Minnesota
May 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
On Memorial Day, it will be four years since George Floyd’s death and the ensuing riots. The riots raged for days, centered on Lake Street in south Minneapolis. So, four years later, how is that part of the city faring? My colleague Bill Glahn drove down Lake Street to see how things are going. The one-minute video below is the result. Watch for a particularly poignant moment: the Minneapolis Police
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May 16, 2024 — Scott Johnson
President Trump gave our own Liz Collin of Alpha News six minutes of his time for an interview before court this morning. I have posted the video below. The related Alpha News story is posted here. President Trump will be dropping into the Twin Cities tomorrow night to be the featured speaker at our impecunious state party’s Lincoln Reagan dinner. According to the current KSTP-TV/SurveyUSA poll, Biden leads Trump 44-42,
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May 14, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In a nearby post John writes about the case of Myon Burrell. In the early days of Power Line John and I wrote several columns for the local newspapers decrying the murder of 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards. Tyesha was doing her homework at the dining room table in November 2002 when she was caught in the crossfire of Minneapolis gangbangers. Myon Burrell was convicted twice of Tyesha’s murder and sentenced to
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May 13, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In 2002, a Twin Cities gang member, Myon Burrell, murdered an 11-year-old girl named Tyesha Edwards. She was sitting innocently in her home when a bullet fired incompetently by Burrell in a gang shoot-out brought her life to an end. Burrell was sentenced to life in prison for Edwards’ murder. But someone–who was it?–wrote years ago about the mismatch between the dead victim and the living murderer. The murderer can
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May 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I wrote about my friend Scott Sansby last year in “My friend Scottie.” We have been friends since my family moved from Moorhead to St. Paul in 1958. In other words, we have been friends since the Eisenhower administration. Scottie has an incredibly wide network of friends and admirers, but we stayed best friends through high school and have remained friends ever since. I share so many memories with Scottie
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April 30, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I went to federal court in downtown Minneapolis yesterday morning for the opening statements in tbe first Feeding Our Future fraud trial. When it comes to Covid fraud, we’re number 1. The case features a cast of “diverse” defendants without much diversity. They are almost all Somali, I am sorry to say. By the same token, I believe that one of my Somali friends helped expose the fraud and assist
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April 27, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The kill-the-Jews rallies going on across America have resulted in casualties, including the leader of Columbia’s protests, now banned from the campus although it doesn’t appear that he has been expelled. Here in Minnesota, we have the entertaining spectacle of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health being fired, and subsequently starting a lawsuit. On to that in a moment, but first,
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April 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Mark Twain said that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress. However, he didn’t know about the Minnesota DFL party’s legislative delegation: The arrest rate in the United States is 2,181.7 per 100,000 each year, or 2.18%. The arrest rate for #mnleg Democrats is 3 per 104 in the last year, or 2.89%. Elected #mnleg Democrats have a 32% higher arrest rate than the general population. pic.twitter.com/rXxYlU31qi —
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April 23, 2024 — John Hinderaker
The Democrats hold a one-vote majority in Minnesota’s state Senate. They used that advantage to pass an unprecedented barrage of far-left legislation in the 2023 session. Their skinny majority is now in jeopardy, however, because a DFL senator has been arrested for burglary. This account is from a local news outlet in Alexandria, Minnesota: A state senator from Woodbury, Minnesota has now been charged with burglary for breaking into her
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April 14, 2024 — John Hinderaker
We have written a number of times about Mary Moriarty, the leftist who now serves as County Attorney for Hennepin County, Minnesota. Moriarty is a former public defender who thinks her job as prosecutor is to take the side of criminals. When she was sworn in as county attorney, did she put her hand on the Bible or perhaps a copy of the Constitution? No: she rested it on a
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April 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I’m not a fan of the Star Tribune, yet keeping up with it is an occupational necessity for me. The Star Tribune dominates the local news in roughly the same fashion that the New York times dominates the national news. It sets the agenda for other outlets that chase its tail. Over at Alpha News, we seek to fill the void created by the Star Tribune and its uncompetitive competitors.
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April 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I want to strike a Nietzschean note in this comment on the rideshare ordinance enacted by the City of Minneapolis this past month. Under the ordinance, Uber and Lyft would be required to pay drivers a minimum rate of $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute to ensure that they earn the equivalent of local minimum wage of $15.57 per hour — effective May 1. The city council overrode
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April 4, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In my opinion, conservatism–i.e., freedom–is superior to liberalism–i.e., state power–on philosophical and moral grounds. But then there is the added argument that freedom, unlike socialism, actually works. We have seen this repeatedly: e.g., Jimmy Carter failed, while Ronald Reagan succeeded. Donald Trump (by no means a perfect exemplar of conservatism, but still, a sponsor of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) succeeded, while Joe Biden failed. In recent years, we
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March 22, 2024 — John Hinderaker
It was Scott who first referred to the sacramental view of abortion, some years ago now. Abortion (much like slavery over the course of the 19th century) went from being a regrettable but sometimes unavoidable evil to being a positive good–indeed, these days, the noblest good to which political life can aspire. To see this perverse attitude in full flower, you almost have to live in Minnesota. Minnesota’s lieutenant governor,
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March 20, 2024 — John Hinderaker
We have written about the Great Sort many times, but frankly you can’t emphasize it enough. Americans are deserting blue states and cities in favor of red zones. Liberalism has proved to be a failure by the most reliable measure: fewer and fewer people want to live under liberal regimes. Here are two examples. First, the City of New York, which was thought doomed to dystopia in the 1970s, rallied
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March 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
On the local front, I have sought to draw attention to the case of JaycCee Cooper v. USA Powerlifting in several posts accessible here. Filed in Ramsey County District Court and assigned to Judge Patrick Diamond, the case raises the question whether USAP’s separation of men from women in USAP’s Minnesota competitions must yield to Cooper’s self-identification as a woman. Although a biological male, Cooper seeks to compete with the
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March 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Star Tribune represents the mainstream media at work in Minnesota. It is the dominant voice of conventional wisdom that relentlessly peddles the left-wing line on its news pages and in its editorial positions. It is, moreover, a profitable business owned by a billionaire. Glen Taylor bought it in 2014 for $100 million. He may have assumed some of the paper’s debt in the process. It reportedly makes a substantial
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