The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Three months is long enough for Minnesota's unemployment rate to rise more than half a percentage point. It's enough to start and end a war in Gaza. It's even enough time for Christian Bale to go from being known as the much-lauded star of classics like Dark Knight and Swing Kids to the egotistical batshit douchebag who blames his bad behavior on his deep immersion in John Connor's mind.

Eventful barely begins to describe the year that was 2008. There was, of course, the ongoing fiction that Minnesota was ever a battleground state during the presidential election, and the RNC taking place in Minneapolis, er...Saint Paul. But even stripping away the millions of dollars and the monstrous steaming piles of carefully worded bullscheiss funneled into the state and strewn across the landscape like so many cow pies by the national politicos leaves us with a startling patchwork of transcendence and frustration on the local political scene.

Today marked the first day of what promises to be an interminable coda tacked upon an already unwieldy election.