Nick Coleman: Public anger will follow our sorrow

The cloud of dust above the Mississippi that rose after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed Wednesday evening has dissipated. But there are other dark clouds still hanging over Minneapolis and Minnesota.

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

The cloud of dust above the Mississippi that rose after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed Wednesday evening has dissipated. But there are other dark clouds still hanging over Minneapolis and Minnesota.

The fear of falling is a primal one, along with the fear of being trapped or of drowning.

Minneapolis suffered a perfect storm of nightmares Wednesday evening, as anyone who couldn't sleep last night can tell you. Including the parents who clench their jaws and tighten their hands on the wheel every time they drive a carload of strapped-in kids across a steep chasm or a rushing river. Don't panic, you tell yourself. The people in charge of this know what they are doing. They make sure that the bridges stay standing. And if there were a problem, they would tell us. Wouldn't they?

What if they didn't?

The death bridge was "structurally deficient," we now learn, and had a rating of just 50 percent, the threshold for replacement. But no one appears to have erred on the side of public safety. The errors were all the other way.

Would you drive your kids or let your spouse drive over a bridge that had a sign saying, "CAUTION: Fifty-Percent Bridge Ahead"?

No, you wouldn't. But there wasn't any warning on the Half Chance Bridge. There was nothing that told you that you might be sitting in your over-heated car, bumper to bumper, on a hot summer day, thinking of dinner with your wife or of going to see the Twins game or taking your kids for a walk to Dairy Queen later when, in a rumble and a roar, the world you knew would pancake into the river.

There isn't any bigger metaphor for a society in trouble then a bridge falling, its concrete lanes pointing brokenly at the sky, its crumpled cars pointing down at the deep waters where people disappeared.

Only this isn't a metaphor.

The focus at the moment is on the lives lost and injured and the heroic efforts of rescuers and first-responders - good Samaritans and uniformed public servants. Minnesotans can be proud of themselves, and of their emergency workers who answered the call. But when you have a tragedy on this scale, it isn't just concrete and steel that has failed us.

So far, we are told that it wasn't terrorists or tornados that brought the bridge down. But those assurances are not reassuring.

They are troubling.

If it wasn't an act of God or the hand of hate, and it proves not to be just a lousy accident - a girder mistakenly cut, a train that hit a support - then we are left to conclude that it was worse than any of those things, because it was more mundane and more insidious: This death and destruction was the result of incompetence or indifference.

In a word, it was avoidable.

That means it should never have happened. And that means that public anger will follow our sorrow as sure as night descended on the missing.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I'm not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

How ironic is it that tonight's scheduled groundbreaking for a new Twins ballpark has been postponed? Even the stadium barkers realize it is in poor taste to celebrate the spending of half a billion on ballparks when your bridges are falling down. Perhaps this is a sign of shame. If so, it is welcome. Shame is overdue.

At the federal level, the parsimony is worse, and so is the negligence. A trillion spent in Iraq, while schools crumble, there aren't enough cops on the street and bridges decay while our leaders cross their fingers and ignore the rising chances of disaster.

And now, one has fallen, to our great sorrow, and people died losing a gamble they didn't even know they had taken. They believed someone was guarding the bridge.

We need a new slogan and we needed it yesterday:

"No More Collapses."

Pictures from our trip to CT

Facials all around at The Beljorde Day Spa

The biggest, happiest Beljorde Birthday wish to Jana!

Editorial: An Enumeration of Seven Years of Republican Screw-ups

Posted by spatula on Jul. 09, 2007 16:54 UTC

Can you remember all the major examples of gross incompetence, questionable ethics, lies and outright scandal perpetuated under the watch of the White House and the formerly Republican-controlled congress?

I got to thinking today, as the Bush Administration elected to stonewall any further investigation by Congress of what role the White House played in firing US attorneys for political reasons, about the huge enumeration of gross incompetence, questionable ethics, lies and outright scandal brought to us by the White House and the Congress that for the majority of time was controlled by Republicans.

Here is an attempt to list the ones that come to mind.

* The completely contrived story of outgoing Clinton staff stealing W keys and otherwise vandalizing offices.
* Senate Republicans illegally accessed Democrats' computer files
* Bush gets memo, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike". Goes on vacation.
* Bush sits for seven minutes reading "The Pet Goat" while the nation is under attack.
* Nation's energy policy is shaped behind closed doors, apparently with the aid of nation's energy producers.
* Jack Abramoff / Indian Gaming scandal
* Valerie Plame's cover blown
* Unsubstantiated yellowcake claim used in State of the Union when it was already known to be false
* Millions of dollars budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan disappear
* Tom DeLay violates Texas law banning corporate contributions to PACs.
* Tom DeLay launders money via TRMPAC
* Republicans jam phone lines for "get out the vote" efforts by Democrats
* "Journalists" are paid by the Bush administration to write articles favorable to administration goals, without revealing that they had been paid to publish their opinions.
* Speaking of "Journalists," James Gannon/Guckert, a male prostitute (8 inches, cut) for a right-wing shill web log gains unprecedented access to White House press briefings, and also seems to visit the White House frequently for reasons unknown.
* Dick Cheney and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia go duck hunting together, even though Scalia will be presiding over a case involving Cheney. Scalia arrogantly refuses to recuse himself.
* Iraq
* Abu Ghraib
* Congressional pages and Mark Foley
* Guantánamo bay
* Illegal warrantless wiretapping
* Possibly-drunk Cheney shoots friend in the face
* Hurricane Katrina
* US Attorney firings for political reasons
* Terry Schiavo diagnosed over videotape by Senator Bill Frist
* Walter Reed medical hospital conditions demonstrate Republican commitment to the troops
* Osama bin Laden got away, still not caught
* Censoring of government scientists, especially if they offer an opinion about global warming or evolution
* Recession of 2001 followed by 5 years of sluggish economy
* Voting irregularities and failure to correct them
* Resistance to forming the 911 commission and failure to implement 911 commission recommendations
* Ignoring North Korea as hard as possible until they detonated a nuclear bomb
* Unconstitutional "signing statements"
* PATRIOT Act
* Dubai ports deal
* Pat Tillman death by friendly fire misreporting and attempted coverup
* Enron
* California Energy Crisis and refusing by FERC to intervene; slap on the wrist for those responsible for deliberately manipulating the market and creating those conditions
* Abuse of "National Security Letters"
* Abuse of General Services Administration to promote Republican politics
* Swiftboat liars
* Sinclair media
* Use of Republican National Committee servers to exchange emails for official US business; subsequently "losing" said emails in violation of Hatch act

Instrumental in helping to create this list were the Bush Scandals List and the Scandal Sheet.

I've got some good news and some bad news...

By Renita Crawford

Renita Crawford has details of an unusual way of extinguishing a fire. Rescue veterans say they've never heard of it until now.

In most cases, fires are put out with water or foam...but, WJBF News Channel 6's Renita Crawford tells us about some heroes who took a different approach in a last-ditch effort to save two lives in Statesboro.

It was a violent, fiery crash, and minutes after it happened, people immediately stopped to see how they could help the men trapped inside.

James Burdett, John Hagan Plumbing & electrical: "It was horrible. It was horrible."

It was too late for the driver.

It was too late for the driver. Jerry Littleton was killed when his pickup caught fire after overturning and hitting a tree. The passenger, his cousin, 18-year-old Mitchell Hendrix, was still alive, but fire was racing through the vehicle.

James Burdette, and two other workers, were heading in for the day after making a service call. The septic company workers saw the wreck and turned around to help.

Burdett: "We heard the man in there screaming, so we waited for the police to get there, and police showed up. We asked permission to put the fire out, with the pump truck, and they said 'Go ahead, and do that' so we backed the pump truck over there, and put the fire out."

As unconventional as it was, the men doused the fire with 1500 gallons of raw sewage for about ten minutes. It's illegal to release sewage on the ground, but the men say there was no other way to save him.

Firefighters had not yet arrived on the scene.

Jody Shuman, Bulloch County EMS: "I ain't never heard of nothing like this, before, but you got to do what you got to do."

Hendrix was pulled from the wreckage, and airlifted to a Savannah hospital. Currently, he is in critical, but stable, condition at the Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta.

First responder Jody Shuman was there. He says the men were faced with a tough choice, but it ultimately saved a life.

Shuman: "When I pulled up, I could tell how it was extinguished, for that reason. We've got one patient still alive, had they not done that, we would have had a recovery instead of a rescue."

Shuman says the entire ordeal was trying.

Shuman: "The wreck itself was bad; the fire being extinguished with a septic truck, and after everything was over with, and persons on the scene cleaning up the wreck itself. Come to find out we were working on top of a 2 foot timber rattlesnake that was still alive."

Despite the odds, the men say if faced with the same situation, they would do it over again.

Hendrix is still in the Burn Center this morning, and will likely be there for several more weeks. The raw sewage poses a major infection risk to Hendrix, due to his burns. The rescuers on scene were checked out at the hospital for similar reasons.

Corky's New Apartment

A Big Beljorde Birthday Wish For Amy--happy 27th Amy!

Cocaine-addled driver destroys entire cornfield on run from police

Last updated at 09:29am on 26th June 2007

A driver who was high on cocaine destroyed an entire cornfield in an attempt to escape from the police.

Four police cars were destroyed before the 35-year-old crashed into a ditch and was arrested, near the village of Dussen in the south of the Netherlands.

It'll be tough to jumpstart classic car after 50-year burial

TULSA, Oklahoma (AP) -- Calling it "our King Tut's tomb," thousands of people watched as a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere was pulled from the ground where it had been buried for 50 years as a time capsule of American Midwest culture.

The concrete vault encasing the car may have been built to withstand a nuclear attack, but it couldn't keep away water.

At Friday's ceremony, protective wrapping was removed to show the mud-caked vintage vehicle covered in rust. Shiny chrome was still visible around the doors and front fender, and workers were able to put air in the tires.

"I'll tell you what, she's a mess. Look at her," said legendary car builder Boyd Coddington, who was unable to start the car as planned.

From the trunk, organizers pulled out some of the objects buried to celebrate Oklahoma's 50 years of statehood -- a 5-gallon can of leaded gasoline, which went for 24 cents a gallon in those days, and rusted cans of Schlitz beer.

The contents of a "typical" woman's handbag, including 14 bobby pins, lipstick and a bottle of tranquilizers, were supposed to be in the glove box, but all that was found looked like a lump of rotted leather.

Workers also searched for a spool of microfilm that recorded the entries of a contest to determine who would win the car. The person who guessed the closest of what Tulsa's population would be in 2007 -- 382,457 -- would win. So far, all they found were guesses of the population written on postcards.

That person, or his or her heirs, will get the car by June 22, along with a $100 savings account, which is worth about $1,200 today with interest.

A separate time capsule buried with the car was opened, and organizers removed and unfolded an unfaded American flag. Other historical documents, aerial maps of the city and postcards were in good condition.

"We don't care what condition it's in," said Bob Petri. "It's just the whole idea somebody thought of it in 1957 and here we are living it."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.