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

Saturday, November 09, 2002

R E S P E C T - President Bush can't get much from his domestic enemies.

But some people overseas are getting the picture.

(Courtesy Powerline)
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2002 10:25:06 PM

And So It Begins - Maybe - According to the Jerusalem-based DEBKA defense news website, US, British, Iranian, Turkish and Jordanian Special Forces are already in combat not only in Northern Iraq, but in the southeast, attempting to set up Iraqi opposition and secure the oilfields to thwart a repeat of Hussein's arson campaign of 1991.
. The US-led assault force has two primary missions:

A. Within the 60 days assigned to the UN inspectors for completing their report, the troops aim to assert military control over all southeastern Iraq up to the Iranian frontier including the Hawr al-Hammar lake and marshes. They will encircle the great oilfields of Khozistan, but stay outside. This mirrors the situation established earlier in northern Iraq, where US, British, Jordanian, Turkish and Iranian special forces present since April have taken control of much of the region, but came to a standstill at the gates of the two oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul.

US-led allied forces are under orders to skirt Iraq’s northern and southern oilfields for two reasons: One, their capture would nullify the UN oil-for-food program that requires Iraq to pump oil according to a quota. Two, it could goad Saddam to extreme reprisals such as using his weapons of mass destruction against the assault troops or blowing up wells.

B. When completed, the attacking force’s capture of southeast Iraq, on top of its extensive control of territory in the north and west (along the Jordanian border), will transform the political-military balance. US and allied forces will have caged Saddam Hussein, his family, the ruling Baath and the armed forces in the central region, cornering them in the cities of Baghdad and Tirkit and cutting them off from access to the oilfields. Saddam will be dispossessed of his sole source of revenue for keeping the Iraqi army fighting.

How reliable is DEBKA? Read it, and I'll let you be the judge.

However - if it's true, it's very similar to what I was saying a while ago.

Well, one part, anyway.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2002 10:04:33 PM

Power Line! - Local (mostly) blog Power Line does some great commentary on regional and national events. They just came to my attention today, and they're worth putting on your Upper-Midwest regional blog list.

And they were kind enough to quote liberally and complimentarily (?) from my open letter yesterday to Garrison Keillor.

It's fun, watching and participating as this blogging phenomenon starts rolling toward...a critical mass? A pet-rock-style sudden communal loss of interest?

Whatever - there are a lot of great blogs out there. Enjoy!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2002 05:14:08 PM

Shot in the Dark - Now with Archives! - After nine months, I finally figured out how to make Blogger archives work!

Going back through them (for the first time in months), it's fun to see how this site has evolved. Last spring, we averaged probably eight hits a day. Today, we average 50-60, although recent developments may change that.

Yesterday? It's amazing what a link on a mega-site like Instapundit will do for you. We had...

Drum roll, please?

3,300 visits yesterday.

Come for the Keillor trashing, stay for the cheap shots at Cathy Wurzer!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2002 05:08:25 PM

This Just In...Bin Laden Not Dead Yet - Interpol majordomo Ronald Noble says rumors of Bin Laden's demise are greatly exaggeraged.
"Osama bin Laden is alive," he said. "Despite intensive searches, we have not managed to locate him. But until someone can prove to me the contrary, I consider Osama bin Laden a fugitive who is alive.

"Osama bin Laden is a multimillionaire. He was hugely rich before September 11 and he still is today."

Noble also said that the recent attacks in Bali, Yemen and Moscow were messages from terror groups that, "'Your war against terrorism is far from over."'
It seems the President's mission for the next two years is clear.

posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2002 12:50:24 AM

Drugs for Missiles, part II - Courtesy Powerline, this story is from the Strib.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/9/2002 12:14:52 AM

Friday, November 08, 2002

A Man with Better Memory than I - Every once in a blue moon (as in, every four years or so) someone happens along who remembers my stint at KSTP-AM, in my misspent youth (1985-1987), as Don Vogel's producer and the closest thing the Twin Cities had seen to a conservative on the air in those pre-Limbaugh days.

Brian Ward is one of them. He flatters the bejeebers out of my earlier alter-ego in his very entertaining (cooperative, apparently) and distinctly eclectic blog, Fraters Libertas.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 11:45:47 PM

Welcome! - To all of you visiting from Instapundit - thanks for stopping by! Drop me a line.

Pelosi - Ultraliberal from San Francisco replaces Dick Gephardt.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 11:09:22 PM

Oldie but a Goodie - If you think it's The Onion, but it's not...

"Safehouse Beautiful" is a satire of the Twin Cities' Soliah cult. It's been around for a while, and it's still a classic.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 10:17:06 PM

Want Info about Soliah? - This guy seems to have it all.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 10:13:19 PM

More on Keillor - Lordy, I hope this sticks to the old stuffed shirt.

Agendabender comments on the story, especially Keillor's sly hint at Coleman's family situation:
Garrison K is indulging in a rhetorical device that even the lowest gossips disdain as louche. What you have here is a mute item. The more typical and honorable device is the blind item, a morsel of gossip in which the discreditable actions are detailed but the actors remain unnamed though hints are given to their identity. Hints of such specificity that you can usually narrow the suspects down to a hot hundred or so. In the mute item the actor is named but the actions go unspoken. It's a kind of paranormal slander.
That's one point about Keillor's piece that I'd neglected - his assumption that everyone would be in on "the secret" about Coleman's family life. Keillor insinuates that he knows something the rest of us don't.

He doesn't. Norm Coleman's family situation is the worst-kept secret in Minnesota politics. The Colemans would seem to have an unconventional marriage. Mrs. Coleman's acting ambitions take her to California rather a lot. It would seem nothing is hidden or on the sly between the two of them - certainly not in the Clintonian sense of the term. Oh, yeah - and he isn't a predator.

And you don't have to hang around the St. Paul Grill (a tony lounge and restaurant in the St. Paul Hotel, a former haunt of Al Capone's) to know that! Keillor acts as if he's privy to something deep and dark and...unknown
Of course Garrison doesn't mean "everyone" when he says "everyone knows", anymore than he means "knows". He's just doing the turn known as noblesse oblique beloved of mediacrats with delusions of omniscience. Which would be all of them.
True. And with the added wrinkle of doing it badly, and just for the benefit of the out-of-towners, sort of like the village con-man plying his trade as the locals shake their heads and walk past.

The truth is out there. Keillor won't be the one to tell it to you!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 04:27:21 PM

The St. Paul Terrorist - A bad week for St.Paul terrorists.

Kathleen Soliah just copped a plea for the 1975 murder of Myrna Opsahl during a Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery. Note that the Strib's story doesn't actually name the victim until the seventh paragraph -

And the alleged drugs-for-missiles deal which the FBI recently uncovered apparently centers around a St. Paul resident.

Here's the question: I've read my LeCarre and Ludlum. I've read how intelligence and underground organizations work, when they're serious about both accomplishing their missions and staying alive.

And in no case do the operators involved act like this:
Neighbors said they felt sorry for Zahida Ali, but not for her husband. Coleman and her aunt, 27-year-old Beth Jones, frequently butted heads with Ali over Coleman's barking dogs. The women said Ali called police on them several times, but the problems continued until they came home one day in July to find their puppy, Wobbles, hanged in the garage.

Jones and Coleman said they instantly suspected Ali because of words he reportedly said during an earlier argument over the dogs with a man Coleman was dating.

"(Ali) said, 'You don't know who I am, you don't know who you're messing with,' " Coleman recalled. "He was never friendly. He was ice cold."
One of the rules of being a successful alleged spy, agent, guerrilla or anyone who tries, as Mao said, to be a fish in the hostile sea, is to keep a low profile.

If this is the best Al-Quaeda can do, the President might have an easier time delivering a victory than we thought.

I doubt this is the best they can do, though.

posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 04:16:31 PM

Open Letter to Keillor - Garrison Keillor illustrates in this Salon piece why the DFL not only got clobbered last Tuesday, but probably hasn't learned its lesson.

Contempt? He's got it!
To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.
That's right - going to a steakhouse and ordering tuna, to escape a friggin' Lutheran church basement lutefisk social. Elsewhere:
St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party.
I don't know much about Keillor's family situation, but I hear from many former radio colleagues (and people who also hang around the St. Paul Grill) that he's an, er, "interesting" employer. Anyway, nobody who supported Bill Clinton had best throw stones about that issue.

Here's the worst of many parts of this article:
But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.
Ah, Garrison Keillor, dowser of the human soul.

Baby-boomers, at least those who spend their declining years pining for Camelot, caterwaul endlessly about wanting to find "joy" and "heroism" in politics. And yet, how could one look further than Norm Coleman, the most joyfully political man in Minnesota politics today? The man who was...well, not heroic, but certainly above-and-beyond the call in the way he revitalized St. Paul. Not that that wasn't without problems - we're on the hook for the Excel Energy Center, and I really detest subsidizing pro sports. But he did a fabulous job - not that fellow St. Paulite Keillor would admit it.

Beyond that, though - we don't need joy or heroism in the Senate - because that means people are having too much fun doing that job, or that there are crises that must be solved. Do the job. Keep things out of trouble. Then go home. That's all I ask.

And that's why we benighted slobs elected the apparently soulless, joyless bag of skin, Norm Coleman, over the joy-sotted Walter Mondale.

Here's the letter I sent to MPR, which is in the midst of pledge week:

I had planned on pledging money to MPR this year.

After reading Garrison Keillor's smug, unctuous piece in Salon, I changed my mind.

Voting for Coleman was "a low-rent" choice? Coleman was a tuna sandwich to Mondale's "great steak"?

Sorry, Garry. I, and just under half of the rest of your fellow Minnesotans, prefer tuna to warmed-over lutefisk.

And I'll be spending my charity dollar someplace that doesn't actively condescend to me.
They rejected it, of course. Surprise.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 10:23:09 AM

Harbinger of Boom - Austin Bay on the Predator unmanned aircraft attack in Yemen that killed six Al-Quaeda operatives, including the planner of the Cole atrocity - and more importantly, the attacks wider ramifications:
Sophisticated technology, like the Predator, is part of a symmetric power's answer to asymmetric warfare. A common fret among the many uninformed critics of America's counter-terror war is that "asymmetric attacks," like those on 9-11, can't be foiled and, moreover, the perpetrators can't be found. The whine is, "The world's too big."

Al Qaeda's terrorists thought they could hide en masse in Afghanistan. They were wrong. We can debate the success of the battle of Tora Bora, but for the first time in 25 years, Kabul has no curfew. Al Qaeda's latest gambit is to lie low in Earth's alleys and dark corners. All politics is local? American counter-terror warfare can be extraordinarily local. The United States is demonstrating even isolated, tribal locales where everyone's a cousin aren't hermetic. Al Qaeda pledged a global battle without borders, and it's getting one. The Predator attack shows that U.S. counter-terror intelligence has improved. Satellites, UAVs and other cutting-edge technologies extend U.S. military presence in ways bin Laden failed to anticipate.
On another related note - much of this technology was stuff the Democrats opposed lustily when it was in development.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 06:46:32 AM

The Reindeer Armies Go Home - Daniel Henninger on last Tuesday, and how the Blue States of 2000 may have been a fluke, for now
The McAuliffe-Clinton Democrats (if you raise the money, you get the title) now resemble the country-club Republican party of the 1960s and '70s, an outsider party of reflexive obstruction. Exhibit A, displayed in the shadow of the election and the September 11 anniversary, was the Democratic carping over an Iraq resolution. Like Bob Michel's hapless GOP of yesteryear, they ultimately went along, and got no credit from the public for their votes.
Out of touch? I think we're getting that picture.

I don't know that I agree with this next part - the election isn't 72 hours old yet. But if you want to extrapolate a lot of meaning from those 72 hours, this next section seems very appropriate:
Normally in American politics, the professionals get over it, as Nixon did in 1960. But you watch enough of a James Carville spewing invective on TV or read the sort of bilious letters from the left recently described by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ("Dick Cheney is a maggot . . .") and you begin to recall the crackers in the 1950s who used to drive down the highways squeezing off gunshots at "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards.
The Dems' anger - and especially that of Minnesota DFLers - seems to be aimed at Republicans.

All the better - the longer it takes for them to deal with their internal rot, the better.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 06:40:44 AM

Are the Inspections Credible? - Gertz reports UN chief inspector Hanx Blix is gundecking a report that Iraq has nearly 2,000 gallons of Anthrax, and that the inspection may not be credible.
The disclosure that Unmovic has not reported the intelligence to the Security Council follows the recent approval by the United Nations of Iraq's purchase of a specialty chemical that could be used to enhance Iraq's chemical and biological arms.
The sale of a shipment of a fine powder known as colloidal silicon dioxide was approved by the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq despite objections from the U.S. government amid concerns that the chemical could be used for weapons...
The failure to alert the Security Council to the anthrax stockpile has upset some Bush administration officials, who said the information might have helped persuade some members of the council to support tougher U.S. action.
"If Blix won't report this, what will he do when Iraq obstructs weapons inspectors?" one official asked.
Where does this info come from?

According to intelligence officials, reports about Iraq's hidden anthrax were bolstered by a former Iraqi government official who defected two years ago but only recently came forward with new information, U.S. officials said.
The former Iraqi official, who is part of an opposition group of ex-military officers, provided new details about storage sites where Iraq is keeping chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. officials said.
The defector's accounts have been verified by other intelligence, the officials said.
People say Bush will have to deal with Iraq forcefully to survive 2004 after Tuesday's big setup. It looks as if Hussein will give him his opportunity.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 06:30:43 AM

More Diagnosis - Peggy Noonan reinforces what Doug Grow and Nick Coleman have been saying locally; the Democrats are beholden to a base that is not only out of step with America, it's out of step with the Democrat leadership.
The problem the Democrats have with their base is that it isn't liberal in the way the Democratic leadership in general is liberal. It is left-wing, and some parts of it are way left-wing. The last socialists are there, the warriors of race and class; there are environmentalists who want to set loggers on fire, people who think George W. Bush killed Paul Wellstone, activists whose only concern in the world is abortion rights, and people who support capital punishment for only one crime, smoking in public. Soon they will demand the death penalty for smoking in private. (Are there radicals and nuts in the Republican base? Sure. But 20 years of observation tells me there aren't as many and they don't have the same clout. Moreover, Republican candidates are somewhat protected from them. The protection comes from the media, which hate nutty right-wingers more than they dislike Republicans.)

Reporters rarely ask Democratic candidates about the price their base extracts, but it is big. The base determines primary outcomes. The base changes the shape of policy.
If the GOP has an advantage, it's that it's been able to adopt the key elements of the philosophy of its far-right wing, while Bush has been been able to neutralize the PR excesses of the likes of Falwell and Reed.

The Democrats are easily and indelibly linked with Al Sharpton, Phyllis Kahn, Kathleen Soliah, Andy Dawkins, Sandy Pappas...the list goes on.

Is there a way to neutralize them and still remain the Democrat party?

posted by Mitch Berg 11/8/2002 06:19:35 AM

Thursday, November 07, 2002

Big Downside - I've been saying for years - the GOP needs to start learning how to reach out to ethnic minorities. There is no reason that inner city afro-americans (concerned about education), asians (with their small business interests) or hispanics (with their catholic social conservatism and small business interest) should not be GOP. But they're not.

Tuesday's vote in Texas may foreshadow a crisis for the GOP.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/7/2002 02:36:17 PM

Advice - This advice to the national Democratic Party from Dinesh D'Souza seems even more appropriate for the MN DFL.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/7/2002 02:31:51 PM

The Other Coleman - Nick Coleman is not to be confused with Norm. He's a St.Paul Pioneer Press columnist who is spared the title "most obnoxiously leftist columnist in the Twin Cities" only by the existence of the Star/Tribbune's Doug Grow. His stances are generally as stultifyingly simple-minded as they are condescendingly pedantic.

But he has his occasional insights:
A lot of DFLers still call [Norm Coleman] a traitor. But they would be better off asking themselves what might have been done differently.

It does no disservice to either man to note that, in a way, Norm Coleman and Paul Wellstone were fellow spirits. Wellstone will always be revered as a DFL martyr and he was, in truth, beloved by the party when he died. But it wasn't ever thus. Wellstone and Coleman came from different philosophical backgrounds, but they both rejected the stodgy DFL that had calcified by the 1980s (Wellstone used to talk about starting a third party) and they each represented new energy the DFL desperately needed.
Some of the smarter DFLers have noted the party's capacity to feed on its own. For you who are not Minnesotans - the DFL's organization is designed to give special interests an extraordinary amount of power. And these interests - zealots in many cases for causes far enough left to think Wellstone was too conservative - are ruthless in expunging all heresy from the party.

Coleman - Nick, I mean - goes on to nail the result on the head:

Remember those campaign ads that tried to embarrass Coleman by showing him endorsing Wellstone at the 1996 DFL convention? I think they backfired. They were supposed to demonstrate that Norm Coleman was a turncoat. But maybe they also revealed that the DFL had turned its back on one of its most promising leaders.

Today, there is much sadness among Democrats. Two long-in-the-tooth DFLers — Mondale and Moe — are defeated. And two of the party's brightest stars have been lost.

One is dead. The other is senator-elect.
How many promising candidates has the DFL pushed away? Current St.Paul mayor and former state senator Randy Kelly is persona non grata among most St.Paul DFLers. Former mayor candidate, councilman and now county commissioner-elect Jerry Blakey eventually switched to the GOP - the DFL had no room for an afro-american who was prolife,pro-business, and who grew to reject a lot of other DFL sacred cows.

So consider both of the Colemans. You can learn a lot - no matter what party you're in.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/7/2002 09:08:09 AM

Democrat Fatcats - Glenn Reynolds - who, in the blogger world is known as Instapundit - has found both a glaring irony and a wonderful opportunity for Bush and his new majority.

For all the Dems' caterwauling about Republicans and big business, it's worth noting that one of our biggest, most corrupt industries - entertainment - overwhelmingly supports Democrat candidates and causes.

And oy, gevalt, is that industry corrupt:
audits of record companies routinely indicate "errors" that are always in the companies’ favor. (Recording artist Peggy Lee just won a big judgment, and many other artists’ lawsuits are pending). Accounting is byzantine enough to make Enron’s look simple.

Record companies regularly deduct 15 percent off the top of sales as an allowance for "breakage" — a survival from the days of shellac records that now simply serves to reduce artist royalties by that amount. Despite being illegal, payola is rife, keeping interesting artists off the air in favor of the manufactured hitmaker of the week. And now, record companies — who have allied themselves with the just-as-bad motion picture industry – want to make it a felony for you to own a computer that is capable of copying music from a CD to your portable player without paying them money, even though courts have held that such copying is entirely legal.
And this is an opportunity!
But what’s bad judgment and betrayal of principle for Democrats is a political opportunity for Republicans, who can capitalize on that "backlash." Imagine this scenario: the Department of Justice investigates the record and motion picture industries for fraud, where artists are concerned, and price-fixing, where charges to consumers are concerned. (There wouldn’t be anything bogus about doing so: I mentioned the vulnerability of the record industry to racketeering charges a few months ago at an entertainment-law panel discussion that I was moderating, in the hopes of stirring up a hot dispute between lawyers who represent artists and those who represent record companies. But, strikingly, everyone there agreed that the record companies were vulnerable on this ground.)

Meanwhile, Republican legislators denounce these industries for trying to take control of individuals’ computers, denouncing the "spyware" already on Windows Media Player that tracks what you listen to, and promising to outlaw such intrusive technologies in the future. Democrats are left with a choice: side with fatcats, and against consumers and popular artists, or turn on a constituency that has been a major source of campaign funds.

Such an approach would turn the Democrats’ greatest political weapons into vulnerabilities. Are the Republicans smart enough to do that?
Well, this one is. And I'll be on the horn to Coleman's office shortly.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/7/2002 08:59:57 AM

More Downside - Jonah Goldberg on what Bush needs to do:
So now Bush has room for some long passes. He has a Republican House and Senate which know — or should know — that they owe their power to him. This means George Bush has, at best, a year to topple Saddam Hussein and get some serious work done on the home front. For the last year Bush has been MIA on domestic policy, and if he doesn't get some big stuff accomplished, there's every reason to believe the GOP could lose the House, the Senate, and the presidency to Al Gore and the forces of Mordor.
In other words, the administration has to deliver. Fortunately, the administration has been good at that so far.

So what does it mean? Goldberg says:
One irony to keep in mind is that while this election made the government more conservative, it also made the opposition more liberal. Daschle and Gephardt are going to be punished for not attacking Bush on the war and the economy more (because that strategy didn't work), and Democrats like Gore are going to be rewarded (for wanting to fight on those issues). When a party is completely out of power it not only stands on its base, it runs on it. That means a more antiwar and pro-tax Democratic party for the next two years. That can be to Bush's advantage if the Democrats come to be seen as out of the mainstream while the Republicans are seen as the responsible, govern-from-the-middle types.
Exactly. Bush has out-Clintonned Clinton himself, triangulating the Dems into leftie loopdiloop-land. If you're a conservative purist (and I have my moments), that's not all good. If you just don't like liberals running the show - it's a good start.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/7/2002 08:50:49 AM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

Downside - Even if you're a Republican, it's not all good news.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/6/2002 03:53:09 PM

Not Stupid, Stupid - The continuing trope that Bush is an idiot just keeps on going, and going...
posted by Mitch Berg 11/6/2002 02:31:56 PM

It's the Guns? Stupid? - Kathleen Kennedy Townsend lost in Maryland - a huge upset. Some pundits - including Glenn Reynolds - were shocked. Yet a letter to Instapundit puts it nicely (and I hope I can quote it...):
You voiced some wonder that Ehrlich won in MD despite his position on guns (or perhaps despite KKT's position on guns).

I would suggest that during the sniper episode more than a few otherwise liberal or liberal-minded people went to buy a gun and came up against the waiting period and the State Police background checks and the Federal forms answer truthfully on penalty of a felony) and rethought their positions on guns and gun control.(Hey, I'm a law-abiding guy/gal, why can't I have a gun to protect myself, and what if I need one during the waiting period? What if I made a mistake by accident on the forms and get in trouble? Hey, I vote for Connie Morella, therefore I am ok, right?) Maybe some cognitive dissonance set in....

A statistic that came out during the campaign was that thousands of guns were fingerprinted in the last two years (since the law was passed)and not a single crime has been solved on that basis. Meanwhile, the state archivist was found to have declared that MD would not be cooperating with other states' firearms background checks "for lack of resources", calling into question the commitment of the administration to doing something sensible about gun ownership by criminals with the existing laws. Further, I believe there was a brief period of time when even the background checks for Maryland gun purchasers were not done properly. When the sniper's weapon was found to have been brought in from out of state maybe some realized the futility of the exercise.

All of this makes it more than reasonable to assume that what we do about guns is a reasonable question, not an automatic "yes" to more gun laws.

posted by Mitch Berg 11/6/2002 02:28:42 PM

Booyah - Wow. We did it.

Nah. "We", the GOP, didn't do it. We put out a message The voters did it.

Why? The polls a week ago were actually looking just a tad dicey for us - promising in some areas, grim in others.

And yet this is the biggest electoral turnaround since I was in high school.

Andrew Sullivan put it this way, and I agree totally:
This was a vote for Bush, for prosecuting the war on terror, for the tax cut. More important, it was a vote against the hollow negativism, cowardice and mediocrity of the current Democratic Party. They have nothing to say; and that matters. Their predicament is deeper than this result suggests. Since Bush passed his tax cut and since September 11, the Democrats have been cornered.
And this applies even more to the Minnesota DFL. Their entire message is fear - and even when wrapped in Paul Wellstone's firey style, it will was.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/6/2002 02:22:37 PM

Fallout - The Euro press reacts to the "Bush referendum". I liked this, from the far-left French La Liberation:
"The big loser of these elections, apart from the democrats, is none other than Saddam Hussein...An election setback for Bush would have been inevitably interpreted as a rejection by the American people of his threatening rhetoric against 'the axis of evil' whose pivot lies in Baghdad. Bush can thus henceforth claim a strong mandate of popular support for his politics of enforced disarmament of Iraq, and also in his dealing with the U.N."
This might be a good time to sell Hussein stock.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/6/2002 02:00:19 PM

Breakdown - I think we should arrange for VNS to break down every year.

It was the least-obnoxious election in recent memory, just in terms of the coverage. The waiting was actually just a tad refreshing.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/6/2002 01:51:15 PM

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Straight Time - I still haven't voted - but for me, there's no suspense. Just a little amazement.

Because while I'm a thoroughgoing conservative with portfolio (and audition tape), I have never in my life voted a straight party ticket. I have always split my vote to some extent or another - leaving aside the fact that I was a McGovernite Democrat until I was about 20, I've voted for Reformers, Independence Party candidates, Libertarians, a couple of deserving DFLers, and even a North Dakota eccentric that would have been a Green had there been a Green party in 1984.

But this year? I'm voting straight Republican - the first straight ticket in my voting life. The races that matter are just too close. As much as I'd like to see Norm Coleman in the Senate, I have to admit that even if Fritz won, the Senate would still be less liberal than it was with Wellstone in it. But the thought of a Governor Moe or Governor Penny for four years is just too depressing to think about.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/5/2002 04:46:14 PM

James on Fritz - Lileks, as usual, spins the line that captures the idea perfectly - in this case, Mondale
Before he entered the race he was regarded by most Minnesotans as That Old Guy Who Lost That Thing. He had receded into the background, earned the statesman’s halo, and eventually come to represent the state of Minnesota for better or for ill. He was one of our own, on his way to a statewide eulogy. But it turns out he’s willing to hold out his wrists for the strings and twitch to the DNC’s script - if they say Norm Coleman channels Satan, then that’s what he’ll proclaim. I always had a hometown admiration for him as a fellow who knew when to leave the stage and make his way in the real world. But now he strikes me as a man who lies for the sake of power with vigor and enthusiasm - and it’s power he never sought to wield again.

If all these things matter so much to you, Mr. Mondale, where have you been?

posted by Mitch Berg 11/5/2002 04:39:32 PM

Huh? - Did Joe Conason see the same debate I did?

Or that Peggy Noonan did?
posted by Mitch Berg 11/5/2002 04:14:58 PM

Seeing The Elephant - I always like Marc Racicot, former governor of Montana and now RNC chairman. He released this today in response to Terry Macauliffe's continuing cynical shenanigans:
"Because of the Democrats' exhausting inability to address issues of urgency and importance to the American people, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee has attempted to breathe life into an otherwise confusing and scattered agenda through the use of wild and wacky allegations of misconduct. Without a record of accomplishment or leadership, without ideas or vision, without truth or accuracy, Democrats have embraced a desperate Election Day doomsday strategy. They have apparently come to believe that there is nothing left to be done other than to rely upon the politics of fear, fabrication and falsehood."
Finally, an RNC chairman with the cojones to take it downtown.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/5/2002 03:58:49 PM

Getting Personal - A Green party acquaintance of mine forwarded this to me.
From: The Executive Committee Against Uppity Citizens
Subject: Please don't vote.

Dear friend,

On behalf of Shell, Mobil, and Exxon; Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and GE; all
the Enrons, Halliburtons, and Harkens; President Bush, Vice President
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the other CEOs of the Cabinet; and thousands of
us who are working for a better life for the wealthiest Americans, we have
one simple request: Could you please just stay home tomorrow?

See, we have things to do. Nations to invade. Wetlands to destroy. Oil to
drill. Courts to pack. Corporate taxes to cut.

What's frustrating for us is that we're coming up against some pretty stiff
resistance. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure the
Senate, but it looks like we just may lose it. Heck, we may even lose the
House. We don't quite get what it is about our agenda that you people don't
like, but it's clear that this time, you may be upset enough to actually do
something about it.

That's why we're writing this message to you today. Please don't vote. Ask
your friends not to vote. What could the harm be in sitting this round out?
If you could just stay home on Election Day, we can get back to the
important business of running the nation for you, and we won't have to
bother you again.

Thank you,
The Executive Committee Against Uppity Citizens
Remember when I talked about the hatred so many mainstream DFLers feel for Republicans?

This campaign is way too personal.

Go Norm and Tim P(awlenty).
posted by Mitch Berg 11/5/2002 03:55:42 PM

Numbers - Drudge is showing Coleman ahead as of 3PM. Three points.

I'd have to imagine those are metro precincts, but I could very well be wrong.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/5/2002 03:52:52 PM

Monday, November 04, 2002

Gored - Walter Mondale's problem in the debate? While he showed he still had some life in him - quite a bit - he also showed the same misplaced aggression and condescension that cost Algore the debates in 2000.

Peggy Noonan thinks it'll tip the race for Coleman.
I think Mr. Coleman won the election this morning. I think he solidified his rising numbers, and picked up some undecided voters. And I think that considering what has happened in Minnesota the past few weeks that is one amazing story.
I don't want to jinx anything, but Noonan's a pretty sharp cookie.

Second Amendment Voter Guide - David Kopel goes through every race that matters, nationwide.

It's going to be a dicey year, no matter what, for gun-rights advocates.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/4/2002 04:57:46 PM

Sub-par Minds Think Alike - Babs Streisand has bought into Ted Rall's conspiracy theory about the death of Paul Wellstone. It was no accident, says The Star. This, via Andrew Sullivan, who quite aptly entitles his post "Moronic Convergence".

The article goes on to give us a look into the mind of The Star - quoting the NY Post:
The singer, who recently sold her triplex on Central Park West for half of what she originally asked three years ago, gave up looking for another apartment in New York and is sending her furniture out west, where she is building a separate building to house the antique items.

"She's asked five top West Coast designers to bid on a project to incorporate her New York furniture into a farmhouse-like addition on her Malibu estate," said the source.

In a letter to the five candidates bidding for the job, she tells the prospects she won't have time to discuss anything until after the election.

"She then says they better be voting Democratic and goes into a long political missive about reproductive choice, the Supreme Court, the environment and the power of the right wing," adds the source.
Hm. Wonder if they're union contractors? But I digress
Babs' Web site - which hawks everything from soup mugs to golf balls - consists largely of her political statements, with a big section defending her screw-ups.
Which has got to suck up a lot of bandwidth, these days.

Last year, her site urged fans to be more energy-efficient even while she criss-crossed the country on fossil fuel-sucking private jets, roamed the roads in gas-guzzling limos and SUVs, and vacationed on big power boats.

Streisand also urged her fellow Americans to set air conditioners at 78 degrees. One source told Keil that Babs kept the 16 rooms in her unoccupied Central Park West triplex as cold as a meat locker.

And don't forget the time Streisand urged everyone to conserve energy by hanging laundry outside on lines, rather than use electric clothes dryers. But when asked if Streisand herself was using a backyard clothesline, her spokesman said: "She never meant that it necessarily applied to her."
I' m waiting to see how long it takes for some grudge-addled DFLer to post this on the MN Politics mailing list...
posted by Mitch Berg 11/4/2002 01:00:43 PM

Simpsons on Gun Control - I haven't seen the Simpsons in years - and it's one of few shows where I regret saying that.

But last night's show apparently touched on gun control and self-defense, according to Instapundit.

And it was apparently pretty cool!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/4/2002 12:44:43 PM

Barkley - On the one hand, the Barkley appointment is archtypical Ventura grandstanding - after spending days talking about appointing a non-partisan, "typical" Minnesotan, a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he appoints one of the Indy Party's two most consummate insiders.

On the other - wow. This, along with last Tuesday's departure from the Wellstone fiesta, is Ventura at his loose-cannon best.

There are things I'm gonna miss about the big lug.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/4/2002 11:56:55 AM

Impact - Elections have long-term impacts that are often way out of proportion to their near-term ones.

The Grundseth scandal in 1990, for example, affected Minnesota politics in a way far beyond merely whose butt sat in the Governor's chair for 4-8 years. From that scandal arose the election laws that are governing our current Senate rhubarb, as well as Arne Carlson's liberal-friendly redistricting that may have extended DFL hegemony over this state by a decade.

OK - so what about this election?

I have a prediction. Disclaimer: I'm usually wrong, but when I'm right, I really do it up.

OK: Based on what happens in tomorrow's election, I think we may be on the brink of seeing Minnesota's first female governor - and she'll be a conservative Republican.

If Eagan mayorPat Anderson Awada wins the State Auditor slot tomorrow, whether Pawlenty wins or not, she will become in either 2006 or 2010 the state's first major party-endorsed female gubernatorial candidate. She's got some serious momentum, and she could seize a rather high profile if she beats the office temp tomorrow. Given the state's slow creep to the right, I believe she could very well be Minnesota's
first female governor.

What do you think? Write me - it's been a while since I printed any reader feedback!
posted by Mitch Berg 11/4/2002 11:19:21 AM

Rushdie Judgement - Salman Rushdie on the case for invading Iraq, via the CounterRevolutionary blog.
What's more, it's a case that ought to appeal not just to militaristic Bushie-Blairite hawks but also to lily-livered bleeding-heart liberals; a case, moreover, that ought to unite Western public opinion and all those who care about the brutal oppression of an entire Muslim nation.

In this strange, unattractive historical moment, the extremely strong anti-Saddam Hussein argument isn't getting a fraction of the attention it deserves.

This is, of course, the argument based on his 31/2-decade-long assault on the Iraqi people. He has impoverished them, murdered them, gassed and tortured them, sent them off to die by the tens of thousands in futile wars, repressed them, gagged them, bludgeoned them and then murdered them some more.

Saddam Hussein and his ruthless gang of cronies from his home village of Tikrit are homicidal criminals, and their Iraq is a living hell. This obvious truth is no less true because we have been turning a blind eye to it -- and "we" includes, until recently, the government of the United States, an early and committed supporter of the "secular" Hussein against the "fanatical" Islamic religionists of the region. Nor is it less true because it suits the politics of the Muslim world to inveigh against the global bully it believes the United States to be, while it tolerates the all-too-real monsters in its own ranks. Nor is it less true because it's getting buried beneath the loudly made but poorly argued U.S. position, which is that Hussein is a big threat, not so much to his own people but to us.
Damning with faint praise? Perhaps. But it's our damnation with faint praise!

posted by Mitch Berg 11/4/2002 07:38:53 AM

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Grrrr, Part IV - The gall of this man.

It's gotten to the point where, when I see Bill Clinton, I think "Al Sharpton". The same cynical exploitation, the same garrulous grandstanding, the same tenuous relationship with the truth.

After playing his part in the Wellstone Fiesta Ambush, he's now spreading the trope than any Floridian got their vote quashed in 2000.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/3/2002 08:30:41 PM

Temptation - I'm sorely tempted to make this blog a poll-free zone. The insane gyrations of the polls this last few days have to make you wonder - are the voters really as flaky as a bunch of glue-sniffing lemurs, or are the polls perhaps royally screwed up?

Last week, the Star Trib Poll showed Mondale up by 8 - although we noted some problems with that poll earlier in the week. This week, they're in a dead heat.

By the way, I have to wonder about people like this, quoted from the Strib article on the poll (emphasis added by me):
Jeff Foldenaur, 35, a small-business owner in Inver Grove Heights, said that his decision was "a tough call," but that he probably would vote for Mondale.

"All the stuff he's done for us in the past," he said. "It's important to keep a balance in Congress." Foldenaur said he likes Coleman but probably would have voted for Wellstone. "I'm more sure of Mondale," he said. "He's a little more conservative."
How it can be a "tough call" for any small businessman is beyond me. And why do we need a "balance in Congress"? If it's balance we want, shouldn't we have equal numbers of Libertarians, Greens, Zoroastrians, Nazis and Khmer Rouge, just to make it REALLY fair?

And Mondale is "a little more conservative..." than Wellstone in the same sense that a second degree burn is a little less painful than a third-degree burn.

In the meantime, the polls that were showing dead heat in Florida are now showing a lopsided Jeb Bush lead.
posted by Mitch Berg 11/3/2002 08:28:25 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