Mankato high school sports: All children above average?

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

I didn't grow up in Mankato, and I'm always struck by how many of the high school sports teams not only make it to state championships but win a good share of them.

When I ask our sports staff if Mankato doesn't have an unusual share of state tourney appearances and wins, they doubt that is the case. They would have more knowledge than I would on it, but it always seems like Mankato high school athletes, like the children of Lake Wobegone, are "all above average."

Just the championships I can remember, give West at least two football state titles and two basketball state titles or near in the past 10 years or so. Both East and West have made the high school hockey tournament as well. East has been in the state basketball tourney several times and lost a very close game in the state football championship, if I remember right.

Excelling in hockey and basketball also seems to run counter intuitive as you see schools usually good in one major winter sport, not two.

East track team is well known for its success at state tournaments and now we again have the East girls golf in the state tournament.

Again, maybe it's just me. Where I went to high school, we made it to the final game in the State High School Hockey Tournament last in 1961. Washington High School in St. Paul never got past the second game of sections as far as I can remember in the last 30 years.

When I was a junior we did make it to the finals in our section baseball tournament, losing our bid to state to St. Thomas Academy, I believe.

Anyway, it's good to see so many Mankato kids doing well in athletics at the state level. If someone has a little time, I'd be interested in a history of state titles for Mankato schools. There must be a record book somewhere that could indeed prove if the kids in Mankato were "all above average," compared to students in the rest of the state.

For Helen Thomas, the ax just fell

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

The ax finally fell on Helen Thomas, longtime White House correspondent who started her career as a beat reporter with UPI and covered 10 presidents starting with John F. Kennedy.

Hearst Newspaper Corp. helped her decide to retire quickly and suddenly after some untoward remarks about Israel and the Jewish people, telling them to get the "hell" out of Palestine and go home.

Her dismissal isn't as surprising as it is in leading one to think about the rather powerful interests that can get one canned in the news business. She admits what she said was wrong, and apologized. We suspect she wasn't fully aware of what she was saying and the tone.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to me that even the White House Correspondents club? voted to rebuke her and remove her front row seat. I didn't realize the White House correspondents had jurisdiction over seating in the briefing room.

Learn something new every day.

This should be some good fodder for the news cycle, and I'm sure Howard Kurtz will be talking a week after the fact on his "Reliable Sources" media show on CNN. By Sunday, I would think we would have explored every angle, but then again, this business needs news, and the death of one of its own is sort of a morbid, macabre curiosity

Gubernatorial candidate budget plans

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

Here's a look at the plans of gubernatorial candidates for solving Minnesota's budget deficit as submitted to the StarTribune.

It's a crucial issue, and voters should demand these candidates have a plan as soon as possible.

In my assessment of the plans below, Mark Dayton has by far the most detailed plan. We give him credit for taking the politically risky move, thought a move of integrity, for telling people what exactly what he plans to do.

Kelliher's plan seems second most detailed.

I would give Horner and Entenza's plan a tie for details

Emmer has the least detailed plan, relying on slogans and somewhat unclear plan to "peel back the onion" of spending.

Here's a StarTribune editorial calling for more details from candidates

Mark Dayton's plan

Tom Emmer's plan

Matt Entenza's plan.

Tom Horner's plan

Margaret Anderson Kelliher's plan

Mallard Fillmore and Doonesbury

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

Readers of The Free Press print edition may notice that longtime comic strip Doonesbury now has an ideologically diverse partner on the opinion page.

Mallard Fillmore is a politically-oriented comic strip we have been running above Doonesbury in the Monday through Saturday editions. It is billed as a politically conservative strip and we've added it to provide readers with a little more variety of political viewpoints in terms of comic strips and cartoons.

The strip has been around since 1994 and is in 400 newspapers nationwide.

Here's how Mallard's distribution syndicate King Features describes the comic strip.
"Mallard Fillmore first hatched from the pen of Bruce Tinsley at The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va.

Today, the celebrated comic strip about Tinsley's conservative reporter-duck fills the bill in nearly 400 newspapers nationwide.

Distributed by King Features Syndicate since 1994, readers of newspapers across the country enjoy the duck's right-wing viewpoint.

Tinsley created Mallard for what he saw as the conservative underdog. The strip is for "the average person out there: the forgotten American taxpayer who's sick of the liberal media and cultural establishments that act like he or she doesn't exist," he says.

"Mallard" almost did not see the light of day. When asked to come up with a mascot for The Daily Progress entertainment section, artist Tinsley showed editors three ideas: a blue hippopotamus; a big nose in tuxedo and cane; and a duck.

Tinsley says the hippo went unused for fear of offending overweight people, and the nose was axed because it would "offend people of Jewish and Mediterranean descent, not to mention Arabs and anyone else with a big nose." Tinsley says he thought his editors were kidding, but they were not.

Once Mallard Fillmore was off and running, his editors requested Tinsley tone down its conservative bias. When he refused, he was fired.

The strip caught the attention of The Washington Times, which used Tinsley's wise-quacking journalist in the commentary section before moving the strip to the comics pages. The rest, as they say, is history."

Always interesting insight into how editors view comic strips.

 Have only a couple of comments so far from readers on the new strip. One only saw the first couple of days and decided it was "another liberal" comic strip. I informed him otherwise and told him to keep watching.

It should be apparent by now to many that Mallard does have a right wing point of view.

Another said it provides what he thought was a fitting contrast to Doonesbury, being Doonesbury is more subtle and clever and Fillmore is more loud and unsubtle by frequent use of capital letters.

In any case, let us know what you think of the new comic strip.

Community leader program expands

Some 24 community leaders received their community leadership "diplomas" Tuesday night in Mankato as part of Blandin Community Leadership Program that has not been in Mankato for over 10 years.

The Grand Rapids-based Blandin had been conducting community leadership training programs for a couple decades and some 5,500 community leaders in Minnesota have been trained by Blandin.

The Blandin Foundation pays all expenses for the leaders and conduct what amounts to eight days of training, beginning with five in a retreat in Grand Rapids in the fall.

I was part of the Mankato group, that also included such community leaders as MSU Provost Scott Olson, Business owner Todd Snell, YMCA Director John Kind, Voyageur Web owner Yvonne Cariveau, Barb Embacher, from GMG, Anna Thill from the convention and visitors bureau as well as leaders from local government and other nonprofits.

It was an amazing coming together in one room of a lot of people who help make Mankato what it is, and the conversation about the area's strengths and weaknesses was fascinating. I expect great things will be achieved by this simple but important meeting of some of the brightest minds in the community.

The aim of the Blandin program is to help leaders identify the relative "health" of their community, as measured by eight dimensions of a healthy community, and to do something to improve the health of the community and solve problems.

It's a program I found to be extremely helpful and worthwhile.

Blandin typically focuses on communities in rural Minnesota smaller than Mankato. But in a partnership with the Bush Foundation, Blandin has been able to offer the program to Mankato, and in fact, is looking to organize two more such leadership programs this fall.

It's an unusual opportunity for Mankato, and Blandin is looking for 48 more leaders to recruit into two separate retreats. That will bring the number of Mankato leaders going through the program up to 72, a critical mass that Blandin feels helps get things done. A similar program was established in Duluth a few years ago that gave birth to many success stories.

There is more information on the program at blandinfoundation.org.

The group of leaders who graduated Tuesday have identified three community issues to mobilize on: Community physical health and childhood obesity: Self-esteem of young girls, and getting more people of diverse backgrounds more involved in community decisionmaking bodies.

I'll be updating the progress of each group on this blog as well as in the print edition of The Free Press as we make progress.

The distortion begins in politics

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

I don't want to seem partisan because I believe Democrats and Republicans both have good ideas to better govern our state and country, but I have not seen such blatant distortion of an issue as I read the story of "Spin" in Wednesday's Free Press.

Republicans like Sen. Dave Senjem, R-Rochester, and gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, are, in my view, way out of line in describing the bipartisan agreement to tap $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion in federal dollars to help poor people get health care as so called government takeover of health care.

They've suggested this deal, which Gov. Tim Pawlenty agreed to, is leading the path to government making medical decisions.

The Medicaid program we're tapping was actually started under George W. Bush's administration. Many of Republicans, and all of the state's Republican members of Congress, actually voted to stop Bush from cutting the Medicaid funding in this vote in 2008

In fact, many hospitals including ISJ-Mayo based in Senjem's neck of the woods, favored the deal because it would at least go farther in making up the costs they must pay to service these poor people. Don't forget, it has long been a law that hospitals are required to serve people whether they have health insurance or not.
I'm surprised at Senjem, he used to seem like such a reasonable guy.

One Republican legislator told me confidentially, that they're doing this to make the election all about a referendum on so called "Obamacare" hoping to repeat the success of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown.

I hope the Republicans drop that strategy. It is just intellectually dishonest, and their raising it is an insult to all Minnesota voters.

Come on guys, debate the issues honestly.

How Mankato affected by legislative session

By Joe Spear
Free Press Editor

While Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the DFL Legislature offered a somewhat muted victory party on resolving the state's $3 billion budget deficit, there were plenty of things even members weren't too happy about.

Here's how they play out for the average Mankato area resident.

The state budget deficit wasn't really solved, we borrowed about $2 billion of the $3 billion from schools, and are somewhat required to pay it back. My guess is small schools, mostly in rural areas, are harder hit than bigger suburban schools just because small school enrollment is declining, reserves are tight and many may have to borrow to get through.

Both parties seemed to have an agreement on spending $188 million or so, to get a federal match of $1.4 billion to cover health care for poor people, but the deal seemed to fall apart in the end, with the agreement being the next governor had the unilateral right, without legislative approval, to take or leave the $1.4 billion.

Hard to see why one would "leave it" but the thinking goes a Republican governor taking over would "leave it" so as not to appear to endorse the idea of Obama health plan after criticizing it earlier.

Principles come at a high price these days.

If the next governor doesn't take it, there appears to be some deal struck that would allow us to go back to bipartisan plan for GAMC, with rural hospitals getting more to encourage them to participate.

Almost none of them were willing to do so because their rates under the "reform" plan would not come close to covering their costs.

On the GAMC compromise, we gave the Legislature and the governor our first ever "bipartisan award." We won't take it back, even though the deal kind of fell apart. It was nice while it lasted.

The whole health care issue isn't really one of choosing more spending over less spending. We are required by federal law to provide health care, expensive emergency room health care, to people without insurance. (That's been on the books for decades, not Obama plan)

So, it's more a question of all taxpayers paying upfront to maybe save some catastrophic emergency room costs, or those who have health insurance paying through higher premiums. That includes state employees, who collectively can bargain for the taxpayer to pay more of those higher health care costs.

It's not if we're going to pay for health care for the poor, it's who pays and how are we going to share the burden.

Income taxes on wealthy won't happen. DFL tried again, governor vetoed again. Property taxes however, will likely continue their climb and local services will likely be cut. Look for schools to try to approve more operating levies (i.e. property taxes), and voters to approve them because they don't want to lose their neighborhood school and don't want to cut music and art and athletics and teachers.

Hope the next governor is creative at solving financial crises, because it sure looks like we'll have one.