Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
You May Already Be Familiar With This New GOP Hire
Yesterday, MN GOP announced that it hired state Rep. Walter Hudson (R-Albertville) to be its strategic outreach and engagement director. “We are grateful for his willingness to help build coalitions with non-traditional Republican voters across Minnesota,” party chairman David Hann says via press release, going on to explain that those voters include Somali, Black, and Hispanic community members “who hold more moderate views.”
But as a pro-prison, transphobic, anti-choice dude, Hudson himself is hardly moderate. And his social media style is more about comical false equivalencies than grassroots engagement—he once compared Target to the Walker Art Center and pro-vax doctors to plantation-era slavers. You might recall this extremely weird abortion fight he picked with a local mom from earlier this summer.
At least this new gig should be a nice break from Hudson's near daily posts on AG Keith Ellison’s Brazil tweet. But don't worry: Very serious Republican members of the Minnesota House, eyes always on the ball, are keeping the pressure on.
Blue Line Extension: A New Beale Street or Rondo 2.0?
In two years, the METRO Blue Line Extension project could begin construction of a new leg that would take riders from Target Field Station to Brooklyn Park, with connections in Crystal, Robbinsdale, and north Minneapolis. But before cities can approve routes, project planners are looking to get the community—especially the North Side—onboard. A portion of the rail would run along West Broadway, from Lowry to Washington, a key stretch of road in an area with many Black residents. “They just want a means to get people downtown, to the airport and Mall of America,” says Broadway Liquors’ Dean Rose, who tells David Pierini at My North News that he’s stopped going to meetings about the line. “It’s not to actually serve this community but to go through it.”
Pierini notes that planners have spent “hundreds of hours” talking with the community, teaming up with the U of M for an anti-displacement initiative, and receiving $10 million from Minnesota State Legislature for anti-displacement measures.
But there will be displacement; Black community-centered radio station KMOJ, for example, would need to move out from its longtime home at Broadway & Penn. A report in published in June from the project suggests the area would see a loss in pedestrian accessibility and parking (approximately 1,400 spots) and experience a rise in noise pollution and traffic. (This piece from H. Jiahong Pan for MinnPost nicely sums up the findings.) Still, project organizers hope to have the route up and running by 2030.
Large Fish Bad at Fucking, Great at Living
That’s the headline my coworker Jay suggested, so I am sticking with it, because it’s true: Turns out bigmouth buffalo can live a really, really long time. That’s what scientists at the University of Minnesota Duluth discovered after studying the species living in the Rice River system for three years. “We have found them up to 112 years old in northwestern Minnesota. There was one in Saskatchewan that was 127 years old… but those are from really small sample sizes, so they may actually get much older,” ichthyologists Alec Lackmann tells John Myers at the Duluth New Tribune.
However, these large fish only successfully reproduce once every half-century or so. But who needs kids when you’re 100 years old and show no signs of advanced age? “They are still getting better, stronger, at age 100,’’ Lackmann says. “They don't show any signs of aging... For all we know, an 80-year-old bigmouth buffalo could be a young one.”
Sandwich Billionaire Jimmy John Flew a Chopper To Gordy’s
Fun fact: Jimmy John’s is actually owned by a guy named Jimmy John Liautaud. Even more fun: According to this Facebook reel from Gordy’s Hi-Hat, Jimmy himself stopped by the in Cloquet, Minnesota, burger joint via a chopper flown by a former member of the 160th Special Operations Regiment (aka the Night Stalkers) for some “burgers, fish, onion rings, and malts.” Judging by the hashtags used in the post, this looks to be another Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives sighting. Less fun facts: Jimmy John's had to shell out $1.8 million in 2021 to settle wage theft claims and Liautaud used to kill leopards and elephants in Africa for sport.
