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Bailout balk BS (or "You can’t scare me, I’m sticking with the union")
Think what you will about the auto industry bailout. There are two main perspectives: a bailout would help stabilize the industry and economy OR it won’t and is just wasteful. That’s a perfectly good debate and I’m not sure I’ve picked a side yet. But if the auto industry bailout indeed failed yesterday because the…
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Google sees all, but not Minnesota’s Iron Range
This is a map of the areas currently seen on Google Streetview after the company recently doubled its U.S. coverage area. These are the areas you can zoom in on to see photographs at street level, a service simultaneously heralded as “cool” by some and lamented as a “crushing blow to privacy” by others. Notice…
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I’m married to a famous cheapskate
Business North ran this Beth Bily feature story in its November/December edition about my wife Christina Brown, the Northern Cheapskate. Her blog is much more successful than mine. There is a huge audience of readers looking to save money using the internet. The Northern Cheapskate has crafted a niche as someone who finds good deals…
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An opportunity for the Iron Range?
As I tour the Iron Range for my new book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” one of the topics audiences and I keep revisiting is the boundary of the Iron Range. Where does it end and where does it begin? I argue in the book that Iron Ranger status is part genealogical and…
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Moving pictures: My first vLog goes national
I wrote last month about my invitation to join PurpleStates, a public policy project that is collecting viewpoints and reports about the national economy and sharing them in short video segments. They found a blogger from each of the 50 states and are running their vLogs over a 50-day period. I was selected as Minnesota’s…
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Blagojevich: Despite name, not an Iron Ranger
So maybe you’re wondering if disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is a Serbian or a Croatian. He’s a Serbian. You know how I know? A reliable source called me to tell me that “Croatians don’t get mixed up in this sort of thing.” I love living on Minnesota’s Iron Range. Serbs and Croats are still…
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New Range manufacturing company nearly ready to open
Lee Bloomquist with the Iron Range Resources agency blog “RangeViews” reports on a new manufacturing company in Nashwauk called Midwest Manufacturing and Mechanical, Inc. The company is creating 10 jobs for now, up to 27 if their plans are successful. Related posts: No related posts.
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More on Highway 169
The Duluth News Tribune reports on a public meeting regarding proposed improvements to eastern edge of Highway 169 between Tower and Ely. This isn’t the West Range part of that road that I was referring to earlier today, but is also an important and currently unsafe part of the highway that needs additional passing capacity.…
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Rural teachers rally on the Range
Early childhood and K-12 teachers have it tough in a lot of places, but none more than in the St. Louis County schools District 2142. Wages have been stagnant for years while class sizes have swelled and teacher assignments often involve driving between two distant rural schools for limited compensation. The Mesabi Daily News reports…
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Cliffs to cut taconite production by 40 percent in 2009
The Mesabi Daily News reports that Cliffs Natural Resources, owner and operator of six North American taconite mines including three on the Iron Range, is reducing production by almost 40 percent in 2009. This will impact jobs, hiring and taconite production taxes that help fund northern Minnesota schools, projects and services over the next three…
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Pave 169! Say what? Pave 169!
You have to understand something about how my political identity was formed. Sure, my upbringing on the labor bastion of the Iron Range mattered, as did my experiences in the local DFL organization as a teenager and the vociferous reading I did back then. Being the son of a liberal mother and libertarian father also…
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Bad economy means tough road for environmental groups up north
The Mesabi Daily News reports that the state budget deficit and bad economy will likely stifle any potential success of environmental groups opposing copper/nickel mining on the East Range. Related posts: No related posts.
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What we is and what we isn’t
One of my favorite things about Iron Range culture is my people’s willful obliviousness to how we’re perceived by outsiders. Most just don’t care. The ones that do operate off entirely different social cues, the same cues held by nerdy teenagers who think they’re cool. On a good day I straddle the line between these…
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Iron Rangers know recession is a time for defiance
This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Dec. 7, 2008 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Iron Rangers know recession is a time for defianceBy Aaron J. Brown These days I think more about the little houses I see along the train tracks at the edges of our Iron Range towns. Every time a…
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Thank you, Virginia
I’m back from today’s “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” book signing at Woodward’s in Virginia, Minn. I didn’t know what to expect today and was pleasantly surprised. We had a couple dozen folks show up for signed books and plenty of pre-orders to sign as well. I left a healthy stock of signed…