The border crisis needs solutions

January 10, 2023

The bad news at the U.S. border with Mexico keeps getting worse as growing numbers of desperate migrants pile up at ports of entry seeking refuge from violence, persecution and poverty in their home countries. To hear Gov. Greg Abbott and state and national Republican policymakers tell it, the expanding crisis is the result of President Joe Biden’s “open border” policies. An absurd assertion considering that arrests and expulsions of undocumented migrants by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have tripled since 2020, with a record 2.7 million such encounters recorded during ...

Start the new year with a booster

January 9, 2023

Starting a new year offers a fresh start on a lot of fronts. Getting the most recent COVID-19 booster can be one of those resolutions. You wouldn’t be alone if you hadn’t gotten around to getting the most recent booster in 2022. The percentage of Minnesotans 18 and older who’ve gotten the most recent booster is 28% of that population, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The newest booster shots have been available since early fall. Maybe it’s not on the top of minds to start 2023 thinking about an old, drawn-out problem. After all, we’re going ...

Thumbs Up/Down

January 7, 2023

Getting through the storms THUMBS UP: We’ve had some wild winter weather over the past couple of weeks. While Minnesotans are used to bundling up and hunkering down, we still depend on a lot of people who have to go out in the bad weather to keep things working for us all. So here’s a big Thumbs Up to the snowplow drivers who help get the roads cleared as quickly as possible; the police officers and sheriff’s deputies who are still out there just in case someone needs rescuing; the utility workers who are on standby in case the storm affects the power system; the plumbing and ...

Southwest meltdown one for the books

January 6, 2023

The scheduling meltdown at Southwest Airlines is one for the business record books, and the carrier will pay a price for months or years in damaged reputation. The only worse result for seething passengers would be to put Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in charge. Don’t laugh. Mr. Buttigieg’s department said ... it will investigate Southwest’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays.” It will also “take action” to hold the carrier “accountable,” as if the airline isn’t eager enough to make things right. Congress is also doing what it does best: ...

The end of election denial

January 5, 2023

Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for attorney general in Arizona, repeatedly promised to pursue criminal charges against “those who worked to rob President Trump in the rigged 2020 election.” The 31-year-old built his campaign around baseless allegations of election malfeasance and posted an image of handcuffs on social media while vowing that “a day of reckoning” was coming. In November, Arizona voters rejected Mr. Hamadeh and every other election denier seeking statewide office. A judge rejected his court challenge of the result, but the race was close enough to ...

Want to end border chaos? Bennet guestworker bill offers a way

January 4, 2023

During his final days in office, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey stacked unsightly shipping containers along the U.S.-Mexico border at a cost of $82 million. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, up to his usual Scroogian border tricks, continued to herd asylum-seekers onto buses bound for so-called “sanctuary cities,” while dispatching National Guard troops to string concertina wire along the banks of the Rio Grande. It’s another of his tough-guy ploys to thwart what he calls an “invasion.” Never mind that these invaders are desperate men, women and children fleeing danger and despair in places ...