By J. Patrick Coolican | Editor-in-chief
Good morning, Reformers,
Happy first day of fall.
See me live and in person Thursday evening at 6 p.m. Duluth Folk School/Dovetail Cafe, 1917 W. Superior Street in Duluth, where I’ll be on a panel sponsored by the League of Women Voters called “Trusted Elections: Stronger Together.”
We’ll have similar events in the lakes region Oct. 2-3; St. Paul Oct. 8; and Mankato Oct. 22. I’ll provide more details on those later.
Saturday, I’ll be with the national confab of the group “Drinking Liberally” at 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis, from 6-9.
The closely divided Minnesota Legislature is up for grabs. In the Senate, currently controlled by the Democrats 34-33, consider the eight members who are in misaligned districts — meaning the other party’s presidential candidate won the district in 2024.
DFL: Sens. Judy Seeberger, Aric Putnam, Grant Hauschild, Robert Kupec.
GOP: Sens. Jim Abeler, Karin Housley, Julia Coleman, plus the west metro seat held by Sen. Warren Limmer.
If you live in these districts, your mailbox is probably filling up every day. Send pics of any you think are particularly interesting.
Note a difference: Other than Putnam, who was elected in 2020, the Democrats are all running in their first reelection, whereas Abeler and Housley have long histories in their districts. Coleman was also elected in 2020.
The bleak national outlook for Republicans is less severe here thanks to DFL fatigue, which you can see in weak approval numbers for Gov. Tim Walz and even the state’s top vote-getter Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Today’s Reformer:
The Meta hyperscale data center in Rosemount. (Photo by Rob Levine/Minnesota Reformer)
By Brian Martucci
Brian caught up with a forum in Eden Prairie last week that featured Attorney General Keith Ellison and some some folks from labor and academia:
Most of them brought up the unsettling pace of advancement at the AI frontier. After a researcher with Claude developer Anthropic publicly resigned earlier this month with a warning that humans could soon lose control of self-improving AI if development isn’t throttled, top executives from Anthropic and OpenAI called for a mutually agreed-upon slowdown — though the industry remains split on the issue, and lawmakers are unlikely to take it up before the Nov. 3 election with the House’s hasty exit from Washington last week.
Kevin Pranis, business and marketing manager for the LIUNA trade union in Minnesota and North Dakota, said he hoped the stakes would help bring people together.
“We should be taking (it) seriously as a society, and really start focusing and maybe come together around something. … This is probably not a good one for partisan battles,” he said.
By Alex Brown
Individuals and industries may kill endangered animals in the course of logging projects, developments and other activities, it said — so long as the activity’s purpose isn’t killing species.
The memo issued by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik is the most drastic move yet in the Trump administration’s campaign to limit the scope of the Endangered Species Act.
Wildlife advocates and experts said the nation’s bedrock wildlife conservation law would offer few safeguards under the new federal guidelines.
By Ron Way
Downtown resident and longtime public and private sector mainstay Ron Way argues we keep hearing about downtown plans but aren’t seeing much:
“Our city’s core suffered through the pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and then the swarming chaos of federal ICE agents. Hybrid workers vacated downtown offices, few strolled the streets, retailers left.
There’s a conspicuous void in what’s long been a lively center of commerce and entertainment, and devalued buildings have put serious upward pressure on residential property taxes.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Somali leader Omar Jamal's dual role in sprawling fraud case | Star Tribune gift link
There is something we have to do right now about AI | Ezra Klein, New York Times gift link
The Catholic Church’s progressive revival | Harper’s
OH BY THE WAY
This piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones, about (maybe) regretting her choice to uphold her political principles and send her child to a failing, segregated public school has attracted a lot of comment.
The sheer act of writing it, and knowing the vituperative response that would follow, required some courage, and she should be applauded for that. It’s worth reading, which you can do for free with this gift link.
The piece raises some questions for me.
How is sending your kid to a failing, segregated school in keeping with the tradition of Civil Rights work you claim to be upholding? Hannah-Jones’ own reporting once showed that integration was the only thing that worked to close achievement gaps, when it was actually tried. So why this commitment to sending your child to a segregated school, and the hand-wringing about her daughter going to an integrated (albeit selective) high school?
She talks about New York City public school Black students forced to attend highly segregated schools, and then makes this subtle shift: “And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more.”
It’s not true in New York City, however, which spends more than $40,000 per pupil per year, which is double the median largest 100 school districts on a per-pupil basis.
Apropos: Here’s “Another Brick in the Wall” for your Monday, kids.
Have a great day all! JPC
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