The Supreme Court of Minnesota (hereafter referred to as SCOM) says “didn’t actually drive drunk?  Tough –  W your wife did, so the police get a shiny new Tahoe!“.

An “innocent owner” cannot avoid forfeiture of a vehicle when it is jointly owned with the offender in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a split decision published Thursday.

The case involved a Cambridge man whose wife was cited for drunken driving while driving their 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe. The vehicle was seized from owner David Lee Laase. He argued in district court that the SUV should not have been taken away because he was an “innocent owner” under state law.

“This is really a major, major decision,” said Isanti County Attorney Jeffrey Edblad, who credited Assistant County Attorney Shila Walek Hooper for her work. “This is a case that obviously has statewide impact as it relates to being able to keep motor vehicles out of the hands of drunk drivers.”

Laase’s attorney, Brian Karalus, of St. Paul, disagreed.

“This opens up the floodgates for the government to come in and seize property of a 100 percent, completely innocent person,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Now, as I’ve pointed out many times to people who get overheated about court decisions, “the law means what it says it means” (which is partly false; it means what it and related case law say it means – which is why our society is all clogged with lawyers, who are the only people who can untangle it reliably, since the system was built by lawyers to be completely inscrutable to all the rest of us.  But I digress).

So what does the law say?

Under state law, a vehicle cannot be seized “if its owner can demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the owner did not have actual or constructive knowledge that the vehicle would be used or operated in any manner contrary to law or that the owner took reasonable steps to prevent the use of the vehicle by the offender.”

The district court and Court of Appeals agreed that Laase qualified.

But the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court’s ruling, saying that “while Mr. Laase may be an innocent owner, Ms. Laase is not.”

Now, I’m going to suspect there may well be a little bit of backstory there that didn’t make it into the story (inasmuch as the story was likely written by a non-lawyer), but I’m thinking there’s substantial grounds here for a…

{{facepalm}}

“Ms. Laase is not” the innocent owner.  Right. Got that, SCOM.

But if one owner’s guilt is enough to void the whole “innocent owner” law, then there’s no such thing as an innocent owner, is there?   There’s only “owners who don’t co-own things with anyone accused of anything”, and “guilty owners and their victims”.

The SCOM: working to make government richer, more powerful and more stupid for over 150 years.

Minnesota has long had one of the most fertile, bumptious, interesting, active blog scenes in the world.  Most of it is centered on the center-right blog scene; blogging is a medium that favors the underdogs.  

The Northern Alliance Radio Network founded the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers nearly six years ago, as a way of turning that new, fertile, enthusiastic bunch of writers into a social scene.  The MOB, as we called it from day one, has always been rigorously non-partisan; we have strenuously welcomed bloggers of all political stripes, and even bloggers who could care less about politics.  And we always will.  The MOB (Karl Bremer’s delusions aside) has no editorial input into any MOB blogs; our only agenda is to publicize MOB blogs, blogging in Minnesota and, twice a year or so, get together for a party.

That’s it.

It’s something I used to do pretty much yearly – but I’ve fallen gravely short in my duties as one of the MOB’s Capo Di Tutti Bloggi, and so it’s been nearly five years since I last took a trip Around The MOB to introduce you to the 100-odd blogs on the MOBRoll. 

So let’s fix that.  Over the next few weeks, I’m going to take a quick visit (not super long) with every currently-active blog on the MOB Blogroll. 

———-

Which brings us to the top of the order, and the MOBRoll, and the only one so far to depart the Latin alphabet: έχω ζωη (“Echo Zoë”). 

Where most MOB blogs focus on politics, έχω ζωη has always been about faith.  Christianity, as it happens.  The blog has largely converted into a vehicle for a monthly podcast – which are, by the way, well worth listening to (as with this piece, on the nature of persecution).

But the writing is also wonderful – philosophical, tackling the nature of God and eternity with the aplomb many of us reserve for fisking Nick Coleman.  I loved this piece – on the “hateful” label so promiscuously appled to Christians – from last October:

I recently posted a Youtube video by comedian/magician Penn Jillette. Despite being an avowed atheist, and thoroughly rejecting the claims of Christianity, including what I’ve laid out here, he had the intellectual honesty to admit that it would be downright hateful of a Christian to believe what I’ve stated above, and do nothing to share it with others. I was a bit surprised by his understanding of the Good-will of the Christian he encountered.

On the other hand, Jillette is in a small, and shrinking, minority among the vocal unbelieving world. The more common response is much more antagonistic, if not violent. That of homosexuals is perhaps easiest to point to as exemplary. As a Christian, I don’t see homosexuality as any lesser or greater a sin than those which I am guilty of myself. However, it’s quite visible. I know of no other sin that has parades, festivals, or benefits to highlight it. In addition, opposition to it is painted as hatred. But is it really? If I firmly believe a sin (or in this case a lifestyle of sin) to be destructive, not only within this life, but in the next as well, is it really hatred to speak up about it?

It’s hard to believe that έχω ζωη has been cranking out uniformly excellent material, at least every time I’ve checked it, for over six years now.

Stop by, say Hi, give a read and a listen, and support your local MOB blog.

The House healthcare vote:  on a Saturday, when the news media was out golfing.

The last few healthcare votes – also on Saturdays, to avoid more media scrutiny.

The big kahuna vote in the Senate?  Very likely Christmas Eve, when Anderson Cooper and the rest of our elite media will be busy covering shopping lines.

The development came with Senate leaders working round the clock trying to finalize their 10-year, nearly $1 trillion bill in time for a final vote on Christmas Eve. Nelson is emerging as a major obstacle – perhaps the only remaining one – since Democrats need his vote to have the 60 necessary to overcome Republican stalling tactics.

The Pelosi Administration seems to be learning its lesson; next year, votes will be carried out first on the swing shift; when bloggers and talkradio discover this, they’ll vote by meeting at motels in Maryland; eventually our entire system of government will devolve into flash mobs that gather in odd public places, vote, and disperse before they draw attention.

Remember when government surveillance of Americans (against whom there was probably cause to believe they were in contact with foreign terrorists) was the biggest threat the Constitution ever faced?

Either does the Obama administration:

The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.

Now, I have to admit that I think the “right to privacy” is a pretty thin thread, online; to expect that what you write on, say, Twitter or a blog can be presumed to some degree to be public.  Facebook – where the user builds a “closed network” – would be less public.  Email should be private.

But when the government is trawling the ‘net looking for dissenters…:

In October, the F.B.I. searched the New York home of a man suspected of helping coordinate protests at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh by sending out messages over Twitter.

“But that’s a criminal investigation!”

Well, yeah.  So far:

Wired magazine reported last month that In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, has put money into Visible Technologies, a software company that crawls across blogs, online forums, and open networks like Twitter and YouTube to monitor what is being said.

Obama’s CIA, trawling the ‘net to monitor what Americans are saying.

“No biggie!”

Really?  And in 2012 or 2016, when a Republican wins the White House and dissent is suddenly the highest form of patriotism again?

Stimulus funding a Shot in the Dark

We are self funded, thank you very much.

In timely fashion, Monckton presents the most definitive cross examination of a Global Warming Alarmist zealot ever. Points to both participants for the civility. But wow… Global Warming Alarmism doesn’t come out smelling so fresh in this one.

(H/T to the always excellent Global Warming Hoax Weekly Roundup, at the Daily Bayonet)

I”m not sure what’s got me more jazzed; that Obamacare is such a shambles, even the far left is bailing on the President…:

In a stunning reversal of fortune for President Barack Obama top progressives are attacking the health-reform plan moving through the Senate as “hollow,” “unsupportable” and a sellout to corporate interests.

Republicans, after plotting for months to sink the signature legislation of Obama’s first year, suddenly think that Democrats might wind up doing it for them.

Most dangerously for White House chances of assembling 60 Senate votes, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean launched a third day of attacks on the emerging bill, arguing in a Washington Post op-ed that it meets none of his benchmarks for “real reform.”

“[A]s it stands, this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America,” Dean wrote, then took to the airwaves to amplify his case.

…or that Fast Eddie Schultz, a man who actually is as stupid and hateful as the left alleges conservative talk radio to be (see Berg’s Seventh Law), is now considered a “top progressive”:

Ed Schultz, an influential liberal radio host [he’s “influence” a few million listeners to switch back to Limbaugh – Ed.], declared on his “Ed Show” on MSNBC: “The base is restless. They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. … They want to know, where are you? … Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout — a corporate sellout, out that. … The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry — they get a bunch of new customers.”

Don’t you love it when the left takes a break from demanding that conservative leaders run to the center, to demand that liberal leaders move to the left?

While I’ve spent much of the last eight years bagging on former (?) Strib columnist Nick Coleman, it’s not been an unalloyed thing.  When he’s focused on being a city columnist, as opposed to a not-overbright pundit, he writes good stuff; at his best, he’s sort of a “made in Singapore” Studs Terkel. 

Of course, he was rarely at his best; less and less so as the years unwound.  He hit his nadir during the 35W Bridge collapse; he got downsized from the columnist stable shortly thereafter. 

He’s apparently found some sort of work with some sort of think tank.  But I suspect his “downsizing” was more than tad Potemkin; he still appears in the Strib.  Lots.

And it’s just not the same Nick.  I busted him over the summer, parroting MN2020 shrieking points, and not very well at that.  It’s almost like he gets copies of press releases, and just writes in condescending and not very literate insults between the lines.

So what’s Nick up to now?  Well, you be the judge (emphasis added), a week or so ago he turned his keen journalistic senses to what he apparently thought was the key conservative issue of the past few weeks- Obama pre-empting “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”:

I also heard a “Tea Party” supporter on radio claiming that you can tell Obama hates America just by looking at him. All I can tell by looking at him is that his skin color is different than that of every other president. Maybe that’s what the Tea Party person meant.

Ah.  The old “Wing Nutz Are Teh Racist!, based on the off-handed and ill-considered (at best) remark by one person dragged out of context and immortalized by whomever  controls the edit suite” bit.  I hate to say it, but Coleman is making that whole “parrotting MN2020 without thinking” thing look pretty good in retrospect.  He’s now down to parrotting…Keith Olbermann?  Fast Eddie Schultz?  Rachel Maddow?

I was going to leave it at that.  Because I’ve long since learned that any effort I spend fisking Coleman is effort I could have spent…I dunno, itching my elbow?

But this is rich – where by “rich” I really mean “depressing that someone gets paid for writing the kind of duckspeak that’d get ignored on a fourth-rate leftyblog”.

We’ve heard the socialist slur repeatedly from such brilliant students of history as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann (Minnesota’s Poster Girl for Why We Need High School Civics Classes)

Says the guy who is a case study in how badly our system fails our students at science, logic and empirical reasoning.

and that pinnacle of wit and wisdom, Sean Hannity, who is the kind of Irishman my people used to refer to as “Blueshirts.”

“…my people…”

“Your people”, Mr. Coleman, came to America so that they could at long last leave their squalid anscestral squabbling back in the Old Country.  Like most of “our people”, they came to this country so they could escape, transcend and eventually forget the bigotries, hatreds and jealousies of their caste-ridden, incompetent homelands.

So do “your people” proud, and leave your callow IRA references at Ellis Island; “your people” are now a bunch of plush-bottom yahoos who have been “the man” in this country for generations; Among “his people” his father, the former Speaker of the Minnesota House; his little brother Chris is the King George III of Saint Paul; Nick himself is the very Charles Townsend-esque embodiment of “the status quo” in the Twin Cities media.

Blueshirt this.

It was 105 years ago today that Simo Häyhä was born?

“Simo Whøhä?”

Have a seat.

Simo Häyhä was a pretty typical Finnish farmer – the kind of guy you can find in any small town in rural Finland or, for that matter, the Iron Range.  He was born and grew up in Rautjärvi, a spot on the map off the west edge of Lake Ladoga, two miles west of the current Russo-Finnish border.  Like most Finns, he did his year of military service in the mid-twenties, and went back to his real life – farming in the summer, hunting moose in the winter.  He was, outwardly, a pretty unpreposessing man – he stood only 5’3, which is especially diminuitive among the statuesque Finns.

He was 34 when the Soviets invaded Finland.  Häyhä was recalled to service with the Finnish 12th Division.  The division held the Kollaa front, north of Lake Ladoga, and was quickly beset by four Soviet divisions and a tank brigade.

Kollaa was the Somme of the Winter War.  The Soviets would charge; they’d get through the Finnish lines; the Finns would cut them off and kill them, or drive them back. And so it went, back and forth, for three whole months – virtually the entire length of the war.

And one of the reasons was Häyhä.

Simo with rifle

Armed with a Moissin/Nagant M/28 – a World War 1-vintage Russian rifle that the Finns had reworked into a much more accurate piece (the Finns, a former Russian province, had retained the Russian-caliber, mostlhy Russian-surplus, weapons after independence) – and wearing homemade white camouflage, on his own cross-country skis, Häyhä stalked the forest.  Unlike most of history’s snipers, he used only his  rifle’s iron sights – he thought scopes forced the sniper to raise their heads too high, dangerously raising their profile.  He was thorough about concealment – when he had time to prepare a position, he would compact the snow in front of him to avoid raising a small blizzard with his muzzle blast.  He’d also keep snow in his mouth while stalking, to pre-cool his exhalation, avoiding the big clouds of steam that normally accompany heavy exertion in the extreme cold.

Did we mention the extreme cold?  The average temperature during the Battle of the Kollaa varied from “freaking cold” to “how the hell do humans live in this” – from -4 to -40, Fahrenheit.

In a three-month period – roughly 100 days – Häyhä had 505 confirmed kills.  542 if you count some unconfirmed ones.  Some Finnish sources say it was closer to 800.

And he wasn’t just a sniper; when the situation called for the Finns to close with with the Soviets, Häyhä would ski into hand-to-hand range with the rest of the troops for the close assault; he was credited with another 200 kills at point-blank range with his Suomi Model 31 submachine gun.

The Soviets called him “The White Death”.  They tried everything to get him; countersnipers (they didn’t last long), concentrated volleys of anti-tank rifle fire (gunnies will know what they are; to a non-gunny, think “really big rifle desigined to penetrate a quarter inch of armor”), and finally rolling artillery barrages.

A week before the war’s end, on March 6 1940, a lucky shot from a Soviet infantryman caught Häyhä in the jaw, wrecking it and blowing of his left cheek.  His comrades dragged him to the rear, where he began several years of recuperation.  He got one of the very few battlefield promotions ever issued in the Finnish army, from Corporal to Second Lieutenant, in honor of his achievements.

The Soviets suffered 8,000 dead in three months in Kollaa; Häyhä alone accounted for nearly 10% of the total (and at least one of Finland’s other great snipers,Sulo Kolkka, claimed another 400 at the Kollaa; the two men between them accounted for over 12% of the entire death toll).  On the list of the world’s greatest snipers, he’s not only the top of the list by a considerable margin, but he did it all in 100 days flat. 

Even John Woo or Quentin Tarantino couldn’t make him a bigger badass.

But Simo Häyhä was no movie action hero; he was a typical workadaddy hugamommy Finnish backwoodsman.  He survived the war, and lived until 2002 in rural Finland, hunting moose and breeding dogs.  He was bit of a national treasure in Finland.

Asked in the nineties what made him so successful as a sniper, he responded in Finnish “Pyytlikkonyykkeyynnkyypelaapetoonen“; “Practice”. [1]

This video tribute tells the story pretty well [2]

What can we take away from Häyhä’s story?  That a little guy with a rifle can make a disproportionate difference.  He stymied Stalin, just like a lot of American little guys with rifles (but whose preferred weapon is the ballot and the picket sign and the checkbook), outnumbered and outgunned and outspent, rhetorically stymie Nancy Pelosi and Richard Daley and the Democrats today. [3]

And so Simo Häyhä is every bit as much a hero for Real Americans for what he represents as he is for Finns for what he did.

Happy posthumous birthday, Simo Häyhä!

(more…)

This holiday season consumers armed with smartphones are using the internet in their palm to find the best deals, keeping retailers on their toes, and presumably driving prices down.

The rise of smart phones, with their go-anywhere Web access, is changing the shopping game this holiday season.

Tech-savvy shoppers are finding it easier than ever to work the system to get the best deals.

They’re scanning barcodes with their cell phone cameras to load into price comparison Internet sites while standing in store aisles, using GPS to find discounts at nearby stores and flashing electronic coupons straight from their phones.

This is how a free market works.

Now, imagine of you will, a time when health care consumers, free to choose from multiple providers of insurance and care, armed with reviews and cost comparisons via the internet and driven by the same motivation to get more for less.

…if only the government would get out of their way, reform indeed we would have.

Just as our time on earth represents a slim slice of the eons since our planet was formed, our current atmospheric episode is a respite in a wild ride featuring extreme heat, cold and large objects falling on our heads.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

And governments and groupies have been deceived by jet-setting rock stars and carbon-trading billionaires.

Lucky us…

The stroke of luck that’s misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it’s very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Man-made Climate Change enthusiasts are not only politically-motivated opportunists, they must also be the most arrogant people on earth, thinking we actually have a role in the climate of the relative pebble we live on as it screams through the universe.

The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons—the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there’s more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble—its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.

But the wobbles in our trip around the sun are just a start. The sun is a traveler, too. It circles the black hole at the galaxy’s core every 226 million years. And it takes its tiny flock of planets with it. That means us. The result?

The journey around the galactic core is fraught with dangers. For example, every 143 million years we pass through a spiral arm of the galaxy, an arm that tosses tsunamis of cosmic rays our way. Those rays produce massive climate change. Then there’s the innocent-sounding stuff astronomers call galactic “fluff,” massive clouds of cosmic dust lurking in our solar system’s path that also cause dramatic climate change.

Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That’s an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

…unless you have a Convenient Agenda that is.

Remember before the ’08 election, when the left and media (pardon the redundancy) stood, like Captain Renault, and bellowed “I’m shocked, shocked, that you would enforce an ideological purity test” (against the “Override Six”,  six GOP legislators that stabbed Governor Pawlenty in the back and voted to overrride his veto of a huge spending bill, thereby handing control of the state’s finances over to a bunch of irresponsible, wanton DFLers)?

Either does the DFL.  They are in the process of trying to expunge bad-think from the Mother Party (emphasis added):

Minnesota’s leading state-worker union is endorsing [Debbie] White, a Winona City Councilwoman, for the House District 31A seat Pelowski now holds, said a spokesman for AFSCME Council 5. But a top Winona DFLer, Sen. Sharon Erickson Ropes, said she’s backing Pelowski.

The dueling endorsements fuel an emerging intra-party battle among DFLers in District 31A, which covers the cities of Winona and Houston and southern Winona County.

AFSCME officials and Pelowski traded jabs Wednesday, each accusing the other of lying about the union’s endorsement screening process. AFSCME leaders also took aim at Pelowski for opposing a tax increase to balance the state budget in 2009.

DFL to its minions:  “YOU VILL CLOSE RANKS”.

(Via Gary Gross at LFR)

I don’t have a lot of tolerance for stupid.

Part of it is that I am a conservative; I believe that society and its members should strive to be worthy of the best of its legacy.

Part of it is that I spent some of the best worst years of my life working in bars, among the drunks and the idiots.  This was at the same time I was dealing with a famously-addled roommate, “Wyatt”, a child of boundless privilege with uncountable advantages, whose stated mission in life was to stay high all the time and “f[ornicate with] every woman in the world”.

Which brings us to “Jersey Shore”, another vapid MTV “reality” series chronicling the “lives” of a bunch of meatheads who could well be, I kid you not, “Wyatt”‘s younger siblings.  I saw about ten minutes of it, more or less by accident.

I almost puked.  I’ve thought about writing something about that wretched waste of time focused on wretched wastes of flesh.  And then I almost puked again.

So I’ll leave it to Jonah Goldberg to A suck it up and actually address what Jersey Shore and reality TV in general really mean:

Don’t get me wrong; it’s great television. But gladiatorial games would be great TV, too.

Orwell noted that in 1984.  But I digress:

The Los Angeles Times reported the other day that the reality-show industry is suddenly having a crisis of conscience about its impact on the culture. That’s nice to hear, but it’s not nearly enough.

British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it’s hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.

It’s not all bad news, to be sure. The elite minority’s general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs. As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls “ecumenical niceness.” A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass — or people with underclass values — are forbidden.

Meaning that I’d be considered declasse to say that “The Kardashians are not just vapid dimbulb tramps, but in fact signs that our society is basically screwed”, or that “Jon and Kate Plus Eight the show was a vacuous waste of time, but the two “parents” themselves should make every parent in America hang their head in shame that we collectively allow child abuse to become an entertainment sport”, or “the “people” on Jersey Shore are fit only to be used as compost”.

A corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.

Paging Carrie Prejean.

Long before the rise of reality shows, ecumenical niceness created a moral vacuum. Out-of-wedlock birth was once a great shame; now it’s something of a happy lifestyle choice. The cavalier use of profanity was once crude; now it’s increasingly conversational. Self-discipline was once a virtue; now self-expression is king.

Not just “king” – but a form of “art” along the lines of “music criticism”; people with nothing useful (much less ennobling) to say, saying it without any constraint.

Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the “proletarianization of the elites,” one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. [Paris] Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.

The question is: Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?

Read the whole thing.

As for me?  I’m going to throw darts at the picture of the latest cast of Real World.

Keep up the good work (emphases added):

Less than a year after Inauguration Day, support for the Democratic Party continues to slump, amid a difficult economy and a wave of public discontent, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

The findings underscored how dramatically the political landscape has changed during the Obama administration’s first year. In January, despite the recession and financial crisis, voters expressed optimism about the future, the new president enjoyed soaring approval ratings, and congressional leaders promised to swiftly pass his ambitious agenda.

I remember that.

Fortunately, so do a lot of people:

In December’s survey, for the first time, less than half of Americans approved of the job President Barack Obama was doing, marking a steeper first-year fall for this president than his recent predecessors.

I’ve been cautious about the polls – partly because it’s almost three years ’til the next election, but mostly because the bellwether for bad first-year polling is still Reagan in ’81. I was waiting to see if Obama would undercut even that dubious record.

It seems he has.

I’m feeling much better, thanks.

Desperation, thy name is Obama. Earlier this week the President pleaded if we don’t pass health care reform now, no President will ever try it again.

Today, with virtually every federal agency in financial disarray or on a trajectory of financial collapse, the President implies this time it will be different.

President Obama told ABC News’ Charles Gibson in an interview that if Congress does not pass health care legislation that will bring down costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.”

Mr. President, sir, we have no doubt that you will see to that whether we reform health care or not. The truth of the matter is, the federal government, by any measure applied to any non-public entity is insolvent already.

When private entities reach the end of the fiscal road, they don’t have the benefit of raising debt ceilings and taxes. They die a quick death – that is unless the government decides a bail-out is in order – then they die a slow, painful death. Either way, the competition eats their lunch and steals their talent. Of course, the federal government has no competition, no one to keep it accountable (any more).

As for a bankrupt federal government, the tipping point was probably reached some time ago. We will never pay off our national debt and inevitably it’s weight will come crashing down on our economy making 2009 look like the good ol’ days for millions of Americans.

Indeed, Mr. President, I have to agree with you. The federal government will go bankrupt if we don’t pass health care reform legislation.

But if we do, it will come a lot faster.

…in weather a lot like this, that the Battle of the Bulge started.

I thought about that yesterday, as I wrestled with a cold car; “how much more fun would this be if I’d spent the night in a three foot deep foxhole, with no sleep, wrapped in an overcoat and old newspapers?

Here’s an old Army newsreel of the battle, in that classic forties newsreel style.

The Bulge was such a huge story – even 65 years later, it’s hard to know where to start.  So much of it is well-known – the 101st Airborne (and 7th Armored) at Bastogne; Patton’s epic counterattack; the story of thousands of Americans, cut off from higher authority and on their own in atrocious winter conditions, adapting and persisting and eventually prevailing against the Nazi onslaught.

But there are two stories I usually return to, over and over.

One of the great stories of the battle – one that was more or less untold until the eighties – was that of Lieutenant Lyle Bouck and the Intelligence and Reconaissance platoon of the 394th Infantry Regiment – eighteen guys with three machine guns and orders to hold an isolated hill near the Belgian village of Lanzerath, astride one of the huge gaps in the American lines. 

Lanzerath, and the monument to Bouck's platoon, today

An entire German airborne regiment was charged with clearing the hill to make way for the SS Panzergrenadiers of Colonel Joachim Peiper – the elite  stormtroopers who were going to be the tip of the spear that would drive all the way to Antwerp and, according to Hitler’s plan, divide the Allied armies and make victory over Germany impossible.

But the nineteen-man platoon held off the entire German regiment for 24 hours, killing hundreds of paratroopers, delaying Peiper’s breakthrough; not long enough to prevent Peiper from driving all the way to Dinant (the peak of the “bulge”), but long enough that the reinforcements that finally did arrive on the scene were able to hit Peiper’s flank rather than watch his dust (or blowing snow) disappearing in the west.

Bouck’s platoon were captured after they ran out of ammunition.  One man died; the rest spent four months in POW camps.  When released from the POW camp, Bouck was too ill to file an after-action report – and reportedly didn’t think they’d done anything especially notable anyway.  And so the events didn’t get formally commemorated until 1981.

Every single member of the platoon was decorated for their actions that day – making them the most-decorated platoon-sized unit of the entire war:

• PFC William James Tsakanikas (DSC)
• Tech. Sgt. William L. Slape (DSC)
• PFC Risto Milsovech (DSC)
• First Lt. Lyle J. Bouck Jr. (DSC)
• Pvt. John B. Creger (Silver Star)
• Pvt. Louis J. Kalil (Silver Star)
• Cpl. Aubrey P. McGeehee (Silver Star)
• PFC Jordan H. Robinson (Silver Star)
• Pvt. James R. Silvola (Silver Star)
• Pvt. Robert D. Adams (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Pvt. Robert D. Baasch (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Sgt. William D. Dustman (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Pvt. Clifford R. Fansher (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• T/3 James Fort (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Cpl. Samuel L. Jenkins (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Pvt. Joseph A. McConnell (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Cpl. Robert H. Preston (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Sgt. George H. Redmond (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)

Another of the stories – more mixed, in this case – was that the Battle of the Bulge was the beginning of the end of segregation in the military and, in turn, the United States.  Theretofore, most African-Americans in the Army served in labor units, digging ditches and building airfields and burying the dead.  Much of the work was crucial; most of the supply trucks that supported Patton’s blitz through France in 1944 had black drivers.  But it was the considered opinion of many officers, from Eisenhower and Patton to the US Army’s personnel director, General Robert E. Lee (not making that up) that blacks lacked the courage and intelligence to serve as good combat soldiers.

Pressure from the Roosevelt adminstration knocked a few cracks into the system; the Army Air Force trained 1,000 black pilots, including the celebrated “Tuskeegee Airmen”; the Marines, two segregated combat battalions; the Army, a number of combat and combat support units along with some of the traditional black “Buffalo Soldier” units, dating back to the Civil War; the white-led 92dn Infantry Division led the way in Italy, and the 761st Tank Battalion (immortalized in a fantastic book by none other than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) spearheaded Patton’s relief of Bastogne:

A Sherman of the 761st "Black Panther" Tank Battalion

A black light-anti-aircraft battalion had the highest score of any AA gun unit in Europe.

But during the Bulge, the casualties spiked horribly; the replacement depots’ supplies of white replacement troops dried up.  The call went out to the labor, mechanics and truck units, looking for volunteers.  Thousands stepped up; while the plan was to keep them in segregated platoons.  But as the friction of combat ground the plans down, the platoons became squads mixed into white platoons, and soon black soldiers in squads with white troops.  By the end of the Battle, black and white troops were bunking together in confiscated houses. 

It’d be great to say the Army learned its lesson – but it wouldn’t be true.  Once the dust died down, the Army resegregated the troops; the white troops earned points for combat service, while the black ones plodded along through menial service jobs.  It took three more years before Truman desegregated the military. 

But the experience at the Bulge was one of the key experiences that discredited the institutional belief in the inferiority of blacks as soldiers.

I had a dream.

In it, all of the smart, ethical, enlightened, mannered, intelligent people of the world confronted all of the dumb, depraved, rude, stupid, bigoted idiots…

…and beat the crap out of them.

Saint Paul Schools officially have a superintendent:

The St. Paul school board on Tuesday unanimously approved a $180,000 salary and a three-year contract with its new district superintendent, Valeria Silva.

Silva, who most recently served as the district’s chief academic officer, was chosen over two other finalists after a five-month search for the job of overseeing the state’s second-largest school district.

“Chief Academic Officer?”

The Saint Paul Schools have among the worst achievement gaps of any major-city school in the country.  The graduation rate is hovering around 50%.  The minority graduation rate is much, much lower.

What exactly did  Ms. Silva do?

 The district has 38,000 students, 6,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $600 million.

Which means the actual budget is just south of $16,000.  Which is 50% more than a charter school student gets.

But here’s the part I love (emphasis added):

“Now I can get down to the work of leading St. Paul Public Schools for at least the next three years while we all continue our work of providing a premier education for every student,” Silva said.

Read another way: “I am now on the Celebrity Superintendent train!  Whooooooooo!  Three years ’til Denver!  Three more years I’ll be in Chicago!  All abooooooooooard!”

A midwife in a Brit maternity ward writes about a typical day under Britain’s National Health System – the one that Americans continue to insist is fine, Winston, just fine.

Clutching her husband’s hand and with agony and exhaustion etched on her face, a young woman struggled into a room in the maternity unit where I worked.

She was in the early stages of labour with her first baby, she was terrified, in excruciating pain and desperate for any crumb of support.

Helpless beside her, her overnight bag in his hand, her poor husband looked equally traumatised.

My heart went out to them. But I knew there was little I could do. With five other pregnant women to care for at the same time, all with hugely different and complex problems, I was rushed off my feet and didn’t have the time to look after her properly, to allay her fears or to hear about how she wanted the birth to unfold.

“Brits love the NHS”

I longed to sit with this poor young woman, calm her and remind her gently to breathe deeply through each contraction.

Just half an hour of my time could have made all the difference. Instead, I put on my cheeriest smile and followed hospital procedure. ‘Would you like a painkiller?’ I asked.

“Here, look at this poll, helpfuly provided to me by a pro-public option group!”

Ten hours later, after she had been drugged to the eyeballs to dull the pain, I heard she’d given birth.

“PUBLIC OPTION NOW!  PUBLIC OPTION NOW! PUBLIC OPTION NOW!”

Her baby was healthy, but I knew I’d let her down.

The piece also goes into detail on the erosion in numbers of providers – doctors, nurses, midwives and the like – that is inevitable under socialized healthcare.  15 years ago, there were 35,000 midwives in Brit materinity wards.  Today, there are 25,000 – half of ’em part-timers.

Read the whole thing.

And then call your legislator and remind them that if they want this kind of healthcare so bad, they should lead the way by having it themselves.

UPDATE:  Added the link.  It was early.

Kids today have it tough.

Not so much on “life is difficult” front, of course; compared to life in the Depression, for kids who were going to grow up and go off to World War II and spend Christmas of 1944 in weather more or less like this sitting in foxholes in the Ardennes, kids today have it pretty OK.

But on the “adults are scary and stupid” front?  Kids today have it rough.

School counselors have been reporting a wave of…timidity?  Kids don’t socialize as much today as they used to; school counselors note the amazing, depressing numbers of children that head directly home after school, watch television/do homework, and rarely if ever get outside without direct adult supervision.  Part of the problem is the epidemic of single-parent homes, most of whom are headed by single mothers.  Parents’ styles are as individual as they are, of course – but one of the reason God, biology, remorseless fate or whatever you do or don’t believe in made families with mixed-gender parents is because different genders bring different traits to the table; mothers are stereotypically “nurterers”, and more risk-averse; fathers are, again stereotypically, the ones that imprint adventure and risk-taking on the kids (and no, feel free not to flood my comment section with stories of what an exception your mother was; I know, already). And so, with no male in the house to model behavior from, the kids become…nurtured.  And overnurtured, as the case may be.  It’s not the only explanation – but then, this post isn’t about explaining things.

Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids – a blog that is going on my blogroll today – writes about a letter to the editor she got:

Dear Free-Range Kids: My name is Shaylene Haswarey, and I want to share a story with you today.

This morning, my doorbell rang, and two police officers were present.  They asked me if I am the mother of my children, and I said yes.  They said someone called them because my three oldest kids (ages 9, 7, and 6) were walking around our GATED town-house complex, unattended. I said, “They found a cat, and I let them go out and feed it.”…

…I told the officer I am from Idaho, and kids play outside like this all the time.  He said my kids are too young to be out,  because we do not have a yard, and this is a complex.  He also told me there are predators around here.  He finally told me if I let my kids out again he will have to call social services because I am endangering my children! What is wrong with this picture???

Mitch’s answer – which is one reason why I don’t do a blog on parenting – is “they’re prepping your kids for the hyper-feminized school system, where uncontrolled risk-taking is actively squelched”. 

Back to Skenazy’s letter:

1.  Is it against the law to go out in the rain in your pajamas?
2.  My kids know how to watch for cars.  They were following the cat and feeding it.
3.  There are NO predators in my neighborhood. I looked on Megan’s Law, and there are only 6 in our whole city, and none are in my neighborhood.  I live in Aliso Viejo, CA.  Aliso Viejo is a small city in between Irvine and Mission Viejo.  These cities rank #1 by the FBI for the safest cities in America with a pop. of 100,000+.  Therefore, Aliso Viejo is safer than the city I grew up in in Idaho!

After the police officer asked for me and my husband’s name and birthdates, I freaked out!  I am NOT going to let my kids go outside without me again!  I don’t want social services knocking on my door.  What do you think I should do if anything, about this?  My husband’s family is from India.  They have a big house there.  I am thinking of going to their village this September and staying there for a few months, so my kids can be normal kids. — Shaylene

Lenore writes back (emphasis added by yours truly):

Dear Shaylene: Isn’t it incredible that you are living the “American Dream” — a house, four kids, nice town — and longing for the kind of childhood a kid can get in a much less affluent country? Meantime, I put this question to readers: What can this mom do to prove to the cop that she’s not off base? How can we she convince him (and other cops and other neighbors) that being outside is normal and healthy for kids? Should we all call the police department there? Start a petition? Any ideas? — Lenore

Well, you heard the lady ladies.  Let’s cough up some answers!

Some leftybloggers famously dubbed themselves the “reality-based community” – a clumsy, junior-high shot at neo-conservative “faith based” ideal.

Apparently the lefties got the idea at a seance from Egyptian political philosopher and lobbyist Ram-Gar:

“Conservatives and Republicans report fewer experiences than liberals or Democrats communicating with the dead, seeing ghosts and consulting fortunetellers or psychics,” the Pew study says. For example, 21 percent of Republicans report that they have been in touch with someone who is dead, while 36 percent of Democrats say they have done so. Eleven percent of Republicans say they have seen a ghost, while 21 percent of Democrats say so.

And remembering how the nation’s lesser party roasted Nancy Reagan, I thought this next bit was a hoot:

And nine percent of Republicans say they have consulted a fortuneteller, while 22 percent of Democrats have.

It’s explain a lot about Represenative McCollum.

But I think there’s some omission bias at play here:

Fifteen percent of Republicans say they view yoga as a spiritual practice, while 31 percent of Democrats do.

No question about whether a day at the range is a spiritual experience?

Minnesota’s Democrats in Washington are  M doing their best to snatch defeat from the jaws of opportunity:

Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who took office in part thanks to the same wave of support that swept Obama in, said last week that he wants to hear more about the rationale behind the plan before deciding whether to support a larger U.S. combat presence in Afghanistan.

In private meetings with top administration officials, he said, they have impressed on him that the surge may be the last chance to reverse the war’s momentum against the Taliban.

He is still unsure the Afghan government is “willing and able to step up to this,” later adding that he wants “to find out through the hearings how achievable all of this is.”

Perhaps he’s trying to bore the Taliban to death?  It could work.

In a reference to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said: “It’s not 2001. It’s 2009. We’ve been through a president asking Congress to support him in two wars. One of them never should have been fought, and the other one was fought about as poorly as it could have possibly been. So obviously you’ve got some highly skeptical people to deal with.”

We’ve also got some not very bright congresspeople to deal with.

Congressman Ellison – to paraphrase your own nonsense rhetoric, it’s 2009, not 2006.  We have a choice; let the Taliban set up another safe haven (and allow them to safely consolidate their safer haven in Pakistan), or deny it to them.

None of your baked wind matters.  Ever, indeed, but especially on this issue.

A-Klo:

“For me, the issue is, do we have good enough partners here?” Klobuchar said. “By asking the questions, you’re not just getting the answers, you’re actually pushing this government policy and the Afghan government to [be] better.”

Klobuchar, a Democrat, said she is “open to this military strategy” as long as there is a sufficient partnership with Afghan civilians.

Um, right.

And how do you propose to get “sufficient partnership” with people who know that if they support us, and we pack up and leave (as you and your party wish) with the job half-done, they will be getting their heads sawed off?

Afghan civilians have been through hell, this past thirty years.  For the entire time, they’ve had to either choose – Soviets/muj, then one militia/another militia, then more of the same, and now US and Centeral Government/Taliban – knowing that if they made the wrong call, they and their families would disappear, and be eventually, maybe found with their hands tied behind their backs, their heads blown or sawed off, if they picked the loser.

And what precisely is it that you are trying to make us, Senator Klobuchar?

I’m not sure if it’s really a “barometer” measuring howPresident Obama is doing on the far left – but h if the President is losing Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, it could be fairly said he’s got a problem among the friendlies.

Pallmeyer starts by repeating what is to us on the right the absurdly obvious:

“The Nobel Committee gambled and lost,” says Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, assistant professor of justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas. President Obama’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was “a defense of war and militarism. … With this speech the Nobel Committee’s gamble became an embarrassment.”

Pallmeyer’s right – although the embarassment really happened the moment they picked a brand new president for the “peace” prize simply for not being George W. Bush.

But Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer isn’t one for such distinctions.  He’s a professor at Saint Thomas, in the “peace studies” department; if there’s an academic discipline with less actual rigor or merit than “peace studies”, I’m at a loss to think of it.

Nelson-Pallmeyer speculated that “when [members of the Nobel Committee] made their decision they recognized how the stars had alligned in one of those rare moments in history in which crises converge with opportunities.”

I was going to write something here, but it’d just repeat my previous paragraph.

…to indulge in schadenfreud is not a good one.  I resist it the best I can.

Of course, some times it’s  harder than others:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18.

But polls change – which is why they keep taking ’em.

It was thirty years ago today that London Calling by The Clash came out.

If you get 100 people off the street to free-associate what “punk rock” means, I suspect the answers you get will depend on the subjects’ ages and whatever social label they wear on their sleeves (or through their noses).

People under 30 – the ones who were born long after “Punk” was dead?  They’ll probably think attitude-thick genre museum bands like Green Day and Blink 182, people who’ve kept the superficial elements of the punk form – buzz-saw guitars heavy on rhythm and light on solo pyrotechnics, three-minute songs, lots of attitude (justified or not).

People under 40 who see themselves as maybe just a tad counterculture?  Maybe they’ll slip in references to Rancid, Social Distortion, the Dead Kennedys or Henry Rollins, and mumble something about rejecting this and anarchy that and dystopic the other thing, and some of the other adolescent catchphrases that “punks” repeated at the time, and maybe even dye their hair pink, don a pair of greasy black stovepipe jeans and a ripped t-shirt and stick a safety pin through their nose for good measure.

But just about anyone of any age who can remember the term “Punk Rock” will list London Calling as the peak of the genre.  Perhaps if you were sentient at the time – and, at 16, I barely was – you can recall some of the hype and hyperbole over the record; to one critic or another, the Clash were “the only band that matters”; Dave Marsh famously opined that the Clash “is a band that can do anything they want, right now”.  At a time when music was changing faster than it had since the first radio station banned the first Elvis Presley record from airplay, The Clash were the band that was pushing the change further, and faster, than anyone.

The funny thing, though?  The part that two generations of critics, poseurs and after-the-fact fans miss, thirty years after the fact?  London Calling largely wasn’t a “punk” record. 

The ironies keep coming, though.  While London Calling wasn’t “punk”, it did more to further “punk”‘s alleged goals, at least as far as music was concerned, than every other punk record combined.  It effected more change in mainstream musical taste than any other punk record.  It kicked the Top Forty open to ragged, raw, “do-it-yourself” music more than any record, ever.  Its’ appearance on the Billboard charts kicked off the greatest disturbance in the Top Forty force since FM radio stopped being “alternative” – the glorious, four-or-so year period in the eighties where the “alternative” was the mainstream.

London Calling covered the waterfront, style-wise: from brutal, hard punk rock (the title cut, “Clampdown”), giddy ska (“Wrong ’em Boyo”, “I’m Not Down”), balmy bar-band reggae (“Rudy Can’t Fail”, “Revolution Rock”)…

 …and quite a bit that you can’t classify at all; “Spanish Bombs”, which sounds like the Kinks rendering Ennio Morricone; “Jimmy Jazz”, a slinky, boozy “blues” number which is to jazz what Chris Gaines was to alt-rock; “Brand New Cadillac”, a menacing minor-key-inverted cover of “the first British rock and roll record” by Vince Taylor which sounds like…well, like the Clash doing rockabilly.

I think I played my first copy until it turned white from the needle tracking.  And even today, it’s got something for just about every mood; over the weekend I had ‘Rudy Can’t Fail” coursing through my head – partly because we used it as a bumper on Saturday, but also because it’s one of the catchiest songs of the decade.

On those days when I’m feeling very 47 years old and the world’s been beating me about the head and shoulders enough to get me down, I spin “Death Or Glory”:

What’s it about?  The gruelling life of a rock star, for all I care.  But it’s three minutes and change of exactly why I love music; it grabs me in the liver and says “Dance, mofo!”+

And I do.

The other moment?  “The Card Cheat”

I didn’t really “get” this song when I was 17.  I think I was probably into my thirties before I really figured it out.  And today, if someone asks me why London Calling is so great, it’s my answer.

It’s a musical version of a noir film – speaking of genres I didn’t appreciate until I was older. What’s it about?  Flailing against the darkness, or seeking and failing to find one little bit of immortality, or maybe just crap from Mick Jones’ notebook?

I dunno.  But between the Irish Horns’ ruffles and flourishes and Jones’ dork-fingered piano playing, it wrenches a noir beauty out of the garage-band genre. 

The Clash couldn’t live up to the hype, of course; nobody could live up to the kind of hype that they got in their day.  The followup, Sandinista, was ambitious but shrill; Combat Rock gave me the sense that Strummer and Jones thought they were too good for the whole “pop star” thing – it was like a punk-reggae Dennis DeYoung record.

But London Calling is still timeless, as these things go.