News Cut: November 20, 2007 Archive

Corcoran fights back

Posted at 9:40 AM on November 20, 2007 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

My name is 3205 Longfellow Ave. This afternoon, the city of Minneapolis will tack a sign on me that says condemned, despite the unusual involvement of neighborhood residents since the bank foreclosed on the Ecuadoran family that called me home. They're gone now, but I'm still here. So are my neighbors, who are worried I'll bring down what they've worked hard to build in the Corcoran neighborhood.

They say I'm a "tipping point on a tipping point block." They have big plans for me and dozens of others in this neighborhood that could be a model for solving the foreclosure problem nationwide. But none of them can go anywhere until the bank that owns me answers the telephone.

A lot of folks bet on Corcoran a few years ago when light-rail, and the Midtown YWCA came along. The home values here were still considered affordable. Then the market collapsed and people lost their homes -- at least three on this block that I can see from here. And a couple dozen others in the neighborhood.

I've been empty for eight months. I'm missing a back door and two windows. So the city is going to condemn me, which changes my chance of survival because after condemnation, the requirements for living in me change and it will cost my new owners another $100,000 to fix me up. Fat chance.

Last Sunday night neighbors met to form a group to find a solution for the foreclosure problem here. Someone who can work with a banker with good sense, maybe help put a non-profit together to put in sweat equity for new owners.

Yesterday, one of them, Bob Milner -- he lives across the street -- called the bank -- Wells Fargo.

"You can't get a person to talk to you," he said last night. "I kept getting transferred to people in other states. There's no one in charge. I was in no-man's land. It's unbelievably stupid and incredibly bad business. You can't find a person to talk to about buying a decent house. The bank is losing its own money."

And doing a good job of it. Wells-Fargo, the second-largest mortgage lender in the country said last week its home- equity losses are likely to increase in the fourth quarter and get worse next year.

Maybe the turnaround can begin with a door and two windows.

Or answering the telephone.

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Painless drinking

Posted at 12:57 PM on November 20, 2007 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Pretty soon, there won't be a penalty for a night of drinking, to make you never want to do it again. Word comes today that a hangover-less vodka is on the market.

This on the heels of the end of the red wine headache.

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Drinking and flying

Posted at 1:39 PM on November 20, 2007 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Midwest Airlines today is defending a pilot who was arrested in his cockpit at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport last week when someone smelled alcohol on his breath. KSTP reported that is blood alcohol level was .16. It wasn't. It was .016. That's not drunk, and it's not against the law to have a .016 blood alcohol level, as long as you didn't do any of the drinking it in the previous 8 hours. And the airline says the pilot was within the airline's more stringent regulations of 10 hours "between bottle and throttle."

So how many beers, for example, do you have to drink in order to register .016 10 hours from now?

According to this calculator, about 6. Or about the same as a half-bottle of beer within the last hour.

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Fallout from an inside job

Posted at 3:15 PM on November 20, 2007 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

No doubt this will sound like sour grapes. No journalist -- or blogger -- wants to get beaten on any story. And there's no question that blogger Eric Black "owned" (as we like to say in the news business, but only when it happens to us) the Rachel Paulose story. He did a great job on the story start to finish, he reports accurately.

Paulose resigned at 3:13 Tuesday afternoon. At 3:18, Black's Web site posted Paulose's letter of resignation. This came hours after Black reported that more supervisors were about to resign in protest.

Black, it would appear, had a source in the U.S. Attorney's office and there's nothing wrong with that from a journalist's perspective. Paulose, by some accounts, was a terrible administrator who got her job based on her allegiance to the Bush administration. That's a legitimate story and an office leak was required for you to eventually find out about it. Besides, it's difficult for any journalist to argue that what happens in a U.S. Attorney's office stays in a U.S. Attorney's office. Even though, perhaps, it should.

Paulose is gone, and, quite possibly, the people who leaked information can breathe a sigh of relief. Even though no law was broken, there's still a nagging question: What is their view on how confidential information should be handled in the U.S. Attorney's office from here on?

See Bonds, Barry. He's a guy who, by most accounts, is a jerk, and perhaps deserved the indictment a grand jury handed up against him, three years after he testified before a grand jury investigating BALCO for supplying drugs to ballplayers. They never could get him on the drug charges, but that didn't stop someone in the justice system from leaking allegations and testimony from a grand jury for more than four years.

The grand jury sieve made two reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle famous. As it turned out, the testimony was leaked regularly by a lawyer.

Federal prosecutors have a way of taking leaks seriously. Those two Chronicle reporters were ordered to jail for refusing to identify who leaked the confidential information from the sanctity of the courthouse.

A New York Times reporter went to jail rather than reveal who leaked confidential information in the Valerie Plame affair

What are the boundaries of revealing of confidential information in a U.S. Attorney's office, and also enforce, let alone adhere to, the protections to privacy that the law requires? How does the next U.S. Attorney for Minnesota run an office knowing, that he -- or she -- has a staff willing to leak when its in their self interest? What happens if that self interest collides with the law?

The new U.S. attorney's first job is to ask one question: Who here can be trusted?

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Comparing crime

Posted at 5:46 PM on November 20, 2007 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

The naming of Detroit as the least safe city in the United States is causing some consternation in Detroit, oddly enough. But a Minnesota law professor is in the fray, too.

The American Society of Criminology discounted the report from an arm of the Congressional Quarterly magazine, calling it "an irresponsible misuse" of crime data.

University of Minnesota law professor Michael Tonry, the society's president, said "the rankings were unfair because of the different way that cities east of the Mississippi River formed. Those cities are older and have not grown -- and some have even decayed. Newer cities have grown by incorporating new housing developments," according to the Los Angeles Times, which focused on Mission Viejo because... well, let's just say it's no Detroit.

Minneapolis was excluded from the study because of incomplete data (But it's still #1 in the best cities to live well).

Minneapolis publishes its crime data online on a weekly basis, including the "shots fired" map.

One could, if one were of a mind, compare sections of the city, the same way cities are compared to one another. That would make the Nokomis neighborhood Minneapolis' Mission Viejo. And Near North is Detroit. But once you know that -- if you didn't know it already -- what difference does it make?

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