Saturday, September 30, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt nine)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

The biological bombshell that arrived at an Auburn University laboratory in 2009 came in the tiniest of packages—a cardboard box about the ize of a paperback book. Inside it were several plastic tubes that contained flecks so small that they were invisible. Lab workers tipped these tubes into a solution that was as innocuous looking as a glass of water. It was anything but. In it floated a designer “poison” potent enough to eradicate an entire fish population.

The concoction, which held a specially modified fish gene built in a high-security laboratory on the Australian island of Tasmania, was placed into Petri dishes thick with E.coli bacteria and then dosed with a chemical that allowed the bacteria to absorb the genetic material. As the fast-reproducing E.coli numbers then exploded, copies of the gene replicated right along with it, with two new genes emerging each time a bacteria cell split. In a matter of hours the Auburn biologists had untold millions of E.coli, each carrying a strand of the manmade genetic code. And each of those strands held the power to take a species’ collective sex drive and throw it in reverse, to turn sexual reproduction from a life-sparking act into a life-snuffing one.

It does so by adding a twist in the DNA so a fish implanted with the gene can produce only male offspring. The concept, called the “daughterless gene,” is devilishly clever: a developing carp turns female only after an enzyme transforms the male hormone androgen into the femal hormone estrogen. This gene blocks production of that enzyme, so the embryonic fish cannot make the early-life transformation from male to female. The idea is that if you plant enough of these daughterless fish into a lake or river for a sustained period, it’s just a matter of time until it runs out of females to carry on a population. The fish breed themselves into oblivion.



Friday, September 29, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt eight)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

He was convinced that what he had in his glassware was the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance alchemists believed could convert base metals into gold and silver. What he found, it turned out, couldn’t make lead glitter. So his glowing nuggets were only a curiosity used to wow theatergoers and stoke the jealousies of fellow alchemists who could not figure out how their rival acquired such a magical substance.

Rival laboratorians eventually learned how to produce their own phosphorous and within a century the source material for the element became human and animal bones and teeth. Later, rocks rich in phosphates, which is a form of salt containing phosphorous, would be mined and processed for the mineral that doctors came to believe could cure everything from impotence (it couldn’t) to tuberculosis (it couldn’t) to depression (it couldn’t) to alcoholism (it couldn’t) to epilepsy (it couldn’t) to cholera (it couldn’t) to toothaches (it couldn’t).

But as the centuries would unfold, it turned out phosphorous did make a hell of a lethal rat poison, a spectacularly combustible match tip, a dastardly battlefield gas and, in an unlikely twist of history and fate, a wicked class of incendiary bombs dropped by the Allies in World War II that killed tens of thousands of Germans in phosphorous’ own hometown, Hamburg.



Thursday, September 28, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt seven)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

In the opening stanze of his 1916 ode to Chicago, poet Carl Sandburg playfully refers to his City of the Big Shoulders as Hog Butcher for the World and Player with Railroads. He might also have added Conveyor of Crap, because less than two decades earlier Chicago built what is essentially a continental-sized commode, turning Lake Michigan into the world’s largest toilet tank, and the Gulf of Mexico into its toilet bowl. It was a matter of life and death for a mushrooming city that sent its sewage into Lake Michigan, from which it also takes its drinking water.

In the 1890s, in order to protect that drinking water, engineers began work on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The city’s motives for the canal are made clear in its name; when it opened in 1900, its primary job was to flush the city’s waste across the continental divide and into the Mississippi River basin. It also, conveniently, doubled as a massive expansion of the original barge canal linking Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico.

The rail-straight, 25-foot-deep canal that is as wide as a football field does a most remarkable thing. It reverses the flow of Chicago’s namesake river, which was in its natural state a shallow, slow-flowing dribble feeding Lake Michigan. Its headwaters were just several miles west of downtown at the bog Marquette and Joliet first came across in the late 1600s. The Sanitary and Ship Canal, which is lower than Lake Michigan, connects to this river. This pulls the formerly lake-bound river’s flow backwards. Instead of the river feeding Lake Michigan, the lake now feeds the river. The river then flows into the canal, the canal flows through the continental divide and into the Des Plaines River, which flows into the Illinois River, which flows into the Gulf-bound Mississippi River.



Wednesday, September 27, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt six)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

Cleveland was not the only Great Lakes city to make an industrial mess of a river. Similar fires blazed on tributaries from Chicago to Detroit to Buffalo, beginning in the late 19th century and stretching deep into the 20th century. The chemical dumping that caused these fires occurred with impunity because the federal water pollution laws that existed up into the 1960s were toothless to stop industries and cities from treating rivers as liquid landfills; civil and criminal penalties for polluters were basically nonexistent.

It was into this regulatory abyss that a spark dropped from a train passing over the Cuyahoga River on the morning of June 22, 1969. The flames were put out in a matter of minutes and merited only a small news item on page C-11 of the Plain Dealer. But then, like drifting embers, word of the fire landed in newspapers across the country, and a national outrage flared.



Tuesday, September 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt five)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

The fetid slick of alewives was, mercifully, drifting east, bobbing on the waves toward the relatively unpopulated shoreline of eastern Lake Michigan, where they were destined to rot and eventually wash back out into the open water. But then the winds shifted and pushed the mess back across the lake, toward the 3.5 million residents of Chicago. The first fish carcasses started floating in that weekend. A few days later, 30 miles of Chicago shoreline had been smothered—some places shin-deep—in a mound of rotting fish goo. There had been similar but smaller die-offs across the Great Lakes earlier in the decade, including one the year before that plugged the screens on the cooling water intakes at a Lake Michigan steel plant south of Chicago, causing a loss of a half million dollars a day during a 10-day period.

Yet nothing was like what washed ashore that July, and Chicagoans would never look at their lake the same way. The inland sea that had sustained them for more than 100 years with a marvelous array of native freshwater fillets suddenly started retching millions of pounds of inedible flesh that smelled like human waste. The saltwater native alewives were fantastically good at breeding in the Great Lakes. It just happened that they weren’t so good at living in them. In the next several weeks an army of hundreds of workers across the southern end of Lake Michigan used shovels and bulldozers to remove the flesh. Chicago workers reported within the month that they alone had disposed of enough alewives to cover two football fields—500 feet high. But even the city with big shoulders couldn’t shovel fast enough. This is how one UPI news report characterized the losing battle: “Chicago was running out of places to bury dead fish, out of money for their removal, and out of people to do that work. A dozen park district employees quit their jobs in olfactory disgust. Morale among those remaining was described as ‘low.’”



Monday, September 25, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt four)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

On July 26, 1957, the Milwaukee Journal broke news that the “blind and desperate hunt” for the perfect lamprey poison had succeeded. The first application of it in the wild happened later that year under the cover of darkness, on a tiny creek near Cheboygan, Michigan, with “almost the secrecy of a nuclear project,” according to a local newspaper article at the time. Precise dosages of the chemical were pumped into the creek and in the following hours, just as Applegate’s crew of “lamprey chokers” had hoped, thousands of the night crawler-sized lamprey surfaced lifeless from the streambed, with no ill effects to any other fish in the area. Applegate described the scene that night as a “real purty sight.”

By midnight, the weary crews returned to Cheboygan for hot lunches. The lid of secrecy was lifted a bit—there were hints, knowing glances,” the newspaper reported. “The lamprey had had it.”



Sunday, September 24, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt three)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

Applegate, a wiry ex-infantryman from Yonkers, lived for three years along two lamprey-infested rivers in northern Michigan in search of a weakness in the lifecycle of one of evolution’s most durable models. He did it with an intensity that, more than a half century later, still leaves those who worked with him—or who had brief encounters with him—bemused. Applegate toiled around the clock, chasing the slithering gray or black parasites up rivers through the night and into dawn with flashlights and a notebook.He set traps to catch adults swimming upstream to spawn, and traps to catch young lamprey riding downstream on springtime floods toward the lakes. He built outdoor pens to watch them breed. He peeped into their evolutionary secrets through the glass of the aquariums at his lab on the shore of Lake Huron, whose ecological health evidently became more important to him than what was going on under his own pale skin.

“I’ve heard him described as living on cigarettes and aspirin,” said Howard Tanner, a renowned Greak Lakes fisheries biologist, who met Applegate while Tanner was studying at Michigan State University, and who would one day, if unintentionally, undermine Applegate’s goal or restoring the lakes’ native lake trout. “He was very intense. A small man. Red haired.”



Saturday, September 23, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt two)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

New York governor and one-time mayor of New York City DeWitt Clinton gets much of the credit for spearheading construction of the state-funded Erie Canal across this rough route, and he was the politician who sold the concept to the public. But the engineering idea that made it possible was hatched from a prison cell. Jesse Hawley, a flour merchant in western New York, had gone broke trying to move his product down the mess of roads and trails that wended their way out of the wilderness of western New York. Hawley spent 20 months in debtors’ prison beginning in 1807, and while there he scratched out more than a dozen letters to the Genesee Messenger arguing for construction of a canal linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. He wrote that he was motivated by wanting to atone for having led a life of “little purpose” up to that point. The letters laid out the general route that the Erie Canal would eventually take. Hawley knew he was thinking big, acknowledging later in life that his argument was initially received as “the effusions of a maniac.” But there was a genius in it. The way he saw it, God put the Great Lakes so high above sea level for one reason—to provide the energy to fill the locks to lift the boats. Had Lake Erie been at an equal level in elevation to the Hudson River but still separated by a mountain range, such a canal would not have been possible. But once men who knew how to build navigation locks went to work, the upper lakes’ greatest line of defense to the outside aquatic world proved to be their greatest weakness.



Friday, September 22, 2017

the last book I ever read (The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, excerpt one)

from The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan:

Niagara Falls are what made the Great Lakes unique in the natural world. The falls are the most famous 1,100 yards of a 650-mile-long ridge of sedimentary rock arcing from western New York, into the province of Ontario, and down into Wisconsin. This escarpment is the rim of a 400-million-year-old seabed that cradled a shallow, tropical ocean that once sloshed across what is today the middle of North America. At about 170 feet high, the falls that tumble over the Niagara escarpment near present-day Buffalo, New York, are nowhere near the world’s tallest or even largest by volume. But they were among the most ecologically important because they created an impassable barrier for fish and other aquatic life trying to migrate upstream from Lake Ontario into the other four Great Lakes.



Wednesday, September 20, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt eight)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

In one of the courtrooms, I met Marvin Stepson. An Osage man in his seventies with expressive gray eyebrows and a deliberate manner, he served as a chief trial court judge. He was the grandson of William Stepson, the steer-roping champion who had died, of suspected poisoning, in 1922. Authorities never prosecuted anyone for Stepson’s murder, but they came to believe that Kelsie Morrison—the man who had killed Anna Brown—was responsible. By 1922, Morrison had divorced his Osage wife, and after Stepson’s death he married Stepson’s widow, Tillie, making himself the guardian of her two children. One of Morrison’s associates told the bureau that Morrison had admitted to him that he had killed Stepson so that he could marry Tillie and get control of her invaluable estate.

Stepson’s death was usually included in the official tally of murders during the Reign of Terror. But as I sat with Marvin on one of the wooden courtroom benches, he revealed that the targeting of his family did not end with his grandfather. After marrying Morrison, Tillie grew suspicious of him, especially after Morrison was overheard talking about the effects of the poison strychnine. Tillie confided to her lawyer that she wanted to prevent Morrison from inheriting her estate and to rescind her guardianship of her children. But in July 1923, before she had enacted these changes, she, too, died of suspected poisoning. Morrison stole much of her fortune. According to letters that Morrison wrote, he planned to sell a portion of the estate he had swindled to none other than H. G. Burt, the banker who appeared to be involved in the killing of Vaughan. Tillie’s death was never investigated, though Morrison admitted to an associate that he had killed her and asked him why he didn’t get an Indian squaw and do the same. Marvin Stepson, who had spent years researching what had happened to his grandparents, told me, “Kelsie murdered them both, and left my father an orphan.”



Tuesday, September 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt seven)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

He and his friend didn’t divulge anything. But two witnesses revealed that on the day Lewis disappeared, they had seen, a few miles from her houseboat, a car heading toward a snake-infested swamp. On January 18, 1919, investigators, with their pant legs rolled up, began to comb the thicket of vegetation. A reporter said that one of the lawmen had “scarcely stepped in the water of the bayou when his feet struggled for freedom. When he reached to the bottom to disengage them he brought up a thick growth of woman’s hair.” Leg bones were dredged up next. Then came a human trunk and a skull, which looked as if it had been beaten with a heavy metal object. GREWSOME FIND ENDS QUEST FOR MARY LEWIS, a headline in the local newspaper said.

Middleton’s companion confessed to beating Lewis over the head with a hammer. The plot was conceived by Middleton: after Lewis was killed, the plan was to use a female associate to impersonate her so that the friends could collect the headright payments. (This strategy was not unique—bogus heirs were a common problem. After Bill Smith died in the house explosion, the government initially feard that a relative claiming to be his heir was an impostor.) In 1919, Middleton was convicted of murder and condemned to die. “There was a point in Mary’s family that they were relieved the ordeal was over,” Jefferson wrote. “However, the feeling of satisfaction would be followed by disbelief and anger.” Middleton’s sentence was commuted to life. Then, after he had served only six and a half years, he was pardoned by the governor of Texas; Middleton had a girlfriend, and Lewis’s family believed that she had bribed authorities. “The murderer had gotten only a slap on the hand,” Jefferson wrote.



Monday, September 18, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt six)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

The more White investigated the flow of oil money from Osage headrights, the more he found layer upon layer of corruption. Although some white guardians and administrators tried to act in the best interests of the tribe, countless others used the system to swindle the very people they were ostensibly protecting. Many guardians would purchase, for their wards, goods from their own stores or inventories at inflated prices. (One guardian bought a car for $250 and then resold it to his ward for $1,250.) Or guardians would direct all of their wards’ business to certain stores and banks in return for kickbacks. Or guardians would claim to be buying homes and land for their wards while really buying these for themselves. Or guardians would outright steal. One government study estimated that before 1925 guardians had pilfered at least $8 million directly from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards. “The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.”



Sunday, September 17, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt five)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

The oilmen anxiously pored over geological maps and tried to glean intelligence about leases from men they employed as “rock hounds” and spies. After a break for lunch, the auction proceeded to the more valuable leases, and the crowd’s gaze inevitably turned toward the oil magnates, whose power rivaled, if not surpassed, that of the railroad and steel barons of the nineteenth century. Some of them had begun to use their clout to bend the course of history. In 1920, Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance the successful presidential bid of Warren Harding. One oilman from Oklahoma told a friend that Harding’s nomination had cost him and his interests $1 million. But with Harding in the White House, a historian noted, “the oil men licked their chops.” Sinclair funneled, through the cover of a bogus company, more than $200,000 to the new secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall; another oilman had his son deliver to the secretary $100,000 in a black bag.

In exchange, the secretary allowed the barons to tap the navy’s invaluable strategic oil reserves. Sinclair received an exclusive lease to a reserve in Wyoming, which, because of the shape of a sandstone rock near it, was known as Teapot Dome. The head of Standard Oil warned a former Harding campaign aide, “I understand the Interior Department is just about to close a contract to lease Teapot Dome, and all through the industry it smells….I do feel that you should tell the President that it smells.”



Saturday, September 16, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt four)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

The Osage had seen what had happened to the Cherokee Outlet, a vast prairie that was part of the Cherokees’ territory and was near the western border of the Osage reservation. After the U.S. government purchased the land from the Cherokee, it had announced that at noon on September 16, 1893, a settler would be able to claim one of the forty-two thousand parcels of land—if he or she got to the spot first! For days before the starting gate, tens of thousands of men, women, and children had come, from as far away as California and New York, and gathered along the boundary; the ragged, dirty, desperate mass of humanity stretched across the horizon, like an army pitted against itself.

Finally, after several “sooners” who’d tried to sneak across the line early had been shot, the starting gun sounded—A RACE FOR LAND SUCH AS WAS NEVER BEFORE WITNESSED ON EARTH, as one newspaper put it. A reporter wrote, “Men knocked each other down as they rushed onward. Women shrieked and fell, fainting, only to be trampled and perhaps killed.” The reporter continued, “Men, women and horses were laying all over the prairie. Here and there men were fighting to the death over claims which each maintained he was first to reach. Knives and guns were drawn—it was a terrible and exciting scene; no pen can do it justice….It was a struggle where the game was emphatically every man for himself and devil take the hindmost.” By nightfall, the Cherokee Outlet had been carved into pieces.



Friday, September 15, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt three)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

Each hour of the day was regimented and students were lined up and marched from point to point. They were taught piano, penmanship, geography, and arithmetic, the world distilled into strange new symbols. The instruction was intended to assimilate Mollie into white society and transform her into what the authorities conceived of as the ideal woman. So while Osage boys at other institutions learned farming and carpentry, Mollie was trained in the “domestic arts”: sewing, baking, laundering, and housekeeping. “It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls,” a U.S. government official had stated, adding, “Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?...It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.”

Many Osage students at Mollie’s school tried to flee, but lawmen chased after them on horseback and bound them with ropes, hauling them back. Mollie attended class eight months each year, and when she did return to Gray Horse, she noticed that more and more girls had stopped wearing their blankets and moccasins and that the young men had exchanged their breechcloths for trousers and their scalp locks for broad-brimmed hats. Many students began to feel embarrassed by their parients, who didn’t understand English and still lived by the old ways. An Osage mother said of her son, “His ears are closed to our talk.”



Thursday, September 14, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt two)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

Mollie pressed the authorities to investigate Anna’s murder, but most officials seemed to have little concern for what they deemed a “dead Injun.” So Mollie turned to Ernest’s uncle, William Hale. His business interests now dominated the county, and he had become a powerful local advocate for law and order—for the protection of what he called “God-fearing souls.”

Hale, who had an owlish face, stiff black hair, and small, alert eyes set in shaded hollows, had settled on the reservation nearly two decades earlier. Like a real-life version of Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, he seemed to have come out of nowhere—a man with no known past. Arriving in the territory with little more than the clothes on his back and a word Old Testament, he embarked on what a person who knew him well called a “fight for life and fortune” in a “raw state of civilization.”



Wednesday, September 13, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt one)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots—after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state—did police departments emerge in the United States. By the time of Anna’s death, the informal system of citizen policing had been displaced, but vestiges of it remained, especially in places that still seemed to exist of the periphery of geography and history.



Tuesday, September 12, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt fourteen)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

As that date approached, of course, things just kept getting worse and worse. President-elect Trump made it clear that he had no intention of divesting himself of his business interests. He shrugged off reports by every intelligence agency that his election had been, in part, the product of interference by the Russian government. He installed a white supremacist in the White House as his chief strategist.

He also insisted on being a complete jerk. Hillary had graciously conceded the election to him despite the fact that she had earned nearly three million more votes than he had. He couldn’t even bring himself to concede the legitimacy of that popular vote.

Mind you, no one was saying he couldn’t be president if he lost the popular vote. It didn’t matter. He could have let it go. But no. He was a sore winner. The president-elect actually insisted that three to five million votes had been fraudulently cast by illegal immigrants, every single one of them for Hillary Clinton. It was almost as if the incoming commander-in-chief had some sort of mental health problem. The kind of mental health problem that you would be disturbed to discover in your kid’s piano teacher, let alone the president of the United States of America.



Sunday, September 10, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt thirteen)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

I rarely voted with Jeff when he was a senator. And that’s fine. Senators disagree. But I knew that as attorney general he would represent a clear and present danger to the civil rights of millions of Americans. And his confirmation hearing would be my opportunity to raise that alarm. Which I did, without apology, calling him out for overstating his involvement in civil rights cases and holding his feet to the fire on Donald Trump’s fearmongering about voter fraud (which, of course, is nothing more than a pretext for voter suppression). And then I voted against him.

Jeff Sessions is my friend (or was). Franni is friends with his wife, Mary. When our grandson, Joe, was born, Mary knit him a baby-blue blanket, which became his favorite.

It’s hard to unfairly demonize someone whose wife knit your grandson his favorite blankie. Which is why when my job meant doing everything in my power to deny my friend this important position, I was relieved that there was so much to fairly demonize him for.



Saturday, September 9, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt twelve)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Donald Trump’s health care plan, as expressed during his campaign, was as follows: “Repeal Obamacare and replace it with something terrific.”

Okay, that’s not the entire plan. Trump later elaborated on “something terrific,” explaining that his plan would be “so much better, so much better, so much better.”

When he was elected, it became clear that “repeal” was now a real possibility. The “replace” part, however, was as much of a mystery as it had always been. Over the previous six years, Republicans had voted more than sixty times to repeal the law. They had offered zero plans to replace it.



Friday, September 8, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt eleven)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Not long after I got into office, I went to a groundbreaking ceremony in Maple Grove for a three-mile, $47 million extension of Minnesota State Highway 610 made possible bby an infusion of $27 million in stimulus funds. There were about a dozen public officials there—a few state legislators, a mayor or two, some county commissioners, and Senator Klobuchar and me. I was surprised to see Minnesota’s 3rd District Republican congressman, Erik Paulsen, who, like every House Republican, had voted against the stimulus, smiling under his hard hat.

When I got up to speak, I said, “Well, I certainly don’t deserve any credit for this. I got to the Senate after the stimulus was passed. I guess we should thank the members of Congress here who voted for the stimulus.”

I looked down the line of hard hats, and said, “Okay, there’s Amy Klobuchar. Let’s hear it for Amy!” Applause. “And… let’s see,” I continued, looking directly at Representative Paulsen. “Well… I guess just Amy.”



Thursday, September 7, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt ten)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Anyway, I’m telling this story, and suddenly all my Republica colleagues are going, “You really were in show business! You worked Broderick Crawford!”

So this was my first big breakthrough with my Republican colleagues.

My point is, the Senate is filled not just with lawyers, but with old white men.



Wednesday, September 6, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt nine)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

At 10:30 a.m., with the remaining nine precincts counted, and Coleman’s margin now 725 votes, Norm held a press conference and declared himself the winner. When asked what he would do if he were in my place, Coleman was very clear. “I would step back. I just think the need for the healing process is so important. The possibility of any change of this magnitude in the voting system we have is so remote.”

So, in the interest of “healing,” Norm had decided that were he behind, he would step back. It wouldn’t be long before Norm would reverse himself and take the “anti-healing” position.



Tuesday, September 5, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt eight)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Reid interrupted. “What kind of jokes are we talking about?”

We all looked at each other, not sure what to say. Reid tried again, looking at his notes. “It says here, ‘Franken made jokes about the Holocaust.’ What does that mean?”

Diane handed our poll to Harry and pointed to the joke we had tested: “I think a bad Hanukkah gift for Anne Frank would have been a drum set.”

I watched Harry closely as he read the joke and then . . . burst out laughing. In fact, he started shaking with laughter. It was a surreal moment, sitting nervously with my consultants, watching Harry Reid convulse in hysterics over the idea of Anne Frank playing drums in the attic. Finally, he turned to me.

I just shrugged.



Sunday, September 3, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt seven)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

I had known Chuck Schumer since college, where he had seen in a one-act play in which I’d played a character named Bernard, who became transformed whenever he called himself “Spike.” Since I lived in New York for quite some time and traveled in Democratic circles all my adult life, I’d run into Chuck many times over the previous three and a half decades, and he’s always started each interaction by calling me “Spike” to remind me that he remembered the play. I found this slightly irritating, but also kind of adorable.

The day I went to see him in the Senate, he greeted me with a grin and a hearty “Spike!” And then things took a turn.



Saturday, September 2, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt six)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Bean feeds are essentially the organizing medium of DFL politics. They are exactly what they sound like. People show up, maybe make a small donation to the local chapter of the party, they eat, and there’s a speaking program.

To be clear, not every bean feed is literally a bean feed. There are burger bashes, spaghetti dinners, corn feeds, and walleye frys. But the classic bean feed—for example, the one in Kandiyohi County—is the best. It’s basically a potluck, with tables filled with assorted bean dishes. Baked beans. Bean salads. Chili (with beans). And other bean dishes.

Why go to all these bean feeds? Not just for the food. Minnesota has a caucus system, through which the DFL and Republican parties “endorse” candidates for office. The folks at the bean feeds are the people who participate in the caucuses, get elected as delegates to the state convention, and decide who gets their party’s endorsement.

The upshot of all that is that if you want to serve Minnesota in the United States Senate, you start by going to a lot of bean feeds.



Friday, September 1, 2017

the last book I ever read (Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken, excerpt five)

from Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken:

Lies and the Lying Liars was already on bookshelves by the time it became clear that the Bush administration’s biggest lie wasn’t about tax cuts.

“There is no doubt,” Dick Cheney had declared in the lead-up to the invasion, “that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

He was lying. And it’s still crazy to think that he, and the president, and so many others (including, for God’s sake, Colin Powell) just flat-out lied us into a war. Heck, I was in the process of finishing a scholarly masterwork about how they lied all the time, and even I didn’t think they would lie us into a war.