Bob CollinsLost amid all the focus on sexual harassment, Roy Moore, and the presidential tweets of the day is the fact that the Children’s Health Insurance Program will run out of money in February, sooner in some states.
The program was created two decades ago to ensure health care for kids whose parents don’t have a lot of money, yet make too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
If you’ve never been in the position an 80-year-old Amery, Wis., man was in earlier this month, trust me, you will be someday. Let’s hope by then someone in downtown St. Paul will notice that you’ve been looking for your car for five hours and give you a hand.
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USA Today isn’t exactly the official paper of bomb-throwing Socialists. Neither does it have the journalistic heft of the Washington Post or New York Times. So there’s plenty of reasons for those who want to ignore its editorial today to ignore it, if they so choose. Read more →
Here’s a list of the topics and guests you’ll hear today on MPR News. Read more →
Here’s a list of topics and guests appearing on MPR News programming today. Read more →
The normalization of school shootings has made it difficult for those fighting them to get their message to rise above the din of the daily news. One shooting last week in New Mexico barely registered a blip in the news cycle.
Five years ago Thursday, the nation’s shock reached its zenith on the subject when 20 children between 6 and 7 years old and six adults were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Read more →
The U.S. Geological Survey says sea ice is declining because of a warming planet. It has forced polar bears, which feed on seals, onto land where they are dying of starvation. Read more →
Amber Hennlich, of Allen, Texas, is pretty sure that this is the last Christmas that her 7-year-old son, Aluxton, buys into the whole Santa Claus thing. So she was pretty set on finding the Santa Claus that used to appear at a local mall in Dallas until 2015. On Saturday, she did.
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Caribou are disappearing from Lake Superior islands. Let nature run its course? Or intervene? Read more →
Keaton Jones called his mother to pick him up at school the other day. He was afraid to go to lunch where, he says, kids poured milk on him, threw bread at him, and put ham down his shirt. Read more →
Katie Mager, 27, of Apple Valley, Minn., and Ryan Reiersgaard, 27, of Burnsville, Minn., had a ton of fun last week, claiming they were robbed and, as is often the case in these sorts of things, claiming the perpetrator was a person of color. Read more →
Here’s today’s list of topics and guests on MPR News programming. Read more →
Northwest Airlines has been relegated to the ash heap of history, but it made a bit of a proud return to the nation’s consciousness on Sunday when Norman Lyle Prouse told his story to CBS’ Sunday Morning. Read more →
You know humans have a bottomless supply of love and compassion when they stoop to help a rock.
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A good rule of thumb for consumers is when you’re dealing with concert tickets, you’re probably getting ripped off. Just ask some fans of Taylor Swift, who think they got suckered into her Ticketmaster-run Verified Fan program. They can be forgiven; they believed what Swift was telling them. It’s no shock how a fan moved Read more →