News Day

“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 →

In St. Paul, Kira Trevino is missing since February 24 and believed dead. Police charged her husband with murdering her. The body of 16-year-old Anna Lynn Hurd was found in a Maplewood park last weekend. Her 17-year-old boyfriend has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Continue reading →

“Go to the back of the line” is one of the mantras of the current immigration debate, but few know what the line looks like. Continue reading →

The Star Tribune and Pioneer Press headlined Minnesota’s “D” rating on school reforms — but that rating could be a good thing. The bad grade came from Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and has nothing at all to do with how well Minnesota educates students. By most measures, Minnesota’s student achievement is among the best in the nation. The pattern of the StudentsFirst report is consistent: states with high student achievement get failing grades on its education “reform” rating. Continue reading →

UPDATED 6:20 p.m., 12/25/2012 – Christmas Eve — a time of peace, a time of good will, a time to handcuff and carry off to jail a 75-year-old American Indian leader who came downtown to shop and have a cup of coffee?  Continue reading →