Minneapolis / St. Paul Blog

Believe the children: Notorious Watergate source was former FBI official W. Mark Felt--just as Carl Bernstein's kid assured fellow summer-campers back in 1988!

MSNBC today reports that Deep Throat, the anonymous government official who provided leads to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the height of the WashPost's Watergate coverage circa 1973-74, is outing himself in a July Vanity Fair feature. W. Mark Felt, a 91-year-old former FBI official, tells the mag that he was indeed DT.

Score one for Jacob Bernstein, the son of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron--who, at the age of eight or nine, told a fellow inmate at the Hampton Day School Camp on Long Island that "Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he's someone in the FBI. I'm 100% sure." It's all detailed in this now-confirmed 1999 Tim Noah piece from Slate.

Say--wouldn't it be great if there were a way to hydrate and support our troops at the same time?

Remember the 1970s-era peacenik bumpersticker that lamented, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber"? Thirty years on, the US has not done so well on the first count, but it's progressing by leaps and bounds on the second. Since the invasion of Iraq, it's become commonplace for families and church/community groups to stage fundraisers and pass the collection plate to buy combat necessities such as body armor for soldiers serving there.

Naturally there's a place at the table for commerce as well. Now comes Patriot Water, the brainchild of Sandstone, Minnesota entrepreneur Mark Shaffett. As the press release puts it, "More and more people are making it a habit to stay well?hydrated as well as finding an alternative option to support a greater cause." Yes, how true. The hook: Shaffett will donate "a portion of the proceeds" from his bottled water sales to a group called Operation Interdependence that sends packages to soldiers.

From Sunday's Independent (London), bad news for frequent fliers: You're killing us all!

Last week Michael Tortorello posted about the Wall Street Journal's increasing restiveness over the state of the housing market, and on Monday the Washington Post's Michael Powell chimed in with more bad housing news:

Foreclosure rates rose in 47 states in March, according to Foreclosure.com, an online foreclosure listing service. The rates in Florida, Texas and Colorado are more than twice the national average. Even in New York City and Boston, where real estate markets are white-hot, foreclosures are rising in working-class neighborhoods....

Should the nation's housing bubbles deflate, as many economists and federal officials expect, the foreclosures could prefigure a national crisis. Americans now shoulder record levels of housing debt -- more than 8 percent of homeowners spend at least half their income on their mortgage. [Read the rest.]

Culprits examined by Powell: Adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages that get people into houses they can't afford, catastrophic medical expenses. Unindicted co-conspirator: all the home-equity drawdowns during the recent era of high prices and low interest rates, which have propped up consumer spending and piled on additional debt that could turn into a "negative equity" epidemic if the market declines.

It's too late for the kids--save the canines

"People will argue that little Johnny has greater needs than Fido. But Fido is part of the family, too, and his needs are just as great as Johnny's."

--Eden Prairie parks director Bob Lambert on the pressing need for more off-leash dog parks, quoted in Sunday's Star Tribune.

Welcome, former Babelogians, to our new home at The Blotter...

[THESE DAYS]

"Slime worlds" may prove excellent targets for the search for extraterrestrial life, according to new calculations. The research suggests future space missions may be able to detect the signature of microbial life around as many as 200 nearby stars.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicts that more people will live in rural settings, with technology enabling them to do almost anything they like, be it work or play, without leaving their homes.

Russell Simmons and Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, are battling over Minister Louis Farrakhan and Malik Shabazz's affiliation with the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March in D.C.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island residents rank at the bottom of the list when it comes to driving skills.

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[MINNESOTA BLOG OF THE DAY]

Adam, Kimberly, John, Josh, and Lynn make up This Is A Gang And I'm In It.

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[TIME WASTERS]

The one or two fans of UK cuisine out there may enjoy a super-sized Scotch Egg made with an ostrich ovum.

Two cats using a toilet

Dead Monkey Comics presents a little animation on what actually happens when you open those "Want a bigger penis?" emails. It's not pretty, but it's funny.

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[FREEDOM OF SPEECH]

"Their dirty little secret is the repetitive strain injuries. Starbucks is not some old-world European coffeehouse. We face an extraordinary demand every day, while an epidemic of understaffing requires us to work at lightning speed."

Fort Snelling's VA Medical Center is rehabilitating brain-damaged soldiers. But that's only half the story.

Sunday's PiPress featured a lengthy story about Army Staff Sgt. Eric Cagle, a soldier so severely brain damaged in Iraq he spends four hours a day in intensive therapy at the VA Hospital in Minneapolis. It's a horrific tale on it's own, but while the writer was cheerleading the "better armor" and improved survival rate of the war, he failed to stress that Cagle is one of approximately 2,400 soldiers of the Iraq war suffering from a traumatic brain injury.

On top of that, more than half of the brain-damaged soldiers brought to Fort Snelling were injured by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and there's no mention of the fact that the Defense Department was ill-prepared for guerilla warfare and street-to-street combat. It's been more than two years since the war began, and the trucks and Humvees still aren't properly equipped with enough armor to protect the soldiers from IED attacks. While some soldiers might survive certain attacks because of improved body armor (improved since Vietnam, that is), there are plenty of soldiers injured because vehicles are not properly armored. And when attempting to ascertain why there's a high percentage of brain injuries with this war (as compared to the mass casualties of Vietman), better body armor shouldn't even be taken into consideration since it's only designed to protect a person's torso and not their head.

A few other facts about the increase in brain injuries caused by IEDs and the Army's lack of preparation:

1. Of the 79 soldiers who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom in May, 35 were killed in an IED attack.

2. IEDs injure more soldiers in Iraq than any other form of warfare, including blasts, shrapnel, and gunshot wounds.

3. From March 2003 to March 31st 2005, 3,985 injured troops were brought to Walter Reed. ( Two-thirds of them suffered a severe brain injury.)

4. Poorly armored Humvees and trucks have resulted in one-fifth to one-half of the troop deaths and injuries in Iraq.

Click here to read soldiers' stories about being forced to create "Hillbilly Armor."

Moody's downgrades American Express Financial spinoff

Forget the numbers. I have no concrete explanation for why Moody's Investors Service today downgraded the debt rating for Minneapolis-based American Express Financial Corp. I have no pretense that anyone cares.

But I feel compelled to point out that the investment group's recent decision to change its name to "Ameriprise Financial" is an offense against the language. The spinoff, which will be a Fortune 500 company with 2.5 million clients and $400 billion under management, will soon own a blank non-word for its identity. Are they renting out cars? Are they operating a new arm of the right-wing don't-think tank the American Enterprise Institute? As a non-certified financial analyst, I would personally advise them to shitcan that label, and any names like it (Ameriprise Certificate Company, Ameriprise Auto & Home, Ameriprise Trust Company) before the brand's August 1 launch.

Alas, the more likely possibility is that Ameriprise will soon be joining Minnesota's other corporate chameleons in the thick annals of moronic nomenclature. I can already imagine the summer softball tournament between Ameriprise Financial and Xcel Energy (formerly Northern States Power) and CenterPoint Energy (Minnegasco). Does Xcel do anything other than sell power in the northern states? What is the "center" of CenterPoint? Should we really trust our power grid to a group of people who cannot find the space key?

Singing the national anthem near third base: VocalEssence (formerly the Plymouth Music Series).

Debut Column from Strib's Long-Awaited Conservative Columnist Reveals that Conservatives Don't Like Taxes

Several observations from the City Pages newsroom on Katherine Kersten's first Star Tribune metro section column, in which the former Center for the American Experiment policy hawk explains to Archbishop Harry Flynn that the poor are his problem, and not society's:

* Kersten has apparently managed to solve the writerly problem of moving from right-wing op-ed commentator to metro columnist by remaining a right-wing op-ed commentator. So much for Strib political editor D.J. Tice's "boot camp."

* Longtime Strib staffers with vibrant, context-rich, culturally relevant stories to tell rarely get 1,000 words (one reason that even when the place sucks up real talent, we hardly ever see vibrant, context-rich, culturally relevant stories).

* Memo to Gyllenhall and the high-concept team: If you are redesigning the modern newspaper to seem less like the musings of liberal pointyheads and more like the currency of regular ol' folks, it's probably best to avoid the master's thesis approach.

* Poor Katherine, her author photo looks like Margaret Hamilton after a visit to Cheri Pierson Yecke's hairdresser.

But don't take our word for it, read it for yourself.

Last year, USA Today examined the political donations made by the owners of major professional sports franchises. Using public records, the paper found that the 153 lords of big sport--in other words, the owners of NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and NASCAR teams--pumped approximately $14.6 million into the last federal election cycle.

Given the tax bracket occupied by said folk, it's no great surprise where most of that money went: Approximately 83 percent,  according to USA Today, found its way into the coffers of Republican candidates or causes.

Zygmunt Wilf, the New Jersey shopping mall magnate and new owner of the Minnesota Vikings, appears to be  something of an exception to the trend. Since '98, according to the website opensecrets.org, Wilf made about $35,000 in political donations, mainly to center and left center Democrats. In the 2002 cycle, Wilf gave to just three candidates. Among the donations: $2,000 to the late Paul Wellstone

By contrast, former Viking owner Red McCombs has been both much more prolific and more conservative in his giving habits. Since 1998, McCombs donated about $267,000, almost exclusively to GOP candidates and conservative PACs.