The Minnesota Senate Race Is Not Over

And now the most absorbing two minutes in television, the latest from the political grapevine:

Miss the Grapevine? Watch it!

And the Saga Continues...
Reverberations continue from that Minnesota Senate race, where it now turns out that even as Democrats were demanding that Republican nominee Norm Coleman cease all campaign activities, and while Walter Mondale was saying he had made no decision, in fact, Mondale had signaled he was ready to run and agreed to have that story leaked to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The source of this information is the Star Tribune itself, which also reports that while Coleman did halt his formal campaigning for several days, he consciously kept himself in the public eye with a series of TV appearances in which he expressed grief over Wellstone's death.

Pilot Wasn't What He Said He Was
And it also turns out that the pilot who commanded the flight in which Minnesota Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone and seven others were killed was a convicted felon who had lied about his flight experience. The Star Tribune says Richard Conry, who died in the crash, told officials of Executive Aviation that he had 400 to 500 hours of flight experience at the commuter airline American Eagle, but that records show that he had only trained there and had never flown passengers. In addition, he went to jail following a 1990 conviction on 14 counts of mail fraud related to a home construction business.

A Very Opinionated Man...
Harvard University is sponsoring a reading by the British Poet Tom Paulin this week as part of its Morris Gray Lecture program. Harvard's publicity on the event speaks of him as "poet, essayist and devil's advocate." Some of his recent advocacy has included calling Jewish settlers in the disputed territories "should be shot dead," adding, "I feel nothing but hatred for them." He also told the Guardian newspaper, "I understand how suicide bombers feel." But he said he prefers more conventional guerrilla tactics because attacks on civilians "boost morale."

Financed by San Fran taxes...
The official Web site of the city of San Francisco's Grants for the Arts, a program  financed by local taxes on city hotel rooms, reports that $13,500 was allocated for observances of this Veterans Day. That puts the veterans celebration ahead of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year Celebration, which got only $13,000. But the veterans ranked far behind the Chinese New Year Parade, which received $84,000 and the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration Committee, which also got $84,000.