In a burst of prudence on this subzero morning, I took the bus downtown instead of the usual bike commute. I'm fortunate to live near an express bus stop that is within a reasonable 10 minute walk, and the route takes me within two blocks of my weekly destination.
After the return ride, [...]
Yesterday's ride across Minneapolis and back finished before noon, so I missed this kind of cycling adventure. However, today I'll get a chance to test the snow clearing and driving practices in the northwest suburbs for a short but required meeting that hardly seems [...]
To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored.
– "It's natural to behave irrationally," Washington Post
Natural to behave irrationally? Not from the free-market economist's point of view. Climate change is just one more policy problem designed for the market to suss out as [...]
Front and center at a state Senate Tax Committee hearing on the bill were Rep. Paul Kohls, who we're [...]
Colleague Dane Smith says here that tax cuts haven't delivered prosperity as promised, and neither will we get there by just raising taxes.
Urbanist Jon Commers says here that a structural solution to the state budget can start with "efficient places."
And the ever-valuable Minnesota Budget Project says here that we must [...]
I suppose there is life after Afghanistan. The Soviet Union's nine-year stay ended just over 20 years ago.
The war cost the Soviets about 15,000 lives, and messed up the country's relations with China, the Muslim world and the West, including a trade embargo and boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in [...]
DFL candidate for governor, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, will be at Drinking Liberally tomorrow, December 3rd. He has declared, but has yet to launch a website for his campaign, which kicks off officially on Sunday.
Look for him at DL around 7pm Thursday — at the 331 Club, 13th [...]
Bob Herbert pretty much says it for me.
The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But [...]
Hal Davis sends me this bleak time-lapse graphic of the deepening rate of unemployment across America since January 2007.
I link to it with my standard caveat — that population-based data projected in geographic space can be misleading.
It's the same point being made by dueling cellular network ads for Verizon [...]
I suppose the free market has a good solution for this problem, if we'd only let it work.
The state of Idaho has an estimated 846 gray wolves — compared to Minnesota's 2900.
Now, if you're thinking, "good, the wolf population in the west is starting to recover," you're not thinking [...]
I saw this link to Nora Ephron's "Top 10 Thanksgiving Recipes You Didn't Cook Last Year That You're Cooking This Year" post at HuffPo, and figured it would be a parody of the GOP's Top 10 Things That Didn't Win Last Year But We'll Insist Candidates Do Next [...]
I was standing near the front of a long line waiting to be called for my turn. Two clerks out of about 10 were helping only business customers, and one, whose station was open, began calling the names of various companies.
No one responded.
Then, he spotted someone just behind me. "Bob," [...]
If James Howard Kunstler seems to be spending all his time tilting at windmills, maybe that's because he's practicing for the future. Globalism, growth and recovery are just fantasies that get in the way of dealing realistically with the world we are going to face.
What's going on in the US [...]
Here's the kind of transparency report that annoys me because it seems to come with a point of view attached.
The House Financial Services Committee voted yesterday to give regulators the authority to break up large financial firms that create too much systemic risk, in an effort to prevent future financial crises. The [...]
Here's another study to make conservatives crazy, but progressives should be wary of pushing the findings too far.
In an analysis of previously conducted research on inequality and health studies, epidemiologists have found support for the ideas that income inequality affects health and that there is a threshold of income [...]
If I google the word "dither," I get 238,000 hits. If I search within those results for "dither Obama," I somehow get about 597,00 hits.
And who says there's a right wing echo chamber?
Our glorious hardass ex-vice president, whose administration essentially ignored Afghanistan for eight years, now accuses Pres. [...]
A few miles outside of Los Angeles, in a business-tax-free haven of strip malls and strip clubs called the City of Industry -- under 800 residents and fewer than 100 voters -- ground is ready to be broken for an $800-million football stadium. The team to play there is yet to be determined.
[...]
As Neil [...]
Bob Collins at News Cut talks about yesterday's Give to the Max Day in Minnesota, which raised more than $12 million for local nonprofits yesterday. Commenters there and at this story weighed in with their confusion (and in some cases, disappointment) over the fact that $500,000 can't [...]
NASA says the world is not ending any time soon.
The film characters who are best prepared for the planetary calamity had been consulting the ancient Mayan calendar, which runs through more than five millennia and then comes [...]
A Bluestem Prairie follows up on my post concerning the purge of David Strom.
His former boss has stepped down from the Minnesota Free Market Institute, although she has not yet been erased from the website. And no one besides us lefties seems to be talking about the treatment [...]
I loved this quote from a Pharma industry association exec justifying drug industry price hikes (occurring coincidentally!!) in advance of health care reform:
"In AARP's skewed view of the world, medicines are always looked at as a cost and never seen as a savings -- even though medicines often reduce unnecessary hospitalization, [...]
On Thursday night, during a sometimes heated meeting, resident after resident of the small Hennepin County community railed against now-Mayor Jill Krout, urging her to [...]
Small-government conservatives like to hold that transportation users should pay for infrastructure through user fees. That's what drivers do via gas taxes, they argue, and what transit riders don't do via fares.
Another view is that everyone benefits indirectly as well as directly from the entire system. Individual decisions about how [...]
My research leads down some strange and rewarding paths.
[...]Via Streetsblog, a Milwaukee business writer compares his home in Milwaukee with the condo he and his wife own in Spain and finds "all infrastructure — and no people":
What's the cost for living our American way? It's not just the thousands of dollars for the second car, insurance and [...]
Steven Colbert did a riff last night on America's rolling shortage of ammunition — observing that ammo scarcity was being caused by hoarding gun owners who feared ammo scarcity — and proposing that the new U.S. currency be lead-based.
Good yucks.
But even a good supply of bullets won't be much help [...]
Some people think the most dangerous part of my day is cycling in city traffic, but on Thursdays, the greatest peril occurs during the four hours I spend with three to five year olds.
Here is the day's chronicle of potential injuries, maladies and mental conditions — mostly averted:
Eye gouged catching [...]Exactly one year ago today (11/11/08) MinnPost ran a story announcing that Pat Anderson was replacing David Strom as president of the Minnesota Free Market Institute (MnFMI).
The story said Strom would stay on as senior fellow of the institute, and he did — making speeches, writing op/eds, appearing on [...]
Hard to escape the contrast between two local college basketball programs featured on the front page of today's sports section.
A portion of Tubby Smith's team probably could've benefited from time on Jay Pivec's team. And some time across town probably wouldn't hurt the UofM men's coach, either.
But for [...]
Isn't this strange?
Nidal Hassan, the US Army psychiatrist who is the sole suspect in the Ft. Hood shootings, is 39 years old and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1997, when he was 27 years old.
It's not unheard of for older graduates to enter medical school after a [...]
I can almost see Ultimate Happiness from my front door. From Colorado, that is, where we're about 25 miles from the Utah border.
Utah scored the best among U.S. states in a study based on the Gallup Organization's Well-Being Index. Colorado and Minnesota tied for fourth.
"Our research shows that happy [...]
In the Strib story about the deer hunting opener, DJ Danielson sees parallels between Gov. Pawlenty's performance as governor and his hunting ethic.
After wounding a small buck
Pawlenty had to leave for Iowa, where he was headlining a Republican Party fundraiser.
Before leaving, he told reporters, "they're looking for it [...]
Eric Black reports on the Minnesota Supreme Court decision to levy an addition $100 to the annual fee paid by practicing lawyers to renew their licenses.
The funds raised will to subsidize the operation of state public defender offices and Legal Aid — which help poor Minnesotans in criminal and civil [...]
The daughter of a friend recently had her bike stolen. It was a utilitarian beater that had gotten her around campus, and to and from jobs throughout college.
And then it was gone. Not a great pecuniary loss, and with winter and graduation approaching, [...]
Michelle Marston, a top aide to Rep. Michelle Bachmann, said she was leaving the job the day before Bachmann's latest and greatest media stunt — a "house call" on Congress to protest the health care bill.
Marston declined to state a reason for leaving, but it's possible the stress of [...]
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
The Associated Press reports that a massive barrier will block Berliners' view of U2's concert celebrating 20 years since the [...]
Over the weekend, I spoke with a former diplomat and World Bank type who had lived in Toronto for 20 years. He was lamenting how American ignorance of other cultures and countries made us so susceptible to anecdote-based lies — in this case, about the Canadian national health care system.
I [...]
One of the main complaints about the Central Corridor light rail project comes from businesses along University Avenue that fear it will disrupt parking — and therefore harm their businesses.
I have huge sympathy for struggling small businesses. Much less for Americans who can't get their butts out of a car [...]
