WonderfulPessimist.com

What’s $2.16 billion in budget surplus funds anyway? Chicken-feed, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press political reporter, Megan Boldt.

Her article on the fictionally-low $2.16B surplus (it’s actually more like $3B if government did their accounting the way they require private businesses to do it) starts off like so:

“State lawmakers will have about $2.16 billion in new money to spend on proposals and programs for the next two years. That projected budget surplus, released today as part of the state’s tax-and-spending forecast, is just $7 million off from the projection made in November.”

She then makes it worse by quoting only one source on the matter, who makes it clear it is his purpose to convince people that $2.16B is chicken-feed, and that clearly it’s nowhere near enough to allow the government to take a stand against new taxes or - heaven forbid - offer state taxpayers some kind of rebate or tax break.

I thought J-school was still teaching news reporters the two-source rule. Oh well, it would have only been another liberal tax-n-spend source anyway, to drive the agenda home. So I guess it doesn’t matter.

“We are going to have to be careful in how we budget,” said Finance Commissioner Tom Hanson. “We have to be very concerned in the commitments we make.”

Only a tax-n-spender could call $2.16B a cause for concern and a need to be careful with the commitments the state makes in future budgets. Some folks need Ionamin to suppress their appetite; clearly, there needs to be an equivalent drug to suppress the tax-n-spend appetites of Minnesota lawmakers - be they RINO Republicans or DFLers.

Clearly, this state has no real conservatives anymore.

How sweet it is.

Yesterday, on Thursday, March 1, Minnesota Public Radio had a “sold out” public insight forum scheduled that was to focus on the “hot-air” topic of global warming. Except it had to be canceled.

The reason? Wait for it… A huge blizzard!

Of course, global warming revisionists will point to the science fiction movie THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW like it’s a science textbook and claim that such cold snaps are part of global warming, but it’s all part of a desperate attempt to make their failed theory line up with the facts increasingly as time goes on.

The latest proof against the prevailing global warming winds comes not from La Nina, but from Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia. Abdussamatov has been studying the climate on Mars and has noted that there is a similar climate change on the red planet that lines up with what some scientists claim is happening on Earth.

Of course, Abdussamatov may agree that there’s a warming trend, but his data suggests that it is sunspot and other solar activity that are behind the trend, not human activity on Earth. That means even if we all switch over from gas-guzzling SUVs to horse-drawn buggies like Al Gore suggests, it wouldn’t make one iota of difference!

Don’t tell Al Gore. We all know how much his little theory means to him, especially now that he’s won a couple Academy Awards for this little PowerPoint show. We wouldn’t want him to get all depressed and start using diet pills, now, would we?

As unlikely as it might seem, there’s actually someone who wants to be the Adolph Hitler of the 21st century. Even more strange, there’s already a winner: Iranin president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The truth of that label was made clear by his most recent public statement.

“The Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan,” Ahmadinejad said, speaking to a meeting of Sudanese Islamic scholars in the capital Khartoum. “Many Western governments that claim to be pioneers of democracy and standard bearers of human rights close their eyes over crimes committed by the Zionists and by remaining silent support the Zionists due to their hedonistic and materialistic tendencies.”

Add this in with the fact that he’s been promising that Israel would be destroyed and wiped off the map soon, as well as his Holocaust deniers conference last December, and it doesn’t take a top-notch dual-core processor and loads of computer memory to figure out the obvious: while he may not have death camps set up quite yet, Iranian President Ahmadinejad is the next Adolph Hitler.

What a sad, sad reality. The world has learned nothing from the lessons of World War II, apparently.