MN Media

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We’ve got more drama in Minnesota than all y’all combined

March 11, 2009 in Politics | No comments

Hey, let’s go back to January: remember when Norm Coleman said that the weight of “disenfranchised voters” brought down his campaign website? Anyway, his dumb, unimpressive fake crash stunt left a database full of info on supporters/donors unprotected and free for anyone to download, including information such as unencrypted credit card information (credit card numbers, expiration dates, and card verification numbers) for people who donated online. Well, a couple months later, and now it’s all up on Wikileaks. As Aaron at MNpubulis mentions, Norm Coleman broke the law in more ways than one.

Coleman’s team is falsely claiming that there was a breach within their firewalls that didn’t show up on server logs. That’s pretty dumb because a) those types of things generally show up on such logs, b) it had nothing to do with firewalls but DNS, and c) if all you needed to do in order to obtain the information was to right-click and save to your computer, that’s not hacking or “breaching” anything.

RNC 2008: Bringing Unsexy Back

May 14, 2008 in Politics | No comments

I thought mosquitoes and tornadoes were decent-enough plagues for Minnesota. Then, in 2007, the Monster from SimCity 2000 attacked a bridge of ours and we had to choose between fording the river, taking a ferry across, or just waiting until they rebuilt the damn thing. This summer, it’ll be swarms of Republicans descending upon the Twin Cities in fucking Zubaz.

I suppose it will be an incredible week for prostitutes, taxi drivers, pick-pockets, the Mall of America, area hotels, and anyone else who can think of ways to profit. The rest of the Twin Cities will just have a 4AM closing time to look forward to.

Learning positive alcohol consumption at a younger age

April 1, 2008 in Health, Politics | No comments

A Minnesota House bill introduced by Reps. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis; Chris DeLaForest, R-Andover; Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, and Leon Lillie, DFL-North St. Paul, seeks to lower the minimum drinking age to 18 for the purchase of alcohol at establishments holding liquor licenses. Critics of the proposed shift argue that binge-drinking and drunk-driving would only increase, but don’t recognize the combination of psychological reactance and alcohol expectations as active forces behind current underage drinking behavior.

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Cops look for whatever they can get on Facebook

March 23, 2008 in Politics | 2 comments

I’m not quite sure why who thought this story about busting underage drinkers would be positive for advertising the use of a police department’s resources, especially when coming across parts like this:

Because police didn’t have a specific address, officers had to search for the party. About 2 a.m., they found it in the 1100 block of Lockridge Avenue South.
“We had officers on patrol … going to specific neighborhoods,” McCarthy said.

Is there honestly nothing better to do than to track down and cite 33 people for Minor In Possession of alcohol (~$200 fine) on a Saturday night at closing time off in Cottage Grove? Clearly not, as evident by the party-goers thumbing their nose at the cops, refusing to let them in, and forcing them to get a search warrant before they would let them indoors.

As a life-time resident of the city of Minneapolis, refusing to let the police inside my house, while entirely within my legal rights, sounds completely foreign. The MPD are heavyweights, and they do not play around– it’s just got to be much easier to have the underage drinkers hide or scatter off into the night than to refuse entry to the police.

If your police force can’t instill the fear of God into some drunken teenagers, something is gravely wrong in your town. When you are searching out a house party full of kids instead of potential drunk drivers of legal drinking age, your priorities are misplaced.