St. Paul school kid kicked off a bus for speaking English:

It happened to a few children in St. Paul and now the school district is apologizing.

Rachel Armstrong sent her kids to pick up the bus as usual Monday, but after the driver let the kids on, he told them he would not pick them up again. He even said he wouldn’t take them home that afternoon.

Armstrong left work early Tuesday, forced to pick up her kids from Phalen Lake Elementary School.

Her twin girls, 10, and her son, 8, were kicked off their regular school bus. They were told by the bus driver the route is for non-English speaking students only.

There was an explanation, of course; it was a bus assigned to all-Spanish and all-Hmong schools.

Ah.  It wasn’t a mistake – it was part of an official policy of balkanization!

More on school bureacracy later…

…that’ll work.

We warned you.

Vote DFL, or stay home because “the Republicans suck” or “they’re all the same”?

Pay through the nose:

The 2007 legislative session offered the Minnesota DFL an opportunity to shed a bit of its hard-taxing reputation. With a projected $2.2 billion state budget surplus, legislators could have funded champagne-style programs while avoiding the headache of higher taxes. Given the surplus, some hard-pressed Minnesota taxpayers were even dreaming of a rebate.

Sober up, taxpayers. In the opening hours of the legislative session, the DFL-dominated Senate went on a tax increase binge.

More of that “bipartisan cooperation” that the DFL and the Strib were always yapping about when the GOP was in control, obviously.

Read the whole thing and weep.  It’s going to be a brutal couple of years.

Victor Davis Hanson on the Democrats’ approach to Iraq:

Apparently the party line is that we can’t win, but we’re afraid to pull out in case we do, and so we will equivocate as we watch the battlefield and make the necessary rhetorical adjustments just in time.

They’ll vote for it, before they vote against it.  Before they vote for it again.

Generals in the bedroom, lotharios on the battlefield.

Al Quaeda leader killed by US airstrike in Somalia:

The suspected al-Qaeda militant who planned the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa was killed in an American airstrike in Somalia, an official said Wednesday.

Watch for editorials and leftyblog posts about the lack of due process any moment.

Who wrote this Democrat puff piece?

Anyone who expected Democrats to grow delirious with power once they took the reins on Capitol Hill will be sorely disappointed with the first major bills passed by the U.S. House last week.

Yay!  They got through a day without gagging on hubris!

Let’s see; ahistorical; carefully omitted context; hagiographic to Democrats.

Gotta be Sturdevant.

Whaddya think?

The phrase “[something someone said that the speaker doesn’t like] speaks volumes…”.

Indeed – but probably less about the subject than about the speaker.  It’s become the new “at this point in time”, something people toss in when they don’t or can’t spend the intellectual effort to come up with a serious response.

One acquaintance of mine once sniffed “the fact that you support Ann Coulter speaks volumes.”  Perhaps.  Volume I: the speaker was too lazy to say exactly what that meant.  Volume II: the speaker ignored the context of the “support” (Coulter was in an argument with someone who, unlike her, is always crazy, and not just for Coulter’s theatrical effect).  Volume III:  You speak in code words, like “Coulter” and “Wingnut”, among those for whom those code words have meaning and outside of which do not.  Volume IV: If challenged (and I did challenge) the speaker could not tell me which “volumes” were being “spoken”.

Someone using the phrase “speaks volumes” indeed, itself, speaks…ill.

The City Pages’ Britt Robson interviews a range of Strib staffers on their reactions to the paper’s recent sale.

Rochelle Olson – she of the piece on Alan Fine’s domestic abuse arrest which, for space reasons, neglected to mention the salient facts of the arrest’s expungement, the lack of any physical evidence against Fine, or later convictions against Fine’s soon-to-be ex that one might expect would give the reader a complete picture of the case – notes:

“There is enough anger to go around, but from what I hear, it is mainly directed at Pruitt and Anders,” says [Olson], a metro reporter who has worked at the paper for seven years. “There’s a lot of derisive talk about Pruitt, because he was painted in other media as the golden boy, this tanned San Franciscan up-and-comer who liked rock and roll music and talked about a new paradigm. He and Anders led people to believe they cared about journalism. And when push came to shove, all they cared about was the bottom line.”

It might explain the key facts being left out of the Fine piece; people were too busy provisioning their lifeboats.

Well, it’s more palatable than “all parties involved were in the bag for Keith Ellison”, isn’t it?

There are, though, a couple of interesting quotes; I’ll add the emphases. First, reporter Mike Kaszuba:

“We need to squeeze out another 10 years to stay in this industry. And you sit back and say, wow, I wonder if there is another 10 years left in this industry? We are the Watergate babies, from back when it was cool and sexy to be a journalist. We were naive, goofy idealists in a way. Now it is about dollars and cents. The thing I got into it for, I’m not sure it’s even among the top five reasons this place runs anymore.

And Biz beat reporter Mike Meyers:

I didn’t go into this job to retire at 50 or to make a fortune. I did it because I liked it and I enjoyed the work. It is a calling. And over time, it has become more and more of a regular job where you show up do your job and leave.

I remember going into radio, and staying in it for years after I should have left, because it was cool and sexy (and, lest I forget, because I loved doing the job, most of it). I never had the baggage of a “calling”, although with talk radio I had the impediment of it being the first serious love of my life, which is similar, I think.

And I remember the realization; the world doesn’t have to fund my fun, to say nothing of my love. And anyone who follows a “calling” has to accept the notion that not everyone will support it; just monks are dependent on the largesse of a church or institution, newspaper reporters with a “calling” are dependent on the world valuing that calling sufficiently to keep them, or some number of them, employed.

So why has that calling been so devalued in the past 20 years?

I’d have loved to have heard the answers Britt Robson got to that question.

What do you get when you take Minnesota drivers – the types who tailgate at 60 mph on glare ice while telling their friend via cell phone “I’m a good driver”) – with ice?

Wet, cold, very lucky idiots:

Jacob Schmidt and Russell Omann were trying to reach a fish house last Thursday night when their truck broke through the ice about 200 feet off shore. Omann climbed out through the passenger window and Schmidt got out through the rear window of the cab.

Not sure what this fascination Minnesotans have with driving on ice as the temperatures soar into the 40s.  Maybe it’s overconfidence – the misplaced hubris of a people that considers itself winter people (even though, compared to North Dakotans, they may as well be from Nebraska or some such).

Or maybe it’s that Minnesotans have a streak of “Let’s take a stupid chance”, a gene that bids them to tailgate on glare ice, or snowmobile at 80mph through unfamiliar woods, or vote for a pro wrestler.

New York’s stench is apparently a Jersey swamp thing:

Across the length and breadth of Manhattan, people were asking, “What’s that smell?” after a pungent odor like natural gas or rotten eggs blanketed the borough and northern New Jersey for three hours yesterday morning.

By evening, the answer seemed to be a stinky gas emitted by a New Jersey swamp or marsh.

So the winner of the “Why Does NYC Stink” poll is “Jersey Swamp”.

I’m out $20; I had “the fetid stew of [frequent commenter] Angryclown’s ill-contained ire wafting in from Queens” or Lawn Gisland or whereever he lives…

I was wondering when the European population gap was going to come to this:

When her water broke early on New Years Eve, Julia Gotschlich was mainly thinking about the imminent birth of her second child. But she couldnt help worrying about family finances, too.

She and her husband stood to lose out on more than $13,200 if the baby arrived before midnight, when Germanys generous new family benefits took effect – part of a government effort to raise one of the lowest birthrates in Europe.

Births in Germany dropped 4 percent in 2005 from the previous year, according to figures from the Federal Statistics Agency, to around 690,000. Thats the lowest since World War II and lagging even 1946, when 922,000 babies were born even as the country lay in ruins.

A recent government study forecast that Germanys population will drop by as much as 16 percent by 2050, from the current 82.4 million to as little as 69 million. That could hurt the economy by sapping the work force – and undermine the state pension system.

Not to mention leaving the country being assimilated into the Moslem world.

Will money do what social vitality can’t?

 (Read the whole series) 

As I noted a while ago in the first and second parts of this series, I didn’t start out as an opponent of the public school system. As the son of a teacher and grandson of two more, Education was one of those issues where, even as I swung to the right on most politics, I remained very much a moderate. After all – the schools did a pretty good job with me, right?

Maybe, maybe not. But either way, I went about ten years without any real contact with any kind of school system, from age 18 to my late twenties.

Then, I got a prefab family – my then-wife had a nine-year-old son when we got married – and got a quick education. My stepson was in fourth grade when we got married. We enrolled him in the Saint Paul Public Schools.

Now, my stepson – who is now 25, lives in Manhattan and is a very talented manager who is engaged to a lovely girl who’s involved in the theatre business in NYC – had some big pluses and, when it came to school, a couple of minuses. He was (and is) blazingly intelligent – especially when it comes to tinkering with things. Mechanical things, mental things, systemic and managerial things – he’s a kid who likes to tear things apart, put them back together again, and make them work. Smart? After high school, he got a grunt job at a flailing, wretched business; within six months, he’d risen to manage the place (a store in a national service chain) and become a superstar within the chain’s district management (hence, when he wanted to move to Manhattan, the company gave him the job he wanted pretty much for the asking). He did with that store in the Midway what he did with countless apppliances, toys, and gadgets over the years as I was helping raise him; he took it apart, saw how it worked (or in the case of the store, didn’t work), and put it back together again better than it started (in the case of the store. Not so much with the appliances).

That, of course, is not the way schools work these days. In retrospect, it never was, of course; most school systems, public or private, place a premium on:

• Sitting quietly
• Learning by absorbing what’s fed to you, when it’s fed to you. No sooner, no later.

Now, apologists (witting or otherwise) for the “sit your butt in the chair and be quiet” model of education will respond “they’re going to have to learn that anyway, to survive in the adult world”.

It’s true, sort of – although the vast majority of people would learn that without 13 years of reinforcement, anyway, just as they did in the centuries before compulsory schooling – and still misses the point. The public system (and most private ones) teach, at the end of the day, little but obedience and learning according to program. The kids who are, for whatever reason, wired to learn best in that manner succeed, and are labelled “good students”. The rest?

For years, teachers (sitting in panels that outnumbered the parents present, always) solemnly intoned their concern for my stepson’s future; “we want him to succeed”, they insisted, even as they drew ever more clearly in the sand that the only criterion for success was becoming engaged in a process that was the exact opposite of how he was wired to learn best – by doing. As years went on, it became clearer and clearer that my stepson had earned the dreaded “bright, but…” label; a smart kid, but he just didn’t care about keeping his ass in a chair for six hours a day learning what he was told to learn.

What he did do – and excel at – was fixing computers. He started by putting computers together at schools, then wiring school computer rooms, and eventually – in ninth grade – working with a teacher to essentially wire and network an entire junior high school. He put in overtime, coming home hours after school let out, doing (according to the school’s netgeek) excellent, diligent work.

“All well and good”, the panels of teachers said, “but he still needs to learn to do his work, and finish what he starts”

By this point, the irony of it even got through to me.

Eventually, though, there was no more wiring and networking to do, and it was back to the grind. He became aggressively unmotivated; waking him up became a dreaded chore. Homework went begging. Finally, he started skipping school. Aggressively so – there were days I’d drive him to school, and find out later that he’d slipped out the back door as I drove away. He got by on pure charm and BS for years, when finally called on it (yet another skill he has)…

…until the week before senior prom, when security met him at the door and told him he’d been expelled. He wasn’t with the program. The school washed his hands of him and the statistical drag he was giving them. “We’re worried that he won’t know how to succeed”, I remember a teacher saying.

The punch line: after he got his diploma at a self-paced alternative program, the Saint Paul Schools hired him to run the network at their crown-jewel, showcase high school.

Not bad, for a kid who never really “learned how to succeed”.

It was after that that he started work at the ailing Midway store in a national chain. He took the chronically-underperforming store apart, cleaned it up, and made it the star of the local chain.

If only he’d learned to sit in a chair for hours on end without becoming distracted, who knows what he’d be today. Right?

I thought that, without sarcasm, for quite some time. Then I had kids of my own.

And it was time for me to learn.

(Read the whole series)

Brangelina attack Guydonna’s latest celebrity therapeutic adoption:

Her comments follow accusations that Madonna used her fame and money to speed the adoption of one-year- old David Banda late last year.

‘Madonna knew the situation in Malawi, where he was born,’ said Miss Jolie, who has adopted two Third World youngsters of her own.

‘It’s a country where there is no real legal framework for adoption.

‘Personally, I prefer to stay on the right side of the law. I would never take a child away from a place where adoption is illegal.’

Not so dumb, really.  And this next part…:

Miss Jolie, 31, also made clear she was shocked by Madonna’s decision to take David from the country where his father still lives.

…may be the first time I’ve ever seen a celeb pay even lip service to the father in the situation.

I’m amazed.

Seth Kirk might just be a lot like me:

Seth Kirk enrolled his elder child in a Minneapolis kindergarten five years ago. Then he went back to school, helping in his son’s classroom, getting active in school leadership and finally tackling district-level issues such as class size.

By last July Kirk was a frustrated man, pounding out a manifesto on his computer keyboard. The title: “Minneapolis Public Schools: A Sinking Ship.”

The online posting by the 42-year-old industrial process researcher speaks for many parents who are true to their own schools but are losing confidence in the district. And when you consider that Kirk is relatively happy with Armatage school, where he has a fifth-grader and a second-grader, you see how precarious things are for Minneapolis schools.

Indeed, the Kirk kids could join the exodus.

“I like to say that we have a one-year lease,” he said, anticipating his high-performing son’s transition to middle school next year. “I would bet very little money that we’re going to finish our public school career in Minneapolis.”

I, of course, have been there; I finally got the last of my kids out of the Saint Paul Public School this fall – and Saint Paul is “better” than Minneapolis (miles “better”), by any objective and most subjective measurements of school districts. The reasons are part of an ongoing series in this blog (which will, shortly, indeed be progressing).

The Minneapolis district’s enrollment is off by a quarter in the past six years, a victim of – critics often fail to note this – black flight: minority parents are leading the exodus from the public schools, to charter, private and suburban schools (using Minnesota’s open-enrollment law to put their kids in a district of their choice).

The article also notes the three most-cited problems, citing the most common “solutions”:

• Leadership. Like other urban districts, Minneapolis has relied on hiring new superintendents, electing new school board members or chasing silver bullets to fix things. Some critics say that a lack of stable leadership and focus keeps the district from following through on valid strategies it does pursue. Others suggest that the district is so straitjacketed — by such factors as contractual limits on how teachers can be assigned to schools — that no change in leaders will matter.

All this is true, as far as it goes. But the real problem is that Minneapolis is a one-party town – and that party is largely controlled by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, a group with an institutional imperative to keep the current system untouched. A party that facilitates the election of chuzzlewits who may know nothing about schools, but are dogmatic racists, to the school board.

Changing the approach at Minneapolis’ public schools would require a huge political change in Minneapolis; this is as likely as Anna Nicole Smith winning a debate on speaker points.

• School readiness. A high proportion of Minneapolis students arrive at kindergarten without the preparation for learning that other children bring…Meanwhile, the most recent comprehensive report card on preschool readiness found some key indicators getting worse, not better.

Most of the “talk” is, of course, wrong; pre-school teaches very little except how to act like the system wants a child to act; if the system itself is the problem, then the “preparation” is just part of the disease.

• Achievement. Although poverty is the most consistent predictor of a student’s performance, as a group, low-income white students often outperform middle-class black students on standardized tests. Some point to the clustering of inexperienced teachers at many schools dominated by low-income, high-needs minority students or the small share of teachers of color.

Er – if poverty is “the most consistent predictor of a student’s performance”, then why do poor whites outperform middle-class black kids?  Or is poverty perhaps not a consistent predictor, but merely a politically-palatable excuse? 

 And given that black flight is the reason the MPS system is collapsing, one might ask – are the charter, private and suburban schools chock-full of teachers of color?  Are their teachers more “experienced” – and, indeed, is teacher experience an indicator of anything but resistance to burnout?

 Beyond that, is it possible the system itself has nothing to do with ‘achievement’ at all, but rather about perpetuating itself and the gravy train it provides for the union and the academic-industrial complex?

“Saving” the Minneapolis schools is going to come down to a simple horserace, between two forces:

1. Minneapolis’ ability to think outside the one-party-town box, and
2. the market, as parents with what P.J. O’Rourke calls “the common sense to give a sh*t” flee the broken system, taking the money assigned to their students with them.

The market, versus a 180 degree change in an ossified political system. Hm.

Where are you putting your money?

(Other than the money you pay in taxes, obviously…)

The fever-swamp fringe of the American Left subsists on a number of ongoing memes, the most head-scratchingly bizarre being that they are an oppressed minority among the media.

As evidence, they point to Fox News – one cable network in an array of four broadcast and at least four major cable news sources – and whinge “They’re biased”, incredibly ignoring Eason Jordan’s CNN, Dan Rather’s CBS, and, worst of all, the late Peter Jennings’ ABC.

Which would be bad enough, except it’s not true in the first place.

Five news outlets — “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown,” Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.

An additional feature of the study shows how each outlet compares in political orientation with actual lawmakers. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal scored a little to the left of the average American Democrat, as determined by the average ADA score of all Democrats in Congress (85 versus 84). With scores in the mid-70s, CBS’ “Evening News” and The New York Times looked similar to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has an ADA score of 74.

Most of the outlets were less liberal than Lieberman but more liberal than former Sen. John Breaux, D-La. Those media outlets included the Drudge Report, ABC’s “World News Tonight,” NBC’s “Nightly News,” USA Today, NBC’s “Today Show,” Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, NPR’s “Morning Edition,” CBS’ “Early Show” and The Washington Post.

The study’s a little over a year old – and got virtually no publicity outside the blogosphere and talk radio.
Says Brian Anderson, citing the study in a LATimes Op-ed:

The propaganda charge is unfair, at least when it comes to the network’s presentation of news. In the 2004 presidential race, Fox pollsters consistently underestimated President Bush’s support. In its final preelection poll, Fox had Kerry winning by a couple of points, one of the only polls to show the Democrat on top. I’m not sure a right-wing fifth column would do that.

A recent comprehensive study by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri-Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Milyo found Brit Hume’s “Special Report” — Fox’s most straightforward news show — more centrist than any of the three major networks’ evening newscasts, all of which leaned left…And although it’s true that the network’s opinion shows (as opposed to its news shows) are, as they’re supposed to be, noisily opinionated, it’s equally true that Fox’s biggest star, O’Reilly, is no mainstream Republican. He regularly charges the oil companies with price-gouging and attacks big business for squashing the little guy. And who can say what host Greta Van Susteren’s politics are? She mostly zeroes in on lurid murder mysteries and scandals..There’s no doubt, of course, that Fox News is more conservative than CBS or CNN. But, after all, that was its founding mission…
Fox’s real ethos is not Republican but anti-elitist — a major reason it connects with so many Americans and annoys so many coastal elites. “There’s a whole country that elitists will never acknowledge,” Ailes once observed. “What people resent deeply out there are those in the ‘blue states’ thinking they’re smarter.”

The other meme – that two out of three Fox viewers believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 – is cited as hard fact by legions of credulous leftybloggers, talk radio callers, and commenters. Of course, it’s not; even the original “study’s” authors, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, says that the study wasn’t broad enough to be interpreted as a basis in fact; correlation (however arrived at) doesn’t equal causation. And, oddly, the study didn’t ask, say, CBS viewers how many believed the Memogate allegations were true, or how many CNN viewers believe that WMDs were the sole reason for invading Iraq.

I somehow suspect that poll will never be taken.

I just wanna bang on the drum all day.

The UK Pop Charts are getting overhauled to match the new, downloadable digital reality of music sales:

The British pop chart will undergo one of the biggest shake-ups since its inception 54 years ago on Sunday when any song downloaded from the Internet will be able to compete for the number one single spot.

Up to now, only songs which were physically available for purchase in shops counted toward the weekly chart.

In theory, almost any song can now make the charts.

In unrelated news, King Banaian and I will soon be dusting off our various Nick Coleman dance mixes.

I actually slept until seven today. I never do this; I normally wake up without the benefit of an alarm clock around 5:30 – but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

More posting later today.

Every time the Strib’s New Years’ editorial makes a muted plea for a monolithic socialist state or a vacuous apology for the vapid left, an angel will lose its wings and fall to earth.

As we say farewell to 2007 and hello to 2008, it’s appropriate that we take a moment to reflect on events of the past year. That a single circuit around the sun could have brought so many welcome developments would have seemed incredible a year ago. Remember the sadness of that season? The deaths, in cruelly quick succession, of Frank Stanton and Gerald Ford? The prospect of a winter with virtually no snow? The Iraq Study Group had found almost no reason for optimism in the war; polar bears were endangered; Israel was proposing a new settlement in the West Bank; James Brown was dead.

Into that void of hope strode 2007. How quickly things changed!

No one could have foreseen the sudden surrender of Osama bin Laden. His dramatic arrival at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, with his hands up and his BlackBerry at his feet, turned the tide of what we used to call the “war on terror” [“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh”] and certainly earned him his recent designation as Time’s Person of the Year (albeit deceased). The rapid unraveling of the Iraq insurgency, and the speedy consolidation of power by Iraq’s first female president [“Someone grab my harp!!!”] , combined to form a miracle: a truly democratic, progressive [“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp”] government, and a year in which the dwindling U.S. force — now down to 150 — suffered not a single casualty.

Likewise, the 2006 Christmas sales numbers for Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” [“Pull thy ripcord, Jeremiah!”] shocked Detroit, the energy companies and Washington into an unprecedented effort to fight global warming [“I’m going in! I’m going in!”] . President Bush’s now-famous shirtsleeves stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue [“A Jimmy Carter reference…hey, where the hell are my wings?”] before delivering his State of the Union address last January showed that he finally understood the nature of the threat [“Hang on! It’s going to be a bumpy landing!”] . And while the arctic summer ice has yet to recover, the federal initiative to outfit polar bears with FEMA pontoon boats offered a temporary fix and won world admiration.

Of course, some problems remain. The refugees who fled North Korea after Kim Jong-il’s suicide still need meaningful work [“Assuming the position!”] . Fidel Castro’s renunciation of communism has created a troublesome brain drain in Miami as Cuban-Americans pull up stakes and move back home [“Did he just write the communism will recify its own excesseswhoooooaaaaaaaaaaaah!“] . And the passage of national universal health care threatens to extend the average U.S. lifespan and put more pressure on the Social Security system [“This place is so crowded from all those British cancer patients who died on the waiting liwhoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!“] .

Even so, a country that can make college free for any student with a 2.5 grade point average or better can do just about anything [“Did they just devalue college, and at the same time raise the demand curve to the point that no person can afford a higher education without government assistance, all the while utterly socially devaluing all non-college-track vocationsaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!“] . We’re proud to live in a country that, in a single year, brought peace to Sudan and Somalia [“Isn’t that a conservative value…hey, I still have my wings…”] , gave free HIV medications to anyone on the globe who needed them, made abortion permanently legal but completely unnecessary [“ISn’t that a complete logical inversion, making a good free and ubiquitous but then assuming that people will have the infinite common sense not to use is Heeeeeeeeeeeeey, wheeeeere did my wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings gooooooooooo…“] , and established a national endowment to prevent domestic abuse [“Oh, take my fecking wings. The notion that you can spend money to prevent something like domestic abuse – something we don’t even entirely understand – is just too stupid to think about. I’m walking home”] .

And of course, the Twins’ victory in the 2007 World Series speaks for itself. [“Welcome to the Metrodome. No, I have no wings. Just a pitchfork”]

Jay Reding on one of the Dems’ favorite memes; the incredible shrinking middle class, and their inevitable solution to the nonexistent problem (you get one guess), in re Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown’s latest bit of anti-free-trade demigoguery:

Either the middle class is getting shorter, or this is just more populist garbage. There’s no evidence that supports a “shrinking” middle class. Instead, reality tells a different picture. We’ve had years of solid growth. Unemployment is at record low levels. Consumer confidence is high. For all this talk about how terrible life is for the middle class these days the numbers state otherwise.

Here’s how you tell an economic bullshit artist from someone with a clue: if they start resorting to sob stories about how little Mary Jane Pityme lost her job at the mill because of some big bad corporate fatcat, you’re dealing with a bullshit artist. Real economists go for the head, not try to pull wool over people’s eyes with sad stories. Senators Dorgan and Brown are bullshit artists, as will soon be demostrated.

Read the whole thing.

Watch for the media to note that the middle class has stopped shrinking in about January of ’09, by the way – assuming a Democrat wins.

I gotta hand it to Keith Ellison; although I think he’s well on his way to being a terrible Congressional representative, this is a pretty smooth move.  For his controversial swearing-in on the Qu’ran tomorrow…:

We’ve learned that the new congressman — in a savvy bit of political symbolism — will hold the personal copy [of the Qu’ran] once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

“He wanted to use a Koran that was special,” said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison’s 5th District, was happy to help.

Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

I don’t personally care on which book, if any, a Congressman takes his/her oath; using the book, if any, that is most meaningful to them makes perfect sense to me. 

 Because the part that counts starts later this week.  And oy, what a mess that’s going to be.

Barack Obama was a cheetoh-chomping cheeba zombie in high school and college, and he admits it…:

Obama’s revelations were not an issue during his Senate campaign two years ago. But now his open narrative of early, bad choices, including drug use starting in high school and ending in college, as well as his tortured search for racial identity, are sure to receive new scrutiny.

As a potential candidate, Obama has presented himself as a fresh voice offering a politics of hope. Many say he offers something new in American politics: an African American with a less-than-traditional name who has so far demonstrated broad appeal. What remains to be seen is whether the candor he offered in his early memoir will be greeted with a new-style acceptance by voters.

…and, like Ed in his piece on the subject, yes, I am qualified to criticize; I’ve never smoked pot in my life (largely because in my punk-rocking high school years I figured pot was for dozey, dim hippie bulbs; punks, in my little worldview, were all about beer and speed. Of course, I didn’t do speed or, until college, drink beer either).  And I say…who cares?
I don’t support Obama – I think the notion that he’s a “moderate Democrat” are pure marketing – but I think it’s a safe bet that he, like President Bush, has reflected on, recovered from, and gone on to abjure his youthful vices.

Of course, it’s incumbent on all of you Democrats who claimed that Bush’s old (and thoroughly-controlled) addictions disqualified him for office to get out there and oppose Obama. Right?

The Strib is happy with Pawlenty’s tone at his inauguration:

As Pawlenty acknowledged, achieving shared government won’t be easy

I love that term; “shared government”.

You can bet that had Mike Hatch choked a few thousand more votes out last November, the “s” word would be nowhere to be found.

especially if it’s to achieve more than a too-easy, least-common-denominator result. But in the 2006 election, restive voters signaled an impatience with petty politics that gets in the way of quality-of-life gains.

Huh-what?

OK.  I suppose it’s possible that there are voters out there who are dumb enough to think that “funding government” equals “quality of life” – and that paying more to the State will make your life better.  But if the Strib editorial board thinks that November 7 was about “gridlock” in Saint Paul, it’d explain a lot of other things.

Pawlenty appeared yesterday to be reading the electorate accurately, and responding. If the Legislature does the same, a truly productive governing season could be dawning.

The three most terrible words in the life of any hard-working, schmuck taxpayer: “productive governing season”.

Oh, Governor Pawlenty; if you don’t run that veto pen red-hot, you and I are going to go ’round and ’round.

Rhetorically speaking.

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…

I had a band.

We’d had one gig – and now, another.

It was Saturday, January 3, 1987, and what we didn’t have was a guitar player.

After our gig at Williams Uptown, two of the three brothers I was playing with seemed interested in progressing with things. The other – the eldest of the three, the other guitar player – on the other hand, was not interested. My Houserockers-Via-Clash vibe rankled his Prince-like sensibilities; he wanted to play dance music that’d reel in the babes; I wanted to create a loud, angry wall of sound.

It wasn’t going to work out.

The other two brothers, the bass and drum players, huddled in the basement the previous night, Friday, and tried to figure out what we were going to do. We had a gig in about two weeks. Our options were:

1. Go as a “power trio”; guitar, bass and drums. I didn’t want to do that; I wanted a bigger sound, plus I was really enjoying doubling on keys.
2. Bag the gig. Not a chance; I wanted to play.
3. Find another guitar player, fast – someone who could learn three sets of material in like two weeks.

If you have known me for any time at all, you know that there was only one option for me; #3 it was.

I dug back through the lists of guys who’d contacted me when I took out my ad in the City Pages. There was one – a guy from Jamestown we’ll just call “Casey” (I’m changing the names, since the story gets a little dicey in the next year or so).  He’d contacted me just after I’d settled on the other guys, a little over a month earlier.

And yes, he was still available.

So it was tonight, January 3, that we all got together and started learning our stuff.  We had three sets to fill at McCready’s – three hours of playing.  And the other three of us – the bass and drummer and I – were closing in on having enough stuff, most of it originals.

We got together at five o’clock Saturday afternoon and played for about five hours, until the noise ordinance said we had to shut down.     then, we sat in the filthy living room of the ratty house and drank Carlings Black Label until about 2AM talking music and musicians.

We were going to do it again, five days a week until we had all four of us ready to go.