Six-term state Rep. Joe Mullery lost a rival from within the DFL when Minneapolis School Board member Peggy Flanagan dropped out of the Minnesota House District 58A race last month to care for her ailing mother. Flanagan’s challenge left the contest without a DFL endorsee, her candidacy’s buzz left Mullery vulnerable, and her departure left an opening for another DFLer to test Mullery’s grip on the job.

Enter (on the final day for filing) Jon Olson, the north side’s representative on the Minneapolis Park Board since 2002. In 2006, in the midst of a four-year stint as president that ended early this year, Olson saw a three-acre park just upriver from park board headquarters renamed for his father (Orvin "Ole" Olson, a Minneapolis park commissioner in the 1970s) and briefly entered the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Martin Sabo. Olson, a 30-something who’s shown he’s not afraid to stand up to party elders, owns and operates a Dairy Queen in North Minneapolis.

The ornery renegade spirit of Ron Paul’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination animates software engineer and self-described lifelong student Grant Cermak, 30, who says his own political pedigree is limited to a distant relationship to Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak (elected in 1931, only to die in 1933 from an assassin’s bullet likely meant for President Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he was shaking hands). Cermak’s campaign got a boost late last month when he became the first candidate in the state and among the first few nationwide to win a Ron Paul endorsement — the result, Cermak says, of his "pursuing it with vigor."

Paul’s is a valuable name to drop in the heavily DFL district, Cermak claims, as the Texas congressman’s anti-war stance and budget hawkishness keep doors from being slammed in Cermak’s Republican face — as they otherwise would "100 percent of the time." Indeed Obama supporters and people with Al Franken signs in their yards have pledged votes to him, the candidate tells MnIndy, suggesting free-floating allegiances unknown in the heyday of the old north-side DFL machine.