…you need to get out and support Doug Wardlow.

Kevin Jackson, owner of Black Sphere.net, is worth checking out…

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I are up from 1-3.  In addition to the usual “week in review” stuff, we’ll be talking with comedian Kevin Jackson from Blacksphere.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!

(All times Central)

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

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

Join us!

Over at his new gig at Politics in Minnesota, former City Pages and Minnesota Independent reporter Paul Demko – who is as a rule one of the smarter bloggers in the regional Sorosphere, and I promise you I don’t mean that in the “Jessica Simpson is smarter than Anna Nicole Smith” sense of the phrase, so don’t go there – has what he believes is bad news for Governor Pawlenty:

Fewer than 5 percent of likely Republican voters want Gov. Tim Pawlenty to be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, according to a new Zogby poll.

Zogby? 

You mean, the same Zogby that said Martha Coakley was still winning  the Massachusetts special election the day before the vote was held?

The same Zogby that might be the only poller in the business with a worse record, and a better record at telling Demcrats what they want to hear, than the Star/Tribune’s “Minnesota Poll”?

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was the most popular choice, with support from just over 22 percent of those surveyed. Tracking closely behind was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who was the top pick of nearly 20 percent of likely Republican voters.

Pawlenty is just shy of five points, says Zogby, who is presumably out golfing with with Senator Coakley, helping OJ find the real killer.

A seemingly grim sign for Pawlenty’s presidential prospects: He received less support than Massachusetts Sen.-elect Scott Brown (5.2 percent). On the plus side, he topped former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (3.9 percent). Of course, those difference are statistically meaningless.

Of course, the polls a year before the 2008 election showed Barack Obama a 27 point dog to Hillary Clinton, too. 

W’e’ve got almost three years ’til the election.  And while I’m far from throwing my gear on the Pawlenty bandwagon, crowing about Pawlenty’s showing at this point smacks more of sour grapes over Minnesota’s current legislative situation than detached analysis.

Brown’s numbers will drop down to where a junior senator’s should be (unless he gets himself deified by the media, like a certain former junior Senator);  Romney and Palin have the same two years of campaigning to do that Pawlenty does. 

Anything can happen.  And this is going to be one hella exciting couple of years.

This blog has never “Endorsed” political candidates – because, like, who cares what I think? 

And Shot In The Dark generally only gets into showbiz as a snarky critic or, occasionally, fanboy.

As to some of showbiz’ glitzier diversions?  This blog generally keeps its own counsel.

But one of the great pleasures I’ve had on the Northern Alliance this past year has been interviewing Brook Kilgarriff, Miss Minnesota, twice, at the state fair and then just before Christmas at the studio.  She was a delightful interview; sharp, unflappable, and just plain good on the air.  “Wow” moment for me; at the State Fair, she was promoting her CD (to benefit the Children’s Miracle Network), and mentioned that she’s attenting the Boston Conservatory, majoring in Musical Theatre.  So I suggested – jokingly – that she sing something for us, never expecting that she’d actually sing something a capella in front of a crowd with no warning.

But she did.  And she killed!

So anyway – while this blog rarely if ever “endorses” anyone or anything, I do declare that we are openly and utterly in the bag for Brooke in tomorrow’s Miss America Pageant, which is tomorrow on TLC.

Here’s hoping she can do for Minnesota what Brett Favre couldn’t…

Brian Lambert shows why KTLK-FM had such a rocky start in the Twin Cities, in a piece that purports to be about Air America tanking; along the way, it also shows why liberalism is starting to gasp for air in the age of Obama.

Lambert starts with the genesis of his short-lived radio show:

I was summoned to a meeting with Clear Channel Communications “talk radio guru”/consultant, Gabe Hobbs, after only a couple weeks on the job. Having just spent a chunk of the previous 15 years covering radio consultants, or more accurately, the inanity and chaos they left behind, I was prepared to sit across from a complete cartoon.  (OK, not every radio consultant I had met or interviewed was a “complete” cartoon. But that’s a little like saying “some cigarettes are good for you”, to which you reply, “yeah, the ones you don’t smoke.”)

Lambo got that one right.  But I digress.  But so did he.

In their wisdom the local Clear Channel group had decided that “a WCCO for the 21st century” was the way to go for the FM talk experiment they were starting up.

Which was how I put it at the time; for whatever reason, a generation of consultants decided that conservative talk was dead (based largely on wishful thinking after the 2004 election), and tried floating the “all things to all people” format all over the country, including KTLK and KSTP-AM.

After saying that he wasn’t sure what to make of the idea of dogs and cats playing together, Hobbs conceded he was intrigued by the righty-gal vs. the lefty-guy dynamic. And then he got to the nut of modern (conservative) talk radio.

(I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but I swear the essentials are accurate.)

And he’s right about the consultant’s opinion being accurate – an awful lot of “talk radio gurus” deeply hate conservative talk; some of them are ideological liberals, but most of them are just dying to come up with a take on a format that clicks, somewhere, and makes them millions of dollars in consulting fees.  It’s not going all that well, by the way, after almost 20 years of trying.

One of the problems is the contempt these people have for “the talk radio audience”.  Mr. Hobbs would seem to have shared his with Mr. Lambert:

“Try to keep in mind,” said Hobbs, “that the average listener for a show like yours is a 42 year-old guy who doesn’t follow the news all that close but is listening because he doesn’t want to be left out of the discussion. What he wants from you is something he can bring to conversations at work and at home. Something that makes it appear he’s in touch with what’s going on. You’re not here to educate him so much as you are to give him a few ideas he can throw out to feel like he’s part of the conversation.”

Well, it must work; Pew shows that Limbaugh’s audience is better-informed on news and current events than the average American, testing about the same as the famously-smug NPR audience in terms of overall knowledge.

Which is – even Lambert might admit – at odds with what the consultant had to say about ’em.

Well, maybe Lambert wouldn’t admit it:

Since this image so thoroughly gelled with the image I’d had for years of the Limbaugh Dittoheads…

The point being that talk radio doesn’t square well with having contempt for one’s audience.  Consultant Gabe Hobbs’ advice famously splattered; KTLK-FM’s first incarnation, the “WCCO for the 21st Century” famously cratered on impact.  (Does anyone remember their first lineup?  Colton and Guest in the morning?  Pat Kessler? Sarah and Brian?  Dan Conry?  They wanted to be all things to all people so badly they practically adopted Norwegian accents).  Part of it was the concept; part of it was some of the talent wasn’t that talented.  But mostly, it’s that whether people really are as stupid as Gabe Hobbs thinks they are (and that image “gells” with that of Lambert, who is lest we forget one of the Twin Cities foremost media columnists) or not, they can tell in this day and age when they’re being condescended to.  When the whole concept for your format is based on the kind of cynicism that Lambert and Hobbs shared, you think it doesn’t show?

It did!

No, really:

A radio audience of middle-aged guys who, for whatever the reason — distraction, indifference, laziness and/or stupidity — haven’t done their own homework on the big events of the day but want to pretend they have among their workmates, pals and spouses, by staying up to date with the bumper sticker slogan du jour. Hmmm, and I guessed “Make Love Not War” wasn’t exactly what these guys wanted to repeat down at the office, across forklifts in the warehouse, or over dinner, to impress the wife and kids with how tough it is out in there in a real man’s world.

That is, of course, the conceit that drives the entire mainstream media; you, the people, are bunch of mindless cattle that need your news, your entertainment and everything short of your food carefully pre-digested for you, lest you choke from trying to think about something too big. Information is too precious a gift to get in too big chunk – at least for all of you lumpen peasants.

No.  Again, really:

Beyond Hobbs’ carefully parsed point, is this: The “pretense” of thoughtful consideration, at least in terms of a commercially successful narrative delivered via mass media, requires much … much … heavier doses of simplicity and indignant finger-pointing than scholarly nuance.

Lambert mentions “simplicity” – as opposed to condescenscion – like it’s a bad thing.  As if making complex ideas “simple”, or simpler, isn’t among the most important missions for all of journalism, from Edward R. Murrow through NPR down to the Highland Villager.

This is all a lot of set-up for a couple thoughts on the little-lamented demise of Air America, the “liberal alternative” to the monolithic presence of conservative-radio. There are roughly 12,500 radio stations in the U.S., 22% fall under “news/talk” and “religious”. The former describes a few, like WCCO, and WBBM in Chicago, but mostly its conservative talk,  and the vast majority of the “religious” are conservative-driven. Moreover, a significant of those conservative stations are full-power licenses, broadcasting across the entirety of  all of the biggest metro areas in the country. By … stark … contrast, from its inception in 2004 Air America was confined to much lower-power AM stations that only barely blanketed the entirety of the few  metro markets they could buy in to.

Lambert, the media columnist who chided [his mental caricature of] the conservative talk radio audience’s “simplicity”, apparently needs to oversimplify the issue himself.  Radio stations aren’t sinecures; every format has to prove itself at every station, every time the ratings “book” comes out.  Big conservative talk – Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck – settled on big AM stations because it pays the bills.

And the fact that Air America had to “buy in” to metro markets shows what an awful concept it was.  Becuase nobody pays to get Limbaugh.  The Rush Limbaugh show (and Hannity, and Beck, and Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller and every other conservative show that matters) is free to the stations that carry it, provided they agree to carry the network’s commercials, 5-8 minutes worth per hour.  That’s it.

If there were any organic demand for Air America, they’d have been able to do the same.  But there was not.  So in New York, Chicago and LA, they had to pay radio stations to carry the programming.

And even that didn’t work.

It’s not as simple as saying “conservtives got all the big stations!”, but it’s in fact the truth.

But the bigger problem — by far — is the mindset of your average liberal, who, in my unscientific survey is a somewhat different animal than Gabe Hobbs’ mythical under-informed 42 year-old male.  For one thing, if the gender breakout of national delegates is any indication, the average liberal is more likely to be a woman than a man. But, in my experience, there’s also the very familiar liberal quality of believing you already are the smartest guy/gal in the room, which means you hardly need some cartoonish radio bloviator spoon-feeding you your “fact of the day”. More likely — if you’re a liberal in the media — the liberal audience with whom you think you are simpatico will rear up and quarrel with every interpretation of statistics, trends and historical reference you dare make. They know better and if just given the chance could do better.

Which is an interesting view which, I suspect, has more to do with Brian Lambert’s view of himself than the NPR/MSNBC/Air America audience’s actual merits.

Where conservative media audiences display a startling affinity for what I’ve called “The Big Daddy Guru Complex”, pompous-to-preposterous all-knowing father figures, liberals, more often than not, maintain the attitude that “big daddy” is a bit of a ponce, and needs to be brought down a peg.

Dunno, Lambo.  I sat in front of a room full of Air America fans with Matt Entenza, Michael Medved and Fast Eddie Schultz a while ago.  And the AA fans were a lot more prone to chanting pre-approved slogans and hissing on command than the people to stage and ideological right, if you catch my drift.

The idea is a trend in search of evidence; the closest they come to “evidence” is the fact that, yes, people listen to Rush Limbaugh.

But it’s a fact of human nature that any mass group of people gets pushed, or pulled, by someone, and that the best way to pull is not through the mind, but through the heart; Someone who captures the group’s fancy on some level; Martin Luther King, Richard Simmons, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, Lech Walesa, John Lennon, Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan all led people in improbable directions by simplifying complex ideas into forms their followers could feel as much as think.

Lambert quotes a few talking heads re the “problem” liberalism under Obama faces, and concludes:

The takeaway is this: The Conservative narrative dominates this country because it is simple, asks (and requires) nothing of its audience other than that they accept it and express a kind of rote indignation … at others.

Leaving aside the poison-pen fuming about the audience’s motivations – Lambert’s wrong, but then he’s supposed to be wrong about conservatives.  Simplicity in a narrative is a good thing.

And at the end of the say, it’s not all that simple.  Conservatism itself takes a lot more mental energy to wrap ones mind around than liberalism; the ideas of abstemiousness, enlightened self-interest, and rejection of instant gratification both personally and culturally are tough ones for modern people to choke down.

As opposed to leaden cop-outs:

Given the lack of 2000-plus radio stations to amplify a counter-narrative,

Which is balderdash; the liberals have four broadcast networks, NPR, and practically every newspaper in the country.

It’s just that their narrative, at the moment, isn’t selling, and certainly isn’t up to the competition it’s getting in the marketplace.

I actually let this post sit for a couple of days as I tried to figure out how to respond to this next line:

as well as liberal resistance to paternalistic “guru-ism”,

Remembering the masses of liberals who “rejected guru-ism” by chanting in unison waiting for Obama to appear, I’m going to have to keep thinking about it.

Obama and the few bona fide liberals in D.C. are at a profound disadvantage when it comes to a very real battle of relentless accusation and sloganized consensus-building , which, sadly, is what works quite effectively on largely apolitical 42 year-olds who just want to sound like they know what they’re talking about.

And just like Gabe Hobbs, Brian Lambert leads with the contempt.  We’ll see how it works.

And he says about the Chicago politican…:

Bottom line: The burden to deliver such a message of constant attack — utterly justified in the case of how this economic disaster started — falls to a guy, Obama, who finds shamelessly demagogic rhetoric and divisive-ness-baiting beneath him and his idealistic standards of statesmanship.

Speaking of simplification.

Another reminder; Tuesday is Caucus night in Minnesota.

“But Mitch – I’ve never been to a precinct caucus!”

Well, it’s interesting, and you should try it. You go to wherever you’re supposed to be – usually a school, library or other community center – and you find your precinct and grab a seat with your neighbors.  There’s some precinct business to take care of, and then you get down to the stuff we all really come for:

• Endorsing candidates, although this doesn’t usually happen at precinct caucuses.
• Electing delegates to the BPOU (Legislative District) conventions.  This is important; these are the people who will endorse the candidates for the Legislature, and vote for delegates for later conventions.
• Voting in any straw polls that might be held (might be one for governor, but I’m not sure about this year)
• Resolutions.  You can suggest resolutions to be included in the state party platform, campaign for ’em, and get ’em adopted to get sent to the BPOU conventions.  If your resolution gets enough traction, it can become part of the platform…

The important thing is, caucuses matter.  And when I say “matter”, I add “party politics is about persistence more than passion”.   The last round of major caucuses, two years ago, saw a huge outpouring of support for Ron Paul, which indirectly changed a lot of things about the way the party works, and led the party into a good position as re the whole Tea Party movement – but changing any party is a matter of showing up, year in and year out, and convincing people that change needs to happen.  So every time you go to the caucuses, you affect the way the party works – perhaps not as much as you want it to, but every bit matters eventually.

Anyway – hope to see you there on Tuesday!

…and she wasn’t popularized for her intellect…if you know what I mean.

Ettinger, 28, said that even though she doesn’t have health care — “I can’t afford it” — she still thinks Obama should have waited to tackle the thorny legislation that has been blamed for the devastat ing Democratic loss of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

He did create some jobs, but most of them were government jobs and that doesn’t really help the middle class. But it helps a bit,” said Ettinger.

Apparently Hooters doesn’t offer health insurance.

J. D. Salinger is dead.

He’s most famous – at least among the non-English-Department crowd – for Catcher in the Rye:

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

Musta been a baby-boomer thing; I hated Catcher. 

No, that’s not true; I hated Holden Caulfield.  Viscerally.  Down in the pit of my stomach, I wanted to strangle that moopy little fop.  I don’t even know why.  I last read the book when I was 18; Caulfield filled me with revulsion so intense I could taste it.  Maybe that’s the mark of a good book – or maybe someone who probably wasn’t an especially sophisticated reader.  Not sure yet.

I probably should give Catcher another try, to see if the lack of post-adolescent emotion or hormones opens something up to me that I missed before.

Until then?  Sorry.

According to Representative Marion Berry, all we really need is more Barack Obama.

According to Barack Obama, that is:

The retiring Berry, who doesn’t say when the remarks were made, now scoffs at Obama’s 50-or-below approval rating:

Writes ADG reporter Jane Fullerton:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.” [snip]

Does Obama really think he was that big an edge on Bill Clinton in the “personal charm” department?  Perhaps, but let’s remember Clinton combined “Bill Clinton” with a heck of a lot of triangulation to save his presidency in 1994.  Obama seems, if anything, to be triangulating left.

Berry seems to think so, too:

“I began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out,” said Arkansas’ 1st District congressman, who worked in the Clinton administration before being elected to the House in 1996… “I just began to have flashbacks to 1993 and ’94. No one that was here in ’94, or at the day after the election felt like. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling.”

We shall see.

Obama holds forth on Constitutional Law.

Justice Alito says “not so fast…”

This is going to be an interesting year.

I only caught the last twenty minutes of Obama’s Castro-length State of the Union last night.  My impression on hearing that part – and the wrap-up analysis – was…

…well, a picture says a thousand words:

Seriously.  “The American people are rejecting statist gigantism – so I’m going to give them more statist gigantism!”

They do breed ’em cynical in Chicago, though; the conventional wisdom was that Obama took a more “populist” tone, going after banks and “Wall Street”.  In other words, he’s trying to give the masses the same ideological bread and circuses that always work in liberal cesspools like Chicago.

Are fiscal show trials going to turn back the Tea Party Tsunami?

The President’s teleprompter mentioned “jobs” twenty nine times by my count. Unfortunately for the citizens of the United States of America, where “when the Union was turned back at Bull Run and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach” and blah blah blah, their President thinks creating a public sector job is something other than simply enlarging the government.

…and at the same time, is still hawking the now infamous “Two Million.”

Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed.

Who are these two million people?

200,000 work in construction and clean energy. 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, and first responders. And we are on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.

…and the other 1,410,000, sir?

All public employees, sir. With all due respect, we need jobs that “pay the bills,” sir.

The term “Clean Energy” or “Green Jobs” is a euphemism for “Government Subsidy” and “beauracracy”…and “Failure.” Sir.

The Obama administration’s call for green jobs as an economic savior initially sparked hope for economic recovery. But the federal funds have only dribbled into the sector

Among the victims: the plodding light-rail project in St. Paul; the massive layoffs at Suzlon’s wind turbine plant in Pipestone and the deep job cuts at New Flyer’s hybrid bus plant in St. Cloud, the site Vice President Joe Biden visited last year to herald the administration’s green initiatives.

…back to the teleprompter:

Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America’s businesses.

…but not so much while Obama is President.

So tonight, I’m proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat.

More TARP? Jolly good idea, Mr. President, because the billions of TARP dollars already out there are getting lent out, right? The TARP that the banks that are lending, that are in good shape, are giving back to you with a “Thanks, but No Thanks”?

I am also proposing a new small business tax credit – one that will go to over one million small businesses who hire new workers or raise wages. While we’re at it, let’s also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment; and provide a tax incentive for all businesses, large and small, to invest in new plants and equipment.

…like the health care reform you proposed? How’d that go?

Next, we can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow.

Read: grow government.

From the first railroads to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been built to compete. There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains

…ours will be faster because they will be empty!

or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products

…in China.

Tomorrow, I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act.

…because if there is one thing Tampa needs, it’s a high-speed railroad.

There are projects like that all across this country that will create jobs and help our nation move goods, services, and information.

…how do you move a service? Sorry Mr. President, you were saying…

We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities, and give rebates to Americans who make their homes more energy efficient, which supports clean energy jobs.

…like this?

And let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after twenty years

Why don’t we just give them the money when they’re born like Hillary wanted to?

– and forgiven after ten years if they choose a career in public service.

…or you could tell them to skip all that and just give them the job.

From the day I took office, I have been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious – that such efforts would be too contentious, that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for awhile.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question:

How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?

…apparently about three more years.

Fearless – and, as it happens, inevitable – prediction:  now that Joe Repya has not only left the MN GOP, but is running for the Independence Party nod for Governor, he will become the Twin Cities’ media’s leading voice for conservative Republicans who are, let us never forget, inevitably disaffected by the rise of “extreme” (read: all) conservatism.

Now, I’m n0t going to bag on Joe Repya; a retired Army colonel who served in three wars, including one as an infantry platoon leader, which is just about the most dangerous job there is, he’s also been a leading voice among grassroots conservatives in Minnesota for the past seven or eight years.   He left the MNGOP last year because of differences with the new regime on Park Street, Tony Sutton and Micheal Brodkorb.  I’m not sure what the differences were – although I inadvertently caught some shrapnel from the firefight last year – but they’re the kind of thing vex a lot of us who care deeply about politics and government, but not so much about parties except as a means to affect, well, politics and goverment.

So I’m not writing to bag on Repya.

But if the media wants to convince Minnesotans that ideas like this…

Joe Repya, a longtime Republican now running for governor as an Independent, says he has an answer for the long-running battle over whether the Vikes should get a new stadium funded by taxpayer dollars: Yes, as long as the the state gets a controlling stake in the organization.

On his homepage, he writes:

As your next governor, I would agree to public financing of a new Viking stadium only if Ziggy Wilf and the NFL agree to sell a 51% equity of the Vikings to the State of Minnesota with a never to relocate iron clad clause. Ziggy could run the team as long as he wishes and without state interference. We will increase state revenues by allowing Minnesotans to purchase one share of non-voting, non transferable interests (like the Green Bay Packers “stock” program”) in the Minnesota Vikings. If Green Bay can own the Packers, Minnesota can own the Vikings.

…are the kinds of things that sends disaffected conservatvives to protest at the Capitol, they’ve got a rude surprise coming. State-owned football teams make no more sense than state-owned light rail lines or factories.

The holes in the idea aren’t only ideological, of course; and they’re obvious enough that even the City Pages gets it:

Two small points of order:

First, Green Bay doesn’t actually own the Packers; fans and investors own the Packers. The team has been publicly owned since 1923, when it was registered as a Wisconsin nonprofit corporation.

And when even the City Pages points out that forking over for a football team makes no sense in a year when the state budget is looking ghastlier than Tara Reid’s resume, you know there’s a problem.

So sorry, Twin Cities media.  I’ll give a shout to Repya for all he’s done for this country and for conservatism in Minnesota.

But nobody’s elected him “the voice of the disaffected” just yet.  There’s a whole lot of us out there who haven’t picked a leader yet, but it’s for sure we’re not going to let you do it.

Brett Favre’s unretirement offers a career lesson…for the rest of us?

Maybe we should all take a leaf out of Brett Favre’s playbook.

Not the last-minute interception: The delayed retirement.

The veteran 40-year-old quarterback just led the Minnesota Vikings to the conference playoffs–and within a whisker of the Superbowl–at an age when most of his peers have either faded to minor teams or hung up their cleats altogether.

Mr. Favre first toyed with retirement two years ago, before choosing to stay in the game. He’s now halfway through a two-year deal with the Vikings and is reconsidering whether to come back next season, following Sunday’s pounding by the New Orleans Saints when he limped off the field with bruises, cuts and a sprained ankle.

But with Brett Favre, who knows?

As a broken-hearted Minnesota Vikings fan…you decide.

Here’s a story that’ll make the media wonks on NPR’s On The Media knit their brows with academic exasperation:  Fox News is the most trusted news net:

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.

I could jump up and down and invoke Berg’s Seventh Law (when liberals defame conservatives, it’s pretty much always pre-emptive projection), but this story actually brings up a much more interesting question.

The numbers hint at that question, being split among ideological lines:

There was a strong partisan split among those who said they trusted Fox — with 74 percent of Republicans saying they trusted the network, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did.

CNN was the second-most-trusted network, getting the trust of 39 percent of those polled. Forty-one percent said they didn’t trust CNN.

Each of the three major networks was trusted by less than 40 percent of those surveyed, with NBC ranking highest at 35 percent. Forty-four percent said they did not trust NBC, which was combined with its sister cable station MSNBC.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted CBS, while 31 percent trusted ABC. Both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled.

Of course, the wonk class – hanging out at the cocktail parties as they do with their pet media figures – are “deeply concerned”, and chalk it up to some form of defect among the hoi polloi:

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll.

Which, neither he nor apologists for the American media will tell you, is actually an anomaly worldwide.  In most of the world’s nations, press outlets have an overlying political orientation; The Times and The Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right, Die Zeit and Le Monde are center-left, The Guardian is neo-socialist.  Like Fox, they report the news basically straight – but they are honest about their papers’ political worldviews.

The purported American media tradition says, on the other hand, that reporters and news outlets are to be not only completely detached – which violates several laws of human nature.  And this detachment – some of them persist in calling it “objectivity” – is enforced by nothing more than their more-or-less earnest say-so.

There’s a longer discussion about the nature of the “objective” American media, and how it’s not necessarily a huge conspiracy that they trend left-of-center while strenuously denying any bias.

But the main point is this; the European system works – provided that one believes that the news consumer is well-informed enough to account for his/her news outlets’ institutional biases.

The real question is “why does the American media and wonk establishment find this idea – that the people can do their own filtering without needing to trust to the dubious “objectivity” of “gatekeepers” to do it for them – so threatening?

Debnam:

“But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

Debnam echoes the line that regional media wonks – and institutional media “criticism” shows like NPR’s On The Media (which is more of a labored weekly apologetic for the media’s excesses and liberal slant than anything) – will likely use in discussing the news; that bias about which the media is forthcoming is worse than unstated, denied bias is not only a bad thing, but a symptom of some deeper pathology among the simpletons who bypass the elites’ gatekeepers.

It’s a line that sounds, more and more, like “the peasants are revolting”.

(Disclosure: I haven’t watched a network newscast from any network, barring the odd emergency special report, in years and years).

In all of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, there may be no blogger more persistent than Doug Bass of Crossword Bebop. Doug subtitles CBbop “Perhaps the first Anglospheric crossword blog”, and to my knowledge he’s exactly coirrect.

Eclectic? Heck yeah; you think posts about Sodoku written with archaic Cypriot syllabic alphabets grow on trees?

The Cypriot syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from ca. the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. But it seems to have enough interest to have its own Unicode chart

And that, indeed, is what blogging’s supposed to be about; people writing about what grabs ’em in the liver!

So check out Doug at Crossword Bebop . Learn things you never knew you needed to know, and be glad you did!

I heard about this from – I kid you not – NPR yesterday.  (Allah also bumped it today.) Insanely entertaining and yet still relevant.

On the one hand, there’s no such thing as a “safe seat” for Republicans in Minnesota.  Between a mercurial population given to flights of bizarro fancy (Jesse Ventura?  Al Franken?  Hello?) and a deep messianic liberal streak running through the population (Paul Wellstone?  Aaagh!), no Republican should ever get too complacent.

One of the bright spots in the dismal ’08 election was Erik Paulsen, who ran to the right of conventional wisdom (the district was supposed to be much more purple than Paulsen, after nine terms of Jim Ramstad).

But Derek Brigham at the Dogs and True North warns against complacency:

Today I got a request from Katie Nadeau and Sheila Kihne who are heading up the GOTV effort for CD3 this year. They wanted me to make a map to illustrate the reality of just how blue CD3 had become to help dispel the myth that CD3 is an easy territory for the Republican party.

Image by Derek Brigham

I took the 2008 Minnesota House election results map showing the winning party by precinct and enlarged the northwest metro area. Next I cut out all the areas that were not in CD3 (there are a few flaws I left in like SD45 so I did not have to cut off the names). The results?

You see the results on Derek’s map.

I don’t know how many people believe that CD3 is “safe” for the GOP, although I think Paulsen is an excellent incumbent to have in place; he’s to the right of what the “conventional wisdom” said could win, but he’s crafted a pretty careful message to his very mixed district.

Derek goes on to note that there are infinite variables – it’s looking to be a better year for the GOP than ’08, for starters – but now’s no time to relax.  If you live in the Three, and you care about the future of this nation, you need to get out and help not only keep Paulsen in office, but flip some of those baby-blue State House districts to red.

D

A – I’m still here

B

D

A

I work at a company that employs (like a lot of American companies these days) a very large number of south-Asian subcontractors.  Most of them come from one rather large Indian vendor.  And that vendor threw a little “Understanding India” session for us a few weeks back.

It was interesting, of course; other cultures fascinate me, India more than most.  I grew up around a fair number of South Asians in North Dakota (it’s a long story), and had some exposure to the culture.  Still the vendor session was fascinating.

And frustrating; to try to explain a culture as old, broad, multifaceted and complex as India in 90 minutes was a little like – well, trying to explain cricket to Americans.

And then I thought; how would I explain America to a foreigner new to the country?

Not all the usual “civics in ten minutes” stuff – the broad strokes of our history and culture.  I got to wonder – what’d be a good, entertaining crash course in “what is America” to someone who’d never been here before?

And I thought; almost every culture in the world, from the poorest village in rural Pakistan to the eighties in Manhattan, has one form of communication in common; the movie.  Even if you don’t speak a foreign language, you can often make out at least the broad outlines of what a movie is trying to say.

So my question is this; if you had to pick five movies to explain America to someone from another country who had only the usual civics-class understanding of our nation and culture, what would they be?

Leave comments.

I hear you, conservatives.  After years and years of giving time and money to the Minnesota and national GOP, you felt that in some respects the party left you.  I’ve heard the criticisms, and I agree with many of them (Bush did spend too much; the GOP became the party of slightly less bigger government; the GOP supported the likes of Ron Erhard for years) and disagree with a few (d’ya think Norm Coleman’s ANWR or ethanol subsidy votes were more important than Obama having a supermajority?)

And so many of you sat things out in 2006 and 2008.  For some of you, it was a practical thing; you’d been volunteering in every election since 1998, or earlier; your families, jobs, and personal lives had paid the price.  For others, it was that feeling of rejection.

But a week from tonight is the day you can start taking your party back.  It’s Caucus night in Minnesota on Tuesday, February 2 – a week from tonight.

And there, your votes matter, both for straw poll results and, most importantly, by electing delegates to go to your “BPOU” convention (usually equivalent to your House district or county); these, in turn, endorse State House and State Candidates, and elect delegates to your congressional district convention; there, you endorse candidates for the US House, and send delegates to the State Convention.  Where you endorse candidates for the big races; Senate (but not this year), Governor, and so on.

The kicker is this; while all politics is a matter of patience and persistence, groups of activists can make a huge difference the caucuses.  Two years ago, the Ron Paul campaign’s legions of highly-motivated activists made a huge dent in the Minnesota GOP; hopefully some of them will stay involved – and serve as an example to the rest of you.  Here, your vote matters to your party.

I hope you can join us there!

“But where’s do I go, Mitch?”

The MNGOP has it all right here.

You can also follow, and post on, your caucus on Twitter using the #MNGOPCaucus hashtag.  You can also add an MNGOP Caucus Twitter Ribbon to your avatar (I refuse to call it a “Twibbon”, I’m sorry) at this link, if you’re so inclined.

At any rate – if you don’t show up at a caucus on February 2, I don’t wanna year you complaining about the MN GOP’s course.

In my trip around the MOB, I’ve been delighted to find a few blogs that I’d overlooked over the years, that I realize I’m going to have to check out much more regularly, or even devote a coveted spot on my feed reader to.

One of those would be Conrad Zero. He’s an enigmatic anonyblogger with a taste for writing depthy analytical pieces about eclectic topics; he doesn’t blog often, per se, but he writes interesting stuff.

Yes, interesting:

A leisurely stroll through the fiction section of your local bookstore will reveal a surprising number of book covers that are… ass.

Literally.

Primarily female ass.

I’m going to be the very, very, very last person in the world to complain if people want to put any portion of the female anatomy on book covers.  So blame my Inner Philosopher for asking “Why?”

The simple answer is that ’sex sells.’ But for the sake of a blog post, I’m going to pretend there’s more to it than that.

It’s a longish post, like most of Zero’s output.  And, like most of Zero’s output, it’s an interesting read.

So I’ll be checking back more often.

That may be the downside of taking this tour of the MOB; my daily reading load keeps rising.

British researchers have helped chimps produce their first video:

The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists.

The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other.

It will be screened within the Natural World programme “Chimpcam” shown on BBC Two at 2000GMT on Wednesday 27 January.

Hollywood’s production community, which is already losing thousands of jobs to Canada, is rapidly trying to unionize the primates.

Late word has it that both KTLK-FM and Janet Roberts’ “AM950” are trying to sign the chimps, pending figuring out their political sympathies.

Last Saturday was the first-ever Shot In The Dark “Staff Meeting”.  This blog’s staff – which has doubled in the past year to four – met at “Hell’s Kitchen” in Minneapolis (the nearly-liquid scrambled eggs take some getting used to, but the wild-rice hash browns are proof God loves us).

There was no agenda, nobody took minutes, and nothing was decided.  But it was fun getting the whole crew together for, as far as I can recall, the first time ever.

Gallup has Obama’s approve/disapprove numbers dead even.

Oh, that Gallup.  They must be working for Karl Rove, too.

Question, Democrats:  As more and more polls show Obama in freefall, will they all be in bed with Fox, too?

And since Zogby has predicted a Democrat victory in every race since 1984, would it be safe to say that a) he’s in bed with MSNBC, and b) you lefties’ snarking about Rasmussen’s supposed Fox-friendliness is an example of Berg’s Seventh Law?