BY ED FELIEN Instead of burning Roman slums to make way for the Via del Corso to the Colosseum, Michael Schroeder, the planning “genius” of the Park Board, is flooding homes in South Minneapolis to make room for his vision of a swamp. If Nero could be credited with the…
BY ED FELIEN It’s a rematch from two years ago when Samuels came within two points of beating Omar. This year, Samuels says he wants to “end the divisive politics that has been so successful in dividing neighbors and even family members against one another.” He was the subject of…
BY ED FELIEN To the person pasting a QR code over our article “Never forget Hind Rajab” in our June edition: Please stop. Write to us. Let’s talk about it. Your QR code linked to a recapitulation of the horror of October 7. We have, in past issues, condemned that…
BY ED FELIEN “The road not taken,” a lecture by Michael A. Meeropol, will be Tuesday, July 23, 7:30 p.m. at the Women’s Club (410 Oak Grove St.). Admission is free. As an historian, and someone who has lived American history as the eldest son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,…
BY ED FELIEN The Israeli military has “slaughtered” (Noam Chomsky’s word) more than 35,000 Palestinians—most of them, women and children. From Wikipedia: In January 2024, three months into the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, much of the Strip was largely deserted and bombed out. The health care system in Gaza was collapsing…
BY ED FELIEN On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd of his supporters: “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. “We want to go back, and we want to get this right because we’re going to have…
BY ED FELIEN Sunday, April 14, was a beautiful day to be outside, but registration for the District 62 DFL convention at Washburn High began at 9 a.m., and the convention didn’t adjourn until after 7 p.m., so most of the delegates didn’t get much of a chance to enjoy…
BY ED FELIEN Doug Marvy died last month after a short and intense relationship with cancer as a result of a long-term blood disease. I first heard about Doug when I learned about the Milwaukee 14 burning draft records and serving prison terms for their opposition to the draft and the…
BY ED FELIEN I grew up Roman Catholic. St. Helena’s Church in South Minneapolis. I was a good Catholic, went to Mass, took Communion. It fell apart for me in my freshman year at the U. I started reading James Joyce, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Then…
BY ED FELIEN The 62nd District DFL endorsing convention will be Sunday, April 14, at Washburn High School. Registration begins at 9 a.m. and the convention will be called to order at 10 a.m. There are four excellent candidates seeking DFL endorsement: Bill Emory; Londel French; Ira Jourdain; and Anquam…
BY ED FELIEN Hodan Hassan was first elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2018, and she’s been re-elected ever since. She and Rep. Aisha Gomez have introduced a bill in this session of the Legislature to spend $10 million on construction of the Neighborhood Development Center on Lake…
BY ED FELIEN In her Dec. 9 article in The New Yorker, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” Masha Gessen makes the case that Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Israelis are acting like Nazis: “For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in…
BY ED FELIEN Hey, Jason, can we talk? I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. But you won’t answer my emails or return my phone calls. On Jan. 4, I sent you the eight-point proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza we had just published in the January edition of…
BY ED FELIEN Please go to your DFL Precinct Caucus on Feb. 27. It’s a matter of life or death for Palestinian children. More than 10,000 Palestinian children have been murdered by U.S. bombs dropped from Israeli planes or from U.S. missiles shot from Israeli bases. A caucus is a…
BY ED FELIEN “You gotta fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore!” “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of America.” Trump’s racist and nativist appeal is not new. It was the crusading ideology of the Know Nothing Party prior to the Civil War. From “Mitch and John” by…
Columns by Ed Felien