Fox tries, Fox lies, nobody buys. Is it that nobody except the intellectually challenged pays attention to Fox (apart from Fox sports, where broadcasting local baseball IS both credible and useful - Fox Sports has the ugly step-sister).

This link if you care to follow the story links or review reader comments. The screenshot captures the gist of it. As always click the image to enlarge and read. The Gallup link is worth including -- half of Republicans blame Bush.

____________UPDATE____________
Two other interesting poll results, here and here. And some may want to say or think Romney if elected would be no different than Bush. I tend to equate Romney to Cheney, not to Bush. Cheney understood the ethic of corporate raiding, and along with his secret cabal practiced an oil patch Darth-Raider version, (including inducing fruitless oil wars with Romney looking poised to do the same). I expect an election with Romney being the cobra, Obama the mongoose. Obama dodging all the myriad slung venom, ultimately having a lunch.

Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Are Ramsey town officials intent on flattering their Vadnais Heights counterparts?

Ramsey, this online city calendar [highlighting added]:

Woo, woo. A community sports complex!

Vadnais Heights, here (with italics emphasis added).

Article by: TIM HARLOW , Star Tribune
Updated: May 8, 2012 - 8:34 PM

The Vadnais Sports Center, controversial from the start, has sunk into a financial morass that has city leaders faced with the choice of cutting ties with the arena and defaulting on $26 million in bonds or assessing taxpayers $1 million to keep it running.

Revenues have fallen short of projections. Expenses have exceeded budget. And the center that officials promised Vadnais Heights residents would be able pay its own way without their help has been delinquent in remitting a year's worth of sales taxes to the state.

[...] While there are no immediate plans to close the center, the glitzy facility that opened 19 months ago has created discord among city staff and council members.

Some City Council members and staff suspected that the arena at 1490 E. County Road E was under-performing financially, but the complexity of the bond financing and confusion over the ownership arrangement made it difficult to get a grasp on the depth of the problems. They recently got a clearer picture of the seriousness of the problems after seeing a council-ordered audit.

According to documents obtained by the Star Tribune, the sports center owes Vadnais Heights $127,000 for a loan the city gave it last year to make a bond payment. The center also owes the city $47,000 for unpaid legal and insurance costs, and there are $54,000 in unpaid utility bills. But most alarming for council members is that even though the arena turned an operating profit of $330,000 in 2011, that was far below the amount needed to cover debt service of $1.1 million.

[...] In championing the sports center, [former mayor Susan] Banovetz and others said the arena would have 1.3 million visitors and generate $2.3 million in revenue in its first full year, enough to pay the bills without tapping city money or needing a taxpayer bailout.

[... Q: She could not see how it could fail?]

Compounding matters is that the center owes money to the Minnesota Department of Revenue. [...] An accountant hired by the city said he feared the department would put a lien on City Hall.

Vadnais Heights already has contributed $3.2 million to the project, and, as master lease holder, is responsible for covering bond shortfalls. Bond payments are scheduled to rise to $1.6 million in 2013.

Who's in charge?

Signs of trouble surfaced about a year ago when an audit by the Edina firm of Abdo Eick & Meyers found that there was confusion about who was responsible for financial aspects, the city or the nonprofit Sports Facility Development and Management Group that the city hired to run the arena.

That confusion resulted in a $79,000 insurance check to pay for a dome collapse in 2010 being deposited into the management group's account instead of the sports center's account. It's still not clear if all the money has been transferred to the sports center's account, according to city memos.

Auditors also found that the arena suffered from sloppy recordkeeping and had been lax in checking user permits. The findings attracted the attention of State Auditor Rebecca Otto, who ordered changes.

The city complied. It took over the sports center's checkbook, and more recently it put out a request for proposals with the possibility of hiring a new management company. Sports Facility Development and Management Group's contract is up Dec. 31.

The center made its $582,000 bond payment in February, but it needed the loan from the City Council to make it. Another $582,000 payment is due in August.

The facility is "not self-supporting," the city said in an April 12 news release.

That's what some arena opponents tried to tell city leadership long before construction workers turned the first spade of dirt.

A separate management entity - for Ramsey just as in Vadnais Heights? Why not? Decisions will be made. Perhaps a Landform - Look Signs - Flaherty joint venture LLC could be formed to manage the Sports play place contemplated for Ramsey. All things are feasible. Possibilities are limitless.

Perhaps Ben Dover could own a piece of the management operation. The risk piece for Ben.

The reward piece, if any, would not be for Ben, but rather for the private sponsors of such a thing. Flaherty would approve of such a sports play palace arrangement. It would have the spoor of Flaherty ways and means all over it, so what's to not be liked by Flaherty? Or Cronk? We wait. We see.

Perhaps Ramsey could finally form that elusive "Port Authority" to manage the play palace (as if it were a port).

Again --- Possibilities abound. City officials will grab the brass ring, or put Ben under from the trying.

____________UPDATE___________
Earlier times, rose colored glasses, the mayor was excited; here.

__________FURTHER UPDATE_________
PiPress, here, by Sarah Horner, June 12, headlined, "Vadnais Sports Center pitched as a project that couldn't lose. It has."

The Vadnais Sports Center wasn't supposed to cost residents a dime.

The plan was this: The city of Vadnais Heights lends its bonding authority to a nonprofit that builds a 200,0000-square-foot sports complex on blighted acres in the northern suburb.

Revenue from arena rentals, along with a reserve fund, were to cover bond payments and operations for the $26 million facility, city council members were told, leaving the city with a cleaned-up corner of town and residents with two hockey rinks, a domed field and a running track.

"To me, it's a win-win," then-Mayor Sue Banovetz said in 2008, when the city first started talking about a sports center.

Fast-forward to today -- 17 months after the complex opened -- and city council members are wrestling with a different reality. Accusations of mismanagement, threats of lawsuits and growing financial problems are swirling around the arena.

"Is this where I (expected) us to be right now? No. ... Are we working diligently to correct the situation? Yes," said Marc Johannsen, the city's current mayor.

Preliminary numbers included in the sports center's 2011 audit indicate revenue was about $750,000 less than expected last year, according to city documents. To fill in the gap, the city has loaned the complex about $225,000 and is expected to hand over at least an additional $400,000 in August. The city's general fund is about $5 million a year.

Bond payments go up next year, meaning the need for loans could get even bigger.

We had a Ramsey Town Center launched during the Norman-Gamec times that "couldn't lose" either. Now we have a city financed rental bonanza [with a bank having the lien on the property, not the city], and it "can't lose" either, some say.

Sure. This year, the Boston Celtics couldn't lose with the lead they had in the Miami series.

As with lawyer money for covering for their misdeeds and mismanagement with Brodkorb, Minnesota Repbulicans are intent on finding a way to waste more tax money on lawyer-fee money. Sure they say they are job creators, primarily for their croney lawyers; not for the 99% (which includes the lower-upper and middle classes, i.e., all but the unreasonably powerful and rich who run and fund the class war against all the rest of us).

Image from here.

Brodkorb, the latest, here. Voter-ID waste atop that, here.

When will it stop? That elephant is getting heavy.

And it is not sitting on any fat cat. It's you carrying the weight, so grin and bear it.  How's this for a Q and A?

Q. Who's bringing a three legged stool to the legislature?

A. Troves of Republican lawyers, for milking their cash cows.

A "job creator" having an Olympic reach and passions.

E.g., here, here.

The Banobo genome. So was the Gipper's pal Bonzo a chimp, or a Bonobo?

Ars Technica reporting, here.

Nature publishing the multi-author item online, full access, (where multi-author is the norm on genome sequencing), here.

Supplementary item, more than you might care to learn, here.

Human, chimp and bonobo common ancestry.
Click to enlarge and read. From here.

Megaupload - fallout. Does the government owe a duty to users of online file locker services to preserve legitimate owned-and-stored data?

The obvious answer for a user, after the Megaupload seizure-shutdown, is if you use cloud storage and/or a file locker service with special irreplaceable data - the high-school football tapes when you scored all those touchdowns or led the cheerleader corps, then store it with multiple services. One getting shut down will not cause damages, if you do that. Also, there is local workstation backup in case of a hardware failure or a theft. For backup the ideal is off-site, not the portable drive on the USB port that you keep attached to the computer since a thief is not going to be courteous and leave it behind in taking all else. That is cause to use the cloud. To use file locker services. The problem, file locker folks such as Megaupload appear to have part of the business plan being support of piracy. Or winking at it, at best, and the film-recording people are bloodthirsty over getting their royalties off artists' works. And if you use a file service or cloud account where you only utilize the free five gigabytes of storage and pay nothing, would you only be owed your fee back, i.e., zero in damages, if there is a seizure of a service provider's domain by the feds, as with Megaupload?

It seems simple, the feds shut it down, seizing the files - all of them - as evidence, and then tell private persons who did no wrong - who pirated nothing - to f.o. because the feds owe them nothing - people will further dislike the government that apart from such things as file sharing - cloud storage, has given citizens ample cause for hate, fear and loathing. The attitude of we-owe-nothing because you assumed all risk in dealings with these people, including the risk of government actions, is an attitude that begs further attention.

Your data is your property. Intangible personal property, unlike land and buildings. But property.

If it is seized by the government, are you not owed "due process" under the Fifth Amendment? When the government seizes land and buildings, they traditionally have been constrained to not adopt an f.o. attitude.

So, what's the real difference?

Then there is the responsibility placed by the Constitution on the feds to honor and not impede "freedom of contract." While each case may need exposition on what contract freedoms are fundamental, if you place property in custody of another are you not entitled to reasonable expectations? When local authorities shut down a pawn shop they do not walk off with the goods and tell people still having redemption rights to go away. Again, where's the difference?

All that is a prelude, to this online item giving some detail on the very issue being litigated - innocent data owners who entrusted stuff to Megaupload apart from any piracy that may or may not have happened.

As a side-note, giving Google returns on the Constitutional provisions begs the question of nuances that may apply. However, in conforming existing law to new situations, generality and a fresh look apart from nuances of precedent in other situations is not necessarily a bad thing. Precedent is precedent. Common sense is not necessarily in tune with precedent, especially if precedent is reviewed by judges lacking rudimentary common sense (and such judges do exist). Cloud storage and file lockers are new - the entire web and present levels of connectivity and access to information stores of unprecedented magnitude, is access from the home not ever available before. However for perspective, the law of bailments is older than Blackstone, so what should courts do? Most bailment litigation is between bailor-bailee, the two private parties, and most of it is in situations where government action is absent - vs. Megaupload where government action was the precipitating cause of having to ask about innocent third party rights and expectations the law should honor.

_____________UPDATE____________
Two members of the US House, one Republican and one Democrat, propose an "Internet Bill of Rights," but it seems the old fashioned founding-fathers' Bill of Rights is more on point for the innocent Megaupload user than their proposal; online here.

NOWTHEN: Laurie Olmon has decided to not seek reelection, and issued a press release aimed at advising candidates and her successor.

Nowthen does not have a primary, all council seats open for election any cycle are town-wide, at large, and the top vote totals determine who will serve starting next January. I believe seats are staggered so that there will not be a total replacement of the council in any one election.

I met Laurie while she already was on the Nowthen city council, but had declared as a DFL candidate in old Senate District 49, where Mike Jungbauer was then the incumbent.

Peter Perovich won the DFL's Senate endorsement and Olmon at the convention dropped from that race endorsing Perovich, and entered her name as a House district DFL candidate. She won that endorsement, eventually and unfortunately losing the general election to GOP incumbent Tom Hackbarth. Laurie and her husband have become personal friends and I regret her not feeling able to continue in office as actively as she believes the office deserves. Below is her press release which you can enlarge and read. Laurie is one of the good people who enter politics entirely as a civic responsibility, and wholly without any personal or family agenda of conflicting interests. Because we sometimes have seen land speculators crassly seeking office to further advance personal or family pecuniary agendas, it is good that most folks running for city council in the north metro are, like Laurie, not in that camp.

click the image to enlarge and read

My hope is to still be able to exchange email with Laurie over issues and events, for years and years. And that, health permitting, she may again hold office. Please read her thoughts in the press release.