Y’see, when I write:

And let’s be clear: Personal Rapid Transit seems to be a rather pie-in-the-sky proposal that’d crisscross cities with small rails for tiny, taxi-like rail cars whose destinations could be programmed for anywhere on the system, rather than shuttling back and forth on a single line.  It’s utterly un-tested, and it’s the kind of thing that draws all sorts of fawning resolutions at caucus-time demanding government support, and its cost estimates (which are usually about 10% those of light rail lines per rail mile) strike this tech/engineering industry hanger-on as hopelessly pollyannaish.

… and you write a piece asking “Is Mitch Berg A [Personal Rail Transit] Pod Person?”, then the informed, logical reader might well say “Wow.  You, gentle writer, are a vacuous bobblehead”.

Fortunately, your blog has no informed, logical readers, so you should be safe.

But thanks for your patronage – where “patronage” = “the never-ending shooting gallery of ineptitude you present”. 

That is all.

…what could be a better way to knock out a couple hours on Fathers Day Weekend than a trip to the Minnesota Street Rod Association’s  Back To The Fifties Weekend?

It’s an annual tradition in the Midway – and the Northern Alliance Radio Network will be there! 

Ed, King and I will be doing our annual “The Band Is Back Together” show from 11-1.  Ed and I will solo next from 1-3, with special guest James Lileks joining us during the show.  King Banaian will return for the Final Word at 3PM. 

Hope to see you there, literally or figuratively!

In seven plus years of blogging, I’ve noticed that it’s the times I undertake my most ambitious projects that the rest of my life – the day job, the kids – get the most crazy. 

So I’ve got a raft of notes for the final stretch run of my series on MN2020’s hit piece on charter schools – but I’ve had almost no time in the past week to bring it all home.  Hopefully this’ll be a nice relaxing weekend for the purpose.

Hah.  I slay me.  But I’ll git ‘er done, because it’s fascinating stuff.

So my favorite TV show of the past couple of years is USA’s Burn Notice.  Sharp, well-written, funny, Bruce Campbell being Bruce Campbell, and lots of interrogation techniques to use on teenagers.  Well worth the odd watch.  Indeed, since its season is whenever 24 isn’t on, it’s kinda my only real “appoitnment” TV these days.

But I have to wonder: there’s car crashes, car chases, enough running gun battles to make Dirty Harry blush with shame, pitched fights, Venezuelan commandos slipping in from the sea into a marina in full battle rattle, and explosions, explosions, explosions – and nobody in Miami calls the police.

But Michael Weston swims in from the sea, crosses the beach and runs into a hotel, and a full dragnet turns out?

As prediced: Govenor Pawlenty is going to unallot the budget to balance it – and the Dems are going to cry that police and fire protection will be chopped (even though they’re a small fraction of most city’s budgets). 

Speed Gibson is onto the scam:

Even on the normally more reliable KSTP-TV, yes the sky will be falling from police cutbacks, closed libraries, neglected parks, and of course, unavoidable property tax increases. All from the loss of a very small cuts in Local Government Aid (LGA).

“I don’t need any lecture from Tim Pawlenty on how to run a budget,” says Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak. Yes, you do, Your Honor. Police protection, your number one obligation, is less than 10 percent of your budget. The Fire Department costs less than half of that. To even hint at cutbacks in these areas solely on the basis of LGA not being what you want is nothing short of a lie. But of course, nobody in the newsrooms will likely call you or any other mayor on this.

I’m going to have to take a look at the cuts Saint Paul’s budget can absorb without hurting police and fire protection.  I’m suspecting it’s “lots”. 

When Minnesota’s liberals aren’t trying to scare you into submission on their tax and spend plans, the apparent SOP is to riffle down through shame, ridicule and, presumably, chanting. 

Aaron Brown of “Minnesota Brown” issues what could almost be a parody of all of these approaches in a post this morning. 

Just to make it fun, we’re going to call out (with emphasis and, er, more) the standard-issue cliches that you can espect to see every liberal and media figure trot out every time the budget is discussed.  Be watching for them.

Yesterday, in a fiery press conference Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced his unilateral solution to the budget debate he was unwilling to negotiate during the legislative session.

Uh-oh!

“Unwilling to negotiate”? 

Well, that’s a way of putting it.  “Using the one tool he has when facing a two-chamber political disadvantage” would be more accurate.

Yay, executive power! Good luck in ’12, bub. But the outcome is devastating and the governor and his allies are unwilling to admit the role they’ve played in trying to turn Minnesota into a cold weather Mississippi.

That’s another of those “Scare” lines that the lefties throw at you to try to get you to cough up taxes, frightened by visions of roach-infested sheds and kudzu growing on school desks. 

Of course, Mississippi’s problems have much less to do with money than with a society that for three centuries was built on slavery (of blacks) and systematic disempowerment (of lower-class whites) run by a pseudo-aristocracy (the plantation owners before the war, and their descendents for most of the time since) that created a culture where people don’t do a lot to better themselves and stay in school and improve their communities because, really, what’s the point? 

This is in comparison with Minnesota’s industrious, cantankerous, Calvinist Scandinavian and Germans.  And, for that matter, the Dakotas’ and Nebraska’s and Montana’s cantankerous, Calvinist Scandinavian and Germans; all of those states have built well-governed, high-functioning (if low-tax and mostly lower-“service”) states, just as Minnesota did – only without the collective mythology of “high taxes are what make us special!” that’s plagued Minnesota.

You could tax Mississippi at Minnesota levels for a hundred years, and it’d still be…a warm, muggy, bug-infested Mississippi.  You could cut Minnesota’s taxes to Mississippi levels, and it’d be…

…well, a state full of hard-working people, and a bunch of whiny DFLers.

Brown:

The governor is a pleasant fellow. I’ve met him and, on paper, I can follow his policy goals from point A to point B. But his perspective on the role of government is from another universe, a closed universe that doesn’t reflect the Minnesota than most voters have supported over the last several decades.

Yes, since Gov. Pawlenty took office his policies have been rejected in three consecutive legislative elections.

Like we couldn’t see this coming:

No, Mr. Brown.  If his policies had been rejected, he’d have gone back into private legal practice in 2006.  Furthermore, voters rejected mushy, republican-in-name-only hamsters who donned the “R” label but voted like…I was going to say Democrats, and that’s accurate, but the real answer is “voted like the national GOP, who spent eight years voting like Tip O’Neil-era Democrats”. 

If voters had “rejected Pawlenty’s policies”, they’d have rejected Pawlenty.

Let the record show; they did not.

What Minnesotans seemed to be suggesting in their last three electoral choices is balance. Needed services funded. Efficiencies and budget cuts sought. Taxes made as fair as possible for all Minnesotans.

Needed services are funded; show me a city without police and fire protection, and you might have a point.  Efficiencies – like privatizing less-essential government services – are actively rejected at all levels.  Money is spent on light-rail boondoggles as cities whinge about being short of money.   

The governor is responsible for all Minnesotans — including that majority that didn’t vote for him or his policies in any of the last three elections.

While that’s literally true, it’s also a matter of interpretation.  But please, Mr. Brown, run with that theory; please have a word with Betty McCollum and Chris Coleman and Ellen Anderson and Alice “the Phantom” Hausman; while they “represent” the 30-40% of their districts that vote Republican, their voting records are not 30-40% conservative. 

Are you willing to put your beef where your moo is?

Tuesday, friends of mine rallied on the Iron Range for the theater program at Hibbing Community College. (Photo: Hibbing Daily Tribune). The program’s full time director is leaving and the college, because of unallotment cuts that are worse than the cuts they had already planned for, is not replacing him. This theater program might sound like a throw-away thing to many who live where there are plenty of theater options, but for the Iron Range HCC’s theater represented a flagship of quality artistic expression. And it — like advanced courses in most of our schools, care for our elderly and more — are out the door not through negotiation, but through a decree.

Sorry to hear that.  As a guy from a small town who had enough credits for a theatre minor (but all performance and technical, not academic), that’s gotta suck.

But the question, when times are tough, is “what is essential“.  Hibbing’s theatre program may not be a “throwaway”, but is it “essential?”  Essenntial as healthcare, fire protection, police, roads? 

Go ahead and make that case.  Or better yet, take up a collection and keep the guy in his job. 

For me and the many others who are trying to promote a better quality of life for the people of the Iron Range (or the people of any other forgotten corner of the diverse geography of Minnesota) these cuts aren’t just bean counting, they seem personal.

But they’re not.  They are bean-counting.  Because if we took everyone’s “personal” priorities into account when setting up a state budget, everyone else would be taxed at 100%.

They will damage our communities for decades and possibly longer. They will retard our growth and prosperity while the wealthy parts of the state get another pass, again.

So question, Aaron Brown:  what level of spending – and taxing the rest of the state – will it take to make the Iron Range prosperous?  Bearing in mind that the Range has had preferential tax treatment and received immense subsidies for a solid generation now – what exactly is the price tag?

Something like the price tag for eradicating inner-city poverty and improving public education?

No, that was me talking.  Never mind.

Posting will be VERY light until this afternoon.

Yep.  One of those days.

SCENE:  At a sleazy bar in a newly-gentrified part of Northeast Minneapolis.  Music is playing on a jukebox, from which everything but the Indigo Girls and Sting have been removed.  A group of people – “Phoenix”, “Wege”, “Spotty”, “Aaron”, “Two Putt”, “MNob”, Jeff and “Blue Man” – sit, drinking organic beer.  One of them reads a tabloid newspaper.

BLUE MAN: “Hey, look at this!”

Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.

TWO PUTT: “HOLY CRAP!”

PHOENIX: “OMGz!  What a bunch of fascists!”

JEFF:  “Er guys?”

WEGE: “Let’s think this over.  MNob – can you do some lawyer stuff?”

MNOB: “I’ll demand a summary judgment!”

BARTENDER:  “You can’t.  The judge has already ruled.

SPOTTY: “Demand it again!”

[Some of them rise from their seats]

BLUE MAN (continues):

In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name

SPOTTY: “So in other words, bloggers who blog anonymously aren’t protocted any more?”

AARON: “Oh, my, god…”

JEFF: “Er, Aaron?  Technically, “Aaron Landy” actually IS your name”

AARON: “I hate you”

WEGE: “Let’s run for it!”

[TWO PUTT, MNOB, SPOTTY and AARON jump up and run from the room]

BLUE MAN: “Wait – isn’t this in England?”

PHOENIX: “It doesn’t matter; their court decisions should supercede ours!”

[All of them leave the room at a dead run]

And…scene.

We’ve visited this topic before; for the past forty years or so, when outstate Minnesota was lagging and the Twin Cities were booming, Minnesota’s government instituted “Local Government Aid”, which essentially subsidized the growth of the rest of the state.  This coincided with a period where Minnesota Republicans, like Republicans nationwide, were very different from the post-1980 Republicans that most of us came to know, and with a period of time when Minnesota – blessed with immense natural resources and brain power, would very likely have boomed anyway.  This period was dubbed “The Minnesota Miracle” by Time Magazine, and it spawned the most noxious myth in the history of Minnesota politics; that Minnesota’s prosperity was a function of Republicans “cooperating” (read: acquiescing without question) with the DFL, a myth that still drives much partisan rhetoric in Minnesota.

And it still drives it, even though the dynamics have changed almost beyond recognition in the past forty years.  A generation of DFL social canoodling have left the Twin Cities short on revenue (“despite” some of the most confiscatory commercial property taxes in the country) and very, very long on spending; for a generation, the DFL has used the urban core as a warehouse for the poor, with all the spending that it causes and, (not very) arguably, attracts.  “LGA” has become a subsidy of the Twin Cities metro by the parts of the state that actually pay their way.

Governor Pawlenty has now followed through on the promise of his veto of the DFL’s attempt to crash a porkfest tax and spend plan through the legislature.  He’s cutting 2.7 billion dollars from the state budget.

Expect the usual yelping from the usual suspects. 

Bob Collins at MPR’s News Cut notes an opening salvo:

On MPR’s Midday this afternoon, Rep. Loren Solberg predicted massive property tax increases because of Gov. Pawlenty’s “unallotment.”

Only if the cities and their elected governments can convince the people that every blessed nickel that they spend is essential.  Oh, no doubt they’ll ram the tax increases through; Saint Paul’s city council still has two years before they face re-election, so they no doubt feel pretty safe, although Mayor Coleman is up for re-election this year. 

But here’s the interesting part:  Bob Colins asks:

How familiar are you with how your city spends tax money? What would you be willing to do without if you were given a choice?

Oh, where to start?

With a hearty nod to regular commenter “Nate”, who left a long list of ideas on a previous posting on the subject (thanks Nate!), I’ll start a list up, speaking in this case for my city, Saint Paul:

• Privatize snow plowing.
• Lose the refrigerated outdoor hockey rinks.  This is a cold city.  We don’t need to refrigerate ice.
• Dump all the STAR program arts grants.  A real artist does it for the love of the art.
• Cut all vacant building enforcement and a good chunk of non-essential Code activity
• Cut all funding for neighborhood councils
• Cut all funding for economic development – HRA and the Port Authority; if they were doing a decent job, we wouldn’t have this problem anyway
• Axe most of licensing and inspection
• Dump most of the Mayor and Council staff (the Mayor has 24 aides, most of them with assistants)
• Sell off all of the City-owned golf courses (all three of ’em!);
• Cut all parks-and-recreation programs and park improvements;
  meter maids;
• Cut or privatize the convention bureau; the local hospitality and events business can run their own operation.
• Slash all money going to support the Central Corridor. 
• Dump the Youth Job Corps; if there’s a need for working youth, employers can fund it; if there’s not, well, looking for work in tough times is one of life’s essential skills.
• Dump every committee, board and commission and all their staff from the Advisory Committee on Aging through the Fair Carousel Board to the Truth in Housing Board of Evaluators.
• Start charging at least a nominal fee to attend Como Zoo; it doesn’t have to be much, but during the fiscal crisis, every little bit helps.
• Remove the costly. wasteful and excessive security at city and county offices. This would have the salutary effect of making city/county workers a lot more circumspect in their demands on the citizenry. That could only be a good thing.

I stress, as did Nate in the original comment, that none of these reflects on the value of any of these programs; merely the need for the city to fund them at all costs at a time when the city’s tax base is heading south faster than Tommy Lee Jones’ career bell curve and people are feeling justifiably insecure about their place in the economy.  Perhaps when the crisis passes, the people of Saint Paul will decide they really do want to fund all of these programs.  And perhaps they will not. 

But “when the crisis passes” is the operative phrase.

What do you think?

On my IPod just now:

1. Bruce Springsteens’ “Backstreets”, perhaps the greatest bittersweet angrysweet breakup song of all time (…”when the breakdown hit at midnight, there was nothing left to say/but I hated him, and I hated you when you went away…”), immediately followed by
2. Stevie Wonder’s “I Believe” (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever), perhaps the best song about faith in the idea of romance ever.

Fifteen rounds, come out at the bell.

Don’t forget: a week from Sunday is the Twin Cities’ “Gun Rights Gathering”, at the picnic area by the Lake Harriett Bandshell.

It runs from 11AM-ish until mid-afternoon.  It’s open-carry optional.

Here’s the flyer [ALERT: PDF FILE! Although it’s a small one]
I wrote about last years’ event, which drew dozens and dozens of Twin Cities Second Amendment activists and, more importantly, just plain folks for a gorgeous afternoon of food, fun, conversation and…well, nothing else.  Forty-odd citizens, many of ’em armed, and not a single incident; no road rage run amok, no shootouts, not even a self-defense shooting…

…but I digress.  I’ll see you there!

I’ve gotten in a few good interviews with people at charter schools, advocates, and some state legislators.  I’ve got a TON of stuff to cobble together into a few more good posts ont he subject.  And while I’m normally a very fast writer when it comes to dashing off these little screeds of mine, when I’m trying to get sources and facts and quotes straight, I am a tad more deliberate.

I also wrote a condensed (very condensed) version of this series for the St. Paul Legal Ledger, which should be coming out fairly shortly; I’ll keep you posted.

I hope to have the next part of the Charter series out tomorrow; otherwise, Friday.

Conrad DeFiebre is not one of the bad ones, as a general rule, as far as media types are concerned.  While he was a Strib writer for about 600 years, he was also one of the reporters that could tell a balanced, fair story.  He was the first reporter from either of the dailes (to say nothing the TV statiosn) to be bothered with reporting the actual facts on the Concealed Carry debate back in the nineties.  For that, I’ve personally given credit where it was due, not that anyone cares.

Long story short:  He’s always been a good reporter.

But these days he works for MN2020, the regional “non-partisan” “progressive” think tank.  Which is apropos not much, except that for someone whose gig has been telling entire, complete stories for his entire career, he kinda, well, doesn’t.

His latest piece is called “Conservatives “Re-Writing History”

; I’ll direct you to read the piece to find any examples of history at all, much less conservatives “re-writing” it.

Opposition to modern transit development may be on the wane in most parts of Minnesota,

“May” it be?  Well, I guess we have to take Mr. DeFiebre’s word for it.  Perhaps he knows of a Minnesota Poll on the subject?

but it’s alive and well in one surprising location: The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.

“Light rail is an expensive investment without return except as an exercise in chest-thumping to make a city feel like it’s in the big leagues.”

That’s a quote from Lyle Wray, former Citizens League executive director, posted in big letters in the history center’s long-running transportation exhibit “Going Places: The Mystique of Mobility.” It enjoys equal billing with more mildly-worded praise of light rail in the display’s vintage Soo Line boxcar.

OK, so we have a qualitative judgment about the “mildness” or, I dunno, “spiciness” of wording?

I’ll let that pass.

What’s worse, an accompanying video clip features half a dozen anti-light rail comments, some from anonymous on-the-street interviewees, some from inveterate transit bashers at the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.

Er – so what?  Isn’t it refreshing that the Minnesota History Center,noted conservative tools that they are (note to non-Minnesotans: they are not; they are more given to hagiographic treatment of old labor and Farmor/Labor Party organizers) actually presents both sides of a story?

Does MN2020 have a problem with that?

Oh,wait.

I digress.  My question:  Where is history, and its conservative re-write?

Worse yet, the exhibit also includes plenty of promotion of personal rapid transit, a thoroughly failed technology that has been embraced by both the rabid right and the lunatic left, mainly as a foil to responsible transit proposals.

“Rabid”?  “Lunatic?”  Such invective from a…reporter?  Why, it’s almost as if DeFiebre is getting talking points from…someone with an ax to grind?
And let’s be clear: Personal Rapid Transit seems to be a rather pie-in-the-sky proposal that’d crisscross cities with small rails for tiny, taxi-like rail cars whose destinations could be programmed for anywhere on the system, rather than shuttling back and forth on a single line.  It’s utterly un-tested, and it’s the kind of thing that draws all sorts of fawning resolutions at caucus-time demanding government support, and its cost estimates (which are usually about 10% those of light rail lines per rail mile) strike this tech/engineering industry hanger-on as hopelessly pollyannaish.

But “Thoroughly failed?”  It can not “thorougly fail” unless it’s been “thorougly tested”.

But that kind of invective on an utterly speculative subject like PRT?  Why that can only mean one thing:

Minneapolis artist, activist and blogger Ken Avidor tipped me off…

[scraaaaatch]

Ken “Avidor” Weiner is indeed a blogger.  He’s an “artist” of sorts as well – the only “cartoonist” in the Twin Cities less talented that Swiftee.  But he’s indeed an “activist” for light rail; so active, indeed, that he felt he needed at least two of him.

Note to Conrad DeFiebre: you might wanna pick better sources for this stuff.  Not that “Sources” matter so much in your new career – clearly John Fitzgerald is mushy on the subject – but still.

But yet again, I digress.

The post is a puff piece about the wonders of light rail, and how short-sheeted they allegedly are in the MHS presenation on the subject.

So where is the the ballyhooed “conservative rewrite of history?”  It’s the present.  And the issue of “is light rail a boon or a doggle” is very, very Very, VERY, VERY much in the balance.

Because even if oil runs out tomorrow, the free market will have developed a hydrogen-powered car (the ultimate Personal Rapid Transit) and a network of nuclear powered hydro stations long before government will have built rails to haul the gray, lumpen hordes of proles about.

Does anyone know of a way to send financial help to the dissidents in Iran?  Back in 1980, Solidarnosc took donations (and I got one of the cool T-shirts out of the deal).

Anything like that today?

…because President Obama conveniently failed to say “Americans.” In the spirit of creating crises that ostensibly only larger government can solve…as long as we’re counting the “uninsured”…I know there are a great many other living beings that aren’t insured too.

The administration uses the “46 million uninsured” as a reason to nationalize health care. But the Census Bureau says about a fifth of those aren’t U.S. citizens. In fact, a goodly number are illegal aliens.

According to “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” a Census Bureau report published last August, of the 45.6 million persons in the U.S. that did not have health insurance at some point in 2007, 9.7 million, or about 21%, were not U.S. citizens.

“Being uninsured is a transitory state, since most uninsured Americans [emphasis mine-JR] are only without coverage for a short time.”…only 19 million Americans go without insurance for a full year.

If we work real hard, enlist our nation’s Neighborhood Organizers^®, and count house pets for example, we might find close to “100 Million Uninsured” if we discretely drop the “people” moniker altogether.

Subtract noncitizens and those who can afford their own insurance but choose not to purchase it, and the number of uninsured falls dramatically. “Many Americans are uninsured by choice,”

…but what about house plants! People talk to their plants, which means they have feelings, which means they suffer, which means they have a right to access affordable health care. Since most plants don’t have legs, we need to provide transportation as well.

Now we’ve got ourselves a crisis!…that only government can solve!

“Conventional Wisdom” among anti-bicycling conservatives is that as the number of bikers rises (as it has been steadily for some time, which accelerates as gas prices rise), the carnage on the road rises with it.

Not, apparently, so, according to Quimby:

…as bicycle ridership has increased in New York City, the absolute number of bike injuries and fatalities has dropped.

That means the rate of accidents has dropped from roughly 4,000 annual casualties per 80,000 daily riders to well under 3,000 per 160,000 riders — about a three-fold improvement.

Which I’d suspected would happen, but this is the first empirical evidence I’ve seen.  It’d be even more interesting to break that into accidents per rider mile – since I’d suspect as the number of bikers doubles due to gas prices, the lengths of their trips do as well.

The most interesting thing to look at of all, though?  I started looking at this a few weeks ago, but haven’t had time to follow through:  Compare the number of person/years lost to bike fatalities to the number of person-years gained by previous non-riders getting into better shape from the exercise they get from biking.

Example:  Say in a typical year (1992, in this case) 459 cyclists above the age of 20 died in bike/vehicle accidents (we’ll discount children, since they’re not likely to be commuting or biking for fitness).

Let’s break ’em down by age group:

Now, let’s figure how much life expectancy was lost (taking the US average life expectancy of 78 years  and the average age in each bracket (let’s assume that the years spread evenly in each age bracket; there’ll be as many below the midrange of each bracket as above it) to figure the total person/years lost.

The result?  Bike accidents claim 15174.4 person/years (using the figures above).  A ghastly toll?  Certainly.

But what do we gain from having thousands more people being in better – much better – physical condition?  Say, having a bunch of formerly-sedentary mid-forty-something suddenly getting into the best shape of their lives?  Or a bunch of twentysomethings go through their lives never falling out of shape in the first place, since biking is, along with swimming, the the most sustainable form of exercise (and a lot less likely to bore you to death than swimming)

How many person-years do we gain?

Let’s extrapolate from New Yorks’ numbers: growing from 80,000 to 160,000 bikers out of a population of 12,000,000 extrapolates a rise from 2 million to 4 million bikers nationwide; let’s arbitrarily lop those numbers in half, just to be very (what else) conservative and allow for those who live where biking just isn’t tenable (say, people who commute 60 miles to work, or farmers, the handicapped, everyone), and say that the American recreational, fitness and/or commuting biking population has risen from 1 to 2 million in recent years.

Thirty minutes of (aerobic) exercise a day adds four years to life expectancy compared to sedentary people.

So let’s say that one percent of those two million bikers rides half an hour a day (which, by the way, I do): it’s a hopelessly-low 20,000 – which translates to 80,000 person/years of life expectancy added.  Ten percent (200,000 daily riders, 800,000 person/years) seems on the high side of plausible; let’s split the difference, say 100,000 Americans, like myself, ride at least five days a week for at least half an hour a day.  That’s 400,000 person/years added to life expectancy (using a formula that fudges sharply toward the conservative),

But even if you take the lowest feasible figures it’s a 6-1 skunking: Biking saves 80,000 person/years to 15,000 lost to accidents, even if we take comically-low numbers, 30-or-more to one otherwise.

Some biking critics say (chant, really, more as an autonomic response than a considered position) that biking is a “dangerous hobby”.  But when you look at actual numbers, it seems that not biking is the risky frippery.

SCENE: A Very Special  Place.  Four people – two women (GRACE and “PHOENIX”) and two men (TOM and BIFF) – are sitting around a table.

GRACE:  “God, I hate George W. Bush”.

PHOENIX: “Me too”

TOM: “Me too,too”.

BIFF: “You do know that he’s not President anymore.  Right?”

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: “Never mind”.

[The four people peck away at keyboards]

PHOENIX: “Wanna see what I wrote about the elections in Iran and the dirty neocon plot?”

THE OTHER THREE: “Sure”

PHOENIX (reads aloud):

“the neoconservatives and their allies in the news media were already hammering away at [the notion that negotiating with an illegitimate government is impossible] within minutes of the announced results.

“However, the fact that there are massive opposition-led protests and that the opposition is quite Westernized-looking — as our TV networks have been showing us over the past twenty-four hours — works against the neocon plan to garner American support for nuking Iran until it glows. The neocons want us to think of the Iranians as subhumans with whom we have nothing in common and who therefore deserve a fiery death. It’s actually harder for them to sell that POV when our TV screens are showing us people who would not look at all out of place in any American town or city.”

GRACE: “Yaaaaay!  When the world finds out the Neocon Air Force is going to nuke Iran, just like they nuked the World Trade Center…”

TOM and PHOENIX: “Hisssssss!”

BIFF: “Er, there is no “neocon air force”.

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: “I mean, if the “neocons” were going to nuke Iran, wouldn’t they have done it when they, y’know, had power?”

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: “For that matter, I’m not aware of a “neocon” policy on Iran – Bush certainly had none – other than Michael Ledeen’s.  And Ledeen’s ideas involved peaceful destabilization of the mullahs by supporting the trade unions and other peaceful dissident groups, in recognition of the fact that a good majority of Iran’s people would be happy to rejoin the west and lay off the damn theocracy.

GRACE, PHOENIX and TOM: (stare uncomprehendingly)

BIFF: Stop me if I’m wrong, but I’m at a loss to think of a single credible “neocon” who’s advocated “nuking” a largely friendly country because of the mullahs.

TOM:  “Why do you hate the troops?”

GRACE: “CHIMPY!  CHiMPY MCBUSHITLER!”

NURSE RATCHED [opens window and yells]: “OK, everyone…”

PHOENIX [turns]: “Nurse Ratched! Biff is being naughty!”

RATCHED: “that’s nice, Phoenix.  Time for your meds”.

[The four stand up and get in line at the window]

[AND…SCENE]

Joe Biden opens his mouth and out comes humor, drivel or drool.

“Everyone guessed wrong,” Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday, on the impact of stimulus legislation.

Not everyone. And by the way, they weren’t guessing – they were siezing an opportunity to not unwaste a crisis and transport America quickly to the left under the cover fire of Obama’s Doom and Gloom speech.

Some 330 economists signed a statement last winter saying that President Obama’s claim — that “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy” — simply “is not true.”

The economists were not crackpots but respected scholars, including Nobelists James Buchanan, Vernon Smith and Edward Prescott, as well as Reagan Office and Management of Budget Director James Miller, Walter Williams and John Lott.

Also opposed to the stimulus are the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and a core of U.S. representatives and senators, too small unfortunately to change the outcome, who saw through the smoke and weren’t fooled by the mirrors.

The result is now a soon-to-be total debt per American household of several hundred thousand dollars, the result of which will soon weigh heavily on the shoulders of liberal Democrats and our facist President when Republicans ask in 2012 “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

David Letterman did the unthinkable.

Apologized for a really inappropriate joke.

“As they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s not a very good joke,” he said. “I take full blame for that.”

“I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed,” he said.

“So, I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke,” Letterman said. “I’m sorry about it and I’ll try to do better in the future.

Nearly unprecedented I reckon.

Then again, it’s sort of like your buddy apologizing for passing gas on a road trip in the winter. You hear the apology and all but your eyes are still burning and watering for miles.

While I watch little television, especially that late at night, I have watched enough Letterman over the years to classify it as the high-fructose corn syrup of the medium.

David Letterman really has no nutritional value either.

Letterman’s joke…

…that (Sarah) Palin’s “daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” at a recent Yankees game, still insisted he was referring to Palin’s 18-year-old, Bristol, who gave birth to a boy in December, and not her 14-year-old, Willow.

…wasn’t funny, but given the source it really wasn’t surprising.

Or relevant.

What is interesting is that David Letterman, in apologizing, forwent a potential Donald Trump v. Rosie O’Donnell-esque battle that would have most assuredly been a ratings boon for Letterman, who is reportedly already beating upstart Tonight Show host Conan O’Somethingorother in the ratings.

Then again, maybe it isn’t really all that interesting and I should go to sleep now.

Sorry I wasted your time.

A “progressive” propaganda website that’s spent the past three years shamelessly shilling for DFL politicians, reports not taking any backlash over its indirect ideological ties to the “Holodomor“, or Soviet-induced starvation of seven million Ukrainians in the 1930’s.

“Really, it’s been sixty years since the American left cuddled up to Stalin” reports Chris Steller, spokesbeing for the Minnesoros “Independent”, struggling to dissociate himself and the publication from the forced expropriations of food and destruction of crops and farmland, and mass-relocations of civilians to Siberia, that led to the slow, painful starvation of seven million human beings.  “Hubert Humphrey drove the Stalinists out of the DFL in 1976″, he added, ignoring the fact that he, as a member of the media, shares culpability with Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter that willfully suppressed details of Stalin’s atrocities.

Stellers also denies any backlash from his publication’s ideological comity with the Minnesota DFL, of which former Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah was a member while hiding out for twenty years in Saint Paul.  Soliah was recently released from prison after serving a sentence for complicity in a murder carried out during a botched bank robbery in the seventies, about which Steller also claims ignorance.

———-

Stupid, right?

Well, at least my bit is fictional.  Chris Steller at the “Independent” gave us the real thing.

An “End the Fed” group that will rally this afternoon outside the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank hasn’t felt a backlash since Wednesday’s arrest of James von Brunn in the fatal shooting of a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Von Brunn, who mixed anti-Semitism with antipathy for the Federal Reserve, served six years in prison for his 1981 attempt to take Federal Reserve board members captive.

Conservative Web outlets with whom von Brunn consorted quickly moved to dissociate themselves from the 88-year-old white supremacist after Tuesday’s shooting.

Honestly, I try to stay civil.  I try really, really hard to be the conservative that can have a face-to-face debate with the other guys and not troll through the gutter.  I really do.  And I try to take the high road; I keep the language on this blog generally PG13.

But I almost ripped Congressman Ellison’s head off Saturday for saying conservatives “nod and wink at James Von Brunn”. 

He was a neo-Nazi and a convicted felon.  He killed people.  Had I been in DC, and the powers that be in their infinite wisdom allowed me to carry a concealed handgun, and no security guards were there to do it, and the shoot were legal under self-defense law, I’d have done it myself.  And I know of no credible conservative anywhere who backs anything Von Brunn ever stood for – and writing for “The Freep” does not make him a “credible conservative”.

And to argue otherwise – as Representative Ellison did this past weekend on “Radio Free Nation” – is the depth of rhetorical cowardice. 

So let me make this perfectly clear to every one of you lefties that wants to try to smear all conservatism by association with Von Brunn, from Keith Ellison (with all due respect) down to the most scabrous, spyrochaetal-paretic leftyblogger.

Go screw yourself.  You are not worthy of civil discussion.

And grow some cojones while you’re at it and tell me to my face how much I support, and how closely I’m ideologically linked to James Von Brunn.  Because while I try to take the high road, I will wipe the low road, and the gutters alongside, with your face.

Rhetorically speaking, of course.

Do this, or hold your scabrous tongue.

That is all.

Really, really all.

It wrenches the needle off the jingo meter.

It still provokes somber tut-tutting from our betters about the knee-jerk ignorance of NASCAR America.
And nowhere in American pop culture after 9/11 did the id of the vast mass of America between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre get expressed better.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t competition.  Springsteen’s The Rising evoked loss, commemorated heroism, and opened the faucet on the best evocations of spirituality during times of tragedy in American pop music history. Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” and Big and Rich’s “Eighth of November” took very different approaches to illuminating the best in American, and human, character against horrendous odds.

All well and good.

And it’s true; there are times when diplomacy and nuance and meeting your enemy halfway and being aware of ones’ own faults is essential – even in wartime.
But there are some times, some moods, when putting a boot in someone’s ass, the American way, is all that will suffice.  There are times when, like Churchill’s “Dunkirk” and Reagan’s “Shining City” and “Brandenburg Gate” speeches, I just need to hear it.

There is no substitute.

So kudos, Toby Keith.

Yeah, yeah, I know – most important American band of the last twenty years, bla bla bla.

Save it.

REM – Michael Stipe, Pete Buck, Mike Mills and the long-departed Bill Berry – have been critical darlings and, for the most part, commercial powerhouses for a generation now (it used to really bug my stepson that after a jag of feeling hip that he’d gotten the new REM record, I pulled out my copy of Murmur from my sophomore year of college. Psych).

Well, good for them.

Here’s the maddening thing about REM; I can scarcely listen to a single one of their albums all the way through.  Pete Buck once described the band’s is-it-a-stereotype-or-is-it-a-cliche style:”Minor key, mid-tempo, enigmatic, semi-folk-rock-balladish things. That’s what everyone thinks and to a certain degree, that’s true.”  REM’s music is all oblique this and badly-enunciated enigmatic reference that and sophomore poetry-class the other thing, and always, always Michael Stipe prancing around going “hreydee-yo hree murrup” and “and nuh freyn konnukter fez, ryever ape, pake a mape”…

Mind you, I don’t mind oblique, enigmatic and sophomoric per se. And I can’t knock the band itself; Mills and Berry were an excellent Watts ‘n Wyman-style rhythm section; Mills has a distinctive yet perfect backing vocal style; Pete Buck is…well, perfectly functional given his chosen limits. And Michael Stipe is a good singer with an excellent (albeit not Bono-like) and distinctive voice.

But most of REM’s music invariably bores me stiff…

…except that every album (that I bothered listening to, which hasn’t happened since 1998’s Up, includes one, and only one, song that I just absolutely love, love love – which always comes out after  the dreary, minor-key mid-tempo southern-mythology-sodden ballad.

Album by album:

• Murmur – was entirely dispensable – except that life without “Radio Free Europe” would be a lot poorer.  But it’s more a visceral thing – the rhythm section’s tight snap, the cool (if inscrutable) hook line, the zing of the thing.  Certainly not the lyrics, as delivered by Michael Stipe  “Sigh this elf if radio munna slay/Reason it muld paw ish utta pray/poodat poodata poodta up your wah/Mrs. Islecumfray ah haul.  Raving station, be fly…”
• Reckoning led off with the “South Central Rain (I’m Sorry)”, or as Stipe pronounced it, “Um Hawry”, which makes me nod off a bit 25 years later – but followed up with “Don’t Go Back To Rockville”, which was a really good song.
• Fables of the Reconstruction – Produced by Joe Boyd, who produced Richard Thompson’s classic “Shoot Out The Lights”, Fables breaks the pattern only slightly: lead-off single “Driver 8” didn’t suck, and follow-up “Can’t Get There From Here” is actually IPod-worthy.
• Lifes Rich Pageant – Not even Don Gehman – who’d just produced John Mellencamp’s classic Scarecrow, could make most of this album less tedious – except for the gorgeous “Fall On Me”.
• Document – “The One I Love” almost made me pound my ears out with a potato masher.  And “Exuming McCarthy” may have been the dumbest anti-Reagan song in a decade full of standouts.  But “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” jumps in at last minute and staves off self-mutilation.
• Green – What if the Brill Building was in Athens, Georgia in 1988, instead of Philadelphia in 1962?  You’d have gotten “Stand”, and most of the album.  Except “Orange Crush”, which, dude.
• Out of Time – I used to wonder if “Losing My Religion” was a self-parody; if I were going to write a spoof of REM, it’d sound just like LMR, and have just about the same lyrics.  But I still love “Shiny Happy People”, although having Kate Pearson on board helps.
• Automatic for the People – Small breach of protocol: “Everybody Hurts” and “Man In The Moon” don’t suck.
• Monster – Bla bla bla “What’s the Frequency KennetH” bla bla bla.
• New Adventures in Hi-Fi – Broke the pattern again – all of it sucked.
• Up, Reveal, Around the Sun, Accelerate – never heard any of ’em.

But as with most of these “things I should love but don’t” pieces, it’s not so much the artist as the artist’s fans. And it’s not just that REM fans are just this side of Grateful Dead fans in terms of worshipping.  No, it’s the damage they did.

An alt-rock radio program director I once knew summed up alt-rock in the late eighties: “There are two types of music”, said the learned sage; “Noisy rock, and Jangly rock”.  The poles of his universe were Dinosaur Junior on the one hand, and REM on the other.  And this program director was hardly alone.

So for a couple of years in the late eighties and early nineties, alt-rock diverged into two miserable paths: sludgy, mopey glop that eventually morphed into grunge, and jangly, folky music in a zillion nearly-identical permutations (The Connells, Wednesday Week, Aztec Camera, Let’s Active!) that eventually morphed into…

…well, landfill.  Nobody remembers any of it.  Not even – be honest! – most of what REM did.

Well, some of it, we do.  Only we can’t make out the damn words.

I’m currently interviewing people from some of the charter schools mentioned in John Fitzgerald’s MN2020 report slagging the financial management of public schools.

While I’m working on that, though, I thought I’d check into the media’s coverage of this “story”.  Remember: MN2020 is a “non-partisan” “progressive” think tank that employs a number of former Twin Cities media figures – partly for their obvious skills, and partly because nobody can get placement from news media people like other news media people.

It’s probably not a surprise that the “progressive” Daily Planet ran the entire report verbatim. I don’t know that MN2020 and the Daily Planet get their money from the same place, but their sources are certainly cousins.

It’s not “Media”, but on the “Parents United for Public Schools” website (PUfPS is an astroturf group that, I’ll bank dimes to dollars, gets its money from the same non-profit trough as MN2020), in a piece slugged “critics can’t answer the reports allegations!”, the author of a piece citing the MN2020 report writes:

Some wondered why we didn’t separate severe findings (called material deficiencies) from less severe findings (called significant deficiencies). We didn’t separate them because significant deficiencies can become material deficiencies, and when they do, the taxpayer loses.

It’s John Fitzgerald, of course, writing about his own report.  And he tries to answer one of the criticisms I, among others, raise; why did he count hundreds of tiny, niggling, piddling infractions (more tomorrow) in the same category as the real, severe problems?:

Significant deficiencies are like a benign melanoma – checking it early can help avoid disastrous problems later. We determined both levels were important enough to note in each school’s tally.

Which would be an honest answer, but for the fact that Fitzgerald did not distinguish between trivial and serious issues when he concluded that Minnesota should abandon charter schools.

EdWeek links the report without any actual fact-checking.

The Saint Paul Public Schools’ blog linked the report, as well as the St. Paul “Network of Education Action Teams“, without comment.

On the other hand, Minnesota Public Radio ran the report’s marquee point – the percentages of schools that had issues – pretty much verbatim.  But reporter Elizabeth Baier also dug beneath the numbers to the real issue (emphasis added):

In a statement, the Minnesota Department of Education said both school districts and charter schools frequently have “findings” in the financial audits they submit to the state. Districts and charter schools are required to submit plans to the Education Department to correct their financial shortcomings, but the department said it’s up to the local school districts and charter school boards to make sure corrective action is taken.

The think tank report follows a 2008 report by the state auditor which also raised questions about financial management at charter schools. In that report, the auditor’s office recommended that charter school board members be required to attend financial management training. It also found that charters were roughly comparable to district schools in terms of financial health.

Er – how’s that?

“Roughly comparable”?

But John Fitzgerald’s report looked at the same findings that the Legislative Auditor looked at and used it to launch a call to shut down schools that had issues!  And yet the Legislative Auditor merely suggested better finance training?

Question, John Fitzgerald: does this mean we should shut down public schools, too?

(KSTP-TV , the Pioneer Press, WCCO, the Winona Daily News, the Worthington Post carried roughly the same report, both of which credited the AP, and included a shorter mention of the Auditor’s actual conclusions).The Duluth News Tribune did the same, but added material related to a Duluth charter which was found to be among the “worst offenders” in the report.

Among bloggers?  “Phoenix Woman” at Mercury Rising dives into the deep end of the “Racism” pool in a comment to her own post (which brought us nothing otherwise but ad-homina against charter school organizer Al Fan and the sense that she thinks charter schools are a conservative phenomenon, just as MN2020 told her they are):

The problem in Minnesota is that a lot of folks got bamboozled, especially in the Native American community, early on about charter schools. That’s why we have so many of the danged things. (It was a school targeting Native American kids whose director just got caught taking $1.4 million from the till.) If there’s a pedagogical equivalent of “greenwashing”, the buying off of the local Native American and African-American communities WRT charter schools is definitely it.

Really?

I’d like to take that question to the parents of Native American students – who have the lowest gradation rates of any ethnic group in the public system, and who are closely involved in the many Native American charter schools around Minnesota – and get their reactions.

Heck, I’d like to get yours.

Tomorrow (or, possibly, Wednesday): A look at the “infractions”.

What precisely is the ethical difference between the statement that got the loathsome Don Imus fired (calling the Rutgers women’s hoop squad “Nappy Headed Hos”)…

…and Letterman’s (that Bristol and/or Willow Palin are promiscuous little tramps)?

Other than the mainstream media and liberals in general not believing that conservatives deserve anything they get, I mean?

Andrew Rothman – firearms instructor and blogger – awrote last Friday, in the wake of the Holocaust Museum shootings and, as it happens, on what would have been Ann Frank’s 80th birthday:

“Never Again” is not a prayer.

On Facebook [last Friday], I noted that today would have been Anne Frank‘s 80th birthday, and closed with “Never Again.”

A Jewish friend sent me a message, saying I was too optimistic.

I’ve often wondered how American Jews can mix endemic (and justifiable) pessimism about anti-Semitic persecution with their reflexive support of the American left, which not only roils with anti-semitism, but – more importantly – has such a breezy, pollyannaish worldview about dictatorships and tyranny?

Rothman:

It’s not optimism.  When I say “never again,” it’s not a prayer — it’s a warning.

European Jews had a shtetl mentality.1 Unfortunately, a lot of American Jews do, too. Israeli Jews, largely, don’t.

And neither do I. If they should come with the cattle cars, they won’t find all sheep: there will be some sheepdogs2 in the herd. Fuzzy and gentle, like sheep, but with teeth and claws, too, and the willingness to use them.

It’s scant accident that “gun control” laws in Israel – a state founded on making the prayer a warning – are “liberal” enough to make a Wyoming libertarian nod with approval.  And some of my best friends in the firearms rights movement – Rothman and Joel Rosenberg, among others – are Jews who bring a certain historical awareness to their “gun nut-ism”:

Read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.3 That’s what a small group of utterly unprepared Jews did. Well, we aim to be better prepared, which may go a long way to prevent the next time from even happening.

And yet so many American Jewish liberals are on the other side.

“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a man with a rifle behind every blade of grass.” – [a fully accurate  statement which is, nonetheless, often falsely attributed to] Isoroku Yamamoto, Japanese Admiral Do you know why the Japanese never invaded the U.S. mainland during World War II? As admiral Yamamoto famously said “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a man with a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

Well, the same goes for the Buford Furrows, the James von Brunns, and the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads of the world. Don’t try it — there’ll be an armed Jew behind at least some of those blades of grass, and we won’t come quietly again.

Happy Birthday, Anne. Never again.

It’s a prayer, and a warning…

…and in places like California, where Buford Furrow was able to slaughter disarmed Jews with impunity, a “to-do” and a plea.