At the Dem convention, John Kerry (did you know he served in Vietnam?) gave tribute to US veterans – in front of a photo of a flotilla of Soviet-era Russian ships.
As the Daily Caller notes, the airplanes the Dems used in their tribute to American vets? Turkish F-5s flown by Turkey’s equivalent of the Thunderbirds.
But this blog has learned that it could have been much worse. Below the fold.
Yet another University Avenue business – the Mai Village, which was one of the great University Avenue success stories until the Met Council’s toy train came along – is bleeding out the nose:
[Owner Mai] Nguyen said profits were down at least a third since construction began, which amounts to about $30,000 a month in losses. The $15,000 a month mortgage, which doesn’t include property taxes or insurance, has been impossible to keep up with, she said.
Mai Village did receive a $400,000 loan from the city — which has been deferred — to help build the restaurant. In addition, it received a $20,000 forgivable loan for help with construction-related losses, but Nguyen said that is a “drop in the bucket.”
In addition, the county halved the restaurant’s property taxes when the building’s value decreased a few years ago.
The couple has appealed to city leaders for more help, but has received little response, Nguyen said.
And the response (with emphasis added)?
City Council Member Melvin Carter III said his office has done everything it can to help Mai Village, and that there isn’t enough money to go around to help all the businesses that are suffering.
Anyone up for a MOB Vietnamese food night / slash / primer on the Central Corridor Business Destruction Zone?
Christian Schneider at The Corner, in re the noxious opinion by ultraliberal Wisconsin judge Juan Colas that gang-rapes Constitutional logic to try to overturn the will of Wisconsin’s voters and their duly-elected legislative and judicial branches:
It’s not hard to see why Colas likely wanted his opinion buried. It is a legal document so acrid, if it were read aloud at a funeral, the corpse would emerge from the casket and try to strangle the person reading it.
Mark Dayton gave a speech the other day.
John Gilmore at MN Conservatives heard the audio.
And we’ll get to that. But first, the review:
Gov. Dayton’s first two years have been abysmal. What was it he wanted to do as governor anyway? Wouldn’t a house and senate controlled by republicans offer him the perfect opportunity to lead? To show compromise? To get things done as these political types like to pretend they can? If one was a real leader instead of a lost soul looking for external housing to shore up the inner, yes. But a leader is not who Gov. Dayton is and it is not who he will be in the coming two years, either.
John’s a good friend of this blog. But I’m not sure whether he’s overestimating Dayton, or underestimating him.
On the one hand, the entire body of evidence that Mark Dayton has ever been that kind of politician is…the body of Mark Dayton’s spoken record claiming it.
On the other hand? Mark Dayton, his beliefs, his “ideas” and “ideals” and “policy initiatives” – are about as relevant as mine are to the job – because Mark Dayton isn’t really the governor. Indeed, when they paint Mark Dayton’s official gubernatorial portrait – hopefully in two years – it should look a little like this:
It’s an intercom speaker. Dayton occupies a seat with the sole mission of repeating, like that intercom speaker, what Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid and Javier Morillo and Tom Dooher to say.
And when he doesn’t have electric cables tied to him, figuratively, to carry their messages, he may as well be that intercom speaker; he’s about as fluent a public speaker as a disconnected intercom.
Back to Gilmore:
Last week the Governor, sounding like a vaguely fascist mandarin, simply insisted without any intellectual depth or sustained engagement that taxes must increase because of his perceived need of all that government must do. His idea of the size & scope of government is not open to discussion. There is no opting out from it because he knows best. What’s that called again?
He made his statement at what, until just yesterday, I had been led to believe was simply a speech reported on by the press. Instead, as MinnPost reported the day before (as did the Pioneer Press), it was a University Lecture. MinnPost polished the knob by saying that the title “university lecturer” could be added to Mark Dayton’s resume. No, really.
Yet what shocked is that this was a lecture grandly titled: “Minnesota’s Future: Challenges and Opportunities” given to the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellows (there’s more intellectual diversity among supporters of Ron Paul by orders of magnitude; the Fellows are the stuff of David Mamet’s nightmares). This was a liberal/progressive/left confab with Little Lord Fauntleroy in attendance.
Now, listening to Mark Dayton speak is, to this speech teacher’s kid, a singularly masochistic thought. The guy has the diction of Michael Stipe circa 1984. He’s not a monotone – he’s got two or three tones, really.
And that’s just style points:
I listened to the audio of the Governor’s 25 minute speech. It is appallingly bad. To learn only after the fact that it was a university lecture proper for a set of fellows was mind boggling. He spoke from notes as best from what I could tell. Meandering, at times pointless, at others a non-sequitur minefield, his speech revealed that there is serious trouble with our Chief Executive.
Here’s the problem:
But wait there’s more! The event was closed to the public.
Pardon? Is this possible? Is Common Cause Minnesota on it? From whence shall our help come? Surely the event was taped and surely I will get my hands on it. Try making it private. The entire speech and question and answer session should be posted on the Humphrey School’s website without delay. This event was not a private function.
Huh. Odd, that.
Where are Common Cause? The ACLU? All the usual watchdogs? MPR’s “Poligraph?”
But here’s the real question:
Why would the press acquiesce in this? Access? Or just the usual hot dish politics? Both?
That’s easy. For some of the media, it’s access.
For others, it’s that they see themselves as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.
Remember – after over a decade of hearing about the Governor’s history of alcohol abuse and treatment, of mental illness and concomitant prescriptions for various psychotropic medication, the sum total of the Twin Cities mainstream media’s coverage of Candidate Dayton’s chemical and psychological history was one, single, solitary piece in the Strib by Rachel Stassen-Berger, in January 2010 – roughly nine months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap about the election.
Our Governor’s visual performance at this public event is what is being deliberately withheld from the public. What an odd thing to say about Minnesota politics.
Nothing odd about it.
Nothing new, either.
It’s been one gaffe after another for The One this past week.
During a weekend where a casual listen to National Public Radio programming repeatedly, er, repeated that the economy double-dog-is in recovery, and Mitt Romney is probably doomed, I got to hear the network ask itself and its listeners: Is National Public Radio biased?
This was the question addressed by NPR’s “On The Media” over the weekend.
The program, hosted by Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, with some help from NPR’s Ira Glass (host of “This American Life”, which probes the obsessions of America’s white liberal upper-middle-class), ran the question a couple of different ways – listen at your leisure – including via some people who believe NPR is conservative.
Of course, bias is hard to measure, especially if you camouflage it as carefully as NPR does.
But here’s an easy example: when Brooke Gladstone refers to the conservative response to NPR’s firing of Juan Williams, she referred to the response as “the Fox outrage”.
Because naturally Fox News – dog whistle as it is for liberals – is the voice of all of American conservatism, right?
Better example: in the program, Gladstone plays a piece (while interviewing a “conservative volunteer”) in which an NPR reporter asks a commentator “if the country can afford” a tax break for corporations building domestic factories.
Gladstone’s reposnse: “there was a conservative response!”
And on one level, that’s true. But on another? The question itself could only come from someone with a purely “progressive” perspective; the idea that money exists first as government revenue, then as the property of those who earn it, is a purely liberal one.
A reporter who was truly detached from any politics might have phrased the question “so what’ll that do to tax revenue?” rather than “can we afford…” with the implied “to spend money via a tax cut”.
Listen to the whole thing. Feel free to comment.
But when you do, remember; on NPR, the economy is perking right along, and the polls show us Mitt Romney – who, incidentally, favors cutting NPR funding – has already lost.
PS: We must be between legislative sessions at the state and national level; Gladstone pointed out that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives 2% of its funding from the government. That’s the same thing Minnesota Public Radio says – when we’re between sessions. That changes, of course, the moment there’s a serious challenge to public radio funding in the legislature, when the message changes to “look at all the misery that will befall this state if the funding is touched in any way”.
DoakesDroppings@Twitter: Muslims blame film “Now look what you made us do;” wife-beaters object “That’s our line.”
I’ve always been fascinated by exiles – people who are forced from their homelands for whatever reason. From the Volgadeutsch of rural North Dakota – Germans who fled to Ukraine and then to the US, where they fully assimilated but still observe and in some cases mourn their old country (Stalin killed most of the Ukrainian Germans during the war), or the Cubans of Florida, many of whom share a nominal goal of getting their homeland back by one means or another.
And it’s soldiers in exile that fascinate me most. Poland has supplied many of them; several generations of Polish warriors fought, either to regain their home or to serve foreign rulers who promised, someday, maybe, to do it for them. Among them were Napoleon’s Polish Legion, an elite cavalry unit that fought all over the continent (and other continents – 600 of them fought in Haiti, most of them dying of one miserable tropical disease or another). Most of whom would never see their homes again. And from among these men sprang a song, Mazurek Dabrowskiego that with independence and nationhood became Poland’s national anthem. The song speaks of the yearning of the exile with raw, painful emotion.
Norwegians aren’t prone to expressing raw, painful emotion, of course.
We – and I can say “we”, since four of my eight great-grandparents, on both sides of my family were born in Norway – are most famous for calm-to-the-point-of-dull accommodation and negotiation, accompanied by a nasty passive-aggression that is more prone to being internalized than acted on. A Norwegian builds to violence famously slowly – but practices it in a way that people from Russia to Ireland, from Scotland to Algeria, still keep tucked away in a dark corner of their ethnic and national consciousnesses; “Viking” is still a synonym for ruthless, calculated remorselessness that would make a Mafioso gag up his skull; for the old Norsemen, it truly was just business.
———-
It was that sense of dull accomodation, of orderly communitarianism and plaintive idealism, that was conquered in the spring of 1940. In the two and a half years since the sucker-punch invasion of officially-pacifistic and almost-completely demilitarized Norway, thousands of Norwegians signed up for one form of service or another; tens of thousands served in Norway’s massive Merchant Marine, which provided a huge proportion of the allies’ shipping across the Atlantic. Many more served in the Army and, even moreso, navies in exile; Norwegian-manned British ships were involved in most of the Royal Navy’s major and minor operations in the Atlantic.
And veterans of Norway’s tiny, obsolescent Air Force escaped across the North Sea, by plane or boat, and thence to Canada – where a group of exiles set up a training airbase at Toronto Island, christened by the locals “Little Norway“. There, equipped with American-built planes that had been completed just too late to be shipped to Norway as the government frantically tried to re-arm, they learned how to fly modern aircraft, before shipping back across the pond to the UK to form a new squadron, “331 Squadron” of the British Royal Air Force.
The squadron was equipped with the iconic Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane, perhaps the most aesthetically beautiful instrument of war ever produced, and issued the RAF fuselage code “FN” – reputed to be, by design or coincidence, the abbreviation of the squadron’s motto, For Norge, “For Norway”.
Spitfires of 331 Squadron at their first base, at Catterick, Scotland
And it was 71 years ago today, at Catterick Scotland, that 331 Squadron became operational.
In the Dieppe Raid of August 1942 – a commando raid that served a shake-down for D-Day – 331 (and its sister squadron, 332 Squadron) shot down 15 German planes for a loss of three, making it the highest-scoring RAF squadron during the raid.
The squadron spent 1943 doing “sweeps” over Belgium, France and Holland, attacking German ground transport and mixing it up with German fighters that came up to fight.
331 Squadron Spitfires taxing out for a fighter sweep in 1943.
331 was the highest-scoring fighter squadron in the RAF in Europe during 1943.
Captain Svein Heglund, Norway’s top-scoring fighter pilot of World War 2. The dent in his Spitfire’s propeller spinner was from a part of one of the German aircraft he’d just shot down. Heglund ended the war with 17 confirmed kills.
The two squadrons of Norwegians were among the mass of aircraft flying top cover over the D-Day invasions, and met and drove off one of the few attempts at a Nazi air raid that day. Not long after, they relocated to the continent, among the first Allied fighter squadrons to move operations to France and, eventually, the Netherlands. As the German Luftwaffe faded from the battlefield, the Norweigans spent a good chunk of the rest of the war shooting down German V1 “buzz bomb” cruise missiles.
The two Norwegian squadrons ended the war with 300 confirmed, “probable” or damaged German planes; they lost 131 planes and 71 pilots in combat and accidents. This, out of squadrons that at full combat strength had 18-24 pilots and planes.
331 Squadron F16 lining up to fly a mission over Libya last year.
The Norwegian Air Force’s two current combat fighter squadrons are still named 331 and 332, in homage to their ancestors who, seven decades ago, fought a lonely, hopeless battle far from home.
People who’ve never served in the military – and some who do, but aren’t in the infantry – shake their heads and wonder what it takes to find someone who can run toward gunfire, when the natural numan instinct is to run away from it.
But training, and the testosterone that most young men have in great abundance, mixed together with enough esprit de corps or coercion or whatever, can overcome, or at least tame, the instinct of self-preservation enough that armies can and do exactly that; charge toward people who can kill them, and – sometimes – vanquish them.
But beyond that – what does it take to not only see and understand hell, but willingly walk into it?
It was 72 years ago today that Witold Pilecki (pronounced “Pi-LETZ-ki”) undertook perhaps the most daunting intelligence mission in history.
And if you’re American and not Polish, your response may well be “Witold who?”
Sit back for a moment.
———-
If you were to develop a laboratory process to develop a perfect strain of militant patriot, the end result might be a lot like Witold Pilecki.
Pilecki in his Polish cavalry uniform
Born in the Finnish-Russian area near Petrograd, Russia, where his family was forcibly resettled by the Czarist Russians after his grandfather spent seven years in Siberia for participating in a failed uprising against Russian rule in 1863, he grew up steeped in the militant patriotism of the motivated exile. The family moved to Lithuania when he was a boy – where he joined the Boy Scouts.
For those of you who have watched your kids make Pinewood Derby cars and go camping, that seems pretty innocent. But in Poland – or among ethnic Poles scattered all over Russian Europe at the time – Scouting in Poland – the “Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego” (Polish Scouting and Guides) or ZHP – was, however, considered an underground paramilitary organization and an instrument of undesirable Polish patriotism. ZHP fought in the Russo-Polish war as well as as part of the Polish Underground in World War 2.
And that was Pilecki’s introduction to war. At age 17, as World War 1 devolved into the Russian Civil War, his Boy Scout troop became an irregular combat unit that fought against the Bolsheviks and, when the area was overrun, served as a guerrilla group until Poland’s independence. He then joined the new, regular Polish Army as a cavalryman, and fought at the Battle of Warsaw, the high-water mark of the Bolshevik advance into Poland. as well as the ensuing pursuit of the Bolsheviks back to Ukraine.
And then he finished high school, at age 20.
Over the next decade and a half, he was a gentleman farmer, a reserve cavalry officer, a husband and father (with two children born in the thirties), and a social worker.
Pilecki during his brief civilian life
When World War 2 started, he was called up and, at age 38, served as a cavalry platoon leader, and a ferocious one; his platoon destroyed seven German tanks, shot down one airplane, and destroyed two more on the ground as they retreated across Poland. During the war – which lasted barely over a month – he went from leading a platoon of 40 horsemen to the deputy commander of an Infantry division with a paper strength of 12,000 men (although by that point in the war it was more like 4,000). When Poland surrendered, he and his commander, Jan Włodarkiewicz. slipped away and went to Warsaw to found a resistance group. The two men built the group into one of the network of underground armies that undertook the resistance against the Nazis.
And it was while serving among the commanders of the Polish underground that the word of a German concentration camp near the Polish town of Oświęcim – “Auschwitz”, in German.
It was believed to be a fairly run-of-the-mill labor camp at the time Pilecki undertook the mission. On September 19, 1940 – 72 years ago today – carrying fake paperwork undre the name “Tomasz Serafiński”, Pilecki deliberately out into the middle of a roundup of Jews, and was hauled off to Auschwitz. He undertook to form an underground organization to gather information and eventually rebel against the Germans.
Tomasz Serafinski, Auschwitz Prisoner 4859
At the time, Auschwitz was still a labor camp – a terrible enough place, to be sure, but it hadn’t yet morphed into the Vernichtungslager, or “Extermination Camp”, that it would shortly.
But as it did, Pilecki was there. He and his organization – the “ZOW” (“Związek Organizacji Wojskowej“, or Union of Military Organizations) gathered information, built a radio transmitter out of smuggled parts and improvised bits and pieces, and reported on the gathering horror as the work camp evolved into a death camp.
It was Pilecki’s intelligence that the final, definitive reports of trains full of Jews being brought to the camp, gassed and burned – transmitted seventy years ago this month, and then smuggled via the Polish Underground (the “Home Army”, or Armija Krajowa, as it had become, the Polish nationalist branch of the resistance) to the Polish Government in Exile, and thence to Winston Churchill and FDR.
Who did shamefully little with it. We’ll come back to that later in this series.
Remember – this was in the middle of a concentration camp. The Gestapo eventually caught wind of the guerrilla group forming amid the death camp, with the radio transmitter, and began homing in on Pilecki. And in April of 1943, he and a couple of comrades overpowered a guard while assigned to a job outside the wire, cut the phone line to buy time to escape, and got away cleanly. Pilecki linked up with the Armia Krajowa in a few weeks, and went back to Warsaw. His war wasn’t nearly over.
He led an AK unit in the Warsaw Uprising in August of 1944 (of which much more in a couple of years); after the uprising’s betrayal by the Soviets, he – saved by his military commissions from drumhead execution – went into a German POW camp.
Which was liberated by the Soviets; Pilecki went to Italy and served in the Free Polish Army for the remainder of the war.
And that was when the real war began. The Polish government in exile sent Pilecki, under another fake ID, to organize anti-Soviet resistance; it’s largely forgotten in the west today, but armed resistance to the Soviets continued in Poland until the early fifties.
It was there, in 1946, that Pilecki’s cover was blown. He was arrested, tortured by the Soviets’ Polish Communist puppets, and executed after a show trial on May 25, 1948.
Pilecki on the stand at his show trial
A few weeks back – not long after President Obama was making his “Polish Concentration Camp” gaffe – the people of Poland were undertaking a forensic expedition to find Pilecki’s remains; buried in an unmarked grave by the Communists, it’d taken decades of research.
“[Pilecki is] a hero because he volunteered to go to Auschwitz,” says Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland.
“He went to find out what was happening and tell the world.”…Since the fall of Communism in Poland, Pilecki has received several posthumous honors from the Polish government.
“But he is even more of a hero to the Jewish people of Poland,” according to Rabbi Schudrich.
Pilecki’s story is, in many ways, a microcosm of the Polish story; Poland was torn over the plight of its Jews; many Poles were virulently anti-semitic and actively collaborated with the Nazis – but the biggest contingent among the Righteous Among The Nations are Poles who risked and frequently lost all to help Jews hide, escape and resist; the nation then suffered years of battle between Stalinists and nationalists and the ensuing decades of Communist rule before finally leading the Soviet world in its own flight to freedom starting thirty years ago.
Survey USA polls show that the Voter ID Amendmennt appears to be cleared for landing – barring, naturally, a major change in the landscape – while the Marriage Amendment could be a squeaker.
Let’s start with the Marriage Amendment.
At first glance, the news is good; the amendment is up 50-43. Now, in elections for Constitutional Amendments, blanks ballots are counted as “no” votes. So if every single “Undeicded” in this poll either votes “no” or doesn’t vote on the amendment, it flails 51-48. On the one hand, that seems unlikely; it’s a lot more likely that some of the undecideds will break for the amendment; if an eighth of the undecideds vote “yes”, the amendment passes in a 50-plus-one-vote to 50-minus-one-vote squeaker.
Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect that the landscape will stay the same. Both sides are going to pour money into this state on this amendment in the next seven weeks. Given the deep pockets behind the left’s “grassroots” efforts, I suspect they’ll deploy a lot more money. I suspect, as I have all along, that his vote is going to be a tight one.
Voter ID, on the other hand?
The proposed Voter ID Amendment is unchanged since the last round of polling, over a month ago. It’s ahead by a 2:1 margin, with only 7% undecided. IF every single undecided vote is a “no” or an abstention, the measure will pass with a 3:2 margin.
The “yes” vote crushes among all age groups – even moreso among young voters (which makes sense; they’re the ones that see their classmates being approached to take part in the scams); it wins among every party and ideological stripe except among Democrats and self-identified liberals, and across all regions, income brackets and levels of education.
This measure is going to pass resoundingly.
…is counting on all those German electoral votes he worked so hard to get four years ago, he might face an uphill fight…
Obama apparently thought he’d get three warning letters.
…but I wonder if any of the major-media “fact check” operations are going to go the new ad from “Alida Buys The Legislature” “A “Better” Legislature” that claims…:
Here’s a job for Minnesota’s “professional fact-checkers”; do a story on Alida Messinger’s entire attack-PR operation.
No, I’m not holding my breath either.
You see it in Presidential statements, in Bill Clinton’s pro-Obama ad, and all over the place:
“Deregulation and tax cuts are what got us into this mess in the first place”.
It’s a Big Lie, and they’re repeating it over and over and over, in hopes that they can lop off not only the low-information voters, but maybe a few “moderates” and “Independents” who don’t pay much attention beyond the sound bites.
The melt-down in the financial industry was caused by the socialization of risk and privatization of reward – by the government.
The melt-down had nothing to do with tax cuts. Democrats say that the deficit was exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts – which is true, if you believe that spending is inviolate and must be paid for rather than cut.
“But non-discretionary spending is, well, non-discretionary”. Only if you don’t have the guts to change the laws.
Long story short: the Democrats are lying to you, in hopes that enough of you are uninformed or incurious enough to buy their BS.
There’s really no more artful way to put it. And I’m getting tired of trying to be artful about it.
It goes a little something like this:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to coerce the livelihoods from another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the superior and unequal station to which the Theories of Keynes and Bloomsbury entitle them, a decent respect to the needs of government requires that they should declare other peoples’ property to be public property first, and their own last.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equally vital belongings of Government, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Duties, that among these are to support the government that makes us all so very equal.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted upon Men, deriving their just powers from, paradoxically, their power.
Governor Dayton has an odd idea of what unites us as a people, and of what this nation is supposed to be all about.
It starts as the same old story…:
Dayton told a group at the University of Minnesota today that his administration is coming up with a plan to overhaul the entire tax code to make the tax system fairer to lower and middle income people. He didn’t offer specifics but said his plan would continue to include an income tax hike on the state’s top 2 percent of earners.
…but quickly devolves into a big toke off the Obama/Soros/Messinger kool-aid-filled water pipe:
Dayton also criticized Republicans in the Legislature and in Congress for being reluctant to raise taxes to pay for new programs.
“This unwillingness to pay taxes and seeing it as a threat to our freedom and our liberty and our way of life, to me, is going to be the death of this country if it’s not corrected,” Dayton said.
You heard him right.
The desire to keep what one earns rather than seeing it squandered, the spirit of dissent against the idea that the fruit of your labor belongs to government first and you, eventually, maybe? That’s the threat to the nation!
All you peasants have got to quit being so uppity!
Your nobles have spoken!
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
Last week, the drone was Obama’s weapon of choice and his war strategy was working.
This week, CBS News reports:
“. . . there had been threats that Islamic militants might try to take revenge for the death of al Qaeda’s No. 2 commander Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in June, and he said the U.S. consulate should have been better protected. Confirming al-Libi’s death for the first time in a video posted online Monday, al Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahri called on Muslim’s in al-Libi’s native Libya to take revenge for his death.”
Follow the logic with me: on Monday, September 10, Al Qaeda instructs Libyan Muslims to take revenge on Americans. On Tuesday, September 11, Libyan Muslims storm the embassy, Libyan officials betray the ambassador’s safe house, Muslim terrorists kill him and drag his body through the streets. This was a terrorist act, not a religious one.
The “your film clip insulted Mohammad” line is a cover story to divert American attention from the fact that Muslim terrorists struck Americans on 9/11 AGAIN, three years into Obama’s watch, as a direct result of the President’s specific war policy choices and we knew it was coming.
The cover story is intended to protect Obama by appealing to American Liberals who want to blame Jewish filmmakers and Christian ministers for Muslim violence under the same “look what you made me do” reasoning used by wife-beaters everywhere. Saddest of all, it seems to be working.
Joe Doakes
Saint Paul, Minnesota
I spent most of Monday night – as in, from 9PM to 1AM – at a 4th CD GOP meeting.
As I probably foreshadowed the other day, I figured it’d be an ugly, contentious meeting.
It certainly was.
I haven’t had time to write an actual recap of the evening – I certainly will – but until then, check out Joe Schultz’ take on the event.
Here’s the capsule summary:
I do want to commend the chair for bringing the potential FEC violations to the attention of the Full Committee. It is certainly his duty to bring such issues to light. The problem I see is the circumstances under which the audit was conducted. First, to the best of my knowledge John is not a qualified auditor. There were several people at the meeting who have more experience in FEC matters than John that were questioning his legal interpretations and fine conclusions. Second this issue seems to be being used as a way to withhold funds from CD4’s endorsed candidate Tony Hernandez. Remember John didn’t want to call a meeting to discuss disbursement of funds before he had any inkling of FEC violations. FEC fines are uncertain. It certainly seems like an excuse. Finally a big issue is what was not discussed. What were John’s plans for usage of the $5k before he knew about any potential FEC fines? Why was there no associated fundraising plan to waylay such funding concerns so that CD4 could continue to support its candidates? Where is John’s plan for victory in CD4?
Perhaps the most obvious problem stemming from the meeting last night was the combative atmosphere between John Kysylyczyn and what looked like 95% of the CD4 Full Committee. Several members of the Full Committee shouted – or typed – profanities during the meeting. John, for his part, showed a healthy dose of condescension and egotism bordering on contempt. One thing was amply clear: CD4’s Republicans will not move forward with John Kysylyczyn as Chair. There is too much animosity. Regardless of the merits of the issues John brought to the CD4 Full Committee meeting (and there were merits), the way in which John went about it destroyed any chance for progress.
More, most likely, tomorrow.
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
In 2008, Candidate Obama’s pick for Energy Czar, Steven Chu, said: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
On June 30, 2008, gas prices were $4.00 and Candidate Obama said: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”
On January 20, 2009, when President-Elect Obama took office, the price of gas was down to $1.84 a gallon. Going backwards, for him.
Today, in St. Paul, gas is back up to:
So have we achieved Secretary Chu and Candidate Obama’s goal?
Gas Prices in Europe are in the $9.00 per gallon range.
No, we have not achieved the President’s goals. We’re only half-way there.
At the convention, President Obama asked for more time to accomplish his goals.
It’s going to be a long four years.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Dying to see what he does with natural gas…
US Ambassador to Libya killed by “Islamic Protestors”. Embassies getting stormed, burned.
Imagine how miuch worse it’d been if we hadn’t had The Light Worker making the US image abroad so very very squeaky clean.
Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein is getting shut out of media coverage.
Wonder why that is?
.Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
I suggest a reader-input question:
What would you like to see President Mitt Romney do in his first 100 days?
Here’s one item I’d like to see. It’s not the highest priority but it’s something that really should be done.
Dear Queen Elizabeth:
Your government graciously gave our government a bust of Winston Churchill that symbolized the close relationship between the major powers in the English-speaking world. The bust enjoyed a place of honor in the White House for many years until it was thoughtlessly returned. I apologize for that and, if it please Your Majesty, we would very much like to have it back.
Sincerely,
President Mitt Romney
It’s not crititcal but it’s the right thing to do.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Take it away, folks.
The comment section, not the Churchill bust. I’m with Joe on this one.
There is nothing I can tell you about 9/11, and what it did for and to this nation, that you haven’t heard a million times from people much smarter than me.
But a while ago, I saw The Best Years Of Our LIves, the 1946 William Wyler classic that won the Academy Award winner for best picture. It was the story of three servicemen coming home from World War II; a former bank loan officer who’d spent the war as an infantry platoon sergeant; a soda jerk who’d won a Distinguished Flying Cross as a bombardier in a B-17, and a sailor who’d lost both hands when his ship was sunk (played respectively by Fredric March, whose turn as the ex-NCE won the Best Actor Oscar, as well as Dana Andrews as the bombardier and Harold Russell, who had actually lost both hands to an accidental training explosion while serving as a paratrooper, and who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role). The movie was about the difficulties the veterans of the day had in re-adjusting to life at home – and shows that the topic didn’t first occur after Vietnam. If you’ve never watched it, don’t watch another movie until you see it.
It won seven Oscars – and generations of admiration from an America that got it; it told the story that so many veterans couldn’t, and for decades didn’t, tell.
And World War II was different – and almost incomprehensible to people today. 12 million Americans served, out of a population of 160 million; that’s one out of thirteen. And around 400,000 Americans died of all causes and on all fronts during the war – one out of every thirty that served, one American out of four hundred. Every family had a servicemember; virtually everyone knew a family that lost someone.
In World War II, just about everyone was close to the war, one way or another.
The War on Terror that switched into its “hot” phase for most of us eleven years ago today has been very different. While most Americans of all stripes make noises about supporting the troops – and most truly do, in their own way – it’s a whole different world than in the forties. It’s a detached thing for most Americans. Less than one percent of Americans serve. For most Americans, service in the war on terror is something someone else, someone else’s family, does.
In terms of loss? We’ve suffered around 6,000 military dead in the past 11 years; an incalculable loss of some of our nation’s best people, of course, but about the same death toll as three weeks on Iwo Jima (where the oldest brother of my father’s childhood friends was killed), or two months in the waters off Okinawa (where my ex-father-in-law served). Most Americans can name someone who died in the service of this country – but for most of America, it involves someone else’s family, someone else’s husband or son or father, frequently from some far corner of their family or social circle.
I was never that someone else. I came close to joining the service a few times – talked with an Army recruiter in high school and again after college, and with the Navy Reserve when I was in my mid-twenties – but like 99% of Americans, I took a different path. On 9/11 I was a 38 year old guy with a couple kids and a job in a dotcom that was already failing, with a bad knee. Not exactly military material.
And so for me, like most of you, this war has been something fought by someone else. It’s someone else’s family dreading deployments and watching their family climbing onto buses and planes and dreading reports of violence on the news and counting the hours until their loved ones come home, in many cases to start the cycle over again.
And so today I’ll just send my prayers and hopes and best wishes and deepest thanks to all of the “someone elses” out there; all of you who did spend the best years of your lives overseas fighting a war that most of your countrymen barely acknowledge, much less understand.
I’m hoping someone, someday tells your story in the way you deserve it to be told.
Funny you should ask!
I was at the 4th CD meeting we discussed the other day.
I’m going to need at least a day to write about it. And I’d rather not profane 9/11 with it.
Tomorrow. Maybe.
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