After doing this for a while, I have realized that the Strib doesn’t do much actual reporting, just mostly picks up stories from other similarly biased sources, and that it has a set of themes that it just reiterates day after day after day. Mostly those themes are how bad Trump and Reps are, while burying most stuff that might reflect negatively on Dems. Today’s paper is a classic.
The top headline is about big tuition increases at state colleges and universities. Not a word about how poorly managed these organizations are and how little learning they deliver. In other words, as usual, no real journalism. As in the rest of the country, our state colleges are over-staffed with people who do nothing and who are overpaid. Professors basically don’t work, teaching a couple of classes a week. You want to prevent large tuition increases, do something about the poor management.
Then we get the really big headline, Bidementia, who I thought was slowly ossifying at a beach in Delaware, claims Trump has taken a hatchet to Social Security. Why is anyone reporting anything this senile dunce says? Please note that as usual the story fails to note that in fact the Trump administration has not decreased any Social Security payment.
Dems are crooks in Minnesota as elsewhere and sometimes the crookedness is just too blatant to ignore, even for the Strib. So we learn that the state Senate leader is a Dem who used his position to benefit his clients. Buried inside a few pages we finally get a story on the real scandal here–our scum of an AG was meeting with and soliciting campaign contributions from the Feeding our Future fraudsters, who stole hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money. I hope there will be a federal investigation to find out the full set of links.
Finally, in what I consider comic relief, the business section features a story on how businesses in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis are hoping to revitalize the area. Uptown is about 30 blocks south of downtown and very near the lakes. It used to be kind of a hip area with shopping, restaurants, entertainment. It emptied out because of crime and high taxes. The few businesses left are delusional, thinking they can somehow get 40 new businesses to fill all the vacancies. No one is coming back to Minneapolis. There is no committment to reducing crime, services suck and taxes and fees are soaring.
