BY ED FELIEN He’s their useful idiot. They’ve been playing him for 30 years. In March of 1986, Dubinin, the Russian Ambassador to the U.N., with his daughter, went up to the Trump Tower to meet Trump. According to his daughter, in an article for Komsomolskaya Pravdanewspaper, he told Trump,…
BY ED FELIEN Dave Bicking has stopped the reappointment of Susan Segal as city attorney. Bicking has been a longtime opponent of the city attorney. He challenged her decision to allow the city to give a New Jersey racketeer hundreds of millions of dollars to build a sports stadium when…
BY ED FELIEN This year Valentine’s Day fell on the same day as Ash Wednesday. They always happen around the same time, right after Groundhog’s Day on Feb. 2. What a strange collection of holidays. What could they possibly have in common? Perhaps they’re all a riff on the ancient…
BY ED FELIEN You had a great Super Bowl party, and the Downtown Council honored you at a fancy luncheon. But you work for us, not Jimmy Fallon or Tom Brady, not the Downtown Business Council or the StarTribune. We hired you to run this City, and we expect progressive…
BY ED FELIEN It won’t happen fast. We don’t want it to happen fast. It’s an important educational experience. It should take time and it must be as public as possible, so nobody freaks out and thinks it’s a trick or unfair. They won’t bust him for collusion with the…
BY ED FELIEN This year Valentine’s Day fell on the same day as Ash Wednesday. They always happen around the same time, right after Groundhog’s Day on Feb. 2. What a strange collection of holidays. What could they possibly have in common? Perhaps they’re all a riff on the ancient…
BY ED FELIEN One of my more ambitious projects was to try to take over the electric company. It had all the romantic allure of Castro and Che sweeping down from the hills to take over a radio station and declare the Revolution. In Minnesota more than 146 municipalities owned…
ED FELIEN Tomorrow night, Feb. 13, from 7 to 9 p.m., at Pearl Park Recreation Center, the Park Board will be hosting a meeting to discuss its Lake Nokomis Shoreline Enhancements Project. According to the Park Board, “This project is focused on stabilizing erosion along portions of the shoreline, improving…
BY ED FELIEN At 6:30 p.m. tomorrow, Feb. 6, your neighborhood DFLers will gather to elect delegates to the Legislative District 62 Convention on March 10. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to endorse a candidate to serve our community in the Minnesota Legislature. Call the DFL for precinct locations: 651-293-1200…
BY ED FELIEN “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” –Oscar Wilde And the Minneapolis Police Department seems to want the worst of both of those worlds. Our police officers seem to kill our citizens with barbaric indifference, and the administration creates…
BY ED FELIEN From the forests and the prairies, From the great lakes of the Northland, From the land of the Ojibways, From the land of the Dacotahs, Ye who love the haunts of Nature, Love the sunshine of the meadow, Love the shadow of the forest, Love the wind…
BY ED FELIEN When Mark Dayton called it “The People’s Stadium,” he knew from reading Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. Ticket prices for the Super Bowl will probably reach $5,000. Not a price that a lot of lesser equal…
BY ED FELIEN “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” —Oscar Wilde And the Minneapolis Police Department seems to want the worst of both of those worlds. Our police officers seem to kill our citizens with barbaric indifference, and the administration creates…
BY ED FELIEN “Dear landlord Please don’t put a price on my soul” –Bob Dylan, 1967 In 1974 the vacancy rate for rental housing in Minneapolis was 3%. Rents had gone up 35% on the West Bank in the city-supported Cedar-Riverside Towers and 15% around Loring Park. Poor people were…
BY ED FELIEN What is this guy thinking? Raj Bunnag makes monsters come alive and leap off the page at you, and he uses pen and ink, black on white printmaking and wood block carvings to create a horror that seems lurking behind the public manners of everyday life. The…
