One Day At Jared ® Headquarters

SCENE:  At the headquarters of Jared ® Jewelry.   Patricia LOPEZ, the receptionist, is sitting at the front desk answering phone calls.

Phone rings.

LOPEZ:  Hello, Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry®…

VOICE on phone: Hello, this is Sol Gallivan, the Guardian of Empiricism.  What does your slogan “It can only be Jared” mean?

LOPEZ: Hello again, Mr. Gallivan.  It means the same thing it did yesterday.  It’s an ad slogan.

GALLIVAN:  But it implies that all meaning comes from Jared ®.  How do you substantiate that claim?

LOPEZ:  I don’t.  Can I help you?

GALLIVAN:  Yes.  Explain how you figure all meaning comes from Jared ®?

LOPEZ:  I really can’t, sir.  It’s just a slogan.  Thanks for your call.

GALLIVAN: But I…

(Phone hangs up).

(LOPEZ continues typing an email).

(Phone rings)

LOPEZ: Good Morning, Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry®…

GALLIVAN: Hello, this is Sol Gallivan, the Guardian of Empiricism.

LOPEZ: Hello again, Mr. Gallivan.

GALLIVAN: Could you please explain what you mean when your company says “it can only be Jared®?  Because it implies that there is some order to the universe, some eternal questions that are answered by your store.

LOPEZ: Yes, Mr. Gallivan.

GALLIVAN: Can you please tell me what those questions and answers are?

LOPEZ: No, Mr. Gallivan.

GALLIVAN: Because I’d like any empirical evidence that you have that your store actually imposes order on the universe.

LOPEZ: We’ll get back to you on that, sir.

GALLIVAN:  When exac…

(LOPEZ hangs up the phone).

(Jared LIGHT, CEO of Jared ®, walks in).

LIGHT: Hey, Patty.  What’s new?

LOPEZ:  Same as always.  That Gallivan guy is yapping about our ad slogan.

LIGHT:  (Yawns deeply).  OK.  Well, could you send one of the interns out for coffee…

(Phone rings.  LOPEZ holds up hand for a moment of quiet).

LOPEZ:  Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry®…

VOICE (on phone):  Yeah, this is Jeff Buckstein, security director for Jared’s ® Maplewood, MN store…

LOPEZ: Hey, Jeff.

BUCKSTEIN: Hey Patty.  I just had security haul off that Gallivan guy.  He was standing outside the store, yelling at people who were walking in.

LOPEZ:  What was he doing this time?

BUCKSTEIN: Yelling at people coming in the store that “there is no scientific evidence that It could, indeed, only be Jared ®”.

LOPEZ: Criminy.

BUCKSTEIN:  Please pass the word, OK?

LOPEZ: Will do.  Thanks, Jeff. (Hangs up).

LIGHT:  Gallivan again?

LOPEZ:  Yep.

LIGHT: Maplewood again?

LOPEZ: Yep.

LIGHT: It’s gonna be one of those days.

LOPEZ: Yep.

(Phone rings)

LOPEZ: Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry®…

GALLIVAN:  Hello, I’m Sol Gallivan, the Guardian of Empiricism.  I’d really like to know what you mean when you say “It can only be Jared…”

LOPEZ: It’s still just a slogan, Mr. Gallivan….

GALLIVAN:  I’m just wondering how you can sleep at night telling people untruths like…

(LIGHT motions to LOPEZ to give him the phone as GALLIVAN chatters away in the background).

GALLIVAN: …preying on the gullible and weak-minded…

LIGHT: Mister Gallivan?  This is Jared Light, CEO of Jared Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry®.

GALLIVAN: Mister Light, I’d like to ask you…

LIGHT: No, Mr. Gallivan, I’d like to ask you; if Jared Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry® is not what it can only be, what else can it be?

GALLIVAN: …

LIGHT:  Mister Gallivan?

(GALLIVAN hangs up the phone).

LOPEZ: Thanks, Mr. Light.

LIGHT:  No problem.

Hope 73. Tyranny 0.

It’s hard for us, today, to picture what the world was like seventy years ago.

The Nazis march into Paris.

For the better part of a decade, much of the world’s intelligentsia actively wondered if democracy’s day had come and gone.  Various flavors of totalitarianism – whose ghastly crimes against humanity had been hidden from the world by a compliant media – had their adherents and even admirers in the West; Hitler and Stalin had both won Time’s “Man of the Year” award – making trains run on time impressed journalists then no less than now.

Here in Minnesota, as in much of the US heartland, the demoralization of the thirties led to a splintered worldview; the Minnesota Democratic Farmer/Labor party was cozied up to Stalin (and would stay that way until Hubert H. Humphrey, in one of his great contributions to the integrity of American politics, tossed the reds from the party six years later), to the point where it opposed war with Germany, with whom Stalin was then allied via the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact.  In the meantime, the upper Midwest was a haven for the Deutsche-Amerikanische Bund, which favored rapprochement with the Nazis.

Stalin, from a Gus Hall fan site. Gus Hall was from Minnesota. The poster says “Happy To Pay For A Better Smolensk”.

Worse?  The totalitarians had just spent four years showing that their supporters in the West might have a point.  They conquered Spain.  Naziism dragged Germany out of the Great Depression (which had started ten years earlier in Germany than the rest of the west) well ahead of the rest of Europe or the US.  By all appearances, the Soviets were doing quite well too.

Poster for Nazi “Kraft Durch Freude” (Strength Through Joy) movement. Remind you of any recent City Pages ads? Me too

And World War II seemed to be the final nail.  Germany had swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia without a struggle; Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and, finally, France – theretofore Europe’s greatest military power – all fell in dazzlingly short order, sending the Brits reeling across the Channel.  Britain had beaten back the Luftwaffe the previous summer, but everyone expected Hitler to get ready for another invasion attempt in the spring; his U-boat campaign to starve Britain into submission looked, to insiders, to have a great chance of doing just that.

London burns after Scottish soccer fans, angered by three straight 0-0 tie games, run riot.

The Japanese also were going great guns, as well as rolling up vast swathes of China before their military juggernaut.  State Shinto – a pseudoreligion not a whole lot different than Naziism in its own way – seemed a viable option to many as well.

And everyone expected war between the US and Japan, and probably Germany and Italy as well.  It was a year away – but the buildup to war had already begun; Roosevelt had instituted the draft and called up great swathes of the National Guard already.

And so even though the world hadn’t fallen off the cliff into complete cataclysm – Germany wouldn’t invade the USSR for another eight months – everyone knew that the world was a horribly bleak place on December 8, 1940.  And nowhere was it bleaker than for the world’s democracies.  There were those that thought the classical American notion of liberty was on its last legs.

To say nothing of America itself.  As the fascist wave crested, the Nazi and Fascist and State Shinto leaders arrogantly looked at America, demoralized by a decade of depression and softened by the decadence of its “refrigerators” and “telephones” and “movies” and “vaudville”, and thought that America would love its prosperity too much to fight for others’ liberty – or even defend its own.

The “experts” around the world counted America out.

It was the day of the eighth playing of the 1940 NFL Championship.    And the Washington Redskins were the prohibitive, odds-on favorite of the same media and punditry that had applauded Mussolini, who lauded and feted Hitler and Lenin, who’d uncritically published and eaten up Walter Duranty’s mash notes to Joseph Stalin.

Against them stood the Chicago Bears.  The Bears had been a dynasty in the thirties, but it was a new, harrowing decade, and, like Darth Vader swallowing up the Republic, things in the NFL had changed as badly for the worse as they had in every other part of the world.  The Redskins, led by Sammy Baugh, seemed to tower invincibly over the plucky Bears, like Dolph Lundgren over Sylvester Stallone.

Sammy Baugh

The Skins had beaten the Bears 7-3 three weeks earlier, toward the end of the regular season.  As the teams headed toward the championship, at Griffith Stadium in DC, the Skins’ owner, George Preston Marshall, told the media (who else?) that the Bears were quitters and crybabies – exactly as Hitler was telling his minions about America, halfway around the world.

The Bears, like the Brits, like the Chinese, like capitalism, like democracy itself, had no chance.  Everyone knew it.

The “experts” said so.

———-

The Bears brought some of the same things to the table that America itself did, though.  Indeed, the juxtaposition should escape nobody; the Skins, led by the German-descended Baugh [*], faced the Bears, as polyglot a bunch of Yanks as the squad in any World War II war movie – with names like Musso, Osmanski, Clark, Stydahar, Macafee, Maniaci, Kavanaugh –  led by Brooklyn-born Sid Luckman, the son of pogrom refugees, and perhaps the greatest Jewish quarterback in the history of pro football.

Sid Luckman

And the Bears were at the forefront of a change in tactics; they ran from the “T Formation”, allowing greater flexibility compared with the ‘Skins’ single-wing formation – especially for Luckman, who’d become known by the end of his 12 year career as the NFL’s first great long-ball passer, even as under the bleachers at the nearly University of Chicago, other Jewish refugees were revolutionizing warfare forever as they carried off the first nuclear fission reaction.

The Bears, like America itself, brought a love of the underdog, and not a little bit of good ol’-fashioned America ingenuity and improvization skill.

———-

And so that morning, inflamed by Marshall’s arrogance just as their forebears had been enraged by Santa Anna’s brutality at the Alamo, the Bears took the field, and took the game directly to the Redskins, like the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes tearing into the Luftwaffe’s bombers.

And like the RAF – and like the US Navy would do a Midway a year and a half later, and the US Army would do at Omaha Beach in three and a half years, and in the Bulge in a little over four years – the Bears, against all odds, not only prevailed…

…but kicked the favorites’ asses.

73-0.

The “weak”, “crybaby” underdogs prevailed against the favorites.

Just as America itself did, five years later.

Would it have happened without The Bears’ epic victory, 70 years ago today?

Thankfully, we’ll never need to know.

But it’s worth observing that, as America’s fortunes waxed during the war years, so did those of The Bears, who won championships in 1941, the pivotal year 1943 and then again in 1946, setting up the successful reconstruction of Europe.

The 1940 Bears. Not just champions; titans of liberty.

The point being that the fortunes of America the nation, the shining city and the great experiment are inextricably intertwined with those other palimpsests of all that is great about America, the Bears and conservative exceptionalism.

It was in 1963 when our nation – a month past the murder of its beloved, patriotic president – needed strength.  And the Bears, led by Bill Wade and the first of many great Bears linebacking threesomes (Joe Fortunato, Bill George, and Larry Morris), gave it to them with another come-from-underdog win against the New York Giants, featuring airtight defense and an appearance by a young Polish-American tight end, Mike Ditka, upsetting the Giants and putting a comforting coda on the end of a horrible chapter in American history.  Americans could to go bed that night knowing that all was well.

Of course, the Bears’ fortunes ebbed for the next twenty-two years – as did those of conservatism, and of America itself.  And the nation’s fortunes, as always, reflected that waning.  The drought years of the sixties and seventies coincided with the epic droughts in the rest of American society; the Bears, America and the GOP reached their nadirs, with  the fall of Saigon, Abe Gibron’s years as head coach, the WIN button, Stagflation, Watergate, Desert 1 – simultaneously.

And yet three great Americans rose from the ashes during this time, laying the groundwork for a resurgence; Walter Payton, and Republicans Ronald Reagan and Mike Ditka.  Payton led the Bears out of the Wilderness just as surely as Reagan led America.

Walter Payton…

Reagan and…

...Ditka. When America needed all three, they were there.

…Ditka. When America needed all three, they were there.

And in 1986, at the depths of the Cold War, when once again “the experts” united to claim that America had seen its best days and the “nuclear clock” was supposedly ticking down as remorselessly as the timer in “24”, and that the USSR and the Patriots might well be viable and unstoppable in the modern world, Ditka (mirroring the rise of that other great Pole, Walesa) and Reagan and Payton rose up, leading other great Americans, Singletery and Weinberger, Dent and Schultz, Kirkpatrick and McMahon, and against all odds scored epic victories for freedom at the 1986 Super Bowl and the Rejkjavik talks, both leading in their way to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism and, finally, the re-ascendancy of Western Civilization.

But history didn’t end in 1990.  The Bears, like freedom itself, choked in 2006, against the Democrats and the Clots, leading directly to the defeats of 2008.

And after those dismal seasons, there were those that said the Bears and Real America would need years of rebuilding to be contenders again – if, indeed, either could do it at all.  That The Bears, like conservatism itself, were relics of a past unlamented by the likes of pundits Keith Olberman and Ed Schultz, or sportscasters Ed Schultz and Keith Olberman.

But when America, and Western Civilization, need to be saved, then the true heroes who walk among us will step up;   The Bears unpredictably have been rising out of nowhere to shock the league; the Mama Grizzlies, likewise, rose from nowhere to shock the political world.

Will it stick?  On the one hand, it’s too early to tell if justice, the Bears or conservatism will win out in 2011 or 2012.

On the other hand – we owe it to posterity to see that all of them do win.

But on the field as in and about the land, there is hope.  For conservatism is rising, and the Bears are contending, and for now there is hope.

Today, as seventy years ago today, you can thank God, Guns, Guts, and the Bears.

[*] Yeah, I stretched that metaphor too far.  Baugh was a great American, and was named “The most versatile player in NFL History” by the NFL network.  Luckman, for his part, served in the wartime Merchant Marine, playing in odd spare Sundays with the Bears.

Chanting Points Memo: Buying Minnesota With Daddy’s Money

So far in this campaign, as the DFL hammers its way toward its primary next month, most of the attacks against Tom Emmer have come from a shadowy group, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.

I’ve busted them repeatedly stretching the truth and/or lying; Channel Five followed suit earlier this week.

But who are these people?  And where did they get the money to run all these slick (if utterly truth-free) ads, and all these posh (but amateurishly-designed) websites?

Because they run through a lot of money!

2006 Campaign – We first heard of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (A4aBM) during the 2006 campaign.  During that outing, A4aBM spent $2,545,162 – about $2.3 million of it in ads against Governor Tim Pawlenty.

Where did that money come from?

Their donor list is as follows:

  • CWA COPE $5,000
  • MAPE $5,000
  • Midwest Values PAC (Franken) $5,000
  • MN AFL-CIO $5,000
  • United Food Comml Workers $7,500
  • Ma Mah Wi No Min Fund1 (Mille Lacs Tribe) $7,000

Unions and Native American gambling interests so far; no big surprises.

  • Tom Kayser (MN) $7,500  [One of Mike Ciresi’s cronies]
  • Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $15,000
  • MN Nurses $15,000
  • United Steelworkers $22,000
  • Afscme Council 5 – $25,000
  • Lks and Plains Carpenters $25,000
  • IBEW MN State Council $25,000
  • Intl Union of Operating Engineers $25,000
  • America Votes MN $30,040 [aka “ACORN 2.0“]
  • Coalition for Progress $50,000 (Mich)
  • Laborers Dist Cncl $60,000
  • Pat Stryker (CO) $100,000
  • SEIU MN State Cncl $100,000
  • Educ. MN $135,000
  • Tim Gill (CO) $300,000
  • Alida Messinger (NY) $746,000
  • Win Minnesota $778,500;

So – out of two and a half million dollars spent, about 20% – about $449,000 – came from those whom I thought were the most likely suspects, the unions.

And nearly 2/3 came from two sources – “Alida Messinger”, and a group called “Win Minnesota”.

We’ll come back to both of them.

2010 Campaign So Far – To date in the gubernatorial campaign, A4aBM has raised $93,386 (as of this past Tuesday).  They’d spent $72,383 of it as of Tuesday (on ads that were, as we ascertained earlier this week, wall to wall bullcrap).   Of that $93,386, 79.636 of it came from the “Win Minnesota PAC”.

So that’s two election cycles in a row (so far) where “Win Minnesota” has been the leading funder of scabrous hit pieces against Republican candidates.

Win Minnesota?  Seems pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?

Who is “Win Minnesota”, And Who Funds Them? – Here’s the list of major contributors to “Win Minnesota” during the 2006 campaign.  I’ll be adding the emphasis for reasons that’ll become fairly obvious:

  • Anne Bartley (San Fran) $25,000 [Linked via the Rockefeller foundation to Alida Messinger – whose maiden name was “Rockefeller” and who…well, we’ll get back to that.  She’s also linked to Hillary Clinton’s “Women’s Leadership Council” and former Clinton administration figure]
  • Shayna Berkowitz (Mpls) $100,000; ]
  • John Cowles (Mpls) $20,000; [Why yes, the former Strib publisher!  But don’t you dare say the Strib is biased!]
  • Andrew Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
  • David Dayton (Mpls) $5,000;
  • Eric Dayton (Mpls) $1,000;
  • Mark Dayton (Mpls) $25,000;
  • Mary Lee Dayon (Mpls) $100,000;
  • Vanessa Dayton $1,000;
  • Sandra Ferry (NY) $50,000; [Yet another Rockefeller – sister of Alida Messinger]
  • Barbara Forster (Mpls) $25,000; [generic liberal with deep pockets]
  • Roger Hale (Mpls) $100,000; [Former Daytons’ executive]
  • John Harris (PA)$20,000;
  • Myron Kunin $5,000; [Hair care tycoon]
  • Kim Lund (Mpls) $25,000
  • Darlene Luther 47A Committee $10,000 ;
  • alida Messinger (NY) $165,000;
  • Midwest Values PAC (Franken) $20,000;
  • Linda Pritzker (TX) $30,000; [Scionette of the Hyatt fortune, big-time liberal with deep pockets; major donor to MoveOn.org]
  • Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux $10,000;
  • Tina Smith (Mpls) $10,000;
  • Linde Uihlein (WI)$100,000; [Schlitz heiress, long-time political plutocrat]
  • Julie Zelle (MN) $5,000

That was a lot of Daytons, and people linked with the Daytons…wasn’t it?

So how about this year?

So far in 2010, “Win Minnesota” lists the following donors to “Win Minnesota”‘s current warchest (currently worth $1,173,500), again with emphasis added by me:

  • Andrew Dayton $1,000
  • David Dayton $50,000
  • John cowles $25,000 [Remember him from 2006?]
  • MaryLee Dayton $250,000
  • Emily Tuttle (MN) $5,000
  • Ronald Sternal (MN) $5,000
  • Alida Messinger (NY) $500,000
  • James Deal (MN) $50,000
  • Roger Hale (MN) $10,000 [Remember him from above?]
  • Barbara forster (MN) $25,000
  • Democratic Governors Association $250,000;

So of the $1.1 and change million warchest, $851,000 came from Daytons, and Alida Messinger.

But wait!  There is another fund registered with the state, with a different account number but with the same email and street addresses, that has $850,000 socked away but has spent no money.

And where did that $850,000 come from?

  • Alida Messinger (Mpls) $50,000
  • Win Minnesota $50,000
  • Education MN $250,000
  • Laborers District Council $100,000
  • MAPE $50,000
  • IBEW MN State Council $50,000
  • MN Nurses Assc $50,000
  • Local 49 Engineers $25,000
  • Vance Opperman $50,000
  • Afscme Council 5 $50,000
  • MN AFL-CIO $25,000
  • SEIU MN State Council $50,000
  • AFSCME (Wash DC) $50,000;

And who is this Alida Messinger who has contributed so mightily – over $1.46 million over the past four years! – to the cause of disinforming Minnesotans about Republicans?  Other than the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller III?

The ex-wife of candidate Mark Dayton.

So “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” is essentially a front for a group of unions and, to the tune of millions over the past four years, Mark Dayton’s family, friends and ex-wife.

They are paying millions of dollars to advertise – and hiding it from casual view behind two layers of astroturf.

Mark Dayton is trying to buy the election, but he’s taking great pains to make sure you don’t know about it.

Chanting Points Memo: The Alliance For A Deceitful, Sloppy, Not Very Bright Minnesota

The “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” – an astroturf group sponsored by a consortium of DFL-linked pressure groups – has been behind much of the smear-mongering against Tom Emmer so far this campaign. They’ve occupied themselves with a klutzy false-flag website, a couple of twitter accounts (one of baldfaced propaganda, and one, “StuffEmmerSays”, that tried to mock Emmer statements but actually made him sound like Ronald Reagan to the point I spent the last month mocking it as a pro-GOP site; it seems to have worked, and the account seems to have demised).

And if that’s the best the DFL can do, this election’s not going to be nearly as hard as I’d worried.

“A4aBM” ran the first anti-Emmer ad of the campaign this week; and the Republican Twitterverse has been redounding with bits and pieces of the information A4aBM got wrong.

Long story short; the ad is warm runny bulls**t.

Claim #1: Audio: “Tom Emmer sided with Governor Pawlenty and opposed a plan that would force corporations and CEOs to pay their fair share of taxes”  ABMBackup: “On May 18, 2009, Emmer voted against the second attempt at a DFL- written FY2010-2011 revenue bill…

Sounds pretty gnarly, huh?

The Truth: Tom Emmer did not cast a vote on this roll call.

Oh, my.  You mean, A4aBM got a fact wrong?

Well, the ad is 0-1 so far.

Claim #2: Audio: “They cut funding for education” ABM Backup: “On April 18, 2007, Emmer voted against HF 6, the K-12 funding bill, which passed the House with a huge bipartisan majority of 119-13. On May 8, 2007, Emmer again voted against the bill as it was re-passed on a similar 119-14 vote…

Voted against it twice?  Emphasis added:

The Truth: After April 18, 2007, there were no additional votes taken on this bill that year.  During the 2008 session, this bill was used as a “vehicle” and a delete-all amendment was added completely changing the bill.  The vote they reference on May 8, 2007 was actually a vote on May 8, 2008 and it wasn’t a vote on the bill but, rather, a procedural vote on whether the bill should be taken from the table.  Emmer voted against taking the bill from the table.

You’re trying to say A4aBM lied about the real intent of voting on a picayune procedural technicality in the life of a background-noise bill to try to smear Tom Emmer?  Say it isn’t so!

0-2 so far.

Claim #3: Audio: “[Tom Emmer and Tim Pawlenty] cut funding for education.”

The Truth: There is nothing in the bill cited that included a cut to education.  In addition, KSTP’s Tom Hauser recently had this to say about the claim that Governor Pawlenty cut education funding: “As for Pawlenty cutting education funding, that’s not true.  According to the education department, per pupil funding has gone up since 2004.”

0-3 – well, more like 0-4, really.

Claim #4: Audio: “[Emmer voted to cut] job training.”

The Truth: Nowhere in ABM’s backup is there any support for this claim.  “Training” is mentioned only once in the legislation, and that is in reference to home ownership education.  This bill had nothing to do with job training.

Zero for five.

Claim #5: Audio: “[Emmer and Pawlenty cut] job training and health care”.  On screen: “Source: Minnesota House Journal, 4/25/2005”

The Truth: According to the Minnesota House of Representatives Journal, the House was not in session on 4/25/2005, meaning there could be no Journal of the House for that day.  The Alliance’s citation, therefore, does not even exist.

So the lesson for today is, whenever “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” speaks, distrust and then verity.

Because the DFL asssumes that you, the people, are too stupid to know any better.

A Day In The Life Of Every Uppity Conservative

ME:  Hi!

REPRESENTATIVE GROUP OF LIBERALS (RGOL):  Conservatism is fundamentally racist!

ME: Um – beg your pardon?

“RGOL”:  Racism oozes from every pore of conservatism!

ME:  OK, that’s what we call “bigotry” where I come from, but what the hell, I love a good ad-hominem argument.  Do tell!

“RGOL”:  Nixon’s “southern strategy” brought all the racists to the GOP!

ME: Er, let’s get back to “the south” in a bit here.  You did read my post last week about Jacob Weisberg’s article in that noted racist conservative hangout Slate, that noted there are distinct differences between Northeastern, Southern and Western conservatism, right?  How Northeastern conservatism is largely comfortable with big government but with an emphasis on making big government more fiscally sane – think Mitt Romney – and race is largely a non-entity, and in fact part of the roots of Northeastern conservatism are at least partly in the abolition movement?  And how Western conservatism, the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, is fundamentally libertarian, which means racism is anathema, since libertarian government is utterly color blind, and all real racism – the racism that makes people unequal before the law – is entirely a function of excessive and illegitimate government power, right?  Which leaves southern conservatism, which certainly had racists among its adherents, but whose fundamental “racism” is at least partly a matter of framing by, well liberals?

“RGOL”:  Of course we did.  Now – look at this list of southern conservatives and the racist things they’ve said…

ME: OK, you’re more or less dodging the point here.  Can individuals be racist?  Certainly.  I mean, every human in the world is a “we-ist”, more comfortable around and attuned to people like their own community, and less to to people less like them in ways that are manifested as everything from pointed humor to muted suspicion to blind hatred.

“RGOL”:  Right.  Like conservatism!

ME:  Well, no.  Liberals too.  I mean, mention, say, a white fundamentalist from Mississippi who resurfaces driveways for a living…

“RGOL”:  Hah!  Dumb redneck wingnut!

ME:  …or an NRA member…

“RGOL”:  Bigger gun clinging snake-handling cousin-kissing Jeeeeeebus freak hahahahahahahaha!

ME: ….right, or Sarah Palin…

“RGOL”:  Hahahahaha!  She went to community college!  Trig is Bristol’s baby!  She can’t even write and has fake boobs and slept with her deputy mayor and …

ME:  …or the Japanese…

“RGOL”:  Er…what?

ME:  Well, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the godfather of the modern nannystate, did not only order the most singularly racist government action in the past 100 years – the mass internment of American citizens of Japanese descent – but did it after two terms in which he supported California’s deeply racist anti-Japanese immigration laws.

“RGOL”: …

ME: OK, fine, it was seventy years ago.  Still, your entire case that “conservatism oozes racism”  seems to be based on 1) a bunch of anecdotal stories of Republicans who said racist things 2) a bunch of memes from Media Matters and the like, that largely yank statements by the likes of Rush Limbaugh so far out of context you’re getting into borderline defamation, and 3) framing conservative issues as fundamentally racist.

To which I reply 1) Why does Robert Byrd never make it into those lists, 2) Gosh, a liberal flak group waterboarding context, notify the media, and 3) when your entire argument is designed to try to misleadingly frame your opponent as something evil – and we all agree that racism is a bad thing, right? – then you are committing a crime against truth!

“RGOL”:  What are you talking about?

ME: For example, every time a conservative talks about strengthening the Tenth Amendment, some idiot lefty will come back with “That sounds like “states rights”, which was once used to defend slavery.

“RGOL”:  Right!   Conservatism supports slavery!

ME:  {{facepalm}} No.  No, we are pretty much the opposite extreme; we are the party of individual self-determination.  And, by the way, it is a fact that Jim Crow after 1900 was largely a government initiative that overrode the free market; that in most southern states, the business community – which are stereotypically conservative, right?…

“RGOL”:  Bosses!  Bosses!

ME: …right.  They largely opposed Jim Crow, since Jim Crow took anywhere from 10 to 50% out of their markets!

“RGOL”:  But the southerners were racists!  And Nixon brought them into the GOP!

ME:  Well, no and yes and no.  The “Southern Strategy” sought votes from southerners who were upset over a variety of things – federal intrusions into property rights and free association as a matter of principle, the size and growth of government, and the federalization of an awful lot of things that had always been left to the states.  And yes, there were no doubt some among ’em that were upset that the Feds poked their nose into race relations – because a racist citizen’s vote counts just as much as yours does.  Which galls the crap out of me when I see some of those anti-semitic filth at left-leaning demonstrations, by the way – but I digress.  The framing of all southern conservatives’ flight to the GOP as race-related has become part of the conventional wisdom, to the extent that all defenses of the thesis become tautological.  Just watch:  “The southern strategy was not primarily about race”.

“RGOL”:  But the southern strategy was racist because it brought racist southerners into the party…

ME:  Thanks.  I rest my case.

“RGOL”:  …um…

ME:  Move along.

“RGOL”:  Yeah?  Well…what about Arizona?

ME:  Jeez.  More framing.  The Arizona law – which most Americans support, in its final form – is about securing our borders.  That is one of the missions of government, no?

“RGOL”:  But it’s racist!

ME:   Huh?  Let me ask you something; if Minnesota were awash in Canadians sneaking across the border, and illegal Canadian immigration were forcing down American wages, and if in coming here they rejected American culture and upheld Canadian culture with their back-bacon and hockey-worship and mass drunkenness, and if the Canadian Army were charging across the border to help out Canadian drug smugglers and killing people on our side of the border, that “illegal” Gordon Fitzpatrick wouldn’t replace the “illegal” Juan Jimenez as the boogeyman du jour?

“RGOL”:  But that’s just dumb.

ME:  What if our hypothetical Gordon Fitzpatrick was pro-charter schools and anti-card-check?

“RGOL”:  Then he’d be racist and he’d hate children…

ME:  Er, yeah.  Look – do our laws mean anything, or do they not? Are we a sovereign nation, or are we not?

“RGOL”:  Er…huh?

ME:  …

“RGOL”: You are obviously a racist.

ME:  Riiiiight.

My Tax Day At The Capitol Mall

So I not only got to attend the Tea Party at the State Capitol yesterday, but it was my immense privilege to be the lead-off speaker; mine was the first in a long stream of excellent speeches, including that of my NARN cohost  Ed Morrissey, whose speech I videotaped and is currently up at Hot Air, and Twila Brase, and Katie Kieffer, who will no doubt post video, also gave an excellent speech.  There were more.  Many more.

Lil ol me.  Courtesy Peter Anderson.

Lil’ ol’ me. Courtesy Peter Anderson.

I estimated about 1,500 people at the event at its peak around 6:30 or so.  It was good-sized, jovial crowd – but not quite as big as last year.  Some people were worried about this.  I’m not; last year, people were upset, and wondering what the hell to do, and the Tea Party was like a psychological life ring to a whole lot of people whose political activism had never gone beyond going to the polls, maybe, every couple of years.  Over the past year, though, conservatives have changed; we turn out for rallies; we call Congresspeople in vast numbers; better yet, of the 11,000 who attended last week’s Bachmann/Palin rally, over 1,000 volunteered to be election judges.   We saw similar results last night.  Conservatives are doing what they need to do to turn the spirit of the Tea Parties into the action this nation needs.

One group that was not in evidence were the “crashers”; this wasn’t the case everywhere, and the Saint Paul Tea Party was ready with a sizeable group of volunteers armed with orange vests and cameras to handle security – but other than half a dozen “Tax Me More!” activists who stood across the street for about half an hour, and a “Thanks To Taxes” billboard-truck that desultorily circled the capitol grounds (the billboard seemed to imply that we have children, sunshine and sex because of taxes), there was really no “opposition” at all.

And while last year I saw a few signs that made me cringe, I didn’t even see much of the far-out fringe in the crowd this year, either.  I mean, if you’re one of those lefties who gets the victorian vapours over references to John Galt, then yeah, I suppose the crowd was big and scary.  But the far-out, Alex Jones fringe was mostly absent from the rally itself.  I saw not a single “Birther” sign, much less anything I”d call racist.  Indeed, almost all the far-out fringe contingent…

…was up on stage.   For some reason, one of Toni Backdahl’s co-MCs was a guy from AM1710, a little 15 watt AM station in Maple Grove that could be charitably said to be out there on the Alex Jones fringe of the movement.   And one of the opening “musical” acts was a kid in an “InfoWars.com” t-shirt (these are the folks that make the radical Randers shake their heads and go “good lord, how wierd”) who did a pseudo-rap rant that might have fit in at an anarchist rally and whose message would have made me cringe even had the kid not considered “intonation” part of a socialist conspiracy.  There were also a few speakers that sputtered about the unconstitutionality of the income tax, which is pretty much the norm at these things.

Now, I don’t fault the Tea Party’s organizers for including a lot of people that I, personally, disagree with strenuously – because that’s the whole point of the Tea Party.  It’s a group of people, some of whom would not normally agree about anyting, gathering together for a common cause; making government smaller, more responsible, and less frivolous with our rights and liberties.

And so I say “Yay” to all; the mainstream-of-the-mainstream Republican, the disaffected Democrat, the Ronulan, and everyone in between, and all of us who are united behind the idea that we are all created equal, and that people aren’t free until government is limited; let’s all kick ass in November.

Indeed, the only problem I heard about involved a reporter from “The Uptake”.  He’s a local leftyblogger who usually blogs anonymously; he went by “Steve” on the Uptake’s video.  Now, he interviewed me briefly last year; I never saw his final product, although I was told either his voiceover or his editing really mangled the context of my interview; I wouldn’t know – I don’t watch the Uptake much.  I did another standup with him after I got offstage – I figure if he and the Uptake want to Maye what I said, it says more about him and them than it does about me.   He referred to the people around him as “tea-baggers”; I gently corrected him, but I got a sneaking hunch it was a tell as to “the Uptake’s” overall tone of “coverage”.

But shortly after that, a few of the orange-clad security guys came up to me and said they’d been getting complaints about the Uptake’s crew.  I asked them for specifics; they took me to a couple that that said the Uptake’s crew hadn’t identified themselves as a “news” crew that was going to publish an interview online, and that they seemed to be trying to get them to say something stupid, to make them – Tea Partiers in general, it seemed – look stupid.    The woman said that the “reporter” seemed to be trying to pick a fight with her, trying to one-up her on her knowledge of issues; “I”m not an encyclopedia, I can’t answer all the questions he has right away”, she said, still visibly exasperated.   Her husband, a Vietnam veteran, echoed his wife’s thoughts; “he was trying to pick a fight; he was harassing us”.

I walked away, wondering – is “the Uptake” still trying to be an actual news organization, or are they down to trying to do bogus Jon Stewart-style “attack” man-on-the-street interviews?   It’s entertainment, I suppose, watching a self-professed “smarter-than-thou” taking pot shots at those he and his viewers consider inferiors for cheap yuks.  But is it “news?”

Now, I haven’t contacted The Uptake about this, and I doubt that I will; when it comes to “reporting” on the Tea Parties, even the mainstream media seem to find waterboarding context acceptable.  But I think it’s curious that an organization that is fighting for its standing on the Capitol Press Corps would seemingly take such gratuitous liberties with the whole idea of “journalistic ethics”, whatever they are, with this kind of behavior, if true.

Bill Salisbury at the Pioneer Press, and Jessica Mador of MPR both did good, balanced jobs of reporting on the event; or at least I got no complaints from security about either of them (except from the guard that Salisbury bowled over in his rush to interview Katie Kieffer).

I’ll be looking forward to next year.  Goodness knows there’ll be work to do.

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One Day At The Oceanaire

(SCENE:  At the Oceanaire – a tony seafood restaurant in Downtown Minneapolis.   Representative Paul Thissen, Senator Tom “Baby Got” Bakk and Speaker of the House Margaret Anderson-Kelliher are sitting at a table with five empty chairs.  Anderson-Kelliher, bored, drums her fingers on the table.  Thissen checks his watch, and Bakk rock nervously in their seats. )

(Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak enters the room)

THISSEN, BAKK and ANDERSON-KELLIHER, SIMULTANEOUSLY:  Hello, Mayor Rybak.

RYBAK:  Hey, Margaret!

(BAKK and THISSEN, deflated, go back to gnawing on toothpicks)

RYBAK:  Thanks for calling the meeting, Margaret.  What’s up?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  I’d like to lay out some ground rules and strategy for the campaign.

(SEN. MARK DAYTON walks into restaurant).

RYBAK: That’s a great idea.  (Notices DAYTON).  Hey, Mark!

DAYTON:  Aaaaaaagh!   (DAYTON dives to floor, rapidly low-crawls to the table, furtively sits in chair).

THISSEN:  What’s the matter, Mark?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER – Shut up, er…

THISSEN: Paul…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: …whatever.  (Turns to DAYTON)  What’s the matter, Mark?

DAYTON:  (Affixing a lobster bib) Er, nothing.  Why?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Just curious.  (Looks at menu, as former Senator MATT ENTENZA, with wife LOIS QUAM, enter the restaurant.

BAKK: “Hey, Matt…”

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  I said SHUT UP!

BAKK: You told Paul to shut…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Don’t care! (turns to ENTENZA) How are you today, Matt?

ENTENZA: I’m doing…

QUAM: (A little too effusive) He’s doing just fine, Margaret!  (ENTENZA abruptly stops).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: Ah, excellent!

(A loud belch issues from outside the entrance.  Rep. TOM RUKAVINA walks in, pounding his chest.  He shakes out another mild belch).

THISSEN:  Hey, Tom…(Trails off as ANDERSON-KELLIHER stares him down; THISSEN looks bash fully at his menu).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Excellent!  I believe that’s everyone…(counts noses)…except…

(Harps play in the hallway.  A little dry ice fog obscures the floor.  Sen. JOHN MARTY, hands clasped as if in prayer before him, moves across the floor as if floating, and lands like a hummingbird on the remaining chair.  A golden aura briefly suffuses the room, then vanishes).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Hey, John.

MARTY:  May the blessing of my presence bring you peace.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: Er, yeah.  I called you all here today because voters are having a hard time telling the difference between us.  For the good of the DFL race, it’d be best if we all come up with some sort of differentiation between us before the convention.

RYBAK:  Primary.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Convention!

ENTENZA: Yeah, convention!.

QUAM:  Primary!

ENTENZA: Er, yeah.  Primary.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Convention!

THISSEN:  Convention, just like Margaret says…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  For the last time, shut the **** up! (ANDERSON-KELLIHER flings a salt-shaker at THISSEN, hitting him in the face.  He falls backward over his chair, and lies on the floor, motionless.  DAYTON dives for the ground).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Like I said, convention.  So I’d like you all to think of things we can do to distinguish ourselves to the voters…

WAITRESS (Approaches with order pad in hand):  Hello, my name is Wendy, and I’ll be your…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  For the last ****** time, shut the **** up…

RYBAK: Er, Margaret?  She’s the waitress…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Oh.  Go ahead, then.

WAITRESS:  Er, OK.  Any drink orders before we order dinner?”

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Boilermaker.

RYBAK: Appletini, please.  Extra tini.

BAKK:  I’ll have whatever Margaret is having.

THISSEN:  (Groans incomprehensibly)

RUKAVINA: Grain Belt Premium!

ENTENZA:  I’ll take your house chablis…

QUAM:  He’ll take the house merlot, and so will I.

ENTENZA:  Er…yeah.

DAYTON:  A diet Pellegrini.

WAITRESS:  Sir, all Pelligrini is “Diet”.  It’s water…

DAYTON:  Two diet pellegrinis.

MARTY:  I shall have a glass of water.  But please bring it in gaseous form.

WAITRESS: Er…wait – you want a cup of steam?

MARTY:  As it is said, so shall it be poured.

WAITRESS:  Er, OK.  And would you all like to start a tab?

(All at table break up into uproarious laughter)

RUKAVINA:  Baby, you ain’t seen nothing.

(WAITRESS LEAVES)

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: OK.  I’d like everyone to say, for the record, what makes you different.  Paul?

THISSEN:  (Groans, puts hand on forehead).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: OK.  Matt?

ENTENZA:  (Looks at QUAM)

QUAM:  He will raise taxes for a better Minnesota.

(ENTENZA nods enthusiastically).

RYBAK:  Well, I’ll raise taxes for a better Minnsesota, too.

BAKK:   Well, I won’t…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: Yes, you will.

BAKK:  Yes, I will.

DAYTON:  I will raise taxes.  For a better Minnesota.  (Eyes door furtively).  I will.  I will.  I will.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  OK.  Not getting what I want here…

RUKAVINA:  I’ll raise taxes more for a better Minnesota!

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Better…

WAITRESS (Carrying tray of drinks):  OK, that’s two house Merlots,  a Grain Belt Premium, two Boilermakers, an Appletini, two “diet Pellegrinis” a cup of steam, and (looks at THISSEN) some smelling salts.

THISSEN:  (grunts painfullly)

WAITRESS:  That’ll be $77.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: No.

WAITRESS:  Er, maam?  I brought the drinks.  You need to pay up.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Shut up.

WAITRESS:  Maam?  This isn’t funny.  You wanna leave me on the look for almost $80 worth of drinks?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Shut up!

RUKAVINA:  Yeah.  Shut up!

WAITRESS:  I’m gonna call the police.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  (Stands at table)  Attention, everyone in the restaurant.  Please pay our drink tab!  It is for a better Minnesota!

(RUKAVINA, BAKK, RYBAK, QUAM, and ENTENZA applaud; DAYTON balances spoon on his finger; THISSEN groans)

MARTY:  As it is written, so shall it be done.  (MARTY disappears in a blinding flash of pure light).

And…scene.

There Will Be Drool

The DFL is heading toward a convention that will bestow its usual “kiss of death” to whomever gets it – usually the candidate that makes the “progressive” activists that control the party the most tingly; this will lead to a summer of hammer-and-tong DFL fratricide leading up to a September primary that will determine the real candidate for governor.

This combined with the fact that the DFL is in a historically disorganized state, and heading into a headwind of disaffection with Barack Obama and a GOP with new leadership at its head and a Tea Party chasing it to relevance, and the DFL and its minions are desperately in need of a sideshow to draw attention away from their own cage match.

Dave Mindeman at mnpAct wants to direct the reader to the sideshow they’re counting on – the neck-and-neck GOP endorsement battle between Marty Seifert and Tom Emmer:

The Emmer vs. Seifert free for all on the GOP side of the governor’s race is heating up. Both sides are capable of some prolific attack dog politics. And it will get nasty.

It is gradually developing into a conservative base vs. party establishment fight. Emmer is increasingly drawing endorsements and support from conservative bloggers, conservative activists, and conservative leadership. Seifert has support from old line party leadership and the more traditional Republican base.

Which is an interesting way for the local leftysphere to put it, given that both Emmer and Seifert are routinely portrayed as “conservative extremists” whenever they’re mentioned in any other context.  But it’s not untrue; Seifert’s got the organizational mojo, Emmer’s a conservative firebrand and the best stump speaker in Minnesota politics today.

The two have developed a recent history. Emmer had challenged Seifert for Minority Leader a few years back and then refused to vote for him for Speaker in 2009. Emmer has been waiting awhile for this opportunity and he is cashing in.

Add to all of this the fact that delegate strength to the convention is nearly evenly divided and you have the makings of an old style, no holds barred, nasty party convention.

Yep.  The GOP convention is going to be a donnybrook, very possibly crazier than the 2002 convo.

It is noteworthy that Seifert has been particularly critical of Emmer’s voting record of late. The in-depth research style has the definite ring of a Brodkorb type tactic. Although the former MDE attack blogger has been careful to be neutral in his capacity as party deputy chair, his fingerprints are almost detectable in the current Seifert strategy.

It’s no big secret; Seifert’s the “insider”.   The party has several years invested in Seifert as minority leader.

But this – and the idea that for every yin there needs to be an opposite yang – leads Mindeman to a fatally flawed assumption or, if you are more cynical, to the gaping whopper the DFL wants you all to believe about the MNGOP in the upcoming election; the sideshow, if you will, to try to distract the voters and encourage the DFL troops as they go through their own cage match this summer.

He starts out OK…:

Looking over the general Republican landscape, let me make a speculation…and mind you this is only an opinion.

The conservatives are putting a vested interest in Emmer. He is emerging as their consensus choice. Emmer has a wind at his back as he makes his case for the convention.

Yep.  The GOP’s conservatives are using the endorsement process as it was intended to be used; as the time to reject compromise, to declare “death or glory”, to come home with their shields or on them; to campaign for the most conservative candidate left in the race.  They don’t want the consolation prize; they want it all.  And correctly so; now is the time to fight like hell for the brass ring.

Seifert’s supporters, by the way, are doing exactly the same thing.  Because now is the time for the fight.

But it’s on May 2 that Mindeman’s theory goes to pot.

If Seifert manages to wrest the nomination away from Emmer in a bloody convention, you will see a party that will go into the fall campaign divided. A conservative backlash might just stop the conservatives from coalescing around Seifert, reducing his turn out and possibly moving toward some other third party or maybe even forming one.

Let me take you back in time to 2002.  Brian Sullivan – who was and is every bit as conservative as Tom Emmer – had the backing of the conservative base.  Tim Pawlenty – who held the same position in the GOP caucus that Seifert does today – and Sullivan were every bit as closely locked together as Seifert and Emmer are today.   And some of the punditry, especially on the left, predicted exactly the same result; that Sullivan’s supporters would stay home, that conservatives would break away, that the GOP would battle itself into irrelevance.

But the convention, as long and brutal as it got, had exactly the opposite effect.  To win the endorsement, Tim Pawlenty had to adopt one of Sullivan’s key driving points – the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge.  And for the imponderably vast majority of Minnesota conservatives, that was more than enough.

Tim Pawlenty took the pledge – and, more importantly, has honored it for eight years, now.  And I, as a fire-breathing conservative talk show host, could care less if he took a trip to the arctic with Will Steger that had absolutely no policy ramifications, as long as he stuck to the point that mattered – stymying the DFL’s plan, “spend like crack whores with stolen gold cards”.

In short, the bruising endorsement process had exactly the effect it was supposed to; a candidate won, but as a result of his fight to get endorsed, he took the keystone of his challenger’s platform to the Governor’s Mansion with him.

Emmer may have a better chance of holding the party together but he is going to carry some baggage as well.

Nope.

Look – I’m not backing any particular candidate, at least not publicly.  Not yet.  But I’ll tell you this; even if you are a stone-cold Tom Emmer zealot, you have to realize that not only would Marty Seifert be a better governor than any of the DFL’s pack of hamsters, but that Marty Seifert’s voting record in the House is more conservative than Tim Pawlenty’s ever was.   Seifert is a conservative.  As conservative as Emmer?  Perhaps not – but plenty good enough.

So campaign like hell for whomver your candidate is – Seifert or Emmer.  Because for once,  conservatives are in a win-win situation.   Whomever gets the nomination will be a better, more conservative governor than any of the alternatives available to us today.  Neither will be perfect – but perfect, as they say, is the enemy of “plenty good enough”.

There will be blood.

No.  There will be coffee, and shouting, and more coffee, and pictures of delegates sleeping at 2AM with drool coming out of the corner of their mouth, and more coffee, and Excedrin, and five or ten or fifty ballots, and concession and acceptance speeches, and handshakes, and meetings, and buried hatchets and smoothed feathers, and looks out the window at the Tea Partiers who are done asking nicely for results.

And on the morning after the final gavel, there will be a campaign that hits the road at the head of a mostly-unified GOP that has a three month headstart building a winning campaign, on its way toward capping off an epic comeback.

There will be coffee, drool and victory.

Three words to live by.

Protocols Of The Elders Of Times Square

Freedom can be confusing.

We’ll come back to that.

I’ve told this story many, many times.  I think it’s still illustrative.  Back in the nineties and early naughties, you could predict a few things about GOP gatherings.

  • At precinct caucuses, you could be assured that there would be an avalanche of pro-life/anti-stem cell/anti-gay-marriage resolutions.  In the former two cases, they would be largely redundant with what was already in the platform.  No matter; they had to be debated and voted up or down, one at a time.
  • At legislative district (“BPOU”, in the MNGOP’s curious parlance) conventions, there’d be two big clusters of people in the room.  To stage right, there’d be a group of pro-lifers.  To stage left, there’d be everyone else.  And if one was running for a district office, one could expect a series of questions about one’s commitment to life.  “Are you pro-life?”  “How pro-life are you?”  “Please describe exactly how pro-life you are?”  “If your pro-life-ness were a mountain, which mountain would it be – Denali, K-2 or the Matterhorn?”

And pro-lifers weren’t the only single-issue voters.  During the nineties, after the nadir of the Clinton crime bill and Alan Spears’ various attempts to ratchet up gun control in Minnesota, the shooters came out.  And it could lead to comical results; pro-lifers would occasionally express revulsion at rolling back gun controls, while some of the shooters were visibly bored at the pro-life talk.  They came for their issues, and their issues alone.

That was then.

Now, we have the Tea Parties.  And while the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) likes to try to portray the Tea Parties like Nick Coleman once referred to “peasants beating on the observatory door” with pitchforks and torches, they are actually a whole lot more complex – John Kerry’s word was “nuanced” than that.  You see a lot of people at these rallies who, two years ago, didn’t care about politics, who a year into the Obama administration have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves.

And there are many roads to education; there are as many stories at the Tea Parties are there are participants.  Some reacquainted themselves with Reagan.  Many others in Minnesota arrived via (Minnesota-based syndicated talk show host) Jason Lewis’ long-running Tax Rallies, and Lewis’ heady introduction to the Federalists and Limited Government; Lewis, with his MA in Political Science, gives a pretty compete education in Federalist history.  Others come via other media figures – Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – to a new appreciation iof what limited government means, and how far off from that ideal we currently are.  Another contingent were brought to politics by the Ron Paul campaign.  And you can find others who filtered into the movement from immigration reform, pro-life and other groups, including a few from groups that we can tactfully call “the fringe”.

All of them – the good, the weird and the rhetorically ugly – come together for one reason; they want to put government back in its place.

Which, compared with the anything-goes, single-issue-bound GOP of 2000 and 2004, is pretty exciting stuff.

And as with anything that excites conservatives, the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) must spin it as some sort of potential depravity or another.

Commenter “Master Of None” drew my attention to NYTimes piece on the Tea Party movement yesterday.   I read it.

At first read, it was almost encouraging; it seemed at first blush to pay some service to the most important facet of the Tea Parties; that represents a wave of self-education, an “awakening” if you will, on the part of an awful lot of people.   It almost seemed like the NYTimes might start portraying Tea Partiers as people; actual individuals with their own motivations, each as unique as they are.

I said almost.

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

I chewed on that last clause for a bit.  A phrase like “bracing for tyranny” has two different meanings in our society.  To a big chunk of “Red” America, it means “being aware that unlimited government can not end well”, with a twist of “so let’s not let it get out of control” on top.

But to an NPR-listening, Times-reading, down-the-nose-at-the-hoi-polloi-looking putative “elite”, it’s a code phrase, for something the “fearful, Jebus-clinging, John Birch-reading gun freaks” do.

In other words, it’s something foreign.  Un-American.  Worthy of fear and, inevitably, fear’s eldest child, hatred.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

“Militia groups”.  It’s another media code word; the unwashed, insane, depraved, usually racist undercurrent that Blue America sees hiding under every rock between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

“Shadowy international networks”.

You see some of that at the Tea Parties.  Again, it’s the fringe; the people with the beards and camouflage and the huge potbellies and the pamphlets that gather around the fringe of  the Tea Party rallies, mixing uneasily with the vast majority; the people in dockers and polos, or work boots and embroidered shop jackets, who make up the vast majority of people at the Parties.  People like you and me and, someone tell the Times, your typical Times reader as well.

Oh, the Times gets parts right – enough to make the whole thing worth a read:

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

Defiance of easy definition notwithstanding, the Times wants you to accept their facile definition anyway.

And those facile definitions are always based on fear of the great unwashed unknown:

At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.

“Ah”, I thought.  “This could be good!”.   The rural west is a fascinating sociological hodgepodge; my own hometown in North Dakota jumbled college professors with their urbane, sometimes far-left beliefs, together with engineers (from a few local manufacturers) and business people (mostly fiscal conservatives) and agribusiness types (conservatives who loved farm subsidies)  to a few drastically-misplaced hippies, and always, always the farmers – including a few who’d been driven to radical populism by the hard times.

Who do you suppose the Times would be focusing on today?

In the inland Northwest, the Tea Party movement has been shaped by the growing popularity in eastern Washington of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, and by a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992, resulting in the deaths of a marshal and Mr. Weaver’s wife and son. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d’Alene until he was shut down.

Of all the “local peculiarities” to pick, what do you suppose the odds were?

The piece focuses, throughout, on the Tea Parties’ most paranoid lunatic fringe – almost as if to say “pay no attention to the populist awakening behind the curtain, Boston and New York and San Francisco!  They are unclean!  These are the bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freaks we warned you about!”

If they can’t beat the Tea Party on the facts, it’s logical that the next step will be fearmongering.

Day Late, Millions Short

Brian Lambert shows why KTLK-FM had such a rocky start in the Twin Cities, in a piece that purports to be about Air America tanking; along the way, it also shows why liberalism is starting to gasp for air in the age of Obama.

Lambert starts with the genesis of his short-lived radio show:

I was summoned to a meeting with Clear Channel Communications “talk radio guru”/consultant, Gabe Hobbs, after only a couple weeks on the job. Having just spent a chunk of the previous 15 years covering radio consultants, or more accurately, the inanity and chaos they left behind, I was prepared to sit across from a complete cartoon.  (OK, not every radio consultant I had met or interviewed was a “complete” cartoon. But that’s a little like saying “some cigarettes are good for you”, to which you reply, “yeah, the ones you don’t smoke.”)

Lambo got that one right.  But I digress.  But so did he.

In their wisdom the local Clear Channel group had decided that “a WCCO for the 21st century” was the way to go for the FM talk experiment they were starting up.

Which was how I put it at the time; for whatever reason, a generation of consultants decided that conservative talk was dead (based largely on wishful thinking after the 2004 election), and tried floating the “all things to all people” format all over the country, including KTLK and KSTP-AM.

After saying that he wasn’t sure what to make of the idea of dogs and cats playing together, Hobbs conceded he was intrigued by the righty-gal vs. the lefty-guy dynamic. And then he got to the nut of modern (conservative) talk radio.

(I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but I swear the essentials are accurate.)

And he’s right about the consultant’s opinion being accurate – an awful lot of “talk radio gurus” deeply hate conservative talk; some of them are ideological liberals, but most of them are just dying to come up with a take on a format that clicks, somewhere, and makes them millions of dollars in consulting fees.  It’s not going all that well, by the way, after almost 20 years of trying.

One of the problems is the contempt these people have for “the talk radio audience”.  Mr. Hobbs would seem to have shared his with Mr. Lambert:

“Try to keep in mind,” said Hobbs, “that the average listener for a show like yours is a 42 year-old guy who doesn’t follow the news all that close but is listening because he doesn’t want to be left out of the discussion. What he wants from you is something he can bring to conversations at work and at home. Something that makes it appear he’s in touch with what’s going on. You’re not here to educate him so much as you are to give him a few ideas he can throw out to feel like he’s part of the conversation.”

Well, it must work; Pew shows that Limbaugh’s audience is better-informed on news and current events than the average American, testing about the same as the famously-smug NPR audience in terms of overall knowledge.

Which is – even Lambert might admit – at odds with what the consultant had to say about ’em.

Well, maybe Lambert wouldn’t admit it:

Since this image so thoroughly gelled with the image I’d had for years of the Limbaugh Dittoheads…

The point being that talk radio doesn’t square well with having contempt for one’s audience.  Consultant Gabe Hobbs’ advice famously splattered; KTLK-FM’s first incarnation, the “WCCO for the 21st Century” famously cratered on impact.  (Does anyone remember their first lineup?  Colton and Guest in the morning?  Pat Kessler? Sarah and Brian?  Dan Conry?  They wanted to be all things to all people so badly they practically adopted Norwegian accents).  Part of it was the concept; part of it was some of the talent wasn’t that talented.  But mostly, it’s that whether people really are as stupid as Gabe Hobbs thinks they are (and that image “gells” with that of Lambert, who is lest we forget one of the Twin Cities foremost media columnists) or not, they can tell in this day and age when they’re being condescended to.  When the whole concept for your format is based on the kind of cynicism that Lambert and Hobbs shared, you think it doesn’t show?

It did!

No, really:

A radio audience of middle-aged guys who, for whatever the reason — distraction, indifference, laziness and/or stupidity — haven’t done their own homework on the big events of the day but want to pretend they have among their workmates, pals and spouses, by staying up to date with the bumper sticker slogan du jour. Hmmm, and I guessed “Make Love Not War” wasn’t exactly what these guys wanted to repeat down at the office, across forklifts in the warehouse, or over dinner, to impress the wife and kids with how tough it is out in there in a real man’s world.

That is, of course, the conceit that drives the entire mainstream media; you, the people, are bunch of mindless cattle that need your news, your entertainment and everything short of your food carefully pre-digested for you, lest you choke from trying to think about something too big. Information is too precious a gift to get in too big chunk – at least for all of you lumpen peasants.

No.  Again, really:

Beyond Hobbs’ carefully parsed point, is this: The “pretense” of thoughtful consideration, at least in terms of a commercially successful narrative delivered via mass media, requires much … much … heavier doses of simplicity and indignant finger-pointing than scholarly nuance.

Lambert mentions “simplicity” – as opposed to condescenscion – like it’s a bad thing.  As if making complex ideas “simple”, or simpler, isn’t among the most important missions for all of journalism, from Edward R. Murrow through NPR down to the Highland Villager.

This is all a lot of set-up for a couple thoughts on the little-lamented demise of Air America, the “liberal alternative” to the monolithic presence of conservative-radio. There are roughly 12,500 radio stations in the U.S., 22% fall under “news/talk” and “religious”. The former describes a few, like WCCO, and WBBM in Chicago, but mostly its conservative talk,  and the vast majority of the “religious” are conservative-driven. Moreover, a significant of those conservative stations are full-power licenses, broadcasting across the entirety of  all of the biggest metro areas in the country. By … stark … contrast, from its inception in 2004 Air America was confined to much lower-power AM stations that only barely blanketed the entirety of the few  metro markets they could buy in to.

Lambert, the media columnist who chided [his mental caricature of] the conservative talk radio audience’s “simplicity”, apparently needs to oversimplify the issue himself.  Radio stations aren’t sinecures; every format has to prove itself at every station, every time the ratings “book” comes out.  Big conservative talk – Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck – settled on big AM stations because it pays the bills.

And the fact that Air America had to “buy in” to metro markets shows what an awful concept it was.  Becuase nobody pays to get Limbaugh.  The Rush Limbaugh show (and Hannity, and Beck, and Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller and every other conservative show that matters) is free to the stations that carry it, provided they agree to carry the network’s commercials, 5-8 minutes worth per hour.  That’s it.

If there were any organic demand for Air America, they’d have been able to do the same.  But there was not.  So in New York, Chicago and LA, they had to pay radio stations to carry the programming.

And even that didn’t work.

It’s not as simple as saying “conservtives got all the big stations!”, but it’s in fact the truth.

But the bigger problem — by far — is the mindset of your average liberal, who, in my unscientific survey is a somewhat different animal than Gabe Hobbs’ mythical under-informed 42 year-old male.  For one thing, if the gender breakout of national delegates is any indication, the average liberal is more likely to be a woman than a man. But, in my experience, there’s also the very familiar liberal quality of believing you already are the smartest guy/gal in the room, which means you hardly need some cartoonish radio bloviator spoon-feeding you your “fact of the day”. More likely — if you’re a liberal in the media — the liberal audience with whom you think you are simpatico will rear up and quarrel with every interpretation of statistics, trends and historical reference you dare make. They know better and if just given the chance could do better.

Which is an interesting view which, I suspect, has more to do with Brian Lambert’s view of himself than the NPR/MSNBC/Air America audience’s actual merits.

Where conservative media audiences display a startling affinity for what I’ve called “The Big Daddy Guru Complex”, pompous-to-preposterous all-knowing father figures, liberals, more often than not, maintain the attitude that “big daddy” is a bit of a ponce, and needs to be brought down a peg.

Dunno, Lambo.  I sat in front of a room full of Air America fans with Matt Entenza, Michael Medved and Fast Eddie Schultz a while ago.  And the AA fans were a lot more prone to chanting pre-approved slogans and hissing on command than the people to stage and ideological right, if you catch my drift.

The idea is a trend in search of evidence; the closest they come to “evidence” is the fact that, yes, people listen to Rush Limbaugh.

But it’s a fact of human nature that any mass group of people gets pushed, or pulled, by someone, and that the best way to pull is not through the mind, but through the heart; Someone who captures the group’s fancy on some level; Martin Luther King, Richard Simmons, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, Lech Walesa, John Lennon, Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan all led people in improbable directions by simplifying complex ideas into forms their followers could feel as much as think.

Lambert quotes a few talking heads re the “problem” liberalism under Obama faces, and concludes:

The takeaway is this: The Conservative narrative dominates this country because it is simple, asks (and requires) nothing of its audience other than that they accept it and express a kind of rote indignation … at others.

Leaving aside the poison-pen fuming about the audience’s motivations – Lambert’s wrong, but then he’s supposed to be wrong about conservatives.  Simplicity in a narrative is a good thing.

And at the end of the say, it’s not all that simple.  Conservatism itself takes a lot more mental energy to wrap ones mind around than liberalism; the ideas of abstemiousness, enlightened self-interest, and rejection of instant gratification both personally and culturally are tough ones for modern people to choke down.

As opposed to leaden cop-outs:

Given the lack of 2000-plus radio stations to amplify a counter-narrative,

Which is balderdash; the liberals have four broadcast networks, NPR, and practically every newspaper in the country.

It’s just that their narrative, at the moment, isn’t selling, and certainly isn’t up to the competition it’s getting in the marketplace.

I actually let this post sit for a couple of days as I tried to figure out how to respond to this next line:

as well as liberal resistance to paternalistic “guru-ism”,

Remembering the masses of liberals who “rejected guru-ism” by chanting in unison waiting for Obama to appear, I’m going to have to keep thinking about it.

Obama and the few bona fide liberals in D.C. are at a profound disadvantage when it comes to a very real battle of relentless accusation and sloganized consensus-building , which, sadly, is what works quite effectively on largely apolitical 42 year-olds who just want to sound like they know what they’re talking about.

And just like Gabe Hobbs, Brian Lambert leads with the contempt.  We’ll see how it works.

And he says about the Chicago politican…:

Bottom line: The burden to deliver such a message of constant attack — utterly justified in the case of how this economic disaster started — falls to a guy, Obama, who finds shamelessly demagogic rhetoric and divisive-ness-baiting beneath him and his idealistic standards of statesmanship.

Speaking of simplification.

Give Me Half A Pound Of Soul

An ambulance crew brings in a shooting victim; one shot to the chest, one to the head.  There was a lot of blood loss from the chest wound, and the victim is in immense cardiopulmonary distress.

The head wound missed the medulla, at the brain stem, the part that controls the heart and breathing and the rest of the body’s automatic functions (and, for most of the Minnesota Progressive Project staff, their writing as well) – so the victim didn’t die instantly.  But the victim seems to be non-responsive; there are indications his brain functions are badly damaged; he may be in a coma, or worse.

So the doctors give up and administer a massive overdose of morphine to kill the patient, because it’s all over anyway and why drag it on?

Well, no.  They don’t. They stabilize the patient as best they can.  They check further to see if the brain is really shut down; if it’s not, they do what they can to restore function.

When in doubt, they err on the side of saving lives [1].

Now, I don’t write a lot about abortion.  I’m opposed to it, of course; I’m personally pro-life.  I find most of the arguments in favor of “choice” to be self-indulgent and childish.  I’m going to skip most of them – it’s nothing I haven’t written about in some depth, of course.

With that in mind, the argument about the “viability” – the idea that a fetus isn’t really all that terribly human until it’s “viable”, or capable of living on its own – is perhaps less stupid than most.  It’s wrong, of course; after three kids, I can say with authority that a “fetus” isn’t “viable” until it can get a job and pay its own rent.

More seriously?  I believe that since a fertilized egg, left to its own devices (no medical intervention for or against its existence – just like in our great-great-grandparents’ time) will gestate for nine months 75% of the time, and those who get that far will be born alive two out of three times (those stats are from primitive cultures like 1890-era rural Minnesota), it’s fairly clear that whatever the physics and physiology and metaphysics behind the process, the whole thing is intended to create living, breathing human beings.  Beyond that?  I think it’s fairly clear that since preemies have been successfully brought along to fairly normal lives as early as 22 weeks into gestation, that the idea that a “fetus” isn’t “human” until a 40-week fetus’ umbilical is cut is a self-indulgent, illogical absurdity.

None of the above, by the way, touches on spirituality at any level.  It’s nothing but logic, so far.

But I’m a Christian.  I believe  that every person (except Ryan Seacrest) has a soul.

“When?”

We don’t know.

Souls are not measurable.  There’s no place in human physiology that’s been identified as a “soul fill valve”, leading to a “soul tank” where the ephemeral concept is kept.  It’s not like a brain wave, much less synonymous with it, and if it were, the gunshot victim in the example above would be out of luck.  Not everyone agrees that there is such a thing; atheists all bet the “under” on Pascal’s Wager.    No matter – if you assume there is no soul, and are motivated by anything other than naked self-interest, it actually makes the question harder to resolve.  We’ll come back to that.

So the question – part of it, anyway – is “when does a fetus get a soul?”

Dog Gone at Penigma writes a very long treatise that says, essentially,  we don’t know because spirutual authorities have never agreed on the subject:

I have read widely on the subject of our human soul and spirituality, and listened to many different voices pontificating ther dogma on the subject in the course of satisfying my own curiosity…This breadth of recognition might suggest some sort of consensus, some unanimity of understanding, a clarity and agreement on definition, right?

Of course, not.  Ecclesiastical bodies have fought long, bloody wars over the subject; when two of the great Christian denominations have been split for almost a thousand years over the Nicene Creed and the job description for saints, when Presbyterian congregations fall into epic near-blood-feuds over applause in church, to say nothing of gay marriage, looking for general consensus on the nature of the Soul is hopelessly optimistic.

There is no consensus across history or across the geography of our planet on any single specific aspect of that essence we name souls. We don’t agree on what it is; we don’t agree on when it is inside of us; we don’t agree on the origins. We don’t even fully agree on whether or not the soul is immortal or eternal; some believe that the soul can die, others that it grows as the body grows, with experience. We don’t agree on how, where, and from whom our souls derive. We don’t agree on who or what possesses a soul.

DG goes on to note that even within Christian tradition, the idea of the genesis of the soul has knocked around a bit:

The Christian tradition is contradictory. The roots of early Judaism posited that animals, at least some animals, had souls, as do other religious and spiritual traditions. In Islam, the belief is that the soul enters the body of a fetus in utero after 40 days. Not 90 or 180 days, not 30 minutes, and not at conception; they are quite definite on the 40 day figure. But then, in the Islamic faith, not only humans have souls either. Djinn and angels also have souls in that faith’s traditions. In the Druidic tradition, and in many other traditions (the many irreverent verses of “Give me that old time religion” are playing in my head) so do some trees and other inanimate objects.

Right.  But then, traditional religion from the dawn of time until pretty recently believed all sorts of stuff we find crazy today; insert boilerplate here about burning witches and kosher laws and selling indulgences and human sacrifice and stoning gays (oops; one religion still does that).

Of course, in that era people couldn’t tell with any certainty that the crop they planted in April wouldn’t be eaten to the ground by bugs in July or blown away by a sudden storm in August; people never connected “taking a dump upstream from where you get your drinking water” and the hacking, fever-ridden wave of deaths that would periodically befall the village; in a village where the people had raised vegetables and sheep for uncounted generations, humans were born the same way the animals were; the way nature had left the process.  And it was an ugly process; 1/3 of babies (of the 3/4 that weren’t miscarried earlier) were stillborn or died of complications during delivery, as did 10% of the mothers (with each birth); and that was even before infant mortality set in.

So given the exceedingly crude nature of “science” back when years had three digits and the world’s major religious leaders were half a generation removed from raising keff and goats, especially the understanding of human physiology and development at the time, the question “when exactly does the soul inhabit the body” was purely academic; like “what will I wear on my third date with Scarlett Johannson”, it might be fun to think about, but the practical application is pretty minimal.

But today, the vast majority of “fetuses”, barring pseudomedical interference and, of course, miscarriage, survive until birth and beyond.  Not only that, but as noted above “fetuses” born just past half-term go on to live normal lives – utterly unthinkable even a generation ago (which, if logic rather than politics reigned, would make most non-health-related third-term abortions murder).  We don’t know when life is viable, but the boundaries keep getting pushed back.

The objective boundaries, anyway.

And since, unlike my third date with Scarlett Johannson, the essense of life is actually a valid, testable question these days, the question “when does viable, human life begin” isn’t an academic question.

100 years ago, the gunshot victim in the first paragraph might have been given up for dead without bothering with a trip to a hospital.  Today, science can find out if there really is a brain function in there that can be nursed back into control of the body.  People what would have been give up for dead fifty years ago walk among us today.

And definitions of “when does a human become human” written a thousand years ago by people for whom it was an utterly academic question are no more informative to us today than surgery textbooks from 1700 are to the Mayo today.

Leaving aside the fact that the concept of “the soul” is ephemeral and unmeasurable in any way; even the fairly objective measurement of “when life begins” is, paradoxically, more difficult than ever, since science has made the instrumentation and criteria so much finer than before.

And so the paradox is, if you care about the intangibles that make humans human, the more we know about how life works, the less meaningful the attempts to put an arbitrary, “objective” limit on them.  How do you put a number on something that gets less measurable, the better able to measure it you theoretically are?

Since we don’t know – and, unlike the rabbis of the Old Testament and the druids and popes and mullahs of 1000 years ago, we know what we don’t know – then if you believe that human life has any intangible but real value (call it a “soul” if you want, or “worth as a human life” if you don’t), then the only logical response, as with the gunshot victim above, is to err on the side of life.  If we don’t know life to be absent in an organism that is intended to live, then you assume it – he or she – is alive.

And you can tell Pope Pius II I said so.

[1] Although with Obamacare in place, they’ll have to check with a committee of government accountants and lawyers for medical advice, first.

SITD Redux: How To Save Public Schools

This is a piece I originally published in April of 2005.  Some minor updates and copy-edits have been added.

———-

When I hear blowhards like Nick Coleman ranting about how Republicans want to “abolish the public school system”, I get a chuckle. I grew up in the public schools – Dad was a high school teacher, and a great one. As far as conservatives go, I was long in the “we can fix the public schools” camp.

Of course, a huge percentage of the biggest proponents of mandatory public school for all – Coleman, Jay Benanav, Clinton, and on, and on – are either private school products or have their children in private schools.

As my kids wended through the school system – and, finally, are getting toward the end of it all – I got more depressed every year with the way schools in general – but especially the public schools – do their job.

In Saint Paul, the budget breaks down to over $17,000 per student – but there’s never enough money.  The graduation rates are lower than Chris Coleman’s tax increases, but there’s still not a crisis.  The achievement gap is the worst in the nation, but the schools still noodle around with unfunded PC mandates more than they actually bother with teaching.  Parents are leaving the public school system faster than a Vanilla Ice Fan Club reunion, but the only solution the ruling Democrats can think of is to gut school choice options.

And at the end of the day, our kids aren’t getting an education.

There’s an obvious, and I suspect workable, solution out there. It’s inexpensive, and, best of all, tens of thousands of years of human experience shows that it works.

Let’s abolish elementary school.

The more I watch schools, and the more I read about the history of the public schools and the assumptions on which they are built, the more convinced I am that elementary school in particular does more harm than good. I’m talking specifically about the “Sit your little butt in the chair for six hours a day and learn what we grownups tell you to learn” model of education.

Let’s be blunt; Elementary School is a bad idea for several reasons.

  • It’s unnatural
  • It turns everything about human psychology on its head.
  • It’s unamerican.

Let’s start at the top.

———-

Let me throw out a couple of parallel ideas here:

  • Language is one of the most complex functions of the human brain. It involves a level of logic that the most powerful computers are only able to ape in the most comical fashion. Next to learning language, things like the scientific method, critical thinking and logic are child’s play, so to speak. And yet nearly every child in the world is functionally fluent in at least one language by age five, with no more help than mere untrained, uncredentialled parents, family members and friends to help. Indeed, when my son was in Kindergarten I sat, agog, as I watched a five year old H’mong classmate of his at a parent-teacher conference, interpreting the conversation between his parents and his teacher.  Fluently.  Without the aid of a “H’mong as a first language” class of any kind. 
  • Barring profound mental and physical problems, it’s nearly impossible to keep a kid from learning languages, to say nothing of every other thing that they can get their little fingers on. Reading? Pffft. Nothing to it, in comparison; it’s just assigning symbols to the sounds that the child has already learned to associate with the ideas that their little brains have been busy compiling since shortly after birth. You have to wonder – if kids do that well with something as wondrously, gloriously, impenetrably complex as language with mere parents, siblings, extended family and playmates to help them, imagine how well they would do if they had experts with PhDs in cognitive development to help them…!
  • …like they do with reading, for example. How is it that the same kids who learn one of the most complex cognitive processes known to mankind with almost no difficulty then toddle off to school and spend the next six, even twelve, years struggling and often failing the relatively simple tasks of reading, writing, adding, subtracting and simple arithmetic?

Imagine if your children were taught (by force of law, mind you!) to speak by professionals, rather than the way they’ve learned to speak for all of human time; imagine, further, that they were taught speech the same way they’re taught reading, math and history, by being herded into a room, plunked at a table, told to LEARN SPEECH NOW and don’t you dare go to the bathroom without raising your hand and getting a travel slip first. What’d happen? We’d have a boom market in speech pathology professionals, national concern about “why Johnny can’t speak”, academic programs dedicated to special speech problems, and demands for more money to solve our nation’s speech education crisis.

 Absurd, right? And yet that’s exactly where we are now.

Kids below age 12 would be better off out of school than in it. Note that this has nothing to do with the classic “school problems”, or with “problem schools”.  Even if you leave drugs, crime, and all the other highly-publicized dangers of our time out of the picture (and if you live in the inner city, you know that you can’t), and assume that all teachers are literate, caring, inspired practicioners of a noble craft, and that all administrators are boundlessly capable and unfettered by the pinheaded impedimenta of a system that, like all systems, is more concerned with self-perpetuation than mission.

Question: Where is the scientifically-valid evidence that a child who sits through six years in a classroom is any better “educated” than a child who spends six years just being a kid, learning what he or she needs, learning responsibility and reading and manners and math the way kids always have – by doing?

Start looking. I’ll help you out. There really is none.

I have a few friends and acquaintances who are involved in various alternative school systems; Sudbury, Waldorf, Montessori – and more that homeschool their kids. The literature on the Sudbury system – which, essentially, lets kids learn whatever their curiosity drives them to learn, coupled with a strong dose of individual responsibility for maintaining their obligations to others – is fascinating. Nobody tells the children at a Sudbury school “now is the time we learn to read” – and yet they all do. Nobody says “You will all learn math” – but when they decide they want to learn it, they frequently learn the math that takes kids six years in a classroom, in a matter of weeks.

My homeschooling friends tell the same story; if they leave the door open for their kids’ own fascination to drive them to learn…whatever, it will not only get learned, but learned at a pace that dazzles the parents, most of whom came up through the traditional public system.

———-

So what’s wrong with school?

What could be wrong with an institution that:

  • Strictly breaks up the day into learning time and play time, conditioning a child to know, forevermore, that learning is drudgery. The message to the kids is crystal clear; unlike all the learning they’d done so far in life – learning how to talk with Mom and Dad, learning how to stack blocks with big sister, learning how to walk and throw and joke and climb, this sucks!
  • Imposing an external schedule on learning. Rather than letting them follow their own rhythms and attention spans – which happen to be the ones they actually learn by – we force kids to cut short the stuff that actually benefits them, and then jam their little butts into seats, pretty much arbitrarily, to shift gears and do something completely different. We try to set student’s mental agendas for them, telling them the subjects they “should” care about, regardless of what interests them, and when, and where.  And for some students, that works, to be sure; some naturally take to that kind of education; others learn to go along and get along.  Others never do.
  • Setting arbitrary standards that mean nothing to students (and, judged empirically, mean even less to grownups). 
  • Plop a kid into a system where they’re at the bottom of a complex, arbitrary hierarchy – teacher’s aide, teacher, principal, union, superintendant, school board – with them, all pretty talk aside, way down at the bottom of the pile. If you have to go to the bathroom, you have to ask permission. You stand in long lines for food, water, the rest room, recess, field trips, to see the nurse, the principal, to get out of the f*****g building after the whole miserable day is over! You move when the bell tells you to move; you sit when the bell tells you to sit; you repeat the process for twelve years, like an assembly line – only you’re the product, with the unionized factory workers bolting on little bits of knowledge at pre-programmed points on the line, regardless of whether that’s where your brain is at the moment.   And if you, the child, don’t feel like keeping your twitchy seven-year-old butt in that hard friggin’ chair, you get labelled “ADHD” or “special ed”. And you’d damn well better show up, or have an excuse that’s acceptable to that arbitrary and unreasoning authority, or you will be shunted into the “bad kid” track, and even into the fascistic, niggling cousin of the criminal justice system, which will make damn sure you keep your ass in that chair, at the risk of criminalizing yourself and your parents. If such a system were applied to adults, they’d call it prison. If it were a nation, it’d be North Korea. If it were an employer, every TV station in town would be bum-rushing the place with hidden cameras. And yet that’s where we send our kids.
  • You are a part of a group; you travel with the group, stand on line with the group whenever you leave your chair, are punished and rewarded as a part of the group, until such time as you learn to play the paper chase game well enough for the system to reward you – not so much for your learning, as for learning to play the system to your benefit. Those kids will go far. For the rest? Labels, concerned shrugs, and eventually a resigned sigh; “they fell through the cracks, even though they had so much potential.  If only they’d have colored inside the lines”.
  • Your education is separated from your “real life”. Even some of your crustier elders, in unguarded moments, will say it in as many words; “Wait’ll you get out in the real world”. School is totally unreal; the experiences and knowledge are all diluted through external filters; textbooks, teachers, state-approved curricula. The economics are diluted; it’s “Free”, so the children get no sense of the opportunity cost that goes into their education, nor of their responsibility toward those paying the cost (qualifying them to be DFL legislators, anyway).
  • Worse, the kids’ lives – and the lives of their families – are geared toward the rhythm the institution demands; up at 6:30, to school by 8, keep your hyperactive little ass in the chair until 3 with a couple of dingy, pre-approved breaks (if you behave, and if your school hasn’t been swept up in the “no recess” bandwagon), get dinner eaten by 6, do two hours of homework, be in bed by 9AM to repeat the process the next day, ad infinitum, for 12 years. There’s a meteor shower or an Aurora Borealis late at night? Don’t wake the kids, for crying out loud, they’ll be tired for their spelling test!
  • Which might be worthwhile, if there were any validity to the idea that it does kids any more good than the alternative – no school at all.

The question shouldn’t be “what’s wrong with the system”. It ought to be “what’s right?”

———-

Let’s go back to the “North Korea” bit.

When De Tocqueville came to the US in the early part of the 19th century, he found a population that was staggeringly literate by world standards. What was the “system?” There was none. People learned to read, write, do math, and function in society by any means necessary – at church, at community schools, from neighbors or siblings, or any way they could. They did it because, to participate in our democracy, they had to. And they did.

It’s useful to note that the current model for public schools – the government monopoly with the professional teacher caste and a huge, self-feeding academy – is a product of the past 100 years or so, when people realized that in a nation awash in immigrants, we’d damned well better make sure that all our children are learning the same things. Exactly the same things, lest those filthy immigrants corrupt our society…

And so we have a system of elementary education better suited to the Department of Corrections, or the Prussian military (indeed, Horace Mann modeled many of his ideas upon the Prussian state education system, which introduced the magic element, compulsion, to the mix).

And so, in a system that purports to value individual responsibility, we send our children to “learn” in a system that systematically strips responsibility away (as long as you stay in line, you’re fine!). In a system that purports to value critical thinking, we entrust our children to a system that regards the very discipline as forbidden fruit. In a nation that claims to value the integrity, choice and value of the individual, we send our kids to schools that destroy all three.

“But what about universal literacy?” It’s worth noting that our society is little more functionally literate, in a practical sense, than it was 100 years ago; the ability of adults to read, write and figure has remained nearly static among adults for the past century, unbudged by changing educational theories, vast increases in education funding, and national fretting on the subject.

“But hey”, comes the next response, “I came up through the system. It’s not that bad”. That’s called “Stockholm Syndrome”. You owe it to your kids to do better. Saying you “survived” six years of elementary school is hardly a recommendation; saying “I survived it, my kid sure as hell will” isn’t education, it’s ritualized abuse.

———-

So what exactly do we lose if we abolish elementary school? Say, start kids in school at age 12?

We gain, instantly, a generation of kids who haven’t learned to equate “learning” with “misery”.

We gain, over time, children who grow through their most formative years free of the distortions to their identity and self-respect that are a part of the canonical tradition of elementary school, undivided into “jocks” and “geeks” and “brains”.  They could get to the brink of puberty – the most awful time in life – without piling all that awful baggage on top.  They could spend six or seven years as humans, rather than as parts on an assembly line.

As part of that, they would be free to develop the skills that children develop more or less naturally; to think, to analyze, to tear things apart, on their own terms, without having an adult tell them “you’re wrong, do it my way” at every turn.

It goes without saying that they’d be free of the suffocating idiocy of too much of the educational/industrial complex – the rotating theories and methods and ideals that at best are just more turd-polishing, and at worst (see Carol Gilligan and the gender theorists) actively, and after a certain point maliciously, harmful. They’d grow up regarding learning as both an opportunity and, most importantly, their own responsibility. Which is, we’re told, the American way.

Inevitable response: “What about kids in lousy situations? Or where both parents work?”

So we take the $10-15K per student that we currently spend in the metro, and spend it on community centers, or daycare, or anything but elementary school. I don’t care if the idea saves not a nickel over what we’re already spending (although it inevitably will, in direct spending to say nothing of the social costs of our failing system); it’ll be better than what we have now, even for the vulnerable kids, the poor kids from the lousy neighborhoods. What could be worse than being a poor kid from a lousy neighborhood? Being all that, and having any possible love of the learning you’ll need to get out out of that rut beaten out of you by age eight.

It’s not just about the survival of our educational system.  It’s about the survival of our nation, our culture, and most importantly our children.

Abolish it.

Kill The Death Penalty

This post is an expansion of a comment in a thread way down below.  Partly because my monkeying with my code this morning put a crimp in my morning blogging schedule.  Partly because the subject deserves it.

I oppose the death penalty, not because I break with most conservatives on the issue, but  because I am a conservative.

Stay with me on this one.

Conservatism is about upholding time-honored truths.

One of those truths is that the individual – one of the “Free Association of Equals” that our society is supposed to be, in the conservative view of things – is of supreme importance, and should be protected from the excesses of government. It’s why we conservative natter on about things like the Tenth Amendment – because we uphold the worth of the individual; there are some things that, to protect the individual, the government should just stay out of.

This directly contradicts the notion that individuals are “eggs” to be broken in the interest of the state’s convenience to make a social “omelet”. Frequent liberal commenter “RickDFL”’s left a remark in the comment section yesterday, that actually sent me looking for a remark about eggs and omelets that I coulda sworn Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Hitler made. No dice – the closest I got was Stalin’s “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic” – but Rick (I puke in my mouth a little bit in writing this) is right; it’s something one of them would say.

Conservatives do believe that the pursuit of good requires sacrifice; the Americans who died at Omaha Beach and Gettysburg and Chosin Reservoir were also of incalculable value, and they did nothing to deserve what happened except serving their country, and their loss was a tragedy for all of us. But they died (most of us believe) for a greater good, in a time and a place and for a cause for which there was no alternative, and which helped bring immense good as a result.

Killing an innocent person to “deter” the guilty? It brings no good (the guilty party goes free forever!) (I mean, what DA is going to say “oops – killed the wrong guy the first time! Let’s try this again!”), there is an alternative, and, lest we forget, it kills an individual who did no wrong – which is exactly who this society is supposed to protect.

And it echoes Andrea Dworkin (or Catherine McKinnon?  Jeff Fecke?  I get confused) who said it’d be “good” if men got falsely imprisoned for rape, to make all the real rapists a little more afraid. It’s an idea straight out of the worst of the French Revolution (which had no problem executing the innocent “pour l’encourager les autres“), carried on via Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot.

Hypothetically, if the system could be “perfected”, would I support it? Sure. But that’s another tenet of conservatism; mankind can never be perfected; the hypothetical is pointless. And to a conservative, protecting people from the problems that human imperfection brings to government drives what government is supposed to do – including impelling government to back out of big parts of our society.

So since…

  1. Mankind – including prosecutors and the police – can never be perfected, and…
  2. these imperfections kill the innocent, and…
  3.  killing the innocent is immeasurably evil, and…
  4.  since a foolproof alternative exists that surely and swiftly punishes the guilty (remember – life in supermax without parole begins at sentencing; death takes an average of 12 years) while protecting the innocent, and…
  5. protecting the innocent is one of society’s supreme goods, then…

…abolishing the death penalty is supremely conservative.

To me, the logic of my stance depends on the five interconnected points above – all drawn from orthodox conservative beliefs to a finely-polished “t”.  If you want to disagree, by all means do it in the comment section.  But if you can’t successfully attack that five-point chain of logic, I’m not sure you’ll get a lot of traction with me.

Distrust But Verify. Then Distrust Some More.

The Violence Policy Center has a long record of cooking data to try to build a national case against civilian ownership of firearms.

They’ve failed, of course; more Americans own guns today than ever, while the idea of a link between crime and the demonstrably law-abiding armed citizen is almost too specious for modern physics to measure.  Gun control is a third rail like few others in American politics.

Which doesn’t mean they won’t try; the VPC – the very definition of an astroturf group – has masters with deep pockets to obey. And so they keep cranking out the material.

Like this “study” (which should be getting slavering coverage from the bought-and-paid-for lefty media) to show pervasive violence on the part of carry permit holders nationside.

The “study” summary:

As the impact of lax CCW laws grows, the evidence is now overwhelming that these laws have completely failed to reduce crime or increase public or personal safety.

Overewhelmingly lacking, at any rate; John Lott proved the case, and while astroturf hacks like the VPC may jump up and down and cry otherwise, they are bringing jackknives to sword fights.

But that’s really not the issue:

On the contrary, these laws have armed individuals who have murdered law enforcement officers and innocent citizens. Review of the devastating facts surrounding the 30 incidents detailed in this study alone should immediately halt any effort to create a national concealed carry system and, in addition, impel the
repeal of state “shall issue” laws allowing the carrying of concealed handguns.

Well, it’s an interesting conclusion.  Although not only is it not borne out by evidence in general, but even the VPC’s own evidence, viewed in detail, convincingly refutes the VPC’s own claim.

  • Over the two-year period May 2007 through April 2009, concealed handgun permit holders have slain seven law enforcement officers resulting in criminal charges or the suicide of the shooter. All of the killings were committed with guns. An additional three law enforcement officers were injured in these incidents.
  • Over the two-year period May 2007 through April 2009, concealed handgun permit holders have slain at least 43 private citizens resulting in criminal charges or the suicide of the shooter. All but one of the killings were committed with guns. An additional six private citizens were injured in these incidents.
  • In six of the 30 incidents (20 percent), the concealed handgun permit holder killed himself, bringing the total fatality count to 56.

So let’s look into the numbers in detail.  As noted above, “Carry permit holders” accounted for seven dead and three wounded law enforcement officers; 43 dead and six wounded citizens, and six suicides (all of them after other shootings).

But if you look at the individual cases, some facts emerge that the VPC found inconvenient to stress.  I broke them out into several categories:

  • Self-Defense Cases Gone Seemingly Awry: One of the problems with self-defense claims is that ones’ decision to respond to an attack that needs to be made in seconds under mind-warping pressure will be picked apart by prosecutors and jurors who have leisurely days and weeks to judge the results.  Two of the killings – one not charged as of yet, one resulting in a manslaughter conviction – fit this description.
  • Self Defense Against Law Enforcement Officers: One of the trickiest cases in all of self-defense is when a citizen believes – legitimately or not – that a law enforcement officer (whether known to them or not) presents them a lethal threat.  Law enforcement enjoys special protections under the law – usually for good reasons.  But cops screw up, too; in Minneapolis a few years ago, a SWAT team executed a no-knock raid – on the wrong address.  The owner of the house, an Asian man in a crappy neighborhood crowded with scumbags, had no idea who was charging into his house; he was eventually exonerated.  In the VPC report, two law-enforcement officers (federal and local) were killed and two wounded.  In one case, the killing was the result of a seemingly stupid response on the part of the shooter, and ended in a manslaughter charge (although, significantly, not murder). The other killing, and the two wounded, were the result of no-knock raids seemingly gone awry.    Note that these cases all took place in the citizens’ dwellings – and thus have nothing to do with the carry permits.  You don’t need  a permit, in most places, to have a gun.
  • Accidents: One of the killings was an accidental shooting involving a pistol owned by a carry permittee.  Tragic, certainly – but it has nothing to do with the permit.
  • Shooters Who Shouldn’t Have Gotten Permits: It’s generally agreed that people with criminal records, or records of mental illness or just-plain-violent behavior, should not be granted permits.  When this happens, it’s usually a matter of less-than-thorough investigation by the granting authority (usually a county sheriff), or, as is the case in jurisdictions where permits are issued purely by police discretion (this was the case in a shooting in New York state), faulty use of discretion.  Shootings involving people who should never have been issued permits included 12 incidents, involving 24 dead and two wounded.

And with all of those out of the way – the ambiguous cases or the people who should never have gotten permits at all – that leaves us with the actual, unambiguous crimes where a carry permit holder did something for which they were clearly, unambiguously at fault; Ten cases, involving 20 deaths.  It’s skewed a bit, of course, as it includes one mass murder case, the Michael McClendon case in Alabama which claimed ten people and the shooter.

Of course, concealed carry permits are hardly a direct contributor to mass spree killings; many have happened at the hands of people with no hope of ever getting a permit.  But for purposes of dealing with the article, let’s grudgingly count it among the 20 unambiguously wrongful deaths where no blame is shared with other peoples’ negligence.

Now – how many carry permits have been issued nationwide?  Nobody has a complete count, but the general rule seems to be about 1% of eligible citizens seem to apply; that ratio holds true in Minnesota (5 million people; over 50,000 permits issued).  Other states are higher, some might be lower.  Now, about 220,000,000 Americans live in states with shall-issue laws, or with no restrictions at all (Alaska and Vermont, where no permit is required); it seems reasonable to assume that 2.2 million Ameircans have some sort of carry permit.

2.2 million Americans with permits divided by 20 murders committed over the course of two years equals less than .5 murders – half a murder – per 100,000 carry permittees per year.  Even using the VPC’s numbers exactly as they are in the “study” means the 2.2million permittees are responsible for 56 wrongful deaths over the course of two years (ambiguous or not, related to carry permitting or not) gives a murder rate of about 1.4 per 100,000 permitted Americans.  Of course, the chance of any American being wrongly killed by a permit holder (using the VPC’s statistics, which as we’ve seen above are poppycock) are .014 per 100,000 Americans.

The overall murder rate in America in 2007 was 5.9 per 100,000.  In other words, Americans are 1/421th (roughly) as likely to be murdered by a carry permit holder as they are by a typical citizen – and that’s using the VPC’s numbers without qualification, which as we’ve noted in the past, one should never do.  If we leave out the ambiguous cases, the accidents and the others that have nothing to do with concealed carry, the average American is almost three orders of magnitude less likely to be killed by a legal carry permit holder than by, say, anybody else.

Let’s be clear, here; we want no unjustified killings by holders of carry permits, which are supposed to be a tool for the law-abiding.

But when you see this VPC study being flogged by the media, pass the word; there’s less there than meets the eye.

About 1/421th as much.

Roseville Vice

“It’s a bad one”, Sergeant Koziolecki said; the flushed look on his face showed that he wasn’t exaggerating.

“Whadda we got?”  I clipped my badge to my belt as we walked through the abandoned warehouse in the Saint Paul Warehouse District, ducking under the yellow “crime scene” tape.

“Four vics; two hispanic males, early twenties; one black male, late twenties; one caucasian female, late teens-early twenties.  Gunned down execution style” Koziolecki recited from fresh memory.

We rounded a dirty, ratty corner to what had been the lobby of a shipping dock, and saw the CSI crew going over the scene.  Four bodies were lined up, face-down, by a grafitti-clogged block wall.  “No kidding”.

“A bullet to the back of each head” Koziolecki read off the notes, pushing his readers up to the bridge of his nose.  The acrid smell of fresh blood was fading as we stood there, replaced by the smell of death.  Death and…I thought for a moment, not quite placing it.

“Killer or killers left a calling card”, Koziolecki continued.  “May I?” he asked the CSI guy, who nodded as he dusted, fruitlessly, for prints.  Koziolecki gently rolled the body of a girl – late teens, with tattooed arms and hair that’d been multicolored even before getting sprayed with her own and her friends’ blood and brains, who looked like a tank grrl or roller-derby chick.

Former roller derby chick.

And she had something in her mouth.

Continue reading

Jack Kemp

There were three people who turned me into a conservative.

Four, if you count Ronald Reagan.  But before I, who grew up very much a liberal, could embrace the idea of conservativsm that Ronald Reagan put out there – and let’s remember that to a liberal Ronald Reagan, especially the version of Reagan that liberals discussed amongst themselves, was a very scary figure –  someone had to soften me up.

The first was Jimmy Carter.  He created a lot of Ronald Reagan voters. And with the “Malaise” speech and his relentless “America Last”-ism, he gave me a good start up the ladder.

The second was Dr. James Blake.  He was the head of the English Department at Jamestown College.  He was also that rarest of creatures – a college English professor who was also a conservative. The son of a New York cop, Blake described himself as a “Monarchist”; whatever, he also made me read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, and Doestoevskii and Tolstoii and Solzenitzyn and, for that matter, P.J. O’Rourke.  I may have been the last person in Western History to have been pushed up the ladder to conservatism while majoring in a humanity.

But Carter’s impetus was negative; Blake introduced me to the high-level reasons conservatism was not only better, but indeed vastly preferable for intellectual and personal freedom.

But it was Jack Kemp who first connected those ideas to daily life for me; to money, to jobs, to the nuts and bolts of running a government and a society.  While Reagan focused on the big picture – as, indeed, a President and leader should – Kemp tackled the machinery.

In the wake of the Carter malaise, he was one of Reagan and Stockton’s foot-soldiers for supply-side economics. He first filed his tax cut bill – which became known as “Kemp-Roth” when it finally passed, in 1981 – in 1977, long before supply side economics was a household word. Kemp was more than an adherent; he was a pioneer.

Every time in this century we’ve lowered the tax rates across the board, on employment, on saving, investment and risk-taking in this economy, revenues went up, not down”, he said – and, as a major mover and shaker during the Reagan years and George HW Bush’s HUD secretary, he worked to follow through, advocating privatizing public housing (a policy on which Clinton’s HUD boss Henry Cisneros followed through, after carefully rechristening it to get credit for his boss); many of the “welfare reforms” that happened during the Contract for America were ideas that Kemp had been instrumental in not only thinking up, but whose bureaucratic angles Kemp had worked through.  Kemp was the giant on whose shoulders the welfare reformers stood.

Kemp was a native of Los Angeles, the son of a small businessman who went to a small college, mainly because it was his best shot at getting to the pros as a football player.  He was a journeyman quarterback for years…

…he was present at “The Greatest Game Ever Played (before the ’86 Super Bowl)” – the Colts/Giants NFL championship game in ’58 – as a third-stringer on the Giants’ taxi squad. He was cut or traded by five teams before he latched on with the Buffalo Bills, back when the AFL was a separate league.

He led the Bills through a series of great seasons, before and after the merger with the NFL, before injuries slowed him down.  He was drafted to run for the US House in 1971 by the GOP, and he stepped away from his contract with the Bills to run his campaign.

Maybe it was the humble roots, the non-Ivy-League background, the years of struggle and failure before hitting it big, his self-taught nature that made Kemp a face of conservatism for the little guy. I’ve often said that Reagan’s great strength was that he translated Hayek and Friedman into something accessible to pretty much everyone; Jack Kemp turned those ideas into things of substance.  The supply-side claim is not a claim. It is empirically true and historically convincing that with lower rates of taxation on labor and capital, the factors of production, you’ll get a bigger economy.”

And he was always a conservative Republican who spoke to the little guy first and foremost, as befitted perhaps a Rep from Buffalo; There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble“, he once said.

And as I moved to the city and started plying a trade – first as a bush-league conservative pundit, and then as a schmuck trying to make my way, and then again as yet another bush-league pundit, Kemp was consistently a voice and an inspiration to those of us who sought to break the noxious liberal strangle hold on places like Saint Paul.  And like many like me, I took inspiration from another Kemp protege in Jersey City, where Brett Schundler, a Reagan Republican who was very much in the Kemp mold, won three terms as mayor and tranformed his city.  When I’ve said that the Minnesota GOP will never really contest control of Minnesota until we make a play of it in the Cities, I’m echoing Kemp;  There really has not been a strong Republican message to either the poor or the African American community at large“, he once said, nailng one of the enduring chinks in the GOP’s (albeit not conservatism’s) armor.

People say the GOP needs another Reagan.  That’s true to a degree, of course.  But Reagan spoke of truths that are eternal enough that pretty much anyone can remember them; freedom, limited government, security. Reagan took on the world.

Jack Kemp took on mainstreet, one store-owner, voter, program and American at a time.

What the GOP really needs, stat, is a few dozen Jack Kemps; people who can spread the gospel to everyone from the local town hall meeting all the way to the Beltway, and back again.

Hero Worship

Growing up, I dreamed – among a few other things – of being a news reporter.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing not every dream comes true.

But I digress.

One of my “role models”, of sorts, was “Joe Rossi”, a character played by Robert Walden from the Lou Grant TV series.  One of the things about “Rossi” that I remember admiring, and to which I aspired, was fanatical detachment from everything – groups, people, society – supported by a hard-bitten cynicism about just about everything else.  “Rossi” went overboard, of course; never voted, never joined any groups, never did anything that’d compromise this detachment (which was sent up in a memorable episode in which the rest of the staff, in an orgy of chain-yanking, signed Rossi up for every organization they could – the AARP, the NRA, severel political parties, the AAA…

OK, it was  TV show – but that was one of the things (supported by my later experience and a little formal education in the field) that I carried with me through my brief, fruitless career as a reporter; reporters should have a healthy skepticism about everything.
Including reporters.

And I suspect most reporters would agree – at least as a platitude.

That needs, of course, to be combined with ravenous curiosity (which was one part of the craft that I did get right), including the ability to question ones’ own gaps and, dare I say, preconceptions.  We’ll come back to that.

“Skepticism”, of course, has its limits.  Reporters are human; they follow baseball teams, they read books, they vote – they have preferences.  None of them – not even “Joe Rossi” – attains their perfect ideals, whatever thepy are. So it’s not a surprise that, among other sins, reporters are just as big a bunch of fanboys as the rest of us, when you get down to it.  Or so it’d seem, seeing the coverage of Seymour Hersh’s appearance last week at the U of M, as partof the U’s “Great Conversations” program.

I didn’t go – I don’t think the “U” is especially aggressive about inviting non-believers to these things, but I have no idea, honestly.

But it was all over the place; Hersh dropped a few “bombs” (as reported by the local media, who did attend in droves) that got picked up by the big leftymedia.

More on that angle in a bit.

Eric Black of the MinnPost was there:

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Heady stuff!

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Of course, when it comes to “covert executive assassination squads”, you don’t have to do a lot of “dwelling” for the story to grab attention, do you?

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

Hersh, who is most famous (recently) for releasing the Abu Ghraib story (which the Army had been investigating, and which CBS was sitting on at government request) must be complimented for his focus on “empiricism”.

You might be too, if you’d had enough of your claims – apparently the less-“empirical” ones – turn out to be complete squibs.  I’ll direct you to this story from two years ago; Hersh claimed (amid a flurry of publicity) that US Special Forces were operating in Iran, preparatory to a US invasion.  It’s a claim that’d seem to have fallen down the memory hole; I have read no accounts of any of the journalists present at this or any other appearance questioning Hersh about it.
So perhaps it’s a good thing he’s waiting.  Except for the whole “Dropping the bomb in a talk at the U of M” bit.

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

Or, in Mondale’s case, were intimately involved in causing the crises.

Again, I digress.

Black continues:

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Viethnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

Nothing like working a relentlessly friendly room.

That’s not a digression.

We’re getting into the interesting stuff here:

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

And we’ll wait for the evidence on that.

I’m not saying I doubt it, necessarily – it’s just that I hope Mr. Hersh isn’t too busy waiting for the invasion of Iran to show us the evidence.  Someday.

Now, here we get into the part of the story where it might have been useful to have some journalists in the room with Mr. Hersh:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

Let’s take a brief time-out here.

Re-read Hersh’s explanation of JSOC.  Assuming Black is reporting his words accurately (and I’ve expressed my complete confidence in the honest of Eric Black’s reporting in the past), Hersh explains JSOC as if…:

  1. He expects nobody has heard of it (probably not an unfair assumption, given his audience)
  2. He wants people to believe that its status is something unique, sinister, and unique to the Bush Administration.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Joint Special Operations Command was established so that key, vital, high-risk special operations – hostage rescues, counterterrorist missions and the like – could take place without the paralyzing overburden of the military’s bureaucracy and its effects on these types of operations.

And it reports to the Executive Branch – the Secretary of Defense – rather than Congress; of course, the entire Executive Branch reports to the Executive Branch!  But JSOC is isolated from much of the miltiary’s bureaucracy; it does things that need to be done without bringing 535 other commanders into the chain of command.  JSOC reports to the Secretary of Defense, and thence to the President and Congress.

This chain of command – directly to the highest ranks of power – was established  after an infamous military disaster caused by, among other things, interservice bureaucracy, and micromanagment by civilian officials.

The disaster was “Desert One”.  And the order to create JSOC came from President Jimmy Carter.  The boss of Hersh’s fellow guest on the panel, former Vice President
Walter Mondale.

A roomful of journalists might have known that.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

And I’m sure we’ll wait for evidence of the “executions”, in Hersh’s book, upcoming in a year or so.

But barring that “evidence”, there’s a point of order here:  the military doesn’t have to clear its operations with ambassadors or the CIA!  The military doesn’t report to either of them!

There’s no question that JSOC – the umbrella for the US’ clandestine military, including the Joint Special Operations Detachment Delta (“Delta Force”) and the Navy’s DEVGRU (formerly “Seal Team Six”) – does things that aren’t supposed to see the light of day.  And some of these things are by their very nature controversial.  Mark Bowden chronicled the Clinton-era use of JSOC troops to track and kill Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar; one wonders where the chorus of demands for constitutional due process were back then?

It’s not an idle question for any democracy; in the UK during “The Troubles”, Britain’s Special Air Service – the unit that “Delta” and many of the world’s other special forces are modeled after – garnered decades of controversy in its clandestine surveillance and, in some cases, direct action against the IRA.  While Britain’s constitution recognizes a closer relationship between the military and civil authority than we have in the US – something that helped spawn our tradition of Posse Comitatus, in fact – it’s the sort of thing that a free society needs to watch out for and be aware of.

But, until we get Hersh’s “evidence”, really, all we have is innuendo
A roomful of journalists might have known this, and asked Hersh to square his account with history and, while we’re at it, JSOC’s stated organization, oversight structure and (since it can be reasonably assumed Walter Mondale was there) three-decade-long mission.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Really?

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has found that there’s nothing illegal about what Bush sent JSOC to do?  Distasteful to modern, urban, urbane, small-l-liberal (and usually big-l-Liberal) products of the university system, perhaps, but not illegal?  Indeed, necessary under the circumstances – just as Jimmy Carter found when he plugged the whole thing in three decades ago?

A roomful of journalists might not have known this – but, armed by the skepticism that I and probably not a few of them used to think was a key part of the trade, you’d have thought someone might have asked.

A roomful of star-struck hero worshippers?  Not so much.

Am I being unfair in characterizing the room – people paralyzed, if not by Walter Mondale’s suffocating gravitas, by Hershs’ reputation as, as Black put it…:

…the best-known investigative reporter of his generation…

…as a bunch of star-struck fanboys? Who are acting like the shrimp-league lefty commenter on Marty Owings’ show last weekend whose entire line was “who are you to question Sy Hersh?”

Maybe.

But just as someone has to question the government – and its servants, like JSOC – someone needs to subject Seymour Hersh to some skepticism, too.

And I’m sure that roomful of Journalists will do just that.

After Hersh gets done covering that invasion of Iran he warned us about.

Titanic Stabilizes At -12,000 Feet

Just as people who move to New York from elsewhere become the most preening, arrogant New Yorkers, some of us who come to conservatism from liberalism are the most vituperative about our rejection of vast swathes of our former beliefs.

So I don’t give liberals a whole lot of credence on economics.

Still, it can be useful to see what they’re telling themselves.

Jeff Rosenberg shut down “Twin Cities Daily Liberal” to join “MNPublius” last week.  Congrats to both Jeff and the MNPublii; one hopes the hire was accompanied by  Aaron Landry being perp-walked from the MNPublius office as jeering onlookers pelt him with rocks and garbage.

But I digress.

Jeff’s a good guy, and he’s made the odd good point in his oeuvre – but Emperor’s Clothes-watchers should perk up at this bit from MNPub yesterday, titled “Under Obama, the stock market is stabilizing“.

Of course it’s “stabilizing”.  As long as companies still produce things that people need to buy, some companies will retain some value, and that value will be reflected in the equity market for their stocks.  Until this nation resorts to being a subsistence-farming economy with a barter currency system, companies will be worth something.

Yes, I know conservatives say the stock market is experiencing a catastrophic collapse under Obama, but they also said the fundamentals of the economy were strong under Bush.

And both are true.  If the former were not true, the market would, tautologically, not be off 43% in the past year; if the latter weren’t fact, there’d be no talk of recovery, no matter who to thank.  “Strong fundamentals” – a capable workforce, a currency capable of supporting commerce, management that can find and exploit opportunity – are the reason that 70-90% of us are not subsistence farmers, as our anscestors were 100-300 years ago, and why we’re unlikely to revert to that, even now.

You have to take conservative arguments with a grain of salt.

(Although not due to anything you’ll read here – but I digress.  Ed.)

The truth is that, in Obama’s first six weeks, the market’s volatility has decreased, and though the declines of the Bush economy haven’t stopped, they haven’t become worse, either.

That’s because, short of complete monetary collapse and reversion to barter and subsistence farming – in short, as long as there’s a market out there – then there is a bottom.  Where is that bottom?  As a theoretical matter, when the market capitalization of publicly-traded companies is equal to their physical and financial assets; when the combined value of alll the hundreds of millions of shares of 3M stock, for example, is the same as the value of 3M’s buildings, computers, inventory and bank accounts – presuming that any of those things have worth at all (again with the “forestalling monetary collapse and not heading to the woods with your rifle and your bag of oat seeds”).  The real bottom, presuming the fundamentals of the economy are strong enough to see us into a recovery, is somewhere north of that, depending on the  potential investors see or, paradoxically, less than that for companies that have no future.

The trouble is that conservatives and the media like to use charts like this, which ignore even the recent past [courtesy of Media Matters]:

The trouble is that liberals use charts from Media Matters.  Let’s break it down:

But the truth looks more like the chart below. Under Bush, the Dow Jones lost 6,000 points, or about 43 percent of its value, from its peak in 2007. That includes about 3,000 points lost since September 2008. Under Obama, the Dow has continued to slide, but it is only down about 1,000 points since its low during the Bush administration.

Which makes sense, until you get into the “why” of it all.

The first 3,000 was the impact of the collapse of the housing bubble.  No question about it: it was a financial catastrophe.  And while the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans did try to beat back some of the governmental idiocy that subsidized the inflation of the bubble in the first place (the systematic socialization of risk and privatization of reward – read “distortion of the free market” – that allowed the bubble to grow and put Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac on the hook to clean up when it popped), there’s plenty of blame to go around; the failure of the Bush Administration to expend the political capitol needed to turn the idiocy back; the Dems complete ignorance of the issue going back to 1998, when the Clinton Administration started instituting the policies that led us to disaster, and so on.

That’s 3,000 points over a little over a year; figure about 250 points a month.

Which, by many accounts (and let’s be honest; if you put 100 economists into a room, you’ll get 175 theories) pretty much covered the correction from the housing bubble.

Then, from September – in the waning months of the Bush Administration, when it became pretty clear that Obama and his socialist, interventionist policies were going to hold sway, and when the (frankly) spendthrift Bush Administration did its level best under Henry Paulson to speed the transition to government funding of the whole mess, the market justifiably reacted – through January, the market shed another couple thousand points. That’s around 400 points a month, depending on where you demarcate your starting and finish lines.

And in the past 45 days, the market has reacted to Obama’s his full-throttle power-dive into a socialist command economy, his tax-hiking, and (I think it’s fair to say) indications of his administration’s incompetence, and burned through over 1,000 points, speeding to what may or may not (the coming weeks will tell us) be close to the Dow’s hard bottom.

You do the math; that’s a 401K-shredding 600-point-per-month pace.

So yes, Jeff – while “sloughing off all value to the point where the market is down to not much above asset value” is a form of “stabilization” (in the same sense that a crashing airplane doesn’t get much below ground level, provided the ground below the plane doesn’t open beneath it and swallow the plane up whole), Obama has “stabilized” the market.

By your leave, we’ve had enough of this kind of “stability”; we’d like him to stop before he “stabilizes” healthcare, home values, Americans’ net worth, and our foreign policy.

By your leave.

CORRECTION: TC Daily Liberal, not MN Liberal Report.  To be fair, Twin Cities leftyblogs sorta run together after a while. MNBlue, MNSpeak, MN Liberal Report, Daily Liberal, Powerliberal, PowerMonkey, Daily Monkey, MNObserver, MNObsessive, MNCompulsive…who’da thunk “branding” was the one thing Mark Gisleson (“Norwegianity”) would excel at?

The Barricades

Four years ago, I and most thinking Americans had a field day, roundly ridiculing a couple of risible strains of “liberal” whinging:

  • Stars who claimed they’d “move to France” if George W. Bush won the election.
  • Vacuous lefty blog-gerbils who yapped about the Blue States seceding from the union and joining to form “The United States of Canada”, and leaving the red-voting “Jesusland” states to themselves (I had particular fun with this, as well as pointing out the political and historical illiteracy of the idea; most of Canada west of Ontario is as red as Montana).  I had extra-special fun with these morons.
  • Acres of “He’s Not My President” bumper stickers.

These were many of the same people, by the way, who tearfully demanded that conservatives “stop questioning their patriotism”, by the way.

But I digress.  The vacuous snivelling hamsters got their president finally.

It’s the other side I’m concerned about now.

We got a call on the show last Saturday from a guy who’s question echoed one I’d heard from not a few people on blogs, on Twitter, and around about in recent months – itself a reprise of something I heard a lot back in the seventies and, just a bit, in the early nineties.

“When should we stop talking and start the active resistance?”

I often ask these people – why?

“It’s never been worse than this!”

I’m starting to lose patience with some of them.

Whenever anyone says anything is “the worst ever”, they’re almost always wrong.  They almost always really mean “the worst I’ve seen”.

Politics is not the dirtiest and nastiest it’s ever been (that’d be the Jackson/Adams contest in 1828, or any election where the Hearst papers uncorked their smear machine); this is not the worst unemployment since World War II (not even close, not yet)…

…and if you’re a freedom-loving American, the Obama administration is shaping up to be a bad one, perhaps a horrible one.  But it’s by no means the worst we’ve seen on any count.

Spending?  Roosevelt’s New Deal was worse.  So far.

Gun control?  While Obama’s record is bad, he hasn’t done anything yet; Democrats from FDR through Clinton all took their swipes at the Second Amendment, from Roosevelt’s prohibitory taxes on automatic weapons (which eliminated gang warfare!) to Clinton’s “1994 Crime Bill”, which did for many less-fashionable liberties what Bigfoot does to junked cars.

Civil Liberties?  Three words; J. Edgar Hoover.  FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ got away with things that’d make any of the ofay gerbils that were protesting George W. Bush’s “Abuses” gag up their skulls.  Nixon invoked executive orders that gathered unprecedented “emergency” powers unto the executive – which has had libertarians chattering amongst themselves for almost forty years.  Obama bears watching; the Dems in Congress bear even more of it.  But so far, the threats are minimal (while still intolerable).

Repackaging vacuity as “change” and “audacity?”  OK, there Obama’s in a league of his own.

Overall demoralization of the parts of this country that matter?  The seventies were worse.  They had everything we have today and more – instability, out-of-control government, the Middle East going nuts, stagflation, Jimmy Carter – and a nation that was coming off of Vietnam, which, if you don’t remember it (and I only do through the prism of a 12 year old’s memory) was the most demoralizing thing to happen to this nation since the mid-thirties.  I don’t know if anyone ever ran the numbers, but Carter’s “Malaise Speech” must have prompted more population-wide suicides than any other single event in American history (shaddap about Oberlin undergrads popping too many Valium after Kerry lost).

And even that wasn’t the worst it’s gotten.  In my father’s lifetime – well within my grandparents’ early adult lives – there were those in the mainstream who seriously considered socialism, communism, even pre-war Naziism viable models with much from which we could learn, even much to emulate for our own good.  There were those in positions of great power who actively sought to incorporate “the best” of these ideologies into our own.

The point being that, so far, the Obama Administration isn’t the worst thing our constitution, our economy and our society has faced – yet.  And while the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the Founding Fathers well-recognized the possibility that Americans might need to throw off another tyranny someday, this isn’t it.

Not yet.

It’s a big government, and it’s getting bigger.  It’s a not-ready-for-prime-time government, run by a lot of very canny people who buffaloed a lot of our nation’s not-too-bright with a lot of breezy platitudes, and which rode to office on an almost-but-not-quite-unprecedented wave of discontent with the status quo.  It’s a government full of poltroons and ideological three-card-monte sharks.  But it’s not a communist dictatorship.

It was elected, for better or worse.  And we have three years and eight months to make the case that it should be thrown out of office and – this is the important part – nobody’s changing that.

If they do?  Well, get back to me then; it’ll be then you should think about putting on the camo and grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods.

Until then?  It’s still America.

As Douglas Adams said, “Don’t Panic”.

Three Or Four Races Are Plenty

I’m sitting looking over my broad, tree-lined avenue with a glass of single-malt, and the sky is blue and the white families with their happy, present-sotted kids are wandering past on their errands, and the election is over, so let’s all relax and quit irritating each other, OK? Michele Bachmann, Erik Paulsen, Jim Oberstar, Betty McCollum, John Kline, Colin Peterson and that other guy are about to take office, so all you black people just get over it. Go stock up on watermelon and spare ribs and maybe real estate in Liberia. White people still rule this country. Deal with it. Boom Shakalaka Boom.White legislators plan to bring sanity to Washington, and why not begin with Congress? It has been sorely in need of reform for a long, long time.

Democrats intend to bring reform to Washington, and why not begin with the United States Congress? It has been sorely in need of reform for a century or so. Equal representation for all people is a good idea in theory, assuming they are half smart, but then you look at Keith Ellison, an incurious frat boy from the state of Humphrey and Mondale, and you think, whoa, something is wrong with this picture. We need some horizontal control.

Let’s start at the beginning and redraw the map. First of all, is there a reason for South Central Los Angeles to have a congressional representative? I have often wondered about this. Why give a House seat to a half million wannabee gangbangers, pimps, crack addicts, prostitutes and derelicts while Utah gets one lousy House for millions of honest, hard-working people? (Compton has roughly the population of Salt Lake.) It’s OK if South Central LA sends somebody with brains and an independent streak, but when they send a couple of Black Democrat hacks, then it makes no sense.

The idea behind the Congress was to create a representative body of wise counselors who rise above the petty tumult and think noble thoughts and do the right thing in a pinch. Can you think of a time when Los Angeles’ representatives have done this? No, you can’t. So let’s bite the bullet and make Compton a federal protectorate and appoint an overseer – ooh, what a perfect word! This would be a good assignment for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s done a heck of a job in south Chicago, so let’s give it all of Compton and, while we’re at it, Newark. A wonderful postcard place, but what have its congresspeople done other than grub for federal largesse for Newark? Change the name to “Housing Project # 447227” and put HUD in charge of it.

While we’re at it, let’s admit that Detroit, El Paso and Philadelphia have never been completely comfortable as part of the United States. They’ve tried to fit in, but it just isn’t working, so let’s allow them to pull out and find their own path. You could attach El Paso to Juarez and make a lovely little desert nation out of that, and let Detroit join Canada, and make Philadelphia an “independent” nation. Add Camden New Jersey to it. They really are part of the same thing. This leaves us with 40 or 50 House seats unoccupied (more if we simply assumed that all black people could be conveniently represented by a few token representatives, since they all vote the same anyway. It’s called consolidation, folks. It goes on all the time in corporate America and also in local school districts, so let’s make it work for America.

We White people will personally foot the bill for the new, incredibly convoluted district maps. This is a promise.

We now have 40 states and 20 extra Senate seats to parcel out. Give some to ex-CEOs. This would rescue them from their lonely lives on the lecture circuit and lend some pizazz to the place since they’d be free to spout off and say whatever they think. People would sit in the galleries to listen to Lee Iaccocca. He’d be down there sawing away with Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley and maybe some former bank and auto execs. Let them in the club and put that experience to use. And give congressional seats to the NRA and the GOP itself. This would definitely add brains to the assembly.

And that is how you create a permanent white majority. Al Sharpton showed us the way. Learn from the master. Those dinkeldorfs who ran the show for 40 years must never be allowed to return to power. Take those fuzzy-headed libruls to the cleaners. Subject them to alternative interrogation techniques until we get to the truth. Keith Ellison would make a decent host of a daytime quiz show. He came dangerously close to running for president. Ai yi yi yi yi. Let’s get to work.

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You Might Be Anti-American!

In the wake of the flap the agenda media and the Sorosphere manufactured over Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statements a few weeks ago on Tinglyball with Chris Matthews, I wondered – is it possible to question other peoples’ motivations anymore?

I’m convinced – having not only read the accounts and seen the video of Rep. Bachmann’s appearance, but having talked with Rep. Bachmann about the subject – that Rep. Bachmann meant “people who don’t have the nation’s best interests at heart”, and “people who love America exactly as it isn’t and has never been”, when she said “anti-American”.  And when she said the media should be exposing this, she meant “doing its job, and giving people some means of critically examining candidates’ views”, rather than “witchhunting”. 

Not that facts or context matter, of course.

Are there “anti-Americans” out there?  In the sense that there are people who want America extinguished from the planet?  Probably none in public life that matter, Jeremiah Wright and his invocation of the Sixth Commandment notwithstanding.

But can someone’s commitment to “American” ideals – the things that our founding fathers enshrined, things like “one person, one vote” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, “the rule of law”, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – be criticized?

One of the most popular posts that’s ever appeared on this blog came out four and a half years ago, during a previous spate of demands that nobody question anyone’s motivation (“Don’t you dare question my patriotism!”).  Entitled “You Might Not Be An American If…“, it kinda summed up how I feel about Bachmann’s statement and, yes, the targets:

If You Believe: that America has problems – huge problems – then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that America’s problems make it an inherently rotten concept, then maybe you should think about whether you’re living in the right place. 

If You Believe: …that America’s projection of power around the world is immoral – then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that any projection of American power is inherely unjust because it’s America, then maybe you should be living in, say, Sweden? Just an idea.

If You Believe: …that capitalism is wrong because its inequalities are inherely unjust, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that the free market is inherently, irrevocably evil, perhaps China would be a better fit? Just suggesting…

If You Believe: …that invading Iraq was wrong, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that our temporary administration of Iraq is worse than Hussein’s 30 year reighn of horrors, then perhaps you should rot in hell we need to have an attitude adjustment.

At four years’ remove, I might add a few:

If You Believe: …that racism still exists, and that people (or even just White People) inflict it on others, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that all of America (or just White America) makes its every decision based purely on racism (unless they vote for Barack Obama), then you might be Anti-American.

If You Believe: …the Constitution is a “living document”, then dissent is hunky-dory.
But If You Believe: …that the Constitution is itself a corrupt, vile document that never did anyone any good, then perhaps you should find a different society to live in, just on basic principle.

Wanna swat at Bachmann’s statement?  You gotta bring more game than most of her critics seem to be able to manage.

Square Bullets For The Infidels

I remember reading a book about thirty years ago – The Social History Of The Machine Gun, or something like that.  It was a pseudo-academic treatise, adapted for some shred of popular market appeal, that talked about the social roots of fully-automatic weapons.

In one of the first chapters, they included the plans for an early, rudimentary multi-chambered cannon.  It dated back to the 16th or 17th century, and had five or six chambers attached to a circular plate; the plate could be rotated to push the chambers up against the barrel for firing – sort of the anscestor of the Gatling Gun (or, for serious gun geeks, the multi-chambered Aden gun).

It had one extra feature noted in the plans; it used a traditional round chamber to fire round bullets “for use against Christians”, the plans noted (I’m paraphrasing).  But if the troops were facing Moslem troops, the plate could be swapped out for one with chambers bored for square bullets (and no, I don’t recall any plans for square barrel bores), on the theory that square bullets would cause grislier wounds and do more damage.  Of course, being Mohammedans, the extra cruelty was justified, at least to the inventor.

There’s nothing new, there, of course.  A teacher of mine in high school – a Vietnam-era veteran who served in the US or Germany, if memory serves – recalled that one of the first things that the drill instructors did in basic training in wartime was to dehumanize the enemy; Vietnamese and Japanese and German humans became “Gooks” and “Japs” and “Krauts” and what-have-you.  Because killing humans is hard – but pushing a bayonet into a hateful caricature is easy.

Of course, German society (like much of Europe) had a solid head-start in dehumanizing Jews.  Hitler pushed things over the edge – but when it came to reducing a class of humans to untermenschen, he stood on the shoulders of giants.  Hateful, loathsome giants.

For most people – normal, decent people, at any rate – the first step on the road to unspeakable hatred is the belief that somehow, your opponent is less worthy of the decency most of us afford to actual humans.  And once you get past that, really, it’s a hop skip and jump to any ghastly horror you can imagine.

Emily from X Perspective is, by the way, a normal, decent person.  But a recent posts shows some of the dehumanization that is swallowing the left in re Sarah Palin.

[Not following politics this week? GOP VP Candidate Sarah Palin’s 17-yr old daughter is pregnant. Which we’d ignore if Palin wasn’t adamantly anti-sex-ed and anti-abortion.]

I admit to a small amount of hypocrisy of my own here: in general, I believe we should leave the kids out of this election – it’s not the girl’s fault her mother is running for office. But this was just too spot-on not to share.

“We should leave kids out of politics – unless we really hate what their parents [supposedly] stand for?”

And then, all bets are off?  Because decency is only for people who believe as “we” do?

And where’s Palin’s “hypocrisy?”  She – and, we presume, her daughter and future son-in-law – are pro-life.  And they’re following through on that belief.  Perhaps that’s a form of logic impermeable by conservatives; either way, I’m just not seeing it. 

Leave aside that the Juno analogy is completely off.  It supports Palin’s, and the pro-lifers’, stances; the Juno character had the baby, which, by the way, pissed off the pro-abortion crowd to no end – especially here in the Twin Cities, from whence Juno screenwriter and last year’s Hottest Writer Ever, Diablo Cody, sprang a few years back; local “feminists” were in a aorta-busting froth that Ms. Cody didn’t have young Juno abort her “oops”, more or less as they are with Bristol and, for that matter, Sarah Palin.  On whom, by the way, “feminists” have also bestowed dictatorial power over her daughter and her “reproductive choices”.  But that’s just a sign of a photoshopper with no command of metaphor.

On the other hand, every time the left slags Palin and her family, there’s another struggling middle-class-or-lower family who realizes there’s somebody running for the White House who just plain gets it.  And that translates into votes.

So by all means, photoshoppers; photoshop on!

The Right Of The People

By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States today ruled in the Heller case that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is exactly what the founding fathers intended; that a right “of the people” means “people”, not “the National Guard”.

The court dealt forty years of erosion of civil liberties and contempt for the law-abiding citizen a sharp kick in the groin with pointy boots. The decision stands as the capstone on one of the most remarkable bits of grassroots politics in American history – a three-decade battle where the nation’s people, black and white and Republican and Democrat, fought their elites first to a standstill, and then came back to an escalating series of victories, starting in the courts of public opinion, extending through legislatures and city councils around the nation, to today.

This ruling euthanizes the DC Gun Ban – which is was, like most gun control measures, a racist concoction intended to keep all those brown-skinned people from running amok in the nation’s capitol, to return us in deed if not in thought to the days when black people had a separate, unequal justice system…

To quote Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog:

the Court nullified two provisions of the city of Washington’s strict 1976 gun control law: a flat ban on possessing a gun in one’s home, and a requirement that any gun — except one kept at a business — must be unloaded and disassembled or have a trigger lock in place. The Court said it was not passing on a part of the law requiring that guns be licensed. It said that issuing a license to a handgun owner, so the weapon can be used at home, would be a sufficient remedy for the Second Amendment violation of denying any access to a handgun.

The decision opens up possibilities for litigation and legislation on further gun bans, like Chicago’s, and also at least partially ejects US V. Miller from its misbegotten role as definitive precedent on Second Amendment issues.

This is not the end of the war over the Second Amendment, of course. It’s not a complete victory; licensing at the end of the day is conceptually scarcely less odious or abuse-prone than a ban (as we’ve found out in Saint Paul this past year). The orcs still control much; many cities (or at least their governing elites) still pay lumpen, unthinking fealty to the notion that a disarmed, docile citizenry is a safe one.

Some of this world’s people know better…:

…that the only genuinely secure people in this world are the ones that can see to their own security.

Yes, folks – this is serious business.

This is far from the end. Indeed, as Churchill said, it’s the end of the beginning…:

…and much hard fighting remains.

The court did the right thing – and now, this is a battle we Real Americans have to consolidate, extend, and win in the legislatures, City Councils, and in Congress.

The orcs will regroup and try to consolidate and, eventually, make another assault on the God-given rights of the law-abiding American. It is inevitable; it is the way of the orc to feed on your freedom. Softcore fascists like Heather Martens and Wes Skoglund aren’t drying up and blowing away because of this ruling; it remains to us to extinguish the smoldering dung-heap of that whole school of thought, in the legislature, in court, and most importantly in the hearts of people smart enough to know the difference between “rights of the people” and “privileges granted by your masters”.

But we – the Americans who’ve fought long and hard to keep this issue on the national radar, and drive this nation back from the insane nadir of the collectivist seventies – deserve a moment, if only a moment, to relax and enjoy the fruits of today’s victory. It’s a great respite from a dismal political season, and a solid jumping-off point for what comes next.

Enjoy it. I sure am.

To all of you who’ve spent so much time, toil and treasure winning today’s victory, a salute. You’ve earned it.

Tomorrow? Well, it’s back to work. Back to the endless job of putting the enemies of freedom to the rhetorical point of the political pike – one Congressman, one Justice, one voter at a time.

The way we’ve done it all along.

Thank you. And God Bless America.

(Over the top a little? Not really. Oh, I’m doing the endzone happy dance. I’m doing to do the endzone happy dance on David Lillehaug’s neck – rhetorically speaking, of course. Today’s a great day, and I’m going to treat it as such).

Happy Patriots Day!

No, not the football team – the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride to mobilize the militia against the British, and the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

By bypassing the mainstream media and taking the word directly to the people, Revere was in a sense the first conservative blogger; indeed, had his horse been named “Blog”, the metaphor would stand on its own.

Sadly, that is not the case.

However, a look through Massachusetts state archives reveals that, like a good conservative pundit in the public eye, Revere stirred up a firestom of controversy.

In the Bofton Ftar-Tribune, columnist Richelieu Sturdevaant wrote:

Patriots of olde have lamented to me that thif is a fad, far cry from the old days in Maffachufettes, where real patriots worked with the Britifh Government!

Zebulon Perry, writing the Maffachufsetf Monitor – a broadsheet funded by British parliamentarian and tax patriarch George Townsend, wrote:

Revere, who riddeth fourth against the lawful Brittifh taxes, is funded by the Sons of Liberty!

Hezekiel Martens, of Citizens for a British Massachusetts, noted:

The righte to keepe and bear armfe is clearly laid down in the Britifh Conftitutione to derive to the Militia, which is the Britifh Redcoatte. Mufkettes kill 1,000,000 Maffachufettef children a year.

Grace Kelleye, writing fo the broadsheet MassRed, wrote:

George Washington is the real fascist. We should all lay down on the roade in front of Mr. Revere.

Lord Jefferey Fleckey of Broadsheet of the Moderatte Royaliste simply wrote:

Revere if fo pwnn3edde

And Otis Coleman of the Ftrib wrote:

Fure, fit a ftupid overfexed filverfmith aftride a faft horfe, and fure, he’ll feel like a ftud. Fo what? He’fe no big cheefe. Af a feventh-grader fitting on my knapfack, sucking on a sucker, fifty yearf ago on the weft fide of Bofton, I faw that.

Really!

Happy Patriots Day!

Just Like A Spirit In The Night

Someday if I ever made a movie of my own life,  most of the soundtrack would probably be Springsteen songs.  I associate one song or another with most of the big milestones of my life – teenage angst, love found and lost, hope, determination, grief, whatever you got.

The E Street Band is just a tad greater than the sum of a bunch of great parts; the beating heart of the Weinberg/Tallent rhythm section, Miami Steve’s raw, sloppy-yet-perfect backup vocals, the Big Man’s sax garnishing the whole thing…

…but under and around and occasionally soaring above it all was the soul of the E Street Band’s sound – Danny Federici and his Hammond B-3.

Federici passed away yesterday at age 58 from complications of skin cancer after nearly forty years of playing with Springsteen:

It was Federici, along with original E Street Band drummer Vini Lopez, who first invited Springsteen to join their band.

(“Child”, with Springsteen, Federici, Vinny “Mad Dog” Lopez and Vini Roslin)

By 1969, the self-effacing Federici — often introduced in concert by Springsteen as “Phantom Dan” — was playing with the Boss in a band called Child. Over the years, Federici joined his friend in acclaimed shore bands Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and the Bruce Springsteen Band.

Federici became a stalwart in the E Street Band as Springsteen rocketed from the boardwalk to international stardom. Springsteen split from the E Streeters in the late ’80s, but they reunited for a hugely successful tour in 1999.

Federici and Springsteen were half of “Steel Mill”, a first-generation metal band (of all things) that predated the E Street Band by a couple of years, and whose bootlegs have been for thirty years among the most sought-after in the boot business. 

  It’s no accident that the Springsteen moments that I remember the most are, most often, the ones most keenly-accented by Federici’s raw, understated, yet always dead-on playing:

  • The figure in the chorus of “Incident on 57th Street” (The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle); it’s only three notes repeated eight times, dissolving into a high, fat wash of chords keening above the raw longing of Bruce’s vocals; “Puerto Rican Jane – oh won’t you tell me…”, but without it, it’d be just another lovelorn guy baying at the moon; Federici’s part adds and accents the tension, the hope, the passion. 
  • “Jungleland” (from Born to Run);  The huge swell as Bruce roars “From the churches to the jails, tonight all is silence in the world…” signals that this song is going downtown to rumble.
  • “Sandy”, from E Street Shuffle, featuring Danny on an unforgettable accordion part

  • The Farfisa part that propels the choruses of Born in the USA’s “Glory Days” (and is virtually a sample of the even cooler part on “I’m a Rocker” (The River).
  • “Backstreets” (from Born to Run); Federici does two things that stand out in this song – one of my favorites, and easily the best “breakup” song of all time.  From the bridge (“Endless juke joints and Valentino drag…”) to the end, of course, Federici’s B3 howls with all the anger and longing that this angry, longing song deserves; the organ is the atmosphere.  But it’s at the beginning – the long intro Federici shared with pianist Roy Bittan – that is the most ingenious.  The organ part starts low, mournful and sad, with broad chords behind Bittan’s eighth-note riffing.  But then, when the band comes in, Federici swells up into a higher register, playing a nervous, jittery pentatonic counterpoint behind the rest of the band.  It’s so subtle you have to listen hard for it – and you usually sense it rather than hear it.  But it adds the angst-y undercurrent to the intro; while the rest of the band broadly thumps away, the organ twitches and twists in the background like all the unanswered questions behind any lousy breakup. 
  • “Jackson Cage” (The River) – Federici is the propulsion behind this, one of Bruce’s rawest sprints, almost challenging Weinberg to keep up. 

And of course, the entire album Darkness on the Edge of Town.  Dave Marsh once wrote that Born to Run belonged the Clarence Clemons and Roy Bittan – but Darkness belonged to Federici (and the low end of Weinberg’s drum kit, the toms and bass).   Marsh was right, as he usually was (when not writing about politics, anyway); Federici has almost too many great moments to catalog; the burst of howling joy in “Badlands” (especially the roaring swell in the second verse – “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king…”), the fatigue-ridden last-call motif on “Factory”, the indigo atmospherics in the title cut…

…and, perhaps best of all, “Racing In The Street”, which constantly dukes it out with “Darkness…” for the title of my favorite Bruce song.  The song is the flip side of “Born To Run” – it’s about growing up and realizing after you’ve driven your suicide machine through the mansions of glory, that party’s got a morning after – the rest of your life. 

And the final coda, after the last chorus – “tonight my baby and me are gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands…” – is entirely driven by Federici; slow and mournful at the beginning, and then brightening like the sun rising in the east over The Shore, as another day begins as things pick up tempo and life starts up again.

Federici was the quietest member of the band, the one who stayed the most in the background, the one whose career was most-closely tied to the band.

 

  Unlike Nils Lofgren, he had no previous solo career; he never forged much of a second career, like Steve Van Zandt’s acting or Max Weinberg’s now-long career as a bandleader, or for that matter Gary Tallent’s as a producer; he didn’t have the force of a supersized personality like Clarence Clemons to boot doors open.  His single solo album, the jazzy and largely instrumental Flemington, was and remains obscure.  He reportedly took the E Street Band’s extended hiatus, from 1990 to 1998, the hardest; rumors among the E Street fan hive had it that he had a bit of a drinking problem; the band’s reunion and tour in ’99 was, the rumors had it, a huge boost to his life. 

Whatever.  The fact remained that whatever the rest of the E Street’s bands parts brought to the table, Federici added the atmospherics, the foreboding, the tingle of anticipation…the soul of the band.

RIP, Danny Federici.