Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Angie's List(ing to the Center)
Rep. Angie Craig (DFL-MN) is among 30 or so “prominent younger Democrats,” as Katie Gluek of the New York Times calls them, who’ve formed a new group determined to save their party from permanent minority status. (But they seem so comfortable in that role!)
Their diagnosis: The Dems need to become a “big tent” party and define what the party stands for. (Those seem like very different, and perhaps conflicting issues to me, but hey, I don’t get firehosed with cash for telling politicians what to say.) The group—which is also a PAC, of course—is called Majority Democrats, which strikes me as pretty weak name coming from branding-obsessed people.
Craig told the Times that anti-Trump sentiment, “might win a midterm election but it’s not going to build lasting majorities. We’ve got to lay out the case for what we’re for as a party.” And she ain’t wrong—there’s clearly a message vacuum at the center of the national Democratic Party.
But she’s also not defining “what we’re for as a party.” The story suggests that “affordability, safety and challenging the power of Big Tech” will be priorities for Majority Democrats (the name just rolls off the tongue). But I’m suspicious of Craig’s commitment to reining in tech’s power, considering how cozy she is with the crypto industry, and “safety” likely just means funneling federal money into law enforcement—a Craig speciality. As for affordability… well yes, but let’s hear some specifics.
Given the centrist bent of its members, Majority Democrats could easily become just a rebranded Blue Dog coalition. No matter how big the tent is, the left always winds up shivering outside in the cold.
Anyway, the publicity is good for Craig, 53 (I guess that means I too, at 55, am a "younger" Democrat to the Times), who’s running for the U.S. Senate in 2026. If Craig wins, Sen. Amy Klobuchar will become our state’s most-left-leaning senator.
Speaking of which, here’s a brand-new photo of Klobuchar posing with internationally beloved statesman and/or wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.
Private Equity Is Coming for Minor League Baseball
Two years ago, the founders of the St. Paul Saints sold the minor league baseball team to the private equity firm Diamond Baseball Holdings. DBH owned “more than a dozen other minor league teams,” the Strib reported at the time. Today, Jen Ramos Eisen writes in Defector, the company owns 45 teams, or more than a third of all minor league franchises. And it’s looking to gobble up more, abetted by Major League Baseball, which has loosened rules that once strictly limited how many teams an entity could own. The cap is now 50.
While GMs and former owners have kind words for DBH, Ramos Eisen heard from players and others that it was “an employer less focused on America’s pastime and more on how to regionalize operations and turn stadiums into entertainment complexes.” The piece offers more smoke than fire, but given private equity’s track record with, well, everything it owns, there’s plenty here to make Saints fans a little uneasy.
ICE Is (Still) Coming for Your Neighbors
As you might expect, Sahan Journal has been publishing the best coverage of the ICE onslaught on Minnesota’s immigrant communities. Sahan’s Katelyn Vue looks at the case of Chia Neng Vue (presumably no relation), a 43-year-old Hmong man who lives in Coon Rapids. After some gang involvement and a criminal conviction when he was young, Vue turned his life around and was checking in regularly with immigration officials. Now he's in the Freeborn County Jail, waiting to learn his future, after being seized at home by ICE.
In another Sahan story, Andrew Hazzard talks with immigration attorneys and policy experts about how due process is fast eroding for immigrants. More cases are being reopened, while more immigrants are being detained or slated for “expedited removal,” an option that allows the government to sidestep many procedural protections. One thing this crisis highlights is just how few legal protections non-citizens have against the state when it targets them.
Federal Cuts Hit Science Museum Hard
While the funding for ICE is seemingly unlimited, there’s a mere trickle of resources for programs and institutions that genuinely benefit Americans. The Minnesota Science Museum laid off 43 of its workers this week—a 13% reduction in staff—after the Trump administration announced (with dubious legality) that it would withhold $1.3 million in grants to Minnesota institutions. Four of those grants were for Science Museum projects, and would have kept more than two dozen staffers employed, including an entire department dedicated to program evaluation and another dedicated to equity, access, and community outreach.
Though dwindling funds may be to blame, staffers aren’t thrilled with how management handled the cuts. “This could’ve been done in more collaboration with the union and department leaders, not just dropping a list of names 24 hours before,” Gretchen Haupt, the museum’s evaluation and research associate, tells MPR News. Haupt, a 14-year museum employee, lost her job due to the cuts.
And today Fred Melo broke even more bad news in the Pioneer Press: The 42 summer camps the museum runs will be discontinued next year, again for lacking of funding. This will hardly upset Republicans, who, as we know, prefer another kind of camps.
