This is an interesting country

We learned last year that Barack Obama was Muslim. Then this last winter we learned that he had an imam who was called “Reverend” at a strangely-name mosque with the words “Trinity” and “Christ” in its name who said strange things. Now we find out that his wife’s cousin is a rabbi. [story]

Obama’s family’s long-time connections with this land have made for some interesting developments. His opponents merely snicker when they are reminded that Dick Cheney is the Senator’s cousin and now we learn that a rabbi is his wife’s cousin. This is indeed an interesting country.

And that seems to be about all that these things show, but that won’t stop conspiracy foes with nothing better to do from playing with something. We will probably find out that Mr. Obama only married his wife to get the Jewish vote.

Earlier post: Observations on Obama, his mosque, and his imam [3/23/08]

Well, it is almost morning

Well, it is almost morning. [Cf. Previous post, But will the respect us in the morning? (1/9/08)]

Mining has agreed to sell its East Side property to the Port Authority. A lot of questions about reuse still have to be resolved, but when Port develops, the new jobs that result tend to be better than when a lot others do so.

And had Mining decided to do the redevelopment they probably would have done their own thing taking counsel with nobody else. Now the city and the neighborhoods will have at least some chance for input in all that comes about.

I’m still not sure that we are respected, but maybe when morning is finally here we will have a better idea.

Barkley as stealth candidate?

KEVIN DUCHSCHERE of the MSJ&T wrote Monday that their Minnesota Poll shows that Franken is catching up to Norm, but that Dean Barkley, while way behind, seems to be gaining from both.

I certainly am not ready to suggest that Dean Barkley be returned to the U.S. Senate, but there are things to be said for him.

He already lived here so did not have to move here just to run for office and he has demonstrated that he can return here when his service is over. Almost any other former Senator who can combine his former Senator’s floor pass with a law license stays around the District of Columbia and makes himself a lot of money, but Dean Barkley came back and drove a Metro Mobility bus.

Al Franken and Norm Coleman continue to throw a lot of dirt around. Earlier we were concerned with whether Norm’s wife actually lived in Saint Paul with him and later we got tied up in whether he was sleeping unscrupulously in Washington. Now we know that Al Franken uses foul language. I’m sure that Norm has used bad language too and I am certain that his love of a worker’s secret ballot is entirely feigned and know that Al cannot figure out where to send his taxes. [And note that his ad in defense only notes that he paid the state where he lived and does not mention which state that is.] And do we really think that Norm will end Social Security or that Al will stop Medicare.

And Dean Barkley seems able to stay above them. Maybe it is a long shot, but it may be a winning strategy.

FLASHBACK: Who is not sleeping in his/her own bed?

No, this is not about any politician running for whatever office this year. In the course of researching something else I found a post I made elsewhere three years ago in another forum. When I wrote this excerpt, it was a peripheral post on a discussion of a political official who worked late at night.

But the situation I mentioned then still happens. I really don’t know what to do, but maybe one of my six or so readers has an idea for an approach.

The more real and pressing late night/early-morning scandal is instead that so many [young children] are being moved around during these hours. Cab drivers, convenience store workers, and other strange people who work where they see the public during these hours can verify that there are many children these days who are not allowed to spend the night in their own beds, but find themselves moved around for the convenience of the adults who are supposed to be responsible for them. [Yes, I know that sometimes children must be moved at odd hours, but certainly not in a number anywhere near what they are.]

Just some post-convention thoughts

Our local political and business leaders were exultant when it was announced that the GOP convention was coming to town. They are all educated and plugged-in men and women who should have known what all was involved.

There are things that we all should have known the day that announcement was made.

> There would be extensive media present, both traditional and non-traditional.

> There would be protesters, both traditional and confrontational.

> There would be police action required both to make the site secure and to observe the protesters and take whatever action needed to be taken.

> There would be confrontations and post-convention second-guessing about everything, including the degree and type of police involvement. Security concerns would entail street and sidewalk closings and making innocent people of whom nothing evil could be reasonably inferred subject to stops, searches, and even seizures.

> While some businesses in the host city would see improvement in their business climate, others would suffer.

.

Every city which was trying to get the convention knew these things and yet they tried to get the convention anyway. We were the winners who of course received no victory. [And in our case since we had a larger city immediately adjacent, we didn’t even get our name on many of the stories.]

Now our leaders are telling us how well we [and they] handled it all. Well, we did get through things relatively well, but there were problems. We knew that would happen too when we learned that we were the winners in the contest to host. Neither protesters nor police nor anybody else always act in the best and most professional manner even in the most normal and sedate circumstances, so mistakes were inevitable. Nobody is perfect. So now we are going to have second guessing ad infinitum about whether the reaction of our police and the officers from other cities who came to help handled things well or whether they may have overreacted.

I have heard from both protesters and people sympathetic to the police regarding the events of the first four days of this month. I am unsure who deserves the most blame and even more unsure that we can ever know and wonder why we really want to put up our own tally sheets on these things.

We do need to have our political and police leaders check into what happened to find out where they erred so that they can take action against appropriate parties and adopt measures to avoid repeat behavior, but they need to be doing that all the time anyway. And we can hope that the protesters and “anarchists” do similar introspections.

And, unfortunately, we know that some of the same things will happen again, here and elsewhere, no matter what approach we take.

And we might consider removing a sheriff who believes in holding people until a warrant can be obtained. O.J. Simpson is on trial right now for doing pretty much the same thing, but for him they call it “kidnapping.”

And once a Maverick was a cheap Ford [not entirely a pun]

Well, some of the vengeance that Pawlenty and company wanted on the Override Six had come about and more likely will. It seemed very strange for Republicans to go against other Republicans for doing the will of the Chamber of Commerce.

And now Pawlenty’s national party wants to glorify mavericks.

Interesting.

Quote of the Day -- Laura Schlessinger

I wondered when somebody on the right would raise this matter. Actually, I guess it happened last week, but I hadn't known it.

I’m stunned - couldn’t the Republican Party find one competent female with adult children to run for Vice President with McCain? I realize his advisors probably didn’t want a “mature” woman, as the Democrats keep harping on his age. But really, what kind of role model is a woman whose fifth child was recently born with a serious issue, Down Syndrome, and then goes back to the job of Governor within days of the birth?

From a post datd 9/2/08 on www.drlaurablog.com.

My Lord, what a daughter

What is there about Priscilla Lord Feris that would make anybody who should be voting in an DFL primary want to vote for her?

She is not Al Franken and that may be a plus, although the only people who were willing to be publicly identified as DFL people chose Franken. She is a lawyer so she loses that advantage that Franken has over Norm. And she is very old to become a freshman senator. By the time that she could be a second term senator she would be almost the same age that McCain is now.

I remember when Hubert Humphrey [the real one, not Skippy], Gene McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy were running against each other for president, but that ended forty years ago this June when Senator Kennedy was killed. Somehow she is telling us that they all were her people, but even if it is true, how relevant could it be now? And to most people those names are just things in history books. How old does she think the average DFL primary voter is?

[NOTE: Some recent posts have been delayed or gone unposted while I fight the Blogger software. This may continue for a bit. I won’t know until after things are actually posted.]

They are gone

Well, the GOP people have left and the process[es] of assessment/reassessment has/have begun.

I think that Joe Soucheray has it right when he thinks that Mpls. pulled one over on our civic leaders. They got the money spenders and partiers and we got the barricades and protesters. And despite what our leaders say, they had to know that you cannot invite a convention without inviting protesters, both “legitimate” and other, when you invite a major party, especially the party in power to come to your city. I don’t know whether we will find out that our authorities overreacted to them or not. I suspect that the officials will have the official version, but history never has clear consensuses.

Mayor Coleman the Second tells us that the whole extravaganza was a success, but tell that to the people who tried to navigate through our city, to the businesspeople whose customers who could not find them, to the people whose medical procedures at United or St. Joseph’s had to be delayed, to the locally-licensed taxi drivers whose once-in-a-lifetime chance for a bonanza was taken away by authorities who decided to let anybody in the world with a top light on his/her car pretend to be driving a taxi. [Taxicab drivers in this city can tell you that this is nothing new, but the magnitude of the event made it seem worse. Check Grand Avenue late at night on any weekend or the Excel/NSP arena after any hockey game or big concert and take a look yourself, if you wish.]

Mayor Coleman the First was in his glory, bragging to delegates and whomever else was listening that he had made the building possible. Running for reelection to the Senate, he needed every chance he could want to bow.

Mayor Coleman the Second had assured us that business would not only be normal, but that there would be extra things for us to enjoy, including the display of an “original copy” [lovely oxymoron] of the Declaration of Independence at City Hall from Monday through Thursday.

That was a lie. I went there on Wednesday about noon and could not find it. CH/CH staff did not know where it had gone, but the man in building operations thought it might have gone to someplace on Summit Avenue. My own email inquiries have told me that it was there as late as Tuesday and have raised the suggestion that it was moved to a Summit Avenue residence for GOP fundraising purposes. I have not been informed of any more likely possibility, but am still willing to accept suggestions.

Eagle Street Grille hedged its bets by renting the whole place to CNN which brought in its own chef but allowed the local wait staff to work. But Soucheray notes that Mancini’s was almost empty. How can that be possible? And how can anybody think that any event designed to attract so many people with that much disposable money just a mile away who don’t make it to Mancini’s can be a good thing?

Of course, we did get to see “Saint Paul” or its truncated cousin “St. Paul” on a lot of printed and visual media, but does that make us feel that much better? And Minneapolis still got first billing on the convention logo.

They say that this was a “once in a lifetime’ event. Let’s hope that they are right.

Something wrong with Community Organizing?

Community organizer is a vague title which covers a lot of things. It is a title that even I used to have. I can assure anybody who wonders, though, that there is nothing inherently evil in organizing people or communities and nobody gets rich doing it.

Even in the religiously conservative Christianity Today, Stan Guthrie says, “Whether community organizing is the best way to help the poor is one thing, but to dismiss out of hand the work of someone willing at least to try to help is another entirely.”

But The Woman Who Does Not Love Her Children attacks Obama because he used to be a community organizer, contrasting that with being a small town mayor. It is kind of like attacking garlic because it doesn’t taste a lot like horseradish. They both have their place. Both Obama and TWDNLHC went on to other things. They both probably had ambitions to do so when they took those positions, but that’s politics, isn’t it? So, where’s the story?

Cf: earlier post, Ambition, the Hidden Trait [1/8/08]

The Woman Who Does Not Love Her Children

What kind of “pro-family” person gives her children names that they cannot face the world without getting strange looks and comments with? It seems to be a simple matter to conclude that Sarah Palin does not love her children. The names she has given them seem prima facie proof. Let’s keep that in mind as we evaluate the younger woman that McCain dumped Governor Plenty with.

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.