Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/paul-schmelzer/page/11/)
When “DC Madam” Debra Jeane Palfrey released her phonelists in July, I, like a lot of other journalists, pored over the lists looking for numbers of local politicians. I found a few numbers in St. Paul, Minnesota, home to our State Capitol and some of the local offices of our delegation in D.C. I called one number and got a voicemail; I heard a male voice I couldn’t identify.
Fred Phelps is coming!
Fred Phelps is coming!
Fred Phelps… didn’t come.
WorldJerks
Living in a Northwest Airlines hub, we Minneapolitans have to live with less than stellar flights from time to time (like our cancelled flight home from San Francisco recently; the airline rescheduled us to a midnight flight that took seven hours. When we chose to stay an extra night at a hotel instead, they refused to kick in for the extra expense). So when given a chance to give a little less to this repeatedly disappointing company, I jump.
Dear Paul Schmelzer,
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Over the past few days, I’ve been interviewing Rex Sorgatz, an executive producer for MSNBC.com, Wired contributor, and creator of the local community blog, MNspeak. A pioneer of “placeblogging,” he spoke about the difficulties for newspaper journalists making the shift online, “big media” adopting a “small media mentality,” how the Star Tribune’s Buzz.mn blogger James Lileks is doing, and the future of citizen journalism. Read it all at Minnesota Monitor. Here’s an excerpt:
The five-bathroom, three-car-garage mansion that Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder reportedly purchased is impressive in its grandeur — as it should be, perhaps — but not over-the-top in a William Randolph Hearst kind of way. Yet to the 145 or so Star Tribune employees affected by Ridder-orchestrated downsizing — and the dismayed Pioneer Press employees who are emailing the real estate link around this week — the 8,000-square-foot Lake of the Isles mansion might seem excessively posh.
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When U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Rachel Paulose stepped up to the podium on Monday for a press conference about the recent prostitution busts in the Twin Cities and Austin, Minn., she laid out her ground rules: she’d only accept questions on that topic. Most reporters toed the line, writes Powerline’s John Hinderaker. But “[t]here were two notable exceptions to the professional demeanor of most of the reporters in attendance. One of the two was KARE 11’s Scott Goldberg, whose story evidences his other interests, if not his rudeness. I forget the other, but he too was a piece of work almost up to the Goldberg standard. Let’s call him the Goldberg variation.”
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Yikes: Someday, Howard David Ludwig’s Firearm Owner’s Identification Card will be stored in a box with his first pair of shoes and perhaps a lock of his baby hair.
That’s because the card was issued when Howard, nicknamed Bubba, was just 10 months old. It lists his height (2 feet, 3 inches) and weight (20 pounds) but doesn’t note he’s yet to learn how to walk.
With some exceptions, FOID cards are required of any Illinois residents purchasing or possessing firearms or ammunition within the state.
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Seventy years ago today, planes from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy made one of history’s more infamous bombing runs — and its first test of the military strategy now known as “shock and awe.” In wave after wave, their low-flying fighters — acting in service of Fascist Gen. Francisco Franco — dropped a cumulative 30 tons of munitions, strafing civilians with machine guns, and setting fire to what remained. By the end of the day, some 2,500 people were dead or injured and three-quarters of the town’s buildings were destroyed, according to the Basque government.
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Why did Bush order flags flown at half-staff to mourn the dead at Virginia Tech, but has never done so for any of the 3,300+ US service men and women killed in Iraq? Continue Reading
City Pages’ new editor Kevin Hoffman ventured into Don “Nappy-Headed Hos” Imus/George “Macaca” Allen territory this week in a news item that squeezed three questionable ethnic stereotypes into a wee 291-word piece entitled, “New Delhi Star Tribune: Local businesses, meet your new advertising partner: Habib.”
Reporting on Star Tribune plans to outsource some 25 jobs to New Delhi, Hoffman’s April 18 piece referenced a week at the Star Tribune “that saw new publisher Par Ridder smacked around like a two-bit ho in a lawsuit filed by his former employer.” Hoffman also called the Strib’s outsourcing plan “Operation: Sanjaya,” after the wouldabeen American Idol Sanjaya Malakar, who is an American citizen born to an Italian-American mother and Bengali Indian father in Seattle. Both references — which can be seen in Google’s cache — have been scrubbed from the paper’s online story.
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