Duluth

The Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior drew a record 12,000 people for the 23rd annual LGBT Pride event Labor Day weekend. Anti-gay protesters shouted at parade participants and festival-goers, while politicians angling for the DFL nomination for governor worked the crowds. The festival boasted a big name act with international drag sensation RuPaul.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty wants to cut nearly $200 million from the Local Government Aid program as part of his plan to eliminate the state’s $2.7 billion budget deficit. While the fiscal hit to the program is less than feared (Pawlenty had originally proposed whacking $450 million from LGA), it will still present a significant fiscal [...]

Same-sex couples residing in Duluth will find it easier to prove their domestic partner status as the Duluth City Council voted on Monday evening to approve a domestic partner registry.

Gay Duluth city council member Jeff Anderson is introducing an ordinance that would create a domestic partner registry this year. The registry would allow employers who wish to offer same-sex partner benefits a legal document to work from, much like Minneapolis’.

The sun shines more brightly in St. Louis and Olmsted counties than in any of the seven counties in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, according to a recently completed nationwide evaluation of county Web sites by a group that advocates for transparency in government.

Wikileaks: They’re not just for revealing how Norm Coleman stores unprotected, unencrypted donor data anymore.
We mentioned yesterday the varied mix of leaked documents that the Wikileaks.org Web site posts, including a U.S. Army memo on soldiers’ exposure to toxins. Today that Army memo and the Wikileaks site share center stage in a Duluth News Tribune story (via), along [...]

Photo: Adbusters

If ever there was a year in which Buy Nothing Day might really take off, it’s 2008, as the foul economy clouds consumer confidence and impedes the Black Friday shopping impulse. But since a byword of BND, as the international grassroots anti-consumerism movement is known for short, is “Do Nothing,” Buy Nothing Day [...]

The big guns come out in Duluth. But only T-Pal continues on to meet the snowmobiling faithful in Grand Rapids and Bemidji.

The event was billed as a Sportsmen for Norm Coleman rally featuring Todd Palin, but the guests of honor — besides Norm and the First Dude, they included Coleman’s wife Laurie and National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre — arrived to find the crowd in the midst of a full-throated “We love Sarah!” chant.

Recent headlines out of Duluth haven’t been pretty — except when they’ve been over pictures of the Tiffany window that the city may auction off to get out of a $6.5 million budget hole. City officials’ efforts to sell off another public asset — parkland along picturesque Park Point — puts Duluth in the same league as one of the Twin Cities metro area’s tiniest towns: little Lilydale, Minn.