Something's Rotten in Belgium

Some parts of the world have the cart so far ahead of the horse that they'll employ state censorship to prevent hurt feelings.

Should government harassment of the Brussels Journal continue, should Paul Belien and/or any of his collaborators be punished in any way by the government of Belgium for the public expression of their opinions, and above all, should the Brussels Journal be shut down, the government of Belgium should know that this issue will not simply disappear.

Where are all the perpetual hippies who made an industry out of pointing fingers and yelling 'fascist' at the government? Why in the EU power structure of course . . .

A Nice Way to Start

Nice result, new kits not withstanding. 2006 FA Community Shield from Millennium Stadium in Cardiff; Liverpool 2 - 1 Chel$ea.

One More From MV Mississippi

You just know they're watching NHL Center Ice with that dish.

2,600 Tons of Fun

There's a scene early in the film "Hunt for Red October" where Jack Ryan is showing Admiral Greer pictures of a Soviet Typhoon-class submarine. Greer mutters "mmm . . . big son of a bitch." Those were my thoughts about noon today.

The Army Corps of Engineers had MV Mississippi in Saint Paul today, and I went down to have a look around. She's 241 x 58 and the pilothouse is about 5 stories over the waterline. Three Caterpillar 3606's, putting out 6,300 HP and driving 93" props, get her around just fine.

MV Mississippi's main role is to move and secure the barges and other equipment that's used for sinking concrete mat systems that stabilize river beds; no small feat on the southern Mississippi River.

Did I mention it's a big ol' boat?

Mike, Johnny, June and . . . Don

Mike Douglas 1925-2006

Here's a little culture rewind from 1981:

The ACLU vs. The Air Marshall

I know which one I'd rather be seated with:

The plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending, travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.

Democrats and their media allies screamed bloody murder last year when it was leaked that the government was monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA wasn't designed for, nor does it forbid, the timely exploitation of what are often anonymous phone numbers, and the calls monitored had at least one overseas connection. But Mr. Reid labeled such surveillance "illegal" and an "NSA domestic spying program." Other Democrats are still saying they will censure, or even impeach, Mr. Bush over the FISA program if they win control of Congress.

In short, Democrats who claim to want "focus" on the war on terror have wanted it fought without the intelligence, interrogation and detention tools necessary to win it. And if they cite "cooperation" with our allies as some kind of magical answer, they should be reminded that the British and other European legal systems generally permit far more intrusive surveillance and detention policies than the Bush Administration has ever contemplated.

Does anyone think that when the British interrogate those 20 or so suspects this week that they will recoil at harsh or stressful questioning?

If only 1% of Muslims in this world are willing to die in order to kill those they deem Not Muslim Enough, that's 10 million people. That and the above are some things to think about the next time you hear the sad pleas to understand and negotiate with people willing to kill and die for their religious fanaticism.

Up Against the Wall at City Hall

Put Dean Zimmermann on the list of convicted Minneapolis City Council members that includes Brian Herron and Joe Biernat. Zim got rung up for taking bribes from a developer who wanted favorable zoning outcomes. I guess the developer took Zim's own bio a bit too literally:

Assisted numerous small businesses in navigating city policies.

Minneapolis; it's going places!

Speaking of going places, the Boy Mayor peeked out of his nest yesterday and made a heavily guarded appearance on Minneapolis' diseaed north side. After suffering thought a record pace for mudrer and mayhem, you couldn't harley blame the citizenry to voice their displeasure with Mayor Touck Feely, who promtly and swiftly ran away to a his waiting car.

What leadership.

Muslim Whackjobs in the News

We cannot win by fighting them. We must seek to understand them.

“Is it the horrendous noise? The speed? The condensation trails?” said one unnamed source close to the panel, listing some of the areas of inquiry the experts plan to pursue. “Because if it’s any of those things, we can get to work on engineering changes to make airplanes more tolerable to our Muslim brothers.”

The Kids Are Alright

Not sunny, buy humid.

Healthcare No Government Can Provide

Dale: Hey, Cindy, who so down?
Cindy: Well, my kidney's aren't working quite right.
Dale: Well, I got two . . .

“He was a regular customer that I had been waiting on for about eight or nine months. For the longest time, I didn't even know his name - we called him the poached egg guy because that's what he always ordered,” Boswell said. “One day, I was a little down and he asked me what was wrong. So I told him about my medical problems and that I needed a kidney. He told me that he would donate me one of his.”

Whether it's digital media, penicillin, the synchromesh gearbox, cajun pork chops or random acts of organ donation; the greatest inventions, innovations and acts on Earth are NOT the product of nanny government.

Congratulations to Georgia's Fourth

You came to your senses and drubbed the sociopath out of Washington DC.

Combatants Fighting Non-combatants

Moshe Yaalon:

It is clear to any objective observer that Hezbollah is using Lebanese civilians as human shields. It builds its headquarters in densely populated areas, embeds its fighters in towns and villages, and deliberately places missiles in private homes, even constructing additions to existing structures specifically to house missile launchers. The reason terrorist groups such as Hezbollah use human shields is elementary. They try to exploit the respect for innocent human life that is the hallmark of any civilized society to place that society in a no-win situation. If it fails to respond to terror attacks, it endangers its own citizens. If it responds, it runs the risk of killing innocents, earning world opprobrium and inviting diplomatic pressure to stand down.

Terrorists are fanatics, but they are not idiots. If the terrorist tactic of using human shields helps them achieve their goals, they will utilize it. If it undermines their goals, they will abandon it. If we want to live in a world where civilians are never used as human shields, then we must create a world in which employing such measures results in the unequivocal condemnation of terrorists and in forceful action against them by the civilized world.

If the world were now blaming Hezbollah, Syria and Iran for the innocent Lebanese killed, hurt or displaced in this conflict, then it would be sending a powerful message to every terrorist group on the planet: We will not tolerate the use of human shields. Period.

Instead, those who condemn Israel have sent precisely the opposite message. They have told every terrorist group around the world the use of human shields will pay huge dividends, thereby providing them with a powerful weapon that endangers innocents everywhere.

Please Disregard All 920 Photos

More bad news for Big Media, and ultimately for Hezbollah.

Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah. Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work.

More @ Power Line:

It appears to me that (Adnan) Hajj is a member of, or sympathizer with, Hezbollah. Many of the pictures he took for Reuters appear to be staged in cooperation with Hezbollah for use as Hezbollah propaganda. Thus, for example, as we noted over the weekend, the same woman was pictured two weeks apart, on each occasion allegedly bewailing the loss of her home in an Israeli air strike. Or the same wrecked building was shown on different occasions, allegedly damaged in two different bombings.

Are You Ready for Some Socialism?

Don't look now, but the DFL nominee for the 5th district is whoring for money outside the 5th district. I can already hear the remake of Hank Jr. party classic: "All My Lefty Friends are Coming Over Tonight:

Saint Paul Supports Keith Ellison Fundraiser with Congresswoman Betty McCollum, Mayor Chris Coleman, Commissioner Toni Carter. Sunday August 13th - Home of Dan and Cassie Cramer, 1910 Hampshire Avenue, Saint Paul.

The list of those expected to show up smiling and fork over the moola reads like a who's-who of tax-and-spend big government in St. Paul: Sen. Ellen Anderson, Rep. Matt Entenza, Chief Bill (Corky) & Linda Finney, Rep. Alice Hausman, Council Member Lee Helgen, Rep. Sheldon Johnson, School Board Member Kazoua Kong-Thao, Council President Kathy Lantry, Rep. John Lesch, Rep. Tim Mahoney, Rep. Carlos Mariani, Council Member Debbie Montgomery, Revs. Byron & Sharon Moore, Sen. Mee Moua, School Board Member Al Oertwig, Comm. Rafael Ortega, Sen. Sandy Pappas, Rep. Michael Paymar, Comm. Victoria Reinhardt, (former failed Mayor) Jim Scheibel, School Board President Elona Street-Stewart, Rep. Cy Thao, Council Member Dave Thune, Rev. Carl Walker and the beat goes on.

You may have noticed that among those featured to lead the chanting is my representative, the mostly invisible and completely predictable Betty McCollum. If you remember, she pitched a fit last August about the possibility of Mark Kennedy making doing some campaigning outside of his district. I guess Betty was just feigning indignation last year, since she's blowing sunshine for Ellison outside his district this year.

Stop the Marketing People Now.

Attention Major League Baseball: The home team wears whites that say the team name. The road team wears grays with the city name. That's it. No third color crap. No sleeveless crap.

Attention American automakers: Stop pretending that eveything you make is a hot rod. A Hemi head engine in every Dodge? The SS badging on a front-drive Monte Carlo? A Focus GT?

Attention beverage manufacturers: Diet vanilla cherry caffiene-free Dr. Pepper boost? Just stop the shelf-space grabbing madness.

MTV @ 25; Ho Hum

So it was probably 1983 or 1984, over at Nate's place in Stillwater, that I first saw MTV. I lived in Afton then, and I don't know if you can get cable there now, so one had to go 'to the wire' back then.

Yea, it was cool and revolutionary. Everything is when it's the first thing out there. MTV was radio that had something for your eyes. Of course, you can argue all day long about whether this was a good or bad thing. As a fan of short-format conceptual video, I was always very interested in how a filmmaker would interpret a song into something visual. However, now it's easy to look back and damn the whole process, since, to this day, I can't hear Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" without seeing a Lewis Carroll-gone-wrong treatment.

Not that I'm listening to a tremendous amount of Tom Petty.

More than CNN or ESPN, MTV drove cable TV into American households. It also was the first legitimate chink in the armor of the big 3 networks, and since the cracks are still widening, we should be grateful to MTV for starting a broadcasting revolution.

MTV was like watching the Olympic Games live for the first time as opposed to tape-delayed and edited recaps. You had to keep watching because you really didn't know what would come up next. The idea of unpredictability was unheard of in music programming. God knows KQRS and other living-on-borrowed-time FM dinosaurs weren't going to give me the B-52's, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Pretenders, Todd Rundgren, etc., etc., etc.

Then, (whenever then was) MTV really dropped off my radar. By the admission of it's founder Bob Pittman, the channel would have to teardown and reinvent itself every couple of years (which is a very healthy attitude to have from day 1), but the problem came when MTV went from lots and lots of music to less and less music. You're now hard pressed to find much time devoted to new music, and the overwhelming majority of programming are docudramas and reality shows that have nothing to do with music.

There's the killer: MTV has turned its back on the music. The content is no longer all about the artists. It's now all about the audience. As a nearly 40-year old with a wife and a house and a degree and a job and friends and a life, watching shows about MTV's audience couldn't be a worse use of my time.

You always hear about the very first video played during MTV's first hour on the air in August of 1981; "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. Well, in their zeal to make a statement, MTV was too myopic to realize the irony of their selection. Let's go to the lyrics:

They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology
and now I understand the problems you can see.

And now we meet in an abandoned studio.
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago.
And you remember the jingles used to go.

Video killed the radio star.
In my mind and in my car,
We can't rewind we've gone to far.

Say what you want, that's not a kickoff, it's a death watch.

Can you imagine CNN with no news, or ESPN with no sports? Hey, Music Television, where did the music go?

Minnesota Family on the Move

Whoever these rubes are, their house really should be the market this week; secrets are not kept forever.

Five Minnesota Zoo meerkats destroyed after a girl was bitten did not have rabies after all, a zoo official said today. The 9-year-old girl, who has not been identified, was bitten Wednesday when she reached her hand into the animals' exhibit.

Stupid zoo; why wouldn't there be any signs that say 'don't pet the animals.' Oh, there were signs? Moving right along . . .

The meerkats -- two mates and their three offspring born this spring -- had been vaccinated for rabies but were killed because the girl's parents didn't want her to have to undergo a series of rabies shots, said zoo collections manager Tony Fisher.

Thank God for that. What could be worse than a 9-year old learning that there are sometimes unpleasant consequences for ignoring the signs?

The girl had climbed atop 3 feet of rock work and reached over a 4-foot glass barrier Wednesday afternoon when she was bitten. The entire family of meerkats was destroyed because it is unknown which one bit the girl, Fisher said.

The least, and I mean the VERY least, these crappy humans could do is offer to pay the zoo for the replacement of the meerkat family. When I am governor, all zoo visitors will sign a waiver that allows zoo officials to tackle and forcibly vaccinate for rabies on the spot anyone (of any age) who breaches a barrier and makes contact with the animals.

Really, for your own good, and for the good of your precious, insulated, illiterate daughter, leave town.

Now.

One That's Going Around

A plane carrying a Texan, a Frenchman and an Israeli crash lands on a remote island and the three are immediately captured by a tribe of cannibals. The Chief tells the 3 captives that each will receive a last wish before they are eaten by the tribe.

He asks the Texan, "What is your last wish?"The Texan replies: "I want a 2 inch thick steak with all the trimmings, Cajun fries and a case of Bud." The Chief motions to some of his tribesmen who immediately run into the jungle and come back with the steak, the fries and the beer. The Texan eats his meal and he is thrown in the pot.

The Frenchman is asked: "What is your last wish?" He replies: "I'd like a case of Dom Perignon and I'd also like a big plate of escargots cooked in the French manner." The Chief motions to his tribesmen who immediately rush off into the jungle and bring back everything the Frenchman asked for. He eats and drinks his fill, and he is then thrown in the pot.

The Chief turns to the Israeli and asks, "And what is your wish?" The Israeli looks the Chief squarely in the eyes and replies: "I want you to kick me in the behind as hard as you can."The Chief is bewildered and asks the Israeli again, only to receive the same reply. "I want you to kick me in the behind as hard as you can."The Chief shrugs his shoulders, asks the Israeli to turn around, and kicks him as hard as he can. With that the Israeli pulls out a gun and kills the Chief and all of the other cannibals.

The Texan and the Frenchman get out of the pot, look at the Israeli and say: "If you had that gun why didn't you do anything sooner?" The Israeli replies: "What? And risk being condemned by the UN, EU, the Vatican and the State Department for 'overreacting' to insufficient provocation?"

What if the Shoe Fits Either Foot?

Where does crime and violence come from? Maybe it's manufactured:

How could it happen? In Seattle, of all places, a city of moderation and diversity? On Friday, July 28, a man barged into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. It is alleged that, armed with two handguns, Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, killed one woman and wounded five others. And so the War on Terror comes to liberal Seattle, at the very heart of the congressional district of “Baghdad” Jim McDermott. Although Seattle is the very enemy of “hate,” Haq will not be prosecuted for a hate crime, according to Seattle Times reporters. He will be prosecuted under state murder laws.

That’s as it should be. The hate crime laws were designed with right-wing militias and gay-bashers in mind. They were never intended to be used against Muslim hatemongers and Jew-baiters. Back when right-wingnuts were blowing up innocent civilians in federal office buildings, no less a person than the President of the United States hinted that right-wing talk radio was to blame.

Overwhelmingly, people do what they are told; they respond to the cues that the culture sends out, young people more than anyone. Today progressive Seattle is conducting unity meetings to bring everyone together. The trouble is that tomorrow Seattle will return to its grand old progressive tradition: encouraging victims and condoning social pathology.

Stormy North Woods