July 02, 2009

John Bolton thinks this is an ideal time to explain to the Iranian people that if Israel bombs them, it is nothing personal.

The statement that destroying Iran's nuclear capability is "not incompatible" with regime change, as if the Iranian people would understand if we came in with jets to "help" them, is plainly nuts on the face of it!

Oh, and then Glenn Beck and a guest agree that only a major attack on a major city by Osama bin Laden will wake the people of America to the threats that face them! How paranoid to you have to be to think that we need major violence to...prevent even more major violence?

No, these people don't want to prevent violence. They want to glory in it. They are not only nuts, but dangerous. They are in love with violent solutions and despise non-violent solutions.

Ford is staking its financial future on the Taurus. Based upon my experience of owning one for a week now, I would say it is a good bet. Mine is a 2009, but it appears to me that the differences between it and the new model are matters of style rather than substance. This car makes me want to jump in and go somewhere. Anywhere.

Meanwhile, I saw the boys use my Ranger as a farm vehicle for the first time today and it was somewhat disconcerting. I have to inform them that it is to be treated with respect.

July 01, 2009

This lady is going some. Perhaps I retired my Ranger too early. Well, I didn't give the Ranger the care this woman gave her Mercury.

Andrew Sullivan doesn't identify the readers whose comments he publishes, but this one is mine.

June 30, 2009

It was an art afternoon for me today, something I am unaccustomed to. I drove to Grand Forks. Lance's show closed and since he is working in Santa Fe until August, I boxed the photos up and put them in my car.

Then, I attended an "exclusive" reception for the two artists featured at the new exhibit at the North Dakota Museum of Art. The food was great. The company was interesting. (One woman said that she was surprised I had come since I had written a "mean" column about modern art once. I came home tonight, found the article and re-read it. I think it is anything but mean! In fact, I should have been meaner.)

Then, over to the museum. Photographer Chuck Kimmerle, a mentor to Lance and a friend to both of us, had 51 photographs on display.

The crowd was large. They swarmed Chuck's photos. The reaction was heartening. Chuck, who is UND's photographer, only started taking artistic photos of the prairie about three years ago. His eye is phenomenal. It is great to see him get deserved recognition.

The artsy fartsy types are always hesitant to like anything that isn't vague, pretentious and difficult to interpret. Chuck's photos are straight forward, yet they represent a new and vivid look at our area's landscape. It was great to see the farmer types who showed up at the show simply due to the story in the paper respond enthusiastically and unabashedly. Meanwhile, the artsy fartsies looked around trying to figure out how they were supposed to respond.

"Ah, the masses love the accessibility of photography," said one as he arrived upstairs to find the crowd there thicker than it was downstairs for the more abstract display of rocks, logs and wire.

Both exhibits are worth seeing and are on display until the end of August. Stop by the very excellent NDMOA, a true gem on the prairie.

June 29, 2009

One more here.

It is about that time of the season when the Twins usually get their act together and start winning. The key this year will be if their middle relievers can get their act together.

Aside from middle relief (for you non-baseball fans, those are the pitchers that bridge the gap between the starting pitcher, who by current doctrine can only throw about 100 pitches, and Joe Nathan, who by team doctrine can only come in to start the ninth inning), the Twins are solid. They should be poised for a run.

Liriano's game yesterday was an encouraging sign. If all five starting pitchers can pitch to their ability, look out.

So far this year, the Twins have been a mediocre team. The disappointments? Middle relief. Delmon Young. Carlos Gomez. LIriano. Whoever plays second base.

The bright spots? Mauer and Morneau, of course. Crede has been solid at third. Span continues to be a very solid and valuable player. Harris is providing good offense and defense. He deserves the shortstop position full time. Nathan is the best in the game.

The defense is very solid at every position, which is the Twins style.

If nothing else, the Twins are fun to watch just to see what happens when Mauer comes to bat.

Tomorrow evening is the opening of photographer Chuck Kimmerle's exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art. The show will run for the next two months. I am going to the opening tomorrow evening. Chuck's take on the Great Plains is at the same time blunt and whimsical.

June 28, 2009

Storm clouds gather over one of the rides at the Norman County Fair in Ada while animals wait to be won.

June 26, 2009

Bush administration official John Bolton gets it so wrong it scares a person. Read between the lines of this piece. He wants an invasion of Iran. Now. Just think how much fun that would be, both for the Iranians and our military.

No doubt we'd be greeted as liberators, as usual.

Do these crackpots ever learn?

June 25, 2009

Yesterday, I picked Aunt Olla up at the Hilton and we went for a drive in the new car. She loved it, of course. The most important thing, however, was, "what kind of response are you getting?"

Well, people really have no choice but to say they like the car.

We drove around the countryside, pulled into the gardens, then went to town for coffee and a muffin. Olla didn't need her wheelchair, although we brought the walker. She is better on her feet than she has been all winter. Of course, it helps that there is no snow and ice.

Olla is still determined to write her book. I wish she would get on it, but I am not about to push her. If they took CNN out of the nursing home, she might get something done.

Yesterday, she reminisced about when their father died in 1919. Olla's oldest brother Roy was 15 and my grandfather Melvin was 12. They took over the farming. Roy was head of the house.

Olla implied that Roy was much more kindly than their father had been. Their father had been a stern disciplinarian with a fiery temper, although he babied Olla. Roy was more calm.

Roy would take the kids to town every now and then for a treat in the Model T. Olla would always get the most extravagant dessert on the menu, a pineapple sundae. Olla tested her older brother's patience at times. One time after Olla was older, he took her little box of makeup and threw it into the lilac hedge. Olla didn't find it until spring. It was ruined.

When we went for a ride in my car, Olla said what she always says when she sees something new and wonderful: "Oh my, what would Mama say?"

Mama lived until 1969 or so. She was in her eighties. She had seen many wonders in her life. She was a wonder herself. Widowed at age thirty-five with seven children under fifteen, she kept the farm solvent through the lean years of the 1920s and 1930s.

I have been watching the news coming out of Iran. Andrew Sullivan continues to be the best source.

The response on this side of the pond from various commenters has been bizarre. The unhinged FOX news types have been using the Iran crisis to beat up endlessly on President Obama. Every event in the world, to them, is a chance to show Obama's incompetence--never mind that he has handled the crisis brilliantly.

Fred Barnes, who could be ignored as a loony if he hadn't been the journalist closest to the Bush White House, flatly denied that Iranians have any memory of 1953. "They're a young society," he said with a wave of his hand at the mere suggestion that Iranians would be resentful of 1953.

What happened in 1953? The CIA sponsored a coup in Iran which overthrew their democratically elected prime minister and put in the Shah, who ruled as a ruthless dictator. There is no debate that this occurred. The Shah was replaced with an equally ruthless Islamic regime in 1979.

Now, do you think that if an outside country had sponsored a coup in this country in 1953, say replacing Eisenhower with McCarthur, that even our younger people might be aware of it? You think we might be resentful at the country which instigated the coup?

Barnes is so blindered, so provincial, so ignorant, so convinced that all American foreign policy has been lily-white that he is actually convinced the Iranian people just don't remember that huge event in their history. In fact, some of the young demonstrators have been holding signs with pictures of Mohammed Mosaddeq, the prime minister overthrown in 1953. They want to go back to democracy, the democracy they had before the CIA overthrew it. And they are very aware of their history.

Obama is aware of this history and realizes that any hint of interference from the United States will be perceived as hostile. Barnes, like the administration he so loved, believes that such awareness of history is for eggheads and just gets in the way of the need to use military force to impose our divinely-ordained will.

A snotty Fox reporter at Obama's last news conference asked the president, "What took you so long?" to condemn the violence in Iran––as if condemnations from the US president are going to do any good! Again, it is relief to have somebody in office who actually cares about the history of other nations and isn't militantly and boastfully ignorant.

The Iranian mullahs best friend was George Bush. He was a foil adequate to keep them in power. Obama's soft power advances have robbed the thug-like mullahs of their biggest argument for staying in power: the need to keep the Great Satan, the United States, at bay.

Not suprisingly, the nut faction just can't live with the thought that an Iran that isn't as hostile to the US might emerge from this ongoing revolution. The Cheneyite thugs have been agitating for war with Iran for years. Cheney himself considered provoking war with Iran in crazy and truly treasonous ways. For these nutcases to lose an enemy, or to have that enemy moderate without our intervention, just goes against their world view. They prefer the Iraq model.

In some of the right-wing thug commentary (to distinguish morons like Krauthammer, Steyn, Limbaugh, Barnes from respectable conservatives), you sense that they sort of admire the resolve that the mullahs have shown. One commenter on a newspaper website actually said out loud what these guys are thinking: "We can't let these protests make us forget that Iran is our enemy. Rioters in this country would be put down the same way."

No wonder who's side he's on. Not so deep down, this guy loves to watch people get beat up with clubs and thinks that we sort of need a little more of that sort of thing in this country. I don't think I exaggerate. The pro-torture Cheneyite thugs admire tough regimes who put down liberal protesters. In normal times, these thugs would be called fascists. But because they have become such a significant minority, they have gotten by with presenting themselves as "conservatives."

They are anything but.

Some of the emails I have get whenever I mention torture are just crazy. One guy said, hey, Franco and Mao used harsh interrogations, why should we go into conflicts with one hand tied behind our back? You get the impression that he sort admires the manly willingness of Franco and Mao torture their helpless victims, while viewing those who would treat captives humanely as sort of wussy or, "dangerously naive," one of the fear-monger's favorite phrases.

It might seem off topic, but these are the same sort of sadistic types who view spanking of children as a sort of holy sacrament. I have seen them in action. The kid goes over the line, and they get a very serious, ministerial look on their face as they lower the boom. One soon gets the distinct and unpleasant impression that the Spanking Sacrament is an adequate substitute for Cialis.

If there is one principle these thugs love and defend, it is the virtue of cruelty towards the powerless.

Underneath all of this, of course, is a pathological level of fear. One correspondent I have states baldly that we are in much more danger now that we were in World War II. I suppose if you imagine that the corresponding thugs in radical Islam can 1) get ahold of a nuclear bomb and 2) figure out how to deliver it, then we are in danger. But there is no evidence of anything of the sort happening. And we are already at war with the Islamic radicals in Afghanistan. What more do these people want, a war with an entire religion? The answer is yes.

The danger we are in now is that a few vandals and thugs might get their hands on a weapon, or catch us negligent and napping as they did to Cheney and Bush on 9/11. Compared to the danger we were under in World War II and the Cold War, what we face today is simply piddly. But when you get paranoids in power, they can drum up the fear until they feel justified in staging an attack in order to provoke a war that they feel is inevitable. At that point, these thugs have become crazy--and dangerously so.