Kersten’s School Daze

One of the few effective and newsworthy themes Katherine Kersten consistently digs out in her Strib column is the use of the public schools to advance various cultural and religious agendas, notably ones with which she disagrees.

For those of us on the left or center who are skeptical of the idea that colleges are hotbeds of intolerant one-way thought and that the public schools are laboratories of dysfunction and social engineering, the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Welcoming Schools” curriculum, as described by Kersten, is further evidence that urban public schools have passed the point of nuance and are into blatant social advocacy. I can’t vouch for Kersten’s accuracy, but in broad strokes, as a public school parent, it rings true.

Welcoming Schools is a curriculum developed by a DC-based GLBT advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign. MPS is testing the curriculum in three schools as an “anti-bullying” effort.

Now I have no problem with the values Welcoming Schools pushes, namely that families headed by gay and transgender parents are normal and acceptable. We can debate whether they are optimal, but if you believe as I do that homosexuality isn’t a choice and that there are many kids out there in need of good homes, same-sex households with children are helping society, not hurting it.

But I have real qualms about using public school classrooms with kids as young as six years old to so blatantly engage in efforts to shape values that many in our society don’t accept. Not because I want to validate homophobes or endorse parents’ right to be intolerant but because it puts the schools on a slippery slope and ties them to a social movement that on its fringes goes beyond tolerance and understanding to forms of advocacy that even some liberals don’t agree with.

Such advocacy also feeds perceptions on the right that schools have become an instrument of the left, making community, state, or national consensus harder to achieve about funding levels, teacher qualifications, and ongoing evaluation of school effectiveness.

A small digression: My kid is winding down fourth grade at an MPS school. Based on my anecdotal feedback, he has had more classroom instruction about Martin Luther King, Jr. than any other historical figure. MLK was and is important, but his disproportionate salience to the public schools is part of its agenda to empower African-American kids. If the effort is having any success, more power to them I guess, but if it isn't, then my kid’s education has been put secondary to an ineffectual social agenda that is irrelevant to his needs.

My point here is that the right wing’s perception that the public schools are being used to indoctrinate kids in values steeped in multiculturalism and social engineering seems more accurate than not. Multiculturalism has taken on the dogma and emphasis of a religion in academia—it doesn’t take a lot of digging to discern that.

I want my kids to be educated. I hope they learn values in the home by watching us, in religious school by listening to the rabbis and teachers, and in regular school by the enforcement of respect and tolerance.

The problem is many parents have lost confidence in the public schools’ basic efficacy. The Welcoming Schools effort causes me to question whether the schools believe that they now must function as parent and church as well—my guess as to why this curriculum is being tested. (The alternative, pure ideological indoctrination, is frightening, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.)

And if the schools must now be parent and church, whose values rule? What then of the kids who don’t need or whose parents don’t want an edgy values curriculum? And what are our kids missing in all that classroom time spent validating?

Hunting the Turkey

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.

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.

Panic Mode

There’s a really interesting analytical article in the current Rolling Stone by political writer Matt Taibbi (articulating better than anything I’ve read or heard) about how the media, with its preoccupation with manufactured controversies, distorts the political process, particularly in the current Democratic race for president.

(Taibbi also appears regularly on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, which is must-viewing for its candor and willingness to hold pols and the media to account.) His prose and commentary is rife with juvenile profanities, which will turn some people off, but look past it because this is, in a nutshell, the story of our culture right now.

“Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom . . . keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest. . . .

“What we’re getting with all of these scandals isn’t a sober exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any stimuli.”

Taibbi seems to be in Obama’s camp, but this is not merely about Rev. Wright and “God Damn America.” Taibbi also has no patience for the Geraldine Ferarro contretemps and the uproar over John McCain’s end-of-days preacher. And that’s the point—it’s a game all the campaigns play to because they know the media can’t resist.

Taibbi is appropriately critical of the public and the campaigns, but this is a media-driven trend, uniquely exacerbated by talk radio and cable TV networks with hours of “news programming” to fill and no budget to do any real journalism.

Ultimately, our plethora of choices has degraded the discourse, not improved it.

Sarah Jane’s Lockup

I will not defend or minimize Sarah Jane Olson’s self-indulgent protest crimes, legitimize the ridiculous Symbionese Liberation Army, nor attempt to discern if Olson actually feels remorse for building bombs and robbing a bank where someone was murdered.

And I can’t argue with them hauling her back in last week after releasing her from prison; the sentence is the sentence.

But I question the imprisonment to begin with, especially a sentence well beyond what her co-conspirators received. I know, she conspired to build bombs and participated in a robbery in which an innocent person, a mom such as her, died.

But after you’ve evaded apprehension for nearly three decades, lived a subsequent life of magnanimous rectitude, and become a parent . . . I don’t know what was gained except to satisfy the victim’s family’s sense of vengeance, not what we should be concerned with when crafting justice.

Olson had teenage and pre-teen children in her home at the time of her arrest. It’s a given that the absence of these kids’ mom for a decade will have an irreparable effect on their adult lives. Maybe it will be garden-variety dysfunction; maybe they will become criminals themselves; maybe they will abuse or abandon their children, either physically or emotionally, as they were abandoned.

If a person is a danger to society, we must incarcerate them. If a person is not a danger to society but functions without any benefit to society except to commit crimes, I accept imprisonment as well.

But if they are not dangerous and living otherwise productive, relevant lives, what do we gain when we send parents to prison? A domino effect of troubled adults rearing troubled children that the broader society suffers and pays for.

Couldn’t we have sentenced Olson to a decade of community service? Forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for ten years, plus the first five years in-house arrest outside the service? That sentence benefits society, at little actual cost to taxpayers, and does not wreak damage on the lives and psyches of Olson’s kids, the other innocent victims of her crimes.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe her kids, all of whom are now legally adults, have navigated the last decade unscathed and will go on to live lives unaffected by all this. But the fact remains that America has a larger share of its population in prison than any democracy, and the Olson case is another example of the insanity of how we mete out justice in the USA.

The Hard Sell

I have a coupon worth half off at any Starwood hotel property in the world. I would like to use it this summer, but it is rife with exceptions and asterisks, and I was required to call Starwood to find out where I could actually use it. They suggested to me that I put together a short list of destinations since August is a heavy travel time and the coupons are often blacked-out or sold-out at many hotels.

I did just that and called back. I sat on hold for ten minutes and then got transferred to a different department, luckily not in India. I then went through resort after resort, hotel after hotel, hearing “not available, blackout, not available.” Finally, at one of my lesser options, I heard, “that’s available, can I have your credit card number to hold your reservation?”

“Uh, there are a few others I’d like to check.”

“How many?”

“Is there some limit?”

“Uh, I can’t check like ten or anything. But I can hold the reservation for you until Friday without a credit card, if you’d like.”

“Look,” I said, “I sat through a ninety-minute time-share presentation to earn this coupon. I haven’t had a real trip alone with my wife in five years. The dollar is worthless overseas. I sat for ten minutes on hold, spent hours on your website, and you’re trying to talk me into buying the first hotel you can find a room at? Do you work on commission or something?”

Turns out these fine folks are compensated, in measure, by the number of reservations they “close.” Starwood believes that, coupon notwithstanding, if I get off the phone with Bob, I might just call Hyatt (which applies no such pressure tactics) and decide to stay with them. And even if I call back, Bob cares less if I stay with Starwood than that I book with him and not Susie in the cubicle down the corridor.

What an asinine way to run a business.

It reminded me of some window-shopping I was doing for a TV at Ultimate Electronics, flush with my holiday bonus. “Can I ask if you’re planning to take one home tonight?” asked the salesman.

“I’m not, no. I’m doing my research and comparing sets and retailers . . .”

“What if I told you we match all our competitors prices and have all the models they carry? Would you be ready to buy tonight?”

“Pal,” I said, “This is an $1,800 television set, not a $20 pair of headphones. I don’t drop two grand on impulse.” He walked away, not interested in making me a customer of one of his colleagues in a week or two.

It reminded me of the time I was at Carousel Audi test-driving a car a few years ago. It’s an upscale place, trust me. They’re not pulling folks off the street with bratwurst and popcorn.

“Are you planning on purchasing today?” the salesman asked me.

“No, I’m going to drive several different cars and then make a decision.”

“Is there anything I could do or say to you to get you to make a purchase commitment today?” he asked. I told him I didn’t make $35,000 impulse purchases.

Which reminded me of a recent meal I ate at a local steakhouse. I was researching for an article, and we had ordered a lot of food, borderline gross in fact. Salads, sides, main courses, sauces, etc., but no appetizers.

“Could I thrown in an order of calamari for the table, to start?” the server asked.

I looked at him and raised my eyebrow. “We’ve ordered more food than we can possibly eat; you have to know that. I’m sure people do the same thing all the time. Did you really believe we’d order a plate of calamari?”

“You’d be surprised.” He smiled, winked, and walked away.

The left-wing pundits wonder how hundreds of thousands of people took out mortgages they could not afford, without asking how they worked or thinking about various economic scenarios. It had to be fraud on a massive scale, they suggest.

Maybe so.

Or maybe the banker just asked.

Earth to Pundits: Men Like Sex

The punditry is not covering itself in glory this week, it’s covering itself in delusion. A couple notable examples, ripped from the headlines:

Our Internet friend Jason DeRusha asked on WCCO-TV: “Why do men do that?” Meaning go all Spitzer.

His package failed to quote Chris Rock, whose message on men and sex remains the only one of any value or insight: Men cheat because they can. All men want to cheat. They do it in direct proportion to their opportunity and desirability.

Our culture has become so feminized, and feminine values so dominate today’s relationship norms (probably a good thing, on balance) that men understand female sexuality better than women (and some men) understand male sexuality.

Some politically correct men won’t even own up to theirs. (Was Spitzer one of those guys who frowned at dirty jokes and billboards for Hooters?) It’s one area where the Christian right and the over-educated left come together.

The male sex drive is like a mind-altering drug. It compels us to take risks and clouds our judgment about the magnitude of those risks. The biological imperative at the root of the sex drive also compels men to seek variety in sex partners. Spread the seed and multiply.

Or, as the saying goes, “show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of ------- her.” Not because she isn’t beautiful anymore. But because his sex drive has moved on as it’s programmed to. That’s why AIDS spread so fast in the gay community—monogamy is much harder to sustain without a woman in the mix.

If women could see a running display of men’s thoughts, they would be horrified. They’d lock the door and not come out of their house. And it’s not just the cads on construction crews, trust me. It’s the IT guys at your office. It’s the lay pastor at your church. But on balance, most men are pretty good at keeping it in their head and their pants.

Which is why what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

When I turned eighteen, the guy I worked for that summer bought me a hooker for the afternoon. It was a sprung on me a la “here’s the motel key, she’s waiting in room 104 across the street.”

I was insecure and overwhelmed and turned the gift down to the girl’s face. My boss said I’d regret it in about an hour. (It was more like two.) I tell this story to women, and they think my boss was sleazy. I tell this story to men, and they want my ex-boss to teach seminars across America on management.

I’m not endorsing prostitution; I’m not claiming most men don’t love their spouses. (I’m not sure they’re mutually exclusive. Women would inevitably disagree.) What I am saying is that male sexuality is in an ongoing battle with monogamy and intimacy and will be until they make us take a pill to stop it. All these ridiculous “why?” discussions just deepen the culture’s denial.

Eliot Spitzer cheated not because he was power mad, not because he is low down and no good, and not because he has a psychological disorder. He cheated because his brain was telling him what all men’s brains tell them and he, like many men, gave in to it because he thought he could pull it off without consequence.

The genuinely interesting question is not why do men cheat? It’s why didn’t Spitzer realize he was more vulnerable than most guys, and who brought him down?

****

Earth to Pundits: Mississippi is not America

Last night, during the Mississippi primary coverage, it was interesting watching the press unable to maintain its impulse control. I had MSNBC on. The pundits were atwitter over Clinton apparatchik and ex-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro’s unapologetic remarks that Barack Obama would not be in position to win the Dem nomination for president with so little time in government if he weren’t black. And she was being pilloried for having the nerve to say it.

The pundits were incredulous that a Democratic pol would dare to imply that some black people get a free pass in our culture.

Ferraro’s right in broad strokes but wrong in specifics. There are amazing opportunities for black Americans to jump the queue in our society. They can go very far, very fast, in many professions. And they don’t have to be as good as the non-minorities they are competing against in many of those situations.

Admitting that does not distort the reality of life in black America today or minimize the challenges black Americans face. Why would anyone imply that it does? I don’t know why that isn’t obvious to Keith Olbermann.

But that’s not why Barack Obama is leading Hillary Clinton. It’s because he is an inspirational, transformational figure while she is a lunch-bucket politician and a fairly ruthless one, we are discovering. Americans are looking for leadership, and he seems like a leader.

Admittedly, there are liberals who are ultra-besotted with Obama because he’s black, and his election portends a transformation of white attitudes. But for most of us, it’s because he inspires and portends a reordering of American politics . . . maybe.

The punditry was equally useless in analyzing Obama’s win in Mississippi. Obama’s white support was less than in Wisconsin and Virginia. It was a “disturbing trend for the Obama campaign.” So was exit poll data that, for the first time, showed Clinton’s supporters more unwilling to accept Obama as the nominee than vice-versa.

Uh, it’s MISSISSIPPI. Look at the demographics. Obama underperforms in states where the bulk of the white population is undereducated. But we can’t admit the truth about Mississippi on TV, so we just cite “disturbing trends.”

Why can’t the pundits accept that the fundamental dynamic of this campaign has not changed in weeks and will not change until the end? As in all campaigns, Clinton and Obama have disparate bases with divergent makeups, and each has difficulties attracting the other’s base. The question for the superdelegates (and it’s why they’re there) in August will be which one will be better at cobbling together 270 electoral votes against John McCain?

But every Tuesday the pundits seek to label the natural state of electoral politics as a “disturbing trend” portending some revised end game. It’s nonsense. (And why end it so fast boys? Aren’t MSNBC’s ratings higher than in years? That’s not due to Lockup: Raw, trust me.)

Last week Clinton was ascendant. Obama couldn’t close the deal. This week we’re back to where we were two weeks ago: the numbers just don’t add up for Clinton. Dontcha feel a little used?

And now we’ve got six weeks to Pennsylvania. It’s not going to get any clearer. It’s just going to get more stupid.

Stuff White People Like

I’m taking a couple days away from the assembly line, so I’d thought I’d amuse or offend you today with a link to a site my colleague Sarah Howard brought to my attention.

It’s called Stuff White People Like, but it’s really focused on a certain kind of white people—earnest, educated, socially aware, consumerist. It’s funny at first, but I’d stick to the headers and photos and not delve into the text, because you soon stop laughing. See, Stuff White People Like is written by a holier-than-thou person who doesn’t have a lot of subtlety.

The kind of self-righteous person who might suggest (near end of article; a very useful piece by the way) that it was wrong to pay Indonesia and Brazil to stop the cutting of their rain forest so as not to release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere because the act makes Westerners feel better about drinking bottled water and traveling by plane.

Yes, white people are annoying. But usually not as annoying as the scolds and tedious intellectual moralists who think they know better.

Minnesota’s Night to Shine!

So it has come to this. Now, I’m not one of those locals who wants to see the local-boys-and-girls-made-good fail, but after a quarter century in these parts, I never cease to marvel over why a story’s connection to us is still the most important aspect of the story?

Why do we only hear about the elephant mauling in Thailand if an ex-Minnesotan was mauled? Why do so many of us see the attention we receive from out-of-town media or celebrities as validating our worth rather than noblesse oblige, which it more often is? Why are so may of us so indifferent to our region investing in dreaming big, competing with other cities, and making a national splash yet then so obsessed with it when it happens?

The Chicago Tribune did not lead Monday’s paper with “ex-Chicagoan Diablo Cody . . .” in a headline nor was the fact that Cody grew up in suburban Lamont mentioned until the thirteenth paragraph—though her connection with Chicago is no different than the Coens’ with Minnesota (grew up here, parents here, visit irregularly).

And what makes the matter more ironic is that neither Cody nor the Coens claims this place as their home. Minnesota is somewhere they left and ain’t coming back to. Fargo told you everything you know about how the Coens’ view Minnesota. It set the Twin Cities back about a generation in how the country perceives us: as a bunch of affable rubes driving Oldsmobiles in the snow.

Diablo Cody had a cup of coffee here. She did some notable work (the feather in our cap in all this, perhaps), got discovered, and split. She speaks of us affectionately.

Both the Coens and Cody are compelling stories. They stand out in Hollywood because they are nonconformists and have maintained an admirable artistic integrity. They have an interesting body of work (Cody not so much, obviously), and their Minnesota status is deserving of little more than a passing mention in the third paragraph because it is not at the heart of their success or interest.

Embedded in our fascination with the lives of our émigrés is our insularity, our provincialism, and sometimes our hubris—that sense that life and people are just better here, and now and then the world finds out. Just the sort of hothouse attitude in which creative people flourish.

Sanny Wants Somethin’ for Nothin’

If you want an example of the vacuousness of modern conservative fiscal policy, look no further than my friend Bob Sansevere’s commentary on Eyewitness News Thursday night. Bob’s a decent guy and plays the everyman role well for the St. Paul newspaper, KQRS, and Channel 5. If you ran into him at a watering hole, you’d like him.

But his statement, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I want our roads and bridges fixed, and I want them to find a way to do it without raising taxes,” nearly caused me to choke on my quiche. I mean, I would like a new 3 series BMW, and I’d like it for $100.

Yesterday the legislature passed a substantial tax increase (sales, license tab, gas) to address a transportation picture that has grown desperate. It’s so frickin’ large a package because nothing’s been done in twenty years in this state. Several metro area Republicans voted for it. On MPR, I heard Anoka GOP Rep. Jim Abeler say, “If you want to see Highway 10 rebuilt in your lifetime, we need to do this.” And from Bloomington Republican Neil Peterson, “My party is not doing what it needs to do because of politics,” or something to that effect.

Governor No is going to veto, and an override in the Senate is assured next week. The House will be close. There are some who theorize the Governor wants the bill passed, secretly, as long as he can remain opposed to it. I doubt that.

He says it’s bad policy to raise taxes in a recession. When we weren’t in a recession, he said it was bad policy to raise taxes with gas prices going up. If the economy improves and gas prices fall, he will not support a tax increase either. No-tax is his second religion.

Fundamentalist Christians, who dominate Republican politics, apply an almost biblical approach to government. You are good or evil; policy is right or wrong, every belief is a “value,” compromise is immoral. That’s the way Tim Pawlenty talks about taxes because I suspect that’s how he looks at the world.

The tax issue has become so politicized that most Republicans fear for their political lives when they vote for one. They have built taxes into such an evil with voters that their constituents go ballistic when they feel compelled to support one.

As for Sanny and the vox populi, they have simply bought the b.s. hook, line, and sinker. They’ve lost track of one of life’s great truisms—you get nothing for nothing. Tell me what you pay for in your taxes that you think the state or local government should stop funding to pay for roads, bridges, and maybe transit? Schools? Parks? Police?

We live in an age where greed and selfishness are validated by our culture. Where Christian values are flaunted but not lived. And where people will apparently believe anything—like you can have better roads and lower taxes (a gas tax not raised in twenty years and not indexed to inflation is a tax cut—ask any economist).

Veto-proof majorities are hard to achieve. Winning the Governorship or the Presidency is a better route. If Gov. Pawlenty’s veto is sustained, it will be another black mark on a DFL party that cannot produce leaders inspiring enough or appealing enough for the public to support. Where is Minnesota’s Barack Obama?

The Debt That Keeps On Giving

Well, you certainly are a modest asexual bunch out there. Not a single bit of chocolate ribaldry left in the comments space. I figured DeRusha had one in him.

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Did you read the Strib piece in Sunday’s paper about the next type of mortgage to blow up—the Option ARM? It’s offered to buyers with good credit (unlike subprime loans) and is notable because the interest rate and the balance owed adjust upward over time. It starts out with low payments, which can ultimately more than double.

Apparently, folks assumed they’d refinance out of these things before that happened but failed to foresee a period of falling home values and no buyers. Now they owe more than their home is worth, can’t find a loan with a payment they can afford, and can’t sell the house, so they’re screwed. My general take has been that someone with the good sense to have a 740 credit score should have known better. A lot of people simply don’t pay attention, period. Don’t incur debt if you can’t handle the worst-case scenario.

But I’ve had my own experience with a scheming lender, and I understand the depths they will go to. A couple years ago, I dropped approximately $5K on a new home-computer setup and laptop. I had one of those 0 percent interest offers from a credit card, so I rolled it into that and have continued to do so, from offer to offer, as I whittle down the balance each month.

I never do what the banks want, which is to carry the debt past the point the teaser interest expires. But over the holidays, Chase, which is carrying the remaining balance at 0 percent, sent me an offer: Charge $100 on your card during the holidays, and we’ll credit you $25 back. I assumed they figured I’d spend a bunch, not pay it all off, and they’d make some money off me in interest.

Instead, I paid off the $120 in purchases when billed plus my monthly chunk of the computer. But Chase started charging me interest—every month. When I called them on it, they pointed me to a bit of fine print in the Terms and Conditions booklet.

The clause gave Chase the right to determine how payments would be applied to my balance. Chase applies all payments to the lowest interest debt. I would have to pay off the entire remaining balance to avoid paying interest each month on my Christmas stuff since it went to the back of the line.

Chase lured me into using the card with free money, suspecting that a borrower of my profile—paying off a no-interest balance in chunks—would not write the big check and thus end up paying interest on the recent purchase. If I had spent $1,000, they’d be cleaning up on me. But Chase will still come out behind on this. I will pay the card off before they make $25 in interest, but Chase got me nonetheless.

Is it illegal? No. Unethical? Maybe. Bad business in the long run? Certainly. Chase is banking on the fact that even the people who pay attention to the fine print don’t quite understand what it all means. Credit cards, until last year’s mortgage fiascos, were regarded as banking at its most unscrupulous: usurious interest, constantly shifting terms and conditions, outrageous fees.

If I send $1,000 to my credit union, I can apply $500 to my mortgage and $500 to my car loan. Or some other ratio. But credit cards function like these dodgy mortgages—lots of variables, lots of moving parts, and little interest on the part of the lender in keeping a customer happy and solvent.

I don’t see how it works to their advantage: I will pay off the remaining balance before my no-interest period ends and never do business with Chase again. And I have new sympathy for the families stuck with Option ARMs. Because it’s clear that the banking industry has become ever craftier in skating on the periphery of ethical business practices.

I’m sure there’s a big-bank CEO paying the price for unethical strategy, incompetent risk management, and billions in losses as you read this—leaving his job with millions of dollars in severance and stock options.

When you and I f-up, we pay extra interest or lose our homes. When CEOs f-up, they just get richer. Nice incentive for reforming the banking business.

Love In the Time of Chocolate

There’s a candy shop in the skyway that sells edible underwear. Chocolate to be precise. It sits in the window day after day. It was still sitting there on Valentine’s Day. It’s still sitting there today. Which got me to wondering—does anyone make a habit out of chocolate underwear?

In an unscientific poll I conducted at work on Valentine’s Day, not a single one of my randy colleagues, most in their romantic prime, would cop to having been involved in a dessert (or main course) of a chocolate thong. No one had even considered it, they said, preferring flowers, Jane Austen DVDs, and jewelry. No one could even tell me how chocolate underwear functioned.

I mean, how is the chocolate held together—mesh, string, carrageenan? At room temperature, chocolate lacks tactile flexibility, and at body temperature, it lacks rigidity. I thought about buying a pair to investigate further, but after checking with accounting, only certain key executives here are authorized to expense “romantic gifts” (expense code 0270/617).

Now, I’m not as squeamish as some, not as open-minded as others, but chocolate underwear befuddles me. I mean, you have to really want to eat a lot of chocolate to do a pair of chocolate boxers. And if you’re only concerned about certain strategic components, that means there’s a bunch of half-melted chocolate on the bed. (What about the office guys/gals who wear it to work in hopes of a lunch-hour encounter? What do you say to the dry cleaner the next day?)

So I say to you: Share your chocolate-underwear stories, advice, neurotic fiction with us. Chime in under an assumed name, like you do on all the other websites you comment to. Discretion is assured.

And after you share your chocolate underwear story with us, if it was from Valentine’s Day 2008, keep in mind that though you and your chocoholic partner might not mind a bed that smells like Hershey, Pennsylvania, the remains of your romp could be curtains for Fido. So change the sheets.

Less To Life

I’ve been puzzling over this new marketing slogan for the Twin Cities—“More to Life”—and wondering how we’re going to keep up with the Bostons, Portlands, and Austins of the world. Places people are flocking to.

Last year, my company produced a book for local corporations to use to sell prospective employees on the Twin Cities. Apparently they are having trouble selling MBAs and creative classers graduating from Stanford and Georgetown to settle here in the tundra.

They think, says the research, that we’re cold, provincial, and dull as Steve Berg explained on MinnPost. And they don’t even suspect that we fund our schools, transportation infrastructure, and state university at levels below most of the states we compete with.

The “More to Life” slogan is meant to connote that we live better here because we combine the amenities of a sophisticated metropolis without the grind and long commutes of huge cities. But we have the proximity to nature and clean living of hip small cities, such as Bend, Oregon, or Boise, Idaho. I know, the slogan is obtuse and doesn’t serve its purpose. And it was chosen over a much better option, “North of Ordinary,” which conveys specialness and a snap of wit.

I muse about this as we slog through an obscenely cold, dark, winter. One of the more wearying in memory. It’s not supposed to crack zero on Friday . . . again. My home is a petri dish of viruses, which bounce between me, my wife, and kids who are trapped inside. The legislature has embarked on another session of unproductive rancor. And I’m not convinced most of us care.

KSTP-TV surveyed a bunch of us and discovered that a neither a majority of out-state or metro-area residents support a gas or other tax increase to fund transportation improvements. We like it here just the way it is.

In 1981, I moved to a Minnesota that tried harder. Though the Twin Cities of 2008 is a more sophisticated place, I think the efforts that kept the Twin Cities moving forward, trying harder, were not an organic expression of a progressive populace but the work of a small cadre of business, arts, and political elites who counted on consensus and got things done.

Without that consensus, you need leadership. Someone with the ability to counter the incredibly seductive siren song of self-interest—convince people to pull their heads out of the sand. But the DFL seems so rooted in identity politics that it does not produce visionaries or inspiring leaders. Rybak, Murphy, Pogemiller, Kelliher, Klobuchar—I doubt they could sell me on a hand warmer this Friday. I thought Al Franken was perhaps a leader who could inspire people, but after hearing about his thoroughly infantile display with the Republican student in Northfield, I’m losing hope.

There is a bankruptcy of leadership and vision in today’s Minnesota (sorry, you can’t convince me that the very able and effective Gov. Pawlenty and his playbook of “no” is leadership or vision). That’s apparent when you see someone of Barack Obama’s skills. When your leaders lack the capacity to sell their constituents on the value of repairing dangerous bridges and educating citizens, it’s time to question the efficacy of those leaders.

“More to Life” is a lousy slogan. But perhaps we need to rethink the product we’re selling as well.

Who’s Afraid of “The Super Bowl?”

There, I said it. And on a commercially driven website. I am using the Super Bowl to advance the fortunes of my employer. It’s only minutes before we hear from the lawyers, I’m sure. Cease, and desist.

As we approach the game this weekend, I am more and more aware of the gradual replacement of the name “Super Bowl” in our culture with the phrase “The Big Game.” It’s long been rife in advertising, ever since the NFL started pursuing businesses trying to make money off its event without becoming a paid sponsor.

Want to advertise your salsa’s utility for Super Bowl parties? Like to promote a plasma TV as just perfect for watching the Super Bowl? Can’t do it anymore if you don’t want to pay the NFL. So instead, marketers call it The Big Game. Everyone knows what they’re talking about, and the greedy NFL and its coterie of billionaire owners, sour coaches, and recidivist players gets nada. Nice.

But have you noticed the phrase “The Big Game” showing up in casual conversation? I was sitting at a restaurant’s bar the other day, and the guy next to me was talking about “The Big Game.” “The Super Bowl, you mean?” I said.

“Well, yeah, but we’re not supposed to call it that,” he said.

Then on the Today Show, Matt Lauer introduces a cooking segment of chicken legs that might be suitable for halftime munching, and he says “The Big Game.” Cut to the TV news—“big game.” Newspaper headlines—“Big Game.”

What’s going on? As best as I understand the law, as long as you’re not using the term Super Bowl to promote a product that is separate from the Super Bowl, you owe the NFL nothing. TV anchors can say it. Guys at restaurants can say it. Even Hillary Clinton can say it. (Bill can’t.)

Much the same situation exists with the upcoming Oscars. The “Academy” maintains very tight control of its trademark and pursues anyone who uses it to promote a party, prix fixe menu, plasma TV sale. Problem is, there’s no real catchy generic label for the Academy Award.

Unless you’ve sat through one end to end. Can we all agree on “The Big Snooze®©™?”

Kinda catchy. And no lawsuits.

Bridge and Tunnel

Is yesterday’s announcement from the National Transportation Safety Board preliminarily blaming a design flaw in the I-35W bridge a blame-game changer? Yes and no. Clearly it takes the wind out of the sails of the “neglect” constituency.

That doesn’t mean neglect wasn’t a contributing factor, which seems to be Nick Coleman’s point, but it’s clearly a negative for those DFLers hoping to use the legislative session that begins next month to hammer Pawlenty's starvation budgets and guilt the misers into more sensible transportation spending.

I’m not receptive to the view that the NTSB’s announcement was politically motivated. This is a federal agency previously known to be immune to politics. (Admittedly, others also once immune, such as NASA, have been corrupted by the Bush administration.) The NTSB typically issues mid-investigation updates in major disaster cases, so this week’s was not an outlier. I think we need to give the NTSB the benefit of the doubt, for now.

That noted, the 35W bridge didn’t collapse in 1969. It stood for forty years with said design flaw. That’s a long time. Clearly the ever-greater loads the bridge received and its ongoing deterioration had to be contributory factors. We design everything from bridges to airplanes with more safety and redundancy today.

“Fracture critical” bridges are not wise structures to test the limits of age and use. We are doing so because we have been starving transportation funding in this state since the Carlson administration. It remains foolhardy to believe last August’s bridge collapse was based merely on a design flaw—but with no broad-based meaning and implications.

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Met Council chairman Peter Bell, one of the few pleasant surprises of the Pawlenty era, laid down a gauntlet this week in a Strib op-ed column. The Central Corridor LRT line is massively over budget. Unless $300 million in costs are shaved, the feds won’t pay for half, meaning it won’t get built.

There are three major budget busters in the current plan: extra stations along University Ave., building the line through all of downtown St. Paul to little-used Union Station, and a subway tunnel under Washington Ave. at the University of Minnesota.

Govenor Pawlenty only budgeted half the necessary state bonding needed to get the feds to pony up, noting in his State of the State address this week that he would look kindly on doubling down only if the various interest groups could make the necessary compromises to bring the costs down.

The Central Corridor is going to carry a lot more “local” (non end-to-end) traffic than the Hiawatha Line. More stations mean more riders. We need to find a way to keep walking distances to University Ave. stations to no more than a third of a mile.

The Union Station gambit is a good idea, especially if it becomes St. Paul’s transit hub and the region’s new Amtrak terminus—but that’s not close to happening. So it may need to become a future extension unless the city and Ramsey County alone find a way to pay for it.

But the University subway is an unnecessary boondoggle, and it is ridiculous that the University remains so fixated on it.

LRT to campus has the potential to massively reduce auto traffic and congestion in Stadium Village. The idea that there is some danger to students and pedestrians from relatively slow-moving transit vehicles in what is already a traffic speedway is asinine. Moving the line over the new I-35W bridge through Dinkytown makes no sense as it’s not the part of campus that commuter students need access to.

Simply put, the University is jeopardizing the future of a regionally integral transit venture by insisting on a feature that is not just costly but probably unwise. It’s predicated on un-sound and intellectually unsupported reasoning—scary coming from the realm of academia. Turning this subway into a make-or-break issue has the potential to seriously damage the U’s credibility among the liberal intelligentsia and urban DFL caucus that is its most valued constituency.

It’s time for the U to get on the train or get out of the way.

My Compact: Denial Is Not Virtue

We are a nation of fanatics. How can one conclude anything else? We have to turn everything into a religion. Osama would be proud.

Consider the acolytes of the Compact, an anti-materialist venture that requires its adherents to buy nothing new for a year. (Does Internet porn count? A friend was wondering.)

One of the Compacters the Strib quoted yesterday said the $1 bins at Target she once loved now “repulsed” her. That bin filled my kids’ stockings last month I’d have her know. And she’s still buying diapers (our kids used cloth; think of the water we wasted).

It takes goofy ventures such as the Compact (or this silly young family in NYC that is going without petroleum or its offshoots for a year—no deodorant) to illustrate why liberals seem so feckless to the rest of the country.

I mean, isn’t it enough to recycle, take public transit now and then, trade in your SUV, compost, recycle your feces into handy tools and implements . . .? Sorry, got carried away—I have liberal leanings.

And I’m in the media, who are fellow travelers. The press, by and large, hates consumerism—though it’s what pays its bills. The Strib is going to follow these Compactors for a year, mind you. So it can revel in their self-denial and sense of righteousness. So it can feel righteous, too!

Throughout the years, I’ve tried to divine the contempt that so many of my peers in the local media feel for the magazine I work for. We don’t hurt anyone, we don’t take cheap shots, tear anything down. We build up, we tell stories, we recommend.

I used to think it was because earnest journalists believed that the only form of professional legitimacy was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. (Which we don’t do all that much of here.) But most journalists aren’t that stupid.

What most of them are, though, is addled with contempt for those who don’t share their values. And journalists are offended by the consumerism that lifestyle magazines are rooted in. There’s a kind of proud asceticism in writers and academics though I generally regard it as snobbery rooted in false virtue.

I wish I could go to the other side, but they’re worse albeit less smug. I mean, I’m pissed off that all these greedy bastards in banking and investing created this lending bubble that has got our economy in the tank. Canada’s economy is fine, you’ll note. So is Australia’s. Greed isn’t validated in those societies, and there are more checks and limits on it. And I have no sympathy for the rubes who took out mortgages they didn’t understand either. Own up to your own greed, I say.

There is something about people preoccupied with consumerism to the exclusion of everything else that is chilling. Perhaps it’s the abdication of a sense of responsibility for anything but yourself that nags at me. Whatever. It’s just a different kind of fanaticism. I mean, would it hurt you to read a paper or think about something besides when the next issue of Lucky arrives?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a seat in business class, a 42-inch plasma TV, a trip to New Zealand, an iPhone, and some granite countertops that I have my eyes on. But I am not so distracted by all of it that I’m paying no attention to the world around me.

There is more to life than gratifying yourself and earning more money so you can gratify some more. But why is it that so many of the people who understand that are not people you’d want to have a beer with?

Off-Target?

I am not much of an investor, but I have a massive stake in Target Corp., Minnesota’s most prominent Fortune 100 company. My wife works there as a real estate attorney, her 401K match is paid in Target stock, and she gets market-priced stock options most years. TGT stock showed some flashes last year but is back in the dumper, trading for less than $50 (as of January 2) and as close to its post-9/11, tech-bubble lows than this decade’s highs.

If that sounds fishy to you, it does to me, too. Target is universally regarded as an innovative, well-run retailer. It’s growing, profitable, and always hits its numbers except in times of economic turmoil. Target stock should be a lot higher.

A guy named William Ackman agrees with me. He’s an “activist investor” and multi-billion dollar hedge fund impresario who has amassed 10 percent of Target’s shares. He has called Target the best-run retailer in America and thinks the stock should be trading at approximately $120. The guy is no fool.

And he obviously wants to make some money on his investment. He is calling on Target to sell its credit card operations (frequently the most profitable aspect of the company’s business—the company is studying it), buy back shares (already happening), and just concluded Target needs to “unlock the value” in its $42 billion in real estate holdings. It’s a fair assumption that means sell.

A lot of folks at Target HQ are uneasy about Ackman’s goals, I suspect. Does it really make sense for the company to sell its most profitable operations and its real estate in a down market during a near recession? And what then? If this respected management team believed the key to the company’s future was generating all this cash, wouldn’t they have done so?

Trust me, I would love to see Target stock at $120. It would not make us rich, but I’d have a fighting chance to put my kids through college without saddling one of us with massive amounts of debt. But William Ackman does not have Target’s long-term interests at heart. He has his own short-term interests and will, one way or another, walk away from the red bull’s-eye in a matter of months.

Problem is, under our economic system, a public company’s primary obligation (under law and economic tradition) is to its stockholders, who incur the most risk of all the company’s stakeholders (employees, creditors, lenders, etc.).

If the market likes Ackman’s strategy and Target refuses to play ball, it will punish Target’s stock. The company will come under pressure, management wisdom may be questioned by its board, a takeover gambit could even ensue—Target might become a division of GE, and its headquarters would move to NYC.

None of that would be great news for Target, my finances, my wife’s continued employment, or the Twin Cities (via the massive number of jobs and economic activity Target generates here). But long-term thinking rarely plays in our gamed, short-term driven markets.

It’s now up to Target, if it isn’t going to monetize all its assets, to convince Wall Street, institutional investors (such as pension funds), and market pundits (such as Jim Cramer), that there’s comparable upside in thinking long-term and trusting management.

Odds are, there will be some sort of compromise to get Ackman out of Target’s hair—management will do some things they’d rather not do, and Target will go back to business. But make no mistake—guys like Ackman operate with a scorched-earth strategy. The mess he can potentially create at Target could permanently damage or even lead to the loss of the company.

He may be here to unlock value, but the values he represents are more likely to unlock chaos.

The City That Smirks

Maybe it’s because I’m from Chicago, which justifiably calls itself “The City That Works,” but I’ve never been particularly impressed by Minneapolis city government—with its ineffectual mayoralty and a City Council driven by left-wing ideological factionalism and tilting at windmills. Two topics in the news right now have me shaking my head again.

The first is the once-lauded effort to wire the entire city for wireless internet access. This endeavor has proved disastrous in other cities, where the wireless providers have backed out after the process proved too costly and non-remunerative. US Internet of Minnetonka won the bid hereabouts, and was supposed to have finished wiring the city by now. They are months behind, and every time I check the progress map on their website, ever more and more of Minneapolis is grayed-out, meaning it won’t be wired.

USI is finding the city harder to wire than it thought, due to all the trees and stucco exteriors, which are proving impenetrable to wireless signals. Residents are complaining about the hideous apparatus sprouting all over telephone poles, and on web discussion boards there are many complaints about the quality of the USI signal and constant outages.

Only in the tech industry would things like trees and stucco be an acceptable after-the-fact excuse. Wasn’t it USI’s obligation to do its due diligence before it made its bid? If there weren’t enough available places to hang apparatus, why didn’t it know that beforehand? Why wasn’t the company aware that wi-fi couldn’t penetrate stucco and trees? Isn’t that wireless 101?

My address in Kenwood, hardly the outer reaches of the city, is now considered “outside of the Minneapolis coverage area.” We won’t be getting wireless, according to the website. Neither will CIDNA, Lowry Hill, East Isles, and several other south side neighborhoods. Well then, why are my tax dollars paying for it?

Minneapolis has had nothing but good things to say about USI, perhaps seeing a disaster in the making and trying to cover its rear. Wi-fi is one of the few citywide endeavors of the ineffectual Rybak administration, and it’s not going well. There goes that Senate run.

Topic two is garbage. The city is again about to be sued by the consortium of private haulers (Minneapolis Refuse Inc.) that has operated in a no-bid, sweetheart-contract environment for decades. Several council members have been trying to get an open bid process to see if they can save the taxpayers some money. Some oppose this because trash collection is considered to be satisfactory and this consortium includes small mom ‘n' pop haulers which could probably not bid competitively against BFI or Waste Management.

The consortium successfully sued the city in 2006 because it failed to follow statutory procedures before it opened the bidding. Now the city has jumped through the hoops the law dictates, but the consortium is again planning to sue, saying the city has still not followed the letter of the law.

It’s unclear to me if this bunch of monopolists will stop at nothing short of endless litigation to maintain its monopoly or if the city has again stepped in it. But more and more the city seems capable of managing less and less without a great deal of mess. Who is our Mayor Daley?

A Union Hell-bent on Calamity

If you’re not familiar with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, it is the union that represents public school teachers in Minneapolis. If you want a case study in how teachers unions are playing a vital role in the demise of public schools, MFT is textbook-worthy. It is also rapidly on the way to destroying itself. But it’s not clear which will happen first.

MFT and the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) have been engaged in contract negotiations since spring, and face a mid-January deadline to agree on a new one or city schools will start losing state aid in draconian fashion. MPS has not exactly covered itself in glory in recent years, and neither has the School Board, but current leadership has settled on a reasonably bold reform agenda aimed at stemming massive losses of students to charter schools and taking back control of its classrooms.

The district wants back the power to decide which teachers belong in which classrooms; to lay off according to need and skill instead of seniority; to let qualifications and potential guide how schools are staffed, not a hire date. These are reasonable goals for any organization, but essential ones for an entity as deeply troubled and threatened as MPS.

The union cares about nothing but its power base. And it has built a massive one. It controls teacher assignments, has gamed the system to dominate the teacher discipline and remedial assistance process, and refuses to allow rigorous qualifications for teachers that teach in specialty programs. Teachers in Minneapolis are not regularly evaluated for competency and effectiveness. That’s shameful.

MFT accepts none of the responsibility for the flight of students out of the district, one of the root causes of MPS’s never-ending financial crisis. It’s all unfunded mandates, victimized teachers, and bad administrators in its world. The union wants better pay and stable benefits as the district crumbles. Will the last MFT member in a Minneapolis school please turn out the lights?

How through-the-looking-glass things are: Just last Sunday the Star Tribune, long every Minnesota union’s best friend, took on MFT with both barrels in an editorial calling for reform of the teacher placement process. Current negotiations are at a veritable stalemate, and in state mediation. A teacher’s strike is a real possibility. It is time for Minneapolis’s elected officials and the school board to start making the case to the public and parents, because it needs their support. It will be interesting to see how many of the city’s DFL elite will stand up to one of its most powerful patrons.

What’s so sad about all this is that MFT represents hundreds of great teachers, a sizeable number of whom surely disagree with its factory model of public education. And I am sympathetic to many of MFT’s goals: smaller class sizes, stable benefits, rigorous results-oriented management of principals and administrators, and taking a hard and consistent line against students who act out violently in schools. If schools aren’t safe and controlled, they can’t function.

Your right to a public education ends when you become a destructive force in school. But so should your right to teach or represent teachers.

The Mouth That Roars—My Journalist of the Year

Later this month, when Brian Lambert joins this site, any of my future attempts at media commentary will inevitably provoke fits of outrage from his gaggle of smitten college-age hangers-on, his venomous mad-dog attorneys, and his peyote-addled new-age sycophants, so I thought I’d get one in while I still can.

A year ago I would have argued that the Star Tribune lacked a metro columnist whose work was impactful. Doug Grow is a very nice guy, but was a very quiet columnist. His role was in need of reinvention. The paper ended up forcing the issue.

Kathy Kersten, though she has improved her photo, has yet to write a word which gives me any reason to believe she is capable of philosophically independent thought (as opposed to parroting a canned ideology).

Nick Coleman seemed to be devolving into self-parody. From his high-handed railing against everyone from Carl Pohlad to Don Samuels, to his populist regular guy shtick, to an evaporation of his great biting wit, Nick seemed past his best days. (When newspapers, or any media outlet, cannot find prominent roles for new talent and fresh voices, it sows the seeds of its own irrelevance. The Twin Cities media is worse than most in this way.)

Then the bridge collapsed.

Since August 1, Nick Coleman has been the most important opinion journalist in the Twin Cities, and one of the most important journalists, period. He has almost single-handedly called to account not just the Governor, not just Lady Molnau, but the entire culture of fiscal starvation that passes for leadership in this state. And he isn’t letting up.

It’s polarizing, surely, drawn in too-broad strokes at times, but in doggedly pursuing the forces that shaped the state’s greatest public sector disaster, Coleman manifests journalism’s higher calling: not letting the big lie go uncontested.

I suspect he’s doing it at some peril to his own career. This is a newspaper that doesn’t like controversy, doesn’t like risking its access to the powerful, doesn’t like perceptions it is imbalanced. Only in its coverage of the Vikings and Timberwolves does the Strib seem to allow rank negativity to prosper.

I know some will argue that Nick has been engaged in a months-long witch-hunt when all the facts aren’t in. That he’s scapegoating figureheads who would never be expected to have a command of small details in any other walk of life. But Coleman gets the larger point: unless there was a tiny earthquake under the Mississippi last August 1, bridges don’t collapse unless something is neglected. Not willfully, but because of a philosophical approach to the public welfare.

And Coleman isn’t the only one. The paper’s primary reporters on the after-story, Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe, have been dogged as well. For all I know, there may well be a Pulitzer in it for them.

Ironic, isn’t it, that it took an unprecedented disaster to give an atrophying newspaper a reason to live?

Terminal Insecurity

I boarded a plane the other day at MSP. If you haven’t run the TSA gauntlet yet this month, and perhaps you are about to for Thanksgiving, you’re in for more than you bargained for. New additions to the security gauntlet include flashlight examinations of your driver’s license and new handling rules for any electronic device bigger than an iPod.

Here’s my step-by-step inspection:
1. Show boarding pass to TSA agent. Remove ID from wallet sleeve for flashlight examination at screener’s podium. (Told this new procedure is now applied to everyone.)
2. Remove jacket and shoes, place in plastic tub 1. Add coins from pocket and place in shoes.
3. Remove laptop from case and place in tub 2. Nothing else can go in this tub.
4. Remove camcorder from case and place in tub 3. Nothing else allowed in tub.
5. Remove liquids/gels and place in tub 4. Nothing else allowed in tub.
6. Place camcorder and laptop case in tub 5. Nothing else allowed in tub.
7. Place carry-on bag on belt.
8. Walk through.
9. Return all items to cases, put on jacket and shoes, return coins to pocket, liquids/gels to suitcase.

When I shook my head, a TSA screener said I should have “come prepared.” I told him that was impossible when the rules change every sixty days.

The only way I could have streamlined the process would have been to place the coins in my coat pocket before I reached the checkpoints. Sure, I could have checked my toiletries, laptop, video camera, etc. But who in their right mind does that? You end up with thousands of dollars in broken/stolen goods or conditioner all over your clothes.

Perhaps you saw that TSA got another poor report card last week from the latest independent tests conducted on them. They missed a lot of “bombs.” The response has been to add even more steps to the process and more contraband that needs separate analysis. Five plastic tubs and one carry-on bag for one person!

But do I feel any safer? It’s been six years since 9/11. Where is the new technology? Where is the smart profiling? And we still don’t x-ray cargo. There has got to be a better way.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m thankful America has not been the victim of another terrorist attack. But if our airport security checkpoints are indicative of our overall efforts to combat terrorism, we’re winning through sheer luck and lack of determined opponents. This system is broken.

Capitalist Tools

The news is rife with stories of impending airline mergers, all centered around number-three carrier Delta, and the thinking is if Delta and United combine, as an investment fund is urging, a whole chain reaction of airline mergers will follow. What makes this story so interesting, and dispiriting, is that the merger momentum is being driven largely by hedge funds and other Wall Street manipulators. And Delta’s management, for one, seems to be paying close attention.

The mergers are driven by the premise that consolidation will take airline seats out of the skies and that reduction in supply will drive up the cost of air travel, thus increasing airline profitability, currently threatened by high oil prices. Problem is, this theory has not been borne out over the last thirty years of deregulation

The hedge funds, investment bankers, and brokerages are in it for a quick buck: the pre-merger run-up in the price of the stock they hold and the massive transaction percentages reaped doing the deals. It’s the same logic that has fueled the boom-to-bust American economy for over a decade. Are we better off for it? Look at the strength of our economy, currency, and infrastructure and compare it to Europe’s, the UK’s, or Canada’s. It’s not pretty. When we short-term greed-fuel the future of our transportation infrastructure, which needs to grow, not shrink, we put our economic health at even greater risk.

It’s been more than two years since America West bought US Airways, a transaction dwarfed in size and complexity by the mergers being advocated today, but US Airways remains dogged by terrible operational and labor problems brought on by the merger.

The Twin Cities relies on Northwest Airlines for the vast majority of its transportation lift. We have an interest in seeing i