Thanks, Hoosiers, we needed that!
There is a spring in our step this frigid Wisconsin morning. An America aching to its soul wanted Indiana to win their game Monday night 01-19-26, needed the Hoosiers to be crowned the champions of college football, and they did it! The gods must not be angry, after all. All-American kid Fernando Mendoza, grandson of (legal) Cuban immigrants, lip bloodied by an uncalled flagrant foul, praises his teammates, kisses his MS-afflicted mother, makes the sign of the cross in tribute to a merciful God, and thanks (of all places) cold Midwestern Indiana for taking him in. No recrimination against the hometown school that spurned him, that being Miami. Just an exploding scoreboard of gratitude from one fully realized human being.
Indiana QB comforts losing coach
Everyone loves an underdog — college football’s perennial doormat gets up off the floor and delivers a haymaker to that college football factory in Miami. Rocky Balboa in cleats. If it couldn’t be the Wisconsin Badgers, let it be a real Big Ten team from the Midwest. The sequel to that Gene Hackman/Dennis Hopper movie about Indiana high school basketball except that Fernando’s dad looked sober enough.
Indiana’s dour coach can smile after all — but only after the job is done — when he can lay fingers on the trophy. Curt Cignetti won us over once again when he vowed to lay more fingers on that cold beer of victory. This bud (as in worshipful fan) is for you.
Is Minnesota the graveyard of progressivism?
In the Land of Honah Lee, “Voters cheerfully accepted statewide tax increases to better fund under-served local school districts. The state’s elected officials seemed to all be starry-eyed idealists motivated by a genuine commitment to service and little expectation of reward.” Sounds like Madison WI but The New York Times is describing the liberal petri dish that spawned Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Tampon Tim: war-torn Minnesota.
Imagine our shock to read in the publication that committed The 1619 Project that the social welfare state (aka: More Free Stuff) enlarges in inverse proportion to the lack of diversity. “Researchers, drawing on data from around the world, have noted a clear correlation between the generosity of a country’s welfare state and the homogeneity of its population.” In other words: Denmark and Sweden can afford to be generous (albeit, not with Greenland). (Question for MAGA nation, is it O.K. to be a globalist now?)
Beneath its rhetorical commitments, [Minnesota] possesses some of the country’s most severe racial disparities across a wide range of metrics, from unemployment to homeownership to incarceration to educational attainment. …
“African Americans are worse off in Minnesota than they are in virtually every other state in the nation,” the University of Minnesota economist Samuel L. Myers Jr. has written. … Well-off white people, living in neighborhoods surrounded by other well-off white people, could afford to subsidize a generous welfare state and were mostly insulated from its failings, when they were aware of them at all.
Result: Minneapolis is recording a near-record number of homicides and a 537% increase in carjackings following George Floyd’s death. (Would More Free Stuff help?)
The fraud scandal in Minnesota, in which dozens of members of the state’s Somali community are implicated in stealing over $1 billion from the state’s much-vaunted social services system, has struck bone because it fits so neatly within this line of argument: that liberals’ civic commitments are not just empty and unproductive but also a cover for looting the state by the very people liberals are most preoccupied with protecting.
If the sort of self-satisfied liberalism that Minnesotans are famous for hasn’t served the people of color that those liberals are so concerned about, then what is the point of it, exactly? — New York Times
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Nothing was given the Indiana football team. The downtrodden Hoosiers worked hard, played by the rules, and were gracious in victory. America has a national role model!
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