Marmots are, in fact, rodents.
And it's pronounced just the way it's written: mar-mot. It is not mar-mo. It ain't a French rodent.
Update for Avidor: Check here, and scroll down to order.
Friday, April 25, 2008
This just in
Spot will be happy to hear this
In the long list of who's giving law school commencement addresses, no one thought to invite Professor John Yoo to give one.
He's your witness, Mr. Aplikowski
When we last left Andy Aplikowski, he was bemoaning the fact that he had received a citation for failing to control his dog, a hairy brute of doubtful provenance named "Lugnut."
I happen to have a little to say about this [dog legislation being considered] as Lugnut was a bad boy Sunday night. He got out and got into it with a dog which apparently lives behind me. The people called the City, saying my dog was dangerous, and I was issued a citation for a loose dog. No one was harmed, I’m not so sure what really happened but I’m just going to deal with it.
Andy decides to contest this manifestly unfair action by the jackbooted thugs at Animal Control. He pleads not guilty and represents himself at trial. Your faithful correspondent Spot is called by the prosecution as an expert witness on dog and owner relations. After his direct testimony damning Andy for his neglect, it is Andy's turn to cross examine Spot. We pick up the action there.
AA: Spotty, you say you're a dog, right?
J: That's Mr. Spot in the courtroom, please.
AA: [rolling his eyes] Ok, Mr. Spot, you say you're a dog.
S: No actually, Spot doesn't think he said that; he thought it was apparent.
J: Mr. Spot, will you knock off that third-person reference crap in my courtroom?
S: Oh, of course, Your Honor. Sp --, I'm sorry. And I'll stipulate that I am a dog.
AA: What?
J: It means you don't have to prove that he is a dog. That should lighten the load a little for you.
AA: Mr. Spot, have you even seen the defendant?
S: Well, I'm talking to him right now.
AA: I mean Lugnut.
S: Lugnut is not the defendant; you are.
AA: [rolling his eyes] Ok. Have you ever seen Lugnut?
S: Well I've seen pictures of him; he's a little unkempt I must say. He could use a trip to the groomer.
AA: Objection! Slander!
J: Overruled. I've seen the pictures, too. Lugnut is pretty mangy. In fact that will be one of my findings.
AA: Mr. Spot, if you've never seen Lugnut, how do you presume to judge him?
S: Your Honor, will you remind Mr. Aplikowski that we're - well you're - here to judge him, not Lugnut?
J: He's right, Mr. Aplikowski.
AA: Did you know that kids from the Sunday School at the church that abuts my house like to tease my dogs on Sunday morning?
S: I thought the incident in question took place on a Sunday night.
AA: It did. But don't you think that Lugnut was still worked up Sunday night over events that morning? He is a brooder.
S: I won't speculate about that. But I don't think it makes any difference.
AA: What? You don't think that an encounter with giggling children in the morning wasn't sufficient provocation for Lugnut to jump the fence that night and attack the neighbor dog?
S: As a species, we're not that complicated, Mr. Aplikowski. And the ordinance says no loose dogs, and you had one. Don't try to blame it on the children. The kids probably only teased, to use your word, Lugnut because he acted aggressively when they were around. Spot finds that children are uniformly friendly around Spot: all the petting and hugging can be a bother sometimes, but it's the price of celebrity, I guess.
AA: Well, what am I supposed to do about the kids?
S: One simple thing would be to keep him in the house on Sunday mornings. It's only one morning a week. That would seem like the neighborly thing to do anyway; barking at churchgoers isn't very civilized.
AA: But it's my yard, and Lugnut's, too!
S: Indeed it is. But when Lugnut hurls himself over the fence and picks a fight with his neighbor, that's not in his yard, is it?
AA: Your Honor, do I have to answer that?
J: No. It was sort of a rhetorical question. The point was made without your answer.
AA: This witness is a waste of time. I call myself as a witness.
J: Not yet, Mr. Aplikowski. The prosecution has one more witness. Bailiff, will you bring in Mr. Lugnut from the hallway?
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Drinking Liberally tonight!
Continuing the salon discussion of what it means to be a citizen and what you'll be doing during the Republican National Convention, Drinking Liberally will meet tonight at its usual place, the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis. Meeting time is six to nine.
The Eagle's Nest?
Word now arrives at the doghouse that Fightin' Joe Repya has a blog. He calls it The Eagle's Nest. It's kind of a regrettable name.
Why do you say that, Spot?
Well, grasshopper, here's the real, or at least historical, Eagle's Nest:
Ooh, that is a bad association.
Well, never mind grasshopper; we'll let Joe fight it out on the battlefield of ideas.
Just be sure, Joe, that you never go into a battle of wits lightly armed!
Spot did notice one thing, though. In the posting Joe has done so far, Spot found only one link, to a letter to the editor in the Strib that he was going to criticize. Yet, the posts are full of Iraq cheerleading and references to what Joe undoubtedly likes to call "the facts on the ground."
Technorati Tags: Joe Repya,The Eagle's Nest
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Welcome to the pantheon
The Uptake won a City Pages "Best" award this year for the Best Citizen-Based Media Outlet. Congratulations on the award; it is well deserved.
Spotty you won an award last year from City Pages for the Best Liberal Political blog, didn't you?
Why yes, grasshopper, now that you mention it, The Cucking Stool did. There's a little badge on the right-hand column with a link to the award. It's nice of you to remember.
Who won in that category this year, Spotty?
As far as Spot can tell, grasshopper, nobody won in the category. Apparently after The Cucking Stool won last year, the editors saw little point in continuing the competition.
Nick Coleman got the award for Best Columnist which is richly deserved. As the City Pages editors observe, he cut Carol Molnau into bite-sized serving pieces almost too often to count.
Dumb ol' Jimmy Carter
Steve Sack, the usually perceptive cartoonist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, drew this one for the paper today:
Yeah, Spotty, what was that old guy thinking, talking to Hamas and urging it to consider peace with Israel? Boy, the nerve of some people.
Sack was probably picking up on remarks by America's Warrior Princess, Condi Rice:
“We wanted to make sure there would be no confusion and there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow a party to peace negotiations" between Israel and more moderate Palestinians, said Ms. Rice, speaking on the margins of an international meeting here on aid to Iraq.
Making peace is our job, Spotty! We're so good at it!
We are, aren't we, grasshopper? Anyway, Spot will say in Carter's defense that his recollection of the conversation with the State Department about meeting with Hamas went a little differently:
"No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him (Carter) to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President (Bashar) Assad or leaders of Hamas," said a statement released by the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which speaks on the former president's behalf.
Sadly, the AWP apparently missed a couple of days at diplomacy school when some Very Important Stuff was discussed.
Like what, Spotty?
That you don't get to pick your adversaries, for one thing. You have to deal with the one that's there, not your idealized view of the perfect pushover adversary. Spot wishes he had a nickel for every time Israel, or some blind supporter of it, said, "We don't negotiate with terrorists," or "Arafat is not a partner for peace." He wouldn't have to write this blog.
You don't make any money on this blog, Spot. You don't even accept advertising.
Oh, right. He'd still like the money. But Spot digresses.
Before you go off and make extravagant statements about who you will or will not talk to, you'd better be sure that you're prepared to deal with the consequences of not talking to somebody. If you insist on total surrender, you'd better be able to get it.
We have a pretty good object lesson in this from the war in Iraq. For a long time, the administration's position was that we were just going to whip the Sunni insurgency. When it became clear that strategy wasn't going to work, somebody got the bright idea of co-opting some of the insurgency to our side, and the Sunni Awakening was born. We talked to the enemy. We now find ourselves in the awkward position of funding and arming Sunni militias that are not part of the government in Iraq, but the principle is still illustrative.
Grasshopper, what do you think the likelihood is that Hamas can be stamped out?
Well, since Hamas is the popularly-elected government of the Palestinians, and since it's a guerilla movement, probably not very great.
Right, grasshopper. Better to talk to Hamas. Which brings Spot to his second point.
In the terrorism department, the Palestinians have learned from some of the best.
More than 2,000 years ago the first known acts of what we now call terrorism were perpetrated by a radical offshoot of the Zealots, a Jewish sect active in Judea during the 1st century ad. The Zealots resisted the Roman Empire's rule of what is today Israel through a determined campaign primarily involving assassination. Zealot fighters used the sica, a primitive dagger, to attack their enemies in broad daylight, often in crowded market places or on feast days—essentially wherever there were people to witness the violence. Thus, like modern terrorists, the Zealots intended their actions to communicate a message to a wider target audience: in this instance, the Roman occupation forces and any Jews who sympathized or collaborated with the invaders.
July 2, 1946: The King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed, killing 91 people
Menachem Begin, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for peace, is the same man who planned the destruction of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin. Ex prime minister, Shamir, was originally a member of the Jewish terrorist gang called Irgun, which was headed by none other than Menachem Begin. Shamir later moved over to the even more radical "Stern Gang," which committed many vicious atrocities. Shamir himself has defended the various assassinations committed by the Irgun and Stern gangs on the grounds that "it was the only way we could operate, because we were so small. So it was more efficient and more moral to go for selected targets." The selected moral targets in those early days of the founding of the state of Israel included bombing of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin. [italics are Spot's] April 9, 1948 A combined force of Irgun and Stern Gangs committed a brutal massacre of 260 Arab residents of the village of Deir Yassin. Most of whom were women and children. The Israeli hordes even attacked the dead to satisfy their bestial tendencies. In April, 1954, during Holy Week, and on the eve of Easter, The Christian cemeteries in Haifa were invaded, crosses broken down and trampled under the feet of these miscreants, and the tombs desecrated. The Israeli military conquest, therefore was made against a defenseless people, who had been softened up by such earlier massacres as Deir Yasin (where 250 Arabs; men, women and children were massacred).
When "terrorism" is committed by the weak and dispossessed against their oppressors, and it's by a guerilla movement with popular support, it is virtually impossible to stamp out. History is littered with examples of this. The AWP must have missed that day, too.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
More evidence of American exceptionalism
Alternate title: We're number one!
Here's the lede from an article that Spot saw on Tuesday night in the online New York Times:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
George Bush has told us since 9/11 what good people we are, Spot. What gives?
That's a great question, grasshopper. The answer has a lot of people puzzled. Here's what the reporter at the NYT, Adam Liptak, says:
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
Even those civil libertarians, the Russians, are mere pikers compared to us:
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
Gosh, Spotty, that means that every day, several of your readers are behind bars!
No, Spot doesn't think you can draw that conclusion, grasshopper, but it's a sobering thought. In addition to Russia and China, think of all the other Shangri-Las that the US had to beat out for the title: Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Myanmar, Kazakhstan; it's truly impressive.
According to the article, this is a fairly recent phenomenon, too, extending back only to the last quarter of the twentieth century.
It seems that we are neither as free as we thought, nor as brave as we thought if we think we have to lock all these people us to keep the rest of us safe. And Moose, this is certainly one of those growth areas in government you've been complaining about.
So that's why he wasn't at the Taxpayer Rights rally
Minnesota's most God-loving tax cheat and former fugitive has been busy. In addition to representing himself in his tax evasion trial starting this week, there appears to be some evidence of a plot he's been orchestrating in an effort to terrorize the federal judge presiding over the case:
Mr. Beale, Cucking Stool readers will recall, is one of the early funders of World Net Daily and is the father of Vox Day.
More later as the details emerge.
Beale told his common-law wife, Mun Suk Kim, in an April 3 conversation that God wants him to "destroy the judge. That judge is evil. He wants me to get rid of her."
Mr. Beale, Cucking Stool readers will recall, is one of the early funders of World Net Daily and is the father of Vox Day.
More later as the details emerge.
The timid Malthusian
In his column yesterday, Paul Krugman - whose column Spot really likes, by the way, at least most of the time - said there were three competing views of the current economic situation:
- The current run up in oil prices, and hence everything else, is just fueled by speculation. The bubble will burst and things will settle down.
- Fundamentals are at play here: increased demand from China and India, etc., but we'll drill more and plant more and everything will be fine.
- Jeebus Christmas! We're running out of stuff!
Krugman says that his view is somewhere between 2 and 3 above. Spot thinks this is the most alarmist that Krugman has ever been. People like James Kunstler, writing about the Peak Oil phenomenon in The Long Emergency, have been saying for some time that we're in the number 3 scenario.
Remember not so many months ago when it was the consensus opinion of "leading" economists that it was unlikely that the US would even go into recession in 2008? The paradigm seems to be shifting, and fairly quickly.
Oh Spot, that's such a dated thing to say!
What?
Paradigm!
Sorry.
Monday, April 21, 2008
How to make a horse from bacteria
This one is for the Crazy Singing Uke:
How can chromosome numbers change?
Come by DL, Uke, and we'll discuss.
Technorati Tags: evolution,chromosome numbers
Sunday, April 20, 2008
I made me all by myself
Last Saturday, there was the annual Minnesota Taxpayers' League piss and moan session on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol Building. It was a cold day, but the exhaust from the speakers, including Chris Baker, Jason Lewis and Michele Bachmann, kept everyone warm, if not dry. It was the usual run of buster and bile, with a special dollop of invective reserved for the six Republican representatives who voted with the DFL to override the governor's veto of transportation bill. Since Spot was not there, he doesn't know if Jason and Michele conducted a formal excommunication ceremony. Probably.
Jason and Michele had a little pep rally on Friday in advance of the main event. (A thump of the tail to Charlie for the Dump Bachmann link.)
The boys and girls over at The Uptake put up a little video in response to the rally explaining the real incidence of taxes, all as explained by Growth and Justice's Angela Eilers:
Angela talks about the most recent Minnesota Department of Revenue tax incidence report that shows that high income people pay a smaller percentage of their income in total burden than the middle class.
Oh, Spot, that must be some kind of liberal voodoo!
By Governor Pepsodent's Department of Revenue? Spot doesn't think so, grasshopper.
Anyway, the conservatives get all lathered up when they talk about "letting taxpayers keep their own money" and railing against "redistribution of income." But what a just tax policy should be about is making sure that taxpayers pay their fair share. A progressive tax system is most definitely not just "soaking the rich."
Regrettably, it often gets framed that way, even by candidates would be better off appealing to people's sense of equity.
Spot has written, maybe many times by now, about how the government services - state services, but federal services, too - are far more valuable to wealthy people than poor people. Take health care for example. The government spends a lot of money on the Centers for Disease Control; the advances in science and medicine that it makes are more valuable to those people who have health insurance to take advantage of them.
Police protection is more valuable to people with property than people without it.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is obviously more valuable to people with, well, capital. The same is true of banking regulation and insurance. Even Warren Buffet agrees with Spot that it takes a village to make a millionaire:
"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned."
At least everybody gets the same deal in being protected by our armed forces, right Spotty?
Well grasshopper, read this quote by Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC:
I spend 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.
Maj. General Butler, by the way, was a two-time Medal of Honor winner. Butler also testified in front of the US Congress in 1934 about the so-called Business Plot, a plan by wealthy business interests to overthrow the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Butler was approached about being involved in the plot.
The bilious fools Chris Baker and Jason Lewis each moved to Minnesota from their radio gigs in low tax Texas and North Carolina, respectively. If this is a such a terrible place to live, Spot invites them to move on back to where they came from.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Etymology for Saturday
E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898.
or Choking-stool, for ducking scolds, is not connected with choke (to stifle), but the French choquer; hence the archiac verb cuck (to throw), and one still in use, chuck (chuck-farthing). The cucking-stool is the stool which is chucked or thrown into the water.
“Now, if one cucking-stool was for each scold,
Some towns, I fear, would not their numbers hold.”
Poor Robin (1746).
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Ein Völker
Consider:
We got a lot of folks from different backgrounds and different states, all of whom were talking about the effects of the pro-growth economic package that was passed by the Congress and how that package is causing them to make capital investments that they might not have made in the year 2008.
or:
And I just want the folks to know what I told the Taoiseach is true, that the United States will continue to stay engaged and will be very supportive of helping the process move forward.
or:
I also congratulate the Prime Minister on having a 16 percent flat tax. I'm a little envious. I would like to have been able to achieve the same objective for our tax code, and it was a smart thing to get done, because I think those kinds of policies will enable the Romanian folks to have a bright future.
or even:
Why don't I start out with Israel, because it's freshest and most recent. I think I had good sessions all the way around. A lot of the folks I've known a long time. I've known Ehud Olmert since he was mayor of Jerusalem. We used to attend together the Jerry Ford conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado, under AEI auspices every June.
If you go over to the White House website, you can find nearly 2000 references by the President or some other administration official referring to "folks."
Now, consider this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all folks are created equal . . .
or:
We the folks of the United States . . .
or:
. . . that government of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks shall not perish . . .
It's kind of chilling, isn't it?
This is not just a matter of the incapacity of the folks in the current administration to employ a little more soaring rhetoric. Rather, it is as Susan Jacoby suggests in her new book, The Age of American Unreason, a diminutive for referring to people, or citizens. Folks aren't expected to think hard thoughts the way citizens are.
Folks implies an Orwellian animal clubiness, a rathskeller assemblage of smiling rustics, or the rallying around the security of the homeland, or is it the Fatherland? It is part of the anti-intellectual forces that have roamed the land for most of Spot's adult life.
It is part of the same crap that permits Hillary Clinton and John McCain, both raised in privilege, to call Barack Obama, raised by a single mother and grandparents, elitist.
When George Bush, or Dick Cheney, or any of the other administration flacks call you folks, people, it is not because they're your chums and they want to have a beer with you. No, it's because they want you to turn your civil liberties and your responsibilities as a thinking citizen over to them.
Drinking Liberally tonight (Thursday)
We will meet at the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis from about six to nine.
No formal program, but Spot may bring a video camera and interview some of you about what you think a democracy really is, what you believe are your duties as a citizen, your view of the role of the media, and what you'll be doing during the Republican Convention late this summer.
It might be a chance for you to use up a few of your fifteen minutes of fame for a video project sponsored by The Uptake.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Singing in the rain!
Alternate title: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life!
The last scene in The Life of Brian:
And so says Katie "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" Kersten today!
Minnesotans are facing real economic challenges, and there's some justification [Katie really works up a passion for things sometimes] for both private and government efforts to soften the sharp edges.
But before we declare an economic emergency and demand a "New Deal" for the new millennium, let's remember a classic American resource that was in ample supply 75 years ago, when unemployment was not 5.1 percent, but 25 percent.
Hey, that's great Spotty! I didn't know we had a classic American resource that was going to get us out of this economic jam. Will it work in Iraq, too? What's the resource?
Katie wants us to look at the glass as half full.
You're kidding, right?
No, Spot is not kidding.
Maybe Katie lives in the half of the glass that's full!
That's a good way to look at it, grasshopper. And undoubtedly true.
Katie goes on to wax nostalgic about the hardships endured by her parents and grandparents:
If you know people who grew up in the Great Depression and started adult life in the 1940s, you've heard about this resource. It was an attitude, a set of expectations -- the "glass half full" view of life.
I learned something about it from a practical joker and his wife -- John and Jeanne Kersten of Fairfield, Calif., my mom and dad.
The intrepid Kersten duo made its way east, miraculously avoiding the stampede of Iowans leaving for California at the time, finally to Fort Dodge, Iowa where Katie grew up.
Boy, I'll bet Katie endured some hardship, too, Spotty!
Yes, of course, grasshopper. Apparently she had to share a bedroom.
Oh, that's awful!
Yes, but just imagine what it was like for her siblings!
[whistling] Now there's hardship, Spotty.
Indeed.
Katie, like a lot of conservatives, especially boomer conservatives, channels the experience of her parents or theirs and thinks that she somehow lived those experiences herself. As a result of having experienced - even vicariously - hardship, Katie thinks she is entitled to preach on optimism, thrift, and sacrifice. Not Katie's sacrifice, naturally. That's only good for other people.
Governor Pepsodent is another one just like Katie. He likes to bring up his working class roots, but his was not a life of unremitting toil; it was his dad's.
Both Katie and Pepsodent are perfect examples of the unempathetic little scrubs that infest the Republican party today.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
JNP on MPR
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer was on Midday today at eleven. You can hear the program here. Among other things, JNP expressed his eagerness to debate with Al Franken.
A classy ending
Here is Terri Bonoff's concession speech from the DFL Third District Congressional Convention last Saturday. Behind Terri you can see her husband, one of her children, and her campaign manager. The stage was full of red-shirted people, many of them misty eyed.
Bonoff made a call to those assembled to unite to win the general election in the fall.
Ashwin Madia made a great acceptance speech, too, which you can see here.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Sorry, Big E
Eric Pusey raises the question Why is Ron Erhardt attending DFL conventions?
Last Saturday, I saw Rep. Ron Erhardt (R-Bloomington) at the MN-03 convention. This is the second time I've seen him at a DFL event since the budget override. He also attended the SD41 convention at Bloomington Kennedy High School. I saw him talking to DFL Party Chair Brian Melendez last Saturday. What do y'all think they were chatting about? The weather?
It's a little late for Ron to defect as we have an endorsed candidate Kevin Staunton running against whoever wins the Republican primary ... if Ron's still going to run. Obviously, Brian wants DFLers to win in every district and would never do anything to weaken any DFLers chances, but I would love to be a fly on the wall if they two of them ever did meet for coffee or something like that.
Eric is going to draw some flak from an unexpected quarter here, but sigh, so be it.
First, that's Ron Erhardt (R-Cakeville), not Bloomington. Ron has represented Edina, or at least most of it, for nine terms. He is the second-most senior Republican in the Minnesota House, eclipsed only by Dennis Ozment who is retiring at the end of the term. Ron is a popular legislator who has represented the area since a lot of your readers were in middle school, Eric.
Ron Erhardt is the last pro-choice Republican in the Minnesota House. He has consistently voted against the anti-gay marriage amendment foolishness, and he is also an unwavering opponent of the gun lobby's agenda, including conceal and carry. Ron has been a thorn in the side of the likes of Governor Pepsodent, Steve Sviggum, Marty Seifert, and Michele Bachmann for a very long time. He's been in favor of a gas tax increase for many years.
Taking the vote he did to override the governor's veto of the transportation bill on the eve of the Republican endorsing convention in SD 41 was an act of considerable political courage. Erhardt knew he had a challenger for the endorsement, but he voted the way he did anyway.
Ron does not deserve the abuse you imply.
Second, Eric, you don't have a DFL endorsee in 41A: Spot does. Ron Erhardt running in the Republican primary or as an independent is a formidable opponent who would have a lot of appeal to DFLers who have known him for years.
Third, this is America, not Afghanistan. We do not make women, party officials, or anybody else wear burqas and avoid contact with unrelated persons. Brian Melendez can chat amiably - and in public - with Ron Erhardt or anyone else he chooses, and it is hardly a source of gossip or innuendo.
A few days ago, Avidor sent Spotty an image of the poster that was going to be handed out at the Taxpayers' League rally at the Capitol last Saturday. It is emblematic of the vitriol that has been directed at Erhardt by a party that he must hardly recognize anymore.
Al Franken on Midday - 4/14/08
Al Franken was interviewed on Midday at eleven o'clock today. You can listen here.
At about 19:20, a caller named "Michael" asked Al, given the fact that Al's corporation had incurred a penalty for unpaid workers' compensation in New York recently, how could he be trusted to make laws in the Senate?
Spotty, wasn't that the unemployed Republican political operative Michael Brodkorb?
Yes, grasshopper it was Michael Brodkorb. But remember, he just says that he is not employed by any candidate or the Republican party.
I guess he was taking an early lunch so that he was on break when he called in to MPR to gig Al. What was it, about eleven thirty or so?
That's about right, grasshopper.
Gosh, Spotty, Mr. Brodkorb is really good about doing this stuff on his own time, isn't he?
Yes, he is, grasshopper.
Al also got two questions about dodging debates with Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer. The first one was by host Gary Eichten right at the beginning of the program, and the second was an email question read at about 39:00.
Al did say, in response to the second question, and rather grudgingly, Spot thought, that he would debate Jack in advance of the convention!
Spot has been harping on this for some time, and just for old time's sake, here's a little video he made urging Al to debate:
Jack, incidentally, will be on MPR tomorrow's Midday program: same time, eleven o'clock.
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