What Have Right-Wing Loons Got Against Actual Loons?

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

Think Tank Cranks Annoyed

The preservation of the loon’s natural habitat. A state effort to diversify the staff of various departments. A small state grant for a Dungeons & Dragons podcast. A new Minnesota state flag. If these are the four things you’re most angry about as 2024 ends, you either a) truly lead a charmed life or b) work at the Center of the American Experiment. (I want to say “perhaps both?” but I find it hard to call life as John Hinderaker or Katherine Kersten “charmed.”) 

The Golden Valley right-wingers have announced nominees for their annual “Golden Turkey” awards, raising their muskets to take down the biggest in-state boondoggles, and all I can say is that if these are their four finalists… the government’s honestly doing a pretty good job? 

Take the National Loon Center they’re all worked up about: AE harps on the center’s $18.5 million funding goal without mentioning that only a fraction of that is coming from tax money. As for the state diversity programs, “DEI” is no longer even a dog whistle—everyone knows exactly what people who chant those initials meaningfully are really complaining about. Maybe a D&D podcast shouldn’t have gotten a $10K state arts grant, but then again maybe it should have! Arts funding is a general good, and how is this project less worthy than other arts-related broadcasting? And that flag thing is serious dead-ender nonsense; anyone clinging to that hideous rag of old is just a clown. 

Anyway, as with the upcoming Musk/Ramaswamy “government efficiency” panel, AE’s goal here isn’t to establish good government, but to wave your arms around, shout “Isn’t this craaaaaazy?,” and vilify government spending in general. But AE’s usually better at serving up red meat for reactionaries. This year all they’re serving is a plate of cold turkey leftovers.

Frey-Friendly PAC: Mayor Robin Wonsley Wants to Raise Your Taxes

With local elections nearly a year off, you might think the aggressively centrist fact-spinners at the All of Mpls PAC could sit back and relax till after the holidays. Instead, they were all up in your crankiest neighbors’ inboxes today, depicting Minneapolis City Council Member Robin Wonsley as the leader of a loony progressive fringe determined to raise your taxes, transform Minneapolis into “Detroit or Saint Louis,” and probably take your parking spot. 

Several local politics noticers on social media spotlighted a new email from the org with the subject line “Tax hikes courtesy of the DSA,” which accused a Wonsley-led cadre of “exploring a new Minneapolis income tax to make up for their budget deficits.”

As Josh Martin helpfully points out, this is not how things work. Not even a little. Wonsley is not the president or vice president of the council. It’s the Board of Estimate and Taxation that sets a maximum tax levy. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey has proposed a budget. Council can cut the budget or shift items around before offering it back for mayoral approval, but cannot increase it. Frey is already looking into the “alternate revenue streams” that strikes such fear into the wallets of his All of Mpls cronies. 

But All of Mpls doesn't want you to know how city government really operates. The org is clearly out to create an atmosphere where anything bad that happens between now and next November can be chalked up to "socialist mismanagement" or whatever. The end goal? Nextdoor posts that say things like “That new Labor Standards Board raised my property taxes.”  

Have We Suggested Breaking Up UnitedHealth Recently?

If there’s one thing UnitedHealth Group is good at, it’s making money—the Minnetonka-based insurer announced $6 billion in earnings last quarter. But one of the ways UnitedHealth makes money, as this story from Annie Waldman of ProPublica reminds us, is by refusing to reimburse customers and providers for covered healthcare costs. One of the company’s big targets? Mental health coverage. According to Waldman, federal regulators in 2016 discovered that “the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.” 

When several states acted to stop this, UnitedHealth quite simply stopped using the algorithm there, while continuing to employ it elsewhere. In the words of Lauren Finke of mental health advocacy group the Kennedy Forum: “It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole all the time for regulators, because they can just move their scrutinized practices to other products in different locations.” 

There’s no way a Trump DOJ will ever break up UnitedHealth, and the department may even withdraw currently filed antitrust suits seeking to prevent the company’s planned mergers. As for the rest of us, we’re gonna need all the therapy we can get.

Here Comes a… Bar Owner?

Have you always dreamed of owning a piece of drunken Minneapolis history? Well, Louis Krauss at the Strib reports that the CC Club just might—maybe, possibly—be back on the market soon. Randy Segal and Steve Shapiro bought the storied south Minneapolis watering hole at 26th & Lyndale a decade ago, but both owners are nearing 75 and contemplating something called “retirement.” (I just looked that term up online—supposedly some people make so much money they can stop working when they’re old? That doesn’t sound real.) 

That said, Segal doesn’t seem in a hurry—he’s waiting for the right deal. He told the Strib he’d offer collective ownership to employees before shopping the dive elsewhere. He also shoots down complaints about the neighborhood. Krauss notes that major construction begins on Lyndale next year, adding that “some local social media users have speculated it could drive beloved local businesses in that part of Uptown [Racket note: Hm, but is that Uptown?] out of business.” “None of that really enters our mind,” Segal told Krauss. “Everybody, or at least a lot of people, walk here on foot.” Having been to the CC on a weekend night, all I can add to that is, god, I sure hope so.