More spending and higher taxes, year after year

Can we please get over this idea to tax, tax, tax and spend for too many “wants”? Let’s simply work on the things we really need.

If the St. Paul mayor and City Council continue down this path of year-after-year property tax increases, sales tax increases, reparations, bikeway funding, streetcar funding, low-income funding, and rent-control stagnation, we are all going to find ourselves seeking low-income financing.

Winter is on our doorstep. Maybe we could start with the need to plow our streets once and for ALL.

Mark Kirchner, St. Paul

 

Speedy power restoration

Like so many residents in the Twin Cities, we were awakened by the severe storm early on Tuesday morning. And, like so many others, we lost power when the winds toppled a tree onto the electric line connecting our home to the grid.

Xcel’s online and phone power outage reporting services worked smoothly, and the company promised to restore power by noon on Thursday the 29th. To our surprise and delight, a team arrived and had us reconnected about 12 hours after our power went out.

Many thanks to the workers who restored our electricity promptly and under difficult circumstances.

Mary Ann Saurino, St. Paul

 

A barrel of salt

The social media posting over the weekend by former President Trump that if reinstated to the White House his administration will be “great for women and their reproductive rights” must be taken with a barrel of salt.

Having repeatedly taken credit and lavished praise on himself for appointing the three Supreme Court justices who combined with two others to extinguish the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs case two years ago, his remark is about as welcome as an arsonist who tells the owner of a building that he has set afire that he will fetch a bucket to help put out the blaze he started.

Anyone, especially women, who accept that assurance will probably find, like the owner of the burning building, that the bottom of the fire starter’s bucket is replete with holes.

Marshall H. Tanick, Minneapolis

 

The Lynx were inside that day?

The Minnesota Lynx played a big game on Aug. 24. They are the third best team in the WNBA, they had a five-game winning streak, they had not lost a game since before the Olympics, they were retiring Maya Moore’s jersey and they were playing against Caitlyn Clark’s Indiana Fever.

Yet, after a big win, they couldn’t make the front page of the sports section. Instead, the front page was reserved for a Vikings preseason game, a story about PJ Fleck, and a loss by the Loons. Too bad the Pioneer Press doesn’t treat women’s sports with the respect they deserve.

Kathy Kilian, Woodbury

 

Inspired

It is amusing that St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter III was considered a “chant leader“ for Minnesota during the DNC in Chicago.

The government paying off his student loan debt must have triggered it as he has never shown that much excitement while leading the city.

Jacqueline Heintz, Maplewood

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By ELLEN KNICKMEYER and AAMER MADHANI, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were sharply at odds Thursday over prospects of reaching a deal for a Gaza cease-fire and hostage release, with Netanyahu saying it was “exactly inaccurate” that a breakthrough was close.

“There’s not a deal in the making,” Netanyahu said in an interview with “Fox and Friends.” His public skepticism comes as U.S. officials said they were working on a revised proposal to address remaining disputes between Israeli and Hamas leaders after the weekend discovery of six dead hostages added urgency to the talks.

National security spokesman John Kirby reiterated Thursday that only disagreements on “implementing details” of a cease-fire proposal need to be hammered out.

“I’ve heard what the prime minister said. I’m not going to get into a back and forth with him in a public setting,” Kirby told reporters. “We still believe, though this is incredibly difficult … if there’s compromise, if there’s leadership, we can still get there.”

President Joe Biden’s team, a lame-duck administration two months before the election, has projected optimism this summer as it works with fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar to try to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a truce in the 11-month war in Gaza. The deal would release more of the hostages taken by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, including Americans, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners — one of the big sticking points.

Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, and European Union.

U.S. officials said in the days before Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six recently slain hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, that Israeli and Hamas leaders could sign off on a deal as soon as the end of this week.

“I’m optimistic. It’s far from over. Just a couple more issues. I think we’ve got a shot,” Biden told reporters last Friday.

Even before that, Netanyahu was digging in his heels, adding conditions that make sealing any agreement before the U.S. elections difficult. His far-right government publicly prioritized for the first time in July — months into the talks — a demand for Israeli forces to keep their presence in a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Netanyahu says it’s needed to prevent Hamas from smuggling arms into the Palestinian territory.

“To ask Israel to make concessions after this murder is to send a message to Hamas: Murder more hostages, you’ll get more concessions,” Netanyahu said Thursday. “That’s the wrong thing to do, and I think the Israel public overwhelming is united against that.”

Hostage families have accused Netanyahu of blocking a deal and potentially sacrificing their loved ones to hold the border strip, called the Philadelphi corridor. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets, calling for a deal and saying time is running out to bring home the hostages alive.

Netanyahu has brushed off criticism that his management of the war and cease-fire negotiations has been politically motivated and said he believes only heavy pressure on Hamas will force it into concessions.

The Biden administration has stressed that its ally Israel has supported the negotiations and Hamas has been blocking a deal. This week, however, Biden said “no” when asked if Netanyahu was doing enough in the talks.

“We see time and again that Israel agrees to certain terms,” said Shira Efron, a policy adviser at the U.S.-based Israel Policy Forum, which analyzes Israeli-Palestinian relations. “It doesn’t say no, it agrees to certain terms — but then says, ‘Yes, but under those conditions.’”

“These public statements that come out after what seems to be an agreement … basically derail the agreement,” Efron said.

Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Middle East Institute research center, said she saw the talks as being between the U.S. and Netanyahu, and “in this bilateral negotiation, I see Netanyahu having the upper hand.”

The U.S., Egypt and other Arab nations have raised objections to a lasting Israeli presence in the Philadelphi corridor. Hamas says the Israeli position is in breach of the bridging proposal’s call for Israel to leave densely populated areas of Gaza.

U.S. officials say Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have been more agreeable to negotiations in private discussions than in their public statements.

A senior U.S. administration official told reporters Wednesday that Israel and Hamas have agreed on 14 of the 18 paragraphs in the bridging proposal, have technical differences about one paragraph and deeper differences about three paragraphs. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

Those three paragraphs in question focus on the exchange of hostages captured by Hamas and the number of Palestinian prisoners who would be released during what is supposed to be at least a six-week cease-fire.

The list of Palestinian prisoners to be released in the initial phase of the deal includes some who are serving life sentences in Israeli prisons. The official said the dispute about the ratio of prisoners to hostages to be swapped has been further complicated by the recent deaths of the six hostages.

For each hostage, there’s a certain number of Palestinian prisoners that were to be released. Now, “you just have fewer hostages as part of the deal in phase one,” the official said.

Netanyahu said they are still discussing the number of prisoners to be released for each hostage, the list of prisoners to be freed and whether they will be allowed to return home or have to leave.

The U.S. and others hope a cease-fire would calm tensions that threaten a wider regional conflict, including fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants in neighboring Lebanon.

Attacks by Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups have increased since the Oct. 7 attack, in which some 1,200 people were killed. Hamas fighters also took about 250 people hostage, with roughly 100 remaining in Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive in response has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count.

When it comes to a deal, “we’re being pragmatic about it, and we do believe that we have made an immense amount of progress in the last few months in terms of getting the structure of the deal in place,” Kirby said.

___

AP writers Zeke Miller and Matthew Lee contributed from Washington.