Is Rev. Wright Al Franken’s Accountant?

I was staggered this week to see Al Franken on the cover of both local newspapers! Did he refuse to shake another college student’s hand? Did he grunt while exercising? Did he tell a joke that people didn’t understand?

No, it was for releasing the information that due to an accountant’s error, he had failed to pay taxes for speech income in states he was not a resident, mistakenly paying (overpaying) those taxes in New York state, where he then lived.

The Star Tribune story is massive and strikes me as a local distraction from a very important Senate race. Should we be offended by Al Franken or perhaps the newspaper?

Perspective is a bitch, I know, but that doesn’t let the paper off the hook. I mean, so Al Franken’s accountant screwed up? Big deal. What next, stunning news that his cleaning lady put a plastic-wrapped microwave burrito in the compost?

It has got to be a meaningful and important story because the Strib put it on the front page and jumped to a nearly full page following. But the media refuses to make essential connections and put things in context. Why does this matter? What does it tell us? (I know, not their job. They’re objective. Please.)

GOP apparatchik Ron Carey is deputized for that. He’s “troubled” and “offended” because of the “double standard.” (What double standard would that be, Ron? Maybe I should direct that question to the newspaper?) Sen. Coleman is “troubled” because thousands of local small businesspeople “meet their obligation” in tough economic times. And if their accountant screws up, they pay the tax and interest and penalty just like Al did. (Then their troubled neighbors burn their houses down and chase them out of the county.)

The fundamental point in all this is that our political campaigns are too long. After a few weeks of discussing the issues, the media tires and preoccupies itself with nonsense. In the case of the national media, it starts immediately.

So how stupid are we? How easily distracted? I’m not sure Al Franken is the savviest politician—he has not sanitized and glossed every aspect of his resume or recast his positions to suit the zeitgeist. But if we’re stupid to enough to fall for the idea that this tax thing is meaningful in any way, shape, or form, the media and their manipulators who play us for fools have won again.

Good Legislators, Bad Politicians

We’re in the quiet period now, as the legislature and governor do their dance, pre-session end. The nail biter is whether the DFL majorities can convince Governor No to sign onto a restoration of $70 million in bonding money for Central Corridor LRT or whether the line is delayed two or more years until the next bonding session while other transit initiatives fall like dominoes in its wake.

I’m placing my bet on “no,” for primarily this reason—I think the Senate and House DFL leaders are poor politicians. Note: I did not say poor representatives of their constituents. Politics is the art of the possible, the art of compromise. We can watch our federal government to see the outcome of government by executive fiat and partisan impasse.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I wonder what Sen. Larry Pogemiller and Rep. Margaret Anderson Kelliher were thinking when they signed off on a bonding bill that left the governor’s top priorities out and exceeded his stated limit by $100 million bucks? I mean, he has a line-item veto! Did they not grasp that?

And how did they think he would wield it? On lots of $3 million projects scattered all over the state in various constituencies or on one or two big-ticket projects with limited geographic impact in constituencies where he is already unpopular? Then factor in Pawlenty’s inevitable pique at having his transportation funding veto overridden by these same metro-area legislative leaders.

Should anyone have been surprised that Central Corridor was line-itemed? Apparently Kelliher and Pogemiller were. Which really calls into question their savvy and political skills.

As gasoline spirals up toward $4 a gallon, who anymore questions the need for a serious public transportation infrastructure in this metropolis? So it’s all the more ironic that when the Central Corridor was needed more than ever, our legislative leaders decided to play political chicken with it.

The Media’s New Story Line

If you watched the first hour last night of MSNBC’s coverage of the Pennsylvania election results, you would have been preparing last rites for Hillary Clinton. It was all the drying up of her fundraising base, how long can she continue, etc., etc. There were no returns in yet, so it was conjecture driven, I assumed, by exit polling they were not acknowledging, portending an Obama surprise of some magnitude.

What happened was exactly what the pundits predicted a few days earlier. Hillary matched her Ohio margin and got enough of a bounce to go forward. See ya in Charlotte.

Wait, no.

Somewhere between 8 and 9 p.m., as our Tivo was taping Hell’s Kitchen, the story changed. The results didn’t, but the media decided the expected outcome was in fact unexpected. Hillary then gave a “great” speech. Obama gave a “flat” speech. Why can’t Obama close the deal? Hillary has raised two million dollars in the last hour. In Scranton she beat Obama by 50 percentage points. (Obama had similar margins in Philadelphia, but it was apparently not notable.) If he can’t win in Indiana, bordering his home state, is Obama no longer inevitable?

I hate to take you back to Chomsky and the idea of manufacturing consent, but this is how the press drives perceptions and expectations. PA was a push. Clinton didn’t see a bounce to indicate she had grown her piece of the action, and Obama didn’t deliver the coup de grace. As expected. But Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, and Joe Scarborough decided to move the goalposts to keep it interesting.

By this a.m., the networks were full of talk about how the Obama campaign had peaked, can’t expand beyond blacks and tweedy whites, and how Hillary is forming her strategy to turn back the superdelegate tide, and all it will take is a win in Indiana.

Don’t get me wrong—this is shaping up as a very complicated choice between two candidates who could well lose to John McCain. A Hillary candidacy will be predictable, sharp-edged, and the victory, if it comes, will be narrow, the Presidency inevitably fractious—more of the same.

An Obama candidacy will be unpredictable, perhaps dispiritingly ugly, with the possibility of a landslide loss, but with the potential for incredible upside, rearranging America’s attitudes about race and remaking the tenor of our political campaigns.

But can we be honest and say that was the story six weeks ago, is still the story today, and will probably be the story after the final primaries on June 3?

Insider Take: Clinton Trying to Save Dems from Selves

This link from the respected DC website Politico is to an interesting article contending that Hillary and Bill Clinton continue to hammer so hard at Barack Obama for reasons other than their collective ego and sense of entitlement. They are apparently convinced that the Republican machine will chew Sen. Obama up so assiduously that he’ll be running to Rev. Wright screaming “God damn America” by October.

At first I found the reasoning compelling, in a cynical way. I mean, when do the ads from Weather Underground Victims for Truth start airing? John McCain might be principled, but he can’t stop that stuff.

But in the end, I find its logic unsatisfying, though it does make the Clintons appear a bit less craven. If you think Obama can win at this point, it’s on the premise that he can convince enough Americans to ignore the slanderous ads from 527 groups and vote their hopes, not fears and knee-jerk sensitivities.

The worrisome question is to what extent can Obama get the media to ignore trivialities? Part of why George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson could not see the obdurate arrogance of their questioning last Wednesday (“Will you commit on this stage . . .”) was they and the nation’s entire insider political realm, whether media, campaign hacks, consultants, ad producers, etc., are steeped in this culture Obama is trying to deviate from.

They believe this is all part of the game and that you are not ready or worthy until the process has vetted you or destroyed you. They believe as much because to believe otherwise is to devalue and call into question the very way they have chosen to spend their careers and lives. To believe anything else makes them cynical hacks. Your call.

Obama might well fail, might be too naïve for this. But it’s about time someone tried to break the cycle, isn’t it? Bill Maher posited Friday night that things are bad enough in this country for people not to fall for and propagate the kind of political reasoning that got us two terms of GW.

Disgusting, Disgraceful, Demeaning

I watched the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour ABC Democratic debate tonight then turned off the TV. The exchanges encapsulated everything wrong with the American news media as Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos spent the time peppering Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with an unending litany of gotcha questions rooted in meaningless campaign contretemps.

Rev. Wright, the flag pin, the Bosnia exaggeration, the Weather Underground guy . . . belch.

I know what ABC will say after the hammering they are surely taking all over the blogosphere: Democrats are concerned about electability, and these questions explored how these controversies affected the candidates’ electability.

And it’ll be a self-serving lie like it always is.

Bloggers might be drunk on their own influence, but it is only the validation and incessant repetition from the mainstream media that legitimize this crap and mutes discussion of real issues. I know the campaigns surreptitiously push these controversies in the press’s face, but George and Charlie don’t have to bite.

But they’re bored with the issues and in love with the horserace. They are in their own insider bubble, out of touch with what’s afflicting this country and the change in tone Americans crave—even the Americans who are too simple-minded or vulnerable to resist these hot-button manipulations.

So they devote the most-watched portion of a debate capping the unending PA campaign to a recitation of vomit that demeans the election process, disgusts and wearies voters, and turns politics into a cesspool.

Here’s my vow: I will not watch an ABC news or politics program through the remainder of the election cycle. It’s the only way I have to express my disgust at its trivialization of the most important American election in four decades. I urge you to do the same. 

Merging, Going Nowhere

A lot of us are pondering what the merger of Northwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines means for the Twin Cities. A lot of ink is being spilled, a lot of pundits and academics are pontificating—trust me, a lot of it is garbage. The end result will be somewhere in between the rosy forecasts of life under the benevolent hand of the world’s largest airline and the predictions of a return to flyover territory status. But will it matter?

Not if oil prices keep rising, it won’t.

If oil prices keep heading up (jet fuel costs have nearly doubled since 2006), major changes are on the horizon for America’s mobility. Example: Last summer I traveled to Washington, DC, with my son. We paid approximately $280 each for our tickets on Northwest, a fairly typical tariff to a major East Coast city.

We’re going again this summer (important meetings with Bill Clinton, doncha know). Ninety days out, the lowest fare is more than $400, and it ain’t because the flights are oversold or Sun Country has pulled out. It’s because of the cost of fuel. We can rant all we want about the state of flying, but you can no longer accuse the airlines of overcharging. Even Sun Country is charging four bills to DC. It’s oil.

The airlines have cut to the bone: Regional jet pilots are paid less than a Subway manager, new American Airlines flight attendants complain they qualify for food stamps, planes operate with the minimum legal crew, and the fleets are geriatric relative to the European and Asian carriers. It has become a frugal business. So fares must go up. And oil hit another record yesterday.

Problem is, many of us may have to fly half as much if airfares are twice as high. Especially us leisure travelers, who have become accustomed to flying to Fort Myers to watch a spring training game, to Chicago to view a museum exhibition, or LA to try a hot new restaurant. On-task America lives in the world of the short break. The two-week vacation is now four three-day weekends fueled by cheap airfares. We may be returning to the world of 1968—when flying was for the affluent, a honeymoon, or grandma’s funeral.

America fiddled through two decades of artificially cheap oil and didn’t use the time to prepare for the inevitable. And there is no alternative. There is no credible effort on the verge of a great advance in alternative jet fuels, despite Richard Branson’s puffery. We have no TGV to carry us to Chicago in three hours as they do in Europe. Just overcrowded Interstates that can barely take another driver (driven I-95 in Florida lately?)

For the travel industry, this could be devastating. Consider isolated Hawaii, having lost thousands of seats a day of West Coast visitors after Aloha’s bankruptcy. Hawaii is not a profitable market for most airlines. Aloha used those routes to feed its dense inter-island network of flights. United or Delta have no such motivation and have not rushed in to fill the void. Thousands of fewer seats mean thousands of fewer tourists. Good luck, Waikiki.

And for those of us who feel most alive when we are discovering a new place, a new culture, seeing something fresh and exciting, reveling in the amazing things cheap mobility has brought us, the words There’s Always Brainerd are little consolation.

Bankrupt, Completely Bankrupt

A family member nearly filed bankruptcy last year. They overextended themselves, got caught up in the housing bubble, and made some overly optimistic assumptions about their earning potential. But the 2005 toughening of the bankruptcy laws dissuaded them from filing bankruptcy.

Those changes were made by Congress at the behest of the banking industry, which insisted Americans were abusing bankruptcy after bacchanals of overspending to discharge their debts. And based on my relative’s experience, that seemed plausible.

Of course, people declare bankruptcy because they lose jobs, have crushing medical bills due to a lack of adequate health insurance, or perhaps receive a home loan at predatory interest rates in which the payments ratchet up to unaffordable levels, and they can’t sell their house because the lender and appraiser colluded on a phantom value, and the house wouldn’t sell when the market tightened.

Whatever.

But if you read The New Yorker, James Surowiecki’s always illuminating Financial Page had some surprises this week.

According to the column, bankruptcies fell 62 percent from ’04 to ’06, and credit card issuer profits rose 30 percent in the succeeding years. But promised drops in usurious-card interest rates and outrageous fees for late payments and the like—no longer needed to cover the costs of all the debtors who had their obligations discharged by bankruptcy courts—have not taken place. Are you surprised? (I switched to a credit union two decades ago and haven’t looked back.)

Surowiecki’s column makes a couple other interesting connections, suggesting nations with the most lenient bankruptcy laws have higher rates of entrepreneurship because people can start over quickly and become productive participants in the economy again, and a suggestion that the housing bubble might have been exacerbated by changes in the bankruptcy laws.

Of course, he notes, credit card issuer profits were tripling over the decade before the bankruptcy laws were tightened—meaning the “threat” Congress dealt with was “imaginary.”

Sure, the GOP Congress loved to do the bidding of its patrons in the banking business. But even average Americans, when given the option, prefer punitive to permissive, a kick in the ass to a lift off the ground. But now that so many Americans’ economic lives are messed up, perhaps Congress and the next President will see some wisdom in unfixing a system that wasn’t really broken.

Pawlenty’s Revenge

I have heard, from people who have worked with and for him, that Tim Pawlenty has a hot temper, can be petty, is a micromanager, and has his eyes very keenly set on national office. He doesn’t show much of that to the public—we see the smiling, soft-toned suburban dad who just doesn’t like taxes, gosh darn it.

Jeepers, Governor, then how do we interpret your line-item veto of $70 million in design work for the Central Corridor LRT? I mean, you put half that much into your own bonding proposal and indicated an openness to the needed $70 mil if the Met Council and other stakeholders settled on a route the feds would fund (they did, weeks ago).

I mean, it’s only the highest priority unfunded transportation project in the metro area, and T-Paw line-item vetoes it out of a $900-plus million dollar bag of goodies and pork? The net effect will be to push the line’s opening back a year at minimum and jeopardize the federal government’s willingness to pay for half of it. The feds prioritize funding decisions based on clear evidence that the state or municipality is behind the project.

This looks like an act of pique. Governor No is still sulking from the override of his veto of the transit-funding bill and is taking it out on Central Corridor because it gores the ox of all the folks who drove that override. He’s throwing a fit and calling it fiscal responsibility. And I’m sure it raises his flagging street cred with all the right wing crank yankers who want John McCain’s veep nominee to be as rigid an ideologue as possible.

Now I’m sure some out there will say this is a bargaining chip, and T-Paw will eventually agree to fund the line in a separate bill in exchange for something he wants. But that sort of thing is said every year, and it’s never accurate. Pawlenty is not a wheeler-dealer, he’s an autocrat dressed as your neighbor.

Two Robberies

I was robbed twice this week. First time was Monday. My locker was broken into at the downtown Minneapolis YMCA. The lock was cut with bolt cutters, and my wallet was pinched. An hour after the theft, I was on the phone canceling credit cards, ATM cards, and the like, but they were already in use on the north side of Minneapolis.

As crime goes, it’s pretty low-grade stuff. My car keys, house keys, and home address were all in that locker, but nothing was taken out of my pants but the wallet.

I spent yesterday going over security tapes with the Y’s director. The thief was a guy who was hanging around the locker room with no apparent purpose. I’d never seen him before, and he kept moving between the bathroom and lockers wearing a heavy coat (I didn’t see the bolt cutter).

It’s a different crowd at the Y than at LifeTime. You see people at the Y every day who look deeply troubled, vaguely threatening, or just creepy. And I would have felt sheepish heading up to the black guy at the counter suggesting they boot the black guy in the locker room because he looked shifty. A lot of urban black people look shifty to me.

The Rev. Al Sharpton (and perhaps Barack Obama) would tell us that black folks are hassled and jailed for this sort of stuff while white America commits “victimless” crimes and goes unpunished.

Which transitions us nicely to Wednesday’s robbery. It was the day my wife got her job review. Our income is going to be down 15 percent or so this year due to the state of the American economy. My wife works for a big national retailer. Sales and profits are down, the outlook is iffy. It’s not her employer’s fault.

But that 15 percent is a lot more than the $150 in cash and $15 Caribou Coffee gift card in my wallet. And it’s thievery, too. Wall Street got together with the mortgage industry and the banking industry and had a big party at our expense. The ability to cheaply finance any sort of home purchase, no matter how unsound, drove a wild bubble in housing prices, which fed Americans’ unique sense of “where’s mine?” until it all started collapsing in on itself.

There is no housing bubble in Europe, Canada, or Australia. There is no recession there either. Wages are not being slashed, employees laid off. Those countries have laws, controls, and a culture that doesn’t validate extreme risk-taking and communal greed. The ex-CEOs of Countrywide Financial or Merrill Lynch—excoriated for multi-million dollar compensation and severance packages after ruining their companies and driving this bubble—didn’t set out to steal from my kids’ college funds or our summer vacation. But the guy who ripped off my wallet did.

I have no sympathy for him. Granted, he might have been raised in a valueless home and a cruel urban subculture by a single parent. He probably dropped out of school. But in my book, you relinquish any sympathy due you when you victimize others. His other victim Monday afternoon was a black man like him. And if I cancel my membership at the Y, his victims are all the other at-risk Minnesotans supported via the Y’s good works funded by $91 monthly membership. (That’s why I walk a mile to the Y instead of a block to LifeTime.)

Both crimes, though, are the result of a culture of depravity that victimizes more of us than benefit from it. Rules and constraints might stop the next housing bubble from forming, but we can’t seem to send enough CEOs to jail to deter ever-morphing greed posing as financial innovation. And we can’t seem to put enough thieving criminals in Stillwater to keep them from ripping off the rest of us.

Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo, when he retires on his millions in Martha’s Vineyard, Naples, and Pebble Beach, will continue to deny his own avarice. And the guy who ripped off the Y will keep thieving until he’s jailed or murdered or parents another generation of depraved kids or perhaps all three.

Which crime is worse? My gut tells me it’s the scumbag who threw my wallet with baby pictures and sentimental mementoes of the last two decades in the trash. But my head tells me it’s the one perpetrated by Wall Streeters in suits and Golden Valley mortgage brokers in golf shirts and chinos who didn’t really care what the consequences were as long as it goosed the numbers and their compensation. Welcome to the American Dream.