I just got back from a quick two day vacation to Montreal. A few thoughts:
- The food was good. The service was excellent. Surprisingly enough I was more impressed by the service in Montreal than the food. Don’t get me wrong, the restaurants were all quite good (Au Pied de Cochon, in particular was a real treat) but there are certainly places in Minneapolis that more than surpass what Montreal has to offer. While the food wasn’t mind-blowing though, the level of service was incredible. No snootiness, no French attitude (something I was prepared for after hosting two French cousins this past summer), and no sass. I was impressed.
- Businesses in Montreal have a strange aversion to accepting credit cards—only about one in three shops that I visited accepted plastic.
- The subway in Montreal is one of the better mass transit systems that I’ve seen. By American standards it was incredibly clean and I never waited more than five minutes for a train. Evidentially nationalized transportation works in Canada.
- Hotwire saved the day again by furnishing an incredibly nice room for a stunningly low price. I highly recommend it. Use betterbidding.com if you want a better idea of which hotel you’ll be landing before you commit.
- Tim Horton’s is nothing special.
Glad to see that some grownups are getting real about nuclear energy:
Ramping up the pressure to repeal a 15-year-old ban on building more nuclear power plants in Minnesota, union officials, business leaders and politicians — including U.S. Reps. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and Erik Paulsen, a Republican — urged the Legislature on Tuesday to lift the moratorium.
“Everything must be on the table,” Walz said.
Hear hear. Honestly, one of the most nonsensical positions taken by the environmentalist crowd has been their rigid opposition to any expansion of nuclear energy in Minnesota. It’s all well and good to talk about harnessing wind power (a la Matt Entenza) but if we’re actually going to take real measures to curb global warming—without knocking our standard of living down a few decades in the process—nuclear power is really our only option. I’m not a huge fan of Erik Paulsen for obvious reasons, but I have to commend both Representative Walz and him for taking this sound policy position.
I’m getting sort of sick of Tim Pawlenty’s new-found affinity for stupid gimmicks:
The state’s general fund budget would be frozen in line with revenue received during the previous budget period under a constitutional amendment proposed today by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.
The amendment, if placed on next year’s ballot by legislators and approved by voters, would limit government spending and force legislators to set firmer priorities, Pawlenty said.
This is really stupid idea. For one, any sort of policy that forces the government to slash spending during an economic downturn is necessarily going to lead to some pretty perverse cyclical consequences. Further, on a more philosophical note, I’m extremely uncomfortable with putting checks in the State Constitution that are not needed to ensure a functioning democracy. What I mean by this is that Pawlenty’s proposal, while debatable on its meager merits, is a policy proposal, not a constitutional matter. It’s important to constrain the powers of the legislature when it comes to issues like freedom of speech and other fundamental rights which are necessarily to ensure a healthy democracy; it is very dangerous, and frankly a little bizarre, to limit the power of legislature when it comes to policy measures.
Policy should be debated and voted on by the state legislature, not by the voters. Let too many referendums pass and too many constitutional constraints slip into place and you’re looking at the prospect of Minnesota devolving into a Californiaesque quagmire. I think that’s something we would all like to avoid. Pawlenty’s silly constitutional amendment should fall on that point alone.