Excuse me, what? According to an AP story, “Garrison Keillor says he hasn’t seen the allegations of improper conduct made against him. … On Thursday, MPR said the lone complaint included multiple allegations. MPR declined to give any details. Keillor has mentioned only one incident in which he put a hand on a woman’s bare back while trying to console her, and apologized.”

Also, John Bowden of The Hill says, “Writer and former ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ host Garrison Keillor has been removed from his regular column in The Washington Post, according to a statement from the newspaper. The newspaper’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, said in a statement Thursday that Keillor’s firing was due to the columnist penning an article about sexual misconduct allegations facing multiple high-profile men in media without disclosing his own misconduct allegations. ‘Knowing he (Keillor) was under investigation for his workplace behavior, he should not have written a column on that subject; or, if he was going to write, he should have told his editors and readers that he was under investigation,’ Hiatt said.”

At Slate, Ruth Graham says, “But there were always reasons to suspect that Keillor’s folksy persona wasn’t a true portrait of the man: the unseemly lawsuit against his neighbor, the messy personal life. In interviews, he often comes off as aloof and awkward. A profile last year in the New York Times ended with the radio host breezing past the reporter after a show without acknowledging her, or even seeming to recognize her. ‘He is certainly the strangest person I know,’ the writer Roger Angell, his one-time editor, said in that piece. ‘I don’t think he’s necessarily a happy man.’”

At The New York Times, Bari Weiss puts it this way: “I’d venture a bet that no American hates ‘Prairie Home Companion’ more than I do. Having loved people who have loved the show, I have tried desperately to understand its appeal. I have failed. Those relationships, perhaps not coincidentally, have failed, too. So when I say it’s dead wrong that Minnesota Public Radio is going to stop rebroadcasting past episodes of the radio program, I don’t make the argument out of any devotion to it or Garrison Keillor. … scrubbing the culture of work produced by the complicated or compromised or conniving or criminal or contemptible is a practice with a chilling legacy.”

USA Today stopped in at the Chatterbox Cafe. Writer Alyssa Zaczek writes, “… residents of the area that inspired Keillor’s tales are reeling from allegations of ‘inappropriate behavior’ that caused Minnesota Public Radio to terminate his contracts. ‘All of Central Minnesota is going to feel this hurt,’ said Bud Heidgerken, former owner of Charlie’s Cafe in Freeport, Minnesota, which inspired Keillor’s famous Chatterbox Cafe. … Although the current owners of Charlie’s Cafe declined to comment, Heidgerken, the former owner, said that the allegations don’t line up with the Keillor he knew. ‘It surprises me. We most certainly never saw any of that in Garrison,’ he said. ‘He always treated people with respect.’”

What you get with one party rule. For The Hill, Timothy Cama reports, “The House voted Thursday to overturn the Obama administration’s decision to temporarily ban mining in an area of northern Minnesota’s Superior National Forest. The Minnesota’s Economic Rights in the Superior National Forest, or MINER, Act, passed 216-204, with nearly all Republicans in support and nearly all Democrats opposed. The Obama administration’s decision, made the day before former President Obama left office, blocked mining for two years in an area of the forest near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in an effort to protect those waters from potential mine waste output.”

You gotta see the picture. KMSP-TV reports, “Authorities in northern Minnesota cited a truck driver earlier this month for hauling a 36-foot wide shed – what they called the definition of an oversized load.  On Nov. 19, a Pennington County sheriff’s deputy stopped the truck on Center Avenue North west of Thief River Falls, according to the Minnesota State Patrol. The truck was hauling the shed without proper permits or an escort vehicle, taking up both lanes of the road.”

And this is how they treat a guy exercising his precious Second Amendment rights. April Baumgarten of the Forum News Service tells us, “A defense attorney claims a Clearbrook, Minnesota, man sentenced this week for shooting at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter is a ‘nonviolent, peace-loving human being’ who overreacted to what he believed was a life-threatening situation. U.S. District Judge Michael Davis sentenced Carstie Lee Clausen, 72, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, in Minnesota’s federal court to 60 months in prison for assault of a federal agent and damaging an aircraft under the jurisdiction of the U.S. A third charge of discharging a firearm during the commission of a crime of violence was dismissed.”