March 9, 2008 - March 15, 2008

« March 2, 2008 - March 8, 2008 | Main | March 16, 2008 - March 22, 2008 »

Vote buttons available now for Best of the Twin Cities

Filed under: City Pages

Want to win our Readers Poll for the annual Best Of issue? Of course you do. Combat the itchy clicking fingers of competing individuals or establishments by downloading these buttons for your website. Use 'em how you see fit. they're after the jump.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 14, 2008 11:13 AM | Comments (1)

 

Breakfast of Champions: 3/14

Filed under: Breakfast of Champions

South by Southwest coverage is advancing inexorably, like a towering glacier. But a really fast glacier.

DAILY DISH: WHAT'S NEW AROUND THE SITE

Sarah Askari files an on-site report from SXSW, where she catches a series of acts including locals Knife World. Village Voice Media's group blog has more, including capsule reviews of Cloud Cult and Tapes 'n Tapes.

Freelance photographer Darin Bark traveled to SXSW with locals The Pines, and caught their show on the way Austin. The images are here. St. Paul's Red House Records had their showcase event at SXSW yesterday, documented by our slideshow. You'll also see some slideshows from national acts appearing in the sidebar. along with For more photos and reviews, try the group blog, where you can see Lemmy, Moby, and ... OK, do you really need to see any more than Lemmy?

Anarchists with tasers. It's like I'm back in Eugene all of a sudden. Except this announcement in advance of the Republican National Convention is probably satire. Right? Right?

Beth Walton updates her profile of two soldiers with a new post about hundreds of antiwar veterans traveling to Washington, D.C. in an effort to end the war in Iraq.

Minnesota cops are pledging not to make September's RNC look like Seattle's WTO riots of yesteryear.

Got a hangover? Hey, who doesn't? James Norton has the cure.

BRAIN CANDY

It's Friday, and that means we check out the five most popular stories, slideshows and blog posts of the past week. These numbers are from last Wednesday through this past Tuesday.

TOP FIVE STORIES
Jesus Weekend
Strip Club
Winter Soldiers
Baldies
Adoption malpractice

TOP FIVE SLIDESHOWS
Naked Sushi
Winter bluegrass
The Hives
Adoption malpractice
Sia

TOP FIVE BLOG POSTS
Naked Sushi
Novak & Pawlenty
Gene Simmons Sex Tape
Conjoined Twins
Strip Club

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 14, 2008 4:22 AM | Comments (0)

 

NYPD blues: St. Paul cops reject 2004 RNC tactics

Filed under: St. Paul

This week's Village Voice examines police preparations for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The New York weekly notes that local cops are pledging to avoid the heavy handed tactics of the NYPD in 2004. But the article also points out that the St. Paul Police Department is purchasing 230 tasers--one for every officer on patrol--in time for the September gathering. It further notes complaints from anti-war activists that the city has been slow to issue demonstration permits. Still SPPD spokesman Tom Walsh is promising respectful treatment for protesters:

So far, the run-up to the 2008 convention is mellower than that for the 2004 confab. Although Walsh acknowledges that St. Paul police have been in regular contact with NYPD officials to get advice on "general plans," he says he doesn't know the details. But he does tell the Voice that Minnesota cops aren't planning mass arrests like the 1,800 made in New York City—more than 1,600 of which were dismissed without any charges being filed. "To my knowledge," Walsh adds, there are no plans to set up a mass-detention facility. In 2004, the NYPD used a former bus depot off the West Side Highway to detain RNC protesters for more than two days before they were brought into court.

As for pre-convention surveillance and infiltration—two tactics vigorously embraced by New York City officials in the summer of 2004—Walsh demurs on the details, but insists that the St. Paul Police Department doesn't have the money or the resources to spy on and infiltrate organizations (most of them benign) all over the country, the way the NYPD did.

"I'm not going to characterize their approach as being too heavy-handed," Walsh says. "I'm just saying we're taking an approach that is different, and it is a little more open."

Of course if the St. Paul cops really do intend to spy on protesters and conduct mass arrests during the RNC, Walsh probably wouldn't admit such plans to the press. Only time will tell.

Posted by Paul Demko at March 13, 2008 5:51 PM | Comments (0)

 

Shouts of wrongdoing: will veterans's protests against the wars be heard?

Filed under: Iraq

Hundreds of veterans will travel to Washington, D.C. this weekend to speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to expose what Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other peace groups are calling “the human consequences” of failed U.S. military strategy and war policy in the Middle East.

“We broke it, we bought it,” says former army specialist Steve Mortillo in a graphic IVAW video released this week. “But, we’re buying it with American lives. Just what do you think the purchase price is for that damage?"

"There is no forgiveness in my book for someone who sits here in America and orders Americans into battle to die and makes money off of it and profits hand over fist and lies through their teeth to keep it going. I mean at some point it becomes enough.”

IVAW has posted online a short, graphic film that includes video and photographs of the war taken by active duty soldiers to generate interest. It’s worth watching--if you can stomach the gore. Fair warning: by "graphic," we mean a realistic depiction of war, including bloody children, blown apart heads, screaming, grieving crowds and the dead bodies of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers.

In the words of former Marine Corporal Jason Washburn, who was instructed to evaluate a town considered an insurgent stronghold after a U.S. military air strike:

We rolled through there and I didn’t see anything that I could identify as an enemy combatant. There were dead women, children, men all over the place, homes completely destroyed… One of the things that stood out in my mind was the torso that was hanging from a street sign. It was just some kid, you know. Nobody had weapons; there was nothing like that anywhere. We basically reported it as total destruction, but a victory on our side.

I just couldn’t understand how that could be so when we were supposed to be there to liberate these people and we were just destroying them.

Winter Soldier testimony, including sessions on “Corporate Pillaging and Military Contractors,” “the Dehumanization of the Enemy” and “Aims of the Global War on Terror: the Political, Legal, and Economic Context of Iraq and Afghanistan” will be streamed online and broadcast on radio outlets starting Thursday, March 13, continuing through the weekend.

Winter Soldier Two is modeled after a Vietnam G.I. resistance movement in 1971. Initially ignored by the mainstream media, soldier testimony at the time brought legitimacy to the antiwar movement and eventually led to a congressional investigation, helping bring the Vietnam War to an end, says history professor Scott Laderman, who holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota.

Some 37 years later, it will be interesting to see what happens this time.

Ten members of the local Iraq Veterans Against the War chapter are attending Winter Soldier Two. City Pages profiled one of them--a former guard at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military holding facility in southern Iraq-- last week.

"What I saw hasn’t been on television," says Iraq war veteran and IVAW member Brandon Day, 29, of Saint Paul, who worked with other veterans to fact-check soldier testimony prior to Winter Soldier to ensure military records and eyewitness accounts could substantiate the soldiers’ claims.

“This will be the war stories with the PR stripped from them,” he says.

Posted by Beth Walton at March 13, 2008 2:20 PM | Comments (0)

 

Breakfast of Champions: 3/13

Filed under: Breakfast of Champions

The annual South By Southwest (SXSW) music and film festival is underway, and we'll have posts and photographic dispatches from Austin coming in throughout the event. In the meantime, if you're hungry for SXSW news and views, check out our national Village Voice Media blog, where music writers from around the country are congregating to tell stories and swap show reviews.

DAILY DISH: WHAT'S NEW AROUND THE SITE

Jeff Severns Guntzel visits the Weinstein Gallery's exhibit of the photographs of August Sander. Read the full review, but here's an element thathttp://articles.citypages.com/2007-06-13/news/wcal-a-trust-betrayed/ piqued my interest:

But I assure you, if you've seen these photographs before, you've never seen them like this. And if you've never seen them like this, you may never have the chance again. The prints are from the original negatives, some of them nearly 90 years old. They survived three years in an underground storage facility in Nazi Gemany during World War II.

Nate Patrin conducted an in-depth interview with the Background Noise crew, a local collection of hip-hop talent. You can download one of their MP3s within the post.

Hear a snippet of Radio Allstars' performance (or follow a link to download the whole podcast) within Ward Rubrecht's review. The Allstars blend music, storytelling and drama to update the tradition of radio variety shows.

Hillary Clinton is in Wal-Mart's pocket, or so says a new video posted by Kevin Hoffman at a reader's request.

Paul Demko updates yesterday's discussion on Geraldine Ferraro's racially charged comments with a video.

Classical music inspires fervent comment discussion, as does Jonathan Kaminsky's post about Save WCAL. A new report updates the facts of an article Kaminsky wrote last year.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 13, 2008 7:21 AM | Comments (3)

 

Likely $5 Million Victory for SaveWCAL

Filed under: Media

The long-awaited Special Master's Report has arrived in the WCAL case that pitted St. Olaf College against supporters of the erstwhile classical music station, which was sold to MPR and converted to The Current. That case, you may recall, was the subject of a City Pages article last year.

The report amounts to a significant victory for the station's advocates. The judge in the Rice County case will use the report as a guide in determining how to rule, and is not bound by its findings. A hearing is expected to be scheduled shortly.

Click through for a nutshell of the report...

--Most fundamentally, it declares that the former radio station was a charitable trust, representing a vindication of Save WCAL's position and a repudiation of St. Olaf's stance.

--It finds that $5 million in listener donations--about half the amount the school received in exchange for selling the station to MPR--should to be set aside for "core WCAL activities," although it is not clear what form these activities would take or who would administer them.

--The report does not list the station's license as part of the charitable trust, explaining that "it is impossible to discern from the record what assets were purchased with which funds or, most likely, combination of funds."

SaveWCAL President Ruth Sylte welcomed the report as a big step forward in her organization's efforts to get St. Olaf to admit it made a mistake in selling the station and to set about recreating it in some form.

“It is a very good day for supporters of public radio and thousands of SaveWCAL supporters!” Sylte said in a statement. “The report confirms that listener donations and support do matter.”

Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at March 12, 2008 2:01 PM | Comments (27)

 

Breakfast of Champions: 3/12

Filed under: Breakfast of Champions

Does anyone else think that guy in the rotating "Judgment Days" banner looks just like Mel Gibson? I know it's supposed to be Abbie Hoffman, but those wild eyes and the crazy hair evoke to me a frazzled Gibson on the brink of tinfoil hat rantings.

Just me? OK. Let's move on.

DAILY DISH: WHAT''S NEW AROUND THE SITE

For the last several weeks, I've been occupied heavily with research for the current feature story about Minnesota's first adoption malpractice case. The story is about Ty and Stacy Mooney, a couple whose adoption was disrupted. See the Mooneys and baby Rylee in the slideshow. Also see my Reporter's Notebook, which has legal details and anecdotes we couldn't fit into the print story.

Twins blogger Judd Spicer is back, and he cautions you not to take spring wins and losses too seriously. We'll get a post a week or so from Judd during spring training, and more frequent baseball postings once the season starts.

Gabriel Francois, who recently spent two years behind bars, is back out and accused of conning day laborers. Paul Demko reports.

Local dog makes good: an update on Stella, the pooch who competed at Westminster.

Oddsmakers favor Barack Obama. And there's a reason people only tear down casinos to build new, bigger casinos. Elsewhere in national politics, there's a dust-up over some comments Geraldine Ferraro made about race and the presidential election.

I have one item to add to Rachel Hutton's "Top 5 Coffee Mistakes" list: being allergic to coffee, which I am, is a big, big mistake.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 12, 2008 6:17 AM | Comments (0)

 

Reporter's Notebook: Gone Baby Gone

Filed under: City Pages

For six weeks, Stacy and Ty Mooney were parents of a little girl called Rylee.

The Mooneys are the subject of this week's feature, a piece I wrote about the first adoption malpractice suit filed in Minnesota. To understand how Rylee went from being theirs to the daughter of another couple unknown to them requires understanding of how modern adoptions happen here -- and how they can go bad. This post explains some of the legal issues hinted at in the feature and includes some anecdotes we couldn't find room for. Also, please visit the photo slideshow for images of Stacy, Ty and Rylee.

Ty Mooney with Rylee. More photos in the slideshow.

At every stage, the Mooneys allege, the attorney they retained to handle the adoption misapplied the law, filed some forms before it was legally permissible to do so and didn't file others at all. They also say the lawyer, Daniel L. Giles, failed to counsel them properly about the legal requirements they needed to meet.

Unfortunately, I was unable to convince the attorney representing Dan Giles that he or his client should speak with me for the story. But the focus of the piece isn't the specific legal facts of the case, anyway: it's about the fact that Mooneys had a daughter, and they lost her.

Minnesota's adoption statutes are rigorous and strict. This is good, in the sense that adoptive parents are held to high standards before they can take a baby home. This is problematic in the sense that it takes an attentive and trustworthy attorney to jump through all the hoops.

“Anybody can get anybody pregnant,” says Ty Mooney, remembering the efforts he went through to no avail, “but for adoption, they put you through a lot.” The couple endured extensive background checks, multiple interviews, full physicals for each of them, and home studies. They understand what the laws are intended to do, and hope they're effective -- especially since they now know that Rylee has been placed with another family.

Minnesota adoption law guru Gary Debele has a 20-minute standard primer for anyone interested in the topic, basic groundwork essential before one even gets to the finer points in the process. “If I'm representing a birth parent, a big part of my role is making sure she understands all there is about that process,” he says. “The direct placement statute very specifically lays out, 'Here's how you do it.'”

Debele estimates that there are between 7-10 qualified lawyers in the state fully prepared to handle a direct placement adoption. Still, he told me, this should be enough to meet the demand since adoption rates are more or less static here. I spoke with two other lawyers not quoted in the piece that said roughly the same thing.

Debele recommends going through an attorney who is a member of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, which has a listing of Minnesota adoption attorneys here. He is a member, and several of the attorneys listed by the academy are employed with Debele's own firm, Walling, Berg and Debele. Debele recommends each of those academy-endorsed lawyers, and one Minnesota adoption attorney who is not a member of the academy, Jody Alholinna.

To adopt a baby, you have to “free” the child from parental control. If the state doesn't terminate parental rights, this has to be voluntary. In a case like the Mooneys', this involves securing a set of consent forms from the birth parents at very specific times. “One thing that makes direct placement attractive is that you can get agreement to gain custody upon birth, and can get that secured up to six weeks before birth,” Debele said. “This enables virtually all the paperwork to be filed before birth.”

Legally, the birth parent's final consent can't be signed until three days after birth. This creates a brief period of legal limbo. “If you've got a good attorney,” said Debele, “that attorney makes sure the birth mother signs that consent on the 72nd hour. From there, she has 10 days until the consent becomes irrevocable.”

Otherwise, a birth mother need not even say why she wants to reclaim the child -– the birth mother can change her mind for any reason. After consent becomes irrevocable, a birth mother wishing to reclaim her child generally has to show fraud, which is extremely difficult.

They key is making sure that those consent forms are signed and valid. But if they're not, a so-called "disrupted adoption" is possible. Those words disrupted adoption are pretty sterile, and fail to describe the tumultuous emotional journey taken by the prospective parents who dream of watching a child grow up in their home.

The Mooney farm now has 10 horses, including a new foal. More photos in the slideshow.

Once she found out the baby had been permanently adopted into a new family, Stacy Mooney told neighbor Stephanie Tuott that she and Ty were thinking of setting up a trust fund for the infant. As Tuott remembers: “She said 'Steph, I love Rylee. She once was ours, and if she doesn't know it now, she'll know it when she's 18.' If that's not love, I don't know what is.”

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 11, 2008 3:01 PM | Comments (10)

 

Dog Days at Westminster redux: the triumph of Stella

Filed under: Animal Rights

This past weekend, three-year-old Stella hopped across the pond and won the reserve "Best of Breed" award at the prestigious Crufts dog-show competition in Birmingham, England.

Earlier this month, we chatted Hennepin County Sheriff's Detention Deputy/dog handler Darryl Cooper about his pupil Stella, a Spinone Italiano. Stella went home empty handed after the Westminster Dog Show in New York, but this time around, things panned out in her favor.

Stella's pops, Ron Turner of Charles City, IA, said that Stella, Cooper and his wife, Teri, have yet to return from England. But Terri did leave him a message and sounded "pretty excited," Turner said.

"She said that Stella was the second best female out of over 100 females," he said.

Stella is the first American Spinoni to win Best of Breed. A Giant Schnauzer, Philippe Oliver, won Best of Show, and was awarded a massive bottle of champagne that matched the size of his hearty trophy.

Turner, a retired schoolteacher, leaves the doggie traveling to his wife and Cooper. In the meantime, he occupies himself with the family's four other Spinoni Italianos. Turner said that he and his wife have been breeding the dogs for years.

Stella, the baby of the canine family, knows that she is the star, Turner said, calling her a "show off" and a "lover" at heart. Still, every working girl has her limits.

"A year ago she was on the road most of the time, and this past year she only showed about once a month," he explained.

When Stella isn't wowing crowds with her sleek physique and well-sculpted beard, she attends the local elementary school every other Friday to have children read to her.

"She loves going to school and having the kids lay on her and play with her," Turner said. " The kids read out loud to her and they think that Stella knows when they make a mistake because she turns and looks at them."

Posted by Amy Lieberman at March 11, 2008 12:45 PM | Comments (0)

 

Breakfast of Champions: 3/11

Filed under: Breakfast of Champions

DAILY DISH: WHAT'S NEW AROUND THE SITE

"Have you followed Eliot Spitzer's career at all?" Jeff Severns Guntzel asked me. I knew the news had to be big, because who talks about Eliot Spitzer?

By now you've heard that the first-term New York Governor is named as one client of a prostitution ring. At the time, J.S.G. and I were headed into a pitch meeting, so we had to follow the breaking news by fervently hitting refresh on my iPhone's browser. I ran through my standard checklist of reactions to news like this:

* What an asshole;
* Look, Girl Scout cookies! Mmmm, cookies;
* I feel bad for his wife;
* Oh great, this means more airtime for the likes of Joe Lieberman and the moralistic finger-waggers.

Given this last reaction, it was no surprise that Spitzer was pilloried on TV that evening by the upright and staid GOP operative Roger Stone. Wait, what? That Roger Stone? The orgy-and-leather guy that Bob Dole had to pitch overboard after he and his wife were revealed to be eager group-sexers?

There are lessons to be learned from this. But all I'm coming up with is a) "Joe Lieberman and the Finger-Waggers" would be a helluva name for a band and b) the family that swings together stays together. Hey, I'm trying.

Elswewhere, on the Blotter, we find that Mike Ciresi is out. This clears the path to the nomination for Al Franken, it would seem (sorry Jack).

Paul Demko has done tons of work on the Duy Ngo story. Now, a new profile of Charles "Chip" Storlie -- the man who shot Ngo -- is out in the Strib.

Should John McCain pick an African American running mate, asks Kevin Hoffman. Paging Alan Keyes: time to shore up those conservative credentials, John!

Musically, The Most Serene Republic played with Grand Archives at the Entry on Friday. Grand Archives, if you're scoring at home, is the latest project of Mat Brooke, late of Carissa's Wierd and Band of Horses. Desiree Weber reviewed and Daniel Corrigan photographed.

It slices! It dices! James Norton highlights a garlic-cuttin' gizmo. Personally, I just eat garlic cloves whole, like apples. No, not really.

U.S. soccer begins the Olympic qualifying process today against Cuba. I will take this opportunity to quote the Immortal Technique line "I'm obnoxious, motherfucker, can't you tell/I walk through Little Havana yellin' 'Viva Fidel!'" Just because I can.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 11, 2008 5:59 AM | Comments (0)

 

Ciresi, Over and Out

Filed under: Politics

Mike Ciresi, a DFLer who got extremely rich suing tobacco companies, bowed out of the U.S. Senate race today. Surviving him are writer/funnyman Al Franken and academic/anti-war enthusiast Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer.

"The memories and friendships forged are timeless," Ciresi said in a statement released on his website, although he's evidently not referring to his time spent with the remaining DFL candidates, neither of whom he is endorsing.

Ciresi had previously run for Senate in 2000. That year, he lost the DFL endorsement to Iron Range populist Jerry Janezich, who went on to lose in the primary to eventual winner and noted wordsmith Mark Dayton.

Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at March 10, 2008 5:34 PM | Comments (0)

 

Storlie speaks

Filed under: Crime

David Chanen has a fascinating profile of Charles "Chip" Storlie in today's Star Tribune. For the first time since shooting undercover officer Duy Ngo multiple times with a machine gun five years ago, Storlie gives his account of what happened that dreadful night. The MPD officer tells Chanen that when he realized he had shot a fellow cop, "the blood rushed from my face and I felt like I was wearing lead boots."

Storlie was never charged with a crime. He was also cleared of any wrongdoing by the MPD's internal affairs unit. However, by all accounts the investigation into what happened that night was horribly botched from the outset. The City of Minneapolis settled a civil lawsuit stemming from the incident in November for $4.5 million.

Since the shooting, Storlie has served two tours of duty overseas with the Minnesota National Guard. Most recently he's been working as a security guard for a private military contractor in Iraq. However he intends to eventually return to the MPD.

Ngo gave his account of the shooting incident in this 2003 CP cover story.

Posted by Paul Demko at March 10, 2008 1:10 PM | Comments (1)

 

Breakfast of Champions: 3/10

Filed under: Breakfast of Champions

DAILY DISH: WHAT'S NEW AROUND THE SITE

Let's start the morning with a couple of notes from my review of Temple's naked sushi event that didn't make it into the post:

Fashionistas were out in force. One woman had a Coco Chanel bag and a designer dress with a brocaded silver front. The silver design looked almost exactly like the Green Lantern Corps logo. I was going to mention this, but didn't think she'd take it as a compliment.

While I was grabbing a hunk of hamachi from off of a models thigh, two female friends were making a $50 bet over whether yellowtail tuna flesh is red. One, I mused at the time, was about to lose $50. Unfortunately, there was no way I could get in on the action without spoiling the bet for one of them.

James Tran's photos of the night are here.

Robert Novak thinks Tim Pawlenty is a liberal. I think Robert Novak is an undead vampire, sucking the life out of the practice of journalism and, indeed, ethics itself. Opinions differ.

I love it when Matt Snyders gets righteous. An Iowa politician claims terrorists would rejoice if Barack Obama won. Presumably, this is because of his middle name, or because he is a Democrat or something. Snyders has the rhetorical takedown.

An actress employed by Hillary Clinton for the "3 a.m." ad is actually an avid Obama supporter. So are residents of a town in western Japan.

NOFX played at Myth last night with No Use For a Name, and Jen Paulson reports on cramming punk rock into a place that used to sell shoes.

Benjamin Polk previews the Gophers' hopes at the Big Ten Tournament.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 10, 2008 7:14 AM | Comments (0)

 

« March 2, 2008 - March 8, 2008 | Main | March 16, 2008 - March 22, 2008 »