Remember back in the eighties, when some less-than-articulate conservative commentators lapsed into self-parody by referring to fairly run-of-the-mill fabian statists as “commies”?  The reversion to facile cliche did conservatism no favors, and probably helped you (this kills me) look like the level-headed ones?

I just though I’d thank Chuckles Schumer (P[inhead], NY) for paying the favor back with interest:

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who famously hammered then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato for calling him a “putz-head” in their hot 1998 campaign, was accused Thursday of stepping into the gutter himself after he sent out a fundraising e-mail in which he called Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right tea-bagger.”

The two-term Democrat, in accusing Brown of being aligned with the conservative “tea party” movement, used a term that every tea party critic knows refers to a sexual act.

DISINGENUOUS LIBERAL: “But nooo! They themselves sent tea-bags to legislators! That’s what me (sknxx) mean!  Honest!”

“Chuck has a way of saying things that I don’t think he really understands or means, and it’s unfortunate,” Brown told Fox News Thursday when asked about the e-mail. “I’m not into name-calling. … so shame on Chuck.”

What was it Gandhi said?  “First they ignore you; then they mock  you; then the mocking turns into a self-parodying cliche that says more about the smugness of their own isolated, cossetted point of view and their tendency to listen to your own press; then your degrading cliche turns into a wry rallying cry for the very opposition you’re trying to mock; then they get angry realizing you’re turned their smug ignorance has been turned against them, and they either say something even dumber (see Martha Coakley vs. Curt Schilling) or they sic your SEIU goons on the opposition; then we win.”

Yeah.  I think that was what Gandhi said.

In Obama’s speeches, one favorite phrase: ‘Let me be clear’

Obama’s declarations of clarity are far more than a little presidential throat-clearing.

In a presidency in which everything is murkier than Obama could have imagined, the “let me be clear” preface has become a signal that what follows will be anything but.

“Now let me be clear — let me be absolutely clear…”If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, a quarter-million dollars a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.” Since then, several proposals have muddied that assertion, including the Obama-approved tax on costly health insurance plans.

Let me be absolutely clear about what health reform means for you,” he said in July. “. . . It will keep government out of health-care decisions. It will give you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it.” In fact, the government’s role in health care would increase under the legislation, and the changes would, in all likelihood, result in many people ending up with different coverage through reasons not of their own choosing.

Now, let me be absolutely clear:

Proverbs 26:24-26: “A malicious man disguises himself with his lips, but in his heart he harbors deceit. Though his speech is charming, do not believe him, for seven abominations fill his heart. His malice may be concealed by deception, but his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly.”

Add this guy to the roles of those who owe their livelihood to the Obama stimulus plan. Is he creating more jobs? No. …growing the economy? No.

He’s researching the myth that is man-made global warming.

A scientist in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal received economic stimulus funds last June.

As NewsBusters reported on November 28, Penn State University is investigating Professor Michael Mann, the creator of the discredited “Hockey Stick Graph,” for his involvement in an international attempt to exaggerate and manipulate climate data in order to advance the myth of manmade global warming.

According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.

It’s one thing to see stimulus dollars funding worthless but predictable make-work projects employing government workers whose jobs were never at risk in an era overseen by liberals hell bent on growing the public sector. It’s quite another to see funding of borrowed taxpayer dollars diverted to support a failed and blatant liberal cause.

It should be a crime.

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 David Kaplan of the Minnesota News Council about their upcoming gubernat.
• 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!

Churchill once said the US and Britain were “two people divided by a common language” .

Sometimes I think American conservatives and liberals are, too.

For example – to a conservative, the idea of responsible government involves carefully limiting what it gets itself involved in, taxing as little as possible, and spending within those means.

To a liberal, it seems to mean that taxation keeps pace with government’s self-assessed needs to accomplish all of the missions, great small and idiotic, that it takes on for itself.

And by that standard, the Obama Administration is doing pretty dang well:

It looks like a happy new year for you — if you’re a public employee.

That’s the takeaway from a recent Rasmussen poll that shows that 46 percent of government employees say the economy is getting better while just 31 percent say it’s getting worse. In contrast, 32 percent of those with private-sector jobs say the economy is getting better, while 49 percent it is getting worse.

Nearly half, 44 percent, of government employees rate their personal finances as good or excellent. Only 33 percent of private-sector employees do.

It sounds like public- and private-sector employees are looking at different Americas. And they are.

Seems most of those “Shovel Ready” jobs went to government shovelers Shovel Operations Technicians I, II and III:

Private-sector employment peaked at 115.8 million in December 2007, when the recession officially began. It was down to 108.5 million last November. That’s a 6 percent decline.

Public-sector employment peaked at 22.6 million in August 2008. It fell a bit in 2009, then has rebounded back to 22.5 million in November. That’s less than a 1 percent decline.

A squib?

This is not an accident; it is the result of deliberate public policy. About one-third of the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February 2009 was directed at state and local governments, which have been facing declining revenues and are, mostly, required to balance their budgets.

The Dems goal, in Washington, was to keep their little buddies in the various state houses all warm and fed.

How ya feeling about your Hope and Change now, private sector?

Forget the Palestinians and the Israelis; the White House is embroiled in the biggest no-win diplomatic war of all.

It’s W trying to deftly navigate the whitewater…

The White House on Thursday quickly took away the possibility of Boise State University’s football team joining the national champions Alabama at an honorary Rose Garden ceremony.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — a well known opponent of college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) — sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting that the undefeated Boise State Broncons join the undefeated University of Alabama Crimson Tide at the ceremony.

But a White House spokesman indicated to The Hill that Boise’s presence at the ceremony is unlikely, but did not rule it out completely.

The reason?  Well, kudos to the President:

“The president has previously articulated his displeasure with the BCS system, but he’s focused on more important things right now,” White House spokesman Adam Abrams said in an e-mail.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s not some interest in the recreational equivalent of nation-building:

Obama has criticized the BCS and backed a playoff system in past media appearances but today’s indication shows that he is not quite willing to make a large-scale statement on the issue.

On the other hand, it might be a better use of half of the President’s time:

The president is simultaneously trying to shepherd healthcare reform legislation through Congress before his State of the Union address in a few weeks and help coordinate U.S. disaster relief efforts in Haiti after a massive earthquake struck there this week.

But at the end of the day – if someone gets a “stimulus”, everyone wants a “stimulus”:

The anti-BCS political action committee PlayoffPAC criticized the president for missing an opportunity to “make a statement” against the BCS without spending taxpayer dollars.

“No one’s saying this is a top-tier issue on the President’s agenda, but college football’s off-the-field impact on schools isn’t trivial either,” PlayoffPAC official Matt Sanderson said in an e-mail. “He promised a year ago to ‘throw his weight around,’ but now it looks as if he may pass-up a golden opportunity to make a statement without spending one extra taxpayer minute or dollar. An overwhelming majority of college football fans will be disappointed if the President doesn’t make good on his word.”

Let me make this clear:  WE are at war with people who want to kill us.  We are in a recession that looks like it’s going to be a lot more intractable than even the Jeremiahs have been saying.  So what in the flaming fine feathered flying flapping fowl is the Federal government doing wasting any time on this kind of crap?

If one taxpayer dollar is wasted on this utter non-issue, it should be an excuse for taxpayers around the nation to storm capitals with torches and pitchforks and chase people from office with coats of tar and feathers.

That will be a playoff we can use.

…weren’t we told that the November Republican turnaround victory in Virginia and the stunning upset in New Jersey weren’t referenda on Obama’s first year?

If that were true, then wouldn’t this story just, like, totally not exist?

Coming off stinging election losses in Virginia and New Jersey — not to mention Copenhagen, where he failed to win the 2018 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago — President Obama is staying away from what could become another painful loss.

Even though the campaign of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has been making quiet entreaties, the president has no plans to visit her in the last week of the special election to fill the Senate seat once held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

“It’s not on our schedule to go to next week,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said matter-of-factly.

Huh.

Damn tea partiers.

Katie Kieffer infiltrated Speaker Pelosi’s office, and you just won’t believe what she turned up:

I’m a conservative blogger. My job is to scope out news that liberal media networks send to the shredder. This week, I did some sleuthing inside Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office. You’ll never believe what I found out…

I wore a tie-dye t-shirt and a hippie wig, which worked better than a press pass to get into Pelosi’s chambers. Her aids welcomed me as one of their own granola-crunching comrades. I asked them to show me what the House was working on and they proudly showed me this press release that Pelosi was drafting:

PRESS RELEASE (DRAFT)

TO: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

FROM: REP. NANCY PELOSI

I know, it’s tough out there. You’re hanging onto your job for dear life. You’re stressed. You’re tired. You’re working harder and longer hours than ever before. You need a break. So, you hit the bar. Then, you go home and crash. You get the munchies and raid the fridge. You’ve skipped the gym for the 12th day in a row.

THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL WARNING: You are now living in a no wake zone. Change your lifestyle now or you’ll get the pink slip.

And Madame De Speaker has some big lifestyle changes in mind for you, her subjects. 

Did I say subjects?   Constituents, I mean.  Silly mistake.

Read the whole thing.

Some folks  never get the word:

A musical about Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” election campaign premieres in Germany this weekend, including love songs by the president to his wife Michelle and duets with Hillary Clinton.

This doesn’t entirely not make sense; “The world” was perhaps Obama’s biggest constituency.

The venue for the premiere seems appropriate since the optimism of Obamania remains largely intact in Germany, about a year after Obama, an accomplished public speaker, became America’s first black president. One campaign highlight was a July 2008 speech to some 200,000 people in the heart of Berlin about the world, the U.S. and its place in it.

To be fair, “Peanut Farmer From Plains” just closed last year in Munich, after a 32 year run.

…the left would have to invent him.

That is all.

Years ago, Wilebski’s “Blues Saloon” was the cornerstone of the local blues scene.  The tumbledown second-story tavern at Thomas and Western in Saint Paul was a stop on the regional blues circuit, and hosted one of the better open-stage nights in town every Monday.

And then, like most good things in the world of bars, it came to an end.  The club went through a number of identities; a couple of wan attempts at wan R’nB bars, with a shot at a gay bar in the middle somewhere.

But I was riding by on the 67 bus the other day, and saw the banners on the sides of the building: “Wilebski’s Blues Saloon”.

Yow.

I’ll be looking for details.

Up next on my tour of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers – Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry.

I always urge everyone to read every MOB blog – but Casual Sundays… has always been one of my favorites.  It’s one of the better blogs you may not be reading.

Casual Sundays…is not your one-stop shop for political head-banging.  It’s a wry look at family life from someone who’s had a family for a while, now.

Of course, that family started back in Jamestown, North Dakota – back when I was in college, where her husband Jay was the basketball coach.  Their oldest was born there, which was a subject of one of the long list of my favorite posts from the blog:

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Jay decided that that was it; he could never put me through such an ordeal again. Yeah, that worked out. Have you met our three other kids?

Having babies is amazing. When you are in the thick of it, you swear nothing could possibly be worth the trouble. Then, at the height of the awful, they hand you the most wonderful, awesome, fascinating and beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, felt or imagined; your own child.

The world literally changes.

Okay, the world doesn’t change, the world doesn’t even notice. Here’s what’s important; You change.

She’s also the sister of Katie McCollow, of the late and much-lamented Yucky Salad With Bones.  So the knack must run in the family

She’s been writing the blog pretty consistently since 2006.

Stop by and say Hi!

Back in the eighties, I thought it’d be fun to get a group of conservatives together and publicize a “Tachometer to Tyranny”.  It’d have basically been a gauge of some sort that would represent the consensus of a number of conservative thinkers about the speed at which the world was driving towards one-world dictatorship.

Of course it would have  been a biased indicator!  That was the point!

It was, of course, a response to the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists'” “Doomsday Clock”, which was  prominently on display during the eighties as a barometer (to mix my gauges) of lefty opinion about the state of the world.

It’s baaaaaaaaaaaack:

The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock will be moved at 3pm this afternoon, for the first time in two years.

The timepiece in New York conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction, which is represented by midnight.

I’m wondering if the  media – which cover every “adjustment” of the clock with breathless, unquestioning credulity – ever asked themselves “why was it that the “Bulletin’s” “scientists” became the most pants-wettingly depressed about Ronald Reagan’s actions – the very actions that made it possible to adjust the clock “backwards” shortly after his administration?

Oh, that’s right.  Must not question them; the science is settled.

With news filtering out of Haiti as slowly as aid is effectively able to get in, the scale of the massive earthquake’s destruction is still hard to determine.  For a country already in political and economic ruin, magnitude-7 quake destroyed most of Port-au-Prince, leaving estimates as high as 500,000 dead and perhaps as many as 3 million in need of emergency aid:

Tuesday’s earthquake brought down buildings great and small — from shacks in shantytowns to President Rene Preval‘s gleaming white National Palace, where a dome tilted ominously above the manicured grounds.

Hospitals, schools and the main prison collapsed. The capital’s Roman Catholic archbishop was killed when his office and the main cathedral fell. The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing in the ruins of the organization’s multistory headquarters.

Police officers turned their pickup trucks into ambulances to carry the injured. Wisnel Occilus, a 24-year-old student, was wedged between two other survivors in a truck bed headed to a police station. He was in an English class when the earth shook at 4:53 p.m. and the building collapsed.

“The professor is dead. Some of the students are dead, too,” said Occilus, who suspected he had several broken bones. “Everything hurts.”

To put Haiti’s most recent tragedy into perspective, the earthquake may already rank as one of the deadliest in history.  Only Shaanxi in China’s 1556 earthquake may have been worse with an unconfirmed 830,000 dead, but with the inaccurate of historical records, the 1976 Tangshan earthquake and it’s official death-toll of 255,000 ranks as the worst of the modern era and likely the most deadly. 

There are many fine organizations assisting survivors in Haiti, but I would encourage SITD’s loyal readers to consider donating to the International Red Cross in this hour of need.

If seeing James Cameron’s boffo blockbuster special effects extravaganza Avatar doesn’t give you a 3-D induced headache, apparently it will give you thoughts of suicide instead:

The beautiful alien planet Pandora depicted in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is so captivating that some audience members are becoming depressed and even suicidal when they fail to find meaning in real life after the film is over…

“I just watched avatar a few weeks ago and I’m feeling depressed and sad. It’s like I want to reach out and be in Pandora. I’d do anything to be in Pandora. I’ve tried so hard to dream about me being on Pandora but it hasn’t worked.”

“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.'”

I’ll admit I felt the urge to grab a gun after seeing “Cool as Ice”, but I don’t think it involved the same motivations.

While there’s nothing amusing about the serious depression and social alienation that allows individuals to be driven to thoughts of suicide from a 3-D film with 2-D characters, Cameron’s opus isn’t the first nor the last work of science fiction to do so.  There’s Star Wars depression.  There’s Twilight depression.  Who knows, maybe even Mitch’s light posting this morning caused a few cases of SITD withdrawal.

But regardless of the source, the causes for such depression from a work of fiction seem as much culturally based as personality-driven:

Tamara Nichols, who practiced psychotherapy for 11 years, says, “[The genre] can provide a sort of a symbolic model for people who don’t fit into the more mainstream ideas of what a man should be, what a woman should be.”

…it seems that many people who read science fiction as children had similar experiences: raised outside their mother countries, moved frequently, had health problems, troubled childhoods, and/or were academically gifted. These circumstances led these people to delve more deeply into books than to reach out to other people.

A multitude of critics as varied as the floral and fawna on Cameron’s fictional Pandora have expounded on the political and social messages that Avatar and its appeal suggest.  But regardless of the film’s real or accidental messages (and Cameron leaves little doubt about environmental intentions of the movie), the concept that Avatar’s appeal is largely what filmmakers 50 years used to call a “sword and sandal spectacle” is seemingly too timid a conclusion for some to be willing to reach.  What would columnists and bloggers have to write about without broad, overreaching conclusions on social phenomena?  Especially when your protagonists are giant blue cat people.

Maybe that’s the real underlying message of Avatar – millions of people are secretly suicidal furries.

Posting is going to be light as a baby’s footsteps until this afternoon.

UPDATE:  In fact, this day has a strong shot at becoming one of my rare weekdays off.

The GOP gubernatorial field has been an embarassment of riches so far, for a good conservative.  Tom Emmer, Dave Hann and Pat Anderson are all good orthodox conservatives; Marty Seifert is more of a pragmatist but certainly acceptable. 

But with the 800-pound gorilla rumors that Norm Coleman is pretty likely to enter the race, some of the air got sucked out of the room. 

And Pat Anderson, who served as State Auditor from 2002 to 2006 (and a very, very good one at that) has decided to run for her old office.

Good for her, I say.

Coleman – so says at least one thread of conventional wisdom – is going to get into the race, likely lose the endorsement but go to the primaries, and have an excellent chance of winning the governor’s office against the pack of gabbling hamsters the DFL will field. 

Coleman is not the perfect conservative, but if the choice is between an imperfect conservatve (who’s voted to the right of John McCain and Jim Ramstad, for crying out loud) and Steve Kelley, Mark Dayton or Margaret Anderson Kelliher (especially since the MNGOP is unlikely to flip the House and/or the Senate this fall, not that that’s not going to stop me from trying like hell), the choice should be obvious, if that’s what it comes down to; I am hoping that the presence of strong conservatives Emmer and Hann will drive him to the right, one way or the other.  That’s presuming we all believe the conventional wisdom.

But this is about Pat Anderson.  She’s young.  She articulates a conservative vision in a way that reaches out to people in the middle who might be sticker-shocked by the DFL’s coke-binge-like spending spree.  She’s very sharp.  She’s also been out of the public eye since the drearily unaccomplished Rebecca Otto upset her for Auditor during the 2006 election.  I think four years in the public eye will set Anderson up nicely for whatever comes next.

I first predicted in 2002 that Pat Anderson would be Minnesota’s first female governor or Senator. 

I’ll amend it; she’s got a great shot at being Minnesota’s first female governor or good female Senator.

Here’s the dirty little secret of elections:  if you wait until November, all the really important decisions have already been made.  The party’s selection of candidates, its platform, its high-level policy -all of that gets set…

…at the precinct caucuses.

Which are on Tuesday, February 2 – just three weeks from tonight!

If you’re a Republican – or, more importantly, are an “indepdendent” who is reeling from sticker shock at all the “hope and change” out there, and want to join a lot of like-minded Americans in saving things while we can – then I hope you see you on February 2 at your GOP precinct caucuses.  It’s there that you vote for delegates that will go to the State House District Conventions to support your candidates – and hopefully win, and go on to the Congressional District conventions, and finally the State Convention, where we will hopefully select the next Governor of Minnesota.

And it all starts at your precinct!

“But where’s that, 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.

When the guys on the Northern Alliance Radio Network originally started the MOB, we had a few clear missions

1. Build a social organization!:  Social media are the most fun when they’re social.  And for a mostly-solitary hobby like blogging, getting out and meeting people could be a huge boost.
2. Give the mass of smaller Twin Cities blogs an instant audience.  When blogs like Fraters, Powerline and I got started in 2002, it was hard to find any other bloggers in your area; I blogged for probably ten months before I encountered the guys from Fraters.
3. Give activists an outlet.

That last has been interesting, and in some ways controversial.  We wanted to give smaller political groups – district and BPOU committees, smaller interest groups – a way to get around the various party bureaucracies to get the word out, whatever “the word” is to them.  And the MOB (and the overtly partisan spin-off True North) drew quite a few of these smaller bodies; their motivations are different than many of us amateur pundits, but the goal is still the same; communicate with people, change things.

Carver County GOP has been one of those blogs for almost four years now. They’ve been an active, useful blog – part party information, part polemics, and all exactly what we had in mind when we got the MOB going.

GOP activists – check them out.  And think to yourselves; could my BPOU use something like this?

When Barack Obama expressed concern over the deficit, and pledged to cut it in half, I suppose there were some taxpayers that actually thought that implied a reduction in government spending.

Nope. What he meant was he was about to invent another tax and wrap it in fabricated righteousness.

President Barack Obama may propose a fee on financial-services companies as a way to fulfill a vow on cutting the budget deficit in half, administration officials said.

Despite the fact that by some miracle the government is well on it’s way to recovering much of the infusions made last year in the interest of preventing further disaster, Obama wants more. How dare the financial sector recover from a crisis seeded by the government and admittedly germinated by the avarice of a few bad apples and actually start turning a profit again!

Banks repaid the U.S. $165 billion last year, letting the government recoup about two-thirds of its total investment in the banking system through the $700 billion financial rescue, according to a U.S. Treasury Department report released today.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program also collected $12.9 billion in fees, dividends and interest, the Treasury said. So far, the U.S. has made an 8 percent return on its bank investments, a Treasury official told reporters.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said he expects the government to be repaid for the funds put into banks at a profit.

You can’t have it both ways.

A few banks exhibit risky behavior while the government looks the other way. Risk is realized. The government bails the banks out just as the banks expected, thereby rewarding them by mitigating the risk normally realized by this behavior.

No one should be surprised that some banks are picking up where they left off, and the government is just as culpable as the banks.

Public sentiment has turned against last year’s government rescue of the financial-services industry. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe bailing out the banks was a bad idea, a Bloomberg National Poll taken Dec. 3-7 showed.

Just over half of respondents said banks should be subject to stricter regulation and 31 percent would allow troubled banks to fail.

Americans are pissed off – and they should be – but not just at the banks, rather at the bureaucrats that saw fit to reward risky behavior with taxpayer dollars.

…and ironically now seek to create yet another tax to repair the damage caused by the misuse of taxpayer dollars in the first place.

One must never underestimate a liberal’s creativity in finding new ways to confiscate capital and turn something into nothing.

It looks like it’ll be official: North Dakota governor John Hoeven is going to announce his candidacy to replace Byron Dorgan in about an hour.

Listen to the press conference at 6PM Central time here.

Ed and I interviewed Rob Port, who is the foremost political blogger in North Dakota, who correctly noted a nuance that escapes a lot of outside observers; while North Dakota is famously Republican, the state also has a mixed traditi0n in terms of spending; it has the nation’s only successful state bank and state mill; there’s a long prairie populist tradition, as well as some of the Scandinavian communitarian traditions that the state shares with Minnesota, that means the state government is a little more activist than many other Western states.  As such, Hoeven is a more “Moderate” Republican on spending than some of his GOP counterparts.  It’d be a mistake to call him a RINO; he’s probably slightly to the right of Norm Coleman and John McCain, and if elected he’ll be a big improvement over Dorgan, and vastly better than either of Minnesota’s senators.

Tune in!

Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons turns 68 today.

Clemons, who’s been playing saxophone (and, briefly on the Rising tour, bagpipes) with Bruce Springsteen since 1981, is one of the great rock and roll stories.  Son of a fish merchant from Norfolk, Virginia, grandson of a Baptists minister, Clemons went Maryland State College on music and football scholarships, and had a tryout with the Jim-Brown-era Cleveland Browns; an untimely car accident before his tryout sent him to Plan B, working as a social worker by day and a musician by night.

Over the years, Clemons was a reliable foil for Springsteen in concert…

He wasn’t the most flexible sax payer of all time – I think a guy could do serviceable impression learning three or four basic licks on the horn.

But what he may lack in major chops, he makes up in distinctiveness; there may not be a sax player anywhere in music with a more identifiable sound.

Of course, the story of the first meeting between Clemons and Springsteen is known to anyone who ever listened to Born to Run; it’s the story in “Tenth Avenue Freezeout” (here’s a particularly frenetic rave-up of a version):

In more prosaic form?

One night we were playing in Asbury Park. I’d heard The Bruce Springsteen Band was nearby at a club called The Student Prince and on a break between sets I walked over there. On-stage, Bruce used to tell different versions of this story but I’m a Baptist, remember, so this is the truth. A rainy, windy night it was, and when I opened the door the whole thing flew off its hinges and blew away down the street. The band were on-stage, but staring at me framed in the doorway. And maybe that did make Bruce a little nervous because I just said, “I want to play with your band,” and he said, “Sure, you do anything you want.” The first song we did was an early version of “Spirit In The Night“. Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for. In one way he was just a scrawny little kid. But he was a visionary. He wanted to follow his dream. So from then on I was part of history.

Happy Birthday, Big Man – and many more!

To: Star/Tribune

From: Mitch Berg, Gubernatorial Candidate, “No Government Subsidies To The Media” Party

Re:  Your request.

After snorting coke from the bellybuttons of a bunch of filipina hookers, waking up under piles of U of M cheerleaders after booze-induced blackouts, and telling people I enjoyed Natural Born Killers, I had someone tell me to pull it all together.

I did.

Now – given the media’s history as self-appointed high priests of knowledge and newspaper reporters’ reputation for sucking the fumes from the corks of empty booze bottles, perhaps you could favor us with details on your reporters’ drinking habits?  Y’know, so we can use it to judge your ability to cover the news?

Failure to repond will be considered a go-ahead to say anything we want about you. 

Ta,

Mitch

Jon Stewart, fake newscaster, sets the barometer of the American media:

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would [Walter Cronkite] think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.

Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.

I’ve managed to dispense with it. 

And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’

“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”

But don’t worry:

None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.

Well, Stewart’s the symptom. 

When Cronkite ruled the airwaves, the media were the High Priests of Information; people trusted them (wrongly). 

Stewart is merely a high-concept extension of the same mass of skepticism that blogs, talk radio and the rest of the alt-media traffic.  It’s fashionably left-of-center enough for establishment liberal media figures like Brian Williams and NPR to recognize and ackknowledge.

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

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