News Day – January 19

View from under the kitchen table Minnesotans without health insurance won’t be sitting quietly at a kitchen table considering the family budget, in T-Paw’s Norman Rockwell image. Nick Coleman describes disappearing health care access, with stories from the front lines, including “one low-income patient who needs an MRI and a knee injection in order to return to his job, but he hasn’t been able to find a doctor who will treat him without an up-front $800 payment.” T-Paw proposes cuts in state health care and human services spending. On the other side, Take Action Minnesota, a coalition of union and progressive groups, is pushing for a solution called the Minnesota Health Security Act.

Dr. Ann Settgast, co-chair of the MN chapter of Physicians for a National Healthcare Program, writes in the TC Daily Planet today:

As a physician, I know that offering a placebo in place of known effective treatment is unethical. Hence, while I applaud the good intentions of Senator Tom Daschle, the Healthcare for America Now (HCAN) coalition, and others, I advise against their proposals to extend a system that is fundamentally flawed. In these times of economic uncertainty and crisis, single payer is the only fiscally responsible option for reform…and it is the only solution that will actually work.

For an amazed and unbelieving look at the U.S. health insurance system from the outside, read a BBC reporter’s account of his family’s experience on this side of the Atlantic.

The pause that refreshes Today, with Martin Luther King Day, and tomorrow, with the inauguration, celebrations are the order of the day. From the Obamas on down, today’s motto is “A day on, not a day off,” volunteering and encouraging volunteerism, reports the TC Daily Planet, which also lists MN MLK Day celebrations and inauguration parties.

Slashing schools and budgets Shut them down. That’s the Robbinsdale plan for its budget and enrollment crisis. The district may shutter three schools this year, writes Norman Draper in the Strib, and the most likely targets are Sandburg Middle School in Golden Valley; Pilgrim Lane Elementary in Plymouth, and Sunny Hollow Elementary in New Hope. Parents are up in arms, with 400 turning out for a meeting last week and another public hearing scheduled for 5:30 Tuesday before the 7 p.m. board meeting. In St. Paul, the school district announced an expected $25 million budget shortfall for the 2009-10 school year.” The district press release pointed out that, “Twenty-five million dollars is about 5 percent of the district’s operating budget. This is the largest single-year shortfall the district has faced in more than a decade.” The press release cited the economy, declining enrollment and state funding as contributing factors.

As kids struggle to read, somebody in the Minneapolis district office needs a better handle on math. More than two million federal dollars went unspent last year, according to Vickie Evans-Nash’s report in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder that:

During the 2007-2008 school year, while more than two million dollars for tutoring services sat unused, thousands of students in the Minneapolis Public Schools District (MPS) were below grade level. While 9,924 students were eligible for federally-funded tutoring services during that same school year, only 1,324 were actually enrolled to receive services.

DTV or not TV: That is the question With apologies to the Bard, the question looms large for millions still without DTV access. Federal money for even partial converter-box subsidies has run out and Congress will consider extending the February 17 DTV conversion deadline. In the Daily Planet, Barbara Teed tells about here 85-year-old father and his rabbit ears and Lisa Peterson de la Cueva reports from a recent meeting on access to DTV for communities of color.

Charters in the cross-hairs The legislature is targeting charter schools with proposals for a broad spectrum of new regulations, reports Megan Boldt in the Strib. One starting point may be the legislative auditor’s recommendations:

The auditor’s report suggested the Legislature:

• Narrow the scope of who can sponsor a charter school.
• Require sponsors to better monitor schools’ financial and academic performance.
• Mandate financial management training for charter-school board members. School district board members must attend such training within 180 days of being elected.
• Strengthen conflict-of-interest laws for charter-school boards. Currently, board members or close relatives can have a financial interest in an organization that does business with the school.
• Scrap the requirement that teachers make up a majority of a charter’s board.

Expect legislators and the state education department to weigh in with proposals, possibly including a moratorium on expanding beyond the current 143 charter schools. A recent report by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School said that, on average, charter school students perform at a lower academic level than those at traditional public schools, though a handful of charter schools show good academic achievement.

Bank or bust Trickle-down theory meets the recession /depression /financial crisis. Now many of Minnesota’s community banks face failure writes Chris Serres in the Strib. The MN bank crisis comes from commercial real estate loans, with bad commercial and mortgage loans up by 84 percent in the third quarter of 2008, compared to the third quarter of 2007. That’s 5.7 percent of all commercial real estate loans in MN more than 30 days past due. According to the MN Department of Commerce, 50 of the states 429 state-chartered banks and credit unions are now on its watch list, and 133 “had commercial mortgages and construction loans exceeding four times their core capital, a level regulators consider excessive.”

On a national scale, writes Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times, “The concept of the financial supermarket — the all-things-to-all-people, intergalactic, behemoth banking institution — bit the dust last week,” with Citigroup’s failure and Bank of America’s signaling the failure of the practice of combining “insurance, investment banking, mortgage lending, credit cards and stock brokerage services” in a single institution. She thinks that’s good, “because maybe we can go back to a banking model that is designed to do more than simply enrich the folks at the top of the enterprise while shareholders and taxpayers absorb all the hits.”

MN Job Watch Five hundred Minnesotans will lose their jobs as Circuit City’s nine MN stores close, according to the Strib. That’s only our part of the pain. The Washington Post reports that Circuit City’s decision on Friday to close all of its 567 stores will cost 34,000 employees their jobs. Circuit City had been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, but was unable to reorganize or sell the company.

Nationally, high unemployment rates have been great for the military, with all branches of the armed forces meeting or exceeding recruitment goals last year. “When the economy slackens and unemployment rises and jobs become more scarce in civilian society, recruiting is less challenging,” said Curtis Gilroy, the director of accession policy for the Department of Defense, told the New York Times.

Forgive and forget? Paul Krugman doesn’t think that’s a good idea:

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

Don’t eat the peanut butter Seriously. Don’t eat the peanut butter, peanut butter cookies, peanut paste — the FDA is warning everyone to stay away from peanut butter everything as they continue to search for the cause of a national salmonella outbreak. MPR reports that at least six people have died, including two in Minnesota, and hundreds of people in 43 states have been diagnosed with salmonella.

And the beat goes on This week: look for more jockeying for position in Norm Coleman’s legal battle to overturn the recount results and keep his Senate seat. The three-judge panel has said the trial will begin on Monday, January 26.

In other MN political news, former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton filed to run for governor in 2010, joining (in alphabetical order) fellow DFLers State Senator Tom Bakk, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner, State Senator John Marty, and State Representative Paul Thissen.

Gaza update First Israel and then Hamas announced a cease-fire in Gaza this weekend. Israel’s attack, launched December 27, killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, according to BBC reports, including some 700 civilians. Ten Israeli soldiers were killed, some by “friendly fire,” and three Israeli civilians were killed by rocket attacks. Hamas rocket attacks had killed 18 Israelis over eight years.

Besides the massive death toll, Gaza’s parliament building, police stations, mosques, homes and schools were destroyed, along with some of the tunnels used to smuggle everything from food to arms from Egypt into Gaza. BBC quoted “local sources” as saying that some 4,000 buildings were destroyed and another 20,000 severely damaged. The Hamas government, however, survived.