Is she gone yet?

Well it took a while, but my new City Council member has proven himself to be a car-hating Luddite. 

Nice frame from the PiPress’s Dave Orrick: “Faced with the choice of killing park­ing or killing traffic on University Avenue, St. Paul City Council Member Russ Stark on Wednesday evening said kill the traffic.” Stark is proposing a two-lane road to preserve parking, but could it really function anytime someone has to parallel park? Haters aren’t quoted.

David Brauer

I really think most people didn’t believe me when I said that Stark showed up at my precinct caucus in 2007 and all but called for putting speed bumps on Snelling Avenue. Russ, FIRST YOU PUT IN LIGHT RAIL, then you shut down traffic.

I agree something has to be done, but Stark is a transportation radical. This isn’t about bikes, it’s about fixing the problem before you ban the current system. Orrick is dead right: cut University Avenue down to two lanes and the parallel parkers will kill the flow of traffic. 

St. Paul’s already fucked up enough streets with their idiotic three-lane system designed to widen lanes for all the idiots who bought SUVs then realized they didn’t have the driving skills to negotiate narrow lanes. Now Stark wants traffic on Minnesota’s longest street held hostage by every burka-wearing Somali student driver, off-their-meds senior, and otherwise incompetent parallel parker.

The wingnuts make me laugh when they go after bike paths, but Stark is single-handedly pushing me into taking an anti-bike stance with his stunning lack of common sense. The solution has to be bikes AND cars, Russ.

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Traditional idiocy.

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Franken, and more Franken.

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Just in case I forgot to put up a link to it, here’s Obama’s St. Paul speech.

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Nixonland is fast becoming the book on what’s happening in America today. Read author’s Rick Perlstein’s take here, and Mrs. Robinson’s here. In retrospect, it’s hard to argue with the notion that Nixon’s Southern strategy did more to shape today’s America than all the hippies put together. Why else would a Minneapolis ‘burb have three students in trouble for displaying the Confederate flag? The same Confederate flag making headlines in Florida?

After WWII, Germany banned all displays of the swastika. We need a Constitutional amendment banning all displays of Confederate flags for exactly the same reason.

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Even Hillary “RIAA” Rosen thinks Clinton gave a lousy speech. but Charlie Rangel has the definitive quote:

 

“We pledged to support her to the end,” Representative Charles B. Rangel, a New York Democrat who has been a patron of Mrs. Clinton since she first ran for the Senate, said in an interview “Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is.

 

See also Al Giordano on how Obama dunnit, and Steve Benen on how Barack backed Joe fucking Lieberman up against the wall. Al Giordano also has the scenario of how Hillary’s going to withdraw from the race this Friday. Apparently kicking and screaming are out, and aides have will spray the podium with PAM to make sure Hillary remembers to let go of it.

Maha’s been having problems with trolls, and in discussing her troll abatement policies she does a good job of reviewing how unseemly this entire run has been.

And still more from Al, who explains why Hillary’s not going to be veep, and why she won’t be able to say much about that. [Hint: any attack that begins with 'Caroline Kennedy, that lying bitch....' probably won't gain much traction.]

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Siegelman prosecution almost completely undone. If Karl Rove ends up spending one less day in prison than Don Siegelman did, justice will simply cease to have any meaning in America (not that it’s doing all that well as is).

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John McCain gets questions.

Answers? Not so much. And while we still don’t have much in the way of answers regarding the retired generals who got paid to flog George’s war on the talk shows, there’s a new scandal emerging about how the Bushies co-opted the media.

Lots of media reform stuff coming to the Cities this week. Corporate Babysitter has the low down.

But getting back to McCain, Talking Points Memo has the unintelligent “design” press release:

In a symbolic move, Obama spoke in the same hall where McCain will accept the Republican nomination at his party’s convention in September. Campaign officials, citing the local fire marshal, put the crowd at 17,000 inside the eXcel Energy Center, plus another 15,000 outside.

McCain addressed a smaller crowd by design, an estimated 600 in his audience and another 600 outside.

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How did John McCain hook up with the Rev. John “Hitler was cool” Hagee? Ask the Bush White House.

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LA Times: dead tree newspapers good for another 35 years.

Steve Ballmer: try ten years tops.

Hmm, optimists, all of them.

 

 

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