The center, which has existed in one form or another since 1977, has been planning a new children’s area at its centerpiece museum and has a fundraiser and holiday program on the calendar for December. The center also houses a 7,000-volume library and research center and hosts events throughout the year.

In January, the museum was scheduled to open an exhibit of photographs from Walden Woods in Massachusetts, a project involving the Walden Woods Project. That’s a cultural nonprofit (dedicated to preserving the place that Henry David Thoreau made famous) founded and supported by musician Don Henley.

Now would be a good time for a famous son or daughter of the Iron Range to do the same for the former Ironworld.

Rep. Tim Walz and Allen Quist

Quist’s announcement at 1 p.m. in the Rochester City Council chambers will settle a candidacy question that only a month ago he told the Minnesota Independent was “a big if.”

Quist gained the GOP endorsement in 1994 but failed in a run at becoming governor, losing in the primary to incumbent Arne Carlson, who went on to win re-election. Quist was elected to three terms in the state House in the 1980s.

His wife Julie is Bachmann’s district director.

Walz is a DFLer who has held the southern Minnesota district since unseating Republican Gil Gutknecht in 2006.

“It’s usurping the power of the legislature… Right now he’s actually writing laws,” he said. “I don’t know where’s he getting this authority, and nobody’s really taking him on.”

“Right now any governor — whether the governor is Tom Rukavina or Tim Pawlenty — can basically sign every spending bill and then decide to unallot,” he said.

Rukavina agrees that Pawlenty’s motives in unallotment have been more about his national political ambitions than in looking after Minnesota’s future.

“I think he’s being very insincere in his claim that he loves this state and loves the people of this state,” he said. “Because what he’s doing to them isn’t, from where I come from, any sign of love.”

On Monday, the House Rules Committee voted to file a brief in support of a suit against the governor’s unallotment of some $2.7 million from the state budget.

Watch it:

See answers by DFL gubernatorial candidates R.T. Rybak and Paul Thissen to Stellmacher’s ongoing candidate series on the biggest threats to Minnesota.

No, it’s not the return flight-path for those errant Northwest Airlines pilots. It’s U.S. Sen. Al Franken’s hand-drawn map of Minnesota, done on spec for National Geographic. 

Franken and 10 other senators responded to the magazine’s request that they draw the outline of their home states, marking three important places. The assignment was right up Franken’s alley, since he regularly shows off his ability to draw a freehand map of the entire United States from memory.

But highlighting only three places stumped Franken, who responded in wordy fashion with “the importance of Minnesota in the region,” “the entire state” and  ”my hometown, St. Louis Park.”

In attempting to cover all conceivable bases while not playing favorites, Franken seems to have inadvertently tipped his hand, mentioning the state’s prairie land twice:

There’s natural beauty throughout Minnesota, from the Boundary Waters in the Northeast that we share with Canada to the prairies in the west back to the gorgeous bluffs of southeastern Minnesota. There’s the prairies of the west — the fertile farmland along the Red River Valley of the North and the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers.

The senators’ entries appear to have been done in permanent marker, so even if Franken realized he’d let his prairie obsession show, he couldn’t fix it. Or maybe he’s trying to curry favor in areas where Democrats have to work harder for votes. In any case, here’s his whole sketch:

The reason Palin talks like a Minnesotan — to the extent that she does — is that the part of Alaska where she grew up was populated by a 1935 migration of people from the Upper Midwest. Of more than 200 families who moved north from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, the largest number (15) came from Minnesota’s St. Louis County.

The researchers from Madison compared Palin’s speech during the vice presidential debate last year to speech they sampled from two native Minnesotans: a man born in Austin in 1977 and a woman born in Minneapolis in 1978.

With some words, like “boat,” the male sounded “hyper-Minnesotan, whereas the female Minnesotan has a BOAT vowel closer to Sarah Palin’s.”

Yet for all the commonalities, the paper says, ”Sarah Palin’s dialect lacks certain features of contemporary Upper Midwestern English.”

On the one hand, there’s no mistaking a certain “Fargo” twang:

Palin shows clearly identifiable Upper Midwestern features in her discourse markers (you betcha, etc.) and in her phonology (‘final devoicing’ and some particulars of her vowel space).

Yet in Palin’s way of speaking, what seems Minnesotan may not be.

Perceptually, the ostensibly Upper Midwest features outweigh the Western features, even though they are not necessarily categorical or even high-frequency patterns (like final devoicing), nor identical to patterns found among speakers in Wisconsin or Minnesota today (vowel acoustics.)

Here are a few other tidbits from “Defining Dialect, Perceiving Dialect, and New Dialect Formation: Sarah Palin’s Speech” (pdf), which appears in the December issue of The Journal of English Linguistics.

Palin is 20 times more likely to say “heck” and 46 times more likely to say “darn” than the average English speaker.

With regards to “her ‘g-dropping’ [goin', takin', hurtin'],” the researchers say, “the impression left may be of pervasive use, but it is both limited and systematic.”

The paper features a diagram showing the precise sounds Palin’s mouth makes when she says the word “pack,” as in “Joe Six Pack” (remember him?).

Margaret Anderson Kelliher

Gubernatorial candidate Margaret Anderson Kelliher picked up an endorsement from Minnesota’s largest union of state professional employees today. MAPE — the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees — announced its support for Anderson Kelliher, who is speaker of the state House of Representatives.

MAPE, which has nearly 13,000 members, interviewed each gubernatorial candidate in Roseville on Monday and Tuesday, before selecting the Minneapolis Democrat as its choice.

“We believe Speaker Kelliher’s proven leadership skills and her ability to manage the state in difficult times make her the strongest candidate,” said MAPE Statewide President Chet Jorgenson. “Speaker Kelliher is willing to bring people together to solve problems in a crisis. She has a history of respect for state workers and the jobs they do. It is for these reasons that MAPE’s elected officials endorsed Speaker Kelliher for governor of Minnesota.”

“We believe she is the most electable candidate in the race,” said MAPE Executive Director Jim Monroe. “Speaker Kelliher can raise the necessary money, has the necessary experience to guide this state in hard times and has a superior campaign structure.”

But first things first. Below is the clip from the 2006 movie “Talledega Nights” that provided Pawlenty with one of his most commented-on gag lines, used to describe his wife. After calling the movie “goofy” and “silly,” Pawlenty set about recounting a scene in which Will Ferrell, as race car driver Ricky Bobby, gives a dinner-table blessing that includes thanks for this “red-hot, smoking wife.” (Note that Pawlenty resisted using Ferrell’s addendum to that description: that his wife is also a “stone-cold fox.”)

The Weekly Standard’s Daily Grind liked it: “I don’t immediately think of Tim Pawlenty as being cool with the pop-culture references, but quoting Ricky Bobby shows promise.”

The Des Moines Register’s Kathie Obradovich seems to fall in the “didn’t bring it” camp:

“… Pawlenty delivered a spirited performance … but it didn’t automatically scream ‘presidential candidate.’ … It’s safe to say Pawlenty is the first potential presidential candidate to come to Iowa and quote a Will Farrell [sic] movie. Pawlenty turned to ‘Talledega Nights’ when introducing his wife, Mary: ‘Thank you, Lord, for my red-hot, smokin’ wife.’ … I thought it was funny, but some might take potshots at that brand of humor. … He didn’t knock Iowa Republicans’ socks off, but he’ll likely find plenty willing to look him over the next time he ventures across the border.”

Obradovich also noted: “He attended a gathering at Des Moines businessman Doug Reichardt’s house before the GOP dinner and stayed until the bitter end of the evening event. (Believe me, people noticed.)”

That gibes with what Jason Hancock observed at the dinner itself, which he covered for the Minnesota Independent’s sister site, the Iowa Independent: Pawlenty stayed through the gubernatorial candidates’ speeches that followed his.

But Norwegianity notes that the Register didn’t include Pawlenty in its trio of pictured “heavy hitters” who visited Iowa over the weekend.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza headlines a post this morning at The Fix this way: “Pawlenty’s national forays show need for polish.” But he’s talking about T-Paw’s dalliance in the New York State special congressional election, not the Iowa appearance.

But what Cillizza sees as a gaffe — Pawlenty’s dissing of Sen. Olympia Snowe — Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review’s The Corner views as possibly successful overture to Iowa conservatives: “At least as an Iowa strategy, I’m not sure that’s was [sic] a fumble.”

Iowa’s Democratic chairman, Michael Kiernan, attacked T-Paw’s boasts about not raising taxes, saying Pawlenty “has increased ‘fees’ by hundreds of millions of dollars while at the same time putting the state in a terrible economic bind.”

Powerline’s John Hinderaker concludes that “Pawlenty and Mitt Romney are far and away the Republicans’ best Presidential prospects for 2012.”

Pawlenty didn’t miss while hunting deer in northern Minnesota earlier in the day on Saturday, but the buck was only injured and got away. That supplied another gag in his Iowa speech about a “shoot-and-release” program for deer, but Ken Korczak of Kittson County wasn’t laughing: “Governor, if you don’t mind, a note from a lifetime northern Minnesotaner: Real men track and butcher their own deer.” But instead, Korczak surmises, “he needed to be in Iowa for a major speech to Republican activists.”

“I knew Nate felt strongly. I anticipated (his resignation), but it’s not what I wanted,” associate pastor David Sperstad told the Brainerd Dispatch. “I expected to work with him in ministry for quite a while.”

In early October, a Minneapolis church voted to leave the ELCA over the vote. And a number of churches throughout the state are considering the same.

According to the AP, this year’s 115 bank failures represent the most closures since 1992 (for comparison, 25 banks failed last year and three in 2007), but it’s well short of the tally in 1989, when, in the thick of the savings-and-loan crisis, 534 were shut down.

The shuttered banks — California National Bank in Los Angeles; Bank USA, NA, in Phoenix; San Diego National Bank; Pacific National Bank in San Francisco; Park National Bank in Chicago; Community Bank of Lemont in Illinois; and the Texas banks North Houston Bank, Madisonville State Bank, and Citizens National Bank in Teague, — were reopened on Saturday under the US Bank name.

According to the FDIC’s summary, five Minnesota banks failed this year, including Riverview Community Bank in Otsego and Mainstreet Bank in Forest Lake.

Kohls’ departure leaves at least 13 GOP candidates pondering a run and five officially announced candidates. Here’s Kohls’ statement:

Friends,

The last several months have been absolutely amazing.

My campaign’s message of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and personal responsibility has resonated with not only GOP activists but also with a much broader cross section of Minnesotans. I’ve had a chance to meet and get to know hundreds of activists from across the state and visit places I would typically not have a reason to visit. All of this has reaffirmed for me that this is a great state full of great people with great potential.

One of the challenges facing my candidacy from the beginning was that I am not as well known as some of my fellow candidates. I trusted this challenge would be a great opportunity to make a positive first impression on many who are just getting to know me. I am confident that I have succeeded at this and look forward to continuing to build upon these new relationships. I have been truly humbled by the level of encouragement and interest in my message and my candidacy from people all across Minnesota.

Although I have continued to gain political and financial supporters since our party’s October 3rd convention, it has become clear to me that the activists are lining up in much greater numbers behind some of the other candidates in the race, and there continues to be speculation about others who may enter the race. I certainly continue to believe that I’m the strongest Republican to take on the DFL candidate in 2010, but I also believe that this decision belongs to our party’s delegates, not to me.

In light of this and after much prayer and deliberation, I am making the very difficult decision to suspend my campaign for Governor.

I want to thank my wife Kelly and our children for their sacrifice over the past several months. I also want to thank everyone who volunteered, contributed or supported my campaign in some other way. Your friendship, support, and generosity has been humbling and I can never thank you enough.

Although this is a difficult decision, I am pleased with the impact I was able to have on the race over the past few months. I remain the only candidate to move beyond the rhetoric of supporting limited government by coming forward with a plan to move Minnesota in that direction – my new Minnesota Spending Freeze. I have repeatedly had other candidates tell me they agree with my ideas and they have begun advocating for similar policies. And I have had countless activists tell me how much they appreciate my thoughtful approach to the issues and my ability to articulate conservative principles in a way that has appeal beyond just the party faithful.

I don’t know today what my political future holds, but clearly we as a state and country face very difficult challenges. I look forward to finding ways to contribute to solving those challenges in a manner consistent with the principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility and personal responsibility.

Again, thank you for your support. I am so grateful to each of you.

Warmest regards,

Paul Kohls