The Wege linked to:
Nasty things to say while not taking responsibility for a collapsed bridge
or Senator Day's column in the Strib. Tom Scheck at Polinaut summarizes the commentary:
GOP State Sen. Dick Day (who is also running for Congress) writes a response to DFL Sen. Steve Murphy's response to an interview with Lt. Gov. (and Transportation Commissioner) Carol Molnau. Got all that?
Our favorite reaction comes from our friend McPherson Hall. Minnesota Central takes a look in Dick Day is right ... there is a Leadership Failure. He begins:
Dick Day’s Op-Ed piece : Leadership failure? Look to the DFL aptly uses a variety of phrases – “shifting blame is laughable”, “It's good theater” and ”I suggest we stop the grandstanding”.
Day’s right … but he’s doing all those things in his editorial.
Frankly, it is embarrassing that someone of Day’s stature would resort to comments that might be more attributed to a “political hack” or blogger.
The calumny used by Day in describing Congressman Oberstar “-- whose name never appears in print unless it is accompanied by "the powerful chairman of the House Transportation Committee"” is childish.*
I have never meet, nor spoken with, Congressman Oberstar although I have written negative and positive commentaries about his proposals … yet it is inappropriate to mock how the news media may describe Oberstar. Petty personal attacks may be best described as "grandstanding".
What is outlandish is that Day complains that Oberstar's proposal of a “5-cent federal gas tax, but we know now that's not going to happen. Congress has been unwilling to raise the federal gas tax in 15 years” yet Day in February 2005 proposed a nickel-a-gallon gas tax hike to pay for transportation projects, which would violate Pawlenty's staunch no-new-taxes pledge. link . If Day “knew” that 435 members of Congress would not approve a tax increase, Day certainly knew that Pawlenty would not approve a Tax Increase.
Transportation has been a major issue for Day, yet his Leadership has failed.
Go over to Minnesota Central, read the rest, and say hello.
We did find ourselves in disagreement with one of MC's observations. He writes:
But shifting blame is what this is all about. Day and the other members of the legislature for years have underinvested in transportation. Day complains about Highway 14 … and those of us who have traveled it know that this is not a new problem … but decades old. But Day knows that.
Actually, we're not sure Day knows Highway 14 is a problem. On his campaign website, we find this remarkable passage:
As an individual legislator, Day became a leading voice for transportation funding, working to reprioritize wasteful metro spending in order to deliver tens of millions of dollars to expand the local stretch of Highway 14. Thanks to his bipartisan and persistent efforts, a decrepit length of road that once killed dozens of Minnesotans a year is today a safe and efficient corridor for families, farmers and commercial vehicles.
In other words, one local stretch of the road that includes Day's Owatonna is fixed...problem solved. Tell that to the people west of Mankato, and east of Rochester. Only the release of federal funds in early November seemed to have rescued the 2008 improvements between Owatonna and Waseca.
* Day's childish bluster about the tag line is also highly inaccurate hyperbole, but then, since Day doesn't use a computer, he probably didn't realise that readers can use "google news" to check it out. A search of the last month's news turns up exactly one such reference: Day's column itself. Heck, even a plain old-fashioned google web search turns up only six hits, half of which are repeats of the same material.
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