Donor Anton Lazzaro denied bail in sex trafficking case
Good evening,
GOP donor Anton Lazzaro was denied bail on sex trafficking charges Tuesday after a long court hearing. Lazzaro's indictment on sex trafficking precipitated the fall of Minnesota Republican Party Chair Jennifer Carnahan, with whom he was close. [ Read more from Brian Bakst and Matt Sepic]
Brooklyn Park City Council member Lisa Jacobson narrowly won the suburb's mayoral race by just two votes, after a recount. Listen to Jacobson discuss her win and platform with MPR's Cathy Wurzer. [Listen]
A host of protests at the Minnesota Capitol, including against the Line 3 oil pipeline and another against mask mandates, has led police to close the Capitol to visitors and re-erect controversial security fencing around the building. [ Read more from the Pioneer Press' Dave Orrick]
So far no Republicans have announced candidacies for chair of the Minnesota Republican Party after Carnahan's resignation, though a number of prominent names are mulling bids. [Read more from the Minnesota Reformer's Ricardo Lopez]
A bipartisan group of Minnesota lawmakers are pushing to expand the use of biofuels as a way to reduce carbon emissions from motor fuel (as well as boost agriculture interests). [ Read more from MinnPost's Walker Orenstein]
The U.S. House approved the blueprint for a $3.5 trillion spending plan, funding a host of "human infrastructure" policies that are a top priority for many progressives. The party-line vote came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi smoothed over a divide between moderate and progressive factions in the House Democrats, with some moderates concerned about the measure's price tag and urging a focus on the $1 trillion physical infrastructure plan recently passed by the Senate. [ Read more from The Associated Press]
Dive deeper: This is just the first hurdle for the Democrats' $3.5 trillion spending bill. Ultimate leverage for this bill is going to lie with Senate moderates, since Democrats have a razor-thin 50-50 edge in the Senate and can't pass anything that Sen. Joe Manchin doesn't support. As political scientist Josh Huder explains in this thread, factions among the House Democrats know this and are primarily jockeying for the strongest position before the House (presumably) sends a bill to the Senate. [ Read more]
"The sooner we can finish the better," President Joe Biden said of the U.S. involvement with Afghanistan. Biden is pushing to complete an evacuation of U.S. forces and Afghan refugees from Kabul by an Aug. 31 deadline, despite some domestic and international pressure to extend that deadline. [Read more from NPR's Elena Moore and Domenico Montanaro]
Something completely different: The oft-overlooked 1920s saw truly epic transformations of American life — the popularization of the automobile, the radio and skyscrapers, revolutions in morals and consumer taste, a stock market boom and bust, presidential scandals and real estate bubbles, prohibition and gangsters. And a shockingly good summary of these sweeping changes was written all the way back in 1931, Frederick Lewis Allen's "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s," which I finished last week. With a lively historiographic voice and a generally even-handed perspective, Allen's takes on the 20s read as surprisingly modern (with the notable exception of his analyses of changes in 20s sexual morals). Chapter after chapter I kept being struck by relevant quotations, like when a young person wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1920 that, "The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us... They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties.'"
Listen: The past month's news about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan reminded me of a poem by Rudyard Kipling about a foreign power suffering a military disaster in Afghanistan 150 years ago. In "Ford O' Kabul River," Kipling laments (in dialect) the 1878 deaths of 46 British cavalrymen while attempting to cross the Kabul River in the Second Anglo-Afghan War:
Turn your 'orse from Kabul town —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
'Im an' 'arf my troop is down,
Down an' drownded by the ford.
(The third line there can be translated as, "Him and half my troop is down.")
Folk singer Peter Bellamy put the poem to music, and the group Blackbeard's Tea Party released a more modern version back in 2013. [Listen] | |
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