A New Five Minutes Hate

     Smoke, mirrors and an unceasing firehose of crap.  The news cycle was threatening to slow down, and what was coming out wasn't looking too good for the incumbent administration.

     But there's always something out on the fringes, where a constant churn of ragebait swirls, both fueled by and fueling the preoccupations of the moment; a big-noise politician comments, Left or Right attacks, Right or Left defends, and whatever fire there might or might not have been is lost in the smoke and shouting.  The current fogbank is around daycare centers, primarily Somali-run or -serving in Minnesota, and the deeper you dig, the less there seems to be.

     Daycare centers tend to be marginal at best; they go in and out of business, parents get government help with the costs, some centers get grants, and there's a certain level of graft, fraud, mismanagement and pure bad luck: it's not a frictionless machine.  One or two bad actors can make the entire enterprise look shady, and that appears to be how the mess started: allegations of fraud, followed by President Trump and Governor Walz -- yes, that Tim Walz -- throwing shade at one another.  Amateur "investigative journalism" followed, and the problem with that--

     The problem with roll-your-own investigative journalism is not that the people doing it don't have a Press card or NewsGuild-CWA membership.  The problem is the same one that dogs investigation in general, and that gave rise to the Scientific Method, modern criminal investigation processes, and laws against entrapment: you can't work towards an assumed result.  You've got to follow the data, wherever it leads.  Suspicion and rumor may launch the investigation, but it cannot be the guide.  Instead, the effort has to be designed around a neutral approach.  You find what is actually there, not what you expected to see.  In reporting, that's the approach the pros are paid to take* and the best amateurs do the same.  And it's not what I'm seeing in the early "citizen journalist" videos out of Minnesota.

     People want to do what they see on TV: the news crew shows up, cameras rolling, and surprises the malefactor(s) in mid-malefaction.  But that's only the dramatic peak of a long, slow arc, weeks or months of gathering facts, assembling a timeline or sequence of wrong-doing based on fact, and running it past experts, peers, bosses and lawyers to ensure it makes logical sense and sticks to known and proven facts.

     Nevertheless, the White House yanked funding to all daycare programs in that entire state, and followed it up by freezing such funds nationwide, from Alaska to Florida, until each and every program can prove, by so far unspecified criteria, that they are on the up and up.  (And never mind that they already had to.)

     That's the smoke all over the news cycle.  At the heart of it, there may be -- there almost certainly is -- a very small fire.  But it's probably already been put out, and the details, if they ever emerge, will be trivial.

     Welcome to 2026.  Same crap, different number.
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* Or disgraced if they don't.  Oh, hey, is that Dan Rather and an anachronistic font over there?