As a facilitator of group sessions, on leadership development or talking with the media or tatting, I often, when I remember to, give out a Smartass Award. Somebody shoots off a zinger nailing me or a corporate sacred cow or a boss who can take it, and I’ll toss out [...]
Number of comments: 10 One in four kids in America on food stamps. Ninety thousand new food stamp recipients in Minnesota in the last two years. A Hennepin County spokesperson told the StarTribune Sunday that the “solidly middle class have fallen into the safety net.”
Now Minneapolis will have 25 fewer cops next year because [...]
Number of comments: 10 What should Tiger Woods do?
Something other than what he’s doing, surely.
John Feinstein wrote Monday that Tiger, like most big businessmen, likes control. He’s carefully controlled his image and the media’s access to him, and now, by running down a fire hydrant and a tree, he’s lost control over the conversation [...]
Number of comments: 10 President Obama has a hard job ahead of him — convincing Americans we should keep fighting in Afghanistan, convincing us that the soldiers who are being killed and maimed there are serving our national interest and the interests of global security, freedom and democracy.
I’m tired of useless, ill-conceived and poorly [...]
Number of comments: 10 Yesterday’s service at Fort Hood for the soldiers murdered last week was a haunting introduction to Veterans Day. These are trying times for our country, President Obama said in Texas. He’s trying to bring the Iraq war to an end, and trying to understand what path is best in the [...]
Number of comments: 10 A wall is a symbol. Of fear. Of hope.
The Berlin Wall — and its absence — is a symbol that change is possible. Change can come. There is always hope, in the deepest dark, that the world can change. For 28 years in prison, Nelson Mandela held on to [...]
Number of comments: 5 Did yesterday’s election tell President Obama to go more to the right or more to the left? Spinners are making the Arachnid Hall of Fame these last 24 hours. Obama’s done, the Right will Rise Again. Or, these were local elections and they were about the individual candidates and blahmeblahblah. [...]
Number of comments: 3 Chalk this up to me being an old fuddy-duddy, a conservative, but I voted today in Minneapolis using the instant-runoff ranking, and it felt stupid to me.
I wanted to be interviewed by somebody — newsies were interviewing voters about the new ranked-choice voting, and most of the comments were about [...]
Number of comments: 6 The Obama administration has gone one for two on issues with the media recently — and it’s gotten the most important one right.
I think they’ve muffed it on Fox — good lord, grow a thicker skin and don’t give those twerps the satisfaction of successfully picking a fight with you. [...]
Number of comments: 10 Don’t want to overlook Lois Quam, quoted in yesterday’s StarTribune, supporting a public option for health insurance.
This is a big deal. Quam is smart — one of a handful of incredibly smart women in health care, including former state health commissioner Jan Malcolm, I had the privilege to meet when [...]
Number of comments: 10 Senator Joe Lieberman threatens a filibuster to fend off the dreaded Public Option. It’s a serious threat — who would want to listen to Lieberman blither and dribble for hours on end?
Why are the Democrats so afraid of a filibuster — other than the reasonable concern that there wouldn’t be [...]
Number of comments: 10 I just re-upped for the domain name thesamerowdycrowd.com. For nine years. Don’t know why nine, exactly. Mainly because I’m terrible at keeping track of things and now we won’t have to worry about it again until 2018.
When a small nerdy herd of us dreamed this blog up three years ago [...]
Number of comments: 10 A story in the StarTribune today made me think about how covering the health care debate the way we cover elections — as a horse race — results in such lame coverage and an electorate that knows very little about what’s truly going on.
The story is about a small young [...]
Number of comments: 4 New York Times headline today:
U.S. Deficit Rises
To $1.4 Trillion;
Biggest Since ‘45
______________
Two Parties Trade Blame
A brushfire is about to torch your house, the wind is blowing and cinders are falling on your roof. You see two fire engines pull up — and the firefighters jump out of their trucks and start [...]
Number of comments: 4 Michele Bachmann made the front page of The New York Times today, in a story showing her to be a beacon for conservative views and a lightning rod for liberal stupefaction, the second-most-popular woman to Sarah Palin among conservatives, a woman with a love of TV cameras, and a person [...]
Number of comments: 3 Sometimes it takes a Nobel Prize winner to say something clear and strong and compelling about our world.
No, not our Nobel Prize winner — Bangladesh’s.
Muhammad Yunus is this week’s person answering 10 questions from Time Magazine readers. He is the genius behind local microloans that help people in Bangladesh start [...]
Number of comments: 1 My friend John Gaterud and his daughter Abbey have created Blueroad Press, and their newest offering, Stompin’ At The Grand Terrace, is being celebrated tonight at The Loft in Minneapolis and Sunday at the Dakota, also in Minneapolis.
If you need a break from baseball or from the shock of cold [...]
Number of comments: 5 I’ll see your Brett Favre and raise you a Ron Gardenhire, Jon. The Twins manager taught us a leadership lesson last week. When Carl Pavano gave up 7 runs in 4 2/3 innings last Wednesday, Gardenhire went to the mound with the hook. It was a must-win game, and Pavano [...]
Number of comments: 7 When I was with an intergalactic PR agency, “Reputation Management” became the next big thing. I thought it was mostly bullshit until I heard the guy who ran reputation management for our agency, and the guy who literally wrote the book on reputation management, talk about transparency. “You mean,” I [...]
Number of comments: 10 The frog soup is getting warmer.
You know, the frog in the pot, the burner is on but because the water is getting warmer gradually the frog doesn’t leap out, and is boiled.
Our state keeps falling apart because we — and the weasels we too often elect — don’t have [...]
Number of comments: 10 The StarTribune will emerge from bankruptcy this month, and that’s a strong step toward survival. But the underlying problems will all remain.
Austin put forward his solution months ago, and as usual he makes a ton of sense. I’ve been thinking a lot about all this, and listening to others’ ideas, [...]
Number of comments: 6 Sarah Palin, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, exhumes the corpse of death panels again.
“Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. [...]
Number of comments: 10 As President Obama goes on the air Wednesday night to try to explain why we need reform of the health insurance business in America and what might make health care better, he’s working against the dead weight of history and the dead weight of Republicans who are not putting country [...]
Number of comments: 10 Who is this Brett Favor guy?
Does he have a particularly great way — or did he when he wasn’t old and retired — of carving pork butt or something?
Emily? [...]
Number of comments: 10 What’s the media’s role when someone says something that’s not true? And how can we know what’s true or not?
I think the media is not doing its job. Media way too often just transmit what someone says, with no research done or assessment made about whether the statement is true [...]
Number of comments: 7 “When we pass this health care reform, people will no longer be discriminated against for the simple crime of getting sick.”
“When we pass reform, the insurance company can’t cancel your insurance because you get sick.”
“Your health care premiums have gone up three times as much as your wages.”
“I’d rather have [...]
Number of comments: 5 Just landed in Memphis. The trip wasn’t as long this time — Minnesota is closer to Tennessee these days.
Our child poverty rate is growing, according to a damn good Warren Wolfe story today in the StarTribune.
We’re still number 2 overall in the country on kids’ well-being, but we’re dropping [...]
Number of comments: 10 You know it’s going to happen. The Republicans are going to say Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have prostrated the United States before the puppetmaster of North Korea. Apologists. Secret deals. Bowing to a dictator. Selling out the SuperPower.
Clinton, with lots of people behind the scenes, was able to spring [...]
Number of comments: 4 No-longer-governor Sarah Palin had a wonderful suggestion for the news media as she stepped down — quit, boogied, ditched, lit out, her job unfinished — from the august power of the Alaska governor’s chair yesterday.
To the media, her you-apparently-gotta-run-away-before-you-run-again-ness said, “How about, in honor of the American solider, you quit [...]
Number of comments: 7 Lest those of us who are fans of Barack Obama forget that he is, in many ways, a traditional politician, he reminded us with some silly political words today.
The flap over Henry Louis Gates’s arrest in his home had grown to such ridiculous proportions that Obama came into the regular [...]
Number of comments: 10 Many political scientists maintain that peace and prosperity are among the most reliable predictors of presidential electoral success.
At this stage, America in the Obama era has neither. It has the highest unemployment in a quarter century and is embroiled in two bloody, complex and unpopular foreign wars. Bad news, [...]
Number of comments: 10 How far should we go in censoring ourselves? What we put up on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, all that jazz, lives forever and can make potential employers, maybe potential dates or friends, steer clear of us. If we worry too much about that, will we be misrepresenting ourselves as boring, vanilla [...]
Number of comments: 5 South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s Argentine fling saved us from a presidential candidacy that would have flooded the country in blather.
Sanford is a poster boy for the politician’s disease — the inability to use one word when you can vomit out a dozen or more. This man is incapable [...]
Number of comments: 10 Jon Tevlin has a powerful column in today’s Star Tribune that shows the results of Republican policies at the local level. The piece details what Governor Tim Pawlenty’s cuts mean to his hometown of South St. Paul. The city with a shrinking population and tax base will take nearly $2 [...]
Number of comments: 10 Tim Pawlenty was burnishing his national reputation for folksiness on Sean Hannity’s Fox show yesterday. Yeah, he said the same stuff about not knowing if he’ll run for president, but then he ran. About not trying for a third term as governor, Hannity quoted him saying it’s better to leave [...]
Number of comments: 10 “Let me be clear,” Newt Gingrich said yesterday to a Republican fund-raising dinner in DC, “I am NOT a citizen of the world.”
I caught Newt on C-SPAN, and that sentence arrested me in my channel flipping. “I think the whole concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous,” the disgraced one-time [...]
Number of comments: 3 Journalist Roxana Saberi, a North Dakota native, was freed in Iran yesterday. At last, and thank God. We forget sometimes, those of us who’ve studied in the genteel rooms of Murphy Hall or St. Thomas or Mankato, those of us who’ve been members of the Newspaper Guild, who’ve gone home [...]
Number of comments: 7 Every now and then Jesse Ventura cuts through the bullshit.
OK, and not so rarely he has supplied the bullshit. But on Larry King Live Monday night (not yet posted on LK’s site or YouTube but it will be shortly) our former Guv and current expat in Mexico gave it to [...]
Number of comments: 8 David Brooks is impressed with the intellectual force of the Obama administration. And he’s also worried by it.
Brooks, the New York Times columnist and Public TV commentator, spoke Tuesday night — filling Orchestra Hall — for the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. And he evoked echoes of [...]
Number of comments: 9 Barack Obama’s press secretary doesn’t represent the same communications values Obama does — clarity, calling a spade a spade, authenticity. Gibbs isn’t yet a good mirror of Obama’s style and substance.
Too many political communicators think communications is about message creation and discipline. Too many in our business get off [...]
Number of comments: 8 Words reveal values. What we say shows what we believe.
One of the reasons I find Barack Obama’s first 100 days so encouraging — like finally being able to breathe after too long in a hog confinement barn (come on, I’ve been there), or being able to read the newspaper without [...]
Number of comments: 10 (Guest post from Joe Loveland)
Defending an extension of the ceaseless Minnesota Senate recount is about as popular as defending an extension of the sitcom Cavemen.
But count me in. I support Senator Coleman’s appeal questioning whether absentee ballots were judged by varying standards in the counties.
By the way, this is [...]
Number of comments: 10 As I keep sending out my invitation for solutions to bringing a viable version of the Star Tribune into the electronic age, I’m hoping people will look at saving the Strib — in some form, not necessarily the current one — from new perspectives. And I’m getting some really smart [...]
Number of comments: 10 The Newspaper Guild members at the Star Tribune — reporters and many editors — are doing something really smart. They’re not waiting around for whatever’s going to happen to their newspaper, which is now in bankruptcy and may face the same fate as now-dead papers in Denver and Seattle.
The [...]
Number of comments: 3 This morning Barack Obama declared war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He said American and world security depends on not letting Al Qaeda rise again in the chaos of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The people who killed more than 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, are in the mountains of [...]
Number of comments: 10 John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad heading west in a beat-up truck piled with family possessions. Businessmen in frayed suits selling apples and pencils on street corners. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Guilded Age, written in 1873. These are symbols of turning points in our social history, symbols of when [...]
Number of comments: 7 The last question at President Obama’s town hall forum today in Costa Mesa, California, came from a black guy who said he’d been laid off and can’t find a job. He’d worked for 13 years, was laid off at Toyota, and has a felony on his record and says that’s [...]
Number of comments: 10 Jon Stewart on The Daily Show spanked Jim Kramer and CNBC and financial journalists in general Thursday night, further endangering his reputation as a fake journalist. Stewart charged that financial journalists were lapdogs, not watchdogs (my words, not his). It’s a hell of a good point.
Stewart had taken a shot [...]
Number of comments: 9 My niece Ally and I got to sit in on the page one news huddle at The New York Times Monday and we saw what’s at stake as newspapers around the world try to figure out how to stay alive when there’s so much free information, including their own, on [...]
Who is this Brett Favor guy?
Does he have a particularly great way — or did he when he wasn’t old and retired — of carving pork butt or something?
Emily? [...] 
