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?

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.

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]

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.]

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.

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.

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.

Lincoln note for the day: 1860 compared with 2008

Eric Black of MinnPost has an interesting article comparing the campaigning and voting practices of 1860 which elected Abraham Lincoln with what we know now and how the election map has rotated almost 180 degrees.

 

He notes some of the differences in ballots between then and now.  The ballots were far from secret and arguing about stray marks and dangling chads would seem strange.

 

Sometimes it seems that our new president was taking extreme measures to compare himself with his fellow Illinoisian.  Black finds some comparison, noting that Obama carried every state that Lincoln carried while the South has become Republican territory and provides links to maps which show this.

 

Today is January 1

This is January 1.  Happy New Year!

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana to mark the completion of the Cuban Revolution.

It is also the 100th anniversary of the birth of Barry Goldwater in Phoenix, Arizona Territory.

I am noting these because nobody else seems to be and in our five-finger, two-hand, decimal-oriented society those are usually thought of as big numbers.

Those of us who are old enough can remember Castro being considered somewhat of a hero in this country and Goldwater a nutcase. Attitudes toward both have changed and likely will change again.

Just something to consider.

Pat Flahaven is retiring

It has been reported before but Doug Grow reminds us that Pat Flahaven is retiring as secretary to the Minnesota Senate.  He has done the job for 36 years and is certainly entitled to retire, but it will indeed mark a transition in the operations of our state. 

I wish him well. 

I first saw Pat Flahaven from the visitors’ gallery of the Minnesota Senate in 1971.  The first few days of that session were good theater and just the kind of thing that would interest a young person interested in public affairs.  Secretary to the Senate is a position which is generally invisible to the general public but very visible when one is in the chamber or the gallery and the young, clean-shaved man who seemed to be an up-and-comer headed for greater and higher things, looked very comfortable in the position.  In 1971, Pat Flahaven had just been chosen for the position, on a 34-33 vote.  He only held it for a few days before the Minnesota Supreme Court on a straight party-line vote removed the DFL majority. 

Two years later, after 114 years of statehood, the GOP finally relinquished control of the Senate, the DFL winning too many seats for even the most partisan of courts to take away and Pat Flahaven moved back to the post he has held since. 

I have not spoken to the man in many years and never knew him well, but have to note that comments made from many from both parties as he approaches this retirement are all favorable. 

And it is going to take two people to replace him.  Especially in this time of economic downturn in both public and private sectors, that is in itself an especially good commentary. 

Marty in 2010?

Joe Kimball suggests that John Marty wants to run for governor.

Question 1.  What do Warren Spannaus, John Marty, Mike Freeman, Don Moe, and Mike Hatch have in common? Answer: They were all chosen by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to be its choice for governor.

Question 2.  How did Governors Spannaus, Marty, Freemsn, Moe, and Hatch do?  Answer:  It's a  trick question.  None were ever governor.

It is a cold and hard fact that in this alleged blue state that the last time the DFL was able to endorse and elect non-incumbent governor was in 1970 when they chose State Senator Wendell Anderson. To put this into perspective that was in the middle of Richard Nixon’s first term while Saint Paul had its Supermayor, Bill Rigney had brought the Twins to their second consecutive American League West championship [and the Designated Hitter rule was still two years away], just a few months after the Apollo 13 adventure, and twenty years before this year’s youngest voters were born. [For that matter, it was in that same 1970 election that Minnesota voters approved a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to nineteen.]

Question 3.  Which of the men mentioned above lost the worst? Answer:  You could make a case that it was Freeman who managed to lose 2 to 1 to a Republican that the GOP had not supported, either in that election or the one previous.

Question 4. Can the DFL learn to pick better?  Answer:  I really do not know, but I guess Senator Marty thinks they won’t.

Let George do it

George Johnson was to be honored Wednesday night at District 2 Community Council’s December Board meeting/ Holiday Party. I was unable to be there, but assume that it all went well. I do know that our city council voted that day to honor him and I am assuming that Councilmember Bostrom was on hand at D2’s festivities to relay that commendation.

I first met George Johnson during the summer of 1988. District cleanups were new then, having been city funded in 1987 for the first time and still being funded as one-time-only events. I was the president of Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council then and the late Paul Gilliland, who held the similar position for District 2 suggested to me that perhaps we hold a joint cleanup at the now-gone Phalen Shopping Center. In the course of planning the joint cleanup he introduced me to a hydrologist named George Johnson who was the chairperson of his board’s committee which was planning the cleanup and who had the idea of working with Ramsey County and combing the joint cleanup with a hazardous waste cleanup. I immediately sensed by what seemed to be his true-believer approach to the matter.

That cleanup went well, too well really. The cleanup drew traffic lined up on Johnson Parkway back onto Seventh Street almost to White Bear Avenue. The Police Department had to do significant reassignments to handle the thing. Fortunately, both districts managed to get enough volunteers to work the event. For some of the volunteers finishing up did not come until dusk. I don’t remember the exact numbers of how many came or how much was collected, but I doubt if the numbers have ever been really topped. And I remember George Johnson, moving about confidently and unflustered as crisis after crisis [or what we thought were crises at the time] came about.

[There were others whose deep involvement in this effort merit commendation, including Mr. Gilliland and District Five’s counterpart to Mr. Johnson, Roger Hallman, but this is a post about George Johnson.]

That was twenty years ago. Cleanups have gone on since and District Councils have started to think of them as entitlements and city staff to think of them as a comparably inexpensive technique for removal of junk. George Johnson has been organizing his district’s cleanup every year and sometimes even advising and/or helping out at others. Several years ago when District Five was undergoing a staff change and temporary shorthandedness, he helped us do ours.

George’s cleanup work was specifically cited in the City Council action Wednesday. But a full accounting of his contributions should include mention of his other contributions. I don’t know them all, but I feel that I should mention some of what I know.

He has served on the Board of Directors for District 2 for [as far as I aware] the entire time since shortly before that 1988 cleanup, serving as its president for a few months in 1990. [Full disclosure statement: I was a D2 employee at that time so he was my supervisor then.] He also has served for many years on the Saint Paul Planning Commission, including a spell [2004-2006?] as its Chairperson. He succeeded his wife on that commission.

And somehow as he has done all this he has raised a couple of sons and maintained a house and kept employment and all the other things that other people do.

The City Council praises several people each year this way. There are many people who deserve such commendation and they get some of them. There is a certain “hit-or-miss” factor involved in this, but this commendation seems well in order and I wish to add my own praise also.

November 11

1ovember 11 brings to mind that life is dangerous. If we don’t create havoc to ourselves, nature may to it to us.

Last year on this date, I posted on both Veterans’ Day and the Armistice Day blizzard. Nothing much has changed.

The links are

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/11/veterans-day-observations.html

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/11/armistice-day-blizzard.html

If you don't trust the polls, maybe you want to think of things this way

We are entering the time of the election cycle when we start hearing about how irrelevant things affect our elections. This morning I heard that when the Redskins win on the last day before the election that one party wins and when they lose the other does. It supposedly worked out that way for the last dozen or so quadrennial cycles.

Others have based similar theories on things like hem lengths of skirts, whether the Dow Jones goes up or down the day/week/month before the election, or whether the American League or National League team wins the World Series. If you take a small enough sample you can make any of these work for a spell, and indeed their could be a relationship between stock prices and politics.

But I have observed one thing which nobody seems to have noticed. I don’t know that there is any cause-effect thing here, but I do admit that we are not as geographically united a country as we sometimes seem to think we are.

But the truth I have noticed is this: SINCE 1944 EVERY WINNING NATIONAL TICKET HAS HAD AT LEAST ONE CANDIDATE WHO WAS RESIDENT OF OR NATIVE TO A SOUTHERN OR BORDER STATE, border state being defined as one where slavery was still legal up until the Civil War.

To be specific

1944. Harry Truman [Missouri]

1948. Truman and Alben Barkley [Kentucky]

1952 and 1956. Dwight Eisenhower [born in Texas]

1960 and 1964. Lyndon Johnson [Texas]

1968 and 1972. Spiro Agnew [Maryland]

1976. Jimmy Carter [Georgia]

1980. 1984, and 1988. George H. W. Bush [Texas]

1992 and 1996. Bill Clinton [Arkansas] and Al Gore [Tennessee]

2000 and 2004. George W. Bush [Texas]

So who is it this year?

Palin and McCain don’t qualify, so I guess it will have to be Obama and Biden [Delaware].

Maybe we will know if this holds out some time next week.

ADDENDUM [11/5/08]: Well, it was Obama and Biden, so the string continues for one more cycle.

Trick or treating -- revisted

This is a repost of a post from one year ago. Nothing has changed so I will put it in front of you again. RS


This is October 31. In addition to its being the end of the month, it marks something called Halloween. When I was a child about half a century ago, I used to go freeloading with my little brother. We probably hit every house in an area of about a quarter mile and brought home a lot of calorie-laden food.

We never thought twice about it. We never questioned the safety of the food. We never asked ourselves why would people we did not know or only knew vaguely would be all ready and apparently happy to give us candy or other treats. And when we found the occasional person who was not participating, we somehow felt that we were being deprived of something to which we were entitled. [And we somehow resented that our neighbors, almost all of whom attended Catholic school, would get the next day off and got to eat their stuff sooner.]

I have long suspected that this type of attitude explains a lot of people’s attitudes toward other parts of life these days. Maybe trick-or-treating enables the entitlement mentality.

We never heard of President Scoop Jackson. Or Orville Freeman. Or Herschel Loveless. Or Henry Wallace.

So McCain went North to the Future for his running mate instead of to the North Star State.

He decided against Pawlenty in favor of a younger person, a woman. [There is an interesting parallel with the senator's love life there, but it is probably off topic.]

Actually, our governor was probably never high in McCain’s eye anyway. History is full of people who have been thought of as likely running mates who never got the honor. John F. Kennedy had almost every Democratic governor [including Orville Freeman] whose state had wavering delegates convinced that he was going to be the one and then chose Lyndon Johnson, a person nobody suspected [and who because of the choice did become president]. Almost every other GOP office holder in the country was surprised when the first Bush picked J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana.

Historically, the choice has not always been the candidate’s. Until FDR went to Chicago to accept his party’s nomination in person it was not unprecedented for candidates who were to be on the same ticket to not even have met. Party leaders had a role and they forced candidates, even incumbent presidents to remember that. It wasn’t until about three decades after World War II that the parties seemed to finally concede the nominees this privilege. They forced FDR to dump Henry Wallace for Harry Truman in 1944. In 1956 Adlai Stevenson decided to not fight the leaders and throw the choice up to the delegates. In 1972 George McGovern had a hard time selling Thomas Eagleton when his own delegates thought they were truer believers than their own nominee. There was even a GOP effort to bolt at the choice of Agnew in 1968. each other beforehand.

Pawlenty may feel jilted. Romney may too. But that’s politics and may simply be testament to McCain’s acting ability, possibly mixed with the flawed mirrors which seem to be in every politician’s abode.

And Sarah Palin will be the second post-war governor and the first since Agnew to be nominated for Vice-President by a major party.

ECBD? What's that?

Does anybody remember something called the East Central Business District [ECBD] bypass?

No, you cannot remember the bypass itself. It never happened. But maybe somebody remembers people talking about constructing it.

Four bypasses around the city’s Central Business District were planned. These were never planned to be free-way type streets, but wider streets which would remove the need to actually drive through downtown for people whose destinations were on the other side. Three of the four have been [more or less] completed.

The North CBD bypass includes Pennsylvania Avenue. The West CBD bypass is Marion/Kellogg/Chestnut. I believe that this one did not develop the way originally planned, but it is close. The South CBD bypass is Shepard/Warner Roads.

The missing link is the bypass on the east. The East CBD bypass [which was later shortened even more to ECBD bypass] was to run from Warner Road from almost underneath the Lafayette Bridge to connect with I-35E at Pennsylvania.

Its forthcoming completion was supposed to be one of the reasons that the state accepted a truck ban for the Practice Freeway segment of I-35E. Trucks could use Shepard/Warner Road and the ECBD bypass as a routing instead. As it is now, they have to cross through downtown on Jackson/Sibley.

It has been over twenty years since I served on a city-established task force to advise on the preparation of the draft Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] for the realignment of Shepard east of Randolph, Warner Road west of Childs, and the ECBD bypass. I was serving as the representative of Payne/Phalen District Five Planning Council and my purpose was primarily to make sure that whatever alignment for the ECBD bypass connection with I-35E did not make the connection for the road we now call Phalen Boulevard more difficult to obtain. Most of the people participating [besides the engineers and public works people and planners] were high-ranking shirts representing businesses [such as West Publishing and Anchor Hocking -- remember them?] with Shepard Road concerns. I did feel a bit out of place among such exalted company, but stuck to why I was there and nobody else seemed to oppose me in what I was there for.

Well, the draft EIS was done and it showed no reason to not build the bypass. But it never got done. Somehow it has never been funded.

Even though I never thought I would live long enough to see it, Phalen Boulevard is done, so we don’t have to wonder whether that connection can be established. Ironically, when I was serving on a task force considering Phalen Boulevard road design, including the bypass became a concern for building it.

And there is still no bypass. I am a bit ambivalent now about the whole matter now. I have no direct interest in how many trucks drive on Jackson or Sibley. But if I had an interest in Lowertown property or development I think I would like to know what’s up.

And I wonder if my posting this may double the number of the people [to ten] who even are aware of this thing.

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

Who's watching the store? OR A Bridge between them?

I had never heard of 24-hour, no-frills, unstaffed health clubs before this morning. I suppose I can see possible problems. After all, seeing possible problems is something I seem to have a knack for. And, according to at least one Administrative Law Judge, present city code does require that staff be on premises at all times.

If I read this morning’s newspaper story correctly, David Thune, current and past councilmember from City Council District [often called “Ward”] Two is against them and wants the law to stay the way the ALJ is interpreting it. I am surmising that if the ALJ opinion is not upheld that he would want an ordinance adopted to require that they be staffed whenever they are open.

Another former councilmember from that same district, Mayor Coleman the Second, is quoted in the DPP as saying, "It can't be OK everywhere else and be somehow more risky in St. [sic] Paul." [Note to the Mayor’s fans, of whom there must be some: “Sic” is inserted because that is what is done here at CCM when we find the name of our city unnecessarily abbreviated. However, I suspect that His Honor made the statement orally and it is just the paper’s defective, penny-pinching style sheet which instituted the abbreviation. So save the letters, or at least send them on other things.]

This is quite a choice, having to choose between these two men, who usually seem to only be separated by the High Bridge.

It has been traditional in our culture to recognize that problems are possible in a lot of businesses and to adopt codes to protect the public from unscrupulous or incompetent operators. We license, charter, or regulate restaurants and bars, building contractors, motor vehicles and drivers, pawn shops, utilities, and scores of other things.

Sometimes [probably most of the time] we regulate well or at least “pretty good”. Other times we fail. And sometimes we forget why we license and legislate or enforce from outdated models.

Old timers may remember [probably 25 or 30 years ago] when Sister Rosalind wanted to open her first massage center in the city. She had to face a lot of legislative hostility because we had several places which had been known as “massage parlors” in town which had been serving as fronts for prostitution and for whom the city had adopted some drastic regulations. [Regulations don’t always work as they are intended. By the time Sister Rosalind was applying for her licenses, all or almost all of the former “massage parlors” had quit offering massages and were no longer affected by them. They were still open, just weren’t “massage parlors” anymore.]

I sometimes have wondered if her fight might have been too difficult to pursue had she not been a middle-aged Catholic nun, but she got changes made after telling our city leaders that she resented the proposition that she and her employees were in the prostitution business and were entitled for more dignified treatment. Ordinances were altered, but they still worked from the anti-prostitution perspective for several more years, including requiring that masseur/masseuse licenses be issued by the City Council and that the licensee’s name be on the City Council agenda and minutes.

And I would be remiss if I forget to mention that having regulations guarantees the public that they will be enforced. For one thing, government bureaucrats seem to find it easier to hassle those with licenses than those who operate without them. Any licensed taxicab driver or owner in our city knows that

Thune says that the new style health clubs present a neighborhood issue and threatens to enlist the support of neighborhood organizations, especially District Councils. Maybe he will indeed get such help, but I suspect that while they may give him some lip service that most neighborhood organizations are already so deeply committed to fighting more obvious crime and the decay in our housing situations and developing stable business and social environments to jump on that bandwagon really hard.