Minnesota Lawyer

New for-profit corporations can serve our evolving, more socially responsible capitalism by providing security for social entrepreneurs.

Our political undertakings have lost their core as we have become more and more fractured along various cultural fault lines.

Last week I enjoyed a fine Russian lunch at Moscow on the Hill in St Paul with two Republican friends. They were talking about the party caucuses of last Tuesday. One friend had been chair of two BPOU caucuses in Duluth and the other had attended his BPOU caucus in St. Cloud.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Angry over revelations of National Security Agency surveillance and frustrated with what they consider outdated digital privacy laws, state lawmakers around the nation are proposing bills to curtail the powers of law enforcement to monitor and track citizens.

Last week’s New Yorker ran a long article on President Obama by David Remnick. After reading the first several paragraphs I assumed I was participating in a publicity build-up to a celebrity event launch — something akin to the Grammys or the Oscars. The article, I thought, was timed to prepare an influential segment of the public mind for the president’s State of the Union address this past Tuesday.

Two stories last week linked money to our politics in revealing ways. One reported that, for the first time, more than half of the politicians elected to Congress are millionaires in net worth.

So it’s now 2014. A century has passed since the outbreak of an accidental but horrible war thanks to a terrorist’s lucky shot at the heir to the Austrian imperial throne. A half century has passed since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, an election that also carried Minnesotan Hubert H. Humphrey to the vice-presidency.

In my last commentary I offered Minnesota Republicans some free advice. So to provide partisan balance, this week I want to pay equal and similar respect to the Democrats by sharing with them some thoughts from my vantage point as an outside observer of their aspirations, strategies, and tactics.

I was putting my clothes into a locker at the college swimming pool when one of my classmates rushed in late, saying, “The president has been shot.” Another quickly replied, “That’s impossible.”

Well, now that some truth is sinking in about the Affordable Care Act, what have we learned from the past few weeks’ media frenzy that merits serious consideration?