Barone, Covert Enemies

Michael Barone is a genius, and he says something here that I've been trying to say for years, but he says it better than I likely ever will. Read it all, it is WELL worth the time. Our Covert Enemies

Key excerpts for posterity:

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel's self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

No need to add anything, genius has spoken.

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity is a book that should be read by all, atheist, Christian, and agnostic. Lewis was all of the above at some time in his life, and he was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that this book resulted from talks he gave on the BBC from 1942 to 1944 on the Christian faith. Times have changed.

One point of his conversion that I find quite interesting.

"Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God does not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning."

The decision to believe in God is still a decision, this "proves" nothing. Anything that can come of intelligence and order CAN also come of randomness. As I've said before, God isn't going to force you to believe in him, you are welcome to worship chaos and meaninglessness. Down that path, the highest moral certainly is "what feels good". You may dress it up as "what feels good for the most people", but it is still a human determination about "pleasure". However, the Lewis formulation on meaning is still a nice try.

In chapter 4 he makes one of the best statements of not only why Christ had to die, but why nobody is "saved by their own decision".

"Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death is not something God demands of you before he will take you back and while he could let you off of if he chose: it is simply a description of what going back to him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking him to take you back without going back. It cannot happen. Very well then, we must go through it. But the same badness which makes us need it makes us unable to do it."

He then goes through a discussion of how God himself is unable to help us in his God state; ...

"But supposing God became a man - suppose human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender his will, and suffer and die, because he was man; and he could do it perfectly because he was God.".

The chapter that hits home to me the most was chapter 8, "The Great Sin". ...

"There is no fault which makes man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. 

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-conceit: and the virtue opposite to it in Christian morals, is Humility. ... According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride."

He goes on to talk how it is of course pride that makes Satan, and of course one can't be human and be without some of this most grievous of sins. In the modern world, it has become very common to refuse to acknowledge God at all, but even for those that would like to do so, removal of pride is a great gift.

"The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether". There isn't a lot to be added to that.

I'm not going to go on any more. I know it is a book that has changed many lives for the better, and no doubt made some more angry and bitter as well, but that is certainly not the intent of it. It is with certainty a "great book" in that it takes on the questions of most fundamental meaning to a human. Is this all there is? C.S. Lewis makes a marvelous case that it is only the beginning.

Why "Everyone" Believes

Anyone notice anything missing on the news this year? What about Hurricanes? They seem to be strangely absent, yet we were assured last year that due to global warming there would be more and more hurricanes every year.
2006 would be WORSE!" Take a look at Hurricanes Below Normal to see just how far below last year we are.

What does it mean? Who knows? The point is that the media knows that it is very difficult to react to what you DON'T see, so they feed us the stories that they want us to believe, and leave off the stories that don't fit with their model. They like global warming, it fits their model, people that buy into global warming vote the way they like, so we get a lot of information about how true and dangerous global warming is. When something is happening that just doesn't fit the media model, we just don't hear it and most of the population just goes along hook line and sinker.

Be a true radical! Free yourself from only listening to the MSM and read and learn "outside the lines". You too can think for yourself, and once you do, you will never go back to the processed MSM gunk that the rest of the sheep are feeding on exclusively. Unlike the sheep though, once you think outside the box, you don't have to be on any "restricted diet", you will be ready to look at information from all sources critically. You can look at BOTH CNN and Fox News, and understand the viewpoints behind each.

Then you can have YOUR viewpoint, and that is the most refreshing of all.

What if hurricanes DO start up now? That is OK too ... you don't have to live by ideology like the rest of the sheep while being told that you are "unbiased". It is enough to know that if the number of hurricanes were CLOSE to the predictions by now, it would be a MAJOR story. Just watch and discover, if some biggies happen, it will be right back front and center and interpreted to fit their model of global warming. If they don't happen, you will never hear, and they will never let you know. You can predict the future behavior of the press. Since you know the real world isn't predictable like that, you know they have to be biased.

Part of "intelligence" is a mental model that maps to reality, and you can test that by seeing if your mental model makes accurate predictions about reality. It is hard, because we all love to be right, and never wrong, but one never really learns that way. The MSM model is tempting because if lets you live the fantasy of always being right. As long as you agree with them and follow only them, you will see ONLY things that show that their model is right. You won't have to suffer the pain of being wrong, since you can always agree with them, be with "the majority" on a day to day basis and know that any ACTUAL "inconvenient truths" will be dutifully ignored. Even better, some nice distracting story will always grab the front page to help you forget that something that was supposed to be happening isn't , or to tell you that something happening (like the current good economy), "really isn't". Just believe, and you can be happy.

The only problem is then you are a sheep living the life that is being fed to you, and you never get to be you and to have your viewpoint. You don't learn and grow. OK with the Democrats and MSM, but it ought not be OK with YOU!

Brave New World

The education in the small Northern WI town in which I grew up wasn't exactly "prep school", and I didn't manage to really get the idea that "reading/education is fun for it's own sake" until a few years into a corporate career when "making a living", at least in the sense of food/shelter/clothing/Bass Beer became assured enough that I felt I could "waste some time" on recreational reading. I finally got around to reading Aldous Huxley: "Brave New World".

Other than a rather strange obsession with sex, and the kind of almost cute replacement of god with "Ford", I doubt that it will be memorable. The rise of consumerism and the need for perpetual mental occupation with nothing of meaning seems to be a pretty good prediction of where modernism moved. His writing style has been criticized, but while I didn't think it added much, it also didn't get in the way for me.

While Huxley is concerned with the masses being "infantile", the book is founded on that infantile idea that there is "some controller" or "some conspiracy", or "some secret human knowledge" that is someone helping "those in the know" and enslaving the rest of humanity. Oh if it were only so, then such "knowledge" COULD "get out", unfortunately, it doesn't exist and a bunch of fallible humans are all just making it up as we trundle along.

Pictures

Ok, there are some pictures out there now

The URLs don't seem to edit in very well with the .Mac stuff, although the upload from iPhoto is very nice and simple.

Macaulay Hatchery where fish ranching vs fish farming is done. Fish farming is illegal in AK, and it involves big pens and keeping the fish captive. In fish ranching, a hatchery is built, some salmon eggs are obtained, hatched, and the fingerlings are "imprinted" on the chemical composition of the water at the hatchery site, and then releases. Seven years later, they come back and fight to get into the hatchery. We happened to be there as this was happening. 100's of thousands of salmon boiling the water in the bay in front of the hatchery and fighting up the fish ladder.

We saw the Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau.

The ship went into College Fjord where we saw beautiful mountains and glaciers.

We spent the last two days of the trip in Seward Alaska, surrounded by beautiful snow capped mountains, but breating sea level air.

Lieberman Loses

The angry left defeats the sitting Senator from Connecticut and VP candidate from 2000 in the primary. We live in radical times. The MSM of course refuses to see the angry left as “radical” at all, since they are so close to what the reporters themselves believe. Even to come up with their usual leftward slant, they feel that they are “pulling punches” and forced to be “conservative” by their editors and the owners of the media outlets that they work for. Their hearts are over with the wing of the Democrat party that managed to defeat Lieberman in the primary.

When I hooked up at the Anchorage Airport, Time/CNN was already lamenting the thought that the Republicans would be able to “exploit this”. Their little articl was pretty weepy about “Just when the Democrats should be in the drivers seat with Bush’s low poll numbers, trouble in the mid-east, etc, they will “use this” to try to develop a “wedge” to their advantage. Hardly seems fair … somehow, all the of the reasons for disliking Bush are “real”, but the Democrats themselves voting out a guy that was good enough to be a VP candidate 6 years ago is some sort of a “fake issue”.

While the media spends a ton of time trying to make the Republican party out to be “radical”, “extreme” and “out of the mainstream”, it is pretty clear which party that is actually true of. Lieberman is a moderate Democrat, but WAY less so than Olympia Snow, Lincoln Chafee, or even Arlen Specter are “moderate Republicans”. Lieberman is more the Democrat equivalent of John McCain in the Republican party, or even in many ways George Bush.

The reasons that Bush’s poll numbers are as low as they are is because he is quite moderate, and loses at least he poll favorable ratings from 10-20% of the Republican party … the “no social programs, isolationism, budget balance at all costs, close the border if you have to shoot Mexicans” wing of the party. The media is pretty quiet about that wing right now, since they are just happy to see Bushes numbers low, and certainly don’t want to portray him in any way as a “moderate”.

So does the right wing of the Republican party stay home in November as the MSM and the Democrats hope? Does the leftward tilt of the Democrats bring more folks to the Republican side from the middle ground of the Democrats (a trend that has been going on since Reagan)? These are key factors on which the election will turn, at least we know where the MSM stands.

I'm Back

We arrived back home at 2AM Thursday, and worked the last couple of days, so still in catch up mode. Some significant posting will likely happen over the weekend since some posts were written on the trip, but not uploaded. So, continuity may suffer as it may look like I'm "still on the cruise" since that is where the posts were written.

Seward / Princess vs Carnival

Sitting in a hotel in Seward Alaska after getting off the Coral Princess in Whittier this AM. My connections have been spotty, and so has my writing, so a little background. We left Vancouver on Monday, July 31 at 4 in the afternoon. I will try to post up some pictures at some point, but of course they do very little justice to most elements of a trip like this.
The
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifCoral Princess
is 954+ feet long with 13 decks, and a capacity of a bit less than 2K passengers and 900 crew. Over 90% of the cabins have balconies, and having now cruised with a balcony, it would be hard to go back to a window. Princess is supposed to be a cut above Carnival where our previous two cruises were taken and I’d agree with that statement. It is almost exactly the same kind of comparison as “WalMart vs Target” in the department stores, although I’d argue Carnival is at the “Target level” and Princess is maybe like a Nordstrom’s or Bloomingdales. Cabins are a little bigger, ship is a little newer and nicer finished, service is a bit better, food is a bit better … it is all just a “cut above”, but of course you pay for it.

Is it worth it? Well, I shop at Wal-Mart vs Target, but I’m more inclined to think so in this case. I shop every week but I don’t cruise every week (boo hoo). Vacations don’t come around all that often, so it seems to me that a bit more investment is warranted since you are likely to have those memories for the rest of your life. The weekly milk, cereal, and other sundries will not be long in memory.

That trade-off between “stuff” and “memories” came to my mind a few times on this trip. In my younger years, my thinking tended to point toward the “stuff”, maybe partially because I didn’t have that much of it. As the years have gone by and the stuff as piled up, the value of the memories seems much enhanced. Can we “take those with us” forever? Seems worth hoping at least for at least the good ones, and as long as we have anything in this world (our minds), they are always with us here. As Don Henley says on the stuff; “You don’t see any hearses with luggage racks”.

Glaciers

Woke up just after docking in Ketchikan around 6am local time with the clocks being set back one hour overnight. Low clouds, little sun peeking through now and then, very much like it looks in here quite often it sounds like. Sitting out on the balcony after a nice breakfast on the ship and a little shopping tour of town. In one respect, it seems that all ports are alike, Alaska or Caribbean; lots of T-shirts, jewelry, art galleries, and local foods. Salmon here, rum cakes and other seafood in the Caribbean.

Nice little stream that had a few remaining spawned out salmon milling about that were fun to watch for a bit, Three cruise ships sitting at the dock right now, ours, a Holland America, and a Celebrity. Ours is full to capacity, the other two certainly don’t look empty, so the terrible Bush economy must be one other thing that the unbiased MSM hasn’t been able to get exactly right. Strange how they can be so interested in “truth”, yet somehow miss something that would see to be somewhat easy for valiant reporters to ferret out. Most likely they wouldn’t even need to resort to some secret source in order to figure out that number of things are humming along very well.

While this post started in Ketchikan, it is ending out in Glacier Bay. For some reason I was just able to get my first post of the trip up, so thought I’d try another. The weather has been “ok”. Plenty of rain, fog, some very nicely arranged points of glimpses of sun and relative clear that have allowed us to see some of the great scenery, but not enough to just sit out and bask in it. The high latitude means that the distance up to the tree line is only a few thousand feet, so we commonly sail by peaks that have a good deal of snow on them even though we are of course at sea-level. The combination of the peaks with the steep inclines of the valleys cut by glaciers with the water makes for very pleasing scenery almost everywhere.

News at 11, these glaciers have been receding for 2500 years now; faster in the 1800s than in the 1900s. Yes, this would indicate “global warming”, but major surprise, a quick check for continental glaciers covering North America could clue in not even the very geologically sophisticated that we are likely between ice ages. Given the glacier data from this trip, it would appear that we are still in the warming phase, and likely have thousands of years left until the next cool-down which will move us into the next ice cycle. How much effect did the humans have to cause the glaciers to recede faster in the 1800’s than now? Probably none, although one might conclude as scientists did in the 60’s and early 70’s that we were speeding the turn to global cooling.

My analysis of Princess vs Carnival is that for the extra money one gets a less crowded ship, better fit and finish and higher quality food and food service. Kind of like shopping at WalMart though, Carnival is plenty good enough for me, although it would be hard to cruise without a balcony after cruising with one.

Well, we are getting close to what is supposed to be the prime whale watching area, so I guess I better head out to do that. We have seen humpbacks and killers so far, but only 2 pods of the humpbacks and one of the orcas so far, so it would be nice to see some more

Hooray For Hezbolah

I can now tell that postings from the trip will be “sparse”, the connection from the ship is just very slow, so the way the blog is set up it simply takes too long to get to the posting page. Were I to be in this mode commonly, I realize that I could post using e-mail, but my impression was that speeds even from the sea would be increasing, but at least for this cruise that is not the case. As it is, my connection time there will be limited.

Have been able to catch up with the “highlights” of the news via one source or another over the past few days. Is there a “rule of nature” that one of the US parties has to be anti-Jewish? I realize that hatred of many groups really knows no political boundaries, but historically the Republican party was successfully tagged with the anti-Semitic label until the John Birch Society was purged from the ranks by William Buckley, and now is only slightly represented by Patrick Buchanan.

The level of only mostly contained glee in the MSM as Hezbollah holds out for “longer than was supposed”, and inflicts “more casualties than expected” on Israel continues to amaze. NPR was blathering that “the people of Israel are starting to wonder what this war is about”. Apparently, since all is relative to the left, there is simply nothing in the world that is ever worth fighting for, so even if someone is raining indiscriminate rocket fire on your homeland, you would be “prone to forget” why one might take action to reduce or prevent that.

There is also the apparent liberal principle that “nothing hard is worth doing”. Since it seems that Israel isn’t going to be able to stop the rocket fire in a short period of time, they ought to give up. I’m thinking that the left ought to try to understand the other side and consider that for people that aren’t absolute cultural relativists that believe in nothing but a pessimistic future, to stop trying would be just as difficult as for a lefty to stop complaining and wringing their hands about one thing or another. It just isn’t going to happen. The “radical right” is going to keep working to secure their “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” with just as much fervor as the left is going to continue to “carp, bellyache, and howl in umbrage”, the tools that they see as most helpful to the good life.

Speaking of the good life, it was a very relaxing day at sea. Some rain this AM, mostly clear this PM, but very little ability to see the shore. Just cruising along at 14 knots in calm seas. At one point this AM, while reading out on the deck, dolphins started coming to the ship from all around in the sea, formed up behind and followed in the wake for longer than I cared to watch. I suppose there were 15-30 visible on my side of ship, likely many more if one looked in the wake and the other side. I’m sure it is likely a common phenomenon, but was interesting for me to watch. Saw one other cruise ship and a couple fishing trawlers, but very much open sea with an occasional glimpse of mountains on the eastern horizon.

Not a bad way to spend a day at all. Tomorrow, Ketchican.

McCain's Son Jimmy Enlists

CNN Article

This one will be interesting to watch. The linked article is actually "fair and balanced". Points out some facts on both sides, doesn't really tell us what to think. The media loves McCain when he panders left, they of course hate him when he panders right. Somehow, they can watch Hillary pander as far to the right as anyone, but that never bother them a bit. I suppose they have faith where her heart truly is (deep in the ditch on the left side) ... where with McCain, they just aren't sure, and even though he is willing to "pander for power", which gives them hope, they have a sense of foreboding that all that time as a POW, the Annapolis years, the family history, and the apparent actual religious beliefs probably means that he is a conservative at heart. He appears to even have character, a quality that no liberal can stomach.

I suspect that they will find some way to demonize poor Jimmy. Maybe he was at some wild party, maybe he was too fresh with a girl or drove wild. Maybe he smoked pot. Maybe he didn't do anything but someone will be willing to claim he did. Those things are all of course GREAT if he is a Democrat (he can even molest and kill the girl and claim to just be driving while drunk and be a sitting Senator if he was a Democrat) ... BUT, his name could be easily drug through the mud badly somehow given that he is McCain's son. I hope not, I hate to see the MSM and the left behave like the MSM and the left to young Marines, but they will be developing some hatred on this one, especially if they are disappointed and the Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

Finally Consistency

I often observe that liberals lack consistency, but I'm beginning to understand that is only on the intellectual and character front. The juxtaposition this week of the visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, along with the John Bolton hearings gives us a couple of points to plot.

al-Maliki addressed a joint session of congress this week and gave an excellent speech on what anyone that wants success in Iraq would have to want; the continued support of the US until a stable security situation can be reached. Naturally, the MSM and the Democrats didn't want to hear is message on that front, nor hear any of his claims of progress. They saw it as a better opportunity to bash Bush, so they castigated al-Maliki for not standing up for Israel, and boycotted the speech! None of them are idiot enough to think that the head of a Shiite Arab country that needs to show that they are not a puppet of the US could possibly stand with Israel against Hezbollah. They pandered to the weak minded among the Jewish vote in the US, and of course did what they could to bash Bush while not helping either the US troops or the Iraqi people. A typical performance.

Now on to the Bolton hearings. Alan Dershowitz, a self described liberal Democrat, but ALSO Jewish,writes in an excellent op-ed :

Now, there's John Bolton, who follows in that tradition with distinction. Were he not to be confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at this crucial juncture it would send a powerful message to the international community that Senate Democrats do not stand behind our policy in the Middle East. It would be seen as undercutting American policy toward Israel. Even if that were a misunderstanding, it would have a devastating impact on the world's perception of America's solidarity with Israel.

On one hand, the Democrats give the back of the hand to the leader of a country that American blood and treasure has given a chance at democracy, while they claim "defense of Israel" as the higher good. With the other hand, they seek to stop a nomination for Ambassador to the UN of a man that even left-wingers that actually care about Israel want to protect. It would appear very inconsistent.

I come to realize that liberals actually ARE consistent about what matters to them. Emotions, how they feel. They hate Bush, that is all-consuming, they really don't care who is helped or hurt in their blind rage. Islamic fundamentalist blood thirsty terrorists can be aided and Israel or US Troops can suffer great loss but if in their calculation "it looks bad for Bush", that counts as a "win". They have no principles, no higher meaning beyond "if it feels good", so doing anything that they perceive as damaging Bush is "right" because it feels right, and it is actually consistent in their model of life.

Using a UN Shield

The statement by UN Secretary General that the Israeli bombing of a UN observer station "appeared to be deliberate" was widely reported and not questioned very much in the MSM.

It requires a bit of searching or watching some "right wing biased" news sources to find that Hezbollah was using the post as a "human shield" and firing rockets from right on top of it. Full Article

"The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity."

Those words, particularly the last sentence, are not-so-veiled language indicating Israeli strikes were aimed at Hezbollah targets near the post, said Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie.

"What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defence Forces)," he said.

That would mean Hezbollah was purposely setting up near the UN post, he added. It's a tactic Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie, who was the first UN commander in Sarajevo during the Bosnia civil war, said he's seen in past international missions: Aside from UN posts, fighters would set up near hospitals, mosques and orphanages.

We and Israel stand and fight forces that purposely use religious shrines, hospitals, and UN Observer posts to shield their activity. Beyond this, we are expected to work with a UN organization so corrupt that it tacitly approves of the use of it's own observers as shields by condemning the forces that are purposely sending rockets in on random civilian positions. The MSM in the US and the Democrats sit by completely complicit in the whole situation and cheer on Hezbollah. Welcome to the 21st century.

American Dream Initiative

The Democrats have rolled out what they call their "American Dream Initiative" which on NPR they said was "to give everyone a shot at the middle class", to which one of my more witty friends replied, "yes, and guarantee being middle class to the wealthy".

Supposedly this is something like the Republican "Contract With America" that Democrats assailed as the "Contract ON America". It worked for the republican's, they won the house in '94, and it worked for the country, they drug Bill Clinton kicking and screaming to a balanced budget, for which he promptly took the credit and left the Republican Congress with the blame for cutting the rate of growth in Medicare. Of course Clinton, the Democrats, and the media were happy to claim "Republicans Cut Medicare.

For those of you that can't quite get the difference, if I'm getting 7% wage increases every year and my boss decided that 4% would be good enough, that is cutting the rate of growth in my salary. If I turn around and claim "my salary was cut", you would be able to understand that I was lying. Somehow Democrats and the media saying the same thing relative to the rate of growth being cut in government programs never get called liars.

Note, for the lefties in the crowd that have a lot of trouble with the concept of truth, this is an ACTUAL lie, not "a failure to predict the future correctly" like Bush (and everyone else) saying "Iraq has WMD", or me claiming "buy WalMart Stock, it is going to go up". Presumably, everyone with a tiny bit of knowledge understands that cutting the rate of growth is NOT a cut, so when they say it is, they are lying. If I make a statement about WMD or a stock that I believe to be true, but it isn't, that is known as being wrong. There was once a difference between being wrong and lying, but that is just one more distinction that the left has decided to blur to fool the sheep.

I'm thinking that renaming the American DECLINE Initiative might be more accurate. It is always possible to have more income equality by reducing the amount of income. It is sometimes said that "we can't all be at the top", but unfortunately, the inverse isn't true, we CAN all effectlvely be at the bottom (or at least 99% of us, except the ruling hunta).

Most Jobs Since Reagan

ST. PAUL—June was an extremely strong month for job growth in the state with an increase of 14,700 jobs, according to figures released today by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). When added to the upwardly revised job gain of 3,300 in May and the 14,900 new jobs in April, the second quarter 2006 experienced a total job gain of 32,900—10 percent of the nation’s growth and the highest quarterly gain since the first quarter of 1984.

In fairness, this WAS reported "a little" in some of the MN papers. Generally, the economy now is better than it has been since Reagan, but much like the media in the '80s, it is very hard to tell. When a Republican is in the WH, good news is reported very little, and when it is, it always has some caveats like "it isn't as good as it looks", "not everyone is taking part in this goodness", and "it isn't going to be good very long". All of which are just as true with a Democrat in the WH, but for some reason the good news gets a lot more reporting and the caveats are always missing.

Why do Democrats get surprised in elections lately? Because the bulk of the public never hears the good news until the Republicans start doing campaign ads, and at the same time they find out that the Democrats would love to kill that golden goose of econimic progress with higher taxes as soon as they get in office. Of course, when the Republican ads point out that piece of truth, they are "negative". A Democrat will never actually ADMIT that they are going to raise taxes on pretty much everyone, they will couch it as "raise taxes on a couple rich guys".