The Eclectic Mix

I’ve decided I need to occasionally make this thing a little more topical once in a while…So, I’ll try to throw more political commentary your way…As I remember…So you may never see this bit again. Who knows.

Dominating everything right now is the health care reform debate. And, I think, as usual, both sides are completely screwing the whole process up for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which is pure party politics.

The Democrats have decided to push through something–anything–probably just so they can say they’re doing something. The Republicans are fighting that, for obvious reasons, but also don’t like much of the plan, and have been busily trying to spread rumors about the true language in some portions of the bill in an effort to further divide the country on the issue.

In the process, both sides have completely stopped talking to each other about the core issues. A democratic government, which everyone there pretends to hold up as one of the greatest strengths of this country, is all about negotiation and compromise, not divisive party politics and filibusters and one party “ramming a bill down the throats” of the other party or the people of the country. Like it or not, this country is not, nor has it ever been, a dictatorship.

Yet, that’s exactly what’s happening. Initially, the Democrats saw their chance, holding a super majority, to push through whatever they wanted, and that was wrong. Compromise was never offered, discussions were never held, and quite frankly, the Democrats came off as the kid who brought the ball to the game–sure, you can play, but it’s my ball, so play it my way. The Republicans, probably rightly so, were indignant with that approach. But then they decided to take it a step further and smear the Democrats and all concepts of health care reform in public. So for their part, they appeared to be the whiny children who simply decided that since they couldn’t play the game they way they wanted to, they would instead go running back to anyone who would listen and call the schoolyard bully nasty names.

Yes, our congress is populated by 45+ year-old children. Every last one of them…Who got the job because we put them there. Who’s stupid now? Nope. Still them. We, at least, can vote every last one of them out, if we get it together long enough.

So as we speak, the Democrats are positioned to have an up-or-down vote on a bill that is hopelessly flawed, which is no way to run a country, let alone a piece of important social and economic policy. And the Republicans are positioned to block it at all costs, regardless of what it might do or bring to the country.

Quite honestly, I don’t think either side really knows what’s in the bill, and that’s a shame. Because instead of talking about the issues, we’ve been stuck for months talking about the process.

Moving on…

Locally, T-Paw (erm…Governor Pawlenty) finds himself in a mess largely of his own making: His entire career in the legislature and the governor’s office has been marked by his inability to deal with financial issues at that time. Instead, he has pushed it off through procedural moves, budget tricks, and other manipulation that doesn’t include anything actually labeled a tax increase. And during this time of rough financial sailing, the state finds itself in a very, very deep financial hole. Add to that the fact that both sides–Democrat and Republican (and governor)–are holding true to the national theme and not talking to each other, and you see the problem. The Gov unilaterally cut spending last year, and is now being sued because of it, simply because he can’t bring himself to raise taxes. While the Democrats can’t pass a budget that finds that middle ground between cuts to unnecessary programs and tax increases.

So, we’re exactly where we were one year ago. And probably likely to stay there for a while. Yay us!

Here’s the thing, in case you’ve missed it here: All sides need to be locked in a room by an angry mob of taxpayers, and not allowed to leave until there is some compromise on everything–budget, health care reform, education reform, foreign policy, what-have-you. Because they aren’t going to do it otherwise. Whether they like it or not, they’re there to represent all of us, or all of the people in their district, whether we voted for them or not. And in the end, everyone in all elected bodies ultimately govern us all, so we should have some semblance of consensus over disagreement.

So just shut up, all of you. Retract the rhetoric and just do the right thing for a change. Holding your seat or a majority isn’t nearly as important as not ripping the fabric of the country apart. And if you yell about holding to your principles, go for it if you must, but remember that there are at least a hundred other people in the same body who are probably doing the same  thing…With the same, imperceptible results.

Lemme just put the soap box back over there…

See you tomorrow.

While the world is going to hell in a hand basket, we Minnesotans are still firmly ensconced in the continuing battle over the Franken/Coleman election. What once seemed like a campaign that wouldn’t die has turned into the court case and recount that wouldn’t die.

How many more times do we need to hear the news trumpeting the fact that Amy Klobuchar is our ONLY senator? How many more times do we need to hear that the three-judge panel is being asked to hand inspect each piece of dust on every rejected ballot in order to determine the mite’s intent so that their vote can be properly captured and registered in the annals of history?

Coleman is being whiny. He’s now officially FORMER senator Coleman, until either candidate is declared the winner, since his term expired along with our hope for a quick resolution to the 2008 campaign season. And he’s acting like the three-year-old that had to give back the neighbor kid’s tricycle.

Franken, on the other hand, is being pompous. He declared himself the senator-elect today in several interviews with the local newshounds. He told us how he has been in regular contact with senate and democratic leadership and has been selecting members of his office once he officially takes up permanent residence somewhere in the basement of the senate office building.

Each are now countering each other by claiming that ballots were wrongly rejected from areas that typically vote their way. Let’s go through that thought slowly, shall we? Coleman wants to count “wrongly rejected” ballots from areas he and Republicans typically do well. And Franken, employing the only defense that probably makes sense, called for the same from areas that are Democratic strongholds. So wait. Are they saying that election officials in those areas worked for the other side? What sense does that make? When you become an election judge, you don’t usually go very far from your own precinct to work the polls. And these are absentee ballots, so I’d think they’re looked at by a central location in each county. When Hennepin county, say, is leaning heavily toward Franken, what possible motivation could a judge have for rejecting absentee ballots based on who they’re voting for?

At this point, it’s become a strictly legal process. Politics has nothing to do with it, except for the candidates’ continued attempts to look statesmanlike while still playing the victim. It ain’t flattering. And from what I heard on MPR the other night, just in the last month or so, each side has raised about $1 million just for the legal fees for their campaign.

Meanwhile, as if he really is going to get it, Franken has appealed to the state supreme court to ORDER the gov and secretary of state to give him an election certificate. I’m sorry. Isn’t there state law involved here that says that all legal challenges need to be exhausted before the certificate can be granted? If you’re trying to make a point, just go on TV and say “Na na, na na, boo boo. Coleman’s a whiner!”

For that matter, maybe we should just decide this thing with a best of seven game of rock-paper-scissors, or “Your momma’s so…”, or a hot-dog eating contest. No, wait! A lutefisk eating contest! First to finish eating without throwing up wins!

The problem has renewed calls for the state to adopt instant runoff voting, wherein voters rank the candidates in their order of preference, and the first, second and third place votes for each are tallied. If the first choice votes are tied, then they go to the second choice votes, and so on. But in this case, it would screw things up completely: Assuming that about 42% of the voters each went for Franken and Coleman, their second choice wouldn’t have voted for the other one. Instead, they probably would have gone for Dean Barkley. And let’s face it, would we really want a senator who 84% of the voters didn’t want as their first choice? He’d forever be “senator also-ran, ” or “senator lesser-of-two-evils.”

Sorry kids, but at this point, the candidates and their people just need to shut up in public and let the legal process work it’s magic. If either one is going to say anything in public, it should be to man-up and say that for the good of the state, they’re giving this challenge up and wishing the other the best for the next six years. I’d bet it would put them in a better position when the seat comes up again.

Here’s the point: there are bigger things going on that need solving than figuring out who has a better legal team to win them the election. We did our voting. Just pick a damn number and move on. Both candidates have alienated more people than they attracted to their campaign, so why bother? Right now, to use the hockey vernacular, we’re short-handed in the senate, and as long as that continues, we have less representation than we’re entitled to. And if either of them are really out to serve the people of the state, they should solve this over the weekend. Is there such a thing as senatorial time-share? Just think of the fun! Schizophrenic senate representation! One week, in favor of higher taxes and solar panels on everyone’s roofs, and the next week, we’re voting against women’s rights and universal health care!

Wait. That would be just as bad as nothing. Which is exactly what we have now. Never mind.

See you tomorrow.

Yeah, I’m fighting a cold, so what you read here may or may not be influenced by some or all of the decongestant I’m taking to try to keep my head free from resonating when I talk like a solid body guitar.

I passed on commenting on the Michele Bachmann thing last night (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just google it and you’ll have more than enough to read. But tonight, I’m (sort of) ready.

I don’t understand why she can’t just shut up. Even now, as she’s backpedaled furiously from what she said for over 9 minutes on national television, she insists that she was set up–forced by that clever Chris Matthews into saying what she said. I watched the interview again today just to make sure, and while yes, he introduced the word anti-American, it was her who ran with it at every opportunity, using the terms leftist, liberal, anti-American, and terrorist in the same sentence frequently.

You wonder where her advisers were at that time. Wasn’t one of them jumping up and down next to the camera gesturing wildly to get her to shut the hell up? Honestly, I kept listening to the audio, waiting for the forehead slap of her adviser in the background.

It all sounded like she was handed some talking points memo right before going on and just kept running with the thought, but simply forgot to just stop talking. Matthews’ interview was asking about the charge, as leveled by the McCain campaign itself, that Obama “associated” with a member of a 60’s and 70’s radical organization. Somehow, in those 9 or so minutes, it went from that to her ACTUALLY SAYING that the media should investigate members of congress to see if they’re anti-American or not.

Now, her crap and inability to think on her feet aside, just what makes someone anti-American? Because by using some of the same criteria that they’re weighing Obama with, I’d be anti-American. I’ll admit, I don’t love this country. But it’s where I live. It’s where I was born, and it’s given me the opportunity for me to lead my life relatively free from encumbrances. But there are things that this country, or the government of this country does that I do not like, do not agree with, and wish would be stopped post-haste. I’ve always felt that way, regardless if it was Bill Clinton commanding the country, or Ronald Reagan. I’ve always distrusted the government, positive that it can’t organize or plan its way out of a paper bag. Every task that it takes on, either at the national or local level turns into an overpriced, botched disaster, waiting for the next administration to come in and fix it, only to find out that wasn’t the best answer either.

Politicians are zealots. Let’s face it. No one in their right mind wants to become a politician unless they’re just out of their gourd about the power or the desire to help make things better for people. The Kennedys seemed to be about the power of it all. Paul Wellstone, on the other hand, sincerely wanted to make a change in government. Both left their mark. Both had qualms with how the country was operating at the time. But were JFK and Wellstone anti-American at the time? Certainly not.

It all goes back to how adversarial our society has become: if you’re not with us, you’re against us. And that just isn’t so. So what if someone I know supports McCain. I don’t agree with him, but he’s got every right to go to the polls in two weeks and vote that way. And he’s got every right to joke with me about how badly Obama is doing in the job, should he win. And he’s got every right to publicly tell people just how much Obama is screwing up the country. And not a bit of that would be anti-American. Heck, last I checked, that would be part of his first amendment right to free speech.

Michele Bachmann is an idiot. Plain and simple. Heck, according to her Wikipedia page (and you can take that or leave it as you will, but the references seem complete, though some are out of date, but a cursory search of the wayback machine at work found most of them), she decided she was a republican over a book:

Bachmann had grown up in a Democratic family, but says she became a Republican during her senior year at Winona State. She told the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune that she was reading Gore Vidal’s 1973 novel, Burr: “He was kind of mocking the Founding Fathers and I just thought, ‘I just remember reading the book, putting it in my lap, looking out the window and thinking, ‘You know what? I don’t think I am a Democrat. I must be a Republican.’”

I’ll grant her that Matthews did a very good job in the interview of giving her the rope she needed to hang herself. He spotted that she was going down a path that probably should have been avoided, but simply kept repeating points she was making and asked for clarification. And in Bachmann’s strange little world, clarification eventually meant charging that many in congress are anti-American and should be investigated by the media.

Yeah, the media who the right distrusts SO MUCH.

Watch the interview if you haven’t. It’s just fascinating to watch her crash and burn, right on the screen…And she didn’t even realize how much she screwed up until a couple of days later.

And she hasn’t even apologized. Yet. Mark my words. She’ll apologize. She’ll have to if she wants any chance to get back in the voters’ good graces.

See you tomorrow.

So there’s a problem in trying to force yourself to write every day…Either you need to learn to lead an interesting life, or you run out of stuff to write about. I don’t think I’ve done the former yet, and I may be achieving the latter. But we’ll see. Either way, it’s kinda depressing when you think about it.

Oh, well. I’ll write about politics, then.

First to some site news: Thursdays henceforth here on the blog will be “Jenni Thursdays,” or whatever she decides to name them. Apparently, she’s decided that if this whole daily blogging thing was going to go down, she was going to go down with it…Or something like that. I’m sure that sounded better in my head than it does here, so just ignore it and move on. The upside, of course, is that gives me an off day. So I’ll try to pack in extra livin’ on Thursdays so I can come back fresh and prepared on Friday.

The rest of the site? Yeah, still working on it. Don’t hold your breath. That’ll just cause problems. But I promise I’ve started working on it, including a fun new stories section.

Otherwise, not too much going on here in the heartland. We narrowly avoided Jesse, phase two, but I mentioned that before. So that really just leaves us with a senatorial race between a comedian and a schnook.

I can honestly say this one’s a no-brainer for me, even though the choice I have to make isn’t palatable in the least. Al Franken has the positions I can agree on, and shows no signs of waffling like Norm Coleman frequently does. But I’m afraid that he will either get bogged down in his own celebrity in Washington, or find out that the job is substantially different than what he expected.

I think that’s the biggest problem for non-politicians. Becoming a legislator at any level looks supremely simple–you show up on the chamber floor, give a couple of speaches, vote on the bills in question, then go back to your constituency and wait for their showers of praise. But it isn’t anything like that. There is so much discussion and negotiating and wrangling over just the language of bills in addition to the actual substance of proposed laws that sometimes it’s a wonder they just don’t die under their own weight. And it’s that neverending compromise that kills some congresspeople. That give and take, that constant deliberating and back and forth and caucusing is how government is really formed and run. And most people outside of Washington never get to see that.

That’s part of why I wasn’t too surprised to see Paul Wellstone run for a third term, even though he was going against his promise to stay for two terms and then leave. Even for a senator, who gets six years in office, you still spend the first two years at least as a junior senator, relegated to the cheap seats in the senate, given token, though menial, committee posts, and generally ignored until the next batch of newbies comes waltzing in with hope in their eyes and promise in their hearts. By the time the senator enters his third year, he’s finally given some responsibility, but needs to earn respect so that he can finally make a difference by the time he’s entering his final year of his first term. By then, it’s time to rev up for re-election, so the first term is almost wasted. The second term is when you get things done. For Wellstone, who went to Washington with a terribly ambitious agenda and the same expectations as all freshman senators, he wasn’t even close to checking everything off his list in the second term, and probably felt compelled to run for the third because he had that much left to do.

Thus poses a conundrum–Coleman’s been there for one term. He’s just starting to get traction, and any respect he’s earned has been partially due to his reputation as one of the Republican party’s golden boys, though even that’s been tarnished of late with his attempts to distance himself from the right wing of the party. In the meantime, Amy Klobuchar is also in her first term, and I’m not sure the state could stand another four years of having two first-term senators. It’s already far too easy to overlook us, and we don’t need more national attention paid to Governor Pawlenty than is absolutely necessary.

Fortunately, I’m not one who’s ever really considered my votes as throw-aways. Just look at my vote–the only one of it’s kind in Garrison, North Dakota in 1996–for the Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

So as I start filling out my dance card for November, Franken’s on the list.

Dang it.

Finally, once in my life, the Twins–my Minnesota Twins–have a nationally recognized power hitter and the baseball world has to sit up and take notice.

Dang it.

But they won’t. Because the whole baseball world had a bigger story to cheer on tonight.

Dang it.

For those of you living outside of the little baseball world called the All-Star Break, I’ll give you the synopsis: Justin Morneau won the Home Run Derby tonight–the last such contest at “old” Yankee Stadium before it’s town down and the Yankees move across the street, but go to any non-local site, and the story will be all about Josh Hamilton. Josh Hamilton hit an incredible number of home runs, 28 in the first round alone, smashing the old record of 24. Plus, he’s a recovered (or -ing) drug/alcohol addict. Plus his 71-year-old little league coach was pitching to him. Justin hit 8 in the first round, 9 in the second, and just 5 in the third and final round. But won because Hamilton only hit 3 in the final round. He blew himself out in the first two rounds and clearly had nothing left in the tank. Based on the rules of the derby, by which the finalists scores are zeroed out for the final round, Justin won 5-3.

And no one will think he deserves the award. I mean, just look at the front page story from ESPN.com:

Josh Hamilton simply added to his and Yankee Stadium’s legend Monday night. Ah, but in the end he didn’t win the Home Run Derby. Justin Morneau did.

I know, everyone in sports and sports reporting loves the underdog–loves the little guy–the unknown guy who jumps into the spotlight and does something truly amazing. And honestly, Josh Hamilton deserved to win the contest. Under any other rules, he deserved to win. But the rules are what they are, and almost certainly, baseball fans, reporters, and blogs across the country will insist on hanging the ever-dreaded asterisk next to Justin’s win.

But no one hangs an asterisk on a winning horse when a thoroughbred leading the race tires after the final turn and is beaten by a horse that started coming through the pack in that turn. No one hangs an asterisk on the football team’s win that comes by way of last-second field goal, after trailing for much of the 4th quarter. They’re labeled incredible comebacks.

Justin didn’t need to come back. He “played” (if that’s an accurate term for hitting in the Home Run Derby) the game well, and consistently. Did what he had to do to win, didn’t try too hard, had fun, and showed some experience that he gained from last year’s 4 home run effort. Hamilton got into it, and was smashing 500+ foot homers to right and relishing the crowd’s applause. Then he ran out of gas at the end, obviously laboring to catch up with batting practice pitches to launch into the Bronx crowd. Justin paced himself, stayed consistent, and was classy and knew he’d otherwise been beaten after the end of the game.

I’m thrilled that Justin won. A Minnesota Twin won the Home Run Derby. I think I can die happy now.

Meanwhile…

Tonight was the tale of two channels. ESPN and CNN were the focus of the evening. CNN had Jesse “the whiney body/mind/governor/pain in the you-know-what” Ventura on “Larry King Live” tonight to let Jesse announce his intentions with regards to the senate race in Minnesota.

Personally, I wonder if Norm Coleman was in the fetal position under a table at home during the first 5 minutes of the interview.

But, alas, Jesse will not muddle the senate race with his nonsensical politics. Granted, I voted for him for governor, but that was because the other candidates sucked, and at the time, it seemed like we needed a fresh perspective on the office. It was an awkward experiment. One which didn’t need to be repeated in the U.S. Senate.

His politics, demeanor, style, and attitude would not work in Washington, where left-turn changes are viewed as something akin to the devil…Or wearing white socks under your suit. In a country where the middle is increasingly forgotten (middle class, middle America), the last thing we needed was to give the coasts a REASON to hate us. Coleman will continue to blend in and will do a minimum of damage because his political yo-yo is gradually returning to the center. Al Franken, I will grant you, is a train wreck waiting to happen, but he’s approaching this whole thing seriously, and seems to genuinely want to serve the state’s needs in congress. His views might be a bit too far left for some, but I think he’ll recognize decorum when he sees it. Jesse would have tried putting a throw-down on Sen. Robert Byrd. That would just be embarrassing.

And his whole attitude toward the Minnesota media is childish. So what if they’ve criticized him? Or reported on he and his family in a less than favorable light? They’re doing their jobs. They’re telling us what we got for our votes for him for governor. And if he were to represent us (that is what the job would be as senator) in Washington, how else would he communicate his views and votes and stances on issues back to us here in fly-over land?

So, needless to say, it’s been a good night. Justin: Yes. Jesse: No. All-in-all, a positive night for Minnesota.

See you all tomorrow.