End the Fed rally last April. Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

Minnesota’s End the Fed group has something to celebrate Sunday as they march on the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s effort to audit the Fed passed in the House Financial Services Committee last Thursday.

Six of Minnesota’s members of Congress are among 313 co-sponsors to Paul’s bill: Republicans Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Erik Paulsen, and Democrats Jim Oberstar, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz.

Bachmann and Paulsen serve on the House Financial Services Committee and voted in favor of the amendment Thursday, which passed 43-26. Democrat Keith Ellison is also on the committee; he voted no.

Organizer Melissa Hill said she expects “a couple hundred” people to turn out for the local End the Fed group’s fourth rally at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank in the last year.

For the first time they will gather elsewhere — at 11:30 a.m. at Loring Park on the other side of downtown — before marching (on sidewalks) to a 12:30 p.m. rally the Fed building on the Mississippi riverfront.

Hill says the Minnesota group tries to be nonpartisan and is not affiliated with the conservative Tea Party movement. “We lean a little more toward the left” than other End the Fed groups nationally, she said.

For Hill, the march comes on the heels of losing her race as a “Civil Disobedience” candidate to incumbent DFLer Diane Hofstede in Minneapolis’ city council election. And she is still the target of criminal proceedings in Pittsburgh, where she is appealing a charge of  disorderly conduct arising from the recent G20 economic summit there.

Ending the Federal Reserve (a move for which Paul also has a bill pending) would, Hill says, mean getting control of the nation’s money supply again  – “in our control instead of behind shadowy doors.”

A more politically progressive protest kicked off the string of demonstrations at the Minneapolis Fed in late September 2009, when groups (including ACORN) protested federal bailouts for Wall Street financial firms without similar aid for homeowners threatened with foreclosure on Main Street (video).

Donald McFarland, who spoke at that rally, told MnIndy those groups had no affiliation with the End the Fed protests.

A few weeks earlier, during the 2008 Republican National Convention, Ron Paul himself made an appearance at the Minneapolis Fed’s plaza at the culmination of a Green Bay-to-Minneapolis “Walk for Freedom” — which some people call the beginning of the national End the Fed movement, Hill says.

Como Student Community Cooperative. Photo: Chris Steller

The University of Minnesota has quickly, if quietly, begun to address threats posed by a toxic waste dump it discovered under student family housing in Southeast Minneapolis.

The university found the toxins under three buildings on a four-city-block residential complex last year.

On Sept. 18, 2008, workers digging a trench at the Como Student Community Cooperative found ash and debris in the ground at its complex. Samples tested that day showed high levels of several toxins, including arsenic and lead. More tests revealed more hazards, so within days, on an emergency basis, the university hauled away 558 tons of contaminated dirt to a landfill in Rosemount.

The university last week finished the first phase of cleanup work, bringing the total amount of soil removed so far to 10,000 tons.

For generations, children have lived and played on the land along East Hennepin Avenue between 27th and 29th avenues SE. And for generations, it seems, the soil around the houses has held rich deposits of lead and arsenic — so much so that a handful of dirt ingested by a child, “if it was from a hot spot, could potentially cause brain damage,” according to Lynne Grigor, project coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Toxins were detected from eight inches to eight feet below ground. Forty-eight soil tests revealed no pattern to the hot spots that would allow targeted removal.

Acting rapidly (compared to the usual pace for such projects) with more than $700,000 from Hennepin County and about $200,000 of its own money, the university last week finished the first phase of cleanup around two of the buildings, hauling away another 9,457 tons of soil.

With another application pending with the county’s brownfield fund, the university hopes to complete the cleanup next year.

Evidence of widespread effects on residents has not emerged. Several children have been tested, CSCC residents and staff said, but no one had heard of anyone showing high lead levels. University of Minnesota Environmental Health specialist Janet Dalgliesh said she knows of one case of elevated levels, for an unrelated toxin.

But it’s unclear whether that’s because the toxic dirt from the dump hasn’t affected anyone, or because people who have been affected haven’t yet been tested.

Jim Kelly, a health risk assessor at the Minnesota Department of Health, said his agency gets involved when local authorities request public health advice, or when blood tests reveal elevated lead levels in children. Neither has happened yet with CSCC, where several people said that the only tests specially spurred by the discovery — on older boys who dug deep in the dirt — didn’t have alarming results.

State law requires notification to the department only if a child younger than age six has more than 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, explained Erik Zabel, who works with immigrant populations for the department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The brains of children develop more quickly at that age and they’re more likely to get dirt in their mouths, he said.

In any case, Zabel said, the state doesn’t have responsibility to inspect for lead in Minneapolis, which has its own health department and lead-poisoning prevention programs, as well as a good rate of kids being tested.

Who knew what when?

Families of international students — married or in domestic partnerships — occupy just over half of CSCC’s 360 apartments (48 percent are from the United States or Canada, 18 percent from China). About 40 percent of the families have children, for a total population of about 1,000, according to General Manager Gerald Erickson, who has been at CSCC for 30 years and said he was surprised to learn about the pollution after the contractors found it last year.

CSCC from above. Toxins were found in soil around the three buildings at the north (upper) end of the complex. Photo: Google Maps

Once the contamination was discovered, Erickson said he left communication about it to the university’s Environmental Health staff, which provided email updates and fliers for residents and spoke at three co-op board meetings.

Board president Kendra Hernandez said the university offered to hold a special meeting for CSCC residents, but the board declined after no residents showed up at its board meeting for an announced university presentation on the topic. “There was never really a huge outcry” among residents, Hernandez said. The biggest complaint may have been about the orange fencing that kept people off the CSCC’s one recreation field and playground with swings. (An on-site child care center also used those play spaces, according to CSCC staff.)

One resident of a building where soil is being replaced, Rachel Dittli, said she considered the notices residents received adequate. But her husband, Albin, said he had concerns about dirt from the cleanup work blowing through windows into the apartment, including onto their kitchen table.

Another resident, Kaying Thao, has been less satisfied with the information she has seen since moving to a CSCC apartment in June. When she heard workers were removing ash, she thought they meant trees. Thao first learned details about the pollution Nov. 4, at a meeting of the broader neighborhood group, the Southeast Como Improvement Association (SECIA), which has made environmental efforts a priority since a pair of nearby chemical-plant fires in the late 1990s.

Two possibly affected populations are more in the dark. Residents living across the street only got notice about the pollution last week, thanks to a SECIA volunteer. Grigor said her agency will review whether adjacent properties can join the queue for state Superfund money. SECIA Environmental Coordinator Justin Eibenholtzl said he was disappointed that neither neighbors or the neighborhood group were notified.

Grigor said the pollution-control agency was also concerned about past residents of the dump-site housing, who wouldn’t know about the pollution at their former homes and may have moved to other polluted areas, increasing risks due to cumulative exposure. But while the MPCA has sometimes tried to track down people in similar situations, the health risks at CSCC aren’t high enough to trigger that sort of response, she said.

People tend to live at CSCC for only two to four years (and must move after seven), so exposure periods for individual residents are limited — a consideration in assessing risks, said the university’s Dalgleish. Short stays meant risks haven’t been “undue,” she said, but once the university learned of the pollution, any risk beyond a residential standard was “unacceptable.”

But high turnover at CSCC also means thousands of former residents don’t know they were living on a toxic waste dump.

Theories and skeptics

How did the ash get there and why did the university build housing on it?

The ash likely came from a municipal incinerator that operated in South Minneapolis from the 1930s until 1960, said Dalgleish, but dumping stopped after the university acquired the property in 1945.

Since 1947, thousands of young parents and children have lived in homes provided by the university on that property. First came quonset huts and trailers where families of G.I. Bill veterans set up housekeeping in the 1940s and 1950s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s came CSCC.

If construction crews noticed the ash in 1982, they may have seen it more for its advantages in building foundations than for its potential hazards. Although the federal Superfund laws were in place by then, contractors’ attitudes and practices concerning polluted building sites didn’t fully change until 1990, she said.

Photo by Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

A good theory?

“I think that’s absolutely it,” said Tim Busse, a spokesman for University Services, which includes both Environmental Services and Facilities Management departments. “Attitudes have changed,” he said. The university would not build housing on an ash dump now, he said, but he doesn’t think the university is going to investigate why it happened 27 years ago. “Rather than trying to fix blame, the idea is now to fix the problem and get it cleaned up for the residents,” Busse said.

But the incinerator-dump theory has some detractors among older neighborhood residents.

Joe Stimark, who turned 87 on Monday, still lives in the house where he was born, three blocks from CSCC. He remembers playing baseball there, on what were then open fields. He can tick off the factories and other industrial neighbors down through the decades. He doesn’t remember a dump at the CSCC site.

Dave Williams, 88, a neighborhood resident since 1943, lives a block away from CSCC. Long in the excavation business, he knows how the lay of the land has been altered over the years but recalls no dump on the CSCC site. His guess: the university brought in fill to make a sloping site more level for the post-war quonset huts.

Also skeptical is Connie Sullivan, a neighborhood resident since 1977 and local historian since retiring from the university faculty. Her research shows the land sat unused as railroad property for 50 years before the university bought it.

Whenever the toxic ash arrived and whatever its source, one thing is certain: young people were playing on it. Like her father before her, Stimark’s daughter, Mary Gregg, and her neighborhood friends played hide-and-seek amid waist-high grass there in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the quonsets were gone. Boys drove go-carts there, coming home splattered with mud.

In the 1970s, intramural university softball teams played on three diamonds over the dump site, recalled alum Andy Mickel.

Now, the soil under the polluted play areas has all been removed and replaced. But the long delay put a strain on families with children, said Hernandez, the co-op board president, who coaches a kids’ soccer team on the play field. The pollution cleanup’s pace may have been quick by state standards, she said, but it didn’t feel that way to residents.

“Our big field was out of commission for so long,” she said. “People said, ‘Are they ever going to be done?’”

Karen Armstrong. Photo: TED.com

During their joint General Assembly in Minneapolis this week, the National Council of Churches and Church World Service have a busy agenda: install a new president (a Minnesotan), vote on whether to make the body’s stance on nuclear disarmament an official resolution, and discuss issues like immigration reform and gun violence. The three-day gathering will close on Thursday with a special prayer, “The Charter for Compassion,” a document, to be read worldwide tomorrow for the first time, created by scholars from the three Abrahamic religions at the urging of religious historian and former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong.

Currently, the Council is weighing the likely adoption of a statement, adopted in September by the Council’s Governing Board, called “Nuclear Disarmament: The Time is Now.” The resolution “reiterates the NCC’s historic declaration that nuclear weapons are a violation of God’s law, and the idea that they deter enemy attacks is nonsense,” according to a release by the ecumenical group. If adopted Wednesday evening, the resolution will get elevated status as a General Assembly Resolution.

Thursday night at Minneapolis’ St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Rev. Peg Chemberlin, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Churches, will be installed as the 25th president of the Council, which has members from 35 different Christian communions. She’s the first Minnesotan to hold the office — and the second Moravian and fourth woman — since the Council was founded in 1950.

As the assembly’s closing prayer on Thursday, attendees will read the Compassion Charter. Here’s how the charter came to be. Last year, Armstrong — author of popular books like “A History of God” and “The Battle for God” — was awarded the prestigious 2008 TED Prize. Winners — like Bill Clinton, Bono and biologist E.O. Wilson, among others — are given $100,000 with which to fulfill a wish. Armstrong’s wish: to create, launch and propagate a document that would promote compassion, a central tenet of major world religions — a.k.a The Golden Rule. She enlisted 18 “inspirational thinkers” from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions to help draft the document, which has been signed by leaders including the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

“Compassion was the major test of any true spirituality and the chief means by which human beings come into contact with God or Nirvana or Brahman. And yet you rarely hear people talking about compassion,” she said. “The idea is to change the conversation so people feel empowered to demand compassionate speaking from their priests, monks and rabbis,” she says.

Here’s Armstrong’s TED Prize speech:

The board announced the rulings today, but reached its decisions at a meeting on Thursday — the same day Rybak registered a gubernatorial campaign committee. He won re-election to a third term as mayor on Tuesday. The rulings were prompted by complaints filed by the Republican Party of Minnesota.

The board also heard evidence about Rybak driving to events around the state meant to showcase candidates for governor — with mileage costs that Rybak bore personally but that the Minnesota GOP said constituted an in-kind gift.

But it was the survey costs that the board focused on, and they didn’t buy Rybak’s defense that the polling work was on behalf of his mayoral campaign against much lesser-known challengers:

The response on behalf of Mayor Rybak contends that the survey was to support a re-election bid for Mayor of Minneapolis. But this response does not persuasively explain why a survey to support the Mayor’s re-election would have a geographic calling area that included metro area residents that are not eligible to vote in Minneapolis.

The board found the survey questions revealing:

As an example, the survey asks if the respondent voted in 2006, (the last time the office of Governor was on the ballot), and if the respondent intends to vote in 2010. The office of Governor is on the ballot in 2010, the office of Mayor of Minneapolis is on the ballot in odd numbered years (2005 and 2009).

The board ordered Rybak to form a gubernatorial campaign committee (which he did), which must transfer to his RT for Minneapolis mayoral campaign the cost of the conducting the survey last May.

The board also ruled (pdf) on whether St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman violated state statute by failing to register a fundraising committee while exploring a bid for governor. The complaint from the Minnesota GOP noted that Coleman had participated in gubernatorial forums with other candidates and openly discussed his plans for the state if elected to the office. The board determined that Coleman was indeed a candidate for governor earlier this year and spent personal funds in excess of $100 to support his campaign.

The Board considered possible reasons why Mayor Coleman would travel to locations throughout the state to participate in gubernatorial candidate forums and present information on what actions he would do if elected Governor. In the Board’s view the only reasonable explanation for those actions is that Mayor Coleman was seeking nomination or election to the office of Governor.

But the board also ruled that Coleman did not improperly use funds from his mayoral campaign to support a gubernatorial bid. Coleman has since announced that he will not be running for governor, but the board stated that that decision did not alter its findings in the matter. The administrative body ordered Coleman to submit a detailed accounting of his expenditures on behalf of his gubernatorial campaign by February 1, 2010.

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

MINNEAPOLIS: Rybak is DFL’s “strongest candidate” for governor. So says Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza. [The Fix]

HUGO: 10,000 loons? The crowd at U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s “House call” protest included a Hugo couple who call her “a very effective representative.” [St. Cloud Times]

ST. PAUL: Now his Trice will really get Dusty. Dems’ one-man answer to the Minnesota Democrats Exposed hangs up his spurs. [DustyTrice.com]

MINNEAPOLIS: “The K” is #1. The University of Minnesota’s student radio station, Radio K, has the nation’s best student media website. [UMNews]

DULUTH: Market improves for uninhabitable homes. City government will pay $40,000–60,000 each if the council accepts $3 million in federal funds to create a “blight-free Duluth.” [Northland's News Center]

ST. PAUL: “DFL: Pawlenty’s partying gift to MN is instability.” That typo (?) proves MN Publius doesn’t just parrot party pronouncements. [MN Publius]

Challengers huddled across the street from the Dinkytown polling place. Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

They went there to ensure that nobody was wrongfully turned away from a Minneapolis polling place infamous for electoral mishaps. They ended up across the street, with police threatening arrest them if they set foot inside again.

On Tuesday night, election officials accused two men at a Minneapolis polling place of disturbing the voting process. Each had been officially designated by Ward Three council candidates to keep an eye on the proceedings at the University Lutheran Church of Hope, a short walk from the heart of the University of Minnesota campus-area commercial district known as Dinkytown.

The election judges ejected the challengers at about 6 p.m. Citing witnesses’ claims about raised-voiced disruptions, police refused to allow the challengers back inside.

But it’s not the first instance of election-day mishaps there: It’s the same polling place where 133 ballots went missing last year during the Franken-Coleman U.S. Senate recount. And it’s the same site where student residents were turned away from the polls despite having proof-of-residency documents that had allowed them to register to vote there in past years.

With those troubles in mind, candidates hoping to replace incumbent Council Member Diane Hofstede posted official challengers there Tuesday. (While other states have poll watchers, Minnesota’s election law terms candidates’ representatives who monitor polling-place activity “challengers.”)

Tensions between election officials and candidate challengers came to a head after a man who owns a house across the street was twice turned away with proof of residency documents deemed inadequate for same-day registration.

William Wells, a challenger for Republican Jeffrey Cobia, says he reminded officials about the missing ballots from last fall. Ryan Ahlberg, an attorney who DFLer Allen Kathir had designated as his official challenger, asserted his right to talk to voters about their eligibility to vote.

Election judges refused comment, but Ahlberg said they argued that challengers could only object to voters’ qualifications, not discuss options for proving residency.

First two and then three police officers arrived, kicking out the challengers as well as, in due course, a pair of reporters who had been alerted to the situation by Kathir.

The conflict spilled out of the church as darkness, rain and the temperature were falling.

Two squad cars idled empty for about an hour while officers spoke by phone with city officials, occasionally emerging to ask the challengers what they intended to do next.

One challenger asked police exactly what would happen should he try to re-enter the polling place. The answer: He’d get a citizen’s arrest warrant for trespassing and a trip downtown to Hennepin County jail that would last six to eight hours.

Ironically, that challenger was Ahlberg and not the representative of candidate Melissa Hill, who ran under the “Civil Disobedience” banner. Hill told the Minnesota Independent she isn’t sure the volunteer who offered to monitor voting for her in Dinkytown ever showed up.

In the end, Kathir appointed his campaign manager, Rick Brundage, to act as challenger for the 45 minutes of voting that remained.

Ahlberg and Wells said at least four to six people attempted to vote during the course of the day but were turned away and did not return.

By Kathir’s estimate that amounted to about 10 percent of the precinct’s total turnout.

The dispute over, Kathir returned to his get-out-the-vote efforts, shuttling students from nearby blocks to the church before the 8 p.m. close of polls.

Hofstede prevailed with 1,485 first-choice votes, to Kathir’s 348 and Cobia’s 242.

Hill had 112.

City Council incumbents Don Samuels (Ward 5) and Barb Johnson (Ward 4)

So much for election night drama in Minneapolis. Despite more than 50 candidates vying for 13 posts on the Minneapolis City Council, only two contests resulted in the top vote-getter failing to surpass the 50 percent threshold required for victory under the new instant-runoff voting (IRV) system. Incumbents Barb Johnson and Don Samuels each easily out-polled their challengers but failed to earn first-choice support from more than half of voters on Tuesday.

This means that election officials will now have to go through the laborious process of hand-counting voters’ second and third choices to determine who will ultimately be declared the winner. But results posted at the Secretary of State’s Office suggest Samuels and Johnson are likely to prevail when all the electoral dust settles.

Let’s consider the math. Johnson, the city council president and four-term incumbent, was the top choice of 47 percent of voters in Ward Four. Among her trio of challengers, Troy Parker finished a distant second with support from 28 percent of voters. Johnson also received 23 percent of second-place votes and 21 percent of third-place votes. The upshot: She appears a lock for re-election.

Four years ago, Johnson faced no electoral opposition. But this year she narrowly survived a battle with Parker for the DFL endorsement and was hit by last-minute revelations about dubious campaign expenditures. Even so, she appears headed for a fifth term.

Samuels’ position appears only slightly more tenuous. The Ward Five incumbent was also the top choice of 47 percent of voters. Running second was a familiar foe: former city council member Natalie Johnson Lee, with first-choice support from 30 percent of voters. Three other challengers trailed well behind.

But Johnson Lee, who lost to Samuels four years ago, doubled up the incumbent on second-place votes, 34 to 16 percent. She also narrowly topped him for third-place ballots with support from 22 percent of voters. While this means the race will undoubtedly tighten as the other candidates are dropped and second- and third-choice votes are added, it seems likely that Samuels will ultimately reach the 50-percent threshold.

The incumbent says he has not heard from any of his challengers. But he’s not surprised by the lack of congratulatory calls considering the novel voting calculations and the lingering uncertainty about the outcome.

“The promise of ranked-choice voting is that the very unlikely is likely to happen,” Samuels says. “There’s a thread of hope out there no matter how thin.”

But for all the electoral activity and hand-wringing over the potential implications of the new voting system, the end result is this: every incumbent who ran for re-election appears likely to prevail.

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

Minneapolis’ first try at instant-runoff voting (IRV) Tuesday went well, judging by a low number of spoiled ballots. But the number of ballots cast was also low, spoiling the system’s otherwise successful debut.

An Election Day that turned cold and rainy dumped water on IRV’s promise as a boost to voter turnout, which failed to match (let alone exceed) the 30 percent figure from the last city election in 2005.

“It worked pretty well,” said Council Member Cam Gordon, a Green Party leader who has fought long to bring IRV to Minneapolis. “People seemed interested in having a variety of choices [in candidates].

Still, he conceded, “I wish we had a bigger voter turnout.”

Gordon, who lost and then won in consecutive nail-biters in the last two city elections, coasted to victory Tuesday in Ward Two over Republican challenger Allen Aigbogun with first-rank votes on 85 percent of the ballots cast – the high water mark in all the contests for city office this year.

Only Anita Tabb, who ran unopposed for park board, won with a greater proportion of the vote (97 percent). Mayor R.T. Rybak gained 77 percent of the vote to best 10 rivals for a third term.

Gordon told the Minnesota Independent that he might have won the first time he ran in 2001, when DFLer Paul Zerby narrowly edged him in the general-election contest, had IRV had been in place then.

DFLer Allen Kathir, who placed a distant second Tuesday to DFL-endorsed incumbent Council Member Diane Hofstede in Ward Three, had an opposite reaction.

The old system of holding early-September primary elections — for which turnouts were typically microscopic — might have given him a better shot.

Had he gotten 348 votes – the number he received Tuesday — in the ward’s 2005 primary, he would have earned a higher-profile berth to take on Hofstede one-on-one in the general election.

A surprise newspaper endorsement gave Ward One DFL candidate Susan Howitz Hanna enough of a boost to place third in first-rank votes in an open-seat race that appears to have narrowly skirted a runoff.

DFL endorsee Kevin Reich squeaked by with barely 14 more votes than needed for the 50-percent-plus-one threshold for outright victory in a single-seat contest.

Hanna holds out hope that the race will be sent into a runoff by the hand count that’s required for every race because the city’s tally machines aren’t certified for IRV elections. But by randomly assigned sequence, Ward One will be last among the city’s 13 wards to be counted, putting that date with destiny off by as much as a month.

Mark Fox, an independent who finished last in the five-way Ward One race, would be the first candidate eliminated in a runoff. In Fox’s view, Reich’s bare-majority support, from “less than 12 percent of the people,” means “Minneapolis government is pretty evidently non-representative.”

“If this [election] were a council meeting, I would ask for a quorum call,” Fox wrote in a morning-after email.

The UpTake’s Michael McIntee says his group “wanted to know about how the mayor was going to follow through on creating more jobs in his next term,” but it was hard to get such questions in with all the legacy media clamoring for news about a possible gubernatorial run. As Rybak has said before, he’s interested but hasn’t made a final decision yet.

A snippet of a longer exchange from last night, followed by the video:

Q: What about the governor’s race?

Mayor R.T. Rybak: Well, I’ve been saying for many months that it’s likely I’m getting into the race, and I’m saying the same thing now ’cause I… but I won’t be making any definitive measurement for a little bit of time. (inaudible) And I’m going to take a breath and then make a final decision.

Q: You said it’s likely?

Rybak: Yeah. It’s likely. Nothing has changed. What I think is important is I haven’t made my decision yet.

Q: Then you’ll think over that in a couple weeks?

Rybak: I think a couple months. (inaudible)

Q: What are you waiting for?

Another “awesome” Minneapolis ballot getting a bit of Lizard People–style attention is that of mayoral hopeful John Charles Wilson, who’s running as the “Edgertonite National Party” candidate. Boingboing, the country’s number-five blog, picks up on it today, noting that the story of Wilson’s party affiliation makes the ballot even more interesting. As MnIndy’s Andy Birkey wrote in January, the party is based on the Wilson-created Lauraist religion, which posits that Laura Ingalls Wilder is God and that the Lauraist homeland will occupy an area within a 240-mile radius of Minneapolis.

“A new nation, to be called Edgerton, with its capital at Minneapolis, should be created on the land from approximately Hibbing to Des Moines, and from Fargo to Madison,” Wilson’s campaign Web site said at the time.

As local Boingboing blogger Maggie Koerth-Baker says, “God, I love this town!”