It’s election week, and the Department of Justice plans to send 1,000 monitors to all 50 states, including Minnesota, to oversee the process. This is standard operating procedure for elections, and voters should know “Department of Justice monitors will not be allowed to observe from inside polling places. The counties said monitors will be subject to the same polling place access and distance requirements as other members of the public.”
Rep. Lisa Demuth, the GOP candidate for governor, has done her best while campaigning to avoid policy specifics, instead focusing on broad statements about combatting fraud. But during an appearance on The Jay Thomas Show on WDAY in Fargo, Demuth said that as governor she would end the universal school meals program passed under the Walz administration.
“When you have families that have seven-figure incomes receiving free lunch on the backs of hardworking lower to middle-class Minnesotans as taxpayers,” said Demuth in her appearance, “it doesn’t make sense.”
Thirteen thousand Minnesota taxpayers reported earnings of more than $1 million, based on 2024 figures reported by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journals. The program has provided over 450 million meals since 2023-24 to 820,000 K-12 students.
Turmoil has swirled around a proposed Google data center in Hermantown, just outside Duluth, for months now. A city council meeting scheduled for last Monday was postponed after protests, then rescheduled for Tuesday, then postponed again with restricted attendance. When the meeting happened on Friday night, the majority of speakers were critical of the plan for the data center, but the city council nevertheless voted to approve the project. The planned facility would use approximately 500 megawatts of power — equal to the electric power used by all the homes in the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth and Rochester. There are still three lawsuits challenging the data center’s environmental review to be reckoned with.
Administration officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and FBI Director Kash Patel traveled to St. Cloud last week to put a spotlight on the arrests of four Medicaid providers who intended to defraud the program of $41 million. Bessent also fielded a question about the government’s purchase of the Appleton prison for almost $500 million when the property had been offered to the state for $75 million last year.
“Yeah, I don’t know anything about that. What we are here to do is to prosecute criminal fraud. And any question like that that deflects away from it, I think is a waste of our time.”
Roadside vegetation can reduce air pollution from highways, but it’s devilishly hard to get plants to thrive next to highways. The University of Minnesota is teaming up with the Minnesota Department of Transportation to see if hardy species like the prairie willow could stand up to those difficult conditions and do the job of greening the state’s roadways.
And finally in your Minnesota news roundup: The end of October brings the ramp-up to the holiday season, so now is the time to think about what kind of holiday shows you might want to check out. For my money, really hard to go wrong with the Guthrie’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol.” Granted, it’s no “Muppet Christmas Carol,” but the Ghost of Christmas Future is worth the price of admission alone.
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