Today’s story ties together a bunch of my favorite themes; Epic Historical Events that happen as a series of happenstances and blunders; second-chance redemption stories; untold stories of great significance.

But most of all, it’s the story a maritime people sweeping the seas of their foes.

The maritime people, in this case, is North Dakotans.

We Come From The Land Of The Ice And Snow:  Joseph Enright was born in 1910 in Minot, North Dakota.

Enright, near his retirement in 1963, as a Captain.

He graduated from Annapolis, spent three years on the battleship USS Maryland, and then transferred to submarines, qualifying as a sub officer in 1936.  As the Navy, and especially the submarine service, grew frenetically before World War II – part of FDR’s version of “shovel ready jobs”, as well as getting ready for the war everyone on both sides of the Pacific knew was inevitable – Enright moved up fast, serving on the crews of the World War I-vintage subs S-35 and S-22; not long after the war started in 1942, with a new promotion to Lieutenant Commander, Enright was given command of an even older boat, the USS O-10, a predecessor of the S-boats, used as a training ship.

USS O-10

The early years of the war were tumultuous ones in the submarine service; equipment problems dogged American submariners’ efforts for the first 18 months.  It didn’t take long for a combat command billet to open up for Lt. Commander Enright; he assumed command of the brand-new USS Dace.

USS Dace, which went on to a stellar war career.  In one notable episode in 1944, after participating in sinking two Japanese cruisers and damaging a third, it rescued the entire crew of the USS Darter, which had run aground in an area crawling with Japanese ships.  It ended up in the post-war Italian fleet from 1955 to 1975.

Take Me Out, Coach:  He took command of the boat in July of 1943.  By November, he had the boat worked up and ready for action.  The boat’s first war patrol took it into Japanese home waters.

Enright, aboard Dace.

On November 15, a few weeks into the patrol, directed by an intercept from the US Navy’s “Ultra” cryptography unit, Enright and Dace were directly in the path of the Japanese aircraft carrier IJN Shokaku, one of two surviving carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor.  Enright made contact with the carrier’s task group – a powerfully-escorted force, dangerous to attack – but couldn’t quite maneuver into position by daybreak; in his own report, he described having made a “timid approach, breaking off as daylight approached”.  Later in the patrol, an attempt on a Japanese tanker ended with a sound depth-charging at the hands of Japanese escort ships.

The seven week patrol ended with no sinkings.  Disappointed in his own performance, Enright asked to be relieved of command.  Admiral Lockwood, the crusty submariner who commanded all US subs in the Pacific, obliged, as he had not a few earlier officers who’d decided they didn’t pack the gear.  Enright was assigned to administrative duties at the Midway Island submarine station.

And with most officers relieved of a combat command, that’s where it would have ended.

Redemption:  After six months of administrative penance, Enright asked Lockwood for another shot.

Incredibly, Lockwood said yes, assigning him to command the USS Archerfish.

USS Archerfish

Archerfish had had almost as disappointing a war as Enright so far.  In four war patrols, they had attempted three attacks, for zero kills.  They hadn’t even seen a ship on two patrols, and had spent one patrol on “lifeguard” duty off Iwo Jima, rescuing one shot-down naval aviator from the water.

Crew of the Archerfish on Guam, Christmas 1945, on their way home from their fateful fifth war patrol.  I’m not positive, but I think that’s Enright, in the baseball cap, on the far left of Row 2.

And so in October, Enright took Archerfish out on its fifth war patrol.  From November 11 to November 28, the boat cruised off the Japanese coast not far from Tokyo, on “lifeguard” station again – cruising in a small, fixed area that damaged American B-29 bombers could get to if they were too badly damaged to make it back to their airbase on Saipan.

With the cancellation of the day’s strikes on November 28, Archerfish was cut free from lifeboat duty, and was free to patrol.

And there, toward dark, his lookouts spotted what they originally thought to be a Japanese tanker, with an unusually heavy escort of three first-line destroyers, leaving Tokyo Bay.

Enright and his officers soon figured out it was actually an aircraft carrier; the ship was moving at a good clip, zig-zagging toward the south.  The officers worked out the math, and moved Archerfish as fast as its 20-knot surface speed could manage, to get it into position for a shot at the one point in the zig-zag they could intercept.

After six hours of maneuvering – much on the surface, but the last stretch underwater to avoid detection – the ship zagged into Archerfish’s path.  Enright ordered all six of the boat’s forward torpedo tubes fired, and watched as the first torpedoes hit and the ship began to list, before ordering the boat deep to avoid a depth-charging.

Four of Enright’s torpedoes hit the ship.  Although Enright never did see the final outcome, his sonarmen could hear the sound of internal compartments rupturing, the unmistakeable sound of steel ripping and crumpling. They knew they’d drawn blood.

They returned to Pearl Harbor, claiming an aircraft carrier.  The Navy staff was certain it had to have been a cruiser; they were pretty sure there were no surviving Japanese aircraft carriers in the area.  They grudgingly credited Enright and Archerfish with a light carrier after Enright sketched what he’d seen through the periscope in great detail.

The Big Kahuna:  They were both wrong.

The ship was the IJN Shinano, at 70,000 tons the largest aircraft carrier ever built.

The only known photo ever taken of Shinano (other than one taken from an Air Force reconaissance plane), on its very brief sea trials in Tokyo Bay, days before its sinking, taken by a civilian photographer on a harbor tug, who had no idea that he was committing a capital offense (for which he was thankfully never discovered).

The ship had started life as a sister ship to the Japanese battleships Yamato and Musashi, the biggest battleships ever built to this very day.  As it became clear that the age of the superbattleship had ended and the aircraft carrier was here to stay, the Shinano was converted into a large aircraft carrier.  It retained much of its battleship structure, including armor.

It had been built under complete secrecy, so paranoid that most of the Japanese fleet knew nothing about it; built in a covered drydock, by workers sworn to secrecy on pain of death by beheading, with no mention of it ever made on the radio or any other medium that the Allies could monitor.  It was the only major warship of the 20th century never to have an official construction photograph.  Shinano was in fact a complete surprise to the Allies – so complete, in fact, that they didn’t believe what Enright had sunk until they looked at records after the war.

It was the largest aircraft carrier ever built (until the American supercarriers of the 1950s through today).  It was the largest ship ever sunk by a submarine – and one of the largest ever sunk in combat, period (only its half-sisters, Yamato and Musashi, were bigger).

The moral of the story?

Forget F. Scott Fitzgerald; America is all about second acts.  Enright came back from palookaville to score one of the biggest notches in the history of naval warfare.

And watch out for North Dakotans.  We’re a maritime people.

And we know how to break things.

Here’s the link to “the Overnighters“; I reviewed the movie today.

Here’s that twitter post from the Moms Demand Action leader. The actual illustration is a photoshop, in case you were wondering.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Back in the 10th and 11th centuries, Viking raiders would set forth from Norway in mid-October, after the harvest was laid in.  They’d go to sea and loiter off the coast of the various nations, waiting.

Waiting.

And on the morning after Thanksgiving, the Vikings would strike.  They counted on catching the locals – the indolent French, the filthy Irish, the martinetical Germans, the hapless English – in the throes of hangovers and awash in tryptophan.  The locals, disabled by wine and whisky and turkey and thinking only of the ceremonial winter market, were at a low ebb of alertness and competence, leaving them easy pickings.

The Vikings would storm ashore, hauling away longships full of swag; French wine and cheeses, German oxcarts, Irish filth and emigrants, and any foodstuffs the English hadn’t yet cooked.

And that is the true legacy of Black Friday.

Well, it’s as true as Toni Braxton’s version of it seems to be.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama is a lame duck with delusions of royalty. He’s going to issue whatever Executive Orders he wants, knowing his hand-picked Attorney General won’t let Republican lawsuits affect his actions for years, if ever.

Republicans could impeach The First Black President, but Democrats have been slavering to be thrown in that briar patch, it’d set the Republican Party back a century.

Republicans’ only power is the purse. Maybe the Republicans should start advertising “Do not plan your vacation to visit any national parks or public monuments, Obama is going to shut them all down on July 1.”

He’ll do it in response to our shutting off the money, true; but why take the heat for it alone? Get out in front of him, for a change. Start telling people right now “There’s only one way to stop an out-of-control dictator so get ready for it, we’re shutting ‘er down.”

Joe Doakes

Watch for a media campaign claiming that the “power of the purse” is racist…

For the record, I’m a fan of MPR’s Bob Collins – if for no other reason than few people write about aviation issues as well as he does (and there are other reasons).

Which is not to say that I agree with him all the time.  We’ve had our disagreements. 

The Minority Case:  And this Collins blog post is one of them; it quotes a story from Tim Pugmire about an incoming state representative John Heintzeman of Nisswa, who scored a big upset win earlier this month.   Pugmire quoted Heintzeman as saying:

“People of faith need to be able to know that they can practice their faith in the way, in the tradition that their family has over many, many years, without being afraid of somehow violating the law,”

 Collins follows:

“Rural values” and “traditional values” are fairly vague terms, which are often left to the rest of us — city slickers — to figure out what they define exactly. They often are intertwined with religion or “faith,” as Heintzeman said.

 And that usually leads to the obvious question: whose religion and whose faith?

For the benefit of the audience that Collins is writing to – the Volvo-with-a-reproduction-“Wellstone”-sticker driving, free-range-alpaca wearing, straight-ticket-DFL-voting Macalester alumni set that is the “must win” demographic for MPR, I’ll explain it.

It’s about Islam. 

It’s so the young Somali woman working at the Midway WalMart need not worry about feeling racist, faith-ist repercussions when she politely asks an infidel like yours truly to please move the pork chops across the scanner, since her observance of her faith doesn’t allow her to handle them. 

Oh, it probably also covers cases like the photographers and bakers and florists who, for religious reasons not a lot different than the young Somali, tried to beg off participating in gay weddings, even trying in some cases to refer the “customers” to gay-wedding-friendly competition, leading to test cases (since that was what the “customers” were looking for in the first place).   And, yes, sometimes those concerns aren’t purely individual in scope.

It could even – hard as this may be to believe – cover religious freedom for people whose beliefs are more in line with the MPR audiences’. 

Really, it’s about protecting the minority from the majority – which is supposed to be what a representative republic (as opposed to a democracy) does. 

In other words – everyone’s religion and faith.  Or even their complete lack of either. 

Rights are rights. 

Oh, there’s more to it than that.  There’s a wedge to be pounded:

Pick Your Herbicide:  Perhaps you’ve heard the story; a GOP district chair in Big Stone County, whose day job is was working at a Hardware Hank, did a no-no; he said really stupid things about Muslims.  Of course, this is red vegan meat for the DFL establishment – at least in part because it’s more fun for them than some other stories that wecouldbe talking about. 

Collins finds a greater significance in it, though (emphasis added):

In Big Stone County, the chairman of the Republican Party is defining those values, at least for his neck of the woods.

Jack Whitley posted this yesterday on his Facebook page.

Let’s make this clear: a guy who was elected chairman of the GOP in the fifth-smallest county in Minnesota, a county with fewer registered voters than MPR has assistant producers, is “defining” “rural values”?

Would that be in the same way that Paris Hilton or Plukey Duke “define” “urban values?”

No?

Naturally, everyone from Ken Martin to CAIR jumped on the statement… 

“It’s very disturbing to see a Republican Party leader engage in outright bigotry and hate,” the Council for American-Islamic Relations said in a statement calling on Republicans to disavow Whitley’s values. “Without a clear rejection of these inaccurate and intolerant remarks, the party’s silence will appear to be agreement.”…

 …““How such a violently bigoted person can hold a position of leadership in the Minnesota Republican Party is confounding and absolutely unacceptable,” DFL Chair Ken Martin said in a statement which called on Downey to demand Whitley quit his party position.

…using it to impugn all Republicans and, as Collins seems to be flirting with, the whole idea of “rural” values themselves.

Naturally (as Collins notes), MNGOP chair Keith Downey did condemn the statements.  Some of Ken Martin’s oompa-loompas have wondered publicly and in the media why Downey doesn’t just fire Mr. Whitley; perhaps that’d work in the DFL, but chairs of GOP house, senate or county districts are elected by their members, and need to be removed by them (as readers of this blog have learned over the years).

But this isn’t about inside-the-GOP party mechanics:

Too-Free Association:  In 2008, Barack Obama referred to Americans with “rural” values as bitter, gun-clinging Jeebus freaks.   The Obama coalition relied on creating a big, sharp, thick wedge between “mainstream” America – in the stereotypes, the part that is white and mainstream-Christian and straight and usually male – and anyone else. 

And the Minnesota DFL is no better; Minnesota’s political map is the results of decades of wedging city vs. suburbs, metro vs. outstate, white vs. black, and in the case of MPR, us vs. them.

And there sure could be more wedges:  if the Minnesota media ever held the DFL to account for, say, Keith Ellison (who openly supports Hamas, whose charter calls for the extermination of Jews), or Phyllis Kahn (who bent party rules, and party dogma about election fraud, to the breaking point in keeping a Muslim insurgency from ousting her at her district convention) I’m sure that could create some wedges, too. 

But nobody wants those wedges, apparently.

I Am Just A Caveman:  I’m still trying to figure out what Mr. Heintzeman’s statement – about protecting freedom of religious conscience from majority coercion, which is a right most people support unless it transgresses Big Gay – has to do with Mr. Whitley’s outburst. 

And I imagine I will be for some time.

“Please keep focusing on that guy in Big Stone County.  Please keep focusing on that guy in Big Stone County.  Don’t focus on this.  Please keep focusing on that guy in Big Stone County”.

To:  Valeria Silva, Superintendant, Saint Paul Public Schools
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  How You Can Superintendantsplain Things To Your Black Students

Superintendant Silva,

In the immediate aftermath of the Ferguson Grand Jury release, you tweeted:

No indictment for officer Wilson!  Very sad day in America.  How do I explain this to my black students? 

I’m here to help.  You can start by explaining to them…:

1. The reasons Saint Paul – despite spending more money per student than almost every district in the state – continues to have among the worst black student achievement gaps in the country.  Worse even than other urban toilets like Detroit or Philadelphia. 
2. You can explain why it is you support the current school board, which – being elected city-wide rather than by ward, is thus under the complete control of the DFL vote machine, and thus represents the wishes and whims of the city’s Crocus Hill DFL elite; lots of gnashing of teeth about multiculturalism and the morality of Junior ROTC, and absolutely nothing about pulling “your black students” up.  You could explain why you aren’t actively working to return the school board to a ward-based system. 
3. You can explain to them, maybe, that while there are bad cops, there is also nothing in the world more stupid and unpredictable than an 18 year old boy, and that even if a cop is bad (and I’m not saying Office Wilson was), provoking them is a really really bad plan. 
4. Explain that rioting is a good way to get a good chunk of society to swing from “middling to sympathetic” to “loading up with birdshot and walking their sidewalks with their neighbors”. 
5. Perhaps you should explain the reasons that Saint Paul shouldn’t follow New Orleans’ lead, shut down the public school system, and go all charter? Because the African-American community in NOLA – much bigger than in Saint Paull, btw – is doing much better since they did exactly that. Three reasons will do.

Let me know if you need more help.  Being a public bureaucrat, I’m sure you rarely have to deal with the actual public.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Saint Paul has basketball courts, outdoor refrigerated ice rinks, softball fields and golf courses, all of which cost millions to build and lose money every year.

I’m not aware that Saint Paul similarly subsidizes facilities for bagpiping, curling, flying boomerangs and model airplanes, swordplay or shooting.

Discrimination. No Peace, No Justice. Nothing will change until we force the public to wake up and take notice.

I’m off to set fire to a few cars in Black neighborhoods.

Joe Doakes

Be the change, Joe.

Be the change.

Rock and roller and conservative icon Ted Nugent tweets about Obama’s response to Ferguson:

Obama’s empty neutrality, moral bankruptcy and political cowardice is now undeniable to even his most loyal cheerleaders and boot-lickers!

— Cornel West (@CornelWest) November 25, 2014

Well, Ted Nugent saying that sort of thing about Barack Obama barely rises to Dog Bites Dog, now, does it?

UPDATE:  Wait…

We’re already down to convention-planning time. 

And while the Democrat National Committee is pondering New York, Philly and Columbus, Ohio, Kevin Williamson has a more appropriate idea:

The Democrats, if they had any remaining intellectual honesty, would hold their convention in Detroit. Democratic leadership, Democratic unions and the Democratic policies that empower them, Democrat-dominated school bureaucracies, Democrat-style law enforcement, Democratic levels of taxation and spending, the politics of protest and grievance in the classical Democratic mode — all of these have made Detroit what it is today: an unwholesome slop-pail of woe and degradation that does not seem to belong in North America, a craptastical crater groaning with misery, a city-shaped void in what once was the industrial soul of the nation. If you want to see the end point of Barack Obama’s shining path, visit Detroit.

Not, he points out, that New York and Philadelphia aren’t headed in the same direction…

…was the media’s performance. 

Not only did the CNN “legal analysts”, Jeffrey Toobin and the loathsome Mark Garagos and some fashionably ethnic female talking-head-ette whose name eluded me but whose shrill tone and clotted inarticulateness unfortunately did not, all but begged the protesters to start throwing things (as one of the carefuly-placed cameras caught it all) practically beg people to start rioting (Garagos calling the justice system a “parody”, to talking-head-ette claiming that “all the grand jury needed was probable cause” (which is crap; they needed to tell the prosectutor there was enough evidence to get a conviction), to giving lavish coverage to mobs of people sacking stores (most of them owned by minorities), CNN in particular seemed to actively fan the flames. 

That’s the American mainstream media: utterly useless for keeping government in check, but perfectly happy to use its power to burn cities to the ground.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Iraq war veteran, double-amputee, elected to Congress. As a Democrat. But she’s too sick to travel because she’s pregnant.

The Democrats won’t let her vote in a Democrat party leadership election by proxy.

Let’s see, Democrats, did we leave any boxes unchecked in our hateful War on Women?

Joe Doakes

If we were playing blackout bingo, we’d be headed home with the big prize.

According to Don Lemon on CNN, his sources say that officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted.

I’m watching CNN tonight for the first time since probably 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan.

I know – I feel dirty too.

UPDATE: Van Jones expresses an easement the Tea Party opposes police brutality.

Nope. No bias there.

UPDATE: Is anybody but me betting that the media is hitting its knees and praying for a major riot?

UPDATE : and here comes the press conference…

UPDATE: Dist. Atty. takes a not remotely muted whack at the mainstream media. Good.

UPDATE: “No probable cause exists to indict Officer Wilson”.

UPDATE: As the grand jury report continues, CNN is showing footage of demagogues… well, demagogue in.

UPDATE: Observation of the crowd as presented on CNN: lots of black people with visible faces; lots of twentysomething white people with bandannas over their faces.

It looks like some stuff is being thrown around – and some people are running hither and Jan. Hard to tell if anything is actually breaking out yet.

UPDATE: Shrill media woman asking the district attorney if the police will in the future be required to shoot for hands and legs, went under attack – or not shoot on armed suspects.

Somebody’s been watching too many movies.

UPDATE: Reporter who looks like he was from the Pacific Network asks: why are there no laws protecting the likes of Michael Wilson?”

UPDATE: Oh joy. The oresident is next.

UPDATE: CNN talking head – I think it’s Jeffrey Toobin, but I can’t tell for sure, knows what really matters whether; defending the media against the district attorney’s complaints about their wretched performance in this whole case.

UPDATE: Mark Garragos is a disgrace to the legal profession, and to America.

UPDATE: reports of gunfire. Good news – the reports are coming from the mainstream media, so they’re probably BS.

But it did take CNN precisely 10 seconds to put it a screaming “Gunshots Heard in Ferguson” banner.

UPDATE: President Obama opens with “this nation is built on the rule of law”. I couldn’t help but laugh.

UPDATE: at first blush, Obama’s speech is not a bad one. It’s not exactly soaring rhetoric, and that’s probably okay.

Related news – wow, that’s a lot of teargas.

UPDATE: oh, goody – cars burning, teargas in the air.

UPDATE: a very winded sounding Jake Tapper is reporting bricks being thrown, looting, cars overturned.

UPDATE: reporters are getting to your guest. So at least there’s some good news.

UPDATE: Van Jones assures us of the vast majority of the crowd is peaceful – but there is apparently quite a bit of teargas. And that’s where the media are, naturally.

UPDATE: Don Lemon apparently needed to pay attention during gas mask training. He tried to don his mask, but was overcome.

UPDATE: I don’t know what makes for worse television – Don Lemon gagging on tear gas, or Don Lemon psychoanalyzing the crowd.

UPDATE: i’m not going to say that there’s no justification for black anger with a white police department – but if I hear Don lemon rationalize the crowds violence anymore, I’m a grab a teargas lunch for myself.

UPDATE: cNN’s Chris Cuomo needs to shut up and put a gas mask on.

UPDATE: Jake Tapper is on the scene of extended vandalism and looting.

UPDATE: Cuomo is reporting handgun fire in response to teargas launchers.

UPDATE: producing live spot news broadcast is difficult. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. But I get the impression that the wheels are coming off cNN’s production the moment.

UPDATE: numerous reports of protesters firing handguns at the police. This is incredibly ominous – in the entire history of American protest, that has been extremely, extremely rare, especially in a nation that is as relatively heavily armed as the United States is.

…from the mainstream media. 

Big Media have almost completely blacked out coverage of the Johnathan Gruber scandal.  Of course, that’s the part that you see on the evening newscasts (if you still watch them; it’s been close to ten years since I’ve watched any). 

Behind the scenes?  The national media has the same approach the local media takes on issues that redound to Democrat disadvantage (emphasis added):

On the web, name reporters from [NBC and ABC] have chosen a blackout or ridicule approach. NBC News’ crack team of political reporters led by Mark Murray and Chuck Todd have covered their eyes and ears. ABC political director Rick Klein can’t be bothered either. However, John Harwood took a more direct approach:

I listened to/get what Gruber said, & get why it makes people mad about ACA madder. but that is only significance @ron_fournier @JohnEkdahl

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) November 18, 2014

Six million healthcare plans lost on an admitted and oft-repeated lie, and this isn’t news to them. Enough is enough.

They have chosen, like most scandals involving the Obama Administration, to report on the Republican reaction and “overreach” instead of on the story of itself.

It’s significant – and not in a good way – that the only Obama scandal the media has come close to taking seriously is the allegations that the Administration spied on, lied to and has been opaque with the media. 

Because lying about your doctor and Benghazi is one thing; being forthcoming to ones’ media benefactors is serious business:

Gruber, to whom the administration deferred on dozens of occasions to speak for them, admitted the only way ACA could be passed was to lie to stupid American voters. American voters have figured out the lie, as demonstrated by the results of the 2014 midterm elections. But the only group left defending the Obamacare catastrophe is the media by now ignoring Gruber.

This isn’t bias. This is malfeasance and corruption.

It is long past time for the GOP to stop bothering with the mainstream media.  No more GOP primary debates on ABC; no more agreeing to Democrat ticket-punchers like Candy Crowley in presidential debates, and if possible no more presidential debates on the Big Three or CNN. 

Starve the beast now!

…”when Obama’s lost SNL, he’s truly lost” – I mean, nobody really thinks about SNL much any more, do they?

And yet…:

And the “funny” thing is, this is better “Journalism” than most of the mainstream media has done on the subject of Barack Rex’s overreach.

John Fund:

It’s no wonder that the White House and its allies aren’t citing the recent elections or polls in defending their actions. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken ahead of Obama’s move found that voters opposed him taking executive action without approval from Congress by 48 to 38 percent. Even among Hispanics, only 43 percent favored the action versus 37 percent who opposed it.

Look for this to be as far as the media (AKA “The Praetorian Guard”) to go in criticizing Barack Rex.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A “zero day” is a bug in a software program that allows hackers access. The NSA says they don’t search for these and stockpile them to use against terrorists. Why the hell not? And why lie about it, unless that’s your top-down management style?

Joe Doakes

That’s the thing about the whole espionage, counter-espionage, cryptography, counter-cryptography, terrorism and counter-terrorism thing; it’s all about head-faking the other guy.  Constantly.  And sometimes, we are “the other guy”.

Our schools are failing, and every snowfall turns our streets into Bolivian goat paths.

But they’re talking about putting a “cap” on 35W from Washington down to 5th Street.

It’s a noise-abatement thing:

Across the country, cities are covering loud highway trenches with lids, or caps, that block out noise, restore old neighborhood connections and yield development opportunities.

In Minneapolis, planners have their eye on covering a portion of Interstate 35W that separates Downtown East and Cedar-Riverside neighborhoods, running from Washington Avenue S. to about 5th Street.

A lid over that gap would create 17 acres of green space above the highway and the chance to put up new buildings on both sides.

Still in the early concept stages, the project team has yet to nail down a cost estimate or get a funding proposal in place, but they say the payout will be greater than the risk.

They always do, don’t they? 

At least they’re not talking about making it a retractable roof.

Two events coming up for Second Amendment supporters:

Saturday, December 13:  The Minnesota Gun Rights Seminar and Member Meeting

It’ll be at the Chaska Community Center starting at 9AM.  Come out, hear some great speakers, and find out what the good guys are going to be doing in the coming year.  And be one of the good guys.

Monday, January 26, 2015:  Minnesota Gun Owners Lobby Day (MNGOLD)

At the State Capitol; quick program on the steps, then going inside to lobby your legislators.  Get more information at the MNGOLD website.

More details on both events available from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter) and the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee (Web, Facebook, Twitter).

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

I’ll be talking with:

• Bryan Strawser of MNGOPAC
• Andrew Rothman of GOCRA

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

…in the winter of 1980, on an evening where the air was cold and dry enough to tickle your nose a little, not a lot different from this one, I asked a girl to come out on the floor near the end of the high school dance, for one of the slow songs.

And to my shock, she said yes. 

And you could smell the heating in that old high school building, and the smell of a whole bunch of high school kids – flop sweats, cheap booze, cheaper cologne, and anticipation, as we – well, I – stumbled awkwardly out onto the floor.

And the band counted four, and they started into a pretty faithful cover of this song:

And for four minutes, the world felt perfect.

To:  Y’all
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  The Way Forward

Do the following…:

1. Pass a bill securing the border.
2. Devise a way for illegals already here to get a work visa
3. Overhaul the rules for legal immigration.
4. Let Obama veto it.
5. Seize the moral high ground.

I don’t for a moment think either of you are smart enough, or independent-enough of all that K-street “talent” and US Chamber money, to do this.

But you could sure surprise me.

Go ahead, gents.  Make my day.  Make being a Republican less humiliating.

That is all.

If I’ve learned one thing after leaving my post-adolescent years, it’s that there are few things in the world more useless than rock critics.

Not every rock critic.  Not all the time.  But as a job classification, rock critics are somewhere between supermodels and professional reality-TV contestants in terms of useful output generated per unit of input.

Of course, part of my emnity with rock critics is embarassment over the way the adolescent Mitch ate up the crap they were peddling.   I managed to evade some of the more embarassing adolescent gaffes of the eighties, of course – photos of me with a frizzy seventies perm, or supporting Gary Hart – but I sure did drink up the whole jug of “rock critic as social commentator” koolaid.

I’ll forgive myself for missing it, of course, because like any teenager, my perspective started in junior high; nothing that came before counted, naturally.  Even moreso – growing up in rural North Dakota, my main window into pop culture, and pop counterculture, was through the issue of Rolling Stone that came to the Jamestown Library every week.

And in RS, every week, the “great” critics of the day – Dave Marsh, Robert Christgau, Cameron Crowe – and the not so great (the execrable Parke Puterbaugh) held forth on the changing culture…

…through the medium of the album review.  The self-important, “English majors gone wild”-style attempts to turn snark about this week’s entertainment product into commentary on Deep Thoughts-style reviews that you went to Rolling Stone for.

Anyway – the geist of that particular zeit, was “old is bad – new is good”.

Same as it ever was and ever shall be, of course.

And so by the time I became aware of the musical world outside Jamestown, the new and loud and snotty – the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, reggae, ska, punk in general – was in.  The old and measured and, worst of all, commercial – everything from Led Zeppelin and Bad Company to Linda Ronstadt and Elton John – was out.

And one of the big losers in that calculus was The Eagles.

And truth be told, I was always fine with that.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve always had a few Eagles songs that, deep in the back of my musical consciousness, I’ve loved.  “Take it to the Limit” is one of my favorite last-call songs ever.  “Already Gone” is one of my favorite guitar raveups – I’ve always wanted to play it in a cover band.  And the guitar player in me has spent hours dissecting all of the glorious technical nuance in “Hotel California”.

Last week, I wound up watching the movie “History of the Eagles”, covering the band’s story up through their breakup in 1980 (and the sequal, covering their various solo careers and reunions after 1994).

Lessons learned:

• The re-united Eagles are an extraordinarily un-compelling band whose muse has left them.
• But that implies that the Eagles had a muse to lose.  And up through about 1977, they did.

The snotty teenage Mitch chose to ignore the latter point – and never really stopped until last weekend.

But the more I learn – or re-learn – about the Eagles in their original incarnation, the more I think I may have short-changed my adolescent self.

Videos below the jump.

(more…)

On the one hand, the President has the right and power to not enforce a law.

Andrew McCarthy:

Prosecutorial discretion means you are not required to prosecute every crime — which, since doing so would be impossible, is just a nod to reality.

On the other hand, the President doesn’t get tochangethe law:

It does not mean that those crimes the executive chooses not to enforce are now no longer crimes. Prosecutorial discretion has never meant that the passive act of non-enforcement has the legal effect of repealing criminal laws enacted by Congress. And it has never even been suggested, because to do so would be absurd, that under the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, the executive decision not to prosecute certain crimes means the people who commit those crimes should be rewarded for committing them. That, of course, would only encourage others to commit them on a more massive scale.

Yet that is President Obama’s theory. He is claiming not only the power to determine what immigration laws get enforced and which illegal immigrants get prosecuted — power he unquestionably has. He also claims the power to declare (a) that criminal acts are somehow lawful — that illegal aliens now have a right to be here — just because Obama has chosen not to prosecute them; and (b) that those who engage in this unprosecuted activity will be rewarded with benefits (lawful presence, relief from deportation, work permits, etc.), as if their illegal acts were valuable community service.

That is an utter perversion of prosecutorial discretion and a blatant usurpation of congressional power.

So let’s lay this out there:

John Kline?  Erik Paulsen?  Michele Bachmann/Tom Emmer?  Not one dime of funding to enable this adminstration to declare itself emperor. 

You vote to enable this madness, I will do whatever I can to primary your asses straight out of DC. 

Enough is enough.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Good take on shirt-storm:

“Of course, the very point of the mob action is that no conscious offense by Taylor was required for him to be boiled in online oil. Thoughtcrime does not always proceed from deliberate action; intention is divined by the accusers. The goal is to create an atmosphere of terror, in which everyone is double extra careful to pre-censor their words and deeds, and by extension their thoughts, for fear of career destruction.”

Joe Doakes

It’s like 1984 – except instead of a screen watching you wherever you go, it’s your “fellow citizens”.