What Happens in Minneapolis, Stays in Minneapolis

The hearse belongs to Dave Karsnia and his wife, Maureen; Dave is the arresting undercover police officer who busted Idaho Senator Larry Craig in the on-line infamous cruise section of a men's room at the Minneapolis airport.  (Karsnia is a member of the Northland chapter of the Professional Car Society of which another family member is president. The hobbies of public servants are, of course, none of our business, but old Caddy is a beauty and an appropriate vehicle for hauling off Craig's political career....plus, it may be making a tv debut soon: rumors are already out there that the Craig case may become a "Law & Order" episode ...)

Editor & Publisher (thanks to GalleyCat for the tip) tells us why it took three months from Craig's arrest for lewdness (June 11) to his guilty plea on August 8 (for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor):

...Editor Dean Miller of the Post Register in Idaho Falls defended the lack of reporting on the arrest by his paper and others, saying a misdemeanor arrest in another state does not always get easily discovered.

"It is not something we would ordinarily see," said Miller, who went on leave three weeks ago as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University for a year. "It would not come to your attention if you are not in Minneapolis."

Some Washington, D.C.-based editors, such as Dean Baquet, who heads The New York Times' D.C. bureau, agreed.

"I am not so shocked that it would not get out," said Baquet, who is also a former editor at the Los Angeles Times. "The way things work, sometimes if you have a misdemeanor arrest, they don't make their way out here. It was not in his state. My guess is if it had happened at La Guardia Airport or at an airport in Washington it might be different."

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, also found it unsurprising. "We don't have a Minneapolis correspondent," he said. "He is not a local congressman -- it happened in Minnesota and Idaho."...

Evidently what happens outside the beltway, stays outside the beltway. (Say, wasn't it in Minneapolis where some of the 9/11 hijackers got their flight training? Does that mean if they'd been training in New York ... "it might have been different"?)

In the meantime, as Gawker pointed out: MSNBC's frat boy, Tucker Carlson, macho'd out on TV last night and confessed to a felony in a Georgetown men's room (he was "hit on," left the bathroom, returned with friends, and roughed the guy up...the cops came and arrested the solicitor).