I hope you all had a great year, I know I did, and I can only hope 2007 will be as exciting. I will try to do a “best of” kinda post tomorrow, if I don’t get too crazy tonight, that is.

Thanks to everyone for everything.

Happy New Year,
AAA

Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq
It is being dubbed story of the year by so many, why not take a look back at how it all began?

You decide

Minnesota Campaign Report is a local lefty blog run by one of the local George Soros paid shills. I normally don’t spend much time browsing around there, but someone emailed me, and said that I’d be VERY interested in the Soros paid political blogger’s take of the Saddam execution.

It was in paragraph form, I bullet pointed it so you see EXACTLY what he was saying, and emphasis is mine.

And yes, I do have thoughts on the hanging of Saddam Hussein.  I just can’t give them top billing, because I don’t see any good answers to the quandaries I find myself pondering.

• Was he a terrible dictator who ruined and ended countless lives?  Yes.
• Did our leaders lie repeatedly to get us to this point?  Yes.

So it is ok to rule a country as a terrible dictator and ruin countless lives. Wait, let me guess, Mr. Bodell has sent Castro a ‘Get well card’.

• Did Saddam deserve to die for his crimes?  Yes.
• Did he commit many of those crimes with implicit and covert American support?  Yes.

Did you catch that? He just implied that Saddam murdered countless Iraqis with covert US support. What proof has he got? Why does he instantly decide that if Saddam, a man who murdered his way to power 3 decades ago, could only be an evil man with US support? Does he hate Bush so much that he’d blame all of America for something only Saddam made happen?

• Do Saddam’s supporters now have a martyr for which to fight?  Yes.

Wait! I thought Saddam had nothing to do with terrorists? That’s what the left has repeatedly said. Why would they simply assume that killing one of the most savage leaders in world history would propel him to martyrdom? Could it be that Bodell secretly knows the absolute evil of the terrorists who support Saddam (and of which Saddam hoped to lead against America, remember he did try to assassinate one of our former Presidents) and Bodell is just too afraid to stand up and call the the Saddam ’supporters’ what they are? An enemy to World freedom and peace. And a threat, yes threat to America.

• Is the penalty of death something best left to God’s determination, instead of the judgment of mortal, flawed human beings?  I think so, how do you feel?

And there you have it. In order to get to his actual point (capital punishment is wrong), he has to make excuses for Saddam, blame America for Saddam’s genocide, and say that Saddam assuming room temperature is going create more jihaders.

There are nuances to this entire ordeal that many people on both sides of every cultural divide in America simply don’t want to think about.  And that bugs the hell out of me.

What bugs the hell out of me is that a liberal punk who gets paid by the largest America hater in the world is actually going to say that Saddam’s genocide and terroristic rule over his people and the region is the fault of the US. I am sick and tired of punks like this that spew hate like this, especially when they are receiving money from someone who wants to see America lose.

I am going to take a big and bold stand here, and do what needs to be done. Joe Bodell is not a patriot. I did not call him unpatriotic, but post is an example of anti-patriotism. You can not besmirch the reputation of your entire nation, blame a foreign leader’s genocidal mass murderous behavior on your own nation with no proof, and then try to wrap yourself in your flag.

Just like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy are as close to traitors as you get, Joe Bodell has crossed a line between dissent, and aid and comfort that we should debate.

Is it OK for a paid political operative to attempt to make statements like this? Now I know Bodell says that what is on MCR are his words, but he is being paid to blog at MiniMoni (that’s the MN Democratic leaning blog that is funded by George Soros through one of his political smear laundering rackets, MediaMatters.org), is there some magical time clock in his head for these thoughts? Some are off the Soros dime, some are on?

With such dangerous and slanderous words about America, I think that we need to seriously ask ourselves if any group or affiliation he has after this should have to address the situation. Silence from his fellow lefties that he shares the Soros funded Minnesota Monitor with, is tantamount to an endorsement of his words.

Is it the commonly held Minnesota Progressive/Democratic view that America is responsible for Saddam murdering his own people? Would the World be better off with Saddam alive, maybe even free, rather than having been put to death by the duly elected government of Iraq?

Taking a real quick moment from my night of hanging out with my two nephews to remind you that had Senator Amy Klobuchar had her way, Saddam Hussein would not only still be breathing, but he’d still be in power.

He’d also still be a free man not having faced justice for the brutal mass murder of countless Iraqi citizens.

“She opposed this war from the beginning.”

Justice does not always have to please or appease everyone, thank god it didn’t listen to the anti-war Democrats like Amy Klobuchar.

PS: What Will CAIR Do? YOu too Congressman Ellison. Your response?

This one just showed up in my INBOXI’m putting it below the fold as it is not for the young of age. Read at your own risk.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well the Strib does finally admit crime is up sharply in Minneapolis, but they do it a bit too late.

Reports of violent crime in Minneapolis rose 17 percent through Monday, compared with the same time in 2005, driven by a continued proliferation of aggravated assaults and robberies.
The year-end number of homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies will be the highest since 1997. And the department’s Fourth Precinct, which makes up the North Side, is again facing double-digit-percentage increases in overall serious crime reports.

The story is pretty much a fluff piece with no real meat. There is one small hint at one of the major factors though.

Every crime expert offers a variety of theories on why homicides, aggravated assaults and robberies are back on the rise, including a decrease in police staffing levels, easier access to guns, high recidivism rates and even the glamorization of violence or crime becoming “a sport.”

recidivist |riˈsidəvist| noun a convicted criminal who reoffends, esp. repeatedly.

Now who could be responsible for that I wonder? Of course that person is left out of the story completely. And I am sure she was unavailable for comment while traveling.

Look, I’m not surprised the Strib left out the entire role the justice system covering Minneapolis plays. Lord knows they did everything they could to protect the former County Attorney from any connection to the rising crime during the Senate campaign this year.

She was given, or rather, allowed to take credit for the fall of crime from 97 to the early 2000’s, but not responsible for any of its rapid climb the last year or two. It is a shame, because this has so much more to it than just the Senate race.

In Minneapolis, serious crime, which includes the violent crime categories plus theft, arson and burglary, increased 4.3 percent this year. So far this year, there have been 59 homicides compared with 49 in 2005. The sale or purchase of marijuana was the motive behind 10 of them.

As of Monday, Minneapolis had nearly 1,000 more robberies and aggravated assaults than the same time last year. Robberies increased 19 percent, down from a 36 percent rise as of June.

Well, gee, do you notice something? It seems that after June, things got better. What could have happened in June. Well, Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak finally realized he couldn’t keep cutting cops for green projects. And Amy Klobuchar was an absentee County Attorney as she spent all her time on the campaign trail and the day to day decisions on justice were not in her hands anymore.

The attention the blogs gave crime in Minneapolis definitely did change the tactics of those entrusted to deal with it. Once there was pressure and blame being passed around, officials finally did something about it. Its too bad that these people didn’t take their jobs seriously at first though.

59 murders, over 3000 robberies, hundreds of rapes, and countless other violent crimes. What is always lost in these events are the victims. For every crime committed in Minneapolis last year, some one or many were left to pick up the pieces. In 2006 there were more than there should have been if you ask me.

Let’s only hope with one factor of the problem now off to DC to be derelict in the US Senate, those who are still here will take their jobs more seriously and do a better job in 2007. There is definitely room to improve this situation, time will tell if they are up to it.

Mark Ritchie promising to be a partisan Mark Ritchie, not Minnesota’s non-partisan Secretary of State.

But Ritchie and many of the Democrats newly elected to Congress also hold strong views on international trade, income disparities, job insecurity and related economic issues. Some of their ideas about how to blunt the hard edges of the global economy, particularly on trade, could collide with the free-trade, pro-globalization tilts at Minnesota’s large transnational corporations.

The new Democrats — including U.S. Sens.-elect Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jim Webb (Virginia) and Jon Tester (Montana) and U.S. Rep.-elect Tim Walz, who will represent Minnesota’s 1st District — will be voting on many issues related to business and the economy. For the most part, Ritchie won’t, since his duties as secretary of state are mainly to supervise elections and manage business filings and other public records.

But given his experience and passion, Ritchie promises to be anything but a plain-vanilla secretary of state.

He is likely to bring a more activist bent to the Minnesota State Board of Investment, where he will become a director along with the governor, state attorney general and state auditor. The board manages more than $50 billion in public pension money.

In other words, he is not planning on being a Secretary of State, he is going to be an activist who will abuse his power in order to make his personal political beliefs a reality. Such irony. Too bad Republicans never bothered to muster anything against this guy. But then again, all they cared about was getting….

Mark Ritchie, your activist SOS Minnesotans. We now have 2 Democratic Constitutional Officers who are hell bent on legislating from their offices who have no business doing so. One can only hope that in 4 years, there will be a better level of Republican party support for people brave enough to risk it all for the good of the state. Lord knows that not very many people will be willing to risk a run for these offices given what happened in 2006 from the state party.

Which is a bloody damn shame because these Constitutional Offices are very very important, and one can only hope someone is willing to try make a run for it. “Support all endorsed candidates” not in Ron Carey’s MNGOP, and look what we get as a result, a Commie in a statewide office.

(for those of you offended by the Commie line, Mark Ritchie was supported by the Communist Party of America in his campaign to become MN SOS. )

I have dropped the security level comment stuff back down again. You don’t have to register and login to comment here, but I reserve the right (heck I don’t have to reserve it, I am God here on RF and can do what I want) to take precautions again.

But this should not be abused by cowardly people trying to smear me or others anonymously. I am not one of the bloggers who thinks people have a right to say anything they want with out having to put their real name or identity behind it. But I will try to be open minded and allow you people to positively join discussions here.

But again, if it gets nasty again, I will have no choice to make it a pain for the regular people who can be nice.

MPR has a story about the upcoming MN Legislature and their transportation agenda. Or rather their plan to raise your taxes in various forms, and add a few new forms.

St. Paul, Minn. — Matt Dawson’s mind is made up. With the exception of using one of those one hour rental car services a couple times a week Dawson has dropped out of the car culture.

Dawson, a 28-year old Minneapolis resident, relies on public buses for most of his commuting to and from his various theater jobs, and he’s all in favor of more transit.

“I just love the light rail and I wish we could some more, get it a little bit extended,” he says.

Matt Dawson is part of Minnesota’s transportation solution and he’s part of the problem. He’s ditched his car for transit lessening by one the glut of single occupant vehicles in Twin Cities rush hour congestion. But by no longer buying gasoline for his 12-year old Chevy Dawson is no longer a contributor through the state gasoline tax to the state highway trust fund.

That’s the big pot of money that pays for a good share of road and bridge building in Minnesota.

Of course the story starts off with one of the liberal ‘I really wish this was New York’ bums who expects the rest of us to provide him with transportation to his job. Mind you his job is at different places all the time. Which common sense would say that is a perfect reason to drive your own lazy butt to and fro.

Unlike Matt Dawson most Minnesotan’s are driving more not less. So, one would expect gas tax revenues to be higher. But the vehicles are slightly more fuel efficient, and a small but increasing number of them burn fuels that aren’t taxed or are taxed at a lower rate.

The result is that in 2005, for the first time in nearly a quarter of century, Minnesota’s gasoline tax revenue declined. Lawmakers can no longer count on year after year of stellar increases in gas tax revenue.

So all those environmental mandates have finally begun to harm the mass hysteria cause of transit. As cars get MORE fuel efficient, gas tax revenues drop, and with the MPG standards getting cranked up more and more, that is a trend that will continue. Meanwhile, that money is being drained away so Matt Dawson can have his travels subsidized by you and me.

Some say the solution is to raise more money with a higher gas tax and registration or tab fees. A nickel more on the gas tax raises about $160 million. A 1 percent tab fee increase raises about $5 million.

Um, didn’t they just point out how gas consumption is going down? Hey, how will the E-85 craze fit in? Is that taxed the same as gasoline, or is it tax free? But of course we all know what they are up to, they want you out of your car,m and they aim to make it so financially painful for you and me to drive that we will all beg for us to rip up those pesky roads so we can have rails everywhere, no matter the cost or benefit to our society.

Minnesota House Transportation Finance committee chairman Bernie Lieder, DFL-Crookston, says wait a minute.

“I definitely don’t want to jump into it and say we’re going to raise this tax or any other tax until you get a feel for what’s going on here,” he says.

‘Here’ is the state capitol.

Rep. Lieder personally favors raising the gas tax and tab fees. However one estimate puts the state short more than $1 billion a year in money for meeting transportation needs.

Keep an eye on your wallet, that’s a billion dollars they want to find.

Senate Transportation Committee chairman Steve Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, is urging people to lower their expectations for how much money can be raised.

“Even with the best bill that we can get through the legislature we’re not going to come close to meeting those expectations,” he says.

Murphy and Lieder say they want to see what consensus they can build among lawmakers. Consensus will help avoid the legislative gridlock that has plagued transportation funding packages in prior sessions. Consensus might also mean having enough votes to override a veto by Gov. Pawlenty who has said he will not approve a transportation funding bill with a gas tax increase.

In other words, the DFL legislative leaders are hell bent on raising your taxes.

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce is among the most ardent and powerful voices urging action on transportation funding. Chamber President David Olson says proposals to raise lots of money risk driving away supporters.

Too late jackarse, you were the one who rammed that goll dang MVST amendment through. Did you know that since 2003 that MVST tax revenue has been falling, and what was supposed to be this $400 million dollar influx of money for roads, was actually only $230 million and falling? I bet you didn’t because the MN Chamber didn’t want you to, because you would have voted against it.

If lawmakers worry about taxpayer reaction to higher gas taxes and tab fees, they’re also hearing from their constituents about property tax increases.

Property taxes are rising at double digit rates in many locales.

One of the reasons is local officials’ increasing reliance on property tax revenue for transportation, according to Minnesota Transportation Alliance lobbyist Margaret Donahue.

“When state revenues like the gas tax and license tab fees and even the motor vehicle sales tax don’t keep up, then local governments really have no choice but to look to local property taxes to fix their local roads,” Donahue says.

What, you mean they are all not keeping up? Well, gee, why don’t we build more LRT lines so we can have fewer people contributing to the revenue stream? Brilliant, yes. Let’s focus all our attention to spending more than a billion dollars per 20,000 commuters and in no time flat we will finally figure out that transit is not the solution for our problem. Wait, what, that doesn’t make sense.

You see most people don’t go from A to B, and need to have flexible transportation, like their own cars. So they can make different stops at different places, all of which aren’t along these ridiculous LRT lines. But then again, the criminal powers that be pushing these things want to redevelop these areas with new stuff.

Are we going to rebuild our society to meet the needs of the LRT lines, or should we make our transportation system meet our needs? I prefer the later, but then again, I have a functioning brain stem and not a social engineer orientated elected official who is surrounded by special interests and has long lost touch with the actual users of the transportation system.

As for additional transit funding some Twin Cities area lawmakers and county officials favor a metro-wide sales tax dedicated to transportation including transit. But again, agreement is elusive.

Was that on your ballot? Oh yeah, I forgot, no one bothered to make this election about the actual differences between DFLers and Republicans. One is going to tax their way out of a problem (Read sweep it under the rug by throwing money at it) the other is going to (or should be) trying to actually solve the problem before money is just thrown at it (read drop the stupid idea that trains can solve EVERYONE’s problems since they only serve a few thousand people out our two plus million commuters in just the Twin Cities.)

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce opposes the idea. The Minnesota Transportation Alliance has favored it in the past. The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy likes the idea.

The MCEA describes the Twin Cities as transit starved. MCEA attorney Jim Erkel says a sales tax trumps other ideas for addressing the issue.

Remember what I said, this is a Environutter group favoring a massive tax increase on your car. The funding gap (lower gas tax revenue from vehicle efficiency) is a problem they helped create by lobbying government to raise MPG standards. Now they want to raise your taxes so it is too expensive to drive your car, thus getting to their actual goal of doing away with your fossil fuel burning car all together. Think about it, its an environutter group, they don’t give a rats ass about transportation, except for making sure you do it in a green way.

“Looking around it’s [Twin City Sales Tax] the one thing that has a broad enough base. It spreads out the joy or the pain depending on your point of view, and it can raise the kind of money that is required to fully implement a well planned transit system,” Erkel says.

Notice how he said ‘transit system’? He has no intentions of building roads. He wants to build trains and LRT.

Polls don’t supply much insight on how Minnesota taxpayers feel about transportation funding. Transportation advocates are cheered by the 57% of Minnesota voters who approved spending all, not just half, of the vehicle sales tax revenue on transportation. But that’s not a new tax. And it’s not reliable evidence in the minds of some lawmakers that Minnesotans’ are ready to dig deeper to pay for transportation.

They haven’t ever done a poll on it. And I doubt they could give you an accurate pulse of where people stand. Except that of the 2.5 million or so people who travel in or out of the Twin Cities every day, 95% of us are in cars or trucks. Maybe that would shed some much needed light on this subject they don’t want to get to the bottom of.

They want trains dang it, and no fact will get in their way.

Do you still have a hand on that wallet? You better not lose sight of it for the next two years, because DFL social engineers legislators are trying to figure out how to get as much money out of you as possible so they can try to build their utopian society. It will cost billions, and YOU and I will be paying for their dreams, which are really our nightmares.

[end rant, let blood pressure drop to normal level again]