Sarah Palin. Is there any other name that can launch a thousand conversations with at least as many nuances as hers? Not right now, there isn’t. For better or worse, Sarah Palin is an icon of our times. As Newsweek recently proclaimed, “How do you solve a problem like Sarah?” But there is a simple and remarkably satisfactory answer to that question. “Treat her like a human being – for once.” That may sound too simple to many people, but only because they are caught up in the attempt to define Sarah Palin – and, sadly, all women who have the audacity to be themselves.
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Northstar
Today the Northstar Commuter Rail line opens from Target Field to Big Lake, with an extension to St. Cloud coming soon. It’s a commuter rail line, meaning that it’s a full-blown train operating on existing tracks, costing $320M for the 40 miles that it will run. It’s expected to carry about 4,000 people per day in a few years at speeds up to 80 MPH, but experts say that ridership may be much higher. As the hoopla becomes a staple on the news for the next few days, a lot of us in Saint Paul might be wondering when we get our ride – and the answer is that we could have had something just like this by now. But we don’t.
Currency
I’ve been thinking about money lately. No, not just because I need more of it, but that haunts all of us from time to time. I’ve been thinking about how the various attempts at making our US currency more colorful and difficult to slap into a copier and come up with a decent counterfeit have only highlighted how incredibly lame our currency is compared with other nations.
Quality
I’ve long been a believer in the power of Citizen Journalism, but I’ve never seen myself as any kind of expert or leader in the field. One of the things missing in the field has been a definitive primer on quality in Citizen Journalism. No one has written one yet, so I’ve decided to write one myself even without credentials. Given the topic, why not?
First Job
Think back for a moment to your first summer job. You may have landed an unpaid internship, or if you were as lucky as I was a grunt job doing all the things no one else wanted to in a power plant. It probably wasn’t glamorous or particularly exciting, but the odds are you learned a lot. If you can remember your first summer job, I can peg you as probably being over 25 years old and getting on in your “real” career. Summer jobs like you had don’t tend to happen anymore.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 