Good morning,
In a surprise move, Sen. Susan Kent resigned Thursday night as the Senate DFL leader, less than two years after the caucus unseated longtime leader Tom Bakk. Kent has been under fire for her handling of sexual harassment allegations by a Senate staffer, but she said she was stepping down — and retiring from the Senate altogether — to help care for her ailing mother. The move comes the same week after her Republican counterpart, Sen. Paul Gazelka, similarly stepped down as caucus leader. Read more from Brian Bakst.
It's unclear who DFL senators will choose as their new leader in a Sept. 13 election. Sen. Scott Dibble has confirmed he'll seek the job, and several others are rumored to be interested. Read more from the Minnesota Reformer's Ricardo Lopez.
A working group still doesn't have a plan to distribute $250 million in bonuses to pandemic front-line workers, despite a looming Monday deadline. Read more from Tim Pugmire.
"Nobody likes the idea of a fence" around the Minnesota Capitol, but state officials are still debating what security measures to put in place around the building after a chaotic two years. Read more from MinnPost's Peter Callaghan.
The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to allow a strict Texas anti-abortion law to take effect didn't come following formal oral arguments. Instead, it came via the court's so-called "shadow docket" — their decision of which emergency requests to grant pending more formal decisions. Read more from the Wall Street Journal's Brent Kendall.
In a provocative essay, demographer Lyman Stone proposes that the U.S. should eliminate one of its core voting qualifications: age. Stone argues that all Americans should be able to vote, even infants (whose votes would be cast on their behalf by their parents). This would be more just, he says, since the idea of limiting voting to those who can pass some threshold of knowledge or cognitive ability is disdained in other circumstances. It would also help reorient American politics toward future generations, by giving more weight to young families and comparatively less weight to the elderly. Read more from Lyman Stone in the New York Times.
As the urban-rural divide has become increasingly important in American politics, are regional divides falling by the wayside? Will Wilkinson argues that there has been a "Southernification of rural America" (along with a similar cultural and political homogenization of city-dwellers in different regions). Read more from Will Wilkinson.
Something completely different: Thursday saw the debut of the first trailer for the upcoming "Wheel of Time" series, based on a bestselling collection of epic fantasy novels by the same name. If you're into fantasy literature, you're probably already familiar with the books, which have an even larger scope of characters and fictional countries than George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" (though "The Wheel of Time" is decidedly PG-13 rather than R). If not, from my experience, you may have never heard of them — while they were huge bestsellers, they never got the mainstream critical recognition that flowed to Martin's celebrated books. I have no idea if the TV series will be any good — that will largely depend on the quality of the show's writing, which you can't tell from a teaser trailer — but the set design and casting on display here looks superb. It debuts in November. Watch the trailer.
Listen: It's not their most famous song — not even the most famous from its album — but my favorite Queen song is the sci-fi-themed "'39." Listen. | |
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