Proving the Republicans do not have the only freak show in town.

It says, "16 new from $0.21 37 used from $0.01"

Valued about right.

_____________UPDATE_____________
Spin, can you say spin? Democracy Now can, calling out lame spin-meistering by the State Department.

Computerworld. Amazon discussion forum threads, here and here. Rely on the cloud? Only if you've your data valuables also mirrored and backed up, on local storage.

Wikileaks is getting clouded over, perhaps, with a chance of inclement weather ahead?

Remember that we were told this latest Wikileaks disclosure thing is only a starting installment, with even more interesting things to come later.

Sure.

Wait and see. The Iranians in an English language web outlet, here, have an argument:

The apparently leaked documents suggest leaders of other countries such as Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates as well as the Israeli regime also considered Tehran's peaceful nuclear program an existential threat, urging a US attack on Iran.

At the beginning, Wikileaks sought to shed light on Washington's belligerent polices and condemn the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, analysts believe the recent document release is a scenario carefully orchestrated by US intelligence agencies to deflect attention from the United States' domestic problems, upset the situation in the region and lay the groundwork for military action against Iran.

Puzzling elements.

It was raining, so I did not take a great deal of time to show Ramsey tax payers what they're buying for being taxed. New badging, "Golly, of all things ... it's new badging".

Start with the photo, above. It shows a stylized malignant melonoma skin cancer, underneath which is a lie about Northstar. A banner attached to an expensive light pole along a stretch of sandbur fields lit by the million-dollar lighting.

A close-up:

Let's hope its a lie, since, cost-wise, the excessively unneeded signs are a drop in the bucket compared to putting fourteen million of tax money into something a mere proven handful of current bus-riding people will use. The stop. In Ramsey. Woo-woo.

If done, the entire existing tax base of Ramsey's automobile commuters will end up paying dearly for the planned crystal palace commuter-rail stop, for years. Actually - for years, and years, and years - and then more years.

It will grow on taxpayers like a real malignant melanoma, stylized per the signs you're paying to have put up around you, a brain-fart of an idea, by Darrel and cohorts.

Do we need a commuter rail stop in Ramsey, at fourteen million cost, for 150-250 persons a day, round trip, max?

Believe, however, it's coming. They say, so you pay. The riders do not pay, will not pay nearly enough to justify the fourteen million more-or-less estimated cold cash cost.

My idea, if it's built, put a commuter rail fee on parking ramp stalls, require an all day permit purchase by the rail commuters, and have a traffic patrol marking tires and writing tickets on the ramp where no permit's been purchased and the culprit parks overtime. Make the fee sufficient so that the venture is self-sufficient, that the ridership pays for the riding benefit the ridership receives. Or they drive to Elk River or Anoka, as now, and board there, as now, working fine, now.

The meter maid parking enforcement effort would be all indoor work since the top floor (exposed to the weather) NEVER has been or will be full; unless the trend continues as the latest fiasco, building yet more unwanted unneeded shared wall housing and this time without having any builder-provided parking.

The tax base - the existing residents of Ramsey wanting only restaurants, instead will subsidize some opportunistic venture from which, for all I know, Landform is extracting a fee while at the same time, we know this, it is extracting a humongo monthly fee from Ramsey, and for what? To give our local parking ramp stalls to strangers?

Go figure.

It is called "Republican Fiscal Conservatism," but screw-the-existing-homeowner-taxpayers seems a more appropriate "branding" of what's been and being done.

It is yet more of putting whipped cream atop the moribund Ramsey Town Center CORpse, as if adding a new sign added where an old sign is would change anything, so that we can have two signs memorializing a colossal brain fart of a collective bunch of people who, simply put, should have known better (or as with some, had a chance to get money off the land, and knew enough but only enough, that way).

I am a social liberal and I have not been hiding the beliefs, but I surely am more a fiscal conservative over wasting local taxpayer money chasing stupidity, than the current crop of Ramsey's elected "leaders."

Knee deep in the Big Muddy, and the damned fools say push on.


"Sergeant, don't be a nervous nellie."
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.


All of a sudden, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The sergeant said, "Turn around men,
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the Captain dead and gone.


A good Pete Seeger song, but the sensible turn-around is yet to happen - in Ramsey. More will be wasted before it happens.

I suppose so-called, self-called, fiscal conservatives, Republican genre, don't like Pete Seeger as a liberal, no matter that what he sung sounds - basically - conservative and unpretentious.

Big Muddy Melanoma double-badging next, at the unneeded light at Sunwood and Ramsey Blvd., to rub our noses in it while it is - paid for - by us.

Will the older sign of the two, as a symbol of "failure," be removed so that only the new sign,  the emperor's new clothing looking too much like a stylized rendering of a deadly menanoma skin cancer, will be all that's eventually there at the corner, across the street from the Allina clinic?

Closing close-ups next, as close as I want to be to that forlorn big-time error, i.e, photographed from across the street where the sandburs are absent.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy, and ...

Information Technology --- City of Ramsey takes one step toward the mythical paperless office, with online current data, and other anticipated website upgrading of archived materials access.

During the last council meeting, the switch toward paper-free agendas and minutes for meetings was a point of discussion noted by Mayor Bob Ramsey. If you are unsure of accessing city records online, this screenshot, with left marginal blue and red underlining added will help explain things:

The screenshot is the City of Ramsey Homepage:

http://www.ci.ramsey.mn.us/

There are two data access points noted by the blue underlining for current records, and the red underlining for archived material [the legacy LaserFiche WebLink database, maintained on a shared governmental server not internal to direct city data services]. The Public Meeting Notices feature [left sidebar, not underlined] has existed now for years, allowing residents and others to be put on an emailing service for notices regarding user-selected meeting items and date reminders.

The new feature, (blue underlining), puts all upcoming meeting materials online as produced by city staff, for equal timing of access by all citizens along with the city officials on council (or the boards and EDA, for example). Paper delivery of meeting agenda items by Ramsey police officers as done in the past is now superseded, making things paperless or starting that way, and freeing police time for policing.

The ongoing bottleneck. I had an opportunity to speak by phone with Mayor Ramsey about the other part of Ramsey data, the archive accessed as "DOCUMENTS" on the website sidebar, (per the red underlining).

That routes users to a different document server, not owned or operated by the city, where several governments share storage and access bandwidth. Ramsey has an allocation of "public" bandwidth apart from preferential staff access, as I understand things, to the LaserFiche WebLink database of past archive documents. The mayor has agreed that access by search in that data is non-intuitive, at least one city staff person has said even staff has access bottlenecks at times, and I on a too frequent basis aim to access the archive and get an "all lines busy" kind of error message, meaning the public access bandwidth allocated to Ramsey happens, when I try to log on, to be all in use.

Search is primitive there, more like search in the 1980's than by Google or Bing services now available for general web materials.

Previously, it was feasible to download pdf items from the stored images in that system, and to review searched for and retrieved materials offline, so that bandwidth was freed and not hogged by long usage and access times. Currently, after site changes, it appears some access is improved for individual image records; but if there's still a way to download pdf copies of archived materials it is a mystery to me and any reader who can explain whether it's a present system feature or removed is asked for help.

In any event, the download feature is NEEDED beyond doubt, because otherwise time online with bandwidth so limited means other subsequent users are denied access until the now lengthier sessions are concluded by users fortunate enough to log on with the first, second or third try.

Mayor Ramsey is not a database expert and says so, hence I have a request in to staff on whether/how under the new LaserFiche WebLink software update, downloads are done, if at all. Hopefully I can add an update with a positive message about this.

The Mayor indicates a longer term goal would be to convert the LaserFiche WebLink data to local storage, probably as downloadable pdf documents.

My suggestion was that Google and Bing [Microsoft's latest search brand] as part of their business model are generally happy to spider-crawl "dark web" or "deep web" data such as municipal records, and to index them for online access; free of charge to the data repository.

That means, if my understanding is correct, Google and Bing would both do indexing free of charge, with spider-crawl updates at a reasonable frequency, free of charge to the city. The business model is to optimize access to everything available, unless told not to index particular owned material, to encourage user volume allowing higher charges that the indexing services charge businesses for advertising space and for demographic access/usage data collecting which provides the income that allows indexing and access without data source fees being charged.

That might not be so, but I think that once the LaserFiche WebLink umbical is cut and the data is put onto a city owned server or other, better service, it is a no-brainer to get Google and Bing indexing for serach purposes.

In effect, twenty-first century search instead of 1980's search paradigms.

__________UPDATE__________
Amy Dietl, one of the city's information technology people, has sent an explanatory email, with screenshot detail, on the new software and data services methodology for current data [agendas and minutes].

I will post the screenshots and explanatory text in a FURTHER UPDATE, but later.

Still, the bottleneck is archive materials access, the LaserFiche WebLink part of the data storage and information retrieval services the city provides citizens.

Half a loaf, it's still better than no bread at all; but let's hope the IT bakery's not finished at that level of divided access. Clearly, it is always proper to streamline current and future methods first, and to later upgrade archive access.

This is as praiseworthy a step as renting city hall space to the license office, so people need not risk ingress-egress onto a busy stretch of accident-prone Highway 10, as with the prior licensing location, north side of Highway 10, toward the Thurston light - between there and the Sunfish Blvd. light.

With Wikileaks online showing allegations the Arabs wanted us to fight the Iranians for them, and with the Irish and Portuguese financial crises, it is ill-covered news that a global climate conference is happening.

This link.

Cancun.

Sweet.

I'd go there to discuss climate. I bet the agenda has enough personal time to it, that sun and beach would be available to experience different climate directly - during these cold, short, winter days in Minnesota that make us tough and resilient as a people.

I would volunteer to be sent there now to investigate climate conditions, it would be a climate change, for me, and I even would attend a meeting or a lecture or two.

GOP appologist Mitch Berg weighs in - lightweight - on the Tom Hackbarth scandal and how coverage, not Hackbarth is to blame. Shoot the messenger, Mitch, fails stupendously.

This link.

Dropping the watch? Napping on the job? Hackbarth-wise, so far no woofing.

ALWAYS cuts that puppy a BIG duty.

Harold Hamilton is a no-nonsense businessperson. And the key voice - key bark - underlying Anoka County Watchdog. His judgments often have merit and his past attention to detail has been sound.

I await his judgment and analysis of the Hackbarth situation, as a GOP advocate, and as a good community person.

I respect Harold.

He should weigh in on this embarrassment now facing Anoka County; House District 48A.

I know in my heart he disapproves. He should go public.

Short of going public - Harold Hamilton's opinion in this would carry much weight with GOP House leadership regarding committee chair decision making, on a permanent and not temporary or interim basis.

If Hamilton continues to choose to not publicly comment, which is his option, I am certain he has House Speaker-designate Zellers' phone number. Zellers likely would be taking his calls.

Again, I have great respect for Hamilton and his business judgment and accomplishments. A non-public contact with Zellers would be fine. I just feel a watchdog should bark at anything clearly amiss. That's all. And barking over the phone to Zellers, that qualifies as helpful, even if not serving to enhance or maintain a publicly credible image. ALWAYS cannot credibly mean SOMETIMES. It's how it is.

The bad side of my personality is considering a new snotty sidebar poll.

Vote on whether this couple should go on a diet?

Background: Here, here, here, here, here and here.

If not provoked, I'd not be judgmental about these two - but what they did proves they belong in the same category as Rush Limbaugh, per the Franken book title.


__________UPDATE_________
The two are Plymouth Neon people; this link. (That's an expired brand based on insufficient buyer appeal with the production run ending 2005; e.g., this link; and with dubious quality ratings; this link).

Was the Eagan-based TempWorks firm right in firing her as detrimental to its public goodwill?

The First Amendment protects the couples' right to willingly place themselves into Franken's Rush category; repeatedly and publicly, but doesn't the GOP support unconstrained freedom of business owners to run a business any way they want; regulation be damned?

Seems so, from things the likes of this couple often espouse.