Powerline.com has a broad national following. But one of the things that makes it such an engaging and successful site is the way it reports on local happenings in and around Minneapolis. Today, for example, it takes apart a column about local real estate by a Star Tribune regular, whom powerline calls, in its unabashed voice, “a third-rate columnist for a second-rate newspaper.” Never mind that the issue—the size of a particular house on the shore of Minneapolis’s Lake Calhoun—is of little moment to a Brooklynite like me. Powerline manages to bring alive the mindless passions and petty resentments and politically correct politics that seem to permeate the local newspaper of record.

The point is that many of the local stories powerline brings to a national audience are not local at all. The website has been on top of the Flying Imams case from the beginning. It has introduced us to the imposition of shar’ia law in Minneapolis, with “Somali taxi drivers who refuse to transport passengers carrying alcohol” and “Target cashiers who refuse to ring up pork products.” Are such things happening elsewhere in the country, one wonders, or only in the twin cities?

My own hunch, on that score, is that the only thing truly special about Minneapolis is the presence there of a small band of extraordinary guys working away in their pajamas.

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