Gov. Mark Dayton, labor activists and House members made an appearance at the Minnesota State Fair on Tuesday to renew a push to raise the state's minimum wage from $6.25 per hour to $9.50 by 2015.

Gov. Mark Dayton’s office set politicos and reporters abuzz this week with a late-arriving and mysterious addition to his daily schedule for Wednesday. The update said only that Dayton would be traveling out of state with Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) Commissioner Katie Clark Sieben for a “meeting regarding a possible economic development opportunity for Minnesota.”

State Rep. Ryan Winkler has issued an apology for an incendiary comment he made on Twitter in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

In the end, the DFL-controlled 2013 Legislature finished its budget work on time — with four minutes to spare, to be exact. It was 11:56 p.m. on adjournment day by the time the Minnesota Senate wrapped up its vote on the tax bill.

Rachel Larson Bohman wasted no time getting into the race for Minnesota secretary of state. Within an hour of DFL officeholder Mark Ritchie’s Tuesday announcement that he would not seek a third term in 2014, Bohman released a statement putting her name in the ring as a Democrat.

In the days leading up to a contentious Republican primary contest last year between Connie Doepke and Dave Osmek for a Senate seat in the western suburbs, Americans for Prosperity Minnesota circulated a mailing. Doepke went on to lose the election by just 107 votes.

DFL Secretary of State Mark Ritchie announced Tuesday that he will not seek a third term next fall, and already there's a large field of potential candidates from both parties interested in the office, including activists and current and former legislators.

Whether the 2013 legislative session in Minnesota was a successful one depends on which Democrat you ask. While many long-sought DFL priorities were achieved at the end of the five-month session, including gay marriage and increased spending on education, a handful of high-priority issues were ultimately shelved in 2013 in the hustle and bustle of crafting a $38 billion budget.

It was four minutes to midnight on the final day of session when the Minnesota Senate passed the omnibus tax bill that wrapped up the Legislature’s work on the state’s $38 billion budget for the 2014-15 biennium. The down-to-the-wire finish followed a contentious final two weeks of negotiations between House, Senate and the governor’s office over the terms of final budget and policy deals.

State lawmakers on Monday sent a campaign finance bill to Gov. Mark Dayton that allows candidates to raise and spend more money. The bill received bipartisan support in the House and Senate but also drew dissent from DFLers in the majority on some provisions.