NOTE TO READER: This long post is an effort to convey information, and opinion, about a specific issue I wasn’t aware of, in a community other than my own. I was not seeking to find the issue. To some, the issue described may seem small and insignificant, and it was and remains a non-mandatory issue for the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners – they can do what they wish to do. Nonetheless, to this writer, the voluntary action described illustrates simply one example of a careless action, ignorance of history, and a (possibly) inadvertent and very negative change in tone of leadership in our civil society.

As a society, we choose our own fate through actions of leaders we freely elect. As individual citizens we either seek to change the status quo, or we sit idly by. Simply voting (which includes not bothering to vote informed, or to even vote at all) is only the first action of a responsible citizen. An accumulation of seemingly small actions can have an irreversible long term impact.

It is important to keep our leaders accountable. For Hennepin County residents here is an opportunity.

(click on all photos to enlarge)

 

Flags at Woodbury City Centre March 2,2013

Sometimes research leads to unexpected results.

In December, 2012, I finally discovered the documents I needed to document a very important event in Minneapolis in March and May, 1968. They were in the archival records of Minneapolis Mayor Arthur Naftalin (1961-69) at the Minnesota History Center. There were many pages about the 1968 Declaration of World Citizenship of Hennepin County and the City of Minneapolis. Found in the file was Lynn Elling’s‘s history of the event, written in late May, 1968: Henn:Mpls Decl Mar 68001

These documents answered my previously unanswered questions – they were exactly what I was looking for: World Law Day May 1 1968001.

Days after my discovery, unsought and completely unexpected, came a link to an April 2012 commentary about a March 27, 2012, action by the Hennepin County Board, removing the United Nations flag as one permitted to fly at the Hennepin Co. Government Center, Minneapolis. That issue instantly attracted my attention, and while I’m still searching for more facts, today, March 5, 2013, seems to be the appropriate time to bring the issue to public attention.

March 5, 1968, 45 years ago, was a significant day in the history of Minneapolis and Hennepin County. On that day the Board of Commissioners of Hennepin County, the Minneapolis City Council, and then-Minneapolis Mayor Arthur Naftalin unanimously recognized “the sovereign right of our citizens to declare that their citizenship responsibilities extend beyond our city and nation. We hereby join with other concerned people of the world in a declaration that we share in this world responsibility and that our citizens are in this sense citizens of the world. We pledge our efforts as world citizens to the establishment of permanent peace based on just world law, and to the use of world resources in the service of man and not for his destruction.”

Later, a bi-partisan who’s-who in Minnesota signed the declaration as well.

This Declaration, by “the first American community to take such action”, further requested that the Municipal Building Commission “proudly display the United Nations flag on suitable occasions at the main entrance to the City Hall and the main entrance to the new county building.”

 

Minneapolis/Hennepin County MN Declaration of World Citizenship signed March 5, 1968, dedicated May 1, 1968

On May 1, 1968, then as now, Law Day, a large group of citizens, including at least 27 Mayors of Hennepin County communities, met at the City Hall to publicly celebrate the Declaration and publicly raise the United Nations flag alongside the American flag. A new flagpole had been raised for this purpose. In Minnesota the observance came to be known as “World Law Day”, as shown in a May 1, 1968, cartoon in the Minneapolis Star: World Law ‘toon My 1 68 001

Keynote speaker May 1 1968, former Minnesota
Governor Elmer L. Andersen, proudly supported
the flag raising.

Among other remarks he said the raising of the United Nations flag “represents a commitment to cooperation among nations for world peace, to belief in the common brotherhood of all men of all nations, and to aspirations for a world community of peace, freedom and justice under world law.” His speech can be read here: Elmer Andersen I Trust..001

 

Elmer L. Andersen (center), Mayor Arthur Naftalin (right) and unidentified person with the UN flag before raising May 1, 1968

The United Nations Flag was raised on the new flagpole next to the U.S. flag, a symbol of community and non-partisan friendship with the world. Certainly, proper flag protocol was followed. The flagpole gave permanence to the word “suitable” in the earlier resolution.

That UN Flag, and many successor flags, to my knowledge, probably flew consistently until March 27, 2012, when the Hennepin County Board, quietly in the consent agenda, and likely with no public hearings or even internal debate, directed that the UN Flag be taken down permanently. The directive stated that “solely the flags of the United States, Minnesota and Hennepin County” be raised, “in compliance with the U.S. Flag Code.”

The 2012 Board Resolution is here: Henn Co Res 3:27:12001

I discovered this resolution at the end of December, 2012, and immediately took issue, as a citizen, by writing the Members of the Hennepin County Board: Bernard Ltr 12:2912001. I learned that six of the seven had been on the Board at the time of the earlier resolution; apparently four of them had voted on the resolution, all in favor.

I have received no response from any Board member which in itself is not especially surprising, since I don’t live in Hennepin County, but it nonetheless significant (see comment about Arthur Naftalin, below).

To date, the only rationale I know of, provided by the Board to a citizen of the county, is that flying the U.N. flag in some way goes against the U.S. Flag Code Section VII, Paragraph C. This statute is easily accessed on the internet. The cite from Statute seems to apply only to the U.S. flag “when carried in a procession with another flag”.

The flagpoles at City Hall were stationary, certainly by no means in “procession”. Whatever the case, the Code in question has no penalties for even egregious violations – its tenets are superseded by freedom of speech.

There is nothing illegal about the UN flag. It is a legitimate flag. The UN is headquartered in New York City, and a prime mover for the founding of the United Nations was the United States, led by people like another former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen. The U.S. has been a dominant player at the UN since its founding. The UN is hardly an enemy nation, though it is portrayed that way by some who seem governed by fear.

There are people who just despise the United Nations, and they won on March 27, 2012. The UN flag was quietly taken down at Hennepin County Government Center.

There is no need for the issue to remain quiet.

The decision makers, the Hennepin County Board, need to hear from citizens. Only in that way will an unfortunate decision be reversed and a proud day, May 1, 1968, be once again honored.

I’d suggest that an appropriate occasion to re-fly the United Nations flag and publicly re-affirm the 1968 Declaration of World Citizenship is May 1, 2013, Law Day.

POSTNOTE:

A bit of history

Prime movers of the 1968 Declaration, and a later similar Declaration of the State of Minnesota, were Minneapolis businessmen Stanley Platt and Lynn Elling. Now 92, Lynn still lives in Minneapolis, and remains active. Lynn was the MC of the May 1, 1968, event, and later described the process leading to the Declaration: Henn:Mpls Decl Mar 68001

 

Lynn Elling at Minneapolis City Hall May 1, 1968 opening the event where Minneapolis and Hennepin County declared themselves World Citizenship Communities, joining perhaps 1000 other world communities, and where the United Nations flag flew alongside the U.S. flag.

 

Lynn Elling with the Minneapolis Declaration at Minneapolis City Hall, Dec. 22, 2012. Photo compliments of Bonnie Fournier of the Smooch Project

In 1971, the State of Minnesota also declared itself a World Citizen. Again this was completely non-partisan. The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial spoke to the concept of World Citizenship then.

The United Nations Flag does continue to fly to this day

Travel two miles east from the Hennepin County Government Center to Augsburg CollegeCampus and you’ll see the United Nations flag proudly flying amongst four others, properly displayed in relation to the U.S. flag. Those attending the 25th Nobel Peace Prize Forum at Augsburg this weekend will see the flags flying, alongside I-94.

 

Augsburg College, Minneapolis MN, March 3, 2013. UN flag is at center

Augsburg is not unique. Minneapolitan Jim Nelson, who was at the May 1, 1968 dedication, spent his career at Honeywell, where the UN flag flew every day.

Then as now a small group attempted to bully decision-making.

In 1968, after the dedication, some enraged citizens demanded that the UN flag be removed. On Feb. 7, 1969, Mayor Naftalin wrote colleague Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco affirming the importance of the Declaration. In relevant part, he said “we were pleased to issue our proclamation, although our action has not met with universal approval judging from some of the mail it has prompted.” [there were perhaps 15 negative letters, only three from Hennepin County citizens]. “However, I am still convinced the proclamation has much merit as a symbolic step towards world peace and I view it as being in the best interests of our city, county, state and nation.” (s) Arthur Naftalin, Mayor.

Interestingly, and in contrast to subsequent action by the members of the 2012-13 Hennepin County Board, Mayor Naftalin wrote individual and respectful acknowledgement letters to every one of those who complained about the Declaration of World Citizenship, regardless of where they were from, or how abusive the tone of their letter (and there were some “hum-dingers”). (I have copied the entirety of the relevant files).

Mayor Naftalin was connected with the greater world; he recognized he was more than leader of just a major city, but himself a World Citizen. I wonder about today’s Hennepin County Board.

Why I feel the flag issue is an important one

Perhaps like most people, I do not customarily notice flags, their placement, etc.

This incident has caused me to look more closely at flags I see displayed.

The photo at the beginning of this post is from Woodbury, my home, and in that setting the U.S. flag is set considerably above all of the other flags (primarily military banners – Army, etc.) One might call the Woodbury display a “War Memorial”.

At Augsburg, on the other hand, the flags are in compliance with the Code, but at equal height, neither subordinate nor superior. They more befit the theme of “Peace” within and among nations. There is an entirely different tone.

There are notes of irony, for instance: doubtless there are “State’s Rights” people who might logically demand that their State flag be set higher than the national banner, while at the same time demanding that only the U.S. flag be revered.

Emotion too often trumps reason.

The flag debate is a debate about the tone of our society. How we see ourselves as compared with others.

This is an important question to be considered and discusssed.

This post was written by Dick Bernard and originally published on Outside the Walls.

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The rate of Caesarean-section deliveries varies widely among U.S. hospitals, according to a University of Minnesota study published Monday in the journal Health Affairs.

Researchers at the U of M’s School of Public Health analyzed hospital discharge data from 593 hospitals that had at least 100 births in 2009. They found that the C-section rate ranged from 7.1 percent to 69.9 percent.

Hospital C-section rates could, of course, be expected to vary somewhat, as some hospitals serve populations with a greater number of women at risk for pregnancy complications.

But after analyzing the data from low-risk pregnancies alone, the U of M researchers still found that hospitals exhibited a wide — and troubling — variation in C-section rates, from 2.4 percent to 36.5 percent.

umn.edu

Katy Backes Kozhimannil

“To think that in a hospital with 100 deliveries there would be 36 percent of low-risk women having Caesareans is quite astounding,” said Katy Backes Kozhimannil, an assistant professor at the U of M’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author, in a phone interview Monday.

But the low end in the data range was also troubling, she added, as it suggests some hospitals may not be performing C-sections when they are needed.

“There needs to be a better structure and system step up so that the decisions that are made by patients with their clinicians are in line with evidence-based practice and so they are more consistent for women across the country,” said Kozhimannil.

Most common surgical procedure

The Caesarean-delivery rate in the United States has climbed significantly in recent years, from 20.7 percent in 1996 to 32.8 percent in 2011, according to background information provided in the study. C-sections are now the nation’s most commonly performed surgical procedure.

Although C-sections can be lifesaving for mother and child alike, the procedure is still major surgery and thus poses significant health risks. For the mother, those risks include infection, blood clots and additional surgery. Women who have C-sections also tend to have more difficulty breastfeeding and may experience medical complications with future deliveries. For the infant, being born via a C-section increases the risk of respiratory and other lung problems.

C-section deliveries are also more costly than vaginal deliveries — an average of $12,739 compared to $9,048 for private health insurers, according to 2010 data. The added cost of a C-section delivery places a significant financial burden on Medicaid, which now pays for over 40 percent of all U.S. births. In 2009, state Medicaid programs spent more than $3 billion on C-section deliveries.

What’s driving the higher rates?

To explain the rise in the C-section rate, the U.S. medical community often points to increases in maternal factors associated with high-risk pregnancies (such as high blood pressure, obesity and pregnancy-related diabetes) as well as physicians’ concerns about liability and malpractice.

But those factors don’t fully explain the increase. Nor do they explain the wide variations in C-section rates that other studies have found geographically or that this new study found among hospitals.

Medical practices regarding childbirth are a likely driver behind those variations, said Kozhimmanil.

“It’s how the hospitals manage labor and delivery,” she explained. “It’s whether or not they decide to induce labor. It’s whether or not they decide to augment labor — to use Pitocin to move labor along — and whether or not they are using continuous electronic fetal monitoring, and what they decide is fetal heart spacing that is non-reassuring.”

“There is a growing consensus that there needs to be a consensus about how to manage those things,” she added, “but not so much that it burdens a clinician’s own expertise in his or her practice.”

Recommendations for change

To reduce the variations in hospital C-section rates, Kozhimannil and her colleagues recommend that hospitals do a better job of triaging maternal care. Women with high-risk pregnancies could be sent to hospitals, while those with low-risk pregnancies could be encouraged to have their babies in birthing centers where the focus would be on vaginal deliveries.

The researchers also recommended that more data about C-section rates be collected and measured as part of a hospital’s quality-of-care assessment. That information would help women make more informed decisions about childbirth-related medical decisions.

“Without good, clear, unbiased information, it’s hard for women to even ask the right questions,” said Kozhiminnal.

The stage is set for lawmakers’ final negotiations to shape Minnesota’s landmark health insurance exchange.

The state House passed the exchange legislation Monday night along roughly party lines, teeing up the measure for a Thursday vote in the Senate.

The procedural votes -- it’s been clear from the beginning that DFLers would eventually pass the bill – set up conference committee negotiations where one body will likely give significant concessions to the other. That’s where Capitol watchers expect the bill to finally take shape.

Some of the key differences between the House and Senate bills include:

• The House funds the exchange operation through withholding up to 3.5 percent of a premium, while the Senate would use state tobacco revenues.
• The Senate has kept a straightforward “active purchaser” structure, while the House gave concessions to business groups and went with a hybrid model that leans slightly toward a “clearinghouse” exchange.
• The House version bans insurance plans on the exchange from covering abortions, though that could change when lawmakers amend the Senate bill.

The exchange is expected to serve 1.3 million Minnesotans -- and save individuals and small businesses roughly $1 billion -- while providing coverage to hundreds of thousands of uninsured people across the state.

Advocates liken it to an online portal where consumers can easily compare and shop for coverage, while opponents say it’s little more than an expensive website that won’t help drive down insurance costs.

Tight deadline

A key provision of the federal health reform law, Minnesota Democrats have been pushing forward with the exchange since the beginning of this session to meet tight deadlines or risk having a federally imposed model.

“There will be a health insurance exchange in Minnesota sometime in the foreseeable future,” DFL Rep. Joe Atkins of Inver Grove Heights, who carried the bill in the House, told his colleagues on Monday night.

If the state doesn’t move forward on its own, he added, the federal government “will impose a health insurance exchange up on us. That to me is untenable.”

Lawmakers have until the end of March to finalize an exchange, although the process will likely go quicker than that.

Atkins noted the marathon pace his bill took -- it went through roughly nine committees and in the end was the focus of more than 50 hours of debate.

Republicans authored roughly 100 amendments on the House floor Monday night, a few of which were adopted. Perhaps the most controversial new provision was a measure from DFL Rep. Patti Fritz that would ban plans on the exchange from covering abortion.

That could become a sticking point with Senate lawmakers, though a similar provision could be added on the House floor.

GOP opposition

Republicans criticized the exchange for potentially not addressing rising health insurance costs and compromising Minnesotans’ data privacy. That was the refrain during roughly five hours of floor debate on Monday night.

“This does nothing but stick hundreds of millions of billions of dollars into government bureaucracy,” said Republican Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen, who predicted a “mass exodus” of doctors and other health care professionals if the exchange is implemented.

“This is not good for Minnesotans. It’s not good for their health care,” GOP Rep. Kelby Woodard said. “It is less choice, it is higher cost and it is no privacy.”

Despite strenuous GOP opposition, the measure passed roughly along party lines, with one Democrat voting against the exchange and one Republican voting for it.

There was even some partisan wrangling around being on the conference committee. GOP Rep. Jim Abeler voted for the measure, which he didn’t support, to have an opportunity to provide input during the bill’s final negotiations.

What remains unclear is how lawmakers plan to negotiate the bill’s final version. Several key pieces of legislation, including the 2011 budget deal that ended the historic government shutdown and last session’s Vikings stadium bill, were negotiated in secret.

Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, had those concerns. The “conference committee should be public, unlike 2011 budget negotiations in ‘cone of silence,’ locked [in the] Capitol,” Liebling tweeted on Monday night.

Sen. Tony Lourey, who is carrying the Senate bill, has given the “hybrid” model in Atkins’ bill a cooler reception. It’s unclear how the other provisions will be ironed out, in private or in public.

Abeler, urged lawmakers to consider an exchange that works. “I hope as this process goes on, the conference committee will listen,” he said.

Minnesota Lt. Gov. Yvonne Prettner Solon is in Washington D.C. this week representing the state at a Great Lakes Commission meeting.

The commission, made up of eight states (with two Canadian provinces as associate members), promotes development and conservation of the water in the Great Lakes system, which includes Lake Superior (in case anyone's forgotten "HOMES," the word to remember the five: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior).

The commission continues to promote the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a major effort to clean up and protect the lakes.

While at the meetings, Prettner Solon's office says she'll:

[U]pdate Great Lakes advocates on important progress being made in Minnesota to protect Lake Superior coastland and watersheds, improve water quality in Lake Superior and its tributaries, enhance wildlife habitat, and properly monitor beaches for preventable exposure to disease-carrying bacteria.

Another topic to be discussed: letting others know of progress in cleaning up the St. Louis River as it flows into Lake Superior. Twenty-six years ago, the St. Louis River was listed as one of "43 Great Lakes Areas of Concern due to significant pollution and habitat challenges," but great progress has been made in cleaning it up.

"If we continue our commitment to those efforts, the river can and will be delisted from the Area of Concern List within the next 10 to 15 years," Prettner Solon said in a statement.

The eight states making up the commission are Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Canadian provinces that are associate members are Ontario and Quebec.

A bill introduced in the Legislature would direct $6.4 million in Legacy Amendment funds to 15 metro area wildlife and conservation projects.

Two freshmen, state Reps. Mike Freiberg (DFL-Golden Valley) and Anna Wills (R-Apple Valley) introduced the bill Monday, and say they have 33 bi-partisan co-sponsors from all seven metro counties.

They say their bill, HF 1119, won't take funding away from other state-wide wildlife, habitat and conservation projects, because there is $10 million left unspent in the Outdoor Heritage account for next year.

Said Freiberg in a statement:

These 15 projects will help protect, restore and enhance publicly owned land in the metropolitan area for habitat. These lands are our most precious assets. They have been set aside permanently for wildlife – and, to a limited degree, humans. Nature is in our soul and we must protect it.

Wills said:

These Legacy dollars have been set aside by the voters. The funds will be spent. It is only right that the needs and resources of the metro area are addressed. We are not seeking to take funds away from other projects.

The 15 projects, according to the bill as introduced, are:

• $500,000 is for Dakota County to convert existing agricultural land and low-quality woods and grassland in Whitetail Woods Regional Park to prairie and oak savanna centered around an existing wetland, resulting in substantial habitat improvements for waterfowl and other wildlife.
• 60,000 is for Dakota County to protect and enhance Miesville Ravine Park Reserve through earth shaping, slope stabilization, and perhaps piping of one severe gully erosion situation and other eroding sites that are presently contributing sediment to Trout Brook, impairing water quality and the brook trout population.
• $500,000 is for the City of St. Paul to remove 18,000 tons of contaminated materials and preserve sensitive access to natural amenities and nature-based recreation in Lilydale Regional Park. Funding would help to improve access to Pickerel Lake, while enhancing habitat and improving water quality.
• $915,000 is for the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board to protect, restore and enhance shorelines; reduce invasive upland species; and repair erosion and unpaved walking paths at Sweeney and Twin Lakes and to enhance the Wirth Lake wetland complex; reduce invasive upland species; correct erosion problems; close unauthorized trails; and repair unpaved walking paths in Theodore Wirth Regional Park.
• $468,000 is for Ramsey County to restore 72 acres in Battle Creek Regional Park along the bluff of the Mississippi River, including restoration and enhancement of prairie, savanna, oak woods, and shrub swamp seeps to improve waterfowl and upland game bird feeding and nesting habitats.
• $210,000 is for the Three Rivers Park District to restore the water quality and game fish habitat in Lake Independence in Barker Park Reserve by reducing phosphorus loading from Spurzem and Half Moon Lakes through treatment with aluminum sulfate.
• $400,000 is for the Three Rivers Park District to enhance and restore the quality of Cleary Lake and restore the fishery by controlling curly-leaf pondweed, reducing phosphorus runoff from the watershed, and controlling internal phosphorus cycling with aluminum sulfate.
• $200,000 is for Carver County to restore and enhance Lake Minnewashta Regional Park by converting 37 acres of existing turf or old fields to native prairie and oak savanna. These areas are identified in the park master plan as medium to high potential sites for restoration.
• $270,000 is for Anoka County to restore and enhance 120 acres of prairie and woodland habitat within the 273-acre Mississippi West Regional Park. Outcomes will include increased habitat for game and nongame species and benefits to migratory waterfowl on the Mississippi flyway.
• $200,000 is for Anoka County to restore 45 acres of prairie and oak 
  savanna and remove invasive species from 40 acres of riparian forest land at Rum River Central Regional Park. The restoration will benefit the adjacent 550-acre Cedar Creek Conservation Area, which is open to hunting and was funded through a recent appropriation from the outdoor heritage fund.
• $338,000 is for Scott County to restore and enhance 150 acres within the 1,150-acre conservation-focused Doyle-Kennefick Regional Park. The project site is part of an 850-acre mosaic of natural lands including Minnesota County Biological Survey forest and some of the highest quality wetlands in Scott County. The park master plan identifies this natural complex to be conserved for habitat and biological diversity with very light recreational development.
• $37,000 is for Scott County to restore and enhance Cedar Lake Farm Regional Park by partnering with the Cedar Lake Improvement District and Scott Watershed Management Organization for four years of treatment to control the curly-leaf pondweed infestation dominating Cedar Lake. The goal is to restore 700 acres of shallow lake, improve fishing opportunities, and increase native aquatic plant habitat.
• $1,523,000 is for Scott County to restore and enhance 302 acres of contiguous forest, wetlands, and lakeshore in Spring Lake Regional Park by improving habitat for interior forest birds, waterfowl, and amphibians. Adjacent to Upper Prior, Spring, and Artic Lakes, this site is part of a larger permanent habitat network.
• $425,000 is for Washington County to restore and enhance Lake Elmo Park Reserve by creating 168 acres of interconnected tallgrass prairie through the restoration of 12 wetland basins that are scattered throughout an existing tallgrass prairie complex. These diverse landscapes provide critical habitat for native ground-nesting birds.
• $350,000 is for Washington County to restore and enhance rare and unique forest communities identified by the Department of Natural Resources in Lake Elmo Park Reserve and St. Croix Bluffs Regional Park. These forests provide exceptional habitat for native and migrating bird species and represent some of the best opportunities for avian habitat improvement in Washington County.

The man who many believe had the most thankless job in the state will have a proper sendoff.

Pat Shortridge, chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota, leaves the position April 6. On Monday, March 18, conservative blogger and activist John Gilmore will host a thank-you event at the Seven Sushi and Steak Ultralounge in Minneapolis.

“He stopped the bleeding and he made us believe that we would live to fight another day if we stopped fighting among ourselves,” Gilmore said in explaining why he decided to organize the party.

Shortridge, who took no salary, replaced Tony Sutton. Under Sutton's management, the party accumulated a $2 million dollar debt and fines from the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board. Shortridge is credited for reducing the debt by about $300,000.

Gilmore is rounding up Republican notables to headline the evening.  A Facebook event page extends the invitation to all politicos.

Minnesota officials say 12,100 jobs were added in the state during January.

The monthly report from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development means the state has regained about 90 percent of the jobs lost during the recession.

The seasonally adjusted numbers, though, show an increase in the state's unemployment rate: 5.6 percent in January, from a revised 5.4 percent in December. The national rate was 7.9 percent in January.

State officials were happy with the numbers.

"The Minnesota labor market is staging a robust comeback, with all 11 industrial sectors showing year-over-year growth rates for the first time since 2000," said DEED Commissioner Katie Clark Sieben.

The trade, transportation and utilities sector had the most job gains in January, adding 4,100 jobs. Financial activities was the only sector that lost jobs in January, down 100.

Please forgive me if this is too Bolshie a question, but with the Dow reaching a new all-time high today, with the NYTimes today summarizing the incredible state and federal tax breaks that enable corporations to build their projects with tax-free bonds, with many corporations enjoying record profits, with CEO pay up 727 percent since 1978 (compared with 6 percent for average workers), with the top one precent of households owning 34.5 percent of all household wealth and the bottom 50 percent of households holding 1.1 percent, what additional incentives are needed to get the job creators properly motivated to do their small bit to get the unemployment rate down from its current 7.9 percent to something a little closer to the 3.9 percent it was in December of 2000, just before, well, you know...?

As the Mayo Clinic preps for a two-decade, $5 billion expansion — Rochester voters have already approved a half-cent sales-tax increase for the clinic and the Legislature is being asked for bonding authority for $37 million to upgrade the civic center and $500 million for new roads – Elizabeth Baier of the Rochester Post-Bulletin says Mayo officials are keeping a close eye on similar developments at other medical centers. One of these is the Cleveland Clinic, where the $465 million Cleveland Medical Mart will open in July. The project is publicly financed, will have corporate sponsorship and is expected to bring tens of thousands of visitors each year to northeast Ohio, a region with more than 600 biomedical businesses. Like Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic is also expanding around the country and overseas. Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins built a $1 billion hospital in Baltimore last year with the state contributing $100 million. Another Mayo competitor, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, has added several new buildings to its main campus and is building a cancer care center.

The Fergus Falls Journal reports that all-day every-day kindergarten will be free starting next school year. The previous fee of $195 per month [$75 per month for students who qualify for reduced-price lunch and free for those who qualify for free lunch] had generated about $75,000 each year. Other options such as Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning-only classes will still be available. The move is in advance of decisions before the Legislature, which is considering free all-day kindergarten for students that qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Xcel Energy has shut down its nuclear power plant in Monticello for refueling, reports the St. Cloud Daily Times. Workers are upgrading the plant’s generating capacity to by 71 megawatts. About 2,000 contractors will help plant staff complete maintenance and construction.

State demographer Susan Brower told folks in Martin County that economic growth, an aging population and more racial diversity will set the trend for Minnesota’s population for decades to come, writes Jenn Brookens of the Fairmont Sentinel. Brower said the state is competitive: "We are 10th in the nation for the number of people with bachelor's degrees, we have a high GDP, and we're 12th highest for median household income," she said. Economic growth in the next 20 years will occur around the Twin Cities and in regional centers such as Mankato, Rochester, St. Cloud and Duluth, as will the population, she said. There will also be more retirees: “In 2002, there was an increase of 91,000 people ages 65 and older. By 2010, that increase was 285,000 people, and will peak at about 335,000 people in the year 2020,” With greater retirement comes a loss of workers, which shows the need for a skilled work force to replace them, Brower said, and that leads to diversity. "About 17 percent of [Minnesota’s] population is a person of color," Brower said. "We have a big refugee population too, starting with the Vietnamese in the 1970s, the Hmong in the 1980s," Brower said. "We've also seen a large increase from Africa, from counties such as Somalia and Ethiopia. ... We're seeing a lot of Indians with visas to work. About 85 percent of them have bachelor's degrees." In Martin County, the population has been in decline since 1980, and median income has gone from $46,156 in 2000 to $40,389 today.

John Lundy of the Duluth News Tribune has a profile on a couple from Germany that runs the Bauer-Hartz Blood Brain Barrier Group, which seeks treatments for epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Bjorn Bauer and Anika Hartz moved to Duluth from North Carolina’s Research Triangle six years ago and formed the research group in  association with the University of Minnesota’s College of Pharmacy. They have brought millions of dollars of grant money to support their work, while Hartz has received the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. It’s a big deal, said Paul Ranelli, interim chairman of the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “To have this kind of recognition and these great researchers here is important growth for us,” he said. The blood-brain barrier is composed of cells that separate the body’s bloodstream from the brain. Bauer already was researching the blood-brain barrier’s relationship to epilepsy when they came to Duluth, which did the best job of recruiting the couple. They now are collaborating on additional research involving brain cancer.

A barn fire in Spring Valley killed 1,800 hogs, reports Kim Ukura of the Morris Sun Tribune. The barn and hogs belong to Lowell Moser and Loren Schmidgall of Spring Valley Farms. The Morris Fire Department responded at 8:15 a.m. Saturday, and was soon assisted by firefighters from Chokio, Hancock and Donnelly. Morris Fire Chief Dave Dybdal said early loss estimates are between $600,000 and $700,000, which includes the building and hogs. 

Hormel is resurrecting its spokescharacter, Sir Can-A-Lot.  The character will be used in social media, along with Roy Choi of Kogi BBQ Truck fame, to “rid the world-wide-web of mealtime boredom,” according to the Austin Daily Herald. Throughout March, the animated Sir Can-A-Lot will seek out and respond to users on Spam’s Twitter, YouTube and Facebook pages. “Participants will experience the fun-loving, down-to-earth brand personality firsthand through their dialogue with Sir Can-A-Lot and enjoy new recipes created by Chef Roy Choi,” said Nicole Behne, senior product manager of Spam family of products.

The new owners of the Cup and Saucer Cafe and Sweet Shoppe in Sherburn will be determined through an essay contest, reports Jenn Brookens of the Fairmont Sentinel.  The restaurant was run by Pat Hanson and her family for more than 60 years, and then closed for about a year and a half. Last fall, Gene Scheppmann re-opened it with the intention of turning it over to someone else. "It's important for small towns to have a working cafe, and we also knew we needed to help find a new owner," said Bryan Stading, director of the Regional Center for Entrepreneurial Facilitation. The essay contest idea came from a Bethany Lutheran College business class, which has taken on the project. Essays are to be no more than three pages and address why the applicant should be the new café owner, as well as plans to improve the café and the Sherburn community. Requirements will include the desire to work long hours as well as a strong sense of community. A $75 entry fee will go toward the development of the café  The contest will run through April 8. It can be entered online at www.martincountyeda.org

Operation Prom Dress was born from the idea that no girl should miss prom for lack of money to buy a dress, reports Karin Elton of the Marshall Independent. Girls from around the area can receive a free prom dress by e-mailing fieldsofgrace@live.com. "Participation is confidential," said Terrie Lendt of Fields of Grace. Lendt heard about Operation Prom Dress in Sioux Falls and decided to start the project in Marshall. "All girls should be able to have the experience of going to prom and looking nice," said Lendt, who has three daughters. Many of the donated dresses had been dropped off at Carrow's Cleaners and never picked up. Carrow's and Midwest Cleaners are cleaning the dresses. Fields of Grace volunteers are doing the alterations. Carrow's also offers a tuxedo scholarship. Lendt is working on finding donated shoes and affordable hair styling. 

Despite the slow, snow-day commutes in the Twin Cities, the U.S. Census Bureau shows the average commute for the Twin Cities is only about 20 minutes. Search for your zip code to explore detailed data.

This map was created by the talented folks at WNYC.

It is perhaps fitting for the currently chaotic state of the Minnesota Timberwolves that I have now scrapped two prior versions of this column to accommodate incoming and conflicting updates from various media sources. But the gist of my take on the possible return of former Wolves coach and general manager Flip Saunders to a position of authority in the franchise remains the same: Respectfully, no. It would be disastrous to the still-promising short-term future that die-hard supporters have waited nearly a decade to experience.

Let’s recap the various gyrations that have recently cropped up in the media regarding Saunders and the Wolves. It began last Thursday with Kent Youngblood’s feature story in the Star Tribune, entitled “Flip Saunders: Keeping his head in the game,” which amounted to a not-so-subtle lobbying effort by Saunders to become a coach and/or general manager of a college or pro basketball program.

Cut next to nonagenarian newspaper columnist and legendary local sports shill Sid Hartman’s Sunday column, with the provocatively specific headline, “Will Saunders Be Next Wolves GM?” In the nut graph answering that question, Hartman writes that, unless Saunders receives a lucrative offer to return to coaching somewhere else, “I think it’s a strong possibility that Saunders will replace Kahn before next season.”

Kahn, of course, is current Wolves President of Basketball Operations David Kahn, who is facing another team option on his contract at the end of this season.

Parochial loyalty?

It is easy to pass this off as merely wishful homerism on Sid’s part. After all, Saunders graduated from and starred at point guard for Sid’s beloved University of Minnesota, and did it during Sid’s heyday of the late '70s besides, earning him cachet beyond the standard local roots that prompt Sid’s reflexive parochial loyalty. Plus, Saunders obviously still talks to Sid and David Kahn mostly does not.

But even in his 90s, Sid hasn’t totally forgotten how to marshal an argument. He correctly notes that Wolves owner Glen Taylor is in frequent consultation with Saunders over personnel matters, and adds that the Wolves personnel situation has been “a disaster.” (True to an extent, but because of Kahn’s first two years, not his subsequent two years, as Sid claims.)  And he had the still-fresh smell of Saunders’ ardor lingering from Youngblood’s story.

The third salvo in the Saunders campaign occurred Monday, when AP sports journalist Jon Krawczynski, following up on a story from KFXN-FM radio, reported that Saunders is involved with a prospective ownership group that is interested in buying the team. According to Krawczynski, “Taylor confirmed on Monday night that he has had conversations with the former coach, who approached Taylor at the behest of a group of buyers.”

A bit of wiggle room

There is small but crucial amount of wiggle room in that sentence. It strongly implies, but doesn’t flatly state, that Taylor’s conversations with Saunders about team personnel were being conducted with the full knowledge that Saunders is a front man for a group that wants to buy the team. That would certainly alter the nature and balance of those conversations.

Tuesday morning, St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Charlie Walters, who is also Sid Hartman’s longtime arch-rival for sports gossip, tidbits and scoops, chimed in, using quotes from Taylor to rebut the notion that Saunders would return to the Wolves in any capacity.

“There’s nothing to it. I haven’t talked to anybody about it. It came out of nowhere,” Taylor says to Walters. Then Taylor backtracks slightly. Saunders did visit Taylor down in Mankato, and the opening particulars in Krawczynski’s piece take shape. “[Saunders] was looking for some people to buy my club, what it would take, and said he might have some guys that might be interested,” says Taylor in quotes from Walters' column. “Of course I met with him. He was working with some guys who are in basketball.”

Then, in a separate, stand-alone paragraph, Walters quotes Taylor saying, “That never materialized.”

Another bit of small but crucial wiggle room. What, exactly, “never materialized”? The strong implication is that a meeting with Saunders’ backers never happened. But the wording also implies that at least one of the times Saunders and Taylor met, it was at least partially to hear about the “some guys who are in basketball” that Saunders “was working with.”

From comments Taylor has made to me and others, it is also well known that Saunders and Taylor frequently talk about NBA personnel, presumably including players on the Wolves.

The well-intentioned dysfunction of this situation is classic Glen Taylor. On the one hand, he genuinely wants to seek outside input from people he respects, genuinely wants to keep the franchise in Minnesota, and genuinely wants to relinquish control over the franchise surely but slowly, so that he can enjoy the experience of ownership and still ensure that his heirs won’t have to bear the bureaucratic and financial complexities — and potential dollar losses — after he’s gone. Taylor has told me this himself. For all these reasons, an ownership group fronted by Saunders would likely be appealing, provided they were competitive with other bidders on the franchise purchase price and the timetable for transferring control.

The domino theory

But here’s the problem, and the probable reason Taylor was shrewd enough to try to nip this Saunders-generated speculation about Saunders in the bud: The return of Saunders is perilous to the short-term prospects of the franchise. It would almost certainly upset what is currently a unique and delicate balance of power within the Wolves’ braintrust and create a domino effect of exiting assets.

The lead domino is current head coach and de facto personnel guru Rick Adelman. When I wrote a piece for Twin Cities Business Magazine about how Taylor has revamped the Wolves the past two years, he explained in some detail how the hiring of Adelman changed the philosophy of the franchise toward a more short-term, win-now orientation. He also revealed, sometimes tacitly, sometimes directly, that landing a Hall-of-Fame-caliber coach like Adelman required giving him a good bit of authority and leeway over personnel decisions.

One of the reasons Adelman had a falling out in Houston after struggling valiantly to overcome a welter of injuries to key personnel (sound familiar?) was the lack of input and control he exerted over the makeup of the Rockets roster. This was in marked contrast to the freedom he enjoyed in Sacramento, which was a more autonomous situation that he very much wanted to duplicate on his next job. It is unlikely he would have taken the Wolves job without those assurances. The reported 5-year, approximately $30 million contract offered by Taylor was generous and provided security, but by signing it at the age of 65, Adelman was essentially gambling one of his final chits as a coach on being able to lead the Wolves to a championship —  the one item missing from his glorious career résumé.

We are now nearly two years into that deal and Adelman, at 67, is enduring what is surely the most difficult season of his near-lifetime tenure in the sport. An incredible string of injuries has sabotaged any chance he had to see and evaluate the personnel he had so adroitly constructed during the off-season — and bringing back those same players next year will be much more expensive, foreclosing other options. Meanwhile, his beloved wife, Mary Kay, has had a series of troubling seizures, and from what little he and the team have revealed, the cause of her condition is apparently still uncertain.

How Adelman would see Saunders

Under the current circumstances, it is not a sure thing that Adelman will decide to continue coaching the Wolves after this season. But hiring Saunders in any capacity on this franchise would almost certainly cause him to bolt. Unlike Kahn, Saunders has an NBA résumé that warrants respect of his opinion on personnel matters. Indeed, more than anyone else who could reasonably be linked with interest in a position with the Wolves, he has the coaching victories (638) and winning percentage (54.8) to at least not be thoroughly cowed by Adelman’s 991 wins and 58.8 percentage. He has a distinctive and innovative basketball mind and the confidence and courage of a cogent philosophy. And he has a long-term rapport with the owner.

Put simply, Saunders would rightly be regarded by Adelman as an unacceptable check on his authority over personnel decisions.

If Adelman goes, the next domino to fall would likely be Wolves’ superstar Kevin Love. Yes, Love has had an acrimonious relationship with Kahn, but replacing Kahn with Saunders would likely not compensate for the ongoing instability wrought by losing Adelman, the unquestioned architect of the currently promising roster. Love has dealt with disrespect (mostly by former coach Kurt Rambis) and instability throughout his tenure in Minnesota and is uniquely talented enough to command a major salary for a championship competitor willing to spend luxury tax dollars to significantly bolster their odds at a ring.

Again, put simply, Love, like Adelman, doesn’t need the Wolves as much as the Wolves need Love.

If Adelman and then Love leave, then understand that Ricky Rubio isn’t far behind. This past week we have watched Rubio be the only member of the Wolves’ ideal starting five healthy enough to take the floor, even as he continues to recover from his own debilitating knee injury and surgery from a year ago. And the abiding virtue, greater even than his phenomenal passing skills and court vision, that has characterized Rubio’s game in this trying period has been his will to win. He is a cold-blooded competitor from a warm-weather country who will not tolerate toiling on the frozen tundra for a franchise with no shot of being successful in the near future.

The dominos would go in succession, Adelman, Love and Rubio, and despite all his formidable knowledge and people skills, there would be nothing Flip Saunders could do to stop them. 

Shattuck-St. Mary's isn’t looking any better ... . Madeleine Baran of MPR writes, “It was the sound of teenage boys screaming that jolted teacher Seth Hedderick out of his apartment one night in a dormitory at Shattuck-St. Mary's. What he uncovered would remain a secret for years until it surfaced in criminal charges against one of the Faribault boarding school's most beloved teachers. … an MPR News investigation has found several teachers and top administrators did know about some of Seibel's alleged sexual behavior but failed to notify police. Hedderick and two other former teachers said they heard rumors about Seibel's sexual interactions with students both while Seibel was employed at the school and in the months following his departure in 2003. Hedderick told two school administrators about the naked dance party, he said, but no one treated it as a criminal matter.”

It doesn’t happen often … .Joy Powell of the Strib reports, “A Ramsey County judge on Tuesday removed a defense attorney from a murder trial that was to start this week, saying he has a potential conflict of interest involving a co-defendant who was to be a star witness. Judge Roseann Nathanson granted prosecutors’ request to remove private attorney Ira Whitlock from the trial for Durron Lashawn Brown of Minneapolis. Prosecutors alleged that Minnesota attorneys’ rules of conduct preclude Whitlock from representing Brown because he once represented his co-defendant, and also because Whitlock allegedly provided that co-defendant with advice about the current murder trial. That’s a claim that Whitlock says was fabricated.”

More signs of creeping progressivity in Minnesota energy: John Myers of the Duluth News Tribune says, “Solar-powered electricity would increase Minnesota — in size and number — under legislation introduced at the Capitol and supported Tuesday by the Minnesota Department of Commerce. The bills would amend Minnesota’s 30-year-old law limiting solar units to 40 kilowatts and expand the limit to 1,000 kW, or 1 megawatt. The bill also would expand opportunities for small businesses to install solar projects and would set minimum solar electricity generation standards for utilities. The bills also would allow a third party to finance solar projects as an investment, a move that has spurred increased solar generation in other states. State law prohibits third-party investment.”

OJ’s ex-girlfriend will not do hard time.The AP says, “A former girlfriend of O.J. Simpson has been sentenced on a felony robbery charge in North Dakota. Christie Prody, of Moorhead, Minn., was given a suspended four-year prison term and two years of supervised probation after entering an Alford plea Monday. The plea means she did not admit guilt but acknowledged there likely was enough evidence for a jury to convict her. Prody was accused of trying to steal a woman's purse in November at a mall in Fargo, which neighbors Moorhead. She also is accused in Minnesota's Clay County of stealing painkillers from an elderly couple.”

“Grid instability” is at the heart of the issue. Thomas Content of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says, “Opponents of a high-voltage power line linking Rochester, Minn., and La Crosse are appealing to federal energy regulators to stop the project. The Citizens Energy Task Force and Save Our Unique Lands petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, contending the project should not have been given the go-ahead. The $500 million project will cause instability on the power grid – unless a companion project between La Crosse and Madison is built, the groups say, citing a 2009 press release from Xcel Energy. Xcel is a lead developer in the CapX2020 project.”

The Strib’s Lori Sturdevant sifts through a new report on the impact of foreclosures in these parts. “The home foreclosure explosion that triggered the Great Recession caused damage that reached deep into Minnesota communities. So says a new report, 'The Wall Street Wrecking Ball,' released last week by a coalition of religious and grassroots social justice organizations backing foreclosure reform legislation at the Capitol this year. In Hennepin County alone, the report says, the total decline in home values due to 50,507 foreclosures from 2008 to 2012 topped $8.75 billion. Worth noting is that the loss in valuation of homes in proximity to foreclosed properties exceeds that of the foreclosed homes themselves by nearly 2 to 1. In addition, the costs to taxpayers and lost tax revenue associated with foreclosure during that four-year period cost local governments in Hennepin County nearly $525 million.”  At least we can take satisfaction that the miscreants have been publicly shamed and reduced to ruin and the outright criminals are behind bars … .

Here’s a novel notion … make voting easier. The early-voting bill is beginning to move. Tim Pugmire of MPR writes, “Under the proposed Senate omnibus elections bill, eligible Minnesota voters could begin casting their ballots 15 days before Election Day. The new early voting window would close on the Friday before the election. The sweeping bill also would allow more people to vote by absentee ballot without having to state a reason why they can't vote in person at their neighborhood polling place on Election Day. So far, however, the proposed election chances have yet to receive any Republican support, which could be the key to their becoming law.”

Get the message to ‘em while their popcorn is still warm … . Laura Yuen of MPR writes, “In education circles, we're hearing more about Minnesota's inconvenient truth — that poor kids and students of color are not achieving in school at the levels they should be. But the Minneapolis Foundation thinks if more Minnesotans knew that the state has some of the highest educational disparities in the country, they'd be shocked. ‘Somehow the information about the achievement gap is not penetrating to the public,’ Sandy Vargas, the foundation's president and CEO, said in an interview Monday. That's why her group is launching a public-awareness campaign to make sure more people get the memo. A movie trailer that will run in theaters this month, voiced by Twin Cities vocalist and actor T Mychael Rambo, makes the economic argument for why Minnesota's educational gaps across race and class are everyone's problem.”

Telecommuting may be most problematic for panicked organizations. Julio Ojeda-Zapata of the PiPress writes, “A marketing professional at the Fast Horse marketing agency, [Mike] Keliher can choose his work venue day to day. So can his co-workers at a company with a liberal telecommuting policy. … perhaps the highest profile experiment with the concept was Best Buy's Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, for corporate workers out of the retailer's Richfield headquarters. That program is being phased out. Best Buy, like Yahoo, has been facing major challenges, a reason both companies altered their stance on telecommuting. … Yahoo's Meyer has her defenders. Among them is Matthew Dornquast, chief executive of Code 42 Software, a data-backup specialist in Minneapolis. He is ‘vehemently opposed to working at home.’ … Emails and instant messages are notoriously easy to misconstrue or misinterpret, Dornquast said. Such information exchanges are intolerably inefficient, he said.” May I suggest … a telephone?

Small-business owner Dave Wirig would blend in well at any business luncheon. Scott Kadrlik looks like you’d expect a managing partner in an accounting firm to look. Tabatha Erck’s appearance is perfectly congruent with her role as CEO of a thriving chiropractic network.

Looks can be deceiving. After shedding their business attire, one of these three executives dons a wig and spandex and transforms into a rock musician. Another grabs a microphone and hits Twin Cities stages as a stand-up comedian. The third guns a BMW and races around Brainerd International Raceway at 140 miles per hour.

Are they the exceptions or the rule among the seemingly staid world of corporate America? It’s hard to know how many high-level execs are living double lives, but we’ve found a bunch of them.

Rock God / Dave Wirig

Day Job:
Co-founder and CFO of Medical Solutions, Inc., a provider of new and reconditioned medical equipment (medicalsolutionsinc.com)
Double Life:
Plays guitar under the alias Davey Roxx for heavy metal band Hair Metal Mania (hairmetalmania.com)

When Dave Wirig, 44, and his lifelong friend, Dave Delgado, decided to start a business of their own in 1996, they had two criteria: It should have controllable outcomes and be in an industry that could withstand tough economic times. “Dave and I were trained in sales,” Wirig says. “We knew we would do well if the company was direct-sales-oriented. We chose the medical field because it’s so interesting; there are always cutting-edge breakthroughs and new products coming out.”

The two Daves ended up founding Medical Solutions, Inc. Medical Solutions purchases new equipment directly from more than 50 manufacturers, but also buys used equipment from medical facilities throughout the country. The bulk of the company’s sales come from surgical tables, stress-testing systems, EKG machines, and autoclaves, but they’re willing to buy whatever comes their way. “We may get a call to liquidate a metropolitan-area clinic,” Wirig says. “That equipment, which may be outdated for that owner, may be perfect for a rural clinic or hospital.”

Much has changed in the 16 years since Wirig and Delgado opened up shop. Revenue has surpassed $2 million, and in 2007 the pair purchased a 12,000-square-foot commercial building in Maple Grove. One thing hasn’t changed: The two of them are still the firm’s only employees, handling everything from sales to shipping. “We had salespeople, but they lacked incentive,” Wirig says. “We learned that bigger is not necessarily better.”

Photo by Travis AndersonCFO Dave Wirig encounters his alter ego Davey Roxx

Medical Solutions is all that Wirig hoped it would be. Even so, he felt that something important in life was missing. “When we started the company, I put my guitar down,” he says. “I didn’t pick it up again for eight or nine years. One day, I finally sat down and listened to what my body and soul were telling me. I was missing playing the guitar and the way it helped me express my creative side. Once I started playing again and making music, it was so wonderful I didn’t want to stop.”

What Wirig also missed was the euphoria of performing for a live audience as he did in his college years. Feeling the itch to join a band, he turned to Craigslist and quickly connected with a group in need of a guitarist. For a couple of years, the band played soft rock and pop under the name Hard to Handle. Then, at Wirig’s urging, they morphed into an ’80s rock tribute band called Hair Metal Mania, with a set list that includes greatest hits from Poison, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, et al.

The members had to look the part. Add a wig and Spandex, and balding, mild-mannered Wirig was transformed into Davey Roxx. “When I put on that wig, Dave Wirig ceases to exist,” he says. “The only person present is Davey Roxx, rock god.”

As Roxx, Wirig goes all-out to embody the persona. “I was in theater in high school so I have a background,” says Wirig, who also supplies back-up vocals. “Playing the part is as much acting as it is guitar performance.”

The band’s biggest gig was headlining at St. Croix Casino in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, last summer, but no matter where they perform, Wirig marvels that the audience always buys the act. “What amazes me the most is that people listen with their eyes as much as they do with their ears,” he says. “When they see someone in rock star garb with a rock star persona, they have trouble distinguishing whether it’s a real rock star or just a medical equipment guy with a wig. That speaks to the authenticity of the show.”

Indeed, Wirig doesn’t just view Davey Roxx as a fun alias; he’s fully committed to the identity, even speaking about him in the third person: “He is a perfectionist and wants to play and perform as authentically as possible. Even though I’m 44, I’m still interested in getting better. Putting in all that time and repetition to learn and perform the songs has definitely helped me be a more patient person in every aspect of my life.”

Wirig, who dreamed of being a rock star as a guitar-obsessed teenager, manages to keep his double life in perspective. “It’s a different gratification to sell a surgical table than it is to play your favorite song onstage,” he says. “They’re both equally wonderful and neither can replace the other. Then again, I don’t have women screaming my name when I sell a surgical table.”

Jet Fighter Pilot / Dan Sullivan

Day Job:
Consultant to superDimension, a producer of medical devices (superdimension.com)
Double Life:
Charter member of the Hoppers, the first civilian formation team of MiG fighter jet trainers (hopperflight.com)

When Dan Sullivan was named CEO of Plymouth-based superDimension in 2006, he took revenue at the medical device company from less than $1 million to $30 million in 2011. “We pioneered a new market for the diagnosis and early treatment of lung cancer,” says Sullivan, who has continued to consult for the company after it was sold to Ireland-based Covidien in 2012. “By catching it early, the 10-year survival rate goes from 15 percent to 90 percent.”

It’s not surprising that Sullivan, 57, got superDimension flying high. He’s part of the Hoppers, a group of flying enthusiasts who stage air shows in four MiG fighter jet trainers. They were trained by a former F-15 instructor to fly formation to Air Force standards. “Flying a jet in formation is the most intense concentration you can possibly imagine,” says Sullivan, who owns three military jets. “The Hoppers are my second family. We literally trust our lives to each other. It’s a bond so deep, you can’t break it and you can’t describe it.”

The Hoppers make a special effort to connect with and inspire kids. “When a kid comes up to us at an air show with their eyes lit up, we love it,” Sullivan says. “Our goal is for kids to gain an appreciation of what these jets are about and walk away thinking, ‘I could do that too.’ ”

Semi-Cop / Joe Thornton

Day Job:
Senior director of brand management for Stream Global Services, which operates call centers all over the world (stream.com)
Double Life:
Member of the Woodbury Police Reserves

As the senior director of branding for Eagan-based Stream Global Services, which provides business process outsourcing (BPO) services primarily for Fortune 1,000 clients, Joe Thornton, 48, manages message development and strategic communications for the company, which has more than 50 service centers and 35,000 employees in 23 countries.

Thornton, a former news anchor and news director at KDLH-TV, the CBS affiliate in Duluth, assumed his current position in December 2011 after a five-year stint at St. Paul-based Lawson Software, where he was director of media relations.

After spending the day dealing with media and industry analysts, Thornton turns his attention to upholding the integrity of a very different brand. For one or two weekend night-shifts a month, he dons the uniform of the Woodbury Police Reserves, an all-volunteer team whose members function as uniformed officers representing the department. “I take this work very seriously because there’s a responsibility that comes with putting on that uniform and representing the police department,” Thornton says. “There’s a big difference between what reserve officers do and what sworn officers do, but to the community we’re cops. We wear essentially the same uniform and drive in marked squad cars.”

Reserve officers do not have authority to arrest or detain suspects, but they do assist with general patrol and hands-on activities such as transporting prisoners to jail, drunks to detox, and domestic violence victims to shelters; patrolling parks; assisting crime scene security; providing crowd and traffic management at community events; and helping with disaster response. “Transporting a prisoner or taking someone to detox can take a police officer off the street for an hour or two,” Thornton says. “If we can perform that function, the sworn officer can stay on the street to stop drunk drivers, respond to medical emergencies, and catch more bad guys.”

Serving in a law enforcement capacity had never been on Thornton’s radar until the summer day in 2010 when he picked up the phone and found himself speaking to Mark Buratczuk, who led the reserves at the time. Buratczuk had seen an email Thornton had sent on behalf of his family thanking all of the officers for the work they do. When Buratczuk suggested that Thornton consider joining the reserves, Thornton laughed. “I told him I was in my mid-40s and a PR guy by trade,” Thornton recalls. “I said he probably wanted someone who was younger and eager to become a cop. Buratczuk said, ‘No, we try to balance our program with people who are civically minded and have an appreciation for what law enforcement professionals do.’ ”

Given that reserve officers drive squad cars, carry Tasers, and represent the Woodbury Police Department, the application process included an extensive background check, psychiatric evaluation, and rigorous interview process. After being accepted, Thornton was trained in police procedure, self-defense, and how to respond to different scenarios in real-life settings. That training is ongoing, says Thornton, who now co-leads the 12-member reserves.

Working with and alongside sworn officers has deepened Thornton’s respect for what people in public safety do. “My appreciation for police officers has been multiplied many times over,” he says. “There are exceptional people doing exceptional work out there. The importance of their work becomes even more evident when you get a firsthand look at what goes on in the middle of the night in a Twin Cities suburb.”

Racetrack Legend / Tabatha Erck

Day Job:
CEO of Chiropractic Care of Minnesota, Inc. (chirocare.com)
Double Life:
Performance driving at racetracks

As CEO of Shoreview-based Chiropractic Care of Minnesota, Inc., Tabatha Erck, 44, oversees the nonprofit’s flagship product, ChiroCare, a chiropractic network with 1,600 providers. ChiroCare is hired by insurance providers to perform many of the same functions that insurance companies do, but with an exclusive focus on chiropractic benefits, practitioners, and clinics. After launching a new acupuncture network called AcuNet on December 1, Erck has shifted into overdrive to get the network up to speed.

Shifting and speed are right in Erck’s wheelhouse. Erck, who joined the BMW Car Club of America eight years ago, trains with professional drivers at the Dakota County Technical College on its driving track in Rosemount and at Brainerd International Raceway, reaching speeds of up to 140 mph. In her first session, she had to navigate through a slalom course of orange cones. “The first couple of times I hit every single cone,” she says. “Within an hour, I was able to go through at 60 miles per hour without touching the cones, but moving them because I was that close.”

A passionate advocate for car safety, Erck volunteers for the Tire Rack Street Survival teen driving program, teaching teens how to drive at the Dakota County track. “We teach them everything about driving, from adjusting their mirrors to handling their vehicles on icy roads,” she says. “That is five times more rewarding than anything else I do.”

Stand-Up CPA / Scott Kadrlik

Day Job:
Managing partner with the accounting firm of Meuwissen Flygare Kadrlik & Associates, PA (mfkcpa.com)
Double Life:
Stand-up comedian (taxxmate.com)

Thirty years ago, the night before Scott Kadrlik took his CPA exam, he lay awake all night thinking about the test. He also imagined himself performing stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He passed the test the next day, but kept his comedy aspirations to himself for the next 23 years.

In the meantime, Kadrlik, now 53, forged a successful and rewarding career as a CPA. In 1991, he became a partner at Eden Prairie-based Meuwissen Flygare Kadrlik & Associates, a 15-person full-service firm offering audit, accounting, tax, and consulting services. Kadrlik also is a personal financial specialist (PFS), one of only 5,000 CPAs in the United States to have earned that designation.

Kadrlik’s comedy dream lay dormant until the summer of 2004, when he heard a radio interview with local comedy legend Louie Anderson. Anderson announced he was staging a contest for aspiring comedians and that the winner would open for him at Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis on New Year’s Eve.

Kadrlik set his sights on the following year’s contest. Determined to learn both the business and art of stand-up comedy, he began attending workshops and seminars. “They all said the same thing: ‘You can’t learn about comedy from a class,’ ” Kadrlik says. “ ‘Get three minutes of material and find an open microphone.’ ”

Encouraged, Kadrlik spent months crafting a solid three minutes of “wacky accounting humor.” When fall rolled around, he was ready; unfortunately, Anderson scrubbed the contest. Then shortly before Christmas, in an article about open mic nights, he read that first-timers were guaranteed to go onstage at Acme Comedy Co. in the Warehouse District. “I told my wife we were going down to Acme on Monday so I could perform,” Kadrlik says. “She thought I was nuts. She had no clue that this was one of my dreams. Nobody did. But she came along, as did my two daughters and one of my best friends and his wife. They all wanted to see a train wreck.”

That Monday, “it all ended up going as smoothly as I hoped. Looking back, it really wasn’t a very good three-minute bit, but people laughed in all the right spots and that’s all that matters.”

Hooked, Kadrlik signed up for a workshop with local comedy veterans Scott Hansen and Dave Mordal, where he studied the mechanics of joke writing. Five years after being bitten by the comedy bug, he achieved his original goal: opening for Louie Anderson.

Right before going onstage at Edinborough Golf Course in Brooklyn Park, Kadrlik spent some time with Anderson talking about comedy. “Louie asked me if I was nervous,” Kadrlik recalls. “I said, ‘No, I’m not nervous.’ He said, ‘Well, you should be.’ At which point I was instantly nervous.

“I walked downstairs to perform and completely forgot everything I was going to say. I didn’t even remember my name. Fortunately, it was a momentary panic. As soon as I heard my name announced, I was ready to go and had a great set.”

Kadrlik has gone on to open for Anderson several times, including a show at the Louie Anderson Theater at Palace Station Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. After performing at all the comedy clubs around the Twin Cities, as well as a number of accounting conferences and corporate events, he has nearly 30 minutes of material at his command.

“Ultimately, I want to put together a corporate hour that I can carry around and perform for large companies,” he says, “because that’s where the money is in this business.”

Kadrlik’s comedy career is gaining momentum, but don’t expect him to give up his pencils and spreadsheets. “Comedy is strictly on the side,” he says. “Being a CPA is what I’ve worked for all my life and I really enjoy the accounting business. Besides, some of the funniest people I know are accountants.”

Power Lifter / Bob Krowech

Day Job:
Founder and CEO of Heat Recovery System Technology, Inc., a supplier of consulting services to the power and steam generation industry (hrstinc.com)
Double Life:
Bodybuilding and powerlifting veteran who’s set numerous state, national, and world records.

When Bob Krowech, 68, founded Eden Prairie–based Heat Recovery System Technology, Inc. (HRST) in 1998, he resolved to create an environment in which every employee felt valued, motivated, and committed to the firm’s success. “A lot of corporations will say, ‘We’re all in this together,’ ” he says. “But what they really mean is, ‘If things go bad, you’ll get laid off, and if things go good, we’ll get rich.’ I wanted HRST to be the antithesis of that mindset.”

The strategy worked. HRST was listed among Inc. Magazine’s fastest-growing companies in 2008 and 2009. The $10 million company has five satellite offices in the United States, one in Switzerland, and does business in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and South America. “We do the overseas work primarily for the ‘adventure factor,’ since there is plenty of work here in North America,” Krowech says.

Krowech is not only a business builder, he’s a bodybuilder. He’s a two-time winner of the Over 50 division of the Mr. Minnesota bodybuilding contest; while in his 50s, he also took first place in the 35 and Over category in three other state bodybuilding contests, edging out competitors who were young enough to be his children.

Krowech had been lifting weights for decades before deciding to compete. While his high school buddies in Roseau were playing hockey, he preferred hoisting dumbbells in the school gym. “I remember seeing the Charles Atlas comic book ads,” Krowech says. “When I saw it I knew I wanted to be that guy.” Except for a year of military service in Vietnam, he’s been lifting ever since.

At the age of 54, Krowech transitioned from bodybuilding, which values looking as good as possible, to powerlifting, which values lifting as much weight as possible. “In bodybuilding, I had achieved as much as my genetics would allow, and the intense dieting regimen had a negative effect on my disposition,” he says. “A friend I was training with said, ‘Why don’t you do a powerlifting contest? Hardly anyone has a title in both bodybuilding and powerlifting.’ So there was a challenge for me.”

In no time, Krowech was setting state, national, and world records, including the national record in his weight class for dead-lifting 611 pounds. Krowech performed this feat of strength—which involves picking up a loaded barbell from a bent-over position, lifting it with straight arms to a standing position and then slowly lowering the weight back to the ground—five years ago, at the age of 63. What’s even more impressive is that he hoisted that record weight three years after being diagnosed with tonsil cancer and a grueling regimen of chemo and radiation.

A year after his diagnosis, Krowech was competing again. As he slowly regained weight, he set one record after another in weight classes he never dreamed he’d be competing in. “The lifts weren’t up to my standards, but it was good to be back in the game,” he says.

Krowech is equally at home at the gym or in the office, noteworthy considering that the former is an individual pursuit while the latter is a total team effort. At HRST, he and his staff of 30 engineers are paid the same salary and share equally in the profits at year’s end. In January 2012 every employee, including the administrative staff, received a bonus check averaging $22,000. In December the company formed an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) so employees could buy company stock with pre-tax dollars. “When we get together for our semiannual meetings,” he says, “the spirit of cooperation and enthusiasm actually brings tears to my eyes.”

Although Krowech’s two worlds appear to have little in common, he sometimes doesn’t know where one begins and the other ends: “It’s hard to tell whether my level of ambition and work ethic are part of my natural makeup or if they developed from my time in the gym.”

Kayak Roller / Christopher Crowhurst

Day Job:
Executive vice president of technology and partner at Marketing Architects, Inc., a direct-response advertising agency and product development company (marketingarchitects.com)
Double Life:
Founder of Qajaq Rolls, a company dedicated to passing on the Inuit art of Greenland-style kayak rolling (qajaqrolls.com)

At Marketing Architects, Inc., Christopher Crowhurst runs the company’s data centers and handles software development. The Hopkins agency also develops and markets its own products, including Stuffies stuffed animals and the HurryCane, an innovative walking stick.

What really has Crowhurst rolling is the business he started two years ago to disseminate information about kayaking, a lifelong obsession. His first product was a guidebook on how to roll your kayak. For non-kayakers, that means how to return to right-side up when you capsize.

Crowhurst, 43, a native of England, named his company Qajaq Rolls because “qajaq” is how Inuits of Greenland spell “kayak.” “Greenland kayak rolls are steeped in the history of the Inuit people, whose very survival depended upon their ability to roll up and recover while hunting,” he says. “The Inuit had about 30 different ways to do it, and I documented 25 of them in a waterproof book and companion DVD.”

Crowhurst is so passionate about kayak rolling that he helped train 150 people to roll in local lakes last year, gratis. “I developed my skills from people in the Inuit culture who wanted to share with me,” he says. “I’m just passing them forward to the kayaking community.”

Equestrian Adrenaline Junkie / Anita Janssen

Day Job:
Founding principal of 542 Global Foods, LLC, a producer and provider of food products.
Double Life:
Cutting-horse champion (janssenperformancehorses.com)

Anita Janssen had grown restless. After 15 years of owning Maxxum, Inc., an IT data and equipment disposal firm she had launched in her hometown of Rush City, her entrepreneurial itch needed scratching. She was also yearning to do work that fit who she was at her core. “As I matured in my career, so did my social agenda,” she says. “I had been raised on a farm, I still live on a farm, and even though I’m very corporate when I’m out and about, I have always felt a strong commitment to the ‘feeding the world’ part of agriculture.”

When an opportunity to enter the ag industry presented itself, Janssen, 44, jumped ship. She sold her stake in Maxxum in December and joined forces with two partners to launch 542 Global Foods, LLC, a producer and provider of food products for overseas markets and immigrant populations in the United States. The new company, which raises animals on a large scale for the Asian market, is negotiating with a group of investors who want to set up high-quality commercial hog production overseas. “We’re taking a global approach in a way that’s respectful to the earth, the communities and the people we serve, and the animals that ultimately become the protein sources,” says Janssen, who handles the business management and development side of the company.

When she’s not riding herd on underserved global food markets, you might find Janssen riding a cutting horse amidst a herd of cattle. Cutting is an equestrian event where a horse and rider are judged on their ability to separate a single animal from a herd and keep it isolated for a short period. While Janssen is modest about her prowess in the sport, she competes at local, regional, and national levels and has won a number of competitions and awards.

Janssen, who owned a horse during her high school years and returned to recreational riding in 1998, discovered cutting in 2001 and was instantly hooked. Five years later, through mutual friends, she met Bob Janssen, owner of Janssen Performance Horses, one of two full-time cutting-horse trainers in the state. In 2008, they married. The couple now own 25 show-caliber cutting horses and prospects, as well as 100 head of cattle. “A cutting horse is a highly trained athlete,” Janssen notes. “You can’t just take a horse out of your pasture and go do it. They go through two full years of training before they even get to a show.”

Given Janssen’s personality, she considers cutting the ideal sport for high achievers. “As a businessperson and entrepreneur, I have an active mind and tend to be wound fairly tight,” she explains. “Riding a cutter is a great way to escape. It’s a very physical activity, but also an intense mental activity. And I love learning. I’m never going to get to the point where there’s nothing more I can learn from this.”

Janssen has benefitted so much from cutting that she teamed up with Twin Cities business coach and entrepreneur Sue Hawkes in January 2012 to conduct corporate leadership training using cutting horses. “Cutting appeals to a lot of high-level businesspeople because it’s a huge adrenaline rush,” Janssen says. “Because it’s fast and very adrenaline-inducing, it attracts people who typically run pretty hard anyway. It feeds their competitive nature.”

In one memorable moment, a cutting horse changed Janssen’s life and the way she runs her business. “Whenever I walked into the stall of my third cutter, he would turn around and put his head in the corner,” she recalls. “The first two cutters I bought had done the same thing. I got frustrated and asked my trainer, ‘Why is it that I can’t get a horse that likes me and wants to hang out with me?’ He looked at me, said, ‘What if it’s not the horse?’ and turned around and walked away. It was an awesome light-bulb moment.”

What Janssen realized in that moment went far beyond her relationship with a horse. “That question taught me in an instant a whole lot about interacting with people, whether employees, clients, or vendors,” she says. “I’ve always been focused on the next task at hand and wasn’t taking time to be in the moment. I’d rush into that horse’s stall, halter in hand, and be ready to halter him up, take him out of the stall, and go to work. I never spent any time developing a relationship with him. So when my trainer said, ‘What if it’s not the horse?’ I started asking myself, ‘What could I do differently to make sure I’m as approachable as I need to be to be a good leader?’ I now joke with people that the reason I got into cutting is that horses are cheaper than therapy!”

Doctor of Systems / Ralph Bashioum

Day Job:
Plastic surgeon (nipntuck.com)
Double Life:
Microsoft certified systems engineer

Ralph Bashioum might be the only plastic surgeon who can give you a facelift or tummy tuck after writing the source code for your paperless office. Bashioum, whose plastic surgery practice has the perfect Internet domain name, nipntuck.com, is also a systems engineer and programmer who wrote his own EMR (electronic medical records) application.

When Bashioum, 61, moved his practice from Golden Valley to Wayzata 17 years ago, he envisioned a paperless office but couldn’t find an affordable network administration solution. “So I started doing that work myself but found that the only way to do it safely and efficiently was to become educated and certified as a MCSE [Microsoft certified systems engineer],” he says.

Bashioum now spends 20 hours a week on network administration above and beyond the 40 hours he devotes to patients. “The skill has served me very well,” he says. “We’ve gone through four iterations of hardware, and I’ve rebuilt the network each time.”

Looking forward to life after medicine, Bashioum plans on marketing his paperless office solution. Bashioum’s application runs on a simple Microsoft Office program and scales very quickly. “I like the problem solving in programming,” he says. “Unlike medical problem solving, there’s an exactness to it. It’s a nice avocation and a real joy.”

Humanitarian Personified / Ward Brehm

Day Job:
Founder and chairman of The Brehm Group, a Twin Cities estate and insurance planning firm (brehmgroup.com).
Double Life:
Nationally recognized leader in African humanitarian efforts (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Brehm).

Ward Brehm, 61, founder of the Brehm Group, a Minneapolis-based boutique estate and insurance planning firm that caters to generationally affluent families, attributes his business success to a straightforward philosophy: “Rather than chase transactions, we build long-term trusted relationships.”

That innate sense for what matters guided Brehm to accept his pastor’s invitation to visit Africa in 1993. “I’ve never been the same,” says Brehm, who toured remote areas of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania on that initial trip and since has visited every country in sub-Saharan Africa. “I saw people living in absolute squalor and children dying from fully preventable diseases. It just broke my heart. When a woman loses a baby because she can’t get to the hospital due to muddy ruts in the road, her pain and screams of anguish are exactly the same as they would be for our wives and mothers. But nobody hears her. I’m trying to do whatever I can to act as an advocate and be a voice for these people.”

That may be the understatement of the century. Brehm has visited Africa 35 times, was appointed chairman of the United States African Development Foundation by President George W. Bush in 2004, was awarded the Presidential Citizenship Medal in an Oval Office ceremony, and delivered the keynote address at the 2008 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. He is the author of two books on his experiences in Africa, Life Through a Different Lens and White Man Walking.

This article is reprinted in partnership with Twin Cities Business.

A group of third-graders in St. Paul have their shoveling work cut out this week.

Sure, we hope they were helping to clear the family driveways and sidewalks after the big snowstorm, but these seven St. Anthony Park Elementary School students were also out Tuesday afternoon scooping snow away from city fire hydrants in their neighborhoods.

They call themselves the Hoppity Hats, and their Destination Imagination project at school is not only to clean out buried hydrants themselves, but also to get others to do it, using the Adopt-a-Hydrant program.

They've met with fire department officials, who've endorsed their efforts to publicize the program with press releases and fliers. They're working on a video, too.

The boys are: Gunnar Jacobson, Sam Skinner, Alexander Kamenov, Soren Sackreiter, Milo Fleming, Jude Breen and Ian Culver. Parents Lisa Sackreiter and Marc Culver are team managers.

They make up one of their school's 14 teams in the school's Destination Imagination program— coordinated by fourth-grade teacher Nancy Hausman — which lets student teams solve challenges and  present their solutions at tournaments.

The Hoppity Hats are working on the DI "Real to Reel" challenge, where they are required to identify a community need, work to address the need, make a movie about what they've done, and prepare for a press conference. They'll present their solution at the state competition in April.  

The Hoppity Hats, who even have a blog, and created a Facebook page for their project, chose the Adopt-a-Hydrant program because they liked the web-based technology, which Twin Cities residents can use to choose their hydrant, said Lisa Sackreiter.

Some comments from the kids:

 Soren Sackreiter:

"We wanted to choose a project that didn't just affect just our St. Anthony Park community but the Twin Cities community."  

Ian Culver: 

"We can help more than one community in one challenge. Maybe other cities will start using the website in Minnesota or even around the country. We thought if we can help more than one community it will help many more people."

Alexander Kamenov:

"It's important to help the fire department and the community because they help us when we need them."

The Hoppity Hats, a Destination Imagination (DI) team at St. Anthony Park Elementary School, wants YOU to help the community by maintaining access to fire hydrants. The 3rd grade DI team focuses on encouraging people to adopt a fire hydrant by going to  http://adoptahydrant.opentwincities.org/. 

Where the weather is wacky, like Minnesota, hydrants get covered in snow and become difficult to access. According the St. Paul Fire Department, it takes 5-6 minutes to dig out a snow-covered hydrant.  Fires can double every 30 seconds.

That means a fire can double 10-12 times in the amount of time it takes to dig out a hydrant.

If you are interested in adopting a hydrant, go to  http://adoptahydrant.opentwincities.org/. Once you log on, find a hydrant or two near your home and adopt it! Then, you can name your hydrant. The website will e-mail you after snowfalls to remind you to clear your hydrant.  There are about 18,360 fire hydrants in the Twin Cities. Fewer than 100 of them are adopted. Now let`s go help the community!

The St. Paul Fire Department is whole-heartedly behind the program, and has even made it's own Adopt-a-Hydrant video.

Fire Capt. Rick Zech said that it's important for everyone's safety to have the hydrants clear when the fire rigs arrive at a fire: "Every minute we have to spend digging out a hydrant is a minute we're not fighting the fire," he said.

They troop each day into a hall just a few minutes’ walk from St. Peter’s Square, passing through a doorway flanked by Swiss Guards in black berets and their distinctive red, yellow, and blue striped uniforms.

Around 150 cardinals from around the world are engaged in intensive talks this week about who they will elect as the successor to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who resigned last week and is now living out his retirement in a 16th-century castle on a hill outside Rome.

The cardinals, wearing red sashes and black cassocks, are sworn to secrecy about the details of their discussions, most notably about who they consider papabile or the most likely papal contenders.

At their first session on Monday, each of them placed his hands on the Bible and pledged “rigorous secrecy” over the proceedings – on pain of excommunication. But in the past few days they have been at liberty to discuss the broader problems facing the Roman Catholic Church, and the sort of man who will be needed to steer it out of the troubled waters of the last few years.

For a start, many cardinals would like to see a relatively young man appointed pope – Benedict was the ripe old age of 78 when he was chosen as the successor to John Paul II in 2005.

Eight years later, he said he no longer had the mental or physical strength to continue, becoming the first pontiff in nearly 600 years to abdicate.

Cardinal George Pell, 71, the Archbishop of Sydney, said age would be a “significant factor” when cardinals gather, probably next week, in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave – the secret process by which the new pope will be elected.

“I think it’s unlikely that we will choose somebody who’s 77 or 78. I think it’s also unlikely that we will choose somebody who is too young, however you define that, because I think there’s virtue in the papacy changing every 10, 15, or 20 years,” he told La Stampa newspaper this week.

Also wanted: polyglot administrator

The new pontiff would need to be an accomplished linguist and strategist with a proven capacity to administer.

“Some factors are rudimentary: a man of faith and prayer, a good track record, a man with languages. I think we need somebody who is a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner, somebody who has got strong pastoral capacities already demonstrated so that he can take a grip of the situation and take the church forward,” Cardinal Pell said.

Among the issues the new pope will have to tackle head on would be the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the demographic decline and spreading secularism in the West, Cardinal Pell said.

The new pontiff will also have to try to reform the intrigue-ridden Curia, the powerful governing body of the Holy See.

The theft and leaking of documents from Benedict’s private offices last year revealed a disconcerting picture of nepotism, cronyism, and alleged corruption within the Curia.

The documents were stolen and passed to the Italian media by Benedict’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, in what has been dubbed the “Vatileaks” affair. He was imprisoned for a few weeks in the Vatican but received a pardon from the pope just before Christmas.

Curiosity about Curia report

The pope personally appointed three elderly cardinals, including a prominent member of Opus Dei, to delve into the scandal, and they presented their 300-page, two-volume secret report to him in December.

There has been intense speculation that the report was a factor in Benedict’s decision to resign the papacy.

Cardinals said this week that they were keen to know more about the report and what it discovered about malpractice, jealousy, and turf battles within the Curia.

"I would imagine that as we move along there will be questioning of cardinals involved in the governing of the Curia to see what they think has to be changed, and in that context anything can come up," said an American cardinal, Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago.

"I think the Curia in general, beyond whatever emerges from Vatileaks, needs to be revolutionized. And as well as the word reform, there must be a second: transparency. The Curia must begin to open up, and not fear transparency," German Cardinal Walter Kasper said in an interview with La Repubblica, an Italian daily newspaper.

The broader scandal

The new pontiff will also be expected to be more proactive in dealing with the hugely damaging pedophile priest scandals that have rocked the Church over the last decade.

"He obviously has to accept the universal code of the Church which is zero tolerance for anyone who has ever abused a child,” said Cardinal George. "There's a deep-seated conviction, certainly on the part of anyone who has been a pastor, that this has to be continually addressed."

But associations representing sex abuse victims say they have heard these bland assurances before, and that a new pope will have to be much more active in taking to task predatory priests and the bishops who protect them.

“The PR mantra from the Catholic Church in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas has been – ‘We didn’t know, we have learnt from our mistakes, we are reforming, we are sorry,’” says David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests or SNAP. “Despite all the pay-outs to victims and the law suits, there’s virtually no church official who has been demoted or disciplined or defrocked. That needs to change.”

Many cardinals do not have the moral legitimacy to take part in this week’s discussions – known as General Congregations – nor in the conclave, SNAP argues.

“It might sound extreme but we suspect most of the cardinals to be complicit in covering up predator priests. Crises have erupted in country after country and the pattern is always the same,” says Mr. Clohessy.

“Their presence in Rome rubs salt into the wounds of betrayed Catholics and suffering victims. It sends precisely the wrong message – that you can engage in wrongdoing but you won’t face any consequences. They should voluntarily go home.”

The group also released a "dirty dozen" list of 12 papabile cardinals whom they consider to be "the worst choices in terms of protecting kids, healing victims, and exposing corruption."

Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras insisted Benedict had made progress in cracking down on sexually abusive priests but said those “clean-up initiatives” must continue under his successor. "We must present a church with a transparent face," he said.

Cardinal Jean Luis Cipriani Thorne, the archbishop of Lima, said the priest sex abuse scandals remained “a grave wound” to the body of the church. “The new pope will need to confront them straightaway,” he said.

The cardinals are expected to announce in the next day or two the start date for the conclave. The Sistine Chapel was closed to tourists on Tuesday, to make way for carpenters, electricians, and other technicians to prepare it for the conclave.

The new pope will be chosen by 115 elector cardinals who qualify to vote because they are under the age of 80.

Counting of ballots from Kenya’s contentious presidential election was abandoned and restarted manually Wednesday after an expensive new electronic system failed.

More than half of the estimated 10 million votes had already been provisionally tallied since polls closed on Monday, giving Uhuru Kenyatta an 11 percent lead in the presidential race over his main rival, Raila Odinga.

The country, spellbound by the contest, was asked to dig deeper into its collective patience, however, when a server at the electoral commission crashed and its software could not be rebooted. The glitch postponed the results, which are now expected Friday.

Delays announcing the outcome of Kenya’s last elections, in 2007, led to allegations of vote rigging that sparked weeks of violence and left 1,100 people dead.

“People are saying that there could be something wrong, but for now they still trust that we can finish this thing without any problems,” says George Ondu, a community activist in Kenya’s western city of Kisumu, an Odinga stronghold.

“It’s still calm. No one is protesting,” says Fred Simiyu, a Catholic bishop from Kitale, an agricultural town close to Kenya’s border with Uganda.

Kenya remains under intense international pressure to avoid the alleged rigging that marred its last polls.

For this election, a new system was developed to transmit results electronically directly from each of the 33,400 polling stations countrywide to the national tally center in Nairobi. Local election officials were given mobile phones to transmit results using software designed to communicate only with a central server, which was supposed to upload all the results to one database that the public could see.

But by late Tuesday, electoral officials had switched it off.

Instead, returning officers from all 290 constituencies were ordered to hurry to Nairobi, the capital, physically carrying the forms that tallied the votes in their polling centers. These are now being collated at the national level.

But legal challenges to the result are now likely because of the large number of rejected ballots, an estimated 6 percent of the total cast.

Odinga's running mate, Kalonzo Musyoka, said yesterday that the number of rejected ballots was "worrying" and technical arguments on whether they should be included in final total tallies are consuming the increasingly chaotic count process. Some have already compared the debate about the rejected ballots to the controversy over Florida's "hanging chads" in the US presidential contest in 2000.

Before the electronic system failed, Mr. Kenyatta led Mr. Odinga by 53 percent of votes to 42 percent in the provisional results.

However, including the rejected ballots in the count could pull Kenyatta's total below the absolute majority needed to win without a runoff.

Kenyatta’s coalition, the Jubilee Alliance, said Wednesday that Britain’s high commissioner – its diplomatic envoy to Kenya – was meddling in the elections in a “shadowy, suspicious” manner over the rejected ballots.

Christian Turner, the commissioner, was “canvassing to have rejected votes tallied in an attempt to deny the Jubilee Coalition outright victory,” said Charity Ngilu, Kenyatta’s coalition partner, at a press conference.

“The Jubilee Alliance is deeply concerned about the shadowy, suspicious and rather animated involvement of the British High Commissioner … in Kenya’s election,” she said.

Britain denies the allegations.

“Claims of British interference, including by the High Commission, in the electoral process are entirely false and misleading,” said a spokesman from the Foreign Office in London in a statement.

“The UK does not have a position on the question of how to handle the rejected votes. That is for the [Kenyan electoral commission], and if necessary Kenyan courts, to determine.”

SEOUL — Now that Dennis Rodman is home, how many Washington policymakers are bitter that they didn’t get to be the first American to meet Kim Jong-un?

John Kerry is perhaps one, joining a chorus of critics jabbing at the NBA hall of famer.

"Dennis Rodman was a great basketball player,” the secretary of state told NBC. "And as a diplomat, he is a great basketball player. And that's where we'll leave it."

The defense Rodman mounted in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Monday wasn’t exactly eloquent. “Guess what? Don’t hate me,” was his awkward conclusion after a minute of stumbling over his claim that Bill Clinton’s sex scandal is comparable to North Korean prison camps.

But look past the bumbling, and it’s possible that the seemingly clueless Rodman is part of a grander, gradual change that State Department bureaucrats have been trying — and failing — to achieve for two decades. He’s the latest in a line of artists, musicians, scientists and athletes to visit this “hermit state,” helping to open the Asian dictatorship to the world.

Celebrity diplomats

So far, Nate Thayer of NK News has published the most thorough account, explaining how the Kim dynasty came to love basketball. Kim Jong-il had an affinity for the sport during the height of the popularity of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, pushing his son to inherit the hobby.

North Korea is even home to the world’s tallest basketball player, Michael Ri, and the sport occasionally fuels international exchange. In June 2012, Koryo Tours, a Beijing-based tour agency, also took a group of players — though not as well-known as the Harlem Globetrotters — to train children.

But basketball isn’t the only channel of informal diplomacy exploited by a country facing the heaviest sanctions — and diplomatic isolation — in the world.

North Korea occasionally invites foreign music virtuosos, whom the White House has been dismissive toward, too. In 2008, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra brought some 300 foreigners to a concert in Pyongyang, where it performed the American and North Korean national anthems, along with the Korean folk song "Arirang."

But the administration of George W. Bush brushed off the concert, just as Kerry did to Rodman’s visit this week. Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino clarified that the administration saw the concert as just a concert, and not a diplomatic “coup.”

This week, right after Rodman departed, the prominent Japanese conductor Michiyoshi Inoue landed. On Friday, he’ll be the first conductor to lead the state symphony in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. North Koreans will be able to watch it on television.

In the 1980s, North Korea even harbored Yun Isang, a dissident South Korean pianist who lived in exile in Germany thanks to persecution by the Seoul military regime. Yun hoped that by engaging North Korea with music, he could promote the cause of reunification.

And let’s not forget Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s visit in January. Kim Jong-un has prioritized technology, along with sports, as a part of national development. But the State Department passed off that one too, with spokeswoman Victoria Nuland lamenting that the visit wasn’t “helpful.”

Ping-pong legacy

Rodman’s “slam-dunk” diplomacy most closely follows the allegory of American “ping-pong” diplomacy in 1971. The American Table Tennis Team accepted an invitation from the then-hostile Chinese government to play matches and tour the country for a week.

Upon returning, one of the players offered a view of China that Rodman could easily have said about North Korea today:

“People are just like us. They are real, they're genuine, they got feeling. I made friends, I made genuine friends, you see. The country is similar to America, but still very different. It's beautiful. They got the Great Wall, they got plains over there. They got an ancient palace, the parks, there's streams, and they got ghosts that haunt; there's all kinds of, you know, animals. The country changes from the south to the north. The people, they have a, a unity. They really believe in their Maoism."

The matches paved the way for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. He and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger soon thawed frosty relations with Mao Zedong. Back then, China was just as isolated as North Korea is now.

Propaganda victory?

Regardless of the good intentions of visitors, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) puts a propaganda spin on almost every high-profile foreign visit to the country.

“The propaganda showed a welcoming young leader, unafraid of the American, warmly welcoming him to enjoy a sports match. It showed an American delegation behaving as gracious and humble guests,” said Curtis Melvin, an economist who blogs at the North Korea Economy Watch. “The visuals of the delegation bowing to Kim Jong-un in public were probably just the sorts of images the propaganda apparatus was hoping to capture.”

The possibility that Rodman is just giving fodder to a repressive government doesn’t console the defectors in the South, many of who escaped poverty and political persecution through a trek across the Chinese border.

“There is a possibility that his trip helped prop up the regime as its propaganda at least indirectly,” said Kim Seok-hoon, a campaigner at the North Korean Intellectuals’ Solidarity, a group of professors and scientists from the country.“Engagement does not seem to have a great impact on reforming the current North Korean system.”

Others, like North Korea expert Andrei Lankov, believe that getting this sort of outside information to regular people in the country is needed to spark change. Perhaps State Department officials aren’t the only ones who can instigate reform in North Korea.

MOSCOW, Russia — It’s no secret the protest movement here is floundering.

Pumped up with enthusiasm and electrified with energy as recently as a year ago, Russia’s opposition has been hobbled by accusations of inaction in the year since President Vladimir Putin’s re-election, during which the authorities have jailed anti-Kremlin demonstrators and charged key activists with crimes.

Despite the movement’s loss of momentum and dwindling numbers at public demonstrations, however, some ordinary Russians are continuing to hit the streets.

“It’s an opportunity to make an appearance, to be seen and heard,” said 61-year-old Yelena Rostova, who took part last weekend at a March for Muscovites’ Rights, organized by leftist groups and other grassroots activists.

The rally attracted a mere 2,000 to 3,000 people and was only quietly sanctioned by the coordinating council, a loose group that unites some of the opposition’s main leaders.

Nevertheless, it was part of what observers say is a trend of steady public dissent that grew out of last winter’s mass anti-Kremlin rallies and continues today.

Since establishing their coordinating council last October, the opposition’s high-profile leaders — including anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny and socialite-turned-TV-personality Ksenia Sobchak — have met periodically, mainly to vote on future rallies and make formal declarations. But critics say they’ve failed to do more to capitalize on popular discontent.

The authorities have helped by piling on pressure: Navalny and another key leader, firebrand leftist Sergei Udaltsov, also face criminal charges — Navalny for accusations of fraud and money laundering, and Udaltsov for allegedly plotting mass disorder.

Thanks partly to the vacuum at the top, many liberal Muscovites who helped swell earlier protests are now staying home.

But some of those who have taken the cause into their own hands are attempting to attract a more diverse crowd by appealing to “social” concerns such as increases in utilities prices and illegal construction.

Civic activist Natalia Chernysheva is a Moscow municipal deputy who helped organize the March for Muscovites’ Rights. She criticizes the opposition council for shying away from openly backing the march.

“It’s what’s called political short sightedness and a misunderstanding of the moment,” Chernysheva said.

The director of a nongovernmental group called the Organization for Civil Control, Chernysheva joined a second opposition group, the “experts’ council,” after narrowly losing a seat on the opposition council.

She also criticizes the opposition’s main leaders, from politicians to bloggers to environmentalists, for failing to train and prepare “new cadres” of politicians.

Nevertheless, critics acknowledge very real concerns about public protesting, especially in the wake of the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.

Most notable has been the so-called “Bolotnaya Affair,” the prosecution of 19 protesters accused of inciting unrest during an opposition rally last May that ended in violence and mass arrests after police blocked protesters from reaching their sanctioned meeting place.

Named after the square where the rally took place, the case has resulted in the sentencing of one protester to four-and-a-half years in prison for his alleged role in the violence. Other defendants face even longer sentences on charges such as “using violence against a representative of the authorities.”

Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin, a former member of a presidential council for human rights and civil society, says although the protest movement has undergone a period of “demotivation” for that and other reasons, he believes the earlier rallies helped convince and reassure opposition-minded Russians that “there’s a portion of civil society that stands in genuine opposition to the government.”

The protest movement “may not exactly be standing upright at the moment, maybe it’s prostrate, or sitting awkwardly,” he said. “But it’s nevertheless a very real cross-section of people who don’t support the government, and the authorities should take that into consideration.”

Ordinary protesters now appear less interested in supporting particular leaders than in simply voicing a range of concerns they feel aren’t being articulated.

Muscovite Nikita Kanunnikov, 25, says he continues attending protests to draw attention to the Bolotnaya Affair, in which his friend, Sergei Krivov, faces jail time for allegedly attacking a police officer.

He says he also wants to see a line-up of potential candidates for elections to the Moscow city legislature next year and to express his anger over the destruction of architectural monuments in the capital.

“I’m a bit displeased because I’d like to hear more concrete proposals, something I’m not seeing or hearing now,” Kanunnikov says. “But at least we’ve been able to achieve something so far.”

He points to the ouster late last year of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov following a corruption scandal. Serdyukov’s firing was part of an ongoing Kremlin campaign against corruption, which observers say Putin has championed in order to appease a growing awareness of official graft, thanks in large part to the opposition movement.

More recently, Vladimir Pekhtin, a senior member of the ruling United Russia Party, resigned his post as parliament’s ethics committee chief after Navalny publicized claims he failed to declare his million-dollar luxury apartment and other properties in Miami Beach. Navalny has since published more compromising materials about other officials.

The revelations follow the Putin's introduction of legislature that would bar officials from holding foreign bank accounts. Many believe the measures — which fit a Kremlin drive to isolate Russia from the West — are aimed at appeasing public anger over corruption and giving Putin greater leverage over the globe-trotting elite.

However they have also given rise to new allegations of official hypocrisy Oreshkin says may anger a broader array of people, including those who either traditionally support the authorities or remain apolitical, especially amid the Kremlin’s renewed focus on promoting patriotism and criticizing the United States.

“When someone like Pekhtin keeps saying that Russia is so wonderful and America is so terrible,” he said, “it’s a seriously disturbing revelation for many that he owns property specifically in the United States.”

More from GlobalPost: Creating Sochi Olympic site comes at high cost for local residents

Whether such scandals will actually drive more Russians back onto the streets remains unclear, however.

In the meantime, 34-year-old social activist Nadia Chetayeva, who spent last Saturday handing out pamphlets to a thinning crowd of protesters, says the opposition should concentrate on uniting protesters through civic activism.

“But first," she says, "we must learn to convince others to come out and protest.” 

For a couple of years now, I've been bugging my older son who lives in Chicago to buy a house already. After all, mortgage rates are at rock bottom (about 3 percent for a 30-year fixed), and house prices haven't completely rebounded from depths they reached a few years ago.

But there may be a good reason for him to bide his time: something called "the great senior sell-off."

The theory comes from Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Research Program at the University of Utah, whose ideas were written up in a recent Atlantic Cities story, and it goes like this:

Baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, some 78 million strong, have by their numbers reshaped practically everything in American life. Demographers call them "the pig in the python" because they create a huge bulge as they pass through life's phases. When they were children, there was a classroom shortage; to get into college, they had to compete with each other like pit bulls.

In their family forming, big-spending years, they bid up the cost of housing to unprecedented levels. (Of course, loose lending practices that allowed almost anyone who could breathe to get a mortgage also ramped up prices.) Nelson estimates that boomers drove 77 percent of new housing construction in the United Stater from 1990 to 2010, mostly single-family homes on large suburban lots.

The oldest boomers are now 67. And, even though many surveys show that seniors say they want to age in place, Nelson predicts that as they travel through the old age portion of the python, they will want to sell their three- and four-bedroom homesteads and move to a condo. Or, when they get older, to assisted living facilities. Ergo, the great senior sell-off.

The big question is: Will there be enough buyers? Or, will there be enough buyers who can pay what the departing seniors will be asking? The generations coming along after them are smaller in number; and given the lousy economy, it's unclear whether they will be earning enough to pay the freight.

Nelson predicts that all of this will hit the fan around 2020. At that point, he says, seniors will be trying to offload 200,000 more houses than there will be families coming into the market to buy them. A lot of people won't be aging in place but stuck in place. And, presumably, prices would drop, enabling younger folks with less change in their pockets to get into a house.

How might this play out in the Twin Cities?

Tom Melchior, director of market research for CliftonLarsonAllen, a business accounting and consulting firm, who has a specialty in senior housing, believes that prices will depend to a great extent on location.

"Most of the action now is in Minneapolis and St. Paul's downtowns and Uptown,” he says. “Also in the inner ring suburbs."

That's where people seem to want to be these days, he says, and he doesn't expect prices in those areas to fall precipitously. But people out in Chanhassen or other far-flung suburbs could find selling difficult.

Anyway, I'm letting you know now. You have seven years to plan.

During the course of the nine-year US presence in Iraq, at least $8 billion – or 13.3 percent of US reconstruction spending – was wasted, according to the final report released today by the Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction.

The report, entitled Learning From Iraq: A Final Report From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, offered a detailed assessment how $60 billion in American taxpayer money was spent in Iraq during the war. Of that sum, about $25 billion went to training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, while the remainder went an array of development projects ranging from infrastructure construction to governance improvement programs.

The report offers several case studies demonstrating waste, including a project to reconstruct a bridge and oil and gas pipeline in northern Iraq. Geologists advised against drilling in the Tigris River to do the repair work because the soil was too sandy. Engineers ignored the report and spent tens of millions of dollars before the drilling plan was aborted.

The Iraqi reconstruction program was the second-largest nation building effort ever undertaken by the US, superseded only by Afghanistan, where appropriations for reconstruction spending are nearing $100 billion.

Several Iraqis interviewed for the report now question the value of the money that was spent, saying even the money that can be accounted for was not spent wisely or in such a way that will bring about enduring changes in Iraq.

“There exists limited tangible evidence of any positive effects from the rebuilding program,” wrote the report's authors, summarizing an interview with Iraqi Minister of Minister of Finance Rafi al-Eissawi. “It was a mistake to launch a huge number of programs across numerous geographic and infrastructure sectors rather than devote resources to a finite number of worthy and well-focused projects.”

Mr. Eissawi is a native of Fallujah, a city in Western Iraq that was a focal point for the US throughout the war and scene to some of the fiercest fighting. There, the US constructed a $108 million wastewater treatment facility (and paid $99.8 million of the total cost). When it was completed, the plant served only 38 percent of those its designers estimated it would help. In the end this proved a major cause of frustration for a number of Iraqis.

The report provides a case study of the controversial Fallujah Waste Water Treatment System, highlighting a number of problems that plagued reconstruction projects throughout Iraq.

“Limited planning, a minimal understanding of site conditions, an unskilled workforce, and no clear idea about how much the system would cost burdened the project,” explained the report’s authors.

The plant was intended to remove raw sewage from the streets in Fallujah and improve public health by reducing the risk of contaminated water supplies. According to initial estimates in 2004, when completed the plant would serve 100,000 people after only 18 months of construction at a cost of $35 million. By the time it was completed in 2011 it served only 38,400 after 88 months of construction and a total cost of $108 million.

By comparison, Eissawi said that many residents still have positive memories of the British presence in Fallujah during the 1920s because they built a critical bridge over the Euphrates Riverthat is still in service today.

The size and scope of Iraqi reconstruction was largely a result of the eagerness of the US militaryand their civilian counterparts to launch a counterinsurgency. The strategy relies heavily on separating the local population from insurgents, and gaining locals' support by providing them with services and assistance. Throughout both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, soldiers commonly used and use terms such as employing “money as a weapon.”

In his description of the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Leonard DeFrancisci wrote in the Military Review that the Marines sought to undercut insurgent strength by using “a powerful weapon – money – to drive a wedge between the insurgents and the people and help win the second battle of Fallujah.”

Lt. Col. DeFrancisci wrote that the Marines passed out a considerable sum of money meant to meet Iraqis’ immediate needs and settle disputes. He attributes the program with helping to win the support of large segments of the population.

Such thinking and strategies were prevalent throughout the Iraq war, with the US military often conducting programs such as microgrant initiatives, where US soldiers gave Iraqis cash with extremely limited oversight.

In its final recommendations the report urges that future development spending be delayed until there is a reasonable amount of stability and that initial projects scale back their ambitions and scope. It also suggests oversight of projects starting at their inception.