On the surface, it might not seem like Sun Country Airlines, which yesterday announced it would have to defer half of its employees’ pay for the rest of the year, has much to do with the current Wall Street mess. CEO Stan Gadek was going to get some cash to get it through the slow autumn (its schedule is already a shell of what it was a year ago as it gradually reverts to a charter and vacation carrier) from Sun Country’s parent company, Petters Worldwide, until word came down that Petters was under a massive federal fraud investigation and much of the company’s capital may have been illegally obtained.

Normally, in such a situation, if anything about the Petters mess can be labeled “normal,” Sun Country would look to a lender for a line of credit. But, and I don’t know if Sun Country could obtain financing in its current state, the credit markets are dried up. There’s no money to borrow because banks and lenders are hoarding cash to stave off bankruptcy from all the debt and bad mortgages they are carrying.

So companies either defer employees’ pay or lay them off. If credit isn’t forthcoming in a few weeks, they will eventually shut down. This is the economic death spiral that the freeze-up in our credit markets leads to.

I don’t know about you, but I lost a lot of money in yesterday’s market meltdown: our 401Ks, our kids’ college 529 accounts, some of my wife’s stock options sank further under water. So I don’t really get the members of Congress who don’t want to bail out Wall Street on the backs of taxpayers. Most of us are taking it up the shorts even without the bailout. If the market gained back the 1,000 points it has lost in the last two weeks, I’d have a lot more money, and so would you.

So it puzzles me to see the unlikely array of Minnesota Congressional reps who voted “no” on the bailout. Michele Bachmann was no surprise. You can always count on her not to understand an issue with nuance. Collin Peterson functions like a small-town pol, reflexively voting his constituents angst or pocketbooks. But Jim Ramstad? One of the bits of analysis of yesterday’s House vote was that most of the retiring House members in both parties, absolved of political considerations, voted for the bill, a sure sign that it was the right thing to do.

Ramstad is a sober, pragmatic, moderate elected official. I respect his opinion. His take is that the bailout was hastily put together, insufficiently debated, and we can do better. Perhaps, except that this panic in the markets is making a very good case for haste, no? And I have yet to hear any respected, independent figure outside the House GOP caucus endorse some of the lesser measures it prefers.

Peggy Noonan said this morning on MSNBC that the public has scared Congress (and the Presidential candidates) shitless with outraged calls and e-mails. Those missives don’t manifest any nuanced understanding of the current situation, the bailout, nor the interconnectedness of all of this (see above). Half of us could lose our jobs tomorrow and still oppose the bailout. It’s the American prerogative.

Noonan’s point was that we have reached a Watergateian level of distrust of Washington. No one believes anything Bush says—he’s lied and played us too often. Congress and government institutions have failed in their check/balance and watchdog roles. $700 billion sounds like a lot of money, and Joe Blow think it’s going to go to some investment banker who’s going to use it in Manhattan on lots of $400 bottles of Cabernet and $200 Wagyu sirloins.

So here we are: A nation in free fall, unable to distinguish between schadenfreude and self-immolation. Have a nice day.

I was on a long flight on Saturday and took a bunch of newspapers with me to try to read up on the implosion on Wall Street. One of the things I read stopped me short: that in trying to unravel the mess at AIG, neither the Fed’s nor the SEC’s staff could sufficiently untangle the complex array of finance and investment vehicles it held to arrive at a dollar figure of AIG’s exposure.

Basically, the smart guys outsmarted themselves. That’s really it in a nutshell. Problem is they outsmarted everyone else as well, to such an extent that I still can’t look out my window and understand why this happened. How what seems to me to be a relatively modest number of bad loans could unhinge the core of our nation’s (and the world’s) financial systems.

I mean, there are no foreclosures on my block. And most of yours as well, I’d presume. But the world’s credit markets, the nation’s banking system, and the entire housing economy has been rendered a bloody pulp.

Laying blame is less important right now than figuring out ways to keep ahead of the shysters going forward. Simply put, how do we find some regulators smart enough to stay abreast of the state-of-the-art in high-wire finance because whatever protections are put in place will inevitably be backward-looking.

We are simply too greedy a nation to learn our lesson from this. The next generation of go-go financiers is in search of the next financial Wild West to play in. Count on it.

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(I like The Wall Street Journal because I am interested in business and its coverage is typically the deepest. But its preposterous editorial positions and slanted cultural coverage make it too much to swallow for many. If you’re one of them but feel The New York Times is not up to the task, give the FT a look. It’s not as easy to find, but its European orientation and inherent ideological pragmatism made its coverage of the Wall Street implosion last week particularly interesting.)

Throughout the course of this year, I have become more and more aware of the immense amounts of time my peers spend on the road transporting their kids to sports leagues and games. The more I learn, the more appalled I am.

—One colleague transports her teenager to Blaine from south Minneapolis several days a week for lacrosse.
—Another participates in three concurrent basketball leagues for their pre-adolescent, with games and practices across the south metro.
—Another spends several evenings a week and most summer weekends at baseball practices and tourneys from Farmington to Forest Lake.

At one time, I envied these one-income families (virtually none of the parents that sign up for this rat race have two full-time careers) for all the additional time they had to be together on weekends. No spending half the weekend running errands and paying bills, etc. But I’m not so sure now.

Many of these folks routinely drive 200 miles or more a week transporting kids to sporting events. In an era of $4/gallon gas, the cost is astronomical. There are no “family Sundays” etc. Just a relentless schedule of practices and games.

Last spring, my son asked if he could play in a youth baseball league all spring and summer (He already played park district ball twice a week, but the season was only two months long.). He would have to attend practices and games two weeknights at 5 p.m. all over the metro area. Weekends would feature tournaments requiring two days of attendance at a ball field, often in the exurbs.

We said no. We could not leave work at 3:30 p.m. to have him in Lakeville by 5 p.m., and we simply would not spend so many hours of our evenings and weekends away. It would shortchange his sister and turn our remaining lives into a constant race of catching up with everything we were neglecting while we were sitting around watching him practice or play or sit. (The ironic upshot—the neighborhood kids he had plenty of time to play pickup ball with weren’t around all summer—they were in Farmington playing in weekend-long tournaments.)

As a guilt-induced token, our son is playing “fall ball,” five Sundays of baseball all over the metro, consuming up to eight hours of the weekend, more if there are Saturday evening practices. I’m still appalled.

I’m appalled by the waste of gas and carbon emissions, ostensibly by people who care about the environment. I’m shocked that these leagues and circuits have not been optimized to conserve fuel and minimize driving. I’m amazed that so many of my peers check their values at the door when it comes to pleasing their kids. And I’m saddened that so many of my peers seem to think their children are incapable of respecting the fact that there is more out there in the world than their obsessive schedule of sports. That their siblings and parents have the right to time of their own, interests of their own.

“I know it’s crazy,” said one parent to me about their time on the road each week. “But I can’t bear to say no to him because he loves it.”

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m shortchanging my children. But I wonder what kind of kids we are creating when we don’t expect them to relate to or recognize needs other than their own and through our actions subvert the very values we say we maintain merely to keep them smiling?

This evening will mark the end of Priscilla Lord Faris’s campaign for Senate. The personal injury attorney and DFL stalwart chose about a month ago to pit Al Franken to a primary challenge because she didn’t like his coarse language, he lived in New York for years, and he got donations from “outsiders” who are “buying” the election. (The same could have been said of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for New York Senate—minus the Playboy bylines.)

If Lord Faris gets more than aproximately 450 votes, it will be a sign to me that xenophobia and provincialism still play in this place so desperate to prove its sophistication and status as a player among states.

Let’s face it, Lord Faris could not defeat either Franken or Norm Coleman unless one of them turned up with a dead girl or a live boy as the saying goes. She’s just one in a long line of ridiculous DFL insiders who don’t understand what voters want and are steeped in a 1960s view of Minnesota politics—where earnestness, a Midwest accent, and lifelong attendance at the DFL state convention earn you the right to run for office.

I know right now that Barack Obama and Al Franken look like high-risk candidates, but the bland dreck that the DFL placed on the ballot election after election, and its tin ear for changes in the electorate are at the heart of why we have had one DFL governor and two senators in two generations.

Lord Faris, by positing the same arguments against Al Franken that the GOP uses, has merely served to legitimize its talking points in the eyes of women like her, who will surely serve as the swing vote in the senate and presidential race and are trying to decide whether sex quips are a voting issue. Throwing in the caveat that she wants to defeat Norm Coleman doesn’t wash away the hubris.

Hubris? Isn’t that a little strong? I don’t think so. I don’t know whether Patricia Lord Faris is on an ego trip or is just another DFL babe in the woods, but she never had a chance and only served to distract from her party’s efforts to unseat a very vulnerable opponent who does not deserve another term in office.

If she only knew how to field dress a deer.

As part of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's coverage of the Republican National Convention, I will be blogging live about the media scene and other happenings going on around town, which you can read here.

I'll resume writing this blog next week.

Thank you.

—Adam Platt