Police influence on the medical marijuana debate annoys some legislators. Tom Scheck at MPR says, “Some Minnesota legislators, frustrated with their inability to make any headway against law enforcement objections to a medical marijuana bill, are expressing concern that police and prosecutors are spending too much time at the Capitol protecting and serving their own interests. … But medical marijuana isn't the only issue that police and prosecutors are trying to influence. They also have been working on criminal forfeiture, surveillance and drug issues.”

Al Franken’s campaign against the giant Comcast/Time Warner merger has a serious campaign finance facet. Daniel Wiser at the Washington Free Beacon writes, “The potential merger’s impact on the $5.4 billion local cable advertising market, including political advertising, has been largely absent from public debate as the companies seek approval from regulators at the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission (FCC). … Other cable and satellite providers such as Verizon and DISH have outsourced their ad sales to Comcast and TWC. The combined companies could reach as many as 50 million households with ads sold as a result of these ‘rep deals.’” Why so little attention is paid to the local TV end of political money is a fascinating mystery (to me).

It’s either a case of the Governor being a cash magnet or his opponents having (much) less than rock star appeal. At Politics in Minnesota, Mike Mullen says, “At least one observation can be made following the new disclosure reports: Whichever of the five leading Republican candidates emerges as that party’s nominee, he will almost certainly enter the general election season at a significant cash disadvantage to DFL Gov. Mark Dayton. The Democratic incumbent has some $733,000 in the bank, more than five times as much as his closest Republican competitor.”

Amy will soon be back on the streets … . The AP says,“The wife of former Minnesota Vikings player Joe Senser will leave a state prison this week where she has served time for a fatal hit-and-run. Amy Senser is due to be transferred from the Shakopee prison to a work release facility. She's been approved for transfer to a jail or halfway house.”

That “rural America is dying/disappearing” meme may not have quite as much validity. In the New Ulm Journal Fritz Busch covers a conference and writes, “… while rural areas lose a high percentage of 20-24 year olds, the number of 30 to 49-year-old moving into rural areas nearly offsets the younger out-migration. … [W]hile many rural school districts have declining enrollment, certain classes — often kindergarten and the lower elementary grades — have increased numbers in recent years.”

To no one’s surprise … Rick Adelman has retired.ESPN’s story says, “The decision brings to an end to a celebrated coaching career that includes 1,042 victories, eighth on the NBA's career list. Adelman coached Western Conference powers in Portland and Sacramento and also had stops in Golden State and Houston. ... ESPN.com's Marc Stein reported in March that Minnesota would have Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg -- a former Wolves player and executive -- and Michigan State coach Tom Izzo (who's close to president Flip Saunders) high on their list of potential successors.”

Well … a Beatle, at least. That “big act” coming to Target Field? … Sir Paul. Jay Gabler at The Current says, “... the Minnesota Twins’ outdoor field will host a performer who would be on anyone’s list of rock ‘n’ roll all-stars: Sir Paul McCartney. The gig is a long-awaited coup for the venue, certain to excite rock and pop fans who have been waiting for the Twins’ home to host a show by a major performer who’s — no offense, Kenny Chesney — outside of the country genre. McCartney’s appearance will happen 49 years, to the month, after he played the Twins’ Met Stadium with the Beatles on August 21, 1965—the Beatles’ only Minnesota concert.” Every (now) mature, composed woman/grandmother who can prove she was at The Met in ‘65 should be given free front row seats.

Oh my … . City Pages’ Aaron Rupar reports on some very delicate sensibilities … .“Uptown Vapor Shoppe has been open at 2817 Hennepin Avenue for a year. Since day one, the business has had a sign in its window that says, ‘No Statutory Vape.’ The sign's reference is meant to be to a store policy prohibiting minors from purchasing products. It had never been an issue until last Friday, when the Vapor Shoppe's Facebook page was slammed by commenters decrying the sign for making light of statutory rape.” I hope the shop’s critics are as upset about our gun “laws.”

Tracine D. Asberry

This is my second year of a four-year term on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education and I am convinced that timely, transparent, competent, and respectful communication is the best way a) to honor the decision of families to choose our schools, and b) to maintain community engagement throughout their educational experience.

This became glaringly evident last week at the MPS Area C meeting at Lake Harriet Community School, Lower Campus, held after the district budgeting error that left particular Area C schools questioning the district’s commitment to academic funding for the second year [PDF]. Topics included academic programming and budgeting alignment, rallying around high-priority schools, narrowing boundaries to address overcrowding, student-to-teacher ratio necessary to meet safety regulations, and educating Gifted & Talented students [PDF].

A first-time observer may define this exchange as community engagement at its finest and I would agree. As a second-year observer, I would recognize that the opposite is true, considering that parents repeated budget concerns from last year as well as last month.

Let me be clear. My goal is not to blame. Rather my goal is to acknowledge that the chance to do better this budget cycle was possible, the opportunity was missed — and to express why we can’t wait.

1. Excerpt from my communication to District Leadership, March 19, 2014:

Equally important to the budget process is addressing previous concerns shared by MPS Area C families to demonstrate a better transparent and competent process this budget cycle. You will notice by the emails to follow that this process has significant flaws.

I request your leadership to understand why similar questions and concerns expressed by Area C families last year resurfaced again at the Area C meeting tonight, in the email below as well as additional emails and Facebook comments. 

My concern is that the concerns are not new since last year and it appears as if we, as a Board and District, were not listening and prepared. 

I shared emails regarding budget concerns from Lake Harriet Community School (LHCS), Burroughs Community School (BCS), and Kenny Community School (KCS) Site Councils last year. 

A few months ago, I shared emails from both LHCS and KCS focused on being proactive to ensure a smoother budget process this cycle. I appreciate that site meetings have taken place to provide assistance and will continue to take place with principals and Site Councils. However, I'm unclear how such a reactive response is an effective and efficient use of time and energy, especially, since this response to stakeholder concerns occurred last year. 

Respectfully, I request an evaluation of the budget process based on the concerns consistent to those expressed last year, the unclear definition of minimum programming, and the need to improve transparency and engagement.

2. Excerpt from my communication to District Leadership, March 20, 2014:

I want to clarify that this response addresses support with our principals. However, the response does not address my requests from last night and this morning regarding transparency and excellence with our Stakeholders.

3. Excerpt from my communication to District Leadership, March 20, 2014:

Per my previous email, I look forward to a leadership response to budget concerns that maintains a commitment to equity, transparency, excellence, and our vision throughout MPS district wide."

Unfortunately, my area has yet to receive a thorough response to school budget needs.

This is why I immediately reached out to parents after the Area C meeting and I later contacted district leadership to request Site Council conversations to a) give attention to school budget needs, and b) ask how to rebuild trust.

This is why I shared the Area C budgeting experience on 89.9 KMOJ FM radio last Friday. This is why I’m writing this Community Voices commentary in MinnPost today.

My constituents have waited long enough; every family deserves timely, transparent, competent, and respectful communication in every corner of Minneapolis Public Schools.

Policy 8110 – Purposes and Role of the Board #12 states, “The Board shall inform the citizens of the City of Minneapolis of the progress and needs of the schools.

Onward together!

Tracine D. Asberry, Ed.D., is a member of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, representing District 6. 

WANT TO ADD YOUR VOICE?

If you're interested in joining the discussion, add your voice to the Comment section below — or consider writing a letter or a longer-form Community Voices commentary. (For more information about Community Voices, email Susan Albright at salbright@minnpost.com.)

Buy your $10 tickets today!

Attention news junkies and MinnRoast fans:

MinnRoast 2014 tickets have been selling briskly, and we are more than 200 tickets ahead of where we were this time last year.

But since we’re in the much bigger Historic State Theatre, we're offering last-minute cheap seats in the upper balcony for only $10!

The small print:

• $10 upper balcony seats tickets can be purchased online only here until 11:59 p.m. Thursday. They will not be available at the door.
• The curtain opens this Friday, April 25, 7:30 p.m. at the Historic State Theatre. Show details here. The theater lobby bar opens at 6:30. Theater doors open for seating at 7:00.  

Wherever you sit, you’ll enjoy the gentle skewering of politicians and journalists in our song-and-skit variety show. And with Gov. Dayton, Sen. Franken, Minneapolis Mayor Hodges, U of M President Kaler, and former Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch taking the stage, there’ll be plenty to talk about afterwards.

Need one more reason to buy a ticket? This year’s headliner: Minnesota’s own Lizz Winstead, co-creator of "The Daily Show." Enough said. 

Buy your $10 tickets today!

The current Supreme Court features one octogenarian, three septuagenarians, two sexagenarians and three justices in their 50s. There have been some close confirmation battles to fill recent vacancies and -- compared with most history of high court nominations -- an increase in partisan/ideological voting.

As Jonathan Chait notes for New York magazine, in the last confirmation (of Elena Kagan, the current youngest justice at age 53) only five Republican senators voted to confirm her. Three of those five are now gone from the Senate and one of them -- Richard Lugar of Indiana -- was defeated for renomination by his own party in part to punish him for that vote.

As Ian Millhiser writes for ThinkProgress, the price paid by Lugar raises the likelihood that any Republican senators voting to confirm any future Obama nominees to the high court would be risking their political lives.

If, after January, Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate, and if, during the last two years of Obama's presidency, a vacancy should occur on the court, what are the odds that any Obama nominee could be confirmed?

If Republicans united to deny a Democratic president the power to fill a vacancy, and taking into account the degree to which Supreme Court nominations have been thinly disguised votes on the future of highly-ideological and partisan issues such as abortion and campaign finance regulation etc., what are the chances that future Senates would behave differently if the president was of a different party than the Senate majority?

We aren't talking about filibusters here. It's true that when the Senate recently exercised the famous "nuclear option" to allow most appointees to be confirmed with a majority vote, the Senate left alive the power of filibusters in the case of Supreme Court nominees. But as that new rule was imposed by a majority vote, the rule easily could and probably would be extended to Supreme nominees if the need arose.

So the question is whether we are soon to enter a new era in which Supreme vacancies might stay open indefinitely until the same party controls the Senate and the White House or until some other kind of unprecedented new arrangement could be made.

Yes, by tradition it is not supposed to work this way. By tradition, the Senate has generally accepted qualified, scandal-free nominees even if they were from the "wrong" side of the partisan/ideological split. But the Constitution has no such requirement. And yes, the business of rejecting nominees on ideological grounds probably derives most clearly from the liberal rejection of Reagan nominee Robert Bork. So I'm not blaming this on the current Senate Repubs.

But in the new system of partisan/ideological warfare, how likely is it that the Supreme Court might be short a justice or two or three or four, when the president and the Senate majority are of different parties?

If you’re of my vintage — an early Gen X’er — the mention of Earth Day may bring to mind the old TV ad that featured a Native American man paddling down a polluted river, past belching smokestacks and littered shorelines. The ad ends with him standing at the edge of a busy highway, a single tear rolling down his right cheek after a passing motorist throws a bag of trash at his feet (mind you, road rage was just in its infancy). A voice-over announces, “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

That inaugural “Crying Indian” ad ran in 1971 on the second celebration of Earth Day. As flag-wavingly patriotic and “green” as the ad appeared, all was not as it seemed. The commercial’s star carried the stage name “Iron Eyes Cody,” but his given name was Espera Oscar de Corti and he was the son of Sicilian immigrants in Louisiana. And “Keep America Beautiful,” the nonprofit sponsoring the ad, was bankrolled by the biggest names in the can and beverage industry, who did indeed want to keep people from littering, in part because it would stifle their plans to move the country away from reusable bottles toward more consumer-friendly and portable disposable cans.

De Corti died in 1999 (taking with him the explanation for why he only cried out of one eye) but Earth Day celebrations continue. If you’re too young to have been chastised by de Corti’s tear, the thought of Earth Day likely brings images of children planting flowers, and people cleaning up parks. Or something like this year’s Earth Day Santa Cruz celebration — “an exciting community event offering education information, activities for kids including an arts and crafts tent, live music and a focus on green businesses.” Earth Day Miami plans an evening of “music, networking, and Eco-fashion,” and EarthFest Ohio is offering “biodiesel-powered amusement park rides and healthy food from food trucks.”

Music and artisanal food won't cut it

Now, I like biodiesel amusement park rides as much as the next guy (the “Canola Coaster” and the “OPEC Octo-Scrambler” are my favorites) but here’s where I rain a little on the Earth Day parade. Here’s where I want to throw trash on the moccasins of anyone who suggests that an afternoon of wood flute music, artisanal foods, and Eco-fashion is a serious response to the serious challenge of climate change.

These Earth Day festivities are no doubt sponsored by good people doing what they can, but from a public-relations standpoint, they’re counterproductive if they send the message that our so-called “environmental issues” are cosmetic in nature — too many cans and food wrappers in the ditch, and not enough flowers.

That “distracted driver” crackdown? Something tells me a few scofflaws slipped through the nets. Mary Lynn Smith of the Strib says, “A 10-day crackdown on distracted driving snagged 550 people who were illegally ­texting while driving on Minnesota roads. … State troopers and police officers have seen it all: people eating burgers, applying makeup, shaving, reading newspapers, scrolling on computers and of course, texting.”

Covering the Byron Smith/home invasion killings trial in Little Falls, Dave Unze of the St. Cloud Times says, “'The dogs always come back to the pail after they've been fed so well.’  That's what Byron Smith told investigators after he shot and killed two teenagers who broke into his house on Thanksgiving Day 2012. What he meant was that he had been the victim of thefts and burglaries at his house before Haile Kifer and Nick Brady broke into his house and that the burglars would likely return again. … Smith's defense attorney contends that Smith was a man frozen with fear after multiple burglaries that increased in frequency and violence and that Smith was a man scared to be in his own home.”

Paul Blume’s KMSP-TV story says, “Prosecutors told the jury they will hear the full audio recordings taken as Haile Kifer and Nick Brady broke into Smith homes, as well as recordings of the deadly shootings. Prosecutors said Smith piled the bodies [of] Brady and Kifer on top of each other in his workshop, using a tarp to avoid getting blood on the carpet.”

Hot on the heels of Britt Robson's two-partGlen Taylor interview, MPR's Martin Moylan asks the new Strib owner if he'll buy the Pioneer Press. "Taylor said he'd probably take a look. But before he made an offer he'd need to know the financial condition of the Pioneer Press and the potential for the Twin Cities to support two daily newspapers." P.S. The PiPress's top out-of-town managers are in town today and tomorrow.

At TIME magazine, Sean Gregory gets into the Minnesota State/Todd Hoffner story, writing, “Hoffner knew his university — which had placed him on leave after a technician found videos of naked or partially clothed children on his Blackberry — had overreacted. And that the authorities had arrested him under false pretenses. “There was shock, fear, and I gradually worked myself towards resolve,” Hoffner says. “I set two goals for myself as I sat in that jail cell. I wanted to be exonerated from the criminal charges, and vindicated by my university.”

In a Strib commentary, Eric Schubert, who has Humphrey Institute and Chamber of Commerce cred, looks at Minnesota’s glass ceiling status and says,“… Minnesota ranks high nationally in Fortune 500 companies that have female board and executive team members. ... But hold the Minnesota Rouser for inclusive leadership in our state. ... [A]mong Minnesota’s largest 100 publicly held companies, women hold just 14.9 percent of board seats and 18.6 percent of executive officer positions. Thirty-four of these companies have just one female executive officer, and 35 have none.”

On Worthington’s water problems, Patrick Condon of the Strib reports, “The man who manages this city’s dwindling water supply stood on cracked dirt at the bottom of a shrinking, man-made lake outside town and wondered if state lawmakers debating a $1 billion spending plan understand the consequences of another dry spring in Minnesota’s thirsty southwestern corner. ... The city’s only wells, seven of them clustered around Lake Bella, have risen 6 inches in March and April. By this time last year, they’d risen 6 feet.”

Very much related … . Dave Peters at MPR writes, “Three-quarters of the state gets its drinking water from wells and how much we can take without taking too much depends on how fast precipitation recharges the water underground. And the speed of recharging can vary dramatically, depending on how much, how hard and when rain falls … . [Says Hydrogeologist Ray Wuolo]: ‘So, if you believe in such things as climate change, impacts to future groundwater supplies could be very dramatic.  ... it will be even more important to begin to think about how to augment groundwater storage with flood water.’”

But probably smart enough … . At the Business Journal, Jim Hammerand reports, “[Republican] State legislative candidate and former Fine Line Music Cafe owner Dario Anselmo sold his Edina home for $2.5 million this month.  … ‘I may not be the smartest guy in the world but I know you have to stay in the district to run for office,’ he said ... . Anselmo recognized that a multimillion-dollar home sale might not help his campaign … .” I doubt a $2.7 million home is a liability among Edina Republicans.

Not exactly progress on cleaning up the congested, pot-holed atrocity that is the Hennepin-Lyndale bottleneck. Emma Nelson of the Strib writes, “The preliminary designs unveiled at a public open house last month provoked some residents and transit advocates to protest that the new intersection will not be much better than the current one. Now community members are scaling back their vision of the area as the gem of the city. [Says one,] ‘It should be our Champs-Élysées, and it’s anything but that.’” More like a demolition derby on the Oregon Trail.

Supporters of medical marijuana legalization in Minnesota will continue to pressure lawmakers with a state Capitol rally Tuesday at 10 a.m.

They say they'll show signatures from more than 100 doctors and clergy  who want people with specific ailments to have legal marijuana access.

The House bill would allow people with conditions such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy to access medical marijuana if their doctors recommend it.

Legislators have debated the measure for weeks, and so far, pressure from law enforcement and other opponents has bottled it up.

Scheduled to appear at the rally in Room 125 at the Capitol are:

• Rev. Catherine Schuyler, pastor of Duluth Congregational Church
• Minnesota Nurses Association
• Bill Tiedemann, executive director of the Minnesota AIDS Project
• Heather Azzi, political director for Minnesotans for Compassionate Care
• Representatives of the AFL-CIO, United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and other groups that support the bill
• Minnesota patients and family members

Two St. Paul libraries will hold appraisal events — similar to PBS'"Antiques Roadshow"— in May.

Mark Moran, guest expert from the PBS series, will appraise items at the West 7th Library and the Hayden Heights Library.

Appointments are suggested to secure a time for a one-on-one consultation. Moran won't appraise appraise coins/money, weapons, fine jewelry, or Beanie Babies.

The schedule:

• West 7^th Library, 265 Oneida St.
  Thursday, May 8, 4-8 p.m.
  651-298-5516 for reservations
• Hayden Heights Library, 1456 White Bear Av.
  Sunday, May 18, 1-5 p.m.
  651-793-3934 for reservations.

Spectators are also welcome.

Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1527 - 1593, Milan. Fire, 1566.
66.5 cm x 51 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

Europe’s longest-ruling royal family – rising in the late Middle Ages, declining at the end of World War I – the Habsburgs had the time and the money to acquire a lot of art. Paintings by Rubens, Tintoretto and Titian. Greek and Roman antiquities. Arms and armor. Court costumes and carriages. In February 2015, a major traveling exhibition titled“The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s Greatest Dynasty” will bring nearly 100 artworks and artifacts to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Most have never left Austria until now. From here, where it debuts, the show will go to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.

Key works include Caravaggio’s “The Crowning with Thorns,” a portrait of Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein the Younger, and Correggio’s “Jupiter and Io,” a jaw-dropper showing a nude Io being embraced by Jupiter in the form of a giant, menacing yet furry gray cloud. Be ready with a story to tell the kids about that one. Opens February 15, ends May 10.

A week before conducting two “Echoes of History” concerts at the newly remodeled Northrop, Osmo Vänskä will be at the Kennedy Center, leading the National Symphony Orchestra in three nights of music by Sibelius, Aho and Mendelssohn. Speaking last week with the Washington Post’s Anne Midgette, Vänskä touched on his feelings about resigning last October as the Minnesota Orchestra’s music director.

Months before, Vänskä had said he would quit if the then-unresolved lockout prevented the orchestra from performing at Carnegie Hall in November. When the orchestra’s board canceled the Carnegie dates in late September, “I wanted to give a pressure so that they could make an agreement,” he told the Post, then added, “I was very surprised that they, that the board allowed [the resignation] to happen.” And hurt? the Post asked. “Oh, yeah. Of course.”

Vänskä’s future remains uncertain. He’s still talking with the Minnesota Orchestral Association about a possible return. He continues to guest conduct around the world; the NSO concerts were already on his calendar when he left the MOA, but he has also been free to accept more last-minute dates. “There is a temptation to think about doing only guest conducting,” he told the Post, “because you don’t need to take all the headaches that the music director has to. It’s obvious that I am still living with many question marks.” As are the musicians and the audiences.

Twenty years after a split so bitter that Prince changed his name to a glyph and wrote “slave” on his face, he’s back with Warner Bros., the label he first signed with in 1977. The new deal includes a 30th anniversary “deluxe reissue” of his classic album “Purple Rain,” the release of long-awaited, previously unheard material and a new studio album, probably with his band 3RDEYEGIRL. Plus Prince will regain ownership of all the master recordings made when he was previously with Warner. “If you don’t own your masters,” he once told Rolling Stone, “your master owns you.”

Prince said in a statement, “Both Warner Bros. Records and Eye are quite pleased with the results of the negotiations and look forward to a fruitful working relationship.” Shortly before midnight on Friday, Prince released a surprise new single, a ballad called “The Breakdown.”Listen here.

Benedict Cumberbatch – the “Sherlock” star, “Star Trek” villain and voice of Smaug the dragon – will not be attending Wizard World Minneapolis Comic Con, coming up this weekend at the Convention Center. (We’re thinking the rumors that he would attend started because Cumberbatch was booked for – and recently appeared at – the Oz Comic Con in Adelaide, Australia.) But William Shatner will be here, as will Dean Cain, Ernie Hudson, James Hong, Matt Smith (the new Doctor Who), Lou Ferrigno (Hulk!), Robert Englund, Sean Astin, and many more, plus a slew of creators, writers and artists. C.J. has a hilarious interview with Shatner. FMI and tickets ($35-$45 single day, $75 weekend, more at the door).

On Thursday, Shatner fans will also have the chance to see their staccato hero on screen in “Shatner’s World,” the film version of the one-man Broadway show Entertainment Weekly called “agreeably ramshackle.” FMI and tickets. In the Twin Cities, “Shatner’s World” will screen at the Showplace Icon in St. Louis Park, Eden Prairie 18, Brooklyn Center 20 and Rosedale 18.

Minnesota Citizens for the Arts tells us that according to a new national study, Minnesota has 13,835 arts-related businesses that employ 55,040 people– up 2,785 businesses and 2,091 people since the Legacy Amendment kicked in. Using data from Dun & Bradstreet, the study includes nonprofit museums, symphonies and theaters as well as for-profit film, architecture and design companies. “Arts businesses and the creative people they employ stimulate innovation, strengthen America’s competitiveness in the global marketplace, and play an important role in building and sustaining economic vibrancy,” the study said. If you like, you can download and peruse the complete “Creative Industries: Business & Employment in the Arts” reports here. You’ll need to create a log-in.

Also from MCA: Eight of ten of our representatives in Congress are members of the Congressional Arts Caucus. This includes six of our eight Congressional representatives – Democrats Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, Rick Nolan, Collin Peterson, and Tim Walz and Republican Erik Paulsen – and both of our senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar (both Democrats, they joined the Senate Cultural Caucus). Which two haven’t signed on? Republicans Michele Bachmann and John Kline.

The Rochester Art Center has received a $40,000 grant from the Jerome Foundation in support of its 3rd Floor Emerging Artist Series. Jerome has helped to fund this series since its launch in 2004. So far, 40 Minnesota artists have presented solo exhibitions at RAC. Additionally, a $5,000 grant from the Carl & Verna Schmidt Foundation will support RAC’s upcoming exhibition “Lamar Peterson: Suburbia Sublime” and accompanying programs. If you live in or near the Twin Cities and haven’t yet visited RAC, it’s a nice drive and not too far.

For artists: Applications for the Loft’s 2014-15 Mentor Series program are due by 11:59 p.m. on April 28, 2014. Now in its 35th year, the Mentor Series offers 12 writers the rare and precious opportunity to work closely with bestselling, award-winning writers in workshops, craft seminars and individual conferences, plus give a public reading. If you’re chosen, it’s free. The 2014-15 mentors are Ru Freeman and Diego Vázquez (fiction), Dani Shapiro and Kao Kalia Yang (nonfiction), and Matt Rasmussen and Patricia Smith (poetry). FMI. … The 7th annual Minneapolis Underground Film Festival (M.U.F.F.), scheduled for Oct. 2-5, 2014 at the St. Anthony Main Theater, is accepting entries in the feature film, documentary feature, experimental/avant-garde feature, music video, short film and MN-made categories. FMI.

It’s the final full week of National Poetry Month, and Thursday is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Choose a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others. Need a poem? Go here, click a pocket, and print out a PDF. Or visit a local bookstore and head for the poetry section.

***

In a metro area with more live theater than any sane person can keep track of, there’s a new theater with a new play worth seeing. Especially if you have ever wondered, “Why are there so many Hmong people in the Twin Cities?” (Minnesotans elected the first Hmong-American legislator in the U.S. Mee Moua of St. Paul served in the Minnesota Senate from 2002-2011.)

Originally from Laos, thousands of Hmong came here after the communist takeover of Laos in 1975. During the Vietnam War, when they were trained, funded and armed by the U.S. government, they fought a secret guerrilla war against the Communists; after the Americans withdrew, hundreds of thousands tried to escape the massacres and re-education camps.

Photo by Scott Pakudaitis

Gregory Yang and Song Kim in “The Shadow War”

American playwright Amy Russell was a child in Laos during the war. A play that began in her memories and took shape over four years, with help from the Hmong community and Hmong actors including Sandy’Ci Moua, “The Shadow War” combines Hmong, Lao and American perspectives on the war, giving us glimpses into the complexities, loyalties, politics, and immense human costs of a conflict most of us know little or nothing about. It’s a play produced on a shoestring and presented on a mostly bare stage; each of the five actors plays four or five roles, and the scenery consists of shadow puppets and images projected on a white backdrop. The story and the passion of the actors draw you in.

Last Friday’s performance was followed by a talkback with Russell, the cast, We Theater founder Teresa Mock, a Hmong veteran who served in Laos, and dramaturge Lee Pao Xion, who told the mostly Hmong audience, “I was one of those kids that got on one of those planes in Long Tieng [the CIA-operated military base] … When the plane landed, it kept taxiing and Dad pushed us on.” Many in the audience brought their young children. “The Shadow War” continues through this Sunday, April 27, at the Wellstone Center. FMI and tickets ($10-$15; tonight only, Tuesday, it’s pay what you can).

Our picks for the week

Tonight (Tuesday, April 22) at Northrop: Trey McIntyre Project. After two years on Hennepin, the Northrop Dance Series has officially moved back home. Meanwhile, the Trey McIntyre Project has announced that it will end its full-time dance company to pursue new artistic projects. So this performance is both hello and good-bye. “Mercury Half-Life” is set to the music of Queen, “The Vinegar Works: Four Dances of Moral Instruction” is inspired by the work of Edward Gorey, who loved the ballet (and cats, and books). 7:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($40-$60; free for U of M students).

Wednesday at the U of M and Carleton College (and probably other places, too): Shakespeare’s 450th Birthday. Forsooth, the Bard is a very old dude! Celebrate his birthday at the U outside Murphy Hall on Church Street from 4-6 p.m. with live music, food, and special guests. Theatre arts and English students will perform their favorite scenes, readings, sword fights, sonnets and songs. Share your own tales about Shakespeare at the open mic. If you’re near Northfield, stop by Room 172 of the Carleton’s Weitz Center for Creativity on 3rd St. E. two blocks south of the campus for performances, displays and refreshments. Both events are free and open to the public.

Wednesday at the Black Dog: Poetry About Food & Sex. An attention-getting title for a poetry reading, for sure. Celebrate National Poetry Month with performances by poets, activists and storytellers Robert Karimi, May Lee-Yang, Jessica Lopez Lyman and Chaun Webster. The Black Dog promises “special aphorodisiac surprises” on its menu. 7:30 p.m. No cover, donations accepted.

Wednesday at the Regis Center for Art (East): Public reception for the new exhibition “The Enduring Spirit of Labor.” Organized by Anna Meteyer, an undergraduate senior at the U majoring in global studies and studio art, this show speaks to injustices rampant in labor industries and celebrates the struggle against systemic forces of injustice. Much of the art shares two common themes: the underlying social, political and economic systems that maintain injustice in labor industries, and the detrimental effects of hardening, mechanized work on the human psyche. Featured artists include David Bacon, Rachel Breen, Meteyer, and Xavier Tavera. Public program on art and activism with the curators and artists at 6 p.m., reception from 7-9. Free and open to the public. The exhibition continues through May 3.

Courtesy of the Regis Center for Art

Xavier Tavera, Stone Worker, 2014 Digital photo, inkjet print 35 x 35 in.

Thursday at the Dakota: Evan Shinners. Bach is not old music. Bach is about the newest music there is, especially when performed by someone like recent Juilliard grad Shinners. His playing is joyous, fearless and infectious. (We’re reminded of something Bobby McFerrin said Saturday night at Orchestra Hall: “We’re musicians, and we play for a living.”) Here’s Shinners performing Bach’s “French Overture” on two pianos, because Bach wrote it for a harpsichord with two manuals. He also reportedly tells stories and sings songs. 7 p.m. (one show only). FMI and tickets ($20).

Thursday and Friday at the Hopkins Center for the Arts: Art Spiegelman. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust narrative “Maus” – told as a graphic novel with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats – artist and illustrator Spiegelman has been a major force in changing how the public perceives comic books. He appears not at Comic Con but at the Pen Pals Author Lecture Series, a ticketed series benefiting the Friends of the Hennepin County Library. What could a cartoonist possibly have to say? We heard Roz Chast last year in this series and she was fascinating. Friday at noon, Saturday at 7:30 p.m. FMI and tickets ($40-$50).

Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society
/Minnesota State Archives

Photograph identified as Phil Rice but likely of
Houston Osborne, taken c.1895. Phil Rice and
Houston Osborne were both clients of Fredrick
McGhee; however, Phil Rice was white, so he
is unlikely to be the man in this photograph. A
photograph identified as Osborne from the
same collection resembles a courtroom sketch
of Rice, so it is possible the attributions
were switched.

In the early morning of June 2, 1895, Houston Osborne, a young African American man, broke into Frieda Kachel's bedroom in her St. Paul home. When Kachel screamed, Osborne ran; he was caught and hanged from a cottonwood tree but let down before he died. He died in prison eighteen months later.

Race-based lynchings were a gruesome fact of life in the United States, especially in the South and Midwest, from the end of the Civil War until the mid-twentieth century. None is known to have occurred in the Twin Cities, but St. Paul came close with the near-lynching of Houston Osborne in 1895.

Osborne, born in Tennessee in 1867, appears to have been a rootless young man who drifted around the country working sometimes as a waiter. He arrived in the Twin Cities in the spring of 1895.

In the early hours of the morning of June 2, fifteen-year-old Frieda Kachel, sleeping in her house at the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Iglehart Street in St. Paul, awoke to find Osborne in her room, his hand over her mouth. She screamed, rousing two sisters and her brother Anton, who lived next door at 1091 Iglehart. Osborne took off running west toward what was then open country.

Anton Kachel pursued Osborne, along with his brother-in-law and a neighbor. The three men also enlisted the help of some dairymen out with their animals. Though Osborne was later reported to be suffering from tuberculosis, press reports stated that the chase went on for over a mile until he was caught near Snelling Avenue and brought back to the corner of Lexington and Iglehart.

A crowd of about a dozen people gathered and someone suggested getting a rope. Anton Kachel fetched a long piece of window sash cord. As Osborne pleaded for his life, men pulled him to a cottonwood tree behind the house he had broken into. They tied one end of the rope around his neck and tossed the other over a bough. Osborne's feet were off the ground and his body twitching when Augusta Horst, a married older sister of Frieda Kachel's, persuaded the men to let him down. They then used the same rope to bind him and lead him to the Rondo Street police station.

Osborne's last-minute delivery from death was an unusual outcome for such a racially charged incident during the Jim Crow era. The St. Paul Globe treated the events as a thrilling adventure, with Osborne a "brute," his captors "resolute," their actions a "burst of righteous wrath."

The St. Paul Dispatch concluded—the next day—that Osborne was guilty of "the most dastardly and shameful crime in the annals of wickedness," and now "has no right to encumber the earth." That "shameful crime" was rape, presumably, though no rape had occurred.

Both the Globe and the Dispatch, however, expressed relief that Osborne had not been murdered. According to the Globe, only a "happy accident" had spared St. Paul "lasting regret." To the Dispatchwriter, Frieda Kachel's sister had saved the city "the ineffable disgrace of a Negro lynching."

Lawyer Fredrick McGhee, one of St. Paul best defense attorneys, undertook Osborne's defense. The grand jury charged him with burglary and indecent assault. Though McGhee was known for taking his cases to trial, he quickly negotiated a guilty plea to the burglary charge (breaking and entering for the purpose of committing a felony). On June 24 Osborne received a ten-year sentence; he arrived at Stillwater Prison one week later.

Those who had urged Houston Osborne's death did not have to wait long. He died of tuberculosis at the prison on February 13, 1897. He was thirty years old.

For more information on this topic, check out the original entry on MNopedia.

“I sent my first text two weeks ago,” said Tommy Mischke Friday afternoon, holding up his month-old iPhone while sitting in the log cabin study in the backyard of his St. Paul home. The veteran KSTP-AM and WCCO-AM host and City Pages columnist recently signed on to Tom Barnard’s podcast stable, and the iPhone and all its DIY magic will serve as Mischke’s new radio studio.

Mischke abruptly quit WCCO in August, citing burnout. After six months of “doing absolutely nothing,” he’ll return to the airwaves May 12 with The Mischke Road Show (whose web site is still under construction), a mix of storytelling, video, music, and photography that has the 51–year-old St. Paul native rejuvenated and reinventing himself yet again.

MinnPost: You’re a very independent person, artist, storyteller. How much of that informed what you’re about to do now, versus the reality of the job situation? Meaning, did you feel constrained by commercial radio, and is this the blank canvas you’ve been looking for?

 TM: I used to go into ‘CCO in at night and I’d come out after, and I just didn’t feel good about what I was doing. And I thought, “What’s the problem?” I had all the freedom. Mick Anselmo, the GM over there, said, “My job for you, Mischke, is to stay out of your way,” and he did that all the years I was there.

When I was at Hubbard Broadcasting, they said, “Don’t ever work anywhere else. They’ll never give you this much rope. You better stay here.” And this was [coming from] other workers, who’ve worked at other stations around the country: “Mischke, you’re spoiled. The Hubbards are giving you all this freedom and that’s not the way it works.” So I go over to ‘CCO and I’m expecting the good days to be over, but Anselmo gets there a year before I do and he changes the culture there and says, “Do whatever you want.”

So I’m going home, night after night, and I’m thinking, “What’s the problem?” And the problem was 22 years of the regimentation, the grind. I don’t know that creativity necessarily should ever be placed in a routine. And if it’s placed in a routine, the clock starts ticking. And the life expectancy turned out for me to be 22 years.

MP: Plenty of people ignore that ticking clock. They do the gig.

TM: For me, there was nothing left in the tank. So then it was, “Well, what do you do now?” And for six months I didn’t do anything and I had no desire to do anything else and then Barnard’s nephew (Sean) had really been on me to do something. And just so you know, he put my City Pages deal together — on his own, behind the scenes. Nobody knows this.

When I got fired from KSTP, I didn’t even know the guy, really. We were co-workers a little bit at KSTP, but we didn’t hang out or anything, and he said, “Mischke, I’ve got your next thing. We’re gonna do a thing where you write a column for City Pages and do a podcast there.” I said, “I don’t know if that’s going to work,” and he got the parties together, he played the agent, he made it all work, he told me to keep it all quiet because he was working for KQ at the time. He did the whole thing, and that bought me a year between my no compete at KSTP and ‘CCO, then I get to ‘CCO and I quit that after three and a half years and there’s (Sean) Barnard again, saying, “You know what? We were five years too early on that podcast idea. The landscape has changed.”

MP: It’s true. Commercial and public radio can really feel like dinosaurs, especially after listening to a great podcast.

TM: Yeah, so the long answer to your question is I think what I got tired of was the box. The beige, padded soundproof [radio studio took its toll]. Not the creativity, but just sitting in that room. So this show is all about not being in the box. And by the box I mean literally the studio, not by “thinking out of the box.” I mean actually going out on a sunny day and going down to the Mississippi River and talking to a fisherman.

MP: Or yourself.

TM: Or myself.  But I’m not in a radio studio. Believe it or not, it changes everything. As much freedom as I had at ‘CCO, it’s still in a radio studio and it’s a commercial radio station with commercials and rules … and there’s nothing as free as the Web. It’s the ultimate freedom.

MP: I bet what you’ll enjoy most is the ownership of the podcast, and the archives, and as a creative person, I think that’ll provide a foundation for you where you’re really building on something from the ground up.

TM: Stuff like that’s really important to me. When I got to City Pages, I said, “I want to own all my writing.” And they said, “Well, that’s not how it’s done.” I said, “That’s how I want to do it,” and eventually they agreed. They let me own it. I said, “I’ll put it in your publication but afterwards it’s mine.” They agreed to that. It’s a funny thing, but that is important — to have your stuff be your stuff.

The other part of it is that it was attractive for me to explore writing, video, and photography so the website will have all that as well. And the other thing you don’t know is that I read that Jason Davis was retiring from “On The Road” and I thought it was meant to be that I should host “On The Road.” I was going to make a strong pitch to do it, and as it looked like it was going to happen, my wife learned that she was going to live for the next year in [Lawrence] Kansas. She’s getting her doctorate in psychology at the University of Kansas, and she’s going to be the psychologist for the students there.

So I didn’t want to [commute] and do “On The Road,” and that’s when it all started to come together: What if it was “The Mischke Road Show” and what if I took Sean Barnard up on this idea and did shows from The Dinky Diner in Iowa? Then everything opened, then it was like, “Now the world is my studio.”

MP: It’s interesting because on the way over here today I was thinking about “On The Road” and how Kerouac would be doing podcasts now. It’s flight, it’s storytelling, and it’s perfect for you.

TM: He sure would, and he’d be great. We don’t know the answer to this question, but I bet if you could find the answer, it would be mind-boggling in its revelation: The number of human beings, songwriters in particular but I’ll say any creative sort, who have been behind the wheel when they wrote what they wrote, has got to be [infinite]. There’s something about that movement on the road, the idea that we’re going somewhere.

MP: This will probably make for a more intimate Mischke.

TM: I know what you’re saying. It’s already such an intimate medium. When I started in this with [KSTP’s Don] Vogel I’d sit across from him and say, “Why are you saying things now that you wouldn’t tell your own wife? Do you know there are thousands of listeners listening to you right now?” And I knew he wouldn’t say this stuff to his wife – the most intimate stuff – and that’s when I realized, “Oh my god, it’s this medium. He really does act like a guy in a closet at home, like no one’s listening.” So that intimacy thing is a huge part of the whole thing.

MP: How’s the learning curve with the technology going? That’s got to be freeing, too.

TM: It’s going good. I found the coolest thing. It’s called Hindenburg Journalist, which is software for “This American Life”-type people who want to do storytelling, and I bought an application for my iPhone, so this is what I record it on. I can edit on this, and I can press one button on it afterward and it blasts to the Hindenburg software on my laptop and desktop. It’s very simple, just made for the human voice. Up until a month ago, I’d never touched [a smart phone]. I sent my first text two weeks ago.

MP: It’s a blank canvas. You’ve got to be excited.

TM: Yeah, and scared. Because the thing that you tell yourself is that it only really works if you’re half of it. You do your hootenanny to an empty room and it’s fun to play with those people, but you’re not doing it for that. So who’s there to receive it? That’s always a little scary. When I was doing radio and I realized that people like what I do, you can breathe at that point because up until then you’re working with the idea that, “I hope people like this.” And that’s not as fun. It’s much more enjoyable knowing they like it and being hit and miss with it, but know that they’re rooting for you.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with all this, but I do know that if I feel invigorated, which I didn’t last summer, it can’t help but result in people going, “Well, he’s back.” Thumbs up or thumbs down on the material, but “He’s not a tired old [man].” People were picking up that I was kind of coming across tired, which I was. Tired of the grind of it.

I don’t know what the average person does, because I believe my experience is universal: You go through life and you do stuff and stuff that wasn’t old gets old — and then what? What do people do? Do they endlessly reinvent themselves, or do they just say, “Well, it’s a living.” That’s what I was looking at. “I’ve got two kids in college, I’ve got a good paying job, just go in and do OK.” God, I would say that to myself and it was the most … it would sound like … it was the equivalent of someone saying, “Just get a job at Menard’s.”

It was the worst thing to say to yourself: “You know this lovely medium you thought was as good as it gets? Just go in and just be OK and it’ll just be OK.”

MP: You’ve never done that, you’ve never been like that.

TM: It’s hard to settle. It’s so hard to settle. But one of the keys of the thing is that I’ve got advertisers who are very curious to know if this thing will be good, or if it’s happening. I want to be able to go into Summit Brewing and say, “Guess what? There’s a bunch of people who like this.” If those guys get excited, I’ll make a living.

Lately, we’ve seen a succession of community groups shoot down developments — or modify them into infeasibility.

In February, the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood association prodded the Minneapolis City Council to veto developer Kelly Doran’s bid to raze an old one-story building in Dinkytown because it might be historic. The decision killed his project— a $25 million five-story boutique hotel.

In March, an apartment and theater complex that would have spiffed up the Franklin and Lyndale intersection met with so many objections from the Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association that it is off the table, for this year anyway. Similarly, the Cedar Isles Dean Neighborhood Association has pushed developer Trammell Crowe to reduce an 11-story luxury apartment building to be erected on the site of Tryg’s restaurant site near Lake Calhoun to six stories. Whether developers can charge luxury prices for what will now be nonluxury views is an open question.

And let’s not overlook the mother of them all: the Southwest LRT. The objections of local groups both in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park to various aspects of the route have forced the Met Council into proposing a fix that would raise the cost of the line by about $140 million to $150 million. Even so, they are unappeased, and a major piece of the region’s future transportation network is now teetering on the edge of a cliff.    

Top-down flattening — followed by a rebellion

What a far cry all these goings-on are from how things were in the past. In the olden days, developers, engineers and city officials flattened neighborhoods right and left, literally paving the way for roads, hotels, apartments, stadia and shopping centers — often to serve the commercial interests of local notables. Local groups not only had no say; they barely knew what to say.

The results were often far from wonderful. And, so, a rebellion against that city-fathers-know-best planning model — in concert with the civil-rights movement — broke out in the 1960s with groups of every stripe arguing their causes. Even city planning, previously a top-down process, had its change agents, and chief among them was Paul Davidoff, a legendary figure who died in 1984. (His major claim to fame was contesting exclusionary zoning regulations that kept minorities out of most suburbs.)

Davidoff's idea, outlined in a rather famous 1965 essay, was advocacy planning. He argued that city planners couldn't and shouldn't view themselves as neutral technocrats but "represent and plead the plans of many interest groups." In other words, planning should take community views into account.

I suspect that Davidoff viewed the roles of community groups as somewhat passive; they would channel their opinions through the planners and politicians who represented them. But in the 50 years since Davidoff advanced his ideas citizen participation has become a sine qua non in planning. Federal, state and local governments have embedded community outreach (or community engagement as it is now called) into nearly every stage of every kind of development project. These days, government agencies have to ask local groups for their opinions about everything down to the color of each park bench. Even if they're not asked, most neighborhood groups are bumptious enough to make their views known, and agencies and politicians who ignore them do so at their peril.

My route to a somewhat jaundiced view

That's all to the good, you say, and I agree. People obviously should have some say in what goes on in their neighborhoods. But early on as a grad student in the urban affairs program that Davidoff founded at Hunter College in New York City, I came to have a somewhat jaundiced view of community groups and what they bring to the table. They aren't always representative, and they often don't consider the greater good — or even what's in their own long-term interests.

The city planning program at Hunter was far different from that of the typical planning school. Its students rarely built balsa-wood models, colored land-use maps or calculated floor area ratios. Instead they discussed how to incorporate into housing, zoning and transport plans the needs of minority groups, the poor and the working class — people whose interests and neighborhoods were most likely to fall under the urban-renewal bulldozer. 

As a former Peace Corps volunteer (Sumpango, Guatemala), I glommed onto this in a big way. Helping to surface the wisdom of the poor, the downtrodden and the overlooked and blending it with the interests of others to create plans that would serve everybody — or most everybody — seemed like a grand notion.

Such idealism foundered on my first in-the-trenches experience. I learned, alas, that the wisdom of crowds is not always so wise, that the voices of local people, down-to-earth though they may be, are not always worth listening to.   

At issue was the South Richmond Plan, which called for a $6.5 billion ($37 billion today) redevelopment of the southern third of Staten Island, New York City's fifth borough. Previously, the island had been almost inaccessible to New Yorkers, but the 1964 completion of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn opened the floodgates to new residents. The result was explosive and uncontrolled growth: congested roads, inadequate schools, overflowing sewers and ticky-tacky suburban tract housing that developers put up willy-nilly without creating sidewalks, parking or driveways.

'Cities within the city' plan

To get it all under some kind of rational control, the City Planning Commission asked the Rouse Corporation, which had developed an award-winning new town in Columbia, Md., to make a development proposal. A very thoughtful plan envisioned 12 new communities — "cities within the city"— for Staten Island that would create denser development that would save more land for parks, improve roads and sewers, expand public transit and add parkland. About 17 percent of the housing units would go to low-income residents.

My class, an advanced seminar on advocacy planning, was to divide itself in groups that would take the case, so to speak, of different entities on Staten Island grappling with the plan. One group was assigned to the Rouse Corporation; another to the office of the borough president. A small group of black students gravitated to the Urban League, which was arguing for more affordable housing, and the tree-huggers among us joined an environmental group claiming that development would destroy oyster beds. My group's job was to work with the Civic Congress, an amalgam of local taxpayer associations. Although their politics were only slightly more liberal than the Posse Comitatus — the borough had voted for George Wallace the in the previous presidential election — I felt that homeowners had the most dire case: They were fighting to save their homes from condemnation.

So for weeks on end our group crammed itself into a VW bug for the two-hour trip to the home and basement rumpus room of Dorothy Fitzpatrick, president of the Civic Congress. A tough cookie who smoked like a chimney, she wasn’t about to give any ground. To her and her working-class neighbors who had purchased the cheaply built tract houses, Staten Island was a hard-won piece of suburbia safe from the crime, dirt and chaos of Brooklyn from which most of them had emigrated.

Rouse’s plan was a ground-breaker that would have done Staten Island and New York City a great deal of good. It envisioned neighborhoods of 1,000 dwellings grouped around schools, day-care centers and small shops. With more compact development, akin to gated communities you now see in Florida, the city could fit in more people and reap an extra $2 billion in tax revenues. That would be enough to add all kinds of amenities and services — which, it was hoped, would bring business and jobs to the island. Additionally, the cost of delivering services to homeowners would be rationalized and made more efficient, cutting their annual expenses for utilities, water and sewers in half.

An offer to adjust Rouse's plan

None of the students in our group wanted to see the Rouse plan founder. But we did think that the city would be acting unfairly if it condemned houses that were maybe ugly, but newly built, up to code and cherished by their owners. Instead of the “blank slate” development proposed by Rouse, which would wipe clean practically everything already constructed, we offered to create a plan that would achieve the same density as the Rouse plan but allow it to be built around the houses that were already there. “It won’t be pretty,” I remember arguing. “But it will achieve the aims of the homeowners and the city.”

But Fitzpatrick didn’t buy the argument. The problem was that the new Rouse developments would bring “undesirables,” as she termed black people, and Staten Island would become just like Brooklyn. (Brooklyn may now be the hipster capital of America, but back then, people, especially people from Staten Island, saw it as a crime- and drug-ridden ghetto.) 

“You can’t argue with the Rouse plan on that basis,” I told her. “The city is not going to kill it because you don’t want blacks on Staten Island.” Tirelessly, our group turned out land-use maps showing Fitzpatrick a housing arrangement that would save their homes but allow for Rouse’s communities. Finally she agreed to have our group present our plan on behalf of the Civic Congress at a spring hearing before state Sen. John Marchi, who was shepherding enabling legislation for the Rouse plan through the state Senate.

The hearing room was jammed with angry homeowners who booed, hissed and sneered whenever anybody said one kind word about the Rouse plan. Scorn met our classmates who had the temerity to speak on behalf of affordable housing or oysters. (“They want to save them so they can eat them,” yelled a man from the back of the hall.) Our group’s testimony, while not cheered, brought forth no strident objections.

When we returned to our seats, however, one of our fellow students brought us a flier that members of the Civic Congress were placing on car windshields in the parking lot. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but the gist was: “The Rouse plan will bring blacks to South Richmond and ruin Staten Island.” I tried to ask Fitzpatrick about it, but she waved me away.

Marchi got the bill through the Senate that spring, but it later died in the House. Practically every group on the island had its own reason to say no to not just Rouse's plan, but to any modification of it. Environmentalists insisted it would wreck the parks and the oyster beds; the borough president's office did not want to lose any control over permitting and zoning to the Rouse Corporation; the Urban League termed the plan "racist"; and powerful property owners who worried about getting top dollar for their land from the Rouse Corporation also campaigned against the plan.

Rouse gives up

In the face of such virulent opposition, Rouse gave up on the venture. Zoning regulations were passed to keep housing low-density and to prevent the development of what would have been efficent communities.

Supposedly everybody won. Landowners made bundles selling at top dollar to housing tract developers; the borough president's office maintained control over land use; environmentalists kept the oyster beds — for a while, at least. And homeowners managed to maintain the prevalence of suburban tract housing and to keep blacks out (only about 5 percent of the island's population is African-American).

But today, Staten Island is an even bigger mess — a sprawl of cheaply built and expensive-to-maintain houses — what one regulator called “the most abysmal housing I’ve ever seen.”

Hurricane Sandy easily trashed much of it. Roads remain congested, and traffic is horrible. The lack of transportation and other amenities has kept businesses from locating on the island, and Staten Islanders have among the longest commutes in the nation — and most expensive. To cross the Verazzano Narrows Bridge to Brooklyn now costs $15. Task force after task force has tried to attack the borough's problems, but retrofitting light rail and denser development now would be costly and politically infeasible, given the island's low population; its people constitute only 3.8 percent of New York City residents.

So much for the wisdom of local interests. For a brief moment, they had an opportunity to shape a plan that could have provided continuing vitality to their neighborhoods, the city and the entire region. But they let it drop, and they're now paying a steep price.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The barman at Café Manhattan is buff and shirtless as he mixes afternoon drinks for two men sitting together on bar stools topped with cowboy saddles. The cocktail list is long but the African Queen (crème de banana, triple sec and orange juice) is always popular.

On the sunny terrace outside most tables are occupied by men, some in couples, some in groups.

At the heart of Cape Town’s gay village Café Manhattan, on a corner of Waterkant Street, has for years been a mainstay of the city’s vibrant, thriving, visible and open gay scene.

No one here is hiding. Nearby are a diner called Beefcakes where pastel pink and white flamingo statues welcome punters, a long-running gay nightclub called Beaulah (“Where Cape Town’s fabulous gay community meet to party”) and the popular Amsterdam Action Bar, among other joints.

But Cape Town’s gay village doesn’t, wouldn’t, and couldn’t exist in any other country on this continent, the majority of which outlaw homosexuality. Some have seen a recent increase in penalties for homosexual acts. In these places gay people and other sexual minorities are forced into lives of secrecy and fear. Coming out is an act of bravery and defiance: Far more than social awkwardness is at stake.

Homosexuality is illegal in 36 out of 55 African countries and carries the death penalty in four. The presidents of Nigeria and Uganda recently passed new laws strengthening existing anti-gay legislation. A parliamentary caucus in Kenya is demanding anti-gay laws be applied rigorously and one MP recently said homosexuality is “as serious as terrorism.”

South Africa runs contrary to these currents. The country’s 1996 constitution prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex, sexual orientation and gender. Pierre de Vos, a law professor at the University of Cape Town, says South Africa is different “because of the way in which it became a democracy.

“Equality was very important to some of those deeply involved in the struggle against apartheid and they successfully put the argument that the struggle is against the denial of dignity and against all discrimination,” said de Vos. “Part of the struggle was about human rights.”

Even so, South Africa is no paradise for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people, as de Vos points out. His experience as “a privileged white middle class, gay man in Cape Town” is very different from that of, say, “a black, lesbian woman in a small town.”

Brutal “corrective rapes” of lesbian women and hate crimes against homosexual men, including beatings and killings, happen despite the legal protections of the constitution.

Nevertheless, South Africa is an outlier when it comes to the state’s efforts to protect sexual minorities from the kind of discrimination gaining traction elsewhere in Africa.

“The specter of colonialism and imperialism hangs over this,” said Desiree Lewis a feminist activist and head of the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape during a recent public discussion on sexuality and the law at a bookshop in Cape Town.

Colonial rulers first wrote most of Africa’s anti-gay laws more than half a century ago. Despite their rhetoric that holds homosexuality as “un-African,” today’s anti-gay lawmakers are defending, and strengthening, that colonial legacy, according to Lewis: The ideas of both the nuclear family and exclusive heterosexuality were “colonial constructs.”

“We must ask where does the homophobia come from?” said Lewis. She went on to blame recent Christian fundamentalism for “fueling a backlash against sexual rights and feminism.” American evangelicals have been linked to the formulation of Uganda’s anti-gay law, which included the death penalty in an early draft.

The uncomfortable truth for liberals of every persuasion is that the anti-gay laws in much of Africa are popular and to call for their tightening is a near-guaranteed vote-winner. Analysts have noted that the passing of the Nigeria and Uganda laws come ahead of presidents Goodluck Jonathan’s and Yoweri Museveni’s expected reelection campaigns for 2015 and 2016, respectively.

Such moves would be unlikely to gain support in South Africa, however. “Populist politicians would find it hard to make anti-gay arguments because the elite discourse in South Africa rejects homophobia,” said de Vos.

He argued that South Africa can play a role in countering the anti-gay movement in Africa by showing there is an alternative to repression. De Vos pointed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a respected church leader and anti-apartheid activist, who publicly criticized Uganda’s new anti-gay law by comparing it to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.

“The history of people is littered with attempts to legislate against love or marriage across class, caste, and race,” Tutu said.

I am a Hmong-American, currently getting my social-work degree and interning at a culturally specific agency. I have seen that this service has helped improve many Asian-Americans’ mental illness in St. Paul. I see that there are so many people who have mental illness and there aren’t enough outpatient agencies to provide the help they need. There should be more mental-health agencies that are culturally specific in the metro area, because so many people from this part of the state are immigrants and Asian-Americans.

Some of my family members experienced mental illness, but there weren’t many outpatient services available to provide them the resources they needed. The only thing that helped them was seeing their therapist, but in some cases this didn’t help them enough. Also, as Asian-Americans, they found that there weren’t many services that understood how to help them within the cultural context. The agencies didn’t address culture and just placed my family members with whichever therapists were available, and this caused the mental illness to get worse.

I hope that there will be an increased funding to open more culturally specific mental-health services. With this increased investment, risks of suicide and hospitalization could be reduced. This would help Minnesota spend less money on hospitalizations and other expensive mental-health treatments. Instead, patients would be better served with less costly, culturally specific outpatient care.

MinnPost welcomes original letters from readers on current topics of general interest. Interested in joining the conversation? Submit your letter to the editor.

The choice of letters for publication is at the discretion of MinnPost editors; they will not be able to respond to individual inquiries about letters.

This being Earth Day, I call your attention to the 2014 edition of the Environmental Performance Index, a massive inventory of global progress, stasis and backsliding on all things environmental.

Issued biennially by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities, the EPI ranks 178 countries of the world in ways that may test some of your preconceptions.

The top-ranked nation is Switzerland, and No. 2 is Luxembourg. Both fit the notion that exemplary environmental stewardship is the prerogative of wealthy Western nations possessing not only the means but also the cultural mores and advanced economies that make it easier to be green.

But Singapore — populous, cramped, port-oriented, Southeast Asian Singapore? Or Australia — with its horrific wildfires and retreat from initially aggressive policies on climate change? And the Czech Republic — just a couple of generations into its post-Soviet history?

Yet those are the countries rounding out the top five, for reasons I'll come back to in a moment.

No surprises at the bottom of the list: Afghanistan is dead last, with Lesotho, Haiti, Mali and Somalia ranking only a bit better.

And as for the U.S., well, extend three fingers on each mitt and get ready to pump them skyward as you shout, "We're No. 33! We're No. 33!"

Which is actually about where we've typically ranked since 2002 in the data assembled by the EPI, despite a dramatic change in environmental rhetoric, at least, from Washington.

The Chinese paradox

Perhaps the most interesting metrics this year are those that attach to China — leading contributor to global warming, frequent focus of headlines about environmental evil-doing.

China comes in at No. 118 on the list, but that summary ranking, like the typical news footage, obscures some quite high marks earned for serious efforts to do better, particularly on climate change.

Writing a few weeks ago at ChinaFAQs, an interesting blog supported by the World Resources Institute, EPI chief author Angela Hsu had this to say about the paradox:

Although the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China is emerging as a leader in tackling climate and energy issues. Their standing at 21st out of 121 countries, while Germany stands at 31st and the United States at 49th, is a testament to the actions the Chinese government has taken over the last decade to reduce the energy intensity of their economy.

This is not a strictly apples-to-apples comparison, because Germany and the U.S., as developed economies, earn their rank based on how well they reduced carbon intensity over the decade from 2000 to 2010. China, still developing, is scored slightly differently — on how much it slowed its growth in carbon intensity in the five year period 2006-2010 versus the period 2000-2005. But still:

China performed better than all other emerging economies (Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa) in reducing its rate of carbon intensity growth.

The goal set by the [Beijing] government was to reduce energy intensity 20 percent by 2010 from 2005 levels, and the government’s programs and policies to reach this goal are well documented.

These efforts include the closure of small, inefficient industrial and manufacturing facilities; a program aimed to improve efficiency at the Top 1,000 energy-consuming enterprises; and standards for energy efficiency aimed at buildings and appliances.

Rigorous and readable

The EPI has earned a reputation for rigor over the years, and earned good marks last week in an independent review by the European Union's Joint Research Center.  It computes rankings in nine separate subject areas: environmental health impacts; air quality; water and sanitation; water resources; agriculture; forests; fisheries; biodiversity and habitat, and climate and energy.

This year's list of 178 countries is larger by 46 than in 2012. With these additions — mostly from sub-Saharan Africa or of small island states — the index covers environmental activity under flags that account for 99 percent of global population, 98 percent of the world’s total land area, and 97 percent of global gross domestic product.

So you could say the analysis is exhaustive, but I would also point out that in the run of such reports this one is, at least to my eyes, not only exceptionally readable but so attractive it's even pleasant to peruse, whether the news in a particular section is good or bad.

(My favorite place for reading the whole thing online is over at the magazines-on-the-Web site Issuu; and if you register, you can download the PDF. If you'd rather just sort and crunch numbers to dig deeper into topics or places of particular interest, there are impressive interactive features available as well at Yale and Columbia; see links at end.)

And though I think over-summarizing the findings may be a disservice, it's worth pointing out that this year's best news is probably about continuing progress on assuring steady access to safe drinking water and sanitation, advances that have led directly to reductions in child mortality.

 More than 2 billion people who lacked a safe water supply in 1990 have it today, according to the EPI, a pace that exceeded agreed-upon global goals. Singapore's achievements were a key reason for its high rating; even Afghanistan made big progress.

On the other hand, worsening air quality in many parts of the world has continued to take a toll on public health. For one grim example, premature deaths from air pollution in India (No. 155) rose from 100,000 a year in 2000 to more than 600,000 in the next decade.

Better on health than habitat

In general, the report found more progress on environmental measures related to human health and mortality than to ecosystem health and habitat protection. For just one discouraging example of the latter, the report finds that 87 percent of the world's fisheries are in serious trouble, many so overexploited they will never recover.

It was performance on some of these more traditionally "environmentalist" initiatives that seemed key to the rankings of this year's top performers. Switzerland got high marks for the creation of national parks as a vehicle for land and habitat conservation, while also pursuing a carbon-reduction program in its energy sectors that outpaced even Germany's.

Land preservation, high water quality and sustainable development initiatives lifted Luxembourg into the second spot despite poorer marks on climate and energy systems.

Australia overcame poor performance on climate, energy and fisheries management with traditional environmental protection and conservation policies; its recent work toward a carbon tax and a renewed bolstering of climate policy also scored some points.

Singapore won recognition for all it does to manage the impacts of a large population in a small space, from land-use planning to sustainable development to recycling, along with investments in wastewater treatment and sanitation.

The Czech Republic's poor air quality — linked to the highest cancer rates in the European Union — was outweighed in the EPI rankings by its investments in public lands conservation aimed at protecting habitat and biodiversity.

The U.S. rankings were little changed, as I said, from previous years. Our score for fisheries management dropped dramatically in the standard 10-year comparison, but this was offset by slight gains in air quality, agricultural practices and environmental health.

Most of western Europe ranked higher, as did Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan ranked lower.

Somehow I never get used to seeing that we rank 35th in the world for child mortality.

* * *

More information about the EPI in its present and past editions is available at the websites of its authoring organizations, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network.

Editor’s note: this is the second of four candidate profiles to succeed Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorfman. The primary election for the downtown/southwest Minneapolis and St. Louis Park seat is Tuesday, April 29, with the general election May 13. You can read Monday’s Ken Kelash profile here; Ben Schweigert and Marion Greene profiles will appear Wednesday and Thursday.

Anne Mavity started her career as a neighborhood organizer in Minneapolis and later spent four years in Russia for the United States Agency for International Development teaching citizens how to make change using the ballot and free speech.

A two-term St. Louis Park City Council member, she encouraged her colleagues to join her in voting against the Minnesota marriage amendment.

She wrote housing and community development legislation for the U.S. Congress and earned a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Georgetown University.

She has served as a member of the Minneapolis Civil Rights Commission and the Hennepin County Workforce Investment Board.

Mavity is a biker and a runner who has completed two marathons and three triathlons. She is 50.

She is one of six candidates for Hennepin County Commissioner in District 3 to replace Gail Dorfman who resigned from the board earlier this year.

MinnPost: What would you have done differently with the Southwest Light rail Line?

Anne Mavity: We have to get a regional system built, and Southwest Light Rail is one line of that system. At this point we are building them out at about once every 10 years and that is totally inadequate to create the system we need in the time we need.

We need to be really smart about moving forward. That is my position. I feel very strongly about that.

I’ve been fortunate, or unfortunate I guess, to be on the front lines with this project. My particular perch has been focused on land use and development surrounding the light rail. I’ve been on the Hennepin County Southwest Light Rail Community Works Committee looking at how we leverage that investment to create jobs and affordable housing around those stations.

That’s the excitement of this project. It’s not about moving a single person from Eden Prairie to Downtown; it’s really about job development and investments.

One of the key challenges of the project overall is the perceived and real, and I think it’s a little of both, lack of transparency in the process.

I think the biggest loss in the project is the loss of trust. I think that needs to change in future projects. I don’t know how much that can change in this project.

At this point in time we’re fairly down the path and we need to move forward and get this project moving, to work with the Met Council. Let’s roll our sleeves up and figure this out.

But this lack of transparency has been one of the challenges. In any large project, having authentic community engagement is a challenge. There are so many parts of this. It’s so complex.

MinnPost photo by Karen Boros

Anne Mavity

The trust that all of the options were thoroughly reviewed and looked at early on, when we had much more flexibility, that’s been one of the challenges.

Very specifically, when the locally preferred alternative was chosen, freight trains were not part of the discussion and were very explicitly not part of the process.

I think in retrospect, that was a key misstep and has certainly caused us a lot of angst along the way.

There were many routes and alternatives reviewed and looked at. This one would not necessarily be my first choice. I know everyone has an opinion about where it would be best. But this is where, for a thousand reasons, where we landed. So I think we need to move forward.

But the fact that when we were looking at the alignment of the light rail, at that point in time freight was very explicitly excluded from the discussion, I think that is part of the problem.

Originally, in St. Louis Park, I was the one, on a 6-to-1 vote, who said let’s reroute the freight trains north through St. Louis Park past the High School where both of my children were in attendance. There were many residents of St. Louis Park who were very unhappy with me at that time.

There are certainly challenges to co-location (freight and light rail in the same area) but I am absolutely supportive, at this point in time, of the Met Council recommendation.

No one is completely happy with anything so maybe we’re doing something right.

MP: The winner in this contest will take office while Hennepin County and the cities along the SWLR line are in the process of deciding the question of municipal consent. Minneapolis is at odds with the current plan. What do you do to get them into the fold?

AM: I’m running for Hennepin County Commissioner. I am not running to be the Metropolitan Council Chair. I am going to trust that the City Council and the Met Council are rolling their sleeves up because I believe that Mayor Hodges and the others are very committed to equity and the regional transit system.

They have another two and a half months to work this out. I’m not going to second guess or tell them what needs to happen in their negotiations. I think they are all extraordinarily competent, dedicated folks who can figure this out.

MP: Leaders in Minneapolis and St. Paul are dedicated to closing the opportunity gaps that exist between persons of color and those who are white. How would you move Hennepin County if this direction?

AM: This issue about disparities and justice is a cornerstone of my campaign, and frankly, of my career.

This county has an enormous opportunity to have a wonderfully positive impact in moving this forward and they need to do that. Disparities and the dispiriting impact of them need to be the lens through which all of these programs are being judged. Everything from transit to libraries, to health care to housing, the whole range, has both an opportunity and a responsibility.

When we look at policies we are looking at money. Where we put our money should follow our policies, which should follow our values. I think that’s not always true. I think that needs to be a core piece.

If we create this world class transit system, if we do all of this work within the county and we still have the kind of disparities we have now, we will have failed.

For example, libraries are a key issue. On a Saturday morning you go into the libraries, and for all of these families, all of these children who do not have computers at home, the libraries are places to do homework, or search for a job. Libraries are a key tool.

Investing in early childhood education is another key area. We’ve heard a lot about how, if we don’t invest in our children very early, we lose these critical learning moments in brain development.

Once they start kindergarten, if they are not all at the same starting line, catching up is extraordinarily hard. It is not cost effective to just let this go and not address it. It’s certainly not the right thing to do. It’s not the moral thing to do.

We have up to 2,500 children homeless in our community every night, every night, and we have normalized this, and we have accepted this when we should be outraged knowing that those children are going to experience trauma that needs to be addressed.

We expect them to go to school and learn with that kind of anxiety and instability. Most of us would not be able to handle that at all.

We need to be forward thinking and start investing in programs we know are delivering outcomes, particularly in early education issues, to address these disparities.

The county has key opportunities to leverage both its own resources and to partner and collaborate with other stakeholders. That is what we need to do more of to address disparities.

One last point: The county leadership at all levels does not look like our community and we need to make sure we are creating opportunities for communities and community leaders to participate authentically.

My background is as a neighborhood organizer, it’s where I started my career, and to me this piece is absolutely critical. Communities need to be empowered and have the capacity to engage so they can be involved in the decisions that impact their lives.

The county’s key role is to make sure every family has enough of their basic needs met so that as the children enter school they are prepared to learn. It is the schools' job to teach our children but the county can play a key role in making sure the children are going to school from a stable home, that they are coming back to a stable home, that they have food in their bellies, the nutrition they need to actually allow them to learn.

The county has a key collaborating role, a leadership role in making sure our children are prepared so that when they walk into that school room the teachers can do what they do best which is teach.

MP: What do you bring to this contest that makes you a better choice for County Commissioner than your opponents?

AM: What I offer is that I have 30 years of commitment and a track record of actually doing the work. It’s not just talking about what we would like to see.

My first job out of college was as a neighborhood organizer fighting to make sure we had resources in a central neighborhood in Minneapolis. I was on the Civil Rights Commission standing up way back then before that was popular or easy.

I worked for Congress writing laws on housing and community development. For the last 16 years I have worked professionally to prevent and end homelessness, linking together these very complex service systems with affordable housing and opportunities at the policy level and at the project level.

When I have come into this, it’s not just talk. I have done the work. I have delivered results. I understand who those partners are we need to engage and I have the relationships.

I’ve worked for Congress. I understand the legislative role. But local government is a very different role.

I’ve worked with a seven-member board trying to figure out how we move a policy forward. I have a track record for doing that.

I led the way to do citywide organics recycling as part of a new 5-year garbage and recycling contract. It sounds easy. Let’s all say we’re going to do it. But it takes a year of hard work.

These are things we should be doing citywide in Minneapolis, we should be doing it county wide to have an impact on being good environmental stewards for the generations to come. I have the track record to demonstrate that I know how to do this.

This is not a simple job and I think I bring the most demonstrated commitment for doing the work and getting results.

And let me add that working with the community in solving problems is a whole different way of addressing issues than just being smart enough to figure out the right thing to do by yourself. 

The messiness of democracy is where I have lived my life, my career. Folks may not agree on things and you work through that process with the community and that’s how you get the best decisions coming out the other end.

That’s a skill set that, compared to the other candidates, I have done throughout my life, in every job.

MP: The winner of this contest will have to run again come November. If you lose in May will you challenge the winner this fall?

AM: No. I plan on winning. (Laughs) Should I not have that privilege I have great work that is very fulfilling, ending homelessness and creating opportunities. I serve on the City Council and work with the community.

MP: You will not have much time between May and November to establish a track record. What will your number one priority be and how will you make that happen?

AM: I would say the core core issue of my campaign is equity and ending disparities. And to get the county to provide increased transparency in its budgeting and programs and accountability. And understanding, across all programs, where its investments are being made and how it’s impacting the communities within the county. We need details.

For example, the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, the garbage burner. The county just passed a $407-million allocation for that this past month. We need details about what that’s for. I think it’s been since 2002 that we’ve had any real reports on the environmental impact of that project.

I want to understand how the county’s money is going into communities of color. For example, if the count is saying we need to look into health issues of Somali women. Are we working with that community to do that? Or are we working with the traditional organizations who hire their one Somali outreach worker? 

MP: Hennepin County is second only to the state of Minnesota in size. Yet some complain that it is an almost invisible government. Do you think this is a problem? What do you do to change this image?

AM: For the single mom who is in our shelter downtown at People Serving People and meeting with her social worker and going to the Workforce Board to get a job while her kids are at the library doing their homework, the county is not invisible to her.

It’s quite a privilege to say the county is invisible. The people I have dedicated my life and my career to, the county is not invisible to them.

Is it as responsive as it needs to be? Not necessarily.

But this issue of invisibility, I think, what a privilege that the county is invisible to you because you are not in need of these services.

I think the county needs to authentically engage the community in the issues that are impacting them. So when we do road re-designs, like we just did Lyndale Avenue from Lake Street all the way down, the community needed to be involved in that planning and that visioning. Working with neighborhood groups, working with neighbors. That’s absolutely critical.

I think our focus is less about making it less invisible and more about the people who have to use these county services, who are in the emergency room because they have an abscessed tooth and don’t have access to health care.

We need to make sure we are delivering cost effective, quality, [respectful] services to folks so they have an opportunity to move ahead and succeed.

The tendency has been to engage folks you know best and are most comfortable with. What I’m saying is that we need to go beyond that into constituents and communities that have not been engaged and have not had a voice in really being able to help the county articulate what programs, policies and investments would best benefit those we’re trying to serve.

MP: Is there a question I haven’t asking that would your like to answer?

AM: I’m a Washburn [High School] graduate. Not only is southwest Minneapolis my stomping ground, I know every nook and cranny of this community. My first apartment was on Hennepin and 26^th. The work I’ve done has been in the policy arena of Minneapolis.

I’m on the St. Louis Park City council. I know and love St. Louis Park.

So when Minneapolis is thinking about who is going to be their best partner on the County Board, to help the city succeed as a city, what I offer is an understanding of what that is and how we best leverage each other's resources and energies to move this community forward.

MP: This final question is the product of a journalism seminar I attended a few years ago. It is designed to get people to talk about themselves and perhaps reveal something about who they are. Here’s the question: What is your favorite childhood memory. How does that influence you today?

AM: I grew up on Park Avenue and the creek. And my mother worked downtown at the Government Center so she wasn’t around during the day.

So all of those kids, we would live in the creek all day long, finding crayfish, following the creek to Lake Nokomis, sitting under the falls, the memories of those long summer days just hanging around.

Before we had bike trails, we’d say let's bike the perimeter of Minneapolis and we’d get on the bikes in the morning and that would be the day’s adventure. Those long summer days just creating our own trouble and our own fun.

I’m a very resourceful person. I think it’s always a challenge with children today who are so programmed. We had so much time unprogrammed and had to create our own fun and our own activities.

That ability to be creative and resourceful and a little bit of measured risk taking was what it was all about.

Creative Commons/Lara604

Science writer George Johnson: "There were new hints that coffee may lower the risk of some cancers and more about the possible benefits of vitamin D. Beyond that there wasn’t much to say.”

The idea that there are “superfoods” or even "super diets"— ones loaded with antioxidants and other nutrients that offer protection against cancer — has been slowly unraveling over the past decade, science writer George Johnson points out in his “Raw Data” column published online Monday in the New York Times.

Johnson, whose books include “The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery,” has just returned from the mammoth (18,000-plus participants) annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, where, he notes, “the latest results about diet and cancer were relegated to a single poster session and a few scattered presentations."

"There were new hints that coffee may lower the risk of some cancers and more about the possible benefits of vitamin D," Johnson adds. "Beyond that there wasn’t much to say.”

That’s a massive turnaround from 1997, when the cancer research community believed that getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables might lower the incidence of cancer by as much as 20 percent.

“Whatever is true for other diseases,” writes Johnson, “when it comes to cancer there [is] little evidence that fruits and vegetables are protective or that fatty foods are bad. About all that can be said with any assurance is that controlling obesity is important, as it also is for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke and other threats to life. Avoiding an excess of alcohol has clear benefits. But unless a person is seriously malnourished, the influence of specific foods is so weak that the signal is easily swamped by noise.”

As happens repeatedly in medicine, the shift in attitudes is the result of more rigorously designed studies, which have almost universally failed to find convincing evidence linking diet with cancer.

As Johnson explains, even with the more rigorous studies “it is hard to adjust for what epidemiologists call confounding factors: Assiduous eaters of fruits and vegetables probably weigh less, exercise more often and are vigilant about their health in other ways. Some of this can be sorted out with randomized controlled trials, with two large groups of people arbitrarily assigned different diets. But such studies are expensive, and the rules are hard to enforce in the short term — and probably impossible over the many years it can take for cancer to develop.”

Scientists haven’t given up entirely on searching for links between diet and cancer, but, as one leading expert noted at the meeting (a bit ruefully, says Johnson), such research “has turned out to be more complex and challenging than any of us expected.”

You can read Johnson’s column on the NYTimes website.

Today Your Humble Blogger confesses to being perpetually behind.

To wit: Last fall, the Minneapolis School Board took the landmark step of voting to require an equity impact assessment be performed on every program and policy created in the district. This is huge.

Think of it as the race- and poverty-focused equivalent of an environmental impact statement. You know, like the studies that have been done on the proposed PolyMet copper and nickel mine in northern Minnesota.

The Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) assessments seek to ensure that decisions are made by diverse groups of stakeholders and that the initiatives contemplated support the district’s focus on equity. It’s a simple process that, taken seriously, could have a profound impact.

So far, staff seems to be struggling with the concept that the board means business in this department, and the board seems willing to cheerfully and sweetly remind them of its importance. And they’re not accepting any of these “We’ll clean the groundwater for 500 years, honest” promises, either.

But on to the point of this post: The policy and its roots have gotten some well-deserved national attention from the nonprofit Race Forward, which has offices in Oakland, Chicago and New York City. The group is showcasing the effort as a success story and is offering other communities the tools to replicate it.

To that end, Race Forward, which publishes the excellent Colorlines, has produced a 12-minute video that features Minneapolitans talking about the evolution of the equity impact assessments. If you are at all interested in equity in education or the power of community organizing, it’s worth a watch.

The nutshell version: In the run-up to its 2008 referendum, MPS backers asked various minority communities to vote yes on the levy. Unconvinced the district was committed to their interests, leaders of the groups turned to the Organizing Apprenticeship Project, which formed a coalition that assessed the impact passage of the levy would have on people of color.

The group came out of the process convinced the referendum was badly needed if the district was to honor its commitments, and it was communities of color that delivered the vote.

The following spring, the group turned the process — five simple questions — into a pocket guide to budgeting equity that could be used by cities, counties or any other policymaking entity.

Later that year MPS asked the group to assess the potential impact of a high-profile move to change school attendance boundaries. This time, the organizers said no, the district needs to learn to do this. Et voila.

And so I deliver you, Dear Reader, into Race Forward’s capable hands.

State Rep. Jim Abeler ended speculation that he would abandon his U.S. Senate campaign and run again for his Anoka-Ramsey seat. Instead, he introduced his potential successor Tuesday and pledged he is “fully committed” to winning the Republican nomination to challenge DFL Sen. Al Franken in November.

The new Republican name in Abeler's increasingly swing district is Abigail Whelan, a former legislative assistant.

“It’s the right step to take,” Abeler said of his decision to seek the Republican U.S. Senate endorsement although “more likely than not I would run in a primary.”

According MinnPost’s Campaign Finance Dashboard, Abeler has just under $14,000 cash on hand — well below all of his GOP rivals except Julianne Ortman, who has not reported her campaign’s cash on hand.

Fundraising is always a concern, Abeler said, but predicted “pure money will not be successful,” perhaps a reference to millionaire GOP rival Mike McFadden.

Abeler added that his advantage over Republican competition is that “the problems of our time are the deficit, debt and health care. My experience and expertise is in those areas.”

Abeler said that 57 legislative colleagues asked to him to run for re-election to his House seat, an acknowledgement of that expertise — and the risk of losing a newly open, competitive district.