BY CAROL BECKER The City of Minneapolis is updating its Comprehensive Plan to change the zoning for single family homes to allow for up to four units of housing on a single house lot from Lowry Avenue North to 38th Street. Currently, higher density housing is zoned along transit corridors,…
BY JOHN KARRIGAN I have not written about birds for several months because there have been very few birds in the park lately. Hopefully there will be a big change soon—as always, we’ll have to wait and see. Despite the absence of small (or song-) birds, there is still activity…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE March was a dizzyingly busy month for Twin Cities progressives, and it’s going to get even more intense in April and May. Even though admittedly the DFL cannot always claim to be progressive, still a lot of progressive folk can be found there, especially in March…
Everyone needs an education I don’t know why the idea didn’t create a real stir around the country. To offer education classes to convicted criminals is such an absurd suggestion! But it really did happen in the 1920s, and the program worked. The prison was the Charlestown State Prison in…
BY TONY BOUZA That is, according to Hamlet, the question. As a naturalized citizen I feel it is something we must all ask ourselves. At the very least it becomes a sovereign exercise in introspection. The life unexamined … In a very complicated equation, it finally became clear to me…
BY JANICE F. BROOKS My name is Janice F. Brooks. That’s the name I was given at birth but my new name is: PARANOID SCHIZO INCAPABLE ERASED AND DEAD. Today’s topic is toxic shame. I was born normal. I had my first psychotic episode in 2006. I was incapable of…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Welcome to the new Southside Pride column Resistance Persistence. We will offer a summary of the past month’s progressive resistance activities across the Twin Cities and note upcoming actions in near future months. We welcome feedback, including corrections or suggestions. The Twin Cities political scene is…
BY ED FELIEN It happened in less than a minute. I got on the elevator at City Hall on the third floor to go down to the parking garage. Jack Baker got on with me. Jack had been president of the university student association, a very out gay. He’d just…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Merlins Rest 3601 E Lake St 612-216-2419 merlinsrest.com www.facebook.com/pages/Merlins-Rest/43488676171 Merlins Rest is a Longfellow mainstay and one of four area “pubs” that offer an interpretation of British and/or Irish food along with the beers and booze. Merlins Rest’s main claim to fame is its impossibly huge…
BY POLLY MANN What can be done with guns? In 2012 after the rampage shooting of 20 school children and six educators, in Newtown, Conn., Connecticut lawmakers passed some of the toughest gun measures in the country: 1) expanding an existing ban on assault weapons; 2) prohibiting the sale of…
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 COOPER Recently, I took my third trip to Paris. My first was when I was 17, to visit family friends and to take my first trip to Europe. A week into my trip I was scouted for a top model agency—Marilyn in Paris, one of the top five agencies…
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 JOHN CHARLES WILSON Metro Transit is planning something called the D Line for the Chicago Avenue corridor in South Minneapolis. The D will also serve Fremont Avenue on the north side and will follow the C Line, which is planned for Penn Avenue North. These streets are currently served…
