Photocop is DOA:

Drivers in Minneapolis won’t need to worry about smiling — or grimacing — for the cameras again any time soon.

The state Supreme Court agreed Thursday with the lower courts that the city’s so-called PhotoCop cameras at a dozen intersections are preempted by state law and therefore illegal.

Wave bye bye!

Katherine Kersten writes re the Somali booze/pork flap:

Will America do better than Europe at assimilating Muslims? The jury is still out. But recent local events – Somali taxi-drivers refusing to carry passengers with alcohol, Target cashiers refusing to handle pork, the flying imams incident — signal that difficulties lie ahead.

Perhaps, but I’m not sure for whom.

Where are these problems in other cities? Detroit, which has the largest Moslem population in the nation per-capita, doesn’t seem to have these issues (or maybe Detroit’s other issues overshadow them); If the scruples of Moslem cabbies and checkouts were causing trouble in New York or LA, you wouldn’t think the selectively-righteous indignation of a few cabbies and clerks in the Twin Cities would make the news, would you?

These “problems” just don’t seem to exist elsewhere.

Submitted for your approval; the “problem” arises from…:

1. …the presence of a relatively huge Somali community, brought to the Twin Cities during the Clinton Administration (with major help from our local DFL representatives, who realize that poor, welfare-bound immigrants make reliable DFL supporters),
2. a number of imams serving that community that preach a strain of Islam that’d seem to be more fundamentalist than the Quran itself, and
3. a local media that will serve as the chuzzlewitted, unpaid sock puppet of any special interest that can chant “Bush Sucks” in any language.

How will it resolve? Well, that’s the interesting question. Will the new DFL majority, to be sensitive to the new immigrants’ mores, ban pork and alcohol? Will local Somalis tire of the ostracism their excessively fastidious and publicity-hungry coreligionists will continue bringing them?

Or will this be for a group of publicity-hungry imams what Tawanna Brawley was for Al Sharpton?

 The latest lunacy to seize Minneapolis – a city that seizes lunacy like Lindsay Lohan seizes appletinis – is “Instant Runoff Voting”.  An idea husbanded by the Green Party, it basically brings to elections the sober reflection of the Lotto with the insight of a high school popularity contest.

Here’s how IRV works (and I’ll note in advance that my disdain for the idea will make this description seem about as dismissive as I intend it to):

1. For each race, the voter fills in their their choices for candidates, in descending order.  For example, in my most recent Mayoral race, I’d have put a “1” by Randy Kelly, a “2” by the written-in name of my dog, a “3” by Mary Jane Reagan (if she were running – and she’s always running for something), a “4” by the written-in name of “Idi Amin”, a “5” next to DFL-endorsed Chris Coleman, and a “6” next to the endorsed Green candidate (whose name I’m fuzzy on – I think it was Moonbeam Birkenstock, but don’t quote me on that). 
2. The computers would count everyone’s first choices. 
3. If nobody gets a majority, then the computer takes the second choices.
4. And so on.
5. And so forth.
6. And I’m actually very fuzzy on how it works at this point.
7. It’s confusing.  Really.
8. And we come out with a winner.

What I think is most interesting, by the way, is that the same people who kvetch and barber about electronic balloting and how Diebold is run by Republicans are the same people, in many cases, who want to turn our democracy (whatever that means in Minneapolis) over, entirely, to a ranked sorting algorithm.

Seem…opaque to you?

We have a rare moment of bipartisan consensus.  On a St. Paul politics discussion board, a commenter with long-standing ties to the DFL writes:

…remember who is most empowered by the IRV system,  it is those voters who chose candidates who get dropped from the ballot  first.  So, if you would agree that in most municipal elections the  candidates who finish last are not some brilliant issue oriented candidate who  just didn’t have the resources to be heard, but rather a candidate with lots and  lots of tin foil on their head.  And, remember those voters who voted for  that candidate then get their second choice.  You really start to see how  the IRV system is
just about as far away from Jefferson’s goal of having an  educated and informed electorate as possible. 

In fact as someone who has been running campaigns for over thirty years in  Saint Paul, it doesn’t take a lot to figure out the purpose of the IRV system,  it is to achieve by random chance and confusion what one can’t do in an open an  informed election — elect Minor Party candidates.

While I agree with the writer about as often as I french-kiss Marisa Tomei, I think that’s a great point; IRV makes the fringe, nutcase bloc inordinately powerful.  Combine that with a slick, coordinated message that “democracy is broken” and a faith-based plea to make trite protest-voting a way of life, and you will have…

…a city even more strangled by fringe politics than Minneapolis already is. 

  The essence of the new campaigns once IRV happens is vote Green, it doesn’t matter.  Don’t  worry, our candidate won’t get elected, your second choice will win, so it  doesn’t matter that you voted for us first.  Send a protest vote!  So,  if you can be convinced that it really doesn’t matter who you vote for and it  won’t hurt you to throw away a vote, and if they can get enough people  comfortable with that, then they get to win a few seats. 

Democracy and governance is no longer of some value, its just a parlor  game. 

 They want to bring the system to Saint Paul, by the way – and the proposal is getting some traction in high places.  

  [IRV proponents] want to tell you that it will be cheaper to not hold  primaries.  What they don’t mention is that we will need all new computers  for every polling place to read IRV ballots and they don’t mention that the  school board won’t be on an IRV ballot so, you might need two separate ballots  and machines, or at least you will have one contest where you IRV and one where  you don’t
IRV, that will make the average voter happy…

 Another thing about IRV; I measure Usability for a living; it involves answerign the questions “Who is using a product (software, hardware, toy, shopping process, whatever), “What are they trying to accomplish, how important is it to them” and so on.  I (and a class I was teaching at the time) did a usability evaluation on the infamous Butterfly Ballot, for example – and founds scads of things that could make it incrementally more difficult to use more correctly.  Fact is, when things are designed by people whose first interest (or competence) is not designing things to be usable by people whose primary goal in life isn’t using that thing, you’re going to have problems.

And if American election authorities can’t design a punch card ballot – a book with a pinhole – to be clear and usable, what makes anyone think that they can design a rank-based ballot that will be any clearer?  And before you answer that question, remember – there a small but solid number of people out there who earn a very living wage, myself included, precisely because industry realizes exactly how dismally bad most people are at making things usable.

 And, having done campaigns, if you ask voters why they don’t vote in  primaries, the normal answer is because they don’t know who all of the  candidates are and that they don’t pay attention to the election until the field  is narrowed, and of course that will never happen in IRV.  So, you are as  likely to turn off voters as stimulate them. 

But, remember it isn’t the general public that we are concerned about, or  what the average voter will be most comfortable with, the real issue is How In  the Heck Can We Come Up With a Scheme To Elect A Green Candidate????

Exactly.  If you can’t win ’em over with your platform and candidates, baffle ’em.

The “good” news – Minneapolis misses the “distinction” of adding two more deaths to what is shaping up to be a horrible year.

The bad news – the double homicide happened in neighboring Brooklyn Park.

The bodies of a man and a woman were found in a car in the parking lot.

The victims had been shot multiple times.

Names of the victims have not been released and no one has been arrested.

Brooklyn Park is a schizophrenic place; the northern part is an idyllic ‘burb; the south, an expansion franchise for North Minneapolis’ crime quagmire.  A Hennepin County city, it “benefitted” from eight years of Amy Klobuchar’s worthless legacy as County Attorney.

This part kills me.

A woman there said she believed it was her son who had been shot because other young people were calling her about it.

“All we can do now is pray for my son,” said the woman, who was then directed by an officer to go up the block to Brooklyn Park police headquarters.

Yeah.  And everyone else in the area, as well.

Lest we forget, Minneapolis voters were duped into electing a racist troll to their school board this past November.

Jim W. at Anti-Strib sums up where things are at.

Stay tuned at Anti-Strib – this is one of the most amazing stories in Minnesota politics today.

The Strib editorial board, learning a lesson or two from the street thugs they’ve been avoiding writing about for the past year, are circling their next victim – you.

Watch your wallet:

In June 2004 the Hiawatha light-rail line debuted to rave reviews from riders, applause from community leaders and a volume of passengers that far exceeded official projections.

And yet, even with the ridership numbers, 2/3 of the line’s revenue is from state appropiations. A little over 1/3 is from ridership and advertising – the stuff the Strib editorial board clucks over. “Rave reviews” and inflated ridership haven’t made the Ventura Trolley anything but a state-sponsored money pit.

The result? Minnesota won’t open its next light-rail line until … 2014.

Speaking as someone who lives six blocks off the next light rail line, there’s a term for that; reprieve.

That’s appalling. It’s not just a sign of ossified planning and a lingering love affair with the automobile, it’s a warning that state leaders haven’t grasped the truth about growing, prosperous cities — that an adequate transit network relieves road congestion, improves quality of life, conserves energy and triggers lively new forms of metropolitan economic development.

Of course, 1, 2 and 4 are backed by no emprical evidence, and 3 is doubtlful. But don’t stop ’em – they’re on a roll.

Accelerating the region’s transportation timetable — including light rail, commuter rail, road projects and dedicated bus lanes — is one of the most urgent tasks facing the 2007 Legislature. It would help restore Minnesota’s reputation for enlightened urban planning while burnishing the high quality of life that has long been a Twin Cities selling point in the national competition for economic talent.

I’m no transit hawk – I ignore most of the city-bashing endemic in most critiques of transit, because there is a place for transit, determined by the market. There is no market need for a train from downtown to the airport. There is market need for something – train, bus, whatever – to haul people from the cities, where they live, to the ‘burbs, where more and more of them work. And there are cases under which Northstar and Red Rocks (the commuter lines from Big Lake and Hastings, respectively) could be self-supporting – not right now, of course, but at some point when population in the far east and far west metro exceeds our capacity for building roads (which, despite the one-size-fits-all panaceamongering of the road-hawks is also going to happen; the very thing that makes rails so expensive, buying right-of-way, is going to smack roads upside the head, too), and assuming the Met Council doesn’t turn the lines into monuments to themselves (going easy on building stations, buying used rolling stock for starters), both lines could be self-supporting in the reasonable future.

But that’s not what the Strib is talking about.

Early next year a coalition of planners and business leaders, with wide support from mayors, will ask the Legislature to create some form of dedicated metro revenue stream, perhaps a half-cent regional sales tax, to get these projects on track. Such a tax would raise more than $200 million annually, cost the average local household less than $75 a year, and let the Twin Cities make a commitment now — rather than waiting a costly decade.

Here’s what they envision: The commuter from Eden Prairie could get to her Minneapolis office without wasting time on clogged freeways. The Vikings fan from Elk River could get to the Dome without downtown traffic jams [only to fly into a rage when they realize the same government that taxed them to build the transit system also put the Vikings up in Blaine or Anoka or Farmington…]. The Bach enthusiast from Edina could get to the Ordway without fretting about parking ramps. Suddenly, people would have new choices about where to live and how to get where they’re going.

I have a vision, too. She’s a gorgeous, 35 year old redhead. She has no psychological problems, is a cheap date, smart and articulate enough to replace half of the NARN on the air, has a thing for [censored for the early morning audience], and best of all she’s going to knock on my door in about ten minutes, without my having to so much as take out an ad on Match.com!
Really! That’s my vision!

I went to a presentation a few years back by former Saint Paul mayor Jim Scheibel – one of the most disastrous mayors this city has had. It was at a forum on affordable housing. He got up and spoke on the vision for affordable housing; liveable places, with enough of the amenities of modern life to make the resident feel like they’re not removed from society; enough room to put one’s family in; of course, in easy walking distance from good transit. Completely absent from the discussion; what those of us who have to find our own affordable housing have to pay for this. Try as I did, he never got around to that.

A vision of…well, the paper calls it “convenience” without a vision of the work that Minnesotans are going to put into the taxes to pay for it – and believe me, on top of everything else I pay for in this state, $75 to pay for this “vision” is too much – isn’t a vision so much as it is the petty tyranny of the petty bureaucrat.

This isn’t some planner’s fantasy. In Denver, transit has spurred a $1 billion cleanup of an old industrial brownfield;

Nice, but – at whose expense?

in Portland, it has created a leafy, walkable urban core;

Again, nice – but does the core necessarily follow the transit? Minneapolis has a “walkable urban core”.

in Washington, lively neighborhoods of cinemas, bookstores and condominiums have sprung up around Metro stations.

Benefitting DC’s yuppies immensely. No, I’ve been there, and the DC transit system is a wonder. And a money pit, too!

In fact, it’s the very concept embodied in the Metropolitan Council’s main planning documents. The problem is that Minnesota doesn’t have the money to carry out its own plan.

And where I come from, that’s called “a reason to get a new plan”.

There are plenty of details to negotiate in a regional transportation tax, some involving principle and some involving mechanics. But if lawmakers want to maintain the momentum of this vibrant metro area, they need to say, “All aboard.”

No. They need to say “let’s suspend our transit dogma and quit building visions, and start doing what Minnesotans really need.

I’ve taken my swipes at Nick Coleman before.   He’s deserved quite a few.

He’s also written some good stuff. Yesterday’s was one of his best:

So the most infamous of the city’s 59 murders of 2006 closes with tears, a life sentenced to rot in prison, and a mystery. No one may ever understand how a 21-year-old with nothing on his record to warn he might kill, who was not a gangster — “not a menace to society,” as his mom, Yolanda, tearfully told the judge — how it came to a point he sprayed an entertainment block with gunfire.

“He’s not the worst person we’ve encountered in this system,” the judge said, noting that Holliday showed some remorse after his arrest.

Holliday had been in AmeriCorps, helped build a house for a homeless family, worked at the Y, was hoping to go to college and had a chance to turn out OK. Somehow, he ended up on a street with a gun. And he took two lives — Alan Reitter’s and his own.

It’s actually worth a read.

Saturday: Michael Brodkorb of MDE appears on NARN3 with King and the guys from Anti-Strib to shred Minneapolis School Board member Chris Stewart (AKA Rahelio Soleil), who would seem to be not only a racist, but a particularly dumb one whom even Democrats are having trouble supporting.

Sunday: Michael Brodkorb’s house is egged.

And while the mere act of egging doesn’t pin blame on the soon-to-be-disgraced school board member and his supporters, we’re waiting for investigators to tell us if the egg was free-range.

It would be circumstantial, but still dispositive.

If you don’t live in Saint Paul, you might not know or care about Porkys’, a University Avenue institution for about fifty years.  The drive-up restaurant, with its greasy burgers and heavenly, American Heart Association-condemned onion rings, has been an anchor on the Uni cruising circuit since Eisenhower was in office.

While RT Rybak apparently can do nothing about crime, and is intent on taxing Minneapolis business into Eden Prairie or Sioux Falls, he does know his fast food, according to Doug Grow:

But there’s nothing normal about Porky’s, which has achieved icon status in St. Paul, or the debate the drive-through restaurant has stirred in northeast Minneapolis…To some, like Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, Porky’s conjures up romantic visions.

“As a kid, I rode my bike there,” he said, referring to a time when there were three Porky’s in the city.

All three closed decades ago, victims of the “Big Mac-ing” of America.

Rybak gets almost misty-eyed when he talks of the deeper meaning of Porky’s onion rings. They represent local ownership, a destination point, affordable family dining.

“If a piece of our history can’t be part of our future, the city has lost some of its soul,” the mayor is fond of saying.

And while I think Rybak’s romanticism is out of control – Minneapolis has lost vastly bigger swathes of its history than Porky’s – I wish all the best to the restaurant’s expansion.

And by “all the best”, I mean “good luck”.  They’ll need it.

Some clearly don’t share the mayor’s cosmic view of Porky’s. An organization — Neighbors Against Porky’s — believes it’s the wrong restaurant in the wrong place.”I like the onion rings, too,” said Doron Clark, a member of the group. But not in this place.

Some neighbors say the drive-through restaurant, which will have limited indoor seating, would dump too much traffic into the neighborhoods just off Central Avenue. Porky’s will bring more crime, graffiti and litter, detractors also say.

Finally, Porky’s foes have expressed concern that Porky’s will attract the classic car crowd that has attached itself to the Porky’s on University Avenue in St. Paul.

As part of the zoning committee’s approval, Truelson must agree not to encourage the classic car crew to show up on Central if he wants to build in Minneapolis.

Ah, yes. The dreaded “neighborhood activists” are sounding off.  They’re the ones that have basically shut down the hot rod cruise on University and Snelling on Saturday nights, the ones that extincted the Midway’s biggest, coolest June event, the Minnesota Street Rod Association cruise nights during their annual weekend convention.  Cars – the most amazing assortment of hot rods you’ve ever seen – would jam Snelling and University for miles, from Porky’s up Snelling to the Fairgrounds and down Uni to the Capitol…

…until the “neighborhood activists” got it shut down.  They couldn’t let other people be different from them for one lousy night a year.

These are, largely, the same people who are pressing for more mass transit, people who are “happy to pay for a better Minnesota”, people who vote for Metrocrat DFLers.

In other words, they want to live in a big, cosmopolitan city – but they can’t seem to stand people doing the legal, fun things people do in big, cosmopolitan cities.  These dolts want all the benefits of city life, and they want it to be as loud as an Iowa cornfield, 24/7/365, in the bargain.

I’m about ready to declare war on this hamsters.  They should…:

• either learn to compromise once in a while, and recognize that their blessed “diversity” includes “diversity of recreation” and “diversity of noise tolerance”
• or, if at the end of the day they really find the scrum and bustle of city life so intolerable, move to friggin Burnsville or Chanhassen or Hugo and leave the city to those of us who appreciate it.

Rybak, for once, is right.  But he might not know why.

The public school system has a lot of problems.

• The goal, in this era of “No Child Left Behind”, is for students to do well on tests. That’s about it. Schools, teachers and administrators can back and fill all they want, but at the end of the day they are all just “teaching the test” – on pain of running afoul of NCLB’s “Accountability” rules. NCLB has been ta disaster.
• The biggest disaster, of course, was way public education got into the mess in the first place. The teachers’ unions take a lot of blame – justifiably – for the “dumbing down” of education. The unions, being unions, have done their best to turn education into a blue-collar factory job with white-collar accessories and workload. Detractors call the system the “Factory Model of Education”, and justly so; the system resembles an assembly line. Procedures must be followed. Parts that don’t fit the specs are removed from the production line. Speed and efficiency are essential.
• The basic model for education – sit in a desk in an airless building for six to eight hours at a shot, eat lousy food, get water only when given (infrequent) permission, learning things when someone else, a curriculum designer or teacher, deems fit – is one that works, objectively, for maybe a tenth of the population. For the rest, it’s a matter of gritting one’s teeth and toughing it out, or…not. Remember – most of what kids learn in six years of elementary school can be taught to average kids of average intelligence in a matter of weeks.
• Above all, students have to show up and sit in those damn desks. Schools are paid on a per-student, per-day basis; if Johnny doesn’t have his butt in that desk at 8:40, the school doesn’t get paid for the days that the student is absent, or even late without an excuse.

It’s hard to figure which is less of wonder – that kids see the whole charade as a waste of time, or that the schools are failing to teach more and more kids the basics every single year.

The Strib addresses the truancy “crisis” in an editorial this morning:

At North High School, almost 50 percent of the 1,300 students skipped enough school last year to be considered habitual truants. That’s the highest truancy rate in Minneapolis — not coincidentally in one of the highest crime areas in the city. Those numbers speak volumes about how important is it to intervene with early-stage truants.

Only if you presume that:

• …school figures on “truancy” are accurate. They are not. Schools consider a student who is late without a “valid excuse” three times in a semester to be “truant”. They don’t, for the record, care why the student is late without an excuse; absentminded parents forgetting to write notes, kid missed the bus, car wouldn’t start, kid not feeling well? Who cares! The kid is “truant!” Why? We’ll get to that.
• …wanting to leave the madhouse of the modern inner city school is inherently irrational. Yet in a school where the majority of students do not learn what they need in the adult world (to say nothing of things like critical thinking and the love of learning), where they go through metal detectors and practice “locking down” and are subject to a routine more in line with prison than with school, truly – what’s irrational about wanting out?

The districts respond, of course, like any bureaucracy:

Recent city and county efforts are not the first or only antitruancy programs. Both Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys’ offices have addressed the issue with some success.

Really?

Have they?

Ramsey County’s “Truancy Intervention Program” employs a group of lawyers to chase after “truant” kids – county prosecutors who should be prosecuting crimes against citizens. They spend their highly paid days chasing after kids and parents who, for whatever reason, don’t get to class (or just don’t get there on time often enough), threatening dire consequences for non-compliance.

Have they had “some success”? The program’s website explains the “success” in terms that make perfect sense to bureaucrats; butts were indeed jammed back into seats. So why does a school district need to have the full weight of the County Attorney’s office to corral kids back into their seats? Could they do it less expensively – or is the TIP basically a make-work program for less-talented county lawyers?

This isn’t rocket science: Teens who like school and feel successful there are much less likely to skip. Young people who regularly participate in activities through community, church or school are too busy to look for trouble.

But the first thing school districts cut when the budgets are cut fail to rise as fast as the union wants are the very programs that help give so many kids a reason to stay current – indeed, where so many kids learn vastly more than they do in school, if they’re at all like I was.  And – biggest madness of all – “good” schools are now demanding a positively insane amount of homework, a bit of collective lunacy that deserves its own post.

As fond as the left is of seeking “root causes” for things, you’d think they’d be interested in the “root cause” of truancy.  But I suspect the “root result” is the biggest issue to them.

A few weeks back, Minneapolitans elected racist dolt Chris Stewart to their School Board. The Strib, expending a new-found effort to report some of the the inconvenient facts about liberal politicians, notes that Stewart ran a blog that trafficked in racist japes.

There are people more qualified than I to excoriate this dolt. But I thought these two bits from the Strib story were interesting.

At one point, Stewart notes:

Stewart said he deeply regretted being at the center of a racial controversy, but he challenged his critics to look honestly at race relations in Minneapolis, using Keith Ellison as an example. Ellison, a black and a Muslim, was elected Nov. 7 to Congress from the Fifth District.

“Keith Ellison did everything we were told to do as kids,” Stewart said. “He got an advanced education, he got married, he had kids. Yet he’s reduced to his color and his religion.

“I see it as naked racism.”

Ellison was “reduced to his color and his religion” – and sent to Washington, to boot.

But let’s leave out that whole “he’s a member of Congress, now”, bit. Who “reduced” him to his color? And how? (Oh, the City Pages reduced the race to a matter of color, all right – count the number of times “white” turns up in this bit about the Apostate Heritic Ventura Independence Vote Suck Party)

Anyone?

The Strib noted elsewhere in the story – with no apparent irony intended – that Stewart also said:

The postings include… references to the “gelded quality” of black executives who speak precise white English.

Consorting with terror supporters is apparently less a problem to this hamster than speaking English.

Finally, this moral gelding moron whines:

“If you’ve written stuff and other people have written with you, does that discount you from political service?” Stewart said. “If the stuff is potent, does that discount you from participating in democracy?”

Of course not. But if your “potent” “stuff” is grossly offensive, it might make people think you can’t be trusted with elective office.

I suppose that pointing that out makes me a “racist”, too.

Perhaps being freed from the angst of being a political minority in a state he believes is “his” (for a couple of years, anyway) is helping. Or perhaps he’s just come to terms with the fact that he’s no political commentator.

But Nick Coleman has managed to write a column that skirts perilously close to a number of inconvenient truths.

He’s writing about Target Corporation’s plea for property tax relief from Hennepin County:

Luckily, when it comes to helping bail out billion-dollar outfits, Hennepin County sets the standard for compassion.

Earlier this year, the County Board came to the rescue of Carl (Big Pockets) Pohlad, handing him half a billion (a billion, when you count the interest taxpayers will pay). Hennepin County has become a beacon to the needy, and this important charity work has attracted other hungry billionaires, such as Zygi Wilf, who is thinking of getting in line for an $800 million stadium. I don’t know about you, but this kind of charity work makes me proud. When you can feel good by doing good, then you are on the right track. No corporation should be left behind.

Well, that’s kinda what happens when a group – a state, a church, a nation, whatever – gets into the habit of subsidizing things, to say nothing of picking and choosing what to subsidize.

Minnesota – and especially Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis – has always subsidized two things:

• Big Businesses – stadiums for billionaire team owners and millionaire players are only the latest in a long, fiscally gruesome record of turning over money and resources from those who have, to those who have more. From eminent domain land grabs (which took private property from business owners to give to…other business owners) led to the Best Buy and Target headquarters buildings in Richfield and Downtown Minneapolis, respectively; Tax Increment Financing (TIF), which is essentially eminent domain with money instead of land, has floated the development of countless businesses in the city and the ‘burbs. Some call it “corporate welfare”, to try to draw a specious equation between it and, say, entitlements paid out to the poor; let’s call it “Subsidizing Business” for right now, since the intended consequence to “subsidizing” something is to create a favorable environment for more of that something.
• Poverty: like every state (only moreso), Minnesota – especially Hennepin County – pays for people to be poor. It’s called “welfare”, since it’s supposed to look out for the “welfare” of the poor, but it is essentially “Subsidizing Poverty” – making poverty a viable lifestyle, and giving the poor a viable option to starving on the one hand (a good thing) or getting themselves out of poverty on the on the other (a bad thing). Sine any time you pay for something – in this case, paying for people to live at a just-good-enough level of poverty – you create more of that thing, both in terms of making it easier for people not to improve their own incomes (most people at any level of income will take the path of least resistance; why get out of poverty, when you’re being paid to stay at a level that’s bearable?). It’s a subsidy; we subsidize poverty.

Coleman:

Once upon a time, companies like Target were ashamed to ask for handouts from a government that had kids to feed and libraries to run and cops to hire. Thankfully, we no longer live in hard times. The welfare queens and their babies — it’s always, “Feed me, wah, wah, feed me!” with these kids — have been kicked off the welfare rolls to make room for worthier recipients.

Except that Minnesota never actually kicked anyone off of welfare. Oh, the state added the thinnest possible veneer of “workfare” and “up and off” windowdressing to its panoply of programs. But at the end of the day, Minnesota still has the most “generous” welfare benefits in the Midwest.

Now – if you accept that putting a bottomless pot of money in front of a bunch of billionaires will draw a parade of Wilfs and Pohlads and Targets and Best Buys begging for their piece of the freebie pie, what makes anyone think that the poor behave any differently? If you give away things, you’ll draw takers. If you make a habit of it, the crowd of takers will stick around for more.

Coleman snipes:

I don’t know why it took so long, but Minnesota finally has turned into the kind of welfare state worth having.

A corporate welfare state.

Coleman is too modest. Minnesota has always been a welfare subsidy state. It’s a big part of the state’s very mythology; from our “compassionate” welfare poverty subsidies to our “public/private partnerships” which provide corporate welfare subsidies to business, to the “Happy to Pay For A Better Minnesota” campaign which is welfare for government workers a plea for endless subsidy of the public class, Minnesota’s very “compassionate” ethos is built on taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those whom government, for whatever reason, favors.

And it’s something that Coleman, like his father before him, has enthusiastically supported at every turn…

…unless the welfare applicant has a corporate logo.

I’m almost willing to write this Strib editorial off to post-election let-down; perhaps the editoral writers are still hung-over from the election they and their paper worked so hard to engineer.

But the piece – which sniffs and phumphers about ad space being sold on the outside of trains – frankly, makes absolutely no sense.

Trusting the stranger is a basic precept of the successful city. An urban place cannot thrive if public sidewalks, parks and transit are overtaken by the fear of unpredictable or threatening behavior. Happily, those tensions can be eased by good architecture. Unobstructed windows are especially important because they provide transparency between, say, a sidewalk and street-level business. As the urbanist prophet Jane Jacobs observed, the more eyes looking in and out, the greater the confidence in the urban experience.

That’s why it’s so ironic that the Twin Cities’ latest and most celebrated venture into the urban experience — light-rail transit — so eagerly violates Jacobs’ dictum.

For starters, Jacobs’ “dictum” has been pretty well debunked – not by free-market conservatives, mind you, but by the people who’ve actually spent the last fifty years trying to make it work. “Eyes on the Street” doesn’t prevent crime, and a city is built on distrusting people enough so that the honest people stay honest. (Read the linked article; it doesn’t debunk “new urbanism”, merely guts out the very myth that the Strib is peddling in this editorial).

Metro Transit has shrouded most of its light-rail cars in advertising. Whole trains — windows and all — have become gliding billboards for supermarkets, sports teams, discount stores, you name it. Commuters on platforms can’t see into the cars; riders inside can see out, sort of, but only into what appears to be a murky, depressing city.

Thus, the transit agency trades the confidence and pleasure of customers for the revenue that advertising brings. It’s willing even to obscure its own brand identity in a desperate dash for cash. These “wraps” account for one-third of Metro Transit’s $2.7 million annual ad sales (but far less than 1 percent of its total budget).

One wonders what the Strib is thinking:

1. A city that is “murky, depressing” through a thin layer of translucent paint will spring to vibrant life through a clear window?
2. “Brand identity?” The train is a government venture! Branding only matters if there is competition! There is only one train! Oh, sure – the train is competing against cars. But does the Strib board think that the very Metro Transit “brand” that Twin Cities’ commuters shun by a 95-5 margin is going to actually draw people in? That the dismal off-white cattle pens on rails are going to be any more inviting, in and of themselves, than the dismal off-white cattle pens on wheels?

Back to the Strib:

We do not disparage advertising.

But it’d be perhaps useful to note that the Strib competes for the same ad dollar that the trains are eating up.

Perhaps some of that money should go to teaching the Strib some elementary logic. Or maybe just how to control one’s hysteria:

…transit is a public product, and allowing whole trains to be tarted up with images of toothpaste and laundry soap demeans the public’s pride in its investment.

It’s a train! An ugly steel trolley shuttling back and forth on ugly steel tracks over ugly cement overpasses! The only “pride in investment” in having a train in the first place is the efficiency it (supposedly) brings to the city’s life. Trains can be aesthetic – but that’s not the point of the public’s investment.

Imagine the outcry if Lake Harriet were “sponsored” by a hamburger chain on condition that lighted golden arches were placed at the lake’s center.

I sat, stunned, the first time or two I read this.

The Strib editorial board can’t tell the difference – conceptual as well as literal – between a natural wonder in the middle of our city, and a train?

Or if the 2006 election had been “brought to you by” a TV newscast, which placed ads on every ballot. At some point a line is crossed. Metro Transit has crossed it.

The Strib also notes that the MTC has begun rolling back the amount of window surface to be covered. so why write the editorial in the first place?

It’s unfortunate that Metro Transit hasn’t been provided the money to build and operate a fully modern system.

No, Strib editors. It is, in fact, too bad that metro taxpayers have been saddled with a “transit” system that is structurally unable to pay its own way – a billion-dollar “train to nowhere from nowhere”, linking the airport and the Mall to a downtown full of people who don’t, as a general rule, take the train to the airport or the Mall! A train whose main function is to take the (few) commuters in South Minneapolis who neither drive to jobs in the ‘burbs nor downtown, to the relatively few jobs remaining downtown, or to take revelers on the now-ritual Friday/Saturday night trolley pub crawls.

A train could have been built to haul people from the inner city, where people actually are, out to Burnsville and Bloomington and Eden Prairie, places to which people actually need affordable transit, that had a better (though still dismal) chance of paying for itself. But a work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy trolleythat hauls working people about isn’t quite as posh a monument to the wisdom of its creators as a gleaming train connecting the crown jewels of a city – its downtown(s), airport, and “destination”.

Or to put it in the business terms that the Strib’s editors so poorly understand, “get a sound business case before you worry about branding”.

(Oh, and Strib? Weren’t you guys just raving about what a “success” the Hiawatha line has been?)

It’s too bad that it feels the need to become so thoroughly “wrapped up” in the pursuit of extra cash. It’s regrettable that it has violated the see-through principles of safe, responsible urbanism [hah!]. Advertising truly has its place on public transit — just not every place.

The Strib’s version of “new urbanism” is unsafe, irresponsible, and obsolete; their concern for the “branding” of a train that should never have been built (or at least built where it is) qualifies as “turd-polishing”.

I like satire. And normally, when the satirist runs up against the dim wailing of the not-too-bright audience, I take the side of the satirist.

But not this time:

A growing chorus of people who see no humor in Chris Stewart’s role in a satiric campaign website want the new Minneapolis school board member to resign even before he is sworn in.

But Stewart indicated that he is staying the course.

On Friday, former school board member Ann Berget joined those calling for Stewart’s resignation after he took responsibility for a racially themed website that mimicked the official website of Fifth Congressional District candidate Tammy Lee.

Racially themed? You be the judge. Here’s a bit:

Congressman Martin Sabo’s longtime District Director, Kathleen Anderson, who is a lifelong, loyal Democrat is crossing party lines for the first time in support of Tammy Lee’s campaign for Congress. Anderson says, “Independence Party candidate, Tammy Lee, is the only candidate that I feel is white enough to carry on Congressman Martin Sabo’s legacy. I’m voting for Tammy Lee because I’m a drunken hag who can’t possibly vote for Mandingo.”

Four suburban Mayors also agree and are publicly supporting and endorsing Lee’s candidacy: ReNae Bowman (DFL Mayor of Crystal), Mike Holtz (DFL Mayor of Robbinsdale), Martin Opem (Ind. Mayor of New Hope) and Gary Peterson (DFL Mayor of Columbia Heights). These are all elected politicians who no one has heard of, but still, they’re white like Tammy Lee.

Stewart’s side, via the Strib:

“The buck stops with me and I take responsibility for the caustic and gross commentary that has resulted.”I look forward to focusing my energy on the incredibly tough work of creating safe, orderly and academically rigorous schools for every child in Minneapolis.”

Naturally, the buck-stopping and responsibility-taking stops short of an concrete penitence.

Of course, if Stewart resigned, he’d be replaced (this is Minneapolis, after all) with someone who do doubt believed the same, whatever his/her race, whether they said it or not. This is the city that elects Greens to responsible positions in government, after all. But it’d be nice to draw the line somewhere.