Bob CollinsA community group formed to bring TV to the rural area says it decided to stop relying only on Orr property tax assessments to function. It has previously also gotten support from neighboring Leiding, Minn., which stopped contributing in 2012. 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.
Something unusual happened on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives late this morning.
Democrats and Republicans stood in a show of unity in the aftermath of what increasingly appears to be a politically motivated attack on members of Congress this morning. Read more →
There is only one state in the Union that doesn’t recognize Veterans Day as an official state holiday. It’s you, Wisconsin.
Maybe that’ll change.
Read more →
The shooting occurred one day before the annual Congressional Baseball Game, the event, which started in 1909, that always gives us hope that perhaps warring factions can put political differences aside for a greater good. In the past, these sorts of things might make the country step back and perhaps even draw closer.
Read more →
‘I do not believe we send our young minds to be victimized to read such immoral drivel,’ Carrol Sarsland wrote in his formal request to ban ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.’
Read more →
A lot of us laughed when an off-season statistics calculation predicted the Minnesota Twins would win nearly 80 games this season, even though the franchise did almost nothing in the off-season to boost their roster, which lost more than 100 games last season.
We were wrong. Read more →
Yes, we’re fully aware that NewsCut has its share of readers who will say, ‘what are these kids learning by intentionally striking out so Braydon Gero, 12, a kid with Down Syndrome can have a happy moment in his last Little League game of the season?’
And the answer is easy Read more →
Andrea Pitzer, a writer for Slate, says Dylan lifting the work of others is nothing new and checking his work has sparked a cottage industry.
Dylan got $923,000 for his lecture as part of his Nobel Prize in literature. Pitzer says he should give some of it to the authors of the work he used. Read more →
The future of Obamacare is being decided in a back room somewhere in Washington, from what we’ve been told, but maybe its immediate future is being decided in some cubicles in the Twin Cities.
Read more →
What’s another day in June without a yearbook controversy in the nation’s schools?
This time it’s Wall High School in New Jersey where student Grant Berardo noticed a difference between the photo he submitted and the one that was printed, according to the Asbury Park Press. Read more →
Where is the next generation of pilots coming from? Sometimes, they come from the garage; they’re the little kids building airplanes with a grown-up. Read more →
If you’re a veteran and you want the government to honor its committment to provide health care coverage, it helps if you can get your story told on a local TV station. Read more →
If you stuck up a bank and walked away with a few hundred thousand dollars — several times — how long do you think you’d be in prison?
The case of a White Bear Lake man provides an instruction for how to steal money properly: do it with a white collar.
Read more →
Parking lot attendants in Fargo are finding out what most cities have already learned. The world doesn’t need parking lot attendants anymore. Read more →
If you’ve watched sports stadium debates over the years, you might recognize the technique. Nothing’s ever dead except for people’s interest in opposing it. Read more →