After late-August protests, Cleveland and Filson were put on leave from their jobs. Photo: Andy Birkey, MnIndy

Anoka-Hennepin School District 11 teacher Diane Cleveland filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) in Ramsey County District Court Monday, alleging that earlier this summer it wrongly disclosed that she had been accused of harassing a student over his perceived sexual orientation.

Cleveland and another teacher, Walter Filson, who worked at the Secondary Technical Education Program (STEP), which gives 11th and 12th graders the opportunity to receive college credit, allegedly made jokes, comments and innuendos about former student Alex Merritt’s supposed sexual orientation. The teachers were put on unpaid leave, while the case, which received plenty of media attention and public outcry, concluded with a $25,000 settlement agreement in August 2009 between the district and Jodi Merritt, Alex’s mother.

The 28-page complaint (pdf) against the human rights department, which states that she was “portrayed in a negative fashion,” contends that MDHR violated some parts of the Minnesota Human Rights Act (363A.01 et. al.) and the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, Chapter 13, when it printed her name online and provided the summary investigation, which names her, to the Star Tribune.

Cleveland’s attorney, Philip Villaume, said the case centers on her right to privacy. “The law is complicated, but the allegations are simple,” he said.

In the original complaint Cleveland wasn’t a respondent but a witness, so the department “did not have the right to use her name … It violated the confidentiality part of the settlement.”

The original charging documents don’t mention her by name and she was never interviewed by MDHR. That she’s a public employee doesn’t factor into it, he said.

Villaume declined to comment about why the other teacher isn’t a plaintiff in the case, whom he added he doesn’t represent. A press release from Villaume’s office states: “Plaintiff stresses that this action has absolutely nothing to do with the minor child’s complaint filed with the MDHR, only the release of private data by the MDHR.”

Cleveland wants a restraining order and an injunction “restraining the Defendant from publishing her name on their website or dissemination of any information relating to the Plaintiff effective until a trial on the merits of this case,” according to the complaint. She’s also seeking $50,000 in damages, including lost wages, anxiety, humiliation, pain, suffering, mental anguish attorneys’ fees and more.

Jeff Holman, spokesman for the state human rights department, passed on a response from MDHR legal affairs manager, Michael K. Browne, who said that the department acted lawfully under the Minnesota Human Rights Act.

“The Commissioner has a duty to eliminate discrimination through education,” he said, adding that she has the authority to choose the most effective means. “The Department publishes information on closed cases and settlement agreements on its web site, as it did in this case, to fulfill its legislative mandate to educate Minnesotans about their rights and responsibilities under the Act.”

Further, under the law, he said, information is public once a case is closed. MDHR is required to release certain documents upon request.

“The charge included the names of those involved, including teacher Diane Cleveland; refusing to release the charge, or withholding any part of it, would potentially violate the Act,” he said.

Local data practices expert Donald Gemberling said the human rights commissioner has some latitude in releasing information for educational purposes, “showing people how to not get into trouble with the Human Rights Act,” he said.

But he’s unsure if it’s ever been tested.

“The fact that someone is not a respondent is an interesting argument,” he said, adding that it seems well within the department’s authority to do what it did. Sometimes settlement agreements include a provision for confidentiality, but it has no legal effect. “Settlements are public if they involve government entities,” he said.

Many aspects of the data practices law are black and white, but how information about public employees gets handled is murkier. It’s unclear how information flowed from the school district to the state department. Normally, when a department has some leeway in instances like this, “the judge favors the department,” Gemberling said.

A forum held by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) in Minneapolis this week centered on the relationship between law enforcement and the media at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and indicated the extent to which journalism is evolving.

The event was organized in response to the predicament that numerous journos found themselves in while they covered the convention: By the Minnesota Independent’s count, nearly 50 journalists were arrested or detained by police at the RNC, including MnIndy’s Paul Demko, while more than 800 people were taken into custody.

St. Paul city officials announced last week that the city wouldn’t prosecute journalists facing “unlawful assembly” charges, but many still want to know why they ended up in plastic handcuffs in the first place, or what they could’ve done to prevent it. A couple reviews of RNC security efforts are being done in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but city officials say that police performance isn’t the focus.

The Uptake has video of the discussion here.

Not a witch hunt

Al Tompkins, a media expert who arrived from the Florida-based Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, moderated the talk, saying it would be a productive dialogue between representatives of the media and law enforcement and not a witch hunt. Still, emotions ran high. On hand to answer questions from Tompkins and attendees were St. Paul Deputy Mayor Ann Mulholland, KARE-11 photojournalist Jonathan Malat, St. Paul Assistant Police Chief Matt Bostrom and Pioneer Press reporter Mara Gottfried.

It started with a recap of the RNC’s events, featuring protest footage from Malat. Later, Malat made the point that he was herded onto the Marion Street bridge while trying to obey police officers’ dispersal order on the last night of the protests.

Assistant Police Chief Bostrom said protesters and journos had plenty of time to leave the scene. “If someone disobeys a lawful order, they shall be arrested,” he said, adding that it’s up to the individual officer’s discretion. He conceded that there may have been a gap in their planning because he and other law enforcement agencies didn’t anticipate the sheer number of people claiming to be media. In his 20-plus years of police work, he says he’s never encountered so many journalists involved in an hourslong criminal activity, as he put it. “What do you want us to do?” he asked the crowd.

Deputy Mayor Mulholland defended the police response to the RNC protests. Mayor Chris Coleman “believes that police did what they needed to do in the name of public safety.” When asked if it was legitimate for journalists to be on the scene, she answered, “I think the mayor ultimately believes that it is appropriate for journalists to be wherever people are gathered lawfully.” (Her statement was left hanging until someone referenced it later, saying that in order to continue covering an illegal activity, they would likely need to get farther away from the action, or run the risk of getting in the way.)

Further, “I think we have determined a special role for media to assure that members of the media have access and the information they need to tell a story. Having watched hours of footage, I’d be hard-pressed to think we didn’t give great access,” she said. But does that mean bloggers and traditional journalists should be lumped together as equals? “I don’t know who the journalist is … I think our approach was probably to treat everyone the same.”

Lawful journalists?

But the Associated Press’ David Pyle testified that not everyone was treated the same, not even within his news crew. Four AP staffers were detained, including one photographer who was forced to the ground and “roughed up” before being let go and another who was held for 10 hours. Coincidentally, it was one of their AP photos that the police used to ask for the public’s help in identifying the alleged anarchist who broke the Macy’s window during a protest. Pyle said he was relieved that police didn’t credit the AP. “We don’t want to be identified as an investigatory arm [of the police].”

Twin Cities attorney Mark Anfinson, who specializes in First Amendment law, said that when given the order to disperse, journalists “very much like covering a war, proceed with some risk. Here the risk is being arrested… It’s hard to see where the police violated rights as opposed to acting without a lot of tact or wisdom,” he said. “A lot of these charges were of this species, about failure to obey a lawful order… What’s a lawful order?”

Dave Aeikens, the national president of SPJ and staff writer of the St. Cloud Times, said he hopes that journalists and law enforcement officials can come to an understanding so arrests can be avoided in the future. While he said that SPJ prefers not to define who is a journalist, WCCO’s Jason DeRusha commented that he thought the whole reason for coming together was to find out who gets to be in the “in crowd.” Contrary to that, he said, independent media advocates seem to be arguing that journalists shouldn’t be afforded any special protections.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which maintained a hotline for journalists during the RNC, said from her Virginia office that she was prepared for some of the things that went wrong. “Sometimes you have to get arrested,” she said, in order to keep doing your job. But in certain cases, such as the scenario with the AP staffers, “That is inexcusable.”

Photos by Kathy Easthagen

While the film is specifically about the experiences of Kimberly, an aspiring rap artist, and her husband Scott, it also provides a rare glimpse of what Deal calls “all the Katrinas” poor people, like those in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, face. “It’s not about extreme weather; it’s about extreme poverty,” he says.

Presented with support of executive producer Danny Glover and directed produced by Deal and Tia Lessin (who were behind Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine), the film won the 2008 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Listen: Actor/producer Danny Glover talks about the movie’s impact

Listen: Carl Deal discusses poverty and how the film came to be

[Updated] St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s office issued a statement this morning announcing that the city attorney won’t prosecute journalists who were cited by authorities at the Republican National Convention (RNC) with “presence at an unlawful assembly,” a misdemeanor charge.

That pertains specifically to the journalists who were swept up in the massive arrests during protests in St. Paul on the convention’s first and last days (including MnIndy’s Paul Demko, who was arrested on the last night of the RNC).

How many people that might include hasn’t been tallied yet, but nearly 50 of the more than 800 people arrested or detained were onsite to cover the RNC, according to a MnIndy analysis (see comments for additions to our original list). Their cases will be individually reviewed according to this policy, according to City Attorney John Choi.

In other news related to RNC journalist arrestees, it should be noted that the pending charges against “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman and two of her producers are being dropped. Choi explained that his office is declining prosecution in Goodman’s case, “because the facts and circumstances related to Amy Goodman fell outside of our charging policy for obstruction of legal process cases,” which is what she was cited for.

Choi explained that, “In conjunction with the police department and community activists, the City Attorney’s Office has developed a more conservative approach to handling obstruction of legal process cases. We felt that same policy should apply to this case.”

Further, after reviewing the facts, circumstances and video evidence, pending unlawful assembly charges against the show’s two producers are also being cleared.

Choi said the decision doesn’t necessarily mean the arrests were improper. “What defines probable cause for an arrest is different from what defines probable cause for a charge. … We have to look at whether we can succeed at court,” he said.

Minneapolis attorney John Lundquist, who represented Goodman on the matter, said, “Obviously we’re very happy that [the city attorney] made the right call in declining the charges. It was a little slow in coming, but I agree that it was correct to dismiss it. Clearly there was never any prosecutable case.” Further, “I strongly disagree there was ever any probable cause for the arrests in the first place.”

Mayor Coleman said in the prepared statement about the policy decision made concerning journalists at the RNC, “This decision reflects the values we have in St. Paul to protect and promote our First Amendment rights to freedom of the press. … A journalist plays a special role in our democracy and that role is just too important to ignore.” While police carried out their charge to protect public safety, “we are serving the public’s interest to maintain the integrity of our democracy, system of justice and freedom of the press.”

The statement acknowledges the “growing media profession in print, broadcast and the Internet, the city attorney’s office will use a broad definition and verification to identify journalists who were caught up in mass arrests during the convention.”

Joel Barkin, executive director at the Progressive States Network

Nathan Newman, a policy director at Progressive States Network, authored the report.

The New York-based political group Progressive States Network (PSN) has just released a report entitled, “The Anti-Immigration Movement That Failed,” which counters media hype around anti-immigration legislation, revealing that over the past few years, states have largely enacted various policies that embrace new immigrants.

While the anti-immigration movement may appear to hold sway at the federal government, the report makes the case that there’s still a heated debate going on at the state level, especially within swing states, said PSN executive director Joel Barkin, at a recent press conference. He calls the report, which examines nationwide policies on a state-by-state scale, “important and timely.” “It’s a significant fight and the pro-immigrant side is winning,” he said, adding, “It’s far from over.”

Report author Nathan Newman, a PSN policy director, attributes the inflated anti-immigrant message to political opportunists who tried to make it a “wedge” issue in electoral politics. But the data shows they’ve been so far unsuccessful. “The states that are the most experienced with the immigration issue, conservative or liberal, have the most positive approach.”

Newman advocates for “strong, integrative policies” that work to assimilate foreign-born people. That’s beneficial for everyone, he argued, pointing out that it can help raise labor standards for both immigrants and American-born workers. That includes things like higher wages for all employees. “Scapegoating immigrants is not going to solve the economic pressure working families experience.  The real problem is a far more pervasive one of employers violating the workplace rights of all workers, both native and immigrant,” the report states.

The vast majority of immigrants across the U.S. live in places that have adopted positive, “integrative” approaches that are welcoming to “New Americans.” A mere 11 percent of undocumented immigrants reside in states that have comprehensive punitive policies, or ones that are broadly unfriendly to immigrants. To the contrary, many states have started offering in-state tuition for undocumented people heading to public universities, health insurance for undocumented children and English language instruction.

Others have introduced programs that provide assistance to immigrants who want to obtain citizenship. More and more states are getting tough on employers that aren’t up to par when it comes to minimum wage, safety code and workers compensation.

(Minnesota, which has a mix of both punitive and integrative laws, is among several states that have passed “new crackdowns on companies misclassifying employees as ‘independent contractors’ in order to evade wage and tax laws.” Other states, like New York, have established something along the lines of a Bureau of Immigrant Workers’ Rights to go after companies that violate wage laws.)

Only in a handful of states that were already conservative-leaning were “significant anti-immigrant policies able to make headway in 2008… Everywhere else, states either stalled anti-immigrant bills or enacted positive policies to better integrate new immigrants,” the report reads.

Minneapolis and Cuernavaca have a longstanding bond.

Minneapolis recently entered into a “sister city” agreement with Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos, a small Mexican state that is the homeland to nearly 30,000 immigrants who have resettled in the area. That pre-existing relationship, which is unusual for sister cities, was cemented in a signing ceremony in Minneapolis on Sept. 13.

Ricardo Hernandez, who heads the Mexican Consulate in St. Paul, explained that the trend began years ago, sort of informally, with people who trickled in gradually at first and then called for their family members and friends to join them. After that, the next generation comes. “That’s a pretty common way for an entire village to move,” he said, terming it an “immigration shift.”

Part of the reason for coming to Minnesota as opposed to places that are closer to the nation’s border is that immigrants have been “pushed to move somewhere else, where labor is needed and immigration isn’t so aggressive,” Hernandez explained. Here, there’s a good standard of living and a sense of community among the immigrants and “everyone knows each other.”

Over the past 50 years, more and more arrivals from Cuernavaca and its neighboring areas have landed in Minneapolis, with a marked influx just in the last 15 years or so, while the city’s overall Hispanic population more than doubled from 1990 to 2000. (They set up shop, for instance on Lake Street, where the word “Morelos” appears in business names such as in Morelos Taxi, Video Morelos and others.)

It’s part of a larger movement of immigrants flooding into Minneapolis from Laos, Cambodia, Latin America, Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and other places, in contrast to the wave of northern European immigrants that redefined the city’s demographics at the turn of the 20th century, a city staff report states.

Currently, Minneapolis’ social network includes eight other cities. Some of those are Eldoret, Kenya; Uppsala, Sweden; Kuopio, Finland; and Ibaraki, Japan. Its first sister city was Santiago, Chile; that connection was established in 1961 (it’s no longer active). The Cold War-era program, which is administered by the Washington, D.C.-based Sister City International, started out as a government-aided initiative to promote peaceful international relations with elementary school students who corresponded with overseas pen pals. The program fosters “educational exchanges, tourism, arts and culture, and economic development,” according to a city report.

City Council member Gary Schiff, who has been leading the charge along with Mayor R.T. Rybak, summed up: “We consciously chose [Cuernavaca] based on immigration. I hope it sets a framework with regions of the world where the people have already chosen us … I hope it raises awareness about where people come from and that we’ll learn about our future.”

Mayor R.T. Rybak announced this afternoon that Minneapolis would conduct a series of reviews into the Minneapolis Police Department’s (MPD) actions in Minneapolis during the Republican National Convention, including a standard “after-action report” that will look into related security measures and the development of new policies for dealing with the media. A City Council member who has urged a blue-ribbon, multijurisdictional review said the mayor’s statement was “good” but appeared to fall short of “a public, independent, transparent process.”

According to a statement from Rybak’s office (see pages 1, 2, 3), the police review — which will focus on the Critical Mass ride, the Media Party, the Liberty Parade and the Rage against the Machine concert — will assess police officers’ training prior to the RNC and identify areas for improvement. It will be completed by the end of October.

Minneapolis officials will also cooperate with St. Paul in its outside review of public safety, which that city’s mayor recently announced would be conducted by attorneys Andy Luger and Tom Heffelfinger.

In addition to the police evaluation, the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office will examine the protocols used for arresting and citing people at the RNC. It will also consult with the Hennepin County courts about the financial burden the RNC’s arrests/citations posed, given that the courts didn’t receive national security dollars to process them.

Civil Rights staff will make sure that processes for accepting complaints from the public are clearly laid out. A summary of complaints from each of these departments (plus the Office of Risk Management) along with recommendations and other analysis will be presented to city officials by February 2009. Rybak adds that “a six-month review will at least give policy makers a sense of the scope of issues to be addressed.”

Furthermore, given the “significant evolution in how the media covers stories and even the basic question of how media is defined … we think it valuable to try to develop a model policy for how to work with the media during large crowd events,” Rybak said.

The Minnesota Independent contacted the two Minneapolis City Council members who issued a call for Minneapolis and St. Paul to jointly form a blue-ribbon panel to investigate police conduct during the RNC.

Council member Cam Gordon had had a quick look at it. “It’s good we have the [mayor's] statement but it doesn’t necessarily meet what I’m hoping to get to … the kind of public, independent, transparent process that I would hope for,” he said.

“We might benefit from more of an opportunity to have a public hearing and take some public testimony,” Gordon added. “It might take Minneapolis and St. Paul working together.” He sees as “positive” St. Paul City Council Member Dave Thune’s planned “community conversation” hearing.

“The thing that gets me is this sort of a ‘National Security event,’” Gordon said. “What does that mean?” He said if the Super Bowl and baseball’s All-Star Game now fall in that category, “we need policies … to decide if we even want those kinds of events.”

UPDATE: In an email announcement Friday afternoon, Council Member Gary Schiff wrote that he supports the city’s review but hoped the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would also review federal agents’ actions. Schiff also recalled that he and Gordon had been the council’s lone dissenters last year on the city’s contract for the RNC that put Minneapolis police under the control of the feds, adding at the time that “safety should not be used as an excuse to limit a free press or stifle free speech.”

Andy Luger and Tom Heffelfinger

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman announced late Tuesday afternoon that the city will undergo an outside review of the public safety effort tied to the Republican National Convention — but its limited scope may not satisfy calls from various quarters for independent review of police misconduct.

Leading the charge is former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, who now works for Minneapolis law firm Best & Flanagan, and Andy Luger, previously an assistant U.S. attorney who is employed at Greene Espel in Minneapolis.

They’ll be putting a team together to perform the assessment and define its parameters, according to a statement from the mayor’s office. The timeline for the study and other details are yet to be nailed down, according to mayoral spokesman Bob Hume. He told Minnesota Independent that the city had always planned to “take a hard look at the events of the week,” but didn’t before know “what form it would take.”

“Today we basically said we would bring in a fresh set of eyes to work through the process of determining what went well and what lessons are to be learned,” said Hume.

Regarding the questions that members of the public have raised about security measures during the RNC, “We want to be able to answer those as best we can. Our feeling is these two [attorneys] will help us navigate that and will give an honest look at how things went,” he said.

But Heffelfinger is saying the team will not look into allegations of police misconduct, raising the question of whether St. Paul’s move will satisfy the various organizations and officials demanding independent reviews. An international human rights group, a national civil liberties organization and a smattering of local officials have issued calls — ranging in tone from livid to tepid — for investigations:

Amnesty International wants “city and county authorities to ensure that all allegations of ill-treatment and other abuses are impartially investigated, with a review of police tactics and weapons in the policing of demonstrations” — adding that it should be prompt and public.

The American Civil Liberties Union wants “an investigation into possible violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, including the arrest of reporters trying to gather the news; the mass arrest of hundreds of peaceful protestors; the surveillance and subsequent raids on several activist groups and private homes; and the confiscation by law enforcement agents of constitutionally-protected private property.”

Locally, St. Paul City Council Member Dave Thune has said he wants “a public airing of what went right and what went wrong.” To that end, he’s scheduled a “community conversation” on Sept. 24, 5:30 p.m., City Council chambers, to hear from interest groups — but no open mic for public testimony. He’s also is soliciting citizen comment for St. Paul’s official police “after-assessment.”

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak wants to investigate police actions personally — “just the mayor taking a look at how the police responded to the protests,” his spokesman told MPR. The mayor is eschewing any formal review.

Minneapolis City Council Members Cam Gordon and Gary Schiff want “an independent, blue ribbon panel to conduct a thorough investigation into the events, decisions and policies surrounding security issues and the RNC, hold hearings and make recommendations for future policy changes.”

Schiff told Minnesota Independent on Monday that he envisions a joint Minneapolis-St. Paul commission approved by both city councils, with funding from both cities. In contrast to Heffelfinger’s statement that civilian review and police internal affairs panels could handle charges of police misconduct, Schiff said the cases arising from hundreds of RNC arrests would overwhelm those local boards, and that is why an independent blue-ribbon panel is needed.

Another parochial concern that may elude Heffelfinger are Minneapolis’ guidelines of recent vintage against which Minneapolis council members intended to measure police actions during the RNC, the “police policies regarding public assemblies” that the council passed in July 25. Gordon aide Robin Garwood and Schiff agreed city police appear to have violated at least one of the 29 policies regarding treatment of the press.

Might RNC policing be an issue in Minneapolis elections next year? Schiff shrugs, but Dave Bicking, who unsuccessfully challenged Schiff for the Ward 9 city council seat three years ago, says it could. Police accountability was one of the main issues on which Bicking ran in 2005 — a lit piece of his cautioned that “Expensive lawsuits should not be the only means for accountability” — and it could be again, especially now that Bicking’s daughter Monica is one of the marquee arrestees facing the stiffest penalties from the pre-RNC sweeps.

ABC News crew wears gas masks while filming the Funk the War group, in front of MPR on 7th Street. Photo: T. Roman

Of the 800-plus people who were arrested or detained in conjunction with RNC protests, a good chunk of them — 46, by our count — were members of the news media. Media representatives in town to cover the events, from both big and small presses, were slapped with citations and pending charges ranging in severity, including unlawful assembly, obstructing the legal process, misdemeanor interference with a peace officer and felony to riot plus other riot pretenses. (Notably Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was jailed along with two of the show’s producers.) Many others who weren’t arrested or detained endured pepper-spray and other arms used for crowd-control.

MnIndy has compiled a list of journalists who were detained or arrested, including some preemptively, culled from news reports and sources, including the Ramsey County sheriff’s department’s booking roster. Let us know if anyone is unaccounted for and we’ll add them to the list.

Journalists detained/arrested:

Tom Aviles, WCCO photojournalist

Charlie B, MTV Think blogger (full last name unknown)

Anita Braithwaite, New York-based Glass Bead Collective

Wendy Binion, Portland IndyMedia

Andy Birkey, Minnesota Independent

Geraldine Cahill, The Real News

Eileen Clancy, I-Witness Video, a New York-based media collective

Paul Demko, Minnesota Independent

Amy Forliti, Associated Press reporter

Ben Garvin, Pioneer Press photographer

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! host

Art Hughes, Public News Service

Suzanne Hughes, The Uptake, volunteer coordinator

Ted Johnson, Variety managing editor

Olivia Katz, Glass Bead Collective

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now! producer

Alice Kalthoff, MyFoxdfw.com editor

Jon Krawczynski, Associated Press reporter

Joseph La Sac, Pepperspray Productions journalist

Brian Madigan, Minneapolis freelancer

Ed Matthews, University of Kentucky photojournalism student

Jonathan Malat, KARE-11 photojournalist

Stephen Maturen, Minnesota Daily assistant picture editor

Britney McIntosh, University of Kentucky photojournalism student

Matt Nelson, University of Iowa student

Jason Nicholas, New York Post freelance photographer

Mark Ovaska, Rochester freelance photographer

Christopher Patton, Editorial board member of The Daily Iowan

Elizabeth Press, Democracy Now!

Matt Rourke, Associated Press photographer

Sheila Regan, TC Daily Planet

Lambert Rochfort, Pepperspray Productions journalist

Seth Rowe, Sun Newspapers, St. Louis Park community editor

Jeff Schorfheide, Madison, Wis. Badger-Herald photographer

Mark Skinner, University of Nevada Las Vegas Rebel Yell reporter

Ania Smolenskaia, The Real News

Matt Snyders, City Pages

Nicole Salazar, Democracy Now! producer

Vlad Teichberg, New York-based Glass Bead Collective

Dean Treftz, U-Wire, national college news service

Nathan Weber, photographer, Chicago-area freelancer

Tony Webster, Twin Cities independent media professional

Jim Winn, University of Kentucky journalism adviser

John P. Wise, MyFox national editor

Dawn Zuppelli, Rochester IndyMedia

Like many places in the Twin Cities, this building on Marquette Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, a board-up that faces the Hilton Hotel — where numerous delegates and other conventioneers stayed last week — seems to have received a pre-RNC makeover. It has been transformed into the Abdo Markethouse, in homage to owner/developer Lawrence Abdo’s business by the same name. Apparently Abdo does have plans to redevelop the site into boutique offices, as reported by Finance and Commerce, but the only thing the shop appears to be selling right now is the idea of a storefront.

Where only weeks ago there used to be broken windows and a Notice to Condemn, the faux panels now bear the business name in stenciled lettering (“established in 1919,” it reads). Currently, there are no business hours posted and the door is locked. Like a theatrical set, the otherwise drab facade gives the illusion of an actual business occupying the otherwise blighted property, and one can only think that it must have provided a convenient showing for out-of-towners. However, it might also be a creative advertisement of what is to come for those who regularly pass by.