http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:41:48 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/13/084148.php Michael FinleyDAY 9 ...After nine days I have lost 9.5 pounds -- from 226 to 116.5 lbs.This makes me very happy. Happier still, because my original high weight, before starting the "South Beach Diet," was even higher -- 238 (the scale only said that once, but ... wow, am I right)?I look in the mirror for the first time in years. I was unable to really look before. Too painful psychically. Seriously -- when I was heavy, which was for like 11 years, I lived in the twilight of denial.But diabetes busted down the ability to keep denying. It dissolves your body. In my case, I began to literally rot in all the private dank places. Foot rot, crotch rot, pit rot, behind-the-ear rot. I felt like a corpse, like Lazarus.More than you wanted to know, I know. It was very disturbing to me. I didn't know I had diabetes. I thought I was -- melting.So this diet was very wonderful for me. I am about to go "off" it for 3 weeks while I go on a car trip to Utah. I will be on the maintenance phase of it, though, with 16.5 pounds till to lose, I will hop back on the harsh phase for a few days as soon as I get back, and am able to abstain without going crazy.Projection: I will lose the next 16.5 pounds more slowly -- by summer's end.I thank the diet but I thank other things as well, that came together for me pretty miraculously.This sounds like a sports testimonial, but I thank God. I figured out a long time ago that I had a mild eating disorder -- I just ate 5-10% more than I was supposed to -- and I was unable to stop. I was awful at dieting, just awful. So I told the Great Spirit, "Listen, I'm no good at this. You're going to have to step in and take over." I can't prove I had divine help -- no footprints in the sugarbowl -- but it's a very odd coincidence, wouldn't you say?Second, my wife Rachel is a nurse practitioner, and it was her idea that I try an Atkins-like diet. This goes back practically a year. I did for a while, a year ago, but I found I was eating mountains of pork rinds and oceans of grapefruit juice. [Shudder]. South Beach has many points in common with the Atkins diet -- carbohydrate-aware, and not afraid of a little fat. This is key, I think. My "eating disorder" is really a kind of allergy to carbohyrates. The more starch I eat -- crackers, beer, home-bread bread -- the more I want to eat. So I have to draw a line in the sand on the stuff, for life.Third, I started attending an Overeaters Anonymous group here in Saint Paul. The people are very sweet, and they have the goods -- an understanding of why we eat crazy. They provided me with a rationale that makes it all work -- the need to admit you can't do it yourself, and to place the task in the hands of a higher power. I would have been reluctant to come to this on my own -- I have always prayed, but pessimistically. My sense of God was that of an absentee landlord. "I know this won't do any good, but ..."Finally, a church I have been attending with my son. It is an evangelical church here in Saint Paul, which sometimes "creeps me out" (their phrase, not mine) culturally. I am constitutionally unable to let go and say "Praise the Lord" in public, and I don't know if it is vanity or perfectionism (I am a writer, you know) but these people are good at it and I suck, though I am getting better.The thing is, the people I run into there are genuinely good. I have not felt the kind of alienation there I have felt at other, more subdued places, despite my own semi-good intentions. This church has helped me deepen my dependence on God and be less embarrassed about it. This constitutes a major, major, major life change, as I have always been a little ticked off at The Man.I feel I am on fire now -- not because I am rotting, which I am not any more. But that I am really living again. It's not the weight loss, which is lovely -- it's a feeling of being back myself in the world. It was me that left, in my despair and disappointment, not God.So isn't it interesting how many things had to come together for this diet to "work" for me?So great credit to the diet and Dr. Agatson. But I doubt that the diet alone -- with my original attitude -- could have prevailed. Surrender to God was part of it.And something bigger than that, a discovery I made. Praying to lose weight is itself a loser, a vanity -- although in my case it is a prayer for life, because diabetes is gonna take me down one day.Somewhere along the way, I realized it will be as easy for God to save us all -- from our eating, from our self-absorption, from our anger, from our paranoia, from our certainty, from our pride, from our economy (which is the sum of all our fears and delusions) shutting down all around us, to the future wars that call to us to kill, in the name of survival.Anything God "does" violates the laws of nature. Why would he do that just for me and my cracker problem? Well, maybe he did, and I am humiliated and busted because of it.But I have altered my prayer. I now pray that he helps us all -- including you -- to find peace, to build confidence and courage, to turn around this terrible attitude of global pessimism that my life has embodied.Just remember, when things start getting better again -- it started with me.Mike Finley Saint Paul Culture6147@blogcritics.org Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:41:48 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/12/131143.php Michael FinleyI started at 226, and am down now to 218 -- eight pounds in a single week. Not bad.What is strange when you lose weight, you feel a little loose in the skin. I can pick my belly up and drop it -- couldn't do that before. Course, there's less of it.I am going on vacation Sunday for 3 weeks, driving through Utah and Colorado. Can't stay on the hard part of the diet for the duration -- "Phase 1" they call it -- so I will drop down to the more carbohydrate-friendly Phase 2, until I get back. A maintenance schedule seems easier to manage while away from home.I'll let you know how it goes. Culture6119@blogcritics.org Thu, 12 Jun 2003 13:11:43 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/08/085036.php Michael FinleyChecking briefly after the second full day of my test of "The Southe Beach Diet."Down another pound -- 3 1/2 in two days. Pretty satisfying.And -- I cheated -- perhaps a half cupful of macaroni I dumped into some lamb-based spaghetti sauce. I'm not technically allowed any starch the first two weeks. I also gnawed on a frozen pizza crust my son left behind.Which reminds me how I gained the unwanted 30 pounds inthe first place -- feeding my babies, eating the crusts they wouldn't eat. All those toasted cheese sandwiches a dozen years ago.This diet seems legitimate to me. The author is Arthur Agatson, a Florida cardiogist who wanted a diet his patients could stay on. So he designed one himself.How successful? The book is ranked #8 on the Amazon sales list. A true best-seller. Compare that to my best-selling book, "The New Why Teams Don't Work": #51,015.The regimen is a loose derivation of the high-protein "Atkins" style of diet, loose because he sees some carbs and fats as OK and others as not OK. If this works, fantastic. Isn't it odd that for 50 years doctors pursued a nutritional model which didn't work -- the Food Matrix, with an emphasis on reducing fats? Gosh, if they can be so wrong about something with which they had multitudinous evidence -- what else can they boot? Culture6002@blogcritics.org Sun, 8 Jun 2003 08:50:36 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/07/074833.php Michael FinleyThe claim of the "South Beach Diet" is that ordinary food-chain diets don't work because it's the wrong foods -- too much carbohydrate and not enough fat -- and not enough volume to satisfy a bird.During the first 2 weeks, it's pretty strict, but on carbs, not volume. For breakfast I have 6 oz of tomato juice, eggs and Canadian bacon, and decaf coffee with fat free milk.I was good except for the decaf coffee, using 1% milk instead, by mistake. I'm not sure about decaf.A morning snack of a mozzarella cheese stick. Instead I had some cottage cheese and canned fruit in light syrup (which was againt the diet, but I'm hooked on the stuff).Lunch -- caesar salad and dressing. I had a bowl of steamed unfrozen peas, with a bit of butter and salt. I figured this was a good sub because peas are very low glycemic -- important for me cuz I am diabetic.Afternoon snack -- cottage cheese again, which they recommend this time. (Again, I used light canned fruit instead of tomatoes and cucumbers.)Dinner - fish, vegetables, salad. I followed the rules on this one.Dessert - lemon peel ricotta creme. I had baby carrots for a later snack instead.Result: I was 2 pounds lighter this morning. Not bad for a first day.And -- I felt very little irritation. nervousness, martyrdom or "suffering."I think it's working well. But -- diets often work well at first. (Not for me, but for many people.) Have to study this closer and see if I feel satisfied even after the novelty wears off.My goal is to get from my current weight of 222 down to 199. I'm in no hurry -- 3 months to lose 23 pounds will be fine. But "South Beach Diet" says it can be done in 2 weeks! (Not that it's a quick weight loss regimen -- it evens out over the long haul until you're just experiementing to see what you can get away with. But the first two weeks condition you to be a little stricter with yourself, and this results in greater weight loss at the very beginning.)We shall see. Have a nice day. Culture5990@blogcritics.org Sat, 7 Jun 2003 07:48:33 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/06/110129.php Michael FinleyWell, you can't expect me to consider the day I got the book in the mail to be Day 1. So this will have to do.The emphasis of this diet is on eating what they call the right carbohydrates and the right fats.It is a 3-prong affair. The first two weeks is semi-strict -- you are allowed 5 meals a day (3 meals and 2 snacks), but no starches and sugars of any kind, even fruit.Mmm, fruit.This is difficult for me. I love bread, crackers, beer, and such. I don't eat much candy or ice cream, but I love a bagel as much as any Christian man.It also means I must shelve my Slimfast regimen for the duration. Too much sugar.I am doing OK. I cheated and scarfed a handful of Reduced-Fat Oreos last night -- another reason why today is Day 1 and not yesterday. No Oreos today. Hah!Weight after 24 hours -- up 2 pounds, but that is likely water. And Oreo.I'm going to try to do an honest job of this -- no small feat, as diets are typically haunted by rampant dishonesty. "Oh surely this doesn't count." "I only had a single serving!"Your prayers are welcome. Culture5963@blogcritics.org Fri, 6 Jun 2003 11:01:29 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/05/154938.php Michael FinleyI just got a copy of the year's big diet book, The South Beach Diet, by Dr. Arthur Agatson (Rodale Books). But rather than just breeze through it and tell you what it says -- the way some critics do -- I'm actually going to go on it for Blogcritics readers. I'll report in every few days to let you know how it's going. It won't be a long wait. the book promises to knock off 8-13 pounds in the 2 weeks.My plan is to do my best to follow the diet. If I mess up, I'll take the blame. If I succeed, the diet gets the credit.So you know, I am 52, 5 foot 10 inches, I weigh 226 pounds, and I walk a lot. I admit I am helpless in the face of Wheat Thins. Sounds stupid, but God help me, it's the truth.It should be an interesting experiment because I have every reason in the word to want to nosh right now. I just lost two year-long paying gigs, my wife is down with a very bad back, and our collective anxiety is running high.But maybe it'll work. If it's a great diet, and I'm an honest man, it should, right?It'll be like De Niro in Raging Bull, in reverse.I'm also going on a two-week car trip to Utah. See if anyone can follow a diet while opn the road!But, I'm motivated to succeed, too, because I'm middle-aged, diabetic, and need to be lighter on my toes to keep heart disease at bay. Books5937@blogcritics.org Thu, 5 Jun 2003 15:49:38 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/26/152546.php Michael FinleyJust the other side of the airport, on a bluff overlooking the Minnesota River, is Fort Snelling National Cemetery. It's a classic military cemetery, with thousands of identical markers laid out like poppies in Flanders fields.The cemetery abuts the area where I walk my dog, so I walk through there frequently. Few people buried there were killed in battle. If you served in the armed forces, it's your right to be interred here, and your spouse's. I always pause a moment, when I see on the marker a death date between 1965 and 1972. And think: there but for the grace of God is me. It takes me back to my experiences with the draft. I'm a little hazy on it. It was 1969, the haziest year of them all.I was a hippie wannabee, full of contempt for LBJ and General Hershey. I had a dozen plans for my life, and none of them involved rice paddies. I remember toying with the idea of filing as a conscientious objector, but it didn't work for me. They asked you whether you?d attack Ho Chi Minh with a tire iron if you came upon him raping your Aunt Sally, and I had to admit I wasn't too hot on that idea.When the Selective Service form asked if I wanted to overthrow the United States Government by force or violence, I wrote, "force."I was what you?d call a nominal draft resister. I attended a few rallies and read everything disrespectful I could get my hands on. I read in Paul Krassner's magazine The Realist that your draft board had to file everything you sent them. So I sent them a six-pound bonito, a handsome ocean fish I purchased at the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. The idea was that the draft board would be helpless except to live with the stench of a decaying fish in their file cabinet. Instead -- figure this -- they drafted me.I was in the U.S. Army, technically, for a couple of weeks, classified as AWOL. I wasn't even aware I'd been drafted; I was hiking around in Alaska at the time, away without leave, without a thought in my head, and only found out about my induction later. Then I applied to the nearest college I could find -- Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, also known as Pat Boone University -- and hid there, cowering, under its ivied protection, until the lottery replaced the draft.So I never went to Vietnam, and I never missed it. But the war was part of my life anyway. I took my childhood friend, Paul Plato, to his ship in San Pedro when he shipped out. For a while I knew a couple of actual deserters in Los Angeles. They were a pair of goofy guys who claimed to have escaped from interment at The Presidio. I never believed their stories, but one night they were rousted from their beds and led off by MPs. At my first high school reunion, I learned that our one fatality was Skeeter Barnes, a sweet kid from the wrong side of the tracks, who stepped on a land mine somewhere and was no more. We played Little League together when we were nine.It is hard to say who was the coward and who was the hero. Poor Skeeter was no one's idea of a hero; he was just a poor dope who couldn?t work the system like I did. I thought I was an intellectual hero, full of higher ideals than flag and conscription, but I kept myself far from harm's way, didn?t I? One more thing I have in common with George W. Bush.When I think of 56,000 of my generation tossed out there to die defending our Laugh-In way of life, I get blue. Thirty years later, it still hurts.But there is one thing I would like to set straight. When the war ended, an urban legend popped up, claiming that our returning soldiers were routinely spat on by those who didn?t go, and called baby-killers. People who spread this awful story must have had an axe to grind: blame the defeat on the hippies and the liberals.But I swear it never happened. Or if it happened on a couple of bizarre, sick occasions, they were anomalies. Vietnam vets suffered from a host of problems, from post-traumatic stress disorder and Agent Orange to unemployment in the stagflation of the 70s and early 80s. Many wondered where their reward was for the contribution they'd made. Where was their GI Bill?What a terrible choice our country forced on a generation of boys: be good and die stupidly or be marked for life, or be smart and survive, but feel like a traitor to your own generation.And I look at these graves at Fort Snelling, row on row on row on row, their gray faces from jet exhaust -- and I want to salute. Culture5631@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 May 2003 15:25:46 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/26/151440.php Michael FinleyIn my home state of Minnesota, we just passed a right-wing led "concealed-carry" law enabling citizens to carry guns anywhere they wish.Now, guns aren't my issue. I don't care about them. So far no one has ever shot me, and I expect things to continue at that pace.As odd as this law sounds, I doubt that our gun death statistics will change much (partly because they're already high, and people have lots of guns anyway.)But a lot of suburban people in our fair state appear convinced that a tidal wave of urban violence is about to do the Big Apple on their heads. (Mixed metaphors, you have no power over me!)If life is truly dangerous, makes sense to pack some heat. I can find no fault with that logic.I saw a poster that said "Armed Americans save 2 million people from criminal attack ever year." It is comparable to saying: Deaths due to elephant rampage in the U.S. this year: 0, thanks to guns. You can't argue with sound thinking. But ...This is happening the same week as the U.S. has announced plans to disarm the nation of Iraq. We see you with a gun , we shoot you. Question here is: if Americans can arm themselves to be safe in a pretty safe country, why are Iraqis -- to whom we are extending the benefit of our superior way of life -- denied this right, in a country that is about as dangerous as they get?And don't gun people always say: The first sign of tyranny is when the government takes away your guns?And didn't all the lawn signs say: Liberate Iraq?Well, how can people be free without the sine qua non of freedom, machines that punch holes in people? I feel guilty even asking, but there it is. Politics5630@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 May 2003 15:14:40 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/26/151053.php Michael Finley(The following is a note I wrote a friend who is a preacher. I had just attended his church, and heard him allude in his sermon to someone sneering behind a window whade as he protested outside an abortion clinic.)I don't know how free politics is from God. I get the very strong impression from friends in the radical conservative camp that liberality is a hellbound train. What a great political strategy ? make the opposition's name into a curse-word! I took Paul aside at the retreat and told him 20 ways in which Jesus invented liberality ? generous-mindedness ? responsibility for the forgotten ? the idea that all people are equal in God's sight ? the idea of empathy for the sufferings of others is a liberal idea.    Respect, that's more of a conservative idea. Good one, too, but empathy ? Jesus just about invented it. Where in literature do we encounter it before? Ruth?I believe that we all come to God from our own stories, and those stories forge our identities.    I am a relentless, instinctual hater of bullies and bullying, owing to things I witnessed as a child ? God, unfortunately, being one of the bullies, which I continue to struggle with -- and my politics (and maybe my faith problems) spring almost entirely from that.The essence of radical (not historical) conservatism is sticking up for Caesar, covering up the truth, being indifferent to the opinions of others, extolling the Pharisee, ridiculing the publican, and telling the leper to shut his tattered yap.I'm agin it.Historical conservatism (people left to their own devices will do bad things, so they must be constrained) is something I agree with. But not this radical anti-reflective, who-cares-what-you-think stuff making the rounds today.Who does the hard work for people in trouble? Liberals like my wife Rachel, who gut it out day after day, helping people with big problems, one at a time. The nurses and teachers and foster families and social workers who wade through misery every day for a living.   Not because they are Democrats, but because they have the idea that everyone matters. They live liberality. All these people are demonized by the current regime as ?liberal do-gooders.?   Many of these liberals hate religiosity, but they live a deeper kind of religion ? they act on the premise that other people are really there.I'll bet someone did sneer at you from the window of the abortion clinic that day. But that's not the entire reality.   The bigger picture is that a lot of young girls are in a world of trouble, and they've too few resources to have their babies, and the people who work there ? despite the occasional person sneering, and maybe that person has a story, too ? they live in a war zone, and are subjected to enormous amounts of hostility and unkindness from well-meaning people.War is insanity by definition ? the suspension of civility. If a sneer is all you suffer amid the shooting, maybe you got off easy.And if society takes abortion away, and doesn't replace it with something as empowering for women, something that helps balance the power inequity going back to the cave era, girls lose and brutality wins. And I'm agin that.I wish there were nearly zero abortions ? families should be free to choose between the life of the mother and that of the child. And some situations are so hideous, like incest and rape, that society should not have the right to coerce the girl to bear that fervently unwanted child to term.Maybe as a Christian, that is an evil point of view. But as an American and a hater of bullies, I am obliged to be for the rights of women to choose what they do with their own bodies. It's in the Declaration of Independence. And it's in the Bible, implicitly ? that women are people, and the least of us are known to God.So much untruth-telling going on, such as that late term abortions are common. They're rare. The vast, vast, vast majority occur in the first six weeks of pregnancy, months before the "quickening" that early Jewish scholars noted as the onset of life.I would feel differently if I saw tons of kindness and nurturing for young women on the part of the pro-life side. But mostly I see narcissistic fervor and moral superiority. And occasionally, outright hate.And I think of our pro-life ethic acted out in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, where we dropped 30,000 cluster bombs ? bombs whose one purpose is to shred human beings. Radical conservatives were positively gleeful about the prospect of ?precision? bombing ? but there is nothing precise about a cluster bomb.Of course, being devoted to the truth, we forbade our news outlets from showing pictures of what a cluster bomb does to a child. The whole world saw it, but not us. Because we knew from Vietnam that if we see the girl on fire, running naked down the road, it pricks our consciences.We have the power, and wise little girls will get out of the way. And if they don't, let ?em burn. If little girls die in back-alley abortions, as they did in uncountable numbers for the ?good old moral days? decades before Rowe-v-Wade, they were not wise little girls.Do we sound like Christians, or do we sound like the Romans, steamrolling those who get in our way? Christ offered the world an alternative to might, and it was mercy. The law is a rough approximation of mercy. The law is supposed to be about keeping little girls from bursting into flame. It's not perfect. It's often awful. It's our pathetic effort to mount an alternative to male brutality.And I don't think this contradicts what I take to be your stance on the difference between men and women, which I think I agree with. Your talk on what women want vs what men wants was totally right on. I have a mental picture of the ?way things ought to be,? and it does not involve abortion mills. Under our roofs and in our church communities we are free to impose whatever vision of God's plan for us we discern ? from the catacombs to Waco. But in America, we have rights, and they too are rooted in the Judeo-Christian view, that individuals matter, that little girls matter.   In friendship - Mike  Politics5629@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 May 2003 15:10:53 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/26/150612.php Michael FinleyWe in Minnesota are facing a huge $4 billion budget shortfall, which our Republican governor has sworn to fix without causing pain to his suburban, midlife, Christian-Caucasian supporters.The DFL, our version of the Democratic party, threw in the towel this week. There will be no way to balance the pain of these cuts on all the classes of people in the state. The axe will fall almost entirely on the poor, the elderly, the rural, and the unwhite.It's all due to a Bushian group called the Minnesota Taxpayers League, who extracted a no-taxes pledge from the Governor during the campaign, and have kept him on a tight leash since then. For some reason, this group of vigilantes can dictate state policy, despite the fact that the electorate cast more votes for candidates advocating budget flexibility (possibly involving a tax increase) than for the unopposed Tim Pawlenty, who knelt before the Taxpayers League.What astonishes me are the vituperative letters to the editor from Minnesotans, who seem outraged that Minnesota's high tax profile has consistently placed Minnesota among the top handful of states to live in, for job, for education, for quality of life. The reason is that the people of the suburbs ? whose taxes might have gone up under another governor ? figure they'll have a good quality of life even if the state goes to hell, even if the cities die.Which is what will happen. Consider that the federal government, in its effort to kill off government growth for the next 10 years, has created a nationwide deficit, causing every state to slash its budget as well.At the end of this chain are localities ? cities, counties, and townships, which formerly got by with Local Aid to Government block grants ? mainly to offset property taxes.Those funds are gone forever, under the Taxpayers League plan to make Minnesota more like South Dakota.Cities are also strapped, and in Minnesota they have announced a change in appraisal, from the old system which undervalued properties, to a new system which will be closer to market value.Thus, a house (mercifully) undervalued at $100,000 under the old system will now be taxed at the likely new value of $250,000. Thus a tax burden of $1,000 per year may skyrocket to $2,500.And that's just due to a change in appraisal method -- before actual property tax increases occur. The increase could tack on an additional $1,000.This increase will be a painful wound to nearly every property owner in the state. But it will be a knockout punch to those on fixed and low incomes. In Minnesota there are hundreds of thousands of retired home-owners who have paid their mortgages, and have not budgeted for this kind of increase.Many will be able to pay for the new taxes. Many others will not be. What will they do exactly?They will lose their homes, that's what they will do. They will be forced to either move in with their kids, or rent cheap apartments until their money runs out, and then go into subsidized housing or nursing homes ? where space is scarce, and which are funded by dwindling state and federal revenues.But that's OK, because the people most affected will be old, or poor, or unwhite. Not at all the kind of folks we have living in the outer ring communities that elected Pawlenty, and that are the strongest supporters of the Taxpayers League.When 7-8% of all the homes in Minneapolis or Saint Paul are put on the market because of high taxes, that does not represent successful tax reduction. All these tax cuts will result, a year down the pike, in tax increases that will brutalize and dispossess the elderly, the poor, the rural, and the nonwhite.The result will be a kind of real estate boom. Much like the one experienced in Germany in the 1940s, when social policy resulted in a similar abundance of vacancies. It will even look good, because young families will be able to snap up all the starter homes.The great thing is that people of the outer ring -- the Minnetonkas, the Woodburys, the Mendota Heights, the Coon Rapids -- won't be affected, because their tax burdens are already so light, because they don't let old people, poor people, and those nasty colored people live there, and cost them money. They are smart ones.Religious, too. Pawlenty carried the Christian vote in the election, and continues to kowtow to them. Remember when Jesus was on the side of the little guy? Not no more he ain't. Somewhere up there Jesus must be smiling, knowing that his new chosen people will get a break on taxes, and all those others -- removed from their homes so the suburbanites can relax in theirs -- can go to hell. Politics5628@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 May 2003 15:06:12 EDT