PrairiePundit

 The Federalist Wire: ... Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) received the lowest rating in the Cato Institute’s latest report card on governors’ fiscal management of taxes and spending. Walz, who is currently running as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 election, has been leading Minnesota since 2019. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that advocates for limited government intervention, fewer regulations, and lower taxes, recently released its biennial report, evaluating the fiscal policies of all 50 governors over the past two years. In this year’s report, Walz scored a 19 out of 100, the lowest rating in the nation, and was given an “F” grade. The next-lowest score went to Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY), who received a 29. “He has overseen substantial spending increases and pushed many tax hikes,” the report stated. “Minnesota’s general fund budget increased from $51.9 billion in the 2022–2023 biennium to $70.5 billion in the 2024–2025 biennium, a 36 percent i...

 Newsweek: Recent polls of Minnesota voters point to a close presidential race in the North Star State, as former President Donald Trump could improve on his 2020 showing. Republicans are hoping to flip Minnesota red for the first time in decades in November amid a close presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris . Polling for Democrats , which collapsed at the presidential level after President Joe Biden 's poor debate performance against Trump in June, mostly recovered after Harris became the nominee. But the race remains close, and the election is viewed as a toss-up by most election forecasters. In Minnesota, polls suggest Trump may be in a stronger position than he was four years ago, despite Harris picking the state's governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate. Recent polls suggest the race could be decided by only a few points, and polling averages suggest the race could be tighter than it was four years ago. ... Larry Jacobs, director of the Center f...

 The Federalist Wire: ... Gwen Walz, wife of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, recently disclosed that she kept the windows of the governor’s mansion open during the violent Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 in order to “smell the burning tires.” This bizarre admission sheds new light on the peculiar and troubling behavior of the Walz family during one of Minnesota’s darkest chapters. In an unearthed June 2020 interview with KTSP, Mrs. Walz recounted the chaos that engulfed Minneapolis and St. Paul in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The riots left over 1,500 businesses damaged, some beyond repair. ... Her husband facilitated the destruction by waiting five days to respond to it while his wife was taking in the smell.  Actually, they both appeared to be perverts.  Sending them to Washing with Kamala Harris looks like an attempt to destroy the whole country. See also: Walz Used COVID Relief Funds for Things That Had Nothing to Do With the Pandemic

 Michael Snyder: It turns out that we really do need the police, after all. Do you remember a few years ago when blue cities all over the nation wanted to defund the police? Needless to say, that didn’t work out too well. Wherever police budgets were slashed, crime rates shot up. Today, we are in the midst of a massive crime wave sweeping the country. In fact, it has gotten so bad that even our most liberal politicians are desperate to restore law and order. But that won’t be so easy because, after everything that transpired, blue cities are discovering that they are having difficulty finding enough warm bodies to serve in their crime-ridden communities. Just look at what is happening in Minneapolis.  Since the death of George Floyd, the number of officers serving in the MPD has fallen  by about 35 percent … The Minneapolis Police Department is experiencing historically low staffing shortages, with ranks down approximately 35% since the death of George Floyd in 2020...

  Biz Pac Review: Minn school board unanimously votes to pay non-white teachers more, segregate staff This looks like a violation of civil rights law.  Will the Biden DOJ act? 

  Daily Mail: Minnesota sends in the National Guard to save desperate nursing homes: Hundreds are given 'rapid-fire' training to fix care staffing crisis as Covid surges ...   The nursing home has been crippled by an exodus of burned-out employees, forcing administrators to shutdown entire wings and limit admissions.  ... North Ridge and other care homes caring for mainly Medicaid patients receive around $16 per hour - that's not much more than local fast food restaurants. Fatimate Massquoi, a nursing manager at North Ridge, said the pandemic had made the physical and mental demands of the job even harder. 'People don't know what it's like to hold the hand of someone dying alone because their family isn't allowed to be here,' she told the NYT. 'Sometimes after a patient dies, I have to go into the bathroom to cry so no one will see me because I have to stay tough.' ... The pandemic has made it a tougher job and also limited family access to elde...

  National Review: Men Suspected in St. Paul Shootout Have Long, Violent Rap Sheets, Were Barred from Possessing Guns ... At a press conference on Sunday, St. Paul’s Democratic mayor, Melvin Carter, said he was “shocked,” “appalled,” and “heartbroken” over the shootout, according to the paper. He also said, “we’re not used to things like this happening in our city,” and “we don’t accept things like this happening in our city.” However, mounting body counts in St. Paul indicate that “things like this” have been happening more and more regularly in the city. Sunday’s killing was St. Paul’s 32nd of the year, two shy of last year’s total of 34, which matched the all-time high previously set in 1992. The rap sheets of Brown and Hoffman also show how accepting of criminality Twin Cities leaders have become. Over the last 15 years, the two men have been arrested over and over again, only to be returned to the streets to reoffend, according to court records. ...   Minnesota's r...

 Power Line: Joe Biden’s manifest incompetence is, naturally, driving down his approval ratings. After all, some failings can’t be concealed forever, regardless of how compliant the press may be. Thus his current approval/disapproval numbers in the  Rasmussen survey  are 42%/56%, with a 47% plurality strongly disapproving. And his disastrous  Iowa numbers  made headlines last week. Now, blue Minnesotans are getting into the act: the  Star Tribune poll  finds Biden under water in the state at 47%/51%. Given Biden’s appalling job performance, that shouldn’t be surprising. But the poll reveals dramatic and, I think, surprising splits. Start with gender: Minnesota men overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden, by 28%/70%. Those numbers are shockingly bad. But someone needs to get the message to the state’s women, who support Biden by 64%/34%. That can only be explained by the assumption that a great many women are still happy that our president isn’t Donald Trump...

 Red States: Two Minnesota lawmakers, Rep. Mary Franson and Sen. Scott Jensen, are causing waves after making a bombshell claim that COVID deaths are being heavily inflated. This happened last week after a review of thousands of death certificates. This per the  Washington Examiner . State Rep. Mary Franson and state Sen. Scott Jensen released a video last week revealing that after reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state,  40% did not have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death . “I have other examples where COVID isn’t the underlying cause of death, where we have a fall. Another example is we have a freshwater drowning. We have dementia. We have a stroke and multiorgan failure,” Franson said in the video. She added that in one case, a person who was ejected from a car was “counted as a COVID death” because the virus was in his system. Franson said she and a team reviewed 2,800 “death certificate data points” and found that about 800 of them did not have...

 Andrea Widburg: Across America, the Wuhan virus has allowed Democrats to implement some of their long desired plans for "reforming" America in a properly Marxist mold.  One of the most hallowed plans, which academia promotes, is "de-incarceration" (i.e., ending prisons).  The other one, although it's kept hush-hush, is to end that pesky, morality-driven, hardworking, freedom-loving middle class.  Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz is working on both issues, with disastrous results for good people.  That's why this arrogant societal manipulation could soon prove to be the Democrats' downfall. Daniel Horowitz,  writing at TheBlaze , exposes what Walz is doing.  The human face of these horrible leftist policies is Larvita McFarquhar: Larvita McFarquhar is America embodied. An African-American single mom with four children to support, Larvita never asked for handouts. She opened Haven's Garden, in Lynd, Minnesota, a family-oriente...

  Ed Morrissey: “War Zone”: Investors Avoiding Minneapolis For Some Reason ...   It doesn’t just  look  like a war zone. Murders have gone up more than 50%, shootings have increased more than that, and most famously, carjackings have increased a whopping 537% year-on-year for November. With the police force down 20% in manpower since June, the Minneapolis PD hasn’t had enough presence on the street to put a dent in the impression of impunity that carjacking rings have felt. ... The looting in the summer was bad enough to scare off investors, especially those who wanted to open or maintain family-owned businesses in the Twin Cities. The ongoing explosion of violence is more than enough to have larger capital stakeholders looking for better places to put their money. Perhaps that vote-by-feet outcome will be enough to convince Twin Cities residents to start looking for new leadership. If it’s really “the economy, stupid,” then those voters have a lot of stupidity to f...

 Ed Morrissey: Go figure .  What insurer wouldn’t love to issue policies in cities where, ah … [checks notes] … rioters controlled the streets for months on end, separatists harassed and extorted business owners, and prosecutors refused to bring cases when malefactors did get arrested at all? Shorter ask: What insurer wants to go broke while others get woke? None, as it turns out in Portland: Commercial insurance premiums were rising even before the coronavirus, while coverage was decreasing. The pandemic exacerbated those trends. Premiums for commercial property and casualty insurance increased by an average of almost 11% in the second quarter of 2020, according to the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers. But brokers say insurance companies have become particularly wary about covering Portland businesses, especially those downtown, as ongoing protests have given the city a reputation for upheaval and led to a spike in vandalism and destruction, often committed by a smal...

 Steve Pomper: This past summer, the people of Minneapolis simultaneously saw its government implode and riots explode. All this violence and destruction was predictable — to lucid people.  It was also predictable that the "defund the police movement" would end in disaster for every city that tried it.  The Minneapolis City Council, which also led on the absurd idea by endorsing legislation not to just defund but to abolish their police department and replace it with a pretend police agency.  This, predictably, led to an increase in crime — especially violent crime. Not long after voting to defund the police, Minneapolis City Council members began hearing complaints from their constituents about rising crime in their districts.  Cars racing, property damage, assaults, and home-invasion robberies...who would have guessed that would happen?  As for the social workers and " violence interrupters " that were supposed to solve everything, a poor social work...

  Washington Post: Minneapolis violence surges as police officers leave department in droves Gunfire, robberies and murders have soared as the city grapples with two crises after George Floyd’s death: rising violence and fewer police officers on the streets. Defunding has been especially bad for minorities.  It is one of the really dangerous and bad ideas pushed by the BLM gang.  About the only good thing to come out of the movement is that it led to the defeat of several Democrats.   It is also leading to an exodus from cities that have backed the movement.

 Jerry Powlas: I came to Minneapolis in 1972,  lived in the western burbs until I married in 1991, and bought a house in a small but growing suburb northwest of town.  We have been very happy here.  We like the place and the people.  It was our intent to spend the rest of our days here. Then the Chicoms sent us a little biological warfare experiment.  If anybody else had done that, we would have called it an act of war.  The Dems and the Beltway swamp-dwellers had tried everything in the book and not in any book to put down the administration of the duly elected president.  Nothing worked until we got that little bio-gift from the Chicoms.   The "free press" ran with it.  They ramped up the fear, counted the cases, counted the deaths, counted everything and made the counts look as bad as they could.  If a  foreign country had done that, we would have considered it an act of...

 Washington Examiner: President Trump's reelection campaign slammed "free speech stifling dictates" in Minnesota that will limit attendance at a Friday evening rally, billing the move as a partisan shot by the state's Democratic leadership. "Trump will be speaking to the people assembled there, but he will also be speaking directly to every citizen who lives in one of these Democratic lockdown states," Trump 2020 communications director Tim Murtaugh told reporters on a call. "Now, the president wants everyone to be safe and take precautions, but he knows that we need to keep reopening America. Biden represents lockdown, along with the Democratic governors in the states," he added. The Trump campaign lashed out at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats, late Thursday over directives to restrict attendance at the Friday rally.   The notice came after Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden announced a socially ...

 PJ Media: If you believe the polls, Joe Biden has a commanding lead nationally and is beating Trump in the battleground states. For sure, he’s headed to an easy victory, right?   Trump supporters say, “Don’t believe the polls,” and pollsters are convinced that after their embarrassing failure in 2016 they’ve got it right this time. Okay, well, then why is Joe Biden  going to Minnesota on Friday ? A Republican hasn’t won the state since 1972, and yet, four days before the election, the Biden campaign, which has enough money on hand to work at expanding the map for Democrats, is coming to what should be safe territory for them. Some in the media are seeing sirens. But, polls show Biden ahead. It’s all in the bag for Biden, right? Trust the polls! Well, let’s consider the facts. In 2016,  the last two polls out of Minnesota  had Hillary Clinton up in Minnesota by a healthy margin. The  Star Tribune  poll had Hillary up 8 points, and the KSTP/SurveyUSA po...

 Power Line: ...   In a post earlier   this afternoon , Scott noted that Jason was within the margin of error in the most recent public polling. But I believe Scott was writing before this poll came out, just an hour ago: A few thoughts on those numbers: 1) In Minnesota, as across America generally, the tide is flowing in a Republican direction. If a gap remains, Jason has two weeks to close it. If he really is within a point or two, he likely will win. 2) I think the numbers in this poll, like others that have been taken in this race, are actually more positive than they appear. At this late date, large numbers of Minnesotans claim to be undecided–12% in this most recent poll. That strikes me as unlikely. The fact that an incumbent senator is only at 43% (and not much higher in other recent polls) means she is highly vulnerable. My guess is that most of those “undecideds” will vote for Jason Lewis. 3) Lewis has run, I think, a smart campaign. He has linked his fortunes t...

Breitbart: Project Veritas Releases Another Ilhan Omar Video Showing Cash for Votes Harvesting Scheme ... There is more at the link above.  What I find remarkable is that much of the mainstream media appears to be ignoring this scam.

Star-Tribune: Sold! Twin Cities homebuyers spur run on Duluth homes Home sales hit a 15-year high in Duluth this summer even as inventory hit a 15-year low. Liberal Democrats appear to be chasing off taxpayers with their "defund the cops" movement.  Unfortunately, the minority community is stuck with the liberals.