Star Tribune
Antivaxxers test new round of losing election slogans
Blithely confident that Minnesota voters find chaos, cruelty and misinformation appealing, the antivaxxers assembled.
“It’s not a vaccine, it’s a death shot,” newly elected state Sen. Nathan Wesenberg,R-Little Falls, said of the COVID-19 vaccine. Dozens of people gathered with him in the Capitol Rotunda for the No Forced Vaccines rally nobody asked for this week.
Thursday’s rally leaned into the off-putting crackpottery that helped GOP candidates lose every statewide office and their majority in the Minnesota Senate in the last election.
“We should maybe start sending people to jail” for trying to save lives during a global pandemic that has already killed more than a million Americans, Wesenberg added. “Maybe we should start with [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz.”
Organized by an anti-vaccine group that isn’t getting any free ink from me, the Jan. 5 rally featured last year’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen, who likened vaccine refusal to cancer patients making their own end-of-life treatment decisions.
The focus of their fury was legislation floated in the state Senate last session — by the party now in the majority. The bill would have made it harder for parents to opt their children out of routine immunizations for polio, measles, whooping cough and other childhood killers based on personal beliefs.
“Unfortunately, there are those who want to make vaccines a condition of us living,” said newly elected state Sen. Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael.
It is true that still being alive is one of the major side effects of most vaccines. Just ask Gen. George Washington, who had the entire Continental Army inoculated against smallpox — saving lives like a true patriot.
Back at the rally, speakers called the pandemic the “scamdemic.” They speculated that maybe it was a vaccine, not an unlucky tackle, that stopped Damar Hamlin’s heart during that terrifying Buffalo Bills game.
The false claim that the COVID vaccine is killing athletes has circulated for years, ignoring all proof to the contrary. You may have heard that one from your angry cousin who won’t stop talking about the imaginary microchips in vaccines that he learned about on YouTube.
Nobody wanted to sit next to the bitter, conspiracy-spouting cousin at Thanksgiving dinner. Fewer and fewer Americans want to vote for the angry, conspiracy-spouting candidate on the ballot. The kind of candidates who would rather block their own party from taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives than admit that government actually has a job to do.
This year’s rally was much smaller and much less heavily armed than the hundreds who turned out for Minnesota’s Storm the Capitol rally on Jan. 6, 2020. No one was wearing Trump hats in the crowd this year.
What hasn’t changed is that lies won’t become truths if you repeat them.
“That isn’t to say we can prove anything,” Jensen, a doctor, told the crowd, immediately after suggesting that thousands of people probably dropped dead within hours of receiving a COVID shot.
New year. New hats. Same message the voters rejected the last time around.
DULUTH – The Minnesota and Wisconsin transportation departments will make upgrades to the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge in the summer of 2025, in preparation for the structure to become the premiere route between this city and Superior during reconstruction of the Blatnik Bridge.
Built in 1961, the Blatnik Bridge carries 33,000 vehicles per day along Interstate 535 and Hwy. 53. It will be entirely rebuilt, starting in 2027, with the help of $1 billion in federal funding announced earlier this year. MnDOT and WisDOT are splitting the remaining costs of the project, about $4 million each.
According to MnDOT, projects on the Bong Bridge will include spot painting, concrete surface repairs to the bridge abutments, concrete sealer on the deck, replacing rubber strip seal membranes on the main span’s joints and replacing light poles on the bridge and its points of entry. It’s expected to take two months, transportation officials said during a recent meeting at the Superior Public Library.
During this time there will be occasional lane closures, detours at the off-ramps, and for about three weeks the sidewalk path alongside the bridge will be closed.
The Bong Bridge, which crosses the St. Louis River, opened to traffic in 1985 and is the lesser-used of the two bridges. Officials said they want to keep maintenance to a minimum on the span during the Blatnik project, which is expected to take four years.
Red Wing will celebrate the grand opening of its first permanent set of pickleball courts next week with an “inaugural play” on the six courts at Colvill Park on the banks of the Mississippi, between a couple of marinas and next to the aquatic center.
Among the first to get to play on the new courts will be David Anderson, who brought pickleball to the local YMCA in 2008, before the nationwide pickleball craze took hold, and Denny Yecke, at 92 the oldest pickleball player in Red Wing.
The inaugural play begins at 11 a.m. Tuesday, with a rain date of the next day. Afterward will be food and celebration at the Colvill Park Courtyard building.
Tim Sletten, the city’s former police chief, discovered America’s fastest-growing sport a decade ago after he retired. With fellow members of the Red Wing Pickleball Group, he’d play indoors at the local YMCA or outdoors at a local school, on courts made for other sports. But they didn’t have a permanent place, so they approached the city about building one.
When a city feasibility study came up with a high cost, about $350,000, Sletten’s group got together to raise money.
The courts are even opening ahead of schedule, originally set for 2025.
REDWOOD FALLS, MINN. – A truck crashing into a school bus left nine with minor injuries Wednesday morning in rural Redwood County, a statement from the Redwood County Sheriff’s office said.
The bus driver, serving the Wabasso Public School District, failed to yield when entering the intersection of County Road 7 and 280th Street, the statement said.
Deputies received word of the crash around 8:15 a.m. and identified the bus driver as Edward Aslesen, 72, of Milroy.
The nine injured passengers on the bus were transported to local hospitals, the statement said.
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