The 35W bridge, which collapsed more than a year ago, reopened today after an astonishingly fast reconstruction. After the bridge fell, many observers didn’t think the new bridge would be ready until late 2008 or even early 2009. The contractor beat that timeline handily and stands to collect millions in incentives. I don’t get to the northern suburbs often, but I’m sure I’ll have occasion to cross the bridge eventually. Traffic was still heavy on I-94 heading into Minneapolis from St. Paul, but it was heavy even before the collapse. And I was glad to hear that the extra lane added to 94 last year will remain open.

The winner of this year’s Cannes Online Short Film Competition is a Spanish film called The Story of a Sign. The video link doesn’t offer audio description, so let me try to sum it up. An elderly blind man is begging in a park on a sunny day. Beside him is a homemade sign that says “Have Compassion. I’m Blind.” Most of the passersby are ignoring him and his tin cup contains only a few coins. Along comes a handsome guy in a suit who looks like he’s on his way to an expensive lunch date. He stops in front of the beggar, considers the sign, and changes it to read “It’s a beautiful day. I cannot see it.” The previously thrifty passersby notice the revised sign and soon the beggar’s cup is overflowing with cash. The end.

And the moral of the story is…what, exactly? Even pity needs a little spin? Fabulous-looking people are watching out for us gimps?  Beggars suck at marketing? If this is the kind of filmmaking that wins awards, I need to start shopping around that script I’ve been working on. It’s got an adorable orphan boy in a wheelchair, his way hot guardian angel, and puppies. Lots and lots of puppies.

Thanks to Amy for the tip.

Does Sarah Palin have a Minnesota connection? Because she sure sounds like a Minnesotan, especially in her tendency to elongate her vowels. Tina Fey has fun with her accent in this Saturday Night Live sketch, making her sound like a character from Fargo.

I also had a chance to watch clips from her interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson. She had this to say about the issue of entitlements:

GIBSON: So you’d take military off the table, the veterans’ benefits. That’s 20 percent of the budget. … Do you talk about entitlement reform? Is there money you can save in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?

PALIN: I am sure that there are efficiencies that are going to be found in all of these agencies. I’m confident in that.

GIBSON: The agencies are not involved in entitlements. Basically, discretionary spending is 18 percent of the budget.

PALIN: We have certainly seen excess in agencies, though, and in — when bureaucrats, when bureaucracy just gets kind of comfortable, going with the status-quo and not being challenged to find efficiencies and spend other people’s money wisely … then that’s where we get into the situation that we are into today, and that is a tremendous growth of government, a huge debt, trillions of dollars of debt that we’re passing on to my kids and your kids and your grandkids … It’s unacceptable.

Entitlement programs are probably one of the country’s thorniest economic issues and I don’t expect any politician to deliver a fully detailed response while in campaign mode. But Palin seems to think that the costs related to Social Security and other entitlements can be reduced by cutting some dead weight from bureaucratic agencies.

Let’s say you owe your credit card company an obscene amount of money, like $100,000. You need to cut expenses, but the only thing you do is drop your gym membership. That’s essentially what Palin is proposing. It’s not a serious answer.

McCain has already admitted that economics isn’t his strong suit. Evidently, it isn’t Palin’s, either.

I went out to pick up a new pair of shoes and ended up at a little neighborhood theater for an opening night performance. Such is the unpredictable life of the city dweller. Bad Jazz, a troupe of performers that features local writer Kevin Kling, put on an absurdist show that featured a model steamboat, songs about crawfish, and burning shoes. You just had to kind of sit back and go with it. Afterwards, the audience was invited to a barbecue in the landscaped garden behind the theater. And I ran into a friend while I was there. Not a bad start to the weekend.

Michael Gerson has a column in today’s Washington Post in which he proclaims that Trig Palin, Sarah Palin’s infant son with Down’s syndrome, represents a milestone for the disability rights movement. Gerson notes that 90 percent of pregnancies are aborted when prenatal testing reveals the presence of Down’s syndrome. He also writes:

This is properly called eugenic abortion — the ending of “imperfect” lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities. By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens[…]And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

Gerson sees abortion as a cause of disability discrimination and a betrayal of the left’s espoused communitarian values. I’m not blind to the tension Gerson points out. As someone with a significant disability, it frustrates me that many expectant parents receive biased or inaccurate information about the quality of life that can be lived with a disability. I’m also struck by the slightly awed tone of commentators from both the left and right when discussing Palin’s decision to have Trig, which should speak volumes about how both conservatives and liberals regard disability.

If a woman equipped with neutral and accurate information chooses to have a child like Trig, she should expect the rest of us to fully support her decision in both word and deed. In practice, that means we may all need to pay a few more dollars to support things like health care, education, and the other services that child will need throughout life. And if that same woman chooses not to follow that path, she should expect the rest of us to not treat her like a criminal or a child. I’m pro-choice because the alternative is to enforce a regime that substitutes its own judgment for that of the individual. And as a person with a disability who has some experience with other well-meaning people wishing to supplant my judgment for their own, I simply can’t go along with that.