Former pol emerges as pine recycler

It was the DFL city convention of 1974. Delegates from around the city were meeting to re-endorse Larry Cohen for Mayor and select candidates for City Council and School Board.

Members of the City Council were elected city wide back then and this was to be the first election for which they all ran for specific seats [the “alley system”] and with party designation on the ballot. The party’s incumbents seeking re-election [Vic Tedesco, Leonard Levine, Ruby Hunt, Patrick Roedler] each had their alley already assigned, but the rules provided that the non-incumbents select the seat they would seek in the sequence they were endorsed.

The first non-incumbent endorsed was a young blond-haired man who had run a good campaign two years previously in the only run-in-a-pack for seven seats election. He approached the podium to announce his choice. He could have chosen the seat currently being held by Rosalie Butler who was vacating her seat to run against the DFL for Cohen’s spot, but instead with seeming bravery told the enthusiastic and partisan cloud that he would take on Dean Meredith, the long-time Republican [“call me an independent”] Dean Meredith, who had always had enough personal attraction to be able to maintain a seat running against the field.

The hall was filled with joyful enthusiasm as a young David Hozza made the announcement. Dean Meredith decided not to seek reelection, but to make his own ill-fated attempt to become Mayor, running as an independent against Cohen who won the DFL primary and Hugo Hagstrom, the official GOP candidate who really wasn’t running. [Maybe I will write about the Hugo Hagstrom matter some other time. It is a good story, although there are those who have better insights into than I do and is another reminder of the shenanigans which can happen when parties are not allowed control over their own labels and trademarks.]

History tells us that the DFL reelected Larry Cohen and won all seven Council seats that year with Hozza, Jack Christensen, and Bob Sylvester joining Tedesco, Levine, Hunt, and Roedler.

Dave Hozza seved three terms for six years [remember those were two-year terms back then] and, for reasons I never understood, decided to retire in 1980 when he was still in his mid-30s. When one considers some of the folks who have come onto and off of our city political stage since then, it can be interesting to wonder what might have happened had he decided to become a career politician.

He ran a bakery on West Seventh Street for a while several years ago, but I am not sure what he has been doing for the last 29 years. I knew he had been involved in banking, but it is the DFL’s dirty not-so-secret that many of its people participate in things like that.

But he resurfaced this week, in the major, front-page article in Monday’s paper about his enterprise to salvage millions of board feet of white pine from an old grain elevator in Superior, Wisconsin, an enterprise he got himself into as a result of his banking activity.

I am not sure that this venture is leftist-green or whether it may instead be capitalist chic or maybe something else. Maybe it’s a mixture. But it does seem like a good idea to preserve so much wood and it seems like such upper-class wood to save.

I guess my sentiment is to wish Dave Hozza luck on the venture. According to the article he is 64 years old now and thinks he might have five more years to go on the project. Who knows what his next venture will be?

1977 murder suspect charged

Mark Shemukenas was murdered in 1977. It was a particularly brutal crime which received sensationalistic coverage and I am old enough to remember. There were those in the gay community at the time that law enforcement was not as concerned about the crime as they should have been.

While I doubt that, they may well have been right. But regardless, the crime seems to have been solved and Richard Hubert Ireland jr. is now in custody awaiting prosecution.

The victim’s sister was quoted in the Mpls. paper as saying, “[I]t is the family's hope that justice will prevail in the end."

When these long ago murderers are brought to trial there is always somebody saying that somebody is finally being brought to justice. But are they?

Richard Hubert Ireland, jr. is 59. In 1977 he would have been about 37. The sentence for the offense is life imprisonment. Even if conviction for the maximum charge is still possible [and we always hear about how much harder it is to prosecute old cases] the sentence Ireland will receive is 32 years less than it would have been had he been immediately caught and prosecuted. In other words, it might be 15 years instead of 47.

It seems that justice cannot be done, at least not completely. Time has made that so.

But [assuming of course, that they have arrested the right person] we still need to extend kudos to the Saint Paul Police and its Cold Crimes Unit and the BCA people involved and all others involved in cracking this case.

Is there a racial bias being used against President Obama?

Is there a racial bias being used against President Obama by these “birthers”?

Does anybody think that if our President were named Herman Hermann, to a German-born father and a white American mother and had a Certificate of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii that we would have all these “birthers” running around?

Some IRV considerations on a slow election day

The debate on Instant Runoff Voting should be heating up locally shortly. I am still trying to keep an open mind. Some critics [think Joe Soucheray, for one] seem so sense partisan [or at least ideological] agenda behind the effort. Based on who seems to be supporting the move in this region, it is easy to see how he has reached that conclusion. But it seems to me that there are plenty of places where IRV, if adopted, could work for different ideologies differing from the ones that Soucheray suspects.

Full disclosure: IRV is not my favored way of addressing our ongoing situation of minority winners. I favor a two-step process, but nobody else seems to favor the process I do.

After finding out this last year how many people could screw up something like ballot marking using our present system, I have found myself wondering whether we might just be asking for a whole lot more problems with the necessarily more complicated IRV ballot. I guess that before adopting it here, it would be nice to see how Minneapolis handles it, but since we are making our decision simultaneously to their beginning their IRV experiment, we will not have that chance. And, with this year’s decision out of the way, we will probably lose whatever opportunity to make a decision on what system to use with their experience to consider.

In my precinct where 1124 people voted for electors for President of the United States, I was voter number 21 at approximately three in the afternoon today.

It would seem that our community is not committed to our two-stage election process. I just wonder how IRV might change that.

D. J. Tice writes and the President will speak -- health care some more

While I still think the most important thing for health care reform is to get the matter taken completely away from employment. It seems to me that access should be a matter of citizenship instead of employment and, as a function of employment, it helps us price ourselves out of the market in too many things.

But it appears that in his speech tonight that President Obama is unlikely to go that way. Every bill which has been introduced still works off that employment model.

But whatever we hear tonight, it seems to me that D.J. Tice of the Mpls. paper is raising questions that we haven’t been hearing, by noting that most of the people who oppose a “public option” in health care [an idea to which I admit warmness] oppose education vouchers for K-12 students [to which I concede coolness], while most of the voucher-haters seem to want the public option in health care.

As I have said before, we are all pro-choice. We just aren’t all pro-choice on the same things.

There are various fields of enterprise in which there are public sector competes with private sector. K-12 education is one, but there is also higher education, package delivery, commuter trains [in some places], weather forecasting for starters. The results of these competitions vary and are certainly judged differently by different people and factions.

Public option health care and public education seem to work well in many countries, but they aren’t the only way to do things. As we consider what works for our country, maybe we should read Tice’s article and think a bit.

The Senator's plane has crashed

Albert Eisele who in past lives worked for the Pioneer Press Washington Bureau and wrote a dual biography of Hubert Humphrey [the real one] and Eugene McCarthy wrote about the death of Senator Ernest Lundeen.

Like Paul Wellstone, Lundeen died in an airplane crash, but I had never realized that there was so much mystery about the 1940 crash in Virginia. Lundeen was an isolationist, something we never seem to see much of any more. And he was the last major office holder the Farmer-Labor Party had, so it is probably in order if somebody speculates on what might have been.

Link

Why the uproar on Obama speaking to our children?

I find the hoop-de-do over President Obama’s speech to our country’s schoolchildren even more amazing to the presumptuousness of the White House decision to interrupt what for many is the usually chaotic enough already first day of school at what is lunch time in much of the country.

I have vague memories of hearing President Eisenhower when I was a child in grade school. My memory says it was during the national hysteria that we weren’t teaching our children enough science which came after the Soviet Union had launched the first. My memory is of a radio being brought into our classroom and a speech coming over WSUI radio [University of Iowa radio] from Iowa City. Because we would have been listening to a single house-sized radio with the limited sound projection that three- or four-inch speakers provided over a low-power station in the next county and having to hear it over whatever sounds even an attentive audience of thirty or so would have been making I don’t remember hearing much, but I think all the leader of the free world was saying was that America’s children needed to study more because the other country’s children were. It probably took no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

This might not have been a national address and it may not have been especially aimed at children, but I don’t remember hearing of any parents or politicians objecting. And, since I had not even thought about this for half a century, I may be a bit off on what I remember.

Post office update

Both of the post offices in our city which were being threatened with closure are being saved. We need to thank whomever led the USPS to think twice should be commended.

I have no inside knowledge but suspect that our Congressional delegation is due thanks.

Earlier post: http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2009/08/post-offices-not-big-enough-not-to-fail.html [8/4/09]