More than 50 people gathered in front of Brainerd City Hall, holding signs reading “America’s middle class: too big to fail” and “tax Wall Street,” according to the Brainerd Dispatch.

Josh Brewster of Brainerd was holding a sign that read “Tax the richest 2 percent.” He said he attended the demonstration because he wants a future for his children. Nothing, not even a little rain, was going to keep him away Wednesday, he said.

In Duluth, more than 100 people braved a rainstorm in Lake Superior Plaza, according to the Duluth News Tribune.

Anne Fryberger of Duluth, an investment adviser and former broker who has been in the business for 25 years, held a sign saying she supported the Occupy Wall Street objective.

“I’m not against capitalism. I’m against the part of capitalism that can’t get enough and gets more and more by taking it from everyone else,” she said. “The whole system is predatory. I believe the middle class is losing ground in this country and we need to stop it.”

Duluth police told the News Tribune that protesters have been advised that they won’t be allowed to camp overnight on public property.

KIMT 3 also has a story on a group that’s organizing in Rochester, having held three meetings now, with the most recent happening in the storefront of Zeus Auto Repair.

Zane Zodrow told the station that he was “tired of politics being driven 100 percent by money instead of by principle and what the American public wants.”

The Rochester Post Bulletin is the latest Minnesota newspaper to oppose the Republican’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. In a Wednesday  editorial the paper argued that current Minnesota law on same-sex marriage is sufficient and a constitutional amendment is unnecessary. The Post Bulletin joins more than a dozen other papers throughout the state that have spoken out against the amendment.

The Post Bulletin wrote:

Same-sex couples aren’t getting married here, nor are they lining up to challenge the law. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s health care system, public schools and courts are teetering on the edge of economic crisis. Legislators should keep their eyes on the prize.

Furthermore, we object on principle to the idea of legislating through the constitution. We elect public officials to run our state government, a job that includes setting taxes, allocating money and creating the laws we live by. Our legislators should do that job themselves, rather than delegating important decisions to the voters — and thus finding a way around the checks and balances that are inherent in our legislative process.

The Rochester paper joins papers in numerous other communities, including Winona, Duluth, Minneapolis, Albert Lea, New Ulm, Fairmont, Grant County, McLeod County, Mille Lacs and Mille Lacs County, Virginia, and the University of Minnesota that oppose the GOP measure.

“This, to me, is not an issue of policy, it’s a matter of human rights,” council member Michael Wojcik said before the vote. “If you ask me how long it takes me to vote on a question of human rights, it’s not one minute.”

The vote prompted a glowing review from the editorial board of the Rochester Post-Bulletin:

It’s never too soon to do the right thing. That’s the rationale that compelled the Rochester City Council to publicly and legally affirm the basic right of all Olmsted County residents to visit a loved one in a time of medical crisis — even if that loved one is a same-sex partner. Compassion won out over fear, and Rochester proved that it’s ready and willing to live up to its claim of being an “inclusive community.”

Source: Wikipedia

Rochester is considering an ordinance that would allow same-sex partners to register their domestic partnership with the city. Mayor Ardell Brede proposed the measure, which among other things would allow for hospital visitation for same-sex couples in “Med City.” The proposal has drawn early support from Independence Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner, and if it passes, Rochester would join four other cities in the state — Minneapolis, Duluth, St. Paul and Edina — in enacting such an ordinance.

Brede told the Rochester Post-Bulletin that it was the right thing to do, despite the likely controversy the move may cause.

“Yeah, of course, there are those people — and I know some of them by name — that will be (objecting), whether blogging, by personal note or phone call,” he said. “It’s not who’s right, but what’s right and I think this is a ‘what’s right’ situation.”

Horner told the Post-Bulletin’s blog Political Party that he hopes the city council will approve the measure.

“I hope that the Rochester City Council is able to go ahead and pass the domestic benefits. I think for Minnesota to be a state that is open to the best talent, that attracts the best talent, we need to address these kinds of equality issues and be a leader in addressing them,” he said.

“I understand that most Minnesotans aren’t ready to take that on. I think what they are ready to take on are the same kinds of steps in the public sector that the private sector already has taken and has been there is some cases for many years.”

CityPages has a transcript of the appearance:

He said that in Japan, to wait and get health care is almost impossible. You get on a list and you wait and you wait and you wait. But he said this is something people don’t know: in Japan, people have stopped voicing their opinion on health care. There are things that are wrong with Japanese health care, but people are afraid of voicing. ‘Well why is that,’ I asked. [He said], ‘Because they know that would get on a list and they wouldn’t get health care. They wouldn’t get in. They wouldn’t get seen. And so people are afraid. They’re afraid to speak back to government. They’re afraid to say anything.’ Is that what we want for our future? That takes us to gangster government at that point!

The Star Tribune tried to verify the accuracy of Bachmann’s claim that Japanese citizens are denied care if they criticize that nation’s health care system, but could find no mention of such a policy.

The Rochester Post-Bulletin captured this video of the event:

Photo: quistforcongress.com

As if to illustrate Allen Quist‘s November comment that he and Rep. Michele Bachmann are “two peas in a pod,” the First Congressional District candidate’s campaign announced Saturday that the pair will share a podium on Feb. 1. Bachmann will be taking part in a health care forum the campaign is organizing in Rochester.

But there are more peas in that pod as well: Also participating will be U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, a physician who was part of Bachmann’s health care town hall in Lake Elmo last August. Quist’s wife, Julie, has been Bachmann’s district director in Minnesota since late 2007.

Quist is running to unseat Rep. Tim Walz. His GOP challengers include Randy Demmer, Jim Hagedorn and Frank McKinzie.

The proposed cuts are equivalent to 3.3 percent of the program’s funding in 2009 and 7.6 percent in 2010. Towns with populations under 1,000 are exempt from the cuts. Many municipalities in greater Minnesota with shrinking populations rely on LGA to bolster their finances, as do larger cities with high levels of poverty.

The League of Minnesota Cities has posted a spreadsheet breaking down Pawlenty’s proposed cuts to local government aid. While a city’s overall budget needs to be scrutinized in order to gauge the significance of the hit, in sheer dollar amounts here are the ten municipalities slated to lose the biggest chunks of change:

1. Minneapolis: $44.6 million in 2009; $102.4 million in 2010
2. St. Paul: $5 million in 2009; $11.6 million in 2010
3. Rochester: $1.7 million in 2009; $3.9 million in 2010
4. Duluth: $1.5 million in 2009; $3.5 million in 2010
5. St. Cloud: $1.2 million in 2009; $2.7 million in 2010
6. Winona: $531,000 in 2009; $1.2 million in 2010
7. Moorhead: $489,000 in 2009; $1.1 million in 2010
8. Brooklyn Center: $464,000 in 2009; $1.1 million in 2010
9. Owatonna, $454,000 in 2009; $1 million in 2010
10. Faribault: $392,000 in 2009; $905,000 in 2010

The Sunshine Review recently completed a 10-point evaluation of Web access to county government information for all 3,140 counties across the United States.

One factoid: Among Minnesota’s 87 counties, only 23 make their budgets available via the Internet.

St. Louis County, which includes the city of Duluth, ranks highest in the state. All that’s lacking from the St. Louis County Web site, according to the study, is information about permits and zoning (a single criterion) and lobbying. The county is the only one in the state to offer information in all four of these often-overlooked areas: audits, contracts, public records and taxes.

Still, the northeastern Minnesota county (the state’s largest in area) is a surprising title-holder, given recent complaints about efforts to ban a watchdog group from videotaping public meetings.

Olmsted County, which includes the city of Rochester, scored a close second. Its county Web site’s gaps are in lobbying data and public records, with partial credit for providing information about public meetings.

By contrast, each of the Twin Cities’ metro-area counties met only four to six of Sunshine Review’s 10 criteria: Anoka (5), Carver (4), Dakota (4), Hennepin (6), Ramsey (6), Scott (5) and Washington (5).

Sunshine Review has set its sights next on completing evaluations for city government Web sites across the country. So far, 51 Minnesota cities’ Web sites have been examined.

The studies are done by wiki, meaning anyone with Web access can contribute.

Incidentally, a cursory Minnesota Independent evaluation of the mock Web site for the fictional city of Pawnee, Ind., using Sunshine Review’s transparency checklist, suggests a failing grade. The site was created as a subtle promotion for NBC’s new local-government satire, “Parks and Recreation,” which premieres Thursday.

Now that the Federal Railroad Administration has told the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern railroad that it is not going to give it the hoped-for $2.3 billion loan to expand into the Powder River Basin, is that the end of a decade-long dream for the DM&E’s CEO Kevin Schieffer?

The answer is: No one knows. Schieffer at least in public has said he’s not throwing in the towel. The Surface Transportation Board and the FRA have approved the project, just not the massive loan. The Mayo Clinic and other opponents along the route haven’t scheduled any victory parties. And freshman Congressman Tim Walz, whose upset victory last fall came partially because of his opposition to the loan, is holding out an olive branch saying, yes, we want the railroad to upgrade and succeed, but no, we’re not crazy about the coal.

Ten years ago when Kevin Schieffer set off on his quest to turn the Class II DM&E into a Class I railroad, he thought he had a surefire solution: Extend his fledgling regional operation into the coal-rich PRB and begin shipping America’s last remaining supplies of relatively cheap fossil fuel to coal hungry power plants in America’s heartland. Though there were already two railroad lines servicing the area, his new route would be shorter and more direct to points east. It sounded like a can’t-fail plan.

more insideYet he didn’t anticipate the opposition that would arise along the way from a vast and diverse myriad of interests. Despite this opposition he kept pushing forward, but partially because of the opposition the project grew more expensive. Would-be investors started to get nervous. So Schieffer turned to his old friend John Thune, a newly elected senator from South Dakota, for help. Thune obliged by adding a last-minute provision into the massive 2005 Transportation Bill that would all but assure the DM&E of a low-interest, taxpayer guaranteed federal loan that would cover about 35% of the cost. It seemed like a slam dunk.

Citizens, the media and all but a handful of legislators didn’t find out about this provision until after the behemoth bill was passed. Soon the media were trumpeting the DM&E PRB expansion project as a done deal: You can’t fight both the railroad and Congress.

But they forgot to ask a few folks along the way. While the environmental opposition had faded away after a series of Surface Transportation Board decisions favoring the railroad that were upheld in court, there was still strong opposition from ranchers in Wyoming, citizens in Brookings, S.D., and above all, the Mayo Clinic and the City of Rochester, Minn. The latter two, which had been fighting the expansion quietly for years, suddenly swung into full combat mode, pulling out all the stops

That was in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. But on Monday, she was full of hope as she stepped out of a private jet that flew her to Rochester for treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

Though Ali is 11 now, she looks like she hasn’t grown much since the attack. She’s gaunt and her wide eyes look languid. Still, she managed to smile and seem playful as she strode through dozens of people who waved encouraging signs and flowers at the Rochester International Airport.

One sign read, “The bad part is over.”

It’s exactly the message that the couple who sponsored Ali wanted to send her. The Rochester pair, Abdi and Zahra, who wouldn’t give their last names because they didn’t want to be overwhelmed with all those in need, didn’ know Ali until they read her story on a Somali website.

“We couldn’t sleep the night we saw [Ali] on the Internet,” said Abdi, who began to mobilize a network of people and organizations to help Ali. “She’s just like my 3-year-old daughter.”

Severe Injury

Ali was 7 when thugs kidnapped her near her family’s home in Mogadishu. She was going to a nearby grocery shop to buy cooking oil.

“Before you reach the shop, you will have to pass some old buildings which were ruined in the civil war,” according to a statement on the website Somalitalk.com from her father, recounting the events of that fateful March morning in 2002. “After [she was] away for 30 minutes I heard screaming.