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chuck holtman

minneapolis, MN
Commenter for
3 years 37 weeks

Recent Comments

Posted on 05/24/12 at 04:36 pm in response to City Council follows stadium script, approving project 7-6

If we just completed the devolution back to lions and whatever disfavored folks might now be selected (let's have a vote!). If the owners didn't have $200M payrolls we could negotiate much better stadium funding terms and, given the appetites of lions, we could maximize public use by having stadiums everywhere and events every day! Wouldn't even need any bread with our circuses!

Posted on 05/25/12 at 09:42 am in response to Agenda 21 and looming battles over urban development

Extremely nicely put. I'll add that as in almost all things from the ideological Right, psychological projection rules the day. What is claimed as the free market is the result of canonical market failure: monopoly, subsidy and "information asymmetry." What is claimed as social engineering is the orthodox response to market failure. But again, facts don't count. It's bumper sticker ideology as attempted diversion from the inner discomfort about a worldview that is obliterated by the...

Posted on 05/23/12 at 05:01 pm in response to Taxpayers League unscientific survey says Minneapolis residents oppose stadium deal

Paul, I'm not a polling expert, but I think a push poll is one that is a slander of a candidate dressed in the flimsy raiment of a polling question, e.g., "Would you be more or less likely to support candidate X if you knew that he had been convicted of Y?" - where Y is just conjured. This poll question appears to be factually correct (though perhaps understated - I think $875M is the actual Mpls cost). And the outcome is certainly consistent with all other past polls and anecdotal...

Posted on 05/11/12 at 04:28 pm in response to Scott Walker told a big donor that his strategy on unions would be to 'divide and conquer'

What permanent trauma will he suffer by being the only child whose name does not begin with "K"? Why have his parents chosen to hang this mantle of ostracism on him?

Posted on 05/11/12 at 10:11 am in response to Reaction to Vikes stadium deal

"‘I know it happens across the nation, but it saddens me to think that our citizens believe that this is a wise expenditure of tax money,’ Newman said.”

Senator Newman need not be sad, since by all accounts a substantial majority of Minnesotans did not favor this. The lack of vision, leadership and courage shown by Governor Dayton and legislators who pushed this through is breathtaking. We might have led the nation in moving from an economy of waste and spectacle to one based on...

Posted on 05/10/12 at 12:16 pm in response to With $50M more from Vikings, House passes compromise stadium bill

The Mn Supreme Court has ruled that circumventing the Open Meeting Law thru a series of non-quorum meetings is illegal. But the legislature isn't subject to the Open Meeting Law. It's subject to its own open meeting law, which requires committee meetings to be open, except ... (wait for it) ... the courts have no jurisdiction to enforce it! Self-enforcement only.

Posted on 05/08/12 at 09:03 am in response to House passes stadium bill, but NFL is not pleased

and I'd be glad for the city to kick in another $105M so the NFL won't be unhappy with us. I've been thinking that $850 million (oops, I mean $150 million) is a bargain. Nothing is more important to me and my family than some guys running into each other and getting concussions.

Posted on 04/24/12 at 09:48 pm in response to Here's the Minneapolis City Council's pro-Vikings-stadium resolution

Eric: For 15 years I have gone by the Dome pretty much every day to and from work, and not once have I ever seen any human activity there. I'm not doubting what you say, I'm simply stating my own experience. Perhaps the two can be reconciled. Beyond the question of frequency of use is the question of how many of those uses/events could readily have been accommodated elsewhere. Again, there are many analyses that could have been done to support the stadium (public financial/risk analysis...

Posted on 04/13/12 at 11:47 am in response to Talking with Jeff Blodgett and dissecting Team Obama's language

The Democrats have relied on Fairness since forever. It's a term with connotations of weakness and victimhood and readily mischaracterized by Republicans as class warfare, envy, income leveling, selfishness, etc. The Democrats should take a page from the Rove playbook and base their rhetoric on Freedom. Take the term away from the Republicans and in this case it would have a strong foundation. The Republicans' "Freedom" means a lottery in which everyone has the abstract possibility of...

Posted on 04/11/12 at 05:06 pm in response to Is political conservatism our 'default mode'?

But it is consistent with other features of current Right/Left thinking:

(1) The Right appeals to the fear of the unfamiliar and the desire for security; the Left argues for a worldview that seeks to expand the embrace of the "other" across dimensions of geography, culture, species and time. In other words, the Right seeks to drive folks down toward the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy and the Left seeks to raise them up into the realms of the self-realizing and other-regarding. It...