More of Normie's votes:

Giving foreclosure protection to ordinary people: voted no

Allowing medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies ( why not?) voted no

Pell grants to low income students: voted no

Healthy mothers, healthy babies act: voted no

He really doesn't like ordinary people.

He did like bitching about the UN for a couple years, however.

Coleman, Franken, and the Republican Hate Machine...

Republicans know they are in trouble. Their policies and their president have run the country into the mud like the drunk cousin you hope doesn't come to the wedding, so any positive campaign is out of the question.They have nothing. Franken, in reality, is the front runner for the DFL. So the Repub noise machine is focused on one thing; run a blistering negative campaign against Franken. This will include the usual tactics; press releases, circulated fake stories etc etc. My favorite is posing callers and blog commentators. These people will call or write in, posing as normal citizens, then immediately spin out a statement right out of a campaign message plan...see these comments here, and it is obvious. This is a problem, because for some reason, I have never seen reporters confront this. So, for reality's sake, here is part of Coleman's campaign donor list. The CEO of Amway..interesting; A truer nutjob if ever walked the planet. Hey..Bill Mcguire, big time thief. This what they do not want you to see. Norm's ties to the extremely wealthy,the crazed right wing and his lapdog service to them. Geez, he doesn't like funding education for the disabled or to extend unemployment funding for people laid off. Here is his voting record...

over here

Sometimes you have to look at a road accident...

And sometimes you shouldn't. And this was one of those nights when I should not have, as someone was breathing down my neck saying don't look, you know what you will see. But I LOOKED. And it was bad. The local district Repub party website. Especially the part stating what we believe. As you read it, you begin to wonder where these people live. Just where? Religious belief is now persecuted? Where are the hordes of agnostics burning bibles? Conducting modern day pogroms on church attendees on Sunday mornings? Mildly sipping coffee and reading the paper over pancakes? Then they say they believe in absolute morality. What is that? Does it include Halliburton? Ted Haggard? The lunatic John Hagee? Does local control include No Child Left Behind? I know now why I had not looked before, because I know what happens with deluded people when they get together...they make up more delusions, and you get a roomful of nuts. I hope no one gives them a Ouija board...

This is a picture from the Weimar Republic; a woman heating with cash money as inflation made it useless. For money is actually worth nothing, only what you can get for it at a current exchange rate from someone who has the things you need. And now we need more to buy the things we ordinarily use, like food and fuel. The question is why? Is oil more scarce, at least scarce enough to say, jump in value so much over this time? Not that scarce, though the good, easy to get stuff is going and will be gone...we and others are using more, but not that much more than three or four years ago...so what gives? It is about our money, and what its value is. Back when Nixon dumped the old Bretton Woods system, he made a deal with the Arabs; all oil deals would be done in dollars. And largely, except in a few cases, that is how it is done to this day. You want to buy or pay for oil, you do it in dollars. It makes our currency the baseline that every other currency is compared against. This works well, except when everyone starts seeing the fundamental basis for your economy and the attached value to the currency is a lie, and they know your currency is toilet paper waiting to happen. Such as when you fund war debts by cutting taxes and printing money, as the Bush administration has been doing for a few years now. Or when they realize the three card molly game you played with U.S. housing debt, and overall debt, for a half a decade to prop up an economy going down the drain quickly because of your messed up policies. Other oil producers want to deal in Euros, partly for political reasons, but also because they know we are just printing money and not actually paying for what is happening. Oil is not going up; the value of our cash is going down, probably by 30% in the last two years as judged by the rest of the world. So, when you hit the gas pump next time, thank your republican friend or relative for their blind support of someone with their hand in your pocket...and buy a smaller car and a woodstove. You might need it sooner than you think.

A good examination of Pawlenty's playing with health care at Minnesota Monitor; the typical repub attitude towards ordinary people. Letting them die.

James Oberstar is running again...Thankfully. We in this district have been lucky for decades to have someone this thoughtful serving us. Some may not agree with everything he says or does, but that is true for most of humanity. We do have someone here, however, who is not a deluded ideologue, engages real problems, offers thought out solutions and has stood up,voted his conscience and later proven to be correct on his prediction more than once. And he's done this for ordinary people, and been up front with that...definitely not a servant of lobbyists. Yes, I am thankful. I could be stuck with a Michelle B., a lunatic of the first order ( if anyone wants to see an agnostic genuflect, I just did..and I'll do it again if you mention her or Norm's name..or buy me some ravioli at my fav range restaurant)