Minnesota Politics News

Rationing is one of the terms the right likes to throw around to scare people about health reform. The government is going to ration care! They won’t cover important procedures! They’ll put senior citizens to death to save money! We’ve heard all of these arguments.
They neglect to mention, though, that rationing is already a part of [...]

That's the word this morning from Steve Sviggum's office at the Department of Labor and Industry. As we noted a few weeks back, the DLI commissioner and former GOP House speaker put his run for governor on hold after learning that his role in administering federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) funds might disqualify him from running for partisan office under the terms of the Hatch Act.

Sviggum, who's currently attending a conference in Salt Lake City, requested an advisory opinion on the matter from the Department of Justice's Office of Special Counsel (OSC) in mid-July. An OSC rep tells PIM that the status of the request is treated as private information, but adds that "we try to respond to these requests in weeks, not months." 

An adverse OSC opinion would likely

read more

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a
second term as Iran's president Wednesday, protesters chanted "Death to the Dictator" in the streets surrounding the ceremony.

That bloggers wrote about Michael Brodkorb's blatant hypocrisy with regards to Colin Peterson's decision to no longer hold Town Hall meetings is no surprise; MudSlingerMike's pals at his old radio gig tagged him as being in charge of "special ops."  What is surprising is one member of the traditional media picking up on it.  Monday's  St. Cloud Times Editorial noted:
Really, though, the worst out of all this is the state Republican Party's attempt to turn his (Rep. Peterson's) comment into a campaign issue. It plans to run advertisements about it across the district this week.

"Really, Collin, 25 percent of your constituents are so out of touch they believe the U.