Ever since the immediate aftermath of the 35W bridge collapse, a parade of lefty pundits lined up to blame the disaster on lack of state aid to local govenrments, closed libraries, and the war in Iraq for all I remember.

The response – let’s wait until actual engineers investigate this thing.

Well, they’re still investigating.  But according to federal transportation officials, Bthere’s a working theory, and that theory is that Nick Coleman suffered a stroke has, has, so far, nothing to do with money:

The top federal transportation official said that investigators have a “working theory” of why the 35W bridge collapsed in August: a poorly designed metal component called a gusset plate and excessive weight on the bridge that day.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters’ comments Thursday mirrored statements she made in August, a week after the collapse, and like her previous comments immediately led to controversy. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the collapse, has said a formal finding will not be available for at least a year.

Everyone knows this.  But knowing that the investigators have narrowed things down to a short list of theories does help…

…in dealing with this kind of thing:

Sen. Steve Murphy, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said Peters told a gathering Thursday in Washington, D.C., that he attended that “a finding of fault was not going to be lack of inspection or lack of maintenance” by state officials.

“I think it taints the findings,” he said.

No, Senator Murphy.  It taints the spin you and your party want to bring to the upcoming election.

It is all politics to the likes of Murphy.

But a spokesman for Peters said Murphy’s account of her comments was inaccurate.

“What she said is, look, I’m not going to prejudge what the NTSB is going to find, but the working theory that they are operating on, and this has been in the news for about two months now, is that there was a combination of a gusset plate and too much weight placed on a certain part of the bridge,” spokesman Brian Turmail said.

“Certainly, the NTSB would want to look into whether lack of maintenance was a factor in the collapse of the bridge,” he said. But Turmail added that “the working theory at the NTSB is that it is not a lack of inspections, but a design flaw and weight.”

Doesn’t seem all that controversial, does it?

Unless you’re someone for whom the bridge collapse was nothing but political red meat in the first place:

Later Thursday, Rep. Ron Erhardt, R-Edina, confirmed Murphy’s account. “Murphy was sitting behind me and I turned to him and said, ‘What is this?'” Erhardt said. “To hear that it wasn’t maintenance or inspection, I thought, ‘What the hell?’ I remembered early reports about the gussets and I thought, what is that but lack of maintenance?”

I have to sit still for a minute.

I need to breathe slowly.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Rep. Erhardt:  If the gusset plates were (as the “working theory” postulates) poorly designed – meaning “not designed to be capable of relieving the stress on the joints that they needed to under the circumstances” – then their maintenance would (under my understanding of the theory) be irrelevant.

If you design a gusset plate (and its attendant bolts and welds, and its interaction with the rest of the structure) to transfer fifty tons of weight from girder A to arch B, and there’s really eighty tons being transferred, it wouldn’t matter if the plate were brand new out of the box; there’d be a problem.

A design problem.

Not a maintenance problem.

The Strib piece – by Patricia Lopez – notes the real importance of this theory. Oh, and it has nothing to do with the bridge falling over:

A design flaw would give administration critics less of an opening to hold current officials at the Minnesota Department of Transportation or Gov. Tim Pawlenty responsible.

And – oh, yeah, just like all of us people who care about science and stuff have been saying all along – it’s not over yet:

“It’s true, yeah, we are looking at the design issues and the gusset plates and the weight of the construction materials and equipment on the bridge,” NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said. “We’re also looking at the maintenance and repair history. We’re looking at the de-icing fluids — any role they may have played. We basically haven’t ruled anything out yet.”

But you can smell the fear, can’t you?

It’s interesting; for all the yapping the left does about the (caricaturish, cartoon-y parts of the) right’s flailing about with non-issues like evolution and creationism, it’s amazing the contempt the (caricaturish, cartoon-y parts of the) left has for science.

Sue Jeffers over at True North takes Jim Oberstar to task:

In your Tribune Counter Point comments on Oct. 26 you stated it is “unfathomable to not be moved to act decisively” after the tragedy of the bridge collapse. Well, what are you waiting for?

On August 6 President Bush signed your bill to authorize $250 million in emergency transportation aid and $5 million in transit funding assistance to MN for the collapse of the 35W Bridge. MN needs the remaining $195 million promised immediately.  Three months later MN is still waiting for the federal funding while behind the scenes state Democrats continue to play politics with state DOT funding.

Read the whole thing.

And ponder the media’s selective double-standard in covering these things.

Nick Coleman is a monkey for the local chamber of commerce.

He notes (at the behest of local car dealers) that Flatiron – the company building the new 35W River Bridge – has bought a bunch of new trucks.

In Colorado.  With Colorado registrations.

A Flatiron spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment, but permit me to sum up the situation here: Buying Colorado trucks for a high-profile project in Minnesota that still carries the emotional pangs of death and destruction? Dumb, Flatiron.

This is a company that was judged to have better public “outreach” than the local firms that lost out on the project, despite submitting lower bids. Would a Minnesota company buy a shiny new fleet for the project from, say, Colorado?

Depending on Minnesota’s business tax laws, or conditions of one deal or another the Minnesota company had cut with taxpayers?

I mean, the short answer is this; I have no idea why they’d buy and register their new fleet of trucks in Colorado.  One might think that there must be some state tax-related reason to buy trucks there, in their home state and the state in which they are incorporated, rather than here.

And, by the way, while the bridge collapse was indeed an emotional cataclysm for Minnesota, I don’t care if the engineers and ironworkers involved in the reconstruction share those emotions or not.  Indeed, I’d just as soon they kept emotion out of things.

Is Rochelle Olson’s reward for sliming Alan Fine to be moved over to the celebrity gossip beat?

Oh, probably not. But this story seems at first blush to be yanked from an episode of Dallas.

Actually, it’s a pretty interesting story…:

What started as a lawsuit about rich people behaving badly at the Wayzata Country Club has turned into a judicial snit fit and become the talk of Twin Cities legal bigwigs.

The case has the elements of a prime time soap: name-calling, money, extramarital sex, public betrayal and humiliation. Now comes the new twist: judicial fury.

It involves DFL financier Vance Opperman and one of the cattiest lawsuits this layperson has ever read about…

Minneapolis cops find some unusual swag: 

Officers dispatched to recover an ATM machine found by a Housing Inspector during an inspection of a foreclosed home. Car 21 responded and processed the ATM which had been pried open.

Or maybe it’s teenagers.  Like mine. 

Minneapolis lefties (ACORN, in this case) want to freeze foreclosures in the city:

An advocacy group has started a campaign calling on the Minneapolis City Council to support a three-month voluntary freeze on foreclosures in the city to give some borrowers more breathing room.

The proposal by the local chapter of Minnesota ACORN, a community advocacy group, would target loans made by the 25 largest subprime lenders to owner-occupants. Subprime lenders typically offer less favorable terms to borrowers whose credit record disqualifies them for conventional loans.

ACORN turned to the City Council after getting turned down by the Hennepin County Board. ACORN also will talk to St. Paul officials.

Will they ever learn – “buyer protection” legislation makes it impossible to be a buyer?  I’m no economist (paging King Banaian!), but if you gut the lenders’ recourses for dealing with bad loans, all you do is prevent all lending?

Remember five years ago, when the last of the Ventura-era legislatures (controlled by the DFL) passed “buyer protection”  legislation against insurance companies, and made it nearly impossible to buy homeowners’ insurance?

There seems to be just a whiff of sanity in Minneapolis, at least:

Just three of the 13 council members — Gary Schiff, Don Samuels and Cam Gordon –have spoken in support of the proposal. Council President Barb Johnson said she isn’t sure how the proposal will fare in the full council.

It’s Minneapolis.  I call it a tossup.

Alice Hausman is seen in district 66B in daylight.

And Nick Coleman writes a good column.

No, I’m being catty.  Every year, Nick Coleman – this blog’s guest of fisking honor, a person against whom I’ve pulled very few punches – writes one or two columns that make you sit back and go “this is what a metro columnist should be doing”.

And it is:

“It seems crazy,” she says, looking up at her paint job. “We don’t just have to fight drug dealers and gangbangers. We have to fight the city, too.”

Damn.  It’s a quote I’d love to have found.  It’s at the end of today’s bit, about a retired, MS-riven woman in a crime-sodden, lethal neighborhood in North Minneapolis who  is being fined into poverty by a city that can’t and won’t deal with  the crime that has destroyed the neighborhood that her family has lived in since 1941.

Slyter, 57, owns a home in the Hawthorne neighborhood of north Minneapolis. She has been a bulwark of decency as the block she lives on has been invaded by hoodlums and drug dealers. But in the eyes of the city, there is a bigger problem than criminals: Peeling paint.

Slyter was slapped with a $200 fine in July (it has doubled to $400) because her house trim needed painting, and she wasn’t able to reach to the peak of her roof, where the trim is 25 feet above street level. Get a ladder or hire a professional painter, a city inspector told her. But a ladder is a tough climb for a woman in a leg brace, and a professional painter is expensive and hard to come by in a neighborhood where workers can get shot.

Slyter’s peeling trim was going nuclear: Unless she got it painted, city fines could escalate quickly to $2,000 or more.

“They could fine me out of my home,” she says. “They just keep doubling until the fine is more than the house is worth.”

Of course, this ties into a bigger problem, one that is crying for some investigation – Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s imperious, gratingly arrogant-yet-comically ineffective code enforcement departments.  (Although someone is trying).

So this week, Slyter climbed atop a scaffold she built in the back of her pickup truck. With the aid of a 15-foot painting pole, she stood on tiptoes to paint the chocolate-brown trim and get the city off her back.

Her home, built in 1887, has been in Slyter’s family since 1941.

Context?

Slyter has tried to be a good citizen while the neighborhood has suffered through waves of criminal activity.

“Drug dealing, robberies, shootings,” Slyter says, reciting a litany of troubles. “Any direction you go within three blocks, you can point to a murder that has happened. If you want to live here, you have to turn your home into a fortress.”

Slyter built a fence to secure her back yard, and nailed planks across her storm windows to keep them from being pried open by burglars. These are not crazy measures in a part of the city where law-abiding residents cover windows with shatter-proof plastic and valuable belongings are chained to garage ceiling beams.

“We’ve all had to build fortresses,” says Joan Thom, chair of the neighborhood safety committee. “It’s not the cops’ fault. We love our cops. But when they arrest dealers, the judges let ’em loose and say they don’t have enough courtrooms to deal with every drug dealer. Then they haul people into court for stupid stuff like this. Hello!?! Which part of this picture are you missing?”

But at least the boat has perfectly-ordered deck chairs.

Question:  Does Minneapolis code enforcement go after homes stuffed full of gang-banging thugs?

I’m going to take a step back for a moment.  Yes, it’s important to keep neighborhoods up.  The “Broken Windows” policies of Rudy Giuliani in NYC and Brett Schundler in Jersey City were part of the plan that brought both cities back from decades of blight and – when combined with aggressive (some might say heavy-handed) police response – crime.

Minneapolis has got half the formula down:

If you are thinking it doesn’t make sense to police the paint while criminals control the corners, well, it doesn’t have to make sense: It’s city policy.

The inspections department is much more aggressive, says director Henry Reimer, especially in north Minneapolis.

The city issued 80,000 citations last year, ordering owners to cut grass, paint trim or make other repairs. Peeling paint might seem trivial, Reimer said, but city codes keep bad blocks from getting worse.

If you are a Minneapolis Republican…no, strike that.  If you live in Minneapolis and care about the future of your city, you should print out this next paragraph, quoting bureaucrat Reimer (emphasis added):

“People who maintain their property in disrepair help bring forth an environment in which crime is welcome,” he said. “We’re trying to move things in the right direction in terms of fighting crime. If you own property you don’t feel safe keeping compliant [with housing codes], then you shouldn’t own that property. Or you should pay someone to fix it who isn’t afraid.”

In other words, according to city bureaucrat Reimer, if you are afraid (of criminals the city can’t and won’t deal with), you are the villain.  You should leave.  Mr. Reimer:  Whose city is this?  The gang-bangers?  The Code Enforcement department’s?
If the Minneapolis GOP doesn’t have this quote in every mailbox in the city during the next mayoral election, they should disband.

Coleman even gets it:

But it isn’t that easy.

For the past 18 months, drug dealing was going on next door to Slyter. It was only when a recent police raid put an end to it that Slyter felt safe to do outside chores.

“I wouldn’t be out here in my yard if they were still next door,” Slyter said, nodding at the empty drug house where a pile of dirty mattresses sits on the curb. Even now, she says, she only does yard work before noon.

Why? “The gangbangers don’t get up until noon,” she says.

I can see R.T. Rybak’s next statement: “most of the victims are people who are out between 12PM and 5AM…”

Reimer says he respects Slyter’s concerns, but fear does not excuse homeowners from keeping up their property.

“We’re working holistically to address crime issues and take back our city,” he says.

It sounds good. In theory.

Barely.

With rights come responsibilities.  There’s a term for responsibilities without rights – in this case, the right to see your local drug-dealing gang-banger being tasered into incontinence and thrown into the back of a squad car, and then sent off to jail for a very long time.

Oppression.

But when you see a retired woman on a truck trying to reach the top of her house with a paint brush in a neighborhood where drugs are being sold on the corner, something is out of whack. Slyter isn’t the person who most needs cracking down upon.

Still, with luck, her house trim may now meet city approval.

Too bad the people of Minnesota can’t do the same thing to Minneapolis; walk in, declare the place out of code (“out of control gangs, catch ‘n release justice system, city government more concerned with citizen compliance than with fighting crime, largely for political reasons”) and start turning the screws through fines and harassment, ending in eviction.

Oh, wait – we can.  Every four years.

Will the people of Minneapolis be smart enough?

I’ve enjoyed this past few months, biking to work.  Of course, biking is something that’s only intermittently tenable when my kids are in school – I can manage it once or twice a week (there’s a post in there), but it’s been a great thing for me.

It didn’t teach me anything new about human nature, really; I used to bike a lot, and I ran into (figuratively) all the usual pathologies about urban traffic and raging drivers.  Of course, I have always been something of a stickler about following traffic laws; something about not wanting to spend the rest of my life in a vegetative state, and ending up no better than a contributor to Dump Bachmann…

…but I digress.  Like a lot of people, I’d not heard much about Critical Mass until last month, when the group’s monthly ride turned into a riot in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).

in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).According to yesterday’s column from Katherine Kersten,  I might have been wrong to be sanguine.  Assumptions about Critical Mass’ benign-ness might be misplaced:

They block traffic by “corking” — some riders hold cars at intersections during green lights while the mass passes through a red light. Others stand in the street and wave their bikes defiantly over their heads.

Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son’s baseball game?

Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday?

Critical Mass doesn’t give a rip. Tough luck for you, Mac, because you’re a gas-guzzler and I’m living green.

So do we chalk this up to innocent adolescent posturing?  Or, with 11 months until the Republican National Convention, is there something more sinister to it?

Why are Minneapolis police condoning this lawbreaking? Because the guys upstairs do. Two City Council members, Cam Gordon and Robert Lilligren, joined the Critical Mass mob on last week’s ride. Mayor R.T. Rybak also rode with the mob once several years ago.

In August, after some of the ride’s rougher elements provoked a confrontation with police, and 19 people were arrested, Gordon, whose aide was one of those arrested, called foul. The usual hand-wringing and internal investigation in the police department followed. Gordon organized a meeting, where police and Critical Mass representatives discussed what were called mutual expectations.

Police Chief Tim Dolan says he doesn’t like expending limited police resources on Critical Mass rides. But support for more hard-nosed enforcement isn’t there, he says.

In other words – in Minneapolis, the well-connected get a different brand of justice.

It’d be interesting to see what’d happen if a right-to-life group, or Protest Warrior, interfered with traffic in Minneapolis.

This breeds a sense of entitlement.  Kersten notes…:

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements. He points out that political protest has changed since the ’20s and ’30s, when those involved were usually poor…The ’60s and ’70s brought a sea change. For the middle- and upper-class young people who flooded into the streets, protest became a vehicle for self-assertion — the “politics of personal expression.” (Think Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.) Middle-class kids wore their arrest record as a badge of honor.In his psychological studies of ’60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism — the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.

Not surprisingly, Lichter says, protesters often latched onto high-sounding motives to justify their self-absorbed actions. “You can’t take expressions of love for humanity at face value,” he explains. “They can serve as cover for aggressive feelings and tendencies.” A phenomenon like Critical Mass “allows people to act aggressively, while convincing themselves and some others that it’s all for a moral purpose.”

The problem with tolerating – and even officially encouraging – this sort of self-absorbed adolescent posturing is that it breeds the same solipsistic sense of entitlement that we noted last summer in Kathleen Soliahs’ husband and daughter:

“She lived in Berkeley,” Emily [Olson, Soliah’s daughter] says, trying to explain her mother’s affiliation with the SLA. “It was kind of normal.”…says Fred. “The LAPD massacre of the SLA was a bellwether event-the first televised SWAT team -” “Team murder,” Emily interrupts…“I always tell people she wasn’t a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla,” says Emily, smearing Blistex on her lips while waiting for the waitress to return.

And, perhaps in parallel, much of official Saint Paul, acting unofficially, condoned Soliah, and continues to to this day.

Minneapolis authorities eventually will discover what parents learn when they allow petulant children to break the rules “just to keep the peace.” You don’t get peace. You just open the door to bigger trouble.

That’s my only klinker with Kersten’s article.  I wouldn’t use the “spoiled kid” analogy.

A kid starts out with perfectly innocent motives; her parents do the spoiling.

A better one; if you leave the door open, over and over again, even after being repeatedly burgled…

I’m amusing myself at the moment by pondering this question: How would Lori Sturdevant describe a leader among conservatives, one who was unswerving in his devotion to conservative first principles and in their forwarding in the Legislature?  Someone like, say, Michele Bachmann or Phil Krinkie were, when they were in the State Senate?  Or like Marty Seifert is today?  I’m guessing words like “divisive” and “extremist” would pop up.

Just a hunch.

Naturally – being a DFL hack in all but name – Sturdevant can be expected to provide the same treatement to their opposite numbers in the DFL – if you’re in opposite world. 

So she shows, in yesterday’s column featuring my “represenative”, Alice “The Phantom” Hausman:

When state Rep. Alice Hausman of St. Paul rises to speak on the House floor, I’ve noticed, chatter quiets and paper rustling stops. 

If the chatterers and rustlers live in District 66B, they’re probably amazed to see that she actually exists.  Hausmann is not known for returning phone calls, or for that matter being seen around the district, unless there’s a photo op.   

Minneapolis’ 35th murder victim of this year so far was a guy not a lot different than me.  40something, kids, worked in the software racket, liked biking.  Mark Loesch even lived in my old neighborhood, just a few blocks from where I lived way back when. 

He was apparently beaten to death while out on a bike ride late last Friday night.

A local blogger and friend of Loesch’s remembers the victim:

I met him 12 years ago at an insurance company; I was a contractor, he was an employee. A manager casually mentioned to me that “this guy Mark really likes music, like you. You should go say hi”. So I dropped by, and we hit it off immediately: the awesome production skills of Trevor Horn was our first conversation.

We were work pals for a while, but worked on very different projects, and then he went off to something new. A few months later, he called me up with a fascinating new opportunity: He was part of a team moving a Prescription Benefits company from Detroit to the Twin Cities, and they needed to build a team FAST: Did I want to help?

So I joined him, and we worked very closely, at which point he invited me over for a party… so Pamela and I showed up. One week early! But he invited us in, and we had a great time for hours… maybe more fun than the “real party”… at least I remember our pre-party more. We carpooled for a year, and grew very close. He notoriously mixed me the “killer” eighth martini at my 30th birthday bash. I of course blamed it on him making it with Gin… not the obvious issue of it being the EIGHTH.

With all the carnage in Minneapolis, it’s important to remember that there’s a story behind every death.  Not all of them are as sympathic, on the surface, as Mr. Loesch’s, but behind even the most hardened banger or the most far-gone junkie there’s a father, a little sister or someone who loses a huge chunk of themselves.

Foot is even more tired of uninformed, zealot dolts than I am.

And that is very tired indeed.

The city’s North Side and Phillips neighborhoods are foetid cesspools of crime.

Gangs prowl downtown, fighting and shooting and intimidating pretty much at will.

The budget is a disaster.

Their last fire chief was tossed for being a Lothario…er, Lotharia?

But never let it be said Minneapolis’ City Council doesn’t have its priorities straight.  They’re working on banning wild animals from Minneapolis.

Barry Hickethier writes:

The Minneapolis City Council is considering amending an ordinance in a way that would ban any circus animals that are “wild by nature” (e.g. elephants, lions, tigers, etc.). This would in effect bring and end to the Minneapolis Zuhrah Shrine Circus. The amendment is sponsored by Cam Gordon and Ralph Remington. A .pdf of the ordinance with proposed amendment is here or you can link to it from this page.

The Shrine Circus raises tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for Shrine Children’s Hospitals. Last year, over 80,000 attended the Zuhrah Shrine Circus. Shrine Hospitals are a leader in spinal and burn injury care and research. In 2006, Shrine Hospitals attended to the needs of over 128,000 patients all at no cost to the patient or their family. The hospitals rely solely on donations through member dues, donations and fundraisers such as the Zuhrah Shrine Circus. Outlawing the circus will lead to a reduction in funding, which means children going untreated, research being cut or both.

Never a group to let untrammeled PC get in the way of doing what’s right, it’ll be fun to see what the Green/Looney dominated City Council ends up doing.

We share a city with some…”interesting” people. 

Lassie at True North notes that the “9/11 Truthers” are setting up shop over in Minneapolis:

 This Tuesday, September 11, many will reflect and say a prayer in remembrance or honor those who lost their lives in the wake of 9/11/2001. Then, there are those who think 9/11 was an inside job — the 9/11 Truthers. They plan to show their film “9/11 Press for Truth” and act out with some street theater in Minneapolis, with Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent.

Spend an evening celebrating our freedom of expression thru music, dance and spoken word (open mic time, too.)

Learn about the case for impeachment, find out about the campaign for a US Department of Peace, and discover great ways to work for change right here in Minneapolis…

Speakers Include: Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent and Time person of the year 2003, Marv Davidoff founder of the Honeywell Project…

If there ever was a better opportunity (or duty) to crash a party, this is it.

Hm.  Some parties, I’d like to crash.

Others, I’m happy to let stew in the fetid backwash of what Dostoevskii might have called their “brain fever”.

Joel Rosenberg notes a cruel, capricious irony in a brutal local crime:

Thom Pham, the owner of Azia, was mugged on Tuesday.  There were apparently six to eight attackers; fortunately, he only was “hospitalized with blunt force trauma to the head, lacerations to the skull and face, broken orbital (eye socket), concussion and severe bleeding.”

 Azia’s a nice place.  Had a date there once.  But I doubt I’d go back – and not entirely because of the prices.  No, I noticed the same thing Joel did:

I’ve never eaten at Azia; it’s one of the very few restaurants in Minneapolis that still has those silly No Guns signs up, and I prefer to spend my money where there’s no formal or informal suggestion that either the customers or the staff have been disarmed for the convenience of garboons.

 For those of you from out of state:  Minnesota’s “shall issue” law was accompanied by a requirement saying that stores or businesses that wanted to exclude the law-abiding gun owner from their premises needed to post a sign to that effect on their doors.  The first months after the passage of the Personal Protection Act saw a number of stores get posted, but the custom withered away pretty quickly; most proprietors realized that the law-abiding gun owner was both a non-risk and a pretty good customer; others responded to the reactions of long-time customers who, it turned out, were getting permits and donning concealed holsters and libertarian scruples.

Mr. Pham’s place – marooned in the deepest, darkest, dankest DFL-sodden part of The Wedge neighborhood in Minneapolis – no doubt earned the odd kudo from the occasional frumpy “the state is my mother”-type local resident. 

So I wonder if the irony is lost on Mr. Pham?

Hey, Thom?  I’ve got an offer: take down the silly signs, buy Felicia and me dinner, and the class is on me.

Mr. Pham:  Joel’s class is as good as Azia’s food.  And that’s saying something on both counts.

Go for it.

Yesterday, along with their “prepared statement” – which their spokesbeing read word for word from the exact same handout that’d been given to all the “press” and any other onlookers that asked – the Anarkids handed out this statement about last week’s riot in Minneapolis, produced here word-for-word from the “release”.

While fisking it is probably not going to be as interesting as finding out who the writer’s English Teachers were over the years, it’s probably worth a look:

On Friday, August 31, nineteen people were arrested after police brutally attacked cyclists with Tasers, pepper spray, and excessive physical force.  The cyclists were part of the monthly Critical Mass bike ride.

This month’s Critical Mass was a kick-off for the pReNC, a weekend of organizing against the Republican National Convention to be held in St. Paul in 2008.

Interesting.  On some of the local discussion forums, lefties are claiming that there is no, was no, never has been any connection between the two. 

  The RNC Welcoming Committe (RNC-WC), a group hosting the pReNC, gave a public speech before the ride exhorting riders to avoid confrontation throughout the weekend. 

Well, bully for them! 

But of course, in the months before the ride, they were busy talking about all the mayhem they were going to carry out.  Wonder if that “speech” managed to counteract all of that braggadocio? 

While the police as a whole use excessive and brutal force in our communities on a daily basis, we feel that yesterday’s police response was highly inconsistent with their usual behavior.

Um – hello?  So which is it?  If they’re a bunch of jackbooted fascists “on a daily basis”, what’s “inconsistent”? 

The bikers did not provoke this incident, as they committed no violent or destructive acts. 

It’s perhaps not surprising that this contradicts the Strib’s account of the incident. 

 Unmarked cars filmed and targeted specific people.  A State Patrol helicopter accompanied the entire event. 

And is it any wonder?  Given all the threats that these jackbooted little wannabee fascists have been making, if I were a cop I’d make sure that there were plenty of cameras aimed at the scene, too. 

 Three police cars followed throughout the ride, attempting to intimidate the riders by sounding their sirens regularly and driving into the crowd, but issued no official dispersal orders.

Wow. Cops driving into a crowd of bicyclists? 

I’m a bicyclist.  I know if a cop ran into my bike, I’d have some damage to show for it.  Right away!

Two cruisers – #993 and #998 – drove into the back of the Mass at the corner of La Salle and Grand.  Witnesses report that at least one bicyclist was hit by a squad car.  At this point, the police began to arrest and pepper spray those who had gathered at the site of the accident.  They pointed Tasers at a nonviolent crowd, as if to create a sense of panic.

Again – and naturally, and not unexpectedly (“HONEST, officer, someone put that crack pipe IN my purse!  Really”), this contradicts everything I’ve seen in the media on the subject, which reported the cops tried to arrest someone who was playing “chicken” in traffic, and were in turn attacked by a crowd of anarkids. 

Now – take careful note of this next part (emphasis added):

  Nearly twenty squad cars arrived on the scene.  Over forty police created a line formation in which they advanced on bikers, arresting, and brutalizing those who fell behind.

Huh-whah?

Anarkids on bikes couldn’t escape a bunch of cops, loaded down with gear, advancing deliberately in a line (per normal riot training)?

Am I the only one who suspects that they must not have been trying to “get away” all that hard?

One cyclist was pepper sprayed when she attempted to obey dispersal orders.

“I swear to God, officer – I have no idea where that TV came from!  Stolen, you say?  Someone must have stuffed it into my backseat!” 

  She was then handcuffed and held to the ground as a third officer Tasered her in the neck.  Witnesses were also pepper sprayed and one bystander was among those arrested. 

I’ll be interested in seeing the video. 

 Most of the nineteen arrestees were held on “Probable Cause” for Riot charges and their bail was set at $3,000 each.

Let me take a step back here.

I know that it is entirely possible that the police might have overreacted.  Nothing about being a conservative involves blindly accepting government’s view of things – indeed, since every actual systemic government infringement of free speech in our society today attacks conservatives rather than liberals, we are right to be vigilant. 

But what do you suppose the odds are that the Minneapolis Police Department – one of the most intensely-politicized police departments in the business, which works for among the farthest-left-leaning city governments in the nation – being fully aware of both the Anarkids’ proclamations and intentions and the sympathies so many of their civilian bosses have for the “protesters“, would allow their officers to go all unhinged?  Indeed, I’m going to make a very fearless prediction here; the officers covering and responding to the “protest” knew that they were going to be on dozens of videocameras, both official eyes in the sky and a thousand points of cell-cam.  I’d be amazed, under those political and technological circumstances, if there were more than the thinnest film of police misconduct.  Just a hunch – but like most of my predictions, I’m pretty comfortable with it.

We believe that the police aggression experienced Friday night was a pre-meditated attempt to intimidate the anti-RNC organizers.  Although members of the RNC-WC were the intended recipients of police violence, the officers present exercised no discretion in their brutality.  All Critical Mass riders were subject to the police’s use of unrestrained force.  This was, with no question, a police practice run for next year’s RNC.

Well, they were half right.

I’ll bet anything that this was an intentional provocation, intended to inflame a sense of righteous victimhood on the part of the “protesters” – to create a sense of “we have nothing to lose, so anything goes.  Our ends now justify our means!”. 

Indeed, their next passage indicates almost exactly that (emphases added): 

  When the RNC-WC says that the State brings violence to the streets and leaves poeple, pacifist or otherwise, with no peaceful option for resistance, these acts of brutal force are what we speak of.  We do not expect the police to be held accoutnable by a system that necessitates their violence; however, we remain committed to confronting this repression wherever it exists and with whatever means available.

We will not be intimidated.

No, I don’t suspect “being intimidated” has ever been on the agenda. 

UPDATE: A commenter noted that, while I DO try to avoid using “nazi” references, I did let one slip through. 

I’ll cop to it.  The thought of these jagoffs polluting my city, my adopted hometown, with their puerile/violent little fantasies, is noxious to me.  So I slipped.

Good catch.

A while ago, I wrote about the City Pages – the Twin Cities’ “alternative” freebie ‘zine – and their front-page article about the 35W Bridge Collapse.  I said that…:

 …”last week’s City Pages did a long, meandering, utterly speculative assignment of blame to everyone from the Governor to David Strom.  Absent from Anderson and Demko’s list:  “The design of the bridge itself”.

Former City-Pager Mike Mosedale emailed me:

That is incorrect. If you read the story, you will see there is a full section devoted to the subject.
Here is one relevant snippet:

“Even though it’s early in the investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board is already raising questions about the bridge’s design. One issue of concern: the bridge didn’t have any piers built into the riverbed. It also lacked what are commonly referred to as “engineering redundancies”—back-up support built into the system to minimize damage if one part fails. Last week, the NTSB and Federal Highway Authority focused on so-called gusset plates, steel sheets that connected the bridge’s girders together. The inspectors said the plates may have been a design flaw.”
 
I’m not interested in participating in your comment scrum, but I do think you should post a correction or apology.

Well, it goes to show you that I don’t read the City Pages as closely as I once did. 

But I apologize:  I missed the article’s brief nod to empirical fairness amid the pages of speculative, politicized witchhunting.  My bad. 

Because goodness knows how important it is to check one’s facts.

Kerry from Smoothing Plane has the same reaction to the term “closure” that I do; it’s terribly overused, and totally wrong.

Especially as the last bodies are recovered from the Mississippi:

“Families will get closure…”, “Closure…”, “Another body pulled….closure”. Will billboards be pulled onto the roofs of buildings, “Got closure?”…? Relatives and families of the dead will not get closure; they will learn what happened to their missing father, son, mother or daughter. The palpable empty nothing of not knowing will untangle into dense, light cannot escape its gravity grief…All language less than rituals of grief for the dead shame and banish grief, as if it were some drooling cripple, muttering shattered curses, from whom we look away, masquerading the stone in the stomach.

I don’t know what kind of traffic Kerry Hogan gets, but he should get more. 

UPDATE:  The last body was found just after I wrote this.  May God – or the Great Spirit or Karma or random physiology or whatever you choose to believe in – bring peace to the families. 

Over the weekend, the Strib seemed to all but declare “low taxes” the culprit behind the bridge collapse.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writes for the Center of the American Experiment:

But for any connection to hold, at least one of the following conditions would have to be true, when not a single one is.

It would have to be demonstrated, for instance, that decisions by the Minnesota Department of Transportation about what to do about the bridge — whether to repair it, how to repair it, when to repair it — were made on the basis of what such steps might cost. But I know of no evidence that money played any role in determining what state officials or anyone else did or didn’t do in maintaining the bridge.

Likewise, to draw any suspect connection between the collapse and the consistent preference of large numbers of Minnesotans to hold the line on taxes, one would have to assume that inspectors and other officials charged with protecting and serving allowed anything other than their professionalism to determine how they gauged the sturdiness and fragility of the state’s infrastructure. Without a morsel of evidence that any of them compromised their integrity, it’s slanderous to imply that any of them did.

And then, of course, even if Pawlenty broke his no-tax pledge 20 minutes after taking office in 2003, and even if MnDOT’s budget doubled in a single bound, does anyone really believe that federal, state and local bureaucracies would have moved fast enough so that anything other than maybe talking about a new 35W bridge would have happened by now?

Oh, and I have a fearless prediction; last week’s City Pages did a long, meandering, utterly speculative assignment of blame to everyone from the Governor to David Strom.  Absent from Anderson and Demko’s list:  “The design of the bridge itself”. 

That’s where my money is…

Margaret Martin, over at Minneapolis Crime Watch, notes the ongoing furor over in Minnesota’s most dangerous city about Mayor Rybak’s failure to hire more police officers.

Last week, it was the police federation – granted, hardly an action against their own interests, but still.

And now, the most unlikely union of all (I add emphasis):

Today another challenge was issued to the Mayor. This time in a joint press release from the Independence Party and Republican Party of the 5th Congressional District. The chairs of both organizations attended a meeting last night where police coverage was a key topic of discussion.

The release takes Mayor Rybak to task for not living up to one of his campaign promises and for not putting a priority on public safety.

We support the police federation in their campaign to bring more cops to Minneapolis . We believe that the mayor’s first priority should be to keep the promise he made one year ago. The city’s police department should be restored to 893 sworn officers, the number of officers that existed just four years ago, before the city’s drastic cuts to police department staffing. Even though the mayor promised to restore the department to 893 officers, and the city council budgeted the funds to achieve that commitment, we now stand 50 officers short of the goal. By year end, with no plans to hire additional officers, the department is likely to be at least 65 officers short of the goal.

It appears from the release that the mayor once again leaned heavily on the “but they cut LGA” crutch. This is a cop out (no pun intended) by the mayor. True, LGA was cut in 2003, but there have not been cuts since. The truth is that the mayor and the city council have deemed public safety a lower priority than other budget items, or they could have simply shifted funds from those projects into public safety. On top of that, LGA is well above earlier years which had greater coverage and the police budget was a higher percentage of the overall city budget.

Read the whole thing.

When the MNGOP and the “Independence Party” (think “DFL Lite”) team up on a DFL mayor, you know things are getting hairy.

If there’s a Minnesota politics “expert” whose shelf-life is more expired than Larry Jacobs, the U of M PoliSci prof who is cited in virtually every story about politics (or so it seems) in the Minnesota mainstream media, it’s gotta be Wy Spano.  Spano turns up everywhere, on every panel (or, again, so it seems), doing for panel discussions what Lori Sturdevant does for the Columns page; gurgitating DFL talking points.

Which would be one thing if he weren’t an intellectual thug…

…well, let’s let Margaret take over the story over at Anti-Strib:

David did the political panel on Almanac this past Friday. If you didn’t see it, the panel had most of the usual suspects: Ember Reichgott-Junge, Fritz Knaacht, Wy Spano and David. The panel quickly devolved into Wy vs. David, with Wy trying to make the argument that the bridge collapsed because maintenance was underfunded and the Taxpayers League (David and his rich friends) had ruined the state. Wy spouted that the no longer were Minnesotans going to believe the Taxpayers League and that basically the bridge collapse showed that the battle was over and conservative arguments had lost. The on-camera debate continued largely civilly although Wy continued to butt in and talk over David, but that’s his style so nothing really new there. What the viewers didn’t really see what the shouting match that developed after the segment was over. Interestingly, neither the producers, nor Erik Eskola told them to shut up, except for an initial “quiet on the set” when Cathy Wurzer began the index file question segment. There was shouting and hand waving so loud that I, sitting on the bleachers couldn’t hear the question (a weekly bit of Minnesota trivia for those of you who never watch the show). Cathy was clearly distracted and you can see an occasional silhouette moving around behind the strategically placed vase full of sunflowers.

I will have to summarize the “discussion” that took place after the cameras stopped rolling because there was a lot of noise. David pointed out that the Stillwater Bridge is in worse shape than the I-35W bridge was and Wy started shouting that David was a “liar” and a “know nothing” and that the “know nothings had been winning” but now “they” were going to take back the state.” It was quite the scene, reminiscent of Nikita’s Kruschev’s “we will bury you” speech. Or the Wellstone memorial.

They apparently think everyone will be deaf before the engineers finally come out and say the bridge collapsed due to things that wouldn’t have been affected by any more spending. 

It may be their only hope, in fact.

UPDATE:  In my haste, I missed the link the first time. 

Here’s how the media world has turned around in the past twenty years; when I worked for Hubbard Broadcasting, from 1985 to 1987, it was a big honkin’ player in the local media scene, with a market value of around $400 million dollars.

Today, Hubbard is valued around a billion dollars – and is a “ma and pa shop” in the great media scheme of things.

Their flagship TV station, Channel 5, has taken its ratings lumps – but it’d seem they’ve done something right.  They were pretty universally acclaimed as having the best coverage of the bridge collapse last week.

Sarah Janecek, writing last  week, sums up the plaudits:

KSTP TV started reporting on the bridge in its Wednesday six p.m. newscast with the first live chopper shot at 6:22. The station stayed on the air covering the story live for the next 25 hours straight. I cannot begin to calculate what that cost. Never mind the costs of the employee overtime, or the expense of keeping helicopters live in the air for 13 hours straight, there were no commercials. None. The first commercial break was a short one during last night’s ten p.m. newscast.

Old man Hubbard, himself, was in the news room Wednesday night, observing his hard working news team. At no time was cost an issue in terms of coverage. He just let his team run, and run, they did.

Janecek also be-kudoes the local citizen journalist community.  Check it out.

…because unlike certain over-the-hill Metro columnists, I’m not going to pretend to be an engineer, but…

Engineers think they might have possibly found egg on Nick Coleman, Elwyn Tinklenburg, Alice Hausman, Amy Klobuchar and Wreck Chupke’s faces a possible clue as to what might have brought down the 35W River Bridge:

Opening a new window into last week’s fatal bridge collapse, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that one of its areas of inquiry involves the design of steel connecting plates known as gusset plates; the material makeup of those plates; and the loads and stresses they bore.

Hours later, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters said the NTSB indicated that the stress on the bridge’s gusset plates may have been a factor in the bridge collapse and that one possible stress may have been the weight of construction equipment and materials on the bridge.

A mistake on the drawing board?

Wow – that would have nothing to do with the gas tax, would it?

Again – it’s way too soon to tell; this is nowhere close to a conclusion.

But if it is, Nick Coleman is going to have some ‘splainin’ to do.

The groundswell is growing; Minnesotans don’t want the DFL to hijack last week’s tragedy to ram through a shopping list of their pork projects.

57% of Minnesotans aren’t buying it.  I’ve heard some lefties respond to this poll “of course people oppose a new tax; you need to ask them what the tax is for!”   Perhaps – but then, I suspect nobody will ask the citizens of this state what they really want out of a “special session”, either;

Leo “Psychmeister” Pusatieri issues the call (I add the emphases):

There appears to be a substantial number of Republican lawmakers who are seeing the call for raising the state gas tax to be what it is– an opportunistic ploy by DFL lawmakers to ramrod a political agenda by exploiting a tragedy that had absolutely nothing to do with either the presence of or absence of a tax increase. While they certainly see the need to prioritize and ensure the safety of bridges and other infrastructure, they are likewise acknowledging that the answer lies not in an additional burden on Minnesota taxpayers, but rather on a good, old-fashioned prioritization of allocation of resources.

The bottom line is that neither a special session nor a tax increase is required to prevent what happened on the I-35 W bridge from happening elsewhere.

A phone call or email (Pawlenty@state.mn.us) to Governor Pawlenty’s office will go a long way toward ensuring that the solution to the bridge and infrastructure issue is a prudent, effective measure, rather than a knee-jerk tax-and-spend reaction.

There’s your links.  Get on it.

Leo also points us to essential posts on the subject from:

• Strom: “I see a backlash coming, a la Wellstone Memorial”
• Gross:  “this poll clearly indicates that people want to see a solution-oriented legislature. They want to drive across safe bridges. This isn’t a poll that says we can afford inaction. This is a great opportunity for Gov. Pawlenty and the House GOP leadership to show Minnesotans their common sense approach to solving problems.”
• Aplikowski:  “it is almost like the people who support the currently elected crop in St. Paul (and lash out at those of us who disagree with and question their authority) are completely out of touch with the reality of Minnesotans.”
• Gary Miller: “Raising taxes would be nothing short of admitting complicity in the 35W tragedy.  How this fact is lost of the Governor, who has left the door open to a gas tax increase, defies credulity”
• Michael Brodkorb: “Of the 38% that support a gas tax increase, 47% think it should be raised less than 5 cents.”

Read ’em all.

But call or email the governor first.

Like most MOB blogs, I’ve made a bit of a sub-career of ripping on the hapless Nick Coleman. 

Last week’s two vile, politicized, uninformed, illiterate, hateful columns about the bridge collapse (1 and 2) were the nadir of a career with very few high points. 

But Roosh – from RooshFive – shows what would be possible, if Coleman’s editors merely trusted him less and forced him to take some input (or cut the crap and replaced Coleman).

It ends…:

All the more reason to find ourselves reassured and in awe, and so proud of the heroes of late – both professional and civilian, that have shown our entire country how great a place the Twin Cities of Minnesota are to live and work

…but you should read the whole thing.

Number 1:  When the engineers finally release their report about what actually caused the 35W Bridge Collapse, a lot of regional lefties – Elwyn Tinklenberg, Rep. Alice Hausman, Nick Coleman and others among them – are going to owe the Governor, Lt. Gov/Transportation Commissioner Molnau, the Taxpayers’ League and the “hold the line on taxes” crowd – a lot of apologies for a lot of defamation.

Number 2: None of them will actually give those apologies.

That is all.

We’ll check back on this when the report comes back…