MinnPost is bigger and better than ever. In our eighth year, we set new highs for readership and membership, and for the second year in a row we were named by the Online News Association as one of the nation’s top sites of our size.

Our 2015 year-end report, published Friday, includes a review of our journalistic accomplishments and financial health, as well as thank yous to those whose contributions helped us have such a successful year.

Our page views, visits and users were all up, as was the amount of time people spent on the site. All in a year in which there were no major federal, state or local elections — coverage which is MinnPost’s bread and butter.

This year, many of our most-read stories were also our most ambitious: exhaustively reported pieces on issues critical to Minnesota. An in-depth look at the hiring practices at the University of Minnesota. An investigation into misconduct by a Minneapolis police unit. Several deep-dives on the political maneuvering behind a new professional soccer stadium. These stories often take weeks, and sometimes months, to produce, and their popularity is testament to both the community’s need — and readers’ hunger — for journalism that goes beyond the factoid of the moment or the meme of the week.

Membership donations and event revenue were up 14% from 2014, with the strongest growth coming from member-donors who give less than $1,000. We finished 2015 with 2,616 member households, up 16% from last year.

Advertising and sponsorship revenue were up 3% in what continues to be a challenging and competitive market.

A year ago, we reported that we had begun positioning ourselves for a successful future, hiring two new leaders for the editorial and business sides of MinnPost. 

Publisher Andrew Wallmeyer and executive editor Andrew Putz have now been on the job for more than 18 months, and they are having a great impact, as you can see in their accompanying reports. In addition, MinnPost just promoted office manager Bethany Hollenkamp to the new position of director of finance and operations, and recently welcomed our first development director, Claire Radomski, to fill out the executive team.

With these leaders in place, we as co-founders will continue to transition our staff roles to our new leadership during the course of the year. We are working on a detailed transition plan with our Board, which anticipates our continued commitment to serve as active members of the MinnPost board of directors and a few board committees.

We are profoundly grateful for the opportunity to work with so many fantastic people: our staff, our Board, other volunteers, partners, and MinnPost’s many financial supporters and loyal readers. Our goal continues to be to provide high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota, and to create a sustainable business model for that journalism in a challenging time for media.

We are proud of what MinnPost has accomplished, and what it has come to mean to Minnesotans. And we are optimistic that its future is bright, and that our leadership succession will be managed to leave MinnPost in good hands.

In three days — and after almost an interminable year of campaigning — Americans will finally begin the process of selecting the next president. On Monday night, Iowans will head to caucus sites around their state to select their preferred candidates for the Republican and Democratic Party nominations.

So far, three Minnesota Democrats — Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Rep. Tim Walz, and Rep. Keith Ellison — have hit the campaign trail in Iowa. Klobuchar and Walz have stumped for the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, while Ellison is backing the insurgent campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sen. Al Franken is officially backing Clinton too, but he has gone to New Hampshire to campaign for her ahead of that state’s February 9 primary. The three remaining Democrats — Reps. Betty McCollum, Rick Nolan, and Collin Peterson — have not officially endorsed anyone yet.

Minnesota’s three Republican representatives, meanwhile, have steered clear of their party’s primary process: not one has officially backed a GOP candidate yet.

Klobuchar campaigns with fellow Senate women

Klobuchar, who endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, has logged some serious hours on the campaign trail for Clinton, and has emerged as a prominent surrogate for the candidate in the media.

In Iowa, Klobuchar has often appeared on the trail with a group of fellow Democratic women in the Senate. Earlier this month, she hit an event in the northeast Iowa town of Dubuque with a trio of colleagues: Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

And, on January 24, Klobuchar shared the stage with one of the many celebrities who’ve publicly supported Clinton. At an event in Waukee, on the western edge of Des Moines, Klobuchar plugged Clinton alongside actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

In a statement to MinnPost, Klobuchar said that her visits to Iowa have convinced her that Clinton “has a strong grassroots campaign in Iowa and across the country,” adding that “it helps that she grew up in the Midwest as well.” (Clinton is from a suburb of Chicago.)

Walz: A rural Democrat from a neighboring district

Though he might not be as familiar to non-Minnesotans as Klobuchar, Rep. Walz has been dispatched to Iowa to stump for Clinton. In December, he participated in a three-city swing, attending events at VFW halls in Dubuque and Waterloo, and a debate-watch party in Mason City. Walz formally backed Clinton last year, and he recalls positively the experience of working with then-Sen. Clinton on a veterans’ bill when he got to Congress in 2007.

The five-term congressman told MinnPost in an interview that the Clinton campaign reached out to him about going to Iowa, and probably for two reasons. For one, his First District runs the length of the Minnesota-Iowa border, and some media from the north spills into the south — so Walz is somewhat of a familiar face in that corner of the Hawkeye State.

Also, Walz — who grew up in rural Nebraska — is a rare House Democrat representing a rural area, and as such, is a valuable asset in Clinton's effort to court those kinds of voters. His background as a non-commissioned officer in the Army National Guard and work on veterans’ issues doesn’t hurt, either. “They pick where you think you can make a difference,” he says.

Walz isn't under any illusions that whoever wins Iowa will capture another Midwestern caucus state — Minnesota. He said that while his corner of Minnesota is very similar to Iowa, the states' cultures are different, and trying to divine the outcome in Minnesota based on Iowa is useless. “It's a long ways from being done,” he said, adding that he thinks people will end up supporting “pragmatic leadership, compromising to get things done, setting high goals. Minnesota tends to fall in that. But you can't necessarily say anything because of Iowa.”

Walz acknowledged Iowa's importance in the national process, but he didn't seem jealous of it. “It's healthy when people are engaged in the process. It's neat,” he said. “It's not a Minnesota-Iowa friction thing, they’re certainly punching above their weight. People who have won the caucus haven't gone on to win the presidency. It distorts the process. I don't think I'd wish it on Minnesota the way they do it.”

Ellison pleasantly surprised

Rep. Ellison, meanwhile, has broken with his Minnesota Democratic colleagues by backing Sanders. And in doing that, he’s also set himself apart from nearly all his congressional colleagues: Ellison is only one of two sitting members of Congress to endorse Sanders. (Over 180 Democratic lawmakers have officially endorsed Clinton.)

The Minneapolis congressman calls Sanders, the only Senate member of the Progressive Caucus, a good friend, and has stumped for him not just in Iowa, but in D.C., South Carolina, and Minnesota.

In December, Ellison tried to convince Iowans that Sanders deserves their support. At the height of the furor over GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s comments about Muslims, Ellison appeared in Cedar Rapids— the site of the country’s longest-standing mosque — and told voters that supporting Sanders was a way to combat discrimination against Muslim-Americans.

Ellison heads to Iowa this weekend to do some last-minute stumping for the Vermonter. In an interview with MinnPost, Ellison said he is surprised by how well the 74-year-old progressive has been doing in the polls. In October, when he endorsed Sanders, he says he asked himself, “How can I, given everything I stood for, not support it even if we don’t win? I have to support it.” Now, he says, “I’m actually a little bit pleasantly surprised we’re doing as well as we are.”

Ellison says he’s confident Sanders will win Iowa if the big crowds the senator has attracted translate into caucus-goers. If it does, he says it’ll have big implications for Minnesota. “I certainly think that Iowa will start a chain of events… I think you can assume if it’s playing in Iowa, it’s probably playing in Minnesota,” he says, adding that the two states share a “common sensibility.”

It was clear, though, Ellison relishes the Iowa fray a little more than Walz. He admitted that he wishes Minnesota got the quadrennial national spotlight the way that its southern neighbor does.

“I think it would be interesting if we did… It’d be very interesting because Minnesota is very representative of most of the country in many ways. For now, we just gotta deal with the cards that’s dealt.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the state Sen. Baldwin represents.

In March of 2014, shortly after taking office representing the 13th Ward in 2014, Minneapolis Council Member Linea Palmisano kicked a hornet’s nest, pushing for a moratorium on teardowns of existing homes in some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, such as Linden Hills and Fulton. The point was to slow down the trend of demolishing existing homes and replacing them with homes that were often much larger — and much uglier.

The moratorium was lifted once the city crafted a “construction management agreement” to deal with the day-to-day complaints by neighborhood residents. And later in 2014, new zoning rules were added to respond to the height, massing and appearance of the replacement houses.

All of which is why, after getting plenty of grief over the last two years for trying to do something about teardowns, Palmisano wasn’t going to stand for being accused of doing nothing in the pages of Governing Magazine.

While the article, in the magazine’s December issue, was focused on next-door Edina, it also included a dismissive aside about the 2014 moratorium put in place by the Minneapolis City Council: “They had to pull the plug on the idea less than a month later in the face of widespread complaints,” the article noted.

In response, Palmisano wrote to the magazine: “I believe that the 16 zoning code changes I have authored, and, construction management agreements we were able to move into place  … have shown quite a bit of betterment of quality of life as these changes happen in our neighborhood.”

It is understandable that Palmisano would be sensitive about the issue. Winning council support for the moratorium — which affected teardowns and large remodeling projects in five southwest neighborhoods — was one of the first issues she took on after taking office in January 2014. At the time, she was responding to horror stories about teardowns and so-called Monster Houses built in their place. It wasn’t just noise, dust, debris spilling into neighboring yards, or the dumpsters and portable toilets placed where they shouldn’t be. The complaints also concerned public health and safety issues, including disruptions to the water table and damages to foundations of nearby homes.

While public hearings that resulted from Palmisano’s push offered a chance for residents to vent their concerns, they also drew builders, who said they were fulfilling a demand for larger and more-modern homes in a part of town where many mid-century houses were worth less than the land they occupied. Urbanists complained that the moratorium was a response to people who didn’t want the city to grow, to change. And Realtors noted that buyers blocked from building what they wanted in Minneapolis would take their projects — and tax dollars — across to Edina, which has embraced the teardown trend.

When the moratorium was eventually lifted, in the spring of 2014, Palmisano said it was worth the political pain, even though the process “felt a little bit like standing in front of a train.”

Now, 15 months after the new rules became effective, an odd thing has happened. An equilibrium has developed, balancing concerns of the neighborhoods and the demands of the marketplace. Short of stopping teardowns completely, the system seems to have successfully created a way to quickly respond to construction problems, even while it assures that the new, larger houses don’t become monsters.

“There are still problem developers and there are still problem properties,” Palmisano said. “But I think that between the toolkit and the construction management rules, it has gone a lot better.”

A short-lived moratorium

The moratorium took effect in March of 2014, after it was introduced by Palmisano and approved by a unanimous council. To remain in place, however, it would have needed to get the approval of a council committee and another vote of the full council.

MinnPost file photo by Terry Gydesen

Council Member Linea Palmisano

But before that could happen, city staff drafted a construction management agreement that put building standards in place. That agreement addressed builders hours of operation, noise, posting of contact information, neighbor notification, storage of equipment, crew parking and even a requirement for a pre-construction meeting between the builders and neighbors.

Later a “Toolkit for Neighbors of New Construction” was unveiled, a guide to help neighbors navigate the bureaucracy, explain the construction management agreement and give advice as to how to exercise their rights. (It ended with advice to “Try to avoid taking your frustrations out on the people who have chosen to live on your block.”)

Then, on Oct. 1, 2014, 16 zoning code changes took effect, rules that governed what the new houses could look like, how they sit on the lot, how much of the lot they could occupy as well as their height and mass.

Construction confusion

Before the zoning changes could take effect, there was a rush to the permit counter by builders who preferred the old rules to the new. In September of 2014, 24 permits for new, single family homes were issued. Of those, 14 were issued during the last week of the month.

The glut of September permits led to some confusion during the following construction season. “One of the things about last year and last building seasons is: I wasn’t sure when a house was being built whether it was the old rules or the new rules,” Palmisano said last week. “There were some I could tell because there were flagrant things about them that we made sure can’t happen anymore. But there were still brand new houses being built under the old rules.”

Eventually, though, as those permits were used or abandoned, more and more of the new homes fell under the post-moratorium system. In a report to the city council on the one-year-anniversary of those rules taking effect, Jason Wittenberg, the city’s manager of land use, design and preservation, said the transition went reasonably well. That might have been foreshadowed by the fact that only one person testified against the new zoning rules when they went before the planning commission. “Entering the process, we would not have anticipated that level of consensus given the range of issues that have been brought forward,” Wittenberg said.

The new rules include limits on height; on how high basement foundations can stand above the natural grade of the lot; demands for larger side-yard setbacks; and ratios to assure that houses take up less space on lots. Builders also must include some combination of features favored by the city, from including a basement and a detached garage to using higher quality exterior materials and keeping a house within range of a neighborhood’s predominant house height.

The rules discourage attached garages in another way as well: by counting their square footage in the “floor area ratio,” which measures the amount of square footage that can be built as a relationship to the size of the lot. Moreover, front “tuck under” garages are not allowed if the lot has alley access.

Wittenberg said architects and builders seem to be able to abide by the rules. “They have either come in the door having met the standards or were amended in a way where they met the threshold,” he said.

There remains an ongoing issue around what are termed “virtual teardowns,” however. Some builders have taken existing homes nearly down to the foundation and built from there. But oftentimes those foundations do not meet the new side-yard setback requirements. The city is continuing to look into ways to enforce a requirement that any demolition that takes down more than 60 percent of a house constitutes a teardown, and therefore must meet the new rules.

Builders reaction

Andrea Corbin has reason to dislike the new rules. She had to take down a house that had been framed to the second story after the city noticed that it was too tall by 18 inches. Corbin, who said she does six to eight teardowns a year, mostly in southwest Minneapolis, said the violation was caused by a surveying error, but didn’t fight the order to take it down and start over.

While a few other houses were stopped at the foundation level, the house at 40th and Thomas might be considered the first teardown of a teardown. Yet Corbin, who owns Contract Design, considers herself a fan of the new rules. “Overall, I think they’re great changes,” she said, calling them a “happy medium” between concerns of neighbors for their neighborhood and the response by builders to market demands for larger and more-modern houses.

Corbin estimates that meeting the rules — both for design and construction management — adds about $15,000 to the costs of building. But the houses she builds sell in the million-dollar range. “It’s like anything else,” she said. “When it’s new you have to change the way you do things. Once you get used to it, it’s no big deal.”

A builder with a less favorable view is Loren Schirber, the owner and business manager of Castle Building and Remodeling, who said he lost a $400,000 contract because the remodel his clients wanted wasn’t allowed under the new regulations. The problem arose when his clients, looking to remodel their house to help them “age in place,” wanted an attached garage at the rear of the house. But because the square footage of attached garages are now included in the floor area ratio, the plans turned out to be 424 feet over the limits.

MinnPost photo by John Whiting

A new home being built on the 5100 block of Abbott.

Schirber wrote Palmisano and other council members and said the rules not only cost him a contract, but are likely costing the city economic activity. His clients decided to sell and do a project in nearby Edina.

Only Palmisano wrote back: “From our perspective, building bulk is building bulk — and excluding attached garages from FAR [floor area ratio] actually encouraged the building of attached garages when we’re trying to incentivize detached garages as the traditional urban form.”

Schirber said he remains frustrated and disappointed. The type of project he lost is outside his regular business of smaller remodels. But he said he is trying to expand into what he termed a “Property Brothers” line of work, where he gets the client first and then helps them shop for homes to remodel into what they are looking for. “A big job is nice,” he said. “It is easier to sell one $350,000 project than 30 $10,000 projects. So they hurt when you lose one.”

Schirber said he understands the issues and “gets” the new rules, especially as they are applied to the street and side elevations  — those visible from front of the house. “But if people want to ruin their (back) yard with an attached garage, it’s their yard,” Schirber said. “It doesn’t effect the front of the house.”

One impact of the teardown phenomenon is in property tax collections. Each $250,000 house that is replaced with a million dollar house adds significantly to the taxes paid. A trip down the 5300 block of South Chowen Avenue in the Fulton neighborhood illustrates that. A house on the corner sold for $250,000 in March of 2014; its replacement sold for $756,000 one year later. Another house sold for $260,000 was replaced by one that eventually sold for $800,000.

Though taxes lag increases in value, the $250,000 house paid $4,600 in taxes a year ago. A neighboring house that sold for $785,000 in the summer of 2014 is paying $12,204.

No slow down

Jamie Long is the chair of the Linden Hills Neighborhood Council, the same position Palmisano held before being elected to council. He said there does not appear to be any lessening in teardown activity, and the rebuilding in the area west of Lake Harriet and south of Lake Calhoun remains a hot topic in the neighborhood.

“I hear fewer complaints, although there are still complaints on a lot-by-lot basis,” Long said. He says the thinks the new rules strike a balance between complaints about height and mass and the demand for new housing. He also said he thinks the problems surrounding water table penetration and ground water infiltration have been reduced.

And while he said the new houses add to the housing mix in the neighborhood, something he said “makes a neighborhood interesting,” he does worry that existing smaller houses will be lost completely.

“I hope it doesn’t become every single lot filled to the brim,” Long said. To promote the mix of housing in Linden Hills, where one-third of residents rent their homes, the association is sponsoring a “Little Homes Tour” this summer to highlight smaller homes which are defined as less than 2,000 square feet.

Larry LaVercombe has watched the teardown controversy from both sides. A former chair of the Linden Hills Neighborhood Council’s zoning committee, he is also a real estate agent with an office in the area.

“The tension that I was tracking was the tension between neighbors who wanted to maintain the quaint community aspects of the neighborhood and the perceived need of the city to increase density and the market for bigger houses,” LaVercombe said. He described the new rules as “enormously successful.”

“While Councilmember Palmisano took a lot of heat for the moratorium, the serious nature of the moratorium is what got the builder’s attention,” he said. “I’m for the changes that are attempting to balance issues of the historical makeup of the neighborhoods relative to the fact that it has become the most attractive neighborhood in the city for people who want to build their own home. You can buy a lot for $300,000, and for $300,000 more build a family home worth $900,000.”

Did the rules slow demand? “Not in the least,” he said.

“Some developers have decided they don’t want to work in the neighborhood, but there are plenty of others. Builders and Realtors are clambering for properties.”

An at-home non-invasive screening test for colorectal cancer that can detect microscopic amounts of blood in stool is a “feasible and effective” alternative to colonoscopy, even if used year after year, according to a study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That last finding is important, as health experts had been concerned that the effectiveness of this method of colorectal cancer screening — known as the fecal immunochemical test (FIT) — might wane after the first year an individual used it.

The findings also suggest a way of reaching the third of American adults for whom preventive colorectal screening is recommended, but who have never been screened or who are not up to date with it. Many people avoid colonoscopy because of the long and uncomfortable preparation it requires, as well as the invasiveness and unpleasantness of the test itself. Others can’t afford the screening. They are either uninsured, or loopholes in their insurance require high co-pays for the procedure.

Colorectal cancer kills about 52,000 people annually in the United States, making it the nation’s second leading cause of cancer death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is also one of the most curable types of cancer — if diagnosed and treated early 

Screening for colorectal cancer can be very effective, and is recommended for people who are 50 to 75 years old, which is the age group at greatest risk of developing the cancer. FIT is simple and inexpensive, but needs to be done every year. Colonoscopy is a much more complicated and expensive procedure, but is required only once every 10 years.

A four-year study

For this study, researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., analyzed data collected from 323,349 of their health plan members between the ages of 50 and 70 who participated in FIT screening for colorectal cancer over a four-year period. (Those numbers represented about half of the people who were originally sent the screening test and asked to participate.)

To use FIT, people collect a small sample of their stool and then mail it to a laboratory, which looks for microscopic amounts of blood that might indicate a slowly bleeding polyp or cancerous tumor. FIT is similar to, but not the same, as the fecal occult blood test, which uses a different laboratory technique and is not considered quite as effective as FIT at detecting colorectal cancer.

In the first year of this study, FIT detected colorectal cancer in 84.5 percent of participants who were diagnosed with the disease. In the next three years, the test picked up between 73 and 78 percent of the cancers.

“We found that the sensitivity for cancer was somewhat higher in the first year, and that's not surprising,” said Dr. Douglas Corley, a Kaiser Permanente research scientist, in an interview with HealthDay reporter Dennis Thompson. “The first year you screen someone, for breast cancer or for anything, you’re going to find cancers that have been there for a while that may be larger or are easier to detect.”

High adherence

Another positive finding from the study was that adherence to the screening was high: 86 percent of the participants completed the test for all four years.

All those numbers combined led Corley and his colleagues to conclude that FIT was “both feasible and effective” for screening large groups of people.

Again, this is good news for people who have avoided getting screened for colorectal cancer because they dreaded (or couldn’t afford) a colonoscopy.

“There are a couple different effective tests for colorectal cancer screening, including colonoscopy and FIT,” Corley said in his interview with HealthDay. “They have different strengths and weaknesses. This study provides additional support that FIT can be an important tool for getting more people screened in a way that is both sensitive to picking up cancers and making it easier for people to comply.”

FMI: You’ll find the abstract of the study at the Annals of Internal Medicine website, although the full study is behind a paywall. For information about colorectal cancer, including screening, go to the National Cancer Institute’s website on the disease.

It was certainly possible to imagine, in advance, that Donald Trump’s petulant decision to skip the last pre-Iowa debate would backfire on him, making him look like a coward or a baby or a control freak or whatever. But, after suffering through Thursday night’s two-hour blather-a-thon, I suspect Trump “won” the debate by not showing up.

It was incredibly boring. I would like to stick to the old-fashioned eat-your-vegetables belief that it is not the job of politics to be entertaining. I actually believe that — or am trying, desperately against all evidence, to cling to some version of that pre-Trumpian belief.

But in the case of last night’s GOP presidential debate, “boring” doesn’t mean substantive. In addition to lacking entertainment value, the debate also lacked substance. I didn’t learn anything interesting about any of the candidates’ records or ideas. You wouldn’t have to be terribly cynical to have an overwhelming impression that they were almost all lying or at least exaggerating their “records” of “accomplishment.”

(The exception to that would Dr. Ben Carson, who has no “record,” at least in the government-policy area. He chose to filibuster his own closing statement by reciting the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. He got only two words wrong, out of 52, as far as I can tell.)

Without Trump to suck up all the oxygen, it came across how much the other candidates despise Sen. Ted Cruz. (And, watching and listening to him, it’s not that hard to understand why.) Of course, it’s well known that the Republican Establishment dislikes Cruz so much that many of its members prefer Trump.

In a time of anti-establishment fervor, that could be a badge of honor, unless, as you watch Cruz weasel around the issues, you find that you don’t like him either. (Not a single one of Cruz’s Senate colleagues supports him for president, but he did manage to get one U.S. House member from Iowa, Steve King, to co-chair his campaign, and he managed to mention King five times last night.)

The level of dislike for Cruz among his colleagues actually became a premise for one of co-moderator Chris Wallace’s questions. It turns out that on several occasions on the Senate floor, Cruz has made motions that died for lack of a second, even though seconding a colleague’s motion is normally treated as a minimal act of senatorial courtesy.

Obama-bashing trophy

Marco Rubio wins the Obama-bashing trophy for the night for this, from his opening statement: “This campaign is about the greatest country in the world and a president who has systematically destroyed many of the things that made America special.”

Cruz wins the transparently-sucking-up-to-Iowa trophy for this: “If I am elected president, keep an eye on the tarmac, because I'll be back. Iowa in 2017 will not be fly-over country. It will be fly-to country.”

In general, the candidates have all learned that it is better to lie than tell a truth that doesn’t fit the political needs of the moment. Here are a couple of examples from last night.

The Fox team, which did a good job, showed videotape of Cruz arguing for an amendment to the famous “Gang of Eight” bill on immigration in which Cruz plainly stated that he wanted the bill to pass and that he wanted to grant “those 11 million people who are here illegally, a legal status,” short of citizenship, that would allow them to remain in the U.S. And that if only his amendment would be adopted (which clarified that the 11 million would not be eligible for full citizenship, although their children born on U.S. soil would), the bill would be more likely to pass.

After showing the tape, Megyn Kelly (Trump’s favorite journalist) asked Cruz: “Was that all an act? It was pretty convincing.”

Cruz moved his lips for a while. Words came out. None of them responded to her question, and none of them told the truth when he said on the videotape:

“I don't want immigration reform to fail. I want immigration reform to pass. I believe if this amendment were to pass, the chances of this bill passing into law would increase dramatically.”

What he meant was: “I want this amendment to pass because I believe it will help cause the overall bill to fail.”

He managed to get through the moment without admitting that what he said on the videotape was a — what’s the word I’m searching for? — lie.

Accidental truth-telling

The other beauty in the accidental truth-telling-moment department occurred near the end. Jeb Bush, who by consensus had his best debate so far (which isn’t saying much), made a pitch for people to read a book he wrote about the immigration issue.

Bush believes — he said so last night and he apparently said so in his book — that “we should have a path to legal status for the 12 million people that are here illegally. It means, come out from the shadows, pay a fine, earn legal status by working, by paying taxes, learning English. Not committing crimes and earn legal status where you're not cutting in front of the line for people that are patiently waiting outside.”

Rubio said last night that “earned path to citizenship is basically code for amnesty.” He also claims to be opposed to amnesty. But, in the past, he (like Bush) favored an earned-path to legal status — not citizenship, but legal status — which could also be called a form of “amnesty” because it allows those who came into the country illegally to remain here legally. Now that part of his evolution on the issue has become inconvenient. But he had the chutzpah to accuse Bush thus:

RUBIO (To Bush): You used to support a path to citizenship.

BUSH: So did you.

(LAUGHTER)

RUBIO: Well, but you changed the — in the book...

BUSH: Yeah. So did you, Marco.

Rubio didn’t deny it, didn’t confirm it, but pivoted to the uber-safe, consensus Republican position that no overall solution to immigration reform can work until greater measures are adopted to prevent more migrants from crossing the border illegally.

If by any chance you would like to read a full, annotated transcript of the debate, the Washington Post has once again supplied one.

Buffers rebuffed. The Pioneer Press’ Dave Orrick writes,“Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton has ceded ground to farm interests, Republicans and some Democrats over a contentious aspect of his plan to require vegetative buffer strips to help protect water from agricultural runoff and erosion. … Privately owned drainage ditches are off the table, Dayton announced Friday morning following a meeting with Republican leaders Thursday. … The decision is a reversal of Dayton’s steadfast insistence that a law he signed last year covered private ditches in some instances. However, Republican leaders who supported the law have maintained that private ditches were never on the table, and the administration’s attempt to include them was out of line, if not illegal.”

Veteran homelessness may soon be a thing of the past in Minnesota. MPR’s Matt Sepic writes,“State officials say Minnesota is on track to find permanent addresses for all its homeless veterans this year. … A major data-collection effort that started in 2014 has been key to helping veterans, said Cathy ten Broeke, the state's director to prevent and end homelessness. … She also credited the $35 million set aside for affordable housing in the 2012 bonding bill with helping many formerly homeless people.”

MinnPoster Andy Sturdevant lays down the harsh truth about all those top-ten lists we’re so fond of sharing.Sheila Regan’s story in City Pages begins:“It’s a question that seems to come up with greater frequency each year: How do our cities stack up when compared to other cities across the country? … ‘You will always come across these lists on the internet, the top 10 cities for living or recreation or for singles or live music or whatever else,’ says artist, writer, and Minneapolis personality Andy Sturdevant. ‘Nobody knows what the method for coming up with these things is, because usually it’s just a website where a bunch of freelance writers are sitting in a room and then they go, “Well, Seattle seems pretty good. And Minneapolis seems like it’s okay. Let’s put that as number two.” There’s not a lot of rigor behind it.’ ”

Maybe it’s the Funyuns.The Minnesota Daily’s Raj Chaduvula has the lowdown on a new study from the U: “ Dope doesn’t necessarily make you dopey, according to a University of Minnesota study published this month. … The eight-year study measured the IQs of twins — some of whom abstained from marijuana, while others reported using the drug — over time to determine how marijuana usage affected intelligence. Researchers concluded that measured drops in IQ were likely not directly caused by drug use but instead by common factors affecting both twins. … ‘It’s not the marijuana that is causing the decline,’ said Joshua Isen, a psychology postdoctoral research associate from the University of Minnesota who co-authored the study.”

In other news…

No opinion of new, no-artificial-ingredients Trix cereal, but this is one cute bunny:“General Mills Rebrands Trix To Promote Artificial Ingredients Removal” [Twin Cities Business]

Better quack your spot early to get a view of this:“New Quack City: giant rubber duck headed for Duluth” [Minnesota Brown]

Free rides to the St. Paul Winter Carnival. [Metro Transit]

That’s a lot of cash:

Former #mn06 Rep. Bachmann's congressional campaign still has $1,753,399 cash on hand. Wow. pic.twitter.com/5Xz3uPQx8f

— R. Stassen-Berger (@RachelSB) January 29, 2016

Just another day in the Badger State:“Wisconsin police recover another load of stolen cheese” [AP]

Service Employees International Union Local 26 (SEIU) officials are meeting Friday with Minneapolis-St. Paul Contract Cleaners Association for the first time since roughly 4,000 SEIU janitors voted to authorize a strike if a contract agreement is not reached by Feb. 14.

The union janitors, who clean commercial buildings throughout the Twin Cities, saw their contract with metro employers expire on Dec. 31.

After several bargaining sessions, union officials have challenged the contract cleaners association — which represent local cleaning companies — to meet them on clearly defining the workload limitations for their janitors, and say they’re willing to go on strike if an agreement isn’t reached before their Valentine’s Day deadline.

“So far we’ve had about eight bargaining sessions and not a single proposal has been agreed on,” said SEIU executive board member Brahim Kone. “The biggest proposal we have so far is workload [limitations].”

In fact, though lot of attention has been given to the $15 an hour part of their contract proposal, Kone said, some union members are actually more concerned with lessening the workload they believe is unfairly put on the janitors, most of whom are people of color. 

Many SEIU janitors are being forced to clean more space in less time, Kone said, and the union wants to clearly limit how much work can be required in the new contract. “The language that we have right now says that the employer shall not put an unreasonable workload on the worker,” he said. “But what is unreasonable?”

Adriana Espinosa, who works for Marsden Building Maintenance, said she already works part time for just over $13 an hour. She voted yes on Saturday because $15 an hour would help her pay for things like her mortgage, her car insurance and buying food. “I need a raise,” she said. “I have to work two jobs just to pay for family expenses.”

Kone said that while they voted to allow a strike, the union hasn’t yet finalized any plans for one. But they’ve discussed a 24-hour strike if the contract isn’t agreed upon by their deadline.

John Nesse, with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Contract Cleaners Association, said the association isn’t willing to discuss the specifics of contract negotiations, but that — in addition to the session being held Friday — they have already scheduled several more bargaining sessions.

“We remain hopeful that we will reach an agreement,” Nesse said. “And we’re committed to negotiating an agreement that reflects the market.”

While the union bargaining committee has only discussed a 24-hour strike, SEIU member Sonia Cortez said she’s willing to go on strike for longer if the janitors' demands aren’t met. “This moment is the reason why everybody came together,” she said. “We’re thousands of people and we’re ready to strike.”

Five light rail lessons for the Riverview Corridor

from streets.mn by Bill Lindeke

Planning transit takes a long time, and there are so many ways it can go wrong. For my money, the best remaining urban transit project in Saint Paul is the so-called “Riverview corridor” running from downtown along West 7th street down to the airport.

As the latest ridership numbers show, rail has been the key to boosting transit in the Twin Cities. The two light rail lines already account for a quarter of the riders in the whole system, and will only grow as the land use develops to emphasize transit.

At this point, though, there are a lot of options on the table, at least if you take the planning documents at face value. So here are some Riverview observations, from someone who spends a lot of his time on West 7th Street, and on the existing Twin Cities light rail.

Caucuses: Democracy of, for and by the extroverts

from Wry Wing Politics by Joe Loveland

On March 1, Minnesota’s two major political parties will select its presidential nominees with a caucus system.  Iowa will use a similar system in just a few days.  So maybe we should take a moment to consider who gets the most and least representation out of this system.

The caucus approach requires that party members gather in groups in various locations to debate issues and candidates before they vote.   If a citizen wants to be a party delegate, they must attend additional lengthy gatherings.

Our city, our problem

from #unitecloud by Natalie Ringsmuth

It’s been a big week for St. Cloud – and not really in a good way. After reading the City Pages article that labeled this area the “worst place in MN to be a Somali”, many St. Cloud area dwellers have received Facebook messages and e-mails from their friends and family across the country asking “Is it REALLY this bad in St. Cloud?”, “Glad I got out of there when I did!”, or, ” I had no idea this was happening in our hometown – did you?”

While the “bigotry smack-down” narrative of the story, especially the title, was tough to swallow, the stories in the article stand out as of the utmost importance to the cultural tension in our city/area. As the founder of #unitecloud, I can not say whether this is the worst place in MN for our Somali neighbors to be because, well, I am as white as the snow we are forecasted to get tomorrow. I don’t know what it’s like to love my cultural heritage as much as I love the opportunity of America. I have no idea how different my life would be if I had skin that didn’t burn at the first sight of the sun. I can not speak to the stares, jeers, and comments that I would get if I would profess my devotion to my faith by covering my head.

Helping children cope with a scary world

from Community Matters by Gael Thompson

​Our world can be a scary place. As parents, we worry about our children growing up when wars, shootings, bombings and other horrific acts of violence seem to happen one after another. Frightening images stream across our TVs, computers and phones constantly. We wonder how to help kids feel safe and how to talk to them about their fears and confusion while we try to manage our own.

The Timberwolves and flash seats

from Old and In the Way by Gary Sankary

At the end of the day, Flash Seats has seriously changed the value equation for me with regard to the Timberwolves. Where I used to be able to counter crummy team play with a great fan experience, thanks to the ticket change I now have seriously negative experiences as fan, and with the horrible coaching on the floor I’m struggling to justify renewals. Mrs. S is, for the first time, seriously lobbying against it.

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The chase is almost always more fun than the destination.

As one who has come and gone from Minnesota at least four times in the past 17 years, it might be thought I never believed in the idea that “you can’t go home again.”

Mary Stanik

Of course, it took quite a while to fully realize that for most of those years, I did not think of Minnesota as home. It was a place of many friends, a measure of career success and a reasonable cost of living. It also was a place I always wanted to get away from in order to be somewhere containing more of that elusive quality known as excitement. Somewhere populated with more single people my age who would not ask if I went to high school in the area (I did not). Somewhere promising even more career success.

Through all my moves both painful and exhilarating, I eventually understood that excitement is not confined to swish bars, stores or miles of museums — and that career success is not always defined by a job title conferred by someone else. In June 2014, not long after reaching that level of hotdish comfort, my previously outstandingly healthy mother had a stroke and I had to hasten to Arizona to care for her and sell her house. I’ve written about this for MinnPost, including the excitement I felt one year ago at having talked my mother into leaving Arizona and my two Midwest weather-averse brothers in order to go back home with me to Minnesota.

I know you know the rest of my story. You can even tell me you would have told me so. Yes, Mum did not take to Minnesota. And I soon knew that for as much as I thought things would be so much better when I was “home” again, being back home as a solitary caregiver (and especially in a place where one’s parent has no friends or relatives) is far from hotdish comfortable. Soon after getting back, I knew I had made a mistake — but perhaps only of sorts. Since I left Minnesota in 2014 as fast as a drug smuggler wearing a blaze orange cloak, I came to believe I had this past year to say a proper goodbye to friends, places and to Minnesota itself before I haul my mother and myself back to Arizona.

The thing is, when saying goodbye to a place where one has lived (off and on) since university days, one sort of wants to do so at much-loved shrines and spots from days long gone. So I drove to Duluth last July and was happy that the Pickwick’s walleye remains as tasty as I’ll never find in Arizona. Lake Superior was as cold and rippled with whitecaps as ever. I thought about how often I used to go there to get a fresh air refill and an attitude adjustment, especially when I encountered death on a regular basis when I was a spokesperson at the University of Minnesota medical center.

The U of M campus is one place that certainly has changed a great deal during the past 25 years or so. But when walking near Dinkytown one day, I still found the former house of a boyfriend I’d dated for years. He’s been married to someone else for a long time. But I occasionally hear from his Minnesota-born wife, who is a big fan of my book. She’s always effusive in her praise of my writing, though every once in a while she’ll mention the fact that her husband and I were not well suited. I guess that is what some call Minnesota Nice. I wrote her a Nice note while stopped in front of the old boyfriend’s old home.

Two friends I’ve known for years recently took me to another place of yore, St. Paul’s famed Mancini’s Char House. I hadn’t been there since another former boyfriend took me there to ask me what I might think if somehow he became ready to ask me to be his wife. I don’t know if it was the char, the cocktails, or the relief that the boyfriend never became ready, but the fact that I hadn’t seen these friends in years did not matter. They said they will definitely visit me in Phoenix. I actually think they’ll do so.

Now, as I pack my desert-bound caravan, trying to be as optimistic as John Derek was while portraying the Exodus-organizing Joshua in the film “The Ten Commandments,” I am happy I had this year to put my affairs in order. And without making an overly emotional fuss one might expect of someone from, say, Milwaukee (my native home), I shall say goodbye. And thank you.

Thank you, Minnesota, for becoming my home.

Mary Stanik, a writer and public-relations professional, lived in St. Paul until heading west with her mother this week. She is the author of the novel "Life Erupted." 

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The quiet of good work. I've realized, I will never get a big award. I will never stand on a podium. My face will never be on the front of a magazine. No coin will be minted with my visage. Finally, no record book will list my name. As I slide toward 60, it's clear: A lifetime in education, while good work if you are able, is quiet.

Kris Potter

It's 5 a.m. with a coffee cup in your hand and fear and busyness in your stomach. You head out into the cool winter day, sun rising, educational ideas a swirl, students in mind.

You remember the student you lost — the one who was so sharp, likely the smartest one ever, killed on a country road while training. The one who ran away from you; being a good teacher you chased him, in heels across a baseball field, to bring him back to elementary school. The fear is there because, deep down, you remember the year that did not work.

You were sick, and your class was in a way, too. The low point making medically related phone calls about intimate body parts in the school office. No cell phones, and only that phone to use. No, the lowest point, having to ask permission to leave school grounds at lunch to walk around outside to relieve the relentless anxiety and discouragement of being unable to get a class to bond and learn. No, there was a lower point, the day a fellow teacher stole the one, new thing you had in your room — chairs — because she was older, had been there longer, and was way, way taller. I also remember teachers whispering to me in the hall, "It's not you. Keep going, we know you can do it." If I had not had 10 years of experience before that year, I never would have taught again.

The fear of failing children. Of losing my job, of not catching all the problems that a teacher needs to catch. The year four children came to my classroom door unable to read, but it was third grade — how did they get there unable to read? The child who didn't have a house — but when I read the child's essay in cursive I was stunned by the lyric words and sentences. When I told the parent that the girl was a good writer, she thought I was talking about her cursive, not the words. A week later she was gone.

The threats. One delivered by an administrator: If every child in my class did not have a certain percent on a unit test, maybe I just shouldn't teach there. I was unclear how every student, so different, could possibly get the same test score.

Teaching is quiet. The moments that glimmer are often only seen by you, the teacher. The inside class joke when everyone laughs together at the same thing. The day you hear a student use your very own words, in a good way. The minute, when you look up, and the flow of learning is like a flood, all heads turning to see the picture in the book, all crayons coloring, and all brushes brushing on birch bark on the easel. The pregnant silence of a class of third-graders reading, silently, each in their own book world. The student sharing with you, first: My parents are getting divorced. The sparklingly creative comment by a child that makes you draw in a breath at the originality of it.

A class bonds, usually for just a year, which means as kids get older, in about February they realize they will soon move on. Teacher wisdom begins to fall on closed ears as they prepare for the next year. Weary of your advice and limits, restless and ready for another set of adults to advise them. The window when you can reach them is small and short. After eight hours a day with a group of humans you know them very well, you see them with their peers through a lens that no one else in their life does. It's a fear-inducing level of responsibility.

It's a quiet kind of good work. If you do it well, it actually becomes loud work. Loud in the future. Loud with authors, lawyers, mothers, doctors, fixers of all kinds, scientists, technology experts, singers, musicians, good humans. It's work that resounds with human empathy, booms with love, serves others, nurtures a healthy self. I'm at an age now where I will never see my students fully grown. I won't know what happens to them. They won't remember me. They won't remember the day the wool roving turned to felt, or when the bird lady showed them how a feather zips, or when the mystery box arrived from New York City and we had to use the clues to figure out where our pen-pal class lived.

It's OK to have quiet, good work. In fact it's sufficient to not even be the very, very best at this quiet, good work. What has happened is this: I've gotten to do work that is infinitely impossible to conquer. I've waited for that day to come for over 30 years. When I taught perfectly, everyone learned exceedingly well and all the test scores were at least 85 percent. So greedy — why not a whole year where every teaching decision was right? Now I know: It won't be happening. The true joy has resided in trying, showing up, and continuing the quest of human curiosity for learning as a teacher, and a learner.

I have a picture of my grandmother, in the early 1900s, standing in front of a chalkboard facing her math students. She was a little shy and quiet when I knew her. But as a young woman, she had the courage to stand up, and share what she knew. It's what teachers really do best: divulge what they know, who they are, and who you are in their eyes.

Kris Potter lives in South Minneapolis, where she teaches at a play-based preschool. 

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.)

MinnPost photo by James NordGov. Mark Dayton

In the Pioneer Press, David Montgomery has the details: “Dayton fainted around 5 p.m. Sunday while speaking at a political event, a recognition of volunteers for state Rep. JoAnn Ward, DFL-Woodbury. He left the event but was taken by ambulance to the hospital after feeling light-headed again. A statement from the governor’s office said the governor is awake, resting comfortably and 'joking with family, doctors and staff.'”

A good year for deals. Neal St. Anthony and Patrick Kennedy of the Strib report, “About 375 public and private Minnesota companies acquired or sold a business, in what was the busiest year for corporate transactions since the Great Recession of 2008-09. The 2015 total transaction value for Minnesota was $65.7 billion, down slightly from $72.2 billion the year before. 2014 was bolstered by Medtronic’s $49.9 billion stock-and-cash acquisition of surgical-supply maker Covidien PLC.”

If want you to remember fondly when winter was really winter, Marino Eccher of the Pioneer Press says, “It’s going to dip to around 16 degrees in St. Paul and Minneapolis on Tuesday night, according to the National Weather Service. Two decades ago in St. Louis County, they would have considered that a tropical paradise. Feb. 2 marks the 20th anniversary of the coldest temperature ever recorded in Minnesota — a Hoth-like 60 degrees below zero. … Things weren’t so hot in the Twin Cities, either, with a temperature of 32 degrees below zero at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport — just a few degrees off the coldest day on record in the metro (minus 34 in January 1936).”

Says David Peterson for the Strib, “Minnesota cities are hitting the spending pedal after years of recessionary caution, a new report shows. Among the bigger municipalities, capital spending — expenditures on long-term assets such as buildings, roads, parks and the like — leapt in 2014 by $200 million, to $1.2 billion, after remaining level for several years, according to the state auditor’s latest update on local finance. ‘A lot of infrastructure is aging and in need of repair and maintenance, and that is a big driving force,’ said Gary Carlson, director of intergovernmental relations for the League of Minnesota Cities.” Often that’s called “waste.” Especially in election years.

Bet you don’t have a selfie with Chelsea. In the PiPress, Rachel Stassen-Berger says, “Chelsea Clinton, former first daughter, will campaign in Minnesota on Wednesday to help her mother’s bid for the White House. ‘Clinton will attend organizing events in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area to talk to caucus-goers about how her mother will make a difference for families as president and what is at stake in this election,’ Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton campaign’s said.”

An anti-“foreign law” bill would be dog whistle for what, exactly?Sally Jo Sorensen at Bluestem Prairie continues to follow the tale four prominent state Republicans and their concern with Sharia law … in Minnesota. “After a week in which state senator David Brown, R-Becker, was rebuked for speaking about SF1264 at an event described as anti-Muslim, four Minnesota House Republicans introduced HF2489 on Friday … . We've put together a side-by-side comparison of the language in the two bills. Download the comparison here. The two bills aren't paired as companion bills, but they're fairly close in language. State representative Mark Anderson, R-Lake Shore, is the author of the new house bill; Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, Bob Dettmer, R-Forest Lake, and Cindy Pugh, R-Chanhassen, are co-authors.” 

Maybe 007 can pull this off, but not this dude. Says Will Ashenmacher of the PiPress, “A driver survived an estimated 30-foot fall early Saturday after he tried to flee police and jumped onto westbound Interstate 94 in St. Paul. … The man left his vehicle and jumped off I-35E onto I-94 below. Ernster said early indications were that the man was trying to flee the officer, not attempting to harm himself. The man was arrested and was hospitalized with broken legs and a broken back. His identity has not been released.”

Ok, how about this guy?Stribber Alejandra Matos says Minneapolis schools have a new name to kick around. “A new name has emerged in the search for Minneapolis’ next superintendent: Michael Thomas. In board meetings, Facebook forums and e-mails to the board, some community members say Thomas, a Minneapolis School District administrator, has the passion and experience to lead one of the state’s most troubled school districts.”

The Minnesota Book Award finalists have been named,reports MPR's Tracy Mumford: “Authors and artists living in Minnesota are eligible for the award. The finalists were selected by a group of 24 writers, teachers, librarians, booksellers and others from the literary community."

If I turn it into luxury condos, will it still be tax exempt? In the PiPress, Richard Chin says, “For sale: A 103-year-old church on St. Paul’s most prestigious street, designed by the same architect who created the Cathedral of St. Paul and the Basilica of St. Mary. Asking price is $1.69 million, reduced from $1.79 million. Great acoustics. Worship home of former governors. Stained glass, pews and organ come with the building. Also included is a body buried underneath the altar. St. Paul’s on the Hill, a historic Episcopal church, is looking for a new owner.”

The new President of the Center of the American Experiment, John Hinderaker, explains his goals in a post at Power Line. “Many Minnesotans overestimate how well the state is doing economically. This causes them to be indifferent to, or skeptical of, calls for reform in Minnesota’s public policies. It isn’t just Minnesotans, either: the idea that Minnesota proves blue states can still work has become a common theme on the left. In particular, President Obama and others have compared Minnesota’s economy favorably with Wisconsin’s as a way of discrediting Governor Scott Walker. Here in Minnesota, we hear a great deal of happy talk about our economy in the state’s media.” Note to media. Ignore that happy stuff.

If you are a Democrat, have you made your mind up whether you would rather see Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders as the Dem nominee for president?

I haven’t. Of course, I’m a mere Minnesotan, not a mighty Iowan or New Hampshirite. So what I think might not matter much. But I try to be a thoughtful voter. So I think about it often. Lately, every day.

My dilemma is the electability riddle. A lot of people apparently don’t think it’s a riddle. They think Clinton is the more electable one. And I sort of understand why they think so. But I’m troubled by the lack of hard evidence.

Right now, in the latest trial-heat polls I can find matching the top Dem contenders against the top Repubs, Sanders does a little better than Clinton. You certainly can’t take that to the bank, and the difference isn’t much.

Personally, on almost every policy issue where Clinton and Sanders disagree, I favor Sanders’ position (which, in almost every instance, is the more progressive). Single-payer health care. Robin Hood tax policies. Free tuition at public colleges and universities. I also appreciate that, on foreign and especially Mideast issues, Sanders’ approach seems to be less likely to get us into another war.

But to state the obvious: At least in the current situation in Congress, none of Sanders’ ideas that would require congressional action have much chance of being adopted. The same could be said for most of Clinton’s policy proposals.

As long as the Republicans control either house of Congress and perhaps even if they controlled only enough of the Senate to sustain a filibuster, Bernie’s $15-an-hour minimum-wage plan and Hillary’s $12-an-hour proposal are non-starters. So are most of their other ideas that would require legislation. The United States will not adopt Bernie’s single-payer health care system, nor will many of Hillary’s ideas for expanding the reach of the Affordable Care Act be enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress that is sworn to repeal Obamacare.

If there are any vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court, either of the Democrats will nominate justices who will uphold the Affordable Care Act, will vote against the continuation of the Citizens United regime and will protect the basic ruling in Roe v. Wade. (The question in my mind in the future-Supremes-area is whether one or both parties will soon adopt a strategy of filibusters so that new justices with the “wrong” leanings will simply not be confirmed and we will experience some long vacancies until one party controls both the Oval Office and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.)

As you are perhaps aware, the great future-knowers of the punditocracy believe that the Dems have a chance of regaining a Senate majority this year, but no chance of taking over the House. If the Repubs still control both houses next year, the top priority for any voter with a liberal Democratic bone in his body should be to retain Democratic control of the veto pen. And that, of course, is why the electability of the Dem presidential nominee should count more heavily in one’s thinking than single-payer-versus-expanded-Obamacare and most other differences in policy preferences between Sanders and Clinton.

Conventional wisdom

So who’s the more electable candidate? The conventional wisdom is — and always has been — that Clinton is electable and Sanders is not.

But, as I mentioned above, the most recent polling points the other way. Looking at a few recent polls is in no way a reliable guide to this question. The polls have bounced around and will continue to do so. Polls do not predict the future. They don’t even always predict the present accurately. But if you are trying to figure out the electability question, how can they be ignored? And the comparisons are generally good for Sanders.

Real Clear Politics aggregates a lot of polls and then for each matchup, averages the three most recent ones. I’ll rely on that for a relatively recent comparison, but many of the head-to-head matchup polls are pretty old. I can’t find more recent ones. (Click the links embedded in the section below and you will get the most up-to-date three-poll averages.) According to RCP’s averages at the time I’m writing:

Clinton vs. Donald Trump shows Clinton ahead by 2.7 percentage points, but her lead over Trump has shrunk fairly steadily since she led by huge margins earlier.

Sanders vs. Trump shows Sanders ahead by 5.3 percentage points, but the two most recent polls show him ahead by double digits.

Clinton vs. Marco Rubio shows Rubio ahead by 2.5. Sanders vs. Rubio shows Rubio ahead by 1.0.

Real Clear Politics doesn’t have any Ted Cruz vs. Sanders matchups. For Clinton vs. Cruz, they show Clinton slightly ahead in the most recent poll but Cruz slightly ahead in the three-poll average.

And yet, on the Jan. 24 edition of “Face the Nation,” CBS Elections Director Anthony Salvanto, describing their latest polling, said Democrats see Sanders as the guy who will “shake up the system” and “get progressive things done,” but “when you look at the people who want, most of all, to win in November, they are overwhelmingly with her [Clinton]. Like 75 percent, OK?”

Safer choice

That reflects the belief among pragmatic “electability” minded Democrats that they believe Clinton is the safer choice, which is slightly different from proving that their assumption is correct. But it’s widely shared.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, who shares my admiration for Sanders’ position on the issues, recently wrote:

I adore Bernie Sanders. I agree with his message of fairness, and I share his outrage over inequality and corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his authenticity. And I am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems calculating and phony. And yet if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, they’ll need to hold their noses and nominate Clinton.

In his New York Times column, Charles M. Blow wrote:

Sanders likes to tout that he doesn’t have a “super PAC” and doesn’t want one. That is a principled position. But the Republican candidate will have the support of many super PACs, awash in hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money, and the Republican nominee himself might even be a billionaire. They are going to beat Sanders like he is a nail with the “socialist” label and his proposal on new taxation. Middle of the spectrum Middle America is likely to be very susceptible to this negative messaging.

But wherefrom comes this certainty that Sanders is unelectable?

Part of it is from people who, as soon as they realized that Sanders, who has long called himself a Democratic Socialist, was going to seek the presidency without repudiating the S-word just assumed that no one who embraced that term could be elected in America. Maybe they’re right. I thought the same when Sanders’ campaign started, and I still believe it might be so. But as the weeks have gone by and Sanders has maintained a poll lead over Clinton in New Hampshire and about caught up with her Iowa, I have wondered whether the word is so toxic. Still, the label will be a barrier when it’s time to recruit moderate independents or even Republicans in the fall.

Blow, in the excerpt above, suggests that the Sanders-is-a-socialist attack line will be effective once the Repubs start hammering on it. He doesn’t say, but perhaps implies, that the Repubs (who trash Clinton constantly) haven’t started “negative messaging” on Sanders because they really hope to face him in the fall because they, too, believe he is unelectable.

I do not dismiss this argument at all. Most of the country had barely heard of Sanders before this year. Since his emergence as a serious presidential contender, his exchanges with Clinton have been models of civility by the standards of modern American politics. How his appeal would survive the kind of attack that would be directed at him by the Republicans is unknown, and perhaps unknowable, unless and until we see it play out.

Unrelenting attack

Clinton, by contrast, has been under permanent, unrelenting attack by Republicans since she became a candidate, and really for years before that. A great deal of “negative messaging” by Republicans is built into her current standing with the wider electorate.

On the third hand, or whatever hand I’m up to by now, just this past weekend the news brought a reminder that there may be ticking time bombs ready to explode Clinton’s electability quotient, like the sudden announcement of “top secret” information in her emails, coming this time not from a Republican committee of Clinton haters, but from the Obama State Department’s investigation.

Sanders is also old, Jewish, speaks with a Brooklyn accent and it’s better if we don’t try to describe his hairdo. He connects really well with young liberal Democrats, but Clinton does better among older voters, whom the experts believe are much more reliable in terms of turning out.

In Vermont, after a much more mixed record in elections before 1990, Sanders has won 10 consecutive statewide races for congressman (which, in Vermont, is a statewide race) and senator. His most recent Senate reelection, in 2012, was by an impressive 65-32 percent. But, c’mon. We’re talking about a very small, very liberal state. How his appeal will play out nationally is at best an open question. In general, Clinton crushes Sanders among voters of color, who will become especially key members of the Dem electorate after the two mostly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire are out of the way.

Even in his remarkable surge this year to a top contender for the Dem presidential nomination, Sanders has always trailed Clinton badly in national polls. (In the most recent RCP three-poll average, it’s Clinton 52; Sanders 38.) As much as I admire his policy positions and his straight talk, I have little more than hunches about how he will play in Peoria, and especially in Ohio and Florida, the two states that really matter in November. (Sorry, Minnesota.)

The Sanders argument

The Sanders campaign has an electability argument that purports to deal with these possible weaknesses. It’s this: Bernie is motivating young people (there’s little doubt about that), a group that doesn’t always vote, and will make up for some of his electability weaknesses if they do.

Sanders takes that argument one step further, and even disputes the idea that his tax-the-rich-and-give-everyone-else-a-raise cannot be adopted. He says that his movement represents a potential “political revolution.” The first time I heard him call for “revolution,” I thought this would turn into another politically suicidal word choice. And maybe if the Republican attack machine gets hold of it, it will turn Sanders into Lenin.

But as I’ve heard Sanders go back to “democratic socialism” and “political revolution” —  and explain both terms — it seems that he has a vision that extends well beyond the 2016 presidential election. It envisions an enduring belief that an enduring majority coalesces around an enduring conviction that the government should be used to help the people, “not just the 1 percent.” (I stole that from a line he delivered in Dubuque, Iowa: “Are you ready for a radical idea? Together we are going to create an economy that works for working families, not just the 1 percent.”)

So now he’s embracing a third politically hazardous two-word phrase: “radical idea.”

For fear that I’ve been too hard on Clinton and too dewy-eyed about Sanders, I’ll close with the news from the Sunday New York Times that the editorial board, a bastion of liberalism, has decided to endorse Clinton for the Dem nomination.

Read the editorial for a lot of kind words about Clinton’s readiness for the job. The Times summarized Sanders thus:

Mrs. Clinton’s main opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, has proved to be more formidable than most people, including Mrs. Clinton, anticipated. He has brought income inequality and the lingering pain of the middle class to center stage and pushed Mrs. Clinton a bit more to the left than she might have gone on economic issues. Mr. Sanders has also surfaced important foreign policy questions, including the need for greater restraint in the use of military force.

Good luck deciding whom to support, if the race goes as far as the Minnesota caucuses on March 1.

For decades, health officials have given us a straightforward message about what to do if we want to shed unneeded and unhealthful body fat.

“To lose weight,” they say, “you must use up more calories than you take in.”

Of course, for that strategy to work, we have to be counting the calories we consume correctly. Yet, as journalists Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley report in an article published last week on the science website Mosaic, our current system of calorie-counting is broken.

“A calorie isn’t just a calorie,” they write. “And our mistaken faith in the power of this seemingly simple measurement may be hindering the fight against obesity.”

At best, the numbers printed on food labels are just “good guesses,” they say. “Worse yet, as scientists are increasingly finding, some of those calorie counts are flat-out wrong.”

The ‘bomb calorimeter’

Scientists use a two-chambered “bomb calorimeter” to determine the calorie counts of various foods. Food is placed inside the inner chamber, and the outer chamber is filled with water. The food is then burned, and the rise in temperature in the outer chamber is recorded.

As Graber and Twilley explain, “Roughly speaking, one calorie is the heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.”

This way of calculating calories is known as the “Atwater method,” a name derived from the Department of Agriculture chemist, Wilbur Olin Atwater, who first developed it in the late 1880s. Although the method has been modified since then, some of the calorie counts given foods today can still be traced back to that period.

USDA

Wilbur Olin Atwater

Yet despite the upgrades, any “aura of scientific precision” behind the method “is illusory,” argue the two reporters.

“Even if the calorie counts themselves were accurate,” they say, “dieters … would have to contend with the significant variations between the total calories in the food and the amount our bodies extract. These variations, which scientists have only recently started to understand, go beyond the inaccuracies in the numbers on the back of food packaging. In fact, the new research calls into question the validity of nutrition science’s core belief that a calorie is a calorie.”

Why calories are not all alike

Graber and Twilley describe the various reasons why the calories currently attributed to foods may not be all that meaningful, including the following:

[O]ur bodies sometimes extract fewer calories than the number listed on the label. Participants in [recent nutrition] studies absorbed around a third fewer calories from almonds than the modified Atwater values suggest. For walnuts, the difference was 21 per cent. This is good news for someone who is counting calories and likes to snack on almonds or walnuts: he or she is absorbing far fewer calories than expected. The difference, [one researcher] suspects, is due to the nuts’ particular structure: “All the nutrients – the fat and the protein and things like that — they’re inside this plant cell wall.” Unless those walls are broken down — by processing, chewing or cooking — some of the calories remain off-limits to the body, and thus are excreted rather than absorbed. …

[C]ooking unlaces microscopic structures that bind energy in foods, reducing the work our gut would otherwise have to do. It effectively outsources digestion to ovens and frying pans. [A scientist] found that mice fed raw peanuts, for instance, lost significantly more weight than mice fed the equivalent amount of roasted peanut butter. The same effect holds true for meat: there are many more usable calories in a burger than in steak tartare. Different cooking methods matter, too. In 2015, Sri Lankan scientists discovered that they could more than halve the available calories in rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice in the refrigerator. …

There’s also the problem that no two people are identical. Differences in height, body, fat, liver size, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and other factors influence the energy required to maintain the body’s basic functions. Between two people of the same sex, weight and age, this number may differ by up to 600 calories a day — over a quarter of the recommended intake for a moderately active woman.

A ‘gut reaction’

Recent research also suggests that intestinal bacteria and other microbes influences how many calories we receive from a food, write Graber and Twilley:

The microbes in our intestines digest some of the tough or fibrous matter that our stomachs cannot break down, releasing a flow of additional calories in the process. But different species and strains of microbes vary in how effective they are at releasing those extra calories, as well as how generously they share them with their host human.

In 2013, researchers in Jeffrey Gordon’s lab at Washington University tracked down pairs of twins of whom one was obese and one lean. He took gut microbes from each, and inserted them into the intestines of microbe-free mice. Mice that got microbes from an obese twin gained weight; the others remained lean, despite eating the exact same diet.

“That was really striking,” said Peter Turnbaugh, who used to work with Gordon and now heads his own lab at the University of California, San Francisco. “It suggested for the first time that these microbes might actually be contributing to the energy that we gain from our diet.” 

Time for a replacement

“All of these factors introduce a disturbingly large margin of error for an individual who is trying … to count calories,” report Graber and Twilley. “The discrepancies between the number on the label and the calories that are actually available in our food, combined with individual variations in how we metabolise that food, can add up to much more than the 200 calories a day that nutritionists often advise cutting in order to lose weight.”

That’s why some scientists are calling for innovative ways of labeling foods, such as by giving individual foods rankings for satiety (the ability of a food to make us feel full) or for their calorie-by-calorie nutritional value.

Other scientists are also working toward an even more revolutionary and personalized approach to nutrition — “a future,” explain Graber and Twilley, “where you could hold up your smartphone, snap a picture of a dish, and receive a verdict on how that food will affect you as well as how many calories you’ll extract from it.”

“None of these alternatives is ready to replace the calorie tomorrow,” they add, “yet the need for a new system of food accounting is clear. …  Science has already shown that the calorie is broken. Now it has to find a replacement.”

FMI: You can read the article by Graber and Twilley on the Mosaic website and check out the latest episode of the authors’ podcast, Gastropod: “The End of the Calorie.” Mosaic is published by the Wellcome Trust, a British-based “independent global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health through science, research and engagement with society.”

It’s been almost a year since we learned that Joe Haj would succeed Joe Dowling as the Guthrie Theater’s artistic director. Ever since, we’ve wondered what his work and decisions would look like, and how the Guthrie would change under his vision and leadership.

With Shakespeare’s “Pericles” — Haj’s first play at the Guthrie, now on the Wurtele Thrust Stage — we finally have the chance to see his directorial hand. Haj has directed “Pericles” twice before, in Oregon and Washington, D.C., to ecstatic reviews (words like “magical,” “beyond-fantastic,” and “stunningly staged” were used), which might make it seem like a safe bet for his Minnesota debut.

Not entirely.

“The Oregon Shakespeare Festival stage is a 274-seat thrust configuration, but in a very small room,” Haj said during an interview last week. “The proscenium theater in Washington, D.C., in the Folger is also small; 300 or so seats. And here we are in a 1,100-seat theater. We’ve quadrupled in scale. So while the actors are the same and the costumes are the same and the props are largely the same, the scenery has been redesigned in each of these three spaces.”

The projections — starry skies and stormy seas — had to be rendered differently. The billowing blue sea in which Pericles nearly drowns — a 60-foot piece of China silk — was created and painted here. The actors made major adjustments.

“Putting ‘Pericles’ in this room is a very great challenge for the actors,” Haj said. “In rehearsal, they’re like, ‘My God, I’m still crossing!’ You’re in acreage out there. The actors have been playing in intimate rooms where we can be talking like this” [Haj uses a normal voice] “and doing everything necessary for everyone in the room to hear, understand and feel what we’re doing. In an 1,100-seat room, after the fourth row, this is gone. And you have your back to one-third of the audience all the time. It’s an enormous challenge.”

We spoke with Haj in his office at the Guthrie while snow fell outside the big windows.

MinnPost: You moved to Minnesota from North Carolina seven months ago. Have they been long months or short months?

Joe Haj: In three weeks, it’ll be one year since I was announced here. That feels like a minute ago. The last seven months have flown by, considering that we moved our lives, our house — sold and bought and moved in — and our kids to a new school. It already feels like this is home, like we’re settling in.

The [Guthrie] organization is large and complex enough that I’ve only scratched the surface of beginning to understand it. It’s been a delight to learn the building, learn the community, learn the region, and learn who we want to be in the national/international conversation, let alone the regional/local one.

People have been unfailingly gracious and kind and buoying – genuinely hopeful for our success and my success in this role. We all know it doesn’t have to be like that, and it isn’t always like that, but that’s the sense I’ve had so far, and I don’t take it for granted at all.

[The conversation turns to Joe Dowling and the Guthrie complex.]

JH: Joe did such a splendid job through his tenure. He didn’t only get the building built, he also built a sturdy business model. I’m grateful that it’s not left to me to come in and go, “How are we going to make sense of this place with three rooms and the restaurants and the bars?” He made sense of it.

The great gift of his legacy to me as the next leader is that it has allowed me very quickly to set my eyes to a much further horizon. I’m able to get out of the gate and figure out the art-making and the impact. What do we want to do? Who do we want to include in the making? Who do we want to include as the folks who come and watch it? I could quickly move to those questions without going, “Pump the breaks! We’re bleeding here and we’re in big trouble.” Joe kept this place in superb financial shape.

MP: So you didn’t feel as if you had an immediate problem to solve.

JH: On that side, no.

MP: On another side?

JH: The best way I can talk about it is in terms of my own succession at PlayMakers [Repertory Company in North Carolina]. Vivienne Benesch, who succeeded me there, is strong in ways that I wasn’t. She’s able to support some of the things that I instituted, which I’m thrilled and proud of. [There are] other things [on which] I spent nine years working my tail off, and she’s going to take them out back and shoot them. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I’m a very different artist, theater-maker, person and thinker than Joe, so invariably there are changes in culture, changes in aesthetics, changes in who participates in the making of the work. Those changes are challenges to an organization.

[The Guthrie] was built around Joe’s leadership for the past two decades. So I’ve remade the senior team. I’ve created new positions and new roles, and in most places, put new people in them. There has been a lot of change at the top of the organization in a way that I think best serves the Guthrie and my own leadership approach and priorities.

I think that’s a very good and healthy thing, and on the day that I leave the Guthrie, whenever that day may come, the next person is going to come in and do exactly the same thing.

[Haj praises his new hires: David Stewart, director of production; Jeffrey Meanza, associate artistic director; and Jennifer Bielstein, managing director. We note that they all left much warmer places to follow him here.]

JH: To be called to serve at the Guthrie is the phone call that many of us dream of in our careers. From the moment of its birth, it was an enormously important theater in this country and it remains so. For each of these jobs, there were extraordinary candidates to choose between, and I’m really excited about the team we have.

MP: People have wondered how the 2015-16 season took shape—how much was yours and how much was Joe Dowling’s. I’ve heard that most of the plays were in place, but you had the option to change the ones you didn’t want.

JH: A little over half of the plays were already slotted into the season. Joe called me immediately after I was announced, and he was like, “We’re looking at this show here, and this show here; we need something; we’ve got this show; we need something; we’ve got something. These are the titles, and this is what’s in place.”

He said, “You need to be able to stand over this season, Joe. I can’t have two last seasons. You need to tell me what else you want in this season.” And of course I said, “What works well here, Joe?”

He also said, “If any of the plays that are in place are ones that you hate, you should say so, and we’ll figure something else out.” That said, some of them, especially ones at the front of the season, were pretty far along. “Mockingbird” was already in the design process. If I had said, “We’re not doing ‘Mockingbird,’ ” I’m sure he would have figured out how to unravel that, but these pipelines are long, and some of these things were pretty far down them. So I didn’t change any of the things that were already there.

“Pericles” obviously has my print on it, and that’s what I wanted to do there. “South Pacific” [opening June 18] was already in the season, but I put myself on it as director. “The Critic/The Real Inspector Hound” [opening Feb. 23] is a coproduction with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., that Michael Kahn is directing. Joe Dowling and Michael Kahn dreamed that up and we’re excited to bring it in. That was in the pipeline forever, way before me.

Photo by Jenny Graham

Zlato Rizziolli (Sailor), Wayne T. Carr (Pericles) and Sam Wick (Sailor) in “Pericles”

So, much of the season was in place, but there were a lot of gaps that I worked with Joe to put plays in.

MP: Two have PlayMakers connections.

JH: “Trouble in Mind” [opening May 7] we did last year. “Disgraced” [July 16] was programmed there for this year, but they did something else.

MP: You’re doing “Harvey” here [April 9]. Why “Harvey”?

JH: When we were thinking about that slot, genre-wise, thematically, we were like, “What about a classic American comedy?” As I looked across the season, there weren’t as many women writers as I would’ve loved to see. “Harvey” is written by Mary Chase. It’s one of the small handful of classic American comedies written by a woman, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

MP: Do you like the play?

JH: I like the play a lot. The Guthrie can’t be making one kind of anything … If you think of it like a meal, we don’t want to just eat meat. We don’t want to just eat dessert. We want a salad and an appetizer and an entrée and a side dish.

A play that satisfies in an uncomplicated way, allows people to have a nice time at the theater and go home, is a perfectly fine piece of programming, too. It shouldn’t be all that we’re doing, any more than we should only be making the most bone-hard, provocative, challenging thing. But if we’re doing our job right, we should be stretching the sine wave between kinds of plays across the year.

That’s where I get excited about a season: not because it has a whole lot of any one thing, but because it offers a journey of a kind. That’s how we think about it.

MP: Are you considering doing a new play festival along the Humana lines?

JH: I’m not saying that we wouldn’t do it, but if you’re asking what’s forward in my mind, no, not a festival. But what is very much on my mind is that the Guthrie must participate in the new play game somehow, and I’m trying to think of where we could be of unique value.

We have the Playwrights’ Center, which is a major national generator of new work. I don’t want to be replicative of what they’re doing. So I’m trying to figure out how we could be useful, not just in the region but in the field. Are we going to serve the well-established playwright best? The early-career playwright? The mid-career playwright? The regional playwright? The national playwright? The international playwright? Where’s the gap? Where’s the place that isn’t being filled, where we could be of real value to artists?

MP: Have you started framing a response?

JH: Yes. Nothing I’m prepared to speak about narrowly, but I think even as soon as 2016-2017 we’ll see an idea about an approach to new plays, and I’ll be commissioning new plays here at the Guthrie.

There are real challenges here. This is one of the world’s great theater facilities, [but] it doesn’t quite have a new play space. The 200-seat [Dowling Studio] room is so small. And then you move to scale so quickly on the 700-seat proscenium and an 1,100-seat thrust. A new play by an unknown playwright in one of those rooms? Not impossible, but super challenging. You could do no greater disservice to a playwright than say “Write a play,” then put it in a room and nine people come. Nothing good happens there. I think very hard about that.

“Pericles” continues through Feb. 21 on the Wurtele Thrust Stage. FMI and tickets. On Tuesday, Feb. 9, the Guthrie will host a public event to introduce Haj to the community. “Meet Joseph Haj” will feature brief remarks by Haj followed by a Q&A with the audience. Tickets are free, but reservations are required. 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. on the McGuire Proscenium Stage. Go here or call 612-377-2224.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

CROSBY, Minn. – In 2014, when Amelia Udenberg began looking for a teaching job, she admits that she had her eye on a big city. And why not? She had grown up in Cloquet and gone to college at the University of Wisconsin’s campus in Superior, across the bay from Duluth. City life would be something new.

That career path took a turn, however, after the principal at Cuyuna Range Elementary School, which serves students from this town of 2,400 and a handful of nearby hamlets, offered her a job teaching the sixth grade. She accepted, ultimately drawn by the familiar feel of the deep woods, the promise of classroom innovation and a mentorship program that pairs new teachers with veterans.

“It was clear to me that they want talented teachers here,” she recalled of her initial job interview, “teachers who are looking to stay.”

Indeed, finding teachers, and keeping them around, will soon be at the top of the Crosby-Ironton School District’s to-do list. Over the next three years, the district expects to lose a third of its teaching force to retirement – inconveniently at a time when the number of applicants for recent job openings, a harbinger of interest, has been modest. 

Hoping to build momentum, the district is embarking on an aggressive campaign to recruit candidates. The centerpiece of the initiative is a four-minute video that the district first broadcast online in December; the district is also distributing a glossy recruiting brochure and dispatching its two principals to the state’s teaching schools to meet directly with recent graduates. 

The video spot, which appears on the school’s website, opens with a nod to the region’s natural beauty – a panoramic, overhead shot of lakes surrounded by forest that could be mistaken for Minnesota’s famed Boundary Waters. The clip generated nearly 600 views within a month or so of its first broadcast. 

Early in the video, Michael Gindorff, a longtime teacher and coach in the district, appears on screen. “It’s a close-knit, up-and-coming community. Things are headed in the right direction,” he tells the viewer before ticking off a few other attributes: “Excellent hospital. Great schools. Safe place to raise your kids.”

Revealing trends

About a year ago, the state Department of Education issued a 162-page “Teacher Supply and Demand” report [PDF], based on surveys of school officials across the state, that highlights some of the barriers schools often face in hiring teachers. 

Some of the concerns deal with policy. For instance, here in what is defined as the “north central” region of the state, more than half of the districts reported that teacher testing requirements represented a “large barrier to hiring teachers.” In the “northwest” region, meanwhile, 68 percent of the districts said teacher licensing requirements represented such an obstacle. As a result, many districts end up short-staffed or using teachers who have received temporary permission from the state to fill certain disciplines.

Other sticking points identified in the report include teacher pay (a teacher fresh out of college could start with a salary as low as $37,500 in Crosby-Ironton); debt that saddles college graduates (and prevents some from entering the teaching profession); and the perceived lack of public esteem for teachers.

Yet perhaps most revealing — at least for the health of districts in the most remote parts of the state — is the litany of comments from district personnel, included in the report, about the challenges of attracting young teachers to small towns.

MinnPost photo by Gregg Aamot

The Crosby-Ironton Public Schools Secondary Campus, which includes the high school, is located in Crosby.

“Many people are not willing to move to a very rural area when jobs are available in other areas,” reads one comment. Another official wrote, “Geographic location of being a smaller rural school. New hires want the comforts and choices of a larger economic community.” Still another: “We are in a rural community, weather conditions are harsh, and young people are more attracted to the metro areas.”

Erin Doan, the executive director of the state Board of Teaching, the governing body that oversees teaching standards, said geography certainly factors into the teaching shortages some rural districts are experiencing. “For a lot of young teachers, being far from cultural centers isn’t as attractive as being close to big cities,” she said.

Adding to the troubles: Minnesota is granting fewer annual teaching licenses to college graduates than it was a decade ago.

A boomer bubble

Eleven years ago, teachers in the Crosby-Ironton School District were about to embark on a strike over salaries and promised benefits for retired teachers. The impasse lasted two months and grew bitter after the district began hiring substitute teachers.

These days, it’s not a labor dispute that threatens the vitality of the district, but an upcoming rash of retirements among Crosby-Ironton’s 75 teachers.

A bubble of baby boomers hired three decades ago is about to burst, with little to suggest that the district will be able to generate a deep pool of candidates to replace the retirees. Superintendent Jamie Skjeveland said that when he came to the district a decade ago, hired in the wake of the strike, he probably saw 200 to 250 applications for every open teaching position. Last year, in sharp contrast, the district had about 30 applications, total, for 14 openings, he said.

The dreary numbers caused some soul-searching throughout the district, which spent $4,500 on the recruitment video, created by a Stillwater firm, and another $1,500 on the brochure. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘Is there anything we can do?’” Skjeveland said. “Ultimately, we decided that we don’t just have to sit here and let this happen.”

Some economic incentives that could encourage young teachers to consider rural districts are emerging at the state level.

The Office of Higher Education is administering a $200,000 loan forgiveness program, passed during the 2015 legislative session, for teachers who accept jobs in areas that are struggling to find teachers. Gov. Mark Dayton’s administration had proposed an even bigger package – $25 million in forgivable loans for prospective teachers who agree to teach in shortage areas for four years.

The great outdoors

The adjoining cities of Crosby and Ironton sit along the Cuyuna Iron Range, a stretch of buried ore that was discovered in 1895 and mined until the late 20th century. (Crosby is about 75 miles southwest of Hibbing, which sits at the center of the better-known Mesabi Iron Range). Despite its remote feel, Crosby is just 15 miles to the east of Brainerd, a regional center of about 20,000 people (including its adjoining city, Baxter) and the gateway to the popular Whitefish Chain of Lakes.

MinnPost photo by Gregg Aamot

Despite its remote feel, Crosby is just 15 miles to the east of Brainerd.

Michael Gindorff grew up and went to school here. By the time he left to study and play football at Concordia College in Moorhead, in 1987, the mines had closed. These days, the old mine lands have been turned into popular hiking and mountain bike trails; one popular shop in Crosby is Cycle Path and Paddle, which leases bikes, canoes and kayaks.

A few years after college, after teaching in Isle on the southeast side of Lake Mille Lacs, Gindorff ended up back in his hometown; his wife, Wendy, landed a teaching job at Cuyuna Elementary School and he soon followed. He now teaches biology at the high school and coaches the varsity football team.

The Gindorffs have raised two children whose successes were chronicled in the Crosby-Ironton Courier the day a reporter visited. The paper noted, in its year-end wrap up, that their daughter, Abby, had been the 2015 class co-valedictorian; the paper also reported that son Noah scored 22 points in the basketball team’s recent win over Fond du Lac Ojibwe.

MinnPost photo by Gregg Aamot

Michael Gindorff teaches biology at the high school and coaches the varsity football team.

Theirs is an appealing story about the possibilities of rural life and small schools, and both Wendy and Michael Gindorff are featured in the recruiting video.

Yet Michael Gindorff knows that recent college graduates – millennials bred on the broadening appeal of digital technology – are probably thinking less about roots and family and more about life experiences. So the district’s message is likely to reach only some. “You really have to have a special interest in the outdoors to live here,” he said.

Builders, not spectators

When Udenberg isn’t teaching, or coaching students in a hands-on after-school program called Destination Imagination, she likes to fish and hunt (though she didn’t get a deer this year, she noted with a smiley shrug). She also plays the flute in the community band.

“I’m very comfortable here,” she said.

Kurt Becker, the principal of the elementary school, will soon be looking for more people like Udenberg when he begins visiting the Minnesota colleges and universities that train teachers. (First stop: Bemidji State University, in March). Part of his sales pitch will be the district’s focus on technology, such as the iPads provided to every third- through sixth-grader and the elementary school’s Creative Café, a classroom that encourages students to blend creativity with technical savvy.

Another part of his message may be a more difficult sell for young teachers: the idea of place as a piece of the compensation. But he believes in it.

A high school classmate with Michael Gindorff, Becker worked in Pierz and also in St. Francis, on the far outskirts of the Twin Cities, before accepting the principal job here and moving his wife and two children to his hometown.

 “When I lived near the Twin Cities, I went to a lot of things, like everybody else,” he explained. “But being involved here, in a small district like this, doesn’t mean simply attending things. It means actually getting involved. You are not a spectator. You are not a participant. You are building things.”

He paused. “What will I say to them? ‘You can start and end a very long career right here.’ That’s what I will tell them.” 

The stream of refugees that has thrown Europe into crisis is made up of thousands upon thousands of individual tragedies.

In 2016, there may well be another, different kind of victim: Angela Merkel.

Over the past decade, the German chancellor has become the “indispensable European” through an effective if unspectacular stewardship of the continent’s most powerful country. Little more than a month ago, she was named Time magazine’s 2015 person of the year. 

So it’s striking that there now is open talk in Germany – and throughout Europe – about whether she can survive politically.

If she does fall, it will be the result of an unexpected burst of idealism. Specifically, it will be because she insisted on applying to the refugee crisis what people familiar with her background say are the principles she learned as the daughter of an Evangelical Lutheran pastor in East Germany. 

Winter, a time of cold weather and rough seas, is supposed to be the season when the flow of refugees through Turkey and Greece and northwest into Europe slows down. Members of the European Union, aware that free movement of people and goods within the EU is in jeopardy, appeared to be betting that they had time to make sure the new year wasn’t simply a repetition of 2015, when more than 1 million people arrived.

They miscalculated again. An estimated 55,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in the first 28 days of the year, according to the International Organization for Migration. Border officials in Bavaria told the BBC that 3,000 to 4,000 people were arriving in southern Germany per day. At that rate, the number of arrivals in Germany this year would actually surpass 2015.

There have been the predictable accidents. On Saturday, about 40 people died when a boat capsized off the Turkish coast. And European attitudes are hardening. 

A wave of harassment and sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, allegedly by men of North African or Arab appearance, focused attention on Germany’s open-door policy.

Sweden, which has accepted more people per capita than any other European country, announced last week it may send 80,000 back. Denmark imposed stringent new measures, including authorizing officials to confiscate money and valuables and delaying family reunifications. Hungary’s prime minister wants to build a wall to fence off Greece.

Merkel, who has lived on the wrong side of one, is not a big fan of walls.

The chancellor pressed Germany, and the rest of the Europe in 2015 as a matter of principle to open their borders and their doors to the waves of people fleeing violence or repression in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and elsewhere. Many others are seeking economic opportunity. Germans took by far the largest number, and showed great generosity. However, the welcome is wearing thin. And Merkel’s political allies are deserting her, notably the powerful Bavarian branch of her Christian Democratic Union.

Writing in Germany’s Der Spiegel in recent days, Markus Feldenkirchen and Rene Pfister took a deep dive on the questions of what is driving Merkel, and whether she will be able to survive. 

While Merkel’s downfall is by no means a certainty, they say a rough draft for how it would play out already exists and that “a critical mass is slowly coalescing.” Members of parliament and at least one Cabinet minister are publicly demanding she change course on immigration.

One reason Merkel has survived as long as she has, Feldenkirchen and Pfister add, is that “she has never fought for a larger political project. She had no great political goals.” 

Until now. What is it about the immigration issue that means so much to Merkel? And why is she so unyielding about it?

While there are practical considerations, the Spiegel writers said those don’t really provide an answer. They quoted a former mayor of Hamburg who knew Merkel’s parents, and a pastor who, like Merkel, is from the former East Germany. Both pointed to her religious upbringing behind the Iron Curtain. 

The pastor, Rainer Eppelmann, said the house in which Merkel grew up was not only a parsonage, but a home for people with disabilities. “She breathed in empathy like air and oxygen,” he said, and learned not to value herself above other people – no matter who they were or where they came from. Having lived in East Germany, she also knows full well what it’s like to live under a repressive government. 

Compare Merkel’s statements on the immigration crisis with those of the church, Eppelmann says. They’re virtually identical.

So, does Merkel have a political death wish? 

If she is motivated primarily by religious principles, are they incompatible with what she needs to do to govern a powerful modern country? Which is she willing to sacrifice? Or is it a false choice? Is there a way to remain true to her principles and close that door – at least a bit?

Tough questions. But worth asking – and probably more likely to yield a solution than building another wall.

An ad in the Star Tribune became a story in the Star Tribune. Paul Walsh writes,“Responding to concerns about prejudice toward Muslims, many Minnesota leaders in politics, higher education, health care and business lent their names to a full-page advertisement in Monday's Star Tribune calling on citizens to reject such behavior as‘"un-Minnesotan.’ … ‘Though we may be a soft-spoken bunch,’ the ad reads, ‘we know better than to be silent or still in the face of bigotry shown to Muslims. Our Minnesotans.’ ” 

Speaking of which… MPR’s Mukhtar Ibrahim writes,“A Dakota County District judge Friday ordered a southern Dakota County township to issue a conditional use permit for an Islamic cemetery. … Judge David Knutson ruled that Castle Rock Township's rejection of a proposed cemetery for Muslims in August 2014 was ‘arbitrary and capricious.’ … ‘We hoped that a simple request for a proposed Islamic cemetery in Minnesota would not need a court order, however we welcome the court's decision to grant the conditional use permit,’ Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN), said in a statement.”

Nothing to worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong.The Rochester Post Bulletin’s Andrew Setterholm writes about that city’s expanding surveillance program:“The Rochester Police Department is ready to begin integrating private and public surveillance cameras into a citywide network, creating a new resource for officers to investigate crimes. … The city of Rochester in November signed a contract with SecuroNet, a Minneapolis-based company that provides a program for creating a visual representation of where cameras are located in the city.”

A Minneapolis icon will be revived.MPR’s Tim Nelson reports: “The historic Grain Belt beer sign on the Minneapolis riverfront could glow again next year after being dark for decades. … The August Schell Brewing Company completed the purchase of the sign on Nicollet Island. … The New Ulm-based brewery bought the Grain Belt brand 14 years ago but that didn't include the sign. … Schell's hopes to have the sign glowing again on the Minneapolis skyline by the summer of 2017.”

In other news…

Gov. Dayton is expected to leave the hospital Monday. He fainted during a campaign event on Sunday. [MPR]

Northern Minnesota is home to at least one endangered species: “‘Pro-union’ Republican Farnsworth enters 6A race” [Minnesota Brown]

Well, this should turn things around: “Best Buy adds fee for TV and computer recycling” [Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal]

Is this a field trip or a punishment?“Como Park H.S. Students Head to Iowa Caucuses” [WCCO]

LAX-MSP Delta flight grounded by a fistfight— between flight attendants. [Washington Post]

If anyone cares to see me pontificate about how ridiculous it is to have any state, even a state like Iowa that's almost as likeable and smart as Minnesota, have the special first-in-the-nation role every cycle, I'll be on the KARE-11 show called "Breaking the News" at 6:30 tonight.