Free Republic

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota would be permitted to retain blood samples from newborn babies under a bill that passed the state House Thursday, potentially restoring a valuable research tool despite privacy concerns from some parents. The bill that passed 69-58 would let parents opt out of having their child’s sample kept. Lawmakers also added an amendment banning sale of the samples and related test results and data. The bill now moves to the Senate. Supporters say keeping the samples can save lives by helping researchers develop tests for new disorders. Opponents say they amount to giving ownership of...

LITTLE FALLS, Minn. (AP/WCCO) — The Little Falls, Minn. man who shot and killed two teenagers after they broke into his home has been found guilty of all four counts of premeditated murder. After roughly three hours of deliberation, the jury found 65-year-old Byron Smith guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder for the shooting deaths of 18-year-old Haile Kifer and 17-year-old Nick Brady.

The St. Paul teachers’ contract may have an unwanted side effect: Limiting school spots for the city’s integration effort. The class-size lim­its her­ald­ed as a key fac­et of the new St. Paul public schools teachers contract are com­pli­cat­ing ef­forts to boost en­roll­ment and blunt­ing an in­itia­tive de­signed to in­te­grate some of the district’s most popu­lar schools. That initiative, Re­flect­ing St. Paul, was launched this school year and seeks to open seats in 11 schools to stu­dents from neighborhoods with low­er in­comes, high­er per­cent­ages of non-Eng­lish-speak­ing families and low­er test scores. Under the program, the stu­dents, many from mi­nor­i­ty groups, are...

New restrictions on police use of cell phone tracking technology has won backing from the Minnesota Senate. Senators voted Tuesday to require a special tracking warrant when a device is used to find a person's location by their cell phone or other electronic devices. The bill says law enforcement must show probable cause of a crime. People being tracked must eventually be notified that their information was collected.

It’s getting tougher for Minnesotans to avoid the state’s taxes by spending part of the year somewhere else. Snowbirds and high earners are discovering that they must do more than buy a condo in the Sun Belt and register a vehicle there, after a court decision last year reinforced the state’s ability to use any of more than two dozen criteria to determine who is a Minnesota resident. “People refer to it as Hotel Minnesota,” said Matt Shea, a lawyer at Gray Plant Mooty. “You can come any time you like, but you can never leave.” To determine tax residency,...

During the last twenty years, roads and bridges have taken a back seat to commuter and light rail projects. This was never clearer than in a 2010 report by the Metropolitan Council titled, “Regional 2030 Transportation Policy Plan,” which virtually gives up on constructing any new vehicle lanes in the seven-county metropolitan area. Instead, the plan places heavy emphasis on rail projects. The population of the metropolitan area is about 3.3 million. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are only about 20 percent of that. In other words, most people live and work outside of the two cities. So why is there...

Minority residents in the Twin Cities are much more likely than white people of similar incomes to be rejected for a mortgage, whether they’re buying a home or refinancing. If the home sits in a diverse or mainly nonwhite neighborhood, the application is also more likely to get the boot. Those are the findings of a new study from the University of Minnesota Law School suggesting that mortgage redlining remains alive and well in the Twin Cities. The report suggests that while banks may have justifiably tightened up credit standards, they have swung so far that they are cutting off...

DULUTH — In a competition to create a cleaner-running, quieter snowmobile, the team from the University of Minnesota Duluth reduced friction and turned heads to dominate the competition when it came to style and functionality at the 2014 Society of Automotive Engineers Clean Snowmobile Challenge. The club walked away with the BASF Corporation Award for Innovation for the first time, as it competed against 13 to 16 schools from around the United States and Canada last month.

After nearly 12 hours of impassioned objections by Republicans, the DFL-controlled House sent an overhaul of Minnesota's bullying-prevention law to Gov. Mark Dayton early Wednesday morning. GOP lawmakers acknowledged from the start of the debate at 1 p.m. Tuesday that House DFLers had the votes to pass the Safe and Supportive Minnesota Schools Act, but they objected to the measure right up until the vote, shortly before 12:30 a.m. The bill prevailed on a 69-63 vote, mostly along party lines. The bill passed the Senate last week with a 36-31 vote with all Republicans and three DFLers voting against it....

ACTION ITEM BELOW!Some people in my native place, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, have in their bizzaro-world imaginations dreamed up a project to nominate the next Archbishop.Yes, the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform, all four of them, have been busy.To get an idea of what these folks are about, look at the links on their side bar: Council of the BaptizedProgressive Catholic VoiceCatholics for Marriage Equality MNAmerican Catholic CouncilCall to Action MNCall to Action USFutureChurchRoman Catholic WomenpriestsSpirit of St. Stephen’s Catholic Community I think you get the idea.For some real fun, scroll down a bit and read their...

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Minnesota's minimum wage would rise to $9.50 per hour within a few years and continue going up unless a governor's administration applied the brakes, according to terms of an agreement announced Monday. The outline described by leaders of the House and Senate resolves one of the biggest remaining standoffs in a session on course for an early adjournment. The wage legislation could move through both Democratic-led chambers this week; it was scheduled for a Senate vote on Wednesday. Gov. Mark Dayton said he would sign the bill.

Hope Baker is one determined young lady. She won't take no for an answer, even though it looks like her Don Quixote-type quest has run smack into a legislative windmill up at the state Capitol. Along with Jayne Jones, her Concordia University political science professor, and six like-minded classmates, the 22-year-old Alexandria native and law school aspirant wants to add impaired driving as a specified exclusion to a state law that grants lawmakers immunity from arrest in certain cases while the session is underway. But the push to clarify a centuries-old state Constitution provision has not gone over well with...

A couple walked into the Wabegon Bar, flummoxed. "Where the hell are we?" they asked. The bartender had heard it before. That's because the Wabegon is the only bar in Wisconsin you can't get to through Wisconsin. "Unless you canoe here," said regular Bill Talarico. The bar is just off a stretch of Minnesota 23 known at the Evergreen Memorial Scenic Drive, which stretches diagonally from Duluth to the far reaches of southwest Minnesota. Just outside of Duluth, though, after the road leaves down-on-its-heels Gary-New Duluth, it crosses the St. Louis River and passes through a spit of Wisconsin barely...

Caught -- and released to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. Rob Scott, the Crane Lake, Minn., angler who caught a potential tip-up world-record lake trout in February, pleaded guilty Friday in Fort Frances Provincial Offences Court to keeping one lake trout over his limit. Scott, 65, won't get to keep the fish. He paid a $400 fine plus court costs amounting to about $75, according to Kevin Elliott, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources enforcement supervisor in Fort Frances. Scott, who was represented by an Ontario attorney, did not contest the charges. He caught and kept the fish that unofficially...

Just when Mary was mastering not over-cooking (burning) steaks on our grill at home in Florida, duty called us back on the road, with our Conservative Campaign Committee team traveling to freezing Minnesota to defeat Al Franken. My charcoal-grill-master-in-training awesome wife hates cold weather. Nevertheless, she is willing to brave bone-chilling temperatures and snow to fire Franken! Not only is Franken responsible for causing pain and suffering to millions of Americans by providing the 60th vote that enacted ObamaCare, but Franken also threw Minnesotans under the Obama bus in the process. Unique to Minnesota, they already had a program (MinnesotaCare)...

ST. PAUL, Minn. — The troublesome fish currently known as Asian carp may get a new name in Minnesota over concern that the current one casts people from Asian cultures in a negative light. Proposals advancing in the Legislature would require the Department of Natural Resources to refer to the fish as "invasive carp," a reference to the threat the non-native fish pose to Mississippi River-area ecosystems. ...

House File 1944 and Senate File 1915, politically motivated measures aimed at suppressing political speech by membership organizations such as the NRA, continue to move quickly through the Minnesota legislature. These flawed and dangerous bills pose a grave risk to freedom of speech in Minnesota and overreach to impose excessive regulatory burdens on political interests. HF 1944 and SF 1915 would require organizations like the NRA, who engage in political speech, to disclose the names of many of their donors, including those who pay membership dues. This legislation would re-brand what is now recognized as free speech as “elections speech,”...

After a check of the last two years of disciplinary records at St. Paul Schools KSTP found dozens of records that show employees got off with relatively light punishments for serious violations. One employee, who worked on a bus route, missed 18 days of unexcused work, and only received a written reprimand. A teacher at a high school sent out dozens of Tweets with sexual references that students had access to and only received a one-day, unpaid suspension. Another employee showed up to school "under the influence of alcohol" and received a one-day, unpaid suspension. And yet another teacher called...

Since this bill isn’t going away — we don’t have the votes to kill it — we are working with our allies AND the bill’s authors to transform it into something fair and constitutional. We’ve come a long way, and there are still more changes to come. There’s another hearing Wednesday at 2:15 in Room 10 of the State Office Building, and if you can come to show your support for civil rights, we’d love to see you there. The long version: Last Thursday and today, the Minnesota Senate and House heard their separate versions of Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s “domestic...

The House version of Michael Bloomberg’s unconstitutional gun grab bill, HF3238, will be heard Tuesday morning in Rep. Paymar’s Public Safety committee. The bill strips accused individuals of fundamental Second Amendment and property rights without due process, and imposes, practically, a gun forfeiture on such accused individuals. In the Senate, bill author Ron Latz successfully urged his fellow DFLers on the committee to pass the bill, promising that the bill would be fixed after it was passed out of committee. This is, in the words of GOCRA co-founder and attorney David M. Gross, “backwards, upside-down, and inside out“: bills are...