Free Republic

Earlier this week, House and Senate conferees agreed to final language for the Women’s Economic Security Act (WESA). While most of the attention has focused on the bill’s family and sick leave provisions, one particularly bad policy provision has attracted little attention. Specifically, WESA lays the groundwork for a “state-administered retirement savings plan” for employees in the private sector. Yes, this would essentially be a government-run retirement plan controlled by the State Board of Investment. The ramifications of such a plan could be devastating for private sector employees as well as taxpayers who would likely be on the hook for...

Minnesota on Wednesday passed the nation’s first law requiring smartphones to have the ability to be remotely disabled. The law requires smartphone manufacturers to introduce so-called “kill switches” in devices to allow users to make lost or stolen phones unusable. In so doing, the state hopes to remove the incentive for such robberies, which are on the rise. A Consumer Reports survey released last month found that 3.1 million Americans had cellphones stolen in 2013, nearly double the 1.6 million thefts reported the previous year. Some of those robberies can become violent, as was the case for a Minneapolis mayoral candidate who received nine...

One of the roughest Mexican drug cartels has allegedly been hiring a ruthless American gang to kidnap and torture those who cross the cartel inside the United States. The Sinaloa cartel reportedly hired MS-13 gang members to fly from Los Angeles, Calif., to St. Paul, Minn., to find the people who stole 30 pounds of meth and $200,000 from a stash house. Police say three MS-13 gang members kidnapped two teens who they believed stole the meth and cash. Then they tied them up and tortured them, even cutting one victim’s pinky with a scissor. The teens were eventually let...

Three enforcers hired by Mexico’s biggest drug cartel flew from Los Angeles to Minnesota last month, kidnapped two local teenagers, and then tortured them for hours at a house in St. Paul in an effort to recover stolen drugs, according to court documents reviewed by the Star Tribune. Acting under orders from the Sinaloa cartel, the three kidnappers were trying to determine who had stolen 30 pounds of methamphetamine and $200,000 from a stash house on Palace Avenue in St. Paul. Before the episode was over, they had issued death threats against the Minnesota pair and their families, demanding that...

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Apple fans in Minnesota will soon be able to find a favorite apple in grocery stores year-round. The Honeycrisp apple has come a long way from its humble beginnings here in Minnesota. When the apple was first introduced in 1991, University of Minnesota researchers only produced a three-week supply. Now, Honeycrisp is the No. 1 desired apple in America. “When you find a winner, you stick with it,” scientist and Honeycrisp breeder David Bedford said. Spring usually means Honeycrisp apples fans must do without their favorite fruit. But Bedford says researchers found a way to have the...

House Dem: Climate change bigger health threat than AIDS, malaria By Andrew Restuccia - 04/06/11 12:25 PM ET Just hours before a vote Wednesday on a GOP plan to block Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) called climate change a bigger public health threat than AIDS, malaria and pandemic flu. Capps and several other liberal Democrats spoke out Wednesday morning in opposition to the legislation, authored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.). The lawmakers, who were joined by officials from the American Lung Association and the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Upton...

Josh Hartnett is 35 now and mostly acts in indie films, but he was a hot commodity back in the early 2000s, and almost every big picture wanted him in the lead. "Spider-Man was something we talked about. Batman was another one. But I somehow knew those roles had potential to define me, and I didn't want that," he told Details magazine of passing on the iconic characters. He also passed on 2006's "Superman Returns." "I didn't want to be labeled as Superman for the rest of my career. I was maybe 22, but I saw the danger." Hartnett admits...

Iowa City police seized $48,000 in cash from a Minnesota couple during a traffic stop in March. They want it back – but that’s been proving difficult, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reports. The publication says Kearnice C. Overton, of St. Paul, was pulled over March 16 for speeding. Overton’s kids were in the car at the time. Police say a K-9 signal gave them the authority to search the car, the Press-Citizen reports. So they did, found the $48,000 in cash, and seized it. Overton says he got the money from his wife, Tiffani D.S. Barber, to buy some property...

Minnesota’s Senate race isn’t one of the best chances for Republicans to pick up a seat, but a new poll shows that it’s a possibility. A new Suffolk University poll finds Democratic incumbent Al Franken leading all four, relatively unknown Republican candidates, but he fails to pick up majority support from voters. In four head-to-head match-ups with declared Republican candidates, Franken gets roughly 44 percent support to the Republicans’ 29 percent. While his lead is in the double digits, the gap falls within the percentage of Minnesotans who say they remain undecided on who to support. Nearly one-fifth, or 19...

“This case is big. This is Minnesota’s Trayvon Martin case,” prosecutor Pete Orput said before the Byron Smith murder trial. Except it never really was. Unlike the Florida case that became a lightning rod on race and the boundaries of self-defense, the Smith case got national attention but never gained the traction some predicted among gun proponents. Joe Olson thinks he knows why. Olson is as big of a gun advocate as you will find. The Hamline University law professor has worked on behalf of gun owners at the Capitol for 25 years and written book chapters on self-defense. Olson...

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.

MINNEAPOLIS -- The NBA suspended Timberwolves swingman Latrell Sprewell on Tuesday for one game without pay after reviewing comments he made to a female heckler during Minnesota's overtime victory over the Los Angeles Clippers on Saturday. Tim Frank, vice president of basketball communications for the NBA, said the league senior vice president Stu Jackson reviewed the tape of the incident and then ordered Sprewell suspended for Tuesday night's game against Dallas. He said league policy prohibits directing obscenities at fans. "Our policy is that you can't do it," he said. "When you do it, you're going to get suspended." During...

Spring seems to be taking forever to arrive, but we are not really seeing the worst of the late spring. The Great Lakes, and Lake Superior is holding on to their ice. As a result the freighters that normally travel the Great Lakes are having their fair share of problems. This has been a very long winter season, beginning with the Great Lakes freezing on December 6th, not allowing Northwest Indiana steel mills to stockpile materials. Glen Nekvasil, vice president for Lake Carriers' Association explained that lake freighters are struggling to make the voyage across Lake Superior despite the thick...

Too often, Janet and LeRoy Peterson have heard the tell-tale sounds of screeching tires and, soon after, a rap on their door. Another motorist has just discovered that the natural terrain around their river valley home makes a natural funnel for deer, the Petersons told members of the Indian History Hunters at a Nov. 4 meeting in Willmar. Some 20 years ago, the Petersons discovered that Minnesota's first inhabitants had this all figured out at least 7,000 years before the first car-deer crash. Except it wasn't 100- to 200-pound whitetail deer that brought Minnesota's first people to the Peterson's three-acre...

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has endorsed businessman Curt Clawson with days to go in the Republican primary race to replace former Florida Rep. Trey Radel. Clawson’s announcement of the endorsement offered no statement from the retiring congresswoman, but the candidate heaped praise on Bachmann, the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus.

Rice’s recent speaking gigs on college campuses and her ascension to the board of the file-sharing company Dropbox have sparked protests calling for her to be disinvited, cashiered and generally isolated and shamed --snip-- When the University of Minnesota invited her to give a lecture Thursday as part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the herd of independent minds that is the school’s faculty roused itself. Roughly 200 of them demanded that the invitation be revoked, mostly for her association with George W. Bush’s interrogation and detention policies, but also because she is unfit...

[1]Back in 1962, Robert Gover published a novel called the One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding [2] whose premise Amazon describes this way: “A college sophomore spends a weekend with a pretty 14-year-old black prostitute under the manly misapprehension that she has invited him because she finds him irresistible.”I remember reading it as an undergraduate and finding it mildly amusing. Of course, inflation being what it is, it’s hard to write a book about a piddling hundred dollar misunderstanding anymore. But somehow the novel came to mind today when reading one of my favorite websites — The College Fix [3]. The...

April 16, 2014 9:38 AM Students Demand Arrest of Condi Rice for War Crimes By Nathan Harden Self-proclaimed “radical” students at the University of Minnesota are demanding that campus police arrest Condoleezza Rice when she visits campus for a guest lecture tomorrow. Members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at UofM accuse the former Secretary of State of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” Julianne Stanford reports the details in her feature story today at The College Fix. According to Stanford, students published an open-letter calling for Rice’s arrest. “The letter goes on to offer a physical description of...

The clock is ticking for Minnesota's indoor ice rinks. By 2020, the refrigerant chemical now used at half the state's 240 arenas to make ice no longer will be manufactured or imported into the U.S. as part of a global effort aimed at ridding the world of greenhouse gases linked to depletion of the ozone layer. The phaseout of the odorless gas R-22 is expected to be costly for arenas -- most of which are publicly owned -- because of an anticipated rise in its cost. After the deadline, arenas still will be able to use the refrigerant gas for...

A new video obtained by Breitbart News shows the former comedian and left-wing pundit playing with a pair of traffic cones pretending they were a pair of female breasts. Franken is seen in the video holding two cones to his chest and grinning in an apparent flash of comedy. The footage was taken in June 2012 at a fundraiser breakfast in Paradise Valley, Arizona, according to a source who provided the video. The event was held in support of Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Richard Carmona, who challenged Republican Senator Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. after Sen. Jon Kyl, R-AZ retire