David Trinh

I used to be a huge consumer of alternative history (this was shortly after my Star Trek phase) which is why I was positively tickled by Matt Yglesias’ reference to Harry Turtledove today:

Back in the day, I was a big fan of “alternate history” novels such as Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South in which apartheid South Africa manages to send some dudes back in time with the information necessary to start manufacturing AK-47s and providing them to the South in order to let the Confederacy win the Civil War. There’s also his series of books that ask the crucial question “what would have happened if lizards from outer space invaded amidst World War II.” Later, in college I learned that analysis of counterfactuals is intimately related to analysis of claims about causation bestowing the whole thing with something of the air of legitimacy.

Thus, my new idea for a book in which Mitch McConnell travels back in time to 1860 to explain to Jefferson Davis and other Southern Senators that instead of seceding from the Union they should just stick around and filibuster the entire Lincoln administration agenda. Sure, the Republican Party may have been dedicated to banning slavery in the territories, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act is already on the books and there’s no way they’ll find the votes for cloture. Exciting! Similar tactics could also have spared us the horrors of such Lincoln-era adventures in big government folly as the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad. Admittedly, The Procedural Stalling Tactics of the South doesn’t have quite the same ring about it.

Most excellent!  It’s not every day that one comes across an article that both stirs feelings of childhood nostalgia and assumes that Mitch McConnell would have been pro-slavery.  It’s moments like this that I really savor.

Matt Yglesias responds to a piece I read in the Times this morning about a nationwide glut of stadium space:

Charles Bagli has an interesting piece in the New York Times about metropolitan areas suffering from a glut of arenas. He leads with the case of New York City, but the most clear-cut example is probably one he gets to later, Minneapolis. They have the Target Center in Minneapolis and a separate Excel Energy Arena in St. Paul for the NHL’s Wild. Meanwhile, “Both sites are losing money, and they must also compete with the University of Minnesota, which has two arenas.” On top of all that, Minneapolis just isn’t an especially large metropolitan area.

This is too bad. Unlike a football stadium, an indoor arena really can serve as an important element in neighborhood revitalization. That’s because an arena fits relatively comfortably into the urban landscape and also because, in principle, an arena can be used on a high proportion of days. But of course to get a high usage rate, you need to pack a bunch of different things—NBA, NHL, maybe a WNBA or Arena Football, concerts, etc.—all into one space. Splitting it up among two or three not only creates money-losing arenas, but deprives the arena neighborhood of the critical mass of foot traffic that can turn it into something worthwhile.

Exactly.  I would add that not only is this problem bad but it’s going to get even worsewhen Target Field, the new Twins stadium, opens in the warehouse district next year.   When the Twins leave the Metrodome (another facility which both the Times and Yglesias neglect to mention) will be deprived of one of its biggest clients.  To top all that off, the Vikings too are begging for a stadium, so it’s entirely possible that the Twin Cities will soon have five massive arenas serving a metropolitan area which is much, much smaller than New York City.  If New York can’t support this many arenas, I don’t see how Minneapolis and St. Paul can possibly fill the same number of seats. 

In brief, this is why I believe it is extremely irresponsible for municipalities and other levels of governments to involve themselves in large commercial development projects.  If the Twins need a new stadium, then the owners of the team should front the money and pay for it themselves.  Instead the taxpayers of Hennepin County are subsidizing a massive public works project (to the tune of $392 million), a project which is less than germane to the public’s welfare. 

Look, big shiny new buildings are certainly sexy; however, the government’s job is not to support huge entertainment complexes, especially when such support gets in the way of arguably more important things like public safety and road repair.  Further, not only are projects like this outside of the scope of government but, more often than not, government actually does a pretty poor job of encouraging the right kind of development: the most strikingly egregious example of intervention obviously being the Block E in downtown Minneapolis (seriously, go read the Yelp reviews for this place– they’re a riot).  If there is a bright side to any of this it is that Target Field is being built right next to both the failed Target Center and the apocalyptically awful Block E, so at the very least this new urban hellhole will be contained to a few sad square blocks.

Marcus Epstein, the sad, sad man who formerly headed up Team America PAC for Tom Tancredo and Bay Buchanan, and who, apparently, was recently denied admission to the University of Virginia’s law school because he karate-chopped an African-American while yelling racial slurs has a website! And, even better, he has a collection of essays, one of which describes his thoughts about the great state of Minnesota! It begins with his observation about ‘Minnesota nice:’

[T]here is a great deal of truth to the “Minnesota Nice” mentality showcased in movies like Fargo. My short experiences show how this type of social trust is pretty obviously maintained by the state’s relative lack of immigrants.

Obviously Mr. Epstein never ventured into Little Somalia or Frogtown but I am pleased to report that Minnesota does indeed have people who aren’t lily-white. Moreover, I also must inform you that I am shredding my own ‘Minnesota nice’ credentials-obviously, as a half-Vietnamese Minnesotan I lack the requisite skin-tone to be a friendly Midwesterner. My lack of magnanimity is further bolstered by Epstein’s observation that “Every single cab I’ve taken here was driven by an American and they were all eager to strike up a conversation. In fact, the only thing that suggested a lack of ‘Minnesota Nice’ was an African American cab driver who was from Mississippi.” (However, I am also half-Norwegian so maybe I only have to act like I’m from the jungle half of the time.)

Epstein continues:

When I was trying to hail a cab in the rain, employees who were opening up a bar let me in, and gave me a free cup of tea while they called a cab. They both were both white teenagers whose parents owned the bar. I’ve never had an illegal alien busboy do the same.

While Mr. Epstein’s words really defy commentary, I must say his nasty rhetoric underscores a point Matt Yglesias has belabored lately; while conservative commentators are often quick to decry false accusations of racism, they don’t seem too concerned about racism that actually occurs. Certainly the fact that a person like Mr. Epstein was working for a reasonably prominent conservative group underscores the fact that real racism does in fact exist within their political ranks.