Disclaimer: This is not a photo of my yard.

I was lucky to stumble upon a yard with these two signs side by side, because these are the two people I recommend you vote for in the upcoming City Commission race.  I’d be happy to explain why.

First off, Mike Motsenbacher has a consistent record as a fiscal conservative, unlike anyone on our current city commission.  He’s been involved with conservative activist groups in town as long as I’ve known him, he’s got business experience as well, and I just plain like him.  You and I can trust him to be prudent in his decision making and not share the same fetishes as the current commissioners.

But here’s the newcomer (to me, anyway): Duane Pool.  A friend of mine received this letter from him, and I’ve received permission to reprint it.  Upon reading this letter I became instantly convinced that I’m voting Pool for Commissioner in the June election:

 I want to thank all of you for your varying levels of support, influence, council and inspiration leading up to this last week of the Bismarck City Commission Election. I know not all of you a Bismarck residents but thank you anyway. If you are a resident, I encourage you to vote or stop by the City-County building and turn in an absentee ballot if you are not able to vote on Tuesday, June 10th.

This election is about choosing a city commission that reflects your values and values your input. I hope I have shown myself capable of doing so and deserving of your support. I strongly encourage you to watch the League of Women Voters forum on Dakota Community Access or online at freetv.org.

My Core Values:

• I believe Government should be transparent: The public should be informed and a genuine part of the process both within the Tom Baker meeting room and before the issues gets there. People should have access to information and they should know their input into the process has meaning and influence.
• I believe in the Democratic Process and I believe in my community: Democracy is a responsibility and participatory process. We are obligated to participate:
• As Candidates
• As Voters
• As Citizens in public meeting and forums.
• People engaged in the process should be treated with dignity, sincerity and respect.
• Once elected you still need to honor the will of your constituents, both those who supported you and those who did not since you represent them all.
• Planning is a key to efficient and sustainable growth: I have been involved in planning for much of the last 15 years. I think as a community we need to really focus on a vision of what we want to be 10 and 20 years from now and plan our community efficiently around that goal. (healthy, growing, safe, educated, happy, economically stable with a good standard of living)
• Economic growth and efficiency are highly desirable community characteristics: I have taught economics at both the under graduate and graduate levels for over 25 years. Including the principles of economics into public decision making will make for efficient and logical decisions for both the short and long term viability of our community infrastructure as well as business environment.

My personal focus:

•  Infrastructure to support growth. How and where we plan it, scalability, cost and liability.
• Public Finance. Government provides services necessary to our safety, security, business and social networks, education, and health.
• How much service is provided must be balanced with the cost and how we pay for it. Public spending is not synonymous with public investment and we need to assure the public that when we do responsibly spend their tax dollars the services and benefits are necessary and desirable.
• Existing and future investments must be sustainable from a fiscal perspective.
• Focus on the future rather than reactionary spending. EX: The Civic Center expansion was denied at the polls, yet the existing Commission voted to spend ~10-15% less on a revised plan. Paraphrasing the City Commissioners rationalized this as “…they voted against the higher cost expansion, not the new proposal…”. Subsequently when the public reacted the Commissioners voted to do a study regarding future Civic-events Center locations, expansion and needs. This was either the cart before the horse (study first then spend based on an informed decision) or a disingenuous attempt to quell the public outcry with no intent to change course. In either case the public will was discounted. If the process were inclusive of a long-term community vision the study would have preceded the decision and the urgency to begin construction would not have overridden an open public process nor blatantly disregarded public opinion.
• A focus on planning and vision for the future will aid in efficient long-term spending to build and maintain an adequate community infrastructure.
• Public safety and health: As our community grows, demands on police, fire and public health resources will increase. These services are vital to an attractive and vibrant social and business culture. The culture and economic opportunities in Bismarck are what makes our city attractive and provides the backdrop for growth.

I hope I have your support at the polls on Tuesday!

Respectfully,
Duane B. Pool, PhD.

The Civic Center thing struck a chord with me.  I’m a Civic Center employee, but I was firmly against pouring more taxpayer money into the expansion.  I outlined my reasons in a post here.  So were most of the rest of you.  That was not enough to prevent our commissioners and mayor from diverting taxpayer moneys from elsewhere and proceeding anyway.  For that reason, they need to go.  Their cavalier attitude and fetish for downtown, “green space”, and the Civic Center expansion need to be their ticket out of office.  Duane Pool gets it.

I may have some other research to pass along regarding the vote this week (if you early vote) and next.  Stay tuned, and vote Pool and Motsenbacher for City Commish!

Now that he’s no longer carpetbagging for a North Dakota senate seat, Byron Dorgan can finally be honest about where he’s really lived for the last twenty years: Virginia. The former senator’s home has been featured in Home & Design magazine.

It may be news to you, but the meager apartment buildings above are where Senators Conrad and Dorgan claimed to live “on paper” so they’d be eligible to run for office as representatives of North Dakota. I lived in one of these buildings, and (if the Senators’ appliances were the same olive green as mine) they were hardly what one would expect of a United States Senator. No worries, though…I never ran into either of them while living there, and I doubt these apartments were more than a technicality to facilitate their re-election. They are the addresses they used to claim residency.

This ornate hand-written address label no longer exists, so I suppose the Senator and Kim have moved on. After all, there’s no reason to have a North Dakota address anymore. Certainly these lavish accommodations in no way compare to their Virginia mansion.

In case you’re a new reader, you probably don’t know that former senator Kent Conrad actually owns these two buildings via an LLC that he formed. If you only frequent North Dakota media, you probably don’t know that Senator Conrad was under ethics investigation for a sweetheart mortage deal from Countrywide Financial on this property, which consists of sixteen units in two buildings, even though the company’s policy for the rest of us is to finance nothing larger than a four-plex. Democrats even went to the point of changing the locks on committee room doors to prevent Senator Conrad’s conduct from being discovered!

Isn’t a corruption investigation involving a United States Senator from our state newsworthy? Apparently not. Oddly enough, KFYR/KXMB/WDAY seemed uninterested in this circus; same with the Tribune, Forum, or other state newspaper groups. In fact, this scandal didn’t seem newsworthy to them until after a Democrat committee chaired by a co-conspirator let Kent Conrad off the hook. THEN it was front-page news. If I was an assignment editor or news director at one of these organizations, I’d be asking myself some tough questions after either missing this or willfully ignoring it. If some blogger with a few minutes of spare time and a Google search can come up with piles of relevant information but their newscasts and printed pages contained nothing, isn’t that cause for a little self-examination?

Oh, and about Senator Gaylord “Kent” Conrad: don’t think that he was left out of the “expensive east coast mansion” situation. He has a million dollar house on a Delaware beach that didn’t show up on his financial disclosure reports.

I wonder if newly-elected “independent voice™” Heidi Heitkamp is paging through the real estate pages out there on the east coast?

About a week ago a letter I wrote to the editor of the Bismarck Tribune was printed. In it I called upon Senator John Hoeven to back North Dakotans’ view of gun control, reminding him to do more than just be “not Byron Dorgan.” I just posted the video of that original exhortation a few days ago, so scroll down if you haven’t seen it.

My writing style tends to be verbose at times, albeit not nearly to Clay Jenkinson levels, so I chose my words carefully. The original letter is posted below:

Dear Senator Hoeven,

Thank you for voting for the “fiscal cliff” deal to raise taxes on 77% of Americans, including my little family. Our tax increase is equivalent to picking out a monthly bill and doubling it, although you Washington types claim it was only punishing “the rich.”

At a Take Back Washington Summit a few years ago, I mentioned that we wanted you to win that Senate seat and be more than just “not Byron Dorgan.” Those high hopes are beginning to fade, especially after watching you waffle on 2nd Amendment rights on C-SPAN. Please reconsider who you represent: North Dakotans want no part of the gun control Senator Heitkamp’s ilk are proposing.

I wish I could keep the faith, Senator…but you need to earn it. You said, “We’ll have to see…” when asked about gun control. I felt the same way about your term in the Senate, and what I’ve seen so far is not what North Dakotans need from their Senator. I expect you’ll ask us to send you back for another term in a couple of years; please give us some reasons to do so by standing up for our constitutional rights.

I’ve seen longer letters to the editor, so I figured that I was within limits and likely to see my entire letter printed. So it was, minus one line inconvenient to North Dakota Democrats:

“North Dakotans want no part of the gun control Senator Heitkamp’s ilk are proposing.”

To whom am I referring? It could be the North Dakota Democrats who introduced their own weapons and magazine ban legislation in the state legislature this session: House Bill 1415 and House Bill 1416 (click on them to read the text in PDF format on the legislature’s website). These bills have since been yanked without discussion to avoid embarrassing Democrats.

On the national stage, who is it that’s talking about “gun control” (actually “people control” if they’re honest)? Democrats.

Who’s been quoted as saying that the American people need to be “brainwashed” when it comes to guns? Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat.

Who has said, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States, for an outright ban, picking up everyone of them (every gun) Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in. I would have done it”? Senator Feinstein, a Democrat.

Who is taking to the stages across America and lecturing us once more on what we “need” – this time for hunting? Democrats.

Senator Heitkamp herself has had to perform an intricate dance in order to placate the fringe groups who helped her win her Senate seat as well as her party masters in Washington, DC who want to charge full-tilt toward gun control…all while trying to cling to the “independent voice for North Dakotans” mantra on which her campaign was based within our state’s borders. If she wants help from the Democrat National Committee in another five years, she’d better deliver on the liberalism. Doing so will remind North Dakotans what happens when you send another partisan leftist to DC our behalf.

Given the fact that Heitkamp’s support came largely from out-of-state organizations seeking to enforce a Democrat majority in the Senate, I expect her loyalties to continue to lie with those whose values oppose those of North Dakotans, as do the loyalties of Democrats even within our own legislature. For some reason, making even a passing remark about this association is too much for the Bismarck Tribune to let slide.

CSPAN has put together remarks by Senator “Not Byron Dorgan” on the upcoming assault on the Second Amendment:

and:

Pretty wishy-washy and non-specific. What I’m looking for is, “My constituents are firm in asserting their rights under the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and as their duly elected representative in the Senate I plan to stand by and fight for their convictions on the chamber floor.”

Instead we’ve got a big question mark hanging over us. What will we get in return for sending Governor Hoeven to the United States Senate?