Man fatally shot at Green Line station in St. Paul

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A man was fatally shot Friday night at a Green Line station in St. Paul.

Police responded at about 11 p.m. to a report of shots fired at the eastbound Metro Transit Green Line station at Dale Street and University Avenue. Officers found a man on the platform with multiple gunshot wounds.

He was taken to Regions Hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to the Metro Transit Police Department, which is leading the investigation.

Buses operated in place of trains while the scene was being processed. Light rail service was restored Saturday morning.

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Joe Soucheray: We’ve been burned before. So, some questions about that $100 million, Governor

posted in: News | 0

The office of Gov. Tim Walz announced the other day $100 million in new funding for organizations serving Minnesotans facing homelessness. Ordinarily, this kind of news would be met with charitable reflection or the whispered thanksgiving of gratitude; homelessness is a scourge and a shame.

Ordinarily. But this is Minnesota, land of disappeared moola.

The announcement came as food fraudsters are on trial for stealing $250 million of our tax dollars in a scam that went unnoticed for too long by the Walz administration. And to this day, the public remains unaware of any elected or unelected bureaucrat from Walz on down suffering any consequences whatsoever for the outrageous pilfering, nor have there been any apologies for the biggest food fraud scandal in the nation during the pandemic.

Minnesotans might be excused for skepticism with another 100 million public dollars in play. The announcement said that funds went to 135 organizations in the metro and Greater Minnesota, after a “streamlined’’ application process. The process to get money to feed those previous tens of millions of kids was also streamlined.

It might inspire confidence once in a while if the government said of a new pile, “this money is going to be extremely difficult to get.”

From the news release: “The 135 organizations receiving state grants are meeting people where they’re at to get them on their feet, whether providing hot meals, chemical health assessment and treatment, or shelter space, their services are vital.”

Some questions, to put skeptical minds at ease. Please answer, Governor. I’m sure this newspaper would be glad to print your guest editorial.

What safeguards are in place to make sure the agencies receiving grants are real?
Who or what department is responsible for visiting the recipients of funding?
Will homelessness be reduced by x number of people? Such a generous amount of money should compel noteworthy goals.
Will the recipients of funding be required to provide weekly or monthly accounting receipts, verifiable numbers of people fed, provided shelter or treated for addiction? Who will verify such reports?
Are recipients of funding required to provide specific goals and the means by which the goals are identifiable and measurable? Put another way, how will providing $100 million be measured for success or achievement?

Your news release was full of boilerplate babble, but no hard facts.

If, heaven forbid, fraud is discovered, will government employees charged with running the program – the Department of Human Services – be held accountable along with the fraudsters?

We all want solutions for homelessness, especially in Minnesota, where it’s tough to be homeless about seven months a year. But we’ve been burned, terribly burned, and this administration and legislative body, which devoured an $18 billion surplus, remember, has offered no evidence of fiduciary responsibility. This is the administration in which nobody ever stopped and said, “Wait a minute. We don’t even have that many children in Minnesota.”

All we want is for the government of Minnesota to treat our money the way we do. Carefully.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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Working Strategies: No, ‘working vacation’ is not an oxymoron

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Amy Lindgren

Hey workers, it’s almost summer — are you ready for a vacation? If you’re muttering “Born ready,” maybe the “bleisure” trend will be your ticket to fun.

Literally — maybe you can convert a business trip and the related plane ticket into your next vacation.

Here’s how it works: Agree to business travel, then extend the stay to include time for yourself. Get it? Business + leisure. Bleisure!

Okay, that was kind of sarcastic. It’s just that I’ve been around the block a few times on faux perks, making my spidey-sense kick in fast.

In truth, this could be a good concept for workers who don’t have quite enough money (or time) for a full-on vacation. Piggybacking on expenses that your boss is covering, such as airfare, could make the difference between something and nothing when it comes to time away.

Let’s start with vocabulary. Bleisure, as noted, is a sequential thing: Work first, then extra days that are only for you. Despite the fancy name, this has been going on for eons. Unless you have an unusually cool employer, plan on paying for the extra hotel days and any expenses that occur after the trip officially ends. But free airfare is still a big perk.

Of course, this works best for solo-vacationers, since a second airfare would still be a cost if you want to share your trip. Hence, as a bleisure variation, you might have your second person share your hotel room during the company portion of the trip and then enjoy your evenings together. In this case, the “free” expense is the hotel (and your airfare).

Continuing with vocabulary, have you heard of workcations? These are a newer concept, rooted in the more recent COVID-inspired hybrid culture. This is where you pick up your laptop and head somewhere nicer to work, such as a beach or a mountain cabin. In this case, you’re likely paying all the expenses yourself, since the boss didn’t assign you to do it. That’s where your uncle with the timeshare might come in.

As a variation, some professions are already structured with workcation opportunities where the employer does pay the costs. This could be true of college professors spending a year teaching in a different university, for example, or traveling health care professionals. Choose a nice enough location and your weekends will feel like free mini-vacations.

And staycations? Those sad little things are the long weekends where you stay home on PTO and pretend you’re not bothered by unfinished projects while you hustle the kids off to the zoo.

Oops, being sarcastic again. I’ll confess, I’m struggling with ‘cation envy at the moment. In our secret double life, our family shares our home with a variety of English language learners. Our current Swiss national is not helping my attitude, with endless pictures of camper travel from his nationally-mandated minimum four weeks (paid) work holidays. Grrr.

Okay, back again. Here’s some more information on bleisure travel that you might find interesting, from a survey taken by Howdy, a company specializing in talent sourcing from Latin America.

The survey itself is a relatively small sampling — 1,013 American workers age 20-77, according to Howdy — so you need to take the results with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, there were lots of thought-provoking nuggets in their information.

For example, it seems that some people go on work trips and skip some of the work, creating their own version of bleisure. GenZ respondents were the most likely to fess up to that behavior, if you’re wondering.

For the folks crafting a more sanctioned version of a bleisure trip, it’s not surprising the numbers veer to the two ends of the age spectrum. That is, GenZ and baby boomers (68% and 63% respectively) most often extend their business trips, compared to Millennials and GenX (44% and 48%)

That makes sense, since those in the middle of the age spectrum are the most likely to have kids, pets and a lawn to mow. For these families, engineering a longer work trip can be more disaster than delight.

It’s a fun read, which you can find here. Watch out for the last paragraphs though, or you’ll get a case of ‘cation envy too. That’s where Howdy promotes some of the Latin American cities they serve, complete with links.

If you’re inclined to try a bleisure trip yourself, be sure you and your boss are crystal clear on who’s paying what and which parts of the trip will be coming from your vacation days. Then, off you go!

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

David Brooks: The authoritarians have momentum, and here’s partly why

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The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.

In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of reelection. Russia and Iran are showing signs of strength.

Over the last two centuries, liberalism has evolved into a system that respects human dignity and celebrates individual choice. Democratic liberalism says we don’t judge how you want to define the purpose of your life; we just hope to build fair systems of cooperation so you can freely pursue whatever goals you individually choose. Liberalism tends to be agnostic about the purposes of life and focused on processes and means: rule of law, the separation of powers, free speech, judicial review, free elections and the rules-based international order.

In his stirring and clarifying new book, “Liberalism as a Way of Life,” Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t merely a set of neutral rules that allow diverse people to live together; liberalism, he writes, has also become a moral ethos, a guiding philosophy of life. As other moral systems, like religion, have withered in many people’s lives, liberalism itself has expanded to fill the hole in people’s souls.

Liberals honor individuals’ right to see themselves with self-respect; racial slurs have become our form of blasphemy because they assault this sense of self-respect. Liberal morality tends to be horizontal: Pure liberals don’t look upward to serve a living God; they look sideways and try to be kind and decent to their fellow humans.

Pure liberals place a high value on individual consent; any kind of sex or family arrangement is OK so long as everybody agrees to it. At one point, Lefebvre has a nice little riff on all the traits that make us liberals pleasant to be around. We respect autonomy and personal space, dislike hypocrisy and snobbery, and strive to achieve a live-and-let-live tolerance.

But I confess that I finished the book not only with a greater appreciation of liberalism’s strengths but also more aware of why so many people around the world reject liberalism, and why authoritarianism is on the march.

Liberal societies can seem a little tepid and uninspiring. Liberalism tends to be non-metaphysical; it avoids the big questions like: Why are we here? Who made the cosmos? It nurtures the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency but not, as Lefebvre allows, some of the loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love.

Liberal society can be a little lonely. By putting so much emphasis on individual choice, pure liberalism attenuates social bonds. In a purely liberal ethos, an invisible question lurks behind every relationship: Is this person good for me? Every social connection becomes temporary and contingent. Even your attitude toward yourself can be instrumentalized: I am a resource I invest in for desired outcomes.

When societies become liberal all the way down, they neglect a core truth: For liberal societies to prosper, they need to rest on institutions that precede individual choice — families, faiths, attachments to a sacred place. People are not formed by institutions to which they are lightly attached. Their souls and personalities are formed within the primal bonds to this specific family, that specific ethnic culture, this piece of land with its long history to my people, to that specific obedience to the God of my ancestors.

These life-altering attachments are usually not individually chosen. They are usually woven, from birth, into the fabric of people’s being — into their traditions, cultures and sense of personhood.

The great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained the difference between the sort of contracts that flourish in the world of individual choice and covenants that flourish best in those realms that are deeper than individual utility: “A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

The great strength of the authoritarians who oppose liberal principles, from Trump to Xi to Hamas, is that they play straight into the primordial sources of meaning that are deeper than individual preference: faith, family, soil and flag. The authoritarians tell their audiences that the liberals want to take all that is solid — from your morality to your gender — and reduce it to the instability of a personal whim. They tell their throngs that the liberals are threatening their vestigial loyalties. They continue: We need to break the rules in order to defend these sacred bonds. We need a strongman to defend us from social and moral chaos.

These have proved to be powerful arguments. One recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52% of Republicans believe that America needs “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.”

We could be living in a year in which authoritarians take or keep power in nations across Europe, Latin America and in the U.S. while Putin continues to make advances in Ukraine and Hamas survives the war in the Gaza Strip. In short, the authoritarians still have the momentum on their side.

Liberal politicians need to find ways to defend liberal institutions while also honoring faith, family and flag and the other loyalties that define the purposes of most people’s lives. I feel that American presidents from, say, Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan knew how to speak in those terms. We need a 21st-century version of that.

If liberals are merely nice and tolerant and can’t talk about the deepest and most sacred cares of the heart and soul, which seem so threatened to so many, then this is going to be an ugly election year.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

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