…it looks like we’re gonna need some more Democrat senators.
To Quote Han Solo…
29
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Frustrated
Here’s a flashback to my first year in radio: Doug Fieger, via dead at 57:
Fieger formed The Knack in Los Angeles 1978, and the group quickly became a staple of Sunset Strip rock clubs. A year later he co-wrote and sang lead vocals on “My Sharona.”
Fieger said the song, with its pounding drums and exuberant vocals, was inspired by a girlfriend of four years.
Here’s one for old times’ sake:
RIP, Doug Fieger.
President’s Day
Bob Collins has an excellent challenge over at NewsCut:
The five items today are my five favorite presidential moments, limited to the period that I witnessed (I go back to Eisenhower but I’ll be darned if I can think of a huge Eisenhower moment that makes the top 5). They are listed in their order of impact.Yours may differ, in fact I hope they do. Add yours in the comments section below.
So what are the top five Presidential moments of your lifetime? I presume Collins means good, bad and otherwise; he includes Nixon’s resignation and Clinton’s “I did not have sex with this woman” bit.
His choices, by the way, were:
- Reagan’s Challenger speech.
- Nixon’s Resignation
- Obama’s speech on race
- Clinton’s Lewinski speech.
- George W. Bush at the World Trade Center.
Seems like an interesting exercise. So here goes.
1. George W. Bush at the World Trade Center. I had my reservations about Bush even in 2000; he was a big spender with not a few social policies that fit in just fine with Ted Kennedy. But immediately after 9/11, the nation – at least, the part of it I lived in – needed this speech:
At a time when a good chunk of the nation was feeling insecure and afraid, there you had the President, standing on the rubble (that is Secret Service advised him to avoid), talking through a bullhorn (forget about a teleprompter), unafraid, confident, ready to kick ass.
Did he kick the right ass? Did his administration handle the interrogations of those whose asses had been kicked properly? In September of 2001, those questions were as ephemeral as dinner plans in 2016 are today to you and I. The nation needed leading. And Bush not only led, he did it with a style that’d make Reagan and Churchill and Kennedy sit up and say “good job, son”.
2. Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech. I saw this one when I was a kid.
And while I believed, in my teenager-y way, in everything liberalism promised (because it was all I knew, if you think about it, I was struck even then at how depressing everything about this speech was; how Carter looked almost as if the desk controlled him, rather than the other way around. Some of my lefty-apologist friends grin smugly when I mention this speech and say “he doesn’t actually say malaise in the speech”, and them nod their heads with a self-satisfied “hmmph”. I reply “he didn’t have to”. Even as a kid, I could feel it.
I list this speech as one of the key moments that pushed me along the way to becoming a conservative.
3. Reagan’s 1981 Christmas Speech. I wrote about this before Christmas. This was the speech where Reagan lowered the boom on the Communists’ repression in Poland (which kicks off around 3:40).
(The video above cuts off before the last part, where Reagan asks America to light candles in their windows on Christmas for Poland).
I remember this speech. I remember how I felt; a little fearful (I had little concept of presidents actually standing for something), combined with the realization that this is the right thing.
And the notion that a President could do the right, but difficult thing, rather than the expedient one, was a new one for me.
4. Nixon Resigns. I was 11, I think. I won’t say I understood the whole issue at the time. That’d be absurd.
But there’s no way that anyone of any remotely cognitive age could see this, and know what was going on in the nation at the time, and not be affected.
5. Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate. Yeah, I know – two from the same president. I think it’s appropriate.
The speech wasn’t that notable at the time, oddly enough; it passed without widespread comment, as far as I remember. But its ripples changed history.
So let’s hear yours.
Newsweek: “Go to your room, voters!”
I started out my “adult” life, at least to about halfway through college, as a liberal.
But starting in high school, I had doubts; the Dems were a disaster on national security; the economy was falling apart; I started to have doubts that “giving everything to everyone” was anything more than a good campaign promise to people who didn’t think all that hard in the first place.
Those doubts culminated in looking furtively about the polling station in November of 1984 and pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan. And then lying to my parents about it. For the time being, anyway; I obviously stayed conservative; within two years, I was hosting a conservative talk show in the Twin Cities.
So here’s a question: was my political evolution, which was a considered result of a whole lot of reading and thinking and discussion, a sign of growing up and finding myself when it came to my political worldview?
Or a sign that I was just incoherent?
The latter, claims Jacob Weisberg in a Newsweek article called “Why the Public Is to Blame for the Political Mess”
In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.
That’s a fairly big thought, there. We’ll come back to that.
Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the economic stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but polls reflect something more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.
They neglect one other things; polls don’t exist in a vacuum.
A year ago, “the public” was wracked with Bush fatigue. With the full connivance of a media that was completely in the bag for Barack Obama (painting him as a centrist, for crying out loud), they had a brief fling with radical liberalism. Then they saw the price tag, and the rot that would set in if Obama’s agenda passed, and changed their minds.
They may be demanding action – but not the action that Reid, Pelosi and Obama want to bring them.
Weisberg is half right. The public had a moment of immature incoherence. It lasted through all of 2008.
We’ll see if people grow up by 2012.
Unsettled Unscience
The science behind global warming is taking more hits than Jean-Pierre Koopman against Mohammed Ali:
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.
It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife.
Sounds bad.
However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Long story short; humans do cause warming – where they live:
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
Do you think a weather station surrounded by strip malls and houses is going to be warmer than one out on the lone prairie?
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
In other words, he was part of that universal consensus, before he wasn’t.
Gaza Blues
Raise your hands if you couldn’t see this coming?
Palestinian protesters have added a colorful twist to demonstrations against Israel’s separation barrier, painting themselves blue and posing as characters from the hit film “Avatar.”
The demonstrators also donned long hair and loincloths Friday for the weekly protest against the barrier near the village of Bilin.
They equated their struggle to the intergalactic one portrayed in the film.
I think the Navi lost me when they sent a suicide bomber into the human pizzeria.
For Fair Elections
Here’s where you can go to become an election judge.
The Ultimate Tenure Rejection
It’s been all over the news; three member of the U of Alabama/Huntsville’s biology staff were killed yesterday, allegedly by a woman who’d been denied tenure.
Tenure, of course, is one of those niceties of academic life that promotes basic academic freedoms by making it much harder to arbitrarily and capriciously fire a professor. Call it an “arbitrary termination-free zone”.
In a sense, all of the victims were denied an even more-important tenure – the right to protect themselves and those around them from being arbitrarily and capriciously blown off of this earth. U of Alabama/Huntsville was a “gun-free zone”.
Several pieces of information indicate that students, faculty, and staff are banned from having guns on university property (here and here).
My condolences and prayers to the families of the victims – and the family of the alleged perp.
So how many more humans are to be denied their temporal tenure to placate our anti-gun lords and masters?
Brenda Lee Comin’ On Strong
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. We’ll be talking about Obama’s tightrope walk – the need to triangulate on jobs, healthcare and security – while appeasing his base. We’ll also be interviewing Janet Beihoffer on the GOP’s push to recruit election judges.
- 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!
LORAN Time No See
I’ve joked, over the years, about how my native North Dakota is a maritime state, peopled by folks with salt water in their veins. It’s partly a joke, of course – NoDak is pretty land-locked. Not entirely a joke, of course; many of us are descended from the Vikings (not the ones that choke in the playoffs – the ones that made all your anscestors cry “uncle”).
But at least partly because North Dakota had a Coast Guard base.
For the past forty-odd years, thirteen of the loneliest coasties in the entire service have manned a LORAN transmitter near the little town of Lamoure. The station broadcast a continuous signal with about four megawatts of power (most of our metro TV stations and bigger FM stations are 100,000 watts) to ships and planes around the world; in the days before GPS, it was the gold standard of electronic navigation.
Was. The system was officially shut down this past Monday:
On Monday at 2000 GMT, the U.S. Coast Guard terminated the transmission of the LORAN-C radionavigation signal, marking the end of a system which has been an important factor in maritime navigation (and, to a lesser extent, air navigation) for more than half a century. The termination of LORAN was based on budget considerations and on the conclusion that LORAN’s functions have been supplanted by GPS. I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.
LORAN was developed in World War II, and has served well. But time and technology march on. But progress doesn’t always progress, really:
Most LORAN users have now converted to GPS: however, there are signficant concerns about the increasing level of navigational dependency on this satellite-based system. For one thing, GPS signals are necessarily weak and can be jammed relatively easily. This was much less of a threat for LORAN because of the very high power (up to 4 megawatts) of its terrestrial transmitters.
So powerful, in fact, that they’d kill birds in flight near the towers.
Various proposals have been advanced for GPS backup systems, one of which involves radio signals transmitted from blimps. An alternative that was on the table was e-LORAN, involving the upgrade of the system’s accuracy to about 8 meters: indeed, significant money has already been invested in e-LORAN development. I’ve seen estimates that the cost of completing e-LORAN deployment would have been about $250MM, which is roughly the same amount of money being spent to dismantle the existing LORAN infrastructure. (LORAN operating costs were quite reasonable, about $35MM/yr.) I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever we wind up doing for GPS backup turns out to cost a lot more.
Of course, GPS developers have a lot more political clout than LORAN technicians, these days.
Anyway – bon voyage, LORAN!
Unintended Consequences
KSTP-AM pulled the plug on its thirty-year, once-wildly-successful experiment with talk radio this week.
General Manager Ginny Morris, from the station’s website:
Radio is an ever-changing landscape and throughout its 87-year history, KSTP-AM has been known for many things. In the very earliest days, when my grandfather was programming the station, we covered a lot of news and carried the NBC radio network, we aired soap operas and played many different types of music. Later, when my dad ran the station, he played Jazz and classical music, and then evolved into playing rock music, which at times dismayed his dad.
On Monday, February 15, we evolve again, and you will know us as AM1500 The SportsTalk Station.
Joe Soucheray and Patrick Reusse invented SportsTalk in this town – arguably in the country – and we look forward to featuring them together every afternoon. They are wonderfully talented entertainers and storytellers, as individuals and as a team, and they will anchor our new line-up that we think you will enjoy.
Well, we could hardly enjoy it any less than the one the station’s had for the past year or two.
I more or less predicted this a little over a year ago. KSTP’s been drifting toward…something for a long time, now.
A little background: After almost sixty years as one of the leading radio stations in the country (in the ’30s and ’40s), and then one of the top music stations in the metro (60s and early 70s), KSTP-AM switched to talk radio in about 1980; music radio had pretty well died on AM radio by that point. And in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, it nearly died again; Hubbard Broadcasting was actively seeking a buyer for its once-flagship station, amid rumors that the FCC would soon decommission the entire AM band. It even stuck the AM operation in the old transmitter shack, on Highway 61, to make it easier to move. It’s asking price in 1986? A ludicrous $5 million (or so said the rumor among the staff at the time, of which I was one).
And then, in 1987, Ronald Reagan killed the “Fairness” Doctrine, opening up the radio market to untrammelled political talk of all kinds.
A consultant pitched this new host – Rush Limbaugh – to KSTP’s management, saying that sure, Limbaugh was political, but his schtick was much more about his irreverence and humor. So Hubbard took a chance.
And it paid off handsomely; in 1986, the AM station was the poor cousin of the Hubbard family. By 2003, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis, Bob Davis and the newly-“conservative” Joe Soucheray dominating their time slots, the AM station was rolling in money, and financially carrying the rest of the Hubbard slate (“Chick-Talk 107”, KS95, and Channels 5 and 45), making so much money they were able to experiment way outside the format with hosts like Tom Mischke.
But the rumors were always there; Hubbard didn’t like being “conservative”. Ginny Morris pined for the days when her grandfather’s KSTP, like its hereditary nemesis WCCO, was all things to all people, offended nobody, and was the broadcast pillar of the community (back when the community had three newspapers, three TV stations, a couple dozen radio stations – and that was it).
And so when Jason Lewis, and then Rush Limbaugh, left KSTP – buoyed by a 2005 meme among consultants that “conservative talk is dead” – the station replaced them with middle-of-the-road milquetoast, and sports. The station landed the Minnesota Twins in 2007.
The mixture performed terribly. KSTP’s ratings are a shade over half of what they were seven years ago. More importantly, the station’s revenues are doing about the same; scuttlebutt around the market says that KSTP’s revenues are off 40%. Some of that is the economy, of course – but it’s worth noting that revenues at “AM1280 The Patriot”, where I do a show, dropped by a tiny fraction of the losses at KSTP (expressed as percentage of overall revenues). By way of discussion, KTLK-FM, which started with the same “dog’s breakfast of ideas” format to which KSTP has aspired, saw its revenues drop by 30% – and decided to switch to more or less all conservative talk to get back in the saddle. Because conservative talk is the only mass format in radio that’s paying its freight these days.
Except, perhaps, sports.
Amy Carlson Gustafson at the PiPress covers the carnage:
As of Thursday, the station had gotten rid of weekday on-air folks including Bob Berglund, Jay Kolls, mid-morning show hosts Shawn Prebil and Chris Murphy, late-night host Al Malmberg and midday host Kelly Webb.
Most of whom – Berglund excepted – should never have been on the air in the majors anyway.
KSTP’s management rationalizes:
“In a talk radio marketplace that’s gotten pretty [crowded], we’ve found that it’s tough to succeed if you don’t own a position,” [Hubbard exec Dan] Seeman said. “KSTP-AM was the original talk station and for a long time that meant something — you could do some talk, some opinion, some sports. Well, then, all of a sudden you have specialized formats in conservative talk, liberal talk, sports talk, pop culture talk. We really decided we needed to settle on a position.
This is tush-covering. KSTP-AM had a position. It was in fact a very dominant one, ten years ago; Limbaugh, Lewis and Soucheray were as potent a ratings punch as this market has seen. KSTP squandered that position.
And our strengths are Joe, Pat and Twins baseball. Sports, sports, sports.”
Well, no. Those are the only strong hosts the station left itself with.
The station is eventually going to switch to ESPN’s morning show, which would normally be considered a bit of a black eye for a station with KSTP’s history and size; most big stations in major metro areas have their own local morning show. But KSTP’s morning lineup has been utterly hapless since 1980, and the gabbling bobbleheads on ESPN will likely be an improvement. Or at least cost less.
As a way of making a rayon purse out of a sow’s ear, it’s not a bad move; it’ll support the Twins broadcasts better, it’ll draw a defined audience for the first time since the station ditched political talk, and it’ll give the station the first chance it’s had at an actual identity – “position” – in a long, long time. Maybe, if they’re lucky, it’ll be a “position” that management actually gets behind as well.
Which would have helped the station a lot over the past 5-10 years or so.
Around The MOB: Grumpy Old Men
What happens when you get a bunch of guys together who like to write, but don’t want the hassle of running their own blogs?
Besides the entire newsroom at Shot In The Dark, I mean?
You get a bunch of the Twin Cities’, and the MOB’s, growing crew of group blogs. Including one of the newer additions, Grumpy Old Men, featuring a phalanx of people you know from other blogs and, indeed, the Shot In The Dark comment section; BikeBubba, the prolific Mr. D, K-Rod, Steve (formerly of the late lamented Gigglepundit. I think), and a few others whose names are new but whose styles look oddly familiar.
Sample? Sure. Bubba captures the “grumpy old man” aethos quite nicely:
The happiness and very life of your daughters, or sons, probably depends on it, according to Charlotte Allen. Now she doesn’t come out and say it–her 12 page piece more or less only documents how many promiscuous (and predatory) men use social darwinism to justify their behavior–but the reality is that our children’s defense against the “meat market” mentality appears, if the testimony of the “male sluts” quoted in the article is indicative, to be the willingness of parents to actually raise their children. Overwhelmingly, the “pick up artist” is one who didn’t have a decent relationship with his dad. His victim–the same.
So polish and clean the old shotgun, and get ready to tell the kid with the jeans hanging halfway off his rear end to get off your porch until he’s wearing something that fits and has his shirt tucked in. Be a grumpy old man, and your kids will be the better for it.
Words to live by.
Make GOM a stop on your tour around the MOB!
“It is impossible to fathom the impact Fred Morrison has had on the world…”
…through the invention of such a simple object know as the Frisbee”
Who hasn’t owned and thrown a frisbee, one of a handful of quintessentially-American inventions whose trademarked name became the descriptor of the entire category.
Fred Morrison put his World War II experience as a fighter pilot to peaceful use by inventing what became known as the Frisbee.
The Frisbee became the frisbee; Kleenex became kleenex.
Raised in Utah and California, Mr. Morrison began his fascination with flying disks as a teen, throwing popcorn lids and then cake pans on the Santa Monica beach. In a memoir, Mr. Morrison wrote that a stranger once offered to buy one of his pans for a quarter.
“At the time cake pans cost about a nickel,” Mr. Morrison wrote. “A business was born!” Mr. Morrison’s toy business was interrupted by World War II, during which he piloted bombers and fighters. He was shot down while flying a P-51 Mustang over Italy in 1945 and held as a POW. After the war, he used the knowledge he had gained in the Army Air Corps to design a more aerodynamic flying cake pan.
Because theretofore cake pans weren’t suitable for efficient flight?
Morrison died this week and we will remember him by these words:
“I never liked the name Frisbee…I thought it was stupid.”
…but it paid the bills.
Profiles In Resolution
Whatever else we may say about the Administration, at least they held the line on Iraq.
When then-Senator Joe Biden had the opportunity to call for a withdrawal, and for the partition of Iraq into three states, thank goodness he held the line.
When then-Senator Obama had the option to vote with the rest of his party against the war, thank heavens Obama’s wisdom caused him to look past short-term polling and vote for perseverence.
And when the time came to fish or cut bait with the 2006 troop surge to exploit the newfound successes of the “Anbar Awakening”, thank the good Lord that Barack Obama and Joe Biden bet long and supported Gen. Petraeus’ plans and the efforts of our troops.
All that perseverence paid off during the 2008 Presidential Campaign, when both Obama and Biden bucked the left’s base and demanded resolution and perseverence in Iraq, that our sacrifices and those of the Iraqi people would not be in vain.
And so thank you, Vice President Biden. Your claiming of credit on Larry King last night was so well-earned…
…I’m sorry. I can’t keep a straight face anymore. I’m lying.
But then, so was Vice President Biden, when he actually claimed credit for the Administration on its stance in Iraq.
Andrew Malcolm in the LATimes:
Now, the Obama-Biden pair that opposed the Iraq war and its tactics and predicted their failure is prepared to accept credit for its success.
It seems that Biden, who’s from Delaware when he’s in Delaware and Pennsylvania when in Pennsylvania, is certain now that Iraq will turn out to be one of the Obama-Biden administration’s greatest achievements.
No, really.
Here’s how Biden put it to Lar:
I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.
I spent — I’ve been there 17 times now. I go about every two months — three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.
Biden did not elaborate on what all the administration’s other “great achievements” were so far.
There’s your Hope and Change; Biden hopes you don’t notice he’s changed history.
(With thanks to commenter Fingers. When I first read the headline on Drudge, I thought it said “Iran“, not Iraq. Oy.).
The Fiscal Monkey On Our Backs
I’m willing to go back and forth with people who favor the so-called “high-tax, high service” model of government.
“Mighty big of ya, Berg!”
Well, no – that’s how democracy works; we each go out and plug for our various positions, and at the end of the day some sort of compromise gets reached. One of the ways we plug for our positions it to nominate, endorse and vote for candidates that reflect our positions; the more of them we get into office, the more amenable the final compromise will be to “we”.
Now, the pr0-tax, pro-“service” crowd has two conceits that not only drive me nuts, but really make rational debate about taxes, spending and “services” impossible.
- The “Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota” meme. It was a sign that started popping up around Minnesota back about the time Governor Pawlenty started cutting Local Government Aid to balance the budget (when the legislature couldn’t do it). I won’t say “the meme is dumb” – but it is misleading. It has little to do with paying for a “better Minnesota”; it’s all about making sure government never, never does without.
- The “If you oppose taxes, you support firing cops and letting the streets go unplowed” meme. It frames the argument so that by opposing any government spending – $50,000 drinking fountains, overlapping “Human Rights” departments, green roofs, yellow bikes, city trash collection – you oppose all government spending. It’s a fairly childish manipulation.
The issue, by the way – for everyone on the right except perhaps the most anarchic of libertarians – is not “all government or no government”. It’s “make sure that people come before government when doling out fiscal security”.
Which bothers the tax and spend crowd, for whom all well-being seems to come through gobvernment.
Dave Mindemann at mnpACT seems to have gotten his mellow harshed by a GOP flyer questioning some spending proposals:
There is a flyer floating around Eagan this past week. It is prepared and paid for by the Republican Party of Minnesota as an “independent expenditure”. The one I got hold of is directed at Senator Jim Carlson….it says;
DEBT
IT FEELS LIKE A TEN TON
GORILLA ON YOUR BACK
Senator Jim Carlson is wasting your tax dollars on these items in the DEBT BILL?
–$2 million for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
–$11 million for the Como Zoo Gorilla & Polar Bear Upgrade
–$15 million for the St. Paul Ordway
–$22 million for the Minneapolis Planetarium
Call Senator Carlson today….It’s time to end Wasteful Government Spending!
Now, we know that’ll act on Dave Mindemann – who, I think it’s fair to say, favors a “high tax, high spendign, high “Service”” model of goverhment – like a red cape in front of a bull.
So, this is the Republican definition of waste? We apparently shouldn’t keep up the cultural and affordable family venue part of our economy? If we are not going to maintain the Como Zoo, then scrap it. I want the Republicans to go on the record. They want Como Zoo to be torn up and plowed under. Give the animals away. Sell the land and tell everyone that this free family venue is no longer worth the bother.
Someone get the lad some smelling salts and tell him to get a grip.
I live in Saint Paul. I’ve taken my kids to Como many, many times. It’s one of Saint Paul’s little hidden treasures – and it’s a freebie! It’s a freebie because of me, the Saint Paul taxpayer! The walkways, the veterinarian, the food they throw to the seals – I pay for it! So I feel not the slightest compunction about taking my kids there; I did my part. I agree to do my part of it, every time I pay my Saint Paul property tax bill, among many many others (including state and federal taxes).
But the appropriation in question isnt’ one to run the whole zoo; it’s to remodel the Gorilla and Polar Bear exhibits. Not “run the zoo or tear it down”.
To call the issue “remodel the gorilla/polar bear facilities or tear down the zoo” is inflammatory, obtuse and, worse, dishonest.
And at a time when Minnesota and Saint Paul are hurting (largely due to the profligacy of the DFL-controlled legislature), would it kill the polar bears and gorillas to wait a year or two, in their utterly adequate current facilities?
Ditto with the other line items in the flyer. The Sculpture Garden and the Ordway are all built, paid for, and running just fine with what they have. They could use some upgrades, sure – what couldn’t? The Planetarium is a little different – it would replace a perfectly good planetarium torn down when Minneapolis built its boondoggle of a Central Library. But do they each need millions from the public coffers in mid-recession?
Make the Ordway take care of itself. Let those ticket prices skyrocket out of reach for the average Minnesotan.
One wonders if Mindemann has tried to take a family to the Ordway lately. Ticket prices are out of reach for a helluvva lot of Minnesotans.
And as for the Minneapolis Planetarium? …Not surprising these days, but as a person very interested in astronomy, it is a shame that Minnesota can’t support an educational opportunity like this.
A “person very interested in astromomy” might also note that the Twin Cities has several other planetaria – from the U of M to Como High School 0- that should be able to bridge the gap until it’s make economic sense, perhaps, to replace the old Minneapolis one.
And, again, the issue isn’t “appropriate the money now or do without forever“; it’s “maybe these are appropriations that can wait until we’re not in a freaking recession.
Yessir, we need to get that 10 ton gorilla out of the room all right, except it is not at Como. That gorilla is Republican hypocrisy and it resides quite visibly at the Capitol in St. Paul.
The only primate in the room is the howler monkey that’s shrieking “give us our money or tear everything down!”.
Someone call animal control.
His Goalposts Have Skis
After bagging on executive bonuses during the campaign, President Obama has discovered that “savvy” bankers deserve some bonus love:
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
So what defines “savvy” in the world of President Obama?
Let’s just say “savvy” is less in the head and more in the pants. Wallet pocket, I mean:
Well, Dimon has given over $100k just to the DSCC. Plus individual candidate donations, most of which go to Democrats.
And Blankfein gives almost all of his donations to Democrats – $136k to $4k.
Yep. They’re’ “savvy”, all right.
The Strib Exudes A Literary Aura
In my comment section, Jeff Kouba pointed me to a recent “book review” by the Strib’s Kristin Tillotson.
At least, it became a book review, of sorts. But in the first graf, it was hard to tell (emphasis added):
Wells Tower is a serious wiseacre, the kind who gets away with it not because of his cleverness, but because he cuts to hard truths.
As a clever wiseacre with a thing for hard truths, I sat up and took notice!
Written with startlingly original voice, careening imagination and an abiding fondness for what Teabaggers would call “the non-elites,” his stories are set in a surreal America we know, but aren’t sure we want to.
I’m trying to wrap my brain around a thought process that prods Ms. Tillotson to swerve that far outside any rational connection to her theme to take a passive-aggressive, blovious swipe at what may have once been half of her newspaper’s audience.
And I’m still trying.
So I sent this email to Ms. Tillotson:
Ms. Tillotson,
I’m trying to figure out the point of the “Teabagger” slur in your review of Wells Tower’s short story collection. It seems – labored?
I’d suggest a couple of possibilities, but I’d hate to get written off as one of those with “pursed lips, bloviating and passive-aggression“, so I figured I’d let you put it all in your own words.
Mitch Berg
I don’t expect anyone from the Strib to respond to mere peasants, of course. And if they do, it’ll be something…well, pursed, blovious and passive-aggressive, usually.
But I’ll keep you posted.
Drag
James Joyner has an excellent piece on the defining-down of slurs in our current discourse:
Views held by pluralities of Americans are now routinely dubbed Fascist, Communist, treason, unpatriotic, or un-American.
Let’s not forget “neocon” – a slur that’s fairly unique, since almost nobody who uses it can define it in any sense – and, most recently, “teabagger”.
Which I bring up for a reason:
It’s an effective tool, at first, just as Saul Alinsky predicted: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” But, as he also warned, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
I think “teabagger” – the favorite of a lot of dimwitted leftyblog shrieking-point recyclers and MSM party hacks – has upped the curve. I can’t put my finger on it, but I think the slur was starting to backfire on the left.
This next nine months will be interesting; the left’s been hitting the Alinsky playbook so hard it’s starting to get stale.
Around The MOB: GOP Mommy
Part of the reason I’m taking this tour through the MOB is to make sure I read some of the newer MOB blogs that, for whatever reason, I might have missed reading over the past few years. There’ve been some pleasant surprises; when people ask “where are the new blogs?” I can answer “all over the place!”.
One good example that is completely new to me is GOP Mommy. Jalen is, indeed, a mommy (of two), and also a GOPer. Indeed, as she explains in her site’s sidebar:
A little about me: I am now a registered Republican and I make Alex P. Keaton look like a flaming liberal. I believe in a small government since much of what the government touches turns to crap. I am a fiscal conservative though I tend to be more lenient when it comes to (some) social issues.
Which sounds a lot like an awful lot of us!
And she’s had just about enough of the Susan Komen foundation:
I am literally sickened by the fact that the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is partnered with Planned Parenthood. How insanely hypocritical is it for a group that wants to save the lives of women with breast cancer to donate your donations to a group that DESTROYS the lives of infants? Don’t ask me to donate money to “save lives” when you work with a group that wants to END life for profit! Pretty sure “abortion” is the polar opposite of “saving lives”. Pro-murder groups- oops, I mean pro-choice (to murder)groups like Planned Parenthood have no business working with or accepting donations from any group that claims to want to help people.
Also, I find it interesting that having an abortion is linked to causing breast cancer. This simply means that the Komen foundation is helping to CREATE new breast cancer patients! Just know that if you donate to the Komen Foundation, they give a percentage of your donations to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. Think about that before you donate. Perhaps they should use donations to find a cure for breast cancer instead of for ending lives….that would seem to make the most sense.
My donations to the foundation have ceased permanently.
GOP Mommy is no shrinking violet!
So tune in when making your rounds of the MOB!
Comparing Apples And Tuna
The arrest of James O’Keefe – the conservative new-media activist who stung several ACORN offices last year – on charges related to the completely unrelated allegations of tampering with Senator Landrieu’s phones has provided the left with much-needed grounds to try to equivocate and rationalize ACORN’s guilt away.
The dumbest rationalization? “O’Keefe didn’t wear his [fanciful and exaggerated] pimp outfit into the actual neighborhoods where the ACORN offices were located”. Gosh, d’ya think? I’m told that Steven Colbert isn’t a real blowhard conservative pundit, either. And it’s just possible that “Gunga” Dan Rather didn’t do a great job of passing as a Muj, either:
Slightly less dumb: “O’Keefe edited his footage”. Well, doy. Everyone edits their footage. Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric edited their interviews with Sarah Palin – allegedly to present her in the least flattering light possible (we won’t know until ABC and CBS release the raw footage of their interviews – which, of course, they will not, although they’ve rarely been shy about doing so to buttress whatever credibility they may actually have). Did O’Keefe’s edits mislead anyone? Well, ACORN seemed confident enough in the credibility of the footage, edited or not, to fire pretty much everyone busted in the sting.
A little dumber: “O’Keefe’s footage only showed the ones that got caught!” Well, again, doyy. The media doesn’t care about “dog bites man” stories; its when the man bites the dog that ears perk up. How many ACORN officials fell for the sting? Half a dozen? If half a dozen GOP state chairpeople agreed with a cretinous proposal to spend taxpayer money on, say, polo ponies, do you think the mainstream media would dowse up a “climate of corruption” story or two?
The jury is still out on this next bit; is O’Keefe’s sting better or worse than this bit here, where Luke Hellier at Minnesota Democrats Exposed busted an Uptake “reporter” not only deliberately editing footage from the Capitol to create a story where none existed, actively misleading the public about the nature of an exchage between Rep. Mack and ..:
Click to view full size
…but giggled about her ability to do it on Twitter?
Now, I’ve gone around a bit with the Uptake. On the one hand, most of the people involved in leading the group strive to present a clear and accurate, if not unbiased, representation of the news. On the other hand, they are committed to a “citizen journalism” model where virtually anyone can contribute, leading to some fairly ethically decrepit “reporting” (which the Uptake management, to their credit, have endeavored to fix).
The rationalization came from Charlie Quimby, who on the one hand writes/wrote for one lefty think tank or another and thus gets/has gotten some liveihood out of rationalizing the left’s behavior, but on the other hand is usually a fairly rational guy:
Kid needs supervision, like some other young videographers I could name
Now, I am not a news reporter – but I tried my hand at it, and never (allow me to brag a bit) lost a gig for breaching whatever passes for “ethics” in the business. Someone tell me again – did O’Keefe’s editing actually put words in peoples’ mouths they did not say? Did it imbue them with thoughts they did not think? Did it present a misleading impression of the ACORN employees’ malfeasance (that would have made firing them, as ACORN did, a mistake?)
Because it’d seem Ms. Maye did.
Where’s the equivalence?
And if the Uptake hires people (Ms. May was, according to Hellier’s copy and paste of Uptake’s posting on Ms. May, at the capitol more or less full-time), has the Uptake’s commitment to covering the news fairly and honestly passed its “sell by” date?
Mark Down “March 13” On Your Calendars
That’s the date of the MOB “Winter” Party.
It’s a Saturday night. It’s about a month away, so there’s plenty of time to get that babysitter (or parentsitter). It’s going to be at a different location, at least for purposes of this party, although it’s still going to be centrally-located.
Stay tuned for the location, later this week. And if you’re going to attend, drop me a line at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”.
The Hand That Feeds You
Going all populist is all the rage these days.
Which is a fine thing if you’re running for Senate in Nevada, or your supporters are a bunch of out-of-work manufacturing workers.
Not if your main support is, say, Wall Street plutocrats:
“Chuck says, ‘I’ve been there to help you,’ ” says one lobbyist. “Well, that’s when we were playing stickball. Now we’re in a cage match and he’s hiding under his desk.”
Schumer’s critics—who accuse him of adopting a populist streak so he can be the next majority leader—have no hope of unseating him, but they can take revenge in other ways, writes Smith in New York magazine. That includes getting behind Harold Ford Jr. as he tries to oust Kirsten Gillibrand—”a virtual ward of Schumer’s”—from her Senate seat. “A lot of what’s fueling the Ford thing is Chuck’s donors, who are furious at him,” says a political consultant. “They feel he’s walked away from them.”
Cool.
But I’m confused; I didn’t think corporations had any influence over Democrat politicians before the Supreme Court scuppered McCain/Feingold. What happened?
Turf This
Remember Berg’s Seventh Law? “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.”
Or is the word I’m looking for “transference”?
At any rate – remember when the left insisted the Tea Parties were “astroturf”, or fake grass-roots?
A Web site popped up in January dedicated to preventing the tea party’s “radical” and “dangerous” ideas from “gaining legislative traction,” targeting GOP candidates in Illinois for the firing squad.
“This movement is a fad,” proclaims TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, which was established by the American Public Policy Center (APPC), a D.C.-based campaign shop that few people have ever heard of.
But a close look reveals the APPC’s place in a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.
Here’s how it works: What appears like a local groundswell is in fact the creation of two men — Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups, the non-profit election organizations that hammer on contentious issues (think Swift Boats, for example).
Lefties would insist that the Tea Parties themselves would be the same. Notwithstanding the fact that other than Dick Armey’s think tank’s high-level message-mongering and a few approving pieces on Fox news, nobody’s come up with the faintest
The system helps hide the true sources of funding, giving the appearance of locally bred opposition in states from Oklahoma to New Jersey, or in the case of the Tea Party Web site, in Illinois.
And this whitewash is entirely legal, say election law experts, who told FoxNews.com that this arrangement more or less the norm in Washington.
Such a shame that the Supreme Court opened poltics up to big money, huh?
Around The MOB: Freedom Dogs
Blogging is a lot of fun – but it’s hard to keep it going for a long time.
One of the problems is that it can be a very solitary thing; it’s hard to keep up the output one needs to get established over a long, long time, all by oneself.
Back in 2004, there was a huge surge in blogs and blogging around the Twin Cities. And over the course of the next year or two, many of those blogs gave it up. And more than a few of them, thankfully, shut down their own blog and joined up with one of the other, larger group blogs that started springing up or, in some cases, coalescing from groups of people who liked blogging, but couldn’t quite justify the time it took to do it every single day.
I joked at the time that eventually the Twin Cities would their A-listers – Power Line, Captains Quarters – a few solitary holdouts (this was long before I’d entertained the notion of making Shot In The Dark a group effort), and several big group blogs that aggregated large groups of talented writers that wanted to blog, but couldn’t devote the time it took to get established on their own.
Even at the time, I joked that Freedom Dogs would eventually have 75 writers and an output rivaling Hot Air.
The Dogs – led by Derek “Chief” Brigham – do the Twin Cities blogging community a great service by keeping a lot of good bloggers writing.
And there’s a lot of good writing . “Lassie” writes in re an Obama For America (OFA) email that didn’t pass the stink test:
Do we know that the OFA supporter would have survived even if she had “quality insurance,” or was her cancer too pervasive to defeat? As an ovarian cancer survivor, I dare say my insurance would not have saved me had I been one stage deeper with my spreading tumor. My chance for survival was just over 50%. We all have family and friends who lost their battles, despite being covered. Would government-run healthcare have saved her? Remember John Edwards’ claim that electing John Kerry as President would have made people like Christopher Reeve walk?
There’s no question that health care reform is needed. But to blame ObamaCare opponents for this poor woman’s loss to cancer is beyond belief. Tell OFA that if government takes over our care, that cancer patients will be waiting months to get seen and diagnosed – let alone getting treatment (if the panels have a say). Don’t believe me? Check out the survival stats for Canadians and Europeans under socialized medicine. Government doesn’t produce, and it certainly doesn’t heal.
Granted, it’s hard to pass the stink test against a dog.
Anyway – read the Dogs!
Strict Obedience Is Demanded
Remember the great lefty whinge during the Bush Administration – “you called us unpatriotic?”
(Of course, no lefty could name a single significant conservative who had called all liberals unpatriotic, or who were referrring to defined groups of lefties whose stances were proudly anti-American, or who were referring to specific policies that, they claimed, actively harmed US interests and endangered the United States; when pressed to provide same, the examples inevitably turned up to be one of the three limited cases above, and they always will. But I digress).
But now that they’re in power?
Criticizing the Administration’s handling of the Eunuchbomber is…well, you know where this is going, don’t you?
In an oped in USA Today, John Brennan — Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism — responds to critics of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies by saying “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”
Hm.
Brennan writes that, “Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill.”
Right. But they deserve the response we hope to enact; extinction.
But let’s be honest; after all their lofty campaign rhetoric, the Administration is finally learning how to deal with terrorists.