King is running for Mayor of the MOB:

Mitch says we need to pander to him to get his endorsement for MOB Mayor. I don’t think I can afford his breakfast tab on Saturdays, and he has only his vote to give — he’s banned everyone else but Flash from his blog. So we would like his support but need to focus on those whose support we can use to push us over the top.

Oh, brother.

Somebody go and vote for him already.

UPDATE:  Wow.  He’s pulled even with Atomizer.

Behold the power of Mitch.

I’m not sure what to make of this odd admission:

We moved into our house last March. Two days ago I did my first batch of laundry.

Do you use fans, or do you have a sterno-fueled potpourri burner?

““You don’t like the fact that thou hast no representation on tax issues? Move thee to the West Indies, knave!.” (Lord Chauncey Hamm, Adjutant Governor of the Delaware Colony, 1774)

““You don’t like the fact that you’re a slave just because of the color of your skin? Drop out of life!” (Rep. Zebulon Hamm (D, SC), 1859)

“Jüdenmord und die Endlösung gefällt euch nicht? Bring sich um!…er, haha! Das wäre Irönie, nicht?” (Obserturmbannführer Friedrich Hamm, Gauleiter, Blausack-am-Rhein, 1937)

“You don’t like sitting in the back of the bus? Walk!” (Klavern Kop Ronnie Joe Hamm, Hattiesburg, MS, 1958)

““You don’t like the fact that you can’t have a gun on your college campus? Drop out of school.” (Peter Hamm, The Brady Factory Campaign, 2007)

SaintPaulicy notes a new campaign teeing up in Saint Paul:

While campaign staffs in wards across the city work hard to get to Election Day – another race is quietly taking shape and there is already one candidate in the contest.

SPicy has learned that a very prominent Saint Paul leader has apparently decided to be the first to challenge Chris Coleman.

No, fellow SPicy readers – it’s not Tim Marx. It’s none other than William “Corky” Finney.

Finney has apparently made the decision to run for Mayor – before the “current occupant” hits the half way point.

What would make a one-time-supporter of Chris Coleman break ranks?

SPicy is on the case – and remember – you read it here first.

Finney – Saint Paul’s former police chief and a DFLer with immense political capital – would make this next mayoral race a very interesting one.

SCENE:  Mitch’s kids Bun and Zam are coming home from a day at school.

MITCH (props glasses up on bridge of nose as he reads newspaper at the kitchen table):  “How was school?”

BUN: “We learned a lot of stuff today…but…”

MITCH (Looks up): “But…?”

ZAM: “Well, it’s our teacher, Ms. Marty.  Some of the stuff she’s teaching us…”

MITCH: “Like what?”

BUN: “Well, for instance…[digs out paper from backpack]…in Literature this morning she taught us that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the greatest poet of the British Romantic period….”

MITCH: “Well, she was rather prominent…”

BUN: “No, Dad – she said “Byron and Shelley were Browning’s beeyotches“. 

MITCH (nonplussed): “Hmmmm…well…”

ZAM: “And she told me that Lord of the Rings was a story Tolkein stole from a collective of Bolivian coffee plantation serfs”

MITCH (Wrinkling brow): “Well, that’s just…”

BUN: “And then in history, she told us that Thomas Jefferson cribbed the entire Declaration of Independence from a female slave’s knitted scarf, and that ‘womyn’ not only planned D-Day, but did all the fighting”.

MITCH: “Er…”

ZAM: “And then in phy ed, she told us that Billie Jean King was the real quarterback of the ’72 Cowboys, and that Roger Staubach was just a fabulist patriarchal conspiracy”

MITCH (takes deep breath): “OK, kids.  You know how I’ve explained to you that there are two types of feminists; real feminists, who believe that the goal is to make sure that all opportunities are open to women…”

BUN AND ZAM: “Like you”

MITCH: “Right.  And then the other kind, the kind that believes in making up some phony fantabulist history to give ‘womyn’ some kind of phony ‘self-esteem’ boost.

ZAM: “So that makes Ms. Marty…”

BUN: “The other kind?”

MITCH: “Well, I think there’s always a chance for people to change.  I mean, even I was a liberal once…”

BUN AND ZAM: “Oh, jeez, here he goes again”.

MITCH (Laughing): “I know, I know…”

ZAM: “OK – then, in journalism class, she told us to write ‘reviews’ of the next season of Scrubs, and a look back at the ’08 Presidential Election”.

MITCH: “But neither of those…has…er, happened yet…”

ZAM: “She says it doesn’t matter!”

BUN: “She also says “Minnesota Monitor” is rigorously independent”.

(Pause).

ALL: “Bwahahahahahahaahahahahahaaaaa!”

MITCH: “OK.  Let’s get ready for dinner…”

(And…Scene!)

Brodkorb has more on SecState Ritchie and some interesting transactions:

I have received information this morning that certain state employees associated with Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial events have complained about receiving solicitations for contributions from Ritchie’s campaign. Secretary of State Ritchie’s official office has an active role in Minnesota’s Sesquicentennial events and his official website lists information about next year’s events.

According to numerous sources who spoke with me on background, some state employees have received solicitations for contributions from Ritchie’s campaign at their state email addresses. At no time did they provide Ritchie’s campaign with the specific contact information through which they received their solicitation for contributions from Ritchie’s campaign.

This new information widens the scope of the allegations against Secretary of State Ritchie.

Just saying.

It’s going to be an interesting Volume III on the NARN this weekend.

Jeff at TvM Ttalks about a discussion with his seven-year old on foreign policy, noting that his son’s philosophy…:

…these days is focused on the question, “Which is more powerful, the dark side of the force or the light side?”.

And I think that makes him a more nuanced thinker than Barack Obama. From the foreign policy journal, MTV:

Obama also reiterated that he would be willing to talk to such rogue nations as Iran and use diplomacy — not unilateral military action — to try to repair the image of the United States on the world stage. He promised to close the controversial terror detainee jail at Guantanamo Bay, restore the right of habeas corpus to detainees and to bring back all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his arrival in the Oval Office.

Obama has got it in his head that his path to the nomination means embracing defeatism, surrenderism, and America is to blameism.

And keep in mind, Obama is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One wonders if he’s absorbed anything sitting on that committee.

Iran has been committing acts of war against the US since 1979. Our problem is not that we haven’t talked talked to Iran, or engaged in diplomacy. Our problem is that we’ve talked too much, and engaged in diplunacy.

I’m going to my wayback machine, picturing Premier Bzurek Obamski, leader of Poland, expressing growing “concern” with German aggression – on September 1, 1969.

Overheard on NPR; smug lefty exploits the fallen troops:

Anti-War T-Shirts featuring the names of 3,734 troops who died in Iraq  

…and wraps self as potential “victim”hood…

These shirts are illegal in five states and could soon be illegal nationwide. As seen on CNN, NPR, USA Today, and of course, FOX-News.

And while he ignores the requests of families of some of the fallen who disagree with his anti-war stance (it’d dilute the message) by wrapping himself in the First Amendment…

…the “auteur” also points out – as obliquely as possible – that he’s turning a $4-5 profit per shirt.

No, you can listen for yourself, courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer.

It’d be a shame if his business accidentally fell off the table and broke.

Failure is an orphan.  Success has a thousand fathers.

And if the Iraq situation continues to improve, you’re going to see a party full of deadbeat parents rushing back.

Or so says Giuliani:

“I think they’re going to change their minds. I think the verdict of history is going to be that it was the right decision,” Giuliani said.

He argued that had the U.S. not invaded Iraq, it would now be facing two dangerous countries trying to become nuclear powers – Iraq and Iran.

“Suppose Hillary Clinton and John Edwards’ new position was their position back then, that it was a mistake to take him out,” Giuliani said, referring to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. “Wouldn’t we be dealing with Saddam Hussein becoming nuclear right now? If Iran was becoming nuclear what would he be doing? Sitting there letting his arch enemy gain nuclear power over him? Or would we now be dealing with two countries seeking to become nuclear powers.”

“Honest, Junior, the support check really did get in the mail.”

Rudy also does the unthinkable; point out that the Dems are simply not ready for prime time not serious about the world’s real situation:

On Iran, Giuliani criticized Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., also a candidate for president, for saying they would engage in diplomatic relations with Iran. Obama has said he would be willing to meet with Iran’s leader in the first year of his presidency without conditions; Clinton has said envoys below the presidential level should begin diplomatic work.

“This is the world we live in. It’s not this happy, romantic-like world where we’ll negotiate with this one, or we’ll negotiate with that one and there will be no preconditions, and we’ll invite (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad to the White House, we’ll invite Osama (bin Laden) to the White House,” Giuliani said.

 The Dems’ response?  “Stop talking mean to us”.

Well, close:

The Democrats’ campaigns quickly challenged Giuliani.

Edwards spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said Giuliani was spinning “convoluted foreign policy theories” and that Edwards “believes we have to take action to end the war quickly and responsibly and bring our troops home.”

Reid Cherlin, Obama’s spokesman, said Giuliani’s “cheap applause lines, unfounded political smears, and shoot-first-think-later politics are irresponsible in a campaign, and would be catastrophic in a presidency.”

They remind me of the Samoan lawyer from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Go over to Kool Aid Report and vote in the annual Mayor of the MOB election.

With incumbent Andy Aplikowski running a fairly low-key campaign (AKA “Throwing the Election”) and prior incumbent Doug Williams having disappeared, Hoffa-like, from sight (as in “getting kinda worried here”), it’s the most wide-open field since last year.  And the candidates are all good, except for Bobo the Chimp.

Voting is on through Friday; vote daily.  The front-runners right now are Tracy Eberle, Atomizer, King Banaian and…the aforementioned chimp.

(This blog only endorses candidates that shamelessly pander to me – at least in the MOB polls)

Cindy points us to the latest incarnation of Project Valor IT – a “Soldiers Angels” production. The goal is to raise money to provide assistive technology to wounded servicepeople.
The fundraiser brings a bit of friendly inter-service rivalry to the table; although all the money raised goes into the same pot, and all goes to support deployed troops and their families.

Me? Well, I’m from North Dakota. We are a maritime people in NoDak; the salt water is in our veins. And many is the North Dakotan, stranded on the drift prairie in mid-blizzard, who’s looked in relief to see a Coast Guard chopper flaring out to pull them to safety, or a Navy Snow-Cat hoving across the drifts with food, fuel and water, the skipper on the bridge barking orders down the voice-tubes to the helmsman.

Also, my twin uncle was a submariner. And the Navy is behind.

So here’s a link to the “Navy” donation page (and a list of the Navy team)
Anchors aweigh, and let’s turn it out for the skimmers, bubbleheads, flyboys and coasties!

UPDATE: The code screws up Firefox. I’m going to put the counter code in a separate Valour-IT page (on my right menu, or here), and provide a link to the “Navy” page.

Yeah.  We…

…are everywhere.

I got an email from my evil twin brother Jed:

I read Robin Marty’s evasive, straw-addled non-review of Indoctrinate U, and had to comment when I read this bit here:

As an English major, I picked electives that introduced me to many multi-cultural works. Yet my required classes instead embraced the “white, heterosexual males,” Norman Fruman opined in Kersten’s column that colleges were rejecting. I was given the works of Robert Browning while we skipped over his wife, Elizabeth, or even stranger, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was better known as a painter, over his sister, Christina. Complaints regarding the complete rejection of women writers for study in that class convinced our professor to give us a handout of “A Room of One’s Own” and the declaration that we can go “have a study group with it, or something.”

One simple explanation for this “disparity”; if one is teaching a required survey of Western Literature, Robert Browning and Dante Rossetti are both vastly more important figures than Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. They matter more.

For someone who’s majoring in literature – toss ’em all in there! But if you’re talking about a survey to show people where Western Lit has been and what it’s done? There’s no excuse for ignoring important authors (whiteness and maleness and straightitude notwithanding) in preference to usually-trivial female authors.

Jed, having been a lit major, has strong opinions about these things.

I’ve never liked Mark Ritchie much. 

Minnesota’s Secretary of State, swept into office last November by the anti-Republican trend of the day over the vastly more-competent Mary Kiffmeyer, came to office on a platform of empowering the indifferent and the illegal.  He’s a sloganeering stealth party hack who is dedicated to bringing masses of uninformed, disinterested people (and, apparently, suggestible ones) to the polls, as I wrote last year.  He’s a leading figure in the trivialization – read “devaluation” – of the franchise in Minnesota.

It’s also a little bit personal.  A little bird told me that Ritchie ordered the removal of the state “painting” (actually a hand-colored photograph) of “Grace”, by Eric Enstrom – a photo in whose genesis my grandmother was closely involved) from the Secretary of State’s office, presumably to be replaced by a photo of Mao leading the Long March.  Suffice to say that Secretary Ritchie might wanna ensure he was alternate backup if plans to walk in front of any buses.

But today, it’s all business.  Nothing personal. 

Allegations have surfaced that Secretary Ritchie has used his office improperly:

I have received the letter sent to Jim Nobles, the Legislative Auditor for the State of Minnesota, earlier this morning requesting that he investigate how contact information provided at an official meeting of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office ended up being used by Ritchie’s campaign to solicit campaign contributions.

The letter, signed by two attendees of the April 2nd meeting organized by Ritchie’s official office at taxpayer expense, call Ritchie’s actions “an abuse of his position as the chief elections officer”:

“On October 22, 2007 we each received a campaign email from Mark Ritchie that included a solicitation for campaign contributions.  It is our belief that Mr. Ritchie used his capacity as Secretary of State to collect information from prospective donors and transfered that information to his campaign.  We believe that this is an unwarranted use of government resources and an abuse of his position as the chief elections officer.” Source: Giga and Tomczak letter to Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles, October 29, 2007

Click here to read entire letter sent to Mr. Nobles. 

Jim Nobles – the state’s legislative auditor – is known as a person of scrupulous integrity; his office is no partisan hacketeria. 

 Stay tuned to MDE for the latest.

Sue Jeffers over at True North takes Jim Oberstar to task:

In your Tribune Counter Point comments on Oct. 26 you stated it is “unfathomable to not be moved to act decisively” after the tragedy of the bridge collapse. Well, what are you waiting for?

On August 6 President Bush signed your bill to authorize $250 million in emergency transportation aid and $5 million in transit funding assistance to MN for the collapse of the 35W Bridge. MN needs the remaining $195 million promised immediately.  Three months later MN is still waiting for the federal funding while behind the scenes state Democrats continue to play politics with state DOT funding.

Read the whole thing.

And ponder the media’s selective double-standard in covering these things.

Could you quit whining about your precious “curse” already?

The Boston Red Sox have won the World Series, completing a four-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies with a 4-3 win last night.
For the second time in four years, the Boston Red Sox sit at the pinnacle of the baseball world. After going 86 years without a World Series title, the Red Sox now have won two of the last four in most impressive fashion.

The Red Sox dominated Colorado, a team that came into the World Series having won 21 of 22 games. Boston outscored the Rockies 29-10 in the four-game sweep. Boston has seven World Series titles, which is fourth on the all-time list.

Just…stop.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Oh, yeah – and congrats, BoSox and your fans!

Craig’s List has been the source of a few really bad dates and some really great deals on household stuff.

But naturally, there’s a dark side

Katherine Ann Olson had answered online ads for nanny jobs before without trouble. But one posted on the popular Craigslist.org website for a job in Savage may have cost the young woman her life.

Olson, 24, was found dead in the trunk of her car at a Burnsville park late Friday night. She was last seen by friends on Thursday morning, when she went to meet someone in Savage about the job, which authorities said she had found on Craigslist.

As a father of a daughter who’s a few years away from going out into the world, the story is both heartbreaking and alarmng.

This quote from Olson’s mother kills me:

“We grieve even more because of what the world has lost. Not just for us, but for all these other people she would have touched,” said Nancy Olson, her face still speckled with glitter from holding a Mother’s Day card Katherine made for her a few years ago.

“Parents get to raise a child and then release them to the world. And now she’s gone to the next world,” Nancy Olson said. “We’ve had her for the time we had her. And now we’ve given her away.”

It’s hard to really add anything.

A 19-year-old Savage [“]man[“] who police believe placed the ad is being held in the Scott County jail pending charges. Authorities did not release his name but said charges could be filed as soon as today.

While I still oppose the death penalty on principle, I will applaud the first yegg who jams a shiv into the guy’s chest if he’s found guilty.

I attended the Twin Cities’ debut of Indoctrinate U Friday night at the Oak Street Cinema on the U of M Campus (details here).

Things I liked:

• It was the kind of movie I’d love to see more of, in this Youtube/ITunes/Blogger driven era of grassroots media; you could tell it was shot on video on the cheap.
• Which didn’t distract from the message; there is a systematic anti-right, anti-conservative, anti-Christian bias in american post-secondary education, at schools big (Scott Johnson’s daughter Eliana, known to bloggers of a certain age as “Yale Diva”, testified about life as an underground Republican at Yale) and small (Ahmed al-Quloushi, a former guest on the Northern Alliance, who testified about being pushed into a psychological gulag at his small California college for writing a pro-American essay.

Plenty of other notables were there: Jamie Delton was there (and I’ll hope he writes a review soon). Scott Johnson wrote about it on PowLine this morning:

The theater was also packed with a responsive crowd last night, a large part of which stuck around after the screening to hear from Evan and film producer Thor Halvorssen. I haven’t seen such a big crowd in that theater since “Putney Swope” opened there in 1969. Several University of Minnesota students were in the audience and testified to the accuracy of the film’s depiction of university life. In a recent New York Times column Stanley Fish (wrongly, in my view) pooh-poohed the film’s portrayal of the university, but he also smartly captured Evan’s genius

I’m tempted to say Robin “Rew” Marty of the MinMon went to and wrote about the wrong movie – but no, I actually saw her there. So that doesn’t explain her review.

A better one might be that the standard knee-jerk response on the left is to ascribe all conservative complaints as “whining”.

In response to Maloney’s tales – of conservative newspapers being stolen from their drop sites, of conservative students being spat upon, of conservative students being forced to attend psychological counseling for…being conservatives, Rew wrote an anecdote about one of her professors:

…and concludes:

Are there left-leaning professors who push their students? I’m sure there are, and I am sure that just like the other professors I have encountered, they have what they believe is a good reason for doing so. College is a time for new ideas, new challenges, and new outlooks. I responded by becoming more firm in many of my beliefs, just as Mitch Berg and other responded by finding a new path more suited to their convictions. But that’s education, not indoctrination.

Well, yes. That, indeed, was the point of my piece yesterday – where my advisor, Dr. Blake, helped me question the bases of my own “beliefs” as a late-teen/early twentysomething. Robin tells a similar story, and tells it modestly well (although she fails to indicate why any survey of English literature would be intellectually honest in eschewing Robert Browning’s work for his wife Elizabeth’s – indeed, there is none).

But it has absolutely nothing to do with Maloney’s point in Indoctrinate U. The film isn’t about people feeling uncomfortable about having their beliefs challenged, or about professors “pushing” their students. It’s about:

• A student Several students being accused of harassment and being coerced into getting psychological treatment for (in one example) pasting up fliers to a conservative speaker’s appearance.
• A psychology department head being harassed to within an inch of her job after being “outed” as a conservative – and the attendant lopsidedness of political beliefs on college campuses, especially in the humanities and liberal arts.
• Conservative newspapers being systematically stolen from their drop boxes.
• Conservative activists being attacked, spat upon, and harassed – for exercising their First Amendment rights (which we’ve seen in spades in the Twin Cities over the years)
• Professors using their bully pulpits to vent about politics in courses that have nothing whatever to do with politics.
• Liberal groups using mob tactics to bully non-PC groups – recruiters, especially – off campus.
• Administrations systematically enacting double standards – allowing left-leaning students to behave in ways that are sanctioned when the students lean right…

…and on, and on. The movie is 90 minutes; it’s funny and aggravating and has nothing, really, to do with anything Robin talked about.  Rew giggles, comes up with an off-topic but personal anecdote (which is intended, one supposes to counterbalance all 90 minutes of Maloney’s material) and says conservatives are whining, that it really cuts both ways (absent any actual counter-evidence).
Which, to be fair, is still no worse than the rest of the left does in addressing this issue.

You don’t have to take my word for it, of course. Get your butt on down to the Oak Street Cinema at 7:15 PM any night this week.

Kudos to the Minnesota Association of Scholars for participating in the showing.

According to the Minnesota Association of Defensive Firearm Instructors the number of carry permits issued in Minnesota topped 50,000 last Thursday.

Wes Skoglud – wherever you are? How’s that whole “blood in the streets” thing going for ya?

Huckabee stock seems to have taken a bath recently.

First Ringer sounds off with a resounding “sell” order:

Huckabee appeals to the media and pundits for two reasons. As a Baptist preacher who seems like a combination between Jerry Falwell and William Jennings Bryant, pundits believe his pro-marriage, pro-life preachings echo those of the stereotypical conservative while his “Cross of Gold” economic views have won him fans among the Manhattan/D.C. publishing nexus.

In other words – a Republican Lori Sturdevant would like, with a drawl?

Are Republicans ready – or interested – for a socially conservative Huey Long? Probably not. Populism has shallow roots in the GOP, even traditionally. One might have to go back to Alf Landon, nominated in 1936 amid the Kansas sunflowers and Republican dread over their election prospects, to find even a minor populist leading the national ticket. And given the results of that election, the argument for another populist nominee seems slight.

Huckabee – the man from Hopeless.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I The First Team – John, Brian and Chad – will shoo the Stroms from the studio and kick things off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will be in next, from 1-3.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will talk Minnesota trash after that until 5PM.

So join us on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, 11AM-5PM Central on AM1280 The Patriot, and at Townhall.com!

AM1280 has a brand new website.

Bookmark it!

Teegs?  Sar-Sar?  Two quick notes:

1. Tune your damn guitar.
2. Sarah – you know that thing where you scoop your voice like a quarter-step sharp in the middle of a phrase?  Stop it.

That is all.

I was pretty smug about what I believed when I went to college.

There, I encountered a number of professors who agreed with my smug, self-satisfied beliefs – and one who challenged them, assaulted them, turned them on their heads.

Of course, I went into college a liberal – and Doctor Blake was a self-described “monarchist”. Doctor Blake cajoled me into reading Crime and Punishment, Modern Times by Paul Johnson, The Gulag Archipelago, and PJ O’Rourke’s essays (the ones that later became Republican Party Reptile). I entered college as a kid who had been just too young to vote in 1980 – and in 1984 I voted for Reagan (and in 1996 may have done it again, although I don’t remember).

The challenge to my “beliefs” was a whack up side my intellectual head. It was also one of the things I went to college for in the first place.

Of course, Dr. Blake wasn’t on a mission to create young Republicans – indeed, I barely remember him discussing current events or politics in class. He was not on a mission to indoctrinate kids, and while when called upon he did talk about why he was a Republican and why the Democrats were wrong, it was never as an abuse of his position, at the front of a classroom.

Which is where the line needs to be – and all too often isn’t.
So as I join with King Banaian and Janet Beihoffer in hoping you can attend Indoctrinate U at the Oak Street Cinema starting this evening, I’ll also draw your attention to the latest Katherine Kersten piece. Not every professor, it seems, is as forebearing as Dr. Blake:

t’s become a common complaint that U.S. campuses are home to a stifling liberal orthodoxy where contrary beliefs are persecuted. Doyle says it’s no illusion.

A new film, “Indoctrinate U,” documenting that atmosphere, opens near campus tomorrow.

Bethany Dorobiala, a senior political science major at the U of M, knows just what Doyle is talking about. Dorobiala was one of the few students who agreed to speak on the record about the problem.

In many courses, Dorobiala says, professors load up reading lists with books that reflect their ideological agenda. “If you speak up in class and present an alternative view, you may risk being ridiculed by a professor twice your age with a PhD.,” she said. “Students who agree with the professor’s politics are regularly praised and encouraged.”

Dorobiala has encountered this disregard for intellectual diversity in classes outside of political science. “In geology class, I had a teacher who made side comments bashing President Bush,” she said. A rigid orthodoxy prevails on issues as disparate as the death penalty and global warming, she says, and some professors regularly pontificate on topics outside their discipline.

Read the whole thing. Check out the movie.

Challenge is good. Abuse is bad.

Nick Coleman is a monkey for the local chamber of commerce.

He notes (at the behest of local car dealers) that Flatiron – the company building the new 35W River Bridge – has bought a bunch of new trucks.

In Colorado.  With Colorado registrations.

A Flatiron spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment, but permit me to sum up the situation here: Buying Colorado trucks for a high-profile project in Minnesota that still carries the emotional pangs of death and destruction? Dumb, Flatiron.

This is a company that was judged to have better public “outreach” than the local firms that lost out on the project, despite submitting lower bids. Would a Minnesota company buy a shiny new fleet for the project from, say, Colorado?

Depending on Minnesota’s business tax laws, or conditions of one deal or another the Minnesota company had cut with taxpayers?

I mean, the short answer is this; I have no idea why they’d buy and register their new fleet of trucks in Colorado.  One might think that there must be some state tax-related reason to buy trucks there, in their home state and the state in which they are incorporated, rather than here.

And, by the way, while the bridge collapse was indeed an emotional cataclysm for Minnesota, I don’t care if the engineers and ironworkers involved in the reconstruction share those emotions or not.  Indeed, I’d just as soon they kept emotion out of things.