Bob CollinsThe steady dreambeat, now, of sexual harassment allegations gives us pause to ask them a question: Who raised you?
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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.
Jeff Ernst has a mental illness, he acknowledges in an op-ed in today’s Star Tribune, and he writes that we’re all too eager to accept the portrayal of the mentally ill alongside people who’ll kill innocent people.
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There was probably no chance at all that former President Barack Obama was going to be selected for a jury when he showed up for jury duty in Chicago today. Read more →
Once again, the video also shows that when people first arrive at the accident scene, their instinct was to take a video and sell it to TMZ. Read more →
We’ve heard this sort of thing before, but let’s play along anyway. In the not too distant future, we’ll get around in flying cars from Uber.
So says the BBC and Reuters today, claiming Uber and NASA are working on an aircraft to start demonstration flights by 2020, and service by the end of that decade.
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The entitlement of the cigarette smoker in one video. Read more →
Vito Perillo probably isn’t getting much attention in the listing of important election results around the country, but his lesson is a good one nonetheless. Read more →
Sometimes, we’re lucky enough to get a good snapshot of what love looks like. It looks like this.
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If we’re really interested in stopping mass murder, it’s well past time to start talking seriously about whether we take domestic abuse seriously enough.
Find a man who’ll beat up women and children, and you may well find a man capable of killing the defenseless. Read more →
It’s not clear what happened in today’s crash. But it’s important to remember that no plane is entirely safe and free from the mistakes a pilot makes, no matter what the marketing says. Read more →
Dick Gordon was the pilot on Apollo 12, the second mission to the moon on which Charles Conrad and lunar module pilot, Alan Bean got to bounce around on the moon while Gordon, like Michael Collins before him, got to orbit the moon by himself for a few days. He died on Monday. Read more →
One of the reasons we have people in public service we don’t like is because we have no interest in being an alternative. Read more →
In a world full of corporate phonies, few are as fraudulent as Mickey Mouse and the company that’s amassed a fortune and immense corporate power and isn’t afraid to use it to intimidate a free press into submission. Read more →
A roundabout in Worthington, Minn., was apparently too confusing for the driver of an RV. So he/she simply ignored it and took the direct route. Read more →
Debi Berger, of Moorhead, didn’t get the last look at Christmas lights that her daughter and friends tried to arrange before she succumbed to liver cancer on Saturday.
Britney Berger had desperately tried to get people to put up Christmas lights early to ease her mom’s anxiety and fulfill a last wish.
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