Protests

Gov. Pawlenty isn’t the only one feeling a chill at the one-year anniversary of events around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The RNC cast a few odd shadows at a forum for candidates seeking to replace Pawlenty in Minneapolis this morning.

Do not be alarmed, you residents near the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant. The state, federal and local officials you see acting as if there’s been a terrible nuclear accident are doing just that: acting. They do this every other year, at the insistence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This year, Tuesday and Wednesday [...]

When health care reform protesters packed the St. Paul office of U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum Friday, at least two GOP office-seekers were in their midst: Republicans Pat Igo, a candidate for St. Paul school board, and Jamie Delton, who is again seeking the Minnesota House seat in District 65B.

As the heat gets turned up on the health care reform debate, anti-immigrant activists are using the issue to whip up fear and anger toward immigrants, portraying them as a costly and burdensome drain on any taxpayer-supported U.S. health care system.

Thanks to instant-runoff voting and no primary, everyone running for office in Minneapolis will stay in the race through the general election. For lesser-known candidates, that may be most significant impact of the city’s new election system.

The message on a Minneapolis street corner Wednesday was unmediated: VIVA IRAN. That and dozens of other slogans of the Iranian protest movement were carried on signs and on the mercifully cooler air that wafted through downtown, where a crowd of as many as 200 people gathered in a semicircle for urgent call-and-response chants.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is due back at work today following a mysterious several-day absence. For Minnesotans whose memories extend to the 1970s, news of an AWOL governor evokes the early days of Gov. Rudy Perpich’s first term in office — days Perpich spent out of the office, whereabouts (then) unknown.

Iran has proven the headline prescient, even if the terminology needed tweaking: “The revolution will be Twittered.” That was the title of Tom Elko’s Sept. 9, 2008, Minnesota Independent post about how Twitter messages (technically, “tweets” that were “tweeted”) came in handy during protests outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

An “End the Fed” group that will rally today outside the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank hasn’t felt a backlash since Wednesday’s arrest of James von Brunn in the fatal shooting of a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Von Brunn, who mixed anti-Semitism with antipathy for the Federal Reserve, served six years in prison for his 1981 attempt to take Federal Reserve board members captive.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to an American Indian jobs center in Minneapolis today carries special (if little-known) resonance with either end of her political career, from the time she arrived in what later became her California congressional district to the recent rightwing taunts she has taken over terrorism.