This is one of two contested judicial races in Ramsey County. The two candidates:

Timothy Mulrooney (incumbent)
Winona Yang

Timothy Mulrooney was appointed in 2016 by Mark Dayton, re-elected in 2018, and is finishing up a six-year term. When I looked him up, I found no scandals or anything else of concern. There’s no reason not to vote for his re-election.

Winona Yang graduated from law school in 2021.

There was an editorial in the Star Tribune this week by a guy who used to chair the state committee for judicial selection (which is to say, the committee that recommends people who would make good judges.) He highlights the actual courtroom experience that Judge Mulrooney had even before he was appointed: he worked as a prosecutor for five years, then in private practice for eight years in family law. Then he heard family law cases as a referee for eight years before he was appointed. He notes that he looked up Winona Yang in the Minnesota Court Records online and it indicated that she had never appeared in court.

(I had never noticed you could do this! If you go to https://publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us/CaseSearch one of the options is to search by attorney.)

Anyway. I am absolutely going to vote for Judge Mulrooney. Winona Yang might be qualified for the bench eventually — but she sure is not yet.

---

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)