Dan Powers wants your support to become the DFL candidate to face Rep. John Kline in the MN-02 race. Powers is a small business owner who has become sick of politicians who don't listen. Kline is one of those politicians who doesn't have to listen because he's easily won reelection year after year.
Powers is building a grassroots campaign based upon healthcare reform, building a green economy and fiscal responsibility. He's started by hiring Mary Breitenstein ("MaryB"), a veteran of countless campaigns including Franken, and told me he will soon have a Finance Director.
"The deal is that I was a project manager for construction companies," Powers told me. "My job with those companies, and then running my own, was to listen and do what's best for the customer." An attitude like this would be drastically different than the rude and indifferent Kline. Read more about Power's background here
Powers supports a public option, wants to lure companies to build wind turbines and solar panels in his district and work hard for the people of his district. In contrast, Kline always toes the Republican party line.
Kline's main campaign theme is to ban "pork." Pork is earmarks. Earmarks are federal money to build local projects. Kline has repeatedly stated that fixing earmarks is his top priority. Kline neglects to mention that earmarks are less then 0.5% of the federal budget.
"I think that fixing the bridge in Hastings is really important," Powers said. "What Kline is doing is raising taxes locally because he won't work hard for his district. Somebody's got to pay for this so we don't have another bridge fall down. Since Kline won't even try to help, local taxpayers foot more of the bill."
My oldest son and I were returning home from a quick four store Christmas shopping trip around 4:30 Sunday afternoon. As we drove up Pilot Knob Rd toward Farmington, we approached a mini-traffic jam. After numerous cars ahead of us moved into the right lane to pass a slow driver, we were left following a white Ranger pickup going about 45 mph, and slowly swerving from side-to-side across the lane. My assumption is that he had been cheering on the Vikings or Packers with a libation or two.
I don't know if there had been any alcohol ingested, but when I approach a driver who seems to be showing signs of intoxication, I like to stay back, not in front of them, so I didn't pass. I made it the next couple miles safely home, and assume the driver of the white Ranger made it unsafely home.
I thought about that driver again this afternoon when I read a story that Dakota County is among the deadliest counties in Minnesota for alcohol related crashes. The next article I read was about earmarks requested by the each congressional representative. Among the requests was a $100,000 DUI court request for Koochiching County. It made me mad.
I know you are wondering what the maddening connection is. I got mad because Koochiching County is going to get $100,000 for an issue that is important, and that we, including our children, have a danger every day of coming into contact with, Yet John Kline didn't request any funds for the 2nd Congressional District. No funds! No transportation infrastructure improvements. No startup business funds. No hospital funds. No state trooper funds. Not even a frickin' 100K for anything DUI related, when four of the seven counties he represents: Dakota, Rice, Washington and Scott, all make the list of the deadliest DUI counties!
Rep. John Kline (R-MN) simply doesn't care what his constituents want or what's best for them. Instead he prefers tilting at imaginary windmills. He thinks that one of the US's biggest problems is earmarks. Despite the fact that earmarks make up less than 2% of spending, he has somehow reached the conclusion that eliminating earmarks will solve our budget problems.
Ironically, he used to rake in "pork" for his friends and donors prior to needing a new campaign slogan. He can't exactly campaign on standing up for polluters, large agri-business and how strong of a supporter of President Bush he was.
This latest exemplifies how out-of-touch and useless he is to his district. He recently met with a few mayors from his district.
Rep. John Kline (R-MN) wants his constituents to think that he's fiscally responsible. According to Kline the most important fiscal issue is earmarks or as Kline characterizes it, pork. He always fails to mention that earmarks are less than 2% of government spending. Ironically, he delivered plenty of pork for his friends and corporate donors before he needed a new bumper sticker slogan.
Of course, he's also hoping his constituents will forget that he voted for every irresponsible tax cut for the wealthy, that it is under his watch that a Clinton surplus was turned into a mind-bogglingly huge Bush deficit.
Kline also wants to his constituents to pretend that he's taking care of his district's business.
He's hoping they don't think our roads and bridges are important. Kline has repeatedly voted to slash the budgets to improve and maintain our infrastructure. After the I-35W bridge collapsed, complaints that the Hastings bridge across the Mississippi was about to collapse were taken seriously. The economic collapse has made it difficult to find the funding for the rebuilding effort, though.
Obviously, John Kline is unwilling to help obtain an earmark to make sure this important project could begin. So it will get done without him. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is helping obtain right of way money, but there is a $66 million shortfall, according to the Hastings Star Gazette. Officials claim the project is merely delayed.
Kline's constituents will have to be grateful that our lone Senator, Amy Klobuchar, will be working to get this project done as Kline is MIA.
One person's earmark is another person's good idea.
Earmarks get a bad rep. They can be very useful. And I believe part of the problem is how we talk about them.
Who can forget Senator McCain's Top 10 Lists of "Pork barrel" projects via Twitter? Randomly posting pieces of information with no other facts makes for good entertainment, but it doesn't help us to understand perhaps why these earmarks exist. Referring to all appropriations spending as pork does a discredit to sometimes very sound projects. How to we remedy this? Congressman Walz seems to have a pretty good grasp on what to do.
Second-District congressman John Kline was recently in the news for his unusual stand on earmark spending: He refused to request any for his district.
"If I'm in there fighting for my projects on the merits and I get $7 million, and somebody who's been here longer gets $200 million, that's not a program I want to participate in," Kline said recently.
Is this a principled stand against pork, or cutting off his nose to spite his face -- or his district? Now that some of his colleagues have released their lists of sponsored earmarks in the just-passed House omnibus spending bill, we can ask whether it's all seniority and pork or if these projects are really necessary and good for Minnesota.
Congressman Jim Oberstar, representing northern Minnesota, announced this week that a total of $90 million in federal funding would come to Minnesota under his requests. Several of his requests totaled more than $1 million, including...
