One of the more common refrains of sports fans, especially those who call into Sunday morning radio shows, is that the local sports media is cynical, negative, don’t ever see the glass as half full. Pat Reusse, even to my jaded ears, wears on me with his utter disdain for so many sports figures, historical and current.

Then something reminds me why he’s right.

If you had been online last night at approximately midnight, you would have realized that long after the NBA draft ended, the Timberwolves pulled off a huge trade, sending its highly regarded number three pick, OJ Mayo, to Memphis for the less-than-sure-thing Kevin Love. A passel of other players changed hands as well.

I’m not going to evaluate the merits of the trade, look here for that, and here’s some trenchant background.

After I read the news on the Star Tribune’s website, I scanned the rest of the sports articles, and my jaw dropped. Under Sid Hartman’s name were these words, “Wolves wanted Mayo all along”. Clearly the sports legend had written his column before the midnight trade. Under Jim Souhan’s byline: “Wolves made the right choice [Mayo]”.

Hartman’s column, now revised with the headline “Wolves liked Mayo and Love”, was particularly embarrassing. “There was never any doubt,” he wrote. “Wolves assistant general manager Fred Hoiberg verified Thursday night that Mayo was their choice all along. Hoiberg said the Wolves never came close to making a trade. The truth of the matter is they think so much of Mayo that they wanted him on the team.”

“Our people thought that Mayo had far more upside than Love,” Wolves owner Glen Taylor told Sid.

Later in the column, team boss Kevin McHale told Sid that the Wolves “couldn’t be happier” guard Greg Buckner is under contract, as he’s a role model and teacher. “He is a world-class kid.” Buckner was traded to Memphis along with Mayo.

I am not here to bury Sid or Souhan for that matter. And I’m sure the Wolves, at Friday’s press conference, will tell the media the trade came up out of the blue, the team didn’t expect it, and it only traded Mayo because it was able to acquire other key players and unload stiffs. And that may be partly true, but it’s also partly b.s.

The team has deservedly taken a lot of heat over the years for bad basketball and poor management decision-making. Pat Reusse laid it on the line earlier this week. It is certainly entitled to hate the local press and mislead them on draft night (though when you speak to the press, you are speaking to your fans, I’d remind them).

But Sid is a different story. He may not always support you, but he is the only sportswriter in town that always gives management the benefit of the doubt—the opportunity to spin disingenuous drivel in the name of authoritative source material—and a guy who never takes a cheap shot.

The Wolves knew it was dangling Mayo, knew something might be brewing, and knew it valued Love almost as much as Mayo. They all lied. Someone owed it to at least Sid to whisper, “Hey, more may happen tonight, don’t run those quotes until you check with me” or something to that effect. It happens all the time.

Instead, Taylor, Hoiberg, and McHale demeaned themselves and the entire Wolves organization by their disingenuousness and burned the one local scribe who always roots for their success.

Classless.

If you heard the snippets of Barack Obama’s Father’s Day sermon at a Chicago church, you heard him call out African-American men (and women) for their interest in making babies but disinterest in parenting them. It is a singular cultural miasma confronting urban America, and it will be interesting to see if the Senator’s rising profile as a national leader can goad this community to more introspection and less scapegoating.

If you want an insight into the latter, peruse the African American Community Covenant, which the Minneapolis Urban League and African American Mobilization for Education have convinced the Minneapolis Public Schools to sign onto as the latest silver bullet in dealing with failing inner city schools.

It is a fascinating document because it places the bulk of the responsibility for poor African-American school performance, behavioral problems, and school failure on the public schools and society at large. It is merely a framework for a joint effort aimed at black achievement, requiring the district to swallow a lot of its pride—board member Tom Madden telling the Strib’s Terry Collins that its preamble was off-putting, but the goals are worthwhile.

Public schools certainly bear some of the blame for the state of black achievement. They have been slow to adapt to the challenges of educating in this cultural milieu and have been eclipsed by more nimble educational models (see below) unburdened by regressive unions and bureaucracy. But we only have to look at other urban districts and other racial and ethnic groups to realize this problem is neither unique to Minneapolis nor endemic among all urban populations.

If the Urban League and its brethren really think, as the covenant states, that the problem is a lack of a curriculum built around African American themes and a failure to recognize black kids learn differently than everyone else, they are kidding themselves. My daughter attends a majority African-American Montessori school on the North Side, and there is not a separate curriculum for black kids nor are there different expectations—each child is an individual, and the teaching is at once universal and customized.

But such schools are self-selecting cultures of parents that care enough to think about educational models and want their children in an environment rooted in proven success. The kids and families that the schools fail (or that fail the schools) are more deeply troubled—mired in multi-generational poverty, drugs, and criminality; in family and social units where education is derided and studiousness mocked.

The question is can or should we rejigger the schools enough to make up for lack of parenting, a values crisis of monumental proportion, and an external culture that refuses to acknowledge how bad things are for fear of being called racist?

There has to be more to this than endless cries of victimhood and demands for external solutions to internal problems—otherwise, we’d be making progress. It is not easy out there, and there are ways public institutions can be part of the solution. But Barack Obama laid out the diagnosis on Father’s Day. It’s a sickness no school or government program can overcome. First things first, I say.

It has been a cool and rainy spring. Cooler than any I can remember. Which means we’ve been hearing a lot of one of the more irritating comments bandied about locally whenever it is unseasonably cool: “More evidence of global warming.” Paul Douglas ran a gutsy forecast in the June 10 Strib (no longer online, as best as I can discern) where he specifically called out a guy who greeted him with such a salutation.

Douglas, who has never taken the easy way out by hiding his beliefs on this strangely controversial topic, pointedly explained that weather and climate are different things, and it could be snowing this Independence Day and global warming would still be irrefutable because climate is the broad view of years and years of data. Weather is the current season.

I know most conservatives hate environmentalists and anything that portends organized efforts of obligatory social responsibility (I don’t deny that many conservatives act responsibly on an independent basis), but the willful stupidity of looking at today’s weather and making statements about climate change is simply too dumb to countenance. And everyone from Dave Dahl to Joe Soucheray to every other conservative on KSTP-AM thinks it’s funny or convincing (and apparently it is).

What’s funnier to me is how the oil economy is going to subvert their denial and inaction. The cost of driving and burning fossil fuels has spiked to the point that it represents a greater threat to our economy than subsidizing research and rewarding conservation. The great motivator for the average American, who sides with the deniers out of pure selfishness and obstinance, is the gradual depletion of their buying power.

Climate change is suddenly a trauma that may be cost effective to deal with. Who doesn’t want more efficient cars, lower airfares, and more money to spend with Comcast? The climate change deniers may be right in the end—that we were not causing it—, but they are more likely a loud but ignorant minority, and it’s going to get tougher and tougher for them to convince Americans that doing nothing is going to make their current lives any better.

As a great Minnesotan once said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

We’ve had some unlikely governors in recent years, Jesse Ventura, most notably, and we may be about to elect a satirist to the Senate, but perhaps the most strange and disturbing portent of this election season is lieutenant governor Carol Molnau finishing out Tim Pawlenty’s final two years as governor. (With DFL Senate president Jim Metzen of South St. Paul elevated to lieutenant governor, by constitutional mandate. State senators are not up for reelection this fall.)

This is all predicated on Gov. No being named John McCain’s running mate and then winning the vice-presidency, but apparently there is no provision in the state constitution for a special election if a governor leaves office voluntarily.

I have been waiting for the Strib to explain this succession stuff for months now, to no avail, but MinnPost's Bob Whereatt did, sort of, earlier in the year.

Molnau makes Gov. Pawlenty look like a Rockefeller Republican, her opposition to any and all forms of spending (and a fanatical hatred for public transportation) being a cornerstone of her ideology. Another MinnPost link suggests Molnau might be well-positioned for a long reign, but the GOP insiders I know suggest otherwise.

Molnau is, behind-the-scenes, the same hard-edged, scowling figure within her own caucus (our Dick Cheney without the influence). She offers few of the warm fuzzies that have compelled Minnesotans to gloss over Pawlenty’s inflexible right-wing governance and reelect him.

They speculate that the state GOP would be unlikely to nominate her to run in 2010, but she would serve to absorb the body blows from a DFL legislature, allowing a fresh candidate to run without her baggage (the I-35W bridge collapse, her ouster as state transportation czar, and the state’s weak economic performance).

Metzen has been in the legislature since 1975 and is an old-style, blue-collar district liberal who would do a lot of ribbon cutting and presiding and have no influence. The MinnPost link implies the 2009 Senate could replace him when it goes into session on January 6, two weeks before the new president is inaugurated, but that assumes Pawlenty did not resign before then.

Unless a 1975 letter to Penthouse magazine’s “Forum” emerges in the next few days (“I am a satirist at a small New York television program, so you can imagine my surprise when the hottest page at the network decided to make me her summer project . . .”), Al Franken will be nominated this weekend to represent the state DFL in this year’s U.S. Senate election.

Franken’s latest affront to the Minnesota political class’s sensibility is a piece of fictional humor he wrote for Playboy years ago, before he changed his profession from satirist to political muckraker and candidate. The reaction has mostly come from within the DFL, prompting yelps from Reps. Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, and Jim Oberstar—representatives of the three most reliably Democratic Congressional districts in the state. If you want evidence of the dead earnestness or humorlessness of our political class, look no further. (My colleague Brian Lambert proposes some shock therapy, which you should also dig in to.)

But it’s hard to take these yelps seriously over a bestiality joke and the suggestion that robots might perform sexual acts in the future. I mean, once the DFL swung its dollars and hearts behind Franken, who has made his career as a (political) satirist, they had to assume he was going to have made jokes throughout the years that would not be welcomed in their PC, multicultural pretend world. The kind of jokes most of their constituents make every week.

Now, Katherine Kersten, in her bubble, is predictably bothered (What do we say to the children, Ward?). But it’s silly hypocrisy of the highest order, pandering to who-knows-what constituency really, for the DFL to smack Franken when they knew exactly what they were getting in him. A liberal should have a liberal sensibility, no?

They took his money, his lists of entertainment-industry givers, and his tireless campaigning throughout the last couple election cycles, and in return, they are smacking him for being edgy when he made his living doing exactly that? Like the leaden Mike Ciresi or Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, the current unelectable darling of South Minneapolis and academia, are nirvana-on-a-stick?

Franken is a real person, not someone who has spent decades scrubbing his past and crafting his resume to accumulate power. That person would be our current Senator, Mr. Coleman. Write in if you have any clue what Norm stands for besides his own ambition or what truth, belief, or value he holds dear enough to fall on his sword for.

Al is also tough, smart, centrist enough to cobble together an elective majority and the kind of pol who will get Minnesota the attention it so badly craves. But it all comes down to how deeply we want to delude ourselves. Norm will get the voters on the right and Al the voters on the left.

But the soccer moms and yuppie dads who split their tickets are going to decide this thing. Is the DFL really sending the right message to them when Rep. Oberstar suggests someone who wrote a piece of fictional satire should “disown it.” Disturbing, indeed.

Let’s face it, this is a humorless place. We take ourselves very seriously here in God’s Country and take offense very easily. If the DFL elite and voters who agree with Franken on the issues can’t stomach him this weekend or in November, it will not be because he’s a carpetbagger, not because he paid taxes in the wrong state, and not because he didn’t shake the college kid’s hand.

It will be because we can’t discern that cravenly rubber stamping the agenda of a President who has gone a long way to destroying our country’s security and economic vitality is actually more offensive than a joke about sex with robots.