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published in the Star Tribune 12 April 2003

Star Tribune,
10 June 2007

Beyond party affiliation and labels, what we’re seeing in latter-day America is nothing less than a merger of wills from both sides aimed at maintaining the power elites. No president — I don’t care who he or she is — will remove those new military bases from what has become our 51st state, Iraq. No president will stop genuflecting at the phrase “support the troops” long enough to note that what poses as patriotism is actually patronage of defense contractors.

Simply saying such things provokes hatemongering, name-calling and no-holds-barred personal attacks on the Internet and in other media. We can no longer have a conversation about anything other than “American Idol” in this country. Every opinion becomes an opportunity for character assassination.

This makes the United States a frightening place to be at the moment. Not as frightening as Iraq, where we’ve been training jihadists and common criminals in the art of guerrilla warfare since the invasion. And not as frightening as it’s going to be here, either, once the apocalyptic scenarios that we know are coming finally arrive.

Star Tribune,
9 June 2009

We professional Internet responders represent Americana at its best and we don’t want anybody sanitizing it. [...] Just imagine how much better the Lincoln-Douglass debates would have been if we’d had the Internet:

Lincoln: Slavery is an abomination.

Douglas: So is your mama.

Cool, huh?

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune March 24, 2003

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Jan. 22, 2003

from The New York Times,
published in the Star Tribune Aug. 25, 2009

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naive, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it.

President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.

And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

written for the Washington Post,
published in the Star Tribune May 20, 2007

These assertions that “torture works” may reassure a fearful public, but it is a false security. We don’t know what’s been gained through this fear-driven program. But we do know the consequences.

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking tme bomb. Any degree of “flexibility” about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

To understand the impact this has had on the ground, look at the military’s mental health assessment report released earlier this month. The study shows a disturbing level of tolerance for abuse of prisoners in some situations.

Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its “recuperative power.”

The torture methods [...] have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

published in the Star Tribune June 22, 2007

One thing for which I’ve always envied conservatives is that their fundamental message is such an easy sell. Boiled to its essence it is this: “YOU have already done more than your share. If sacrifices and changes need to be made at all, they should be made by others. Support us and we’ll protect you from change.” Short of saying, “We’ll pay you for your vote,” it doesn’t get much more simplistically appealing than that.

Any newspaper or TV station that holds up a hand and says, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the next scientifically suspect opinion disputing “the hoax” of global warming will inevitably be hit with charges of bias. That’s how the system is gamed these days. Those charges will come from the same crowd that first denied any warming was happening, then moved to accepting global warming but denying a human involvement, and now to essentially saying, “OK, it’s warming and carbon dioxide is involved ... but there’s nothing we can do that’ll have any significant effect, and the only thing we’ll achieve is the destruction of a lifestyle that is the envy of the rest of the planet.”

Selling a credulous public the too-good-to-be-true nostrum that nothing more should ever be asked of them may win elections, but it’s not a game any honest journalist can play.

written for the Los Angeles Times;
published in the Star Tribune February 16, 2006

But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

Counterpoint in the Star Tribune November 12, 2009

Right-handedness is a nearly universal human institution. Across the world and throughout history, marriage has been almost exclusively right-handed. That’s not because of anti-left-handed bigotry, but because marriage is anchored in a primal biological and social fact: Most people are right-handed, and tend to have right-handed children.

Left-handed marriage would not — as advocates claim — merely extend the benefits of marriage to more people. Such a redefinition would compel us to repudiate time-honored ideas of social organization.

Once right-handed relationships are stripped of their organic purpose, why restrict relationships to people who use their hands properly? People who eat with their fingers, people like doctors who insist on writing illegibly, and people who use only their thumbs to text on their cell phones: All will want society to recognize and respect their relationships.

editorial; reprinted in the Star Tribune August 13, 2009

If there’s anything good about putting warning notices on packages of frankfurters, it’s that the labels could say: Beware of Dog.