Two Quick Shots

(photo Jim Gehrz, Star Tribune)

Blogging has been lighter than I planned for the past few days, but sometimes life intervenes. Anyway, here's two quick shots before I have go to work:

• The most important local story of the past year is finally near closure. The Star Tribune reports that the NTSB report on the 35W bridge collapse will indicate that the bridge was doomed from the start because of a design error. That's an important finding for a number of reasons, but in the current political season it matters because some of the most prominent voices in the early days of the collapse attempted to pin the collapse on Tim Pawlenty, Carol Molnau and any other Republican who happened to be in view. Among the most prominent voices doing that was Elwyn Tinklenberg, who now thinks he deserves a seat in Congress. I would hope that Tinklenberg will get asked about that every single day until Election Day. He should be -- I can still remember watching Tinklenberg standing near the collapsed bridge, while rescue efforts were still under way, throwing blame around everywhere he could. Then again, with that skill set, he'd make a perfect member of the Democratic caucus in Washington.


• This feature strongly supports Lori Grivna, who is running to unseat incumbent Kate Knuth for the seat representing District 50B in the Minnesota House. Lori has run a positive, issues-oriented campaign and has asked that no negative ads be run on her behalf. None have. The same can't be said for Knuth, who has benefited from some really sleazy crap from the DFL. Our friend Right Hook over at Boots On has all the details -- go read it. It's a classic example of why no good deed goes unpunished.