As the workweek begins tomorrow, every Interstate Highway and railroad across Iowa is closed by flooding. Wisconsin isn't faring much better, with I-94 across the state flooded out along with one of the three remaining cross state railroads. Truckers are having to take long, roundabout routes burning up $5 a gallon diesel fuel to make hopelessly late deliveries. The busiest railroad in America, Union Pacific's transcontinental main line across Iowa, Is shut down by high water, with trains backed up as far as Nevada. UP is even "embargoing" destinations affected by the flooding- essentially telling shippers not to send freight that way because it'll merely clog up their system. Despite the wider and deeper rivers, things aren't moving much on the water either- barge tows are tied up on 200 miles of the busiest stretch of the upper Mississippi from Muscatine to St.Louis as fast moving flood waters make safe navigation impossible.

I couldn't ignore the height and heft of the levee not even a block from the Wonder Bread bakery- it was as tall as the twelve and a half foot tall bread truck I drove. The side I saw most from the bakery was grassy yet massive, but the other side was pure business- a concrete wall designed to resist any efforts by the mighty Cedar River to escape it's confines. When things were slow I'd walk to the top of that levee, reassuringly noting that the river was several feet below the floor of the bakery. But today that river is right up to the top of that concrete wall and starting to escape any way it can. The levee's holding, but they're rescuing citizens by boat behind it.

I do floods- back in the 90s I took hundreds of pictures of the Minnesota, Mississippi, and Red River floods looking for evidence of pesticides washed from fields into the rivers that provide many city's water supply. I was on hand for all those historic floods and even spent half an hour standing in the july deluge that took out Des Moines water supply- visibility was so bad that I parked my motorcycle on the shoulder and walked as far as I could from the road to avoid anyone driving in that blinding downpour.

So taking advantage of todays lull in the downpours I headed the Buell for northern Iowa...  

Fuel is expensive, and my home base in Minneapolis is 200 miles from the nearest Obama campaign office in South Dakota. But as last week passed by, I became increasingly worried about about how many delegates the R&B committee, Puerto Rico, and even... South Dakota might hand to Hillary. Yes, with an older electorate and voter registration that shuts down 15 days before the election South Dakota may not be made for Clinton, but it's certainly a hospitable state for her. So by thursday I'd decided to blow the budget and ride out to  South Dakota.

In those sad days after a losing campaign, we bought a bunch of office furniture from a democratic campaign for governor. We stashed those desks and chairs away- when you've got 4000 square feet and only a handful of housemates you've got plenty of storage space. Prowling the local garage sales, we added to our stash of campaign stuff. When the Obama campaign needed furniture and stuff for the Iowa offices last summer, we hauled down two loads of campaign "stuff".

I just took a ride through northern Iowa to see what had become of those campaign offices. If I found any of the stuff we'd hauled down earlier left and unused, I'd have come back with the truck to haul the stuff to another campaign office or store it away again until needed. I found all three offices I checked empty with for rent signs back in their windows, with none of the campaign stuff we'd hauled there in sight.

These past weeks in South Dakota and Montana, Obama supporters are again reinventing the wheel- scrounging for office furniture, supplies, etc.. After tuesday It'll all be thrown away and the campaign offices abandoned, then the process of renting and equiping campaign offices will be repeated all over again for the november general election.

There has to be a better way...    

Finally quit raining, so I hopped on the motorcycle and took a ride out to Pope County. My business partner works for the railroad and business has been slow, so we had a long relaxed lunch around the kitchen table discussing the rural economy before she finally got called to work. What stuck out from that conversation, and kept me thinking on the ride home, was the tale of a local family farm. This family has been farming since virtually the invention of dirt. By hard work they'd built a family farm of several hundred acres and raise crops on a few hundred rented acres as well. They're smart managers, finding good deals on used equipment, and maintain it in their own shop. They hold jobs in town too just in case, and probably for the health insurance too. Now about this time of year farmers need money for seed, fuel, land rent, etc. to see them through 'til fall harvest. So they make their annual early spring pilgrimage to the bank to borrow working capital to put a crop in the ground. With $150,000 worth of corn in the local co-op elevator for collateral the $60,000 loan of operating capital should have been routine... But the bank said NO.

A few days back I posted a diary asking what would be the best use of a 40 acre farm in west central Minnesota. The answers, quite frankly surprised me- Kossacks divulged a plephora of romantic suggestions, most of which would lead our little farm right into bankruptcy. But I shouldn't really have been surprised- currently less than 2% and falling of our population live on farms. And most folks don't even live near farms- even here in Minnesota, two thirds of our population lives in metro areas. Ag news has been pushed to early morning hours on rural AM stations, and much of that "news" is thinly veiled PR from big agribusiness. Is it any wonder that Kossacks, never mind the general public, are so easily swayed by rumors of shortages and anti-ethanol propaganda?

My friend and I have been looking at a 40 acre farm in west central Minnesota for a couple years now. She's already sold on it, I've been skeptical- $2000 an acre is a lot when corn was going for less than $2 a bushel. But $2000 an acre is a bit below market in this county, where speculators have driven prices to $3000 an acre. These rich folks took their money out of the stock market when it dropped, did a tax free transfer buying rural land, then put it in CRP and let the government pay them not to farm it. But with commodity prices rising I'm losing my skepticism. The owner is a friend whose family farms hundreds of acres and is willing to help us get started in farming, and he hasn't jacked up his asking price as commodity prices have soared. If we buy now, we can get in a crop this year!

I got my handle from a UPS dispatcher, in honor of my sly ability to avoid really dangerous work. I'd seen enough of my Teamster brothers and sisters get hurt in stupid accidents- slips and falls on slippery surfaces and accidents on roads so icy that no one should have to drive on them were common. I got hurt myself-slipped and fell on my wrist while trying to roll 500 pounds up out of a trailer that sat too low due to a broken spring that the company had put off repairing. My boss was mad and made me work the rest of the shift with a broken wrist. But after punching out I went to the nearest emergency room and got the best medical care available. That medical care and my wages for the next six weeks while I recovered were paid without a quibble by Worker's Compensation Insurance. Had I been an employee of Al Franken, I would have been in serious trouble...

Welcome to the political battleground of the prairies- we're miles from the nearest WalMart, in the shadow of a giant elevator on the Old Minneapolis & St.Louis rail line to the Missouri River. 'Cept the tracks only run a few miles further west today and dead end.

The convention officialy started at 10 a.m., but we've finally gotten through with the first course of lunch and the convention is being called to order at quarter past noon...

Unfortunately, Al Franken is considered "very unfavorable" by 13% more respondents than Mike Ciresi In the latest Rasmussen Poll. Yup, while fellow Dem challenger Mike Ciresi was given the "very unfavorable" rating by only 19% of respondents and Repug Coleman after nearly a full term of angering Minnesotans received the electoral "kiss of death" from 22%, Al Franken blew 'em out of the water with a "very unfavorable" rating from 31%  of respondents!

Grant County lies in the heartland of Minnesota prairie progressivism, a broad swath of west central Minnesota that was crutial to the Farmer-Labor party's victories during the depression. Activists there cut there teeth taking on railroad and banking monopolies, took over Minnesota politics during the dustbowl and depression, and joined a young Paul Wellstone in fighting to regain control of their rural power cooperatives and stop an unneeded mega powerline. That tradition lives on, literally- I had the pleasure of meeting one of the leaders of the 1980s farmer's movement at yesterday's convention. The convention was held alongside the Floyd B. Olson Memorial Highway, named after the popular Farmer-Labor Governor who we lost too soon to cancer in 1936.

Al Franken was MIA on the campaign trail yesterday, perhaps he was in Hollywood or the Big Apple for another fundraiser? Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer was at least in the state he intends to represent, campaigning in Duluth. Only Mike Ciresi realized the significance of the Grant County convention, travelling with his wife and son from his home over 150 miles away. They were greeted by traditional Minnesota winter weather, meriting warnings from the Weather Service (what happened to global warming?).

Welcome to west central Minnesota, land of Dueber's Department Stores and DeToy's Resteraunts. Both are old school enterprises (Dueber's doesn't even have a website) that survive because they're miles from the nearest franchise fast food and big box retailers. This is a rich agricultural prairie transected by two lanes, with grain elevators and church steeples being pretty much the only structures to rise above the tree tops. These are swing districts, and democrats run to the center here to survive, Conventional wisdom has it that the most conservative candidate in the race for the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party endorsement, Al Franken, would win overwhelmingly here.

Minnesota's McLeod county is a good test of a candidates strength- one end of the county includes Minneapolis suburbs while the other end is cows and cornfields. In between you'll find a couple medium sized towns with some industry rubbing shoulders with the grain elevators and feed stores. If any county is a good early test of the relative strengths of Minnesota's Democratic Farmer Labor Party candidates for the U.S. senate, this is it. We just had our caucuses last tuesday, and over the next couple months the the delegates chosen at the precinct caucuses will attend county conventions and pick delegates to the state convention which endorses the Dem candidate for U.S. Senate. A couple counties are already holding conventions this weekend, but McLeod is the most representative of Minnesota's demographics and being that they did the classic "Minnesota Walking Subcaucus" we got an actual measure of the candidate's appeal with the delegates.

I knew right from the start that Hillary wasn't my candidate- in a campaign underwritten by PACs my hundred bucks and a lot of volunteer hours won't even pay the cover charge. So I volunteered for Obama, and even sought and was offered an internship- which I couldn't afford to accept. Join me in an introduction to the brave new world of campaign finance...

I was hired by the Postal Service in 1993, it was once a job I took more pride in than any I'd ever had. We gave every citizen the same service, whether they were in huge urban buildings that had there own zip code or at the end of miles of dirt road- The Postal Service was America at it's finest.

Then came the Republicans to power. The Postal Purchasing manual got rewritten, and through a no bid contract instead of buying new trailers the Postal Service paid more to lease used trailers from General Electric. Mail was pulled off Amtrak trains and entrusted to fly by night truckers who delivered when they felt like it. Defense contractors with no experience in mail processing were given multi million dollar contracts to build high tech mail sorting machines that didn't work, given more lucrative contracts to fix them, and even more contracts to replace them. Meanwhile the Postal Service revealed it's grand "Network Redesign" plan to gut service to rural areas while giving even bigger discounts to junk mailers. In my little corner of the Postal Service, a big city Post Office loading dock, I fought the good fight to move the mail. I lost that battle, and retired before they fired me. It's been over two years since I left, but I'm still angry at how they're gutting and corrupting our Postal Service.  

Well, it's a week 'til the Iowa caucuses and I'm still in Minneapolis. This isn't the way I'd planned it- I should be camped out in Iowa tonight with thousands of Obama volunteers, catching a few hours rest before we get back to feverishly working for a stunning victory. The ingredients are certainly there- Obama's well within the margin of error in the polls. The "inevitable" Hillary Clinton has stumbled with shills planting softball questions, a health care plan that further overtaxes the working poor, and the dumbest holiday ad imaginable.

But something's wrong with this picture... I and who knows how many hundreds of other Obama volunteers are Fired Up, With No Place To Go...