Author Archives: Mary Turck

All recount, all the time After coverage of every challenged ballot and video of every minute of the State Canvassing Board, you might think that the public appetite for more recount coverage is sated. Not so. Now the three-judge panel hearing the Coleman challenge to the recount will allow one TV camera, one still photog, and one audio recorder. After The Uptake’s faithful recount coverage, I wonder who will provide the single TV camera for the court proceeding?

Getting a running start According to the New York Times, President Obama is expected to sign executive orders thursday, ordering Guantanamo and any remaining CIA secret prisons closed, and also ordering an end to “coercive interrogation methods.”

News Flash: House Republicans find root of all problems! House Republican Minority Leader Marty Seifert discussed MN’s status as a “welfare magnet” in a press conference yesterday, reports MPR’s Tim Pugmire. Siefert cites an analysis release by — well, actually, Marty Seifert — last August. The analysis showed that food stamp or welfare recipients used their EBT cards to make $10 million in out-of-state charges in 2007, and he thinks this must stop. He also wants to reduce welfare benefits for people who have lived in MN less than five years. State Senator Linda Berglin said that all welfare benefits paid by the state total only one percent of the state’s general funds, so she doesn’t think Seifert’s proposal will go very far in addressing the state’s $4.8 billion deficit.

The New York Times cites a different burden on state budgets, saying that state bills for Medicaid coverage for unemployed, uninsured residents are surging. The NYT notes increase of 5-10 percent in state Medicaid populations in 2008, with greater increases expected in the near future. According to the NYT:

Eligibility for the income-based program can vary widely by state. But at any one time last year, Medicaid was providing coverage to an average of 50 million people, or about one of every six in the United States. The cost of the program — $333 billion in 2007 — is shared by state and federal governments, with Washington roughly matching the spending approved by the states. The federal government currently picks up about 57 percent of the tab, eating up 7 percent of the federal budget, and the program is one of the largest drains on every state’s budget.

Where’s a daisy when you need one? She’s out, she’s in, she’s out, she’s in–reports on Caroline Kennedy and whether she has withdrawn from consideration for the NY Senate seat flew thick and fast Wednesday. Early reports confidently asserted they had reliable sources. As the day wore on, claims of reliability faded. From TPM:

And now check out this hilarious AP news alert, time stamped at 10:38 p.m. ET:

“Source: Caroline Kennedy remains in contest to fill Hillary Clinton’s NY Senate seat. (Corrects APNewsAlert with source saying Kennedy had withdrawn.)”

But as of Thursday morning–it appears that she’s out of the running.

Free computers, no studying required! An online tutoring program that promised free computer and internet access was a fraud, according to criminal charges against the Minneapolis mother and son who ran CyberStudy 101, reports Lora Pabst in the Strib. The two filed tax returns for more than 1900 people in 2001 and 2002, receiving more than $2 million in education tax credit payments. They bought computers f rom Kmart for $529, but never paid Kmart. The company had no instructors, and was not eligible for the reimbursement. Anyone who believes they may have been a victim of the fraud is asked to call the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at 651-293-3759.

Doc disclosure Park Nicollet Health Services now requires doctors, physician assistants, nurse midwives and physical therapists to publicly disclose all of their financial relationships with drug companies and medical device companies, reports Janet Moore in the Strib. Park Nicollet has more than 1,400 doctors and clinicians in 25 clinics and Methodist Hospital. Other health systems have much more limited disclosure requirements. Mayo makes disclosures only to individual patients, in contrast to Park Nicollet’s public website, and Allina says many of the docs who practice at its hospitals are not employees, so it can’t tell them to make disclosures. Really?

“I think that transparency is a terrific disinfectant for any conflicts, things that would interfere in the trusting relationship that patients depend on from our physicians and care teams,” said Dr. Samuel Carlson, Park Nicollet’s chief medical officer.

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.”

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.