Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
77 Things Glen Taylor Hates About You
And by “you,” I mean Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore, the new owners of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx. When the billionaire owner of the Minnesota Star Tribune decided he didn’t want to sell his basketball teams to Lore and Rodriguez after all (the superrich are such fickle, inscrutable creatures), he needed ammo to convince the NBA to block the sale. And so, according to sports podcaster Pablo Torre, Taylor ordered two of his underlings to gather up “'a burn book,’ as in a Mean Girls-style list” of 77 itemized reasons why the sale should not be approved. (The discussion begins around the 35-minute mark.)
Among the “revelations” Taylor had hoped would sway the NBA: “Alex Rodriguez did steroids,” “Marc Lore came into the arena with an open bottle of alcohol,” and, best of all, “Marc Lore had dinner with Kevin Garnett and never told me.” The hatred Taylor and Garnett have for each other burns so pure and bright you could power the planet if you could harness its energy.
Why Aren’t We Talking About Police Violence This Election Year?
That’s what Pascal Sabino wonders for Bolts. After all, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the resulting protests, the question of replacing the police department was up for a citywide vote. But in this election, though we're seeing plenty of scaremongering about "defunding the police" from Frey-aligned candidates and PACs, even the most progressive candidates are not confronting police abuses head on.
An exception is Soren Stevenson, the city council candidate for Ward 8 who lost his left eye and most of his sense of smell after a police officer shot him in the face with a foam projectile in 2020. (The officer was never disciplined.) “We have local leaders that might want to talk about [police reform] a little bit when it’s convenient, but they don’t want to ruffle feathers,” Stevenson says.
Another is Nekima Levy Armstrong, who tells Sabino, “There is a lack of political will to take definitive steps to eradicate the harms that police are allowed to inflict without any real accountability.”
In other “How’s the MPD doing these days?” news, Minneapolis city auditor Robert Timmerman elaborated to Ben Henry of KSTP about the “resistance and delay” with which he has been met while his office looks into police conduct related to the shooting of Davis Moturi and death of Allison Lussier.
Moturi, a Black man, was shot by his white neighbor after months of harassment. (He was a guest on RacketCast, where he discussed his ordeal.) Lussier, an Indigenous woman, was found dead in her apartment after making repeated domestic violence calls. In each case, there are serious complaints that police should have acted sooner. Honestly, it is astonishing that these stories are not front and center this election year.
Land of 10,000 Data Centers?
I don’t know what city council meetings in Hermantown, Minnesota, are usually like, but I imagine the council chambers are rarely filled to capacity with hundreds of town residents while even more crowd outside the building. And I’d guess few issues garner four hours of public testimony from 50 or so speakers.
As Dan Kraker writes for MPR news, what’s turning Hermantown residents out en masse is a proposal to build a data center that would be the largest development project in the city’s history. Supporters (including council members) say the project will bring jobs, housing, and infrastructure to Hermantown.
Opponents not only point to serious environmental concerns, but are also troubled by a non-disclosure agreement that kept residents in the dark until there was a proposal on the table. In fact, all that's known about the developer is that it's “a Fortune 50 company.”
Shutdown Won’t Stop Klobuchar From Enabling Trump Nominees
It’s October 21, 2025. The government has been shut down for nearly three weeks, Republican House members are AWOL, federal employees are going without pay, millions of Americans recently flooded the streets in opposition to the Trump agenda, DHS thugs are arresting civilians in American cities, the East Wing of the White House has been bashed in, and, this afternoon, by a vote of 66-32, the Senate invoked cloture on the nomination of Harold D. Mooty III to be U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Alabama.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) voted “aye.”
You’d think, given the confluence of events I mentioned earlier, it might be time for even an exemplar of bipartisan comity such as our senior senator to say, “Hey, no votes from our side of the chamber till you guys get your act together.” But maybe Moody is just that good of a judge. Maybe if the Senate didn’t act now he’d go be a judge in some other country, and then we’d all be sorry.
