DOA though it is, Maya Rao of the Strib walks readers through Trump’s proposed budget. “President Trump $4.1 trillion federal budget proposal, released Tuesday, would vastly reshape the federal government’s funding of health care, food stamps, and an array of programs that aid hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans. The proposal also excludes further federal funding for the $1.9 billion Southwest Light Rail Transit project, by only paying for transit projects that already have a “Full Funding Grant Agreement” in place with the federal government. The Southwest project does not.”
A KARE-TV story on pet breeding continues to draw attention. The story by Jay Olstad says, “Loopholes in the law keep records concerning inspections of Minnesota pet breeders secret. And critics claim that leaves pets at risk and pet owners in the dark. … For dogs to get so sick, so soon, the families think they must have been infected before they brought them home, at the pet stores or even earlier at the breeder. Which raises the question: who is inspecting them.”
Josephine Marcotty for the Strib writes, “Another 120 households in the east metro area are being advised to drink bottled water after Minnesota health officials drastically cut the exposure limits for a class of toxic chemicals that have long contaminated drinking water there. Minnesota regulators concluded after months of review that the current federal standards are insufficient to protect infants and small children from the chemicals’ health risks.”
For The Washington Post, Garrison Keillor has some ideas for decluttering D.C. “Every ethnicity and political faction and interest group has got its monument in Washington … . Everybody but us columnists. Haul McClellan down off his high horse and put up H.L. Mencken on the pedestal. It’s a handsome horse so keep that and let Mencken hold the reins, and inscribe his words: ‘The man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. This leaves the field to the intellectual jellyfish, to the blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and the mountebank who is willing to conceal and disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold.’”
If publicity was touchdowns. P.J. Fleck, the high octane attention-grabbing football coach gets an interview with Sports Illustrated. Talking to Pete Thamel we get this:“When you take over a program, I think the most important recruiting class you have is the first full recruiting class, and the second is the next. …We have to attack 2018 because a lot of those guys are going to have to start, are going to have to play, are going to have to be major impact players as freshmen. That’s why we’re having so much success. People can feel like they can come to the University of Minnesota. We have one of the best facilities in the whole country being built that will open, we have the best public institutions in the country.” So is it the BCS championship this year or next year?
Oh, and about that guy who fled the St. Paul cops and jumped over the Mississippi bluffs near the Ford Dam … and the body found near the dam? Different people. Says Mara Gottfried for the PiPress, “A body found in the Mississippi River in St. Paul on Monday was that of a 52-year-old missing since the beginning of May. Earlier on Monday, authorities were searching the river bluffs in the area for a motorist who ran from police attempting to stop him.”
