Tim Droogsma's blog

Whitney and the anthem

2012-02-11T23:35:00.005-06:00

As regular readers know, I'm not a big music guy, and I'm also not one to make a big deal out of celebrity deaths. Listening to someone's album or watching their movie gives me no special insight into their life, it doesn't make us friends and I don't pretend to know anything special about them.

Having said all that, the first thing I thought of tonight when I learned of Whitney Houston's death was that she gave one of the greatest national anthem performances of all time, a YouTube video that I've watched dozens of times over the years.

It was 1991, just weeks into the first Gulf War and the setting was perfect: A Super Bowl, a great orchestra there for accompaniment and her big, beautiful voice, with a flyover right at the end.

The pace was perfect, and she didn't drag it out and make it about herself, as so many anthem performers do. And by NOT making it about herself, she absolutely owned the song. It chokes me up every time I hear it, and I hope you enjoy it. R.I.P., Whitney.

The weight of government

2012-02-09T13:38:00.002-06:00

Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, has been quoted as saying something along the lines of, "I just want to shrink government down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."

The case for doing just that is made in this instructional tale from, of all places, the New York Times, which is virtually always in favor of bigger and more intrusive government.

It details the challenges faced by a woman trying to open an ice-cream shop in San Francisco. You would think it would be a fairly easy task, but it took her more than two years and cost her well into six figures to get her little shop up and going, thanks to a government that threw barriers in her way at every opportunity. There were $20,000 in permit fees, and an $11,000 fee just for turning on the water, along with an approval process that moved at a glacial pace.

Two quick thoughts:

1) Similar stories happen every day, all over the country, and they are strangling the economy.

2) All of these costs have to be passed along to the consumer. I have no doubt that the ice cream there is delicious, but I also have no doubt that a couple scoops cost you $4-5, because that $20,000 permit fee and $11,000 water fee have to be recouped, and they undoubtedly make up a big share of the price of the final product.

Big government isn't free, and its costs come out of your pocket in ways you don't even realize.

A Minnesota moment

2012-02-06T01:42:00.019-06:00

We are, of course, the State of Hockey, and learning to skate is part of the legacy. With the warm winter, however, there's been no good outdoor ice on which to start teaching the grandkids. So on Friday we just surrendered to reality and headed for Prairie Island Arena and open skating time, so Sam and Annie could become the third generation to skate on the ice sheet where I played men's league for several years, and where William played his high school hockey.

Annie went first, and we started her off with the traditional "walker" so she could get used to the surface. It was a bit of a struggle, but she started to get the hang of it. (She's four years old).

After a half hour or so, she started making some tentative steps on her own, and before we left, she made it all away across the ice without falling, although the grip on Opa's hand was pretty tight!

(And you've got to love my vintage goalie skates, purchased at Bill St. Mane's sporting goods in the winter of 1979-80 and still going strong hundreds of games and 32 years later.)

For Sambo, at age 2, it was more of a struggle. He made a couple attempts with the walker, but he just doesn't quite have the balance yet. But he was thrilled just to be on the ice, and at the end he sat for a picture atop one of the same nets his Opa and Uncle Will used to defend.

I've said before that being Opa is the best job I've ever had, and that's especially true on days like this.

Welcome to Obamaville

2012-02-04T13:41:00.004-06:00

Does this picture look familiar? It should, because the sight of an empty storefront is something most Americans now see every day, and those dark windows and locked doors represent the fruits of the Obama Administration.

In a very well-written piece that you can read here, Kevin Williamson of National Review explains why all of these vacant storefronts are not just a problem for their owners, but they're a problem for you as well.

From the edge of Red Wing, to Robert St. in West St. Paul, to downtown Minneapolis and every suburb, a scene like the one picture here has become commonplace, and the problems in commercial real estate - according to Williamson - are going to get worse in 2012.

The problem is that a commercial property mortgage - unlike the common 30-year residential mortgage - is normally only five years. After five years, the owners will normally face a balloon payment, which they normally re-finance. But these aren't normal times.

In 2007, there was a great deal of commercial real estate construction. Every pension fund and insurance company in America wanted a piece of the action, and they financed billions and billions of dollars in commercial buildings. In 2012, those five-year loans are coming due, and that means a lot of trouble on the short-term horizon.

In the stagnant Obama economy, there are fewer businesses needing space. Fewer tenants means lower cash flow for the strip mall owner, and higher vacancy rates means that those businesses that HAVE survived the Obama years can shop elsewhere for lower rent, putting an even greater squeeze on property owners.

You might think to yourself "So what? Why should I care if some rich fat cat strip mall owner goes broke?" The answer is that the banks, insurance companies and investment firms that financed these properties have done some of that with YOUR money. The success of your 401(k), your mutual funds and your pension are strongly tied to the ability of some company to invest that money and make it grow for you. For many years, commercial real estate has been a successful vehicle for those investments. Every dark storefront can represent a little dent in your retirement plan.

(A side issue to the discussion is this: Who would want to risk opening a business now, when every action of the Obama administration screams "If you're successful, we're going to demonize you, call you selfish and punish you with higher taxes"?)

Williamson writes very well about financial matters for National Review. Take a moment to enjoy the article.

How tough are Alaskans?

2012-02-01T17:31:00.003-06:00

You may have noticed in the news that they had a little cold snap up in Alaska a few days ago. How cold? Well, in one small interior town, it got to 79 degrees below zero, and they were all poised to break their all-time record of -80, when the thermometer broke. That's cold!

Now, I grew up playing outdoor hockey, so I know a little something about cold. We used to want it to be between about zero and 10 degrees, because at that temperature, the ice stayed hard, and if you were skating with a hat and sweatshirt on, you stayed perfectly warm. If it got up to 20 degrees, it was really too warm.

These Alaskans, however, operate on a totally different scale. As proof, you can read a message from the McGrath School District to its parents, outlining the "cold weather policy." In a nutshell, the policy is this:

Anything down to -49 degrees: School schedule is normal
-50 to -54: School runs two hours late
-55 and colder: Then we shut down school

Imagine living in a place where you have to get to -50 before things even START to change! I admire these folks a lot, although I don't quite understand why they want to live there.

You can read the entire memo here.

"I lie so people will pay attention to me."

2012-01-31T00:32:00.006-06:00

That's usually the rationale for a teenage girl saying something outlandish, but it now explains the bizarre behavior of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a challenger to Whoopi Goldberg for the title of Dumbest Woman in America.

Schultz is a member of Congress from Florida, but also the chair of the Democratic National Committee, and in her role as DNC chair she is simply the gift that keeps on giving....to Republicans. At least once a week this shrill, unlikable woman sticks her foot in her mouth in a way that embarrasses her party.

Early on, she had trouble understanding what the word "literally" meant. She once said that a program to reform Medicare was "literally a death trap for some seniors." Then she said the requirement for voters to show photo ID would "literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws." Moments later, she said those same laws are "literally just throwing a barrier in the way" of people who want to vote.

Apparently the DNC staff staged an intervention to explain the meaning of "literally" to her, because she seems to no longer butcher the language so badly, but it hasn't corrected her habit of making incorrect statements, leaving one magazine to describe her as "hysterical, hyperbolic and just to the left of Karl Marx."

This week, after making an outrageous claim that the Tea Party was somehow responsible for the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Schultz was called on to apologize for a statement far beyond the bounds of decency and civility.

She gives us a reason for her hysteria, however, in an interview with Newsweek, (Really? Newsweek is still publishing? Who knew?) saying that “I make strongly worded statements so people pay attention a little to what I’m saying.”

A pathetic need for attention is to be expected from a disturbed teenager, I guess, but it doesn't seem like a desirable trait for Democratic Party spokesperson, unless that's the best they've got, which just might be the case. Literally.

The case for optimism

2012-01-29T23:22:00.003-06:00

The weekend brought a lot of interesting reading, including a piece here in which British scientists and their data show that not only did any "global warming" cease to exist 15 years ago, but that the sun's patterns suggest we've entered a "little ice age" similar to that of the 17th century. Fascinating piece that adds to the mountain of proof that "global warming" is a massive hoax, but we'll talk about that another day.

But I really enjoyed this piece from the Wall St. Journal, which makes a case for almost giddy optimism about the future. I'm not even going to pretend that I'm smart enough to fully understand all of their points, but they have a worldview that I find easy to agree with: The best is yet to come.

Over the past 200+ years, almost all of the answers to the world's problems have been found in America. Innovation, technology, engineering, you name it, and the minds of Americans have pioneered the solutions to the world's problems. These two argue that - much like America a century ago - we are on the cusp of gigantic progress that will radically improve the world, and that the solutions will be found in an "American culture...particularly suited to times of tumult and challenge."

Again, I'm not smart enough to grasp it all, but it gives me hope that just as American survived and prospered after catastrophes such as the Civil War, the Great Depression and the Clinton Administration, we will also survive and prosper despite the Age of Obama.

Simple enough?

2012-01-28T23:19:00.002-06:00

I realize the political world is fascinated right now with the Republican nomination contest, and all of the little things being bandied about: Whose tax returns have been released, who loved Reagan the most, who wants to colonize the moon, etc., etc. But when we get done sorting through all of the background noise, and settle on a nominee, here's what the election is going to be about.

If you were an incumbent, would you want to run on this record?

Neither would I.

Small man, small ideas

2012-01-27T01:50:00.003-06:00

I never got to work on a State of the Union message, although I have written a State of the State speech, as well as a speech for the Republican National Convention, so I have a little bit of an idea about the process.

And I found myself this week listening to Obama's State of the Union address, and almost feeling sorry for his speechwriting team. I mean, here they are, three years into his presidency, and they've got nothing to say. I can almost hear the discussion:

"Well, we could talk about the economy....uh, no."
"Can we point to the progress on unemployment...no?"
"Have we brought down the national debt? No, we've added $4.6 trillion to it."
"Did we help bring gas and other energy prices down? Ummm, no."
"Things are better in the Middle East, aren't they? No."
"We've done all those cool 'alternative energy' things like Solyndra and, um, no, I guess not."
"I know...we set a goal of one million electric cars on the road by 2015. We must be getting close to that, right? Chevy must have sold a couple hundred thousand Volts by now, right? Oh, really? Only 7,500? That's almost a million, isn't it? And a bunch of them caught on fire?"

These poor fellows had to turn over every rock they could find to look for one measure of how the average person is better off now than they were on January 20, 2009, and five minutes into the speech it was clear that they had nothing. So, instead, we got:

Let's increase taxes on some people
Let's force kids to stay in high school until they're 18. (How?)
Let's try to stop the Chinese from selling pirated DVDs
Let's create more government bureaucracy to regulate lending, clean energy and medical research, because government has done such a great job with those so far

As I said, I almost felt sorry for them. Looking back on three years of deficits, failures and decline, the closest they could come to a rhetorical flourish was the laughable (coming from this particular president) call for "No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts."

They probably didn't realize it, but they wrote a great campaign slogan for the opposition this fall.

Way to go, Tim Thomas!

2012-01-23T17:11:00.006-06:00

For a wide variety of reasons, I've always liked Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas. It wasn't just that he was a fellow goalie who shared a first name with me, it was his entire story.

First off, he was an American at a position recently dominated by butterflying French-Canadians and Finns. Second, it took incredible determination for him to make it to the NHL. After playing four years at the University of Vermont, he was drafted 218th by the Quebec Nordiques in 1994.

(To put into perspective what a long shot that made him, consider that there isn't even a 218th draft pick anymore - the NHL only drafts seven rounds, and 210 players - and the Nordiques don't exist anymore.)

Unable to find an NHL job, Thomas carried his pads whereever the hockey winds took him. Over the next several years he played in Birmingham and Houston. He went to Finland, and won the Finnish Elite League championship for HIFK. Then it was the American Hockey League, and the Hamilton Bulldogs. Then back to Finland, and another stint with HIFK. Then back to America, and the Detroit Vipers of the International League. Then back to Europe, and a year with AIK of the Swedish League, before returning to the Finnish League with Karpat-Oulu.

At that point, most goalies would find it pretty easy to abandon the dream, but the Bruins acquired his rights, and he came back to play for their minor-league team in Providence. Finally, at the age of 28, he made his NHL debut and won three of four games for the Bruins.

But he still wasn't in the big league to stay. He played 43 games in Providence the next year, and when the lockout happened in 2003, he went back to Europe and played another year in Finland, this time for Jokerit.

It would be the 2006-07 season before Thomas earned the Bruins' starting goalie spot, and since then he's won two Vezina trophies, and was MVP of the Stanley Cup Playoffs at age 37, leading the Bruins last spring to their seven-game triumph over Satan's Team.

How can you not love that story?

And today it got better.

As I said, he's long been one of my favorite players, and I had no idea about his politics, or whether he even had political convictions. But today was the Bruins' chance to go to the White House and celebrate their Stanley Cup win with the President. Every championship team gets the photo op - stand in the Rose Garden, give the President a jersey, smile for the camera. It's a nice, harmless tradition.

Except today, Thomas said "No, thanks." Turns out that he's a conservative guy through and through. I should have been tipped off by the "In God We Trust" painted on his mask, along with the Gadsden flag ("Don't tread on me"), but I always chalked it up to simply a Boston/history thing.

Which turns out not to be the case. He believes in conservative causes, and he wasn't going to lend his MVP presence to a photo op with a president he clearly disagrees with. It was a gutsy call that likely won't win him any fans in Massachusetts, but a guy that I already admired a great deal earned a little bit more of my admiration today.

A book recommendation

2012-01-23T00:47:00.003-06:00

I've never been much of a Stephen King fan, in part because I generally don't care for the horror genre, and in part because once you see the liberal/environmental extremist themes running through his stories, it becomes sort of tiresome.

(Watch "The Shining" again, and look for all the neither-clever-nor-subtle hints about alleged abuse of American Indians. Likewise, once you realize "Pet Semetary" is just a thinly veiled screed about oil companies, it loses a lot of its charm.)

Also, science fiction doesn't interest me much. I had a good friend in high school who worshiped the Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke trinity and did his best to draw me in, but it just never took.

However, once in a while the subject of time travel will captivate me. When I was young there was a short-lived series called "Time Tunnel" that I found fascinating, and in my college years, a film called "Time after Time" captured my imagination. (In the movie, Jack the Ripper is transported into the 20th century by a time machine owned by H.G. Wells, who then has to chase after him. Great story, and it includes a very young Mary Steenburgen. Worth watching if you ever see it on cable.) And of course, the "Back to the Future" series is always great fun. (Trivia note: The first "Back to the Future" was specially screened at the White House and was said to be Ronald Reagan's favorite movie.)

But I digress. My appreciation for time travel stories has allowed me to take on another Stephen King book, and I'm going to use a blog post just to tell you how much I enjoyed his recently published "11/22/63."

The date, of course, is the date of John F. Kennedy's assassination. I've mentioned in earlier posts that I was fortunate enough to have a high school history teacher who encouraged me to research JFK's shooting (I was only six when it happened), and over the years I've read almost everything there is to read about it. When I heard that King was using the event to write a time travel book, I decided to take a chance on him again.

What's it about? Well, it's about 850 pages (sorry, old joke), but don't let that keep you from taking a crack at it. The premise of the book is that a modern-day high school teacher is shown a way to travel back in time, and the friend who shows him the portal urges him to go back and find a way to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting JFK. He agrees to do so, and along the way he begins to understand all of the implications of messing with past events. That's as much plot as I'm going to give you, lest I spoil the story, but it's a fun, fun read.

It's even more fun for people who know some of the more obscure details of the assassination, because all sorts of historical figures - both famous and obscure - keep showing up in the story as our time traveler runs into folks like Edwin Walker, Jack Ruby, George de Mohrenschildt, James Hosty and others, including a great scene in which he opens his apartment door to find Marina Oswald standing there, looking for her husband.

Despite the 850 or so pages, I was able to read it in just a few days because the story is so fun, and so interesting, that it just flies by. Take a chance and dig into it, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

"An act of national insanity."

2012-01-19T12:52:00.004-06:00

That's how respected economist Robert Samuelson described President Obama's decision to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried crude oil from Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. (Read the entire column here.)

Samuelson is absolutely right, and yesterday's decision alone should disqualify Obama from any chance at re-election.

Even the Washington Post editorial board - hardly a group of free-market, pro-growth advocates - saw the absolute folly of Obama's decision, writing: "On the substance (of the issue) there should be no question."

In case you haven't followed the story closely, Keystone would have carried 700,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to the gulf coast. It would have created thousands of jobs, and helped to reduce the leverage Middle Eastern countries have on our oil supply.

Obama was forced to choose between two Democrat constituencies that had staked out a position on the project: Organized labor, which wanted the jobs, and left-wing environmentalists, who somehow believe that blocking the pipeline (leaving us more dependent on Middle Eastern oil) will force us to use less oil.

Because the far-left nuts are about the only reliable voting bloc he has left, the President chose to appease them, costing us jobs, damaging relations with Canada and giving a huge gift to the Chinese, who are the most likely customer for the Canadian oil.

(As an aside, isn't it a shame that he couldn't simply base the decision on the best interests of the United States of America, rather than on what might enhance his re-election chances? If he had done that, as the Post says, "there should be no question.")

This project has been under review for more than three years, and has passed every regulatory hurdle it had faced. Obama's own "Jobs Council" had reported just the day before that the energy and security needs of this country "require the United States to optimize all of its natural resources and construct pathways (pipelines, transmission and distribution) to deliver electricity and fuel.” It added that regulatory and permitting obstacles "that could threaten the development of some energy projects, negatively impact jobs and weaken our energy infrastructure need to be addressed.”

Again, the Washington Post editorial page: "Rejecting Keystone XL would....help China lock up more of the world’s oil production, cost infrastructure jobs in the United States and offend a reliable ally. More delay after three years of review is insult enough."

Simply put, Obama put his own re-election needs ahead of the needs of the country. It was an act of national insanity to elect this guy, and it would be even more insane to give him four more years.

Why I love Newt

2012-01-17T12:14:00.004-06:00

As mentioned a few posts ago, I'm a great admirer of Newt Gingrich, and I think it's a shame that some of the missteps in his career have made him largely unelectable. But this clip from last night's debate shows Newt at his very best: Smart, combative and willing to defend a strong conservative position. It really is a shame that he'll never be president. Enjoy:

Drop dead, Macy's

2012-01-03T00:29:00.003-06:00

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I wrote a long post about the outstanding customer service I received when dealing with Sprint, a post that you can read here.

Now comes the opposite side of the coin, courtesy of the chuckleheads that run Macy's.

As some of you know, I have worked in downtown St. Paul for a number of years, and I always made an effort to shop at the downtown Dayton's store. As St. Paul went through difficult times and a number of retailers fled the core city, Dayton's maintained a commitment to the city that I admired. And when Dayton's became Marshall Field's, I continued to go out of my way to shop there, just to honor their commitment to serving the downtown crowd. And several years ago, when Macy's took over Marshall Field's, I continued to patronize the place and accepted the Macy's credit card they sent me, simply to honor the effort they made to keep a store open in a downtown that is not particularly hospitable to business.

So over the years I bought clothes, a pretty expensive watch, some hard-to-find perfume and many other things at Macy's. And sometime last summer, I made another (to be my last) purchase there. I don't even remember what it was, but sometime in late August I got a statement saying that I owed $11.50, which leads me to believe it was a tie, or a golf shirt from the clearance rack, or some such thing. At some point in the first few days of September, I walked over to the store and dropped off a check for $11.50 at one of the registers.

Here's where things get a little fuzzy. Macy's didn't credit my account for the payment, and at some point in October I got a bill again for $11.50, plus a $35 late fee. (Let's set aside for a moment the morality of a $35 late fee for an $11.50 balance and just focus on the process.) I went into my checking account online and saw that the check had not cleared, which was strange because when I looked at the sequence of check numbers, the check I had written before the Macy's check had cleared on Sept. 8, and the check I wrote after the Macy's check had cleared on Sept. 14.

So I called the folks at Macy's (which included the "push 1 for English, push 2 for customer service, blah, blah, blah...) and when I eventually got through to a person, I explained that this $11.50 had been paid, and that they had the check somewhere. Sorry, the person said, "It says on my computer that this hasn't been paid."

I told her that I didn't much care what her computer said, I had paid the $11.50 and I wasn't going to pay a $35 late fee. She then suggested I stop payment on the check, and send out a new one for $46.50. I explained that it was pretty unlikely I would pay my bank's $30 stop-payment fee, plus send an additional $46.50 to Macy's, which would drive the price of this tie or shirt to around $76.50. She said she'd make a note in the computer.

I thought that would be the end of it, that eventually the check would show up in their records, they would see the error of their ways and this would all be over. Boy, was I wrong.

Later in October, they started calling me, and we went through the same routine three times. They would explain that they were calling from Macy's, and could I please send them their $46.50. I would explain that they already had all the money I owed them, and no more payments would be forthcoming. They said they'd make a note in the computer.

The December statement brought an epiphany of sorts. Turns out the folks at Macy's had FOUND my $11.50 check. And even though it was been given to them back in September, they hadn't credited it to my account until sometime in late November. So now my statement tells me that yes, you did pay the $11.50, but Macy's would now like another $77.50 in fees and interest.

So I put in another call to their "customer service" department, who told me that we could clear this all up if I could just produce a copy of the check. That means another fee to my bank, of course, but I was ready to bite the bullet just to prove my point.

But wait a minute. Turns out the folks at Macy's don't run checks through the system like most businesses do. They process them electronically in a way that doesn't leave a cancelled check. So my bank, which can provide me on-line copies of virtually every check I've written in the last five years, can't provide a copy of the Macy's check, because of the way they process their accounts.

One, final, communication with "customer service" was answered with an e-mail that essentially said, "Sorry, there's nothing we can do. Please send us $77.50"

At this point, it's more likely that Elvis will show up in the Macy's parade singing "Blue Suede Shoes" than it is they will ever get a $77.50 check from me. I cut up my card, sent them the pieces along with a little note, and made a vow to never, ever, ever set foot in a Macy's store again.

Perhaps they'll make a note in their computer.

Bigotry at Hamline

2011-12-29T09:21:00.004-06:00

I've had two interactions with Hamline University in my life. The first came back in 1974, when several of my high school buddies and I were trying to decide where to go to college. At that age it matters a bit what your friends think, and so we decided to visit several colleges together, even though we weren't likely to attend the same schools. But four of us made trips to different schools, sometimes taking advantage of the offer to spend the night, other times just making a day trip.

At each school, the person assigned to guide us around understood the drill. Only one or two of our group was considering the school, but the opinion of our peers meant something, and they took care of our group.

One of the guys wanted to check out Hamline. He had grown up Methodist, and Hamline was - at least marginally - still considered a Methodist institution in those days. So the four of us took off one day to tour the school.

Some staffer was assigned to meet us, show us around, get us to the cafeteria at lunch time, etc. My friend listened closely, asked some questions and was trying to size up the place. At one point in the course of the day, our tour guide asked me about my plans, and I told him that I was likely going to attend the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He asked another one of us, who mentioned that he was leaning toward the U of M's Morris campus.

At that point he started berating us, saying that we were "wasting his time" and "not being honest" by taking a tour when we were probably going to go to a different school. We were pretty taken aback and left soon afterwards. Needless to say, no one in our group went to Hamline, and the lasting impression I had was that the place was full of arrogant jerks.

I thought little about Hamline for the next 25 years or so, until my oldest son, Travis, announced that he wanted to attend Hamline. I told him the only impression I had of the place was that it was full of arrogant jerks, but if he wanted to attend, it was fine with me. So we set about getting him admitted, arranging financial aid and getting him set up in his dorm room.

And he came home in about 30 days. "Get me out of here," was more or less his plea, and when I asked him why, he said the place was "full of hippies." Everything was about gay rights and save the planet and the professors finding a liberal message in everything. Which pretty much dovetailed with my impression of the place, and so home he came.

(Keep in mind that Travis isn't some fire-breathing Young Republican. His views are considerably to the left of mine, he's a practicing vegan and makes his living as a manager at an organic food co-op in Minneapolis. We're not talking about Ron Paul, Jr. here.)

Which pretty much ended any thinking I did about Hamline until a few weeks ago, when the school again went out of its way to come off like a bunch of arrogant jerks. Former Republican candidate for governor, Tom Emmer, had reached an agreement with the school to do some teaching in the business department. The whole story can be read here, but in a nutshell, a handful of professors whined about hiring someone with conservative views, and the school reneged on the offer.

The opposition was led by a petty little associate professor named Jim Bonilla, who - get this - carries the title of "Consultant on Diversity in Higher Education," according to the school's web site. It's hard to find a better example of what a farce higher education has become: Putting a bigot in charge of "diversity."

The school's behavior is indefensible on so many levels, including the fact that Emmer is a bright, talented, engaging guy (he's an attorney who currently hosts a very entertaining morning radio show) who was more than qualified for the job. And then there's the entire question of what someone's political views have to do with teaching a business course.

The message from Hamline is loud and clear: We hold our liberal viewpoints near and dear to our hearts, and "education" can only be provided by those who share our politically correct views. A university is not for exploring other ideas or expanding minds, its sole purpose is to indoctrinate impressionable young minds in the ways of liberalism. Like the Italians, Irish and "Coloreds" in years past, conservatives need not apply.

I've written enough over the past year (see the archive list on the right) about the declining value of higher education, and this sordid episode helps make the point. The whole question of "value" is particularly acute for small, private schools like Hamline, St. Thomas, Carlton, St. John's and others, who have largely priced themselves out of the market for the middle class. A year at anyone of these schools will cost you close to what an Ivy League school costs, without any of the commensurate benefits. There is far more value to be had at a state college than at any of these schools, and given the competition, you wouldn't think Hamline would be going out of its way to tell the public what a closed-minded, bigoted faculty it has in place.

As for Emmer, he comes out of this looking far more classy than either the Hamline faculty or administration.

Sometimes the first impression is correct, and I'm more willing than ever to stand by the judgment I made in 1974.

A must-read article

2011-12-22T14:16:00.003-06:00

National Review's Victor Davis Hanson is always worth reading, no matter what he is writing about, but yesterday's contribution is particularly worthwhile.

In addition to his teaching, writing, lecturing, etc., Hanson raises grapes on the California farm that has been in his family for generations. Yesterday's piece tells the story of what can only be called a breakdown of civilization in the beautiful farming valley he lives in near Fresno.

But it's not just a tale of some local crime spree; It's a look into the future of American society being brought to us by those who value "diversity" and "tolerance" above all else.

Read it here, and enjoy.

Vaclav Havel, RIP

2011-12-19T00:40:00.004-06:00

A cynic might suggest that my only real knowledge of the Czech Republic comes from interacting with and watching so many of their hockey players over the years. And while it's true that I have much admiration for those in a long line that includes Hasek, Sykora, Hlinka, Jagr and so many others, there was one Czech in particular whom I admired, and I don't think he ever wore skates.

Vaclav Havel died yesterday at the age of 75, and if Lech Walesa was the man who led the downfall of Communism in Poland, Havel was the man who did the same for Czechoslovakia.

Havel never set out to be a political figure. He was a writer who used his work to try, at first, to "soften" the Communist system that enslaved his country. But when the Soviets rolled their tanks into his country in the 1968 "Prague Spring," effectively ending any attempts at liberalization, Havel realized that Communism could not be appeased, and must be stopped.

His writings reflected that belief, and the government took notice. First, they sentenced him to three months in prison for "subversion." When that didn't stop his writing, they charged him again, and sentenced him to 4-1/2 years, prohibiting him from writing anything but letters to his family.

Finally, the government put pressure on him to emigrate, figuring he would be less of a bother outside of the country. He refused to leave, instead working a menial job at a brewery and chipping away at the Communist regime. Finally, in 1989, after the Berlin Wall fell and Communism went on the run, a group of Czechoslovakian patriots gathered to form a new government, and made Havel their new president.

In 1992, as the Czech Republic and Slovakia began to go their separate ways, he resigned rather than preside over the breakup of the country. But when the separation was complete, he was elected President of the Czech Republic.

As President, he was very pro-American, having fallen in love with New York City in a 1968 visit, and he even continue to write essays and plays later in life reflecting his belief in individual freedom and liberty. Czech writer Erik Tabery summed it up this way: “While the Communists ruled for 40 years, most Czechs stayed at home and did nothing. Havel did something.”

One of my favorite old sayings is that "The pen is mightier than the sword," and Havel's life proved it.

Hypocrisy in action

2011-12-15T13:11:00.003-06:00

You just can't make this up: Call it irony, call it hypocrisy, call it whatever, but the ongoing "amateur hour" vibe given off by the Obama administration was on display again yesterday in Texas.

Corrupt Attorney General Eric Holder (see Black Panther intimidation case, Fast and Furious, etc.) went to Texas to make a speech condemning efforts by legislatures to protect voting rights. Yes, that's right, Holder (shown at left, digging for some evidence) and the Obama kids are AGAINST laws to protect YOUR voting rights.

Over the past couple of years, more than a dozen states have passed laws requiring those who want to vote to show a photo ID before they can vote. It's in response to numerous instances in Minnesota, Wisconsin and other states where large numbers of people who later shown to be ineligible to vote have cast ballots.

Of course, every ballot cast illegally diminishes the value of YOUR vote, while also undermining the integrity of the election process itself. That's why so many states are trying to tighten up the process.

Holder doesn't like this. He's okay with weapon-carrying Black Panthers standing in front of polling places to intimidate voters, but he doesn't like asking people to produce an ID before they vote. Launching into Barney Frank-like hysteria, Holder said that asking people to show ID is a "deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.”

And I suppose that being required to show ID before boarding an airplane is a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students and minority and low-income voters from flying.

So, you ask, where is the irony? Where is the hypocrisy?

Well, in order to attend Holder's speech, you had to show a photo ID before you were allowed in the building!

"Do as I say, not as I do," is a long-standing liberal credo, and Holder provides us with another great example.

GREAT customer service

2011-12-13T14:48:00.004-06:00

I complain often enough about lousy customer service, so I think it's only fair that I take a moment to single out someone who provided me with a fantastic service experience.

Sunday night my cell phone died, which was a big disappointment. I've had a Palm Pre for a couple of years, and it's a terrific phone...Besides making calls, I can surf the web on it, take high-quality pictures, play music, do pretty much whatever I need to do. But the Pre has a small design flaw that sometimes results in the phone's battery being unable to take a charge. Something comes loose in the little USB port on the side of the phone, and when you plug it in to charge it up, nothing happens, and then the battery just slowly dies.

That's what happened with mine Sunday night. Fortunately, I've had mine long enough that the folks at Sprint have been sending me emails, reminding me that I could now upgrade my phone at a reduced price, if I would just renew my contract. So I went online to look for a new phone.

There I found something called the HTC EVO 4G. It sort of looks like the i-phone, had all the features I need (plus quite a few more) and best of all, it was FREE (with the renewal of my contract.)

I have an acquaintance at the Sprint store in South St. Paul, so Monday morning I sent him an email asking two questions: 1) Was this the right phone for me; and 2) Could I come up to the store and pick it up? Here's where the plot thickens.

He told me that in order to get all of the available discounts that made the phone free, I would have to start the ordering process online at the Sprint web site. During that process, he said, I would have the option to "reserve in store." By choosing that option, I could order the phone, and then two hours later show up in his store to pick it up.

So I went to Sprint.com and started through the ordering process. I got all the way through and was ready to place the order, but I still hadn't seen the "reserve in store" button. I didn't want to submit the order and then find out I had to wait for the phone to be shipped, which the site said would take 2-5 days. So, I called the customer service number on the side of the screen to make sure I could get the phone at the store.

My call was answered by a guy named Jeff, and I had every reason to expect that Jeff would be like most customer service people and would do only the minimum amount of work necessary to get me an answer and get me off the phone. I was wrong. Way wrong.

I explained the situation, and Jeff said that, yes, I should have been able to find a "reserve in store" button on the web site, and he seemed genuinely puzzled that I couldn't. He asked if he could put me on hold while he talked to some techie. I said that would be fine, and expected a long wait.

He was back within a minute or so, and explained the problem. It turned out that I had been on the right screen in the ordering process, but I missed the "reserve in store" button because it was disabled, and reserving in store was not an option for this particular phone. This meant that I could only order the phone to be shipped, which meant I would be 2-5 days without a phone.

(Which isn't the end of the world, but from both a business and personal standpoint, it's difficult. I have an office line, but almost no one calls it, because my clients have all been conditioned to call my cell since I'm out of the office a lot. Also, I have all of my emails forwarded to the phone, so that if I'm on the road all day, I can still respond to an email without waiting to get home at night. Plus, my kids are conditioned to keep in touch with me by texting me. And most importantly, I have to have a device to play Sudoku on before I fall asleep at night! So several days without my cell is quite an inconvenience.)

I said I would call the store and see if there were any other options, and apparently Jeff could hear the disappointment in voice. At that point, it would have been reasonable for him to say, "I'm really sorry, there's just nothing I can do about it. Place your order and we'll get it shipped out as soon as possible."

Instead, he said, "Call your friend at the store and see what he says, and I'm going to call you back in a half-hour or so and check on things."

I called the Sprint store, and my guy said, "Sorry, I guess we're stuck." But he assured me that if I ordered it, they usually arrived in just 2-3 days.

At that point I was resigned to calling my clients and telling them I had no cell service for a few days, and that I might not respond to emails very quickly.

Then Jeff called back.

First, he wanted to know if the Sprint store had been able to help me out. When I said "no," he said "I've had your case open here for about an hour, trying to figure out what we can do. What if I could overnight you the phones? Could you get by the rest of they day without your phone?"

I said that yes, I could get by for the day, although I wasn't crazy about having to pay for overnight shipping. "No, we won't charge you for that," he said. Then he went online himself, accessed my account, and placed the order to provide overnight shipping.

At that point, I was thrilled with the level of service. Then it got even better.

"Now, let's talk about the Palm Pre," he said. "Let's try a couple things to see if we can get it going." He had talked to another techie, who gave him a couple of things to try involving removing the battery, re-plugging the phone in, etc...Unfortunately, none of those worked.

"Well then," he said, "I can set it up to have all of the calls to that number forwarded to a different number for today if that will help." Yes, I said, that would help immensely. So I gave him my office number, and Jeff went to work setting up the forwarding of my cell phone calls to my office line.

In the middle of all this, something he said about the battery reminded me that I had another cell phone battery in the house. My sons both have Palm phones, and I had bought Travis a couple replacement batteries and a charger because his battery wasn't holding a full charge. I was going to give them to him on Wednesday, but I still had them in the house. So I took out my Pre's battery, put in a charged replacement battery, and my phone came back to life!

At that point, Jeff cancelled the forwarding, so that calls would again come to my Pre. So, in about a 90-minute period after taking my call, Jeff had:

-- Found an answer to my original question about the "reserve in store" button
-- Realized that it wasn't a satisfactory answer and started looking for a solution
-- Called me back with a solution that got my new phone ordered
-- Tried to help with my old phone, leading to a solution to that problem

And all the while he was friendly and chatty, telling me he worked just down the road near LaCrosse, Wisconsin, had been out ice-fishing already, etc., etc. By the time we were done, he had solved every phone issue I had, and now - only about 24 hours later - I'm sitting with my new HTV EVO 4G.

I don't know how he could have made this interaction any better, short of personally fetching the phone from the warehouse in Kentucky, driving it up to my home himself and waxing my car once he got here.

It was a phenomenal customer service experience, and it's a shame that it's so rare these days that it merits a blog post. So, Jeff....thanks, man.

Just because it's fun

2011-12-08T18:24:00.002-06:00

For about 18 months back in the '80s, I lived on Capitol Hill in D.C., where neighborhood parking was always at a premium. So I can relate to the reaction this driver had when he saw a parking spot that was just the right size for his car. I can't condone it, but I can relate, and I post it here just for the comedic value. Enjoy.

Why I remember Pearl Harbor

2011-12-07T16:35:00.004-06:00

Today, of course, is Pearl Harbor day, the 70th anniversary of Japan's sneak attack that more or less launched the U.S. into World War II.

There are a few historical events that I consider myself pretty well versed on. From the time I was young, the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations fascinated me, and I've read virtually everything I could get my hands on about those two events. (FYI - Oswald did it, and did it all by himself. Every other theory is crap.)

Another is Pearl Harbor, though I can't really take credit for it. Credit goes to a wonderfully gifted history teacher from Princeton High School named Pete Finelli.

We moved to Princeton after my freshman year, and U.S. History was a required sophomore course, taught by Finelli. I'd always enjoyed American history (see this entry about the Landmark series of history books I read as a kid), and on the first day of class, Finelli asked the class a series of pretty basic questions about American history, designed - I guess - to gauge where the class' knowledge baseline was.

I must have had a large number of shy classmates, because I know I wasn't any smarter than most of them, but I ended up raising my hand a lot and answering most of the questions. After class, Finelli came over, noted that I had recently transferred into the district, and asked if I had taken American history the year before at my former school. No, I told him, I just read a lot about history, and he seemed to like that.

Over the next few years, we moved beyond a normal teacher-student relationship and became pretty good friends. It turned out that Pete not only shared my love of history, but of baseball as well. He had been a minor-league pitcher, and served as a) the pitching coach for the high school baseball team, b) a sports writer for the local weekly paper and c) the play-by-play guy for the local radio station. Talk about two guys having something in common.

(Slightly off-topic story: I was reading a biography of Red Sox great Ted Williams, and learned that his first wife had been from Princeton. The next day after class, I rushed over to Pete's desk, anxious to share my discovery with him, and maybe amaze or surprise him a bit. I showed him the passage and asked, "Did you know Ted Williams' wife was from here?" It didn't have the desired effect. "Yeah, Ted and I used to go fishing together in the off-season," Pete said.)

And one of Pete's favorite topics was Pearl Harbor. Each year he would spend an entire week lecturing and quizzing on Pearl Harbor, getting us ready for a great learning experience: Watching the movie Tora, Tora, Tora. This will be hard for my children to understand, but in the fall of 1971, there were no VCRs, DVDs, computer downloads, Netflix or any other means by which to watch a full-length, feature motion picture in a classroom.

Unable to bring the movie to the class, Pete figured out how to bring the class to the movie. He convinced the local theater owner to rent the movie and screen it for Pete's history class. Preparing for Tora, Tora, Tora day was a big production. In addition to teaching us all about the attack, Pete would prepare us for some of the film's cinematic shortfalls, such as the way white letters were used in the subtitles, and didn't show up very well with white naval uniforms in the background.

Come movie day, we had a prescribed path to walk the 8-10 blocks from the school to the theater. A small herd of 150 or so kids would make the hike, watch the movie, then trek back to the school by lunchtime. It was about a 10-day immersion in all things Pearl Harbor, culminating with the film, and I have to believe that every kid who graduated from PHS in those years could quote Japanese Admiral Yamamoto saying, "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve."

As I mentioned, Pete and I remained friends beyond the classroom years. I dabbled in radio, and he eventually brought me on as his stat guy for football broadcasts, and as a color guy for baseball broadcasts. When he stopped writing for the local paper, he helped me get hired there for my first real sportswriting job. We were even linked to another historical event: I was in Pete's RV, along with his family, on the way to the state Legion baseball tournament in New Ulm on August 8, 1974, when we had a flat tire just north of Mankato. While waiting for the tow truck, we listened on the radio to President Nixon's resignation speech, and enjoyed sharing an historic moment together.

Pete has now retired and lives in Rochester, but I never get past Aug. 8th or Dec. 7th on the calendar without remembering a terrific teacher and all-around good guy who worked very hard to make history come alive for his students.

The war on jobs

2011-12-04T01:16:00.003-06:00

George Will is almost always worth reading, and the column you can read here is a typically strong one.

There are so many failures in the Obama administration that it's hard to select the biggest one. But certainly among the most egregious is its assault on job creation. Whether it's blocking the XL pipeline, having the National Labor Relations Board try to stop a Boeing plant in South Carolina or trying to block domestic oil exploration, Obama consistently pursues policies that deter job creation.

Will's column focuses on the effect the threat of a fully-implemented Obamacare program is having on job creation. Here's the money quote from a CEO:

“...employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”

"Reduce labor content" means "not hiring as many people." That's the effect Obama is having on everyone who needs a job. Enjoy Will's column.

The Obama administration goes after freedom of the press

2011-11-30T20:12:00.006-06:00

Of all the disgraceful appointments in the Obama administration, Eric Holder is probably the worst. Under his "leadership" the Justice Department has done things like dismissing a voter intimidation case it had already won because those doing the intimidating were members of the Black Panthers.

A bigger fiasco was Operation Fast and Furious, in which ATF agents allowed members of Mexican drug cartels to buy high-powered weapons, thinking that they could then "trace" the weapons and find out where they went. It went badly awry, they lost track of more than 1,000 guns and one of the guns was used to kill an American border agent.

Holder has done his best to stonewall a Congressional investigation into Fast and Furious, even going so far as to seal court records about the murder of the border agent.

As a result of Holder's bumbling, more than 50 members of congress have called for his resignation. His response: Tell the media to stop reporting it.

Yesterday, in this photo, Holder sticks his finger in the face of a reporter from the political website The Daily Caller and says, “You guys need to — you need to stop this. It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it.”

Imagine if a member of the Bush administration had told a reporter to stop writing about a subject he found uncomfortable. The cries of "fascism" would be deafening.

I don't think even Nixon was this paranoid about the media. You can get a thorough description of Fast and Furious here.

(Afterthought: I just noticed the expression on the face of Holder's aide standing on his left. She's thinking, "Uh-oh...time to update the resume, because this gravy train is about to come to an end.")

Newt on the rise

2011-11-30T00:49:00.004-06:00

From the very time the Republican field began to form itself last year, my first choice for President in the entire group was Newt Gingrich, but I had convinced myself - as many others had - that Newt was simply unelectable.

As he rises in the polls, and seems prepared to emerge as the only credible opponent of Mitt Romney, I find myself rethinking that assumption.

Gingrich has been my favorite political figure since Reagan left the scene. In the 1980s, when I served on Sen. Boschwitz's staff, the conventional wisdom was that a Republican majority in the House of Representatives was simply unattainable. The Democrats had controlled the place since 1952, and the entire infrastructure of the House - members, staff, committee staff, everything right down to the janitors - had been controlled by the Democrats for a generation. A Republican majority was simply unthinkable.

Except to Newt, Vin Weber, Connie Mack, Dan Coats and a few other bright young lions who called themselves the "Conservative Opportunity Society." Unlike more senior Republicans in the House, who more or less accepted the permanent Democrat majority, Newt and his colleagues went to work, using the Reagan years to build public support for conservative ideas and set about the business of attracting candidates whom they hoped could someday provide a Republican majority.

They fought the battle on a lot of fronts. They recruited stronger candidates, then found innovative ways to train the candidates and provide some funding. They targeted resources on swing districts, and they slowly made gains, aided by an organization they founded and called GOPAC.

In 1992, I was one of their candidates. Running in Minnesota's First District, I listened to the training tapes GOPAC sent out every week. I took part in the conference calls, and I went to their candidate school in Washington. And while I had simply admired Newt before that year, it was in 1992 that I began to fully recognize his genius.

Newt has a way of taking almost any issue and turning it back into a values question. Instead of asking the question, "Should we cut welfare programs?" Newt would phrase the question as "How do we tear down a system that limits an individual's potential and leads to generations of dependence, and replace it with a system that allows each individual a chance to realize their fullest potential." He had candidates all over the country talking about "Breaking down the bureaucratic welfare state" and replacing it with an "opportunity society." He wasn't afraid to call, for example, the Detroit public schools "a particularly tragic example of the human cost of protecting unionized bureaucracy at the expense of serving the public."

During my campaign, I was always working more Newt talking points into my speeches. I'd talk about how "Earning by Learning," a volunteer-based inner city literacy program, worked better than 20 years of Title 1 funding, and I'd see people in the audience nod. Or I'd talk about Health Savings Accounts (a really radical idea in 1992) as a way to make the necessary re-connect between the consumers and the payers of health care, and people would come to me to say how much sense the idea made to them. Newt and GOPAC gave all of us the tools to compete.

Some of those GOPAC candidates succeeded in 1992, others didn't. (I was one who didn't...another story for another day.) But all of us who fought the fight were inspired by Newt's vision of a Republican House majority that could begin to roll back the cancers eating away at America. I still keep a letter I have from Newt, expressing his condolences on my loss.

Two years later he authored the "Contract With America," a series of 10 changes he promised the American people would be made within 90 days of the election of a Republican House majority. The Republicans rode the Contract - and the fecklessness of Clinton's first two years - into the Republican House majority that almost no one thought was possible.

Two things stand out if you get to know Newt at all. First, he has an absolute love of America, and believes in his heart that this country has a special duty to lead the world. "Without an America that is strong, and safe, and free," he said, "The world becomes a very dark and dangerous place."

Secondly, you learn right away that he has a world-class intellect, and that he is an incredibly fast learner when presented with a new idea or new perspective that addresses an old question. And I think the long series of debates over the past few months have given voters a window into exactly how sharp a thinker Newt is.

Does he have flaws as a candidate? A mountain of them. His personal life has been messy, to say the least. There have been poor decisions, incorrect opinions and hundreds of moments I'm sure he'd like to take back. In recent years, he hasn't always been the most conservative guy around, but I'm confident of this: As President, he will tackle every issue head-on, speak truthfully to the American people and never, ever apologize for the United States of America.

As I said at the top, I had sort of fallen into the "trap" of thinking that all of his baggage made him unelectable, and when his campaign staggered out of the gate, I decided I was right. But a steady diet of his debate performances and increased exposure to his thinking seem to be bringing Republican primary voters around.

I have no doubt that if he is the Republican nominee, he will beat Obama, and probably do so in a landslide. The contrast between his upbeat, innovative vision of what America can become and Obama's view of an America that needs to recede from the world and manage its own decline will give Americans a very real choice that I believe they'll embrace.

The Scholastic Book Club

2011-11-20T21:29:00.003-06:00

A few blog posts ago, (click here) I reminisced about the beauty of the Landmark series of American history books for children. Today, I was reminded of another great contribution to children's reading, The Scholastic Book Club.

The reminder comes via this blog post, written by Roger Kimball, who talks about a Washington Post book reviewer name Michael Dirda. Dirda has a new book out, and in it he recalls the incredible joy he would feel as a child when it came time to order from the Scholastic Book Club:

Each month Mr. Jackson would pass out a four-page newsletter describing several dozen paperbacks available for purchase. “Lying on my bed at home,” Drida recalls, “I lingered for hours over these news print catalogues, carefully making my final selections.”

The care was dictated in part by the budget imposed by Dirda’s mother, who stipulated a monthly budget of no more than 4 of the 25-35-cent books. Each month, Mr. Jackson sent in the class order. “Then in the middle of some dull afternoon, … a teacher’s aide would open the classroom door and silently drop off a big, heavily taped parcel. … Sometimes we would be made to wait an entire day, especially if the package had been delivered close to the three o’clock bell when school let out.”

But sooner or later, the swag was distributed and then Dirda, like his classmates, would

methodically appraise each volume’s art work, read and reread its back cover, carefully investigate the delicate line of glue at the top edge of the perfect bound spines. … To this day I can more or less recall the newsletter’s capsule summary that compelled me to buy The Hound of the Baskervilles. … “What was it that emerged from the moor at night to spread terror and violent death?” What else, of course, but a monstrous hound from the bowels of hell?

I had the same experience, over and over again, when those little Scholastic Book Service order forms came out, and the same argument with my dad over how many I could buy. I'm not sure Hound of the Baskervilles was ever one of my selections, because I was given that and other Sherlock Holmes books by a relative, but I know that over the years I ordered dozens and dozens of those little paperbacks, and I don't ever remember being disappointed by any one of them. There were many, many sports books, of course, and I was also quite taken with the exploits of a bright young kid named Encyclopedia Brown, who was great at solving mysteries.

The story also struck a chord with John Hinderaker over at Powerline, who wrote this about his experience growing up in Watertown, S.D in a post titled "The Most Exciting Box in the World."

But it seems like yesterday: our teacher would, as Roger says, pass out a newsletter or catalog that listed and described the books available for order. I pored over that catalog for hours, studying the descriptions and wondering about the books. I would carefully make my choices after discussing them with my friends–you may say that I was a little weird, but I wasn’t the only one, to paraphrase John Lennon–and some weeks later the box would arrive.

It was the highlight of the year. Better even than Christmas, because this box didn’t contain underwear or socks; it contained only books–not only that, but the books we had chosen ourselves. The minutes in which the box was opened and the books were distributed to the kids who had ordered them were the most exciting of my youth.

I know the Scholastic Book Club still exists, although I'm not sure if it still distributes books the same way or if the Internet has taken over the process, but it was an incredible part of my childhood. Daughter Corrie, now a librarian, apparently inherited the same love of reading, and the gene appears to have been passed on to the grandkids as well, which is one of the few of my traits that I hope they have.

Catching up

2011-11-16T15:21:00.012-06:00

Okay, I'm back from a little vacation, and I realize that I totally reneged on my promise to post a few things from the road. Sorry. Here's a few tidbits to get back up to speed.

Naples golf - It was my first trip to Naples, which happened instead of the trek buddy Pete Thrane and I usually take to Myrtle Beach. To be candid, the results are mixed. On the plus side, the weather is fantastic. October/November weather in Myrtle can be a little iffy, but everyone assured us that the 80 degrees and sunny skies we had almost every day in Naples was pretty standard stuff. The one day it was "cold" was when it only got up to about 72, and the locals were feeling the chill, breaking out the sweatshirts.

From a golf standpoint, there are a number of beautiful courses in the Naples area, but accessibility is an issue. Most of the courses are private, and we were fortunate enough to have a couple of contacts that helped us get on to some very nice courses, but without those contacts, it would have been tough sledding. We tried to fill in some schedule gaps by using the internet to find some public or semi-private courses, and it was really tough. Anything public seems to be somewhat older, with less than ideal conditions, or they have a "resort course" layout that is not particularly interesting.

The high point was a private club called Heritage Palms, just north of Naples in Ft. Myers. We were able to get on via the good graces of old friend Joe Quinn, a former legislator and retired judge that I have known since the 1980s. This was a very interesting design, in immaculate shape, and we're really, really grateful to the judge for getting us on. As DFLers go, Joe's a really, really good guy!

The one public track we played that we found worthwhile was called Panther Run, northeast of Naples. We liked it well enough that we played it a second time, and it was open enough that we ended up playing 36 holes, with a sit-down lunch in between, in about 7-1/2 hours. And along the way, we made the acquaintance of this local:

All in all, we determined that while the weather is certainly nicer, there is a lot more access to affordable, quality golf in Myrtle Beach, and it seems likely that we'll head back there next year.

Speaking of wildlife, I learned that the Florida Panthers hockey team is called that because there is actually a band of Florida Panthers. Turns out there are only a couple hundred of them, but most are located in the area between Naples and the Everglades. Lots of cool info can be learned by going to http://www.floridapanthernet.org/

The main road towards our resort had a couple of "Caution: Panther Crossing" signs, but I never saw one.

Then, via text message on the second day of the trip, came this announcement from home:

And, for some reason, I can't get the audio to work, but what little Annie is saying is "Opa, we're having a baby!"

Which is how I found out that The Smartest Little Girl in the Universe and grandson Sambo are getting a sibling next May, grandchild #3. Congrats to daughter Corrie and husband Sam!

While in Ft. Myers, I got my first look at Hammond Stadium, where the Twins have spring training. Nice looking ballpark that is part of a big complex. The Roy Hobbs tournament was taking place, which is sort of the World Series for 35-and-over baseball players.

And speaking of baseball, I flew in and out of Tampa, and my hotel was just down the street from George Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the Yankees. I stopped in to look around, and found a couple dozen guys involved in a "fantasy camp" which involves middle-aged guys paying $4,000 to come down and hang around for a week with former Yankees, playing a few ball games, drinking a

lot and listening to stories. (Most team, including the Twins, run similar things.) There weren't too many big-name Yankees around, but Cecil Fielder (now known as Prince Fielder's dad) was coaching first base. That's the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' stadium across the street.

Of course, the whole Penn St./Joe Paterno scandal broke while we were there, and Pete's legal mind was fascinated by it all. He foresaw a number of things that I didn't see coming, such as the Big Ten stripping Paterno's name from the championship trophy, and the possible downgrading of Penn State's bond debt by the ratings agencies. I still don't know what to make of the whole mess, and I don't really have the stomach to learn much more.

Also in the news, we learned that the Solyndra scandal just gets worse and worse. Now it turns out that as the company was failing and planning huge layoffs in October of 2010, the White House put pressure on them to delay the announcement until after the election. Nothing like playing politics with taxpayer dollars.

Finally, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street crowd and their wanna-be copycats, I'm thinking of starting my own protest, which will be known as "Occupy Sanibel Island." A few friends and I will sit on the beach, drink rum punch and refuse to leave until the tides stop rising and falling. It might not turn into a crime wave like the other "Occupy" encampments, but at least we'll have a point.

Off to the Sunshine State

2011-11-07T12:28:00.003-06:00

As some of you know, my good friend Peter Thrane and I spend several days in Myrtle Beach every October. We've been going down there for about 13 years to enjoy the marvelous golf and great weather. It's a great way to end the golf season.

This year, however, we couldn't find October dates that worked. I never like to go when the Wild are at home, and we just couldn't make things work. And Myrtle in November can be beautiful, but you're also taking some real chances with the weather. So it looked like we might miss our annual golf trip.

But an opportunity arose, a couple things fell into place, the Wild are headed out on a road trip and so Pete and I fly out this week to spend a few days golfing in Naples, Florida. I've played a little bit of golf in Florida before - Key West, Daytona, Orlando - but it was always in the context of a business trip, never a golf-only proposition. Now we get a chance to go into our full-blown golf trip mode, which is pretty simple: Be on a course by 8 a.m., play 36 holes (or sometimes more) until sundown, have dinner, sleep, repeat for five days.

Our base of operations is GreenLinks golf resort (www.greenlinksnaples.com), but we hope to play several other area courses. I've never been to Naples, but hear great things about it, and I'll try to file a report or two along the way.

I'm staying out of the woods

2011-11-02T17:40:00.005-05:00

I'm the first to admit that I'm not a big nature guy, so maybe I'm overreacting here, but then again, maybe not.

When I was a kid, and snowmobiles were a relatively new invention, it was considered controversial that snowmobilers up in northern Minnesota were using their new machines to hunt timberwolves. The news stations would show footage of snowmobilers chasing down the little critters and running them over. That wouldn't kill them, they would just pack down into the snow, but eventually they would get tired and the guys on snowmobiles could grab them or shoot them. Seemed like harmless fun to me.

But I don't remember the timberwolves being very big. They looked like I would expect a fox to look, or maybe an adult dog, like a black lab. A timberwolf didn't seem like a particularly scary animal.

And then yesterday I saw this picture of a timberwolf killed by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. If I was on a snowmobile, and saw one of these, I'd be driving as fast as I could the other way.

I assume this is a little on the mutant side of the timberwolf growth scale, but still, if there are things like this out in the woods, I'll take my chances on the city streets.

A little Groucho talk....

2011-11-01T01:14:00.004-05:00

Okay, I admit right from the top that this is a bit of an unusual topic to expect from my blog, but I found this story very interesting and wanted to share it.

In my high school years, I found myself fascinated with the Marx Brothers, particularly Groucho. For a couple of years, WCCO-TV had a Saturday night show hosted by a fellow named Alan Lotsberg that featured Marx Brothers movies. (Lotsberg was also a sidekick on the kids show "Clancy the Cop," playing detective Willie Ketchum.)

Every Saturday night, Lotsberg would introduce another Marx Brothers movie, and tell us a bit of the history of it, who wrote the script, which young actors played the bit parts, and then I would sit on the floor absolutely charmed by "Duck Soup," "Night at the Opera," "Day at the Races" and all the others.

As often happened when I would get intrigued by something, I headed off to the library and started reading everything I could about Groucho (real name: Julius) and his brothers. I didn't learn enough to become an expert, but I knew more than your average 10th grader.

(This also led, I believe, to a fascination with Woody Allen movies, which was not at all the norm for teenage Minnesota boys in the 1970s. But I digress.)

Over the years, I've read a number of interesting anecdotes about Groucho, or seen bits and pieces of interviews with people like Dick Cavett or Johnny Carson. But until the fellows at Powerline linked to THIS story, I had never read of the exchange of letters between, and subsequent meeting of, Groucho and T.S. Eliot. The relationship seems improbable, given Eliot's rabid anti-Semitism, but I found the article fascinating, and apparently they got on quite well. Click on the link and I think you'll enjoy the story.

He CAN'T be this stupid, can he?

2011-10-25T17:37:00.006-05:00

The inventor of the Austrian language and supporter of the intercontinental railroad is at it again.

We've catalogued a number of the President's ridiculous mistakes/falsehoods before (there's a nice summary here) and once again, it's math that he's struggling with.

Yesterday he told supporters at a Las Vegas fundraiser that:

"Last week, we had a separate vote on a part of the jobs bill that would put 400,000 teachers, firefighters and police officers back on the job, paid for by asking people who make more than $1 million to pay one-half of 1 percent in additional taxes. For somebody making $1.1 million a year, that’s an extra $500. Five hundred bucks. And with that, we could have saved 400,000 jobs. Most people making more than $1 million, if you talk to them, they’ll say, I’m willing to pay $500 extra to help the county. They’re patriots. They believe we’re all in this thing together. But all the Republicans in the Senate said no."

Of course, an elementary school student could tell you that one-half of one percent on a $1.1 million income is $5,500, not $500. And this wasn't a one-time slip of the tongue: He said it three times in a 15-second span.

The President has pretty much cemented his reputation as a dim bulb, but something like this goes right to the very competence of his staff. Understand that it's a very long road from a speechwriter's keyboard to the President's teleprompter. A speech is reviewed by a higher-up in the speechwriting shop. Then it goes to someone in the policy shop. Then it's normally reviewed by the Chief of Staff, and all along the way there are other folks sticking their noses in and making comments, edits and suggestions. (Peggy Noonan's book, What I Saw At The Revolution provides great insight into the White House speechwriting process.)

And yet, NOWHERE along the line did ANYONE say, "Hmm, that math doesn't seem right. I should check that. Does anyone have a calculator handy?"

Set ideology aside for a moment and realize that this kind of mistake - happening on a recurring basis - indicates a White House staff that just simply isn't very competent. When things like bad numbers and the intercontinental railroad repeatedly make it to the teleprompter, it's easy to see why this administration has made so many really, really dumb mistakes. The diversity hire at the top isn't very smart, and he doesn't care if the people he hires are either, as long as they share his left-wing, socialist view of the world.

A man without his machine

2011-10-20T01:42:00.009-05:00

I'm not a big fan of Conan O'Brien, but he had a nice little bit this week about the theft of the presidential teleprompter. Enjoy (and sorry I can't eliminate the commercial...bear with it.)

"If everyone has a degree, then nobody does"

2011-10-17T14:37:00.005-05:00

Just a little while ago, I had a few musings (see here, here and here) about the declining value of a college education.

Now, it turns out that the same realization has hit many of those in the collection of communists, anti-Semites and anarchists who call themselves the "Occupy" movement. Whether it's on Wall Street, in D.C. or in downtown Minneapolis, the few coherent complaints that come from the group often boil down to "I have a degree and I can't find a job." National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke has spent some time in lower Manhattan, and filed this report, which I found interesting. Enjoy.

The number of people participating in the Occupy Wall Street sit-ins because they are angry that their education has not yielded the fruits that they hoped it would becomes more apparent by the day. Many of the protesters I have met are understandably ruffled that they are unemployed, and they often finish their remonstrations with a non-sequitur, delivered as if it were a knockout blow: “And I went to college!” Well, one might ask, “So what?”

I first noticed this “college = good life” fallacy back in England. A close friend of mine was looking for a job straight out of college, and remained unemployed for six months while he searched for what he described as a “graduate job.” Outside of those careers that rely on specific skills and expertise — doctors, veterinarians, and so forth — I have never been sure quite what this term means. My friend has a degree in modern history. Congratulations! But there is no obvious career path for this qualification. Why should it lend itself more to working in, say, finance than to working in a 7-Eleven? Compare this attitude to that exhibited by another friend of mine — a recently naturalized American citizen. After her parents escaped from the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s and fled to the United States, her engineer father worked as a garbageman for five years until he found a job which tallied more closely with his abilities. At no point did he complain. Was it a waste of talent? Undoubtedly. Did he have a right to a “post-graduate job”? No. That’s just not how free economies work.

Yet you would not know this from the prevailing attitude. Each year in Britain, scores of intellectually average people graduate from intellectually average institutions for no better reason than that they think they should. Emerging from graduation ceremonies, they proudly wave an expensive piece of paper above their heads, which in many cases is worth little more than the Munich Agreement. And months later, when the euphoria abates, they wonder out loud why they are no more employable than before. Given the promises of milk and honey that have been made to them, this is apprehensible. But those promises have always been laughably misguided. The late Labour government’s promise to send 50 percent of British children to college is based upon a staggering failure of logic, which has not yet been exploded. It was, until a few years ago, possible to draw a direct line between the possession of a university degree, and a better paying job. This was not the product of a timeless ironclad equation, but because the default was not to go to university; to have a degree thus set one apart from the crowd. But if everyone has a degree, then nobody does. We are now caught in a spiral in which a master’s is the new degree and, soon, a Ph.D. will be the new master’s. Would that economics classes had given our children an understanding of the importance of adding value. You don’t pay your plumber more because he has a degree in physics.

In the West, we are hard at work establishing a culture that fetishizes education, and instills the belief that college — regardless of its content or application — will, and should, inexorably lead to a better job, or a better life, or even a better America. Worse, that one has a right to these things. In doing so, we have created a Potemkin aristocracy, one based upon the erroneous and tragic conceit that having letters after one’s name intrinsically confers excellence. We are happily encouraging our children to join its ranks, regardless of whether there is any evidence that to do so will be in their interest. This is supremely ironic, given that so many of America’s billionaires — i.e. those who pay for more educations and create more jobs than anyone else — are college dropouts. Indeed, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates failed to finish college. Can we say with a straight face that this has adversely affected them, or America at large?

On Thursday, I met a guy down in Zuccotti Park. He speaks six languages, but he has nothing useful to say in any of them. He is the movement’s perfect spokesman.

9-9-9, Herm Cain and David Gregory

2011-10-16T18:06:00.004-05:00

I first wrote about what an impressive fellow Herman Cain was back in May (click here for the post) so it's nice to see him doing well the past month or so. Part of his appeal is that he seems like a pretty straightforward, no-nonsense kind of guy who is willing to say what's on his mind.

Today he had an interesting exchange with David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, as Cain tries to explain his tax reform plan, which he calls "9-9-9" (9% income tax, 9% corporate tax, 9% national sales tax). I think the approach has a lot of appeal, though I need to study it more.

David Gregory, however, feels no such obligation for further study. His handlers in the Democratic Party have told him it's bad, and so he devoted a great deal of time this morning trying to trip Cain up about the plan, by talking about its effect on state sales taxes. Cain tries over and over to explain that the plan has nothing to do with state taxes, but Gregory just isn't smart to enough to figure it out. The relevant transcript:

MR. GREGORY: The other defect in the plan comes from fellow conservatives who say, “You’ve got some problems here.” … “The real political defect,” the Journal writes, “of the Cain plan is that it imposes a new national sales tax while maintaining the income tax. … A 9 percent rate when combined with state and local levies would mean a tax on goods of 17 percent or more in many places. The cries for exemptions would be great.”
MR. CAIN: Don’t combine it with state taxes. This doesn’t address state taxes. If you add them together, yes, you’ll get that number. This is a replacement structure. These are replacement taxes. They’re not on top of anything.
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
MR. CAIN: We replace capital gains tax. We replace the payroll tax. We replace corporate income tax, replace personal income tax, and replace the death tax. It is a replacement tax structure.
MR. GREGORY: But where do state taxes go? You’re saying they’re going to be repealed?
MR. CAIN: If you–with the current structure, you have state taxes, right? So with this new structure, you’re still going to have taxes–state taxes. That is muddying the water.
MR. GREGORY: How so?
MR. CAIN: Because today, under the current tax code, state taxes are there if they have it. If they don’t have a state taxes, they don’t have it. It has nothing to do with this replacement structure for the federal tax code.
MR. GREGORY: But that doesn’t make any sense to me. If I’m already paying state taxes, and I have a new Cain administration national sales tax, I’ve got more state taxes.
MR. CAIN: No you don’t.
MR. GREGORY: How so?
MR. CAIN: David, David.
MR. GREGORY: You’re not saying they’re going away.
MR. CAIN: Your state taxes are the same. Your federal taxes, in most cases, are going to go down. That’s muddying the water.
MR. GREGORY: The Wall Street Journal says you have one on top of the other. There’s a combined levy.
MR. CAIN: That is not correct, David.
MR. GREGORY: Right.
MR. CAIN: Let’s try this one more time. State taxes are there today. The current tax code is a 10 million word mess. You have probably 100–you have thousands of loopholes and tricks and what I call “sneak attaxes” in the current code. State taxes today, whatever they are, zero or some number, has nothing to do with replacing the tax code. Nothing.

I once heard someone say to another person, in exasperation, "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you." The fact that David Gregory, entrusted with hosting Meet The Press, can't grasp the distinction between federal and state taxes tells you a lot about the pool of talent at NBC.

Another great moment in journalism

2011-10-11T16:15:00.003-05:00

The Senate is preparing to vote on the President's "jobs bill" and the run-up to the vote gives us a nice glimpse of the mindset at the Star-Tribune and other mainstream media outlets.

The current makeup of the Senate is 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans and 1 "independent," the self-avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who virtually always votes with the Democrats. In addition, if there is a tie vote, Vice-President Joe Biden - to whom the Constitution assigns the role of President of the Senate - can cast a tie-breaking vote.

Again, important point: The Democrats control the Senate. Remember that.

Now comes the "jobs bill." It's not really a jobs bill, it's just a multibillion dollar tax increase coupled with more government spending, similar to the 2009 "stimulus" bill that failed to create jobs and ballooned the deficit. It's a bad idea, but that's beside the point for this discussion.

The bill isn't going to pass, and it isn't going to pass because the Democrats - who, remember, control the Senate - can't get 50 Democrat senators to vote for it. If they could get to 50, Biden could break the tie, and the bill would pass.

But there are a number of Democrats - current estimates range from four to six - who oppose the tax increases and/or other components of the bill, and who say they will not vote for it.

We keep hearing that "bipartisanship" is what we need in Washington. Well, the opposition in the Senate to this bill is very bipartisan: Both Republicans and Democrats oppose it, while the only votes in favor of it are coming from one party, the Democrats.

So how does the Star-Tribune headline the story on their web site? "Republicans prepare to kill Obama jobs bill."

Isn't that beautiful? A bipartisan coalition in an institution controlled by Democrats opposes a bill, but it's "the Republicans" who are going to kill it.

Don't ever doubt that the Strib and its fellow travelers at the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. are totally in the tank for the Obama administration, and that what they report is much more propaganda than it is journalism.

Sorry Steve, you were no Edison

2011-10-10T01:10:00.006-05:00

I know this will be hard for those of you who know me to believe, but I was a bit of a bookwormish little nerd as a kid, as opposed to the bubbling, outgoing, sparkling extrovert I have become. (Turn off sarcasm generator now.)

Early on - and I'm talking first and second grade - I learned to love the library. I was lucky enough to develop pretty good reading skills at a young age, and the school library was my favorite place to hang out. In particular, I loved a series of books called the "Landmark series" of American history. Whatever I wanted to learn about history - The Alamo, Abraham Lincoln, the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson, Pearl Harbor - was all there in a book written specifically for elementary school kids. I learned to look for books that had that little Landmark chevron logo in the upper right corner of the cover, and I soaked them up.

And one that particularly captured my imagination was the Landmark biography of Thomas Edison (pictured here). I because engrossed in the story of his curiosity and his way of experimenting over and over until he could figure something out. I read dozens of these Landmark books, and Edison's story is the one I remember most.

Years later, I would end up working for General Electric, a company that was formed by merging the company Edison himself founded - Edison General Electric Company - and a competitor known as the Thomson-Houston company to become General Electric. Having admired Edison so much as a child, I got real pleasure in working for the company he founded.

(Today, of course, GE is practically a criminal enterprise, famous for making billions in profits without paying income taxes, dumping pollutants in the Hudson River for decades, turning out crappy appliances and getting government to subsidize its "green" business units that can't earn a spot in the competitive marketplace. (You know those stupid CFL bulbs that don't give you enough light and contain dangerous mercury to boot? GE became one of the first to figure out how to make them, then spent millions lobbying the government to make them mandatory.) But I digress...another story for another day.)

So....my point (and I'm getting to it) is that I always considered Edison an historical giant, which he certainly was. And though I admired the recently deceased Steve Jobs, I cringed a little when I heard or read commentaries about his death that called him things like "The Edison of his generation," because, frankly, there is NO Edison of this generation.

So I was pleased to come across this commentary in The American magazine, written by Vaclav Smil, which you can read by clicking on here: http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/why-jobs-is-no-edison.

I don't write this to denigrate Jobs in any way, but it's a nice chance to bring Edison's name up to a new generation, and remind people of what a remarkable genius he was. And if you're rummaging around a garage sale and find any of those old Landmark books, buy them for your kids. Someday they'll thank you.

Oh, those "evil" corporations

2011-10-07T17:37:00.005-05:00

You've probably seen this posted in several other places, but I like it so much I'm going to put it up here anyway. What little coherent thought that is coming out of the "Occupy Wall Street" and similar protests seems to be centered around the notion that corporations are evil.

Of course, corporations are nothing more than an organization of people who produce goods and services that people have the option of purchasing. I'm not sure what's inherently "evil" about that, but this graphic does a nice job of pointing out the silliness of the idea. Enjoy. (click on the picture for a bigger view).

Steve Jobs, R.I.P.

2011-10-06T02:08:00.004-05:00

I'm not one of those people - though I've worked with some, particularly graphic designers - who get emotional arguing about the utility and reliability of Apple computers vs. PCs. That doesn't limit, however, my admiration for Steve Jobs' story as an entrepreneur and innovator. But rather than have you read my own (inadequate) thoughts, I'm just going to turn this over to Kevin Williamson of National Review Online, who sums it all up pretty well, and uses it as a great illustration of what people with ideas and a vision can do for society, versus those who sit and wait for government to do something. Enjoy Kevin's work.

---------------------

By Kevin D. Williamson

I don’t know what Steve Jobs’s politics were, I don’t much care, and in any case they are beside the point. The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works. The model that made this:

into this:

and this:

into this:

That old Motorola cinderblock would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn’t play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy. Not all of them, but a great many.

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. Take this article, for example:

Last year the founder of the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Apple one of “America’s Least Philanthropic Companies.” Jobs had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.

CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

Seems realistic, doesn't it?

2011-10-05T15:11:00.002-05:00

As some of you may be aware, there is a group of nutjobs calling themselves "Occupy Wall Street" who have been setting up camp in New York's financial district for a couple of weeks. Copycats are springing up around the country, and they seemed to be the same types of protestors we had in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention: Anarchists who have no real aim other than generating attention for themselves.

But I wanted to be fair, and so I went to their web site, where one of the protestors listed the demands the group has. They are:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Free trade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

So that all seems pretty reasonable, eh? Dissolve all debts, pay everyone at least $20 an hour whether they work or not and spend $2 trillion on infrastructure and "green energy." All that's missing is mandatory missions to the moon to harvest the green cheese, and free pixie dust rations for everyone.

I'm guessing that not too many of these kids have spent time in an economics class, or perhaps any classroom. But I'm sure it won't take long for the New York Times, Washington Post or Star-Tribune to call them something like, "An authentic voice of a generation yearning for social justice and equality."

How goofy is Maureen Dowd?

2011-10-05T02:54:00.005-05:00

Granted, most people who live outside of the planet Manhattan - or its moon, Washington, D.C. - have never heard of Maureen Dowd. She's a New York Times columnist who has had her lips firmly planted on Obama's buttocks for a number of years.

In today's Times, writing about Chris Christie's decision not to run, she summed up the political mood of the country with this remarkably out-of-touch-with-reality sentence:

"Americans who have been hurt want to identify the villains, and Obama is loath to target villains."

Huh? Has anyone in the history of politics sought out and scapegoated villains more than Obama?

In less than three years in office, Obama has gone out of his way to demonize:

George W. Bush
Oil companies
Corporate jet owners
Insurance companies
Talk radio hosts
Millionaires
Israel
Oil "speculators"
Billionaires not named Warren Buffet
The Tea Party
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
The European economy
Arizona
Greedy doctors
The Japanese tsunami
Large corporations
The Supreme Court
Pick-up truck owners
And of course, Republicans in Congress who would like to vote on his "jobs bill" (see post below).

There is almost no one in the world that the President isn't willing to demonize. He's managed to take an office once known as "the most powerful position on Earth" and turn it into an inconsequential little job that is totally controlled by a vast, worldwide collection of bad guys.

Of course, this may not all be recognizable from the Planet Manhattan, which would explain Dowd's continued defense of a failed presidency.

No shame in the White House

2011-10-05T02:36:00.003-05:00

In case you doubted that the President's "jobs bill" was nothing more than a political play - rather than an attempt to create jobs - the White House removed all doubt with a ploy so cynical that even I'm shocked by it.

Republicans in the Senate are anxious to bring the jobs bill to a vote. In fact, Republican leader Mitch McConnell went to the floor of the Senate Tuesday to ask "unanimous consent" - a parliamentary move - that the bill be brought to the floor for a vote. But Democratic leader Harry Reid objected to the motion and blocked the bill from consideration.

Less than 15 minutes after this, the Obama campaign sent an email out to its supporters, complaining about Republican obstruction of the bill, and suggesting that people "Find Republican members of Congress on Twitter, call them out, and demand they pass this bill."

In other words, Obama and the Democrats have no intention of passing the bill, and introduced it only for the purpose of NOT passing it, then complaining about it not being passed, and trying to blame Republicans. These are the same folks that campaigned on "hope and change" and "no more business as usual." Their contempt for the American public is on full display, which may be why, according to this poll, ANY Republican candidate for President is six points ahead of Obama at this point.

Huh?

2011-10-03T00:35:00.003-05:00

Once in a while a sports figure will give a sportswriter a really, really good quote. And then there are other times, when they something almost incomprehensible. The latter are much more common.

Today, Vikings coach Leslie Frazier was asked if - considering the team's 0-4 start - he might consider changing quarterbacks. According to the Star-Tribune, Frazier said:

"We're not in a situation where I don't think we're going to make a quarterback change."

I'm thinking the English faculty at Alcorn State might not be top-shelf material.

A staffer's nightmare

2011-09-28T01:57:00.003-05:00

Anyone who has been a staff person for a high-level elected official - governor, congressman, senator, president - knows the nightmare: Doing something that makes you or your boss look like a doofus.

And because I had one or two such moments over the years, I can sympathize with the person in the White House press office who put together the credential pictured here for the President's just-completed trip.

As you can see from the list of cities on the credential, the President visited the states of Washington, California and Colorado. The staffer who designed the credential decided to illustrate this by highlighting the three states in white.

The problem? They highlighted Wyoming, not Colorado. Next time, double-check the atlas before you okay that printer's proof.

Take the last train to Sharksville

2011-09-25T18:19:00.008-05:00

Demonstrating once again that there is no "added value" in an Ivy League education, the President showed up on the Kentucky-Ohio border the other day and informed the crowd that America was the nation that built the "intercontinental railroad." (See a transcript here.)

Really? We built a railroad that runs from one continent to another? Was that the one between North America and Europe, or between North America and Asia?

It's just another sign that Barry isn't that bright a guy. We've enjoyed the other examples, noted here, here, here, here and here, that reinforce the notion that not only is he not the brightest guy in America, he probably isn't nearly as smart as Dan Quayle.

But at least some of the mistakes - the "Austrian" language, the inability to pronounce the word "corpsman" - could be written off as one-time gaffes. It turns out, however, that this was at least the fifth incidence of his using the "intercontinental railroad" phrase, (see examples here) which means the folks in his speechwriting shop aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer either.

Think there's any chance you'll read about this in the New York Times, Washington Post or Star-Tribune? Doesn't seem likely, because it would interfere with their already-established narrative of Mr. Hope-and-Change being a brainiac, although a quick glance at the nation's economic statistics would seem to tell you otherwise.

A new blog for Minnesota Wild fans

2011-09-23T02:35:00.004-05:00

Actually, two new blogs. As many of you know, I work part-time for the Wild, and one of the things I do is prepare a set of game notes before each home game. These are distributed to the Guest Services and Security staff, along with some others, before each game. They provide the staff with a little background info, some historical notes, standings, etc., in part so that they can have a little extra insight when they talk hockey with the patrons.

Anyway, this year I've decided to put those notes up on a separate blog, so that staff can read them before they get to the arena, and so that they also have a place to direct some of the fans who have learned about the notes and often request a copy. So before each home game, you'll be able to find the notes at www.wildgamenotes.com. I anticipate that I'll also share some post-game observations and maybe a little discussion will take place.

The second blog belongs to my oldest son, Travis, who is a very shrewd observer of both the Wild and the entire NHL. He has started a new blog at:

http://wildlybiasedobservations.tumblr.com/

and I expect it will be a lot of fun for hockey fans. Enjoy them both!

Line of the week

2011-09-21T02:43:00.002-05:00

I'm not normally a big Jay Leno fan - his humor seems stuck in 1992 - but tonight he got off a really terrific line about the President:

"After saying the jobs bill is paid for, President Obama now says that it will be paid for by raising taxes over 10 years. I can’t figure out if he’s the kind of guy who makes infomercials, or the kind of guy who falls for infomercials."

It was said back in the '70s that people really knew Nixon was in trouble when Johnny Carson started making fun of him. I think it still holds true, and probably even more so for a Democrat: When Hollywood lefties like Leno think you're a buffoon, you're probably in big trouble.

Solyndra....get used to hearing about it

2011-09-15T14:04:00.005-05:00

The White House predicated much of its economic recovery plan on the idea of "green jobs." The idea is built on the fantasy that there is some sort of available technology - solar, wind, biomass, whatever - that can be cheaper and more effective than our current energy sources.

That fact is that if such technology existed and could be properly harnessed, the private sector would be doing it. But liberals love to believe the fantasy that we can all slap a solar panel on our roof and a windmill in our backyard and fulfill all our energy needs without any byproducts.

It's a pipe dream, but it's a harmless one - until they start spending your money trying to fulfill it.

Which is where Solyndra comes in. Solyndra was a California start-up company whose founders claimed they could create thousands of jobs manufacturing solar panels, if only they could get a little help from the government.

And help they got. The company applied for a $535 million loan guarantee through a Dept. of Energy program. The application was being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which had a number of concerns about the project, and one OMB staffer even said that according to the business model, the company would "run out of money by September, 2011." That warning turned out to be prescient.

But the White House was undeterred. E-mails released this week by congressional investigators show an unrelenting pressure from the Obama administration to approve the loan guarantees. OMB finally bowed to that pressure, allowing the president to travel to California (see the NBC clip below) to boast about all of the "green jobs" he was producing.

Except, of course, it was just another liberal pipe dream. Solyndra burned through half a billion dollars, then filed for bankruptcy and laid off all 1,100 workers. The FBI has raided the business, and the Treasury Department has launched a fraud investigation.

So why would Obama push so hard for this project? Well, as Deep Throat said in "All The President's Men," "follow the money."

It turns out that a foundation belonging to billionaire George Kaiser was a big investor in Solyndra. Who is George Kaiser? He's an Oklahoma business man who:

-- Personally donated more than $53,000 to Obama's 2008 campaign
-- Raised and "bundled" between $50,000 and $100,000 for that campaign
-- Encouraged Solyndra executives and board members to donate another $87,050 to that campaign
-- Was a visitor to the White House on 16 occasions

The House held two days of hearings this week on the scandal, which is explained well in the NBC report below. You'll be hearing a LOT more about this story in the coming weeks.

"If you love me, you got to help me pass this bill"

2011-09-15T00:49:00.003-05:00

His Holiness, Obama the First (and soon to be last) actually said that to a crowd in North Carolina on Wednesday, reported here by AFP.

So that's what it's come to, eh? His popularity plummeting, his policies ruining the economy and his fellow Democrats deserting him (see that story here) Obama is down to the only card he thinks he has left: The cult of personality.

It got him to the Oval Office, where his inexperience and ineptitude have been exposed. It won't get his flawed jobs program passed, and it won't get him re-elected.

A remarkable 9/11 story

2011-09-11T00:09:00.005-05:00

Everyone is writing about their memories of 9/11/01, and being a bit of a contrarian, I wasn't planning to write anything special, since my experience was quite similar to that of millions of other people. Shock, disbelief, anger, etc.

But today I found a story worth sharing. It involves a pilot named Heather Penney, who was a Lieutenant on 9/11, stationed at Andrews Air Force base outside of Washington. You can read the entire account here, but the story in a nutshell is this:

On duty as a newly-minted Air Force pilot, Heather and her commanding officer learned of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks much like everyone else. Then came the news that a fourth plane was in the air, and believed to be heading for Washington. The two of them were told to get in their jets and stop the airliner.

The kicker to the story is that there was no time to put ammunition or missiles on their planes. The two of them went up in the air, prepared to fly their planes directly into the airliner, sacrificing their own lives to bring down the plane.

Read the story for all of the details, but it's a remarkable story of heroism that Lt. Penney - now a Major - has not talked publicly about until now.

I remember being with some friends a week or two after 9/11, and we talked about how encouraging it was to see people flying the flag, singing "God Bless America" and the general sense of patriotism that was becoming part of more people's daily lives. I said that while it was uplifting to see people reacting that way, I wanted others to know that some of us felt that same way on Sept. 10, and that we didn't need to be attacked to understand how much we loved America.

Heather Penney loved America as well, and was prepared to give up her life in a war that none of us even understood we were fighting at that point. She went on to fly two tours in Iraq, and still flies for the National Guard. As long as America continues to produce men and women with her kind of courage, we'll continue to be the land of the free.

Enjoy her story.

If you don't believe me.....

2011-09-10T02:53:00.003-05:00

....then perhaps you'll want to listen to Michael Barone. While Barone might be considered slightly conservative, most political observers consider him a middle-of-the-road guy - he wrote for U.S. News and World Report for 18 years - whose opinions are worth listening to. He has been writing about politics for several decades, and is the editor of The Almanac of American Politics. Educated at Harvard and Yale Law, and a former George McGovern supporter, Barone is hardly a flaming right-winger.

You already knew I was not going to be impressed with Obama's "jobs speech" on Thursday night, so I won't bore you with my take. Instead, I'll treat you to Barone's response, which I consider a serious, thoughtful analysis. Enjoy:

------

Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be). He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.” Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.

Obama assured us that this would all be paid for. But as far as I could gather, he punted that part of it to the supercommittee of 12 members set up under the debt ceiling bill. He now blithely charges it with coming up with more than its current goal of $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Oh, and he’s going to announce “a more ambitious deficit plan” that will “stabilize our debt in the long run”--11 days from now.

In the meantime, he called for higher taxes on “a few of the most affluent citizens”—as if this could pay for all the spending he’s been backing. What’s interesting here is that he seems to have left the way open for a 1986-style tax reform, cutting tax rates and eliminating tax preferences, or at least that’s how I read these words: “While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets [did he look up at his guest Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, which paid no corporate tax on $14 billion in profits last year?]. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary—an outrage he has asked us to fix [actually, Buffett could volunteer to pay more if he wants to]. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake, and everybody pays their fair share. And I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.” As I read it, he’s not insisting on higher tax rates, though he apparently is not ready to agree to a tax reform that is scored as revenue-neutral, as the 1986 act was. Also, if Obama wanted a 1986-type reform, he could have used the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission’s recommendations last December as a springboard; instead, he brushed them aside without a murmur. So on balance I don’t think he’s serious on this, but there is a glimmer of a possibility that he is.

Straw men took a terrible beating from the president. He assailed “tax loopholes” for oil companies, the chief one of which is that they are treated like other companies classified as manufacturers. The administration proposal is that the five largest oil companies shouldn’t be, because—well, because we want to get our hands on more of their money. Today’s Republicans, he gave us to understand, want to “eliminate most government regulations” and “wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades.” And, he suggested, they would never have created public health schools or the G.I. Bill or research universities.

When Barack Obama says, “This isn’t political grandstanding,” you have a pretty good clue that that is exactly what it is. Lest anyone doubt that, consider this from the third-to-last paragraph. “You should pass it. And I intend to take that message to every corner of the country.”

In other words, this was a campaign speech. It might result in passage of some of Obama’s proposals, and some of them might even do some good. But of course we didn’t see the kind of change of direction on policy that Bill Clinton made in 1995 and 1996, which enabled him to rise above his party’s 45% level of support in the 1994 elections (that’s the Democratic percentage of the House popular vote) and with 49% of the vote win reelection in 1996. (Ross Perot won 6% that year; polls suggest two points of it would have gone to Clinton had Perot not run.) I don’t think these proposals have the potential to turn around the careening economy, I don’t think many of them will become law and I don’t think this campaign initiative is likely to prove successful. From the demeanor and affect of the unhappy warrior at the podium last night, I suspect he may feel the same way.

The "summer of sorrow"

2011-09-07T23:14:00.006-05:00

That's how Star-Tribune NHL writer Mike Russo headlined his blog post today, announcing the death of former Wild center Pavol Demitra in a plane crash in Russia. An entire team was lost in the crash, including at least seven players and coaches with NHL experience, but Demitra's loss strikes the State of Hockey directly.

There have been a number of memorable nights in the first 10 seasons at Xcel Energy Center, but perhaps the biggest regular-season game was April 3, 2008. With just two games left in the season, the Wild needed a win over Calgary to clinch their first-ever division championship. That night, the player who best answered the call was Pavol Demitra.

The Wild had acquired Demitra in their first-ever "blockbuster" trade to play center alongside fellow Slovakian Marian Gaborik, and the two had instant chemistry. On that April night - as you can see from the highlights below - Demitra first set up Todd Fedoruk for the tying goal and then, with the score tied 1-1 in the 3rd period, he threw a beautiful cross-ice pass to spring Gaborik, who went in to score what would be the game-winner. The Wild had their first championship.

Demitra played two seasons here, scoring 40 goals and 118 points in 139 games, and was a thrill to watch.

The Wild have played just 10 seasons, and about 160 players have worn Iron Range Red. With Demitra's passing, we have now lost three of them, including Sergei Zholtok and Derek Boogaard. The odds of losing three athletes from one team before the age of 40 seem very high.

R.I.P., Pavol, and thanks for helping us hang a banner.

The dumbest thing you'll ever read in your life

2011-09-04T01:08:00.012-05:00

Back in July I wrote about some of the failures of higher education, and this weekend the Star-Tribune printed what will now be exhibit "A" in the case for the diminished value of sending so many people to college.

I'm going to reprint the entire op-ed here, rather than simply link to it, because I'm afraid someday the link will no longer work, and this idiocy must be saved for posterity.

Under the headline "The subtle racism around us (even in a cup of coffee)", someone named Hinda Mandell serves up something so....well, I'll just let you read it for yourself:

----------------

What do you do when a favorite coffee shop features various coffee blends with racially tinged names?

This is probably not one of life's great questions. But it's one I've been pondering lately.

I was sitting in this beloved joint in New York recently, with its hipster-hippie ambiance, when I overheard a conversation. I'm convinced that the barista and customer, both white, were oblivious to the racially charged nature of their utterances.

Asked the customer: "What type of roast is the Jungle Roast?"

The barista, who looked on the younger side of 20, answered: "It's a darker roast."

I sat there flabbergasted. These two women were engaging in a practical conversation -- is the coffee a light or dark brew?

But because of the name of the roast -- and its richer flavor -- they were in fact reinforcing the notion of the jungle and its people as "dark."

Perhaps you think I'm making too much of a simple exchange.

But consider, too, that while eavesdropping I was sipping on a luscious coffee blend that the shop calls Jamaica Me Crazy. It's seasoned with fresh cinnamon. Maybe that's what they drink in Jamaica? I don't know, since I've never been there.

But I do know that if the coffee was labeled Protestants A Plenty, Catholics Be Crazy, Jews be Jivin' or Blacks Be Boppin', there would be an uproar. Of course, Protestants and Catholics, as part of the religious mainstream, do not typically face the brunt of prejudice in the United States.

And most know that intolerance against Jews and blacks is not publicly accepted. Blatant bigotry is easy to spot, while covert bigotry -- where an entire group is used to sell coffee -- can be easier to stomach and therefore ignore.

It's been nearly a decade since I learned one of my biggest life lessons. Difference is all about perception.

This lesson came in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, when I was riding a campus commuter bus with a college classmate into Boston. I was retelling a story I heard on the radio. It was about a teenager who had an African-American parent and an Arab-American parent.

The newscast covered this boy's life in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, since the boy's skin was dark, but not in a "familiar" way. As a result, he was often met with suspicion by people ranging from clerks to security personnel.

"He must have been interesting-looking," I said.

That's when a fellow student turned around in her seat, faced me and said, "Why? Because he's black?"

I don't remember my response. But I remember feeling knee-jerk defensive, as one typically feels when accused of racism or any other kind of "ism."

Yet it took me the better part of a decade, until I began studying communication messages for a living, to understand this student's point. The teenager who is half African-American and half Arab-American is "interesting" because he is different -- at least to me, a white person with two white parents who grew up in mostly white neighborhoods.

I should have known better than to use the descriptive term "interesting," which is really code for "different," especially since I grew up as a Jew in Minnesota.

One summer in high school, I attended an all-girls' basketball camp. I was the only one under 5 foot 7 inches. And the only non-Christian. One night, a girl who slept on the bunk above mine was complaining about her ex-boyfriend.

"He's weird," she said. And then, as an afterthought: "He's Jewish."

Uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation, I spoke up. "I'm Jewish," I said.

My bunkmate then reached out her hand. "Give me five," she said.

I did. And I never felt like such an idiot, high-fiving a person because I was Jewish and therefore different -- to her.

It's this distance of difference that allows the coffee shop to offer its blends without protest. After all, what's the likelihood that someone from Jamaica -- or the jungle -- would walk into this cafe in upstate New York cafe?

People tolerate intolerance if it's not directed at them and if it's dished up in a cutesy format.

I have not been back to that coffee shop for a while. Not out of protest, but because it would force me to confront myself. Do I embarrass the cafe manager by saying something? Do I become complicit by ordering a medium Jamaica Me Crazy with steamed milk, please?

Deciphering these messages might be the easier part. Figuring out what to do with them afterward is a lot harder.

---------------

My first thought was that this had to be a parody. I had to make sure I wasn't at The Onion's website. No one could possibly be stupid enough to really think that calling a coffee blend "Jamaica Me Crazy" is "covert bigotry." But as you read on, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that she is totally serious. It's not a parody; She is actually "flabbergasted" that there is a blend of coffee called "Jungle Roast," and that people aren't ashamed to say the words out loud.

By her standards, there must have been incredible racism afoot in the land when people began selling Belgian waffles, French toast, Canadian bacon, German chocolate cake, Swiss cheese, Spanish rice and Swedish meatballs.

How did those poor people from a city in Germany ever deal with the racism and bigotry of having people across America eating Hamburgers? Should I now feel racial guilt for ever ordering Peking duck? And if you've ever eaten Chicken Kiev, Brussels sprouts or Irish stew, you're probably guilty of "covert racism" as well!

What about a Milky Way candy bar? Isn't that offensive to any would-be visitors to our planet from elsewhere in the galaxy? Was it the consumption of Polish sausage that make all those high school Polack jokes palatable? I probably have to apologize to Hank Hill for having ever eaten Texas toast. And everything Thanksgiving we must be offending the entire country of Turkey!

The rest of her silliness speaks for itself, but here's what I find really scary: She is described at the bottom of the column as "a 1998 graduate of Edina High School and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York."

First off, if I'm running Edina High School, I'd revoke the diploma immediately. Who needs the bad publicity that comes from having a total nitwit claim to be a graduate of your school? Secondly, you really have to think twice before writing those large tuition checks to any higher education system in which someone like Hinda Mandell can become an assistant professor.

In all seriousness, the real tragedy is this: Sadly, there are still vestiges of racism and bigotry in the world. But when the name of a coffee blend is considered "racism," then the word "racism" has no meaning anymore, and it becomes more and more difficult to combat real racism. It's not just that Ms. Mandell is an intellectual featherweight, the fact is that her kind of thinking is a huge obstacle to the noble goal of a color-blind society.

And finally, the fact that an editor at the Star-Tribune found this piece of gibberish worthy of printing tells us a lot about the value of their judgments as well.

UPDATE: I don't know for sure that it's the same person, but there is a "Hinda Mandell" on Facebook who lives in Rochester, New York. She lists her colleges attended as Brandeis, Syracuse and Harvard, which makes you think mom and dad didn't quite get their money's worth with little Hinda's college fund.

The great Minnesota get-together

2011-09-02T12:12:00.016-05:00

I admit it: I'm a state fair junkie. When I was a kid I loved it, when I spent hundreds of hours there working for Sen. Rudy Boschwitz and his flavored-milk stand, I loved it, and now that I spend 9-10 nights each year working at the Grandstand, I still love it.

The food, the people-watching, the same old familiar sights year after year...it's always fun. Here's a quick photo essay of this year's activity.

Here's Cal Clutterbuck of the Wild, signing autographs at the Wild's booth. Judging from his biceps, I'd say he's been doing his off-season weightlifting.

Classic state fair scene: Minnesotans watching a gadget demonstration in the hot, stuffy grandstand.

If you want to be considered a "real" radio station, you have to broadcast live from the fairgrounds. Here's KFAN's Dan Barrerio interviewing Gopher basketball coach Tubby Smith.

And just a hundred yards or so away, Joe Soucheray of ESPN 1500 (formerly KSTP-AM) trades jibes with Governor Mark Dayton.

The Minnesota Twins now have a huge tent of their own, and out back they've set up a little whiffle ball field.

My daughter Corrie gave each set of grandparents their own nickname, and I'm "Opa" which is a Dutch variation of Grandpa. Imagine my surprise to find my own food/music/beer spot on the grounds. (I think Opaa is a Greek version of the same word.)

UPDATE: The valedictorian of my high school class (Princeton '74), Sandy Radeke, informs me that "Opaa" is sort of a Greek version of "Cheers" or some other celebratory word. Makes sense, and is further evidence (as if anymore were needed) that Sandy was paying attention in class while I was slacking off.

Yes, you need to pay more in taxes

2011-08-29T10:56:00.005-05:00

Government budget cuts, we're always told, are "draconian" and cut government services "to the bone." That's always the rationale for higher taxes: We've cut everything we can cut, and there's just no alternative to increasing revenue.

Well, here are a few items that might make you think twice about the need for higher taxes.

First, the State of Illinois has spent thousands of dollars paying convicted sex offenders to babysit. That's here.

Then comes the City of Minneapolis, which is trying to lay off firemen, but is offering up to $84,000 a year for a new "Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator." Details here. How did people ever walk anywhere or ride a bike without a government "coordinator?"

Not to be outdone, the St. Paul School District is paying its superintendent - who already has a base salary of $180,000 - another $40,000 to move from the suburbs into the city proper, even though there is no legal requirement for her to live in the city, and even though she already owns a condo in the city. Details here.

Finally, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is spending $700,000 - more than the median cost of a home in the city's famed Sunset district - to add a 10-foot wheelchair ramp to the podium in their chambers even though none of the board members are disabled. The rationale for a ramp that costs $70,000 A FOOT is available here.

Just a little something to remember the next time you hear a public official complain that "we just can't cut any more from the budget."

"Irresponsible and unpatriotric"

2011-08-25T10:47:00.002-05:00

Just over three years ago, presidential candidate Barack Obama was angry. He was upset with President Bush's handling of the federal budget, and lashed out at the President. The full clip is below, but here's the money quote:

"The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up the national debt from 5 trillion for the first 42 presidents — number 43 added 4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have 9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic."

Got that? Driving up the debt is "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic."

So, 37 months later, here we are, and President Obama has already added $4 trillion in debt, much of it on the "credit card from the Bank of China," so that we now have $13 trillion of debt, just about $47,000 for every man, woman and child.

By his own definition, Obama is an "irresponsible and unpatriotic" president. Expect this clip to be seen in a lot of campaign ads next year.

It's baseball....Don't leave early!

2011-08-22T00:55:00.009-05:00

I've been around baseball most of my life, and I've been fortunate enough to have been involved in a number of different capacities: Player, manager, sportswriter, broadcaster and umpire. I don't know how many games I've actually been around, but I know I have umpired more than 1,500 at the high school, college and town team level, plus played at least a couple hundred more, gone to at least a couple hundred major league games....well, you get the picture.

And I'm not saying that to boast, I'm just saying it to help explain the notion that in baseball, there's no way you've ever "seen it all." No two games are alike, and as the cliche goes, you never know what can happen, as evidenced by these two clips.

The first is from a minor league game in Omaha, and involves a bizarre triple play that begins with two runners on, and the batter hitting a long drive to center field. The Nashville outfielder gets a glove on it, bobbles it off his head, makes the catch and doubles two runners off base for a triple play.

He makes the catch for the first out, and throws the ball in. When the infielder steps on second, the runner who started the play on second is out, and with the throw to first, the runner who started on first (and has already rounded second, not thinking the ball would be caught) becomes the third out of the play.

The second clip comes from Atlanta, where a Braves fan makes one of the greatest catches of a foul ball that I've ever seen. It's stuff like this that always makes me reluctant to ever leave a game early, because you never know what you'll see. Enjoy:

An insight into Obama's priorities

2011-08-19T00:59:00.003-05:00

You may have noticed that the stock market is tanking, the economy is stalling (again), unemployment remains over 9.0%, the federal government is running a deficit of more than a trillion dollars and housing values have stagnated. If you've noticed these things, you might think to yourself, "What's the most important thing government could do to help the economy?"

Well, here's what's at the top of Obama's list: More diversity! From The Hill:

President Obama issued an executive order Thursday intended to coordinate a “government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.”

The order creates a council of deputy agency chiefs and federal workers tasked with developing a government-wide plan to improve diversity in recruitment, training, and promotion of federal workers. The plan is due within 90 days, and each federal agency has been tasked with developing its own guidelines within 120 days after that.

“The federal government has a special opportunity to lead by example,” said John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in a conference call.

Because, you know, the economy just isn't going to get going until we have more people of color and women in government. According to OPM's own numbers, minorities currently have ONLY 38.8% of the federal jobs, and women make up ONLY 43.9% of the federal workforce. Clearly our top economic priority needs to be increasing those numbers! Because if we can just turn over 50.1% of all government jobs to women, the economy will immediately pick up.

Fair and balanced?

2011-08-15T14:17:00.004-05:00

The Star-Tribune sent staffer Mike Kaszuba to Cannon Falls today to live-blog the President's visit. In the space of four blog posts, Kaszuba managed to find three people with nice things to say about Obama. Who were they?

Well, the first was a man described as having "sympathy" for the President. "I blame Congress for most of the problems," he said.

Then came a fellow who said Obama needs to attack Republicans more. "We tend to forget what he's accomplished in two years," he said.

Finally came a review of Obama's speech. "I thought it was terrific," said a guy named Bruce Roberts.

So who were these three? Well, the first guy, named Bud Widholm, was described as "a retired state employee."

The second, Tim Bowes, was "a public school teacher from Red Wing."

And Bruce Roberts? "A professor at St. Olaf College."

So there's your sampling: Three guys who make their living as recipients of taxpayer dollars. Yes, I'm sure they think deficit spending, higher taxes and a bigger, more intrusive government are all wonderful things. Another nice bit of balanced reporting by the mainstream media.

New Olympic symbol

2011-08-12T12:20:00.002-05:00

This is making the rounds right now as a replacement emblem for the 2012 London Olympics. Funny, but the British riots are a very serious symptom of the sickness that is consuming European society.

Congratulations!

2011-08-10T11:58:00.003-05:00

Congratulations to the unions that spent nearly $30 million in order to retain the Democrats' minority status in the Wisconsin Senate. That has to make your members feel really good about seeing that "union dues" deduction line on their paychecks.

In a somewhat related story, it was announced today that cleaning up and repairing the Wisconsin Capitol building after the union thugs occupied it earlier this year cost taxpayers about $8 million. Seems like we could have hired quite a few teachers with that money, eh?

He's just not that bright

2011-08-09T01:33:00.003-05:00

Over the past couple of years, I have argued here, here, here and here, that Obama just really isn't that bright a guy. I've yet to read anything that would change my mind.

Now Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has come to pretty much the same conclusion, and has a long list of evidence. You can read the piece here, and it's worthwhile.

As the U.S. loses its AAA credit rating for the first time in history, unemployment stays over 9.0% and the economy continues to tank, we sort of have to ask ourselves: "Really? We elected a guy who never ran a business, never ran a state, never served even a full term in Congress and never held a real job in the private sector in his adult life? Really? We turned leadership of the free world over to him? What the he** were we thinking?"

What liberals really think about you

2011-08-07T01:07:00.003-05:00

It's all summed up quite nicely in a piece you can read here, by someone named Jacob Weisberg, writing at the Slate.com website. Weisberg is a classic liberal, who believes we need higher taxes, and that ultimately, only government can solve problems. He's a little pessimistic right now, because, as he puts it:

"...there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people."

See, there's the problem: You and I are just too stupid to understand that there's nothing wrong with trillion-dollar deficits extending into the foreseeable future. We're too stupid to see what a genius Obama is, and how he could save the world if we'd just let him do whatever he wants.

Thank goodness we have upper-crust elites like Jacob Weisberg to do the thinking for all of us dummies out here. Now if we would just stop having elections - and hand our votes over to geniuses like Weisberg and Obama - they could fix the world and save us from our own stupidity. Wouldn't that be great?

Noel Evans, RIP

2011-08-05T15:00:00.010-05:00

March was a difficult time for me. I had a much-loved aunt dying of cancer, and visited her for the last time. A fellow Gideon succumbed to heart disease. A former co-worker and friend was lost to cancer. Looking for a little respite from the death that seemed to be surrounding me, I was looking forward to working at the State High School Hockey tournament.

But instead of finding an escape, in my first hour I had two of my regular season-ticket holders show up without their usual companions. First, a man from Hudson, Wisconsin, showed up without his son, who had been wheelchair bound since a motorcycle accident. They sat on the disabled-seating platform at the top of my section and we had great visits every year. But his son had recently contracted pneumonia and was unable to beat the infection. Just a few minutes later, the husband of an elderly couple from Woodbury who attended every year arrived without his wife. He explained to me that she had passed just a few weeks earlier, and in one of their last conversations in the hospital as death neared, he told me that she reminded him to "get to the tournament and tell Tim how much I enjoyed talking with him."

All of this tore at my heartstrings. And then along came Noel Evans.

Noel was one of the very first people I met when I moved to Red Wing in 1980. A dentist, his office was down the block from the newspaper office where I worked. He had a son, Erik, who was a gifted hockey player, and Noel was anxious to meet the new guy who would be covering hockey. He loved to talk about sports, and we hit it off immediately.

A Red Wing high school grad, he lettered in baseball and football, and lettered in baseball at St. Olaf. He got his dental degree at the University of Minnesota, and he loved Gopher sports his whole life. After a two-year stint in the Air Force he returned home to Red Wing and ran a dental practice for the next 35 years. But describing Noel as just a "dentist" or a "hockey parent" doesn't come close to doing him justice. Noel was the sort of guy who was part of the fabric of Red Wing, and evidence of his involvement was everywhere.

He was a Jaycee, and was their "Young Man of the Year" in 1966. He coached Little League. He taught Sunday school at United Lutheran for 25 years. He was a member of the Rotary and Lions and Kiwanis clubs, as well as the local American Legion post. He was chairman of the school board, and he helped found the Red Wing Amateur Hockey Association. His name is on the Red Wing High School Wall of Honor.

It was hard to NOT find Noel around Red Wing. If the Lions were selling peanuts or collecting old eyeglasses, Noel was there. If you went to the Kiwanis pancake breakfast, Noel was over the stove, flipping pancakes. If you went to a high school football, basketball or hockey game, chances are Noel was somewhere in the bleachers.

When hockey began in Red Wing, there was no local arena. Having driven his children all over southern Minnesota in search of ice time, Noel decided to spearhead the drive to get Red Wing its own rink, and over the years my stories in the Red Wing paper quoted him any number of times. The effort succeeded, and when Bergwall Arena opened on Valentine's Day in 1983, Noel had the biggest smile in the place. His love of Red Wing and his community involvement were unmatched. Even in retirement he mowed lawns for the city and was a substitute rural mail carrier. His whole life revolved around serving others.

After our kids grew we saw each other less, but bumped into each other from time to time, and we always saw each other in March at the state hockey tournament. He and a couple other locals shared some season tickets in my section, and it was always a highlight of the weekend to catch up, ask about each other's children and hear his thoughts on the tourney.

Last March, he approached me at Xcel Energy Center, walking with a bit of a limp. Because he was 74 years old, and still very active, I assumed he had undergone a knee or hip replacement. No, he told me, they had found cancer in his lungs and it had already spread. In all likelihood, he said, this would be his last state hockey tournament.

Which just didn't seem possible. And it still doesn't, even though I attended his funeral today, and he was laid to rest on the outskirts of Red Wing, just a couple slap shots away from his home. The church was filled to overflowing, and the minister said, "Noel's smile told people more about Christ's love than any of my sermons ever did."

Leaving the church, I had a moment with his widow, Alberta, and I told her that "Every kid who ever skated at Bergwall Arena owes something to Noel." Which is true enough, but again, doesn't do justice to the legacy of a great guy who did so much for so many, and did it all with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. Thank you, my friend, and God bless.

The Summer Wind...

2011-08-02T16:51:00.003-05:00

No political statement here, just something that amuses me: A New York City construction worker spending his lunch hour with a karaoke machine, belting out a Sinatra tune. In fact, I heard Wayne Newton sing this same song just last week out at Treasure Island, and this guy has 10 times the chops that Newton had. Enjoy:

Great moments in government

2011-08-02T09:18:00.008-05:00

Just a little sampler from the news today, with a common theme: Next time the government says it's running out of money, just remember that it still has enough money to do these things:

Click here to read about the ticket given to an 11-year-old girl for trying to save an injured bird.

Click here to read about the 4-year-old forced to shut down her lemonade stand.

Click here to read a similar story from Wisconsin.

And here for one in Georgia.

Click here to read about the public employee union that hired a private investigator to harass high school kids at their homes.

And just so you know this isn't just a recent phenomena, here is a story from 1934, when a private businessman was fined and jailed by the feds for not charging enough for his service.

Government. Yes, let's have lots more of it.

UPDATE: Just to show that Canadian government can be as stupid and money-wasting as our own, here is a story about a government health agency handing out $50,000 in free crack pipes. According to the story, the aim of the project is to "reach out to the rising number of crack cocaine smokers."

NOT a parody!

"The Spending is Nuts"

2011-08-02T01:26:00.003-05:00

The Powerline Prize winner (see a couple posts down for details) has been announced. It might not have been my favorite, but it's very, very good, particularly the ending. Enjoy:

"For God and country. Geronimo."

2011-08-01T14:06:00.003-05:00

I'm not normally one to recommend anything from the New Yorker magazine, but the August 8 issue contains a remarkably detailed account of the Seal Team Six raid that killed Osama BinLaden. It's written by Nicholas Schmidle, who obviously has some very good sources in the intelligence community, and in the White House as well.

Click here to read the story, and marvel at the capabilities of the American military.

The Powerline Prize

2011-07-28T12:13:00.006-05:00

A couple months ago the guys over at Powerline (www.powerlineblog.com) announced a competition they called the Powerline Prize. They asked people to submit some sort of representation that best explained the federal debt. Entrants could use any medium they wanted to: A song, a video, a PowerPoint presentation, a painting, whatever. And Powerline made it worth entering: First prize was $100,000!

The top 10 winners are being revealed, and I'll share a few over the next few days. This video was NOT one of the winners, but I liked it a lot. Enjoy:

Can a college degree actually HURT you?

2011-07-27T11:12:00.007-05:00

It's a bit of coincidence that just as I was writing about the declining value of college education, (see two preceding posts) along comes a story about someone who is actually being harmed by his decision to gain more education.

Let me introduce a friend of mine named Katy Lindberg. Katy runs her own insurance agency in Hastings, MN - you can see her agency page by clicking here - and she does a terrific job. I know that no one is excited about talking to an insurance agent, but Katy is as good as they come, and if you let her handle your insurance - auto, home, life, whatever - you'll never be sorry.

End of commercial. The story involves her husband, Andy, who wants to be an elementary school teacher. While preparing to enter the field, Andy made the decision to not just get a bachelor's degree in education, but a master's degree as well.

Now he's finding out that the master's degree is making it well-nigh impossible for him to even get interviewed for a teaching job. It's an illuminating story about one of the many detrimental effects unionization has had on education.

Up until about the midpoint of the 20th century, teachers were similar to free agents in football. You found a school to hire you, negotiated a contract and taught for a year. At the end of that year, if the school wanted you back, they made you another contract offer designed to keep you there. If you were a particularly good teacher, you often found yourself in a "bidding war" between schools, all of whom strove to find and hire the best possible teachers.

Then came the unionization of teachers and collective bargaining agreements. Instead of having each teacher paid based on his or her performance, the unions insisted on a scale for everyone. That led to the development of what is known as the "steps and lanes" system.

The way it works in most districts is that there is a big chart, with horizontal columns listing the number of years a teacher has taught (the "steps") and vertical columns listing the amount of education a teacher has (the "lanes.") Determining a teacher's salary is simply a matter of finding their spot on the grid. So every teacher with four years of experience and a bachelor's degree gets paid the same amount, regardless of their effectiveness.

(If I'm not describing this adequately, click here for a great visual example.)

What Andy has inadvertently done is price himself out of the market. By obtaining a master's degree, he has forced any district that hires him to pay him about 8% more than they would have to pay another rookie teacher with just a bachelor's degree. In a time when there is a surplus of teachers, and districts are fighting tight budgets, it seems unlikely that Andy will get a fair shake in the hiring process, no matter how gifted and talented a teacher he might be. And of course, Andy isn't allowed to say to a district, "Hire me, and pay me less," because the union won't allow that.

Two points:

#1. The time and money Andy spent obtaining his master's degree has not only failed to help him, it's actually HURT his job prospects. I think that's a great metaphor for the current problems in higher education that I alluded to in previous posts.

#2. An equal loser in this scenario is the education system itself, which finds it very difficult to weed out poor teachers, while at the same time unable to reward exceptional teachers. The steps-and-lane system works AGAINST the efficient distribution of education resources in a way that makes our children receive a poorer education than they would receive if schools were able to make pay and hiring decisions independent of the union scale.

College degrees and fastballs

2011-07-24T22:26:00.006-05:00

This is a follow-up to the post below regarding college, and an explanation of my own personal theory about the reasons why college degrees are overrated.

First, here's a link to an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Titled, "Are Too Many Students Going to College?" the article provides a number of interesting quotes, and also points out that in 1970, 40 percent of high school graduates went on to college, but that number is now closer to 70%. Most of those who share insights in the article agree that a four-year college is a poor choice for most high school students, with one of them saying, "College attendance, in my view, is usually a drain on our economy and society."

For the first 200 years or so of the United States, a college degree was a requirement only for certain professions, or higher levels of a company. But almost anyone attempting to crack the job market, or move up in an organization, often finds out that the words, "Four-year degree required," can stop your career in its tracks. Why is that? Well, my theory relates to the sports world.

For years, baseball scouts or college coaches trying to find pitchers would go out and look for young men who knew how to, well, pitch. There's a lot more to pitching than just throwing a baseball hard. I've spent literally thousands of hours behind home plate, either as a catcher or as an umpire, and I know what it takes to successfully pitch. Good pitchers don't need to throw hard. It doesn't hurt, but it's not a requirement. They DO need to throw with control (putting the pitch where they want it), they need to know how to read a batter's weaknesses (Does he hit high pitches or low? Can he handle inside pitches? Will he chase an outside curve ball?), and they need to learn how to keep hitters off-balance by changing the speed and movement of their deliveries. Baseball history is full of successful pitchers who - as the saying goes - "couldn't break glass" with their fastball but knew how to pitch.

But sometime around the late '70s or early '80s, the portable radar gun became widely available. Now a scout could sit behind home plate, and figure out how hard a kid's fastball was. Instead of writing in a scouting report "Has good fastball, sharp curve, changes speeds well," they now wrote "Consistently throws 90-92 MPH."

Suddenly there was an objective number taking the place of subjective judgment, and because human beings tend to be risk-averse, the number became a way to cover your backside. If a scout recommended that a certain pitcher be drafted, and the pitcher didn't work out, the scout could say "I don't understand it. The gun said he threw 92," and everyone would excuse the scout for a poor selection, because his decision was based on the radar gun's number. Never mind that the kid never really knew how to pitch.

But now imagine if a scout said, "This kid doesn't throw real hard, but he knows how to pitch. I watched him throw a three-hit shutout where he had no strikeouts, but he only walked one batter and only threw 82 pitches. I think we should draft him." When that pitcher is drafted and doesn't work out, the scout is going to be ridiculed, because "Everyone knows you shouldn't draft someone who can't throw 90+." And so scouts became conditioned to protect themselves by relying on the number. A piece of electronic equipment had replaced judgment, experience and acumen.

Another example, from another sport: There was a local kid in Red Wing (I won't name him, but if you're from here you probably know who I'm talking about) who was a phenomenal golfer. Went to the state tournament in his younger years, was shooting par or better as a high school freshman, had a bright future ahead of him. So bright, in fact, that a Big Ten school asked him early on to commit to a scholarship, which he did.

The beauty of his game was that he knew how to "work" a golf ball. If the hole layout called for a long, low draw, he could hit it. If he needed a high fade to a back pin location, he could do it. And around the greens, his touch was impeccable. His only flaw: He didn't regularly hit 300-yard tee shots. Hitting the monster long drive wasn't part of his game. But as they say in golf, "It's not how, it's how many," and he knew how to get around the course in as few strokes as possible.

But this wasn't good enough for the Big Ten coach. Having recruited the young man, he now sought to change his game. He wanted the kid to hit those long 300+ yard drives, and so - while the kid was still in high school - he started working on changing the kids' swing to get more distance. In almost no time, the changes ruined his swing. In trying to generate more power, he lost the tempo and rhythm and plane of his beautiful swing. He began fighting a vicious snap-hook, he lost confidence and by his senior year of high school, he didn't even qualify for the state tournament that he had been a pre-season favorite to win.

He went on to the Big Ten school, but it didn't last. He never regained his swing, and dropped out of the golf program before his junior year.

So why did the coach want to change his swing? Because he wanted a number - the 300-yard drive - to validate his decision to recruit the boy. If you recruit a kid who can hit the ball half a mile, and it doesn't work out, you've covered your butt by saying, "We had to take a chance on him, he could hit it 330 regularly." But if a kid doesn't work out and you say, "He had great hands and a terrific short game and I thought he was worth taking a shot on," you get laughed at.

All of which brings me back to my theory: As a society, we've lost our willingness to go with "gut instincts," and we're terrified to take the risk of making a bad decision. It's just not in sports, it's part of the corporate world as well.

Once upon a time, people running Human Resources departments - they used to be called "Personnel" - would fill a job by reviewing an applicant's experience and education and learning about them through an interview. At the end of the process they made a gut decision based not only on an applicant's skill set, but on his personality and aptitude.

Once in a while, a hire didn't work out, but that was okay because everyone understood it's an inexact science. Hiring was a subjective judgment, and subjective judgments are, by nature, sometimes wrong.

Now, however, the HR person has learned that if they only use objective criteria, they can insulate themselves from being criticized. "If I make it a requirement to only hire someone with a college degree, then I can't be criticized if someone with a college degree doesn't work out." Never mind that holding a college degree tells you nothing about a person's work ethic, ability to adapt to change, ability to respond in a crisis situation or any other quality that makes a valuable employee.

Like the baseball scout and the golf coach, the HR person knows that if they never use their instincts, they're immune from being second-guessed.

And so the pitcher who can get batters out, the kid who can shoot par and the bright, energetic job prospect who knows how to keep customers satisfied are denied opportunities because they can't throw 92, can't drive the ball 330 yards or they never got a college degree. Talent goes to waste, because people who make decisions are afraid of occasionally being wrong.

And so we've artificially inflated the value of a college degree to the point where most high school kids think "I have to go to college or I won't succeed," even though there's no legitimate reason for that kind of thinking. As a result of that artificially driven demand, the cost of those college educations has skyrocketed, and now we're producing legions of 22-year-olds who are carrying $40,000 of college debt at graduation and find that their degree in whatever - Literature, Music, Art, Psychology, History, Government, Communications, you name it - doesn't make them any more qualified for a job than if they'd spent eight months learning auto body repair at the local technical college or a year as a plumber's assistant. In fact, they're probably LESS qualified.

I don't know how to put the genie back in the bottle, but it's something for a parent to think about before you start writing those five-figure checks so Johnny or Susie can go live in a nice dorm and have faculty teach them the value of "diversity," "tolerance," and the collected writings of Emily Bronte.

What's the value of college?

2011-07-21T14:03:00.003-05:00

Just a couple of months ago, I attended the college graduation of my youngest son, William, marking the third time in four years I've sat through one of my children's college commencements. It's become somewhat expected now that a high school graduate will move on to college, but historically that's not been the case, and I've begun to wonder lately if the experience isn't a bit overrated.

My father was one of eight children, all of whom were raised on a farm, and of the eight, I believe only two had any sort of post-high school education, involving what was then known as "Teacher's college." I may be wrong, but I don't think there is a single four-year degree among them, and all went on to have productive lives as business owners, farmers, postal workers and such, even a newspaper editor.

These eight Droogsmas produced nearly 40 offspring, and among my first cousins I would guess that two-thirds of us went on to attend college, a generational change that would seem to be in line with the usual American demographics. Now, in my household, the percentage of college grads has risen to 75%.

But will that college degree help them achieve more vocational success than they might otherwise have had? I'm beginning to wonder.

It's a bigger topic for another day, but I've been thinking about it lately because of a series of posts at the National Review website. One today, in particular, frames the question in an interesting way. It was written to NR's John Derbyshire, an exceptional mathematician and author who is largely disdainful of higher education. Here's a letter he received, which I'll just reprint here and write more about later, but it's interesting food for thought. Enjoy:

Derb,

Saw your post today about college and thought you would find this interesting and depressing.

I work as an energy trader and recently took a customer down to Appalachia to visit some coal mines. On our visit to one of the mines, there was a large sign prominently displayed: Accepting Applications. Once the meeting and mine tour were finished we were in the mine manager’s office and I asked him, “How come you’re hiring? Did you just lose some workers?”

“Hell, no!” was the reply. “We are always looking for people.”

Not sure if you have had the chance to visit Appalachia, but there are large pockets of poverty here, especially when the overall unemployment throughout the country is close to 10 percent. Hard to imagine there would be any job openings. So I asked him again, “How come? Don’t you pay enough?”

He explained to me that a high school graduate can start working at the mine and make roughly $40K a year. After 90 days of training (or in the industry lingo, when a worker goes from being a “red hat” to a “black hat”) that pay jumps up to about $50K a year.

Now granted, this isn’t easy work. It’s a 50-hour work week (with overtime of course), which includes night shifts and weekends. But $50K for a high school graduate?

The manager went on to explain to me that, “If you know which end of a wrench to pick up” the company will be glad to train you to be an electrician, equipment operator, etc. in which case your salary will rise to $75–$100K a year.

I asked him, “Then how come you can’t get workers?”

His reply was telling. “All you have to do to get a mine job is come to work every day, work reasonably hard, and pee clean. We just can’t find people who can do this.”

Apparently it’s not even illegal drugs. Legal prescription painkillers are the main cause. People will shop doctors and get multiple prescriptions. Doctors are happy to prescribe these, because they run clinics and make money from Medicaid selling the pills.

Finally I asked the manager, who was in his mid 50s or so, “What about your kids?”

He replied: “Oh, they both went to college.”

“What are they doing now?”

“Working for the state government.”

“How much do they get paid?”

“About $25 grand a year.”

I won’t waste your time describing how many things about this 5 minute conversation made me depressed about the current state of the U.S.A. I’ll focus on one thing.

How can someone rationally decide that it is a better choice to go to college, waste time and money for four years, only to get a job that pays half or less of another job you could get? Are people so deathly afraid of hard work?

I grew up in a steel mill town in eastern Pennsylvania. Before unions ruined the mill in the early 80s, I can recall most of the men in the town being happy, well paid, successful blue collar workers who could afford nice homes, nice cars, vacations, all while having a sense of pride and accomplishment in what they were doing.

Where has this attitude gone?

I’m fortunate enough to make a comfortable living sitting behind a desk, but if I could make more as a laborer, I would do it in an instant.

Putting her in her place

2011-07-20T16:04:00.004-05:00

Because of different jobs I've had over the years, I've had to deal with dozens and dozens of reporters. Many of them - particularly those in the print media - are pretty straightforward, making an effort to be fair and balanced.

The most irritating of the bunch, however, are anchor folks. They like to call themselves "reporters" - the retired Don Shelby was a great example of this prima donna type - when they don't really do any work that could be called reporting. They simply read copy that is the result of reporting and writing done by other people.

Which brings us to a woman named Contessa Brewer, who anchors for MSNBC, the little boutique network that is home to foaming-at-the-mouth liberals such as Ed Schultz and Rachael Maddow, and used to be home to Keith Olbermann.

Contessa, again, is just someone who reads news, but she likes to think of herself as a "reporter." And so she does interviews, which usually consist of her throwing softball questions at Democrats. ("Don't you think what the Republicans are doing is incredibly stupid?" would be her typical fare.)

Today she tangled with Congressman Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama. They get into a discussion about economics, and when he doesn't agree with one of her premises, she snarkily asks, "Do you have a degree in economics?"

To which Brooks responds, "Yes I do. Highest honors."

Turns out that Congressman Brooks got through Duke University in just three years, earning degrees in both Political Science and Economics, and was awarded highest honors in Economics.

Brewer, by the way, has a degree in Broadcast Journalism - close to an oxymoron - and a "Certificate of Contemporary Europe" (whatever that is) after going to school in France for a while.

Enjoy watching this verbal beatdown:

Where are the jobs?

2011-07-19T12:36:00.004-05:00

If you're wondering why the economic recovery hasn't happened, here's a very good insight. It comes from Steve Wynn, the famous casino developer, who describes himself as a "Democratic businessman." It's a great explanation of how the Obama administration is killing job creation.

I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I'm afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.

And I'm saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal and it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, they're holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs.

"Do it for the children"

2011-07-15T13:19:00.008-05:00

I admit that I knew nothing about Casey Anthony until the verdict came down, at which point I had to have a friend explain the case to me. Tragic story, but I didn't give it much more thought until this little bit of weirdness came out of Oklahoma. I'm not totally certain why bizarre stories like this fascinate me, but they do.

Meet Shireen Nalley (above). Shireen lives in Chouteau, Oklahoma, and the other night she stopped at a local convenience store to buy some gas.

Inside the store she encountered a young clerk named Sammay Blackwell (right, in pink shirt.) Sammy appears to have at least a slight resemblance - and similar hairstyle - to Casey Anthony (right, in blue shirt.)

Shireen apparently thought so as well, and in fact, she managed to convince herself that Sammay WAS Casey. (Which seems odd, considering that Casey is still incarcerated in Florida, more than a thousand miles away.)

When Sammay got off work a little later, she got in her car, looked in the mirror and saw Shireen watching her. Sammay backed out, and headed down the road for home. Then things got really strange.

Shireen, in a a minivan, drove up and rammed Sammay's pickup truck. Panicked, Sammay pulled off into a parking lot to try to get away, only to have Shireen ram her with the minivan, rolling it over twice and leaving it on its side. (That's the truck, pictured below.) Shireen then high-tailed it out of there but was captured by police and is now in jail, charged with assault with a deadly weapon and various other offenses.

Shireen's explanation for the attempted murder was that she was "trying to save the children."

The kicker to the story: Sammay does have a daughter, and her name is Caylee, just like Casey Anthony's daughter.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, but news accounts say that Sammay is trying to get a restraining order against Shireen. I'm not sure that will be necessary, since I suspect Shireen will be a guest of the Oklahoma correctional system for a good long time.

"Diversity is where nations go to die"

2011-07-13T12:36:00.005-05:00

I wish I could take credit for that line, but I can't. It came from the keyboard of the magnificent Mark Steyn. A Canadian, Steyn has been on to the diversity racket for years, and his book "America Alone" is an important explanation of the threat Islam is to Western civilization.

This photo prompted Steyn's blog post today, along with the title of this blog post. This picture wasn't taken in Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan or Iraq. It was taken at a public school in Toronto on a typical Friday. You can read the story by clicking here, and I dare you to read it and not come away with a genuine fear of what the forces of "tolerance" and "diversity" can do to our society.

UPDATE: There are other reactions by Canadian writers here and here. Feel free to click away.

Right on the money

2011-07-13T10:55:00.004-05:00

One of the real bright lights in the political firmament right now is Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. The son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio is a rock-solid conservative as well as a bright, articulate spokesman for basic liberty and freedom issues. Yesterday on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Rubio summed up the Obama presidency very succinctly when asked by Hewitt about the president's problems.

"I think there are three things going on here. Number one, I think he’s a prisoner to extremist elements in his own base who not only, they don’t care that the taxes don’t solve any problems. They want their pound of flesh. They want to punish somebody, they want class warfare. That’s what they believe in. And this is their chance to do it, and they’re putting pressure on him to do that. So I think that’s his first problem. His second problem is that I think he’s surrounded by a bunch of people who philosophically do not believe fully in the free enterprise system, and in fact, they’d like to see government play a greater role. And they see this downturn in the economy, and crisis such as this, as an opportunity to exert more government involvement in our economy. And that’s the second problem. And his third problem is a level of incompetence. I think the President, quite frankly, is not up to the job. And if you look at every measure of quality of life in America today, unemployment is higher. The debt is higher. The only thing lower is the value of your home. If you look at every measurable economic thing in America today, they are all worse than they were the day he took over. Two and a half years into his presidency, things continue to get worse, not better, and it’s because the President is incompetent in his job as president. He is not, he doesn’t know what he’s doing."

Much of what Rubio said can be equally applied to Minnesota's own Gov. Goofy, Mark Dayton. I believe Rubio is going to be a major player on the national political stage for years to come.

Math is hard at the Star-Tribune

2011-07-12T01:14:00.003-05:00

The Star-Tribune has been performing as a public relations arm of the Dayton Administration since the government shutdown began on July 1. Every story is written from the premise that the shutdown is bad, and that Republicans are at fault. (Though it was Dayton who vetoed a balanced budget and refused a "lights-on" bill that would have kept things functioning.)

The bias in favor of considering the shutdown a catastrophe made it into the paper's web site Monday when a headline said "As the shutdown enters its third week..."

Well, I'm no math wizard, but I think the timekeeping goes something like this: The shutdown started on July 1, and today was July 11. That is somewhere around 11 days. If we were going into our third week, it seems that this should have been maybe - oh, I don't know - maybe the 15th day of the shutdown?

When folks have that much trouble with simple math, how can you trust them on the big things?

The Dayton Shutdown, Day 7, and an easy prediction comes true

2011-07-07T21:49:00.003-05:00

Normally when you make a political prediction, you have to wait weeks, months or even years for it to come true.

Today, however, the Carlson-Mondale "commission" made the prediction in my post of less than 48 hours ago (which you can read here) come true.

I said that anything with Arne Carlson's fingerprints on it was sure to include a tax hike. With remarkable speed, the group spit up their report today, and the highlights include:

- A 4% income tax increase for everyone in the state;
- An increase of over a dollar in the cigarette tax;
- An alcohol tax increase;
- A "human services surcharge" of $250 million

Net effect of all these taxes and surcharges? A $1.4 billion tax increase and a double-digit increase in spending from the previous biennium. Of course, the income tax hike is supposed to be "temporary," but there is nothing more permanent that a "temporary" tax increase. House Speaker Kurt Zellers said it best: "It is a retread of failed tax-and-spend policies."

Thanks for playing our game, Wally and Arne, too bad you failed miserably. Please return to the obscurity of your retirements.

Where do they get the nerve?

2011-07-07T01:36:00.004-05:00

At left are Minnesota government employees (according to the caption in the Star-Tribune, which gets credit for the photo) and I guess that maybe unionized government employees inhabit a different world than I do.

I can't imagine having the nerve to go out in public and demand that government stick its hand in someone else's pocket so that I could have the money.

Full disclosure: I spent about six of my 30-odd working years on government payrolls, serving as a staffer in the Minnesota Legislature, United States Senate and Office of the Governor of Minnesota. But I considered each of those positions to be a privilege, and an opportunity to serve. The idea that the taxpayers owed me a living - or the notion of picketing to make them pay more - would have been unfathomable to me. I worked for the taxpayers, not the other way around.

My successor in the governor's office was a bit of an airhead - her previous career involved reading the news on TV - who got caught by the Star-Tribune forcing staffers in the governor's office to watch her kids during the work day. When she was called out on it she huffed, "These people work for me." Someone had to remind her that, no, those people worked for the taxpayers of Minnesota, who weren't paying them to be her babysitter. Her attitude would have fit perfectly with these stooges on the capitol steps.

The Dayton Shutdown, Day 5, and some insight into Arne Carlson

2011-07-05T12:41:00.002-05:00

The Dayton Shutdown continues, and today's news brings word that a "commission" assembled by former Veep Walter Mondale and former Guv Arne Carlson is now going to sit down and try to hammer this out.

Let's set aside for a moment the fact that we have elected representatives to do this job, and there's no real reason why we should farm the state budget work out to a group of unelected, unaccountable people.

Before this group has even met, here's what I can guarantee you: Part of their solution will be an increase in taxes.

That's because Arne Carlson is involved, and he never saw a tax rate or a government program that he didn't think should be increased.

As some of you know, I was Gov. Carlson's Press Secretary in the first year of his administration, and in early 1991, Minnesota was facing a budget "shortfall" as it is now, although much smaller. I vividly remember sitting in the governor's office in the Capitol in the second or third week after taking office, with most of his high-level staffers around to discuss the budget. Finance Commissioner John Gunyou, Chief of Staff Lyall Schwarzkopf, Patsy Randall, Lt. Governor Joanell Dyrstad and about five or six others of us were in the room. The discussion immediately turned to which was the best way to raise taxes to get out of the mess.

Income tax surcharges, sales tax increases, cigarette taxes, liquor taxes...they were all part of a 30-minute discussion about what the political fallout would be, which ones DFLers would go along with, etc., etc.

Finally, after listening to all of this, I spoke up and said, "How about we cut spending instead of raising taxes?"

They looked at me like I had suggested flapping our arms and flying to Mars. The notion of cutting spending instead of raising taxes hadn't event occurred to this group, and it was right about then I realized I probably wasn't a good fit for this administration. I'm a pretty conservative guy, but I'm not exactly a flaming right-winger, so if I'm far and away the most conservative guy in the room of alleged Republicans you know something's wrong.

In the end, taxes were raised, programs were expanded and the entire Carlson administration continued the explosion in the growth of government that has contributed to the current predicament.

So if Arne has his fingerprints on this "commission," there's no doubt in my mind that higher taxes will be part of their proposal. It didn't fly when Governor Goofy proposed it, and it won't fly when this group does it either.

My favorite 4th of July story

2011-07-04T01:27:00.004-05:00

As I probably mention every year, the 4th of July is my day. A couple years ago I wrote about the special 4th of July celebrations I grew up with in Pease, Minnesota (which you can read here), and even on my 54th 4th of July, the day still brings out the little kid in me. You might not think of me as a guy who enjoys musical theater, but my favorite play of all time is 1776, the musical that tells the story of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and others in the Continental Congress.

These men were giants; Visionaries who risked their "lives, fortunes and our sacred honor" to challenge the most powerful nation in the world over the concept of liberty, and then saw the battle through to the very end. Their actions changed the course of history and still resonate today.

One of my favorite 4th of July stories took place in 1826, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That day, Jefferson and Adams both passed away, and the story of their passing is one of history's great tales. Bill Bennett told the story in his book, "Our Sacred Honor," and I'll let him take it from here:

"It was if Adams and Jefferson willed themselves to live to see July 4, 1826. There was much anticipation regarding the Fiftieth Anniversary of America's Independence in Adams' hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts. Adams was too weak to attend any of the planned festivities, so a local committee approached him in late June to ask him for a toast. Adams replied "Independence forever," and refused to add another word.

Though bedridden, when the great anniversary arrived, Adams asked to be seated in his chair in front of the window, so that he could take in the festivities. Soon after he slipped into a state of unconsciousness, and his doctor predicted he would not live to see another day. Adams' last thought - at least the last one he uttered out loud - was of his friend and fellow laborer for independence, Thomas Jefferson. Adams woke from his coma and said, "Jefferson still survives." Those were his last words. He died that evening.

But Adams was mistaken - Jefferson did not survive him. Jefferson's health had been on the decline. He told his grandson in the spring of 1826 that he did not expect to live to see midsummer...In the weeks that followed, Jefferson prepared for his death. On the morning of July 3, Jefferson's doctor reported that his "stupor" or coma was "almost permanent." However, Jefferson woke up at seven o'clock in the evening and asked the doctor,"Is it the Fourth?" The doctor assured him it soon would be. He clung to life long enough to die peacefully at around one o'clock in the afternoon on July 4, 1826."

It was left to the great Daniel Webster, speaking at Faneuil Hall in Boston a month later, to sum up the momentous event:

"Adams and Jefferson are no more. On our fiftieth anniversary, the great day of national jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and reechoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight together to the world of spirits...Poetry itself has hardly terminated illustrious lives, and finished the career of earthly renown, by such a consummation. If we had the power, we could not wish to reverse this dispensation of the Divine Providence. The great objects of life were accomplished, the drama was ready to be closed. It has closed; our patriots have fallen; but so fallen, at such age, with such coincidence, on such a day, that we cannot rationally lament that the end has come, which we knew could not be long deferred."

Indeed, the "great objects of life" had been accomplished, because these two great men believed certain "truths to be self evident." And now, 235 years later, we live free because of their vision. I know it's a day for picnics and golf and time on the boat, etc., but take a moment to thank "Divine Providence" for what happened in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago.

The Dayton Shutdown, Day 1

2011-07-01T00:07:00.003-05:00

As of midnight, July 1, Minnesota state government is shutting down, thanks our own Governor Goofy, Mark Dayton.

I've talked about the issues involved before, in this post, but it's worth a quick review. During one of the worst economic recessions in history, the Minnesota Legislature managed to pass a balanced budget that increased spending by about 9% for the two-year budget cycle, without raising taxes.

The Legislature increased funding for education, highways, the criminal justice system and other priorities. Dayton vetoed the budget bills because 9% wasn't enough of an increase: He was insisting on nearly $2 billion in increased taxes as well. (His tax hike bill was voted down in the legislature, 63-1 in the Senate, 131-0 in the House...the very definition of bipartisan opposition.)

The tax hike was a non-starter in the legislature, but Governor Goofy is insistent. And so, tonight, most of government came grinding to a halt. Even the editorial board of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, not exactly a bastion of free market conservatives, ridiculed Dayton's stance, calling his threat of a shutdown "hostage taking."

Now, the only people who are really going to notice the shutdown right away are people who wanted to spend the 4th of July weekend in a state campground. Those were shut this afternoon, and the campers sent elsewhere. Also, if you wanted to use a rest stop on the highway, you found those closed as well. The Minnesota Zoo will also be closed, but fortunately - if you just HAVE to go see animals in captivity - there's the fantastic Como Zoo, which isn't run by the state and has free admission. (Hmmm, maybe there's a lesson there about government efficacy?)

If you're not affected by those, it's going to be a while before you really notice anything. Personally, I can go quite a long time without the:

Department of Human Rights
Department of Tourism
State Arts Board
Minnesota Lottery
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
Department of Commerce
Department of Labor and Industry
Board of Accountancy
Office of the State Archaeologist
Board of Assessors
Board of Animal Health
Chicano Latino Affairs Council
State Office of Climatology
Minnesota Film and TV Board

and most of the other agencies that employ these thousands of bureaucrats.

Shut 'em all down until Labor Day, at least, and maybe by then the voices in the governor's head will go away and he'll realize the basic economic folly of raising taxes in a recession.

In the meantime, Minnesotans can enjoy the little extra bit of freedom that comes with diminished government, which seems particularly appropriate for the 4th of July weekend.

NHL Draft weekend

2011-06-25T21:57:00.006-05:00

Just spent two terrific days on the floor of the Xcel Energy Center, working the NHL's 2011 Entry Draft. There are lots of great perks to working on the X's Guest Services staff, but this weekend was one of the best non-game experiences ever.

For a hockey nerd like me, being at the NHL Draft is like attending the Academy Awards. Except that instead of saying things like, "Look, there's Tom Cruise" or "Look, there's Sharon Stone" we said things like "Look, there's Mike Babcock....Hey, there's Bobby Clarke...Wow, that's Cam Neely." All the coaches we see standing behind benches and the GMs we see sitting in the press box during a long winter with the NHL Center Ice package are right there in the flesh!

Just a partial list of sightings (and yes, I feel like a stupid teenage groupie...I've gotten over it and so should you):

Todd McClellan
Claude Julien
Chuck Fletcher
Craig Leipold
Steve Yzerman
Dave Tippett
Mike Ricci
Bobby Clarke
Paul Holmgren
Ken Holland
Joel Quenneville
Dan Bylsma
Barry Trotz
Pierre McGuire
Brian Murray
Steve Tambellini
Glen Sather
Mike Babcock
Lou Lamoriello
Brian Burke
Cam Neely
Pierre Mondou
and the list goes on....

Part of my job was checking everyone's credentials, making sure they weren't on the floor without the appropriate pass. So when a person approached, instead of looking at their face like you normally would, I would first glance at their torso, to see if they had the proper credential hanging around their neck. Early on the first day, a man moved into the periphery of my vision, and the first thing I noticed was that he wasn't wearing a credential. The second thing I noticed was that he was sort of wandering aimlessly, just looking around and not talking to anyone and looking as though he might not belong there. I was about to step forward and ask if I could help him find his proper spot. That's when I focused on the face, made eye contact and realized it was NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Stepping back from the brink of a major faux pas, I managed to say "Commissioner, we're honored to have you here," and got a "Thank you, glad to be here," in return.

My next contact came when Penguins Coach Dan Bylsma came over near my post and had a conversation with a couple of fellows. When he finished, he turned around, paused, and made eye contact. I've always felt a little kinship with Bylsma because that "sma" at the end of his name - just like Droogsma - means we both have Dutch heritage. Normally in my job, we try to stay out of conversations in these situations, but I decided to make an exception and dive in. I stuck out my hand and said, "Nice to meet you coach. My last name is Droogsma, and it's always nice to see another Dutch boy do well." He lit right up! We ended up having a couple minutes of conversation about the Penguins' injury-filled season, our Dutch background and his recent Adams award as coach of the year. After a moment a woman from the Penguins PR department came over to take him to an interview, and I said, "Sorry, didn't mean to take your time." He said, "No, anytime for a Dutchman," and then turned to the PR woman and said, "You know what they say about the Dutch, don't you?" She said no and he told the oldest Dutch joke in the book: "If you're not Dutch, you're not much." A good laugh, another handshake and he was on his way.

A short time later my friend Gary Harker came by. Gary scouts the Upper Midwest for the Toronto Maple Leafs and is a great guy to talk hockey with. I've mentioned him before in this blog, and I almost always learn something when I have a conversation with him. We were discussing various draft prospects, the atmosphere in the X and making a little small talk when he suddenly asked, "Have you ever met George Armstrong?"

George Armstrong's claim to fame is that he was captain of the Maple Leafs when they won their last Stanley Cup in 1967. He played 21 years for Toronto, and was captain for 11 of them. He still scouts for the Leafs, and he and Gary sit next to each other at the Leafs' draft table. Gary brought him over to meet me.

This was exciting. I started thinking about some of the great players Armstrong had played with: Frank Mahovlich, Dave Keon, Johnny Bower, etc., etc. After introductions, I decided to ask about Bower, a goaltender I admired as a kid, and who is famous for having lied about his age to get into the Canadian Army as a 16-year-old and subsequently serving in Europe. (I wrote about Bower a couple years ago here.) As soon as I asked about Bower, I knew I had started the conversation right:

"Johnny and I were roommates for 11 years," Armstrong said, and went on to reminisce about the four Stanley Cups they won together, various road trip escapades and other stories. Then I wanted to ask about another former Maple Leafs player, and said, "You must have overlapped with Tim Horton at some point, didn't you?" Horton is the former Leafs and Buffalo Sabres defenseman who founded the doughnut chain that bears his name, and who was killed in a car accident while still playing in the NHL. When I asked about him, Armstrong's demeanor got a little more serious.

"Timmy and I played in the minors together and we went to the Leafs together," he said. "When I got married, Timmy was the only hockey player in the wedding." He then went on to share stories about Horton's personality, character and business sense.

We also had a chat about Dave Keon, who succeeded Armstrong as Leafs' captain. I told him I had watched Keon later play as a Minnesota Fighting Saint in a building (the old St. Paul Civic Center) that had stood right where we were now standing, and he told me about the estrangement between Keon and the Maple Leafs organization. We talked about old goalies, old coaches, and he went on and on for about 15 or 20 minutes.

(Part of Armstrong's charm - at least I found it charming - is that he's absolutely unable to speak without being amazingly profane. You have to imagine every sentence I've quoted here as being sprinkled with f-bombs about every fifth word. It's an all-purpose noun, verb and adjective for him, and Harker said he's that way all the time. It just comes naturally and, oddly, doesn't sound out of place.)

The rest of the weekend was a great treat, watching the drama surrounding the reactions of all these 18-year-olds as they had the moment they've dreamed about most of their lives; Hearing their name called at an NHL Draft. They would stand up, hug their dad, moms, other relatives, etc. who were there to share the big moment.

My favorite reaction came when the Montreal Canadiens chose a young man name Nathan Beaulieu. He had been projected by some to go among the top 10 or so after an outstanding career in Quebec junior hockey, but he fell to the 17th spot before Montreal selected him. He went to hug his mother, and she just erupted in tears. It was like she had been holding in all the pressure that had been building on her son as he slid down the board, and now, all of a sudden, her baby boy had not only been chosen, but had been chosen by the Canadiens, and she just couldn't keep the emotions bottled up anymore. He gave her a huge hug, and I think it's that image I'll remember the longest from a memorable weekend.

Off to the draft

2011-06-24T02:13:00.003-05:00

The NHL Entry Draft takes place Friday and Saturday, and for the past couple of years I've live-blogged it (though last year's blog was interrupted by a thunderstorm that took out my DirecTV signal).

This year, however, the Draft takes place at our very own Xcel Energy Center, which means I'll be up there working the next two days. I've been told I'll be working at the Media stage on the main floor, so if you're watching (6 p.m. Central time on Versus Friday, 10 a.m. Saturday on NHL Network) you just might see me.

Important weekend for the Wild. Rumors abound that Brent Burns may be traded, and if you're going to trade someone with that kind of talent, you better get something pretty strong in return.

What planet is he living on?

2011-06-21T12:11:00.001-05:00

Here's what Obama had to say today about the economy:

"And so I'm extraordinarily proud of the economic record that we were able to produce over the first two and a half years..."

Huh?

Birth of a new Wild blog

2011-06-21T00:23:00.003-05:00

My oldest son, Travis, follows the Wild as closely as I do, and has a remarkable talent for writing. Sadly, he's too "hip" for me to follow a lot of his writing, which tends to gravitate towards music I've never heard of.

He has now, however, started a blog that will focus on the Minnesota Wild and the NHL, and I encourage you to take a look at his first couple of offerings at http://wildlybiasedobservations.tumblr.com/

I'm not sure what this "Tumblr" thing is yet, but it appears to be another blogging template, similar to the Blogger setup that I use here. But if you're a hockey fan, I think you'll find it worthwhile to stop by Trav's blog from time to time.

NBC gets caught with hand in cookie jar

2011-06-20T00:35:00.004-05:00

One of the annual treats of Father's Day is watching the last day of the U.S. Open golf tournament. NBC's Johnny Miller is one of golf's best commentators and the coverage is always excellent.

Today - with the Open being played outside Washington, D.C. - they opened their coverage with an attempt at patriotism, by showing the Pledge of Allegiance in a series of clips, with each group saying a few words. However, after the clip of people saying, "One nation," they went immediately to a clip of people saying "indivisible."

Of course, they edited out the words, "Under God."

The outrage directed at NBC must have been loud and immediate, because a short time later, anchor announcer Dan Hicks was forced to read a statement saying, “We began our coverage of this final round just about three hours ago and when we did it was our intent to begin the coverage of this U.S. Open Championship with a feature that captured the patriotism of our national championship being held in our nation’s capital for the third time. Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out. It was not done to upset anyone and we’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”

It seems like a small matter, but in fact it's a great insight into the mindset of media elites. It's easy to imagine a group sitting around an NBC editing room, and someone says, "You know, let's just take out that 'under God' part so we don't offend anyone." And because the liberals who dominate the media share similar mindsets, no one in the room even thought to say, "Um, aren't we going to offend millions of people who believe in God and think He should be recognized when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance?"

I've been part of the media, and I know the mindset. And even if someone thought it, they wouldn't dare say it because their colleagues would consider them some kind of backwoods Bible-thumping rube.

Pounded by phone calls, NBC tried the old "We apologize to anyone who was offended," defense, but the fact is, they did what they believed was right when they edited out the words.

Which is worse: The stench of defeat, or the taste of tear gas?

2011-06-16T01:25:00.014-05:00

It's probably a stretch to call Vancouver the epicenter of evil in the world, when there are cities like Tehran, Pyongyang, Beijing and Northfield that can compete for the title, but the little Canuckers really made a bid for the top spot Wednesday night.

First, their hockey team completed an epic collapse in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, losing 4-0 to the Boston Bruins.

(The Bruins, by the way, were picked to win the Cup back in April here, by a pretty astute blogger. Read down to the last paragraph. I'm just sayin'....)

While the soulless Canucks stretched it out to seven games, it was pretty obvious Boston was a better team. After Vancouver opened the series by sneaking out a pair of one-goal wins, the Bruins won four of the last five games by a combined score of 21-4. The series may have turned in Game Three, when Canuck defenseman Aaron Rome took a typical Vancouver cheap shot and sent Boston's Nathan Horton to the hospital with a concussion. Horton was unable to return, and the same can be said for Rome, who received the longest suspension (four games) in the history of the Cup Finals. From that point on, the Bruins pretty much dominated.

Then, after seeing their team lose 4-0 Wednesday, the always-classy Canuck fans stood in their arena and booed the presentation of the Stanley Cup. Some Canadians I heard on ESPN Radio were quick to claim they were only booing NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, but that's a flat-out lie. After Bettman handed the Conn Smythe Trophy (for playoff MVP) to Boston's Tim Thomas, and after he then handed the Cup to captain Zdeno Chara, they kept right on booing as the Bruins enjoyed the traditional skate around the rink. It was a pathetic, classless display.

(I think I have a little extra credibility on this subject, because oldest son Travis and I were in Met Center in 1991 when the Pittsburgh Penguins hammered the North Stars to clinch the Stanley Cup. We stayed in our seats, watched the presentation, and applauded Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr and the others as they paraded the Cup around our rink. The fans at the Met had an appreciation for the history of the Cup, and for what we had just witnessed.)

At the same time, according to Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun, Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini was "directing the same coarse, four-letter obscenity repeatedly at reporters" trying to interview him in the locker room.

Not content with making asses of themselves IN the building, the Canuckleheads went outside and began torching their own city. Now, I think the question of whether Vancouver SHOULD be trashed is a fair one, and worthy of discussion, but it's pretty unusual for the natives to begin the work themselves.

Above and below are some nice photos from the Vancouver Sun, showing the fans tipping over a car, celebrating the burning of a pickup and generally behaving like savages. Stores were looted, riot police were brought in, tear gas was put to its intended use. Vancouver General Hospital declared a "Code Orange" and began triage on the wounded. Perhaps someday order will be restored.

I'm actually kind of glad to see it, because some people think I've been too harsh on Vancouver and Satan's Team over the years. I think Wednesday night demonstrated that I've actually been too kind to this pile of jerks.

Stay classy, Vancouver.

Picture of the day

2011-06-14T13:18:00.002-05:00

Tens of thousands of fans gathered in the streets of Vancouver Monday night, expecting their group of thugs, divers and misfits to win the Stanley Cup. Instead, we got this wonderful picture. Let's hope for a similar photo on Wednesday night.

Total cop-out, I realize, but still.....

2011-06-14T00:13:00.002-05:00

I have to admit that I just don't have the ability to adequately summarize this year's Stanley Cup Final, now headed for a Game Seven Wednesday night in Hell, excuse me, Vancouver. Boston's 5-2 beatdown tonight (a 4-0 lead in less than 10 minutes) was spectacular, and this has easily been the most entertaining Final of the past decade.

But as I said, I'm not enough of a writer to do it justice, and so I'm going to turn it over to one of the writers I admire most, Bill Simmons of ESPN.com. Simmons - a.k.a. The Sports Guy - is such a talented writer that I'm now reading his 800-page book about basketball for the third time, and I don't even like basketball.

He admits that he's being a front-runner, but he took his Dad to Game Four of the Finals, and wrote a spectacular column about the evening, and about his relationship with hockey. It's a great read, and you can see it all by clicking here. Enjoy.

Score one for the California education system

2011-06-09T00:42:00.002-05:00

This fun photo, courtesy of the New York Post, is of an obscure actress named Q'orianka Kilcher, who apparently portrayed Pocahontas some years ago in a movie.

Perhaps with a little more time spent in English class, and a little less time learning about the evils of corporations, she would have been able to learn how to spell the word "destruction."

What an absolute poster child for the American left.

Two words: Suh-weet

2011-06-07T00:55:00.002-05:00

Spent a fabulous evening last night with oldest son Travis, enjoying the great food at Rudolph's at Franklin and Lyndale, while watching the Bruins lay an 8-1 savage beating on the soulless Vancouver Canucks. It's a long way from over, but Boston gave us hope tonight that evil can be stopped. Go get 'em, B's!

Reagan at Normandy

2011-06-06T12:29:00.004-05:00

It was 27 years ago today that Ronald Reagan spoke at Normandy, in ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of D-Day. If your kids don't know about the "boys of Pointe Du Hoc" - and they might not, given educators who would rather espouse the values of "diversity" or push the myth of global warming - make them watch the video, and tell them the story. June 6, 1944 might be America's greatest moment, and Reagan was up to the challenge of giving these men the honor they deserved.

John Edwards was right

2011-06-03T15:19:00.003-05:00

It turns out that there really ARE "two Americas." There's one America in which millionaires get billionaire friends to write six-figure checks to try to hide their mistress and child from their dying wife, and then there's everybody else.

When Political Correctness trumps reality

2011-06-02T16:30:00.002-05:00

The Minnesota Lynx (that's a professional women's basketball team, in case you didn't know) begin their season this week, and like about four million other Minnesotans, I don't care.

The only reason I bring this up is because it highlights just one more reason why you shouldn't trust the mainstream media.

The Lynx play in something called the WNBA, which has been around for about 15 years and has never turned a nickel of profit. Let me stipulate right up front that the women of the WNBA are great athletes. They are among the best in the world at what they do, and I admire any athlete that puts in the work needed to reach the pinnacle of their sport.

What I do NOT admire, however, is the way the media tries to shove the WNBA down our throat by publicizing something that clearly has not earned publicity. And there is hardly a worse offender than Minnesota's own Star-Tribune newspaper.

In order to make my point, consider another sport I don't really care about: Indoor lacrosse. I don't care about outdoor lacrosse either, but the comparison is relevant here because indoor lacrosse - like women's basketball - is also played professionally, in a league that spans North America like the WNBA does, and Minnesota has a franchise, known as the Minnesota Swarm.

The Swarm plays its home games at the Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild. They have been around for six seasons, and over those six seasons they have had an average attendance of 10,232 fans.

During those same six seasons, the Lynx - playing in the Target Center in Minneapolis - have had average attendance of 7,050.

I'm no math whiz, but I'm pretty sure that computes to the Swarm having an average crowd that is 45% larger than the average Lynx crowd.

Now, again, I'm not trying to sell you on the idea that you should all be spending Saturday nights watching indoor lacrosse. Again, the players are amazing athletes, and they play a brutal, physical game, but I don't find the sport particularly interesting. I attended one game, and didn't care for it. I waited two years, and went to another one, thinking I should give it a fair shake. I left before it was over, and I've pretty much written it off as unwatchable, at least by me.

The point of this little rant is to consider how the Star-Tribune treats each sport. If you go to the Strib's web site you will find about a dozen articles and blog posts about the Lynx from that past week or so. The Lynx even have their own "tab" on the sports page, alongside the Twins, Vikings, Wild, Timberwolves and Gophers. "Lynx: Opener only two days away" is one headline, "Lynx tabbed most improved team" reads another. Throughout the season, you'll see headlines on the front page of the Strib web site that say things like, "Lynx lose again," or "Lynx edge Los Angeles," given the sort of placement that would lead you to believe someone cared about the results.

By contrast, you could read the Star-Tribune all year and not know the Swarm existed. On April 2 of this year, the Swarm won a home game in front of more than 10,000 fans to clinch a playoff berth. The next days Star-Tribune covered the event with a 42-word summary that was buried at the bottom of an "area round-up" story, BELOW longer blurbs about Gopher women's track and softball.

The point: Newspapers love to tell us that they cover things based on their importance to the community, or their newsworthiness. Over the years I've seen tons of news conferences that aren't covered because "nobody cares about this story," or some such reason. If the Star-Tribune was really making coverage decisions based on what their readers care about, it seems they should be devoting about 50% more coverage to the Swarm than the Lynx.

So why don't they? Oh, that's right, the players on the Lynx are WOMEN. And according to the kinds of folks that run the Strib, women are oppressed in American society. Oh, maybe not as oppressed as in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia, but oppressed nonetheless. They are victims, and as such, they've earned preferential treatment and coddling by the media. Because of their victimhood, they can't be judged by the same standards as everyone else, and so institutions like the Star-Tribune have to change the rules to help them out.

In truth, it's condescending and it belittles women athletes. It's telling them, "You're not good enough to earn your spot in the sports marketplace, so we'll give you extra help based on your gender." To treat them differently, rather than letting them compete in the marketplace along with everyone else, is the most destructive kind of discrimination, and we'll see it practiced regularly in the Star-Tribune from now until whenever the WNBA season fades away.

The Stanley Cup Finals begin

2011-06-01T00:05:00.006-05:00

It's been 17 years since the forces of evil in the universe have been able to harness all their powers of darkness and deliver the Vancouver Canucks to the Stanley Cup Finals. Fortunately, in 1994, Mark Messier and the New York Rangers were on hand to preserve order and justice, and send the Canucks back to the underworld.

Much like Germany in the 1930s, however, the Canucks have returned in a more vicious and even less appealing form. Led by the Sedin sisters - Danielle and Henrietta - Satan's team has found its way back to the finals, in part because of a blown icing call in the last game of the Western Conference finals that let them get up off the mat and win on a fluke goal in double overtime.

Standing between civilization and a Canucks victory: The Boston Bruins, who I picked as the Cup winners here, about seven weeks ago. The Bruins are a franchise with a proud history, an Original Six team, and a club that counts Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, Gerry Cheevers, Cam Neely, Eddie Shore and Ray Bourque among its alumni. The current club is led by 6-foot-7 defenseman Zdeno Chara, and 37-year-old goalie Tim Thomas. They've survived two Game Sevens in this year's playoffs, defeating Montreal in the first round, and topping Tampa Bay 1-0 in the Eastern Finals.

There is a long line of evidence - the fall of the Twin Towers, the Packers Super Bowl wins, Ted Kennedy surviving Chappaquiddick, Titanic (both the ship and the movie), Madonna's career, the making of Star Wars Episode 1, the Obama presidency - that shows us that once in a while, the bad guys win. For 40 consecutive seasons, however, we've been able to watch the Stanley Cup be presented to a team NOT from Vancouver.

If the Bruins can't make it 41, there may be no hope for the future. Does anyone really want to live in a world with "Vancouver Canucks - Stanley Cup Champions" t-shirts? Anyone?

Come on, B's, all the members of decent society are rooting for you.

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-31T00:51:00.009-05:00

I'm posting after midnight, so technically it's not a Memorial Day post, but it will have to do. Normally I like to take in Red Wing's Memorial Day ceremonies, but I had the chance to golf with some family members this morning in the Twin Cities, so I got up early and made the trek to NE Minneapolis. It was a memorable round that included almost every weather element Minnesota has to offer: Thunder, lightning, rain, hail and high winds, lacking only a little snow and sleet. And that was all by the third hole, where we quickly invented a "local rule" calling for automatic two-putts on greens that were covered with hailstones.

Afterwards, I took some time to make my semi-regular stop at Ft. Snelling, (you can read about last year's visit here) to visit the grave of my Uncle and Aunt, Vernon and Dena Peterson. Vernon, as I've written before, saw plenty of heavy combat in World War II, in the N. Africa and Italy theaters, and was awarded the Purple Heart. We lost him in 2000, and Dena was reunited with him just a few weeks ago. They were wonderful people - funny, smart, devoted to their faith and family - who lived on the shores of Cross Lake in Pine City, MN. For several summers they would take my brother and me into their home for a week so we could take our swimming lessons at a nearby beach, and their home was the site for numerous family gatherings over the years.

I snapped pics of both sides of their headstone, and found it very comforting to think of them spending eternity side by side. God bless them both.

A touching moment

2011-05-28T13:24:00.005-05:00

As noted below, Harmon Killebrew meant a lot to me, and the same can be said of Rod Carew. If Killebrew was the hero of my youth, Carew was the one who kept me in a fanatical relationship with baseball through my high school and college years. In particular, his MVP season of 1977 - .388 batting average, 100 RBI, 128 runs scored, and I don't even have to look up those numbers - was incredibly memorable. I probably attended 45 or 50 Twins home games that season, plus a few on the road, and Carew made it all worthwhile, so much so that my oldest son is named Travis Carew Droogsma.

Rod and Harmon had a special relationship, not just as former teammates, but as long-time friends as well. Here is Carew's stirring eulogy from Thursday's memorial service at Target Field.

I was also pleased to learn during the service that Harmon loved 'What a Wonderful World," which has always been one of my favorites as well, another song that I'd like played at my funeral. Here is former Twins pitcher Mudcat Grant - who had a nice off-season singing career while playing for the Twins - performing the song at the service.

The people of Hiroshima beg to differ

2011-05-26T14:01:00.005-05:00

Over his 49 years in public office (yes, that's right, 49 years) Joe Biden has said enough stupid things to fill a book, but yesterday he may have outdone himself. Talking about Obama's decision to approve the raid on Osama Bin Laden, Biden called it:

“The boldest decision … any president has undertaken on a single event in modern history.”

Hmmm. Just off the top of my head - and Jonah Goldberg at National Review has a similar list - I would say....

Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation
Kennedy committing us to go to the moon
Reagan challenging Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"
Nixon opening relations with China
Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory
Roosevelt's decision to enter World War II
and, oh yeah, Truman deciding to use the atomic bomb

...all were slightly more "bold" than approving a commando raid on the world's most wanted terrorist.

I know there are a few history buffs among my readers. Feel free to add to the list, and feel free to add this comment to the lengthy list of stupidity coming from Biden.

For a great list of Biden gaffes, go here. My personal favorite is when he talks about President Roosevelt going on television to discuss the 1929 stock market crash. (Roosevelt wasn't president in 1929, and television had not yet been invented. Otherwise, great example Joe.)

Governor Goofy, Part II

2011-05-25T00:59:00.008-05:00

In the 1980s, Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich earned the nickname "Governor Goofy" because he was prone to large, grandiose ideas that often had no basis in reality. Personally, I liked the guy - in part because he was one of the most personable "retail politicians" I've ever known - and in part because a few of his big ideas came true, often to the state's betterment. The National Sports Center in Blaine, the Mall of America in Bloomington and the Gorbachev visit to Minnesota are just some of Perpich's ideas that took hold. He might be my favorite Democrat of all time.

There was, however, the Goofy side. He had a mercurial temper, and was prone to conspiracy theories, particularly about the media. There was a bit of a "take my ball and go home" attitude when he didn't get his way, and a number of former staffers tell stories about the way he would flip-flop on positions and issues for no discernible reason.

His goofiness is nothing, however, compared to that of the current occupant of the Governor's office, Mark Dayton. Minnesota voters knew last November that they were taking a risk, given the history of Dayton's, well, let's be polite and call it his "emotional and mental health." But I don't think anyone realized he was capable of holding the state hostage with a child-like temper tantrum.

It all begins with the state budget. Like most states, Minnesota began the year facing a bit of a budget crisis, although it's more accurate to call it a "spending crisis." State government has been growing at rates far, far greater than the rate of inflation for a couple decades, and the budget for the 2009-2011 biennium (Minnesota does its budgets in two-year cycles, beginning every other July 1) was the largest in state history at somewhere around $34 billion. Remember that $34 billion number.

Dayton - who never saw a spending program he didn't like - offered up a budget that called for nearly $2 billion in tax increases. In March, the Legislature took a vote on the Dayton tax proposal. The Senate voted it down 63-1, and the House vote was 131-0. At that point, it would have occurred to a rational person that there was a bipartisan distaste for tax increases, which would have had a horribly detrimental effect on the mild economic recovery now taking place.

Meanwhile, the Republican majorities in the Legislature went about the business of putting together a responsible budget that recognized the reality of the economic times, and the basic spending obligations of state government. Overall, their budget came out to about $34 billion, or about a 9% increase over the previous biennium. They increased the K-12 Education budget. They increased spending for courts and the justice system. They introduced some meaningful reforms to government operations, and trimmed budgets of some other state departments. And at the end of the day, they produced a balanced budget - the largest budget in state history, despite the state of the economy - without raising taxes.

This set off alarms in Dayton's head. It wasn't enough that spending increased faster than inflation (again). It wasn't enough that K-12 funding grew, or that the budget was balanced. He wants tax increases, and, well, what's the point in being the Governor if you can't hold your breath until you turn blue in order to take more money out of the people's pockets?

So he vetoed all of the budget bills (except for the tiny Agriculture bill), and now that the Legislature has reached the Constitutionally-mandated adjournment date, the only way a budget can be put in place by July 1 is through a special session of the Legislature. Without a budget by July 1, state government will shut down (which may not be a totally bad thing, but that's a discussion for another day).

So Governor Goofy is willing to incur the cost of a special session - or even a government shutdown - for what? Not for some high-minded principle like a balanced budget, job creation, increased education funding or a revitalized economy. No, he's willing to do all of this because the voices in his head say that taxes should be raised.

It's a goofiness that makes Perpich look sane and sober in comparison.

The truth: Can they handle it?

2011-05-24T01:23:00.004-05:00

Tim Pawlenty (see below post) is only one day into his presidential campaign, but he did something today that impressed me. He went into Iowa, and said that ethanol subsidies have to be phased out.

For 30 years, candidates of both parties have been trudging into Iowa and promising support for ethanol. The truth is, corn-based ethanol isn't simply a questionable idea, or a shaky idea, or an idea needing further study. It's flat-out a HORRIBLE idea that has wasted billions and billions of dollars and done untold environmental damage, but politicians supported it because they thought they had to in order to curry favor with voters in Iowa, Minnesota and other corn belt states. Bob Dole was one of the most shameful practitioners, with Bill Clinton running a close second.

The fact that Pawlenty was willing to do that shows a certain amount of courage that most risk-averse politicians lack.

Rumor has it that Pawlenty is going to go to senior-laden Florida, and say that Social Security cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs) need to be means-tested. It's a reasonable idea that needs to be done - Does Warren Buffet really require an annual increase in his Social Security payments? - but one that politicians have been afraid to touch. (If we had adopted a very minor COLA adjustment plan put forward in 1989 by my old boss Rudy Boschwitz, there would be no Social Security problem now.)

This tells me that Pawlenty is ready to tell the truth to the American public about the incredible depth of our current fiscal crisis. Whether the American public is willing - or smart enough - to listen to that truth will be one of the key questions affecting the success of Pawlenty's candidacy.