Gifts for People You Hate, 2022

Posted on December 11, 2022 by naomikritzer

I think I started this on Black Friday (“As I type this, the annual obligatory shopping season has begun” was originally the first sentence) but of course I didn’t actually get it done, so HELLO FROM WELL INTO THE ANNUAL OBLIGATORY SHOPPING SEASON. Sorry about the procrastinating.

If you’re lucky, you don’t need this gift guide, because you’re only shopping for people you actually like, people you sincerely want to make happy with your gift. Stuck for what to get? There are gift idea articles all over the Internet for people looking for good ideas. My friends, that is not what I am providing here today! THIS shopping guide is different. THIS is a guide for all the people who are grudgingly buying an obligatory and hopefully inexpensive gift for someone they can’t stand. Given how popular this guide is, apparently it fills a need! And I live to serve.

I will note: I myself am lucky. I do not buy gifts for anyone I don’t like — although I’ve definitely given bad gifts on occasion out of clueless good intentions. For example, one time back in the late 1990s, I bought a Siberian husky angel ornament for my mother-in-law. (My in-laws trained and raced sled dogs.) My mother-in-law gave that ornament a deeply skeptical look and said “I’ve never met a husky who deserved that halo.” I mean. I tried. I thought, “huskies, oh, she likes husky stuff!” and that sort of well-intended swing-and-miss is sufficiently common that you can use it as camouflage for your own gift-wrapped calculated passive-aggressive gesture. I also do not scrutinize gifts I receive for hints that the person secretly hates me. (In general, I assume that everyone likes me, unless they block me on Twitter, and then I assume that I got caught in a blockchain because who would block me, I am delightful.)

On to the gifts!

Shall We Play A Game?

Giving games can be hazardous if you’re celebrating together. If you give a bad game in-person, especially on a long December day without a lot else going on, you run the risk of being roped in to playing it. So choose wisely.

If you’d like a game that’s fun to play (in case you’re roped in) but with a subtle “there’s a reason I picked this game for you” vibe, you could gift Guillotine (in which various figures from the French Revolution are sent to the guillotine) or Give Me the Brain (in which zombies attempt to fill fast food orders). (Both of these are good games, just to be clear: the passive-aggressiveness potential there is mainly in the titles.)

On the other hand, if you are absolutely sure you are not at any risk of getting stuck playing a round, there’s this “what if Hot Potato, but the potato gives you an electrical shock?” game: Lightning Reaction.

The Opposite of Fun

As a podcast listener, for a while I was constantly hearing ads for an electric toothbrush with the suggestion that an electric toothbrush would be a terrific gift. Electric toothbrushes are in fact the perfect passive-aggressive gift: it suggests that the person’s dental hygiene probably needs work, and let’s face it, tooth brushing is kind of the opposite of fun. (I brush my teeth every day — I feel like I need to be clear about this given the state of Hygiene Discourse on Twitter — and I in fact use an electric toothbrush. I bought it for myself, though, and I’m not going to pretend that it somehow made brushing my teeth fun.) If you do gift someone an electric toothbrush, the one that advertises on podcasts apparently has poor quality control and doesn’t work very well, and this one is cheap and breaks quickly. (Also, the weirder the off-brand, the harder it will be for people to get the replacement brush-heads.)

Anyway, if you want to go for something even less fun than a toothbrush here’s a toothbrush sanitizer, which has the added bonus of giving them a brand new thing to worry about.

Other “for the person who has everything!” completely unfun gadgetry: a sweater de-piller (per reviews, this actually works pretty well), a magnetic wristband that’s supposed to hold screws but doesn’t work, and for people in northern climates, a large, bulky, completely nonfunctional electric windshield scraper. If you want a cheaper dysfunctional windshield scraper here’s a heated one that has a review from someone saying they had better results using a spatula.

Terrible Kitchen Gadgets

I have been cooking for a really long time at this point so let me start with a short discussion of what makes something a good kitchen gadget. A good kitchen gadget needs to make some job easier. Ideally, it should make a frequent job easier. It needs to be comfortable to use and easy to clean. There should be a way to store it conveniently and safely. I’m not unalterably opposed to a cutesy design, but nearly everything I’ve ever tried that was cutesy was also much harder to use, clean, and/or store than the non-cutesy version.

But cutesy kitchen gadgets are, well, cute. And thus absolutely perfect bad gifts because the recipient will feel bad about getting rid of it.

For example, here’s a box grater that’s shaped like an adorable bear. Non-cute box graters have a handle on the top so you can hold down the grater while you’re using it. This one does not have that feature. Alternately, a pizza cutter that’s shaped like a circular saw! This is a little less frustrating to use, but you have to take it completely apart to get it clean and there’s no safe way to store it. (Pizza cutters frequently have that problem, but this one is also shaped in a way that makes it super awkward to put in a drawer.) From the same company that makes the bear grater, here’s a Vampire-shaped garlic press (this doesn’t look like it would actually be that much more annoying than any other garlic press — they’re basically all annoying) and a Ninja-shaped cutting board that holds a knife (so you can’t readily stash it with your other cutting boards).

If you’re Christmas shopping for a cooking enthusiast who’s less than a foot tall, these miniature (yet usably sharp) kitchen knives will be a terrific choice! … they’re cute and completely pointless for everyone else. (I mean, yes, in theory someone could use them as letter openers. No one will actually do that more than once: they will grab something larger and easier to handle.) For an even more useless item, the same people also make a tiny folding knife. I’m not sure how you unfold it but I’m guessing maybe you use the same tool you use to pop out your cell phone’s SIM card, if you can find it.

Books and Book-Related Novelties

Books are, as a general rule, excellent gifts, but they’re much better gifts if you choose them with the person’s interests in mind. For example, Meg Elison’s Number One Fan is a genuinely good gift for anyone who likes thrillers and doesn’t mind some body horror (I read it in two sittings, after tearing myself away at 1 a.m. because I really needed some sleep) but it’s also the perfect gift for your misogynistic brother-in-law who doesn’t need to know anything beyond “it’s like Steven King’s Misery in the era of social media!” H. Clarke’s books (Scapegracers and Scratch Daughters) would both be a genuinely excellent gift for someone who likes queer, witchy YA fantasy about teenage girls and a passive-aggressive gift for anyone who dislikes queerness, witches, or teenage girls. If you know anyone from the “we’ll just all move to Mars with Elon Musk!” school of global warming solutions, Ruthanna Emrys’s Half-Built Garden would be a highly personalized “get it together, bucko” message (but it’s also a good gift for people who are interested in hopeful science fiction and plausible utopias.)

There are also some interesting book-related novelties you could give someone headaches with. Like bookends. The thing about a bookend is, if you’re storing your books on bookcases, a bookend is only useful if you don’t have enough books to fully fill a shelf — which is a situation that most people I know handle by buying more books. A bookend masquerades as something useful, but is only going to get in the way.

You can gift one that looks like two halves of a cute vintage bicycle and according to the reviews, is too light to actually hold up books — so it’s also not useful for the person who’s storing their books on open shelves rather than a bookcase and actually needs an effective bookend to keep them on the shelf. This one incorporates a bud vase, because sure, you definitely want to keep a little test tube of water right next to your books. Here’s a set of oversized elephants that again, according to reviewers, will still slide to the side if you try to use it to hold books up that don’t want to stand on their own. Or maybe you’d like some slightly creepy disembodied hands!

If you truly want something they will have to find a spot for, there’s this one:

A silhouette of Superman appears to be flying and pushing against a stack of books to keep them from falling over. The books are leaning slightly to the side.

….which works its magic using a slanted bookend you slide into a book, and magnets. (The Amazon page has a short video that shows you how it works. Once again, it’s too light to hold up most books, but it’s solidly in the category of “for the right person, actually awesome?” so gift wisely.)

For other not-terribly-functional gifts for readers there are all sorts of elaborate bookmarks, including “looks like jewelry, is not actually long enough to stay in the spot in the book“; “a cute bookworm that is excessively fussy to put in place“; and “looks pretty nifty displayed on a shelf, super annoying as a functional bookmark.” You could also gift them a book light for reading in bed that has to be moved with every page flip and according to reviews gets scratched if you breathe on it.

What You Need is a Hobby!

Part of why it took me so long to write this piece this year is that I got a little hung up on this one. Apparently one path to de-radicalizing family members lost down a rabbit hole of horror that occasionally works is to find them a better hobby. So I started thinking, maybe I should suggest good hobby kits for people? Which turned into a lot of unnecessary pressure because as it happens, I do not know what sort of hobby your aunt might actually find absorbing enough to pursue, and also, “if I just pick the right hobby for my aunt, maybe it will restore her to the person I used to know” is a lot of pressure to pack into a holiday gift. Anyway: hobbies are actually great, but these kits are not.

Gardening! These tools look fairly terrible, a bunch of them are really not useful, and they come in a case. You don’t actually want a case for garden tools; you want a basket or something. The case means you’ll have to clean them carefully after each use just to put them away. Pair this gift with a bunch of seeds that would have to be started indoors to be useful (for example, tomatoes if they live in Minnesota.)
Latch hook! Remember latch hook? If you were a kid in the 1980s you probably remember latch hook. This kit is tiny, so they might actually finish it (unlike 99% of latch hook kits sold in the 1980s) but it also just does not look very good.
Diamond Painting! This is a craft that involves painstakingly sticking down lots of tiny sparkly beads. The people who like it say it’s relaxing. This kit has a very boring picture that doesn’t really showcase the sparkly.
Birdwatching! Here we have a pair of absolutely terrible binoculars. Pair it with a bird identification book for the wrong part of the country. This series is fantastic. (I mean, it’s genuinely fantastic. But it’s also regional, so you could get someone the wrong region. “I didn’t see one for Michigan, so I bought you the one for Minnesota since both states are in the midwest.”)

So Horrifying it’s Arguably Awesome: Clothing

Alas, my friends, I procrastinated on this so much that the sweatshirt on which Jesus is ministering to a bunch of cats in heaven is now not going to arrive in time if anyone orders it.

A hooded sweatshirt with a photorealistic image of a smiling Jesus crouching down and playing with a bunch of kitties.

Fortunately, you can still get a t-shirt of cats doing the Titanic pose as they pop out of a space nebula, “Three Wolf Moon” but with cats (who are howling, I guess?), sweatpants covered in extremely alarmed looking cats, and a sweatshirt with a brightly colored glow-in-the-dark cat peering out of it. Those would all arrive by Christmas.

So Horrifying it’s Arguably Awesome: Home Decorating

To start with, I have for you (or someone who deserves it, for whatever reason) a solar-powered multicolor light up yard peacock. Also a less flashy (it’s not as colorful) but still somehow horrifying solar powered light-up squirrel. Or a very colorful solar-powered rose garden.

This probably happened a while ago and I just failed to notice, but we crossed some threshold with solar power where they can just make things light up that did not used to light up at all. Like wind chimes, available in both light-up hummingbirds and light-up cardinals. (Wind chimes are one of those things a lot of people hate anyway. Random tinkling noises are pleasant to some people, super grating to others.)

For some indoorsy items, here’s a cute little tabletop fountain with a motor that within a month or two will make a grinding noise that drowns out the soothing sound of trickling water. Alternately, remember the joys of “some assembly required” children’s toys? Here’s a lamp that comes as a “puzzle” (but you can plausibly claim it just looked like a lamp on its Amazon page.) Finally, here is a novelty computer mouse that looks like a car. I bet it is a lot more annoying to use than the boring sort of computer mouse.

Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts

I was thinking a few weeks ago about how symbolic animal adoptions tend to focus on cute animals with wholesome reputations and wondered if there were any insect-focused zoos that might offer virtual adoptions of bugs. A google search for “insect zoo” quickly turned up the St. Louis Zoo’s Insectarium. I got all excited, checked out the website – you can, of course, adopt any animal at the zoo – went looking for a list of the insects at the Insectarium and turned up nothing.

No problem, I thought, I will simply send an e-mail!

In retrospect, I think my mistake was in providing context (including a link to last year’s gift guide) rather than just asking for a list, because no one has replied to my e-mail even though I was very very clear that what I wished to do was send them donors. (I mean, to be fair to them: it’s also possible that the person who would normally have replied to my e-mail is out with Long COVID. But I sort of suspect that’s not it.)

Anyway: I’m going to direct you this year to the Minnesota Zoo, which allows you to adopt any animal at the zoo and has hissing cockroaches, although it does not list them on its page of animals. If a cockroach (even a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach) would be just a little bit too on the nose, I’ll note that they also have wolverines (which have cool associations thanks to sports teams and Red Dawn but are in fact stinky and mean); trumpeter swans (loud, decorative assholes); and sea dragons (like their less-badass-sounding cousins the sea horses, the males are the ones who get pregnant). Oh, and fruit bats. I think fruit bats are adorable but mileage definitely varies on that. You can do a virtual adoption of any animal at the zoo.

For years, my suggested fallback charitable option was charitable gifts through Oxfam Unwrapped, which let you give someone crabs, worms, or *cough* manure. Imagine my dismay when I went to check on the links and discovered that the entire Oxfam Unwrapped program has been discontinued.

“Have them give malaria nets,” my kid suggested. “If you give someone a malaria net and say ‘this made me think of you,’ and they weren’t already interested in malaria prevention, there is basically no way to interpret this that isn’t insulting. Are you saying they remind you of mosquitoes? Of malaria? Either one is bad.” A friend suggested the Biogas Stoves from Heifer Project (or shares of them), since that’s symbolically representing coal or possibly suggesting “you are simultaneously full of both hot air, and burning animal feces.” One of my personal favorite charities is the International Medical Corps, which in fact has a gift catalog but most of their gifts are just nice things that people need and don’t have any particular double meaning like “crabs,” alas. (Maybe I should write in and suggest they offer some options like that for next year.)

Have You Considered Giving Someone My Books?

I had a book come out last year — Chaos on CatNet, the sequel to Catfishing on CatNet. I also have a short story collection called Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories, and I had a short story appear this year in an anthology called The Reinvented Heart.

You can usually find signed copies of my books from Dreamhaven Books or Uncle Hugo’s, both of which do mail order. When Amal El-Mohtar tweeted about Catfishing on CatNet she said, “Do you know a queer teen? Are you a queer teen? Are you an adult who misses an internet that felt kinder & purer? Did you love the Hugo-winning short story ‘Cat Pictures Please’? PLEASE do your heart the gift of acquiring & reading this beautiful book.”

So if you want a good gift you could totally give someone a copy of my book. And just from Amal’s description you can probably figure out exactly which of your relatives this would be a bad gift for. I’ll note that there’s nothing on the book jacket that will give away, for example, the scene where the main character and her friends hack an instructional robot to provide accurate sex ed, so if you want to pretend ignorance later, your plausible deniability is covered. You could also buy any or all of these for yourself — if you’ll be spending time this holiday season around highly stressful family members, there’s no escape like a good book. And if supply chain issues have made print copies difficult to find, I am just as happy when people read my books on their e-reader as when they read print copies.

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

Election 2022: Sample Ballot/Index of Posts

Posted on November 8, 2022 by naomikritzer

Hello to a bunch of people looking up this site on their phone from a voting booth! Here are links to (hopefully) all my posts about this year’s races. (If you scroll and don’t find what you want, try a search, but remember, I only write about races that appear on the ballot in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I did write a post about how to research a race, though.)

ETA: Someone was inspired to do similar research for city races in Lakeville, Credit River, Apple Valley, Eagan, Burnsville, Chaska, Eden Prairie, and Bloomington, with a bit of miscellany for St. Cloud, Maplewood, Robbinsdale, Maple Grove, Osseo, and Wayzata — find those writeups (not mine, but using a similar approach) at https://candidatenotes.com/

STATEWIDE

Governor & Lieutenant Governor: Tim Walz and Peggy Flanagan

Secretary of State: Steve Simon

State Auditor: Julie Blaha

Attorney General: Keith Ellison

JUDICIAL

There are no contested judicial races anywhere in either Hennepin County or Ramsey County.

MINNEAPOLIS AND HENNEPIN COUNTY RACES

US Representative District 5: Ilhan Omar

All State Senate districts: the DFLer

All State House districts: the DFLer

Hennepin County Commissioner District 2: Irene Fernando, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.

Hennepin County Commissioner District 3: Marion Greene

Hennepin County Commissioner District 4: Angela Conley, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.

Hennepin County Sheriff: Dawanna Witt

Hennepin County Attorney: Mary Moriarty

School Board Member at Large (SSD #1) (elect two): Collin Beachy and Sonya Emerick, but if you haven’t been following this race you should probably read my post to see if you agree with me; Sonya was my most controversial endorsement this year by far.

School Board Member District 1 (SSD #1): Abdul Abdi, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.

School Board Member District 3 (SSD #1): Fathia Feerayarre, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.

School Board Member District 5 (SSD #1): Lori Norvelle

SAINT PAUL AND RAMSEY COUNTY RACES

US Representative District 4: Betty McCollum

All State Senate districts: the DFLer

All State House districts: the DFLer

Ramsey County Commissioner District 3: Trista MatasCastillo

Ramsey County Commissioner District 4: Rena Moran

Ramsey County Commissioner District 5: Rafael Ortega

Ramsey County Commissioner District 6: Mai Chong Xiong

County Attorney: John Choi, but I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested

County Sheriff: I did not write about this one because it’s uncontested.

In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNet and signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven and the NOW REOPENED Uncle Hugo’s (it’s at 2716 E 31st St in Minneapolis, in the former Glass Endeavors.)

I do not have a tip jar or a Patreon; instead, I highlight fundraisers. Three places you can donate this year: there is a science teacher at Sullivan STEAM magnet who needs some better computers so his students can actually program the cool robots they got. (This fundraiser is a long way from funding, so I want to note, DonorsChoose isn’t like Kickstarter, they’ll work with teachers and donors to come up with a good use of the donations if it only gets halfway there.) You can also donate to the Theater program at Henry High School in Minneapolis. Or, you can donate to the Movement Voter fundraiser I created; I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and the fundraiser is still active.

How to Research a Local Political Race

Posted on November 5, 2022 by naomikritzer

Back in 2014, I wrote a post with the title “Methodology” that talked some about how I research races with an eye towards helping people trying to figure out where to dig and what questions to ask. I think it’s probably time to update that post, so below you will find my advice (hopefully suitable for people all over the country) on how to figure out who you want to vote for in a local election.

Local races are incredibly important. People tend to focus on national races, and while those sure are important, your local representatives often affect your day-to-day quality of life in much more tangible ways. Local elected officials make decisions that affect library hours, school curricula, snowplowing, zoning rules, pothole repair. Pay attention to these races! Learn about who’s running, vote all the way down the ballot, and encourage your friends to do the same.

1. Get a list of the races and candidates who will be on the ballot.

In Minnesota, you can do this via the Secretary of State’s “Find My Ballot” page. If you don’t live in Minnesota, try searching “find my ballot” and your state to see if you have something similar.

2. Look up candidate websites.

When MN candidates file, they have the option of writing down a URL, and if they do that, there may be a link right on the page that comes up on the Secretary of State’s site. If there’s no link, or the link leads to a nonexistent website, try searching the candidate name + the office, or the candidate name + your town. Sometimes people running for a minor office will use a Facebook page as their campaign page.

Take a look at the websites you find. In particular, look for the following:

Endorsements. If one’s endorsed by the Republicans and one by the Democrats, that may be all you need to know.
Experience. Not always required for a low-level office, but I like candidates who’ve at least shown some interest in local governance before running — maybe by serving on a city or county committee, fundraising for the library, etc.
Accomplishments, if this is someone running for re-election. Do you like the things they claim credit for? Do you think they’ve done good work?
Big red flags. Racist and antisemitic dogwhistles, repeating gross urban legends, a school board candidate who puts a lot of emphasis on “parental rights,” anti-vax stuff.
Small red flags. Candidates who just don’t seem to know anything about the issues. Candidates who repeatedly say “WE THE PEOPLE” in all-capital letters or use a lot of patriotic stock art.

Other useful things you’ll often find on candidate websites: a bio (which will give you information about past experiences that might be applicable to them serving in the job); links to their social media; some information on contacting the candidate (very useful if you have follow-up questions)

3. Look at other information online.

If you search online for both candidate names, sometimes you’ll find questionnaires from newspapers or organizations. These can provide you with a bunch of side-by-side information to compare.

Searching for the candidate name + location sometimes turns up other details about a candidate, from old news articles to lawsuits. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes it’s useless.

If you go to your library’s public information databases, you can often use your library card to search your local newspaper. This can turn up information about all kinds of things — old letters to the editor, news articles about scandals from years past, arrests.

If you look on Facebook, sometimes you can find a candidate’s personal Facebook page. Some candidates lock those down or sanitize them heavily, but if they don’t, you can learn a lot about a person from the memes they re-share.

If you look on LinkedIn, often you can find someone’s professional resume, and that can be extremely helpful to sort out what some of the stuff in their bio means. Lots of people will call themselves “educators” and sometimes that means they worked as a professional teacher in a public school and other times it means something that is absolutely not that.

4. Look for candidate forums.

There may be community forums where the candidates are invited to show up and answer questions. Sometimes you have to actually go, but usually these days forums are recorded and posted online later for people to view.

5. Talk to door-knockers.

Depending on the size of the race, you might get door-knocked by the candidate and be able to ask whatever questions you have. More often door-knockers are volunteers. My standard questions for people who volunteer on behalf of a candidate is, “can you tell me what you like about [candidate]? You are giving up your free time to do work for them — what about them inspired you to do that?” This is a question almost everyone can answer, and the answers can be revealing.

6. Contact the candidates.

Most candidates provide information on how to contact them — either an e-mail address or a phone number. If you contact a candidate, I would strongly encourage you to pick one question to focus on. If it’s a list of a dozen questions, they will think, “I don’t have time to do this right now — I’ll set it aside for later” and then they’ll forget. If it’s a complicated question and you send an e-mail, you may also have better luck if you tell them you’d be happy to talk on the phone.

Regardless of the question, if you send an e-mail, many candidates will ask if they can call you. Partly this is because they want to start by asking you a little about yourself. There are some good reasons for this: a lot of issues provoke related but varying concerns and they want to know where to focus their answer. They also want to demonstrate to you that they are a good listener and that they empathize with your struggles.

7. Talk to your friends and neighbors.

One of the things about local races is that a lot of people struggle to find information about them. So if you have done some research, reaching out to other people voting in your area is not pushing your politics on people, it is a generous public service. “It can be hard to find information on the Dogcatcher race, so since I did a bunch of digging, I wanted to share what I found!”

You can also reach out for information. Ask your neighbors if they know anything about the people running. (If they don’t, you can circle back with information you find.)

8. Do not feel like you need to research every possible aspect of every candidate on your ballot.

There are a lot of options here and I cannot emphasize enough that you do not need to go dig up everyone’s LinkedIn resume to be an informed voter! My first step is always to look at party endorsements. If there’s a Republican and a Democrat, that’s all I really need to know. If there’s an incumbent candidate who hasn’t been at the center of a scandal, who’s endorsed by people you like, and their opponent on the ballot has no website? You have done your due diligence! It’s fine! You can vote for the person who sounds OK vs. the person who doesn’t care enough about the race to make information easy for voters to find. Life is short: if Candidate A has a well-organized website that describes sensible goals you approve of and Candidate B’s website has a giant animated gif of a waving US flag and zero policy ideas, you do not have to watch the forum unless you want to.

It’s good to be an informed voter. But all of us make these choices with incomplete information and that is also okay. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” is good advice in a lot of situations — including voting using the information you have to select the best candidate.

My name is Naomi Kritzer and I’m a SF/F writer and an opinionated person with a blog. Since sometime in the early 2000s, I’ve been researching local races (first in Minneapolis, later in both Minneapolis and St. Paul) and sharing the information I find with my community. If you do the same in your own community, you may find this very time consuming but people really do find it super useful! You can find more about my novels here.

Election 2022: US House 04 and 05

Posted on November 4, 2022 by naomikritzer

I’m just going to put these in one post. I think these are the last contested races I hadn’t written about? (Note: I only write about races that appear on the ballots in Minneapolis and St. Paul, so if you’re trying to find information on the congressional races in 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, or 8, you won’t find details here other than “obviously you should VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRAT.” I also don’t write about uncontested races.) If I’ve forgotten a race, you can leave a comment and I’ll try to get to it. In the meantime — I’m going to try to do some doorknocking this weekend and would strongly encourage my fellow DFL voters to find a way to volunteer, whether that’s doorknocking, text-banking, phone-banking, or GOTV catfishing (look, I’m not going to judge).

In Minneapolis/congressional district 5, we have:

Ilhan Omar (DFL)
Cicely Davis (Republican)

Ilhan Omar is hardworking, fiery, and a member of “the Squad.” Cicely David has a website that manages to be both frequently illegible and mostly content-free, and she spends a lot of time trying to present herself as super moderate while ignoring all questions about her position on abortion. Vote for Ilhan Omar.

In St. Paul/congressional district 4, we have:

Betty McCollum (DFL)
May Lor Xiong (Republican)

Betty McCollum is hardworking, reliable, and from what Paul Wellstone used to call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” May Lor Xiong scaremongers on her website about “open borders.” Per a comment to MPR, she apparently thinks the Mexican border should be closed to immigrants. She’s also opposed to the Green New Deal and the ACA and has scrupulously avoided all public comment on abortion but she’s endorsed by the MCCL. May Lor Xiong is not even doing a very good job at the “pretending not to be a right-wing extremist” thing, and I am absolutely voting for Betty McCollum.

So a week or two back, it looked like WordPress had deleted most of my subscribers? But now it’s back to saying I have 10,143 instead of 473. But if you rely on e-mail to notify you I’ve posted, and this is the first post you’ve seen this year, you should know I’ve posted a bunch of other posts! Also, if you’re not a subscriber, plugging in your e-mail in the subscriber box (you may have to do this on desktop rather than phone) will get you an e-mail every time I post. That might not sound appealing, but if it does, now you know.

If you’d like to make a donation to encourage me to keep working on these, I am highlighting a science teacher at Sullivan STEAM magnet who needs some better computers so his students can actually program the cool robots they got. Or, you can donate to the Movement Voter fundraiser I created; I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and the fundraiser is still active. You could also get out this weekend and do some GOTV volunteering. Drop me a comment if you do and want to tell me.

Election 2022: Minnesota State Auditor

Posted on November 4, 2022 by naomikritzer

For State Auditor, I’m going to make a very specific plea: even if you hate Julie Blaha (I don’t know why you would, but if you do), do not vote for the weed party candidates.

On the ballot:

Julie Blaha (DFL)
Ryan Wilson (Republican)
Will Finn (Grassroots – Legalize Cannabis)
Tim Davis (Legal Marijuana Now)

Julie Blaha (DFL)

The State Auditor audits the spending of county and municipal governments. They have a page explaining what they do and also a FAQ that explains who’s responsible for various kinds of oversight that are outside their domain.

Julie Blaha is the only person running for the job who understands what the job even is. That alone is a reason to vote for her!

Ryan Wilson (Republican)

This is one of the handful of offices where I have at any point in my life voted for a Republican (I voted for Judi Dutcher, probably in 1998. I mean, she switched to the DFL a few years later, retroactively justifying my positive feelings about her). It’s not necessarily a particularly partisan job because “waste and graft” are at least in theory something both parties are supposed to be against. However, at this point, most of the Republican party has embraced lies, fascism, election theft, and science denial, and I have no reason to believe that Ryan Wilson is any better than the rest of his party.

Ryan Wilson wants to audit the schools. The problem here is that my full expectation of any Republican auditing schools at this point is that they’d declare social-emotional learning, sex ed, and any history they disliked to be “waste.”

Will Finn (Grassroots – Legalize Cannabis)

Will Finn’s actual name is Kevin Finander, but he’s running as Will Finn because that’s “how the Libertarians and pro-weed folks know me.” He runs something called the “Taxation is Theft” political action committee. The Grassroots party repudiates him along with everyone other than their 1st Congressional District candidate who’s on the ballot as a Grassroots party candidate. Hilariously, Will’s link goes to a Linktree page that links to the Grassroots Party page saying he’s not a valid candidate, which honestly says about all you need to know about both the Grassroots Party, and Will Finn. They’re a bunch of clowns and no one should vote for any of their candidates in the hopes that they’ll drop back into well-earned obscurity.

In 2018, both weed parties had a bunch of candidates on the ballot who were Republicans filing entirely in an attempt to act as spoilers. This worked, and the main reason we didn’t get the DFL’s really good marijuana legalization bill was that they didn’t have a majority in the Senate due to a handful of seats with these fake weed party candidates who sucked off just enough votes to give those seats to the Republicans. Oliver Steinberg, the party chair, engaged in a bunch of breast-beating about how he was going to try to make sure this didn’t happen again. This year, the treasurer of the Grassroots party, Marcus Harcus, tried to change the party name to Marijuana Advocates with Governing Aspirations, MAGA, in an attempt to siphon votes the other way. This got foiled by Oliver Steinberg.

Tim Davis (Legal Marijuana Now)

Tim Davis at least has a website. He lists four issues: (1) Drug Legalization; (2) Alternative Energy & Resources; (3) Population Reduction; and (4) Right to Die.

The State Auditor’s office has nothing at all to do with three of those things. Alternative energy, they oversee some public pension funds and Ryan Wilson has criticized Julie Blaha for disinvesting from coal; Tim Davis gives absolutely no indication that he’s talking about pension funds here, and I literally think he just doesn’t know what the auditor actually does.

Also, I’m just going to note, seeing “population reduction” and “right to die” back to back is chilling, and it does not help that he provides zero explanation of what policies he’d actually advocate for.

The Legal Marijuana Now folks managed to really impress me in 2020 by offering up Oliver Steinberg’s criminal record when I asked what their US Senate candidate stood for. The LMN party stands for even less than the Grassroots party; they literally just want to continue to be a major party so they can keep acting as a spoiler.

So yeah: vote for Julie Blaha. If you hate Julie Blaha for some reason (maybe she beat you in the Crop Art competition at the State Fair and you hold a grudge?) write in your favorite person who you think would make a terrific State Auditor. Do not vote for the weed candidates. Tell your friends not to vote for the weed candidates. The weed parties have done absolutely nothing useful or helpful with their major party status. They do not need to be providing an endless parade of actual Republicans with a second slot on the ballot.

Election 2022: Hennepin County Commissioner, District 3

Posted on November 1, 2022 by naomikritzer

There are a number of contested County Commissioner races in both Ramsey County and Hennepin County this year. This is a Hennepin County post.

There are two candidates on the ballot:

Marion Greene (Incumbent, DFL-endorsed)
Ashley Boldin

Marion Greene has been on the Hennepin County Board since 2014. She was unopposed for endorsement at the DFL convention this spring and sailed through (and has endorsed Mary Moriarty, I saw when I went looking for whether she’d had any challengers for endorsement). Her accomplishments page is impressive. Ashley Boldin uses a lot of buzzwords, has no endorsements that I could find, and hasn’t posted on her social media since early September.

I would vote for Marion Greene.

Election 2022: Judicial Races

Posted on October 31, 2022 by naomikritzer

Unless I’ve missed something, there is not a single contested judicial race on either Hennepin County or Ramsey County ballots.

Is this bad? No. It’s fine. Being a judge is mostly a job where you sign off on agreements of various kinds, or listen to a bunch of people who are having probably the worst day of their lives. There are judges who are better than others, but most of the time, incumbent judges only get challenged because (a) somebody who probably should not have the job wants it (like Michelle MacDonald), or (b) they really screwed up in a way you’ll probably find if you search their name (like the judge in Ramsey County who drove drunk in 2018.) Michelle MacDonald is currently disbarred and while there are judges who did stuff that pissed people off, none of them made their peers mad enough that someone’s running against them.

Okay so what do I do with these races? You can check off the incumbents’ names if you want, or some subset of incumbents’ names (someone told me yesterday she was going to vote to re-elect all the judges who weren’t originally nominated by Pawlenty, that’s fine but you’ll have to go create your own list), or you can leave them blank. It does not matter, because it’s rare an incumbent judge loses even if they have an opponent on the ballot, and it’s really unlikely to happen if the opponent is a write-in. Someone would have to be fundraising for a gazillion mailers and billboards and so on. You would probably have heard.

What do you do with these races? If I’m not in a huge hurry, I usually fill in the dots by all the incumbents’ names because I am the sort of person who wants to fill in all the dots.

Can I write someone in? Of course, but FYI, in addition to the fact that they won’t win, they cannot serve if they are over 70 or under 21 and they must be a licensed attorney to serve as a judge. (Although they won’t win, so feel free to write in whoever strikes your fancy. This really does not matter.)

I’m in some other county and I have a contested race. How am I supposed to know who to vote for? My recommendation is that you look at both websites and google the name of the incumbent judge to see what comes up (a drunk driving arrest? a really shoddy job at a high-profile trial? or nothing at all?) If the challenger just links to a law firm site (that’s weirdly common) that suggests to me that they view the filing fee as cheap advertising and are not seriously running. If you find nothing in particular about the incumbent judge, I would vote for the incumbent judge. I will note that lawyers nearly always just vote for the incumbent judge.

ETA: My dad, a Political Scientist who’s written a book on judicial selection, looked up the one contested judicial race in Minnesota:

The one contested trial court race is in the First Judicial District which includes some suburban counties; the counties in the district are Carver, Dakota, Goodhue, Le Sueur, McLeod, Scott and Sibley. See https://www.inforum.com/news/minnesota/over-100-minnesota-judges-are-up-for-election-only-one-race-is-contested,

The incumbent was appointed in 2021 after about three decades of practicing law. There are no issues that have been identified with the incumbent who is being challenged, except that he did not go to law school in Minnesota (https://www.republicaneagle.com/opinion/letters/letter-rare-opportunity/article_eceab28e-56ec-11ed-94b5-3f1831184083.html). The challenger graduated from William Mitchell (another place says Hamline) and passed the bar in 2018. Other than as a student, he has had little, if any, courtroom experience (his website says that he worked with a small firm doing commercial litigation). He’s had three jobs since graduating from law school and it’s not clear what he’s currently doing (https://hansonforjudgemn.com/issues/).

I would absolutely vote for the First Judicial District incumbent. Judge is not a “four years out of law school” kind of job, that letter also says he’ll be an “originalist” (what would that even mean at the district court level? good grief) and “he didn’t go to law school here” is Minnesota at its most absurd.

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board, District 5

Posted on October 31, 2022 by naomikritzer

Confusingly, all the school districts in the state have district numbers (Minneapolis is District 1) but also Minneapolis is split into 6 geographical areas for Park Board and School District seats. This seat is on some ballots in South Minneapolis but not others. This was made extra confusing by redistricting — if you’re uncertain, you can view your sample ballot on the Secretary of State’s site by putting in your zip code and address. This seat is currently held by Nelson Inz, who is not running for re-election.

In District 1, Abdul Abdi is running unopposed. In District 3, Fathia Feerayarre is running unopposed. The School Board reps from Districts 2, 4, and 6 are not on the ballot this year; those seats will be up for election in 2024.

District 5 has two candidates:

Laurelle Myhra
Lori Norvelle

Laurelle Myhra is an Anishinabe woman who directs a wellness clinic; she’s a licensed family therapist and one of her top priorities is “culturally-relevant and trauma-informed education and curriculum.” She is vice chair of the American Indian Parent Advisory Committee.

One hesitation I had about her is that she describes herself as Christian on her first page, and that can be a red flag for anti-trans bigotry specifically. I e-mailed her to ask, and she responded to say, “I do not personally support discrimination of LGBT or any other marginalized group. In fact, I’m seeking endorsement by a LGBT advocacy group.” (I checked her endorsements and I don’t see that one, so I do not think she got it.)

Lori Norvelle was a middle-school math teacher until recently (and then burned out and quit). Prior to being a math teacher, she worked as a special education assistant and a substitute teacher. She’s also an MPS parent and her major priorities could kind of be summed up as “repairing the damage” (technically, that’s her second priority; her first is recruiting and retaining staff, but that’s totally also “repairing the damage,” I think, and her third priority is “reclaiming our success as a district” which on closer inspection of details like “careful research in advance of making decisions and allowing time for feedback,” I’d sum up as “trying not to break anything worse.”) I like these priorities. They make a lot of sense to me.

The thing I find most appealing about Laurelle is that she would bring expertise about trauma and recovery, which would be genuinely useful right now. But in this race, I would go ahead and prioritize experience in the classroom; I think, post-strike, that adding teachers and recent former teachers to the board is potentially a path toward healing. I have been thoroughly persuaded that more people coming from the teachers’ perspective on the Minneapolis school board would be a really good idea. Also, she seems to have a clear idea of where Minneapolis is as a district. I would vote for Lori Norvelle.

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board At-Large

Posted on October 31, 2022 by naomikritzer

Well, this turned into kind of a clusterfuck of a race. Here’s who’s on the ballot:

KerryJo Felder (DFL-endorsed)
Collin Beachy (DFL-endorsed)
Sonya Emerick
Lisa Skjefte

In the primary, I said I would vote for KerryJo Felder because the school board suffers from chronic lack of institutional memory due to people rarely serving more than one term (KerryJo is not an incumbent, but served one term from 2016-2020) and Sonya Emerick because I was impressed by their responsiveness and thoughtfulness. It turned out that part of why I hadn’t heard back from Collin was because he’d had COVID — and I felt bad about that, but also, it was a primary, the DFL-endorsed candidates can be expected to sail through a primary, and so I was not super worried about it.

Lisa Skjefte has no website, although she has been coming to candidate forums.

I’m going to put a break here and FYI: this is going to get long. If you want to skip straight to who I would vote for: Collin Beachy and Sonya Emerick.

Continue reading →

Election 2022: Hennepin County Attorney

Posted on October 25, 2022 by naomikritzer

I wrote about the two candidates who made it to the final ballot, Mary Moriarty and Martha Holton Dimick, pretty extensively during the primary. My opinion about the two candidates has not changed significantly, but there have been some developments since then that I wanted to talk about.

On the ballot:

Mary Moriarty
Martha Holton Dimick

Seriously: there’s a lot of information in that July post that I’m not porting over — I thought about it, but I don’t want to bury the new information. There’s just no perfect option here.

One of the bits of news that blew up earlier this month was Martha’s failure to renew her law license. The whole story was really odd. Practicing lawyers are required to have a license, and someone looked up Martha’s and found that her license was not active. Her spokesperson said that this was because she’d de-activated it to save money. Except this makes absolutely no sense: you’ll save $46 in the short term, but then to re-activate (as she’ll need to do if she wins) you have to pay that $46 plus another $125. The lawyer whose Twitter thread I’m linking to there has a couple of theories as to why she might have done this, and the one I think is the most plausible is that she was behind on Continuing Legal Education credits. That’s actually, IMO, sympathetic, and if that was the case she should have just admitted it up front. (Realizing you’re about to have to binge-watch 40 hours of boring webinars or you’ll lose some certification you want to keep: WHOMST AMONG US HAS NOT. I mean, I haven’t, but that is only because I have never had a certification like this.)

Then it came out that she filed for office with an expired card. She says this was an accident and she had a non-expired card at the time but as far as I know, no journalist has asked to see it? or her cards from prior years? Nor has Martha just produced any of them nor has there been any other public followup. I don’t know what to make of this but the whole story is extremely weird. Like the best-case scenario here involves a mix of bad decision-making and extreme flakiness, neither of which seems ideal for a County Attorney.

The other thing I wanted to highlight was covered in this article (a collaboration between Bolts and Mother Jones) about the race. Martha is endorsed by the Police Federation, but during the primary, several other candidates also tried for that endorsement. Paul Ostrow was struck by the questions he was asked at the screening:

Ostrow also sought the endorsement from the MPPOA, but was taken aback that the screening panel—which included the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis—weren’t interested in his ten point plan to improve public safety. Instead, “they were almost exclusively questions about police prosecutions,” he told me. “It was really the only issue that was discussed at that screening.”

Here’s something that really should not be controversial: police prosecutions are profoundly necessary, and I don’t just mean for cold-blooded murders committed in front of multiple cameras, I also mean for the sort of casual everyday brutality that would get anyone else prosecuted for assault. We have got to start holding police officers accountable in a meaningful way. The Police Federation already does everything within its power to prevent the city from firing officers — they also want to be sure Hennepin County continues to have a prosecutor who will not prosecute them.

Mary Moriarty, meanwhile, has promised to create a “do not call” list — a list of police officers who have lied so routinely on the stand that they may no longer be called as witnesses. The fact that this is controversial blows my mind, frankly. Why would you want to call to the stand someone who has repeatedly demonstrated their contempt for the truth? I mean, unless your goal is to have them testify and then charge them with perjury? I’m sorry, is it the defenders of the police who think that it’s unreasonable to expect police officers not to lie on the stand during trials?

Anyway, for these reasons plus all the reasons I cited back in July, I would absolutely vote for Mary Moriarty.

ETA 10/31: On a radio show on WCCO, local defense attorney Joe Friedberg launched into a 20-minute furious rant about how bad Martha was as a prosecutor and as a judge. Worth noting: he’s not especially progressive (he says he’s voted for Republicans, Democrats, and Jesse Ventura) but thinks Mary is just a significantly better lawyer, and although he’s a defense attorney, one of his stories is about Martha kind of giving away the store to a client Joe was defending. (She refused to talk to him, and when the judge finally brought them into chambers, immediately agreed to the lower-than-guidelines sentence he threw out as an opening bid, which given the wildly indefensible case, Joe thought was ridiculous. The whole story is also a really interesting illustration of how lawyers view their “indefensible” clients.) If you’d rather read than listen, David Brauer transcribes some of the rant into a Twitter thread.

So exciting news: apparently WordPress deleted a bunch of my subscribers? If you used to get notifications of new posts by e-mail and now you’re not getting notifications by e-mail, and you would appreciate notifications of new posts by e-mail, please try signing up again. This possibly explains why I’ve been getting a lot less engagement on my posts in general this year, which has been weirdly demoralizing. (I really hope it’s that my subscriber list got screwed up and not that no one’s paying attention to the midterms.)

If you’d like to cheer me up and reassure me that people are reading my work, you could donate to one of the two DonorsChoose projects I’m highlighting. In Minneapolis, I found a science teacher at Sullivan STEAM magnet needs some better computers so his students can actually program the cool robots they got. In St. Paul, I found an English teacher at Harding Senior High who would like snacks for her students. Or, you can donate to the Movement Voter fundraiser I created; I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and the fundraiser is still active.

Will Tell Stories For Food

Naomi Kritzer's blog

Gifts for People You Hate, 2022

Election 2022: Sample Ballot/Index of Posts

How to Research a Local Political Race

Election 2022: US House 04 and 05

Election 2022: Minnesota State Auditor

Election 2022: Hennepin County Commissioner, District 3

Election 2022: Judicial Races

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board, District 5

Election 2022: Minneapolis School Board At-Large

Election 2022: Hennepin County Attorney