How about some karma offsets?

Headline below the fold on the front page of today's Strib:

How much bang for GOP bucks?
Packed hotel rooms, restaurants jammed with patrons, thousands of shoppers descending on retail stores.

That's the promise from organizers of the Republican National Convention who say the influx of visitors for the Sept. 1-4, 2008, event at the Xcel Energy Center will pump $150 million to $250 million into the state's economy.

. . . Mostly in the form of steak dinners, crappy red-white-and-blue souvenirs, and shiny nickels tossed to buskers screwing up "God Bless America." Figures take into account the likely 10-12 percent tips generously showered upon the servers, hotel staff, etc.

Okay, now consider the headline directly below the one about how the Twin Cities were about to be rolling around in bags of cash handed down straight from the altruistic elephants:

Concrete jungles' dirty secret: Miles of unpaved streets
. . . St. Paul has about 60 miles of streets that have never been finished to moderns standards -- though most of them have been covered with enough layers of oil that they appear to be roughly paved. Officials are working to change that.

. . . St. Paul is tackling its oiled streets by spending $12 million a year to pave roads, check underlying utilities and add curbs and lamp posts. As part of that program, which the city hopes will rid St. Paul of oiled streets by 2018 (!! - Ed.), residents are assessed about 25 percent of the cost -- about $38.50 per foot of a homeowner's lot width.

Gosh . . . if only the city had an unexpected windfall or some sort of sign that it was time to pretend to be part of the big leagues or . . .

Granted, the hundreds of millions of dollars brought in by the RNC don't exactly go right into the city's coffers. But still. Come on.

Still lost . . .

It's tough to find your way around out here in Flyover Country. I mean, we may live in an era of GPS-equipped cars and Google Earth and whatnot, but obviously the cartographers still haven't been able to map out the vast, unknown territory between the coasts. And how appropriate, then, that this unexplored wilderness will soon be home to scary civil liberties-trashing, social services-eviscerating, beady-eyed, white-toothed, undomesticated beasts. "Here be monsters," indeed.

From the Strib:

A Nexis search of the last three months’ worth of news stories about the convention turned up a dozen references to the convention being held in Minneapolis, in publications ranging from the Washington Times to The People’s Weekly News. Other offenders include National Public Radio, the New Republic, the Associated Press — and a news release written by an anonymous staffer working for Minneapolis City Hall. Even high-ranking Republicans, including Jim Nicholson, the party’s former national committee chair, and Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning, were quoted placing their convention in the wrong city.

Not even The New Yorker and its famed team of crack researchers and fact-checkers managed to figure out that the Convention is going to be in . . . hang on, it's on the tip of my tongue . . . Sao Paulo? San Jose?

From the "Comment" in the 11/26/2007 Talk of the Town*

. . . But in 2008, in Minneapolis, the Republicans will nominate a candidate on a promise of four more years of the same.

*In other words, from the first page of text that anyone outside of New York actually reads. Way to go, guys! Need a copy editor? Have your people call mine.

Damn liberal media conspiracy. Oh . . . wait. The elephants themselves are still wandering around trying to figure out where they are. Check out their logo:


First, staying on topic: Granted, they managed to get the real city on there. But note how it gets second billing.

And now the graphic itself must be commented upon, because, really, you just can't let it pass. I mean, it's kind of the elephant in the room, isn't it? Specifically, the washroom.

As numerous wags have noted, that elephant sure does have a rather, er, wide stance, and given that "Minneapolis-St. Paul" is a term most commonly used to describe a certain international airport . . . and the placement of the red "2008" . . . and . . . okay, guys, this is a joke, right?

Some choice comments from Kos:

Are they going for a "Still screwing the country in 2008" theme, or is it a reference to hypocritical adulterers like David Vitter and just about the entire Republican presidential field?

Elephants only stand on their hind legs for one thing; count on the Extinction Party to know nothing of their habits.

Judging by the shape of the eye, I'd say he's been shot in the face by Cheney.