News Cut: April 17, 2008 Archive

Theology vs. trivia

Posted at 9:29 AM on April 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Religion

Pope Benedict XVI is celebrating mass in Washington today and a nation that walks a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning, as the Rev. Jimmy Buffet once said, is struggling when it comes to discussions about the visit.

Last night, for example, the pontiff told bishops, the Boston Globe said, "to do better communicating with the public, connecting with priests, and educating children; he also exhorted them to demonstrate unfettered support for immigrants. And he offered an analysis of the role of religion in America, suggesting that the freedom here has at the same time allowed faith to flourish but also can 'subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator.'"

OK, let's talk about that.

"The pontiff doesn't like to drink wine with dinner, and at dinner last night he was seen with a can of orange Fanta, and some Cracker Jack was also seen," the commentator on CNN noted during live coverage of the mass this morning. That was a few minutes after noted theologian Mike Piazza, who conducted services for years behind the plate at Shea Stadium, described the differences between Pope Benedict and his predecessors.

So what are viewers left with? Here's a review of the coverage so far from Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times:

Cable news channels and the networks interrupted their regular programming to provide live coverage of the pope at the White House as he read his speech precisely and evenly in a slight German accent. He graciously shook hands with cabinet members and elected officials (Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, kissed his ring). The pope, who turned 81 on Wednesday, smiled winningly when the crowd broke out in a ragged version of "Happy Birthday." He looked pleased -- he smiled and stretched out his arms to well-wishers -- when the soprano Kathleen Battle led a more expert rendition of the song. But it provided, at best, a fleeting look at the pope. TV commentators tried to compensate, extolling the excitement of the crowds and the geniality of the guest of honor. One anchor declared that the pope looked "thoroughly overjoyed."

The challenge in covering a papal visit, then, is fairly enormous: don't make it an infomercial for the Vatican, explore the issues -- good and bad -- that have challenged the church and its followers, and don't come off looking anti-Catholic.

Consider this letter today in the Star Tribune:

The Star Tribune covers it by running an Associated Press article with 35 column inches of written copy (plus some pictures). The first 28 of those 35 inches deal with sexual abuse by Catholic clergy over the past half-century. Only the last 7 inches refer to other aspects of the pope's visit.

Some Americans feel the media are anti-Catholic. Where in the world might they ever get such an idea?

Peter Steinfels, a religion columnist for the Times and professor at Fordham University provided one of the more insightful comments on the visit last night on... of all places ... The Daily Show (Video here):

"I think he'll probably deliver messages that are complicated and deserve analysis and parsing, but he'll leave the country and we'll never pay any attention again to those complicated messages," he said

So maybe the visit is about us. Steinfels says we only discuss religion when it intersects with the culture wars. "We have a hard time dealing with genuine, religious, profound messages, and I think that this pope really does think that religion is not a set of propositions that you believe in some fundamental orientation toward the universe which he thinks is love, and we've got to find a political thing on page 82 when he writes an encyclical."

If you'd like to discuss the papal visit, be sure to listen to Midday today at 11.

(Photo: Mandal Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)

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The reports of nuclear's demise were greatly exaggerated

Posted at 1:58 PM on April 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

With relatively little fanfare, Xcel Energy this week released its plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions under goals set by the Legislature last year. It wants to crank up the juice at the Prairie Island nuclear plant and add another 35 "dry casks" to store the nuclear waste.

As cranky as the global warming debate is in general, no other environmental issue in these parts has been more contentious in the last 20 years than the dry casks at Prairie Island.

Check out this description of the 1994 debate from a 2003 story from MPR on how little had changed in the intervening years:

"Even before the first meeting began, 83-year-old State Representative Willard Munger was overheard challenging 44-year-old Senator Steve Novak to a fistfight, because Novak accused Munger of wanting to shut down the Prairie Island plant," (Capitol reporter Mike) Mulcahy reported. Novak was waste bill's chief sponsor. As his bill struggled through endless committees, he argued that what NSP needed was time to ease itself away from nuclear energy. He said his bill would buy that time.

Anti-nuclear forces wanted the plant shut down when the utility -- then Northern States Power -- first asked the Legislature for permission to store the waste on site in 1994. After an administrative law judge denied the request, the Legislature -- after a contentious debate -- cut a deal to allow 17 casks (the utility wanted 48) with a deal that it would provide 200 megawatts of windpower and 75 megawatts of biomass by the end of 2002.

As soon as a national storage facility for radioactive waste was completed, the agreement said, the Minnesota waste would be sent to the site -- Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That was supposed to happen in 1998. It never happened.

In 2003, the Legislature allowed the expansion to 48 casks.

In 1994, the Legislature thought it was setting the stage for the end of nuclear power in Minnesota. It hasn't turned out that way. The percentage of electricity generated by Prairie Island in 1994 was 20 percent; it generates 20 percent of it now.

But maybe this is an issue with declining passion at the Capitol. At a hearing today on the issue, no legislator asked a question.

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Abstaining for Oliva

Posted at 10:06 PM on April 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (15 Comments)

The Minnesota House has passed a resolution to end trade and financial restrictions to Cuba, on an 86-9 vote. Legislators don't have to vote on resolutions, but that didn't explain why 39 of them took a pass on an issue that, at least at first blush, doesn't seem like something that's going to bite them in the election-year behind. It's not as if we're Florida.

So I sent an email to a few dozen of them to see what i was missing.

I was missing Tony Oliva, the star of the Minnesota Twins in the '60s.

Everyone's boyhood hero (OK, not everyone's, but he was one of mine, and I'm from Boston.) was in the House chambers. Oliva is a native of Cuba and favors an easing of the restrictions. Oliva didn't want to leave his mother, father, and nine brothers and sisters when he was a kid. But his father told him to go to America and be "rich and famous."

The only legislator to respond to my e-mail was Rep. Tom Emmer, the one legislator I was pretty sure would.

Bob, thanks for your note. I thought we had more important things to do & I didn't agree with the res. Out of respect for Mr. Oliva, I chose not to vote rather than no.

You can't say no to heroes.

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The brains behind the award

Posted at 4:39 PM on April 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Things that are puzzling

How does a meatpacking plant where 18 workers have gotten a mysterious neurological illness, possibly because of the work they did, win a health and safety award from the American Meat Institute?

It's an apparent head-scratcher to a lot of people, Dan McCoslin, AMI's director of worker safety and human resources, acknowledged to me this afternoon. But there actually is a decent explanation for the award to Quality Pork Products in Austin.

"Performance is 60-percent of the total awards points," he said, "measured between the total number of incidents reported to OSHA (treatment beyond first aid) and... the rate of the number of days away from work. On the program side, it's how the facility measures up... on training, employee involvement, adherence to standards; that sort of thing." (Listen to full description)

So how did the Austin plant win?

"Their overall performance is, in fact, excellent. They're consistently below the industry average in both total cases and the days away," McCoslin said. "Their overall safety program is excellent. (Listen)

Quality Pork has between 1,200 and 1,400 employees, according to McCoslin, and from a numbers point of view, 18 "incidents", though serious, is less than 1 percent of the total workforce. "Although this is vexing and everyone is still trying to get to the bottom of it, it doesn't mean they don't have a good safety program."

McCoslin says the plant "deserves something of a pat on the back for the way they handled this incident. As soon as the nurses there realized that there was something different and unique going on with these particular symptoms, they notified management, management notified the Minnesota Department of Health, the Mayo Clinic... was brought in as well, Minnesota Department of Health brought in the CDC in Atlanta. All of this started when QPP stepped forward and did the right thing and said, 'Hey, we've got something going on here and we don't know whether it's a big problem or a little problem but we do know that it's more than we can deal with.'" (Listen)

Point taken. The reason we know about it is a reflection on the plant's safety program.

Nothing is proven yet, that the the practices at the Austin plant is what is responsible for the mysterious illness, but McCoslin says the industry is watching, even though most plants don't "harvest" pig brains the way the workers at QPP did.

"I had never heard... and I've been in the industry for 40 years ... of harvesting brain tissue with compressed air," according to McCoslin. " That's not the way it's normally done. Normally, at the end of the line the reminder of the skull is split in half and brains are simply scooped out and placed in containers, chilled, packed, and sold. And the other part of that is, as you may imagine, there's not a tremendous market for pork brains these days." (Listen)

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Live-blogging 'Energy and National Security'

Posted at 7:04 PM on April 17, 2008 by Bob Collins (16 Comments)
Filed under: Energy

I wrote a post earlier this week about my experience with ethanol vs. non-ethanol blended-gasoline and it spawned a lengthy debate about the issue. Tonight (Thursday) MPR's Kerri Miller is hosting a discussion in the UBS Forum at MPR with Anne Korin, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and chair of the Set America Free Coalition, and Ed Garvey, director of the Minnesota Office of Energy Security. Matthew Wald, who covers energy issues for the New York Times, was supposed to be here but he's been dispatched to Louisiana to cover the American Airlines maintenance woes (or so I'm told).

It's not about ethanol per se but it's close enough to warrant sticking around for a little live-blogging. You can listen here and if you'd like to add your comments during the event, so much the better.

7:05 - We're underway. Here's the theme. How does our reliance on foreign oil change influence our foreign policy? How real are the claims that the U.S. can be truly 'independent' of foreign oil and what will the next president's energy policy look like, given the way oil prices are headed. Four years ago, a barrel of oil hit $50 and drivers were grumbling as a gallon passed $2. Oil closed today at almost $115. At a gas station in Blaine gasoline is going for $3.52 tonight.

7:11 - Korin: "We paying for both sides of the war. Every time we go to the gas station, some of the money goes to Saudi Arabia, which funds terrorist groups around the world."

(Continued below the fold)

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