There's a decent amount of ongoing Minnesota political news, but only one development matters today: Gov. Tim Walz says the 2021 Minnesota State Fair "should be pretty close to a normal event." The 2020 Fair, of course, was cancelled due to the pandemic, the first such cancellation since 1946. But with COVID-19 vaccination increasingly widespread, Walz is optimistic that the 2021 Fair will happen. The final decision, however, is not Walz's, but rather in the hands of Fair officials. [ Read more from the Minnesota Reformer's Ricardo Lopez]
Above I said there was a decent amount of ongoing Minnesota political news, but that was a lie. (Lies for the sake of a good introduction fall into the same category as "Yes, that outfit looks good on you." It's fact, look it up.) It's actually a pretty quiet day!
In local politics, Minneapolis voters might vote this fall on a charter revision replacing the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety, after advocates submitted 20,000 signatures Friday. The move co-exists with a City Council-led plan to replace the MPD with an Office of Violence Prevention. [Read more from the Star Tribune's Susan Du and Liz Navratil]
In response to Republican critiques that a $1.6 billion dollar surplus means it's the wrong time to raise taxes, legislative Democrats are bringing up the 2019 legislative session, when Senate Republicans agreed to renew (but reduce) the state's expiring medical provider tax. Of course, renewing an expiring tax is not quite the same as raising existing taxes. [Read more from MinnPost's Peter Callaghan]
The big picture: Politicians on both sides of the aisle often argue that the time isn't right to (alternatively) raise taxes or cut spending. You can't raise taxes/cut spending in a recession, because that harms people who are already hurting. But you can't raise taxes/cut spending when there's a budget surplus, either, because it's wrong to hurt people when you can just spend the surplus. Lawmakers rarely offer up their thoughts on when would be the right time to raise taxes/cut spending. The answer, of course, is that most of these lawmakers actually have a general opposition to tax hikes/spending cuts, not a situational opposition. But situational opposition often seems like a stronger argument.
He worked as a state bureaucrat in New York before returning home to his native Somalia to widespread acclaim. But now Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed is facing a fierce backlash — including from the U.S. government — over his attempt to extend his term by another two years. [Read more from the New York Times' Declan Walsh and Abdi Latif Dahir] The new Census Bureau results show the American electorate keeps getting less and less white. But contrary to hopes on the left and fears on the right, this less-white electorate doesn't have much correlation with the share of the vote going to Democratic candidates vs. Republicans. [Read more from the Washington Post's Philip Bump]
Recent years have seen an emerging demographic political divide: residents of big cities, nonwhite Americans, and college-educated suburban whites increasingly vote for Democrats, while rural whites and non-college-educated suburban whites vote for Republicans. How much does this idea hold up? I took Census data and looked at the share of the population in this "Democratic coalition" vs. 2020 election results. The results: in most of the country, the more people who fall into one of these categories — nonwhite, city-dweller, college-educated suburbanites — the better Joe Biden did. The exception was in the northeastern United States, where Biden did equally well in states with many and few members of the "Democratic coalition."
Sen. Joe Manchin doesn't support a law granting statehood to Washington, D.C., a potentially fatal blow in the 50-50 Senate. Manchin said the 23rd Amendment — which grants the federal district three electoral votes — means D.C. statehood should be done by a constitutional amendment, not an ordinary process. Otherwise, the rump federal district that's not part of the new state might get there electoral votes for a handful of residents. Of course, a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority. [ Read more from the Washington Post's Meagan Flynn]
In his State of the Union response Wednesday, Republican Sen. Tim Scott said that "America is not a racist country" and criticized people he said were trying "to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present." On Friday, President Joe Biden responded, saying that, "I don't think America is racist, but I think the overhang from al of the Jim Crow, and before that slavery, have had a cost and we have to deal with it." [Read more from NPR's Brian Naylor]
More updates in the White House's ongoing pet drama: the First Family is about to adopt a cat. This poses some potential issues for the Bidens' rescue dog Major, who has had several incidents in which he's bitten White House staff. Major has been sent on visits to cat shelters in an attempt to acclimate him to felines. [Read more from NBC News' Dareh Gregorian]
Not a cat person: First Lady Jill Biden is apparently the driving force behind the new First Feline. When the president was asked if the cat was his idea, he replied tersely: "No."
Historical context: Socks, the White House cat of President Bill Clinton, was a bone fide celebrity. He was even the star of an SNES game. (The game was cancelled before its scheduled 1993 release, but not until after review copies were sent out.)
Something completely different: Take a deep dive into the creative and bizarre world of "fan edits," where fans produce their own versions of movies in an attempt to make them better ("Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Edit"), to restore the creator's original vision (Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain") or just weird experiments like changing a film's genre or presenting it out of order. [Watch from The Royal Ocean Film Society]
Listen: In honor of the as-yet-unnamed Biden cat, take a listen to singer Cindy Mangsen's "Rudy's Big Adventure," a mostly true story about, as the chorus goes, "the cat [who's] got his head in the disposal." [Listen]
