Today’s MOB stop – Les Enfants Terrible, written by someone named “Tea Party”. He’s been writing more or less prolifically since 2005.

And I loved this piece, written on the occasion of the US Olympic hockey loss to Canada:

I love Olympic hockey. I’m a Minnesotan who came of age with the 1980 U.S. men’s team, how could I not? As I have been watching the Olympics this winter my eyes have naturally been drawn to one of my favorite photos, which hangs prominently in our family room:

Ya, that’s me in the middle with my brother close behind, waiting to have our sticks signed by Herb Brooks the summer after the 1980 Olympics. The photo was taken at the Roseville Ice Arena just after a session in Herbie’s summer camp. Attending his camp the summer after the Olympics was akin to hanging out with God just after the seventh day. We even got a pep talk from the man himself, in which we were instructed by the greatest coach ever to watch out for fast women.

Stop by Les Enfants Terrible and say hi!

Allahpundit at Hot Air on the administration’s push on amnesty for illegals, quoting his former boss Michelle Malkin, notes that while these things pop up from time to time…

…maybe this time is different.

Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections…

If anyone can deliver immigration reform to America, it’s an “assertive” president with a 45 percent approval rating who’s lost three big state elections in a row.

But this isn’t about giving green cards to illegals:

The wild card is the GOP. Obama obviously wants to use this as wedge issue, to try to cut the Dems’ losses in November by reminding Latino voters that Republicans are “nativists” or whatever.

It’s an attempt at a wedge and a distraction; Obama believes he can count on a thick film of GOP sovereignty activists to put a crack in the party’s opposition, and get the Tea Party – whose members are largely anti-illegal-immigration, but it’s not the Parties’ focus by any means – to divert its attention.

So will Obama’s fragile, panicky cohort of Blue Dogs stay the curse?

Course, I mean.  Will they stay the course?

The good news:  The Eunuchbomber’s underwear bomb probably wouldn’t have destroyed the 747.

A bomb on board a U.S. Christmas Day flight would have failed to bring the plane down even if it had been detonated successfully, a new test explosion suggests.

A controlled blast on a Boeing 747, using the same explosives that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is accused of smuggling on board, failed to burst the fuselage.

It means, had the bomb exploded on December 25, Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit would have successfully landed .

Testing showed that the a charge the size of the underwear bomb would have sprung some rivets and bulged some fuselage skin – bad for resale value, of course – but not compromised the plane’s structural integrity or blown up its fuel tanks.

The bad news?  Now the terrorists know this.

Michael Yon reprints a letter from an officer in the 82nd Airborne; at a firebase in remote Afghanistan, our Spanish allies are apparently O making life just a little bit miserable for our troops stationed there:

2) Qal E Naw: The Spanish are not interested in helping in anyway, and are trying to make us decide to leave based on their unacceptable treatment of Americans. Our refuelers [soldiers who refuel helicopters] that are living there have to run out, unroll the hoses, pull security, and roll everything back up. They have asked for gravel along the FLS as it is currently calf deep mud, but the Spanish refuse to make any improvements. They asked for a T barrier (just one) to put at a 45 degree angle outside the fence where the FARP [Forward Arming and Refueling Point; where helicopters land for ammo and gas] has to be set up so they can run for cover in case there is small arms fire, the Spanish say no and refuse to make any improvements. They asked for a small gate where their billets are located so they can access the FARP directly rather than going a half mile loop to get out the gate, but the Spanish said no and refuse to make any improvements.

It’s not just logistics – it’s the petty stuff, too:

They [sic] guys are living hard (we understand that) but have to do laundry by hand as all of their stuff is stolen if they turn it into the laundry, they discussed this with the Spanish, but they refuse to many any improvements.

And not-so-petty:

They refused to allow a Marine detachment that was dropped there to come into the wire or feed them overnight. Our refuelers had to fight the Spanish to bring them in and squeeze them into the two small tents that they have and give them MREs as they [sic] Spanish wouldn’t feed them. Is this how we allow our Coalition partners to treat Americans?

Well, that’ll be intersting.

Yon:

So, our soldiers and Marines, living in rough conditions at the far tip of the spear, apparently are being treated with contempt, with all basic support denied, from laundry to the conditions of the field on which our troops do their thankless job. If this report is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, the Spanish are endangering the lives of our warriors by failing to provide basic safety.

Yon is going to get his report to Defense Secretary Gates.

Go read the whole thing.

I was reading Ed’s piece yesterday on the apparent attempt by “human-caused global warming” partisans at the National Academy of Sciences to attack their detractors (via the NYTimes, naturally, rather than via actual science or anything), and I came across this bit here (emphasis added):

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Paul Ehrlich.  Leading the attack.

Ladies and gentlemen, this battle may be over.  Because while the fact that Ehrlich has spent his entire fifty-plus year career being wrong about absolutely every single issue he’s touched , saying that disproves anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in and of itself is a bit of a logical fallacy.   But let’s just say that not only am I glad Ehrlich’s not on my side of this debate, but frankly the fact that the politic0-scientific left associated with Ehrlich at all is a bit of an indictment of the left’s entire “science as advocacy” meme.

Ehrlich started his academic career as an entomologist, an expert on Lepidoptera – butterflies.  But in 1968 he wrote one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of pseudo-scientific literature, The Population Bomb.  In it, Ehrlich reprised the work of Thomas Malthus, arguing that population growth would eventually, inevitably lead mankind to three choices:  Stop making new humans, stop consuming resources, or starve to death.  The book started “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He spent much of the next decade writing other books and articles in support of his thesis in Population Bomb, adding in a later article “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”  The book and his body of “work” through the seventies proposed a number of radical solutions to the overpopulation crisis; dumping sterilizing agents into water supplies, allowing only selected people the privilege of reproduction, and performing mass “triage” of nations, the same way an emergency room triages patients – between those who don’t need help (North America, Australia, parts of Europe), those who can be saved, and those who are behond help – India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Asia, which he predicted would be hell on earth by the 1980’s; he essentially gave up all hope for Africa and India.  Our ecology was going to strike back at us; in a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe!”, he predicted that by the end of the century the population of the US would be under 20 million, and our life expectancy would be around 40 years – due not to starvation, but to pesticides.

By the mid-seventies, though Ehrlich broadened his sights a bit, behond overpopulation and into geopolitics.  In 1975’s The End of Affluence, Ehrlich predicted cataclysmic food riots in America, leading the President to declare martial law.  But it did no good – in Ehrlich’s narrative – because the world was driven to destroy the US in a combined nuclear assault, spurred by our use of…

…pesticides.

He broadened it further with 1978’s The Race Bomb, which was a paranoid melange on the dangers of racial diversity, followed by The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States, in which he called for sealing off the border long before it became Tom Tancredo’s issue. 

By the eighties, he’d joined with much of the left’s elite (who were, by the by, not busy participating in food riots or race wars, and were well-fed enough to go to protests) in warning about the danger of nuclear war, joining with Carl Sagan to write The Cold And The Dark, demanding the US disarm just in time for our generations of deterrence to render the point moot with the fall of the Soviet Union.

He was, of course, early on the Climate Change bandwagon, with Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environment Rhetoric Threatens Our Future, a 1998 book co-authored with his wife Anne, which basically served as a model for the left’s response to questions about Global Warming this past decade – he didnt’ call for Nuremberg trials per se, but he wasn’t that far off, either.

His body of work – at least, his work that impinges on politics and human events – has had three things in common. 

He’s blamed Western Civilization – especially our economic freedom – for successive waves of self-caused, predicted catastrophes.

He’s prescription to deal with these catastrophes has been, in every case, for the individual to surrender his/her autonomy, and even future, to an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful central entity that’ll make all the hard, life and death choices for them.

And he’s been wrong on every count.  Humans, rather than sitting in caves waiting to get eaten by sabre tooth tigers, invented spears.  Faced with floods, we invented the sandbag as an alternative to drowning and mildew.  And faced with shortage of resources, we adapt.  And humanity in the past forty years has adapted – learning to grow crops where we didn’t before, learning to conserve farmland and water, developing new crops and practices. 

Julian Simon, an American economist, placed a bet with Ehrlich:

Simon set up a bet wherein he would sell Ehrlich $1,000 dollars worth of any five commodities that Ehrlich chose. Ehrlich would hold the commodities for ten years. If the prices rose — meaning scarcity — Simon would buy the commodities back from Ehrlich at the higher price. If the prices fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Professor Ehrlich jumped at the bet, noting that he wanted to “accept the offer before other greedy people jumped in.”

In October of 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $570.07. As Simon predicted, free markets provided lower prices and more options. Simon would have won even if prices weren’t adjusted for inflation. He then offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred.

The bet never happened.  Ehrlich moved on.

To global warming.

While Simon died, it’d seem that another bet was placed, if only in spirit.  Ehrlich is paying us all back with excess hot air.

It was exactly six years ago today – March 6, 2004 – that the Northern Alliance Radio Network had our first broadcast.

And by “broadcast”, I meant singular; the show started as a single three-hour show with several co-hosts.

“Several?”  On that day, the show had nine co-hosts; Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker from Power Line, Chad the Elder, JB, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward and Atomizer from Fraters Libertas, Ed Morrissey (then) from Captain’s Quarters, King Banaian from SCSU Scholars, and me. I think King was out of town on business – so what meant a total of eight people.   It wasn’t quite the first time we’d all seen the business end of a microphone; I’d had a little one-hour dress rehearsal the previous week, so everyone could try on headphones and learn a little bit about talking into a mike.

But one thing I wasn’t clear on, on that first morning, was who was exactly who.  I was pretty clear on who was Scott and who was John.  But I had only met Chad, JB and Atomizer once before (at the infamous lunch party in Wayzata with Hugh Hewitt the previous January that’d launched the show); I kept mixing them up on the air. In my defense, the only people who do shows with nine cohosts are cable access shows and NPR.

Things have changed, of course.  In big ways (Scott, JB and Atomizer left early on; Chad’s burgeoning family drew him away last year; the NARN morphed into two, two-hours shows, and then a third, adding Michael Brodkorb from 2006-2009) and small (most of the guys are more or less perfectly comfortable “soloing”, or doing their whole two-hour show by themselves; even though I’d done talk radio before, that even intimidated me six years ago).

But two things haven’t changed.  We get virtually no money (other than the odd talent or appearance fee – and if you see an AM1280 sales staffer out there, please tell ’em to get on the stick) – and it’s still a blast.  One of the highlights of my week.

We’ve had plenty of help, of course; I gotta thank everyone else that helped out; our array of producers over the years, Tommy Huynh, Jon Osburne, Matt Reynolds, Sam Holmgren, the Russian Wonder-Twins Irina and Anna, and of course the late Joe Hansen.  Also the folks at AM1280 – John Hunt and Patrick Campion, the GM and program director who for whatever reasons decided to give airtime to nine bloggers, and to Ron Stone and Lee Michaels, who do the same thing today, and to Nick Novak, the program director who helped so much with the show’s development from ’06 through ’08.

Anyway – happy birthday, NARN!  And thanks, Ed, King, Brian,  John, Chad, Michael, Scott, JB and Atomizer!

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 doing the week in review – healthcare, the earthquake, and Global Warming’s strange bedfellows.
• 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!

I was digging through some old headllines the other day.  I was amazed at what I found.  Here’s a sampling:

French Cops Say Top Cop A Flop (July 8, 1943)

(Vichy, France) (AP) – A leading association of French policemen condemned the film portrayal of a French police chief as “unrealistic” in a statement released today.

Jacques Omerde, spokeshomme for the Fraternal Order of Vichy French Law Enforcement Officers, said “the character of Jean Renault, played by Claude Rains in the recent hit movie Casablanca, is unrealistic and tres degradement.”

“Mr. Rains’ portrayal of a corrupt, semi-competent lothario besmirches the reputation and good name of the hard-working law-enforcement officers who work for the Vichy government.”

“Furthermore” Omerde concluded from the prepared statement, “the final scene – where Prefect Renault ignored the shooting of a German officer – would in real life be a gross violation of procedure.  There have been no real-life accusations of any such behavior”.

Omerde called on Casablanca’s director, Paul Henreid, to apologize.

Fisherman’s Association Says Hemingway Story, Movie Just Big Fish Tale: (July 8, 1952)(Miami, FLorida) (AP) – The Association of Cuban-American Fishermen are crying “foul” over Ernest Hemingway’s latest novel, Old Man and the Sea.

“Cuban fisherman have a tradition of fraternalism”, said Juan-Carlos De Miel, president of the ACAF’s Miami chapter.  “84 day losing streak or no, nobody would have ostracized the old man.  Because as our anscestors said in Cuba, “It takes  a village to take care of an old guy”.

“Also, no fisherman worth his salt would have lashed a marlin to the side of a skiff.  Procedures would have prevented the shark attack that consumed the Marlin; it’s utterly unrealistic!”

“Finally, this book and movie portrays Cuban fishermen as rash, impetuous people, when in fact we are a group of solid professional fish extraction technicians”.

Paper Execs: TV Series Papers Over The Truth (July 8, 2004)(New York, NY) (AP) – The American TV series “The Office” “defames the American paper sales industry’s proud traditi0n of professionalism”, according to American Association For Paper Sales president Excedrine Ruff.

“Funny may be funny, but I can say with complete assurance that a manager like Michael Scott would never be permitted in the American paper sales industry”. 

“It’s defamatory”.

Silly?  Of course.  Casablanca, Old Man and the Sea and The Office aren’t about Vichy police procedure, the commercial fishing industry or paper sales.  They’re allegories about America’s status as a reluctant warrior, the Bible, and the dynamics of groups of people jammed together in an artificial situation. 

To find anything trivializing or defamatory in any of them requires, at best, an overly-literal reading – and at worst, a focus on grievance-mongering that’s become so common that the little parodies above could very well exist for real, for all we know, somewhere in the world of academe this past few decades.

But Casablanca, Old Man and the Sea and The Office are not literal descriptions of professions or industries.  They all aim for something else.

So, too, with Hurt Locker.

———-

The Hurt Locker doesn’t seem to leave a lot of people in the middle; people either love it (it’s up there with Avalon as the front-runner for Best Picture at the Oscars) or not love it (some veterans pan its realism).

Let me take a step back here.

There are very, very few people in the world who take their calling quite as seriously as soldiers (and sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, for that matter); their trades are literally a matter of life and death for themselves, their comrades, everyone around them and, eventually, all of us.  Like cops, firemen, doctors, nurses and paramedics, theirs is a profession not merely of commitment – but where the consequences of lack of commitment are deadly.

Duly noted.  That is as it should be.

And people who take their professions seriously are justifiably critical of people who try to portray their profession inaccurately. 

Is Hurt Locker “accurate?” 

Not in the sense that, say, Band of Brothers strove for accuracy.  But BoB was history – a collective oral history of real events told by real people, who were portrayed as themselves, as they had been 50 years earlier.  It’s theme was very literal; a group of ordinary, teenage-to-twentysomethign Americans who did extraordinary things, and forged an extraordinary bond.  It was a story as powerful as any fiction.

Hurt Locker is a work of fiction.  It’s not literal history; its’ primary purpose isn’t accuracy, and isn’t supposed to be.

If it was, of course, it’ would have failed…:

The film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by journalist Mark Boal (who was embedded with a bomb disposal team), stars Jeremy Renner as Staff Sgt. William James. Not deterred by protocol or his own safety, James is an adrenaline-addicted bomb defuser who occasionally puts his unit at risk, and at one point takes to the streets of Baghdad on a solo personal mission. Members of EOD teams in southern Iraq said in interviews arranged by the Army that “The Hurt Locker” is a good action movie if you know nothing about defusing roadside bombs or the military.

Sgt. Eric Gordon of San Pedro, an Air Force EOD technician on his second tour in Iraq, has watched the movie a few times with his friends. “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh,” Gordon said.

He scoffed at a scene in which a bomb is defused with wire cutters. “It’s similar to having a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle,” Gordon said.

An EOD team leader in Maysan province, Staff Sgt. Jeremy D. Phillips, said, “My interest is bringing myself and my team members home alive, with all of our appendages in the right place.”

Although he was glad the film highlighted their trade, he disliked the celluloid treatment of EOD units. “There is too much John Wayne and cowboy stuff. It is very loosely based on actual events,” he said. “I’m honestly glad they are trying to convey to the public what we’ve been doing, and I wish maybe they had just done it with a little bit of a different spin on it,” he said.

Others are more supportive. Sloan, a former U.S. Army captain, said at the panel discussion that “The Hurt Locker” offered a perfect snapshot of modern conflict. “This is what’s going on for the men and women who are fighting this war,” he said.

All well and good, the pro and the con.  Those reviews are better than some I’ve seen, like this one on Yahoo…:

“The depiction of our community in this film is disrespectful,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “We are not cowboys. We are not reckless. We are professionals.”

This is more or less the same review I got from a fellow from Big Hollywood that John Hinderaker interviewed on the Volume I Northern Alliance show a few weeks back; the show was anti-American, or at least anti-military, because it portrayed soldiers unrealistically – and some of that portrayal was at the very least unprofessional, to say nothing of not technically realistic; they do things, they say, that American soldiers realistically just don’t do, as professionals, warriors or people.

Which would be a valid criticism – except that the movie isn’t about what American soldiers do.  It’s not a how-to on disposing of bombs, or fighting a counterinsurgency.  It’s about war, and its affect on people who partake in it.  It’s about psychology, not combat engineering.

The big three criticisms seem to be that the Hurt Locker:

• is technically unrealistic,
• shows the American troops – from Jeremy Renner’s taut, layered Staff Sergeant Mackey to David Morse’s almost surfer-dude-like bird colonel to Christian Camargo’s flippant, risk-taking psychiatrist – as unrealistically unprofessional.
• that it show’s Renner’s character as an unrealistically bad human being.

As to the first charge?  Doy.  That was apparent in Mackey’s first incident – where he pulled on a piece of wire and dislodged eight artillery shells connected into a remote-controlled explosive.  The shells wiggled like empty milk cartons when Mackey pulled the wire; in reality, they weigh 80-100 pounds apiece.  Chalk it up to dramatic license.

As to the second charge?  I’ll refer back to my original review last summer.  I noted that the movie gave us a hint in the opening scene:

The new film The Hurt Locker opens with this quote, from former NYTimes war correspondent Chris Hedges, in white type over a black background:

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.

As the movie rolled into the first scene, the last clause – “war is a drug” stayed highlighted.

…

…I had no idea what to say about the film.  Something didn’t quite add up.

Then I looked up the rest of Chris Hedges’ quote.   I found it, from a piece he wrote for Amnesty International back in 2002:

…one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers -historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us.

And then it hit me.  It’s not a war movie – or should I say, it’s not just a war movie.  It’s a movie about war as a drug, and its affect on its addicts.

The movie isn’t about bomb disposal engineers.  The film could have been set among Israeli tank drivers or Danish commandos or British submariners, or for that matter professional infantrymen from the Roman centurion to Lee Marvin’s long-timer “The Sergeant” in The Big Red One to the yin and yang of Sergeants Barnes and Elias (Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe) in Platoon to any number of other portrayals of people who’ve made a living of the art, craft and hell of war.  It’s not about defusing bombs; it’s about war’s affect on a guy who does it for a living and a life.

The final criticism – which was levelled by the Big Hollywood critic on the NARN broadcast – was that near the end of the film…

SPOILER ALERT

(more…)

The DFL’s primary mission in this session, as in the past four or five, is to money to keep the slavering maw of government satiated and without even the most trivial want.

With that in mind, Dave Mindemann at mnpACT notes that Senator Tom “Baby Got” Bakk wants to zip down and let fly on one of Minnesota’s great third rails:

State Senator Tom Bakk will probably get a lot of heat for his tax proposal on clothing. However, he should be commended for being willing to take a leadership position on a real solution to our budget problems.

Well, let’s focus for the moment on giving him the heat he deserves.  Even I, a middle-income guy with two teenagers, look at clothing as one of the most frustrating expenses in my family budget.  No two ways about it; kids burn through clothes like Margaret Anderson Kelliher goes through rationalizations.  And I make decent money, and have only two kids, one of whom earns a bit of her own fun money.  How much worse are things for, say, a family of six with a household income of $45,000?

Indeed – I’m looking forward to Bakk and Mindeman explaining this proposal to that family of six, after getting the news this past week that government workers’ average salaries (nationwide, but it can’t be proportionally much different in Minnesota) are around $75,000, while private sector workers average around $45,000 a year, and that government employment is safe and rising while private-sector jobs are tenuous and still getting whacked by the bushelfull.

Personally, I still think any expansion of the sales tax should be on the service sector [Great, Dave.  Throttle whatever recovery might just happen before it can start – Ed.] but I understand where Bakk is coming from on this proposal as well.

I’m not sure that Mindeman does, but I sure do.  In the DFL’s special little world, it is the peasants’ obligation to keep government satiated first and foremost; looking to their and their families’ rude needs is secondary at best.

And in that world, it is the DFL’s and the Government’s sole prerogative to bestow dispensations and mercy within that rule:

I would be more comfortable if we moved to this type of tax with some restrictions as well. Maybe a rebate for lower income people or only tax clothing on leather or fur, or with a designer label. That is certainly up for debate, but Bakk’s general premise is a realistic position to take.

Provided that the only goal that matters is making sure government wants for nothing, ever – no matter how rough the rest of us have it.

And that is the goal:

The biggest selling point to me is that it has a particular pupose. To pay back the schools. The Governor (and his minions) have not come up with a way to reallot (is that word?), the $1.6 billion cut in education (and it IS a cut) that the Governor foisted on us last year.

Whenever a DFLer says “and it IS a cut”, the rule is always “distrust but verify”; to a liberal, cutting an increase in entitlement funding is a “cut”. 

In addition, the end result in subsequent years is to lower the overall sales tax percentage.

Right. Because the Minnesota state government and its DFL-controlled bureaucracy (to say nothing of the stultifying DFL majorities in the Legislature) have such a great record at rolling back tax hikes.

Excellent plan. A realistic plan. A plan that shows leadership.

Thank you Senator Bakk, for the courage of your convictions.

Dunno, Dave.  I’ll kudo Bakk’s “courage” when he takes that proposal to people outside the Capitol.

Every couple of years, some lefty organization or another will release a brow-furrowed “report” on the dearth of female bloggers.

And it’s true – males bloggers outnumber females by a goodly bit.

But on the right, some of the women make up for the number gap by being blog powerhouses.  Some of the top conservative bloggers – Michelle Malkin and Mary Katherine Ham, among others – are women.  And the MOB is loaded with talented women who not only blog, but are powerful and effective at it.

A great example has always been Cindy from h Ladies Logic.

Cindy has been one of the cornerstone Twin Cities conservative bloggers ever since she started writing, almost four years ago.  She was one of the orignal bedrock bloggers for True North.

The wild part?  She’s remained one of Minnesota’s best, most prolific blogs, even after she and her family moved to Utah!

Hard to pick an excerpt from Ladies’ Logic; I liked this bit here:

One of the many epithets that the left loves to pour on right leaning individuals is that they are “haters”….any disagreement with ANY left leaning cause gets you labeled a hater.  You don’t believe that gay marriage is a “right” – you’re a hater.  Don’t think that President Obama has the right answer on health care = hater…don’t agree with him on cap and trade policy = hater…don’t agree with the left on abortion = hater.  The list goes on.  But is that really true?  Consider the reaction from the right when Ted Kennedy, Lion of the Senate was diagnosed with cancer.  Did Rush Limbaugh go out and gleefully gloat over Senator Kennedy’s illness?  No.  Did Sean Hannity pray for his death in retaliation for what Senator Kennedy “did” to Mary Jo Copeckne at Chappequiddick?  NO.  Did Michael Savage….well yes he did but then again Savage is an a…..

The bottom line is all of the mainstream representatives of “the right” except one did not turn the announcement of Senator Kennedy’s illness into a chance to score political points?  As a matter of fact they all (with the one noted exception) offered up prayers to the Senator and his family for his speedy recovery.

Our friends on the left are hardly ever as gracious…

For those of you who don’t already?  Make Ladies’ Logic a stop on your daily MOB (UOB?) rounds!

There is evidence that John Bedell, yesterday’s Pentagon shooter, was there to P get the “truth” about 9/11:

Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces, and had questioned the circumstances behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up…The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dusty Trice, the City Pages and the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s that even the most tenuous intellectual synchronicity is evidence of a shadowy undercurrent of hatred.

So – I believe the inflammatory remarks of Jesse Ventura and Minnesota “Progressive” Project’s Grace Kelly led to this shooting, and wonder when they’ll accept responsibility.

(Ever since I learned the technique of holding people responsible for things people who seem tangentially like them also happen to say, I find that I’m relieved of the usual burden of being responsible and accountable).

UPDATE:  Of course the leftyblog hamsters tried to tie Bedell to the Tea Parties. 

But no, he isn’t.  Or wasn’t:

It has become pretty clear pretty quickly that Bedell sufferred from Bush Derangement Syndrome, and was a 9/11 Truther, just like 35% of Democrats as of May 2007.

So we’ve got Bill Sparkmann, Major Hasan, John Bedell, the guy who crashed his plane into the IRS office – all of them who were seemingly driven to horrendous (and/or self-immolating) acts by the rhetoric of the left…

Why, if I were a leftyblogger and the parties were reversed, I might be tempted to call it a “climate of hatred…”

While the global economic meltdown has caused immense problems, it might have dealt a major jump ahead to my plan to have my own island nation:

The Greek state must sell stakes in companies and also assets such as, for example, unpopulated islands,” Frank Schäffler, a member of parliament for the pro-business Free Democrats, told the Bild daily.

Marco Wanderwitz, an MP for Merkel’s own conservative Christian Democrats, said Athens should provide collateral for any money it receives from the European Union to help it out of its debt crisis.

“In this case, certain Greek islands also come into question,” added Wanderwitz.

“We give you cash, you give us Corfu,” the Bild commented.

Greece has around 6,000 islands off its coast, of which only 227 are inhabited, according to the country’s National Tourism Office website.

The Kingdom of Berg, at the corner of the Adriatic and the Med.  Of course, we’d have to import snow, but that’s a small price to pay for being my own potentate.

Now I just have to get someone to pay me a ton of money.

Minnesota, following the national trend by its usual 10-20 years, passed a moratorium on nuclear power plants in the state a decade and a half ago.

With energy prices having zoomed upward in the past few years, and likely set to do it again if the economy ever recovers, a good chunk of the USA – especially the part where it gets cold, and electrical and natural gas heating costs have gotten out of control – started demanding our zombie overlords look again at nuclear power; given advances in the technology that address the very, very few safety concerns that ever existed about non-Soviet nuke plants, the time seems right for a fresh look.

The DFL wants to make sure we don’t:

Last year, the state Senate passed a bill that lifted the state’s moratorium on nuclear power plant construction.

The fate of the same proposal this year is now bogged down in a Senate committee.

The Senate Energy committee this afternoon approved a controversial amendment 9-6 that lead the bill’s author to ask to halt the discussion.

The amendment displays either the DFL’s ‘ignorance about business, or its hostility toward business and efficient energy:

The chief sponsor, Sen. Amy Koch, R-Buffalo, said the amendment, which was offered by Sen. John Doll, DFL-Bloomington, “guts” her bill. The bill as amended now bars utilities from charging ratepayers for construction costs before a plant is completed. Doll’s amendment also requires a federal nuclear waste repository be created to store spent nuclear fuel rods.

Has anyone looked into how much money John Doll gets from wind, solar and biomass interests?

Sen. Ray Vandeveer, R-Forest Lake, said the new requirements in the bill would prevent energy companies from building nuclear power plants in Minnesota.

“The Doll amendment puts us in the dark ages and it keeps us there and condemns us there,” Vandeveer said.

Lifting the nuke moratorium might be bad business – for the DFL.  It’d gut the “renewable energy” market, and make fewer people dependent on the state energy-welfare bureaucracy.

The rest of us, on the other hand?

…that Carly Simon is finally revealing who “You’re So Vain” is about…:

Fans of Carly Simon are a step closer to learning the identity of the person described in her 1972 hit, “You’re So Vain.”

Simon told Uncut Magazine that listeners can hear a clue to the identity of the man on her acoustic version of the song, which is featured on her latest album “Never Been Gone.”

“You know what, I’m just going to tell you this,” Simon told the magazine. “The answer is on the new version of ‘You’re So Vain,’ on my new record. … There’s a little whisper and it’s the answer to the puzzle.”

…or that anyone remembers Carly Simon, or “You’re So Vain” as anything but a commercial jingle, or cares who the song was about at all.

(It’s David Geffen).

(I know.  Big whoop).

From coast to coast – and, very possibly, in the halls of the Supreme Court – the human right of self-defense is pushing the orcs back into their rancid caves.

Which doesn’t stop them from trying to gnaw away at your human rights – to say nothing of your pocketbooks – like sweaty little rats.

In a year when the Legislature has to try to deal with a 5.8 billion dollar deficit of their own making, Rep. Michael Paymer (Orc, Saint Paul) thinks gun control is the kind of thing the Legislature should be wasting its time on:

From Virginia to Arizona, federal and state gun laws are loosening everywhere from national parks to Amtrak trains.

But in St. Paul, a proposal that would send Minnesota in the opposite direction is headed toward its first hearing Friday — a bill requiring background checks on the purchaser of any firearm sold at a gun show.

The proposal pits its DFL sponsor, St. Paul Rep. Michael Paymar, against the mighty arsenal of gun rights advocates and lobbyists who have managed to turn back nearly every effort to tighten Minnesota’s gun laws in the past.

The article – by the often-excellent Mike Kaszuba – is correct, but only if you cut history off at about 1996.  Up until 1974, for example, Minnesota required no permit, training, certificate, background check or anything else for a law-abiding citizen to carry a concealed handgun.  Starting in that year – a nadir in many, many ways for the state of Minnesota as well as the nation – the gun control movement started picking up steam in Minnesota, peaking in the mid-late eighties.  The usurping of our law-abiding citizen’s human right of self-defense didn’t really start to ebb until groups like the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance and Concealed Carry Reform Now started their organizing efforts – to this day, one of the greatest victories of grass-roots politics in Minnesota history.

How fuzzy-headed is Paymar’s timing?  Even Kaczuba points it out:

In a session dominated by pressing financial issues, it’s unclear how much time and energy lawmakers have for an explosive gun control debate. The GOP already is saying no way. But just the attempt is arousing serious passions as all sides take aim at Friday’s hearing.

Paymar knows when to toss out a boogeyman:

“I’m not backing down,” said Paymar, a veteran lawmaker who chairs the House public safety finance division. “I think there’s an undue fear of the [National Rifle Association] here at the Legislature.”

Of course, the NRA has been a relative bit player (albeit important) in the gun control debate in Minnesota.  GCRA and CCRN-MN have done the heavy lifting, and still have a pretty powerful mailing list; the last time the DFL tried to gnaw away at the law-abiding citizens’ human rights (the late ’90s and early ’00’s votes against Shall-Issue), outstate DFLers got spanked, many of them being tossed from office in defeats largely attributable to the state groups’ organizing.

I’m wondering what some of the outstate DFLers are thinking right now; harried by the Tea Party and their party’s association with the tax-guzzling spending-whores of the metro DFL delegation, they’ve gotta be thinking “thanks for nothing, Paymar; you’ve painted a metaphorical, rhetorical, electoral target on my butt”.

How fuzzy-headed is the timing of Paymar’s bill?  Even Kaszuba points it out (emphasis added):

Whatever the outcome, the nation’s pro and anti-gun lobbies are using Paymar’s proposal to make their points. Gun rights groups say the law makes no sense at a time when gun registrations have gone up in Minnesota, yet crime has gone down.

Serious crime decreased in Minnesota during four of the past five years, while permits by individuals to carry weapons in the state have risen by more than 6,000 in the past seven years.

Kaszuba is correct in spirit, but he’s got the numbers wrong; as of today, 71,182 Minnesotans have carry permits (and hundreds more every month) obtained since 2003.

I’ll be watching this.

(Via AAA)

Top 10 Girls performances last night. Recaps and breakdown after the jump.

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It’s unclear who actually first used the aphorism “Democracy can only survive until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.  I’d always thought it was De Tocqueville, but a cursory search shows it could also be anyone from King George III to Jessica Simpson.  I just don’t know.

And, given yesterday’s news that Americans depend more on government than ever before…

Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.

…and get more in bennies than they pay in taxes…

Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes.

…it’s really a lot less important to know who said it, and more important to see if the unnamed sage was correct.

Because we may just find out, here.

Paul Clement, arguing on behalf of the NRA at Tuesday’s SCOTUS hearing on McDonald Vs. Chicago, with emphasis added:

Just to dwell for a moment if I’d could on the First and Second Amendment, I think it’s striking, very striking, that if this Court’s not going to reconsider its Privileges or Immunities Clause jurisprudence, the Cruikshank case [an 1876 case that ruled that the First and Second Amendments restricted federal power] actually stands as very good precedent for incorporating the Second Amendment, just as it was the precedent this Court relied on in incorporating the assembly and petition rights of the First Amendment in the DeJonge case. And the reason is Cruikshank — the whole reason that Cruikshank said the First and Second Amendments aren’t privileges of national citizenship is because they were preexisting rights that didn’t depend on the Constitution for their existence.

That seems to me to be a pretty good working definition of what a fundamental right is, one that is so fundamental and basic that it preexisted our very Constitution. And so it’s not surprising that DeJonge cited Cruikshank as favorable precedent for incorporation.

I think the exact same logic would apply to the Second Amendment here and, as I say, I do think the consequence of that, certainly the most logical consequence, would be to carry over the jurisprudence under the Second Amendment. Now, right now that’s not carrying over a lot, right. That’s carrying over the Heller case.

But I think in a way that points up to the fact that one of the virtues of incorporation is that, because the Miller decision of this Court sowed confusion, we do not have substantial Second Amendment jurisprudence. And I would think that it’s going to be difficult enough to develop the Second Amendment jurisprudence that you wouldn’t want to make it more difficult by having to develop a Federal Second Amendment jurisprudence and then some sort of shadow version of that jurisprudence for the States.

Heller was the first time I’d ever actually read SCOTUS (or any other) transcripts.  It helps to be a lawyer and all, since they do sorta talk their little funky secret lawyer language half the time – but it’s interesting stuff.

Domestic violence activist caps her hubby of five days:

A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.

Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.

Usually an accused felon will appear at a preliminary hearing a day later, but Bridges’ hearing was within hours of the shooting death of Anthony Rankins. Officials said the court appearance was moved up because of the unusual circumstances around the crime.

Witnesses told police that Bridges was wearing a nightgown and a shower cap as she argued with Rankins on the sidewalk on North Avenue near West Peachtree Street around 10:45 p.m. Monday.

And moments later, witnesses said, they heard shots. They said she then “calmly walked away.”

A MARTA police officer stopped her as she was getting into her car, perhaps to return to her home nearby on Centennial Olympic Park Drive.

According to Atlanta police, Bridges told investigators that she and Rankins had been dating for a few months and were just married on Feb. 24.

I’m trying to figure out of this killing was Bush’s fault, or a result of Michele Bachmann’s rhetoric…

Reminder:  the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ Sixth Anniversary Winter Party is a week from this coming Saturday, March 13, at Ol’ Mexico in Roseville.  We’ll have their entire party room to ourselves; the joint’s located just north of Larpenteur on Lexington Avenue in Roseville – about a mile south of Highway 36, or half a mile north of Como Lake on Lexington.

You don’t have to be a blogger to show up; you just have to like hanging out at a fun place with a bunch of cool people.  And the cool people will be there!

Drop me an RSVP at “feedbackinthedark” at yahoo dot com email address.  Or check out the event’s Facebook page and sign up.  Or just show up unannounced!  We’d

At the bottom of a Bloomberg column yesterday, it reads:

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

The opinions she expressed are also something I haven’t run across since West “Dirty Liar” Skoglund left office and the public eye: the kind of comical, context-challenged buncombe that more-or-less savvy gun control advocate stopped using ten years ago.

In other words, I fisk this column for the same reason “historical re-enactors” dress up in Civil War uniforms and re-enact the Battle of Antietam; partly so that people don’t forget how bad things were, and partly for the sheer joy of blasting away at a target that can’t maneuver. (more…)

So at the convention last night, we were debating one of the final resolutions of the evening – a proposal by a delegate to remove language supporting the Death Penalty in the current GOP platform.

It wasn’t my resolution – I submitted two at the caucuses, both of which passed easily – but I spoke in favor, for reasons discussed elsewhere in this blog.  Now, “speeches” around resolutions are pretty limited; two in favor, two against, generally short; they’re never what you’d call “great oratory”.  Mine was something like “I support the death penalty for every reason but one – the inevitability of human error.  Now, in the 34 years since the Supreme Court reinstated the Death Penalty, there’ve been over 200 complete exonerations – as in, people who were considered guilty beyond a reasonable doubt that were released directly from death row.  And it now seems absolutely certain that Texas executed an innocent man.  Since government can’t even fill in potholes correctly, should we trust them with the power of life and death?”

A woman a few rows in front of me rose to speak for the resolution.  “That just seems wrong, saying the government can’t get anything right.  Aren’t we the part of possibilities?”

The rules didn’t allow me to respond to the response, so I couldn’t leap to my feet and say “NO! We are the party that believes the people are capable of anything they set their mind to, and the government is too stupid to trust with a cardboard knife!”

We are, indeed, a huge tent.

Top 10 Guys performance last night. Recaps and breakdown after the jump.

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Today’s stop on our lap around the MOB is Kowabunga http://www.kowabunga.org/.. It’s written by Todd Hanson, a family guy and seemingly unreprentant geek for comic books and games (or at least that’s what I think he was writing about…).

…and the same jaundiced eye for lefty social convention that I have:

I hear that the Progressives (they don’t like being called “liberals” any more, which works for me as they don’t believe in Liberty) have started a group to counter the Tea Party movement. They have picked the delightfully witty and appropriate term “brownbagger”. I had to look it up in the urban dictionary, which had seven definitions, including #5, which I believe is suitably appropriate. Yech! Appropriate, but yech!

Hansen’s been writing Kowabunga for just a little over six years.  Like a lot of bloggers, he’s hot and cold on it; there are months with one entry, there are months with fifty.  Here’s hoping to more twenties, Mr. Hansen, and by all means hang in there!

The post office wants to dump Saturday delivery.

The U.S. Postal Service, facing a crushing budget deficit, unveiled a sweeping cost-cutting plan Tuesday that apparently includes elimination of Saturday deliveries.

Who was it that once said in response to the question…

“Show me one thing the government has done well”

…The Postal Service?

Tangent notwithstanding, this should be no surprise. The fact is people are mailing less, emailing more, and if they need something sent quickly and reliably…there are other options, and people are willing to pay for the privilege.

Drop Saturdays. Fine with me. Why don’t you drop Tuesday through Saturday while you’re at it.

…in fact, lose Monday too. I’m sick of shovelling the snow away from my mailbox so I can empty it into the recycle bin every day.

Daily delivery of the mail is overkill.

You want to send me something? Make it an email.