Category: Uncategorized

Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature have a complex relationship with the Data Practices Act, as shown by their actions over the last several weeks.

Being out of executive power, Republicans in the House and Senate take on the duty of checking the power of the current administration. But to carry out that function, elected Republicans have been using the state DPA to ask for information from agencies they suspect of acting illegally, or at least inefficiently.

But should the Legislature be subject to the same transparency tool? No, GOP leaders say.

View the complete August 8 article by Peter Callaghan on the MinnPost website here.

MINNESOTA — On Monday, August 12, 2019, at 10:00 AM, U.S. Reps. Angie Craig (CD2) and Dean Phillips (CD3) will kick off Transportation Week in Prior Lake by holding a roundtable on efforts to improve water quality with city and county elected officials and representatives from the Metropolitan Council. The roundtable will focus on how the federal government can respond to the local needs of communities in Minnesota.

Then, at 1:00 PM in Bloomington, Rep. Phillips and Rep. Craig will continue Transportation Week by hosting a listening session in Bloomington on surface transportation infrastructure with city and county elected officials and representatives from the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

Rep. Craig serves on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Water Resources Subcommittee where she pushes for bipartisan, common-sense investments and improvements to local infrastructure projects. Rep. Craig’s bill to improve local water quality, the Local Water Protection Act, passed out of the House earlier this year with overwhelming bipartisan support. Continue reading “MONDAY IN PRIOR LAKE AND BLOOMINGTON: Rep. Craig and Rep. Phillips to Host Roundtables Together in MN-02 and MN-03 on Water Quality, Surface Transportation”

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, major Wall Street financial institutions have handed a wealth of information on Russians linked to Donald Trump and members of his family to congressional committees.

The report states, there are “thousands of pages of documents related to Russians who may have had dealings with Mr. Trump, his family or his business,” according to sources.

“Some banks are also giving documents related to Mr. Trump’s business, the Trump Organization, to New York state investigators,” the report continues.

View the complete August 8 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Millions of Americans who did not like the president in 2016 now say they do.

Donald J. Trump doesn’t always seem like a candidate focused on expanding his base of support. He may have done so anyway.

The share of Americans who say they have a favorable view of him has increased significantly since the 2016 election.

And over the last few months, some of the highest-quality public opinion polls, though not all, showed the president’s job approval rating — a different measure from personal favorability — had inched up to essentially match the highest level of his term.

View the complete August 7 article by Nate Cohn on The New York Times website here.

EL PASO — President Trump visited Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso on Wednesday on a day intended as a show of compassion to cities scarred by a weekend of violence, but which quickly devolved into an occasion for anger-fueled broadsides against Democrats and the news media.

Mr. Trump’s schedule was meant to follow the traditional model of apolitical presidential visits with victims, law enforcement officials and hospital workers after calamities like the mass shootings that resulted in 31 deaths in Dayton and El Paso and that created a new sense of national crisis over assault weapons and the rise of white supremacist ideology.

That plan went awry even before Mr. Trump, who has acknowledged his discomfort with showing empathy in public, departed Washington. On Tuesday night, he tweeted that Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman from El Paso, should “be quiet.” As he prepared to leave the White House on Wednesday morning, he went after former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said in a speech that day that Mr. Trump had “fanned the flames of white supremacy.”

View the complete August 7 article by Michael Crowley, Maggie Haberman, Mitch Smith and Michael D. Shear on The New York Times website here.

This issue brief and accompanying interactive are part of a series on structural racism in the United States.

Authors’ note: CAP uses “Black” and “African American” interchangeably throughout many of our products. We chose to capitalize “Black” in order to reflect that we are discussing a group of people and to be consistent with the capitalization of “African American.”

Wealth—a household’s assets minus its debts—is a key measure of financial well-being. Unfortunately, the United States is home to stark and persistent racial disparities in household wealth. While various proposals exist with the aim of shrinking the racial wealth gap, estimates of their long-term effects are limited. A new simulation developed by the Center for American Progress (see below) demonstrates how separate proposals implemented today, in combination or in isolation, would reduce racial disparities in average wealth—total wealth divided by the number of households in the United States—by 2060. The simulation specifically tracks white and Black couples who are currently beginning their careers and starting to accumulate wealth and compares their total projected household wealth as they near retirement. Continue reading “Simulating How Progressive Proposals Affect the Racial Wealth Gap”

In Minnesota, soybean exports have sharply declined. Pork and other goods may soon halt.

China’s announcement that it will stop buying U.S. farm products is yet another setback for farmers already weary of a trade war that’s dragged on for more than a year.

“We need to find an end to this very soon, because it’s not sustainable for us much longer,” Darin Johnson, a corn and soybean farmer near Wells, Minn., said after the news Tuesday.

“China is a large customer of ours and has been in the past and we’ve worked very hard to keep their business. At this stage, we’ve lost a big portion of it and we honestly can’t afford to lose any more,” Johnson said.

View the complete August 6 article by Adam Belz on The Star Tribune website here.

Former President Obama criticized President Trump for ramping up racial tensions on Monday — a rare intervention in political debates from the 44th president.

Now, the question is how Trump will respond.

As of Tuesday evening, Trump had restrained himself, by his combative standards. His only response was a tweeting of comments made by Brian Kilmeade on “Fox & Friends” that suggested an unfair correlation was being drawn between Trump and mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that left 31 dead.

View the complete August 6 article by Niall Stanage on The Hill website here.

Some of President Trump’s re-election ads have repeated his inflammatory claims about an “invasion” on the southern border — language that is under scrutiny after the El Paso shooting.

View the complete August 5 article by Thomas Kaplan on The New York Times website here.

Two new mass shootings renew debate over firearm restrictions

Suburban and college-educated voters favor new gun limits

After two gruesome mass shootings in a 24-hour span, some Republicans are raising alarms that their opposition to new firearm limits is making the party toxic to the suburban women and college graduates who will shape the 2020 election.

“Republicans are headed for extinction in the suburbs if they don’t distance themselves from the NRA. The GOP needs to put forth solutions to help eradicate the gun violence epidemic,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and oil-and-gas executive who supports President Donald Trump.

Last year, Eberhart said, he was having lunch with Rick Scott when the then-Florida governor learned of the massacre unfolding in Parkland. It marked the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history, as a gunman used an AR-15-style rifle to kill 17 people. Eighteen months later, as the country reels from killing sprees in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Eberhart said it’s time to join Democrats and majorities of Americans who want to ban those types of guns.

View the complete August 6 article from Sahil Kapur on the Bloomberg News website here.