Joel Spoonheim, a good friend and fellow Civics Board member, is running for Secretary of State as an Independent.  While I am and most likely will always be a progressive DFLer, I think a strong Independence Party could have a healthy influence on Minnesota politics.  After Governor Ventura left office, the Minnesota IP movement withered on the vine and nearly disappeared for a time.  What remains to be seen is whether a significant number of Minnesota voters can be convinced to support an Independence Party that doesn’t have a former pro wrestler as the headliner.  Regardless, I wish my friend Joel luck and much success.  I know him well enough to declare with confidence that he would make a supremely competent and eminently fair Secretary of State. 

“If I had no legs, I wouldn’t enter for the London Marathon.”  With these words, Guardian columnist Alexander Chancellor launches into a somewhat oblique criticism of the “political” efforts of employers to hire people with disabilities.  So as not to come across as too much of a…well…dick, he first praises us supercripples who are “triumphantly successful” in our chosen careers.  He notes the accomplishments of a renowned percussionist who happens to be deaf, but the strain of trying to conceal his true nature must have been too much for him, because he then writes, “Why she wanted to embark on this career, and how she has succeeded at it, I cannot imagine.”  That a person who is deaf might possess a deep love for music seems to be a fact that he can’t entirely square with his tragically limited worldview. 

 

By the end of the column, we learn that the source of Chancellor’s grumbling appears to be a letter carrier who has dyslexia and failed to deliver several hundred pieces of mail.  But in the course of his grousing, Chancellor seems to be charging some of us for not knowing our place.  “It is still a mystery to me why people should be determined to do the one thing for which fate has sought to disqualify them,” he writes.  Couldn’t the same be said of someone who rises out of poverty or some other life trauma to achieve success?  Sometimes, reach exceeds grasp, no doubt about it.  But what Chancellor calls “fate” is what many of us would call “prejudice” or “ignorance.” 

 

The real mystery to me is why the Alexander Chancellors of the world get paid for their ill-informed ramblings while talented young bloggers toil away in obscurity. 

Despite what some conservative blowhards would have you believe, Al Gore’s film isn’t a stern 90-minute piece of propaganda on how we humans are causing our own extinction.  Yes, he does illustrate how dire things could become if carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere continue to rise exponentially, but he expresses a lot of optimism for our capacity to address the problem, if only we can summon the necessary political will.  The film’s website contains lots of practical tips on reducing our carbon footprint in the course of our daily lives, most of which I can comply with except for the one about planting a tree.  Here in downtown, we are sorely lacking in tree-lined boulevards, so maybe I can start a letter-writing campaign to urge the City Council to green up the neighborhood. 

The World Cup, the biggest sporting event on the planet, began today.  While productivity in most of the world’s nations will take a hit as close to a billion people tune in to the matches on television, radio, or the Web, we Americans remain proudly oblivious to the event.  This shouldn’t really surprise anyone.  After all, we couldn’t be bothered with the metric system either.  I do hope the American team does well, but I’ll be pulling for my birthplace, Germany.  Deutschland über alles!

While even your grandmother probably maintains a blog, elected officials continue to be wary of the practice.  Few public officeholders blog on a consistent basis and this reluctance to use such a potentially powerful medium probably has several causes.  Many lawmakers fear that political opponents could take a blog entry out of context and use it as a campaign weapon against the author.  And while blogs can make an elected official seem more accessible, it also provides an avenue for intense criticism from members of the public, criticism that, whether accurate or not, could influence other voters.  But on the whole, the potential benefits of blogging for lawmakers outweigh any potential risks.  Blogging is a quick and cheap method for reaching out to constituents and encouraging a more participatory democracy.  Here in Minneapolis, Councilmember Cam Gordon maintains a blog and he persuaded the City Council to pass a motion permitting all Councilmembers to use city resources to maintain blogs.  In fact, political blogs are more likely to proliferate at the local level before lawmakers at the federal level get up the gumption to blog at any meaningful level. 

 

I’ve often wondered what I’d do with this blog if I ever ran for office.  My advisors would probably urge me to mothball the whole thing, but I’d probably resist.  The people deserve to know what they might be getting themselves into if they elect me.