Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
FEBRUARY 5, 2026 – White House Border Czar Tom Homan—Gruppenführer Gregory Bovino’s replacement as overseer of “Operation Metro Surge”—announced yesterday a 700-agent drawdown from the purported 3,000 ICE agents and Border Patrol agents on the loose in Minnesota, mostly in the Twin Cities metro area. Ask people on the ground here, however, and no one …
FEBRUARY 3, 2026 – (Cont.) The dramatic conclusion of Into the Bright Sunshine features the clash between advocates of civil rights and protectors of states’ rights at the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. In that era, party platforms carried far more weight than they do today, and the intra-party fight over the civil rights plank …
FEBRUARY 2, 2026 – On July 6, 2016 Philando Castile was shot and killed by a policeman during a routine traffic stop here in Minnesota. The shooting occurred less than half a mile from our quiet, leafy, liberal—and by way of our complacency, racist—town of Falcon Heights (pop. 5,200). Within a single news cycle, news …
FEBRUARY 1, 2026 – I’ve written about him several times on this blogsite, most recently on September 7, 2025: our neighbor, the inimitable “Mr. Paulson,” literary savant, retired honors English teacher at Roseville High, life-long coach, and honorary scout for the Twins. Our paths often cross as he’s out walking the family’s ancient canine and …
JANUARY 31, 2026 – I’ve known lots of conservatives ever since I was old enough to parrot my two older sisters as we romped around the house in the fall of 1960 shouting, “Nixon, Nixon, he’s our man . . . Let’s put Kennedy in the garbage can!” I was in first grade and didn’t …
JANUARY 30, 2026 – After my daily ski outing at noon, I returned home to “de-ice” over lunch and the latest news about ICE. When I saw live coverage of the mass demonstration underway in downtown Minneapolis, six miles from our driveway, I left word with Beth, who was out, and headed down to join …
JANUARY 29, 2026 – First, a disclaimer. I’m not an immigration lawyer or immigrant rights advocate. Decades ago, I handled a few procedural hearings in several pro bono asylum cases that my firm had taken, but my involvement was otherwise insubstantial. In other words, I’m not an expert nor do I claim to be one. …
JANUARY 28, 2026 – Last Sunday, in addressing abuses by ICE agents in Minnesota, Governor Walz compared ICE agents’ treatment of children in Minnesota to the experience of Ann Frank. His exact words: We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story …
JANUARY 27, 2026 – What happens next in Minnesota; in the United States of America? Our speculations are driven by a combination of hope, fear, knowledge, ignorance, wishful thinking, and in many cases, deep-seated attachments to ideology and religious beliefs. The influence of these factors is no less than at any other juncture along the …
JANUARY 26, 2026 – At noon today I drove to the Whipple Building, headquarters of Minnesota ICE operations. The outside temperature registered 6F on my car dashboard—a veritable heat wave compared to last week’s deep freeze. High chain-link fences on top of Jersey barriers lined the approach. Behind the fence on one side was a …
JANUARY 25, 2026 – I remember a disturbing moral question produced by a scene in the 1997 movie Titanic. A key factor in the actual disaster and depicted graphically in the film was the inadequate lifeboat capacity, which could accommodate only 50% of the passengers. This tragic reality led to the order that women and …
JANUARY 24, 2026 – This morning I was putting the finishing touches on another post about ICE—specifically, the unintended consequences of the policy behind it—when suddenly, out of the calm cold blue, I received notification that a man in Minneapolis had been shot by ICE agents. Now the world knows what happened yet again at …
JANUARY 23, 2026 – This morning we woke up to find that the outside temp was “A LOT” below zero, the lowest all week. At least the sun was shining, ever higher and brighter, if not warmer, as the North Pole shifts incrementally but inexorably toward the sun . . . at least till the …
JANUARY 22, 2026 – Amidst the ongoing ICE goon squad raids here in the Twin Cities, I find both hope and despair; hope in the persistent and burgeoning local opposition to these cruel and unlawful encroachments on the peace and prosperity of our community but despair in the knowledge that a large contingent of Americans …
JANUARY 21, 2026 – This morning with my daily serving of oatmeal fortified with fruit, nuts, honey and cinnamon, I joined my wife in the living room and watched our esteemed president deliver his anxiously anticipated speech before the Davos World Economic Forum. “Speech” describes it charitably. In the style we have come to expect …
JANUARY 19, 2026 – At noon today when I pulled up to my usual spot by the neighborhood entrance into “Little Switzerland,” the car thermometer showed an outside temperature of 4F. My anger temp, however, was still running high. It had skyrocketed during the top of the hour newscast while I was assembling myself for …
JANUARY 18, 2026 – Yesterday evening, we joined our friends Ann and Ravi at nearby Bolé, a gourmet Ethiopian restaurant. Parking was so bad that after letting Beth off at the entrance, I had to drive nearly halfway home to find a spot. The walk from the car back to the restaurant took time, given …
JANUARY 16, 2026 – As if the record needed to reflect any further the state of winter in the state of Minnesota . . . “Let the record reflect,” as a deposing lawyer will often say (for the record), that ice abounds this year, in both its traditional form and its newly encountered goon-squad configuration. …
JANUARY 15, 2026 – According to Viking lore, to throw enemies off course, Eirik the Red called the (then relatively green) island hanging just below the arctic circle, “Iceland,” and named the glacier covered island now in Trump’s crosshairs, “Greenland.” If Trump couldn’t care less about anything green, doubtless when Marco Rubio informed him that …
JANUARY 13, 2026 – If the fascist raiders now on the (ice)-covered ground of Minnesota weren’t a distressing flashback to Germany in the Nazi era—or Norway during the German occupation from April 1940 to V-E Day in 1945 (see yesterday’s post)—we all could laugh at the BlackICE[1]-analog to the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany. Take for …
JANUARY 12, 2026 – Yesterday evening I watched Betrayed, a Norwegian film about the flip side of the courageous Norwegian resistance during World War II, namely the round-up of Jews by Norwegian Quislings` doing the Nazis’ bidding. The film values alone—everything from casting to cinematography to screenplay writing to acting to directing—are topflight, a standard …
JANUARY 10, 2026 – One central lesson I learned from my periodic forays into litigation over 40-some years of practicing law is that there’s no such thing as the “open-and-shut” case. Even when a defendant you’re suing defaults, you still have to enforce the judgment in favor of your client against what is doubtless a …
JANUARY 9, 2026 – After another day filled with talk about Wednesday’s cold-blooded killing by an ICE agent, I’m in equal parts mad and sad—mad that people in positions of the highest responsibility talk and act so irresponsibly; sad over the loss of our decency and dignity. From the president and his closest minions to …
JANUARY 8, 2026 – When many of us pull one eye away from our newsfeeds, we ask, “How in the world did we get here?” The question is especially freighted with special urgency in the wake of recent ICE actions here in Minnesota. One response I’ve heard (from white libs, mostly) is, “It all started …
JANUARY 7, 2026 – From my earliest days I remember the Morton Salt logo—a long-striding girl walking in a downpour and carrying an umbrella gracefully supported by one arm and under the other arm, an upside-down container of Morton Salt “pouring down” behind her. When I was old enough to read, I puzzled over the …