Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential candidate, picked by Minnesota’s own Walter Mondale as his running mate for his 1984 presidential run, died this morning, according to the Associated Press. Found at YouTube from EVGINC.

The University of Minnesota Press has released a book dealing with the 35W bridge collapse, The City, the River, the Bridge: Before and after the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse, based on the symposium of the same name. The video below features the editor of the book, Pat Nunnally, speaking at the symposium. Found at U of M Institute For Advanced Study via Peter Fleck.

No one makes a better political argument than President Clinton. In this speech he gave in Minnesota last Thursday, Clinton eloquently lays out the reason it’s important to elect a veto-proof Democratic majority:

On the way out the door, I grabbed a bagful of cherries to eat for breakfast at work this morning. I didn’t consciously grab them for this reason, but once I got to work I realized I couldn’t have had a more appropriate breakfast.

Life is absolutely a bowl of cherries for me today.

I’m still warmed by the afterglow of Obama’s acceptance speech. It wasn’t his best speech but it was a very politically tactical speech that was nevertheless superb. It certainly wasn’t his most inspiring speech but I was still moved not so much by the speech itself but by the historical moment.

My life experience has thankfully given me a what I think is a fairly unique perspective on race in America, at least for that of a white, male Minnesotan. That experience deserves its own post, with which I promise to follow up. Suffice to say, at the outset of this Democratic campaign, I was fairly skeptical of America’s willingness to support a black man for president.

So though I’ve known this moment was coming for quite some time, the moment it happened, the moment Barack Obama actually accepted my party’s nomination for president, I was surprised at how moved I was.

I spent a year and a half of my high school years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I met virulent racists. There was the kid who tried to beat up a black girl on her first day of school because she was black (that was her only day at that school). There was the kid whose father had turned their basement into his own personal armory in anticipation of the race war he believed to be coming. There was the friend who found a Klu Klux Klan sword between the walls of his house while his family was renovating a room. There were the gallows I spied driving past a corn field one day.

These racist kids I knew learned racism from their parents and had they stayed in Indiana, there’s little to lead me to believe that they’d ever change.

So, to witness the history that took place last night inspired me to have more faith in my fellow Americans and today, I am the proudest I’ve ever been in my life to be an American.

So, yeah, today’s a pretty good day.