So I am finally back. Other than the Gov's race here in Minnesota, it was a victory all around for progressive people. The Con's are at each other like dog's on rotten meat trying to figure out what happened, blaming each other. Somehow they are trying to spin this into a "victory for conservatism". They ignore a few things. Their conservatism has been a pathetic failure, which combined with criminal behavior and the numerous closeted gays in their party destroyed the self- created perception of them as middle of the road people. Your policies have failed. You have not solved problems for ordinary people. And you have done this while robbing the taxpayer's treasury blind. Now shut up. The people caught on.

Since this week Rod Grams complained that Rep. Oberstar has spent too much time in Washington lately, I decided to look at where Rod the dairy farmer has been the last few years. Now I have a question....How does one do barn chores from K Street in Washington D.C. ? : http://sopr.senate.gov/cgi-win/m_opr_viewer.exe?DoFn=3&LOB=GRAMS,%20RODNEY%20R.&LOBQUAL==Rod....Dairy farmer and lobbyist? I personally like the fact he was lobbyist for Brown and Williamson tobacco. Maybe next week he'll show up at an American Lung Association picnic and talk about health care reform. He lobbied for Patton Boggs, famous for its push for oil drilling on the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge( Anwr for short). So Rodney....apparently you need to be reminded of where you have been the last few years. The best part is one of his hacks went on a local radio show to complain about this...Brad Bennett's show to be specific. Brad portrays himself as protector of the taxpayers, but his record...hmmm :http://www.snowbizz.com/ExcessLevy/carwreck.htm. After this I am going to start a new fund for republican memory research. I'll make sure it doesn't use embryonic stem cells so they can feel reassured.

Tony Lourey is running for senate down in Minnesota's 8th district. A good guy....here's his website: http://www.tonyloureyforsenate.org/.

Foolish "Sportsmen for Bush". I still see those fading bumperstickers occasionally, though it seems more and more of them are scraped off. I wonder if they realize now what they were voting for. It seems two years ago I was surrounded by these things, almost always on a pick up. Whenever I'd talk to someone who had these things, often a buddy, it would get murky. Why do you have it?, I would ask. Because the democrats always want gun control....So have you looked at their platform?...no....So how do you know this?..the deer in the headlights look would come over them ( I know it well, having taken out five deer with vehicles). Next would come some drivel they had almost always picked up in a magazine or from a radio show. They actually never had an idea on what a candidates actual record and policies were. Bush likes to hunt they would say....Then I would point out it was canned hunts, on his private lands in Texas, where they have no public lands...mostly him getting out of a truck and shooting at birds chased up by someone else paid to do the job. I would bet them fifty dollars he had never cleaned an animal in his life. They always shagged off the bet. Still they would go on....it was more or less a continuation of ignorance, stuff I have heard all my life. (Being a hunter and fisherman, and working in the natural resources field have taught me much about our school system's failures when it comes to basic biology. Let me say this to everyone: There is no such animal called a black panther, especially in the midwest, and don't call the office to report it anymore) Ranting and raving about liberal volvo drivers drinking lattes and saving wolves, anecdotes about vegetarians, the evils of government and the inherent goodness of any pickup driver with a gun.


I was once more critical of my fellows, but now I realize they are often just stupid or gullible, most often the latter.

The first complaint you will often hear is about the lack of game. whether its a proponent of quality deer management ( called the "we want bigger horns" party) with their cult like obsessions, or a call in guy complaining about the Indians taking all the big walleyes out of Mille Lacs, what you almost always hear is sincere delusion or the zenith of neanderthal reasoning. There is only so much habitat. There are only so many duck producing wetlands. When there are ten thousand boats on a lake during opening morning, it is going to take a slice out of the population. When a lake is entirely surrounded by cabins, and the weed beds and shorelines are disrupted, not as many northerns will be spawning. And when 20 percent of those are removed in a year by overfishing.....well, there are are only so many; next year, there will be less northerns and more stunted bluegills. That is the law. You can't avoid it. Biological laws are as stern as the laws of physics. Jump off a 600 foot cliff, I guarantee you will impact at close to 160 miles an hour. Degrade and overfish a 300 acre lake, and you will go from northerns and walleyes to stunted sunfish and bullheads. It will happen. Somehow, strangely, it seems most people, including sportsmen, don't see that. Somehow someone else is always to blame. Wolves. The DNR. Indians. It is never me and my buddies, using atv's in habitat already degraded by logging roads ( roads do influence and degrade habitat...don't even try to deny it) taking an extra deer, my buddy down the road poaching, the new housing development abutting the formerly duck producing wetland, the pollution we make....I can go on and on.

I do most of my fishing by canoe....all my hunting is done on foot, without an atv ( as do most of my friends and cousins), and more often than not without a stand. Two years ago I shot three deer in sixteen hours, on foot, all with black powder. I am still fairly young, but often I feel like an anachronism. There are no special gimmicks...it is all hard work and knowledge of things like wind, animal habits and observing the landscape. It is knowing the water and the fish. And it is expectations, which I consider the most important. And this is what I see that lies behind the Sportsmen for Bush" stickers.

Today I drove by two places selling ready-made camouflaged stands on sale for over a thousand dollars. This fall, I will watch as highway 53 loads up with hunting parties carrying and using enough fuel and equipment for a company of troops. There will be scent trapping ghillie suits, rifles sighted in repeatedly for 300 yard shots, four atvs and enough liquor to overwhelm the crew of a destroyer. Grunt calls. Apple licks. Areas arrayed with cameras and special clover food plots. Stands built to seal out the weather.

This is what hunting and fishing have become for most people. A reflection of their lives as collectors of things, not of experiences. Of technological obsession, and not of learning new skills and acquired knowledge. Of McDonald's type instant gratification rather than the patience and skill that hunting and fishing require. It is in this disconnect that the republicans have learned to exploit. Rather than deal with shrinking and degraded habitat, we will manipulate their macho by talking about guns. Rather than acknowledging that we are destroying habitat everyday by sprawl, we will blame the Indians. And we will tell you we won't take your guns away. Just be prepared to be rich enough to pay to hunt on a private preserve, because that is all that will be left.


So my fellow sportsmen, think deeply. What kind of a world do you want? A world of canned hunts? Of streams without trout because developers were allowed to build next to them and atv'ers are allowed to pass through any way they wish?. These are choices we must make. Ducks cannot breed on a shopping mall parking lot. They need cattails and sedge grasses and populations of small predators limited by wolves. Their nesting habitat can't be disturbed by tractors and atv's. It is just like physics.

The republican record on conservation issues is a horror story. Whether pollution, wetlands, public lands ( they wish to sell everything off to the rich), water quality, oil leases or development, their policies are a disaster. They won't take your guns away, but you won't have a place to use them unless you are a member at a private club.

So think...Please think.

And take off that stupid bumpersticker.

Here's a good one :http://www.gramsforcongress.com/News/08.30.06%20Spying.htm. Someone videotaping a public campaign event is now an act of aggression. They accuse Oberstar of sending campaign staffers to "intimidate and bully the public" according to their public feedback. This is good stuff. I hear things like this everyday from people wearing aluminum foil hats. I like the public feedback part....I will assume that by the public they mean camera shy republicans. I'd be camera-shy too with whack job stuff like this coming out of a campaign. (I'll just mention the results of the last six years while they've been running things, the one big reason they should crawl into a hole somewhere). I like the part about Rod not being intimidated about being in front of a camera. Now there's bravery. I'm impressed. I'll tell the local teenagers how brave they are for filming themselves tomorrow ( Maybe then they'll stop trying to get me to watch their goofball bike crashes).

This is also part of the rightwing's pattern the last two decades. Indignancy. A good fancy word. Say it with an english accent. Really what they do is whine over things that aren't happening because in their world, they are always oppressed. They are oppressed in college because someone tells them they might be wrong. They are oppressed by senior citizens who actually dare question them on social security and call them liars. Any questioning of them is seen as oppression. I'll remind them that reality exists. Now they are oppressed because someone actually films them at a public campaign event.

I'm going to make a suggestion to the Grams campaign. Stop trying to create false controversy. This is a great old republican tactic: We know we are losing on actual issues like wages and health care so we'll create something the press will latch onto, like this. It'd be good if it wasn't so incompetent and pathetic. They are truly getting desperate.

Poor Rodney. Still owing money from 2000. Take a look at this: http://herndon1.sdrdc.com/cgi-bin/cancomsrs/?_06+S4MN00213. Mr. fiscallyresponsible overspends on a campaign and takes six years to pay it off. Some will, of course, write this off as no big deal. It does, however, beg the question: What exactly is he about? Looking at his personal history, he is all about whats good for Rodney, public or private. Looking back at his campaigns and voting record, there is a pattern. It isn't about public service and good governing, it is about a self serving need for power and personal gain. In 94, the only thing his campaign didn't accuse Wynia of was being a bad mother. In 2000, he pulled out his mom in the bitter end, after his usual negative garbage failed. Now we have him running around the eighth district, claiming how we wishes to help us, passing off the same republican garbage he has been spouting for years now. Rodney: Your parties policies have been a failure. You have brought us a war with no end in sight, enormous debt, no health care and more problems being thrown onto the back of ordinary people to save you and your rich buddies some taxes on write offs. You are and have been 100% in line with the Bush administration and the republican insanity for years now. Leave us alone.

This letter caught my eye a couple weeks ago. A better hack campaign letter I haven't seen in a while: http://www.timberjay.com/current.php?article=2482.

Going over this is pretty fun, but it is like analyzing the tome of a ten year old.

The writer obviously knows nothing about the BWCA. I'll let them in on a little secret...there aren't any roads. Having had some personal experience, creating roads to handle heavy equipment is not a quick process.I envision skycranes hauling in feller- bunchers. That might affect the profit margin a little. Then there was that little matter of the quality of the timber. Fallen logs, twisted snags, thousands of acres of blowdown at up to 60 tons per acre. Most of it damaged in some way. The companies buying timber have certain standards, and it doesn't include bark beetle infested pulpwood. That's a problem. Loggers need to get paid.

Next we see their endearing concern for the ecology of the place. First, the area contains some of the most fire prone vegetation in North America: conifers on rock. I can bore you with references, but suffice it to say this is one of the most naturally fire prone areas of the continent. It is a fire ecology. There is nothing out of the ordinary going on here. It was made worse by not letting fires burn there for a century. The place was meant to burn. The comment on the dying animals is hilarious, for they have been living with fire forever, and the area will now be a giant berry plantation with new, succulent growth for several decades. There will be a gain in populations for most species, and some newbies will show up.

The rest of the letter is typical party hack messaging. This is the theme the Grams campaign is trying to push up here, in vain hope that noone remembers his past, like his wifey-poo pleading guilty to violating election law: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44567,00.html or his sitting in the lap of the great Jesse Helms for six years.

Looking at the letter, I see a template handed out at the district repub meeting: "here's your talking points".

Don't forget who this guy really is. He'll do anything and say anything to get elected, but he is really an extremist right-winger wanting to sell everyone's soul ( and their social security)to the highest bidder.

Soory for the text in the last post...whatever happened there, the html was taking too much of my time so I left it.

We have a new terror plot. Now we have the same chanting we have had for the last five years: Be frightened, trust us, we will save you from the crazed lunatics. For five years we have had this rammed down our gullets. And they have done nothing except rob the treasury blind and lie. People: Get it through your heads that this group are pathologically sick. They are all criminals, only educated and given power. Most likely, this crew is the same as the group in Florida we hear nothing about now, who seem to have mysteriously dropped from the planet. They didn't really drop from the planet , of course, it just turned out that after investigation, things were not as they seemed. (Check out this story from the Australian press:http://www.news.com.au/sundayheraldsun/story/0,,19575461-663,00.html ). Frankly, these people cannot be trusted.


Remember, your local republicans, as we speak, support these thieves and liars. They are one and the same. Remind them of that everydaym especially at election time.

Poison Pawlenty


Why are 3M's profits more important than my child's health?
Why does the Governor wish to poison us?....For cold hard cash?

These are simple questions the Governor needs to answer. By appointing a pollution control commissioner from a regulated industry, He is saying " your and your children's health doesn't matter".

Like most Republicans, he is always concerned that somehow environmental regulation hurts the economy. I'll remind him it is only cheaper for a company if it can move somewhere else and pollute...in other words, poison for profit. When he appointed Cheryl Corrigan as PCA commissioner, he plucked her from one of the largest chemical producers in the state, 3M. He didn't choose an environmental scientist, or someone who had experience with regulation of pollution....no; he chose someone from the very industry they were supposed to regulate. When she announced her resignation back in June, the Gov showered her with the usual honors, and then pontificated about how she had shown that pollution and job growth could be balanced.

My question is this: When did poisoning us and the natural world become part of the equation? When did it suddenly become legitimate to give people cancer, disease and death?

If I poison my neighbor and/or his family or animals, I will be subject to criminal prosecution and civil suits. If I am a regulated industry, however, somehow my needs have to be balanced against a few cases of cancer. Or rather, the owner's profits are given equal value to lives lost, which is what it really means. There is always the handwringing about lost wages of workers, which means the company will simply move somewhere it is legal to poison and kill, namely China or some other place of great desperation. In short, let us poison you, or you and many others won't have jobs.

This what the Governor and repubs in general have handed us with all their talk of the free market and trade agreements. Poison.

Back to the state issues.

The case of Pawlenty's commissioner covering up for her former employer, 3M, is well known. His general viewpoint is already stated: Government should just get out of the way of business. In short, let foxes do what they want, the chickens will be alright.

But there are other issues as well.


At the ground level, within the Department of Natural Resources, Pawlenty has done nothing except cut the budget and further the aim of one of his contributors, the Atv lobby, mainly Arctic Cat and Polaris. In February of 2005, two long time managers in the northwest were canned by commissioner Gene " the icebox" Merriam. (Merriam's sole qualifications for Dnr commissioner were being a Republican and an accounting background.) No reason was given, but within the Dnr it was common knowledge they were booted for one reason: Their refusal to let the ATV whackjobs in the northwest run hither and yon wrecking the countryside. This is a place where Arctic Cat and Polaris rule. In short, let's sacrifice the landscape for the sake of some idiots who want to churn up dirt all day. We'll can people with years of good public service protecting the land and water so that our contributors can make money and some of our lunatic supporters are happy.

There are numerous other wasy he has bs'd his way around the environment. Trying to create the wastewater fee, where every citizen paid the same no matter what income or water use was a true classic...whether an apartment renter, or an Oakdale mansion owner, we would all pay the same. Nice idea. The free market for everyone except the rich. The dance around the mercury issue, where the political pressure finally made him do something. There are more, but I don't have the patience to write them.Look it up yourself.


He has sacrificed our and our children's health for money. He has sacraficed the natural world for contributors and supporters.
He has, and will, continue to wreck the environment in exchange for money and power. So Governor, thank you for your concern ....and the poison.

More from the republican platform.

Yeah, I know. You're begging me, icepick to your eyes, " Please...no more of that drivel...I will blind myself if you do". Sorry...Just some more...maybe.

While the republicans run from Dubya faster than a nude man from a hornet's nest, I'll remind them and everyone else what they actually say in their platform:


B. President George W. Bush, whose principled leadership in time of war
ensures that America at home is free and prosperous, and abroad
remains the beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world;

Hmmm...principled....Let's see..Lying to get us there....Messing up on the plan....letting no bid contracts out to friends...ill-equipping our troops, then cutting the VA budget....Halliburton...Katrina...This is what republicans are about, and this is what they have done for 25 years. Fed at the trough of working people, made our lives more difficult, and sold their soul to a bunch of religious fanatics. Remember: They love George, except that he is really unpopular now. They are all still one and the same.

Republicans aren't repubicans...they're just "candidates"....


I have spent several painful hours going thru the bs called the Minnesota republican party platform, and it is quite interesting. Somehow their candidates never mention this thing,most likely because they hope noone ever reads it. God forbid someone finds out what they acually do.

Here is good one from section 2:

Y. That the lawful definition of a ‘Human Being’ shall be: ‘When the DNA
(Deoxyribonucleic Acid) of Mankind is joined.’

meaning when the sperm hits the egg. What we have here is a religious definition, plain and simple. Having gone thru the enlightenment ( meaning satanic knowledge called biology class) calling an egg inside a hen a chicken. About a million things could happen on the way to the rodeo called birth, most of them natural. The aim of this is to ban ban birth control and abortion. Throughout this section, there are multiple references to this idea, including that sexual partners should have a right to force a women to bear the child. Again: it says fathers should have the right to force a woman ( or girl) to bear a child if there has been "conception". Here is what this means:. My daughter has sex with her boyfriend. She comes and tells me. She decides, a month into a pregnancy, to have an abortion, when the fetus is nothing more than a collection of cells. I support her. The father, an 18 yr old low life, will have the right to force my daughter to bear his child. I, of course, have no right to sue to force him out of the gene pool for doing my under 18 daughter.

This is called forced pregnancy. The Nazi's did it. So did Stalin. So do the fanatical muslims. In short, the republicans want to force our daughters and sisters to have children....they don't want us to have birth control or family planning, they don't want us to have access to abortion, they merely want to make us slaves to their religious beliefs.

Why is it that republicans hate ordinary people? I am reading through the voting records of Rod Grams and Mark Kennedy this morning, and these guys hate anyone with an income under 100,000$. Minimum wage....we don't need it. Overtime: We don't need it. Assistance to build schools , headstart, health care funding and aid for small farmers are all part of some vast conspiracy. The other day I was at my father's assisted living ( i am sure another crazy liberal idea...housing the old and infirm with dignity and care, rather than that wonderful republican concept of homelessness or the old poor farm), and a man was walking around....he had prosthetic arms and came over to ask me how I was...he had obviously been burned and lost his arms in that...turned out he was a veteran, wounded in Korea. This year, the repubs voted to cut vet's funding....frigging vet's funding. Now that's patriotic. Wave a flag repubs, and yell "we screwed vets". Remember: these people have voted against anything that has improved people's lives for the last 70 year. The eight hour day, overtime pay, social security, health care, the minimum wage..they have fought against it all and are trying to get rid of it now. They want to bring back the good ol' days of slavery. But if you are a large corporation, and contribute oodles of cash to their forever growing pockets, suddenly you are in need of desperate assistance. The poor, poor rich suffering the burden of the estate tax...forced to get only millions and billions.....never actually having to work....I am crying for them. I have concluded this: These people are just self-serving fanatics who cannot and will not deal with reality. Blind to the real world, they do not see what is real, but only what they wish to see. Then they fatten themselves and their friends at the public trough.

More rightwing drivel.

I chose to suffer through Twin Cities' Public Television Almanac the other night, exposed to two republican hacks, Sarah Janacek and Andy Brehm. These people stay on message so well that a tornado could rip though the studio and they would somehow blame a dem. They do not deal with reality at all, namely that their party's policies have turned the country into a mudhole of dying troops and debt. The only reason I mention this is Janacek's whining about the treatment of Karl Rove, how evil protesters harassed this decent man to his car. Sarah....The man is scum ( simply google Max Cleland's and Rove's name together). Take off your blinders and admit what your party has become: highly paid criminals running the country into the dirt while legally poisoning us and our children for personal profit. These are not the republicans of 30 or 40 years ago.


That makes a good transition to my favorite mama's boy lately, Rod Grams. He claims nice Minnesota roots. Grew up on a dairy farm in Anoka county...blah blah blah blah. He definitely didn't learn anything there. His votes against ordinary people, ( whom he always claims to represent) is so long I won't even try to post it. He voted against Head Start, voted against money for 1997 flood victims ( remember the Red River Valley?), and even voted gainst money for Veterans and their families health for god's sake. He never met a rich contributor he didn't like or vote for ( in the old days this was called bribery). He would call himself an ideological purist, which really means he is a fanatic, like most rightwingers nowadays.These people are downright scary...the only thing which appears normal from the outside is when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, lately a daily occurrence. Reporters and others need to start calling people like Grams on their BS, once and for all actually look at what they are doing, rather than what they are saying. Simple questions like " Why did Rod Grams vote against the Family and Medical Leave Act?" might be a start.....Think about what a world this might be....

Like herpes,too bad there isn't a pill for this.

Grams, admittedly, has little chance. Oberstar is a long time incumbent,mainstream in outlook, and adept at finding solutions to problems and helping the district. It is also a strongly DFL place. Grams record as congressman and senator was on the extreme right and his main claim to fame was being lapdog to Jesse Helms.His last campaign was painful to watch, and his insipid whining afterwards wuld have been comical if not for his history. Grams,a man who never met a dollar and a dirty campaign he didn't like, snivelling as he got buried. Pulling out the mom commercial at the bitter end was wonderful to watch....a desperate high schooler begging for approval.One would have thought that was the end.

He tried re-incarnating once before, but the republicans dumped him like a live skunk that time.


So why is he running?

Ego and a need for power, of course.

His first campiagn speech in the north was spent ranting about the blowdown to republican loggers, a pretty small straw to grasp at.

But why are the repubs backing him?

For them, it is a set up. Grams was a loyal pet, so he is trustworthy, and Oberstar won't be here forever. So with this campaign, they can test their slogans and methods, create some myths and plan for two years from now. They will survey and measure responses. They will study demographics. They will hand out talking points to local media. They will do this to the finest detail, a percentage here, a percentage there, hopefully to pull this off.

That is wha this is about.

They could care less about Rod Grams. They will do whatever it takes for this district, however.