If you’ve followed this blog, you are aware I like to travel and am dismayed at the government’s failure to invest in a safe and reliable transportation system—roads, rail, and air. In recent months, many advocates have decried that the country is on an unsustainable path that is driving the nation toward gridlock and leaving people without alternatives. New Yorkers routinely have to factor in hours of delays when traveling in and out of the region’s three airports. It’s often the same in Chicago.

Now a truly important voice has spoken up. Robert Crandall, longtime (and ex-) CEO of American Airlines, the man who lead the carrier to a position as the nation’s largest (and one of the world’s most respected) airlines. His comments in a recent speech should come as a wake-up call to government. It advocates a radical cure to save the nation’s airline industry, which he believes is locked in a vicious cycle of bankruptcy to bankruptcy.

This is not about any specific airline but about how deregulation, high oil prices (not the primary problem, he argues), and government’s refusal to modernize the system of airports and air traffic control and adequately fund roads and rail have left the airlines with no choice but to compete in ways which threaten their stability and leave them at odds with their customers.

Crandall loves the aviation businesss, and his prescription, though perhaps not something we could achieve consensus on, contains some harsh truths that the public must come to accept (the inevitability of higher airfares in some cases, taxation to modernize the nation’s transportation infrastructure) if we are ever going to get anywhere. It’s important reading, if you’re someone who ever has the need to get outta town.

My sum total of experience with Al Franken consists of three encounters:

—An interview I conducted with him at his home in Manhattan around 1999. He was gracious, not exactly gregarious, but made time for me outside of normal business hours.
—An authentic, emotional, and quite impressive (and unpolished) speech he gave at Temple Israel a few years later.
—A fundraiser last summer with him and Robert Kennedy Jr. Franken seemed more machine-like and a bit heavy on the rhetorical fervor, but the forum lent itself to that.

A year later, I seem to be one of the few moderate lefties who still wants to see Al Franken elected. Heavy hitter DFL friends of mine say stuff like “Amy Klobuchar says Norm Coleman has worked very cooperatively with her.” Others tell me that Franken is unfriendly and insular when they’ve met him. That he seems aloof and ungracious in showing appreciation to people such as waitresses and caterers. And I keep hearing that he’s “angry” from people who I know to be angry about the current state of American government.

Putting stock in people’s perceptions, even connected people, can be risky. But when DFLers are parroting Republican talking points about Franken and PC party insiders can’t get over the fact that he penned tacky jokes, you’ve got to think something is off the rails about his campaign. I mean, nobody likes Mike Hatch, or so you’d imagine from what people say, but I never heard this kind of friendly fire during his run for Guv.

Either I misread Franken and, though smart and articulate, he’s a mean, sullen SOB. Or he has been victim of one of the most effective disinformation campaigns in state political history. Or we are an electorate who still, after eight years of George Bush, would rather elect the affable slippery character over the smart guy who couldn’t sell you a broom after a dust storm.

I suspect it’s a mixture of at least two. I just don’t know which.

The Franken campaign has to start showing the world the Al Franken I saw moved to tears when he spoke about the troops in Iraq. The guy who makes gratis USO Tours all over the globe. The guy whose passion for a just society lead him to give up a lucrative media career and depart his adopted hometown. The quirky ads from his ex-teacher and the tit-for-tat nonsense with Coleman aren’t helping.

And he needs to find a way, in a year when voters are supposedly craving authenticity and consistency in candidates, to show voters how wildly all over the map Norm Coleman is. I am a moderate pragmatist who would love to see such people in office. Norm Coleman would like us to believe he is such a guy, but watching his ideological gyrations over the past couple decades, it’s clear he’s merely a pol with his finger to the wind.

As the Fair starts and the real campaign season begins, Al Franken has failed in framing his opponent and defining his own legitimacy to voters. Norm Coleman should have been one of the most vulnerable incumbents this year. Time is running out.

I can’t say I am moved by all the controversy this summer over how many will be allowed to protest at the Republican National Convention and how close they can get and for how long. I think it is an exercise in impotence by people more concerned with making noise than making change. Trust me, I despise this Bush administration as much as anyone. And I recognize that among the delegates to the RNC are the truest of its true believers.

But c’mon—don’t these Republicans know the country hates their war, their abrogation of the Constitution, their manipulation of science, their attempts to politicize every once-sober function of government, and their attempts to label anyone who would disagree with them as unpatriotic? They know. They support a President with 27 percent approval ratings. They know the country is done with them.

This convention was sought out by our Democratic mayors and Democrat leaning Congressional delegation as an economic development tool. They didn’t just bid for the DNC. They went for whichever one would bite. If we didn’t want the RNC, we should have decided that beforehand. (Or we can let RT know at the ballot box in 2009. But we won’t because we are suckers for well-meaning earnestness and ineffectuality.)

In the meantime, why not focus on how to make our Republican guests feel as welcome as possible so some of them come back and steer their conferences and vacations here? So they walk the streets and spend money in our restaurants and shops instead of holing up in their hotel room in fear of a bottle being thrown at them. So they relocate their businesses or consider expanding one here. I mean, we want their dirty money, no?

I have to laugh after reading that several members of the Minneapolis City Council will be on the line in St. Paul protesting. It’s the usual suspects: the windmill tilters, the circus haters, the perpetual victims, the folks who spend the bulk of their time trying to solve social problems beyond their reach rather than figuring out how to make the city work.

Councilmember Cam Gordon notes (in the Southwest Journal article), to his chagrin, that despite participating in decades of protests, protesting doesn’t seem to affect real change. Ding, ding, ding!

I’ve been surprised over the years at the number of people who are heavily involved in protest work (earnest liberals mostly) who don’t vote because they believe the game is cooked either way. That’s Ralph Nader’s line, and it’s not without grains of truth although failing to vote is nothing short of brain-dead.

But if corporations and money run this country, why not work to affect change in ways that have impact (voting for one)? Pension funds and consumer pressure and basic economics have more impact on corporate behavior than protest marches.

I know you’re angry. I’m angry too. Maybe it’s time to figure out ways to protest that are harder to ignore and more likely to effect change.

It is astounding to me, in this age where service industries dominate America, that the Twin Cities no longer has a diaper service, but the last one has bitten the dust. Cheek to Cheek Diaper cleaned my daughter’s diapers from 2004-06, and the now-defunct Crib Diaper did my son’s from 1998-2000. I’m glad we are done having babies.

Disposable diapers are noxious things, but they do a better job of hiding what’s in them, and that’s why they rule (you get a longer sleep from a dry baby than a wet one). I am sure diaper services are not a growth industry (In a story we published four years ago, Cheek had 300 customers; it is down to 125 today.), but it strikes me that the Twin Cities is a particularly inhospitable place for businesses that care for people in their domestic lives.

Don’t ask me why—probably part of the Lutheran DNA, self-sufficiency, etc.—I think people here are sheepish about having someone to clean the poop out of their kid’s diaper. Perhaps this is pointless nostalgia rooted in a sense that more and more of our progress is not really making our lives easier. (Love those ads showing folks checking their e-mail from a National Park or tropical beach.)

My son comes home from summer camp today, after two weeks away. Last week we sent his sister to Grandma Camp, and my wife and I spent a week together alone (on a very busy work-vacation—progress!) for the first time since 1998. It felt odd and sort of lonely. It was a sneak peek at empty nesting, and I realized what an adjustment that will be in 2022, should we be so lucky. (Try having a week of meals with your spouse, not mentioning your children, and having anything to talk about by day six.)

Cloth diapers create a tactile sensation that takes you to infancy or early parenthood faster than about anything else. There are a pile of cloth diapers on a shelf in my daughter’s room, relics of an era of her life that is now past. She will start school in a year and at some point will want them out of her sight.

For now, though, I enjoy looking at them when I go to kiss her good night. They are remnants of a chapter of her life that is now over, an era of child rearing that is gladly past, but nonetheless a reminder that progress is not all it’s cracked up to be.

As a community, we have to mourn when we lose the last remnant of a piece of our collective history.

I think the McCain campaign and the GOP have hit on a winning issue in the Democrats' refusal to countenance oil drilling or expansion of nuclear power in the USA, one that could cost Barack Obama the election.

It’s a good issue not because the Republicans are right. You know when Michele Bachmann is gaga over an effort, something is rotten about it. Americans who pay attention understand that domestic oil drilling is not likely to substantially impact oil prices for years, even if it invades every potential continental shore and wild land in the Arctic. Neither will it be possible to construct new nuclear plants and come to terms with radioactive waste storage in the next few years.

But most people don’t get the nuance. They see today’s gas prices and will see this winter’s energy bills and are demanding solutions. By standing in the way of solutions, the Dems look like ideologues who are putting green dogma ahead of the country’s economy and the average guy’s solvency—during an economic crisis no less.

Even John McCain understands we must be aiming for a post-oil America, one where what remains is dedicated to specific purposes for which there are no alternatives. More drilling is not going to accomplish that. Nuclear power might help. But the first order is conservation and the second step is investing in making all kinds of other things work.

If the Dems hope to inoculate themselves against this issue, they are going to have to compromise and insist on tangible conservation and alternatives incentives while we take steps to find more oil and figure out how to make nuclear power work. If they refuse, the GOP will reasonably portray them as extremists, and most Americans will agree.

More oil drilling is more than likely a gimmick, particularly in the short-term. But it’s a gimmick that will turn into a land mine if the Dems can’t navigate their way past it.