The Rake Magazine

I had a hard time deciding whether to write about the "Imam Incident" or the "Bleskachek Blunder". They both offer up the easy target of political correctness run amok. Everyone's upset about Muslims being put off the plane, and everyone should be upset about Mayor Rybak appointing someone to a top city job who would have been disqualified if even a cursory investigation had been done.

Ok, one crack before moving on to the main event: If Bleskachek is magnanimously offering to take a demotion after costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars because of her misconduct--a demotion to the same rank she had when she sexually harassed and discriminated against her subordinates, with all back pay and her lawyer's fees covered--can we ask the same of the person who appointed her?

But, the Imam idiocy gets my attention, if only because it has garnered national publicity. You might put me down as a right wing crank after reading this, but those Imams would have been put off my plane, too. If a story in the Washington Times is to be believed, these guys were intentionally acting to fit the profile of a hijacker. To wit:

It was an Arabic speaker who helped bring them to the attention of the crew. Presumably the Arabic speaker was not prejudiced against Muslims, yet knew what was being said.

Three of them requested unneeded seat belt extenders, to draw attention to themselves, yet did not use them. Seat belt extenders can be used as weapons.

They sat in other than their assigned seats spread through the plane, to draw attention to themselves, and also, as noted in the story, to cover exits.

They did this in an airport in the constituency of the only Muslim congressman-elect.

These guys were obviously trolling for an incident. They got it, and they deserved what they got, which was the inconvenience of having to take a later flight, something I have had to do on occasion, including the last time I flew from New York, because the TSA had a problem with my wife's nail polish remover in her carry-on.

If they were actually trying to hijack the plane, they would have tried, presumably, to remain as inconspicuous as possible. They were trying to either set up big publicity or a lawsuit against the airline. They got the first, and does anyone doubt the second will follow soon?

Thousands of Muslims fly every day in this country without incident. These guys could have done so, too, if they'd wanted to.

Steve Brandt, the Strib reporter whom I criticized yesterday, has posted a response to that blog and another comment I made at e-democracy. (The rules of the e-democracy forum prohibit me from making a response because I've hit my daily post limit already due to my own stupidity. The daily post limit is two, btw.)

So here is Brandt's response to me:

Those who followed Tom Bartel's link to The Rake might have been better served had Bartel gotten his facts straight. He suggests that he ought to be hired by the Star Tribune to cover schools (my beat) because he was able to speak to Chris Stewart on Monday. That's great, but I wasn't trying to reach Stewart on Monday. Another reporter was. That's because this began as a 5th District campaign issue. I cover schools. I did try to reach Stewart on Tuesday night as returns came in, for normal campaign coverage. He didn't return my call, nor that of the reporter who originally tried to reach him. I got someone else's mess dumped in my lap after the election.

As for why no story was printed out of the Lee press conference for the election-day paper on the basis of one candidate's assertion, the Star Tribune is very cautious about printing last-minute charges without a response from the target. That's something that differentiates the MSM from blogs. Some people like to throw up anything and see if it sticks. If that's your threshold for reporting, fine. But for all the Star Tribune's faults, that's not our M.O.

Steve Brandt
Star Tribune
Not The Rake

And here is mine to him:

I notice that Brandt didn't deny anything I said in my blog, except that he hadn't made the original call to Stewart. Here's what the story Steve Brandt wrote said: "Stewart didn't return calls until after his election." Please forgive my inference that Brandt had made the calls related to a story that Brandt wrote.

However, the substance of my post was that Brandt, or whoever makes his calls for him, blithely accepted Stewart's "explanation" of the site. He didn't question why Stewart had published it under a pseudonym, or why he'd linked to KKK and Nazi sites, or why, when Lee first confronted him, he posted a response along the lines of "Thanks, Tammy for making us famous," or any of the other questions I suggested. Finally, he never asked (or at least didn't print the reponse to) the question of why Stewart refused to return calls until after the election.

The answer to that last one, though, Brandt does supply himself. It's because Stewart well knew that the meek Star Tribune reporters wouldn't actually do any digging, or threaten to print the truth without his comment, and that Stewart would be safe from widespread bad publicity until after the election. Hey, Steve, papers print things all the time like: "Stewart refused to return repeated calls for comment."

That's part of the story--that Stewart was stonewalling admitting his involvement, wasn't it?

Brandt calls this caution. I call it sloth or cowardice. Take your pick. If that's the Strib's M.O., you can have it.

Tom Bartel
The Rake
Not the Star Tribune

The Star Tribune finally managed to get a story in about Minneapolis School Board member-elect Chris Stewart's "Tammy Lee and Everyone Who Supports Her Hate Black People" web site.

They couldn't get the story in before the election for some reason, probably because, as they said, Stewart didn't return their call until after the election.

I spoke to Stewart on Monday, though, which I guess means the Strib should hire me to replace Steve Brandt, their school board man.

Brandt didn't go into much detail on the story of course, because, after all, the Strib had to leave plenty of room for Katherine Kersten to tell us again how wonderful Michele Bachmann is. But I so admire his apparently pungent questioning of Stewart--which elicited this response: "It breaks down to some frat-blog type humor that never was meant to get out to the public and it's completely inconsistent with my politics."

Some questions I might have asked: "Stewart, what you really mean is it wasn't supposed to be revealed that you wrote it. Right?" and, "Since you did write it, how can you say it's inconsistent with your politics?" and, "If we accept your explanation that it was frat boy humor, how do you think the citizens of Minneapolis ought to feel about having just elected someone of such awesome intellect?" and "Would you have returned my phone call if I had left the message that we were going to run a front page story on Election Day that exposes you as the author of patently racist diatribe and we wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself?"

A question Brandt might ask his own editorial board is, "What sort of research did you do on this guy before we endorsed him?"

And he might ask his own editor "Why do you tolerate an excuse at the level of 'He didn't return my phone call?' for not getting this story to the voters?"

The founders planned for it to work out this way: one party controls the executive; the other party controls the legislature. Except for the fact that the chief executive is George Bush, things could be a lot worse. God knows they have been for the past 6 years.

If there is one thing that's been clear, it's that old saw about absolute power corrupts absolutely. With few exceptions, the power party was clearly governing for the benefit of the party, not of the country.

But what I'm most encouraged about is that the American people may be slow, but they're not completely stupid. It took them longer than it should, but to be fair, the Democrats certainly put up some dreadful candidates. (John Kerry, Coleen Rowley and Patty Wetterling come immediately to mind.)

But they also came up with some good ones, like Tim Walz.

Now the Democrats have to actually prove that they have some ideas. We know that Bush's strategy in Irag is wrong. However, we don't know what is right. The Democrats better figure it out soon, because the people seem to be demanding it.

Congress, you're on. Don't screw it up.

And those of you who depend on the newspapers or the TV for your news did, Minneapolis School Board Candidate Chris Stewart wrote and posted this "spoof" of Tammy Lee's website front page on his blog, americanhotsausage.com.

It's since been removed and the blog has been passworded so you can't see any of his previous scurrilous screeds unless you have the secret password, which I'm guessing is probably "honky" or "ofay" or whatever is slang for "white motherfucker" these days.

Stewart goes by Rev. Rahelio Soleil on his blog and as a letter writer (to The Rake, among others) and frequent commenter on local blogs. If you want to google him, you can, and you can read some of his stuff if you click the "cached" link on the google listing.

He commented here the other day as RS2, and stopped just short of calling me a racist. On the Tammy Lee page, he didn't hesitate to put racist words in my mouth.

I spoke to Stewart yesterday and asked him point blank if he'd written the site. He refused to answer a simple yes or no question.

Chances are Chris Stewart will be elected to the Minneapolis School Board today, and by God, we'll be proud to have a thoughtless cowardly racist like him representing us. Especially one who says such things behind a pseudonym.

(Pardon us while we laugh our ass off when we quote what Stewart says he stands for on his website: "A intense focus on core knowledge, character education, and civic accountability.")

At least Keith Ellison put his name on stuff he wrote. Too bad Stewart can't muster the same courage.

And too bad none of the main stream media couldn't do so either. Maybe the Strib just didn't want to make themselves look any stupider than they already do by ignoring this story about their endorsed candidate.