Attention, Boutique Writers!

The City Pages, for those of you from out of town, is the local freebie lifestyle handout.

It features some excellent reporting - at its best, as good as and sometimes better than the dailies serve up. Call that "sublime".

Of course, the bulk of the paper (not counting the ads for escort services, bars and gablines) is devoted to endless rehashing of this years' model of garage band, and reviews that range from the pretentious and overwrought to the pretentous but fairly good. Let's call that part "ridiculous".

And then there's their blog, the "Blotter", the latest repackaging of "Babelogue", the big blog that, 'til now, couldn't. "Blotter" features some excellent writers - Paul Demko and Brad Zellar - and some others who serve more as comic relief.

Mike Mosdale - well, he never made much of an impression on me, and the one he left was "Might as well read MoveOn.org press releases and cut out the middleman.

On the upside - he noticed my humble blog. On the downside, his head is jammed in his agenda to the shoulder.

He writes in re my piece about the Kelo decision:

A lot of conservative bloggers whipped themselves into a lather over yesterday's Supreme Court decision upholding the right of government to seize private property to make way for shopping malls, office parks or any other development project that strikes the fancy of an ambitious city planner.

Among other things. Many other things.

But why quibble so far?

Naturally, much of the rhetoric was overheated. Shot in the Dark's Mitch Berg shrieked that the court's "five liberal members gang raped property rights" and than blathered on with a reference about "the Ba'athists here at home we have to mop up."

Yeah, that's the nice thing about having a blog; nobody to enforce their temperament on me.

Powerline's Scott Johnson, striking a somewhat more restrained tone, complained about the court's "accommodation of governmental power over individual rights." Meanwhile, his colleague John Hinderaker was moved to harrumph: "I don't see how the ideological lineup could be clearer. If you care about property rights, vote for conservatives."

Strangely enough, I found myself in agreement with many of the sentiments expressed by these tiresome gasbags. [Which, for a boutique writer, isn't bad - Ed.] Kelo v New London is an outrageous decision. It will enrich big corporations, powerul developers and real estate interests; it will result in little people getting screwed out of their homes. In other words, it a decision that ensures more business-as-usual.

And he's right - as far as he goes.

"As far as he goes" meaning in this case "as far as his agenda allows him". Let's look further:

But I do wish someone on the right would own up to their favorite president's sordid history in regards to exactly this practice. Bush made the bulk of his personal future (as general partner with Texas Rangers) thanks to an eminent domain land grab and massive public subsidy that was used to build the Ballpark at Arlington.

Hm. Mike? I know that Nick Coleman ascribes a lot of power to us NARN bloggers, but honestly, we have pretty limited control over things that happened over a decade ago in another state. But OK, for propriety's sake - Bad president. No donut.

Now, shall we grow up? Because once Mike Mosedale's woody for Bush-whacking has subsided, really, eminent domain is a tool of the establishment - and the establishment isn't partisan so much as it is a subscriber to the realpolitik of keeping itself, er, established.

So while the left is in a froth over putative GOP fatcats profiting from eminent domain, it's been a tool of the left for fifty solid years; the skids of the Urban Renewal social engineering movement, a fundamentally statist (ergo un-conservative) movement that condemned whole neighborhoods to build freeways (destroying Minneapolis' Phillips and St. Paul's Rondo and West End and North End 'hoods) and acres of dreary moderne office buildings (Minneapolis' Gateway neighborhood) and crypto-Bauhaus corridors (Saint Paul's Cedar Avenue), were greased with Eminent Domain.

Of course, the urban alternative media has only the most cursory knowledge (if any) of the massive pre-emptions and takings in the rural west, in the interest of wildlife and wetland mitigation, irrigation projects, conservation project and the whole array of "government knows best" ideas.

Eminent Domain - and its first cousin, Tax Increment Financing, which does for money what Eminent Domain does for land - are just as much the province of the DFL machine in Minneapolis on behalf of Target and the Twins, or the heavily DFL City of Richfield on behalf of Best Buy, as it is in Shoreview or Woodbury or Eden Prairie. The Establishment is just as much Vance Opperman as it is Bill Cooper.

So my question to the starboard bloggers: Where's the outrage?

Screw outrage. That's for boutique writers who are slumming on fake blogs.

I'll spend my time trying to figure out how to take back some of the legislative ground whose loss led us to this point.

Care to join us, Mike Mosedale? I mean if Mark Gisleson and I can agree on something like this (and it is the only thing we've ever agreed on), certainly you're not beyond hope?

Or are you just a tiresome gasbag?

Posted by Mitch at June 28, 2005 05:02 AM | TrackBack