There are a bunch of reasons I prefer Saint Paul to Minneapolis.  One of them is the cops.

Not the cops on the streets, of course; Minneapolis cops (a number of whom read this blog) are, cop for cop, as good as any, and their hearts are all in the same places.

But when you start talking about upper leadership?  Saint Paul’s chiefs come from within the department, and have worked their way up through the department’s ranks.  Most Minneapolis chiefs have been political appointees from elsewhere, with indifferent-to-lousy results.  And the civilian leadership?  Twelve years of moderate-DFL-to-GOP-come-lately administrations under Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly helped a lot.  And while I disagree with Chris Coleman on everything but bagpipes, he’s a much better, more serious mayor than RT Rybak. 

And every once in a while, the SPPD just plain shows some style: 

 “Smile. This area is under video surveillance and has been for three months. If you sell drugs or have sold drugs then an arrest warrant will be issued for you.”

It was in relation to a sweep last week:

After a three-month investigation called Operation Shamrock, officers fanned out last week to arrest 100 people charged with drug dealing. More than 30 were picked up right away, and arrest warrants were issued for the others.

Law enforcers responded to an increase of open-air drug sales, fighting, mugging and intimidation that occurred near bus stops. Bus riders and others complained of behavior that made them afraid to wait at certain bus shelters.

Cough Cough.  Sixth and Minnesota.  Cough.

Good riddance. 

Who wrote this:

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

Was it:

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

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

A celeb-watch site notes:

Paris Hilton has not eaten or slept since arriving at ..a Los Angeles jail and is being given psychotropic drugs…

In other words, life in jail is pretty much like life outside.

(more…)

William “Frozen Assets” Jefferson, with an NRA rating of “F” on gun-control issues, has a small arsenal.

Noel Shepard quotes AmThink:

As far as the broadcast networks, only the “CBS Evening News” felt this court proceeding was at all newsworthy, and its producers totally ignored the gun issue.

Yet, most important, none of the reports that did include the firearms story pointed out Jefferson’s strong anti-gun positions in the past, an irony that was certainly not lost on the American Thinker’s Marc Sheppard (emphasis added):

But the specter of a gun-toting gun opponent raises some rather curious questions, wouldn’t you say?You might ask yourself, what does a man who, in 2005, voted against a bill to protect law-abiding gun dealers and manufacturers from litigation blaming them for criminal misuse of their products by others, need with rifles?  Did he own them when he voted against similar law in 2003?

Why would a legislator with an anti-Second-Amendment voting record that earned him an NRA rating identical to that of Chuckie Schumer and Nancy Pelosi own multiple shotguns?

Second Amendment for Me, but not for Ye, apparently.

 

Second Amendment for Me, but not for Ye, apparently.

Shoot a cop…

…get released?

Doesn’t happen, generally – unless the cop’s done something grossly wrong.  Cops and district attorneys take “shooting at cops” pretty seriously.  Rightly so.

We don’t exactly know what happened in the shooting incident on Highway 10 last week in which a civilian concealed-carry permit holder shot an undercover cop who was – according to the civilian – engrossed in road rage and pointing a gun at the shooter’s wife, as he drove his family in an SUV.

But the fact that the shooter was released without charges after a night in jail might, maybe, possibly, indicated that Minnesota’s latest concealed-carry permit holder to defend himself and his family might have been in the right:

Nearly 72 hours since he was involved in a rolling argument in Coon Rapids that led him to shoot an undercover police officer, Martin S. Treptow still believes he had little choice but to act as he did, his attorney Marc Berris said Saturday.

Endangered first by the officer’s “extremely aggressive” driving, and then stunned to see the officer point a gun at his wife, Treptow, 35, was simply trying to protect his family and himself, Berris said.

He added: “When all the facts come out, it’ll show he had absolutely no opportunity to deescalate the situation.”

Which is part of the burden that a citizen bears in a self-defense case; proving they weren’t a willing party to the conflict, that he/she tried every reasonable means to de-escalate, that the force was reasonable under the circumstances, and that there was a reasonable fear of death and/or great bodily harm – where “reasonable” means “a jury would buy it”. 

So you be the judge:

[Treptow’s attorney Marc] Berris, who said he is in the midst of his own investigation of the incident, offered this account of the Thursday altercation:

Treptow, his wife and their two children were heading to St. Paul when they were confronted by a man driving erratically, including pulling alongside Treptow’s SUV and yelling at him and his wife.

At one point, Treptow honked, but the feud continued. It came to a head along 99th Avenue NW. near Foley Boulevard NW. as the two vehicles were stopped behind other cars at a stop light.

According to Berris, the man, who Treptow did not know was a police officer, reached out his window and pointed a gun at Treptow’s wife. Treptow, who had been working as a security officer until last month and who has a permit to carry his gun, quickly reached across his wife and fired at the car. The officer was hit in the legs and an arm.

Still fearing for his family’s safety, Treptow drove away from the scene while his wife called 911, Berris said.

They stopped at a nearby gas station, where police took them into custody.

Which is far from abnormal, even if the alleged victim isn’t a cop.

While Treptow left jail after an evening, the Coon Rapids police aren’t saying much:

But for Coon Rapids police officials, such conclusions regarding the Thursday afternoon shooting are premature.

Sgt. Tom Hawley said Saturday that investigators are still analyzing evidence and trying to compile and sort through conflicting accounts from the parties involved and several witnesses. He said it could be several days to weeks before their work is complete.

We’ll know more than that, soon.

Joel Rosenberg writes:

Note the shape of the defense:  the cop was the aggressor; Treptow’s response was minimal initially; he was reasonably in fear of the immediate death or GBH for himself and/or his wife; he fled not out of mens rea but because he feared for his safety, and they immediately called 911.

Note how important that latter is. 

Money quote:  “When all the facts come out, it’ll show he had absolutely no opportunity to deescalate the situation.”

Just guesses: Treptow won’t get charged at all.  Officer Friendly will end up seeking other career opportunities.

Stay tuned.

Mexico is upset about the open border:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday that Washington is taking steps to address Mexican concerns the U.S. is not doing enough to stop illegal weapons from being smuggled across the border and into the hands of brutal drug gangs.

A meeting here of attorneys general from the U.S., Mexico and six other Latin American countries focused on Mexican complaints weapons from the United States are fueling a wave of cartel-related executions and violent crime that is battering the nation.

“We are concerned about the number of weapons coming into Mexico and Central America illegally from the United States,” Gonzales said. “There is more that we can do, and we are looking to do, to try and stem the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico.”

Maybe they should build a fence.

The rest of the NARN guys and I broadcast from the site of the Minnesota World War II Memorial, live from the top of the capitol mall on Saturday afternoon.

Although the forecasts earlier in the week called for possible thunderstorms, it was in fact the most beautiful day of the summer so far. 

We were at the top of the Mall, by the end of a long convoy of lovingly-restored WWII-vintage vehicles (of which more later).  The dedication was at the other end, down by the Veterans Affairs Building; the Memorial is in what would amount to the VA building’s back yard – so most of the attention, justifiably, was far from us.  But we had the pleasure of meeting quite a few old vets that made it up to our “studio”.

And I was astounded not so much at how many WWII veterans made it to the dedication, but how well so many of them got around.  We interviewed a number of veterans – including a fellow, Gerry Boe, who as a 19 year old private in the First Infantry Division immediately after the war had been a guard at the Nuremberg Trials.  Fascinating stuff.

After the show, my pal Mark, his girlfriend and I wandered among the WWII-era vehicles parked along the streets the dissect the Capitol Mall, partly to get the vehicles’ owners’ stories (the owner of the Bren Carrier…

…who’d had to fish the vehicle out of a swamp somewhere in southern Ontario was a standout)…

…but mostly to talk with the vets.

I remember a lot of the vets when I was a kid; my home town’s National Guard unit had fought on Guadalcanal, and the one from neighboring Valley City had been in the Battle of the Bulge, so a lot of those guys had been in the thick of things – and they rarely talked much.  Part of it is that war is hard to explain to people who’ve never been there.  Part of it, as Steven Ambrose said, was that that generation just wasn’t a self-aggrandizing bunch. 

But I think that in a lot of cases, as the Greatest Generation gets on a bit, they – or some of them – are talking a lot more.  Especially if they think people are interested. 

And I was.  So I wandered about and listened. 

I listened as a guy who’d been a Sherman tank driver in North Africa, and then across all of Europe, talked about his time in action.  As we stood by another Sherman, another guy – a Mr. Schweigert, from Fulda MN, who’d been in Company B, 1st Battalion of the 222nd Infantry (42nd Infantry Division) told stories about riding on the back of tanks just like that, for about 100 the 600 miles he estimated he’d marched across the continent.  Schweigert, who must have been at or slightly over 80, looked fit enough to hike the whole thing again; his old olive drab uniform jacket still fit him.

After we made our way past the memorial itself – which you should see, if you haven’t yet – we walked out to the other side of the Vets building, on the frontage road, overlooking downtown Saint Paul.  We found “the gun” – the original four-inch gun from the deck of the USS Ward that, hours before the bombings started on December 7, 1941, fired the first American shots of the war.  It was, in fact, this very gun…

…fired by the crew of Minnesota Navy Reservists shown in the photo above.  The Ward was a recycled WWI destroyer; like hundreds of other such obsolete ships (called “Four-Stackers”, because of their four exhaust funnels), the Ward was pressed into service due to a woeful shortage of modern ships capable of escorting convoys and doing other vital work.

Standing at the gun was a guy wearing a hat identifying himself as a crewman on the USS Roper, one of Ward’s sister ships:

My command of immense stores of otherwise-useless trivia finally made itself useful for something besides winning free drinks at Keegans; I knew a bit of the Roper’s story (it had sunk a U-boat in a controversial incident in 1942; I did not know that sci-fi author Robert Heinlein had served on the ship at one point).  That started the guy (whose name eludes me at the moment) talking; stories of convoys across the South Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, getting hit by a kamikaze that was flying right at  his position on the signal platform next to the bridge, until a last-second shot caused the plane to swerve into the #1 gun (on the “forecastle”, in front of the bridge), killing an officer and injuring a dozen of his shipmates.

I was far from the only one, of course, standing and listening to the old guys, many in their old uniforms, telling their stories to crowds of all ages. 

Wish we could do it again.

The Saint Paul DFL had its City Convention on Saturday.

The usual pack of clowns got the nod…

Incumbent Saint Paul School Board members Anne Carroll and Kazoua Kong-Thao along with newcomers Keith Hardy and Kevin Riach were endorsed by acclimation at today’s Saint Paul DFL city convention.

No opposition was expected and they were the only nominated candidates. Congratulations to all four … the real campaign for St. Paul school begins now. As a united front, they have a great chance of dislodging Republican…

…I presuming they’re talking about Republican Tom Conlon, the sole non-DFL member of the board, the body’s sole source of any form of diversity, and the only sitting Republican office-holder in any city-wide office in Saint Paul. 

We’ll have to come back to that later.

Some parts of the DFL are also gamboling about like jabbering lemurs over Instant Runoff Voting, which was endorsed:

The Saint Paul DFL Party endorsed the Better Ballot Campaign on the 2nd ballot today at the city convention. The Better Ballot Campaign is working to put Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)on the ballot in November. Voters would then choose whether or not to have city municipal elections for Mayor and Council using IRV.

An emailer on a Saint Paul Issues discusssion group, however, noted the irony of the vote:

Excuse me if I am the only person who finds this extremely ironic that
the  advocates for Instant Runoff Voting made it so that it was the only
issue  position that got two chances to reach the 60% needed to be supported by the  party?  Get it?  These are the people who think you should only vote  once in any election cycle and wanted two votes on getting party support! 

All humor aside, it was an interesting look into the way the DFL runs things in Saint Paul in general (I add some emphasis):

The rules allowed the advocates of IRV to make a presentation of  their position lasting fifteen minutes (only those for IRV); then there was a  question and answer period where the answers were given by the advocates of IRV  (one was really funny, someone asked about the concerns that the head of Ramsey  County Elections had raised about IRV and if they would explain them to the  group … the response was, “well everyone is entitled to their
opinion” and on  they went to the next question); during the entire Q and A their was a continual  run of the Pro position being run on the big screen to the group; then after 25  minutes of presenting one side of the issue, both sides got five speakers, one  minute each.  They had made sure that there was no way to discuss all of  the problems that IRV would cause.  You can’t get much across in one minute  and barely can touch on the issue. 

And after all that?

So, with that IRV didn’t reach the 60% needed for endorsement and they
had  to use the extra special second vote that only IRV was allowed and then
they won  by two votes.

Expect the DFL and the Strib (pardon the redundancy) to pull out all the stops to push IRV in Saint Paul and, since this is a DFL campaign, vilify all opponents without restraint.

The Saint Paul DFL Party endorsed the Better Ballot Campaign on the 2nd ballot today at the city convention. The Better Ballot Campaign is working to put Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)on the ballot in November. Voters would then choose whether or not to have city municipal elections for Mayor and Council using IRV. Exact numbers are at the very bottom of the post.

IRV ballot measure missed the 60% endorsement threshold by 2 votes on the first ballot and then won by 2 on the second! Surprisingly, it appears that only 1 delegate left between the first and second ballots. Over here in Minneapolis, we’re used to higher rates of disappearing delegates. I doff my cap to y’all.

France looks to be sending a conservative avalanche to their parliament in elections being held today:

Pollster CSA said Sarkozy’s bloc would win 440-470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly lower house after a second round of voting on June 17. IPSOS Dell pollsters saw the centre-right taking 383-447 seats against 120-170 for the mainstream left.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who won his seat outright on Sunday, said voters had given a “beautiful lead” to Sarkozy’s allies, but warned that the job was only half done.

“Everything will really be decided next Sunday. That is why all the French will have to go and vote. Change is underway,” he said in his Sarthe constituency west of Paris.

CSA gave the opposition Socialists, in disarray since May’s third straight loss in presidential elections, just 60-90 seats compared to the 149 seats the party won in 2002 elections.

They have their own version of Lori Sturdevant, too!

Senior Socialists appealed to voters to turn out en masse next week in a bid to stem the conservative “blue tide” that risked submerging the opposition in parliament.

“Come and vote, come for yourself, come for democracy, come for the Republic, come for France, come for social justice and come to help us reconstruct a new left,” urged Socialist Segolene Royal, who remains popular despite losing out to Sarkozy in the May presidential elections.

Maybe we need to start importing conservative politicians from France.

(more…)

Today on the NARN and elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Mitch:

• Yard work!
• A big tripleheader NARN show at the dedication of the State WWII Memorial, with  NARN Volume I (“The Opening Act”) and Brian, John and Chad,m  Ed, King and Michael and I talking about the memorial, interviewing guests, and talking with people who’ve come to view the memorial and the event. 
• Then, more yard work!

Tune in on AM1280, either on the air or via the web. 

To: Ms. Winehouse
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Wretched Excess

Ms. Winehouse,

While I do sort of like the retro-girl-group vibe in your new song “Rehab”, I’d like to address an issue of which you might be unaware.

Just because three verses are good, doesn’t necessarily make nine or 22 or 37 or however many nearly-identical verses that song has even better. 

I apologize if you’ve heard otherwise, but it just ain’t so.

Hope rehab treats you well.

That is all.

M Berg

It may have been the greatest piece of arts criticism ever written – on the topic of “Gates”, by Christo, one of history’s great works of art, which draped Central Park in orange banners. 

The critique cuts relentlessly and yet obliquely to the core, and yet hovers uncertainly yet fiercely (or perhaps neo-fiercely) at the most trivial yet profound surface:

The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

Oh, I’m lying – it was Sheila and a group of her friends, spoofing modern art criticism so well it reads like a catalogue at the Walker.

What brings it to mind is, of course, that it’s dead-on – as related by  Roger Kimball in  a spectacular piece in New Criterion, “Why the Art World is a Disaster”.

He excerpts a catalogue piece that reads, on its surface, more like parody than Sheila’s piece:

…its assault on the English language is something you can find in scores, no, hundreds of art publications today: “For Valie Export, the female Body is covered with the stigmata of codes that shape and hamper it.” Well, bully for her. “As usual with Gober, the installation is a broken allegory that both elicits and resists our interpretation; that materially nothing is quite as it seems adds to our anxious curiosity.” As usual, indeed, though whether such pathetic verbiage adds to or smothers our curiosity is another matter altogether.

But that’s a tangent from Kimball’s larger point – why Art (visual art in this case) sucks so badly these days:

Why is the art world a disaster? The prevalence of exhibitions like “Wrestle,” of collectors like Marieluise Hessel, of institutions like the Hessel Museum and Bard College help us begin to answer that question. Their very ordinariness enhances their value as symptoms. In part, the art world is a disaster because of that ordinariness: because of the popularization and institutionalization of the antics and attitudes of Dada. As W. S. Gilbert knew, when everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody. When the outré attitudes of a tiny elite go mainstream, only the rhetoric, not the substance, of the drama survives.

Put another way, when everything is designed to shock middle-class bourgeouis sensibilities, nothing does. 

That’s part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic—well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration would be closer to the truth. But that is only part of the puzzle. There are at least three other elements at work. One is the unholy alliance between the more rebarbative and hermetic precincts of academic activity and the practice of art.

Which is, to step out of the world of visual art for a moment, what makes so much post-Ellington jazz music so utterly unbearable, and what made most serious “classical” music of the 20th century positively unlistenable. 

 As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying “Wrestle”—accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days—demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication [which is fun for satirists! – Ed]. It’s not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn’t even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man’s land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration. Increasingly, the “art” is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it,

How true is this?

What is the easiest way to satirize art these days – to actually attempt satiric art, or to caricature the manner of an “artist” or “critic” describing things? 

A second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money—not just the staggering prices routinely fetched by celebrity artists today, but the bucket-loads of cash that seem to surround almost any enterprise that can manage to get itself recognized as having to do with “the arts.” The presence of money means the presence of “society,” which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday’s philistine is today’s champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be…The vast infusion of money into the art world in recent decades has done an immense amount to facilitate what my colleague Hilton Kramer aptly called “the revenge of the philistines.”

Take a meander around Loring Park or Lowertown or Uni-Raymond sometime; start talking with “artists” about how much of their time they spend chasing grants to pursue their “art”.   

A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in “Wrestle”: almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.

It was always an abstraction to me, of course – I have little background in visual art; I inherited the family’s music and writing genes.  But it smacked me in the head one day in 1987, when my sister and I were at the Walker Gallery, at a “minimalism” exhibit.  I was looking at some “minimal” piece of work, and stepped over what looked like some construction material – a diagonal swatch of tartan sponge (think wrestling mat material) lying against the wall on the floor. 

A guard  hurried over. “Sir, don’t step on the art!”

I looked around, confused.

“Sir, you’re standing on the art”.

No.  I was standing on a piece of tartan foam that had earned somebody with an MFA a whole bunch of money – but it was “art” in the sense that Alban Berg was “music”. 

But there is, one wants to believe, hope: 

But this, too, will pass. Sooner or later, even the Leon Botsteins and Marieluise Hessels of the world will realize that the character in Bruce Nauman’s “Good Boy, Bad Boy” was right: “this is boring.”

And it really, really is.

(Via Jeff Kouba at TvM)

I got this email from a local “Peace” activist on Wednesday.  I may have to give this a shot after the show on Saturday:

The event to organize protests to  the Republican agenda during the
September 2008 convention is still taking place this Saturday, but the
location has changed from St Paul Trades to the Student Center of the U of
M St Paul campus.  The full announcement is listed as follows:

Sat. 6/9 @ 2-5pm, NEW LOCATION (sorry for confusion) @ U of M – St.
Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave, St. Paul, MN (Directions and parking
info: http://www.spsc.umn.edu/about/directions.php)

The Republican National Convention (RNC) is coming to our backyard. 
Feeling angry?  Want to do something? You and your organization are
invited to join us for a gathering of those who have already started
organizing to resist the RNC in 2008 and those looking for a place to start. 
This will be a space for people to come together and share ideas and
energy. The afternoon will be broken into 3 parts.  We’ll start with a
“clearinghouse” where organizations can table and have an opportunity to
chat with attendees one-on-one.  This will be followed by a facilitated
“open mic” discussion period.  Discussion will start with explanations
about what is already underway, and continue with attendees sharing
their hopes, dreams, and visions with each other.  The day will conclude
with “break out” sessions where participants gather around specific
topics of interest and
decide on “next steps.” Let’s meet each other, get to know each other,
and start to work together! Child Care and Snacks Provided. Co-hosted
by: Protest RNC 2008 and the RNC “Welcoming” Committee.

To increase your participation level please contact Karen R at:
[redacted]. Increased participation could include: having
an information table, presenting your “already underway” plans, and/or
volunteering to help with the event.

It’ll be interesting seeing what respect for “democracy” is brewing in these meetings.

So the other day, when I wrote…:

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

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

So is this a change of heart? 

Why?

…was I being accurate or fair?

We’ll find out soon!

More to come – stay tuned.

Since we’re spending Saturday commemorating Minnesotans who served in World War II, I’d be remiss as an American of Norwegian descent not mention one unit with a strong regional connection.

Early in the war, when Washington and London were casting about for ways to regain a foothold in Europe, occupied Norway was considered an option.

And one of the things the Army decided it needed was units of men who looked and spoke Norwegian, to go into Norway to mobilize guerillas to prepare the way for an invasion force. 

Which led to the formation of the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) – a unit of Norwegian-speaking ski troops formed in Minnesota from first-and-second-generation Norwegians from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan:

[…On] 10 July 1942, the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) was ordered formed by H.Q. Army Ground Forces. The men needed to be able to blend perfectly into the local Norwegian countryside, so requests for Norwegian speaking volunteers were sent throughout the army.  Native speakers were preferred but Americans of Norwegian descent who were fluent in the language were also accepted. Efforts were made to recruit Norwegians stranded in America by the war, and it was hoped that many tough Norwegian merchant seamen would enlist. All volunteers had to be citizens of the United States or must have applied for citizenship. 
As might be expected, many of the men who volunteered came from Minnesota and the Dakotas.  Those accepted were ordered to report to Camp Ripley, where the Battalion’s first morning reports were filed on 15 August 1942. The unit’s first commander was Captain Harold D. Hanson, and it had an authorized strength of 884. Officers were to be Norwegian-Americans until native Norwegian officers could be graduated from officer candidate schools. 

Training in Northern Minnesota, naturally, was interesting:

At Camp Ripley the unit engaged in enhanced soldier skill training and physical conditioning.  
Training went well until all the units tents were collapsed under an unseasonal mid-September snowfall that was very wet, heavy, and deep.  Realizing that the training would be hampered at Camp Ripley, Captain Hanson moved his unit to Ft. Snelling. The battalion’s motor officer, Lt. Lester Carlson from southern Minnesota, had contacts with the State Highway Patrol and was able to make special convoy arrangements for a non-stop motor march to Ft. Snelling.  At Ft. Snelling the battalion continued the training started at Camp Ripley–physical conditioning, long road marches, enhanced soldier skills, and Norwegian language classes. The Twin Cities’ large Scandinavian population made sure that the men were well cared for, and many social events were organized to entertain the men when off duty. 

 Although they were an infantry unit, their mission was not unlike that of the US Special Forces, formed ten years later; infiltrate the target country, using guile and cultural and language skills, and serve as a trained nucleus around which guerrilla groups could form, to prepare the way for a possible Allied invasion. 

On 17 December the battalion was transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado. Getting off the train and realizing that the snow was 6 feet deep, many soldiers wondered what they had really gotten themselves into. They soon found out. Carrying equipment weighing up to 90 pounds, the unit spent much of the winter training in the mountains on skies and snowshoes, and developing winter survival skills. In the spring when the snow melted the men received extensive rock climbing training.

But war’s exigencies being what they were, the 99th was reassigned as a regular line infantry battalion when the powers that be pointed the invasion at Normandy rather than Norway.  The 99th went on to fight in Normandy, and then participated in one of the key actions in the brutal Ardennes campaign, fighting against the best the Nazis had:

 The battalion saw its heaviest combat in the Battle of the Bulge, when it was reinforced with tank destroyers and armored infantry and sent to hold Malmedy against [Nazi commando leader Otto] Skorzeny’s 150th Panzer Brigade. “They were good,” Private Howard R. Bergen recalled later, “but not good enough.”

The Norwegians smashed the SS attack, and held the crossroads for most of January before being sent back to France for re-training as part of the 474th Infantry Regiment, a unit made up of the 1st Special Service Force (the so-called Devil’s Brigade) [from which the US Army Special Forces – the  “Green Berets” – are indirectly descended].

After the end of the war, they finally served in Norway, helping move demobilized German troops back across the Baltic to Germany and serving as King Haakon’s guard until a Norwegian native guard force could be formed. 

The unit, 880-odd men strong as it shipped out, suffered 300 dead and seriously wounded during the war.

I hope some of them show up on Saturday.

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

Of course, conservative bloggers are swooping in like vultures:

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

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

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

That is all.

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Via Schmaltz Und Grieben,  the story of a man in Poland who went into a coma under communism, and awoke a free man:

A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.

“It was Gertruda that saved me, and I’ll never forget it,” Grzebski told news channel TVN24.

“Not forgetting” seems to be a smart tack to take…

…but I digress.  The verdict?  Freedom rocks:

“When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol lines were everywhere,” Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system’s economic collapse.

“Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin.”

Grzebski awoke to find his four children had all married and produced 11 grandchildren during his years in hospital.

Mr. Grzebski gives us Red Minnesotans hope; we will too wake up from the coma that started November 8.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is the 63rd anniversary of D-Day.  And as we get ready for Saturday’s dedication of the Minnesota World War II Memorial, it’s an especially-important anniversary.

The Minnesota Historical Society has been collecting Minnesotans’ stories from the war.  Their collected D-Day and Normandy Campaign stories are very well worth a read.

And for Minnesotans of Norwegian descent, it’s worth noting that 37 Norwegians died on D-Day – most of them aboard the HNoMS Svenner, a borrowed British destroyer that was sunk while providing fire support along a British invasion beach.  While Norway contributed the term “Quisling” to the English vocabulary, the Norwegian resistance was larger (as a percentage of the population) than any other in Europe save Denmark’s; Norwegian commandos succeeded in shutting down the heavy water plant on which the German nuclear weapons program depended, and provided thousands of men for the Norwegian Navy and Air Forces in exile.

But how does this connect with Minnesota?

More on that tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So is this a change of heart? 

Why?

Eric Black goes to his first Minnesota Monitor editorial meeting:

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

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

ALL (Bored): “Hey, Eric!”

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

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

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

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

[several staffers break into loud hissing sounds]

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

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

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

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

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

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

FECKE: “Doh!”

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

[scattered hissing]

ANDY: “Wingnuts!  Wingnuts!  Unclean!”

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

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

BLACK: “…um…” [stares, nonplussed]

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

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

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

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

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

BLACK: “Er, right, but…” 

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

MARTY: “…er, Jeff?  That’s us…” 

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

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

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

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

MARTY: “We have a pledge”.

BLACK:  “Ah.  Never mind then”.

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

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

 UPDATE:  Foot continues the thread.

One of the groups sure to be commemorated on Saturday at the commemoration ceremony at the State Capitol grounds will be the group of Minnesotans that fired the first American shots at Pearl Harbor. 

They were part of a group of 40-odd Navy Reservists from Minnesota who made up about a quarter of the crew of the U.S.S. Ward, an obsolete Word War I destroyer that had been saved from the scrapper’s torch by the outbreak of World War II, refitted, and sent to Pearl Harbor less than a year earlier after nearly twenty years in mothballs.

Their story:

It was just after 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941. The U.S. was not at war — yet — but the Ward had orders to intercept anything that was not supposed to be there.

The order was given to fire, and the first round sailed high. A second shot put a 4-inch shell through the conning tower. Depth charges were dropped, and Lehner watched the sub glide into oblivion.

“We didn’t know whose it was,” said Lehner, one of five USS Ward veterans invited in by the Navy League for the 64th anniversary of the attack. “In fact, the skipper said later: ‘God, I hope it wasn’t one of ours.’ “

The gun in the photo above is on the frontage road south of the Capitol Mall toward the Policeman’s Memorial.  It has stood there since the Navy (which had removed the gun from the Ward when they converted it into a long range escort and refitted it with lighter anti-aircraft guns after the war started) gave it to the state in 1958.  The Ward was sunk by a kamikaze in 1945.

Stop by Saturday and see a piece of history.

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My definition of “Jazz I Like” is sort of like the the definition of obscenity:  I know it when I see it.

And among the scattering of names in post-Duke-Ellington jazz I have ever really liked was saxophonist Michael Brecker.  Brecker died this past January at 57.

Scott at Powerline, who may be the best music critic in the Twin Cities, directs us to this piece by the NYTimes’ Corey Kilgannon, on Breckers’ last recording sessions, for his Pilgrimmage album, which has been out for a couple of weeks now:

Mr. Brecker’s favorite collaborators — the guitarist Pat Metheny, the bassist John Patitucci, the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the pianists Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau — all agreed to attend the session on short notice. Mr. Brecker had played on more than 900 albums, including familiar pop solos on Paul Simon and James Taylor tunes, but now it was apparent that his days were numbered. A reporter was invited to document a day of recording.

Not that there was anything morbid about Mr. Brecker. He became energized immediately upon reuniting with his longtime sidemen. He cast off his cane and began zipping around the studio taking care of logistics.

“Even the first day in the studio, we didn’t know if the whole thing was going to happen,” said Mr. Brecker’s manager, Darryl Pitt. “But Mike just kept getting stronger and stronger in spirit, and it carried through him physically.”

 Of course, I have a soft spot in my heart for Brecker, who – along with his trumpet-playing brother Randy, David Sanborn and Wayne Andre, served as the horn section on Bruce Springsteen’s original “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”, from Born to Run, which served as my introduction to the Brecker brothers.

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

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

Er, says who?

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

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

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

And why are those other places more prosperous?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT?

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

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

“MNob” at Norwegianity tries to turn my genuine, apolitical tribute the the late Nick Mancini into a political screed.

Oh, she fails, of course, because whenever MNob (or pretty much any other leftyblogger) wants to tangle with me on any subject she always fails, and always will. 

But on this topic MNob is…well, a bit thick, as the sage might say:

what the suddenly ethic-loving right wing fails to grasp is that Mancini’s is in the middle of the bluest neighborhood in the bluest city in the bluest state. 

“Suddenly ethnic-loving”.  Hah.  That’s funny, coming from someone as screechingly myopic as Ms. Nob.  Nobster:  I am demonstrably more ethnically eclectic, in terms of personal anscestry, experience and overall fluency, than you will ever be.  We can take that to the bank.

But it’s the “bluest neighborhood” thing that’s more “interesting”, where “interesting” in this case means “removed from reality in kind of a bizarre way”.  Nob – so what?  It’s my city.   Nick Mancini was a restauranteur – one who (unlike some hypothetical MNob-owned restaurant, presuming MNob is a better cook and entertainer than lawyer) leaves his politics at the door.

Which is what MNob should do with her rhetoric, since…

Dave Thune has his election parties there, and it’s safe to assume that those GOP faithful visiting are doing so as if venturing into some odd ethnic enclave.

…she’s wrong.  Tim Pawlenty, Norm Coleman, Phil Krinkie, Joe Soucheray, Randy Kelly, Jerry Blakey and all manner of non-DFL, non-“blue blue blue” politicians and media figures have turned up at Mancini’s over the years, for all the same reasons that Dave Thune does; because Nick Mancini welcomed everyone, and, unlike MNob, didn’t let politics overcome basic human character and decency.

It’s “safe to assume” that Republicans who go there think they’re on some sort of safari?  Jeez, someone’s been marinading her brain in the cliche bucket.

It’s the West End – the part of the city Mitch Berg has labeled the semi-gritty, somewhat downmarket West End of Saint Paul. It’s the real childhood home of Nick and Chris Coleman, although Mitch seems to want to forget that part. 

“Seems to forget it?”

No, MNob, I know that the Coleman brothers – children of one of Minnesota’s most powerful politicians, stepchildren of one of its most powerful publishers – wrap themselves in the West End’s blue-collar mien at every opportunity.  But since I was paying tribute to Nick Mancini, I figured it really didn’t contribute to the original story.  Her little snif is to be expected of someone who didn’t mention even one word about Coleman’s skill on the bagpipes.   

It’s racially integrated, has small houses, and has a whole host of functioning neighborhood groups and churches – social engineering at its worst!  It’s the home of the people who defeated the state-subsideized [sic] Gopher State Ethanol plant. It’s the neighborhood that figured out how to make sure that 35E will never ever have a speed limit of more than 45 miles per hour.

All of which I’m on the record as supporting the West Enders on, by the way, not that MNob would let anything get past her Impenetrable Wall of Stereotypes.

Like… 

And as much as Mitch and Erik Hare get along, Erik lives in Irvine Park, the snooty appendage to the real West End.

The lawyer is dinging on people for being snooty!

It’s the sort of neighborhood and restaurant the average Anti-Strib and Shot in the Dark reader holds a romanticized image of, but would never actually visit, and would likely get lost in if they tried. 

 So do us all a favor and stay in Minneapolis.  I’m sure there’s some corporate chain steak place you can visit without having your sensibilities offended by the genuineness of Mancini’s.

And I repeat: …not that MNob would let anything get past her Impenetrable Wall of Stereotypes.

I know nothing about MNob’s background – but since she never lets that stop her, I’ll feel free to fill in the blanks.  MNob – while adding zilch to the discussion about Mancini – has shown that like most preening, stereotype-sodden liberal city residents, she’s terribly insecure about what must certainly have been her privileged suburban upbringing (I’m guessing Plymouth), and about the simple fact that she’s less eclectic, less tolerant, and not nearly as good a feminist as I am. 

Dave Thune, by the way, is a fellow North Dakota expat.  Say “hi” from me, wouldja?

Never send a Nob do to a Wege’s job.