The Strib editorial board, writing about the Saint Paul School Board’s perennial search for the flavor of the month in Superintendants:

Given the challenges faced by the district, the schools need a collaborative, inspirational CEO who has had success in improving student achievement. The district needs a strategic thinker who can build relationships, heal morale problems and be a strong, respected advocate for schools within various constituencies.

Er, no.

:Advocating for constituencies” is what got the Saint Paul Public Schools into the mess it’s in now.

The SPPS is paralyzed by “constituency” politics; watching a School Board meeting is like watching film of 1960’s Comintern meetings, with endless streams of apparatchiks solemnly declaiming their district would meet its quota of desk chairs or eggs or iron ingots in support of the glorious Five Year Plan.  Only instead of eggs or desk chairs or ingots, or even students, the apparatchiks principals and program directors and staff members would solemnly swear that they were meeting their goals for “diversity”.

And yet the SPPS’ achievement gap is the worst of any major city.  The schools’ budget is bigger than that of the City of Saint Paul, but the graduation rate is south of 50% and falling. Over an eighth of Saint Paul’s parents have hit the lifeboats (myself included), bailing out for charter, private and parochial schools, or schools in the ‘burbs, or homeschooling (and that was as of two years ago; the numbers have no doubt accelerated).  And for all that – with increasing budgets and declining enrollments – the SPPS threatens to cut teachers, programs and schools every budget cycle (although never laying a finger on the grotesque bureaucracy at 360 Colborne).

What the Saint Paul Public Schools needs is someone with experience in arresting failure.  The district needs the educational equivalent of Red Adair.

What the district will get, with its current all-DFL, mostly-Teachers-union-member board, is what it’s had for the past twenty years; a principal who is adept at being politically correct; one who carefully massages the various constituencies (and I’m not just talking ethnic groups, here) on the one hand and plays them against each other on the other hand.  One who will sit quietly aside while the School Board, as concentrated a bloc of far-far-far left DFL ideology as you will find in this state, babbles on about diversity and barring recruiters from schools and abolising JROTC and handing out condoms and supporting constituency support programs that happen to employ their non-profit cronies…

And beyond those qualifications, the district’s next leader must be committed to staying on the job long enough to make meaningful change.

And given the dynamics in the “market” for big-city superintendents – with an endless parade of school boards bidding up salaries and benefits ever-higher in an endless game of institutional musical chairs that essentially ensures the power of the radical left in big-city education – that “committed” leader will ride in on a pink unicorn.

The market for superintendents – paid for with an ever-rising pool of taxpayer money – is a scam designed to jack up the power of “elected”, invariably liberal school boards.  It turns the Superintendant into basically a temp employee.

Or a well-tended lapdog who isn’t too bummed about having to spend half of his/her term looking for the next, higher-paying job, for a position that will pay better and be of even less consequence.

Fox News got busted altering photos of Rep. Bachmann’s rally to make it look bigger than it was.  (As if getting 10,000 people from around the country to turn out on almost no notice was any mean feat).

Bad Hannity.  Bad boy.  Give your radio show to someone else in penance.  Like me.

But isn’t the left just a tad disingenuous in baying “foul” at the moon over using pictures to lie?  Laura, writing at the Greenroom, has been keeping a list and checking it twice:

• The use of carefully cropped photos to make Republicans and conservatives look sinister.
• Using photos with inconvenient truths like stage management and Communist symbols cropped out.
• The denigrating, sexist focus on Sarah Palin’s shoes, especially shots angled to have someone appear to be looking up her skirt.
• Years of tightly cropped photos of anti-war and pro-illegal immigration protests to make crowds seem larger or to hide the Mexican flags.
• The Obama halo photos.
• The media’s habit of passing by hundreds or thousands of sane people and zeroing in on Truthers and other whack jobs at tea party protests.
• Shamelessly edited video. To say nothing of Keith Olbermann.
• And the most damning indictment of all: the open secret of Pallywood.  Instead of exposing this travesty of journalism, our media routinely uses blatantly dishonest anti-Israel imagery.

There is no excuse for what Fox News did, and I’m glad they were caught at it.  I’m not aware of anyone on the right defending it.  But spare me the outrageously outrageous outrage, lefties.  You don’t have a leg to stand on.

Always remember Berg’s Seventh Law – when they accuse conservatives of hatred or perfidy, they’re projecting.

Not for his steroid nutritional supplement-induced ramblings…rather for the one thing (at least that I can remember) he did for us as governor…

I wrote the check for my license plate tabs this week.

The latest Rasmussen poll shows that Republicans are beating Dems by four points in the very early polling for 2010.

But here’s the part that really shocked me (emphasis added by me):

As was the case in last Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections, independents are helping the Republicans’ cause. In the latest poll, independent registered voters favor the Republican candidate by 52% to 30%. Both parties maintain similar loyalty from their bases, with 91% of Democratic registered voters preferring the Democratic candidate and 93% of Republican voters preferring the Republican.

Question:  Are all those independents, who were “agents of hope and change” last year, suddenly “teabaggers?”

The basketball program at Minneapolis Community and Technical College is on the chopping block.

The program has grown from a run-of-the-mill junior college program into a national powerhouse among two-year colleges, under the leadership of coach Jay Pivec.  He’s got plenty of experience turning obscure colleges into basketball powers; if memory serves, he came to MCTC in ’89 or ’90 from (I hope I remember this correctly) Havre, Montana – whose college he also took to the bigs.  And before that, he coached my alma mater, Jamestown, turning it’s hoops program into an improbable success.  Jay also coached my one phy-ed class – Tennis, I think – where our only real subject in common was Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.  We have more in common now, of course; his wife, MLP, writes the excellent blog  Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry; his sister-in-law, Katie McCollow, ran the late, lamented Yucky Salad With Bones.

At any rate – MCTC’s basketball program is to college hoops what junior/community college is supposed to be for college; a place for students who are late bloomers or who slipped off “the rails” in high school to get their act together and move on to “regular” college, or at least down some path with a better education.  Unlike so much in public education, MCTC’s program (actually programs – the women’s program does the same thing), it works:

Most MCTC players lacked grades or money. Some of the players live at home to save money; some have kids of their own. Lindahl said he holds practice between 6 and 8 a.m. because he knows his players have other responsibilities, and Pivec and Gates are widely known for salvaging the careers, if not lives, of at-risk players…Last year, the men’s coaches helped Cortez Wallace land a scholarship at Western Missouri. Pivec and Gates found Wallace, who dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, playing AAU ball. They pushed him to get his GED, recruited him and gave him a future.

“Coach Gates and coach Piv have done so much for me, helped me get jobs, helped me get work-study,” said women’s player Natalye Horne. “Coach Piv and coach Gates especially treat me like a second daughter. This program is like a family, and now they’re breaking it up.”

Guard Sondra Jones said: “For a lot of people, this is a stepping stone to something bigger. But the administration looks at this as an option instead of a priority.”

Freshman point guard Freddie Burton could have left the program once he found it was doomed but said, “I’ll just try my luck here. I like the program. I really don’t know what I’m going to do next year.

“Damn that Pawlenty and his LGA cuts!”

Well, no – it was a fairly capricious-looking decision by the MCTC student senate – the DFLers of tomorrow:

Last year, the school’s Student Senate and Student Life Budget Committee decided that basketball was not a high priority, and school President Phil Davis accepted the recommendation to withdraw funding for the program. That silly process — letting students who will spend a maximum of two years on campus decide the fate of a traditionally powerful program run by two dedicated lifelong coaches — leaves the Mavericks renowned yet doomed.

The crazy part? The program is excellence on the cheap:

While some players are circulating petitions to fund the programs, Davis has made it clear that the program would have to be financially independent, requiring $118,000 a year.

$118K?

There are Twin Cities’ corporations for whom 118 large is a week’s philanthropic giving.  Given the amount of money society as whole saves – I’m saying this with absolutely no intention to condescend – on future social costs for the people the program turns around – it’s a bargain.

There are Timberwolves players with $118,000 under the seat cushions in their Bentleys.

You’re going to tell me someone out there can’t cover that?

In this past month, we’ve seen amply on display the left’s forbearance at jumping to conclusions…

…at anyone who’s not a conservative.

Chicago mayor Richard Daley – mayor of the city with the toughest gun control laws and among the highest gun crime and murder rates in the US – on Fort Hood:

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.”

Unless that group is law-abiding gun owners and the NRA, of course.  Or talk radio, or Michele Bachmann or Michael Savage or Glenn Beck or Karl rove or “neocons” or “teabaggers” or Christians or pro-lifers.   Other than that, you don’t blame a group.

It should go without saying that not only is Chicago a “gun free zone” (for the law-abiding) but so was Fort Hood; the Army doesn’t allow private carry of firearms on base.  A base full of soldiers who’ve not only trained to use firearms under excruciating pressure, but have largely done so through multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, had no more means to protect themselves from Hasan’s alleged onslaught than a bunch of high school kids or Chicago shoppers or anyone unlucky enough to live in a place throttled by wahhabi liberalism that values ideology over human life.

The legitimacy of any government body that tries to thwart your absolute human right to defend yourself and your family should be questioned.

I got this email from a business associate yesterday that said a bunch of the things I was fumbling with trying to say:

I speak for myself. As a man that has not served in our military I am painfully aware of the sacrifices made by so many, that I may live the most comfortable and safe life in human history. I believe this country was founded by men with devine intervention from our creator to do good in this world. So many have sacrificed more than I can imagine allowing me the blessings I enjoy everyday of my life. My heart aches for the loss of them, and the pain and anguish of others and their families. On this day I know I owe my life to so many that I can never begin to express my gratitude to, lt alone repay:

May GOD continue to bless the Unied States of America.

What he said.  Thanks, veterans…

I joke, constantly, with liberal commenters and critics – the few that are worth engaging, anyway – “If a princpled conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear it, is he/she still crazy?”

It’s a joke that covers a very serious reality; for a big chunk of the left, individually and as an institution, “insanity” is the only possible reason for dissent.  You encounter is from lefties small (“Suddenly John McCain got crazy!”) to big (the Soviets considered dissent a psychiatric condition, and filled psychiatric prisons to prove it).  To altogether too much of the American left, not being part of the American left is (to paraphrase Michael Savage) a mental disorder.

I saw that Dave Mindeman had written a piece entitled Bachmann has close to “Unsinkable” status” and thought briefly that perhaps Mindeman – who is one of the more estimable regional leftybloggers – was going to try something we’d not seen before; a sober, responsible, dispassionate look from the left at the success of one of the most drearily, rotely, predictably maligned figures in Minnesota politics.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, or know anything about Minnesota politics, you already know not to take any action on that bet.

Any post that starts with a Paul Krugman quote is off to a bad start, of course:

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.– Paul Krugman (NY Times)

So sit down with someone like  Paul Krugman, a Lori Sturdevant or, I’ll take a wild flyer here, a Dave Mindemann and ask them “what would the “rational right” look like?”.  If they get past the stumbling and the phumphering (I give you about one-to-four odds), they’ll describe something that looks, talks and votes indistinguishably from a Democrat.

Because, to these people, everything to the right of Dave Durenberger or Chuck Hagel is not just putatively wrong; it’s “crazy”.

Mindemann:

Outside of Bill Prendergast at MN Progressive Project (as well as some of the local 6th District bloggers like Hal Kimball and Political Muse), a lot of left leaning writers and activists (including myself) have considered Michele Bachmann to be a kook or extremist. [Really?  The hell you say. I’d put it more like “every regional leftyblogger has “Bachmann is teh crazee” on a hotkey – Ed.] Someone to make a caricature of, but not somebody to accept as a spokesperson for the right on the scale that she has nurtured.

That has to change, because Michele Bachmann is beginning to remind me of someone else….someone much more sinister….

Who might that be?

Margaret Thatcher, who presaged Ronald Reagan by fighting against not only a blinkered, ossified liberal leadership with immense success, but countered countless scabrous insults about her state of mine – because the British left was no less prone to see dissent as a mental illess as our own left?

Sarah Palin, whose own struggle with media/left (pardon the redundancy) orthodoxy has so completely paralleled that of Bachman (and Thatcher!)?

Who, pray tell?

Joe McCarthy.

{{facepalm}}

Wow.  Never heard that one before.

McCarthy rose to prominence because of fear. Fear of communism, the red menace. He turned those fears into an irrational paranoia. It ruined lives and paralyzed the US government. For a time, everyone had to tread carefully around the potential accusations that came out of McCarthy’s committee.

Bachmann is becoming the icon that the paranoid right is turning to now. She equates their fears into a “fight for freedom” or a “war against tyranny”. This new paranoia is not about real fears but about a loss of power that eight years of President Bush and 6 years of a Republican Congress kept in check.

Wow.  Speaking of paranoia.

Mindemann’s piece is marinaded in a crock-put full of the modern left’s most durable, and durably predictable, memes:

• To a liberal, a conservative never, ever fights the culture war because they have concerns and they wanna take their shot at correcting what they see as a problem in society.  It’s always about “fear”.
• No matter how carefully, even punctiliously, a cultural or social (or, these days, even a fiscal or security) conservative spells out a case, they are without exception “paranoid”.
• It is impossible for a conservative to speak on any issue, in any rhetorical terms, without it being considered “hate” on one level or another.
• Any conservative thought is assumed to immediately link to the most ludicrously extreme possible end results – and the most ludicrious fringe is inevitably concatenated with the most mainstream conservative thought.  This is not just intellectual laziness (although in the case of most lefty pundits, it certainly is the path of least resistance); this is part of a concerted pattern on the part of the left to frame all disagreement as one form of depravity or amother.

This is the lens through which the left – not even the extreme left, mind you, but the mainstream left that got Barack Obama elected – sees all dissent, and into which they want to frame all dissent for everyone else.  Too much of the media accepts it as the baseline; much of the American left can’t be bothered to question it.

That’s gone, and now their paranoia has a face and its quite different from the faces they have been used to.

Michele Bachmann has become the rallying point for this new paranoia. She listens to them…she understands them….she IS one of them. When she calls them to Washington to stand against health care, they come. Never mind that a lot of that crowd was paid for by astroturf front groups. The fact that deep pocket astroturf groups are willing to bankroll a Bachmann rally makes her all the more dangerous.

Mindemann is shocked, shocked, that right-leaning groups spend money to get across right-leaning messages and support right-leaning causes.  Because goodness knows the entire left-wing slander machine is funded through bake sales.

She has an entire news channel (Fox News) at her disposal.

Because goodness knows the left gets short shrift on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, the AP, Reuters…

Her message can reach the people it needs to anytime she chooses. She is also recognized as an “official” opposition voice by other media as well. And she loves the attention, doesn’t care about “facts”, and makes it all personal.

Tangent alert:  I was at a town hall meeting in Saint Paul before the ’08 election featuring Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg and Bachmann.  E-Tink spoke in vague blandishments, and seemed about as sincere and connected to the moment as the moaning in a porn video.   Bachmann, on the other hand, did something I’ve never seen a pol do; she grabbed a whiteboard and a marker, and she started putting up the numbers; the amount of Porkulus; the morgage bailout; the upcoming, inevitable bailouts of other industries; the amount this’d add to our per-capita deficit figure, and what that meant not only to our paychecks, but to our children’s futures…

…in short, the facts. She not only waded through the numbers, but she made them – the facts – accessible to everyone in the room.  It was the most affecting explanation of the gravity of our current fiscal situation that I had seen to date, and just about the most effective I’ve ever seen, period. From anyone, in or out of politics.  Ever.

As to anyone on the left – the party of Saul Alinski – carping about a politician “making it personal?”  I’ll hold my tongue, so that my contempt doesn’t overtake me.

And dare I say it, she has a certain charisma that convinces her supporters she can do no wrong.

No.  She has a charisma that convinces her supporters – and even a few intellectually honest detractors – that she’s right.

The Democrats chance to defeat her was in 2008. They had the right candidate [um, no – E-Tink was a disaster – Ed.] and the right opportunity [True – Ed.] — it just all came together too late.

(Also incorrect, if  you’ll indulge the tangent; “it”, in the form of a Keith Olbermann interview about not much that got its context carefully doctored and blown up into a much-ado-about-not-much-ado  event by an uncritical all-too-compliant media – “came together” too early; Bachmann was able to get The Real Michele back in front of the voters in enough time to stanch the bleeding.  Thank God.

Tarryl Clark is an excellent candidate [Hah! – Ed.]. So is Maureen Reed. Clark could be a consistent winner for the DFL…..just not in the 6th District. I doubt Reed or Clark is prepared for the type of war they are about to embark on. The DFL candidate, whomever it is, is taking on an incumbant that now has an unlimited national war chest of funding…An incumbant who can call on high profile names to support her campaign.

Which is apparently only a bad thing when the  “high profile names” don’t come from Hollywood and the  “unlimited war chest” isn’t from George Soros.

An incumbant who will be protected by a national party that has become dependent on her followers.

Which is a pejorative way of saying “found its conservative voice and unifying principles” – the only voice and principles since the Great Depression that has led the party to any sustained success and impact on politics, in 1980 and 1994.

Which, frankly, terrifies the crap out of the Democrat establishment.  This is why the left and media (pardon the redundancy) push the meme of the “responsble” (inevitably “moderate”) Republican – in their world, Dede Scozzafava and Arne Carlson are the voice of the GOP! – to divide and then to conquer the party, to marginalize conservatism and conservatives.

Because we not only win, but we win against all odds and conventional wisdom.

Mindemann comes oh-so-close to an answer…

Is the state DFL prepared to meet that kind of challenge? I have my doubts. They can treat MB as a buffoon, but it will only enhance her appeal. Their candidates have shown an ability to raise some money but nowhere near the amounts needed to compete with Bachmann.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the 6th District has enough discerning voters that she can be defeated.

…but swerves away.

The worst thing you can do in any form of public life is to “believe your own press”.  Likewise with memes about ones opponents.  When conservatives start to write their opponents off as a bunch of gutless entitlement symps and lumpen government employees – and all too many conservatives fall into that trap, too – then it takes ones’ edge off.  You should never underestimate your opponent.

But the only real arrow in the left’s quiver in the Sixth District is underestimation to the point of collective slander, not only of Representative Bachmann.  The left’s entire point of view about Rep. Bachmann is framed by a years-long propaganda campaign waged by some of her most, let’s just say, “focused” destractors, people who find her social conservatism anathema to the point they lose their faculties of reasoning.  This has framed the entire 6th CD DFL’s thought on Rep. Bachmann – a myopia that can only have helped send Rep. Bachmann to Washington twice now.

Dave Mindemann – do you honestly think that Rep. Bachmman’s successive victories, in two of the most anti-Republican elections in 35 years, was the result of “undiscerning voters”?

Voters of the Sixth – to Dave Mindemann (oh, I’ll be fair – to the Institutional Left), you are nothing but half-trained lab animals in a pavlovian experiment designed by that most devious mind-warper, Karl Rove.

Not people who arrive at intelligent conclusions for reasons of your own.

Hold that thought for another year.

But at this moment, that seems nearly impossible.

And one is torn between hoping Mindemann, and the rest of the state and 6CD DFL, do and/or do not figure why.

After almost six years of doing the Northern Alliance, my mom is finally worried.  She sent me this email, asking “I had no idea your radio shows got this violent!”.

The headline:

This not very charming fan: Morrissey storms off stage after bottle hits him in the eye

“No relation”, I told Mom.  “Not to worry”:

When it comes to live performances, it seems former Smiths frontman Morrissey just isn’t having any luck of late.

The 50-year-old musician stormed off stage last night after being hit in the eye with a bottle while performing in Liverpool.

I told Mom not to worry.  The Twin Cities’ left is usually pretty benign; their idea of “heckling” at live events is to stand at the periphery of the crowd and chant “Public Option Now!  Public Option Now!”  For many of them, it’s also their idea of “argument”.

Anyway – all’s well.

via Mail Online.

“Conservatives hate women” is conventional wisdom…

…among people who aren’t all that wise

– in this case, Politico’s Meredith Shiner and Glenn Thrush:

But the growing schism between the Republican Party’s ascendant right wing and its shrinking moderate core has clear gender undertones — and Scozzafava’s departure raises fresh questions about the GOP’s ability to recruit, elect and even tolerate the sort of moderate women who used to be part of its ruling mainstream.

While Republicans scored a pair of impressive electoral victories in New Jersey and Virginia with solid support among female voters, the events of the last week offer harbingers of serious trouble ahead with the largest swing voter bloc in the country — women.

Right.  Because Dede Scozzafava is the only woman in the GOP.

As opposed to Sarah Palin and Sarah Palin?  Or – here in Minnesota – conservative movement stalwarts Pat Anderson and Laura Brod?

Rob Port from Say Anything:

The problem with this analysis?  It’s awfully selective.  It leaves out people like Arlen Spector and Lindsey Graham, both frequent targets ofthe conservative base.  And it also leaves out Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, both very popular figures within the resurgent conservative movement.

If the tea party movement had a problem with women, why would people like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann figure so prominently in it?  And why wouldthe opposition to so-called “RINOS” or ‘moderates” include both men and women?

Leave aside the fact that many of the Tea Parties – including the Twin Cities’ ones – are largely organized by…women?

Politico has a conclusion in search of data.

I was thinking the other day that, in the Twin Cities’ leftymedia, many of the same people who last month were ready to indict Rep. Michele Bachmann for “aiding and abetting” in the death of census worker Bill Sparkman are the exact same people who are demanding absolute forbearance in the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan; one tried to conclude on Sunday that the investigators had determined terrorism wasn’t involved at all.

Jeff Goldberg notes that it’s not just a local thing:

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about “Southern populist terrorism” in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as “nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war,” demonstrating how “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult”?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their “nothing to see here” reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

See:  all of the hoax “hate crimes” that swept college campuses, the Duke Rape Case, the implication of talk radio in the Oklahoma City bombing…

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

On Twitter yesterday, I watched, somewhat slack-jawed, as a couple of reporters argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin debated exactly how unconfirmed the “Allahu Akbar” rumors really were.  Neither had heard anything about Hasan’s alleged links to radical clerics who’ s been linked with Al Quaeda, or had at least neither had opted to address them.  We’ll see if that ever fits into the template.

To: E-Trade
From: Mitch Berg
Re: The Kid.

To whom it may concern,

While I’ll allow that the line “Shankapotamus” is inspired and hilarious, I can’t get around the fact that doctoring a toddler to sound like a whinging, chick-drink-slurping late-twentysomething yuppie…

…gives me the serious creeps.

That is all.

So let’s strike! ….because there’s no one else that can drive a bus or a car on tracks.

[Curly Stooge] Ironic, aint it? [end Curly Stooge]

[Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Edward] Rendell and [U.S. Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pa.] had announced a tentative agreement late Friday, but it fell apart Saturday over the union’s call for an independent audit of the pension fund and assurance that members would not be affected if the company’s costs increased with possible passage of a national health reform plan. [in other words they want the same deal as Congress!-JR]

So, let me get this straight. Union workers in Pennsylvania are fearful that national health care “reform”, brought to to us by the gerbils they almost assuredly voted for, could cost them their pension? So they strike…the week unemployment tops ten per cent?

The stupid is so thick you can taste it.

I started watching Youtube vids from twenty years ago tonight – and I couldn’t stop.

Here’s an excellent, contemporary report from the CBC that shows some of the immediate background – but still reports on the Deutsche Democratische Republic as a going concern.

More about the extended, but brief and dramatic, collapse of East Germany:

…including the delicious irony that the actual motivation for the crashing of the Wall was an on-camera flub by East German Politburo member Guenther Schabowski, who muffed the announcement of the opening of the border, causing immense confusion between the crowds and the East Germany border police.

In the above video, the part between three and four minutes in – about the first break in the dam, where the East German commander at the Bornholmerstrasse gate decided to disobey a direct order and opened the crossing – is almost too powerful to watch.  It’s the first video I’ve seen in twenty years of the very first group to be allowed to cross from the communist East to the free west, freely and without bureaucratic buncombe (much less dogs and machine guns chasing them).  As the gate opens, as the people stream past the confused border guards (East and West), they look like kids tiptoeing down the stairs on Christmas morning; the first ones through walk gingerly, as if they expect the whole thing to get yanked away from them.  And then the weight of numbers dispels all doubt.

Another documentary about the schwehrpunkt at Bornholmerstrasse:

If Obama wins in 2012, then I have a hunch election night 2016 will look a lot like that.

The Bundestag (West German Parliament) breaks into the German national anthem:

German TV’s report:

Margaret Thatcher

It was a great time to be alive.

It was twenty years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell.

It’s hard to remember at twenty years remove that it, and the Communism it represented, didn’t just get swept away in a wave of small-l liberal euphoria. 

Dinesh D’Souza, in his excellent bio of Reagan, notes that between 1980 and 1983, the experts were united in their belief that the “Second World”, Communism, was here to stay.  Make no mistake, people had recovered from the spell of Walter Duranty long enough to know that the Soviet system was cruel and corrupt gangster-run autocracy even worse than Chicago.  The publication of The Gulag Archipelago and other releases from the samisdat media, and the flood of people who fled Germany from 1948 through 1961, popped the bubble of acceptability that had accompanied travesties like Stalin’s “Man of the Year” awards in 1939 and 1942, and Stalinism’s embrace by “intelligentsia” throughout the West (including the early version of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer/Labor Party).   The stories of the thousands of heroic Soviet-bloc citizens who risked death and imprisonment fleeing their foetid, starving, lumpen homelands inspired many a young patriot in the day.

But while the bloom was long off the rose of western acceptance of Communism, the number of western intellectuals who seriously believed in 1980 that the decade would see the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in short order, communism itself would have fit in a single room at a Ramada Inn. 

There had been resistance, of course; in Budapest and Gdansk in 1956, Prague in 1967, Gdansk again in ’71 – all put down with ruthless brutality by the authorities, including the Soviet military.

And so I’m not aware that anyone held out that much hope for change in 1979 – thirty years ago – when Lech Walesa, a young electrician in Gdansk, led a pro-democracy union strike in Gdansk.  The movement had traction, of course – it swept Poland, and threatened to spin out of control; the Polish Army under General Wojciech Jaruzelski staged what amounted to a last-ditch military coup to bring down the government and declare martial law to quell the strikes, siccing “ZOMO” thugs (no, it’s not Polish for SEIU) on the protesters and strikers.  Jaruzelski was reviled around the world for the action – although there is evidence that history has misjudged the General, that he acted as did many in the Polish Army, as a Polish patriot, to prevent a Soviet invasion, which would have been much, much worse).

And indeed, had the status quo ante held sway after 1980, nothing much would have happened.

But in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan signalled an end to detente – the diplomatic legitimazion of the Soviet gangster regime.  Reagan jacked up the rhetoric war, and the civil support for trade unionists behind the Iron Curtain (with considerable help from Margaret Thatcher, the Pope and, speaking of strange bedfellows, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO), as well as building up the US military from its post-Vietnam nadir (although to be fair Jimmy Carter had realized the problem, and taken a few of the necessary high-level steps to start facilitating this).   The rhetorical confrontation peaked at Reagan’s classic Brandenburg Gate speech in 1987…

…but the diplomatic war had reached its Battle of Stalingrad at the Rejkjavik conference the year before, when Reagan called Gorbachev’s bluff on intermediate-range nukes.  Lily-livered pundits in the west flew into a panic, expecting mushroom clouds over London…

…but Gorbachev blinked.  He realized the communist East could not outlast the free West.  He accelerated the “liberalization” of the USSR and the Communist bloc – not to extinct it, initially, but to try to save it.

It was too late.  The Poles tossed aside the commies, followed by the Czechs. 

It didn’t go entirely without a fight, though.  As the Baltic States – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – tried to follow neighboring Poland’s suit, Soviet soldiers attacked some demonstrations.

But in dizzyingly short order, the Communist Bloc, which had killed tens of millions of people in the previous seventy years (estimates range from 20 to 60 million) and floated on a sea of blood that dwarved even Hitler’s monumental crimes against humanity, fell, kicked to the curb in a sea of ebullient humanity.

The left never got it.  Some of them had backed the wrong team.  Others were so invested in the idea that capitalism and western-style liberty were obsolete that they couldn’t wrap their arms around the new reality.

Some believe that if western-style democracy and liberty were so cool, the nations left in the wake of the fall of The Wall should have been able to get up and run from the get-go.  I distinctly remember Tom Brokaw, in 1992, describing Poland’s difficulties in changing from a command economy to free-enterprise.  “Et wrold sheem thut Eesturrrn Yurp’s ukspurramunt in Kapetelezm hez FEHLED” (“it would seem Eastern Europe’s experiment in capitalism has failed“), he said, with no further comment, apparently seeking his own Waltern Cronkite “this war can not be won” moment, writing off three whole years of effort on Poland’s part.  He was wrong, of course; Poland survived, and thrived.  And while the road to prosperity has been difficult for some former Soviet counties (indeed, for Russia itself, which may or may not be socially amenable to small-L liberal goverment), most of Eastern Europe thrives today, free of prowling Black Marias and windowless trains in the dark for long enough that people are starting to forget what they meant. 

Which must be an incredible blessing.

But Brokaw’s pronouncement, more than anything I can remember, started curing me of the habit of watching network news.

There are those who still say the whole fall of The Wall was Gorbachev’s idea – an idea that requires a preposterous suspension of disbelief, buying the notion that the Politburo – think Capi di Tutti Capi in Russian – would turn the Premiership over to anyone whose goal wasn’t the survival of the system. 

Whatever.

My many friends and acquaintances and neighbors and co-workers over the past twenty years who fled to the West tell me that they and their people back home remember who their real friends are.

So – Fröhliche Zwanzigste Jahre der Freiheit, Deutschland.  Und viele mehr.

May the rest of us remember.

At least better than our feckless current leadership does.  Obama blew off the observance, just as he blew off Poland’s observance, six weeks ago, of the beginning on its soil of the greatest single cataclysm of human history.

Just as well.  He’d probably deliver a heartfelt apology for the US having won.

Joe Lieberman walks a fine ideological line and trips over his own feet much of the time, plus he talks like a weenie (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

…but today he stands poised to be an American Hero.

If a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent whose vote Democrats need to overcome a GOP filibusters, told “Fox News Sunday.”

“I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren,” he said.

…or their parents for that matter.

I joined Facebook a while ago, largely to reconnect with friends from high school (for which it’s been great).

But for whatever reason, I’ve been “Friended” by a lot of people with some outspoken political beliefs.  Most of them are regular, workadaddy hugamommy conservatives like me.  A few – very few – are left of center.

And there are a couple from, let’s be polite, a paranoid fringe that spans and ignores party boundaries.

And in the immediate aftermath of the Stealthcare vote on Friday, they were out in force.

Some were just…out there?  “It’s time to talk secession!  Democracy’s dead!”

Well, no.  This bill has to get through the Senate yet – and when you consider that the Dems had a 75 vote majority in the House, and it only passed by five votes, you can see where the Senate, with a two vote lead, is going to be a problem.

The majority were just…depressed?  I can’t say as I blame them; it is depressing to think that Congress is controlled by such profligate wastrels, and even worse to know that so many of our fellow subjects citizens voted for these hamsters.

But I had to respond; “don’t you guys read the blogs?  Or listen to the NARN?  Or member ninth-grade civics? This is not the end of the debate.  This is the end of the beginning of the debate. ”

And Saturday, while not exactly “good news” in the classic sense, wasn’t bad; 39 Dems flipped – most of them because they feared MoveOn and Nancy Pelosi less than they fear…

…you.  The workadaddy, hugamommy conservative who turned out at the Tea Party rallies, and who showed up at their Town Hall meetings, and weathered the ignorance and mockery and occasional seat-stacking and even more-occasional violence to get your points of view across to these idiots.  And so Nancy Pelosi had to rush the vote into a weekend in November, so her minions can’t get home to hear more from you, and in order to try to ram this thing through before the 2010 campaign gets into swing – because the Tea Parties, the Town Halls, and last Tuesday’s elections show that she’s not gonna get an infinite series of chances.

The Senate?  Well, they worry about re-election too.  And while Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins may well join the Dems, there are a lot more blue-dog Senators, especially a few that would not have otherwise won in 2006 and 2008, who are going to be watching their phone logs and mailboxes closely.

So relax…er, no.  Don’t relax.  Call your Senators; let ’em know where you’re at.

And call your Representatives.  If they voted against the bill, thank them (and by the way, thank you John Kline, Erik Paulsen, Collin Peterson and Michele Bachmann).  If they voted for it, politely let them know you’re not amused (presuming the likes of McCollum and Ellison have bothered to clean out their voice mail).

To quote the sage – this isn’t over until we say it’s over.

CORRECTION:  Added Collin Peterson, who is the unusual combination of utterly safe (he won his last race by 45 points), Democrat, Blue Dog and sane on healthcare.  He voted against as well.  I’ve updated the post.

There is no person in the Twin Cities media that inspires more unreasoning derangement than Katherine Kersten.  When it was announced, several years ago, that she’d be joining the columnist staff at the Strib, the “journalist” community acted like management had proposed mandatory sodomy during work breaks.

The Twin Cities’ “journalist” community – which has tolerated all manner of abuses of contact, fact and selective omission and mangling of context with scarcely a peep – was concerned about the “journalistic integrity” of the Strib’s famously biased, fact-challenged editorial pages.

But for these many years, I’ve been trying to press these people for details.

Here’s a typical exchange (*) from a local chat room frequented by media and near-media:

[Writer A]: Katherine Kersten is teh suck.

Mitchberg: Er, why do you say that?

[Writer A]: Have you read her latest article in the Strib?

Mitchberg: Yeah.  What about it?

[Writer A]: She says that marriage is about having kids.

Mitchberg: Yeah.  And…?

[Writer A]: That And she says that people who don’t have kids should get married!

[Editor B]: Hah!  She is teh crazee! LOLZ!  Can I haz baybee?

Mitchberg: Y Er, OK, both of you – I read the whole article.  She says no such thing.  Merely that the institution of marriage, traditionally and historically, throughout the world’s many, impossibly diverse cultures, is pretty universally about bringing men and women together to have children.  And that the dissolution of this tradition has caused lots of problems in our society.

[Writer A]: Marriage is about kids?  What?  What about adults?

Mitchberg: You’ve never been married, have you?

[Writer A]: No, and what does that have to do with it?

Mitchberg: Er, never mind.  Look, her main point is that marriage has always been how societies see to the upbringing and protection of children.  It goes back to prehistory.

[Writer A]: Marriage was always about property.

Mitchberg: Well, yeah, managing property, sure…

[Writer A]: No, because women were property.

Mitchberg: Er, yeah.  Put down the Womyn’s Studies textbook.  There are a zillion societies on earth, and their treatment of women varied widely.  In some, they were chattel.  In others, they were second-class citizens at best. In sub-saharan Africa, most societies were matriarchal, and in much of Asia many societies had a stealth matriarchy.  The treatment of women varies, historically, as widely as possible.  Others were not a whole lot different than we see ourselves today.  And some societies detested homosexuality with a homicidal passion, and others tolerated it with no major issues.  The variations were almost infinite.  And yet every single one of these societies had one thing in common; they were an institution in which man/men came together with woman/women to have, protect and raise children.  What do you suppose the odds were, given the vast number of permutations in every other facet of male-female relationships, that pretty much every one would see marriage as a union of males and females to raise kids?

Mitchberg: Hello?

[Writer A]: So people who don’t have kids shouldn’t marry?

[Editor B]: LOLZ!  ShE Iz tha CrayXEE, Beeyotch!

Mitchberg: Ed, yeah, got it.  A, I didn’t say that.  Could you show me where she does?  Of course you can’t.  Kersten neither prescribes nor proscribes.  She merely points out that the institution of marriage exists for a reason, and that reason isn’t sharing employee benefits.  Do I believe having kids is the only justification for marriage?  I dunno.  In the extremely unlikely event I marry again, I’m sure not having any more.  I’ve done my time.

[Writer A]: So you agree with her.

Mitchberg: Er, that’s kinda NOT what I said.

[Producer C]: I would think as a conservative you’d want the Strib to hire a smart conservative to represent your side.

Mitchberg: Let’s stay, hypothetically, that Katherine Kersten really is a poor writer, and that, as you also say, everyone always knew it.  Given the panic the Strib’s editorial board and columnists went into over hiring the putatively sub-par Kersten, do you honestly think they’d go and hire an even better conservative?  I mean, even as things are and/or putatively are, Kersten give them aneurysms.  Can you imagine if they had a bigger, badder one in the newsroom?

[Writer A]: So  you think marriage is about kids.  Isn’t it about adults?

Mitchberg: You may have perfectly summed up the crux of the Culture War.  Some believe marriage is about benefits, status and adult concerns.  Some of us believe it’s about raising kidst.  It seems the twain will never meet.

[Writer A]: This is futile.  She is teh dumb.

[Editor B]: And she a looser.

(*) Of course it’s satire.  Any resemblance to conversations I’ve had with people in the Twin Cities media and sorta-media in past – especially in the past 48 hours – is purely coincidental.  All celebrity written voices are impersonated – badly .

Mitchberg: Yeah.  And…?

…that Keith Olberman wasn’t one of the people killed in the Fort Hood massacre.

Life would be so much better if the MSNBC gasbag had pled, unsuccessfully, for his life last week.

But can you imagine how funny it’d be to see his eyeballs fly off in different directions?  Bwahaha!

What? Not funny?

But the left’s co-arbiters of entertainment just said that wishing for the death of people you disagree with is a laff riot, didn’t they?  I believe they did.

I get so confused.

The Dems want to adopt a European healthcare system.

Some of them might want them S might want us to take theirs off their hands:

Question:  Is introducing a dissenting point of view a “hatecrime” yet?

(via King Banaian).

Michael Regan thinks a great GOP resurgence may be afoot.

Republicans have dramatically turned around their fortunes with two high-profile gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey — both by comfortable margins.

Wouldn’t it be swell if this anticipated resurrection were due to the GOP being on point, producing a clear and wide message to voters and not simply because of Che Obama’s blowback?

In almost a year, the Obama administration and congressional liberals have focused their efforts so far left so much faster than anyone envisioned…and at the same time accomplishing nothing. They are making the Gingrich years look productive.

Nancy Pelosi is dancing a jiggly jig having passed a health care bill that has no chance of surviving the Senate in tact while unemployment climbs higher than predicted without the stimulus.

[gulp]

Not that anyone predicted this.

…and Americans are getting pissed.

Imagine the possibilities if the GOP actually gets it’s ducks in a row.

Interesting webtoy from the NYTimes for figuring and visualizing unemployment trends by demography, age, gender and edumacation.

White college educated males (Mitch raises hand) over 45 are around 4.1% so far.  Which is up from somewhere around 2% two years ago.  Rates for women in pretty much every combination seem to be lower than for men, indicating that feminists can quit their whining about the unfairness built into the system.

Black males from 15-25 without high school diplomas are up toward 50%, unfortunately; the rate drops by about half with a high school education, and half again with college; the feminization of poverty would seem to have missed a spot.

Question:  I wonder if anyone’s done crosstabs for people who were home-schooled, charter-schooled, parochial-schooled or alt-schooled versus recent public school graduates?

Gorbachev gives Obama advice on Afghanistan

“I think that what’s needed is not additional forces,” the former Soviet leader said through a translator, “this is something that we discussed, too, years ago but we decided not to do it. And I think our experience deserves attention.”

Maybe that’s why a month has lapsed while Barack Obama dithers over Afghanistan…he’s getting advice from anyone and everyone.

While you’re at it, Sir, why don’t you seek counsel from Jimmy Carter on hostage negotiation.

…Alec Baldwin on parenting.

…Britney Spears on driving a car.

…Oprah Winfrey on losing weight.

…Sean Penn on poise under pressure.

This is fun. You try it!

This morning the Pastor at our church brought up the recent health care debate thusly:

“A friend came up to me this morning and asked ‘So what do you think about the health care vote yesterday.'”

It was clearly a loaded question, the Pastor explained.

His reply was that he would respond with a God-centered perspective. Every person, every life in this country is precious; sacred. “Our health care system should reflect that.” He said further that he didn’t know how it should be managed or paid for but that is how he believes we should be approaching this issue.

…and I found myself agreeing with him in principal, although I’m not sure he believes government is the answer or not.

Is there a way to look at this debate from a “What Would God Do?” perspective?

I would not presume to know what God would think and recognize that many of you don’t even believe that God exists.

I do believe that individuals and families should have access to quality health care in America and should have a choice as to where they buy insurance to protect them against catastrophe, and how much of that risk they are comfortable retaining. They should have a choice as to where they seek care and from whom.

While I believe it is inevitable that all citizens be required to carry some form of health insurance, I believe they should have more choice as to where they obtain it, not less, and without regard to where they work. For those times that they are not able to afford it temporarily due to unemployment or being unemployable, the government should provide a backup and help those that can’t help themselves.

So far I think most Americans would agree with me and would deem it common sense. Believe in God or not, most would agree government should have a benevolent and responsible role in health care. Where Americans find themselves divided is how to get us there.

I believe God helps those that help themselves and expects us as individuals to help those that can’t. Teach a man to fish and if he can’t, give him one.  If we all lived this way, much of our federal government would find itself out of a job.

As for health care, creating incentives and removing barriers is or should be the conservative approach. Private enterprise has a way of filling a vacuum if it is allowed to do so. After all, there certainly is a demand for quality health care, and people are willing to reasonably pay for it. That sounds like the preamble of any good business plan.

But liberals would say that the private enterprise system has failed here and it is time for a benevolent government to wrest control. They offer more of what broke the system (and many others) in the first place.

If Congress cares so much about Americans, their health care and actually improving it, why is there such a rush to ram it through the legislative system?

Why are they not recognizing who they serve and honoring the promise to allow legislators and the public time to read and understand the bill?

Why are they lying about how many people are uninsured by choice?

Why is the trillion-dollar burden not borne by everyone equally, and not skewed for political bias?

Why is Congress exempt from the plan?

If there are such savings to be gained why does it cost a trillion dollars more than the current system?

Liberals think that an ever-growing government is the only means by which to effect change on any front.

The fact that many Americans don’t have health insurance or access to quality care is not a function of a lack of government intervention rather a result of too much of it.

Government has so regulated the industry such that most Americans have their health care choices made for them by their employer, who has the ability to choose from only a few insurance companies and thus care providers in each state.

If insurance carriers have been allowed to dictate to doctors and patients, have failed to cover preexisting conditions, while at the same time jacking up costs and profits, it isn’t due to a lack of regulation, rather a lack of competition because of over-regulation.

As I have said before, don’t blame the free market system when the market isn’t free.

A truly free market would force insurance companies and health care providers to vie for consumer health care dollars on the basis of coverage, quality and cost, just like auto insurance, which is also required by law.

Beyond that, a compassionate, benevolent (and mostly God-fearing) citizenry would see the mutual benefit of a federal government that takes care of those that legitimately can’t take care of themselves.

But what about those that can help themselves and choose not to? What would God say to this? For example, you don’t exercise, you eat too much, and you smoke or take drugs?

Does God expect us to pay the wages of our sins, or does he call for a benevolent government to transfer those burdens to others? That is admittedly also a loaded question and the answer is clear.

The current bill says that the government will not allow private and public insurance companies to penalize you for the higher burden you will eventually be to the system.

I think God would expect you to pay the wages of your ill-chosen behavior. I think God would expect you to take care not to be a burden to your neighbor. I think God expects you to live your life with others in mind.

God would have voted against this bill.

The NYTimes runs a handy graphic on the 39 Democrats who overcame their party’s collective insanity and voted for a free future, good healthcare, and a viable economy.

It’s illuminating – all but five of them came from districts that either McCain won, or that had voted Republican up until 2008.,  Tellingly, six of the last were from former Republican districts and won their seats by less than five points – in several cases, by less than a point.  Tuesday’s election results had to have had an extra impact there.

Many, like Collin Peterson, represent solidly Republican areas, and are as safe as can be (Peterson won his last race by 45 points).  Others, like Dennis Kucinich, apparently were angered by the fact the bill doesn’t give full benefits to plants.

All but 14 are classed as “Blue Dogs”.

Remember – this is a 39 vote swing in a chamber with a 75 vote Democrat majority.  Passing Pelosicare should have been as simple as counting the votes.

Why the swing?  Why did Nancy Pelosi come five votes from failing?

Because of you.  You turned out at town halls and tea parties. You endured the insults and the mockery of the misbegotten “elites”.  You flipped a big group bird at the “conventional wisdom”.  And you almost pulled off the impossible – turning a near-supermajority against itself.

Don’t think the Senate – where we need two votes – is paying attention?

Cross-posted in The Greenroom.