Nitwits 'r' us

Joel Hanson of Eden Prairie somehow imagines that a few months of slightly improved economic news erases all the myriad of facts illustrating new records of economic failure on the part of the current administration.

The unvarnished truth is that President Bush and his team are poor stewards of the economy: They have amassed the worst jobs record in more than half a century, piled up a mountain of government debt for the nation’s children and, equally bad, they have no realistic, fair and effective plan to fix the economy and put America back to work.

The nation has lost jobs in 25 of the 31 months that President Bush has been in office, making for the worst jobs record at this point in a presidency of any administration since Herbert Hoover. Including last July’s loss of 44,000 positions (when economists had predicted a 10,000-job increase), our economy has shed more than 2.5 million jobs and 3.2 million private-sector jobs since the president took office.

Hanson the genius figures this demonstrates Republicans are more in favor of a strong economy than Democrats.

Then there is brain boy Mark Hepokoski of Menahga, Minnesota who thinks that killing some 12,000 innocent Iraqi civilians is Ok because Saddam Hussein's political (and criminal) prisoners have been released and because the Iraqi Olympic team had a pleasant trip. He also claims the Kurds no longer have to fear poison gas attacks, conveniently ignoring the fact that they have not had to fear them since the first Gulf War when the weapons inspectors showed up and destroyed all the equipment (which the USA sold Iraq back when they were our buddies) for making the stuff. He also ignores the fact that by wasting our time and lives in Iraq, we've taken our eye of the ball -- hunting down Osama bin Laden and dismantling Al Queda.

I'm sure every country which has a despotic ruler would love to have the USA invade, cause mass civil destruction and insurrection and kill thousands of their innocent civilians in order to get rid of the despot. Just ask the surviving family members of those 12,000 Iraqis how happy they are.

St. Paul mayor vetoes smoking ban

St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly ought to just get it over with -- and change his party to Republican, a party that as it is currently constituted may as well be called the neo-con right-wing party for amoral corporate interests. Kelly apparently can't read the writing on wall, writ large by the Bloomington and Minneapolis city councils earlier this summer. He appears ignorant of, or immune to all the evidence which shows that smoking bans do not harm business over all and often even help it. Except of course the tobacco business. That must be the business Kelly is worried about when he says the St. Paul ban would "harm businesses."