Ken Martin's Blog

Anna talks non-stop during the whole drive to her ballet class. This evening she was cheerfully chattering...

"...and I think that it should be a law that you have to read the whole Bible before you start a church. That way there wouldn't be any Catholics or Lutherans. Only Baptists."

"No, honey, they've read the whole Bible. Sometimes people just have some different ideas about what they see there."

"Really?"

"Yes, dear."

Long pause.

"Obviously they have some misunderstandings."

More proof I was born in the wrong era; a nice message from my favorite old time radio drama. Click here to listen.

In case I don't get to posting this week, have a happy Thanksgiving. :)

Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!
(II Cor. 9:15)

We must make the best of the men as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.

Sorry to leave my severe finger wagging at the East Side Review on top for so long. I've been buried. Sometimes work is work, and so work has been. And we had a head cold take a few of us down. And diagramming Greek is just not taking hold in my head. And I'm teaching this month. And... and... and...

So get out and vote. Republican. Or stay home. :)

By the way, Obi Sium, who is running for Minnesota's 4th, has finally appeared in the media. He's running radio ads that rock. You gotta vote for him.

A while back I commented on a story by Katy Zillmer concerning the Maplewood City Council and the Sherrie Le lawsuit. I noted what I consider to be pretty crafty bit of innuendo in the way Zillmer left out a relevant portion of the credentials of a lawyer the city had hired.

Inspired by a related bit of news (which I commented on in that same post), I sent my observation in to the Minnesota News Council. They responded (in part) with the following:

Hi Ken. Thank you for using the Minnesota News Council's online complaint process to submit your complaint about the East Side Review.

We forwarded your complaint along with print-outs of the Lillie website and your blog to Mary Lee Hagert (Katy Zillmer's editor at Lillie Suburban Newspapers) today. We have asked them to respond to you directly and send us a copy for our records.

Because the story does not implicate or name you directly, your complaint is classified as a public complaint. It is our policy to keep public complaints open for 15 business days. If a media outlet does not respond within that time period, the complaint is closed.

Guess what? A month later, no response.

It's too bad. I truly would not have minded if they responded with something so simple and believable that it showed my accusations to be presumptuous and ill-informed. I'm OK with being wrong.

But the lack of response, the other things I've observed in the East Side Review over the last few months, and the very simple facts of this particular complaint lead me to be yet more convinced that the East Side Review is quite willing to consistently report in a way favorable to one "side" of a story.

I've seen careful research against one side with little research going against the other.

I've seen what for all intensive purposes should have been an editorial by a political entity presented as news by wrapping some of it in quotes.

I've seen words left out of someone's qualifications which left a distinctly inaccurate impression.

And, somehow, these all seem to be to the advantage of one group of people or the disadvantage of the other.

Shame on you, Lillie Press. Yeah, I know; that's 1950s Leave it to Beaver talk. Nevertheless.

Given the best spin I can think of, shame on you for sloppy reporting. Given the less pleasant option, shame on you for presenting bias as news. And shame on you for not having the guts to either correct your work or to assert why there was nothing wrong with it.

I actually think newspapers with biases are a perfectly fine idea. Decades ago that was normal. But their biases were self-confessed; right out in the open. You knew what you were getting. You knew where to go to hear the opposition. I'm going through Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals - The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln right now. It's great. What were newspapers like back then? "The Whig newspaper"... "the Democratic newspaper." They were comfortable enough - bold enough - to say who they were and stand up for what they believed.

Far from being brave, dogged ideologists, they cower behind a disguise of impartiality. They neither truly report news nor truly stand for something.

Wonderful news! His patience and dilligence has paid of in a very nice promotion and a greatly improved schedule. Huzzah!

I guess they didn't do that background check. :)

As much as I post about Maplewood, MN, I don't live there. I just got caught up in the interesting whirlwind of local politics and personalities. I live nearby on Saint Paul's luxurious East Side. Today, the oft-berated East Side Review landed on my step. And I congratulate them on a really nice set of pages devoted to the upcoming mid-term elections, featuring each of the candidates, and their responses to some questions which are pertinent to the particular offices.

And the Republicans running out here should be ashamed of themselves.

I'll quote the paper:

• Lori Windels (R) did not respond to the Review's questionnaire or a reminder phone call by deadline.
• Richard "Rick" Mulkern (R) did not respond to the Review's questionnaire or a reminder phone call by deadline.
• David Buehler (R) did not respond to the Review's questionnaire or a reminder email by deadline. (Ed: Buehler? Buehler?)

And the answer from Debi Makidon (R) provided for each of her three questions? "Please contact the candidate directly."

Are you kidding me? This is how they intend to win? Hello, Republican Party of Minnesota? Anyone working over there these last few months? What kind of ship are you running?

Oh, I know... I'm a crazy idealist. I think that if someone wants to participate in the public arena, they might want to, well, participate in the public arena. Sure the East Side is wildly democratic. I know. Maybe you wouldn't win. But you could at least start a conversation so someone later could.

C'mon. It's a questionnaire. If you're too busy to fill it out a questionnaire, what hope does anyone have that you'll be able to handle political office? If you're too afraid to answer some questions, what does that say about how you feel about the strength of your positions?

In fact, that what offends me most. Some of their positions are probably like some of mine. And these would-be leaders can't spend a moment to develop a decent polemic to defend what I could in my sleep. Is that because I'm so cool? No. (Though, plainly, I'm pretty cool.) No, it's because I've thought out why I hold a position, and I'm willing to put it to the test.

And so their weakness or laziness or fear or defeatism or inability to apply a stamp to an envelope casts aspersions on perfectly legitimate positions.

Some credit is due Obi Sium (R) who is running for the U.S. House District 4 seat. Though I can't for the life of me understand why I've never even heard of this guy running for Betty McCollum's seat. He at least answered the questions. He answered pretty well.

Also, kudos to Warren Anderson (R) who did a good job, too. No website, though. Hmph. I guess the internets is too dern complicated. (Again, hello MNGOP? Dynamic template sites? CMS?)

State House District 67B candidate Greg Le May (R) seems like someone who would actually like to win. It seems like he's got an ad in every issue of the East Side Review. All year. Often a new ad. He's got signs everywhere. Last weekend I even saw him standing on the corner of a local street-highway intersection with his campaign signs over him as a sandwich board. And he actually argues his point.

And if Sheldon Johnson doesn't look quite like a particular dear friend of mine, I'll eat my hat.

And yes, that's this website's use number two of the phrase "casting aspersions." :)

And here's tonight's class. Finishing up on genitives and getting ready for datives. More diagramming, too.

I don't know how it happened, but the audio for class 6 just appeared. And so here it is! It was a good class with a nice overview syntactical categories of genitives, and an intro to the diagramming we'll be using for sentences.

Dave Downing comments on it here.

U2! I don't blame them. I would, too, if I had anything worth moving to a tax haven. After all...

The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sutherland, 1965

I think Bono is a sincere man with a passion to make things better. Look at PRODUCT(RED). A very cool idea. But it's a different take on things; using the capitalist system as opposed to forcing donations through a government-based system. I hope it works well. Get your (RED) iPod here. :)

I like capitalism because it accounts for Man's nature. We like to have things for ourselves. It's not that "greed is good" (per the movie Wall Street) but that self-interest is reliable. U2 isn't being greedy by seeking a tax haven. They are just acting in their own best interest.