Minneapolis potpourri-
Connie Nompelis writes of the signers to the Sayles-Belton support
letter:
Ben Bowman - Was a candidate in House District 59B against Phyllis
Kahn. Ben is a facinating young man who was still a U. student at the
time of that race, and yet actually managed to take a precinct away
from Phyllis. (I believe he was the only Repub. to take a precinct in
the city.)
[TB] No he wasn�t. There was some guy running for State Senate Dist
60 who got 65% of the vote in precinct 7-10 when he ran against Myron
Orfield. The vote was 804-423 with 11 write-ins. You know those
students at that conservative Christian college over there, they�ll
always vote for the gay guy.
Martha Bolinger comments on the Minneapolis crime rate:
Concerning the Minneapolis 35 year crime low, I believe Lisa McDonald's
campaign had numbers showing that per capita crime today is actually
higher, because the total MPLS population is less than it was 35 years
ago. The "low" refers to a drop in total numbers of serious crimes
reported. Perhaps Lisa et al could check my memory.
[TB] That is correct, if you take crime on a per capita basis it is
now much higher than it was when the population of Minneapolis was at
its peak.
Crime everywhere is going down, much of it is a function of the aging
population. Younger people commit most crime and we just don�t have as
many people in the high crime age groups as we did a few years ago.
But, that will be changing as the birth rate has been going up.
Crime, as anything that is measured with statistics, can be looked at
in a number of ways and the Mayor is using the ways that make her look
good. Her opponents won�t be as kind.
Andy Driscoll chimes in with:
You may write this on the blackboard 100 times. Downtown developers and
their pushers that use public/taxpayer dollars to feed the corporate
maw arep panicking over the possible (likely?) election of R.T. Rybak
in Minneapolis
and Jay Benanav in St. Paul, both of whom have eschewed inappropriate
public
expenditures for corporate munching at the public trough.
[TB] On this side of the river, the Strib clearly wants a new stadium,
maybe 2 of them. How can they support putting public money in to
stadiums if they come out against the Target store, Block E, etc?
Sayles-Belton should have handed the CEO of Target Corp the gold key to
the store at their grand opening last weekend with all the money we
dumped into that one. The Strib is just drooling over that building.
You can bet who they will be endorsing when the mayoral endorsement
comes out. I know enough about Sayles-Belton not to want to vote for
her, I�m not sure if this is enough about Rybak to justify voting for
him.
Finally, Russell W. Peterson writes about endorsements:
That's portraying a group of professionals as pretty two dimensional,
don't you think? Perhaps you say obvious because it made a splash, but
perhaps MPEA and others are endorsing Rybak because of less splashy
things such as the bloated increase in spending in the city
coordinators office, the massive internal services debt, the lack of
living wages in development deals, the loss of the AAA bond rating, the
lack of attention to basic services, loss of support at the state
legislature from an incompetent city lobbying group, financial weakness
in one of the greatest economic expansions of our time, and the overly
glossy image of the mayor's record. I don't speak for Rybak or MPEA,
but all of these things would compromise their jobs and the people who
work for them as well as the health of the city they so dearly work
for. Maybe they are not as two dimensional as you think.
[TB] I still think it says a lot that the groups that work closest to
the Mayor, including many elected officials from her own political
party are endorsing her opponent.
Then she shades everything. She trys to make it appear that she has a
Wellstone endorsement, she is critical of her opponent because he has
worked outside of government. Her credibility is right up there with
Brian Herron.
Terrell Brown
Loring Park
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