Bob Collins… make snowballs. 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.
When it comes to health care, Minnesota is the nation’s teacher.
The Boston Globe reports that a contingent from Massachusetts, a state that usually ranks fairly high in health care innovation, is finishing up two days of meetings with experts in Minnesota to figure out what this state knows that others don’t. Read more →
North Carolina is the latest location to provide an example of bare-knuckle politics that leads to the kind of cynicsm among voters that politicians like to criticize Read more →
The players have boycotted practice and are threatening to sit out the team’s bowl game, apparently a move to try to pressure school officials to ignore whatever was in that 82-page report.
There can be only one reasonable reaction: Go ahead.
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There is no news value in what you’re about to read. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I was elevating a personal story to the rarefied air of a NewsCut topic. But it provides some background for why posting will be light here today and also closes the book on a chapter of NewsCut that occasionally surfaced here: the time I built my own airplane in my garage. Read more →
When he died last Friday, Chris Connors, of York, Maine, was said to have expired from a combination of stubborness and whiskey. Also ALS and pancreatic cancer.
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Will someone please try this with Minnesotans? Read more →
Edwin Benson has died and with him a language may also pass on. Benson, of Twin Buttes on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in west-central North Dakota, was the last living person who could fluently speak Mandan.. Read more →
The story of the child who died in the arms of Santa Claus, posted earlier this week, was so poignant and unusual that there had to be doubt whether it actually happened. But those sure looked like real tears that Eric Schmitt-Matzen — Santa — was shedding in his interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel when he was telling it. But now the paper says it might all be a fake.
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With the seasons first big snowfall behind us, the “steamed because I got towed” season is well underway.
In Mankato, 332 cars were towed during the snow emergency on Monday, overflowing the impound lot that usually handles an average of about 150 towed cars when it snows.
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The Democrats’ search for a savior — a party chairman — is tilting toward Minneapolis congressman Keith Ellison, but it’s not hard to miss the clear dissatisfaction with the choices party leaders have been given, Politico indicates in a survey of them today. Read more →
The State Patrol said the truck’s windows had fogged up and frozen with yesterday’s cold temperatures so she couldn’t see where she was going, and was going to pull over to clear things up.
Why does this happen?
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Sometime between Sunday and Tuesday morning, someone broke in and stole the Christmas presents under the tree of one of the families in the building, the Duluth News Tribune says. Read more →
The family of Shane Paul Lohan, of Hanover, Mass., wasn’t reluctant to describe their son in the obituary his mother had to write for him last week.
He was a drug user; heroin, as near as we can tell. It killed him at he age of 24. Read more →
Real Minnesotans? They’re the ones who’ll stand along the canal in Duluth when an ice-laden ship like the Great Lakes Trader comes in from the netherworld of lake Superior as it did today. Read more →