For all your camel-riding needs: Middle Eastern Festival to take place in West St. Paul on July 13-14

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The St. George Middle Eastern Festival, a cultural celebration with food, music and family activities that include camel rides, returns for its 14th year this month.

The festival, hosted by St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in West St. Paul, runs from noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, July 13, and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday, July 14.

Throughout the festival, a silent auction will be held, and Middle Eastern food and pastries will be served, including kebab wraps, hummus and the church’s traditional farani bread. A large kids’ tent is set to include inflatable slides, mini golf and other games.

John Khoury, a local Lebanese singer and bandleader, will headline the main stage Saturday and perform throughout the day Sunday. Arab folk music group Amwaaj, DJ Joey and the church’s traditional dabke dance group also will perform. Bakers will lead a baklava cooking demonstration Saturday afternoon.

A full schedule is at mideastfest.com.

Admission is free and visitors may park in front of the church at 1250 Oakdale Ave. in West St. Paul.

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Belwin Conservancy announces $10M capital campaign to expand access

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It’s been more than 65 years since Charles and Lucy Winton Bell of Wayzata began acquiring land in Afton for what would eventually become a conservancy.

Charles Bell, the son of the founder of General Mills, and Lucy Winton Bell wanted to do something to help address the challenges of diminishing wild spaces, water pollution and the lack of outdoor education in the east metro area.

The couple established the Belwin Foundation – a combination of their names, Bell and Winton – and donated 225 acres of their land to it. They also signed an agreement with St. Paul Public Schools that would dedicate their land to outdoor science education for children.

More than a half million children have come to Belwin Conservancy for outdoor science education over the years, and more than 1,500 acres in the St. Croix Valley have been protected from development. The permanently protected land includes woodland, prairie, oak savanna, ponds, streams and wetlands.

On Wednesday, Belwin officials will launch a $10.2 million capital campaign to make one of the area’s most diverse nature preserves more accessible. Money raised through the capital campaign, dubbed “Inspiring through Nature,” will be used to improve educational facilities, open more land to the public and protect and restore critical habitat in the Valley Creek watershed, said Katie Bloome, Belwin’s executive director since 2018.

“We know people benefit from time spent in nature, but as the area around Belwin develops, wild spaces are being lost,” she said. “People need places where they can sustain that connection.”

New education center

Belwin officials have already raised $7.8 million toward the goal of the capital campaign – the first in the history of the organization, which was founded in 1970.

About $3.5 million of the Belwin Conservancy’s new $10.2 million capital campaign is being used to create the 5,000-square-foot Peter J. King Family Foundation Wetlands Center. The new center, which will open to students in the fall of 2025, will be able to accommodate an additional 5,000 students per year, including students from Stillwater Area Public Schools. It also will be the new home of Belwin’s adaptive outdoor education programs for students with special needs, operated for 48 years in partnership with St. Paul Public Schools. (Courtesy of Belwin Conservancy)

About $3.5 million of the campaign is being used to create a new 5,000-square-foot Peter J. King Family Foundation Wetlands Center, which will allow Belwin to accommodate an additional 5,000 students per year, including students from Stillwater Area Public Schools, Bloome said.

The new education center also will be home to Belwin’s adaptive outdoor education programs. Designed for SPPS students who have special needs, the building will feature support spaces like calm rooms, easy access to surrounding paved trails for children and adults with mobility devices, and geothermal heating and cooling, she said.

Students from St. Paul Public Schools have been visiting Belwin every year since 1971, said SPPS Interim Superintendent John Thein. “For many, it is their first time experiencing the beauty and vastness of nature,” he said. “We are thrilled that this space will become even more welcoming and inclusive for the next generation of SPPS students.”

Not done growing

David Hartwell, president of the Belwin Conservancy board, talks about his grandparents, Charles and Lucy Winton Bell, from atop the Druid Circle at the Belwin Conservancy in Afton while giving a tour in his 1960 Fiat Jolly on Tuesday July 9, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

David Hartwell, 67, of Minneapolis, is the president of the Belwin board. The grandson of Charles and Lucy Bell, Hartwell is serving his 50th year on the Belwin board.

“My grandparents bought 66 acres (for $33,000) in 1958, and they immediately started to worry about what their neighbors were going to do,” he said during a tour of the site on Tuesday in his family’s red 1960 Fiat 600 Jolly. “So they bought out additional property to keep it from being developed in the 1960s.”

“My grandmother finally said to my grandfather, ‘Figure out what you’re going to do with this because we don’t need this extra property,’” he said. “He started looking for programs that would use it. They talked to the Boy Scouts, they talked to lots of different groups.”

St. Paul Public Schools officials had hired someone to find a facility to do environmental education in the St. Croix Valley, and he connected with the Bells in July of 1970, Hartwell said. “Three months later, they signed an agreement,” he said. “That would never happen like that today. It would take years.”

Belwin isn’t done growing, according to Hartwell. The organization eventually would like to end up with 2,000 acres of protected land in the area.

“It’s really infill at this point,” Hartwell said. “It’s our border protection. It’s infill of stuff between things that we already own. … We have kind of gotten as far as we are going to get without buying developments and tearing down houses, which just isn’t practical.”

Fishers and mountain lions have recently been spotted on Belwin land, he said. “We’ve been very lucky to have the opportunity to preserve it at this point – for the health of animals, for human health, for mental health,” he said.

Hartwell said Charles Bell, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, loved coming back to the St. Croix River Valley from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., and visiting the property.

“I’d always take him out here, and he would always say the same thing as we drove in: ‘I can’t believe we did this,’” he said. “He was amazed we got to where we were. I think he’d be even more amazed to see how big it’s gotten.”

Other plans

Signs direct visitors at the Belwin Conservancy in Afton on Tuesday, July 9, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

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In addition to the new Peter J. King Family Foundation Wetlands Center, Belwin officials plan to use money raised through the capital campaign to install clearer, more visible entrance signage and infrastructure across the conservancy’s multiple sites; the opening of Oxbow Trails, a new public hiking area on St. Croix Trail north of downtown Afton; habitat protection and restoration along Valley Creek; and renovations to the Savanna Center, a new program and artist-in-residence site located on a 300-acre oak savanna.

Lead campaign gifts include $2 million from the Bell/Hartwell Family, $1.3 million from the Peter J. King Family Foundation, $1 million from the Washington County Land and Water Legacy Program, $500,000 from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, $435,000 from the Smikis Foundation, $380,000 from the Outdoor Heritage Fund, and $250,000 from the Fred C. and Katherine B. Andersen Foundation.

“We want to be an asset for the community,” Hartwell said. “We have hiking trails that are open here for anyone who wants to use them. The local community often doesn’t have much in the way of that, but we’ve been able to help create that for the community.”

Target stores to stop accepting personal checks

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Target will no longer accept personal checks from shoppers as of July 15, another sign of how a once ubiquitous payment method is going the way of outmoded objects like floppy disks and the Rolodex.

The Minneapolis-based discounter confirmed the move in a statement to The Associated Press on Tuesday, citing “extremely low volumes” of customers who still write checks. Target said it remained committed to creating an easy and convenient checkout experience with credit and debit cards, “buy now, pay later” services and the Target Circle membership program, which applies deals automatically at checkout.

“We have taken several measures to notify guests in advance” about the no-checks policy, the company said.

Target’s decision leaves Walmart, Macy’s and Kohl’s among the retailers that still accept personal checks at their stores. Whole Foods Market and the Aldi supermarket chain previously stopped taking checks from customers.

Shoppers have pulled out checkbooks increasingly less often since the mid-1990s. Cash-dispensing ATMs, debit cards, online banking and mobile payment systems like Venmo and Apple Pay mean many young adults may never have written a check.

Check usage has been in decline for decades as Americans have largely switched to paying for their services with credit and debit cards. Americans wrote roughly 3.4 billion checks in 2022, down from nearly 19 billion checks in 1990, according to the Federal Reserve. However, the average size of the checks Americans wrote over the 32-year period rose from $673 in 1990 — or $1,602 in today’s dollars — to $2,652.

The drop in check writing enabled the Federal Reserve to sharply reduce its national check processing infrastructure. In 2003, it ran 45 check-processing locations nationwide; since 2010, it has operated only one.

Rising incidents of check fraud are also making people shy away from check writing. It’s being fueled by organized crime that is forcing small businesses and individuals to take additional safety protections or to avoid sending checks through the mail altogether.

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David French: What happened to the Originalism of the Originalists?

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When I read the majority opinion last week in Trump v. United States, which held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for official acts within their “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for all other official acts, I was genuinely and sincerely confused. The Supreme Court’s opinion is difficult to decipher, and in many important ways it is not originalist. For the second time this term — after Trump v. Anderson, which blocked efforts to remove Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the court has reached a decision that’s truly difficult to square with the constitutional text.

What is going on?

I reject the simplest explanation — the explanation you can see plastered all over social media — that the court’s conservative majority is biased in favor of Trump. In this era of institutional collapse, I’m certainly more open to allegations of corruption or venality than I was in years past, but it’s hard to square this explanation with the judicial evidence. After all, if the conservative majority was truly in thrall to Trump, the election challenges in 2020 would have had a very different outcome. Instead, conservative judges at every level of the judiciary — including at the Supreme Court — rejected Trump’s specious arguments.

Even more, as I’ve explained in detail in long analyses in 2023 and 2024, in many other areas the court has specifically rejected MAGA legal arguments, including by dismissing a dangerous legal theory — called the independent state legislature doctrine — that was one of the cornerstones of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and would be the cornerstone of any future effort to disrupt election results.

Given this history, however, one would have expected a narrower immunity ruling in Trump v. United States and a narrower ruling in Trump v. Anderson. Instead, the conservative majority created a barrier to prosecuting presidents for even the most blatantly corrupt official acts and blocked any enforcement of Section 3 against candidates for federal office in the absence of congressional action.

In reading both decisions, I’m struck by the way the court’s conservative majority (with the partial and notable exception of Amy Coney Barrett) ultimately made a series of policy choices more than it engaged in the kind of close textual analysis that should be the hallmark of originalism. The court’s policy choices are rooted in real concerns, but they’re not textual, they should not be constitutional, and they contradict the wiser judgment of the founders in key ways.

If the court in Trump v. Anderson had upheld Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot, such a ruling would have raised the possibility that rogue state officials or a rogue judge could knock candidates off ballots for illegitimate reasons. And in Trump v. United States, there was an obvious concern that future presidents would wield their prosecutorial discretion in blatantly political ways, perhaps pursuing their political opponents by stretching broad federal criminal statutes to prosecute predecessors for their different policy choices, not for true corruption or criminality.

Both these concerns are legitimate. Before Trump v. Anderson was decided, Republican officials openly mused about ejecting Joe Biden from the ballot, including on the grounds that permitting an “invasion” at the border constituted a form of insurrection or rebellion. Similarly, Trump has threatened to prosecute Biden.

There is no question that it would be terrible for our democracy if states engaged in abusive attempts to limit candidates’ access to the ballot, or if presidents ordered prosecutions for political reasons. The court’s decisions in both cases go a long way toward preventing future injustices, including potential future injustices by Trump.

As a matter of pure policy, then, these Supreme Court rulings represent a credible choice. But I fear that the court’s originalist majority neglected its originalism.

The Supreme Court isn’t a policymaking body; it’s an interpretive body. Indeed, conservatives often deride any approach that injects the judge’s policy preferences into the textual analysis of the Constitution as a form of “living constitutionalism.” Yet, in both cases, it was the court’s liberal dissenters who made the better textual case for their position.

Let’s take, for example, the plain text of Section 3 in Trump v. Anderson. Section 3 begins with an unequivocal declaration: “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state” having taken a previous oath of office and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution or provided “aid and comfort” to the enemies of the Constitution.

The language is plainly mandatory. Yet, the practical result of the Supreme Court’s opinion is to change the plain meaning to add a final, unwritten additional condition: Section 3 is enforceable against candidates for federal office only if Congress makes it enforceable.

Similarly, the court’s immunity ruling both adds to the Constitution and deviates from its text. You can read the entire document from cover to cover and not find a single reference to presidential immunity, and it’s not as if the founders were unfamiliar with the concept.

This is entirely consistent with a constitutional structure that is comprehensively anti-monarchical. The founders could have made the president more powerful and less accountable, but they chose the opposite course — and for good reason. They had fresh experience with the terrible consequences of consolidating power in the hands of one person.

Consequently, to the extent that the Constitution speaks at all to presidential criminal liability, it leaves the door wide open. The impeachment judgments clause limits the reach of an impeachment conviction to removal from office and disqualification from future federal office (in other words, impeachment convictions do not function like criminal convictions), but the clause also states, “the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.”

The court’s ruling alters that clause — essentially changing the word “shall” to “may.” Even a party convicted after impeachment can still be absolutely immune from prosecution if he was acting while carrying out a “core constitutional power.” Even when the president’s official actions aren’t “core,” they’re still presumptively immune, presenting a high bar for prosecuting any official act.

I disagree with the conservative majority in both Trump cases, but not because I think the court is trying to do Trump favors or because I think its policy concerns are frivolous. There are legitimate reasons to worry about rogue prosecutions or rogue efforts to knock candidates from ballots.

I disagree with the Supreme Court’s rulings for the most basic reason of all — they do not square with the text of the document the justices are supposed to interpret, and that means they’re granting the presidency a degree of autonomy and impunity that’s contrary to the structure and spirit of American government. In both Trump cases, the liberal minority was more originalist than the conservative majority. This time, it was the conservatives who created a living constitution.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.

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