East Phillips Alien

My blog has moved to a permanent home at peterrieke.com. Stop by and say hi.

Reuters geefully proclaims that last night's election results represent "trouble for Bush."

Maybe so. What does it matter? It also means trouble for the Left, since they seem to keep forgetting that Bush WILL NEVER STAND FOR ELECTION AGAIN.

The simple fact is that if principled, viable Republican candidates emerge in 2006 and 2008, the Republicans will easily maintain their control of federal government, precisely because the Democrats are blinded by their hatred of the President and act irrationally because of it. And because their party is devoid of good and creative solutions to meet the challenges of our time. And most of all because the American people don't trust the Democrats to keep us safe.

But Reuters can just keep on dancing on Bush's grave. They're missing the forest for the trees.

I catch the bus each morning at the corner of Bloomington Avenue and 27th Street in South Minneapolis. The corner is usually populated with a colorful assortment of drug dealers and purchasers, prostitutes and single moms with kids in tow. This morning as I waited for my bus into downtown, a school bus happened to drive past. One of the dealers who was standing on the corner picked up a rock, hurled it at the bus, and shouted, "F***ers are wasting your time! Ain't gonna learn s*** sittin' in f***ing school! Get your a**es out here and hustle!"

It occurs to me that this is what poverty really is. Not so much a lack of money, or shelter, or food, or community for that matter. Rather, it is the complete absence of hope, the jadedness that would drive someone to believe that pursuing evil is their only way out.

Today's Star Tribune contains an opinion piece by state Rep. Phil Krinkie, who is chairman of the Minnesota House Taxes Committee. After the obligatory (and deserved) pot shot at the Vikings' Love Boat cruise, Krinkie vows that no new tax money will be allocated for stadium without a public referrendum. Anoka and Hennepin counties are currently considering sales tax increases to fund new stadiums for the Vikings and Twins, respectively.

I see Krinkie's point. However, it gets me thinking. On the one hand, what's the point of having elected representatives if every major decision is subject to referrendum? And on the other hand, if all the other things our tax money is wasted on were subject to referrendum, would government as we know it still function?

The idiocy of the Minnesota Vikings over the past ten days has motivated me to return to the blog.

In case you haven't heard, several Vikings players have been implicated in an out-of-control party cruise on Lake Minnetonka over the bye week, at which there were duffel bags full of sex toys, strippers, and sex acts being performed in full public view. On any other team, we would call this a scandal. With the current group of clowns we call our local NFL football team, we call it a "Thursday."

As a lifelong Vikes fan, I'm simply embarassed at the time and energy I've spent cheering for this group of losers. Fish rot from the head, and this team is no exception. I was really pulling for Mike Tice to be a successful NFL head coach. At the beginning of his tenure, he seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn't take crap from his players, who would crack the whip and instill some heart in what was a pretty gutless team under Denny Green. Instead, the opposite has happened. The Vikings traded away the most talented, dynamic wide reciever in the history of the game because Tice lost control if him. Getting rid of Randy Moss was supposed to clean up this team. At this point, they might want to think about bringing him back as a role model.

Former owner Red McCombs must be laughing all the way to the bank for snookering Ziggy Wilf into paying $600 million for a team that has one win (over a terrible team) to its name and has been an utter embarassment off the field. We're watching the defining moment of Wilf's ownership. What he should do is clean house, starting with Tice. There's no doubt that Miami Mike will be gone at the end of the season, and there's no reason to risk screwing up talented players by subjecting them to Tice's abysmal leadership skills for the remainder of this lost season. Fire his ass now, and appoint Fred Zamberleti (the trainer) as head coach for all I care. At the end of the year, bring in a head coach who has no previous ties to the Vikings organization to get tough with this team and transform its attitude. Bring in a real general manager as well. And Ziggy, you might want to lay off asking Minnesota taxpayers for a $1 billion stadium for a while. Like until after you have a Lombardi trophy or two under your belt.

I'm toying with the idea of leaving this site for something else.

I'm testing out Xanga right now.

Updates to follow.

The Wall Street Journal's Brendan Miniter hits the nail on the head with today's column, which carries the subtitle, "long before Katrina, the welfare state failed New Orleans' poor." He writes:

We still only have anecdotal evidence to go on, and we can be hopeful as the death toll remains far below the thousands originally predicted. But it's reasonable to surmise that Sen. Kennedy is correct about those who wanted to leave: Most people who could arrange for their own transportation got out of harm's way; those who depended on the government (and public transportation) were left for days to the mercy of armed thugs at the Superdome and Convention Center. It was an extreme example of what the welfare state has done to the poor for decades: use the promise of food, shelter and other necessities to lure most of the poor to a few central points and then leave them stranded and nearly helpless.

This isn't a failure of President Bush's compassionate conservatism. Nor is it evidence that Ronald Reagan's philosophy of smaller government is fatally flawed. If LBJ had won his war on poverty, Ninth Ward residents would have had the means to drive themselves out of New Orleans. Instead, after decades and billions of tax dollars have been poured into big government programs, one out of four people in the Big Easy were still poor. That is an indictment of the welfare state and all its antipoverty programs.

He's absolutely right. Ownership - of a home, a retirement account, a college education - is the the best vehicle for getting out of poverty, period.

So here's a thought. As we think through what it will take to rebuild New Orleans, we should consider how to go about it in such a way that fosters ownership. Rather than rebuilding failed housing projects using overpriced union labor, we should pursue a model similar to the one used by organizations like Habitat for Humanity, where people help build their house and have their labor counted as equity.

At least we scored more points than the Packers.

Unfortunately, the Vikings weren't playing the Packers yesterday, they were playing the Tampa Bay Bucs, to whom they lost 24-13 at the Metrodome.

After a near-perfect preseason, Daunte Culpepper played his worst game as a pro. He committed five turnovers (including two interceptions in the red zone) and could only manage 233 yards passing. He was not helped by his collander-like offensive line, who gave him no time to find open recievers and also couldn't provide any running game to speak of.

The defense was the bright spot for the first time since Tony Dungy left in 2994. Despite spending almost two whole quarters on the field, they held the Bucs to 17 points until the end of the 4th quarter. The offense had the ball in the red zone with 2 minutes to go and a chance to take the lead.

Obviously, there's a lot of panic going on in Purple Nation right now. I think everyone needs to take a deep breath. Yes, there are legitimate concerns. The Vikings looked underprepared (the offense, anyway) yesterday, which raises questions about new offensive coordinator Steve Loney. The O-line was in disarray for most of the game and the ground game was nonexistent, which is a bad sign for what was supposed to be a power-running offense.

On the other hand, Daunte Culpepper had his worst game ever and we still had a shot at winning the game. The defense looked awesome, special teams tackling was serviceable, and it looks like we've finally found a reliable punter in Chris Klewe. Hopefully yesterday's reality check will bring better results in Cleveland next week.

I’m going to post my NFL picks each week this season. Feel free to post yours in the comments – maybe I’ll make enough money blogging to sponsor a prize at the end of the year. (

Winners are in bold.

Oakland @ New England
Houston @ Buffalo
Cincinnati @ Cleveland (who cares?)
NY Jets @ Kansas City
Denver @ Miami
Tampa Bay @ Minnesota
Tennessee @ Pittsburgh
Chicago @ Washington
New Orleans @ Carolina (Going with the emotion pick here)
Seattle @ Jacksonville
Dallas @ San Diego
St. Louis @ San Francisco (See above re: Bengals/Browns)
Indianapolis @ Baltimore
Philadelphia @ Atlanta

It’s always sad when smart people embarrass themselves by saying stupid things in public. It’s especially sad when someone as smart as insightful as Thomas Friedman takes stupidity to a new level like he does in his latest column. A wire-to-wire bash-fest aimed at the President, Friedman’s offering is so full of falsehoods it’s remarkable that it passed his paper’s fact-checkers.

Of course, his paper is the New York Times …

Friedman writes:

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?

I understand and share people’s frustration over $3.00 gasoline. But accusations of “price gouging,” reflect a lack of basic understanding of how our economy in general and our oil supply in particular work. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in yesterday’s lead editorial, raising prices in light of increased demand or decreased supply is what keeps the oil flowing. Price ceilings and other government controls will only result in gas lines, since rising prices are a signal to consumers that they need to consume less.

I happen to agree with Friedman that Bush has dropped the ball on long-term energy solutions that sever our dependence on oil, especially the sort that is pumped up from ground owned by Arab states. It’s a matter of national security even more than economics. But this is a mid- and long-term problem. In the short run, the fact that a new oil refinery hasn’t been constructed in the United States needs to be accounted for, and the blame lies squarely at the feet of those on the political left.

Friedman goes on to criticize Bush tax policy advisor Grover Norquist, saying:

I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars.  I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

Classy. And patently false. The Commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that funding cuts to levee construction programs did not contribute to the disaster. In fact, one of the sections of the levee that failed was brand new. Moreover, as recently as five months ago, Friedman’s employer called for cutting the Corps of Engineers’ budget, specifically citing the New Orleans levee project (HT: Tim Ellsworth). Unfortunately, Friedman’s mind has been made up, so don’t anyone confuse him with, you know, the facts.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

Someone at the times should check and make sure that Friedman isn’t plagiarizing Kos. In any case, he’s contradicting himself. To Friedman, apparently, it’s an evil conspiracy when events drive the price of gas higher (see earlier complaint about “price gouging”) but it’s perfectly fine for the government to artificially raise gas prices nationwide by imposing a federal gas tax - at the risk of crippling our economy – in order to force people into buying cars with technology that is largely untested, still under development, and doesn’t satisfy the demands of most consumers.

I’m not even going to dignify the comment about nationalized healthcare. I happen to agree that our military is too small, but we have 8 years of cutting by Bill Clinton to thank for that. Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t to blame, as only about 10% of our military is deployed in those two countries combined.

I think the Democrats are having another Wellstone Memorial Service moment in the wake of Katrina. Their unadulterated hatred of Bush and complete lack of original and helpful ideas is on full display. Maybe they’ll regain some of their sanity when Bush leaves office in 2008, but by then it might be too late.