Friday, September 19, 2003
Clark's Leadership - Several different thoughts on Wesley Clark today.
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This old WaPo article on how he'd have handled the war on terror has been circulating the 'net the last few weeks.
It all seems so simple, the way he puts it:The Kosovo campaign suggests alternatives in waging and winning the struggle against terrorism: greater reliance on diplomacy and law and relatively less on the military alone. Soon after September 11, without surrendering our right of self defense, we should have helped the United Nations create an International Criminal Tribunal on International Terrorism. We could have taken advantage of the outpourings of shock, grief, and sympathy to forge a legal definition of terrorism and obtain the indictment of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban as war criminals charged with crimes against humanity.It should have been a legal exercise?
We'd still be chasing those indictments.Had we done so, I believe we would have had greater legitimacy and won stronger support in the Islamic world.Yes - because the Islamic countries that support terror subscribe so fully to the rule of law, don't they?We could have used the increased legitimacy to raise pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to cut off fully the moral, religious, intellectual, and financial support to terrorism. We could have used such legitimacy to strengthen the international coalition against Saddam Hussein. Or to encourage our European allies and others to condemn more strongly the use of terror against Israel and bring peace to that region. Reliance on a compelling U.N. indictment might have given us the edge in legitimacy throughout much of the Islamic world that no amount of "strategic information" and spin control can provide. On a purely practical level, we might have avoided the embarrassing arguments during the encirclement of Kandahar in early December 2001, when the appointed Afghan leader wanted to offer the Taliban leader amnesty, asking what law he had broken, while the United States insisted that none should be granted. We might have avoided the continuing difficulties of maintaining hundreds of prisoners in a legal no-man's land at Guantanamo Bay, which has undercut U.S. legitimacy in the eyes of much of the world.Clark reminds me of too many managers; relentless focus on process, to the expense of actually accomplishing a goal.
Instead of cutting NATO out, we should have prosecuted the Afghan campaign with NATO, as we did in Kosovo. Of course, it would have been difficult to involve our allies early on, when we ourselves didn't know what we wanted to do, or how to achieve it. The dialogue and discussions would have been vexing. But in the end, we could have kept NATO involved without surrendering to others the design of the campaign. We could have simply phased the operation and turned over what had begun as a U.S.-only effort to a NATO mission, under U.S. leadership.
But what actually got accomplished in Kosovo?
Andrew Sullivan says it best:It's important to remember that under the last administration, almost nothing happened to address the genocide in the Balkans until the genocide had taken place. Why? Because we needed a consensus from all the Europeans to even wipe our collective ass. And the Europeans couldn't agree on anything in the 1990s. Have you noticed greater unanimity since?As to the "Tribunal", Sullivan continues:Maybe Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia could head up the committee. If I were to imagine a parody of what a Rhodes Scholar would come up with in such a moment, I'd be hard pressed to come up with something more perfect. His insistence throughout the piece is on process, process, process. Everything is seen through the prism of NATO's Kosovo campaign, his one claim to military glory. Can you imagine having to get every special ops target in Afghanistan approved by 19 different countries, including those who opposed any action against the Taliban?The Administration's way - coalitions of the willing, rather than static bureaucratic bodies - has its advantages; accountability, decisiveness, flexibility. These things matter in wartime.
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Noah Schachtman in TCS notes that Clark did have a key role in the US military's technical supremacy:General Clark, who directed the Kosovo campaign, had long been a military technology advocate, said retired Colonel Mike Mehaffey, who served under Clark in several capacities. Mehaffey now works at WaveCrest Laboratories, the electric motor company chaired by Clark.I don't know that anyone questions that Clark is a superb military bureaucrat - and I'm using the term Bureaucrat in a neutral, rather than negative, sense.
When Clark worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he helped produce "Joint Vision 2010," the Pentagon's template for information age warfare. At the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, Clark helped set up a series of "battle labs" to test out new technologies, Mehaffey said.
But developing programs - and, more germane to Clark, doctrines and practices - is a fundamentally process-oriented job. Remember - and I'm sure Schachtman knows this - the US military's technological renaissance (or, more accurately, the evolution from a mass draftee force to a professional military buttressed by technology) began in the '80's, when Clark was an obscure staffer and brigade commander. That Clark kept the technology advancing is proof he's a capable administrator - but to call it "Wesley Clark's Army" is stretching it.
To be fair, it's leadership. To be realistic, it's not the same as leading a nation at war.
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So Clark's military record is a matter of debate. But Powerline's Hindrocket addresses the political side of Clark, echoing Medved:I'm neither a four-star general nor a Presidential candidate, but I know how I would have voted on the war. Don't you? Is there any way to interpret Clark's hedge other than, "I want to position myself thirty degrees to the right of Howard Dean, but not unambiguously more conservative than John Kerry"?Stop the presses - a politician crafting a carefully-calibrated message.
Just what the Dems needed. Another weasel.
Yet that's a luxury that isn't allowed the wartime leader. What we have, as re the War on Terror, is a pack of Monday-Morning Quarterbacks; some of them played the game at one point (Clark, Kerry), but none of them have actually had to craft a policy for a nation under attack - except in their position.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/19/2003 09:04:22 AM
Yeah, I know that's two things. That's how bad I hate it. And on this, the thirtieth year since that issue hit the stands, the local media have been obsessing about it; does, indeed, Minnesota still measure up to...whatever Minnesota was thirty years ago? The question is inevitably couched in partisan rhetoric, of course; had Roger Moe won the gubernatorial election and continued the Ventura spending spree, I'm sure we'd not be hearing word one about it.
Pushing the Idea Across the Synapses - Conservatism - and conservative beliefs - aren't for the casual thinker.
Notice that I didn't necessarily say "conservatives are smarter than liberals"; that'd be the type of arrogance that, if you're not careful, will turn you into Al Franken.
But conservative thought doesn't come easily. Many conservative beliefs take serious thought and effort to reall warm up to; the liberals' "Feed everyone, damn the cost" comes more easily than the conservative's tough love. Forcing everyone to be nice to each other through the force of hate crime laws seems more intuitive than allowing the marketplace of ideas to regulate behavior borne of free will in its own good time.
The concealed carry debate is one of those ideas that some people just can't push across the synapses, even if they're in an environment where they're getting the right information (for example, my dinner table). With trivial analysis, the notion of "letting people carry guns "pack heat" in public" seems counterintuitive. Like so many conservative issues, it takes time to move beyond the pat answers.
For a kid cut off in the wasteland of simple pat answers - the typical university - it has to be impossible.
King Banaian from the Scholars sent me this piece last night, from the Saint Cloud State "University Chronicle", by Amanda Deegen. I read the piece, and remember when I was 18, liberal, and the whole world seemed so simple...
...well, let's let Amanda take over here:I was casually strolling through Crossroads Mall a few weeks ago when I noticed the Gap had a sign hanging up stating that they "do not allow guns on their premises." Unbeknownst to me, the state government had passed a law allowing the concealment of weapons in this state.
Unbeknownst?
The issue was debated in seven straight sessions, and was, after the budget crisis, the second-most-covered issue in the legislature last session.
Time to spend less time at the mall, Ms. Deegen, and put in some time in the library.
I digress:Hallelujah! Now I know that I too can, without worry, carry a concealed 9mm pistol through the mall without worry of restraint, except the Gap. Let me hold your pistol while you try on some jeans?
Since Ms. Deegen managed to miss seven years of debate on the issue, I suppose it's a bit much to ask her to know the qualifications to get the permit (over 21, clean criminal record, passed skills course, no record of drug or chemical abuse or violent mental illness).
Which means, Ms. Deegan, that anyone carrying a gun in the Gap as you're trying on jeans is illegal, untrained, and very well may have a criminal record.
With this next bit, I can imagine the ghost of Skip Humphrey, smiling down from heaven, knowing that a liberal angel had gotten its wings with this bit: I thought it was a well-known fact that one shouldn't carry a loaded, concealed weapon with them in public places, especially places like bars and taverns. I can somehow picture the horrible combination of drunk rednecks and firearms producing not-so-pretty results.
Memo to Matt Entenza: Well, you have to feel all warm and fuzzy right now, knowing that your carefully-spun propaganda had the desired effect with at least one young woman. Guns=lowlives, to Entenza, Moe, Skoglund...and Deegen.
Question: If someone with a degree in Literature who can play the Brandenburg Concertos on the cello from memory and can get around in four languages gets a concealed carry permit, is that person automatically a "redneck"? Are they drawn to alchohol, bars, and brawls through some unknown force?
And how many of the drunk rednecks that plague, er, the Crossroads Mall does Amanda Deegen figure have gotten carry permits?
Question: What is Amanda Deegen's major?So I ask the good citizens and students of St. Cloud, what precisely is the point of having a concealed weapon anyway? Is it easier to sneak up on Bambi that way? I can't really see the purpose or necessity of such a law. Even if it's in the name of defense, how can any situation possibly have a more positive outcome when a gun is involved?
Education.
And picture the possible outcomes, Ms. Deegen: You're carrying a bag of new jeans to your car at the Crossroads Mall in Saint Cloud. It's late, cold, and the parking lot is empty. A car - let's say a car with a couple of "drunk rednecks" - pulls up next to you as you walk. A man opens the door, flashes a knife, and says "get in the car or I'll cut you, bitch".
One possible outcome - you get raped. They're bigger, stronger, faster, meaner - there's really nothing you can do about it. Think it doesn't happen?
Outcome #2 - You're armed, and you know what to do. Seem far-fetched? It's not. I know people - gays who've been bashed, women who've been raped - who carry religiously (illegally before, legally now). They'll tell you about "positive outcomes", if you want to hear about them. I really have many more important things to worry about than whether or not the person next to me is packing heat.
Like learning current events, for one.
And developing a perspective on the issue; the "heat packer" you need to worry about doesn't have a permit in the wallet.I can see my dreams of world peace slowly dissolve as I notice the new age militias stockpiling their weapons for the new threat of terrorism. Lord help us if we go into code "yellow," or whatever color represents America in fear. And I am finding that this country is becoming a scary place to live.
Again, Humphrey smiles from the great beyond. Criminals are OK - it's the law-abiding citizen that "scares" Amanda Deegen. In my honest opinion, I think the second Amendment is outdated. Granted, the Constitution was a brilliant document, but I feel it still has its flaws at times. I understand the necessity of arming oneself back in the 18th and 19th century, when crime was less monitored and society was less organized, but in modern society, such weapons of aggression are unnecessary and can only be fatal for the wrong reasons.
Ms. Deegen needs to crack those history books; crime was lower in the 17-1800s. Society was rigidly organized; churches, towns and families exerted intense control over society.
And not only can a law-abiding citizen kill someone for all the right reasons - self-defense - they don't even have to kill anyone at all. Concealed carry deters violent crime. Criminals are less likely to commit violence in concealed-carry states. They tend to switch to non-violent crime.
Like shoplifting jeans from the Gap in St. Cloud.
P.S. - Open Letter to the Liberal Media - We need to talk about how you refer to the act of concealed carry. Note that I'm not trying to get you to change your minds about the issue; you've probably seen all the facts and figures people like me have been sending you for the past eight years.
No, I'd like to talk about your catch-phrases for carrying a pistol.
Here are some that need to go:
Why not use, instead, less anachronistic terms like:
posted by Mitch Berg 9/19/2003 06:03:36 AM
Teaching Moment - I design computer user interfaces for a living. Well, I do when I'm working, anyway. Hopefully soon.
Fraters brought up a great point (and a nice plug) earlier today. Let's talk about the Star/Tribune and Pioneer Press - and, by extension, nearly every other major newspaper site that I'm aware of.
Newspaper websites are designed to look, essentially, like online versions of newspapers. Like newspapers, they present their material - news, features, sports - in descending order of what the editor perceives as the reader's interest in the subject: The section A, above the fold story from the dead-tree edition is the top-center item on the website; the next story comes in below; the lead sports or special interest or politics or biz item comes in below that, depending on the news, or, more accurately, how the editorial staff decides to present the news.
Across the top of the webpage, there are menu links which are analogous to the major sections of the print edition. It makes sense - if you're used to operating in the world of print - which, naturally, is newspapers' only frame of reference. And in most cases, the newspapers' online editions are perfectly capable transliterations to the online world - almost as if the paper is being scanned and plopped on a web page (although the Strib apparently plans to make things even worse - creating, literally, a scan of the daily paper. You get all of the disadvantages of the print newspaper (linear, paginated access to stories, visual searching for pieces of content) and all the problems you get online (slow downloads, exacerbated by the size what has to be a big scanned or Java version of the paper).
In other words - they want to take a bad idea and make it even worse.
There are reasons why paper newspapers are organized the way they are, and have been for most of recent history. The traditional organization has hundreds of years' worth of "user testing", and it generally works fine - for print newspapers. It suits the technology involved - once ink is pressed onto paper, it's there, permanently. You can't reorganize it - although newspapers have certainly thought about it. About ten years ago, some newspapers (including the Strib) thought about, even experimented with, custom-designed newspapers - which would allow a subscriber to essentially get a custom newspaper delivered every morning. Want more metro and sports, less A-section and Variety? Voila, it's yours. Of course, while the logistics of gathering and storing all of that subscriber preference information has become dirt-cheap, the cost of actually producing, printing, assembling and correctly delivering potentially thousands of permutations of the basic newspaper (and the advertising without which it just makes no sense!) were daunting. (And the Star-Tribune seems to think that the way forward is
So how can an online newspaper be better than a print paper and the current incarnation of newspaper websites? What does technology have to offer the newspaper, besides a different layout challenge?
Here's a partial list:
But doing that with an online newspaper is not only relatively simple, it verges on the trivial today. Not only is the technology everywhere, but it's being user-tested constantly. It's the common blog - or rather, the uncommonly sophisticated weblog.
Here's a simplified mockup of a hypothetical newspaper - what we call a "wireframe" in the user-centered design business. It's not too-detailed a layout, but it should give you the basic idea.
Rather than cramming the content into a pseudo-newspaper, it presents stories the same way a Blog does - in reverse order, newest stories at the top, as they're published. If the user wants to see nothing but Sports, he/she clicks on the "Sports" link at the top, or the "Sports" (or "Vikings" or "Wild") icon next to the story head, or in the head's footer. If the user wants to find all references to Norm Coleman, he/she types "Nahm" in the "Search" box at the top, and gets all references to the Senator (that haven't been archived) in reverse chronological order. In other words - the user picks his/her own layout. The newspaper doesn't have to.
Of course, there's more to it than just a page layout.
Needless to say, if you're the editor of a newspaper website, I'd be more than happy to help out...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/19/2003 06:03:05 AM
Handicapping Clark - I'm not of the opinion that Wesley Clark is either:
I also don't think he's going to be a threat for the nomination, much less the Oval Office.
Ben Domench does a fine job of explaining why. Here's a good excerpt:Clark fills a needed niche for the Democrats, but I also believe that he's doomed to lose this race for the nomination, for a couple of reasons:
Also, Clark is no Ike. While he's a relatively moderate, Catholic/Baptist/Jewish southerner, he has no lock on the military:
-Clark is bad on the stump. He's wooden and looks short. He has all the marks of an inexperienced candidate, and he's doomed to make mistakes (the same kind he made as a talking head) when he has to respond to other wannabes.
-Clark has a genuine dislike for domestic policy. He just doesn't care that much about it, and he strikes me as a guy who will hate kowtowing to the activist groups that already love Dean and Gephardt naturally. And in the end, this campaign is not going to be about the war: it's going to be about the economy. On that ground, Dean is strongest (as an outsider with budget balancing experience), and he'll win every time they go toe-to-toe. The last time anyone won an election on foreign policy issues was (arguably) Nixon in 1968 - Reagan had the domestic policy villains of Carter and Mondale, Bush I had Dukakis' Massachusetts plan, Clinton had "the economy stupid," and Bush II had tax and education reform. War or no, recession or no, 2004 is not going to break the trend, and that's bad news for Clark.-Clark has made many, many enemies inside and outside the military. He has no natural base among military personnel, and there are a lot of four star generals who are retired now that will come out of the woodwork once Clark gains steam to criticize him and his skewed view of Iraq.
Finally - and this is from the "Truth Hurts" department - Domenech hoists Clark by the same petard that my own quixotic hope, Condi Rice, is on:-Finally, the Presidency is not an entry-level political job. The last time we elected someone President with a resume devoid of elected politics was Ike - and Bosnia was not Normandy. We don't elect resumes, otherwise Dick Lugar and George Mitchell would've been elected President a long time ago. As much as we on the right like to gab about Condi Rice, the fact is that she wouldn't survive a race for President at this point. She needs to win something else first. Clark is the Dem version of Condi - a very smart person with an atypical and astoundingly good resume. But he'll end up facing the same result as McClellan [Union general George McClellan, who ran as a Democrat against Abraham Lincoln in 1864] in the electoral field.
Read the whole thing.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/19/2003 06:02:58 AM
Bork Bork Bork - First they dump the Euro. Now, Sweden is thinking about following Denmark and Norway, and rolling back at least the worst excesses of socialism.
Blogger Edge of England's Sword has an interesting piece on Sweden's tentative steps away from the command economy and toward a free market:The Swedish think tank Timbro serves as the epicenter of classical-liberal thought in the region. Under the leadership of journalist Mattias Bengtsson and Marxist-turned-libertarian Mauricio Rojas, the institute (which is funded mostly by large Swedish corporations) has pushed for welfare reform, free trade, and more capitalism. "We are working for a long-term shift in the public opinion in favor of free markets, entrepreneurship, private property, and an open society," Bengtsson describes his organization's goals.
What next? Germany swinging to the right?
Oh, yeah - that's happening too!
posted by Mitch Berg 9/19/2003 05:00:36 AM
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Contra Les Americains! - Jay Reding on Fouad Ajami's excellent piece on the roots of French anti-Americanism.
It's not something we'll placate by just giving in to them, or the UN, or anyone.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:00:44 PM
Beating Martin - On a local email politics discussion group, I asked a local liberal "exactly what liberties have you, or anyone, lost due to the Patriot Act".
He responded with Martin Niemöller's famous aphorism:First they came for the Jews
Of course, Niemöller wrote this when citizens had to choose between life and death - a Nazi firing squad or surrender to moral turpitude.
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
And there was no-one left
To speak out for me.
In this context, of course, it's analogous to the activists who overuse the term "Genocide" or "Fascist", invoking them whenever they feel the need to play a moral trump card. The left - especially that part of the left that thought libertarians were a bunch of paranoid Freepers during the nineties, but have become stiff-necked Madisonians since January 2001 - trots out Niemöller whenever they're stumped for a genuine response to that question.
So, as my personal service to the American left, I'd like to give you this - my update of Niemöller:"First they came for the Branch Davidians, and I didn't speak out, because
Circulate it to your liberal, newfound-libertarian friends.
they were nutbars."
"Then, they came to blow up the Jews, and I didn't speak out, because everyone tells me Israel is the REAL terrorist"
"Then they came for the Iraqi and Iranian and Sudanese and Syrian citizen who'd fallen into disfavor with his or her government - and I didn't speak out because hey, we're not the world's policeman, are we?"
"Then they came for the refugees from North Korea, but I didn't speak out, because that'd be siding with the Bush Administration.
"Then they came for the people who had killed 3,000 of my countrymen. And I stood up and said "hey, visualize world peace, maaaan".
You're welcome.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 12:47:26 PM
Writ Large - I have no sources for this. There is no corroborating evidence.
This post is based exclusively on a hunch. And I'm going to run with it.
Remember the last two elections in Minnesota? In '98, the polls showed Norm Coleman neck and neck with Skip Humphrey. Both were fairly confident in writing off Jesse Ventura.
The less said, the better.
More germane; in 2002, the Democrats polling showed them even with Tim Pawlenty in the gubernatorial race, and put Mondale ahead of Norm Coleman, before the Paulapalooza.
We know how that turned out.
The point being, the left was convinced that they were going to win; they lost, in many cases losing big. The gap between perception and reality was yawning.
Do Republicans do this? Maybe - but I don't remember anyone on the right seriously predicting a Dole victory in '96, and most serious conservatives were very worried about George HW Bush in '92 as well. I don't recall an election in my congnizant life where Republicans, on a wide scale, consistently mangled the tea leaves to mislead themselves the way so many on the left do today.
The left is latching onto the faintest scraps of news - a dip in the polls here, a bombing in Iraq there - and stitching it into an ornate scenario that ends with a Democrat victory in '04. Not to say that victory couldn't happen - the President is vulnerable - but none of these candidates are going to pull it off with any of the issues or conditions they find in place today. But it's fourteen months away!
Michael Medved says the stage may be set (as of now, anyway) for a set of historically-sweeping reversals for the left. Medved may be optimistic - it's 14 months away for us, too - but his case is a lot more convincing than a couple of polls and some short-term reverses.
We'll be following this for...oh, the next 14 months.
UPDATE: Yes, I do have some sources for this!
And yeah, anything can happen in 14 months, as we discovered in 1991. But the economy is improving (presumably over Paul Krugman's dead body), which is something George41 didn't have in his corner.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 07:46:02 AM
Quagmire Alert - From Instapundit, a report from a musician currently touring Iraq and Syria, on the state of the country from his perspective.
He says this about Syria:If CNN hasn't gotten it, it appears that Assad in Syria has. The cabinet change was a big thing even though many hoped/expected that Assad would choose a non-Baathist over Otri. Still, they think a few of the new guys will be non-Baathists which would have been unthinkable before.
Hm - sounds suspiciously close to what some of us were citing as a justification for the war - enforcing moderation on terror-mongering states like the Syrians and Iranians.
They sure need it-- the country is a beautiful basket case full of intelligent, kind people who could do something good if given a chance. On a more superficial, but probably important level as well, the kids military uniforms we saw last year are all gone, and a lot of the militarization you used to see in posters and monuments, etc. seems to have been toned down. The Lebanese paper, The Star, attributes this directly albeit grudgingly to the US being right next door.
Read it all.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 07:42:21 AM
Liberal Blogosphere Tour, Part III - As part of my continuing tour of lefty blogs, I visited the Daily Kos.
Kos is better than the typical run of the mill lefty blogger; if nothing else, he hatched the "Political State Report", a very ambitious group blog that strives get at least one blogger from each party, from each state in the union. Naturally, since it's a Kos project, the contributors swing firmly left (I contribute occasionally), but it's a good effort.
But Kos himself continues to illustrate "Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary" (see the top right of this blog) in this post, which quotes a cite from a post by Tom Tomorrow (a mediocre cartoonist whose blog is very popular on the left):The Congressional resolution authorizing Bush's War required the president to certify to Congress that war was necessary. Part of that letter (the full one is at Tom's site):
Remember Berg's Law: Liberals are incapable of addressing more than one of the justifications for war at a given time; in this case, Kos/Tomorrow don't even address one justification entirely. Iraq's involvement with Al Quada is irrelevant; their involvement with terror at large (not to mention WMDs, flouting of UN resolutions, and human rights record) were.
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
In other words, Bush is certifying that Iraq had a role in the 9-11 attacks, thus justifying the subsequent invasion.
Kos goes on to print an email from a reader who defended (apparently reluctantly) the Bush statement. He responded:It should be obvious (to me, especially) that the Bush administration is masterful at crafting language that seems to say one thing while saying another.
When you've already decided what the President is saying - as in, back in November of 2000 - then that's going to happen.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 07:32:09 AM
The Other Kennedy - Minnesota Sixth District Representative Mark Kennedy recently visited Iraq, and writes about it in the PiPress.
Kennedy has lots of interesting observations - on the morale of the troops (not high, but workaday matter-of-fact, as is to be expected), the popularity of the UN among Iraqis (not very) and the meaning of it all: "The most striking comment I heard was from the vice mayor of Mosul. He said that, for America, success in Iraq is a foreign policy issue, but for the radical Islamic fundamentalists, it is life and death. If we succeed, their worldview, like the Taliban's in Afghanistan, will be extinguished. They fear, and we hope, that democracy in Iraq will spread to its neighbors – Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and beyond.
Read it all - it's not very long.
The attacks against aid workers at the U.N. and the Shiite cleric will hopefully reinforce to Iraqis that Iraq and America have a common enemy — those elements in society that do not want Iraq to continue its progress toward a prosperous and democratic future."
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 07:14:25 AM
"Repeal" Watch - The local "Repeal Concealed Carry" movement is losing momentum faster than Britney Spears. And I don't think Madonna's going to give them a big smooch onstage to rev things up for them.
However, in the great North Dakota football tradition, I'm going to pile on; I'm going to make it a regular practice to fact-check some of the local conceal-repeal websites.
Let's take a look at repealconceal.com.
As expected, they covered last week's big "story" - the guy in Anoka that shot his brother's car 11 times. Let's go over what the website says about the story, and stop when we get to an egregious error:Only eight days after getting his permit to carry a concealed handgun,
Well, that didn't take long, did it?
The permit was completely irrelevant to the story. The shooter - Damian Peterson - was on his own property. This sort of shooting happens all the time, in every trailer park, small town, slum and even places like Anoka. The only thing that makes this shooting remarkable - and the only reason it made the news - was that Peterson had a permit.
Had this shooting happened in the parking lot of a restaurant or the Metrodome, or someplace where a law-abiding citizen would not have been carrying a gun four months ago, then this story would have been news - and this blurb would have been at least incrementally more accurate.Damian Peterson got into an argument with his brother, fired 11 rounds into a car, including one while it was fleeing the scene.
Nobody disputes this - including Peterson, who, unlike an actual criminal (the type that regularly carry firearms, permit or not) cooperated with the police.
He had also called the police (remember them? The ones we're supposed to trust to prevent crime?) and tried to get them to keep his drunk brother off the road. He shot the car (he says) to keep his brother from driving, not in some depraved road rage incident. The incident is proof only of Peterson's lack of judgement, not proof that he was completely off his rocker and shooting wildly. In other words - he was wrong, just not in the way that the Repealers wish he were. This occurred in a neighborhood where families have children playing nearby.
If memory serves, the incident happened at night, in an area that was rather isolated from the rest of the neighborhood. There has been no report of children anywhere near the incident.
While either I nor, it seems, repealconceal can confirm or deny the presence of children, if children weren't anywhere nearby, this sort of statement could be fairly categorized as "cheap manipulation". Despite receiving gun safety training, Peterson still believes he should still be legally entitled to carry his weapon in public.
Quoted out of context. The rest of Olson's quote: ""But there are always exceptions, and this gentleman is a moron," he said. "There will be people who will do stupid and illegal things and the law is set up so they lose their permits, which sounds like it worked just fine in this case." The addendum is important - as we shall see shortly.
According to Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now, "no one has ever claimed that permit holders would be perfect." However, for years, Olson's website has led readers to believe that all permit holders are impeccable citizens with statements such as this: "Men and women issued permits are responsible, competent adults. They are the kind of folks who remain stopped at a lonely stoplight at 3am because they are habitually law-abiding."
And then repealconceal shows us nothing - besides this badly out-of-context case - to dispute that.
Read CCRN's website for yourself.
Beyond that, the site contains the usual phalanx of strawmen:Concealed-carry laws have been passed in 34 other states, but Minnesota's flavor of concealed-carry is particularly extreme, especially with respect to businesses.
repealconceal then goes on to show exactly no reasons why our law is "extreme". Our law is thoroughly middle-of-the-road. Someone like repealconceal might consider Alaska or Vermont "extreme" (no permit is required at all), while concealed-carry activists think Michigan's law is extreme (lots of law enforcement discretion, selective and expensive training, etc). The "Our law is extreme" argument has never, to my knowledge, been backed up by a single fact or figure. * Guns are allowed in parks.
But outside of manipulative strawmen like "CHILDREN play in parks, nobody has showed why this is a bad thing. People carry guns in parks all the time; it's just that very few of them have carry permits, and most of them have criminal records.
Let me put this another way; Concealed Carry activists fought hard over the past seven years to get a law that would specifically state where people could not legally carry their permitted firearms; without this specificity - if the law were written with lots of "oopses" built in, waiting to create a new class of inadvertent criminals - the law would be worse than useless. Opponents seem to feel we should have the opposite - a list of places we CAN carry (and that the list should include our basements and that's about it. * Guns are allowed at the State Fairgrounds.
Again - people carry guns in city hall meetings all the time. They happen to be criminals for the most part.
* Guns are allowed in city hall meetings.
And if one of them - the criminals - opened fire, the permittee under Minnesota law would be crazy to return fire under most circumstances. * Non residents can carry concealed guns.
Which is a matter of common sense; if a person is considered law-abiding, sober and sane, and has passed a skills course and background check, why should their permits not be recognized? * Sheriffs may not deny an permit to somebody who has been acquitted of a crime. (This and the above provision mean that someone like O.J. Simpson could come to Minnesota and carry a concealed gun.)
I've pointed this little strawman out to the person who runs repealconceal. He knows it's wrong.
Another strawman. Businesses must post a sign (so people KNOW they're breaking the law) and verbally notify anyone that missed the sign.
* Businesses can not prohibit guns on their private property unless they post signs at each entranceway and verbally notify each customer. An official legislative estimate states that this law will increase the number of people licensed to pack heat on Minnesota streets by 750%, from 12,000 now to 90,000.
Let's assume for a moment that 90,000 documentably law-abiding citizens with permits is a bad thing (and I don't assume this): the fact is, the number of permits issued so far is nowhere near that pace. The figure comes from an "official legislative estimate" that Wes Skoglund's been throwing around all year - but nobody has even once showed us where that figure came from. Saying "it's official!" doesn't mean it's accurate. Even CCW activists admit the number of CCW permits will rise to about 50,000. Needless to say, gun sales are going to increase. Some portion of those guns will be stolen, and get into the hands of criminals.
Read: We need to base policy on the potential actions of deviants?Here's the most important part of this equation: Most Minnesotans feel that this law will make Minnesota a more dangerous place!
So?
Most Alabamans in 1960 "felt" desegregation would make Alabama a more dangerous place. They were misinformed, weren't they?
Now, we get into the "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with skoglund" part: This law circumvented most normal procedures in the legislature. It was tacked on to an unrelated bill.
Baloney.
It went through "normal procedures" every year for seven years. It went through committees for seven years. Every year, it gained votes.
And the writer of this website obviously assumes the reader doesn't know much about legislative process; legislation is "tacked on" to "unrelated bills" all the time - but it's done according to a procedure that ensures clarity and open debate. It didn't go through the normal committee process.
Again, the writers states this as if it's an abnormality. It passed the committees it had to
Supporters did make a point of keeping the bill out of committee in the Senate, where all the relevant committees are controlled by metro DFLers with anti-gun agendas. When the likes of Skoglund and Ellen Anderson bleated "why can't we take this back to committee and talk about it", it was pure spin for public consumption; they knew as well as CCRN that it was a tactic to kill the bill, even though the votes were there to pass the bill, and had been for at least a session before the current one.
In other words, it was the Senate DFLers who tried to jiggle procedure to flout democracy, as they had for the previous seven sessions. This time, CCRN had lined up the votes to beat the DFLers' stonewalling...
...democratically. It didn't have very much public debate.
The bill was debated publicly and exhaustively for seven years.It was opposed by a broad base of organizations (over 300 groups, including churches, three major statewide police associations, city councils, and health and education groups),
Strawman.
The bill was opposed by a large number of groups representing a narrow band of special interests; liberal, anti-gun churches, politically-motivated police chiefs, DFL-dominated city councils, and unnamed "health and education" groups that were largely closely alighned with the DFL. To say that they represent more people than......the NRA, Concealed Carry Reform Now! and the Republican Party of Minnesota...
...is disingenuous to say the least.
The site also cites information from the Brady Factory Campaign that is years out of date, grossly factually-challenged - and very long. We'll deal with that in a separate post.
Opposition to concealed carry is the same now as it was then, and the same as it is for all gun-control legislation; a mile wide, and usually an inch deep. Except for zealots like Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota, most really don't see much impact from guns one way or the other.
The "Repeal" movement is, I suspect, likewise a group of people that is impressed enough with their own zeal (and relative clout at the Capitol) that they feel they're more powerful than they are.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:04:01 AM
Absence of Knowledge - Josh Marshall continues to confirm Berg's Law of Liberal Commentary on Iraq (see upper-right corner of this blog) in last Sunday's edition of his blog. The left continues to believe that the war on terror is really a war on Al Quaeda.
Marshall comments about Vice President Cheney's appearances on the Sunday Morning Pundapaloozas last weekend:MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?
But in the great scheme of things, it's all more or less irrelevant, because the war on terror is not just a war on Al Quaeda, as much as it pains the simple-minded lefties who display their "Bin Laden At Large 652 Days" counters on their Blogspot blogs. Iraq may or may not have been connected with Al Quaeda - but they're connected with Hamas, Hezb'allah, Jamiyat e' Islamiya, and the whole rogues' gallery. Drawing distinctions between one Islamofascist group and another is academically satisfying, intellectually pointillistic, and practically pointless; the intellectual link between kamikaze airliners, bombs on buses and people being fed into plastic shredders is as important as any meetings that may or may not (and most likely did) occur. And, remembering Berg's Law, keep in mind that there are all those other justifications:
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think itÂ’s not surprising that people make that connection.
MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We donÂ’t know.
Marshall continues:Even applying so low a standard as that by which we judge incidents with four-year-olds and cookie jars, Cheney's statement that "we just don't know" whether Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks is a lie.
Y'know what, Joshua Micah Marshall? If you want to define "we don't know the full story, in a context with many other variables (see the list above)" as a "lie", then fair enough. I'll use that standard:Why do 69% of Americans continue to believe that Iraq may have been involved in 9/11? Many reasons. But one of the most important is that their leaders keep lying to them.
OK - and by Marshall's standard, the left is lying as well - by focusing exclusively on one single variable of the Iraq story at a time, without considering the broader context of the story; "The administration is lying about WMDs" the left will say, carefully ignoring the UN resolutions, human rights abuses, and Iraq's public ties with other terror; They'll solemnly yet gleefully intone "they lied about the Al Quaeda Connection", as if Al Quada were the only terrorists that mattered.
Do I think the Adminisration should dispel the public's notion that there's a definite link between Iraq and 9/11? Sure. And, lookie here, they're doing just that.
OK - one problem down; a list of strawmen (see above) yet to go. Your turn.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:02:24 AM
Rock on the Right? - You don't hear much rock and roll that makes you sit up and say "Jeez - that sounds downright Republican".
I was listening to the Franky Perez CD the other day. It took a few listens for this one to hit me:...I won't lie for an honest buck
That's from "Cry Freedom", from his CD "Poor Man's Son", which I highly recommend. It's got some filler, but the high points are high enough to make me forget it. 0
I'm a messenger in a pick-up truck
My old man ran in to hard luck
And passed it down to me...
...I won't stand in your welfare line
What I lack in cash I make up in pride
You get yours and I'll get mine
I got to feed my family
The government takes half our wages
Picket lines and classified pages
You can't count on the man to save us
So we take it to the streets
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:00:54 AM
Clark - All Wrong - David Frum on all - or at least many - of reasons Wesley Clark is not only a bad choice, the but a spectacularly bad one
Democrats think they can inoculate themselves from the charge of being weak on national security by hiring a general to express their weakness for them. It’s an old antiwar fantasy. Back in the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party recruited a former Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to give speeches on the eve of World War II denouncing military preparedness as a capitalist racket. The idea was that by persuading an individual man of valor to propound shameful views , those views would somehow become less shameful. It didn’t work then. I doubt it will work now.
More - much more - to come.
Especially since Wesley Clark is an odd person on whom to hang an argument against the Iraq war.
If any one figure sums up the illusions and errors of the 1990s, it is Clark. Clark was the general who led the U.S. into a purely humanitarian war in Kosovo – at exactly the moment that the Clinton administration was disregarding the gathering threat to the United States from Middle Eastern terrorism. Clark has criticized the supposed and alleged errors of U.S. planning in Iraq – notwithstanding that his campaign in Kosovo was based on an unending series of errors, above all his claim that his air campaigns could destroy Serbian military capabilities without harming the Serbian civilian population.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:00:53 AM
Close. No Cigar - It finally happened - the Stribgot into the blog business.
Sort of.
On the one hand; lots of links to blogs, including the Fraters and Lileks.
On the other hand; the bloggers are pretty universally slanted left (which is fine), and - worst of all - you have to register to leave a comment.
Boy - if the major media ever figure out blogs...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:00:43 AM
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
The Blogosphere's Best and Worst of 9/11+2 - Lots of writing on 9/11. Although nobody asked me, I'm going to sort though my best and worst of 9/11 on the blogosphere. It's the least I can do.
The Best
The Worst
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 06:02:15 PM
More On Albright - The Commissioner of the Northern Alliance, Hugh Hewitt, adds to what I said below about Madeline Albright's contention that Algore would have headed off 9/11:
"Secretary Albright is peddling a book, and so interviews are to be expected. What isn't expected, or routine, is for a former Secretary of State to so stridently attack the sitting President, or to do so with transparent dodges and awe-inspiring rewrites of history. The most eye-opening line is: 'Frankly, if there was a President Gore, we wouldn't be in this particular mess,' but there is much, much more that is dishonorable, and a serious interview might have posed at least one hardball like: 'Do you regret clinking glasses with and bestowing legitimacy upon the murderous tyrant running North Korea even as he duped you and your colleagues?'
Naturally, read the whole thing.
For years Secretary Albright was thought to be a serious participant in the foreign policy community. Now she's Carville with cute pins. Dinner to anyone who finds an interview with James Baker or Lawrence Eagleburger from the fall of 1995 or earlier in which either man launched wholesale, partisan attacks on Clinton."
I think this thing could backfire on the Democrats - in fact, if I have anything to say about it (and I did, below), I certainly will.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 02:26:13 PM
Paging Orwell - Need a break that's both depressing and comic relief?
That's right - the Democratic National Committee has a blog.
More later.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 12:48:20 PM
Gored - As part of my continuing quest to, as Sun Tsu urged, know the "enemy", I've been trying to read more left-wing blogs. By the way, I say "enemy" with a wink and a nudge; I grew up among liberals, I get along with them just fine, and I believe this nation really does need to learn how to debate civilly, without resorting to the sort of trashy name-calling that some of the lunatic fringe on the left and right get into.
That being said - oh, Lordy, there are truly some moonbats out there.
I read the left-blog "Counterspin", written by a fellow named "Hesiod" (and what's with the left-blogger fascination for pretentious pen names? Hesiod. Joshua Micah Marshall. Kos. Atrios Eschaton. My, my. Speaking purely apolitically, give me the right's simple, direct noms de plume - names like Instapundit, Rottweiler, Hindrocket, St. Paul, James and so on. But I digress).
"Hesiod" is under the impression that everything would be soooo much better if only Algore had won. And he bases this on the testimony of...
...Madeline Albrecht. The worst Secretary of State since Warren "Run Away!" Christopher.
"Hesiod" starts:"GOING NUCLEAR: I think it's time to take the gloves off with the Bush administration and the GOP. It's so vitally important that Bush lose next year's election, I think we have to start using the big guns.
And that big gun is...What do I mean? Well...we need more rhetoric like Madeline Albright's assertion that 9/11 wouldn't have happened under a President Gore.
"...rhetoric like...". Good start. Do I know this is true? I think, intuitively, that at the very least a Gore administration would have taken the Al Qaeda problem seriously from the beginning, and wouldn't conducted a ridiculous 'policy review' for 7 months.
That's right - Algore, the consummate wonk, the man of a thousand studies, the most risk-averse politician since Bill Clinton, would have drastically parted from his sugadaddy's foreign policy. You know - the one that let Bin Laden walk not once, but several times.
"Intuitively", "Hesiod" "knows" this about Algore. Why?
No answer. I do think they would have warned airlines, and airports about possible kamikaze hijackings when they had some credible intelligence about it 30 days before 9/11.
That's right. After years of "credible intelligence" about potential attacks (the type of "credible intelligence" that currently has the Threat Level bouncing around like a toddler on caffeine in a Moonwalk), an Algore administration would have magically picked that precise set of "credible intelligence" - from the veritable flood of "credible intelligence" that warns constantly of every sort of potential attack - and picked the right course of action?
Like Algore and Clinton did with the "credible evidence" before the first WTC bombing, the Mogadishu incident, the Khobar Towers bombing, the bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the USS Cole?
All this is leading up to one inescapable conclusion; "Hesiod" - and by extension, much of the moonbat, tinfoil-hat left - thinks that not only is Algore clairvoyant - they apparently believe themselves to have extrasensory powers as well!
"Hesiod"'s "intuition" tells him that, in direct contravention of all evidence in the record about the administration of which Algore was the adjutant executive, Algore would have reached into the big revolving drum of "credible intelligence" and, voila, picked "Al Quaeda, 9/11, in New York, with the Airplanes"!
Indeed, the next paragraph shows that "Hesiod" is taking a hit from the same rhetorical bong that Dionne Warwick bogarted:They may also have better prepared domestic air defenses by deploying more fighter jets for intercept duties around high probability target areas. New York being an obvious one.
"May" have.
Right. And he "May" have "intuitively" figured out who the attackers were going to be, and been waiting at Logan Airport on the morning of 9/11 at the head of his crack squad of terrorbusters.
Hey, "Hesiod" is crediting Algore with near-supernatural powers. Why is my scenario any less credible, or entertaining, than his?Would that have prevented the 9/11 attacks? Maybe not.
So let's get this straight, here: President Algore would have:
The hijackings and the loss of those planes, passengers and crews were probably unavoidable.
But, in my opinion, it probably would have prevented the WTC hits and possibly the Pentagon hits. The pilots would've been less likely to follow the orders of the hijackers, and the jets would have been closer and more able to intercept and down the airliners.
Clairvoyance! It's the answer!In essence, we'd probably be mourning four flight 93 style hijacking events, as opposed to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Negligence? Or lack of superhuman perception?
Basically, you can make a case that Bush's negligence cost at least 2000 people their lives. Possible more.And...since the GOP and the warfloggers have no moral prohibition about exploiting the deaths of those people to unfairly attack Democrats and Bill Clinton, why should we hold back such criticism from Bush...when it actually has some MERIT?
If I were as clairvoyant as "Hesiod", I'd probably know the answer to that.
I'm afraid I'd need to be clairvoyant to know why saying "Clinton let Bin Laden escape, both from the Sudan and from Quatar" is "Unfair", but saying "Bush let 9/11 happen" isn't. Anyone?I say...repeat it loud and often. If nothing else it will drive the warfloggers and the GOP/Bush Fedayeen hacks bananas."
Actually, disposing of the "logic" behind "Hesiod" and Madeline Albrecht is fairly simple. What drives me "bananas" is that there is a large population of moonbats in this country that, like professional wrestling, Enquirer and Psychic Friends, think this sort of buncombe is in any way credible.
My own take on a hypothetical Gore Administration's hypothetical response to terror is no less fanciful, much more honestly sourced - and (if I say so myself) a much better read.
Your mileage may vary.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 10:09:58 AM
Not Blaspheming - Yesterday, I wrote about Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame nominee Patti Smith "Easily the most overrated person in punk music; let's wait a year or two (although I think she did "Because the Night" better than Bruce, to say nothing of the dismal 10,000 Maniacs".
Email correspondent JS from Arizona writes:Patti Smith's version better than Bruce's? In the words of Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers: Don't you blaspheme in here!
A fair point. I plead temporary, job-hunt-related insanity yesterday.
I should have said "Bruce's version is great - one of my five favorite Darkness-era songs, really - but it's pretty much Darkness-era Bruce whichever way you slice it, and there are times I'm just in the mood for Smith's more idiosyncratic take on the song".
Mea gulpa.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 10:00:19 AM
English Majors, Unite! - I love this one,, via Volokh:
"A man is on his first visit to Boston, and he wants to try some of that delicious New England seafood that he'd long heard about. So he gets into a cab, and asks the driver, 'Can you take me to where I can get scrod?' The driver replies, 'I've heard that question a thousand time, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive.'"
Sure, maybe a little inside. But I'm the guy who, when asked by my German professor to conjugate the German word for "to Stay", responded "Blieben, Blob, Gebloben", and have broken up in gales of laughter for the past twenty years every time I recall it.
I need a job.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 08:33:34 AM
Pucker Time - Waiting on two jobs - or technically three. I interviewed for one job - let's call it "Job A" - last week with two separate, distinct sets of qualifications. For one set, my qualifications are stellar. For the other, not so much. We'll see.
The other two have been exercises in patience. One - we'll call it "Job B" - I interviewed for a while ago. Valentines Day, to be exact. I met the manager, who told the recruiter afterwards "This is the guy we need". There was, however, no open requisition - he just wanted to get a head start on interviewing for when the req did finally open. Seven months later, it may be opening soon. Maybe.
The other - let's call it "Job C" - is nearly perfect. It'd involve designing User Interfaces for mass storage, which I did for 2 1/2 years at another local company. I'm very good at it. My contact just needs to convince the Vice President that they need me. I have my fingers crossed.
Significantly, both jobs would be less than a ten minute commute, which will be a relief compared to the commutes to my last several long-term or full-time jobs (35, 20, 23 , 24 and 26 miles, respectively). This is becoming the make-or-break issue. I'm almost willing to trade money for short commute.
Almost, I said.
In the meantime, a contract gig that was supposed to pay my bills for the next month seems to have crashed.
Anyone need leaves raked?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 07:58:29 AM
Enter Clark - The near-left is singing the Alleluiah Chorus - Wesley Clark is going to enter the presidential race today.
His supporters claim his leadership experience as one of his main qualifications.
But while Clark (who came up through the Armor branch, and has commanded tank units from company through division strength) has an impressive record (including a combat tour in Vietnam, like most of his classmates that progressed beyond Lieutenant Colonel in rank), it's got its warts. They might be considered serious warts, for someone who aspires to lead the free world.
This BBC piece might call his leadership into question: "But General Clark's plan was blocked by General Sir Mike Jackson, K-For's British commander.
In fact, his main qualification to leadership, especially in the Kosovo campaign under President Clinton, may have been...
'I'm not going to start the Third World War for you,' he reportedly told General Clark during one heated exchange.
General Jackson tells the BBC: ''We were [looking at] a possibility....of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.'' "
...his proximity to Clinton. David Hackworth notes:"He's a boy from Arkansas who's connected to Clinton from '66 at Oxford. He has gone up the political route. He was Alexander Haig's aide-de-camp; he was a White House fellow. He didn't have the kind of assignments that a real muddy-boots grunt would have, someone like Schwarzkopf. If you had Schwarzkopf running the capaign, you would see a far different campaign, meaning you would hit their forces with overwhelming power, and thump the son-of-a-bitch in the head with a two-by-four on the first hit so he's seeing stars from then on."
In other words, General Clark is another Clinton hack (forgive the pun).
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 07:43:15 AM
Hmmmm - Fraters' post yesterday sparked the "mad scientist" in me.
More on this tomorrow.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 07:23:55 AM
Let Them Eat Back-Issues - Donald Luskin of Keep Them Poor And Stupid, and Silvain Galineau of Chicago Boyz both tear into Paul Krugman's latest smear effort.
Galineau starts by quoting Krugman: " Think it's more than a bit of a reach to claim that the real objectives of conservatives and their tax-cuts are poverty, illness and ignorance? That's nothing compared to what Krugman says in his new book. There he states that the Bush administration is part of the rise of a 'revolutionary power' comparable to rise of 'totalitarian regimes in the 1930's' [page 5]. To the objectives of poverty, illness and injury Krugman adds, 'a country ...possibly -- in which elections are only a formality' [page 8].
Galineau continues:I love the smell of liberal sweat in the morning. Well, not really, but you get my drift. And yes, Krugman does argue that the deliberate objective of conservative tax cuts are poverty, illness and ignorance for the masses. Which makes sense, when you think about it. You can make so much more money when everybody is poor, ignorant and ill; just watch all those businesses getting in line to move to Africa, for instance. Brings a tear of joy to the eye of every self-respecting capitalist. "
The frustrating part is that so many of my liberal friends still think of Krugman as a credible source of information on the economy. He's from Princeton and the Times, dammit!
But his stridency is starting to worry even a few of my friends that support him.
So let's keep paying out the rope. As long has he's pulling...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 06:03:36 AM
Is It Real... - ...or is it ScrappleFace, yet again?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 06:02:59 AM
Art Parrots Life - HBO's new series, "K Street", stars James Carville as "James Carville", Mary Matalin as "Mary Matalin", and a cast of thousands as...themselves.
Says Timothy Noah in Slate:K Street—the new HBO series from producers Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney—is something different, because its star, James Carville, is a real person playing a slightly fictionalized version of himself... In K Street, though, "James Carville" and his wife, Mary Matalin (who recently left the White House, where she was senior adviser to Dick Cheney), have decided to cash in on their bipartisan connections by starting a Washington lobbying firm. It's no small testament to the powerful lure of show biz that Carville and Matalin agreed to pretend on K Street that they're much sleazier than they are in real life.
I don't have HBO. But I'd gladly pay money to see "Survivor: Talking Heads in Siberia".
I've stated elsewhere my worry that K Street will further glamorize Washington's influence-peddling racket and that it will lend too much credence to lobbyists' self-image as wayfarers through a thicket of moral complexity. The inaugural episode did not dispel that anxiety. It focuses on the decision by "Carville" to provide debate prep to presidential candidate "Howard Dean" (who appears as himself). "We're going to need some client shoring-up," a worried "Matalin" says, and dispatches an aide named Maggie Morris to soothe Republican Sens. "Don Nickles" of Oklahoma and "Rick Santorum" of Pennsylvania.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 05:59:54 AM
Paging Richard Daley - From "the Corner", this outrageous quote from Jeffrey "What Plutonium" Smith:
"'Whether [Gen. Clark] runs or not, the views that he, Gen. Zinni and others have recently been expressing must be heeded. All of the men and women who now rest in national cemeteries demand it.'
Ranesh Ponnuru asks in response: All of them agree with Clark, Zinni, and Smith? All of them want a draft? Was there a poll?"
Were they in Florida when they demanded it?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/17/2003 01:04:02 AM
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Intimidation - Christiana Amanpour said that CNN was "too intimidated" by the Administration and by Fox News to do its job.
How, I ask, could CNN's ostensible competitor "intimidate" CNN?
Randal Robinson has the answers"The Top 10 Ways Fox News Intimidated CNN:
I guess given the favorable coverage the Bush Administration has gotten from the likes of CNN, Bill Clinton must have been holding news execs' children hostage, huh?
10. Sent Greta Van Susteren to use a little muscle on Aaron Brown.
9. Fox and Friends urged viewers to egg Paula Zahn's house.
8. Neil Cavuto challenged Lou Dobbs to a Financial News Death Match.
7. Sean Hannity snapped Larry King's suspenders and raised a welt.
6. Brit Hume shaved off Wolf Blitzer's beard and held it hostage.
5. Fox anchors kept referring to CNN as the 'Commie News Network.'
4. Laurie Dhue's makeup tips caused Christiane Amanpour's skin to break out.
3. Geraldo Rivera threatened to nuke CNN's ratings 'back to MSNBC country.'
2. Painted Fox News helicopters black and had them hover over CNN headquarters.
1. Bill O'Reilly's mean smirks sent shivers of fear throughout CNN."
(Via Instapundit)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 05:18:52 PM
Tribute - Jay Reding starts his tribute to Flight 93:
"Just 90 minutes after the terrorists started their attack, they lost their first battle to a group of Americans armed with little else than their courage. This is their story."
Someday, Flight 93 is going to be to this generation what Davy Crockett and the Alamo were to previous Americans.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 05:15:45 PM
Wow - High Praise indeed from the Commissioner, in yesterday's installment of his blog:
A very fine interview of Powerline's John Hindrocket by Israpundit. Among other things, the Israpundit asks why Powerline has moved from triumph to triumph. JH makes nice comments about the many who have praised him and his colleagues, including yours truly, but his humility may obscure a key couple of points. Why has this blog become a must read? First, Powerline is a believer in freedom and a voice for many people and causes needing freedom. Point two: It is smart --recall the fisking delivered the Strib last year on its polling methodology. That is one of many, many examples of deep digging and analysis that accompanies smart but quick observations on the say's events. Finally, Powerline has a sense of humor. A very good sense of humor. All of the Northern Alliance blogs share this trait, which may have something to do with snow.
Well, thanks, Hugh! And I'm certainly available...
Refer to my posting below: Any paper in the Twin Cities with a sentient publisher would throw money at Powerline (and Mitch) to write for them. If circulation and influence mattered, that is.
It's certainly been interesting, being involved with a group like the Northern Alliance; anything where a hobby writer like yours truly gets mentioned in the same paragraph as people like Lileks, Hinderaker, Johnson, Banian et al is sort of like stumbling into my garage in the dark, turning the key, and finding myself at the wheel of a Ferrari.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 08:06:46 AM
Drink the Rich! - Pioneer Press columnist Laura Billings still doesn't get it.
Today's column starts out discussing the "creative" ways school districts and cities have come up with to raise more money:Here in the Recovery Belt, we know that drinking doesn't solve our problems — it only disguises them temporarily.
So far, so good.
Yet, this lesson may be lost on our friends on the coasts, who seem to be turning to liquid refreshments to help them solve their liquidity problems.
It's here, though, that the logic goes badly awry.
For the benfit of Billings' fans, I'll explain things as we go along:In Seattle, where Puget Sound sophisticates have long known that espresso has no "x" in it, voters in today's referendums will decide whether to tax nondrip coffee drinks 10 cents a cup to raise money for early childhood programs and better salaries for day-care providers.
That's called a "tax increase".
As opposed to this:...in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed that Snapple had paid the city $166 million to become the Big Apple's official provider of water, juice and iced tea.
This is called a "donation".
They are very different things. Ms. Billings may or may not know this: backers of Initiative 77 — better known as the "latte tax" — say it could raise between $3 million and $7 million a year for the city's youth and won't impose any undue economic hardship on people who have already elected to pay more than $3 for a caramel mocha whip, along with a quarter or two in the tip jar for the attitude-dripping barrista who takes their order.
"If you can afford a caramel mocha, you can afford to pony up to support the Teachers' Union!".
The caramel mocha and the tip are both voluntary. The citizens of Washington are deciding if they want to put the burden of supporting the teachers' union and their immense public education infrastructure on the backs of people who drink chi chi coffee.
Call it what you want - it's a tax. More accurately, it's people who drink Folgers deciding that people who drink Starbucks should pay for the Folgers' peoples' services. To bastardize Alexander Tytler , ""A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from those who go upmarket from them."
Billings continues:New York City's sweet deal with a juice company might not be as fruity as it sounds, either. Snapple will get exclusive rights to the vending machines in the city's 1,200 public schools, a deal that will eventually extend into city buildings and police stations, adding some 6,000 Snapple machines to the landscape. But at the city's insistence, the company also is creating four new drinks — 100 percent fruit juices — to comply with New York's new ban on soda, candy and other cavity-causers from school vending machines. Some $40 million in Snapple proceeds will go directly into public school coffers.
This, however, is not a tax. This is Privatization. Many people have proposed doing exactly this sort of thing to help stretch the educational tax dollar (or even replace it, in many cases). You'll find many, many people who'll enthusiastically support this sort of thing.
But brace yourself, Laura Billings; most of them are Republicans. And when we propose it, people like Laura Billings are the first to cluck about "commercialism in the classroom". It needs to be, I guess, a politically-correct company like Snapple making the proposal.
It's here that Billings veers into the weeds:"Unfortunately, the creative marketing behind such campaigns can't disguise the lack of political courage that inspires them: the basic unwillingness of many of our public officials to admit out loud, 'Hey, we need more money for schools.''
Most of them do "admit" it out loud. And the voters have told them "No. The education budget in this state nearly doubled in ten years. Now, we want results. We want more reading, and fewer politically-correct mandates. We want kids learning what they need for life, not a bunch of PC multi-culti bathwash. We want to know our tax money isn't going down some institutional rathole, and until we do, taxes are staying firmly put. And you can wave 30-year old Time magazine covers in my face and whine about "the death of Minnesota Nice" until your arms and tongue fall off, but until you can show me that I'm getting my money's worth, especially when I'm not sure I'm going to have a job next week, you and your teachers' union friends can scrimp, just like I am. After all, in a world where tax cuts are offered as the only solution to a sour economy and a shrinking job market (a 'solution' that, incidentally, hasn't worked), ...
Yet.
And when they do, Laura Billings, you'll find another rationalization. I'll count on it. ...few want to risk the political capital it costs to suggest that in such tough times, taxes for the things we claim to value might actually need to go up."
Laura Billings: the "things I value" are my children. Not the schools. Not our tax-supported institutions.
I value the schools that I send them to exactly as I value my car. I like my car; but if I'm getting nickled and dimed to death, I'll sell it to a Democrat and buy another one.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 06:50:19 AM
Just Like the Maltese Falcon - Today's Bleat closes with a bit of detective work, ending with:
So I’m going to call them back tomorrow, and ask them: “I’m curious how you matched a phone number, a specific name, an address, and referenced a particular conversation. Because if the Justice Department did to you what you’ve done to us, your breakfast would be running down your pants leg.”
Can't wait for tomorrow's denouement.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 06:46:56 AM
Newsroom of Whores - The media'd never knuckle under to a tyrant, would it?
Our fourth estate would never dream of taking the path of least resistance - no?
John Burns of the NYTImes says "not so fast"> Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
For Burns, the terror is not merely the academic variety, talked about by the pampered, blowdried likes of most journalists. For Burns, according to his story, it was the real thing:
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.The reason they kept me here is that when the war starts, I could become a hostage.
This form of reportage - taking the easy way - has real-world consequences:
Well, I stayed. On the night of April 1, they came to my room at this hotel and said, "You're under arrest. We've known all along you're a CIA agent. You will now collaborate with us or we will take you to a place from which you will not return." They stole all my equipment. They stole all my money.
Then they left. The hotel had no electrical power at the time. They said, "You stay in your room." I assumed they left somebody outside. I went out into the darkened corridor. There was nobody there, so I slipped into the stairway.
To tell you the truth, I didn't know what to do. As it happened, a friend of mine, an Italian television correspondent, happened to be coming up the stairwell. She asked, "What are you doing?" I replied, "I really don't know. I'm at wit's end." She said, "You come to my room. They won't attack my room." She is a former Italian communist who had not challenged them.I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.
Burns' conclusion?
For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone.There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers.
Read the whole, dire, dismal thing. Please.
(Via Sullivan)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 05:00:41 AM
Strangely Appropriate - Is it real, or is it Scrappleface?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 05:00:11 AM
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - There's a whole new slate of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
So we'll see.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 04:56:09 AM
Cowboys vs. Bureaucrats - Mark Steyn has this superb piece on what the Anna Lindh murder says about Swedish, Euro and American society:
You can blame it on a lack of police, as everyone's doing. But Lindh's killer didn't get away with it because of the people who weren't there but because of the people who were: the bystanders. When I bought my home in New Hampshire, I heard a strange rustling one night, and being new to rural life, asked my police chief the following morning, if it had turned out to be an intruder whether I should have called him at home. ''Well, you could,'' said Al. ''But it would be better if you dealt with him. You're there and I'm not.'' That's the best advice I've ever been given.
Appease them, and they'll go away.
This isn't an argument for guns, though inevitably Sweden has gun control, knife control and everything else. It's more basic than that: It's about the will to be a citizen, not just a suckler of the nanny-state narcotic. In Lee Harris' forthcoming book Civilization And His Enemies, he talks about the threat of societal forgetfulness: ''Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.''
Lindh would have thought that was just American cowboy talk: too raw, too primal to be of relevance in Europe. But I don't think so. On 9/11 the only good news that lousy day was that the fourth plane never got to slice through the White House. That's because a bunch of passengers decided they weren't going to follow FAA regulations and outmoded 1970s hijack procedures but instead rose up against the terrorists. ''C'mon, guys, let's roll!'' said Todd Beamer. They could have used him in that department store."
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 04:55:59 AM
In The Control Room of the Beast - I'm pondering getting involved with a local non-profit communications group. I went to an orientation meeting the other day, and was amazed by the ways in which the group's governing body - which is famously left-of-center - tiptoed around the idea of exerting agenda-based control over the group's output.
Whenever I confront this sort of things, I go to SCSU Scholars; the subject seems to be one of their most reliable threads.
Sure enough - yesterday, King Banaian was talking about SCSU's new speech codes.
The piece is a Brinks truck full of money quotes - read it all. I suppose if you're involved with non-profits, academia or education, this is all head-thumpingly obvious stuff. For me - getting back into it for the first time since my last involvement with a crushingly-liberal non-profit in the early nineties - it's a continuing, er, re-education.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 04:32:44 AM
Toward Genuine Education- This post involves a meeting of very different -yet similar - minds.
It's clear that something needs to be done about education in this country. Perhaps that answer is to privatize it. I agree, in the same sense that I agree we need to abolish the progressive income tax; it's a cool idea, and it'll never happen.
I'm as conservative as the day is long. So it mystifies people, and sometimes confuses them, when I tell them that I generally think the "Shut up, keep your buttin your desk and learn what we tell you to learn, when we tell you to learn it" model of education does at least as much harm as good to children. The more I hear from friends about the Sudbury school model, the more impressed I am. Don't be put off by the hippiedip language on the website; the beauty of the system is that it not only talks with kids about personal responsibility, it makes them live it from day one. The school talks about freedom - but freedom's companion, responsibility, is right there, too, and I think that's one of the greatest lessons any school can teach.
But back to the world I live in, where I'm underemployed and my kids attend the public schools. And like most conservatives, I'm all over the idea of reforming our schools; the schools seem to be more about serving as social service laboratories than places for kids to learn. Yet you don't have to listen to talk radio very long to get depressed about the right's standard notion for reforming schools, as you hear the umpteenth voice demanding "Focus on Readin', Writin' and 'rithmetic", and "Telling those kids to sit their asses down in those seats and pay attention." Inevitably, calls for "accountability" turn into calls for testing.
And testing students against artificial criteria is just about the worst way to tell whether they're learning, even under the best of circumstances. And best circumstances aren't on the radar these days.
Nat Hentoff writes in the Voice In the October 25, 2002, Voice, I wrote about disturbing early signs of educational dysfunction in the new chancellor, Joel Klein. In a September 25 front-page story in The New York Times, Klein had been quoted as saying briskly: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators." That alone was an ominous augury for the future, but then Klein actually said that he had no objections to teachers "teaching to the test. . . . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability and we need to conform our efforts."
In other words, it's not about teaching kids - it's about making the numbers.
No "better" than any stock trader (Think that analogy would horrify half of the American Federation of Teachers?).
Of course, there are two ways to raise an average; increase the higher numbers...and decrease the lower ones: In The New York Times' invaluable series (July 31 and August 1) on the many thousands of public school students being pushed out of school because their test scores would reflect poorly on principals and superintendents, Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina omitted Klein's specific contribution to the growing number of push-outs.
That's right - the New York schools "fired" students that weren't putting up the numbers!
"Diplomas are for closers!"
No, the Glengarry, Glen Ross comparison isn't entirely humorous:Writing in the October 25 Voice ("The High-Stakes Testing Trap"), I noted that Klein was "already making a significant mistake by deciding to give superintendents bonuses of up to $40,000 based on improved test scores in their districts. Before that [with Klein's support] principals have been getting $15,000 bonuses for higher test scores in their schools. But what of the many kids who will still fail the tests?
I think we know the answer to that.
OK, so things are bad in New York.
In the series on New York City push-outs in the Times, Don Freeman, who retired last year as principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, said something Joel Klein should have heard before he assumed he was knowledgeable enough to run the city's school system:
"Ten years ago you could focus on the kids. The pressures were not the same, and you could take some risks. Now you're supposed to focus on the numbers."
Now, finally acknowledging how many students have been told that, in essence, they're too dumb to stay in school, Klein has told principals:
"It is a disservice to students and ourselves . . . to rely on shortcuts or play numbers games in order to make things look better than they really are." He says he is now monitoring that "disservice." With what punishment for the perpetrators?
So how is the system in Minnesota any different? The new standards in Minnesota, which are all about "accountability", measure "accountability" with...
Yep. Tests. And numbers. Numbers which are held over the heads of principals and superintendants whose numbers don't improve.
"Budgets are for closers!"
Of course, rather than the frantic chase for numbers, educations should be about learning to understand the things one needs to survive and thrive in the world around one: how to communicate, function, interact, think critically, reason, know something of the background of the culture that is their home. Neither the left's fascination with sociological tinkering nor the right's fixation with numbers addresses all of those.
In the meantime, Katherine Kersten of the Center for the American Experiment writes an interesting essay about the future of civic education:The heart of civic education is the study of American history and government. In recent decades, however, our schools have fallen woefully short in these areas, as evidenced by the abysmal results from the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, on which more students scored "below basic" in American history than any other subject.
And we're not teaching any of that, presently. In fact, the multiculturalist's assertion - that Western culture is no better than any other culture in the world by any subjective criteria - seems to hold sway at the moment in the schools.
A glance at the textbooks that dominate U.S. history and government classrooms suggests why. Today's standard texts are dry, lacking in detail, monotonous, and politically tendentious. Such books could never inspire students to cherish their heritage of freedom. To foster democratic citizenship, we must fundamentally change the way our schools teach history and government. We must work to tell America's dramatic story in a way that engages young people's imagination, excites their gratitude, and reveals what is at stake in the American experiment.
America's story has two major themes: principles and people. Our challenge is to bring both to life for students. In teaching principles, we should make liberal use of original documents, as well as the stirring rhetoric of the Revolutionary and Civil War eras. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the great speeches of Washington, Patrick Henry, and Lincoln-all eloquently capture the essence of the American creed of liberty and equality, of majority rule and minority rights.
More to come.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 04:31:58 AM
Segway or the Highway - Saw my first Segway the other day, while driving up Fairview Avenue in Highland Park.
I guess I'll think about getting one when I see how they are merging into freeway traffic...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/16/2003 04:30:08 AM
Monday, September 15, 2003
Feds: Recall Nixed, Ari Deep-Sixed, Ahnold Perplixed - The Ninth Circuit has just delayed the recall until March 1:
"A federal appeals court postponed California's Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall election, ruling Monday that the historic vote cannot proceed because some votes would be cast using outmoded punch-card ballot machines."
Lots of peoples' 15 minutes of fame just got extended by six months.
UPDATE: Powerline has the usual high grade analysis:There are several ironies here. The Democrats' most recent ploy has been to disparage the recall as the latest in a series of "undemocratic" efforts by Republicans to overturn the popular will. (How an election can be undemocratic is unclear, but never mind.) It will be interesting to see how they react to something that is truly undemocratic; i.e., a court's order that an election called pursuant to state law not take place.
And isn't the court's rationale - that minorities are more likely to screw up with punch-cards - an odd thing to say to minority voters.
The implications of the court's order are unclear. Is the court telling us that it is unconstitutional for any county in America to use punch card machines? Or just these counties in California? Was every election held over the last 100 years unconstitutional? Or is the Constitutional right to non-punch card voting machines one that just now came into being?
Also, the court's solicitude for the possibility of punch card error is ironic in the context of the massive voter fraud that afflicts American elections. If voters are Constitutionally entitled to elections free of punch card error, are they also entitled to elections that are free of voter fraud? Or, more precisely, if counties are Constitutionally required to use the most up to date technology to reduce the relatively remote chance of machine error, why aren't they also required to use the most up to date technologies to reduce the much greater risk of voter fraud? And if punch cards are unconstitutional, why aren't Motor Voter laws?
SON OF UPDATE: In the quote above, Hindrocket asks "Was every election held over the last 100 years unconstitutional?".
As if on cue, Scrappleface says "9th Circuit Court Reverses Elections Since 1964".
Truth is stranger than satire these days.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 01:17:35 PM
Among the True Believers - The Fraters beat me to yesterday's Pioneer Press cover story, a report from inside an Iraqi guerrilla group, and did a great job commenting on it. Read their piece; it's a good one.
My first question was "why did the "guerrillas" allow an American correspondent (Knight-Ridder's Hannah Allam) to talk with them in the first place?In neither instance did the fighters attempt to prevent the journalists, an accompanying translator or their driver from seeing the route along which they were taken. But during the trip to the camp, the journalists' satellite telephones were confiscated and turned off, out of concern, the intermediary said, that U.S. forces would trace the phones' signals to pinpoint the camp's location.
Of course, it's not the journalist's place to note that the men were fighting on behalf of a regime that behaved vastly worse than "imperialistically" to its own people.
Both cell leaders said they were willing to talk because they didn't want the story of what was going on in Iraq to be told only from the American military's standpoint. Abu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn't consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of "U.S. imperialism."
But in a conflict that seems to be striated on sectarian (Sunni versus Shi'a) and ideological (foreign pan-Arabist and Ismlamofascist, versus native Iraqi) lines, it is her job to give us some background on her interview subjects. Are these typical Iraqis in the street? Sunnis with a vested interest in Ba'athist control? Foreigners?
Allam hints at some answers [with my comments in brackets]:The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers [who were overwhelmingly "reliable" Sunnis and predominantly Ba'athist] and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters [which might tend to imply the guerrillas are Sunni].
Ms. Allam doesn't specify exactly how organized the US intel and military officials thought they were in the first place, of course. What she describes is pretty much "Guerrilla Warfare 101" - small cells that operate in isolation of one another, with knowledge strictly compartmented to avoid losing too many people if one is compromised.
The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam's elite Fedayeen militia force [Foreign zealots] as well as foreigners who slipped across the country's long and porous borders to battle American troops, they said. Abu Abdullah, who directs the camp near Baquba, said he came to Iraq shortly before the United States invaded it last spring.
The anti-American forces appear to be more organized than some U.S. intelligence and military officials thought. Cells receive orders and intelligence from Diyala, which lies within the northern "Sunni Triangle" of danger. According to the fighters, the Diyala leadership oversees about 100 guerrillas, including an all-women's unit, and is backed by private donations as well as Syrian funding, according to the two cell leaders.
It'd appear the war's not going that well for the "guerrillas":His thin frame slumped under the weight of a Kalashnikov and a military-style vest packed with hand grenades and ammunition. His hands shook, and he explained that he was nervous because U.S. raids were growing closer to the Diyala leadership. Raids in recent weeks had resulted in the arrest of one member, he said, and two others had narrowly escaped capture.
Earlier in the piece, the reporter tells us that the interview subject, "Abu", went from being a raw recruit to leader of a 20-person cell within a matter of scant weeks. Unstated: was this because "Abu" is a brilliant guerrilla commander, or because of casualties in the cell? Given the nerves shown above - not inconsistent with someone who's been on the wrong end of a few ambushes - it's worth asking.
Fear of informants restricts recruiting to family members, close neighborhood friends and military buddies, he said.
Here's the big question; is this group of "guerrillas" on the level? If these people are serious resistance fighters, then for what reason are they talking with reporters? Is it a sign of some grossly undisciplined troops? Or that someone up the foodchain from "Abu" and his group is savvy enough to want to get the guerrillas into the international spin market?
Ms. Allam is at least honest enough to answer - she's not sure, and can't really confirm or deny what they are:It is impossible to verify the claims of the two men. But Abu Mohammed described two fatal ambushes of U.S. convoys that matched times, dates and locations of recent incidents recorded in American military accounts. And an explosion nearby lent credibility to Abu Abdullah's claims after he hurriedly broke off an interview, saying his men had been ordered to ambush a U.S. convoy that had moved within range. A security report by international agencies later listed an attack on U.S. troops at about the same time and place as the explosion. One American soldier was reported injured.
The paper disclaimed the story in an afterword:The interviews for this story were conducted in clandestine meetings in Baghdad and at a camp in a rural area north of the city. They provide a chilling insight into a shadowy organization responsible for at least some of the attacks that have killed 70 Americans since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. The story may disturb some readers who will believe that American journalists should not talk with the enemy and that American newspapers should not publish anything they say. But the story provides important information to help the public understand something of the nature of the enemy that U.S. troops are facing.
True - and kudos to Ms. Allam for what must have been quite a piece of reporting work.
But the "...important information ...of the nature of the enemy that U.S. troops are facing" that the Knight-Ridder editor appended is all between the lines. And while it's not Ms. Allam's job to spell this out, it is mine.
Watch for the left-wing blogosphere to latch onto this - especially the parts that could be, by accident or design, labelled "Sympathetic" - as a sign that the liberation of Iraq is a going badly.
I think that's the wrong interpretation, of course. My speculation (and I'm clearly labeling it exactly that): If we extrapolate this report into a cross-section of the Iraqi guerrilla/terrorist movement, they are:
It would also seem (by inferring between the lines) that the "flypaper" school of US strategy - using Iraq as a lure to draw Moslem terrorists from around the world to their eventual destruction - might be working.
Conjecture? Sure. Got another thought on it? Let me know.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 11:00:08 AM
Karaoke in the UK - According to Ananova, via Powerline, these are the favorite Karaoke songs in the UK:
1 Daydream Believer - The Monkees
Now, one thing I direly miss in my life is playing in a band. I played in a zillion bands from age 15 until...oh, I guess last year. Whether playing in a garage or at the First Avenue mainroom, it's always been the place I've been happiest. And since I don't have a band, Karaoke is a reasonable substitute, in the same sense that watching "Basic Instinct" is a reasonable substitute for sex.
2 My Way - Frank Sinatra
3 I will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
4 New York, New York - Frank Sinatra
5 Angels - Robbie Williams
Least favourite:
1 Barbie Girl - Aqua
2 Bat Out Of Hell - Meatloaf
3 My Heart Will Go On - Celine Dion
4 I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston
5 The Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler"
So my own, personal Top Five - the songs I most love to sing at Karaoke night:5. Pretty In Pink - Psychedelic Furs
And the least favorites I hear from other people who've had eight to ten drinks too many? Heh. That's even easier to list:
4. Cleveland Rocks - Ian Hunter
3. I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones
2. Jump Around - House of Pain
and my favorite song to sing at Karaoke night,
1. Born to Run - Bruce (what? You thought it'd be the Frankie Goes to Hollywood version?) 5. Friends In Low Places - Garth Brooks
And yes, I SWEAR I wrote this before I read today's Backfence (courtesy Fraters, who are providing me tons of material today)
4. I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
3. Love Shack - The B-52s (easily the worst new-wave band ever)
2. Two Out of Three Ain't Bad - Meat Loaf
and the worst song other people sing at Karaoke night,
1. American Pie - Don MacLean - all 27 eight minutes of it.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 10:39:40 AM
Ya Sure, You Betcha - If there's one thing I really, really hate, it's the way local media reflexively cite "Minnesota Nice" as an all-purpose description of our culture, and the constant referral to that groll-farbed 1973 Time magazine cover of Wendell Anderson holding that damned fish.
I'm not surprised to find I'm not the only one that feels this way. I am surprised that one other person that does is PiPress stentor Nick Coleman. In 1973, I had never heard of Thai food, the 12 steps, Woodbury, Garrison Keillor or Eurasian milfoil. I had never met a Somali, a Hmong or — even more exotic — a transplanted Californian. In 1973, life was simple and sweet: My father and my grandparents were alive, I still was dating my high school girlfriend (she married another guy in 1974), and I was a cub reporter for The Minneapolis Tribune, getting paid $147.50 a week and driving a Chevy Nova I had purchased off the showroom floor for $2,150. Cash.
And worse than dull, for some:
Ah, yes. Minnesota was pretty decent back then, what I can remember of it. And dull.Life was good in 1973, for the right people. Minorities were still fighting for a place at the banquet table. Other than a reference to Indians living in "the only really shabby area" of Minneapolis, the Time article that gave Minnesota a big head skipped over the grinding poverty on the reservations: the tarpaper shacks, the lack of running water and electricity, of jobs, health care and education. And the bigotry that Indian people faced.
Yeah, Coleman uses this column, like so many others, as a vehicle for bitching about Minnesota's swing to the right. And the sun rose in the East, I'm told, this morning. Still, the column is a great one - a message I wish the rest of the regional media would pay attention to.
I don't remember many Minnesotans complaining back then about the not-so-good life that Indians were experiencing. Today, though, it's increasingly common to hear grumbling from many quarters about the money generated by casino gambling on a few of the more fortunately located reservations in the state, as well as crude griping about the public resources that are spent on immigrants and other new arrivals to Shangri-La.
The column focuses on Minnesota's Native Americans - and with good reason:The gaming revenue [from Minnesota's first Indian gambling establishment] even helped pay for a lawsuit that forced Prior Lake, which had annexed all the land surrounding the Shakopee tribe's small reservation, to permit Indians to vote in municipal elections.
Largely worth a read. Especially if you're one of those people who waves that damned Time magazine in peoples' faces...
Yes, folks: The 8th District of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that our Indian neighbors in Prior Lake had the right to vote. The year was 1985. Aren't we proud?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 07:49:08 AM
The Peace of the Dead - Ian Buruma in the Financial Times, on why the best recruiting tool for modern conservatism may be - modern liberals.
A cash drawer full of money quotes in this rather long piece - but here's the best one; after noting of western critics of the liberation of Iraq...:What is astonishing here is not the naivety, but the off-handed way well-heeled commentators in London, California, or New Delhi, talk about the suffering of the very people they pretend to stand up for. Vidal dismisses it as "not my problem". Tariq Ali calls for more violence. And Arundathi Roy prattles about civil society.
...he adds:More significant, by far, is the backing for Bush received from Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and especially Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner from East Timor. These are men, who, unlike most commentators in London or New York, know what it is like to live under the cosh. They paid the dues of voicing dissent when it was a matter of life and death. Havel and Michnik were subjects of Soviet imperialism. But the case of Ramos-Horta is more interesting, since he opposed a US-backed government, General Suharto's Indonesian regime. East Timor was a cherished cause for Chomsky and others on the left.
This from the leader of a nation that has suffered, proportionately, as much from genocide as any nation on earth.
In an article published just before the Iraq war started, Ramos- Horta recalled the suffering of his people. He wrote: "There is hardly a family in my country that has not lost a loved one. Many families were wiped out during the decades of occupation by Indonesia and the war of resistance against it. Western nations contributed to this tragedy. Some bear a direct responsibility because they helped Indonesia by providing military aid." Thus far, none of our left-wing critics would disagree. The split comes in the conclusion. Ramos-Horta remembers how the western powers "redeemed themselves" by freeing East Timor from its oppressors with armed force. Why, then, should the Iraqis not be liberated too?
Ramos-Horta respects the motives of people who demonstrated against the war, although he wonders why, in all these demonstrations, he never saw "one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurdish people". He knows that "differences of opinion and public debate over issues like war and peace are vital. We enjoy the right to demonstrate and express opinions today - something we didn't have during a 25-year reign of terror - because East Timor is now an independent democracy. Fortunately for all of us, the age of globalisation has meant that citizens have a greater say in almost every major issue. But if the anti-war movement dissuades the US and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead".
Read the whole thing - it's long, but excellent.
(Via Andrew Sullivan)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 07:09:38 AM
36 - With Thursday's override of Governor Bob Holden's veto of Missouri's concealed carry bill, within thirty days Missouri will become the latest "shall issue" state.
The Senate's 23-10 vote to override the veto met the bare minimum required for a two-thirds majority.
As Kim DuToit notes:
The House voted 115-43 Wednesday to override Holden's veto. The Senate's concurrence today means the measure will become law in 30 days without the need for Holden's signature.
Missouri becomes the 45th state to allow concealed guns in some fashion, although nine sharply restrict permits, according to the National Rifle Association.
The fight to legalize concealed weapons has been long and bitter in Missouri. Lawmakers had been rebuffed for years by former Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan when they finally agreed to put the issue to a statewide vote in April 1999. The ballot measure -- the first ever in the nation on the issue -- was rejected by 52 percent of the vote, with strong urban opposition overcoming rural support.Just out of interest, here are some statistics concerning CCW in the United States:
And the train keeps rolling - Wisconsin looks very likely to repeal it's "No Conceal" law, opening the way for a very strong "Shall Issue" proposal very shortly. And Ohio's proposal seems to be proceeding as well.
Sounds to me like The People have spoken -- whether on a popular basis, or on a representative one.
Meantime, Minnesota's left is pulling out whatever stops it can to try to repeal our three month old law. More on these people and websites shortly.
(Via Spoons)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 06:00:07 AM
Locheim! - Our comrades in the Northern Alliance, Powerline, have been declared IsraPundit's Site of the Week.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 05:50:42 AM
testing the post to the future feature on Friday, September 12.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 05:06:08 AM
An Ex_Terrorist - So is Bin Laden alive?
The Chicago Boyz opine: "So, nu? That's it? Osama walking on some rocks, with a voice over? Riiiiight.
I'm continually amazed that anyone still thinks he's alive - and that the left is still trying to ding Bush for not finding a man that hasn't been confirmed seen in nearly two years.
This convinces me Osama's friggin' dead, or so beat to sh*t that they don't want to put him on TV. It would have been nothing to just have him look at the camera and say 'Paul Bremer will drown in fire and his own blood' or some such Islamo-flavored threatening bull pucky. That would absolutely prove he's alive, now, today. But nooooo."
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 04:46:15 AM
Didn't We Get Rid of Him? - Bill Maher has a blog
Granted, you have to beat the bushes among some of the tinfoil-hatted moonbat lefty blogs to find any links to it, but it's out there.
Here's some typical fare:It’s time for new animals to symbolize the democratic and republican parties. Forget donkeys and elephants.
This from a guy who said he really, truly wasn't biased.
Personally, I think democrats should be dogs. Dogs slobber all over you as long as you keep them fed. They’re also great at rolling over, playing dead and begging. Just like democrats.
Cats are supercilious self serving pricks who thank you for feeding them by shitting in your house. Just like a republican.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 04:17:06 AM
Hu-whaaa? - This anti-Bush blog - oh-so-cleverly called "smirkingchimp.com", which is itself a commentary on liberals' alleged intellectual power - has nothing really to recommend it; there's less there there than in most blogs. The site really just recycles anti-Bush pieces from the media, both major and moonbat.
But here's the part at which I shake my head in wonder:Donations needed! Our expenses now approach $1,000 a month.
$1,000 a month? They say recycling is expensive, but I thought that was just for newspapers and bottles.
I'm at a loss to think of how I could spend a grand a month on a blog even if I tried.
Here's an interesting experiment, though; try reading the comments on a conservative blog, and compare them with the general tenor of the comments on a moonbat blog like this. Conservatives are often angry. Liberals are more often direly smug and self-adulatory. Here's a game to play; see how many times commentors on a moonbat site say "Conservatives can't read!"
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 02:10:57 AM
"Ooh, That's an Ugly Bomb" - Pioneer Press media critic Brian "The Press Isn't Liberal!" Lambert exhibits his keen understanding of weapons of mass destruction:
ABC's "bomb" — a "device" so nasty and obvious-looking you'd swear Bullwinkle's nemesis, Boris Badenov, wired the thing together — is a 15-pound chunk of depleted uranium with wiring and assorted mechanisms in a briefcase. While too small for a nuclear bomb, 15 pounds of uranium would be more than sufficient for a dirty bomb.
Aaah.
We need to train the D of HS to look for "nasty" weapons. I guess everyone coming into the US wearing a colostomy bag is in for a tour in Guantanamo.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 02:02:12 AM
Doesn't Add Up - Last week, ABC was whacking its audience over the head with "controversy"; radio promos for its story about its' smuggling of "Depleted Uranium" into the United States from Indonesia, to test Homeland practically crowed about how "controversial" the story was, even before it aired.
Something stuck in my craw (ouch); Depleted Uranium has very low, almost nonexistent, radioactivity. It's not the same as trying to find weapons-grade Uranium with a radiological detection device - depleted uranium is radiologically more similar to lead than weapons-grade material.
Didn't really look into it last week, of course, although ABC thought they had the story dead to rights:The ABCNEWS project involved a shipment to Los Angeles of just under 15 pounds of depleted uranium, a harmless substance that is legal to import into the United States. The uranium, in a steel pipe with a lead lining, was placed in a suitcase for the shipment.
Clayton Cramer has the rebuttal I'd have liked to have written. Read it, of course.
"If they can't detect that, then they can't detect the real thing," explained Tom Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which lent the material to ABCNEWS for the project.
Cochran said the highly enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons, would, with slightly thicker shielding, give off a signature similar to depleted uranium in the screening devices currently being used by homeland security officials at American ports.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/15/2003 12:51:53 AM
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Let's Hear It For The Rodents! - On the N.Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, I'm currently ranked #632 among participating blogs - which puts me in the "Adorable Rodents" category (as compared with the likes of Instapundit (#1) and Lileks (#10), who are considered "Higher Beings"
The rest of the Northern Alliance fares quite well, with Powerline coming in at 303, the SCSU Scholars at 849, and Fraters at 854 out of the roughly 4200 blogs currently ranked.
The ecosystem ranks blogs in terms of incoming links (a total of 58 blogs link to Shot In The Dark, which amazes me).
So thanks for reading!
posted by Mitch Berg 9/14/2003 12:23:51 PM
Irresistable Force, meet Immovable Object - The Star-Tribune "Minnesota Poll" has some "surprising" opinions about the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. The poll was taken right about the time the law passed its third month anniversary.
shows that Minnesotans who fear that the newly liberalized law will make the state a more dangerous place still overwhelmingly outnumber those who think it will be safer,
So after seven years of uninformed demigoguery and chicken-littling by the media dn the likes of Wes Skoglund (DirtbagFL, Minneapolis), and a solid year before any meaningful statistics are available, the percentage of Minnesotans who buy into the hype from the left is dropping, while the number of those who fall in somewhere near the truth is rising. OK, not bad.
But the biggest change in public opinion since a Minnesota Poll in April, before the new law took effect, is an increase in those who foresee no change in overall safety - to more than one-third of the state's adults.
The percentage saying that the new law will make Minnesota safer fell 6 points since April, to 11 percent. The percent saying that the state will be more dangerous stood at 51 percent; in April it was 55 percent. The percentage predicting no effect from the law rose 10 points to 35 percent.
Now, here's a suggestion for the folks behind the Minnesota Poll; do a survey of Minnesotans who actually know that the law doesn't "put a gun in the hand of every gang-banger" (as Skoglund has put it) or "allow every Minnesotan to pack heat" (a favorite of Matt Entenza); poll people who are actually well-informed about the issue, who have actually learned the truth about the law.
See if the numbers aren't pretty much inverted; 51% predicting no change to slight drop in crime, 11% predicting rising crime, the rest predicting some improvement.
Think we'll see that poll any time soon?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/14/2003 08:21:55 AM
The Republican War - Via Sullivan, a fascinating piece by Lawrence Kaplan on why the war on terror seems to be an exclusive Republican effort.
Money quote:Does this mean that all Americans have reverted to pre-September 11 type?
Read it all, naturally.
Not exactly. Fear of terrorism cuts across all demographic sub-groups. Yet a willingness to do something about it, to adjust our priorities, does not. The latest Pew survey, which asked respondents whether the president should focus on the war on terror or on the economy, reveals a puzzling trend.
Evangelical Christians, whites, residents of rural areas, southerners, and self-described conservatives evince more concern about the response to September 11 than do secular Americans, African Americans, residents of cities, non-southerners, or self-described liberals. In fact, the very city dwellers most at risk tend to attach the least importance to the war on terror. If these results seem more suited to a gun-control survey, consider another way of reading the same data. A Newsweek poll in November 2002 found that respondents who cited terrorism as the nation's foremost priority voted Republican by a margin of three-to-one. In a similar vein, the Pew survey finds that Republicans split evenly on the question of the war on terror versus the economy, while only 18% of Democrats profess more concern with terrorism.
It hardly comes as a surprise, but the emergence of a partisan gap on a matter that supposedly transcends politics has come awfully quickly. All the more so, because one of the most popular analogies generated by the September 11 industry likened the new unity of purpose to that which prevailed after Pearl Harbor.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/14/2003 06:59:18 AM
Thin Film of Common Sense - Note to people flogging ultraliberal causes: when even the Strib Editorial Board comes out against you, you should probably reconsider your strategery.
Minnesota's two biggest public employee unions are talking strike again. Their last strike - weeks after 9/11 - was memorialized in an editorial Saturday: "Minnesota's two biggest public employees' unions are not known for possessing keen public-relations instincts.
AFSCME and MAPE employees will be voting on the state's "Final" offer in about ten days. The unions' leaders are apparently leaning toward rejection.
Two years ago, they conducted what was arguably the worst-timed strike in state history. The picket lines went up just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, amid a blizzard of private-sector pink slips and a precipitous drop in economic activity. The work stoppage lasted two weeks, ending in a split-the-differences settlement that just about covered the wages foregone during the strike -- but contributed to layoffs within their ranks, and cost the unions valuable public good will.
So what is the meat of the deal? The Strib takes up the story:Single state employees would still see their monthly premiums fully paid by the state. Family-coverage premiums would rise to $93.22 per month in 2004. Copayments for office visits, other than preventive visits, under the least-costly plan option would rise from $5 to $15.
Even when I was working and had insurance, I didn't get premiums like that. I've been paying copays of at least $15 for years.
Deductibles will rise - again, to the sort of levels that most Minnesotans are very used to.
So most Minnesotans, I think, won't feel all that sympathetic - but the feelings of the Minnesotan on the Street have never mattered to the Strib editorial board before.
So reading something like this:The unions should recognize that their best interests would be served by a negotiated settlement that averts a strike, and avoids the spectacle of union workers refusing benefits many private-sector workers -- not to mention unemployed Minnesotans -- would gladly accept.
...should make any union leader blanche in horror. Even the Strib has jumped ship.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/14/2003 05:45:38 AM
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Weekend - Have a good one. See you Monday with a whole bunch of stuff (much of which, due to the miracle of "Post to the Future", was written yesterday!).
posted by Mitch Berg 9/13/2003 01:51:09 PM
The Unbiased NPR - Instapundit cued me into something I'd almost forgotten about - an interview I heard Thursday night on "The World", with Terry Gross interviewing Ann Garrels, NPR's woman on the street in the Bagh for much of the past year or so.
NZ Bear covers the story like I wished I'd have remembered to do at the time.
Money quote:Gross asked a simple question, Garrels answer to which speaks volumes:
Pathetic isn't the word I'd use. I'd pick "depressing" or "infuriating".
Terry Gross: Could you describe what you consider to be the emotional high point and low point for you during the war --- as a reporter and as a human being being there?
Anne Garrels: I think a curious high point was in the weeks afterwards when I realized that all the months of staying there had really been worth it because Iraqis had so accurately predicted what was going to happen happen; Iraqis knew themselves and made it very clear. So in a perverse kind of way I guess that was a high point. I was astonished at how ill-prepared the Bush administration was for the aftermath from the very beginning. And that continues to this day.
Think about this. Garrels witnessed the fall of one of the more evil regimes of the past century. Even for the most staunch opponent of the war, the end of Saddam's power and the beginning of the Iraqi people's freedom must be recognized as a hugely achievement event for human decency.
But what was Garrels emotional high point? That's right: when she felt reassured that yes, things really are going badly for Iraq -- and the U.S. When her view that America was screwing things up was confirmed.
It is human to want to validate one's own actions; to feel some smug self-justification if events do indeed turn out badly when one has been predicting they would. But in Garrels situation, with all the things she must have seen and experienced, to declare that feeling to be the high point?
It is honorable of Garrels to admit this honestly. But that doesn't make it any less pathetic.
Bear's story includes the entire depressing thing in RealAudio.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/13/2003 09:54:51 AM
Confessions - I'm a pretty regular guy. I live in St. Paul, not Edina. I drive a Saturn, not a Lexus. I shop at Cub, not Whole Foods (although there's no beating the produce at Mississippi Market.
But I don't like much of your regular, American, good-ol' Macrobrew beer. It's not a snob thing; my first exposure to beer was in Europe, and when I came back to the US, the stuff here just didn't taste good.
That's why this poll is so garshfarled irritating: "The campaign by August Schell Brewing Co. to revive Grain Belt Premium beer gets a boost from the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.
Even by the dubious standards of low-end, $5 a case American brew, Grain Belt is "a big gulp of cattle urine."
The venerable brand earned the title of 'Hot Retro Brew' in the 2003 Hot List of the Sept. 12 issue, which features Britney Spears on the cover.
The magazine calls the beer a 'big gulp of authentic Americana.'
Yeah, yeah - when it's hot out and I've been painting or something, a cheapo beer can taste as good as a Summit or a Newcastle. But even then, I'll take a PBR or a Stroh's, maybe even Old Milwaukee, over Grain Belt.
Unless...you know...someone's buying.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/13/2003 07:20:55 AM
When Statists Melt Down- Read this online debate on the Cato website - actually an exchange of emails - between Johan Norberg and Robert Kutner, on the history of capitalism.
Watch Kutner slowly start to lose it. I expect to read about him sitting on a clock tower with a high-powered rifle by the end of next week.
(Via Instapundit)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/13/2003 12:03:35 AM
Friday, September 12, 2003
Yesterday By Day - I liked this episode.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 06:32:28 PM
Rolled - Woo Hoo! Powerline has finally blogrolled Shot In The Dark (along with our friends the Fraters and the Scholars). Thanks, guys!
First Instapundit, then Hewitt, now Powerline...hm. What next?
Ah, yes. Vodkapundit.
My sights are set.
ALSO: Hey, SCSU Scholars - Happy First Blog Birthday on Wednesday! I had no idea until yesterday, and then, well, other things were happening. Congrats!
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 05:09:17 PM
Absence Noted - Elder from Fraters attended the 9/11 memorial last night, and I have to commend his memory; he noted that the bagpipers were the Minnesota Pipes and Drums, remembered that that's my band, and mentioned my absence.
Which is true; I'm not a piper yet. Just a student, honking away on the chanter, learning by far the most complex of my ten instruments.
I'll say this; it's on occasions like 9/11 that the bagpipes come into their own. They combine the best of both worlds; the starkness of the pipes' mournful keening (listen to "Amazing Grace" or "Flower of Scotland" and not feel choked up) catalyzes the emotions; on the other hand, when they switch to more martial music (listen to any the hundreds of jarring, asymmetric-sounding martial airs that have been written for the instrument), it provokes an urge to club the enemy to death with your shoes, grocery bags, whatever is at hand - the pipes are incendiary. Which is why all the Scottish regiments in the British (and Canadian, and Indian and even Pakistani) armies still play them.
Next year.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 03:12:02 PM
Level the Peaks, Fill In The Valleys - Frabjous day, callooh, callay; Blogger has just made all their "Blogger Pro" features available to freebie users like me.
What does this mean? Well, for me, it means that I can start to level out my output. Some days, if I'm feeling a little slow or have nothing in particular to say, I don't blog a whole lot. Other days I make up for it, posting dozens of column-feet of material. I've always wanted a "post-to-the-future" capability, so that I can bank posts for later in the week, or into the next week, so that I have a more constant output. At least, that's what it means in theory.
In practice, of course, it means that I've spent a good chunk of the morning scattering posts all over the next week or so, just to test out Blogger's new
Now, when should I post this? Hmmmmm...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 12:30:38 PM
2003 - Doublespeak Finally Adopted - The Star-Tribune editorial board outdoes itself with today's editoral, begging the question: do they carry the Democrats' water in a big jug, or in individual bottles?:
"Almost immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration began building a case for taking down the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. President Bush gave two principal justifications: Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that were a threat to the United States and the world, and had close links to Al-Qaida -- to which he might pass some of his WMD stores. It was a mantra repeated again and again, to the point that some polls now show 70 percent of the American people believing Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Perhaps, but also irrelevant.
Whether there was a link between Saddam an 9/11 or not, there are unquestionable links between the Hussein regime and terror in general. To draw an artificial, legally-pointillistic distinction between Al Quaeda and any of the tongue-twisting array of other butchers - Hamas, Jamiyat-e-Islami, the PLO, the Islamic Jihad - is the sort of speciousness that explains why the likes of Bill Clinton and David Lillehaug are so popular among DFLers.That is false. There were no links between Iraq and those attacks, and no evidence has surfaced that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The Strib is lying.
If there was "no" evidence, then why was the entire world, including the UN, worried enough about it to pass resolution upon resolution?The inescapable conclusion is that at the time of the U.S.-British attack on Iraq, that country posed no terrorist threat to the United States and no threat of attack with WMD.
I'd like to ask the Strib Editorial Board - what's the threshold for something to be considered a "threat"?
Remember - while building an atomic bomb or Sarin gas for the first time is a Nobel prize-winning effort, after a few dozen or hundred or thousand have been built it becomes more a matter of craftsmanship - having the right skills and equipment - and information. Since the information needed to build a bomb or refine Sarin from pesticide can be burned onto a single compact disk, which would be very difficult to find in an area the size of California (assuming ten low-key militants didn't simply pocket CDs and flee to the four corners of the world), the Strib's point is specious; information and knowledge are themselves threats in this age, when the precursors for WMDs are mere commodities. That was then; this is now: In an address on Sunday evening, President Bush asserted that Iraq is 'the central front' in the war on terrorism. He may well be right. If so, it is a situation of his making. He confronted an Iraq that was no threat and succeeded in converting it into one.
Orwell was 19 years off, but Doublespeak has finally arrived. Hussein was benign; a free people are malignant. When a nation that has a long, bloody history of committing and supporting terror has free reign to develop, buy and distribute any weapons they want, any way they want, it's no problem; when US troops control the place, it fullfills the prophesies of terror. Liberation is terrorism. Freedom is slavery.The Strib continues:But look at the damage created along the way:
Let's assume, for a moment, that France's "goodwill" was completely on the level (and that is to say the least questionable): "Goodwill" doesn't protect you from terror (and France's "goodwill" ended long before Iraq became an issue in the war on terror).
And are we alone? Troops from nearly three dozen nations are with us in Iraq now; moreover, they're from nations that have an interest in preserving freedom; from nations just getting free of totalitarians as bad as Hussein (Poles, Albanians, Czechs, Bulgarians) and from others that remember all-too-keenly the horrors of dictatorship, and have quietly vowed never to forget (Norway, the Netherlands).
Does the Strib editorial board honestly believe that the military effort will be better served by adding troops from Fiji, Ireland and the Philippines?
Worse - does the Strib pay any attention to history at all? The UN's efforts at military intervention have not only almost uniformly been disasters, the very names of the interventions have come into the language as synonyms for bungling, bureaucratic inertia, lethally inept micromanagment; Congo. Brazzaville. Biafra. The Golan Heights and Lebanon. Somalia. Srebrenice. The Congo again. Rwanda.
The Strib continues:U.S. assessments of the state of the infrastructure in Iraq were inexcusably worthless,
...for the simple reason that we've only liberated one totalitarian dictatorship before.
Under dictatorships, there is none of what we Americans call "process". The people who run the infrastructure tend to accumulate the knowledge of how to do it, and keep it amongst themselves as institutional knowledge, almost like ancient tribal bards who kept collective history in the form of songs and stories, long before there was such a thing as written communication. The Germans were at least fanatical keepers of records; the Iraqis were apparently not. In addition, while the US allowed ex-Nazis who were not associated with war crimes to man key infrastructural posts after the war, we've barred Baathists from those same positions - justifiably, but in so doing we've also barred their specialized knowledge of how things run from the process as well. It'd be as if KSTP fired Paul Brand from Auto Talk; the Rookie could probably host the show, but it'll take years to develop the expertise about cars that'd make the transition complete.
The Strib goes on: The belief that American soldiers would be joyfully greeted as liberators has turned into a grim reality of being greeted by rocket propelled grenades and homemade bombs.
The belief that they woudn't be greeted as liberators in the vast majority of the country was a more malignant fantasy still. And the notion that they'd be greeted as they were after World War II, with rapturous crowds in the villages, was a simple-minded bit of spin on the left's part anyway; after the UN-brokered betrayal of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs in 1991, Iraqis were justifiably cautious; as the Zogby Poll from Tuesday shows, they also appreciate being liberated. A corollary notion behind the invasion of Iraq is that the United States would awe the Arab world with its military strength, contributing positively to chances of a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, and setting off a wave of reform in the oppressive Arab world. But it hasn't worked out that way. Instead, the United States has given the world a fascinating glimpse at the limits of American power.
Really?
I guess that explains all the terrorist attacks we've had in the past six months, right?Belatedly, and half-heartedly, the United States has gone back to the United Nations -- but not hat in hand. The Bush administration can't seem to set aside its arrogant approach to the world body. As someone said, the Bush administration is now in the position of asking for rescue but insisting it will dictate the terms.
The Strib's editorial board has it backwards.
The UN demanded its piece of the liberation, even though it was not only unprepared to do the work involved in achieving it (even assuming that the bulk of the UN wanted to pursue any but another pusillanimous set of wrist-slapping resolutions), but actively impeded it.
Bush is now telling the UN to put up or shut up. Arrogant? Perhaps. Justifiable? Damn right.If anyone thinks that litany is recounted with glee, they're mistaken. The United States can't afford to lose in Iraq. It must stay there and finish the difficult job it has begun.
True, and we will, even despite the best efforts of people like the Strib editorial board. And it must mend its relationship with the world community.
The Strib still doesn't get it. The only thing that mends relationships, when you're the big dog on the block, is success. Being seen as the only (rational) game in town will buy us a lot more international approval than decades of kowtowing to the Distinguished Representatives from Bumfungle, Buttlustistan and the Hellspawn Islands.Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is now beating the abusive drum that criticism of the president is unpatriotic and undercuts the American effort. He couldn't be more mistaken. Americans owe it to their nation, and to the men and women who serve in its military, to ask the difficult questions.
Commensurately, we owe it to our nation to ask you, the news media, equally difficult answers, and questions of our own.
To wit: The most important questions are these: Wasn't there a better way? And what can we learn from the past two years that will help make Sept. 11, 2004, an anniversary of both remembrance and relief?
OK, Strib; you've asked your tough question. Now, I'm going to ask mine.
What is the "better way" you'd like to see? Spell it out, in concrete detail - and I mean, every bit as concrete as the reality we currently face. Don't give it to us in terms of Hallmark-y platitudes about international goodwill; spell out the specifics in terms of efforts and strategies, of this "better way", and then spell out what you believe are the most likely consequences of your approach, especially in terms of eradicating terror.
And do it now.
If you work at the Strib - and according to my hit log, there are at least three of you, sometimes more - please pass this up to your editorial board. I hereby challenge them to debate this issue, in any forum of their choosing.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 10:54:23 AM
RIP Johnny Cash - Johnny Cash passed away, surviving the his wife, the late June Carter Cash by four months.
Cash, Zevon, Strummer, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Stuart Adamson, Ben Orr, George Harrison - it's truly been a dismal couple of years for music fans.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 09:50:26 AM
The Latest - The Minnesota Poll has tended to be as accurate as Baghdad Bob, only not as entertaining.
You remember the Minnesota Polls before the 2002 midterm elections? The Democrats and the Strib certainly hope you don't.
The Strib is at it again, saying the Economy takes its toll on Bush: "A new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found Bush's job approval rating stands at 49 percent, down from 63 percent in April, when Minnesotans, along with the rest of the nation, rallied behind a president leading a nation in wartime. Bush's approval rating now is 1 point below the rating he received in February, but far lower than his high of 87 percent after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Look for the Democrats to latch onto this like it's the last bag of Cheetos at a Dave Matthews concert.
As it has been throughout his presidency, Bush's approval rating is lower in Minnesota than it is nationwide. An ABC News poll this week found that 56 percent of Americans approved of the way he is handling the job of president.As the presidential campaign gathers momentum, the new poll numbers potentially pose a peril for Bush. Support for his performance is relatively weaker among women, and Bush appears to have alienated a substantial number of the conservatives who form the core of his support.
Bush has been alienating conservatives since his name was first broached as a potential candidate for the presidency!
The poll - and the Strib - get two things wrong here:'This is the same trend you're seeing in most places around the country,' said Larry Jacobs, a University of Minnesota professor who specializes in public opinion polling.
Unstated by Jacobs; Bush's biggest problems at the moment is that He's been on vacation. When he's in Crawford, the Democrats have the media all to themselves. His numbers always take a hit. Always.
'This is just a snapshot, and it may work out for him 14 months from now, but at this point, he's got a problem,' Jacobs said. 'He's in dangerous territory, because 50 percent approval is where the alarms go off.'"
Watch for the spin - and then put it in perspective.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 09:39:57 AM
Coulda Been - We came so close...
GORE'S TERROR POLICY "THIS CLOSE"
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters) - President Gore says passage of his landmark anti-terror legislation is "this close", after a frantic week of negotiations with a Congress he's simply not been able to conquer since the 9/11 attacks.
"After two years of intense, but cooperative strife, we are nearly finished in finally providing this nation the anti-terror legislation we need for the children, to prevent any further tragedies like the one that happened two years ago yesterday", the President said to a gathering of abortion fundamentalists in San Francisco.
Gore used the speech as an opportunity to castigate not only the Republicans, but members of his own party as well. "This strife has been carried out for the children with an eye toward leveraging America's rich social diversity", Gore said, "although some Senators have used this as an opportunity for grandstanding for risky schemes".
The legislation - which would create an interagency task force to investigate and prosecute the 9/11 crimes, would grant sweeping new powers, not only to federal law enforcement, but elsewhere in government.
The task force, consisting of FBI, CIA and representatives from many state and local police departments and social welfare agencies, would be granted wide-sweeping powers to serve subpoenas and summonses worldwide. In addition, it would provide so-called "Terrorguard" grants to state social service, transportation and welfare agencies to help upgrade services. Critics have noted that the upgrades don't necessarily need to have anything to do with terror.
The opposition to the bill has come from both sides of the aisle. Rep. Maxine Waters introduced a controversial amendment that would have declared America a terrorist state, "since America is designed to terrorize minorities". The amendment would have required the anti-terror task force to first investigate allegations of terrorism on the part of the US and several state governments "before wasting time overseas", according to Waters. The amendment delayed the passage of the bill during the crucial mid-term elections last year.
Senator Hillary Clinton held up, and nearly killed, the bill last spring with her controversial-but-effective "It Takes a Terror-Free Village" effort. The amendments, which declare hunger, large class sizes, right-wing talk radio and restrictions on late-term abortion "domestic terror", was finally allowed into the bill as a compromise last month, and accounts for 55% of the bill's $300 billion price tag.
More troubling in the run-up to the 2004 election is Republican criticism of the Administration's rejection of military force against the terrorists. "Republican criticisms of my military record are pure partisan politics", Gore said, noting that his February, 2002 cruise missile strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan, Somalia and the Sudan may have killed as many as a dozen terrorists "who may have been linked to the attacks".
"Above all, critics who say I'm 'weak on terror' only do so by ignoring for the children the raid in Islamabad", Gore said, referring to the January, 2003 raid by FBI, CIA, BATF, NRO, AFL-CIO, FWPS, NEA and NARAL agents on gathering of bankers that had had dealings with terror organizations that claimed four bank employees and 16 US agents.
Secretary of Defense James Carville responded to the critics more forcefully. "That's a dog that don't hunt", he said to a group of evangelical Unitarians. "Down in Louisiana, we'd take them critics out behind the barn and make 'em squeal like a pig". He added "Tarnation, we increase the defense budget, and the Republicans are killing children anyway"
House minority leader Dennis Hastert noted that the bill would not increase funding for military combat units, but rather triple funding for diversity training and add $300 million for the Hillary Clinton-sponsored "War against Terror against Military Women and Children" initiative, which calls for a creation of a separate uniformed branch of armed services.
Gore, hampered by his very slim electoral margin of victory in the hotly-contested 2000 election, has had a hard time, critics say.
"Taking two years to pass a response to 9/11? That doesn't bode well for the Democrats in '04", says commentator Rush Limbaugh, currently being held without bail at the US Maximum Security Prison in Marion, Illinois, after the sweep of conservative talk radio hosts under the "Vast Conspiracy Act" passed in October of 2001.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/12/2003 07:11:36 AM
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
OK... - ...now, I'm really taking off to get ready for the interview.
Prayers and other karmic infusions gratefully accepted as always.
Good News, Bad News - If I read correctly, we had both in the St. Paul School Board primary last night.
The bad news? Tom Swift - Occasional "Shot" contrib and firebrand Republican who's been a much-needed gadfly to the School Board's relentlessly liberal mien - didn't make it into the top eight.
The good news? Either did Uber-Green Richard Broderick, who we've written about several times in the past. We have three years before we have to worry about someone using the schools to indoctrinate little Greens with the help of Friends for a Non-Violent World again.
UPDATE: Ooops. I read the chart wrong. Broderick made the cut, although he was second from the bottom.
Republican Georgia Dietz, however, made the cut.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 10:37:30 AM
Tick Tock - Ripped from the headlines:
"The government of Iran has begun preparations to resist a military invasion by the United States scheduled for the year 2015. The attack will come after 12 years of attempts to get Iran to cooperate with United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding its nuclear program...
Sometimes it's hard to know where Scrappleface ends and real life begins.
...A high-ranking Iranian official said his nation's war plans are based on a study of the history of U.S. and U.N. policy toward Iraq.
'We know the clock is ticking,' said the unnamed source. 'We only have so much time before the international community takes action against us.'"
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 10:35:49 AM
Vital Music News - Elder from Fraters Libertas worries about my post ribbing JB Doubtless' taste in music:
"Does this mean that my dreams for a Northern Alliance band (JB on geetar, Lileks on keyboards, Atomizer on triangle, and Mitch on everything else) are dead?
Of course not. What would the Beatles have been without the dissonance between Lennon and McCartney? Would The Who have been better had Daltrey and Townsend not come to blows constantly? Where would Sinatra have ended up without the Gallo/Gambino feud? Where would the E Street Band ended up if Springsteen had gotten along with Vinnie "Mad Dog" Lopez, instead of firing him in 1974?
No, the Northern Alliance Band (JB on guitar, Lileks on keys, Atomizer or "A-Dog" on triangle, and me on guitar, bass, drums, mandolin or harmonica or whatever needed) will surivive a little cognitive dissonance.
On some matters, anyway:I wonder if it's too late to return my 'Colonel' outfit.
There, we could have problems.
So it's "Gabba Gabba Hey", and let's conquer the day!
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 10:06:49 AM
Wednesday - Big interview at 1PM. I may also hear about another job I interviewed for a while ago.
On Valentine's Day. No, seriously - the requisition may finally open today.
And they say American business isn't cautious enough.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 07:52:24 AM
No Doubt - To balance this morning's screed about Fraters' JB Doubtless' attack on Zevon unfair, let me join with Doubtless in urging you to tune in Medved today, as he tangles with Al Franken.
I may roll tape.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 07:51:12 AM
Battle for the Heart - Powerline refers us to a fascinating article by Karl Zinmeister, whom they describe thus:
the editor of the American Enterprise magazine and an enterprising journalist. He served as an embedded reporter with the 82nd Airborne; his new book about the experience, Boots on the Ground, has just been published.
The piece has fascinating insights on the Iraqi view of their liberation.
If you believe the left's cant, the war for the Iraqi heart and mind is already lost (as it was, they said, long before the first tank rolled); ipse yesterday's NYTimes editorial:The United States has no clear exit strategy from Iraq or immediate hope of a turnaround in a violent, complicated and expensive commitment. The hard realities of postwar Iraq have convinced Mr. Bush that he needs the United Nations support he snubbed before the invasion. But even there he is avoiding the hard choice of acknowledging his error and ceding real authority to other nations. Diplomats are wondering, with good reason, whether Mr. Bush is embarking on a new era of international cooperation or simply giving them permission to clean up his mess
So Zinmeister (whose book will have a spot cleared for it at the top of my reading list this fall) and his article come at a perfect time.
He starts with the observation:We all know that journalists have a bad-news bias: 10,000 schools being rehabbed isn't news; one school blowing up is a weeklong feeding frenzy. And some of us who have spent time recently in Iraq--I was an embedded reporter during the war--have been puzzled by the postwar news and media imagery, which is much more negative than what many individuals involved in reconstructing Iraq have been telling us. Well, finally we have some evidence of where the truth may lie.
...and then moves on to the evidence:The results show that the Iraqi public is more sensible, stable and moderate than commonly portrayed, and that Iraq is not so fanatical, or resentful of the U.S., after all.
The article goes much farther, of course; if you are tired of the left's chicken-little cant on Iraq, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.
The article is, above all things, realistic; it notes the difficulties ahead, as well as some areas where the US didn't come out quite as well. None of this is to suggest that the task ahead will be simple. Inchoate anxiety toward the U.S. showed up when we asked Iraqis if they thought the U.S. would help or hurt Iraq over a five-year period. By 50% to 36% they chose hurt over help. This is fairly understandable; Iraqis have just lived through a war in which Americans were (necessarily) flinging most of the ammunition. These experiences may explain why women (who are more antimilitary in all cultures) show up in our data as especially wary of the U.S. right now. War is never pleasant, though U.S. forces made heroic efforts to spare innocents in this one, as I illustrate with firsthand examples in my book about the battles. Evidence of the comparative gentleness of this war can be seen in our poll. Less than 30% of our sample of Iraqis knew or heard of anyone killed in the spring fighting. Meanwhile, fully half knew some family member, neighbor or friend who had been killed by Iraqi security forces during the years Saddam held power.
Don't just sit there. Read it.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 07:17:25 AM
Sleep When I'm Dead- Don't get me wrong - Fraters Libertas is one of the best blogs in the Twin Cities. It's on my daily read list. It should be on yours.
But...how do I say this diplomatically? - JB Doubtless is to music what Al Franken is to hockey, as we found yet again in yesterday's slime-job on the late Warren Zevon.
Again, don't get me wrong - JB writes some great stuff, too - as long as he steers clear of music. He made his debut with the Fraters last winter by puking on the grave of Joe Strummer (in a piece I misattributed to the Elder), followed up by condoning Norah Jones' beating Springsteen for the Grammy...and now this:I’ve been reading quite a bit in the last few days about the death of Warren Zevon and What His Music Meant.
Just like Charles Schultz, who died the day the final episode of "Peanuts" ran; ones life's calling can frequently keep one alive. Many artists and authors have defied the odds of their illnesses to complete one last big work - and thankfully, Zevon's one of them. His final album, "The Wind", is stunning - but more later.
As we all know, he was diagnosed with cancer last summer and told he had two months to live. Knowing his time was almost up, he made a memorable appearance on Late Night where Letterman gave him the entire hour. He then gathered his friends and made one last record, finishing it just months ago. Now he’s dead, proving that doctors don’t really always know what’s going on.To be sure, he was a gifted musician and songwriter, but I don’t like what is says about our culture when someone this dark, this nihilistic is hailed as a musical saint.
Two things to say, here:
Doubtless continues: But Doubtless, you say, how can you write such things about such a great man? Hey, I Iike the guy too, but this idea of Artist As Suffering Soul has to be defeated and I’m just the guy to do it.
No, Zevon's the one to do it - and he always did. Nobody took the "suffering soul" image less seriously - or poked more holes in it - than Zevon. Mr. Zevon’s songs paid tribute to murderers, mercenaries, drug dealers, werewolves and assorted other miscreants. Violence, death and suicide were frequent themes, as was love among the desperate and downtrodden.
Sounds simplistic. Zevon's oeuvre was much more varied than that. At his best, he wrote playful songs about violence; hilarious songs about depression; affirming songs about suicide; above all, beautiful and genuinely lovely music about love, both desperate and redeeming.
Sounds great, don’t it? I’m afraid Zevon suffered from one of the great conceits of his generation; the assumption that there are two groups of people in the world--the squares: suburban, gainfully employed, happy-go-lucky, and the realists: artists, drunks, people that would rather feel pain than what they thought the squares were feeling (nothing). And they felt it was their job as the feeling artists to let the squares know How It REALLY Was.
I'm afraid Doubtless suffers from the conceit of the...er, Doubtless. There may not be an artist anywhere, ever, that has documented more thoroughly the emptiness and self-betrayal of the artistic stereotype. Many artists make the value judgement Doubtless describes; Zevon wasn't one of them.
Although Doubtless tries to pin the rap on him anyway:Zevon says as much in the song Aint That Pretty At All:
Unstated by Doubtless; the song is as ironic as they come. The song mocks the self-absorbed nihilism of its protagonist.
Well, I've seen all there is to see
And I've heard all they have to say
I've done everything I wanted to do . . .
I've done that too
And it ain't that pretty at all
Ain't that pretty at all
So I'm going to hurl myself against the wall
Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
Better yet, his classic "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead", from "Stand In The Fire", one of the three best live albums in rock history:So much to do, there's plenty on the farm
Homage to self-destruction? If you read the lyrics in isolation...sure. If you hear them in context - delivered by a guy who was living their hollowness - it makes more sense.
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Saturday night I like to raise a little harm
I'll sleep when I'm dead
I'm drinking heartbreak motor oil and Bombay gin
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Straight from the bottle, again and again
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Well, I take this medicine as prescribed
I'll sleep when I'm dead
It don't matter if I get a little tired
I'll sleep when I'm dead
I've got a .44 Magnum up on the shelf
I'll sleep when I'm dead
And I DON'T intend to useit on myself
I'll sleep when I'm dead
Doubtless continues:Fusilli goes on to make the point about dark music I’ve heard dozens of times but I still don’t understand:
Read Crime and Punishment lately? For Raskolnikov's redemption to mean anything, one has to understand the darkness, the murder - the sin! - that he's been redeemed from!
"Like one of his literary heroes, Ross Macdonald, Mr. Zevon saw the dark side of life on the outskirts of Los Angeles and, chronicling it, revealed universal themes that transcend time and geography."
How? This is never explained. How. How does writing about murder, suicide and wretchedness reveal universal themes? Does jumping into a latrine help one to understand shit? Does sleeping with the homeless help you understand alcoholism and mental illness? And what are the universal themes? Original sin? Hatred?
Or to put it in Zevon's oeuvre, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead or Carmelita ("Now I'm sitting here playing solitaire with my pearl-handled deck/the county won't give me no more methadone, and they garnished your welfare check/Carmelita, hold me tighter, I think I'm going down/and I'm all strung out on heroin, on the lonely side of town") is a necessary prologue to Accidentally Like A Martyr, where the darkness parts and forgiveness happens:The phone don't ring, no no
Doubtless continues:
And the sun refused to shine
Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly
For what was already mine
For such a long, long time
{Refrain}
We made mad love
Shadow love
Random love
And abandoned love
Accidentally like a martyr
The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder
{Repeat refrain}
The days slide by
Should have done, should have done, we all sigh
Never thought I'd ever be so lonely
After such a long, long time
Time out of mindTo me, there’s way more than enough darkness in the world.
And some of us defeat it with art that explores it!I don’t need it in my pop records, books, movies or personalities. Declaring those who toiled their entire lives in this darkness to be geniuses steers our culture toward a path that is dangerous for our souls.
Doubtless misses the point; Zevon worked in darkness, pushed little corners of it back from his life, poked ribald fun at the rest, and in the end created some art that brought light and dignity and humor to some dark and humiliating and harrowing situations; recovery from addiction, confronting imminent mortality.
I'll take "the Wind" over the entire Frank Sinatra catalogue (and before Doubltess doubtless brands me a musical philistine - I get around on ten instruments, have played classical cello for 30 years now, and have forgotten more music in more genres than most people will ever learn).
And someday when I have the mental energy, I'll address Doubtless' assertion that Norah Jones' upset win over Springsteen at the Grammies wasn't a crime against humanity.
UPDATE: It's not just mortality. Emailer PB writes Zevon was, and is, also great for:Or just getting through the rain. Since 1976, Zevon has always been the music I turn to on dreary, rainy days. It meets the mist head on, and shows it to be a wispy vapor that is temporarily hiding the bright sunshine a mere mile above. I always feel better after listening to Zevon in the rain, and a bit embarrassed for letting myself accept the dreary viewpoint. Life doesn't have to be dreary. It can be a wacky funfest. Zevon let us know that with both barrels.
PB is right, and I hope JD is getting this.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/10/2003 12:49:05 AM
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Busy Morning - Some domestic BS, plus I have to do some research for a second interview tomorrow.
Pointers to information on Rational Unified Process, UML and Use Case Modeling will all be gratefully accepted.
Profiles In Cluelessness - There's a little current among the tinfoil-hat left that the US should leave Iraq, and pay Britain and the UN to finish the job; we just can't do it, so they say.
I saw this - from a purveyor of that notion - on a local politics discussion group the other day:The U.S. soldier is well armed, well fed, comparatively well paid, and well trained. They do not appear to know spit about counterinsurgency warfare. TV cameras show them bunching up on patrols and crossing bridges. The British don't.
So - these people get their knowledge of infantry tactics by what they see on CNN?
I'm still shaking my head.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/9/2003 09:42:12 AM
Broderick, Again - Richard Broderick - a Green candidate for the St. Paul School Board - is at it again with his latest press release:
Of the key proposals I have presented in my race for the St. Paul School Board none has generated more excitement than my call for the development and implementation of a comprehensive, district-wide, K-12 peace curriculum to be accompanied by the creation of student-run committees for -violent conflict resolution in every junior and senior high school.
Mr. Broderick is the same guy who said, a few months ago, that he'd use the School System to essentially indoctrinate students with a Green worldview:"The core principles of the Green Party -- ecological wisdom, grassroots
Scary enough yet?
democracy, social justice, and non-violence -- are all rooted in a categorical
rejection of exploitation and domination as acceptable means to our ends in
life," Broderick said. "In order for our society to adopt these values (as it
must, if we are to survive on this planet), we need to nurture the instinctively
Green consciousness of our young people through the comprehensive application of
these principles to curriculum, instruction, administration, and district-wide
decision-making processes.
No. It's not.
Here are excerpts from Broderick's latest press release:Briefly, upon winning in the general election I will establish and chair a task force made up of volunteers from the school district as well representatives from organizations like Friends for a Non-Violent World with a proven track record in training people in the theory and techniques of non-violence. At the end of the current school year, I will gather recommendations from this task force -- recommendations that will cover course content, budgeting, and a time table for implementation -- and embark upon a campaign to raise money from one or more of the many foundations dedicated to shaping a more peaceful world in order to hire professional curriculum writers to develop a peace curriculum for St. Paul's public schools. Cost to the district? Zero.
In other words, the St. Paul Public Schools' curriculum will be even more devoted to pacifism than it currently is.
At "no cost". Meanwhile, come January I will ask FVNW to work with individual schools to provide training for students involved in conflict resolution committees. These committees will differ from the peer mediation groups that now exist
First - this sort of involvement can be useful - in schools that are genuinely democratic (and by that I'm referring to Sudbury-model schools, which democratize the entire education process, down to the curriculum). In schools that are fundamentally authoritarian (as all traditional schools are), I have to wonder, especially about the "These committees will differ from the peer mediation groups that now exist bin some area schools in that they will involve the entire student body, be transparent rather than working behind closed doors, and -- a key contrast -- be proactive, addressing the underlying sources of conflict" bit.
in some area schools in that they will involve the entire student body, be transparent rather than working behind closed doors, and -- a key contrast -- be proactive, addressing the underlying sources of conflict, from racial tension to taunting to disrespectful behavior in and out of the classroom, before the conflict has a chance to simmer over into violent confrontation.
"Be proactive"...how? Sending troops of students through the schools to root out evidence of "violent" badthink?
The Hitler Youth were proactive, too.In a world of increasing levels of interpersonal, intercommunal, and international violence, the creation of a district-wide peace curriculum is not only the right thing to do morally, it is also a perfect example of "practical idealism." In addition to providing students with the tools they need to confront conflict without violence and to help create a more peaceful future, a peace curriculum will also end up saving the St. Paul school district money and resources at a time when it faces critical budget shortfalls.
Unstated - they'll "save the money" by importing an ideology from an organization from "Friends for a Non-Violent World", a group with a very strident agenda. Can you imagine the school district getting curriculum help from Gun Owners of America (the people who think the NRA are too mushy)? It's analogous!By providing students from kindergarten on with the techniques, theories, and ethical principles of non-violence, a comprehensive district-wide peace curriculum will cause an immediate improvement in classroom demeanor.
This, I'm afraid, is completely wrong.
I'll say this now; a little "violence" in grade school prevents a LOT of violence later. Roughhousing can be scary, but it teaches people - especially boys - the limits of their inherent aggressiveness. If those limits aren't learned early, then the child grows up not knowing them at all - and violence becomes serious business, rather than something the child learned to eschew the hard (and direct) way.
I suggest to you that the current discipline problems in the classroom are associated with the feminization of education, and the artificial focus on "non-violence" that it has bred.
I am writing Mr. Broderick right now to ask for clarification. In the unlikely event I get any, I'll let you know.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/9/2003 09:35:00 AM
Monday, September 08, 2003
Immigrant-Bashing Immigrants - Immigrant bashing. Ethnic stereotyping. Absolute intolerance of real diversity.
Isn't that what the Democrats way Republicans are all about?
Sergeant Stryker reports on a Nuremburgesque pro-Davis rally, starting with a Davis quote:"'You shouldn't be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state,' in an apparent reference to Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent.
The Sarge expresses my own disgust:
The theme was picked up later in Alhambra at an Asian American rally against the recall. An appointee to the Workforce Investment Board, Sukhee Kang, suggested that Schwarzenegger's accent hindered his governing abilities.
'He can't even speak English well. How can he govern the state of California?' said Kang, who emigrated from South Korea in 1977 [emphasis added - Kang arrived in the US nearly a decade after Scwartzenegger], as he warmed up the crowd before Davis arrived.Uh...I'm sorry, my shallow reserves of wit fail me. I'm just trying to figure out what kind of a state I live in where Democratic picnics sound like neo-Nazi rallies and Korean immigrants bash on other people for not speaking English well. Greetings from the Hotel California. "
This recall is turning into a referendum between someone who's renounced his family's Nazi past, and those who are embracing something almost as bad.
(Via Powerline)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/8/2003 05:57:42 PM
The Conscience - Oliver Willis channels Jonathan Alter, who notes Britney Spears' vacuous quote from last week:
Britney Spears, best known recently for a lip lock with Madonna, is hardly an authority on the political ramifications of September 11. But Spears has a bankable feel for the popular pulse, and her comments last week reflected a good chunk of public opinion on the subject of patriotism: "I think we should just trust the president in every decision he makes," she told CNN, "and we should just support that, and be faithful in what happens."
...and draws the conclusion...MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, most of them Republicans, define themselves politically and define others patriotically by adherence to that simple Spears standard. The Bush White House will do everything it can to identify those voters; play to their sometimes sublimated emotions of fidelity and fear, and turn the first Tuesday in November 2004 into a referendum on the second Tuesday in September 2001. Stay Proud. Stay Safe. Vote Bush.
To which Willis adds:Britney Spears: the political conscience of the right.
Hm. Fascinating.
As John at Freespeech.com says:Which of course suggests that you or I or anyone is free to point out any arbitrary liberal media starling as the political conscience of the left.
Hm. A list is in order, here.
Which is it? Johnny Depp? Harrison Ford? Alec Baldwin? Barbra Streisand? Larry Flint? Can you think of other famous people who say vacuous things that we can arbitrarily declare the political conscience of the left?
I'd like to get celebs, and their vacuous quotes.
THE POLITICAL CONSCIENCE OF THE LEFT
We can (and will) go on...
So with a nod to Jon "The East Is Red" Alter, I need to rephrase him just a bit:MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, all of them Democrats or Greens, define themselves politically and define others patriotically by adherence to that simple Alter standard, "whatever we say or do, we're smarter than Republicans". The left will do everything it can to identify those voters; play to their almost-never sublimated emotions of arrogance, superiority, entitlement and fear of their fellow citizen, and turn the first Tuesday in November 2004 into a referendum on the first Tuesday in November 2000. Stay Proud. Stay Perpetually but Inarticulately Outraged. Never Park the Bus. Vote Anybody But Bush.
It may not roll off the tongue, but...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/8/2003 08:17:15 AM
Drift - David Warren, on his switch from the Anglican/Episcopal Church to the Catholics.
Midwest Conservative Journal has been admirably and productively obsessed with what it calls the Episcopal Church's drift away from Christianity, also.
Some fascinating reading. I'll have to finish writing my own shot at theological exposition...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/8/2003 07:19:34 AM
Hasten Down The Wind - We knew it was coming.
It doesn't help.
Warren Zevon died yesterday afternoon at age 56: "In a macabre songbook that includes 'Excitable Boy,' 'Lawyers, Guns and Money' and 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,' Zevon presented a world of the undead and the unethical on the rampage in a mercenary world. In 'Mr. Bad Example,' an altar boy grows up to be a vagabond con man: 'I'm very well acquainted with the seven deadly sins/I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in/I'm proud to be a glutton and I don't have time for sloth/I'm greedy and I'm angry and I don't care who I cross.' "
Now that he's dead, he'll probably start getting his due.
UPDATE: Powerline, who've covered Zevon's illness as well as any bloggers, wrap it up with style.
RIP, Exciteable Guy.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/8/2003 06:37:07 AM
The Speech - The President took back some of the momentum with last night's speech.
This part was key:Second, we are committed to expanding international cooperation in the reconstruction and security of Iraq, just as we are in Afghanistan. Our military commanders in Iraq advise me that the current number of American troops ? nearly 130,000 ? is appropriate to their mission. They are joined by over 20,000 service members from 29 other countries. Two multinational divisions, led by the British and the Poles, are serving alongside our forces ? and in order to share the burden more broadly, our commanders have requested a third multinational division to serve in Iraq.
As we come up on the second anniversary of the launching of the Third World War, it's worth remembering what brought us here.
Some countries have requested an explicit authorization of the United Nations Security Council before committing troops to Iraq. I have directed Secretary of State Colin Powell to introduce a new Security Council resolution, which would authorize the creation of a multinational force in Iraq, led by America.
I recognize that not all of our friends agreed with our decision to enforce the Security Council resolutions and remove Saddam Hussein from power. Yet we cannot let past differences interfere with present duties. Terrorists in Iraq have attacked representatives of the civilized world, and opposing them must be the cause of the civilized world. Members of the United Nations now have an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation.
Third, we are encouraging the orderly transfer of sovereignty and authority to the Iraqi people. Our coalition came to Iraq as liberators and we will depart as liberators.
And how we'll leave:Fellow citizens: We have been tested these past 24 months, and the dangers have not passed. Yet Americans are responding with courage and confidence. We accept the duties of our generation. We are active and resolute in our own defense. We are serving in freedom's cause ? and that is the cause of all mankind.
Note to the Dems: It's going to take more than prescriptions and handouts to get the momentum.
Sullivan has a great piece - on the "State of the War" speech.
Money quote:Critics will say that the Iraq-terror connection, brutally outlined in the Washington Post yesterday, is a result of the war and didn't exist beforehand. They're wrong. The links between Baathist remnants and al Qaeda are obviously stronger now than the links between al Qaeda and the Saddam regime a year ago - but they all always had a common goal: the prevention of the liberalization of the Arab world and the defeat of Western interests through terror, both state-sponsored and otherwise. We've flushed them out but we haven't yet destroyed them. Now we have a chance to go in for the kill. If Bush can successfully persuade people that violence in Iraq is a) unavoidable and b) an opportunity, then he will be far more persuasive in the coming months. And we all need him to be.
To deny the ideological link - as Josh Marshall seems to in the article I addressed yesterday - is the sort of Clintonion pseudological pointillism that may make legalists warm and fuzzy - but in the amorphous world of terrorism, makes no sense.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/8/2003 12:52:35 AM
Art of War - A fascinating piece in Chicago Boyz about Steve Mumford, an artist currently drawing post-war Baghdad.
It's a fascinating piece - both the Boyz' bit and the original Artnet piece. Read 'em both. Engrossing. "Drawing here takes a little getting used to. The Iraqis are intensely interested in most things western, so the presence of an American sitting on a stoop or at a cafe making a drawing always elicits an avid audience. Every brushstroke is watched, and people have many questions. The Iraqi sense of personal space is very different from a westerner's; here people crowd in so close they're touching me, and men feel free to stab at the paper to point out someone I've drawn whom they know. If an onlooker blocks the view, however, he'll be shouted at to get out of the way. Sometimes a passage is greeted with a round of 'tsk, tsk, tsk,' which in Iraq doesn't necessarily connote disapproval as much as interest (I think). "
Verdict?In general, Baghdad seems to me to be better than it was two months ago, despite the rise in bombings. Many of the huge mounds of trash are cleaned up, the curbs repainted, less gunfire at night. The endless gas station lines are much shorter, the traffic snarls less intense and there's more electricity at night, although still far from enough. Most importantly, the Iraqis of Al Wasiria seem to like these Americans, often calling out to them by name as they're on patrol.
About that last point; when discussing the issue with liberals who've bought the Dean/Kerry/Scheer/Dowd cant that Iraq is a quagmire, I've taken to responding "Let's revisit the question in a year".
History tends to be kinder to conservatives than liberals.
Mumford's drawings, by the way, are very interesting. I hope he has an installation around the Cities sometime.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/8/2003 12:35:28 AM
Sunday, September 07, 2003
DuToit Connects - With a post I could have written at any point in the past fifteen years.
Lupino, Bergman, Bacall, and the list goes on.
Sharon Stone? Sarah Jessica Parker? Pfft. This is one of few areas where the world has not improved one iota.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/7/2003 04:12:32 PM
Powerline Contra Marshall - Interesting, I think, that Power Line gets an entirely different take on the Washington Post Al-Quaeda story:
"Read David Horowitz's Washington Times column 'How to look at the war on terror' together with the Washington Post's story 'Al Qaeda plans a new front.' "
One article. Two completely different analyses.
UPDATE: Sullivan, too -although his permalink isn't working as this is written (scroll down to see the article entitled "FLYPAPER - IT'S WORKING".
I'm picturing a Josh Marshall writiing in November, 1944; "Why the Normandy Landings Were Bad Strategy".
posted by Mitch Berg 9/7/2003 01:13:23 PM
Massage Not Lest Ye Be Massaged - The story from the left is this: The Bush Administration made up a bunch of things about Iraq, and will keep looking until it finds proof to match its preconceptions.
To reach this conclusion, Josh Marshall - the current darling of the blogging left - is...er, looking until he finds proof to match his conclusions.This is one hell of a story in Sunday's Washington Post. The outlines of the tale are ones we've known for a while now: Iraq had little or nothing to do with al Qaida before the war. But the war itself -- the supposed remedy for the tie between Iraq and al Qaida -- ended up making the Iraq/al Qaida mumbo-jumbo into a reality.
In this paragraph, Marshall leads his little Republican Democrat Guard of strawmen into battle:
No, the piece shows merely that Al-Quaeda-affiliated guerrillas are flocking to Iraq. Which, if I recall correctly, was not only something we conservatives were predicting, but in fact hoping for ("Bring 'em on").
We return to Marshall:You knew that in general terms. But here are the particulars. One confluence of events seems key. By the middle of 2002 al Qaida was seriously damaged, its infrastructure disrupted, many of its soldiers and key leaders dead. The mix of damage to the organization and increased security in the United States made new mass-casualty terrorism in America all but impossible. The organization had to fall back on smaller-scale attacks mainly in Muslim countries, carried out by local affiliated groups.
Again, ask yourself (or better yet, Marshall) how this proves what Marshall "already knew" - that there was no pre-9/11 connection?
But the Iraq war -- and the onset of the occupation -- provided the organization (or its remnants) with a new opportunity. It was both a new vehicle to galvanize followers and operating there meant fewer logistical difficulties since it was close by. Even just before the war, in February of this year, key al Qaida operatives started planning the move toward Iraq as the new front.
Marshall's not dishonest; he just works context like an old-world craftsman. It doesn't always work. Marshall says:Also key is the role of Iran, which, according to the Post article, provided key members of the damaged al Qaida organization with a safe-haven during the period between their expulsion from Afghanistan and the opening of their new front in Iraq.
...which he notes in his next post, is a squishy theory.
Marshall continues:A story like this, culled together from different sources, many of whom are no doubt interested parties, is only a first run at the truth. Points will be refined; major elements of the story may change. But I think this story and those that will follow it will be a major point of discussion for some time to come.
Note the careful double-standard; the left's anti-war cant is allowed to evolve into, apparently, the "final draft" truth over time; the case for war was allowed no revision or room for adaptation.
While I've been tempted to read exhaustively through Marshall's archives to figure out the gestalt of his Iraq coverage, others have done it before. Hugh Hewitt writes in the current edition of his blog:Joshua Micah Marshall was on the program yesterday, and we mixed it up over Joshua's refusal to articulate any short-term standard against which the occupation of Iraq can be judged. Marshall's entry today is another amusing brew of unattributed insider knowledge, rim-shots off of newspaper stories, and wild rumors: "What changed, apparently, was that the Joint Chiefs went over too Powell's side." Ah, Seven Days in May must be on Josh's bedside. How breathless. How dramatic. How completely absurd: "Colin, this is Dick Myers. I've got Peter Pace with me here, and we want to come over to your side."
Marshall's article points to something I've noticed in the left's entire case against the war Administration, all along. It's led me to a realization, that I think I can postulate in the form of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis I will henceforth call Berg's Law. To wit: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.
Think about it; when was the last time you saw a left-of-center commentator note the UN resolutions when jawing about the disappearing WMDs? Can you show me a liberal blogger who's talked about WMDs and still noted the UN resolutions that Iraq flaunted? Has anyone on the left spoken of the technicalities of the resolution-enforcement process while noting the WMD allegations and the pre-war evidence of terrorist (not just Al-Quaeda) connections?
Ask around. I'd love an answer to this.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/7/2003 12:35:27 PM
The First Bonehead - The anti-gun left smells blood. The fact that it's just ketchup escapes them and their pals, the media.
The Pioneer Press reported the story of a guy in north-suburban Anoka County who got into a stupid incident with a gun. Unmentioned in the story - it's the type of story that would have never been widely reported under normal circumstances; it's the type of thing that happens constantly in trailer parks and Frogtowns nationwide.
The only thing abnormal about these circumstances is that the guy has a newly-minted Concealed Carry permit. An Anoka County man, who shot 11 bullets into the hood of his brother's car in an attempt to "kill" it, may be the first Minnesotan to have his gun permit suspended under a new state law that allows holders to carry handguns in most public places.
So far, so good. In fact, so far, exactly to specs; we concealed-carry supporters never said the law-abiding citizen was perfect - merely that he or she was, statistically, incredibly trustworthy. Joe Olson, of Concealed Carry Reform Now, commented accurately on the story's importance (near the veeeeery end of the PiPress' piece):Joseph Olson, president of the Minnesota-based Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, said, "No one ever claimed permit holders would be perfect." Information from other states shows that permit holders are more law-abiding than the population in general, Olson said.
Exactly. The guy screwed up - and is paying the consequences.
"But there are always exceptions, and this gentleman is a moron," he said. "There will be people who will do stupid and illegal things and the law is set up so they lose their permits, which sounds like it worked just fine in this case."
Of course, the anti-gun movement as manifested by Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota's Rebecca Thoman, see goblins in the dark:[Thoman] said the case shows why her group opposed the law.
The story - by Mara Gottfred et al - didn't mention that the guy did feel he was protecting lives; he was trying to shoot out the engine, to keep his drunk brother from going out on the freeway and endangering others. This, of course, is not allowed under Minnesota's paternalistic self-defense laws, where until recently one had a "duty to retreat" as far as possible before defending oneself (a provision that KSTP host Ron Rosenbaum says has been changed, although I've not been able to confirm that).
"This is an obvious case of a man turning to a gun in the heat of the moment," she said. "It also goes to the poor training that this law requires. It's not appropriate to use a gun to protect property. It wasn't a situation of his life being threatened."
So what does this story tell us?
Only this: In a year that has featured a rising number of shootings carried out by "people" who do not qualify for carry permits - demi-human vermin who kill cabbies for money, who blast indiscriminately at drug-industry competitors on residential streets without regard for who's in the houses they're drilling, the Victim Disarmament movement is really desperate for some "good" news from its perspective its it's going to yap about this case.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/7/2003 10:36:48 AM
Friday, September 05, 2003
New Year - It's my tenth autumn here in the Midway.
I first moved to the Midway in 1987 - and with about a two-year gap from '89 to '91, I've lived here ever since.
I moved into this house ten years ago next month. Now, I spent ten years, maybe eleven, in my father's house in North Dakota, so we're rapidly approaching a personal record, here. It feels strange, given that between college and my first years in the Twin Cities I moved about 12 times in five years.
The rhythm of life here in the Midway has markers not all that different than the ones I grew up with in North Dakota, at least conceptually. The rhythm is the same; the details aren't.
Winter is winter, of course - sleet, then snow, then the months of gazing out at the cold wet blanket from the safety of the warm living room, cocoa in hand, watching the Hamline students trudge past. Spring is marked by the return of bikes to the bike paths, and the shortening of sleeves. Summer? Halter tops.
But fall is the one that hits you. We have three colleges or universities within a mile of my house - Hamline is a block away - and the sights and sounds of college kids moving into the dorms, trying out their stereos, throwing their first tentative parties, warming up the boom cars with the big, beginning-of-the-year displays of audio bravado color the nighttime soundscape. The first slicks of vomit are also turning up in the gutters.
On my block, it's really the beginning of the New Year. The little cold tinge in the night air still gives me that 20-year-old feeling, time to start packing up, vestigial but still there.
Unlike most of the Hamline kids, I was here four (and eight) years ago, and I'll probably be here four years from now, if not forty years from now. I love this place - the trees arching over the streets (the 'hood has finally recovered from the Dutch Elm Disease that made the main streets so sere and barren-looking even 15 years ago), the neighborhood stores, the neighbors themselves...
...and every fall, when most people would start feeling blue with the reminiscences of the end of summer, we have the loud, crass, baggy-pantsed reminders of renewal here among us; walking through our yards, puking on our boulevards, tossing beer cans in our gutters, and reminding us of what we were not that long ago, and sometimes, on wistful nights like this, making one take stock of what parts of that part of our lives need to be exhumed and re-examined and maybe revived just a bit.
Happy New Year.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/5/2003 09:38:43 PM
Couture du Trashe Blanc - When I was a kid, tattoos meant one of two things:
Things, of course, have changed.
I was at a swimming beach on an east-metro lake the other day. While I know that tattoos are much bigger business than they used to be, I was amazed - it seemed like we non-tattooed people were the minority.
And I figured - as I often do in thses situations - "we need some sort of taxonomy, here".
Submitted for your approval:
Hamfisted, but I suspect largely accurate.
Yes, I nearly got a tattoo, once. It was 20 years ago, and it was a near miss. Subject for a later blog, I'm sure.
Or not.
I'll be back online this weekend, to make up for the lame week. Stay tuned.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/5/2003 06:09:17 PM
Still Working On It - the computer, that is.
I'm having a very arcane hardware problem. I'll probably catch up on posting over the weekend.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/5/2003 03:21:44 PM
Travails - More computer trouble, plus a possible phone job interview later today - we'll see.
More posting later, when we'll try to answer the questions: Will Fraters and Hugh patch it up? Is Sullivan going to the dark side? Is Layne OK?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/5/2003 08:23:49 AM
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Why? - Electric Venom states the resentful feminist case against the Islamic fundies.
Nothing new - but lots of old stuff you may have forgotten, in one convenient package.
(Via Instapundit)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/4/2003 02:06:10 PM
Good Vs. Evil. Then Shopping - Virginia Postrel starts the discussion about the gross misapprehension of America's real values:
Americans had forgotten bourgeois virtue. Freedom and affluence had made us soft. We were self-indulgent moral nihilists -- materialistic, selfish, and impulsive. We might have been having fun, but we’d created a culture no one would fight for.
Her conclusion?
At least that’s what the wise men said.
On September 11, 2001, they shut up. Ordinary Americans, it turned out, were not only brave but resilient and creative, even lethal, when it mattered.Buffy was right all along.
ScrrrrraaaaAAAAAAAATCH.
Buffy?
Nope, I've never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then again, I've never watched Friends, Will and Grace, Frazier (maybe twice), or much of any other "Must See TV".
But Postrel states an eloquent case for the WB's flagship show: The mere existence of Buffy proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex and evolving characters. Playful language. Joy and sorrow, pathos and elation. Episodes that dare to be different -- to tell stories in silence or in song. Big themes and terrible choices. In the show’s most wrenching moment, Buffy kisses her one true love and saves the world by sending him to hell.
Postrel (who vaguely resembles Buffy, actually) then lists the precepts. Read 'em - it's fascinating stuff.
Buffy assumes and enacts the consensus moral understanding of contemporary American culture, the moral understanding that the wise men ignored or forgot. This understanding depends on no particular religious tradition. It’s informed not by revelation but by experience. It is inclusive and humane, without denying distinctions or the tough facts of life. There are lots of jokes in Buffy -- humor itself is a moral imperative -- but no psychobabble and no excuses. Here are some of the show’s precepts, a sample of what Americans believe:
So maybe I'll check out the DVD after all.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/4/2003 10:37:05 AM
Women Glow and Men Chunder - Daughter is feeling fine today, but son and I are both home, sick as the proverbial dogs.
Blogging will either be nonexistent or obsessive, depending on how this headache plays out.
Notice is Served - People have ribbed me via email, noting that I occasionally respond to quotes in my blog with the single-word "Indeed", a la Glen Reynolds. The emailers ask if I'm not copying the Professor a bit blatantly.
Buncombe. I've been using the word "Indeed" as an all-purpose, non-committal response for at least twenty years, and I have college pals who'll back me up on it.
I was Indeeding when Indeeding wasn't cool.
Yes, I feel like a pioneer. What's it to you?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/4/2003 10:11:35 AM
"Saint Paul DFLer Sentenced for Bank Robbery Murder" - Wouldn't that have been a wierd headline?
Of course. To have put out such a headline about the sentencing of Kathleen Soliah would have implied that Soliah's politics were an element of the crimes for which she was sentenced.
You ask "So what?"
Tim Graham in The Corner notes:Am I the only one to find it disturbing that NBC/MSNBC is routinely referring to abortionist-killer Paul Hill today as an "anti-abortion activist," as if he's comparable to Chris Smith or Phyllis Schlafly?
Indeed.
How many criminals have their vocations or avocations tied to their sentencing?
The headlines did not scream:PAINTER EXECUTED FOR LINDBERG KIDNAPPING
or PLUMBER SENTENCED FOR ROBBERY
because the occupations of the perps aren't generally elements of the crime.
Referring to Paul Hill as a "Murderer" or "Zealot" or "terrorist" would be both true and germane to the crime for which he was executed. Calling him - not just occasionally, but as a general thing - an "anti-abortion activist" links Hill's crime with the efforts of everyone who actively opposes infanticide.
)Via Jeff Fecke)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/4/2003 07:38:36 AM
Museum of Communism - Radley Balko at Fox News writes about the struggle to create a memorial to victims of Communism:
"Most of us are justifiably revolted at the sight of a teenage kid wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika. But glimpse the same kid in a shirt featuring a sickle and hammer, or a portrait of Che Guevara, and many of us will find him quaint, perhaps idealistic -- at the very worst, naïve and misguided. In New York City, you can get tipsy at the KGB Bar, a chic spot featuring Soviet-era symbolism and paraphernalia. Imagine what might become of the entrepreneur who tried to open a nightspot themed with Nazi regalia.
This isn't merely tongue in cheek; there actually is an effort underway to create this memorial.
It become fashionable of late for celebrities to make high-profile pilgrimages to Cuba, to be wined and dined by Fidel Castro. In the time it takes to extol the virtues of universal health care and education, you can bet at least a dozen Cubans have risked their lives to get out. Iconic director Stephen Spielberg was the latest to make the trip. You’d think the man who so eloquently documented the brutality of totalitarianism in "Schindler’s List" would know better than to cozy up to tyrants.
It's running into struggles, though:One such project is already underway. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has been raising money toward a museum for several years now. The organization plans to build an online “virtual” museum first, then a standing memorial in Washington, D.C., with a final eye toward a bricks-and-mortar memorial similar to the Holocaust Museum.
Balko continues, talking about the irony inherent in that resolution.
But there’s a problem with the project’s funding. Project Director Jay Katzen says that although initial plans called for the museum to be funded entirely with private donations, the challenges of private fund raising has led the group to seek public dollars.
Read the whole thing - as well as George Mason University's "Museum of Communism" site.
(Via Tocquevillian)
posted by Mitch Berg 9/4/2003 06:30:19 AM
Quote Of The Day - Lileks, natch:
That’s the good thing about the Dark Side.
Even working on a .NET project looks good right now.
Eventually, your eyes adjust.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/4/2003 05:22:16 AM
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
The Weekend - The irony of being a long-term unemployed (that's what the Department of Labor calls me now!) on Labor Day weekend didn't escape me.
Still, it was a great weekend. Saw Franky Perez at the Bandshell on Saturday night at the Fair. Now, the Bandshell crowd has to be one of the toughest crowds out there; a mixture of people from stroller-bound toddlers to septuagenarians and everyone in between, all footsore and gassy and worn out after a day of violent rides and greasy food. Of the several hundred people there, it's a safe bet that only a thin film of them have any idea who you are. And if you're a club animal like Perez - who puts on a kinetic, old-school raveup of a show that's tailor-made for a club (or at an outdoor gig full of rock and roll fans, like last July at the Block Party - that has to be hard. The show was good - but you can tell when a hyperkinetic stage animal like Perez just isn't feeling the love. A group of maybe forty fans dancing around the foot of the stage picked things up. Here's hoping he has another local club gig soon.
More job leads. Sigh. I've been playing the numbers game all along; I've sent hundreds of resumes, had dozens of interviews of various types, and have probably 5-6 serious job leads right now. Eventually, the logic - my logic, anyway - says something's gotta break. Right?
Speaking of breaks - thanks to everyone that made this past month a record month for donations. I think Amazon delays telling me about gifts for at least thirty days, so - if you donated money via my Amazon link about this time last month, thank you very much! This site continues to be completely self-supporting, which in these times is pretty encouraging.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 11:20:03 AM
Due To Gun Control, Part CVI - Spoon has a long, fascinating post on the ramifications, not only of Chicago's unconstitutional gun ban, but of the consequences of the gun-control "moderates'" favorite solution, registration.
It seems the last-registered owner of a pistol used in a murder sold the firearm to a couple of policemen who ignored the law. The result? He's in jail on $100,000 bond: "Got that? This poor mope, Beuck, legally buys a gun, probably some time around 1966-67. He keeps the gun for 15 years or so, without incident, at which time he promptly complies with Chicago's unconstitutional gun ordinance and registers his gun with the City in 1983. He keeps the gun for another decade or so, until 1994, at which time he legally sells it to a cop. Nine years later, and after at least two police officers have ignored the gun ordinance, a career violent criminal (in violation of a half dozen state laws and City ordinances) somehow gets ahold of the gun and kills several coworkers. The cops track down Beuck, now homeless, and ask him about the gun. Beuck cooperates, tells the police what he knows, but because this homeless man cannot now produce records regarding the sale of his gun nine years ago, Beuck gets sent to Cook County Jail on $100,000 bond!
And the left tries to ridicule the pro-Second Amendment movement's reference to the slippery slope...
You gotta wonder what would have happened if the authorities had shown as much interest in locking up the murderer, Tapia, after any of his more than a dozen arrests as they did in locking away a 58 year old homeless guy who couldn't come up with the paperwork documenting a gun he sold nine years ago."
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 10:36:40 AM
It's The Terror, Stupid - Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Spectator (via Sullivan), on the intellectual self-destruction of the Left after 9/11, over the only issue that really matters: Terror.
Remember - Wheatcroft's no dittohead:"Two years later, the sorriest consequence of all this has become much clearer. Because the critics of the Bush administration and Blair government made themselves so ridiculous in the aftermath of 11th September, the proper case against the Iraq war was subsequently much weakened. Sane critics of Bush and Blair must have been embarrassed by the sheer emptiness of the Voices for Peace, one of the instant books which came out in autumn 2001, in which Mark Steel, Ronan Bennett, Annie Lennox ("I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it"), George Monbiot ("Let’s make this the era of collateral repair"), Anita Roddick ("We must shift from a private greed to a public good") and other usual or unusual suspects were rounded up, along with Adrian Mitchell (yes, also still with us), who rather lamely reprinted his old favourite "Tell me lies about Vietnam," which must have taken a few wrinklies back to the 1960s.
Intellecual vacuity, of course, is far from international. One had only to watch any of the Twin Cities' left's
These unthinking "radicals" provoked more than just amusement mixed with irritation—they induced a sense of despair. They simply had nothing to say—as they showed when they were asked for more practical advice. If Alice Walker’s suggestion that Bin Laden should be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done was one of the most remarkable entries in this whole sottisier, it wasn’t much different in kind from the fatuities on offer elsewhere. Paul Foot led the way by telling Bush, "first, cut off your aid to the state of Israel." This was like saying, first, conquer the law of gravity, or, first, fly to Venus.pro-Hussein anti-war rallies to see that ofay symbolism has replaced rational thought with all too many on the left (and on too many issues, as you notice if you work on the Concealed Carry debate too long).
This is an interesting topic, one I'm planning on exploring more. If you ask the left (see Josh Marshall), the left is just about to hit its stride. And yet as the Dean candidacy unfolds, and General Clark's mendacity is exposed to daylight, it looks like the sort of stride you see in a Three Stooges episode, only better, because the slapstick humor is unintentional.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 09:46:15 AM
Crossfired - I cut my political teeth watching "Crossfire". Back about the time I was converting from liberalism, the show crackled with energy. Original hosts Tom Braden and a pre-boogeyman Pat Buchanan attacked their topics and guests with a flood of overtly-partisan but unabashedly articulate barrage of rhetoric. It was, of course, all opinion and no fact - which, in the years before Al Franken, was something we weren't used to getting overtly from the major media.
Then, I didn't watch it for about 15 years, and was shocked to hear that it's a prime candidate for the tank. I had no idea.
David Frum explains it well:Is it possible that the brilliant original formula that made Crossfire a success in the 1990s--all opinion, no information--is out of date in a world in which Americans are threatened by dangers about which they crave information. You can learn things by listening to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, or by watching the Fox News Channel or CNN's Aaron Brown. But who has learned anything from Crossfire" recently? It may be that the show has failed by doing something that TV executives used to sneeringly insist was impossible: by underestimating its audience.
So it seems.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 07:10:22 AM
Krusing and Boozing - Colleen Kruse used to be a modestly serviceable comic. The bulk of her schtick has always (as I remember it) been to beat her audience over the head with PC cliches about...Colleen Kruse "Teenage Single Mom! Waitress! Woman in a Man's Racket!". As the City Pages said about her, The comedian is a product of working-class East St. Paul, teenage single motherhood, and a tour at Mickey's Diner. Those experiences have put her, as she declares onstage in thigh-high boots, "in touch with her inner motherfucker." Whether talking about her young son's pride in his erect penis or her day job in restaurants, Kruse is more interested in observational storytelling than one-liners". In other words, humor tailor-made for "This American Life".
She's managed to insinuate herself into the local writing crowd; she's reviewing books for the Strib now.
I can't tell what stands out the most about her review of Al Franken's new book, Icky Poopy Conservatives and Why I Hate Them: Ms. Kruse's fluence with strawmen, or the casual stupidity of her hatred.
Both are in evidence: Fluency with strawmen:There's an adage generally attributed to Mark Twain: "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on." (He would have loved AM talk radio.)
and casually-stupid hatred:On the other hand, if you play your Friday night game of cribbage with Grandma using an FBI's Most Wanted Deck just in case, you're going to want to fire up your Hummer 2 and motor on down to the union-busting mall bookseller, plunk down your $24.95 and see what you're up against. Because you've got to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.
Oh, yeah; Kruse thinks Franken is a cogent, on-point commentator:Franken has been keeping a very close watch on his opponents, including Fox News shouter Bill O'Reilly, instapundit Ann Coulter [Note to Ms. Kruse: vide Instapundit. Don't make me come back there], former CBS correspondent turned media critic Bernard Goldberg, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch. With detailed, and often searingly funny footnotes, he deconstructs their writings and public utterances for maximum embarrassment value.
Ms. Kruse; I'll toss O'Reilly over the transom if you do the same for Begala or Carville.
He catches O'Reilly boasting that the tabloid TV show "Inside Edition" won two prestigious Peabody journalism awards while he was on the staff. Never happened. He dings Coulter for research methods that wouldn't fly in a community college debate class.
I'll be waiting.Franken is brilliant at converting actual, factual quotes from our very own public servants and powerbrokers into wry commentary by simply affording them the relative calm of the printed page, rather than shouting over a media host's screaming agenda.
Where I come from, we call that "Taking the writer out of context". Note to Ms. Kruse; Franken's famous for it. Of course, Franken's fact-finding can be fallible, too. He makes a mistake when he attributes an article that appeared in the Star Tribune to "Mpls./St. Paul Magazine (the weekend magazine of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.)" But that's error, not deliberate deception.
Right.
And Franken's reflexive support of a president that lied under oath? That was...hep me, here?Readers who pick up "Lies" simply expecting a laugh will find the joke's on them. The joke is, this is no joke. Franken's sardonic critique of our culture of political disinformation is serious business, and there's a lengthy chapter on the Wellstone memorial controversy to prove it.
Ms. Kruse: What Mr. Franken proves is that he's as bald-faced a spin doctor as a Carville, without half the entertainment value. Like any pro comic, Franken doesn't shy from any subject. He's thoughtful and thorough, and not always side-splitting.
He's a cheap shot artist who specializes in out-of-context japes that, often as not, fall apart under detailed scrutiny, not that anyone cares to scrutinize the pathetic, publicity-whoring has-been.
By the way, Ms. Kruse; about your writing. I read this bit here, and I'm getting concerned:But a lot of the time, he is. Enough of the time, he is.
Much of the time, you're better than that. Some of the time, you're better than that. It would have been unseemly for him to have paced his laughs in any other way. They would have become the point of the book rather than its highlight and saving grace. Franken has built this finger-pointing book to be sturdy and interesting, no matter which side of the capital-gains tax break you butter your bread on.
Actually, I rather suspect you'd have to be sitting on Ms. Kruse's side of that issue, holding a wedge of Brie and a glass of Chablis with her and Al and Lori Sturdevant for all I know, to find it (if my skimming is any indication) anything but a has-been's painful attempt to cash in on a brief flash of outsider-hip cred.
But then Colleen Kruse probably thinks Molly Ivins is an incisive commentator, too...
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 06:28:57 AM
Sundaze - Lori Sturdevant wrote a great column on Sunday.
There's a timelessness on Machinery Hill. The visitor notes the timelessness of the 4T Program message - Tractors, Transmissions, Tarnation, Tranquility - and the clusters of genuine young 'uns gathered around their mechanics projects. These are the "Family Mechanics" of the future - the people who'll run our family garages and farm equipment dealerships, carrying on this state's proud traditions...
Or perhaps this:Standing around the 4R booth - the R's stand for Radio, Ratings, Rip and Read - one can see what 101 constant years of constant, generation-to-generation commitment (in terms of state subsidy) that the program has brought to the youth involved. The children - who will carry on Minnesota's "Family Radio" tradition - benefit - and so do we all...".
Of course, I'm lying. Ms. Sturdevant really wrote this:There's a soothing timelessness inside the 4-H Building at the State Fair. The eye can rove from the 1930s group photos and 1958 ribbons in the display case to the clusters of real young people around beribboned exhibits, and admire what 101 years of constant commitment has produced.
Sturdevant's column noted that funding cuts to the U of M Extension Service's "4H" program will spell the instant death of the family farm - or at least the Norman Rockwell-y image of the Family Farm that the DFL continues to flog.
The eye can be deceived. Courtesy of state budget cuts, change is coming to 4-H, and to its parent organization, the University of Minnesota Extension Service.
She says:County 4-H program coordinators -- along with the once-ubiquitous county extension agents -- will soon be gone.
And along, it should be added, with the tiny-town family farm life, which has been on the ropes for thirty years, and is pretty much a dead issue.
Time was that farm life in the Upper Midwest was centered around hundreds of small towns - each with a grain elevator and a rail spur, a grocery store, a church or two or three, about the same number of taverns, an extension/4H worker and a high school.
Today, the schools are consolidated, farmers think nothing of driving two hours to shop. The elevator is closed, the spur shut down years ago, the store and the taverns folded, the school consolidated with four others - in a bigger town 20 miles away - and the small towns are basically nursing homes with freeway exits. There's a new structure coming: 18 regional offices with 18 regional extension educators, coordinating the work of volunteers and of as many paid county 4-H staff members as the state's 87 county boards of commissioners care to hire.
Whither the Young Ford Dealers? Whither Future Guitarists of American? Whither indeed the Editorial Columnist Kids club?
Where county elected officials are willing to raise and spend property tax dollars, 4-H will flourish. But in counties where 'no new taxes' is the rule, whither 4-H?
Whither indeed; nobody has decided that it's worth taxpayer dollars to create the next generation of car salesmen or musicians or journalists.
So - can 4H be saved? How important is the question?
Sturedevant found a patsy - a rural DFLer - to answer that:State Rep. Al Juhnke, DFL-Willmar and a 4-H parent, spoke for the pessimists: 'Minnesota's 4-H programs are in trouble!' he warned, as he argued at a press conference for restoration of $850,000 lost to 4-H through state budget cuts this year. 'We are at risk of losing 4-H and all the good things it does for rural kids.'
But that's not the point. Why do rural kids rate a special subsidy? So we don't lose the seed art at the State Fair? Why?Did voters in Jackson and Martin counties in 2002 understand that 'no new taxes' could mean a smaller 4-H program?
Or perhaps it will dawn on Lori Sturdevant; Rural Minnesota's kids will pay their "First-ever" membership fee, if 4H is important to them. If it's not...
'I don't think so,' Harries said.
It should dawn on them before the next State Fair rolls around."
...it'll go the way of Future Whalers of America.
Need a Kleenex?
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 06:28:28 AM
Real, or Satire? - Which is satire, and which is reality: A, or B. Remember - no fair peeking:
A - "U.N. Troops to Lead 'Operation Haughty Weasel':"It's really a goodwill gesture," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "We want to let the Iraqi people know that even though we opposed their liberation, we still love their petroleum. So...you know...no hard feelings."
B - "The UN declared Aidid an outlaw and, using troops (and US helicopters) ill-equipped for such a mission, began trying to track him down. The UN raids resulted in many Somali deaths, which had the effect of uniting Aidid's clan behind him. So when Clinton reluctantly agreed in August to send Task Force Ranger, an elite force of commandos backed by US Army Rangers, to accomplish the job more professionally, the stage was set for "Black Hawk Down".
All right, dumb question.
But the UN's record at fighting terror - from Mogadishu (where they set the stage for the Black Hawk Down incident) to the Congo (where they set the stage for as ghastly a genocide has has ever happened) is as worthless as the Democrats need it to be.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/3/2003 06:27:39 AM
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Manic Tuesday - Very busy day today - job interview, plus getting the accursed computer working again.
More about the Labor Day weekend, my computer woes, plus notes on America's Next Third Party, the Democrats, either tonight (if I'm lucky in the computer department) or tomorrow (if I'm not).
Hopefully back to full-speed blogging this week.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/2/2003 04:33:36 PM
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
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