Transportation

Blame deregulation? The Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot Minneapolis-St. Paul last week told federal investigators they were immersed in discussion about the airline’s merger with Delta.

U.S. Rep. John Kline knows his buttons. As a Marine, he stayed at the side of Presidents Reagan and Carter, carrying the satchel known as the “nuclear football” that holds the how-to kit for pressing the most fearsome button of all. Now he’s once again the go-to guy, carrying the ball for Republicans who want [...]

More trouble with Texans for Norm Coleman. Politics in Minnesota recounts some tales about Fred Malek, the leader among a group of Texans who recently hired the former senator to head a new organization called America’s Action Network. Malek helped Al Checchi buy Northwest Airlines with mountains of debt in 1989, tallied Jews at the [...]

Nearly two weeks after a Continental Airlines flight left 47 people stranded on a Rochester tarmac for six hours, a plane filled with Minnesotans spent the same amount of time awaiting takeoff in New York on Friday. The Sun Country flight opened boarding for its 100 passengers an hour late and took off six hours [...]

Do not be alarmed, you residents near the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant. The state, federal and local officials you see acting as if there’s been a terrible nuclear accident are doing just that: acting. They do this every other year, at the insistence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This year, Tuesday and Wednesday [...]

A light rail service from downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie passed an important test on Monday: cost and ridership estimates show that parts of the project falls within the parameters to receive federal assistance. Only one proposed route of the Southwest Transitway would qualify for federal funding — between Cedar Lake and Lake of the [...]

The House last Friday provided a generous lifeline to the wildly popular clunkers program — which grants drivers up to $4,500 to scrap their gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles — and the Senate is poised to pass that bill Thursday. But there’s a glitch. The proposal steals its funding from a Department of Energy program encouraging the development of renewable energy technologies.

What kind of “crack research” is Fox’s Gretchen Carlson smoking? The Fox & Friends co-host and former Miss Minnesota claimed today that after spending “a tremendous amount of time” researching the issue, she found that only two cash-for-clunkers deals have been consummated in her home state. The widely reported stat: two percent of pending deals have [...]

State Sen. Scott Dibble has been named chair of the National Conference of State Legislatures” Transportation Committee. The Minneapolis Democrat currently oversees the state Senate’s Transit Subdivision.

The plight of Minnesota’s dairy farmers occupied the time of Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Reps. Tim Walz, Collin Peterson and James Oberstar, who worked this week to find relief for farmers hard hit by economic and natural disaster. That and other highlights from Minnesota’s congressional delegation inside.