Good evening,
Supporters of the ballot initiative to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety are suing the city for appending an allegedly "misleading" explanatory note to the referendum on the ballot. [ Read more from Jon Collins]
The federal COVID-19 eviction moratorium has ended — but Minnesota's protections are still in place. An "off-ramp" negotiated this year between Democrats and Republicans is slowly winding down the eviction moratorium, starting with evictions for cause, then for nonpayment of rent for people not seeking rental assistance, down to a complete lifting of the restrictions next summer. [Read more from Tom Crann and Megan Burks]
At the federal level, progressives are furious at President Joe Biden and Congress for alloying the federal eviction moratorium to lapse. [Read more from The Associated Press]
Minnesota's big settlements from drug companies over the opioid crisis are likely to trigger a sunset clause in added fees imposed on drug companies in 2019. Those fees bring in about $20 million per year to fund treatment, opioid enforcement and more, but under a provision negotiated by the Republican-controlled Senate are only a temporary measure until lawsuit settlements arrive. [Read more from MinnPost's Peter Callaghan]
The Senate has finally unveiled a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, with big spending for roads, bridges, transit, water infrastructure and more. The Senate is already moving to debate and amend the package. Meanwhile, Democrats are also hoping to pass a bill with provisions Republicans wouldn't accept, using a loophole in the Senate rules to bypass a GOP filibuster. [Read more from The Associated Press]
Minnesota local governments spent $10 million on lobbying in 2020. That's a 3 percent increase over 2019 and an exception to a trend that non-budget years like 2020 involve less lobbying. [Read more from the Minnesota Reformer's Rilyn Eischens]
A fun historical look at Leonard Rosing, the late-19th century chair of the Minnesota Democratic Party who helped elect the state's first Democratic governor since before the Civil War. [ Read more from MinnPost's Frederick L. Johnson]
One common observation is that American politics — in the aggregate — is "thermostatic." That is, just like a thermostat measures the temperature in a house and then turns up the heat or AC in response, the American people have a tendency to react against whichever political party is in charge . That's why the president's political party tends to lose seats in midterm elections, for example. Below is a chart clearly illustrating that point. It shows the fluctuating share of the American public who say that "Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people" vs. those who say "Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals." The trend isn't perfect, but you can see in general more people endorse bigger government when Republicans are in office and endorse smaller government when Democrats are. | |
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Of course, the fact that public opinion tends to be thermostatic here doesn't mean it can't ever change durably. Most experts would tend to agree that Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped make Americans more supportive of big government, and that Ronald Reagan helped make them more supportive of smaller government. But in between those big structural changes you tend to have lots of cyclical changes.
Something completely different: Nothing profound today, just sharing the information with you that the partridge — the game bird known for perching in pear trees on the first day of Christmas — etymologically basically means "fart-bird." I'm not joking; it's thought to derive ultimately from the Greek word "perdesthai," meaning "to break wind," in reference to sound the bird's wings make in flight. [Read more from Mark Forsyth]
Listen: A whole lot of ways I could pivot here for a song of the day, but I'm gonna go with They Might Be Giants' "Birdhouse In Your Soul." [Watch] | |
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