Time to exit gracefully, Norm

I'm not sure Minnesota voters have really spoken in the race for the U.S. Senate, but they have managed a faint, hoarse whisper and that -- especially at this late date -- ought to be enough.
For two months the vote-counters have been counting and when they finally got to the bottom of the pile -- the pile as defined by the laws of the state of Minnesota as interpreted by the Minnesota Supreme Court -- Al Franken has come out 225 ahead. That, according to the rules, makes him the winner and a member of the U.S. Senate.
Congratulations Al.
And congratulations, Norm, on a hard fought campaign and thank you for your service.
That, should be that.
But it may not be. There are strong rumblings and grumblings that Coleman will take the whole thing to court -- prolonging the uncertainty until both sides either run out of money or avenues of appeal.
Please, don't do it, Norm.
Quite frankly, at this point, I really don't care which man claims the seat in Washington, but when the new Congress gets down to business, I want one of their butts sitting in it. Minnesota's interests deserve to be represented by two votes in the U.S. Senate -- not just one. The counters counted more votes for Franken -- it's time for Coleman to gracefully step aside, get on with his life and in six years, perhaps give those 225 voters the chance to reconsider.
It would be the classy thing to do.

Sweet Caroline

So Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (funny how she's recently dropped the 'Schlossberg') ants to be the next U.S. Senator from New York. It seems a bit odd in this day and age to have someone lay claim to public office on the basis of hereditary right -- I thought that sort of thing went out of fashion when the Hapsburgs quit laying claim to every vacant throne in Europe.
Now I'll grant that Caroline was a cut kid -- sitting on her pony 'Macaroni' while it dropped road apples in the Rose Garden -- and her father's death is an American tragedy, but at 51 her life's most extraordinary feature is being rich and privileged -- something she has in common with a goodly number of Senators, but probably not what the Founders had in mind when they established the office. Somehow, it strikes me that somewhere in all of New York there dwells an individual with greater breadth of experience, depth of insight and profundity of understanding than a wealthy woman who wouldn't merit a moment's consideration if her last name were simply Schlossberg.
And if New York is really that hard pressed for Senate candidates -- might I suggest they appoint whichever New Yorker comes up short in the Minnesota recount. I'm sure that Norm from Brooklyn or Al from Manhattan will serve the Empire State quite as well as Ed Schlossberg's wife.

Hey, that's OUR president you're thowing shoes at!

Poor ol' George -- he just get's no respect.
Good heavens, the man went to all the trouble and expense it took to liberate Iraq and give those poor benighted folks a free press and all, and how does he get repaid -- one of the press guys he went to all the trouble to free goes and throws his shoes at him.
No respect.
And it doesn't help a bit that from reports coming out of Mesopotamia and the adjacent region that Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the 28-year-old Iraqi shoe chucker, has become an instant hero to many of the folks living there.
No respect at all.
As for George, well, after 8 years of shaping foreign policy and dealing with people who don't live around here and speak English with a funny accent (New Yorkers don't count), past experience helped the increasingly lame duck president understand the situation. "I saw his sole," he told reporters.

The slick, the gullible and the just plain dumb

There was another one in my in-box this morning -- this one from a Mr. Gary Kreep (I couldn't make that up)-- one more in a seemingly endless parade of email insisting that Barack Obama has been a liar since before the day he was born and, by the way, if I send Mr. Kreep some money he promises to do something about it.
This whole Obama-doesn't-have-a-birth-certificate BS is really getting old. I suppose the Kreeps of the world will keep milking the mouth-breathers for Godly and patriotic donation until the well runs dry -- it's what we ought to expect from that breed of political bottom feeder. What gets to me is that we have folks out there who are entrusted with jobs, credit cards and drivers licenses who actually believe there was a prenatal conspiracy to make a Kenya-born Obama the first Muslim president, thereby bringing down the wrath of an affronted almighty down upon this erstwhile Christian nation.
Lemme tell ya, if there's anything to this tale those conspirators have to be the most uncannily brilliant folks since the Learned Elders of Zion -- to be able to flawlessly predict in 1961, when miscegenation was a crime in 22 states, that the mixed race baby of an impulsive, ill-educated 18-year-old mother and a Kenyan daddy was destined to become president of a country that made it awfully hard for non-white folks to vote would have taken a mind of prescient power unparalleled since the Masons took clandestine control of Western Civilization.
These folks really demonstrated their demonic brilliance when they slipped that birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, for a son to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama nine days earlier. Getting that kind of documentation for a kid born in Kenya took Romulan deviousness, Klingon ruthlessness and the amorality of a Ferengi.
Yeah, for 47 years, powerful forces have been at work ... Nostradamus predicted it, you know.
Either that, or it's all made up bunk -- more fodder for the yahoos from the Black Helicopter crowd.
After all, there is the inconvenient fact that Mr. Obama's birth certificate is very much in existence and has been examined by quite a number of reputable folks - and it is all ordinary and legitimate, standard documentation for a child born in Hawaii in 1961. Attested to by Snopes, FactCheck and most importantly, good ol' common sense.
Common sense. Has it ever been in such short supply?

Yo, ho ho and a bottle of rum?

Aaaargh ... Blackbeard must be dancin' a jig in hottest Hell. The old buccaneer must be splitting with pride to see the latter-day sons of the Jolly Roger thumbing their noses at every navy on God's blue seas. But what in the Name of Heaven, in the age of geo-positioning, laser-guided weaponry and satellite surveilance are we doing with pirates running amok on the high seas?
Good Lord, where's Errol Flynn when we need him. Across the globe nations, ours among them, dispatch submarines armed to destroy continents, carriers loaded with an air force apiece, cruise missiles, and the toughest, best trained fighting men on earth -- and all this might is helpless against a handful of ill-tempered swashbucklers armed with a stolen motorboat and nothing to lose.
And you know, it's hard not to have a grudging admiration for men who have the nerve to go out and steal a supertanker -- oil and all. Talk about the ultimate gas drive-off. And the thought of the Saudis and the world's shipping magnates literally dropping gunny sacks of cash from hovering helicopters to keep their captains and crews from walking the plank has a real David and Goliath-ness to it.
Pirates -- your kid can take a wrong turn and end up another Henry Morgan or Calico Jack Rackham, a Mary Read or Anne Bonney. Avast, me hearties and shiver me timbers -- there be pirates afloat and the king can't catch 'em.

No bail out for the MoTown dinos

I don't have to go any farther than the office parking lot for all the reason I need to tell the Big Three automakers "go fish." Parked in its usual spot is my 1998 Metro -- a car the likes of which our domestic car companies didn't see fit to sell after 2001.
Because I'm cheap, I bought it used five or six years ago. There's no mistaking it for a Mercedes, but it's yet to fail to start, and other than a blower switch I haven't done any thing but routine maintenance - plus tires and light bulbs to keep it on the road. It compares well with Gayle's '97 Prizm which is about to roll 200,000 miles and has yet to have a wrench on the engine. They haven't made those for years either.
Oh, and did I mention if I don't get better than 35 mpg on a road trip from either of them it's entirely due to a heavy, heavy foot. A really nice feature a couple of months ago when gas was better than double what it's costing me today ... and it will be a really nice feature in the very near future when we're back to paying that price again and more.
But for years Detroit hasn't seen fit to put solid little cars on the American market -- though anywhere beyond North America solid little cars are about all there are to see. Instead they marketed dinosaurs -- big, inefficient, expensive and, for them, profitable -- as long as they were selling. Trouble is, when it cost a Franklin to fill the tank and the tank needed filling twice a week -- the shine came off that Detroit steel and folks, not always being as dumb as we look, looked around and bought a Hyundai.
Now Ford, GM and Chrysler want Unka Sugar to dig deep and save their bacon ... sort of like he did for AIG and the Wall Street bankers who forgot how to add, subtract, and figure simple interest. Unfortunately, there are thousands of ordinary folks whose jobs are on the line here -- and it's not fair to folks who just build 'em to suffer because the hotshots in the corner office have proven themselves no brighter than sea cucumbers.
So, let me suggest Congress tells the guys from Detroit to go back to MoTown, clean out there desks, turn in their keys and put in for third shift closers at the nearest Mac & Don -- then put in a call to Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and VW to make them an offer their not likely to refuse -- with cash-back financing to boot.

What if we just have enough stuff?

The hand-wringers were working overtime again last week. Now it seems that Americans aren't hitting the stores hard enough to keep the Chinese gizmo factories humming and some are even daring to suggest they might only spend what they can afford on Christmas gifts this season. All of this, of course, is the latest harbinger of economic collapse to spoil the day of any American not in the Marine Corps, in prison or so spectacularly wealthy they don't have to worry about their next three hots and a cot are coming from. Of course, this bad news comes hot on the heels of the dire warnings that Americans were drowning in debt, couldn't get credit and the whole tottering economic edifice was about to collapse because we just couldn't exercise any self control at the checkout counter.
Y'know -- y'just can't please some people.
Now I realize that for decades millions of us have lived up to the consumer mantra: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping -- and Americans have always made it a point to prove to the world that nobody's tougher than us. Through the years we've dutifully bought stuff and bought stuff -- putting up ever bigger houses complete with multiple car garages (with the multiple cars parked on the driveway) to hold it all. We just kept on hauling it home and stacking it up and now, I suspect, more and more of us are confronted with a reverse Mother Hubbard -- far from being bare, the cupboard doors barely close. After a half century buying binge -- might it just be that a whole lot of us have enough stuff and might just use all this recession talk as an excuse not to add on yet another room to hold another holiday's worth of gifts we'd really rather not get?
And if enough is finally enough, does that mean the inevitable collapse of commerce? Well, not necessarily. While a lot of us can't find room for one more thing, there are a whole lot of people elsewhere in the world who'd have no trouble finding room to walk into their walk-in closet -- if they only had a house to put a closet into. If we have enough stuff, maybe we could let them have some -- there are some long Christmas lists out there.

Two buck gas on Election Day?

Welly, welly, well -- two months ago, who'd a thunk it? Driving by the Kwik Trip on the corner I see gas selling for $2.149, just like back in the good old days when auto petrol was just too expensive, not ruinous.
Good lord, wasn't it just back in June when anyone with a wit about them consigned Sweet Shelly Bachmann to the ranks of the terminally dingy when she suggested that if we were to drill, baby ,drill the price of gas would drop back to two bucks. And all us pink-diapered lefty sympathizers know she would have been laughed out of office if sh had suggested that we might well be driving to the polls on $2 a gallon gas on Election Day ... and if it were to happen, we all had the dots connected and the conspiracy concocted linking Exxon Mobil, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the Republican National Committee and all the Sheiks of Araby.
Well Michele is on the verge of being laughed out of office any way, gas or no gas, and the virtually the only drilling that's gone on since June has taken place in dentist's offices. It appears all it took to bring down the price at the pump was a world-wide economic collapse. You betcha, nothing like the prospect of a real life sequel to The Grapes of Wrath to take the fun out of international commerce.
So here we are with cheap(er) gas on every corner and nowhere to go.
Hey buddy, can you spare a dime?

So long Sarah, it's time to get serious

How is it that no sooner do we start having fun when something has to come along and ruin it?
We've had almost three weeks of good old fashioned political theater -- Sweet Sarah, the moose-hunting mama takes aim at Washington. Such fun it was -- the bridge to nowhere, Troopergate, jets on eBay, teen-age sex and shotgun weddings -- way better than the wonky stuff the Democrats wanted to talk about. When putting lipstick on pigs becomes a major campaign issue -- politics just don't get any better.
Then reality rears it's ugly head.
Here we are with an economic situation that hasn't been so grim since Herbert Hoover insisted that prosperity was just around the corner. Look folks, when the country's biggest banks are going broke the rest of us best sit up and take notice -- especially those of us running for president - or voting for president.
It's time to take the GOP's Tina Fey wanna-be off the front page and start asking the guys at the top of the ticket what they intend to do to keep 2009 from looking all together too much like 1929.
We'd best quit looking to find a candidate who's "just like us" and find out which one is a whole lot smarter than we are. Sarah may know the price of sneakers at the Wasilla Wal-Mart, but we need the folks in the White House who understand a whole lot more than that.
Sorry Sarah, it was fun while it lasted, but now it's time to get serious and you're just a side-show.

Driven batty?

I guess it would be a stretch to link the pair of rabid bats found in Winona over the last couple of weeks with the political goings-on in Denver and St. Paul, but after two weeks of non-stop poli-spin anybody who's been paying attention to the parties' parties is probably a bit batty at this point.
In Denver we had three days of non-stop invocations in the name of St. Barack culminating with worship in the Greek Temple on the 50 yard line ... if the Democrats could have come up with a virgin, she would have been in a dangerous place.
Republican's usually have a better time with virginity, but since Alaska's First Family + boyfriend has been declared off-limits, we won't go there. The GOP -- who've supposedly had the keys to the White House these last eight years and fielded majorities in the Congress for all last two (when they insist nothing was done anyway) spent a week working itself into a lather to "throw the bums out" and "clean up the mess in Washington." It's the first time on records the tenants served themselves the eviction notice.
Meanwhile, hurricanes are lining up in the Atlantic, the unemployment rate creeps ever upward, an ice shelf the size of Manhattan disappeared in the arctic and Winona is dealing with an outbreak of rabid bats.
Enough, already.

SNL used to be funny too...

Saving a U.S. Senate campaign from terminal tedium is a tough assignment for a fourth grade teacher, but that 's the assignment Al ... er, Allan ... Franken has given the woman who decades ago drilled him in multiplication and the memorization of the states and their capitals (spelling counts).
For those of us who savor politics as an medium of entertainment as well as mechanism for debating public policy, Minnesota's U.S. Senate campaign has been one disappointment after another. The prospect of months of Franken riffing on Senator Norm and his good buddy Dubya could only have been improved by Jesse "The Ego" jumping in with both oversized feet. But Ventura couldn't be lured from the Baja and Fearless Al reverted to Stewart Smalley -- "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and by gosh people like me..." A guy who made a career out of the emperor's lack of clothes -- or at the least that he let his mother dress him funny -- is being played the fool by a trio of bogus bowlers in the employ of the seriously humor-challenged Minnesota GOP.
C'mon Al ... a serious comedian is as credible as a fornicating TV preacher -- only a lot less fun to talk about.
Lighten up, Al, lighten up.

The breast news this week

Every now and then a bright sliver of rationality dawns over the world and we do well to note and celebrate it.
This bit of common sense comes to us complements of the federal court of appeals which ruled that a 7/16 of a second glimpse of Janet Jackson's 38-year-old right breast wasn't worth $550,000 -- even if it is the highlight of a championship football game. (Of course, with about 90 million people watching -- it does work out to a little more than a half cent per peek -- which isn't too bad a price.)
Yeah, the moral watchdogs at the FCC lost their fight with CBS over the infamous 2004 Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction." Grossly paraphrasing, the judges ruled the punishment didn't fit the crime, if, in fact, there ever was a crime to be punished.
Well, I'm quite certain the only damage done was to the eyesight of all of us (yeah -- you too) who squinted over grainy, pixelated screenshots to be sure we saw what we thought we were seeing -- ultimately realizing it really wasn't worth the trouble.
But with the political advertising season well upon us, this ruling comes at an appropriate time. Thoughout the coming weeks, I'm sure I won't be the only one expressing the profound wish that the only boobs on television were attached to a pretty woman's chest.

Finie, Julius C.

Well, at long last the Julius C. Wilkie has been reduced to flinders and toothpicks -- albeit rotten flinders and toothpicks.
It wasn't Winona's finest hour.
I can't say I had any great love for the boat-shaped building at the foot of Main St. It was a Disneyfied misconception of a remarkable era; a structure that was neither historic nor contemporary with as close to an anti-functional design as has ever been foisted upon a good intentioned community.
Built on the cheap, haphazardly maintained, never open and forever in the red it was a only a matter of time until the whole edifice collapsed in upon itself. A few hours and a backhoe finally put it out of its misery.
But the tragedy that finally played itself out last week had little to do with bad plans and poor lumber. After the original Wilkie\Pierson burned, the Winona community rallied to replace what had been lost. People dug deep, writing checks and tossing change into collection buckets sitting at virtually every checkout counter in town. Winona invested money and spirit in what was promised to be a lasting representation of their heritage ... and Winona was badly shortchanged.
But at long last it's all over, but for carting away the rubble. Hardly a good, definitely not a happy, ending. But an ending.
Let's learn from it.