Buy pork

Our pork producers [the kind on the big farms, not the kind in Washington] are complaining, perhaps correctly, that calling this new strain of influenza “swine flu” is hurting them because people are avoiding pork or pork products.

Maybe different nomenclature will help, but what might help would be if we all purchased a bit more pork. I wouldn’t want anybody to do anything they feel violates their conscience [e.g., buy Hormel] or religious dictates [e.g, our Muslim and Jewish friends], but if you can find some pork that you can use, maybe it would be a good idea to get some.

I picked up some pork chops yesterday.

Which will be worse? Obama's flu or W's hurricane?

If Michele Bachmann’s district included local territory, I would never have to look for something to write about. She would be the gift that keeps on giving. But once in a while I suppose it is not extremely out of order to note her once in a while, since national coverage usually just lists her as “R-Minnesota” and, unless we make it clear every once in a while, people from elsewhere might think she is ours.

Finding any relevance in the “fact” that the flu named after swine has come twice when Democrats are president requires a stretch of one’s brain that I doubt that few of us could ever manage. And on top of that, as many are now pointing out, it is not even historically accurate.

W was never blamed for Hurricane Katrina, just for the inadequate response for it. But if we use Ms. Bachmann’s approach, we have one more less than satisfactory thing to put into the last president’s historical file.

Right is right and wrong is wrong and torture is the latter

In recent years the DPP [Dispatch Pioneer Press for those who were wondering] has reduced its editorial and opinion section considerably, in editorials, syndicated columnists, and letters to the editor. However, they sometimes do obtain good guest columnists and certainly A. L. Brown’s occasional contributions qualify.

Since KSTP radio has shelved Mr. Brown from his Sunday afternoon spot again, it is indeed fortuitous that his work shows up once in a while in the DPP and yesterday’s column is indeed edifying.

Brown is a lawyer. After distinguishing between legal advise and legal counsel, he identifies the poor counsel given by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, particularly the work of Jay Bybee who is now a federal judge.

But his primary point is the indefensibility of the use of torture by a free people. He notes

“The American standard is clear: Torture is always morally and legally wrong. This standard is a strength, not a vulnerability. It deprives our enemies of a rationale or moral standing while providing both to those who work on our behalf.”

I fear that he errs in writing this in present tense. I suspect that under the misdirection of the Bush administration that we have already gone too far in the wrong direction. And I doubt that Bybee’s counsel probably made much of a difference, because I suspect that if he had not given them such counsel that [although it might have taken some doing] they would have found an lawyer who would.

But Brown points out that each person who tortured or helped make the torture possible, needs to have his/her case examined.

President Obama seems to have been less than clearly decisive on this. But we still need vigilance on this matter and ought not let it be forgotten. And maybe we will learn from our inexcusable mistakes.

NOTE: I suppose that we should not view Brown’s departure from KSTP with alarm. This seems to be a seasonal thing, since the station commandeered the Twins from their age-old home with the Good Neighbor and they no longer need him to fill in that slot during spring and summer, but it is still a shame. While KSTP seems to have made some moves lately to move a little bit away from its right-wing base, eliminating Willie Clark and [apparently] all three faces of ThompsonO’BrienDavis and replacing them with Pat Reusse [whom it looks like is being played as the new in-house “liberal”], a couple of guys from Wisconsin who don’t seem to think that political topics are the only topics to cover, and WCCO discard Smarmy Al Malmberg [who seems, however, to have made a transition from simply smarmy to smarmy and pandering with the pseudo-conservative, anti-tax constituency his new station has given him], they really should have more room for Brown. I think it would be interesting if he could fill in for Joe Soucheray sometime, but I imagine that it would be too much shock for Garage Logicians.

Link to the DPP column

Trees? We like them, don't we?

Today is Arbor Day. [In this era of artificially moving holidays to specific days of the week, I don’t know why this made-up holiday isn’t held on Saturday, but it doesn’t seem to be.]

I had not intended to mention this, since it really is not particularly local and everybody loves trees, at least until the birds come to the one by where he/she parks his/her car.

But thanks to Joe Kimball of MinnPost I have been made aware of some local happenings which will take the spirit of Arbor Day well into May. The complete list of events can be seen in Mr. Kimball’s post, but it is worth noting that in addition to planting 300 trees in the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary [and isn’t it a bit unnatural for humans to introduce life into a nature sanctuary?], Como Park will receive more than 100 new trees. This seems to be a smart idea after all the natural demolition which took place a couple of years back.

Kimball’s post also notes that volunteers are still needed for this endeavor on Saturday, May 2 and he provides a link for those interested.

Inland grandstanding on open-seas piracy

I once thought that Marty Seifert was one of the reasonable Republicans but that misconception disappeared quite a while back. There is a shortage of reasonable people in both parties in our legislature at this time.

He got so far out in right field, especially in his immigrant-baiting that Rubén Rosario of the DPP called him “Sir Punisher.” He could not wait to try to make an issue of it when an immigrant here illegally was charged with vehicular homicide after last year’s school bus accident near Marshall.

And even though the most extensive ballot recount in Minnesota history has failed to deduce any evidence of voter fraud, he is leading the state push for the national GOP goal of requiring photo identification for all voters.

[Click the label “Marty Seifert” on the right side of this page for earlier Marty Seiffert articles.]

Now, he apparently wants to take on organizations which attempt to make sure that non-citizen defendants in criminal cases receive full legal protection and the presumption of innocence that comes with it, specifically by denying public grants and tax-exempt status to such organizations.

This seems to have been triggered by the case of Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, alleged to be the only surviving hijack attempter on the Maersk Alabama, who was arraigned in Federal Court in New York yesterday. Seifert’s target is assumed to be the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, whose director has stated that his organization has no position on the guilt or innocence of Mr. Muse, that his organization had been contacted Muse’s family and that his organization is merely trying to help the family understand the US legal system.

Seifert seems to be one of those who think that if people cannot pronounce the prevailing language that they shouldn’t be here. We might infer that being haled into federal court is not sufficient reason to accommodate a failure to speak the prevailing language.

But the ones who say “if they’re going to be here they better speak our language” and who have little but contempt for those who don’t really do not have much argument here, anyway, since Muse only came here as a prisoner. We brought him and we are not in a position to let him have time to learn US language, law, and judicial processes, so maybe Rep. Seifert and those who think like him need to back off on this one, anyway.

DPP article [from AP]

Minnesota lawmaker: No funds to pirate lovers

State of the city this afternoon

The state of the city speech will be given this afternoon at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

We will probably hear Mayor Coleman the Second tell us that we have problems, but that while we all come from different backgrounds that we are hardy and creative people who will somehow find a way to get through our problems.

But maybe the choice of a hospital is a good metaphor.

HAPPY EASTER TO MY EASTERN CHRISTIAN READERS


Christ is Risen!

He is Truly Risen!

Quote of the Day -- Meghan McCain

The daughter of Arizona's senior senator is quoted on gay marriage and abortion. It is a seemingly unusual mixture of positions in today's politics, but it makes sense to me. [I'm not so sure I agree with the Republican part.]

link

I believe life begins at conception and I believe that people who fall in love should have the option to get married. Lest we forget, our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, grants the same rights to everyone in this country—“All men are created equal.” If you think certain rights should not apply to certain people, then you are saying those people are not equal. People may always have a difference of opinion on certain lifestyles, but championing a position that wants to treat people unequally isn’t just un-Republican. At its fundamental core, it’s un-American.

[emphasis mine]

She doesn't connect the views here, but it does not seem inconsistent at all for one who believes in life to believe in liberty. It's the definition of terms that brings people's blood pressures up.

Who does your taxes? and why?

This is April 15, the traditional deadline for filing income tax returns. Various places which are seasonally rented by income tax preparers will be shutting their doors and the workers therein returning to their other jobs.

Many of these outfits have advertised, often garishly, now they can not only get your tax return prepared but let you have a loan [often, if not usually, with huge fees and at high interest] on your expected income tax return.

Minnesota municipalities have established zoning restrictions on currency exchanges and pawn shops. There is a feeling that a concentration of them in a neighborhood reflects that the neighborhood has a lot of poor people and detracts from the business opportunities elsewhere on their streets and on the residential properties in the area.

For similar reasons many neighborhoods try to avoid having a proliferation of used car dealerships, particularly the ones advertising easy or no credit necessary.

So why, now that the season is over, don’t we look at these tax outfits, especially the ones who seem more intent on offering refund loans than on filling the blanks correctly?

Hooking up Pierce Butler

I never thought I would live long enough to see the completion of Phalen Boulevard, but somehow I did.

And at the dedication ceremony for the boulevard’s completion, Mayor Kelly stated that the job was not really done, that the connection west of 35E for Pierce Butler really needed to be made to allow for the whole strip through the city to be made accessible for development.

That is what I had always thought and it encouraged me to hear a sitting Mayor say so. Of course, three months later Randy Kelly was no longer mayor.

Maybe it was partly because of that and almost certainly partly because of the staggering economy the connection to Pierce Butler has not seemed to progress much.

But the lead story in this week’s East Side Review seems to indicate that it may well be finished during the lifetimes of many who are alive today.

Well, you know what they say about hope.

for some historical perspective, see ECBD? what's that? [7/14/08]

What do you do with a juvenile hijacker?

Anytime a juvenile gets arrested for something particularly notorious, there are screams by those who presume to have the interests of victims and society at heart to have the young person get the maximum penalty allowed.

And most of the time there are a fewer, quieter, do-gooders who note that the criminal is young, perhaps too young to understand what he/she did or was perhaps under the influence/control of an older, corrupting influence.

Most of these cases fall under state jurisdiction. Few of them fall under federal jurisdiction.

Now the federal government has to figure out how to handle a 16-year-old boy who was involved in an attempted hijacking of a ship in open sea.

The Obama government needs to show that it is tough on crime and actively combating hijacking, yet it has its share of people who will want mercy for the young man.

Of course, this all supposes that “juvenile justice” and “standing tough on crime” are mutually incompatible. That often is not the case, but few concede this.

Could be interesting.

To my Western Christian readers

Happy, Joyous Easter!

The Savior is risen!

Happy Easter [or other spring holiday] to my secular readers

Happy holiday!.

If I have these holidays right, there was some guy named Santa Claus who was born one December in a barn and who celebrated his birthday by riding a sleigh powered by a team of flying reindeer, giving presents to good children of Christian families, saving the best presents for the children of the more affluent families.

He became very unpopular with some people and they had him executed one spring by crucifying him on an evergreen tree, but he came back to life as a rabbit who passed out eggs and chocolate and went back to flying that sleigh.

The parks cleanup as seen from Phalen Park AND District Council gets award

This morning was the annual Saint Paul Parks cleanup. People gathered at various parks around the city, received bags and instructions and proceeded to remove a lot of things which should not have been where they were. They all merit commendation.

One such gathering point was the Phalen Park picnic pavilion where a few dozen gathered. I do not know how many places had miniature programs before the public disembarked, Phalen Park did.

For those of you from St. Anthony Park or Mac-Groveland who may not be familiar with Phalen Park, the pavilion sits directly south of the statue defaced last year.

Mayor Coleman the Second was there to present the Payne/’Phalen District Council with an award for its work in organizing the community after last year’s vandalism to the statue. The mayor mentioned that he had been in China and discussed the statue with the maker and commended the neighborhood for its good work. Director Kerry Stone accepted the award along with President Ryan Kapaun, Sheldon Schwartz, Al Oertwig, and other directors, staff, and volunteers from the organization. The ceremony was short, to the point, and dignified [considering that all present were dressed as if they were going to a cleanup].

When mayors come to events, they seldom are early and leave as quickly as they can, probably often because there were other places they have had to be immediately before and after the given appearance. However, this time the mayor was there at least half an hour early, talking with people who came by, even this writer. [We agreed that remaining ambulatory was a good thing.]

Anyhow, congratulations to the Payne Phalen Council [for the record, I am a director but was not involved in this project] and thanks to all the volunteers who showed up at all the locations to help keep our city’s parks clean.

[Cf. Scarred statue, 08/10/08]

What is in a name?

For a long time Saint Paul Public Schools did not name schools after people, living or dead. When schools were significantly rebuilt they were given new, geographic names. Van Buren became Dayton’s Bluff, Deane became Parkway, Harrison became Phalen Lake. They refused to recycle an already used name [Mechanic Arts] for what became Arlington High school.

Then things changed. I think the first was allowing the new elementary school in the old Johnson building to keep Governor Johnson’s name. Quickly after came naming existing schools after the almost-dead Bruce Vento and the newly dead Paul and Sheila Wellstone. There was a lot of emotion in all three of these renamings.

Now we are learning that we might rename Webster School in honor of either Barack Obama or both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, both of whom are very much alive.

Whenever we rename something which has been named for one person to naming it for somebody else, one has to wonder why we are removing the name. Have we learned something about Daniel Webster which speaks ill of him?

We also need to remember that naming something after a living person poses risks. In 1962 and 1963 John Glenn was the great American hero. Schools, streets, and parks around the republic were named after him. I suspect that if President Kennedy had not been killed so soon after Glenn's orbits that many more things would have been given the Glenn name, but there was suddenly a big movement to name new things after the slain president. How many people would have guessed that they were naming something after a future politician? I don’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with politicians, but how many Republicans must have bit their tongues while they went into polling places at schools named “John Glenn” as they cast their votes?

Likewise, there were a lot of schools and other places named for Richard Nixon while he was the president.

I doubt that President Obama will do anything as embarrassing as Tricky Dick did and I know that there is some appeal in being the first [or at least first in the area] to jump on the let’s-name-something-after-Obama bandwagon, but maybe we could wait a bit.

Tom Conlon is not always right and if the DPP quotes him correctly, ["I can't think of any precedent where we named it after a living politician."] he is mistaken on this a bit since BruceVento was still living but he was terminally ill when East Consolidated was named after him, but in a way Conlon seems to make sense.

Politicians, their lawyers, and Equal Protection

Eric Black of MinnPost says it well this afternoon.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, Repub of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and might therefore be viewed as less than an impartial commentator, says that Dems who tell Coleman to give it up are guilty of "blatant hypocrisy" because their current position -- don't count any more ballots -- contradicts the position they took -- keep counting -- in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the Florida statewide recount thus making G.W. Bush president. In the interest of brevity, Sen. Cornyn did not find space to comment on the hypocrisy of Repubs who have made an opposite switcheroo between the Bush/Gore and the Franken/Coleman cases.

He has a good point. Politicians take the side that looks good at the moment and attorneys argue whatever point of law is on the side of whoever is paying them. Do you really think things would be much different if the numbers were the other way around?

I doubt whether Norm Coleman or Al Franken reads anything here.

So I won’t try to tell either of them what to do next. [After all, even if one of them happened upon this place, there is no reason to believe they would pay attention to what I am writing.]

[Old time SNL watchers: Remember when the 1980s were going to be the “Al Franken Decade”? Are we now looking at a “Al Franken recount decade”?]

I am tired of the hypocrisy on both sides. It’s just that the hypocrisy on the Coleman side stands out worse because of one simple matter: FRANKEN HAS THE VOTES AND IT IS UNLIKELY THAT HE WON’T WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE.

Our election laws and procedures have been shown to be remarkably good. An election this close will show the imperfections and we need to be willing to react to what we have learned, but we do darn good. It is just that there is no good tool available to measure something so close adequately. It is like trying to guess who wins an Olympic race when clocks measuring thousandths of a second cannot distinguish a winner.

But Norm’s claim that not all ballots are being counted equally, while perhaps somewhat true, misses a big point. We do have more equal treatment of ballots statewide than we have ever had before. We once had a mixture of hand-counted paper ballots, machine counted paper ballots, lever machines [which left no paper trail], and [if I understand correctly] even a few jurisdictions using punch card ballots. Now we all vote with paper ballots which makes a recount like we have just seen possible, with every ballot and ballot application open to review by observers of all/both sides.

I will try to avoid this subject for a while. It’s getting tiring.

Albert Lea editorial on Senate race

From a Tuesday editorial in Albert Lea Tribune [a paper which had endorsed Norm Coleman last year]

Coleman, who rails against career politicians, is looking like a career politician who is losing his career.

A good politician knows when he is looking bad and making his state look bad.

Throw in the towel.

Can Norm take a hint?

After three month’s delay caused by his taking a dubious case to court, Norm’s margin of defeat has grown from 225 votes to 312.

Al Franken may not be much, but it is looking like it has to be him or nobody.

Can Norm take a hint? Or is he still too obstructionist? Or too well funded?

Whither goest ye, GOP? (And will we all learn to pronounce Ng?)

Every politician, probably especially incumbents, find people who would vote for Judas Iscariot [at least he knew where the money was] than for him/her. I am sure that Mayor Coleman the Second is no exception.

But right now people who are looking for a Judas or anybody else to vote for instead of him are at sea. John Krenik who had been the apparent GOP hope has switched to run for school board, apparently thinking that Tom Conlon needs assistance there.

So the Republicans have endorsed Eva Ng who says she sought that party’s endorsement even though she says she isn’t part of it, just an independent who wants to unseat Coleman. It used to be that actual Republicans [think Meredith, Konopatzki, Schaber, McCutcheon, Sonnen, Gaertner] ran as independents because they wanted to avoid the stigma that the GOP label brings about in our city. [And Mayor Coleman the first even pretended that he was a DFLer for a while to avoid that stigma.] Sometimes their personal charisma or other appeal got them elected and if they stayed in office long enough sometimes the DFL would adopt them. But Eva Ng must figure that the GOP image is no longer so dimly accepted or the DFL’s image is no longer as bright as it once was, or both.

In the meantime, those who are looking forward to getting a new mayor may be a bit confused. November is still quite a bit away, but for the moment we have gone from having two other options to one.

Noting a transition -- Tom Byrne

Today’s DPP mentions the death last night of Thomas Byrne. While they did publish it as a news obit, they apparently did not think the death of a former mayor was important enough to be placed on a news page.

That may be because in many ways Tom Byrne must have seemed to younger people at the paper as remnant to a day long gone [it is almost 39 years since he left the third floor of City Hall], when the city was used to having leaders who were Irish and Catholic and when the city and its news were important enough for the newspaper to cover.

Tom Byrne was not the last Irish mayor. We have one now. He was not the last Catholic mayor. That designation has to belong to Randy Kelly or Jim Scheibel. [I am sure that somebody knows.] But it seems that somehow there has not been a mayor so Catholic [he had been a seminarian before his military service and he was an archbishop’s brother] or so Irish, so connected with the city’s working and ethnic past. [For the record, I am neither Irish – at least not the green kind – nor am I Catholic.]

I realize that sometimes when we look back, we see things colored a bit, like early, color photographs left in the sun too long distort the colors we see, but it seems to me that the passing of Mayor Byrne in some ways illuminates that an era has changed.

The new Saint Paul has different people living here and different people in leadership. Let us just hope that as we move on the latter is adequate for the former.

Looking at Iowa AND A note on how we choose judges

Our legislators are considering a constitutional amendment being pushed by elder statespeople of both parties to eliminate our system of electing judges in favor of a system of retention elections in which voters would merely vote in favor of or opposed to keeping any given jurist on the bench. California and Iowa already have similar situations.

The Iowa Supreme Court has just overruled that Iowa Code section 595.2 [the state’s “Defense of Marriage” law]. This act was passed in an overwhelming and bipartisan manner during the tenure of former Democratic Governor [now Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack. The Court ruled that the law violates the state’s constitution.

I am not going to quibble about the law behind the ruling. I am not well enough versed in the Iowa Constitution or the arguments given to question it. I do note that coverage today indicates that the ruling was unanimous and I would suggest that since the justices all knew the election system that they have would not have made this ruling capriciously.

But I don’t know whether anybody here has wondered about the implications of things like today’s decision on elections here. I haven’t seen anything yet, but I am probably not the only one who will connect the two things this way.

We have already seen how a personalized campaign against a judge can result in removal for grounds more emotional than legal when we saw how in 1986 California voters ousted their chief justice Rose Bird and two associate justices whom they thought did not vote to allow enough criminals to be executed. Television commercials featuring children and other survivors of moral victims were shown across the state as big money was raised in the effort to remove them. It will be interesting now to see how voters in Iowa react toward their high court justices in the next elections.

Our system has worked well for the most part. People are probably correct in seeing problems coming up. We can look over the St. Croix to Wisconsin and look at their judicial elections going on right now and see some of the problems that happen there and might here. Maybe we should pause before we rush to change things here.

FYI: This ruling was by Iowa’s highest court was based on that state’s constitution and has no direct effect in any other state. Iowa has a time-consuming process for constitutional amendment and the absolute earliest any amendment could go to the voters would be in the 2012 election, so it would seem that this ruling will be in effect for some time. Iowa does not require residency for marriage, something which has kept the Little Brown Church in business. We will probably learn shortly whether our local authorities think that Minnesota will be entitled or obligated to recognize same-sex marriages performed there to residents of our state.

Anybody got an old papyrus to read?

As we keep changing our methods of disseminating and storing information, we are presenting opportunities for people who can transfer data from one format to another.  78 rpm records gave way to LPs which gave way to CDs which are giving way to iPods and whatever else.  Computer files went from 5.25” floppies to 3.5” floppies to all the various drives and sticks and cards we have these days.  VHS beat out Beta but is losing [has lost?] to DVD and TiVo.  Web sites come and go and get changed without notice while printed paper is disappearing.  [The DPP and StarJournal (and) Tribune have printed archives which one can imagine being read four hundred years from now, but does MinnPost?  Or even the newspapers for their digital-only stuff?]

 

You hear every year about some high school someplace which has decided to replace the yearbook with a DVD.  But as they prepare for their twentieth [or even tenth] reunion will anybody have the equipment to open it?

 

Historians study the correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  They have been kept.  What will happen to the emails between W and his father?

 

A MinnPost article today by Matt Ehling calls some of these problems to us.  He reminds us to print everything.  I haven’t printed much of what goes here and haven’t maintained the printouts much anyway, but it does give something to think about.

 

Of course, why would I think that future eras would be interested in what so few are interested at present?

Is Bostrom the only one who can see? OR April Fool's Day at the City Council, only they were not joking

Congratulations to Dan Bostrom for nailing things correctly when he suggested at yesterday’s City Council meeting that what the opponents of candy cigarettes really want to outlaw the real things.  Our local tobacco Taliban is back at things again so we all need to prepare for another round of intolerance.  That they are now attacking candy is but another sign of how they won’t let up on anything until they have achieved total domination of and utter demolition of what is supposed to be a free society.

 

So-called “public health” advocates oppose cigarettes because they associate “second hand” smoke with bad effects, real or imagined, which are said to include cancer, heart problems, and emphysema.  About the only possible second-hand problem caused by candy anythings is litter.  But the intolerant person is often a blind person so this minor detail won’t catch the eye of any of their eyes.

 

There may indeed be some public safety benefit from the part of the proposed ordinance which bans novelty lighters.  Lighters which do not look like lighters may be more of a hazard than lighters which do.  Of course, there is no real reason why this should be part of the same ordinance, except perhaps to provide cover for a councilmember who does not have the backbone to directly stand up against intolerance to rationalize a vote for the proposed ordinance.

 

But shame to people like Katie Engman, who works for the Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota and is unlikely to feel shamed by her intolerance for bringing this thing to our City Council’s attention.  [After all, it is not like they have anything important to do.]  Double, or even triple shame on her and her cohorts for bringing youths like Shanicee Dillon and Calitta Jones into the fray.  Let us hope that these young people can grow up into more tolerant people than they are now being led to be.

 

DPP coverage is available here.