BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE New Secretary of Education At least we don’t have Betsy DeVos anymore! In March of this year the new Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, was appointed, and he couldn’t be any more of a refutation of DeVos if he had been designed by a computer that…
BY TONY BOUZA The Minneapolis Police Department budget document itself is a turgid piece of bureaucratic invention intended to obfuscate and mislead you into thinking your $200 million is being sensibly spent. It ain’t. The pages are replete with references to how sedulously they monitor and invest your dollars, how…
BY DEVIN HOGAN The CRUNCH was so massive it shook the earth. I was tooling around in the back yard when I heard squealing tires, followed by that visceral blow of what sounded like a car accident. I ran around to the front of the house, and, to my surprise,…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE More great cider! Last month The Dish 2.0 covered a couple of innovative cideries in Minneapolis, and we didn’t even mention Sociable Cider Werks! I apologize for that, and I am going to make up for it by telling you all the cool things Sociable has…
BY KAY SCHROVEN Low-income communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color in Minneapolis (and many cities) experience unequal health, wealth, employment and education, and also are often overburdened by environmental conditions such as traffic and stationary pollution sources, brownfield sites (real property that may be compromised by the presence or…
BY ED FELIEN Southside Pride sent the following to the two candidates running to represent the 6th Ward on the Minneapolis City Council, Abdirizak Bihi and the incumbent, Jamal Osman: “Southside Pride will be publishing a Guide for Voters in the 6th Ward in our upcoming Riverside edition coming out…
BY ELAINE KLAASSEN “The Times They Are A-changin’ ” is ever true. Sunday, Sept. 12, was a “bittersweet” morning, said Bethany’s Pastor Jeffrey Schulz at the final worship service of Seward neighborhood’s Bethany Lutheran Church. An ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) congregation at 25th and Franklin Avenues, it was…
BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE Selby Avenue’s hilly, bumpy history When Selby Avenue was first named on a map, in 1854, the site of the present Cathedral of Saint Paul (the fourth and final one to bear that name) was occupied by a 40-acre farm belonging to Jeremiah Selby. This land,…
BY ELINA KOLSTAD Rep. Barbara Lee is having a well-deserved moment as the sole congressperson to have voted in 2001 against the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which granted war powers generally held by Congress to the president of the United States. Twenty years of war has long…
The desperate need for prison reform Linda Franks of Baton Rouge, La., turned a room in her beauty salon into a meeting place for the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, exemplifying what is happening to prison reform all over the country. One example is Vanessa Fano’s brother who…
BY DEVIN HOGAN In 2005 the junior senator from Illinois – then in office for just six months – gave the commencement address at Knox College, a small liberal arts school in western Illinois. It was a speech whose themes would define his career. Knox and the city of Galesburg…
BY DORIS OVERBY Our neighborhood block club has been celebrating National Night Out (NNO) and other events together for nearly 30 years. What hasn’t changed Since our block club was established in the early 1990s, some important things haven’t changed. We know our neighbors by their first names. We know…
BY KATHRYN KELLY Lake Hiawatha is impaired with phosphorus. Much discussion has happened over the past few years about how to resolve this issue. What is the solution? There are several possible solutions: (1) implement natural wetlands (called constructed wetlands), (2) control the sources of excess phosphorus, and/or (3) phosphorus…
BY JOE HESLA AND ALICIA SMITH MURC (Minneapolis United for Rent Control) You may have noticed, there is a big conversation and fight for rent control going on in the Twin Cities. In St. Paul, renters and organizers collected nearly 10,000 signatures to put a tenant-centered rent control policy on…
BY JIM SPENSLEY The “MSP airport noise problem” isn’t a real problem as much as it is a sign the airport is at the center of life-threatening health and safety problems. An apt health analogy is that hearing airport noise is like seeing the light from a forest fire on…
