Across the Great Divide

This is Not the [Blank] We Knew.

Eric Black didn't say this. Neither did Scott McClellan. But they could have.

Only Some Mentors are Disappointed Today.

In light of Eric Black's stories on the Mike Hatch/Lori Swanson regime, I went back into my archives to find a post I thought I'd written prior to the last election for attorney general, in which I thought I'd quoted a source in the AG's office: "If you like Mike, you'll love Lori."

I think the ambiguity was deliberate.

Turns out, I'd written it in a private communication, but now you have it. This person did not at all approve of Hatch's management style or uncomfortable, often crude communication style, but on balance believed Hatch's heart was in the right place.

I guess we'll see in part two of Black's report whether that view is still represented.

Some people will thrive under an overbearing boss; some crumple and others just grumble. As a former — and sometimes possibly overbearing — boss, I understand how hard-drivers can be frustrated by get-alongers and half-assers. Perhaps the AG's office had a few of those when Hatch came in, but a good manager would've had them out quickly and not brought in any more.

Black's account sounds like a let's-separate-the-men-from-the-boys style of abusive, politically driven leadership helped create the current management problems.

As I futilely searched for that quote, I came across an old post that reminded me Hatch's penchant for insulting the media didn't start with Eric Black and MinnPost.

As his gubernatorial race came down to the wire, Mike Hatch was trying to clarify that he merely called a reporter a media hack — not a media whore. Allow me to rerun my glossary:

Was Mike Hatch misheard, or was he stumbling, Kerry-like, as he tried to select the proper term of opprobrium from a rich lode of invective against the media? Let's review some of the possibilities, along with the distinctions among them.

A whore performs a repulsive and demeaning act for pay — and pretends to be excited about it.

A hack performs the same act for pay and acts bored — while trying to figure out who else will pay him for the same job.

A jackal works in packs and rarely does any original work — but is capable of surviving entirely on regurgitated material.

A flack performs the same insipid act over and over, hoping to do it well enough to advance to hack.

A hound only masquerades as a member of the media in order to attract coverage by the hack or the whore.

Today Scott McClellan's new book, and the reaction to it, call for an addition.

A mouthpiece speaks the speech as they pronounced it to him, trippingly on the tongue. Some lose the taste for it once they discover the lie, but others...

Separating Right and Wrong.

A few weeks ago, blogger Two-Putt Tommy took a cheap shot at Sen. Norm Coleman through his wife, Laurie Coleman, who is promoting a hair dryer holder called Blo & Go. I didn't write about his juvenile stunt at the time and don't plan to now, because I thought it was in bad taste and not at all germane to Coleman's performance as a senator.

But I am interested in what Tommy said since.

The point is correct: even when the shot is open, even when the target damn near asked for it, doesn’t mean it’s still right to take the shot.

I was wrong. Taking that shot at Mrs. Coleman is a shot I should not have taken. The point I was going after with the complaint to the State Of California was the financial aspect; that’s where I should have focused. It’s where I’ll focus, in the future.

What brought about Tommy's change of mind? He listened to a Coleman partisan's point of view and reconsidered. He listened to a conservative blogger who just this week published his reckless speculation that Coleman's opponent, Al Franken, had forged the signature of a doorman at his apartment building.

Tommy's shot at Coleman was well-documented by comparison. Yet he was open to the thinking from the other side, which is a progressive characteristic. Meanwhile, good luck getting Mr. Right to admit he was wrong.

Saving Tape.

The Bush White House was more committed to recycling than I thought. And, no, I don't just mean bringing back Cheney and Rumsfeld or resurrecting supply side economic policy.

It so happens the administration recycled email backup tapes used to archive White House emails during the critical spring of 2003.

Presidents are responsible for preserving all historical records during their time in office under the Presidential Records Act. Congress is conducting an investigation into possible violations of this act, including the destruction of at least ten million White House email records.

In response to a judge's orders, the White House Office of Administration (OA), which manages the networks and email systems in the White House, filed a statement, which revealed that no emails were saved between March 1 2003 and May 22, 2003. "Office of Administration is preserving 438 disaster recovery backup tapes that were written to between March 1, 2003 and September 30, 2003. Of those 438 tapes, the earliest date on which data was written ... is May 23, 2003," according to the Bush administration filing.

This time period is perhaps the most historically significant of the entire Bush administration. It includes the run up to the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic jockeying to try and rally United Nations support for war, the possible planning for retaliation against former diplomat Joe Wilson, who was accusing the administration of lying about Iraq weapons of mass destruction claims, the use of harsh interrogations in the so-called "War on Terror", as well as the formation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) – the ruling body in Iraq after the invasion – and the controversial policy decisions the CPA undertook.

What Obama Said to Me.

The week Barack Obama made The Speech About Race, I've been working on another conversation America needs to have. Nominally, it is about guns and the right to self-defense, but the larger topic is Obama's.

How do Americans with differences form a more perfect union?

My discussion with Joel Rosenberg is ongoing. For some, my side of it has been too general and naive, as Obama has been accused of being. Some others might mistake Joel's desire for clarity and doggedness about change as bellicosity, but committed struggle, too, was something Obama endorsed.

As two verbal and opinionated bloggers, we could easily have fallen to skewering each other in comment threads and planting unanswerable tarbombs in our posts.  That can happen when you don't do hard time in conversation and jump right into the fight. When you fill in the other's words for them. When you stick with your tribe and brand Them as embodying all your fears.

Instead, we've tried to have a conversation and actually listen to each other. Sometimes, it's gotten rocky or we've wandered off the tracks we'd each hoped to follow. At times, I've risked coming across as weak by simply letting Joel say his piece instead of standing up to every utterance with which I might have some difference.

Obama talked about that, too.

We may not move the other very far from where we started, but that's not the main point. It's to show how such a respectful conversation can take place, and then another, and then another, until we find that common thread that will lead to a better solution than the one we have.

I'm not a lawyer or a politician, so the modes of debate and fierce advocacy don't speak to me. As a career creative problem-solver, I've dedicated myself to discovering new ideas and reinvigorating old ones. I don't think good creative solutions come from fighting — or from compromise. But a new idea almost always brings together opposites in a new way.

If you were my client, I wouldn't show you all this work in process, because I'd want to dazzle you with my solution later. But here, I'm willing to show how messy and difficult this business can be, so that you won't be discouraged when your own efforts at reaching across the divide don't produce anything right away.

I don't know exactly how this will conclude, but I am full of hope.

Mistakes (and the Lying Liars Who Make Them).

All people make mistakes — even Dick Cheney and Kim Jong Il. But we're more inclined to forgive a mistake based on our perception of the source.

Every time I stumble across a mislaid fact, error or apparent untruth, I try to assign the motive force behind it first to inattention, then to ignorance, then to deceit and, only lastly, to malevolence.

Naturally, I place all my mistakes to the left side of this continuum, where they truly belong. Ann Coulter gets no slack from me at all. In fact, I think she would be disappointed in her performance if I put something she said anywhere short of the far right.

Inattention: A few days ago, the Strib published a photo of withdrawn candidate Jim Cohen to represent Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, the John Edwards of Minnesota's two-horse Senate race.

Ignorance + Inattention: Twin City Sidewalks grabbed a Strib graphic showing weekend primary results that misplaced Louisiana on a map. He also shows a CNN map covering the same story that has trouble placing Kansas and Nebraska. In both cases, someone didn't know the difference, and others weren't paying enough attention to correct the mistakes.

There is a midpoint on this scale beyond which facts transmute into the building blocks of lies. We could name names locally that routinely project untruths upon a scrim of fact, but it's election season, so let's pick on somebody we won't have to kick around any more.

Deceit: Mitt Romney's state did produce 60,000 new jobs during his tenure as governor. Say this with enough sincerity and it may obscure the fact that Massachusetts indeed ranked 47th among the states during that period.

Malevolence: Even power-crazed dictators must make honest mistakes once in awhile, but the sad truth about people at the far end of the scale is they are convinced they are right. They look with contempt upon us flip-floppers and grey-seers.

One last thought. You and I are probably on the right edge of the right wing's version of this chart, and there is always someone who sees a conspiracy in the flubbed caption.

The Scandal of Slavery in Westchester County.

The story of poor Audrey Davison is starting to make the rounds among the anti-tax blogs.

Audrey Davison lives alone, gets a $620 Social Security check each month and worries about the sharply rising taxes on her four-bedroom house. Davison, 76, raised her family there and after 43 years, she really doesn't want to leave Greenburgh.

Greenburgh doesn't want her to leave, either.

The town is pushing a program that would let seniors work part-time, for $7 an hour, to help pay off some of their property taxes.

The proposal has caused a stir in Greenburgh, a town of 90,000 in Westchester County, which has the nation's third-highest homeowner property taxes. The plan would be unusual if not unique in New York, but similar programs are considered successes in Colorado, Massachusetts, South Carolina and elsewhere.

Davison, who suffers from arthritis and sciatica and needs a walker to get around on her bad days, said she pays about $12,000 a year in property taxes — perhaps $2,000 to the town — and has already taken out a reverse mortgage to pay her bills.

Anti-Strib blames liberals for her plight and calls it "The New Slavery." Mitch pays it forward under a simple "Slavery" and sarcastically ties the Greenburgh, NY, property tax to the "happy to pay for a better Minnesota" campaign of a few years ago. (New York ranks 4th for state and local property taxes. Minnesota's 26th.)

A 76-year-old woman who sometimes uses a walker makes an appealing martyr for the anti-tax campaign. There's no need to look any deeper into the story if it reinforces a perception of government insensitivity and rampant spending.

But there is more to the story.

As the article notes, Davison lives in the county with nation's third highest property tax rates. What it doesn't say is that her town is among the wealthiest spots in the country.

Greenburgh, NY, ranks tied for 13th in the nation for households with country club memberships. The median home price is $592,000 and the median family income is $111,843. The comparable numbers in Eden Prairie, MN — which ranked 10th among Money Magazine's Best Places to live — are $289,250 and $105,177. You can tab through other comparisons here. Greenburgh outscores many of top 10 best places on a number of measures.

Audrey Davison wants to continue living alone in a four-bedroom house in one of the most prosperous places on the planet and not pay the taxes that sustain the area's high-performing schools, many libraries and very low crime rate. If she were a government agency, she'd be instructed by the same commenters above to reassess her priorities and try to live within her means. If she were welfare recipient, she'd be told to exercise some personal responsibility and get a j0b or go live with family members.

There's more.

Davison says she "pays about $12,000 a year in property taxes — perhaps $2,000 to the town." But that doesn't seem to be the case.

According to county records, a house at the address listed to an A. Davison — which was mortgaged 44 years ago and appears to be occupied by the original owner — only paid $4,707 in property taxes in 2007, up about $317 from the prior year. About $1,815 of that amount went to the town and the county combined.

Property taxes are regressive and do fall disproportionately on retired homeowners who want to stay in their homes. An argument can certainly be made for reducing the impact of taxes on people with modest, fixed incomes. And maybe her tax bill is a hardship to this woman.

But I wouldn't build my campaign to get rid of government on this case.

And I Served With John McCain During Vietnam.

I'm pretty sure. At least, that's what I remember.

Okay, it might've been on different days. And in different countries. But we were on the same side... kind of.

Just ask my kid — he'll tell you.

The Phoenix writes:

In the most-watched speech of his political career, speaking on “Faith in America” at College Station, Texas, earlier this month, Mitt Romney evoked the strongest of all symbolic claims to civil-rights credentials: “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.”

Except he couldn't have.

What's true to us is not what happened, or even what we experienced. Truth is the story we tell ourselves about what we experienced.

Police Were Careless in Shooting of London Terror Suspect.

Back in 2005, in an earlier incarnation of this blog, I wrote at length about the mistaken killing of a Brazilian electrician supposed by London police to be a terror suspect. In particular, I was interested in how eyewitness and police accounts were conflicting and unreliable. They appeared to be influenced in part by the panic that followed recent subway bombings.

The inquiry by the police was slow in coming, raising suspicions of a whitewash, but a court yesterday found the department guilty of endangering the public. The jury cleared individual officers involved and ruled that the organization as a whole was responsible. The head of the police, however, said he would not resign because there was no evidence of “systemic failure.”

In the Twin Cities, we have a different version of a slowly unfolding investigation. Here's some of my earlier posting, and more current information from Joel Rosenberg, who continues to follow the case closely.

In the first case, early surmising about what was justified police action was wrong. We still don't know what happened when an undercover cop got shot, but it's possible I'll be the one wrong this time.

Hsu Gives it Up to My Sister.

Norman Hsu's lawyer claims the FBI took advantage of his client by interviewing him after he was discharged from the hospital after recovering from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Calling the agents' behavior "a legal scandal," Brosnahan said it was "absolutely wrong" for them to interview Hsu without a lawyer and while he was in a fragile medical condition.

In the federal complaint, authorities said Hsu "initiated contact with FBI agents in Colorado on three separate occasions" and that, after being released from a hospital to a Colorado jail, Hsu told the agents he wanted to speak without his lawyers present.

My sister and her partner were the agents who interviewed Hsu and obtained his confession to major fraud  that involved using investments from new suckers to pay off earlier investors. She assures me they did not engage in water torture, Indian burns or any of the other techniques I taught my younger siblings.

 Hsu's wrinkle in the Ponzi scheme was using ill-gotten funds for charitable and political contributions that enhanced his credibility with high-buck investors. It appears he had little actual interest in influencing the  politicians who took his contributions. Giving big to Hillary Clinton simply boosted his visibility.

Allow me to brag on my baby sis for a moment. She was also involved in getting the confession from Chelsea Gerlach and enlisting cooperation from others involved in high-profile eco-sabotage cases throughout the west. You would not want her on your trail, but if you did get caught, you'd want her to be the one to take you in.

What interrogation techniques work, according to her? You treat people as human beings. You let them know you're only after justice, not to make a name for yourself.

You won't see my sister's name on the Hsu case. That's just the way she and her partner want it.