Minnesota

Minnesota’s members of the House of Representatives are back in their home districts gauging how constituents feel about federal issues. That feedback will also include town hall meetings for a number of Congress members including Reps. Tim Walz, Collin Peterson and Michele Bachmann. Will Minnesota’s town halls get as rowdy as ones around the nation? Time will tell. Here’s what Minnesota Congressional delegation was up to this week.

A report released this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that Minnesota ranked in the top fifteen states for mortgage fraud claims in 2008 and in the top ten on a couple of measure. Specifically, data from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network found Minneapolis FBI field offices ranked 9th in the number of [...]

The Big Fish in Bena, Minn., is endangered — and not because Minnesota’s fishing season opens at midnight. A rotting wood frame has landed the former Big Muskie Drive-In hamburger stand on the state’s Ten Most Endangered Historic Places list.

Supreme Court Justice David Souter plans to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court when the court’s current term is over at the end of June. Souter will likely stay on until President Obama’s nominee to replace him has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate, National Public Radio reports.

Minnesota’s top health officials are in close communication with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta about the new flu that has killed more than 100 people in Mexico. But they aren’t calling the flu by the same name. The CDC calls it “swine flu,” but Minnesota Health Commissioner, Dr. Sanne Magnan, says the official state term is “H1N1 novel influenza.”

Michele Bachmann might not return to Congress, if one of the scenarios at Swing State Project for redistricting Minnesota after the 2010 U.S. Census comes to pass.

Oral arguments in Norm Coleman’s senate-election appeal are set for June 1, the Minnesota Supreme Court announced in an order (pdf) issued this morning — a schedule that adopts Coleman’s slower-paced proposal rather than Franken’s fast-track plan.  

Here’s evidence that Minnesota’s post-election battle for U.S. Senate has permeated pop culture. Al Franken and Norm Coleman were cited this week by contestants in another competition that attracted millions of partisans: the race between movie actor Ashton Kutcher and news juggernaut CNN to be first to gain one million followers on Twitter, the social-media [...]

“We will never know who won,” Norm Coleman said Wednesday. That’s after seven Minnesota judges — three on Monday and four in January — concluded that Al Franken won Minnesota’s 2008 election for U.S. Senate. His was a “close victory,” the Democrat conceded on Monday. But Coleman — now down by 312 votes — isn’t buying it. “Our system isn’t geared for this kind of closeness.” Still, some precision is possible in politics, as Gawker.com suggested Wednesday with its two-word description of Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

We knew she was killing, as in funny. Now it turns out Sen. Amy Klobuchar is also knowing, as in clairvoyant. Her prediction two months ago about when she’d gain a home-state companion in the U.S. Senate was within 42 minutes of a court ruling that Franken won. UPDATED with new video clip from Rachel Maddow’s show. UPDATED again with video of Klobuchar on CNN.