{"id":55963,"date":"2015-11-03T08:52:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T14:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55963"},"modified":"2015-11-05T08:26:04","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T14:26:04","slug":"sitd-saint-paul-voter-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55963","title":{"rendered":"SITD Saint Paul Voter Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are two main elections in Saint Paul today &#8211; for City Council, and to fill four seats on the School Board.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll address them both today.<\/p>\n<p><strong>City Council<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>Ward 1<\/i>: \u00a0DFLer Dai Thao is running\u00a0against <del>another cookie-cutter DFLer<\/del> Tahern Crews, a Green Party candidate (h\/t Fred Melo for the correction). \u00a0Tomayto tomahto.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 2<\/i>: \u00a0A bunch of cookie-cutter DFLers\u00a0&#8211; no, I mean a bunch. \u00a0A gaggle. \u00a0if they were crows, they&#8217;d be a &#8220;Murder&#8221;, and they could actually divide into two Murders. \u00a0And\u00a0Bob Hosko, who&#8217;s a fairly conservative Democrat and a Saint Paul businessman, but has no money. \u00a0If you live in 2, for Hosko. \u00a0Since Saint Paul uses Instant Runoff voting, if enough people got out and voted Hosko, there&#8217;d actually be a chance to make a difference.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 3<\/i>: \u00a0DFLer Chris Tolbert is running\u00a0without opposition. \u00a0 It should tell you something that Tolbert is probably one of the\u00a0<em>least\u00a0<\/em>awful members of the council.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 4<\/i>: \u00a0Incumbent DFL extremist Russ Stark is running against challenger DFL extremist Tom Goldstein. \u00a0This is my ward. <strong><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">I will be writing in my senior cat, Nosemarie Berg. \u00a0I urge you to do the same<\/span><\/strong>, as there will be absolutely no tangible difference between Goldstein and Stark if you&#8217;re a Saint Paul taxpayer; they&#8217;ll be functionally identical.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 5<\/i>: \u00a0Incumbent DFLer Amy Brendemoen&#8217;s only mistake was that she used her position to muscle David Glass &#8211; a fellow DFL activist &#8211; out of his lease at Black Bear Crossing. \u00a0 Glass &#8211; an utterly conventional DFLer in every way &#8211; is challenging. \u00a0Potayto Potahto. \u00a0There&#8217;s an independence party candidate in the race\u00a0too, and like everything to do with the Independence Party I&#8217;m already bored writing about it, but I urge you to vote for the IP person, whoever it is.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 6:<\/i>\u00a0 Dan Bostrom &#8211; probably the closest thing to &#8220;moderate&#8221; on the City Council, which pisses the orthodox wing of the DFL off to no end &#8211; is running against a couple of people who will be forgotten to history in about 24 hours. \u00a0Vote for the moon for all it matters.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 7<\/i>: \u00a0Jane Prince &#8211; a DFLer most famous as former Senator Ellen Anderson&#8217;s legislative assistant &#8211; is running unopposed. \u00a0 While Prince, like Anderson, if far enough to the left to make the ghost of Paul Wellstone sit up in his grave and say &#8220;dial it back a notch, Janie&#8221;, she was actually superb at customer service when she was Anderson&#8217;s LA. \u00a0Since she&#8217;s unopposed, what the hell. \u00a0Vote for her. \u00a0Once.<\/li>\n<li><i>Ward 8<\/i>: \u00a0There is technically no Ward 8 in Saint Paul. \u00a0It is kept in reserve, against a hypothetical future threat to DFL hegemony, when the ward and its thousands of DFL votes will be pulled out of a file box in a warehouse on Plato Boulevard.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Saint Paul School Board<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Back in the eighties, Carl Sagan &#8211; who was sort of the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the 1980s &#8211; referred to the nuclear arms race between the USA and USSR as &#8220;two bald men fighting over a comb&#8221;. \u00a0While Sagan was no more sage a political commentator than DeGrasse Tyson, the analogy is apt in this &#8220;race&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This race will fill four open seats on the at-large school board. \u00a0While there are quite a few candidates, the actual race boils down to a donnybrook between&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Four formerly-DFL-and-Teachers Union endorsed candidates<\/strong> who have sided with current Superintendent Valeria Silva, and who have helped preside over the last five years of the wheels coming off in the Saint Paul Schools, versus:<\/li>\n<li><strong>Four people\u00a0<em>now\u00a0<\/em>endorsed by the DFL and Teachers union,\u00a0<\/strong>who want to change superintendents but otherwise keep the status quo. \u00a0A vote for the &#8220;challenger&#8221; is, in fact, a vote for complete, unfettered union control of the district and its money.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The outcome of the battle between last cycle&#8217;s DFLers and this cycle&#8217;s DFLers will mean precisely as much to the students and families of Saint Paul as the battle between Al Capone and Bugsy Moran meant to the poor immigrants of Chicago.<\/p>\n<p>So in this election, I&#8217;ll be voting:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Aaron Benner &#8211; the one, single solitary person on the ballot who proposes any meaningful, worthwhile change. \u00a0He&#8217;s run an underfunded campaign, and I&#8217;m not even sure he&#8217;s more than a warm body on the ballot at the moment &#8211; but I&#8217;ll be voting for him.<\/li>\n<li>Clu Berg, my golden retriever<\/li>\n<li>Puff Berg, my junior cat<\/li>\n<li>Greg Copeland<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>And I&#8217;m pretty convinced my votes will do more to further kids&#8217; education than either of the major slates.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: \u00a0Yep, Jane Prince worked for former St. Paul City councilman Jay Benanav, not former State Senator Ellen Anderson.<\/p>\n<p>DFL pols in Saint Paul\u00a0all sort of run together after a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are two main elections in Saint Paul today &#8211; for City Council, and to fill four seats on the School Board. I&#8217;ll address them both today. City Council Ward 1: \u00a0DFLer Dai Thao is running\u00a0against another cookie-cutter DFLer Tahern Crews, a Green Party candidate (h\/t Fred Melo for the correction). \u00a0Tomayto tomahto. Ward 2: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55963"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56006,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55963\/revisions\/56006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}