Minnesota celebrates 150 years of statehood this weekend. Raise a toast to Pigs Eye Perrant, Joe Rolette and the rest of the state's scoundrels: the one-eyed barkeepers, bootleggers and ne're-do-wells won't get celebrated any other way.

Even better yet, turn out for the Sesquicentennial Wagon Train and see what transportation emitted before greenhouse gasses. There's a whole trail of it stretching back to Cannon Falls this week.

I caught up with the wagons as they were breaking camp in Hastings this morning. Wagon master Jon Olson was leading a string of 20 wagons out of the park down by the Mississippi. It's a bit of a motley fleet: there are buggies and grain haulers and rubber-tired hay wagons in the caravan. Some are restored antiques, some came right out of a welding shop.

Rick Schmidt, a retired carpenter from Lakeville, built his double-box grain wagon out of ash from scratch. That's him at right. "I thought it would be a hoot," he said of the project. His wife didn't initially see the charm, he admits. "But now she thinks its pretty nice."

The most interesting thing, though, is that this may very well be the last time in history you get to see an actual wagon train go through Minneapolis and St. Paul proper. They're headed to Inver Grove Heights this afternoon and they're supposed to be at Fort Snelling by lunch time tomorrow.

The crew likes visitors: they had 100 people in Hastings for a chuckwagon meal and some dance music.

From Fort Snelling on Sunday, the wagons will start up 54th Street, Minnehaha Drive, Godfrey and 46th Street in Minneapolis about 11 a.m. They'll hit St. Paul about noon and go up Ford Parkway, Cleveland and then down Summit Avenue to the Capitol in the afternoon. The gawking will be good, if Hastings was any indication this morning.

Here's the turn-by-turn schedule for Saturday and for Sunday.

Congress opened hearings yesterday on direct-to-consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals, lead by U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan.

Television commercials for Lipitor featuring Robert Jarvik were the immediate cause of the uproar. Pfizer in February pulled the ads for the cholesterol drug starring the creator of the artificial heart (never mind the puzzling logic of that endorsement) over objections to featuring an actual medical professional's endorsement.

But there's more to it than the ethical issue here. Think of the money.

Direct-to-consumer drug ad spending has grown from about $1 billion 10 years ago to about $5 billion now, according to the Wall Street Journal. About half of that goes to television.

Do the math: maybe 3 percent of the television advertising industry's $80 billion revenue comes from drug companies. That means the likes of Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis are effectively paying for something like two minutes of every hour of television.

(It seems like even more than that if you watch cable for any amount of time.)

Drug manufacturers have long argued that marketing costs aren't unduly inflating the cost of medicine, at least not above the rise in the Consumer Price Index.

But all that money's not coming out of thin air, either. Whatever you think of the change in the price of medicine, there's only one real place to get billions to spend on drug marketing: from the people that take the pills. Or injections. Or whatever.

Granted, $2.5 billion in advertising expenditures would be a drop in the bucket of the $2.3 trillion Americans spent on health care last year. But if you're taking name-brand Lipitor, for instance, at $100 a month or so, it still means you're feeding more than a buck a year to your television.

And if that's not the only drug you're taking, or not even the most expensive drug you're taking, you (or you and your insurance company's clients) might be paying $2, $3, maybe even more, in annual medical costs to keep the MHz flowing into your television receiver. (And, to a much lesser extent, the magazine coming to your mailbox or the radio waves to your car antenna.)

I'm not going to argue about the truthfulness of the ads, or the medical or legal implications of direct to consumer drug marketing. And the media have an honorable place in promulgating medical information.

But given all that we ask of our health care system and the many ways it falls short, doesn't it seem just a little bit absurd to ask it, too, to help bankroll the likes of Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice and reruns of the Golden Girls?

Before you get all excited about Carlos Gomez's hitting for a cycle at U.S. Cellular last night, (and prompting pitcher Mark Buehrle to take a bat to a dugout space heater, no doubt at least tepidly responsible for the White Sox's 13-1 shellacking) check out the new Fox Sports ranking.

It comes our way from Cubs fan and MPR staffer Tom Weber.

The upshot: our Minnesota Twins rank 7th in the bottom 10 rankings of all sports franchises.

At least they still beat the AL doormats on this list, the Tampa Bay Rays (they seem determined to drop the 'devil' in their name) and the now (Mike) Sweeneyless Kansas City Royals.

Best to take it as some consolation for the bottom-of-the-9th pinch Sweeney hit that broke up Scott Baker's no-hitter last September. Arrrgh.

Gomez, by the way, hit what I assume to be an extremely rare REVERSE "natural cycle" last night. There have only been a dozen times in recorded major league history that a single player hit a single, double, triple and homer in order in the same game.

(I actually got to see one hit by the St. Louis Cardinals John Mabry at Coors Field in Denver in 1996. It was spectacular, even if the Cardinals lost.)

Ah, spring. The snow melts. The robins sing.

St. Paul is going broke.

This is actually the first year in many that I haven't watched from the 3rd floor windows at City Hall as the trees leaf out on Kellogg Boulevard. But I took at least some comfort this week, as both papers reported multi-million dollar budget deficit projections in St. Paul.

Some things do never change.

The number goes up and down, but it's practically as reliable as a spring ice out. I went back and looked, out of curiosity, at what had been reported for the last 10 years.

Here's the rundown of projected "next year" deficits, as reported in April and May of the listed year.

2008: $13.1 million
2007: $16 million
2006: $16.5 million
2005: $16 million
2004: $17 million
2003: $33 million
2002: $6 million
2001: ($10 million)
2000: $7.3 million
1999: $7 million

There was no mention of a deficit in the spring of 2001 (heady days, indeed!), although I'll credit Norm Coleman for that year trying, unsuccessfully, to give out a $10 million tax rebate. All told, it adds up to about $106 million in total projected deficits.

Drop the rebate outlier and the conflagration of 2003 and its about $12.3 million, on average per year.

Now, go out and enjoy the day.

One of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence is on display at the Minnesota History Center. On Tuesday the museum opened a display of the document printed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

It's here in Minnesota to help celebrate the state's sesquicentennial, to be marked this Sunday.

But America got a new beginning, too, just downstairs from the Declaration of Independence this morning. A 129 people from 40 different countries stood in the 3M Auditorium and swore their allegiance to the United States.

They were drawn by love; they fled war, and everything in between.

"In this country, you can become what you want to become if you wish. That's an incredible opportunity here," said Adasanya Adelaja, of Brooklyn Park. Originally from Nigeria, he wore his leather U.S. Army jacket to the ceremony: like several others among the newly minted citizens, Adelaja is already an American soldier.

That's him at left. He quickly made friends of two other African natives at the ceremony -- Rahel Desta, of Bloomington, (at center), and William Doup, of St. Cloud (right). She's originally from Ethiopia. He's from Sudan. They all followed siblings or parents to America.

"I'm proud to be a citizen of this country, of the greatest nation in the world," Adelaja said, showing off his citizenship certificate.

A couple rows away, Kamran Ardakani, a health care manager from Eden Prairie, was sitting alone, the sole immigrant to stand when the USCIS adjudications officer read "Iran" from the roll of countries from which today's immigrants had come.

He fled his native country more than 20 years ago. "His parents sent him away," his wife, Britt said. "They didn't want him in the Iran-Iraq war." He's never gone back.

Ardakani came instead to the University of Minnesota and majored in physics. "The alternative was to go fight in the war," he said. "The way to stay out of that was to go to university, just graduate from high school and go to college, but the colleges were closed for a year or two at a time. Really, the only opportunity was to continue your education. The United States offered me that opportunity. Here I am."

Ardakani, his wife and daughters Catharina and Julia (holding her hand over her face with firm 4-year-old defiance) and son Nicky were all in St. Paul for the occasion, and for cookies and lemonade at a reception in the upstairs rotunda.

It may be true, as the Declaration of Independence's author Thomas Jefferson said, that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

But the toil of college students, the yearning of mothers for their sons and daughters, a father's pride and even the heartache of leaving behind family and home - they all help, too, if Wednesday's crowd at the History Center was any indication.

It turns out that the complexity of Al Franken's income taxes isn't a recent phenomenon. They date back to the Al Franken Decade.

Comedically speaking, anyway.

Hearken back to April 5, 1980, and Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. It dates from the end of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players era, just five episodes from the final breakup of the original cast. The newsbreak was one of the classics, with Jane Curtin and Bill Murray at the anchor desk.

And, um, Al Franken as the "social sciences editor," asking that prescient question: "Well, now that it's tax time, I know a lot of you are thinking, what can you do to help me, Al Franken, do my taxes?"

Here's how Franken explained the situation 18 years ago (with a tip of the News Cut chapeau to colleague Elizabeth Stawicki, who pointed us to the site):

Okay, now I'm gonna tell you three of the ways that I legally avoid paying my fair share of taxes. I'm not going to tell you everything - after all, this is something I pay my big-time accountant for, whose services are, by the way, tax-deductible.

Now, first - the Al Franken Corporation. You see, I make only $300 a week, paid to me by Al Franken the Corporation. Now, the rest of the money taken in by the Al Franken Corporation goes to paying many of the expenses of its employee - me, Al Franken. Now, of course, the more business expenses that Al Franken, me and Al Franken, the corporation can document, the less taxes I have to pay.

He urged the audience to send in their receipts for any and everything. Books, medicine, food, whatever, noting that, as a comedian, anything could be part of his act and a business expense. "My accountant can do something with it. Believe me."

Here's what looks to be a reasonable transcript of the segment. The Internet Movie Database and several other sites indicate that there was indeed a Franken tax sketch on that episode, but no one else seems to have the actual video.

As always, any contributions would be warmly welcomed here at News Cut Headquarters.

Anyway, consider this today's reminder that there's a very fine line between tragedy and comedy.

Who knew it'd turn out to be a U.S. Senate race?

Goldman Sachs analysts now say they can foresee another $80 tacked onto the new $122 a barrel oil record. It's an extension of their "super spike" theory, the one that once predicted (SHOCKING!) oil at $105 a barrel.

Assume for argument's sake that that everyone keeps getting, proportionately, the same piece of oil's financial action that they're getting now. That would put gas at about $5.72 a gallon or more when oil hits the magic $200 mark.

We're talking $100 for a typical 17 gallon tank that was costing you just $34 as recently as the last time the White House was up for grabs.

At some point you might as well just get out and push. (That's actually why I quit driving the nitro-fueled funny car to work. I do miss the 93-second commute, but then again, it was hard to park.)

But is $5.72-per-gallon gas the straw that's going to break the Camaro's back?

Probably not.

If you're driving 40 miles each way every workday, $200-a-barrel gas is going to cost you maybe an additional $100 a month from what you're paying now.

That's a lot, but what's the alternative? Selling your house and moving closer to work? You'd have to move halfway closer to the job and pay a bargain-basement $200,000 mortgage for five years to recoup just the bank fees with your gas savings.

And that's saying nothing of the bath you took on the real estate, the stuff you broke during the move or what you're actually saving when gas drops back to a relatively reasonable $5 per gallon.

How about selling your car and getting something more reasonable? If you're getting 20 miles a gallon now, you'd have to trade in for a 32 mpg model to match today's per-mile fuel cost.

You know what vehicle gets 32 mpg, according to Car and Driver magazine?

The Smart Car.

Yeah, that little French two-seat number that looks like the egg that Robin Williams popped out of in the opening credits of Mork and Mindy. But with wheels.

The Smart Car is four feet shorter than a Volkswagen Beetle. AND it requires high buck 91-octane gas, to boot. You aren't trading the Corolla in for that thing, let alone the Volvo XC70 or the Ford F150 XLT.

Here's what the News Cut Strategic Global Petroleum Index Assessment™ says: Whatever Goldman Sachs says oil is going to cost, you're gonna pay it.

Shazbat!

Relief groups are scrambling to get aid to Myanmar to help victims of last weekend's cyclone - the south Asian version of a hurricane.

But that's no comfort to Minnesota's fastest growing refugee community, ethnic Karen who fled Myanmar, which the Karen still refer to as Burma.

Eh Taw Dwe is among them. He's doing a lot of praying these days.

A translator for the St. Paul Ramsey County Department of Public Health, he fled Myanmar in 2002. He and his then-pregnant wife crawled under gunfire on the Thai border to escape oppression of the ethnic Karen at home.

They've still got family back home, but there's been no phone contact, no email, nothing to do but listen to the radio and watch television since the cyclone hit over the weekend.

The storm swept straight across the northern neck of the Karen homeland. And though his family lives inland, Dwe says about half the population of the nation's Bay of Bengal delta is ethnic Karen.

"I feel like I am one of them," says Dwe, who lives in St. Paul with his wife and three children. "I feel terribly sad for them."

Like many other Karen, Dwe joined the armed struggle against the military dictatorship in Myanmar. His people have struggled for their independence, or at least some measure of autonomy, for half a century.

It's sparked a sometimes brutal response in the nation's Karen state. The government began a military offensive against the insurgent Karen National Liberation Army two years ago.

Dwe himself had been arrested, beaten and nearly summarily executed before he fled his native country six years ago.

Now, he and other Karen in Minnesota fear that the political unrest will spell even further disaster for their friends and family back home. Like those among the Tamil diaspora after the tsunami struck Sri Lanka in 2004, Karen refugees fear their brethren will intentionally be left out of recovery from the natural disaster.

And they are brethren. Many, like Dwe, are among a significant Christan minority. Their families were brought to the church by American Baptist missionaries to southeast Asia nearly two centuries ago. It's part of the reason they've had to flee their homeland.

For many, though, there's no where to go. More than a half million Karen were though to have been driven from their homes by the armed struggle with the government. About 150,000 have fled to Thailand, swelling eight refugee camps on the northern border.

"We're really concerned," Dwe said. "We really want to have good management for this assistance to get directly to the people that are suffering, not to the Burmese military. We want to cooperate with the local government."

He said he expects the death toll to rise dramatically in coming days, nonetheless. Dwe says the estimates of 20,000 dead and 40,000 missing only account for the cities, not low lying rice-growing areas where many Karen grow rice.

Dwe also fears a lack of clean water and food, dysentery and malaria will kill many more in the wake of the cyclone.

The eventual death toll, he says, "will never, ever be counted."

Here's a 5-minute interview with him.

The Star Tribune has refuted reports out of New York that it is on the verge of bankruptcy, but clearly something is going on over there at 425 Portland.

It's probably a lot like what's going on wherever they're putting out a newspaper these days, according to Lauren Fine. She's a former Merrill Lynch media industry analyst - considered one of the country's best newspaper watchers. She's now teaching at Kent State University.

She doesn't have any direct knowledge of the situation in Minneapolis. But Fine doesn't think the Star Tribune's owners brought in the Blackstone Group in preparation for a bankruptcy.

Its sounds more like a sub-prime mortgage, as Fine explains it:

"My guess is that if there were covenants at any time that they could be coming dangerously close to breaking through them, and this would be the time ahead when you hit those problems, that you would look for alternatives. And alternatives could range from trying to get an infusion of equity. It could be renegotiating to a different type of instrument that maybe has no near term cash pay component, but maybe something that defers those payments to later. It could be something that takes into account new covenants and doesn't change the interest rate structure... I'm guessing, but I imagine that they're facing some severe pressure points right now."

She's not putting any odds on a workout. Fine ran through a list of other scenarios for the endgame for the Newspaper(s) of the Twin Cities. Here's her run-down, from likeliest to the longest shot:

● A joint operating agreement with the Media News-owned Pioneer Press that would combine back shop and production resources and leave the newsrooms separate. Whether they are "intact" would be another matter altogether. "If they are interested in a JOA, I doubt the Justice Department would have a problem with that," says Fine.

● An acquisition of the Star Tribune by MediaNews. It would be difficult for the bigger paper to buy a smaller competitor under the Newspaper Protection Act, but if the Strib does declare bankruptcy, it could help satisfy the NPA requirement that an acquired property be "failing." But Fine and other industry observers don't think Media News is in any condition to be borrowing for or spending money on any acquisitions either.

● The Hail Mary. The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., recently quit publishing a paper and went online only. It slashed costs, but doesn't allow them to monetize sheet after sheet of newsprint any more, whether anyone reads through the "Bargain Pet" classifieds or not. The online revenue today is only a fraction of the print revenue, and Fine doubts there's enough time for the two to converge in Minnesota.

● Stop the presses. Businesses close down all the time, some of them quite substantial. Bear Stearns started in 1923 and survived the Great Depression. But not the foreclosure meltdown. It had more than 15,000 employees when J.P. Morgan bought it at fire sale prices. "The option would also be to basically say, 'You know what? This isn't working," says Fine. "We're really sorry. You have another paper. It's a great paper. We made them a better paper by virtue of competition, but we're sorry, we can't afford this any more, we're shutting the doors. I doubt that would happen."

You can hear the whole 7 minute Megillah right here.

I've spent a fair measure of my time recently painfully reliving my tween years: I've been covering the Legislature while it debates a statewide sex education mandate.

Unlike the subject, the legislative discussion gets a little, um, sterile.

Luckily, there's a DVD. You hear about it every now and then at the Capitol. Its formal title is "The Talk, An Intercourse on Coming of Age." It's a school video that's mentioned as a potential element of a sex-ed curriculum.

It's occasionally referred to by lawmakers as the "Captain Condom video."

It really isn't clear how many who talk about the video have actually seen it. The teenagers in the actual "Captain Condom" scene actually decide it's best to abstain from sex. Or pretty much from sex. But they take a rather awkwardly hilarious route to that conclusion.

"Kids are really engaged with it," says Catherine Conzet, development director at the Minneapolis-based Youth Performance Company, which produced the video. "It's something that teenagers won't roll their eyes at, like other videos... They're horrible, and they're usually written by adults. This one was predominantly written by teenagers."

It first ran in YPC's 2004-2005 season, and subsequently reappeared at the Fringe Festival, as did the other YPC smash hit: Goddess Menses and the Menstrual Show. Conzet said the YPC filmed "The Talk" for DVD because the demand for the production to tour was so high that they worried that the cast wouldn't get their school work done if they took the show on the road.

"We've sold the DVD in 28 states," Conzet says. "They're showing it in India and South America."

As a rule, we don't typically recommend sex education films here at Minnesota Public Radio News. But since Bob Collins is on vacation and I've got the run of the place, I thought I'd urge the gentle readers of News Cut to decide for themselves just what Minnesota's youth might actually be learning at school.

Click on the play button below to see the video. The clip runs about 5:20 and the second-best line is the last one.

How often, driving over a freeway bridge or under a railroad overpass, do you think, "Hey, I'm sure glad they finished that eight weeks early"?

That thought came to my mind when I head that that Flatiron Construction thinks it can finish the new Interstate 35W bridge by September, rather than well into winter. They're not making any guarantees, but there is a $200,000-a-day carrot at the end of the MnDot stick. (You can read the story here.)

It's hard to argue with the builder's alacrity, particularly if you've spent any time sitting on Minnesota 280 in Lauderdale.

Right?

But the construction is at the point at which some of the state's most recent bridge misadventures have occurred.

An apparent miscalculation by a scaffolding engineer led to the collapse of the Lake Street bridge one night in April 1990. They had to start over. Similarly, a design flaw is blamed for the hairline cracks that brought construction on the Wakota Bridge to a halt three years ago.

That project still isn't finished.

In fact, the only engineering feat that brings fame to mind for the speed of its completion was the transcontinental railroad, which was finished in 1869.

It's also remembered for the Enron-esque Credit Mobilier scandal and a smallpox epidemic from which we'd recoil in bio-terror today.

The project also involved some early, and apparently often fatal, experiments with nitroglycerin and a forced-labor work-ethic for some of the Chinese immigrants working on the project.

There is also the issue that the railroad and its construction helped wipe out Native American populations across the West. If you set those issues aside, the construction of the railroad was an amazing feat.

At any rate, the general rule of getting things done seems to be: Fast. Cheap. Right. Pick any two.

Flatiron wasn't the low bidder on the project, and there's speculation that taxpayers may have to put up as much as $20 million more to get the job done early.

I got so busy working on the Women of World War II stories over the last week (here, here, and here and thanks for asking!)that I neglected to put together a News Cut Quiz last week. Nobody noticed -- a blow to your education and my ego. But let's muster on. This week's quiz is full of great trivia from this week's news stories. Where else can you learn the temperature at which a seed of corn germinates. There. That's your only clue this week.

As always, report back here when you're done.

I am heading to New England for the next two weeks. I'll be occasionally posting something but in the meantime, if I hear correctly, MPR's Tim Nelson and, perhaps, Tom Weber will be your hosts. In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter.

And, what's that? You say you have a good angle for News Cut, or a person you think I just have to profile? Good. Tell me about it.

Mary Baruth, 85, of Bloomington was one of the first people to know that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor to start World War II. "I was a telephone operator in the Kenwood District -- the only one left that was manual. We were all half-asleep when the board lit up," she told me on Thursday. "I knew our life was going to change from then on." (Listen)

She didn't know then, of course, that she'd spend the war years in the Army Air Force. She hadn't considered the military until a trip to Seattle where she met women in the Coast Guard who convinced her that the reputation of military women as "raunchy" wasn't true. "It was new to have women actually in the service and there were rumors that there were a lot of rough women in the service. And there were a few." Two of her best friends in the service became nuns after the war. "I made two of my best friends nuns," she said. (Listen)

She joined the Army after a fight with her boyfriend, she said. She served in the Army Airways Communication System, investigating people who were going to be engaged in secret work. "Any guy who was going to do any of the secret work had to be investigated, and we would try to get information on him from the various police departments." She started in Shepherd Field in Texas but was eventually moved to Langley, Virginia, now the home of the CIA. "That was interesting because of all the secretive work that was going on there."

"Any secrets you'd like to share," I asked.

"No," she said with a laugh, leaving the distinct impression it wasn't because she didn't know them. "They had us in a building with no windows. It was like working in a dungeon."

Mary Baruth (then Mary Reese) met the man who would become her husband after the war, when he walked into her office by mistake. It wasn't until 1949 that they married and had three children -- he called them "Little works of Art." He died last year.

The military was one of the best times of her life. "When I went in the service, I had to do things whether I liked to or not. Just to get out and meet people, it just changed my whole life as far as me not being in a shell anymore," she said. "I always think it gave me more confidence -- the people I met and travel. But I wasn't just going in for me. I was trying to help out."

Asked about an event next week at which Minnesota's women veterans will be honored, Baruth said, "It's kind of late, isn't it? We were new to the service, but it's taken awhile and I'm thinking, 'how many of us are left?'"

What would she like to hear someone say? "That we've done well. That we helped out," she said, with a touch of guilt, however. "We were there to relieve the guys and if we weren't there, maybe some of them wouldn't have had to go overseas."

This is the final of the short series on the women of World War II. You can find the first one here and the second one here. My colleague, Elizabeth Stawicki, also produced a nifty story on the subject in 2005.

Lindsay Petterson, whose story I profiled here last month, is happy that the Legislature has finally reached a deal on compensation for victims of the I-35W bridge collapse last August... and maybe a little hesitant about what's next.

She posted on her Caring Bridge Web site today:

I will be curious to see how my emotions play out in the next few months. For so long, I was able to focus on the legislative stuff when I felt hopeless and helpless. At least I could do something to make a difference. I'll just have to wait and see how things play out at least.

More musings on what it means to politicize the I-35W bridge collapse.

John McCain's comment in Pennsylvania:

"The bridge in Minneapolis didn't collapse because there wasn't enough money. The bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because so much money was spent on wasteful, unnecessary pork-barrel projects."

Rep. Keith Ellison in the Associated Press story on McCain's remarks:

"The last thing we need is a misinformed presidential aspirant posturing at our expense."

Keith Ellison on August 3 -- two days after the bridge collapse:

"Well, I will say this. You know, life is about tradeoffs. Government is about tradeoffs. And you can have one thing or another. You can invest in infrastructure or you can pursue other government expenditures, which are not as productive as basic infrastructure investment."

Are they saying the same thing with different words? Infrastructure is crumbling because money is being spent elsewhere?