Central Minnesota Political

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On Tuesday Shelli-Kae Foster and I met with LP-GE high school principal Mr. Rud. We wanted to discuss the forming of a YES Team at the school. YES Teams, or Youth Eco Solutions Teams, are groups of high school or middle school students that use a science based approach to tackle a wide range of environmental problems and to educate themselves in the process. As Shelli-Kae, who is the YES Program Manager, told Mr. Rud, a YES Team can be embedded in a science class or it can be an extracurricular activity. Three of the twenty-six teams in Minnesota school are located in Alternative Learning Centers, according to Shelli-Kaye. The ALCs hands-on learning style is particularly well suited to the YES Team approach, Shelli-Kaye said. Here are descriptions of some of the YES! Team projects from nearby schools that were done last year: Melrose -  Sold LED light bulbs provided by their local utility and educated their community about energy savings. Used the money...

Nuclear Power Violates Climate Justice, Human Rights Environmental and Climate Justice Leaders Call Out Nuclear as False Solution  Call On COP24 to Refuse Ambition-Killing Demands of Nuclear Promoters VIDEO RECORDING:   https://unfccc-cop24.streamworld.de/webcast/enhancing-ambition-human-rights-and-climate-justic Katowice, Poland – NEWS ADVISORY –  Nuclear power makes climate change worse, and must not be promoted under the Paris global climate treaty, environmental and climate justice leaders with the Don’t Nuke the Climate Coalition said Wednesday, 12 December. COP24 has seen a marked escalation in the promotion of nuclear power by countries and corporate interests that are resisting urgent action on climate. Climate and environmental justice leaders from Africa, Asia, and North America called on climate negotiators to refuse calls for nuclear power and false solutions to climate change, which violate the climate justice and environmental integrity principles i...

The New Deal during the 1930s had a tremendous and long lasting impact that will continue well past its 100-year birthday. Many of the roads that we drive on today in Todd County were built by local people working for the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. The beautiful murals in the Long Prairie and Sauk Centre post offices were painted by artists employed by the New Deal arts project. Many of Minnesota’s state parks were started during the New Deal and many of the buildings and roads in use today at our nearby parks of Lake Carlos, Sibley and Itasca were built by WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers. There probably are other New Deal projects in our area that we use regularly but don’t recognize as having been built by the government’s New Deal programs. The New Deal not only provided employment for, and gave dignity to, America’s working people when there were few to no jobs available in the private sector of the economy, but it created useful and beautiful res...

Do you have a smart phone? It’s probably smarter then you think. According to a New York Times story published this week your phone is probably recording your where abouts hundreds or even thousands of times every day.  Maybe you don’t care. But a school teacher that the Times wrote about did care. “An app on the device (her phone) gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times,” the Times wrote about the school teacher. The Time bought the information on the school teacher from a company that gathers location information from phones and the apps on phones. At first the data was anonymous but the newspaper was easily able to connect a name to the data. The data showed the school teachers location was recorded on average once every twenty-one minutes. It tracke...

Chuck Prentiss, from MN350.org sent me this. Hello all -  NatGeo channel will premier the  new documentary about climate change "Paris to Pittsburgh"  on Wednesday evening December 12 at 8 pm central time.  I've seen only the  two minute trailer , but from write ups about the film it definitely seems like something we should urge friends and neighbors to see. So, please use FB, NextDoor, your church or coffee shop bulletin board or any other publicity channel you can access to encourage people to tune in to see this program.  For those who don't have access to Nat Geo channel, I'll send a note about other ways to see the program as soon as I have info about that.   'Paris to Pittsburgh' documentary puts Steel City in leading role in climate change efforts - video Don Hopey  12/4/18 Pittsburgh has a star turn in the new documentary film, “Paris to Pittsburgh,” about how communities and individuals are taking the lead in...

I ran this column in the Long Prairie Leader recently. After reading it a friend contacted me. She said her Mexican-American friends in Long Prairie had all been able to vote but all of them had been asked for their drivers licenses. She was not asked, she said. The dark skinned people were being treated differently then white skinned people, she said. She suggested that we have poll watchers at the next election. Good idea! These Mexican-Americans had current and up-to-date voter registrations. The Long Prairie judges discriminated against the because the law says that if your registration is up to date you do not have to show you i.d. Here's the language from the Minnesota Secretary of State. "If your voter registration is current and active, you do not need to bring identification. This means you were successfully registered at least 21 days before Election Day and you have not moved or changed names since then." Here's the link to that language: ...

Call Rep. Collin Peterson today (320 225-2165) and tell not to vote for border wall funding.