The Supreme Court gave the EPA an important, but fairly easy, job in 2007. The high court issued a ruling that required the federal agency to formally state whether greenhouse gases were pollutants representing a danger to health or the environment.

EPA complied, shipping its findings to the White House via electronic mail. It was then, according to the New York Times, that the Bush administration chose peculiar course of action: If we don't open the e-mail, White House officials reasoned, then the response never really happened, and we won't be bound to act on its findings. So they simply let the correspondence languish, forever highlighted, in the "New Mail" category.

That's right. In defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, the Bushies ran out the clock on their administration so they wouldn't have to do anything about fuel efficiency, pollution, and climate change. This is a strategy I refer to as "The Alf Defense."

As we reported this spring, Minneapolis is moving, if a bit fitfully, toward instant runoff voting in municipal races.

It's shaping up differently in St. Paul. Organizers there have gotten enough signatures to put IRV on the ballot in November, but the City Council, buoyed by City Attorney John Choi's warning that IRV doesn't jibe with the state constitution, is considering the drastic step of keeping it off the ballot altogether.

Today's Star Tribune has an editorial calling for the City Council to let the voters decide.

"City councils are not courts," the Strib opines. "It isn't the role of a council to settle disputes over constitutionality."

It was Pride Festival weekend, and we have two slideshows with 41 images from the bevy of events. Don't miss the parade images especially.

From one of those happenings: "If my 13–year–old self had known that I would be attending an En Vogue concert 16 years later, my tween self would have been impressed," writes Jessica Armbruster. If you had told my tween self that, more than a decade-and-a-half on, we'd be running a slideshow and review of the group, I would have asked you how President Springsteen could allow such a thing.

Rudolph's nose is about to get a lot redder: scientists say that the North Pole could briefly lose all its ice this summer. According to senior researcher Mark Serreze from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, via CNN:

Since I rarely get sick, it's easy to forget how miserable the condition can be. I've got as much energy as a sloth on a Nyquil binge, and yesterday I was so out of it I linked to a Flash animation of David Hasselhoff in a speedo.

What a time to get the pestilence, too, with summer in full swing and the month in photos showing me what I'm missing.

Plenty of newsworthy phenomena to keep the mind occupied. According to Monocle Magazine, Minneapolis is one of the 20 most livable cities in the world. Praise from something called "Monocle" (it's a British magazine, of course) conjures up images of being praised by the guy from Monopoly, or possibly Mr. Peanut.

Minneapolis, part of what London's Monocle magazine calls "a rustbelt revival," ranks as the 19th most livable city in the world.

That's according to The Monocle Global Quality of Life Survey, which has a trailer (yes, apparently in the UK, print features have video trailers. In it, over a frenetic soundtrack, the narrator explains:

For the past twelve months the editors of Monocle have been tracking the performance of urban centers around the world, measuring them on the merits of livability. From communication links to crime, from hours of sunshine to liquor licensing hours, we've been reshuffling our deck to see who comes out on top.

One other American city made the list: Honolulu (12th place). At the top of the list: Copenhagen, Munich, and Tokyo. Being a resident of the 19th most livable city in the world, however, won't get you access to Monocle's article. Subscribers only, deadbeat.

I read the local news from the 1930s so you don't have to.

In August 1934, Minnesota Governor Floyd Bjerstjerne Olson had been dealing with a bitter and violent feud between Twin Cities trucking companies and organized labor. There were strikes in Minneapolis. The police, in the pocket of the trucking bosses, were shooting at striking truckers and sympathetic protesters. The Governor had already tried martial law and now he was trying something new. Here, in all its eye-popping glory, is how Time Magazine covered the story on August 13, 1934:

Last week, Governor Floyd Bjerstjerne Olson of Minnesota, his patience exhausted, turned up Minneapolis' skirt and spanked her because she stubbornly refused to settle her three-week-old truck drivers' strike. His authority to spank grew out of his declaration of martial law for the city a fortnight ago. The spanking took the form of an order sweeping from her streets all trucks except those bearing milk, ice, bread, fuel, newspapers, cinema films and necessities of life. Wails and smiles greeted his order.

This is how Time played it: A skirt lifted, a bottom spanked, then wails and smiles. Incredible. My oh my, how the sensibilities of our nation's journalists have changed. Or not.

For all you quantum physics people out there, ponder this: Jonathan Kaminsky recaps this week's print Blotter. Now I'm recapping Kaminsky's blog post recapping print Blotter.

Soon, all of this will collapse on itself in a kind of Hasselhoffian recursion.

From Mindy's Tom Elko comes a shocking-but-not-surprising story about how the federal Department of Justice excluded people from high-level jobs if they belonged to conservation groups, pro-choice groups or progressive legal societies.

Elko writes that "influence came in the form of a 'screening committee' made up of political appointees who would 'deselect' candidates based on political affiliation, organization membership and ideology."