Last post of the year

Tonight is New Year’s Eve and tomorrow will begin 2008. Local media have been full of end-of-year retrospectives. I know that they do this between the December 25^th holiday and the end of the year because that is a slow time of the year. January usually brings Congress, state legislatures, and city councils back into operation, often with new personnel and leaders, and new Presidents, governors, and mayors into office around the Great North American Republic, providing new news. So to fill the space and air time available the end of year retrospectives such as the top stories in various categories and the who’s who of dead people are done prematurely. U.S. News and World Report’s “The Paper Trail” aptly noted this phenomenon saying,

I've indulged in some end-of-the-year, space-filling lists to round out the holiday season.

A parenthetical note: Last year President Ford generously died during this week and the national media must have secretly jumped for joy since it gave them a chance to till their spaces and time with things that they already had in the files or cans.

Since these time/space crunches don’t affect me I will do some of these in the next few days as 2008 works its way through.

Some of these things will be brief RIP notes on some local people who left us in 2007, retrospectives on departing members of our City Council, and a new recall for U.S. Senate Republicans to demonstrate consistency regarding Senators Vitter and Craig now that Louisiana will have a Republican governor.

I have also been studying some of the recurring controversies on gay marriage and the use and non-use of “Christmas” as the name for the December 25^th holiday. I think there are some interesting links that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere, but I don’t quite have the thing enough together to post at this time.

And I am sure that there will be more to comment on as things develop.

AND A HAPPY 2008 TO ALL!

Sheriff vs. Sheriff AND Isn't there supposed to be a PD or two in here someplace?

In a December 28 post, Doug Grow of MinnPost writes of the forthcoming battle between our own Lord High Sheriff, Sir Robert, and Hennipen County’s, Rich “I never used that word” Stanek, over who gets the most camera and ink during the upcoming Republican assault on our city.

Grow has an interesting way of throwing phrases around which I assume should be expected from his many years of writing for the Mpls. paper. His notes on how the two are set up for the race include these paragraphs:

Both men have similar backgrounds. Stanek is a former state legislator and former Minneapolis cop. Fletcher is a former St. Paul City Council member and St. Paul cop. Both are said to have dark sides. Neither is saddled with any troublesome humility.

Both men have built-in strengths for the race. Stanek, who has designed a dress uniform fit for a Latin dictator, heads an office nearly twice as large as Fletcher, 800 employees to 400. But Fletcher has the home-field advantage, given that the convention — Minneapolis views to the contrary — is a St. Paul event.

But the next paragraph is more telling of ongoing problems which indicate possible problems which likely will go beyond 2008.

Drop the name Fletcher around St. Paul police officials, or drop the name Stanek around Minneapolis police officials, and eyes roll -- and sometimes neck veins pop.

I don’t know if eliminating the office of Sheriff as an elected position would lessen this problem. After all, bureaucrats have egos too. But this may indeed be interesting stuff to observe next year.

Fire on Payne Avenue

A fire started late last night at 980 Payne.The building had a liquor store downstairs and apartments upstairs, but I don’t know if they were occupied.

These pictures were taken about 8:00 this morning.
There will probably be some coverage in the DPP tomorrow.
From as close as I could get without crossing a police line or falling on the ice, it looked like Donald’s store and the Borgstrom site were not damaged although there might be some smoke damage.

Moving the Train

Another truth about Transit that I did not mention in earlier posts.

Transit people believe the stuff they say, that they have a kind of civic morality which justifies any amount of civic iniquity. They believe in the rightness of their cause and their own personal goodness that things like whether right or wrong is done to others do not bother them.

About a dozen years or so ago, these wonderful people who give us our metropolitan transit service conducted a survey about how to make the busses run faster.

After spending a bunch of public dollars the Transit people were given a conclusion which I don’t have the exact word for but which can be reasonably paraphrased as, “Busses will make better time if they don’t have to stop to pick up or drop off passengers.”

You can picture the Metropolitan Council execs slapping their foreheads in amazement. Who would have ever thunk it?

Well, now they’re telling us that to have the University Avenue light rail stop at half-mile intervals instead of one mile intervals will make the train take too long, be too expensive, and reduce ridership. It beats me how a train that doesn’t stop and pick up people can have more riders than one which does, but leave the wonks [who, of course won’t be riding the thing themselves or trying to run businesses on University Avenue, or sleep in a house on Sherburne or Aurora] to come up with some kind of explanation.

University Avenue is under attack and all that our city, county, and state leaders seem to be able or willing to do is to discuss how to carry that attack out. Light rail [also known as street cars without stops] isn’t the only thing attacking the Avenue, but it is one of the biggest and it is one where the role of the state is most evident.

University Avenue is a street. Streets are indeed part of a public transportation system, created to move people and things to and from the private properties which adjoin them or to other streets which do the same thing. Historically, University Avenue has seen horses, locomobiles, street cars, cars, trucks, bicycles, and trucks. It will continue to see most of these later uses even after light rail is built, if it ever happens.

People have bought or rented property along University Avenue to operate business or to live or bought property near University Avenue in Frogtown, Aurora-St. Anthony, Midway, and other places because its proximity of the Avenue brings them commerce or allows them conveniently move about.

The businesses along the Avenue need the traffic lanes and parking the Avenue provides. The Powers That Be seem intent on removing most of this so that people who operate trains can operate trains. They say that this is progress and that in the long run properties along the Avenue will have a greater aggregate value

They fail to consider that an aggregate increase of value does not mean that anything good will happen for the owner of a specific property, that whatever increases in property value do develop are probably going to happen around the stops, because that is where people will be able to get without having to find the elusive parking place.

However, it seems that most of this increase of property value will do nothing for property values and therefore property taxes. Construction, both old and new doesn’t line up with the stops. The Capitol complex doesn’t pay taxes. Rondo Library doesn’t pay taxes. The Wilder Foundation will be occupying a good chunk of Lexington.

I haven’t supported this boondoggle. Previous posts reflect that. [link, link.

So it makes sense that if we can only have stops at one-mile intervals that we move the stops. We don’t need a stop by the Capitol. It’s not going to be taken down anytime soon.

So I have this idea which I haven’t seen posted anyplace: Let’s put the stops at Western, Victoria, Hamline, and Fairview. Let the economy move things there. Target [a company which I personally do not patronize for personal reasons but which is a large Minnesota-based enterprise] recently jumped through a whole lot of hoops to build a new store at Hamline. Probably some of these hoops could have been lessened if there were to be an exit at Hamline. Think of what could happen at Victoria or Western. Perhaps some of the small business there might be able to survive or at least be able to receive just compensation from somebody else who could use the opportunity instead of being left to wither like the present plan calls for.

Of course, if they really wanted to get people between the downtowns they would have chosen a different path and left University Avenue to do what it always has done. Alongside the Great Northern [which really should have been the path for I-94] or somehow along the present I-94 would have made more sense.

Big Lake Ripoff

The feds have come up with $157 million for construction for the Big Lake to Minneapolis Commuter Rail line. Add in state costs and the thing gets a little expensive. This is to build rail where there already are railroad tracks. I understand that some track would need to be repaired or bettered and that stations might be needed, but this seems steep. And the thing would still require an operating budget. Yet even Governor “Nonewtaxes” Plenty is in favor.

And it is for a project that the state should be staying out of. There is no constitutional right for somebody who daily goes to somebody else’s city to extract its wealth and bring back to his home city to have the public subsidize the excursion, no matter what level of government is paying for it. [Cf. Transit and Taxes, December 7]

Can anybody spell “ripoff”?

Labor of Love, the fictionalized story of a local woman

Google is wonderful! You can learn a lot of things you never planned on learning when you look at the irrelevant links. This morning, while I was searching for something else which I may be posting later, I stumbled on a link which took me to this one.

It is a play called Labor of Love which tells the story of Liz Anderson, former Planning Commissioner, Metro Council member, unsuccessful DFL candidate in Ward Five [in the first council election by wards] in 1982, and former director of the Como Zoo and Conservatory under Mayors Coleman the first and Kelly.

I don’t know who wrote the play, but it obviously had to be a person or persons close to Ms. Anderson. The play is obviously somewhat fictionalized [e.g. Liz ran for the Senate in 1974, not the House where Tom Osthoff was seeking to unseat Bob Ferderer and Hugo Masanz would never have clsimed to have attended Como High School. He had to be close to 50 when it opened] and highly sympathetic to the subject, but interesting for those of us who remember the 1982 election and some of the other things she has done.

I supported Liz in that 1982 election and was very disappointed when she lost in the election that almost gave control of the City Council to the GOP. [See Election Strategies, starting with the fifth paragraph. You can use the link or scroll down to November 26.]

If somebody knows more about this work, please feel free to leave a comment telling me.

A Note On Immigration

Immigration is already becoming an issue for next year’s elections.. I suppose you could say that I am pro-immigrant. It somehow just seems what this country is about: people coming here for a variety of reasons trying to better themselves. Some people are concerned because the new arrivals, legal or otherwise, speak different languages or worship other gods.

Some say that they are not opposed to illegal immigration, just illegal immigration. Some may come from a legitimate fear about terrorism, but there really is not much correlation between terrorism and illegal immigration. Timothy McVeigh was native grown. Almost all of the September 11^th hijackers got in here legally. I suspect that most people who say they are only opposed to illegal immigration are really more concerned about immigrants whose skin is darker than theirs.

Although Spanish was being spoken in this country a century before Jamestown we panic when people use the language and start wondering who is up to what. We put far more border control personnel on the border with Mexico than we do the much-longer border with British North America [aka Canada]. The northern border, much longer and more porous, is an open invitation for people with less than good intentions to come in. And there is history for being concerned about the northern border. Remember the Millennium Plot? For that matter, remember whose shelling of Fort McHenry our national anthem was written about? Despite the history and the opportunity, we concentrate on the south.

If national security is the reason for Border Control and ICE [which are parts of the Department of Homeland Security], Border Control and ICE are looking the wrong way.

And so are so many of the rest of us.

Vaya con dios.

Three ongoing peeves and a Monday morning to gripe about them.

Peeve One. Does anybody know what “Twin Cities” means? You won’t learn from listening to any radio station, watching any television service, or reading any major area newspaper.

Let’s look at the words a bit.

“Twin” means two. It can mean the other one of two, but every definition you look up stems from the number two.

Suburbs and cities are different things, even though Minnesota law was changed three decades ago to allow suburbs to dishonestly call themselves “cities.”

Minneapolis is a city. Saint Paul is a city. Falcon Heights is not a city; it is a suburb. Likewise North Oaks, Bloomington, Maplewood, New Hope, and a few hundred others. Even if they were cities, they are not two in number.

Historically the Twin Cities have been Saint Paul and Minneapolis. To add any of the two hundred or so other jurisdictions located within a local phone call’s distance is doubly incorrect, since it adds something that is not a city and changes the sum from two to another number.

I am getting very tired of media labeling somebody from St. Louis Park or Mendota Heights as being a Twin Cities driver or banker or janitor or whatever. It is wrong and it is misleading and it makes one wonder how accurate much the other stuff that source is reporting is.

Similarly, referring to Roseville, Falcon Height, Maplewood, Vadnais Heights, or other such place as a “Saint Paul suburb” demeans our city and defeats the purpose of the parasites who live there. They live there because they don’t want to be part of us. Of course they don’t mind sticking their noses into our business, but that is what parasites do. The tapeworm never intends to become a steer. It just wants to use the steer for its own subsistence.

Peeve Two. The second peeve is the recurring “x-hundred block” of whatever street for addresses in our city. Many cities are set up with numbering for which that phrase would be appropriate. Ours is not.

Where is the 1100 block of Payne Avenue? 1100 is a church between Magnolia and Jessamine. 1199 is a saloon at Payne. Jessamine, Geranium, and Rose all come in between. The 300 block of North Snelling? There is a whole freeway in the middle.

Let’s find better ways of getting the message out. If we need to say Payne between Rose and Maryland, let’s say so. If we need to write that something happened at 16xx Highland Parkway, let’s write it that way.

However, if you tell me the 600 block of Fountain Place, I’ll understand.

Peeve Three. The third peeve is referring to Minneapolis as being “across the river. [or to us as being “across the river” from them]. “Upstream” and “downstream” would be more accurate terms. By looking at the fire hydrants in front of KSTP one can easily tell that there are two cities next to each other and there surely is no river there.

On [Around] Wisconsin

Many of us have grown to think of Wisconsin as the obstacle one crosses to get to Chicago or points east, the land of speed traps.

Lately, because of the actions of our Tobacco Taliban, it has been seeming a more welcome place.

Now their governor wants to change things and keep smokers and people of good will [despite what the TT says, these two groups do overlap] out of his state.

I suggest that we all let the powers that be in Wisconsin know that bratwurst, cheese, and beer from Wisconsin will disappear from our shopping lists if this happens.

Many people don’t want to go across Wisconsin already. If they do this, people who want to go east may well want to skip their state altogether. There may not be a good other option for getting to Chicago, bit if you are looking to get to that other big Midwestern crossroads, Indianapolis, or south or east of there, you might want to rethink things. 52 around Rochester, 63 from Rochester to I-380, down the Avenue of the Saints to I-80 and I-74 across Illinois and Indiana is almost the same mileage, but allows one to skip both Wisconsin and Chicago. Some small stretches between Rochester and Waterloo are two-lane, but most is four-or-more lane, divided and there are no toll roads.

And remember: If they don't want us, we con't want them.

Transit and taxes

The last time I saw Mayor Coleman the Second live and in person was at the sign unveiling for the Phalen Village Cub Store.

A few years ago when Ted Mondale was the Metro Council chairperson, he met with people from East Side organizations in an office at Payne and York, right on what was then the #14 bus line.

They both arrived at these events by car.

Outside of perhaps some kind of publicity shot, has anybody seen Governor Plenty [or his predecessor, Governor Janos] or R.T. Rybak on a bus or light rail?

Ugly Truth about Transit: THOSE WHO PUSH IT THE MOST NEVER PLAN ON USING TRANSIT THEMSELVES. Nor for that matter do most of those whose jobs will come from building new railways or busways.

Another Ugly Truth about Transit and Freeways both: WHATEVER THE INITIAL INTENTION INVOLVED IN THEIR CREATION, THEY FOSTER ECONOMIC SEGREGATION. We should note that there is one notable difference between the road projects and bus/train projects. The former are needed to get people to other of the country’s and the region’s cities. The second cannot do that. We need roads to connect Saint Paul to Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, or even Salt Lake City. No MTC bus will do that. Greyhound will, but they need roads. The problem with the way we built our freeways is that we put too many interchanges too close to the city. If 35E had been built with no interchanges between Larpenteur and Forest Lake or 94 with no way to get on or off between McKnight and Bayport, there would have been fewer people finding Vadnais Heights or Woodbury as fit places to live.

We say people drive too much and should use transit more. Americans aren’t about to give up their cars quickly. The car provides us with freedom [as in flexibility] and Americans have come to love that freedom. The answer is not to have us driving less often, just shorter distances. Driving three miles to work uses a lot less energy than driving forty.

Just ponder for a minute: We spend billions of dollars from a variety of taxing jurisdictions building, operating, and maintaining our transit systems. What could we do or could we have done had we spent similar money making all areas fit places for people of all strata to live, work, and recreate?

Big changes in attitude and focus on the part of federal, state, metropolitan, and municipal planners and doers will be required. Money spent on things like housing diversity, local job creation, good schools everywhere, and keeping places of shopping, recreation, and worship nearby will reduce that desire to go forty miles or more each way to work. Money will be needed for things like soil correction and local street improvements.

But continuing to throw money at transit, such as is being proposed in a new sales tax for transit does not seem like the way to a good future.

Baby, the Snow Must Fall

I looked out at 35E about 5:00 this evening and traffic was crawling both northbound and southbound.

Television, radio, newspapers, and their connected web sites had been warning usthat this might happen. The meteorologists were right. Snow was falling and traffic was getting snarled.

Well, folks, it is winter in Minnesota.

And it is one reason that I am glad that I don’t commute.

I hope you and yours were well in the chaos.

A Global Trade Note

I haven’t written about foreign policy much here, but have long wondered why both pro-choice and pro-life people are so friendly with China, a state which actually forces abortions on women.

I have concluded that the answer is that greed trumps moral perspective. Both sides see a buck or two to be made and let principle slide.

But I just stumbled a post on a blog called God’s Politics which got me thinking about the subject some more. This was a twist that I hadn’t really thought much about -- crucifixes and Bible covers made by Chinese sweatshop laborers.

I suspect that any person who honestly reflects on his/her personal financial purchasing decisions realizes that there are some places where he/she falls short of the best standards. I really don’t want to get into a big discussion about this, just to remind myself and others that we each need to look inward a bit.

And we may all wonder what those in substandard and often environmentally dangerous Chinese and other third world sweatshops think of Americans and other westerners who will be the consumers of their labor. And maybe of what non-Christian semi-slaves in an atheist country think of the Christian market they are making things for.

On Any Given Thursday

I put up a post recently [11/24/07 “Election Strategies”] about election rules and how to use them. It looks like Governor Plenty knows what I was talking about. [Of course, knowing the rules is something we expect from our elected leaders, even if they are only plurality elected.]

He has called the special election to fill the Northfield-area senate vacancy on January 3. DFL people are crying “foul:” because in a constituency so filled with students that he called the election so soon for two days after a major holiday and while many students won’t be around.

While I wonder whether any student who does not plan to either be in the district on January 3^rd or has the ambition to obtain a proper absentee ballot should really be claiming residency in the district, I do think there are other reasons to regard the choice of date cynically.

Conventional wisdom says that Republicans do better than DFLers in special elections and when voter turnout is low. [Cf. A Note on Voter Turnout, 11/6/07] First off, the date is on a THURDAY. Americans are used to elections on Tuesdays. Choosing another date seems almost un-American. We often talk about how we should move our elections to weekends, but in Minnesota we have not done this. In fact, federal law requires the election of Congresspeople, U.S. Senators and Presidential electors to be on Tuesday, which had led most states and other jurisdictions to use Tuesdays almost exclusively.

Tuesday, January 1 is a legal holiday and probably not a good day for an election. It might not even be legal. Rather than wait for January 8 which would be a Tuesday, Plenty chose January 3. It’s not a weekend and it is not a Tuesday.

Make your own inferences.

Maybe They Can Call It “Sears Stadium”

We have never had a team playing at the highest level in a major professional sport in our city. Yes, I know we have the Wilds and used to have the Norsemen, but while those teams played at what seems to be the top level in their sports, they did not play one of America’s three major team sports and the 1884 baseball team played in the Union Association team which was not deemed “major league” until after long after its demise and it never played any home games, anyway.

Noting the disappearance of Saxon Ford and the financial difficulties of Sears and Roebuck, City Hall Scoop ["A Blue Light Special for Zigi Wilf?"] today has a suggestion for putting a Vikings stadium at their locations.

They cite the proximity of the proposed Light Rail and the Capitol.

Although I would be opposed to using any Saint Paul or Ramsey County taxes to build the thing and while I would miss the Sears store a bit and would likely be disturbed by the traffic tie ups big events would cause, the idea might be worth looking at. There would be/might be problems for nearby residential area to the west and north, but perhaps they could be addressed.

And if it were built as a domed stadium, it would give us three domes almost in such a nice small area, a good theme for postcards and local web site home pages. Let’s see . . . Capitol, Cathedral, Stadium. Which one do you think will come down first?

Transition

It was announced today that Martin Lumber is closing and that we will no longer have any independent lumber yards in the city. We recently lost our last new car dealership. We are very low on local pharmacies. We still have some hardware stores, but not as many as we used to. We have food deserts from the disappearances of grocery stores. Local banks are disappearing although some local credit unions are filling part of the gap.

Thankfully, we still have a few restaurants and one can still get a pizza locally made by a local outfit and eggs and bacon cooked by somebody who knows where the capitol of the state is.

Some Wednesday Hash

Dr. Robert Cade, the inventor of GatorAde, died of kidney failure. A coincidence?

When did “became missing” or “disappeared” become “went missing”? The use of such an active verb leaves a reader thinking that a person decided to become missing, but the stories this phrase gets used in, when examined, do not usually convey such an intent.

Governor Plenty names his attorney from his 2002 campaign to the Supreme Court. Have we all forgotten that his 2002 campaign was cited for improper collusion with the GOP and that it paid a substantial fine and had its spending limit decreased? That must be good qualification for the Supreme Court.

The December 25 holiday is approaching and all those who hope to make a buck off of unsuspecting saps who feel obligated to observe the birth of the Prince of Peace by targeting suckers are in their usual good form. One of the recurring scams is making its appearance again. You will also find this one for St. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and other Hallmark Holidays. Did you know you can name a star after somebody?

I have a new scheme, a million dollar idea for somebody. For a modest amount you can name a street after somebody. And when the vendor has sold enough street names, he/she can publish a map, duly registered with the copyright office of some country [maybe even ours] and show people just where the street they have bought is. Of course if you actually drove or otherwise went to it, you wouldn’t see that name on the street sign. The jurisdiction entitled to put the name on signs would never have known to put that name on it and the people who had addresses on the street would have never known to put it on their return address spot of their outgoing mail.

That’s why stars are better. Nobody will be going to them to learn what name is used locally until well after the statute of limitations has taken effect.

The Dog-gone Facts About a Dog Park

The last recommendation from Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council’s Arlington/Arkwright Dog Park subcommittee which came from meetings this summer with neighbors, park staff, police, and dog owners, has now made its way through its land use committee and been approved by the Board of Directors.

I won’t publish all the details of the recommendations. I chaired that subcommittee so it might seem self-serving and I really don’t have a good angle to view it all from. Except for the first one which called for a new gate on the southwestern side of the park on Arkwright and has already happened, they will all have to work their way through the various processes.

But I do think that one truth came through clearly in all of this. I haven’t ever owned a dog, but I can see this:

THIS CITY NEEDS MORE DOG PARKS.

Most of the problems which had neighbors concerned in the first place at Arlington/Arkwright were caused or aggravated by overuse. That the city only has one such place is the problem.

When the dog park was established six years ago, it was established on a one-year trial and the District Council agreed to monitor matters in a half year and after one year before recommending that the park be continued. There were no complaints in that first year, and indeed In six years there have been almost no complaints to the District Council office.

The ones we did receive came from overuse, from too many people parking and parking by the back entrance on Clark for easier access.

And we learned that while many of the users did come from the East Side, that many come from suburbs where the people are quite accustomed to leeching off city people and quite a few people came from Saint Paul neighborhoods across town – Mac-Groveland, Merriam Park, St. Anthony Park, and West Seventh were mentioned.

These people don’t come here for anything else. They don’t eat at Serlin’s or Governor’s or buy their hardware from Kendall’s. They don’t attend services at our churches. One of them did mention buying tires at a now gone Tires Plus, but I’m not sure how much play that should get.

We need a new dog park for them. At one time Councilmember Thune suggested one at the site of the soon-to-be removed NSP High Bridge Plant. I don’t know if that is still in his mind yet, but it makes sense to me. I would even go along with closing the Kelly Crosstown [aka Short Line Road aka Ayd Mill Road] and making it a linear dog park. But we probably need one further north.

Any suggestions?

Election Strategies

It’s been up there for several days, but I just noted a post in City Hall Scoop [link here] suggesting that Pakou Hang’s candidacy might have cost Kevin Riach election to the school board.

I’m not sure that I agree, but the case is made interestingly. The article suggests that the increased turnout in Ward Six caused by the unsuccessful Hang candidacy brought out more Conlon voters.

People always need to be reminded that people and referendum items on ballots do affect other things on the same ballot. This is why we had a constitutional amendment on the right to fish and hunt a few years back and it is why Michele Bachmann and Governor Plenty wanted us to vote on one to outlaw gay marriage for last year’s elections, a move echoed [with varying degrees of success[ in several states.

GLBT issues have been used this way by the right for some time. Old timers can remember that Rosalie Butler won her last election in the 1978 city election when the city’s gay rights ordinance then in effect was defeated in referendum. One commentator noted that, if you believed all the hype the various parties were giving out before the election that 50,000 bigots had outvoted 30,000 perverts. [That is why it is not out of line to suggest that Dave Thune had courage when he introduced a new gay rights ordinance several years later.]

Other subjects have also skewed elections. It seems hard to believe now, but the GOP came close to taking control of our city council as recently as 1982 [the first year for ward elections]. The DFL elected Bill Wilson, Leonard Levine, and Victor Tedesco solidly enough and the Republicans picked up three seats with Bob Fletcher, Hugo Masanz, and Chris Nicosia. [Purists will note that the GOP had not endorsed Masanz and that indeed the DFL endorsed him in the next election, but the GOP did publicly note its “support” of him in his run against the DFL-endorsed Liz Anderson.]

In the seventh race, the Ward Two seat, the DFL candidate Jim Scheibel narrowly beat his GOP opponent by 25 votes. If thirteen of those people had thought differently the GOP would have won the Council. [Historians may note that his opponent was a man named Dave Thune, but I suspect that it must have been a different guy.]

What made that election so tight? A referendum on whether the City should be allowed to investigate municipal ownership of cable television. It wasn’t to have municipal ownership, it was just to be able to consider it as one possibility.

Sometimes other things on a ballot have an effect and once in a while the effect is not what the candidate or cause expected.

There is no great lesson here. But before you sign that referendum petition or suggest to somebody that he/she should run for something, you might want to think twice, reflecting on the bigger context of things.

Thoughts on 1963 [and 2001]

WARNING: This is a ramble.

Today marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the close of a weekend that probably anybody over fifty won’t forget, the weekend that Presdient Kennedy was killed, mourned, paraded, and buried.

I’m not sure what makes the people in mainstream media choose what is newsworthy and how much to focus on something, but it seems that this year there was little attention given to the anniversaries.

November 22, 1963 shares a lot with September 11, 2001.

In 1963 the nation was steeped in the post-war idea that we were a strong and invincible country, that our only real enemies were the Communists and their sympathizers among us. We thought we were entering on a new era with a young president, the first one born in the twentieth century.

In 2001 we were beginning a whole new century. We still felt the euphoria of the end of the Cold War. We knew that we had some discontent in the country, but nobody took that seriously.

We all woke up on both of those days. And those who were old enough will never forget where they were or what they were doing when they learned about them. [Personally, I was in high school American History class when the word that JFK was shot was put on the school intercom and at home listening to Barbara Carlson when I heard her saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought she meant the one downtown, so I turned on my television to see if one of the local stations had any video. I got a surprise.]

On November 25, 1963 people all across the nation were watching their televisions. Most people only had affiliates of major networks available to them and the major networks had shown nothing but news and commentaries [no commercials] related to JFK or the new president, Mr. Johnson and what might happen in the future. The television and other media had crowded the Dallas Police Department headquarters and we had seen Oswald moved from room to room several times, protesting his innocence to all the cameras and reporters present. On Sunday the 24^th with the whole country watching he was killed. Talk of conspiracy has gone on ever since and probably will never stop. The 29^th century version of the History Channel on whatever the 29^th century replacement we have for television will probably still be asking questions about it.

There was a late morning memorial service in the city I lived in at a theater downtown and my brother and I went to it. [School was canceled almost every place in the country.] We heard the various civic leaders and clergymen from almost all of the big religious traditions speak or pray about how it shouldn’t have happened.

When we got back home we saw the conclusion of the funeral and the burial at Arlington Cemetery. I remember that the bugler who was to play Taps had not kept his mouthpiece warm and bungled it a bit, something that my band teacher found incomprehensible.

But later on November 25 things started to get back to normal. After the funeral regular programming and commercials resumed and our teachers tried to find ways to get back to us the day of learning they seemed to feel that we had lost. Actually, I had learned a lot.

On this anniversary of the Kennedy burial, it does us well to remember all of our national traumas, to think about their similarities and differences, and learn from them.

TOAST THANKSGIVING [if you’re old enough]

Yesterday many of us had turkey, farm-grown, fattened and accompanied by a lot of trimmings – dressing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, and pumpkin and/or mince meat pie. Often this meal was shared with extended family or friends. And in houses around our republic, wine was an accompaniment to all of this gustatory bounty.

But if in any of those houses somebody born on or after November 23, 1986 partook of that wine, a law was broken.

That same person could legally have had coffee, and if over 18 enjoyed a nice, postprandial cigar, other things usually done more by adults than children.

The basic fact is that in Minnesota that the legal age for just about anything is 18 except to drink [21] and to consent to sex [16]. In a way it seems funny that one can consent to sex before one can sign a contract and one can sign a contract before one can have a glass of wine with the family on a festive occasion. These are two subjects which have preoccupied America for a long time, sometimes to a very obsessive degree, and, on the surface at least, we would seem to have resolved them differently.

The higher age for drinking was influenced by Mothers Against Due Process [MADD] who managed to convince Congress to coerce states to lower the minimum drinking age or lose highway funds.

One of the reasons given for lowering the age was that too many 18-, 19-, and 20-year old people were legally obtaining beer, wine, or spirits and then illegally making them available to 16-and 17-year olds. Rather then enforce those laws,, they found it easier to take rights away from all the elders.

It seems to have some of the same logic as saying that because illegal Mexican immigrants might hide in the local Chicano community, that we ought to deport the entire Chicano community to make enforcement of immigration laws easier. [I suspect that Paul Harvey, Lou Dobbs and a lot of politicians have thought of that one, but a little technicality called the Fourteenth Amendment got into the way.]

There is no direct correlation between drinking and road construction, but that did not stop them from pushing their idea. So if you are twenty years of age and have never driven a car, are blind and never intend to, and live in a transit-orientated place like Manhattan or Chicago, you still cannot drink because a 17-year old in Nebraska might somehow illegally obtain a beer and get into his big brother's pickup in a vain attempt to impress his girlfriend.

If we abolished the minimum drinking age we could minimize some of our problems. A child could learn to drink the same way he/she learns other things that come with maturation, from family, educational and religious organizations, and friends, just as a child learns other things an adult does [dressing, shaving, eating, consuming other liquids, personal hygiene, thinking, reading, etc.] as one matures. There would be no magic moment at which one could get up just before midnight to imbibe as much as one could before closing time, no “power hour.”

I know that seems too radical a change for many. It won’t happen, I am sure. But I do advocate that people start thinking of it.

Sometimes just showing up has strange consequences.

Chuck Repke has an interesting post in Saint Paul Issues Forum [SPIF] [see link in the links box, lower right] about Dave Thune’s trip to our sister city of Nagasaki for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb dropping and how he ended up being highest elected official there.

The link for his post is is http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/stpaul-issues/messages/topic/bxyhRnSISrPaFnvqZau0x.

You will need to scroll down about seven items.

One Word and LIberation

The word “bitch” is being thrown about a lot lately. It used to be an offensive term thrown at females. Primarily it still is, but I know of several recent episodes where it has been thrown at male persons also lately. I guess that is equal opportunity.

But it is still offensive. And because it is offensive and is still in disproportionate frequency toward women, its use needs to cease.

Leonard Pitts, jr. in a recent column notes a recent incident in Iowa where a woman asked the senior senator from Arizona a question about the junior senator from New York, using that word.

Pitts notes

Can you imagine if the Democratic front runner were Sen. Joe Lieberman and the woman said, ``So, how do we beat this Hebe?''

Can you imagine if it were Gov. Bill Richardson and the woman said, ``So, how do we beat this spic?''

Can you imagine if it were Sen. Barack Obama and the woman said, ``So, how do we beat this coon?''

I guarantee you, McCain would not have laughed and if he had, we would now be writing his political epitaph.

I think he has a good point. Senator McCain may well be taken to task for this.

Pitts goes on to note that women who have succeeded in politics and in business have taken on the traits traditionally associated with men.

We demand certain ''feminine'' traits from women -- nurturing, caring, submission -- and the woman in whom those traits are either not present or subordinated to her drive, ambition and competence will pay a social price

.

When I first began hearing of “women’s lib” about three and a half decades or so ago, I wondered if it might be an opportunity to liberate men also. I wondered if opening opportunities for women would create a world in which men did not always have to do the things which seemed to make them men. Ideally nurturing and caring would be gender-neutral qualities and not regarded in lower esteem than drive and ambition and would be manifested in persons of both genders.

It obviously has not happened. We have made more opportunities available to women, but only if they seem to be more like men. There are successful women in almost every area of life now, but they are still considered successes only if they do not seem what we have somehow behave in ways we think feminine.

And we still regard men in what were women’s professions and trades with a strange eye. Men who are nurses, flight attendants, or elementary school teachers are not seen as totally male.

It doesn’t mean that “women’s lib” is a failure. It has indeed been a success, even if only a partial one. But it still means that we are a long way from liberating everybody.

And “bitch” is still not a nice word, except perhaps in certain dog-owner groups.