I had wondered about fisking the new Nick Coleman column – in which he accuses Republicans of being behind a sinister cabal to gut public school sex ed, and if we really cared for kids we’d let the same public school teachers who can’t teach them math, reading or history turn around and show them how not to get pregnant when doing the wang bang diddly. 

He stated his case with his usual diplomatic tact…

 A new Gallup poll shows nearly half the country doesn’t believe in evolution (including two-thirds of Republicans), proving that the rapid stupefaction of America continues unabated.

If you don’t believe me, I have a new Minnesota sex-education law to show you. Or, rather, not to show you.

…but Wog over at Wog’s Blog noticed something else:

In reading a column in Section B of the Incredible Shrinking Star Tribune, I as struck by it’s resemblance to the screeds if Laura Billings, the best fire the Pioneer Press ever made. Well, they bribed her to quit anyway, and the readers rejoiced.

It’s some self righteous blather about troglodyte Republicans plotting to get sex education out of the schools.

The subject, the hysteria, the condescending wise ass tone, the mediocre writing and the utter boringness of the piece had Billings all over it.

The only thing Un-Billings about it was the byline, husband NickBoy.

Hmmmm.  Can we do a DNA test on a column?

Oh, and when you go to Wog’s blog (and please do – he’s sounding depressed about his traffic, and he does write a blog that deserves a helluvva lot more), wish him luck; it looks like he’s slowly edging closer to a needed liver transplant.

How’s that for a hard sell?

UPDATE:  Kouba also shreds Coleman.

Use bogus documents to try to impeach the President’s National Guard record during a presidential compaign?

Oh, OK.  Not good.

But insult Katie Couric?

Now Dan Rather’s gone too far!

Commenting about CBS Evening News’ freefall since Couric occupied Rather’s old seat, Gunga Dan said:

“the mistake was to try to bring the ‘Today’ show ethos to the ‘Evening News,’ and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”

Now he’s gone too far!

[CBS top suit Les] Moonves, asked about the remarks at an appearance in New York sponsored by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, called the remarks “sexist” and said he was surprised at the amount of negative coverage Couric was receiving. Couric, the first solo female news anchor, has been struggling in the ratings.

“She’s been on the air for nine months,” Moonves said. “Let’s give her a break.”

Mr. Rather:  I have a friend who has documents proving that Katie Couric never actually was on the Today Show! 

And they’re authentic!

Honest!

I’ve just confirmed it – Eric Black, soon-to-be-former Star/Tribune reporter and blogger, and soon to be reporter for the overtly-partisan, deep-pocketed-lefty-funded groupblog Minnesota Monitor, will be a guest on the Northern Alliance, Volume II, this coming Saturday.

Ed and I will be talking with him about the state of the Strib, his move, and – the part I’m most interested in – how “traditional” American journalism (which really isn’t all that traditional, and in fact is less than a hundred years old) is changing. 

This should be a great hour of radio.  Make sure you tune in.

Who wrote this:

How the mighty have fallen. New York Times, I weep for you.

Was it:

1. John Hinderaker?
2. Me?
3. Rush Limbaugh?
4. Bill O’Riley?

The answer, of course, is “none of the above”.  It was liberal former NYC mayor Ed Koch, in the Jerusalem Post.

So the other day, when I wrote…:

In the interview, [my interpretation of Strib reporter Eric Black’s view of the role of “object] were clear; better to keep all appearance of bias out of the mix.

Question for Eric Black; to the non-”journalist”, you’d seem to have changed your mind.  You’ve gone to work for an outlet that discloses its biases – or, to be more accurate, disclaims bias because of an unenforceable, untestable “pledge” while waving its “progressive” flag with promiscuous glee…With none of [Black’s new co-workers] is there the faintest reason to assume any of the sort of “detachment” or “objectivity” to which you seemed to aspire – which, indeed, you held up as the preferred model for journalism when you walked with Hugh.

So is this a change of heart? 

Why?

…was I being accurate or fair?

We’ll find out soon!

More to come – stay tuned.

With the news that journalist nonpareil Eric Black has apparently changed his mind about the place of overt bias in the media by joining the “progressive” Minnesota Monitor, I figured – if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.  Sorta like Black apparently did.

Of course, conservative bloggers are swooping in like vultures:

We understand that if Lileks hadn’t found a new bucket at the Strib, there was an agreement in principle for him to sign on at Nihilist In Golf Pants. And then there’s our open offer–made at JB’s behest–for Doug Grow to join the staff here at Fraters Libertas.

In the interest of smoothing the paths of the recent buy-out-ees (and possible future buyout-ees) into non-monastic life, I figured I’d provide a clearinghouse of blogs that’d be perfect in the same sense that MinMoneyitor was perfect for Erik Black [1]:

• DFL Shill Lori Sturdevant goes to Minnesota Democrats Exposed: Sturdevant’s pollyannaish faith in the eternal rightness of the DFL will play nicely against Michael Brodkorb’s invincible wall of facts the same way Eric Black’s ethos of objectivity will play against some of his new colleagues’ comically-overwrought partisan chauvinism.
• Doug Grow joins Kool Aid Report: Sane, predictable, sober, workadaddy-huggamommy mushy-lefty Grow would make a great match for the insane, unpredictable, high, non-mushy-non-lefty staff at KAR. 
• Katherine Kersten joins Blog of the Moderate Left: Talented writer meets the real guy who stands astride the forces of history in his basement in his underwear screaming “Pwned!”
• Nick Coleman starts writing for Anti-Strib: Firm believer in the holy priesthood of “journalism” and relentless faux-populist dramaturge (emphasis on “turge”) meets congenitally-irreverent plate-throwers.
• Minnesota Observer signs on Doug Tice: The always-comically-overwrought and under-informed M “MNob” Nob engages an employee who actually knows something.
• Powerline hires Jim Boyd: Conservative bloggers whom the intellectually ungifted on the left call “hacks”, meet a real intellectually-ungifted hack who hates conservatives!

That is all.

(more…)

I thought about writing about The Today Show’s puffy hagiography of life in modern Cuba…

…but I figured nobody could talk Cuba like Val Prieto.

If you are a Cuban living in Cuba, you have no voice. The Cuban government sees to that.

When you are a Cuban living in exile here in the states – regardless of whence you came – you, like every other American living in freedom, have a voice. But, no one listens. The Media sees to that.

So regardless of how sane your argument is, regardless of how reasonable you are, how verifiable your facts are or how absolutely right you are, the MSM – and by default those that get their news from same – dont really care about what you have to say or what you have experienced. The minute any Cuban crosses the Gulfstream, that voice that has been supressed for so many years becomes like that proverbial tree in the forest that falls. It make a sound, but there’s no one around to listen.

Prieto and his co-bloggers gut NBC’s myopic, oh-so-convenient “coverage” point-by-point, ethical blind spot by ethical blind spot, butt-smooch by butt-smooch, one context-free claim after another, to a devastating conclusion.

The concern is that with the death of fidel castro, so comes the death of his revolution. And the only way to keep that revolution alive, in a post-castro world, is to lionize the bearded tyrant. Barrage the world with the “greatness” of Cuba’s healthcare. Shove the “100% literacy rate” down the world’s throat. Express solidarity with anti-Americanism by making fidel castro, clearly the poster boy of said anti-Americanism, into a David that beat the Goliath to his North.

fidel castro once said that history would absolve him. Yet the only way to do that, given the thousands upon thousands of deaths he’s responsible for, given Cuba’s dismal human rights record, given the revolution’s ruination of a nation, a culture and a people, is to rewrite history. To make the world forget the paredon. To make the world forget crowded Cuban gulags. To make the world forget all the deaths at sea of those whose only hope was to live in freedom.

What we are seeing lately, as the Cuban government manipulates truth, as the world media sheepishly give in to the whims and demands of said government, as the world ignores the inhumanity of the Cuban regime, is the creation of a fictional absolution, fidel castro’s absolution, from thin air.

Read the whole thing, and ask yourself – “why did NBC go there now?”

…Eric Black, one of the Twin Cities’ most respected reporters, is apparently joining the Minnesota Monitor – a publication underwritten by the “Center for Independent Media”, an organization that used to share office space with George Soros-funded attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”.  While we (and for that matter nobody) really knows where their money comes from, appearances count – as does the CIM and MNMon’s silence about the source of their funding.

But let’s ignore all that for a moment.  The MNMon – as a “progressive” news site – subscribes, wittingly or not, to the European model of journalism, where newspapers and other media outlets are honest and up-front about their own intrinsic biases.  For example, everyone knows before opening up the paper that the Guardian is a hard-left leaning paper, Die Zeit and the Sun lean left (by European standards), that Frankfurter Allgemeine is slightly right of center, and that the Times is sympathetic to the Tories.  One filters the news on one’s own, fully aware of any potential ideological bias that might be operating in the writing or editing process.

The American system, for over a century, has either rigorously disciplined itself to seek and maintain detachment and tried to abjure points of view or proffered an elaborate fiction based on the myth of objectivity to cover deep-seated political biases with a thin veneer of dogmatic legitimacy, depending on your view.  Pundits on both sides claim to see, and sometimes strain to advocate, one or the other or some compomise among them.

Black, in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt show last October, would seem to have been firmly in the latter camp:

EB: I don’t believe the way to improve it is to have biased coverage with the biases admitted.

HH: Well, you’ve just admitted that everyone in the newsroom has bias. Every single person has a bias, right?

EB: Right. There’s a tension in my mind. I know you don’t think this is reasonable, but I’m trying to frame this in the way it appears to me. The tension in my mind is whether it’s better to have a system in which people are attempting to overcome their biases, are striving for some sort of a definition of fairness, which I agree is largely in the eye of the beholder, and very difficult to obtain, and as a result of that strategy, let’s call it a strategy or goal or a norm…as a result of that, our not disclosing their biases, or whether it’s better to just have open bias disclosed, but filtering and coloring everything that comes through.

In the interview, Black’s sympathies were clear; better to keep all appearance of bias out of the mix.  

Question for Eric Black; to the non-“journalist”, you’d seem to have changed your mind.  You’ve gone to work for an outlet that discloses its biases – or, to be more accurate, disclaims bias because of an unenforceable, untestable “pledge” while waving its “progressive” flag with promiscuous glee.  It’s an outlet where every single one of your “co-workers” has spent a blogging career writing stuff whose bias is a matter of pride (as is my own).  With none of them is there the faintest reason to assume any of the sort of “detachment” or “objectivity” to which you seemed to aspire – which, indeed, you held up as the preferred model for journalism when you walked with Hugh.

So is this a change of heart? 

Why?

Eric Black goes to his first Minnesota Monitor editorial meeting:

[Scene:  A cluttered garrett in Northeast Minneapolis.   A group gathers around a table; twentysomething hipsters drinking Red Bull, dishevelled thirtysomethings guzzling Caribou, and one nattily-dressed fiftysomething, Eric Black]

EDITOR ROBIN MARTY:  “OK, let’s, like, come to order.  It’s my pleasure to like introduce Eric Black.”

ALL (Bored): “Hey, Eric!”

ERIC BLACK: [Standing, graciously] “Hello, and thank you.”

MARTY: “Eric used to work at the Star/Tribune…”

11th AVENUE ANDY: “…before Michele Bachmann had you fired!  Right?”

BLACK: “…er…actually, I took a buyout, and I’m not sure that Congresswoman Bachmann…

[several staffers break into loud hissing sounds]

BLACK: “…had anything to do with anything at the…er…Strib”

JOE BODELL: “HAH!  I KNEW it!  Bachmann is uninvolved in the day to day operations of the Strib!  HEADLINE!”

BLACK: “Er…she’s an elected official, not a publisher…”

MARTY: “We can, like, come back to that in like a moment or two.  What I’d like to do is get some of Eric’s ideas about some directions we can totally take, now that we are covering Minnesota, Colorado and like Iowa.  Eric?  What do you think?”

JEFF FECKE: “Thanks, Robin.  I was watching Governor Timmy at a press conference the other day, and he looked terrified…”

MARTY: “Actually, Jeff, I was asking Eric”

FECKE: “Doh!”

BLACK: “Quite all right.  I think one of the more interesting stories in the upcoming election is how changes in the demography of all three of these states, as well as their surrounding areas, are affecting the traditional alignments of these states.  Minnesota, for example, has been trending “redder” as a result of the growth of the more-conservative suburbs…”

[scattered hissing]

ANDY: “Wingnuts!  Wingnuts!  Unclean!”

BLACK: “…er, while in Colorado, it’s been sort of the opposite, as liberals from California move to…”

FECKE:  “THAT’s why Governor Timmy the Tool is terrified!  Because Minnesota is turning redder!  He’s a tool!  Why does he hate womenandchildren?”

BLACK: “…um…” [stares, nonplussed]

FECKE: [Continuing, rising from seat] “And that’s why we need fair, balanced, unbiased journalists like us!  He’s totally Pwn3d!…

BLACK:  “Er, Mr. Fecke?  A quick question.  What exactly does “Pwn3d” mean?  You write it all the time.  What is that?”

FECKE: “It’s when a tooltackular hacktool gets himself into a state of Pwnd3tude”.

BLACK: “Ah.  So, Jeff, how exactly is it that you stay detached enough to cover the news as a “journalist”?  Just curious…” 

FECKE:  “Because to show the womenandchildren what a hacktackular tool Timmy the hacktackular terrified tool is, you have to subvert the dominant paradigm!”

BLACK: “Er, right, but…” 

 FECKE: “Why does John Kline hate to admit he’s terrified of me?  Why woin’t Michael Brodkorb admit he’s on the payroll of George Soros?”

MARTY: “…er, Jeff?  That’s us…” 

FECKE: “Yeah, that’ll work!  Hah!  Why do hacktackular Rethuglican tools hate the truth!  Why does Michele Bachmann hate evangelitools!  God is a woman!  John Hinderaker eats pork – why does John Hackdertooler hate vegetables?  Hackey Pwn hack!  Tool tool toolity hackity tool!  Pwn pwn pwn pwn pwn!  Pwntackular hacktoolular pookity pookity!  Plockity pawlenty pawtucket plocktoolkit pucktunkular plockpoofitty plookity plooo ploooo plooooooooooooooooooo…

[drops to floor, convulsing, repeating gibberish, typing it into personal blog]

MARTY: “Thanks, Eric.  Next order of business…”

BLACK: “Er, wait.  The Minnesota Monitor approaches “journalism” from an entirely biased perspective, and is on the payroll of powerful left-wing partisan special interests.  Your staff is composed entirely of people with years of highly biased, partisan writing behind them.  And yet you walk into the Minnesota Monitor offices, put on your “journalist” hat, and you expect the reader to think you’re unbiased and report fairly?

MARTY: “We have a pledge”.

BLACK:  “Ah.  Never mind then”.

MARTY: “Next order of business – why Republican bloggers getting money undercuts democracy…”

Tune in for next week’s edition of “As the Soros Money Burns”.

 UPDATE:  Foot continues the thread.

Sunday’s Strib editorial dances about the obvious conclusion but, blinded by its extremist statist ideology, couldn’t actually spell it out if it were in five foot flaming letters in their North Oaks living rooms:

While the central cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have avoided the economic devastation that still besets much of the Midwestern Rust Belt, they have not kept pace with more dynamic cities farther west, places they would like to emulate.

Er, says who?

That picture emerges from a new Brookings Institution report, “Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America’s Older Industrial Cities.”

Ah.  The Brookings Institution, the famously left-of-center think tank that never met a tax bill or government intervention it didn’t like. 

The impression left is of Minnesota’s urban core drifting between two fates — steering away from the vortex that has swallowed Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis and other Midwestern trouble spots, but unable to join the clubby atmosphere of Austin, Tex., Denver, Seattle and other more prosperous places.

And why are those other places more prosperous?

The condition of central cities is important, the report says, because they are the canary in the coal mine; trouble at the core bodes poorly for the suburbs and the state. Indeed, state governments hold the key to the success of older big cities, the report says, because their policies set the table for older cities to compete.

You can lead a horse to water, goes the old saying, but you can’t wrench the horse from the control of a bunch of sixties’-vintage paleoliberal neo-socialists whose agendas consider drinking water to be a racist, sexist diversion from imposing a narrow, ideologically-blinkered version of “horseness” onto it. 

But let’s look at the specific priorities that the Strib calls for:

 State investments in education, jobs, public safety, transit, housing and urban amenities create cities that are stronger, regions that grow more efficiently and local economies that are “a boon to, rather than a drain on, state budgets.”

And yet doesn’t the Strib call out Austin, Texas – a city larger than Minneapolis, and when combined with San Antonio part of a metro area comparable with the Twin Cities – as an example?

And isn’t mentioning “Texas” a cue for smug lefties to start tittering about the state’s education budget?

Austin has a smaller, less-expensive transit system than the Twin Cities; I can see no references to anyone building trains (which, if you ask a Twin Cities lefty, is the one thing that will one day separate Minneapolis from Omaha). 

Public safety?  Each of the cities the Strib cites has had a “shall issue” concealed carry law for vastly longer than Minnesota; Texas has a reputation for no-BS law and order that is pretty much the mirror image of Minnesota’s criminal-coddling welfare magnet.

Unfortunately, that’s a message Gov. Tim Pawlenty ignored in vetoing a tax bill that would have restored a portion of the deep cuts in aid to cities that he initiated in 2003… As Brookings’ Bruce Katz said in a recent speech: City-based regions are the “main organizing units” of global competition; competing successfully and meeting the great environmental and social challenges of our time “rests largely on the health and vitality and prosperity of major cities and metropolitan areas.”

Then the Twin Cities – locked into an ideology of spending without accountability and want without goal by uber-liberal administrations whose only goal seems to be to garner more money and power unto themselves – are pretty well doomed, huh?

To that end, it’s in a state’s best interest, says the report, to ensure that its biggest cities are safe and fiscally healthy; that their physical landscapes are transformed, and that their middle and upper-middle classes grow.

And what’s the best way for that to happen?

To keep using the inner cities as warehouses for the poor, in a “war on poverty” that is the nation’s real quagmire?

To keep entrusting our cities to liberal administrations who see “lack of diversity” as a bigger problem than crime?

Oh, and since the Strib is sounding the warning gong, just how bad are things?

It’s good that Minneapolis and St. Paul are not on the Brookings “critical list” — at least not yet. But it would be nice to see them moving toward the top tier. Among central cities in the 50 largest metro areas, Minneapolis ranked 16th in economic condition and ninth in residential well-being. St. Paul ranked 30th in economic condition and 15th in residential well-being. While both cities run ahead of their Rust Belt neighbors in the rankings, they trail Austin, Seattle, Denver and a half-dozen other “peers.” That puts the central Twin Cities in a category that might be labeled “pretty good.” In an era of sharp competition, pretty good isn’t good enough.

WHAT?

Forget for a moment that the report, by a left-leaning think tank, is measuring spending; we come in closer to the top of the list than the middle, and the Strib is fussing?

Leaving aside that when the comparison is based entirely on the amount of higher-government spending, “pretty good” isn’t very good at all. 

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.

Tim “Obie” O’Brien quotes Keith “Talking Hairdo” Olberman:

And you thought he was hard on Republicans

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took a break from ripping President Bush to tell the Democrats who caved on the war funding bill just what he thought of their actions. “The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the administration, in which the only things truly compromised are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends and family in Iraq.

Doomed?

Interesting to hear what my friends in the service think about that…

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions — stop the war — have traded your strength, your bargaining position and the uniform support of those who elected you for a handful of magic beans.”

Because magic beans in the form of transitory and misleading poll numbers and a national tantrum for a mandate are all you have, Keef!

The Strib Editorial Board acts like a blindfolded man examining a cow, and declaring what he’s prodding at to be two powderhorns, a dusting broom, a walking cane and a fur rug.

Sometimes a cow is just a cow.

And sometimes a financial scam is just a financial scam.  In this case, it’s the state’s “Alternative Learning Centers” – schools for kids who are having trouble in the traditional school system. 

Today, almost 150,000 — nearly 20 percent of state public school students — go to Alternative Learning Centers (ALCs). But a May 13 story by Star Tribune reporter Jim Walsh looked behind those numbers to reveal some troubling issues.Yes, students are going to the schools in droves, but what happens after they get there? A majority of them never take standardized tests or graduate. A quarter to a half of them are absent most days. So is it good enough that only a tiny number of alternative students are being educated — or are the schools too often holding areas that delay the dropout process for a few years?

The Strib feels about the cow, and finds a wet sloppy thing that it figures is a leather washcloth:

Those and other questions raised in Walsh’s story deserve answers. The state and school districts should do a better job of tracking and evaluating ALCs and students. And more should be done to find effective ways to assess and educate the most challenging students. Tens of thousands of youth are involved; if they fail to get a basic education, their earning capacity and quality of life are imperiled. Moreover, the state’s future workforce and economy will be negatively affected.

It notes a smell – and, in noting “something smells like bulls**t”, comes perilously close to the truth:

Now some observers worry that enrollments have swelled because district officials use the schools as “dumping grounds” for the worst students. There is also concern from some quarters that districts keep the students in the system because of the $200 plus million in state funding they attract.

…but then notices the long legs with the hard ends, and figures it’s part leather dining room table:

One of the original and strongest arguments for the learning centers is that they keep students in school who would otherwise drop out.

They came so close to the truth.

School Funding 101:  Schools get an amount of money for every day a student attends.  If the student is absent – or drops out – that money doesn’t go to the district.

The beast doesn’t like being starved.

Schools have ample tools – including the cooperation of well-funded departments of local County Attorney’s offices – to keep “truant” kids (defined as kids whose absence or tardiness jeopardizes that per diem payment).  But thanks to No Child Left Behind, schools have also become obsessed with test scores.  Students who can’t, or won’t, excel on the standardized tests that have become public schools raison d’etre since NCLB need (although they’ll never say it) to get rid of the problem kids…

…but if those kids drop out of school, the districts lose the per diem that they get for each student attending.  

ALC’s solve this Catch 22, giving districts a place to continue mandatory attendance (and collecting of the per-student per diem, naturally) while firewalling all those inconvenient bad test scores in a place where they won’t be held against all the other schools.  Not unlike a grocery store that hides rotting merchandise under and behind the fresh stuff, except that the “rotting merchandise” is the student body.

  The idea is that with more time and individualized attention, students who couldn’t make it in a traditional school can still earn a high school diploma. Then, after achieving that goal, some will be inspired to go on to higher education.

Except that “extra attention” really doesn’t exist – ALC is basically an unstructured hodgepodge, and graduation is entirely subject (at least in Saint Paul) to the individual students’ motivation to get that diploma – a goal that doesn’t mean much to everyone who is sent there). 

At most alternative schools fewer than 25 percent of the students took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment; among those who did, only 22 percent passed the reading exam and 4 percent passed the math test.

That’s not good enough. State, district and alternative school officials must work together to evaluate ALC programs and find ways to raise their success rates.

Yeah, that’d be nice – but that’s not the point of having ALC.  And the Strib should know that.

Lori “The One-Woman DFL PR Operation” Stufdevant is watching the meltdown of Larry Pogemiller’s “Happy To Pay!” bloc with the usual near-suicidal depression.

I scarcely have the heart to fisk her anymore.  I feel like I could write everything she’s done this session according to a standard template:

 [pick a DFL legislator] is feeling sad.  Her [pick a program] got vetoed by Tim Pawlenty.

“I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to [a constituency the DFL trots out to elicit tears; women, children, immigrants, the elderly are old standbys],” she told me, barely holding back a tear.

A GOP legislator I know who harkens back to a more responsible, caring, cooperative time in this once-great state agrees.  “Arne Carlson would have never stuck [constituency] in the back.”

The only hope, short of an electoral miracle or a meteor hitting Tim Pawlenty and ushering in a more loving, caring time in this state’s history, is a softening of hearts and grips on the $44,500,000 – a fraction of what this state spends on roads and cops! – to buy office supplies and stationery for this program.

Good luck with that.

Need I say more?

Well, of course I do.  The devil is in the details – and there are always details. 

New ideas that build on an intact government-services infrastructure were stopped by evidence that Minnesota doesn’t have one anymore.

Lori Sturdevant would have you believe that Tim Pawlenty has destroyed state government?

“I keep hearing that we should be more like business, and that businesses both cut expenses and invest in new things,” said Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville, the House K-12 finance chair. “I don’t know. I don’t think too many businesses let their whole plant crumble in order to improve the landscaping.”

Her analogy would be more apt if the proposed investments were merely aesthetic improvements. They weren’t.

No, they are much less useful: 

…Getting more little kids ready for kindergarten and bigger kids ready for college goes to the heart of this state’s aspirations for its future.

Read back (if you have the stomach or the tolerance for mindless bathos) in Sturdevant’s piece.  She’s talking about early childhood education – a nice freebie convenience for working parents, but something that does very little to “prepare” kids for school (and that’s even if you assume that “preparing a four year old kid for school” is a good thing!). 

Another interesting detail – Sturdevant’s “don’t look at the emperor” approach to recent history.  Remember – the DFL came into this session proposing a feeding frenzy of spending and regulation, ranging from sending state agents to visit and push state programs on new mothers to bringing the full weight of law enforcement to bear on school stadiums’ lights shining into Phyllis Kahn’s windows to giving the franchise to 16 year olds to sending the Attorney General after companies that don’t achieve “social goals” to…

…well, you get the picture.  Or you would get the picture, if you get your news from Republican blogs and not the Strib, anyway.

Because what does Sturdevant say about Our Silly Legislature?

The ideas bandied about this year may not have been right for Minnesota. Other ways of going at the Big Challenge might work better.

Yes, Lori.  “Other ways”.  “Ways” sponsored by people who are not idiots who are drunk on power and awash with a sense of wanting revenge for having been out of power. 

But discussion of all such options ended too soon this session — silenced by an inability or unwillingness either to raise new revenue or to move money away from programs that were hit in 2003. With one day to go before regular-session adjournment, this year’s Capitol story looks to be the triumph of unfinished business over new priorities. That’s not the way to move Minnesota ahead.

No, but it’s a way to keep it solvent and help the powers that be learn a sense of responsibility.

And by “responsibility”, I don’t mean “…to a phony legacy kept alive by people wanting to re-create the DFL’s salad days”, Ms. Sturdevant.

Nick Coleman is happy to pay spend your money for a meaningless party:

Minnesota’s celebration of its 150th birthday in 2008 is shaping up to be nothing special. I’ll bring the cheese. You bring crackers.

That may be all we get to observe the admission of Minnesota as the 32nd state of the Union on May 11, 1858. We can hold it in my garage, if I can get it cleaned up.

Coleman bemoans the fact that our “happy to pay…” legislature hasn’t ponied up enough money for…I don’t know, a party suitable to soothe the collective egoes of people who tie their personal worth to that of their state?  I have no idea.

The sesquicentennial isn’t underfunded. It is unfunded.

That needs to change, in a big way. And in a big hurry.

Um – why?

The commission was authorized by the Legislature in 2005, and the plan was to appropriate $2 million in state funds for the sesquicentennial and to seek $2 million more in private contributions. But legislation allowing the commission to accept contributions just passed a couple of weeks ago, and Gov. Tim Pawlenty — who didn’t include funding for the sesquicentennial in his budget priorities — vetoed a bill that included a belated appropriation.

Yet another reason we need to be thankful Tim Pawlenty won.

That 1958 celebration of Minnesota’s 100th birthday cost $1.1 million, which is $8 million in today’s dollars and amounted to almost $3 per capita. Today, with a larger population, $750,000 amounts to just 15 cents per Minnesotan. Whoopee. Knock yourself out.

The centennial included a historic train that visited 86 of the 87 counties in the state (Cook County had no rail connection), a big parade and a giant statehood celebration at the old Memorial Stadium, plus celebrity appearances at the State Fair, including a visit from Marilyn Monroe.

This time around, we should ask Prince and Bob Dylan to put on a free show on the riverfront, but we’ll be lucky to get Britney to get out of a cab.

Question:  is there any reason a state government that is constantly piddling and moaning about being broke needs to throw a big vanity-fest at taxpayer expense? 

Look. We need a celebration. Not just to celebrate, but to contemplate, too. To think about who we are as a people, how we got here, where we came from (including a candid look at the way that the wresting of the state from the “wilderness” meant disaster and suffering for the Indian tribes already here), and where we are headed.

Ain’t no party like a Nick C party.

 Nick Coleman writes about Minnesota US Attorney Rachel Paulose:

Today, a different list of removals needs another name:

Rachel Paulose.

Her staff is in rebellion. The senator who nominated her is demanding the head of the man who presided over the process that produced her. And the bottom line is clear:

Her appointment to a job for which she was unqualified, and which she has demonstrated she is incapable of performing, was the poisoned fruit of a corrupt process.

 Er, yeah, except none of that is true.

One gets the impression Coleman is “Sturdevanting” – rotely reciting DFL talking points.

Not that he’s a DFL monkey or anything, nosirreebob.

Nancy Barnes, Strib Editor, wrote a “Q and A” piece on Sunday discussing the changes at the paper.

I won’t address the whole thing – here it is – but a couple of bits and pieces caught my eye.

 Why don’t you do something about the paper’s political views?

The newspaper and the editorial department are separate. As editor, I have no influence over the editorial pages. I do have influence over the news pages. If you see bias in the news pages, please feel free to call me. We work every day to deliver the news fair and straight. If we don’t, we have failed our readers.

This is interesting; to my knowledge, it’s the first time that an editor at the Strib has acknowledged that the peasants are restless about the Strib’s relentless editorial bias.  With the departure of Jim “Our Paper Is Fair and Balanced, And Only A Republican Moron Would Question Us” Boyd, it’ll be interesting to see if the paper actually starts trying to come to terms with its reputation (which is neither entirely justified, at least in terms of many of the paper’s beat reporters, nor inaccurate) of being a de facto DFL PR shop.

At any rate – Barnes has issued the invitation.  Let’s see how sincere she is.

I’m a very, very idealistic person.  And I’ve got a sentimental streak wider than my shoulders.

But I’ve bred a healthy – mostly – streak of cynicism into myself when it comes to the media, to pop culture, to public society.  With people as individuals, I trust but verify. With most public personae, I distrust and, if debunking fails, might be amenable to discussion.

So it took me a whole reading of Nick Coleman’s mother’s day column before I was able to tell my internal cynic to take a break, grab a drink, come back in a few.

I’m not going to quote it.  Read it, and if you have an angle on it – well, you know what to do.

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…)

…when you’ve got Foot?

It all began when noted objective internet journalist Jeff Fecke requested an interview from his long-time friend whom he had always respected and held in high regard, Andy Aplikowski (1) for an article he was writing for the online news source Minnesota Monitor (2). But instead of treating his fellow blogger with the respect and solicitude that he rightly deserved, Aplikowski replied with a series of hate-filled, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, unhinged rants emblematic of any wingnut Republican. Like a good journalist, Mr. Fecke cleaned up the transcript, added some copy and posted the piece.

And so on.  Read it all.

And then look for Obie’s “real” “Blog House” this weekend, and see if there are any substantial differences.

Jeff Kouba on the changes at the Strib:

Conservatives care about news, and bias in newsrooms, because we recognize the importance of a free press. I don’t want the Strib to disappear, I value a strong local paper. I want a local paper that isn’t the publishing arm of the DFL. I want a local paper that finds the stories I never could, and is home to quality writing.

There is much I enjoy about the Strib. I enjoy their theater and music and dance critics. I like the sports pages. In short, I value the local focus Hugh Hewitt says will be necessary for newspapers in a changing media landscape.

That’s a key point – one missed by rage-o-holics like Nick Coleman and Garrison Keillor; most of us have  nothing intrinsically against newspapers or their reporters. 

Merely the blinkered, smug political bias that all too many (but by no means all) newspaper reporters, columnists and editors have.

Some of us, indeed, roil with anger in noting that the Strib has the tools for its own salvation already on board, in the likes of Eric Black, Doug Tice, Lileks (for now) and whomever decided to hire Katherine Kersten, but chooses to ignore them in favor of an ever-more-noxious status quo.  They’re “staying” the wrong course.

But a paper that equates local focus with turning Lileks into a brand new J-school graduate doesn’t know where it’s going, and that’s not a good sign.

Jim Boyd a lousy leader?

Who’da thunk it?

Lori Sturdevant – would would seem to be operating as a full-time DFL Public Relations operative – castigates Tim Pawlenty for keeping his word.

How?

As usual – by dredging up another mildewed name from Minnesota’s paleoliberal past.

You already know what’s in this article, don’t you?

1.  A reference to a Minnesota Republican in the sixties or seventies – one who allowed the DFL to get exactly what it wanted
2. A Republican in the legislature today who’d “frustrated” with his party and wants to follow the DFL’s orthodoxy.

With all these Republicans-who-really-hate-Republicanism that Sturdevant would have us believe she’s unearthing, it’s a wonder we have a GOP at all, isn’t it?

Unless it’s the same couple of representatives being recycled over and over, in the Larry Jacobs fashion…

Anyway, here goes:

Governors always attach messages, public and private, to their vetoes. The publishable ones that get hissed in legislators’ ears range from “Don’t you dare!” to “Go ahead. Override me. I won’t mind.”

The tale often told about GOP Gov. Harold LeVander’s famous 1967 veto of the bill that created the state sales tax is that it bore a message of the latter type. He shot that bill down, twice. In the 1966 campaign, he’d promised not to sign a sales tax into law. For an upright Lutheran lawyer, that ended the discussion. He would not break his word.

But by then, the state had endured years of financial struggle, and property taxes were soaring. (Sound familiar?) [Spendthrift legislatures strongarming an honest Republican into mugging the public?  Yep! – Ed] Legislators of his own party, then in charge of both houses, decided that more state revenue was both a political and a fiscal necessity, and a sales tax was the way to get it. The second override attempt prevailed on the strength of Republican (then Conservative) votes.

Sturdevant recites the drearily-predictable litany of betrayal.  And then…:

Jean LeVander King, the daughter of the late governor, said of her father’s veto stance: “He had made a pledge, but others had made different promises. It was not in his nature to say, ‘You have to break your promise, but I get to keep mine.’ He had great respect for the Legislature, and thought that each branch had to exercise its best judgment.”

Today’s news is recycled history. Last week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty felled the bonding bill with the first in what’s widely expected to be a batch of major-bill vetoes this year.

And here’s hoping he holds the line.

No gubernatorial subtext was needed on the bonding bill veto. That bill didn’t leave the House and Senate with the veto-proof majority — at least 90 votes in the House, 45 in the Senate — needed to raise the curtain on an override drama. If DFLers intend to run the veto gantlet with a bill raising the income tax, it’ll be the same story. Despite its promise of property tax relief for almost all Minnesota homeowners, the House tax bill limped into conference committee with 74 all-DFL votes.

Didja catch that?

Sturdevant trots out Levander’s daughter with one of her father’s moral lessons – and Sturdevant tries to dump it, lock stock and barrel, onto the current situation?

To scold the Governor into getting out of the way for yet another DFL gang-rape of the state economy?

Sturdevant relates one of the back-room – inevitably pro-DFL – intrigue that she must live for:

But there’s a lot of whispering already about the impending drama on transportation funding. It’s speculative stuff: Maybe as many as a dozen House Republican votes, and maybe, just maybe, all 85 DFL votes might be aligned in support of a conference committee report containing the right array of “revenue enhancements” for roads, bridges and transit.

I loved this bit:

Some corridor talk had Pawlenty looking for a way to bend his no-new-taxes rule and let such a bill become law, perhaps without his signature. (Here’s a line for his speechwriters, gratis: “I just couldn’t let Minnesota pass up the federal matching money Jim Oberstar is promising us.”)

Er, yeah.  Egregious porkmongering is such  a chuckle.

Cue the tame “Republican”:

“He wants us to make this issue go away for him,” groused a House Republican who might vote for a gas tax increase, but won’t go along with an override.

It’s now a complete Sturdevant editorial! 

When an override vote comes, they have a duty to exercise their own best judgment about what’s good for Minnesota.

He is.

It’s why we elected him.

Remember that?

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”.

I’ve long advocated introducing toll roads to Minnesota, especially the metro area, as a substitute for generalized taxes to support road construction.

Mentioning this around DFLers, of course, draws offense; to the DFL’s statist senses, all public goods are a public duty, with “public” meaning “the whole public” (or at least that part not favored by tax breaks from the DFL-strangled legislature).

And as the standardbearer of all DFL folk “wisdom”, the Strib can’t help but vent for it, even when basically agreeing with the concept:

Tolls cannot substitute for government’s broad responsibility to raise the taxes needed to build and care for basic transportation.

Um – why? 

I mean, if it were determined that tolls could somehow replace gas and other taxes, why wouldn’t we reassess this “responsibility?”

The Strib does, in fact, support the experimental addition of a toll lane to 35W in the South Metro…:

But tolls used specifically to relieve congestion and support transit on certain crowded roadways might be worth trying. Thus we applaud Minnesota’s application last week for federal money to refashion Interstate Hwy. 35W between Burnsville and downtown Minneapolis to include a toll lane for single drivers that would, in turn, help finance bus rapid transit service.

…but, naturally, all libertarian sense has been stripped from the proposal: 

The idea is to free up more space in regular lanes, draw more commuters to transit and coax others to alternate routes or times. A similar experiment in Stockholm raised bus ridership and reduced congestion by 20 percent.

Indeed, tolls (like so much of the “Transit” mania gripping the local center-left) are to be tools, used to further the powers-that-be’s frenzy of social engineering:

Toll lanes should not be seen as “solving” the metro region’s severe shortfall in transportation funding. They cannot substitute for the Central or Southwest light-rail lines [Really?  Why? – Ed]. Tolls should always be set high enough to retain transit’s competitive advantage. 

Does anyone proof-read this crap?

What “competitive advantage” does transit have?

  And care should be taken to assure that tolling doesn’t damage central business districts.

One wonders if the Strib editorial board has reviewed the ghastly toll that its’ beloved Central Corridor light rail line is going to take on the non-“central” business district in the Midway and Frogtown – a district that has been saved by small, Asian business that is going to be gutted by nearly a decade of rail construction, for a line that will detract from rather than enhance the neighborhood (it’ll be a light rail rather than trolley line).

One wonders if the Strib editorial board even understands any of this.

Waitstaff can have just about the crappiest job there is.  I’ve never been a waiter (or, for that matter, a cook; I guess that means local leftybloggers will start calling me a “chickenfoodserviceworker”), but I’ve worked with ’em in a slew of jobs – and the notion that part of one’s income is dependant on the social skills, much less the felicitude, of one’s fellow restaurant or bar patron would scare the bejeebers out of me. 

Suffice to say that in the 23 years since I worked as a bellhop at a Holiday Inn (partly for tips, and interacting constantly with the waitresses at our hotel’s wan little restaurant), I’ve never stiffed anyone on a tip.   

So, if the NYPost is any indication, the next big beef (as it were) against Limbaugh is that he’s a good customer?

Rush Limbaugh is far from conservative when it comes to his big appetite. The Post’s Braden Keil reports that Limbaugh and a female companion lived large at Kobe Club last Thursday night, devouring bacon with truffles, Japanese strip steak, Kobe beef cheek ravioli, a large seafood platter, a combo of American, Australian and Japanese wagyu steaks and several “side” dishes.

After finishing their $700 feast, Limbaugh left the server a $1,000 tip.

Wow.  He takes care of the working class.

Wonder how Al Franken, Mike Hatch, Judi Dutcher or Chris Coleman tips.  Any Oceanaire staff reading here today?

 (Via Maloney)