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from the Los Angeles Times;
published in the Star Tribune August 31, 2009

If the “thirtysomething” gang could watch a show like “Mad Men,” they probably would feel about Don Draper as I now do about them. And even with their careers, kids, mortgages and responsibilities, they would wonder if they had been absent the day the grown-up badges were handed out.

And then, guess what? A commercial would come on, providing a subtle but strong hint at the answers to the question of where and how childhood ends and real life begins. Adulthood isn’t an objective truth. It isn’t even — as many might argue — a state of mind. It’s an idea sold on TV season to season. And once you get it home, it never looks quite like it did in the ad.

published in the Star Tribune March 26, 2003

It took me a long time to understand this Important Business Principle (IBP): We are emotional beings pretending to be rational.

Some other IBPs:

• Facts are mainly useful to distract the conscious mind while the emotions decide what’s true.
• Logic is how our minds catch up with our feelings.

Star Tribune Commentary page, October 3, 2012

A good constitution, like Minnesota’s, does three things. First, it sets up the structure of government. That is, it creates the legislative, executive and judicial branches and establishes a few basic rules relating to those branches and to local government units. Second, it protects our most fundamental rights. Third, it guards against having the Legislature and governor succumb to the worst temptations of financial irresponsibility, power-grabbing and favor-granting that history — experience — has exposed.

A good constitution, like Minnesota’s, does nothing more.

A good constitution, like Minnesota’s, leaves most policymaking in the hands of each new Legislature. The truth is that constitution makers, when they write or amend the basic charter, are not at that moment better informed on most issues than a future legislature will be.

Star Tribune, April 26, 2004

“Culture is not decorative. It’s not about feathers and beads and strange beliefs. It is the blanket of comfort we place around ourselves to find order and meaning in a universe that may ultimately have neither integrity nor morality, to keep at bay the barbarism that history suggests lies just beneath the skin of everyone.

“All cultures face the same basic challenges. We are born, we grow up to raise children, to feed and protect them, then deal with aging and death. But humans have found so many different and interesting ways to do it. And as we drift toward this bland, amorphous type of world, the range of thought and possibility and variety narrows.”

Minnesota Star Tribune
Strib Voices
February 6, 2025

The rebrand away from a religious identity as motivation for care for the poor and marginalized follows a troubling trend I’ve noticed since growing up Lutheran in the ’90s and early aughts. As part of this trend, Christians who consider themselves non-evangelical and not necessarily religiously conservative or fundamentalist have distanced themselves from our religious and theological motivations.

This distancing, as evidenced by the rebranding of Christian organizations to nonreligious terms, despite still being run by mainline churches, has created a reality in which American Christianity is understood almost exclusively as a conservative, fundamentalist religious movement concerned more with privileging American Christians above other groups than caring for the poor. The historical role of Social Gospel-motivated American Christian movements, like Global Refuge/LIRS, is flattened down and its religious connection is erased. Then, folks like Flynn and Musk can claim that there is no Christian imperative to care for refugees or the poor, and these organizations are simply “money laundering.”

To be clear, I am not saying these attacks are warranted whatsoever, but I am saying that an inability to identify a specifically Christian imperative to care for immigrants has left a vacuum where the Social Gospel as an essential part of American Christianity once was. Into that vacuum has poured a nonthreatening and vague white, privileged liberalism almost indistinguishable from the Democratic Party itself. Mainline institutions who had always enjoyed privileged seats of power within American government lost their sense of a distinct religious identity: a critique foreseen by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who warned about white moderates and their lack of commitment to gospel issues of freedom, civil rights, and care for the poor and marginalized in exchange for a seat at the table of government and political power.

Star Tribune weather page, October 20, 2007

Optimist. Noun. One who usually expects a favorable outcome. Alternate definition: A Minnesotan with a pool or a convertible.

Star Tribune weather page, November 12, 2008

“Hold on, mom, they’re plowing the lake.” That may be the oddest sentence that’s ever come out of my mouth. I remember a long pause on the other end of the phone. “Say what?”

Star Tribune weather page, June 8, 2021

It’s so hot they installed a fan in the debt ceiling.

Star Tribune weather page, March 24, 2024

Every snowstorm is a unique riddle wrapped inside a headache.

Minnesota Star Tribune weather page, February 7, 2025

Looks can be deceiving. Like an early look at a potential storm. It looks like something in a catalog, snowfall totals all bright and shiny. As the storm approaches it looks more and more like your driver’s license photo. Underwhelming.

Minnesota Star Tribune weather page, August 19, 2025

“Hello. I’m Paul, your weather-server. You have only two choices today, baked drought or chunky flood soup. I can throw in a side dish of tater-tot-size hail if that interests you.”

from the Dallas Morning News;
published in the Star Tribune September 17, 2009

It would be a pleasant surprise if conservatives who took the president of the United States addressing youths as an opportunity to stumble toward the fainting couch realized that they had made fools of themselves. Fat chance. Obama Derangement Syndrome is pandemic on the right — and it’s leaving conservatives like me politically homeless.

Unlike this or the last president, I believe in fiscal responsibility, limits, localism and foreign-policy realism.

I also distrust the mob — which is why the degraded state of conservative politics today is so demoralizing.

Conservatism is not dead, it’s undead — a zombie dedicated to little more than frenetic gestures execrating Obama, and to regaining power.

Where can those who wish to think and debate clearly about a serious politics of the right go? The degenerate form of populism now dominant on the right loves to praise “freedom” — but it has no use for freedom of thought, or for thinking much at all.

In turn, increasing numbers of thoughtful conservatives have no use for it.

Star Tribune Commentary page, November 30, 2004

Mass murder in the name of a principle is as human as apple pie, borsht and steamed rice. Treating the perpetrators as space aliens simply disguises the nature of the problem. The potential mass killers live among us, as they always have. They often have perfectly good manners, and some even have high ideals. And the only way the rest of us have to keep them from power is to remember always that the end does not justify the means.

Star Tribune Commentary page, July 8, 2005
(the day after terrorist bombings of the London transit system)

During the whole of World War II, about 30,000 Londoners were killed by German bombs and three-quarters of a million lost therir homes. Then, between 1971 and 2001, London was the target of 116 bombs set by various factions of the Irish Republican Army, although they only killed 50 people and injured around 1,000. And not once during all those bombs did people in London think that they were being attacked because of their values and their way of life.

It was clear to them that they were being attacked because of British policies abroad, or the policies of Britain’s friends and allies. [...] Nasty things, bombs, but those who send them your way are usually rational people with rational goals, and they almost never care about your values or your way of life.

Londoners understand that, and it has a calming effect, because once you have grasped that basic fact you are no longer dealing with some faceless, formless, terrifying unknown, but just a bunch of people who are willing to kill at random in order to get your government to change its policies.

in the Star Tribune
December 30, 2012

[...] the NRA did not commit the Sandy Hook massacre and is not a terrorist organization equal to Al-Qaida. The NRA does much good in regards to firearms in this country, sponsoring responsible shooting events, safety training and education for thousands every year, including children. The NRA is not composed of cowardly white rural males who drive pickup trucks and use poor English. People from all walks of life have benefited from being taught the principles of safe and responsible firearm use by the NRA.

The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is about the history-changing idea that common people should be able to possess arms to preserve their safety and freedom.

To the arguments that guns in the home are more likely to kill a family member than an intruder; that many so-called defensive uses of guns are actually criminal escalations; that guns seldom solve a problem – I agree. But not all of us in this country live in a city where there are hundreds or thousands of police officers and you can expect to hear sirens within 30 seconds of dialing 911.

All that said, the NRA and we gun owners have tolerated an intolerable situation: the profusion of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines; the ridiculous loophole of gun shows and private sales evading the instant background check; the inability of the background check to be integrated with the National Crime Information Center; the lack of due diligence in transferring firearms to those who should not have them; the lack of cooperation with law enforcement to report problematic behavior; the selfishness of our desires to have more and more lethal weapons and technology without concern for our terrified fellow citizens who do not share the belief that such weapons better secure us.

If we cherish our right to bear arms, we must be vigilant in assuring others that it is being exercised responsibly.

I say ban the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines – or put them under the National Firearms Act as Class III ATF regulated destructive devices requiring yearly, retrictive federal licensing provisions.

We must recall that we live in a complicated, diverse society. If we persist in lashing out in our emotion, demonizing and accusing each other, we will feed the false perceptions on either side.

We must ignore the agenda-driven extremists on either side, whether it’s the NRA’s vice president or the ban-and-confiscate-all-guns advocates. It is pointless to look for blame. Too many guns, too few restrictions, inadequate laws to deal with the mentally ill, violent video games and an amoral film industry. All true. But again, here we are. We must act.

in the Star Tribune
July 24, 2007

The Qur’an is clear that “there is no compulsion in religion.” There are countless more verses instructing Muslims to respect others’ beliefs. One such verse states, “Oh Prophet! Exhort them, your task is only to exhort; you cannot compel them to believe.”

Critics of Islam often mistakenly refer to a Qur’anic verse out of context, which would suggest harshness by Muslims to non-Muslims.

[...] The truth is that any verse in the Qur’an that speaks “harshly” of non-Muslims by encouraging Muslims to fight them is always in the context of self-defense. Furthermore, this is always a means of last resort, when it becomes a matter of survival.