When you play bass, you’re rarely the focus of attention.  The guitar is usually front and center; the drummer gets to smash things, at least by appearances.  Not a lot of bass players get much attention, and when they do it’s usually because they sing lead (Rush’s Geddy Lee, the Grass Roots’ Rob Grill, Chicago’s Peter Cetera), or they’re comically inept (Sid Vicious), or they are standout musicians in bands that rely on the bass to hold the whole mess together (The Who’s late John Entwistle, the Clash’s Paul Simonon).

And the bigger the band, the farther in the background they get pushed – because the bass player’s job, along with the drummer, is to be the bedrock on which the rest of the band’s sound is built, and with big bands there’s a lot riding on that bedrock.  Who was the most unprepossessing member of the Rolling Stones?  Bill Wyman, of course – to the point that many people don’t know he’s gone.  Duff McKagan was the beating heart behind Guns ‘n Roses’ Appetite for Destruction; Leon Wilkerson held Lynyrd Skynyrd together; who knew?

And the most in-the-background bassist from the biggest band of all?

It’s Garry Tallent’s sixtieth birthday today.

And the more you listen for Tallent, the more of him there is to hear.  Tallent, for a bit player in a big, big band, is an extraordinarily fluid, mobile bassist.  In fact, it’s easy to miss how much of the band’s motion he provides.

Think about it.  Max Weinberg, the band’s drummer, is a Charlie Watts-style human metronome; he has to be, to keep the whole nine-piece melange in time.  You can count the times he’s gotten to cut loose in the past 35 years – “Born In The USA”, “Roulette”, “Candy’s Room”, “Jackson Cage” – on a hand, with a finger or so in change.  The other key elements – Roy Bittan, the late Danny Federici (and his replacement, Charles Giordano), and the band’s guitar line, whether the classic Springsteen/Van Zandt pairing or today’s Bruce/Steve/Nils/Patti onslaught – and of course Clarence Clemons and Soozie Tyrell, are all layers piling on top of the whole mass of sound.  Weinberg may as well be playing drums in a symphony orchestra, for the all the room he has to stretch out, beyond the occasional accent here and there.

But Tallent is a sly one, if you pay attention.

“Fire“?  Well, that’s a no-brainer.  The verses are pretty much bass solos.

Much more interesting, though, is last series of choruses in “Incident on 57th Street“; as the band builds momentum after the final verse, Tallent starts an increasingly aggressive bass line that sneaks up on you behind the wash of keyboards and backup vocals, until you realize that Tallent’s solo is driving the whole thing.

“Trapped” is even more clever, in its own way.  One of Springsteen’s very few recorded cover songs (until the Seeger sessions, anyway), it’s an almost unrecognizably rock-y remake of a Jimmy Cliff reggae classic.  The rest of the band bashes into it like it’s a Who cover – not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se.  But it’s in Tallent’s bass line that you can hear a faint echo of the song’s roots, just a little zing of caribbean syncopation to counterpoint the rest of the version’s Jersey Shore rock’nroll brawn.

I’ve written about “Backstreets“, of course, over and over again; it’s the best breakup song ever written, it’s one of Danny Federici and Roy Bittan’s best moments together.  But throughout, especially in the song’s choruses, Tallent’s bass line takes what could easily have been a pretty blah mid-tempo ballad, a John Cafferty wham-bam one-to-minor-six etude, and adds an agitated pulse in the middle; it’s disquieting, and carries on the agitated theme that Bittan and Federici set up in the song’s intro.

Could I go on, sure.

But it’d be much better to go turn your internal equalizer way, way down and listen for yourself.

Anyway – happy birthday, Garry Tallent!

UPDATE:  Wow – this is cool!  Welcome, Backstreets readers!  I remember when I was a kid, thinking “how cool would it be to get an article in Backstreets“?  This is just about as fun!  Thanks, all!

And if you like this, I’ll direct you to my tribute to Darkness on the Edge of Town, and my memorial to Danny.

And my thirtieth anniversary of The River?  Oh, yeah.  Wrote it six months ago!

Thanks for stopping by!

The old big-“L” Libertarian dream is to have no president at all in the White House; to just let the executive branch almost completely wither away.

Of course, in the era of Hope ‘n Change, there’s no danger of the executive branch going the way of the Dodo, Vanilla Ice or Crispin Glover.

But is Barack Obama the un-President?

It is important that the nation is suddenly awakening to the possibility that the president has no real plan for anything whatsoever, and never did. He literally seems to be making it up as he goes along, and his strategy is to do nothing at all but procrastinate.

In the recent past, we have watched the White House and its branch offices gaze glassily past Iran, the Taliban, North Korea and Moscow in hot pursuit of their real enemy, which appears to be the dissenting media.

Economic policy, formerly the purview of rooms that at least contained Larry Summers, is now directed by a Chicago-hood playground pal named Valerie, and its focus is on the compensation levels of 200 people.

Joe Biden is the commander in chief.

Of course, the problem with un-Presidents, especially un-Presidents who get in too deep in foreign affairs, is that eventually they have to prove they’re not un-Presidents.  John F. Kennedy was dubious at best at foreign affairs; after getting a huge black eye at the Bay of Pigs, he approved sending troops to Vietnam – for the quick win, naturally, to show that he was really in charge.  Carter, of course, embarked on the Desert One debacle.

What’ll Obama do to show that he’s really not a pretty suit in a fancy office?

Chris Conner, GOP-endorsed candidate for St. Paul School Board, is speaking tonight at the Twin Cities Republican Association:

The Twin Cities  Republican Association will be hosting a dinner at the Fort Snelling Officer’s Club on Tuesday, October 27th, beginning at 6:30 p.m..  The topic for the evening will be to explore how a conservative runs for the important position of school board member; challenges, obstacles and hopes.

I have a family engagement (blahl) but I hope you can make it.

120,000 calls in four hours…and we’re done.

Park Nicollet Clinic shut down its flu-shot appointment line today after it was flooded with 120,000 calls in a four-hour period this morning.

They need to get that soup Nazi guy to handle this.

“Not pregnant? No shot for you!

Older than four? No shot for you!

Healthy immune system? No shot for you!

Move along!”

That would work.

The American people are turning on socialized healthcare.  Indeed, the push to socialize healthcare and use it as a vehicle to put the American people in eternal debt has done the impossible – brought the conservative movement from near-death back to national political viability and power, inside of a year.

Healthcare may or may not turn out to be the epic miscalculation that it was for Bill Clinton, when it sparked the conservative onslaught in 1994.  I’m gonna hold out for “may”, of course, and do my best to make it a “will”.

And we had a good sign in that direction yesterday; the Dems are P trying to snooker the American people (emphasis added by me):

In an appearance at a Florida senior center, the Democratic leader referred to the so-called public option as “the consumer option.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., appeared by Pelosi’s side and used the term “competitive option.”

Both suggested new terminology might get them past any lingering doubts among the public—or consumers or competitors.

“You’ll hear everyone say, ‘There’s got to be a better name for this,'” Pelosi said. “When people think of the public option, public is being misrepresented, that this is being paid for with their public dollars.”

Ah.

So our tax dollars – notwithstanding the longtime Democrat meme that everything we earn belongs to the government before it belongs to us – are not public, now?

Wow.  Maybe those “the income tax is unconstitutional” people have a point!

And since it’s my money, then Nan Pelosi and her hamsters in Washington should have no control over how I spend it, right?

To: President Obama

From: Mitch Berg, staunch critic and forthright conservative

Re:  Setting The Record Straight

Mr. President,

You stink.  Your policies are destroying this country, at home and abroad.

I say this as a representative of a conservative blog and a conservative talk radio show.

Please sic your PR goons on the blog and the show.

That is all.

If there’s a race that’s as important as the Saint Paul Mayor’s race this year, it’s the Saint Paul School Board.

Three endorsed Republicans – Pat Igo, John Krenik and Chris Conner – made it through the primaries, along with the usual pack of DFLers.

And one “independent”, Jean O’Connor.

Or…is she?

Jean was endorsed by the teachers union. They told John krenik they don’t endorse republicans.

That might be damning enough all by itself.  But there’s more:

She was endorsed by the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce. She’s stated that George Latimer recruited her  to run. He’s listed on her lit piece as the chair of her committee (www.occonnellforstpaulkids.org).

[Billy Mays] But wait! [/Billy Mays off]

Amy Filice is her treasurer. She’s Dr. Greg filice’s wife.
He was on the board for years, Ann Carroll was his protoge, then he lost in 99? but she won. He was on the Board of Health Start, the system of clinics in the schools and it was in 99 that they introduced the idea of condoms being handed out in the schools.
Now parents supposedly sign a form saying they do or don’t want that.

That doesn’t sound very “independent” – or “fresh”, “new” or much of a “change” – at all!

Of course, not all is well in the DFL camp:

Vallay Varro has a glossy taboid out. Latimer has a quote on p.3 supporting her and his picture. But in the back, p.4, there’s a sample ballot and it shows all the names but just the endorsed DFL’ers names filled in, Jean’s blank.

She’s upset because she’s  one of them, but Latimer has played a big trick on everyone. Now in St. Paul we have 3 political parties – DFL, Dfl-light, just call yourself an independent and you’re a fresh, new voice, and Republican.

And make no mistake about it – in Saint Paul, the DFL is no “fresh voice”.  The Saint Paul Public Schools spend more money than the city itself does.  But their graduation rates are well down under 50%, and for all the district’s barbering about diversity, the achievement gap is one of the worst in the country and heading south.

The district does, however, excel at spending lots and lots of money playing “pick the celebrity Superintendant“.

Anyway – don’t be fooled, Saint Paul voters.

One of the irritating realities about the law, the part that most vexes us non-lawyers, is that laws pretty much mean what they say they mean, word for word, letter for letter.

Which isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing; once you learn to read a statute, you get a pretty clear idea of what the “law” actually is (barring “case law”, or other courts’ decisions which bear on the law you’re reading, which is one of those things you need to hire a lawyer for, since finding cases is one of those things that is pretty much designed to be impenetrable to people who haven’t been to law school.  And it’s designed that way by the people who write and pass the laws, most of whom have been to law school.  Connect the dots, people.  Connect the dots).   And this can be enlightening; for starters, I’m able to tell people who say “if someone breaks into my house, I’m gonna shoot ’em, and nobody’s gonna do anything about it!” to “shut up and quit being an ignorant effing cracker” with some authority.  (These people are never Minnesota carry permit holders, by the way). 

I’ve digressed a bit, here.

The problem, of course, is that often the law is ambiguous.  This is partly due to the fact that many legislators are idiots.  It’s even more due to the fact that no legislator can anticipate all the possible implications of the law he/she is trying to write.  This, indeed, is usually a good thing; would we want a clairvoyant legislature?  Would it be a good thing if Phyllis Kahn could predict your future? 

Again, I’ve digressed.

It’s when you mix vague, inconsistent, ambiguous laws with big, ugly, emotional topics – in this case, the “war on drugs”, which a third of Americans believe to be a quagmire, a third believe to be a righteous holy war, and a third of Americans don’t care about because they’re tweaking, jonesing, baked, zoobed out or bombed out of their minds?

Well, then you get decisions like this one from the Supreme Court of Minnesota:

In a 4-3 decision Thursday, the state’s highest court said a person can be prosecuted for a first-degree drug crime for 25 grams or more of bong water that tests positive for a controlled substance.

The decision, which reverses two lower court rulings, came in the case of Sara Peck. Items seized during a search of her Rice County home in 2007 included a glass bong — a type of water pipe often used to smoke drugs — that contained 37 grams — about 2 1/2 tablespoons — of a liquid that tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine.

Note that this decision reverses two lower court rulings – which means that some county attorney spent tons and tons of taxpayer money to appeal the ruling all the way to the SCOM.

Over two teapoons of meth-infused bong spew.

The Supreme Court said that unambiguously counts as a drug “mixture” under the wording of state law and sent the case back to Rice County District Court for further proceedings. The decision, authored by Justice G. Barry Anderson, noted that the liquid wasn’t plain clear water, but had a pink color and fruity odor, and that a narcotics officer had testified that drug users sometimes keep bong water to drink or inject later.

The statute defines a drug “mixture” as “a preparation, compound, mixture, or substance containing a controlled substance, regardless of purity.” When the language of a statute is unambiguous, the high court said, precedents prohibit courts from disregarding the letter of the law under the pretext of pursuing the letter of the law.

The possibilities are endless.  If you have a roommate/spouse/family member who smokes a lot of pot, and the the smoke collects on the ceiling, and some narcotics officer testifies that sometimes stoners will lick residue off of ceilings for a cheap buzz, then is your paint-job a “drug mixture?”

If you snort some coke, and then blow your nose and toss the kleenex, could your host be prosecuted over your snot being in their wastebasket?

In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Paul Anderson said the majority’s decision “does not make sense, and borders on the absurd.”

Paul Anderson is the hero of the day.

Local concealed-carry activists adopt a highway and – this seems to confuse some people – actually pick up the trash, while armed…

…and yet no gunfights broke out:

A group of Adopt a Highway volunteers were packing more than trash along the shoulder of Minnesota 55 in Mendota Heights on Sunday morning.

With legal guns on their hips, a dozen area residents spent nearly three hours picking up litter — everything from cigarette butts to blown-out tires — along a 2-mile stretch of the highway just east of the Mendota Bridge. It was the inaugural event for the group, which registered with the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Adopt a Highway program under the name Minnesota Carry Permit Holders.

“We believe this is the safest stretch of road right now in the state,” said Jason Walberg, who collected trash with a Springfield XD .40-caliber, semi-automatic handgun clipped to his belt.

It’s good to know that law-abiding citizens have some friends in officialdom with some common sense:

“This is a perfectly legal group … what they do is clear in state law,” MnDOT spokesman Kent Barnard said, adding that — personally — he has had a gun-carrying permit for several years. “Now, if we had the perverts and pedophiles out there, that would be a different story.”

I hope Mr. Barnard doesn’t take any official crap for having said that.

It should go without saying that any group of rigorously law-abiding citizens availing themselves of their legal right to exercise another legal right peacefully and constructively should get compared in the local media with the worst our society has to offer, naturally:

Adopt a Highway agreements say the agency can refuse, cancel or revise the agreement “if in its sole judgment the nature of the group or its sign is political or in questionable taste.”

“If a group is legitimate and wants to pick up litter, we simply can’t turn them away because we might not agree with something,” Ekern said.

She noted how several years ago the Missouri Department of Transportation lost a legal battle with the Ku Klux Klan over a stretch of highway. The case ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Missouri officials “must’ve seen the writing on the wall” before the court decision, Ekern said, because the state renamed the adopted highway for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

Well, not for most people; one of the commenters seems not to get it yet:

Boy, next thing you know they’ll be having KKK members picking up trash along 94 & Dale.

Why can’t they just pick up the trash without acting like, “I’m cool, I carry a gun.” What a bunch of Dirty Harry wanna bees.

Real men don’t have to carry guns.

That’s correct.  Free will is involved.  Now go back to writing for Minnesota Tragedy of Spyrochaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project.

With one exception Nick Ferraro, the Pioneer Press’ reporter, does a fair job, though – which might be symptomatic that the notion of law-abiding citizens exercising a legal, civil right and doing it without a whole lot of muss and fuss really isn’t that big a story.

The exception – and it’s not Ferraro’s fault, most likely, but some copy editor who (I’ll be charitable) probably didn’t think that hard before headlining the story “Packing Heat, Picking Up Trash”. 

Note to all of the media of the world; nobody has used the term “packing heat” to refer to carrying a firearm since James Cagney ruled the silver screen.  Please cease and desist.

The Strib notes – wonder of wonders – that the GOP’s candidates are a conservative lot:

In the early GOP field for 2010, a common theme has emerged — government should be smaller. Some candidates want to dramatically cut back on mandates and local funding, some would merge departments, reduce state workers and slash one out of every $5 the state is slated to spend. What they want, at bottom, is a government that not only does more with less, but which simply does less.

The candidates are ambitious in their pledges to shrink government — “The sky’s the limit,” state Rep. Tom Emmer said at a recent forum — but haven’t yet worked out all the details.

And that’s the good news.  The GOP of Arne Carlson is dead and unlamented.

“But wait!”, the likes of Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman will respond, “what about the GOP that sat down and worked with the DFL for a better Minnesota?”

For starters, your idea of a “better Minnesota”is a Minnesota that looks, taxes and spends like Massachussets and California.

Second – it was all baked wind and you know it.  While the MNGOP – under its old guise, the “Independent Republican” Party – compromised to the point where it was indistinguishable from the DFL, the DFL never compromised on anything unless the votes forced them to.

Third – this is the campaign. This is the time when parties should present choices to voters.  The MNGOP during Arne Carlson’s era was nothing but the DFL in better suits with less chanting.  Compromise and “working with the opposition” are for after the election, when everyone is in office.

The plans, still in their infancy, could run into political trouble, practical and legal problems and have even prompted disagreement among the Republican field. A smaller, leaner government — long a mantra for Republicans — could hold appeal in cost-conscious times but could alienate those who believe government must step in during economic low-points.

That’s the point.  People who believe that government’s role is to spend money like crack whores with stolen Platinum Cards probably should be in the DFL.  It’ll make for a more honest conversation.

The Obama administration continues to drag its feet, exposing their utter incompetence on yet another front; the war in Afghanistan – ironically the one Obama wanted.

Now he has it. Predictably, his administration is once again resorting to the tiresome practice of blaming the previous administration for their own inability to manage the war Obama campaigned on as the one we should have been fighting.

Now’s his chance…

…to blame Bush.

…again.

On October 18, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows and, in the process of answering questions about Barack Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan, accused the Bush administration of failing to ask the most basic questions about that country and our war there.

Gibbs went on…claiming that a request for troops from General David McKiernan during the final year of the Bush administration “sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president’s, for more than eight months.”

Obama lies. Emanuel lies. Gibbs lies.

In fact, the Bush administration did ask those questions. From mid-September to mid-November 2008, a National Security Council team, under the direction of General Doug Lute, conducted an exhaustive review of Afghanistan policy. The interagency group included high-ranking officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the office of the director of national intelligence, the office of the vice president, the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its objective was to assess U.S. -policy on Afghanistan, integrating a simultaneous military review being conducted by CENTCOM, so as to present President Bush with a series of recommendations on how best to turn around the deteriorating situation there.

…and the troop requests?

McKiernan wanted more troops–he asked for three additional brigades in the summer of 2008–but he understood that he could have them only when they became available. “McKiernan was making requests down the line,” says a Pentagon official, “and late in 2008 we did have the ability to commit more forces. So we did.” Indeed, Bush sent nearly 7,000 additional troops to Afghanistan before he left office, including one brigade that had been repurposed from Iraq.

Barack Obama is the President of Broken Promises. When he can’t or chooses not to keep his word, he waffles; he lies.

…and is so arrogant so as to think no one notices.

HT Chris F.

No huge surprise here; AFSCME, the party that likes its politicians dumb, compliant, and voting for big government, endorses former Senator and State Auditor Mark Dayton, who…well, fits the description to a T:

Dayton, a DFLer, won the AFSCME Minnesota Council 5 nod over nine other DFL contenders as well as Republican candidate Patricia Anderson screened for the endorsement Saturday.

The AFSCME endorsement, which brings with it the campaigning might of the union, is Dayton’s first major endorsement.

“Mark Dayton has won statewide elections — twice,” Eliot Seide, executive director of AFSCME Council 5, said in a news release. “Minnesotans know and like Mark.”

Well, yes – we “like” him because he makes us laugh.  For example, when he closed up his DC office and scampered back to Minnesota because of some unnamed terrorist threat that left every other senator’s office opened.  We got our yuks.  We did.

Seide had said earlier that union members would be very interested in candidates’ electability as well as their history and stands on issues important to union members. Democrats have not won the governor’s office in Minnesota for more than two decades.

And if Dayton wins the endorsement, they should continue this record pretty handily.

Just a quick note – Speed Gibson, one of the best of a large crop of great MOB blogs, has moved.

Update your links accordingly.

So I installed WordPress 2.8.5 yesterday.  That is to say, I upgraded from WordPress 2.0.4 – which, in blog content manager terms, is kinda like going from a ’59 Buick to a ’09 Corvette.

Which isn’t to say the actual content is going to change or anything.  Just saying.

If there’s one thing that encourages me, it’s that people on both sides of the aisle are working against “Instant Runoff Voting”, which is going to get its first, sure-to-be-disastrous workout in Minneapolis’ next election.  There are elements in Saint Paul that also wat to institute “IRV” in Minnesota’s capitol city.

Of course, the NARN has has spoken with Andy Cilek of the Minnesota Voters Alliance for many years now.  The MVA states a pretty convincing case; IRV is a lousy idea.

And if you need to be convinced, still?  There’s opposition on the left as well.  It was my pleasure to interview one of my longtime political sparring partners, Chuck Repke of Saint Paul, yesterday on the NARN.  Chuck is with No Bad Ballots.  He and I disagree on just about every subject imaginable – and I imagine it’s at least mutual between Repke and Cilek.

But IRV is such a terrible idea, it’s hard to even know where to start.

• While proponents say it’ll result in elections with true majorities, it’s patent rubbish; the experience in San Francisco shows that in the end, after all the “spoiled” ballots (ballots whose ranked choices never wind up including one of the finalists), the “Majority” can be south of 40% of voters.
• For all the lefties who were caterwauling about the evils of electronic voting machines between 2000 and 2006, it’ll be comforting to know that IRV counting machines will use a highly complex algorithm, leave no paper trail, centralize all vote counting (and thus make skullduggery that much easier to conceal) and rely entirely on the integrity of the vote-counting authorities.
• Oh, yeah – the machines don’t exist yet, so the Minneapolis election will be hand-counted, and not be certifiably until December.
• And as a usability guy, the just plain usability issues involved with the ballots and the procedure for filling them out are – I’ll be diplomatic – mind-boggling.

I don’t care what  side you’re on.  IRV is just plain stupid, and needs to be gassed.  Three of the cities that adopted it with much fanfare over the past decade – including Tacoma Washington – are dropping it with extreme prejudice.

Let’s be done with this lunacy.

Today is the 26th anniversary of the invasion of Grenada.

The story itself is both mundane and, in a sense, not all that relevant:

Problems between the US and the Caribbean nation began in 1979 (while the Cold War was still in effect) when a bloodless coup placed the pro-Marxist Maurice Bishop as the Prime Minister, which led to strengthened ties between Grenada and communist nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Bishop was eventually murdered in October of 1983 during a power struggle with hard-liners in his own movement, creating a breakdown in civil order that threatened the lives of American medical students who were living on the island.

Of course, the real issue was with the new landlords; with the Marxists came Cuban and Soviet money, equipment and help, much of which went into expanding Grenada’s main airport – which, according to the intelligence of the day, were intended for Soviet patrol planes.

Which brought up quite a few sensitive issues. Jimmy Carter had lost a fair amount of political capital with his fairly impotent reponse to the revelation that a Soviet infantry brigade had gotten stationed in Cuba.

The Reagan Administration was also aware that international law and custom – for example, the “Monroe Doctrine” – was a lot like copyright and trademark law; if you didn’t defend your brand, the courts’d assume you had let the whole thing lapse.

And in the wake of the Bishop murder and the overthrow of the sitting government, anarchy reigned on the island; the government instituted a “shoot on sight” curfew which was an obvious threat to the 800 American medical students attending school on the island.

Between the violence, the anarchy, the communists and their long-standing record of expansionism in the region brought not a few Caribbean governments to consult with Reagan.

Those were the motivations. The media and Reagan’s critics later claimed that the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, two days earlier, was a motivation too. However, all the relevant decisions had been made, and some of the troops and ships were already underway for the invasion when the news of the bombing impacted.

And so on October 25, the invasion went ahead. Marines landed along the beaches; the Rangers parachuted in to seize the airfields. SEALs and Deltas attempted surgical strikes against key Grenadian leaders.

It would seem to have been Goliath versus David, in many ways; over 7,000 US ground troops, backed by thousands and thousands more in the air and at sea, went ashore to tackle about 1,500 Grenadian militia and 700 Cuban military engineers.

But the fog of war, and some grave deficiencies in the US military, caused all sorts of problems. Boats carrying SEALs flipped in rough seas, killing several commandos even before they got into action.  Airborne Rangers dropped on the airfield got pinned down and had to fight a vicious pitched battle.  Delta commandos ran into stiff resistance.  It took US troops – Marines and a big chunk of the 82nd Airborne Division – weeks to finally mop up the island.

Since then, the left and many of Reagan’s critics have sought to portray Grenada as a trivial sideshow at best, a joke at worst.  But the battle led to three epochal changes.

The most trivial was the sense that the US was starting to shed the legacy of Vietnam and Desert One – that the US had the nerve to do what it needed to to safeguard its interests.  Along with the stiff (but largely unpublicized) reaction to Iran’s provocations in the Gulf that happened at about the same time, and the Gulf of Sidra incident and the bombing of Libya that happened three years later, the US got the sense that we were no longer a bunch of beaten dogs.  America got its confidence back.

But there were many effects that ran much deeper.  It had long-lasting, near-immediate (in bureaucratic terms) effects on the US military.  Grenada, its operational success notwithstanding, was not an especially successful operation.  It was marred by faulty intelligence on the one hand, and entrenched interservice rivalries on the other.  Coming hot on the heels of several other US military failures – Beirut, Desert One, the Mayaguez incident and Vietnam – Grenada was the tipping point that led to sweeping, comprehensive reforms of the US military.  These reforms led eventually to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, which led to a major reorganization of the US military, whose major effect was to force the armed forces to operate more as a joint entity rather than four competing sets of interests.

Most important of all?  Notwithstanding the various critics who tried to paint the operation as a trifling diversion, the USSR got the message.  Soviet foreign minister Anatolii Dobrynin, as related in Dinesh D’Souza’s biography of Reagan, recounted after the fall of the USSR that the Grenada set the Politburo back on its heels.  Accustomed to nearly a decade of post-Vietnam demoralization and Carter-era dithering, Grenada served notice to the Soviets that the day of America the facile pushover had ended.

Anyway – kudos to all you Grenada veterans in the audience.

To: Our Loyal Readers

From: Me

Re: The Crash of Shot In The Dark

Sincere apologies for the recent lack of continuity our site has experienced of late. As I learned from my time in radio, dead air (and inside jokes by the way, but I digress) is a mortal sin as much in this medium as it is in radio.

We have made great progress in restoring the site to its retro look however the “post author” function is still busted.

I would like to take this opportunity to confess a couple things under cover of this period of anonymity.

First off, there have been many rumors that our high readership and decidedly conservative stance put Shot In The Dark on par with Fox News. As it were, Blogga Non Grata. The buzz was that our site was taken down by operatives of the Obama administration. This is only partially true.

Truth is, I was watching Robert Gibbs lie through his teeth on YouTube and as I reacted with my signature “up in arms” gesture, I spilled coffee on my keyboard. As I was cleaning up after myself, I pushed “Ctrl Alt Del” which took the whole damn site down. My bad. Sorry about that.

Secondly, I want to confess that I wear women’s clothing. A lot. Mostly in the privacy of my home. Sometimes not. I like the feel of silk as it tickles my hairy legs. I am really excited about Nicole Ritchie’s new “Winter Kate” line.

And lastly, I spend much of my spare time watching Mary Tyler More and Rhoda reruns on Hulu. Cloris Leachman was so hot back then – but even moreso: Ed Asner.

There. I feel better.

Sincerely,

Me.

By now everyone has heard the sound bite from Flight 188’s First Officer Cole:

The first officer of the Northwest Airlines jet that missed its destination by 150 miles says there was no fight in the cockpit, neither he nor the captain had fallen asleep and the passengers were never in any danger.

But in an interview with The Associated Press two days after he and a colleague blew past their destination as air traffic controlled tried frantically to reach them, pilot Richard Cole would not say just what it was that led to them to forget to land Flight 188.

So just what was it?

I’m currently (okay, not currently, but I wrote this during lunch – ed.) watching big fluffy flakes of an entirely-localized weather phenomenon which should not be considered indicative in any way of the global climate trend (ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT) fall from the sky. By my reckoning this is about the fourth such ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT this month. In this part of Minnesota it would be unusual (though not unprecedented) to have even one such ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT before November. Four ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCTs is pretty notable, and just serves as a vivid reminder how much colder than normal most of this year – especially this month – has been.

Which probably goes a long way toward explaining this…

Survey Says: Americans Not Worried About Global Warming

A new poll out today on Americans’ attitudes about climate change presents sobering findings for those that favor aggressive action to curb U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, fewer respondents also see global warming as a very serious problem; 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

The survey also points to a decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity. Just 36% say that currently, down from 47% last year.

The thing is, I am perfectly and contentedly aware that those fluffy white flakes outside my window truly are a local phenomenon and that they do not tell me anything about the global climate. But then I also think the same whenever some hot-headed alarmist points to a single melting glacier, stranded polar bear, or Australian drought as part of the global warming “evidence all around us.” If you’re going to invest so much time and energy fashioning a petard, you ought to be aware about the dangers of hoisting is my point.

It’s entirely possible I’m totally wrong in my views about global warming (it’s natural) and mankind’s role in it (negligible). But even if I’m wrong about that I’m certainly not going to make the foolish argument that the snow flying around outside my window at the moment proves my point. I am, however, going to engage in a little shadenfreude as the fluffy white flakes of ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT help to put a very real chill on the attempted panic of public opinion regarding global warming and the “evidence all around us.”

[note: It’s probably a good idea to note that the above was written by Bogus Doug and not Mitch.  In the site’s recent technical issues, we seem to have lost the post-author thingy.]

[Mitch adds:  The “author name” thing will be fixed this weekend.  Especially if it’s too rainy for yard work]

This post is an expansion of a comment in a thread way down below.  Partly because my monkeying with my code this morning put a crimp in my morning blogging schedule.  Partly because the subject deserves it.

I oppose the death penalty, not because I break with most conservatives on the issue, but  because I am a conservative.

Stay with me on this one.

Conservatism is about upholding time-honored truths.

One of those truths is that the individual – one of the “Free Association of Equals” that our society is supposed to be, in the conservative view of things – is of supreme importance, and should be protected from the excesses of government. It’s why we conservative natter on about things like the Tenth Amendment – because we uphold the worth of the individual; there are some things that, to protect the individual, the government should just stay out of.

This directly contradicts the notion that individuals are “eggs” to be broken in the interest of the state’s convenience to make a social “omelet”. Frequent liberal commenter “RickDFL”’s left a remark in the comment section yesterday, that actually sent me looking for a remark about eggs and omelets that I coulda sworn Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Hitler made. No dice – the closest I got was Stalin’s “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” – but Rick (I puke in my mouth a little bit in writing this) is right; it’s something one of them would say.

Conservatives do believe that the pursuit of good requires sacrifice; the Americans who died at Omaha Beach and Gettysburg and Chosin Reservoir were also of incalculable value, and they did nothing to deserve what happened except serving their country, and their loss was a tragedy for all of us. But they died (most of us believe) for a greater good, in a time and a place and for a cause for which there was no alternative, and which helped bring immense good as a result.

Killing an innocent person to “deter” the guilty? It brings no good (the guilty party goes free forever!) (I mean, what DA is going to say “oops – killed the wrong guy the first time! Let’s try this again!”), there is an alternative, and, lest we forget, it kills an individual who did no wrong – which is exactly who this society is supposed to protect.

And it echoes Andrea Dworkin (or Catherine McKinnon?  Jeff Fecke?  I get confused) who said it’d be “good” if men got falsely imprisoned for rape, to make all the real rapists a little more afraid. It’s an idea straight out of the worst of the French Revolution (which had no problem executing the innocent “pour l’encourager les autres“), carried on via Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot.

Hypothetically, if the system could be “perfected”, would I support it? Sure. But that’s another tenet of conservatism; mankind can never be perfected; the hypothetical is pointless. And to a conservative, protecting people from the problems that human imperfection brings to government drives what government is supposed to do – including impelling government to back out of big parts of our society.

So since…

1. Mankind – including prosecutors and the police – can never be perfected, and…
2. these imperfections kill the innocent, and…
3.  killing the innocent is immeasurably evil, and…
4.  since a foolproof alternative exists that surely and swiftly punishes the guilty (remember – life in supermax without parole begins at sentencing; death takes an average of 12 years) while protecting the innocent, and…
5. protecting the innocent is one of society’s supreme goods, then…

…abolishing the death penalty is supremely conservative.

To me, the logic of my stance depends on the five interconnected points above – all drawn from orthodox conservative beliefs to a finely-polished “t”.  If you want to disagree, by all means do it in the comment section.  But if you can’t successfully attack that five-point chain of logic, I’m not sure you’ll get a lot of traction with me.

There are few icons of La Vida Americana that represent America’s free enterprise system and the freedoms it affords all of us like the automobile.

And so it follows that with a growing number of liberal American apologists, there would be a growing number of “Americans” ditching their wheels.

The recession and a growing awareness of the environment are causing many people to reassess their automobile ownership. After more than a century in which an automobile represented the American dream, car enthusiasm may no longer be a part of Americans’ DNA.

Leave it to The New York Times to count a marginal few as a weighty majority and mark the death of automotive enthusiasm in the name of the environment and a deep but temporary recession – then again, look at their leader – acting on the whims of an ever-more-marginal minority.

Go ahead, ditch the Prius. Better for the rest of us. More road for me; less Obama ’08 stickers to look at.

Well, that was interesting.

Honest – it worked so well in rehearsal!

An attempt to update the site display code ended pretty disastrously last night.  We backed up the whole site – which brought back our old template. 

(Shrugs).

Part of the problem is that I haven’t updated WordPress (the content manager, the program that does all the display-fu for the blog) since I installed it after the, um, 2006 elections.  Since there’ve been, er, three or four major releases since then, and there’s been no maintenance on this particular version in well over a year, it’s high time I updated things.

Which usually means things are going to break. 

But if it’s raining this weekend, I’ll be updating the code, and then getting to work on perhaps updating the site’s “look and feel” for the first time since, ahem, 2003. 

A Northwest Airbus A320 flying from San Diego overshot its Twin Cities destination by about 150 miles on Wednesday, apparently when the crew became distracted, the National Transportation Safety Board said today.

(Passengers aboard the airliner were unaware – having grown accustomed to flight delays.-JR)

Hey, I’ve missed an exit before…what’s the big deal?

Apparently they were not texting:

The Federal Administration (FAA) said the FBI and airport police interviewed the crew, who said they “were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness.” The NTSB is scheduling an interview with the crew.

…you think they will pull that cockpit audio tape?

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are being sent to the NTSB laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Oh yeah.

void tomsawyer() {
try {
assertequals(you.say(his_company), you.say(society));
}
catch (mist) {}
catch (myth) {}
catch (mystery) {}
catch (drift) {}
finally
{
Runtime.exit(TomSawyer.WARRIOR);
}
}

I’m tempted to compile it.

(Via Geekboy)

…how, starting with the NYTimes and the WaPo, and then filtering down through the HuffPo and the Daily Kos…

…and thence downward through MSNBC, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC…

…and then through “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the “Ed Schultz” and “liberal knockoff of Laura Ingraham” “Stephanie Miller” shows…

…and from there down through the morass of the leftyblogosphere, the “TBoggs” and “Think Progresses”, “PZ Meyerses” and “Minnesota Independents”…

…the meme will spread over the course of the next few days…

 …that “Republicans do as they are told”.

P.S.:  Mr. President?  Stop campaigning!  You are, ostensibly, everyone’s President.

For another three and a quarter years, anyway.