Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
America Has Turned Its Back on Duluth’s Famous Kaylee
As you’ll notice very soon if you haven’t already, we currently lack a fully functioning federal government, thanks to the Trump administration’s refusal to spend congressionally allocated funds and a docile GOP Congress offering no resistance. Programs have gone unfunded, grants have been revoked, and valuable federal workers have been cut loose. It’s infuriating. But now we’re taking this nonsense personally, because it’s affecting a member of the Racket family: occasional freelancer and frequent commenter Kaylee Matuszak, aka Duluth’s Famous Kaylee.
As recent RacketCast guest Jay Gabler reports for the Duluth News Tribune, Kaylee has worked at the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center as a park ranger, on a renewable term basis, for nearly four years. She’s become known as one of the museum’s biggest public cheerleaders, and in 2025 she was expecting to receive a permanent staff job, along with a pay raise. Instead she will lose her job next month; a new hiring freeze means her term can’t be renewed, and she can’t be brought on permanently.
The visitor center will be down to just two rangers as the popular museum’s peak season begins—the president of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce calls the museum and its adjourning park, which sees around a million visitors each year, the “No. 1 attraction north of the Twin Cities." Don’t expect any help from Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), who ostensibly represents the Duluth area but has dodged his constituents since Trump took office.
The Eyes No Longer Have It
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office is taking steps to make sure it’s admitted to trials correctly. "There are particular things that police and prosecutors can do to try to prevent a non-reliable identification,” Country Attorney Mary Moriarty (also a recent RacketCast guest) tells KSTP. “So, we have put that in a document and so it will provide guidance for our staff." That document is 10 pages, and is meant to help prevent miscarriages of justice like the wrongful conviction in 2004 of Marvin Haynes, who spent two decades in prison thanks to inaccurate eyewitness testimony before his sentence was finally vacated.
In dumber news, Moriarty is making the national tabloids again, as the “Woke DA” (to use the New York Post’s tag) has decided not to charge the guy recently nabbed for keying Teslas. (He’ll enter a diversion program instead.) The fascist goons on social media are raving about the affair, of course. In addition, MPD Chief Brian O’Hara is in a huff about Moriarty’s decision—or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say that O’Hara’s perpetual huff is currently about this decision. “Our investigators are always frustrated when the cases they poured their hearts into are declined,” O’Hara says in a statement. Keep in mind the guy was literally caught on camera here.
Local Woman Has Intriguing Connection to Dead Pope
We love a local angle here at Racket, and boy did we scratch our heads and Google frantically to find one after Pope Francis died Monday. And all we got were anodyne good wishes like “Pope Francis had 'love for humanity,' says Fargo bishop.” Well jeez, I sure hope so! Similar quotes from area clergy and politicians seemed equally unnewsworthy, even to us.
But the rule of local angles is, if you can’t find a strong one, find the weakest that you can. So kudos to Tom Crann at MPR for locating an extremely tenuous link between a Minnesotan and the dead pope. How is Carleton College student Aselya Gullickson connected to the man born Jorge Mario Bergoglio? Well, Gullickson is currently studying medieval history in Rome… and that’s where the pope lives! And on Easter Sunday Gullickson actually saw the pope in St. Peter’s Square.
The day after Easter, of course, the pope was dead. We do not mean to imply that Gullickson had any role in the pope’s death. Then again, she is a Lutheran.
Duck, Duck… Eagle?
There’s a duck on the DNR eagle cam! A mallard to be exactly, and yes, the DNR knows about it. The female was first spotted over a week ago, and a few days later they noticed eggs. “Mallards delay their incubation, so all of the eggs will hatch on the same day, roughly 28 days from now,” reads an explanation on the site. “That same day, the mother will lead them to water. Mallard chicks are resilient and should survive the drop to the ground.” That still doesn’t tell us why there’s a duck in the eagle’s nest, if this sort of thing happens often, whether or not the ducklings can safely reach ground, or how the eagles feel about it. We reached out to the DNR for more info but they presumably have more pressing matters to attend to.
