Maybe Michele isn't as crazy as we have been thinking

Michele Bachmann says a lot of crazy things, but her comments on the 2010 census may not be so far from the wall as many are suggesting.

The Constitution of the United States of America does indeed provide for a decennial census. But it only specifies one purpose – for allocation of Representatives from the several states. It does not even include locating locations within states to assist them in apportioning congressional, legislative, and seats for other jurisdictions.

A reasonable corollary would be to assume that taking of names and addresses is necessary to make certain that all are being counted and being counted only once. This would require Ms. Bachmann as well as all the rest of us to give a little more information than just that they exist.

But with the increasing cases of government and other big institutions screwing up on privacy matters, one might be reasonably tempted to withhold unneeded information. And despite all the assurances we receive about how secret the data can be we should not forget that we change our rules when we perceive crisis. 1940 census data did help the government find Americans of Japanese ancestry a lot more easily.

Refusing gratuitous answers to irrelevant and personal questions would not necessarily indicate a nut case. It could just be indicating a libertarian.

[And believe it or not, the terms are not always interconnected.]

O Governor, where art thou?

Chris Steller of Minnesota Independent reminds us that South Carolina Governor Sanford is not the first governor to disappear.

He reminds us of Rudy Perpich disappearing in the early days of his first gubernatorial stint. It also brings up memories of the great power line protest which identified so much of the state politics that year and helped bring Paul Wellstone to the attention of many.

Of course, the reasons for Rudy’s disappearance are so much more acceptable.

Hitching your wagon to the wrong star

There have been a couple of times the last few days when I was wondering whether anybody would miss Commissar Pawlenty if he were to disappear for a few days, or whether anybody would mind. But I was never by my computer at the right time to post the question.

But now that we find that the Governor of South Carolina was not taking a hermit’s hike, but instead was philandering internationally, the subject has different coloration.

And I suddenly feel sorry for a lot of Republicans in South Carolina. It is a concern in the back [and sometimes the front of] every political activist’s [professional or volunteer] mind that he/she will support a candidate who does something unconscionable. Think of Grunseth followers in 1990 or local Dino Guerin supporters in the middle of the last decade. Think of where Bill Clinton supporters might be heading if the Monica Lewinski thing had come out during his first term. Or of Elliot Spitzer backers last year.

And new Nixon tapes are out. He must have left a few supporters disappointed also.

You can say that that’s life, that things like that happen, but for those involved it must still suck.

Beer at the game?

I understand that University of Minnesota regents sometimes like to believe that they are above the law. That may be because sometimes they constitutionally are.

Today they agreed to ban sale of alcoholic beverages at all of their sporting events. This follows the legislature’s bipartisan requirement that they, if they provided for the selling of beer in luxury seats at the new South Dakota Bank Stadium that they be required to sell to all legal aged people in the stadium.

But the staff and regents seem to be sniveling a little. It seems a little funny since beer sales are available stadium-wide where they play now. But they seem to think that in order to have a first-class football program that they need to sell beer to bigwigs.

They point out that most Big Ten football programs make such sales available.

Three Big Ten universities do not sell beer in their stadia. They are Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State.

Strange.

What don't I get about the health care debate?

I guess I just don’t get it.

We are having a lot of discussion lately about the cost of and access to health care and whether the federal government should play a role therein.

The cost of health care is making many otherwise profitable businesses marginal or even losers. I have medical coverage and am grateful that my employer has made that possible, but it is a small company and I wonder what it is doing for the company’s bottom line.

Yet it seems that all the plans being advanced by all the political types seem to continue basing access to health care on employers and one’s employment status.

We complain about the high cost of what becomes subsidized emergency room care, but the fact is that health care providers do not offer the public the same rates they charge individuals. While it is usually considered good business to offer volume purchasers a better deal, this makes the burden on the uninsured [or improperly insured] onerous.

I do not know what is the answer, but somehow we need to make sure that we all have access to medical and dental care at rates which don’t rip the general public off and which do not require an employer to have to factor in expenses which similar employers in other countries have to cover and allow all people the option to change employers or to enter or leave other employment or self-employment.

IRV in Minneapolis. Are we next?

After a period of uncertainty while the judges were doing their thing, Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] has been cleared for use in the Minneapolis elections this year.

If you have read my earlier posts, you probably know that I am not ready to sign on the IRV bandwagon yet. But, even though we have learned that SO many of our fellow citizens have difficulty filling out a ballot the way we have them now, I am quite willing to let the city upriver give it a try. And I wonder how many people over there will need to learn how to cast a proper ballot all over again in next year’s general election.

Now it seems likely that we will be voting this year on whether we want IRV for ourselves.

But might it not be better to see how Mpls. gets through its first try with the system first?

Related links:

St. Cloud Times,

WCCO Television

[Mpls.] Star[-Journal and Tribune

Dispatch Pioneer Press

How many happily married ten-year olds do you know?

The U.S. House passed a bill introduced by Congressperson Betty McCollum which would increase State Department staffing on the issue of child marriage and direct that we work with other countries on strategies to combat this problem.

An article in Minnesota Independent quotes her as saying, ““By prioritizing and valuing girls in the developing world, the U.S. sends a signal to countries like Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Yemen that the practice of allowing 10, 11, or 12 year olds to be married to much older men is a human rights violation.”

Of course, she is right and she probably has the primary purpose for her act well stated, but it does not seem to me that 10-year olds of either gender, straight or gay, should be marrying anybody, regardless of age and we should not be approving of any place where that is encouraged or tolerated.

When are you too old for us but not for Lauderdale?

I have always felt that mandatory retirement ages are unfair. As I age, I probably think so even more.

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to be a police officer after age 65, but I have wondered why anybody would want to be one at 25 also.

But per this morning’s DPP one local police officer is being forced to retire later this month. Chief Harrington [or presumably the Mayor or anybody else] cannot help him, it seems, since the matter is determined by statute, a law which apparently only refers to police and fire employees in cities of the first class.

I don’t believe that I have met John Morrow who has been with the department since 1967, longer than anybody else now on the department, but it would seem unlikely that I will now, and all because of a law that makes no sense.

If the newspaper coverage is correct, the statue applies to all employees in the P.D., not just officers. And it only applies to cities of the first class [us, Minneapolis, and Duluth].

Translated it means that anybody who works for the department has to be under 65, even if the job does not involve any special risk or physical activity. I don’t know how the people who maintain police equipment and facilities are employed, but this would seem to include people who file paperwork, repair the vehicles, and mop the floors as well as John Morrow. And it means that Maplewood or Hilltop or Landfall or Coates could hire somebody over 65 to be on their police department, but Saint Paul cannot. We keep forgetting that “suburb” begins with “sub-“ indicating something less. Yet somehow a lesser government has more rights than a real city.

It would seem that although it would be too late for Mr. Morrow, that our legislators should address this at its next opportunity. [Of course, some of our legislators are busy doing their own law enforcement work, already. See post below.]

Need a cop? Call a pol?

We are having cuts in LGA and other challenges to keeping enough police and other public servants working for us.

But we seem to have found a new source of public safety employment: Elected officials.

Yesterday’s paper told how Councilmember Melvin Carter III helped make a bust on an alleged pimp. Mayor Coleman the Second did a stint as a traffic cop a three years ago and Dan Bostrom [who is a retired cop] helped with an apprehension of a gun-toter a couple of years ago. And the late Councilmember Jim Reiter rode around in a retired police car looking to help out.

And today we learn how Senator Ellen Anderson became a bicycle theft detective.

Mayors used to have badge #1 and councilmembers also carried badges. Charlie McCarty used his enough to break up fights in the downtown White Castle and interfere [help?] in a hostage situation in the Hamline-Midway area [the same incident for which retired officer James Mann was belatedly honored earlier this year].

I don’t think councilmember are allowed to carry badges anymore and I don’t know if our mayor does.

But maybe we should look into it.

Let's do the right thing on Jackson, Sibley, and ECBD

I have written before about the unbuilt East Central Business District Bypass [ECBD]. Sibley and Jackson Streets are serving in that role because we have never gotten around to building the ECBD.

In the meantime we find ourselves frequently closing off or blocking off Jackson and/or Sibley for numerous civic events such as parades, basketball tournaments, and now bicycle races.

Trucks that we don’t want on I-35E [but only on the other side of town since nobody thinks it improper to have them bothering East Side and North End people] have to use this ersatz bypass. And if we have something going on down in Lowertown that gets in their way, well, I guess that is just their tough luck.

I heartily suggest that until we are willing to finish our part of the deal and build the ECBD bypass that we place a moratorium on anything which closes off Jackson or Sibley.

It seems just fair.

We’ve been dribbling on this too much already.

Earlier post: ECBD? What's that? [7-14-08]

Even after you have been elected, you still have to get there

Chris Steller of Minnesota Independent reminds us of something which should have been obvious all along. To get to the 60-vote filibuster-proof number, they need Franken but also have to have the 59 others all available to vote and some of them are not well. He cites Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy as examples, but remember that the world belongs to those who show up.

Do you suppose that any of the GOP hardliners will take this into consideration when they contemplate their next step when/if our Supremes rule for Franken?

At sea about how to get up in the air

I wrote about renaming things a bit ago, specifically about a school at 707 Holly. I noted that renaming involves unnaming.

Now the matter comes up again, this time for people who are trying to catch an airplane to go somewhere else.

Should we remove the names of Charles Lindbergh [the younger one, not the Congressperson] and Hubert Humphrey [the elder one, not Skippy] from the terminal buildings at Wold-Chamberlain Field which bear their names? Would people find the numbers one and two easier to remember and differentiate?

I have not been an airplane passenger for several years. But don’t the tickets say where the plane departs from? Oh, that’s right. Nobody holds a printed ticket any more, I guess.

But Lindbergh and Humphrey are both well-established Minnesota names and it seems a shame to take their names off the terminals just because some who are supposed to be flying are at sea.

Of course, if the now-defunct Northwest Orient Airlines had had their way a few years ago, the Lindbergh terminal would now only be used by Delta and the choice would be “Delta or somebody else.”

Parties, their trademarks, and 2010

Our Minnesota major political parties have no way to protect their trademarks. We have neither party registration nor closed primaries. Anybody can claim a party and the only check is an open primary in which it is possible that nobody who will admit publicly to be a part of that party can affirm the claim for the designation, no matter how baseless it might be.

So we have established the party endorsement system. It may not be as inclusive as a primary, but it worked in most cases for quite a while. And the endorsement system allows for a lesser funded candidate to seek office. But the endorsement process can lead itself to being perceived as a process which favors “insiders” and even the most honorable of our political types is tempted to cater to those who suspect insiders when the endorsement does not go their way, especially if their candidate is well funded.

If parties stuck with their endorsement system and consistently refused to recognize or cooperate with those who flaunt the system, they might have been able to preserve the endorsement system, but the violations they have increasingly continued to tolerate have led many more candidates to seek the nomination from the multi-partisan public without obtaining or even trying to obtain the one-party endorsement.

This leads to people dropping out of the caucus-convention system. After all, if your input is deemed irrelevant, why waste the time and effort? Soon only those who have a really deep interest in a candidate[s] or cause[s] or whose livelihoods is directly affected by the future[s] of people in the political class are the only ones participating.

So with so few people participating these days and those who do being so much less representative of the general electorate, you cannot generally obtain a GOP endorsement if you don’t oppose all tax increases, suggest that lesbians and gays deserve the same measure of civic freedom that straights have, or fail to give lip service to pro-life people and causes and you may as well try not to get DFL endorsement if you are not “pro-choice,” or oppose gun control. [Of course, as I have noted before we all favor choice, just that we don’t agree on which subject merit the right or which side one should take. Take minimum wage, seat belts, or smoking for example.]

In a Thursday post. Doug Grow of MinnPost asks, “Can either party endorse a candidate for governor who will appeal to mainstream Minnesota?”

I noted in a previous post, the DFL has not been able to endorse a non-incumbent candidate for governor since 1970. Lest you think I am singling out the DFL, it should be noted that the GOP has only succeeded twice in the same interval [1978 for Al Quie and 2002 for Pawlenty] and has had its own failed endorsees such as such as Wangberg, Ludeman, Grunseth, Quist, and Norm in that period.

I am beginning to suggest that we allow parties to control their own trademarks and to allow them to take responsibility for them. People could wonder whether that would close the system to many others, centrists and extremists, so the same law that would give parties this control would need to address this but there are ways it could be done.

Unlike Mr. Grow, I personally do not think that Pawlenty’s veto of the earlier [August] primary really has much effect on the situation. But Grow notes that under our recent three-party system that one does not need to appeal to a majority of the voters to get elected, quoting Tim Penny as saying, “But we now know that 42 percent plus 312 votes is electable."

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could elect somebody decisively for a change? [The right somebody, of course]

Normandy was a stop on the way TO Germany

Our president is going to Normandy tomorrow. I am sure that he will say all the right things that we expect any president, regardless of party, to say.

And I am sure that his comments will be worth calling to our attention.

But why is he going to Germany first?

It has been the practice of our presidents to go to Germany whenever they go to Europe. Ronald Reagan even caught heat from conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer when he visited German SS graves on the same trip as he commemorated the fortieth anniversary of D-Day.

I know that we live in a different world now.

But this combining of trips seems to be a slap in the face of our WWII vets and the people who knew or loved them. Would it hurt to do the German visit on a different trip?

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, revisited

Now that Pawlenty is out of the race for governor next year, people around the republic are wondering what he is thinking for 2012.

And it’s not just local media.

Among the other out-of-state stories and commentaries is one from Nate Silver of fivethrityeight.com. He calls Pawlenty a “hockey dad” and notes that our governor’s approval ratings have been nothing remarkable but suggests that he could be a factor.

Silver seems a bit disdainful of the whole Republican field and those who will choose their candidates and gives us the quote of the day which may say more about him than about Pawlenty, but is interesting nevertheless:

“If I were him [Pawlenty], I might talk a lot about guns -- but not so much about God.”

Should the DFL be happy now that Pawlenty's out?

I am sure that there are DFLers who are happy with Commissar Pawlenty’s announcement that he will not run in 2010.

I wonder whether that might not be premature. Nobody has ever been elected to a term which would make him/her mayor for a term exceeding eight consecutive years so unseating Pawlenty certainly would have seemed possible.

On the other hand, we need to look at history. What do Warren Spannaus, John Marty, Mike Freeman, Roger Moe, and Mike Hatch all have in common?

They were all non-incumbents endorsed by the DFL for governor.

None was elected.

Even Rudy Perpich as an incumbent was defeated twice.

The DFL only been able to endorse and elect a non-incumbent for Governor only three times and the last time was in 1970.

Will the streak continue?

[Of course if somehow Pawlenty ends up running for re-election anyway, this whole post will need re-evaluation.]