My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.

For being in a place that's landlocked, Minnesotans have a real sense of the wider world. Teachers, friends, neighbors - everywhere I went in Minnesota, people put their heads up and looked out to the horizon.

And I took a walk and I just went to prayer and I said Lord, what would you have me do in the Minnesota state senate? And just through prayer I knew that I was to introduce the marriage amendment in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Republican hierarchy didn't want me to run against their incumbent in 2000; they didn't know who I was. And once many party bigwigs did get to know me, they weren't sure that I could win the seat.

Scarcity drives up demand, and the short golf season in Minnesota makes residents of that state mad for the sport. It's the same reason ancient Scandinavians worshiped the sun: because they saw so little of it.

I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected.

I'm particularly good at turnout. So in my district, I had the lowest voter turnout in 2006. And now I have the highest turnout in the state of Minnesota. And Minnesota is the highest turnout state in the country.

I support the 2nd Amendment - and our sportsmen and sportswomen throughout Minnesota - and I also believe that we need to pass common sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people.

I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.

I know we can find a bipartisan response to pressing challenges - like repairing, modernizing and adding to the infrastructure on which we all rely. I know it because I've seen it happen in my own state of Minnesota.

I'll never have the seniority of lions of the Senate who've been in office for decades. What I do have is a lifetime of experience as a parent and activist, small business owner, and lieutenant governor of Minnesota.

As for family values, they are whatever they are - some families are tight, others are blown away like dandelion puffs. A main value in Minnesota is still: don't waste my time, don't B.S. me, I wasn't born yesterday.

Back in 1983, quarterback Tommy Kramer got hurt and the Minnesota Vikings traded for me. The plan was for me to play, but I got something called Graves' disease, an autoimmune disorder, and wound up on injured reserve.

After 16 months of teaching, consulting, fellowship, and special project activities on matters ranging from conservation to healthcare to international trade, Gov. Ventura appointed me to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

Flip's a player's coach, and I do know one thing, he motivates better than anybody I know. His system is very oriented around the point guard. He and Steph (Marbury) had a great relationship when Steph was in Minnesota.

When my mom and dad got married, they lived in south Boston, which is where the first six of my brothers were born. After that, they moved to Minnesota, which is where the other five of us were born. So there's 11 of us.

I had played in a tournament with the captain of the University of Minnesota's golf team, and he thought I was good. He called his coach, and the coach called me and recruited me. A five-minute phone call changed my life.

I was raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where you never say that you're cold, or that you're suffering, and you listen politely to people, even if you disagree with them completely. Then you say passive-aggressive things later.

Anybody that's from somewhere that's made it in music outside of New York or L.A., if it's a unique enough place, they'll always say, 'Dude's from Minnesota!' Or wherever, you know? So that's how I got the Philly connection.

I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep - an experience I encoded in 'The Stormchasers.'

Shortly after Senator Eugene J. McCarthy died in 2005 the age of 89, I became an honorary member of the committee starting a fellowship in McCarthy's name at his alma mater, Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

I was born in East Germany, before the wall came down. We sort of escaped, I guess. I grew up all over the place. Germany, London, back and forth between Minnesota and Germany. I was sort of an army brat, but not in the army.

People still don't know how good Kevin Love is because he played in Minnesota... you didn't see him much on TV. His passing, his knowledge of the game - the stuff that doesn't show up in the stats - he has so much going for him.

When I testified before Congress after the Hudson River landing, Congressman James Oberstar of Minnesota said, 'Safety begins in the boardroom.' That's as true in medicine as it is in aviation. It always boils down to leadership.

I was one of the first women partners at my law firm, the first woman in my Minnesota prosecutor job, and the first woman elected from my state to the Senate. So advice from women who had done similar things was important for me.

And, actually it was interesting because I had done a lot of traveling in the United States and Canada and Mexico on my motorcycle; and I was really, it was the first time I had really gotten out of the Minnesota area to speak of.

The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I'm looking at a run for Senate in 2008, but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest.

My parents live in the part of the United States that is Canada. It is so far north that Minnesota lies in the same direction as Miami. They have four distinct seasons: Winter, More Winter, Still More Winter, and That One Day Of Summer.

Whenever I've done a sketch in which I'm asked to play a mom, my brain goes to Minnesota. It makes the character seem matronly, warm, the kind of person that takes care of you and brings you Campbell's soup when you're sick. It's a great shortcut.

As a prosecutor and a senator, one of my main criminal justice priorities has been enforcing and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, a bill with deep roots in Minnesota, seeds planted by former Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife Sheila.

There must be something in the water in Minnesota because historically, despite its seemingly homogeneous population, the state has produced some of our more radical political thinkers, and its people have put their prejudices aside to vote for them.

In February 2003, I signed a three-year contract with MSNBC to host a talk show. Having recently decided not to run again for governor of Minnesota, I was still a pretty hot commodity. The show was originally scheduled for an hour, four nights a week.

I went to Macalester in Minnesota to study social psychology, the study of why people do what they do. I was really looking at race, population, gender, and how we psychologically function in a way that affects our societal outcomes around those issues.

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.

Before we even consider expanding Medicare, or another program based on its rates, we must reform our Medicare payment system so that it rewards value, not volume, and doesn't disadvantage states like Minnesota that provide high-quality care in an efficient way.

I look at my own reservation, the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota - on my reservation, one quarter of our money is spent on energy. All of that money basically goes to off-reservation vendors whether it is for electricity, or whether it is for fuel.

Canada has the world's largest Ukrainian population outside of Ukraine and Russia. As a senator from Minnesota, a state with a large Ukrainian-American community, I understand how important it is that Canada works with us to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district, and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.

Cuba is in some ways a perfect trading partner for Minnesota because there's so little overlap between what they are good at and they produce and what Minnesota is good at and what we produce. So it's a natural trading relationship, especially because they're so close.

Whether you are from Minnesota, Wisconsin or any other Northern tier state, you are not going to like the reimbursement formula. The problem we face is that we wouldn't have that formula if a majority of the states didn't like it, and they have the majority of the votes.

I never thought I would be the oldest quarterback in the National Football League at one point, not in a million years. I never thought I would play as long as I did, either, seventeen years from start to finish, with stops in Houston, Minnesota, Seattle, and Kansas City.

I still recall the first time I laid eyes on Ric. Dusty Rhodes and Dick Murdoch were wrestling, at the time, in Minnesota, and they took a liking to this kid who'd been hanging around the matches. That kid was Ric Flair, and they brought him to my ranch in Amarillo, Texas.

Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.

I have more of an identity with Cowher than I do Tomlin. I knew Cowher when he came over from Kansas City as a defensive coordinator, and his teams were tough. Tomlin came in from Minnesota, and I didn't know anything about him. So maybe it's unfair for me to make the comparison.

In many parts of Minnesota outside of the big metro areas, and the college towns, and the regional centers like Duluth or Rochester, the state has a lot of people who work incredibly hard. I think that what happened is that Trump was able to connect with that sense of real concern.

In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth.

I'm from Minnesota and have always lived there. And my competitive career actually started in the late '90s racing motocross, which then turned into racing snowmobiles professionally. I turned pro in 2003, racing with the best in the world and living my dream as a professional athlete.

I thought if anyone need a leg up, it was our foster children. So, I started getting involved in education reform, and that was back in 1998. And as a result of all the reform work that I had done, people urged me to run for the Minnesota state Senate. I did, I was there for six years.

It's incredibly important to my spirits and mental health that I come back to Minnesota and not be surrounded constantly with Hollywood life. Spending time in the backyard, helping out in the garden, going out to the lakes, reminds me of what's important and allows me to realign myself.

I was born in Canada, and then my dad played pro soccer in England and then also on an island off the coast of Portugal. So we lived there for, like, 10 years. And then we moved to Minnesota. So I feel like I've experienced a lot of different cultures, and I'm still figuring out who I am.

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