Part of the problem, now he writes a book to further finance his retirement. Any blame accepted on his part in the book, Keith?
Good job, audience developer. Do you get a commission on books you help conservatives sell?

"Some people do not take it seriously" That would be people like lake and his kind, not because it is true, but because Mr. Hansen wrote the article, and their minds freeze at that point!

yeah, shrinking the economy via austerity measures is just the ticket... for depression. We owed more relative to the GDP coming out of WWII and recovered nicely... but the corporations and well-off paid their fair share of taxes. It was the patriotic thing to do

{{"I worked for the Dept of Transportation in Tennessee for some time. We had rules and procedures, like many states, in how to handle deceased people and Drivers Licenses. You would be amazed at how many of these same licenses were confiscated from minors trying to get into bars and such. What they say is not what they always do."}}

Were you one of "those" typical gov't employees that didn't do what they said?

I am also kind of curious how minors (17 years old) could be using the licenses of dead people? I am assuming that most deceased people are going to be over 55 so the license will have a birthdate that reflects this.

{{"...infringe on your rights? We need an ID to drive, to buy liquor, to go to college, to cash a check. But something as important as voting we're going to just say, "Nah, don't bother with an ID, we believe ya!" I read a recent article that Florida Secretary of State is going to purge 53,000 dead people from their voting records...finally. Do you realize how much potential there is for voting fraud when dead people are left on the registers? And this is happening everywhere. Have you seen the video where a guy goes into a polling place, asks for Eric Holder's ballot, tries to show his ID and is told "No, we don't need it" and is handed Eric Holder's ballot?
The finger inking process in Iraq provides more integrity to the electoral process than ours does."}}

I didn't research this but are those 53,000 accrued over many years/decades or is it just the two year election cycle? Is this their regular purging or do they never cross check the death filings against the voter lists and therefore have years of accued deaths in their voter listings??? The reason I am suspicious is that MN has about 22000 deaths annually for about 5 million people and Florida has about 19.5 million people???? If it's the fomer than what is the problem - they are just doing a regular annual clean up before this next election and no one would be able to commit fraud on those names in an election (and it isn't what "everyone" - including Mr. Hansen - assumes it is). If it's the latter then it goes to show how incompetent their leaders are (republicans by the way) because in this computer age it should be a very simple matter to cross check death records against the voter lists to regularly eliminate the dead people from them (in other words not let their voter lists accrue lots of dead people for decades)!!!

If Mr. Hansen had taken 1 minute to call the local Auditor he could have found out that is indeed what MN does. Once/twice a month they get a list of the recently deceased from the Sec. of State's Office so they can be purged from the voter lists. This is done on a statewide basis. Even if this wasn't done this often a voters name drops off the list if they don't vote for four years thus there would be little chance of accruing a lot of dead voter's in the system. I think Mr. Hansen is losing a lot of credibility by not doing the most trivial of fact checking. How many more times should anyone believe anything that he says? Why just assume that a mess in Florida's system would have any applicability to MN???? Why automatically assume we were doing what they were doing (if they indeed had a backlog of many years of dead voters). Why not educate yourself about how MN's voting system actually works!!! That way you can have an intelligent and informed opinion instead of spreading insinuations that one could say are planted to deliberately cause people to think a certain way about the voter ID question!!!!!!

In 3.3 yrs Obama increased the debt: $5,085,569,319,331.
George Bush took 8 years to increase the debt: $4,899,100,310,609, and he had to contend with the fall out from 9/11 and fighting a real war.

And Clinton did not reduce the debt nor did anything he did balance the budget. What he did do was use Social Security to pay down the public debt (not the total debt, just the portion owned by private individuals). The net effect was that the debt increased every year during Clinton's administration.

Read this for the background financial data:

http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16

Keep on posting! The Minnesota election process is one of the best in the nation and is probably the best. Just look at the scrubbing process in Florida vs ours.

"The Senate Ethics Committee admonished Republican Sen. Tom Coburn on Friday over his contact with a top aide to former Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada lawmaker who resigned in disgrace last year after lying about his affair with the staffer's wife."

Is there a chapter in his book about this "ethics bomb."

Will Keith be writing a column about this? Inquiring minds want to know.

from a right-wing troll. Try addressing the issues, genius.

is Coburn! He is a member of "the family". If you are not familiar with this pious right wing group of "family men" which included Sanford and Ensign, read "The Family", by Jeff Sharlet.

And tell us why we should listen to anything he has to say?

...why are you attacking Coburn's character rather than the premise of his argument? He could have a male prostitution ring operating in the basement of his condow (No, wait, that was Barney Frank...) and his point that we are circling the drain from an economic standpoint could still be right. Personally, I think it's time we hold all politicians to account, regardless of party, for the high cost of government.

...and yes, I know how to spell it, even if I didn't type it correctly. I can even spell condominium.

Yes, character is important, but in this case, it seems like you are fiddling while Rome burns. My comment about Frank was not so much about Frank as it was the silliness of arguing which party is more ethical. Political parties are run by politicians, you know, and anyone who wants to be a politician should be suspect from an ethical standpoint from the outset. And yes, I'm well aware of the double standard held by Democrats. It goes something like this: "Our buddies can do whatever they want, but we will go all Torquemada on any Republican that does something remotely similar." You think Dems are being understanding of imperfections. In reality, they are simply doing the politically expedient thing.

from Congress to ask me what to do in this crisis...still waiting...
My economic position has not changed much in the last four years, so I am bowing to the superior intellectual voices here to offer solutions to our problems.

I just like to keep folks honest and to see all the facts presented.

And I remember WWII's austerity also. I am old!

"Go Torquemada.." No, we don't want to burn 2,000 heretics like he did. That is not nice. We are more accepting of others' rights to different religious views, as long as they are not forced upon us.

...I see you edited your comment to say (after) WWII. I was starting to wonder about you and your new found hawkish attitude.

I'm not sure what you think happened after WWII that would support your apparent conclusion that overwhelming debt is helpful to improving economic activity. Why don't you flesh out your argument a bit more?