DFL U.S. Senate candidate Al Franken, frontrunner in the race to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, owes $70,000 in back taxes in 17 states, where he earned income going back to 2003.

Franken's campaign staff initially said Franken had dissolved the California entity in 2003, producing an unsigned letter on blank paper, dated September, 2003, in which a tax accountant said the company would "no longer be doing business in California."
Franken has had numerous engagements in California during those years, and in his U.S. Senate Financial Disclosure Report, filed May, 2007, stated that he does business not only in California, but in New York, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Delaware, Michigan, Kentucky and elsewhere.

LONDON (Reuters) - An innocent 15-year-old schoolboy was sprayed with bullets
from a machine gun as he lay in his own bed after becoming the victim of mistaken identity during a gang war, a London court heard on Friday.

In a dramatic gesture, Mayor Daley has called for a summit at City Hall today to search for solutions to the bloodbath of violence -- almost all of it involving guns -- that has swept across Chicago's neighborhoods in recent weeks.

Bill Dunkelberg, a professor of economics at Temple University and former dean of the Fox school of business there, periodically issues random thoughts on public policy as it relates to his arena of academic interest. His April 24 “Notes on the Economy” includes this gem regarding that Great Economic Satan, Exxon Mobil:
Some presidential candidates have decided that Exxon is a symbol of what is wrong with America. Recent ads complain of Exxon’s 40 billion in profits as if Exxon is some evil entity. First of all, Exxon is not a person, it is millions of owners owning over 5 billion shares in their investment portfolios. Vanguard holds over 160 million shares for its clients, Fidelity over 100 million shares. Taking Exxon’s profits for hair-brained government schemes will just mean millions of people will have to work longer to accumulate their retirement assets. And, doesn’t return on investment count? 40 billion may not represent a particularly good return on the capital invested in the company. Size is not the issue, the percentage return is what counts.
And the government takes over 40 cents a gallon in tax, far more than the profit per gallon made by refiners. And the government doesn’t make any gas for you.

Despite pledges to the contrary, the Star Tribune continues to hemorrhage print readers, according to an Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) report released today. During the same period, PiPress circulation was essentially flat.
The Strib lost 7 percent of subscribers on Sunday and weekdays between March 2007 and March 2008. That means 40,000 fewer people bought the lucrative Sunday paper; the drop was 24,000 on weekdays.
Here's how Sunday circulation has fallen over the past 18 months:
Sept. '06: 596,000
March '07: 574,000
Sept. '07: 570,000
March '08: 534,000
In the same period, daily circulation fell from 358,000 to 321,000.
The Strib’s Sunday decline was seventh-biggest among the nation's Top 25 papers and its daily decline was the sixth-largest. The Strib remains the 10th-biggest Sunday paper and slipped from 18th to 19th on weekdays.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo
identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.
In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud.

The law "is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting 'the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,'" Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy.

When Congress passed legislation to greatly expand America's commitment to biofuels, it intended to create energy independence and protect the environment.
But the results have been quite different. America remains equally dependent on foreign sources of energy, and new evidence suggests that ethanol is causing great harm to the environment.
In recent weeks, the correlation between government biofuel mandates and rapidly rising food prices has become undeniable. At a time when the U.S. economy is facing recession, Congress needs to reform its "food-to-fuel" policies and look at alternatives to strengthen energy security.

We all ought to reflect on what an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 really means... Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions – CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by
energy use. According to the Department of Energy's most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.
Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.

Consider the residential sector. At the present time, American households emit 1.2 billion tons of CO2 – 20% higher than the entire nation's emissions must be in 2050. If households are to emit no more than their present share of CO2, emissions will have to be reduced to 204 million tons by 2050. But in 2050, there will be another 40 million residential households in the U.S.
Today, the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year (much more if you are Al Gore or
John Edwards and live in a mansion). To stay within the magic number, average
household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year. This is not enough juice to run the average hot water heater.
You can forget refrigerators, microwaves, clothes dryers and flat screen TVs. Even a house tricked out with all the latest high-efficiency EnergyStar appliances and compact fluorescent lights won't come close....

The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all.
Natural gas – the preferred coal substitute of the moment – won't come close. If we replaced every single existing coal plant with a natural gas plant, CO2 emissions from electric power generation alone would still be more than twice the 2050 target. Most environmentalists remain opposed to nuclear power, of course. It is unlikely that renewables – wind, solar, and biomass – can ever make up more than about 20% of our electricity supply.
Suppose, however, that a breakthrough in carbon sequestration, a revival of nuclear power, and a significant improvement in the cost and effectiveness of renewables were to enable us to reduce the carbon footprint of electricity production. That would
still leave transportation.
Right now our cars and trucks consume about 180 billion gallons of motor fuel. To meet the 2050 target, we shall have to limit consumption of gasoline to about 31 billion gallons, unless a genuine carbon-neutral liquid fuel can be produced. (Ethanol isn't it.) To show how unrealistic this is, if the entire nation drove nothing but Toyota Priuses in 2050, we'd still overshoot the transportation emissions target by 40%.

... However, claims on behalf of alternative energy sources – biofuels, hydrogen, windpower and so forth – either do not match up to the scale of the energy required, or are not cost-competitive in current form.
How on God's green earth will we make up the difference? Someone should put this question to the candidates. And not let them slide past it with glittering generalities.

The Governor vetoed a $70 million bonding provision for a part of the $900 million Central Corridor light rail line connecting Minneapolis to St. Paul. Let us assume that the cost of the project would not grow.
Even without a government discount or a bulk discount, one can buy a 36-seat transit bus (the CTS rear engine model from Champion Bus Inc. of Imlay City, Michigan) for about $120,000.
So for the same price for the 11-mile light rail line, you could buy 7,500 buses.
These buses are 38 feet long. So the length of 7,500 buses, rolling bumper to bumper, would be 285,000 feet.
The 11-mile route of the rail line is 58,080 feet long.
So you could have five lanes of buses cramming University Avenue, bumper to bumper for the same price as the train.
Or you could have one lane of buses headed in each direction, bumper to bumper, with 4,500 buses waiting in mothballs until they were needed.
Or you could have 100 buses headed in each direction of the 50-block route, with one bus for each block. That would leave you with 7,400 buses in mothballs. With a five-year warranty on each bus, it would take you 375 years to run out of buses.

Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per
passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.
While most rail transit uses less energy than buses, rail transit does not operate in a vacuum: transit agencies supplement it with extensive feeder bus operations. Those feeder buses tend to have low ridership, so they have high energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile. The result is that, when new rail transit lines open, the transit systems as a whole can end up consuming more energy, per passenger mile, than they did before.
Even where rail transit operations save a little energy, the construction of rail transit lines consumes huge amounts of energy and emits large volumes of greenhouse gases. In most cases, many decades of energy savings would be needed to repay the energy cost of construction.

They don’t have a professional seasoned campaign manager and the result is they’re making rookie mistakes. They should have scrubbed Franken, they should have known this beforehand and they should be doing a lot of other fairly plain vanilla, sort of professional activities to set up the campaign.
“…and there’s even some talk out this week, that there’s some folks in the Democratic Party wondering about running in the primary. What’s going on in the Franken campaign is unnerving. Anyone who is a professional, watching this race, it is alarming. This is just not the way a top-flight, top national race ought to be run”