In addition to Bachmann, the ads are targeting Republican Reps. John Boehner of Ohio, Denny Rehberg of Montana, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, as well as Democrat Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania.

“Stain,” as the ad is titled, “highlights the cash from Big Oil and other special interests taken by Members who voted against the American Clean Energy & Security Act, a comprehensive clean energy and climate plan that will put America back in control of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet,” according to a statement from the Sierra Club.

Here’s the full ad:

Como Student Community Cooperative. Photo: Chris Steller

The University of Minnesota has quickly, if quietly, begun to address threats posed by a toxic waste dump it discovered under student family housing in Southeast Minneapolis.

The university found the toxins under three buildings on a four-city-block residential complex last year.

On Sept. 18, 2008, workers digging a trench at the Como Student Community Cooperative found ash and debris in the ground at its complex. Samples tested that day showed high levels of several toxins, including arsenic and lead. More tests revealed more hazards, so within days, on an emergency basis, the university hauled away 558 tons of contaminated dirt to a landfill in Rosemount.

The university last week finished the first phase of cleanup work, bringing the total amount of soil removed so far to 10,000 tons.

For generations, children have lived and played on the land along East Hennepin Avenue between 27th and 29th avenues SE. And for generations, it seems, the soil around the houses has held rich deposits of lead and arsenic — so much so that a handful of dirt ingested by a child, “if it was from a hot spot, could potentially cause brain damage,” according to Lynne Grigor, project coordinator at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Toxins were detected from eight inches to eight feet below ground. Forty-eight soil tests revealed no pattern to the hot spots that would allow targeted removal.

Acting rapidly (compared to the usual pace for such projects) with more than $700,000 from Hennepin County and about $200,000 of its own money, the university last week finished the first phase of cleanup around two of the buildings, hauling away another 9,457 tons of soil.

With another application pending with the county’s brownfield fund, the university hopes to complete the cleanup next year.

Evidence of widespread effects on residents has not emerged. Several children have been tested, CSCC residents and staff said, but no one had heard of anyone showing high lead levels. University of Minnesota Environmental Health specialist Janet Dalgliesh said she knows of one case of elevated levels, for an unrelated toxin.

But it’s unclear whether that’s because the toxic dirt from the dump hasn’t affected anyone, or because people who have been affected haven’t yet been tested.

Jim Kelly, a health risk assessor at the Minnesota Department of Health, said his agency gets involved when local authorities request public health advice, or when blood tests reveal elevated lead levels in children. Neither has happened yet with CSCC, where several people said that the only tests specially spurred by the discovery — on older boys who dug deep in the dirt — didn’t have alarming results.

State law requires notification to the department only if a child younger than age six has more than 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, explained Erik Zabel, who works with immigrant populations for the department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program. The brains of children develop more quickly at that age and they’re more likely to get dirt in their mouths, he said.

In any case, Zabel said, the state doesn’t have responsibility to inspect for lead in Minneapolis, which has its own health department and lead-poisoning prevention programs, as well as a good rate of kids being tested.

Who knew what when?

Families of international students — married or in domestic partnerships — occupy just over half of CSCC’s 360 apartments (48 percent are from the United States or Canada, 18 percent from China). About 40 percent of the families have children, for a total population of about 1,000, according to General Manager Gerald Erickson, who has been at CSCC for 30 years and said he was surprised to learn about the pollution after the contractors found it last year.

CSCC from above. Toxins were found in soil around the three buildings at the north (upper) end of the complex. Photo: Google Maps

Once the contamination was discovered, Erickson said he left communication about it to the university’s Environmental Health staff, which provided email updates and fliers for residents and spoke at three co-op board meetings.

Board president Kendra Hernandez said the university offered to hold a special meeting for CSCC residents, but the board declined after no residents showed up at its board meeting for an announced university presentation on the topic. “There was never really a huge outcry” among residents, Hernandez said. The biggest complaint may have been about the orange fencing that kept people off the CSCC’s one recreation field and playground with swings. (An on-site child care center also used those play spaces, according to CSCC staff.)

One resident of a building where soil is being replaced, Rachel Dittli, said she considered the notices residents received adequate. But her husband, Albin, said he had concerns about dirt from the cleanup work blowing through windows into the apartment, including onto their kitchen table.

Another resident, Kaying Thao, has been less satisfied with the information she has seen since moving to a CSCC apartment in June. When she heard workers were removing ash, she thought they meant trees. Thao first learned details about the pollution Nov. 4, at a meeting of the broader neighborhood group, the Southeast Como Improvement Association (SECIA), which has made environmental efforts a priority since a pair of nearby chemical-plant fires in the late 1990s.

Two possibly affected populations are more in the dark. Residents living across the street only got notice about the pollution last week, thanks to a SECIA volunteer. Grigor said her agency will review whether adjacent properties can join the queue for state Superfund money. SECIA Environmental Coordinator Justin Eibenholtzl said he was disappointed that neither neighbors or the neighborhood group were notified.

Grigor said the pollution-control agency was also concerned about past residents of the dump-site housing, who wouldn’t know about the pollution at their former homes and may have moved to other polluted areas, increasing risks due to cumulative exposure. But while the MPCA has sometimes tried to track down people in similar situations, the health risks at CSCC aren’t high enough to trigger that sort of response, she said.

People tend to live at CSCC for only two to four years (and must move after seven), so exposure periods for individual residents are limited — a consideration in assessing risks, said the university’s Dalgleish. Short stays meant risks haven’t been “undue,” she said, but once the university learned of the pollution, any risk beyond a residential standard was “unacceptable.”

But high turnover at CSCC also means thousands of former residents don’t know they were living on a toxic waste dump.

Theories and skeptics

How did the ash get there and why did the university build housing on it?

The ash likely came from a municipal incinerator that operated in South Minneapolis from the 1930s until 1960, said Dalgleish, but dumping stopped after the university acquired the property in 1945.

Since 1947, thousands of young parents and children have lived in homes provided by the university on that property. First came quonset huts and trailers where families of G.I. Bill veterans set up housekeeping in the 1940s and 1950s. Then in the 1970s and 1980s came CSCC.

If construction crews noticed the ash in 1982, they may have seen it more for its advantages in building foundations than for its potential hazards. Although the federal Superfund laws were in place by then, contractors’ attitudes and practices concerning polluted building sites didn’t fully change until 1990, she said.

Photo by Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

A good theory?

“I think that’s absolutely it,” said Tim Busse, a spokesman for University Services, which includes both Environmental Services and Facilities Management departments. “Attitudes have changed,” he said. The university would not build housing on an ash dump now, he said, but he doesn’t think the university is going to investigate why it happened 27 years ago. “Rather than trying to fix blame, the idea is now to fix the problem and get it cleaned up for the residents,” Busse said.

But the incinerator-dump theory has some detractors among older neighborhood residents.

Joe Stimark, who turned 87 on Monday, still lives in the house where he was born, three blocks from CSCC. He remembers playing baseball there, on what were then open fields. He can tick off the factories and other industrial neighbors down through the decades. He doesn’t remember a dump at the CSCC site.

Dave Williams, 88, a neighborhood resident since 1943, lives a block away from CSCC. Long in the excavation business, he knows how the lay of the land has been altered over the years but recalls no dump on the CSCC site. His guess: the university brought in fill to make a sloping site more level for the post-war quonset huts.

Also skeptical is Connie Sullivan, a neighborhood resident since 1977 and local historian since retiring from the university faculty. Her research shows the land sat unused as railroad property for 50 years before the university bought it.

Whenever the toxic ash arrived and whatever its source, one thing is certain: young people were playing on it. Like her father before her, Stimark’s daughter, Mary Gregg, and her neighborhood friends played hide-and-seek amid waist-high grass there in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the quonsets were gone. Boys drove go-carts there, coming home splattered with mud.

In the 1970s, intramural university softball teams played on three diamonds over the dump site, recalled alum Andy Mickel.

Now, the soil under the polluted play areas has all been removed and replaced. But the long delay put a strain on families with children, said Hernandez, the co-op board president, who coaches a kids’ soccer team on the play field. The pollution cleanup’s pace may have been quick by state standards, she said, but it didn’t feel that way to residents.

“Our big field was out of commission for so long,” she said. “People said, ‘Are they ever going to be done?’”

SuperFreakonomics and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Photos: HarperCollins, WDCpix

The early reviews for “SuperFreakonomics” have been harsh. The book, wrote Brad Johnson in The Guardian, is a “super freaking mess.” According to environmental journalist Joe Romm, it contains “many, many pieces of outright nonsense” and “major howlers.” In The New Republic, Brad Plumer attacked the book for “garden variety ignorance.” And all of those pans appeared before the book actually hit the shelves this week.

Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner didn’t face anything like this three years ago when they published “Freakonomics,” a surprise smash that sold 4 million copies. Unlike that book, which was based entirely on Levitt’s economic research from the University of Chicago, “SuperFreakonomics” is a guided tour of other peoples’ contrarian research and ideas. The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as “religious fervor,” and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel that attitudes toward their stances are getting brighter.

“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”

Ebell’s reference to “State of Fear” demonstrated just how meaningful “Freakonomics” could be to people who challenge conventional wisdom about climate change. The late author’s novel, published in 2004, cast as villains environmentalists and eco-terrorists who were perpetrating hoaxes to maintain their power. Coming after Crichton had made some well-publicized and much-maligned remarks skeptical of climate change science, the book was pilloried by environmentalists. It sold more than 1.5 million copies anyway.

In the years since, many climate change skeptics feel that the environmental movement has lost ground culturally and politically. A Pew Research poll released on Thursday found that the number of Americans who believed that man-made global warming was occurring, or that a hotter planet was a serious problem, had fallen precipitously. In April 2008, 71 percent of Americans said that global warming was happening, and 47 percent said it was man-made. In the new poll, only 57 percent of Americans said any global warming was happening, and 36 percent said it was man-made. Many skeptics are taking that poll as a sign that their message is getting through.

“There’s just so much … skepticism now,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environmental and Public Works Committee and one of the most prominent skeptics of climate change in Washington. In making the case that Americans are growing more skeptical, Dempsey said, “the Pew poll is one data point. This book is another data point.”

Levitt and Dubner have engaged their critics in the environmental movement, accusing them of “smears” for suggesting that the climate change chapter of “SuperFreakonomics” makes them “global warming denialists.”

“I think anyone who actually reads that chapter will come away with a better fact-based understanding of the actual issues surrounding global warming,” Levitt told TWI. “That said, I also think that partisans love to cherry-pick, regardless of what side of the aisle they sit on.”

Indeed, the climate change skeptics who are excited about “SuperFreakonomics” and the environmentalists who are criticizing the book are focusing on some of the same material. The controversial chapter opens with ironic quotes from Newsweek and New York Times articles from the 1970s that published frightening, if slapdash, research about “global cooling.” That phony scare is a favorite of climate change skeptics, who have attempted to bring it back from obscurity in books and in films like the just-released “Not Evil Just Wrong.”

“The man who came up with that theory, Stephen Snyder, is now one of the people scaring everyone about global warming,” said Martin Hertzberg. The retired meteorologist, who lives in Colorado, has been skeptical of man-made global warming for decades. He has converted the liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn to the belief that, as Cockburn quoted him saying, “the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” while getting into scraps with environmental journalists like George Monbiot.

“The idea of man-made global warming is fear-mongering and hysteria,” said Hertzberg. “There are a large number of know-nothing journalists and environmental lobbyists working hard on this, and they’re completely wrong. Al Gore is not a meteorologist. He knows nothing about science.”

Levitt and Dubner do not challenge all of Gore’s arguments about climate change science. What they do challenge is the idea that man’s use of carbon is speeding along a major catastrophe, and that something like cap-and-trade could be the answer. “It’s illogical,” they write, “to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.” Prominent skeptics told TWI that such an argument, from such high-placed experts is long overdue.

“They’re absolutely right,” said Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Look at the numbers. If every nation that has obligations under the Kyoto Protocols adopted the restrictions of Waxman-Markey [cap-and-trade legislation], you’d see a 7 percent drop in warming by 2100, about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Michaels, who has not read the book but is planning to pick it up, saluted Levitt and Dubner for tackling an issue that few popular economists touch. “It’s about time that people who do popular economics tell people the truth,” he said. “Fortunately, the planet is not warming.”

While Levitt and Dubner do not actually argue that the planet is not getting warmer, some skeptics are hopeful that the book could direct people to studies that suggest that. “I think it is very important to question the [environmentalist] true believers,” said Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace. Now, as the chairman of Greenspirit Strategies, he does some work for energy companies and supports new nuclear power. “[It's important] as they display all the qualities of doomsday fanatics. There is ample reason to be skeptical, including the fact that the world has been warmer than today for most of the history of life, and the fact that CO2 has been much higher than today through most of the history of life.”

The controversial phrasing and criticism in “SuperFreakonomics” is in the book to make another point. Levitt and Dubner present research into geoengineering, a Gordian Knot solution to a warming planet that, for example, would replicate the effect that a massive eruption of volcano ash can have in making the planet cooler. It’s not a popular idea among some skeptics, who argue that bogus data is responsible for much of the global warming panic. One of those skeptics is Ross McKitrick, a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph whose research suggests that numbers suggesting a spike in global temperature are out of whack. He was hopeful that “SuperFreakonomics” could cut through the “groupthink and political correctness” and expose environmental journalists such as Joe Romm as dishonest activists who can’t accept criticism.

“He’s a former Clinton staffer who runs an attack blog funded by Soros money,” said McKitrick of Romm, whose ClimateProgress blog is a project of the Center for American Progress. “He’s only respected by people who approve of his inflammatory tactics and relentless politicization of the issue.”

Climate change skeptics are excited by the prospect of the general public reading Levitt and Dubner, but they’re expecting the authors to remain targets of an active and desperate green movement. “It will make people think and say, yeah, that’s right, it doesn’t make sense to do this,” said Ebell. “But that will just make the environmentalists even angrier.”

Phelim McAleer, the director of “Not Evil Just Wrong,” said his movie had begun to inspire protests and interruptions. His advice for the authors: Develop tough skin.

“Be prepared for it to get worse before it’s going to better,” said McEleer. “They don’t like questions, as Al Gore showed. Enviromentalist journalists are environmentalists, and they will always side with the environmental establishment. Don’t expect fairness from journalists.”

Photo: iStockphoto

More than 2 million pounds of toxic chemicals were dumped into Minnesota’s waterways during 2007, according to a new report (pdf) by Environment Minnesota. 3M was by far the most prolific dumper of pollutants, with more than 1 million pounds discharged into the Mississippi River.

Nationwide at least 232 million pounds of toxic chemicals were released into the country’s waterways, according to the report. Indiana led the nation in total volume of toxic discharges, with 27 million pounds of pollutant’s released into the state’s waterways. Virginia, Nebraska, Texas and Louisiana rounded out the top five.

“Pollutant releases from factories, power plants and other industrial facilities are a key contributing factor to the pollution that leaves 46 percent of the nation’s assessed rivers and streams and 61 percent of its assessed lakes unsafe for fishing, swimming or other uses,” the report notes.

Nitrate compounds, which can cause serious health problems for children when found in drinking water, were responsible for 90 percent of the pollutants dumped into the nation’s waterways. But more than 1.5 million pounds of chemicals linked to cancer were released into streams, rivers and lakes. In addition, 450,000 pounds of substances linked to developmental disorders and roughly 266,000 pounds of chemicals linked to reproductive disorders were discharged into the country’s waterways. The Mississippi River was among the top four recipients for each of these categories.

The Ohio River received the highest overall volume of toxic discharges, followed by the New and Mississippi rivers. More than 12 million pounds of pollutants were dumped into the Mississippi River in 2007. It was the only Minnesota river to earn the dubious distinction of being among the nation’s 20 most polluted waterways.

The data is culled from the federal government’s 2007 Toxic Release Inventory. Industrial facilities reported the release of 244 different toxic chemicals or classes of toxic pollutants into the country’s waterways during that year.

Environment Minnesota is calling on the federal government to more stringently enforce the Clean Water Act. Most notably the advocacy group wants the federal law applied to all the country’s waterways. Owing to court rulings, some small bodies of water are currently exempt from federal environmental regulations. Minnesota Rep. Jim Oberstar has championed the Clean Water Restoration Act, which would beef up federal enforcement of pollution prohibitions.

“There are common-sense steps that should be taken to turn the tide against toxic pollution of our waters,” said Samantha Chadwick, of Environment Minnesota, in a press release announcing the report’s findings. “We need to clean up our water now, and we need the federal government to act to protect our health and our environment.”

Hennepin Energy Recovery Center with Target Field (background right). Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) won’t take a position — yet — on whether to require a new environmental study before Hennepin County’s downtown Minneapolis incinerator can burn more trash, because the agency doesn’t have a pending application for the project.

Foes of the expansion at the Hennepin facility petitioned the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board (EQB) for a new environmental assessment.

The EQB assigned the MPCA as the responsible governmental unit to decide whether the county’s proposed 20 percent increase in burning at the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, operated by a private contractor, Covanta Energy.

The MPCA told three petitioner groups in letters sent this week that the agency won’t say whether a new assessment is needed without having a pending permit application from Hennepin County.

The petitions will stay current for one year, said Craig Affeldt, head of the MPCA’s environmental review unit, and the agency would restart its review upon receiving an application. The petitioners could also renew their requests if an application is still not in by September 2010, Affeldt tells the Minnesota Independent.

Covanta was stymied last summer by the Minneapolis Planning Commission, which voted down the burner expansion plan on the grounds of potential health impacts from burning more trash. Commissioners weren’t satisfied with information from the environmental review done two decades ago at the facility’s construction, and another more recent study for the new Minnesota Twins stadium across the street.

Covanta appealed to the Minneapolis City Council’s zoning and planning committee, but abruptly withdrew its application at a public hearing. A new hearing before the committee is set for next month.

Nancy Hone of Neighbors Against the Burner, interviewed before learning about the MPCA’s action, said the group is looking beyond merely stopping an expansion. “We’re going to shut it down,” Hone vowed.

Minneapolis College of Art and Design's Park(ing) space on the corner in Minneapolis' Warhouse District. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

“Parking” took on a new meaning Friday in parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The annual Park(ing) Day had groups of activists and artist hauling sod, grills and lawnchairs to parking spaces, where they plugged the meter all day and hosted impromptu parks. At ten locations — two in St. Paul, eight in Minneapolis — these temporary green spaces were up and running, most through 3 p.m. Friday, but some even later.

Begun in 2005 by the San Francisco-based art collective Rebar to call attention to a part of that city without much green space, it’s now a national phenomenon, with parks being created in urban areas coast to coast. Minneapolis’ day, organized by the group Solutions Twin Cities, is all legit. Co-organizer Troy Gallas said he called the city of Minneapolis and they told him they were fine with it — as long as meters are plugged. Plus, he added, St. Paul’s city hall ran a space this year.

Park(ing) Day 2009 organizers Troy Gallas and Colin Kloecker. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

Gallas’ said the event in most cities points out the lack of good green spaces, but here it’s more of a reminder of them and what they provide us. His parter at Solutions, Colin Kloecker, points out that much of downtown’s street culture happens in skyways and corporate plazas. “That’s not really public space. [Park(ing) Day] shows that it’s important to have a commons.”

Space 150 employees got their spot right outside work, in front of Minneapolis' Moose & Sadie's. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

A spot taken over by staff and students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design used a bed of sod to host picnic blankets, trays of food, yard games and camp chairs. MCAD staffer Megan Leafblad, in a sun hat, occasionally jumped up to offer Twizzler’s to passersby in cars.

Across the street, employees at the ad agency Space 150, having already fired up the grill, were offering brats to people at MCAD’s “park.”

While the event isn’t anti-car, Kloecker said, “It’s a people-centered activity, instead of a car-focused one. Not a lot of dialogue can happen if everyone is in their cars… unless it’s road rage.”

The view of two Park(ing) Day spots, shot from Space 150's office. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

Heidi Keel, a brand planner at Space 150 agreed. “It’s a way of being a part of the larger community.” (In that spirit, they live-streamed the view of the scene outside their window so co-workers at their New York office could watch the fun.) And James Patrick, an instructor at the IPR music school down the block, seconds that.

“All day I try to be a crabby downtown jerk,” he joked, “but today I find I just can’t do that.”

Various participants and passersby saw the project as about either celebrating green space or injecting some wonder into the sometimes drab urban landscape. That could be perceived as political, Patrick says, but only slightly so.

Lobby furniture and a grill made up Space 150's setup. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

“If you weren’t doing it in an area surrounded by capitalism it wouldn’t work as well,” he said. “My first thought seeing this was: Who’s paying them? I’m glad to hear the answer is nobody.”

One woman, walking her dog past the scene, wasn’t keen on the idea. “It seems kind of weird to take up the spaces that business owners need. And there is a park just two blocks away. I don’t get it.”

“One [parking-spot-turned-park] would’ve been enough,” she added.

Ryan Terrell, James Patrick and Jade Houdek. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

But Toni Christiano, who is a host for the Monte Carlo restaurant’s outdoor seating area, likes the injection of green. “I wish it would stay there.”

That was a common sentiment on 2nd Avenue. Ryan Terrell, an IPR student strumming a guitar at one of the parking spaces, said he wishes it’d happen every day. To that, another IPR student had a suggestion for a winter version of Park(ing) Day: Igloos.

See more Park(ing) Day 2009 photos here.

The Toyota Corolla was the most frequently purchased model, followed by the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Ford Focus. The most popular model abandoned: Ford Explorer. Vehicles turned in averaged 15.8 miles per gallon, while those purchased averaged 24.9 miles per gallon — an increase of 58 percent.

Next up: Cash for Refrigerators. It doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Squirrelly, perhaps, but not squirrelized — until now. 

The story, from ClimateWire, contains a couple errors that Minnesota readers might catch. At one point the story suggests coal travels through Minneapolis on river barges; that hasn’t happened for years.

The writer also makes what’s becoming a common mistake: Assuming that the first time he heard T-Paw tell a particular joke was the first time the governor told it:

But Pawlenty appeared to break his silence on global warming last week. He used the term “climate change” to mock President Obama’s health-care initiatives at the GOPAC conference in Chicago.

“It appears that President Obama is making great progress on climate change,” the governor chided, according to Politico. “He is changing the political climate in the country back to Republican.”

In fact, Pawlenty has been using that line since at least the end of July.

But it doesn’t do much good simply to point out such misfires. No one would worry about Pawlenty trading away his principles for presidential-campaign momentum, if only our nation’s plentiful supply of news-media errors could be harnessed to wipe out environmental problems in certain states, like say, Minnesota and Arizona:

>

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

DULUTH: Sewage spews onto streets, into streams and Lake Superior. That happens sometimes when it rains; the feds have given the city a decade to fix it. [Duluth News Tribune]

ROSEVILLE: Republicans eye guv candidates at party picnic. An activist noted what they had in common: “They’re all conservative, and they’re all staying on message.” She forgot the obvious: They were all wet. [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

DULUTH: Hillary Clinton’s autograph enough to start work on controversial pipeline. Enbridge Energy will pump 19 million gallons of Canadian oil per day across Minnesota to Superior, Wis. [Bemidji Pioneer]

MINNETONKA: H1N1 flu shots are on the house. UnitedHealth Group says it will cover the cost of vaccines for people the government says should get them. [Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal]

MINNEAPOLIS: Gophers try out new football stadium. University of Minnesota students will get in free Saturday – sans breathalizer tests, one hopes — to watch an intra-squad scrimmage.  [Minnesota Daily]

TWO HARBORS: Mayor promises memorial to beloved tree. What’s left of the landmark “Honking Tree” after scoundrels cut it down last spring will provide material for its own monument. [Duluth News Tribune]

Elsewhere in Minnesota headlines this morning …

RED WING: Steve Sviggum could be six months from guv run. So says the former state House Speaker, despite a fresh federal ruling that the Hatch Act won’t let him be a candidate for governor (not even in a rogue Roseville straw poll?) while he’s a state commissioner. [Red Wing Republican Eagle]

EDEN PRAIRIE: Favre hire doesn’t favor stadium bid — yet. Gov. Pawlenty pooh-poohed talk that by signing Brett Favre, the Minnesota Vikings had gained enough momentum to push through a public stadium subsidy. [Associated Press; Minnesota Public Radio]

BOUNDARY WATERS: Half the haze has local source. Nearby coal-burning and taconite plants are clouding the air in Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. [Minnesota Public Radio]

VIRGINIA: Tension over missing millions. Some city officials say $3.4 million is missing, but the auditor says it’s there somewhere. [Duluth News Tribune]

BLAINE: Council might allow gas stations next to schools. A fire official says there’s little danger: “In terms of gas stations exploding, that’s all Hollywood. That just doesn’t happen.” [Star Tribune]

SYLVAN LAKE: UFO landing investigated by Mutual of Omaha. Not the old Wild Kingdom sponsor, but a “Star Team” member from the Mutual UFO Network did travel from Omaha, Neb., to document what seemed to be a big thing splashing into the lake late last month. [Forest Lake Times via HometownSource.com]