Bob CollinsFormer Minnesota transportation commissioner Elwyn Tinklenberg is blowing up one of the most widely-held assertions in Minnesota today: that the transportation issue pits the Twin Cities metro against people in rural Minnesota. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Politics
Maybe cutting health care for the mentally ill, the elderly, and the disabled is simply the price of freedom, a price someone else will bear so that we may enjoy its benefits. Read more →
A law professor says he has rarely read a dissenting opinion as callous as the one Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch wrote. That’s why Sen. Al Franken pursued it at Gorsuch’s nomination hearing on Tuesday. Read more →
Iowa Republican U.S. House Rep. Steve King isn’t a newcomer to racist and bigoted comments. Yet won his last election with 64 percent of the vote.
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The best thing about asking a question — especially a stupid question — is that there are plenty of people who’ll gladly answer it, and make you look even more foolish in the process. Read more →
Who are we?
That question seems to be the unanswered underpinning of many of the attempts to understand the nation since Election Day 2016. Read more →
The female members of Congress sat they wore white as a silent protest against the president and support for women’s rights.
Steve Inskeep tried mightily again to get an answer to the question, ‘Does Donald Trump believe Islam is a religion?’ when Sebastian Gorka, the deputy assistant to the president appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition for the second time in a month and got the question again. Read more →
The war on the free press was ratcheted up today when press secretary Sean Spicer moved the daily briefing from the White House briefing room to his office. Read more →
Finding things that Democrats and Republicans can agree on might seem like an impossible task, but here’s one possibility: We shouldn’t have to pay money to file our taxes. Read more →
The most frightening part of the White House’s assertion that the free press is the enemy of the American people is that the free press has had to work so hard in subsequent days to point out why it’s not. Read more →
If you’re trying to convince your constituents that you respect opposing views, it’s probably best not to insult them in the process. Rep. Jason Lewis has been under some fire for telephone town halls rather than showing up in person. On Monday night in Northfield, citizens held a town hall forum where they knew he Read more →
The question of rebuking anti-Semitism should be a hanging slider that any president could hit out of the park. Read more →
Where does ‘the left’ end and ‘the right’ begins? Is there a middle somewhere where people are neither left nor right? Or is it that people who are in the middle — if it exists — just don’t post on the Internet or make it on to NPR? Read more →
Read it while you still can. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources magazine is on Gov. Scott Walker’s chopping block.
The bimonthly magazine would be eliminated as part of the governor’s budget plan, even though it would have no effect on the state’s budget. Read more →