“Eliminate” means kill, Mark and Tina

January 9, 2020

From the January 7th edition of the Star Tribune, a letter to the editor: In the wake of Trump’s altogether proper decision to send the world’s foremost terrorist to the hell he deserved, many on the left are issuing the all-too-typical challenges that our president is marching the nation closer to war. Nonsense. This president […]

guns

MN-08: Rep. Stauber’s strange justification for opposing better gun laws

January 7, 2020

As a voter in MN-08, I must acknowledge that Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), who is in his first term, could be a lot worse. At least he doesn’t indulge in the public displays of raving idiocy one sees with the likes of Reps. Tom Emmer (MN-06) and Jim Hagedorn (MN-01). He’s even been known to […]

courts

How we got to where we’re at with the federal judiciary

December 17, 2019

I saw this: Moscow Mitch McConnell didn’t just casually toss the Constitution into the trash on Sean Hannity’s show Thursday when he promised Donald Trump would be in control of his own impeachment hearing. He gloated over his wanton destruction of federal judiciary, laughing at Hannity for saying that he was shocked President Obama left […]

On the court rejecting a mining company permit

December 10, 2019

Now with a 12/11 update . . .

House district 5A representative John Persell

Who are the most vulnerable members of the Minnesota House of Representatives?

December 9, 2019

For a number of years DailyKos Elections has computed the House Vulnerability Index (HVI), a metric that endeavors to rank current members of the US House of Representatives according to how vulnerable they are in the next election. The way the index works is fairly simple, all the Democrats (and Republicans) are ordered and ranked […]

PolyMet permitting timeline

December 6, 2019

A companion to the eBook: Fourteen Years of Bullshit

abandonedfarm

Is Big Ag really trying to push traditional farmers under?

December 5, 2019

First, let’s assess the situation as it is now. – Most farms in the U.S. are still, technically anyway, traditional, family farms. Though the farmers’ kids, and even grandkids, are very often far from kids, age-wise, any longer. Economically, though, what those farmers do is determined by Big Ag and Big Ag-friendly (to say the […]

PolyMet: Fourteen Years of Bullshit, the eBook

December 2, 2019

With a link to free ePub, azw3, and mobi format copies, and as a PDF, too

mprbuilding

The long, erratic decline of MPR News

November 25, 2019

I remember when Minnesota Public Radio’s morning e-newsletter was called “Polinaut.” Back then their reporting in general really was a cut above that of corporate-owned “news” media. That is, it was more grounded in objective reporting of facts, and less in false equivalence and other forms of providing conservative spin. In retrospect, I can’t pin […]

hegsethtrump

A Minnesota lad keeps plunging deeper into the swamp

November 24, 2019

Pete Hegseth is from Minnesota. He did high school in Forest Lake. He tried for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2012, but lost to Kurt Bills. Bills went on to be obliterated, by something like thirty points as I recall, by Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the general. That Amy stomped Kurt, and Kurt […]

The Smiler and Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg pulls ahead

November 19, 2019

The Most Trusted Name In Iowa Political Polling™, Ann Seltzer, dropped a new poll on Saturday that showed a completely different race from the one we saw just two months ago. This time, instead of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in the lead, this poll finds the leader of a small provincial fiefdom South Bend, Indiana […]

new nafta

Corporate Dems look to ram through “new NAFTA”

November 17, 2019

Contrary to what some may be claiming, this pretty much bites. “Not quite as bad as the old NAFTA” is not the same as “good.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at her weekly press conference (November 14) that a deal on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was “imminent,” and that it would serve as a template […]