Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Davis Returns, "Don’t Rank Frey" Is Back On
Bad news for landlords and business owners who live in the suburbs but love to pump money into the Minneapolis mayor’s race: DeWayne Davis is back in the running. Earlier this month Davis suspended his campaign to mourn the death of his mother, but he announced his return today with this campaign video.
In other good news: Mayoral candidate Omar Fateh has announced that he and his wife, Kaltum Mohamed, are expecting their first baby together. The DFL state senator also shows off some real hoop skills at the end of his pregnancy announcement/campaign video. Fateh responded to Davis’s return announcement on social media with this sentiment: “I meant it when I said you represent the best of our city.”
If you want to know more about these fellows, Racket did speak to (and consume Mexican food with) both Davis and Fateh, as well as their fellow mayoral challenger Jazz Hampton. Keep in mind, however, that Racket would never tell you how to vote. You can rank Davis, Fateh, and Hampton in any order you like, that’s fine with us.
Can We Protect Elected Officials?
Just days after the assasination of Sen. Melissa Hortman, some creep(s) sent Domino’s pizzas to Rep. Erin Koegel’s home all night long—just their way of saying “we know where you live.” That anecdote is from Matthew Blake’s scary piece in MinnPost today on how hard it is to keep lawmakers safe. The fear, of course, is that an inability to do so will not only lead to more horrific killings, but drive qualified people out of public life. If they haven’t been driven out already.
The general consensus is that the Hortman/Hoffman shootings were shocking but hardly surprising—the Brennan Center found that 40% of state lawmakers in the U.S. had been threatened at some point. If legislators are clearly in danger then, how do we protect them? Well, there are workplace protections, including metal detectors and the like. But keeping politicians safe at home requires a broader initiative—right now the state is stuck on adjusting the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act so that you can’t access their personal addresses.
Every Immigrant Group Eventually Gets This Story Written About Them
Coming up with new story ideas can be one of the trickiest parts of journalism. Unfortunately, the U.S. government consistently makes the Sahan Journal’s job a little easier by ruining the lives of one immigrant group after another, after which Sahan allows members of the community to express their unease. Sadly, it’s now Iranian Minnesotans’ turn.
The folks Shubhanjana Das speaks to, whether they're actively protesting or not, oppose the illegal, clumsily perpetrated, and unnecessary bombing of their home country by Israel and the U.S. (Oddly enough, even people who oppose a regime don’t want friends and family who live under that regime to be slaughtered by foreign bombs. Go figure!)
Some of the people quoted are hesitantly hopeful that, in the long run, recent events may help dissidents within the state. But as Maryam Yusefzadeh, a Tehran-born musician and educator, says, “When a foreigner comes and makes decisions for us without considering thousands of years of our culture and history, whatever they put in place will fail.” Just ask the Shah.
RIP Strib Reporter Mike Kaszuba
Mike Kaszuba, a Star Tribune reporter for 35 years who spent most of his tenure covering state and local government, died at his home in Florida last week. “There's a personality trait that most would regard as negative, but one that Mike Kaszuba wore like a badge: disruptive,” reads his obituary, which is certainly livelier than most. There’s also a great anecdote about how Kaszuba responded to an editor who demanded he cut his hair, and an account of what a solid union man he was. And though he retired from the Strib, Kaszuba never left journalism: He continued working for Public Record Media, a nonprofit dedicated to upholding “integrity and transparency in government,” until basically the day he died.
