Commentaries
Oct 9, 2012
The future of the family is a matter of enormous and incalculable importance, and the strength, health, and integrity of marriage and family life constitute an absolutely essential precondition for all other social, economic, and political goods.
Sep 29, 2012
We tell high school graduates to go to college. We overpromote and overcharge. Then we bend over backwards overlooking the overextended lives of our overworked students.
Sep 27, 2012
On Monday, the Star Tribune offered several terrific photo opps with accompanying text on Senator Amy Klobuchar’s contribution of yet another program wherein government picks winners and probably losers (the article only focused on “winners” so as not to spoil the mood).
Sep 27, 2012
There is a much more reasonable interpretation of the voter ID amendment that does not require upending the current voting process.
Sep 27, 2012
The problem is clear: The jobless rate for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is unacceptably high at 10.9 percent, compared with just over 8 percent for the general population.
Sep 23, 2012
Our strongest students don't measure up in science, technology, engineering and math. Let's create a fertile environment.
Sep 9, 2012
Reading Bonnie Blodgett's recent column about global capitalism ("What global capitalists didn't foresee," Sept. 2), I am reminded that there truly are no settled political, cultural or economic questions. If there were one, it surely would be that free markets are the most powerful force in raising individuals and countries out of poverty and increasing living standards worldwide.
Sep 8, 2012
New research out of Harvard and the Brookings Institution further spotlights the unhelpful fact that influential Twin Cities leaders are trying to improve education for African-American and other children of color with a powerful arm tied behind their back, needlessly so.
Just last month, political scientists Matthew Chingos of the Washington-based Brookings Institution and Paul Peterson of Harvard's Kennedy School released a study that persuasively shows that college enrollments for low-income African-American students who years earlier had won vouchers to attend private elementary schools were 24 percent higher than a socioeconomically-identical group of students who had not won them.
Sep 7, 2012
Peter Nelson answers these important questions: 1. What’s the state of health care in the United States today? 2. How does the United States’ health care system rank in comparison to the systems of other industrialized nations? 3.How will the Affordable Care Act affect how the U.S. health care system currently functions? 4. Do you have a particular personal experience that embodies why you think this debate/topic is important?
Aug 31, 2012
Over the last year, Gov. Mark Dayton and the public unions negotiated a new labor contract that included a 2% pay raise while slightly modifying the approach to health care costs. Aside from the problem of raising salaries when many Minnesotans are without a paycheck and most of us have not seen a pay raise in years, why would Dayton want to increase the state payroll in the midst of our current budget challenges which have serious long term implications?