Guess who got up at the crack of dawn yesterday morning to try and warn all the people heading out on White Bear Lake at Minnesota's grand "Fishing Opener" to be on the look-out for this Pirate PawLENTY who's known to have sworn in pirate blood not to raise taxes on the wealthy, even if it means holding Minnesotans hostage these last six years. We told all the poor Minnesota fishermen who'd listen to be on the lookout for a real hypocritical character in red driving a slick speedboat and who likes to be called "Governor" but who's doing just the opposite of what pirates used to do when they sailed the high seas: PawLENTY's been stealing from the poor to give to the wealthy! He must still think his "no new taxes" piracy is the surefire, cutthroat way to the GOP Presidency.
Somebody must have heard our call because, lo and behold, after a while a colorful pontoon boat bearing peace flags and flying "Tax the Rich" rainbow colored kites came into view on the water. The colorful pontoon appeared to be trying to catch up with the Governor's speed boat all over the lake which, by now, had become nothing but a large free speech zone, without private property walls or barbed wire fences to stop the messages sent over the bow. The Pirate Governor's speed boat, to be sure, was much faster then the little Minnesotan pontoon trying to bring him to account. But even though the Red Pirate was able to continually zip away, he couldn't avoid the commoners' messages: "Pirate PawLENTY -- holding MN hostage!" and "What's FISHY? PawLENTY!"
In the end, Governor PawLENTY did catch his little fish and something he prized even more: a number of staged photo-ops, which was no doubt what he was really fishing for.
Although the hypocrite Pirate is simultaneously poised to veto Minnesota legislators' new tax plan to fund public school education, nursing homes, long-term care facilities and hospitals and despite facing a $4.6 billion deficit in Minnesota's state budget, PawLENTY thought nothing of using poor Minnesotans' tax money to pay for the several law enforcement boats that served as his personal escort service zipping about the lake.
PawLENTY's slick maneuvers have also kept his old Pirate Pal Norm Coleman's senate seat empty and from providing Minnesotans with their right to representation on the national level. Talk about holding a state hostage!
And can anyone venture a guess as to what it may have cost taxpayers yesterday to bring this "Ramsey County Emergency Management Homeland Security Mobile Incident Command Center" shining like a million dollars and full of officers and intelligence analysts to the Minnesota Fishing Opener?!
We hadn't heard that the annual Fishing Opener, special as it is for Minnesota, had been classified in the upper tiers of National Special Security Events, so we wondered what so many of the Governor's homeland security mates could be doing inside the big patriotically decorated Command Center. Were they tasked, for example, with providing the Governor their best intelligence about where on the lake the fish were biting? Or were they just busy trying to manage the data coming in from their links to National Geo-Spatial Center satellites (links hooked up during the RNC) focused on Minnesota's other 10,000 lakes? They might have been thumbing through their recently issued "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" to find out what kind of special threat was posed by the two of us holding signs across the street, but we didn't see anyone even peep outside the windows of the "Ramsey County Emergency Management Homeland Security Mobile Incident Command Center". So heaven knows what they were up to inside. But, shiver our timbers! -- it didn't look as if the Pirate Governor's big smiling photos and fishing opener came cheap for the poor Minnesota taxpayers.
Quick, let's all ask Jon Stewart's "Daily News" program to expose the piracy that went on yesterday at the Minnesota Governor's Fishing Opener!