Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
That's Arf-ul Disappointing...
In 2023, Minnesota Democrats passed the Earned Sick and Safe Time law, which gives workers one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours they work (up to 48 hours, or six paid sick days a year). But on Tuesday, six self-described “Blue Dog” Senate Dems—Grant Hauschild (DFL-Hermantown), Judy Seeberger (DFL-Afton), Matt Klein (DFL-Inver Grove Heights), Robert Kupec (DFL-Moorhead), Aric Putnam (DFL-St. Clould), and Nick Frentz (DFL-North Mankato)—voted with Republicans to weaken the workplace protections their party championed just two years ago.
“It’s OK to pass laws and vote yes and then learn more information and make changes,” Hauschild said during Tuesday’s debate. “That’s not a shameful thing. That’s not weak. That’s strong.”
Whatever you say, tough guy!
The new bill allows employers to request proof of illness/safety emergency after two days (down from three), reports the Minnesota Reformer's Max Nesterak. It also carves out farms with five or fewer employees and other businesses with three or fewer employees.
Not all DFLers are on board; Senate Labor Committee Chair Jen McEwen (DFL-Duluth) called the carve outs “shameful," adding, "These farmworkers are some of the least protected, powerless workers in our society." The bill would still need to pass the House and get a signature from Gov. Tim Walz.
Elsewhere in the world of clawing back progressive wins: Minnesota Republicans have introduced a bill that would scale back and means test the popular universal school lunch program.
Bari Weiss's Heinous Outlet Weighs in on MN Racial Drama
Oh, good: The Free Press has thoughts about the local white woman who repeatedly screamed the N-word at a five-year-old last week and is now getting rich because of it. And you know what's to blame? It's not that violent racism is the very bedrock of our nation, nor is it the current presidential administration's emboldening of race-based hatred as it targets immigrants and people of color for deportation. Is it that algorithms shuffle social media users into online echo chambers that reinforce even the most awful beliefs, amplifying hatred and sucking people down into a metaphorical toilet of loud and shitty beliefs?
Nope!
It's woke.
If you missed this unfortunate local angle, the story was featured in the Flyover last week; a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was filmed screaming slurs at a young Black child on a playground in Rochester. She set up a campaign on "Christian crowdfunding site" GiveSendGo, met her $20,000 goal almost instantly, and quickly raised hundreds of thousands more as the story spread on right-wing social media.
The crux of the Free Press's take, written by River Page, is in these grafs (emphasis ours):
How did America become a place where someone who screams racial slurs at a child in a public park is valorized and financially rewarded for it?
In some sense this story is a decade in the making, and it starts with the zealotry of the left, not the right. The past decade is filled with tales of people who were wrongfully canceled in the fervor of what people like to call the “woke era.” The Free Press has told a lot of these stories. We ran a piece about a child in Evanston, Illinois, who tied three nooses and was accused of being a racist when actually he was just mentally ill. We ran an investigation into the “Central Park Karen,” a white woman who was viciously canceled for calling the police on a black bird-watcher who was yelling at her in New York’s Central Park. Most Americans, upon hearing the details of these cases, would agree that these are stories about ordinary people wrongly labeled as racist by an overzealous progressive mob.
I would push back on that last sentence, and in any case, it doesn't matter, because as Page immediately writes, "Shiloh Hendrix’s story is not in this category. She did exactly what she’s accused of, and it’s all on camera." But the argument goes on like this: The "excesses of the left" are to blame for this shameful behavior, and for the support that behavior has received in the form of donations on social media.
If you want to read the piece in full (and really, I would urge you not to), you can do so without giving Weiss & Co. a click here.
Meanwhile, as N-word screamer Hendrix appears poised to raise $1 million, the Rochester branch of the NAACP turned off donations to its GoFundMe for the victim after two days "in response to the family’s wishes."
"With care and positive intention, we launched a GoFundMe campaign to support the young victim and his family. Thanks to your outpouring of support, we not only met our goal—we surpassed it," an update from last week reads. "Together, we raised $341,484 in two days. Love wins!"
Craftsmanship? No, Paul Manship.
Phew, OK, let's all let our blood pressure return to normal here in Flyover blurb No. 3. For MPR News, Alex V. Cipolle remembers the impact of St. Paul-born artist Paul Manship, the "Art Deco king," on the 100th anniversary of the art movement. The locally launched artist would eventually go on to craft the Bronx Zoo's bronze gates, and—I didn't know this!—he's the artist responsible for the glowing, golden-bronze statue Prometheus at Rockefeller Center.
But before all that, Manship was one of seven kids raised in a house on Summit Avenue. He studied at the St. Paul Institute School of Art (today it's the Minnesota Museum of American Art) and "started his own art business in town," Cipolle reports, using the money to move to New York and study at the Art Students League. And before Manship died in 1966, Laurene Tibbetts, an assistant director at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, convinced him to bequeath many of his pieces to his hometown museum; today, the museum has hundreds of Manships in its collection.
Air Corgi Says Wolves in 7
One more for the road...
Air Corgi a.k.a. Steph Furry/Fluffy Mamba (real name Lilo Ku) has not yet given her 1.5 million TikTok followers a prediction for the Minnesota Frost's playoff chances; the Professional Women's Hockey League's champs face off against the Toronto Sceptres in game one of their semifinal series tonight. (You can watch the action on YouTube.) Air Corgi—are you a girl's girl or not? Everyone watches women's sports.
