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.

So what?

I'm thinking that maybe Barack Obama should consider changing his religion.
I know it's a lot to ask ... from the testimony of everyone who ought to know he's been a good and faithful Christian, a good church-going man as it were, since he was just a little feller going to services with his mama ... but if he wants to set an example and lead this country into a better day, I do believe he should consider becoming a Muslim.
Now to a bunch of gullible, unwitting, misguided or just plain ignorant souls this wouldn't seem possible -- they believe, based on the ranting of various ignorami and liars, that Obama already is Muslim and harbors secret plans to turn us all over to the ayatollahs on Inauguration Day. Now I'm just old enough for that sort of talk to sound like the plans another presidential candidate -- also a Democrat and also a senator -- supposedly had to turn the United States over to the Pope as soon as he was sworn in. But John Kennedy disappointed the bigots and John XXIII never sat in the Oval Office.
Of course, if a President Obama remains faithful to the United Church of Christ, as he has throughout his lifetime, he won't have the opportunity to provide living testimony to the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers that being a good Muslim and a good American are anything but mutually exclusive -- just as JFK did for American Catholics nearly 50 years ago. He could demonstrate that the proper reaction to the "accusation" of being a Muslim is and always should be, "So what?"
Yeah, for the good of the Constitution and all of humanity, perhaps Barack Obama should consider embracing Islam -- all things considered, it would be the truly Christian thing to do.

Congratulations, Del and Phyllis -- after 55 years

I just checked. The sky hasn't fallen yet even though California is issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.
They sign in as Party A and Party B rather than bride and groom -- just in case you were wondering.
The first couple to tie the knot were, appropriately enough, a San Fransisco couple, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon, Del is 87, Phyllis is 84. They've been together 55 years.
Talk about long engagements...
At least they were married in time to have the legal right to make funeral arrangements for each other. The legal right to be there when the other dies.
Fundamentally, that's what this is all about -- legal rights enforced by a contract that they have been allowed to enter into.
A contract -- not a sacrament. Theirs is a union sanctioned by the state, not necessarily a church. It is an act of man, not of God.
Which is how it should be. Civil law is gender blind. The ability to fulfill the civil contractual obligations, rights and responsibilities imposed by the legalities of marriage is no more a matter of genitalia than it is skin color, caste, class or ethnic background -- though those factors too have been upheld as legal impediments to matrimony. This is an issue of equality before the law -- civil law -- not canon law, not sharia, not the laws of Moses nor Levitical injunctions.
And as such, it is good law.
Not God's law -- just good.

What we do and how we do it

There was a long piece in the paper across town this weekend -- plus a column and an editorial -- excoriating the city of Winona for how it has presented information concerning the closure of the Interstate Bridge and subsequent developments.
In short, they complain they've been left out of the loop, nobody's been telling them anything and they don't like it. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence in the depths of City Hall.
Sorry, folks, that isn't quite the case.
At the Daily news, we got first notice of impending problems with the bridge about 7 p.m. Tuesday in a fax from MnDoT (not, as was claimed by Ms. Cynthya Porter, in an email, phone call or secretive phone call from city staff on a cloak and dagger mission). The fax announced an 8 p.m. briefing. Far from a secret conclave, except for the agrieved paper across town, all local media outlets plus some area TV stations were represented, along with members of the city council, county board, state legislature, city staff and a number of citizens who'd gotten wind that something was up. The session went on until no one had any more questions. The meeting set for Wednesday morning was announced, reannounced and announced again.
Just for the record, news of the Tuesday night meeting was posted on winonadailynews.com within minutes of our receiving the fax. A capsule account of the briefing, including an announcement of the Wednesday morning meeting was posted shortly after the session adjourned. That information was available in the newspaper and online.
Hardly a secret session.
All the unhappy folks at the paper across town needed to do is pick up their mail or read the daily newspaper and they'd have known all about what they insist was being kept from them. They might even have made it to that meeting. Our reporters were there -- we had an update on it online just after it wrapped up.
Ms. Porter goes on to claim that "In Thursday morning's edition, the Minneapolis Star Tribune scooped all local media with announcement of a ferry system." Apparently, neither Ms. Porter nor her editors read the banner headline and sub head over Winona Daily News reporter Mark Sommerhauser's Thursday morning story -- "Waiting for answers: City reels from bridge closure, plans shuttle system by Monday." Scooped? Hardly.
Ms. Porter might not have had a clue, but nobody beat the Daily News to the story -- and I'm not about to let the paper across town claim otherwise.
Now I don't care if the paper across town wants to whine and make excuses for itself, but I do mind when Ms. Porter claims the city is "under fire" from news organizations "who have been excluded from the information circle." It has been our experience that during these difficult days Mayor Miller, city staff, council members, area legislators and state officials have been open and fortcoming with information, sharing what they know when they know it and frankly admitting when no information is available.
All a reporter has to do is show up and ask.
Mark, Kevin, Amber, Nolan, Kari, Matt, Fred and Sarah have been out there showing up, asking questions, getting answers. There's no magic information circle to be let in on -- just hard work, tenacity and good, solid reporting.
That's how they got the story, Ms. Porter. Any perhaps, why you didn't.

Parent gripe hits a sour note

It looks like we couldn't make it to summer vacation without another set of parents getting their undies in a bunch. This time folks across the creek in the GET school district are all affronted because there was too much sacred music in a recent high school choral concert.
I want to weigh in here before the Christian Taliban grabs onto this one and replays the typical rant about God-hating liberal secularism taking over our schools and putting us all on the road to Perdition and $5 a gallon gas. This silliness should be held up to proper public ridicule, not because it's an affront to the Almighty, but because whoever's doing the griping has no taste for or understanding of choral music.
Look, unless the kids are going to sing endless variations on a polyphonic Pop Goes the Weasel choral music is fundamentally sacred music -- from plainsong to Bach to Bernstein to George Harrison -- God just keeps creeping into those lyrics. I suppose if the schools wanted to be sure the kids weren't O.D.ing on spirituality, they could require the texts be sung in their original language -- which of course none of the students, much less their parents, would likely understand, but doubtless the tasteless oversensitive would still chafe.
As a former high school chorister, I can assure those concerned parents that the repetition of sacred lyrics by high school juniors eager for lunch is no more prayer than my forceful invocation of the deity upon walloping my thumb with a hammer.
It appears the GET administrators and school board are going about this in the great tradition of public education -- serious deliberation followed by a vaguely worded policy. What is needed is a sternly worded rebuke, tuition for Music Appreciation 101 and a year's membership in Minnesota Public Radio.
Enough of this silliness.

So long Julius C. Wilkie

It appears Winona’s faux-steamboat era is just about over. The council has decreed that by July 25 the rotting hulk at the foot of Main Street will be the stuff of failed dreams and bad memories. Built on the cheap to the specifications of a rich man with more ego than sense of history, Winona has struggled with the Disneyfied riverboat replica for two decades. Too small for a museum, too inauthentic for a historic replica, it had no kitchen to support a restaurant, a dining room tarted up like the parlor of a Victorian bordello with a floor that canted enough to make a sober man unsteady. The only good thing to be said for it was that, at a distance, it looked pretty there at the foot of Main Street, reminding residents and visitors that behind the concrete sea-wall that keeps the city’s feet dry during times of high water flows the Mississippi River – “C’mon down and take a look.”

It was past time for the city to be done with this misbegotten building, but with the flood control dikes between the river and the city, the pre-1965 version of Levee Park is not up for resurrection. We’d be world-class stupid to do anything to jeopardize the city flood control system -- a system that has withstood near record high water twice in recent memory while communities elsewhere along the Mississippi were inundated.

But the Wilkie did look nice perched up there on the levee -- particularly in the winter when snow blanketed the worst of the decay and cold kept folks from coming close enough to see what shape it really was in. It is a wise move for the City Council not to prematurely demolish the hull-shaped foundation and reflecting pool or remove the utility hook-ups that powered the steamboat before it finally ran out of steam.

Let me offer a modest proposal... Send a bright young scholar -- an unemployed historian would be well-suited and likely willing to work on the cheap -- equipped with a notebook and tape measure to record the dimensions of the concrete hull. Then send that scholar off to research the river-packets that plied the Upper Mississippi, calling at the ports of La Crosse, Red Wing, Wabasha and Winona with the goal of identifying a boat whose hull was a close approximation of the concrete foundation there atop the levee. Let’s locate the construction plans for that boat -- or a sister vessel -- and reconstruct her on dry land as a historically accurate recreation. Refit her as she would have appeared to the immigrants, travelers and merchants who trod her decks and relied on her as a vital link to the world beyond the Mississippi valley.

But let’s do it right this time. Let’s not try to turn it into a restaurant -- everybody knows Winona won’t support a nice restaurant anyway, so why would an eatery crammed into building of unsuitable size and shape, in an inconvenient location be any different.

Let’s not try to turn it into a conference center. In this town, Mike Rivers, not the Mississippi River has that niche covered and, considering the 20-year track record of the Wilkie, does a much better job of it.

And let’s not try to do it overnight, on the cheap. The levee isn’t going anywhere -- if it does, we’ll have a lot more serious problems to deal with than what to do with a fake riverboat. For the time being, preserve the Pearson’s paddle wheel with a commemorative plaque detailing the sad story of the poor old boat and its successor. Put a couple umbrella tables up on the patio, let the folks from the Winona Island Cafe set up a snack and soda pop kiosk and make the area as pleasant and attractive as we can while we turn our attention to a lasting solution, worthy of the time, effort, and locale.

Putting up an accurate replica will take time for research and planning. Recreating a structure that is historically authentic in feel and appearance, but also in compliance with contemporary building codes, safety standards and accessibility requirements will require the services and imagination of creative and experienced designers and architects, working in cooperation with historically knowledgeable scholars. It will take time and money to acquire the artifacts and furnishings needed to bring the replica boat to life.

And building and furnishing will only be the first step. While we plan for construction, we also need to plan for what we will do with the thing once it’s up there. How will we coordinate the steamboat center with the William Thompson on exhibit at the Marine Art Museum, with the Winona County Historical Society’s downtown Armory Museum, the Bunnell House, Watkin’s Museum, Polish Cultural Institute, the Luxembourger museum in Rollingstone, the Arches Museum of Pioneer Life and tours of Winona’s historic architectural districts? The riverboat center needs to be viewed and funded as one piece of a much larger historic panorama. To expect it to be financially self-supporting as a stand-alone enterprise or attraction would likely doom it to failure, so establishing either a trust fund sufficient to assure adequate upkeep and maintenance or a cooperative financial relationship with other area tourist and historic attractions needs to be established.

Let’s take the Wilkie for what it was ... a hard lesson in how not to do things. This time, let’s take the time, do the planning, raise the funds and, sometime in the future, create an attraction we can be proud of for generations.

We can do this. Let’s do it right.

Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome/ or go to www.winonadailynews.com.

It's a gas

About the only good thing I can think of to say about the price of gas is at least we don't have to wait in line to buy it.
Back in 1973, when OPEC, annoyed by U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, closed the spigot -- not only did the price of gas shoot up, but there were times and places where gas was doggone hard to get.
Within weeks of the October 19 announcement of the OPEC embargo, Americans found themselves waiting in line to buy gasoline and worrying about where the price hikes would end -- if, as some rumors had it, gas might go as high as a buck a gallon.
Looking back, prices have an air of unreality about them. Before the embargo, oil was trading for under $3 a barrel -- the price shock then was seeing that price quadruple to $12 before the producing nations boosted production.
Meantime, the question was how to make the gas we had take us as far as it could and where to find more when the gauge nudged empty. Stations started flying flags to indicate if they had gas to sell -- green for plenty of gas, yellow for restricted sales, red for no gas, but stop in for a cup of coffee. Drivers were restricted to gassing up on even or odd numbered calendar days corresponding to the last digit on your license plate. Schools and factories went to shortened weeks to save on fuel oil and Congress passed a national 55 m.p.h. speed limit -- the notorious "double nickel" to force fuel savings on the nation's drivers. Year-round Daylight Saving Time was instituted. The Strategic Oil Reserve was established and the Department of Energy was founded.
Meanwhile, the price of gas crept up, from 38.5 cents in October 1973 to 55.1 cents in June 1974 -- numbers that sound pretty enviable today, but as a percentage were no less of a shock to the wallet than the jumps we're currently experiencing. The friendly service station attendant was replaced by the self-serve pump.
In March of 1974, OPEC officially ended the embargo, but things never quite returned to the "way they used to be." We'd taken cheap gas for granted and that confidence was shaken -- at leas for a while. It took the long run of relatively low cost gas starting in the late 80s to lull us all back into a 1950s-stlye complacency and now - with roads full of vans, pickup trucks and SUVs we're taking it in the shorts every time we need to fill up. Only this time, no matter how much Dubya begs the King, there's no spare oil for the Saudis to pump. The taps are wide open and the latest word to folks saying we need to pump more at home is that if ANWAR were exploited to the max it would only bring down the price of crude by 75 cents a barrel.
But, if there is a bright side, consider the plight of your Dutch uncle --according to U.S. Dept. of Energy data, gas in Holland was at $9.52 last week -- and the rest of Europe isn't far behind. (For more cold comfort go to http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/gas1.html)

Capital for a Day -- We did good

There isn't a doubt in my mind as to who should be credited with getting the Minnesota Legislature and T-Paw to come to terms just under the wire -- it's you and me, folks; the good (and not so good) people of Winona. I'd dare anyone to dispute that it wasn't our stellar example of organization, good will and high calorie cuisine that inspired the Guv and the chief legislative talking heads that screwing up big-time was no way to celebrate Minnesota's 150th birthday. So they headed back to the capital for the other 364 days, knuckled down, buckled down and got the job done.
So everybody who helped organize Winona's Capital for a Day events should feel free dislocate a shoulder patting themselves on the back. From before dawn to well after nightfall, they kept things popping along no matter what -- be it folks oversleeping the sunrise to lightning bolts in competition with the fireworks. A good time was had by all.
I can hardly wait for the party we'll throw for the bicentennial ... free beer for everybody!

Dept. of Credit Where Credit is Due: President Bush is right -- seriously

Dubya's got it right this time. On Tuesday, all but one of our illustrious Senators (only Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado was the sole dissenter) voted to quit filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in another classic pander-play centered on the high price of gas.
As you may or may not recall, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in the 1970s to stockpile crude oil to give us a cushion in case our foreign suppliers get the notion to shut off the tap. The stockpile has a maximum capapcity of 727 million barrels -- about two months worth of imports -- and is currently 97 percent full -- 701 million barrels.
Our senators want to say, "close enough," arguing that not buying the oil to finish filling the reserve will bring down the price of gas.
Like heck it will, the president is telling them and has promised to put the kibosh on the plan when it hits his desk.
Like I said -- President Bush is right.
Look we burn up 21 million barrels worth of oil in this country every day -- the government is buying 70,000 barrels a day to put away for the day the folks we're buying from won't sell us any more. That might not be spit in the ocean, but it comes pretty darn close. Not buying it sure isn't going to make filling up that Durango noticeably less painful.
But does send a pretty damn clear message that Congress -- on both sides of the aisle -- is more interested in pandering for a pre-election day advantage than it is in doing anything serious about this country's energy situation.
At the present rate, it will take us 300 days to stockpile enough oil to last us one day -- and the Congress can't even see that far into the future.
With leaders like that -- I'm afraid we deserve $4 gas ... if there's gas to buy at all.