panhandlers with 'tude

Three young women were camped out in the center boulevard at the intersection of Franklin and Cedar Avenues in Minneapolis this afternoon. Unlike most Twin Cities panhandlers, their faces didn't bear the wear and tear of decades of addiction.

While two lounged in the shade of a small tree, one held a hand-lettered sign which read:

If you voted for OBAMA, you owe me some CHANGE.

I regret that I left my camera at home.

Political Ad Snapshot

In addition to the presidential election, we have a hotly contested Senate race in Minnesota. Most of the House seats are fairly secure, but CD-3 is open and CD-6 is competitive. That's eight candidates -- and their respective parties -- vying for eyeballs.

The political ads have been dominating television, and the negative ads definitely outnumber the positive ones.

I don't usually watch the local news at 5:00, but today my son and I kept track through the KARE 11 newscast. I was in and out of the kitchen, working on dinner, so there's a little margin of error.

According to our scrap paper, there were 20 ads. Eighteen of them were political. Sixteen of them were negative ads.

PRESIDENT
Against McCain: 3

SENATE
Against Coleman: 3
Against Franken: 2
For Coleman: 1

CD-3
Against Madia: 2
Against Paulsen: 2

CD-6
Against Bachmann: 2
Against Tinklenberg: 2

CD-2
For Kline: 1

Joe the Plumber

There's at least one good thing about this story: my kid's Halloween costume is going to be easy this year. He's going to dress up as Joe the Plumber.

A pair of overalls, a plunger, and a name tag. Easy and cheap!

Joe Wurzelbacher isn't running for office, and I don't think he deserves to be under the microscope. Sure, it's easy to blame the media, but they are pretty predictable. Right now, they're starved to find some new angle in an otherwise boring stretch of the campaign. If the mainstream media wasn't poking around, somebody else would be.

We've all seen ordinary people thrust into the national media spotlight. Usually they are victims, or the parents of victims. Or else they are suspects, such as Richard Jewell. Of course, if you can manage to be both the parent of an abducted child and a suspect, well, then you hit the big time.

I wonder if the McCain campaign talked to Wurzelbacher before the Wednesday debate. I suspect they ran at least a cursory background check. You'd hate to find that your poster plumber was a convicted felon, for instance. But beyond covering themselves, they should have checked with Joe to make sure that he was okay with the media scrutiny that was going to follow his being cited in the debate.

Sometimes you have to put people ahead of your campaign.

Liberals could have saved themselves a lot of trouble

had they just listened to Mike Gravel. The audio of his September 1 interview on Pacifica Radio is up on YouTube. The interviewers are incredulous as Gravel tells them Troopergate will only work in Palin's favor.

Even if you think you know the territory, listen to the old guy who warns you that you're about to walk into a minefield.

For a small town mayor . . .

. . . she sure is clean and articulate.

The race is hardly over, but anyone who underestimated Sarah Palin was mistaken.

UPDATE: Anyone who overestimated Palin was mistaken, too.

Palinoscopy

Palinoscopy: The in-depth analysis of every detail of Sarah Palin's life.

UPDATE: I thought I was the first to coin this term. A straight up Google search found nothing. Later I ran a Google Blog search and found this prior usage.

Dagnabbit.

What if everybody showed up . . .

. . . and they called off the party.

The conventioneers are here. The media is here. The protesters are here. But the action is at the other end of the Mississippi.

Damned Gustav.

A lot has been written about the pre-convention raids on protesters.

I don't have much to add, other than the story I heard about the anarchist group who lost out on a place to stay because they wouldn't/couldn't agree to some basic rules. Big surprise.

I'm avoiding both downtown areas, so I can't report on what all is going on, but there's a reporter from Seattle who's covering those stories.

Driving back from a gardening job Saturday, I saw what looked like some sort of patrol boat under one of the freeway bridges. That's a level of security that I have not seen before.

Glad I didn't get stopped by the police. I was grungy enough to pass for a anarchist, and I had my 6 foot San Angelo bar, a hefty digging fork, a machete, zip ties, and some rocks among other potential weapons of mayhem.

Purple Pride

Red State, Blue State?

Once again, Minnesota looks to be a battleground state. FiveThirtyEight has us listed as light blue or purple, depending on the map. Late July reports had McCain even with Obama, though the trend seems to be back to Obama.

It's not just the Presidential race; we've got a competitive Senate race, too.

So who benefits from the purple label? Local TV stations. They'll be selling a lot of airtime to the campaigns and 527s. Station owners in solidly red or blue states must be green with envy.

And maybe a few of them will be asking themselves if it's possible to nudge their state to purple.

Big Tent Republicans

Wondering if the GOP has a Big Tent? Sure looks like it. This temporary structure is going up across from the Xcel Energy Center, on the former site of the Armstrong-Quinlan House.

Open letter to Hillary Clinton

Dear Hillary Clinton,

If you would like to convince me that you really care about the disenfranchisement of voters whose state parties have chosen to hold caucuses instead of primaries, then spend the next couple years working to change that part of the nomination process. I'm pretty sure it involves talking to party leaders and motivating the rank and file to push for these changes. It's something you could have been doing since -- oh, maybe since that health care initiative didn't work out.

Next, you might want to consider how to prevent all 50 states from holding their primaries as early as possible.

Sincerely,
Peter Hoh

We now return you to our regularly scheduled garden programming.

Sticker shocker

Driving this morning, I spotted a small import with what looked like the usual display of earnest left-leaning stickers on it's rear end. Now I have nothing against earnest left-leaning stickers, it's just that I prefer humorous ones. And the whole car plastered with stickers has become cliche. Really, if you have that much to say, get a blog.

The first bumper sticker I noticed was "Live simply so that others may simply live." Up on the window was the "89.3 the current" sticker. That's become de rigueur for hipsters and poseurs in the Twin Cities.

There was a wordy one I couldn't make out from a distance. And another which had Michelle Bachmann's name on it, but I couldn't read the smaller text below it. I imagined that it might be from the "Dump Bachmann" school of thought.

But then I noticed the "Choose Life" sticker. And the Bachmann sticker turned out to simply say "US Congress" in smaller type.

The wordy sticker? Turned out to be a quote from Jimi Hendrix: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace."

I love it when people refuse to stay within the lines.

Political Junkie: looking for a party

Watching the 2008 presidential race has been fascinating.

Last Thursday, I got to thinking that it might be fun to watch the Iowa returns with some other political junkies in a bar or coffee shop. Mind you, I'm not so addicted to politics that I thought up this idea myself. I read about a caucus watching party at SLOG, the blog of Seattle's alt weekly, The Stranger.

Could I find a caucus watching party in the Twin Cities?

I took a look at the City Pages blog, The Blotter, but there was no mention of any caucus watching party. Heck, there wasn't a single mention of the Iowa caucus. Meanwhile, on SLOG, the Stranger was offering regular updates from the reporter they dispatched to Iowa and the former intern who was now attending college there.

So I Googled the following: Minneapolis Iowa caucus watching party.

I found one -- from four years ago.

A few similar searches (Twin Cites, St. Paul, etc.) yielded nothing.

Okay, so maybe this stuff doesn't get to Google. I tried Seattle Iowa caucus watching party. Four decent hits, including the SLOG post.

Damn. I'm living in the wrong city.

Or else the local alt media is failing to live up to its potential.

I made my way around the Twin Cities web-based media, hoping that maybe someone would have word on a gathering (or rehab) for people like me. Nope. The Daily Mole, Daily Planet, and Moderate Left had little or no news about Iowa, and not a peep about any meet-ups.

I overlooked MinnPost. Poking through their archives, I see that they had three posts about Iowa on caucus day.

My quick search through a bunch of TC blogs yielded no info on parties, but I noticed that Mark Gisleson at Norwegianity was posting up a storm -- far more than any of the web-based media I surveyed.

Maybe I'm being unfair comparing the Stranger's Blog to the Twin Cities web-based media outlets, but c'mon, how are you going to grow your audience unless you interact with them and provide lots of content?

World Views Tonight

January. Cold.

I'm warming myself by the warm glow of the computer screen. And the radiator next to me.

Not that I need any more distractions since I discovered Google Earth's Streetview, but I found another one. WorldMeets.US is a fascinating site that gathers international reporting about the United States.

I am fascinated by outsiders' perception of something I think I know so very well. Of course, I'm not an expert on America, though I'd like to play one on TV. While I assume that I know what Americans are thinking, I don't. Like most assumptions, it ought to be challenged. Regularly.

Here are two articles -- commentary, more than factual reporting -- written in response to Barack Obama's victory in the Iowa caucus. The first is by a Nigerian, the second by a German.

I don't know where to begin. I see that someone has corrected the Nigerian's claim regarding the racially charged smear against John McCain from 2000, but I'm not sure if that was the WorldMeets.US editor or the Nigerian editor. While I might want to go on a line by line fisking, I think I'll just let it be.

UPDATE: I don't want to give the impression that I believe that the two articles are wrong and need to be corrected. Rather, I'm delighted to see things from a perspective that is far outside my own, even if at times I am convinced that it is mistaken. Of course I want to jump at what I perceive to be factual errors -- that's much easier than addressing the fundamental differences in perspective.

To veg, or not to veg.

So here's the dilemma: how much effort (and space) do I put into growing vegetables this summer? Vegetables require much more attention than flowers and shrubs. This summer, I am hoping to add hardscapes and other structural elements to my garden. And then there's my paying job. I want to be sure that I don't bite off more than I can chew, so to speak. This summer, I am reluctantly cutting back on the veg.

A friend of mine has, with each passing year, decided to turn more of her garden over to perennials, fruit trees, and such. She figures that the produce farmers who sell at the local farm markets can raise her veggies for her.

No matter how many vegetables I grow, I still make a weekly trip to the farmers' market. So why not plan to get all my veggies there? This year, that argument has a strong appeal.

However, I read in the Pioneer Press that many Hmong farmers are having trouble renting land this year. Many of them are city dwellers, who rely on rented farmland outside the city to grow their crops. Housing development is a prime factor in making it harder for them to find rental parcels. This year, some are reporting that landowners who had rented them small parcels in the past are choosing to use that land for corn this year.

And that reminded me of Michael Pollan's recent piece in the New York Times, You Are What You Grow.

After explaining how the current farm bill encourages the production of corn and soybeans, which are turned into the added sugars and fats in processed foods, Pollan writes, "the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce."

Indeed, the experience of Hmong farmers in St. Paul seems to suggest that the current farm bill actually works against certain farmers who grow fresh produce.

And they are among the farmers who grow my produce. So yeah, it is personal.

Local Politics

We have an interesting race for mayor underway in St. Paul. For whatever reason, the campaigns have taken to calling me. Maybe it's because I keep telling them that I'm undecided. And to a certain extent, I am. Many progressives/DFL loyalists want to punish Kelly for his endorsement of Bush in 2004. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get over it.

Anyway, tonight's call didn't help. "May I talk to Peter?" "That's me," I replied, whereupon the caller launched into the script and read it badly with no breaks or pauses perhaps fearing that I might interrupt and kept reading about all the good things that Mayor Kelly has done while keeping taxes down and how will Chris Coleman pay for all the things he's promising and whatever else was on the script until she got to the end at which point she asked if Mayor Kelly could count on my support on November 8.

This was not a perky, enthusiastic campaign volunteer making the call. Nor was it someone who was paid enough to sound like a perky, enthusiastic campaign volunteer. Bored and hurried. A winning combination.

Maybe it's all a big racket. Perhaps the Coleman campaign paid for the call.