Okay, so John Edwards was my first choice. Bwaaa. Boo hoo. But I’m moving on. I’m a 50-year-old female who’d love to send a woman to the White House. I’ve seen Hillary in person. I like her. But at the caucuses in Minnesota on Tuesday, I’ll be voting for Obama. Here are my five reasons why.

In a commentary in the Minneapolis-Star Tribune on Monday, Jan. 28th, state Senator Jim Carlson, an engineer by trade, lays out his reasons for suspecting that the National Transportation Safety Board may be the latest government agency to be politicized under the Bush Administration and how this affects its initial report of the I-35 bridge collapse.

I know. I know. The Bushies have used almost every other part of the federal government as their private tools to punish enemies, protect their pals and give their cronies lucrative contracts. For the Bush administration,  everything is politicized--the Defense Dept, the CIA, the EPA, FEMA and more.  So I suppose I shouldn't be too shocked that the National Transportation Safety Board may be their latest tool.

But still. If we can't trust the NTSB to be fair, how should people respond to the next bridge collapse......or plane crash....or train wreck? What else will be spun?

I know Paul Krugman already reported the seven-fold statistic in his latest column. But somehow it didn't get into my brain until a friend passed on this story from Minnesota Public Radio. Alas, MPR buries the real news in the 8th paragraph, so I'll highlight it for you:

"Two communications professors have been compiling a database of the Justice Department under George W. Bush. They found that U.S. attorneys were more likely to investigate Democrats than Republicans in the past six years. One of those professors, John Cragan of the University of St. Thomas, says U.S. attorneys across the nation investigated Democrats seven times more often than Republicans.

Minnesota Democrats won a huge bunch of victories Election Day. Okay, so we didn't take the Governor's mansion. (Missed it by 22,000 votes or about one and a half percentage points, thanks to an independent third-party candidate who took 141,000 votes.) But on state and local races, we positively stomped the Repubs.

And it wasn't because "the Republicans lost" or we rode a lucky wave. Grassroots activists in Minnesota have been rebuilding the party (known here as the Democratic Farmer Labor party or DFL), taking a listless, tired organization and turning it into a renewed, kick-ass movement. State party chair Brian Melendez explains how. Here's the e-mail he sent out a few days ago.