Recently North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Adam Hamm blasted Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota for sending some of its personnel on sales trips to tropical locations.  Now, given how quickly Blue Cross Blue Shield has raised its rates over the last few years, given how much strain that p...

After the initiated measure to cut income taxes went down under a cloud of taxpayer funded lobbying from people like state university professors, I posted on this blog promising that the issue would be addressed in the legislature. I worked with Rep. Dan Ruby to develop a bill banning the practice.&...

Tomorrow at the North Dakota state legislature there will be a hearing on the extraterritorial zoning issue at 9:00am. For the uninitiated, extraterritorial zoning is the practice where cities expand their regulatory authority to areas bordering the city limits.  This is done in the name of pla...

Those of us from North Dakota are so used to our opportunistic politicians trying to take credit for every good thing that happens that it hardly registers with us any more, but I’ve got to admit that this press release broke through even my cynical filters. Washington – Senators Byron Dorga...

And as much as I think the President has been right about some things, I think he deserves this.  If just for this quote alone, if not anything else. Republican Party officials say they will try next month to pass a resolution accusing President Bush and congressional Republican leaders of embr...

After two straight drubbings in elections - 2006 and now 2008 - Republicans need a change in leadership.  Unfortunately, many in the national party don’t want a change.  They want the maintain the status quo and tried to pull a sneaky move by holding a closed-door meeting about who w...

Senator Byron Dorgan is doing the right thing and coming out against an attempt by the EPA to tax gaseous emissions from livestock.  Such an initiative would be a nightmare to regulate, and the impetus for it (combating global warming) is questionable at best. You would think that we would want...

It’s tough getting people to show up to an anti-war rally in North Dakota. I suspect that it’s getting tougher to get people to show up at rallies against the war in Iraq in general these days.  With it looking more and more like the war is going to conclude with Iraq being a sovere...

The Senate Ethics Committee is investigating, and now 17 other Senators aren’t responding to inquiries about their personal mortgages. Wonder if Conrad’s colleague Senator Dorgan is among them? Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota still rank high in ...

We might be able to buy the “we got bamboozled” line from sub-prime borrowers who hit the skids when their adjustable-rate mortgage payments went sky-high, but are we really supposed to believe that highly-educated US Senators didn’t know what was going on with their mortgages? For...