Doug Grow in the MinnPest does an endzone happy dance over the kickoff of Minneapolis City Hall’s new, hideously expensive, purely symbolic “Green Roof”:

Workers will begin tossing dirt on conservative talk radio skeptics and 5,000 square feet of roof at the Minneapolis City Hall Saturday.

Just a hunchy, Duggles, but I don’t think the last dirt’s been tossed on this issue.

We’re gonna keep this one on the radar for a loooooong time.

(more…)

…the Cubs would win the Series, the people of Myanmar Burma would toss off their military junta for their crimes of neglect…

…and the people of the Fifth District would shake their heads, realize “Oh, Crap – Keith Ellison is one crappy representative!”, and carry Barb Davis White to Washington on their shoulders.

But this is the real world – so Barb’s gotta work for it.

Not just a “real world”, mind you, but a “real world” where the local mainstream media is completely in the bag for the DFL.  As a result, GOP candidates can expect boundless hatchet–jobbery…

…while Democrats  can expect to get their message out pretty much as they want to; the Strib, at least on its editorial pages, is a PR firm for the DFL in all but name.

So last week, the Strib uncritically ran Rep. Ellison’s fairly vapid attack on the Supreme Court’s upholding of Indiana’s voter ID laws. 

Barb Davis-White promptly wrote a rebuttal.  And she’s waiting for the Strib to print it.

And waiting.

And waiting…

Well, I’ll print it here – and if you’re a blogger who assails the Strib, I hope you will, too.  I’m not going to inset my comments – but I will add emphasis to parts I think are particularly important:

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion, has ruled that it is not too burdensome to ask citizens to show a picture id when voting.  Now, most people would say that this is common sense.  In fact, a Rasmussen poll found that 82 percent of Americans, including 75 percent of Democrats, believe that “people should be required to show a driver’s license or some other form of photo ID before they are allowed to vote.” The civil rights of every American are violated when the fraudent votes are counted in an election.     The integrity of the ballot box is just as important to the credibility of elections as access to it.

Representative Ellison does not appear to be blessed with the common sense that the legislatures in Indiana and several other states have.  His recent editorial in the Star Tribune spits out in the style of a first year law student accusations of “disenfranchising voters and likens it to a “poll tax.”  He even brings up the concurrence of Justice Scalia, obviously in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that the court’s most liberal justice wrote the court opinion.  As Justice Stevens points out, “Because Indiana’s [identification] cards are free, the inconvenience of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required documents, and posing for a photograph does not qualify as a substantial burden.”   Again, common sense that is lost on Mr. Ellison. 

In a democracy, the voters, through their elected officials, have a right to pass laws to protect the integrity of their democracy.  There are countless stories where ACORN, a liberal activist group, has been found guilty of voter fraud, from submitting false voter registration forms in Kansas City to bribing voters with cigarettes in Milwaukee.  

We face many threats to our liberties, and these right to vote is an important one not to be taken lightly.  But when you watch what voters in most of the world go through to exercise their franchise, including brave Iraqis who defy sniper fire and suicide bombers, is it too much to ask that our voters show an ID? 

Ellison’s reponse is vacuous demigoguery – good enough for a DFL meeting, but not good enough for an elected official that represents a big, diverse district. 

Myon Burrell has been convicted a second time for the 2002 murder of Tyesha Edwards:

Hennepin County Judge Charles Porter found Burrell guilty of two murder counts: first-degree murder and first-degree murder for the benefit of a gang. He was acquitted of several other charges.

Edwards was shot in the heart as sat in her house in Minneapolis and did homework.

The just ended trial is the second for Burrell in the 2002 shooting. He was convicted in 2003 of first-degree murder in Tyesha’s death, but the state Supreme Court set aside the conviction in 2005, saying a statement he made to police was inadmissible. Burrell has remained in jail in lieu of $1 million bail.

The defense contends that the case was a rush to judgment and that Burrell was charged in a politically volatile atmosphere because of community outrage over Edwards’ death. In a bid to solve the killing quickly, police failed to follow other leads, the defense also said.

Hopefully that’ll be the end of it.

Although Minneapolis’ status as a criminal cesspool, thought slightly improved in recent years, just goes on and on.

Markets change.

Left to their own devices, markets for pretty much anything will move in some kind of cycle or another.

Remember Beanie Babies?  As demand boomed, the prices skyrocketed; when supply couldn’t keep up, fights broke out as the demand curve shot out past the bounds of reason.  Then the supply caught up, and a huge collectors market – let’s call it a “Beanie Baby Bubble” – erupted.  People, awash in “irrational exuberance”, started banking lots of money on the future upside of the Beanie Baby; there were even stories of people betting their retirement funds on the Beanie Baby market.

The bubble deflated, eventually. First, the supply of Beanies caught up with, then surpassed, and finally obliterated demand, as the supply of common sense finally caught up with the supply of duuuuuhhhhhh.

Today, Beanies have a respectable market.  As toys.  Not as investment products.Stores, adjusting to the demand, changed what they stocked;  more XBox 360s, less Beanies.

But then, RT Rybak wasn’t mayor at the time.  Had he been, perhaps – to try to prop up the city pension fund’s investments in Beanies (one can imagine), or to punish stores for having participated in the bubble, he might have instituted policies as stupid as this one:

As New Prague and other cities see more single-family homes changing over to renters because of the national housing market meltdown, many are enacting tougher rental policies. Since February, Minneapolis has decided to collect a $1,000 fee when a home is converted to rental.

The Minneapolis fee will cover costs such as inspections.

Leaving aside the first, obvious question – does it really cost $1,000 per house to send a city droog to “inspect” the property?

What’s the percentage for Minneapolis stifling a sane, rational response to the situation?  Given a choice between renting a house out and leaving it sit vacant, isn’t it better for the neighborhood, the city’s tax base, the crime rate, and “affordable housing” situation to have rentals than block after block of those blue (in St. Paul, anyway) “Vacant Building” posters?

I know – that’d require a city government that believed in the market – or was at least well-enough informed about it to hate it articulately.

The Strib reports – belatedly – the story of Matthew Miller.

Miller was one of the heretofore unsung citizen-rescuers who saved so many when the 35W bridge collapsed. As fast as the police and fire departments responded, the people on the scene were faster – and Miller was right there:

Miller turned — and saw nothing, except dust and smoke.

“After about a minute, I realized there was no more bridge. So then I went from chaos mode to panic.”

Miller worked his way down into the river gorge, across train tracks and woods, to where a huge canopy of highway was resting at a sharp angle.

He jumped down an 8-foot embankment, grabbing a tree branch to break his fall.

“There were screams, blood, everything was down there. … I didn’t even know where the heck I was running. I just kept on running.”

Then he got to the place he calls Ground Zero. “There was eight lanes of concrete hanging 15 feet above me.”

In an instant, he found himself praying. “I said, ‘God, help me not to focus on that piece of concrete, that piece of highway hanging above my head.’ From there, I didn’t look up.”

Miller started getting people out of cars that had come crashing down with the bridge. “Everybody that I helped was alive, though more than one with their eyes rolling into the backs of their heads,” he said.

Among the first people Miller found was a woman trapped in a car upside down. He crawled into the car and ripped out the head rests so she could be pulled out through the back seat.

Strangely, she was calm. “She was very uncomfortable, I could tell,” Miller said. “But she was more calm than I was.”

And now, seven months later?

Miller’s feat, although acknowledged by Minneapolis police, came to public light only last week, when the Congressional Medal of Honor Society announced that he is a finalist for its first Above & Beyond Citizen Honors for unsung heroes.

The award, to be presented by retired Gen. Colin Powell on March 25, would be the first national recognition for any rescuer in the Aug. 1 bridge collapse, which took the lives of 13 people. Among those who died: Miller’s co-worker Greg Jolstad, who had been joking with him hours before.

“I’m not really a big hero. I don’t need to have that label,” said Miller, a senior at Bethel University in Arden Hills.

Fair enough. But kudos, and thanks, anyway.

When I first moved to the Twin Cities, I had a few interviews in some of Minneapolis’ older office buildings – the Sexton, the Endicott, the Grain Exchange, among others.  I was fascinated; they were like snapshots out of a Sam Spade movie, with pebbled-glass door windows and painted names and offices straight out of film noir.  I’ve often thought that if Salem Radio came calling, I’d build a studio in one of those old buidings (hello, Pioneer!).  Call it “Global Import Export”, maybe.

While I don’t agree with much I read at the Strib, it’d seem Eric Ringham has been reading some of the same stuff:

A man ought to have an office in the Grain Exchange. He ought to walk past classy architectural details on his way to work in the morning.

He ought to hear the sound of his wingtips echoing off the marble as he approaches his office.

A man ought to wear a suit and a proper hat. He ought to wear Florsheims, not Rockports. If he wants to get comfortable, he can loosen his tie and cock his hat to one side.

He ought to work for himself. Maybe as a private eye, maybe as a highly paid novelist. He shouldn’t be particular.

A man ought to have a frosted-glass door with his name etched on it. Maybe the name of his partner, too, if he has one. (When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. Not that a man should compare himself to Bogart.)

OK.  Maybe he’s reading too much of the same stuff.

But you get the idea.

On Friday, Minneapolis Crime Watch noted:

There have been NO murders yet in 2008. (Knock on wood). By this time last year, we had 7.

Only 11 months to go!

An emailer notes that Jim Oberstar is going to provide cover for the Tics and their premature indictment of the Taxpayers League, the Governor and the Incredible Stable Gas Tax for the collapse of the 35W River Bridge.

He  points us to this article in the Strib (emphases added):

Minnesota Democrat Jim Oberstar, chairman of the
House Transportation Committee, fired off a critical
letter to the head of the National Transportation
Safety Board (NTSB) on Wednesday, saying it was
“highly inappropriate” for him to dismiss corrosion
and poor maintenance as possible causes for the
Interstate 35W bridge collapse.”

Seems to me that Oberstar is pressuring the NTSB to
make sure that their final conclusion includes some
mention of corrosion or maintenance. 

If the facts don’t support you, argue the law (of physics); if the law of physics doesn’t uspport you, argue the facts.  If the facts and the law are against you, argue like hell.

Call it “trying to create reasonable doubt” – although the doubts Oberstar is trying to create are in no way reasonable.  Bridges don’t fall because of ethical lapses or political choices or semiotic miscues; they fall due to ineluctible failures in material or design.   

Back to Oberstar:

“The board has not determined whether the design of
the plates was the primary cause of the accident
compared to other possible causes such as corrosion
and poor maintenance,”

His earlier statements just after the NTSB press
conference also imply he’s expecting different results
in the final version.  Oberstar is the head of the
transportation committee which has over site of the
NTSB.

In other words, Oberstar would seem to be playing to the nutroots; people who’ll believe any crap you shove in front of them. 

Read and decide for yourself:  here’s the transcript of the NTSB press conference.  See what references to maintenance or corrosion or gas taxes you can find coming from the engineers who contributed to the findings, so far.

The emailer notes:

At no time does the NTSB claim to know the
cause of the bridge collapse.  The purpose of the
press conference is to issue a “safety recommendation”
to the Federal Highway Administration with regards to
re-performing bridge design calculations.

NTSB safety advisory report (not a preliminary report)

and here if you’re a bridge engineer.

The emailer also directs us to this bit on Rep. Oberstar’s website, and this quote:

“Congressman Jim Oberstar says that the preliminary findings by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) may help prev ent another tragedy like the I-35W bridge collapse.  “The NTSB is right to take aggressive action to release any information about the bridge collapse.

Unless it doesn’t provide cover to Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, E-Tink, Nick Coleman, and the DFL and their other water carriers.

I’m going to send an email to Oberstar’s office asking for comment. 

I’ll keep you posted.

What do you get when you combine Katherine Kersten – the Strib columnist that provokes the most irrational hatred per pound of any columnist in America – and Don Samuels, the North Minneapolis figure and former hero who, once he demanded radical change in Minneapolis’ decrepit school system, became minority non grata?

Listen up, folks: I don’t exactly make a habit of praising collaborative, cross-departmental efforts dreamed up by DFLers.

But this is different.

The smart money says “look for the regional leftybloggers to turn on the program”.  Assuming any of them know about it, anyway.

I got this via email today (I’ll keep the sender anonymous, unless the sender wants their identity made public); I’ve added emphasis:

As for the latest gusset plate findings, the original I35W bridge design and it’s approval seem to coincide with the peak of Minnesota political power of Nick Coleman Sr.  [the columnist’s father, and former Minnesota legislative leader] If you really want to P.O. “Nickboy” you can refer to the collapsed I35W bridge and “the Nick Coleman Senior collapse I35W bridge”.

Heh.

Although that’d be kind of below the belt; Nick Senior wasn’t any more an engineer than his son is. 

(Or any less a “journalist”, if we presume that the elder Coleman wouldn’t have been publicity-hungry, or dumb, enough to have blamed politicians for disaster before he knew any empirical facts).

The last time Nick “The Monkey” Coleman talked about gusset plates, he was tittering like a schoolgirl (I add some emphasis):

Get ready to be gusseted…I doubt that many Minnesotans heard of gussets before Aug. 1…“gusset” has become a favorite word in the mouths of politicians, particularly those looking to cast suspicion not on their politics or policies, but on inanimate steel objects.

Of course, if the “inanimate steel objects” (and, more importantly, the design work that went into them) actually were the problem – well, that’d be an issue, wouldn’t it?…Although a three-year study of the problems of the ailing I-35W bridge did not focus attention on the bridge’s gussets, and although the bridge was still in the Mississippi River, it took only a week after the bridge fell for the Bush administration’s secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, to finger the culprits: Gussets.

The mockery oozes through Coleman’s writing; you can practically hear his thought process creaking away:  “GUSsets!  That sounds FUNny.  Sounds like something a Buh-LOGG-er would think up.  Damg WINGnuts“.

Well, he was wrong.  We were right.  And Coleman has, apparently, been “gusseted”.

So badly gusseted was he that he gussets logic even worse than usual!:

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board says inspections of the Interstate 35W bridge would not have found flaws in the design of the bridge, which opened in 1967. Such inspections would not have learned if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or whether the moon is made of green cheese, either.

Ooh, can I play?

“But then, raising the gas tax wouldn’t have copped Oswald, cheesopsied the moon or raised the Titanic!”

Maybe I can be a “Metro Columnist”.

So NTSB board chairman Mark Rosenker was disingenuous, at best, when he said “routine” inspections would not have found a flaw in the bridge gussets that the NTSB is blaming for the collapse. “Routine?”

There was nothing “routine” about the bridge, including its inspections. It had so many problems that it was the most-inspected bridge in Minnesota and engineers were openly worried (according to a story in this paper Aug. 19) about the dangers of a collapse.

That nobody – nobody! – proof-reads Coleman’s material is a matter of record.  But I wonder – does Coleman even read his own stuff after he types it?

The fact that MNDoT recognized the bridge’s issues – “Worried” about it – to the point where it became the most inspected bridge in Minnesota means that the response was routine.

The question isn’t whether the original designers were distracted by thoughts of Marilyn Monroe as they were planning the bridge. The question is why wasn’t the bridge closed, or fixed, by those in charge now?

Because nobody knew the gussets were inadequate enough to topple the bridge.  Corrosion is a fact of life in steel structures, and piers are just as prone to tilting as foundations are to settling after 40 years. 

But the gussets are a godsend to officials who want the public to believe they had no idea the bridge was in jeopardy and there was nothing that could have been done about it.

Neither statement is true.

Right – presuming that any indication existed that the gussets were inadequate for the job. 

Which, as it happens, seems – at this point – to be inconveniently nonexistant.

The gussets are Minnesota’s O Ring. When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the flaw was a gasket called an O ring that failed in cold temperatures. But the O ring problem was known to the officials who crossed their fingers and launched the shuttle.

The O ring didn’t decide to launch itself, and the bridge didn’t decide to stay open to traffic, despite its many flaws.

The difference – because Coleman either chooses not to explain it, or because he doesn’t know any better (place your bets) was that while Morton-Thiokol – the company that designed and built the O-rings on the Challenger – left documentary evidence that they knew the O-rings could contract outside of tolerances during cold weather, there is no documentary evidence (available to the public, at any rate) that the bridge’s designers had the foggiest clue that their gusset plates were inadequate to the job. 

To be able to explain the difference would be the mark of a good journalist…

…so let’s just move on.

But the present administration is in the hands of a political philosophy that has not been willing to invest enough in the future while leaning, too heavily, on what was built in the past.

So for Nick’s benefit, let’s indulge in some alternate history.

Let’s say Skip Humphrey was elected governor in 1998, and turned the show over to Mike Hatch in ’06, and just for kicks, let’s say they governed from 2002 on with Tic supermajorities in both houses.  Let’s assume (safely) that they jacked up taxes, and that they then went on to:

1. anticipate that infrastructure repair was their top priority (we’re being wildly hypothetical, here), and…
2. …until that long, unglamorous job was done, they would resist the politican’s great siren song, to build monuments to their own wisdom by wasteing any more money on mass transit (again, really going out on a limb) and…
3. …in a feat of Kreskin-like prediction, someone at MNDoT knew that they needed to measure all of the gusset plates on the state’s bridges, re-checking forty-year-old calculations and material spec work from long-retired engineers against real-life deterioration and changes in assumptions, on the off-chance that such a project would come up with forty-year-old errors?

Then, if all  of those assumptions were met, there would have been a chance of predicting the disaster. 

Any action on that bet?

Blaming the collapse on design errors made by people who are gone from the scene does not go far enough in finding responsibility for an avoidable tragedy.

No.  It doesn’t go far enough in hunting the witches Nick Coleman wants to find.

The fallout from Aug. 1 is far from over. And Tuesday’s NTSB report won’t end it.

Minnesota was not just let down by flawed steel, but by a flawed commitment to safety and the public good.

And today, it’s being let down by shallow, showy, shrill, shrieking, agenda-driven hackery masquerading not only as “journalism” (where it stands out from the norm only through its own incompetence), but as armchair “engineering” to boot.

(Or as Coleman himself might say in his Bowery-Boys-via-Ole-And-Lena argot, the big cheese Coleman was so full of gas that his column got gusseted by the wingnuts) 

I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see how the local Sorosphere would react to the news that their conclusion that the “No New Taxes” crowd all but blew up the 35W River Bridge was wrong.

And while Lori Sturdevant is the gold standard for Tic PR flaks in this area (and Nick Coleman is the DFL’s trained organ-grinder monkey), there is no better barometer of the Twin Cities’ left’s smug, entitled gestalt than Brian Lambert.  I’ve beein waiting for his take on what is – for most of us – the good news; the news that bad design, rather than depraved malfeasance, led to the collapse.

Was I to be disappointed?

It’s Lambert.  He’s the most reliable source of material in town.

It was 6 p.m. Tuesday when I first heard of the NTSB’s “preliminary” finding that a design flaw—too thin gusset plates—was the cause of the I-35W bridge collapse. By 6:07 p.m., I had received a copy of an e-mail Star Tribune bete noire, Dan Cohen, had fired off into the teeth of Eric Ringham and Tim O’Brien of the paper’s editorial page and columnist Nick Coleman.

Read Lambert’s piece for Cohen’s letter and [the parts of Cohen’s] background [that express Lambert’s bias].  Summary:  Cohen, like me, was jumping on Nick “the Monkey” Coleman’s many, loathsome, premature assignments of guilt.  (A detailed fisk of Coleman’s “the dog ate my logic” column will follow, probably tomorrow).

And to start with, Lambert puts on his big-boy pants and takes his medicine:

Those of us who shared Coleman’s view—that penny-pinching by craven politicians fearful of the wrath of the cynical “small-government crowd” bear a responsibility for the collapse—aren’t exactly buoyed by the NTSB report.

I’m trying to imagine how “buoyed” one would be by circumstances that led to 13 deaths.  But in the interest of discussion, I’ll let that one slide. 

But this one is “preliminary.” It is not the last word, and myriad issues remain, all supporting more comprehensive inspection and maintenance of government-owned infrastructure, something that requires significantly more cash than will ever be generated by a piddly five-cent-a-gallon tax increase…

 …and all of which would be more useful than the billion plus dollars we’re going to spend on a light rail line from nowhere to noplace – which seems to be completely inviolate in the world of Brian Lambert and Nick Coleman. 

Moreover, although Cohen and his “no-new-taxes brigade” have distilled this to Coleman and the Star Tribune vs. Republicans, Carol Molnau and Govenor Pawlenty in particular, Coleman at least was pretty clear at the start that blame should be placed at the feet of both political parties with the Republicans just happening to be running the show as the thing fell into the river.

This is, of course, buncombe:  it was aimed squarely at Pawlenty, fiscal conservatives (and the handy dandy group that serves as our lobbying body, the Taxpayers League) and anyone that doesn’t claim to channel the spirit of Walter Mondale.  Which would be Minnesota’s right – Republicans and the thin film of fiscally-responsible Tics. 

Read it and judge for yourself.

There is actual good news in Lambert’s column, though.  That’s right – those of us who believe Coleman has less “gatekeeping” and “editing” than any self-respecting blogger are also vindicated!

In the interest of both fairness and putting on a quality show for the reading public (who always loves a good scrap . . . not to mention the sight of newspaper elitists eating crow), I called…Coleman, who, at a little before 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, was banging out a column that he doubted the paper would ever run. (Have I buried the lede here?)

When I asked what he was going to say to the Dan Cohens of the world, Coleman replied, “I’ve been strongly advised not to even try.”  Word, he says, had been passed along down the editing chain that nothing from him on the NTSB  finding was wanted unless he could come up with a new, fresh “reported” angle, maybe, you know, another variation on some victim’s story. (Can’t get enough of that, can we?) But his columnist’s opinion on the report? Apparently not, according to Coleman.

Did I mention he was writing one anyway?

No, and since the suspense isn’t killing you either, gentle reader, here it is. 

That’s why I like the guy. He’s a public asset. I think it’s the Irish thing. Born to brawl and all that. When you have some insulated, dweeby editor wringing hands over . . . ooohhh “contentiousness” and “needless provocation” . . ., you want a guy who basically says, “[Bleep] off, and go back to your pod.”

Did the “insulated, dweeby editor” mention anything about “jumping to conclusions” and “acting on facts not anywhere in actual evidence?”

“Responsibility as a reporter?”

“Writing to a standard higher than the bloggers who standards Nick Coleman couldn’t meet if he had to?” 

 I used to think that was what good Metro columnists did. Especially when they had the acute theatrical sense to know that everyone following a story as rich as the Strib‘s (entirely warranted) “Get Molnau” series wants to hear his response to what appears to be a damning official declaration that he and his colleagues have been wrong, and his apology to the poor beknighted Ms. Molnau. (Believe me, that last part ain’t happening.)

And…why?

He was wrong!  The engineers have (preliminarily) scuppered Coleman’s arrogant, purplefaced, wrong conclusion!  Empirical fact has beaten emotional demigoguery!

And Coleman’s empirical, considered, “journalistic” response?

As for Cohen, Coleman says, “I like Dan. Hell, I agree with him on about 90 percent of his criticisms of the paper. But he’s full of gas on this gusset thing.”

“Full of gas”.

And yes, [Strib letters editor and leftyblog starboinker Tim] O’Brien says reaction to the NTSB report is already building with righties demanding to know when the paper is going to apologize to Carol Molnau.

Maybe publisher Chris Harte will run over to St. Paul hat in hand. I don’t see Coleman making that trip.

A better guess: like all good high priests of knowledge, they’ll withdraw to their inner sanctum until the peasants go elsewhere.

We’ll get to Coleman in a bit.

Joel Rosenberg – who follows police issues, especially excessive use of force issues, as closely as anyone – writes:

If you’re interested in the issue I’ve been covering, you might want to read this, right about, well, now.

He links to a piece by Steve Perry in the Daily Mold that does something the rest of the Twin Cities media should do; reports on allegations of excessive force complaints against the Minneapolis Police.

Read Perry’s piece; while he’s a reliably-apoplectic lefty, he (and, when he ran it, the City Pages) intersperses some good reporting into the droning cant.

With yesterday’s news that the NTSB’s investigation of the 35W Bridge collapse will conclude that a design flaw from the 1960’s – inadequate gusset plates – combined perhaps with excess weight on the deck is the most likely culprit for the disaster, the Tics’ key political truncheon for the next session is on the verge of being seized from them.

And they’re neither happy, nor giving up without a fight tantrum.

“The NTSB investigation is not yet complete,” House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher said Tuesday. “It would be helpful if [Pawlenty] would follow his own advice and not add his own speculation on the cause of the 35W bridge collapse.”

Kelliher – one of the dumbest speakers Minnesota has ever had – sounds like a teenager being confronted about a piece of wrecked furniture; “Oh, yeah? Were you there? Did you see it get broken?”

And Speaker Kelliher – you didn’t seem too concerned about “waiting for the report” when your caucus-mate Alice “The Phantom” Hausman went on WCCO to indict the failure of the gas tax even before the last kid was off the schoolbus, did you?

Pawlenty and DFLers came together briefly after the bridge fell on Aug. 1,

[Very briefly]

Pawlenty said on Tuesday that within hours of the collapse, a “political leader” whom he would not name had called him and threatened retribution and that since then opponents had made repeated and inaccurate “linkages” of the bridge collapse to his earlier vetoes of transportation legislation.

In light of the report, he said, they should “have the decency to correct those statements,” he said

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are one-party towns; being a Tic means never having to say you’re sorry.

He noted that there was “a bit of irony” to the fact that the design error detailed by the National Transportation Safety Board had occurred during the fabled golden era for public works in Minnesota.

Kudos to the Governor for saying that; the bridge was an artifact of an age that the DFL points to as one where “we” did things “right”. Indeed, if you want to indulge in excessive metaphor, the collapse frames nicely the demise of the “Minnesota Miracle” – the storied time when government took credit for a boom in regional prosperity that (sssssh) would have happened anyway in Minnesota, a sleeping giant at a time of immense growth nationwide.

“It is clear that MNDOT did everything humanly possible to maintain our bridges,” [Senate Minority Leader Dick] Day said. He accused Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Steve Murphy, who has called repeatedly for Molnau’s resignation as commissioner, of “prematurely and recklessly blaming her.”

But Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, was unrepentant Tuesday, saying that Pawlenty was overreaching and that the report drew no definitive conclusions about the reasons for the collapse.

“If a half-inch gusset plate kept that bridge up for 40 years, why not another 40?” Murphy said.

I’m going to pause and let that sink in for a moment.

Steve Murphy – chowderhead Tic who couldn’t pass an engineering class at gunpoint, but who would say 2+2=Bacon if Margaret Anderson Kelliher told him to – is saying “So what if the plates broke? What if they hadn’t?”

“Could it be because rust ate it away? Because the trips over the bridge went from 25,000 to 140,000? The parameters changed, and MNDOT should have been going back, making sure all the gussets, I-beams and plates could handle 140,000 trips a day.”

Of course – they did.

The NTSB’s safety recommendation noted that “although inspections of the bridge identified and tracked some areas of tracking and corrosion, at this point in the investigation there is no indication that any of those areas played a significant role in the collapse of the bridge.”

That set off U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., who heads the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Oberstar said that such a dismissal of the possible role of rust and corrosion was “inappropriate and uncharacteristic of a board chairman. That [the design flaw] may be the proximate cause, but there are contributing factors in every accident.”

In other words – key Tic porkmonger Oberstar won’t directly try to politically undercut the NTSB, but he’s still running damage control for the locals.

Who, if there is any justice, will need it.

The DFL, as the curtain seemingly starts to close on the “mystery” phase of this tragedy, looks like a bunch of angry hamsters, angrily gnawing and chattering away, trying to wish things into being that just aren’t.

Item #1:  Build new 35W River Bridge.  Well, the job is underway, and supposedly under a year from completion.

Item #2:  Absorb the NTSB report, which reportedly blames design flaws in the collapse of the 35W River Bridge last August.  That’s “Design Flaws” – insufficiently-strong gusset plates.  Which were part of the original bridge construction, forty-odd years ago.  Back when there was, apparently, no shortage of tax money. 

Item #3: Await apology from Nick Coleman:  After all, before they’d even found all the submerged cars, the Non-Monkey had blamed Pawlenty, the GOP and the Taxpayers’ League, and the “failure” to raise the Gas Tax, for the disaster, all but accusing them of complicity in murder.

Item #4:  Await same from Alice Hausman: The famous truck was still engulfed in flames when Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, Tic from Saint Paul, Chairbeing of the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, and subject of an unseemly Lori Sturdevant girl crush, went on WCCO Radio and blamed the disaster on taxes.

Item #5:  Await More Of Same From Elwyn Tinklenberg: Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg, Transportation Commissioner for DFL-Lite “Independence” Party governor Jesse “The Stealth Tic” Ventura, and perennial Tic candidate for higher office (he’s been pondering running against Michele Bachmann since before Rep. Bachmann was actually elected) did pretty much the same.

Item #6:  Congratulate Mike Mosedale The City Pages: The City Pages Mike Mosedale (Winner of the 2007 “At Least He’s Not Matt Snyders or G.R. Anderson” award) wrote ran a long article in the metro’s foremost freebie, speculatively blaming…:

• The Governor
• Carol Molnau
• MNDoT
• The Taxpayers League and David Strom
• The repair work going one on the deck
• The Feds
• The Met Council
• The state bureaucracy
• Society’s addiction to new goodies (like trains and ballparks)

..and…

• The original design of the bridge

In retrospect, the non-political parts of Mosedale’s the piece were remarkably balanced for a local lefty alt-media report.  Which is sort of like saying “except for the iceberg, the Titanic had a pretty good cruise”.

I’ll get working on them.

The inner cities have their issues. If you’re in Minnesota and reading this, you know about them; you’ve either fled them, are paying for them via your taxes, or are – like me – living among them.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul are taxed half to death; Minneapolis’ crime rate has fallen from brutally-high to merely ridiculously-high, with a murder rate higher than New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco.  Higher, indeed, – ironically, given how Minneapolis’ political, academic and media elites sniff at them – than Mobile, Omaha (twice as high!), Tampa, Jacksonville, higher in fact than all of the major cities in Texas but one (and only slightly off Houston’s pace).  Only marginally lower than Chicago. (Saint Paul’s is quite low by major-city standards – 60% lower than Minneapolis – a testament to Saint Paul’s excellent police department, strong neighborhoods, and at least a couple of relatively sane administrations).

The cities are addicts; their drug is money. Nearly four decades ago, the “Minnesota Miracle” enacted the idea of “Local Government Aid”, which as the DFL’s stranglehold on the inner cities accelerated turned into an eternal subsidy of DFL inner-city policy by the parts of the state that actually pay their way. Governor Pawlenty’s cuts in LGA acted the same way as cutting off the heroin acts on a jonesing junkie; the addict went crazy. The body couldn’t get along without the drug; the drug had incorporated itself into the body’s chemistry. City governments had been providing “services” far beyond what their eroding tax based could provide, even as their left-leftward-moving policies drove more and more of the tax base out of the cities themselves. When LGA cuts forced cities to pass the “service” costs directly to their own tax bases, and the cities were forced to pay their own bills – well, you’ve read the headlines and the op-ed pages, right?

And yet, election after election, the DFL stranglehold over the inner city not only deepens, but gets more and more radical; Greens now have a solid foothold in Minneapolis; Saint Paul’s “Gang of Four” ultra-liberal councilpeople is now a Gang of Five. Policies that were madness thirty years ago are commonplaces today.

How did it get this way?

90% of politics is local. And the DFL understood this from the very beginning, and over the past fifty years has extended its reach into every corner of life in the Cities.

Is there hope?

More tomorrow.

Tracy at Anti-Strib on Minneapolis top cop Tim Dolan’s, er, faux pas on the Loesch murder:

Police Chief Tim Dolan uses the letters to the editor page of the Red Star to squander what good will he had by trying to weasel out of the mess his department created by ruining the name of Mark Loesch.

Flashback:  the MPD tried to write off the Loesch murder – in which a fortysomething father of four was beaten to death on a nighttime bike ride through the Phillips neighborhood – as drug-related.  Loesch was trying to score weed, or so they hinted in public last month. 

I’ve never indulged, but it strikes me (and many of Tracy’s commenters) as highly unlikely that a successful middle-aged guy would be buying chiba from gang-bangers on the street; anyone who gets to be forty-something and hasn’t done jail time for buying drugs likely buys it from a long-trusted, safe source.   

 Keep this up and you’ll be gone in a year Tim.

Read the whole thing.

Joel Rosenberg notes a flock of durocs flying over 425 Portland:

 I’d definitely want further confirmation before declaring this an Official Flying Pig Sighting — but it’s possible that Nick Coleman has written a sensible column.

I think Joel may be right.  We may be witnessing that annual – maybe semiannual – phenomenon, the “good Nick Coleman column”.

Read it and judge for yourself.

And, if true, seek overhead cover.

If you wander around the Twin Cities, you can find about a quarter of a million people who were in the Metrodome (capacity: 50-odd-thousand) for Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.

Likewise, in a few years I suspect you’ll be able to find tens of thousands of people who were on the 35W Bridge during the collapse.

The Strib has identified and gotten the stories from most of them.

They want that Pulitzer so bad you can almost taste it.

The Pioneer Press is apparently a tool of Tim Pawlenty; evidence apparently suggests that metal fatigue isn’t the culprit for the Bridge collapse (emphasis added):

In the days after the collapse, reports drawing on past inspections immediately singled out seemingly alarming cracks in the bridge’s steel. The Minnesota Department of Transportation came under fire for what appeared to be shoddy bridge oversight.

But a closer look at the record throws into question the idea MnDOT could have prevented the collapse by reinforcing the Minneapolis bridge, as an outside consultant recommended. The record also casts doubt on the theory that fatigue cracks made the bridge fall.

Here’s why:

— The cracks were repaired in the 1990s. And they were never found in the main I-35W river span, which appeared to fall first on video of the collapsing bridge captured by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveillance camera.

— The cracks were on the approach spans, which were not “fracture critical.” That designation signals a risk of total collapse if one key part of the bridge fails. The fracture critical area of the bridge was in the main span.

— A proposal to strengthen the steel beams in the bridge’s main span by adding steel plates dealt with a speculative problem – potential cracks. The reinforcement also would not have guaranteed against a total collapse.

— Fatigue cracks are more likely to occur and spread in cold weather, when steel is less flexible. The I-35W bridge collapse came after several days of 90-degree-plus weather.

Unlike certain commentators, I would never replace science with my opinion.  I’ll await actual conclusions by real engineers. 

But if I may wax fantastic for a moment – that moment when some people are gonna have to apologize for accusing the Governor and David Strom of complicity in murder might seem to be creeping closer.

The Strib’s been cranking out the stories (and the wishful thinking) about the 35W bridge collapse in the Strib.

According to Sarah Janecek at Politics in Minnesota, there’s a story behind the story:

One GOP legislator, disturbed by the secrecy shrouds detailed in the Star Tribune, sent an email to MnDOT asking what’s going on. [PIM obtained copies of the relevant emais.] Here’s how MnDOT answered the question:

“Unfortunately, the relationship between our employees and some reporters — and I stress ‘some reporters’ — at the Star Tribune has become extremely strained…MnDOT employees have been subjected to professional and unnecessarily harsh name-calling, hostile phone conversations and phone and email harassment. MnDOT employees have come to me with reports of enduring profanity in phone conversations and having their professional and personal integrity questioned. Employees have further reported that, when they have granted interviews and provided professional information, they feel their work has been mischaracterized in print and facts have been disregarded in lieu of predetermined story lines.”

I’d ask someone from the Strib for a comment – but they’d probably punch me.

Janecek:

To be precise, MnDOT employees are tired of hearing “BS” in heated long form, and “you’re lying” and “you’re stonewalling” from the two career Star Tribune reporters with pit bull reputations: Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe. What’s more, a document request made one hour is followed by a series of harassing emails mere hours later asking where their documents are.

Reporters acting like jagbags? Nothing new, right?

Of course, there’s more:

…Many of the document requests are duplicative — different people at the paper are asking for exactly the same stuff. As far as PIM knows, there are at least eight different requests from Star Tribune people. Besides Kennedy and McEnroe, other Star Tribune reporters who are asking for duplicative documents are Dan Browning, Nick Coleman, Pat Doyle, Jim Foti, Kaszuba and Bob Von Sternberg.

Typically, on a big story like the bridge collapse, one editor is put in charge. This apparently hasn’t happened.

In other words, the Strib’s newsroom – wracked by layoffs and budget cuts – is a Sacramento fire drill.

Or is there more?

Better media analysis minds than ours think there’s something else going on: Star Tribune editor Nancy Barnes and others at the paper want a Pulitzer for the paper’s coverage. That makes sense to us. The bridge collapse will likely be the only shot Minnesota media will have in our lifetimes at winning the “Breaking News” prize. [Let’s all certainly hope so.]

Which makes sense; it’s something people’ve been predicting since the spume from the river was still in the air. Indeed, many of us – the Strib’s legions of amateur critics – lauded the paper for its reporting (albeit not opinion writing) in the wake of the collapse, and figured the paper might be in line for its first Pulitzer since the Battle of Yorktown.

Does it affect the paper’s approach to journalism?:

The Pulitzer theory also explains why the paper repeatedly fails to point out MnDOT’s legal constraints on document requests, an omission that is grossly misleading to readers. Media requests for government documents are covered by the Minnesota Data Practices Act (MDPA) and the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The most important aspect of these laws as they apply to obtaining government information about the bridge collapse is that the MDPA applies before August 1, 2007 and the federal FOIA applies after the bridge fell. That’s because the National Transportation Safety Board has an exemption from FOIA for any “ongoing investigation” so as not to jeopardize that investigation. Obviously, that exemption is broad and severely curtails the information MnDOT can legally provide.

Which – as Janecek alleges – is the part the Strib won’t tell the reader.

Is it just another example of “not having enough space” to fit it in – a standard Strib excuse when important details get left out? We’ve been through this before.

On the one hand, “jourmalistic ethics” tend to be exactly what a “journalist” needs them to be to get their story (and/or their Pulitzer).

On the other…well, read the whole thing.

Don’t mind those engineers. They were sitting in class taking calculus and learning the scientific method when people like Nick Coleman were learning how to…

…um…

…well, anyway.

The point being that even though the latest news on the Bridge Collapse investigation – the one being carried out by actual engineers – indicates that the bridge didn’t collapse as a direct result of the failure of the Gas Tax – Nick Coleman still knows better than all those dumb engineers:

Get ready to be gusseted.

Let’s stop right there.

Has Nick Coleman learned nothing from years of having his neologisms thrown back in his face wrapped in ridicule?

I doubt that many Minnesotans heard of gussets before Aug. 1, but since the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge, “gusset” has become a favorite word in the mouths of politicians, particularly those looking to cast suspicion not on their politics or policies, but on inanimate steel objects.

Of course, if the “inanimate steel objects” (and, more importantly, the design work that went into them) actually were the problem – well, that’d be an issue, wouldn’t it?

Gussets are steel plates used to reinforce joists or connect girders. Although a three-year study of the problems of the ailing I-35W bridge did not focus attention on the bridge’s gussets, and although the bridge was still in the Mississippi River, it took only a week after the bridge fell for the Bush administration’s secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, to finger the culprits: Gussets.

A week.

Shocking.

Or course, two days after the collapse, Nick Coleman appeared on cable TV to pin the entire blame on Minnesota Republicans, funding, and the gas tax.

Two days.

She was immediately echoed by a private consulting firm hired by the Pawlenty-Molnau administration within hours of the collapse — without public bid. That firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, was hired for $2 million — coincidentally, the cost of a plan for reinforcing the bridge that was rejected by the Minnesota Department of Transportation months before the collapse.

Since Coleman clearly rejects all of that “empirical method” and “engineering” nonsense in favor of “knowing stuff”, I have to wonder if he wrote that graf without even knowing that it’s complete doubletalk? Two million was the price of a plan. A plan that might have planned to address the causes of the collapse (maybe – and we’ll never know from Coleman’s column), but, given that it came up “months before the collapse”, wouldn’t have actually fixed the problem, even had it addressed the actual cause of the collapse – which we don’t yet know!

The Pawlenty administration has been accusing critics of jumping to conclusions about the cause of the collapse because we argue, whatever the physical causes, that there was a dereliction of a public duty to keep bridges standing and bridge users alive.

And – let’s say it together – Pawlenty is right. “Critics” – mainly politically-motivated hacks like Coleman, Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenburg and Alice Hausman – were blaming Pawlenty before the last girder had fallen.

If you listen to Minnesota’s officials, it’s almost like the bridge never fell. It couldn’t have. After all, they had a great plan for keeping it up.

On paper.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH

You mean, just like the $2 million “plan” to keep the bridge up that Coleman mentioned not ten paragraphs above?

The one that’s distinguished from the “plan” Coleman now ridicules…why?

This is an illustration of the disconnect between no-tax politics and the real world, where gravity is stronger than wishful thinking.

And actual empirical science is stronger than the wishful thinking of a bitter old hack who wants, more than anything, to capitalize on the Bridge tragedy.

This next bit (emphasis added)…:

Pinpointing the physical cause of the collapse will require long forensic investigation. But CYA is Chapter One in the political playbook, so the pols are clinging to their Grassy Knoll Gusset theory.

…makes me wonder if the entire state can take out a restraining order.

Peters, the federal secretary of transportation, repeated her gusset tale Nov. 1, causing one gob-smacked Republican who heard her, Edina’s Rep. Ron Erhardt, to state the obvious:

If gussets failed, he said, “What is that but a lack of maintenance?”

Exactly.

“Exactly” – in the same way that a faulty premise is a matter of bad copy editing.

Numbnuts “Representative” Erhard and “Writer” Coleman:  if the gusset plate was designed wrong, it wouldn’t matter if it was brand-new off of the palette.  It would have been inadequate from the moment it was welded into place. 

That is not maintenance.

That is design.

That is what we get for electing scientific illiterates – or reading them.

Some good news from North Minneapolis – violent crime has dropped:

But serious crime incidents in the North Side precinct are down about 15 percent this year.

That’s good news.

Of course, the numbers are not the whole story:

 The North Side has accounted for about 21 percent of the city’s serious incidents this year, with 17.5 percent of its population.

The North Side, of course, is a big place; it includes gang strongholds like the Near North and Camden, as well as placid near-suburban areas like the big swathe above Dowling and into the forties and fifties. 

Which means, I suspect, thatmost of that “21% of the city’s serious incidents” are taking place in the part of the North Side below Dowling and above Highway 55.  What percentage of the city’s population is that?

The piece seems to have the wrong headline, though – while a paragraph or two are about crime numbers, the piece largely seems to be about…marketing: 

Think of the North Side of Minneapolis and what comes to mind? Crime and foreclosures? Or parks, clubs and gathering spots?

A new marketing strategy for north Minneapolis is designed to get you to think more of the latter.

The strategy has been rolled out for North Side community leaders. Organizers plan to launch their marketing push more broadly by March after seeking business, foundation and public money to finance it. A campaign incorporating a website, street signs, brochures, postcards and print ads is planned. The budget is still undetermined.

The campaign focuses on four strengths — consultants called them chest-pounding topics.

Those selling points, identified in meetings with residents: the area’s breadth of community organizations, its varied businesses, a solid housing stock and an abundance of opportunities for recreation.

On the one hand, as conservative bloggers we well understand the imperative to counter relentless, one-sided bad news. 

And there is value to this sort of effort; Saint Paul did plenty of the same in its epic battle to turn around Selby-Dale; thirty years ago, the neighborhood was a complete toilet.  Today, it’s a largely decent place – allowing the city to fight the ongoing battle to reclaim Frogtown (hopefully before Light Rail destroys it again) and arrest the deepening blight on the East Side. 

But I digress.

I don’t live in Minneapolis, of course.  For Minneapolis crime news, I always turn to the Minneapolis Crime Watch blog, the single essential stop for crime news (since the late, lamented Rambix departed the scene).  Margaret Martin – who lives on the North Side – responds to the piece, noting that the group cited in the story may be talking a bigger game than they actually play:

I’m on some of the e-mail lists and, aside from a rejuvenation of the neighborhood organization in my neighborhood, a group of people has come together to create “a marketing plan” for North…The reality is that something’s got to replace or supplement the NRRC, which has spearheaded many of these types of initiatives in the past, because the NRRC is broke and although NRP got a stay of execution, funding will not be at the same level. It’s a fine time to start looking elsewhere, for development funding.

She also notes the story’s incongruity:

The problem I have with the story is the headline. “Serious crime in north Minneapolis falls 15%.” But the story isn’t about crime, it’s about these activists’ desire for a better future for North. The headline conflates the desire with the reality. The reality may be that “serious crime is down” it doesn’t mean that North is safe, the schools are good and that if we build it “they” will come…I know that the stats have been improving and I don’t deny that they are…The problem is that crime is not just about numbers. It’s about perception.

Perception is, indeed, reality.  You knew that the effort to revitalize Selby-Dale was succeeding when people stopped perceiving that you could get killed for no good reason in the neighborhood; when people perceived that people weren’t getting stabbed every weekend outside the People’s Choice club, or that they could let their kids play outside.

And the North Side isn’t there yet, says Margaret: 

So homicides are down. If you knew that a few blocks away on a “safe” block, a driveby just took out a some people at a barbecue last weekend, would you feel safe? If you had 3 houses on your block that were vacant and deteriorating, would you feel good about the direction that things were going?

Here’s something to think about it. If people in South Minneapolis are concerned about crime and worried about their future in the city, and it’s got all the attractions and amenities that South has, what does North have to offer in comparison?

I’m no expert.  As near as I can tell, the best thing an area can do is “be a place where young families – by definition, low-to-middle-income, for the most part – can afford to live and raise kids without worrying about their safety”. 

So what does the North Side offer? 

I’m genuinely interested.

On the one hand, it’s a bunch of money in a “cash-strapped” city:

The $5.1 million cable-stayed bridge is the first of its kind in Minnesota…

…on the other, it helps people like me avoid getting killed…

…and allows users of the popular Greenway to avoid traffic on Hiawatha Avenue in Minneapolis.

…on a stretch of road that a lot of drivers would like to get over.

On the other other hand, the thing pretty much looks pre-collapsed:

I feel unstable just looking at it.

I wonder – did Atomizer design it while on a bender?

On the one hand, it’s good to hear that there was an arrest in last summer’s brutal murder of Mark Loesch, a Minneapolis father of four who was beaten to death on a late-night ride in South Minneapolis:

On Monday, Loesch’s father-in-law, David Barnes, was initially elated to hear that a 23-year-old man had been charged in the case, which appeared to have all the elements of a violent robbery.

But on the other – there’s a problem. Police allege that Loesch was procuring pot:

But when police officials publicly said they believe Loesch was in the area to buy marijuana, Barnes was brought to tears.

“I know Mark and don’t believe that is what happened,” he said. “They shouldn’t have slandered a dead person.”

I guess that’s one of the “High Risk Lifestyles” that RT Rybak was talking about.