Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily midday digest of what local media outlets and Twitter-ers are gabbing about.
Fox News: Minneapolis Is a Bleak, Uninhabitable, Mad Max-ian Hellscape (Based on Our Hour-Long Visit)
You can have honest debates about public safety in Minneapolis, where violent crime has risen in the years following the murder of George Floyd. Or you can deliberately misrepresent the city, wielding its loaded national significance as a gross ideological cudgel. Guess which route Fox News took last night! If Laura Ingraham’s big pulse-check of Minneapolis went deeper than speaking with two cops outside the 3rd Precinct, viewers didn’t experience it. What they got, initially, was Ingraham teasing the piece on Tucker Carlson’s program, a bit that concludes with Carlson casually/inaccurately stating that convicted murderer Derek Chauvin didn’t murder Floyd. "I was stunned at how bad it is in certain parts of Minneapolis," Ingraham, who may have not been in Minneapolis despite her onscreen geo-tag, told her chronically jaw-drooping colleague.
The six-minute segment itself, which aired on The Ingraham Angle, did little more than chum the waters for Fox News viewers who are eager to be have their core belief reinforced: that major cities remain aflame due to some handshake agreement between BLM/Antifa terrorists and the lefty politicians who do their bidding. "It makes it tough for us to actually do our jobs without being harassed, and cameras in our face," MPD Lt. Jeff Waite says to one of Ingraham's softballs. "You constantly have people questioning how we do things." Slathered with out-of-context defund rhetoric, Ingraham's framing seems to suggest that low cop staffing levels are tied to slashed budgets when, as you know, Democrats keep firehosing police departments with funds—locally and federally.
Why Do You Drive on a Parkway?
Wouldn’t it be cool if when Minneapolis temporarily shut down its parkways for events, there was a more aesthetically pleasing way of letting drivers know than with a bunch of ugly orange “road closed” signs? And if the city saved a little money to boot? “Absolutely fucking not!” says the DFL’s Senior Coalition, which fears any move that might one day lead to cars being denied their rightful place atop the transportation hierarchy. And so, reports the Strib’s Susan Du, after the Minneapolis Park Board spent eight months and $66,000 on the “Open Parkways Pilot Project,” extreme pushback has led to board to kill the project. “It would not have considered permanently closing parkways to cars or changing parkway policy to increase the frequency of temporary closures,” Du writes. Nonetheless, the Senior Caucus considers the pilot program "a step toward the desire to transition parkways solely to active human use.” A. Step. Toward. The. Desire. The horror.
Seniority vs. New Blood in DFL Senate Primary
Baylor Spears at the Minnesota Reformers has a sharp look today at a state legislative primary race in St. Paul that epitomizes the big choices facing Democrats nationwide. Union organizer Sheigh Freeberg was a toddler when the state senator he’s challenging, Sandy Pappas, began representing Minnesota’s Senate District 65 in 1990. Freeberg says Pappas is no longer connected to the communities she represents, and has failed to take the lead on the biggest issues helping working people in St. Paul, including the minimum wage and rent control. As for Pappas, she’s confident that the DFL will win control of the upper house in 2022, and that her seniority will poise her to take the lead on her longtime projects, including statewide paid sick leave and paid family leave, and chair the capital investment committee, which decides which public infrastructure projects receive funding.
46 New Ways to Get Ripped at the Fair, Plus 1 NA Beer
This morning the Minnesota State Fair announced its 2022 beverage lineup, and, holy crap, there are 46 new alcoholic drink alone. So if you want something to complement that delicious fried food or super-sweet sweet, you’ll have options. A few newbies: Hideaway Sunset, a “Tequila Sunrise cocktail in the form of a beer”; the Olive Lager, “a nod to the classic Midwest Martini”; Pitt Boss, a peachy collab between Bauhaus Brew Labs and Animales BBQ; and ENCORE!, a cold press IPA made with Minnesota wild rice. There’s also a few bevs at 6.5% ABV (that’s kinda high for a beer!), including the Cucumber Summer and the Fair Mullet, and a lot of cavity-inducing varieties, such as the Chocolate Chip Cookie Beer and the Baklava Cream Ale. Oh, and the Fair also added two new food vendors this week to the lineup: Pickle Barrel Sirloin Tips, which will offer steak dinners, pitas, and mashed potatoes, as well as the needs no explanation Richie’s Cheese Curd Tacos. For our predictions on new Fair foods we think will bomb or be bomb, check out our post here.
