Central Minnesota Political

There is a primary election coming to Minnesota on Tuesday, August 11th. Voting officials are working to make voting as safe and simple as possible during COVID. But my advice is to get yoour mail in ballot as soon as possible and vote by mail. You can apply for a mail-in ballot from the Minnesota Secretary of State. You can do that on-line. If you are already a registered voter you won’t need a witness signature. I’ve got the link to the page to apply on-line below. Please vote. And please do it by mail. Voting by mail is efficient and safe.   https://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/other-ways-to-vote/vote-early-by-mail/ The following text is from the Secretary of States website linked above. I provide for your edification and elucidation. Read before you apply For your ballot to count, remember this important information:     Read the instructions that come with your ballot carefully.     Your signature envelope might have a box for a witness to comple

Who will pay: A Climate Change Story by Tim King The vast Chukchi Sea, between the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean, has been the friend and partner of the Inupiaq people for millennia. It was the source of their life and their culture. But, for the Inupiaq that fished and hunted in the area of the Kivalina and Wulik rivers, that began to come to an end at the beginning of the last century. ‘Kivalina is a small Unupiaq village in Northwest Arctic Alaska that sits on a barrier reef  island,” Colleen Swan, the Kivalina Tribal Administrator, told Christine Shearer for her 2011 book Kivalina: A Climate Change Story . “The village sits there because, in 1905, the Bureau of Indian Affairs came and built a school on the island, informing the people who lived in the geographic area that they had to bring their children to the school to be educated or face imprisonment. Historically the island had only been used for seasonal hunting and fishing. The Inupiaq people complied and

Dear MN350 Communications Committee and others. A week ago I suggested the MN350 pause it’s advertising on Facebook in response to the growing “Stop Hate for Profit” movement that was launched on June 17th. I’m happy to see that a discussion of that suggestion is on the agenda for the Communications Committee meeting on Wednesday, July 8th. I’d like to briefly explain why I’m asking MN350 to pause its Facebook advertising. Firstly, I do not believe that the size of MN350’s advertising budget is relevant. Many small companies and organizations have signed on to Stop Hate for Profit. You can see the list here  https://www.stophateforprofit.org/participating-businesses There are two reasons that Stop Hate for Profit has grown so quickly. The first is sort of pragmatic idealism. Big companies like Unilever and Verizon don’t want their ads paired with hateful, racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic messages from groups like QAnon. Yet that is exactly what’s been happening. And