MORNING EDITION

Happy 70th birthday, Bob. That Zimmerman kid from up north has done all right for himself. The media are full of tributes and reflections on a career that is still rolling toward the sea. MPR’s Jim Bickal has a good doc up, “The Boy from the North Country: Bob Dylan in Minnesota.”

The Washington Post is running archival stories it has done on Dylan since ... way back. Like this one from 10 days before he sang at Martin Luther King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” rally on the Washington Mall: “Dylan, 22, has captured the imagination of a large following which is spreading the word about the Greenwich Village rebel who writes and sings songs of anguished protest. He has been called both a great poet and a phony. Pete Seeger, the sage of the folk singing set, sees him as heir to the Woody Guthrie tradition of the 1930s. Others find his sloppiness, Midwestern drawl and flip non-comformity all part of an image designed to win him profitable notoriety. The answer to the riddle of Dylan probably lies somewhere in between. But anyone who has watched the reaction of a young audience (such as at last month’s Newport Folk Festival) to a Dylan performance, is aware that here is someone to be reckoned with. Dylan’s origins are obscure, and he seems to prefer it that way. He says he was born in Sioux Falls, S.D., but other reports place his birth in Minnesota and even New York.”

The Guardian has (as usual) a terrific package of Dylan stuff assembled for the day. Alexander Topping and Caspar Llewellyn Smith write: “From Moscow to Madrid, Norway to Northampton and Malaysia to his home state of Minnesota, self-confessed "Bobcats" will gather today to celebrate the 70th birthday of a giant of popular music. Bob Dylan will celebrate with tribute bands, original works, intellectual debates and simple singalongs to applaud a man born as Robert Allen Zimmerman in St Mary's hospital, Duluth on 24 May 1941. In New York, the BB King Blues Club hosts tribute band Highway 61 Revisited, with guests including Rolling Thunder Revue violinist Scarlet Rivera and Never Ending Tour drummer Winston Watson, recreating Dylan's greatest hits. In Hibbing, Minnesota, the town where he was raised, the annual Dylan Days festival at the weekend, with music, art and literature, will showcase the place that ‘spurred’ the young Zimmerman. ‘With Bob Dylan turning 70 we are taking a year to honour not just his accomplishments but the creativity he continues to inspire,’ said Aaron Brown, Dylan Days spokesman. At the University of Bristol, 'The Seven Ages of Dylan' promises to bring forth ‘the UK's foremost Dylan scholars’ to assess his continuing capacity to inspire and infuriate. ‘No one since Kipling has given the English language as many memorable phrases as Dylan,’ said Craig Savage, one organiser of the academic conference.”

The Aaron Brown mentioned in The Guardian story is the author of the respected Minnesota Brown blog about life up on the Range. Brown’s weekly column for the Hibbing Daily Tribune was on Dylan. He writes: “With his early songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘The Times They Are a’ Changin’, Dylan reflected the views of many youth, though fewer youth here in the pro-military environs of the Range. More importantly, Dylan transformed as he aged, cutting tracks such as ‘Like a Rollin’ Stone’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’. This, too, represented his generation as it aged, culminating with the ‘Blood on the Tracks’ album of the early '70s, recorded with aid from his brother and a cast of Minnesota musicians. Time wore on; the nation grew up and settled into old arguments, disputes not entirely different than the ones over Vietnam. Today everything from tax policy to social issues to new wars in new places seems to fall along similar, passionate battle lines. When Dylan grew up on the Iron Range, the mines still dug for original Mesabi red iron ore. Modern taconite ore mining and production were still unknown to most. People grew up believing that when the red ore ran out the place would die and they would leave. For most, that statement ended up half true. A lot of the artists and intellectuals who admired Dylan left and others, many of whom resented Dylan, stayed to mine harder rock amid continued economic uncertainty. And now Dylan is 70. He’s still got some years left. Like an older relative puttering in the backyard on a project that never quite seems finished, he’s still touring the world. He made waves in China and even played Vietnam earlier this year. But his voice is battered and craggy, rich with experience but worn down by use. His band plays louder than ever, like grandpa’s television.” Here’s to you, Bob. It’s not dark yet.

T-Paw is in — formally and officially — and a Google search reveals almost 1,500 stories were filed within the first 12 hours of his announcement in Iowa Monday. Apparently Lori Sturdevant of the Strib has decided there’s no upside to rationalizing Pawlenty’s record here in Minnesota. She writes: “He's running for president. Of course he is. He's been doing nothing else since he left the governor's office at the end of December. His critics would claim that he's been doing nothing else for a lot longer than that. His presidential ambition was laid bare during his second gubernatorial term, as he charted a policy course that seemed tailor-made for national Republican kingmakers but left Minnesota problems unresolved. While Pawlenty was boasting about his gubernatorial record — ‘I moved a Democratic state in a conservative direction’ — his political successors in Minnesota were struggling with the budget shortfall his temporary fiscal fixes left behind.”

Sturdevant makes reference to a blog post by former Gov. Arne Carlson on Pawlenty. Velvety, it ain’t. Says Carlson: “Minnesota has been rolling from deficit to deficit and in spite of warnings from Moody’s concerning the folly of short-term fixes, Governor Pawlenty continued to achieve budget balance by employing the following:
• Borrowing over $1 billion from the tobacco settlement — money designated for health care.
• Taking over $2 billion from the federal stimulus funds.
• Borrowing over $1.4 billion from K-12 education funding.
• Borrowing over $400 million from the Healthcare Access Fund for low-income families.
• Accelerating tax payments.
• Delaying bill payments.
• Engaging in accounting shifts.
In the process, Moody’s lowered Minnesota’s bond rating.
And, much of this activity preceded the recession of 2007 and no borrowed monies have been paid back thereby leaving Minnesota with a $5.1 billion deficit — the 7th most severe in the United States.”

With the clock ticking toward the long-since inevitable special session — or “overtime,” as House Speaker Kurt Zellers was calling it — MPR’s Tim Pugmire filed a late-in-the-final-day story, saying: “Sen. Geoff Michel, R-Edina, urged Dayton to instead start signing the bills now. Michel said he's not ready to give up. ‘I don't want to talk about special session. I don't want to talk about overtime. Let's get our work done,’ Michel said. Democrats weren't sharing Michel's optimism. Rep. Ann Lenczewski, DFL-Bloomington, was already looking beyond the midnight deadline and assessing the session. ‘It's clear that the work will not get done on time, unfortunately,’ she said. ‘I think this session, this is my 13th, is about the biggest failure I can recall. Absolutely nothing has gotten done. Very, very unproductive.' " Other than that gay marriage thing, of course.

Radio is a pretty squirrely business. But getting yanked off the air in the middle of your show is still pretty rare. Up in Fargo, veteran arch-conservative broadcaster Scott Hennen was “canceled” not even midway through his show Monday ... on a station, “The Flag,” he created. Dave Roepke of the Forum papers writes: “Hennen’s latest exit from Fargo airwaves was abrupt, as the local station carrying his syndicated talk show — The Flag, a station he once founded — cut away from his program toward the end of the first of two segments he had planned to air on the show. ... Before he was pulled off The Flag, Hennen had said on air his last show on the station would be on Friday, and following that, he was going to enlist the help of former North Dakota Gov. Ed Schafer to decide how to deliver programming such as commentary and interviews with public figures. Breck Von Bank, the general sales manager for The Flag, said the station pulled Hennen’s show mid-broadcast because ‘all the terms of his departure had not been agreed upon.’. ... In addition to announcing plans to continue his work in another fashion, Hennen also said he had a book coming out July 5 about the tea-party movement called ‘Grass Roots: A Commonsense Action Agenda for America.’ ”

There was nothing guilty in the pleasure I took in “The Passage” by Justin Cronin, an artfully written, vividly detailed piece of dystopian sci-fi. Mary Ann Grossmann of the PiPress interviewed Cronin prior to his appearance here in town Wednesday: “ ‘The Passage,’ just out in paperback, was one of the most widely acclaimed books of 2010, spending three months on the New York Times bestseller list. A post-apocalyptic story that spans centuries, it was applauded by critics for its smooth writing, exciting and detailed plot, fully realized settings, intriguing humans (and monsters), and underlying questions about human culture.  ... Like Mary Shelley's novel ‘Frankenstein,’ which spoke to Victorians' fears of the industrial revolution, Cronin's story touches our shared anxieties. ‘I've been thinking a lot about what fear feels like now,’ he muses. ‘I grew up during the Cuban missile crisis. The only good thing about the Cold War was that we knew exactly what to be afraid of —10,000 nuclear missiles pointed at other nuclear missiles. There was a brief, golden period of optimism and then everything changed overnight with 9/11. Then danger became more diffuse, harder to see. The Virals [the “monsters”] are meant to be a manifestation of how it feels now. Something is out there, lurking in the trees. Like images of 9/11, they come from above. You won't see it until it falls on you."