Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Oh, Becka!
It’s like a particularly dumb law school exam question. Minneapolis Park Board Commissioner Becka Thompson is running for City Council in Ward 12, but her home is on the other side of town in north Minneapolis. The state constitution, quite reasonably, says a candidate must live in the district they wish to represent at least 30 days before the general election. But Thompson will have to resign her Park Board seat if she leaves the district she now represents.
For 25 points, how long can Thompson straddle the line here?
Susan Du works through the confusion over at the Strib today, but while the headline reads "Minneapolis City Council candidate to resign from Park Board amid residency questions," Thompson’s actual comments in the story are much murkier. She says she currently lives over north four days a week and in the South Side's Cooper neighborhood for three. So *Natalie Portman meme* you’re going to move to Ward 12 permanently and resign from your board position, right Becka?
“I will neither confirm nor deny, but what you’re saying is likely to happen imminently,” Thompson says. Uh, OK. And why is she waiting so long? “I just was choosing the last legally possible moment”—which sounds very much like “I was just about to move my car” as the ticket is slipped under your windshield wiper.
If Thompson’s name sounds familiar to you, that’s for good reason—and bad reasons. A strange, hapless, and awful candidate, Thompson, who is challenging Ward 12 incumbent Aurin Chowdhury, has called her critics "indoctrinated college students" and compared them to Hitler Youth, and she’s also claimed that it’s "racist" to say “MAGA has no place in Minneapolis.” And who can forget Thompson’s comment that she “might not have the right haircut, or the desired amount of melanin” for the job. (Chowdhury is Bengali-American.) This spring, Thompson filed multiple complaints with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board against two local independent journalists, Taylor Dahlin and Wedge LIVE!’s John Edwards, for, essentially, not being nice enough to her, accusing them of mocking her on a website they didn’t make.
Why, you might ask, are people so eager to run for office in districts they don’t live in? Well, it seems that the Frey-aligned All of Mpls contingent—the alliance of downtown interests and (often suburban-dwelling) city landlords—can’t find challengers in certain wards, so they have to resort to carpetbagging.
The establishment’s preferred long-term solution is to amend the city charter to reconfigure the wards, and introduce at-large Council Members who represent the entire city. The future that large donors want is one where the Becka Thompsons live anywhere they please, and no one would ever have to pay attention to certain sections of the city ever again.
Small Grocers Scarce in Greater MN
We talk a lot, as we should, about how urban “food deserts” affect folks in the city. But in outstate Minnesota, local grocery stores can be rare as well, as Brian Arola writes over at MinnPost today. Arola spoke with the owners of three rural grocers—KC’s Country Market in Greenbush, Grygla General Store, and Zup’s Market in Cook—about the importance of independent grocery stores to small communities and the problems they face.
In addition to the usual small business problems, these stores are also weathering new cuts to SNAP (aka food stamps), which are slicing into their income. Community members love the stores, but that’s not always enough to keep them in business.
Reading this story, I couldn’t help but think of a certain Strib columnist whose time would be better served looking into issues like this, which actually affect the people of Greater Minnesota, rather than constantly reheating “culture war” issues.
Want a Covid Shot? You Can Get It in MN.
Watching the president stumble over the pronunciation of acetaminophen yesterday and tell pregnant women with fevers they should just suck it up—not exactly the kind of stuff that inspires confidence in the federal government’s medical recommendations, huh?
If, however, you’ve been concerned that the autism-obsessed ghoul heading up the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (stop calling him a “vaccine skeptic"—he’s a vaccine opponent) might prevent you from getting a Covid shot this winter, be happy you live in Minnesota.
Last week, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, staffed by Kennedy-affiliated stooges, refused to recommend the Covid vaccine to anyone and instead encouraged people to make their own medical decisions. (I am literally not qualified to make those decisions! That’s why the CDC exists!)
But Minnesota State Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield is recommending the Covid vaccine, in response to an executive order issued by Gov. Tim Walz.
"Vaccines can prevent severe disease, and we want people to use the tools that we have available," Lynfield says. "We wanted to ensure that anyone in Minnesota who wanted protection against severe disease from COVID-19 should be able to receive the vaccine.”
Bye Bye, Milkweed
Milkweed is closing on October 4—the Minneapolis coffee shop, that is, not the publisher. After seven years on 39th & Lake in Longfellow, owner Brenda Ingersoll is calling it quits, Longfellow Whatever reports. Milkweed was preceded by another coffee shop, Blue Moon, which occupied the space beginning in 1994. And, Ingersoll says, it’s possible that another will take its place. As the Whatever points out, nearby Hymie’s Records closed recently, leaving that spot of East Lake a little underserviced right about now.
