Smoking is now illegal in Minnesota bars, restaurants, and for all I know your basement.

Enjoy your transfats and alcohol while you can!

There’s a local radio personality who lives in the Midway, not all that far from my place.  I’ve known this personality off and on for quite a while.

I run into him periodically at one of the neighborhood coffee shops.  We exchange the usual pleasantries – it’s one of the fun things about having lived in one place as long as I have. 

Still, radio is a strange business.

It’s just weird, for example, running into a neighbor and saying “How’s the first trend of the ol’ summer book going?”

I’m amusing myself at the moment by pondering this question: How would Lori Sturdevant describe a leader among conservatives, one who was unswerving in his devotion to conservative first principles and in their forwarding in the Legislature?  Someone like, say, Michele Bachmann or Phil Krinkie were, when they were in the State Senate?  Or like Marty Seifert is today?  I’m guessing words like “divisive” and “extremist” would pop up.

Just a hunch.

Naturally – being a DFL hack in all but name – Sturdevant can be expected to provide the same treatement to their opposite numbers in the DFL – if you’re in opposite world. 

So she shows, in yesterday’s column featuring my “represenative”, Alice “The Phantom” Hausman:

When state Rep. Alice Hausman of St. Paul rises to speak on the House floor, I’ve noticed, chatter quiets and paper rustling stops. 

If the chatterers and rustlers live in District 66B, they’re probably amazed to see that she actually exists.  Hausmann is not known for returning phone calls, or for that matter being seen around the district, unless there’s a photo op.   

Bear in mind, most of what I know about the law, I learned from watching Law and Order. 

Which I freely admit isn’t a whole lot.  But, in at least one key respect, there’s a lesson or two in there that some parts of the American legal and law-enforcement systems could stand to assimilate.  In L’nO, often as not, thinking you’ve solved the case too early – based on “norms”/cliches, usually – is a “gotcha” that leads to mild, amused chagrin around the bottom of the hour. 

In real life, of course, it destroys lives, literally and figuratively.  It’s been in the news twice this past weekend.

Duke University finally apologized to the three lacrosse players in whose railroading they participated last year.  (No matter – everyone knew they were guilty, until, oops, they weren’t:

Duke University President Richard Brodhead apologized Saturday for not better supporting the men’s lacrosse team and their families after three players were falsely accused in last year’s highly publicized rape scandal.

Brodhead, speaking at the university’s law school, said he regretted Duke’s “failure to reach out” in a “time of extraordinary peril” after a woman accused three players of raping her at a March 2006 party thrown by the team.

“Given the complexities of this case, getting the communication right would never have been easy,” Brodhead said. “But the fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they were most in need of support. This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it and I apologize for it.”

Brodhead spoke at a school-sponsored forum on legal and ethical issues common to high-profile cases, and he received a standing ovation following his speech. He left afterward and school officials said he would not be available for further comment.

Well, after all, they were upper-middle-class white guys (mostly), and one had a record of being a jag.  That whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing doesn’t count for them, right?

And if that white guy looks like of like a redneck, well…:

A woman who spent more than a week trapped in the wreckage of her sport-utility vehicle has been upgraded to serious condition, a spokeswoman at Harborview Medical Center said Sunday…Her husband, Tom Rider, said Friday he was frustrated by the red tape he had to fight to get authorities to launch a search for his wife more than a week after she disappeared…When he couldn’t reach his wife, Rider said he called Bellevue police to report his wife missing.

Bellevue police took the report right away, but when they found video of Tanya Rider getting into her car after work, they told her husband the case was out of their jurisdiction and he should notify King County, he said.

Tom Rider said he tried that, but “the first operator I talked to on the first day I tried to report it flat denied to start a missing persons report because she didn’t meet the criteria,” he said…Thursday morning, detectives asked him to come in to sign for a search of phone records. They also asked him to take a polygraph test.

“By the time he was done explaining the polygraph test to me, the detective burst into the room with a cell phone map that had a circle on it,” Tom Rider said Friday. He said the detective started explaining the blip they had found and within minutes, news arrived that Tanya Rider had been found.

That’s right – shake down the husband before you look for the cell phone.  Because of course  the husband did it. 

The white guy always does it, doesn’t he?