Reprinted from the May 26, 1918, edition of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune
Memorial Day falls on Thursday next. What far-ranging thoughts are summoned to mind as the time approaches to garland again with blooms the graves of the soldier dead! For fifty years the American people have been casting chains of forget-me-nots across the land. This year the flowery bond will span the seas and give out its fragrance where soldiers of ours sleep under the sod of France.
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We've all read about the partisan stalemates at the Minnesota Legislature this year. But there was also a quiet yet significant victory that now protects ordinary landowners when large utilities condemn their property for power lines and pipelines.
The Legislature overwhelmingly (124-7 in the House and 59-5 in the Senate) sided with individuals rather than corporate interests and increased the fairness of the eminent domain process.
(Continue reading)Memorial Day has a distinct meaning for the veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and the families of the 5,400 Americans who have died in these wars.
Just ask Carlos Arredondo, whose son Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo was one of seven Marines killed in the battle of Najaf in August 2004. Alex was 20 years old when he died.
(Continue reading)As a military veteran, I am outraged that President Obama decided that attending the Chicago Blackhawks hockey game was more important than fulfilling his presidential duty in laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery.
Obama will become the first president in U.S. history to skip this tribute to our American soldiers during a time of war.
(Continue reading)RUTH JACKSON, DEEPHAVEN
The clock will start ticking the moment that a winner is declared in Minnesota's historic 2010 governor's race. Once the balloons come down and the cheers go up on the night of Nov. 2, the winning candidate will have a scant three months to deliver a budget that not only tackles Minnesota's titanic deficit, but charts a sustainable course to the future, balancing expectations for economic growth and government services.
It's a complex assignment -- and voters deserve to know well in advance of Election Day how candidates will carry it out.
So far, there's been a disappointing dearth of detail. That's unacceptable given the gargantuan problem the new governor must grapple with: a budget deficit officially pegged at $5.8 billion over the next biennium. Making this year's spending cuts permanent, delaying repayment on the K-12 school aid shift and other whittling around edges could get that down to roughly $3 billion.
Budget proposals, directly from each candidate:
Mark Dayton
Tom Emmer
Matt Entenza
Tom Horner
Margaret Anderson Kelliher
But $3 billion is still an enormous sum. "All the easy things to cut have been cut. In fact, not only have the easy things been cut, some of the hard things to cut have been cut,'' said State Economist Tom Stinson.
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America, not unlike Minnesota, has reached a tipping point. We are on the precipice of a brave new world where 60 percent of us, according to the Tax Foundation, receive more from government than we pay in taxes. From bailouts to ballparks, subsidies abound.
But maybe the most acute spending problem is the unsustainable growth in government employment and compensation.
A list of the largest Minnesota employers compiled by Twin Cities Business not only shows that state government is at the top with 54,900 employees (far ahead of the Mayo Clinic at 37,718), but among the top 20 employers, federal, state, and municipal government accounts for a third of the workforce. And that doesn't include Minnesota's sizable health care footprint, much of it nonprofit and reliant on a myriad of health care consumer subsides.
Government is a growth industry, but it is devouring the private sector's ability to pay for it. While business has been shedding jobs and freezing pay, Washington has been on a hiring binge and granting raises to boot. Federal employment totals well over 2 million people (almost 10 times Detroit's Big Three auto companies) and costs the taxpayer $125 billion annually. Moreover, executive branch and civilian employment (nonmilitary) is growing by double digits, according to the Obama administration's own 2010 budget blueprint.
(Continue reading)It's fashionable to be mad at the government these days. But many folks are unclear about how to join the movement.
The first step is to master the idiom of outrage. It's not just government, it's Big Government. Or even better: Big Guv'ment.
Huge, clunky, intrusive, exorbitant -- that's Uncle Sam. Get off our backs, get out of our lives and let go of our wallets!
The sentiment has been around for 234 years, but never before did we have the Internet to make it feel so fresh and original. Every red-blooded patriot should aspire to a life that's more or less free of government, which apparently can't do anything right.
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"Where did we get such men?"
James Michener, "The Bridges at Toko-ri"
June 25 will mark the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. If experience is any guide, it will go largely unmarked in America. Not for nothing has it been labeled the Forgotten War, a vicious conflict that raged from 1950 to 1953, in which more than 33,000 Americans died in combat. Few realize it never came to an official end.
There is a photo from Korea that never fails to affect me. It shows a file of riflemen marching up the side of one of Korea's endless mountains -- in this case, men of the 9th Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, along Bloody Ridge in September 1951.
The column of soldiers seems endless, too, stretching off into the grainy distance, as if to show that the war would go on forever and the men must just keep coming.
They trudge toward us, heads down beneath their leftover World War II helmets, grimly putting one foot ahead of the other. We cannot make out the faces. The anonymous men of the Forgotten War.
(Continue reading)I ran into my daughter's favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, in New York the other night, whose Magic Tree House books I've read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.
I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I'm not one of them -- I'm a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it -- but I'm sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.
(Continue reading)As the summer barbecue season hits full swing, let me remind you that Tuesday will mark the coming of June, which is Torture Awareness Month.
Bummer, huh?
If you were not aware of Torture Awareness Month, you are among the vast majority of Americans. After years of debate during the Bush-Cheney administration when America used torture techniques like a banana republic, torture has almost disappeared from the public agenda.
This is natural: Countries that use torture have an inclination to forget as soon as possible.
"You don't want to admit to problems you don't want to deal with," says Dr. Steven Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and influential critic of the official use of torture and the complicity of physicians and psychologists in torture.
"'American Idol' seems to have soaked up the attention of all the serious journalists."
Public and media attention have waned, but torture has not gone away. President Obama has renounced the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects, but the United States remains noncompliant with important international standards governing the treatment of prisoners and inspection of prison conditions by human rights organizations. The bottom line is that our practices have improved but our reputation -- and moral leadership in the world -- continue to suffer.
(Continue reading)Opinion Exchange is produced by the Editorial Department, which is dedicated to hosting the discussion on a range of issues of interest to Star Tribune readers online and in print. In its new format, it's our hope that Opinion Exhange will create a more dynamic dialogue between Star Tribune readers and the Editorial Board. Many individual posts will be written and signed by members of the Editorial Board and will reflect their own opinions. Daily editorials will continue to represent the institutional voice of the newspaper and be researched and written by the Editorial Department, which is independent of the newsroom.
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