Funny coincidence, courtesy of Katie: re this past Monday:

My bra Joe’s birthday today. Happy Birthday, Jofey! It’s also Mitch’s b-day, and they went to the same college, WEIRD! That is so freaky!!

Only the latest of many freakinesses: Katie and Joe’s sister Mary (proprietor of this blog) married my college’s basketball coach. Katie’s husband interviewed for another coaching gig at the same school. And Joe and I were, in fact, classmates.

Furthermore, the school – which had about 500 students back then – had a total of five people, counting Joe and I, with December 11 birthdays; four students and the journalism professor. (That, and a total of four leap babies, which is even weirder. Weirder still, if memory serves, one of the leap babies was (ta daaaa) Joe’s roommate.

So let’s see…a heartwarming story about growing up Joe’s lil’ sisty…um, when our folks would go out for the evening, I’d hide in my closet cuz he’d immediately start looking for me so he could sit on my face and fart.

Does this explain anything?  You be the judge.

Veggies will kill you too:

Fresh raw vegetables like lettuce, spinach, tomatoes and green onions were responsible for the illness or deaths of nearly 19,000 people nationwide over a five-year period.

Vegetables are nearly as dangerous as under-cooked meat when it comes to transmitting deadly food illnesses like E. coli, salmonella and hepatitis, according to a study of federal outbreak records by Scripps.

Beef, chicken, pork and their byproducts were responsible for nearly 22,600 deaths or illnesses, according to the study of 6,374 outbreaks reported from Jan. 1, 2000 through Dec. 31, 2004.

No other foodstuff came close to the threats posed by vegetables and meats, the study found.

In related news:  Bob from the American Lung Association and Jeanne Weigum have iron-clad proof that second-hand cabbage has killed more people than the Holocaust.

It’s almost a shame Scott Johnson is such a good lawyer…

…because he’d have been a heck of a music critic.

My blog seems to have dumped a number of posts that I had up and running this morning.

If WordPress’ database is really that unstable, I might be a candidate for MT3.x after all.

UPDATE: I find I’m re-approving comments that I approved earlier today. It’s like the blog stepped 12 hours back in time or something.

Anyone?

The New York Film Critics name United 93 the year’s best film:

Marshall Fine, the group’s chairman, said it was a tough vote for best picture, with critics slugging it out over “United 93,” “The Queen” and “The Departed.”

In choosing the winner, “I think everybody agrees it was an amazing film in terms of telling the story without pushing a political point of view,” said Fine, film and TV critic for Star magazine. “It puts you right in the middle of the scene without telling you what to think or what to feel. It was really one of the most harrowing films of the year.”

It’s not a light watch; my insides were twisted into knots watching the movie, even though the ending was far from a cliffhanger.  And the no-name cast is impeccable. 

 Harrowing is about the right word.  But it deserves every honor it can get

A local leftyblogger (who’ll not chisel another link out of me; Christmas is over, big fella!) took a shot at honing his descriptive skills last week.

It was, unfortunately a swing and a miss.  So to help out, allow me to present a bit of a contest:

Who do the following terms describe:

• “Pasty”
• “White”
• “Out Of Shape”

Is the correct answer:

1. Conservative Bloggers
2. Liberal Bloggers
3. Virtually every Minnesotan over the age of 22

 The answer, of course, is “3”.

Just saying.

(more…)

If’ you’d like to put a thumb in the eye of the local establishment – the types who think that bugging phone calls from terrorists is a crime against civil liberty, but think you a neanderthal for supporting the Second Amendment – then join Joel Rosenberg and a couple dozen of his best friends bin this get-together Saturday at Stub and Herb’s. The party starts at 6PM:

Pro-gun activists from all across the state will be meeting and sharing food, fun, and maybe a little bit of beer to talk how to move the ball forward over the next few years.

This past election was a setback for gun rights supporters – but it doesn’t have to be a fatal one. And it’s at get-togethers like this that we lay the real groundwork for keeping it that way.

I hope to see you there.

Cynthia McKinney, leaving the House, files a purely symbolic bill to impeach the President:

In what was likely her final legislative act in Congress, outgoing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney introduced a bill Friday to impeach President Bush.

The legislation has no chance of passing and serves as a symbolic parting shot not only at Bush but also at Democratic leaders. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has made clear that she will not entertain proposals to sanction Bush and has warned the liberal wing of her party against making political hay of impeachment.

As long as we’re dwelling in the world of symbols, allow me to symbolically lob (if only rhetorically) a sulpherous, rotten egg at Cynthia McKinney’s gibbering face.

In my mind, it made such a symbolic spatter.

I occasionally catch bits and pieces of the History Channel’s Mega Disasters – where scientists (who may or may not be crackpots) wax enthusiastic about their pet theories for civilization-altering disasters, set (in the History Channel’s typical style) to cheesy graphics and crudely-assembled stock footage of similar disasters.

Mega-wildfires destroying Sidney? A Tsunami drowning the entire east coast? A mega-hurricane erasing some other first-world metropolis? No matter; some scientist will appear, grinning like Comic Book Guy who’s just gotten the new Cthulhu Digest, as cheesy computer graphics show some hapless bystander getting swallowed by a tsunami, or stock footage from Indonesia’s tsunami shows a little girl being swept away from a group of other kids clutching an abutment?

Yeah, it’s entertainment. Of course, I’ve met the type of people who find disaster pr0n entertaining.

Ick.

These shows make my skin crawl; the people who get off on them make my  intestines crawl.

…that I started giving Bruce and Jan Berg years of parenting practice.

…and Frank Rich is no Walter Cronkite:

“As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq.

“The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.”

Wow.  The President nominated the wrong Secretary of Defense!

I watched Comedy Central’s Last Laugh 2006 last night.

Odd name, since I’m still waiting for the First Laugh.

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.

It was seventh-hour “Living Sports” class, the end of a long winter day in the middle of my senior year of high school. We were doing ice skating. Lesa MacEwan was showing me how to skate…well, I already knew how, more or less, but if you had a chance to have Lesa MacEwan tow you around the ice by the hand, ethics came in a distant second.

But I digress.

The radio was playing on the house speakers, tuned to KFYR in Bismark (at the time a Top40 AM station – a virtually forgotten specimen these days). “Hungry Heart” by Springsteen played.

And ended.

And the jock came on after the song and said that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

I’d never been much of a Lennon fan. And I never became one; genius doesn’t necessarily imply likeability. And I always found Double Fantasy a completely awful album; Lennon’s death didn’t make it any better.

But I could see why, for so many people not much older than I, December 8 1980 was the day the music died.

Since someone among my group of readers knows pretty much anything that exists, I have two questions:

1. What’s the trick to exporting Moveable Type blogs to WordPress?  My old blog has about 8,000 posts; I can only get MT to export about 6,000 before it coughs.  What do I need to do?
2. While the official age to get a job in Minnesota is 16, my daughter (15) is bugging me to find out what the exceptions are.  Where can one work?  What does one need to do?

Thanks in advance.

Business is business, and your incessant ads are the price we pay for not paying for TV and Radio. Fair enough.

But those constant ads featuring the innumerable remixes of the Rolling Stones’ serviceable cover of the Soup Dragons’ classic “I’m Free” are almost enough to drive me to an all-cash lifestyle.

That is all.

Another long crazy day.  Light posting, again, ’til later today.

Saint Paul stops asking job applicants about criminal records:

Mayor Chris Coleman made the change this week, and ordered the city’s Department of Human Resources to investigate whether ex-convicts have been discriminated against in city hiring practices in the past.

Well, duh.

In a letter ordering the change, Coleman also said he would work with the private sector to “encourage adoption of a similar policy.”

While I think policy change is generally a good idea (I say “generally”), good luck with that “working with the private sector” thing. Most of us don’t have an army of underemployed lawyers to get us out of messes our employees cause.

“As the ability of employers to do background checks increases, one measure of a negligent hiring claim is you didn’t do as much as you could have,” [labor attorney Joe] Schmitt said. “As the bar raises in terms of what you can do, then the bar raises in terms of what you should do.”The Council on Crime and Justice has been lobbying cities to implement changes. Gambill said St. Paul’s decision makes it a national leader in the effort — so far, only Boston has completely removed the question from city job applications.

While I support this change in principle, I have to wonder what’ll happen a few lawsuits down the road.

The city started down this road a year ago, when it moved the criminal question to a part of the application seen only by the human resources department, but not hiring managers in other departments, said HR director Angie Nalezny.

Nalezny also said the city conducts background checks when the applicant would work with children or have access to money or sensitive information, and would know whether those applicants have a criminal record.

Therefore, there’s no risk of a sex offender being assigned to work with children, Nalezny said.

“Anybody that works in a rec center, absolutely we’re going to do a background check on them,” Nalezny said.

All well and good. But it’s the convicted burglars working for the Code Enforcement department that I’m most worried about.

A couple of points if you’re a hapless dolt (whose blog has three posts in a year) who threatens bloggers’ livelihoods over their disagreements:

1. He’s Sicilian.
2. He is a better blogger, and (accounting for all visible evidence, person) than you.
3. You had best stay anonymous.

Just saying.

 UPDATE: Dolt asks what I’d do if I met him.  (Don’t sweat the link – you’re not missing anything)

Simple.

1. Giggle derisively.
2. Resume ignoring him.

#2, incidentally, will commence now.

Reading this Strib piece about a couple celebrating their anniversary on Pearl Harbor day:

The attack drew the United States into World War II, drew Sheldon into the Army and gave him a running joke about how President Franklin Roosevelt, standing before Congress, declared his wedding day “a date which will live in infamy.”

I’m reminded of my ex-in-laws, who were married 65 years ago last November 30 – just in time for my eventually-ex-father-in-law to join the Navy and spend most of the next three years at sea.  So while your’e thanking any WWII vets in your life, drop a nod to the spouses who in so many cases not only waited for their loved ones to return, but ran families and held jobs while they did it, without a fraction of the infrastructure we have to support that kind of thing today.

I remember when I was a little kid, going to parades on Jamestown’s main street. The highlight of the show for me was the national guard guys with all their cool gear.

I remember – as probably a six or seven year old – watching a couple of the “older” guys, probably in their late thirties and early forties, and even talking with them. I talked about my proudest possession – my dad’s old book of WWII airplanes.

I remember one of the guys, probably a senior NCO (I remember a bunch of stripes and rockers on his sleeve) smiling. “I was in that war”.

I’ve thought about that guy often over the past 35 years, as the WWII generation has gone from being Dad to Grandpa, from “the establishment” to “the greatest generation”.

And I thought about them when I read that this may be the final Pearl Harbor Survivors’ Association meeting:

The survivors in Honolulu this week, many hunched, some in wheelchairs, men deeply wrinkled yet still trying to trade a history lesson for a quick kiss on the cheek, collectively know one thing: They defied death 65 years ago, but the inevitable is creeping up on them. They know this from the pain in their backs and hips. They know this as their eyesight fades and their hearing fails. And they know this because every five years, when they return to Pearl Harbor and find that their old buddies are not there, it’s a reminder that their friends either couldn’t endure the arduous Hawaii flight or died within the last few years.

“At our little happy hours each night you see the guys sitting alone who don’t have any old shipmates to speak with because they’ve all died,” said Debbie Marks, 35, who became involved in the survivors association because of her late grandfather. “I just spend the night walking around trying to get the ones who are alone to start talking to each other instead.”

This one killed me:

Donald Robinett came directly to the sign-in area for Pearl Harbor survivors when he arrived here this week.

“I am trying to find my shipmates,” the 89-year-old veteran announced excitedly. “I want to see which ones are here.”

A volunteer at the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, one of the groups organizing a massive reunion to mark the 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on U.S. forces here, began flipping through a log book until she came to Robinett’s ship, the USS Tracy, a small mine-laying vessel that had been in port that infamous day. “Sir,” she said sadly, patting the old sailor on his shoulder, “you’re the only one here.”

There’s nothing I could possibly write here that wouldn’t sound stupid.

I have an exceptionally crazy day going on today.  It is 5AM, and I’m already cranking on stuff.  This could be that rarest of all days – a weekday off from blogging.  At least until 6 or so.

 Posting will be very light until later in the day.

 In the meantime, if you see a WWII veteran, thank them.  The biggest event in their lives started 65 years ago this morning.

And you thought  you had a rough morning waking up today.

(This post was actually written about a month ago, in the middle of a quick, sharp job search. I figured discretion was the better part of ire, and tabled the post at the time – but I figured I’d post it now, in case it helps someone).

You know who you are – you’re a contract vendor. You essentially run a high-tech temp service; you connect companies that want to rent a programmer or a project manager or a business analyst for a project (and maybe to evaluate for a fulltime gig) and the people who do the job. You take a handsome cut off the top – somewhere between 33% and 50% of whatever client pays.

Now, high-tech – after the misery of the early ’00s – is back to being a bit of a seller’s market. It’s hard to find people in some fields; business analysts are hard to find, and Usability people are at a bit of a premium (score!).

And we have memories. And as long as the economy is doing well, we can afford to use them.

So here are a couple of tips for you, Mr. Contract Vendor:

1. If you call us up to tell us about a “three to six month contract”, and at the interview the client tells me the project has a hard eight-week deadline, that’s a bad sign.
2. If you quote me a rate in that initial phone call – to pick a figure at random, say, $40 an hour – and after the interview tell me “um, the highest we can go is $32”, that’s even worse.
3. If, as we’re waiting for the client to make up their minds, you try to get me to commit to the (shorter, lower-paying than you told me) job and blow off any other leads I have working, I might suspect that you are desperate to land this gig, and probably not the kind of vendor I’d like to work for if I don’t have to. Which, heaven be praised, I don’t at the moment.

That is all.

Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media?

But let a couple of evangelical ministers break with the GOP, and suddenly, if you’re EJ Dionne, it’s a trend?

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

Rick Warren is famous for his book The Purpose-Driven Life. He’s famous for donating a lot of money to AIDS research. He’s not famous as an especially conservative evangelical.

But EJ Dionne either doesn’t know that (do they all look the same to him?) or assumes his audience doesn’t.

Another fact; while the left is hopping up and down like monkeys flinging poo because some evangelicals flaked away from the GOP this past election, the numbers are a tad more sobering than that. In 2004, 22% of evanglicals voted Democrat. Last month? 30%.

And they’ve been fickle before. In 2000, when the issues on the table didn’t especially excite evangelicals, they stayed home in droves; some pollsters estimated that Bush would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college had evangelicals turned out in the same force they had in ’94, ’02 and ’04.

Finally – ’08 is another whole campaign. And the Democrat party at its highest level – once you get past the blandishments of Barack Obama, who is not exactly the favorite candidate of the Democrat inner circle – is intrinsically hostile to evangelical beliefs. They may run hot and cold on the GOP itself, but the fact that evangelicans have never been in the Democrat camp (not in recent memory,anyway) should tell you something; that, Rick Warren notwithstanding, Democrat evangelicals are a situational aberration, not a trend. EJ: get back to me in ’08 or ’10.
Mr. Dionne; I’ve met Mac Hammond, and Rick Warren is no Mac Hammond.

I rarely disagree with Dennis Prager (although I’ve broken with him about abstinence and the death penalty in the past).

Less often still do I agree with Keith Ellison.

So mark your calendars; Ed and I are with Ellison on his current flap about taking his oath of office on the Quran.

Ed recaps some of the discussion we had on the NARN last Saturday:

Prager, who usually gets it right, got this issue spectacularly wrong. He wrote that any Congressman not willing to swear an oath on the Bible should not serve in Congress, and that the American fabric would suffer its worst damage since 9/11 if Ellison used the Qur’an instead of the Bible. This is utter nonsense. In the first place, the entire issue is somewhat moot since members have one ceremony where they all take the oath of office as a group on the floor of the House. The rules of the House, furthermore, allows for the use of an “affirmation” for those choosing not to swear their oaths as a religious preference — which demonstrates that America does have a tradition of tolerance for the needs of other religions in its processes. Quakers in particular take advantage of that option, although Richard Nixon swore his oath when elected as President.

Besides, if using a religious text for an oath has any significance at all — and our experience with courts and politics strongly suggests there isn’t much — one would suppose that it would have to be a religious text with significance to the person swearing the oath. Atheists would not feel bound by the power of Divine retribution if they swore their oath on the Bible and then broke it later. Similarly, Christians would not feel much responsibility for protecting the honor of the Qur’an if they swore their oath on that text. Why wouldn’t we want Ellison to swear his oath on the one religious text he holds sacred, if we want him to feel some responsibility for acting in its defense by fulfilling his oath?

If I were to swear an oath on the Quran, would it be worth the air I spent saying the words? Yes, it would, because my word means something, but the Quran bit would be superfluous;  I don’t observe the Quran, less perhaps than Ellison does the Bible. The oath of office is being sworn to give an implied verbal warranty to the officeholder’s beliefs, not the voters’.

But while Prager is less correct than usual on this issue, he’s still more on the ball than whichever editoral-board drone wrote this bit of aromatica.  (I suspect Nick Coleman, the only person in the left-leaning world who still says “wingnut” with all the glee of a toddler who just made a big, juicy pants).