This post covers a bunch of days. Don’t know why I bother with this; the Strib is doing an outstanding job of destroying itself. The paper is obviously in desperate financial shape and seems oblivious to the fact that it is because it is a far, far, far left whacked rag. Every day it gets smaller and has less advertising. The online revenue is getting killed by AI. More and more of the comment is borrowed from other left-wing sources, like the NYT and the Wash Post. Every section becomes more of nothing but an outlet for whacked ideology. It will disappear soon without a buyer who will return it to its sources. Steve Grove the publisher who is a Walz bobo, is clearly doing a great job of running it into the ground. Wonderful hire there.
So here are a few stories and themes with some observations. You know the general methodology for the Strib–get marching orders from the Dem party about what stories to focus on regarding how terrible Trump and conservatives are. So predictably the paper is full of illegal immigration lies, tariffs are bad, courts are reining into Trump’s dictatorship, etc.
Illegal immigration. It is “illegal” because the people came and stayed in the US in violation of our laws about how you come to the country. If you do something illegal, you should expect to eventually be caught, charged with the illegal acts and punished in some fashion, including in this case deportation. Because Dem admins didn’t enforce the border and the laws at all, people poured in, including many criminals and ne’er-do-wells. Deporting every one of them should be the first order of business. For those who have been here many years and are working, a solution should be found which grants them some kind of legal status, coupled with re-payment of any benefits received while illegally here. All government aid programs of any type should be restricted to citizens of the United States. And the ambiguous status of automatic citizenship for anyone born in the country should be clarified by eliminating that status for anyone born here to one or more parents who are not citizens. The Strib’s contribution to this issue is to run stories about how illegal immigrants are fearful and such great contributors to society.
The Strib also does its part for Dems by playing up how wonderful the local Dem politicians are and how bad local Reps are. Thus Tim Walz is a hero for standing up to Trump and spewing his vicious screeds about Nazis and facism. Not a word about what a fool he makes of himself and the state nationally, his absence from the state while a budget is being worked out, his complete failure to support law and order in our cities, and his outright facilitation of massive fraud and waste, so long as a lot of it gets recycled as campaign contributions.
We see an absurd article about the rise of “facism”, whatever that means. I don’t recall the paper expressing any concern about Tim Walz acting as a dictator for years during the epidemic, using the police to arrest those who oppose him and attempting to suppress contrary opinions. I don’t recall any concerns about the use of law enforcement by Dems nationally to attempt to jail political opponents or about their successful efforts to force the media, including social media, to suppress those political opponents’ views. That sounds a lot more like dictatorship and facism to me than anything I see Trump doing.
Some random news–Minnesota used to have a high-quality, low cost health system. No more. And it is getting harder and harder to get an appointment to see a physician. Why? Because like police, no physician in their right mind wants to work here. Speaking of fraud and waste, the city auditor for Minneapolis finds lots of it in a complete failure of oversight of contracts. Those appear to go to “friends”, i.e. contributors, of city officials. The Mayor of Minneapolis is a puerile moron who wants to force police reforms that will drive even more officers away from the crime-ridden city. Students at the U of Minn are concerned about tuition hikes–maybe they should protest the excessive number of administrators and wasted spending on DIE programs.
The state came to a budget resolution that does nothing to address all the spending waste and impending large deficits. The Strib admits that a law enforcement action protested as a raid on illegal immigrants, which led to large scale interference by protestors, was actually aimed at huge amounts of meth. The Strib initially celebrated the protestors. Loss of funding for PBS may be bad for rural stations. PBS has lots of contributors, if what is does is so important, the people, including local people, who want it can pay for it. The organization as a whole has become nothing but a left-wing mouthpiece. Ideological scientists are horrified that the administration may actually require them to follow guidelines for good research instead of just letting them make up data and results.
Deficit spending is fine when Dems do it, but the big beautiful bill would add to the federal deficit over ten years, so it is just terrible. A whole front page story devoted to a patch on some law enforcement personnel’s uniforms that might be linked to Christian nationalists; bullshit which has been completely debunked. But that is worthy of the Strib’s front page. State workers are unhappy about having to go back to the office. A bunch would have been laid off if the budget hadn’t been resolved, and that would have solved their issues about having to actually work. This state is vying with California and Illinois for worst-run state in the country and we might yet win.
I don’t understand why anybody would pay to read that old rag. I used to read it once in a while when they allowed you to see a few articles free just to see how bad they were. Otherwise, I haven’t given them a cent since my last paper subscription expired about 15 years ago.