…it’d be impossible to detest Garrison Keillor any more than I do.

Oops.  I was wrong.

…not a qualification either.

One of the least vulgar things he’s done…is Mick Jagger.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US military was faced with a challenge unlike any they’d faced, ever; how to root out and depose a government that was providing a safe haven for the terrorists that had launched the 9/11 attacks?

Attacking Afghanistan, the mountanous anarchic home of peoples who’d been warring with each other since the Stone Age, dominated by people who put the “war” in “warlord”, was a formidable challenge. In theory, it was all the more so given that in the previous decade the US military had downsized precipitously; of the eighteen ground combat divisions in service at the end of the Cold War scarcely a decade earlier, we were down to ten on 9/11.

Our response? The US Special Forces (the “Green Berets”) airdropped several detachments of soldiers – fewer than 100 men, initially – into Afghanistan, along with some CIA paramilitaries. Using their primary strengths – flexibility, cultural and language skills and a cultivated ability to think outside the box in life-and-death situations – they made contact with the Northern Alliance (the guerrillas, not the radio show), hatched a plan, and went on the offensive. Using weapons both bleeding-edge (laser designators for guiding bombs in from orbiting aircraft, GPS systems, radios) and timeless (exceptional fieldcraft skills, mastery of small-unit tactics, bravery), those 80-odd men, riding horseback, led the Northern Alliance to, over and after the Taliban, routing them to and out of their main strongholds, and toppling their government in weeks – sometimes by bringing in B1s to carpet-bomb Taliban attacks, sometimes leading the Northern Alliance by example, closing in and rooting the Taliban out themselves with rifles and grenades.

One of the keys to this stunning victory? The Special Forces operators had boundless power, right there on the scene. A Master Sergeant with a designator and a radio could call almost directly to the Air Force, orbiting high above in their F16s and B52s and AC130s (and yes, Fingers, the Navy and Marines in their FA18s as well) and get air support on the scene in moments. He did not have to file a request with his headquarters, to be bounced up through higher echelons of approval and then back down the Air Force’s chain of command, hours or days or weeks too late too do any good.

Robert Kaplan in Imperial Grunts, writing three years after the stunning victory, noted that the Special Forces’ approach was not unlike that of a good, bleeding-edge company that decentralized the power – and the decision-making and tools that enabled and supported that power – down and out through the organization. For the liberation of Afghanistan, the military did the unthinkable; pushed power downward from the Pentagon, down from CENTCOM, down from the higher-level headquarters in the ‘Stans, down to the three-man teams of Green Berets and their Air Controllers in the field; it short-circuited layers, and generations, of bureacracy, moving the decision loop down as close to the sergeants in the field, and the pilots in the air, as has ever been done.

Of course, decentralization is a hothouse flower even in lean, limber corporations; in the military – the most hidebound bureaucracy of all (and often for good reason), it was even more so. As the Taliban fell, “Big Army” came in, imposing the bureaucracy and chains of command and all manner of (to the Green Berets’ perspective, as related by Kaplan) impedimenta, including, most disastrously, requirements for multiple levels of approvals and accountability for every mission plan. This (say the Green Berets Kaplan interviewed) bogged down the pursuit of many of the Taliban and Al Quaeda hiding underground, leading us eventually to the situation we have today.

0f course, I’m not here to write about the liberation of Afghanistan. I’m writing about the Minnesota GOP.

But there’s a parallel dynamic at work, here. Empowered, motivated people with the right tools can do the impossible.
———-

The Minnesota GOP is all a-froth in the process of selecting a new chair and leadership. It’s getting ugly out there, with people bagging on the current leadership and their associates, and the current leadership bagging right back.

I’m not going to bag on personalities. This isn’t about personalities (yet). This is about structure.

The GOP is a very top-down organization. Everything from “message” to the tools of the job – databases, voter lists and the like – flow or are mandated from the national office, down through the states, and finally down to the BPOU level.

“Well,that’s as is should be”, the party apologist will say; “the people who show up and work for the party should have the final say on things”.

Which makes sense, sort of. But it also gives conventions from the Congressional District level on up a sense that delegates are spectators at the Central Committee’s event -that all the real decisions were made months before. And when you live in a district that hasn’t put any winners on the board in years, it’s not hard to think maybe it’s time for new decision-makers.

Which we got, to an extent, last spring, as the Ron Paul candidacy sent ripples of panic through the MNGOP leadership. Make no mistake – Ron Paul is a nutcase. But his followers – at least the ones that weren’t awash in 9/11 truthiness and rambling on about Trans-American Freeways for hours on end – brought something to GOP caucuses and convos that they’ve needed for years; the sense that parts of the event were unscripted. Time will tell if the Ronulans will stick around the caucuses. I hope they do – which isn’t to say I’m not going to try to talk them into keeping the libertarian-conservative principles, but ditching Paul himself.

The GOP, nationwide and in Minnesota, needs to learn from its mistakes, to decentralize its thinking, and most of all get better at doing its job.

It needs to reward initiative; it needs to seek out, reward, cultivate and channel ideas and energy that come from outside the party’s bureaucracy, rather than getting paranoid about them.

Being this state’s genuine big tent party, it needs to come up with a way to get its message out, without turning on and eating carriers of other messages. It needs to focus on the parts the party agrees on, rather than ripping itself to shreds over the things it doesn’t.

And on the other hand, I say this as a fire-breathing Reagan conservative; it’s time for conservatives to grow up and play the damn game. The Ron Paul phenomenon can teach us all one thing; for decades, Libertarians sat with their feet firmly in the clouds and declaimed from a position of absolute ideological purity. Finally, they wised up, got into the game, organized, played to their strengths (and the MNGOP’s weaknesses) and came withing a trice of taking over the party’s agenda. Minnesota’s conservatives did the opposite, turning out in droves for the state caucuses and getting Mitt Romney endorsed, but then taking their toys and going home. They were underwhelmed with John McCain, Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty; their fit of pique helped doom the party in the last eletion cycle, and weakened the state and the nation. And in so doing, Minnesota’s conservatives weakened themselves and their cause, making Minnesota conservatives look like flighty, temperamental prima-donnas. Gary Gross calls this pathology out in one of the most timely political posts of the year so far. Politics, down to the root of the word itself, is about compromise; the art is in making the compromise as favorable to you as possible.

The Minnesota GOP faces yet another difficult situation in the next two years. And it’s a battle we have to win, because the stakes are this state’s future and the well-being of the nation itself. The DFL is the party of instant gratification, of taxing and spending and the tyranny of institutional compassion. This state needs a viable opposition like Afghanistan needed dead Taliban.

And Minnesota Republicans should take courage – and knowledge – from that lesson; empowered, motivated people with the right tools can do the impossible.

What does that mean for the GOP? We’ll talk about that in the coming weeks.

[NOTE: While this blog is as a general rule an untrammeled free-speech zone, this particular comment thread is mainly for Republicans talking about the future of the GOP in Minnesota and elsewhere. Non-Republican posts, especially snarks, are likely to get lost down the memory hole. Non-Republican snarkers are a free as ever to romp and play elsewhere on this site; this thread is for the grownups.]

I’m taking bets on the over-under for liberal bloggers, pundits and media types that say Franken is “re-occupying the Wellstone seat”.

Allahpundit at Hot Air writes:

Angry clown certified as winner in Minnesota

Congrats, regular Shot In The Dark commenter Angryclown.  You’ve finally made the big time.

I think I’m going to be sick (again).

This just popped (or pooped-right AC?) into my Yahoo mail.

“wake up and unlock your own personal happiness in 2009”

All you gotta do is listen to Oprah on XM.

You first.

…I have nothing to say but this.

And “yawn”.

And 2010 will be the year the Bears go to the Super Bowl.

Wellstone, Dayton, Ventura now Franken.

Strange things keep happening in Minnesota, where the disputed recount in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken may be nearing a dubious outcome. Thanks to the machinations of Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and a meek state Canvassing Board, Mr. Franken may emerge as an illegitimate victor.

Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on “counting every vote” wants to shut the process down. He’s getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.

And that’s just politics, not to mention professional sports. At least in this case we can rightfully claim he’s not a Minnesotan.

Brian Lambert, on what he’d do if he were king.

I’ll hold off on jokes about “every liberal’s inner authoritarian” for now:

ONE: Restoration of The Fairness Doctrine. When The Fairness Doctrine was abandoned back in the last hours of the Reagan administration it took about a week before 500 dweebs who couldn’t get dates in high school decided they could become as rich as Rush Limbaugh just by telling misanthrophic nerds like themselves that liberals were the reason why they spent Friday nights playing Donkey Kong instead of making out with a cheerleader. In an instant the public airwaves were choked with enough ad hominem vitriol and persistent errors of fact to drive any self-respecting copy editor to alcohol-assisted suicide.

For starters: Way to avoid the “ad hominem vitrol”, Mr. “can’t get a date on Friday night”.
Second:  Condolences to the survivors of all of Lambert’s old copy editors; Limbaugh’s success cut down the number of people in the business.  They just made spectacularly more money at it.

At least, the ones that succeeded did.  That doesn’t include Lambert, who – unlike the whole conservative format – didn’t exactly connect in the market as a talk show host.  (Note to the copy editor who may not have known about Lambert’s past, and thus couldn’t pass it on to the audience; don’t do it.  Life’s still worth living).  [*]

The in-coming Obama administration has no interest in requiring people holding radio licenses to provide counter-arguments to the likes of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Jason Lewis, etc. (Perhaps because time and events have effectively marginalized that cast of characters to a still profitable-but-truly-dingbat core audience.) But as King, I order that each troll-kissing radio jock be required to defend his bumper sticker logic against a live, equally well-remunerated liberal for 15 minutes every hour. And we’re not talking Alan Colmes. Think more like Glenn Greenwald or Katrina vanden Heuvel across the desk from El Rushbo three times every show. Tell me that wouldn’t be fun? (And the King likes fun.)

Tell Glenn and ‘Trina to come on the NARN with us.  Or maybe drop by yourself sometime; you’ll be “remunerated” equally with Ed and I.

You can explain where there’s any shortage of opinion out there, among other things.

No, really.

Oh, it gets worse:

FIVE: A non-profit news consortium shall take control of Minnesota reporting and commentary functions. The King is busy with many other aspects of state — war-mongering and arranging marriages — otherwise he would act as a one-person consortium and make all significant news decisions. And he may yet. But first he will test a system whereby a modest state “information tax” is imposed to staff an organization at least the size of the Star Tribune circa 2004, with no fear of commercial penalties if they investigate the fortunes of local HMO tycoons, football team owners or close friends of any public official. Editorial control will rest in a rotating triumvirate of demonstrably talented journalists. We will begin with MinnPost publisher Joel Kramer, ex-City Pages editor Steve Perry and U of M prof Jane Kirtley.

So in other words, welfare for people who can’t make it in the real world.

No, Mr. Copy Editor!  Back away from the ledge!

SIX: MPR with jokes.  Whatever happened to intelligent satire? …But come on. Can’t we do better than fart jokes on morning drive radio? The King decrees a new radio format be foisted upon the vassals — “Some College Education Required News Talk … with Jokes”. Imagine if Kerri Miller were permitted to play with her guests, needle them and tease them to effect?

Good times.

Good times.

The kingdom will be a better more peaceful place for all this.

Just like  Ukraine  in 1933. (more…)

I wrote a pretty long, involved Part IV that summed up my case.

And went to the bathroom.

And then my son got on the computer and shut down the browser.  I had saved, naturally, nothing.

So I’ll conclude the story tomorrow.

Or perhaps something drunk disspates with too much money do out on Minnetonka.

But it’s actually a bit of vid from the British Marine Special Boat Service, which are sort of like Brit SEALs.

I think I saw a bumper sticker that said that works for the military. Maybe not.

Flush with riders, transit is short on money and options

Revenue from the sales tax on motor vehicles, which provides about 38 percent of the funding for Metro Transit’s bus operations, has plummeted as car sales slumped. State government, already plagued by a shortfall in the billions, isn’t in a great position to help ease a transit funding deficit estimated at $11 million for the current year and at $60 million for the next two-year budget period.

I have a novel idea. How about charging the people that use it a fare commensurate with the costs? You know, like real businesses do. One of two things will happen.

People will buy cars. Problem solved.

People will pay their share. Problem solved.

One remedy — raising fares by as much as 50 cents in 2009 — isn’t leaving anybody laughing. And it would fill only part of the gap.

How about a dollar then?

Habitat homes in big project built by Jimmy Carter and a raft of celebs are having trouble:

RESIDENTS of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day “blitz” organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.

Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.

A forthcoming legal battle over Fairway Oaks threatens the reputation of a charity envied for the calibre of its celebrity supporters, who range from Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to Colin Firth, Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter.

Actually, I’m not going to pile on Habitat; the right H4H project can be a very good thing.

But trying to make something worth other than what it’s intrinsically worth is a bad idea to start with; trying to do it on a large scale is like selling at a loss but trying to make up for it in volume.

Oops. Richardson is out.

WASHINGTON — Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for commerce secretary, withdrew from consideration for that job on Sunday, saying a pending investigation into whether his administration gave lucrative contracts to a political donor would have “forced an untenable delay” in his confirmation.

…and said his administration had “acted properly in all matters.” But he said he had concluded that the inquiry could last weeks or even months, drawing out his confirmation hearings and distracting the new administration as it grappled with the economic crisis.

Maybe he just wasn’t interested in the grappling.

It’s okay. He, like Obama, wasn’t qualified any way. He’s been a politician since he graduated from college. Commerce? He’s done none.

The investigation concerns CDR Financial Products Inc., a Beverly Hills, Calif., company that in 2004 was awarded two consulting contracts worth about $1.4 million to advise the State of New Mexico on a large bond issue for building infrastructure, one of Mr. Richardson’s initiatives. The company’s president, David Rubin, a major Democratic contributor, gave about $100,000 to two political action committees controlled by Mr. Richardson, as well as $10,000 to his re-election campaign in 2005, according to published reports.

Oh, well other than that transaction. Sounds like commerce.

…allegedly.

The announcement, just days before the Senate is to begin confirmation hearings for some of Mr. Obama’s cabinet selections, was a setback for the president-elect, who has assembled his cabinet in near-record time. It raises questions about the thoroughness of Mr. Richardson’s vetting, deprives the Obama administration of a prominent Hispanic — Mr. Obama has, however, named two other Latinos, Representative Hilda L. Solis of California and Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, to cabinet posts — and leaves a hole in the new White House economics team at a critical juncture.

Whatever happened to just picking the most qualified candidate for each position, whether they are Women, Men, Black, Red, White or Blue; Catholic or Jew; Pet Lover or Snappy Dresser?

Would America – no, not the media – the average American, actually give a rodent’s rear end? Are there teams? Are we all making sure we each get our guy (gal) in Obama’s cabinet? If so, then I’m pissed because I’ve heard no mention of an Irish-Italian making the cut.

We didn’t pick our President that way.

…or did we?

By the way, is Snappy Dresser still considered a protected class?

A couple weeks ago, I “attacked” a young lady who agreed to be interviewed and quoted by name in the StarTribune. She was objecting to health questions posed by her employer (who pays for some or all of her and her coworkers’ health insurance) regarding her personal habits.

She and her husband are on a rightful mission to repeal the Smoking Ban, a government intrusion on a slippery-slope and an infringement on the rights of hospitality-business owners and their patrons. But apparently they have confused the legitimacy of their cause with the burden that smoking and obesity, predominantly the products of personal choice and lifestyle, are to our health care system.

This is no small issue given the rising amplitude of liberal chatter to socialize our health care system, which would undoubtedly remove any elements of personal accountability.

Be not confused. The two issues are separate. Smoking is legal and smoking is conducive to poor health – for the smoker and her hapless bystanders. We all pay higher health care costs because of it.

Nonetheless, I don’t begrudge smokers’ personal choices nor business owners’ right to allow patrons to enjoy a perfectly legal activity in their establishments. But keep your smoke off my body, and don’t make me pay for your personal choice. An assertion not usually lost on liberals or conservatives.

As the system is organized, we’re all in this together which means the system has an interest in the degree you have chosen vis a vie your habits or lack thereof, to be a burden to it, statistically at least.

I drive fast and get more speeding tickets than most motorists. I don’t expect you to pay for my actuarial increment.

Let’s be clear on this too. The argument that tobacco taxes mitigate the incremental cost to society is naive. Look no further, all moneys collected by the biggest Ponzi scheme in history The Social Security Administration over the years are accumulating at interest for your retirement, too.

The Syllogism? Contrary to the logic “I’ve smoked three packs a day for eleventeen years and haven’t been hospitalized or died (yet),” ipso facto smoking isn’t bad for your health:

1. Among other issues, smoking causes heart attacks.

A smoking ban in one Colorado city led to a dramatic drop in heart attack hospitalizations within three years, a sign of just how serious a health threat secondhand smoke is, government researchers said Wednesday. The study, the longest-running of its kind, showed the rate of hospitalized cases dropped 41 percent in the three years after the ban of workplace smoking in Pueblo, Colo., took effect. There was no such drop in two neighboring areas, and researchers believe it’s a clear sign the ban was responsible.

The study suggests that secondhand smoke may be a terrible and under-recognized cause of heart attack deaths in this country, said one of its authors, Terry Pechacek of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At least eight earlier studies have linked smoking bans to decreased heart attacks, but none ran as long as three years. The new study looked at heart attack hospitalizations for three years following the July 1, 2003 enactment of Pueblo’s ban, and found declines as great or greater than those in earlier research.

2. Heart attacks are expensive. Billions are spent on devices and medications for the prevention and prevention of heart attacks.

3. We all pay for the aggregate expense as subscribers to group health insurance plans and via Medicare and Medicaid.

4. Hence, if I don’t smoke, and you do, the system is making me pay for your poor personal choices; the basis for my “attack.” That fact and the pressure of rising costs has incented health care providers and employers to rightfully seek to separate and quantify those who make good choices from those who don’t.

Because it’s fair. Because it’s good business. Risk classes should be separated and held accountable to the degree they are a burden to the system. Please don’t come crying to me if you’ve drawn the short straw by your own volition.

It’s an intrusion of your rights only to the extent that the way health care is delivered, via your employer, is also broken – so the system isn’t perfect.

…and if “We The People” don’t fix the system, the government will.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I’m going to be sick.

I just read Nick Coleman’s snarky satire on Zygi’s recent offer to the good people of Minnesota: Vikings Stadium As Economic Stimulus.

Minnesota is in trouble, with a $5 billion deficit staring us in the face and more red ink to follow. We can’t cut our way out of budget problems like that. We have to spend our way out. That’s where Zygi comes in. Thanks to Zygi, we are almost out of trouble already.

Billion dollar football stadium? What are you talking about? That ain’t no stadium. That’s a public works project.

…and I agree.

I’m going to go lay down now.

…the “War on Terror” would involve flying planes into Afghan skyscrapers.
…The “American Revolution” would have been restricted to raising illegal taxes on the Brits in 1775.

…The Union would have had to stick with bombarding Confederate forts.

…We’d have had to have just retaken Kuwait and leave Hussein in power to be deposed over a decade later (oops)

…We’d have had to have to restrict ourselves to torpedoing German ships throughout the World War II.

..We’d have had to have to bomb a Japanese harbor and go home.

“This town needs an enema”

Thanks for Ye Olde Photo Shoppe and the Quote Derek!

John Candy (God rest his soul) probably couldn’t have anticipated that world events would transform his 1995 film Canadian Bacon into a docu-drama.

Among the most unthinkable scenarios for most Americans is the unthinkable idea that the United States could become the disunited or turn into divided states. Even though this union accumulated very slowly in the first place, and against all odds — in other words it was not inevitable — the fact that the USA will not always be as united, or at least united in the way it is now, is considered, well… unthinkable.

But as Juan Enriquez notes in his amazing PopTech talk, based on his book “The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future”, no US president has ever died under the same flag that he was born under. That is, the borders of the United States has constantly shifted even in modern times. The last state was added in 1959 (after I was born!) and more could be added still. Americans are comfortable ADDING states, but it might not take much to subtract one. The outcome of the US Civil War has biased Americans to disbelieving in subtraction, but that might change.

In these scenarios, Minnesota becomes part of Canada, which of course we Minnesotans have known all along.

Right? 

The upside: The Canadians will put an end to all this outdoor stadium foolishness.

HT Althouse

…Kathy Griffin wasn’t this dumb:

“I said Israel will attack any boat carrying doctors and medical supplies,” Barr wrote on her blog, adding that, “Israel is a NAZI state. The Jewish Soul is being tortured in Israel.”[Roseanne Barr], who has courted controversy in the past, also condemned Israel’s counter-terror operation against Hamas, asserting that, “The destruction of the Jews in Israel has been assured with this inhuman attack on civilians in Gaza.

Am I the only one that finds it depressing that Roseanne Barr can still get headlines?

(Via Repurblican)

…so I watched a bit of Kathy Griffin and Anderson “Brillo Hair” Cooper’s New Years’ Eve show on CNN.

Now, Cooper is neither fish nor fowl as far as vacuous prettyboy talking heads-masquerading-as-journalists go. But I kinda felt sorry for him as I watched…

…because there’s a reason Kathy Griffin is on the “D” list.

“What a deeply obnoxious person”, I thought – knowing, of course, that that’s exactly why she was hired. She barged in on pretty much everything Cooper said – not that that made us miss anything, of course, because he was playing the straight man. But Griffin gives “classless and vulgar” a bad name, I thought, flipping the TV off after about five minutes.

Turns out I was right, and missed the “fun” part:

Comedienne Kathy Griffin may be doomed to life on CNN’s S-list after answering a heckler with a shrieking, vulgar tirade during the network’s live New Year’s Eve broadcast.”Screw you,” she told the heckler. “Why don’t you get a job, buddy? You know what? I don’t go to your job and knock the d- – – out of your mouth.”

[Joke about how “that’d explain a lot about the evening’s bookings” deleted for propriety’s sake].

The raunchy exchange, which occurred well after the ball dropped at midnight, was received with guffaws by the camera crew.

Hopefully it’ll be the start of Griffin’s voyage to the 2011 season of “Rock of Love” or “I Love New York”.

In a classic New Yorker cartoon, a couple of math professors are seen pondering a chalkboard. The right third of the chalkboard is covered with an impossibly complex equation. So is the left third. In the center, the other halves are joined together by a large logic cloud labelled “Insert Miracle Here”.

Even without Minnesota Public Radio’s threatened lawsuit for relief from the Central Corridor light rail line’s potential vibration and noise affects on their studio and production operations, the project’s “plan” seems highly dependent on inserted miracles.

On Tuesday, we talked about the subtleties of acoustic engineering. Today’s subject is the brawn and muscle of civil engineering, as well as the pointillistic wonkery of urban planning.

———-

The Central Corridor is intended to start in downtown Minneapolis’ Warehouse District, on the same tracks as the Ventura Trolley, rumbling down Fifth Street to the Metrodome area. There, it’ll split off from the Hiawatha, and rumble through the West Bank U of M campus to the Washington Avenue bridge, which a recent study showed would need massive remodeling to support the additional weight, and whose top, pedestrian deck has had lanes closed due to structural problems.

After the bridge, the train will roll up Washington through the heart of the East Bank campus – a stretch of street that will need to be rebuilt as a transit plaza, making car traffic through the heart of the U a sisyphean nightmare.

The train will exit the east end of the U on Washington, then turn up University. It’ll chug up the long hill through Prospect Park, cresting the hill near KSTP as it enters Saint Paul.

There’ll be stops every half-mile as the train rolls through the west Midway, a neighborhood that is part warehouse district and part business incubator (but which the long-range plans have slotted to turn into a high-density virtual third downtown of condos and mixed-use businesses).

The neighborhood becomes less tony, and the stops become more widely spaced than the trees, as the line moves into the heart of the Midway; the hardscrabble gray thirties-era small-business and housing blocks east of Prior. It’ll make a stop at Snelling – the Midway’s main street. And so will everything around the train; the intersection is already one of the busiest and most dangerous in the Twin Cities. Designed in the early horseless-carriage era, there are those that advocate levelling most of the buildings around the intersection – Midway Books, American Bank, parts of the thriving Midway Center – and building a traffic cloverleaf or half-cloverleaf, sacrificing some of the businesses that have led the Midway’s revival. For a train.

The train will demand more sacrifice as it glides east through the Midway’s tatty last mile and into Frogtown. Frogtown was a north-Minneapolis like catch-phrase for urban decay when I first drove down it, in October of 1985. While most of it will never get into Architectural Digest, the strip along Uni has undergone a revival as successive waves of Vietnamese and H’mong immigrants started new businesses along the street. It’s not always pretty, but it’s an industrious stretch of Uni, a monument to the spirit of the new Americans, and of the resilience and rugged beauty of capitalism. The construction process will gut these businesses like fish.

It’ll whish past the Capitol, and whip a noisy, creaking right down Robert Street.

And it’s there that the fun begins.

Once the train gets downtown, the intention for it to roll down Robert to the frontage road, then jog west to Cedar,where it’ll turn south and roll into downtown, including its fateful whoosh past the Taj Ma Kling.

Four blocks later, it’ll turn left – in the slow, creaking gradual way of “light rail” trains – onto Fourth Street. Unlike the smaller, slower, less “sexy” trolleys that might have been a better choice, has a pretty wide turning circle – wide enough that the line is going to have to demolish most of a block, between Fourth and Fifth, Cedar and Minnesota, to make the turn.

To be fair, the final six blocks to the Union Depot terminal are fairly problem-free.

So count up all the parts of the route that’ll need to be completely rebuilt. Count up all the parts of the route that are not currently rail routes (the technical term is “right of way”) that will need to be turned into right of way by a combination of buying and eminent-domain arm-twisting, which in the middle of a busy metro area is a process that is about as expensive as paving roads with ten dollar bills. Count up all the long stretches of busy street that will need to be shut down, torn up, widened, narrowed and rerouted.  Bear in mind that the Hiawatha Line is no guide on this; most of its right of way, the dismal straight shot down Hiawatha, was cleared for transit as early as the sixties.
Count up all the “insert miracle here” moments.

It’s called “transit planning”.

And solving the “miracles” is both mundane and hideously expensive.

———-

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we dipped a toe into the nuanced, subtle science of acoustic engineering, around which most of MPR’s complaints currently revolve; the overt noise and more-subtle acoustic rumbling of the trains past the front door of MPR’s Taj Ma Kling.

MPR has a suggestion – which swerves to engineering’s opposite extreme. They want the downtown leg of the Central Corridor re-routed:

Has MPR explored every possible way to make LRT work on Cedar Street? Has the City of Saint Paul?MPR has done everything possible to work cooperatively with the CCPO to identify and address our concerns. We have offered to work together with them to find an alternative route for these final blocks of the plan.MPR has spent years working with the CCPO to get accurate information about the project, how close the tracks would be to our building and the actual impact of the trains. That information has not been available until the last few months. Additionally, MPR has worked closely with the historic, 100-year-old Central Presbyterian and Saint Louis, King of France churches on how they can remain viable institutions faced with similar noise, vibration and access issues related to the project.

(Cheap Irony Alert: Central Presbyterian, MPR’s neighbor to the north, is where I learned to play the bagpipes.  For many years the church hosted the bagpipe band’s weekly practices. Now they’re complaining about noise. I digress).

The alternate routes they suggest on the website include Minnesota (in blue, below) and Robert (in green):

There are, of course, problems with both routes. Let’s start with engineering; we’ll work our way back out to urban planning.

One problem with “light rail” as opposed to trolleys and streetcars is that they are long in relation to their width. Which means, among other things, that they don’t turn corners well. The planned light rail line can not turn within any of the existing downtown streets. The currently-planned turn from Cedar onto Fourth Street will require tearing down the old Premiere Bank building at Fifth and Cedar (across from the Pioneer Press building) and basically turning most of the block from Cedar to Minnesota into a rail right of way. It’s not just tearing down buildings; there are utilities to move, infrastructure to relocate…
Which is fine; that’s part of any work in the big city.

But what about the other two routes – Minnesota and Robert?

We know that there’s a vacant bank at Fifth and Cedar. What about Minnesota and/or Robert?

To turn on Minnesota would involve going through the USBank Building (recently remodeled at exquisite expense) and/or the First Bank building (the classic moderne skyscraper with the big red flashing “1” on the roof).

In exchange for losing one of Saint Paul’s major landmarks, the Central Corridor will…:

• Still need to make the two turns by the Capitol – onto the frontage road and back south into downtown. Turns are expensive, slow, and eat up tons of space (as we’ve seen).
• Move the vibration to the other side of MPR’s block.
• Constrict Minnesota, a busy northbound one-way street, shunting traffic onto surrounding blocks.
• Leave the already-vacant space that is slated to be torn down to make way for the currently-planned route…still vacant.
• Do nothing to solve the urban-planning issue we’ll talk about below.

So how about Robert Street (yellow in the picture above)? Making that turn will require tearing down either the Endicott or the Pioneer Buildings, or both. These historic buildings, built in the late 1800s and classic examples of the architecture of the era, are two of downtown’s historic treasures, two of the last remnants of the city’s pre-Urban-Renewal past. In exchange for this, we get:

• A straighter route down from the capitol – faster and incrementally less expensive.
• However, it’ll clog the center of Robert Street, downtown’s only major two-way north-south street.
• Again, it’ll do nothing – even less than Minnesota – to fix the urban planning challenge below.

This doesn’t consider the less-visible challenges of either of these routes – the utilities that’ll need to be relocated, business that’ll need to be compensated and so on.

But let’s say that either of those sets of challenges are manageable. We know that MPR says they’d like either of these solutions. What about Saint Paul?

———-

As I noted on Tuesday, one of Saint Paul’s biggest hurdles as a city is dealing with the detritus of a number of government initiatives from the 1950’s. Urban Renewal’s list of crimes against Saint Paul is a long one:  the gutting of the Rondo, Midway and Dayton’s Bluff for I94, the devastation of the West End and North End for 35E are merely the most obvious.

Downtown Saint Paul’s specific Urban Renewal outbreak was called the “Capitol City” plan, a detailed vision written in the mid-late fifties for downtown that involved gutting most of the city’s old buildings Seventh south to Kellogg, from Wabasha all the way to Wabasha. The better part of twenty square blocks fell to the wrecking ball over the following thirty years. In place of the old, brick and mortar buildings, we got dismal monstrosities like the Alliance, USBank and Securian buildings; we got the airplane-hangar-like Dayton’s (now Macy’s). Worst of all, we got twenty square blocks of downtown where, if you were on foot or in your car, there was no there there. For block after block in downtown Saint Paul, there’s no reason to stop, get out of your car, shop, have a drink, eat, spend, date, live. It’s not an accident that the two parts of downtown that show any signs of life at all – the part of Uppertown west of Wabasha, from the Xcel Center up to Mickey’s Dining Car, and Lowertown’s old warehouse district, now mostly residential lofts and condos and slowly developing into an interesting neighborhood in its own right – are the parts that escaped the ravages of urban “renewal”.

And the worst part? Cedar.

From Seventh – just south of MPR’s studios – all the way to the river, Cedar is a desolate canyon. From the Wells Fargo Tower and Town Square – failed commercial and office developments – to the back side of Macy’s, there is not a single storefront on the street. Not one amenity to humanity. The only sign of life, really, is the little transit center, tucked next to Ecolab’s loading dock down by Fifth Street. Noplace to stop and grab a cup of coffee (unless you know there’s a skyway level food court, safely out of sight a floor above); no signs of any life that isn’t desperately trying to get elsewhere and fast (especially when the cold north wind sweeps down the dismal cement canyon). It’s a depressing cement gash in the heart of downtown.

At worst, bringing a train down the street will do no harm.

At best, redeveloping the street around the pedestrian traffic that the train should bring will give downtown something it desperately needs: a human-habitable link between the modestly-bustling Uppertown with its Pazzalunas and Chipotles and Fuji-yas, and the signs of human life breaking out in Lowertown.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t support government social engineering to change urban geography; Urban “renewal” should have taught us our lesson. However, if we’re committed to a project anyway, why not use it to help repair the damage of the last round of social engineering?

Moving the line to Minnesota is…:

• a throwaway: There’s no there there. Minnesota Street has few jobs, no retail destinations – it’s just something to get through, transit-wise. Indeed, transit stations are the strip’s only notable feature. It provides the city no useful payback for all the damage it’ll sustain.
• a net loss to the city: Tearing down the buildings that’d need to go to make the turn would serve only to leave another vacant, desolate block in a downtown that has too many as it is.
• a side-track, so to speak: Running the line down Minnesota does nothing to re-integrate downtown into a useful, habitable place.

So how about Robert? Leaving aside the engineering benefit of straightening the line, the route would have the same drawbacks as Minnesota, along with tearing down even more historic building stock and doing even less to fix downtown’s urban geography.

———-

As I noted on Wednesday, I think MPR has a case against the Central Corridor for the damage that the line could cause its operation at Seventh and Cedar. The costs of rerouting the lines as they suggest (I think it’s fair to say) would seem to so vastly outweigh the benefit to MPR as to be completely impractical.

So why even suggest it?

More Monday.

You just knew this was coming, didn’t you?

With the state and federal governments looking for ways to jump-start the economy, a New Jersey businessman has an ambitious public works project he says will create more than 5,500 jobs and provide $500 million or more to local contractors.The businessman is Zygi Wilf, principal owner of the Minnesota Vikings.

The project: A $954 million, state-of-the-art stadium for his football team in downtown Minneapolis — to be constructed using more than $635 million in public money.

“Why not? The Vikings are a public asset,” said Lester Bagley, the Vikings’ vice president in charge of stadium development. “This is going to create an economic boost

Of course, stadiums create no more of an economic boost than, say, light rail.

Kiiiiiiing?

Last year and the year before I posted looks back at the previous years’ big goals (I don’t do “resolutions”), just to do a quick gut-check.

Heck.  Why not?

(answers in blue):

1. The bike thing: Start earlier. Indeed, try to start biking to work this spring, before school lets out for the summer, and try to continue after school starts in the fall, to extend my biking season ideally from April through October. (Alternate option: gain a LOT of weight, so I can easily conceal an S&W Model 29 or an M1911A1 or something. Health vs. Firepower…firepower vs. health…oh, screw it, I’ll take the health). (I went with option A – and it was both very successful and a lot of fun!  Although I got started three weeks later than I wanted to; it was a cold spring, wasn’t it?  Not to say I’m not going to invest (or, perhaps, that I haven’t already) in a good biking carry rig – but I’m feeling much better in general)
2. That’s gonna involve the Great White Whale of my personal life; getting my kids to get up and reliably get their own butts to school in the morning. It’s going to take some work.  (Baby steps…)
3. Continue Bun’s great success in school. It’s been a huge, and gratifying, turnaround for her. (It went well!)
4. Get Zam to turn the corner. (Oh, what’s life without a few daunting, difficult-to-requite challenges?)
5. Work hard on enacting True North’s goals for the year – of which much more later.  (It was a very good year!v
6. Find the next step for the NARN, and take it. That mostly involves listening for that banging sound, and figuring it’s opportunity rather than just kids leaving bags of burning poop.  (It was a great year, and there are opportunities.  Who could ask more?)
   

So anyway – all the best to all of you!

For next year?

1. Build that patio.
2. Have my housewarming party – 16 years after I moved in.
3. Get biking by April 1 come hell, high water or deep snow.
4. Find a time, amid all the teenager-y tumult, to have a personal and social life again.

We’ll check back in a year or so…