News Cut: January 2008 Archive

The pampered state of hockey

Posted at 7:44 AM on January 2, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

If Minnesota really is "The State of Hockey," then anyone who watched yesterday's outdoors hockey game in Buffalo between Pittsburgh and the Sabres, spent most of the time up to their garter belts in memories (yeah, hockey players wear garter belts).

There was a time when this was the way hockey was played -- outdoors, on ponds, in snow, and with additional rules (any puck that drops in open water is automatic icing) and odd equipment (we used comic books taped underneath our pants as shin guards).

They were the best of times. And yet, a line in today's Associated Press story on the game jumped off the page as if to scream "this is what's wrong with hockey!"

Playing at the home of the NFL's Buffalo Bills and in elements way more suited for football than hockey, Crosby won the NHL's second outdoor game -- and first in the United States -- in dramatic fashion.

Oh dear. More suited for football than hockey???? Hockey isn't a winter sport anymore? The real snow warriors are football players now?

This is what indoor hockey, Zamboni machines, warm dressing rooms, and youth hockey leagues have given us. Minnesota, save yourselves while you still can.

Bring back the open water icing rule and comic-book kneepads!

(Photo: Dave Sandford, Getty Images)

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On the ground in Kenya

Posted at 11:10 AM on January 2, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

One of Africa's most stable countries has become unstable. Rioting and a massacre in a church have dominated the international news.

I'm interested in talking to Kenyans in Minnesota who may have a connection (family etc.) back in the country. I'm also interested in talking to Minnesotans who have worked or lived in Kenya, to help us put a personal face on the situation. Please contact me via e-mail.

Note also that Kenyans in Minnesota are rallying at the Capitol at noon, calling for an end to the violence.

We're monitoring several blogs for a better sense of what's happening in the country.

White African, for example, details the value of the Internet at times such as this:

First, though the internet is good for us in the diaspora and a few in Kenya, it just doesn't have the reach to the wananchi (average citizen) in Kenya. The government knows that shutting down radio, TV and print is still the most effective way to squash news.

At Kenyan Pundit, Ory Okolloh writes:

Been watching footage of the situation in Eldoret and keep wondering where the police, military are? You can't get access to city mortuary because there are like 60 guys guarding it, but vigilantes have set up 30 roadblocks on the Eldoret road - what the hell is going on?

For images from Kenya -- and, yes, they are disturbing. Be forewarned. -- see the Insight Kenya blog. It's operated by Joseph Karoki, who set it up immediately after the elections there. He is updating it several times an hour.

Mental Acrobatics, described as "the personal blog of a Kenyan patriot, African man, citizen of the world," has been mentioned by several ex-pats of Kenya as a source they're using to stay in touch.

Eldoret, ladies and gentlemen, things are very very bad in Eldoret. Homes being raided. Churches being burnt. Shops being looted. Murder and rape in broad daylight. Ethnic groups after each other. Let me tell you this is much much bigger than Kikuyu -v- Luo. Pamoja.

Be sure to read the comments attached to that post.

There are also a wide range of images on Flickr.

Update 6:29 p.m. As I was about to leave for the day, I got an e-mail from Julia Opoti in Minneapolis:

I am one of the founders and an editor with kenyaImagine, a Kenya opinion and analysis weblog. I live in Mn, but our writers are Kenyans from all over the world. Over the last couple of days, I have been keeping a live blog (the articles with *) on the events going on in Kenya.

Looking forward to hearing from you
Julia

(Photo: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images)

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If only she'd stopped

Posted at 11:42 AM on January 2, 2008 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)

The MySpace page for Elizabeth Rhodes, 23, offers a sad commentary in the aftermath of an accident in Arden Hills in which a car, driven by Rhodes, traveling the wrong way on Highway 10, struck the patrol car of Ramsey County sheriff's deputy Joseph Lopez on New Year's Day, killing his wife.

The last log-in was New Year's Eve and the greeting on the page announces "Beth is ready to start drinking."

(h/t: Greta Cunningham, Tim Nelson - MPR)

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Iowa: Where the stories aren't

Posted at 1:10 PM on January 2, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

The Uptake has a video presentation from Corrine McDermid, who has traveled from Denver to Iowa to cover the caucuses. Her piece centers on the difference in accomodations for "legacy" media vs. "bloggers."

But what she also has, apparently unintentionally, captured were the similarities between the two media: Hundreds of people, sitting in a room, watching a television. It's pretty much the same set-up we'll see in St. Paul later this year, where bloggers have already made a big deal out of being allowed to sit inside the Xcel. If you have a new way of covering news, why cover it the old way?

The story of the Iowa caucuses -- like the stories from national political conventions -- is not in auditoriums, large rooms, or even on television. Told this way, there's virtually nothing you can glean from their reports of any value.

After more than a year of listening to the candidates talking in Iowa, there's been very little coverage of Iowans. It's a story best told from someone's kitchen.

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A plea for Kenya

Posted at 3:03 PM on January 2, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

For many Minnesotans, perhaps, Kenya is just another African country coming apart at the seams (See post on Kenya blogs). Imagine how we would feel, however, if we were a half a planet away from the United States, watching images of a massacre in a Lutheran church because a president rigged an election, and on the last phone call home, your mother told you she was out of food.

That's what it's like today to be a Kenyan in Minnesota.

About 100 of them gathered amidst the disinterest of most reporters at the Capitol today to sing their home country's national anthem and do whatever they could to ask for the international community's help to make the bloodshed stop.

"This is Kenya; this isn't some godforsaken country," pleaded Siyad Abdullahi, the rally's organizer.

Behind the politics of it all, however, is a personal struggle.

"We cry every night," said Hercules Otieno, who held up a blank sign to protest the news blackout from Kenya. (Listen - mp3)

Peter Kengere (above right) says his son returned to Kenya for a funeral, and now he can't get out. (Listen - mp3)

Edwins Omodi (above left) has his mother, brother, and sisters in Kenya. "An African family is a big family," he said. (Listen - mp3)

Nehphat Oliech's family hasn't had anything to eat for three days. "We don't even think in terms of tribes," he said. "We think of Kenyans." (Listen - mp3)

Another gentleman, he identified himself as Reverend Clemons, has been keeping in touch via text messages. (Listen - mp3)

"Talk to me next," many people said to me at the Capitol, though the temperature was near zero. And while each had family back in Kenya, they were most interested in expressing their worry for the future of democracy.

Later, in the warmth of the Capitol rotunda, they sang their country's national anthem, which sounded very much like a dirge. (Listen - mp3)

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The cellphone-traffic jam connection

Posted at 8:27 AM on January 3, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

A lot of newsies, including me on the Current yesterday, pointed out a study from the University of Utah which claimed that people drive slower while talking on the cellphone.

Anecdotal evidence alone suggests that's true.

Where the study runs afoul is a sweeping -- possibly premature -- conclusion:

The talking drivers took 15 to 19 seconds longer to traverse a 9.2-mile segment of Salt Lake County-simulated freeway, according to the study. That sounds minimal, but the cumulative effects on all drivers are magnified because numerous drivers in real-world conditions likely would be on the phone slowing down others, said Joel Cooper, a doctoral student in psychology.

The press release from the lead author is especially strident:

"At the end of the day, the average person's commute is longer because of that person who is on the cell phone right in front of them," says University of Utah psychology Professor Dave Strayer, leader of the research team. "That SOB on the cell phone is slowing you down and making you late."

SOB? Yikes. This, by the way, is the same person who put out a study that purported to show that a driver on a cellphone operates a car as efficiently as someone blowing .08 -- a drunk driver.

The survey assumes that the proper commute is the one that goes as fast as possible, regardless of all other factors, including safety.

For example, substitute the phrase "driving no faster than the speed limit" for "talking on a cellphone" in the study and you'll see the flawed science involved.

In stop-and-go traffic, because the cellphone driver (probably the most reviled class now that smokers have been banished) is "slower to resume freeway speeds," there also is usually a wider gap between their vehicle and the vehicle ahead of them; some would say a safer distance than the bumper-riding, non-talkers, although an earlier study suggested they're slower to brake.

It also showed that drivers talking on a cellphone are less likely to change lanes, which apparently is considered a bad thing.

Theoretically, acccording to this methodology, the person who zips past you and maintains speed all the way to the stop light ahead, is getting home quicker than you are, even though you and your steady speed end up at the same stoplight ... eventually.

And the research is based only on the results turned in by 36 University of Utah students in a driving simulator. That would be an age group that is already predisposed to being poor drivers. Scientifically, it hasn't been proven that the 36 represent the average driver. So, again scientifically, what can actually be claimed is "36 University of Utah students in a driving simulator drove slower when talking on a cellphone." I have to admit that that's not as much fun to read on the radio.

Assignment: On the way home today, check out the people on cellphones. Are they at the front of the jam? How many car lengths behind the people in front? And report back.here. Do not type while driving, however.

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Reckless

Posted at 11:34 AM on January 3, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Let's say you're a security guard in a St. Paul housing complex and one night (or day), you chase down and apprehend a suspected thief in the driver's seat of a stolen car. While removing him, your gun goes off, paralyzing him. Are you guilty of a crime?

A district court in Minnesota says "yes." Today the Minnesota Supreme Court said not.... exactly.

This is the case of Tim Engle and it happened in November 2003. The Supreme Court sent it back to District Court today over the definition of the word "reckless," as used in state law regarding "reckless discharge of a firearm." (Read the opinion here.)

The Supreme Court ruled that "reckless" in driving cases (that is, an act that a person knows or should have known puts others in harm's way) is different from "reckless" in cases like this, determining that "a person is said to act recklessly when he or she consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that an injury will occur, or when his or her action is grossly heedless of consequences."

The case is a good example of how the application of the law -- and a man's future -- can hinge on the definition of a single word.

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Ventura and the CIA

Posted at 2:33 PM on January 3, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Seriously, now: who didn't chuckle just a bit when this nugget was excerpted from former Gov. Jesse Ventura's forthcoming book in this morning's Pioneer Press.

Shortly after he took office in 1999, he was escorted to a state Capitol conference room where 23 CIA agents were waiting. He writes that they grilled him about how he campaigned and won the election. "In short, how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off?"

He said he learned "there is a CIA operative inside every state government. ... In Minnesota, this person was at a deputy commissioner level, fairly high up."

It turns out, he was right. Who says? The CIA.

MPR reporter Tim Pugmire called the CIA to verify the story and got back this e-mail:

Tim,
Thanks for your call. With respect to your questions about Gov.
Ventura's references to the CIA in his new book, you can use the quoted portions that follow from me, in name, as a CIA spokesman:

With respect to his reference to a meeting that occurred shortly after he took office in 1999:

"On occasion CIA officers meet with senior state government officials, as they did in this case, to discuss issues of mutual interest."

With respect to his statement about CIA officers in state governments:

"I wouldn't think of CIA officers as being in state governments.
They're federal employees."

Best wishes,
George Little
CIA Office of Public Affairs

In other words: the goose flies north at midnight.

Tim called back to try to clarify such points as (a) were there really 23 agents involved and (b) huh? He has not heard back.

There's also a call in to Gov. Tim Pawlenty to find out if it's routine that a deputy commissioner in state government might be a CIA agent.

(Photo: Carlo Allegri, Getty Images)

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Citizen journalists tackle Iowa

Posted at 2:34 PM on January 3, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

It's difficult for mainstream media folks to discuss citizen journalism without falling into the "us against them" trap. We are so conditioned to defining journalism as "it's what we do," that when someone or something comes along that clearly isn't doing what we do, the reaction is to say it's also not journalism. Maybe. Maybe not.

But among the more impressive organizations in this citizen journalism space is The UpTake, a Minnesota-based group which is training citizen journalists. The site is to provide live Internet video during the caucuses.

"We have been recruiting in Iowa since our inception this summer. We recruited a group of native Iowans who are capturing their experiences as the campaign trail comes to an end and will be capturing their experiences at caucuses," said Noah Kunin, director of UpTake. "Our advantage is our speed and our flexibility to provide unfiltered content."

Kunin says it's a shoestring budget -- under $600 -- for the group, which consists of "unpaid people with day jobs."

And what has he found so far in Iowa? A heavily controlled state that makes it tough to capture the "real Iowa."

"The media wants the real story, but they structure themselves in such a way that puts them away from the real story... the real island. (The campaigns want to) utterly and completely lock down anyone who's even nominally involved with the campaigns," he says. "Volunteers here are actually credentialed, they have volunteer badges, so you know who they are. But if you try to talk to them, they will not talk to you. They have all been indoctrinated not to talk to any media whatsoever. And so there's a co-construction between the campaigns and the media that makes it very difficult to cover that 'real island' vibe. Everyone who has not already been locked down by the campaigns, isn't very interested in politics anyway and doesn't really want to talk to you."

Not all attempts to get around that are entirely successful. One piece running today shows a mainstream media (dubbed "corporate media") camera crew more interested in shooting a picture of volunteers on telephones -- presumably, that was their assignment from their boss -- than protesters of the Iraq war at the Obama storefront. "Don't you care about the dead in Iraq?" the citizen journalist asks. "I don't care," the camera person responds.

"With that one, I was not the editor on it so I can't speak directly to it," Kunin said. "We decided that was, while certainly subjective, it was a valid viewpoint and it encapsulated a lot of the opinions we're seeing out there... in the blogosphere, on the reactions to the media and the Obama campaign... on his perceived moved to the center. Where I want to go with this, is moving toward the idea of a conversation. When a piece like that goes up, it's easy to respond to it...so people can see the entire spectrum of conversation."

Listen to the interview with Noah Kunin. (mp3 16:54)

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The placebo effect

Posted at 5:05 PM on January 3, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Is it unethical for a doctor to prescribe a placebo to you?

It may happen more often than we think, according to a study out today.

A University of Chicago research team sent surveys about placebo use to 466 internists at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois -- Chicago. Half of the recipients responded, and 45 percent of the respondents reported giving a patient a placebo at least once during their years of practice.

Only 4 percent of the doctors told their patients that the pills -- usually sugar pills -- were worthless.

"I think this shows that it strikes a chord among physicians. We may underestimate the body's natural healing potential," said Rachel Sherman, a medical student at the University of Chicago, whose study was published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The use of a placebo in medical studies is fairly common. But this study focuses on regular clinical use.

There's one other health-related story today: The Centers for Disease Control reports for the first time, confirmation of the suspicion that you can get norovirus -- stomach flu -- from a computer keyboard or mouse.

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The Iowa exodus

Posted at 9:02 AM on January 4, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Iowa is apparently still open for business, even though the business of politics is moving out.

Here's a shot of air traffic out of Des Moines snapped on Tuesday morning. The blue planes are going to or from Des Moines. The green ones are just passing overhead.

And here's a shot at the same time (8:30 a.m.) on Friday morning, from the flight-tracking site Flight Aware.

There are a few more planes leaving town today, but it's not the mass exodus we'd see after a NASCAR race, for example. Two of the exiting aircraft above are private charters. Some reporters travel in style. According to Flight Aware, a New York Times-chartered 10-seat airplane (red hash in image above) left Des Moines at 8 Friday morning. Destination: Manchester, New Hampshire.

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New light shed on light bulb effects

Posted at 10:46 AM on January 4, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

It's always something.

Now, it turns out that one of the proposed solutions to global warming -- the low-energy fluorescent light bulb -- makes skin conditions worse, according to the BBC.

Health conditions which can involve some form of light sensitivity, include the auto-immune disease lupus, the genetic disorder Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP), certain forms of eczema and dermatitis, photosensitivity, and porphyria.

It's a big deal in the UK, where retailers will stop selling the incandescent light bulb by 2011.

The low-energy bulb is also being blamed for migraines and even epileptic attacks.

But even some experts on lupus hint that the "scare" may be overblown. " It is my opinion that if a standard fluorescent tube lighting source is shielded by a standard acrylic plastic diffuser, there's virtually no significant risk for people with systemic lupus," wrote Dr. Richard D. Sontheimer, of a Lupus organization. "However, if a person with lupus is exposed to unshielded fluorescent lighting at close distances for prolonged periods of time, then the cumulative exposure to UVB and UVA could be a problem."

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Data privacy in Minnesota

Posted at 12:12 PM on January 4, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

"Minnesotans should not have to worry about government sharing their personal data without their consent," Governor Tim Pawlenty said in announcing a series of legislative initiatives nearly two years ago to tighten data security in the state.

This afternoon Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion (below) announced that two DPS customer service reps have been suspended after an investigation into the unauthorized use of the state driver's license database.

From their homes they accessed the records of some prominent Minnesotans. Four hundred people will get letters from the DPS explaining the situation. Campion wouldn't say whose records were sought but said they were viewed, but not downloaded. Asked why customer service reps would need access to the database during off-hours, Campion noted that "lots of people" -- including some journalists (none at MPR) -- have access, although he said he couldn't name a reason why these two needed access.

He said there was no evidence the employees intended to steal identities or use the material for criminal use.

(audio and a list of data practices transgressions in Minnesota below the fold)

Continue reading "Data privacy in Minnesota"

Live longer. Be a nurse?

Posted at 4:03 PM on January 4, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Today's research of note:

Nurses have a lower risk of dying from several afflictions than non-nurses.

But you knew there had to be another shoe to drop.

The longer you're a nurse, the greater your chances of dying from cancer.

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Rings, piggybanks, and the thanks for the lift home

Posted at 4:54 PM on January 4, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

In Austin, Minn., a woman is said to have visited her dying relative and stole the the gold wedding ring off her finger. So says the Rochester Post Bulletin.

Over in Sheboygan Falls, Wisc., a man broke into a house and the room of a 2-year-old girl, and started shaking her piggybank for money. The girl's mother heard the racket and chased the guy out of the house, but he took the girl's $20.

In Blaine, Minn., Alexander Wald saw someone give his girlfriend a ride home and thought a guy was moving in on his woman. Police said he punched Alyssa Smith of Fridley several times and threw her to the ground, not realizing the he was a she.

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The price of promotion

Posted at 12:17 PM on January 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

A new survey out indicates that drug companies spend twice as much on the promotion of their products than they do researching and developing them.

It comes this week from a paper on the Public Library of Science Web site.

From this new estimate, it appears that pharmaceutical companies spend almost twice as much on promotion as they do on R&D. These numbers clearly show how promotion predominates over R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, contrary to the industry's claim. While the amount spent on promotion is not in itself a confirmation of Kefauver's depiction of the pharmaceutical industry, it confirms the public image of a marketing-driven industry and provides an important argument to petition in favor of transforming the workings of the industry in the direction of more research and less promotion.

The paper is heavy on methodology and requires some thick reading. But it leads to an obvious discussion.

It was less than a year ago, you may recall, that a study showed Minnesota doctors received tens of thousands of dollars in payments and speaking fees (all legal) from the drug companies.

(h/t The Consumerist)

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Boiling mad

Posted at 2:35 PM on January 6, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

Frogs make a lousy analogy for the erosion of civil liberties, or the price of oil, or just about anything else not froglike in the first place. But that's not stopping politicians from using it. The latest was Hillary Clinton in Iowa last week.

As the New York Times reported:

“It’s like the old saying about boiling the frog,” Mrs. Clinton said during a visit to a school in Guthrie Center, Iowa. She was making the point that when oil-producing countries drop their prices, it tends to lull U.S. consumers and politicians in the United States into complacency about their reliance of foreign oil.

“If you want to boil a frog, don’t put it in hot water because it will jump right out,” she said. “You put it in cold water and then turn up the heat gradually and it’s a goner.”

This has driven writer James Fallows nuts on many occasions, the latest being... today.

OK. But we have also got to figure out how, for the sake of scientific accuracy, freshness in language, and the dignity of the poor frogs, we can stop talking about them in this heartless and formulaic way. (By the way, minus points to the New York Times for reporting the episode as if Sen. Clinton were using a clever image.) Soon, I will release the results of the contest to find other words to get across the point that people can get used to slowly worsening circumstances that would shock them if confronted all at once.

FastCompany.com tested this in October 1995.

We placed Frog A into a pot of cold water and applied moderate heat. At 4.20 seconds, it safely exited the pot with a leap of 24 centimeters. We then placed Frog B into a pot of lukewarm water and applied moderate heat. At 1.57 seconds, it safely exited the pot with a leap of 57 centimeters.

Even so, the analogy lives longer than frogs in Minnesota. Last month, Department of Employment and Economic development boss Dan McElroy used it to describe the state of rural Minnesota. Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan, used it to describe the fee increases in a veterans' bill. House Minority Leader Marty Seifert invoked the frog in urging the governor to veto some bills.

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Dancing at work

Posted at 8:13 AM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Purely on entertainment value only, the popularity of one of the hottest videos on YouTube isn't hard to understand. A UK air crew chief marshaling jets while dancing. What really gets you, possibly, is the concept of enjoying one's job so much that it moves one to dance. It's Monday. Feel like dancing? See?

Senior Aircraftman Dean Tabreham is the talent in this video, which was shot at an air show for a cancer charity. He lost his mom at age 13 to cancer. His wife lost her mother to cancer, too.

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A Parade post mortem

Posted at 11:05 AM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

The filler material in the Sunday paper -- comics, coupons, etc. -- are printed days and, in some cases, weeks in advance.

So perhaps it's not surprising that the Parade magazine cover story on Benazir Bhutto ("I Am What The Terrorists Most Fear") didn't mention that she was killed last month.

The Pioneer Press didn't run an editor's note about the discrepancy, like those "today's advertisement for GigondaMart incorrectly listed the hobby horse price. The actual price is $9.95. GigondaMart regrets the inconvenience" announcements.

For that, Pioneer Press editorial boss Thom Fladung accepts full responsibility. "It's not an excuse, but Parade sent me an e-mail on January 2nd, and I was in Ohio on January 2nd. It's always a mistake when you don't communicate well with readers."

The mistake may have been a topic at the journalistic water cooler, but it's unlikely that folks read the Parade interview on Sunday, only to be shocked to find out on Monday that she's dead.

The online version of the magazine contains the missing detail

Randy Siegel, the editor of Parade, said the insert was printed before Christmas and the only other option was not to distribute it at all. "We decided that this was an important interview to share with the American people," he told the Associated Press.

At the Rapid City (SD) Journal, editor Mikel Lefort told readers, "After a brief e-mail exchange, the Journal decided we would include Parade in Sunday’s paper — but with an A1 explanation detailing the publication’s print schedule as well as our decision. Ultimately, we think that the interview — which includes Bhutto acknowledging that both the terrorists and the Pakistan government were targeting her — is compelling journalism and now a historical profile."

But one reader wasn't buying it, posting on the newspaper's blog...

The fact that it would have cost the Tribune “millions of dollars” (according to its Public Editor) to amend or replace this article TEN FULL DAYS after Bhutto’s assasination gives a hint of just how obsolete the print media has become.

The Editor’s note on page 2 of the newspaper was only more troubling than the ludicrous gaff of running the story (unedited) in the first place.

The absurdity of not being able to pull a story that was tragically obsolete a week and a half before it ran eloquently answers the question, “Why has Internet news outpaced the print media?” But according to this logic, television–or radio news before it–should have put newspapers out of business half a century ago. So part of the problem newspapers face may not be in the competition posed by the Internet, but in the increasingly prefab nature of the medium.

Surely the behemoth of the Tribune has got to become more agile if it is to serve as anything more than a bit of irrelevant entertainment adhering to its raison d’être: advertising.

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An American in Kenya

Posted at 1:24 PM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

(A local official tries to calm a group of Kikuyu refugees during the distribution of clothing in Nakuru, Kenya on Monday . Local volunteers and charities are helping thousands of Kikuyu refugees who have sought shelter here after fleeing their homes in the Rift Valley. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Last week I wrote about what it's like to be a Kenyan in Minnesota, while violence was gripping the East African country. Today, let's look at it from the other direction. What's it like to be a former Minnesota resident living in Kenya?

Katie Springer, originally from Waukesha, Wisc., graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2003, and now works in Nairobi for the Joint Voluntary Agency, which interviews people who want to be resettled in the United States.

I talked her today (it's a nine-hour time difference) after she returned from work, her first full day back since the violence erupted.

(Interview below the fold)

Continue reading "An American in Kenya"

Obama's security

Posted at 2:54 PM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

The Washington Times gives a bizarre voice today to a subject previously reserved for the water coolers: Barack Obama as a target of an assassination:

"For many black supporters, there is a lot of anxiety that he will be killed, and it is on people's minds," said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor of political science and contemporary black culture.

The right-leaning newspaper uses a favorite mainstream media trick to justify its focus: blaming the Internet.

The Internet is rife with theories that someone may try to assassinate the senator — typing into Google "assassinate Obama" brings up more than 2,000 hits. Anyone from Islamist terrorists to racist Americans to operatives of Halliburton and Blackwater are speculated about, but other, more nefarious Web sites are for real, according to reports from the Associated Press.

Typing the phrase into Google actually returns 264,000 "hits" (an odd choice of words, indeed). A little over 2,000 items pop up when searching "news," but none appears to be from "nefarious Web sites" (unless you include the Washington Times) and most are actually about Obama discussing the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Typing just about anything into Google is going to yield a ton of results. It's a poor indicator of the severity of any threat. Here, for example, are some other Google search results and the number of "hits."

Obama Zucchini - 34,800
Britney Obama - 2.3 million
Marshmallow Obama - 59,100
UFO Obama - 271,000
Ointment Obama - 59,000
Underwear Obama - 280,000

The Web site Editor & Publisher employed another long-standing journalistic trick to get its point of view into the discussion: the unnamed "some."

...but some may wonder if this kind of attention -- mentioning that "Obama assassinate" already gets 2000 Google links -- may only increase the threat.

For the record, Obama was placed under Secret Service protection last May, at his campaign's request.

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Returned to sender

Posted at 4:04 PM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

A problem at the Minnesota Department of Human Services didn't pose much of an ethical dilemma for recipients of incorrectly mailed checks.

Fifteen-thousand checks were mailed to the wrong addresses, according to Chuck Johnson, an assistant commissioner for children and family services at DHS. But they had the correct name on them. He told MPR's Toni Randolph that 1,900 of the 15,300 checks mailed had already been cashed when they realized the error. He said some of the checks had made their way to the proper people, redirected through the post office. Half of the checks mailed out were returned as undeliverable.

"We had made a programming change in our computer system to fix a small problem we had with addresses and inadvertently created a larger problem," he said.

One recipient told MPR News her employer got 23 envelopes with checks. "I opened the first one in the automatic mail opening one does, assuming that all the mail in the pile is for us. That was a check for $81 made out to someone else. I didn't open the rest of them as they were obviously checks and obviously wrong," she said. "We did eventually get a check addressed to our company that was for us from that department. It was rent assistance for one of our tenants."

Most of the checks were payments to providers of group residential housing.

The state has promised to reimburse anyone who incurs bank fees as a result of its mistake.

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The immigration issue returns

Posted at 4:58 PM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)

Gov. Pawlenty is back with a series of legislative proposals to crack down on illegal immigration in Minnesota.

Several of them died in the legislative session of 2006, but not because they didn't enjoy broad support among the DFL legislators.

Dismissing the governor's suggestions, Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller said...

"These are warmed-over proposals that couldn't pass the House of Representatives when it was controlled by the Republicans."

Pogemiller is wrong about that.

The most controversial one at the time, which is also included in the measures announced on Monday, would do away with local ordinances -- primarily in Minneapolis and St. Paul -- restricting police officers from asking immigrants about their legal status.

That measure passed the then Republican-controlled House 94-37 in 2006, before it was sent to a committee in the Senate, where it died a quiet death without a hearing. But DFL support for the measure made it one of the most bipartisan bills at the height of partisanship in Minnesota. Thirty-one of the 65 DFLers in the House at the time voted for the measure.

Pawlenty's proposals also introduce a potential wedge issue in Minnesota's 2008 campaigns. The immigration issue is among the most important for Republican voters and candidates, as Pawlenty's choice for president, John McCain, found out. McCain has spent much of the last year trying to repair the damage to his campaign after sponsoring immigration reform legislation in the Senate with Sen. Ted Kennedy.

The immigration issue here, however, is most real in the western part of the state. In Worthington, 200 illegal immigrants were nabbed in a raid on a meatpacking plant. Last month, MPR's Mark Steil reported the town is still trying to recover.

"Right now we're still living in the past," says Pedro Lira, a union official at the Swift plant. "We just try to rebuild this community because (there's) still no trust at all."

The issue sparks emotional debate based on often unverifiable claims.

A 2005 report to Gov. Pawlenty from his Department of Administration (See pdf) claimed an illegal immigrant population of between 80,000 and 85,000, and attributed rising costs in many state programs to them. In a 2006 report to the Legislature, however, the legislative auditor questioned the accuracy of the population estimates (See pdf).

Nonetheless, a 2004 MPR poll showed those surveyed think immigrants cost more than they contribute to the state.

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How to run in the New Hampshire primary

Posted at 6:09 PM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)

First, hit the local cafe....

Then, have a rally in a hall with a big American flag as the backdrop.

They've all read the same book. I wonder whose?

Will no candidate dare go skiing?

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Two things to worry about

Posted at 9:08 PM on January 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

More victims have been found from the 9/11 attacks. According to a nationwide study, the post-9/11 era has led to a nation of worriers, who develop heart problems because of it.

"Chronic worriers -- those who continued to fear terrorism for several years after the attacks -- were the most at risk of heart problems. They were three to four times more likely to report a doctor-diagnosed heart problem two to three years after the attacks," the Los Angeles Times reported.

In a study of 1,500 people, researchers found a 53-percent increase in heart problems in the three years after September 11, 2001. Worry: it's practically the very definition of terrorism. Does this mean the terrorists won?

Coincidentally, this was the second study of the day that linked worry with heart disease.

A study from the University of South California finds older men with "sustained and pervasive anxiety" appear to be at increased risk for a heart attack.

"What we're seeing is over and beyond what can be explained by blood pressure, obesity, cholesterol, age, cigarette smoking, blood sugar levels and other cardiovascular risk factors," said Biing-Jiun Shen, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

According to the Science Daily Web site:

Although most people think of anxiety as intense worry, Dr. Shen and his colleagues looked much deeper, examining four different measures of anxiety. The first anxiety scale measured psychasthenia, or excessive doubts, obsessive thoughts and irrational compulsions. The second anxiety scale measured social introversion, or anxiety, insecurity, and discomfort in interpersonal and social situations. The third anxiety scale measured phobias, or excessive anxieties or fears about animals, situations or objects. The fourth anxiety scale, manifest anxiety, measured the tendency to experience tension and physical arousal in stressful situations.

Quoted in the U.K.'s Telegraph, Dr. Biing-Jiun Shen, went a little further.

Scientists found that men who displayed high levels of shyness, excessive tension under stress, fear of animals, objects or situations, or had irrational compulsions were 30 to 40 per cent more likely to have heart disease leading to an attack.

Fear of animals?

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Mystique madness

Posted at 5:33 AM on January 8, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts replaced its chief executive officer on Monday, reaffirming the danger of a marketing strategy that depends on the average American's desire for something being inversely proportional to his ability to get it.

The problem with the strategy, of course, is once you give us something we can't have, eventually we begin to wonder what the big deal was in the first place.

Nobody was better at the strategy than Krispy Kreme, a North Carolina regional franchise that eventually spread to Minnesota. From Maple Grove to Waite Park to St. Paul, each choreographed store opening featured long lines of traffic, and live radio broadcasts from stations that figured if a doughnut store was opening, it must be news.

And it was, until some months later when Minnesotans realized that they had sat in a traffic jam to buy... a doughnut. Two years later, the company shuttered its New Brighton production facility. Store closings soon followed.

You want ugly? This is ugly.

The company's stock, which was trading as high as $50 when there was still a Krispy Kreme mystique, is trading for a little over $3 at yesterday's close.

Minnesota's Krispy Kreme addicts learned the same lesson here that any beer drinker east of the Mississippi learned decades ago about Coor's beer (Former Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski used to load up the team plane with Coor's whenever the team played on the West Coast). It's called "mystique madness."

Sometimes, things taste better, when you can't have it.

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Sink it. Drink it.

Posted at 1:00 PM on January 8, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

The sad reality of binge drinking on college campuses -- aside from the fact it leaves some kids dead -- is that few people realize the extent to which they're encouraged to drink themselves to death.

BPONG.Com, is lauding a successful, it says, World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas. It was sponsored by Southern Wine and Spirits, which claims to be the nation's largest liquor distributor, and also advises people to drink responsibility. (Neither bpong.com nor Southern Wine and Spirits has yet granted my request for an interview on the subject.)

Beer Pong (known in some quarters as "Beirut"), may be the single biggest reason that binge drinking has become even more popular on the nation's college campuses.

Here are the rules, according to a Web site called BJ's Beer Pong, which is more than happy to sell you all the equipment you need, organize tournaments, even sign you up as an official Beer Pong salesperson:

1. On a table shorter than 8 feet your elbow may not pass the back edge of the table. On tables 8 feet long your shoulder may not pass the back edge of the table.
2. If both teams are new to the table players must shootout to see which team goes first. Players must shoot at the same time while looking into the eyes of their opponent. Challengers always shoot second.
3. Reorganize cups at 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1 for an easier, faster game. Reorganize cups at 6 and 3 for a more challenging game. Another option is allow two re-racks per side at any point during the game, except mid-turn.
4. Cups may only be reorganized at the beginning of your turn. It is your responsibility to ask for a re-rack, your opponent does not have to re-rack unless you remember to request one.
5. Distracting your opponent is allowed as long as you are not obstructing your opponent's ability to see the cups.
6. If you and your teammate make both your shots consecutively you get both the balls back and you get to shoot again.
7. Teammates alternate drinking cups as they are made.
8. Bounce shots: if a ball goes directly from a player's hand to the table top and then into a cup it counts for 2 cups. If a bounce shot is attempted the defending team may grab or swat the ball out of the air before it reaches the cups. (pay attention)
9. If a ball drops in your cup for any reason the cup must be drunk and removed (this does not count if it was dropped in by a non-player, unless that person was giving a guest shot).
10. Once a ball bounces off anything (i.e. the beer pong table, rim of a cup, your forehead) you may grab it before it falls into a cup.
11. If you knock over a cup it is lost.
12. If you touch a ball in the air before it bounces or crosses the edge of the table you must remove and drink 2 cups.
13. Only girls can blow. If a ball is spinning around inside a cup girls can blow in the cup to try and get the ball out. However, if a ball is blown on in one cup, and then that ball goes into another cup, both cups must be drunk.
14. Last cup policy: if your opponent makes his shot into your last cup, you and your teammate have the opportunity to rebut. This means you and your opponent get one last chance to shoot till you miss. If you can make all you the remaining cups without missing both teams return to 3 cups.
15. If there are only 2 cups remaining and both are made consecutively in the same turn there is no rebuttal. If there is only one cup remaining and both teammates make their shots into that cup in the same turn the game is over.
16. No fist fighting (Fist fighting results in disqualifications).
17. All disputes will be settled by management / the house.

If you don't have the full Beer Pong equipment, you can always play online.

And make sure you start every game with the national Beer Pong anthem (note: parental discretion advised).

There's a ranking system for Beer Pong players, and a Minnesotan occupies the #4 spot, according to the Web site, Challenge the Champ.

Binge drinking is more ingrained in the target audience more than anyone could possible have imagined.

Are you a Beer Pong player? I want to talk to you.

Update: More information on the brains behind Beer Pong here.

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U.S warship video released

Posted at 3:57 PM on January 8, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

The Pentagon has just released video of the confrontation Sunday between U.S. warships and high-speed boats from Iran.

You can view it here.

The Associated Press report says a heavily accented man could be heard saying, "I am coming to you. ... You will explode after ... minutes." See if you can pick it up.

From the Hopper's bridge, after spotting the approaching Iranian boats, a Navy crew member says over the radio: "This is coalition warship. I am engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law. Intend no harm."

Often uneven and shaky, the video condenses what Navy officials have said was a 20-minute or so clash. It ends with a blank screen, as only the audio of the Navy's final warning can be heard, just after the voice warns that they are coming.

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Tears on the trail

Posted at 7:26 AM on January 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Tears. What's with the tears? Or our fascination with them?

Edmund Muskie, prevailing wisdom goes, lost his chance to be crier-in-chief when he called Manchester Union Leader publisher William Loeb "a gutless coward" during the 1972 campaign. Oh, and he cried. End of story. End of candidacy.

When former Rep. Pat Schroeder announced in 1987 that she would not run for president, she threw in a pretty good cry, pretty much guaranteeing that any future possibility of her running for president -- ever --wouldn't be hers.

"There are different things we cry over," Republican strategist Edward Mahe said at the time. "A political decision should not be one of those things one breaks down and cries about."

"I got a devastating e-mail about it from a woman writer just a couple of days ago," Schroeder told the London Times the other day. "It's like I ruined their lives, 20 years ago, with three seconds of catching my breath."

Which brings us to New Hampshire and Hillary Clinton, where the now-leading candidate for the Democratic nomination appeared to tear up when talking about her campaign on Monday in Portsmouth (See video).

And, watching the morning talk shows today, one sees nearly all of the anchors asking her if her tears are the reason she won the primary on Tuesday.

"Something happened in the last 48 hours that made people change their minds (about Clinton)," said CBS' chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer, speculating that the incident in Portsmouth (in which, for the record, she didn't break down and blubber) had more than a little something to do with it. For some reason, though, he didn't mention the possibility that all the polls were wrong.

Writing today in Newsweek on Mrs. Clinton's win in New Hampshire, Jonathan Alter was more declarative on the subject.

Whatever actually happened, the 2008 New Hampshire primary will be remembered for Hillary Clinton choking up when describing her everyday struggles. (The original question was about how she got through every morning when things were so tough).

Even many of her harshest critics believed Hillary's emotions were authentic, which was a major advantage for her in closing the "likeability gap" and erasing her image as too controlled and lacking in spontaneity.

Tears as political strength? Now that's change!

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Radio station flap is out of St. Paul's reach

Posted at 12:44 PM on January 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

A column by a Twin Cities gossip columnist on Tuesday appeared to suggest St. Paul's city government was taking on the burden of monitoring the content of radio stations.

The column -- C.J.:Human rights guy wants B96 DJ to Tone it down and Fly right
-- focused on St. Paul's Human Rights Department head Tyrone Terrill, who was opposed to the language (language warning in link) radio station B96's morning show host used to describe an African American woman, and had set up a meeting with station management to find out "what happened and what are they doing to correct it."

The unanswered -- because it was unasked -- question: is St. Paul's city government in charge of monitoring content on area radio stations now?

"No," Terrill said this afternoon. He said his intervention was on behalf of the Communities of Color Leadership Council, the group that helped organize a protest against remarks last year from KQRS morning host Tom Barnard.

"We want to be positive and educate," he said, acknowledging that he was invoking no city-sanctioned enforcement authority as a result of the incident.

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Oh, my aching commute

Posted at 1:05 PM on January 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Here's something you don't see every day, a carless Interstate 94 in Minneapolis

In the tunnel...

... at Broadway

.. at 42nd

..at Hennepin and Lyndale...

All because of a tanker truck rollover at midday. Consult the MnDot traffic page before heading home.

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Watching Wal-Mart

Posted at 2:48 PM on January 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Given the number of news stories over the years about how Wal-Mart has destroyed small town America, it was interesting that a new study on the subject was buried in the business section of my local paper today. Even APM's Marketplace -- that's us -- gave it thin treatment, considering the rather startling conclusion.

Writing in Fedgazette, the newsletter of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis senior economist Terry Fitzgerald found that Wal-Mart is no different from any other business that comes to town.

For example, Wal-Mart is widely believed to destroy local firms and jobs and to have a dampening effect on wages. But fedgazette findings suggest the opposite: Firm growth, employment and total earnings were somewhat stronger in Wal-Mart counties and, in some cases, even in the retail sector. The research does suggest that retail earnings per job fell in virtually all counties studied. But they actually fell by less in Wal-Mart counties.

But neither has Wal-Mart been a boon for local communities. Poverty rates, for example, declined in most counties during the period studied, but they declined by less (poverty rates didn’t improve as much) in Wal-Mart counties. By other measures, Wal-Mart had no noticeable effect. Overall, counties with and without Wal-Mart had similar growth in population and income per person.

End of discussion, right? Not so much.

Writes one commenter on the Wal-Mart Watch, Web site...

The Fed? That bastion of support for lowly capitalists? It’s the Fed, and other legal and governmental manipulators, that prevent this market from being free.

Over on the blog, The Economist's View, the devil has been found in the details... err, methodology.

Most important, none of the findings can be considered causal in nature. In other words, the findings don't tell us whether Wal-Mart's presence (or lack thereof) is responsible for either positive or negative outcomes over the period studied. Proving a causal relationship between Wal-Mart and local economic trends is beyond the scope of this analysis.

(Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

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Should cameras be allowed in Minnesota courtrooms?

Posted at 6:00 PM on January 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

This may be every Minnesota judge's nightmare. A high-profile case, big-name attorneys who love the limelight, and a rule that allows cameras in the state's courtrooms.

That, says Hennepin County (4th Judicial District) Chief Judge Lucy Wieland, is her and her associates' visceral reaction to the idea of allowing the Minnesota media to bring cameras into court. "We talked about it at our executive committee this morning and... there's the intellectual and the visceral position," she said Wednesday. "Intellectually, we should have a pilot. We've been playing with this issue since 1983."

On Friday, Judge Wieland will be one of those testifying when the Minnesota Supreme Court Advisory Committee on General Rules of Practice holds a hearing on a request by media groups to open up Minnesota's courts. The state tried a test program years ago, in which trials could be televised or filmed if the judge and all participants agreed. It didn't work because participants rarely agreed.

"It's uneasiness. It's fear. Is it really going to advance justice? That's the O.J. Simpson factor -- the sensationalism," Wieland said, emphasizing that she was speaking for herself and not for the judicial system. "What I hear the most is the concern on the impact on participants -- witnesses, family members, jurors. Are they going to be impacted negatively by this sense of public scrutiny? Is this difficult experience going to be made more difficult?"

But Wieland says she was impressed by an op-ed column in the Star Tribune last October by Marna Anderson, executive director of WATCH, a court monitoring and research group focused on violence against women.

Public access to the courts is a fundamental part of a healthy democracy. Court monitoring groups around the country exercise this right daily. But for most people, recordings broadcast on the Internet and television are the closest they come to a real courtroom.

Minnesota is one of 15 states with restrictions so great that its courtrooms are, for all practical purposes, closed to cameras. An advisory committee of the Minnesota Supreme Court held a meeting in September to review a proposal to allow cameras into Minnesota's trial courts. The proposal excludes electronic media by the authority of the presiding judge and "where it is shown that the proceedings will be adversely affected."

Other states -- Wisconsin, for one -- have eased the fears of some Minnesota judges. Cameras are allowed in Wisconsin courts and even with high-profile cases -- the Chai Vang case, for example -- the TV cameras and broadcasts caused no disruption, according to the judge in the case, Norman Yackel.

"I think if there are a couple of districts interested in having a pilot program, the committee will say, 'why not?'" Judge Wieland said.

Still, has there ever been a case in Minnesota in which Judge Wieland found herself thinking, "thank goodness there's no cameras allowed in Minnesota courts?"

"The recent Larry Craig case," she said. "Just the requests for access out of the Southdale courthouse . We had two people on our staff here working non-stop for a week, plus the judge trying to set up the rules on where the cameras could be in the parking lots. It was just incredible."

Listen to the entire interview with Judge Lucy Wieland (mp3)

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The brains behind Beer Pong

Posted at 6:16 PM on January 9, 2008 by Bob Collins

Billy Gaines is a 26-year-old patent attorney in Chicago, and a former competitive swimmer at Carnegie Mellon University. He's also the patron saint of Beer Pong fans, as one of the owners of a Web site dedicated to the drinking game. He is just back from Las Vegas, where he sponsored the World Series of Beer Pong.

As I wrote on Tuesday, it's a game that is behind what appears to be an epidemic of binge drinking on college campuses, especially by underage students. That's the game as some see it. It's not the game as Gaines sees it.

"There's a lot of misconceptions about the game," he told me in an interview on Wednesday. "The media will jump out and say Beer Pong is a drinking game and they'll say the cups are filled with beer... the first misconception is the cups are full with beer. The way the game is most often played is the beer is filled with only a couple of ounces. We make it so people play one game per hour so at most there's one beer per person per hour consumed."

Gaines doesn't see the game as being... or encouraging... binge drinking. "It's often described as a chugging contest, but chugging is not part of the game. Anyone who criticizes what we're doing (should) come out to an event."

"Beer Pong is not the problem. In today's society there's certainly a problem of underage overconsumption of alcohol, but I would submit if you were to take Beer Pong out, the same issues would still exist."

Listen to the entire interview with Gaines. (mp3)

Incidentally, on Friday MPR's All Things Considered looks at the issue of excessive drinking. Are college-age students engaging in more binge drinking, and is this a problem that goes beyond college campuses.

Polls, pundits, and pointyheads

Posted at 9:26 AM on January 10, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

The hand-wringing is continuing today in the wake of Tuesday's "surprise" in which Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary, an event which has, in the last 24 hours, grown in stature to eclipse Harry Truman's defeat of Tom Dewey and is moving closer to Jesse Ventura shocking the world.

The New York Times analysis this morning says:

The polls, which consistently showed Mr. Obama running much more strongly than Mrs. Clinton, may have been unable to keep pace with events. In the end, it seems, the preferences of a considerable number of New Hampshire voters were very much in flux in the final days of the campaign. What pollsters call “considered opinion” — the kind of opinion born of reflection rather than one elicited in an instant by a poll taker — registers only when people step into the ballot box.

"Ah," as Captain Queeg might say if he were interested in politics, "the polls. That's when I knew I had them."

The industry -- mine -- that so embarrassed itself in 2000 by being driven by polls as a substitute for journalism, had done it again; surprised by itself.

By now, perhaps, you've heard of the rallying cry for better political journalism from Tom Brokaw, when he schooled MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Tuesday night.

MATTHEWS: We’re going to have to go back and figure out the methodology, I think, on some of these.

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to go back and do? Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: What do we do then in the days before balloting–

BROKAW: What a novel idea–

MATTHEWS: –We must stay home then I guess.

BROKAW: No, no, we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today what moved them to vote. We can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that had not been fully explored in all this.

But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed and trying to stampede and affect the process.

Look, I’m not picking just on us. It’s part of the culture in which we live these days.

But I think the people out there are going to begin to make some judgments about us, if they haven’t already, if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases as we learned in New Hampshire, as they went into the polling place today or in the past three days. They were making decisions very late.

The most illiuminating words in the exchange, however, weren't Brokaw's, they were Matthews'. Take away the polls, he suggested, and there's nothing for journalists to do.

Really?

At one time, it was impossible to get out out of Iowa without being exposed to some sort of discussion on agriculture in the United States, or, now, ethanol. There was almost no coverage of the economics of agriculture or the minefield of ethanol economics from journalists in the year they had to follow the campaigns in Iowa.

Similarly, it was nigh on impossible for any candidate to spend a week in New Hampshire in the past without talking about the issue of taxes, in a state in which the issue has moved more than a few residents to tears (it's that big of an issue.) There was no coverage of the issue in the week leading up to Tuesday night, but for a brief exchange in the Republican debate.

And, back in the day, on it would go from state to state, each with its own particular issue. The net effect was at the end of the campaign, politicians were not only better schooled on -- wait for it -- issues, but so were we. Those days are over. Pollsters talk to voters. Journalists don't.

In the aftermath of a primary, we are left instead with an analysis of the efffect of a candidate's tears (ignoring the fact that there weren't any actual tears) instead of an analysis of the effect of the ideological differences between the winners and the losers.

Here's one analyst's take today:

We become so caught up in the horse race that we often don’t pick up on the nuances as well as the unpredictable makeup of voters. We realize that many voters both in New Hampshire and across the country are on some level trying to send a message to the media that they are simply too powerful — and that we in the media are too impatient with the voting process.

That comes from Steve Adubato, the media analyst at MSNBC, whose column raises a simple question: If the people making the mistake are acknowledging they're making a mistake, why not just stop making it?

It would appear that the problem really isn't the polling or its methodology; it's that the people covering campaigns don't appear to know what stories to do without them. Take away pundits, pointyheads, and polls, and what are you left with? Voters and whatever issues they really care about.

MPR's servers have been inundated with people -- 48,000 yesterday alone -- using our Select A Candidate program. As one of the people who put it together, I can tell you it was a massive amount of work finding candidate answers to about a dozen obvious issues. Why? Given the millions of dollars invested by news organizations to cover the presidential campaign almost two years in advance, it shouldn't be such a struggle to get a concise overview of where candidates stand on issues. And yet, it is.

That's a heck of a story.

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Can online antics hurt students' chances for college?

Posted at 12:36 PM on January 10, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Two questions seem to be dominating the discussion in the wake of news that Eden Prairie High School administrators disciplined students whose pictures -- allegedly showing them drinking -- were posted on the social networking site, Facebook: "what were you thinking?" and "what's the number for our lawyer?"

There's another question, however. "Do I hurt my chances of getting into college by posting stupid things online?"

Yes. Maybe.

First the bad news. A recent survey of 453 admissions departments at colleges and universities in 49 states found one out of four are using blogs, search engines, or social networking sites to evaluate applicants.

"While certainly the traditional factors will still play dominant roles in selecting applicants for admission or rejection, students need to understand that their social network sites are being examined by colleges and universities," Dr. Nora Barnes, the researcher, said. "The content of their sites could have far-reaching effects on their academic futures if they are not careful."

The good news for high school partygoers documenting their lives online? In Minnesota, you don't have to be that careful. A sizeable number of Minnesota colleges don't use social networking sites to evaluate students. Marsha Schuemaker, internal communications director at St. Cloud State University says the school does not check the online lives of potential students, but she was intrigued enough by the question to contact Linda Kohl, a vice chancellor at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System, who said no MnSCU admissions office is using social networking sites in such a way.

The University of Minnesota also does not check online sites for background on applicants, according to university spokesman Dan Wolter.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling offers these tips for high school kids who want to move on to higher education:

Who is Craig Leipold?

Posted at 2:12 PM on January 10, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Ten things you may not have known about the new owner of the Minnesota Wild:

In 2002, Leipold quit the board of directors of LaCrosse Footwear, when the company decided to close down the Racine plant of its subsidiary, Rainfair, a company he sold in 1996 for $10 million. The company makes protective footwear.

Leipold is the founder of Ameritel Corporation, a business-to-business telemarketing firm in Neenah, Wis.

He serves on the board of directors of Gaylord Entertainment, owners of the Grand Old Opry and other venues.

Leipold is also the son in law of Samuel Johnson, scion of Racine's S.C. Johnson & Company.

He and his wife, Helen, have five children.

Leipold is a Republican. He's a contributor to Mitt Romney's current presidential campaign. In the past, he was a financial backer of the George Bush's campaign, as well as Lamar Alexander's bid for the White House. He's a contributor to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. His total political contributions, according to the Federal Elections Commission, amount to $61,714.

Leipold was on the Governor's Milwaukee Stadium Commission, which pushed for public financing of a new stadium for the Milwaukee Brewers in the mid-'90s.

Leipold angered some of the fans of hockey in Nashville when he considered selling the team to a group that some say wanted to move it to Canada.

He ended up selling to a local group for a reported $193 million, after buying the rights to the expansion team for $80 million.

He sent this letter to season ticket holders in May:

Dear Predators’ Season Ticket Holders:

June 25, 2007 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the awarding of the NHL franchise to Nashville that became your Nashville Predators. It’s been an incredible 10-year journey for me. I can’t tell you enough how much I appreciate your strong emotional and financial support of the Nashville Predators. You are a big part of the team’s on-ice success. On behalf of the entire franchise, I thank you.

Ten years ago, I couldn’t call myself a hockey expert. Today, my family and I are as passionate and competitive about the game as the most hardcore fans.

When the franchise began, I said we would run it as a business in order to be successful. We developed a game plan both on and off the ice. We became an integral part of the community, especially downtown Nashville. We made sure we had some fun. And, we indicated that making a huge profit was not a top priority - but we certainly didn’t make plans to lose a significant amount either.

As part of those plans we developed a loyal fan base - every team should be fortunate enough to have a Cell Block 303 and the loudest arena in the league. We built a team that the community could be proud of on and off the ice. We grew our hockey skills exactly as general manager David Poile outlined, using the draft as a foundation and then supplementing at the appropriate times with trades and free agents. We gave back to the community - well over $2 million in grants and in-kind donations through the Nashville Predators Foundation. We created an entertaining in-arena atmosphere for every game night. And, we did it all while keeping our ticket prices near the bottom of the league.

Unfortunately, the success on the ice has not translated to success for me as business owner.

Here are just a few facts as to why:

The Nashville Predators tallied up 216 points in the last two seasons, fifth most in the NHL, yet because of below-average attendance, the team will still have a real cash loss of $27 million during that time. Additionally, that loss is despite receiving the most money in the league from revenue sharing. Over the last five years, the team has lost over $60 million.

We’ve invested heavily in sales and marketing efforts, spending over $50 million in 10 years, most of that with locally-based businesses.

Our average regular season attendance this past season was 13,589, up from the year before, but still 2,000 below the NHL average. A low turnout, combined with a low ticket price results in a poor financial situation.

The new NHL Collective Bargaining Agreement with revenue sharing is not a cure-all. Each local market must still support its local team. In addition, this attendance does not qualify us for our full revenue sharing allocation under the collective bargaining agreement.

While individual fan support has always been strong, we’ve worked aggressively to increase our local business support since Season Four. We’ve tried a variety of approaches with minimal success. Our records show today that corporate support for the Nashville Predators makes up about 35% of our season ticket base. The average in other markets is around 60%. During our first two years, approximately 4,000 businesses owned season tickets. Today, only 1,800 businesses have season tickets.

While my heart and my love of the game tell me we can still be successful, the facts outlined above suggest otherwise. I’ve reached the only possible conclusion and it’s one of the most difficult decisions of my personal and professional life.

Later today, I am announcing an agreement to sell the Nashville Predators franchise and Powers Management to Jim Balsillie. We plan for the sale to be final in early July after a short period of due diligence and approval from the NHL Board of Governors.

I’ve carried the franchise as far as it can go from a business standpoint. It has been well-reported that we have attempted to attract local ownership since 2002. The truth is, we had only one serious inquiry in that time from someone who was interested in a small minority share of the team. Jim Balsillie is interested in full ownership.

It’s time to give someone else a chance to take the Nashville Predators to the next level in terms of local business support. Last week’s announcement that the Sommet Group has signed on as a naming rights partner for the arena is a strong first step in the right direction. The new energy and leadership of Jim Balsillie will be another.

Jim Balsillie is co-CEO of Research in Motion, the company which developed the Blackberry device. He is an avid hockey fan who still plays recreationally. I know he is dedicated to putting a great team on the ice.

The past 10 years have laid a foundation, but there’s still much to be done to both build corporate support and to win a Stanley Cup. I know Jim shares my passion for the game and my commitment to a strong franchise to pursue the greatest trophy in sports.

Despite the financial challenges we faced, owning this franchise has been the thrill of a lifetime. I’ve made many friendships here in Nashville. It’s been an exciting 10 years, and as I move on from the ranks of team ownership, I’ll always remain a fan.

Craig L. Leipold

He apparently left town in the good graces of the city and the NHL.

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Wild grammar

Posted at 6:09 PM on January 10, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

Now that the Minnesota Wild have -- or has -- been sold, is it time for a new team name? Anything will do that will, once and for all, settle the question of what verb should follow the name?

Are they an "is" or are they an "are"?

Minnesota Wild is sold said the headline on the MPR Web site. Technically, I suppose, that's correct. Wild at least sounds like a singular noun so it would take the singular form is, even if it sounds wrong, especially when newscasters announce that the Wild is in Detroit tonight to play the Red Wings, who, it should be pointed out are home to play the Wild tonight. Perhaps that's why we can never beat them; it's many against one.

The big problem comes with the fact wild is not a noun, it's an adjective that, through repetitive misuse, became a noun as people dropped the noun that went after it -- the wild woods, the wild prairie etc.

A few months ago I submitted the question to the arbiter of proper usage in manners of journalism, the Associated Press. I got this response from style guru David Minthorn:

The "collective nouns" entry of the AP Stylebook says team names take plural verbs. So, the Minnesota Wild are ....

The AP's story on the sale today showed the organization's plural style.

Success on the ice has been limited for the Wild, who have made the playoffs twice in six seasons and are currently in seventh place in the Western Conference.

But the Wild, and many news organizations -- I'm talking about you, Star Tribune -- insist Wild takes the singular. If true,one would read, perhaps, that however many dollars Leipold paid for the team are a lot of money.

Nonplused, I submitted the issue to local grammar arbiter Luke Taylor, who handles the Grammar Grater podcast.

"The difficulty with this singular form is that we as humans tend to think of the Wild as a group of players and naturally want to refer to the team in the plural, yet people in the U.S. and Canada are generally trained to use singular verbs with groups. And that's where a real mess arises: using the singular verb in the sentence is fine, but the you're required to use the singular pronoun 'it' later on.

We'd be relieved from all this insanity if we just adopted the BBC News Styleguide's approach. It reads, 'In sport, teams are always plural. England are expected to beat the Balaeric Islands; Tranmere Rovers have extended their lead at the top of the Premiership.' (See page 31 in this pdf)

The problem with that approach is that using plural verbs after words like 'England,' 'Manchester United' or 'Chicago' sounds strange to North American ears. but I have to admit I'm partial to the BBC's approach on collectives because it just seems to fit our human instinct to refer to a group as an actual group and not as an amorphous, inanimate 'it.'

Long story short: my final say with a team such as the Wild is to do what you think sounds best, singular or plural, but then adhere to that form once you've made your choice, remembering to stay consistent with any subsequent pronouns you may use throughout your piece of writing.

As Luke's reponse indicates, a definitive "rule" is hard to come by here.

And so I asked Mary Steen, the English Department chair at St. Olaf College in Northfield.

I'm not a complete authority on such matters, but I'd say that the singular verb is appropriate for a team.

Here's what Diane Hacker says in her Pocket Manual of Style (I don't have the Chicago Manual or some more journalistic manual at hand, but you probably do.):

Collective nouns such as jury, committee, club, audience, crowd, class, troop, family, and couple name a class or group. In American English, collective nouns are usually treated as singular. ...Occasionally, where there is some reason to draw attention to the individual members of the group a collective noun may be treated as plural: A young couple were arguing about politics while holding hands.

Vern Bailey, who runs the English Department at Carleton says...

British sportcasters and most Brits consider a sports team a group of individuals -- "Manchester are leading the rest after the second series."

The American sportcasters and public conceptualize a sports team as a single entity so they say "Notre Dame is leading after two quarters."

Both are correct. The difference can be considered idiomatic, an established pattern that needs no rule to explain it.

Paula Rabinowitz, English Department chair at the University of Minnesota...

I don't have my copy of the Chicago Manual with me--I'm home and it's in my office--but I would say is is what is.

"Is is what is." Now that's style.

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Is the end near?

Posted at 9:39 AM on January 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Over the last decade, we've heard so many dire predictions of the future of the Northwest Airlines brand that we admit surprise that we're a bit misty-eyed at the prospect of the end of the red tail in these parts.

As MPR's Marty Moylan reports, the Delta Airlines board of directors today is deciding whether to pursue a merger with either United or Northwest.

"The airline has stated and restated its commitment to its hub and headquarters here in Minnesota. Obviously, whenever you have mergers or acquisitions, there are so many different variables, it certainly is enough to make anybody nervous. But we do think we are in pretty good shape in terms of having some leverage to encourage them to keep that hub and headquarters here."

What's the rush? High fuel prices, for one. But the Wall Street Journal (subscription) says a significant motivation is the belief that Democrats will soon occupy the White House and be less likely to approve a merger.

Still, some industry watchers are skeptical that a deal is coming. Take Ray Neidl of Calyon Securities, for example.

"I think they're just trying to generate [public relations]," he told the Atlanta Constitution. If the companies were considering serious negotiations, "it wouldn't be published."

And Douglas McIntyre of the Web site 24/7 Wall Street, suggests mergers in an industry people late probably won't solve many problems.

The assumption that putting two big airlines together will save money is undoubtedly true. Compared to overall costs, those savings are probably very, very modest. Running Northwest costs about $12 billion a year. So much of that goes into fleet costs, fuel, and labor that there is not much to cut. Employees can be pushed out over time, but the unions are sensitive about it.

The largest single problem with merger two carriers is that consumers already hate airlines. The quality of service keeps dropping. They don't serve free peanuts anymore. The planes are dirty.

The head of US Air recently admitted that its merger with America West had been a train wreck of the first order. Reservation systems don't work. The employees of each company dislike one another. To put a point on it, the new company has all the hallmarks of an operator that is driving customers to rival airlines.

A merger between Delta and another large airline is not going to solve any problems. The modest savings of the combination will likely be offset by customer defections due to the poor service that comes from integrating two big carriers.

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Games get serious

Posted at 11:28 AM on January 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Tell us again about how video games (and consoles) rot the mind.

IBM and the Mayo Clinic are teaming up to use game console technology to advance the doctors' ability to quickly look at a brain, according to Computerworld magazine.

The chip being used is the one on which a Playstation runs.

There is, as it turns out, a connection between computers and doctors. Bradley Erickson, chairman of radiology at Mayo, invoked Moore's Law to explain the problem doctors face in reviewing images of brains. There's too many of them coming too fast. Moore's Law states that "the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years."

If the PS3 chip idea works, Mayo docs will be able to compare before/after pictures of patients' brains within seconds.

How important is the non-gaming use of a gaming chip?

“It's been a godsend, a gift to science, to use this,” said Klaus Schulten, director of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He uses the chip to generate computer simulations of working components of human cells in a process that starts with an expensive supercomputer crunching data about millions of atoms.

And it all started with Pong.

(Hat Tip: Michael Wells)

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We interrupt this spiral...

Posted at 11:47 AM on January 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Wasn't December supposed to be death for retailers?

It wasn't at Best Buy, unless you think a 1.5 percent increase in same-store sales is something to sneeze at when we're being told hourly that consumers are pulling back and we're on the precipice of a recession.

The Minnesota-based electronics company reported today that after adjusting for a calendar shift that moved a post-Thanksgiving shopping week to November, same store sales increased 3 percent.

The Wall Street Journal describes the increase as modest, but for a bellweather stock, surely a modest increase has got to lift spirits of the folks out on the ledge, especially since it shows the housing slump isn't crushing everybody.

Nope.

Investors apparently are still banking on the dark side. Best Buy's stock is closed down nearly more than 5 percent today.

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Doing the right thing

Posted at 3:03 PM on January 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

"OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don't love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet."

Jane Hambleton wasn't messing around when she found the booze in her son's car. "All of which proved one thing," the Washington Post said today, "America needed this. Oh boy, did we need this kind of tough love, the kind that says, 'I am not your friend. I am your mother. Eat your peas. Now.'"

So how did one parent in a country of about 80 million of them get on Oprah, or Good Morning America, or the Ellen Degeneres Show? She disciplined her kid. Perhaps that should tell us something.

The question of the right thing to do when it comes to parenting teens is rarely simple, however.

In the wake of the punishment handed out to 13 Eden Prairie High School students, whose party pictures appeared on Facebook, some parents found out what it's like to be stuck in a difficult position.

There was no proof alcohol was involved. There was no proof it wasn't. If it was your kid, do you side with the school, even if your son or daughter is claiming innocence? Or do you call the lawyer?

What's the right thing to do? Trust your kid, or trust the school?

I called Colleen Gengler in Worthington, a family relations specialist with the University of Minnesota regional extension service there.

"You back the school," she said. "But you just don't flat out say, 'nope, I don't believe you.'"

Even if there's no definitive proof of wrongdoing by your child?

"I would tell them, 'this is a consequence of putting the pictures online. There may or may not have been alcohol involved, but it's not whether I know for sure; it's how it appears and your responsibility for how it appears.'"

Ms. Gengler says the incident should spawn conversations between parents and their children about the social networking sites. "We would suggest they (parents) monitor it or ask their teen to allow them to take a look at their Facebook page, and determine whether it's appropriate. You want to get the teen to be responsible."

And on that topic -- responsibility -- listen to a special segment of All Things Considered tonight at 5:30 on young people and excessive drinking. During the half hour, host Tom Crann will talk with Nanci Oleson on how parents can communicate with their teens. Nanci covers family issues for Minnesota Public Radio and is author of the blog, How's the Family?

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Naming wrongs for naming rights

Posted at 12:50 PM on January 13, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Say what you want about the Metrodome -- and we know you will -- but you've got to give the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission long-overdue credit for one thing: it was always the Metrodome.

It may be one of the last remaining professional sports stadiums in the country that doesn't have a corporate name, or leave fans with naming "whiplash," when the name of a landmark is changed after everyone got use to it. It was always the Metrodome.

In Cleveland, last week, another long-time landmark changed names. Jacobs Field, the home of the Cleveland Indians, became Progressive Field, when one of the few remaining Fortune 500 companies still headquartered in the Rust Belt city bought the naming rights.

To be accurate, Jacobs Field was a corporate name. The former owner of the team -- Richard Jacobs -- named it after his real estate firm. But it sounded more like an old-time name -- like Wrigley Field, or even Busch Stadium. Similarly, Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati is another nice baseball name, even though it's actually an insurance company.

Progressive Field? Nah. People in Cleveland will always refer to it as "The Jake." The Prog? No. Absolutely not.

The Metrodome -- or The Dome -- is about to disappear from the consciousness of the Minnesota sports fan, but for the occasional tractor pull and Vikings game -- at least until the Vikings open Zygi Park. The Gophers are already building the TCF Bank Stadium, which rolls off the tongue like peanut butter, which means nobody is going to pile the kids in the car with the happy announcement from Dad to "pile in the car and go to the TCF."

The Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild, is "The X" and probably always will be, even if Acme Light and Power buys the utility which bought the naming rights.

Which leads us to the Minnesota Twins. Given their need to extract every penny they can, the Twins are unlikely to name their new stadium after their owner, which is probably just as well. But what legacy name will they choose? Wrigley, Fenway, The Barn all are immediately recognizable names. Progressive Field? Monster Park? Cisco Field? Please don't do that to us. It's baseball, not NASDAQ.

I suppose it's too far fetched to hope Irwin Jacobs buys the rights? The Jake. Nice.

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Check again, counselor

Posted at 4:30 AM on January 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Warning: You know that little "memo" line on your checks? Don't write anything obscene there when you make out a check to pay your parking ticket.

A Pennsylvania man has now apologized for what he wrote on a $5 check and the police have now dropped disorderly conduct charges against him.

But there must be something his lawyer can be charged with for uttering this quote while insisting his client would've been cleared if the case had gone to trial.

‘‘The F-word isn’t what it used to be,’’ attorney Keith Williams said. It doesn’t have a sexual connotation anymore and so can’t be considered obscene, he said.

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Shrinking Antarctic

Posted at 11:53 AM on January 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Another day, another hunk of ice disappears from the planet.

The Washington Post today reports that in Antarctica, ice previously considered stable is now unstable... and melting.

It still snows in Antarctica, if that's any comfort. But researcher Eric Rignot says the ice is melting faster than the snow is falling.

Antarctica is one of the two large ice caps scientists are concerned about. The other is in Greenland. Yesterday, researcher Tom Mote at the University of Georgia had nothing to say to lift our global warming spirits.

Mote's analysis showed the rate of melt for the past decade is sharply higher than the previous 25 years - and that 2007's rate of melt was 60 percent higher than the previous high in 1998.

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School's out

Posted at 3:13 PM on January 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

When last we talked politics -- we try not to talk politics too much on News Cut -- the voters of New Hampshire had just schooled big media on the problem of polls, and big media even sounded slightly disturbed, with faint promises to change.

So how's that going as we start another campaign week?

Not so good.

New Gallup/USA Today Poll: Hillary, McCain Lead Nationally -- Obama in Trouble?

McCain Moves Into Lead; Obama Gains on Clinton (reg. required)

Fluidity in G.O.P. Race; Democrats Eye Electability

Poll: 4-way GOP "dead heat" led by McCain; Hillary trounces Obama (Florida)

And that's just today.

I suppose it's too obvious to point out, by the way, that national polls don't mean much when we use the electoral system to elect presidents. But, if you're going to be enthralled by polls -- and, face it political wonks, you are -- then this is the best site to use to satisfy your electoral urges.

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The winds of change

Posted at 3:21 PM on January 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Sen. Amy Klobuchar picked an interesting spot to hold her news conference today unveiling new legislation she's introducing to promote further development of wind energy. It's the big windmill near the Arbor Lakes Shopping Center at Maple Grove. It's the first utility windmill to creep into the Twin Cities. It's not one of the big ones we see outstate, but as windmills sprout within spitting distance of our homes, we'll probably revisit old arguments with previous intruders to our vistas.

Klobuchar's bill would extend tax credits for renewable energy investments.

Here's an essay on the subject of how our energy and public works infrastructure changes the landscape. Flash is required. Click on the play button at the bottom.

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Return of the Ice Palace

Posted at 3:59 PM on January 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

For a city that once pridefully built the ice palace -- the last time was 2004 -- it was cold comfort to hear last week that the St. Paul Winter Carnival was having a hard time raising money to buy blocks of ice for ice sculpting.

An ice palace? That was never seriously considered. And good thing; the 2004 version took 27,000 blocks of ice. The 1992 version left organizers $600,000 in the hole.

In that context, then, what happens in China every year is astounding.

That's an image from last year's Harbin Ice and Snow World in China.

Of course, you can do impressive things when you have 800,000 people to visit who don't mind paying $21 apiece.

Like everything else winter-like, it's feeling the heat of a warmer climate.

(H/T: Michael Wells)

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Drinking forum live blogging

Posted at 5:34 PM on January 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

We've been concentrating on the issue of youth drinking in the last week or so. It culminated tonight in the UBS Forum at Minnesota Public Radio. It will be played on air on Tuesday's Midmorning. As the forum closed tonight, the Midmorning folks were unclear whether both hours of this forum would be aired, or just the first. Feel free to post your comments, and let's talk about this. You can also join a thread underway on Gather.com.

Live blogging

7:07 p.m. - "The issue is big and it touches our heart very deeply," Michael Caputo of MPR's Public Insight Network said, introducing tonight's forum. And he's right, of course. Shortly before the event started, we heard alcohol is suspected in another death in Mankato today. We're all parents, and yes, we've all -- mostly -- been in college, so we know all about the ritual of drinking. We're trying to figure out what's changed -- or even whether it's changed -- in this ritual that leaves people dead.

7:12 - Reporter Tom Weber interviewed several young people on Saturday night. A tape was played on when it's OK to binge drink. "When you get a promotion or you get married," said one young woman. "When you're at home and your friends won't just leave you to die," said a young man.

What did the young people here in the forum think about what they just heard? Ben Marcy suggested we define binge drinking first. "A point where you're vomiting," he suggested. "Drew" said binge drinking is having more than 5 drinks an hour, or drinking for four days straight.

(More below the fold)

Continue reading "Drinking forum live blogging"

Delta negotiates with two airlines at once

Posted at 9:24 AM on January 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Come on, Delta, one leak. That's all we need: one little leak from your board of directors meeting last week at which, it was reported, you were to decide whether you were going to try to gobble up Northwest Airlines or United Airlines.

This morning, we got it, apparently. The answer is ... both.

According to the Wall St. Journal (subscription possibly required. If so, alternate Reuters story here) , the Delta board has voted to begin merger talks with both airlines.

Of the two other airlines, Northwest, based in Eagan, Minn., is considered the more likely of the two partners, according to people involved in the matter. Mr. Anderson is the former chief executive of Northwest and remains close to Douglas M. Steenland, his successor there. Tammy Lee, a spokeswoman for Northwest, declined to comment.

Great. So now we've got two major negotiations going on that play one party against the other. The Twins are still shopping Johan Santana to either the Red Sox or Yankees. In both, the smart money seems to be on Minnesota losing.

If Northwest leaves, the Minnesota economy may take a hit, according to a story today from Minnesota Public Radio's Annie Baxter. But it's our psyche that may be damaged if we lose another corporate headquarters. The possibility of that seems real, despite a deal between the Metropolitan Airports Commission and Northwest to maintain a headquarters here. That, according to the story, is an unenforceable deal.

Last year, the MAC sharpened the language of its agreement with Northwest, stipulating that Northwest's senior management be located here in order to satisfy the company's promise to be headquartered in Minnesota.

But MAC and state officials say the agreement cannot force Northwest to keep a headquarters here. So, Governor Pawlenty set up a team just last week to look at issues like the cost of Northwest leaving.

Wells Fargo moved its headquarters to San Francisco a few years ago when Norwest Bank merged (maybe there's hope for a name change. There's still a norwest.com). State officials here note, however, that Wells Fargo has more employees here than in San Francisco. But so what? Norwest was ours, now it's theirs.

When The St. Paul Companies merged with Travelers Insurance in 2004, the headquarters stayed here as the St. Paul Travelers Company. Then, the company dropped St. Paul from the name and we got to understand how Mr. Roebuck felt.

As much as we fret about Northwest, other cities have even more to lose. It's expected that Minneapolis will remain a hub for "Norlta" or "Delwest." But they've resigned themselves to doom in Memphis. And out in Salt Lake City, they're rooting for Northwest to be Delta's choice. "If it's United, your hub is toast," one analyst is telling a Salt Lake City newspaper.

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All atwitter at Macworld

Posted at 10:47 AM on January 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

The legion of Mac followers camped out (funny blog from last year's campout here) in chilly San Francisco overnight last night, in advance of today's super secret speech by Apple boss Steve Jobs at Macworld. It's occasions like this that Jobs announces spiffy new gadgets, as he did with iPhone. Predictions this year include some sort of video service and a super-light Mac laptop.

MPR's tech guru, Jon Gordon, who also writes WavLength and Future Tense, is at Macworld and writes to say he's twittering the speech.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, the Pioneer Press techie is there with him, also twittering, as is Dwight Silverman.

11:06 a update - Twitter server goes belly up. I like to think I had something to do with it. How do you like them apples, Jobs!
11:30 a update - The server is back up.
11:31 a update - Down again. I think we can fairly conclude that Twitter is a lousy news platform. Rest easy, mainstream media.
12:19 p update As mentioned above, the announcement is video rental on iTunes, refinements to iPhone, and a slim laptop. Jon's got it on his Twitter page (which is back up). Get it while you can.

Jon also reports the HD version of movies will cost more. And that brings up a subject that nobody seems to be talking about as we go to mandatory HDTV. Why does it have to cost more? We're being forced by government edict to buy only HDTVs. The cable company charges more for HD service. Movies cost more to rent. Why?

When analog "goes away," will they lower the price? They say TVs are going to come down in price. When?

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Bridge collapse cause will send states scurrying

Posted at 12:46 PM on January 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

The National Transportation Safety Board today said the gusset plates -- steel plates that attach several different components -- were responsible for the collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis last August. Read the full report here (pdf). That pretty much confirms what many of the media reports said -- reports the NTSB dampened -- in the aftermath of the bridge tragedy.

But here's the thing: the bridge was built as it was designed. The problem is the design was flawed and the NTSB investigator said there are over 400 bridges across the United States designed the same way.

That's bound to get the attention of transportation officials all across the country (perhaps even around the world), many of whom adopted a "it can't happen here" attitude in the wake of the bridge collapse, even when gusset plates were first mentioned as a possible cause.

"The issue is underdesign," said NTSB chair Mark Rosenker, who wants states to recalculate the design of similar bridges.

"We've never seen anything like this, nor anticipated anything like this," he said. "Gusset plates are usually the most robust parts of a bridge... Why didn't we find it 10 years ago? No one in the hundreds of years of bridge design had found that a gusset plate that was underdesigned and thereby caused a collapse. It was not something people recognized as a weak point."

"We do not believe it's a systemic problem in the United States with regard to bridges, but we feel it's critical we share it with the industry so that we can guarantee there isn't something we don't know about."

Still unknown, however, is what was "the straw that broke the camel's back," Rosenker said. "What was different on August 1st." They think they know what gusset plate failed first, triggering the collapse. They just don't yet know why.

The revelation counters all attempts by the NTSB to dampen focus on the gusset plates when it first sprouted as a possible cause a week after the collapse. At the time, an NTSB spokesman called media reports "overblown.", and going so far as to say the plates were not a problem.

The company that designed the bridge was Sverdup & Parcel.

For his part, Gov. Tim Pawlenty used the occasion to launch a broadside against political opponents and reporters:

“Since the bridge collapse, I have encouraged politicians and members of the media not to make judgments about the cause of the collapse until the NTSB investigation is complete. Unfortunately, my suggestion was not widely followed.

“Some individuals have leapt to premature conclusions. The NTSB clearly stated today the original design flaw was unrelated to subsequent inspections or maintenance of the bridge.

“Again, while the NTSB investigation is not complete, the focus of the investigation appears headed in a direction different than many of the political claims that have been made. It is our hope that at least now people will reserve further judgment until the investigation is complete and that we strive to address these matters in a fair, factual and non-political manner."

MPR's Sea Stachura will have reports tonight on All Things Considered and tomorrow morning on Morning Edition.

Update 3:53 p.m. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters has now sent an advisory to transportation officials in other states.

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Hospitals in serious condition

Posted at 1:40 PM on January 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Now we know why they call it a "waiting room."

A study from Harvard today finds that the length of time one has to wait in an emergency room is increasing. The study found waiting times in ERs increased 36 percent for all patients from 1997 to 2004, which translates to an average of 30 minutes per patient. But as many as a quarter of heart attack patients had to wait 50 minutes or longer.

Are emergency rooms at the breaking point? Many hospitals are closing their emergency rooms. The ones that are opened are said to be understaffed and overwhelmed. And with cutbacks in -- in Minnesota's case -- subsidized health care plans, politicians and others have warned that people without coverage will show up in ERs. Has that happened? Spokespersons for two of the largest ERs in Minnesota -- Regions Hospital in St. Paul and Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis -- did not return my phone calls on Tuesday.

Have you had an emergency room experience lately? Feel like sharing?

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With love from the media

Posted at 3:57 PM on January 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

The online site for Editor & Publisher magazine has a lot of love today for Jeff Cagle, a reporter for the Owatonna People's Press, who wrote a series of articles about Ava Cowell. She had less than a year to live without a liver transplant. She got the liver earlier this month, and Cagle wrote a very touching piece on the donor last week.

"The nicest compliment I ever received, and both of the families said this, they’re saying I’m the one who saved Ava’s life,” Cagle told Editor & Publisher. “I don’t think of journalists with that kind of title. I usually think of lifesavers as firefighters and doctors and nurses, never journalists. But when you hear that, it makes you feel really good.”

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What? You worry?

Posted at 11:06 AM on January 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Economists say a recession tends to be an emotional thing; something that happens when confidence goes away, and people start hunkering down. On Tuesday, state economist Tom Stinson said Minnesota is already in a recession. Then, Gov. Tim Pawlenty dismissed the views of the guy the state turns to for these sorts of things by saying, "Tom Stinson tends to be a bit on the pessimistic side of things, to put it charitably." Smack!

It's natural for politicians to criticize the experts -- Stinson is widely acclaimed for his ability -- but it doesn't give the average Joe much confidence that name-calling at the start of a recession is going to lead to a reasonable plan to end it.

Let's face it, the steady drum beat of bad news makes it tough to be Mr. Sunshine where the economy is concerned. Macy's just announced it's cutting jobs. Northwest is about not to be a Minnesota-based airline. 3M is pulling the plug on 1,000 St. Paul jobs, and has eliminated 800 Minnesota jobs in a little over a year. The Ford plant is closing. A lot of people blame the media for the bad news, but those are the facts.

Even if Stinson is a pessimist, it's hard to find people who know the economy who aren't.

"There is certainly enough out there to make people worry," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York in this morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch. "We think we are getting very close to a recession."

For Minnesotans, if you work in a factory, you should probably be most worried, followed by construction workers, and those in the information industry -- that's me -- according to the state employment report. Those are the two areas that have lost the most jobs in the last year. If you're in the travel and leisure industry, business wasn't awful in December but Steve Hine, the Labor Market Information Director at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, said today that that's one area that could be hurt if people stop spending.

On the other hand, he says, there are "counter-cyclical" occupations that tend to weather downturns better: health care, career counseling, even psychiatric counseling.

But there's another problem: inflation. You'd have to be pretty old -- in working-age years -- to remember what inflation can do. Gerald Ford, was so frustrated by it that the best he could do was try to get everyone to wear a "Whip inflation now" button. It didn't work. During the subsequent Carter administration inflation rose about 10 percent a year.

Are those days back? Not quite. But new government data says it's a bigger problem now than at any time in 17 years. The combination of inflation and recession is rarely pretty.

So now the big question: are you worried? How is the economy making you change the way you live, if at all? Aside from the economic mumbo jumbo, I think recessions are personal things. Even if we keep our jobs, we worry more or less. I'd like to assemble a small group of individuals around the state to talk about this regularly as we go through this period. Are you up for it?

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The Randy factor

Posted at 12:44 PM on January 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Perhaps it was only matter of time, but Randy Moss today became a distraction to the almost-Super-Bowl-bound New England Patriots.

The Boston Globe has Moss's reaction this afternoon to a Florida radio station report that a woman "filed for an order of protection against Moss, alleging he committed battery against her. The report said a temporary injunction was issued, barring Moss from coming within 500 feet of the woman and from using or possessing firearms." (Video available here)

It's the reaction by Moss that will likely raise eyebrows among the formerly faithful in Minnesota.

"I want to make something clear: In my whole entire life of living 30 years, I've never put my hand on one woman, physically or in an angry manner."

Technically true. He used a car before.

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Bridges beyond Minnesota's borders

Posted at 1:34 PM on January 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

A look at what other states are doing as a result of Tuesday's NTSB determination that the design of gussets were at fault in the I-35W bridge collapse.

Alabama - Alabama Department of Transportation officials today will begin checking the stress levels and thickness of gusset plates on the state's three deck-truss bridges.

Michigan - "We're confident in the way they're designed, but also we're prepared to do whatever follow-up or recommended action the Federal Highway Administration may ask us to do," Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman Bill Shreck said. "We'll do whatever it takes to make sure our bridges are safe."

Missouri - A study of Missouri's 232 truss bridges on the state highway system is focusing on the gusset plates used in their design, according to a statement issued by Pete Rahn, Missouri Department of Transportation director. "We don't expect to find anything that is compromising the safety of these bridges," Rahn said. "All our bridges are inspected regularly and are designed to safely handle traffic, or else we'd close them right away. But we need to double-check and make sure all our truss bridges are safe because we cannot let what happened in Minnesota happen here in Missouri."

Ohio - The Ohio Department of Transportation said Wednesday it's ahead of the curve in bridge inspections and already carefully examines the steel plates that connect bridge beams.

Pennsylvania - As a result of the Minneapolis collapse, PennDOT spent $1.9 million on extra inspections of 28 steel truss bridges it maintains. An unknown amount was spent on similar inspections by county and municipal governments. State officials are trying to get more information from the federal government on the extent of the testing required in the wake of Tuesday's announcement.

Washington state - The 26 state-owned truss-deck bridges, similar to the one that collapsed in Minneapolis, have been checked within the last year and inspectors have found no problems with their gussets, said state bridge maintenance engineer Harvey Coffman.

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Black is back

Posted at 2:22 PM on January 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

As anyone with an ounce of fashion sense knows -- or so I've heard -- there are many shades of black -- until today.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York announced they have developed "the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths." It's the darkest material ever made by humans and it is said to be a boon to the future of electronics and solar panels.

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Blo & Go

Posted at 3:02 PM on January 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

By way of City Hall Scoop, we have learned through the Washington Post that Laurie Coleman, wife of Minnesota's senior senator, has started a business called "Blo & Go."

It's about hair dryers.

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Death by Taser

Posted at 3:49 PM on January 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)

Tasers became an integral police tool largely on the strength of the argument that authorities ought to be able to restrain someone without having to shoot them to do it. The news today that five state troopers were involved somehow in using tasers on a driver who was combative in New Brighton, though rare in these parts, is an incident that may well be added to a growing list of deaths by Taser. The Fridley man was pronounced dead at the hospital. It hasn't been determined if the tasering was the reason.

Other incidents: In North Carolina a man high on crack died after being shot with a Taser when he became combative last Wednesday. On the same day, a Coral Gables, Florida man died. A few days earlier, a man was killed by Taser by the Nevada Highway Patrol. And a few days before that, a death was reported in Alabama.

Police use of Tasers came under more scrutiny with the release last fall of the last minutes of a passenger in an airport in Vancouver, tasered to death by the RCMP.

At the same time, a quick search reveals dozens of instances in which officers using Tasers successfully subdued criminal suspects without shooting them.

So what do we have here? A weapon being misused? Or misunderstood?

Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Research Center (FSRC) at Minnesota State University-Mankato, told Police-One.com that even a temporary ban on Tasers "would literally create a catastrophe for peace officers. Lawsuits would increase, officer injuries would increase, subject injuries would increase-all guaranteed. We need additional research, but we don't need to stop using a unique tool that experience has proven is effective and overwhelmingly safe while more investigation is underway."

Two years ago the Dade County (Florida) Commissioners commissioned a study on the stun gun. The results, released by the Police Executive Forum, an organization of police chiefs, suggested better training.

For example, the group suggested a person be shot -- err, shocked -- once, then evaluated, rather than repeatedly shocked.

An article on the report, coincidentally, appeared in today's Miami Herald, following the death last week of a man.

In 2006, a man died in Wisconsin after being shot, prompting the ACLU to call for more training. The organization cited the work of University of Wisconsin biomedical engineering professor John Webster, who demonstrated that Tasers can cause cardiac ventricular fibrillation – a precursor of cardiac arrest – in pigs. "Particularly in susceptible populations, such as the young, the elderly or those with obvious medical conditions, Tasers must be presumed capable of causing cardiac arrest in humans as well," the group said.

The debate has been underway across the country for some time. Because of Tuesday night's incident, it is has now arrived in Minnesota.

(h/t Tom Klun)

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Media smackdown

Posted at 10:04 AM on January 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

From time to time, there are classic smackdowns of the news media. Matt Taibbi's article in the current issue of Rolling Stone qualifies, especially since he's a card-carrying member. Taibbi, it should be pointed out to those who don't already know, wears his politics on his sleeve and in his articles. But the campaign press corps of 2008 walks into the door frame with such regularity (was yesterday's top political story really that Obama and Clinton were forced to agree to play nice? Really? On a day when the economy took such a swan dive?), that even the most conservative pundits would be hard pressed not to slap the guy on the back.

Here are two particularly interesting paragraphs in the article, Merchants of Trivia: Why do the media insist on reducing one of the most exciting presidential primary seasons in American history to a simple horse race?

This 2008 presidential race looked interesting once, a thrillingly up-for-grabs affair in which real issues and real ground-up voter anger threatened to wrest control of America's politics from the Washington Brahmins who usually puppeteer this process from afar. And while the end result in Iowa — a historic and inspirational Obama victory, coupled with a hilariously satisfying behind-the-woodshed third-place ass-whipping for status quo gorgon Hillary Clinton — was compelling, the media has done its best to turn a once-promising race into an idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults, delivered at rah-rah campaign events utterly indistinguishable from scholastic pep rallies. "If there's policy in this race," one veteran campaign reporter tells me with a sad laugh, "I haven't noticed it."

... and

How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests in American history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even Vince McMahon would be ashamed to promote? The real story of the campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability — and therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party's too-cozy relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled a meaningful political phenomenon — widespread voter disgust, not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national political press that smugly enforced the party insiders' stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of dissident candidates.

Update 5:04 p.m. Somewhat related, but here's one of the more bizarre moments of the campaign so far. I'm not sure which is more startling: a reporter picks this particular moment to get tough on a candidate, or a press secretary alleging that calling a candidate to task (at a news conference, by the way) is being unprofessional. In other words, "just shut up and write down what we say."

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Select A Candidate explained

Posted at 11:51 AM on January 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (17 Comments)

I'll be on Talk of the Nation from National Public Radio this afternoon around 1:40 p.m. (Central Time), for a segment they're doing looking at the political quizzes that are out there.

Minnesota Public Radio started Select A Candidate many years ago and we've done it again this year. There's one version here and a recently souped-up version here.

I believe I'm on with a columnist out of Chicago who wrote a column this week(which, at the moment, I cannot find online) after he took several online surveys and found he came up matched to a different candidate each time.

I can't speak for the other surveys -- some of which are well done and some of which are not -- but Select A Candidate is meant to be the beginning of the online fact-gathering for people interested in candidates, not the end. You don't -- or at least you shouldn't -- log on, see which candidate you match up with, and then log off.

Neither should you assume the quiz is "wrong" if you match up with a candidate for whom you do not intend to vote. Indeed, these quizzes reinforce that we make our decisions based on many factors; issues are just one of them.

In addition, there is Bob's Theory of Political Answers at play to explain why often marginal candidates end up as most often matched (Duncan Hunter and Tommy Tancredo occupied the top position at one point or another): Candidates are more interesting and direct in their answers if they're less likely to be elected. Since the options people are given as answers are often the actual words of the candidate, people find -- shall we say -- honest and direct answers to be the most reasonable.

I'll post a link to the Talk of the Nation audio and page later on today.

Update: 2 p.m. OK, well, that was interesting. And a little bit weird since the subtext of the segment seemed to be that there's something wrong with these quizzes because they're only about issues. Given the braying -- much of it deserved -- among columnists about horse race politics and the desire to have more discussion about issues, it was a strange juxtaposition in the criticism. Nobody believes that issues alone is what should dictate the next president. But it should be a piece of the pie.

Update 5:12 p.m. - Here's the link to the interview at npr.org.

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Psst! Want to buy some wheat?

Posted at 12:35 PM on January 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

There's CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and Marketplace, but if you really want to know what's going on in the commodities markets, the best indicators are what people are rioting over and what thieves are stealing.

And today, the answer is: wheat.

In Pakistan, rioting has broken out over flour. (Don't laugh; it's happened in the U.S. before.) There's a shortage of flour in Pakistan and prices are at an all-time high. That's good for America's farmers, but bad for hungry people.

In Egypt, according to today's New York Times, people jostle in line and fights break out over subsidized bread.

Suddenly, the price of oil isn't the big issue. The price of food is.

And the thieves know it. In Kansas, police are investigating "a series of attacks in which nearly half a dozen wheat depositories have been hit by thieves." Thieves drive the big grain trucks up to the Midwest's grain elevators, fill them up, and drive off to wherever people go to fence wheat.

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Pawlenty to schools: 'We are SO not BFF'

Posted at 4:28 PM on January 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Tim Nelson, formerly of City Hall Scoop, is -- lucky for us -- now at Minnesota Public Radio. They haven't given him his own blog yet, but he's always welcome to News Cut space. And so, the following is from Tim.

Maybe it’s not so good to be the king.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty spoke before hundreds of school board members from across Minnesota gathered in Minneapolis this morning for their annual leadership conference. He dutifully touched on his well known policy positions: dealing with declining enrollment, Q-comp, teacher training, market-based teacher compensation.

And then came middle school.

It was an interesting aside on his own experience with his daughter Mara at an undisclosed Eagan middle school, showing that even potential veep contenders still weigh lunch room politics. (Listen - MP3):

But, as ever, they do it for keeps. (Listen - MP3)

Bob here, again.

OK, let's see if we have this straight: The governor of the state doesn't want to go talk to his daughter's teacher about the lack of homework because "nothing will change" and "they'll talk bad about me in the lunch room"?

Let's hit the Wayback Machine:

The governor's 2003 State of the State address: "School accountability begins with parents."

On CNN's Lou Dobbs tonight in 2005:

The number one determinant of how children are going to do in schools, of course, is their parents. The second most thing is the effectiveness of their teachers, and a lot of kids, unfortunately, don't have high functioning or engaged or involved parents. This is the next best thing we can do.

And, again, in his address today on the subject of his dissatisfaction that his daughter's teacher hasn't assigned a stitch of homework all year...

"... I don't think we should even raise it..."

And the governor's complaints seem to collide with his statement after it was announced his older daughter would attend private school this year, instead of a public school in Eagan.

"Governor Pawlenty believes District 196 [Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan] is a great school system and his family is very satisfied with it," (Spokesman Brian) McClung said.

Tangent time: There was a piece in the Wall St. Journal today called "What's Gotten Into Kids These Days?"

The article looks at why kids are having emotional meltdowns in pre-school, and we're not talking the typical antics of four-year-olds here, according to The Juggle blog at the Journal.

The column offers some possible explanations, such as parents and schools are pushing children to read, write and do math too soon, at the expense of social and emotional skills. Time spent in group childcare from a young age can also be stressful for children, it says.

The column advises parents to take a number of steps to avert such problems, such as not introducing academics too early, and to look for low-stress classrooms and low student-teacher ratios (each teacher should be responsible for no more than 10 three and four-year-olds.) It’s also a good idea that preschool teachers have access to mental health and behavior experts. In the column, an expert intervened to stop one preschool from girl from throwing things and picking fights.

Pawlenty is, obviously, talking about a different age group in his complaint about the lack of homework coming home, but it does raise the question of our focus on how young we're pushing academics on kids.

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Video gaming is now a sport

Posted at 10:19 PM on January 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

From the "what am I missing here department" comes this late-breaking news nugget: ESPN is adding competitive video game coverage to its broadcast schedule.

Is there anything worse than sitting in a room watching someone else play a video game? Now we're supposed to watch someone somewhere else play?

Videogame bloggers seem to like the idea. Said the Sports Video Digest...

You know, its good to see ESPN showing video games some love…I mean, they show love to a lot of other fringe sports (strongest man, lumberjack events, pool competitons, etc.) so why not video games? I would be willing to bet that more people are playing X-Box 360 than participating in a hot dog eating contest anyway (although we all love Joey Chestnutt, right?)

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An energy tale of two states

Posted at 7:46 AM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

"There's oil in them thar plains!" North Dakota has almost 4,000 oil wells, pumping about 129,000 barrels of oil a day. Oil prospectors in the state are reaping the benefits of $90-a-barrel prices. But is the state getting its fair share?

ABC's Nightline is going to take a look at that question tonight. The state takes in around $19 million a month, according to the Associated Press. That's a pretty small fraction of the money being made pulling oil out of the state's oil patch.

A few years ago, MPR's Dan Gunderson profiled the Upper Midwest's best-kept energy secret.

Western North Dakota has large oil reserves. By some estimates, it has more oil than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A federal government geologist estimated a formation called the Bakken shale holds 400 billion barrels of oil.

Meanwhile, across the border -- Minnesota -- the talk is all about new energy, not old. Gov. Pawlenty this week proposed a statewide energy plan to make it easier for clean energy projects to move forward. It was a plan notable for the fact DFLers didn't immediately criticize it.

And some legislators are trying to attract a big wind-energy company to move to Minnesota.

When it comes to the generation of wind energy, Minnesota is among the big states, trailing only Texas and California in wind-generated energy, according to figures released on Thursday.

No matter what sort of energy is used -- in this case to generate electricity -- something has to get it from point A to point B. And Minnesota can claim leadership in that area, too. According to Mr. Gunderson, new technology has been developed here that will make those giant power lines more efficient.

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When politics meets advertising

Posted at 11:10 AM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Given American Apparel's history of provocative advertising, it's hard to tell for sure whether the ad in the New York Times last month was meant to alter the course of political debate on immigration, and create a rallying cry...

... or whether it actually was an exploitation of immigrants to sell more product.

It's not as if the company is above such things...

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Noose news

Posted at 11:38 AM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

Another noose incident in Minnesota.

This time it's in Chatfield, where two students have been "disciplined" for hanging a black doll over a stage railing by a noose. The Winona Daily News quoted a parental source claiming the two were suspended for two days. Some in the school say that's not punishment enough.

The paper carries a quote by the school's principal that suggest that the students involved are more stupid than racist.

Principal Randy Paulson said that a poster supporting a white supremacist group was found previously on the locker of one of the students responsible for hanging the doll.

Despite these two acts, along with reports the same student had previously used racial slurs toward (Parent Tammi) Stoos’ daughter and other minority students, Chatfield School District officials said they would not necessarily call what the students did a hate crime, although the students were disciplined under their racial harassment policy.

“I think what happened here is that we had a couple of students that did this incident without a lot of thought, and not realizing that this would be a racial act,” Paulson said.

Blink. Blink. A student who has used racial slurs and had a white supremacist poster on his locker didn't realize hanging a black doll in a noose would be a racial act?

The fallout from the incident would suggest that depending on what school you attend in Minnesota, you may risk more by having a photograph on Facebook of you holding a Dixie cup off school property than hanging a black doll by a noose in the school.

It would appear that the golf community -- not exactly known for its firm stand against racism -- takes things more seriously. Golfweek Magazine sacked its editor today for putting a noose on the cover.

Meanwhile, in Jena, Louisiana on Monday, a nationalist noose-carrying group is planning a protest against Martin Luther King Day. One fairly wonders what kind of behavior the participants exhibited when they were in high school.

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A solution in search of a problem

Posted at 1:05 PM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

The space program, at least in its infancy, changed the technology of America in ways we couldn't have imagined.

Still, it's hard to imagine what the future benefit will be of this. The University of Tokyo is teaming up with a paper airplane group to build a paper airplane, which will be launched from the International Space Station, to prove that it can float to earth without burning up.

As we've seen too tragically, the speed of spacecraft re-entering earth's atmosphere creates intense -- and dangerous -- heat.

But slowing the rate of return of an object from space to prove that it can withstand re-entry without heat protection has already been proven, with the Burt Rutan-designed Spaceship One, which changed into the equivalent of a fluttering leaf to re-enter the atmosphere.

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Herschel's secret

Posted at 2:43 PM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Former Minnesota Viking Herschel Walker reveals in a new book that he suffers from multiple personality disorder.

According to the Atlanta Constitution today...

Multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder (DID), as it is more commonly referred to today, is a rare mental condition in which one person has two or more distinct personalities, according to the Merck Manual of Medical Information.

The personalities may or may not be aware of each other and a particular personality may not have access to all of the individual's memories. The switch from one personality to another can be very disorienting and the active personality may have memory lapses or feel that he or she has lost track of time. Persons suffering from this disorder may refer to themselves in the plural or in the third person.

Victims of DID have usually experienced a severe, traumatic shock of some kind and most report being abused as children. Treatment for this illness involves integrating the various personalities into one and usually requires psychotherapy that may continue for years, according to Merck.

"That's all news to me. All I know is whatever personality he had when he had the football was the one I liked," said former Georgia coach Vince Dooley, showing a remarkable inability to grasp the concept, even by football standards.

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Election results by the roadside

Posted at 2:56 PM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Digital billboards have been a bit of a controversy in these parts since a few of them sprouted in Minnetonka, St. Paul, and along I-494 near Mendota Heights.

Opponents have expressed concern that the rotating ad images would distract drivers.

It was only a matter of time, however, before the operators figured you could do more with them than just runs ads. You could run... news, or -- in the case of South Carolina -- election returns.

Will that increase the odds of an accident? Perhaps not. The South Carolina Department of Transportation analyzed the accident rate near the billboards and found out that the rate went down when the billboards went up.

The election results idea didn't start in South Carolina. Last week, the digital billboards in Michigan carried primary results. And caucus results in Iowa were also "broadcast" on the electronic signs.

A call is out to Clear Channel Outdoors in Minnesota to see if the idea will be tried here.

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Minnesota vs. Wisconsin: cold-weather tips

Posted at 4:05 PM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

There are cold weather tips and there are cold weather tips.

In Minnesota, for example, the sort of advice we get at this time of the year is pretty standard fare: dress warm, drink fluids, and don't trust the ice.

It's not like Wisconsin, where cold-weather advice seems to begin and end with the booze.

"The expert advice for Packers fans looking to brave the near-zero cold at Lambeau Field on Sunday is the same a parent would give to a young adult heading out for a night on the town: Ease up on the booze and keep your clothes on," says the story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Alcohol gives that flushed sensation, a "feeling that you're warm, when you're really not," said James Gast, a family practitioner in the Bellin Health Family Medical Center in Ashwaubenon, the heart of Packers country.

What are the odds anybody will heed the warning?

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Militant vs. insurgent

Posted at 6:25 PM on January 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Insurgent	Militant

On Monday, according to the Associated Press, militants were in the news:

Militants stormed Kabul's most popular luxury hotel Monday, killing at least six people as they hunted down Westerners who cowered in a gym — a coordinated assault that could signal a new era of brazen Taliban attacks.

Similar language was used in a report from National Public Radio.

Meanwhile, in Iraq this week, according to the New York Times, it was insurgents who rigged a house to kill Americans.

From the alleyway outside a day later, there was little sign that this was the house where the bomb exploded Wednesday, during an offensive to clear Sunni insurgents from the northern Diyala River valley, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

Is there a difference? Radio Free Europe muddies the definitions with a headline story last January, Afghanistan: Are Militants Copying Iraqi Insurgents' Suicide Tactics?.

The White House, meanwhile, released a fact sheet last week, referring to Shia militants.

But in a speech in the Rose Garden before leaving for the Middle East, President Bush used several terms, except militants.

"First was a surge of additional troops into Iraq, with a new mission to protect the Iraqi people from terrorists, insurgents and illegal militias; second was a surge of operations that began in June once the troops were in place, with new offenses across the country to drive the terrorists and militias out of their strongholds; and third was a surge of provincial reconstruction teams, was a civilian surge, which deployed across Iraq to ensure the military progress was quickly followed up with real improvements in the daily lives of the Iraqi citizens."

In 2005, a BBC listener pressed Helen Boaden, the director of BBC news on the use of insurgents. She responded:

This term was decided upon because it describes people who are "rising in active revolt".
It is the best word to use in situations of rebellion or conquest when there is no free-standing government.

That was then -- when the BBC implied there's no free-standing government in Iraq -- and this is now. And now, the BBC is using both words in stories coming out of Iraq.

Color me confused. So I submitted the question to AP editor David Minthorn, who is the person who writes and maintains the organization's style guide. He responded:

Insurgent refers to people and groups actively battling the government or coalition forces. Militant usually refers to members of armed militias, which have a variety of agendas. The Kabul hotel attack is believed to have been carried out by Islamic militants, possibility surrogates of the Taliban insurgency.

Possibly, but the terms are often used when we don't know who's responsible for a particular incident. BTW, I submitted the same question to National Public Radio's ombudsman earlier this week. But she did not respond. She was answering other questions, like "What is an ombudsman." That I can answer. It's the person who can explain when and why a news organization uses one carefully chosen word over another.

(Photo credits: Getty Images)

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The drip, drip, drip of foreclosures

Posted at 3:15 PM on January 20, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Whenever stories about people losing their homes in a mortgage foreclosure come along, some of the reaction is fairly predictable. They knew what they were getting into. It's their responsibility. They shouldn't have bitten off more than they could chew.

All of which is usually true. It's also true that it's incredibly sad and -- if you have a pulse -- one's heart aches for the misfortune of others.

The Brainerd Dispatch newspaper (registration required) profiled one such family today.

"We had no heat from mid-August to October," said the mother. "When we filed for bankruptcy they turned our heat back on. There were mornings in October when we had no gas or hot water and we woke up in a cold house. I felt so terrible that my kids had to go through that."

The mother said the children have been hanging in there, but they had a hard time when she and her husband separated. She said the children don't know about the possibility of losing their home.

Sen. Norm Coleman's forum in St. Cloud late last week revealed some staggering numbers. Eighty-thousand families are behind on their mortgages right now. And the highest number of foreclosures isn't in the Twin Cities, but in Wright, Stearns and Sherburne counties.

One of Coleman's solutions is to allow families to dip into retirement savings accounts without incurring a penalty. That may provide some short-term help to keep one's home, but it does lead one to wonder what the long-term effect will be.

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Nobody respects us

Posted at 8:10 AM on January 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Oh boy, it's Super Bowl hype week, and the New York Giants and their fans are already in playing shape.

"Nobody gave us a shot and now we're going to the Super Bowl," Giants quarterback Eli Manning said after last night's thrilling victory over the Green Bay Packers.

This, of course, is not a new thing in sports, or many elements of life, for that matter. The "us against them" method of harnessing the awesome power of paranoia is a tried and true declaration. But there's a difference between it and reality. The Giants were 7 point underdogs, which is not exactly Mt. Everest. So among the millions who took the Giants and the points, Eli, which ones didn't give you a shot?

Count Antonio Pierce, the Giants linebacker, as one of the doubters. "Of course we should be the underdogs," he said last week. "You look at them (Packers): They are the second seed, went 13-3 and won their division.

On Saturday, Missouri came close, but didn't beat Kansas in college basketball. “Besides what the media says, we already knew we had a chance,” said Leo Lyons, a Missouri player. Dude, you lost.

The obsession with respect is not just an American sporting thing. "Most teams don’t last four days here and frankly, I don’t think anybody gave us a chance against the backdrop of Sydney," India cricket captain Anil Kimble said Saturday after a big victory over Australia.

Self-motivation is important. But more important is recognizing that whatever people say you probably won't do today, doesn't mean you can't.

Perhaps the only bigger cliche in sports is "I don't pay attention to what the media says."

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Are we 'shallow dolts?'

Posted at 11:29 AM on January 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)

Dan Gillmor, with whom I'm to share space on a blogging panel in MPR's UBS Forum soon, says today "American Media Treats Americans Like Shallow Dolts." He concludes this by comparing the covers of Time Magazine this week.

Gillmor writes the Center for Citizen Media blog and, as such, he has exhibited a general distaste for mainstream media as apparently required by the standards of blogging. He says Americans won't buy magazines with thoughtful articles on Hong Kong, preferring instead to delve into the complications of romance.

Here's the covers of this week's Time.

U.S. edition		International edition

Gillmor believes an article on how we love is less important than an article on Hong Kong. But is it?

Do we have an inferiority complex they haven't told us about?

Update 2:30 p.m. Looking back at the beginning of December, I find another case of a different cover for an international edition.

In the U.S., it was about what makes us good or evil. But in Europe, the cover focused on a much more important topic in today's world: the death of French culture.

U.S. edition		European edition

Perhaps the conclusion in these two cases isn't that we're dolts. Perhaps in the United States, we're more interested in exploring what makes us tick.

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The good lieutenant

Posted at 3:42 PM on January 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

(MPR's Tim Nelson sends this along)

Joe Corcoran is back in town.

Unfortunately.

The legendary police commander headed the crimes against persons unit in St. Paul for many years, through high-profile cases like the a Lawson Avenue firebombing that killed five small children and the slayings of two officers in 1994.

He retired in 1999 and moved to his vacation home in the Red Lake area. But he’s hospitalized at St. Joe’s these days, brought down, he suspects, by a recent fall on the ice. He’s being treated for what doctors feared could have been a life-threatening head injury.

Publicly, he might best be remembered for nearly always getting his man, even if it took a while. Some of the city’s most infamous crimes occurred, and were solved, on his watch.

But he helped lead a quieter revolution, as well, in the city’s old Public Safety Building.

As a crime-lab supervisor Corcoran helped bring in some of the first digital fingerprinting equipment. The machines helped transform forensics from an academic exercise into a real-time crime fighting tool.

Perhaps more important, though, were Corcoran’s “soft skills.” He tried to give as much care to the survivors of violent crime, both victims and next of kin, as he did to the crimes themselves. The sergeants on his squad were as boiled as anybody, just not quite so hard.

Neil Nelson was among them.

“That’s his real legacy,” said Nelson, who’s still on the force. “Once Joe made the commitment to reaching out to these victims and their families, it made just an incredible difference,” he said.

Cops had traditionally kept their cases closed even to next of kin, for fear of showing their hand to perpetrators. Nelson said Corcoran welcomed families when he could. “He offered them not just some information, but some peace,” said Nelson today. “And while Joe may have done it initially out of compassion, it really did make a difference.” Nelson considers it a key to the investigative success of Corcoran’s unit.

Bill Finney, his former chief, said he may have been the best detective commander St. Paul has ever had. “It’s because of the way he did things that we had such success,” he said, reached in Detroit. “He just threw everything he had at every new homicide, and that’s usually why we got them solved. Or at least knew who did it…. Whatever he asked for, I gave him.”

Corcoran has since gained yet further prominence for helping revive the Upper Red Lake Association to promote wildlife conservation and bring back tourists to the area after overfishing wiped out the walleye on the lake in the mid 1990s.

You can read about his second career here.

Hopefully, he’ll soon bid goodbye again to St. Paul and get back to his second life’s work.

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Economic tsunami

Posted at 7:06 AM on January 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

This isn't pretty. Financial markets all over the country, battered yesterday on a U.S. holiday, got another chance to weigh in on President Bush's economic stimulus plan overnight. And, again, all the markets tanked bigtime.

Around 7:30 this morning, the Fed saw the writing on the wall and cut a key interest rate by 3/4 of a point.

Lehmann Brothers said earlier this morning the U.S. is just "one shock away" from a recession. Is this it? The Hong Kong market has lost 15% of its value in two days. Japan's market had its biggest drop in 17 years. And Wall Street, of course, was bracing for a slap in the face.

First, a few handy sites for the overnight carnage.

Financial Times
The Street.com
Bloomberg

Updates
5:10 p.m. - MPR's Tom Weber samples the local investor community and finds them relatively calm.

3:39 p.m. - The day that dawned looking like the beginning of the end, now looks like the end of the beginning. The Dow closed off about 128 points. The sun is just coming up in Japan, and now the big players will watch the Tokyo Stock Exchange all night. How does anyone sleep in that business?

2:58 p.m. - Democrats announce they intend to move quickly on an economic stimulus plan. They say they're confident they can work with President Bush. It only took 7 years and a global stock market meltdown to reach this point. Robert Samuelson of Newsweek discussed this a couple of days ago. Dow off 128.

1:35 p.m. - The London Stock Exchange closed higher. The Toronto Stock Exchange is en fuego (up 3%). Dow is down 122.

11:42 a.m. - Dow is down only 143. Alan Sloan at the Wall Street Journal levels criticism at "The Big Four" -- Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS -- for frittering away billions by ignoring simple rules of investing.
11:20 a.m. - A discouraging word -- or so it seems to me -- on the very fine Twin Cities blog, Behind the Mortgage where Alex Stenback says about the fed cut: "There is a credible view that a cut like this may add to inflationary pressures, thereby forcing mortgage rates upward."

11:12 a.m. - An important post by The Atlantic's James Fallows on his blog. He's living in China now and just returned to the U.S. "I know that America is on the verge of disastrous recession and that China is dynamic power of tomorrow, etc etc. But, my lord, life can be good here," he writes..

10:38 a.m. - CNN posts video: what does the fed rate cut mean to you.

9:45 a.m. - Change in plans for MPR's Midmorning. They shift to an analysis of the economic situation today. Chris Farrell and the Fed's Art Rolnick weigh in. Rolnick says the probability of recession has increased, but he doesn't think there'll be one. "It doesn't mean the economy is broke," he said. Audio here.

9:36 a.m. - Silver Lining Department checks in. Oil prices are now below $90 a barrel. Grey Cloud Department counters: Twin Cities gas prices are up 3 cents today. The Other Side of the Coin Department chimes in: Statewide, gas prices are falling.

9:22 a.m. President Bush has signaled that he might go higher on his economic stimulus plan. The Dow is down 231 points; not great, but it puts today in the category of "just another January 2008 day on Wall St." How do you like us now, Asia? The Toronto Stock Exchange is up at this hour. At least Canada still loves us.

8:47 a.m. Jim Jubak at MSN Money has posted "5 rules for surviving a bear market."

8:30 a.m. - New York Stock Exchange opens. First number on the screen: Down 233. Ugh. Two minutes later: Down 450.

8:20 a.m. - A cheer goes up on Wall Street. A couple of New York Giants come out to ring the opening bell. As a Patriots fan, I hope this is somehow indicative of their ability to sway the course of events.

(Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

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Time wasters: A blast from the past

Posted at 10:51 AM on January 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

The Library of Congress has begun uploading digital images to Flickr.

A search of "Minnesota" revealed only two results, one of which was a picture of a battleship named Minnesota. The other was a picture identified as a guide at Little Norway in Blue Mounds, Wisc. It apparently made the Minnesota collection because "Minnesota farmer" was written on the transparency jacket.

One picture from Minnesota and it's not even actually from Minnesota? This on a day when we're obviously bending way over backwards to plant the state flag on the national stage.

Many of the color images document the late '30s and early '40s, a time when our parents and grandparents were changing American with their bare hands.

Unfortunately, we don't know who many of these people were, like this truck driver who helped building the TVA's Douglas dam.

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Abortion and a new generation

Posted at 1:49 PM on January 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

There isn't as much coverage as there used to be of the annual anti-abortion protest/rally at the Minnesota Capitol, this year marking the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Part of that is because there isn't much new to say about the issue that hasn't been said before. Nonetheless, thousands of people came to St. Paul in wind chills not fit for humans today.

About 2,000 people (my estimate) showed up this year.

The speeches were cut short, but many of them focused on the national, rather than the state debate, possibly due to a revamped Supreme Court on the issue.

One thing that's hard to miss about this year's crowd. It was young.

Part of that is because a lot of schools bussed their kids to the rally.

Still, is abortion becoming a generational issue?

The L.A. Times looked at that question today, determined that young people are more likely to be anti-abortion in greater numbers than older people, and that it didn't happen by accident.

Pew Research Center polls dating back a decade show that 18- to 29-year-olds are consistently more likely than the general adult population to favor strict limits on abortion. A Pew survey over the summer found 22% of young adults support a total ban on abortion, compared with 15% of their parents' generation.

Looking specifically at teens, a Gallup survey in 2003 found that 72% called abortion morally wrong, and 32% believed it should be illegal in all circumstances. Among adults surveyed that year, only 17% backed a total ban.

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Tales from the Badger State

Posted at 3:38 PM on January 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Wisconsin, sometimes you make it too easy.

Lt. Shawn Haney, a 21-year veteran of the Dane County Sheriff's Office, has been fired for releasing the particulars on a September underage drinking party attended by Waunakee High School football players.

Two weeks before the state quarterfinals, Haney gave the documents to the school district, expecting some disciplinary action to be taken before the football game.

Guess what football team Haney's son played on? The team that was to play -- and would defeat -- Waunakee.

"Honest to God, everybody has to step back and take a deep breath," said Haney's lawyer, Lester Pines. "We're talking about high school football here. I mean, really, come on. This seems so small-town to me."

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A part of the problem, or a part of the cure?

Posted at 10:26 PM on January 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

There are few silver linings to getting cancer in Minnesota. Here's one: You've got a better shot at getting treatment for it -- and fast -- than if you were diagnosed with a mental illness Several speakers at a public hearing on a proposal for a new mental health facility in Woodbury Tuesday night repeatedly made the comparison between the two illnesses.

"If teenagers with cancer were sent home from emergency rooms without treatment because there were no oncology beds available, we would be outraged," Dr. Stephen Setterberg of Prairie St. John's told a Department of Public Health hearing on his for-profit firm's proposal to build a 144-bed mental health facility in Woodbury. The proposal needs the approval of the Legislature because of a statewide moratorium on new hospitals.

Not a heck of a lot has changed since MPR produced its 2004 series, Bad State of Mind, chronicling the difficulty in obtaining mental health treatment in Minnesota. The chief complaint then -- a lack of beds for people needing immediate help -- is the chief complaint now. And Minnesotans need help.

(More below the fold)

Continue reading "A part of the problem, or a part of the cure?"

When in doubt, blame the Internet

Posted at 8:21 AM on January 23, 2008 by Bob Collins

Do social networking sites lead to suicide?

In the U.K., that's a debate that's underway, involving at least one member of Parliament, after a spate of suicides involving people who knew each other.

It must be the Internet, seems to be the conclusion. It helped 'create a suicide cult.'

Says MP Madeleine Moon:

"I'm particularly concerned about this false romanticism of the memory wall that seems to have set up on Bebo giving some sort of romantic idea of suicide and not conveying the huge tragedy and wasted lives that we are looking at here," she told BBC Radio Wales.

Police investigating the latest incidents are trying to discover whether the girls had made contact on the internet, whether by e-mail or on a networking site."

The BBC's World Have Your Say program picks up the theme, and a parent of a teenager who tried to kill him or herself comments...

"I do not believe the pact issue but do think children over communicate."

Overcommunicate?

Review the patterns associated with suicidal behavior, in this case according to Web MD...

* Talking about suicide (killing one's self)
* Always talking or thinking about death
* Making comments about being hopeless, helpless, or worthless
* Saying things like "It would be better if I wasn't here" or "I want out"
* Depression (deep sadness, loss of interest, trouble sleeping and eating) that gets worse
* A sudden, unexpected switch from being very sad to being very calm or appearing to be happy
* Having a "death wish," tempting fate by taking risks that could lead to death, like driving fast or through red lights
* Losing interest in things one used to care about
* Visiting or calling people to say goodbye
* Putting affairs in order, tying up lose ends, changing a will

At least six of these warning signs can only be ascertained through communication.

Update 12:37 - MPR's Charlie Knutson calls my attention to the new Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online.

Truthiness and the NTSB

Posted at 11:23 AM on January 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

Is the National Transportation Safety Board spinning the results -- so far -- of its investigation into the collapse of the I-35W bridge collapse to get Gov. Tim Pawlenty and his lieutenant governor and transportation commissioner off the hot seat? That is what at least one professor appears to be asking.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Rosenker, the chairman of the NTSB, cited design of the gusset plates on the bridge as the key factor in the collapse. That sent Gov. Tim Pawlenty and conservative columnists into "I told you so" mode, saying the results showed that MnDOT was not negligent in its bridge inspections.

Pawlenty said:

“... while the NTSB investigation is not complete, the focus of the investigation appears headed in a direction different than many of the political claims that have been made. It is our hope that at least now people will reserve further judgment until the investigation is complete and that we strive to address these matters in a fair, factual and non-political manner."

But today, C. Ford Runge at the University of Minnesota, in an op-ed article in the Pioneer Press, questioned whether Rosenker had political reasons to draw the conclusion.

... Rosenker is very, very close to the Republican Party and the White House and has spent a career in Republican politics, beginning with CREEP, the Nixon re-election group that brought us the Watergate plumbers, where he was deputy director for radio and TV. He subsequently worked in nearly every Republican campaign from the 1970s to the present. Prior to his appointment to the NTSB, he was deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Military Office, where the secretive Dick Cheney noted that he was responsible for finding "those secure, undisclosed locations where I've been known to spend my time." He is also close to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) who helped launch the recall petition for Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, allowing Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace him. He must therefore be passingly familiar with Republican gubernatorial politics too.

Rep. Jim Oberstar, sent a letter to Rosenker today that turned the heat up another notch.

"The press conference was intended to provide an update on the status of the bridge investigation, and to warn the FHWA and owners of other bridges that the NTSB investigation had revealed that gusset plates in the I-35 bridge were undersized due to a design flaw. This was an important and appropriate message for the Board to convey. However, as properly noted in the Safety Recommendation issued at the conference, 'the Board's investigation is on-going and no determination of probable cause has been reached.' This means that the Board has not yet determined the role played by the poor design of the gusset plates in causing the accident. The Board has not yet determined whether the design of the plates was the primary cause of the accident compared to other possible causes such as corrosion or poor maintenance."

"In these circumstances I consider it highly inappropriate for you to have stated, as you did in the press conference, that the poor design of the plates 'tells us why the bridge collapsed.' Although you admitted that you did not hve complete information on corrosion, you nonetheless insisted that poor design was the 'critical factor.'"

Nearly 6 months after the collapse, then, the debate is now between those who consider the the investigator a political hack vs. those who consider investigating whether the collapse had anything to do with the action -- or inaction -- of MnDOT a "witch hunt." Regardless of which is more truthy, the final report will be damaged goods.

Somehow, in this debate, someone is supposed to figure out why a bridge fell down.

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From a flood to a trickle

Posted at 12:40 PM on January 23, 2008 by Bob Collins

There's a sad reality to last year's flooding in southeast Minnesota that killed seven people and left hundreds of others homeless, jobless, and, in some cases, penniless: You can't recover from that kind of a disaster either quickly or painlessly.

On Tuesday at the Winona County Commissioners meeting, Kevin Kelleher, the flood coordinator for the Department of Employment and Economic Development, defended the state's response to the floods. "Both the state and local governments have responded better and faster than before," he said, according to the Winona Daily News, which also said he blamed "negative press" for much of the controversy surrounding two key programs for getting help to people.

Late last month, Sen. Sharon Erickson Ropes, DFL-Winona, complained that many residents and businesses in the region have not seen any state aid.

Why the disconnect?

I checked in today with Nancy Beer of Lutheran Social Services Disaster Response in Rushford, one of the hardest hit communities in Fillmore County.

"We have people back in their homes," she said. "Every day people get more hopeful, but it's a tough time. We have people still living in FEMA trailers. They're tired of living in apartments with relatives. I tell people we're in the dark before the light, but we're moving ahead."

Residents in the region had to apply for a Small Business Administration loan to get flood relief. If they didn't qualify for the loan, they're eligible for money from a state fund approved by the Legislature during a special session last year. That money doesn't have to be paid back.

Beers says the reason more people aren't applying for the state money in Rushford is because they're being approved for -- and are receiving -- the federal loans from the SBA. "It's a credit to the character and kind of people here," she said.

"Some people are going to have to take out loans," she said. "We have to realize that the government is the government and they can do what they can, but the communities have to say, 'how are we going to bridge that gap?'"

Beers, who is from Albert Lea, has been on the crisis team during two other floods, but says, "I've never experienced this many people with this great a loss." But that, she says, doesn't mean people aren't getting help. "We have a young couple who just recently found some people to help rebuild their home. They got their Quick Start (state assistance) money and they didn't have to go into any more debt. And, they just had a baby."

Beers says the people who are having a difficult time are the ones who can't come up with a plan for recovery. "We know people are still living in FEMA trailers, and some of them don't know what they're going to do. That's the hardest thing. But they (the trailers) don't last forever. You have to have a plan."

Note: I'm interested in listening to your experiences of recovering from the floods in southeast Minnesota. If you'd like to tell your story, please contact me at 651.290.1414 or e-mail me at bcollins@mpr.org.

There's more to life than retail

Posted at 5:06 PM on January 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)

Minneapolis and St. Paul have teamed up for a new slogan to market the two cities: "There's more to life!"

What? Was "For Lease" already taken?

Normally it's not a big deal when a Foot Locker store closes, but it was a big deal this week when the last remaining retail store (that doesn't sell lottery tickets or coffee) closed its doors in St. Paul's Town Square.

It's difficult to overstate how empty the St. Paul skyway system is. Even these pictures from a 30-minute walk through the heart of the system today don't tell the complete story.

The AT&T store closed a couple of months ago in Town Square.

This hair salon around the corner went belly up this month.

I couldn't stand back far enough to get all of the empty storefronts into this picture. In a few months, the people walking by may be delegates or media in town for the Republican National Convention. What will they be telling the people back home about downtown St. Paul?

At 5th and Robert downtown, every building seemed to have the same sign:

No doubt, St. Paul is a pretty cool place with some nice restaurants, some great museums, wonderful architecture and nifty neighborhoods. The downtown skyway scene, however, is not screaming "vibrant."

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Freedom is just another word...

Posted at 5:49 PM on January 23, 2008 by Bob Collins

Occasionally it's worth remembering that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan is called Operation Enduring Freedom.

The death sentence for a journalist in Afghanistan today, reported by the BBC, puts the meaning of the word to the test.

Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, was arrested in 2007 after downloading material from the internet relating to the role of women in Islamic societies.

A primary court in Balkh province said that Kambakhsh had confessed to blasphemy and had to be punished.

The court also threatened to arrest any reporters who protested against Kambakhsh's sentence.

Kambakhsh, a student at Balkh University and a journalist for Jahan-e Naw (New World), was arrested in October 2007 after material he downloaded was deemed to be offensive to Islam.

Shamsur Rahman, the head of the court, told Reuters news agency: "According to... the Islamic law, Sayed Perwiz is sentenced to death at the first court.

Extinction is forever

Posted at 8:18 AM on January 24, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

It's not every day (yet) that we get to observe the moment of extinction. Today is one such day, however, as we acknowledge the death of Marie Smith Jones. She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary. She was the last one to speak the language on this planet.

"To the best of our knowledge, she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive," her daughter Bernice Galloway told the Associated Press.

Twenty other Alaskan languages are in danger of disappearing, mostly because the people who could have learned from people like Marie Smith Jones grew up at a time when it was considered wrong to speak something other than English.

The scenario was well documented a few years ago in an MPR News project:

"I was always talking in Ojibwe in the classroom," said Skinaway. "And the teacher never liked to have me be so disruptive, you know, talking to my other classmates. Some of the older ones used to call me a dumb Indian because I couldn't talk English."

...

"It is very important, because that's the way that was given to us by the Creator as Anishinaabe people," said Smallwood. "We were given ways to communicate with the Creator. And that's why it's important, not only in this world, but when we move on to the next world, go to the spirit world. We need that language."

The extinction of the language, in other words, didn't just happen: it was encouraged. A perfect irony since the U.S. recently adopted a law to try to save the languages.

Here's an interesting clickable map to explore some of these languages.

Tangent-time: Yesterday the New York Times reported on the case of another extinction on earth. The ivory billed woodpecker sighting in Arkansas a few years ago spawned an economic boom for a poor town, until it went bust amid conclusions that the alleged sighting was probably incorrect. It's gone for good -- the town, that is. And so is the woodpecker.

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News word of the day: Fatigue

Posted at 12:19 PM on January 24, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

When things are relatively slow in the news business, I like to grab the dictionary, quickly spin the pages and randomly drop my finger on a word, and find out what interesting things in the news fit the word.

Today, the "news finger" fell on fatigue, which leads to today's stroll around Planet Fatigue.

The Boston Globe reports on a link between a plugged-up nose and fatigue. Its medical blog (Boston being a city of hospitals) reports on research that suggests surgery for sinus problems clears up fatigue as well.

Remember "Yuppie flu," also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Now, the Houston Chronicle says,the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have labeled it a disabling disease, as debilitating as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. But what's more interesting (to me) is an example posted by a commenter on the paper's Web site, on what it's like to have CFS:

Set a Bic pen point down on your forearm with only gravity holding it down. It may not hurt much at all but a few weeks later you'd be in a big hurry for that little bit of pain to go away. Pain meds would only dull it. Anxiety drugs would help but it would be like a wheel of fire in your mind within a few short months-or quicker. Now figure the spinal cord and the immediate nerves coming off it are the biggest nerves in your body. When they get insulted for a long enough period or constantly---you get chronic pain.

A new study says one in four Australian drivers has fallen asleep at the wheel.

A Seal Beach, California firm is sending its new gadgets -- some sort of mp3 player -- to some soldiers in Iraq to help them get better sleep. "NAP20’s technology is based on the premise of Binaural Beats, discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. Through this advanced mastering technology, NAP20 delivers the sleep waves as “carrier waves” within the audible range. The result: you get the effect of the natural sleep waves that guide you to sleep," its press release said.

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Landfall's best

Posted at 2:29 PM on January 24, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Generally speaking, people who don't live there don't have a lot of fabulous things to say about Landfall once they get past "affordable." That's the way it is with mobile home communities. Landfall is tucked away on the Maplewood-Oakdale border along I-94, passed every day by thousands of people who don't much give a sniff about the "town" of 52 acres and 735 people with a per capita income of a little over $15,000 on the shores of Tanner's Lake. In the '90s a developer wanted to turn the town into a shopping mall.

Today, however, the community was named "one of 100 best communities for young people," by America's Promise Alliance, the group formed by Colin and Alma Powell.

It would be easy to diminish the award's merit by pointing out that it's really not one of the 100 best of all the communities in the country. It's actually one of the 100 best of the 750 who applied to be honored, and one of five winners in Minnesota out of 18 communities that applied . If you tell the average East Metro person Landfall earned the distinction, the chances are good they'll look at you funny and say, "the trailer park?"

Here's what they don't know: Landfall is doing more than a lot of communities when it comes to helping its kids.

Back in the '90s, a Stillwater agency -- FamilyMeans -- found that lack of youth activities was a primary concern in the town. With initial funding from the McKnight Foundation, organizer Tom Yuska and others created Investigation Station, which provides programs for kids 5 to 12, such as arts, music, computers and cooking. School buses drop the kids off after school, and they can stay until evening at no cost. At night, a teen center operates for kids, 13 to 18, according to an article last month in the Oakdale-Lake Elmo Review.

Landfall's award, given today at a ceremony in Washington, is based not only on the programs, but also on efforts to improve graduation rates and lower substance abuse rates. "It isn't so much a comparison of one year to the next," according to Danielle Butler, who administers the award program for America's Promise Alliance. "We're mostly interested in making sure they have the data and are taking steps to improve."

"Teens in Landfall were reluctant to tell their friends they lived in Landfall," Yuska said this afternoon, "and now they're inviting their friends."

Things aren't all rosy. "I do know the graduation rate for last year's teens was not very good," he said. "On the other hand, 96 percent of our K-5 group is making 'adequate yearly progress' and we are doing things for older kids. One of the programs we started last year is aimed at middle school kids, especially children of color, to get them thinking about careers and what they want to do in the future. Our program coordinator just took a small group of them on their first college tour and one of the girls who just started high school is asking for help picking out classes that will help her down the road. She wants to be a scientist."

Four other Minnesota communities were similarly honored. St. Louis Park, Mankato-North Mankato, Northfield, and Saint Paul.

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Pawlenty's broadside against social service spending

Posted at 7:03 PM on January 24, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)

Even by the usual standards of political hyperbole, Gov. Tim Pawlenty's rhetorical assault on the state's social services on Thursday was unusually stark. In a speech to business interests, the governor appeared to suggest that one of the reasons for the crumbling roads and bridges in Minnesota is the spending on social services, including the state subsidized health care plan.

Pawlenty was speaking to the Burnsville Chamber of Commerce when he suggested cutting social services to put more money into roads and, presumably, bridges.

As quoted in the Star Tribune:

"If we don't get a handle on this at both the federal and at the state level, and at county, school district and city level, these programs are growing so fast and so out of proportion with the rate of the private economy, that within 15 years it will consume a vast majority of the state's budget."

Told by his host that a client with 11 children has tried to adjust his income under $50,000 to qualify for MinnesotaCare, the governor said he, too, has heard of people who try to adjust their income so they can qualify for subsidized health care.

None of which has anything to do with the state's spending on social services, at least as far as roads, bridges, and MinnesotaCare is concerned.

True, the state has an effective state subsidized health care plan. That's one of the reasons the state was recently cited as the second-most-healthy state in America. But the political debate that surrounds it often ignores the funding mechanism behind it. Money that could be used for roads and bridges is not going to MinnesotaCare because MinnesotaCare is not funded with taxpayer money; the state's share is funded by a tax on health care providers. Recipients also pay premiums (the family cited above would pay about $3,000).

When the governor moved for further cutbacks in MinnesotaCare in 2005, the so-called Health Care Access Fund had a $226 million surplus. That fund made an attractive target for the governor who faced a budget deficit.

The Minnesota Medical Association tried to get legislation passed last year to keep the MinnesotaCare funding from being diverted to other projects. It didn't pass but the MMA says it's going to try again next month.

In a speech earlier this month, the MMA says, Pawlenty vowed not to use the MinnesotaCare money to balance the budget, and even said he might try to lower the tax that funds MinnesotaCare; an interesting proposal if the cost of providing health care is as burdensome as Thursday's speech would indicate.

So what's going on here?

The governor's speech may be more a warning to legislators than an initiative. This month, two panels -- one of which was created by the governor -- will release proposals for revamping the entire health care system in Minnesota. They are reportedly leaning toward expanding health care for Minnesotans, but there are sharp divisions on how to accomplish that .

Times change. A year ago, Pawlenty was proposing expanding health care in the state. But that was before the budget deficit went up and a bridge came down.

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From tiny helmets...

Posted at 8:09 AM on January 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

It's a goofy looking thing, but it sure pins the "what if?" meter.

Scientists in the UK are beginning tests of a helmet that will deliver infrared rays to Alzheimer's patients, under the theory that it might be possible to reverse the effects of the horrible disease.

Says the Alzheimer's Society...

A treatment that reverses the effects of dementia rather than just temporarily halting its symptoms could change the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who live with this devastating condition.

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Scenes from the figure skating championships

Posted at 10:09 AM on January 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

The figure skating championships are underway in St. Paul, bringing with it a grab bag full of traditions. One of these is throwing flowers and stuffed animals on the ice after a particularly moving performance.

MPR's Nikki Tundel is working on a story about the behind-the-scenes thrill of it all, and she sends along this picture of what somebody tossed on the ice after a performance the other day.

We can't figure out what the heck this is. Trash origami?

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Timewasters: Could you pass the U.S. citizenship test?

Posted at 1:00 PM on January 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

These sorts of things are often tricky for citizens. The Boston Globe has a sample of the test given to immigrants who want to become citizens.

MSNBC has a more interactive version here. And there are 100 questions from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service here. However, new questions will be on the test this October.

Tomorrow afternoon, by the way, the Mall of America is hosting a naturalization ceremony.

Tangent time: Today a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. And in Canada, yesterday, the son of a World War II soldier and a war bride, who had his citizenship stripped from him by the 1947 Citizenship Act, and who labeled a bastard in the process, got his citizenship back.

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The week in news

Posted at 2:43 PM on January 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Listening and reading about the state of the newspaper industry these days is a lot like listening and reading about global warming: I wish things weren't so bad, but what exactly do you expect me -- an averge Joe -- to do about it that's going to make a difference before the last ice cap melts or dead-tree edition is printed? The more I learn about both, the more I am filled with hopelessness.

Here in Minnesota this week, the fires were stoked by the leaking of a memo from Star Tribune publisher Chris Harte to his staff, in which he announced the hiring of a consulting firm -- Restructuring Associates -- to fix what is clearly a basket case.

As a result of rapidly declining revenue - and expenses that haven't been cut anywhere nearly as fast - our operating cash flow has declined dramatically since 2000. Operating cash flow, which is the cash we have left after paying cash expenses, and which we then use to invest in everything from new equipment and computers to new products, and to pay our debt, has declined 50 percent in just the past two years and more than that since 2000.

Two former newspaper vets have been mostly responsible for analyzing the situation.

Brian Lambert, the former media critic of the Pioneer Press, the Rake and now Minneapolis - St. Paul magazine took a stab at some of the numbers:

Rumors continue to burble that Avista will attempt to unload its misbegotten Minnesota newspaper venture very soon, and a contract that effectively castrates its unions is viewed as critical to properly "staging" the place for a new buyer. More to the point, no buyer is going to pay anything close to $530 million they paid. If Avista were able to sell today for something in the low $300 million range, it'd be a miracle offer they would grab and cash before the buyer sobered up.

And David Brauer at MinnPost dug up what he could on Restructuring Associates (who, for the record, did not respond to my attempts for comment).

RAI doesn't turn cash-hungry owners into puppy dogs, but they can at least avoid misunderstandings and needless distrust. It's clear the Strib can use the help; Harte didn't bother to call in union leaders before announcing the RAI hire or the bombshell numbers.

Editorially, the Star Tribune tried to shift focus to a "hyper-local" newspaper, a philosophy that only put it in an even more competitive situation with its new-media rivals.

Of course, it isn't just the Star Tribune that's hemorrhaging, and it isn't just the Twin Cities that are heading for a one-newspaper-town status. Just in the last 24 hours, the Boston Globe seems poised for a big cutback, layoffs are underway at the Chicago Sun-Times, the situation in Philadelphia turned dire, and the week started with the Los Angeles Times firing its editor because he refused to make further cuts in journalism to satisfy the new owners.

Today, a Ball State professor is out with a study showing the reporters who are left are burned out and -- why this is news, I don't know -- cynical.

When the journalists were asked if they had intentions to leave newspaper journalism, 25.7 percent answered ‘yes’ and 36.2 percent answered ‘don’t know,’” the study states. “…Further examination reveals that 31 percent of young journalists (34 and younger) expressed intentions to leave the profession, and 43.5 percent answered ‘don’t know.’”

Former newspaper exec Alan Mutter got the reportorial hackles up a couple of days ago when he spoke up for the bosses...

Like Chris and Avista, Brian Tierney (plus his investors) and Tribune’s Sam Zell have put hundreds of millions of their own dollars at risk to try to save a few newspapers at the most perilous time in the history of the industry.

And there we are; lots of energy expended to tell us the glacier is melting, but a situation so dire that the average person can do little to reverse course. But what if the real story here is outside the newsrooms, nobody cares?

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Inflation hits Twins

Posted at 8:50 PM on January 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Inflation hit home in a couple of ways for the Twins on Friday.

Justin Morneau and Michael Cuddyer got big raises with their new long-term contracts.

And the price of the new Twins stadium went way up, according to Twins Sports President Jerry Bell, quoted in the Pioneer Press.

Bell won't say by how much the cost has increased, only that it's a "significant amount."

It's no surprise. Other recent ballpark projects have also gone over budget.

Roger Lewis, a stadium architect, wrote a primer in the Washington Post a few years ago to explain why these things happen once shovels hit dirt.

Field testing reveals unanticipated site conditions. Soil borings may disclose organic fill, clay, rock or groundwater. Undocumented utilities, structures or residual toxic chemicals may lurk below the surface. Hidden structural problems may be uncovered in buildings being renovated. Always expensive to remedy, unforeseen site problems may seriously delay a project and can blow the budget.

Which is what happened downtown. The ballpark site turned out to be Mississippi River bed and they had to drill farther.

Who pays? Bell says the Twins will increase their contribution rather than scale the project back. But Bell still wants to huddle with county officials before being specific.

Elements of the new Yankee Stadium project are also over budget. The Washington Nationals new stadium project is $43 million over budget.

Update Sat. 8:29 The explosion of building costs isn't affecting just stadium projects. The New York Times reports today...

Costs have jumped for projects as varied as levee construction in New Orleans, Everglades restoration in Florida and huge sewer system upgrades in Atlanta. The reconstruction of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, a $234 million project, has been fast-tracked for completion by December, and state officials say it is too soon to know whether it will come in on budget.

The impact has been felt in different regions at different times, and not every project has been high-profile. In Oregon, high costs have forced the State Department of Transportation to slow the rate at which it upgrades roads and bridges. In Seattle, school building projects were put on a fast track this fall because of fears of cost overruns.

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Viewer discretion advised

Posted at 7:53 AM on January 26, 2008 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)

It's not often the Federal Communication Commission publishes porn:

... a woman and a boy, who appears to be about seven or eight years old, are involved in an incident that includes adult female nudity. As confirmed by a tape of the program provided by ABC, during the scene in question, a woman wearing a robe is shown entering a bathroom, closing the door, and then briefly looking at herself in a mirror hanging above a sink. The camera then shows her crossing the room, turning on the shower, and returning to the mirror. With her back to the camera, she removes her robe, thereby revealing the side of one of her breasts and a full view of her back. The camera shot includes a full view of her buttocks and her upper legs as she leans across the sink to hang up her robe. The camera then tracks her, in profile, as she walks from the mirror back toward the shower. Only a small portion of the side of one of her breasts is visible. Her pubic area is not visible, but her buttocks are visible from the side.

The racy narrative is part a 25 page tome (See pdf) issued by the buttoned-down Federal Communications Commission on Friday that a 2003 scene of the ABC series NYPD Blue violated decency standards by being "titillating and shocking."

The FCC also let it be known that organized letter-writing campaigns by a few organizations work, even if it took the government five years and who knows how much money to determine that the scene "depicts sexual organs and excretory organs -- specifically an adult woman's buttocks." The ABC lawyers response? They argued buttocks are not sexual organs, to which the FCC said, "we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense." Next?

The FCC ordered TV stations to pay $1.43 million in fines, the second-largest indecency award ever.

Area stations ordered to pay the fine include KSTP in St. Paul, WDAY in Fargo, WDIO in Duluth, WXOW in La Crosse

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What's your story?

Posted at 9:14 AM on January 27, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Now that we've got News Cut's maiden voyage just about finished, it's time to tell the story that usually doesn't get told: the one about you.

So consider this your invitation to think about those people you know and those stories you know -- the ones where you say to yourself, "you know, this (person/problem/success story) deserves some attention."

But here's the thing: Think about people who do interesting things as a matter of everyday life, as opposed to the big philosophical debates that normally dominate news. I have nothing against them, but for the most part they're getting their due.

As an example, consider the Three Minute Tales concept I tested last month. These are stories that are somewhat related to the day's news, but they're not by themselves the day's news. Simple concept, eh?

I'll go anywhere, and talk to anybody who you find interesting. Ready? Go!

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The medical marketplace

Posted at 9:51 AM on January 27, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

A new Web site dedicated to the concept of consumer driven health care got a double boost today when both Minnesota Public Radio and the Star Tribune released stories on carol.com, a Web site that makes it easier for people to shop around for the best medical deal.

There's no Carol at carol.com, but there's a Tony -- Tony Miller -- who is the CEO of the Web site. He told Lorna Benson the concept of a medical marketplace is already driving down prices.

"You know what has happened since the last time I've been on this site? And I wish I could show this to you historically. I'll have to go back and see if I can archive it. But when we first produced these care packages, Park Nicollet was pricing their base price at $213 versus Minute Clinic's $30," says Miller.

Now the flu vaccination at Park Nicollet is listed at $34. That's a price drop of $183. Miller says it's proof that competition in health care is good for consumers.

Consumer-driven health care is a recent buzz phrase in the field. MPR took a look at the concept a couple of years ago in the award-winning series, Prescription for Change.

It certainly has its supporters; it also has its detractors because of some early research on who is most likely to be most involved in a health care plan that's consumer driven:

Early research shows that consumer-driven health care plans tend to appeal most to healthy people, the very people that help lower traditional insurance costs for everyone else. Albers says without these people in the insurance pool, traditional insurance rates will rise rapidly.

As more companies move toward creating a medical marketplace in their benefits plan, a study out this month from the Employee Benefit Research Institute is worth considering. It says the flaw in the idea is its dependence on an educated consumer.

Trying to “activate consumerism” by promoting consumer-directed health plans seems little different from past managed care attempts to stem out-of-control health costs by changing consumer behavior. But past (and current) “top down” approaches, structured without a better understanding of what consumers need to know and what they value, are likely to be ineffective over time. There is no research consensus that consumer-driven health benefits alone will contain health care costs.

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Ethics at the checkout

Posted at 11:15 AM on January 27, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

Here's another one of those cases that lead me to ask: what would you do?

Home Depot makes a mistake at the checkout and a $199 tool scans for $.01. The sale is completed at $.01 before the store realizes the mistake. By then, the customer says "sorry, the transaction is completed."

Is it a case of a "deal is a deal"? Or is it more like a clerk that gives you too much change? And what do you do, then?

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Pollyanna

Posted at 8:15 AM on January 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

It must be hard growing up in today's world with a name like Pollyanna, the universal way to dismiss any idea -- realistic or not. But maybe Pollyanna has a place at today's table. Or maybe not. NPR explores the question.

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Hesham Hussein

Posted at 9:34 AM on January 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)

Hesham Hussein died over the weekend in a car crash in Saudi Arabia.

He founded two Islamic schools and was a frequent voice for the Twin Cities' Muslim community.

He had occasional appearances in MPR stories, most recently one about the refusal of some Muslims who work checkout counters to handle pork, and the controversy a year ago in Minneapolis when some Muslim cab drivers refused certain fares on religious principles.

Back in 2004, he talked with MPR's Brandt Williams for a series on Islamic life.

"And the same is when you are growing up in a Muslim country and it's occupied and there's poverty and there is no chance for receiving a good education, there is no chance of getting good jobs there is no hope and for a lot of these families and these youth growing up for the future, then you start seeing these things."

Last April he was invited to give the opening prayer at a session of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

· In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

· Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds;

· Most Gracious, Most Merciful; · Master of the day of judgment.

· We worship you, and seek your help

· Guide us to the straight path,

· The path of those whom you blessed, not those who deserve wrath, nor those who went astray.

· God, show us the truth as it is true and give us the ability to follow it

· And Show us falsehood as it is false and give us the ability to avoid falsehood

· And not confuse it with truth

· God you are Just.

· We seek refuge in you from injustice; whether suffering injustice or causing injustice to others, we seek refuge in you

· God, join our hearts in all goodness and give us the ability to understand those who have different opinions than us. Make our debate a way through which you guide us to what is best for us.

· God, our knowledge is limited and your knowledge is not

· Bless our time and our efforts and help us speak for those who can not speak for them selves,

· Help us provide a shelter for everyone who needs a shelter, Help us provide care for everyone who needs care, Help us take care of our elders and provide education for our children

· God increase our resources and bless them for us

· Bless our budget and guide us to the best way to spend it for the benefit of every resident of our state.

· God, You are the peace, the source of peace, enable us to live in peace and resolve our differences in peace.

· God Bless our hearts, our souls, our bodies and our minds. Protect us from all evil, Protect us from Greed, from arrogance, ignorance, from violence, from fear.

· Bless our time, our effort, our people and our state.

· Ameen.

You can view his appearance at about a minute into the video here.

(H/T Online Rilha)

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Squatting at the Capitol

Posted at 1:22 PM on January 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Last year, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, grabbed some headlines for a smooch with President Bush on the way out of House chambers after his State of the Union speech.

Apparently, she's positioned again, according to the blog, Politico. She's among a handful of "squatters," who arrive early to get a good seat near the aisle, and a chance to shake the president's hand, or whatever.

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The final speech?

Posted at 2:11 PM on January 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Sharp-eyed MPR Midmorning producer Nancy Lebens found an odd word in today's Washington Post preview of President Bush's State of the Union address:

For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation's strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.

That is the problem Bush faces as he prepares to deliver his seventh and probably final State of the Union address tonight. For the first time in four years, he will come before Congress able to report some progress in tamping down violence in Iraq. Yet the public appears to have moved on from the war -- and possibly from Bush himself.

Probably?

Under what scenario could this not be President Bush's final State of the Union address?

The 22nd Amendment says:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

What about vice president? Nope. The 12th Amendment takes care of that, because it's an elected office.

The third in line of succession is the Speaker of the U.S. House, currently Nancy Pelosi. There's nothing to prevent President Bush from running for Congress in November and becoming Speaker of the House if the Republicans should sweep into power. Likewise, he could run for the Senate, be named Senate president, and the President, Vice President, and Speaker of the House are unable to serve.

Then, if something were to happen to the elected ticket, the president could give another State of the Union speech. Officially, though, it couldn't occur until 2010. The first speeches of incoming sessions are, technically, speeches "to a joint session of Congress," and aren't considered State of the Union speeches.

The only other scenario I can come up with in which this isn't President Bush's final State of the Union address is if he were to join the cabinet of the incoming president, and the entire line of succession above him is unable to serve.

Does the Washington Post know something?

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Toxic trailers

Posted at 6:07 PM on January 28, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

A report from a congressional committee released Monday says FEMA ignored government research on the long-term effects of formaldehyde in trailers used by victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The House Science and Technology subcommittee says FEMA manipulated findings to play down the dangers posed by the chemical.

FEMA responded to the report late Monday afternoon:

Secretary Chertoff and Administrator Paulison have each made it clear that the health and safety of residents is FEMA's top priority. Every person who has called FEMA's formaldehyde call centers with concerns has been offered an immediate move to a hotel or motel until alternative housing is located.

Whatever happened to those trailers? Many were sold for pennies on the dollar. Some FEMA trailers are now housing victims of last summer's flooding in southeast Minnesota.

Though not nearly as widespread, some of the complaints from Katrina residents have been reported by Minnesotans, too.

A letter-writer to the St. Cloud Times says she experienced the problems firsthand.

Our daughter, her fiance, their 21/2 month old baby, her fiance's brother and a dog all moved into a mobile home in Minnesota last month. The mobile came from FEMA and had been used after Hurricane Katrina. Within three nights, two of the three adults experienced chest pain so serious my daughter considered calling 911. Everyone, including the dog, became extraordinarily fatigued.

... A friend spent about four hours with them and developed chest pain so severe he wanted to cry. I developed breathing difficulty after spending less than 10 minutes inside the mobile home. ...

The first FEMA trailer went to Bonnie and Roger Oldham, the family who rode their home for 1,000 yards during the flood in Stockton. After the first night, Roger Oldham reportedly had lung problems, said the Associate Press:

Roger Oldham's lungs seemed to be irritated by the trailer's "new" smell, but after airing it out the family planned to sleep in it. Still, Bonnie was concerned.

She said Roger has from heart problems and woke up Sunday morning unable to breathe. "I don't care if I lose everything here, I don't want to lose him," she said.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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Mailbag: The cost of war

Posted at 8:02 AM on January 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

The Internet has served most soldiers in the Middle East well, if they're willing to pay for it.

It's been a lifeline, offering immediate communication with their families back home.

Some members of the Minnesota National Guard in Kuwait have found out recently that the connection costs money, and there's no guarantee. Jillian Wilkins of Minneapolis, the mother of a Guardsman, wrote recently that her son had free access to the Internet until a few months ago when a $30 a month charge was imposed on the soldiers. "And what makes it even more
difficult is that most of the time he cannot get connected and/or stay connected. When it was free it was working great, he was even able to make phone calls over the web," she said. "That is also impossible now."

The soldiers in Ali Al Salem, Kuwait have ponied up the money, and gotten little in return.

Jillian's son, Joel, says a lousy connection when the service was free was one thing, but having to pay for it and get so little in return is something else.

"Most of the time, things are downloaded between 1-5kbps," he says. "Today it was actually downloading at over 5kbps, which is amazing for your room. Anyway, regardless of how well the Internet is working in my room, it was working. Some of us on my team live in different buildings. I know that at least three soldiers on my team (in a different building from me) had no access for almost a week. About a month ago, my buddy and I had a 3-day period that we couldn't connect either. It seems to cut out completely from time to time and, of course, there's no reimbursement offered for those days you missed out."

I asked the public affairs office of the Minnesota National Guard for an explanation and was told last week that someone in charge of the Minnesotans in Kuwait "would be in touch" to explain the situation, according to a spokesman. That was the last I've heard from the Guard on the subject.

In some cases, soldiers in the Middle East are to set up networks through their own ingenuity and some help from home as soldier Ronnie Tabor documented on his blog in Afghanistan last fall...

"... a contractor was brought in to provide Internet much as we have just done. They charged everyone a $200 deposit, collected that and never came back. When we first got here there was another contract that would have cost over $48K to the Camp. Each individual would have to pay $100 a month for a 128Kbps connection."

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Should you sign your credit card?

Posted at 12:30 PM on January 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Around the Internet, the worthiness of signing the back of a credit card has been kicked around to a fair degree. One school of thought says, "no" because you'll give the thief access to your signature, which can then be copied on checks. Another says "yes" because stores are not allowed to accept a credit card that isn't signed.

Police in Apple Valley today released details of a brazen robbery in which a woman, paying her respects at a funeral home (located next to the police station, apparently) , had her car broken into in a "smash and grab," in which the woman's purse was taken.

The thieves then headed for the nearest Target store, and used the woman's credit card to charge $529 worth of goods.

Question: How can someone steal a credit card and then, assuming it's signed, charge $529 at Target?

Possible answer: Clerks don't compare signatures.

Some people write "Require ID" in the signature space, some people sign their name which then -- theoretically -- is checked by a cashier against whatever is signed at the store.

It's the first line of defense against credit card fraud, unless cashiers don't check the signature. A TV station in Cleveland a few years ago found that most clerks in a random test didn't bother.

Comedy writer John Hargrave once tried to prove how useless the credit card signature is, by signing credit card receipts in outrageous ways (see image), to see if any cashier noticed. He use hieroglyphics, stick figures, the names Mariah Carey and Beethoven, Kris P. Creme, and -- while visiting the New England Aquarium -- Shamu. No one said a word.

Queried on the policy of checking signatures, a Target Corporation spokesperson promised an official response later today.

Target spokesperson Bethany Zucco says they don't check signatures on cards anymore because of the electronic machines in which customers swipe (perhaps the wrong term here, but you know what I mean) the cards through the machine. "We can't discuss how because it's proprietary but we did testing and found that it's more effective and accurate than comparing signatures," she said.

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A reward? For what?

Posted at 12:38 PM on January 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Add another voice to the outcry over the $5 million reward given to flight instructor Clarence Prevost, who first raised concerns to colleagues over Zacarias Moussaoui. But Charles Midby, who supervised two Minnesota immigration agents involved in Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 16, 2001, isn't upset that the reward should've been split three ways; he's upset that there's any reward at all.

"It's just so obscene, beyond comprehension," said Midby to a McClatchey News reporter. "I can understand why the Muslims view us as such a rotten and decadent society when we feel we have to give something like that to an American do his basic responsibility."

Mark Cangemi, who was the agent in charge for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for Minnesota and four other states, was equally upset.

"I'm very concerned that whoever made the decision that this award should be $5 million has now made it into a lottery. "Now it's, 'If I give something and it turns into something, I get my $5 million.' I think this whole thing has been mishandled. ... I think it sets a very poor precedent."

Somewhere, someone knows who decided on the amount of the reward and the recipient. But the State Department isn't talking. Its Rewards for Justice Web site shows the reward amounts available.

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Coming back from the brink in southeast Minnesota

Posted at 4:37 PM on January 29, 2008 by Bob Collins

Kevin Kelleher could have easily been killed in last summer's flooding in southeast Minnesota. His neighbor in Houston, David "Little Oscar" Ask called him shortly before 1 a.m. last August 19, concerned about water that was rising around his mobile home. "I told him to get to higher ground," Kelleher recalled today, "but he couldn't. I went outside and heard the roar from both valleys and I knew this was worse than I thought. When I tried to call him back, the phone was dead."

Kelleher told his wife he was going to help Ask. "Don't drive," she told him. So he didn't. "If I had, I wouldn't be here today because at the bottom of our road, the hillside had washed away and I'd have driven into 6 feet deep rushing water." Kelleher survived. Ask didn't. His trailer was swept away. Kelleher found Ask's body in a tree.

Because Kelleher has a personal connection to the area, and to the victims of the floods, he says he takes it personally when people criticize the state's response. He's part of that response. He's the head of the disaster task force for the state in his position with the Department of Employment and Economic Development.

A few times this month, appearing before county commissioners in the region, he's expressed frustration with negative media reports about people not getting flood relief. In at least one front-page case, he says, the couple didn't apply for assistance.

That, he says, is not an isolated case. The state says about 730 people were denied low-interest flood relief loans from the Small Business Administration, the government agency authorized to grant them. The denials make the residents eligible for Quick Start loans from the state of Minnesota, which do not have to be repaid if the recipient keeps the home as the primary residence. But, he said Tuesday, there are about 300 people who haven't applied for the flood relief money. His group has either called or sent postcards to the flood victims. "In a small town, the Post Office will find you, even if you're not at the address listed."

Kelleher says he knows some people -- especially older residents -- in small towns don't want to ask for help, but he says the help is available. But time is running out. The deadline for applying has been extended from January to March 15.

The system in place requires that the state assistance for homeowners follows the denials of federal aid. Businesses, however, are able to get the state aid first, and he figures some of the homeowners' frustration comes from seeing businesses getting help first. "The federal people have said that in many disasters in other states, there is no state aid to fall back on," he says, noting that flood dollars had moved into the region faster than ever before in Minnesota.

Still, he acknowledges that the comeback has far to go in an area swept away by a weekend of heavy rain. "Are we ever going to be like we were on August 17?" he asks. "Probably not."

There's no crying in baseball

Posted at 6:33 PM on January 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

So the Twins have traded Johan Santana to the New York Mets. Fine. Whatever. It's not as if we're not used to seeing superstars leave Minnesota. We'll always have memories of Johan pitching that deciding game in the World Series... oh wait, no we won't.

But that's the perspective we need to have if we're to persist as sports fans in the frozen tundra. We win it all when lightning strikes and the stars align, not by actually being better than other teams.

Johan Santana, afterall, was a gift. He was a Rule V draftee. His previous team didn't want him and it's safe to say the Twins, who were horrible, picked him up because he came cheap. He spent two years on the roster and, let's face it, his name could've just as easily been Bombo Rivera for all we cared. Through luck, they ended up with a two-time Cy Young Award winner. So can we really complain that somehow we're jinxed by fate now?

Suffice it to say, you've never heard of the players the Twins are getting in exchange for Santana. But the chances are you'd never heard of Kirby Puckett until the day when you did. So there are two good reasons to feel good about this trade (1) the general manager of the Twins is not named Kevin McHale and (2) not one of the players coming to the Twins is named Ndudi Ebi

But enough about what we think. Let's see what the folks in New York have to say.

The blog Baseball Crank:

The Yankees and Red Sox offers must really have petered out in the end, because the Mets' package here is nothing the team will really miss in the short run and none of the people you would have rated most highly in the long run: Carlos Gomez, Phil Humber, and pitchers Deolis Guerra and Kevin Mulvey, rated by minor league guru John Sickels as the #2, 3, 4 & 7 prospects in the Mets system. No Wright or Reyes, no Pelfrey, no Fernando Martinez (the #1 prospect). Obviously, no Milledge. Not even Dan Norman. Looks like highway robbery to me.

Newsday.com's Mets blog:

Although the Mets sacrificed four key members of their farm system in the deal, they also managed to make the trade without giving up prized prospect Fernando Martinez.

The Hardball Times:

I don't think you can let Twins general manager Bill Smith off the hook here. While it seems the Yankees and Red Sox weren't willing to deliver an acceptable package at this late date, I suspect that the Yankees' interest—and by extension Boston's—waned when potential replacement options in center field (guys like Torii Hunter or Mike Cameron) and in the back end of the rotation started to go off the market.

In the abstract it makes sense for a high payroll team like the Yankees to concentrate as much value as possible into as few roster spots as possible (roster spots being more scarce than money), in practice they would have needed to replace the rumored major league talent heading to the Twins for the move to make sense. Smith should have known that the deeper it got into the offseason, the less a deal would make sense to the Yankees.

The window to close a deal was clearly earlier in the offseason, and while Smith did a good job of drumming up interest, he didn't close. Instead, he clearly overplayed his hand here and got burned. He deserves some credit for cutting his losses and taking the best package possible, but his tenure as GM is not off to a promising start.

Sean Deveney at The Sporting News:

They could not get the Mets to include outfielders Ryan Church or Fernando Martinez, which would have sweetened the deal quite a bit. It seems the Twins are taking a lot less than, say, Lester, Coco Crisp, infielder Jed Lowrie and pitcher Justin Masterson, which was one offer from the Red Sox.

For the record, Church is a 30 year old mediocore player. Crisp is a nobody with the coolest name in baseball. And how shortsighted would it have been to trade Santana to a team in the American League anyway?

All is not lost. The Twins weren't going to win anything this year anyway. And if you haven't heard of the new players, well, had you heard of Johan Santana before 2000?

Look, Santana is a good pitcher, but he's also 29 years old and for three straight years, opponents have hit him better than the year before. There was at least the possibility that on opening day in 2010 in the new stadium, Santana would no longer be the lights-out, best in baseball starting pitcher. He'd just be paid like one.

Twins fans, come in off the ledge and move on.

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Politicians and the pastors

Posted at 6:29 AM on January 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

Who are televangelists responsible to? Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has started an investigation into the televangelists, like Kenneth Copeland, who has, according to CBS News, told Grassley that his operation is only accountable to the IRS. Grassley's investigation hinges on the suspicion that a half dozen televangelists are engaging in fraud by getting rich off the donations of the faithful.

A Christian organization that monitors the financial dealings of ministries, Ministry Watch, told the network that they're frustrated at the inability to get Copeland, or any of the other ministries being investigated by Grassley, to submit financials.

“Our position is though, that if there is nothing illegal going on, why not disclose it?” asks Warren Smith of Ministry Watch in an interview with CBS News. “If there is nothing to hide, why are you hiding it?”

Next to Grassley, some of the most dogged work in examining televangelists has been done by Minneapolis writer Charles Quimby, who authors the blog, Across the Great Divide. For months Quimby has been looking at Copeland's operation, and its links locally, including to megachurch pastor Mac Hammond.

Most of the investigated televangelists — and scores of imitators or active partners — make use of a holding company-like structure they call a "ministry." The ministry operates a variety of ventures that produce earned and contributed revenue streams. It may also serve as a master brand that endorses the individual operations, but the farther the businesses stray from the organization's churchly purpose, the more likely they are named and structured to blur the financial connection.

Quimby's work has made clear just how difficult it will be for Grassley's investigation to untangle the operations of Copeland and his subsidiaries.

A two-month investigation by CBS News appears to have reached a similar stage:

From across the main road it was easy to see parts of his sprawling religious empire – the low-lying Eagle Mountain International Church and shiny new ministry headquarters. To the right the framework of a $10 million “children’s building” is on the rise; far, far beyond, we are told, is the Copeland’s 18,000 square-foot lake-front parsonage where Copeland and wife Gloria often lay their head at night. To the left is the ministry’s private airport and planes; just beyond, cattle stand grazing. Somewhere beyond sight are the gas and oil wells.

And Copeland appears ready for a fight according to the Washington newspaper Roll Call (subscription required)

In a Jan. 22 closed-circuit broadcast of his 2008 Ministers’ Conference obtained by Roll Call, Copeland pledges a holy war against “Brother Grassley” and the Senate for attempting to get a look at the controversial ministry’s finances. Grassley wrote a Nov. 6 letter to Copeland and five other prominent ministers requesting a variety of financial information.

“You render unto the government what belongs to the government. And you render unto God what belongs to God,” Copeland loudly intones to approving murmurs from the crowd of 1,000 ministers and their guests.

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Ken Dahlberg's story

Posted at 1:17 PM on January 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)

Isn't life the darnedest thing? You're a poor kid in Minnesota who moved at a young age to Wisconsin (Listen) and grew up on the family farm, with the two-hole outhouse and the Sears catalog for toilet paper. You get drafted and sent to war, become a fighter pilot and a triple ace, are shot down three times, spending the final months of the war in a prison camp. You come back to Minnesota, start a company that makes hearing aids, and you make a fortune. You accept golf bags full of money as the Midwest finance director for President Nixon, and provide the smoking gun for one of the biggest political scandals in the nation's history when a campaign contribution check with your signature on it turns up in the hands of a Watergate burglar. You stonewall FBI efforts to get you to say where the money came from, and go on to become a venture capitalist, making another fortune as the money behind the Buffalo Wild Wings franchise.

How does that life story not end up as a movie? It has ended up as a book and today, about 100 friends of Ken Dahlberg gathered at an airplane hangar in Eden Prairie to buy a copy, the proceeds of which Dahlberg is giving to the Minnesotans' Military Appreciation Fund.

Dahlberg retains his conservative roots, noting why there are fewer rags-to-riches stories anymore. "Democracy seems to have an Achilles' heel," he said. "In order to get elected you have to promise people more for producing less. And if you think you can have more for producing less, then my discussion is over. We learned on the farm the process of producing. You had to till the ground, you had to plant the seed, you had to cultivate, and you had to harvest. You had to go through a process in order to have a better life. In the political world, no matter which party you belong to, if you promised more to get elected, we knew it wasn't so." (Listen)

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Eau de ethanol

Posted at 2:51 PM on January 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Two stories about water jumped out of the news this week, one possibly as a solution to the other if anyone makes the connection.

On Monday, Tom Meersman at the Star Tribune reported that the wave of ethanol plants in Minnesota may suck up groundwater at an alarming rate.

The issue was brought into focus last year in Granite Falls, where an ethanol plant in its first year of operations depleted the groundwater so much that it had to begin pumping water from the Minnesota River.

It takes between four and five gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol at a biofuel plant, and with 17 ethanol plants now operating in the state, six under construction and 10 more proposed or in the planning stages, the threat of more drains on underground water are rising.

That story came just a few days after this one from Slate Magazine: The dedication of The Groundwater Replenishment System in Orange County, Calif., which takes toilet water, cleans it up, and pipes it to lakes, where it seeps through the ground, only to end up coming out of the tap again.

It's a smart idea, one of the most reliable and affordable hedges against water shortages, and it's not new. For decades, cities throughout the United States have used recycled wastewater for nonpotable needs, like agriculture and landscaping; because the technology already exists, the move to potable uses seems a no-brainer. But the Orange County project is the exception. Studies show that the public hasn't yet warmed to the notion of indirect potable reuse (IPR)—or "toilet-to-tap," as its opponents would have it.

You folks with septic systems may recognize the process, described in even greater detail last November by the New York Times.

The article says a similar plan for Los Angeles was shut down because people said they didn't want to drink toilet water.

(Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

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Cloutless in Minnesota

Posted at 3:54 PM on January 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

Last year, when Minnesota's political parties were considering moving their caucuses (which most Minnesotans never bothered attending) to Super Tuesday, one of the goals was to make Minnesota matter more, to be a player, to get some notice.

"It'll give us a chance to be in the ballgame instead of sitting in the stands," said GOP spokesman Mark Drake. "We were in danger of being left behind again, so this certainly gives us a chance to play a much bigger role."

"It'll boost our importance," said DFL boss Brian Melendez.

So, how's that worked out? Not so well.

Here's the presidential field back around the time the move was being considered.

And here's the field today...

In 2004, 7 Democrats were involved in the Minnesota Democratic caucus; this year there'll be 3. Of course, in '04 there was only one Republican on the ballot. We had more visits early on from presidential contenders than this year. And, yes, I'm including Tuesday night's John Edwards rally in St. Paul, which he held despite already deciding to drop out of the race.

Says DFL analyst Blois Olson:

"The front-end-loaded system has also meant that it took a lot more money to be competitive. The idea that two candidates have already raised over $100 million on the Democratic side, and few candidates on either side is still eligible for public financing. People simply ran out of money, and the long campaign cycle meant they ran out of any mojo.

"Being relevant to many means getting candidate visits. We seem to be getting those. It may also mean that the outline of Minnesota is highlighted on all the stations next week. We should have moved to a Feb 5th primary, then...candidates would still be on the ballot and more than 2 percent of eligible voters would show up."

FYI, here's your caucus finder.

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Paper padlocks

Posted at 9:07 AM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

All across the northern border, people are upset about new rules requiring passports or birth certificates to get back into the United States. Maybe it's not a big deal if you only travel to Canada every now and then, but if you live along the border, it's a big deal, and a big hassle. In Detroit this morning, though, the new rules reportedly went smoothly.

Tom Robertson of MPR takes a great look at the reality in International Falls.

But in addition to the hassle, there's another frustration to the new rule: It's going to cost you money. A passport card, a new version of the passport, will run you $45 because the government has tacked on a "fee" to its cost of giving you one. $10 for kids, $20 for adults and a $25 execution fee. But the card can't be used for air travel.

Meanwhile, the government is jacking up the cost of a regular passport tomorrow, when it shoots up to $100 for people over 16, $85 for kids. You can get a passport at a post office.

So, a family of four may pay almost $400 just to cross the border.

For crossing the border by land, a birth certificate may be used. Minnesotans can start the process of getting one here. It'll cost you $16 for each certificate. If you're in a hurry (an average wait is said to be 4-6 weeks), that'll cost you another $20 a pop and if you pay by credit card, tack on an additional $6.

In this case, the family of four could pay up to $165 to comply with the new rules.

The days of using a Blockbuster card to gain entry are over.

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Have we hit bottom?

Posted at 10:21 AM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

A CNBC talking head made an interesting observation on certain market indicators today. A crisis has bottomed out when the media starts regularly reporting it exists. On Sunday, 60 Minutes looked at the foreclosure problem. Newsweek has the recession story on the cover.

End of the real estate "crisis?" Maybe the beginning of the end of the crisis.

St. Paul Realtor Teresa Boardman, who writes one of the region's best blogs, has a street-level view to share today:

Activity has picked up in the last month. It always does in January. What I mean by activity is that more buyers are looking and sellers are listing. None of us have noticed an up tick in sales, but activity is a good sign.

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Double standard for Twins fans

Posted at 10:59 AM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)

Baseball is a business. That bulletin is coming as big news, for some reason, in Minnesota. Today, Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman characterized the players the Twins received for Johan Santana as stiffs no 5th grader has ever heard of before. The obvious question, which nobody seems to be asking in the wake of the Santana trade to the Mets: if you don't know who they are, how do you know they're stiffs?

I get the whole "we'll miss Johan" thing, but Coleman refers to the trade as Carl Pohlad giving the fans the finger with an "Ol' Scrooge play." Maybe. But it also ignores the fact that an "Old Scrooge play" is what got Santana on the Twins roster in the first place. It's also worth noting that Johan Santana was the one who set the deadline and it was Johan Santana who decided he couldn't make ends meet on $13 million a year. So why is Carl Pohlad the bad guy?

Over at The Hardball Times, a blog for people who really do know how baseball works, Victor Wang pulls out the calculator and dives into the long-term ramifications of the trade (Remember: Santana is signing a 7-year deal with the Mets and 7 years from now, Santana is not going to be a 29 year old).

Concludes Wang:

... the Twins were not ripped off as many claim. However, I would not say that the Twins won the deal outright, as the raw prospect value numbers show. When we include the four factors mentioned above into our evaluation, I would say that the Mets come out as slight winners; the extent of their edge depends on what happens with the contract negotiations with Santana.

If I were a Twins fan, I would be slightly disappointed by the fact that the rumors of the Boston and New York proposals did not come true. Still, the Twins did come away with good value in this trade.

For the record, Johan Santana asked for more than $20 million a year, and didn't think once about what his leaving would mean to Minnesota's 5th graders.

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Planning for the day after

Posted at 11:35 AM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

The first shipment of seeds, to be used to regenerate earth after a global catastrophe, has arrived in Norway, destined for the 'doomsday vault.'

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Super business

Posted at 2:25 PM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Super Bowl Sunday is as important to some industries as the holiday shopping season is to others. Some local companies are poised to benefit from the game.

This Sunday, for example, one in seven of us will order take-out; half of those will buy chicken wings. Minneapolis-based Buffalo Chicken Wings is counting on it. A company official told CNBC today, "it's the most important day of the year."

But there are 364 others and analysts are fairly cautious about the company.

"There are 500 locations nationwide," said MKM Partners restaurant analyst Steve Anderson. "Half of those are in the Midwest, and four of the five biggest states where the company has exposure, they have higher-than-average unemployment rates, subprime ARMs and foreclosures."

Nonetheless, the company has been hot today. Its stock is up more than 11% on the day. closed up nearly 9 percent today.

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What hype?

Posted at 3:16 PM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)

I've taken a sick day today, so I'm watching the NFL Network coverage of Super Bowl week. Several news conferences are broadcast live, which unfortunately gives people a glimpse into the kind of biting questions asked by some people who make their living as journalists. This afternoon, Alicia Keys and Jordan Sparks were announced as the pre-game entertainment, an event usually covered by the B-squad anyway, but still...

Lynne Miller (Ironstar) - "First of all, I love you. I think you're fantastic...." It didn't get better. She wanted to know what was in their iPods.

Amanda Jahn (Channel 3 News) - "First, you guys are so beautiful..." Why even bother with what her question was?

Yetta Gibson (Fox Phoenix) - "How ya doin? Where are your seats? And are you forced to root for the Knicks?" The what? The Knicks? I looked her up on the Internet. She's described as "an Emmy Award-winning journalist." That should tell you how hard it is to win a local Emmy.

Tom Petty, the halftime show, is up next. NFL Network analyst Terrel Davis says he's never heard of Tom Petty. Ugh.

Update:

3:56 p.m. - "Let's give it up for Tom Petty," the moderator of the news conference says. And they do. The reporters... journalists... in the audience..... they do.

3:58 - "Would you please give a shout out to 103.7 FM, 'The Mount' in Seattle?", asks a reporter from 103.7 FM. Petty does. I begin to understand better why The Current has so many online listeners from Seattle.

4:00 - "How awesome is it for you to be performing at a Super Bowl?" asks a reporter. I literally pray that Petty answers, "It's awesome!" Instead, he says "it's mind-blowing," a subject about which Petty appears to know a fair amount.

4:01 p.m. - A reporter asks if a friend of his can sing a few bars of "American Girl," and would Petty critique him. "Umm, no," Petty replies.

4:03 p.m. - Amanda Jahn from Channel 3 (see above) is back for more. She begins her question with, "You guys are still smokin' hot." Good golly, she was once nominated for an Emmy. Here's some of her work. Note the part where she refers to Chris Bergman.

4:05 pm. - Actually an interesting question here. "You've always been Mr. anti-corporation and here you are at the Super Bowl, a corporate orgy, in a halftime show sponsored by a corporation..." Petty says, "that's just the way it is in TV. You just smile and be good boys."

And take the cash.

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Fun with numbers: The voting age

Posted at 4:27 PM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau today shows Minnesota ranks #21 in the nation in population, with a little over 5 million people. Wisconsin is just ahead at #20.

75.8% of Minnesota's population is 18 or over (voting age), only slightly more than the national average (75.5%). That puts us in 29th place in that category.

Utah, by contrast, has only 69.1% of its population old enough to vote.

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A letter from Kenya

Posted at 4:28 PM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Kenya's problems are growing worse. A police officer gunned down an opposition lawmaker today.

The worsening news prompted me to check in again with Katie Springer, the University of Minnesota grad who works in the region, interviewing people from East Africa who want to emigrate. I last talked to her in early January.

Today, she tells me via e-mail:

Nice to hear from you. I was in Dadaab, Kenya, which is the northeast province, for the last 3 weeks. When I left, it seemed things were back to normal. Yesterday on my way home from the airport, after our delayed flight due to the "tension" as its called here, I saw fires burning in the distance and my taxi driver informed me that it was peoples' homes up in flames. The strange part is, everything as far as I can tell is life as normal. However, I had a long talk with my house girl today and she was sharing with me what her life is like in one of the major slums. She said the men don't sleep; they have to stay awake all night guarding their shacks and families inside with machetes. Maybe you heard, but yesterday fliers were distributed around some of the slums telling members of certain tribes they had a matter of time to leave. She is trying to find a way to get her children out and send them somewhere safer, though no one can really identify where that is. So, it seems the tensions are still high, and climbing. However, many of the problems we were seeing before, for those of us not living in the slums, seem to have bettered. Now, it's the economic effects we're seeing. My roommate was forced to take a 20% pay cut. She considers herself lucky as most people were just laid off.

(Photo: Kenyan policemen place roses near a memorial at Uhuru Park in Nairobi today. The memorial was erected in memory of all Kenyans, who were killed, raped or lost their homes in post-election violence. Kenyan police have been given orders to shoot to kill in a bid to stem weeks of violence, a police commander said. Photo taken by Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images)

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Same debate, different views

Posted at 9:09 PM on January 31, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Here is some of the most interesting live-blogging done at the Democratic presidential debate on Thursday night.

New York Times Caucus blog
Editor & Publisher
Norwegianity
The Guardian - Richard Adams
L.A. Times
Andrew Sullivan - The Atlantic

(Phone: Emmanual Dunand/Getty Images)

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