NYT: Is Tim Walz the New Donald Trump?

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

NYT Sez Walz Is Mean Like Trump

Ah, to live in the world of the New York Times, where the greatest dangers trans children face is that their parents will help them transition, the most dire threat to free speech comes from college students, and the gravest sin a politician can commit is to say mean things. 

The Times civility police are currently coming after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for conduct unbecoming a Democrat. In a piece published late Wednesday, Jess Bidgood calls Walz out for using the terms “dipshit” and “South African nepo baby” to refer to dipshit South African nepo baby Elon Musk.

As unelected co-president, Musk, who is the richest man in the world, continues to illegally dismantle the federal administrative state. He’s also funneling ungodly amounts of cash to Republicans who pledge to impeach judges who refuse to rubber stamp Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs. (As you can read about in… the New York Times.)

But by taunting Musk, Walz, we are huffily told, is taking a page from “President Trump’s own xenophobic insults of his political foes” and is “willing to dip into Trump’s playbook.” Bidgood does note, helpfully, that, “Mr. Trump’s remarks were typically directed toward elected officials of color, not white billionaires.” Anyway, if you’re a Democrat facing criticism from the Times, you’re on the right track. When Dean Phillips agrees with the Times, you definitely are.

Musk has already tarnished his personal brand nationally. Tesla stock is plummeting so fast that a major Tesla investor has called for Musk to step down as CEO. Meanwhile, shouts of “Deport Elon” are drowning out U.S. House members as they hold town halls in safely Republican districts. 

From Kevin O’Leary (why do I even have to know who that is?) to Karoline Leavitt, crybabies on the right are in defensive attack mode. The DOJ is contending that vandalism against Teslas constitutes “domestic terrorism” while cabinet members are pathetically (and illegally) begging people to buy Tesla stock on TV. So whatever you're doing, guv, keep it up. It seems to be working.

One last Walz criticism comes from (I’m truly sorry) caterpillar-browed Fox irritant Jesse Watters, who has mocked Walz for publicly using a straw to drink a milkshake. Imagine being so insecure in your masculinity that you don’t drink milkshakes. Your loss, pal! 

Remembering the MN Man Who Saved Ford From Squeaky Fromme

Larry Buendorf of Wells, Minnesota, who was a Secret Service agent from 1970 until 1993, died today, the Star Tribune reports. You probably don’t know his name—you probably don’t know the name of many Secret Service agents—but Buendorf saved the life of President Gerald Ford in 1975. And the ’70s were messy enough with a presidential assassination to deal with on top of everything else.

Ford was in Sacramento, en route to a meeting with California Gov. Jerry Brown, when Buendorf saw a woman raise a pistol. He knocked the weapon from her hand and pinned her to the ground. The would-be assassin turned out to be Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson. (Dakota Fanning played Fromme in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.) 

After Ford left office, Buendorf served on the former president’s security staff. According to his wife, Linda, “He used to say his job was hours and hours of boredom for one moment of sheer terror.” That’s what it’s like working at Racket too.

Hamline Faculty and Students Rally Behind Endangered Creative Writing MFA

Late last month, students enrolled in Hamline University’s Creative Writing MFA program received a worrying email from the program’s leadership, reports Alex V. Cipolle for MPR news. Program Director Richard Pelster-Wiebe and Associate Professors Angela Pelster-Wiebe and John Brandon wrote saying they’d just learned that the St. Paul university was axing the program, the oldest Creative Writing MFA program in the state. The email also said that Hamline would be firing program coordinator Meghan Maloney-Vinz and discontinuing Hamline’s long-running literary journal, the Water-Stone Review. The Hamline administration has not confirmed this, but students, who feel like they’re getting the run around, are demanding answers. The program has a reputation for enrolling non-traditional students with full-time jobs. At stake is the belief that “Hamline University is a place that supports this legacy of beginnings for folks and for writing in general,” Maloney-Vinz tells MPR.

Minneapolis on Course to Ban Landlord Price-Fixing

RealPage, from what I gather, is a company that exists solely to raise your rent. Landlords who subscribe to its service provide a set of non-public data, and in exchange subscribers receive an algorithmically determined price at which units should be rented. This encourages across the board rental increases and collusion, and has already been targeted by the U.S. Department of Justice (we’ll see how that goes now) and various state attorneys general (love an excuse to use that plural).

Now both the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis are going after algorithmic rent adjusting, and it looks like the city will get there first. Today, the Minneapolis Business, Housing and Zoning Committee approved a ban on the practice, which now goes on to the full City Council. If it’s passed, and it meets the approval of Mayor Jacob Frey, the ban will go into effect next March. 

Ward 2 Council Member Robin Wonsley, who introduced the ordinance, says landlords who use algorithmic pricing have raised rent by $312/year on average and that one in seven rental units in the Twin Cities is managed with algorithmic pricing software. Racket readers may already be aware of Wonsley's work on the issue, since she discussed it in last week's feature story on Dinkytown.