News Cut: June 24, 2009 Archive

Five at 8 - 6/24/09

Posted at 7:51 AM on June 24, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

It's a somewhat abbreviated 5@8 today. I had to take Mrs. News Cut to the airport for an early-morning flight. Apologies.

The best part about being up for sunrise? Everything seems possible. MPR's Nate Minor captured the moment in St. Paul this morning.

"We're all endowed with curiosity, but a lot of us, for very good reasons, stop using it after a certain point. After a certain age, we tend to substitute opinions for thinking." That's Phil Terry, a business consultant, quoted in a Lane Wallace column in The Atlantic today that asks if thinking is coming back in fashion? The solution to substituting opinion for facts, she suggests, is Aristotle and the classics.

There are plenty of people out of work, of course, but apparently not enough of them know how to weld a perfect weld, or are electric linemen, or respiratory therapists. "For these hard-to-fill jobs, there seems to be a common denominator. Employers are looking for people who have acquired an exacting skill, first through education -- often just high school vocational training -- and then by honing it on the job. That trajectory, requiring years, is no longer so easy in America," the New York Times says.

The Wolves. People are talking about the Minnesota Timberwolves. In June! The team swung a big trade late yesterday as it tries to forget it ever heard of Hibbing. There's plenty of coverage out there but when it comes to the Timberwolves, only Britt Robson matters.

And if he was wrong to bum-rush (Mike) Miller instead of waiting for a more propitious moment to deal him, he was absolutely right in his timing with Foye. If the kid who's heart is on the wrong side of his body can ever make another deal with the devil that is longer than the month of January--if he can display that dazzling blend of clutch shooting setting up daredevil drives setting up beautiful feeds setting up more clutch jumpers for longer than 30 days, than the Wizards have depantsed David Kahn and all the snickers about his lack of genuine front office decision-making will turn into a shaming din. But that's not the way I'd bet on it happening.

Do you know the difference between the Appalachian Trail and Argentina? If so, you may cut in front of the South Carolinians in line. Minnesota may have its share of weird politics, but we're not South Carolina.

What do you wear to a Beekeeper's Ball? Honey bees are shaping up to be the latest urban agricultural must-have, the new backyard chicken, according to the New York Times. This I've got to see. If you're in the Twin Cities -- the actual cities -- keeping bees, let me hear from you.

As Minnesota pulls back from the concept of health care for the vulnerable, let's look -- again -- at the Massachusetts experiment of health care for everyone. Slate is the latest to do so. It was a "resounding success"... on paper. But "roughly one in 10 state residents still failed to fill prescriptions, ended up with unpaid medical bills, or skipped needed medical care for financial reasons. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to insure more Massachusetts citizens, but many people still weren't getting necessary care. What happened?"

Meanwhile, a story on Morning Edition today led me to this question: What's the point of looking for long-term solutions, if our politicians only know how to think short term? It's the story of a poison control center which costs $6 million a year to operate, but keeps people out of the more-expensive emergency rooms.

Back in Minnesota, Steve Perry reports in Politics in Minnesota, the absence of one-time money for the next budget fix puts us right back in the soup.

Bonus: It's been more than a week, I wonder how the digital conversion is going.

WHAT WE'RE DOING

Midmorning (9-11 a.m.) - How likely is a greener auto industry? Kerri Miller examines the question with a couple of reporters who cover the industry in the first hour. Second hour: The man known for the "Endless Soup Bowl" and other eating experiments joins Midmorning to discuss the latest on food and diet research and his time at the USDA.

Midday (11 a.m. - 1 p.m.) - MPR's Jon Gordon talks about the role of technology -- Twitter, cell phones and YouTube in the popular uprising in Iran. Second hour: New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's speech, which he gave last night in St. Paul.

Talk of the Nation (1-3 p.m.) - The pleasures and sorrows of work.

All Things Considered (3-6:30 p.m.) - MPR's Sea Stachura reports on a summer camp for kids whose parents are in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tom Weber will have details on the University of Minnesota Regents' vote on a dry TCF stadium. David Kestenbaum tracks the efforts of a clown, who is owed $200 by one of the big auto companies.

Bookmark News Cut

By tomorrow morning, MPR will have rolled out its two new Web sites, including one for news. That's where you'll find News Cut, but if you access this blog through the regular MPR.org URL, you may not find it so easily. So please be sure to bookmark now and tomorrow morning you can access News Cut via your bookmark while you learn your way around the new sites. Don't let me down here. Bobby's gotta eat.

Comment on this post

A killing in Parkersburg

Posted at 10:46 AM on June 24, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice

A gunman walked into Iowa high school football coach Ed Thomas' weightroom today and killed him.

Thomas' name may ring a bell. He was the subject of several nationwide news stories -- including this one on ESPN -- about how football helped rebuild Parkersburg, Iowa after it was devastated by a tornado.

Comment on this post

In one ear...

Posted at 11:22 AM on June 24, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Science

If somebody ripped off your copy of Naturwissenschafte, let me help you out with the top story:

Hemispheric asymmetries and side biases have been studied in humans mostly in laboratory settings, and evidence obtained in naturalistic settings is scarce. We here report the results of three studies on human ear preference observed during social interactions in noisy environments, i.e., discotheques. In the first study, a spontaneous right-ear preference was observed during linguistic exchange between interacting individuals. This lateral bias was confirmed in a quasi-experimental study in which a confederate experimenter evoked an ear-orienting response in bystanders, under the pretext of approaching them with a whispered request. In the last study, subjects showed a greater proneness to meet an experimenter's request when it was directly addressed to the right rather than the left ear. Our findings are in agreement both with laboratory studies on hemispheric lateralization for language and approach/avoidance behavior in humans and with animal research. The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior.

Sorry. I spilled coffee on the News Cut AcademicSpeak-O-Meter this morning and it hasn't been working quite right. Let's try this again.

You're in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, "Hai una sigaretta?"

If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.

You have to love science. This is the latest study to show that the brain translates things uttered into your right ear differently than your left ear.

Comment on this post

It's flooding in Fargo-Moorhead again...

Posted at 1:56 PM on June 24, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (0 Comments)
Filed under: Floods

A spate of spring storms left the Red River Valley with swollen creeks and streams over the past week. Eventually, all that water must pour into the Red River and head north to Canada. The photo above was taken yesterday on the north end of the Island Park Levee in Fargo. Instead of a lake, you should see a parking lot and running trails in the foreground.

From approximately the same vantage point (and height of the river), the Red River looked like this back on March 24th:

The rapid rise in the river underscores the basic problem residents in the area will always have with flooding: the flat landscape. The flood gauge in Hickson, just upstream from Fargo-Moorhead, illustrates this point. It takes a lot longer for water to flow out of the Valley than to accumulate in it.

Comment on this post

Dishonorable mention

Posted at 4:02 PM on June 24, 2009 by Bob Collins (26 Comments)
Filed under: Politics

It's not the heat; it's the hypocrisy.

Maybe Mark Sanford had a real shot at presidential politics; maybe he didn't. It's all over now that he's admitted he was having an affair with a woman in Argentina (See emails) and that's why he disappeared for several days and nobody -- including his wife -- knew where he was. The fact his wife said she wasn't concerned told me everything I need to know about the Sanford marriage.

Why do politicians have affairs? Perhaps for the same reasons everyone else who's running around has one: they don't think they're going to get caught, ego, and, sex; -- not necessarily in that order.

Twenty-two percent of adults in monogamous relationships have cheated on their current partner. The rate is even higher among married men, according to a recent survey. If politicians cheat at the same clip, 91 members of Congress are fooling around.

"We think everybody is out there doing it," says Janet Lever, a sociologist at California State University, Los Angeles, and the study's lead researcher told MSNBC. "Well, they're not."

Our reaction -- usually disappointment -- reveals our basic idealism toward politics. "I think why this gets so much attention in the news is because these are people we want to trust - they are people who make important decisions that affect our lives. When they turn out to be dishonest, we are not only disappointed, but we can't trust them at all," Emily Brown, a marriage counselor, told the Washington Post after one politician's fling went public.

The list of pols getting caught, though, seems endless. My ranking of the top 10 political "affairs."

10. Gov. James E. McGreevey - With his wife standing by his side, the New Jersey governor acknowledged he had an affair, then admitted he was gay.

9. Gov. David Patterson - One day after replacing the philandering Elliot Spitzer, Patterson admitted that he also had an affair... or two, causing a communal forehead slap among New York residents.

8. Rep. Vito Fossella - The New York congressman broke down on the House floor last May after acknowledging his arrest for drunk driving and admitting he had a daughter with a woman who wasn't his wife.

7. Sen. John Ensign - It was just last Tuesday -- two days before Sanford took off for Argentina -- that Ensign admitted he had an affair with a family friend. "I take full responsibility for my actions," reading from the first chapter of the "Politician's Guide to Admitting Your Affair."

6. Rep. Newt Gingrich - One of President Clinton's biggest critics during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Gingrich admitted he was fooling around, too, around the same time. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards," he said, while insisting he wasn't a hypocrite. Gingrich, considered a potential presidential contender, may end up proving that having an affair isn't a political death sentence.

5. Sen. David Vitter -- The Louisiana senator was all about family values, as long as you don't define family values as "eschewing the DC Madam." "This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible," he said, with his wife standing nearby.

4. Sen. Larry Craig - The Idaho senator was arrested at the Minneapolis St. Paul airport Concourse C men's room after apparently soliciting an undercover cop for sex. His defense? "I am not gay," he insisted. His wife joined him at his side for his press conference.

3. John Edwards - The former presidential candidate proved there really are two Americas: the men who cheat on their wives and the men who don't. "I was and am ashamed of my conduct and choices," he said of his affair with the campaign's filmmaker. His wife, battling breast cancer, stood beside him. It was an uncomfortable moment, though, when she appeared on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me last Saturday, only to be asked by Peter Sagal, "how big is the doghouse your husband lives in now?"

2. Eliot Spitzer - The New York governor with a squeaky clean reputation, tossed it away for a romp with high-priced hookers. "I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself," he said, with his wife standing at his side.

1. Bill Clinton - Still the mother of all political affairs. "I did not have sex with that woman" is as big a part of presidential history as "I am not a crook." Both were lies. (Zip ahead to 6:18 here). Well-delivered lies.

Comment on this post