HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Help! The Interstate 35W in Minnesota has collapsed and killed numerous innocent bystanders. Help! I have gone across that bridge many times. Granted I do not remember it, because I was less than a year old. At that time my parents and I lived there for a few months. Tragic events happen in Minnesota just as anywhere else, but Minnesota is great. When my parents and I lived there, we loved it. We lived in Bloomington which is a suburb of Minneapolis. Up until this bridge collapsed, Minneapolis-St. Paul was a great place to live. They built the biggest mall in America, aptly called Mall of America, only AFTER we had moved away from Bloomington. But even back then when we lived there in 1984 there were excellent shopping opportunities. And that is what makes Minneapolis-St. Paul so great. It is actually quite odd. Minneapolis-St. Paul is a large, burgeoning metropolis, and yet it still only has enough of a population to be given 10 Presidential Electoral Votes. So in light of what has happened, I thought I’d discuss Minnesota politics.

Democrats have long had a slight edge in Minnesota politics. This is enough so that Minnesota has voted for the Democratic nominee for President continuously in every election since 1976. It even voted for Walter Mondale’s beleaguered campaign. For the record my four favourite states in the American union are Minnesota (lived there!), New York (lived there for a good 7 years!), Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. All of these states voted for losing Presidential Democratic nominees John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis. These 4 are also 4 of the 8 American states that have never voted either for George W. Bush or for his father in presidential elections (we are not counting the times George H.W. Bush was on the Vice-Presidential ticket with Ronald Reagan). The other 4 states in this category are Washington State, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Hawaii. In Minnesota some people thought the state was shifting to a being a Republican state after conservative Republican Norm Coleman beat former Vice-President Walter Mondale in the 2002 federal Senate election. But this ignores the fact that Minnesota has had Republican Senators before, including during it’s glory days of being very liberal Democrat. It also ignores the fact that this election was under peculiar circumstances with the recent death of the incumbent Senator Paul Wellstone in a tragic plane crash in October 2002. But since the Coleman victory Democrats won the 2004 Presidential Election in Minnesota. In 2006, Democratic victories in Minnesota were even more resounding. The Democrats regained control of the State House. Democrat Amy Klobuchar resoundingly won the federal Senate election against incumbent federal Representative Mark Kennedy (who at one time was considered to have a chance at winning). Democrats sent a 5-3 majority House delegation to Washington, and gained control of all statewide positions except Governor and Lieutenant Governor (actually beating the incumbent Republican state Auditor by a solid 10 percentage points!). So at the moment Minnesota is a fairly Democratic state. Now Minnesota has one conservative Republican Senator, and one liberal Democrat Senator. Norm Coleman has the advantage to be re-elected in 2008, but only because he is the incumbent. If he were not running, it would be a surefire Democratic pickup.

But I don’t know what to do about the bridge collapse, the dead innocent bystanders, and the economic damage this bridge collapse is going to cause.