Twin Cities news consumers aren't well served, and it may get worse.

Avista Capital Partners, which owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said earlier this month that its investment in the Strib is performing so poorly that it had to be written down by 75%. Earlier, the New York Post reported the possibility that the paper might go bankrupt. That possibility will loom as long as the Strib, which many locals refer to as "Red Star Tribune," largely serves as the apparent PR outlet of the Democratic Farm Labor Party (the Gopher State's Democrats).

If a Strib bankruptcy were to occur, and it ceases publication, the St. Paul Pioneer Press is less than ready to step into the breach, at least if Tom Webb's article Thursday about recent food price inflation is any indication.

Webb's opening:

What's up at the supermarket? Prices for almost everything

Food inflation hit an 18-year high in April, with grocery prices rising 1.5 percent for the month, the government said Wednesday. Prices rose in every aisle - dairy, breads, meats, beverages, fruits and vegetables. It means $53 more a month to feed a family of four with a typical food budget.

Feminist political correctness washed over Elaine Woo's Los Angeles Times obituary honoring Harvey Karman, "a flamboyant psychologist whose invention made a key contribution to women's reproductive health, particularly by making abortions simpler, cheaper and less painful."

The Times headline was "Harvey Karman, 84; invented device for safer, easier abortions." No one at the Times thought if the abortion was "safer" for the unborn child, just for the alleged mother, and no one must have wondered if the term " women's reproductive health" sounded euphemistic, especially since reproducing was something that was being avoided. It's at best "counter-reproductive."

(UPI copycatted the Times obit.)

But Woo found friends and policy allies who touted his humanitarianism for making abortion "safe" and easy, especially by inventing a tube (or cannula) which made abortion easier:

The names of over 31,000 American scientists that reject the theory of anthropogenic global warming are to be revealed on Monday.

Although this will occur at the National Press Club in Washington, DC., it seems a metaphysical certitude media will completely ignore the event.

Isn't it ironic, dontcha think?

As announced Thursday by PR Newswire via StreetInsider.com:

NewsBusters, I sincerely hope you won't mind me sharing some amazing personal news with you: moments ago, my son Brandon cleared a personal best 2.10 meters (6-10 3/4) in the high jump finals at the Big 12 Championships earning him seventh place and an invitation to the NCAA Midwest Regionals in two weeks:

An early review is in for HBO's upcoming movie, Recount, about the Bush-Gore battle in Florida after 2000 election. Gillian Flynn in Entertainment Weekly, which like HBO is part of the Time-Warner family, has described the film, to premiere next Sunday night, as tilted against the Republican characters.

In her review in the May 23 edition of the magazine, Flynn asserted: “Recount may not be downright blue, but it's not as purply as it wants to appear.” Saying “Recount is an underdog story, and thus a Democrat story,” Flynn reported that the “Republican players here are coolly calculating -- Tom Wilkinson's James Baker III, the Bush team quarterback -- or they teeter on the edge of madness, like Laura Dern's Katherine Harris.” In fact, in an interview elsewhere, the writer of the movie slammed Harris as “a fraud.” [Screen shot is of Dern as Harris]

It probably comes as a surprise to many here, but I actually have always been known in the non computer world for my smile and laugh. I do both much more than the average person, but it's never forced.

I think this article that I saw on Drudge today is great and it is kind of the theory behind my rants on Newsbusters lately.

Please Read!

Smiling can Hurt your health

According to McClatchy News, if you ever want to ski the Alps or dive the Great Barrier Reef, you'd better do it soon because global warming will make both impossible in the years to come.

Never mind that Europe received more snow this winter than it has in many years, as such facts are totally irrelevant to climate alarmists thanks to the propagandist practices of their hero Nobel Laureate Al Gore.

In an article entitled "10 Places to go Before Global Warming Hits Hard," McClatchy's Judy Wiley did her darnedest to get people to travel the world regardless of the obvious hypocrisy in such behavior adding to the so-called problem (emphasis added):

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has long been an indispensable voice of conservatism. As President Bush said in 2003 in awarding the Medal of Freedom to editorial page editor Robert L. Bartley shortly before his death, he—and by extension his editorial page—has been "a champion of free markets, individual liberty and the values necessary for a free society."

But there is one area in which the editorial page's policy diverges strikingly from conservative orthodoxy, and that is on the matter of immigration. To varying degrees, the paper's editorialists have argued in favor of a more flexible attitude toward immigration. That tendency reaches its apotheosis in the recently-released book by WSJ editorial board member Jason Riley: Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.

Riley appeared on this weekend's Journal Editorial Report on FNC to discuss his book with host Paul Gigot and make the case that borders should indeed be opened. Riley seemed surprisingly passive in the defense of his controversial proposal, and I personally came away unpersuaded. Here was the exchange.

View video here.

Phenomena of Life

Google News early Sunday morning, at its "Top Stories" front page, posted a suggestive Photoshopped picture of President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair next to a headline about the California Supreme Court's recent ruling on same-sex marriages.

In the picture, Bush and a shirtless Blair are cuddling underneath an American flag.

Accident? Something to do with Google's auto-generation software program?

Maybe. But consider as you examine the following screencap that the article the picture came from wasn't even one of the featured stories (link to larger more legible version here):

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Indy's Back!

For almost 20 years, Hollywood has been waiting for the next instalment in the money-spinning Indiana Jones adventure series. Indy is back this week – and even an ageing Harrison Ford can still crack an impressive box office whip... The real pleasure for series fans may lie not so much in the madcap action, the carnivorous bugs and the familiar perils of quicksand, but the restored romance between Ford and Allen, and the fatherly relationship that develops between Ford and LaBeouf, who is clearly the new pretender to his whip.

Full disclosure: I'm a HUGE Indiana Jones fan, and am more excited about his return than any new continuing series installment since Godfather II. Anybody else as pumped, or is this just likely another Hollywood blockbuster undeserving of the attention it's getting?

Eleanor Clift's latest online column for Newsweek assumes that white male "Reagan Democrats" are racist and sexist, or at least they're sickened by appeals by too much focus on the "rights" of blacks and women.

Whether the term is Reagan Democrats or NASCAR dads, they're euphemisms for the white men who deserted a party they thought focused too much on the rights of blacks and women.

Isn't that a bit simplistic? Couldn't there be a lot of reasons for white male Democrats to vote for Reagan? There's no room in Clift's racist/sexist analysis for the possibility that defections came because of issues like abortion, the Vietnam War and the "peace" movement, and later, in Reagan's case, the Carter mismanagement of the economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. Clift continued: 

A new movie called "Bloodline" purports itself to be a documentary that claims to have found evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and their "bloodline" has been kept secret by the Catholic Church and a group called the "Priory of Sion." (NB's Scott Whitlock and Mark Finkelstein have written on this as well.)

But the truth is that the film's premise is based on a complete fabrication. The "Priory of Sion" was founded in 1950's France as a hoax by a known trickster. Yet the group's fictions continue to be forwarded by those despise Christianity and seek to degrade the Church. The Priory and its related claims have been debunked over and over and over and over and over and over again.