…but science finally proved what I think we knew all along.
Being the oldest child in the family has its perks: later bedtimes, no hand-me-downs, and, according to a new study, a higher IQ.
The study, detailed in the June 22 issue of the journal Science, analyzed the IQs of nearly 250,000 Norwegian 18- and 19-year-old draftees and found that older siblings had higher scores than younger siblings.
I’ll type slower for y’all.
As I write this, Chad, Brian and John are assailing the Gay Pride parade, among other topics, on NARN Volume I.
Ed and I will be on the air with Volume II at 1PM, assuming Ed shows up. Otherwise, it’ll be just me. Either way, I’m cool with it, since with the Dems running a full court press for the return of the “Fairness Doctrine”, we need to enjoy all the time on the air we can.
Then, King and Michael will be on the air after 3 with “The Final Word”.
Keep your radio with you!
It was eight years ago last Saturday that the FBI ended its 24 year manhunt for Kathleen Soliah, who’d been living in Saint Paul as Sarah Jane Olson for a couple of decades. Married to a local doctor who professed unawareness (successfully, even though he’d been a student radical in the sixties as well) that he’d been harboring a fugitive involved in a a murder and conspiracy to blow up police cars with the cops still in them.
She was arrested in leafy, “Leave It To Beaver”-esque Highland Park, where she’d lived for most of two decades.
The incident uncovered an old, fermenting rift in Twin Cities’ society; people who believed that since Olson/Soliah had spent two decades working as a politically-correct, ultraliberal DFL pseudo-radical, active in pro-“choice” and gun control and getting out the vote for far-left DFL candidates, that she’d more than paid her penance for her role in a conspiracy that, after all, had been back in the seventies when everyone was doing it, or wanted to, versus people who believed laws were for everyone.
On the first side; many of the Saint Paul DFL’s leading lights, who pitched in hundreds of thousands of dollars for Olson/Soliah’s legal defense fund and insisted loudly, sometimes shrilly, that Olson had more than paid her debt to society by just plain being her.
Tara McKelvey interviews Fred Peterson and Sophia Peterson, Olson/Soliah’s husband and daughter, in Marie Claire.
I am prepared for some version of radical when I walk into the Highland Grill, a diner in downtown St. Paul, where I am meeting Fred Peterson for the first time. Instead, I get Middle America academic: Sitting patiently in a booth, Fred is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a long-sleeved, black shirt. His gray-speckled beard matches his shaggy gray-brown hair, which is casually brushed off his forehead. I am surprised that daughter Emily has come with him. Slender, with long eyelashes, heavy mascara, and thick hair reaching past her shoulders, Emily maintains a defensive posture. On the subject of the SLA’s radicalism, she says, “Back then, everyone was.”
At 26, Emily is almost the same age as her mother was during the raid in ’74. “She lived in Berkeley,” Emily says, trying to explain her mother’s affiliation with the SLA. “It was kind of normal.”
I’m starting to see the problem here; it won’t be the last time.
Dr. and Sophia Peterson on the shootout that killed six SLA members:
“That became Sara’s private business,” says Fred. “The LAPD massacre of the SLA was a bellwether event-the first televised SWAT team -” “Team murder,” Emily interrupts.
On harboring a fugitive – knowingly or not – for 20 years, former SDS member Peterson:
“You know, The Fugitive Becomes a Soccer Mom. They’re all stereotypical images of deceit. None of that applies when you’re just living a life and raising kids. People would say to me, ‘How could you accommodate such a depraved criminal mind? How can you live with the knowledge of what happened in the past?’ It captures the American psychodrama. But it was not real.”
I wonder if it was real for Myrna Opsahl’s? Opsahl, whose death at the hands of those who became “unreal” fugitives, including Fred Peterson’s wife, was fobbed off by the SLA’s Emily Harris (as quoted by Patty Hearst) with the following statement:
Oh, she’s dead, but it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor. He was at the hospital where they brought her.”
Maybe Sophia Peterson never read that statement:
“I always tell people she wasn’t a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla,” says Emily, smearing Blistex on her lips while waiting for the waitress to return. Like her mother, Emily has long hair and pale skin-a classic beauty. Today, she’s wearing a pink blouse that’s peeking out from beneath a worn, black leather jacket.
Along with her looks, she’s inherited her mother’s passion for social issues, working as a Head Start teacher with homeless 3- and 4-year-olds from a Minneapolis shelter to help them prepare for kindergarten. “It’s hard,” she says. “A lot of these kids don’t even have coats or boots.”
But on the other hand, most of their mothers weren’t slaughtered by ideologues, either.
Let me digress here; I remember seeing the photos of the Peterson girls – and Dr. Peterson, for that matter – around the time of the arrest. I figured there’s no way Dr. Peterson didn’t know she was a fugitive, especially when I heard about his background in the SDS. But my heart went out to the kids, who were in their early and late teens at the time. They didn’t ask for any of this. Did they?
Well, not at the time. But it seems to be a family legacy; a second generation of children of immense privilege wrapping themselves in phony “revolution” and…
…victimhood?
“In the end,” she says of Olson’s sentencing, “we had to watch our mother be pulled away by two big cops. The aftereffects have been debilitating. I don’t know if people can understand that.” …Sophia comes back downstairs and tells me no one can understand the suffering her family has experienced. She has a flair for drama: Describing her mother’s reaction to the second World Trade Center tower collapsing, Sophia places her hand over her heart and slouches toward the ground: “She said, ‘I’m screwed.'”
On the one hand, I can’t imagine the trauma.
On the other hand, I know one family who can. Perhaps young Sophia needs to talk to these people – the family of Myrna Opsahl, the woman that their mother was convicted of murdering. Click on the link and read the entire site – including all the damning evidence against Soliah/Olson – before you go assigning too much sympathy.
As to Sophie Peterson’s 9/11 tableau – perhaps that was one “good” side-affect of the terrorist attacks; never again, G-d willing, would middle America look at terrorists with the same gauzy, soft focus that Soliah’s generation handed down to us.
I don’t know where Nick Coleman stood on Soliah/Olson eight years ago – I was busy with other things, and not reading him regularly in those pre-blog days – but he makes an appearance:
“She betrayed the people who befriended her by having lived this secret life. Her family and her friends have suffered incredibly,” he says. “At some point, you have to face these charges. And even though she had a family, the only honorable way out of this dilemma was to turn herself in. I’m kind of mad about it, to be honest.”
But as all of us who live in St. Paul remember, it was the smug moral equivocation of Soliah/Olson’s fellow Highland Park DFL cronies that set the tone of the day. Prominent DFL politicians led the fund-raising and the demands that justice be set aside for one of their own who’d proved herself, if not repentant for murdering Myrna Opsahl and plotting to kill Los Angeles cops with firebombs, at least a good DFLer. A pre-Powerline John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson wrote a seminal excoriation of this crew, “Kathy’s Clowns“, in the American Enterprise back in the winter of ’99:
The local response to her arrest was a vast outpouring of support. Democratic state legislators and former St. Paul mayoral candidates Andy Dawkins and Sandy Pappas were her most outspoken and visible defenders. Pappas, for whom Soliah had raised campaign funds, attacked the FBI for tracking her down and wondered aloud, “Don’t they have any real crimes to fight?” It is difficult to imagine what crimes Ms. Pappas considers more “real” than murder, bank robbery, and attempted murder. Welfare reform, perhaps.Dawkins’ comments on the case were equally bizarre. He has invoked events from Selma, Alabama to Kent State in defense of Ms. Soliah, as though they could somehow explain why it was reasonable to rob banks, assault bank customers, kill Myrna Opsahl, and attempt to murder war veterans and policemen. Dawkins says that the allegations against Soliah, if true, represent “a momentary lapse in judgment.”It is perhaps not surprising that Soliah would receive support from Democratic officeholders of the flakier sort. What is more surprising is the undeniable grass-roots movement that has emerged on her behalf. Soliah’s friends and allies have produced a cookbook containing her favorite recipes, held benefits to demonstrate their support, and raised $1 million to bail her out of jail. Local church groups and the “theater community,” in which Soliah was active, have rallied to her defense.
No less interesting than the magnitude of Soliah’s support are the virtues with which her advocates credit her. She is described as a “Democratic activist,” “a true humanitarian,” a “social activist, marathon runner, volunteer and soccer mom,” an actress who hosts fund raisers for Democratic candidates, a gourmet cook who “is involved in every peace and justice issue that comes along.” Peace and justice. Soliah’s brother encapsulated her defense in these words: “There’s not this dichotomy between what Kathy was and what she is now. She was doing the same things in the early ’70’s.” Terrorist or soccer mom; there’s not much difference, from a leftist point of view, as long as you’re devoted to “peace and justice.”
But eight years later, some of the neighbors – the “clowns” – still haven’t gotten the word (emphasis added):
Olson was a “spectacular artist,” says a friend and member of their church. [A community theater colleague] recalls how Olson used to appear in local theater productions. “That woman does have charisma. To this day, it doesn’t really make sense to me. She’s a very gentle person. I think what Sara is guilty of is having made a bad choice of friends.”
Not a woman who needs redeeming, then?
“Redemption?” she shakes her head. “For Sara, I don’t see any – she was already rehabilitated, if that needed to be done. She’s [in prison] to be punished.”
“If that needed to be done”.
McKelvey closes the piece:
It’s 11 o’clock at night, hours after my visit with Sophia at the family home. In my hotel room, I log on to my computer. I’m surprised to find an e-mail from her. In a heated, 17-line message, she says she wants nothing more to do with the article. It’s an emotional outpouring, and she sounds angry and paranoid-convinced I will distort her version of events…I wonder why she has decided to tell me this now. She’d known for weeks about the story; my business card was tacked up on her bulletin board.
Fred, too, retreated after our meeting in the diner, though in less explosive terms, expressing mixed feelings about the “tough questions” I’d asked. “Sara would express caution for sure-if not be outright chagrined,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Thanks for dinner?”
Via e-mail, I ask Emily if I can see her again. She wrote back this: “We, as a family, have experienced a deep hardship and sadness with our mother being away from us. About meeting with you on Sunday, I will have to see if I feel up to it on that day. I have your cell phone.”
She never called.
Kudos to McKelvey, who left the big questions – “do these people really believe all this everyone was doing it crap?” – for us to answer for ourselves.
(Thanks to commenter Soliah.com for the pointer)
My only New Years’ resolution was to “get back into less-pathetic shape”. I’ve stuck with it.
Phase 1 of the resolution – working out at the “Y” 2-4 times a week, as well as eating less-crappily – has been going on apace since January. It’s had some results. Could and needs to be better, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Phase 2 – biking the ten-mile round-trip to and from work all summer, now that I don’t have to be hauling kids around every morning and my bike is all fixed up – starts today. I’ve identified a less-suicidal route downtown, found my company’s shower room and a place to park the bike, and arranged space for extra clothes, deodorant, and splints in my cube’s cupboard.
Phase 3 – a spree of retributive ass-kicking – exists as a “planning-only” exercise.
Phase 4 – finding my true destiny with Marisa Tomei – is still TBA.
As we on the right have been predicting for quite some time, the left – unable to match conservative talk radio in either the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace, wants to bring in Big Brother to do what their own feeble talent and intellect can’t.
A report by the “Center for American Progress” – of which more later – writes:
As this report will document in detail, conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format.
Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.
Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk
A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.
This dynamic is repeated over and over again no matter how the data is analyzed, whether one looks at the number of stations, number of hours, power of stations, or the number of programs. While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, conservative talk continues to be pushed out over the airwaves in greater multiples.
These empirical findings may not be surprising given general impressions about the format, but they are stark and raise serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.
Radio isn’t supposed to “serve the needs of all Americans” (barring, say, local, regional or national emergencies). It’s supposed to provide stuff that listeners want to tune in to – something that the progressives liberals Fabian Statists have proven themselves dismal at (even in liberal strongholds like New York and Chicago, where the 3-1 disparity in programming hours is generous; the listening audience is even more lopsidedly conservative.
The CAP claim that almost a quarter of talk radio’s audience is identified as liberal – and that, therefore, the market should be coerced to provide liberal programming to “serve their needs” – ignoring, of course, that MPR (of which more in a moment) and the rest of the entire mainstream media establishment already provide this 24/7.
The CAP’s report (WARNING! PDF FILE! GIVE UP ALL HOPE OF REASONABLE PERFORMANCE OR USABILITY!) lists several recommendations (which I’ll summarize, since copying and pasting from PDF is such a pain):
By the way, the CAP’s report (look starting around page 12 in the report) has some interesting data – or, to be more precise, makes you wonder precisely what “data” the CAP was using to figure out its ratios, and exposes the weakness of these kinds of surveys, where “conservative” and “progressive” mean precisely what the surveyors want them to mean – if you dig into it a bit.
For example, they credit KTLK-FM with 16 hours of “conservative” talk a day – but the only overtly political shows are Limbaugh, Hannity and Jason Lewis, which rack up nine hours a day among them (John Hines isn’t especially conservative, and Dan Conry is aggressively down-the-middle). By the way, for all the CAP’s carping about centralization of radio station ownership, most of the “progressive” radio that is actually broadcast is on Clear Channel stations; CBS has a higher listed percentage of “progressive” talk programming, but they’re a much smaller network. Smaller networks like Cumulus and Citadel broadcast virtually no “progressive” radio (Salem, I’m proud to say, actively squelches it at a corporate level).
Speaking of CBS – they list WCCO-AM in Minneapolis as having no political talk on either side. WCCO broadcasts Eleanor Mondale, former (alleged) Clinton paramour, daughter of Jimmy Carter’s vice president and sister of paleoliberal Ted Mondale, as well as Jack Rice, Don Shelby and Dark Star; while none of these shows are explicitly political, their tone and topic selection and, when the chips are down, core beliefs do pretty well come blaring through. They may not be “Air America” material, but they are, if not “progressive”, at least exceedingly friendly to the traditional Minnesota paleoliberal status quo. The CAP study doesn’t account for this in the Twin Cities (or presumably any other market)…
…but they do call John Hines and Dan Conry “conservative”.
Food for thought.
Oh, by the way, the “Center for American Progress” – just a bunch of concerned citizens, right?
Not quite. Michelle Malkin:
What is the Center for American Progress and why are they proposing this Government Talk Radio Grab? It’s a left-wing think tank headed by Clintonite John Podesta. It manages a radio studio used daily by left-winger Bill Press’s syndicated radio show. The syndicator is the nutroots Jones Radio Networks. CAP officials appeared frequently on Al Franken’s show and Air America’s airwaves. Seed money for the think tank came from–where else–George Soros, among others, according to the Washington Post.
A week ago, I wrote about the sale of the local “Endicott/Pioneer” buildings.
The new owner plans to evict the current tenants (more on them later) and lease the building to people working on or about the upcoming GOP Convention. My tone of approval for the deal drew one of my regular commenters, who took umbrage:
Buying a century-old piece of real estate with an agreement to do a short term lease to the RNC which will be flush with cash is indeed a great way to make a quick buck.
Of course, in a depressed commercial real estate market like downtown Saint Paul, a “quick buck” is hard to find under any circumstances. But once you get into the actual circumstances…
…well, we’ll get back to that.
The commenter also sniffed…:
Talk about making assumptions. You do understand the difference between renting an apartment and staying in a hotel right?
I don’t do a lot of either. But I digress.
Since I hate making “assumptions”, I did a little poking around.
Yesterday and today, I got emails back from a person with long-standing ties to Saint Paul politics and urban development (who shall remain anonymous). He was involved in the 1981 sale of the two buildings (and the adjacent Jackson Street Ramp), a transaction worth $5.6 million at the time.
> They just sold again
> for $10.00 TOTAL.
I assumed it was a typo. It had to be $10,000,000. Right?
Wrong. Ten dollars. A single Alexander Hamilton.
I asked what the story was – a nifty (judging by external appearances) old building, a historical landmark (it used to house the anscestor of the Pioneer Press) and piece of decent (to the layman) office space, going for less than the cost of taking two kids to Wendys?
The two things I figured were possibilities – a huge blog of debt, or political favoritism.
The answer, naturally, was neither. My source wrote again (I’ve added some emphasis):
There was no debt for the buyer of the three buildings and parking
ramp. Commercial property is primarily valued by the annual net operating
income the property provides. This is true for both property tax and market
purposes. The only real income produced is from the parking ramp. The
rest of the buildings are 98% vacant. On a cap-rate approach to value, the property would have a negative value. This happened because the US Bank knew about 10 years ago they would not renew their master lease of the
property. They occupied most of the buildings. For all those years they
spent a minimum on maintenance. The current income doesn’t come close
to paying for even the operation no less improvements to the property.
In other words, in a market clogged with under-occupied big-buck property, the Endicott/Pioneer buildings came on the market out-of-date and poorly-maintained.
Corporate welfare, he says, is the culprit:
This is a good example of a public subsidy for a private corporation
which seriously damaged the city. The city provided $15,000,000 in TIF to
have them move out of the Downtown, across the river. The new building
doesn’t even cover its own taxes; no less contribute to the city, county or
schools. The bank also vacated substantial space in the First National and First
Trust Center buildings, in the process seriously devaluing those
buildings.
In other words, the city abated millions in taxes to keep US Bank in the city, in a new facility, on which the bank will be paying reduced taxes for quite some time.
The Pioneer, Endicott buildings are worth nothing.
So in other words, the choice was:
After the convention, the market will still be…glutted!
A quick buck beats no buck at all…
Schmelzer in the MinMon, quoting an anonymous source about…something. Or other:
Requesting anonymity, a source close to the Star Tribune submitted this reflection on the $45 million sale of four blocks of the paper’s Warehouse District property to the Minnesota Vikings:
Last month Publisher/CEO Par Ridder went to a meeting of Strib circulation executives in a conference room named for Charles A. Freeman, one of the best-loved employees the newspaper ever had. The glass-walled room was named in Freeman’s honor in 1991 after the company’s circulation/distribution manager collapsed in his office and died of a stroke at age 60.
Established: Mr. Freeman was a good fella.
So far so good.
So here you have Par Ridder, who demonstrated his sense of integrity by jumping from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune under questionable circumstances, and whose next court date is June 25, walking into a room that has a memorial to Chuck Freeman etched into an eye-level glass panel on the door. The tribute is titled “A MAN OF UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY.”
OK. Irony, maybe – assuming that Ridder’s day in court counts for nothing.
Onward:
So what is Par Ridder response to having to confront the ghosts of past Strib executives and a door with “A MAN OF UNQUESTIONED INTEGRITY” etched in the glass?
That’s a good question. What is his response, if any, to “confronting a ghost” – or, less metaphorically, to doing business in the presence of the institutional memory of someone else who did business?
Not a problem: Par sells 4 square blocks of Strib land to Zygi Wilf. The Charles A. Freeman conference room is not in the newspaper’s main building at 425 Portland Av.; it’s across the skyway in the Freeman Building, named for another former executive, Gale Freeman. Wilf will demolish the building, so the wrecking ball will obliterate the Charles A. Freeman conference room and its etched-glass door, an inconvenient reminder of a time when integrity was a core value at the Star Tribune.
Now, I’m not one to defend the Strib, goodness knows. And I’m likely as not to lump Par Ridder in with pretty much every other mainstream media figure as “the enemy”. I could be convinced, but so far, I’ve got no reason to change my mind.
But what’s Ridder doing, here?
Business. Running a dinosaur entity in a dying radically restructuring business.
Is tearing down the old office a sad thing for those who observe institutional traditions like memorializing Mr. Freeman? Of course.
Is it unethical?
The anonymous informer says nothing.
Last weekend, Ed and I had a long, interesting discussion with Eric Black, formerly of the Strib, now of the Minnesota Monitor. One of the questions – how does journalism with an established agenda differ from journalism that, at least formally, abjures a point of view?
I don’t know that we’ll get any answers right now, but it’s an interesting question to keep in mind as you read Black’s debut on the MinMon, on what is presented to us as an awkward moment for US Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose:
Rachel Paulose, the embattled U.S. attorney for Minnesota, suffered through an awkward moment Tuesday when a retirement party for a long-serving prosecutor in her office turned into a thunderous ovation for several of Paulose’s severest critics. Word of the incident has buzzed through the Twin Cities federal legal community and become the latest symbol of a very rough 18 months since Paulose took over the top federal law enforcement job in Minnesota.
Let’s get some context in here.
The Minnesota US Attorney’s office, like the Attorney General’s Office, has been the province of Democrat-leaning lawyers for quite some time. Paulose replaced Tom Heffelfinger, who in turn replaced David Lillehaug, whose political inclinations have led him to seek the DFL nomination to run for Senate.
In other words, Paulose is a very different person than Lillehaug or Heffelfinger, and brings a different agenda to the office than either of her predecessors.
How different? As a layperson, it’s hard to know exactly what difference things like differing management styles and priorities make to people like US Prosecutors.
And the story, unfortunately, sheds little light on that, relying on “conventional wisdom” about Paulose.
Paulose has been under increasingly harsh public scrutiny about how her appointment is connected to the Bush administration’s alleged politicization of the Justice Department, and about how she has run the office.
But as Power Line – especially Scott Johnson – in their extensive coverage of the Paulose tempest-in-teapot has noted, that “public scrutiny” has been generated by a pretty narrow swathe of “public”. Katherine Kersten also lends the reader some context missing from the mainstream (and now explicitly-biased) media’s coverage.
But let’s go to the ceremony in question, this past Tuesday:
This account of the Tuesday incident comes from people who were present but requested anonymity.
So we have not only no idea who they were and what there motivations are, but whether their story is accurate?
Were these “people” acting independently? Were they detached from the Paulose “controversy”?
We don’t know.
On Tuesday afternoon, about 70 employees of the U.S. attorney’s office and other guests gathered in a big conference room to recognize the departure of Assistant U.S. Attorney Perry Sekus. Sekus is leaving to join the legal staff of UnitedHealth. Paulose was present…When it was his turn to address the group, Sekus deflected the compliments that had been sent his way and said that those who deserved the praise were the former supervisors who had resigned their posts, because their actions had required courage.
And then, the chase – as apparently described to Eric Black, by anonymous “people” who may or may not have had an axe to grind with Paulose in the first place; being anonymous, we really have no idea, and are forced to trust, or “trust” (or not) a reporter from an organization which has an agenda on this issue.
At that, the room erupted with loud, sustained applause that could not be taken as anything other than solidarity with Paulose’s internal critics and appreciation for the sacrifice they had made to protest against her– clearly a spontaneous release of the tensions within the office.
According to a witness, the ovation was so loud that it had to represent the applause of 90 percent or more of those in the room.
“Could not be taken as anything but…” – or so say an undetermined number of anonymous witnesses about whose motivations we are utterly in the dark.
Paulose was present throughout and could not have left without calling attention to herself. One of the eyewitnesses said she had a glazed look during the ovation.
Sort of like the look I’m getting, pondering the logical gaps in this story. Words fail me.
Fortunately, they don’t fail Joel Rosenberg, who left a comment:
Okay; you’ve now established that Paulose is unpopular with (at least) much of her staff. I thought that was well-established, but maybe you missed the reporting on that.
What you haven’t established is why — is it because she is, as some have accused her being, overbearing? Is it that under Heffelfinger the priorities of the office were different than hers, and that the staff is chafing under new direction? Is it similar to what happened when Lillehaug took over the office back in the ancient days — when, I believe, you were working for the Star Tribune — and the Star Tribune (at best) glossed over how half a dozen very experienced attorneys in that partisan Democrat US Attorney’s office left in the ensuing demotions and reshufflings he engaged in when he took over? Is this better, or worse? Is it all of those, in some mixture, or none of the above? …Guess I’m going to have to look somewhere other than in your article, which broke the news that a bunch of lawyers cheered when another retired, and you were unable to get a comment from the US Attorney on that pressing matter.
I have an anonymous witness that says that Black’s anonymous witness had a glazed look on her face.
No, I don’t. But I could.
Seriously, Joel’s right. No comparison, no context, no contrast, no history.
A bunch of lawyers – people famous for hating everyone – don’t like their boss.
Mr. Black – perhaps an anonymous tipster can give us some insights on these questions.
UPDATE: I see Brian “St. Paul” Ward reached about the same conclusion.
Listening to anti-concealed-types talking – four years after the Minnesota Personal Protection Act was first passed into law – you’d still think that we concealed carry types were a bunch of blood-lusting troglodytes, stalking the world looking for innocent targets.
Of course, it’s rubbish – the MPPA has been an incontrovertible success by any rational measure.
Of course, the antis were never about rational measures – at least, not in terms of their public statements.
But Joel Rosenberg notes something about Heather Martens, head (and only employee) of Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota, at a recent gross mismatch “debate” at the U of M:
I guess it could be argued — save for one thing — that she felt that her activism was important enough to take the risk of being in a room with dozens of people carrying, as they say, “loaded, concealed handguns”, which the CSM folks have assured us is a very dangerous thing to do. I guess it could be argued that she should be commended for her bravery, to take those risks to debate awkwardly (and it was awkward; Heather doesn’t do all that well in an interactive forum) against the commonsense notion that somebody who is licensed to carry a handgun in public can do so properly at the U if they’re a student or staff member, rather than just a visitor.
I guess she could congratulate herself on that courage, taking those risks. Except for the one thing that makes it clear that even Heather doesn’t think there really were any risks in arguing with and among dozens of armed permit holders . . . one thing that makes it clear that even Heather knows that being around armed permit holders isn’t risky at all:
. . . she brought not only her husband, but her three-year-old daughter. Cute kid.
Wow. With all those guns, in the hands of permit-holders?
Seems…out of character with years of CS“S”M’s propaganda, no?
Rosenberg:
I’m certainly critical of Heather, but she’s not an irresponsible mother — if she really believed that there was any danger from the permit holders, she would, of course, have left the child at home.
We’ve come a long way, when even Heather gets it.
Now if only she’s cry “Uncle”…
As I’ve noted in many other places at many other times, I have the absolute highest regard for Michael Brodkorb.
Now, the other day, I took mild exception to the fact that Michael posted former Senator and possible future Ventura “Independence” Party candidate Dean Barkley’s Match.com ad. My philosophy; keep others’ personal lives out of things. Partly because it’s the right thing to do. Partly because as one sows, one tends to reap.
Andy Aplikowski and Jeff Kouba agreed. Jeff’s TvM blogmate Gary Miller doesn’t.
And when Gary disagrees, it’s worth a look:
Like Justice Scalia writing for the minority, let me inject some reality to the situation.
Politics is a full-contact sport. The other team plays to win. Would the Left exercise similar restraint if the roles were reversed? You already know the answer [Gary writes, linking to the “Dump Bachmann” blog, which has lowered local political yellow journalism to a level even Jeff Fecke can look down upon with both relief and disdain]. To not use your opponent’s words against them is the political equivalent of unilateral disarmament.
There are two Mitches who”ll respond to this, of course; High Road Mitch, and Pragmatic Path Mitch.
High Road Mitch: I’d like to think that I – we – are better than the type of moral and ethical fruit flies that put out goo like the Dumb Bachmann blog. I certainly aspire to aim higher in life, morally and practically, than Ken “Look! Bachmann in a Nazi Uniform” Avidor (as low a set of expectations as that sets). Ones’ moral code is best set to one’s ideals, not one’s detractors’ level.
Pragmatic Path Mitch: Sure, politics is hardball. And as more and more people and pundits keep peeling away more and more layers of whatever “privacy” people used to have, it drives away more and more good people from ever even thinking about getting involved in politics.
I’m certainly one of them. I think I’d be a perfectly fine elected representative at some level or another, if I were to move to a more GOP-friendly part of the Metro. But there’s not a chance in hell that I’d do it, because…
…well, we’ll get back to that.
Minnesota’s 6th is as culturally conservative a district as you will find in these here parts.
Pragmatic Path Mitch responds: But that majority – who put Michele Bachmann, the most conservative candidate in the state in a year where Republicans dropped like Air America programs – has never been in the faintest danger of electing Barkley, a guy who’s never won a a significant office in his life (if you leave out his proxy win via Ventura, his Potemkin candidate) to anything, much less the Bachmann seat.
Folks can discern a great deal about a person’s worldview predicated on how they act when no one is looking.
High Road Mitch responds: Discern…what? That someone’s a divorced guy who’d like to meet someone who (as he writes in a forum that he can’t imagine someone is going to make into a public spectacle) likes some of the same things he does in private?
A professed affinity (in a public forum) for “skinny dipping” and “erotica” is a disqualifier for many people who govern their lives by a different set of values — a majority of whom comprise the electorate in the 6th.
Pragmatic Path Mitch responds: I doubt that anyone who signs up for Match.com actually knows it’s a public forum.
And even so – what’s this? “No, um, “S E X”, please, we’re from the northern ‘burbs“. Criminy, if the guy likes skinnydipping with his signifcant other and reading the occasional Maxim Magazine, as long as he’s not inviting anyone’s kids along to watch or read along, what difference does it make?
Which is a better reason to eschew a Dean Barkley candidacy: “he likes to snog around in the local lagoon with his sig.other and watch a little Cinemax”, or “He’s a tax whore. Worse, he’s a stealth tax whore”.
For that matter, what if someone with impeccable conservative credentials came along, who happened to like a little, er, zing and zip in his or her private life?
Where do these people think tomorrow’s conservative voters come from, anyway?
I will confess, however, to feeling dirty finding out that a fmr. U.S. Senator and trained lawyer can only muster 75-100K/year. Now there’s your disqualifier.
Weirdest part of the whole thing? He used his Senate head shot for his Match profile.
Nick Coleman’s latest column is particularly incoherent. It’s really beneath fisking.
But I thought this bit (emphasis added) was a welcome improvement:
“Get Motivated!” includes talks from Zig Ziglar (couldn’t his parents have given him a decent first name?), Colin Powell (hey, he helped lie his country into war!) and John Stossel, the officious prig and unsung hero who drove Barbara Walters off “20/20.”
No, not that he’s become a great columnist or anything. But it seems he’s learned to parody himself FOR us – or at least deliver the material, gift-wrapped…
Al Franken – Minnesota Politics illiterate?
“Franken has always had an interest in politics.
He lists his political heroes as Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale and Wellstone. But he could name only one House member from Minnesota: Democrat Martin Sabo.” Source: Sacramento Bee, June 3, 2004
Which, for a guy that had already been running in effect for Senate for over a year, is pretty funny stuff.
The Strib endorses RT Rybak’s dream of revitalizing Washington Avenue.
We’ll get to the editorial in a moment or two. Shark Bait at Anti-Strib jumped on the first word of this “plan”, last week, quoting the Strib piece:
The mayor doesn’t know how much it would cost. But he announced that a committee will meet to generate more ideas and a website,
Let me tell you how much it’s going to cost you…WAY TOO EFFING MUCH! You have RAMPANT CRIME in North Minneapolis, you have too few cops on the streets, and you want to spend money on making your city pretty?
Rybak, have you COMPLETELY lost your mind?!?!?!
Well, while I usually agree with the guys at Anti-Strib, this time I’ll leave it with “maybe and maybe not.”
Rybak’s incompetence at dealing with crime is, of course, grimly legendary, to the point that it’s spawned perhaps the most vibrant cottage industry among Twin Cities’ center-right bloggers.
But there is something to making the city less habitable to crime and criminals – by making it more friendly to real people. Downtown Minneapolis has been victimized over the past fifty years by a couple of government-driven trends in urban design that, in retrospect, have been el-flopola. And Sunday’s Strib editorial on the subject notes both of these trends, although they stint a bit on parts of the background, in going through a history of the neighborhood:
From the nearby Milwaukee Road Depot, a traveler [before the early sixties] stepped directly into the city’s worst squalor, where drunkards “littered the alleys with broken whiskey bottles, fought openly on the sidewalks [and] urinated on street corners,” recalled Joseph Hart in his and Edwin Hirschoff’s book “Down & Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis’s Skid Row.”
Washington Avenue was a strip of bars, flophouses, pawnshops, secondhand stores, brothels and charity missions where, according to the Minneapolis Star, rats “burrowed holes from one building to another” and could “travel for blocks.” (The first skyways, perhaps.)
Slum clearance in the late 1950s and early ’60s chased out the denizens […]
So far, so good. The editorial refers to “Urban Renewal”, the first big attempt at socially-engineering the American inner city. Influenced by [see Lileks for the list of the European architectural criminals against humanity], the ideal was that since the suburb was the home of the future, that the inner city should be turned into a hub and destination via piece of minimalist art.
Which is what gave us urban atrocities like St. Paul’s Town Square (a vast concrete abomination that turned the area around Cedar, Minnesota and Fifth streets into a stalinist concrete desert), Riverside Plaza and, as the Strib describes, the neighborhood that’s drawn Rybak’s attention, which used to be called the “Gateway”:
[…] tore down hundreds of buildings and turned the avenue into a desolate funnel for auto traffic.
Unmentioned by the Strib: “Urban Renewal” was a government program – the nannystate’s first big effort to shape the environment people lived in. It, along with the decision to build the Interstate through the center of the city at the same time they tore down the old streetcar lines (which were, after decades in operation, basically self-supporting) with the connivance of a cartel of oil, tire and car companies, effectively turned America’s inner cities into the screwed up messes they are today. In the Twin Cities, driving 94 and the 35s through the center of both cities gutted whole neighborhoods, creating slums where decent neighborhoods once stood, destroying St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood (the city’s traditional African-American neighborhood dating back to before the Civil War) and taking with it the community cohesion that used to be a hallmark of pre-welfare-state Black Minnesota.
Thanks, government.
But I digress.
The problem with “funnels for auto traffic” (and/or “grandiose monuments to the wisdom of urban plans gone horribly awry”) is that they are ugly, barren, uninhabitable, and about as appealing to a regular person, a shopper, a visitor to a city, as a parking lot.
And since nature and humanity both abhor vacuums, who’s going to flock to these concrete deserts?
Criminals.
Now, smacking criminals – property criminals, violent criminals, sex criminals – over the head and tossing them into jail until they get right is a laudable goal – one of state and local government’s precious few most legitimate priorities.
But creating an environment where crime can not flourish is equally laudable. It is, of course, a goal that Minneapolis is comically-ill-equipped to carry out, given its’ one-party DFL government with its’ attendant commitment to using the city as a warehouse for the poor, its punishment of wealth and enterprise and merit, and mania for going mushy on crime; the DFL has spent two generations turning Minneapolis into a perfect storm of crime.
Still, turning Washington Avenue – one of the most depressingly-arid places in the Twin Cities – into something that real, law-abiding people with money and families would like to visit is a decent goal, certainly less-stupid than most of Rybak’s agenda in that, if successful, it could help rather than harm the tax base, encourage rather than discourage real, law-abiding people to come to the area, and make part of Minneapolis inviting rather than actively repellent to decent folks.
Mayor R.T. Rybak’s “vision” for transforming an ugly duckling into a grand, tree-lined boulevard is laudable and well worth trying. The rebirth of the Mills District has shown Washington’s potential as a green, attractive connection between the University of Minnesota’s West Bank and the booming North Loop. Charging a team of talented designers to sketch out a new Washington was the right first step, and their treatment, unveiled this week, is stunning. Their main point (borrowing from European boulevards) is that busy auto traffic can coexist with lively sidewalks if infill shops and a generous barrier of trees are added to give pedestrians an even chance.
Which is a start.
Of course, there’s the little matter of coming up with businesses that’ll inhabit the stores along the gorgeous new thoroughfare – which would involve making Minneapolis less overtly-hostile to business, which would mean electing a government that is happy to say “no new taxes” for a better Minneapolis. In other words, it means voters in the City of Lakes must have the foresight and wisdom to turn its ruling bloc of extremist DFLers and Greens out of office.
The editorial notes what I did a few months back:
In some ways, the city government is its own worst enemy. As developer Jim Stanton pointed out, the city says it wants a pedestrian environment but insists that new buildings extend fully to the street, leaving no room for wide sidewalks or trees. Go figure.
That mentality must change if Washington Avenue is to be transformed. The McGuire Family Foundation has set high standards with its gift of nearby Gold Medal Park. If those standards — and an ethic of public/private support — can spread to Washington, it will become, over time, the beautiful, tree-lined boulevard that the city hopes for.
“That mentality” must change in many, many ways that I doubt the Strib editorial board is prepared for.
The Highland Park District Council’s news is worse than previously thought:
The Highland District Council owes the Internal Revenue Service and the state of Minnesota more than $69,000, about twice as much as previously thought.
About half of that is in back taxes starting as early as 1998, said Tim Puffer, the treasurer of the community council. The other half covers interest and penalties.
The group likely will hold a special meeting next week to discuss hiring an accounting firm to sort out the financial problems, said board president Bill Poulos.
I’m going to try to make the meeting. I’ll run a stopwatch to see exactly when the “P” word – partisan – is broached the first time.
“We’re trying to get a better handle of what this figure is,” Poulos said. “As it stands right now, our liabilities exceed our assets.”
Looks like “partisanship” will do the District Council system a world of good.
James Wolcott is largely a waste of skin, one of America’s most loathsome excuses for a cultural critic.
But he’s oh so right about one thing:
ON the subject of [Quentin] Tarantino, I consur with Will Self, who wrote in Junk Mail “Mr. tarantino is essentially a pasticheru and an artistic fraud,”, to which I would add “and a pimp for geek sadism.” Indeed, he has in danger of becoming the Charles Graner of cinema, presiding over the festivities with a big thumbs up and a jack-o’lantern grin”.
How any cultural conservative anyone who is concerned with the future of Western culture can accept the case of artistic moral emphysema that is Quentin Tarantino and his mindless glorification of all that is ugly and stupid is well beyond me.
Our involvement in Iraq is bringing terrorists out of the woodwork to attack Americans and their interests:
Muslim insurgents killed 7 soldiers and wounded 1 in an IED attack…Muslim insurgents walked into schools and murdered three teachers…Muslim insurgents attacked a school bus…Fourteen were wounded after a small bomb packed with “small iron nails of about 2cm each” was detonated as passengers were exiting a ship …[A] ‘militant’ was ordered to behead 3 Christian schoolgirls …[an attack resulted in the] wounding 8 teenagers and the bus driver…Muslim insurgents killed 10 paramilitary soldiers in an IED attack…
…and on, and on.
Except, of course, that this is in Thailand and heavily-Moslem Indonesia.
Hm. It’s almost like Islamist terrorists don’t need American provocation!
Maria Cantwell thinks the American people “deserve better” when it comes to energy:
“America deserves more fuel efficient cars,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington. But she added “the only way consumers are going to get more out of a tank of gas is if the president and his party help deliver votes in a narrowly divided Congress.”
It’s widely expected the Senate will approve some sort of increase in auto fuel economy as part of an energy bill it hopes to finish in the coming weeks.
Senator Cantwell; leaving aside that the market will inevitably provide that mileage vastly faster and more efficiently than any government regulation, I’m glad to see that you’re on the side of freeing this nation from oil imports.
So how about doing something that’ll matter; pushing nuclear power?
Plentiful nuclear power, delivered at a fraction of the cost of coal, gas or oil power, will free up fossil fuels, provide ample power to generate “alternative” fuels (the energy cost of refining ethanol is its biggest drawback), and lower the cost of energy across the board:
Cheap, plentiful, safe energy will ensure our economy keeps humming along, and best of all will slash our dependence on the House of Saud and the House of Chavez – altering the geopolitical landscape in a way that’ll benefit the entire western world.
We want that, right?
Have your people call my people.
People sometimes ask – usually with a peevish edge in their tone – “Why aren’t you writing about the war? Huh? Huh?”
The answer: Mainly, because I have little to say, and there are people much better sited to write about the subject than I who are doing it every day.
Like Michael Yon, whose latest dispatch on the eve of what will likely be the biggest offensive since the end of the conventional war in Iraq four years ago is out today.
Read the whole thing. Print it out. Mail it to Harry Reid. (Reid’s contact form, courtesy of Wake Up America)
More later.
I meant to write about this sometime between Saturday and yesterday; Ed and I interviewed Eric Black, formerly of the Strib and soon to be with (or around, or loosely related to) the Minnesota Monitor. Busy as I’ve been, I sorta booted that assignment.
Jeff Kouba – currently among the best uninjured writers at Truth Vs. The Machine – caught the interview, and wrote a gratifyingly favorable recap:
In this NARN interview then, Black said he would like to build a model where left and right can talk to each other. He said he does indeed have a lefty slant, but that he invited Doug Tice to join the Big Question to have a more conservative voice. Black argued for outlets where both points of view are heard, not just one-sided places where leftys read only lefty sources, and rightys only read righty sources.
That was, indeed, an interesting branch in the discussion. Black seems to combine a definite point of view with what seems to be a sincere jones to engage in dialog rather than merely throwing plates. The idea interests me, as well; an actual, ongoing conversation that’s allowed to both go deep and take infinite tangents, between some people who actually are interested in conversation rather than banging rhetorical heads (or who can at least mutually bang heads without turning the entire affair into an endless, predictable pissing match) would be an interesting project. I’d be interested in such a project myself…
…after the ’08 election, at any rate.
I’m being mostly facetious; I do relish these sorts of exercises, since they usually help me polish up my own rhetorical, logical and even ideological chops. The unexamined prejudice, to paraphrase Augustine, isn’t worth having.
I did restrain myself from asking “how do you, a fairly distinguished and credible reporter, plan on sharing a masthead with that bunch of clowns” – but then, he did answer the question, too:
Mitch then asked about the seeming incongruity of wanting to promote conversation across the ideological divide, while joining MiniMon, which is unabashedly “progressive,” a place that doesn’t exactly do a lot to promote conservative voices.
Black said he would have his own blog and URL, and his material would be cross-posted at MiniMon. That I found interesting. This way Black can maintain some distance from MiniMon’s one-sided stance, while at the same time exercising his own voice, which may very well fit in nicely on MiniMon’s page from time to time.
It seemed to be a sensible approach. Nice work if you can get it.
Listen to the interview (it spans the last half of the first hour and the first half of the second hour) and decide for yourself!
Reade Seligman is going to sue Nifong:
Former Duke University lacrosse team player, Reade Seligmann, who had been cleared of charges he and two other players raped a hired stripper, says he feels sorry for disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong’s family, but he added he was hurt by Nifong’s statement at last week’s hearing that he still thinks “something happened in that bathroom” at that now infamous team party last year.
“It was probably one of the most difficult parts of the hearing,” Seligmann, 21, told TODAY host Meredith Vieira during an exclusive interview on Monday. “I really did feel sympathy for his family … It’s been a tragedy that another family is going to have to suffer because of Mike Nifong’s actions, but after hearing him say that, it really did make it difficult to feel [for him].”
I’d be tempted to send a few bucks to any legal fund that went after Nifong – but there are many more, many worse cases of prosecutorial misconduct out there.
On the one hand, it’s good to see that justice had prevailed in the Nifong/Duke case:
Time and time again, Mike Nifong strode into court and confidently proclaimed that three Duke lacrosse players raped a woman at a team party. He smirked when anyone suggested otherwise.
The Durham County district attorney thundered away in interviews, calling the players “hooligans,” framing the case as a racially motivated attack by privileged white students. He never even hinted that his case started out weak and soon became fatally flawed.
That self-assured Mike Nifong of 2006 couldn’t be more different than the disgraced man who left a courthouse through a side door on Saturday — quiet, humbled and disbarred.
This is a victory in many ways; for the judicial system, at a time when people are being released (not commuted, mind you) from death row at the rate of three every two years, in most case due to prosecutorial misconduct and witholding of evidence.
It’s a victory, of course, for the lacrosse players who were found guilty by many of the lesser minds among the punditry due to nothing more compelling than “they were men”.
And maybe it’s a victory for people who refuse to smugly believe that rape is a crime immune to abuse.
Here are some things we hear a lot: Vindictive women use rape charges to get back at men. Women’s sexual histories can be informative in a rape case. Women who were “really raped” are easily identified by the way they behave.
None of them are true.
“None”. Paradoxically, it’s a very big word. We’ll come back to that.
Yes, there are some women (and men) who file false rape charges. They are, however, rare, usually quickly identified as false, and are almost always thrown out long before trial. In truth, many genuine victims of rape never see their cases reach trial due to lack of evidence; a genuine rape victim is exponentially less likely to see her attacker prosecuted than an erroneously charged man is to be prosecuted.
The piece goes on to claim that rape charges are about a third less falsely brought than auto theft.
Let’s accept a few things right up front (since if I don’t, some peabrain leftyblogger will write “Why Does Berg Hate Women?” or “Blogger Berg: Soft on Rape” or some such BS); society was disgracefully tardy in accepting rape in its many forms as a “real” crime. For my part, I’ve done my bit of societal penance not only by advocating for women’s (and men’s) rights to self-defense, but by teaching one rape victim to shoot. I am firmly behind empowerment.
But claims of false accusation vary widely: one study claims that around 2% of rape charges are false, while on the other hand…:
A study of rape allegations in Indiana over a nine-year period revealed that over 40% were shown to be false — not merely unproven. According to the author, “These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations.” ( Kanin EJ. Arch Sex Behav. 1994 Feb;23(1):81-92 False rape allegations. )
In 1985, a study of 556 rape allegations found that 27% accusers recanted when faced with a polygraph (which can be ordered in the military), and independent evaluation showed a false accusation rate of 60%. (McDowell, Charles P., Ph.D. “False Allegations.” Forensic Science Digest, (publication of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations), Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 64.)
One interesting discussion on the internet is at the CrimProf Blog, where this topic was raised, and a number of former AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations) comment on this 30% number.
But let’s take the shriekbloggers at “Shakespeare’s Sister”‘s numbers at face value (always a dicey proposition when leftybloggers are concerned), and assume that “only” 1.6% of all rape accusations in the US are false. Each of those false accusations has every bit as much potential to destroy a life, a family, a job and career, as an actual rape does. Even though the three Duke lacrosse players have been completely exonerated, there’ll be an asterisk by each of their names in the minds of some people forever – and the only thing that makes their case more egregious than any other is that so many in the media and the Sorosphere piled on their case (because nothing satisfies like lynching a “rich white male child of privilege”).
So what about the other cases – where a person’s reputation is destroyed (indeed, “raped”) on a more local level? Saying, as so many now are re the Duke case “Oops, I screwed up! My Bad! Sorry, although I’d be sorrier if you weren’t “rich” and white!” doesn’t really cut it.
People making false accusations of any crime – but especially extra-heinous crimes, like rape, where the punishment for real charges is and should be exceptionally harsh – should be charged, and punished ferociously – not merely because they intend to falsely destroy someone’s reputation, but because when the law can be openly abused without retribution, confidence in the law suffers. Jonna Spilbor writes:
It’s not just about punishing one person for a very serious misdeed – though that is surely important, given the devastating impact on the three defendant’s lives. It’s also about the way her lies will wrongly be used by some to question the veracity of genuine victims of rape. Protecting Crystal Mangum isn’t protecting a victim; it’s making every future victim more vulnerable, in the prosecutor’s office and in the courtroom, to being wrongly disbelieved.
Thus, Crystal Mangum not only wronged the three defendants, but also all the women in this world who ever have been truly victimized, or who, sadly but unavoidably, one day will be. These are the unseen victims of Duke.
The law already allows those who falsely report crimes to be punished. I can’t imagine a better case for invoking it than this one.
Mangun committed a crime, counting on society’s justifiable revulsion with rape to carry the day. Prosecutor Nifong abetted the crime for his own careerist profit.
Prosecution may be the least they deserve. It’s the least society should do.
Saint Paulicy is one of my favorite new blogs; they were the first blog to break the story of the Highland Community Council’s financial woes.
And now? Councilman Lee Helgen – and a competing pair of campaign contributions, related to his apparent flip-flop on the construction of a new flood wall for downtown’s Holman Field airport – is in their sights:
[Helgen’s] year-end report lists nearly $1,000 from several Building Trades related political action committees and local trade unions. In order to get these contributions, SPicy believes they are made with some level of confidence that the Candidate will hear the concerns and work toward promoting the bread and butter of the organization(s). SPicy does not believe that Mr. Helgen’s vote is for sale, not in the least.
But, Mr. Helgen must have expressed his ongoing support for certain building projects in the City to gain the confidence of these contributors.
But wait, Lee’s campaign website lists an Environmental focused fundraiser, on June 28th, at the home of Whitney Clark, the Director of the Friends of the Mississippi River. The attendees must be expecting to hear about Lee’s strong stand against the Holman Field Floodwall, one of the FMRs #1 prioroties – to kill.
Which runway will Helgen choose to land upon? If Helgen votes in support of the appeal, SPicy wonders how he will react to a question from a FMR attendee asking Mr. Helgen what he thinks Mayor Coleman should do with his veto power…
Councilman Helgen is going to have a very interesting election this year, on a number of fronts.
Stay tuned.
I always like Cuban/Venezuelan actress Maria Conchita Alonzo.
I mean, duh:
She was the most bearable part of Moscow on the Hudson, among a bunch of other movies.
But best of all? She’s got a jones for beating on Hugo Chavez!
From Hannity and Colmes, live from the protests over Chavez’ imposition of the Venezuelan version of the “Fairness Doctrine” via shutting down Venezuela’s last independent TV station:
ALONSO: Of course Chavez doesn’t listen. He’s not going to listen. So something drastic is going to happen, sadly. You know, I know that the students are being very peaceful. I know that they have been few very incidents with certain students outside of the capital.
There are a few students that are in critical condition. But, you know, they don’t talk about that. They are demanding what was taken from us, which was the closure of Radio Caracas Television, because the government said that, you know, it was doing a lot of propaganda against the government. And it has done a lot of bad things through the years.
You know, it seems that is what they know how to say best, which is lies.
COLMES: As we all know the hallmark of a democracy is a free press, and this is the worst thing you can do in a government that was elected. — He got 60 percent of the vote. People question the veracity of the election, but nevertheless, he was democratically elected.
So the question is can he retain power if he continues this kind of action?
ALONSO: We go again with you! He was not democratically elected .
And on life in a “populist” dictatorship, where the “village” wants to raise your child…:
ALONSO: People hate each other — we have never had that before. If you’re white, the blacks hate you. If you are black, the whites hate you. If you’re an Indian everybody hates you, and you hate everybody. People live in fear of speaking out.
All the students are amazing for us to follow what they are doing because, you know, when you are that young, you feel you are invincible.
So right now we all have to feel with our hearts and spirits, our mind as we — like the youngsters are fighting, really, for the freedom of our country.
(Via Margaret at Anti-Strib)
JB Doubtless writes about Bob Costas:
Bob Costas Is A Pompous, Effete, East Coast WASPGoes without saying right?
Well, maybe and maybe not.
I mean, I’m not sure that a sportscaster’s Christian denomination has been much of an issue at least since 1971, when Pete “The Papist” Pike – unsuccessful play-by-play announcer for the ABA’s Pittsburgh Condors on KDKA Radio – was accused of getting his color commentary directly from Rome.
“WASP?” I don’t think I’ve seen someone described as a “WASP” outside of a MAD magazine or some neurotic Jewish comic or another’s routine since the 1970’s.
But for what it’s worth, Costas was raised Catholic, the child of Greek-Irish parents.
So I guess he’d be a “Pompous Effete East Coast WIGC”?
Michael Brodkorb is one of the best bloggers in Minnesota today. He’s at the leading edge of a revolution in journalism. There is more solid, worthwhile content in a days’ worth of posting in Minnesota Democrats exposed than there is in six months on Minnesota Monitor.
He’s also a valued colleague of mine on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, someone who’s grown into the (amateur) radio business with great panache.
But I gotta confess – I don’t care what’s on Dean Barkley’s Match.com profile.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t much care for the “Independence” Party’s former Senate candidate (and, for a brief stretch, appointed senator after the death of Paul Wellstone and before the swearing-in of Norm Coleman) and likely future sacrificial lamb candidate in the Sixth CD against Michele Bachmann, who also served as a sort of shadow governor during the Ventura Administration. He’s a big part of the reason the “libertarian populist” that the media fancied Ventura governed as a mushy-center-left DFL Lite goober.
But as a fellow single guy, I gotta say – let’s leave Barkley’s personal life out of the public discussion. A person’s family, and/or his primary relationship (and especially any kids involved) – no matter what their party, platform or for that matter preferences – should be their refuge from all the BS of public life. His search – even on a personals website – should be his own business.
I’ve condemned leftybloggers in the past for their habit of publishing peoples’ work and home numbers and bringing hordes of drooling droogs after the families of those who disagree with them. This isn’t quite the same – it’s a personal profile, not a home address – and ergo in no way as base and loathsome.
But it’s high time there was a gentleman’s (and ladies’) agreement; leave peoples’ personal lives out of the public conversation, unless that life affects their ability to do the job.
(And if Barkley’s “likes” from his ad are commentary on his fitness for office, then I guess I’m going to stick with radio).
Brodkorb’s one of the best bloggers in town. But Mike, while I gotcher back as a rule, I’m gonna sit this one out.
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