Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Saturday, June 01, 2002

The Latest from the Middle East - a Fatwa is the Moslem equivalent of a mafia "contract". Fatwas have been issues for Salmon Rushdie (by the Iranians), all Americans - and now...

...software pirates?
posted by Mitch Berg 6/1/2002 08:35:55 AM

Friday, May 31, 2002

State GOP Brouhaha or What's a Republican, Part IV - The Strib is reporting a big brouhaha among the state GOP, regarding its threat not to give state GOP funds to the Senate Republican Caucus. The SRC wants to support two of its moderate members, Senators Kiscaiden and Martha Robertson. Both are, on many key conservative issues, "moderate" - ie, might as well be Democrats.

The question for the SRC is: who decides what a "Republican" is?

And for the Strib: if it were the DFL withholding funds from unendorsed candidates who contravened the DFL's core beliefs, would this even be a story?
posted by Mitch Berg 5/31/2002 07:46:16 AM

Missile Alert - Again - I wasn't being tongue-in-cheek with yesterday's "Missile Alert" post. But apparently it's more real even than that.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/31/2002 07:39:11 AM

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Missile Alert - be on the lookout, for now anyway, for Arab guys walking through Fort Snelling State Park carrying long tubes.

Actually, there is precedent for this - Palestinian terrorists shot at a number of commercial airliners back in the seventies, using the relatively unsophisticated Russian shoulder-fired AA missiles of the day.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/30/2002 08:10:42 PM

Irap - Yesterday, Bono. Today, Eminem.

There's a certain trainwreck quality about watching stars give in to hubris. Marshall Mathers is doing it...
posted by Mitch Berg 5/30/2002 08:07:49 PM

Iraq - Last week, I wondered aloud on this site if Bush's prevarication to the Europeans about attacking Iraq was for show.

William Safetan in Slate advances a similar thesis. Very interesting.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/30/2002 08:02:28 PM

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

I Know It Was a Long Cold Spring - but I hate heat and humidity.

Waaah.

That's part of the reason today's installment is so thin and late. I'll get on it earlier tomorrow...

Meet the New Anchor, Same as the Old Anchor - Brian Williams will succeed Tom Brokaw.

In other words, the least overtly liberal of the major anchors is going to be replaced by someone who may be more overtly liberal than Peter Jennings.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/29/2002 10:52:34 PM

OPM - Y'know, I"ve been a U2 fan since "Boy", in 1981. I may have been one of five people in North Dakota to have bought that album when it was released. And along with Springsteen, there is no better on-stage showman than Bono. Yes, he's an arch-liberal, but goodness knows that if a conservative tried to listen to conservative rockers, we'd be limited to the late Joey Ramone and the interminable Ted Nugent.

And you have to hand it to Bono - he was one of very few performers after 9/11 who checked in as an unabashedly pro-human patriot (as distinct from National Chauvinist).

Of course, his big topic is third world debt. A valid sentiment? Sure. The stupid debts accumulated by stupid, almost invariably socialist or statist governments are indeed crushing the economies.

But, as Mike Lynch argues, just giving these socialistic and/or autocratic countries the money is about the same as giving a 16-year-old his entire inheritance in advance, wagging your finger at her, and telling her "make sure you don't spend it all on CDs and spring breaks in Cancun!".
posted by Mitch Berg 5/29/2002 10:49:29 PM

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Money makes the World Go Round - The Minnesota GOP has its own campaign finance debate going on.

Brian Sullivan echoes the complaints most conservatives have against campaign spending limits - because they leave the liberal media as the ultimate arbiter of what information reaches the public. If Sullivan and his privately-funded (thus unregulated) campaign happen to win the endorsement and the election (which is unlikely,I think), look for massive state and national handwringing about the power of money in politics - the kind that, for some reason, didn't happen after John Corzine won New Jersey's 2000 Senate campaign with 60 million in private spending, or Mark Dayton outspent Rod Grams by severalfold in their Senate race.

Corzine and Dayton are Democrats, of course.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/28/2002 07:40:16 AM

Stop Me If I'm Wrong - but Bush's Normandy speech was not what I'd hoped for.

Granted, it did what Memorial Day speeches are supposed to do - honor those who died protecting our freedom, and bringing it back to those who'd lost it.

But the part many of us hoped for - the statement of doctrine to the Europeans that Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction made them an enemy worthy of our military attention - wasn't there.

Part of me likes to think that silence is golden - that it's all there, under the surface, waiting to come out when the time is right.

Part of me is worried that it won't.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/28/2002 07:20:52 AM

Lunacy International - According to a report by Amnesty International, the passengers of Flight 93, whose doomed uprising against their hijackers may have saved the White House, violated the hijackers' rights to Free Speech, Trial by Jury and Due Process.

OK, not quite. But the rest of their report, despite little motes of occasional relevance (opposition to the vagaries of the Patriot Act) is a statement of such smug and idiotic America-last-ism that words fail. In a world full of Sudans and Zimbabwes, for Amnesty (to which I used to contribute) to harp on the US would be comical were it not so depressing.

No Heads Rolled - I doubt many rational non-agendified people really believe that the president knew anything about 9/11 in advance, certainly nothing he or anyone could have formed a considered reaction to. But Jesse Walker, in Reason, asks - if' that's true, are all of the "Patriot Act's" powers such a good idea?
posted by Mitch Berg 5/28/2002 06:56:17 AM

Ugh - A significant part of the Moslem world is fairly inscrutable to Americans. A place and people that can generate dozens of suicide bombers is just too strange for many Americans to comprehend.

But suicide bombers come in dime lots. And just when I was thinking that radical Islam was the most inscrutably insane belief in the world, comes the news that two thickly-populated nations, India and Pakistan, are just as wacko as the worst Palestinian walking into an ice cream parlor wrapped in TNT and nails.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/28/2002 06:51:34 AM

Monday, May 27, 2002

Memorial Day - With this, I risk diving deep into bathos.

Tough. It's my blog. If you're not in the mood, pop on over to nsync.com til it blows over.

It's 4AM on Memorial Day. Memorial Day has always been a poignant holiday for me - I've never been one of those Americans who was unaware of what this holiday was about. I grew up in a town steeped in the lore of WWII. The local National Guard company - Company H of the 164th Infantry Regiment - served on Guadalcanal and in the Philippines. Their dead were a part of the atmosphere I grew up in. We remembered, all right.

Well, we have a lot to remember today. In addition to the 900,000 American servicepeople who've died in our nation's service in the past 227 years, we have 3,000 civilians.to mourn as well. One of them was from a little town not far from my own hometown. Ann Nelson worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, and I think I knew her brother, although I'm not sure - many North Dakotans are only a degree or two of separation apart, but there are as many Nelsons there as in Minnesota. And I read her portrait in the Times - her story is a little close to my heart, personally. She was another small-town kid who moved to the big city to chase a big dream or two. She died in the World Trade Center, of course.

What do you say? My baser side says "Exact revenge a thousandfold" - and tonight, on the first wartime Memorial Day of my adult life, it feels verygood to say.

But in the end, again, all I can say is remember what this day is for, and pray that this day next year, or the year after, or the year after that, brings us a world free of everything that led us to this point.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/27/2002 04:30:16 AM

Open Letter to the President - President Bush - it's Mitch. I helped get you elected, two years ago. Do me a favor. Please.

You'll be speaking at St.Mere Eglise, overlooking Omaha Beach, sometime later today, Memorial Day. Please, please, drop the dovish tone of the last few days - the one you used at the Bundestag in Berlin last week. The world needs another Winston Churchill. We do not need empty platitudes, calling us to endless wariness and uncertain sacrifice toward an unknowable end.

We need a speech like Churchill or Reagan or FDR would give - one that left our goal so clear even the most myopic tyrant or zealotry-befuddled thug can't help but get the message: We're awash in righteous rage, and we're going to exact a hundred Afghanistans from the next pack of degenerates that doesn't come to the table with its tail between its legs and it nuclear weapons programs lolling about the circular file.

We need a speech that puts Iraq on notice that their current path will lead only to Tomahawks in the dark, shadows in the night disgorging flame and steel and cold-eyed killers in green and sand berets that strike in the dark leaving cut throats and flaming bunkers and numbing chaos. With Turkish tanks rumbling over those who don't have the sense to do what their fathers and older brothers did ten years ago - surrender.

Mr. President; do not let us down.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/27/2002 04:11:06 AM

The Left Gets Its Wish - The Professional Bellyaching Class yapped long and loud about the "treatment" Al-Quaeda prisoners were receiving at Camp X-Ray, at Guantanamo Bay.

So - today, these butchers are treated better than drunk driving convicts in any American county jail.

I'm beginning to think the Russians had the right idea.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/27/2002 03:58:47 AM

Sunday, May 26, 2002

Institutional Culture - We've long known that the Minneapolis FBI office had a hint that Zacharias Moussaoui, the alleged "20th Hijacker" who was arrested in the suburbs of St. Paul a month before the terrorist attacks, had some inkling they were on to something.

Today - word from the WashPost that the institutional culture of the FBI may have thwarted the further investigation that might - just might - have flushed the 9/11 plot before it happened.

The allegations - from a career FBI counsel - hinge on senior FBI officials' careerism - which came before solving cases.

Scary stuff.
posted by Mitch Berg 5/26/2002 09:03:53 PM

Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive