‘Tis the season: Members of Congress — including Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann — are again gearing up for another “War on Christmas” with a resolution that “strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas and expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions [...]
Photo: Jonathunder, Wikipedia
Garrison Keillor rages from the battlements of the War on Christmas in his column this week, telling Unitarians and Jews and other heathens that “Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.”
Unitarians (who [...]
Adam Kokesh at an antiwar rally in September 2007. Photo: Flickr user ragessos
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had barely begun to give his acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention when [...]
Last week in Oslo President Obama confirmed that “evil does exist in the world.” Now scientists at a lab in Tower say they’ve seen signs deep under the Soudan Mine that something called “dark matter” also exists. Two particles of the theorized but [...]
Al Franken says he was only following orders to keep the health-care debate moving when he cut off Joe Lieberman’s speech in the U.S. Senate at the 10-minute mark.
Franken told Minnesota Public Radio that Majority Leader Harry Reid had instructed him and others taking [...]
As the internet buzzed about this awkward confrontation between Sen. Joe Lieberman and Sen. Al Franken, I remembered Franken’s novel “Why Not Me?” in which he runs for president, wins and resigns in disgrace. In the book, Franken chooses Lieberman as his running mate. Below the jump, check out [...]
Photo: WDCpix
An appropriations bill passed by Congress last weekend is being hailed by public health advocates for ending funding for abstinence-until-marriage sex education and eliminating the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs. Minnesota is one of a three dozen states that allow drug users [...]
On Wednesday night, Rep. Michele Bachmann participated in the Family Research Council’s “prayercast” against the health reform bill being debated in Congress. Bachmann and religious right leader Lou Engle led the group in prayer as participants chanted and churchgoers watched around the country.
The state of the nation’s water is a glass-half-full-or-half-empty situation: we have federal standards for water quality, but they’re decades out of date. The makes the question less philosophical and more straightforward: Did you really just drink that half-glass of water? The New York Times has a [...]
In New Hampshire Wednesday, Tim Pawlenty said things like “monstrosity being jammed down our throats” (to describe health care reform), “Ponzi scheme on the Potomac” (to describe federal spending), and “red-hot smoking” (to describe his wife, Mary). People in the Granite State returned the favor, [...]
MnIndy file photo
Rep. Michele Bachmann backed off her statement about anti-healthcare reform advocates being the “light brigade,” after MinnPost shared with her that the term referred to a British cavalry division that was crushed by Russian troops during the Crimean War. “Oh, what [...]
“Are you in favor of reinstituting the military draft, as Democrats in Congress have proposed?” That’s one of 15 questions the Republican National Committee uses to drum up funds in a “2010 Obama Agenda Survey” that arrived in Minnesota mailboxes this week. A search of current [...]
“The federal government is running a Ponzi scheme,” Gov. Pawlenty told a New Hampshire radio audience Wednesday, and if pending reforms are enacted, federal health care programs are destined for bankruptcy.
Pawlenty was interviewed by phone on WGIR-AM ahead of an in-person appearance in the [...]
Allen Quist. Photo: YouTube
Former state legislator Allen Quist has announced his campaign to challenge Rep. Tim Walz in Minnesota’s First Congressional district. A once-outspoken figurehead of the conservative Christian movement, he’s now promising a retooled campaign that will focus more on “Tea Party” [...]
MNTC HQ in Minneapolis. Photo: Andy Birkey, MnIndy
Last December, after the Minnesota Independent ran an article about Minnesota Teen Challenge and the federal earmark the Christian drug treatment center is receiving, the group' [...]
Michele Bachmann wasn’t alone Tuesday in probing unlikely links between politics and poetry. Two Minnesota bloggers also used poetry to illuminate the political landscape, adapting familiar lines by the late New Hampshire poet Robert Frost to Gov. Pawlenty’s trip to New Hampshire today.
Bluestem Prairie’s [...]
Rep. Michele Bachmann’s recent choice of words suggests she knew what she saying when she invoked the “sadly ludicrous” Crimean War episode from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” at a Capitol Hill anti-health care reform rally.
The Minnesota congresswoman’s rallying cry, “[...]
Connecticut resident Tom Hill poses with a homemade sign at a Washington rally. Photo: David Weigel
WASHINGTON — Tom Hill’s massive sign — a white sheet taped onto a fishing pole — [...]
“You give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.” With that line, former Gov. Jesse Ventura cemented a place for himself alongside U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, rapper Kanye West, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah [...]
Minnesota is still in danger of losing a seat in Congress — with the odds on Michele Bachmann’s disappearing, some speculate — if the U.S. Census count comes in just a bit shy as experts have been warning it could. But the state demographer [...]
Photo: MPCA
The skies over Northern Minnesota’s signature natural areas will get 30 percent clearer — by 2018 — under new rules approved today by a 7-1 vote of the state Pollution Control Agency board.
At that rate it will take a century to totally clear the [...]
A massive proposal to mine for copper and other metals in Northern Minnesota underwent exactly the amount of public debate at two meetings last week that government agencies had planned for: none, according to Lake Superior Mining News. Citizens wishing to speak on PolyMet Mining’s plans [...]
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann claimed again Monday that Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, estimated health care reform would cost 5.5 million jobs. Last month PolitiFact called that claim “problematic and contrary” to Romer’s statements. Now Media [...]
Sen. Al Franken grilled his Republican colleague from South Dakota, Sen. John Thune, over what Franken said were inaccurate statements regarding the health care reform bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate.
“You know, again, we are entitled to our own opinions; we’re not [...]
Minnesota may have hosted the decade’s best regular-season baseball game, but according to The Fix the state can also lay claim to two of the decade’s best U.S. Senate races, including one that went beyond the regular season. Both involved Norm Coleman, defeating Walter Mondale in [...]
Photo: Stephanie Swartz, iStockphoto
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt a harsh blow on Monday to victims of abuse by U.S. officials during the “war on terror.” The court announced it would not review a federal appeals court ruling that dismissed a lawsuit by [...]
Minnesota has settled into climate-appropriate winter weather, but Gov. Pawlenty, just back from summer in South America, opined Monday that the science behind global warming is “unsettled” and cap-and-trade carbon controls are “the wrong direction.” On that second point, he is in agreement with a [...]
Dick Armey, former congressman and current FreedomWorks chairman, likes him some Tim Pawlenty. In an interview with CBS News’ Declan McCullagh, he cites Minnesota’s governor as a Republican who’s “becoming emergent” as one of the “most effective voice[s]” in the party. “My own view is that [...]
The Texas firm hired by the State of Minnesota to vet new hires for legal work status says the state and Minnesota Public Radio can expect a lawsuit, after MPR reported that Lookout Services made employees’ private data accessible online.
MPR’s News Cut quotes [...]
Rep. Michele Bachmann will join members of the religious right in a “prayercast” on Wednesday to pray for defeat the “Government Takeover of Healthcare.” The prayercast is sponsored by the Family Research Council.
Joining Bachmann will be Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kans., and Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and [...]
The Minnesota Family Council told WCCO over the weekend that laws that include fines and jail for sex outside of marriage are a good thing and should be expanded. Minnesota has several laws on the books — laws that are unenforced and definitely sexist — [...]
Matt Entenza Photo: Wikipedia
The Stonewall DFL, the LGBT caucus within the DFL, voted this weekend to endorse Matt Entenza for governor in 2010. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Stonewall has endorsed Entenza in every campaign he’s run since his first campaign for the [...]
By Gov. Pawlenty’s executive order, the State of Minnesota checks everyone it hires to confirm they’re legal to work. But the Texas firm to which the state farmed out its E-Verify program didn’t safeguard employees’ data, leaving Social Security numbers and other private info out [...]
“The Nobel Committee gambled and lost,” says Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, assistant professor of justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas. President Obama’s speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was “a defense of war and militarism. … With this speech the Nobel Committee’s gamble became an [...]
Image: fcc.gov
The Star Tribune started it, and now the newspaper has announced an end to the saga of the flat-screen TVs at the state facility for sex offenders at Moose Lake. The facility’s director has been reprimanded and the TVs have been punished.
No [...]
Margaret Anderson Kelliher
Just when Margaret Anderson Kelliher appeared to be pulling away from the pack running for governor with a series of endorsements, charges that she violated campaign-finance rules are setting her apart in ways she didn’t need.
Her Democratic rivals for governor [...]
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is alarmed by what it perceives as growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Minnesota. Prompted by news of racist fliers being posted in St. Cloud and the candidacy of Lynne Torgerson against Rep. Keith Ellison, the group called for religious [...]
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
WASHINGTON — Rep. Michele Bachmann and the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy teamed up with other House Republicans on Thursday on the front steps of the Supreme Court to take a shot at President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for deciding to [...]
University of Minnesota wrestling coach J Robinson has had his problems with Title IX rules requiring equity for women’s athletics. Now he has trouble with titles and equity of a different sort. After the Minnesota Daily revealed a web of wrestlers buying, selling and [...]
MnIndy file photo
Hotline On Call gives a sneak preview of National Journal’s new survey of beltway insiders on “the member they’d like most to shut up, the brightest thinkers and strategists in their parties and much more.” Topping the list of GOP voices [...]
At least two fliers mocking Islam have been found near Somali-oriented businesses in St. Cloud, the St. Cloud Times reported Thursday. The images included swastikas and the Muslim prophet Mohammed in sexualized situations.
Local police are investigating whether the incidents constituted a crime and, if [...]
A Minnesota pastor says his church is incorrectly listed on the website of a conservative splinter group that’s breaking away from the Evangelical Church in America (ELCA) over the church’s recent votes on homosexuality, but that group is refusing to rectify the [...]
Photo: bachmann.house.gov
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann urged her supporters to fight health care reform by calling Congress “every day, when you wake up in the morning and comb your hair and take your vitamins.”
Democrats are purposely pushing health care legislation at holiday time, Bachmann charged during a [...]
In a statement, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner played down the importance of House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher winning EMILY’s List’s backing for governor.
Gaertner apparently felt she had to say something about the endorsement, as the only other candidate with the gender and pro-choice [...]
Minneapolis residents have to look to the neighborhood-association president level to find an elected chief executive who represents them and might actually be at the office today.
President Obama is in Norway, picking up his Nobel Peace Prize. Gov. Pawlenty is in Chile, meeting [...]
What is it about riding a bike under a baseball stadium that Tom Coburn and John McCain don’t understand? The senators decried federal stimulus spending to extend the Cedar Lake Bike Trail into downtown Minneapolis, prompting a blog retort by Transportation Secretary Ray [...]
Photo: Lori Howard, iStockphoto
Six members of You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International, a controversial ministry that holds Christian assemblies in public schools, are ordained as ministers, tax documents show. The members’ status raises questions about their activities in public schools as [...]
Congress’ first Muslim, DFLer Keith Ellison, has drawn an independent challenger with a lot to say — particularly about Islam.
Lynne Torgerson charts her own course, telling the Minnesota Independent in an interview that she considers herself almost “apolitical.”
The Minneapolis criminal-defense attorney unsuccessfully sought election as [...]
Andy Birkey, Chris Steller, Paul Schmelzer, Daphne Eviatar, Paul Demko, David Weigel, Anna Pratt, Mary Kane, Mike Lillis, admin, Martha C. White, Spencer Ackerman, David O. Williams
