Mary Jo who? We don’t want to remember.

A sexual harasser who managed any jail or prison time after killing a woman in the course of his harassment has just died. [Don’t tell us that connections and/or wealth don’t help.] His passing probably won’t get the attention that the recent death of a child molester has received, but he is receiving a lot.

I remember when he spoke at the Civic Center in 1971 to raise money for the DFL Party and people who we would now call “abortion rights supporters” and/or “feminists” demonstrated against him, showing caricatures of the senior senator from Massachusetts pregnant captioned “if he were pregnant” and attacking him for his position on abortion. [In later years he almost looked the caricature, but I am confident that pregnancy was not the reason.]

Of course, this senator whose name I am withholding changed sides and the feminists made peace with him.

In 1980 the same senator whose name I am withholding challenged President Carter and helped bring on the Reagan era.

Yet Democrats continued to lionize him. And last year Senator Obama made an extra effort to enlist his support.

And I hear today that this guy who never saw combat is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

To quote Yakov Smirnoff: “What a country!”

Notes on newspapers

I bought both the local paper and the Mpls. paper today. Only the local paper had any coverage of the death of Senator Kennedy. Considering the timing, that seems understandable.

But further examination of the rags leads me to wonder two things:

1. It was certainly nice of the [Dispatch] Pioneer-Press to tell us all where to go to look for drag races on weekends. Those maps certainly were nice.

2. Neither paper gives a lot of thought or space to its opinion pages any more, yet they both have access to much material. Wouldn’t you think that they might want to avoid duplication unless there was something really good in what was being duplicated? Yet today’s Star[-Journal and] Tribune ran a Kagan piece that the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are not “wars of choice” that the DPP had run Tuesday. Don’t the folks at the Mpls. paper read the DPP? There did not seem to be that much compelling and distinctive content to the piece.

Just a suggestion

Mayor Coleman the Second has announced in his budget address that he intends to keep at least some of the libraries open every day. This will undoubtedly aggravate what is already a confusing schedule for the general public to adjust to since various libraries have schedules which vary from day to day, generally Wednesday and Thursday varying from Tuesday and Friday.

Every library has a sign that tells its hours but you have to be up close to see most or all of them. The signs are pretty useless to people approaching the library by motor vehicle. Why don’t we have signs visible from the street?

Held captive at Rochester

Nobody should feel good about what happened last weekend in Rochester when a few dozen people were kept prisoner in a plane on the tarmac at Rochester International Airport.


There are laws against kidnapping. Are they waived just because an airplane is involved. Why not prosecution in criminal court in addition to whatever civil action might arise from Continental's kidnapping at the Rochester airport.

This idea of using corporations to excuse the evils those involved conspire to do has to come to a stop.

Post offices not big enough not to fail

Per KARE Television

Two Saint Paul post offices are scheduled by USPS for closing. One is the Como Station in St. Anthony Park. The other is Seeger Square on Arcade Street.

A post office is more than a place to send and pick up mail and to purchase postage, necessary as those things are. It is kind of a third place, a community gathering place and a neighborhood amenity. I doubt if there really is another post office which can serve St. Anthony Park like the present one does and I am darned sure that there is no post office which can serve the people of the East Side like the one at Seeger Square does.

This is the only post office in either the Payne/Phalen or Dayton’s Bluff areas. [Yes there is one called the “Dayton’s Bluff Station” but it is not on Dayton’s Bluff, but instead well on the other side of Johnson Parkway. Truth has never been a treasured quality at USPS.]

Closing this station will mean that more than 50,000 people will no longer have a post office in their neighborhood.

Is that responsible efficiency? Maybe, but as I noted above a post office performs necessary services. And a government which can bail out big banks and insurance companies ought to be able to keep necessary community functions being filled.

But neighborhoods just aren’t “too big” to fail.

I can also suggest this earlier article by Mary Thoemke in the Daily Reader.

Cash for clunkers

Somehow when I first heard of cash for clunkers I figured that few buyers would actually get the full $4500. Car dealers will give big trade in prices for bad cars any way and just take keep the purchase price high.

But it appears that the program is popular. I guess they’re going to fund it for more.

But if the thing is suppose to be a stimulus for our economy, why are we letting people use what is in theory money from our government to buy Japanese or other foreign cars?

Helping keep us safe from Holman

It seems an article of common acceptance these days that we must do whatever we can to keep ourselves “safe” these days, whether from weather, terrorism, general crime, the personal habits of others, motor vehicle traffic, or whatever else and whatever sacrifice we have to make of our personal and corporate freedoms should not bother us.

I do not understand all the rules that govern what can go near an airport, but drastic restrictions on development even as far away as the Capitol and Rivoli Bluff seem to be necessary now for our safety. Most of what is being proposed as taboo for a wide area around Holman field has already been built on at least once, but that seems to be irrelevant. Even a baseball stadium in Lowertown apparently would be too tall.

Today we learn from a DPP article that opposition to these suggested rules has brought Lorrie Louder of the Port Authority and Highwood activist [and former City Councilmember] Tom Dimond together. Anything that Port and Dimond both oppose must be truly bad.

The article quotes Rep. Sheldon Johnson as saying, “"(The Metropolitan Airports Commission) and the airport need to figure out their place in the bigger community rather than expecting the community to constantly figure out what they need to do to fit the airport,"

It seems Rep. Johnson is right.

Remembering the Mpls. Trucker Strike

Freedom is not always free. We hear that every time that somebody in our military dies.

But being killed in military service is not the only time that people die to make the rest of us free. This week marks the 75th anniversary of the massacre at the Mpls. Truckers Strike should again remind us that the things we take as givens in life were not always there.

This is a link to last year’s Minnesota Independent article on the matter.

http://www.minnpost.com/iricnathanson/2008/07/22/2643/remembering_the_truckers_strike_of_1934#62-2643

Are we richer for having Ritchie?

We have just witnessed a long election contest for our Class II seat in the United States Senate. It was the longest such contest in our state’s history. The only real problem is that it was close. We sometimes fail to remember that even actual counting is not always an exact science.

Throughout it all, we saw how open, fair, and accountable our system is. Neither of our candidates questioned that. Before the election winner was certified twelve judges of three parties either participated in or agreed with the results. No judge took the other side.

We probably should consider ourselves blessed for the cool and professional work done by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and his staff, tut state GOP leaders, perhaps funded in part by national Republican resentment, have decided to attack him. They have set up a web site attacking Mr. Ritchie as being [gasp, shock] a liberal and a Democrat, suggesting that he somehow led four learned in the law judges on the Canvassing Board, none of whom was appointed by a DFL governor, on the legalities of things.

Many of the charges are documented by articles and statements in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. That seems as good a source for something like this as asking Capitol City Musings for impartial review of civil liberties infringed upon by smoking bans.

There may be good reason not to support Mark Ritchie in next year’s election. After all, he is a DFL person and while that party has long been good on human rights, they have been terrible on civil liberties and they are not as death on taxes as Bachmannites would like.

But taking him on for what happened in this last election seems only to diminish the accusers.

A defense of marriage

Our City Council is scheduled to vote next Wednesday on a proposal to allow domestic partners to register themselves.

I guess I have to oppose it – or at least part of it -- on my own idea of defense of marriage.

I have no problem with gays and lesbians obtaining the status of married people. Registration would seem to me to have zero value, but there was emotional and forceful testimony given to the Council from people who felt that they truly wanted some governmental way of declaring their commitment to each other.

Since Minnesota law does not allow for gays and lesbians to marry, this would at least provide them some way of making a public declaration of their relationship. If our state allowed for gay marriage, there would be no need for other registrations.

But this proposal allows not only same-sex couples to register, but different-sex couples to do so also.

Why? Since time immemorial, men and women have the option to marry each other. Allowing non-married straight couples to register in this way seems to diminish the legal status of marriage, not only for straights but for the gays and lesbians who are seeking it.

Marriage is marriage. Registration should be thought of as a very poor substitute which many are forcing themselves to seek and which seems to lose some of whatever value it might have when used by people to whom marriage is possible and if four city council members and the mayor see it as an appropriate step, that will be fine. But it should only be a substitute where necessary.

The City Council should amend this ordinance to limit it to same-sex registration. They might also wish to provide for a sunset for the time when same-sex marriage becomes legal.

And now we have two

Al Franken, escorted by his senior colleague, Amy Klobuchar and by a former holder of Minnesota’s Class II U.S. Senate seat, Walter Mondale, went to the front of the Senate chamber and was administered the oath of office [on a Bible formerly owned by another predecessor in that seat, Paul Wellstone] by that body’s president, Joseph Biden.

There were some questions one might have raised. Why Mondale? Most senators just use the state’s other. Wellstone used Mondale, but that was because he was disgusted with the ethics [or lack thereof] of his colleague, David Durenberger. And, Didn’t he have a Bible of his own?

Now we have two senators. Never mind that more than four of every seven who bothered to vote last year voted against o9ne of them, if we believe some of the muttering we have heard the last few months we are now at Nirvana.

Diversity on the Supreme Court. Really?

Sonia Sotomayor has been named to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Obama. If confirmed and sworn, she will be the third woman and second Hispanic justice. [Many sources are saying she would be the first Hispanic, but they seem to have forgotten Justice Cardozo.]

Conservative types are aghast. The have found that she might think that a Latina woman would be wiser than a white male. I doubt that she really meant that, but I cannot help but think that she would bring differing perspectives than some of the more typical nominees might.

But how much diversity will she really bring?

All of the justices are lawyers and were chosen from federal appeals courts. This seems to have become normal procedure for choosing Supreme Court nominees since the Nixon days.

I really would like a really diverse court with most of the justices being non-lawyers, people more apt to have better common sense on what is right and what is wrong.

I do not suspect that I will ever see even one such justice.

But even if we continue to have lawyers for justices, maybe we could break the stranglehold that appeals courts justices seem to have on the position. Why not somebody who has practiced law and had clients of limited means or minority heritage? Or for the wrongly imprisoned? Why not somebody who has actual legislative or administrative service as something other than a lawyer? Why not somebody from a state trial court? Or even a law school professor?

Actually, I do wish Judge Sotomayor luck in her confirmation hearings. She will indeed bring a new element to the highest court.

But it really doesn’t add much diversity.

Maybe Michele isn't as crazy as we have been thinking

Michele Bachmann says a lot of crazy things, but her comments on the 2010 census may not be so far from the wall as many are suggesting.

The Constitution of the United States of America does indeed provide for a decennial census. But it only specifies one purpose – for allocation of Representatives from the several states. It does not even include locating locations within states to assist them in apportioning congressional, legislative, and seats for other jurisdictions.

A reasonable corollary would be to assume that taking of names and addresses is necessary to make certain that all are being counted and being counted only once. This would require Ms. Bachmann as well as all the rest of us to give a little more information than just that they exist.

But with the increasing cases of government and other big institutions screwing up on privacy matters, one might be reasonably tempted to withhold unneeded information. And despite all the assurances we receive about how secret the data can be we should not forget that we change our rules when we perceive crisis. 1940 census data did help the government find Americans of Japanese ancestry a lot more easily.

Refusing gratuitous answers to irrelevant and personal questions would not necessarily indicate a nut case. It could just be indicating a libertarian.

[And believe it or not, the terms are not always interconnected.]

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.

Hitching your wagon to the wrong star

There have been a couple of times the last few days when I was wondering whether anybody would miss Commissar Pawlenty if he were to disappear for a few days, or whether anybody would mind. But I was never by my computer at the right time to post the question.

But now that we find that the Governor of South Carolina was not taking a hermit’s hike, but instead was philandering internationally, the subject has different coloration.

And I suddenly feel sorry for a lot of Republicans in South Carolina. It is a concern in the back [and sometimes the front of] every political activist’s [professional or volunteer] mind that he/she will support a candidate who does something unconscionable. Think of Grunseth followers in 1990 or local Dino Guerin supporters in the middle of the last decade. Think of where Bill Clinton supporters might be heading if the Monica Lewinski thing had come out during his first term. Or of Elliot Spitzer backers last year.

And new Nixon tapes are out. He must have left a few supporters disappointed also.

You can say that that’s life, that things like that happen, but for those involved it must still suck.

Beer at the game?

I understand that University of Minnesota regents sometimes like to believe that they are above the law. That may be because sometimes they constitutionally are.

Today they agreed to ban sale of alcoholic beverages at all of their sporting events. This follows the legislature’s bipartisan requirement that they, if they provided for the selling of beer in luxury seats at the new South Dakota Bank Stadium that they be required to sell to all legal aged people in the stadium.

But the staff and regents seem to be sniveling a little. It seems a little funny since beer sales are available stadium-wide where they play now. But they seem to think that in order to have a first-class football program that they need to sell beer to bigwigs.

They point out that most Big Ten football programs make such sales available.

Three Big Ten universities do not sell beer in their stadia. They are Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State.

Strange.

What don't I get about the health care debate?

I guess I just don’t get it.

We are having a lot of discussion lately about the cost of and access to health care and whether the federal government should play a role therein.

The cost of health care is making many otherwise profitable businesses marginal or even losers. I have medical coverage and am grateful that my employer has made that possible, but it is a small company and I wonder what it is doing for the company’s bottom line.

Yet it seems that all the plans being advanced by all the political types seem to continue basing access to health care on employers and one’s employment status.

We complain about the high cost of what becomes subsidized emergency room care, but the fact is that health care providers do not offer the public the same rates they charge individuals. While it is usually considered good business to offer volume purchasers a better deal, this makes the burden on the uninsured [or improperly insured] onerous.

I do not know what is the answer, but somehow we need to make sure that we all have access to medical and dental care at rates which don’t rip the general public off and which do not require an employer to have to factor in expenses which similar employers in other countries have to cover and allow all people the option to change employers or to enter or leave other employment or self-employment.

IRV in Minneapolis. Are we next?

After a period of uncertainty while the judges were doing their thing, Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] has been cleared for use in the Minneapolis elections this year.

If you have read my earlier posts, you probably know that I am not ready to sign on the IRV bandwagon yet. But, even though we have learned that SO many of our fellow citizens have difficulty filling out a ballot the way we have them now, I am quite willing to let the city upriver give it a try. And I wonder how many people over there will need to learn how to cast a proper ballot all over again in next year’s general election.

Now it seems likely that we will be voting this year on whether we want IRV for ourselves.

But might it not be better to see how Mpls. gets through its first try with the system first?

Related links:

St. Cloud Times,

WCCO Television

[Mpls.] Star[-Journal and Tribune

Dispatch Pioneer Press

How many happily married ten-year olds do you know?

The U.S. House passed a bill introduced by Congressperson Betty McCollum which would increase State Department staffing on the issue of child marriage and direct that we work with other countries on strategies to combat this problem.

An article in Minnesota Independent quotes her as saying, ““By prioritizing and valuing girls in the developing world, the U.S. sends a signal to countries like Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Yemen that the practice of allowing 10, 11, or 12 year olds to be married to much older men is a human rights violation.”

Of course, she is right and she probably has the primary purpose for her act well stated, but it does not seem to me that 10-year olds of either gender, straight or gay, should be marrying anybody, regardless of age and we should not be approving of any place where that is encouraged or tolerated.

When are you too old for us but not for Lauderdale?

I have always felt that mandatory retirement ages are unfair. As I age, I probably think so even more.

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to be a police officer after age 65, but I have wondered why anybody would want to be one at 25 also.

But per this morning’s DPP one local police officer is being forced to retire later this month. Chief Harrington [or presumably the Mayor or anybody else] cannot help him, it seems, since the matter is determined by statute, a law which apparently only refers to police and fire employees in cities of the first class.

I don’t believe that I have met John Morrow who has been with the department since 1967, longer than anybody else now on the department, but it would seem unlikely that I will now, and all because of a law that makes no sense.

If the newspaper coverage is correct, the statue applies to all employees in the P.D., not just officers. And it only applies to cities of the first class [us, Minneapolis, and Duluth].

Translated it means that anybody who works for the department has to be under 65, even if the job does not involve any special risk or physical activity. I don’t know how the people who maintain police equipment and facilities are employed, but this would seem to include people who file paperwork, repair the vehicles, and mop the floors as well as John Morrow. And it means that Maplewood or Hilltop or Landfall or Coates could hire somebody over 65 to be on their police department, but Saint Paul cannot. We keep forgetting that “suburb” begins with “sub-“ indicating something less. Yet somehow a lesser government has more rights than a real city.

It would seem that although it would be too late for Mr. Morrow, that our legislators should address this at its next opportunity. [Of course, some of our legislators are busy doing their own law enforcement work, already. See post below.]