Staff members Daniel Fanning and Marc Kimball from U.S. Sen. Al Franken’s office listened to senior advocates and residents Friday at Two Harbors City Hall.

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Minnesota Senator Al Franken may spend most of his time in D.C., but his mind is often on the state’s food: getting it to needy children, pumping up farmers markets, and even bragging about the sweetness of our corn.

1. You recently announced a $1 million grant for Minnesota food shelves to create nutrition programs for children living in poverty. Has the recession made this a growing problem in our state?

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At Netroots Nation Saturday night, Sen. Al Franken devoted his keynote address, the final one of the convention, to the issue that is the single most critical one for the netroots: the corporate takeover of free speech and preserving net neutrality.

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Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., will visit Pine Ridge on Aug. 7 at the invitation of Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., to attend a powwow and discuss housing issues with Oglala Sioux Tribe officials.

Franken is a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Herseth Sandlin issued the invitation to Franken for the Pine Ridge visit after the two discussed Native American housing issues.

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Last week, we heard a disturbing report about insurance companies attempting to sabotage the medical loss ratio, a percentage put into the Affordable Care Act that requires insurers to spend 80-85% of premium revenue on actual medical treatment rather than administrative costs, marketing, overhead, executive salaries and profit. Insurers want to reclassify all kinds of spending as a medical expense, so they can take more and more as profit.

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WASHINGTON – Randy Demmer, a Minnesota House Republican running for Congress, is taking heat these days for suggesting that some laid-off workers are spurning job offers in this down economy to collect long-term unemployment benefits.

The problem, he says, was brought to his attention by Charles Barry, CEO of Twin City Fan Cos. Ltd.

Demmer argues that jobless benefits can act as an impediment to private-sector hiring, a view that has made him a prime target for Democrats launching an election-year jobs offensive.

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My fellow panelist Elizabeth Warren (and boy does it feel good to say that) has continued to receive endorsements from key Senators and editorialists to get the position of director for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While Tom Harkin’s letter to the President, signed by 12 Senators, endorsed someone “with a track record akin to that of” Professor Warren to serve as director, others are going further. Al Franken endorsed Warren for CFPB director while at Netroots Nation, and on the panel Sen. Jeff Merkley said he has talked to the White House about Warren’s nomination. Merkley made the important point to Sam Stein that, because the Dodd-Frank law isn’t really a law but a promise to write a law later, having the right regulators doing that writing is of central importance:

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Over the weekend, Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) made the corporate takeover of our media, and the government’s acquiescence to these corporations, frighteningly clear.

Franken told more than 2,000 bloggers and organizers attending the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas that our media system is at risk everywhere we turn — from our free speech online to the growing power of companies who own a massive number of media outlets.

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The Biomass Thermal Energy Council (BTEC) extends its praise to Sens. Al Franken (D-MN.) and Kit Bond (R-MO.) and Reps. Betty McCollum (D-MN.), Jay Inslee (D-WA.) and Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) for introducing the Thermal Renewable Energy and Efficiency Act of 2010 in the U.S Senate and House of Representatives (S. 3626 and H.R. 5805, respectively). The legislation would assist in developing renewable heating and cooling projects nationwide.

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The Center for Public Integrity’s May 16 story detailing hundreds of flagrant safety violations at two BP refineries continues to reverberate in Congress.

During a Senate subcommittee hearing last Thursday, Democratic Sen. Al Franken repeatedly cited the story’s key finding: that BP refineries in Texas and Ohio accounted for 97 percent of “egregious willful” or “willful” citations issued to all U.S. refineries by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration between June 2007 and February 2010. The Minnesota senator pressed the hearing’s only witness — Steve Flynn, the oil company’s vice president of health, safety, security and environment — to explain why BP had received 760 egregious willful citations. “That’s a pretty hard statistic to believe,” Franken said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

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