Monthly Archives: January 2009

INAUGURATION DAY! And that’s the big news all over the world. Lots of people are live-blogging, but not me. I’m settling in at Golden Thyme to enjoy the inauguration, so this will be a short post.

St. Paul snark Hometown PiPress reported this morning that there was a fire on Grand Avenue last night about 11 p.m. Almost 9 a.m. now, and they still haven’t furnished an address for the fire. As commenters noted, Grand Avenue is more than four miles long and has lots of apartment buildings. Someone needs a refresher course in the 5 Ws – who, what, when, WHERE, and why.

Everybody went to Washington Or so it seems, judging from lots of hometown-folks-in-DC coverage. Take a look at our TC Daily Planet article for lots of links. The dean of Minnesota’s delegation might be former VP Walter Mondale, or 87-year-old civil rights veteran and Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder columnist Matthew Little.

Other stories? Check back later … I’m going to celebrate now.

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.

Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, God and Tim Pawlenty Pulling out the rhetorical stops, T-Paw invoked the big guys and Minnesota icons from lutefisk to loons and from pond hockey to Purple Rain. He jovially called on us to recognize all that we have in common as we gather around our kitchen tables, “trading real-life stories of how almost every one of us has hit a deer with our car.” (Not so much those of us in metro MN, Guv.)

And then he got down to business. Bottom line: No new taxes (surprise!), cut business taxes by half, cut state spending on health and human services. Oh – and for you bleeding heart liberals out there, has he got a deal: increase spending on schools, but only where students are demonstrating achievement.

But wait — that’s not all. T-Paw proposes a wage freeze for all public employees and tuition caps for colleges. The Twin Cities Daily Planet has full text, video and a place for you to put in your two cents worth.

Burn, baby, burn The MN Public Utility Commission approved Big Stone II’s transmission lines, clearing the road for more coal burning and sparking an angry response from MN Senator Ellen Anderson that, “This new polluting coal plant will send us back to the 20th century with 50 years of additional global warming emissions (4.6 millions more tons per year).” At MPR, Stephanie Hemphill reports that the PUC “brushed aside” the consultant review that it had ordered, contenting itself with protecting consumers pocketbooks by conditioning Otter Tail Power rate increases. Construction won’t begin for at least a year, and environmentalists are considering appeals.

Vitamins go better with Coke? The Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest sued Coca-Cola Company to stop its “deceptive claims” that the sugar water it markets as VitaminWater is actually good for you. The Strib publishes an AP story that details Coke’s acquisition of VitaminWater in 2007 and the ensuing boost to corporate sales, even as cola sales slid lower. Maybe they should just go back to the slightly-cocaine-based, feel-good formula that gave the company its name back in 1885.

MN Job Watch Nationally, reports AP:

The Labor Department said Thursday that first-time requests for unemployment insurance jumped to a seasonally adjusted 524,000 last week, above analysts’ expectations of 500,000 new claims. The increase is partly due to a flood of requests from newly laid-off people who delayed filing claims over the holidays, a Labor Department analyst said.

Minnesota is slower in reporting jobless figures. December’s numbers are scheduled for release next week, on Thursday.

Wal-Mart will pay the MN Department of Labor and Industry about $14 million, according to the Strib, as part of the $54.3 million settlement it reached after “Dakota County District Judge Robert King Jr. ruled July 1, following a nonjury trial, that Wal-Mart broke labor laws more than 2 million times and ordered the retailer to give employees $6.5 million in back pay.”

“National treasure” ailing BBC reports that some call Steve Jobs a “national treasure” and “a visionary of the first order,” as the Apple co-founder announced that he’s stepping down as CEO for six months because of continuing health problems, due to unknown health problems . He stepped down for six months in 2004 to battle pancreatic cancer, but came back strong. NYT blogs say that, in the worst case, “Steve Jobs can be replaced, even if he can’t be duplicated. There are lots of ways to run successful and innovative companies. And Apple couldn’t be in better shape, financially or in its public image, to withstand a change.”

Reminding us of why and how much we love our Macs, BBC reports today that “a virulent Windows worm” has hit three million computers, and counting.

Hell freezing over In St. Paul, reports the PiPress, two men died because of subzero temperatures. You may already have heard that a man sleepwalking in his underwear froze to death in Wisconsin, but the Strib has more on the story: he was evidently taking the popular sleep aid, Ambien, which “has also has been linked to hundreds of cases of sleepwalking, sleep-driving and even sleep-shoplifting.”

Cold and ice (including black ice on city streets and freeways, caused by refreeze of exhaust fumes on the pavement) contributed to hundreds of crashes statewide Thursday, reports the PiPress. And hundreds of others throughout the week. I’ve been lucky (so far, knock on wood) — only a bumper damaged and not even an air bag deployed on Wednesday.

Strib bankruptcy As the Strib slides into bankruptcy, I’m thinking more gloomy thoughts about the future of journalism. Like democracy, journalism does not happen in a vacuum. It is nurtured by the participation of all of us. Its future rests in all of our hands. For another take from The Uptake, see Mike McIntee’s interview with MinnPost’s David Brauer.

The Sunday Leader founder, editor and editorial director Lasantha Wickrematunge was gunned down January 8. In a poignant editorial published in his newspaper after his death, assassinated journalist Wickrematunge firmly asserts that “When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.” His lengthy farewell editorial says, in part:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last. …

I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most of them are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. …

In closing, he quotes Pastor Martin Niemoller:

People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemoller. [Imprisoned for his opposition to the Nazi regime in Germany, Niemoller wrote:]

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: The Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.

R.T. runs again Mayor R.T. Rybak announced yesterday that he will run for a third term. He did not rule out a run for governor in 2010. The DFL endorsing convention is scheduled for May 16, after March 3 precinct caucuses. Rybak has run, and won, twice without DFL endorsement. Bob Miller, director of the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, announced his candidacy earlier in the year. Numerous candidates for city council have also announced, so the March 3 caucuses should be lively.

Lenders beware St. Paul and Baltimore will head up a new initiative to share information, coordinate legal strategies, and pressure lenders to be “part of the solution” to foreclosed and vacant housing, says St. Paul City Attorney John Choi. The Strib reports:

St. Paul has seen the number of foreclosures increase from 503 in 2005 to 1,819 in 2007 to 2,289 in 2009. The number of vacant buildings rose above a record 2,000 last year, as well.

Big Stone or no Big Stone? The fate of the Big Stone II coal plant in South Dakota comes before the Minnesota Public Utility Commission (PUC) tomorrow (January 15), notes the Minnesota Independent. More than a year ago, MN Senator Ellen Anderson denounced the Big Stone II proposal in the Twin Cities Daily Planet:

Big Stone II would operate alongside the old Big Stone coal plant, and greatly expand its capacity. More burning coal will mean more carbon dioxide emissions.

Minnesota’s 2007 energy bill sets clear goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to a level 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2015, to a level at least 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and to a level at least 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

You don’t meet goals like that by building expensive new 50-year coal plants.

United to save? Minnesota and Wisconsin governors signed an agreement to share unidentified services in order to help with budget deficits, reports the PiPress. They said that joining in bulk purchases of items such as road salt, bulldozers and food for prisons could save millions. No specific commitments were made, but both governors directed agency heads to look for savings. Minnesota’s budget deficit for the biennium is estimated at $4.8 billion and Wisconsin’s at $5.4 billion.

Politicizing Justice The Department of Justice was so politicized under King George II that Bradley Schlozman, a senior official and acting head of the Civil Rights Division, lauded new hires who were members of the rightwing Federalist Society as “the team” and “ideological comrades,” and sought to hire RTAs — “right-thinking Americans.” He also said he liked his coffee “Mary Frances Berry style – black and bitter.” Berry, an African American, chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1993-2004.

All this and more in the Department of Justice report TPM Muckraker, which has followed the case closely, reports that Schlozman will not be prosecuted for either his violations of law in politicizing DOJ hiring or for his perjury when testifying about his practices.

Attention deficit? “How does a guy on the fast track to be Treasury secretary fail to pay $34,000 worth of federal taxes ($43,200, including interest), or forget to check on the immigration status of a house cleaner — the same sort of upstairs-downstairs slip-up that has tripped up other top-drawer prospects on their way to top jobs here?” asks Maureen Dowd. And how did the Obama vetting process miss these red flags?

The Washington Post explains that “Geithner told the committee that he had failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes because he mistakenly believed that his employer at the time, the International Monetary Fund, was deducting those taxes from his paycheck” and that the housekeeper was a legal resident of the United States, even though Geithner did not have proper documentation of that fact.

MN Job WatchAs St. Paul faces budget cuts, the city will ask workers to take voluntary retirements, leaves of absence and reduced hours, hoping to avoid at least some layoffs, reports the Strib. The city already has a hiring freeze in place, as well as a salary freeze for its 70 non-union workers.

ING, the Dutch financial services firm, will lay off 100 Minnesota workers by the end of the quarter, reports the PiPress, part of a 750-person U.S. cutback. ING will have about 1200 Minnesota employees after the cuts. Marshall-based Schwan Food has cut 52 more jobs, for a total of 130 in the last four months, reports AP. Almost 190,000 Minnesotans are currently unemployed, reports MPR, and that is an increased burden for the state’s Dislocated Worker Program, which expects to enroll nearly 19,000 people during this fiscal year, a 20 percent increase over last year. New applications for unemployment benefits exceeded 33,000 in December, and the state’s unemployment comp fund is running dry.

Health insurance fraud by … health insurer? UnitedHealth Group has run a scam on doctors and patients by setting “usual and customary” payment rates to out-of-network providers too low by “anywhere from 10 percent to 28 percent for certain claims in New York state,” according to an AP report on the settlement that will have UnitedHealth paying $50 million to set up an independent “usual and customary payment” database run by a yet-to-be-identified nonprofit organization.

[New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo] said the databases were riddled with conflicts of interest. He noted that many health plans across the country use Ingenix data to determine usual and customary rates.

Ingenix, in turn, received its data from those insurers. He called that system a “closed loop” that left out consumers.

UnitedHealth regrets that conflicts of interest “were inherent” in the databases, said Mitch Zamoff, general counsel for its subsidiary UnitedHealthcare. …

The new database will include a Web site that allows consumers to learn in advance how much they may be reimbursed for common out-of-network services in their area.

A court case last summer resulted in agreement by California-based Health Net Inc. to pay $215 million to patients who received low reimbursement for out-of-network care. Health Net also used UnitedHealth’s Ingenix database.

Local hero Matthew Little With Martin Luther King Day approaching, the Twin Cities Daily Planet talks with Matthew Little, Minnesota civil rights veteran and columnist for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. At 87, Little saw the entire sweep of the civil rights movement and led a Minnesota delegation to the March on Washington in 1963.

Liberian adoptions suspended The Strib reports that a Minnesota Liberian adoption agency has been suspended by the Liberian government. The West African Children Support Network (WACSN), founded by Liberian-born Maria Luyken of Eden Prairie, has handled more than a hundred adoptions. Canada halted all Liberian adoptions last year because of concerns about fraud, and

According to the Strib, WACSN does not have a Minnesota adoption agency license, and has not filed required charitable agency reports or tax returns.

WACSN charges $8,000 for a Liberian adoption and works exclusively with “devout Born Again Christian Families,” according to its website, http://www.wacsn.org. It says Luyken immigrated to Minnesota in 1979, and began charitable work in Liberia in 1995, and adoptions in 2003.

This morning, the WACSN website displayed only an “under construction” message. A November BBC report focused on fraudulent Liberian adoptions and children being taken by agencies and given for adoption abroad without the consent of their parents or other relatives, including one baby girl adopted through WACSN.

Gaza thread In Common Dreams, Uri Avnery writes:

Nearly seventy years ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

BBC reports that fighting in Gaza intensified with more than 60 Israeli airstrikes overnight, and that the total number of deaths is 13 Israelis and nearly 1000 Palestinians. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon joined Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in seeking a way to negotiate for peace.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher concealed his pre-RNC operations from other law enforcement officials, including the St. Paul city attorney’s office, according to reports published January 13 in a PiPress blog. He now has asked the Ramsey County Board for $300,000 in convention costs, including money spent on agents and informants criss-crossing the country during the year before the convention. The expenditures could not be billed to the $50 million in federal convention financing, since they were secret.

As the RNC Commission presents its report to the St. Paul City Council on January 14, Fletcher’s strange secrecy is not the only unanswered question about law enforcement operations during the RNC. (The RNC Commission, headed by former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy Luger, was appointed by the city of St. Paul to review police planning and tactics, but not accusations of police misconduct.)

Politics In Minnesota (PIM) notes the PR manipulation surrounding police actions and RNC prosecutions:

[N]o one has ever proven the buckets Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher presented as ‘urine’ were actually urine, even though it has become a strongly held perception, underpinning most claims in favor of law enforcements’ conduct during the RNC. (Authorities like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley have regularly accused demonstrators of flinging bodily waste since the 1968 Chicago DNC… it’s something of a classic messaging frame, and it’s worked well so far.) Everyone’s kind of forgotten that Fletcher also claimed bike tires would be used to fling rocks…

(Positioned squarely in the middle of the Minnesota political road, PIM is published by Republican Sarah Janecek, though the about page says a “lefty” balance is provided by Dan Feidt, Peter Bartz-Gallagher, and Andy French.)

PIM also noted that FBI informant Brandon Darby, “who bragged about his actions in an unusual public letter, has sparked nationwide criticism of what’s seen as a law enforcement pattern of synthesizing terrorism-style cases by sending in informants to stir people up, in the classic COINTELPRO style.”

That “classic COINTELPRO style” can also be gleaned from documents posted on Wikileaks.org. Wikileaks publishes secret documents:

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. Our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by all types of people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

Wikileaks posted a Powerpoint presentation titled Special Event Planning 2008 Republican National Convention. According to PIM, the document “was evidently presented somewhere by Terri Smith, Branch Director for Response, Recovery and Mitigation at the Minnesota Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.” PIM goes on to observe:

The most illuminating slide shows the layout of the ‘Multi-Agency Communications Center’ (MACC). In particular, it reveals that the Pentagon’s new Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, had more seats than anyone else; fans of government intrigue will love the idea that this new, increasingly domestic-oriented military command had the most chairs. (According to the Army Times, no tinfoil rag, they are training troops for quelling “civil unrest and crowd control,” Posse Comitatus notwithstanding.)

While prosecutors focus on protesters, the danger posed by militarization of law enforcement slides right under the radar. Media attention to the military and law enforcement issues is easily distracted. As we have noted before, “At a minimum, raising the questions lets people know that the full story has not been told. But the mainstream media has an opportunity to do much more. They have the opportunity — and the resources — to reclaim journalism’s role of finding and speaking truth, rather than acting as stenographers for power.”