Minnesota

Guilty, guilty, guilty

Featured image The jury in the terror trial of the two Somali women who raised funds for al Shabab in Rochester, Minnesota, returned with a raft of guilty verdicts this morning. The women were convicted of charges including conspiracy to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization, of providing support, and of lying to the FBI. The jury deliberated for about 20 hours. The ringleader was not exactly remorseful after the »

Terror trial goes to jury

Featured image We have been following the terror trial involving the two Minnesota Somali women who were raising money for Al-Shabab in Rochester, Minnesota. The case against them was submitted to the jury late yesterday in federal district court in Minneapolis. Reporter Allie Shah provides the customary Star Tribune perspective: if the Somali women are not acquitted, Somalis in Minnesota and elsewhere will think ill of us. They apparently aren’t too concerned »

Liberal “reporting” promotes another bad Dem

Featured image In his post on Jane Mayer, the New Yorker, and Art Pope, John provides a case study in the modus operandi of the Democrat/Media Axis. As John’s series on the war on the Koch brothers demonstrates, the examples could be multiplied virtually without end. The Democrat/Media Axis also works equally hard to pump up or maintain the reputations of frauds, buffoons, and malefactors. The organs of the mainstream media are »

How Dems create jobs

Featured image Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison appeared over the weekend for an interview on MSNBC by the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney. How did Carney sneak in there? I don’t know, but he made the most of his appearance. He elicited this exemplary teaching from Ellison (video below), summarized by RealClearPolitics: Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) tells MSNBC regulations create jobs because a business will have to hire people to help them »

The lonesome death of TiZA

Featured image We’ve written a lot about the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy K-8 public charter school in suburban St. Paul. Given its recent demise, we can write of it in the past tense. It was a school that appears to have been operating illegally at taxpayer expense. You might have said that the school was Islamic in all but name, except that even its name was Islamic. Among other things, TiZA executive »

Ms. Ali regrets

Featured image Two women from Minnesota’s large Somali community went on trial yesterday in federal district court in Minneapolis before Judge Michael Davis, a judge before whom John and I have litigated and whom we greatly respect. He is an extraordinarily decent man, both on and off the bench. The two Somali women are charged with raising money for the Somali Islamist terror group al-Shahab. The long-running investigation into al-Shahab out of »

The Ellison elision

Featured image It could be media bias. It could be media malpractice. In any case some important personal information has gone missing in Chris Welch’s CNN report “My belief: Rep. Keith Ellison, from Catholic to Muslim.” Attentive Power Line readers, I ask you: what’s missing? Chris Welch, this post’s for you: “Keith Ellison for dummies.” »

Keith Ellison for dummies

Featured image After he unexpectedly won the endorsement of the DFL nominating convention for Minnesota’s Fifth District congressional seat on May 6, 2006, Keith Ellison faced a serious problem. The problem was how to deal with his well-known involvement with the Nation of Islam. Had Ellison not managed to dispose of the problem, his candidacy would likely have been irreparably weakened in the competitive DFL primary field. Ellison chose to deal with »

Faith questions for Keith Ellison

Featured image Stanley Kurtz observes that “[o]utgoing New York Times editor Bill Keller has kicked up a controversy by placing on the table a series of religious questions for the Republican candidates for president.” I want to get in on the act and pose a set of questions for Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison, America’s first Muslim congressman. I summarized my research on Ellison just before he was elected to Congress »

A reading of Brian Lambert

Featured image I am afraid that John is overly harsh on Brian Lambert for overlooking our posts on Tim Pawlenty’s withdrawal in his MinnPost Daily Glean column. Although Lambert missed the mark yesterday, his twice-a-day column highlighting news coverage with a local angle is usually worth reading. He has a good eye and covers a lot of territory. To take one example, Lambert’s column provided a valuable guide to coverage of the »

Liberal Reporters Can’t Read

Featured image The big news yesterday morning was Tim Pawlenty’s withdrawal from the presidential race. Within hours after his announcement, both Scott and I wrote about it–Scott here and me here. Were our posts somehow hard to spot on this site? I don’t think so; here is a screen shot: But those posts weren’t visible enough, apparently, for at least one liberal reporter. Here in Minnesota, there is a web site called »

Why Minnesota matters

Featured image I started following the story that I called Minnesota Cage Match for two reasons: I thought, given the constellation of forces at work, that events here would foreshadow events in Washington, and I found the slant of the incompetent media coverage driven by the Minneapolis Star Tribune to be sickening. As in the national mainstream media, Democrats here control what Glenn Reynolds calls “the master media narrative,” only more so. »

Dayton Caves?

Featured image Here in Minnesota, Governor Mark Dayton has agreed to the Republican legislature’s June 30 proposal to resolve the state’s budget impasse and end the partial government shutdown, with several conditions added. The most important of these conditions appears to be the Republicans’ agreement to a $500 million bonding bill “to put people back to work throughout Minnesota.” I don’t have a handle on the numbers, but I assume that any »

O wad Allah the giftie gie us…

Featured image I am something of a connoisseur of the deeply malicious idiocy of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison. I have followed his career closely on Power Line, and I wrote the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first Congressman” about him, introducing him to a national audience as he was about to become the first Muslim elected to Congress. A friend sent me a video of Ellison’s recent remarks on Minnesota »

Now It’s Getting Serious!

Featured image Mark Dayton’s shutdown of Minnesota’s state government is now in its third week, and so far I’ve seen no sign of it. I mean that literally: if I hadn’t read about the shutdown in the newspapers, I would have no reason to be aware of it. Each day, the Minnesota Star Tribune runs an article on some group that ostensibly is being hurt by the shutdown. So far, the ones »

Across the great divide

Featured image In Minnesota the state government may have shut down, but the the Minneapolis Star Tribune remains hard at work. The Strib is working overtime to portray Republican legislators as hardline ideologues responsible for the shutdown and as divided in their commitment to holding the line on spending. Consider Baird Helgeson’s “In GOP, a deep divide over hard line on budget.” (Did Rachel Stassen-Berger have the weekend off?) There are many »

Rudy Boschwitz speaks

Featured image Adding some heft to the idea of a deux ex machina to resolve Minnesota’s budget battle, my friend Rudy Boschwitz writes: Inasmuch as elder statesmen are becoming involved in our state’s budget battles, I too will join the fray. Voters didn’t leave me in doubt when they went to the polls just eight months ago. The shout for fiscal restraint and responsibility was loud and clear. In May the Legislature »