• We dig it up for you.
• Your TC source of news, arts, multimedia, and tomfoolery

Note from underground: Changes…

Dear Mole readers and friends,

The rumors, first reported last week by David Brauer and Brian Lambert, are true: Beginning on February 19, I will be joining Minnesota Monitor. The Mole is going on hiatus starting today, likely to re-emerge as a personal site with a more arts/culture orientation.

It’s been a lot of fun doing the Daily Mole during the past three months-plus. I want to thank all of you for the interest and support that allowed us to build from 2000 or so page views a day during the early part of public beta to 8,000-10,000 a day over the last few weeks–all without paid promotion or mainstream media exposure.

Trying to raise start-up funding in this climate has not been so gratifying. Neither has working in relative isolation every day as we bootstrapped the start-up. I’m very grateful to the world’s finest interweb weatherman, Jimmy “Dutch” Gaines, to my wife Cecily Marcus and our family, and to music contributor Jon Hunt.

And I look forward to working alongside the folks at Minnesota Monitor to ensure the site is one of the most useful and provocative sources of local news and campaign 2008 coverage. Some of the stories and the content departments we’ve been working on here will move to the Monitor, which, I’m excited to say, is in the process of expanding its resources and its coverage.

Hope you’ll join me and the Monitor’s growing roster of contributors there. And once again, thanks for reading and thanks for your support, encouragement, and criticisms.

Big loser in Rasmussen/Fox9 Minnesota survey: Pawlenty

There are no surprises in the presidential preferences expressed by Minnesotans in the pre-Super Tuesday poll unveiled by Fox9 last night. The Rasmussen survey of “likely voters” shows McCain and Obama surging here, as they have in most surveys of other states holding primaries tomorrow. But how those preferences will translate in a state where people have to spend an evening at the caucuses rather than having all day to vote at their leisure puts a premium on ground organization. We’ll see.

The eye-opener involves the two survey questions about Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Back in October, a couple of months after the 35W bridge collapse, a Strib Minnesota Poll showed Pawlenty with a 59 percent approval rating, his highest in four years. Three months later, Rasmussen says that 45 percent of Minnesotans call Pawlenty’s performance excellent or good, while 53 percent term it fair or poor. The real shocker concerns Pawlenty as a prospective Republican VP candidate: While 29 percent say it would make them more likely to vote for the GOP ticket, 35 percent say it would make them less likely to cast their votes for the Republicans. This suggests not only that MnDOT-related scandals and the economy have cost Pawlenty more than anyone has realized, but that the governor has become a more polarizing figure in Minnesota over time.

The Republicans have already invested a lot of political capital in this swing state by choosing to hold their convention here. It’s hard to think that John McCain or the chieftains of the national GOP will find much savor in the prospect of spending more political capital here by choosing a VP for the ticket who looks like a net liability in his own state.

Here’s the Fox9 report, with video, text results, and crosstabs.

Keefe/MPD update: Jordan says Civil Rights Department acted properly in forwarding accusation-laden letter

Earlier this week I posted deputy city attorney Peter Ginder’s “no comment” concerning my question about whether the city attorney’s office or the Civil Rights Department was ultimately responsible for the inclusion of unusual and serious accusations against Minneapolis police lieutenant Michael Keefe in a response to a civil rights complaint by Ron Edwards.

Today I reached Civil Rights Department director Michael Jordan [pictured] and asked him whether his office had acted properly in forwarding to Edwards the case memorandum that contained the Keefe allegations (written by Caroline Bachun of the city attorney’s office).  Jordan answered unequivocally.

“Yes,” he said. “The process is, the complainant makes a complaint. We send the complaint to the person they’re complaining against, the respondent, and the respondent forwards a response to that complaint. The complainant then gets to look at that response and offer a rebuttal. That’s the standard practice with all complaints. It has been for 20 years.”

US general: Let the soldiers blog

One of the best-known faces among top US military brass, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, is pushing the Pentagon to allow soldiers to blog and post video to YouTube, calling it a potential asset in the war for the hearts and minds of Americans back home.

Noah Schachtman posts about Caldwell’s efforts at the Danger Room blog, and he includes a number of useful background links regarding the current ban on YouTube access through military networks and the blocking of numerous soldier blogs.

Campaign ‘08 ads: Clinton goes with the economy on eve of Super Tuesday

In the final weekend before 24 states vote on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton rolls out two ads about the economy. Serviceable if not exactly rousing, but it’s doubtful how compelling they’ll prove to former supporters of John Edwards, who made these issues the centerpiece of his campaign. As David Schultz noted on the Molecast yesterday, one of Edwards’s greatest strengths lay among white male Democrats, and there are a great many white male Democrats who just don’t like her.

Free Fall

Can Do

This Day in Infamy: Nguyen Van Lam executed, 1 February 1968

From the Daily Mole’s partner site Axis of Evel Knievel, an award-winning blog devoted to atrocities, disasters, and portents of doom from the historical record:

By David Noon

On 1 February 1968, several days into the Tet Offensive, Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese police, shot a captured member of the National Liberation Front in the head at close range. Nguyen Van Lam, also known as Captain Bay Lop, had been captured by South Vietnamese forces after a battle at a Buddhist pagoda in the Chinese section of Saigon. Hands tied behind his back and his face visibly swollen, Lam was marched down the street.

American photographer Eddie Adams and Vietnamese cameraman Vo Su — who was working for NBC — had been photographing and filming the battle and watched as two South Vietnamese Marines brought the staggering captive toward them. Adams described the scene years later:

When they were close — maybe five feet away — the soldiers stopped and backed away. I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture — the threat, the interrogation. But it didn’t happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC’s head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time.

The frightful still image of the summary execution quickly became emblematic of the American War in Vietnam, at least to its critics. For the remainder of both of their lives, however, Adams — whose photo was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 — defended Loan, whom he believed was destroyed by the image as well.

Several months after the shooting of Nguyen Van Lem, Loan was severely injured in a battle near a Saigon bridge; one of his legs had to be amputated. He fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon and opened a pizza restaurant in Burke, Virginia, which he operated until when his identity was publicized in 1991 and his business suffered. Loan died of cancer seven years later. Adams passed away in 2004 from ALS. As for Nguyen Van Lam, his body disappeared after the shooting thirty-nine years ago today and was never found.

TC Morning Roundup: Moving targets

Through no fault of the survey takers, yesterday’s MPR/UM Humphrey Institute poll on Minnesota presidential preferences was almost information-free. Measured against the last Minnesota head count, back in September, all it really tells us is that what’s true across the country is true here as well–John McCain and Barack Obama have gained enormously from their exposure and their successes so far in primary season. [MPR] [Strib]

Otherwise, caveats abound:

• The poll is not of likely voters, and never mind the problem of figuring out via phone survey who will actually trudge out to precinct caucuses.
• It was taken before Rudy Giuliani, and, more critically, John Edwards dropped out.
• Clinton’s lead on the Democratic side falls within the margin of error.
• And as we’ve noted here before, the polls this season have missed more often than they hit. (Here’s a WSJ analysis we linked the other day.)

Incidentally, here’s a Gallup tracking poll that contains the first scant hints of post-Edwards and Giuliani trends. And today MPR has additional numbers on the US Senate race. Surprisingly, Al Franken is not only leading big among Democrats but running even with Norm Coleman.

In a hearing yesterday on the main MPD civil rights lawsuit, Judge Michael Davis denied a motion by the city to excise certain portions of the original legal complaint on the grounds they were (David Chanen’s words) “redundant, immaterial, impertinent or scandalous.” These included references to Chief Tim Dolan’s teenage years, when he allegedly put racist fliers in the lockers of black students at his school. Davis also warned the city’s attorneys they’d face sanctions if they tried to tie up proceedings with endless legal motions.

Resume-polishing in our time: Governor Green makes noises about sweetening the incentives for building wind farms in Minnesota… The bridge: Jason Hoppin of the Pi Press writes that the 35W bridge collapse, coupled with a 2006 federal study, has the US Department of Transportation calling for a re-examination of bridges’ load capacities., and earlier this week the New York Times published a nice overview of the controversies occasioned by NTSB chair Mark Rosenker’s press conference a couple of weeks ago.

Josephine Marcotty says researchers studying the illness that struck pork plant workers in Austin who inhaled vaporized pig brains are leaning to the view it’s an auto-immune reaction triggered by the pig brain tissue…

Mortgage fraud: Ronald Joseph, a co-owner of LHS Mortgage Inc., was sentenced to five years in prison yesterday. Joseph, who tried to kill himself a month ago by drinking antifreeze, got the minimum recommended sentence.

And here’s an LA Times story from earlier this week that offers more details on the possible $1.3 billion in fines that United Health is facing in California. (If this poses a cash-flow problem for United, we know where there’s $900 million-plus just sitting around…)

Molecast audio: David Schultz says Super Tuesday may slow Clinton and McCain

In this week’s Molecast Campaign ‘08 discussion with David Schultz, we focus on Super Tuesday. In looking over polling data and demographic trends, Schultz takes exception to the pundits’ chorus that has increasingly portrayed Hillary Clinton and John McCain as solid frontrunners heading into February 5.

He’s struck instead by how thin the public appeal of some of the remaining candidates appears to be. “We’re moving down the line with a series of choices in Clinton, Romney, and McCain who don’t really have a lot of support among independents, Democrats, or Republicans,” Schultz notes. “If you just asked, would you prefer any of these three or an unnamed candidate?, the unnamed candidate would probably win. For a year where ‘change’ seems to be the buzzword, we’re producing an awful lot of candidates who don’t seem appetizing to a large percentage of the American population.”

Molecast audio: David Schultz looks ahead to the Super Tuesday states (14:06)

Below the jump: excerpts of Schultz’s remarks

Read more

Campaign ‘08: The Rapping Pizza sings the praises of the Bush and Clinton dynasties

This is brilliant:

Bush for four years and Clinton for eight,
Then Bush for eight and that was just great,
So if Hillary serves for another eight years,
That’s how many years? That’s 32 years!

BTM: When does it make sense to just walk away from an onerous mortgage?

On Tuesday Alex Stenback at Behind the Mortgage published a series of posts on a subject that the lending industry would prefer we not discuss: deciding when to cut your losses and default on a mortgage that has become unaffordable and/or exceeds the present value of the home itself.

• Stenback started by quoting blogger Paul Kedrosky: “Yes, people used to be much more nervous about defaulting. But so what? If a loan no longer meets your requirements, or if it’s crushing you financially, or if your circumstances have changed, there is no need to go leaping off bridges about it. The world has changed and the consequences of loan defaults & loan renegotiations are no longer need be as dire as they once were… It’s about time individuals caught up with countries and companies. Both have always had more flexibility with respect to loan defaults/renegotiation than individuals have.”
• Stenback’s second post examined the likely downside of rising default rates: “When the shooting is over, we will see lenders attempt to adjust their pricing and underwriting standards to account for the fact that if properly incented, borrowers will simply walk.  This means higher rates, down payments, and tougher underwriting standards in the future.”
• The third post contains a reader-supplied link to a website for people considering mortgage defaults, YouWalkAway.com.

This Day in Infamy: The execution of Private Slovik, 31 January 1945

From the Daily Mole’s partner site Axis of Evel Knievel, an award-winning blog devoted to atrocities, disasters, and portents of doom from the historical record:

By David Noon

American Private Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion on this date in 1945. He had abandoned the 109th Infantry Regimen, 28th Infantry Division in October 1944, just two months after arriving in France. Because of his record of petty criminality as a youth in Detroit, Slovik was originally declared unfit for military service in 1942. As the meat-grinder of war proceeded, however, his classification was changed and Eddie Slovik was declared fit for duty in 1944. Slovik was despondent during basic training and announced his intent to “run away” from his assignment, believing that he would spend at most a few months in prison. Instead, a nine-man jury convicted him of violating the 58th Article of War in November 1944 and sentenced him to death by firing squad.

Slovik appealed to General Dwight David Eisenhower for clemency but was denied two days before Christmas; desertion had become a problem among US soldiers, and the General was eager to set a deterrent example. Sixty-two years ago today, Eddie Slovik’s sentence was carried out near the French village of Ste Marie aux Mines. Of the 49 American deserters sentenced to die during the war, Slovik’s sentence was the only one not commuted. In addition to Pvt. Slovik, 21,048 American soldiers deserted their units during World War II.

Just before he was shot, Slovik was urged by one of his executioners “take it easy, Eddie. Try to make it easy on yourself — and on us.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Slovik responded. “I’m okay. They’re not shooting me for deserting the United Stated Army — thousands of guys have done that. They’re shooting me for bread I stole when I was 12 years old.”

In the last letter he ever wrote, Slovik mused to his wife that “Everything happens to me. I’ve never had a streak of luck in my life. The only luck I had in my life was when I married you. I knew it wouldn’t last because I was too happy. I knew they would not let me be happy.”

Antoinette Slovik had never actually been told that her husband was to be shot. The army insisted afterward that the young private should have told her himself. Riven with grief and anger, Antoinette struggled to clear her husband’s name until her own death in 1979. She asked seven American presidents — including Dwight Eisenhower — to issue her husband a pardon. All refused.

TC Morning Roundup: A thousand cuts

Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy of the Star Tribune delve into the case of the $157,400 staircase constructed at the 35W bridge collapse site and discover that, by the contractor’s own admission, MnDOT overseers paid the staircase builders for a number of expenses that should not have been reimbursed–including basic tools of the construction trade such as shovels, nail guns, and sledgehammers.

But there’s a more telling MnDOT story in today’s Strib that barely mentions the DOT by name. Lora Pabst reports that a gathering of the North Metro Mayors Association turned into a gripe-fest about the state’s chronic failure to adequately fund Minnesota’s transportation needs.
Pabst writes:

“Officials from each city can rattle off a list of projects that they had to finance because the state couldn’t come up with the funds:

• “In Maple Grove, it was $15 million for bridges that typically would have been a state expense.

• “In Blaine, it was $2.5 million for a bridge in the ongoing Highway 65 project that was originally supposed to cost the city $750,000.

• “In Champlin, it has been millions of dollars for upgrades along Hwy. 169 over the past five years.”

It becomes more and more clear that, however extensive MnDOT’s project management troubles may be, the more fundamental problem is that the agency has been chronically and woefully underfunded during the Pawlenty years–while the department’s management, for political reasons, has failed to blow the whistle on the extent of the problems.

Another funding crisis: Steve Berg has an important story in yesterday’s MinnPost concerning the city of Minneapolis’s police and fire department pension funds. A combination of high administrative and legal costs on one hand, and generous pension guarantees underwritten by the city on the other, mean that “the city faces a 200 percent increase in fund payments over the next two years,” Berg writes, “and a pension burden that mounts to $255.8 million over the next 20 years on these two funds alone.”

One fund that’s not wanting for cash: Tim Pawlenty’s campaign war chest.

Economy: Nobody can stop a recession, writes Mike Meyers, and it’s unclear whether steps like tax rebates and Fed rate cuts can delay one… From the LA Times: “Brushing aside concerns that it was doing the bidding of the securities markets, the Fed cited troubled financial conditions as its primary motivation in chopping its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 3% [yesterday] — just eight days after making an emergency reduction of three-quarters of a point.”… And Pat Doyle reports that the state’s troubles with its unemployment claims system are getting better thanks to the hiring of some additional personnel to fix the new computerized claim service…

Animal news: Shriners are huffing and puffing and threatening not to bring the circus to town if the Minneapolis City Council passes an ordinance banning elephant rides… A plan to ship the Como Zoo’s polar bears, Neil and Buzz, to the Buffalo Zoo while their space at Como is renovated has fallen through because Buffalo can’t afford to build a temporary space for them…

Learning from the mistakes of others: If you get drunk and crash your car and a good Samaritan stops to help, do not steal the Samaritan’s car and crash it, too.

Campaign ‘08: Super Tuesday polls

The site USA Election Polls has a handy rundown of current state-by-state poll standings for both parties–though of course none of them measure the impact of John Edwards’s and Rudy Giuliani’s dropping out–and here are some links to polling analysis pieces:

• “Super Tuesday Looks Close for Democrats,” LA Times
• “Is Romney Fighting the Last War?,” Time
• “In Campaign 2008, Pollsters Are Biggest Losers,” Wall Street Journal

City Hall: Mayor still has “full confidence” in police chief and civil rights director; Keefe’s attorney mum

This morning I phoned (and wrote) the office of Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak with two questions stemming from the recent controversies at the Minneapolis Police Department and the city’s Civil Rights Department:

• Does Police Chief Tim Dolan still have your full confidence?
• Does Civil Rights Department Director Michael Jordan still have your full confidence?

I received this reply, via email, from Jeremy Hansen in the mayor’s office (emphasis added):

“Mayor Rybak is in Washington, DC today, so I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to connect him with you. Nonetheless, the answers to your questions are:

“Does Police Chief Tim Dolan still have your full confidence? Yes.”

“Does Civil Rights Department Director Michael Jordan still have your full confidence? Yes.“

I also phoned Mark Larsen, the attorney and former federal prosecutor (he handled the Joe Biernat prosecution in 2003) who is representing Lt. Michael Keefe in the wake of accusations by MPD brass against Keefe that were made public last week. Practically every media person and City Hall watcher I’ve spoken to believes there will be a defamation lawsuit forthcoming from Keith, so I asked Larsen if he and his client were weighing the possibility.

His answer was not exactly a surprise: “I can’t comment on that.”

Capitol roundtable asks: Are we better off now than we were seven years ago?

At the labor news site Workday Minnesota, Barb Kucera covers a pre-State of the Union roundtable gathering at the state capitol consisting of representatives from ACORN, Jobs Now, and other organizations that took the measure of declining standards of living.

Kucera summarizes the statistical snapshots they presented:

• In each of the past seven years, only 369,000 jobs were created nationally in the private sector, compared to 1.76 million jobs per year in the 1990s.
• The number of Americans in poverty rose from 31.6 million in 2001 to 36.5 million today.
• The number of Americans without health insurance grew from 38 million in 2001 to 47 million today.
• Median household income in the United States has dropped from $49,163 in 2001 to $48,023 today.
• The price of a gallon of gas has gone from $1.39 to $3.07 in the same period. • The national debt has nearly doubled, the trade deficit has doubled and consumer debt is now over $12 trillion.

Read the story.

TC Morning Roundup: He said, she said

Longstanding battles–over former US Attorney Rachel Paulose and MnDOT’s Wakota Bridge project–are back in the news this morning.

MnDOT commissioner Carol Molnau spent part of her day yesterday defending the agency’s decision to seek new bids for the project in 2006, even though it resulted in the rehiring of the same contractor, Lunda Construction, that had been fired from the project when new bids were sought. The Strib’s Mike Kaszuba notes that “[a]n independent mediation board later ruled that MnDOT had acted improperly [in firing Lunda] and said the agency had breached its contract with the company.” Molnau’s gambit, as reported in two dispatches from Jason Hoppin of the Pioneer Press: first, she asked for a legislative audit of MnDOT’s decision to terminate the Lunda contract; second, she announced that MnDOT will try to recoup $50 million from the engineering firm responsible for a flaw in the original bridge design.

Yesterday Eric Black at MinnPost waded back into the Rachel Paulose affair, publishing a letter from Scott Bloch of the Office of Special Counsel to US Attorney General Michael Mukasey that a) suggests the Department of Justice is stonewalling in its investigation of Paulose and b) contains additional details about the allegations lodged against Paulose by her then-top deputy, Assistant US Attorney John Marti… More: The Strib follows up.

State Economist Tom Stinson said yesterday that the anticipated $373 million state budget shortfall is likely to grow as the economy slows further, and he cast aspersions on the notion that legislators can do much to stimulate the Minnesota economy… NWA: John Welbes reports that the airline’s modest fourth quarter losses were smaller than expected, and that Northwest’s acquisition of a minority stake in a Milwaukee-based regional carrier, Midwest Air Group, will probably get an okay from anti-trust reviewers at the Department of Justice soon. And although he probably won’t be able to do anything about it, House Transportation Committee chair Jim Oberstar repeated his objection to any major airline merger on the grounds it would raise ticket prices and downgrade service in some areas…

Regulators in California have fined United Health $3.5 million for failure to pay insurance claims in a timely way, but that’s chump change compared to the sanctions that may lie ahead: “Yet to come is a separate sanction by the California Department of Insurance, whose penalty could be as high as $1.3 billion. The Minnetonka-based insurer has paid record fines in at least six other states since 2004 for paying claims slowly, shortchanging doctors, hospitals and patients, or poorly handling complaints and appeals.”

Environment: The Strib’s Tom Meersman writes that industrial chemicals used by 3M until 2002 have turned up in nine more metro-area lakes, including Harriet and Cedar. The backstory: “The metro lakes study began after the surprise discovery last spring of relatively high levels of PFOS in bluegills from Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. Scientists couldn’t explain the source of the contamination, because the lake is not near any known areas where 3M manufactured or disposed of the chemical.” The MPCA says it believes the chemicals spread through stormwater runoff systems.

Who screwed up in disclosing the Keefe/MPD controversy? A (very short) Q&A with Minneapolis deputy city attorney Peter Ginder

Here’s one question on the minds of City Hall watchers a day after the story broke concerning the allegations and counter-allegations being lobbed between the Minneapolis Police Department and Lieutenant Michael Keefe: How did a city attorney’s case memorandum to the Civil Rights Department that contained extremely damning accusations about a Minneapolis cop get forwarded in its entirety to the complainant in the case, Ron Edwards? It’s difficult to believe that assistant city attorney Caroline Bachun’s letter was intended for any kind of public release, as it discusses claims of wrongdoing not only against Lt. Michael Keefe but also against another officer whom Keefe accused of using racial epithets.

This morning I reached both Bachun and the deputy Minneapolis city attorney who heads the civil division, Peter Ginder, to ask whether Bachun’s letter was written with the expectation that it would simply be forwarded to the complainant. Bachun immediately declined to answer and referred me to the city communications office. I then phoned Ginder and had the following exchange:

Daily Mole: Can you tell me whether the letter from your office to the Civil Rights Department was written in the anticipation that it would be shared with the person who filed the complaint?

Peter Ginder: There are certain questions I’m not going to answer, and that’s one of them.

DM: Was it legally proper for the Civil Rights Department to have sent that letter in its entirety to Mr. Edwards?

Ginder: I’m not going to comment on that.

DM: Can you tell me whether, as a matter of city policy, letters from your office to the Civil Rights Department are released to people who file civil rights complaints?

Ginder: That’s not a policy question, that’s a legal question, and I’m not going to answer it.

Obama the war candidate: His Wilson Center speech

Barack Obama has gotten lots of mileage from his putative opposition to the Iraq War, and it’s been highlighted in his stump appearances and in his advertising, like the “Unify” spot below.

But last August Obama gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center–little noted outside the conservative press–that put quite a different spin on his “anti-war” stance. To the assembled foreign affairs crowd at Wilson, Obama demurred that he only wanted to get out of Iraq to wage war on worthier fronts, even if it means sending missiles or missions into the nuclear-armed, and unstable, state of Pakistan:

“The first step must be getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan… I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

In a post at Black Agenda Report that I linked here last week, editor Glen Ford elaborates: “Listen to him: He has ‘a goal of removing all combat brigades by March 31, 2008.’ Sounds like withdrawal from Iraq, right? Wrong. There are 180,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, most of them not in ‘combat brigades,’ and about 100,000 mercenaries in the country. It is thoroughly occupied. Obama would do a cosmetic withdrawal, and then move the ‘combat’ troops to a far more dangerous war, in Waziristan [the Pakistani province where Osama bin Laden is believed to be holed up], that would quickly spread to all of Pakistan and threaten the survival of our great cities.”

Below the jump: the transcript of Barack Obama’s August 1, 2007 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Read more

This Day in Infamy: Andrew Jackson and Edward Abbey

From the Daily Mole’s partner site Axis of Evel Knievel, an award-winning blog devoted to atrocities, disasters, and portents of doom from the historical record:

By David Noon

President Andrew Jackson, whose legend often presents him as a friend of the commoner, called upon federal troops to suppress a labor uprising on this date in 1834 — the first and certainly not the last time such powers would be invoked by an American president. The conflict, which broke out along the sixth section of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, involved rival groups of Irish workers near Williamsport, Maryland. After a laborer named John Irons was beaten to death on January 16, a week of clashes between “the Corkonians” and “the Longford men” resulted in dozens killed and scores wounded in clashes that at times involved hundreds of workers. Construction along the B&O was suspended, and the Maryland legislature appealed to President Jackson to intervene.

As it turns out, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was a close friend of Jackson’s. Indeed, John H. Eaton was a former Senator from Tennessee and had served two years as Jackson’s Secretary of War; he was quite open about his view that American troops should remain in his company’s service for months to come. After Jackson ordered two companies of troops to suppress the disturbances on January 29, Eaton wrote a letter to his friend and wondered if the soldiers might stick around to coerce the strikers into obedience. They did. In February 1835, a section of B&O workers struck for higher wages. As Niles’ Weekly Register reported, mounted troops and riflement “happily reduced the rioters to order, and drove them away.”

***

Novelist, ecologist, and anarchist Edward Abbey was born on this day in 1927. Abbey died in 1989, a little over a week after George Herbert Walker Bush was inaugurated as 41st president of the US. Abbey once wrote that “Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes & disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.”

On what would have been Abbey’s 75th birthday, the 43rd President of the US — also named George Bush — declared Iraq, Iran and North Korea to be an “axis of evil.” As The Decider explained, “I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

Twenty-nine years ago today, a 16-year-old girl named Brenda Ann Spencer shot eight children and three adults — two of whom died — at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. Asked after her arrest to explain her motive, Spencer merely told police that she didn’t like Mondays. The Boomtown Rats wrote a song about Spencer. Titled “I Don’t Like Mondays,” it was released nine months after the shooting.

TC Morning Roundup: Mission accomplished

Following criticism by House Transportation Committee chair Jim Oberstar, NTSB chairman Mark Rosenker conceded yesterday that he had no basis for saying that flawed gusset plate design “tells us why the [35W] bridge collapsed.” But since the press conference in which he said as much was a front-page, two-day story and this is a “clarification” story, it won’t put much of a dent in the public impression that the NTSB chairman said design flaws brought the bridge down.

The fun new fact in Kevin Diaz and Mike Kaszuba’s Strib story: When Rosenker stood before the press and announced that the 35W collapse was a unique, “one-off” situation and that it “is the only bridge failure of this type of which the Safety Board is aware,” investigators from the NTSB had already been in touch with engineers familiar with the partial failure of a similarly designed bridge in Ohio in 1996. (Jason Hopping of the Pi Press broke the Ohio bridge story last week.)

Money quote, since it’s the first time a Strib report has made the political equation manifest: “[Oberstar] and other Minnesota DFLers raised concerns about Rosenker’s statements because they appeared to minimize the role of corrosion and maintenance in the bridge collapse. A design flaw would give them less of an opening to hold officials at the state Department of Transportation and Gov. Tim Pawlenty responsible for the bridge’s upkeep.”

More bridge-related news: Some legislators are trying to find ways to assure that proceeds from the state’s victims fund for collapse survivors don’t wind up getting confiscated by insurance companies, but it ain’t easy.

The AP reports that the ethanol boondoggle is driving up food prices and making more people starve, and that it threatens to deplete the water table, too… Jennifer Bjorhus offers details on the local auction of new housing inventory last weekend: 180 of 216 properties sold, for prices ranging from 20 to 75 percent of estimated market value…

Bill Salisbury writes that a poll commissioned by a good-government organization indicates that Minnesotans, by a 3-1 margin, favor periodic up-or-down votes on judges over our present system, which allows opponents to enter electoral races against sitting judges… The AP’s Patrick Condon writes of the persistent troubles in St. Cloud with racism toward non-Anglos on the St. Cloud State campus…

Former somebody Chuck Knoblauch–widely remembered as the least fan-friendly player the Twins ever had–has agreed to speak to a House committee investigating drug use in baseball. The subpoena may have had something to do with it… Lawyers and loons leave Lake Wobegon: Garrison Keillor, who last week settled a garage dispute with his next-door neighbor, has reached the end of another legal set-to, dropping his harassment order against a Georgia woman who had phoned his house and sent him “a petrified alligator’s foot, dead beetles, and poems.” Yes, but how were the poems? We shall find out: Keillor’s self-designated kindred spirit, Andrea Campbell, tells the Pi Press’s Emily Gurnon that “she is working on a book about how she believes she and Keillor influenced each other’s creative processes.”

keep looking »