Central Corridor is settled, no thanks to the U of M. Assuming its sub rosa communications with the feds haven’t queered anything, there’ll be light rail between downtowns in six years. (God that sounds long; is that the best we can do?)

I am left struck by the U’s impracticality, willingness to queer the line or delay it for years, and its obstinance even when it was clear the feds would never fund a Dinkytown routing. See this previous post (bottom half) for some of the back story.

The bottom line is the U almost (still may have) jeopardized federal funding for the most important public transit effort of the decade simply because it doesn’t want to have to deal with traffic mitigation issues on Washington Ave., which will have to close to cars.

If the U is actually the intellectual hub of our state, the place where the most unbiased, forward thinking happens, might anyone there have noticed gasoline is $4 a gallon? Might they not have wondered if many of their students living hand-to-mouth and middle-income staff and faculty driving gas-guzzling cars or riding buses in freeway gridlock might not benefit by an LRT line through campus built sooner rather than later?

Once Twin Citians figure out $4 gas is here to stay, they might keep their Yukons and Navigators for trips to the cabin and runs to the grocery store, but my guess is they will lose interest in using them for solitary commutes and clamor for better transit options—now! The Twin Cities is woefully unprepared for a massive uptick in transit demand, and I don’t know if the tax hike legislators engineered in March will be up to the task. Its tangible benefits have not been well explained by the pols.

What I do know is that the transit-hating, buses-are-socialist crowd in state government is going to need to learn an ideology better suited to the times. It may take months or even a couple years for the reality to sink in and an election cycle to pass, but the state is going to have to change its emphasis.

The University’s willingness to scuttle Central Corridor over concerns that hardly merited it suggests a detachment from the hard reality. If the smartest people in the state don’t get it, what can we expect at the capitol?

I rarely indulge my interest in sports in this space, knowing that this site’s readership is skewed heavily female and the interest in the topic is inevitably limited. I will make an exception because I’d like to clue as many of you who care into the analysis of longtime Twins blogger Aaron Gleeman, now available on Minn-Post.com.

Gleeman’s statistically based (but not number-obsessing) take on Minn-Post is a particularly welcome middle ground for those of us fans who care enough to want the why, but can’t digest tables of stats and newly invented acronyms every day.

Gleeman’s posts, which I have only regularly perused this year (I lumped him in with many of the homer-bloggers who engage in weepy baseball swoons and see Babe Ruth and Bob Gibson in every fresh-faced minor league player at Fort Myers), recently included a debunking of the organization’s approach to hitting and its image as a defensive juggernaut. I find him lacking in caution about the potential of minor leaguers (a chronic disease in this town, our goofy preoccupation with “the kids”), but otherwise offering a nice balance between skepticism and enthusiasm, with little evidence of stenography.

And we need more Gleemans. Unlike the Vikings, T-Wolves, Gophers, and Wild, who are aggressively and thoroughly dissected by the Star Tribune, the newspaper’s baseball coverage is extraordinarily thin. Joe Christensen and LaVelle E. Neal are nice guys, but their work is workmanlike at best, and exceedingly cautious.

Perhaps the mental strain of, and access issues presented by, having to be around players and management for nearly 200 games from February to September (October is not in the cards this year, trust me) has made them gun-shy around an organization that can be sensitive, I hear. After all, this is a newspaper that often values access over insight.

The duo’s coverage is characterized by frequent bursts of optimistic hype seemingly generated by the organization’s front office, an inability to deliver powerful statistical analysis, and an over-reliance on hoary clichés about the Twins’ pluck. Columnist Pat Reusse is the only consistently skeptical voice on baseball, so his recent shot at sports bloggers seems particularly ironic. (To be fair, Reusse has taken several thinly veiled pokes at Neal and Christensen this season. I suspect he might harbor some of my concerns.)

My mantra is that baseball teams with the most loyal and deep fan bases are those whose fans and media expect the most and can be the hardest on their teams. It’s a sign of success, really, because people care deeply. It would be nice if the Strib could employ the kind of rigor with which it approaches football and hockey in its baseball coverage. It has the inches, but does it have the players?

(Disclosure: This website’s parent company publishes the Twins Magazine under contract to the Twins.)

A lot of internal discussion throughout the last two years has been devoted to the topic of how to foster “community” with this website. The thesis being that the under-forty Internet user only wants to read something that he/she can post a comment to, thereby creating a community with all the other folks who do the same.

Originally, this site tried to police its comments to weed out truly vile or ad hominem stuff, but the job just got too big and interfered with our ability to post comments in a timely fashion. Apparently, commentators need to see their brilliance posted quickly, or they lose interest.

I’ve not been very impressed with the caliber of the comments that show up on the most heavily commented local sites, such as the Star Tribune’s and MN Speak’s. I don’t learn anything or see evidence of particularly nuanced thinking and am rarely introduced to new ideas. But I’m an old-fashioned elitist. I figure the cream rises to the top, and if the only platform available to you is commenting to a blog, there is probably a reason for that.

(I have gleaned that our schools are doing a piss-poor job of teaching spelling or that too many people are trying to comment from their phones while driving and shaving at the same time, but I don’t know which.)

Last night, I read an Associated Press story on the Strib’s site. The Strib has taken to highlighting a comment up at the top of each news story, and it did compel me to read some. The article concerned Sen. Ted Kennedy’s cancer diagnosis, and the comments were full of some of the most despicable pettiness, cruelty, and ignorance I’ve come across in a long while. (There seems to have been a backlash since Tuesday night, so you might have to dig a bit to find the real dung.)

It reminded me why I don’t read blog/website comment, and caused me to again question what kind of “community” is being fostered online, especially on sites that deal with news and hard issues as opposed to special interest narrowcasting sites, such as this one. They don’t seem to be places where people find common ground but where ignorance is validated and polarization enhanced.

The comments made me despair about the goodness and intelligence of average Minnesotans. They made me less interested in the views of people I don’t know, more disgusted with the narcissism of our times.

The democracy of the Internet is an interesting thing. It has held the feet of the media to the fire in some awfully useful ways and given voice to some smart folks (many of whom I disagree with) who could not get past the gatekeepers in the past. But I’m not sure the function of providing a soapbox for everyone with time on their hands to get their pound of flesh in is contributing to anything, and most of it is crowding out the rare intelligent voice with something meaningful to add.

Nick Coleman had an intelligent column today about Jesse Ventura joining the Senate race as Ventura has hinted at doing. I can’t tell if Nick really wants Jesse in or just wanted to get off a few gag lines, but I am puzzled by the ongoing lack of enthusiasm for Franken among the populist cognoscenti such as Nick. Would his fellow travelers really prefer Jesse? On any count, he exceeds Franken in objectionability: ego, sanctimony, intellect, bombast, life achievement.

That said, I am one of the few local media figures who feels Ventura was underrated as a Governor and treated harshly by a capitol press corps that is usually notable for treating the dumbest state legislator like philosopher-kings. If Jesse’s gonna make a go of it, he would probably not turn my vote away from Franken, but it certainly sets up an interesting race.

Despite initial inclinations that Jesse would split the anti-incumbent vote, I think Sen. Finger to the Wind has a lot more to lose from a Ventura race. There is clearly no reservoir of love for GOP incumbents right now, and I think a pro-military, libertarian, fiscally conservative, small government figure with no ties to Bush II would drain Sen. Coleman’s pool quicker than a toddler who shook loose of his swim dipe.

Franken comes into the race under a cloud of skepticism that refuses to dissipate, many apparently bothered by his career in comedy (we are a humor-challenged populace, no?) and the sense that he’s a New York carpetbagger (It would be a three-way race of opportunistic carpetbaggers.). Franken is, nonetheless, a candidate of real substance and study, articulating a more cogent philosophy than Coleman’s. 

Ventura would only steal Franken’s anybody-but-Norm vote, which, judging by the recent Minnesota Poll results, might not be that substantial. But Jesse will not take a single liberal vote or that of many college-educated independents who soured on the guy while governor. Jesse would get disaffected Republicans and the 93X crowd that typically stays home on the first Tuesday in November.

I wouldn’t mind having a straight-talking, rhetorical bomb-throwing opportunist in the Senate criticizing organized religion and all the other sacred cows, calling guys like Dick Cheney “chicken hawks,” etc. And I wouldn’t mind it if he judged Dancing With the Stars while doing so. With Franken or Ventura, we end up with a senator who gets a lot of TV time and will get us out of Iraq. Compared with another six of Norm C., I’d take it. What about you?

One of the few effective and newsworthy themes Katherine Kersten consistently digs out in her Strib column is the use of the public schools to advance various cultural and religious agendas, notably ones with which she disagrees.

For those of us on the left or center who are skeptical of the idea that colleges are hotbeds of intolerant one-way thought and that the public schools are laboratories of dysfunction and social engineering, the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Welcoming Schools” curriculum, as described by Kersten, is further evidence that urban public schools have passed the point of nuance and are into blatant social advocacy. I can’t vouch for Kersten’s accuracy, but in broad strokes, as a public school parent, it rings true.

Welcoming Schools is a curriculum developed by a DC-based GLBT advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign. MPS is testing the curriculum in three schools as an “anti-bullying” effort.

Now I have no problem with the values Welcoming Schools pushes, namely that families headed by gay and transgender parents are normal and acceptable. We can debate whether they are optimal, but if you believe as I do that homosexuality isn’t a choice and that there are many kids out there in need of good homes, same-sex households with children are helping society, not hurting it.

But I have real qualms about using public school classrooms with kids as young as six years old to so blatantly engage in efforts to shape values that many in our society don’t accept. Not because I want to validate homophobes or endorse parents’ right to be intolerant but because it puts the schools on a slippery slope and ties them to a social movement that on its fringes goes beyond tolerance and understanding to forms of advocacy that even some liberals don’t agree with.

Such advocacy also feeds perceptions on the right that schools have become an instrument of the left, making community, state, or national consensus harder to achieve about funding levels, teacher qualifications, and ongoing evaluation of school effectiveness.

A small digression: My kid is winding down fourth grade at an MPS school. Based on my anecdotal feedback, he has had more classroom instruction about Martin Luther King, Jr. than any other historical figure. MLK was and is important, but his disproportionate salience to the public schools is part of its agenda to empower African-American kids. If the effort is having any success, more power to them I guess, but if it isn't, then my kid’s education has been put secondary to an ineffectual social agenda that is irrelevant to his needs.

My point here is that the right wing’s perception that the public schools are being used to indoctrinate kids in values steeped in multiculturalism and social engineering seems more accurate than not. Multiculturalism has taken on the dogma and emphasis of a religion in academia—it doesn’t take a lot of digging to discern that.

I want my kids to be educated. I hope they learn values in the home by watching us, in religious school by listening to the rabbis and teachers, and in regular school by the enforcement of respect and tolerance.

The problem is many parents have lost confidence in the public schools’ basic efficacy. The Welcoming Schools effort causes me to question whether the schools believe that they now must function as parent and church as well—my guess as to why this curriculum is being tested. (The alternative, pure ideological indoctrination, is frightening, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.)

And if the schools must now be parent and church, whose values rule? What then of the kids who don’t need or whose parents don’t want an edgy values curriculum? And what are our kids missing in all that classroom time spent validating?

Being the guy who said let’s not get too overheated about Eliot Spitzer, I must reinforce the same point about Gov. Pawlenty’s sex quip the other night on Mike Max’s (a perfect porn name, isn’t it?) WCCO love-in.

In case you missed it, Governor No was lauding First Lady Mary Pawlenty’s enthusiasm for fishing and general outdoorsyness when he noted, “now if only I could get her to have sex with me.” Maybe this was just a bit of regrettable boys-will-be-boys quippery from our Christian soldier, but perhaps it was a look behind the veil, “scenes from a marriage,” if you will.

And if the First Lady is withholding, let me suggest that when you are Governor No, there might be no other way for a right (left?)-thinking First Lady to get her objections across than with a cinching up of the chastity belt. No Central Corridor LRT? No seat belt primary offense bill? No dangerous plastics ban?

Then no love.

Now I’m sure one or another of the local TV stations are going to chime in with a segment on husbands who want more sex than their wives and how healthy communication blah, blah, blah—they’re missing the point. Mary Pawlenty is a DFL plant in the gubernatorial bed, and she might have found the way to turn Governor No into Governor Yes.

Governor, get that LRT bill done, and get things right with the first lady, and mspmag.com will contribute a $10 gift certificate from Victoria’s Secret to celebrate your being back in the public and marital good graces!

The tragic prosecution of Anthony Klaseus, who killed his own eight-year-old son, mistaking him for a turkey while on a hunt, reminded me how much distaste I have for our state’s “great” hunting tradition, the hypocrisy of “sportsmen,” and the power their interests wield.

Anthony Klaseus deserves to be prosecuted. He took his child’s life under the rubric of male bonding and family traditions. He didn’t intend to. But he loved nature, and pot, and beer, and guns.

I spent a weekend a long time ago researching a story about a family of hunters at their deer shack in northwestern Wisconsin. They were stand-up guys, responsible, affable, and completely disdainful of the louts. But they could never explain the one thing to me that I most wanted to know—why this unequal battle between them and a deer was the linchpin that kept them bonded and steeped in family traditions.

Hunting for them was an excuse to be together, to be challenged, to play. And hunters romanticize it because it is what the men pass down from generation to generation, like baseball in my family. But if I bring a rifle with a telescopic sight to the Metrodome, I’m locked up on terrorism charges.

Explain to me how thousands of guys (mostly) armed with telescopic sights, fake animal urine, camouflaged tree stands, underwater radar, and other advanced weaponry and aids, convince themselves they are engaging in an battle of wits with an animal armed with nothing but its sense of self-preservation?

I’m all in favor of men hunting each other. That’d be a fair fight. I think Gov. Ventura proposed something like that a decade or so ago.

I am stereotyping here, but within every stereotype is an ugly truth. I am suspicious of most hunters’ regard for nature beyond its ability to provide them with prey. Trust me, nature is twice as nice when you’re not worried your buddy thinks you’re a deer.

I support people’s right to hunt; and when they consume what they kill, they’re better than I, who lives off the depravity of the commercial meat industry. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about why people hunt and do away with the romantic fairy stories about hunters and hunting.

So happy fishing opener. Watch out for carp that jump and whack you in the head. I mean, people get hurt.