Politics

End the "Blue Laws"

Michael KoppelmanLeave a comment

The Minnesota Monitor is reporting:

A bipartisan effort is under way to end Minnesota’s “blue laws.” As state laws currently stand, Minnesotans who want to do their car shopping on the weekends or buy beer for a Sunday night party have found themselves out of luck. The selling of strong liquor or automobiles on Sunday is currently against the law in Minnesota.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like they are optimistic on getting the job done:

Ultimately, the bill is mostly symbolic and intended to generate a discussion. “We don’t expect these bills to get out of committee, but we wanted to let people know that these silly laws exist,” said Kahn.

I don’t understand at all what is hard about repealing these backwards-ass laws.

End the "Blue Laws"

Goodbye Molnau

Michael KoppelmanLeave a comment

Goodbye Molnau. We are looking forward to throwing your boss out at the end of his term, too. Good riddance. As I’ve written about in the past, I absolutely noticed a deterioration in MNDot long before I ever heard the word “Molnau”. Add the bridge collapse, the shady business deals (she sold her farm to a developer for 6 times its market value 8 days after pushing through a bill that expanded Highway 212 to better service that area) and a damning legislative auditor’s report, this is an obvious step to take.

The Righties will argue that it is a witch hunt and all of that. They will protect their guy. But the fact is, if you believe in accountability and responsibility then the person at the top of the chain gets axed when things go shitty. Now it looks like Pawlenty’s failure of leadership (“new new taxes”) has led to a large looming budget shortfall. Luckily, thanks to some reasonable Republicans, his veto of the transportation bill was overrode.

I really wish Amy Klobachar had run for governor instead of senator. She’s a great senator but she would have been a great governor as well. We need some smart, experienced person who puts real executive leadership in front of a partisan ideology.


Goodbye Molnau

Ralph Nader

Michael KoppelmanLeave a comment

First of all, I think Ralph Nader is right about just about everything. I agree with his politics and viewpoints. I think that the stranglehold that corporations have on our government is decidedly anti-American. I’m a capitalist and I enjoy free markets. But our government should not be for sale. That should be obvious.

I also think Ralph Nader should not worry about harming the Democrats. We need more choice in politics, not less.

My bitch with Nader is that he seems oblivious to political strategy. By that I mean, in the 11th hour when it is clear that he has no chance in hell of being elected, he should move his support to a candidate that can win. Idealism is a great thing but effective idealists need to be pragmatists as well. In 2000, the day before the election, Nader should have dropped out and asked his supporters to vote for Gore. His idealism got us further from his objectives, not closer. You are not being very smart if you undermine your own goals because of your idealism.

So Nader, yes, please run for President. Shake things up, get your agenda across and get a real liberal agenda on the agenda. But when the 11th hour comes, be practical.

Ralph Nader

Balance the budget, bitches!

Michael Koppelman2 Comments

The US government has run deficit budgets for 31 out of the last 35 years. That is ridiculous. Check out this graphic showing the budget deficit from 1961 through 2005. So Ronald Reagan, hailed as the greatest Republican president in recent history, ran up the debt. Both Bush’s ran up the debt. Nixon, Ford and Carter ran up the debt. The only president to run a surplus budget since JFK was Bill Clinton. (Here’s another graphic showing the same thing.)


WHAT THE FUCK!

George W. Bush grew the budget by 1 trillion dollars during his 2 terms. He inherited a surplus and will be handing Obama a deficit. The war does not come close to explaining this.
I’m a self-proclaimed raging liberal and I think it verges on criminal that we allow these administrations to spend future dollars. While I understand that there are smart and legitimate reasons to occasionally run a deficit, it has become business as usual in Washington because we are governed by a bunch of pussies who preside over an electorate that is too stupid to realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

We have to raise taxes AND cut spending. We should balance the budget every single year. I just heard that by 2040 every dollar the US government takes in will go to social security, medicare and servicing the national debt. Does that sound sustainable to you?

I know most Republicans have already distanced themselves from Bush, but if you needed more proof of the utter disfunction of the Republican party, here it is — they suck at managing the budget and yet they claim they are fiscal conservatives. Bull. Shit.

Let’s see if Obama can get us out of this mess like Clinton got us out of Ford/Reagan/Bush’s mess.

Balance the budget, bitches!

35W — inevitable?

Michael Koppelman, Leave a comment

I wrote and lost a long post about this. Thankfully I don’t have to rewrite it because someone else has written it for me. Nick Coleman has an oped piece that speaks exactly to my point. His is called Gussets, public servants both let Minnesota down.

There was nothing “routine” about the bridge, including its inspections. It had so many problems that it was the most-inspected bridge in Minnesota and engineers were openly worried (according to a story in this paper Aug. 19) about the dangers of a collapse.

Inspections did find that many of the gussets were corroded and thinning, plus a host of other significant problems ranging from cracks and missing bolts to a tilted bridge pier and frozen expansion rollers.

The question isn’t whether the original designers were distracted by thoughts of Marilyn Monroe as they were planning the bridge.

The question is why wasn’t the bridge closed, or fixed, by those in charge now?

But the gussets are a godsend to officials who want the public to believe they had no idea the bridge was in jeopardy and there was nothing that could have been done about it.

The gusset plate problem means that there was too much weight on the bridge. The notion that it was impossible to determine that the bridge was unsafe is false. It’s possible and perhaps likely that under a Democratic governor, the same thing would have happened. But maybe not. The Republican ideology of starving the government of resources creates a system where the cheapest solution always wins.

Whether it was Pawlenty’s fault or not is not my main concern. But somewhere along the line our processes failed us. Pawlenty’s administration seems to be saying that nothing could have prevented this. I don’t buy it.

35W — inevitable?