Minneapolis / St. Paul News Blog

​The National Institute of Family and the Media, a Minneapolis-based collection of busybodies obsessed with video game violence, has decided to shut its doors. The group's founder, psychologist David Walsh, said the decision was made in light of "the current challenging economic environment." 

Founded in 1996, the institute took an adversarial approach to the video game industry, pushing for more stringent regulations on the sale of video games to minors from the get-go. The group handed out annual "report cards," invariably piss-poor, assessing Entertainment Software Rating Board's governing of the industry.

 

Nick Coleman on twitpic

Jesus closes the deal in this picture hung at bank headquarters.

​Riverview Community Bank billed itself as God's favored financial institution.

It attracted national attention for advocating prayer in the workplace. Among the decorations in its Otsego headquarters was this picture of Jesus closing a business deal. You can trust Jesus with your money, right?

One of the bank's founders, Chuck Ripka, once boasted to the Star Tribune that God had actually guaranteed success for investors. "Chuck, if you pastor the bank, I'll take care of the bottom line," he claimed God said.

Now federal regulators have shut it down.

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"Brother, can you spare a mansion?"

​From "Nobody walks" to "Can I crash on your couch?"

The plight of Denny Hecker hit a new low today when a judge  took away his lakefront home, valued at more than $7.8 million.

The fallen auto magnate tried to claim the homestead exemption, which only covers houses worth up to $330,000

​In coming up with the "Ten Best Cities to Earn a Living," Forbes.com placed Minneapolis at number three. Wait. What's that? You're underpaid/unemployed and therefore having a tough time taking consolation in a methodologically ambiguous, arbitrary list? Well, it could be worse. 

U.S. News and World Report today listed "10 Best Cities to Look for Creative Jobs" on its career-themed blog. Our City of Lakes made the cut.

Now, everybody walks.

tcsidewalks provides a ground zero view of Denny Hecker's spectacular collapse, with a photographic tour of one of his abandoned car lots.

If you were looking for a place to contemplate the ruination of our economy, these vast stretches of empty asphault, posed under a network of American flags billowing in a waning breeze, would be a great place to start.

The good news is that Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Gary Stern thinks a recovery is only a few months away. The bad news: You still might not get a job.

Stern told PBS earlier this week that there's a "reasonable possibility" that this would be a jobless recovery.

"The job market recovery is likely to take longer than a resumption of economic growth for at least a couple of reasons," Gary Stern, president of the Minneapolis Fed, said in an interview on PBS' Nightly Business Report.

"I would think that there's a reasonable probability" of a jobless recovery, Stern added.

At a time of record joblessness and a struggling economy, state officials are putting their efforts where they will do the least good: toward banning their citizens from accessing online gambling websites.

According to this Yahoo Finance story, which was prominently linked on the Drudge Report yesterday evening, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety is trying a "novel" technique -- using a federal law that restricts the use of phone lines for wagering.

And by "novel," we mean "sure to fail."

Image courtesy of TheTruthAbout... on Flickr
A state legislator says letting Minnesota farmers grow industrial hemp --in other words, the non-ingestible variety -- could pad their bottom lines.

Rep. Phyllis Kahn (DFL-West Nicollett Island) has introduced a bill to make industrial hemp legal in Minnesota. The bill is set for a hearing on Monday.

Industrial hemp looks completely different from the kind grown under the bed, according to Kahn. "The best way you could stop any outdoor growing of the drug cannabis is have everybody growing the hemp cannabis," Kahn says.

The economy sucks, people are losing their jobs, and Minnesota counties are calculating homeowner taxes on prices the homes are no longer worth. Is this just a scam to plug holes in the state budget?

Minnesota counties are prepared for such a protest that they've extended the deadline to pay homeowner tax bills by four weeks, according to a Sunday story in the Star Tribune.

Image courtesy of James Jordan on Flickr

Minneapolis got $12.4 million, St. Paul $8.9 million, Hennepin County $4.9 million to snap up and redevelop foreclosed properties in areas decimated by the economy.

The money came from the federal government's Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The grant was awarded last fall; the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency decided who got the money and announced its decision yesterday. The agency spread the wealth among zip codes and counties that had the greatest need.

Photo courtesy Neonsign.com

You'll be seeing a lot of this around town.

CNBC.com has a slideshow of the 10 cities with the highest home vacancy rates, and Minneapolis comes in tied for No. 10.

10(tie) Minneapolis, MN: 4.0% (Source: U.S. Census Bureau* Based on Homeowner Vacancy Rates for the 75 Largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas for the Fourth Quarter of 2008) Metro area includes: Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington

Minneapolis may be getting economic stimulus money, but that's not going to save everyone's job. Stimulus, shhhttiimulus -- R. T. Rybak's cutting 33 spots.

Minneapolis's mayor announced the cuts this afternoon, according to Minnesota Public Radio. Here's more from our favorite station:

Minneapolis has lost $13 million for the 2009 budget year, because of a reduction in state aid.

In all, 59 city positions are eliminated, but 26 of those are now vacant. No jobs with the police are involved, but six empty firefighter positions will not be filled. Rybak proposes using one-time money from the federal Recovery and Reinvestment Act to pay for 76 positions in the police department, including 57 sworn officer positions which would have otherwise been cut.

Image courtesy of James Jordan on Flickr
The Minnesota Home Ownership Center says people at risk of losing their homes should act NOW if they want some help from the government.

President Barack Obama announced $75 billion to bailout homeowners facing foreclosure as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus. More details won't be available until March 4, though the administration does have a shockingly non-clunky Web site about the overall plan -- www.financialstability.gov.

But local nonprofits are urging people who need the money to go for it -- NOW.

Photo courtesy of James Jordan on Flickr

The economic stimulus package could help you keep your house ... or maybe the money will go to the guy down the street.

Today President Barack Obama is unveiling details of the $787 billion stimulus package in Arizona, a state that has been plagued with foreclosures. So far the bailout money has gone primarily to Wall Street, but now some of it looks headed for Main Street.

Confused? Local resources can help. If you're facing foreclosure, you might contact Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity. They have a Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention program -- and it's free.

Oh, that Bernie Madoff.

If you thought the beady-eyed huckster's pathological swindling was confined to Manhattan, Hollywood, and Palm Beach, you're unfortunately mistaken. The Twin Cities, particularly the west suburbs, were among the hardest hit.

Circuit City today asked a court's approval to pull the plug on the company's 567 remaining stores. Prepare for Best Buy world domination.

The state budget is nearly $5 billion-with-a-B in the hole. So today they unveiled a Web site asking citizens for their input.

"In order to create a balanced budget for the next two years, we will need to consider all ideas and be creative in finding solutions," reads the site. "All Minnesotans will need to be a part of the decision-making process."

Not many people have weighed in yet, so we thought we'd break the ice. Here are our humble suggestions in no particular order:

When the University of Minnesota's dining centers went trayless, they touted the environmental savings the change instilled at such a large university. The U of M serves 55,000 meals a week and each tray required half a gallon of water to wash, says University Dining Services Associate Director Karen DeVet. Not to mention the extra soap and energy to keep the water steamy hot.