News Day – January 21, 2009

RNC beat goes on Cheri Honkala and the poor people’s encampment are off the hook for camping on Harriet Island on August 28, writes Emily Gurnon in the PiPress. St. Paul city attorney John Choi has dropped the charges. Honkala’s attorney, Ted Dooley, explained:

The whole case, Dooley said, was “bull—-.”
“You got people sleeping in that park every night even when it’s 20 below,” he said. “But when you do it as a group and say, ‘What’s going on here?’ you get arrested. As long as you go quietly and die, you’re fine.”

Tonight (January 21), reports the TC Daily Planetthe on-going art show to benefit the defense fund of the RNC 8 will have a reception and musical entertainment at the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar in St. Paul.

Girl Scout cookies safe! Despite the nationwide salmonella outbreak linked to peanut butter, Girl Scout cookies are safe! So says the PiPress and so say the Girl Scouts, who will be happy to direct you to the nearest cookie-seller. (Girl Scout cookie sellers hit the streets this weekend, so it’s time to get your order in!) Other cookies are not so lucky. Cub Foods has recalled their own peanut butter cookies, reports MPR, and all products containing peanut butter, as well as industrial-pack peanut butter and peanut paste remain under suspicion. The bright spot? Peanut butter in retail-size jars seems to be cleared of suspicion. So, if you’re dying for peanut butter cookies, you can always bake your own.

Caroline and Andrew and Al and Norm What the heck is slowing down NY’s senatorial nomination? Especially in MN, where we have only one senator at present and no way to speed up the process, NY Guv David Paterson seems to be unaccountably slow in naming a successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now, according to the NYT, he promises to make up his mind by the weekend.

Meanwhile, back in St. Paul, the special three-judge panel is hearing arguments on Franken’s motion to dismiss Coleman’s suit today, according to MPR. The trial of Coleman’s lawsuit is scheduled to begin Monday.

Progress at Mpls Vets Home More than a year after the state took over management of the troubled Minneapolis Veterans Home (and four others), the Department of Veterans Affairs told a MN Senate committee that care and quality have improved, reports the Strib. A team of investigators from the federal DOJ will descend in two weeks to look at care in the home.

Though care has improved, the home is still shelling out millions in overtime costs, due to inability to hire enough regular staff, and a recent legislative auditor report found problems in fiscal management. State Sen. Linda Berglin wants the Veterans Affairs Department to shift funding to Medicaid, which would save some of the $35 million annual budget but would require administrative changes and might affect veterans’ eligibility for services.

But more nursing homes likely to close MN nursing homes are still under the gun, with a long history of funding trouble. As Lorna Benson details on MPR, Medicaid funds for patient care come from the feds and are matched by the state. These funds pay for patients who have run out of money. But Minnesota law says nursing homes cannot charge private patients any more than they charge Medicaid patients. That means when the Medicaid price is too low to pay all the costs, every patient pays less than cost, and homes have to cut staffing, or close. Nursing home employees, already paid less than similar workers in hospitals, go begging for raises year after year and turnover soars (see Veterans Home article.)

Patti Cullen, president and CEO of Care Providers of Minnesota, says many nursing homes are on the brink of closing. Some 52 have closed since 2001.

MN Job Watch Ameriprise Financial will lay off 300 workers at its Mpls HQ this week, reports the Strib, as well as more in branch offices. Ameriprise has 8,750 workers worldwide, with 5,700 in MN. Its recent acquisiton of H&R Block Financial Advisors is credited (?) with providing “an opportunity to remake our entire employee adviser force,” said Ameriprise spokesperson Benjamin Pratt.

Robbinsdale revisited Tuesday night, reports the Strib, the Robbinsdale school board voted to close Sandburg Middle School (Golden Valley), Pilgrim Lane Elementary (Plymouth), and Sunny Hollow Elementary (New Hope), in a bid to save $2 million a year. The board will hold separate hearings on each school in the coming weeks, but it’s basically a done deal. One teacher described the bottom line well:

“There is no good choice here,” said Beth Sharpe, president of the PTO at the Robbinsdale Spanish Immersion School and one of many speakers in the public comment portion of the meeting at district headquarters in New Hope. “All of them are difficult, and all are going to cause difficulty in the lives of our students.”

The district’s 12,500 students come from 12,500 Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, Crystal, Golden Valley, New Hope, Plymouth and Robbinsdale.

Let us not forget that there is a whole world out there beyond Minnesota and even beyond Washington:

Massacre in the name of the Lord In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army has killed more than 600 civilians and kidnapped hundreds of children since Christmas Eve. The LRA rampage included torching a church during a prayer vigil, gazing whole villages, rape, torture, mutilation and murder, according to gut-wrenching reports from BBC and Human Rights Watch. Uganda, DR Congo and South Sudan launched an offensive against the LRA in December, and the Central African Republic is trying to defend its border against LRA incursions.

BBC: Over 100,000 people have fled suspected LRA rebels marauding across hundreds of kilometres stretching from the Central African Republic through Sudan and into DR Congo. The LRA has been fighting in northern Uganda for two decades but is now based in DR Congo, most recently in the Garamba National Park. 


Radio Netherlands explains that the joint operation against the LRA, which is led by Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, “has only provoked retaliatory raids by Kony’s messianic sect,” adding:

In the past twenty years, the Ugandan conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and caused some two million to flee their homes. Both the Ugandan army and the LRA have been accused of systematic human rights abuses. Human rights organisations have accused government forces of torture, executions, rape and forced displacement. But these abuses pale in comparison to those carried out by the LRA.

Human Rights Watch agrees that the joint force had provided little protection to civilians, noting that “To date, Ugandan troops have rescued 25 people.”