watch Pipes and Drums, and all kinds of stuff in between.  Stuff that grabs me in the soul.

And then there’s stuff that misses my soul to one degree or another, but which I admire from a technical perspective as a musician, much like a programmer might admire good code or an engineer a perfect gusset plate, as great technique for its own sake.  Stuff like Yngwie Malmsteen or or Alban Berg or Rush or Bela Fleck or Miles Davis or Charles Mingus or Rimsky-Korsakoff – stuff whose pure technical excellence I admire and enjoy to a degree, but which doesn’t grab me by the liver and say “this explains a key part of what life is about!”.

And at the juncture of neither of these avenues lies Radiohead.

Now, if you’ve followed this “Thing I Like/Things I Don’t” series over the past few months, you’ll know this is the point where I launch into a detailed explication of why, even though I know I should  like something, and indeed find things in his or her or their body of work that I do appreciate, there is a paradoxical hitch that keeps me from liking it, or interferes with my appreciation.

But not here.

Because while I’ve tried, and King Banaian (as Radiohead-y of a Radiohead fan as exists) has tried, and other ‘head fans have tried, I can’t honestly say I care about them on either level.

And as with most of these love/hate articles, it’s not that I couldn’t or won’t be converted.  And I’ll cop to the fact that the period from the band’s major-league debut up through what their fans call their “creative peak” (whatever that was – and if you get five Radiohead fans in a room, you’ll get seven answers to that question) happened at a time when I didn’t listen to much music at all, so it never really had a chance to get ingrained in my head, one way or the other.

It’s just that in a decade and change of (sorta) trying, nothing has pushed me in one direction or the other.

OK.  Not much of an article.  Sorry.  I’m a creep and I don’t belong here…

…er, wait.

I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a while:  issue a call to the MOB.

MOB bloggers – of all political persuasions – did you get an “invite” to Amy Klobuchar’s “tele-town-hall?”

Did you get the “callback” from A-Klo’s office to join the meeting?  Did you actually get to “attend” the meeting?

And presuming you got the “callback” – did you attend?  How did the meeting go?  Was there a balanced set of questions?

I plan on trying to listen to the audio later today. 

If you have a blog, write about it and either leave a link in my comment section, or email me.  If you do not have a blog, leave your story in my comment section.  I will update this post as needed.

I wanna see if there’s a story here.

The fifth anniversary party of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is coming up Saturday, September 12 at Keegans in Northeast Minneapolis.

If you’re coming, and haven’t (or even have) RSVPed, drop us a line at “feedbackinthedark”, which is a yahoo dot com email address.

I’ve already gotten an amazing number of responses, allowing that it’s this far ahead of the party.

Hope to see you there!

I’ve been blogging for seven and a half years; I was a couple of years ahead of the “fad” curve, for once in my life.

And when it comes to political blogs, I think the various blog cultures reflect their owners.  Liberals, being primarily herd creatures, are very hierarchical in their blogging; if you follow a lot of leftyblogs (and I do), you can almost see the memes starting with Kos and Atrios and the Huffpo, and work their way down through the ranks (and I use the term “ranks” intentionally).  Conservatives, being basically decentralized (one could almost say “rudderless”, at times in the past half-decade) have approach blogging in a much less organized way – but the underlying current among conservative blogs has been less to serve as a political engine than as a form of “samizdat” alternative media to outflank what conservatives perceive (correctly) to be the bias and in-the-bag nature of the mainstream media.  That is, of course, a much more scattered approach.

And for people who make their living at this, it’s a distinction that matters.

Of course, the mainstream media is the last group of people that can really understand that, but when organizations like CNN try to write about the subject:

“While it is obvious the progressive blogosphere is superior, we are being out-organized on Twitter,” said Gina Cooper, a blogger who helped organize Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of online liberal activists that met last week in Pittsburgh. “There is some catching up to do on the progressive side.”

It took me a moment push  my skull back into my head when I read that – but once I did, it made sense, in context (where “context” means “with the parameters of the discussion shoved into a nearly meaningless corner”).  Liberal bloggins is superior, as a medium for delivering votes to Democrats.  Until the likes of the Center for “Independent” Media and other “Progressive” groups started pouring money into leftyblogging, either directly or via providing cushy full-time blogging jobs for leading leftybloggers, the lefty blogosphere was a morass of banal, unfocused, Bush-deranged rage.  With money and leadership, the leftysphere became a tightly focused array of banal, Bush-deranged rage aimed at raising money and turning out voters.

Of course, in the leftyphere focuses on opinion and organization, not on serious analysis or reporting.  There is no leftyblog analog to, say, Powerline’s shredding of Dan Rather’s hit piece on President Bush’s Air National Guard record.

But viewed purely as organizing?  The piece has a point.  For conservatives, the blogosphere is largely a replacement for the morning newspaper. Most of us are not fundemantally politcal people – we want government out of our lives, not at the center.  So keeping our “organizing” down to 140 characters or less makes perfectly good sense.

Of course, being CNN, there has to be a certain aspect of “they have now idea what they’re talking about” endemic in the piece: 

“Twitter is a news funnel,” she said. “Conservatives are very tightly knit and getting their message out very well.”

“Conservatives are tightly knit?”  That, of course, is madness.  At this juncture in American history, “conservative” is about as meaningful as, say, “caucasian”; just as any descriptor that covers everything from Icelandic people to Berbers, from Slavs to Spaniards is basically so broad as to be meaningless, so “conservative” is today.  Any label that covers the fiscal moderate but evangelical pro-life Mike Huckabee and the tax and immigration hawk Tom Tancredo, or the fiscal conservative but socially pragrmatic Tim Pawlenty, lacks a certain degree of focus.

But the piece has a point; whatever conservatives lack these days in terms of ideological congruency, we are (finally) making up, after two slack cycles, in paying attention and waking up and smelling the coffee and getting out and into politics again, not because of but in spite of the leadership we’ve had – or lacked – in the past six years or so.

And – hopefully – realizing that no matter what your key issue, having any conservative in office, even a conservative that is imperfect on your pet issue, is going to be a better bet than having even the “best ” (hypothetical) Democrat.

The conservative twittersphere is more than adequate – as the article notes – in saying “show up” and “send money”.  As to the “why?”

Well, for that we still have the long-form blog.  And at that, the CNN piece notwithstanding, the conservative blogosphere still excels alone.

Fresch Fisch got an invite to Senator Klobuchar’s  “Tele-Town Hall”:

And it sure sounded on the up-and-up:

Dear :_____

As someone who has previously contacted our office to share your thoughts on issues important to you, I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to participate in a live statewide healthcare tele-town hall meeting this Sunday, August 23 rd , at 7:00 PM…Once you’re registered, you’ll get an automated reminder phone call on Friday evening and you’ll be called again on Sunday to be joined to the call.  The phone number you provide will be kept private.

I look forward to hearing from you on Sunday.

Sincerely,

Amy Klobuchar
United States Senator

I’d have certainly taken that as an encouraging sign!

As did Fisch!

I was really pumped! Maybe all those calls to her Minnesota and Washington offices paid off! I even received my follow up call on Saturday. I was really looking forward to Sunday night.

But we were both wrong:

6:45, 6:50, 7:00, no call, maybe they are just busy, maybe it’s running late. Then at 7:15 I received my recorded message from Amy saying she “missed me”. How could she have “missed me”, I was home since 5 or so. She explained I could listen to a recording of her town hall on her website. If my call was as 7:15, was it over yet? I guess when no one is dissenting, things go pretty fast.

A fifteen minute town hall?  For government work, that is pretty dang amazing!

Seriously – I know there were a few conservatives out there who’d heard from A-Klo about these meetings.  Did anyone actually get “the call?”

Or did A-Klo’s office decide you were racist Nazis?

Fisch:

I guess maybe I didn’t call her office enough I’ll start calling more.

I think that’s a fine plan.

Maybe a bunch of us need to call on her.

…in the age of Obama:

Know your place, you racist teabagging peasant!

Joe Lieberman on Alec Baldwin:

Asked Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union about Baldwin’s recent comments that he might move to Connecticut and mount a challenge to Lieberman because, as Baldwin told Playboy magazine, “I have no use for [Lieberman],”

What a coincidence. Washington has no use for Baldwin.

the Independent senator responded, “You know, make my day.”

Joe Lieberman reminds me of Rick Moranis’ Darth Helmet (mocking Darth Vader) in Spaceballs. The “You know,” preamble really brings shivers.

Clint Eastwood’s pinkie finger could not be reached for comment.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and a flaming liberal (one can assume evidenced by his fawning over Obama via his web site after the election) elected to have his liver transplant performed by a super-specialist surgeon in Tennessee. Job lives near Apple headquarters in Silicon Valley California.

“It’s not gaming the system,” [Jobs’ surgeon, Dr. James Eason] said in the Aug. 18 interview in Memphis. “It’s people choosing where they want their health care. Some people would leave Tennessee to go to California or somewhere else to seek treatment. Now we have people coming from California to Tennessee.”

I am not asserting that Obamacare would force someone like Jobs to seek care within the confines of California, or given his resources, even within the US. The fact that average Americans don’t know what choices they would have or would lose is probably what has derailed Obama’s momentum.

President Obama took his health care message to talk radio Thursday, telling listeners of Philadelphia-based host Michael Smerconish that he wants to overhaul the nation’s ailing health care system out of necessity rather than politics.

That’s a hard argument to make, at least to an informed audience, when Obamacare lacks tort reform. Malpractice litigation represents a large portion of the system’s cost structure and weighs heavily on health care provider decision-making when potentially being sued has to be constantly considered.

…but America isn’t buying it from a President and a Congress that will never be subject to the product of this “necessary” reform. They and their families will retain their private-jet health care.

America has witnessed a government that can’t administer an ill-advised yet simple rebate system for a narrow field of automotive sales transactions and yet aspires to manage the vast and varied intricacies of America’s health care complex.

The public trust of the Obama administration is fast eroding in the wake of White House confirmination that taxpayer dollars were spent on a spam campaign to promote reform most Americans are now resisting.

Liberal elites like Steve Jobs might also consider the fact that Jobs’ liver transplant, an unorthodox treatment of a rare cancer, while leaving 70% of patients healthy after one year, would most surely not be covered by Obamacare.

“It would not be considered the standard of care,” he said July 2 in a telephone interview. “It’s not something that would routinely be done nor is it proven to be a beneficial treatment, but it has nevertheless been tried and I’m sure in some cases been successful.”

However, experimental treatments, even if initially funded by the desperate-but-wealthy, tend to trickle down to the little people eventually once they are found to be beneficial – then widespread adoption drives down costs.

Moreover, at least in the case of Dr. Eason, government hasn’t forced him to care for those that can’t pay or represent a minority. He’s already doing it by his own volition.

While patients of Jobs’s stature are welcome, they aren’t regarded differently than anyone else, Eason said.

“Memphis is a very impoverished city in and of itself, with a large minority population,” he said. “I can tell you our floors aren’t full of billionaires.”

Eason said he’s aiming for better access to transplantation for the region’s poor, black and Hispanic populations.

One has to wonder if Jobs own personal experience might also give him cause for pause for Obama and his policies.

…please remember to join me on the Northern Alliance Radio Network tomorrow from 1-3PM on AM1280 (or at AM1280 The Patriot’s website.

In the first hour, I”ll be joined by Duane “Generalissimo” Patterson from the Hugh Hewitt Show.  We’ll be joined by special guest Rep. Michele Bachmann at 1:30.  And at 2PM I’ll be talking with Ed “Doc” Pepping, one of the original “Toccoa Boys” from E Company of the 506th Airborne, immortalized by Steven Ambrose in Band of Brothers.

Join us!

Obama says ” Republicans oppose my policies”:

I think early on, a decision was made by the Republican leadership that said, ‘Look, let’s not give him a victory, maybe we can have a replay of 1993, ’94, when Clinton came in, he failed on health care and then we won in the mid-term elections and we got the majority. And I think there are some folks who are taking a page out that playbook,” the president said.

Gosh, who’da thunk it?  An opposition party actually opposing?

Trying to provide an alternative?  Dissenting?

What kind of country does he think this is?

Last night, I went to the District 54 “Grill the Candidates” picnic, at Central Park in Roseville.

I didn’t get a count of the turnout, but it was packed, especially gven that it rained off and on for the first couple of hours.  So yeah – great turnout!

Maybe it was the hot dogs.  Then again, maybe it was the candidates; all the gubernatorial candidates, I believe; there are a total of nine, although I caught the speeches by Andersoon, Emmer, Kolls and Seifert, not to mention Laura Brod, whom rumor says is thinking of re-entering the race.  Of course, there was a who’s who of other GOP celebs there; Tony Sutton, Michael Brodkorb, Barb Davis-White, Ed Matthews, Sue Jeffers, Enge and a slew of others.

The best part?  Listening to the candidates, it sounds like they get it; “bipartisanship” is a trap; the GOP’s way forward it to provide an alternative to the DFL’s spendthrift ways.

And people are feeling energized in a way they were not for the past two years.  I observed many times during the ’08 campaign; the GOP runs on volunteers, and after “must-win” full-court pushes in ’98, ’00, ’02, ’04 and’06, the habitual volunteers were completely exhausted.  Between that and the nomination of the fairly politically uninspiring John McCain, the mojo was gone.

If the rest of the party is feeling the way people sounded last night, the vacation is over.

This is going to be a fun year.

A Scots judge frees a terminally ill convicted terrorist:

 Scotland freed the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds Thursday, letting the Libyan go home to die despite American pleas to show no mercy for the man responsible for the 1988 attack that killed 270 people.

The White House declared it “deeply” regretted the Scottish decision as Abdel Baset al-Megrahi left prison and flew to Libya on an Airbus dispatched to Glasgow Airport.

Scotland’s justice secretary said freeing the bomber was an expression of the Scottish people’s humanity but U.S. family members of Lockerbie victims expressed outrage.

It was “an expression of Scottish values” that al-Megrahi be allowed to return home to die.

Of course, al-Megrahi – who has never expressed the faintest remorse for the murder of almost 300 people, and had to be dragged from Libya under international pressure when his value to Gaddhaffi finally dropped below break-even – never allowed any of his victims the same courtesy.

For those who’ve forgotten:

Many of the victims were American college students visting home for Christmas.

Others were innocent Scots in their homes.

It’s good to know that some Scots have some real values:

Some men outside the prison made obscene gestures as al-Megrahi’s prison van drove by toward the airport.

After the Munich Olympic Massacre in 1972, when the “international community” slapped the few apprehended terrorists on the wrist and let them off with fewer consequences than a German traffic ticket for murdering the Israeli Olympic Team, the Israelis sent hit teams roaming the world to track down and kill the terrorists.  Mossad shot them down like scabrous dogs in the streets, pumping their chests full of lead from contact range; they blew them up in hotel rooms; they bombed their cars.  (Tragically, they killed an innocent Arab waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, in a case of mistaken identity; the person for whom he was mistaken lived on for years – but he can’t have made a whole lot of long term plans).

Just saying.  I don’t give a rat’s ass how terminal this piece of human-shaped mold is.  If what he did doesn’t warrant a midnight date with a JDAM or a silenced bullet in the dark or a garrote, I don’t know what does.

On Thursday and Friday, email and voicemail will be on Autopilot as I roam the hills and bends of Minnesota and Wisconsin, avoiding nature’s fury on a bike I haven’t tried before.

The 2009 Road King, courtesy of Hopkins Hitching Post.

Don’t call me I’ll call you.

“Russians don’t take a dump without a plain…” – Admiral Painter (Fred Thompson), Hunt for Red October.

“Democrats don’t protest “Astroturf” unless some major organization tells them where and when to show up, and trained on when and how to cheer” – Mitch Berg, Hunt for Red November

Hyperbolic?  Maybe.  But I never let the chance for a good line pass me by.

Either, it seems, can whomever writes press releases for Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison:

As Minnesotans, we know we need health insurance reform.

(Actually, smart Minnesotans know we need it  vastly less than most people – about 8% of Minnesotans lack any form of health insurance – but then, “smart people” is not who this announcement was aimed at.  I digress).

We are sick of a few loud people dominating this debate.

(So much better to have a few people speaking into microphones in hearing rooms in Washington going unquestioned).

Please join us for a rally in support of reform.

I’d love to get video of the “Minnesotans For Higher Taxes and Eternal Deficits In Exchange For Crappy, Unsustainable Health Insurance” rally.

The rally will be followed by a canvass, where we will hit the streets and talk to you friends and neighbors about the need for reform this year!

Be careful when Democrat “canvassers” “talk“.

Featured speakers include:

Congresswoman Betty McCollum
Congressman Keith Ellison
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman
Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak
State Representative Erin Murphy

I wonder what ugly names Ellison will call anyone who opposes Obamacare?

Oh, there’ll be at least one.

Let me know if you plan on attending.

GeeEmInEm makes Tthe first call of election night, 2010:

In an atomosphere that is growing increasingly amenable to Republicans, I would wager that Rep. Eric Massa’s loss will be one of the early calls on election night 2010.Massa, it seems, told the Netroots he would “vote adamantly against the interests of my district”, a district he called a “right wing Republican district”.

T-shirt makers!  Warm up your silkscreens!

One of the main motivators for Obamacare socialized medicine, we are told, is that America’s health picture is so dismal and that our life expenctancy is falling, and…

…well, no.  Just, no.  Life expectancies in the US are up, and sharply:

The increase is due mainly to falling death rates in almost all the leading causes of death. The average life expectancy for babies born in 2007 is nearly three months greater than for children born in 2006.

The new U.S. data is a preliminary report based on about 90 percent of the death certificates collected in 2007. It comes from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Life expectancy is the period a child born in 2007 is expected to live, assuming mortality trends stay constant. U.S. life expectancy has grown nearly one and a half years in the past decade, and is now at an all-time-high.

Last year, the CDC said U.S. life expectancy had inched above 78 years. But the CDC recently changed how it calculates life expectancy, which caused a small shrink in estimates to below 78.

I suppose it’s possible that socialized medicine will increase life expentancy; people who are waiting in line at the Department of Pharmacy won’t be subject to the risks of being at home, work or out on the street.

Just trying to find the silver lining.

The KSTP Eye in the Sky followed Brett Fahhhhrvuh in a black Cadillac Escalade from St. Paul’s downtown airport to Viking headquarters in Eden Prairie yesterday in an OJ-esque media frenzy, followed later by the official contract-signing announcement later in the day.

Meanwhile ungrateful Packers fans have put a bounty on Fayver, belying the fact that they actually had the pleasure of seeing Favreau play in his prime – unlike Vikings fans who are snapping up tickets just as Ziggy hoped.

The Vikings have sold more than 3,000 season tickets since news broke that Brett Favre was coming to Minnesota. That’s in approximately a 24-hour span.

Chief marketing officer Steve LaCroix says the team has sold about 10,000 single-game tickets during that time as fans clamor over the arrival of the veteran quarterback.

Seats for the game against Green Bay on Oct. 5 are only available through a season ticket. There are roughly 7,000 season tickets remaining. The Vikings had to race to beat the blackout deadline for several games last season.

Merchandise is also moving. LaCroix said several hundred pre-orders for Favre jerseys were placed online Tuesday. The purple No. 4s were to show up in stores on Wednesday.

Brett Favre’s signing is the Ziggy administration’s Stimulus Package.

Costly, of short-lived benefit at best, and leaving the team worse off in the end.

We’re about two weeks away from the Minnesota State Fair, which is always the highlight of the the NARN’s year.  But that’s so big, it needs its own post.

Just wanna point out that Saturday’s broadcast is going to be an embarassment of radio riches, and that if you don’t tune in, generations yet unborn will repudiate your short-sightedness.

For starters, Duane “The Generalissimo” Patterson, ace producer of the Hugh Hewitt show, will be guest-hosting with me live from LA.   It’s always fun talking with Duane, and he loves getting calls from Minnesotans.  Especially about Disneyland rides.

At 1:30, we’ll be joined by Representative Michele Bachmann, of the Sixth Congressional District.  We’ll be talking about healthcare and the 2010 race, among other things.

And we saved the best for last; I’ll be joined at 2PM by “Doc” Pepping, one of the original members of E Company of the 506th Airborne Regiment, better known to recent generations as Stephen Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers”.  Doc was one of the original Toccoa boys, a medic during the Normandy assault, and has a lot to talk about.  He’ll be joined by Dave Cruz from “Honor The Fallen” and Mark Schultz from “Vettes for Vets”.  It’ll be crowded in the studio, but the fun kind.

Mark it down, and join us!

I’ve spent years bagging on Dave Mindemann, blogger at mnpACT!.  Now, when I say “bagging”, I mean “on Mindemann’s policy stances and analysis”, mostly; I disagree with the guy, but he’s no drooling cretin.

And he’s in the midst of a thoughtful – if, I believe, flawed – analysis of the Sixth District race. 

Much to go after – and I’ll leave it to 6th CD residents King Banaian, Andy Applikowski and Gary Gross to go after most of it. 

But Mindemann, even as he notes that traditional social conservative issues deeply resonate with the Sixth’s voters, thinks he sees signs of “Bachmann Fatigue”:

Additional clues seem to come from the county numbers [from the ’08 election]. Bachmann clearly underperformed the Republican vote. McCain did much better county by county in the district. Now, the first thought is….. of course, that’s true, because of the three way race for the Congressional seat. However, that doesn’t explain Tinklenberg’s numbers. His support mirrored Obama’s and even exceeded it in places. That clearly indicates we have McCain voters moving to the Independence Party in the Congressional race.

The obvious question would be why? The answer can only be speculated upon, but it would seem that Bachmann’s antics are beginning to “fatigue” her marginal support. They are looking for an alternative, but can’t bring themselves to pull the DFL lever.

The other answer – the one that seems “obvious” to me – is that McCain and Obama’s numbers fairly closely mirrored the fortunes of their parties in a year that was a generational low-water mark for the GOP, especially given the phenomenon that Obama’s candidacy was (and the coattails he didn’t extend; check out Franken’s relative performance).  And in cases where McCain outperformed Bachmann, he may have a point, although I’m tempted to chalk it up to the fact that people are less engaged in down-ticket races than in the Presidency, even places like the Sixth. 

But in that context – that of a year that was a GOP bloodbath – having Bachmann come in five points lower than she did in 2006, in a year that saw catastrophic GOP results and against a massive full-court out-of-district financial onslaught and that rare Ventura “Independence” Party candidate that was remotely palatable to Sixth District voters (the otherwise apocryphal lapsed Republican Bob Anderson, who may have been the first IP candidate since Jim Gibson to draw nearly as many GOP and DFL votes) is probably a sign of strength. 

But Mindemann brings up an interesting question; do “antics” affect voters’ appreciation of an incumbent that otherwise reflects their values as closely as Bachmann obviously does those of the Sixth District?  As I noted during the campaign, Bachmann is an unusual specimen in national politics – someone who leads with her chin and wears her heart on her sleeve.  She’s the polar opposite of politican “engineers” like Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman, people who figure all the angles and consequences before going public with a stance or position (which makes it sound more cynical than I intend; it’s a perfectly legitimate approach).  And – this is important – every single voter in the Sixth knew this long before Bachmann ran for Congress.  Bachmann was a prominent Senator, and before that an equally-prominent and outspoken eduation reform advocate.   And the thin film of Sixth voters who didn’t know about Bachmann got whatever they may have missed from the small cottage industry in hysterical Bachmannphobia that sprang up while the Representative was still a state senator.

So is there anyone, anywhere in the Sixth, who doesn’t know that Rep. Bachmann is a live wire who wears her heart on her sleeve on all subjects, and who hasn’t long since made up their mind, pro or con?   And if there are, does anyone seriously think that the inevitably-eroding fortunes of the Democrats, as the price of the Obama administration starts to sink in in rock-ribbed fiscal hawk sanctuaries like the Sixth, is going to skip the Sixth?

Add to that the power of incumbency – I mean, if you want to talk about “antics”, remember that people keep returning people like Maxine Waters, people whose “antics” passed “amusing” and swerved into “bizarre”, to office.

Bachmann may be vulnerable, some day, against someone.  But at this remove, I find it hard to believe 2010 will be the election where anyone proves it.

The other day, I wrote a piece about regional DFL activists and media figures trafficking in what I perceive (correctly, I think) to be Administration talking points.

Pat Kessler – WCCO’s long-time Capitol correspondent and one of Minnesota’s foremost political journalists – notes that he’s been sending the following clarification to emailers asking about the appearance on KFAN that started the brouhaha:

You need to know I did not call health care opponents racists.

What I said Saturday was that some of the tension around the debate over President Obama’s policies is ‘about race’- some; not all or even most, but some.

I also referred to ‘code words’ and phrases, and I could have been clearer.  I did not mean that everyone who uses such language intends it to frighten or disparage black people.  However, it is a matter of historical fact that certain rhetoric has had that impact in the past, and that some black people might — and do– interpret it that way today.

Well, fair enough, as far as it goes.

But – and I’m not aiming this at Kessler, specifically – there’s another set of code words and phrases at play here.  There’s a solid case to be made that the biggest divide Obama brings out in America is class, not race.

Class is all over the place these days.  From Obama’s two-tiered healthcare plan and the privately-educated elites’ assault on vouchers and school choice to Elizabeth Gates’ snarks about Sgt. Crowley’s eye liner, the Obama Administration is all about class divides; the nation’s self-appointed brain trust has gotten the hoi-polloi to anoint one of them (of a conveniently PR-worthy race) as president, and now they’re getting their due, exorcising their white liberal guilt at the wheel of the biggest spending machine in history.

And the campaign against dissent is dredging up – and creating – all kinds of code words to keep the peasants down and in their place.  Dissent from Obamacare, from Porkulus and the Eternal Deficit is compared with a regime that murdered tens of millions and made toothbrush mustaches forever out; gigglingly linked with a mild but lurid sex act generally associated with homosexual relations; lumped with a hare-brained “birther” conspiracy that every significant dissenter has repudiated; put on watch lists and impugned with the slander that it is sympathetic with likes of Timothy McVeigh and Gordon Kahl, even with the idea of killing the President.

In short – dissent is called the province of the ignorant, depraved and, let’s face it, “racist” masses that the government needs to protect the rest of America from.

America has a racist past, it’s true.  Unlike every other significant nation on earth, America has spent the past 150 years wrestling with that past, in its own imperfect way.

Maybe all that prejudice and hate need to go somewhere; the people who dare to dissent while middle-class and unconnected with clout are the unlucky, and absolutely permissible, targets.

You think a Packers/Vikings game was a family-un-friendly cesspool of vulgarity, projectile vomit, urine and feces before?

Just wait until the Vikes/Packers games this year – assuming Favre makes it that far.

Packers fans will be leaping from the cheap seats when they see him in Purple.

Personally, I think Jon Favreau would make a better quarterback.

…at least he knows how to pronounce his name. Cheaper too.

$12M for one year? Ziggy really should have gone with the month-to-month plan.

After months of back and forth indecision, the Hamlet of Hattiesburg has finally chosen to be… A Minnesota Viking:

Brett Favre will be a Viking after all.

Three weeks after the future Hall of Fame quarterback told the Vikings he had decided to remain retired, he arrived in Minnesota and prepared to sign a contract at Winter Park.

Word on the street is that Vikings coach Brad Childress called Brett Favre after being stricken with pangs of guilt over how the Sage Rosenfels / Tavaris Jackson tandem would unfairly tear up the league, obliterating quarterback passing records and leading the Vikings to an almost automatic Superbowl victory. With 40 year old Favre at the helm the Vikings should keep things a bit more even and interesting.

Kidding!

I’m thinking this image may be a wee bit closer to the true story here:

“

Quick: which era would you consider the greatest in human history? I’ll give you a few moments to think about it.

…

…

…

What did you come up with? Did you choose the classical era, with the birth of modern philosophy, democracy, and classical art? Or perhaps you’re someone who appreciates the achievements of the modern world, in which the health and wealth of people around the world is greater than its ever been? Or did you focus on some other time? The era of revolution perhaps where men through off the rule of kings for representative governments?
Turns out you’re all wrong. It’s actually been all downhill since the Paleolithic…

IMAGINE a small group of farmers tending a rice paddy some 5,000 years ago in eastern Asia or sowing seeds in a freshly cleared forest in Europe a couple of thousand years before that. It is here, a small group of scientists would have you believe, that humanity launched climate change. Long before the Industrial Revolution—indeed, long before a worldwide revolution in intensive farming, the results of which kept humanity alive—people caused unnatural exhalations of greenhouse gases that had an impact on the world’s climate.

I imagine this is just the first step in a longer scientific trend leading to the conclusion that coming down from the trees was a bad idea in the first place. And of course this will be rivaled by the school of scientific thought contending that the trees themselves were a bad move and we shouldn’t have even left the oceans (a little inside joke there, from a book which rapidly seems to find it’s once absurd-seeming humor challenged by an increasingly absurd reality).