Quote of the Day -- Meghan McCain

The daughter of Arizona's senior senator is quoted on gay marriage and abortion. It is a seemingly unusual mixture of positions in today's politics, but it makes sense to me. [I'm not so sure I agree with the Republican part.]

link

I believe life begins at conception and I believe that people who fall in love should have the option to get married. Lest we forget, our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, grants the same rights to everyone in this country—“All men are created equal.” If you think certain rights should not apply to certain people, then you are saying those people are not equal. People may always have a difference of opinion on certain lifestyles, but championing a position that wants to treat people unequally isn’t just un-Republican. At its fundamental core, it’s un-American.

[emphasis mine]

She doesn't connect the views here, but it does not seem inconsistent at all for one who believes in life to believe in liberty. It's the definition of terms that brings people's blood pressures up.

Who does your taxes? and why?

This is April 15, the traditional deadline for filing income tax returns. Various places which are seasonally rented by income tax preparers will be shutting their doors and the workers therein returning to their other jobs.

Many of these outfits have advertised, often garishly, now they can not only get your tax return prepared but let you have a loan [often, if not usually, with huge fees and at high interest] on your expected income tax return.

Minnesota municipalities have established zoning restrictions on currency exchanges and pawn shops. There is a feeling that a concentration of them in a neighborhood reflects that the neighborhood has a lot of poor people and detracts from the business opportunities elsewhere on their streets and on the residential properties in the area.

For similar reasons many neighborhoods try to avoid having a proliferation of used car dealerships, particularly the ones advertising easy or no credit necessary.

So why, now that the season is over, don’t we look at these tax outfits, especially the ones who seem more intent on offering refund loans than on filling the blanks correctly?

Hooking up Pierce Butler

I never thought I would live long enough to see the completion of Phalen Boulevard, but somehow I did.

And at the dedication ceremony for the boulevard’s completion, Mayor Kelly stated that the job was not really done, that the connection west of 35E for Pierce Butler really needed to be made to allow for the whole strip through the city to be made accessible for development.

That is what I had always thought and it encouraged me to hear a sitting Mayor say so. Of course, three months later Randy Kelly was no longer mayor.

Maybe it was partly because of that and almost certainly partly because of the staggering economy the connection to Pierce Butler has not seemed to progress much.

But the lead story in this week’s East Side Review seems to indicate that it may well be finished during the lifetimes of many who are alive today.

Well, you know what they say about hope.

for some historical perspective, see ECBD? what's that? [7/14/08]

What do you do with a juvenile hijacker?

Anytime a juvenile gets arrested for something particularly notorious, there are screams by those who presume to have the interests of victims and society at heart to have the young person get the maximum penalty allowed.

And most of the time there are a fewer, quieter, do-gooders who note that the criminal is young, perhaps too young to understand what he/she did or was perhaps under the influence/control of an older, corrupting influence.

Most of these cases fall under state jurisdiction. Few of them fall under federal jurisdiction.

Now the federal government has to figure out how to handle a 16-year-old boy who was involved in an attempted hijacking of a ship in open sea.

The Obama government needs to show that it is tough on crime and actively combating hijacking, yet it has its share of people who will want mercy for the young man.

Of course, this all supposes that “juvenile justice” and “standing tough on crime” are mutually incompatible. That often is not the case, but few concede this.

Could be interesting.

To my Western Christian readers

Happy, Joyous Easter!

The Savior is risen!

Happy Easter [or other spring holiday] to my secular readers

Happy holiday!.

If I have these holidays right, there was some guy named Santa Claus who was born one December in a barn and who celebrated his birthday by riding a sleigh powered by a team of flying reindeer, giving presents to good children of Christian families, saving the best presents for the children of the more affluent families.

He became very unpopular with some people and they had him executed one spring by crucifying him on an evergreen tree, but he came back to life as a rabbit who passed out eggs and chocolate and went back to flying that sleigh.

The parks cleanup as seen from Phalen Park AND District Council gets award

This morning was the annual Saint Paul Parks cleanup. People gathered at various parks around the city, received bags and instructions and proceeded to remove a lot of things which should not have been where they were. They all merit commendation.

One such gathering point was the Phalen Park picnic pavilion where a few dozen gathered. I do not know how many places had miniature programs before the public disembarked, Phalen Park did.

For those of you from St. Anthony Park or Mac-Groveland who may not be familiar with Phalen Park, the pavilion sits directly south of the statue defaced last year.

Mayor Coleman the Second was there to present the Payne/’Phalen District Council with an award for its work in organizing the community after last year’s vandalism to the statue. The mayor mentioned that he had been in China and discussed the statue with the maker and commended the neighborhood for its good work. Director Kerry Stone accepted the award along with President Ryan Kapaun, Sheldon Schwartz, Al Oertwig, and other directors, staff, and volunteers from the organization. The ceremony was short, to the point, and dignified [considering that all present were dressed as if they were going to a cleanup].

When mayors come to events, they seldom are early and leave as quickly as they can, probably often because there were other places they have had to be immediately before and after the given appearance. However, this time the mayor was there at least half an hour early, talking with people who came by, even this writer. [We agreed that remaining ambulatory was a good thing.]

Anyhow, congratulations to the Payne Phalen Council [for the record, I am a director but was not involved in this project] and thanks to all the volunteers who showed up at all the locations to help keep our city’s parks clean.

[Cf. Scarred statue, 08/10/08]

What is in a name?

For a long time Saint Paul Public Schools did not name schools after people, living or dead. When schools were significantly rebuilt they were given new, geographic names. Van Buren became Dayton’s Bluff, Deane became Parkway, Harrison became Phalen Lake. They refused to recycle an already used name [Mechanic Arts] for what became Arlington High school.

Then things changed. I think the first was allowing the new elementary school in the old Johnson building to keep Governor Johnson’s name. Quickly after came naming existing schools after the almost-dead Bruce Vento and the newly dead Paul and Sheila Wellstone. There was a lot of emotion in all three of these renamings.

Now we are learning that we might rename Webster School in honor of either Barack Obama or both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, both of whom are very much alive.

Whenever we rename something which has been named for one person to naming it for somebody else, one has to wonder why we are removing the name. Have we learned something about Daniel Webster which speaks ill of him?

We also need to remember that naming something after a living person poses risks. In 1962 and 1963 John Glenn was the great American hero. Schools, streets, and parks around the republic were named after him. I suspect that if President Kennedy had not been killed so soon after Glenn's orbits that many more things would have been given the Glenn name, but there was suddenly a big movement to name new things after the slain president. How many people would have guessed that they were naming something after a future politician? I don’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with politicians, but how many Republicans must have bit their tongues while they went into polling places at schools named “John Glenn” as they cast their votes?

Likewise, there were a lot of schools and other places named for Richard Nixon while he was the president.

I doubt that President Obama will do anything as embarrassing as Tricky Dick did and I know that there is some appeal in being the first [or at least first in the area] to jump on the let’s-name-something-after-Obama bandwagon, but maybe we could wait a bit.

Tom Conlon is not always right and if the DPP quotes him correctly, ["I can't think of any precedent where we named it after a living politician."] he is mistaken on this a bit since BruceVento was still living but he was terminally ill when East Consolidated was named after him, but in a way Conlon seems to make sense.

Politicians, their lawyers, and Equal Protection

Eric Black of MinnPost says it well this afternoon.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, Repub of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and might therefore be viewed as less than an impartial commentator, says that Dems who tell Coleman to give it up are guilty of "blatant hypocrisy" because their current position -- don't count any more ballots -- contradicts the position they took -- keep counting -- in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the Florida statewide recount thus making G.W. Bush president. In the interest of brevity, Sen. Cornyn did not find space to comment on the hypocrisy of Repubs who have made an opposite switcheroo between the Bush/Gore and the Franken/Coleman cases.

He has a good point. Politicians take the side that looks good at the moment and attorneys argue whatever point of law is on the side of whoever is paying them. Do you really think things would be much different if the numbers were the other way around?

I doubt whether Norm Coleman or Al Franken reads anything here.

So I won’t try to tell either of them what to do next. [After all, even if one of them happened upon this place, there is no reason to believe they would pay attention to what I am writing.]

[Old time SNL watchers: Remember when the 1980s were going to be the “Al Franken Decade”? Are we now looking at a “Al Franken recount decade”?]

I am tired of the hypocrisy on both sides. It’s just that the hypocrisy on the Coleman side stands out worse because of one simple matter: FRANKEN HAS THE VOTES AND IT IS UNLIKELY THAT HE WON’T WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE.

Our election laws and procedures have been shown to be remarkably good. An election this close will show the imperfections and we need to be willing to react to what we have learned, but we do darn good. It is just that there is no good tool available to measure something so close adequately. It is like trying to guess who wins an Olympic race when clocks measuring thousandths of a second cannot distinguish a winner.

But Norm’s claim that not all ballots are being counted equally, while perhaps somewhat true, misses a big point. We do have more equal treatment of ballots statewide than we have ever had before. We once had a mixture of hand-counted paper ballots, machine counted paper ballots, lever machines [which left no paper trail], and [if I understand correctly] even a few jurisdictions using punch card ballots. Now we all vote with paper ballots which makes a recount like we have just seen possible, with every ballot and ballot application open to review by observers of all/both sides.

I will try to avoid this subject for a while. It’s getting tiring.

Albert Lea editorial on Senate race

From a Tuesday editorial in Albert Lea Tribune [a paper which had endorsed Norm Coleman last year]

Coleman, who rails against career politicians, is looking like a career politician who is losing his career.

A good politician knows when he is looking bad and making his state look bad.

Throw in the towel.

Can Norm take a hint?

After three month’s delay caused by his taking a dubious case to court, Norm’s margin of defeat has grown from 225 votes to 312.

Al Franken may not be much, but it is looking like it has to be him or nobody.

Can Norm take a hint? Or is he still too obstructionist? Or too well funded?

Whither goest ye, GOP? (And will we all learn to pronounce Ng?)

Every politician, probably especially incumbents, find people who would vote for Judas Iscariot [at least he knew where the money was] than for him/her. I am sure that Mayor Coleman the Second is no exception.

But right now people who are looking for a Judas or anybody else to vote for instead of him are at sea. John Krenik who had been the apparent GOP hope has switched to run for school board, apparently thinking that Tom Conlon needs assistance there.

So the Republicans have endorsed Eva Ng who says she sought that party’s endorsement even though she says she isn’t part of it, just an independent who wants to unseat Coleman. It used to be that actual Republicans [think Meredith, Konopatzki, Schaber, McCutcheon, Sonnen, Gaertner] ran as independents because they wanted to avoid the stigma that the GOP label brings about in our city. [And Mayor Coleman the first even pretended that he was a DFLer for a while to avoid that stigma.] Sometimes their personal charisma or other appeal got them elected and if they stayed in office long enough sometimes the DFL would adopt them. But Eva Ng must figure that the GOP image is no longer so dimly accepted or the DFL’s image is no longer as bright as it once was, or both.

In the meantime, those who are looking forward to getting a new mayor may be a bit confused. November is still quite a bit away, but for the moment we have gone from having two other options to one.

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.

Looking at Iowa AND A note on how we choose judges

Our legislators are considering a constitutional amendment being pushed by elder statespeople of both parties to eliminate our system of electing judges in favor of a system of retention elections in which voters would merely vote in favor of or opposed to keeping any given jurist on the bench. California and Iowa already have similar situations.

The Iowa Supreme Court has just overruled that Iowa Code section 595.2 [the state’s “Defense of Marriage” law]. This act was passed in an overwhelming and bipartisan manner during the tenure of former Democratic Governor [now Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack. The Court ruled that the law violates the state’s constitution.

I am not going to quibble about the law behind the ruling. I am not well enough versed in the Iowa Constitution or the arguments given to question it. I do note that coverage today indicates that the ruling was unanimous and I would suggest that since the justices all knew the election system that they have would not have made this ruling capriciously.

But I don’t know whether anybody here has wondered about the implications of things like today’s decision on elections here. I haven’t seen anything yet, but I am probably not the only one who will connect the two things this way.

We have already seen how a personalized campaign against a judge can result in removal for grounds more emotional than legal when we saw how in 1986 California voters ousted their chief justice Rose Bird and two associate justices whom they thought did not vote to allow enough criminals to be executed. Television commercials featuring children and other survivors of moral victims were shown across the state as big money was raised in the effort to remove them. It will be interesting now to see how voters in Iowa react toward their high court justices in the next elections.

Our system has worked well for the most part. People are probably correct in seeing problems coming up. We can look over the St. Croix to Wisconsin and look at their judicial elections going on right now and see some of the problems that happen there and might here. Maybe we should pause before we rush to change things here.

FYI: This ruling was by Iowa’s highest court was based on that state’s constitution and has no direct effect in any other state. Iowa has a time-consuming process for constitutional amendment and the absolute earliest any amendment could go to the voters would be in the 2012 election, so it would seem that this ruling will be in effect for some time. Iowa does not require residency for marriage, something which has kept the Little Brown Church in business. We will probably learn shortly whether our local authorities think that Minnesota will be entitled or obligated to recognize same-sex marriages performed there to residents of our state.

Anybody got an old papyrus to read?

As we keep changing our methods of disseminating and storing information, we are presenting opportunities for people who can transfer data from one format to another.  78 rpm records gave way to LPs which gave way to CDs which are giving way to iPods and whatever else.  Computer files went from 5.25” floppies to 3.5” floppies to all the various drives and sticks and cards we have these days.  VHS beat out Beta but is losing [has lost?] to DVD and TiVo.  Web sites come and go and get changed without notice while printed paper is disappearing.  [The DPP and StarJournal (and) Tribune have printed archives which one can imagine being read four hundred years from now, but does MinnPost?  Or even the newspapers for their digital-only stuff?]

 

You hear every year about some high school someplace which has decided to replace the yearbook with a DVD.  But as they prepare for their twentieth [or even tenth] reunion will anybody have the equipment to open it?

 

Historians study the correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  They have been kept.  What will happen to the emails between W and his father?

 

A MinnPost article today by Matt Ehling calls some of these problems to us.  He reminds us to print everything.  I haven’t printed much of what goes here and haven’t maintained the printouts much anyway, but it does give something to think about.

 

Of course, why would I think that future eras would be interested in what so few are interested at present?

Is Bostrom the only one who can see? OR April Fool's Day at the City Council, only they were not joking

Congratulations to Dan Bostrom for nailing things correctly when he suggested at yesterday’s City Council meeting that what the opponents of candy cigarettes really want to outlaw the real things.  Our local tobacco Taliban is back at things again so we all need to prepare for another round of intolerance.  That they are now attacking candy is but another sign of how they won’t let up on anything until they have achieved total domination of and utter demolition of what is supposed to be a free society.

 

So-called “public health” advocates oppose cigarettes because they associate “second hand” smoke with bad effects, real or imagined, which are said to include cancer, heart problems, and emphysema.  About the only possible second-hand problem caused by candy anythings is litter.  But the intolerant person is often a blind person so this minor detail won’t catch the eye of any of their eyes.

 

There may indeed be some public safety benefit from the part of the proposed ordinance which bans novelty lighters.  Lighters which do not look like lighters may be more of a hazard than lighters which do.  Of course, there is no real reason why this should be part of the same ordinance, except perhaps to provide cover for a councilmember who does not have the backbone to directly stand up against intolerance to rationalize a vote for the proposed ordinance.

 

But shame to people like Katie Engman, who works for the Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota and is unlikely to feel shamed by her intolerance for bringing this thing to our City Council’s attention.  [After all, it is not like they have anything important to do.]  Double, or even triple shame on her and her cohorts for bringing youths like Shanicee Dillon and Calitta Jones into the fray.  Let us hope that these young people can grow up into more tolerant people than they are now being led to be.

 

DPP coverage is available here.

Candy is not dandy

It appears that our city council is about to take time off from the little problems they usually face such as the budget squeeze, service reductions, crime, and restless youth, to attack something really serious – candy cigarettes.

 

Real cigarettes, those scraps of chemically-altered tobacco lined by a similarly-treated paper wrapper, often with a filter made of who-knows-what, are thought to be [and likely are] a health hazard and purchase and sale of such is limited to people over age 18.

 

Candy cigarettes are sold in packages which might be thought to resemble the packages for real cigarettes, but they are much smaller and the individual items inside are clearly smaller in all dimensions than the tobacco containing items they apparently parrot.  As almost anybody with “D.D.S.” behind his/her name will tell you, candy can well be a health hazard.

 

But it seems that our city’s leaders think that consuming candy cigarettes encourages them to wish to illegally acquire tobacco cigarettes, so they should me made unavailable to people of all ages.

 

We have other things in our society that we think should only be done when people reach designated ages.  Two of these are consuming alcoholic beverages [even those designated by law as “non-intoxicating”] and voting.

 

Maybe we need to consider outlawing root beer and iced tea for people of all ages, since they are similarly named and resemble alcoholic beverages and we must protect our children.

 

And let’s forget about “kids voting” programs.

Looking at counties again

In a post last June, I wondered whether we should not begin examining whether we really need counties.

 

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/06/counties-do-we-need-them.html

 

Now legislators are proposing merging Stearns, Benton, and part of Sherburne Counties.  The bill, which would put all of St. Cloud in one county caught media attention by the bill’s proposed temporary name for the new county, “Lake Wobegon.”  The merger may have merit, even if the name doesn’t, but there will be several politicians and bureaucrats fearing for job security to pacify.  [And what would we do with the rest of Sherburne?  Append it to Anoka?]

Maybe we could just look at what I asked in June.  There would be more hoops to jump, but we might have one, uniform statewide arragement.

Goings on for and about the County Attorney's office

I know neither Dave Pinto nor Cory Tennison, but they seem to be the first two people in the race for Ramsey County Attorney to replace Susan Gaertner who is seeking her newly-adopted party’s endorsement/nomination for governor.  There will be more.

 

In the meantime, Ms.Gaertner who probably cannot afford to alienate any of the trendy left, has told former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer that Kathleen Soliah cannot be prosecuted for voting under her alias of Sara Jane Olson.

 

There can be little doubt that Ms. Kiffmeyer resents her removal from her constitutional office and is merely posturing here and one suspects that there is little point in prosecuting Ms. Soliah for these relatively minor offenses at this late date, but Gaertner’s rationale is disturbing.  It may be good law.  I don’t know about that, but it doesn’t make sense.

 

I understand that marriage allows for name changes.  Changing name at marriage is an old tradition in many communities.  But to call Ms. Soliah’s use of an alias on her wedding license, made necessary by her status as a fugitive, to a name neither hers nor her husband’s a legal name change seems strange.

Observations on forgiveness and parole

Doug Grow of MinnPost has written about the release of Kathleen Soliah to parole in Saint Paul.  In the course of this, he has talked with Harry Flynn, the retired Catholic Archbishop of Saint Paul about the release of Kathleen Soliah and the idea of forgiveness.  [link] [link]

 

I have not been entirely comfortable with some who agree with me that Ms. Soliah, a California person, should serve California time in California.  I have suspected that the police organizations in both states would not have taken this position if police had not been the target of one of her crimes.  And I imagine that Pawlenty’s tepid request to Schwarzenegger was pure grandstanding.  [Yes, politicians do that.]

 

But as much as I think that Soliah’s parole should be served in California, I have never said that what she did was beyond forgiveness, either divine or personal.  I do not know Rep. Laura Brod and while at least one legislator/clergyperson has labeled her statement a call for “retribution,” I cannot guess the motive for her statement, but she noted,

"Forgiveness is a separate issue from where she serves her time.  …This case is different because it involves domestic terrorism and threats to law enforcement. Minnesota is not her home.  Minnesota is where she hid from justice."

 

Grow’s coverage of the matter shows a distinctive bend in favor of the parolee.  Eric Ostermeier, posting in Smart Politics, takes a distinctively different position.  He notes that Soliah’s crimes do not make her the “ordinary” parolee and suggests that her “exemplary” live while here seem less distinctive when one remembers that she was a fugitive the whole time.

Archbishop Flynn notes [per Grow]

Repentence is to look in a new direction. It is to hear with new ears, see with new eyes. … Has she repented? She certainly had taken on a different life [when she began a new life in St. Paul]. Has she made public statements [of remorse]?  I don't think so. But I don't think she'd do today what she did then

But, as the archbishop notes, forgiveness is a part of most traditions, that it does not require remorse, and forgiveness frees us.