Gov. Tim Walz's plans to give his State of the State address on Sunday from his old classroom at Mankato West High School were derailed Wednesday when Walz announced he had been exposed to COVID-19. The governor tested negative for the disease but is going to quarantine anyway. Also exposed, all via an infected staff member, were Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm; Flanagan and Malcolm have had a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine but aren't yet outside of the post-vaccination waiting period to build up their immune system. Walz's quarantine, scheduled to last until March 25, which will delay the State of the State from its original March 21 date. [ Read more from Brian Bakst]
Senate Republicans rolled out their own budget proposal Tuesday, with no tax increases and some cuts to government spending. The GOP budget plan will compete with one from DFL Gov. Tim Walz , that includes new taxes on wealthy individuals and large corporations to pay for new spending on schools and other topics. Minnesota must pass a state budget this year, one that must pass muster with the Republican-controlled Senate, DFL-controlled House and Walz. Though Minnesota once faced a COVID-driven budget deficit, that's since been updated to a projected surplus. [Read more from the Associated Press]
Former President Donald Trump urged his supporters to get a COVID-19 vaccine in a Tuesday TV interview. The endorsement could be significant, because polls have shown Republicans with much higher levels of skepticism about the coronavirus vaccines. [Read more from NPR News' Alana Wise]
Dive deeper: An interesting focus group with a collection of vaccine-skeptical Republicans explored different messages to try to persuade them to get vaccinated. The Republicans were largely unswayed by pro-vaccine messages from GOP politicians like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, but found less political arguments by a former CDC director more persuasive. [Read more from the Washington Post's Dan Diamond]
It's a routine bureaucratic task: updating the definition of "metropolitan area" to account for population growth . Back in the 1950s, the minimum population for an area to be considered "metropolitan" was 50,000 people, and the Office of Management and Budget wants to update that to 100,000. But that could mean hundreds of smaller communities get downgraded to "micropolitan," with potential impacts on federal funding. And so now the politicians have gotten involved, with a bipartisan group of members of Congress writing a letter urging OMB to drop the reclassification. The list of communities on the cusp include Mankato, though Mankato's population growth since 2010 probably puts it just over the new 100,000 line. [ Read more from the Associated Press]
Is Minnesota's tax system "fair"? That's a complicated question, including subjective judgments about what "fairness" means, and big differences between different taxes. Minnesota's income tax, for example, hits rich people more than poor people; its sales tax has the opposite effect. [Read more from MinnPost's Peter Callaghan]
Something completely different: As a kid, cartoons and other media would sometimes include jokes about characters getting tarred and feathered. It didn't seem so funny when I got to be an adult and learned how liquid tar is so hot it can sear the skin. But last night I learned that even that might be wrong — in a fact-check of the old HBO "John Adams" miniseries, whose first episode showed a Loyalist screaming in agony as molten tar was poured over his naked body. It turns out that at least in 18th Century America, tarring and feathering involved pine tar, not modern petroleum tar or bitumen. Pine tar has a much lower melting point, and so wouldn't burn skin. Not that this particular form of mob justice was pleasant, mind you. The more you know! [Read more]
Listen: As long as we're talking about John Adams, let's go with a sequence from modern composer John Adams' 1987 opera Nixon in China: the catchy Chinese Communist curtain-raiser "The People Are The Heroes Now," and Nixon's aria "News Has a Kind of Mystery." For those of you who are neither hard-core opera fans nor hard-core players of the 2005 computer game Civilization IV (which featured Adams' music), you're in for a treat. [ Watch from the New York Metropolitan Opera]
