The Grandma Brigade (5×8 – 1/10/13)

1) HOW POLITICAL PARTIES SNOOP ON YOU

You can't escape the prying eyes of Democrats in Minnesota, ProPublica reports. The site profiles The Grandma Brigade, a group of DFL volunteers committed to finding every shred of identity they can about people who lean to the left. They patrol neighborhoods looking for lawn signs, they read letters to the editors, obituaries, they even listen to radio talk shows and document the first name of the callers, according to ProPublica.

One data volunteer even joked about holding "rat out your neighbor parties," where friends would be encouraged to add notes about the political views of other people on their block.
Once information about individual people is entered into the state party's database, it doesn't stay in Minnesota. Almost all the information collected by local volunteers like the Grandma Brigade also ends up in the party's central database in Washington.
Few places have data volunteers as dedicated as the ones in Minnesota, which has been held up as a model for other state Democratic parties. Both Democrats and Republicans have centralized databases that, among other things, track opinions you share with local campaign volunteers.
Each piece of information the parties have stored about you might not be too interesting on its own. But taken together, they're incredibly powerful. Political campaigns are using this voter data to predict voters' behavior in increasingly sophisticated ways.

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There's no way for people in Minnesota to know what political parties do with the data collected about them, ProPublica says.

Related: How Generation Y really feels about privacy (CNET)

2) WHO CARES ABOUT SEWERS?

The other day we chatted in this space about Minnesota's crumbling infrastructure -- specifically, water mains. What about the other big pipe -- literally -- beneath us? Sewage pipes. And, like the nice water, it's a crisis too, according to PBS.

Watch A Journey to Confront Our Aging Water Systems on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

3) WHAT SNOW TEACHES US ABOUT ROADS

As the snow melts here in flyover country, take a look at where it's still piled up. That, the blog streets.mn says, can tell you a few things. In many cases, Reuben Collins (nope, no relation) writes, roads are built wider than they need to be, just so there's a place to put the snow.

Which forces the question, if we can give up several feet of roadway width for a few months each year and it's not really a problem, does that mean our roadways were overdesigned from the start? Should we have just constructed it a few feet narrower to begin with?
Of course, many will recall that planning for snow storage in the road is already a generally accepted practice. In Minneapolis, the original proposed design for the reconstructed Nicollet Avenue was several feet narrower than the final design. The reason for increasing the width of the roadway was in part due to business owners being worried that snow storage would make on-street parking impossible (or at least unpleasant) for several months every year. Essentially, we purposely build the roadway wider than it needed to be so that we could use a portion of it for snow storage. But given that roadways are not cheap (or generally attractive compared to boulevards), is this the best way to plan for snow storage?

4) THE ICONS AMONG US

If you're a downtown Saint Paulite, you probably know this woman:

[image]

Dianne Brown, is as iconic a figure as anything else in downtown Saint Paul, especially now that Macy's is leaving. Brown works at the post office as she has for several decades.

The sad news: She's retiring in a few weeks.

The good news: She was a guest on MPR Classical's Music with Minnesotans, where she discussed her love of opera.

5) CONNECTED FOREVER

The lives of many people connected on I-94 in Jamestown, ND., last month when a pickup truck with several people inside slid into the path of a semi, killing the men in the pickup.

By all accounts, Stuart Hauge, the driver of the semi, was doing nothing wrong and couldn't have done anything to avoid the crash.

Guillermo Zuniga's father, uncle and friends died in the crash and this week, his thoughts turned to Stuart Hauge. So he called him on the phone, the Fargo Forum reports.

"I don't know how I would take it. I wanted to let him know - I wanted to reassure him that I wasn't mad at him. I don't put any of the blame on him," he told Hauge.

Mr. Zuniga talked to his father on Christmas, the last time they would talk.

"He kept saying, 'I'm proud of you, son,' " Zuniga said.

More connections: Bill Sand of Cincinnati has made it his mission to help those who need assistance. Sand spends most of his free time crafting, creating and building gadgets to help the disabled enhance their lives. He volunteers for the group May We Help.

Bonus I: Harvesting ice for Spicer's ice castle (West Central Tribune)

Bonus II: Live shots gone wrong can really boost a TV reporter's visibility (KARE 11).

Bonus III: What happened to the women in the Obama administration? (CBS)

Bonus IV: A 10-year old boy lost his Christmas present -- a Lego kit -- when he took it to the supermarket against his father's advice. So he wrote to the company. (h/t: Jason DeRusha)

TODAY'S QUESTION

Minnesota's campaign finance board wants tighter standards for legislators to follow in disclosing outside income. Legislators receive only $31,000 a year, so most need to hold other jobs, but outside work can pose conflicts of interest. Today's Question: Does holding down a private-sector job make for a better legislator?

WHAT WE'RE DOING

Daily Circuit (9-12 p.m.) - First hour: In a recent National Journal cover story, longtime journalist Ron Fournier wrote about how two former presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, helped him to understand his son and become a better father. He joins us to discuss the story and his experiences.

Second hour: The future of physics.

Third hour: Notable books series.

MPR News Presents (12-1 pm): Climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State and Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech on what we know about global warming, and why it's so politicized. They spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California.

Talk of the Nation (1-2 p.m.) - Rape: Who does it and why, who the victims are and who reports it?

All Things Considered (3-6:30 p.m.) - NPR will report on bosses snooping on employees. The corporate goal is to catch worker misconduct before it can get employers into legal trouble. For the bosses, it's not a question of whether any employees go rogue. It's a question of where and when.

The Grandma Brigade (5×8 – 1/10/13)

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