Thankfully, if the political process fails, we have a strong state Voting Rights Act now, and there's no real way to do this without impacting protected classes.

And with seven wards, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to pack as many working-class neighborhoods as possible into a single Southside ward and crack the rest into wards with their higher-turnout affluent neighbors. That's the fantasy, I'm sure.

If conservatives succeed at reducing the size of the council, their next move will be to gerrymander every ward to be like 4 and 7. That's what I take from the screenshots people took of Michael Baskins's manifesto before it was pulled down, anyway.

That's my take on 4, not necessarily 5.

I looked at her Schedule D and don't even understand some of these "debts." Since when does Google do "buy now, pay later"? Is this her way of accounting for things she put on a credit card that she hasn't paid yet?

I just want a wifi speaker that I can control through my phone, but as far as I can tell, such things are not manufactured anymore. One day I will settle for Bluetooth, I guess.

It's awful. And the Echo increasingly just ignores my commands and starts playing algorithmically assembled playlists on Amazon Music, even though I have two other music services enabled and not that one.

The two no-hope Republicans in the race have raised almost $1.4 million. Latonya should switch parties. She'd still have no hope of winning, but it would be a lot more lucrative.

At last week's Charter Commission meeting, Peter Ginder made a point of complimenting Elliott Payne on the decorum of the confirmation hearings. I didn't watch the hearings but have not heard anything to the contrary. Interpreting the mayor not getting what he wanted as a lack of decorum is weird.

This is good, fuck ICE, and also, if you find yourself "accidentally" in the exit-only lane for Portland, the only decent thing to do is to take your lumps, exit onto Portland, find a legal place to turn around (like the handy roundabout at 66th), and get back on the highway.

Welcome to our AI-driven future, where a slick-looking website might just be a sign that someone stayed up 'til midnight to get some stuff off his chest and nothing more than that.

A less cringe skin on narratives from the Minneapolis Times?

Anyway, they already mention several 2026 candidates by name, so if there's any sign of them spending any real money, I'm sure they will draw a CFB complaint or two.

The width of the bars also appears to be an issue here. Just a hack job all around.

Aha. But then the number for Flanagan should be $1.4 million, at least the way normal people round numbers.

It's unclear what the point of this is. It's too late for them to mobilize "conservative liberals" to participate in the DFL caucuses like WLM did last year. And if they're not going to register as a committee, they can't meaningfully influence the primaries. It just feels like Frey guys venting.

Seems like the buried lede here is that, apparently, slightly under 50% of the people they surveyed identified as democratic socialists?

Why are the candidates reporting different numbers to the media than to the FEC? Looking at the raw filings on the FEC website, I'm seeing $2.23 million for Craig, $1.90 million for Tafoya, and $1.36 million for Flanagan.

The clerk's office requesting a "yes" vote on the rejection, rather than a "no" vote on the nomination, also makes me think "computer says no" may have been a factor. (The first vote doesn't show up in LIMS.)

I guess maybe he thinks he can flip Osman and get a second vote on Barnette without using the second of his three wishes. We'll see.

I am not knowledgeable about parliamentary procedure to know whether I agree with this, but the only reason we got here is that Frey was petty enough to try this veto ploy in the first place. A normal politician — even Trump! — would have withdrawn the nomination.

There’s been lots of news about the City Council voting down the appointment of Toddrick Barnette. This is a public memo from my office on the ways his leadership has missed the mark and what we want to see from the next Commissioner of Community Safety.

lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/Fil...

Or, if she was going around with a camera and a mic, as a propagandist for the feds, which I gather she is

I semi-regularly "loiter" in that library without holding a book or otherwise engaging in library business, and the cops have never bothered me. They must be applying some criterion that excludes me from their concern. I wonder what it could be.

I want to know who (correctly) added that comma without also adding an "it" so that the second independent clause would have a subject.

That's true; I don't leave my garage open. Who does? That would be weird.

At this point, it's hard to see calling it that as anything other than a reactionary dog whistle.

In that scenario, I use "bees are on the what now?", which doesn't make any sense, even to me.

Something we should perhaps think about before we bake the Office of Community Safety into the city charter so that future mayors and future councils are forced into this particular, still-experimental approach to public safety governance:

The week of spring break, I did that merge every morning at about 8:30 with my kids in the back, and I definitely felt like I was endangering all of our lives. There's a high concentration of sociopaths out there at that hour.

Or, e.g., Adam Kinzinger starting his own party and the Dems just completely standing down.