An error message now marks a post pulled from Hagedorn's blog
As the Minnesota Independent first reported earlier this month, 1st Congressional District candidate Jim Hagedorn removed blog posts disparaging of gays, fellow Republicans and Native [...]
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Rep. Michele Bachmann’s constituents have noticed that her increasingly prominent role as a high-profile conservative has focused her attention away from her district’s needs, but they don’t seem to mind.
Public Policy Polling surveyed (PDF) residents of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s district last week and found [...]
In his interview with Newsweek (mentioned earlier by Chris Steller), Gov. Pawlenty said he regretted a 1993 vote to expand the state’s anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity and that they law should be changed. Specifically, he said laws that protect [...]
If Norm Coleman is not doing polling to probe his prospects for the 2010 Minnesota governor’s race — as one report today says he is, despite his denial — then new evidence on YouTube suggests he should be.
Since conceding his former [...]
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Two days after the Star Tribune carried Garrison Keillor’s War-on-Christmas op-ed, the paper prints a “Counterpoint” by Mitch Pearlstein, president of the Center of the American Experiment. Pearlstein calls Keillor “nasty” but “brilliant” — and agrees that Christmas is under seige.
Point by point, [...]
Since Gov. Tim Pawlenty took office in 2003, not one public official has filed a conflict-of-interest disclosure with the state ethics board, an unprecedented streak for a disclosure system that had routinely been used for the previous three decades.
Critics blame the precedent set for public officials [...]
The only DFL gubernatorial candidates to give a flat “no” to public funding for a new Minnesota Vikings stadium — state Sen. John Marty and House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher — also love the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” That’s the main correlation between [...]
Photo: David J. Oakes, Session e-Briefly
Handicapping is underway in the race to replace Republican state Sen. Dick Day, who is quitting to lobby for casino gambling at horse tracks.
The Owatonna People’s Press is betting on Waseca [...]
Gov. Pawlenty tells Newsweek that “Democrats have all kinds of characters who are interesting, bold and dramatic,” while Republicans have Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin … and him.
The interview, a Q&A with Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, finds the governor in a frank mood. Pawlenty waxes realistic [...]
Photo: mspairport.com
In a move set into motion by a planeload of passengers’ overnight stay on the tarmac at Rochester Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the U.S. Transportation Department has ordered airlines to limit such runway waits to three hours.
The action comes less than a month after [...]
President Barack Obama. Photo: WDCpix
WASHINGTON — A year’s worth of diplomatic outreach to Iran is on the verge of eclipse, thanks to consistent Iranian refusals to accept President Obama’s offers for a new relationship. As a result, Obama administration officials and their [...]
Minnesota’s U.S. senators were explaining their votes for health-care reform right and left Sunday: Amy Klobuchar appeared on Fox News Sunday and Al Franken posted his rationale at Daily Kos. That left a progressive group mulling whether to target Franken in a [...]
Didn’t people ride the rails during the Great Depression? On many Minnesota rail lines during this Great Recession, hobos wouldn’t move an inch because the stalled economy has left much rolling stock idle. The Duluth City Council will decide tonight whether to ask the North [...]
St. Cloud State University poll data released on Friday (PDF) shows most Minnesotans support abortion rights and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, a result that’s in line with polling throughout the decade. Republicans, religious conservatives and those who never completed high school were most likely [...]
The Minneapolis City Council voted on Friday to denounce Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would jail LGBT people in that country and impose severe penalties for allies who work for LGBT rights. The first incarnation of the bill even provided for the death penalty in [...]
‘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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
Andy Birkey, Chris Steller, Paul Schmelzer, Daphne Eviatar, David Weigel, Mary Kane, Mike Lillis, Spencer Ackerman, Martha C. White, Jon Collins, David O. Williams
