Jim Klobuchar Writes

Jim Klobuchar indeed writes, but not nearly enough!
by Charlie Leck

Jim Klobuchar is the father of Minnesota's U.S. Senator, Amy Klobuchar. Before retiring, he was a columnist for the Minneapolis newspaper. I eagerly jumped all over the newspaper to find and read Klobuchar's regular columns. Back then, he wrote with great wit and enormous insight. He's basically retired now, but he still writes with those qualities on his own blog, Jim Klobuchar writes.

For those of you old-timers out there, this is just a bit of notice that you can still read Jim Klobuchar. Let there be no secrets. This man is a progressive or, to use the old fashioned word, a real liberal. He posts something new about every two weeks (sometime a bit more often). It's very well worth your while to stop in at his blog occasionally to read his postings. I can't imagine you'll come away disappointed. In his latest piece he writes about what the seven years under "these imposters" have gotten us in America. Strong stuff! A few paragraphs from his blog follow:

"In the midst of all of this the Wall Street dropouts who have found a safe haven as economists in the Bush administration tell us the best way to avoid a Depression-style crash is to stop hamstringing the dynamic operation of the market with needless regulation.

"This is the market that has consigned 4 million homes to no-man's-land, dumped tens of  thousands of people out of work and driven thousands more into the street by happily engaging in fraud, manipulation, greed, and economic cannibalism.

"In the meantime  George Bush is traveling in Europe trying to recruit more  Eastern European clients to surround Russia with missile launchers.

"This is said to be in the interest of promoting world peace.  It comes from a president whose adventure in Iraq has killed more than 3,800 American service men and women and thousands of innocent Iraqis since he flew onto a carrier in full flight suit announcing the end of his save-the-world mission five years ago.

"So  here we are in an economic free fall, with the surviving Wall Street players cherry-picking the losers, and the natural question then is, if gas is at $3.30 and everybody in the industry denies making windfall profits, where is all the money going?"

Jim continues to get published in the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR on occasion. In 1984 he was voted the nation's outstanding columnist by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He's also written approximately twenty books.

Those of you who enjoy adventure travel should know that Jim is one of the KINGS in this field and takes groups on regular trips that sound extraordinary – but outside my own field of interest. They're for the rugged, outdoor types.

His 1970 book, True Hearts and Purple Heads, remains one of my all-time favorites and I carefully preserve and cherish my copy of it. Klobuchar was an extraordinary sports columnist when he was doing that – as good as the great Jim Murray – but he was wasting too much talent to stay in that field and we are fortunate that our newspaper expanded his duties.