1006 Summit on view

I have not been in the governor’s mansion since 1974 when I was [along with about 80 others] the guest of Wendell Anderson for supper.

I do not know how much it has changed. I do suspect that they no longer have ash trays with special commemorative match books any longer.

But in the spirit of announcing upcoming public events, I should note that the place [located at 1006 Summit, for those who may not know] will be open to free public tours from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. the first three Tuesdays of the next three months.

Photo ID is required for admittance. Somehow I suspect that Marty Seifert must be chuckling.

Time to lose the hula hoop -- and the gyrator too

I have never believed in selective veto because it seems to me to take power from the people other people elected and recent events have done nothing to change my mind, so I found the editorial [which primarily addressed Pawlenty’s political future] interesting.

So i find this editorial in the Albert Lea Tribune, as copied by MinnPost interesting.

Get rid of or at least redefine unallotment, and take a hard look at whether line-item veto really works. It was a political fad, like a hula-hoop, and our state bought it. Time to lose the hula-hoop.

June 13 -- Viet Nam vet day

Saturday, June 13, has been designated as the day for Minnesota to honor Viet Nam veterans. Venues are Central Presbyterian Church and the Capitol complex. Details can be found at http://www.mnhonorsvietnamvets.org/program/index.htm.

As I have noted before Viet Nam vets and those who did not return have been ignored like no other group of United States veterans. We seem to forget that they did not choose the ridiculously dreamed up event to which they were summoned or the coercion called Selective Service which put so many of them there.

Last year we had a similar day in March. I am not sure why the difference, but what I posted then can be seen at http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-honor-of-viet-nam-veterans.html.

Followup on the Obama school name choice

As most probably know and as I alluded to in a post about Tom Conlon two days ago, our school board has decided to unnamed the school at 707 Holly from Daniel Webster and name it after Barack and Michelle Obama.

I suggested a more cautious approach for the renaming earlier. Somebody has contacted me offline to suggest that I missed an important point that renamings generally ignore:

Once you name something after someone[s] you make it more unlikely that something else will be named for him/her/them.

The President and First Lady now will have a school named for them. There is a chance that in a decade or so, when they might otherwise have been in a position to have something better named for them and that they won’t be in the running for that honor.

And, now that the District is in an unnaming mood, what school might be next? Daniel Webster was not a perfect person, but there are schools in our city named after much less deserving people. Andrew Jackson was a slave owner who relocated and slaughtered native Americans. Yet we have a school in Frogtown [with high populations of both of these minority groups] which has been carrying his name for generations. And maybe Warren Harding warrants a school, but a major high school??

School board members work hard for little pay. They are responsible for large budgets for which funding sources often give them little leeway in how they are spent. They have no independent staff to give them the answers to the questions they feel they need. I do not wish to make their work any harder, but maybe they really should start looking at what else needs to be unnamed now.

Will IRV bring about delays?

I have been intrigued about Instant Runoff Voting [sometimes simplified as IRV – although it is not named for our late former House speaker] but never enough to suggest its adaptation.

Minneapolis has adopted it to take effect in this year’s election. We may be getting to vote on it sometime soon.

Now Steve Brant at the Star-[Journal and] Tribune reports that, according to election officials, it may take 10-20 days of around the clock counting to find out some of the winners.

I have wondered all along whether the better approach would be a combination of keeping the September primary date and allowing a candidate’s name to show his/her party endorsements alongside his/her name, multiple endorsements where that is the case, and to declare anybody with a majority in September to be elected.

But before we make our decisions, maybe we will at least have an idea of what the city upstream is getting itself into.

Ramsey County Commissioners join Janice Rettman

For years, Janice Rettman has been the only Ramsey County commissioner opposing the commission’s regular pay increases, the minority in a series of 6 to 1 votes.

Suddenly, her colleagues now join her. The commissioners have decided that they will not accept another raise this time around. They will get by with a little more than $80,000 a year.

People have often thought that politicians like Commissioner Rettman who vote against their own pay increase are grandstanding a bit. Maybe they are, but now the whole commission is made of grandstanders.

The county will save something like $17,000 in this move. That is poultry feed in a budget so big.

I have long felt that county commissioners are overpaid when compared with city councilmembers. I understand that they handle bigger budgets for larger constituencies, but it seems that so many more of the dollars they handle are already committed by their funding sources.

Maybe this will make the disparity a bit less, but let’s see what happens when the financial state of the county gets better. Somehow I suspect that the commissioners [at least six of them] will want to make up for lost time and the pay will zoom up extra quickly.

Tom Conlon is leaving

We elect Republicans in our city quite often. However, we seldom elect somebody who admits to being one.

Tom Conlon was the exception, having fallen heir to Eleanor Weber as holding the only school board seat that the DFL could not take. [Greg Felice was in there too, but that situation is a bit more complicated and did not last.]

Now it has been revealed that, as part of a move to North Carolina, he will be leaving the board.

Sooner or later we will see posters in various fora suggesting that we are closer to one-party rule locally.

Maybe so. However, I suspect that we won’t see a lot of difference. Aside from the fact that local issues are so often non-partisan [as we have been reminded before there really is not much difference between DFL and GOP pot holes] we still seem to find things on which to differ.

As for Tom Conlon: It may well be that he will be remembered for his last dissenting vote, the vote against taking Daniel Webster’s name off of a school and replacing it with Barack and Michelle Obama’s. That decision was certainly defensible even with the partisan element removed. Naming public institutions and places after living people has its problems. There are people who even now have diplomas certifying graduation from Richard Nixon High Schools.

UPDATE: [5/23/09] Yesterday's DPP carried a side bar which noted the times and place of Tom Conlon farewells and suggested a memory book is being compiled.and that people with memories should send them to an Edina address. Somehow that Edina address seems to be saying a lot.

The pols who cannot buckle down want you to buckle up

kThe legislative session is over. We await unknown budgetary confusion or chaos at all levels of government for the foreseeable future.

But somehow, despite all this the legislature and Commissar Pawlenty [thanks to the anonymous commenter who suggested the title – it’s the best I’ve had] managed to agree on something, the totally unneeded bill to make seat belt violations primary offenses.

Although I generally use my seat belt, I am too pro-choice to believe in seat belt legislation and think that any legislator who voted for this bill has given his/her electorate one more reason to reject him/her in future elections.

But, truth be told, I never felt protected by the old law. If I was unbuckled I did not feel that there was really any reason to feel protected by the knowledge that the police had to find some other reason to stop me. There is always a reason.

But the bill [now act] is still meddlesome intervention into other people’s personal decisions.

Pelosi was not alone

I am getting confused and tired by the revelations, accusations, and counter-accusations arising about what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. She is, unfortunately, no different from a lot of other politicians of both parties when it comes to keeping what is important in perspective.

Leonard Pitts, jr. has noted, [link to article from which this was lifted]

In those days of heat, fear and panic, many of us — including, apparently, Nancy Pelosi — failed to consider what should be ever obvious: Our national identity is the one thing that makes us worth attacking or defending. We are a nation of laws, not men, we are better than those who attacked us, we are America and that has to mean something, even — "especially" — in days of heat, panic and fear.

The sad truth is that almost all of our national leaders, regardless of party, turn politically yellow when big national traumas arrive. Whether it be Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, the whole Congress after Pearl Harbor and the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, the Oklahoma City bombing which prompted a GOP-run Congress [including the sainted Paul Wellstone] and Bill Clinton to create whole new categories of capital offenses, or the excesses of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11/2001, too many of them cower and stay silent. Willingness to stand up for what really should be considered our national principles is way too rare.

We might wish to remember one of Martin Luther King, jr.'s less-quoted statements, which Pitts used a week earlier on a different subject: [link]

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

Want to go to Mpls in 2015? Good luck!

I have railed quite a bit about how transit is based on bad premises and in particular on the destruction that the Central Corridor “light” rail will bring to University Avenue, the Midway, Summit-University, and Frogtown neighborhoods.

I don’t go to Minneapolis often. It’s not a bad city, but it’s not my city and I seldom have any reason to go there. But I know that a whole lot of people do need to go there [and to get here] so keeping the routes to and from Minneapolis usable is important.

Our MnDOT people know that too, so one has to be especially cynical when now we learn that in addition to screwing up University Avenue they want to make us pay to use I-94 [or at least any lane that is moving].

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Tourniquets do work, after all

Tourniquets around necks will stop nose bleeds, but most [all?] health care professionals would recommend against this treatment.

Well, I guess that keeping all people from entering our country might make us a little more secure. Of course we need to remember that Timothy McVeigh, the guys from Posse Comitatus, and Lee Harvey were all born here. And we know that what we gain from people coming here has made us the great people we are.

Many people’s concerns are racially- or ethnically-based, sometimes fueled by politicians and commentators whose personal standards allow them to run on this issue.

And, maybe some just comes from ignorance. Christianity has been in India since the First Century. It has been here since the Spanish brought it to Florida in the early Sixteenth Century.

Yet we find that our officials rejected allowing a Christian religious worker into our country because he was Indian born. It took a lot of money and an attorney, who ironically was a rabbi’s daughter, to get him in.

Decisions like this may make one wonder if maybe we should consider just closing the border down and not letting anybody in. Remember: that tourniquet around the neck will indeed stop a nose bleed.

See the story.

All hail, his [what's his title?]

I had been wondering about what we should now call our distinguished governor. I [and a few others] have used Governor Plenty, but that really is just a cheap shot based on a name, not a name which really reveals any particular insight into the person being named.

But his decision announced yesterday unallot and avoid legislative processes, evading normal legislative processes [about the closest thing allowed to a coup d’état allowed under Article IV of the US Constitution] tells us that he should be given a better title.

There is a post on the blog “Liberal in the Land of Conservative” which suggests the title “King Pawlenty.” I understand the thinking, but wonder whether that is the best title. King tends to suggest he obtained his power by inheritance, rather than by seizure. “Tsar” presents similar problems and even His Excellency does not have that level of power. The nature of this assumption of power seems more worthy of a “Generalissimo” but, despite playing commander-in-chief when the National Guard is deployed, he is not military enough. “Shah” seems just too strange to Western tastes. “Fuehrer” seems more appropriate to the way His Excellency, the governor, has assumed his power, but we cannot think of the word without thinking of Hitler and genocide and whatever his flaws.

I think I need to think a bit and welcome anybody’s suggestions.

Meanwhile, Senjum and Marty Seifert [“Sir Punisher”] and other legislative sycophants stood by His Excellency in front of that ornate mantle where governors haven given us their pronouncements on pretty much everything for years.

And I think my suggestion which I have raised several times for one weekly legislative session per month instead of 120 days concentrated in winter and spring has even more merit. [To be fair to CCM readers, I have never posted that here. I had intended to put it in after the legislative session was over and a better post mortem could be done and I probably will. In the meantime, you can dig out your slide rules and calculate 5x12x2.]

Pawlenty in 2010?

A SurveyUSA/KSTP poll says that Minnesotans are against Governor Pawlenty seeking a third term. The margin is 57% to 31%.


Although people often talk of US Senators as being obvious candidates for President, President Obama is the first one to reach that office since JFK [1961]who was the first since Warren Harding [1921]. Governors have done better and several governors have run for President in recent years. Most, including Carter and Reagan waited until they were former governors, but Bill Clinton and W were sitting governors when they were elected.


[Clinton even had to take time off the campaign trail to go to Arkansas and sign a death warrant. He did not want anybody to think he was soft on criminals. W, being the leading civilian executioner in US history did not have that problem.]


I don’t know which would work best for Pawlenty. You would think that GOP bigwigs would blanch at selecting somebody who has never received a majority of his state’s vote, especially when he hasn’t even been able to make his own state red. So it would not surprise me if Pawlenty ran again to achieve that majority.


Of course, he might lose.


Richard Nixon was elected President after losing a gubernatorial election. But [with memories of Lloyd Bentsen talking to Dan Quayle] Pawlenty, you are no Dick Nixon. And if you don’t measure up to Nixon, how low must you be?

A note on Capitol security

The Legislative Auditor [not the State Auditor as I heard on one of the midday television reports] is suggesting that there is inadequate security of the Capitol and nearby state buildings.

Sometimes I wonder whether everything we do in the name of “security” really helps and I won’t weigh in on the new observations, at least for now.

But whatever we have now, it used to be worse. For some perspective, you can scroll down the right side of this page to a miscellaneous link titled, “Story of a rifle delivery to the Capitol building” about a 1970 delivery of a rifle to the Lieutenant Governor’s office.

How much is that latte in the window?

Many of us think of Seattle as a northern San Francisco, a place of leftist-leaning, politically-correct flakes, more likely than the average American to be vegetarian and bicycle-riding, who think of themselves as living as close to Nirvana as any Americans can.


But Seattle also gave us Starbucks, a large chain of coffee shops which has become synonymous with obsequiousness. [Well, they claim to sell coffee, but as far as I can tell they don’t sell much coffee. The sell beverages with a minimum of coffee, mixed with enough creams, mints, herbs, syrups, and oils to make one almost unaware of the coffee content.]

For most of its history, Starbucks has been very profitable and has expanded onto what seems every street corner of the country, at least in downtown, suburban, and affluent urban neighborhoods and downtowns. Fortunately their kind of business has made only minor inroads on our East Side and some of what has come has been more locally-based.

Accounting is a funny science. Not only does it require a knowledge of some really arcane mathematical techniques, but it only takes into account money. Everything has to come down to dollars and cents [or yen and sen or rubles and kopecks and euros or pounds or whatever system one is using.]

I suspect that many of the people who patronize these alleged coffee shops would agree that we do not [and probably cannot] properly factor environmental or social costs into how we evaluate costs and opportunities. Some probably hold great contempt for how Walmartized we have become and, whenever they see an article about the chain, maybe even snort contempt at the crackers and rubes whose patronage made Walmart big. They may be reading this on computers made by Chinese child slaves, but they do not connect the dots and understand that abusing labor makes some companies more profitable than can really be justified.

Well, Minnesota Independent writer Paul Demko [formerly of City Pages] has brought back to attention the ongoing case between the Starbucks Workers Union and Starbucks’ Minnesota operations. I wonder how many people sitting in one of those establishments reading about this on their wi-fi computers will notice this and just keep on clicking.

I am not trying to be especially hard on Starbucks or their clientele, even though the company offers a completely unnecessary product. We all have to make our own judgments on how we do our personal reconciliation between total accounting which includes all costs and benefits and money accounting and we all do it differently and some of us may even feel a bit regretful about some of our decisions.

For example, I would feel a lot better if I could write this on a computer which was not made in a third world sweatshop, but I don’t believe such a thing even exists. And my slave- or child- [or both-] made computer is running partly on energy derived from radioactive power plants and partly on energy made at other plants which operate on underpriced fossil fuel.

There is no law against adults drinking lattes [whatever they may be] and there shouldn’t be. After all, free people need to be free to make free decisions.

But maybe those who consume the stuff might want to open their eyes a bit.

What's the news? What's the ad?

If you looked at pages 8A and 9A of today’s DPP [at least in the city edition] you saw an ad for one of the area’s non-union grocery stores. [They would probably want me to name them, but I can see no point in doing that.]

The page on the right [9A] was clearly an ad. The page on the left [8A] contained three news stories interspersed with full-color pictures of what seem to be a grocery bag spilling house brands for that chain.

Newspapers have carried advertisements since the beginning of the business. But this is the first time I think I have ever seen the ads worked into the stories with so little demarcation.

I really don’t know what to make of this. I think it unseemly to mix stories with ads like this, but don’t know what seasoned or professional journalists or ethicists think of this.

But the DPP should be encouraged to examine themselves a bit more before doing it again.

ADDENDUM: [5/5/09]: David Brauer of Minnpost noticed this too. You can see his comments and a picture of the pages in his post. [link]

The ban on more nuclear power is surviving

NOTE: Parts of this post are lifted from an earlier Capitol City Musings post from February 26, 2008.

Both houses of our legislature are under the control of people calling themselves DFLers. But they seem to differ on the matter of whether we should continue our ban on additional radioactive power plants [generally referred to in the media as “nuclear” power plants.

So you can choose your house and take your chances.

I side with the House of Representatives which has voted to continue the ban.

As I noted last year, electrical energy serves selfish users and nuclear energy in particular encourages deferring the actual paying of the true costs to generations well into the future. This, with modest modification for typos and style, is what I wrote then. And the link above will let you see the original post if you wish to see it.

One of the dirty secrets of electrical energy is that it is produced some distance from where it is used and we users tend to forget that there are environmental costs involved with its usage. This partly explains the popularity of hybrid cars which emit less pollution on the road, but increase whatever is going out of a power plant. In either case, there is an environmental cost, but with electricity we pass the problem on to somebody else.

Nuclear power appeals to this same selfishness. It may seem cleaner at the moment, but instead of sending the problem to a rural or exurban area, it sends the problem to future generations.

The half lives of these products are calculated to be in thousands of years. [And that just means that half of the radioactivity is gone then; the other half will take longer.] We may develop adequate secure places to hide the stuff which may survive our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, but can we be sure that we can make places secure much longer than that?

We don’t know what cataclysms may come up. And, of course, we never know what some crazy person or persons will for terroristic or mental health purposes do what.

We really need to find better ways to handle our energy needs. I don’t know if the sun and wind can ever be harnessed to do it all, but it doesn’t seem that we are even trying too hard to find out. I admit that if the sun stops shining that we would have a problem, but how we get our electricity would seem to be a minor problem under those circumstance.

We need better ways to limit use. Letting NSP or Xcel or other providers raise rates to encourage less usage will only make the providers wealthier, but somehow we need to adjust our accounting systems so that we factor in all the costs.

Maintaining a moratorium on nuclear power plants seems to be a minimal first step toward doing that.

I really don’t want to come across as an environmentalist. There are a lot of matters that "environmentalists” are getting wrong. But I do think we need to look at some of the things they raise and at things they don’t raise too.

Word choice is powerful. Just another matter to wonder about: How popular would nuclear power ever have become, had the name “radioactive power” been established instead of “nuclear power.”