News Day

Map from U.S. EPA website

Which one scares you more — a bomber or a fertilizer plant? Continue reading →

My friend wrote: “So is he in any respect the President people supporting him in 2008 and 2012 expected? What did you expect from O’B in 2008 and 2012?”

I am not sure how to answer these questions. Continue reading →

April 20, 2013 – Last night and this morning, everybody’s talking about Miranda rights and why the feds did or didn’t, should or shouldn’t read them to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old arrested as one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Some of my Facebook friends, and a lot of others, think that it’s outrageous that the feds are “denying him his Miranda rights.” Not so. Continue reading →

Get suspended in ninth grade, and your chances of dropping out of school double, according to a report issued this week by the UCLA Civil Rights Project. That’s true even though “the vast majority of suspensions are for minor infractions of school rules, such as  disrupting class, tardiness, and dress code violations, rather than for serious violent or criminal behavior.” Forty years ago, suspension rates for African American students were almost double the rates for white students — and the disparity has gotten much worse since then. Continue reading →

“Third major oil spill in a week: Shell pipeline breaks in Texas” trumpeted the headline that several friends posted to my Facebook page. My first reaction was outrage, but my second was skepticism. Who is this source called RT? Why haven’t I heard about a major oil spill from any of the myriad other news organizations that I follow? And which of the figures in the short report was accurate — 700 barrels, 50 barrels, 60 barrels or “no evidence”? Continue reading →

“The land belongs to itself. If anything we belong to it…we borrow our lives from it.” Planting in the Dust

More than 25 years ago, I drove around Minnesota with Laura Clark, as she performed “Planting in the Dust.” The play, written by Nancy Paddock, focused on a young couple at the beginning of their career struggling with an ethical dilemma: whether to adopt agricultural conservation practices that would preserve the land, but at the risk of losing money needed to keep the farm.  Continue reading →

Maybe that’s not quite what Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake!”) would say today, but oil is as much king in North America today as Louis XVI was in France way-back-when. The current royal demands include the not only approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, but also nearly doubling the capacity of an existing tar sands pipeline that runs across northern Minnesota to Wisconsin. Continue reading →

Black water from a farmer’s faucet near Willmar, receding water in White Bear Lake, and a dry city well in Hibbing were among the danger signs cited in a recent Star Tribune article on Minnesota’s water. In the land of ten thousand lakes, we are losing water. Continue reading →

I remember paying $65 a month rent for one of my first apartments, which I shared with a 70-something-year-old nun named Sister Mary Edward. We also shared the apartment, involuntarily, with several very large rats, who did not pay rent, but enthusiastically gobbled up all the D-Con we could afford to feed them. I don’t know how much that Chicago apartment costs today, but shocking Minnesota rental figures just hit my in-box this week, courtesy of the Minnesota Housing Partnership. Continue reading →

Not only do they drive on the wrong side of the road —  they actually require that local government “must ensure accessible, affordable care ‘delivered flexibly at a range of high-quality settings’, including schools and nurseries.”

Imagine that! Continue reading →