Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
What the brouhaha over Tom Emmer and the minimum wage left out, an Olmsted County lawyer goes to Iraq so a friend doesn’t have to, baseball players are people too, should the gas tax be diverted for things other than roads and bridges, and the thin line between right and wrong.
Are big-money waiters and waitresses victimizing restaurant owners? Are we a region just barely hanging on? Or are we the next success story? How air conditioning built the Republican Party. Why people aren’t contributing to Gulf relief. And the real cost of buying a ticket to a baseball game.
From whom did we declare independence; worked up over a hot dog eating contest; no arms, no legs, no whining; dissent in time of war; and what’s better than the BWCA.
But here’s the apparent takeaway from Pew’s latest poll: The more patriotic you are, the more likely you are to be critical of the government.
How can the unemployment rate go down, when the number of people losing their jobs is going up?
How an NBA player lost it all, Supreme Court nominees and Minnesota’s obsession with popular culture, flying while standing, life without a high school in Wadena, and why Canby celebrates Ziad Tedeini.
Bob Collins
Conservative comedy