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Justice, jubilation in Hall of Fame announcements

Minnesota Twins baseball fans, especially those of a certain vintage, will take great joy and feel great vindication in the announcement on Sunday that two of the finest Twins to play the game, Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat, will enter the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this summer. Oliva and Kaat, teammates for many year sin the 1960s and ’70s, had been overlooked by the hall of fame voters for decades. But this year the Hall of Fame’s “Golden Age Committee” gave them the respect and the necessary votes they have deserved all this time, both at the age of 83. Oliva burst on ...

Thumbs Up/Down

Parents responsible Thumbs Up: Prosecutors in Oakland County, Mich., have taken the unusual step of charging the parents of the latest school shooter with involuntary manslaughter. ames and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, were called to his school just a few hours before he came out of a bathroom and shot up the school, killing four student. A teacher had found a drawing on Crumbley’s desk with a gun pointing at the words, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me,” according to the prosecutor. The note also said, “Blood everywhere.” They resisted the ...

Omicron is here

Well, that didn’t take long. It was only a week ago that health officials in South Africa reported a new variant of the COVID-19 virus, now known as the omicron variant. Other nations tried to set up travel bans to keep the virus in Africa, but it was already too late. Cases have been popping up around the world, including a Minnesotan who apparently caught it at an anime convention in New York even before the virus was announced to the world. You can bet there are more cases walking around. So omicron is here in Minnesota, half a world away from southern Africa. It apparently ...

MLB’s latest work stoppage — Why?

The Major League Baseball collective bargaining agreement expired last night at midnight, and since players and owners were unable to agree on a new one, the owners are locking out the players. Since the World Series concluded last month, there isn’t much work to stop, but it still begs the question — why? With all the billions of dollars in revenue and ever burgeoning player salaries, why can’t owners and players simply divvy it up? There should be plenty for everyone. Players and owners may say it’s not about the money, but, yes it is. Players want more of their ranks, not ...

Trump court takes on abortion case

Religious conservatives are about to have their day in court, the day they have been waiting for since the U.S. Supreme Court wrote the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing women’s right to have an abortion up until the final trimester of pregnancy. Since 1973 they have rallied, voted for anti-abortion candidates, and pushed for stricter abortion laws that inevitably ran up against the legal precedent of the Roe decision. To abortion opponents, it was clear that the only way to reverse the Roe decision would be through another Supreme Court decision, and that would require a much ...

What happened to ‘respectfully disagree’?

There was a time when members of Congress referred to each other as “distinguished gentlemen” or “honorable representatives,” even as they were ripping each other’s positions on this or that issue. Lately, however, congress men and women have been targeting each other with racist, anti-semitic and islamophobic tropes. This week it was Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a Republican, who caught criticism for telling a story to supporters about Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar, insinuating that she might be a potential bomb-carrying terrorist. Omar called for her to be ...