Across the Great Divide

But That Was in Another Country, and Besides...

Shortly after taking office, U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose  removed an assistant U.S. attorney who had expressed concern over how Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer might be suppressing American Indian voting rights.

Paulose disclaimed any such knowledge ... sort of. Perhaps there's a lawyer out there who can help us interpret the weaselspeak.

The emails

A New Use for Preemptive War.

Today, President Bush came out with--a--bold--plan..... to--curb--green-house--gas-es--by two thousand--nine.

Some cynical Europeans, notably those who have been working on the issue all along, think this is a preemptive strike against United Nations efforts.

But I'm with the president. Technology is the answer, and United States is in the lead. You can tell he is speaking from the heart.

However, the teleprompter operator will be looking for a job tomorrow.

The Luck of the Accountant.

Last time I was out of town, a small, down-market office building near my grocery store was levelled. One less 60s-era two-story brick box was no great loss to the neighborhood — and judging from the longevity of the Space for Lease sign, even the owner was probably glad to see it go.

The replacement use for the lot was a mystery until today, when I saw work crews busily rolling asphalt between concrete planters. Of course. A Park and Ride for the commuters who were booted from a nearby shopping center lot to accommodate required parking for an Appleby's (which already closed its doors this spring).

Normally, I wouldn't consider a parking lot an improvement, but let's invoke a public transit exception.

Still, I will miss that non-descript building, though I'm probably the only one.

Years ago I served on a board with an accountant who had an office there, and we once had a meeting in its dreary precincts. His practice seemed limited to very small businesses — repair shops, cleaning services, the kind of enterprises where owners would show up with a box full of receipts once a year because they had to pay their taxes. Otherwise, you got the idea, they would never balance their books at all.

So the accountant provided a useful service, which is more than I can say about his time on the board, where mainly he was an obstructionist bore — a long-winded know-it-all who didn't.

Meeting him in a bar, you would soon find another table, but the board had such a low estimation of itself and such a tenuous grasp of financial matters, members thought he was the best they could get. Until I found them a normal person.

As luck would have it, the accountant won big in the lottery soon after leaving the board. Almost immediately, he closed his office and moved to Arizona. The executive director, who had a high tolerance for eccentric talkers, being one himself, had maintained a connection and held out hope for a donation from the suddenly flush accountant. But no dice.

Ever after, that boring brick building made me shudder and smile all at once. Life isn't fair, but that's what makes it interesting.

UPDATE: Just in case you had me confused with a reporter, the parking lot is not for a park and ride. An alert reader who pays a lot more attention to local affairs informs me it's a parking expansion for LOGIS, a consortium that handles outsourced IT functions for local governments.

But I was really writing about serendipity...

Thomson Reacts to the Veto.

In light of Gov. Pawlenty's veto of the tax bill, Thomson West is reevaluating plans to expand its Eagan campus. The bill included property tax concessions and would've refunded sales taxes on construction materials for the project.

It's only prudent for Thomson to do this, so it's difficult to tell if this announcement is intended as a shot across the bow of the good ship No New Taxes. But either way, it presents a problem for the governor.

If Thomson decides not to expand in Pawlenty's home town, his veto is likely to get a lot more blame than how the DFL majority structured the tax bill. (They included a provision that Minnesota, like all other states, consider inflation when preparing the budget forecast.)

If Thomson goes ahead and builds without the subsidies, it weakens Pawlenty's case that taxes drive away business and that incentives like the JOBZ program help keep them here.

But then maybe he isn't planning to be around to do the explaining.

Why I Read Conservative Economists.

Not all the time, of course, and not always without steam exiting my ears. But they are thinking instead of parroting, and so they make me think instead of just squawking.

Here, the critique is of environmentalists who favor tearing down hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest, but I can think of a few other places it might apply:

When the personal material cost, at the time of individual action, of expressing one's fantasies is near-zero, very little exists to check the expression of those fantasies.  No matter how bizarre, inconsistent, or dangerous they might be if real-world attempts are made to act upon them, if a holder of such fantasies suffers no personal cost from advocating his or her crazy idea, lots of crazy ideas will be advocated.  This fact is especially true for those crazy ideas that, when held and advocated publicly by certain people, fill those certain people with a personal sense of distinction, heroism, or self-satisfaction.

Report From the Land of No Lakes.

Guess which state recently put its governor in office with less than 50% of the vote?

Which faces dire financing needs for roads and schools yet is insisting on not raising taxes, because they'd harm economic growth?

Which featured a chaotic legislative session with budget bills still coming at the 11th hour?

Why, it's Nevada, one of Bill Cooper's favorite success stories. The difference between there and here — their governor has a 28% approval rating and ours is considered a shining star.

No Buyout for Cindy Sheehan.

Cindy Sheehan has resigned, slipping away like a used-up executive to spend more time with her family. Or what is left of it. I wish her the best.

Like so many who find a job they consider essential, who think they are onto something, who burn bright and intensely and leave others in the dust,  who get called empire builders or fast trackers or attention whores by those less driven and less successful, who rocket past where they imagined but still end up nowhere, who keep going even beyond the sense of impossibility, leaking from wounds and losing sleep, Cindy Sheehan did her job for ungrateful bosses in a fickle company because she believed she had to do it.

For awhile, she did.

The start of her crazy quest was brilliant. Camp Casey got her out of Washington where her sacrifice and the Texas setting put her anti-war message on a different footing. People paid attention because this wasn't greasy hippies fighting with police or sitting in Senator's offices. It wasn't grey wise men filing reports or lobbing op/eds. This was simply a grieving mother who wanted to talk to her president about ending a war and he was having nothing to do with it.

For awhile, this worked. More Americans began to see the war not as killing al-Qaeda mercenaries or to spread democracy, but as wasting lives and rending families because an arrogant and self-righteous president made a mistake and continued to compound it.

As William Rivers Pitt described her at the time, Sheehan was this

woman of passionate energy and commitment who sat in a Texas ditch until the country could no longer ignore her – or the war. The light was in her eyes, the hope that things could be changed was in every word she spoke and, as ever, the sorrow from her loss was there like a shroud. She was motivated, optimistic, cynical, tired, inspired and resolute, all at the same time.

But I confess, she lost me at some point. I don't know whether it was because she took on too much and got out of her depth or just became too much of an over-exposed scold. In the beginning, she highlighted how much the president had failed, but by the end, she was reminding all of us how we had failed to end this war — and it was embarrassing.

I didn't want to be reminded any more and I didn't open her bulletins when they arrived.

So Cindy Sheehan has resigned, with no pension, no health care benefits and no stock options. Her military death gratuity is long gone. The country has not yet announced whether the position will be refilled.

Harder Than It Looks.

During the recent legislative session, there was a lot of focus on whether the state has enough revenue to deliver the services Minnesotans want. Under a no-new-taxes regime, government can't provide services it once did, so Minnesotans are paying for the good life in other ways.

With our highways becoming busier and more complex, and with labor and materials costs continuing to grow, trash pickup is a lower priority for a department of transportation that has a 50-percent backlog on maintenance. Litter is getting worse, but there's less money for cleaning crews or enforcement and none for anti-litter campaigns. The state increasingly relies on volunteers and corrections department crews doing community  service.

When we lived in Minneapolis, my family enjoyed parks, wading pools, playgrounds, branch libraries, picnic grounds and paths that got us out of our houses and acquainted with each other. This infrastructure, a legacy from earlier generations, is getting threadbare in places and hours of operation are reduced.

In the 'burbs, we're more on our own. (Golden Valley has neither a high school nor a true community center to help cement local ties.) Some newer suburban communities are turning to private models for funding and managing amenities like pools, exercise facilities and security. Residents pay higher association fees instead of higher taxes. These facilities undeniably enhance family life and promote neighborliness, but also decrease the chances of rubbing shoulders with anyone who is different.

School choice is another admirable feature of Minnesota life, but how well are the new schools making use of existing public infrastructure and urban cultural resources? Several charter schools are in danger of closing, and others, like Minnesota Business Academy, are already gone, after great fanfare and initial show of support. Running schools well is harder than it looks.

Come to think of it, so is maintaining the fabric of community.

Back Before the Snark.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
– Eleanor Roosevelt

I saw this quote recently and recalled that Eleanor Roosevelt used to write a syndicated newspaper column. What I didn't recall was how astonishing her output was and how clear her voice. She wrote six days a week, from 1935 to 1962, not as First Lady, but as an American.

Here's a sample.

Today, she'd be more presidential than Hillary and offer more editorial page heft than Maureen Dowd, who prefers to write about Al Gore's weight instead of his ideas.

There is No Grass in Iraq.

We have resumed mowing our lawn this year. I cannot say what this means, exactly. We have gone back and forth over the years, using different services and different mowing technologies, trying to find the right combination.

We don't like noise or adding to the earth's poisoning. We are indifferent about cultured lawns but sensitive to our neighbors. We did not go to college to become farmers and have long considered cutting grass an inferior form of exercise compared to running, golf and biking. We consider outsourcing tasks we don't personally care to do as good for America.

For a few years, when we had an indentured teen, we decided giving him a job was better than giving him an allowance. It might teach him the value of hard work. In fact, it taught him he could hire his friend for less than we were paying him, so he could pocket the difference and spend the time finding other neighbors who would also put his friend to work with our lawn mower. Labor-management relations among teens being what they are, the arrangement eventually crumbled  and management's service left something to be desired, so we gave the mower to some friends and hired a service

That was fine for awhile, even when our service nearly came to blows with an adjoining service over leaf-blowing etiquette.

But after stopping the office routine and hanging around the house again, I found myself vaguely embarrassed to be an able bodied male sitting on my porch while another man buzzed around my yard on a riding mower. I was glad he was task focused and deafened by ear protection. I did not want to interact, for to do so would bare my inadequacies as a land holder. Further, writing checks for something I could do myself increasingly became intolerable.

But I handled the dissonance in a manly way. That is, I ignored it until the woman did something about it. She fired the lawn service and bought a new Toro with an electric start, the classic push mower still in the garage deemed inadequate for a lawn of this size.

This weekend, it was my turn. I have just mowed and bagged enough grass to feed a North Korean family for a week. That this image should occur to me makes me wonder if I am slipping to suburban conservativehood, or if it is only the same old smart-ass irony.

I transfer the damp clippings to the compost. Plunging my arms into the wheelbarrow, I can almost feel the lower layers starting to cook in their new proximity.

Hmmm. An entirely new balance of material is developing here. My old composting pile, fed by coffee grounds, kitchen scraps and odd prunings, may be overwhelmed by the volume of grass.

Well, we'll try this new arrangement. Change is good.

*****
A leaflet just appeared in our door. Our neighbor, Matt, has been deployed overseas for the third time. Earlier to Kosovo, now to Iraq. Some neighbors are pulling together to help with the yard, which is on a corner and serves as the gateway for our street.

I don't know which is the better political statement — neighbors supporting a good guy or a lawn overgrown and gone to seed.