Will IRV bring about delays?

I have been intrigued about Instant Runoff Voting [sometimes simplified as IRV – although it is not named for our late former House speaker] but never enough to suggest its adaptation.

Minneapolis has adopted it to take effect in this year’s election. We may be getting to vote on it sometime soon.

Now Steve Brant at the Star-[Journal and] Tribune reports that, according to election officials, it may take 10-20 days of around the clock counting to find out some of the winners.

I have wondered all along whether the better approach would be a combination of keeping the September primary date and allowing a candidate’s name to show his/her party endorsements alongside his/her name, multiple endorsements where that is the case, and to declare anybody with a majority in September to be elected.

But before we make our decisions, maybe we will at least have an idea of what the city upstream is getting itself into.

Ramsey County Commissioners join Janice Rettman

For years, Janice Rettman has been the only Ramsey County commissioner opposing the commission’s regular pay increases, the minority in a series of 6 to 1 votes.

Suddenly, her colleagues now join her. The commissioners have decided that they will not accept another raise this time around. They will get by with a little more than $80,000 a year.

People have often thought that politicians like Commissioner Rettman who vote against their own pay increase are grandstanding a bit. Maybe they are, but now the whole commission is made of grandstanders.

The county will save something like $17,000 in this move. That is poultry feed in a budget so big.

I have long felt that county commissioners are overpaid when compared with city councilmembers. I understand that they handle bigger budgets for larger constituencies, but it seems that so many more of the dollars they handle are already committed by their funding sources.

Maybe this will make the disparity a bit less, but let’s see what happens when the financial state of the county gets better. Somehow I suspect that the commissioners [at least six of them] will want to make up for lost time and the pay will zoom up extra quickly.

Tom Conlon is leaving

We elect Republicans in our city quite often. However, we seldom elect somebody who admits to being one.

Tom Conlon was the exception, having fallen heir to Eleanor Weber as holding the only school board seat that the DFL could not take. [Greg Felice was in there too, but that situation is a bit more complicated and did not last.]

Now it has been revealed that, as part of a move to North Carolina, he will be leaving the board.

Sooner or later we will see posters in various fora suggesting that we are closer to one-party rule locally.

Maybe so. However, I suspect that we won’t see a lot of difference. Aside from the fact that local issues are so often non-partisan [as we have been reminded before there really is not much difference between DFL and GOP pot holes] we still seem to find things on which to differ.

As for Tom Conlon: It may well be that he will be remembered for his last dissenting vote, the vote against taking Daniel Webster’s name off of a school and replacing it with Barack and Michelle Obama’s. That decision was certainly defensible even with the partisan element removed. Naming public institutions and places after living people has its problems. There are people who even now have diplomas certifying graduation from Richard Nixon High Schools.

UPDATE: [5/23/09] Yesterday's DPP carried a side bar which noted the times and place of Tom Conlon farewells and suggested a memory book is being compiled.and that people with memories should send them to an Edina address. Somehow that Edina address seems to be saying a lot.

The pols who cannot buckle down want you to buckle up

kThe legislative session is over. We await unknown budgetary confusion or chaos at all levels of government for the foreseeable future.

But somehow, despite all this the legislature and Commissar Pawlenty [thanks to the anonymous commenter who suggested the title – it’s the best I’ve had] managed to agree on something, the totally unneeded bill to make seat belt violations primary offenses.

Although I generally use my seat belt, I am too pro-choice to believe in seat belt legislation and think that any legislator who voted for this bill has given his/her electorate one more reason to reject him/her in future elections.

But, truth be told, I never felt protected by the old law. If I was unbuckled I did not feel that there was really any reason to feel protected by the knowledge that the police had to find some other reason to stop me. There is always a reason.

But the bill [now act] is still meddlesome intervention into other people’s personal decisions.

Pelosi was not alone

I am getting confused and tired by the revelations, accusations, and counter-accusations arising about what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. She is, unfortunately, no different from a lot of other politicians of both parties when it comes to keeping what is important in perspective.

Leonard Pitts, jr. has noted, [link to article from which this was lifted]

In those days of heat, fear and panic, many of us — including, apparently, Nancy Pelosi — failed to consider what should be ever obvious: Our national identity is the one thing that makes us worth attacking or defending. We are a nation of laws, not men, we are better than those who attacked us, we are America and that has to mean something, even — "especially" — in days of heat, panic and fear.

The sad truth is that almost all of our national leaders, regardless of party, turn politically yellow when big national traumas arrive. Whether it be Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, the whole Congress after Pearl Harbor and the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, the Oklahoma City bombing which prompted a GOP-run Congress [including the sainted Paul Wellstone] and Bill Clinton to create whole new categories of capital offenses, or the excesses of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11/2001, too many of them cower and stay silent. Willingness to stand up for what really should be considered our national principles is way too rare.

We might wish to remember one of Martin Luther King, jr.'s less-quoted statements, which Pitts used a week earlier on a different subject: [link]

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

Want to go to Mpls in 2015? Good luck!

I have railed quite a bit about how transit is based on bad premises and in particular on the destruction that the Central Corridor “light” rail will bring to University Avenue, the Midway, Summit-University, and Frogtown neighborhoods.

I don’t go to Minneapolis often. It’s not a bad city, but it’s not my city and I seldom have any reason to go there. But I know that a whole lot of people do need to go there [and to get here] so keeping the routes to and from Minneapolis usable is important.

Our MnDOT people know that too, so one has to be especially cynical when now we learn that in addition to screwing up University Avenue they want to make us pay to use I-94 [or at least any lane that is moving].

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Tourniquets do work, after all

Tourniquets around necks will stop nose bleeds, but most [all?] health care professionals would recommend against this treatment.

Well, I guess that keeping all people from entering our country might make us a little more secure. Of course we need to remember that Timothy McVeigh, the guys from Posse Comitatus, and Lee Harvey were all born here. And we know that what we gain from people coming here has made us the great people we are.

Many people’s concerns are racially- or ethnically-based, sometimes fueled by politicians and commentators whose personal standards allow them to run on this issue.

And, maybe some just comes from ignorance. Christianity has been in India since the First Century. It has been here since the Spanish brought it to Florida in the early Sixteenth Century.

Yet we find that our officials rejected allowing a Christian religious worker into our country because he was Indian born. It took a lot of money and an attorney, who ironically was a rabbi’s daughter, to get him in.

Decisions like this may make one wonder if maybe we should consider just closing the border down and not letting anybody in. Remember: that tourniquet around the neck will indeed stop a nose bleed.

See the story.

All hail, his [what's his title?]

I had been wondering about what we should now call our distinguished governor. I [and a few others] have used Governor Plenty, but that really is just a cheap shot based on a name, not a name which really reveals any particular insight into the person being named.

But his decision announced yesterday unallot and avoid legislative processes, evading normal legislative processes [about the closest thing allowed to a coup d’état allowed under Article IV of the US Constitution] tells us that he should be given a better title.

There is a post on the blog “Liberal in the Land of Conservative” which suggests the title “King Pawlenty.” I understand the thinking, but wonder whether that is the best title. King tends to suggest he obtained his power by inheritance, rather than by seizure. “Tsar” presents similar problems and even His Excellency does not have that level of power. The nature of this assumption of power seems more worthy of a “Generalissimo” but, despite playing commander-in-chief when the National Guard is deployed, he is not military enough. “Shah” seems just too strange to Western tastes. “Fuehrer” seems more appropriate to the way His Excellency, the governor, has assumed his power, but we cannot think of the word without thinking of Hitler and genocide and whatever his flaws.

I think I need to think a bit and welcome anybody’s suggestions.

Meanwhile, Senjum and Marty Seifert [“Sir Punisher”] and other legislative sycophants stood by His Excellency in front of that ornate mantle where governors haven given us their pronouncements on pretty much everything for years.

And I think my suggestion which I have raised several times for one weekly legislative session per month instead of 120 days concentrated in winter and spring has even more merit. [To be fair to CCM readers, I have never posted that here. I had intended to put it in after the legislative session was over and a better post mortem could be done and I probably will. In the meantime, you can dig out your slide rules and calculate 5x12x2.]

Pawlenty in 2010?

A SurveyUSA/KSTP poll says that Minnesotans are against Governor Pawlenty seeking a third term. The margin is 57% to 31%.


Although people often talk of US Senators as being obvious candidates for President, President Obama is the first one to reach that office since JFK [1961]who was the first since Warren Harding [1921]. Governors have done better and several governors have run for President in recent years. Most, including Carter and Reagan waited until they were former governors, but Bill Clinton and W were sitting governors when they were elected.


[Clinton even had to take time off the campaign trail to go to Arkansas and sign a death warrant. He did not want anybody to think he was soft on criminals. W, being the leading civilian executioner in US history did not have that problem.]


I don’t know which would work best for Pawlenty. You would think that GOP bigwigs would blanch at selecting somebody who has never received a majority of his state’s vote, especially when he hasn’t even been able to make his own state red. So it would not surprise me if Pawlenty ran again to achieve that majority.


Of course, he might lose.


Richard Nixon was elected President after losing a gubernatorial election. But [with memories of Lloyd Bentsen talking to Dan Quayle] Pawlenty, you are no Dick Nixon. And if you don’t measure up to Nixon, how low must you be?

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.

How much is that latte in the window?

Many of us think of Seattle as a northern San Francisco, a place of leftist-leaning, politically-correct flakes, more likely than the average American to be vegetarian and bicycle-riding, who think of themselves as living as close to Nirvana as any Americans can.


But Seattle also gave us Starbucks, a large chain of coffee shops which has become synonymous with obsequiousness. [Well, they claim to sell coffee, but as far as I can tell they don’t sell much coffee. The sell beverages with a minimum of coffee, mixed with enough creams, mints, herbs, syrups, and oils to make one almost unaware of the coffee content.]

For most of its history, Starbucks has been very profitable and has expanded onto what seems every street corner of the country, at least in downtown, suburban, and affluent urban neighborhoods and downtowns. Fortunately their kind of business has made only minor inroads on our East Side and some of what has come has been more locally-based.

Accounting is a funny science. Not only does it require a knowledge of some really arcane mathematical techniques, but it only takes into account money. Everything has to come down to dollars and cents [or yen and sen or rubles and kopecks and euros or pounds or whatever system one is using.]

I suspect that many of the people who patronize these alleged coffee shops would agree that we do not [and probably cannot] properly factor environmental or social costs into how we evaluate costs and opportunities. Some probably hold great contempt for how Walmartized we have become and, whenever they see an article about the chain, maybe even snort contempt at the crackers and rubes whose patronage made Walmart big. They may be reading this on computers made by Chinese child slaves, but they do not connect the dots and understand that abusing labor makes some companies more profitable than can really be justified.

Well, Minnesota Independent writer Paul Demko [formerly of City Pages] has brought back to attention the ongoing case between the Starbucks Workers Union and Starbucks’ Minnesota operations. I wonder how many people sitting in one of those establishments reading about this on their wi-fi computers will notice this and just keep on clicking.

I am not trying to be especially hard on Starbucks or their clientele, even though the company offers a completely unnecessary product. We all have to make our own judgments on how we do our personal reconciliation between total accounting which includes all costs and benefits and money accounting and we all do it differently and some of us may even feel a bit regretful about some of our decisions.

For example, I would feel a lot better if I could write this on a computer which was not made in a third world sweatshop, but I don’t believe such a thing even exists. And my slave- or child- [or both-] made computer is running partly on energy derived from radioactive power plants and partly on energy made at other plants which operate on underpriced fossil fuel.

There is no law against adults drinking lattes [whatever they may be] and there shouldn’t be. After all, free people need to be free to make free decisions.

But maybe those who consume the stuff might want to open their eyes a bit.

What's the news? What's the ad?

If you looked at pages 8A and 9A of today’s DPP [at least in the city edition] you saw an ad for one of the area’s non-union grocery stores. [They would probably want me to name them, but I can see no point in doing that.]

The page on the right [9A] was clearly an ad. The page on the left [8A] contained three news stories interspersed with full-color pictures of what seem to be a grocery bag spilling house brands for that chain.

Newspapers have carried advertisements since the beginning of the business. But this is the first time I think I have ever seen the ads worked into the stories with so little demarcation.

I really don’t know what to make of this. I think it unseemly to mix stories with ads like this, but don’t know what seasoned or professional journalists or ethicists think of this.

But the DPP should be encouraged to examine themselves a bit more before doing it again.

ADDENDUM: [5/5/09]: David Brauer of Minnpost noticed this too. You can see his comments and a picture of the pages in his post. [link]

The ban on more nuclear power is surviving

NOTE: Parts of this post are lifted from an earlier Capitol City Musings post from February 26, 2008.

Both houses of our legislature are under the control of people calling themselves DFLers. But they seem to differ on the matter of whether we should continue our ban on additional radioactive power plants [generally referred to in the media as “nuclear” power plants.

So you can choose your house and take your chances.

I side with the House of Representatives which has voted to continue the ban.

As I noted last year, electrical energy serves selfish users and nuclear energy in particular encourages deferring the actual paying of the true costs to generations well into the future. This, with modest modification for typos and style, is what I wrote then. And the link above will let you see the original post if you wish to see it.

One of the dirty secrets of electrical energy is that it is produced some distance from where it is used and we users tend to forget that there are environmental costs involved with its usage. This partly explains the popularity of hybrid cars which emit less pollution on the road, but increase whatever is going out of a power plant. In either case, there is an environmental cost, but with electricity we pass the problem on to somebody else.

Nuclear power appeals to this same selfishness. It may seem cleaner at the moment, but instead of sending the problem to a rural or exurban area, it sends the problem to future generations.

The half lives of these products are calculated to be in thousands of years. [And that just means that half of the radioactivity is gone then; the other half will take longer.] We may develop adequate secure places to hide the stuff which may survive our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, but can we be sure that we can make places secure much longer than that?

We don’t know what cataclysms may come up. And, of course, we never know what some crazy person or persons will for terroristic or mental health purposes do what.

We really need to find better ways to handle our energy needs. I don’t know if the sun and wind can ever be harnessed to do it all, but it doesn’t seem that we are even trying too hard to find out. I admit that if the sun stops shining that we would have a problem, but how we get our electricity would seem to be a minor problem under those circumstance.

We need better ways to limit use. Letting NSP or Xcel or other providers raise rates to encourage less usage will only make the providers wealthier, but somehow we need to adjust our accounting systems so that we factor in all the costs.

Maintaining a moratorium on nuclear power plants seems to be a minimal first step toward doing that.

I really don’t want to come across as an environmentalist. There are a lot of matters that "environmentalists” are getting wrong. But I do think we need to look at some of the things they raise and at things they don’t raise too.

Word choice is powerful. Just another matter to wonder about: How popular would nuclear power ever have become, had the name “radioactive power” been established instead of “nuclear power.”

Buy pork

Our pork producers [the kind on the big farms, not the kind in Washington] are complaining, perhaps correctly, that calling this new strain of influenza “swine flu” is hurting them because people are avoiding pork or pork products.

Maybe different nomenclature will help, but what might help would be if we all purchased a bit more pork. I wouldn’t want anybody to do anything they feel violates their conscience [e.g., buy Hormel] or religious dictates [e.g, our Muslim and Jewish friends], but if you can find some pork that you can use, maybe it would be a good idea to get some.

I picked up some pork chops yesterday.

Which will be worse? Obama's flu or W's hurricane?

If Michele Bachmann’s district included local territory, I would never have to look for something to write about. She would be the gift that keeps on giving. But once in a while I suppose it is not extremely out of order to note her once in a while, since national coverage usually just lists her as “R-Minnesota” and, unless we make it clear every once in a while, people from elsewhere might think she is ours.

Finding any relevance in the “fact” that the flu named after swine has come twice when Democrats are president requires a stretch of one’s brain that I doubt that few of us could ever manage. And on top of that, as many are now pointing out, it is not even historically accurate.

W was never blamed for Hurricane Katrina, just for the inadequate response for it. But if we use Ms. Bachmann’s approach, we have one more less than satisfactory thing to put into the last president’s historical file.

Right is right and wrong is wrong and torture is the latter

In recent years the DPP [Dispatch Pioneer Press for those who were wondering] has reduced its editorial and opinion section considerably, in editorials, syndicated columnists, and letters to the editor. However, they sometimes do obtain good guest columnists and certainly A. L. Brown’s occasional contributions qualify.

Since KSTP radio has shelved Mr. Brown from his Sunday afternoon spot again, it is indeed fortuitous that his work shows up once in a while in the DPP and yesterday’s column is indeed edifying.

Brown is a lawyer. After distinguishing between legal advise and legal counsel, he identifies the poor counsel given by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, particularly the work of Jay Bybee who is now a federal judge.

But his primary point is the indefensibility of the use of torture by a free people. He notes

“The American standard is clear: Torture is always morally and legally wrong. This standard is a strength, not a vulnerability. It deprives our enemies of a rationale or moral standing while providing both to those who work on our behalf.”

I fear that he errs in writing this in present tense. I suspect that under the misdirection of the Bush administration that we have already gone too far in the wrong direction. And I doubt that Bybee’s counsel probably made much of a difference, because I suspect that if he had not given them such counsel that [although it might have taken some doing] they would have found an lawyer who would.

But Brown points out that each person who tortured or helped make the torture possible, needs to have his/her case examined.

President Obama seems to have been less than clearly decisive on this. But we still need vigilance on this matter and ought not let it be forgotten. And maybe we will learn from our inexcusable mistakes.

NOTE: I suppose that we should not view Brown’s departure from KSTP with alarm. This seems to be a seasonal thing, since the station commandeered the Twins from their age-old home with the Good Neighbor and they no longer need him to fill in that slot during spring and summer, but it is still a shame. While KSTP seems to have made some moves lately to move a little bit away from its right-wing base, eliminating Willie Clark and [apparently] all three faces of ThompsonO’BrienDavis and replacing them with Pat Reusse [whom it looks like is being played as the new in-house “liberal”], a couple of guys from Wisconsin who don’t seem to think that political topics are the only topics to cover, and WCCO discard Smarmy Al Malmberg [who seems, however, to have made a transition from simply smarmy to smarmy and pandering with the pseudo-conservative, anti-tax constituency his new station has given him], they really should have more room for Brown. I think it would be interesting if he could fill in for Joe Soucheray sometime, but I imagine that it would be too much shock for Garage Logicians.

Link to the DPP column

Trees? We like them, don't we?

Today is Arbor Day. [In this era of artificially moving holidays to specific days of the week, I don’t know why this made-up holiday isn’t held on Saturday, but it doesn’t seem to be.]

I had not intended to mention this, since it really is not particularly local and everybody loves trees, at least until the birds come to the one by where he/she parks his/her car.

But thanks to Joe Kimball of MinnPost I have been made aware of some local happenings which will take the spirit of Arbor Day well into May. The complete list of events can be seen in Mr. Kimball’s post, but it is worth noting that in addition to planting 300 trees in the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary [and isn’t it a bit unnatural for humans to introduce life into a nature sanctuary?], Como Park will receive more than 100 new trees. This seems to be a smart idea after all the natural demolition which took place a couple of years back.

Kimball’s post also notes that volunteers are still needed for this endeavor on Saturday, May 2 and he provides a link for those interested.

Inland grandstanding on open-seas piracy

I once thought that Marty Seifert was one of the reasonable Republicans but that misconception disappeared quite a while back. There is a shortage of reasonable people in both parties in our legislature at this time.

He got so far out in right field, especially in his immigrant-baiting that Rubén Rosario of the DPP called him “Sir Punisher.” He could not wait to try to make an issue of it when an immigrant here illegally was charged with vehicular homicide after last year’s school bus accident near Marshall.

And even though the most extensive ballot recount in Minnesota history has failed to deduce any evidence of voter fraud, he is leading the state push for the national GOP goal of requiring photo identification for all voters.

[Click the label “Marty Seifert” on the right side of this page for earlier Marty Seiffert articles.]

Now, he apparently wants to take on organizations which attempt to make sure that non-citizen defendants in criminal cases receive full legal protection and the presumption of innocence that comes with it, specifically by denying public grants and tax-exempt status to such organizations.

This seems to have been triggered by the case of Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, alleged to be the only surviving hijack attempter on the Maersk Alabama, who was arraigned in Federal Court in New York yesterday. Seifert’s target is assumed to be the Minneapolis-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, whose director has stated that his organization has no position on the guilt or innocence of Mr. Muse, that his organization had been contacted Muse’s family and that his organization is merely trying to help the family understand the US legal system.

Seifert seems to be one of those who think that if people cannot pronounce the prevailing language that they shouldn’t be here. We might infer that being haled into federal court is not sufficient reason to accommodate a failure to speak the prevailing language.

But the ones who say “if they’re going to be here they better speak our language” and who have little but contempt for those who don’t really do not have much argument here, anyway, since Muse only came here as a prisoner. We brought him and we are not in a position to let him have time to learn US language, law, and judicial processes, so maybe Rep. Seifert and those who think like him need to back off on this one, anyway.

DPP article [from AP]

Minnesota lawmaker: No funds to pirate lovers

State of the city this afternoon

The state of the city speech will be given this afternoon at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

We will probably hear Mayor Coleman the Second tell us that we have problems, but that while we all come from different backgrounds that we are hardy and creative people who will somehow find a way to get through our problems.

But maybe the choice of a hospital is a good metaphor.

HAPPY EASTER TO MY EASTERN CHRISTIAN READERS


Christ is Risen!

He is Truly Risen!