I only read Playboy for the articles

I outgrew the Playboy phase many years ago and have not seen Al Franken’s article from January 2000 titled "Porn-O-Rama!". From what has been reported in the media the last two days, it seems to have been an article of dubious literary value. However, I suspect that the literary value of the article has become largely irrelevant. The article apparently contains material which might be offensive to many, both of constituencies to which the DFL caters/panders and the “pro-family” groups that usually ignore DFL candidates, but who could use this issue to their advantage well.

In a Minnesota Monitor article posted today [Real bottom line in Franken's Playboy snafu: Mike Ciresi is making his move] Steve Perry seems to feel that the timing of this story is part of a coordinated to bring the former candidate who ethically made himself rich with money which should have belonged to the state back into the race. Doug Grow in MinnPost seems to suspect that there might be a Ciresi surprise in the primary even if Franken is endorsed.

I remember that when Ciresi was in the race that he promised to support the endorsement this time, but I guess that the former candidate is not bound by what he said when he was a candidate. [Of course, if/when he is elected he will be a former candidate again. Look out!]

Perry and Grow may be right. I really do not know.

I just wonder about some things.

Like, isn’t there one aged former adolescent in the DFL leadership who knew about the article and bothered to read it without being distracted by the visual distractions the magazine affords before the vast majority of the party leadership had signed onto the man from New York’s campaign? Late revelations hurt but this would have had to been a lot easier to know about than the GOP’s learning in 1990 that Grunseth was unsuited

And if he had had even the remotest idea of ever entering political life in this or any other state why would have Al Franken have written it?

And, of course, why was this obviously available fact withheld from the marketplace of the news until a week before the DFL state convention?

As I noted earlier, I have not seen Franken’s article and likely won't, having to settle for whatever summaries are made available in the various media by analysts who have managed to read it without the distractions for which Playboy is noted. Being in that magazine is not necessarily fatal to a candidate. Some of us remember the famous Jimmy Carter interview which came out just before the 1976 election.

But this whole deal cannot be a boon to a candidacy which was trailing Norm before this all came out and that is probably what the Ciresi people will remind us.

As David Brauer quoted Congressperson Keith Ellison in another MinnPost story today, "If you're explainin', you ain't gaining."

I mentioned earlier March 15,

[B]etween the two of them [Coleman and Ciresi], there would have been no problem for me in deciding whom [Coleman] to support. And I would like to think that I would have taken the same position, no matter what imaginary enemy Ciresi and Skippy had taken on.”

With Franken it will be different.

If the DFL expects me to vote on their line in November they will have to have somebody who is not Ciresi but who isn’t extremely flaky. It is a good trick being flaky enough to win DFL support and not turn off the general electorate.

For city people to support a suburbanite over a city resident is always a dubious enough situation anyway and Franken is not making his case well so far. I guess that still holds and we will have to see what develops.

Other earlier post http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/ciresi-out.html [March 10]

There will be pie some place bye and bye

A bit of local history:

On Tuesday, March 30, 1999 Robert Irwin Greenberg pressed/shoved a lemon pie into the face of a 65-year woman by a stairway at our Capitol building. Senator Carol Flynn, a Mpls. DFLer, was uninjured, although it is probable that her dignity and aplomb suffered. Greenberg purportedly did this as protest against a proposed routing [since implemented] of Highway 55 near Minnehaha Falls which Native Americans had opposed saying that it threatened a sacred spring. Being a man of conviction Greenberg even used a vegan pie which cost him or somebody $18.

He was sentenced to sixty days in the Ramsey County Workhouse during which the taxpayers fed him according to his special diet.

Senator Flynn later retired from the Senate.

On May 22, 2001 Payne Phalen District Five Planning Council voted 7 to 6 to hire to hire Greenberg as Executive Director [ED]. Although the hiring committee had neglected to mention this detail of the applicant’s history, some directors [including this writer and future Maplewood City Manager Greg Copeland who had learned that there was still a restraining order keeping the candidate for ED from the Capitol Complex] had already learned of the history and raised questions. The minutes note that Directors Copeland, Sammons, and Wilson requested that their votes against be made part of the record. I really wondered back then how well somebody with such a history could work with elected leaders the way that people who work for District Councils need to. I did suspect that there were organizations for which Mr. Greenberg could provide excellent leadership, but District Councils cannot be so confrontational. To borrow religious metaphor, they are more pastors than evangelists, more priests than prophets.

Despite the closeness of the vote Mr. Greenberg indicated that he would accept the job offer.

On May 23, 2001 the Saint Paul City Council, on motion of Councilmember Chris Coleman [himself the son of a state Senator], suspended the rules and revoked all city funding for the District Council. It is my belief that this action, coming late in a meeting under suspension of the rules and without notice given to anybody, is likely the biggest singe assault on our Citizen Participation system by the City Council in the 30-plus-year history of the CP system, bigger than the defunding of Greater East Side Community Council in 1985 [which did come through the committee process with public testimony accepted and grounds given – albeit the grounds given were ridiculous and disingenuous -- or the recent force merger in District 13. Others may disagree and are welcome to comment.

Within a short time, the offer to hire Greenberg was withdrawn and with the help of the late Councilmember Jim Reiter city funding restored. The late Paul Gilliland was hired shortly after as interim Executive Director.

I do not know what happened to either Senator Flynn or Robert Greenberg. Councilmember Coleman now has a different city job. I do wish them both well.

So what brought all of this up?

Well, it is really tangential, but it does involve a pie. From Alison Go of US News and World Report:

A Tom Friedman pie-in-the-face update: One of the Brown University students who hurled green whipped cream at the New York Times columnist last month has been suspended for the fall semester, the Brown Daily Herald reports.

According to the student, the university found her actions to be in violation of its standards of student conduct, which say that protest is not acceptable "when it obstructs the basic exchange of ideas" and which prohibit "directly or indirectly preventing a speaker from speaking—even for a brief period of time—(and) seizing control of a public forum for one's own purposes."

Although both incident show sanction taken against the one making the assault, it is not much of a connection, but it got me thinking about the Greenberg-Flynn incident and the District Council incident which followed.

I haven’t posted much on our Citizen Participation [CP] system even though I have been involved in it for a long time. Maybe that is why I haven’t posted much on it, since I cannot claim an unaffected perspective.

But I do invite your comments on our CP system or on pie-throwing or pie-planting as means of communication. And do the pies need to meet the dietary restrictions of thrower or target or both?

History note: Greenberg was probably supporting the right side when he assaulted Senator Flynn, but there were problems with the way he did it. I remember posting somewhere probably in 1999 or 2000 about the ridiculousness of a federal judge ruling on whether the springs about to be destroyed for Highway 55 were sacred to the Mendota Mdewakanton. The ruling [simplified by a law layperson] was that since nobody was still living when the spring became sacred that nobody could prove that the springs were sacred. I compared it to a judge in Israel looking at a highway that would remove the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and having to make a ruling on whether the site was sacred to Christians. We need to be very careful when we try to evaluate somebody else’s religious ideas. It’s kind of like draft boards attempting to prove whether somebody was a religious conscientious objector or not. I don’t know if that post is available anywhere now or not. It is probably lost in cyberspace someplace.

LINKS:

The US News article can be found at

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2008/5/22/at-brown-friedman-pie-thrower-suspended.html

I have to admit that looking at the grammar of this post that there might have been another reason not to hire him. Robert Greenberg’s account of the pie incident can be found at

http://members.aol.com/noreroute/bobsay.htm

Capitol City Cacophony contemporary comment on the District Five- Greenberg matter can be found by scrolling down about two-thirds of the way at

http://www.geocities.com/minnmusic/boosandbravos.html

People want to work. What’s so bad about that?

It is not local and not even in Minnesota, but the recent ICE raid of Agriprocessor, Inc. in northern Iowa near Postville has received a fair amount of local attention.

More than 400 people were detained and taken elsewhere to be held. His Eminence, Jerome Hanus, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dubuque has condemned the raid.

And it happened while the United Food & Commercial Workers were conducting an organizing drive.

What a coincidence!

So workers’ families are disrupted and their children’s educations endangered. What do you suppose will happen to the employers who will benefit from this bit of federally- sanctioned and implemented union busting?

People want to work. What’s so bad about that?

And if it had happened here, can you imagine how much fun Pawlenty and Seifert would have had?

The What Museum of Minnesota?

On Kellogg Boulevard across from the NSP Arena [Save me the comments and emails. I thought it was Xcel also, but when they send me my monthly electrical bill, they say to make checks payable to Northern States Power] and west of the property Ramsey County says it no longer needs even as it tries to find places near the Court House for employees is a big building called a museum, the latest incarnation of the Science Museum of Minnesota which has migrated from on the hill on University Avenue to Tenth Street and to.

It is apparently quite a tourist attraction. Remembering the success of the Titanic exhibit that Norm and his henchman Erich Mische brought to Union Depot, they knew that we in this region did not respect tombs around here and recently correctly extended that premise by capitalizing on on our disrespect for the dead with a show of bodies. And now they are cashing in on pop culture with a Star Wars exhibit.

I haven’t seen this new exhibit. I cannot imagine that I will. I saw the first Star Wars movie, appropriately named Star Wars, in 1977 and I was bored. The two robots seemed too much inspired by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble and had none of their appeal [and certainly none of the Ralph and Ed from whom the men from Bedrock had been patterned],

Now we are supposed to believe that science fiction is science. When I was in about junior high school way back in the Twentieth Century we were told that science fiction [which was then predicting telephones with pictures and with buttons instead of dials and that we would be moving about with miniature jet engines around our backs by the early days of this century] and science were different things.

Well, our telephones pretty much all have buttons now, but pictures are still pretty rare and almost everybody I know still has to do his/her own perambulation. And none of them ever seemed to have heard of cell phones or the internet.

Go to the Science Museum if Star Wars or other science fiction impresses you. It’s your time and money. I’m no scientist. And I wouldn’t expect to become one by seeing the Star Wars exhibit.

And, of course, you will have to get there before the Republicans come to town since the place is just one of several places they have been given exclusive access to.

It’s Alive

Well, it was a ray of hope. Pawlenty’s veto on train funding had given a ray of hope, one of the few rays of hope possible while he is governor.

Unfortunately, the train is alive again. There are still hurdles to jump, but it’s still alive.

And just to make things worth, keep this in mind: Our local politicos had to give him something in exchange. We may never be sure what it was, but it seems almost certain that it would have had to have been something better. It could hardly have been something worse.

Another Voice on Central Corridor

Sometimes as this "Central Corridor" has moved on towards its seemingly inevitable and certainly destructive end, I have felt like the only person concerned with the “little person” on University Avenue, the only one who was thinking on the right track about light rail on that street. Even Governor Pawlenty's veto [referred to in Grounds for Hope on Central Corridor? 4/7/08] seemed to be only a minor impediment.

I just read an article by kitkat on mnblue which helps make some of that sense of loneliness evaporate.

I don’t want to get too carried away with agreement. Kitkat seems to be a believer in transit which I still believe a tool of economic segregation [Cf. Transit and Taxes, 12/7/07] but he/she does see the injustices of the University Avenue proposal and points out its anti-progressive nature.

Kitkat notes that business ownership is one of the few means through which poor people can accumulate wealth and that University Avenue provides three things which can lead to profits for people who don’t have wealth to start out with – high traffic, affordable rent, and frequent public transit which comes within a block of the business.

Bringing through a train which stops at one-mile intervals and cutting busses back to half-hour intervals would damage those business not near the stations severely and make rents or purchase prices near the stops prohibitive, kitkat notes.

Making the neighboring businesses and residents suffer for some planner’s idea of progress still does not seem fair. As I noted in another December post, [Moving the Train, 12/16/07]

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.

Kitkat has put more work actual footwork into this matter than I have and seems to have reached similar conclusions on this particular project and I commend his/her post [which will be seen by a lot more people than the dozen or so who look here] to your attention.

Cafes as disappearing third places

I recently noticed an editorial from the St. Anthony Park Bugle which merits comment.

I am not sure what prompted it, but suspect that the recent closing of the Parkview Café at Hampden and Raymond had something to do with it, since there is a larger article about both the history and the future of the building where it was.

The writer notes the disappearances of “third places,” of which cafés are a prime instance and notes the general disappearance of independently-owned businesses.

Independently owned small businesses are threatened everywhere, and along the main streets of small and not-so-small towns, the local café often serves as a canary in the coal mine of chain-store-ification that has seen the locus of activity move from the center to the edges of town,

He also notes that although cafés seem to be disappearing in urban areas that coffee shops are plentiful and notes some important distinctions between them.

You can get coffee in a café, but typically the only choice is between regular and decaf. Unlike coffee shops, cafés don’t have Wi-Fi. People come to eat and talk, not to stare at a laptop.

and later notes

Like a good neighborhood, a good café has character — and characters. It doesn’t have to be a place where everyone knows your name, but it should be somewhere you’re comfortable, and somewhere you’re proud to bring a visitor.

To me a café seems like a place more for a community’s common people and coffee shops for its pretentious, and considering what part of the city the Bugle covers, I found this editorial a bit surprising and indeed welcome.

I would recommend the entire editorial to everybody’s attention and suggest that it provides us all with food for thought.

Is Wright wrongfully wounding Obama? And does America appreciate context?

I actually watched Dr. Jeremiah Wright jr.’s speech at the National Press Club live on C-SPAN last Monday. I had been up all night and I guess that maybe I missed its significance.

Parts of the speech seemed like something you might expect a black leader and/or United Church of Christ persoin to say. I did figure that the more Dr. Wright stayed in the background, that the better the chances for the Junior Senator from Illinois becoming president.

As I noted before, crazy ideas come from the denomination with which I am connected. There is a firm belief that everybody needs to learn divine truth[s] for him/herself and feel free to express what they have discerned to be such truth[s].

I have been hearing ever since Monday that Dr. Wright seems to be bringing Senator Obama down, almost as if that is what he wants to do. The Senator has had to pretty much renounce the man. Some speculate that the Junior Senator from New York or people close to her have been keeping Dr. Wright in the spotlight to damage the Obama campaign.

So now I reluctantly suspect that Dr. Wright’s comments may now have that affect. What bothers me is that I am not sure that it is because of what he is saying or because the American public just cannot put the comments into perspective.

There are always conspiracy ideas going around, from the Illuminati of a previous era and the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve of a later era to the Reichstag-September 11^th or the Government invented HIV theories of the present age. I haven’t signed on to a lot of them, but they stay in vogue because there seems to be just enough fact around to make them credible to many.

I doubt if the government invented HIV. However, I am not sure that they haven’t made good use of it since by being overly passive.

I have not signed onto the Obama wagon, but it is no secret that I have little admiration for Senator Clinton. [Senator Rodham would have had more, substantially more.] But regardless of who you and I like, the public is entitled to have its choices better framed with irrelevancies like a nattering clergyperson kept out of things.

Leonard Pitts, jr. is harder on Dr. Wright than I am. But perhaps the summary of a recent column he wrote summarizes the situation well. Noting that a cousin of his held Dr. Wright in awe and lamenting his disappointment and disagreement, he noted

He had his chance to walk on water but - sorry, cousin - he fell in instead. The only remaining question is whether he will pull Barack Obama down with him.

Earlier post: Observations on Obama, his mosque, and his imam [3/23/08]

Truly a Scandal Sheet

When I was in junior high school, I had a teacher who referred to all pieces of paper, but particularly newspapers, as “scandal sheets.”

Fortunately for whatever current affairs minded students he had, his advice on newspapers probably did not carry a lot of weight since he taught industrial arts.

But there is an article in today’s DPP that makes you wonder about what he said.

The first sentence of an article titled, “Two teens shot on West Side, "reads

“Two teens were wounded by gunfire Saturday night on St. Paul's West Side as the city's Cinco de Mayo celebrations ended nearby. Two teens were wounded by gunfire Saturday night on St. Paul's West Side as the city's Cinco de Mayo celebrations ended nearby.”

That’s it. There is no mention anyplace that there was any reason to believe that Cinco de Mayo had any connection to the shooting. We may find that out later, but except for the sensationalistic opening, the article gives no hint that the neighborhood celebration would have any connection with the story.

Using that kind of thinking, any crime that takes place anywhere in the city in late January or early February could be connected to the Winter Carnival. Of course, the Carnival is run by the rich and white for the rich and white and for downtown, not by minority people in a neighborhood.

Just think what crimes might be connected with the Republican National Convention.

Methinks that Ms. Leslie Brooks Suzukamo needs to examine both her work and her motives.

UPDATE -5/5/08

In an article today St. [sic] Paul / Four teens, adult held in shootings, Nick Ferraro notes way down in the sixth paragraph,

[Police spokesperson] Panos said the shootings had nothing to do with the Cinco de Mayo Fiesta celebration that had just ended nearby.

Considering the placement that the paper and Ms. Leslie Brooks Suzukamo gave the matter Sunday, this should have been given better placement.