This mornings New York Times (NYT) had an interesting article about a St. Paul area business man reluctant to hire workers. A couple of days earlier the Minneapolis Star Tribune had an equally interesting column by a long time very prominent business executive essentially rebutting the oft-repeated and false argument of conservatives that taxes will […]
In two years and 381 blog posts, I can think of only one other posting in which I emphasized a single piece of writing I had seen elsewhere. Today is the second. I’d highly recommend a reading of this lengthy item, “The fascinating story of how shameless right-wing lies came to rule our politics” by […]
June 3, 1990, was a chilly, somewhat blustery and threatening rain day in Minnesota. It was also the day that USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, came to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul to visit. It was a ‘coup’ of sorts for we in the hinterlands of the U.S., as outlined in […]
This afternoon I happened across a marvelous video made by folks in Grand Rapids MI, supposedly one of the ten most dying cities in America. You can watch and read about it here. It is 10 minutes of sheer in-your-face optimism in the face of being ridiculed as a loser. We can all use a […]
Today I will probably attend a Memorial Day observance sponsored by Veterans for Peace near the Minnesota State Capitol; I’ll wear the Buddy Poppy purchased at Hibbing from a VFW member on May 13, and a Forget-me-not purchased from a Disabled American Veteran here in Woodbury a couple of days ago. Yesterday I drove over […]
This morning a friend of mine came in to the coffee shop about the time I was leaving, sat down at the table next to me and opened to the Opinion Page of the Wall Street Journal for May 28-29 weekend edition. The banner headline was “Word of the Decade” ‘Unsustainable’ “ by Peggy Noonan. […]
Two grandsons and I were enjoying a major league baseball game at Minnesota Twins Target Field on May 25. It was a perfect day for a ballgame at this new park, which is at the very edge of downtown Minneapolis. (click on photos to enlarge them) I couldn’t help but think that a few days […]
Among the many magnificent gifts the U.S. Founding Fathers gave us when framing the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States ca 1787 was the right to select our representatives. To be sure, the framers initial draft was imperfect: only certain kinds of people could vote, then, and so on…but over time near […]
It is appropriate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the United States on the very day that Harold Camping has determined is Judgment Day: May 21, 2011, at 6 p.m. (As I write at 8 a.m. CDT, it is already 6 p.m. in Kabul, Afghanistan, and later still in Japan and Australia, and […]
A week ago today I was walking in to a place called Tar Paper Annie’s, a recently collapsed shack in the woods overlooking Bear Island Lake just north of Northern Lights Lodge near Babbitt MN. The occasion was the farewell to my cousin, Vincent Busch, who passed away in January of this year. The shore […]