Shot In The Dark

Purchase for Peace - One

Purchase for Peace - One of the loony left's latest conceits is sniping at business. A group of leftist symbolactivists staged a "nationwide" "Buy Nothing Day" yesterday, in which protesters wandered through stores with anti-commerce, anti-war and anti-Bush messages pinned all over themselves.

A Minneapolis leftist site, CircleVision, documents the activities. I'll let you all fill in the blanks.

By the way - "Buy Nothing Day" seems not to have had much of an effect...

(via Instapundit and Fraters Libertas)

Hate Crime - Someone did

Hate Crime - Someone did this to a Norm Coleman billboard in St. Paul yesterday:

Any guesses?

We've been talking about how desperately some - many - Democrats seem to hate Republicans in this space, many times.

I was on a date a few weeks ago, probably two weeks before the election. Now, I knew my date was a DFLer - but I do know they can be reasonable, rational people. Yet the topic of the election came up, and the first coherent thought was "GOD, I hate Norm Coleman", spoken with the kind of face you normally only see from a six-year-old asked to eat Brussel sprouts. Suffice to say, there was no love connection. But I didn't get it - I mean, I don't like Walter Mondale much, but I'd never hiss it like an oath on my mother's grave in the first half-hour of a first date, either.

Why the vitriol?

No, I don't think it's an inherent trait - but there's an atmosphere of revulsion that too many Minnesota Democrats seem to feel. It's reflected in their publications, both official and under-the-table; they just don't like us, don't trust us, don't want to share the sandbox. Keillor's screeds were merely symptoms.

Symptoms of what? Two things:

One: Quite simply; they're used to being in charge - Minnesota used to be their playground, "Berkeley on the Prairie". No more. A neocon apostate has taken "their" senate seat from their newly-canonized martyr. LIke the redneck whites of the Deep South after reconstruction, they don't like all of us uppity conservatives getting off the plantation and gittin' funny ideers. They're angry - and feeling threatened. And they've been striking out for years, in ways both condescending (Keillor) and puerile (Paulapalooza) and corrosively bigoted (the billboard vandalism).

Two: What do the following people have in common: Someone who paints swastikas on a billboard of a Jewish man; someone who straps a bomb to his chest and walks into bus full of children; someone who sets off a bomb at an abortion clinic; one who flies a plane into a building packed with innocent civilans? All of them have adopted a warped, twisted, sick interpretation of their religion.

"But Wait! The Minnesota Democrat Farmer Labor Party isn't a religion!" Enh. For some, it is. You'd have to meet them - some of them are no less dedicated than any monk, and regard their party with no less devotion than any nun. And their prophets! Paul Wellstone couldn't have just been the victim of bad conditions and an inexperienced pilot, they say, he must have been shot down! A victim of a "Bushie" conspiracy! He died for our sins! Of course, one's prophet and martyr mustn't die of mundane causes: Wellstone could no more have been laid low by an inexperienced pilot any more than Jesus could have choked on a a blinz or Joan of Arc could have stepped in front of a moving draftwagon. No, martyrs must die martyr's deaths. And those who oppose the martyrs are the infidels, and nothing is too awful for them.

We'll be seeing much more of this sort of thing in the future. Count on it.

(Photo via Instapundit and Powerline)

MORE: An email correspondent writes:

Someone pointed out that every time a pro-life spokesman opens his mouth, he's basically forced to disavow any connection to folks who murder abortion doctors. That comment came in connection with the suggestion that the same treatment should be given to Islamic apologists. (I happen to be pro-abortion but I think that the pro-life folks have behaved much better. I'm running out of sympathy to lose for the "religion of peace".)

Perhaps the thing to do is to publicize the defaced Norm Coleman billboard with a simple comment along the lines of "brought to you by the DFL".

If the DFL is like every other long-lasting belief system, the current generation will not change, but the next generation might.

True. But it may take longer than that. There seems to be (to me) a sense of bitterness and isolation among the DFL hard-core - that's how I see it, anyway - and I think that if anything things'll get worse. These things feed on themselves.

I think the comparison with the pro-life people is very appropriate - and illustrative. The pro-life groups that get to be that bitter and isolated about their defeats in court tend to be the ones that act the least rationally.

So we know what we have to look forward to!

The big question: Can our society - a free association of equals that disagree, yet do so civilly within a framework where everyone's assumed to be working toward the same end - survive? I think so, but I've never been this worried. Historically, our society has been much more polarized than it is today - the civil war and the conservative/socialist split of the thirties are examples - but things are the worst in the memory of anyone currently thinking about politics.

I've encountered no small amount of the usual "Republican=homophobe, racist, mysogynist, etc.," but at least the discussions end with an agreement to disagree--some of those discussions are with my own mother. I feel for you.

My best friend is a Democrat, but lately he's been bastardizing that old quote, "When I was a child I was a liberal, but as I became a man, I put away childish things..." He still listens to NPR occasionally, but his hearing's been tainted. And I'm smart enough to never, ever get into a discussion about politics with his wife. That's just an invitation to get hurt.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, maybe there's hope? I'll keep reading your posts to find out...

Oh, the stories I could tell - but I'm happy to let you all do it for me. Yes, this is exactly what's going on, both good and bad. Some can agree to disagree. Others are too insecure, in their own beliefs and in what this democracy's about - for that.

Who's in the ascendant? We'll see.

Democrat Hate - The site

Democrat Hate - The site Democrats.com is front and center with every wacko-left conspiracy theory. In the immediate aftermath of the Wellstone plane crash, they were printing conspiracy theories practically before the bodies were cold.

More? Notice this little bon mot (scroll down the page to find it):

CNN and Rightwing Horatio Alger Association Push a Corporate Model of 'Success' to TeensThis is almost as bad as if CNN used its television forum to push smoking or alcohol abuse on teens!! CNN and the 1950's style rightwing outfit the Horatio Alger Assoc. have collaborated to "help young people" through their production, "Only In America." This program is pure corporate propaganda, designed to replace traditional America goals - integrity, sacrifice, making a difference for the greater good of mankind - with a new goal: Become a CEO!! The show is hosted by rightwingnut adman Ed McMahon. What's next? Preteen shows on how to lend your pals money at 18% interest, compounded quarterly?

Working for a corporation is as bad as teen alcohol abuse? And Horatio Alger (and the eponymous society) has goals that are less "traditionally American" than "integrity, sacrifice and"...making a difference for the greater good fo mankind? Huh?

The authors' illiteracy about finance is too plain to even mention. But the question remains - who are these people? Some left-wing nutbars, as removed from the mainstream of the Democrat party as the "Vince Foster Conspricy" tinfoilhats are from the GOP?

As if! Look at this list! These people are mainstream Democrat players!

And if a Republican group were to put out such noxious, hate-drenched slime, it'd bring the media down like a pack of Dave Matthews fans after the last bottle of Zima.

Hate speech, indeed.

Dem Gun Demigoguery - The Minnesota DFL website offers this gun control bon mot - a reprint of a Strib editorial:

The government wants you to think it takes terrorism seriously -- that it's doing all it can to excise murderous plotters from American soil. But think again: Though the White House has done much to heighten homeland security, one font of fear flows as freely as ever. Bad guys still buy U.S. guns by the bushel; the feds are still willing to look the other way.

Which "bad guys"? The September 11 hijackers flew planes, as I recall. Which "bad guys" are the DFL/Strib referring to?

"Bushel"? The hyperbole starts here, and never stops...

Could this really be true? People who've been watching say yes.

Who? Anyone?

Even after Sept. 11, they note, the White House hasn't done a thing to stop unsavory gun traffic -- of which the United States is a large if unwitting sponsor. Underground armies the world over can credit U.S. dealers with supplying the arms fueling their endless wars.

"Underground armies". Remember this bit. It'll pop up later in this fisking.

Even the congressional ban on assault-gun sales hasn't slowed things down much. Thanks to some speedy redesign and renaming, any thug with an ax to grind can stroll into a retail store in any number of states, fill out a cursory background-check form and walk out with a MAK-90 -- a "sporting" version of the banned AK-47.

So let's get this straight: According to the DFL/Strib, "Underground Armies" are flocking to sporting goods stores to load up on sporterized cheap copies of "AK-47"s, with which they equip themselves for "endless wars".

Next time you're at Joe's Sporting Goods, wave hi to the Serbian militiamen and the Hutu death-squadsters!

And though legal limits are placed on multiple handgun purchases, no law bars a buyer from driving off with a truckload of long guns designed to shoot people rather than deer or bears.

No limits are placed on people buying thousands of gallons of gasoline and filling up a stolen tank truck and using it as a bomb, either - but it doesn't seem to be happening, regulations or not.

Transactions like these don't do much for world harmony, and it's hard to see why they're allowed at all.

Because unregulated purchases of sporting arms have no effect on crime in the US, much less wars overseas.

That'd be my wild guess, all in all.

But that's how it goes in gun-mad America: Nearly every would-be terrorist in want of a weapon can get one -- at a gun show, from a pawn shop, through a newspaper ad, from a friend. In days gone by, at least, a no-good gun-buyer stood a chance of getting caught if his gun ended up being used in a crime: If that happened, the FBI typically checked federal gun-purchase records to look beyond the scene of the crime.

No longer. Just when its use could prove most crucial, Attorney General John Ashcroft called a halt to that tracing tactic. Why? To protect gun buyers' "privacy."

Uh oh. It's the scare quotes. Whenever the left wants to get you to part with a right (or rather, a "right"), they put the scare quotes around it. Look for references to "due process" and "free" "speech" soon in reference to "talk" radio.

It's hard to know what to make of an attorney general whose chief civil-liberties concern is keeping secrets for gun owners up to no good. It's certainly not a good sign. Neither is Ashcroft's failure to propose any gun-related provisions in the recently approved U.S. Patriot Act -- the government's catch-all antiterrorism law: Despite Ashcroft's pledge to "unleash every possible tool" to fight terror, it's evident that cracking down on gun trafficking just isn't in his plans.

Perhaps because "gun trafficking" (I can do scare quotes too) in US hunting rifles has not been found to be any sort of problen whatsoever.

But why not? Doesn't Ashcroft know that even now U.S. guns are pouring into terrorist hands? He must know, because the federal government has long been monitoring gun purchases by U.S. militant groups with links to Al-Qaida.

Really? Data, please?

If this is like the "facts", (yaaay) also breathlessly reported by the DFL/Strib, that " a gun is 43 times more likely to kill someone you know than a criminal" (wrong in SO many ways) and "concealed carry permits will put more guns in the hands of gang members"

Yet when the FBI tried after Sept. 11 to see whether anyone on its list of terror suspects was on the government's list of recent gun buyers, the Justice Department threw a fit and nixed the check.

And they were right to do so, just as they would be right to nix blanket checks of recent car buyers or recent Blockbuster rentals.

So there you have it. In the World According to Ashcroft, fighting terrorism means asking airline passengers to take their shoes off at security checkpoints while respecting the "privacy" of unknown characters who buy armloads of long guns in the dark of night.

If they're buying them "in the dark of night", odds are it's not at a gun store...

Where's the logic in that? Where's the safety?

Surely it wouldn't hurt to check whether suspected terrorists are also avid gun buyers. Indeed, doing so might even give investigators new leads as they try to track terror networks. As broadcaster Bill Moyers noted in his Nov. 15 PBS program, "Gun Land,"

...which was chock-full of equally bad information...

it's plain that foreign terrorists have exploited this country's lax gun laws to arm themselves against their own governments -- and ours.

If I say "it's plain that the earth is flat", does that make it so? I've seen precisely no evidence that any US weapons, bought through the same sorts of civil channels that US civil gun buyers use, have had any impact on the world weapons trade.

The United States must toughen its laws to avert such exploitation. It must shake off the silly idea that gun sales should be secret, and do what it takes to catch the exploiters.

"Exploiters"? I thought we were after terrorists.

Of course, we're not. The DFL/Strib wants to make the life of the law-abiding gun owner, buyer and merchant just that little bit more onerous.

They're scared, of course - the GOP won big, the NRA is ascendant, and the Minnesota Personal Protection Act (our "shall issue" concealed carry law) will probably pass this session.

Expect much more of the same.

Soccer Moms with Uzis

This may be the biggest sea change from this month's election: Women aren't necessarily utterly reliable Democrat voters.

As noted in Washington Post article by Tom Edsall, women's attitudes changed drastically after September 11:

The post-9/11 climate has helped the GOP win support from women, especially married women with children. While under normal circumstances women tend to be more averse to national defense spending and military action than men, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the continuing threat of domestic terrorism have changed women's attitudes.

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, found a dramatic shift in women's views about the creation of a national missile defense system. Just before the attacks, his polling showed that 29 percent of women and 42 percent of men agreed that "we need a national missile defense system right now." In October, after the attacks, support among men grew only slightly, to 47 percent, while among women the percentage soared to 51 percent, with 59 percent of women with children backing immediate creation of such a system...

All of these findings point to the increased receptivity of women to the generally more aggressive and tougher stands of Republicans on issues of military preparedness and dealing with foreign adversaries. These shifts may be temporary, a product of the terrorist threat. But while a war with Iraq might come and go, no one knows how long the threat of terrorist attack will continue. There is no reason to believe that this aspect of the political environment will change in the near future.

The cynic could say that women vote with whatever's driving them at the moment.

I wonder, in all honesty, what this says about the differences betwen the genders. White middle class males are the GOP's strongest consituency, minorities are the bedrock of the Democrats - white women seem to be the wild card, switching pretty wildly if the last three elections are any indication.

Via Instapundit.

Hate Crime The Star Tribune

Hate Crime The Star Tribune is reporting that the vandalism of a Coleman billboard is being investigated as a hate crime.

It's about time. I've seen Coleman signs defaced and destroyed in many different ways - our tolerant local DFL-sympathizers in action - including Nazi symbols.

(via Powerline and FratersLibertas)

New Years Day

I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing - in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they'd all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives...

I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her "Yeah - I'm still here in Jamestown". Really, she asked? "Yeah, but I'm moving". Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. "Minneapolis" seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. "Two weeks", I blurted out without really thinking.

Damned if everyone didn't remember that promise when we all sobered up. So - two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my '73 Malibu, and I was off.

Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I'd had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend's place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you've never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything's all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects - and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me - the time when I reflect on the past year's agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so - for me anyway - than New Years' Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years - the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in '87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in '88, crazy in love in '89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in '90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in '91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in '92, in a new house in '93...wondering how long my marriage would last in '98, being able to answer the question "not long at all" in '99...

...and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad...well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there's the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I'd better get on with it.

There've been so many good lists of things to be thankful for, from people as diverse as Michelle Malkin and Ted Nugent and Andrew Sullivan - and my own for that matter.

But I forgot one. I'm thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I'm doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing - or better - next year.

(Granted, if Monica Costello were to reappear somehow, I'd be thankful of that too...)

God bless you all. And if you don't believe in God - well, bless yourself silly.

"Useful Idiots" - Anthony Woodlief

"Useful Idiots" - Anthony Woodlief 's theory - that NPR harbors a secret conservative conspiracy to discredit liberalism.

Our National Day - Andrew

Our National Day - Andrew Sullivan has a point - perhaps more than Fourth of July, Thanksgiving is the real American national holiday. I've read this article before - it's six years old, from the Sunday Times of London - but it's as wonderfully pertinent as any.

Here's my favorite of many favorite parts:

At the end of November each year this restless, contradictory and simple country finds a way to celebrate itself. The British, as befits a people at ease with themselves, do not have a national day. When the French do, their insecurity shows. Even America, on the fourth of July, displays a slightly neurotic excess of patriotism. But on Thanksgiving, the Americans resolve the nationalist dilemma. They don't celebrate themselves, they celebrate their good fortune. And every November, as I reflect on a country that can make even an opinionated Englishman feel at home, I know exactly how they feel.

Happy Thanksgiving, America, wherever you are.

Nuge on Thanksgiving - I'm

Nuge on Thanksgiving - I'm a guitar player and first-generation punk rocker who is also a conservative. I've often bemoaned the fact that if you're right of center, the only rock and roll musicians who seem to share your points of view are Marky and the late Dee Dee Ramone, Willy DeVille, and...er, Ted Nugent. The first two I dug. Nuuuge?

Well, I've still never heard a Nugent song I liked, but this article redeems a lot.

Oh, wait - Great White Buffalo was pretty cool...

(Via Powerline and Instapundit)

Fox in the Chicken Coop

Fox in the Chicken Coop - When I heard that Henry Kissinger was going to be heading up the investigation into the government's 9/11 screwups, my heart took a little dive.

Ugh.

Christopher Hitchens has a great take on this.

(via Smart Genes)

Thanksgiving Prayer - Michelle Malkin

Thanksgiving Prayer - Michelle Malkin offers this. It's long, and it's wonderful, and it's all worth a read. Here's the part I liked enough to copy right away...

For "All men are created equal," for "Tear down this wall," for "Ask not what your country can do for you," for "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," for "I swear to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States of America, against all enemies foreign and domestic," we give thee praise.

For iron will, for steely resolve, for mettle tested and time-worn, for uncommon valor that never sleeps, for steady hands, sturdy legs, broad shoulders, and level heads, for stiff upper lips, for blood, sweat and tears, for conquering our fears, and for unbending courage in the face of the unknown, we give thee praise...

And there's so much more.

Affordable Job Shortage The Pioneer

Affordable Job Shortage The Pioneer Press' DJ Tice of the Pioneer Press does the unthinkable - applies empirical reasoning - to the "affordable housing debate:

Ron Feldman, an analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, released a paper on the much-discussed "affordable housing crisis." This "crisis" is occurring all around the country, but is said to be particularly severe in the Twin Cities. It concerns the fact that a considerable number of people have to spend a larger percentage of their incomes on housing than they ideally should.

Feldman's startling, controversial diagnosis of the problem?

Poor people, he says, don't have enough money.

Almost seems hard to believe that a government agency came up with that, doesn't it?

Tice continues:

This may sound like a pointless spat over terminology. What's the difference whether we say rental prices are too high or incomes are too low?

In fact, as Feldman argues, accurately identifying the real problem may determine how many "house poor" people can be helped with available resources.

The commonplace view of the housing issue is that we face is a "shortage" of "affordable" housing. The idea is that there is some malfunction in the housing marketplace, which isn't producing enough low-cost housing. Therefore, government needs to subsidize new construction of housing for the poor.

Feldman's paper, which I'm forced to oversimplify, says this is a misunderstanding (read it at www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/bsdpapers/housing.cfm). He points to data showing that among Twin Citians paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent (the accepted arbitrary definition of "unaffordable" housing), virtually all are in households with very low incomes. Even if rents were to decline significantly, Feldman calculates, most of the poor would still be living in "unaffordable" units.

That's the question - is it possible to lower housing prices - however artificially - enough to make a dent on the demand, to say nothing of the inevitable increase in demand that the subsidy will cause?

I doubt it - and thank goodness the GOP won.

(Via Powerline)

Farce?According to this article, UN

Farce?According to this article, UN weapons inspectors stonewalled the media on observing the first round of inspections today. The only media contact came after the UN team had left, according to NPR news, when the Iraqis let the gaggle of correspondents tour the inspection site.

Of course, noted one of the reporters, the media have no idea what they're looking at. Show them an urn full of smallpox bacilli and call it "Pizza Topping", and Pizza Topping is what'll get on the news.

The inspectors also said "This could take a year".

I don't think they're going to get it.

Things I'm Thankful For -

Things I'm Thankful For - There's quite a list, really.

• My kids, "Bun" and Sam
• My family, who've been behind me my whole life
• God - there's no atheist alive who can convince me he's not watching out for me, and them. Although they're welcome to try
• November 5, and the renewed faith in our electorate it gave me.
• A job.
• Friends - don't know where I'd be without 'em
• Our wasteful, consumeristic economy, which enables so much joyous pseudo-gluttony tomorrow. Huff and poo poo if you want - but be thankful it's an option. Starvation sucks.
• The blogosphere, which has brought a wealth of information (10% of it pretty good) to my life, and given my inner pundit a convenient outlet
• All of you - when I started this thing, it was purely a vanity project. I averaged eight hits a day all summer, maybe 12-20 per day into September. Then, with the elections and the Keillor flap, things took off - and I've been averaging 200 or so a day, with occasonal spikes into the multi-thousands. Thanks to each of you for coming back!
• Wisdom. Especially that of the founding fathers.
• American anger - expressed by everyone who's sick of the way things are. That means all of us - left, right, black, white, justifiable or Mary Daly - who hold each others' feet in the fire when things just aren't right.
• The transience of web-delivered content - because if I say "I'm gonna take tomorrow off", but write something anyway, nobody can call me on it.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend, and I'll hope to see you all again soon!

Make Rules, Not Love or

Make Rules, Not Love or War - aka Why the Left Lost - Part MMMCMLVII.

As we noted in an earlier post, Greens share more with the Puritans of the 1600's than just religious zeal. They share...well, Puritanism itself! Carrie Nation was no less a killjoy than the tree-frenching left.

First it was cars powered with anything larger than a lawn-mower motor. Then nuclear power (with every other type of practical, inexpensive power in close second on the hit list). Then cigars, cigarettes, meat, veggies and fruits that weren't blessed with the seal of the organic komissar, alcohol, CDs, anything that comes in a package...and on...and on...

But we figured - "At least there's one human activity that these bastards can't crush beneath the birkenstocks of their relentless, mindless, soul-destroying Political Correctness". You'd think that there might be one primal, inseparably human activity, one simple, pleasurable, healthy, form of physical/spiritual/emotional joyous release, would escape the grasping clutches of the Greens, the Destroyers of Joy, the Regulators of Life's Simple Innocuous Pleasures.

You'd think so.

You'd be wrong.

Dump the Donkey? - Steve

Dump the Donkey? - Steve Perry is the editor of the Minneapolis City Pages, a sort of cut-rate Village Voice that combines some very thorough (if robustly biased) advocacy journalism with the sort of invincible left-wing slant that makes Molly Ivins look like Cal Thomas.

Perry reflects this, himself - an excellent editor, his politics give "loony left" a bad name.

This week's long-form Op-ed discusses reasons for giving up on the Democrat party. It's a longish piece, alternately fascinating and skull-thumpingly incongruous. For instance:

Since the mid-1980s there has been a steady dribble of social issues polls that have shown the American public standing considerably to the left of its elected officials. (There are polls that prove the converse, too; usually they are the ones that lard their queries with one overriding presumption: You don't want to pay higher taxes, do you?)

So many responses to that; what "social issues" polls? It'd seem to me that November 5 was the social issues poll we need to keep in mind. And Perry, good überliberal that he is, seems to think that the presumption that people want lower taxes is a distraction to the simple-minded voter.

Then there's this:

I am going to argue that the Democrats are not really a lesser evil, that their turn to Republican Lite in the past generation has been as cynical as it is deliberate. But for the moment let's take the lesser evil argument at face value and suppose that the courts and the human services bureaucracies do fare a little better (that is, erode more slowly) under Democrats. Is that "democracy" in any sense? Do you really think so little of your country and your citizenship as to accept that?

Catch that? "Democracy" is equated with a robust "Human Services Bureaucracy".

I'll let you draw your own conclusions. He goes on:

how does the rank-and-file react? Why don't the Democrats... If only the Democrats... If the Democrats were smart... Hold on right there. Let's dispense with the ridiculous, shopworn notion that the Democrats don't get it, that they are too dim or too timid to do the things that are evident to the rest of us: tack left, talk populist, stand up to Bush, push hot-button issues like corporate malfeasance, health care, and campaign finance reform.

Perry ignores the fact that the Dems tried their damnedest to stick Bush and the GOP with each of these issues. None of them stuck; most people see corporate ethics as a business ,not political, issue. Health Care is a cold button. Campaign Finance Reform is like a lead balloon - at the very least, nobody cares. At the most, the samizdat media (talk radio, the internet and the new balanced-to-right news outlets) have convinced enough people that it's really nothing more than elitist speech rationing dressed up in ill-fitting populist clothes. As far as failing to "tack to the left" - well, from Sacramento, Boise is east. From Steve Perry, the Democrat party is "Right".

They see these things as clearly as the rest of us, and they choose not to do any of them. Why? Money is the simple, vulgar answer, and the correct one. The matter of corporate crime, to take one example, is not seen by the national Democratic party as an opportunity to capitalize on Republican weakness and seize an upper hand; it is seen as a problem shared in common with Republicans--the problem of helping one's cash clients in a tough time.

"Seen as" a problem? No, Steve, Democrats benefitted just as much from corporate malfeasance as the GOP, and it's not a matter of perception!

...big money has not held all the cards in quite this way since the Gilded Age of robber barons like Morgan and Rockefeller. And in their day there was nothing approaching the staggering concentrations of media that exist now, which is to say there was not the opportunity to exclude so many voices and interests from public dialogue.

This could only come from someone who's spent his entire career in the "establishment" "alternative" media. I challenge any of Perry's supporters to show a time in our history when the flow of information has been more decentralized, both structurally and ideologically! There are robust alternatives on all sides of most issues (little as Perry thinks of them - being the "establishment" figure he is). Show me if you can an analogue in our history anything like the challenge the "alternative media" (and by that I mean different media as well as points of view) present to the "establishment" media that we have today.

There is so much more to talk about - I could fisk this piece for days. And maybe I will.

Read it and let me know what you think.

Blix' Trix

Tony Blankley on Hans Blix:

When, during World War II, we learned that Hitler was working on the atomic bomb, we assumed the worst and spent as much as it took and worked as fast as we could around the clock to get the bomb first. That sense of urgency reflected in the Manhattan Project is the only rational pace at which we should be moving on all fronts today. But even our good and determined president is finding his pace slowed down by the quagmire in which he finds himself; not the quagmire of battle (our soldiers fly on the wings of Mercury with the weapons of Mars at the throats of our enemies), but the quagmire of diplomacy.
Even the New York Times reports that, of course, we can't expect Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors to actually find the weapons. But they may find evidence of Saddam's breach of U.N. resolutions. Meanwhile, Mr. Blix says he doesn't want to confront Saddam or search aggressively (what he calls an American trait). He admits that it is very hard for him and his team even to assemble and bring into action 35 Jeeps and 100 inspectors. He is bemused. He is patient. He knows his limits. What's a 74-year-old Swedish diplomat to do? More importantly, what's Mr. Bush to do?

Stick to his guns, that's what. Hold Hussein to the letter of the demands, and not an iota less, no matter how the interational nattering set phumpher and garfle.

Work is interfering with blogging, damn the luck. Expect a blogalanche after lunch.

Speaking of Castration

Speaking of Castration - Mary Daly is a feminist separatist academic. She taught until recently at Boston College, and is famous for not allowing men into her Women's Studies classes.

A few weeks ago, she wrote on society's "need" to limit the number of males - to perhaps a one-to-nine ratio with women.

WIE: In your latest book, Quintessence, you describe a utopian society of the future, on a continent populated entirely by women, where procreation occurs through parthenogenesis, without participation of men. What is your vision for a postpatriarchal world? Is it similar to what you described in the book?
MD: You can read Quintessence and you can get a sense of it. It’s a description of an alternative future. It’s there partly as a device and partly because it’s a dream. There could be many alternative futures, but some of the elements are constant: that it would be women only; that it would be women generating the energy throughout the universe; that much of the contamination, both physical and mental, has been dealt with.

What Is Enlightenment Magazine [WIE]: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, “The Future—If There is One—Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

There are a zillion other quotes I could pull out of big articles like this - from "What Is Enlightenment" magazine - but frankly, it's too depressing. Radical feminists do take this stuff seriously - and I wonder if or why the irony escapes them: reading Mein Kampf wasn't much uglier than this.

Just read it.

Empathy Alert

Ths news today, about the El Al hijacker who has apparently confessed in Turkish custody after reportedly being threatened with castration, can be taken a number of different ways:

1. It's a warning: Don't mess up in Turkey;
2. Someone needs to make sure Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly don't read this

.

Bad luck to pick Turkey as a destination, by the way - the only Moslem nation that maintains cordial relations with Israel.

There are some times when only a visit to Tony Pierce's blog will do.

What Firearm Are You? -

What Firearm Are You? - I needed to find out.

Of course you can click through the ad to find out what you are.

Me?

Which Firearm are you? brought to you byStan Ryker

Oooh! Cool!

Try it out.

Son in Marines, Part II - the Kipling Years

Like much of the Blogosphere, Rantburg is writing on this story - of the Volvo-Drivin' upper-middle-class Bostonite whose son joined the Marines.

And he (I presume it was him) added this, with a nod to Kipling:

We are patricians of Boston, intellectuals proud and strong;
We send our kids to private school to avoid the unwashed throng.
When we were young we dodged the draft and got in Johnson's face
For we think our home and country is all the world's disgrace.

For it's Chomsky this, The Nation that, and "George Bush is a clown!"
And "the USA deserved it!" when they knocked the Towers down;
They knocked the Towers down, my boys, they knocked the Towers down,
Yes, the USA deserved it when they knocked the Towers down.
Yes, making mock of uniforms that guard us while we sleep
Lets us feel ourselves superior, and do it on the cheap;
And talking of root causes when we appear on NPR
Is five times more "intellectual" than fighting a just war.

For it's Chomsky this, The Nation that, and "George Bush is a brute!"
And burn the flag in protest when the guns begin to shoot;
The guns begin to shoot, my boys, the guns begin to shoot,
Yes, burn the flag in protest when the guns begin to shoot.

We have no use for heroes, heroism's not our scene,
We cannot understand why John joined up with the Marines;
They're yahoos from the red states; they lack advanced degrees;
They don't even have Volvos! They ride in green Humvees.

Yes it's Chomsky this, The Nation that; but we know we'd lack the soul
To stand up for our neighbors when Todd Beamer called, "Let's roll!"
We're snobbish and self-centered, it's beneath our pride to serve;
But we'll exercise our freedoms, tho' we know they're undeserved!

Great stuff. By the way, the original cite came from Instapundit.

Yeah!

I've been wanting to see this guy put up a website for years. I finally found it.

More Attitude

Eric Raymond of Armed and Dangerous, who is presumably not a Democrat, has written a marvelous article on what a truly responsible Democrat party would look and act like. The highlights:

Support war on Iraq, but insist on nation-building afterwards...
Derail the Homeland Security Act and other intrusions on civil liberties...
Stop the War on (Some) Drugs. This is a civil-rights issue. ...
Support school vouchers. Another civil-rights issue — it's precisely minorities and the poor who most need to escape the trap that the public-school system has become, ...
Speak up for science. Religious conservatives are up to a lot of anti-scientific mischief ...
Stop the RIAA/MPAA from trashing consumers' far-use rights...Young people, who are trending conservative these days, care deeply about the RIAA attack on file sharing. Wouldn't you like to have them back?

Of course, after all the money the Wellstone and Mondale campaigns got from Hollywood, I just don't see that RIAA thing happening...

Many of these, by the way, are things the Republicans can at least nod toward in some degree to consolidate their gains. Like what?

We'll go into this later...

Attitude

A few weeks ago, we talked about the hatred some Democrats seem to feel for Republicans, or any other form of dissent.

Discussing that can quickly slide into the absurd. But on a more personal level - I've observed that many Democrats are unwilling to tolerate any smidgen of conservative thought anywhere in their lives, including among friends and relationships.

Robert Toth discusses this in today's Journal:

Near the anniversary of Sept. 11, a friend of mine told me the most upsetting thing I'd heard all year--but also the most clarifying.

We were talking politics, or rather we were shouting politics. He was laying into me for getting into bed with racists, murderers and hypocrites, people who had committed the equivalent of Sept. 11 countless times--which is to say, conservatives. Meanwhile, I was telling him through my teeth that Noam Chomsky, the source of my buddy's picturesque worldview, was a shameless liar and distorter.

We kept at for almost an hour. Then, as he got off the phone, out of breath and close to tears, he said it: "I don't know how to be your friend anymore."

I fell into a chair, shaking. For the past 10 years, I thought, I've shared every joke, every secret, every fear, with this guy, and this is how it's going to end? I spent a long time wondering how he could feel that way about me. Then I realized I'd been feeling that way about him, too--him and a good chunk of my closest buddies. He'd articulated a feeling that had been nagging at me ever since I started hearing what my friends thought about the attacks. If I had heard a stranger voice those opinions, I'd dismiss him as a crank, someone as monstrously wrong-headed as Gore Vidal or Michael Moore. So how do I stay friends with people who hold those views? Or, more bluntly: Is politics an important enough issue to kill a friendship?

This troubles me. I've run across it many times.

Most recently - I was on a date with a woman. We'd had a great time, and we were sitting in a coffee shop, talking about this and that. Politics came up. I mentioned that I'm a Republican.

She looked like she'd swallowed a moth ball. After a few moments of phumphering and blustering, she said "...if I'd have known you were a Republican, I'd have never gone out with you". The date ended awkwardly, and I got an email that evening saying that the difference in politics would cause a problem, so it'd be best not to talk anymore.

Do Republicans do this? I've never heard of it - but in my dating life (three years, this time around) I've had probably 3-4 women essentially break contact and run when the "R" word came up. I've read the personal ads - and quite a few say "No Republicans", even as the headline; it's the first impression they want to make on anyone who might write them!

So what's with the fear of dissent? I've called it hatred in the past - and we all know hate comes from fear, right?

Anyone have an explanation?

Mulligan

Laura Billings writes in today's Pioneer Press about the Augusta National Golf Course controversy.

Augusta doesn't admit women. Unlike a lot of Twin Cities' columnists, Billings does seem to notice that the free market will one day sort this all out:

I predict that once we have a critical mass of retired women corporate leaders with good handicaps and $50,000 for membership fees, the gates to Augusta will swing right open...

...or if they don't, those female executives will flock to a club that's more amenable to them, and the male-only club will languish...

But whatever - it's rare that a Twin Cities media pundit actually grasps the inherent leveling influence of the market. Kudos to Ms. Billings for doing something Doug Grow never has...

However, the path she takes to get to that realization is crowded with strawmen.

The state's demographer reported that even though Minnesota has the highest percentage of working mothers in the country, and even though we are home to such women-friendly companies as General Mills, working women here still make only 73 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

That's a wage gap that has been narrowed by only 6 cents since 1990. According to the findings of the 2000 census, women who work full time still earn an average of $10,600 less than men.

The census - and Billings - miss or gloss over the reasons for this; it lumps type-a 80-hour-per-week stockbrokers together with people with high school diplomas who raised five kids and now work 15 hours a week at Fashion Bug. It compares apples and axles.

Simple fact - if you compare males and females with the same education, time on the job and qualifications, pay inequity between the sexes is a myth. The funny part is, Billings comes close to realizing this:

Interestingly, the same inequity is not seen in the pay stubs received by the 200,000 men and women who work for local and state government.

Bingo. State workers are at least in a similar group - people with roughly (very roughly) comparable education, background and training.

But in the real world, women take time off to have children. They also frequently take time off to raise them - a very rare thing for men in our society. It doesn't go into a paycheck, sure. It's a part of life that's not only as important when all is said and done - it's something men are often the worse off for missing.

Moreover, many areas of academia and our schools seem to be overcompensating, with boys and men being shorted in many key ways. I say this as a guy who's spent a lot of time at home raising kids.

I'd love to see a columnist at least try to recognize the complexity of comparing men (who tend to start work when their education is done, and work nearly 'til death) and women (who tend to short their education to get into relationships and have children, take time to raise them, and enter or re-enter the workforce late), and add in some of the intangibles that accompany those differences.

Serving the Nation

Frank Schaeffer is a Boston-area novelist - a self-described "Volvo-driving, higher education-worshiping" American brahmin, whose kids went to private schools and whose neighbors regarded military service as...something other people do.

Then, his youngest boy joined the Marine Corps.

It had been hard enough sending my two older children off to Georgetown and New York University. John's enlisting was unexpected, so deeply unsettling. I did not relish the prospect of answering the question "So where is John going to college?" from the parents who were itching to tell me all about how their son or daughter was going to Harvard. At the private high school John attended, no other students were going into the military.

"But aren't the Marines terribly Southern?" asked one perplexed mother while standing next to me at the brunch following graduation. "What a waste, he was such a good student," said another parent. One parent (a professor at a nearby and rather famous university) spoke up at a school meeting and suggested that the school should "carefully evaluate what went wrong."

"What went wrong". Amazing.

And yet Schaeffer finds he's learned a lot from his son's experience:

My son has connected me to my country in a way that I was too selfish and insular to experience before. I feel closer to the waitress at our local diner than to some of my oldest friends. She has two sons in the Corps. They are facing the same dangers as my boy.

And the big lesson:

Have we wealthy and educated Americans all become pacifists? Is the world a safe place? Or have we just gotten used to having somebody else defend us? What is the future of our democracy when the sons and daughters of the janitors at our elite universities are far more likely to be put in harm's way than are any of the students whose dorms their parents clean?

I feel shame because it took my son's joining the Marine Corps to make me take notice of who is defending me. I feel hope because perhaps my son is part of a future "greatest generation." As the storm clouds of war gather, at least I know that I can look the men and women in uniform in the eye. My son is one of them. He is the best I have to offer. He is my heart.

He's right, of course.

Last week, I briefly mentioned the idea of instituting National Service - the sort of system they have in Switzerland, Israel and (to some extent) Norway, where citizens serve a period in the active military (Switzerland - about a year), and then in the reserves for most of their adult lives. Everyone in the nation shares the burden and duty of protecting the country - the sons of janitors and the daughters of diplomats.

Several people wrote after last week's brief reference, saying that there were many sociological and military reasons not to do this. And they're all correct - the astounding proficiency of our current military is a direct result of it being all professional, all volunteer.

That being said - our military, and the attending burden and duty - are predominantly the province of the lower-middle and lower classes. And I've wondered for years - had Chelsea Clinton been a reservist in a motor pool, had the children of our congresspeople and diplomats and bureaucrats and spinmeisters been combat engineers and army truck drivers and tank repair girls, would we have intervened as blithely and cavalierly in Somalia, or Haiti, or the Balkans?

I have no answer to that, of course.

Read the whole article - it's worth it.

Pizza on Patrol

Earlier today, I linked to to a site whose mission is to allow people to send take-out pizza to Israeli soldiers on duty against Palestinian terrorists. I added that while it seemed like a cool idea (and one that'd be interesting to apply to, say, Afghanistan), I wasn't sure that it wasn't a hoax site. Not like that ever happens on the 'net.

An email correspondent writes:

Whats so funny about sending pizza/burgers to israeli soldiers, I've done it!

So I guess the site's legit. Cool.

He went on to answer my rhetorical question about kosher pizza (and I have to say that for a goy from North Dakota, I do know a lot about kosher food laws. Don't ask). My question was more like; "Is Kosher Pizza any good?", but I suppose after a day of looking for dynamite under people's jackets, even Domino's would taste just fine.

Diversity

My kids are still six years way from thinking about college. Thankfully.

Katherine Kersten isn't so lucky. She wrote this op-ed last week in the Strib:

Why does this academic imbalance matter? Today, most college professors encourage their students to view subjects like political science, sociology, economics and history through the ideological prism of the political left. They urge students to analyze American society through the lens of race, class and gender, and to adopt a reflexive skepticism about America's role in the world. The impact of ideological imbalance extends well beyond the classroom. At many campuses, for example, young people may find it difficult to recruit a faculty adviser for a prolife student organization, or arrange a lecture by a conservative political figure.

Where can college students go to hear the other half of the story? Generally, they've got to ferret it out on their own. To help my own young friends, I've purchased a new book by political commentator Dinesh D'Souza, called "Letters to a Young Conservative." In the early 1980s, D'Souza helped found the Dartmouth Review, a conservative student newspaper at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College. His slim new volume is a useful primer for students who are eager to sample the intellectual diversity they can't find in college classrooms.

I converted from McGovern liberalism to Reagan/Goldwater big-picture conservatism while I was in college, no thanks to most of the college's staff (but, of course, for my major advisor, the English department chairman, Dr. James Blake. Can you imagine being able to say "My English Department chairman catalyzed my switch to conservatism" these days, at anyplace this side of Hillsdale or Liberty Baptist?). Dinesh D'Souza wasn't available to me when I was in college (Jamestown College, class of '85). The books that started me rolling to the right were Modern Times by Paul Johnson, Republican Party Reptile by P.J. O'Rourke, 1984 by Orwell, and The Gulag by Solzhenitzyn (nope, believe it or not, no Ayn Rand).

Here's been my big question all these years - we know that the campus became liberalized, then radicalized, in the sixties. While much of the rest of America has swung right since then, the academy has remained steadfastly left of not only center, but of what passes for "left" anywhere else in American society, "left" of where the majority of liberals were even in the sixties and early seventies (when they first took over the Democrat party). So - when does the sixties generation die off? Who replaces them? Is the liberal academic complex self-perpetuating?

To the Manor Born? -

To the Manor Born? - Eugene Volokh - son of a Russian immigrant - tackles Paul Krugman's attack on second-generation Republicans - and wonders why second-generation Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Andrew Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Skip/Buck Humphrey and so on don't come in for the same scrutiny.

Iran

Michael Ledeen of the National Review continues to report on what seems, to some observers, to be portents of the downfall of the "mullahcracy", after half a million Iranians hit the streets over the weekend:

Rafsanjani and his allies are preparing still greater repression for the suffering people of Iran, due o be launched on Wednesday, and already on Sunday members of the failed reformist movement were telling the students to calm down, so as not to provide a pretext for the looming crackdown. But it is by no means clear that the regime has the blind loyalty of the security forces any longer; during the recent demonstrations there were several instances of defections to the demonstrators' side, and even the Revolutionary Guards have been subjected to repeated purges, as the mullahs seek desperately to find willing killers and torturers.

Which brings us back to the debate-that-is-not-happening. How can we tell when a regime is about to fall? The key ingredient is not the sort of thing that the political scientists talk about in the academies, because it can't be measured, only smelled: It is a combination of failure of nerve at the top, and resolute desperation from below. On both counts, the trends are encouraging, but brutal repression is invariably successful if it is delivered with overwhelming strength, and the would-be revolutionaries cannot effectively cope with it.

We do not know how this will play out in the coming days and weeks, but one thing is already luminously clear: The Bush administration has missed an opportunity to strike a massive blow against the terror masters. If, instead of winking and nodding at various Iranian emissaries and back channels, we had supported the Iranian people with money, effective radio and television, and modern communications gear, the regime could very well have been smashed this past weekend.

That is a good question - why are we not exploiting this (or at least exploiting this more visibly)? Perhaps to avoid rekindling memories of the US tinkering that brought the Shah to power? Perhaps because Iraq seems the riper target, or at least the easier one to topple?

Maybe because the whole purpose is to stir the region up enough to cause the overthrow of the mullahcracies more or less spontaneously (with lots of help from us)?

I'm certainly entertaining suggestions.

Keillor, MPR News and the

Keillor, MPR News and the Republicans - A few weeks ago, rumor (local and otherwise, via Smart Genes) had it that Garrison Keillor's anti-Coleman rants had chilled relations between the MPR newsroom and the Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty camps.

Not so, says a source at MPR News: "nobody's had any trouble dealing with Coleman after the Keillor articles. Apparently our News Director talked to him, and he just kept raving about our debate the day before the election." The source "...found him the same as always - easy to deal with. I think your source was misinformed!"

Misinformed? I thought you could believe everything you read on the internet...

Thanks, MPR source!

Bowling for Moore - Instapundit

Bowling for Moore - Instapundit has this piece of fact-checking from Forbes.com on some of the, er, "issues" in "Bowling for Columbine".

I Need Photoshop - So

I Need Photoshop - So I can do this sort of thing.

Can't Make It Up Fast

Can't Make It Up Fast Enough - Read this one a few times. It is apparently not a joke.

And, the more I read it, the more I like it. I believe I'm going to contribute.

I'm just wondering what Kosher pizza is like...

Exit - There's a small

Exit - There's a small undercurrent of paranoid lefties that thinks it's time to get out of the US - that there's someplace out there free from the ravages of John Ashcroft. This article in the San Antonio Current - San Antonio's City Pages, I think - showcases some of it. Note the paranoia...:

It's the not-so-rich whose fates are increasingly constrained by a government that has ratcheted sharply to the fanatical right.

The new thought police don't like anyone to criticize the government; they don't like gays; they don't like the arts; they don't like Muslims; they don't even like Halloween. They control the textbooks in Texas where, by law, history and social studies courses must teach capitalism as the only viable economic system. They control the public discourse, in which local television broadcasters laugh at the Libertarian candidate for opposing the death penalty (yes, that actually happened on election night). And now they control the House, the Senate, the Executive Office — and by extension the judiciary.

...juxtaposed with the triviality with which the subjects of this article address the issue:

So what's a citizen to do? “Prague,” my friend reiterates. I take a bite of the sourdough bread and nod. The best reason I can think of to stay is lunch at the Liberty Bar.

Hm. Maybe if we dropped sourdough bread on Pakistan, Al Quaeda'd capitulate.

The Pre-War Show

We're already working, "like termites" as this article from next week's Time Magaznie says, to undermine Hussein, within Iraq:

America's recent combat experiences in the Balkans and Afghanistan have confirmed for the Pentagon the virtues of psychological warfare and political initiatives in weakening the enemy before battle. These days the U.S. Army likes to say it is committed to "softening up the battlefield." Iraq is being softened up in many different ways. For one, following a Presidential Decision Directive on Oct. 3, the U.S. started a program to train up to 5,000 Iraqi exiles for possible missions in Iraq that could assist American combat troops. There is action inside Iraq too. A senior intelligence official tells Time that the U.S. has contacted groups that may be capable of sabotage before full-scale hostilities start. The U.S., says this official, is opening up lines to "people who can do World War II-style resistance, breaking up the infrastructure of communications and command." In a program that links intelligence, diplomacy, psychological warfare and military action, Saddam is being squeezed. "I see it as poking," says a State Department official. "Let's poke this pressure point and see what happens; let's see what reaction we get."

Remember a few weeks ago - we discussed the left's odd trope that toppling Hussein without a shot would be a defeat for the Administration?

To hear U.S. officials tell it, this war before the war brings a double benefit. On the one hand, it prepares the ground if a full-blown invasion proves necessary. On the other hand, it just may be enough to topple Saddam without having to bomb Iraq and march into Baghdad. "We've embarked on steps that help us prepare for a military option inside Iraq," says the State Department official, "but that don't constitute a crossing of the Rubicon. None of these steps are irreversible, and all of them could help promote the longer-term destabilization of Saddam's government."

In the meantime, the pace of operations is picking up:

Already, U.S. and British warplanes have moved to a more aggressive posture while enforcing Iraq's no-fly zones, the northern and southern regions from which Iraqi planes are banned. In the past, when Iraqi forces fired on allied planes, the reply came in attacks on guns and missile batteries. That has changed. Now the allied planes are attacking command-and-control centers, communications nodes and the fiber-optic network that links Iraq's air-defense system. "We're responding differently," says a Pentagon official, "hitting multiple targets when we're fired upon—and they're tending to be more important targets."

A big issue, not only for the left for for anyone that follows the history of the region, is "what about the Kurds?"

What's more, the U.S., safe in the northern no-fly zone over which Baghdad has no control, is beginning to work more closely with the Iraqi Kurds, who are starting to get their often tangled act together. A few weeks ago, the two leading Iraqi Kurdish political groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (K.D.P..) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.), started to carry out a historic accord designed to end their years of often violent rivalry and to launch a period of working together.

And that "period of working together" may only last until Hussein is at room temperature, or cooling his heels in the Sudan. But the job'll get done.

Murder in Minneapolis - A

A shootout between gangbangers in Minneapolis has left a 12-year-old girl dead.

The Strib's headline this morning? "Stray Bullet Kills 12-Year-Old". Powerline notes the media's soft-focus coverage of this tragedy - and, like many local critics, notices that the bullet didn't motivate itself. It was fired by "couple of Minneapolis's finest gangbangers", as Big Trunk of Powerline calls them, busily blasting themselves - no, blasting everythign around them into infinity, whilst leaving their own worthless carcasses untouched.

So what will (Minnapolis state rep) Wes Skoglund be talking about in re this crime, when the concealed-carry debate restarts? The bags of human scum that fired the shots? Or the fact that they had guns - without distinguishing their most-likely-illegally-obtained pistols from those of the law-abiding citizens he so constantly decries?

By the way, a Minneapolis police sergeant told me in 1986 - when gang shootings were still a bit of a novelty in Minneapolis - that the safest place to be when the bangers start shooting is...their target. The most dangerous place is 45 degrees off the line of fire, in a second floor living room, minding your own business. He was being facetious - the kind of facetious that comes from having to deal with this kind of crap for a living. This was right after an eight-year-old boy was paralyzed from the waist down by a stray bullet from a gang fight two blocks away. The bangers - firing at each other from across the street - all escaped unharmed, if memory serves.

Clinton on Civil Liberties -

Clinton on Civil Liberties - The "Talkleft" blog has a fascinating look at the erosion of civil liberties...

...during the Clinton Administration::

Laura Murphy concludes that "both Clinton and Dole are indicative of how far tbe American people have slipped away from the notions embodied in the Bill of Rights." She omitted the role of the press, which seems focused primarily on that part of the First Amendment that protects the press.

Particularly revealing were the endorsements of Clinton by the New York Times, The Washington Post and the New Republic, among others. In none of them was the president's civil liberties record probed. (The Post did mention the FBI files at the White House.) Other ethical problems were cited, but nothing was mentioned about habeas corpus, court-stripping, lowering the content of the Internet to material suitable for children and the Clinton administration's decided lack of concern for privacy protections of the individual against increasingly advanced government technology.

A revealing footnote to the electorate's ignorance of this subverting of the Constitution is a statement by N. Don Wycliff, editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune. He tells Newsweek that "people are not engaged in the [political] process because there are no compelling issues driving them to participate. It would be different if we didn't have peace and prosperity."

If Ashcroft is gutting the constitution as the far left claims (wrongly, but let's be ecumenical here), then he's standing on the shoulders of giants; Reno, McCafferty, Clinton himself.

...

The Blacklist Continues

I'm posting the Blogosphere Blacklist on a separate page.

Feel free to send me more entries!

This Week on Shot in the Dark - We'll be doing Part II of the St. Paul School Board's alleged budget shenanigans.

What did the St. Paul Public Schools get for the $3,180 paid to Progressive Minnesota? Among other things, campaign literature that may have violated campaign fraud laws.

More later this week.

Hate Crime

A british writer for the conservative "Telegraph" was jailed on hate crime charges - namely:

Mr Page, 61, was detained in a police cell after being interviewed about remarks made by him at a country fair at Frampton-upon-Severn, Glos, on Sept 6...

[Mr Page said] that Londoners had the right to run their own events, such as the Brixton carnival and gay pride marches, which celebrated black and gay culture. Why therefore, he asked, should country people not have the right to do what they liked in the countryside.

Mr Page said yesterday: "I urged people to go on the march and I urged that the rural minority be given the same legal protection as other minorities. All I said was that the rural minority should have the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays.

"What is wrong with that in a multicultural society? I said nothing that could possibly be interpreted as racist."

In a society where victim status is a commodity, anything is potentially offensive.

Idiot Conspiracies

The blogosphere has been examining the left's incoherent rage, as expressed on the one hand by "serious" writers like Keillor, Ivins, Moyers - and, on the other hand, the tattered criers in the "Democrat Street"; on the web and elsewhere:

" … alert: possible bush/republican coup: sen. wellstone assassinated … u.s. senator paul wellstone killed in mysterious plane crash right before pivotal, ‘too-close-to-call’ election, just like mel carnahan in 2000 ….

"remember how just before congress was going to vote on signing away our constitutional rights to the usa patriot act, how mail laced with anthrax was sent to members of congress ….

"remember how the nazis set the german parliament building (reichstag) on fire ….

"this is it, folks. We need to mobilize *IMMEDIATELY* … against a potenital [sic] republican fascist assault …. "

Ron Rosenbaum in the NY Observer writes this excellent article about the raft of lefty conspiracy theories that surrounded Wellstone's death:

Why aren’t those who railed against paranoid, right-wing, murder-list Clinton-hatred standing up to this "cesspool" of incoherent Left Bush hatred? A few, like David Corn in The Nation, have tried to combat idiot conspiracy theories. But who can take left dissent seriously if it doesn’t separate itself from Bush assassination and anthrax charges? Who can take left dissent seriously if it defends Mr. Vidal’s ludicrous charge that Bush engineered the mass murder of 9/11? If it defends Mr. Vidal’s crackpot conspiracy theory—as a couple of letter writers did in these pages—as dissent. Of course we must take Vidal’s ravings seriously, they said in effect; it’s Bush he’s talking about, and so proof is unnecessary. But let’s face it: In a sense, they’re right. For much of the Left, dissent has degenerated into nothing more than incoherent, impotent Bush hatred...

Yes, there still is some issue-based dissent, but it’s drowned out by the incoherent rage. So any idiot conspiracy theory Mr. Vidal feels like floating that accuses Bush of arranging the 9/11 mass murder is just fine with today’s Leftists, because it’s Bush, don’t you see: It’s His Satanic Majesty, the Longhorn Lucifer, the Prince of Harkness (Yale reference), George W. Beelzebub.

Sad, self-destructive, but true.

And Speaking of Sore Losers - Go to this site, and see how many times they refer to the Administration as "The Bush Reich".

Blogs! What Are They Good For?

Michael Moore has made a career of ambushing people with their own statements, on behalf of "the little guy". So the irony of Moore being hoist on his petard by the littlest guys 'n gals in the media - bloggers - is richly ironic.

Here's what "Wired" said:

Years From Now They'll Call it 'Payback Tuesday'," Moore wrote in a hyperbolic letter urging his fans to vote in the U.S. elections Nov. 5. The full letter, posted to michaelmoore.com two days before the vote, predicted, "We will deny Bush control of the Congress next week ... Expect a wake-up call from me at your bedside 6 a.m. Tuesday!"

After Glorious Tuesday (as I'm going to call it until I'm tired of it), Moore took down the "Payback Tuesday" page.

And the story mushroomed. Rachel Lucas noticed the excision, and then followed up on it. Soon, it was everywhere.

So - blogs can help keep people honest. Or, in the case of Moore, make them honest in the first place.

In a more trival vein - I'm having lots of fun with the blacklist - send more!

More Nominees

A couple of correspondents sound off:

"Joe Biernat and Christine Jax [ed: the writer is mistaken. Biernat's a Minneapolis DFL City Councilman who just resigned over corruption charges, and brother of Jax' husband Len, also a bigtime liberal Minnesota pol]. She's the State Commisioner of Children, Families and Learning - there's an Orwellian title for you, huh?] for making liberal sycophancy a family industry"

"Katrina Vanden Huevel-only Trotsky is "progressive" enough for her"

"Rick Kahn [eulogist at the Paul Wellstone memorial and rally], for being the only person in the US who couldn't get Jim Ramstad to vote with the Democrats"

"I'd like to nominate Syl Jones, the [Minneapolis Star/Tribune's afrocentric columnist and...] Racism Expert ("whether it's there or not, he'll find it"). Although I guess this will guarantee my induction in the VWRC (Vast White Racists Conspiracy).

Well, that's the nice thing about being in control of the blacklist - we get to decide who's a conspirator, and who's not, now!

And, says another correspondent:

Mitch! Are you losing your mind? Garrison Keillor! Can't believe you forgot Garry!"

Ooof. He's right.

And another:

John Marty [DFL Senator from the 'burbs who never met an issue he couldn't tie "to the children"]
Andy Dawkins [DFL Rep from St. Paul who led Soliah's crew of local waterboys]
Any Humphrey or Mondale (We have to move on)
Star Tribune editorial board

Nationally:
Marry Francis Berry (The woman is plain nuts)
James Earl Carter
Jesse Jackson
Any Kennedy (See Humphrey and Mondale)
Dennis Kunnich

And more:

Harry ("I've been in the Banana Boat too long") Belefonte

Hanoi Jane role models:
Mike Thompson of California
David Bonior of Michigan

Jesse ("Where's the ambulance?") Jackson

Keep 'em coming!

Blacklist Nominee

Wow - the pixels were hardly dry! An emailer nominates:

Daniel Schorr - If I hear that nitwit brag one more time about being on nixon's enemies list, i'm going to puke.

Another sends

[MPR "Midmorning" host] Katherine Lanpher. The sneering condescension oozes between the lines of everything she says.

I'll compile the full list tonight, by the way.

The Blogosphere Blacklist

In the mid-nineties, P.J.O'Rourke started a tongue-in-cheek "blacklist" of liberal celebs and eminementoes that had outstayed their welcomes, and needed to leave the public eye.

Well, it's a new century, and a new adminstration - and it's time for a new blacklist! And where better to do that than here in the Blogosphere?

I'll start things out:

• Noam Chomsky
• Barbra Streisand
• Alec Baldwin
• The Berkeley City Council for crimes too numerous to detail
• The Minneapolis City Council for looking up to Berkeley
• Kathleen Soliah aka Sarah Jane Olson
• Soliah's benefactor, MN State Senator Sandy Pappas
• Common Cause of Minnesota, for carrying the water for the Speech Rationing movment
• Nina Totenberg
• Jessica Lange for bringing her squalid Hollywood politics to Stillwater

More to come!

I'm accepting nominations! And spread the word!

The Babs Test

Rachel Lucas got this petition drive in the mail. Supposedly it has seven thousand signatures.

The HUSH Petition (Help Us Silence Hollywood, or, more informally, Up Babs')
We, the undersigned, being of sound mind and strong viewership, would like to petition both Hollywood and the news media in order to restrain celebrities (movie & TV stars, pop & rock stars, producers, directors, etc.) from capitalizing on their celebritihood to sound off on whatever issue-du-jour comes rolling along to which they must bear witness. It is our deeply held belief that, on an extremely sunny day, only 1/2 of one percent of these stars could pass an entry-level college final relating to the political event for which their feet are oft found wedged deeply in their mouths (see B. Streisand, A. Baldwin, M. Moore, H. Belafonte, S. Penn, J. Fonda, W. Harrelson, M. Sheen, E. Asner, J. Lange, et al, etc., ad nauseam) and thereby merit no ink nor air time. It is ruinous enough for the civic culture to hear TV anchors who wouldn't know a "demand curve" from their elbow yammer on and on about the economy, but the glitterati sermonizing to us about America!?

It's clearly time to demand some evidence of educated brain waves prior to handing the public megaphone to celebrities. It is also our belief that if not for showing off their silicon, facelifts, and/or hairplugs on the silver screen, most of these knuckleheads would be modeling underwear at Wal-Mart, working third tier escort services in Jersey, or removing asbestos from tire factories in Detroit. And, as such, the news industry must restrain from entering these vacuous remarks into the public domain until said celeb has passed the appropriate college-level test corresponding to their tirade at hand.

Say, for instance, a Cher belches out that Bush is poisoning our drinking water. Prior to this being placed into the public domain for mass digestion by the news media, it is essential that Cher immediately take, and receive a passing grade on, a college-level Chemistry final. Or the next time a Madonna flatulates that the Republicans are Nazis, Madonna must promptly pass an upper-level history exam on the National Socialist Party's rise to power in 1920's Germany. Or when a Babs bladders poetically about the Hollywood Blacklist, she must drop everything and write a 1,000-word essay (using Spellcheck, of course) on The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and also get 80 percent or above on a pop quiz regarding Stalin’s pact with Hitler, just for good measure.

In essence, the protocol defined in this petition places the burden on celebrities to first prove that their IQs are deeper than their makeup before their opinions, and other like tantrums, see the light of day.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Fly-Over Country

Perhaps what we need, a la P.J. O'Rourke's classic book, "The Enemies List", is to start a new "Black List" of limo lefties, condo pinks, piddlers on merit and greenshirts that need a group razz.

Hmm...

The Daschle Rant

Trying to find a non-Democrat scapegoat for the Democrat degüello of two weeks ago, lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Daschle has been lashing out at conservative-dominated Talk Radio. It's gratifying to see talk radio lashing back.

Now, I've always been amazed to read/hear liberals complaining about "conservative-dominated media". Greens might be able to make this claim with a straight face - to a Green, Peter Jennings probably is legitimately pretty conservative. But I'm trying to remember the last time I heard a major media outlet other than Fox News coming down on the right side of gun control, abortion, foreign policy, welfare reform, taxes...

A reader writes:

After being frozen out of the Big Media, the Right proceeded to build alternate means to spread its message. The first area was AM radio. Ostensibly a dead medium 20, 30 years ago, unapologetically conservatively biased talk shows took off. The fortunate arrival of the talented conservative entertainer, Rush Limnbaugh, accelerated this build-up, but it was due to happen anyway. There was a market.

The Left, being at best somewhat suspicious of markets, has reacted to this trend by invoking bogus Equal Time requests and generally whining.

I don't know if this is at all a significant realization on my part, but I thought it was interesting. It may not even be unique, which means that someone else may have said it better than I.

Well, there is nothing new under the sun, but it's a very good point. The left has near-full control of the major commercial and public media with regard to editorial stances and coverage spin of the issues that matter to most people: pocketbook and simple policy.

Now that we, the right in all of our mind-blowing diversity, have built an alternate, samizdat media culture of our own, suddenly the left is concerned about media bias?

He Who Laughs Last

As I've said many times in this space, and as virtually the entire blogosphere knows, James Lileks is a great writer, a humorist in the classical sense, capable of mixing poignance, rage, intelligence, love and bathos into a zany laff riot. Like most bloggers (almost all of whom link to him), I hover about, reading his stuff, hoping to find cast-off bits of his talent at the writers consignment shop (Uptown, 32nd and Hennepin).

But, finally, I'm ahead of him on one thing. He's been assimilated. Here's the story.

Like me, James is an expat North Dakotan. He's from Fargo's urban jungles. I'm from Jamestown - a more western outpost.

Years ago - no, years ago, when Lileks was filling in for Bob Yates at KSTP, he was talking about scenery. This, obviously, was in the days before "talk radio" meant "politics all the time'.

I called, and asked:

"James? You're from North Dakota, too. Don't you think that the prairie, in its own way, is just as beautiful as the mountains? I mean, in a nuanced, subtle kind of way, all in the little details, in the same way that a really great line drawing is just as uplifting and interesting as a busy Classical scene study? I mean, the nuances of the prairie grass against the magnificence of the sky, the sounds...don't you think?"

He answered:

"No".

So today's Bleat comes out - and I'm astonished to see this, referring to Fargo's recession-proof (this time) economy and local leaders' efforts to pitch the city:

Climate, I’ll grant them. It’s marrow-cracking cold in the winter. Big deal. So you dress in layers. As for scenery, it takes an unimaginative mind not to see the glory of the prairie - after you’ve seen the Panavision sky change nine times in the course of a day, mountains look so obvious, so tired. Imagine a mountain range that reshapes itself hourly, and you have the cloud banks of the North Dakota prairie. And this sight is available to all, unimpeded by any signs of civilization, five minutes from the Barnes and Noble. You can put down your Starbucks, drive west, stop, and behold a magnificent void that humbles your heart more than any city skyline or coastal view. It’s not for everyone; it has its chilling existential implications, but don’t say they don’t have scenery. When you hit the Great Plains, the sky is your IMAX, and it’s open 24/7.

Just what I said, fifteen years ago!

Only, like, better.

Someday, I'll write my own paeon to the place James and I (and Swen) left behind.

Til then, there's plenty of work to do.

War Soon?

Swen Swenson from A Coyote at the Dog Show writes the "impending war" post I've been chewing on for a long time.

Well, part of it.

A Great Proposal

James Robbins of the National Review has the best proposal I've seen yet for memorializing the victims of September 11:

I have always admired the fact the Victoria Cross was originally manufactured from metal taken from Russian artillery pieces captured during the Crimean War, from which the decoration originated. In that spirit I would like to propose something similar - that all campaign medallions awarded for service during the War on Terror be cast from metal from the World Trade Center towers. Currently the salvaged beams are being cut up and sold for scrap in Asia. One long beam would supply enough metal for thousands of medals. And I think it would make the decorations that much more meaningful to the men and women who earn them, as well as let the survivors know that a small piece of the buildings in which their loved ones perished has been put to a noble use.

It is comparable to the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt loosing its first sorties against Afghanistan while flying the flag the three firemen raised in the rubble of the World Trade Towers, or Marines seizing the Kandahar airport and unfurling another Ground Zero flag, covered with the names of the fallen and messages from survivors. ("They took 23 good cops. Pay back time.") These moments merge events with power and elegance. Crafting medals from the debris of the buildings destroyed by our enemies — and let's also include the Pentagon — would ennoble the awards in a manner that reaches beyond the valorous service they recognize. A medal struck from tower beams would be more than an acknowledgment; it would be a tangible connection, an unduplicatable fusion of time, space, and memory.

For what it's worth, I'm foursquare behind this idea.

I'm writing my congresspeople right now. Tell them Senator Inouye of Hawaii - himself a Medal of Honor winner - supports this, and he needs their support too.

Here's the Senate and House websites, with addresses.

If you're from Minnesota, write Senators Barkley (no current email address), Dayton, and Senator-elect Coleman, and our House delegation.

Gored, Part IV

If Moveon.org is the most irritating liberal artifact of the nineties, the most cloying trope of the two-thousands has to be the liberal bleat that Algore was defeated by the fiat of an "activist, conservative Supreme Court".

George Will bludgeons that notion, as well as Algore's recent attempts to reconstruct history.

Barbara Walters recently asked him if there were times during the 36 days of Florida turmoil when he thought he was going to be president. He answered:

''Yes. Specifically, when the Florida Supreme Court ruled that they would have to actually count all the ballots. That's all I asked for. Count all the ballots. I asked them to count them statewide. They were focusing in on four counties but they should've been counted statewide as well.'' (Emphasis added)

Well. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Gore's historical fiction demands refutation.

Will goes on to do just that. Gore never asked for a statewide recount, and it wasn't the US Supremes that were the judicial activists - it was Florida's, which 'breezily dismissed the Legislature's deadlines for counting votes and certifying results as ``hypertechnical reliance upon statutory provisions.'"

I want to print the whole article and carry it with me for every time I run into another halfwit who parrots that trope...

(Via Powerline)

Watching the Detectives - Allegations

Tom Swift is a St. Paul engineer and Republican gadfly. He's one of a small, dedicated group of fellow muckrakers who are wondering where in the hell all of the St. Paul Public School district's money goes.

He went looking for answers. He found something.

Progressive Minnesota is a failed political party that has morphed into a PAC and organizing group working for liberal causes. Progressive Minnesota receives donations from all of the major liberal candidacies - everyone from Jay Benanav for Mayor to Wellstone for Senate appears on their donor lists - in exchange for providing legwork and organizing for the candidacies and their causes. Roy Magnuson of the St. Paul Teachers Federation sits on the Progressive Minnesota Board.

Since May of 2002, Progressive Minnesota has also been a non-profit organization, entitling it to act as a community organization rather than just a Political Action Committee, for legal, regulatory and tax purposes. Remember that date.

In November of 2001, the SPPS paid $3,000 to Progressive Minnesota. The payment was labelled (in the School District's documentation, copies of which Mr. Swift sent me) as "Dinner and Organizing".

The problem with this? Progressive Minnesota didn't have non-profit status - legally necessary to receive donations for such services in any capacity but as a PAC - until this past May. That's six months after the payment was made.

When pressed, the school bureaucracy's cooperation in allowing Mr. Swift access to the information was, at best, grudging. When pressed, one school board member said the money was for "Latino Outreach".

According to Swift, the money had nothing to do with Latino Outreach - Progressive Minnesota has no recognized Latino Outreach program. It was for help in getting out the vote for the referenda on new school taxes, to raise more money for the Saint Paul Public Schools. That is illegal.

The levy referendum passed. When it did, Progressive Minnesota threw a "pre-victory banquet", as it was called in the invitation that was sent out (and of which Mr. Swift has a copy). The Saint Paul Public Schools sent a check for $180 for a number of school board members and staff to attend this "pre-victory banquet".

So - to date, the Saint Paul Public Schools seems to have sent $3,180 to Progressive Minnesota, for political, not educational, services.

Tom Swift confronted the St. Paul School Board last Tuesday night with his information. The board was silent, except for board chairman Al Oertwig, who, to "keep things in perspective", reminded the board that many organizations have both political and civic arms; Oertwig cited the Chamber of Commerce as an example.

However, Oertwig failed to note for the audience and the record that Progressive Minnesota legally did not have a civic arm until they obtained non-profit status - six months after the funds changed hands!

At the very least, this would seem to be a waste of money that's much needed elsewhere. However, in the worst case, these payments are illegal - because Progressive Minnesota was a Political Action Committee at the time the payments were made.

Swift has filed a criminal complaint with the Ramsey County Attorney's office, and is in contact with the staff of Pat Awada - incoming state auditor.

The board sat quietly, as Swift (and Greg Copeland, and former board candidate Georgia Dietz) spoke about the allegations. None rose to defend Progressive Minnesota or the expenditure (although to be fair this may be because of the pending criminal complaint). However, it's worth noting that Progressive Minnesota is not in the least bit shy about their ties to at least three St. Paul School Board members.

There is much more to this story - including separate allegations of campaign fraud that are being forwarded to the Campaign Practices board. We'll go through that next week.

I'll continue covering this as it develops.

Courtesy

Peggy Noonan, on what the ostracism of smokers says about modern-day liberals:

I think it is an insufficiently commented-upon irony that cigarette prohibition and the public shaming it entails is the work of modern liberals. They're supposed to be the ones who are nonjudgmental, who live and let live, but they approach smoking like Carry Nation with her ax. Conservatives on the other hand let you smoke. They acknowledge sin and accept imperfection. Also most of them are culturally inclined toward courtesy of the old-fashioned sort.
If you tried to light up near a left-wing big-city attorney, she would cut off your hand the way Christopher chopped off Ralphie's the other night on "The Sopranos." But if you are a smoker and you go visit a nice little unsophisticated Baptist lady in a suburb of Tuscaloosa, she will not only allow you to smoke, she will scurry into the dining room to find the china ashtray she put away 10 years ago under the folded table cloths. She would do this so you could have a nice place to put your ashes. She wouldn't dream of making you uncomfortable. That would be impolite and inhospitable.

Modern liberals are not culturally inclined toward courtesy. They are inclined toward knowing what's good for you and passing ordinances to make sure you get the picture. The first Thank You For Not Smoking sign I ever saw was in 1976, on the desk of Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. I thought: I have seen the future, and it is puritanical.

Puritanical.

I remember an acqaintance using that word to describe a Green Party meeting - like a gathering of Puritans. Dwelling incessantly on fear and condemnation, afraid of joy as a sign of frivolity or unworthiness, not above castigating you, for your own good of course...

Noonan says:

Maybe it makes them feel in control. Maybe it makes them feel superior.

Or maybe they just want to bully someone.

Read the whole thing - it's worth the time.

Disintegrating Left Alert?

The most irritating artifact of the late nineties is "MoveOn.org", a group that germinated during the impeachment with blandishments to "move on". Move on from investigating a perjerous president; move on and don't turn over any of the rocks of his campaign finance dealings with the Chinese, or the allegations of rape against him, or his role in a bank failure, blackmail, or...insert list of allegations. Like a toddler that just missed the toilet...just "move on". (Significantly, they seem unwilling to "move on" from the 2000 election.

The bad news? The most most recent iteration of their website is a real piece of work: It refers to the administration, in standard juveno-leftist cant, as a "regime", among many other things.

The good news?

It hasn't been updated since before the election!

Like the Million Mom March, which just laid off about 85% of its staff, maybe they're reaching the end of their tether.

Evil Talk Radio

Although the Dems have yet to show how "right wing" talk radio is responsible (as they claimed in 1995) for the Oklahoma City bombing (which indeed may have had Iraqi involvement - hardly a key Limbaugh audience), Yahoo! Tom Daschle is back at it.

He claims that "What happens when (radio talk show host) Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren't satisfied just to listen," the South Dakota Democrat explained. "They want to act because they get emotionally invested. And so, you know, the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that's very disconcerting."

The logical thing to do would be to clamp down on idiots. But that would hardly do (Democrat voter joke deleted for purposes of civil conversation). But no - it's conservative dissent he's after.

And I loved this one:

If entertainment becomes so much a part of politics and if that entertainment drives an emotional movement in this country among some people who don't know the difference between entertainment and politics, and who are then so energized to go out and hurt somebody, that troubles me about where politics in America is going," Daschle said

So all those Democrats who have been shuffling around since 2000 claiming that Josh Bartlett is the real president should change their tone. Right, Senator Daschle?

Oh, Lord, I'm glad he's from South Dakota.

The GOP and the Immigrants

The toughest nut the Minnesota GOP has to crack is the urban vote - controlled in the inner city by afro, latino and asian voters. These voters traditionally vote Democrat nationwide, and DFL locally.

The National Review's Daniel T. Griswold has an excellent article on how the old saws about immigrant voters, like those about voter turnout, may not hold up to scrutiny, especially scrutiny at the polls. One of several reasons he cites:

Hispanics are "up for grabs" politically. Despite their Democratic leanings, they are not monolithic the way black voters unfortunately are. At the presidential level, for example, the share of Hispanics voting Republican swelled from 21 percent for Bob Dole in 1996 to 35 percent for George Bush in 2000. And a recent poll showed that Hispanics would vote 50-35 for Bush over Democrat Al Gore if an election were held today. Many Hispanics are socially conservative with a strong work ethic — Hispanic men have a high labor-force participation rate — and propensity for home ownership. A sympathetic Republican candidate who respects immigrants can woo a sizeable chunk of Hispanics along with other swing voters.

That's Hispanics. The Asians, who are currently a solidly DFL bloc, are equally rabid about small busines - a tradtional GOP strength. The Asian vote is largely habitual in St. Paul - DFL reps were instrumental in bringning many of our Hmong citizens to the US.

If a sympathetic GOP candidate could convince these immigrants - as socially and fiscally conservative as they already are - that the GOP was the party with their best interests at heart, who knows what could happen?

It's a Man's, Man's, Man's Responsibility

Wendy McElroy on the brewing-up of a gender war whose flames I've been fanning myself for a long time - the matching of reproductive rights and reproductive responsibilities.

According to PC feminism, the woman alone has the right of choice in carrying a pregnancy to term while the man bears legal responsibility for child support. Yet, in paying child support, he has no guarantee of joint custody or even visitation rights.

The idea of responsibilities without rights is taken to such absurd lengths that even men who do not father children are held responsible for them. Consider the case of Morgan Wise, as chronicled by journalist Cathy Young. Blood tests proved that only one of "his" four children were actually his, yet the court ordered Wise to continue all child support payments and prohibited him from contact with the children. His role in that family is now the biological equivalent of an ATM machine. Wise's case is unfortunately hardly unique.

And, so, gender warfare becomes a political reality -- not because it exists naturally, but because it has been created. The legal system now assigns rights to women and responsibilities to men.

Texas Cage Match

Don't put Rachel Lucas in the same room as Molly Ivins. It won't be pretty, as this fisking shows.

Ms. Lucas, by the way, is a former Minnesotan. Someday, I'm going to do a Three Degrees of Geographical Separation in the Blogosphere. I think I can eventually link most of us...

Budget Shenanigans at the St. Paul Schools

My kids both attend the St. Paul Public schools. Now, I'm not like a lot of conservatives - my dad taught public school for nearly 40 years, and I'm not one to attack the public school system by reflex.

But all is not well. Despite booming budgets and skyrocketing property taxes to pay for them, the SPPS is starved for cash - or is sure acting like it is. My son came home from school and said his teacher had told him "paper is as valuable as gold" at his school.

So money's tight.

But there's growing evidence that the St. Paul Public Schools made a political contribution to a political action committee, for political reasons. (All but one member of the St. Paul School Board are Democrats, endorsed by the Teachers Union, among others). Money that our students need - and that taxpayers of all political stripes assumed was going toward teachers, books and maintenance - has apparently been diverted to the coffers of a local liberal politcal organization.

More on this as I run down the last of the details.

Casualties of War - DJ

DJ Tice of the Pioneer Press has an excellent analysis of the DFL (and national Democrats') troubles.

What might this reveal? While not ignoring the powerful personal appeal of Clinton, there is a more important common characteristic about the elections from 1992 to 2000, when Democrat presidential candidates did well. Those elections came between the end of the Cold War and Sept. 11, 2001 — a period when issues of national security, for the first time in memory, were not preoccupying Americans' minds.

In this month's election — the first since national security came back as a critical concern — Americans turned decisively back toward the GOP and George W. Bush.

Democrats must fearlessly consider the implication of this pattern. Whatever other problems they face, it simply seems that too many ordinary Americans lack confidence that modern liberals will boldly defend the nation and its interests. It's a long-term problem, born with the anti-Vietnam War movement's declaration that America was the villain in Southeast Asia and continuing today in suggestions among progressives that America's enemies have legitimate reasons to hate us. It's not a problem old-style liberals like Truman or Kennedy had.

In other words, "All You Need is Love" is a fine sentiment when nobody is challenging that assumption; when that happens, the American peoples' motto changes to "Peace Through Superior Firepower".

And I like Tice's closing comment; the notion that bashing American achievement, place and safety was part and parcel of being a big-government, tax 'n spend Liberal is a product of the sixties. Nobody could accuse Truman, JFK, Adlai Stevenson, LBJ, Ed Muskie or Hubert Humphrey of being America-Last-ers. And that generation was shown the door in '72...

...by the likes of Paul Wellstone, Sandy Pappas, Sarah Jane Olson, Andy Dawkins...

Worth a read.

(Via Powerline)

A Pack, not a Herd

A Pack, not a Herd - Glenn Reynolds - aka the Instapundit - writes this excellent column on what Americans can do to be more prepared for - and less worried about - terrorism.

I will say up front, though, that although I'm totally in favor of individual citizens taking the initiative to prepare themselves, such self-help measures would probably do a lot more good if the federal and state governments actually took a role in encouraging and facilitating them. But if they drop the ball, or if you want to get a leg up on the process before the much slower bureaucracy gets rolling, here are a few things you can do to help. The odds are, of course, that you'll never use them, or even come close to needing them, in the face of a terrorist attack. Those are actually pretty rare. But you'll probably never need your smoke detector, either. And, anyway, many of these skills and behaviors may turn out to be useful otherwise.

In the seventies and eighties, saying such things would get one labelled a "survivalist" - with the implicit assumption that one was a paranoid, probably white supremacist.

Good to see, in a way, that world events have made common sense acceptable again.

Gift of the Hatch -

Gift of the Hatch - Mike Hatch says, according to the Strib, that Hatch money from his office to Pawlenty has no strings attached.

Which means, of course, that there are strings attached

Hatch happens to be one of the last DFLers standing after election day, and presumably his largesse won't be forgotten when Pawlenty's administration gets down to the business of imposing major budget cuts. The state faces a budget shortfall of about $3 billion, and Pawlenty has pledged to balance the budget without raising taxes.

Watching Mike Hatch - himself a former gubernatorial candidate - adapt to his first conservative administration is going to be interesting.

Quidditched

I may be one of about twenty adults left in the Twin Cities that haven't read all four Harry Potter books.

Oh, don't get me wrong: I'm not like my sister, who bans the stuff from her house because of her understandable (but silly) belief that they glorify sorcery. My kids have, between them, read them both at least once. They love 'em, and I credit them with catapulting my son's reading level in particular into the stratosphere; it's amazing what a little raucus adventure does for a boy's imagination. And I've read bits and pieces of the books, as bed-time stories - they're fun, well-written, and engaging. Heck - I may even read one all the way through someday. Maybe.

So I understand they're better than either movie adaptation.

Oy, vey - they'd have to be.

I took the kids to see "Chamber of Secrets" Friday night. It didn't help that the 7:45 show was sold out, and the kids inveigled me to wait for the 9:45 show. Which was when I discovered the show was three hours long.

Long story short - I conked out for most of the climax of the movie (although my kids certainly did not). It wasn't just fatigue from having been ill (although that played its part) - it just didn't grab me. It occurred to me - I was more interested in the characters and story in the roughly two hours I've spent reading the stories to my children than in the nearly six hours I've spent in the movies!

John Podhoretz says pretty much what I think:

Might all this affect or scare seven-year-olds? Possibly, but then you can still terrify a seven-year-old by saying "Boo." It's not much of an accomplishment to frighten them. It is an accomplishment to stir their imaginations and infuse their bedtimes with a sense of wonder and excitement. That's what J. K. Rowling has managed to do with her triumphant series of novels. She has revitalized children's literature by making it a grand adventure once more.

The two Harry Potter movies, by contrast, are plodding and dull and dutiful. They attempt to be faithful to the books, and yet the very qualities that make the books so glorious are entirely absent. The movies get everything right but still manage to get everything wrong.

On the plus side - the new Lord of the Rings is almost here.

Before you think that makes me sound like a AV-Club robodork, we are talking about he opposite phenomenon; I couldn't stand Tolkien's books. I made it maybe 30 pages into Rings, and maybe 15 into The Hobbit - and this in ninth and tenth grade, at the height of my acne-ridden, greasy-haired dorkitude.
Yet I loved last year's installment in a way that I never enjoy fantasy/sci-fi movies or books - because it told the story in a way that engaged even a hardened non-fan, made me actually want to know what was going to happen to these people...er, people and hobbits and elves and dwarves and other such things I hadn't talked about since my one lone game of D and D, back in the seventies.

Quote of the Day

"But it is a bit troubling that we're excited and happy when university presidents endorse free speech, isn't it?" Glenn Reynolds.

And now, I'm going home.

Lambert on Keillor

Brian Lambert, if you're from out of town, is the Pioneer Press' media columnist. He's the quintessential critic - in several attempts to be an air personality, he's proven himself an excellent print journalist.

And his left-bias is as subtle as Christina Aguilera's outfit at the MTV Music Awards.

But he has the occasional point, as with this one on Keillor's rants:

But it's not like this anger at double standards and routine character assassination by Republican media foghorns validates rumors about a politician's private life. Mainstream media organizations routinely pursue rumors of all kinds about politicians of all ideologies. And by "mainstream," I mean actual journalists. People who require verifiable facts as the basis of their stories...

In other words, the insistence of infuriated liberals notwithstanding, the media are unlikely to run with a story if they can't prove there is any there, there.

And, as noted elsewhere in the article, nobody's been able to find any there, there.

However, Lambert uncorks this hooter:

It is interesting, though, when you ask news organizations, theoretically, what they would do if they found rumors about a politician's personal life to be true. Some say it would be a story in and of itself and that they would run with it. Others say it would require another set of factors — something that would trigger the so-called "hypocrisy factor," such as pandering to the family values crowd.

Which would explain the ongoing media lynching of former Senator Rod Grams. He didn't do anything "worse" than what, for example, another sitting Minnesota congressperson is alleged to be doing more-or-less currently. Yet the media tarred Grams with the brush of his alcoholic, drug-addicted son's hijinks (even though Grams had been a non-custodial parent - his ex-wife had raised Morgan). If Grams had just been a DFL libertine, this quote seems to indicate it would have been kept on the QT. Right, Mr. Lambert?

Either way, anyone who was disgusted by what was done to Bill Clinton ought to stop and think how far into this sewer they want to go.

Fair enough, that. But if Lambert wants to play the comparison game, he's probably on fairly thin ice.

(Via Powerline and Fraters Libertas)

Cringe

Normally, I couldn't care less about the peccadilloes of celebrities - especially the celebrities who are famous for being famous. People like Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Charles Nelson Reilly...

And Jacko, who's long since lost any claim as a musician.

But this? I cringed looking at this damn picture.

The man...er, whatever...needs to be institutionalized.

National Ammo Day

Powerline reminds me that today is National Ammo Day.

Celebrate the Second Amendment by buying an extra 100 rounds of ammunition on November 19th. Great for hunting, self-defense, target practice and annoying the anti-gun lobbyists.

A box of 8mm Mauser and a couple of .22LRs should do it.

Happy Ammo Day!

Maher's Back - Bill Maher

Bill Maher took a lot of flak for his remarks after 9/11 - mostly unjustified.

He's back, now, with this pointed-yet-funny set of WWII posters, updated for the War on Terrorism.

(Via Smart Genes)

Barbarians At the Gates?

Instapundit is carrying an interesting discussion about how civilized societies fight barbarians - with Al Quaeda and the Islamofascists filling the role of barbarians.

Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit )says:

Civilized societies have always won against barbarians ever since the industrial revolution made making things a greater source of power than breaking them.

Civilized societies have found it harder, though, to beat the barbarians without killing all, or nearly all, of them. Were it really to become all-out war of the sort that Osama and his ilk want, the likely result would be genocide -- unavoidable, and provoked, perhaps, but genocide nonetheless, akin to what Rome did to Carthage, or to what Americans did to American Indians. That's what happens when two societies can't live together, and the weaker one won't stop fighting -- especially when the weaker one targets the civilians and children of the stronger. This is why I think it's important to pursue a vigorous military strategy now.

Another correspondent on Instapundit says

The new barbarians, like those of old, consist of groups in which every member is a potential warrior."

It seems to me that a part of the defense against these "barbarians" is to make every (or least most) members of our society a potential warrior by expanding concealed carry rights and allowing people to carry guns as a matter of course. I say this as a person who cannot be considered a gun nut. I am not a hunter, I've never been an NRA member and I have only minimal experience with guns. For a long time I supported gun control, but no longer. Now I am seriously considering purchasing a gun and getting trained to use it properly.

The writer makes a good point - one of many reasons to support shall-issue reform in Minnesota and elsewhere. But if indeed we face total war against barbarians at the gates, perhaps we should learn a lesson from other nations - our contemporaries - who've faced their own gathering hordes of barbarians; the Israelis, surrounded by enemies bent on their destruction; Norway, facing a Soviet threat alone, high above the arctic circle; and Switzerland, which has maintained its integrity for 400 years on a continent where independence has been maintained at a premium.

I'm talking about National Service.

You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time

This is the year Minnesota will most likely get a shall-issue concealed-carry law. We came so close in 2001, couldn't fight off a poison-pill amendment in '02 amid the budget fiasco...

...but this year we have a majority in the House, and a closer split in the Senate, where we came two votes from passage in '01.

The "Brady Campaign" - formerly and more honestly known as "Handgun Control Inc" - has posted this "study" to try to bolster the morale of the pro-victim-disarmament troops.

Read it - and note that no specifics are ever mentioned. They've posted the "Executive Summary" - but no raw data can be found anywhere on the site!

So when they say:

Between 1992 through 1998 (the last six years for which data exists), the violent crime rate in the strict and no-issue states fell 30% while the violent crime rate for states that liberalized carry laws prior to 1992 dropped half as much — by 15%. Nationally, the violent crime rate fell 25%...

...they don't mention that the states with the "big" drops were states with higher crime rates to begin with - and the "shall-issue" states were those with lower crime (thanks in part to "shall-issue" laws) before the "study" began!

If you're a CCW supporter, you have to keep your eyes out for this kind of thing.

Whither MPR?

According to Smart Genes, the MPR newsroom is "on full alert" after the Keillor rants of the last few weeks.

[longtime DFL road-warrior] Blois Olson, "a Democrat forever" and Janecek's associate publisher at the Politics in Minnesota newsletter, characterized the Keillor rants as "probably the most bitter, immature commentary of that kind that I can ever remember." Looking at the financial downside, Olson added, "And good luck, MPR, the next time you go looking for federal or state money."

The MPR newsroom was on full red alert for unofficial, unvetted opinions on the Keillor columns. No one would speak on record. But it is known that several reporters and hosts were openly angered by the predicament in which the columns put them with the Coleman camp and less sympathetic listeners.

One rumor had it that MPR's news staff's access to Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty was suffering due to the flap. Sources in MPR disagree, saying that the Pawlenty and Coleman (and their handlers) are too savvy to let comments by Keillor - speaking in a forum unconnected to MPR itself - affect their relations with the media.

On the other hand - Bill Kling and Garrison Keillor's longstanding relationship to the DFL is not going to help them much during the next session, looking for funding in the GOP-controlled Minnesota House:

In 1995, MPR and the Democratic National Committee exchanged donor lists, and MPR admitted to purchasing such lists from the DNC prior to then. In 1996, MPR bought donor names from the Wellstone for Senate campaign. (Pioneer Press, July 24 1999, p. 2D.) In 1986, after Lake Wobegon themes were used to promote a DFL fundraising appearance by Garrison Keillor, Bill Kling wrote the Pioneer Press to express dismay over the “crass use of public radio programs and images to promote the DFL party.” (Pioneer Press, October 18, 1986.)

I always wanted to write a bit that starts "Whither..."

By the way - to answer a couple of emails I've gotten, I think that while M/NPR's programming is pretty forthrightly slanted to the left (Katherine Lanpher, Juan Williams, Keillor, Ira Glass and Michael Feldman would never be mistaken for "balanced"), the MPR newsroom does as good a job of maintaining professional detachment and balance as any newsroom in town, and better than several (the Strib and WCCO, for starters, at the very least). Never let it be said I'm not ecumenical.

Life on Lam Ends

In a story that echoes one we covered in this space some time ago, a St. Paul woman has been arrested for hiding her child from her ex-husband.

It was a secretive life for the women and Elluara.

"I don't think the little girl had any friends," O'Hara said. "The shades were pulled. You could not see in the house. I don't think they wanted the neighbors to know the mother and child were living there...

...Deputies found a loaded .38-caliber handgun in a bag in the women's car after the arrest, O'Hara said. Investigators later found two more handguns and two rifles in the St. Paul house where the girl had been hidden.

It'll be interesting to see if the investigation of this case leads to any of the "underground" organizations that help send parents on the lam overseas with their children when they don't get the custody settlement they want.

Steph Tanks

George Stephanopoulos is having some problems as host of This Week, and the ratings show it.

This bit is interesting:

Happily, the roundtable also is home to the show's best asset: the articulate and ever-sharp George Will. Television is overstaffed with pundits, most of whom are bearable only when they're saying what you want to hear, and often not even then. Will is one of the few who is worth hearing even if you're opposed to his positions.

Could you imagine the show with Will as host? It might not work, either, but at least it would give your week a jolt.

Why wouldn't it work? Will is everything the article (and simple observation) says Stephanopoulos isn't - acerbic, tough, mentally light on his feet.

Why on earth not?

Brits

Twin Cities writer Bill Tuomala writes "Exiled on Main Street", a meandering, Godfather's Noon Buffet of pop-culcha. Here, he writes an article I'd been gnawing on for a while - a deflation of British rock history.

He even riffs on Radiohead!

The past few years Smart People and Anglophiles have been wetting themselves over those precious Brits in Radiohead. Those of us who have heard Little Richard would like to adore Radiohead also – if only they had melodies, hooks, and humor. And we wonder: If Radiohead were American, would anyone give a damn? Gladly, Detroit's own Kid Rock has taken to dissing Thom Yorke and Co. In his tune "Lay It On Me", he throws out this couplet: "I got rich off of keeping it real / While you Radioheads are reinventing the wheel." Kid has also taken to dissing Radiohead in the media, most notably pointing out that nobody at one of his parties is going to get lucky whilst playing Radiohead, unless it's out of mercy. In concert, he has been known to cover Grand Funk's "We're An American Band." God bless you, Kid Rock; and God bless America.

I don't feel so alone...

8 Mile and the Detroit Catastrophe

Eminem's new 8 Mile highights the divide between the free market and liberal interventionism. Henry Payne of National Review Online writes this comparison:

The title of the movie is both a literal and symbolic reference to Eight Mile Road, the street that runs along the entire northern boundary of Detroit. As riots, nonexistent city services, and poor schools accelerated the exodus of Detroit's population in the last 30 years, Eight Mile also came to symbolize the growing rift between city and suburb, white and black, safe streets and crime...For movie director Curtis Hanson, Eight Mile is a metaphor for overcoming the odds.

And as politics, Eight Mile is stark evidence of the failure of liberal urban policy.

Coincidentally, greater metro Detroit is also home to America's most densely populated Arab-American community. And it is thriving...

But when Warren Avenue crosses Central Avenue, the vista dramatically changes. Central marks the border of East Dearborn, the beginning of Detroit, and the end of hope. Like someone has flipped a switch, the streets are suddenly lifeless. Storefront after storefront stands empty or boarded up. Graffiti defaces walls, and grass pokes through cracked, neglected sidewalks.

Worth a read.

And then look at the Twin Cities. Look at where South Minneapolis melts into Bloomington, or the north side into the Brooklyns. Not as drastic as Detroit, certainly - duh - but illustrative of the smothering weight of government "assistance".

Faint Praise

The Economist takes on, in impeccable British style, Gen-Y anti-capitalist, crypto-Green anti-globalization gadfly/sex symbol Naomi Klein:

Ms Klein, by her own account, was a late developer as a social revolutionary. Growing up in a family of activists and campaigners, her teenage rebellion took the form of devotion to the shopping mall and willing enslavement to the tyranny of the logo. When her youthful idealism kicked in, its strength and durability more than made up for its delayed onset. In her 30s, Ms Klein has all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent.

As she looks around the world, she sees nothing she likes, no redeeming features—except for “the movement”. The rule of corporations, as she sees it, is inherently repressive and exploitative of powerless citizens. Democracy is a sham. She gives capitalism no credit for the extraordinary progress seen in recent decades in reducing poverty and other measures of deprivation (notably child mortality) in the world's poor countries. She measures the growing-pains of capitalist development not against real-world alternatives but against a Disneyesque utopia in which no poor person ever loses his job or chooses to work in a multinational factory at low wages (by rich-world standards).

And only in the UK could you get:

Ms Klein's harshest critics must allow that, for an angry adolescent, she writes rather well. It takes journalistic skill of a high order to write page after page of engaging blather, so totally devoid of substance.

Read it all.

Wrinkle

According to a new book by an Atlantic Monthly writer, some New York firefighters were busy looting stores even before the towers fell.

In the recently released, "American Ground," [author William] Langewiesche writes about a fire ladder truck recovered from the pile of fallen debris.

"Its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from The Gap," he writes. "It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the looting had begun even before the first tower fell, and that while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely."

This can't be going over well...

Why We Need the Electoral College - Part III

The Canadian system of federal government combines:

• A popularly-elected chief executive, the Prime Minister (Jean Chretien),
• A popularly-elected parliamentary lower house ("Commons")
• A parliamentary upper house that is appointed by...the popularly-elected Prime Minister.

As a result, all federal power in Canada is held by the places with the votes - Quebec, Ontario, the fairly-densely populated east.

In the meantime, the Western provinces - "Cowboy Canada" - goes begging for a voice, especially against the majority's socialistic impulses.

And that begging is turning to that greatest Canadian hobby - talk of secession.

By moving unilaterally to endorse Kyoto, and particularly to do so without disclosing what the all-important implementation plan for the treaty would be, infuriated not only the Albertans, but many other provincial leaders as well. However, Alberta's populace and political establishment buys into the standard intellectual-government consensus less than any other Canadian province. Their customary position as the outermost province in the Canadian political crack-the-whip game has generated growing frustration.

Canada's confederal system contains built-in frustration for the Western provinces. Western Canadians are distinct in outlook and economics from Eastern Canada, permanently outnumbered in representation, and disproportionately taxed by Ottawa to fund lavish social welfare schemes. They (and Albertans in particular, to whom all the previous descriptors apply in spades) have time after time floated political initiatives to redress their concerns, always to end in frustration.

Secession is a word that overly fascinates outside observers of Canadian politics, probably because it is used so frequently in Canadian political discourse for effect rather than as a real indication of intent. Its return to political discourse in Alberta, still on the fringes, is a measure of frustration with Kyoto at present, rather than an immanent [sic] possibility....

However, unlike in the past, court decisions and legislation have established a clear indication of how a secession movement might succeed in practice. Intended for the Quebec issue, it also applies to any other province.

If you're getting frustrated with the logic of anti-Electoral-College activists (read: tons of DFLers after 2000), Canada's a fine counterexample.

Paging Elliott Ness

Along with the Democrat japes about the potential of bringing down Hussein without a fight, there's a persistent nagging from the left that, because Bin Laden may still be alive and on the lam, Bush's mission in Afghanistan is a failure.

Now, it doesn't take a military history buff to know that the leader is not synonymous with his organization (but then, the Democrats don't seem to have any military history buffs in their ranks). Short of destroying the organization, the main goal is disrupting their ability to harm us. Bagging any individual member of the group is, at most, a tertiary issue.

Bin Laden's a priority, says Jim Miller in NRO. Especially a political priority.

Last week, Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle went on the offensive: "I think we have to question whether or not we're winning the war. We haven't found bin Laden. We haven't made any real progress in many of the other areas involving the key elements of Al Qaeda. They continue to be as great a threat today as they were a year and a half ago. I don't want to proclaim that it's not successful, but I think there are increasing questions about whether or not the administration can legitimately say we are winning the war."

It was a shrewd statement, making clever use of CIA director George Tenet's recent congressional testimony, which seemed to contradict Bush's "on-the-run" rhetoric: "The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11." Daschle also engages in redirection: "I don't want to proclaim..." Then he goes ahead and proclaims it.

Having Bin Laden on the loose may or may not be a military threat in and of itself, if his organization has been driven underground and is incapable of striking us. But Bin Laden is certainly a danger to the President - at the hands of his own opposition at home, anyway.

Blogger, Heal Thyself Already

Blogger, Heal Thyself Already - Blogger - the site I use to publish this blog - is having all sorts of problems today. If things are running a bit slow, I'll catch up later...

"No Compromise with the Electorate"

"No Compromise with the Electorate" - That quote - by a British Labour Party functionary - kinda examplifies what so much of the Democratic Party is feeling these days. If only the electorate were smarter...

George Will, on what Nancy Pelosi means to the Dems.

It'll be interesting to see what adaptations - if any - Mike Erlandson's DFL makes here in Minnesota along similar lines.

Paging Sun Tzu

I'm always amazed at the Democrats who believe that if Hussein falls without a shot being fired, it's a defeat for Bush.

The great Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu said the best war is the one that didn' have to be fought. Bush and his administration have shown so many affinities for Sun Tzu during their administration, it's hard to believe that they don't know this one.

Jim Dunnigan talks about the one of the manifestations of this knowledge - the information war against Hussein that may already be leading to cracks in the regime. As usual, read the whole thing - it's interesting.

UPDATE: The Guardian passes this "leak" about potential US/UK strategy - along with astute note that it could very well be yet another attempt to psych out the Iraqi leadership.

Discrimination, Cradle to Grave

Glenn Sacks writes about gender issues from the male perspective.

I bring it up because one of my major issues is discrimination against boys, from elementary school through college. I have a nine-year-old boy myself - the living embodiment of Calvin, from the comic strip, down to hair and stuffed alter egoes. He's a little handful - intensely curious, active, loves nothing more than to be doing things with his hands - in short, utterly typical. Yet schools today are not only not ideal for this type of child - they're hostile:

Michelle Ventimiglia, director of a Los Angeles day care center, says "our schools simply aren't made for boys. I see this every September when my students go into elementary school. Our schools are made for children who can sit still with their hands folded, who aren't distracted by a bug on the wall, who keep quiet and do what you tell them to do even if it is boring. Most girls do fine in this environment, but many boys don't.

"Children need physically connected activities, particularly boys. They learn best by doing. An early elementary school student can learn a ton of math and geometry skills, as well as problem solving and social skills, from LEGOs, building blocks, and wood working projects. Cooking projects are also very useful.

"Boys love these types of hands-on lessons and activities, but too often teachers find it easier to simply give them worksheets instead. And now, with so much time being devoted to testing and preparing for testing, teachers' repertoires are even more limited, which is bad for children, particularly boys."

And heaven forbid they cut up - or, in today's uber-PC environment, work off a little energy with a contact sport or a game of Cops and Robbers. Make the universal "gun" shape with your thumb and index finger, the boy can count on a suspension as often as not.

This scene is heartbreakingly familiar:

Of course, as parents we suffer along with our children, and as our boys are punished we are punished, too. Every day as I pick my son up from school I hope for a good behavior report that can be celebrated with ice cream or a trip to the park. More often I face what I call the "boy parent dilemma"--when my son is "bad" do I punish him because he can't fit into a structure that clearly isn't suited to little boys? Or do I withhold punishment or censure and in so doing undercut the teacher's authority?

I've agonized over this question again and again, but I always decide that it is my duty to support the teacher. But I'll never forget the sadness of my little son who sobs quietly in the back seat after school because I punished him for his bad behavior report. Why did I punish him? Because I simply couldn't think of anything else to do.

I've been there, over and over. And I'm about done with it.

Why is it this way? Because the academic educational establishment is no better. Sacks again writes, this time about why so few men are attending college these days:

One day, after an hour or so discussing tale after tale where Ms. Smith concluded that the men involved were always wrong or evil or cruel or stupid and the women were always right and good and kind and smart, Ms. Smith began softly describing a soothing tale of a father and his daughter setting off through the woods to go to the big city. "The father....and his daughter....rode together... as they went through the beautiful Spanish countryside," Ms. Smith said softly. I sat back and closed my eyes. "They...were on their way to the big city....the daughter had never seen the city before.....she was happy that her father was taking her..." I imagined a special, loving, father-daughter bond. "…and then.....he rapes her."

Jolted, I sat up. A male in the back of the classroom pushed his heavy book off of the table and it made a loud, crashing sound. An accident? Or the only protest he could make?

I did sometimes protest in Ms. Smith's class and others, but a 6'2" male confronting a female educator about her bigotry, however politely, is quickly perceived as a sexist bully. In addition, tension and arguing make the days and semesters long and hard, and there were times when it was easier to tune out, as so many other males had done.

More - much more - later.

Why Males Don't Go to College

Fascinating article on how modern universities have become what feminists would call "hostile zones" to male students.

Early in the semester Ms. Smith informed the class that all folklore was widely believed to be a code of misogyny that was developed and employed by men to suppress women. Ms. Smith did say she considered this to be a slight exaggeration, yet whenever a folktale contained a negative portrayal of a woman, it was cited as evidence of the rampant misogyny in men's dark souls. What Ms. Smith never explained was why this "misogynistic" folklore contained far more negative portrayals of men than of women.

Ms. Smith also informed us that women largely invented folklore, because it was women who had the "long, tiresome, boring jobs" and thus the motivation to invent it. Unanswered were two questions. One, why would we say that folklore was misogynistic if women had in fact, largely invented it? Two, did we really imagine that the men of that era—or at least 98% of them—did not also have "long, tiresome, boring" jobs?

But the academic estabishment's bias aganst men kicks in while they're still boys - about which I will be writing much more next week.

Musical Separatism

A British R'nB singer is being pressured to kick a white guitarist out of his band.

Craig David, to his credit, is pushing back. It's apparently a different world in the UK, where "urban" isn't entirely a euphemism for "black".

Craig, son of a half-Jewish white mother and a father from Grenada, said he had no intention of changing musicians: "It shouldn't matter what colour or creed you are. Fraser plays licks that half those urban guys can't even fathom. They can lump it or leave it."

British critics argue that the American outlook reinforces a racial divide by labelling R&B and hip-hop as exclusively African-American music. "In America, the music scene is seriously segregated," said one British record label insider.

"Over there, urban music is just a euphemism for black music, and it's really hard for us to get our white artists played on urban radio."

It's interesting to remember back twenty years, when the most interesting, challenging and successful R'nB was benig done by Prince (whose band was 2/3 white) and Michael Jackson (whose big crossover breakthrough single was "Beat It", featuring an Eddit Van Halen guitar solo).

Like Butta. On Nails.- Barbra

Like Butta. On Nails.- Barbra Streisand's website, as Rachel Lucas points out, is a rich, reliable vein of material.

The current edition of her "Statements" page doesn't disappoint. There's this bon mot:

The Democratic Party was not able to articulate a clear message - was not able to convey the very real and very many differences between the two parties. They did not allow the American people to make a meaningful choice. They never articulated what it was we were voting for, and in doing so they failed to motivate their base to go to the polls.

On the face of it, this seems a reasonable take on it.

Except that the Dems - with Ms. Streisand acting as one of their de facto leaders, in the absence of most of the party's elected officials from the campaign trail - did articulate a message. "America last. Unions before security. Prosperity through taxation. Bush is illegitimate. Josh Bartlett is the real president".

The Dems, especially Streisand, were strident ("Streident"?) enough to get their message to everyone that would hear. And we see the results - and also see Babs spinning like a Huey Cobra.

The Republicans, on the other hand, spoke directly to their constituency and gave them a reason to vote.

We spoke to more than our constituency. Here in Minnesota - traditionally as lefty as Berkeley - 80 percent of uncommitted voters in the Twin Cities metro (outside the core cities) voted Republican! These were the voters that put Jesse Ventura in office in 1998 - and whose parents kept Hubert Humphrey and Karl Rolvaag and Fritz Mondale in office for decades.

Ipso Babso.

More Links

I have really come to enjoy Rachel Lewis' entire blog - especially her rather large collection of Second Amendment rants and screeds. She also seems to be the one who picked off some of Babs "Like Butta" Streisand's gaffes of the past few weeks.

Lots of good gun-rights links in there, in and among a lot of acid-tongued screedmongery.

Speaking of which - look for my take on the agenda for Minnesota's Personal Protection Act in the coming session. This should be good.

Woo Hooo!

I heard from Swen Swenson, fellow expat North Dakotan and author of A Coyote at the Dog Show...

...which is, to the best of my knowledge, the first blog to blogroll me! (Sort of a blog mitzvah).

Cool blog, too...

Survival

According to the International Herald Tribune, the UK is going to start advising Britons on how to survive chemical or biological attack.

They could do worse than this - a piece from a retired Army master sergeant. The guy's obviously not a writer, and some parts seem to spring from a desire to create confidence more than fact (but not many). But there's some good advice - specifics on surviving chemical, biological and even nuclear attack, plus some general points that are worth noting, if only as general guidelines:

Lesson number one: In the mid 1990s there were a series of nerve gas attacks on crowded Japanese subway stations. Given perfect conditions for an attack less than 10% of the people there were injured (the injured were better in a few hours) and only one percent of the injured died.

60 Minutes once had a fellow telling us that one drop of nerve gas could kill a thousand people, well he didn't tell you the thousand dead people per drop was theoretical.

Drill Sergeants exaggerate how terrible this stuff was to keep the recruits awake in class (I know this because I was a Drill Sergeant too). Forget everything you've ever seen on TV, in the movies, or read in a novel about this stuff, it was all a lie (read this sentence again out loud!). These weapons are about terror, if you remain calm, you will probably not die. This is far less scary than the media and their "Experts," make it sound.

Worth reading from time to time.

By the way, the Israeli government has been teaching their citizens to build simple "safe rooms" in their homes ever since the first Gulf War, to protect most Israelis from potential chemical attack. Here's how it's done. Never let it be said I'm not public service-minded...

So Now What? - John

So Now What? - John O'Sullivan points out something that's been nagging at me ever since about 6AM the morning after the election:

American politics is a wasteland littered with the bones of parties that won "historic” midterm elections and soared confidently towards defeat two years later. Two examples are the Democrats in 1982 and the Republicans in 1994, and they point to the same bipartisan moral: Overconfidence comes before a fall.

What makes this lesson hard for the GOP to absorb in 2002, however, is that the election was a precedent-breaking one and that it really does contain within itself the seeds of a permanent realignment in a Republican direction. But since it also contains the seeds of an emerging Democratic majority, both parties have a great deal to play for? and to guard against.

What started me worrying? Trent Lott.

Why did the GOP win last week? Because we spoke to a vision that hits a chord with the "American street" - and by that I mean any American, regardless of race, class, gender or even political leaning. We campaigned on National Security, Prosperity and Safety.
So what was the first thing out of Trent Lott's mouth? Partial Birth Abortion. That's like getting a phone call from the governor five minutes before your scheduled execution, declaring your innocence and releasing you from death row...and not leaving until you finish the last meal!

What's next, Trent? Push off discussing tax cuts until we get that pressinggay marriage debate resolved?

Nobody asked me, but here's what the GOP has to do to win in '04:

1. Govern to the Right: Cut taxes. Privatize Social Security. Get out of the economy’s way, and stay out!
   
2. No, the Other Right: Stay out of the niggling social values arguments that the Democrats eat for breakfast. Take abortion off the table; move it to the states where it belongs. As good as slam-dunking Roe would be, it would squander a lot of political capital that we're going to need for, I hate to say it(yes, I'm pro-life), more important things. Perhaps 30% of the electorate votes one way or the other based on abortion. The other 70% may or may not be pro-life, but they vote based on many, many other priorities.
3. Win the War: Seems obvious, right? So it should have seemed to JFK and LBJ. Doesn't always work. It has to this time, though.
4. It's the Vision Thing, Stupid:Safety, Wallet, Children. Safety, Wallet, Children.

   Safety, Wallet, Children.

   In case you missed my point: Safety, Wallet, Children.

5. Take care of the Necessities; the Luxuries will follow: Remember why the voters gave you the victory - the rest will fall into place. They gave you the victory...why? I don't want to keep seeing the same hands, people! They- the 70% that don't vote based on abortion - want the war won, the economy back on track, and the future to be a more hospitable place for our kids.
6. Focus: In case you still don't get it: Safety, Wallet, Children.
7. More Focus: You'll note that I didn't mention Abortion, Gay Marriage or Prescriptions.

Note to Senator Lott: Get the vision. Or find yourself a nice ambassadorship.

UPDATE: A correspendent asks me "I thought you were a conservative?", and wonders how I can justify softpedalling things like gay marriage and abortion.

Answer: Not easily.

But there are two different classes of issues here:

• Issues that people have to fix themselves, and over which we conservatives have to win people over, one at at time: Abortion, gay marriage, the gamut of "social" issues. Yes, conservative government has a role in these. But they are social issues; issues where the free will of the individual is involved (assuming they're not vulnerable or underage; I find opposition to parental notification laws for abortion to be reprehensible). Peoples' free wills have to be engaged to win these issues.
• Issues that are goverment's turf: Or that currently are, anyway; Taxes, Criminal Justice, Defense, and the future of Education (whether in or out of the government system).

As conservatives in government, we tackle the latter. As conservatives in our neighborhoods, jobs, regular lives, we have to win the former.

that's how I see it these days, anyway.

Social Middle

President Bush again steers clear of the excesses of the far right.

Dems don't get this; Bush is governing using the best lesson from all the 12-step groups. Take what you need, leave the rest.

He's governing using many (not all) of the best ideas of conservatism. He's leaving the baggage - like Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart - behind.

Spelled another way - he's outflanked the Dems on the right, without smacking into the wall in the process.

Ratzen Fratzen

So I had this huge post about what the GOP needs to do...

...and Blogger won't handle it!

So I'll do it when I get home.

Crunch Day

Big meetings coming up this afternoon, so I'll be a little light on the blogging for a bit here.

Tonight or tomorrow - what the GOP needs to do now.

Wake the kids...

Public or Private? - In

Public or Private? - In yesterday's lutefisking of Keillor, I said that Keillor had had plenty of public financing to get to where he's at.

An NPR personality (who shall remain nameless) sent me some facets to NPR's funding that I hadn't been completely aware of.

Now, another emailer shows me another side of the issue:

I wouldn't cave in so quickly on the issue of taxpayer support for NPR, MPR or public broadcasting in general. They are supported by taxpayers. Their burden comes as a result of NPR's non-profit status.

Contributions to NPR are tax-deductible, which means money normally headed for the coffers of the U.S. government end up in public radio. The result is that non-contributing taxpayers, who may not agree with the politics of NPR (such as myself) are forced to take up the slack when it comes to providing tax revenue to the federal government. Sure the same is true for churches and other non-profits, but at least they are prohibited from taking political stands. NPR is too, but their contempt for business, Republicans and conservatives is palpable in virtually every aspect of their news coverage.

The fact that Keillor's work is funded by an endowment set up from profits from his book means nothing. If the rest of MPR was not supported by taxpayers, that endowment would not exist, because the money would be spent.

Keillor sucks at the public teat and he sucks it hard, just like Moyers, who also mistrusts the public that supports him. My nipples are raw and with his attack on Coleman and Republicans, they're bruised as well. It's one thing to suck hard at the teat, it's another thing to bite.

He also sent this link to MPR's fund-raising site, which shows the extent to which pledges and donations are tax-deductible.

OK. Let me rephrase:

Keillor, whose career started in an institution (M/NPR-affiliated radio) that owes its existence to public support - some directly or indirectly via taxes, and a lot directly via public subscription and corporate underwriting - and who lives in a city, county, state and nation that's populated by people that have a God-given right to agree or disagree with his politics, seems to seethe with contempt for his fellow citizen. He shows it in his writings, his behavior, his admitted revulsion for his fellow Minnesotans' free choice made at the polls last week.

Always great to get your emails - keep 'em coming!

Democrats and Defense

Why it never quite clicks with them - written from a Dem's point of view.

The reasons for this apathy aren't hard to discern. Many Democrats who came of age during the Vietnam War retain a gut-level distrust of the military. Younger staffers, who may not carry the same psychological baggage, have few mentors urging them toward military or security issues. I speak from experience: My main qualification for my first Washington job--covering European security for Congress--was that I could locate the Warsaw Pact countries on a map and correctly identify the acronyms of the relevant international organizations.

But lack of expertise is only a symptom. The malady is an irresponsible lack of interest. The issues that drive most contemporary Democrats into politics are reproductive rights, health care, fiscal policy, or poverty, not national security. Even those young Democrats who are interested in foreign affairs tend to be drawn to "soft" subjects such as debt relief and human rights. Aspiring foreign policy wonks will often get pulled into military affairs by way of, say, their work on demining. But when these young people visualize exciting jobs in the next Democratic administration, they think State Department, not Pentagon.

Remembering the stories of the utter contempt that the incoming Clintonistas heaped on everyone in uniform that walked through the West Wing (except Dominos), it makes sense.

It Never Existed, Winston -

It Never Existed, Winston - Michael Moore was predicting last Tuesday would be a Dem sweep. Now, it seems he's removed any reference to that prediction from his website.

Blogger Rachel Lucas, however, has the goods. And the page.

Call for Merriam Webster

Some new terms have entered the English language from the blogosphere in the past week or two:

• Paulapalooza : noun - an expression of grief that turns into a wholly inappropriate fiesta.
• Lutefisk - the point-by-point attack on a news article by Garrison Keillor (courtesy of Joe Davis).

More to come.

Just a Minute...

An NPR staffer wrote to take issue with my portrayal of Keillor's funding stream. I said in my ;original screed that Keillor got where he is today using tax dollars.

Apparently, it's a little murkier than that - the end-result being that Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio and National Public Radio are not "tax-funded" in the classic, BBC or Deutsche Welle sense of the term. The correspondent wrote:

"National Public Radio" is a bit of a misnomer: since a major financial restructuring in the early 1980s, NPR (as well as PBS) no longer receives any direct public subsidy. Instead, the relatively small amount of taxpayer money appropriated for public broadcasting goes to the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which makes one-time grants, based on their judgement of independent applications. Some of this money goes to projects on NPR. Some of it goes to PBS. Some of it goes to independent stations, or producers, or individuals. On any given year, it makes up a tiny fraction of NPR's income.

So where does the money actually come from? Mainly, listener donations, as filtered through stations and sent to NPR as fees for programming. Also, corporate underwriting, paid to stations or directly to NPR, in return for on-air mentions.

So Keillor is not (at least since the '80's, anyway) on any sort of direct public payroll. Sources of mine within MPR also have told me that the endowment set up with the profits from "Lake Wobegone Days" is big enough to float Prairie Home Companion for quite some time, and MPR to boot (although this may have changed over the years), and so it's possible that Prairie Home Companion receives no direct funding itself (I'll have to check that).

Fair enough. Let's take M/NPR's funding stream off the table, and I'll leave it at this - however Keillor is paid, his views of his fellow citizens - the ones that pledge to his station, buy his books, attend his performances, live on his street, and see the world and their politics differently - are noxious in and of themselves.

Coleman and the DFL

R. Alex Whitlock writes to ask:

You mentioned in your Keiller fisking that Coleman was all but kicked out of the DFL. I've never heard that story... would you mind elaborating on it here or on the blog?

Happy to oblige.

For those of you not from Minnesota, here's how it worked: Norm Coleman was a DFLer (that's Minnesotan for "Democrat"). He worked in the Minnesota Attorney General's office, which is a breeding ground of Minnesota politicians: Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale both served there, and Norm was the protege of Skip Humphrey, Hubert's son and 1998 gubernatorial candidate.

The DFL in Saint Paul is, like Tammany Hall and the Daley Machine, an institution with its own set of rules and traditions. One of those rules is "wait your turn". But when Norm ran for mayor of St. Paul in 1993, he jumped his place in line, beating (if I recall correctly) longtime DFL stalwart Bob Long for the party nod.

This was the first of many transgressions against the party that eventually led to their parting ways after Coleman's re-election in 1997 - although it took a while. Coleman even introduced Paul Wellstone to the 1996 DFL convention! But Norm was a very moderate Democrat - a very Clintonian "New Democrat" in a city and state Democrat organization that isn't a hair to the right of Ann Arbor or Berkeley. He favored privatizing some city services, was openly but moderately pro-life, supported a pilot school voucher program...

...and the final straw; he refused to sign a city Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian and Transgender Pride proclamation. The DFL howled. They parted ways.

I think I got that right.

So when Keillor impugns Coleman for being an "ex-Democrat" - well, he DID have help. The question is, did he jump, or was he pushed?

Update

The Keillor story is bouncing around the blogosphere like a hyperactive six-year-old at a McDonald's Playland.

Tacitus has a superb comparison of Keillor, Bill Moyers (whom we visited earlier this week) and Lewis Lapham (überliberal editor of Harpers), and finds a common thread:

I've remarked on this before -- the inability of so many on the left to ascribe humanity or decency to their ideological opponents. Because we don't subscribe to Lapham's vision of democracy, we are therefore against democracy itself!

It's the hatred thread, back again!

Think they'll figure it out?

Keillor-hauling

An email correspondent says he agrees - Keillor is a genuine humorist, which is a sadly endangered species these days - but adds this:

But I could let [previous japes at the right] pass, because he didn't make a point of publicly denigrating conservatives. He's crossed the line, though, and seems to be working at becoming a Michael Moore clone. (Evidently he has the managerial skills to fit right in.)

That's too bad. I'll miss hearing about Lake Woebegone.

Exactly.

This whole thing is not about bashing back at the left, by the way - my mom's a liberal democrat, as it happens. It's about trying to exist in a civil society with those with which you disagree.

Keillor's articles set that goal back a long, long way.

Just Say Whoah

The Strib's Doug Grow - who's an honest fellow, albeit as reflexively pro-DFL as anyone in the Twin Cities' media, amazes by writing - hold the presses - a soft-focus piece about a group of local "peace" activists! In this case, he's helping flog their current pet cause: signs that say "Just Say No to War With Iraq".

Now, if you're not from the Twin Cities, you've not heard of "Women Against Military Madness", but every city certainly has a similar group with an identical cant - America is wrong, every tinpot dictator from Khadaffi to Andropov to Hussein is morally on the same plane as our own leadership, any war is inherently wrong (although WAMM was noticeably quiet about Clinton's involvement in the Balkans). Here's an example:

Back in September, Ott was becoming increasingly frustrated by how hard it was to be heard above the ever-growing roar for war with Iraq.

Ott and her husband, Gene, both have been to Iraq. Both frequently have spoken to groups about what they regard as the horrors of the international sanctions against Iraq. The innocents in Iraq are the ones being hurt, they say, and a war will cause only more agony for the powerless.

True, the international sanctions were horrific.

Has anyone asked the Otts why the sanctions are in place? Because Hussein is a ethnocidal madman who invaded Kuwait, killed thousands, and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying entire cities?

Worse, when dealing with "peace" activists, is the sense so many of them have that if you're not repudiating our leadership and prostrating yourself before the world, patria culpa, then you're the enemy.

Yet nobody I know wants peace more than the soldiers of my acquaintance. Nobody wanted peace more than those who went ashore at Normandy. I suspect every soldier that will be involved in any war against Iraq will be staunch advocates of peace as well.

But peace without justice - and I mean justice in the old-fashioned, "the wrong are punished, the good are saved" sense of the term - is meaningless.

The problem with "peace" activists? As long as governments are busy killing their own people, it seems it's all really OK to them.

Bigots of Brixton- The London

Bigots of Brixton- The London Police now has a "hate crimes unit", which is criss-crossing the city arresting people; "one for rape but most have been arrested on suspicion of making racist threats and of homophobic harassment."

Worse yet? They're looking for more:

Officers will take a mobile hate-crime reporting centre into the heart of London's gay community in Old Compton Street, Soho.

So not only can anyone accuse anyone else of a nebulous, ill-defined crime against society, but the police will bring a special group to you to hear the complaint...

...and all of this, as London's violent crime rate is spiralling upward in the wake of their civilian gun bans?

And people bitch about Ashcroft...

Slice of Life

This Bleat cuts very close to home.

Keillor. Again

Garrison Keillor's back.

After the drubbing he took in the press for his last Salon article, perhaps he'd have decided to proceed with a bit of tact and grace.

But Keillor has perhaps the most perfectly-developed sense of entitlement of any public figure today. He's spent his entire career living, mostly, from the handouts of others, government and contributors. And while the endowments funded by his book sales (including megaseller "Lake Wobegon Days", back in the eighties) have set MPR up rather nicely, one needs to ask - would the books have sold without the national, tax-funded, pledge-supported platform from which to jump off?

K

eillor is a funny man, a generally superb humorist, and Prairie Home Companion is a weekly ritual - even my children (9 and 11) love it. But Keillor is in his entirety a creation of the public sector. And like any public institution, he suffers the public with the same grace as do the cashiers at the Department of Public Safety. Having known, socially and professionally, many who'd worked with him, having met many more who'd dealt with him in a variety of capacities, one notes this: Keillor treats those he perceives as superiors with unvarnished obsequeity; Peers, he addresses with a veneer of respect; underlings, he treats like cat litter, to be rubbed underfoot and...well, you know how it ends, right? Having known a few people who'd worked on PHC, the metaphor basically fits.

Keillor is reacting to a Republican sweep the same way the Teacher's union, or the National Orgization of Women, do; with doomsday rhetoric, with chicken-little doommongering, with nasty, defensive slurs - and the added fun of lots of personal slurs against "the enemy".

Here's what he had to say:

The hoots and cackles of Republicans reacting to my screed

Whoah, right there.

Hoots and cackles? I recall a lot of people with serious objections to:

• Keillor's smug, dismissive tone,
• the giggly, gossipy references to rumors of Coleman's personal life picked up "at the St. Paul Grill" (does the irony completely escape Keillor? He's acting exactly like the nosy, gossipy crones in his "Lake Wobegon" monologues)
• the palpable hypocrisy of someone who lampooned Bill Clinton's detractors, raising an eyebrow over Norm Coleman's personal life in any case,
• The fact that Keillor, a Democrat who built his entire career on taxpayer largesse, continues to slime Republicans, and hide behind the cover of a station and network that allows virtually no equal time to conservative voices - indeed, where liberal voices just as smug and mocking as Keillor's dominate and carry on slander not much less egregious than Keillor's - at taxpayer expense.

We continue:

... against Norman Coleman, the ex-radical, former Democratic, now compassionate conservative senator-elect from Minnesota,

Garry! The DFL kicked him out! You can't blame Norm for being a "former Democrat" when the Democrats all but tied him up and tossed him in the river when he was mayor!

was all to be expected, given the state of the Republican Party today. Its entire ideology, top to bottom, is We-are-not-Democrats, We-are-the-unClinton,

And let's hope the Democrats continue to think that's our whole approach. '04 should be a cakewalk.

Garry! Voters aren't stupid! If we'd run as what we're not, Mondale would be the senator-elect.

The old GOP of fiscal responsibility and principled conservatism and bedrock Main Street values is gone, my dear, and something cynical has taken its place. Thus the use of Iraq as an election ploy, openly, brazenly, from the president and Karl Rove all the way down to Norman Coleman, who came within an inch of accusing Wellstone of being an agent of al-Qaida.

Hyperbole bordering on "outright lie". Coleman attacked Wellstone's record on defense votes. Think Coleman's attacks were brutal? Ask some of my acquaintances who are in the service.

To do that one day and then, two days later, to feign grief and claim the dead Wellstone's mantle and carry on his "passion and commitment" is simply too much for a decent person to stomach.

A "Decent Person" wouldn't presume to be clairvoyant.

It goes beyond the ordinary roughhouse of politics. To accept it and grin and shake the son of a bitch's hand is to ignore what cannot be ignored if you want your grandchildren to grow up in a country like the one that nurtured and inspired you. I would rather go down to defeat with the Democrats I know than go oiling around with opportunists of Coleman's stripe, and you can take that to the bank.

While at the bank - shall I look for the pictures of you and Bill Clinton?

I've run into plenty of Coleman supporters since the election and they see me and smirk and turn away and that's par for the course.

Uh oh.Those smirking neighbors.

The last time Keillor's neighbors smirked at him, he moved to New York in a hissy.

I know those people. To my own shame, I know them. I'm ashamed of Minnesota for electing this cheap fraud, and I'm ashamed of myself for sitting on my hands, tending to my hoop-stitching, confident that Wellstone would win and that Coleman would wind up with an undersecretaryship in the Commerce Department. Instead, he will sit in the highest council in the land, and move in powerful circles, and enjoy the perks of his office, which includes all the sycophancy and bootlicking a person could ever hope for. So he can do with one old St. Paulite standing up and saying, "Shame. Repent. The End is Near."

So - Keillor sat on his hand, overconfident,"hoopstitching"...but he detests his neighbors for Mondale's collapse?

Funny Keillor should broach the subject of religion. We'll return to that. "You can take that to the bank"

All you had to do was look at Coleman's face, that weird smile, the pleading eyes, the anger in the forehead. Or see how poorly his L.A. wife played the part of Mrs. Coleman, posing for pictures with him, standing apart, stiff, angry. Or listen to his artful dodging on the stump, his mastery of that old Republican dance, of employing some Everyguy gestures in the drive to make the world safe for the privileged. What a contrivance this guy is.

So you think Norm puts on a different face in public that he does in private?

Good. Hold that thought. We'll becoming back to it very shortly.

Paul Wellstone identified passionately with people at the bottom, people in trouble, people in the rough. He was an old-fashioned Democrat who felt more at home with the rank and file than with the rich and famous. (Bill Clinton, examine your conscience.) He loved stories and of course people on the edge tend to have better stories than the rich, whose stories are mostly about décor and amenities.
Paul walked the walk. He was a wonder.

How ironic, really, that Garrison Keillor lionizes the late Senator Wellstone for qualities so utterly absent in Keillor himself.

I used to be a radio producer. I knew people who'd dealt with Keillor - fellow low-level producers, production assistants, the grunts that do the dirty work that has to be done for show like Keillor's to come off. To a person, they all - every one - describe him as "extremely abusive when angry", "selfish", "never has a good word to say about anybody", "no social skills", "treats his colleagues like dirt", " keeps people hanging on without officially hiring them", "destroys people behind their backs", "acts like his shit doesn't stink", "dumps [employees] without warning". Most concisely, "a complete son of a bitch". Every one of those is from people who've worked with Keillor in some professional capacity, many of whom don't dare say a thing because they want to work in these towns again. Keillor, it seems, also as a reputation for squashing careers.

It was a local joke among radio people in the eighties - Keillor went through "personal assistants" like kleenex. He was as petulant as any caricature of a golden-age movie queen. He demanded his subordinates worship him. He cast them off like old underwear when they displeased him. He was a spoiled, petulant egomaniac.

So to apply Mr. Keillor's logic to Keillor himself - how dare anyone who loved Wellstone for his common-man bonhomie possibly take the hand of Garrison Keillor, solipsistic, arrogant prairie patrician?

To gain the whole world and lose your own soul is not a course that Scripture recommends.

Scripture also has some nasty things to say about untrammelled hubris, not to mention treating people like human garbage.

You can do it so long as God doesn't notice, but God has a way of returning and straightening these things out. Sinner beware.

Indeed.

So - Keillor, who mercilessly lampooned Republicans who objected to Clinton's philandering, condemns Coleman's personal life;

Keillor, whose treatment of other human beings is - words fail me - execrably horrid, wraps the mantel of Wellstone about himself.

Keillor, whose entire public persona is a three-decade-old artifice, condemns Coleman for being a contrivance.

Keillor, whose entire career and fortune was built on public largesse, condemns and distrusts the public.

Keillor, whose personal life would seem to have had its wrong turns and whose professional life would make Gordon Gekko blanche, calls down the Scriptures on the head of Norm Coleman.

Here's a verse I like, speaking of Scripture: Psalms 10:2 - The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.

In other words - if he doesn't start reeling in the abuse and hubris, Keillor's afterlife is an eternal Lutheran Church basement lutefisk supper.

Tomorrow

I'll be tackling the big job of fisking the new Garrison Keillor piece in Salon.

But tonight, I have the worst flu I've had in years, and it hurts to look at the monitor.

We'll see you then.

Speaking of Predictions- William Safire

Speaking of Predictions- William Safire predicts that Condoleeza Rice (who by that time will be governor of California) will defeat Hillary! Clinton for the presidency in 2008.

I've been predicting - OK, maybe the better word is "hoping" - for a Rice candidacy of some sort in '08. I hadn't considered the "via California" option.

After last week's Gray-Davis-squeaker against a fairly lame GOP candidate, it seems like she could do it.

The Other Party Found Me

The Other Party Found Me - Last night, I attended a party put on by a bunch of participants in the Minnesota Politics mailing list, at Lendway's on University in Saint Paul.

The occasion? On the list, a number of us had placed some (non-financial) bets on the outcomes of last week's races. I'd staked beer and/or appetizers that

• Tim Pawlenty would win, and get over 30% of the vote, and
• Coleman would squeak it out, and
• the Green Party would lose major-party status.

Let's just say I did just fine - for the first time in my "gambling" life (my political predictions are usually comically wrong).

Among the wagers was one with Matt Linkert, who bet me straight up on the Senate race - and staked a song in my honor.

Well, true to his word, he delivered! Here's the lyrics:

Oh it was a very sad day,
all the polls went in Mitch Berg's way,
Hey-yay, right on Mitch.

I said I would come and sing a song,
and moan about the way that I was wrong,
well hell, life's a bitch.

I thought we were true, and I thought we were fine.
I even stood on Lake Street and held Mondale's sign.
I really truly thought victory was in hand,
but, Mitch was right.

Now I am here, so is this tongue [that's beef tongue - someone else's bet].
The bell for the next round has already rung
Ding dong, look out Mitch.

Watch out and see these two years fly,
then Mitch Berg can kiss Mr. Bush bye-bye,
So long, President.

I thought we were true, and I thought we were fine.
I even stood on Lake Street and held Mondale's sign.
I really truly thought victory was in hand,
but, (gulp) Mitch was right.

Words to live by, indeed. Except that "...kiss Bush goodbye..." bit, but we'll deal with that in good time...

Thanks to all who attended - see you next time!

The Party Finds You- I

The Party Finds You- I got this email this morning:

Ridiculous .. how you belittle the Dems on economy, when clearly they handled it so much better under Clinton.

If you consider "aloft in an irrationally-exuberant bubble" to be "much better", yes, I'll completely grant you that.

Especially when that bubble was largely financed by changes in accounting rules (especially as re Stock Options) that took place during the Clinton Administration, and which are now seen to be largely responsible for much of the corporate accounting and CEO Salary scandals - the ones the Dems tried to fob off on Bush (unsuccessfully).

Onward:

Liberal governments have proven they can handle economy as well as, in some cases better, than the so called "party of fiscal responsibility".

Indeed? I'd like someone to show me that liberal government and that well-handled economy. Sweden? Japan? France? Germany?

The correspondent goes on to supply an answer.

The British increased their income tax last year by public DEMAND ot help pay for their free health service,

...and we'll see how much they'll be demanding when they find that the increase really didn't fix anything in the long term - but I digress...

and their economy is still on an unprecedented high, kicking the trend elsewhere. That's a Labor, left-wing, government,

...that happens to be a "third way", Clintonesque, semi-moderate Labour party government - not at all your father's Labour Party.

They are the least socialistic government in Europe. The fact that they're resisting the creeping EU bureau-socialist tide probably has as much to do with their relative health as anything.

none of your pansy middle of the road Mondales or US Dems (who are frankly undisguised conservatives).

Hm. The party of abortion on demand, gun control, creeping-single-payer-ism, massive intervention in the housing and transportation markets, the party of the untrammelled welfare state...

...I'd say they're pretty darn well-disguised conservatives.

But thanks for the letter.

Numbers - The PiPress' Laura

Numbers - The PiPress' Laura Billings writes this editorial about how her generation - the so-called "Generation X" - missed its chance to put its imprint on commercial society.

Comme ci, comme ca, - if nothing else, it proves that over-weening self-obsession with one's own generation wasn't limited to Baby Boomers - but the part that got me was:

As a result, Chrysler is targeting its products toward the 82 million Americans between the ages of 38 and 57...

Whoooooah, Laura.

The Baby Boom starts at 40, hon. Or, to be demographically correct, it includes people whose parents were of child-bearing age at the end of WWII. As my dad and mom were 9 and 5 in 1945, respectively, I'm sorry (and by "sorry" I mean "overjoyed") to say that, at 39, I'm no @#$@#%^#$^ baby boomer.

I can take a lot of guff, but I have my limits.

Outmaneuvering - It looks like

Outmaneuvering - It looks like the Homeland Security Bill - originally a Dem creation, which Bush has rechristened under his own imprimatur - may pass as early as this week. David Frum's Diary on National Review Online talks about how completely Bush outmaneuvered the Dems on this issue:

After 9/11, Democrats demanded that the federal government take over airport security. Republicans objected, but the Dems prevailed. In order to win, though, the Democrats had to rebut the GOP’s best argument: the fear that civil service rules would prevent the government from ever firing an inept screener. No problem!-said the Dems at the time. Obviously people in vital front-line positions like this have to be disciplinable.

Then the Dems proposed the creation of a vast new Homeland Security department. Many Republicans doubted the wisdom of regrouping departments rather than reforming them. Surely it matters less whether the Coast Guard reports to the Secretary of the Treasury or the Secretary of Homeland Security than whether it is fit and ready for its new role? But again Republicans gave away – with one proviso. Those promises that the Democrats had made in October about the importance of accountability for front-line security personnel – they would be not be forgotten, right? Well, wrong. The opportunity to enlarge their unionized political base was just too tempting.

So that unnamed official was right. It was the Dems who built and loaded the Homeland Security political trap – and then stepped on it themselves.

And Bush is, according to Ivins and Dowd, "the dumb one"...

MNGOP - The Minnesota GOP

MNGOP - The Minnesota GOP made the greatest gains of any Republican party natinwide, according to this Strib articlel

They note something that I'd begun to wonder about in 1998 - the bromide that high turnout benefits the DFL. The huge turnout in '98 certainly didn't pull Skip Humphrey out of third place, and '02 was no different:

Strong turnout traditionally is thought to benefit Democrats. But Samantha Luks, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, said that may be because Democrats used to outstrip the GOP in voting drives. In recent elections, she added, Republicans may have put more emphasis on that tactic in their strongholds.

And the independent vote, which went to Ventura in '98, went GOP last Tuesday:

This year, he said, 78 percent of independents in the Twin Cities' outer suburbs voted for Republicans.

Four out of five. Amazing.

Growing Pains - I just

Growing Pains - I just got an email from a local columnist who I, to be fair, insulted last week (ironically, while voicing a very rare agreement with one of his columns). The email was sent with an expectation of privacy, so I won't quote it or name the sender, but it basically said "Oh, yeah? I know you are, but what am I?".

And the kicker was, the columnist had a point. While I disagree with the columnist involved on just about every count - his politics, his transparent bias on many issues (and his mistakenness on a few that are quite important to me) and his style of writing, I was wrong to be gratuitously insulting. (I'll let you figure out the who, what and where on your own).

I've been doing this blog for nine months now. When I started - and, for that matter, up until probably two months ago - it was a low-impact hobby, which collected about eight hits a day, mostly from friends and the occasional morbidly-curious onlooker from the Minnesota Politics mailing list. I could write like I was talking with a friend on the phone or in a bar - in my unvarnished, rather direct style. If I felt like cutting loose and insulting someone, it didn't matter - nobody'd read it!

Since September, though, my daily hit count has been booming. I've gotten a few links from some of the major blogs on the scene. I've gotten some attention from some movers and shakers, and it's showing.

Which means that I have to write this stuff with the expectation that someone outside my immediate circle of acquaintances may read it, and not do anything that I'm not going to be proud of the next day.

Which is what I'll do. There's more than enough material out there. Who needs insults when the record has more than enough stuff to ding people on?

Keillor Redux - Bruce Sanborn of the Claremont Institute has this excellent take on Keillor's tantrum, and the significance of last week's turnaround.

Conservative Women - the National

Conservative Women - the National Review's Stephen Moore's list of winners and losers from last week's elections includes this bit:

Winners: GOP Women — You won't hear this from the press, but it was the year of the conservative woman, as GOP adds more skirts to Congress than do the Democrats, including Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado, Katherine Harris in Florida, Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee, and Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina.
Loser: EMILY's List — Bad hair night for the feminists as virtually all their candidates went up in flames.

And in Minnesota, we have Pat Anderson Awada as State Auditor, perfectly positioned to:

a) kick the same no-quarter, confrontational butt she kicked while mayor of Eagan, and

b) position herself for bigger and better things.

Before the election, I predicted she would be our first woman governor. It's still possible, but will she want to wait four (or hopefully eight) years to do it? Especially when there are a raft of possibilities open to her: Mark Dayton's senate seat is up for election in '06, and Dayton has been the invisible man lately - and if the DFL's current fortunes obtain for two more years, it could be ripe for the picking, especially by an mover and shaker like Awada.

Whatever - I'm just going to broaden my prediction; Minnesota's first female senator and governor will be from the GOP. The names are up in the air (duh), and their gender is not their cachet - this is a Republican thing. But that's how it'll go down.

Shades of '79 - Unravelling,

Shades of '79 - Unravelling, Part II - More on the ongoing unravelling of the Iranian theocracy, by Michael Ledeen.

On the one hand looms the terrible regime which, fearing that it may be brought down by the kind of national insurrection that the mullahs led against the shah 23 years ago, is lashing out in an increasingly incoherent wave of thuggery, torture, and public executions and amputations. On the other, those segments of the population able to organize are demonstrating their contempt for the regime, daring the security forces to do their worst...

...Both the regime and its opponents are rapidly reaching a point of no return, and the odds certainly favor the people. The mullahs are hopelessly outnumbered, and the forces of freedom in Iran are getting braver all the time. Late last week a commander from the Revolutionary Guards announced he would not order his men to fire on student demonstrators, and was immediately replaced, but this sort of thing can be contagious, as General Jaruselski and Slobodan Milosovic found to their doom. The mullahs are constantly firing and hiring new thugs to protect them against the wrath of the people, and the question is whether or not there is a sufficient supply of killers to forestall the end of this hated regime.

This is yet another test of the courage and coherence of American leaders. President Bush has been outstanding in endorsing the calls for freedom in Iran, as has Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. It would be nice if Secretary of State Powell added his own eloquence to the chorus, especially because many Iranians fear that the State Department is still trying to cut a deal with the mullahs.

This was something I hadn't mentioned earlier this morning when I wrote on this - it's distinctly possibly that, as with the USSR, the mere show of resolution and force and disinclination to back down will be what it takes to bring down the Mullahs.

As, indeed, it may yet be in Iraq.

Pelosi - Last week, we

Pelosi - Last week, we discussed Glenn Reynolds' notion that the GOP should investigate corruption in Hollywood, especially the very dubious accounting used in artists' contracts, accounting practices crooked enough to make an Enron exec blanche with horror..

Today, Army Archerd (who reminds me of nobody so much as Jackie Harvey) writes about new House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's close, cordial ties to Hollywood.

Roz Wyman's association with Pelosi dates back to the Demo Convention in SanFran in 1984. "She (Pelosi) has many friends in the industry," Wyman told me. They include the Kirk Douglases, Warren Beatty (news) and Annette Bening (news) and Sherry Lansing, who co-hosted one of the Hollywood welcoming parties for Pelosi earlier this year.

And, of course, Jack Valenti has known Pelosi throughout her career and reminds, "She makes sure that our highest priority is protection of copyrights."

Read: The RIAA's and MPAA's attempts to coerce Congress to allow the industry to hack your computer to chase down copyrighted material just got themselves a big, powerful friend.

At the risk, indeed the certainty of speaking too soon - it'd seem 2004 is falling into place...

UPDATE: More on this from Jay Caruso.

In other words, she's in their back pocket, and that could provide the GOP with an opportunity to tap into a constituency they usually ignore - younger voters, specifically between the ages of 18-30...

The GOP should take note of this. They could easily make a case for the 'little guy' in the fight for fair use. Let them make Democrats on national television defend practices that have sent others to jail. Ask them if they want consumers to have to purchase two copies of the same CD so they can listen to it on a stereo and a computer. Ask them if they want a CD crashing their PC.

It's an issue the GOP could easily win.

True. We just have to convince the likes of Trent Lott that this is a priority.

I'll start with Norm Coleman!

Unravelling? - Students in Teheran

Unravelling? - Students in Teheran are demanding the release of a university professor sentenced to death for apostasy. According to this NY Times story (free registration required):

In a statement, protesters declared that the death sentence against Mr. Aghajari was an insult to university students and professors and demanded an apology from the judiciary. "The death sentence for Mr. Aghajari is punishing him for his opinion, which is against the Constitution and human rights," the statement said. The director of the humanities department at Modaress and several professors resigned in protest over the sentence.

In the meantime, the rule of the mullahs is being challenged in Iran's parliament as well:

Parliament continued with its reform agenda, passing a bill on Sunday that was aimed at limiting the judiciary's suppression of activists. It was the second such bill in two weeks; a measure passed last week was aimed at limiting the power of the Guardian Council, the hard-line body that regulates elections in Iran and has barred hundreds of liberal politicians from ballots.

Here's the part that especially grabbed my attention:

After their rally in Tehran, students marched through the vast university campus, holding hands and singing "Ey Iran," the national anthem before the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The watching police did not intervene.

Maybe I've watched too many movies, read too many books. I can read stories of protests, and of a Parliament starting to push the authorities - and that's well and good.

But when I hear of students singing pre-revolutionary, Pahlavi-era anthems ("Ey Iran", Farsi for "Hey, Iran"), and police standing around letting it happen - well, I could be wrong, but that seems to me to be the sign of a nation that's lost its stomach for radical theocracy.

What do you think?

Pursuit of Peace - The

Pursuit of Peace - The next time someone says we Americans need to genuflect to Europe on matters of domestic and diplomatic policy, show them this story.

A 35-year-old man from Merseyside is in hospital with head injuries after a smoke or petrol bomb was thrown into a McDonalds restaurant.

Fifteen people were arrested in the violence on Monday night which involved about 100 people near the railway station.

This was in Switzerland?

Bill? It's Us! Earth! -

Bill? It's Us! Earth! - George Bush, as Jason Lewis said, is a master at campaigning from the middle and governing from the right.

But I suggest that, on top of his ability to triangulate on the campaign trail, he's also been a master at coopting the symbols of the GOP that alienate the middle - people who are alienated from some of the symbols of "over the top" conservatism, rather than from simple conservative principles. Lots of people are pro-growth, pro-life (to the extent that they don't regard abortion as a sacrament, whatever their views on abortion), pro-gun - and the GOP under George Bush is adept at playing those cards without the Gary Bauers and Pat Robertsons that have attached themselves to those issues.

But Bill Moyers still doesn't get it.

I loved this part:

And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what's coming.

And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don't even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote 'a Biblical worldview' in American politics?

Mangling context - it's what's for dinner. I continue:

So it is a heady time in Washington — a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.

This demigoguery is being paid for by our tax dollars, by the way.

Yes, I'm writing PBS.

UPDATE: Powerline makes the connection that I didn't; among the tropes about the religious right and the control of the GOP by the "wealthy", there's the drumbeat I've been sounding since Paulapalooza: hatred. Moyers, Keillor, Streisand, Sheen and the whole sorry lot are paralyzed by hatred, to the point that reason seems to have left them.

I hate giving in to hyperbole. Am I wrong, here?

Just What I Needed -

Just What I Needed - So here I am, feeling half-past dead, an then this story has to come out.

Speaking of which - I'm a little under the weather today. Maybe a lot under the weather. So it may be a light blogging day.

Of course, every time I say that, I crank out 20 stories...

Twist - Thomas Bray makes

Twist - Thomas Bray makes the case for Republican Triumphalism.

There's certainly a fine line between overreaching as in 1994, and being to bashful with the mandate

The elections made clear that Mr. Bush now has the trust of the electorate. He shouldn't miss this opportunity to drive home the urgent case for growth-oriented policies. And that's not just because such policies would be good for the whole country rather than just a few favored segments, as some of his advisers seem to prefer. He can also argue that a broad-based tax cut is directly related to his foreign-policy goals.

There you go. Defense, Terrorism and Growth.

Take care of the necessities, and the trimmings'll take care of themselves.

Well, that's one theory. We'll find more, no doubt.

The Thirteen Days - The

The Thirteen Days - The Strib outdid itself with this superb report, from the points of view of all the principals, of the period between the Wellstone Crash and the election.

Seriously worth a read.

I'll be commenting on it tomorrow. I'm exhausted.

The Dumb One, Part XIX

The Dumb One, Part XIX - Compare this article by Andrew Sullivan to Dinesh D'Souza's observation that Ronald Reagan preferred to let his opponents consider him a dolt.

Both seem to realize that not only does it disarm those who are on the fence and cause your enemies in general to underestimate you - but that they were dealing with electoral opponents so awash in hubris they beleived they had to outclass the simple Republicans!

And in both cases, the liberal detractors were wrong. In ways, disastrously so for their own electoral chances:

this electoral victory also reveals his mastery of domestic politics. you can see this most dramatically when you compare the Tories with the Republicans. Bush has rallied, united and corralled a once-fractious coalition. One thing Bush would never have done is force his party to split over an issue like gay adoption. His base in the dwindling religious right is still secure. The victory in Georgia - in the Senate and governor's race - was a coup for Ralph Reed, the religious right strategist. At the same time, Bush is gay-inclusive, counting Northeastern liberal Republicans among his closest allies, installing a pro-gay moderate, Marc Racicot, as party chairman, and avoiding any difficult showdowns on the subject. Ditto his subtle outreach on race, both in backing popular policies among African-Americans, like school vouchers, and appointing some of the most high-profile black officials in American history. One reason the Democrats lost last week was that their black base didn't show up. They didn't respond to the alarms that liberal Democrats have sounded about nefarious racist Republicans. And Bush is one reason they don't buy it.

I'll admit it. I didn't support Bush until he was nominated - and then only grudgingly so. Then as now, I had a lot to learn.

Glad to see I'm not alone!

The Imperial Bureaucrat

The European Union is trying to create a sophisticated, nuanced approach to free speech - as Volokh says, "as opposed to America's "absolutist" insistence that people should be able to express even evil and offensive ideas".

Everyone who genuflects to Europe for political and human-rights sophistication should read this.

This is a question at the very heart of free speech and democratic self-government: May people criticize their governors, suggest that what the governors condemn as evil is actually good, and therefore implicitly urge that either the governors or the rules they adopt should be changed? In broader and broader areas, the Europeans are answering "no."

I'll say it again -- I am not an expert on European law, and am thus hesitant to express what rules the Europeans should implement for themselves (though I feel pretty confident saying that this proposal would be a very serious mistake). But I've heard many people, including American law professors, suggest that America adopt a more European approach to free speech principles. It's helpful to see, then, what the more European approach would actually look like. And it's also helpful to see the slippery slope in action -- from banning advocacy of violence, to banning advocacy of discrimination, to banning Holocaust denial, to banning any speech that purports to justify behavior that an international criminal court has condemned as "genocide" or "crime against humanity."

How does one get through to these people?

Kicking and Screaming

Many colleges and universities have long barred the US military from recruiting or conducting ROTC courses on campus.

Several years back, the Feds enacted a rule that would bar federal funding from institutions (including private ones) that forbade military recruiting. For years, that policy was applied with kid-gloves.

No more. The Fed is cracking the whip. And the academics, faced with the spectre of losing hundreds of millions in federal dollars, are falling into line.

But not without a fuss, of course. Lee Bockhorn of the Weekly Standard examines the paleo-left academy's peevish acquiescence.

As risible as this argument is, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger is employing an additional defense [for acquiescing], one that's both subtler and more radical in its implications. In his letter explaining Columbia's decision, Bollinger echoed Dean Leebron's point, but closed with a more provocative claim:

"The ready availability of [the enormous funding power of the state] requires self-restraint by officials, for otherwise we will lose our liberties not to official prohibitions but rather to the conditions attached to the purse. Such self-restraint is especially called for when colleges and universities are involved. The principle of academic freedom is one of the hallmarks of our country . . . Respect for the autonomy of these institutions is critical."

Notice the intellectual sleight-of-hand Bollinger is attempting here. The concept of academic freedom--the right of professors and students to teach, research, and publish on subjects of their choosing without fear of reprisal--is being extended to include institutional "autonomy," defined as the right of universities to see themselves as inviolable miniature fiefdoms with no accountability to outsiders. No one doubts the importance of defending academic freedom. But doing so becomes more difficult when the concept is stretched like Silly Putty to justify the whims of college bureaucrats who take unusual pleasure in giving the raspberry to the broader community's sensibilities.

This mirrors (in a larger arena) the current controversy in St. Paul, where a group of leftist parents opposes the inclusion of Junior ROTC in the St. Paul Public Schools.

More on that later.

Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny

...that this is a genuine NYT front page.

Via Andrew Sullivan...

Gloves are Off

This email, from a reader who describes himself as "not really a conservative, but certainly not a liberal", on the changing perspective of the Strib's coverage since the election:

Have you noticed that since the election that Strib, which always pretended to be objective, has, well, dropped the pretense? Now I know that the editorial page isn't supposed to be objective, but the editorials were always written as if any reasoned, rational, objective person
can see that socialism is a Good Thing. After the two post-election editorials and the op-ed that Lileks was commenting on today, I detect that that perspective is over. Also, if you buy the dead-tree version (I read it at work), the cartoon that accompanies today's article about tax-cuts on the Business page, would seem to indicate the gloves are off.

I agree - although the Strib's especially slanted and cowardly editorial page cartoons have never really been accused of fairness or balance even when the gloves were on...

Snakeeaters

- This is a fascinating - and long - article on the life and creation of a special forces soldier - the ones that won the war in Afghanistan, and are probably in action in Iraq even now.

Long - but worth a read.

Linked via Instapundit.

We're Everywhere

I just found this one, from a copy of "The Hill" from last February.

We North Dakotans are everywhere!

(I know - I'm from Minnesota these days, and have been since '85. I probably don't even have an accent any more. But while you can take the guy outta North Dakota, it's harder to take NoDak outta the guy.)

(How does that transfer to the blog world? Well, the great Lileks is another expat in the Twin Cities, too, but his memories of the place are apparent enough).

Minnesota Poll

In recent elections - and some not-so-recent - the inaccuracy of the Minnesota Poll has become a statewide joke.

Scott Johnson of Powerline writes this piece. Here's a money quote:

The Star Tribune's final pre-election poll was published on November 3, two days before the election. It showed Mondale leading Coleman 46 percent to 41 percent. In the actual election results, of course, Coleman beat Mondale 50 to 47 percent. The Minnesota Poll understated Coleman's strength as measured in the actual election results by 9 points and missed the margin between them by roughly the same amount.

Again Daves has attributed the discrepancy to a volatile electorate. However, it is a mysterious kind of "volatility" that somehow manages to disfavor only the Republicans.

We know there's a problem. What is it?

There appears to be a problem here that has less to do with a volatile electorate than with the Rube Goldberg methodology of the Minnesota Poll. Traditional electoral polling methods call for the identification of "likely voters" and the tabulation of their preferences. These are the methods used, for example, by the Mason-Dixon polling organization that conducts polls for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

However, this is not the methodology employed by the Minnesota Poll. The Minnesota Poll takes into account the preferences of all respondents, but it "adjusts" the survey results; it "weights" the preferences of poll respondents according to "formulas verified in past elections."

At the City Center shopping mall in downtown Minneapolis, the fire alarm occasionally goes off accidentally. When it does so, City Center security staff deactivates the alarm and announces that the "alarm has been verified as false." That is the sense in which it appears the Minnesota Poll's formulas have been verified in past elections.

It's been said the art of political polling is dead - but according to some pundits, the major pollsters (Zogby, Mason-Dixon, et al) did quite well this past election.

So maybe it's just the Minnesota poll that, while not dead, perhaps deserves a jab to finish it off...

It's Veterans Day - My

My ex-father-in-law, a Navy vet from WWII and survivor of many wartime scrapes aboard his ship, passed away last January. And with that, yet another link to the Greatest Generation (and the Greatest War) passes too.

That generation has been written about pretty exhaustively lately - and deservedly so. They were, for the most part, people who went and did their jobs - as harrowing and gruesome as they were - and then went back to their civilian lives (for the most part) and, largely, didn't go on about it all that much. In a way, it's a sign of the character of the american male of the day - stoic, not very demonstrative, prone to keeping the bad in with the good. In another way, it's a very bad thing - God only knows how many stories are lost forever. They're stories we need, these days.

In my hometown - Jamestown, ND - the wartime generation was still in their forties and fifties when I was a kid. I was fascinated with military history, and knew that it was all around me - the local National Guard unit, H Company of the 164th Infantry Regiment - had been to hell and back. The 164th - which, along with an artillery regiment was most of the ND National Guard at the time - was the first Army unit to follow the Marines onto Guadalcanal in 1942. They spearheaded MacArthur's "island-hopping" campaign through the Southwest Pacific - New Guinea, the Philippines - and ended up on occupation duty in Japan. About 200 of those men came from Jamestown - and most of them were still alive when I was growing up. It didn't take much reading to know that these were the same guys that threw back the infamous Banzai charge on Bloody Nose Ridge, that liberated Manila...but you'd never know it from talking to them. One of my great unrealized ambitions was to write their history, and those of the 188th Field Artillery Group, which fought in Europe, and the 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion, which fought throughout North Africa, Sicily and Italy. Life got in the way - and, as these men pass, the opportunity grows dimmer and dimmer.

One who is still alive is Bill Devitt. His book (whose first draft I edited ten years ago) is a hilarious yet harrowing look at the life of a very typical lieutenant in the bloodiest battle in American history. If you're looking for some great Vet's Day reading, this is a good start. (I have absolutely no fiscal interest in this book, BTW - I'm plugging it because, well, it's a good book).

At any rate - thank a veteran today. And if you are a veteran - well, good job.

The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name - Hate Watch Part II

Two weeks ago, I said the Democrats' big problem was the hatred they feel for opposition.

Today, in the Dish, Andrew Sullivan reprints an email:

Little tiny incidents of dry leaves kept piling one atop the other: Wellstone, the hate Jeb and George W campaign, the Clintons, Leahy stopping the judges, the trashing of the cars outside the rally in Mass, the appearances every night of Begala and Carville as Dem spokesmen (ugly guys are as bad as ugly women), Belafonte trashing Powell, Barbra blaming Republicans for the Wellstone plane crash, the voter fraud around the country, and hundres of other little things created the fuel for a fire under the Republican base and lots of Independents. GWB came along with his blow torch campaigning and set that fuel off.

That, and the Keillor article, and the recently climb to celebrity status and credibility (among the left) of one "Granny D". Read this article only if you're up-to-date with the antidepressants. Especially noxious:

And the reptilism trickles down further, to the weaker minds listening to talk radio or silly enough to spend too much time watching cable television news -- people who buy the lies, who are simply suckered into forking over their own political best interests to the con artists who attempt to pick their pockets at the same moment they are pointing out others who, they say, are the real trouble makers. About 25 percent of our people are susceptible to this kind of con, and they then give us problems by standing against any reasonable reforms. They have been spiritually twisted by the cheap poison of a hundred Rush Limbaughs into the angry, unthinking agents of the superrich...

What we are seeing now from the far right is not conservatism at all. It is fascism: the imposition of a national and worldwide police state to enforce a narrow world view that enriches and empowers the few at the expense of the many, and that gives no respect or honor to other cultures, ways of living, or opinions.

Or this one:

Pull any contractor out of his white pickup truck, turn down the talk radio blaring from it, and ask him, "Government good, or government bad?"

His glazed eyes will widen. "Government bad!" he will say.

Ok, good. You found one to play with.

Where to start? It's almost too depressing to think that someone could get into her nineties as such an irredeemable idiot.

At any rate, Democrats - please, please, listen to this woman. Take her rants to heart. Take her, and Babs, and Alex Baldwin, and Garrison Keillor, and Molly Ivins and Paul Krugman and Sacks and Ted Rall and Michael Moore and Oliver Stone and Jessica Lange and Dan Savage as your gospel. Feel the hate. Let it drive you for this next two years.

And all of us "deluded morons" will meet you at the polls.

Endgame?David Ignatius of the Washington

Endgame?David Ignatius of the Washington Post has an excellent post on the Iraqi leadership's preparations for the endgame.

A faction within Hussein's government is said to be urging him to comply with the U.N. resolution. Give up the weapons, they are supposedly telling the Iraqi leader. The real source of Iraqi power is the country's scientific and technical expertise, they contend, which will still be there in a few years when the Americans have forgotten about Iraq again. The advocates of this compromise approach are said to include officials in ministries that have extensive dealings with the West on issues such as energy, trade and foreign affairs.
But nobody in Hussein's inner circle is thought to be advocating compliance, and for a simple reason: They know that if he reversed course and gave up the weapons he has secretly been accumulating for so many years, it would amount to a disastrous loss of face. The regime's authority would crumble -- and Hussein, his family and inner circle would be more vulnerable than ever to attack. That's why Saddam Hussein is likely to seek a defiant and probably suicidal last stand, like the famous American battle of the Alamo. He has few other viable choices. He is damned if he doesn't capitulate to the U.N. inspectors and damned if he does.

Read the whole thing. There are many things in this article that, if confirmed, beg many questions of many anti-war and/or pro-Hussein pundits.

Animus - A few weeks

Animus - A few weeks ago, I wrote about my observation - that while hatred between liberals and conservatives is a two-way street, that hatred is part of the lunatic fringe in the GOP, and more a part of the DFL mainstream.

And my bit wasn't bad.

As usual, Likeks says it better. (scroll down a bit).

An old friend who still believes what we believed in college took me to task the last time we met, and wondered where Mr. Middle Ground had gone, why I no longer seemed interested in finding commonality. The simple answer is that there is no common ground with people who think you’re a political leper, a winged monkey in the service of a green-skinned Nancy Reagan in a witch’s hat. Respect works both ways, and if it’s not returned, then something changes. There’s a difference between thinking someone’s strategies are wrong, and thinking them a knave who acts from ignorance at best, and more likely acts from malice. If that’s what you think, I am not interested in changing your mind. I am not interested in working together. I am not interested in suffering your insults or your condescension or any other form your preconceptions take. I am interested in defeating you, and getting down to work with the people who come in your place, and grant me the respect I’ll give them.

Sometimes reading Lileks' writing is like watching Richard Thompson play guitar - you want to toss out everything you know about both and start over from scratch...

Inspections

Katherine Kersten says this round is unlikely to succeed.

During its seven-year tenure in Iraq, UNSCOM was fairly successful at detecting Saddam's chemical and biological weapons. In part, this was because it operated outside the United Nations' grossly inefficient bureaucracy. UNSCOM arms inspectors were highly qualified experts, on loan from national governments. To evaluate Saddam's Scuds, for example, UNSCOM bypassed scientists with a general knowledge of rocketry, and recruited experts who knew Scuds firsthand.

UNMOVIC will be part of the labyrinthine U.N. bureaucracy, and will have a "college of commissioners" -- made up of career diplomats, not arms experts -- who must approve its decisions. Unlike UNSCOM, UNMOVIC will draw its inspectors only from the ranks of U.N. employees. As a result, many highly qualified arms experts will be ineligible to serve.

UNMOVIC will also differ from UNSCOM in stressing "geographic balance" over inspectors' technical expertise. Some inspectors are likely to have little experience with the weapons systems they are evaluating, since their own countries do not possess them. Worse yet, UNMOVIC will not require its inspectors to complete a security clearance process. Iraqi infiltration -- a problem in the past -- is highly likely.

Read the whole thing.

POW Flap - A few

POW Flap - A few days ago, Art Bell released clandestine photos of Taliban/Al-Quaeda POWs being transported under heavy restraints in the back of a C-130 transport.

The Washington Post comments on the Pentagon's response.

I wasn't originally going to comment on this story - it's from Art Bell, for chrissake - but one of Power Line's writers (John H. Hinderaker, aka Hindrocket) had this to say:

On the whole, however, I think it may be good for images like these to be circulated, especially in the Arab world. The rise of Islamofascism has been fueled by a spirit of triumphalism resulting from the U.S. government's feeble response to terrorist attacks after 1992. While most Americans were barely aware of al Qaeda and similar organizations and paid little attention to their attacks, the Islamists thought they were winning what to them was an all-out war. As a supplement to America's current strong military response to terrorism, images of terrorists being defeated and humiliated should help deflate the Islamofascists and cause potential supporters to melt away.

To a point, this is correct. And as we'll talk about in a bit, I don't even know where that "point" is.

But historically, treating POWs well is a good thing. Some of the best PR we ever gave democracy was in our extraordinarily humane (albeit secure) treatment of POWs in World War II. These German, Italian and (few) Japanese prisoners went home and told their wide-eyed countrypeople about that huuuuuge nation full of free people that were doing sooooo well they could feed POWs better than the free civilians in their own countries...

...and so on. Of course, there follows the big caveat to that approach in this case:

It is success that breeds enthusiasm, not failure. And in this war, crudeness is no liability. Remember that the terrorists use video footage of the decapitation of Daniel Pearl as a recruiting tool.

We're dealing with a vastly different culture than WWII-era Germans and Italians.

But I wonder if the Japanese don't provide a better example? There are parallels between WWII-era Japanese and Al Quaea. Raised in a culture that was no less absolutist, millenarian, morally lax with regard to violence against ones' foes, and prone to glorification of suicide than that of the Wahabi sect to which Al Quaeda belongs, many were nevertheless struck by the contradictory observation; a nation whose nerve they'd underestimated so completely was capable of such mind-warping firepower, yet such magnanimity to the vanquished. The few that surrendered, once they were safely in captivity, tended to be treated quite well (compared to what they'd been trained to expect, and to how they treated Allied POWs). It made an impression.

I'm not saying I have any answers here - just a few rather pointed questions, the last being "does how we portray ourselves to the worst of our enemies have an impact on how the world sees us".

The first, of course, being "do these pictures harm or help that image". On this question, I'm only asking.

Oh, yeah - and how in the flocking plug does Art Bell land a scoop like this?

R E S P E

R E S P E C T - President Bush can't get much from his domestic enemies.

But some people overseas are getting the picture.

(Courtesy Powerline)

And So It Begins -

And So It Begins - Maybe - According to the Jerusalem-based DEBKA defense news website, US, British, Iranian, Turkish and Jordanian Special Forces are already in combat not only in Northern Iraq, but in the southeast, attempting to set up Iraqi opposition and secure the oilfields to thwart a repeat of Hussein's arson campaign of 1991.

. The US-led assault force has two primary missions:

A. Within the 60 days assigned to the UN inspectors for completing their report, the troops aim to assert military control over all southeastern Iraq up to the Iranian frontier including the Hawr al-Hammar lake and marshes. They will encircle the great oilfields of Khozistan, but stay outside. This mirrors the situation established earlier in northern Iraq, where US, British, Jordanian, Turkish and Iranian special forces present since April have taken control of much of the region, but came to a standstill at the gates of the two oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.

US-led allied forces are under orders to skirt Iraq’s northern and southern oilfields for two reasons: One, their capture would nullify the UN oil-for-food program that requires Iraq to pump oil according to a quota. Two, it could goad Saddam to extreme reprisals such as using his weapons of mass destruction against the assault troops or blowing up wells.

B. When completed, the attacking force’s capture of southeast Iraq, on top of its extensive control of territory in the north and west (along the Jordanian border), will transform the political-military balance. US and allied forces will have caged Saddam Hussein, his family, the ruling Baath and the armed forces in the central region, cornering them in the cities of Baghdad and Tirkit and cutting them off from access to the oilfields. Saddam will be dispossessed of his sole source of revenue for keeping the Iraqi army fighting.

How reliable is DEBKA? Read it, and I'll let you be the judge.

However - if it's true, it's very similar to what I was saying a while ago.

Well, one part, anyway.

Power Line! - Local (mostly)

Power Line! - Local (mostly) blog Power Line does some great commentary on regional and national events. They just came to my attention today, and they're worth putting on your Upper-Midwest regional blog list.

And they were kind enough to quote liberally and complimentarily (?) from my open letter yesterday to Garrison Keillor.

It's fun, watching and participating as this blogging phenomenon starts rolling toward...a critical mass? A pet-rock-style sudden communal loss of interest?

Whatever - there are a lot of great blogs out there. Enjoy!

Shot in the Dark -

Shot in the Dark - Now with Archives! - After nine months, I finally figured out how to make Blogger archives work!

Going back through them (for the first time in months), it's fun to see how this site has evolved. Last spring, we averaged probably eight hits a day. Today, we average 50-60, although recent developments may change that.

Yesterday? It's amazing what a link on a mega-site like Instapundit will do for you. We had...

Drum roll, please?

3,300 visits yesterday.

Come for the Keillor trashing, stay for the cheap shots at Cathy Wurzer!

This Just In...Bin Laden Not Dead Yet

Interpol majordomo Ronald Noble says rumors of Bin Laden's demise are greatly exaggeraged.

"Osama bin Laden is alive," he said. "Despite intensive searches, we have not managed to locate him. But until someone can prove to me the contrary, I consider Osama bin Laden a fugitive who is alive.

"Osama bin Laden is a multimillionaire. He was hugely rich before September 11 and he still is today."

Noble also said that the recent attacks in Bali, Yemen and Moscow were messages from terror groups that, "'Your war against terrorism is far from over."'

It seems the President's mission for the next two years is clear.

Drugs for Missiles, part II

Drugs for Missiles, part II - Courtesy Powerline, this story is from the Strib.

A Man with Better Memory

A Man with Better Memory than I - Every once in a blue moon (as in, every four years or so) someone happens along who remembers my stint at KSTP-AM, in my misspent youth (1985-1987), as Don Vogel's producer and the closest thing the Twin Cities had seen to a conservative on the air in those pre-Limbaugh days.

Brian Ward is one of them. He flatters the bejeebers out of my earlier alter-ego in his very entertaining (cooperative, apparently) and distinctly eclectic blog, Fraters Libertas.

Welcome! - To all of

Welcome! - To all of you visiting from Instapundit - thanks for stopping by! Drop me a line.

Pelosi - Ultraliberal from San Francisco replaces Dick Gephardt.

Oldie but a Goodie -

Oldie but a Goodie - If you think it's The Onion, but it's not...

"Safehouse Beautiful" is a satire of the Twin Cities' Soliah cult. It's been around for a while, and it's still a classic.

Want Info about Soliah? -

Want Info about Soliah? - This guy seems to have it all.

More on Keillor - Lordy,

More on Keillor - Lordy, I hope this sticks to the old stuffed shirt.

Agendabender comments on the story, especially Keillor's sly hint at Coleman's family situation:

Garrison K is indulging in a rhetorical device that even the lowest gossips disdain as louche. What you have here is a mute item. The more typical and honorable device is the blind item, a morsel of gossip in which the discreditable actions are detailed but the actors remain unnamed though hints are given to their identity. Hints of such specificity that you can usually narrow the suspects down to a hot hundred or so. In the mute item the actor is named but the actions go unspoken. It's a kind of paranormal slander.

That's one point about Keillor's piece that I'd neglected - his assumption that everyone would be in on "the secret" about Coleman's family life. Keillor insinuates that he knows something the rest of us don't.

He doesn't. Norm Coleman's family situation is the worst-kept secret in Minnesota politics. The Colemans would seem to have an unconventional marriage. Mrs. Coleman's acting ambitions take her to California rather a lot. It would seem nothing is hidden or on the sly between the two of them - certainly not in the Clintonian sense of the term. Oh, yeah - and he isn't a predator.

And you don't have to hang around the St. Paul Grill (a tony lounge and restaurant in the St. Paul Hotel, a former haunt of Al Capone's) to know that! Keillor acts as if he's privy to something deep and dark and...unknown

Of course Garrison doesn't mean "everyone" when he says "everyone knows", anymore than he means "knows". He's just doing the turn known as noblesse oblique beloved of mediacrats with delusions of omniscience. Which would be all of them.

True. And with the added wrinkle of doing it badly, and just for the benefit of the out-of-towners, sort of like the village con-man plying his trade as the locals shake their heads and walk past.

The truth is out there. Keillor won't be the one to tell it to you!

The St. Paul Terrorist -

The St. Paul Terrorist - A bad week for St.Paul terrorists.

Kathleen Soliah just copped a plea for the 1975 murder of Myrna Opsahl during a Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery. Note that the Strib's story doesn't actually name the victim until the seventh paragraph -

And the alleged drugs-for-missiles deal which the FBI recently uncovered apparently centers around a St. Paul resident.

Here's the question: I've read my LeCarre and Ludlum. I've read how intelligence and underground organizations work, when they're serious about both accomplishing their missions and staying alive.

And in no case do the operators involved act like this:

Neighbors said they felt sorry for Zahida Ali, but not for her husband. Coleman and her aunt, 27-year-old Beth Jones, frequently butted heads with Ali over Coleman's barking dogs. The women said Ali called police on them several times, but the problems continued until they came home one day in July to find their puppy, Wobbles, hanged in the garage.

Jones and Coleman said they instantly suspected Ali because of words he reportedly said during an earlier argument over the dogs with a man Coleman was dating.

"(Ali) said, 'You don't know who I am, you don't know who you're messing with,' " Coleman recalled. "He was never friendly. He was ice cold."

One of the rules of being a successful alleged spy, agent, guerrilla or anyone who tries, as Mao said, to be a fish in the hostile sea, is to keep a low profile.

If this is the best Al-Quaeda can do, the President might have an easier time delivering a victory than we thought.

I doubt this is the best they can do, though.

Open Letter to Keillor

Garrison Keillor illustrates in this Salon piece why the DFL not only got clobbered last Tuesday, but probably hasn't learned its lesson.

Contempt? He's got it!

To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

That's right - going to a steakhouse and ordering tuna, to escape a friggin' Lutheran church basement lutefisk social. Elsewhere:

St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party.

I don't know much about Keillor's family situation, but I hear from many former radio colleagues (and people who also hang around the St. Paul Grill) that he's an, er, "interesting" employer. Anyway, nobody who supported Bill Clinton had best throw stones about that issue.

Here's the worst of many parts of this article:

But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.

Ah, Garrison Keillor, dowser of the human soul.

Baby-boomers, at least those who spend their declining years pining for Camelot, caterwaul endlessly about wanting to find "joy" and "heroism" in politics. And yet, how could one look further than Norm Coleman, the most joyfully political man in Minnesota politics today? The man who was...well, not heroic, but certainly above-and-beyond the call in the way he revitalized St. Paul. Not that that wasn't without problems - we're on the hook for the Excel Energy Center, and I really detest subsidizing pro sports. But he did a fabulous job - not that fellow St. Paulite Keillor would admit it.

Beyond that, though - we don't need joy or heroism in the Senate - because that means people are having too much fun doing that job, or that there are crises that must be solved. Do the job. Keep things out of trouble. Then go home. That's all I ask.

And that's why we benighted slobs elected the apparently soulless, joyless bag of skin, Norm Coleman, over the joy-sotted Walter Mondale.

Here's the letter I sent to MPR, which is in the midst of pledge week:

I had planned on pledging money to MPR this year.

After reading Garrison Keillor's smug, unctuous piece in Salon, I changed my mind.

Voting for Coleman was "a low-rent" choice? Coleman was a tuna sandwich to Mondale's "great steak"?

Sorry, Garry. I, and just under half of the rest of your fellow Minnesotans, prefer tuna to warmed-over lutefisk.

And I'll be spending my charity dollar someplace that doesn't actively condescend to me.

They rejected it, of course. Surprise.

Harbinger of Boom - Austin

Harbinger of Boom - Austin Bay on the Predator unmanned aircraft attack in Yemen that killed six Al-Quaeda operatives, including the planner of the Cole atrocity - and more importantly, the attacks wider ramifications:

Sophisticated technology, like the Predator, is part of a symmetric power's answer to asymmetric warfare. A common fret among the many uninformed critics of America's counter-terror war is that "asymmetric attacks," like those on 9-11, can't be foiled and, moreover, the perpetrators can't be found. The whine is, "The world's too big."

Al Qaeda's terrorists thought they could hide en masse in Afghanistan. They were wrong. We can debate the success of the battle of Tora Bora, but for the first time in 25 years, Kabul has no curfew. Al Qaeda's latest gambit is to lie low in Earth's alleys and dark corners. All politics is local? American counter-terror warfare can be extraordinarily local. The United States is demonstrating even isolated, tribal locales where everyone's a cousin aren't hermetic. Al Qaeda pledged a global battle without borders, and it's getting one. The Predator attack shows that U.S. counter-terror intelligence has improved. Satellites, UAVs and other cutting-edge technologies extend U.S. military presence in ways bin Laden failed to anticipate.

On another related note - much of this technology was stuff the Democrats opposed lustily when it was in development.

The Reindeer Armies Go Home

The Reindeer Armies Go Home - Daniel Henninger on last Tuesday, and how the Blue States of 2000 may have been a fluke, for now

The McAuliffe-Clinton Democrats (if you raise the money, you get the title) now resemble the country-club Republican party of the 1960s and '70s, an outsider party of reflexive obstruction. Exhibit A, displayed in the shadow of the election and the September 11 anniversary, was the Democratic carping over an Iraq resolution. Like Bob Michel's hapless GOP of yesteryear, they ultimately went along, and got no credit from the public for their votes.

Out of touch? I think we're getting that picture.

I don't know that I agree with this next part - the election isn't 72 hours old yet. But if you want to extrapolate a lot of meaning from those 72 hours, this next section seems very appropriate:

Normally in American politics, the professionals get over it, as Nixon did in 1960. But you watch enough of a James Carville spewing invective on TV or read the sort of bilious letters from the left recently described by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ("Dick Cheney is a maggot . . .") and you begin to recall the crackers in the 1950s who used to drive down the highways squeezing off gunshots at "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards.

The Dems' anger - and especially that of Minnesota DFLers - seems to be aimed at Republicans.

All the better - the longer it takes for them to deal with their internal rot, the better.

Are the Inspections Credible? -

Are the Inspections Credible? - Gertz reports UN chief inspector Hanx Blix is gundecking a report that Iraq has nearly 2,000 gallons of Anthrax, and that the inspection may not be credible.

The disclosure that Unmovic has not reported the intelligence to the Security Council follows the recent approval by the United Nations of Iraq's purchase of a specialty chemical that could be used to enhance Iraq's chemical and biological arms.
The sale of a shipment of a fine powder known as colloidal silicon dioxide was approved by the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq despite objections from the U.S. government amid concerns that the chemical could be used for weapons...
The failure to alert the Security Council to the anthrax stockpile has upset some Bush administration officials, who said the information might have helped persuade some members of the council to support tougher U.S. action.
"If Blix won't report this, what will he do when Iraq obstructs weapons inspectors?" one official asked.

Where does this info come from?

According to intelligence officials, reports about Iraq's hidden anthrax were bolstered by a former Iraqi government official who defected two years ago but only recently came forward with new information, U.S. officials said.
The former Iraqi official, who is part of an opposition group of ex-military officers, provided new details about storage sites where Iraq is keeping chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. officials said.
The defector's accounts have been verified by other intelligence, the officials said.

People say Bush will have to deal with Iraq forcefully to survive 2004 after Tuesday's big setup. It looks as if Hussein will give him his opportunity.

More Diagnosis - Peggy Noonan

More Diagnosis - Peggy Noonan reinforces what Doug Grow and Nick Coleman have been saying locally; the Democrats are beholden to a base that is not only out of step with America, it's out of step with the Democrat leadership.

The problem the Democrats have with their base is that it isn't liberal in the way the Democratic leadership in general is liberal. It is left-wing, and some parts of it are way left-wing. The last socialists are there, the warriors of race and class; there are environmentalists who want to set loggers on fire, people who think George W. Bush killed Paul Wellstone, activists whose only concern in the world is abortion rights, and people who support capital punishment for only one crime, smoking in public. Soon they will demand the death penalty for smoking in private. (Are there radicals and nuts in the Republican base? Sure. But 20 years of observation tells me there aren't as many and they don't have the same clout. Moreover, Republican candidates are somewhat protected from them. The protection comes from the media, which hate nutty right-wingers more than they dislike Republicans.)

Reporters rarely ask Democratic candidates about the price their base extracts, but it is big. The base determines primary outcomes. The base changes the shape of policy.

If the GOP has an advantage, it's that it's been able to adopt the key elements of the philosophy of its far-right wing, while Bush has been been able to neutralize the PR excesses of the likes of Falwell and Reed.

The Democrats are easily and indelibly linked with Al Sharpton, Phyllis Kahn, Kathleen Soliah, Andy Dawkins, Sandy Pappas...the list goes on.

Is there a way to neutralize them and still remain the Democrat party?

Big Downside - I've been

Big Downside - I've been saying for years - the GOP needs to start learning how to reach out to ethnic minorities. There is no reason that inner city afro-americans (concerned about education), asians (with their small business interests) or hispanics (with their catholic social conservatism and small business interest) should not be GOP. But they're not.

Tuesday's vote in Texas may foreshadow a crisis for the GOP.

Advice - This advice to

Advice - This advice to the national Democratic Party from Dinesh D'Souza seems even more appropriate for the MN DFL.

The Other Coleman

Nick Coleman is not to be confused with Norm. He's a St.Paul Pioneer Press columnist who is spared the title "most obnoxiously leftist columnist in the Twin Cities" only by the existence of the Star/Tribbune's Doug Grow. His stances are generally as stultifyingly simple-minded as they are condescendingly pedantic.

But he has his occasional insights:

A lot of DFLers still call [Norm Coleman] a traitor. But they would be better off asking themselves what might have been done differently.

It does no disservice to either man to note that, in a way, Norm Coleman and Paul Wellstone were fellow spirits. Wellstone will always be revered as a DFL martyr and he was, in truth, beloved by the party when he died. But it wasn't ever thus. Wellstone and Coleman came from different philosophical backgrounds, but they both rejected the stodgy DFL that had calcified by the 1980s (Wellstone used to talk about starting a third party) and they each represented new energy the DFL desperately needed.

Some of the smarter DFLers have noted the party's capacity to feed on its own. For you who are not Minnesotans - the DFL's organization is designed to give special interests an extraordinary amount of power. And these interests - zealots in many cases for causes far enough left to think Wellstone was too conservative - are ruthless in expunging all heresy from the party.

Coleman - Nick, I mean - goes on to nail the result on the head:

Remember those campaign ads that tried to embarrass Coleman by showing him endorsing Wellstone at the 1996 DFL convention? I think they backfired. They were supposed to demonstrate that Norm Coleman was a turncoat. But maybe they also revealed that the DFL had turned its back on one of its most promising leaders.

Today, there is much sadness among Democrats. Two long-in-the-tooth DFLers — Mondale and Moe — are defeated. And two of the party's brightest stars have been lost.

One is dead. The other is senator-elect.

How many promising candidates has the DFL pushed away? Current St.Paul mayor and former state senator Randy Kelly is persona non grata among most St.Paul DFLers. Former mayor candidate, councilman and now county commissioner-elect Jerry Blakey eventually switched to the GOP - the DFL had no room for an afro-american who was prolife,pro-business, and who grew to reject a lot of other DFL sacred cows.

So consider both of the Colemans. You can learn a lot - no matter what party you're in.

Democrat Fatcats - Glenn Reynolds

Democrat Fatcats - Glenn Reynolds - who, in the blogger world is known as Instapundit - has found both a glaring irony and a wonderful opportunity for Bush and his new majority.

For all the Dems' caterwauling about Republicans and big business, it's worth noting that one of our biggest, most corrupt industries - entertainment - overwhelmingly supports Democrat candidates and causes.

And oy, gevalt, is that industry corrupt:

audits of record companies routinely indicate "errors" that are always in the companies’ favor. (Recording artist Peggy Lee just won a big judgment, and many other artists’ lawsuits are pending). Accounting is byzantine enough to make Enron’s look simple.

Record companies regularly deduct 15 percent off the top of sales as an allowance for "breakage" — a survival from the days of shellac records that now simply serves to reduce artist royalties by that amount. Despite being illegal, payola is rife, keeping interesting artists off the air in favor of the manufactured hitmaker of the week. And now, record companies — who have allied themselves with the just-as-bad motion picture industry – want to make it a felony for you to own a computer that is capable of copying music from a CD to your portable player without paying them money, even though courts have held that such copying is entirely legal.

And this is an opportunity!

But what’s bad judgment and betrayal of principle for Democrats is a political opportunity for Republicans, who can capitalize on that "backlash." Imagine this scenario: the Department of Justice investigates the record and motion picture industries for fraud, where artists are concerned, and price-fixing, where charges to consumers are concerned. (There wouldn’t be anything bogus about doing so: I mentioned the vulnerability of the record industry to racketeering charges a few months ago at an entertainment-law panel discussion that I was moderating, in the hopes of stirring up a hot dispute between lawyers who represent artists and those who represent record companies. But, strikingly, everyone there agreed that the record companies were vulnerable on this ground.)

Meanwhile, Republican legislators denounce these industries for trying to take control of individuals’ computers, denouncing the "spyware" already on Windows Media Player that tracks what you listen to, and promising to outlaw such intrusive technologies in the future. Democrats are left with a choice: side with fatcats, and against consumers and popular artists, or turn on a constituency that has been a major source of campaign funds.

Such an approach would turn the Democrats’ greatest political weapons into vulnerabilities. Are the Republicans smart enough to do that?

Well, this one is. And I'll be on the horn to Coleman's office shortly.

More Downside - Jonah Goldberg

More Downside - Jonah Goldberg on what Bush needs to do:

So now Bush has room for some long passes. He has a Republican House and Senate which know — or should know — that they owe their power to him. This means George Bush has, at best, a year to topple Saddam Hussein and get some serious work done on the home front. For the last year Bush has been MIA on domestic policy, and if he doesn't get some big stuff accomplished, there's every reason to believe the GOP could lose the House, the Senate, and the presidency to Al Gore and the forces of Mordor.

In other words, the administration has to deliver. Fortunately, the administration has been good at that so far.

So what does it mean? Goldberg says:

One irony to keep in mind is that while this election made the government more conservative, it also made the opposition more liberal. Daschle and Gephardt are going to be punished for not attacking Bush on the war and the economy more (because that strategy didn't work), and Democrats like Gore are going to be rewarded (for wanting to fight on those issues). When a party is completely out of power it not only stands on its base, it runs on it. That means a more antiwar and pro-tax Democratic party for the next two years. That can be to Bush's advantage if the Democrats come to be seen as out of the mainstream while the Republicans are seen as the responsible, govern-from-the-middle types.

Exactly. Bush has out-Clintonned Clinton himself, triangulating the Dems into leftie loopdiloop-land. If you're a conservative purist (and I have my moments), that's not all good. If you just don't like liberals running the show - it's a good start.

Downside - Even if you're

Downside - Even if you're a Republican, it's not all good news.

Not Stupid, Stupid - The

Not Stupid, Stupid - The continuing trope that Bush is an idiot just keeps on going, and going...

It's the Guns? Stupid? -

It's the Guns? Stupid? - Kathleen Kennedy Townsend lost in Maryland - a huge upset. Some pundits - including Glenn Reynolds - were shocked. Yet a letter to Instapundit puts it nicely (and I hope I can quote it...):

You voiced some wonder that Ehrlich won in MD despite his position on guns (or perhaps despite KKT's position on guns).

I would suggest that during the sniper episode more than a few otherwise liberal or liberal-minded people went to buy a gun and came up against the waiting period and the State Police background checks and the Federal forms answer truthfully on penalty of a felony) and rethought their positions on guns and gun control.(Hey, I'm a law-abiding guy/gal, why can't I have a gun to protect myself, and what if I need one during the waiting period? What if I made a mistake by accident on the forms and get in trouble? Hey, I vote for Connie Morella, therefore I am ok, right?) Maybe some cognitive dissonance set in....

A statistic that came out during the campaign was that thousands of guns were fingerprinted in the last two years (since the law was passed)and not a single crime has been solved on that basis. Meanwhile, the state archivist was found to have declared that MD would not be cooperating with other states' firearms background checks "for lack of resources", calling into question the commitment of the administration to doing something sensible about gun ownership by criminals with the existing laws. Further, I believe there was a brief period of time when even the background checks for Maryland gun purchasers were not done properly. When the sniper's weapon was found to have been brought in from out of state maybe some realized the futility of the exercise.

All of this makes it more than reasonable to assume that what we do about guns is a reasonable question, not an automatic "yes" to more gun laws.

Booyah - Wow. We did

Booyah - Wow. We did it.

Nah. "We", the GOP, didn't do it. We put out a message The voters did it.

Why? The polls a week ago were actually looking just a tad dicey for us - promising in some areas, grim in others.

And yet this is the biggest electoral turnaround since I was in high school.

Andrew Sullivan put it this way, and I agree totally:

This was a vote for Bush, for prosecuting the war on terror, for the tax cut. More important, it was a vote against the hollow negativism, cowardice and mediocrity of the current Democratic Party. They have nothing to say; and that matters. Their predicament is deeper than this result suggests. Since Bush passed his tax cut and since September 11, the Democrats have been cornered.

And this applies even more to the Minnesota DFL. Their entire message is fear - and even when wrapped in Paul Wellstone's firey style, it will was.

Fallout - The Euro press

Fallout - The Euro press reacts to the "Bush referendum". I liked this, from the far-left French La Liberation:

"The big loser of these elections, apart from the democrats, is none other than Saddam Hussein...An election setback for Bush would have been inevitably interpreted as a rejection by the American people of his threatening rhetoric against 'the axis of evil' whose pivot lies in Baghdad. Bush can thus henceforth claim a strong mandate of popular support for his politics of enforced disarmament of Iraq, and also in his dealing with the U.N."

This might be a good time to sell Hussein stock.

Breakdown - I think we

Breakdown - I think we should arrange for VNS to break down every year.

It was the least-obnoxious election in recent memory, just in terms of the coverage. The waiting was actually just a tad refreshing.

Straight Time - I still

Straight Time - I still haven't voted - but for me, there's no suspense. Just a little amazement.

Because while I'm a thoroughgoing conservative with portfolio (and audition tape), I have never in my life voted a straight party ticket. I have always split my vote to some extent or another - leaving aside the fact that I was a McGovernite Democrat until I was about 20, I've voted for Reformers, Independence Party candidates, Libertarians, a couple of deserving DFLers, and even a North Dakota eccentric that would have been a Green had there been a Green party in 1984.

But this year? I'm voting straight Republican - the first straight ticket in my voting life. The races that matter are just too close. As much as I'd like to see Norm Coleman in the Senate, I have to admit that even if Fritz won, the Senate would still be less liberal than it was with Wellstone in it. But the thought of a Governor Moe or Governor Penny for four years is just too depressing to think about.

James on Fritz - Lileks,

James on Fritz - Lileks, as usual, spins the line that captures the idea perfectly - in this case, Mondale

Before he entered the race he was regarded by most Minnesotans as That Old Guy Who Lost That Thing. He had receded into the background, earned the statesman’s halo, and eventually come to represent the state of Minnesota for better or for ill. He was one of our own, on his way to a statewide eulogy. But it turns out he’s willing to hold out his wrists for the strings and twitch to the DNC’s script - if they say Norm Coleman channels Satan, then that’s what he’ll proclaim. I always had a hometown admiration for him as a fellow who knew when to leave the stage and make his way in the real world. But now he strikes me as a man who lies for the sake of power with vigor and enthusiasm - and it’s power he never sought to wield again.

If all these things matter so much to you, Mr. Mondale, where have you been?

Huh? - Did Joe Conason

Huh? - Did Joe Conason see the same debate I did?

Or that Peggy Noonan did?

Seeing The Elephant - I

Seeing The Elephant - I always like Marc Racicot, former governor of Montana and now RNC chairman. He released this today in response to Terry Macauliffe's continuing cynical shenanigans:

"Because of the Democrats' exhausting inability to address issues of urgency and importance to the American people, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee has attempted to breathe life into an otherwise confusing and scattered agenda through the use of wild and wacky allegations of misconduct. Without a record of accomplishment or leadership, without ideas or vision, without truth or accuracy, Democrats have embraced a desperate Election Day doomsday strategy. They have apparently come to believe that there is nothing left to be done other than to rely upon the politics of fear, fabrication and falsehood."

Finally, an RNC chairman with the cojones to take it downtown.

Getting Personal - A Green

Getting Personal - A Green party acquaintance of mine forwarded this to me.

From: The Executive Committee Against Uppity Citizens
Subject: Please don't vote.

Dear friend,

On behalf of Shell, Mobil, and Exxon; Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and GE; all
the Enrons, Halliburtons, and Harkens; President Bush, Vice President
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the other CEOs of the Cabinet; and thousands of
us who are working for a better life for the wealthiest Americans, we have
one simple request: Could you please just stay home tomorrow?

See, we have things to do. Nations to invade. Wetlands to destroy. Oil to
drill. Courts to pack. Corporate taxes to cut.

What's frustrating for us is that we're coming up against some pretty stiff
resistance. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure the
Senate, but it looks like we just may lose it. Heck, we may even lose the
House. We don't quite get what it is about our agenda that you people don't
like, but it's clear that this time, you may be upset enough to actually do
something about it.

That's why we're writing this message to you today. Please don't vote. Ask
your friends not to vote. What could the harm be in sitting this round out?
If you could just stay home on Election Day, we can get back to the
important business of running the nation for you, and we won't have to
bother you again.

Thank you,
The Executive Committee Against Uppity Citizens

Remember when I talked about the hatred so many mainstream DFLers feel for Republicans?

This campaign is way too personal.

Go Norm and Tim P(awlenty).

Numbers - Drudge is showing

Numbers - Drudge is showing Coleman ahead as of 3PM. Three points.

I'd have to imagine those are metro precincts, but I could very well be wrong.

Gored - Walter Mondale's problem

Gored - Walter Mondale's problem in the debate? While he showed he still had some life in him - quite a bit - he also showed the same misplaced aggression and condescension that cost Algore the debates in 2000.

Peggy Noonan thinks it'll tip the race for Coleman.

I think Mr. Coleman won the election this morning. I think he solidified his rising numbers, and picked up some undecided voters. And I think that considering what has happened in Minnesota the past few weeks that is one amazing story.

I don't want to jinx anything, but Noonan's a pretty sharp cookie.

Second Amendment Voter Guide - David Kopel goes through every race that matters, nationwide.

It's going to be a dicey year, no matter what, for gun-rights advocates.

Sub-par Minds Think Alike -

Sub-par Minds Think Alike - Babs Streisand has bought into Ted Rall's conspiracy theory about the death of Paul Wellstone. It was no accident, says The Star. This, via Andrew Sullivan, who quite aptly entitles his post "Moronic Convergence".

The article goes on to give us a look into the mind of The Star - quoting the NY Post:

The singer, who recently sold her triplex on Central Park West for half of what she originally asked three years ago, gave up looking for another apartment in New York and is sending her furniture out west, where she is building a separate building to house the antique items.

"She's asked five top West Coast designers to bid on a project to incorporate her New York furniture into a farmhouse-like addition on her Malibu estate," said the source.

In a letter to the five candidates bidding for the job, she tells the prospects she won't have time to discuss anything until after the election.

"She then says they better be voting Democratic and goes into a long political missive about reproductive choice, the Supreme Court, the environment and the power of the right wing," adds the source.

Hm. Wonder if they're union contractors? But I digress

Babs' Web site - which hawks everything from soup mugs to golf balls - consists largely of her political statements, with a big section defending her screw-ups.

Which has got to suck up a lot of bandwidth, these days.

Last year, her site urged fans to be more energy-efficient even while she criss-crossed the country on fossil fuel-sucking private jets, roamed the roads in gas-guzzling limos and SUVs, and vacationed on big power boats.

Streisand also urged her fellow Americans to set air conditioners at 78 degrees. One source told Keil that Babs kept the 16 rooms in her unoccupied Central Park West triplex as cold as a meat locker.

And don't forget the time Streisand urged everyone to conserve energy by hanging laundry outside on lines, rather than use electric clothes dryers. But when asked if Streisand herself was using a backyard clothesline, her spokesman said: "She never meant that it necessarily applied to her."

I' m waiting to see how long it takes for some grudge-addled DFLer to post this on the MN Politics mailing list...

Simpsons on Gun Control -

Simpsons on Gun Control - I haven't seen the Simpsons in years - and it's one of few shows where I regret saying that.

But last night's show apparently touched on gun control and self-defense, according to Instapundit.

And it was apparently pretty cool!

Barkley - On the one

Barkley - On the one hand, the Barkley appointment is archtypical Ventura grandstanding - after spending days talking about appointing a non-partisan, "typical" Minnesotan, a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he appoints one of the Indy Party's two most consummate insiders.

On the other - wow. This, along with last Tuesday's departure from the Wellstone fiesta, is Ventura at his loose-cannon best.

There are things I'm gonna miss about the big lug.

Impact - Elections have long-term

Impact - Elections have long-term impacts that are often way out of proportion to their near-term ones.

The Grundseth scandal in 1990, for example, affected Minnesota politics in a way far beyond merely whose butt sat in the Governor's chair for 4-8 years. From that scandal arose the election laws that are governing our current Senate rhubarb, as well as Arne Carlson's liberal-friendly redistricting that may have extended DFL hegemony over this state by a decade.

OK - so what about this election?

I have a prediction. Disclaimer: I'm usually wrong, but when I'm right, I really do it up.

OK: Based on what happens in tomorrow's election, I think we may be on the brink of seeing Minnesota's first female governor - and she'll be a conservative Republican.

If Eagan mayorPat Anderson Awada wins the State Auditor slot tomorrow, whether Pawlenty wins or not, she will become in either 2006 or 2010 the state's first major party-endorsed female gubernatorial candidate. She's got some serious momentum, and she could seize a rather high profile if she beats the office temp tomorrow. Given the state's slow creep to the right, I believe she could very well be Minnesota's
first female governor.

What do you think? Write me - it's been a while since I printed any reader feedback!

Rushdie Judgement - Salman Rushdie

Rushdie Judgement - Salman Rushdie on the case for invading Iraq, via the CounterRevolutionary blog.

What's more, it's a case that ought to appeal not just to militaristic Bushie-Blairite hawks but also to lily-livered bleeding-heart liberals; a case, moreover, that ought to unite Western public opinion and all those who care about the brutal oppression of an entire Muslim nation.

In this strange, unattractive historical moment, the extremely strong anti-Saddam Hussein argument isn't getting a fraction of the attention it deserves.

This is, of course, the argument based on his 31/2-decade-long assault on the Iraqi people. He has impoverished them, murdered them, gassed and tortured them, sent them off to die by the tens of thousands in futile wars, repressed them, gagged them, bludgeoned them and then murdered them some more.

Saddam Hussein and his ruthless gang of cronies from his home village of Tikrit are homicidal criminals, and their Iraq is a living hell. This obvious truth is no less true because we have been turning a blind eye to it -- and "we" includes, until recently, the government of the United States, an early and committed supporter of the "secular" Hussein against the "fanatical" Islamic religionists of the region. Nor is it less true because it suits the politics of the Muslim world to inveigh against the global bully it believes the United States to be, while it tolerates the all-too-real monsters in its own ranks. Nor is it less true because it's getting buried beneath the loudly made but poorly argued U.S. position, which is that Hussein is a big threat, not so much to his own people but to us.

Damning with faint praise? Perhaps. But it's our damnation with faint praise!

Grrrr, Part IV - The

Grrrr, Part IV - The gall of this man.

It's gotten to the point where, when I see Bill Clinton, I think "Al Sharpton". The same cynical exploitation, the same garrulous grandstanding, the same tenuous relationship with the truth.

After playing his part in the Wellstone Fiesta Ambush, he's now spreading the trope than any Floridian got their vote quashed in 2000.

Temptation - I'm sorely tempted

Temptation - I'm sorely tempted to make this blog a poll-free zone. The insane gyrations of the polls this last few days have to make you wonder - are the voters really as flaky as a bunch of glue-sniffing lemurs, or are the polls perhaps royally screwed up?

Last week, the Star Trib Poll showed Mondale up by 8 - although we noted some problems with that poll earlier in the week. This week, they're in a dead heat.

By the way, I have to wonder about people like this, quoted from the Strib article on the poll (emphasis added by me):

Jeff Foldenaur, 35, a small-business owner in Inver Grove Heights, said that his decision was "a tough call," but that he probably would vote for Mondale.

"All the stuff he's done for us in the past," he said. "It's important to keep a balance in Congress." Foldenaur said he likes Coleman but probably would have voted for Wellstone. "I'm more sure of Mondale," he said. "He's a little more conservative."

How it can be a "tough call" for any small businessman is beyond me. And why do we need a "balance in Congress"? If it's balance we want, shouldn't we have equal numbers of Libertarians, Greens, Zoroastrians, Nazis and Khmer Rouge, just to make it REALLY fair?

And Mondale is "a little more conservative..." than Wellstone in the same sense that a second degree burn is a little less painful than a third-degree burn.

In the meantime, the polls that were showing dead heat in Florida are now showing a lopsided Jeb Bush lead.

Just Plain Depressing - The

Just Plain Depressing - The current Zogby poll shows Americans, while still approving of the job the President is doing, believe some just-plain stupid things:

Latest Zogby America Poll results also show that Democrats are now judged the party best suited to handle the economy (43% - 41%). In June, Republicans were judged best suited to handle the economy (44%-38%).

In a related story, 44% of Americans would leave a cat to guard chickens.

That's right - 44% of your fellow Americans feel raising taxes and stifling initiative is what we need.

Who's not paying attention?

TGIF - I'm having an

TGIF - I'm having an incredibly brutal day today. I'll post more stuff over the weekend, when the dust dies down a bit.