Almanac: At the Capitol

Last January, I was asked to make a wish list for the coming legislative session which has now (maybe?) come to a close. While I had a number of specific policy initiatives I wanted to see lawmakers act upon, I had one overriding piece of advice: Think big.

Well, some folks at the Capitol must have been listening because there was some big thinking going on up there these past four months about the environment, taxes, transportation, and education. Seeking to rectify the growing regressiveness of the Minnesota's tax system, Democrats passed legislation raising income taxes on the wealthiest Minnesotans while providing critically needed relief for working families and homeowners living on fixed incomes trying to keep up with annual double-digit property tax increases, themselves a result of deep and regressive cuts in Minnesota's state aid to cities. They also proposed ways to fund mass transit — the Twin Cities are quickly turning into the most congested urban area in the country — and to lower the costs of attending state colleges.

Unfortunately, the Governor was thinking big, too, except he wasn't thinking big about the state, he was thinking big about his own personal ambitions. Taking a page from the Bush playbook, he vetoed proposals that had the overwhelming backing of Minnesotans — like the proposed changes in income taxes — or forced the DFL to back off other proposals for transportation and education that also had strong public support. All so he can head to the 2008 Republican national convention and be able to proclaim that he kept his "no new taxes" pledge (not to be confused, of course, with a "no new fees" pledge he apparently did not take), even at the cost of the future of the state he purportedly leads. While this may prove to be smart politics in the long run (though I personally doubt his gambit is going to pay off), from a policy standpoint, it is nothing short of disgraceful. Like Bush, a chastened Pawlenty last fall proclaimed that the election had opened his eyes to the need to walk, yea, in the paths of bi-partisanship. Since then — again like Bush — he has continued to operate in the narrowly ideological, highly partisan mode that characterized his first term.

Still, the session was not without its bright spots. In terms of environmental policy it was, arguably, the most significant in Minnesota's history. From the historic "25-by-25" renewable energy bill spearheaded by Sen. Ellen Anderson (DFL-St. Paul), to initiatives to cap and then reduce carbon emissions, to an energy efficiency bill that mandates that utilities cut their use of fossil fuels, it's been a good year for green legislation. Fortunately, Pawlenty chose not to stand in the way of these bills.

On the other hand, none of these green policy initiatives entails an increase in taxes or spending, so his acquiescence was hardly a profile in courage. In a previous blog I referred to Pawlenty as Macho Man; at the moment, Little Big Man seems more apt. Given the field of midgets currently clogging up the race for the GOP Presidential nomination, Pawlenty's smallness may prove beautiful — at least among that party's dwindling base. I suspect the general electorate will not be similarly impressed. To paraphrase an old saying, a Governor all wrapped up in himself makes a mighty small package.

The ongoing showdown between Tim Pawlenty and the DFL majorities in the House and Senate puts me in mind of "Quienes Mas Macho?," the old Saturday Night Live skit in which contestants on a Latin game show had to choose which of two prominent figures is "more macho." Bruce Willis or Kim Il Jung? Donald The Trump or Rosie O'Donnell? Quienes Mas Macho? You decide!

Fingers twitching, Pawlenty has vowed to draw down again and again on his veto pen should the pusillanimous varmints in the Legislature dare send him any of their lily-livered bills calling for tax increases, pet spending measures, domestic partnership benefits or anything else he takes a dislike to.

Already gun-shy from vetoes of bills they worked on for several months, DFL lawmakers have been put into a compromising mood. But even having stripped some of the very features from several pieces of legislation that Pawlenty warned would trigger a veto, these same legislators have watched their bills fall before a veto anyway or threatened with same. Small wonder they are feeling spooked.

Purely from a public policy standpoint, this doesn't make much sense. Two parties engage in a dispute. Party A tells Party B that the dispute will end if Party B compromises by agreeing to do X. Party B does X, but Party A continues the dispute anyway — indeed, ratchets up hostility. On the other hand, we are all familiar with this kind of non-productive interaction. It takes place all the time, and represents a displacement strategy in which the real aim of Party A is to hogtie Party B in a fruitless power struggle. The showdown between Pawlenty and the Legislature is not about policy. It is about power, pure and simple.

Last fall, Tim Pawlenty squeaked back into office with about 40 percent of the vote, and the GOP lost control of the House. He could have responded to that outcome in a couple of different ways. Chastened. Or emboldened by his position at the top of a pyramid of checks and balances in which he can, in essence, exert a negative control over the Legislature, even though the latter now represents the majority of Minnesota's electorate.

In other circumstances this would be a risky gambit. George Bush's current showdowns with Congress are doing nothing to raise his public esteem or burnish his ruined credibility. But GW's a special case: a swaggering incompetent with a reverse Midas touch, he has turned everything he's touched in the past six years into dross. Pawlenty still possesses a healthy cache of political capital. And his current brinksmanship may even increase that store.

Why? Because, of the many factors behind the Republican ascendancy these past 25 years, one of the most potent has been the GOP's ability to stake out a position as the party of manhood and of manly virtue, while successfully portraying the Democrats as the party of wimpy cardigan sweaters. Granted, the Democrats have played a big role in creating this image for themselves. And, of course, the GOP could not have succeeded in this ploy if, at the deepest archetypal level, the United States were not an instinctively paternalistic society. Despite hysterical claims about gays and "feminazis" taking things over, America is still very much a country run by men — and white men, at that. (This paternalism, incidentally, may also explain the appeal of the GOP — historically a pro-big business, libertarian organization — to the decidedly small business, non-libertarian Christian Right, which is, as much as anything, exercised by what it perceives to be the threat posed to the patriarchal order by a secular, multi-cultural, libertarian society. An article in the current Vanity Fair speculates that Rudy Guliani's momentary popularity among social conservatives may stem from the unspoken, perhaps not even fully conscious, perception that his flagrant womanizing is an expression of male prerogative).

In deploying the veto card, Pawlenty is playing right into this strategy. What was the invidious comparison he drew recently between himself and the Legislature? Somebody, he observed, has to act like "the adult" in the room. Translation? He is the adult, the lawmakers children.

It's the leader as paterfamilias, a familiar motif for the authoritarian right. Pawlenty's not really an authoritarian (but perfectly willing to pretend to be one if it's the politically smart move), and he should take heed of the downfall of George W. Bush who used similar language back in 2000; remember the snide comments about how the Bush-Cheney ticket was going to put "grownups" back in charge of the White House? Right!

So far, though, the ploy is working. A new poll shows that 70 percent of Minnesotans favor the DFL-sponsored income tax bill raising levies on the state's wealthiest citizens and using the revenue to offer property tax relief for everybody else. Even though Pawlenty has made it clear he will veto any such proposal, other polls show his popularity ratings are on the rise. Go figure. The situation is not unlike what happened nationally in the 1980s, when poll after poll showed that Americans loved Ronald Reagan even though they didn't like his policies. Given Reagan's status as the GOP's iconic counterpart to the Democrat's FDR, the comparison is one that's no doubt in the forefront of Pawlenty's mind as he gears up for a run for national office in 2008. Whether he can stay in that zone in the event of a special session or a state government showdown is another matter entirely. We'll see. A lot will depend on whether DFL lawmakers figure out that Pawlenty's not interested in compromise, or good public policy, just in looking tough.

So — Tim Pawlenty. Or DFL lawmakers. Quienes Mas Macho?

In 1978, Minnesota foreshadowed the coming Reagan Revolution — that two-plus decade of political reaction at home and unilateral military adventurism abroad — with the election of old-time conservative Al Quie as Governor and right-of-center Rudy Boschwitz to U.S. Senate.

Twenty-years later, it seemed that Minnesota might again be foreshadowing the next great realignment of American politics with Jesse Ventura's upset victory in the 1998 gubernatorial race. For awhile, some political observers wondered whether third-party insurgencies — which got off with a bang with Ross Perot's 1992 Presidential Bid — might not end up dismantling the hidebound two-party system. At a minimum, it seemed possible that one of the two main parties might go the way of the Whig Party in the 19th century, eclipsed by some 21st-century version of the new Republican Party of the 1850s.

None of this, of course, came to pass; in retrospect, though Ralph Nader did mount a spirited challenge in 2000, it's easy to see that the forces that contributed to Perot's success in 1992, most notably a deep recession, were no longer operative during the dot.com speculative boom of the late 90s. By then a large percentage of us, sleepily unaware of the aims of some ragtag bunch of fanatics calling themselves Al-Qaeda, had deluded ourselves into thinking that we were gonna ride our Enron/WorldCom/Tyco-heavy stock portfolios right to the top of Big Rock Candy Mountain. Hard as it is to recall from the vantage point of 2007, in 2000 it didn't seem to make a dime's worth of difference (to quote an earlier third-party insurgent) whether George W. Bush or Al Gore were elected President.

But even as Minnesota has at moments seemed to be a political bellweather rather than backwater, the state has, alas, not proven entirely immune to pernicious developments on the national scene. For a time during the Ventura Administration, it seemed that we might take a pass on the bitter, scorched-earth partisanship that gripped Washington and was quickly infecting the states as well. For all his inability to exert consistent and effective leadership once in office, Ventura made a genuine effort to appoint the best and the brightest, regardless of party affiliation, to top administrative posts as well as to the state bench. And if nothing else, his victory in 1998 served to unite the DFL and Republican Party in a common goal of preventing him and the Independence Party from achieving a permanent foothold in the state. The motive wasn't pretty, but at least it generated a few years of bi-partisanship!

Which brings us to today, on the verge of not one, but three threatened vetoes of DFL-backed legislation in only one session: the higher education bill; the income tax bill; and now, a bill that has just passed the Senate and will be taken up (and likely approved on a straight party-line vote) by the House allowing the University of Minnesota to receive state money for stem cell research. In each case, one or both parties to these transactions — Gov. Pawlenty on one hand, DFL legislators on the other — is acting on that current bane of contemporary American politics: appealing to the base, regardless of the harm such narrow partisan behavior might cause society. The pending impasse is the dark triumph of politics according to Karl Rove, a man whose last name, incidentally, sounds like "rogue" spoken by someone with a mouth full of Jack Abramoff's dirty lucre.

As I've said, neither party is blameless. While laudable in its objectives, the Dream Act — that portion of the higher ed bill that would extend in-state tuition and other benefits to illegal immigrants — seems more like a needless tossing down of the gauntlet (and an appeal to that portion of the DFL base for whom immigrant rights trump all) than an attempt to pass legislation. But again, the lion's share of guilt lies with Pawlenty. There is nothing in the income tax bill, which would raise state taxes on a grand total of 92,000 of Minnesota's wealthiest citizens, then use the added revenue to offer desperately needed property tax relief to middle class families scrambling to hold on to their homes, that makes it a worthy target for a veto. That is, nothing other than the Governor's opportunistic "no new taxes" pledge made as part of his deal-with-the-devil to win the 2002 endorsement. Just how many families are going to have to go bankrupt before Mr. Pawlenty wrests his soul back from the clutches of the Minnesota Taxpayers League?

And as for the stem cell legislation, well, don't get me started. The University of Minnesota is conducting some of the most innovative stem cell research in the world right now. While it is true, as Pawlenty says, nothing in current law prevents the University from conducting stem cell research, or seeking funding for same from private sources, all I can say is that Tim Pawlenty is not a stupid man, and he knows as well as I do that state funding acts as seed money and multiplier, attracting several dollars of private funding for every dollar of public money.

Even more important, it will add to the momentum across the country to override the life-negating "pro-life" anti-stem cell research position taken by the Bush Administration. As a member of a family with a history of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other less-common afflictions for which stem cell research holds out at least the possibility of a cure, this is one veto threat I take very personally. Here, appealing to the base is, quite, literally, trading the "sanctity" of embryos — almost all destined to be destroyed in the normal course of things — for the lives and well-being of "post-born" Minnesotans. Partisanship's one thing, Tim. But now you're talking about my kith and kin — and the kith and kin of a lot of other residents of this state — being offered up on the altar of your ambitions to serve as running mate for John McCain's already-doomed 2008 Presidential campaign.

For once, sir, do the right thing — remind the base that you're the Governor of all Minnesotans and sign at least the stem cell bill when it lands on your desk.

Although questions about her experience, management style, and objectivity only surfaced publicly the first week of April, any sharp-eyed news consumer could have foreseen trouble brewing for Rachel Paulose, the new U.S. Attorney for Minnesota.

Paulose, of course, has been the center of negative publicity following the voluntary self-demotion of three administrators in the U.S. Attorney's office. All three chose to go back to prosecuting cases rather than spend any more time working at close quarters with the 34-year-old experience-challenged Paulose, who apparently combines a dictatorial and sometimes abusive management style with an unfortunate tendency to read Bible passages aloud during meetings with her subordinates. Since then, we have also heard more about her lavish swearing-in ceremony where she ordered up a Marine Corps color guard and a choir to serenade her into office; her case has also been caught up in the swirl of controversy over the firing of U.S. Attorneys and their replacement by "loyal Bushies," in whose number I'm certain we can include Paulose, given that her principal qualification for her current position seems to have been that she was a protégé of infamous perjurer and soon-to-be-ex Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Paulose, whose lack of judgement includes calling attention to herself when anonymity might have been her best ally, planted herself front and center in a page 1 story about child pornography in the March 3 edition of the Star-Tribune. Upstaging the work of prosecutors that had already occurred or was well along by the time she appeared on the scene in Minnesota last spring, Paulose was quoted in the article declaring that "no sentence would ever be long enough for a person who takes the innocence of a child." This categorical statement was a natural follow on to Paulose's work with Gonzales: before leaving the AG's office, she had been involved in efforts to stiffen penalties for production, distribution or possession of child pornography. The precise term Paulose has used for her objective was to secure "righteous sentences" for those convicted of these crimes.

Now, there is something peculiarly creepy about child pornography. I certainly agree that those who produce and traffic in the stuff need to be locked up, though whether for longer than people convicted of first-degree homicide is another question altogether. And those who willingly possess child pornography are certainly in need of treatment and, perhaps, incarceration. But —­ excuse me — ­ a term like "righteous sentences" has absolutely no place in the American system of jurisprudence. "Righteous sentences" is the language of theocracy, of "Biblical law," of Sharia ­ — of a fundamentalist mindset that sees no divide between religion and secular life. It certainly is not the language of a secular democratic republic, which happens to be the system of governance bequeathed to us by the Founders, whatever ahistorical fantasies might be harbored by Pat Robertson and graduates of Regents law school. In our system — ­ as opposed to the one that the Bush Administration has been trying to cram down our throats ­ — the law is impartial, its officers charged with enforcement, investigation, and prosecution when appropriate. It is most decidedly not the job of U.S. Attorneys ­ — or Attorneys General, for that matter ­ — to decide for us what constitutes righteousness.

Paulose, then, is another example of the way the Bush Administration ­ — which, like the mullahs in Iran, exhibits equal measures of fundamentalism, corruption, cynicism and a thuggish disregard for the rule of law ­ — has attempted to subvert our judicial system, transforming it into an instrument of narrow ideological and partisan forces.

It should also come as no surprise that Paulose, like the Bush Administration attorneys who have helpfully rewritten the rules concerning torture and repealed our 800 year tradition of habeas corpus, is a member of the Federalist Society. Usually described in the mainstream media as a "conservative" legal organization, the Federalist Society is no such thing. It is an extremist group (Ann Coulter's a member ­ — (Enuff said!)) openly committed to the destruction of the separation of powers and its replacement with a Presidency tantamount to an elected dictatorship under the deceptively mild sounding term "unitary executive."

Far from conservative, the society is the bastard child of the Jacobins of Revolutionary France ­ — the folks who popularized the use of Terror to enforce republican "virtue" ­ — and Leninist "cadres" leading the rest of society sheep-like toward the promised land of Paradise on Earth. A member of the Federalist Society has no more place in the judicial system than a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party.

And that means there is no place in the U.S. Attorney's office for Ms. Paulose. It's time to send her packing.

Here's a prediction: By the time the Crosstown Commons project is completed three, four, maybe five years down the road, today's $285 million price tag for construction will have swelled to something more like half-a-billion, the result of inevitable delays, hang-ups, and rising labor, equipment, and material costs.

Here's another prediction: On the very day the Commons, a massive expansion and reconstruction of the Highway 62/35W interchange on the border of Richfield and Minneapolis, is finally opened it will instantly be operating at full capacity. Furthermore, in a very short period of time — ­ a matters of years, not decades ­ — it will be obsolete, and a new "solution" needed for the ever-growing flood of traffic passing through this area. True, the Crosstown Commons expansion does make room for a rapid mass transit corridor but —­ and this will come as a huge surprise — no money has been allocated to finance construction or equipment for such a corridor. Where will the money come from to turn that particular dream into reality? Your guess is as good as mine.

There are many reasons why the Twin Cities metro region has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country, none of them addressed by projects like the Crosstown Commons. Over the past 30 years, urban sprawl in the metro region has grown virtually unchecked; outer ring suburbs keep popping up like toadstools after a rainstorm ­ — toadstools subsidized in large part with tax monies transferred from the core urban area and inner-ring suburbs. The result? Twin Cities commuters drive more miles to-and-from work, shopping, and school.

Meanwhile, structural changes in the American economy have made the single-breadwinner household an endangered species; today, most families have at least two wage-earners, sometimes more, all traveling to work at different times, in different directions, and with little chance that they can reach their destination on the metro area's under-built and under-funded mass transit system. At the same time, changes in consumer expectations have aggravated the very real structural changes causing this uptick in multi-wage households. During the 1950s, the average home in the United States was about 1,200 square feet. Today, despite the fact that the average size of American families is much smaller than 50 years ago, the average new home in this country boasts more than 2,500 square feet of living space. And that living space —­ ­ and surrounding property ­ — is crammed not only with more cars but also the expensive consumer toys we have become convinced are prerequisites for membership in the Good Life.

Small wonder that in the past 30 years, the total of miles driven and number of vehicles on the road in the Twin Cities have far-outstripped actual population growth.

By now, we should have learned that if we build it, they will come. Or, more accurately, drive. By now, we should also have learned that we cannot solve our transit problems by building more highways. More highways mean more cars on the road and the need to build more highways, with all the economic and environmental burdens ­ — from air- and water-pollution to the expansion of impermeable surfaces and its impact on runoff and erosion ­ — that more cars and highways entail. The answer now, as yesterday, is mass transit. Not pricey futuristic Buck Rogers versions of mass transit, rooted in the faith that we can find a technological fix for the fix technology has put us in, or even LRT ­ — at least not LRT alone ­ — but true inter-modal rapid mass transit that combines new technologies with the creative use of current technologies to produce a system that has both the capacity to drain a significant percentage of cars off our roads and the kind of fare structure to lure middle-class and affluent commuters out of their autos and on to mass transit. Until then, we can expect to pour more public money down ratholes like the Crosstown Commons, the new multi-lane traffic jam coming our way some time in 2009 or 2010.

A shooting incident on one bus; a physical altercation on another that leads to the death of a passenger. Violent crime on the rise across the Metro area. What's going on? Is this just a local phenomenon, or part of a larger pattern?

Turns out, it's the latter. New figures reveal that, even though the American population is aging (most violent crime is committed by young people), and even though the overall crime rate has been going down, an increase in violent crime is taking place in cities around the country, especially in the Midwest.

In trying to explain this phenomenon, experts have trotted out the usual collection of usual suspects: The meth scourge, easy access to guns, prisoners sent away 20 years ago for assault and homicide getting out of prison, TV, the growing income disparity, illegal immigrants, etc. The police chief of one California suburb whose murder rate rose 20 percent while its incidents of deadly assault soared 65 percent between 2004 and 2006, commented that, "There's a mentality among some people that they're living out some really violent video game."

Indeed.

But while all these factors ­ and others not enumerated ­ undoubtedly contribute to a new violent crime epidemic similar to the one that began in the mid-1960s and did not abate until the 1990s, there's one big factor that you will not see cited in the mainstream media.

It's the war, stupid. And the insane, out-of-control militarism that fueled the Iraq catastrophe and may very well lead us into an even bigger catastrophe in Iran.

Increases in violence and crime in general, as well as "immoral" and reckless behavior, have been recorded throughout history in societies involved in war. And the longer the war, the worse the effects. That the United States has been at war or frantically arming itself to go to war since 1941 is as good an explanation as any for this country's violent tendencies ­ and a violent crime rate that far outstrips all other industrialized nations.

Not only does war and the glorification of war deliver the message that violence is acceptable ­ and the only manly ­ way to resolve disputes, but in the U.S., military spending (which now exceeds $750 billion a year if you count interest payments on previous expenditures along with current spending) loots resources that might be diverted to more productive ends.

We've all heard the (valid) argument that if the United States had spent just a fraction of what the lunatics in the White House have wasted in Iraq, we could achieve energy independence within a decade. Just as true is that, for want of that huge trough set out each year to feed the military-industrial complex and its willing accomplishes in Congress and the Executive branch, we could easily afford a comprehensive mass transit system, universal health care, and public education capable of doing more than preparing young people to become cannon fodder. In fact, there is a not a single social or political pathology afflicting us today, from the outsourcing of jobs to that growing income gap to our crumbling infrastructure to the hubris of the Imperial Presidency that cannot be attributed in whole or part to our addiction to militarism.

If so, what can Minnesota lawmakers do about it? For one, they can follow the lead of other state legislators around the country and pass a resolution calling upon Congress to bring articles of impeachment against the war criminal sitting in the White House; under the Constitution, if only one state legislature passes such a resolution, Congress must initiate impeachment proceedings. No, George Bush is not the problem, but he is certainly a problem and bringing him and the crooks around him to justice is a necessary step toward curbing the Imperial Presidency and all its temptations to warmongering, corruption, secrecy, and contempt for civil liberties.

Second, the Legislature can pass a resolution calling upon the Governor to refuse any further deployments of Minnesota National Guard troops to the Iraqi bloodbath. While it's true that the Constitution gives the President as Commander-in-Chief ultimate say in Guard deployments during times of war, it is equally true that no elected official in this country need abide by an illegal request; in fact, they are legally bound to resist and expose such requests. By every conceivable standard of national and international law, the war in Iraq is an illegal conflict, a war of aggression, and thus a war crime and a crime against humanity. If Tim Pawlenty just said no to any further demands for Minnesota Guard troops, he'd find himself not only on solid ground legally but, I dare say, politically as well, in step at last with the solid majority of his constituents who want to bring our troops home, now.

Third, the Legislature can continue to try to make up for wasted federal resources by devoting necessary funding to those very sectors, like health care, education, infrastructure, and transit, that have gone wanting these past several decades.

Almost 50 years ago, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, which, in an earlier draft of his farewell speech, he more accurately called the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. Today, that complex endangers not just our national security and economic well-being but our very survival as a democratic society. To those who claim that addressing this cancer on the body politic is not a state issue, I say Minnesotans are suffering its affects just as much as residents elsewhere in the country. America was founded as a strong federalist system, with an unusual degree of power reserved to the states. Let's find the courage to use those power in order to bring the beast to bay before it's too late.

Tim Pawlenty, unfortunately, has many of the same bad habits as the Bush White House. For instance, while pretending to respond to public pressure for change, he just doesn't seem to be able to keep from playing it cute. Instead, he likes to plant poison-pill stipulations in what he pretends are simple policy initiatives, seeking to place opponents in the position of appearing to "obstruct" the very progress the public is clamoring for. It's a tactic right out of Karl Rove's playbook.

Take, as the most recent example, his proposal to increase Minnesota's state aid to cities — one of the principal victims of recent budget cuts — while tying the increase to two utterly unacceptable conditions: a.) the increase could only be used to fund public safety; and b.) cities receiving the aid would be forbidden to raise taxes. Both of these proposals speak more to the predilections of faith-based politics than to any reality on the ground.

For starters, public safety is not the number one problem facing most Minnesota towns and cities. Yes, the spike in violent crime in Minneapolis may grab the headlines, but the real crime most of our towns and cities are grappling with is cutbacks in services — library closings, shorter hours and later opening dates at pools and parks — escalating fees, and rising property taxes; this last item is, of course, directly related to the aforementioned cuts in state aid. Putting more cops on the streets won't address any of these issues. Furthermore, contrary to the Governor's implied accusation, there is zero evidence that Minnesota cities are spending money in the profligate fashion of, say, the late, unlamented Congressional majority. The imputation that they are is simply more agit-prop of the kind peddled by the Taxpayer League, an organization whose true agenda is reducing the tax burden on those most able to pay, largely by increasing it for everybody else.

If the Governor were serious about helping out Minnesota's towns and cities, he would propose a straightforward increase in state aid, no strings attached, not the booby-trapped proposal he's placed on the table. At a minimum, he should take into consideration the fact that, six years into the reign of George II, the public has caught on to this kind of cheesy sleight-of-hand.