Across the Great Divide

What Really Matters in Politics and War.

Bob Herbert pretty much says it for me.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

And political field days, as we all know, are what really matter in a country badly in need of some nation building of its own.

Partnered with a corrupt government, Pres. Obama is now officially stuck fighting an unwinnable war against a tribal society across a harsh land that has defeated every comer throughout history, so he can claim some temporary, limited victory.

And the Republicans are going, Yessss!!!

Top 10 Recipes for Disaster.

I saw this link to Nora Ephron's "Top 10 Thanksgiving Recipes You Didn't Cook Last Year That You're Cooking This Year" post at HuffPo, and figured it would be a parody of the GOP's Top 10 Things That Didn't Win Last Year But We'll Insist Candidates Do Next Year.

But nope — recipes.

Financial PAC Money to Democrats — Less Than Meets the Eye?

Here's the kind of transparency report that annoys me because it seems to come with a point of view attached.

The House Financial Services Committee voted yesterday to give regulators the authority to break up large financial firms that create too much systemic risk, in an effort to prevent future financial crises. The vote passed by a 38-29 margin, but three Democrats joined with all Republicans voting no. Those three Democrats--Melissa Bean (D-IL), Dan Maffei (D-NY), and Gregory Meeks (D-NY)--received an average of $99,483 from banks' PACs in the last two years, 119% more than the average of $45,358 received by the 38 Democrats voting for tougher regulation.

Comparing the averages implies that the financial industry exerted a disproportionate influence over the three Democrats voting against the regulation.

But the top three Democratic members who voted for the legislation collected more than $435,ooo from the banks PACs, versus only $298,000 for the three Democrats voting against. Committee Chair Barney Frank and bill co-sponsor Paul Kanjorsky together took more PAC money than the breakaway three.

And when you look at the total dollars paid out by the industry to the top 15 recipients — which includes all three "no" voters — the 12 Democratic supporters of tougher regulation among that group collected almost $1.126 million. The other "yes" voters got another $1.384 million.

It's just possible the three Democrats voted the interests of their districts or their consciences. Looking at the money alone doesn't tell us that, but the analysis makes a dark inference.

As for the Republicans, we don't know how much they got. The analysis doesn't tell us the average amount that "bought" the GOP votes.

Angry Politicians Make Lousy Leaders.

Four years ago, Jill Krout recalls, she stood angrily before the Greenfield City Council, railing against then-Mayor Larry Plack and urging him to resign for the good of the city.

On Thursday night, during a sometimes heated meeting, resident after resident of the small Hennepin County community railed against now-Mayor Jill Krout, urging her to resign for the good of the city.

– "Residents implore Greenfield mayor to resign," Star Tribune

One of the hoariest cliches coming from political campaigns — especially from challengers — is "I'm going to fight for you!" 

The fired-up candidate promises to cut taxes, save marriage, expand health care, find jobs for laid-off workers, stop illegal immigration or stop Wall Street from making piles of money. Even (especially?) in local elections, they start out angry about something — fluoride in the water, snowplowing or building inspectors — hoping to storm into office buoyed by other mad people.

Now, Greenfield and its mayor are discovering how that sort of thing works out.

Anger has its place in politics, I guess. It may work when running a campaign, but it's no way to run a railroad. Mayors are supposed to be able to run their cities, or at least supervise the people who do.

Anger carried into office can turn into dysfunction, just as it does in families. It puts the wrong people in charge, or more often, puts them on the back bench.

I tried to think of something a person could do better angry than not. All I could come up with was murder; they'd also be better at getting caught.

"Angry" candidates are either inauthentic, clueless or destined to be ineffective. I'm all for passion, but please spare me the pre-fight routine.

Bachmann: Is She Any Closer to Reality?

Asked whether she might consider an office beyond the House, Ms. Bachmann, who has announced plans to seek re-election, did not address other possibilities. “I am focused 100 percent on representing Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District and ensuring their voices are heard in Washington,” she wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

— "A G.O.P. Agitator Not Named Palin," New York Times

Rep. Bachmann has a funny definition of 100-percent focus. For example, she has one of the highest profiles with those noted 6th District constituent services fellows Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Larry King. At the same time, she's missed roughly one-sixth of her Congressional votes (making her record one of the very worst in Washington).

Now, I don't think showing up is necessarily a measure of effectiveness, so we can cut her a bit of Across the Great Divide Slack™.

But what about, you know, getting bills passed to benefit her constituents, make the state run more efficiently, improve educational performance or even cut taxes?

I can't find the link right now, but I did check Bachmann's record in the Minnesota Legislature and found that she managed to pass two bills she sponsored  in her entire career. One got a stretch of highway named in memory of a state trooper killed in the line of duty and the other added a small patch of lakeshore to an existing veteran's park.

Otherwise, she was a complete non-factor at Capitol. But she learned she didn't have to be — not if she struck controversial poses and flirted in that wholesome Christian way of hers. Saying insane things in plain English was called "straight talk," which is highly favored in some quarters over the difficult and nuanced truth.

She became the golden girl for people who don't want government to do anything, anyway.

She's carried that brand of service to Washington, and spiffed it up with a hard-working outreach campaign  that keeps her positions — if not her accomplishments — constantly in front of her supporters.

But if Rep. Bachmann were to accomplish something in Washington, it would be something like this:

“After years of discussion and planning, I am pleased to announce that the future VA Community Based Outpatient Clinic, which will provide increased access and service to our well-deserved [sic] veterans, is closer to becoming a reality,” said Bachmann.  

The VA has already opened two new CBOC's this year — one in Hibbing and one in Rochester. Another is planned for Rep. Tim Walz's First District, but the second term Congressman, who serves on the House Veteran's Affairs Committee, takes a lower key approach with his advocacy.

Meanwhile, in the Sixth, Bachmann is more or less claiming credit for an as yet unbuilt clinic that was first proposed two years before she was elected.

"Closer to becoming a reality" is as close to reality as Bachmann will ever get.

Confessions of a Mole.

It's time to tell the truth.

Yes, I'm a mole.

For five years, I have worked, mostly diligently, to convince you that some conservatives were indeed interested in building a decent world. Now that we've won and the first all-Minnesota presidential ticket is destined for the White House in 2012 — if not sooner — I might as well stop living a lie.

I left a cushy job creating marketing messages for corporate America to become a fake liberal blogger. This job was even cushier — fewer client meetings and working at home — and I took a nice salary bump.

There were drawbacks, of course. I had to quit the golf club. I had to sell the Jag and bike everywhere, even in the winter. Distasteful as it was, I disrespected my political heroes and said some very harsh things about certain political operatives. Now that they run the party, I hope they will remember my mission and treat me kindly. A communications directorship would be nice, with maybe a little side job as an election judge.

I had to attend Drinking Liberally, at least until I seriously relapsed and my bosses put me in rehab. I called it "Colorado." When it appeared my cover might be blown late last year, I started volunteering in homeless shelters.

All that was miserable, but I pressed on for the greater — though not necessarily majority — good.

My only real friend through all this was Jeff, who kept my spirit company here. He did a masterful job of walking the line between a reasonable conservative, an annoying libertarian and the whacko that all of you fear and detest.

Then Wilford Wicklund outed me. Oh, he was sly and I tried to respond with an equally sly comment. But I don't think I was that convincing. Finally, I should start being honest with myself again.

I have a meeting with my handlers this morning. I'm going to tell them my plan to come clean — that I'll lay everything out here. There may be water boarding, to make sure I wasn't a double mole. If they don't let me out alive, no matter.

I've already time-posted the story, and it will appear here, while I either head for the mountains or begin eternity with my savior.

Of ACORN and Assemblymen.

For the record, I don't condone abetting child slavery, prostitution, exploitation of illegal aliens or tax fraud. Nor am I big fan of spanking fetishes, sex play with lobbyists and then bragging about it at legislative meetings.

But I do think there are some instructive differences between California Assemblyman Mike Duvall's "inappropriate storytelling" and the gotcha video shot by two conservative operatives who make some Baltimore ACORN staffers complicit in their invented prostitution scenario.

Nobody was out to get the family man in full Duvall when he spun out his lewd aside into an open mike. He was an undistinguished legislator who was vice chair of the Assembly Utilities Committee boinking a lobbyist for an energy services company. The news reports pretty well sum up his tawdry business.

ACORN, on the other hand, has been a target for conservative groups who don't like voter registration drives, public support of programs that help poor people or Pres. Obama. In this case, the news stories focus on the senational aspects of the video. There's no question the women on tape were entrapped. It's also easy to say that they used poor judgment in continuing to counsel the pretend prostitute and her ridiculous boyfriend. Staffers at other ACORN offices apparently called the police.

But there's another aspect to this situation that I haven't seen reported. It's about the conflicts that can arise when service providers make a commitment to help people. Whether you are a lawyer, a doctor, social worker, drug counselor, accountant, minister, teacher or housing advocate, you cannot do your job from a judgmental frame of mind. You start from a position of helping the person who comes to you, and you have to put aside your own personal feelings.

Once you start down the path of helping and gaining another's trust, you may hear things you didn't want to hear. There may come a time when you have to decide whether you have become complicit in something you didn't seek out and whether you can continue to ignore it. Some professions have clear standards for dealing with situations that cross legal lines. Those lines may not be so clearly drawn for part-timers in ACORN offices.

In this case, the schemers were deliberately playing out the illicit details of their story. The ACORN women tried to focus on helping them achieve their original stated purpose — to get safe housing for a woman who was being threatened by her former pimp. That required documenting income, filing a tax return and attending a clss about home ownership. Whenever the ACORN staffers focused on those steps, the video team kept bringing the conversation back to their illicit activities until they got what they wanted.

You can also hear the ACORN women advising the young woman to think very carefully about what she was doing, recognizing her naivete about her "business" and her poor grasp of anything related to finance and taxes.

None of this fits very well in the preferred anti-ACORN narrative that it helps hookers and pimps buy houses for underage sex slavery. The salacious will outdraw the subtle every time.

I'm not excusing the fact that some staffers were drawn into the trap and did not — as other ACORN offices did — throw the schemers out.

But I also can't ignore the differences between fake and the real sexual exploitations — and between their desire to help someone else and the behavior of the public man helping himself.

Pawlenty Needs Some Bachmann Lessons.

On the radio, Pawlenty said he understood the address would encourage school children to write to the president. 

"There are going to be questions about -- well, what are they are going to do with those names and is that for the purpose of a mailing list?" the governor said. 

— Star Tribune

Our absentee Governor really missed an opportunity on this one. If he wants to become a national right wing quote machine, he has to ditch the innuendo and go straight for the craziness.

Of course President Obama doesn't want a mailing list of nine-year-olds. He wants to send agents to the homes to recruit them to spy on their parents!

What Obama May See in Grand Junction.

Pres. Obama's western swing this weekend was announced as a tour to encourage people to visit America’s national parks. He'll be landing in four places that qualify, including Grand Junction, where Colorado National Monument unfolds outside my front door. Unfortunately, I'll miss the opportunity to watch a presidential convoy buzz by.

Then, again, his visit to Colorado will actually focus more on health care, and he many only take in Monument views from Air Force One. It happens that all the states he's visiting are represented by key committee members and health care fence sitters.

Aug. 14th, Obama and family will be in Bozeman, Mont., home of Finance Committee Chair and Friend of Pharma Sen. Max Baucus. Obama visits Yellowstone, Aug. 15. Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming is the leading GOP member of the Senate Health Committee and is one of the negotiators reconciling the health care bills. 

The Obamas will spend the night in Grand Junction, and then head to Phoenix, where he'll address the convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and visit the Grand Canyon Aug. 16. Arizona is home to two more Blue Dogs, Reps. Gabrielle Giffords (whose Town Hall Meeting in my Grandpappy's town of Douglas included a dropped firearm) and Harry Mitchell.

Grand Junction is in the Congressional district of Blue Dog Democrat Rep. John Salazar, who has not yet come out squarely in favor of a public health care plan option. The linked story says an email from BarackObama.com urges supporters to contact Salazar’s Grand Junction office: “Let the person who answers know that you’re a constituent. Then tell them: ‘Thanks for working to enact real health insurance reform this year. Voters like me support your efforts.’ ”

Grand Junction is highly rated by the Dartmouth Medical Atlas for its relatively low medical care costs. If you drill down into the reasons why locals get quality care for less, the answer boils down to socialism — the good kind — but no one would dare call it that.

The Rocky Mountain West is fairly conservative territory, and Grand Junction is far from a Democratic stronghold (the vote here was nearly 2-1 for McCain-Palin). The local protesters of the president's visit are sponsoring a "Hands off Health Care Rally" before he arrives, and are announcing, but not "sponsoring," the protest at the site of the Town Hall meeting.

The first rally is at Lincoln Park, next to the VA Hospital, where the government already has its hands on health care. 

The organizers provide some helpful instructions for protesters who can't come up with a clever sign by Saturday: "take a plain piece of cardboard, (cut like a signboard) put it in a black plastic trash bag and tape up the loose ends and slack with duck tape on the reverse side.  Your black protest sign is symbolic of your protest against the Obama administrations' [sic] move to the dark side with their attempts to silence the voice of the American people."

Health Care is Only One Teabagger Target.

All politics is local

Power belongs to those who show up

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

All around the country, No-birds have been showing up at local meetings on national health care policy, spewing disinformation and disrupting actual discourse. But the ones most likely to affect your quality of life are flooding meetings about local issues.

For example, meetings about St. Paul's proposed plan to establish Jefferson Avenue as a cross-city bicycle boulevard or “bike-walk” street. 

Our worst, most inhospitable streets — as measured by safety, health, aesthetics, community, recreation, property values — are those designed for the convenience of people in a car traveling somewhere else. Yet to hear the public outcry, you’d think bicycle boulevards were a plot against neighborhoods.

The Jefferson bike boulevard opponents have provided virtually all the public commentary and follow-on objections. Almost all of it is wrong or misguided, but so far, the volume (in both senses) seems to represent the majority.

"It will hurt home values" — Studies consistently show that home resale value increases by about 8 percent when automobile traffic and speeds are reduced on a residential street.

"Thieves on bikes will scout our neighborhood" — Thieves can already scout your neighborhood, on bikes and in cars. Any increased pedestrian and bike traffic is actually a crime deterrent.

"Cyclists will camp in the yards along the route" — This is a well-known problem on Summit Avenue, where the tent cities erected by cyclists have driven the wealthy to ugly places along freeways where cyclists don't want to camp.

"Pedestrians will be endangered" — As opposed to the safety they experience on streets where traffic flows unencumbered.

"It's a waste of [transportation] money" — This is based on the assumption that drivers pay for roads and that this tax money should be spent on facilitating auto traffic. In fact, most cyclists are also drivers who pay fuel and motor vehicle taxes, and the maintenance of city streets like Jefferson is funded by property taxes and assessments, not by dedicated motor vehicle revenue streams. 

Whatever the issue, facts alone aren’t enough to defeat social torpor and fear masquerading as the champion of freedom and initiative.

You have to show up.

If you’re interested in the cause of bike boulevards:

The map (here's a more detailed one) highlights Jefferson, midway between Summit, which has a marked bike route, and Highland Parkway, where a similar plan was rejected by the Highland Council.  (The St. Paul Issues Forum had an informative discussion that accompanied that proposal, to little avail.)

Minneapolis Bike Love has some current discussion about a public meeting held by the Macalester Groveland Community Council. A meeting of its Transportation Committee will be held at 7pm August 24^th at the Edgcumbe Rec Center. 

A good discussion also resulted when Strib reporter Steve Brandt questioned the Minneapolis Issues Forum before writing this story about whether Portland and Park Avenues should revert to two-way streets. 

Between 1975 and 1984, we lived on Portland Avenue because that’s where we found a decent house we could afford. We moved once we envisioned our toddler tumbling down our steep front yard toward the street.