Minneapolis / St. Paul Blog

By the whopping margin of 74-26, the U.S. Senate approved the disastrous new energy bill which passed the House yesterday. The bill now goes to President Bush, who has said he will sign it into law. Features of the bill hasten our path toward energy oligarchy and heighten the prospect of new wars over scarce resources. Read the grim details from the following press release from the Nader watchdog organization, Public Citizen.

An acoustic experiment testing the audibility of live classic rock in the urban environment has established that the song "Freebird," can be heard across a three mile-diameter in neutral wind conditions. Observation points for this St. Paul research project, titled "Rockin' Ribfest 2005," varied widely in altitude and topography and included the High Bridge, Cherokee Heights, the Wabasha Street Bridge, the Science Museum, and the Xcel Energy Center. The sound source was Jimmie Van Zant, whose amplification equipment was located on Harriet Island. (The question of why Harriet Island is called an island, when it is clearly connected to land, fell outside the perameters of Rockin' Ribfest 2005, though the subject bears further study.)

Data involving the song "Sweet Home Alabama," also played by Dr. Van Zant, were incomplete. None of the researchers involved in the experiment consumed any ribs.

Location: The bottom of Ramsey Hill in St. Paul, Tuesday night, 7:55 p.m. A bearded traveler stands at the traffic light, shouldering an old, external-frame backpack. He has the hollow look of a man who spends his time in places where no one else would want to be.

Above the wash of traffic, a command trumpets out of the megaphone on a St. Paul cop car: "You better not even be thinking of begging."

I blow through a red light. The cops don't say a word.

Would-be senatorial hopeful loses out to a pill-popping blowhard

If Arbitron ratings are any indication of Minnesota's changing colors, it would seem that our once-blue state is turning the hue of an ugly and painful recent bruise: bright purple in the center with edges of swelling red. According to a press release from Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates The Rush Limbaugh Show, Al Franken's Air America show has half the listeners as Rush Limbaugh's, and that's in the blue-blooded city of Minneapolis, about five minutes away from Franken's birthplace of St. Louis Park.

29,200 Minneapolitans are listening to the dull sound of Limbaugh repeatedly beating his chest and blasting "activists" on a daily basis, while only an average of 13,700 are tuning in to Franken's show. What's most perplexing about these numbers, however, is that when broken down by Minneapolitans age 25-54, Limbaugh brings in 14,100 local listeners, meaning that a huge chunk of his Minneapolis audience supposedly is either over 54 or under 25. Maybe it's Limbaugh's Club G'itmo gear that kids and young adults find so amusing: "Hey, kids! Let's reduce an unforgivable and shameful atrocity to a product for profit! It's the American way!"

Yet it's the awful, sex-infested video games, movies, television shows, and popular music that are turning our nation's coddled kids into a bunch of violent, detached drones who are so programmed by this evil they're capable of, say, finding things like abuse by American soldiers not only justified, but utterly hilarious--or even worse--having (gasp!) sex before marriage.

Libertarians do something funny

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that government officials may "take" land owned by private individuals and sell it to developers. If it hadn't been for the scary headlines generated by Sandra Day O'Connor's subsequent resignation, tracking the dogfight between pro-capital conservatives against constitutionalist conservatives sparked by the ruling, Kelo v. City of New London, might have been at least a little amusing. (Often the swing vote in recent years, O'Connor authored a sharp dissent to Kelo, leading some pundits to speculate that the case might have been the straw that drove her from the bench.)

We've got to hand it to the members of the Libertarian Party. Usually a humorless lot, they have conjured the perfect stunt to illustrate Kelo's absurdity:

With unemployment among single mothers up--predictably--welfare reform doesn't seem so successful

According to a study released this week by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, employment rates for single mothers lag far behind their married counterparts--and the gap is widening. The numbers put the lie to the notion that the 1996 federal welfare reform law has been a success.

It has been widely recognized that the strong labor market of the latter 1990s was a critically important complement to welfare reform. The success of welfare reform was in large part predicated on low-income single mothers spending more time in the paid labor market, and in the words of welfare expert Rebecca Blank, the program "got lucky." At the same time that policy changes were pushing single mothers into the job market, the unemployment rate was headed for its lowest level in 30 years. Thus, the demand for low-wage labor expanded more than quickly enough to meet the increased supply (which explains why these workers' wages rose as well).

As shown in the chart, however, employment of single parents has fallen markedly in recent years. In fact, their employment is down much more than that of married parents, suggesting that single mothers are facing a particularly challenging job market.

The short, to-the-point EPI report, which can be viewed here, doesn't note as much, but it's clear to virtually any working mother that the job market is only half of what's up here. The other half is the gutting of childcare funding in recent years--well over $100 million in Minnesota alone.

How is Mom supposed to keep that $7 an hour job when licensed care for just one of her kids easily tops $200 a week? That's a question Pawlenty, Bush, and other right-wing proponents of the Ownership Society have never even attempted to answer. It's terribly shortsighted, not least because in punishing single mothers for what the hawks assume is their licentiousness, they are in fact consigning a whole new generation to permanent residency in the very underclass they're trying to eliminate.

In Twin Cities media circles, taking potshots at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and parent company Knight Ridder is popular, if somewhat cruel sport. The paper has opened itself to a lot of legitimate criticisms in recent years. It has titled rightward, it has more or less abandoned coverage of Minneapolis and it has slapped around its employees with an unseemly zeal.

All that said, the Pi Press has produced plenty of good reporters. Take Hannah Allam. Two years ago, Allam was chasing crime stories in the suburbs of the Saintly City, a righteous if not entirely thrilling gig. Then she rolled the dice and accepted a job with the Knight-Ridder bureau in Baghdad, where she won accolades and eventually rose to the position of bureau chief.

A few weeks back, she caused a stir in the blogosphere when she excoriated Pi Press editorial page writer Mark Yost for his boneheaded attacks on the Baghdad press corps.

This week, Allam announced that she would be leaving Iraq for Cairo. And who can blame her? A few observervations from her interview with Editor and Publisher:

"When I first started, there was a real collegial press corp," she explained. "We knew Iraq was dangerous, but not for us. In the old days, we could travel, the coverage could be comprehensive and complete and you could have a life. Go out to karaoke at night or to parties."

But, in the past few months, Allam said the atmosphere had dramatically changed for journalists. "It suddenly came that you couldn't travel," she said. "You begin to wonder if you can give your readers a full picture. It is extremely difficult and not as much fun."

Or is the mayor just happy to see you?

For all the things Mayor R.T. Rybak will say about his accomplishments, it should be noted that at least one of them is true: He has managed to steer the city of Minneapolis during a time of financial crisis.

"This is the sixth balanced budget I've had to deliver in four years," Rybak crowed during Thursday's proposed-budget address, a familiar refrain of his that is, in fact, a fact. Two of those budgets came under dire circumstances: One was deigned to clean up a shortfall that the outgoing mayor and city council members left for their successors, the other came about because of cuts to state-funded Local Government Aid passed down during Governor Tim Pawlenty's first budget balancing shenanigans.

At the end of the recent legislative session, some $5.85 million of LGA was restored to Minneapolis. Finally, Rybak beamed in front of a packed council chambers, there was some wiggle room for 2006. "This is a budget I've wanted to deliver for four years," hizzoner said.

Other city leaders, however, did not share his enthusiasm.

THESE DAYS

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf joined the Bush administration's war on terrorism and publicly turned against the Taliban immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. But Afghan officials allege that Taliban and allied fighters who fled to Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 are learning new, more lethal tactics from the Pakistani military at numerous training bases.

Congressman Tom DeLay slipped a $1.5 billion giveaway to the oil industry, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas into the energy bill.

CIA officials used a sledgehammer handle to beat various prisoners in Iraq, and one official, whose name is classified, would often brag about his abuse of prisoners, according to testimony in a closed session of a military hearing.

MINNESOTA BLOG OF THE DAY

Check out a very special episode of OpenDoors in which Aaron works through his problem of hating everyone else with the name Aaron. Two hankies.

TIME WASTERS

The Washington Post declares that podcasting has jumped the couch, noting forays into the former grassroots technology by Ted Koppel and the "Queer Eye" guys.

Lingerie for cows

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

"The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I'll kill myself. All we need is one more liar."

-- octogenerian UPI reporter Helen Thomas, speaking to TheHill.com

"I screamed and slammed on the brakes, I couldn't believe it. It's very strange to see my cleavage the size of a brontosaurus. My breasts were huge."

-- actress Scarlett Johansson, upon seeing a billboard for her new movie The Island

"The president's position is not pro-science today. I'm someone who is pro-research, pro-hope, and I'm also pro-life."

-- Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), on stem-cell research in Roll Call

A Q&A with Lila Lipscomb of Fahrenheit 9/11

In April 2003, Lila Lipscomb learned that her eldest son, a Black Hawk door gunner in the U.S. armed forces, had been shot down and killed in Iraq. When we meet her in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, she's undergoing a radical change in her personal politics. Once a flag-flying patriot and backer of the Bush administration, Lipscomb is on her way to becoming a flag-flying, high-profile critic of GWB, his administration, and their war.

Since the premiere of Moore's film, Lipscomb has logged more than 300 appearances and interviews. And its in this capacity, as a member of the peace organization Military Families Speak Out, that the 51-year old will be speaking on Saturday and Sunday, July 30-31 at the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar in St. Paul.