These three luminaries, (the one most at fault being the one with a line item veto power and subject to a most sincere Taxpayer League pledge to not tax unwisely or tax-and-spend profligately), were reported online by WDIO, July 5, 2008, as giving hard working citizens of Minnesota this raw slab of local pork:
The U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Museum is still bouncing back, after re-opening its door on Memorial Day last year. On Saturday, its board and curators held a grand re-opening gala, to show off a new museum logo, and new exhibits behind its doors.
The old seal, which depicts the museum itself, was renewed and brought back, along with a new brightly-colored sign on the side of the building. One of the museum's founding fathers, D. Kelly Campbell, was at the event celebrating his 90th birthday. Hockey great and International Falls native Mike "Lefty" Curran also made an appearance, saying that the museum has gotten plenty of support from its board members, the local community, businesses, and lawmakers like Representative Tom Rukavina and Senator Dave Tomassoni. During the past legislative session, they managed to set up a tax flow from mined taconite, which will provide about $80,000 a year for the next five years, for the museum.
Two new interactive displays were also shown off Saturday: two puck-shooting areas testing speed and accuracy of slapshots. Tom Sersha, the museum's executive director, says more displays are planned to grace the building soon.
There is great hardship in the land.
People are paying outlandish pump prices, the dollar is tanking, markets are teetering, and young people cannot afford college tuition and living costs while their parents are suffering foreclosures and job losses. Miners appear to have died from mining the very taconite mineral that these three --- call them "gentlemen," are specially taxing in order to put public money into a pork-project idea which should have lived or died naturally by action of the free market, only; that very same free market the one having the veto pen professes to love quite dearly, and to trust for winnowing waste.
This pernicious indefensible spending earmark is dumped on us as paid for by a special taxing earmark levied on the very stuff that well might be killing those who mine it. There is a health study now pending aimed at that very question - the mesithelioma and other lung cancer and impairment investigation involving NRRI in Duluth and the Twin Cities campus School of Public Health. That is the study precipitated by the one with the veto pen dumping his appointed head of MDH after that agency failed to promptly act on learning that not merely 17 miners had died of mesithelioma, but, by current count, 59 have so died.
And yet the special tax money so raised is not wisely being put into a health protection or monitoring or scientific research program that might offer a chance of lessening the mayhem and mischief to the workers whose sweat goes into the steel industry making money off the Iron Range.
That kind of garbage would never have passed without others, enablers, letting them get away with doing it.
Remember that.