The first big question about my governor, Mr. Tim Pawlenty arose when he came out in favor of a gas tax increase within a day or two after the 35W bridge collapse, then acted as if he'd never said it a few days later... Tim? Who's holding your leash. It's clear someone or a collection of someone's called him and had sufficient power over him to bring him up short at the risk of making him look like a charlatan, a liar or both. Oh... for a wiretap that would reveal who's calling Tim's shots!

The second big question about my governor is how he's able to project the image of being such a "nice young man" among Sr. citizens while forcing cuts in the reimbursement rates for our state's nursing homes that are forcing many to close and force major staffing cuts in those that stay open while, at the same time, forcing cuts in reimbursement for the home health care aids that he and fellow Rep's have touted as the replacement for nursing homes.

Under Herr Pawlenty, our roads are crumbling, our bridges are falling down, our public school systems are being shredded, our state colleges and universities have suffered budget cuts that have required double digit tuition increases year after year.

He has dismantled a state program that used state income tax money to equalize resources among counties and cities in the state, using formulas based on variations in the local cost of doing what needed to be done, resulting in the laying off of police and county sheriff deputies in many locations, less plowing of roads in our very substantial winters, and forcing local property taxes to increase in ways which threaten to price elderly folks on fixed incomes out of their homes - the very circumstance this Local Government Aid program was created to correct. His own, very blue collar home town, South St. Paul, has suffered massively from these cuts.

He even went so far as to ask the state's major road construction companies to finance a major road construction project last summer on promises that the state would pay them later (and seemed SHOCKED! SHOCKED I tell you! when none of them, well-connected Republicans all, bid on the job).

Meanwhile, every form of state aid to the poor and unfortunate has been decimated (unless you count the MN Twins baseball team and their very wealthy banker owner Carl Pohlad as such). Among other delightful metropolitan area ramifications is that the good tax-paying folks in Hennepin County are now paying to support the best trauma center in the state as it treats every seriously injured-but-unable-to-pay patient from everywhere else in the rest of our very large state.

Meanwhile, and not at all surprisingly, Minnesota, a state that has always been more economically successful in recent decades - not dropping as far in recessions and recovering more rapidly than surrounding states has entered a new era where the whole state, despite all Tim's claims to be creating a "better business climate" is suffering earlier and more seriously and seems likely to recover more slowly from the current economic downturn.

But somehow, the news media in our state, having been bought up and out by wealthy outsiders (beginning with WCCO AM twenty years ago) and wealthy insiders never seems to lay any of this at Tim's doorstep.

If you recall the scene from Terminator II where John Conner's foster mother is talking very sweetly and pleasantly to him on the phone, telling him to come home because she and Todd (his foster father) are worried about him, then the camera pans back to reveal that she's really the T-1000 terminator and has converted her hand into a sharp knife which she has stabbed through a milk carton into Todd's throat and out the back of his head and he's still twitching as she's talking so sweetly to John, that's our governor, Tim.

He's such a "nice young man" and he's killing all the sweet little old ladies who think so and no doubt, even now, laying plans to further decimate our state for the sake of whoever is holding his leash. Perhaps he'll be happy when we sink down to level of that very prosperous state at the other end of the river that begins in our northern forests: Mississippi.

The most tragic part of all is that, according to MN state law, he'll be able to join McSame's campaign (which he's substantially done, already), and if he looses, he can come back to the governor's job until the end of his term.