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Andrew Richner

Minneapolis, MN
Commenter for
2 years 14 weeks

Recent Comments

Posted on 08/15/12 at 10:30 am in response to Technology could supplant voter IDs at polls, but registration problems remain

For the sake of clarity:
- The blurb at the bottom indicates this is a nationally-published series. Since most states DO record party affiliation in their poll books, presumably "party affiliation" was included as a datafield in hypothetical electronic poll books here because they are summarizing proposals across numerous states. Since Minnesota doesn't currently require that information, I wouldn't expect that moving to electronic poll books here would add that data.
- Poll...

Posted on 08/06/12 at 09:08 am in response to Something's coming — something good (we hope) — on Lake Street

It's interesting to me that this article plainly demonstrates how city planners bowing to the wishes of suburban big-box retailers turned out to be a huge blunder on their part which has been an embarrassment for years and has taken decades to undo, while this same column a couple months ago endorsed changing the zoning and putting the Trader Joe's in on Lyndale.

You have the same arguments being made about that development as is stated were made for razing business space at Lake/...

Posted on 07/19/12 at 09:09 am in response to Franken takes Facebook to task over photo tagging

Facebook says they have a policy of not sharing "face print" information with other companies, but I would also be interested to know what authority law enforcement in the U.S. and abroad has to subpoena or otherwise demand access to Facebook's face print database. Surely the Patriot Act permits use by the FBI, CIA, etc. of such a database if they so wished. It's well-known they monitor Facebook activity and use it to spy on perfectly law-abiding citizens with sufficiently "dissident"...

Posted on 06/26/12 at 02:34 pm in response to ‘Liberated’ authors Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein forsake burden of nonpartisan credibility

For your metaphor to hold water, you would have had to have spit out everything she ever cooked for you, never done any housework, pit the kids against each other, and then put your fingers in your ears and sang "la-di-da-di-da, she's evil," at every counseling session. If that was the case, then, sorry, but the relationship was done anyway.

Posted on 06/20/12 at 02:38 pm in response to Pawlenty on the ticket? Two presidential thinkers assess his chances

More evidence that he wouldn't "do it" for Republicans is this: when was the last time you heard even a Minnesota politician tout his or her conservative cred by name-dropping T-Paw? If he was veep material, he would still have clout and presence in the local party, but he couldn't cut it on the ground here.

Posted on 06/13/12 at 02:25 pm in response to What if we dumped the Fed and returned to the gold standard?

This is what I don't get about it. Ron Paul also endorses the subjective theory of value as his preferred approach to economic value -- i.e. that prices determine the value of a commodity and it possesses no intrinsic value. However, his argument for the gold standard relies precisely on the principle that there IS an objective value to gold. Isn't this a contradiction? He wants to base our currency on the market, but wasn't the problem with the mortgage crisis precisely that debt became...

Posted on 06/14/12 at 09:03 am in response to What if we dumped the Fed and returned to the gold standard?

I agree that re-attaching our currency to the gold market is as arbitrary as attaching it to virtually any commodity market, but I think there is a distinction between why it isn't the banana market but needs to be a rare metal market and I think that the reason for this is important to understanding the ideological foundations of libertarian economic policy.

Obviously the problem with "the banana standard" is that that would mean the money supply grows on trees. That's the opposite...

Posted on 06/07/12 at 08:44 am in response to When it comes to public subsidies, Twin Cities light rail seems a bargain

Presumably the legislator who went ballistic was perennial LRT opponent Mike Beard (R, Shakopee). Following last year's shutdown, he whined that too much money in the deal that was eventually made went to Metro Transit, complaining that his "friends" in SW Transit weren't getting enough of the pie. Beard's friends are likewise threatened by a big ol' Metro Transit-run light rail line running straight into the heart of their turf.

Thank you for the subsidy comparison. The Met...

Posted on 05/24/12 at 09:03 am in response to What Charles Krauthammer thinks about Obama and the election

That's because the "Big Government" line is just superficial rhetoric, which is what invalidates Krauthammer's analysis of the underlying meaning of this year's election. Conservatism is not really about the size of government, but the scope. If you look at Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan, the founders of today's conservatism, their understanding of society is that it's an unruly mob which will erupt into chaos if not kept in check by an organizing elite -- the...

Posted on 05/15/12 at 04:26 pm in response to Pawlenty offers truisms about our problems, but little about his future

I Googled the 150 year figure and found that there is enough natural gas to supply current demand for 150 years. We'll run out of natural gas before 2160, though, because natural gas consumption continues to grow and the reserves therefore decrease exponentially (not linearly as TPaw tries to get us to assume). The only way that gas will last 150 years is if we do not increase consumption. So how can he argue that cars should be moved to natural gas, thereby increasing consumption of it...