OPINION | Israel’s Rosa Parks

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Many Americans know about Rosa Parks, who became the “mother of the modern-day civil rights movement,” when she refused to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, on Dec. 1, 1955. Parks’ arrest sparked the 13-month Montgomery bus boycott, which led to the Supreme Court ruling that racially segregated public buses are illegal. The president of the Montgomery Improvement Association was a Christian minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., who galvanized the nonviolent movement to dismantle Jim Crow, the system of American apartheid in the South.Now Israel has a “Rosa Parks” — her name is Yocheved Horowitz, and she belongs to the ultra-Orthodox Gur community in Ashdod. In December, according to a report by Tamar Rotem in Haaretz, Horowitz boarded an Egged bus in her religious enclave in Ashdod, and took a seat in the second row. Continue Reading

OPINION | Vegas on Hennepin

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Politicians, business interests and labor unions are applying a full-court press to build a new stadium for the Vikings (to mix sports metaphors). Team owners Zygi and Mark Wilf favor the old arsenal site in Arden Hills, while Minneapolis boosters – including Mayor R.T. Rybak and the Minneapolis Downtown Council – are dangling sales tax money to lure the Purple People Eaters to one of three proposed sites in the Mill City.Of course, the Vikes have fallen on hard times of late (a dismal 2-9 on the season, as The Circle goes to press); but this is Political Matters, not the Sports Report.Over at the Capitol, two Senate committees held a joint hearing Nov. 29 to hear testimony on proposed stadium sites. There is no bill in the hopper; and there is no funding mechanism for a new stadium (beyond the Wilfs’ offer to put up $425 million, with the remaining $600 million coming from somewhere).A faction in the Legislature, comprised of both Republicans and DFLers, is adamant that no public money be used to build a football stadium; at the same time, a knowledgeable source in St. Paul told me that the building trades unions and the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce are flexing their muscles in support of a new home for the Vikings.The clamor for a football stadium inevitably has breathed life into proposals to expand state- sanctioned gambling. Continue Reading