Al Franken's Blog, page 57

CNN: Al Franken unleashed – Comcast merger bad for consumers

For our full interview with Al Franken, including his thoughts on the roll out of the Affordable Care Act in Minnesota, click here.

Comcast said Thursday it had agreed to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion in a deal that would combine the two biggest cable companies in the United States.

If the deal is approved, the combined group will be the country’s dominant provider of television channels and Internet connections, reaching roughly one in three American homes.

But Democratic Senator Al Franken says the deal would hurt consumers.

“There’s not enough competition, we need more competition, not less. This is going exactly in the wrong direction,” Franken said in an interview with CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“Consumers are – I am very concerned – are going to pay higher bills, they are going to get even worse service and less choice,” said Franken.

More and more Americans get their entertainment from the internet. Comcast currently has 20% of the Internet service market, the merger will give it 30%.

Franken says he was already against Comcast acquiring NBC Universal, and says the broadcasting of the Olympics illustrates why it was a bad deal for cable subscribers.

“If you’re a cable provider, you better have (the Olympics). So if you’re not Comcast, you’ve got to pay … Comcast NBC for the rights to the Olympics. And Comcast can charge whatever they want. They have to pay themselves the same thing by law, but they’re taking out of their right pocket and putting it in their left pocket,” says Franken.

“That’s anti-competitiveness, as far as I’m concerned,” said the senator.

The Federal Communications Commission put conditions on the Comcast NBC Universal deal, but Franken says Comcast has not complied with many of them.

One condition Comcast “fought tooth and nail” was the “neighborhooding” of cable news networks, says Franken. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News were all put near each other, and Comcast was supposed to put Bloomberg TV in the same neighborhood.

“But because Bloomberg competes with CNBC, which is a financial news network, Comcast didn’t comply with that, and they finally had to be ordered to do that,” said Franken.

The company’s failure to comply with the FCC’s conditions on the last merger ought to give lawmakers and officials pause, says Franken.

“My concerns are what it means for a consumer is higher prices, worse service, and worse choice,” said Franken.

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AdWeek: Franken Unsatisfied With Ford’s Data Collection Practices

As far as Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) is concerned, Ford’s in-car data collection practices don’t measure up.

Franken reached out to Ford last month, asking the carmaker to explain what data location information the company collects, how it obtains customers’ permission to collect data, and how it shares the data.

While Franken seemed OK with Ford’s description of its practices, he was unsatisfied that Ford relied on the fine print of its website and mobile app user agreements to obtain consumer consent to collect the data.

“No location data is wirelessly transmitted from the vehicle without customer consent. Location data is used only to support customer requests for services, and to troubleshoot and improve our products,” wrote Curt Magleby, Ford’s vp of government affairs, in a five-page response. Ford explained it receives customer consent through in-vehicle prompts, website user agreements, or mobile app user agreements.

But for Franken, that wasn’t enough.

“This is sensitive information, and notices to consumers about this sensitive data shouldn’t get lost in fine print,” Franken said in a statement.

Franken, the chairman of the subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, intends to introduce next month a privacy location bill requiring clear consumer consent practices. He launched his probe into Ford following a report he requested from the GAO that concluded car makers and in-car navigation systems could do more to inform consumers about how they use and share data.

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Northfield News: Sen. Franken visits Nerstrand farm on propane crisis fact-finding mission

U.S. Sen. Al Franken was deep in the heart of Minnesota farm country on Saturday night to hear from local residents who have been hit hard by the severe propane crisis.

Franken (D-Minn.) visited Shepherd’s Way Farms in Nerstrand for a kitchen-table discussion with local farmers, state officials and local organizations, and made it known to all that he was on a fact-finding mission.

“I really came to hear about what you are experiencing,” Franken said in his opening comments to the 15 people who braved the cold to take part in the discussion. “Are producers taking advantage of people’s anxieties and trying to profit from this terrible situation? That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

Franken heard from hosts Steven Read and Jodi Ohlsen Read, Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman and members of various local organizations ? including Three Rivers Community Action in Faribault ? who were there seeking answers to some of the problems their clients have been facing because of the crisis.

On that list of clients are Ty and Cheryl Newland. They know first-hand how the propane crisis has affected folks who live in the rural parts of southern Minnesota.

The Newlands lost their house in Northfield nearly two years ago and found a place to rent in Montgomery. It was a way for the retired Navy veteran and his disabled wife (multiple sclerosis) to start again and try to rebuild their lives.

The Newlands had a pole barn in which Ty was preparing to start up his wood-working business and Cheryl, who could no longer work at Northfield Hospital due to her multiple sclerosis, could focus on her passion of rescuing dogs and finding them good homes. The road to recovery was in site.

“We went from almost a six-figure existence to practically nothing,” Cheryl said. “I couldn’t work anymore and lost my job. We lost everything.”

Then the propane shortage hit, driving prices up to quadruple what they were a year before. For the Newlands, who were just making ends meet, it was a blow to their plans of making any kind of comeback.

The propane crisis meant the Newlands couldn’t afford to heat both the house and the pole barn because of the higher prices. The pole barn was the obvious choice not to heat, but that came with ramifications, including moving the 11 rescue dogs inside.

“We just can’t keep up with the propane,” said Cheryl, who said the couple was able to get some relief now with a one-time Veteran’s Administration grant because of Ty’s service. “We haven’t been able to start his business because the pole barn has no heat. With the prices up, we just can’t keep up.”

Steven Read knows all about heating pole barns and out buildings on Shepherd’s Way Farms. Not only was he concerned about the rising costs, which affect his bottom line, but also how quickly things have changed in terms of pricing during the crisis.

He said that at the beginning of December, the price of propane was $1.42 a gallon. At the end of December, it was $2.22 a gallon. Then, he said, it skyrocketed.

“I called my propane supplier and they said it would be $3.31 a gallon (a couple of weeks ago),” said Read, who paid more than $20,000 last year for fuel, but is looking at a much larger bill this year. “They also told me I would need to bring a check when I ordered. In two days, it was $4.20 a gallon. You don’t expect to pay three- to four-times more for fuel.”

Rothman said the Minnesota Department of Commerce is keeping a close watch on propane companies and distributors in the state for price gouging and other improprieties.

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National Journal: App That Can Identify Strangers’ Faces Gets Heat From Al Franken

A Google Glass app that claims it can scan strangers’ faces and pull up information about them online is drawing scrutiny from Capitol Hill.

Democratic Sen. Al Franken sent a letter Wednesday urging the maker of the NameTag app to delay its release. Franken demanded more information about how the app will work and urged the company to implement tougher privacy safeguards.

“Your company has a duty to act as a responsible corporate citizen in deploying this technology, which must be done in a manner that respects and protects individual privacy,” wrote Franken, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Privacy, Technology, and the Law Subcommittee.

The makers of NameTag say it can use the Google Glass camera to scan people’s faces and then look for matches online, including on dating sites like OkCupid and Match. Franken expressed alarm that the app could allow users to identify a stranger’s name, photos, relationship status, and other private information without their consent or knowledge.

Google, however, bans the use of facial-recognition technology on Glass—its computerized eyewear that is still in limited release.

“Our policy remains as it did when we publicly banned facial-recognition apps in June 2013,” Google spokeswoman Sam Smith said. “This app would not be available for distribution on Glass.”

But Franken expressed concern that the app could work if a Glass device is “jailbroken”—a modification that could allow users to bypass Google’s limitations on the device.

FacialNetwork.com, which makes the app, did not respond to a request for comment, but in the company’s promotional materials, it argues that the app will make the world a “much more connected place.”

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Pioneer Press: Minnesota’s curlers: A different brand of Olympic athlete

Monday mornings are hardest for U.S. Olympic curler John Landsteiner. Not the conventional drudgery of starting another work week, but rehashing for colleagues his unconventional weekend as a world-class athlete.

Landsteiner is a civil engineer who manages energy pipeline projects across Minnesota and Wisconsin. He also throws the lead rock for skip John Shuster, the Chisholm native whose five-man curling team of Minnesotans will represent the U.S. at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Since August, Landsteiner typically hopped on a plane every other Thursday night, curled over the weekend and returned jet-lagged to his desk at Lake Superior Consulting.

It was a grinding schedule that took him to Edmonton, Alberta, and Las Vegas, as nearby as Fargo, N.D., and to far-flung Fussen, Germany, where his teammates earned their Olympic berth.

“I get a lot of crap for it, but everybody’s excited,” said Landsteiner. “The morning I come back is usually distracting. People want to know how it went: ‘Did you have fun? Did you win or lose?’ ”

The office cubicle, a soul-crushing prison for some sedentary workers, is a welcome retreat for Landsteiner.

“The cube helps because I’m kind of in my own sanctuary and I can focus on what I need to,” he said. “Once I get back there and back to my house, everything feels normal. Curling’s normal, too. That’s the normal life.”

Curlers are the everyday people among Winter Olympians, whose gilded athletes are celebrated for their singular focus, sometimes years in the making.

Sure, today’s curlers train harder and strictly monitor their diets more than their forefathers, who regularly turned bonspiels — curling competitions — into happy hour. But curling remains a niche sport led by amateurs whose passion competes with families to raise, day jobs to fulfill and tuition to pay, particularly in the United States.

Jessica Schultz is a physical therapist who lives in Richfield and is returning to the Olympics after competing in 2006 Torino Winter Games in Italy. Allison Pottinger, a consumer products analyst for General Mills and a mother of two, is an alternate on skip Erika Brown’s team.

The men’s team includes Jeff Isaacson, a science teacher at Gilbert Junior High School in Gilbert. He was fortunate to have the retired teacher he replaced volunteer to return the classroom this month and maintain Isaacson’s lesson plans while he sweeps in Sochi.

And then there is Jared Zezel, who deferred his final semester at Bemidji State, where he is studying exercise science and psychology.

“I thought I’d be done with college by now, but I wasn’t thinking about it too much (while) focusing on that one goal, to curl in the Olympics,” he said.

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Star Tribune: Who’s the real Al Franken? A look at a senator’s transformation

Al Franken’s transformation from spicy comic to wonkish senator has been nothing short of breathtaking. Five years ago, the risk of encountering Franken was that he’d tell a funny story of the sort that would make your mother blush. Now the risk is that he’d make your eyes glaze over with the inside dope on Washington legislation. Franken has become, with no irony intended, a serious man.

“Is it as much fun being a senator as it was working on ‘Saturday Night Live,’?” he asks, reciting a question he often gets. “The answer is no.” But he goes on to say that people’s careers often take new turns. “This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he says, “because its purpose is to improve other people’s lives, and when that happens everything else is worth it.”

“Everything else” is the endless partisan bickering and systematic dysfunction that have led many ordinary people to give up on government and some scholars to conclude that the Constitution no longer works. But Franken, a Democrat, who’s rated among the half-dozen most liberal senators, insists that there’s another Washington hiding in the nooks and crannies, one that’s fully functional and brimming with bipartisan cooperation, even bipartisan friendship. “That’s really what the job is about,” he says.

Take, for example, the new restrictions on large-scale pharmaceutical compounding that Franken and Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas pushed through the Senate last year. Federal investigators had traced contaminated drugs that caused 750 cases of fungal meningitis and 64 deaths to a careless drug compounding operation in Massachusetts. Its tainted drugs were shipped to 18 states. At a tearful meeting last month in Franken’s St. Paul office, two Minnesota survivors dropped by to thank Franken and to describe the painful illness that continues to threaten their lives. It was a heartbreaking scene. And it showed an emotional side of Franken that most voters haven’t imagined.

But it also prompts a question as Franken braces for a re-election challenge this year: Who is this new Al Franken? His opponents tend to see him wearing a kind of disguise, beneath which lurks the same old prankster who wrote books like “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” wickedly funny essays with a streak of mean running through them. In short, they doubt the genuineness of the new Franken.

Friends, on the other hand, see common threads running through Franken’s career, from comic to satirist to senator — namely, his intense interest in public affairs, his appetite for detail, and his strong sense of populist outrage, now tempered by age and position. For them, Franken has emerged as a mature version of his former self, or, in political terms, a buttoned-down version of Paul Wellstone, without the fizz.

Franken, himself, traces his political awareness to his father, who grew up a Jacob Javits Republican in New York and eventually moved his young family west, first to Albert Lea, then to the Twin Cities suburbs. Father and son would pull out the TV trays at dinnertime and watch the news together, most memorably the civil-rights drama of the early 1960s, and most vividly the scenes of white police officers attacking and beating black demonstrators. “No Jew can be for that,” Franken recalls his dad telling him.

In 1964, when Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater failed to support the Civil Rights Act, Joe Franken switched parties. And his son began sipping St. Louis Park’s extraordinary brew of politics and art, a mixture that would produce journalist Tom Friedman, satirist Tom Davis, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and musicians Sharon Isbin and Peter Himmelman, among others. The Blake School, Harvard University and Dudley Riggs’ Brave New Workshop sharpened Franken’s sense of irreverence and launched him toward a brand of politically edged comedy, eventually as a writer and occasional performer on “SNL” and as a talk-radio host who tried to challenge the conservatives’ domination of the air waves.

But Franken’s experience as a public figure did not prepare him for elective office. Early in his Senate campaign, he struggled to find the proper persona between comic and serious candidate. Speaking from the bimah (pulpit) at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Franken told a graphic Buddy Hackett joke about male genitals. The response was shock and embarrassment. It may have been a moment of clarity for Franken: What works on the Borscht Belt or in Las Vegas is way, way out of bounds for a politician in the American heartland, especially in a sacred setting.

Later, during the momentous recount that followed the 2008 election, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff in the Senate, Tamera Luzzatto, hammered home a similar point. Don’t take advantage of your celebrity, she told him. Avoid the national spotlight. Keep your head down. Work hard. Take care of constituents. Build a loyal staff. Earn the respect of your colleagues in both parties.

Not the Ted Cruz of the left

It’s advice that Franken has followed almost too faithfully. “No one ever thought that Al Franken would be boring, but he’s taught himself a whole new skill set,” said University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs. “There’s nothing in his past to suggest that he could be this disciplined and this effective. He has greatly exceeded expectations.”

“He could have been the Ted Cruz of the left, but that has clearly not happened,” said Carleton College’s Steven Schier. “Turns out that the court jester was really an accountant.”

Actually, Franken has employed some of his satirist skills in the Senate, namely his talent for scanning the news and selecting his targets — not for comedy sketches but for legislation. “I don’t know of any first-term senator who has had such a broad sweep of accomplishments,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation’s foremost experts on Congress. (Ornstein, by the way, grew up in St. Louis Park, a few blocks from Franken, and considers him a personal friend.)

Perhaps the best example of Franken’s sharp eye was noticing that Dodd-Frank, the law aimed at a preventing another 2008-type financial meltdown, had failed to discourage what Franken saw as a too-cozy relationship between the credit rating agencies and the Wall Street investment banks. Franken’s clear impression was that the agencies gave AAA ratings to “junk” in exchange for continued business from the banks. “That was the cause of all this in the first place,” he said. “This is a conflict of interest, clear as day.”

While he’s still working to amend that law — “I’m on it like a dog with a bone” — many of his other initiatives have been passed, nearly all of them with the help of Republican partners. Among Franken’s main interests: privacy, technology, workforce development, veterans, health care, renewable energy and agriculture. Perhaps the best way to summarize his legislative work is to ask some of the questions he asked over the last five years:

Should insurance companies under Obamacare be required to spend 80 percent of premiums on actual care rather than on administrative expenses? Should the developers of smartphones and mobile apps be required to get customers’ consent before tracking their locations? Should the federal government decline to do business with companies that require employees to give up the right to sue for sexual harassment or rape at work?

Should partnerships between private-sector employers and community/technical colleges be strengthened? Should veterans have better health care options in rural areas? Might service dogs help wounded veterans adjust to civilian life? Should diabetes prevention be a higher priority in health care? Should landlords be prohibited from evicting women from federally supported housing because they were beat up or sexually assaulted? Should spy agencies be required to release more details about their surveillance programs?

He believes that the answer to each of those questions is yes. Franken owes much of his success so far to his ability to forge alliances, even friendships, with Republican senators. A sense of humor on both sides can break down a lot of barriers, he said. “They figured out pretty quickly that I laugh a lot.”

At the same time, he has emerged as perhaps the Senate’s toughest critic of corporate power, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate contributions to politicians. “They gave corporations a blank check to utterly destroy our political system,” he told his colleagues in 2012.

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NY Times: Minnesota’s Olympic Hockey Cradle (Pop. 1,781)

This time, no royal titles were conferred, like King and Queen of the Frosty Festival, which T. J. Oshie and Gigi Marvin were crowned at Warroad High School in 2005.

Still, it is no small honor for two classmates to be named Olympians from a place that calls itself Hockeytown USA and is one of international sport’s most remote and unlikely capitals.

Warroad, population 1,781, a civic snow globe six miles from the Canadian border, has as many indoor rinks (two) as red lights. The town has sent seven hockey players to the Olympics since 1956 — four of them from the same family, the Christians — and each one has returned with a medal. The hope is for a pair of golds at the Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

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Star Tribune: White House offers $16 million to Minnesota to help with propane crisis

The Obama administration will release nearly $16 million in emergency funds to help Minnesota families and businesses hit hard by the state’s propane shortage.

The White House announced today that it will release more than $450 million, including $15.8 million in Minnesota and $14.2 million in Wisconsin, to help families heat their homes.

U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken of Minnesota and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin wrote to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday, pleading for federal funds.

The Obama administration responded to the pleas Thursday as a severe cold snap bears down on much of the nation.

In Minnesota, Gov. Mark Dayton declared a state of emergency this week because of the rising costs and severe shortage of propane and other home heating fuels statewide.

Along with Dayton, Franken and Klobuchar, U.S. Reps. Betty McCollum, Rick Nolan, Collin Peterson and Tim Walz wrote President Obama over the weekend, requesting federal aid to deal with the crisis.

Franken also wrote two major railway companies, BNSF Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific, whose U.S. headquarters is in Minneapolis, urging them to increase propane shipments to Minnesota.

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Star Tribune: Congress selects State of the Union guests with message in mind

Seats at President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night will be filled with the legislative priorities of the 113th Congress.

On a night when the president lays out his blueprint for the year, members of Congress often choose their guests to convey a message of their own: the person often symbolizes a policy or issue the lawmaker is promoting.

In Minnesota, those issues range from job training and fighting poverty to ending child sex trafficking and repealing President Obama’s health care law.

Here’s a member-by-member look at the guests of the state’s congressional delegation:

U.S. Sen. Al Franken will host Erick Ajax, vice president and co-owner of E.J. Ajax and Sons, a Minneapolis-based metal-stamping company. Franken has introduced legislation that would create a multi-billion dollar grant program to fund partnerships between businesses and two-year colleges to fill job openings in high-demand fields.

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West Central Tribune: Dayton, Minn. lawmakers urge White House action on propane shortage

Gov. Mark Dayton and several Minnesota lawmakers called on the Obama administration Saturday to take immediate action to address the region’s propane shortage.

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