Furst Draft

'Quit printing all this crap about this climate change (expletive)'

Here's a friendly voice mail that greeted me this morning:

Would you start being a little more fair and honest, PUH-LEASE, and quit printing all this crap about this climate change b----t and start going on the other side and going on the side of the skeptics who don't believe this crap -- look outside, look at the weather! Man, no wonder your paper is doing so bad. Don't do so much on climate change and be fair and honest and please start printing the other side. Thank you. Goodbye.

At least she got polite at the end...

Number one, we publish what the world's news services have to say about climate change. We don't do a lot of original research on that topic. (We also don't look out the window, see it's snowing and use that as evidence that climate change is "crap.") We've reported what little is necessary on the so-called "Climate-gate" incident, which is entirely meaningless in the overall coverage of the issue. Not sure if this reader wants us to ignore the international conference in Copenhagen, where just about every country on earth is trying to address what most serious people believe is a serious issue, but we can't and won't.

Number two, our paper's doing just fine, thank you. People read us and respond to us -- like this reader.

Strib says scram to 'Scam" ads

Congratulations to the Star Tribune for recognizing that the "Stop the Petters Scam" ads are themselves a scam. On Saturday, the Strib reported that the paper will no longer sell ad space to -- whoever, whatever organization -- is paying for the ads, which have attacked the handling of the Tom Petters case and are  riddled with innuendo.

Refer to my Nov. 27 Web post on this subject.

Here's what the Strib news story said last weekend:

Bill Hillsman of North Woods Advertising in Minneapolis, who has been directing the campaign, said that the Star Tribune told him the agency didn't fill out the required advocacy advertising application form, and that "the general counsel said there were a number of factual assertions made in the ads that they don't have the time and resources to review before publishing it."

He said the form releases the Star Tribune from responsibility for the ad content, and he agreed that his agency hadn't completed one.

Star Tribune spokesman Ben Taylor would only say that the newspaper decided the ads were "not acceptable."

So these shady advertisers who anonymously attacked public figures with unsourced allegations didn't fill out the one piece of paperwork required by the Star Tribune to take responsibility for their claims. Doesn't that say it all? Hillsman, who's pictured here and considered the genius of Minnesota political advertising, clearly knows how this game is played, and apparently he played it until the Strib caught on.

Now it's lotsa luck to the Pioneer Press, which apparently doesn't have the same ethical or legal standards for advertising as the Strib. That says a lot, also.

If only he had...

A reader, Pat Keith, caught an error in Tuesday's paper:

In Holly Ebel's article about Hanukkah, I think she meant that Alexander conquered Judea, not Judas.

Pat's correct...

Dialogues event is on, despite the snowstorm

Barring some cataclysmic weather event within the next three hours, we're going to go ahead with the Post-Bulletin Dialogues event tonight at the Rochester Public Library, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., though maybe we'll hustle people out of there in less than 90 minutes if the weather's horrendous.

Katherine Stecher of the library staff says the building will be open barring a weather-induced change of heart, and I suspect we'll have a good turnout regardless of the abominable weather.

The art is from Raphael's "School of Athens," a detail showing Plato and Aristotle...lofty inspiration of the P-B Dialogues series...

How many Wisconsin supervisors does it take to run a county?

"Slimmer government is coming soon to St. Croix County, Wis.," I see in today's Strib, where a referendum has reduced the number of county supervisors, or board members.

Instead of 31 supervisors, there'll be 19.

Wow! How will they manage?

In Olmsted County, which has nearly twice the population, we have only seven commissioners. Maybe the jobs are strikingly different, but I doubt it.

The Temptations of St. Tiger

Tell me what you think of Pat Reusse's column in the Strib today, in which he says basically any guy who has the money and fame of a Tiger Woods would wind up in the same boat, cheating with any number of "frisky and gorgeous young women" and then presumably getting clobbered over the head by his wife with a golf club when it all comes out.

As he writes:

There was no surprise in (Woods' philandering), since with all the assets mentioned above to attract very fetching members of the female gender, the assumption here was that Tiger was getting around -- since dang near all celebrity hunks do get around.

So the vast majority of men who AREN'T good-looking, rich and talented arrive at higher moral standards and commitment to our marriages by default -- because we're fat, bald and middle-class? Or we're hypocrites for finding Woods' behavior outrageous? That's an elite point of view, perhaps, that gives the benefit of the doubt to superstars; it's also an amazingly cynical and relativistic view of humanity, and to some degree you might call it misogynistic as well.

Reusse's point overall is that Woods is a wuss because he hasn't faced the media and taken his lumps. But Woods' "transgressions" themselves and the profound impact that his conduct and his seemingly low ethical standards have had on his family and friends basically get a free pass.

Interesting way of looking at the world.

(A last point on the "no surprise": Well, it was a surprise to most of the world outside the golf media bubble, which is why the story has taken on a life of its own. Apparently Woods' hound-dog habits have been well-discussed in the golf world for years; it's interesting that the golf media, Reusse included, nonetheless have assisted in building the Woods image of perfect rectitude.)

This I believe: Tom Friedman is pompous

I've been a big fan of Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist on international affairs, for years, but there are days when I think he genuinely believes he's the Secretary of State -- if not the POTUS himself. Today is one of them. Leaving aside the merits of his argument regarding Obama's Afghanistan plan announced last night, which is surely open to debate, Friedman's column today is almost comically self-important -- closing with these breathless lines:

Hence, my desire to keep our presence in Afghanistan limited. That is what I believe. That is why I believe it.

The headline writer not surprisingly picked up the "This I Believe" phrase, so it reads like a kind of oracular manifesto, as if the entire American foreign policy establishment has been on pins and needles, waiting for him to weigh in.

To his credit, Friedman does obliquely refer to the fact that he was a supporter of the Iraq war, though he trims up his rationale (it wasn't about WMDs, it was social engineering) and continues to hope that the "staggering" cost will have been worth it.

Today's column smacks a bit of not wanting to get caught on the wrong side of history again.