John Gunyou, chair of the Three Rivers Park District board, says he'll run for another term in November.

Gunyou, first elected to the board in 2012, now seeks a four-year term in the 4th District, which includes Minnetonka, Edina, Hopkins, Richfield, Excelsior, Shorewood, Deephaven, Greenwood, Tonka Bay and Woodland.

Gunyou is a former Minnetonka City Manager, former state Finance Commissioner under Gov. Arne Carlson, and ran for Lt. Gov. in 2010 on the ticket with Margaret Anderson Kelliher; they received the DFL nomination, but lost in the primary to Mark Dayton and Yvonne Prettner Solon.

A new poll from Suffolk University (pdf) takes an early look at the still-shaping-up Minnesota political climate ahead of the November elections, and the numbers look good for incumbents Sen. Al Franken and Gov. Mark Dayton.

Republicans can take heart that there are many undecided voters at this stage, but GOP contenders for those spots have an identification problem with voters.

The poll contacted 800 likely voters in the past few days.

Some highlights:

• Franken has a 15 to 16 percent lead in matchups with each of the Republican candidates
• Dayton's lead is 12 to 17 percent over his the potential challengers
• In both cases, though, there are significant undecideds
  
• Of those planning to vote in a Republican primary for governor, Marty Seifert got 10 percent, Kurt Zellers, 8 percent and Jeff Johnson, 7 percent. Undecided: 67 percent.
• Of those planning to vote in Republican Senate primary, Julianne Ortman got 14 percent; Mike McFadden. 12 percent and Jim Abeler, 8 percent. Undecided: 63 percent.
• Of the 89 people who said they'd likely attend a GOP presidential caucus,  Jeb Bush and Rick Perry were favored by 15 percent; Ted Cruz and Chris Christie each had 9 percent.
• Of the 100 who said they'd likely attend the Democratic caucuses gave Hillary Clinton got 63 percent; Elizabeth Warren had 10 percent.
• Half of those in the poll said Minnesota's economy has improved over the past two years; 21 percent said it was worse and 25 percent said it was the same.

“Well ahead … .”MPR’s Mark Zdechlik reports, “A new [Suffolk University Political Research Center] poll finds Democrats Mark Dayton and Al Franken are running well ahead of all of their Republican challengers, but neither incumbent Democrat is drawing more than 50 percent support.… According to the results, Gov. Dayton leads all of his Republican challengers by double digits, but one in four voters said they were undecided on the governor’s race. Pollsters found support for Sen. Franken in the mid-40s and that none of his Republican challengers has more than 29 percent support.”

Wisconsin's Voter ID law has been ruled unconstitutional, the AP tweets. It's an impermissable burden on poor and minorities to get photo identification to vote. Republican Gov. Scott Walker, the law's most prominent supporter, previously vowed a special session to get around any court objections. The decision is here.

Defense contractor Alliant Techsystems' move from the state is continuing. The Strib's Dee DePass reports ATK is moving more defense functions to Virginia, and spinning off sporting goods (think: bullets, etc.) to Utah. The company has not confirmed local cuts in the Eden Prairie office, but they appear logical.

To the jury … . The AP’s Amy Forliti says, “The trial of a Minnesota homeowner who killed two teens during a break-in has been given to the jury after the man's attorney argued the teens would be alive if they hadn't chosen to commit a burglary.” If this was Florida, I know how I’d bet.

Says Pam Louwagie for the Strib, “Prosecutor Pete Orput hammered home the idea that Smith, 65, plotted the killings of the intruders as they descended his basement steps about 10 minutes apart. After repeated break-ins to his home and his adjacent property throughout that fall, Smith set up an ambush, the prosecutor argued.”

Noting the judge’s decision to shut down on-line voter registration here, Reid Wilson of The Washington Post reminds his readers, “Eighteen states — not counting Minnesota — allow online voter registration, and four other states are in the process of implementing online systems. ... The states that allow online sign-ups include both deep red states like Kansas and Georgia, and deep blue states like California, Colorado and Washington. Studies have found online registration can save states big money. Processing a paper registration can cost a state 83 cents, but it costs just 3 cents to process an online registration.”

The AP’s story on the struggle to squeeze every project into the available bonding funds says, “Those [projects] in the mix range from re-roofing college campus buildings to mid-size city civic center expansions to rehabilitation of public housing. But the competition is fierce, with giant projects like an ongoing Capitol renovation chewing up a large chunk of available funds. ‘I'll just name three projects: the Capitol at $126 million, the state security hospital in St. Peter at $56 million, the state prison in St. Cloud at $34 million. I've just given you three projects and that's $200 million,’ said House Capital Investment Committee Chairwoman Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul. ‘That's how fast the $850 million goes.’"

Are we all cool now? From yesterday … news that “Asian” carp are no more. Says the Forum News Service,“Minnesota legislators have been trying to get rid of Asian carp for years and on Monday senators got rid of the 'Asian' part of the name. On a split voice vote, senators approved dropping "Asian" from the invasive carp name. … Sen. Foung Hawj, D-St. Paul, said the state needs to do a better job of being sensitive.”

Meanwhile …Tim Pugmire of MPR says,“Legislation to legalize medical marijuana has cleared another hurdle in the Minnesota Senate. Members of the State and Local Government Committee advanced the bill today on a divided voice vote.”

But colleague Tom Scheck writes, “ … as that bill gets another Senate hearing Tuesday, quieter voices are rising in opposition. People who run drug treatment programs in Minnesota worry that opening the door to any form of legal marijuana will cause many more problems and could lead to greater abuse. … Drug treatment professionals and the medical community have given little public testimony on the medical marijuana bill in the Legislature, though they have joined law enforcement groups in opposing it.”

By the look of the “fans” at the Capitol last year I assumed they already have some kind of brain-controlling “Matrix”-like link to the NFL. However, MPR’s Tim Nelson says, “The team is building an app that will leverage their new home and tie fans closer than ever to the team — to keep them buying tickets and coming to the games. It's part of a broader mobile media strategy to keep fans tied to the team whether they're at home or at the game. You follow the Vikings, the Vikings follow you.” If they follow you down a dark alley and you roll them — in self-defense, of course — see if they’ve got your $500 million in their pockets.

Online voter registration is proof that lawmakers can move quickly to pass policy if facing a hard-and-fast deadline.

The Minnesota Senate cleared a proposal Tuesday afternoon to set up a system of online voter registration in the state. DFL Gov. Mark Dayton said he plans to sign the bill into law as soon as he recieves it Tuesday evening. House lawmakers previously passed the same proposal on a bipartisan vote.

“I am very pleased that this bill passed with bipartisan support in both bodies, and I look forward to signing it into law today," Dayton said in a statement after the Senate vote. "All-told, 62 of the 89 Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature voted in favor of the bill." 

Democrats who control the Legislature faced a midnight deadline Tuesday that would suspend the state’s current system of online registration. Ramsey County District Judge John Guthmann ruled Monday that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie overstepped his authority when he unilaterally implemented the program last year.

Republicans and Democrats roundly criticized Ritchie’s move to implement the system on his own after an online voter registration bill initially failed get support in the Legislature. Republicans cried foul and filed the lawsuit, despite mostly supporting the policy that allows online voter registration.

More than 3,600 people have used the system since last September. Guthmann ruled that those registrations would remain valid.

“This tool has already proven its ability to reduce taxpayer costs by modernizing the work of local government,” Ritchie said in a statement. “Online registration has been embraced by Minnesota voters who appreciate the security and ease of the process.”

The bill goes into effect the day after the governor signs it into law, meaning there could be only a short gap between the midnight suspension of Ritchie’s voter registration program and the new legislatively approved online tool.

After more than two hours of debate, the Senate passed online voter registration on a 41-24 vote. Republicans criticized Democrats for rushing the proposal through the process.  Senators accepted the House version of the bill due to time constraints, despite initial differences between their two bills.

The original Senate bill had more provisions that ensured the security of citizens’ private data being used by the Secretary of State’s Office, Republicans said, and they offered a series of failed amendments to strengthen those provisions.  

“I favor online voter registration — I think it’s a good idea,” said Sen. Scott Newman, a lead Republican on election issues in the upper chamber. “I sincerely believe the Senate version of this bill is superior and the House version is inferior with respect to our data security.”

Newman and other Republicans pointed to recent state-related data breaches in public safety, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and a recent breach with the new state-run health insurance exchange, MNsure.

“Our state agencies are failing us,” Newman said. “The idea of data privacy is almost like a full employment act for lawyers.”

The proposal would also allow citizens to apply for an absentee ballot through the Secretary of State’s website. In both cases, citizens must provide a driver’s license number, a Minnesota-issued ID card number or the last four digits of their social security number and an email address in order to register online.

“I feel that it’s important for the state to establish an online voter registration system,” DFL Sen. Katie Sieben, the author of the bill, said. “I think voters across the state of Minnesota want the convenience of being able to register to vote online…I don’t see any need to delay this further.”

DFL Rep. Steve Simon, the lead on the issue in the House, said he was “proud” legislators passed the bill so quickly after the “court decision effectively ended it.” “The result is greater convenience for eligible voters, savings for taxpayers, and a stronger democratic process,” Simon, a candidate for secretary of state, added.

CC/Flickr/Randen Pederson

Big waves have once again drawn surfers to Lake Superior.

Along with wind and rain this week came big waves on Lake Superior that chopped at the remaining ice on the lake. That can only mean one thing … Surfin’ safari!!!! That’s right, the double-full-body-wetsuit crowd hit the waves at Stony Point between Duluth and Two Harbors, and the Duluth News Tribune was there to get the video. The Trib accompanied the video with a weather story Monday by Brady Slater: The National Weather Service in Duluth reported winds as high as 57 mph at Knife River; Minnesota Power reported nearly 4,700 people were without electricity at 5 p.m., and Lake Country Power reported about 1,600 customers without power; Fox 21 News lost power at 4:50 p.m. causing it to scuttle its 6 p.m. news broadcast. “It was a bummer,” said news anchor Diane Alexander.

You knew this story was coming: The Fargo Forum’s Patrick Springer reports that the recent rain is causing rivers and streams to rise and the National Weather Service predicts the Red River of the North will flood with a crest of 28.5 feet — well above the moderate flood stage of 25 feet – on Saturday and Sunday. This means the bridge connecting 12th Avenue North in Fargo with 15th Avenue North in Moorhead will close when the river hits 28 feet. At 22 feet, the North Broadway Bridge closes. Springer writes that field work will slow down as well: Adnan Akyuz, North Dakota state climatologist, said soils have thawed to a depth of about 20 inches, but between there and 40 inches is a band of frozen soil. It could take another 10 or 15 days for the deeper soils to thaw.

Al Strain got ahold of the statewide unemployment figures released by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development and found that unemployment is down across Southern Minnesota. “Faribault’s jobless rate held steady at 7.4 percent while Northfield’s dropped to 5.2 percent from 5.6 percent in February. Rice County’s unemployment rate decreased to 5.9 percent in March after sitting at 6.1 percent in February. Rice County’s unemployment rate was nearly a full percentage point lower than March of 2013, when it was at 6.8 percent.” Owatonna’s unemployment rate once again dipped below 5 percent; Steele County’s unemployment rate also declined to below 5 percent; Freeborn County’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent; 4.7 percent in Mower County; 6.1 percent in Dodge County; 4 percent in Nicollet County; and 8.3 percent in Le Sueur County. The rate went up in Waseca from 6.6 percent to 6.9 percent. Clark Sieben said the Minnesota economy is continuing its recovery. “After extreme winter weather and a slow start to the year, March gains indicate renewed strength in the economy and continued growth in the months to come,” she said.

Here are follow-ups to two stories reported last week:

The school board at United South Central schools in Wells voted to expel model student Alyssa Drescher for bringing a pocket knife to school, reports Sarah Stultz of the Albert Lea Tribune. Drescher, a junior, said she had the knife, which has a three-inch blade, in her purse after helping her boyfriend’s family cut hay bales over the weekend. A drug dog spotted a scent in her purse during a routine school search. The scent turned out to be from lotion Drescher was preparing to use for prom. The board struggled with the issue, knowing that Drescher gets good grades, participates in extracurricular activities and has never been in trouble before, yet also wanting to send the message that it’s wrong to bring a knife to school under any circumstances. The board meeting was attended by about 50 of Drescher’s friends.

On a better note, the Hermantown School board has reinstated cheerleading, although cheerleaders will have to find their $2,500 budget themselves, writes Jana Hollingsworth of the Duluth News Tribune. Last week the board voted in favor of cutting $250,000 from the budget, which included the end of the cheer program. The board had acted on the recommendation of activities director and dean of students Beth Clark, who said she added it to the budget cuts only because the advisor was quitting and the cut wouldn’t affect the pay of any staff member.

Over in our talent department, we have two new stories:

The first is by Amanda Dyslin of the Mankato Free Press, who talked with a 6-year-old Eagle Lake boy whose book, "The Minnesota Pond," won a national contest and will be punished this fall. He won the PBS KIDS GO! Writers Contest. The Loyola Catholic School kindergartner’s book is about three geese who really like their pond, but when an obnoxious duck moves in, they dislike his chatty, grubby, noisy ways. Soon, they leave to find another pond, but they can’t find one that’s any nicer than the one they left. They go back to the pond, point out the error of his ways to the duck, who agrees to change and everyone settles into life in the pond. For his efforts, Eli Mons will be honored Saturday at the Mall of America with a winner's breakfast and private reception and awards ceremony, followed by a celebration in the rotunda. In addition to the Mall of America celebration, a mascot from PBS Kids will be coming to Loyola in the fall in honor of Eli, too.

There are three new entries in the crummy news department:

The wet and windy weather will close Highway 169 as workers try to remove ice floes from Lake Mille Lacs, the Brainerd Dispatch reports. “With heavy winds and spring ice out, ice flows off Lake Mille Lacs can cross both lanes of the road in as little as 15 minutes,” said Jon Beaufeaux, MnDOT acting maintenance supervisor. “The ice flows will likely continue until the wind dies down or shifts direction.”

The Owatonna People’s Press is reporting that the number of sexually transmitted diseases in Steele County is on the rise. STDs – or chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis — rose 10 percent between 2012 and 2013. Amber Aaseth, Steele County Public Health director of nursing, said lower use of condoms, greater use of more effective birth control and the 2011 loss of the Owatonna Planned Parenthood clinic all contributed to this rise in STDs.

And then there’s this item, reprinted in full from the Albert Lea Tribune: “A vehicle was struck by lightning Sunday afternoon on Interstate 90 two miles west of the Alden exit. The Freeborn County Sheriff’s Office said the driver of the vehicle, Blair Leigh Becker, 26, was checked out by emergency medical crews but was not injured. Her husband came to pick her up, and the car was towed. The lightning strike was reported at 3:40 p.m.”

With a new poll from Suffolk University in Boston showing Gov. Mark Dayton leading his potential Republican opponents by 12 to 18 points, it’s clear the GOP field has some catching up to do to create a statewide resence.

At this phase of their campaigns, the six Republican candidates are still working at the retail level – catching up with voters at coffee shops and local political gatherings in advance of the Republican state convention in Rochester on May 30. But props for imagination, creativity and a dash of chutzpah go to Marty Seifert, the former state legislator from Marshall, who is acting like he is the man to take on Dayton in November.

Seifert has consistently injected himself into statewide debates that don't involve his candidacy. He testified in favor of mining expansion at a hearing in Duluth. He testified against the Southwest Light Rail plans at a Met Council meeting in Minneapolis.

He’s told reporters that he will be offering a statement and taking questions outside the House chamber immediately after Dayton’s state of the state address on Wednesday.

And he’s moving in on the sacred ground of the Governor’s Fishing Opener. While Mark Dayton casts his line into waters of the Brainerd Lakes area on May 10, Seifert will be holding his own Seifert for Governor 2014 Minnesota Fishing Opener in Otter Tail County. Via news release, he invited reporters to witness his first catch on Saturday morning.

Seifert’s efforts may be giving him a small bounce, at least among Republican voters. The poll published by Suffolk University showed him leading in a primary contest. But the bad news for all the GOP contenders (and good news for Dayton) is that 67 percent of the primary voters surveyed said they remain undecided.

Reversing the advice of Teddy Roosevelt ("talk softly and carry a big stick") President Barack Obama has elected to offer tough talk in recent international crisis — and carry a small stick. And while that has generated criticism, it is a policy that is appropriate for the times, and one most Americans seem to support.

The fact is, Americans have had their fill of misguided wars and fruitless military interventions dating back decades — at least to Vietnam. Obama has essentially said: "Enough."

And in many ways, it is a tough sell. To begin with, Obama is under constant pressure from those who want us to be more activist in Syria and Iran, and to remain in Afghanistan. Clearly, he is riding a losing horse with the neocons, who will scorch him when the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan, as they likely will. As we found in Vietnam, and now to some extent in Iraq, the indigenous folks who live there will be there for eons after we have left, and most likely their fratricidal battles will continue. Current body counts in Iraq are all over the board, but the United Nations reported that about 9,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2013; or about 24 deaths per day — mostly from various types of bombs. More recently, many on the right have criticized Obama's failure to protect Crimea, and his actions in the Ukraine crisis.

Regarding Afghanistan, Obama's tough talk dealing with President Hamid Karzai is not having much effect, but his little stick is. He has committed, and is continuing, to remove all our troops from that country by the end of 2014. Count on a reprise of Iraq in that country too — but the course Obama has chosen to follow is the right one for our country now, Karzai  notwithstanding. We are exhausted from managing too many wars in recent years; we are devoid of treasure to operate those wars; and we have sacrificed too much blood already in what history will likely show were mostly useless efforts.

Resisting hawks on Syria, Crimea ...

In Syria, again Obama has talked tough, but carried a small stick. But to his credit he has kept us out of a massively confusing and incomprehensible civil war, tragic as it is. He has resisted the efforts of hawks like Sen. John McCain and others to get involved militarily. Additionally, his mandate to remove chemical weapons appears to have met with success.

Similarly, in dealing with Vladimir Putin in Crimea and now Ukraine, the same strategy is being used. It may be frustrating to some, but for most Obama has acted rationally, choosing the least bad option. A hot war with Russia is simply not going to happen. Staying the course without military involvement may be reaping rewards. And as regards Iran, getting entangled there would be a disaster. Instead, again, Obama has chosen the tough-talk approach. And while it may have the appearance of weakness, it is not without bite.

The main tool Obama has used for his tough talk is sanctions. While there are varying views of the effect of such a strategy, the fact is that when properly applied, and with international support, they work. They have destroyed Iran's economy to the extent that leaders have at least come to the table to talk. Obviously they would not, and did not, do that with the threat of war. As for Putin, there is no question that even the limited sanctions applied now have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy, investments and the ruble. Further sanctions, if done in concert with the EU, could devastate the Russian aggression without a shot being fired.

World knows who has the power

As for displaying weakness, the world knows for certain who is the major military power on the globe — and we are because we spend massive amounts of money on our military. Indeed we spend more than the next 11 countries combined (most are friends of the United States). So that now becomes another advantage of the Obama approach: the possibility of reducing both our military budget and our deficit. Ironically, the hawks who call for more military engagement are the same folks who call for reducing our budget. Having it both ways doesn't work.

It is estimated that Iraq and Afghanistan wars have already cost us over $1.3 trillion with more yet to come. Tough talk is much cheaper than building a bigger stick. The reality is the "stick" we have now will protect us in virtually any conventional war to which we may be exposed. But the Obama strategy is also a recognition of the new kinds of wars — and adversaries — we now face and will face in the future. And these are wars of ideology more than territory, and they will require a much different kind of defense and force than those we have built and employed in the past.

Those who do not approve of Obama will try to characterize his strategy as confusing, weak, tentative or leaderless; they may score some points on those issues. But the fact is, Obama has chosen a path of restraint and nonmilitary intervention, regardless of the criticism he may face. To his credit, he has stayed the course. And for America, at this time and this place, it is the path that will serve us best.

Teddy Roosevelt may be turning over in his grave, but for now, "talking tough and carrying a little stick" is best for our country.

Myles Spicer, formerly of Minnetonka, lives in Palm Desert, Calif. He spent his business career as a professional writer and owned several successful ad agencies over the past 45 years.

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Following the “guilty” verdict in the Byron Smith case, Pam Louwagie of the Strib reports, “Efforts were made to obfuscate what this was and turn it into some type of referendum about being able to protect one’s home, [prosecutor Pete] Orput said. ‘This was a case about where the limits are,’ Sheriff Michel Wetzel said in news conference after the verdicts.”

For the Brainerd Dispatch, Sarah Nelson Katzenberger provides a long recap of the closing arguments.“… state prosecutor Pete Orput told the jury the case is ‘a serious, but very simple case.’ ... Orput said the shooting deaths of Brady and Kifer were intentional and done with premeditation — that Smith planned, prepared, determined and considered what he was doing before he did.”

Dave Unze in the St. Cloud Times writes, “Defense attorney Steve Meshbesher said Smith would appeal the case. One focus of that appeal will be how much the jury didn't get to hear about Kifer and Brady, he said. Meshbesher had tried to present evidence to the jury about their involvement in other crimes, and photos of Brady on his Facebook page holding firearms. But Judge Douglas Anderson ruled before the trial that such evidence was not admissible, a decision with which Meshbesher clearly disagreed.” 

The Daily Mail of Britain knows how to goose a story. Laura Collins tells her readers, “Now, for the first time, MailOnline can reveal the story the jury DIDN’T hear, the history suppressed by the prosecution and the truth behind the hideous explosion of violence in Smith’s Little Falls home that Thanksgiving morning. Because though the prosecution argued that Smith did not know whom he was pulling the trigger on that day, he did know both his teenage victims. And it was that prior relationship that sparked the fatal sequence of events when it went sour five months earlier in the summer of 2012.”

The Strib was ready with an editorial. “For many who followed the case, the recordings provided all of the evidence necessary to conclude that Smith had planned the execution-style killings in retribution for the break-ins. … For obvious reasons, there are limits to the ‘castle doctrine,’ and Smith crossed the line between a reasonable self-defense and premeditated murder. It took the jury just three hours to return the verdict.”

Glen Taylor is on board with the lifetime ban on Donald Sterling. Says Laura Yuen at MPR, “Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor said he backs the decision by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to ban Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the organization for life for making racist remarks. … As chairman of the NBA's Board of Governors, Taylor said he will head a committee that is already working to change the team's ownership to another party, possibly by force.”

The Strib's Jerry Zgoda notesTaylor to talked to Sterling, who argued he'd been taped illegally in a private discussion. The Strib's Patrick Reusse has an upbeat take, noting society's evolution from the brush-off of Calvin Griffith's racist remarks in Waseca 36 years ago to Sterling's lifetime ban today.

Today in roads, Part One: The PiPress says, “If Minnesota drivers hit something, they would be required to stop and investigate what they hit under a bill passed Tuesday by the House. The measure, sent to Gov. Mark Dayton on a 124-3 vote, would make it clear that ‘not knowing what was struck’ is no longer a legal defense for those accused of a hit-and-run collision, the bill's sponsor, DFL Rep. Paul Rosenthal ... . The vote came one week after Amy Senser, the wife of former Minnesota Viking Joe Senser, was released from prison … .”

Today in Roads, Part Two: Mary Divine of the PiPress says, “As part of the massive reconstruction of Minnesota 36 next to the new St. Croix River bridge, the right-on, right-off access road about a quarter-mile west of Osgood Avenue would be closed. Minnesota Transportation Department officials said the closure has been planned for the roadway since 1995 in line with its practice of trying to consolidate access to highway corridors. But [Joseph’s Restaurant of Stillwater owner Joe] Kohler and other business owners are hoping to change the mind of MnDOT project manager Jon Chiglo.”

Today in Roads, Part Three:The Strib's Eric Roper on the ongoing battle between Minneapolis cabbies and appsters Lyft and Uber. Basically, the hacks say the hackers face far less onerous regulation and fees. An intriguing development: City Council Member Jacob Frey says the solution may be reducing regulations on the cabbies.

Take one blonde, add an adult beverage, som un-ladylike language and a playoff hockey game and you’ve got … viral video. Via Bleacher Report… from the Wild v. Avs Game 6. The copy believes the not-exactly shy darling in question is saying, “Whip his ass, Charlie!” to Wild center Charlie Coyle. “The Lady in Pink” was born. “As it turns out, the fan in question appears to be a woman named Alyssa Nelson. Judging by her Twitter profile, she is a Hooters waitress and the biggest Minnesota Wild fan imaginable.” Game 7 is tonight in Denver.

Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society

Oil on canvas painting (1888) by Alexis Jean Fournier of the Ramsey
County courthouse in St. Paul as it appeared at the time of Ann Bilansky's
trial in 1859.

Ann Bilansky was the only woman executed by the action of Minnesota courts. She died in 1860, but doubts about her guilt remain alive.

From soon after statehood in 1858 until 1906, Minnesota law authorized the death penalty for murder. In that time twenty-seven convicts were hanged by order of state courts. The most controversial execution remains that of Ann Bilansky, the only woman ever hanged in Minnesota.

Stanislaus Bilansky, a Pole, arrived in St. Paul from Wisconsin in 1842 at age thirty-five. He worked as a tailor, then a storekeeper-barkeeper on what became East Seventh Street. He was a melancholy man, angry, a drinker, and often ill. His second wife, Ellen, abandoned him and their four children in 1856.

Mary Ann Evards Wright (known as Ann), a widow originally from North Carolina, moved to St. Paul in April 1858 at the request of her nephew, John Walker. In September she married Stanislaus Bilansky and took over the care of the Bilansky children. John Walker took up residence in the two room shanty behind their home.

In late February 1859 Stanislaus Bilansky began showing symptoms of stomach illness, including fever and vomiting. He died on March 11.

A coroner's jury, hastily assembled the next day, ruled the death natural. Bilansky was buried March 12. But that evening one of the witnesses at the inquest, Lucinda Kilpatrick, reported to police that she now remembered having been with Ann Bilansky on February 28. She recalled that on that date, Ann Bilansky bought ten cents' worth of powdered arsenic and made some odd comments about her husband "drop[ping] away sudden." On March 13 the coroner exhumed the body; medical examiners found a trace that resembled arsenic. Ann Bilansky was arrested later that day and on March 15 a new coroner's jury ruled the death a homicide.

The trial began May 23 with Isaac Heard prosecuting and John Brisbin for the defense. The heart of Heard's case was that Ann Bilansky had bought arsenic on February 28; twelve days later her husband died of arsenic poisoning. The proposed motive was a liaison, or desired liaison, with John Walker.

Brisbin put up a skilled and vigorous defense. The medical evidence was inexpert and ambiguous, and his own expert witness gave a contrary opinion. The evidence of any love affair was slender and speculative. Ann Bilansky had sound reason for buying arsenic: rats infested the house and store. But a jury may choose which witnesses to believe. It convicted Ann Bilansky on June 3.

The case went to the state supreme court, though on narrow and technical grounds. The court denied the defense's appeal on July 23. Within hours of learning her appeal had been denied, Ann Bilansky escaped from jail by squeezing through window bars. Authorities caught her a week later just a few miles away.

On December 2, 1859, Judge Edward Palmer imposed his sentence: death. Governor Alexander Ramsey set March 23 as hanging day. But Ann Bilansky still had many supporters, a new attorney in former territorial governor Willis Gorman, and two more avenues to pursue.

On March 5 the legislature passed a bill commuting Bilansky's sentence to life in prison. Governor Ramsey, whose brother Justus had served on the jury, vetoed the bill.

Willis Gorman now turned to clemency. The state constitution gave the governor sole and unlimited power to pardon Bilansky or commute her sentence to any length of imprisonment he wished. Pardon petitions came from citizens deploring the death penalty. Gorman submitted a strong argument for Bilansky's innocence that lamented many irregularities in the trial.

Minnesota Supreme Court chief justice Charles Flandrau wrote that he opposed the execution of a woman. Ann Bilansky wrote Governor Ramsey a four-page letter asserting her innocence. The most powerful plea came from a surprising source, prosecutor Isaac Heard, who wrote of his "grave and serious doubts as to whether the defendant has had a fair trial."

Their efforts were to no avail. On March 23, before about a hundred people at the corner of Fifth Street and Cedar Street, Ann Bilansky mounted a temporary platform and was executed. Before she died, she promised that she would find justice in heaven.

She is buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

I wasn't able, alas, to attend Mike Clark's recent talks in the Twin Cities about how a smart, strategic alliance of environmental and business groups was able to kill a sulfide mine at the edge of Yellowstone National Park.

But I caught up with him via videos, of which at least two are still available for viewing, and found his presentation to be of likely interest to most anybody concerned about the copper/nickel mining proposed for Minnesota's north woods.

Until his retirement last fall, Clark was longtime head of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a collaborative of more than 100 environmental, recreation, tourism and business groups with a shared stake in the health of the Yellowstone ecosystem, and a shared mission of protecting natural resources in the region surrounding America's first national park.

The 10-year fight that GYC led to stop the New World gold mine at Yellowstone's northeast corner ended in 1996 with a negotiated buyout of the mining company's interests and its repair of some damage already done. It ranks as one of modern environmental history's biggest victories against a hardrock mine in a bad place.

Becky Rom of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, which sponsored his lecture tour,  introduced Clark for his talks and described GYC as "the largest conservation group in the interior West."

Certainly its successful approach to coalition-building and collaborative advocacy is widely envied — if not emulated — by other organizations devoted to protecting wilderness and public lands. It may not be coincidence that Clark's early organizing experience was not in the environmental movement but with civil rights in the South and poverty in Appalachia.

For many years now, there's been a lot of talk but little progress on the notion of building a collaborative along GYC's to advocate for the best long-term stewardship of the northern Minnesota region that includes the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the Superior National Forest, Voyageurs National Park and, across the international border, the Quetico-Superior wilderness.

Clark titled his talk "Yellowstone Is More Precious Than Gold: Lessons From the New World Mine Battle."

Parallels to Minnesota

And although he drew few direct parallels between the key issues in that campaign and those currently simmering in Minnesota, he didn't necessarily need to:

• The New World site that Crown Butte Mines proposed to develop was within a few miles of the park 's northeast entrance, and by some calculations would have brought mining activity within a mile of the park boundary.
• Both the project site and the surrounding area had a significant history of previous mining, with the district that included the New World project having been mined as recently as 1956; most of the surface rights were controlled by the U.S. Forest Service. (Indeed, one of Clark's most striking slides mapped the present-day mining claims in the Yellowstone region.)
• From the start, Crown Butte touted the mine as having potentially historic proportions, containing one  "one of the richest ore bodies discovered in modern times in the lower 48 states." 
• Ownership of the mining company seemed to be structured through other firms to limit its long-term liability (later, Clark said, these were proved in a court case to be shell companies).
• Crown Butte proposed to leave the tailings from its mining operations in a plastic-lined pit bordering one of those rivers, and promised that its engineering could permanently contain any acid runoff from the waste or direct it to places it could cause no harm.
• In addition to the problem of acid drainage from disturbed rock, in a zone that included the headwaters of three separate streams flowing toward the Yellowstone River, there was concern about "creation of a huge industrial area suddenly blossoming on the edge of Yellowstone park," in an area where a couple of thriving tourist towns and many vacation homes had grown up in the decades of quietude after mining ceased.

Saying no to compromise

Courtesy of Mike Clark

Mining claims, most now abandoned, in the vicinity of
Yellowstone National Park.

The first and perhaps most important strategic decisions reached by GYC and its allies were that a sulfide mine in this location could not possibly be "mitigated"— that is, operated without significant and lasting damage from acid drainage — and that therefore no compromise was possible.

Moreover, Clark said, there was concern that the relatively compact, underground mine proposed by Crown Butte was probably just an opening wedge:

Beneath the gold was a huge deposit of copper. So while we fought it as a gold mine, we knew that if the mine went in, it would become a copper mine — an open pit mine, almost certainly, and very much along the size of the Butte pit [the mining catastrophe also known as the Berkeley pit].

Once the company began preparing an environmental impact statement, with notice to the Forest Service that it would seek a permit to mine, the campaign put together a team of technical experts to challenge the project at every stage of review.

One little irony of this case is that both Yellowstone National Park and the nation's primary law on hardrock mining were established in 1872, and

We knew that under the 1872 mining law, the Forest Service would have no choice but to grant the permit, because the mining law says that if the company says the deposit is viable economically, they have the right to mine it and see if it works. So although the Forest Service calls this a permitting process, or a review process, it's not. 

In addition to the technical team, legal team, media-relations team and a collection of local grassroots organizations who could speak about the tourism businesses, jobs and recreation opportunities that the mine would threaten, the campaign worked quietly to speak directly to other mining companies and their financial backers:

We went to members of the mining industry and said to them, do you really want a mine like this on the edge of Yellowstone? What will happen to the credibility of your mining sector if the mine fails and Yellowstone is destroyed? Do you really want to deal with that?

We went to the investors, and the bankers, who were providing the capital, and we said the same thing to them: Do you really think this is a good investment? Look at what happens if this thing goes bad. Both of these maneuvers paid off in the long run.

 In the end, a misstep by Crown Butte gave its opponents leverage to bring them to the negotiating table: Earthmoving equipment deposited some material into a small stream, without the permit required under the Clean Water Act, and this led to discovery of a series of problems punishable by fines in the range of $75,000 a day.

Gaining political support

At that point, the New World Mine began to attract overdue (and eventually unfavorable) attention from elected officials in Montana and finally in the Clinton White House at the beginning of the president's second term.

Eventually, the campaign got Crown Butte to agree to abandon the project in exchange for cancellation of its fines and a $65 million payment from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, of which it was required to spend $25 million on site reclamation and allowed to keep the other $40 million as reimbursement of development costs.

In the Q&A that followed his talk, Clark was asked if he thought Crown Butte engineers knew how serious a risk the mine would pose to the environment, and his reply struck me as charitable:

People who mine are focused on the technical challenges they face. They genuinely believe they can handle whatever is generated in that mine.... So I would give the miners a sense of fairness about that. They were focused on the ore body and how to get it out as quickly as they could. They believed they had put together a viable program.

Asked about what it took to gain support for the campaign from elected officials in Montana and beyond, Clark said that, initially, the likelihood of getting a favorable hearing increased with the particular official's distance from the mine site.

County officials, for example, couldn't seem to think much farther than short-term job creation,  until they finally realized what was actually at stake:

"We said, prove to us that you can do this without harming Yellowstone. They couldn't."

Asked how tactics of the New World Mine could be adapted to locales less iconic than Yellowstone, Clark said:

Most of the new mines that are being proposed around our country are on public lands that are so remote and so rugged that nobody's been able to get to them before. ... On the other hand, with the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area, that's the most popular wilderness area in the United States.

It's a very fragile area in terms of how water moves, and I think there's great potential  for turning this into a national battle that says, this is an example of how we have to protect certain kinds of lands. ...

You have to elevate the decisionmaking away from the local situation,  where jobs almost always rule, to a higher level where political leaders can make decisions based on what's good for the country as opposed to what's good for the local situation.

* * *

Clark presented his talk at seven venues during his visit to Minnesota; I watched the video from his session at the University of Minnesota and another video of his appearance in Ely can be seen on YouTube. His visit to Minnesota was sponsored by the Sigurd Olson Lecture Series, a 15-year-old project of Becky Rom's that was funded this year by Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness.

This is one in a series of articles funded by a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation.

Sen. Chris Eaton

Once legislation passes, few care who sponsored the bill. But for legislators who pushed against years of inertia, taking the bill over the finish line is a small, but important personal reward.

 The honor can become a subtle tool for enforcing caucus discipline — as Brooklyn Center DFL Sen. Chris Eaton says she found out when she lost chief authorship of the recent minimum-wage bill. She sat down with MinnPost last week to talk about how the sausage was made.

As the Senate bill’s chief author, Eaton says she was in the middle of the contentious negotiations for more than a year between House and Senate Democrats. A metro-area legislator, Eaton often found herself stuck between her own desire to see a dramatic wage increase — the House position — and her mostly rural Senate caucus’s concerns.

“I was having a really hard time moving the Senate. I was kind of negotiating against myself because I agreed with the House version but I didn’t have the votes in the Senate until the end, when [Senate Majority Leader Tom] Bakk got behind it and started working votes,” Eaton said.

The final Senate floor vote proved bittersweet for Eaton. While the deal raised state’s wage from $6.15 per hour to $9.50 by 2016 and indexed it to inflation — Eaton’s priorities — Assistant Senate Majority Leader Jeff Hayden of Minneapolis presented the minimum wage bill to the chamber.

Eaton said she felt “a little” disappointment in leadership’s move to give the minimum wage bill to someone else. “I’d put a lot of work into it, so to lose the chief authorship seems kind of petty,” she said.

Bakk explains that legislative rules required a new “vehicle,” or bill, because the final deal included provisions not heard in committee.

“The final deal … was an agreement between myself and the speaker — and that is not unusual for very-high-profile bills, ultimately being negotiated out between the two leaders,” Bakk says.

Hayden had become the good soldier for the Senate Democrats on minimum wage this session, representing their concerns in negotiations about everything from small-employer and training wages to indexing the wage to inflation. 

Still, Eaton believes she was also pushed off the bill because she didn’t see eye-to-eye with Senate DFL leadership and the caucus on the issue.

Asked if Eaton’s bill position had anything to do with her being left off, Bakk replied, “We don't talk about what happens in the caucus outside of that door. I don't and members shouldn't. We had several closed caucuses on the minimum wage issue and when we have a closed caucus we don't discuss that with anybody.”

He added, “She never asked to be the author of the Hayden bill. Had she asked, I would have probably considered it. I would have went to Senator Hayden and asked him what he thought, but she never made that request.” 

A big part of the reason Eaton wanted to carry the minimum wage bill in the first place was to help women, she said, who make up about 60 percent of hourly minimum wage workers in the state. “It’s largely an agreement that will benefit women in the state, so it’s fitting that the women legislators here are largely responsible for its content,” Eaton said the day the wage deal was announced.

“It was a tough spot — especially since a lot of people who disagreed with my positions and were pretty stuck in were people from greater Minnesota, some of them [Iron] Rangers, who run the Senate, and some from the southern part of the state,” Eaton said. “I understand their perspective, and I understand the border issues, but if you look at the economies in all the states around us, everything we are doing is apparently right, because we are outmatching them in every way you look at it.”

Eaton said she’s mostly happy with the bill’s final provisions, but she noted she would have also liked to see the workweek defined as just 40 hours instead of 48.

Increasing the wage is only the start of things Eaton wants to do to close economic disparities in the state: “Once it gets up to $9.50 it will only be three quarters of the federal poverty level. It’s not like we are making anybody rich here.”

“The outcome was the important piece,” Eaton added. “Rep. [Ryan] Winkler and I said from the beginning, ‘If we have to get up there and give someone else total credit for it, we don’t care, we just want the outcome.’”

In a low-low turnout special-election primary, Hennepin County commissioner candidates Marion Greene and Anne Mavity beat four challengers to advance to the Tuesday, May 13 general election.

The math was simple: Greene, who finished first, won her hometown of Minneapolis, capturing 42 percent of the vote there. Mavity won her hometown of St. Louis Park, capturing 53 percent of the vote. The difference: more than three times as many Minneapolitans voted — 4,808, compared to 1,457 in St. Louis Park.

Overall, Greene, a former state legislator, won 36 percent of the vote; Mavity, a St. Louis Park Councilmember, captured 28 percent. 

Finishing out of the money were Hennepin County prosecutor Ben Schweigert (25 percent), ex-legislator Ken Kelash (7 percent), Robert "Again" Carney, Jr. (3 percent) and former Minneapolis council candidate Bob Reuer (1 percent).

Turnout in the race to succeed Gail Dorfman, who resigned earlier this year, was a dismal 6 percent.

The question for the general election race is where Schweigert's and Kelash's votes go, who new shows up, and how big a part geography plays.

Like Greene, all defeated candidates live in Minneapolis; Mavity's literature touted her City of Lakes roots as a Washburn High School grad and former Central neighborhood staffer.

Greene has been endorsed by several high-profile Minneapolis lawmakers, including State Rep. Frank Hornstein and former House speakers Margaret Kelliher and Dee Long. Mavity counters with St. Louis Park's city council, State Rep. Ryan Winkler and State Sen. Ron Latz.

Greene's first-place finish largely rested on Minneapolis Ward 7 (downtown and Lake of the Isles), which she used to represent; she took 64 percent of the vote there. She also won Ward 13 in the city's southwest corner, by a more modest 37 percent to Mavity's 28 percent.

Greene narrowly won Minneapolis Ward 10, in the Lake Calhoun and Wedge area, 36.93 percent to Schweigert's 36.58 percent.

Mavity won Minneapolis Ward 11, which spreads southeast from Lake Harriet, 33 percent to 28 percent over Greene. 

One territory up for grabs include Minneapolis Ward 8, east of Lake Harriet, which Schweigert won with 44 percent of the vote; Greene finished second with 37 percent to Mavity's 13 percent.

After graduating from Grinnell College in 2003 with a degree in sociology, Jillian Peterson went right into the heart of the beast: She took a job as an investigator for the Capital Defender Office in New York City with the task of documenting the bio-psycho-social histories of men facing the death penalty.

The St. Paul native and Central High School alum said she was expecting “to meet Hannibal Lecter types, to be afraid, to feel threatened,” she said. “And I didn’t.”

Instead, she said, she began to see the humanity in these “very immature, very young” offenders who were “products of the lives they had led. And there was always mental illness, often a laundry list of diagnoses if you went way back.”

Peterson, who got her Ph.D. in psychology and social behavior at the University of California Irvine and now teaches at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, spent the next decade seeking to more deeply understand the relationship (if any) between mental illness and criminal behavior.

She knew already that people with serious mental illnesses were (and still are) overrepresented in the criminal justice system: In 2009, 1 million of the 7.3 million people under correctional supervision in the United States were diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression. She also knew that the research consistently showed (and still does) that the vast majority of people who are diagnosed with mental illness are not more violent or dangerous than the general population and are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime.

But she took the research a step further to ask the question: “How often and how consistently do symptoms directly precede criminal behavior among offenders with mental illness?”

The answer is not very often and not very consistently, Peterson and other researchers say in a study published in the current issue of the American Psychological Association’s Law and Human Behavior journal.

150 men and 429 crimes

Peterson and her team of eight conducted extensive interviews with and examined the records of 150 parolees of the Mental Health Court serving Hennepin County. (The specialty court, one of three in the state, operates much like the state’s drug courts, with a focus on reducing recidivism by linking nonviolent offenders to medical and social services.)

“A lot of these people had really long histories of criminal justice involvement,” Peterson said. “And it really was a revolving door. If there was something we could do to stop the revolving door, if there was something that could be changed in the people’s lives, what was it, and what type of program would actually be the most effective?”

The researchers identified and analyzed 429 crimes committed by the group’s members across the span of about 15 years, and found that only 7.5 percent were directly related to mental-health symptoms (including hallucinations, delusions, impulsivity, hopelessness and suicidality).

The team took care to establish rapport and build trust with their subjects, Peterson said. They used a “life-calendar” approach to identify and talk through major life events (births, deaths, breakups, traumas) before addressing the crimes.

When the team combined the categories of symptoms that were "directly related" or "mostly related" they found that 3 percent of the crimes were related to symptoms of major depression, 4 percent to symptoms of schizophrenia disorders and 10 percent to symptoms of bipolar disorder, for a total of about 18 percent.

The study found that those who committed crimes directly related to their symptoms also committed crimes that were independent of their symptoms. The real drivers at play, Peterson said, were not mental-health symptoms but substance-use disorders and social disadvantage (homelessness, unemployment etc.).

Out of the cycle

Peterson readily acknowledges some weaknesses in the study: the small sample size and the partial reliance on self-reporting and retrospection. But she said she hopes the results will change the approach to reducing recidivism.

“If you’re focusing on medication and mental-health treatment, you see symptom improvement, which is great,” she said. “But it doesn’t translate into the reduction of crime and violence in the way that you would think it would.”

An effective approach would include not only treatment for mental-health and substance-use disorders, but also attention to basic needs (chiefly housing and employment), she said. “It’s got to be comprehensive and it’s got to be individualized. Each person has such a different story that any one-size-fits-all program I don’t think is going to be very effective.”

Working with the Hennepin County offenders gave her a greater sense of possibility, Peterson said, a different experience entirely (needless to say) from the one on death row. The research subjects “really wanted to get their lives together, wanted to get a job, wanted to have a house, really had goals and dreams that were attainable, and really wanted to get out of the cycle they were stuck in. It felt less tragic. To me I felt a sense of hope.”

An interesting aside

Lest you worry that Peterson is at all dispirited by her field of study, you can watch her exuberant wedding dance entrance video, which has been viewed more than 84 million times on YouTube and has become a fund-raiser for the Sheila Wellstone Institute’s work against domestic violence.

MinnPost photo by Sarah T. Williams

An autographed thank you from the cast of "The Office" hangs on Peterson's office wall. The TV series borrowed from Peterson's YouTube wedding video, "JK Wedding Dance Entrance," which has been viewed more than 84 million times, and which now raises funds for the Sheila Wellstone Institute to help end violence against women and children.

Creative Commons/Omar Bariffi

Reporter Larry Huston: “For-profit companies like Coke and Pepsi don’t spend enormous sums of money just to provide a public service. They expect a significant return on their investment.”

“What role should Coca-Cola play in obesity research?”

That’s the question Larry Huston, a reporter who covers cardiology news, wondered about after he read a paper published earlier this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The authors of that paper point to a decline in physical activity as the leading cause of the obesity epidemic, while downplaying the role of calories and diet.

Not once do the words “sugar,” “soda” or “beverage” appear in the paper, notes Huston in an article he wrote last weekend for Forbes. That’s a puzzling omission given the growing number of studies that have linked sugar-sweetened sodas and other beverages to the obesity epidemic.

But it may not be that puzzling after all. For as Huston points out, three of the five authors of this paper have financial relationships with Coca-Cola.

“It is important to acknowledge that there is an active scientific controversy about the relative importance of diet and exercise,” writes Huston. “But it also seems clear that the perspective on this controversy as presented in this paper is remarkably congruent with the interests of Coca-Cola.”

Research ‘speaks for itself’

Huston contacted the paper’s lead author, Dr. Carl Lavie, a Louisiana cardiologist and obesity expert, and asked him if he thought the public should be concerned that he and two of his co-authors have a financial relationship with Coca-Cola.

Not unsurprisingly, Lavie’s answer was a vehement “no.” Here is his short version of why:

1) Hopefully the science speaks for itself, regardless of the sponsor.

2) Science itself is improved by data and facts.

3) Not to be too harsh, but my opinion (based on my interpretation of the science) is not for sale and cannot be bought. I am sure my colleagues feel the same way.

4) All researchers have bias, as do I, but if you try to eliminate every researcher/scientist/clinician with bias, there will be hardly any left.

5) Therefore, the best way to proceed is to focus on well-designed and well-executed studies.

In a longer Q&A with Huston, Lavie also argues that there shouldn’t be any limitation on industry funding of medical studies as long as the authors disclose their relationship. And he says Coca-Cola funds this kind of research because it wants “to provide a public service.”

‘An unconscious alignment’

Huston addresses all of Lavie’s points in his article, including the one about how his views on obesity “are not for sale.”

“I do not want to suggest anything so stark,” he writes, “but I also think it is fair — and studies have demonstrated — that gifts, even very small gifts, can exert strong unconscious effects. When combined with the flattery and attention of being designated a ‘key opinion leader’ an unconscious alignment with a company can easily occur.”

Huston also points to a paper published late last year in PLoS Medicine in which

researchers conducted a systematic review of systematic reviews examining the association between sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain and obesity. For the papers in which the authors reported no conflict of interest, 10 out of the 12 findings supported the association between sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain or obesity.

In stark contrast, 5 out of the 6 papers with industry support failed to find evidence for any such association. In other words, systematic reviews with industry support were 5 times more likely to find no significant association. “Our results,” wrote the authors, “confirm the hypothesis that authors of systematic reviews may draw their conclusions in ways consistent with their sponsors’ interests.”

As for Lavie’s suggestion that Coca-Cola sponsors such research out of an altruistic desire to provide a public service, Huston calls that “naïve.”

“For-profit companies like Coke and Pepsi don’t spend enormous sums of money just to provide a public service,” says Huston. “They expect a significant return on their investment, though this may be difficult to quantify. In any case, it is more than obvious why Coke would be interested in supporting scientists who maintain that sugar does not play an important role in the obesity epidemic.”

You can read Huston’s article on the Forbes website.

LISBON, Portugal — While European governments were struggling to agree on the names of a handful of Russians they could blacklist in response to the latest mayhem in Ukraine, one of the continent's preeminent elder statesmen was out partying with his old buddy Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president was a guest at a caviar-and-champagne 70th-birthday bash Monday for former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.

The pair were snapped hugging outside the palatial venue of the late-night soiree, which was hosted by Schroeder's employer, a pipeline operator that pumps gas to Germany for the Russian energy giant Gazprom.

Although the German government was quick to distance itself from the festivities, the party in St. Petersburg symbolizes how an ambivalent approach in much of Europe toward Putin's destabilization of Ukraine is crippling efforts to build a resolute EU response.

"The latest sanctions show that Europe doesn't have the spunk or the solidarity, or the political will and unity to actually take a tough stance against what Russia is doing in Ukraine," says Judy Dempsey, a senior associate at the Carnegie Europe think-tank.

"It says an awful lot about Europe's lack of political courage," Dempsey added in an interview from her base in Berlin.

Foreign Ministers from the 28 European Union nations agreed two weeks ago to extend the list of Russian officials and their Ukrainian friends to be subjected to an asset freeze and ban on travel to the EU.

Then they spent two weeks dithering over the names while armed pro-Moscow gangs ran amok through much of eastern Ukraine, comforted by presence of 40,000 Russian troops deployed just over the border.

The list of 15, finally published Tuesday morning, contains a trio of big names: Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, armed forces Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov and head of military intelligence Igor Sergun.

Unlike the United States, which targeted Putin cronies and their companies in new sanctions announced on Monday, the EU list avoids hitting members of the president's inner circle or their business interests.

EU countries that had lobbied for a stronger line are frustrated, concerned that the limp response is encouraging the Russians to extend their romp in Ukraine.

"I cannot be satisfied," Lithuania's Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius told GlobalPost.

"We can see that the situation is not getting better, it's deteriorating. That means the measures we are taking are not enough," he said in a telephone interview. "We need to take these targeted measures against those who are really taking decisions, the inner circle of the leadership."

Some put it less diplomatically.

"Very weak EU sanctions list. Deliberately avoided touching any of Putin's money. Will come back to bite EU in the ass," tweeted Bill Browder, a London-based businessman. Browder has been a vocal Putin critic since his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian jail in 2009.

The Kremlin duly condemned the EU sanctions, ridiculed the Europeans as tools of Washington and threatened dire consequences.

But the measures were less than expected and reflect division among the EU states.

From Spain to Bulgaria, Germany to Cyprus, many EU members are wary of taking strong action against Putin. Some are worried about provoking the Russian leader to even stronger action.
Others fear the impact of sanctions on their own economies.

That's a clear source of frustration in countries such as Poland, Estonia and Lithuania, which are lobbying for a stronger EU line even though their economies are among the most exposed to Russian economic pressure.

"Of course we are taking a risk," Linkevicius said. "We are dependent 100 percent on gas supplies from Russia, but if our position is not clear, the other side will see it as a weakness."

Still, many in Western and Southern Europe see the Ukraine crisis as distant. They wonder why they should get into a fight with a belligerent, nuclear-armed wannabe superpower over a faraway country with which they feel little empathy.

Those divisions have also hamstrung NATO's response to the crisis.

Although the alliance has made a symbolic deployment of fighter jets and warships eastward to assure exposed allies that it stands ready to defend them from any spillover from Ukraine’s conflict, the likes of Poland and Estonia want a more permanent basing of allied troops on their territory.

Sources at alliance headquarters in Brussels say military planners are furious that their hands have been tied by politicians in more cautious allied members.

Germany is key. Chancellor Angela Merkel is one of the few Western leaders to whom Putin listens.

But even though three German military officers are among members of an international monitoring mission taken hostage in eastern Ukraine and paraded by a pro-Moscow rebels as NATO spies, Berlin remains among the European capitals most opposed to stronger Western action.

The government in Berlin has criticized Schroeder's St. Petersburg shindig and pointed out that the former chancellor left active politics after his election defeat by Merkel in 2005.

However, German news media reported the event in the ornate Yusupov Palace was also attended by other senior Germans, including Philipp Missfelder, parliamentary foreign affairs spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union Party. Erwin Sellering, governor of the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was also reportedly present.

Sellering has been enthusiastically promoting business ties with Russia throughout the Ukraine crisis.

More from GlobalPost: Latest from Ukraine (LIVE BLOG)

Not everyone in Western Europe is happy about that.

As pro-Russian units stormed more government buildings in eastern Ukraine Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius threatened that the EU would introduce wider economic sanctions next week if Moscow does not move to de-escalate the crisis.

But he can expect resistance, and without concerted action, such threats are starting to look empty.

"We are speaking loudly... but carrying no stick," former Czech Defense Minister Alexandr Vondra told a security conference in Washington. "We have to respond with some strength, this is what these guys understand."
 

WASHINGTON — Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told MSNBC on Wednesday that Republicans should support raising the minimum wage.

"If you’re going to talk the talk about being for the middle class and the working person, if we have the minimum wage, it should be reasonably adjusted from time to time,” said Pawlenty, now the CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, a bank lobbying firm.

"For all the Republicans who come on and talk about, ‘we’re for the blue-collar worker, we’re for the working person,’ there are some basic things that we should be for. One of them is reasonable increases from time to time in the minimum wage."

But Pawlenty later told Politico he doesn't support a U.S. Senate bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, saying it goes "too far and too fast."

The Senate is set to vote on that bill on Wednesday, but since Senate Republicans remain opposed, Democrats aren't expected to secure the 60 votes needed to break a procedural challenge. (The Hill has a good story today looking at the months of back-and-forth between Senate Democrats and Republicans on the minimum wage.)

As Minnesota governor, Pawlenty struck a deal with DFLers in the Legislature to raise the state's minimum wage by $1, to $6.15 an hour, in 2005. Two years later, he vetoed a wage hike to $7.75 an hour.

This session, under Gov. Mark Dayton, Minnesota lawmakers increased the state minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2016.

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com.

“It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

The year is 1964 and President Johnson is talking not about the war in Vietnam, but about an “unconditional war on poverty in America.”

Today, that Southeast Asian conflict is long past, but the call to arms to fight poverty continues. Five decades later, critics say the war against poverty has failed, while others argue that government programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps have helped millions of families get by and staved off higher poverty levels during the Great Recession. Speakers will review and evaluate the War on Poverty at a conference Thursday in St. Paul called a “Minnesota Poverty Call to Action.” The event is hosted by Minnesota Community Action Partnership and is open to the public.

Have the lives of the poor in Minnesota improved since LBJ declared war on poverty? And how many still need help?

To help answer those questions, MinnPost asked state demographer Susan Brower to compare poverty numbers from 1960, the closest U.S. Census data collection to LBJ’s declaration of war, to Minnesota’s most recent statistics from 2010-2012.

“We see how far we’ve come,’’ said Brower after reviewing the data.

No question, there has been significant progress in reducing poverty in Minnesota. Across the state, the poverty rate overall is 11 percent — almost half what it was in 1960 at 21 percent. (The poverty level in the United States is 15 percent, down from 19 percent in 1960.)

Further, the Minnesota stats show poverty in a variety of demographic categories — from age to race to geographic location — is way down from 50 years ago. (The federal government defines poverty according to annual cash income and family size. For a family of four in 2014 the poverty level is $23,850.)

One of the biggest beneficiaries of five decades of government programs has been the 65-and-older group: poverty among older Minnesotans dropped from 39 percent to 8 percent.

Break the numbers down by race and ethnicity and you’ll see poverty among all persons of color today is still a startling 28 percent, but down from an unconscionable 43 percent in 1960, though there were many fewer persons of color living in Minnesota in 1960 than today. For whites in Minnesota today, the poverty level is 8 percent; in 1960, it was 21 percent.

Among various racial and ethnic categories, the results are more mixed. Poverty in Minnesota’s Asian community has declined, for example, but among non-Hispanic blacks in the state, that number has risen — from 31 percent in 1960 to 39 percent today.

“Part of the increase in poverty we see among African Americans or Blacks can be attributed to compositional changes within that group,” Brower explained in an email. “The African American/Black population in Minnesota has grown significantly, especially since 1990. Much of that growth can be attributed to immigrant refugees, many coming from East Africa where opportunities for schooling were few. We now see very high rates of poverty for many newer African-born populations. Over the same time, U.S.-born African Americans in Minnesota have had persistently high rates of poverty over the decades, and this is also a factor in the overall increase in poverty for this group.

“When we look at other racial groups, we see compositional and historical changes that have pushed the poverty rate in the other direction. Among Asian Minnesotans, for example, there has been a large increase in immigration from India. Indian immigrants tend to come to Minnesota already very highly educated, coming to the U.S. specifically to fill high-paying jobs. U.S.-born Asian refugee populations that have now been in Minnesota for generations have also been able to gain some economic foothold, which has slowed the rate of poverty for this group.”

Rural poverty

Poverty in Minnesota’s rural areas has also declined since the War on Poverty was declared. Some 27 percent of people in greater Minnesota lived in poverty in 1960, and today it’s dropped to 12 percent. (The poverty rate for the seven-country metro area has remained steady over the years: 10 percent in 1960 and 11 percent today.)

The dividing line between the well-off and the poor in the Twin Cities metro is largely along racial lines, but advocates for the poor say the dividing line in rural areas is increasingly age.

(Despite her best efforts, Brower said her office could only uncover the 65-and-older poverty rates in rural areas for the 2010-2012 period: Poverty among older Minnesotans in rural parts of the state is at 9 percent, compared to 7 percent of seniors living in the metro. “Our usual sources for historical census data don't contain this breakdown for 1960 at the county level,” she said.)

Officials who work with the poor in greater Minnesota see trouble ahead. “People often say the best cure for poverty is a job, but are you going to send Grandpa back to work? We’re aging at an accelerated rate,’’ said Bob Benes, who heads up the Lakes and Pines Community Action Council. The council serves Pine, Mille Lacs, Aitkin and Kanabec counties, which measure some of the highest poverty rates in the state.   

Benes said the spike this winter in the cost of propane gas used for home heating demonstrated just how vulnerable low-income seniors in his area were as they tried to pay regular bills and skyrocketing fuel costs.

“People were coming in to take out loans to fill their propane tanks, or worse, putting it on their credit cards and paying 18 percent [interest],” he said. (Because of the sharp rise, the state expanded its fuel assistance program this winter.)

Benes said older people, still struggling to recover from the Great Recession, are selling off property to survive.

Energy assistance and food support programs, access to health care, public transportation and wider Internet access are all important in the fight against poverty, he said.

Officials report poverty has also settled in the suburbs. In suburban Hennepin County there a rapidly growing need for help, said Scott Zemke, director of program operations for the Community Action Partnership of Suburban Hennepin. One example he pointed to is the rise in applications to the Energy Assistance Program in Hennepin County. At the height of the recession in 2008-2009, that number was 13,000; this year it jumped to 15,000.

Over the past five to 10 years, Zemke has seen suburban homeowners “aging in place’’ as they retire but living on much smaller incomes — Social Security and sometimes pensions — because retirement savings were wiped out by the recession.

The recession left others paying home mortgages on salaries 50 percent to 60 percent of they had been before the economic crisis, Zemke  said. “The recession has brought on a new wave of poverty,’’ he said.

Success stories

Despite continued pockets of high levels of poverty in Minnesota, the War on Poverty can claim many success stories in the state, like that of Liane Heupel, 68, who lives with husband, Ken, on a farm north of Ogilvie.

When we talked, Heupel painted a life story of poor times and good, starting in the 1980s, from trying unsuccessfully to scratch out a living from farming to achieving economic stability, all the while dealing with emotional problems in the family and her poor eyesight. Legally blind, Heupel uses special glasses and reads from a computer screen with enlarged type.

She considers anti-poverty programs a necessary stop-gap to help struggling people. “I’ve always viewed these things — for the years we didn’t have much to live on — as being something temporary, as something that people have access to when times are tough, but hopefully they can get past it and be self-supporting,’’ she said.

“We did not get the cash and the food stamps,’’ she said, though the Heupel family qualified and took advantage of Head Start programs for their three daughters. They qualified for government fuel assistance and weatherization programs, which were “a real life saver,’’ she said, but never sought food assistance.

Heupel eventually found a good job as an employment specialist for Kanabec County, where 13.1 percent of people now live below the federal poverty line.

Heupel, now retired and a board member of the Lakes and Pines Community Action Council, an anti-poverty and assistance agency, added: “We’re pretty comfortable now, but it’s been a long road.’’

And as state demographer Brower said, poverty numbers over the past 50 years — and life stories like Heupel's — show how far Minnesota's come in the war on poverty.

Creative Commons/edwin.11

A memorial in the Dachau concentration camp

"April is the cruelest month."

Those words by the poet T.S. Eliot could have been written about genocide. The anniversaries of six genocides occur in April, tragedies that span nearly a century and occurred in Europe, Asia, and Africa:

• April 3 – Darfur genocide
• April 5 – Anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia
• April 7 – Rwandan Genocide Remembrance Day
• April 17 – Anniversary of the Cambodian genocide
• April 24 – Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day
• April 27 – Holocaust Remembrance Day

Last year, the Minnesota House and Senate passed, nearly unanimously, a bill to designate every April as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.

The hearings in St. Paul were deeply moving. Bunkhean Chhun showed a beautiful photograph of his family that was taken in Cambodia before the genocide in the 1970s. His father had died when Bunkhean was very young but he had four siblings. He said, “There, in the picture, were my three brothers, my only sister, my mother, and I. All of them but me were killed.” Two million people perished in that tragedy.

Fred Amram talked about his 3-year-old cousin. She was killed in a gas chamber and her tiny body was turned into ashes in a crematorium in Auschwitz. Fred and his parents are the only survivors in his entire extended family; he has no other relatives. Six million Jews and millions of others were exterminated during the Holocaust.

Recognition and remembrance

At the hearing, I read the testimony of Zara Bezhanyan Tronnes, granddaughter of survivors of the genocide perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, when close to 2 million Armenians died. Zara wrote, “We want recognition and remembrance of an event that lives with us to this day — recognition because this is a defining event of our existence, and remembrance because the last victim of genocide is the truth. Please adopt a resolution to proclaim April as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.”

Gov. Mark Dayton signed the bill into law. Minnesota became the third state in the country, following California and Texas, to pass this important legislation.

Why does this legislation matter? This bill encourages educational, faith, civic, private, and public organizations throughout Minnesota to teach about genocide. Most critically, however, it enjoins us to consider steps to prevent genocide. 

This legislation follows recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute of Peace in 2008. The Task Force report — issued by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen — found that in order to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities, educating the public can help to protect individual rights and promote a culture of lawfulness to prevent future genocides.

Putting a face on the numbers

Two weeks ago was the 11th anniversary of the genocide in Darfur, the first genocide of this century, a tragedy still ongoing. Katie-Jay Scott and Gabriel Stauring, human-rights activists, visit refugee camps in Chad where hundreds of thousands of Darfuris have been living in limbo for a decade. Katie-Jay said, “Stalin once remarked, ‘One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.’ We are dedicated to putting a face to the numbers.”  They travel across the US to schools, universities, and communities, telling the stories from Darfur, stories of more than 400,000 people murdered and three million displaced.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, 100 days in 1994 when 800,000 people perished as the world stood by. Alice Musabende, orphaned during that genocide when her grandparents, parents, 12-year-old sister, and 9-year-old and 2-year-old brothers were killed, said, “Remember with us, not because you must feel guilty, as some often say – although some people at the UN probably should – but because we are a part of you and you are a part of us.”

Two years ago we marked the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege in modern history, which claimed 11,541 men, women, and children. We let this tragedy happen again in Europe, still blood-soaked from the Holocaust.

Creating political will

What can we do? First, we must acknowledge that no president has ever been voted out of office for failing to prevent genocide. The world’s leaders do not have the political will to stop it. In order to create political will, we need a powerful international movement like the one that advocated successfully for an end to slavery in the 19th century.

Ellen J. Kennedy

This requires a massive educational campaign – part of what Minnesota’s bill supports. See the World Without Genocide website for information and listings of events, including "Besa: Albanian Muslims who saved Jews during the Holocaust," a photography exhibit by Norman Gershman; see below for April 30 reception/film event details.

Second, we each must urge our leaders to act. We need international institutions that are strong enough to predict and prevent genocide. We need rapid-response forces for non-violent prevention; diplomatic, economic, and political intervention; and effective international courts for punishment. We need the private sector to cut off supply chains for armed groups and to invest in economic development and education at grass-roots levels, so that people have meaningful alternatives to violence. And we need to support the strengthening of civil society and the rule of law, promoting infrastructures for true democracy, not merely facilitating voting procedures that are sham elections in closed political systems. 

I am grateful to Minnesota’s elected officials for designating April as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. For those who perished, those who survived, and those who bear witness today, we, and our elected officials, must pledge to do better in the future than we have done in the past.

(BESA Exhibit and Film: A free gallery reception will be held at William Mitchell College of Law on Wednesday, April 30, from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., with a film ("Besa: The Promise") and talk from 7 to 9 ($10 general public, $5 students and seniors, free to Mitchell students). Open to the public; no reservations are necessary.)

Ellen J. Kennedy, Ph.D., is the executive director of World Without Genocide at William Mitchell College of Law.

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If you're interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, email Susan Albright at salbright@minnpost.com.)

It is appropriate, maybe, that the first headstone I come across in Memorial Pet Cemetery in Roseville on a ferociously rainy Sunday afternoon is one that reads, through a layer of mud: “With me through rain and snow and mailman.”

It’s been pouring for hours, but like a faithful pet or a terrorized mailman, I must make my own appointed rounds. Roseville’s Memorial Pet Cemetery is testament to the fact that people will pay any price, bear any burden or meet any hardship on behalf of their ever-faithful pets. It’d be crass to let some rain stop me from making my pilgrimage and paying my respects.

Memorial Pet Cemetery is the largest pet cemetery in the Twin Cities, and one of the oldest — it traces its history back to the 1920s, only a few decades after the first modern pet cemeteries were established in London and Paris. A Roseville veterinarian named Arnold Feist set aside some of his farmland to create the cemetery, and it was known as Feist Pet Cemetery until the Ramsey County Humane Society acquired the site in the early 1980s.

Like almost any cemetery in the core cities — certainly most of the cemeteries I’ve written about over the past two years — it once had a bucolic setting but since has been overtaken by 20th century suburbia. Highway 36, merely an unpaved gleam in a planner’s eye when the earliest inhabitants of the cemetery were reaching the ends of their 10- to 15-year lifespans in the 1920s, is now a roaring four-lane expressway that marks the southern border of the park. On this rainy afternoon, cars pass over the rain-soaked pavement with giant splashes.

Photo by Natalie Vestin

Despite the highway, the surrounding Roseville neighborhood is quiet and heavily residential, and the cemetery is very peaceful, and thoughtfully tended. Memorial Pet Cemetery, still owned by the Humane Society, holds occasional devotional and remembrance services, and many of the graves have been recently decorated. There are a handful of older headstones dating back to the 1920s and ’30s, but the vast majority of them are from the post-World War II era. The cemetery stopped accepting new interments in the early 2000s, so most of the headstones are from the middle and later years of the 20th century. 

Most of these dogs and cats are contemporaries of Lassie and Yukon King and Rin Tin Tin, and in reading the dates – 1953, 1955, 1961, 1974 – you imagine scenes in dens and backyards with lots of postwar kids, set in prosperous, leafy Twin Cities suburbs. That sense of postwar prosperity is very powerful here. People have been interring their pets with them or separately since the dawn of history, but the idea of cemeteries for regular people’s animal companions that are roughly on equal footing to those for humans is relatively new, and one that only became widespread in the last half of the previous century.

Devotion and adoration

To that end, Memorial Pet Cemetery doesn’t look much different from a human cemetery, in terms of the headstones, wreaths and funereal architecture. (There are some nice photos on Find a Grave.)

There are statues, both of domestic animals and of St. Francis, throughout. The headstones are made professionally, from handsome chunks of marble and granite. Many include what seem to be standard engravings of various breeds of animal available upon purchase. The same Chihuahua, eyes bulging and smiling broadly, turns up a number of times (at least four are named “Pepe”). There also are many instances of a devoted-looking retriever, a Yorkie’s head in profile, and a leonine cat. Most follow the standard headstone template: a name, sometimes the names of the owners, some dates (more on that in a moment), and a short epitaph.

Inspecting these epitaphs, you begin to see that people’s relationships with their pets are much different from those with their human relatives. The inscriptions on these headstones seem somehow more personal, more loving, more nakedly yearning and emotional than what you typically see on human headstones. There often are thoughtful and moving elegies on human headstones, but there often is restraint.

Photo by Natalie Vestin

Walking through the rows of graves at Memorial Pet Cemetery, you come across outpourings of tender devotion that you never would see expressed so freely with humans: “Faithful.” “Darling.” “Precious.” “Thank you for making us happy.” For a guide dog named Smokey: “Thank you for devoting your life to my welfare and safety.” Something about the relationship with a pet frees people to discuss their love and affection in a more unmediated, expressive way.

Many lingering questions

For all this expressiveness and great love, there also is uncertainty.

There are a lot of “?”s listed as the year of birth, as well as some educated guesses where the specifics weren’t known (“Fall 1959” ventures one). You start to understand how these animals came into their owners’ lives. An impressive many have specific dates of birth, which makes you think either the animals were well-bred, with records and certifications available, or perhaps they were part of the litter of another pet, and the owners marked the specific calendar day. But many of these pets don’t have dates of birth. If Laddie or Buddy or Freckles showed up on your doorstep, you could take them to the vet and make a guess as to their birth date, but it’s otherwise unknown.

The sadder corollary to this is that many graves don’t list dates of death. I come across a grave for Richard and Gaia, born 1955 and 1956 respectively. “Two gallant poodles,” exults the headstone. A photo of the pair is attached, but has faded and cracked into illegibility over the decades. Richard and Gaia’s parents are noted as a colonel and his wife, and immediately, I picture a post-war scene of a military man in full regalia, back from the war, driving a roadster around the suburban streets of Roseville or Richfield or Bloomington, his gallant poodles with their heads out the window, tongues wagging.

Photo by Natalie Vestin

But the scene gets sadder when Gaia is considered. Richard died in 1969 at the age of 14 – not bad for a poodle – but we don’t know when Gaia died. Gaia’s date of death is left blank. What happened to Gaia? Is she buried here? Did she outlive the colonel? Did the colonel and his wife bury her elsewhere, or did they forget Gaia entirely? Did they not want to pay for the second engraving? It’s hard to know.

Gaia is not the only pet without a date of death carved into the headstone. There are other phantoms. In my rain-soaked, chill-racked brain, I begin to consider the possibility that, hmm, maybe these pets are still alive, 40 and 50 years old. Maybe they’re a little worse for wear, but still doddering across the den to their food bowls as their masters look on and smile. But I know that’s just denial of the sad fact that pets’ lives are, in human terms, short. If you have a pet as a child, it’s almost guaranteed that the pet will die many, many years before you. Maybe it’s that fleetingness that drives people’s unvarnished affection for these companions in death.

Placeholders for eternity

The theology is fascinating, too. Crosses abound, as well as a smattering of Stars of David and Hebrew text. My friend Natalie, who’s walking the cemetery with me, notes that when her childhood pets died, her father would bury them in the backyard under makeshift crosses. The crosses didn’t necessarily serve a liturgical purpose, but rather stood as a gesture toward broader ideas about eternity and remembrance.

Photo by Natalie Vestin

The religious references here on the gravesites do the same – it’s difficult to know what the owners’ theological beliefs were in reference to their pets, but the inclusion of so much iconography indicates a spiritual yearning people feel in relation to their pets. Not a literal sense of "My dog accepts the teachings of Jesus Christ," but more a sense of "I will see my dog again someday." A cross if you’re Christian or a Star of David if you’re Jewish is perhaps the easiest way to telegraph that sentiment; a placeholder for eternity.

Photo by Natalie Vestin

Kooky the Boston Terrier

I leave you today with this image of a Boston terrier named Kooky that stuck with me in particular. Kooky was born September 11, 1941, and died November 21, 1952. His owners – Mr. and Mrs. P. Zuehlke and Mr. and Mrs. K. Spielman – commissioned a very lovely black-and-white image of Kooky, bedecked in a harness and looking very serene. My etymological dictionary places the modern definition of “kooky” as a synonym for “crazy” or “zany” in the late ’50s, so Kooky was clearly ahead of his time.

Kooky’s timeline is very interesting to contemplate. He (assuming he's a "he") has been dead for more than 60 years. The Zuehlkes and Spielmans may still be living, but if Kooky came into their lives in adulthood, it’s less likely. It may be that there are no living memories of Kooky, and if there are, it seems a stretch to think that the children of the Zuehlkes and Spielmans, who might have loved Kooky as children, come to visit him regularly in their 60s and 70s. But here he is, looking – in that Boston terrier way – both a little bit silly and very dignified. He might remind you of your dog, who’s been dead for 10 or 30 or 50 years. Here he is, little eyes bulging out, forever waiting expectantly for you to tell him he’s a good boy.

And he is. Good boy, Kooky.