Amid the layoffs, buyouts and restructurings currently going on at the Strib, the rumor had it that Katherine Kersten’s column was saved at least in part because she has never worked as a beat reporter (just as at least one rumor has it that Doug Grow’s departure is tied to the paper’s plan to put him back on the street, due to his experience as a gumshoe general assignment reporter).

And yet her column Friday – about Minneapolis’ reticence to pursue illegal immigrants, even when they are committing crimes – puts to shame many of priorities of the paper’s “news” division (to say nothing of the local partisan agendafloggers dressed in “Ace Reporter” costumes).

Minneapolis, as a matter of city policy, tells its police not to act as surrogate Immigration agents. 

Supporters of the city’s hands-off approach point to a “separation” ordinance, passed in 2003. The ordinance prohibits police from becoming involved in routine immigration enforcement, where immigration is the main issue. Immigrants in the city won’t cooperate with the police if they fear deportation, the reasoning goes.

But that’s not supposed to include interfering with enforcing laws against crime…:

But the ordinance explicitly permits police involvement in investigations like the sex ring. “Nothing in this chapter,” it states, “shall prohibit public safety personnel from assisting federal law enforcement officers in the investigation of criminal activity involving individuals present in the United States who may also be in violation of federal civil immigration laws.”

On Wednesday, Rybak acknowledged that the ordinance doesn’t bar police from engaging in crime fighting just because immigration is involved. “When the issue is clearly prostitution, we will continue to stand strong against it,” he said.

Rybak’s next quote explains a lot about the miasma of dilettantism that besets Minnesota’s largest city:

But wasn’t prostitution the issue in the sex ring bust? “The line between what is prostitution and what is immigration was blurry,” Rybak replied.

I had to stop there for a minute.

“The line between what is prostitution and what is immigration is blurry”.

This is Minneapolis’ mayor. 

Saint Paul, though hamstrung by a similarly-lefty City Council, hasn’t quite slipped the surly bonds of reason:

The St. Paul Police Department, for its part, wasn’t troubled by “blurry” lines though it too has a “separation” ordinance. In fact, the St. Paul police helped lead the charge against the sex ring operators.

So it’s clear that at least one of the Twin Cities’ loony-left-of-center governments can tell the difference between illegal immigration and prostitution. 

Are Minneapolis citizens well-served when city leaders avoid law enforcement on the “blurry” lines theory — when the crimes at issue may involve illegal immigrants?

Mark Cangemi, now retired from ICE, doesn’t think so. Cangemi was special agent in charge of the sex ring investigation until December 2006. “In the guise of protecting citizens, the Minneapolis leadership is actually harming the most vulnerable,” he says…In Cangemi’s view, Minneapolis’ “separation” ordinance — and its overbroad interpretation — have created a wedge between city police and the feds. In an operation like the sex ring investigation, he says, officers would likely be hampered if they had to make an arrest. “They are afraid they will be chastised and disciplined for doing what they are sworn to do: serve and protect,” he says.

Cops, like Cangemi, talk about enforcing the law.

Mayor Giggles talks about clothes and confusion:

“It’s ICE that has created a wedge,” Rybak retorts. The agency has not removed the word “‘police” from its officers’ jackets, despite his request to do so. Rybak maintains that the word “confuses” people who believe that immigration and criminal enforcement should be separate.

“But we are police!” protests Cangemi. Rybak, he says, “is way beyond his level of expertise” in making such a demand of a federal agency. “Police” is an internationally recognized term, used by law enforcement worldwide. Last year, Cangemi sent Rybak an “open letter” making this point, but Rybak never responded, he says. Rybak’s spokesman says he doesn’t know whether that’s true. Meanwhile, it’s Minneapolis leaders’ priorities that confuse people.

And there, finally, Kersten is wrong.

Nothing confusing about R.T. Rybak’s “priorities”.

Protect his constituencies. 

Simple.

The City Pages is keeping a running tally of the newsroom staffers at the Strib who’ve taken buyouts or are otherwise leaving or moving about the paper.

Stribbers taking the buyout:

Eric Black – this is a whack upside the head.  Black was one of the good ones.
Conrad Defiebre – this one, too.  Defiebre actually had a track record as a journalist who could actually write the facts.
Pat Pheifer
Nancy Olsen
Doug Grow – bummer.  Oh, I disagree with Grow about everything – but he was a good reporters.  Which was probably the undoing of his column; unlike Lileks and Katherine Kersten, he’d actually worked as a beat reporter, which I’m going to presume made it likely the paper would carry through on its threat to assign some of its general columnists back to street reporting.
Susie Hopper
Linda Mack
Stormi Greener
Chuck Haga
Sharon Schmickle
Jim Boyd – I’m almost sad about this.  Jim Boyd was a walking, breathing case study of both entrenched,  preening media bias, but of the overweening arrogance of the American “journalistic” caste.  With him in his office, conservative bloggers never had a shortage of material.  With him gone, we may have to work at it.
Jay Weiner
Deborah Caulfield Rybak – I’ve quoted her many, many times over the years, in her capacity as the media beat reporter. 
John Addington
Nancy Entwhistle
Tom Ford
Robyn Dochterman
Joe Kimball – Kimball covered Saint Paul, and did an excellent job. 
Delma Francis
Larry (L.K.) Hanson
Heather Munro
Bob Jansen
Denise Brownfield

Reassignments:
James Lileks will run Buzz.mn – which can only be a good thing for the Strib’s online enclave.
Steve Brandt will be covering City Hall
Kevin Diaz [going to Anchorage, apparently]
Paul Klauda is moving to Night AME (associate managing editor)

Oh, and some of the people who are leaving the paper are really petulant.  This comment on Saturday was from someone labelled “Former Stribber (rowr!)” :

If you’ve read [James Lileks’] blog, you’d realize that he’s been hanging around the office the last few weeks, trying to bond with all the people he so assiduously ignored the last few years when he showed his face at 425 Portland about every six months.

If avoiding deadwood like FS(R) was part of James’ strategy, it would seem it worked.

I’m gonna tell you a story about a couple of groups of people.

News people – especially newspaper people – subscribe to the American ideal of what journalism is, and what journalists are.  Part of the culture involves seeing journalism as an almost monastic calling, with a higher codes and rituals and an impenetrable argot that separates them from baser callings.  Among good reporters, it’s a mission; among lesser ones, it’s an affectation.  It’s neither good nor bad. 

I grew up with a foot in that world; I was a news reporter, on and (mostly) off from age 16 into my late twenties.  I did my level best to stay detached and stay as close to “objective” as I could (even during my stint in the news department at ulter-liberal KFAI, of all places), where I am happy to relate that nobody ever guessed from my reporting that I had any politics at all. 

And then there’s the other world; the more plebeian, less-lofty world of radio, especially the part of radio outside of the few remaining serious commercial radio newsrooms.  The world of stunts, dirty tricks, “punking” the competition with gleeful abandon; the world that spawned Howard Stern and Scott Shannon and Opie and Anthony, for better or worse.  A world where an extra couple of hundred listeners tuning in for an extra fifteen minutes can mean the difference between having a great job and filing for unemployment yet again.   It’s a nasty, brutish, deeply dysfunctional world where arrested adolescents romp and play routinely on the dark side of the ethical moon.  And damn, when it’s fun, it’s fun!

Blogs are somewhere between the two, and way outside ’em to boot.  A blog reflects its writers, pretty much; you can tell Powerline is a bunch of lawyers with scrappy streaks, that The Sheila Variations is written by an eclectic with ADD, that Captain’s Quarters’ Ed Morrissey is a mild-mannered guy with an incisive rhetorical left hook and a Rainman-like command of facts.  And you can probably tell that this blog is the product of a guy who wears a bunch of hats; diarist, would-be-eclectic, amateur pundit-via-rhetorical-pugilist.

Anyway.

Last week, when the “Punk the Monitor” scheme got hatched, I asked myself – “is this a good idea?” to mock, to “punk”, such a request?

Jeff Fecke left a comment yesterday:

Mitch–

Thank you for your interest, but I have no comment at this time.

Sincerely,

Jeff Fecke

P.S. Oh, wow, look how easy that was!

Oh, wow, but that’s not the whole story. 

If it were, say, Tim O’Brien or Nick Coleman or Lori Sturdevant writing to me, that’s what I’d do.  Because they’re biased hacks who are out to attack the politics I personally espouse, and will use any info I provide to that end – but they’re the establishment, and everyone knows what they’re about.  No surprises there.

And if Eric Black or MPR or most mainstream reporters sent an email, it’d be another story; most of them take “detachment” fairly seriously.

But the Minnesota Monitor is an inherently deceitful enterprise, a propaganda organ funded (lavishly, by blog standards) by liberals with deep pockets whose mission is to win elections and regain control of this nation.  Which would be fine – if they were open and honest about their goals, motivations and support, so that the unwitting could make up their own mind.  Nobody reads Powerline or Captain’s Quarters or this blog for that matter and comes away thinking there’s any attempt at neutrality (although I do try to be fair). 

As such, the Minnesota Monitor – like the Huffington Post or the Young Turks – deserves overt mockery – which, by the way, is the type of thing Fecke himself serves up at conservatives in non-Monitor blogging (you be the judge!), but expects everyone else to turn off when he puts on his “junior reporter” hat.  It’d be like me doing this overtly partisan blog five days a week, and then walking into the Patriot studio and demanding that everyone treat me as a non-biased, open-minded objective person – nobody would buy it, and I’d get mocked for trying (and deserve it!).

 Why, it’s almost as if, if you don’t want someone to interview you, you can decline to be interviewed. And you can even do so without being a jerk. And you don’t have to “punk” anyone.

Jerk?

Mommy?  Is that you?

Jeff is right.  “Punking” the monitor is an act of free will. 

And declining “interviews” would certainly be a good idea – I know I would.  Ignoring the Monitor completely would be a fine plan, actually.  Most people do!

But mocking, pranking, “punking” is a perfectly fine way to express a different opinion; that we do not respect The Monitor; we see the “junior journalist” badge, but we’re not buying it (for good reasons that have more to do with journalistic credibility than ideology); that we are competing for hearts, minds, funny bones, votes, and the nodding realization at the end of the day that “these guys are reliable”. 

But hey, that’s what you do when you’re an adult.

No, Jeff, it’s what you do when you respect the requestor. 

 That’s what, say, Michael Brodkorb did the two times I asked him for comment–and the two times he’s asked me for comment.

Michael works in politics, and must maintain relatinships with all sorts of people.  I do not.

You and Aplikowski are less mature than Brodkorb. I mean, if that was me, I’d be really embarrassed. But hey, whatevs.

And I’d be embarassed if I was busted passing clairvoyance off as “reporting”, and even more so if I ever used the word “whatevs” (or “Pwn3d” or “hacktacular” or “whatevah”) in a sentence.

Tomato, tomahto.

Now have your people get back to me on those 13 questions, OK? 

(more…)

Bad news for columnists at the Strib, according to long-time lefty shill Brian Lambert:

Thursday afternoon at the Star Tribune saw the paper’s four metro columnists, Doug Grow, Nick Coleman, Katherine Kersten and Cheryl “CJ” Johnson called in to separate meetings with editors Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie and told, in so many words, that the paper was looking to scale back the number of columnists and would any of them care to raise their hands and volunteer for reassignment to the paper’s suddenly thin — and getting thinner — ranks of street-level reporters?

Nick Coleman and Doug Grow as beat reporters?

Be still my heart. 

There were, as far as I can tell, no immediate takers. Later it was learned that quasi-metro columnist, James Lileks, was also given the same message.

I can see James as a thirties’ kind of reporter, with the pork-pie hat sitting behind a pebbled-glass door, smoking a Panter with his feet up on a steel desk next to the old Underwood. 

But I’m guessing he can’t…

This sort of scale-back/down-sizing/gutting has been anticipated ever since the new owners, Avista Capital Partners took over and after the round of voluntary buy-outs that clipped 24 positions from the payroll two months ago. Widespread assumption in the Strib newsroom is that fewer columnists will soon be matched with fewer theater critics, fewer film critics and perhaps — all though this is very hard to imagine — fewer sports reporters. (Veteran NBA reporter, Steve Aschburner, has already left the paper.)

Which, of course, has to hurt Lambert, who I suspect is slavering to return to the Broadcast beat that the PiPress ejected him from.

Meanwhile, newly-arrived publisher, Par Ridder, the target of a much-publicized lawsuit accusing him essentially of industrial espionage, remains secure in his position.

Yeah, that whole “he’s brand new in the gig and hasn’t been proven guilty of anything yet” bit’ll get you every time.

UPDATE:  Of course it’s worse than we thought.  Lileks’ column is apparently on the chopping block.

Send a note to the Reader Rep.

UPDATE II:  Via trackback, Britblogger Tim Worstall explains things to a European audience that need none with Yanks:

But any European observer, indeed any US manager who has dealt with union shops, would recognise what is going on here.

Take a well respected, well known and (for all I know, well paid) employee and assign him to duties manifestly ill suited to his talents at a time when you’re looking to cut costs and create redundancies.

Then hope they resign in disgust so that you don’t have to pay the “dismissal pay provision”.

The Strib sets the stage for the usual, closing-rush budget battle in the Legislature:

So far, Pawlenty’s attitude has amounted to “fat chance.” Secure in the knowledge that DFLers need Republican votes to thwart his will, the governor instead has threatened to veto every spending bill in sight.

Who wins the staredown in the final three weeks of the legislative session could determine whether schools get their biggest funding increase in years, who gets health care and whether Minnesota’s rich will pay the highest state income tax rate in the nation.

That may sound like all the ingredients necessary for a stalemate similar to the deadlock in 2005, which led to a partial government shutdown and a special legislative session. But DFLers and Pawlenty sound acutely aware that there are few special session scenarios in which either side emerges a winner.

Let’s take our bets for the stock characters we’ll see in the Strib over the next three weeks:

• Republicans who criticize the Governor and side with the DFL being portrayed as “courageous”, “mavericks” and “a nod to the good old days when the GOP and DFL got along”; 2000-1 in favor.
• The Taxpayers’ League portrayed as the villains: 22000-1 in favor.
• Schools being depicted as cash-starved underdogs: 300-1 in favor.
• Peevish huffing from Nick Coleman to the GOP to act the way the GOP did back in the seventies, when the GOP acted like beaten dogs who only wanted the DFL to love them:  5-1 in favor.
• Arrogant snarking from Doug Grow to the GOP to act the way the GOP did back in the seventies, when the GOP acted like beaten dogs who only wanted the DFL to love them:  12-1 in favor.
• Anguished plea from Lori Sturdevant to the GOP to act the way the GOP did back in the seventies, when the GOP acted like beaten dogs who only wanted the DFL to love them:  500,000-1 in favor.

The floor is open.

Doug Grow is saved from the “distinction” of being the local media’s foremost, most pollyannaish DFL shill only by Lori Sturdevant.  He is, literally, a heartbeat away from the title.

And throughout his career, on no issue has Grow been less rooted in rationality than the gun issue.  His latest column is a further descent.  He writes about a group of mayors – including those of both of the Twin Cities – who want to reverse federal legislation restricting government access to legal gun sale transactions.

Grow writes with his customary German-jazz-band subtlety:

Here’s a brutal example of how all this plays out:

Tuesday night, two Minneapolis men were robbed, then shot and killed. It was a horrid, random crime. To the credit of Minneapolis cops, the suspected assailants were quickly found.

Now, what police would like to know is how the gun ended up in the hands of the young gang banger they believe pulled the trigger.

“Imagine if this was a drug deal,” Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan said. “You wouldn’t just want to get the guy buying the drugs on the corner; you’d want to go after the supplier.”

The feds probably have a record as to where the gun originally was bought. But Dolan said his department will be hard-pressed to get it because of the Tiahrt Amendment and the NRA.

“I’d love to pop whoever helped put that gun on our streets,” Dolan said. “Whoever did belongs in prison, too. But the NRA is very powerful.”

Notice what Grow has done; tied the NRA, via a rhetorical back channel, to a murder.  Framed the Minneapolis Police Department as plucky underdogs against the big bad National Rifle Association.  Implied that the Tiahrt Amendment makes it impossible for the cops to zoom directly in on the gun’s illegal supplier.

What Grow does not do – because it would show a sentient reader that Grow’s case is buncombe – is explain what the “Tiahrt Amendment” really is and really does. 

David Kopel explains it all in this excellent piece in NRO.  Read it, and remember its details, while reading Grow’s piece.  Compare fact and reality.  Kopel (who I shall italicize, to distinguish him from Grow) writes:

the appropriations bill reinforces existing provisions in federal and local gun laws prohibiting the release of those records that are allowed to be kept on gun owners. Federal law requires that dealers inform federal law enforcement any time a person purchases two or more handguns in a 5-day period. Current law requires the federal government to keep private the names of lawful purchasers.

In other words, the Tiahrt Amendment protects the law-abiding gun owner from government surveillance and harassment. 

Which is the sort of thing the typical anti-NRA shill will dance about and call “paranoid”, and which a cursory look at the record shows clearly is not:

In early 2003, the Supreme Court was on the verge of hearing a case involving the city of Chicago’s attempt to obtain the name of every multiple handgun purchaser in the United States. After the case had been briefed, but before oral arguments, Congress passed an appropriation with a very specific prohibition on the release of purchaser names. In light of the appropriation language, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts. (For details on the law and the case, see my article in ABA Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases.)

 Oh, yeah – and lest you were in doubt, Grow’s thesis – that the Tiahrt Amendment hampers law-enforcement – is hogwallow:

Sometimes the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) traces a particular gun at the request of law enforcement. The trace may involve an attempt to find the owner of a stolen gun, or to learn more about a gun seized from a criminal, or it may involve a gun seized for a paperwork offense (such as failure to register the gun in some jurisdictions). BATFE traces can be useful in some cases, but they are not representative of the broad universe of guns used in crime — as Gary Kleck and I have explained.The appropriations bill requires BATFE to disclose the necessary caveats in published summaries of firearms trace data — thus preventing BATFE from using trace summaries to push a political agenda, as it did during the Clinton years.

In other words – Doug Grow’s mewling aside – the Tiahrt Amendment requires law enforcement to follow due process  in getting the records of law-abiding gun owners.

It wouldn’t be a Doug Grow Strib column on guns if there weren’t a fawning reference to some astroturf group of “anti-NRA gun owners” to complement the cartoonish facade of the NRA:

There is a new organization trying to rationally represent the interests of gun owners who are as perplexed by some NRA positions as the rest of us are. The American Hunters and Shooters Association, founded by former pro football player Ray Schoenke, is working with the mayors and police chiefs in trying to eliminate such bloody pieces of gun law as the Tiahrt Amendment.

“We’re just trying to do common-sense things,” said Schoenke, who once ran for governor of Maryland.

Common sense is a direct threat to the NRA, so Schoenke’s 18-month-old organization is being targeted.

Let’s stop right there.

Grow states this – or, to be accurate, parrots Schoenke’s statement – with not a jot of background for the reader.  Apparently he assumes his word is good enough. 

And he has to hope so, since the facts certainly gut his thesis to the bone.

But 180 mayors aren’t giving up. They keep pointing to a stunning stat: 30,000 people in the country are killed each year by firearms.

 Unstated; how many of them are killed by people who are not involved in the drug trade, or have criminal records and/or histories of chemical or mental impairment, or are suicides (which is tragic and a totally separate issue).

Also unstated:  that every year, firearms are used between 80,000 (FBI estimate) and 1.2 million (Gary Kleck’s estimate) times to deter, repel or kill criminals in the act, over 80% of the time without a shot being fired, and with over 1,000 criminals killed in legal self-defense per year.

When Doug Grow talks about guns, it’s always the interesting stuff that gets left out.

Among the reporters taking early retirement at the Strib this past week is Dane Smith, dean of Minnesota political reporters.

Doug Tice – an editor who is very rarely mistaken for a cliched liberal reporter – reminisces:

It seems that during the lead up to the Spanish-American War McKinley needed to get word to a rebel leader holed up somewhere in the Cuban hinterland. He called in his best agent and said:

“I need you to take this message to Carlos. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know how find him. I don’t know how you get back afterwards. And if you’re caught your government will deny ever having heard of you. I don’t want any questions. I just need it done.”

And with that the agent saluted, withdrew, and completed the mission.

That’s the kind of guy Dane is. Not much for saluting, to be sure. And a word of complaint now and then has been known to escape his lips. But he got the job done. No matter how elusive the story, or how half-baked the concept of his editors; no matter how long and late the hours; no matter how uncooperative and disagreeable the sources; Dane got the journalistic job done.

And he did it with style, skill, and a dry-eyed shrewdness about politics and politicians leavened with decency and humor.

Eric and I had lunch just last week with a long time political insider who lamented Dane’s departure from the newspaper business. He said it was Dane’s passion for fairness that would most be missed. He recalled the way Dane would patiently interview him on a tough, unwelcome story.

Smith – and, arguably, Black – by most accounts are the type of journalists that most journalists were taught to be, long ago; people who told the story and kept their beliefs, their histories and their politics out of it.

Something that, unfortunately, seems to be a dying art these days.

(Correction: It’s Doug Tice, not Eric Black.  I hadn’t noticed Doug was backstopping Black on the blog)

…pimp-smacking Larry Jacobs – U of M professor and apparently the only “political expert” on any Twin Cities reporter’s rolodex – like fisking Lori Sturdevant, is sort of like doing finger exercises on the guitar, mandolin and cello; they’re things you do over and over again because it keeps you limber for the real fun stuff.

Eric Black – one of this city’s best reporters, and I mean that sincerely and with no hidden joke in the background – went to Jacobs to wonder why Rudy Giuliani is doing so well among conservatives.  Jacobs’ answer – the same one he gives for every surprising result from the GOP – “conservatism is dead!”

Gary Miller at TvM punts the old guy about 90 yards:

Republicans have known for years that the liberal bugaboo Ms. Rodham would be the Democratic nominee in 2008 so that does not suffice as the reason Republicans are turning to the “electable” Giuliani.  Few could mistake the fact that the Mayor is personally in favor of abortion rights and other socially liberal positions.  But what Jacobs apparently does mistake is the fact that by pledging to appoint judges in the mold of “Roberts, Alito and Thomas”, Giuliani has merited the mantle “functionally pro-life”.  In other words, a president can have his own policy preferences, but if his fidelity to the text of the constitution is paramount, he will pledge to allow such decisions to be decided by people in those laboratories of democracy we call “states”. 

Does the Mayor still have obstacles in his quest for the nomination in this regard?  Absolutely.  But for an observer of Jacobs’ supposed pedigree to miss this obvious explanation for Mayor Giuliani’s meteoric rise is an important case study on how conventional wisdom is regurgitated among the chattering class. 

To be fair, I don’t think Jacobs has done anything but regurgitate conventional wisdom in 20 years.  Why he’s still the official go-to-guy for the entire Twin Cities media is way beyond me.

As I explained last week (and was seconded by James Taranto), far from seeing a diminution of their influence, social conservatives are displaying their sophistication. 

The notion that social conservatives are mindless crowd-followers seems to enthrall the left. 

As long as they are cute old folks…

a 78-year-old woman with a variety of serious health problems.

…chasing an inept, harmless footpad…

A large young woman approached Brown’s booth and purchased two dolls and a blanket for $100… $59 worth of jewelry from her; $20 worth of jam at another booth; $15 worth of bath goods from still another booth…

As the woman continued her shopping spree, Brown started to have nagging doubts. She called the phone numbers on the check the woman had written. The numbers had been disconnected. She called the bank and left a message.

The woman left the mall. The bank returned Brown’s call.

“The account is closed,” Brown was told.

…and the action looks like something from Family Guy:

“That check you wrote is no good,” Brown said.

“Whaddya mean?” the woman said.

“Check’s no good, just like you,” Brown said.

The woman started to move away.

“I told everybody, ‘She’s back!”‘ said Brown.

While other booth operators sought help, Brown, who often gets about on a little scooter, caught up with the woman. Then she got off her scooter.

“I told her, ‘You’re not going away, I’m making a citizen’s arrest,’ ” Brown said, adding, “I saw that on ‘Judge Judy.’ “

Good job, Ms. Brown.

Maybe, now that Democrats are in charge in St. Paul and Washington, vigilantism citizens protecting themselves isn’t a symbol of a greater social ill after all…

The Strib staff meets the world outside the media cloister:

NEW YORK It must have surprised its own newsroom as much as it did news operations and media observers across the country.

After reports surfaced Tuesday that the Star Tribune in Minneapolis would be sold by McClatchy Co. to a private equity firm called Avista, a columnist at the paper, Doug Grow, said workers there — like everywhere else — were scurrying around the Internet trying to find out anything about Avista.

“Everything we’ve heard from McClatchy recently is ‘Hey, we’re all in this together. We don’t do layoffs.’ Blah blah blah BS,” he told the Associated Press.

Shocking, innit? That managers might BS reporters as if they were mere commoners!

Seriously – that’s one of the parts about this story, and the decay of the major media in general, that makes it so hard to feel too much sympathy for the Strib staffers. Media people – especially at newspapers – see themselves almost like a monastic order, driven to a higher calling than the proles they “serve” with their reporting. They show it in their reactions to things like blogs (Nick Coleman summed the situation up as “astronomers being assaulted by people who swear that aliens force them to have sex with Martians” from his point of view) and mere readers (see: any Kate Perry column); they are the lonely beacons of enlightenment serving an ignorant and benighted rabble against the encroaching dark.

Maybe reality is starting to sink in?

The New York Times on Wednesday observes: “The sale caught most employees at the paper off-guard [an acquaintance at the Strib, not in the newsroom, confirms this – MB] and angered some newsroom employees, who expressed concerned that Avista Capital Partners, which owns no other daily newspapers, could make severe staff cuts.”

And if that happens, what will the peasants do for fair, objective news reporting? Like this?

Nick Coleman, a metropolitan columnist for the paper, told the Times, “It was like, who? Everyone knows the whole industry is in play and that just about anything could happen, but nobody thought we could get sold. There’s a real sense of betrayal …

“At a fire sale,” he said, “people get discounted, so we’re very concerned, worried and anxious.” But he added, “maybe it takes someone from outside the newspaper business to see the way forward.”

Five will get you ten it takes someone from outside the Strib to see it. Goodness knows they’ve had enough opportunity.

it’s a great time to be in the news and advertising business.”

Lori Sturdevant – who alone surpasses Doug Grow as the Twin Cities’ media’s most reliable DFL flak – must have been saving this piece for the Hatch/Dutcher coronation she felt the state so richly deserved. She must have dusted it off, changed a few tenses, and run it anyway.

For a not-insignificant share of Mike Hatch’s supporters, and maybe even some of his detractors, the most regrettable thing about the DFL gubernatorial ticket’s defeat last month is that Judi Dutcher won’t be lieutenant governor next year.

Just a brief aside here.

Newspaper columnists; could we retire the phrase “not-insignificant share” for describing a vanishingly small group of believers in a hopelessly picayune concept that is nonetheless a writer’s pet idea?

Judi Dutcher was, if anything, an emptier skirt that Amy Klobuchar. Her only clakim to fame is in being perhaps the state’s poster child for RINOism; she was a hopelessly, crushingly liberal Republican who turned coats (purely for political advantage) and joined the party she should have been in all along. So while her fans might be a “not-insignificant share” of people, I’d suspect that a more significant share, at least among those who care about such things, are glad to see the miserable wretch’s political career take its’ last spiral down the drain.

I digress. Sturdevant wants to make sure the people know Dutcher really does know about Ethanol:

“I felt terrible that people would think that Mike didn’t value ethanol, or that I didn’t know what it was,” Dutcher, a former state auditor, recalled in a recent interview…Minnesotans are forgiving people. My guess is that even in corn country, the vast majority of voters would have given her a pass for her forgetfulness.

They would have, that is, had Hatch not tripped on his own angry tongue as reporters pursued the Dutcher-E85 story.

It was good to hear from Dutcher that Hatch treated her much better than he did the inquiring Duluth News Tribune reporter who said Hatch called him a “Republican whore.” (“Mike was terrific,” she said. “He never made me feel bad.”)

Judi’s such a terriffic gal! And Mike Hatch! What a terriffic guy! Never mind all those former employees and their pesky stories about what a pint-sized Napoleon he is…

It was disappointing to hear that, in the weeks since Hatch first publicly blamed her gaffe for his defeat, then recanted, he has not contacted her personally to make amends. (“For the sake of the relationship that Mike and I enjoyed during the campaign, I’m not going to focus on that letter,” Dutcher said.)

Ah. So maybe “Mike” wasn’t so “terrific” after all?

No matter. One doesn’t read these columns expecting to see any smudge on Mike Hatch to be explored beyond the odd expository sentence.

No, one reads them to see the puffiness of the piece extended to a full eight years of what might have been:

But what was most worth hearing from the 44-year-old attorney and former foundation president was a reprise of her proposed job description for Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.

Her notion sprang from the genuine worry she — and plenty of others — have about widening divisions in this state’s body politic. Rural vs. metro, city vs. suburb, rich vs. poor, Republican vs. DFL — all the usual fault lines have widened into chasms. Not coincidentally, a troubling breach has developed between Minnesota citizens and state government. Getting things done at the state level has grown more difficult as a result.

As lieutenant governor, Dutcher wanted to throw herself into that breach and work to heal it.

“My job would be to work with every legislator, both sides of the aisle — get to know them, personally and professionally, and ask what issues are facing their communities. What can we in the governor’s office do to work with them to get the best results?”

In addition, she said, she planned to convene regional forums, aimed at bringing fresh ideas and more citizen input to bear on public problems.

“We’d bring together elected officials and the best public policy leaders in this state, to understand the emerging trends and how we can address them together,” she said. The topics she expected the forums to address, just for starters, included the aging of the population, business development, environmental protection, and education improvement. Rural development — ironically, in light of the E85 flap — was going to be a special emphasis.

“There’s so much work to do, I wish there were six lieutenant governors,” she said.

And knowing Dutcher’s record, there might have been. Or at least six Second Lieutenant Governors.

I’m not sure what to harp on here: Sturdevant’s notion that Judi Dutcher was anyone that could “bring together” anyone – she’s as left-of-center a figure as any in Minnesota politics – or that bringing anyone “Together” is desirable, or that the columnist’s plaintive cry to “get things done…” is anything but a cover for the unstated coda “…the DFL way”.

What Dutcher describes is quite different from what Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s reelected runningmate has been doing. Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau is also Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau, the head of one of the largest and most important agencies of state government.

Four years ago, when Pawlenty announced that his lieutenant governor would also be his transportation chief, it sounded like a good bargain for the cash-strapped state. Molnau had the qualifications. She’d been a transportation specialist in the state House. She would fill two jobs for the price of the lower-salaried one.

Today, with the state once again in the black, the arrangement doesn’t seem as nifty. It implies no criticism of Molnau’s performance at MnDOT to observe that a commissioner who holds his or her own election certificate is hard for a governor to control.

What’s more, employing a lieutenant governor to run a state agency doesn’t take full advantage of the special asset the occupant of that office has. No other junior member of a governor’s administrative team is elected. He (or, since 1983, she) brings to the office a relationship with the voters.

Molnau’s double job aside…huh?

If 1/3 of the passersby on Nicollet Mall or on Main Street in Fergus Falls could name the Lieutenant governor (much less “who was the losing Lieutenant Governor candidate last November?”), I’d grant a “familiarity” between her and voters. But “Special Relationship?”

Using and building on that relationship as a liaison to the Legislature and the citizens, as Dutcher intended to do, would seem to be in a governor’s interest — and the state’s.

Judi Dutcher’s campaign has been ushered to the scrap heap of Minnesota history. Let her ideas lie on the heap where the voters sent them, to lie atop piles of Lori Sturdevant’s old columns.

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.

I don’t necessarily believe that the Star/Tribune’s news editors sit around looking for ways to boost the DFL. I think the DFL is their only frame of reference when it comes to personal and institutional worldviews; they are like extras in Pauline Kael’s classics response to news of Nixon’s 1972 victory, “none of my friends voted for him!“.

Lori Sturdevant, on the other hand, exceeds even Doug Grow in her rank partisanship. Sunday’s column is full of the sort of grating, presumptive self-adulation that Sturdevant took to new personal heights in this past election.

I’m going to skip most of it, because honestly I can probably paste in parts from every other Sturdevant column I’ve ever fisked over the past 57 months and get the same effect. I can almost write the stereotype Sturdevant column, in fact:

Minnesotans love their government. Minnesotans NEED their government. Government is as much a part of the Minnesota character as breathing and passive-aggression. A few Republicans want to change that – but there’s hope we can roll back the tide and keep government…er, Minnesota happy.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating that much.

But here’s the part that frosts me (and this is really from Sturdevant’s column):

Those polled said in heartening numbers that they still think Minnesotans can solve their shared problems. But they are increasingly skeptical about using what has historically been a powerful tool for doing so — state government. Minnesotans need reasons to believe in their government again — and if this governor and Legislature are going to provide them, they need to keep this season’s spirit alive.

“Minnesotans need reasons to believe in their government again”…or else what? Minnesota has minuscule unemployment, a better-educated, healthier and often-happier population than almost anywhere in the nation…what’s to fix?
Government is not the vehicle of our hopes and dreams, much less the solution to our problems. Government is an employee – a lazy, arrogant one that the rules only allow us to fire every so many years.

Sturdevant is fantasizing about a “golden age” of Minnesota politics, where Republicans and Democrats “got along” and “cooperated” to enact a vision of government…

…that was purely the DFL’s. Sturdevant moons and fawns over an era where the Republicans were too gutted out – by the FDR era, by the era of Big Government it spawned, and ultimately by Watergate – to do anything but. An era – and “spirit” – that gave us huge, arrogant government with boundless appetite, and a populace that had been so sotted with the material rewards of keeping the status quo in power than it didn’t care – until the bills started coming due.

Things have changed. Minnesotans are starting – at 40-years’-long last – to take responsibility for their lives, and for regulating government’s role in them. November 7 was a hiccup along the way – the next decade will show it.

And Lori Sturdevant and her ilk will be there, no doubt, in ten years’ time, kvetching about those damn conservatives, not playing along with the people of Minnesota the DFL.

Scott Johnson responds to a note from a journalist friend, which I’ll excerpt here:

Your often trenchant critiques of the Strib’s editorial/opinion pages would be heard so much farther if you granted the strengths of the rest of the paper, thereby allowing you to point out how boring, slanted, vicious, cheap and dishonest the editorials often or usually are, compared with the rest of the Strib.

I’m guessing that, in effect, such an approach would be winsome, winning over many more of the Strib staffers who probably think similarly about the editorials, and would plunge the dart of your retort deeper into the hearts of the editorial editors.

I agree, actually. And I’ve actually done a bit of this, at least in terms of MPR (which is the second-most-important establishment news source in the Twin Cities.

And as far as “winning over Strib staffers” – well, I do hear from enough of them to know that this is a valid goal. There are a few people inside the Strib who know what’s going on, but also need to learn a living and don’t really want to go back to writing obituaries in Sheboygan.
So how about the Strib?

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