Bluestem Prairie: news about Tim Walz (MN-1)

Walz on MPR: Farm Bill good compromise

Just in from MPR, Walz says farm bill is a good compromise.  Looks like Walz hopes that the perfect doesn't end up being the enemy of the good:

. . .Walz said he thinks a one week extension is enough time to finish the bill.

"There's still kinks to be worked out. Pretty big difference between the House version, especially on spending, and the Senate version," Walz said. "But, I think as planting season's here, and our producers need to get some stability in what's going on, the desire to get this thing done will override some of those hurdles that have been put out there."

Walz said the farm bill will most likely address necessary reforms for commodities and maintain a safety net for farmers.

He said legislation this big will always contain compromises. But Walz said, all-in-all, it will be a "pretty decent" bill.

The White House says both the House and Senate versions are too expensive, and it has threatened a veto of either one.

Sounds familiar.

Nebraska news: internship season just around the corner

The University of Nebraska news service reports in Internship season just around the corner that a Cornhusker will be interning in the re-election campaign of Tim Walz:

If you stay at Omaha’s Hilton Garden Inn, visit the Botanic Garden in Chicago or encounter Rep. Tim Walz’s campaign for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives this summer, you may bump into students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Summer is internship season for many college students, and they know internships are crucial. . . .

. . .Jack Ehrke, a UNL freshman on the pre-law track, echoed Sicner’s sentiment on the relevance of internships.

“It’s certainly important to gain that experience and make those connections that can help you later on in your career,” Ehrke said.

Both Sicner and Ehrke will be diving into their chosen fields this summer as paid interns. Sicner will be doing “front desk operations” at the Hilton Garden Inn in Omaha . . .

. . .Ehrke, a Mankato, Minn., native, will be working with guests of a different kind—namely those who are constituents of Rep. Tim Walz, Ehrke's district representative in Minnesota.

Though he is looking forward to his summer experience, Ehrke said he is nervous about dealing with constituents who might disagree with Walz’s views on certain issues.

“That’s just the nature of politics, and that’s something I’ll need to deal with,” Ehrke said. “I’m excited to get to have all these experiences this summer.”

To hear Ehrke talk about the variety of political science internship opportunities, click here.

Ehrke, who said he will soon declare a political science major, said internships are not required for his major like they are for Sicner’s, but he said “it’s certainly important to gain that experience and make those connections that can help you later on in your career.”  . . .

Another Mankato area college student coming home to work for Walz.

Post-Bulletin LTE: Walz gets the job done on U.S. 14

Steven Miller of Rochester writes:

Congressman Tim Walz should be commended for his strong efforts to improve the quality of life in southern Minnesota! He is doing this by bringing in federal funds to pay for local projects such as improving Highway 14.

Congressman Walz is making his funding requests in an open and transparent way that ensures accountability, makes the federal government more open and honest, and thus helps restore trust in the Congress.

Fillmore County Journal: heating and cooling with geothermal energy

The Fillmore County Journal reports on the use of geothermal enrgy for heating and cooling buildings:

LIME SPRINGS, IOWA - In 1994, Steve Johnson, of Johnson Comfort Systems in Lime Springs, installed his first geothermal system, where the earth's temperature is captured to heat and cool a home or building.

"We were approached by the Church Board of Presbyterian Church in Postville, Iowa," Johnson said, admitting that before that job he didn't know much about geothermal.

Since then Johnson's company has put in 850 geothermal units. Today, geothermal makes up 99 percent of his business.

Using a series of looped 3/4 inch polyethylene pipes that are buried six feet below the ground, a geothermal heat-exchange system removes heat from the earth to warm a home and removes heat from a house to cool it.

In nature, the ground serves as a giant solar collector, absorbing the sun's energy that reaches earth. In cold weather, heat is absorbed in the earth and released into the home via a heat exchanger. In warm weather the earth acts as a heat sink as hot air in the home is dispersed back to the cooler earth.

A geothermal system may cost around 50 percent more to install than a conventional heating/cooling system at the outset, but costs up to two-thirds less to operate, allowing the consumer to re-coup their payback in a short period of time. Savings of 70 percent in energy costs are normal.

The system is pollution free as it burns no fossil fuels and generates no carbon monoxide. The only energy it consumes is the electricity to run the heat pump. For each unit of electricity used, the system generates four units of energy from the earth.

Johnson says that while there are great environmental benefits to geothermal, most home owners are attracted to the system because it is an inexpensive alternative to fuel oil or natural gas.

A former state representative is one of the Fillmore County residents who chose geothermal:

Neil and Helen Haugerud chose to install geothermal in their new home in Carimona Township last year. In researching heating systems, Neil found real benefits in going with geothermal.

"It's a terrific heating system, Neil said, speaking about the performance of his in-floor radiant heating system this past winter. "There is no dust, no noise. The floors are warm."

Haugerud said that friends of his have had a geothermal system the last seven years and have found that they pay a 1/3 of what they used to in heating costs.

We've been in a couple of buildings that use geothermal systems and the method is indeed comfortable and inexpensive once the initial investment is made.

NUJournal: Solar energy project coming to Cottonwood County

We hear more about wind and biomass in talk about renewable energy, but today's New Ulm Journal mentions a local firm partnering with Xcel Energy to work on solar energy in Cottonwood County:

The future of electrical energy was discussed by industry experts, elected and appointed official Friday at Bridging Brown County’s Brown County Congress in the Rural Electrical Association (REA) auditorium.

Three years ago, Outland Renewable Energy (ORE) was created by five Southwestern Minnesota farmers.

Now, the firm develops, maintains, owns and operates renewable wind and solar energy projects in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Montana, Texas and New York.

The company employs 60 full-time people in its Canby and Chaska offices and plans to hire 50 more employees within a year.

The firm recently got a $2 million RTF grant from Xcel Energy to develop solar electricity at sites to be determined in Cottonwood County. . . .

Congressman Walz frequently bring up the ingenuity of Southern Minnesotans in working on solutions in the energy industry. He's definitely on to something.

Jackson County Pilot publishes urban legend--with a twist

We were reading the papers today and came across a letter published in the Jackson County Pilot over the signature of  Les Opheim of  that fair southern Minnesota city.  Labeled Food for Thought, here it is:

To the Editor:

About the time our original 13 states adopted their new Constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority will always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith (pilgrims);
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence (here now);
8. From dependence back into bondage.”

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University’s School of Law in St. Paul points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 presidential election:

- Number of states won by Gore: 19; Bush: 29
- Square miles of land won by Gore: 580,000; Bush: 2,427,000
- Population of counties won by Gore: 127 million; Bush: 143 million
- Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Gore: 13.2; Bush: 2.1

Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore’s territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.”

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency” and “apathy” phases of Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some 40 percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “government dependency” phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to 20 million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say good-bye to the U.S.A. in fewer than five years.

Les Opheim
Jackson, Minn.

Most of that looked pretty familiar, so we went online and sure enough, it isn't original. With the expection of the final paragraph about illegal immigrants, it's an urban legend, according to a page at Snopes' Urban Legend Reference site.

What makes it an urban legend?  According to the Snopes site:

1. The population of the counties and square miles of area won by each Bush and Gore appear to be accurate. They are consistent with the election-result map published by USA Today on 20 November 2000.

2. The number of states won by each candidate is wrong, but the numbers given (29 and 19) imply this piece was written before the results of the Florida and New Mexico vote-counts were determined. The final tallies were 30 states for Bush and 20 for Gore.

3. The quote from "Alexander Tyler" is very likely fictitious. His name was actually "Lord Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler," and he was a Scottish historian/professor who wrote several books in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

However, there is no record of The Fall of the Athenian Republic or The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic in the Library of Congress, which has several other titles by Tytler. This quote has also been cited as being from Tytler's Universal History or from his Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern, books that do exist. These books seem the most likely source of the quote, as they contain extensive discussions of the political systems in historic civilizations, including Athens. Universal History was published after, and based upon, Elements of General History, which was a collection of Professor Tytler's lecture notes.

Tytler's book, Universal history, from the creation of the world to the beginning of the eighteenth century, is available for viewing and searching on-line. The complete text was searched for each of the following phrases:

• Athenian Republic
• democracy
• generous gifts
• public treasury
• loose fiscal
• fiscal
• bondage
• 200 years
• two hundred years
• spiritual faith

In no case was text identified that was remotely similar in words or intent to the alleged Tytler quote.

4. Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University is not the source of any of the statistics or the text attributed to him. Professor Olson was contacted (by me) via e-mail, and he confirmed that he had no authorship or involvement in this matter. And, as Fayette Citizen editor Dave Hamrick wrote back in January 2001:

I really enjoyed one recent message that was circulated extremely widely, at least among conservatives. It gave several interesting "facts" supposedly compiled by statisticians and political scientists about the counties across the nation that voted for George Bush and the ones that voted for Al Gore in the recent election.

Supposedly, the people in the counties for Bush had more education, more income, ad infinitum, than the counties for Gore.

I didn't have time to check them all out, but I was curious about one item in particular... the contention that the murder rate in the Gore counties was about a billion times higher than in the Bush counties.

This was attributed to a Professor Joseph Olson at the Hamline University School of Law. I never heard of such a university, but went online and found it. And Prof. Olson does exist.

"Now I'm getting somewhere," I thought.

But in response to my e-mail, Olson said the "research" was attributed to him erroneously. He said it came from a Sheriff Jay Printz in Montana. I e-mailed Sheriff Printz, and guess what? He didn't do the research either, and didn't remember who had e-mailed it to him.

In other words, he got the same legend e-mailed to him and passed it on to Olson without checking it out, and when Olson passed it on, someone thought it sounded better if a law professor had done the research, and so it grew.

Who knows where it originally came from, but it's just not true.

5. The county-by-county murder-rate comparison presented in this piece is wrong.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), in the year 2000 the national murder rate was about 5.5 per 100,000 residents. Homicide data by county for 1999 and 2000 can be downloaded from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NAJCD), and the counties won by Gore and Bush can be identified using the county-by-county election results made available by CNN. (The NACJD provides not only the number of reported murders for each county, but also the population for each.) The average murder rate in the counties won by Gore vs. the rate in the counties won by Bush can be determined from this data.

By calculating the murder rate for each county and then taking the averages, we find a murder rate (defined as number of murders per 100,000 residents) of about 5.2 for the "average" Gore county and 3.3 for the average Bush county. But since people, rather than counties, commit murders, a more appropriate approach is to calculate the total number of murders in the counties won by each candidate and divide that figure by the total number of residents in those counties. This more appropriate method yields the following average murder rates in counties won by each candidate:

Gore: 6.5

Bush: 4.1

There is a distinct difference between these two numbers, but it is nowhere near as large as the quoted e-mail message states (i.e., 13.2 for Gore vs. 2.1 for Bush). Note that the average of these two figures is 5.3, which, as expected, is very close to the reported national murder rate of 5.5.

Last updated:   3 April 2008

As readers may remember from early April, the publisher of the Redwood Falls Gazette recently published a passed--along-email that is often attributed to Andy Rooney, who disavowed the contents as hateful and contrary to everything America stands for. The column, published on April 1, was not a joke.

Now we find a local Jacksonian passing another urban legend off as his own letter.  Presumeably the editors simply trusted the words to be original to the author. The final paragraph strays from the version at the urban legend reference site, though it, too, is not original, as a Google search turns up this blog post and other hits. Just the current version being spread around.

It's certainly an interesting trend: conservatives circulating urban legends in their search for The Truthiness.  We're guessing Opheim will probably use the same defense as the publisher--who cares about facts, when the sentiment is "true."   As the contemporary Ameircan philosopher Stephen Colbert said:

"We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist."

Who knew that the Snopes site--intended for checking up on facts--would become the lending library for the forces of Truthiness in Minnesota?

All-American story: Labrador retriever learns to play baseball

Or at least run bases.  She's not so good at batting, says owner Loren Lien, our favorite former Faribault County commissioner. 

Congress passes one-week extension of the Farm Bill

We found this item in Small Grains, the news source of the Minnesota Wheat Growers.  It looks to be a news release:

The House today passed a one-week extension of current farm law to give conferees a few more days to negotiate a new farm bill.   The current law expires April 18.

The extension will allow farm bill negotiators to continue their work on the 2007 Farm Bill and create a new deadline of April 28th to complete their work.  The measure will extend the 2002 Farm bill while Farm Bill negotiators continue to work out the details of the 2007 Farm Bill.

Congressman Walz is confident that the conference committee is making good progress and with a little more time the farm bill negotiators will be able to strike a deal.  The House Ways and Means committee and the Senate Finance Committee chairs are negotiating a funding framework that will outline how much new spending the package should support and what offsets should be included.   Once we have that framework completed, I am confident that the rest of the farm bill negotiations can be completed within a short amount of time.”

The funding package is necessary as pay-go rules require Congress to offset any new spending with tax revenue or spending cuts.

While President George Bush told Congress he would want a one-year or longer extension of existing farm legislation if Congress was unable to complete a new farm package by April 18, USDA Secretary Ed Schafer has previously given farm-state lawmakers some hope of still another short-term extension when he said if there is enough progress made in ongoing negotiations, he would support another short-term extension.

Hopefully they'll get 'er done.  The Star Tribune notes that Congressional climate has become tougher for farm bill.

If wishes were horses.....

....Brian Davis's campaign would be riding the World Famous Lipizzanzer Stallions. From the Duluth News Tribune article Democrats dream of a good congressional vote:

St. Olaf College political scientist Dan Hofrenning said Walz looks good heading into the election cycle because he has avoided making big mistakes, carved out a moderate record and raised a lot of money.

“Walz has been a leader on the issues that play with the voters in the district,” [DFL chair Brian] Melendez said, citing the congressman’s position on veterans’ issues, the Iraq war and renewable energy.

The GOP considers Walz the most vulnerable of Minnesota’s seven congressional incumbents, [Republican Party of Minnesota chair Ron] Carey said, because he campaigned as a moderate but usually votes with liberal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Republicans endorsed Mayo physician Brian Davis, but he faces a primary contest this fall with state Sen. Dick Day.

“If we can muster resources behind Brian Davis, I think Tim Walz is very vulnerable,” Carey said. [emphasis ours]

The National Journal recently ranked Walz a centrist, so the professor is probably more accurate than the party boss.  And for now, the hope that resources will come Davis's way is a pretty big "if."

The Mankato Free Press provided a tidy analysis of Davis's dismal fundraising:

With detailed numbers now public, Congressman Tim Walz's fund-raising advantage over Republican- endorsed can­didate Dr. Brian Davis of Rochester is actually more daunting.

As previously reported, Walz raised $ 352,000 in the first three months of this year com­pared to $58,491 for Davis. But the full reports to the Federal Elections Commission show that $24,000 of Davis' receipts in the first quarter were a loan he made to his campaign.

And because Davis spent nearly $ 30,000 more during those three months than he raised, even with the loan included, his cash- on- hand declined from $ 80,000 to $ 50,000. Walz, by contrast, saw his campaign balance rise by more than $200,000 to more than $1 million.

State Sen. Dick Day's fund­raising totals are also now on file. While the longtime legisla­tor initially appeared to be run­ning third with just $16,000 in receipts for the quarter, he's actually in a slightly better position than Davis. Day, R- Owatonna, is hoping to win the GOP nomination in September and be Walz's oppo­nent on Nov. 4.

And as we noted in The new Minnesota miracle: candidates who court both delegates and contributors , Davis's excuse for the pith-poor fundraising is that he couldn't do both. Three DFL candidates in contested endorsements in both the Third and the Sixth were able to each raise over $100,000 without loans from themselves or in-kind contributions self-funding them.

The endorsed GOP candidate in the First? We took a look:

Davis took in $15843.00 in individual contributions.

The Freedom Club, the West Metro rich man's group, gave him $10,000.

He provided $8648.90 in in-kind contributions, mostly mileage.

He loaned himself $24000.00   He also owes venders $10804.30.

If Davis is riding in anything, we think Phoenix Woman has the right call.

Community wind: why changes in the tax code make sense for Minnesota

We've written before about the need to extend the production tax credit for the wind energy industry and Congressman Walz's proposal to open it to local investors, as well as the importance of the wind industry in Southern Minnesota.

NuWire Investor, a source that covers "news, trends and opportunities in the alternative investment marketplace," has published an article about Community Wind Power: Local investors seek to transform the rural energy landscape. It's largely about the economic benefits of  local investment in wind to rural communities:

As is the case with almost all renewable energy investment opportunities, viability depends largely on public policy decisions. Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) has proposed a bill that “would allow wind project investors to access up to $40,000 of the PTC against ordinary income,” a move that Farrell claimed “could help as many as 30 percent of Americans access federal incentives for owning renewable power.” With the remaining U.S. presidential candidates all pledging more commitment to energy independence, it’s likely that legislation will produce a richer environment for clean energy investors in coming years.

Even under current policy conditions, community wind projects are held in high regard by both investors and local communities. Minwind Energy, one of the first farmer-owned wind farms in Minnesota, is touted by Windustry as “an innovative business model that allows local investors to own their own commercial scale wind turbines. The group installed four 950 kW turbines (Minwind I and II) in 2002 near Luverne, [Minn.] and seven 1,650 kW turbines (Minwind III-IX) in December 2004 near Beaver Creek, [Minn].”

The importance of local ownership is not simply a concern of investors, it also has an impact on the local economy. In the University of Minnesota study cited earlier, the economic benefits of a locally-owned wind farm are compared to those of corporate owned farms which have no local investment. While the findings are recognized as an upper-bound estimation, it is suggested that “community wind has 5 times the economic impact on local value added, and 3.4 times the impact on local job creation, relative to a corporate-owned development.”

Interesting potential. The piece underscores the difference between serious policy making about energy and the ideological pandering to a perceived base that we're seeing on the part of the NRCC and the endorsed GOP candidate in the First Congressional District.  Rather than being lauded as an economic driver, the PTC is used as a based for a cheap shot by national Republicans. The DFL notes the extremism of the candidate's energy proposals in general here.