Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama released a statement about the murder of Alex Pretti.
Will we hear from former President George W. Bush?
Archives for category: Minnesota
Station KARE in Minneapolis reported:
MINNEAPOLIS — The man shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis on Saturday has been identified as Alex Pretti.
The Associated Press reported Pretti’s parents confirmed his identity, and that he worked as an ICU nurse.
State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, we’ve also confirmed he worked for some time at US Dept of Veterans Affairs as a nurse.
Pretti was an American citizen.
Before Pretti’s killing, Governor Tim Walz activated the Minnesota National Guard to assist local police in maintaining safety.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that Pretti had criminal record. He had parking tickets. He was a licensed gun owner.
Just moments earlier, Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino said at a press conference that the man who was killed “wanted to do maximum damage to agents.”
Walz rejected that as a false narrative.
“Thank God we have video,” Walz said. “It’s nonsense people. It’s nonsense and it’s lies.”
When killed by 10 shots, Alex Pretti did not have a gun in his hand. An ICE officer removed his licensed gun, which he never drew.
The video is startling. Between 3-6 armed, masked ICE agents surround a man, wrestle him to the ground, throw punches at him while he seems to be completely immobilized.
Then shots ring out, and the detainee is dead.
The Department of Homeland Security says he was armed and dangerous. The ICE agents killed him while defending themselves.
The sheriff said he was 37 years old. He believes the victim was an American citizen.
Yesterday, Minnesota held a general strike to protest the military occupation of Minneapolis. There were no incidents of violence.
Some Minneapolis businesses have opened their doors to help people who need to get out of the tear gas or pepper spray.
State and local officials have demanded that the federal government pull ICE out of Minneapolis.
Trump has prepared 1,500 US military to join the 3,000 ICE agents currently in Minneapolis, to subdue protestors. .
Is this America or Germany in 1933?
I’m sick at heart about the targeted assassinations in Minnesota. As everyone surely knows by now, a gunman dressed as a police officer entered the home of Melissa Hortman, a top Democratic legislator, and murdered her and her husband Mark. The same gunman attempted to kill State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, who are hospitalized.
Both legislators were leaders of their party, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which functions as the Democratic Party. Both houses of the legislature are almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Both legislators championed humane, liberal policies.
Governor Tim Walz asked the people of the state not to attend “No Kings” demonstrations for fear that the gunman might attack them.
This is not normal. Sure, we have a history that includes lots of political violence, including the assassination of Presidents and Presidential candidates and outspoken activists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medger Evers, and Malcolm X.
Every time something like this happens, we say “never again,” but then it happens again.
Our politics are hyper partisan, polarized, and inflamed. Almost all gun limits have been stricken down by the zealots on the Supreme Court. We have a President who encourages violence, who failed to call out the national Guard on January 6, 2021, who called the perpetrators of violence against law officers that day “patriots,” and who pardoned all of them, including those who brutally assaulted law officers. Trump has also speculated about pardoning the militia members in Michigan who planned to kidnap and murder Governor Whitmer.
This is one of those days when I fear for the future of our democratic experiment. I can’t think of a silver lining.
Can you?
Trump’s poll ratings are dropping . The public doesn’t like what they see. #ChainsawElon is not popular. His glee at firing people turns most people off, except Trump’s faithful. Does Trump care about polls? We know he does. If his numbers continue to fall, some Republicans might find a spine.
Elon’s latest overreach caused a backlash. He sent an email to hundreds of thousands of federal workers, directing them to list five things they did last week or submit their resignations. Many Trump Cabinet members told their workers not to respond.
Robert Hubbell says that the public is turning sour on Musk’s DOGE tactics.
Robert Hubbell writes:
Trump and Musk have turned the corner—in a bad way. There is a great scene in the motion picture Broadcast News where Holly Hunter tells Albert Brooks that she has “crossed a line” because she is starting to “repel people I am trying to attract.”
At town hall meetings across the nation, Republican representatives are learning the hard way that Trump and Musk are not the anti-hero crusaders they imagine themselves to be. See NYTimes, Republicans Face Angry Voters at Town Halls, Hinting at Broader Backlash. (Behind a paywall; out of gift subscriptions; please post a shared link if you can.) Instead, Trump and Musk personify the “mean-boss” bullies who are born into privilege and spend their time offending and alienating people without a clue they are doing so.
Musk’s weekend email demanding that government workers prepare five “bullets” of their accomplishments in the prior week or face termination was about as “un-self-aware” as it gets. Most people in America hate Elon Musk so badly that he is accomplishing something that Trump’s eight-year run of criminality,
insurrection, and racism could not do: Musk is causing people to turn on Trump. Political gravity is real, and Elon Musk is a gravitational wave of karma that is finally pulling Trump back to political accountability.
I am surprised how often readers respond to my references to Trump’s negative poll numbers by saying, “Trump doesn’t care about polls.”
Assuming that’s true (and I don’t believe it is), that’s not my point. Trump has been able to force the GOP into mass capitulation because his favorability ratings remain stubbornly flat despite his crime sprees, civil findings of sexual abuse, revelations of extramarital relationships while married to the current First Lady, and open courting of white supremacists.
If Trump’s favorability declines, it means two things: (a) Trump is losing support among Independents (and Republicans lose) and (b) Republicans at the margin in Congress can take the risk of voting for the best interests of their constituents rather than the idiotic, self-destructive, revenge-driven agenda of Trump.
It matters that people are beginning to see Elon Musk as the evil billionaire hellbent on controlling the world who is portrayed as the instantly unlikable bad guy in every science fiction and spy-thriller movie. Musk is easy to hate. As hundreds of thousands of federal workers fear for their financial security, Musk wielded a bejeweled chainsaw on stage at the CPAC convention while MAGA acolytes laughed at the now-unemployed working-class Americans who are lying awake at night wondering how they will pay their mortgages.
It doesn’t get any crueler or more clueless than that. Read the room, Elon.
None of this suggests that Trump or Musk will stop their offensive, hateful abuse of the American people. But it does suggest that we can build a firewall in Congress to join the courts in slowing down Trump’s revenge tour. And it should certainly give Democrats confidence that they can craft winning messages and coalitions in 2026 and 2028.
Musk’s email was so unpopular it ran into resistance within Trumpworld. Heads of various federal agencies, in including the FBI, Department of Defense, State Department, intelligence community, and judiciary told employees to ignore the email. See generally, The Hill, Agencies push back on Musk email, including FBI, Pentagon, State, Intel.
Two of the largest unions representing federal workers also advised employees to ignore the email and sent a response to the Office of Personnel Management stating that the request was “plainly unlawful.”
By overstepping in such a mean and petty way, Musk may have sparked a backlash that overturning the Constitution could not achieve.
Doug Vose was a student in Tim Walz’s classroom many years ago. He says he votes Republican more often than Democratic. The one thing he feels strongly about is the character and authenticity of Mr. Walz.
He wrote in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
The idea that “all politics is local” has been more of a theory than a reality when it comes to presidential election cycles.
This idea, however, has taken on a new meaning for me and fellow former students of Tim Walz as news of his announcement as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate led national news cycles last week.
Of particular interest for me — and I imagine for others who’ve sat in his classrooms over the years — has been the GOP’s strategy to paint Walz as an extreme coastal liberal who, if given his way, would love to pull the country into communism.
(Chuckle.)
As a 30-something who’s voted for the other guys more often than Walz’s party, I might have a unique POV on presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign painting Walz this way.
We all remember where we were on Sept. 11, 2001. I happened to be in U.S. history class at Mankato West High School when Walz poked his head in.
“They’ve just hit the Pentagon,” he said, turning to the TV in the corner of the classroom.
“Pay attention,” he told us. “You’re watching history, and your generation is going to remember this day forever.”
And of course, we did.
In the days and weeks that followed, Walz helped students of all kinds cope with their feelings about that horrible day. Students, faculty and friends gravitated to Walz to crystalize their feelings of fear, anger, hostility and sadness. After all, Mr. Walz was an Army National Guard officer, understood the minutiae of global geopolitics, but more than anything — he was a good man.
Tim and Gwen Walz were our faculty advisers for the Mankato West High School newspaper that fall, and in the wake of 9/11 the students on staff quickly pivoted to a big presentation outlining the pros and cons of retaliation in the Middle East for our next edition. A microcosm of our nation in those few weeks, the classroom was full of strong and often divided feelings. What would we say, and how would we say it?
Walz jumped in as he almost always did with student groups — from newspaper to yearbook to the burgeoning Gay-Straight Alliance that we’ve heard so much about in recent days. He challenged students to develop an informed point of view, to consider the value of empathy and to prescribe a path forward for our generation.
These were tough topics for everyone, and “Mr. Walz” served as our conscience.
In those days before his political career launched, it was very difficult for us to ascertain his political leanings. We knew he served at home and abroad in the Army National Guard. We knew he was a gun owner and perhaps the best shot of anyone we knew. We also knew that he was tremendously passionate about equal rights for everyone.
The idea that he’s a coastal liberal was as laughable then as it is now.
Since Walz has been in the governor’s office here in Minnesota, he has continued to stick to his principled approach.
He has been quite fairly criticized for Minnesota’s continued high state income taxes relative to our neighbors. Following widespread riots and looting in 2020, crime became a central issue for Minnesotans entering the 2022 gubernatorial election.
True to his history, though, Walz did not apologize for his convictions or his policies. He told Minnesotans if you don’t like sub-2% unemployment rates, if you don’t want to support a woman’s right to choose, and if you don’t like the way he commanded the National Guard during those fraught days in 2020, go ahead and vote for the other guy.
Walz won by almost 8 percentage points.
So, don’t be fooled by the easy smile and cheesy Dad jokes. When the chips are down and things get hard, this guy sticks to his convictions.
He doesn’t move his support to whichever group yells his name the loudest. He doesn’t take the politically easy route. He actually believes the things that are coming out of his mouth, whether you agree with him or not. When he’s not on TV talking, he is working to make his policies reality.
Walz digs in.
It’s the reason why for years students sought his counsel about hard things when he was a teacher at Mankato West; it’s why he was able to turn the First Congressional District blue for a decade, and it’s why he ran successfully to the right of a DFL-endorsed candidate to win the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018.
Memo to the Trump 2024 team from a dormant Republican and a Mr. Walz student:
Make the campaign about the Trump tax policy. Make it about China. Make it about the border.
Make it about anything other than leadership, decency and competency.
Because if you don’t, and this becomes a character debate, you’re way out of your league.
Doug Vose is a 2004 graduate of Mankato West High School and has been a software sales executive in the private sector for more than 15 years. He lives in Eden Prairie.
Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.
The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.
The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.
They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.
This time, it was a “hard no.”
He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.
Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.
During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.
Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.
As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.
Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…
And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…
In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.
After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.
“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.
The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.
Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…
In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.
“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”
Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.
He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.
Ten days ago, a friend suggested that Tim Walz would be Kamala Harris’s best choice for her VP. My response was: “Tim who?” I looked him up on Google, and I was intrigued. He is Governor of Minnesota. He grew up in Nebraska. He taught public school for 20 years. He believes in community schools. He believes in public schools.
Then I saw Jen Psaki interview him on MSNBC, and I became a believer. Without being asked about education, he volunteered that vouchers were a terrible idea, and he was well informed about why. He had read the research.
I was pleased to see that Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect agrees with me.
He wrote:
With Kamala Harris abruptly taking Joe Biden’s place as the next Democratic nominee for president, speculation about who will be her running mate has naturally exploded. Some reporting has the choice being narrowed down to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and perhaps Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
I am neither capable of nor interested in trying to predict which one she will pick. However, I do believe there is a better choice that fits all the apparent criteria: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
First, the other contenders have some significant downsides. As David Klion writes at The New Republic, Shapiro is one of the worst Democrats in the country on the Gaza war. He supports legal prohibitions on the BDS movement, joined in the cynical Republican dogpile on University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, repeatedly implied that all the protesters against Israel’s war are antisemites, and in general supported Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychotic violence for the last nine months. To be fair, Shapiro had also said that Netanyahu is “one of the worst leaders of all time” who is leading Israel in the “wrong direction.”
Biden’s support for Israel’s war has badly split the Democratic Party, and alienated key youth and minority constituencies. It is vital for Harris to at least paper over this crack (and, one hopes, actually force an end to the war should she become president). She seems to realize this, and sources close to her are leaking stories to reporters about how she would likely take a different tack on Gaza.
Picking Shapiro would immediately reopen that wound in the party coalition. Many activists would immediately start attacking her vociferously, deflating the rare moment of party goodwill and optimism that has built up.
Sen. Kelly is not so incendiary as Shapiro, but he has one massive black mark on his record: Back in 2021, he refused to support the PRO Act, a sweeping overhaul of labor law that would make it easier to organize and add some actual punishments for companies that break the law. One of the reasons so many employers routinely infringe on their workers’ rights is that when they do, the typical punishments are tiny fines or being forced to put up a sign. Even Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) supported the PRO Act. Picking Kelly would also mean Dems have to win a special election in 2026 to keep his Senate seat, while he would otherwise not be up until 2028.
Unions are not only a core Democratic Party constituency and source of campaign cash and precinct walkers, as Hamilton Nolan argues in his recent book The Hammer, they are absolutely vital for rebuilding a source of institutional ballast in the party that isn’t a handful of ultra-rich donors, and, indeed, for protecting American democracy over the long term. Kelly reversed course and endorsed the PRO Act on Wednesday, but this belated conversion makes his sincerity somewhat questionable.
Buttigieg is great on TV, but he has also never held even statewide office, and his tenure at the Department of Transportation has been marred by severe problems in both the airline industry and at Boeing. That’s not really his fault, but also probably not something Americans want to be reminded of.
Of the named contenders, Roy Cooper is perhaps best on paper. He’s a white guy from a swing state, he’s term-limited out, he’s been elected repeatedly in this otherwise Republican state that some think could swing Democratic this year with him on the ticket, and best of all, he’s got an excellent surname. However, he’s also a bit old at 67, and doesn’t have a very inspiring record—mainly he has been trampled underfoot by feral Republicans in the state legislature, who have all but abolished democracy at the legislative level with extreme gerrymandering. That’s not his fault, but it also doesn’t give him much of a record to boast of.
So let’s consider Walz. Demographically, he’s just what the party apparently thinks it needs: a straight, white, cis man from the Midwest. He’ll also be term-limited out in 2026. Though he doesn’t exactly look it, he’s also on the younger side—almost exactly the same age as Harris, as it happens. He’s also quite a good attack dog on TV.
More importantly, he’s had the best record of any recent Democratic governor. (Some might argue for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but she’s taken herself out of the veepstakes.) By way of comparison, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, blessed with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, recently canceled a congestion pricing scheme that had been in the works for decades, flushing perhaps a billion dollars down the toilet in the process. Meanwhile, Walz, with just a one-vote majority in the state Senate, has signed a legitimately sweeping set of reforms. As I detailed in a Prospect piece some time ago, these include a major expansion of labor rights (including a first-in-the-nation ban on employers compelling employees to attend anti-union meetings), a new paid family and medical leave system, protections for abortion and LGBT rights, legal recreational marijuana, restored voting rights to felons, universal free school breakfast and lunch, and more.
That reform package isn’t some kind of radical craziness far out of the Democratic mainstream. It amounts, more or less, to a state-level version of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Picking Walz would signal that Harris is serious about her plans to take another big policy swing, should Democrats win control of Congress, and likely inspire rank-and-file Dems to work even harder on her behalf.
The choice of running mate is often discussed in terms of campaign strategy—how the candidate might pander to certain regions or demographics, how the media might react, and so on. But as we are seeing right now, there is also the possibility it will be a very consequential decision. Just as Harris is taking Biden’s place in the campaign, her vice president might have to take over in turn. Tim Walz has shown he has what it takes.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about an outrageous financial scam in Wisconsin and Minnesota that was inflicted on members of the Hmong community.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges against a Hmong woman who had made extravagant promises to investors, then defrauded them.
On April 13, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against Wisconsin resident, Kay Yang, for “conduct[ing] a fraudulent investment scheme targeting members of the Hmong-American communities in Wisconsin and Minnesota.”
Schneider goes into the details, and she points out that the same financial advisor counseled a Hmong charter school to invest the school’s endowment in a risky fund. Unfortunately, they took her advice, although the school leaders violated Minnesota law by making a risky investment with the school’s funds.
There is another twist in Yang’s story, one that the April 13, 2022, Twin Cities Pioneer Press captures as it alludes to Yang as “having ties to a St. Paul (MN) charter school board”:
Kay Yang has been described in a separate legal matter as a “close personal friend” of Christianna Hang, founder and former superintendent of Hmong College Prep Academy, one of Minnesota’s largest charter schools.
Hang was looking to invest some of the school’s money in May 2019 when Yang referred her to Woodstock Capital LLC, a hedge fund based in London.
That fall, Hang wired Woodstock $5 million in school funds, in violation of state statutes that limit what schools may invest in. Eighteen months later, just $700,000 remained.
The school now is suing Woodstock, alleging its investment either was stolen or badly mismanaged.
Woodstock called the loss a matter of bad timing, saying the coronavirus pandemic made it “possibly the worst time in recent world history for investments such as those made by hedge funds in general.”
Hang and her husband, chief operating officer Pao Yang, resigned from the school at the end of last year with a combined $350,000 in separation payments.
No criminal or civil enforcement charges have been filed in the charter school matter.
The school gambled away its $5 million
Wow.
Through her foolishness, Hang lost $4.3Mof the $5M of HCPA’s money.
Rob Levine, charter skeptic, photographer, and charter critic, recently discovered that the Hmong College Prep Academy had hired one of its loudest critics.
He writes:
BY NOW MOST people who follow education in Minnesota are aware of the Hmong College Prep Academy’s illegal $5 million investment in a hedge fund that ended up losing $4.3 million, costing the power couple who run the segregated St. Paul-based charter school their jobs and casting doubt on the long term viability of the institution.
As the messy saga unfolded, an opaque school finance and consulting outfit called The Anton Group weighed in on the scandal with two blog posts, the first in June of 2021, and the second in late September. In a nutshell, Anton’s assessment was: This is fraud! The following month, something weird happened: Despite Anton’s very public criticisms of HCPA, the company landed a $100k contract to clean up the mess. A month after that, Anton’s Finance Officer became the Chief Financial Officer of the school itself. And sometime between that second blog post in September and the hiring of Anton in October those two blog posts were deleted.
As Levine puts it, “Charter school decided to feed the hand that bit it.”
Please note that Rob Levine asked me to correct the way I wrote the last line.
Diane Ravitch's blog 