MONDAY: The madness of the king advances!

MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 2026

But mainly, Walz drops out: With the Battle of Caracas won, the madness over Air Force One has been general, with warnings issued to Denmark and Cuba, and tariff claims out of control.

We'll set that aside until tomorrow. For today, we'll focus on this news report in the New York Times:

Gov. Tim Walz Drops Re-election Bid, and Amy Klobuchar May Run Instead

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said on Monday that he was abandoning his bid for re-election to a third term. And Senator Amy Klobuchar, a fellow Democrat, is considering seeking the office, two people briefed on conversations between the two politicians said.

Mr. Walz and Ms. Klobuchar met on Sunday in Minnesota, where he informed her of his plans and she confirmed her interest in running to succeed him. For Mr. Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president in the 2024 election, the departure caps a brief rise in national politics.

Mr. Walz said a widening scandal over fraud in social services programs in Minnesota had persuaded him to drop out of the race. He had been criticized for his administration’s oversight of the programs and its failure to prevent widespread fraud.

“I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all,” Mr. Walz said in a statement he read aloud during a news conference on Monday. “Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences.”

So reports the New York Times. For Mediaite's initial report, you can just click here.

Should Governor Walz be leaving the race? On balance, we'd be inclined to say that it's time for a change. 

Over at Fox, there has been a fair amount of the usual crackpot reporting and commentary about the Minnesota fraud prosecutions since the topic went viral. Also, the sudden emergence of this topic in late November produced two days of astonishing conduct n which the sitting president said that Minnesota's Somali-American population is just a bunch of "garbage."

That said, this is not an invented scandal. The New York Times has published two major reports on the topic in the past six weeks. For better or worse, the first report—a sprawling front-page report on Sunday, November 30—fingered Governor Walz right in its headline:

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

That's the way the lengthy report began. On December 20, the Times followed up with this:

Prosecutors Say Minnesota’s Fraud Scandal Goes Further Than Previously Known

An investigation into fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs has broadened significantly, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.

The prosecutors told reporters that they were investigating suspicious billing practices in 14 Medicaid-funded programs. Until now, the investigation had focused on only three safety net programs run by state agencies.

“What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes,” Joseph H. Thompson, the federal prosecutor overseeing the investigation said at a news conference. “It is staggering industrial-scale fraud.”

A preliminary assessment suggests that more than half of the $18 billion in taxpayer funds spent on the 14 programs and intended to help low-income, vulnerable people since 2018 was most likely stolen, the federal prosecutors said.

And so on from there. By the way:

On Fox, that "more than half of $18 billion" tends to be referred toas $18 billion in fraud full stop, just plain completely straight up!

The Times has been reporting on this topic since 2022. At that time, the prosecutions started under the Biden Justice Department.

Fox News has enjoyed every moment of this. But what about us Blues?

We Blues! Almost surely, we helped send President Trump back to the White House by our refusal to come to terms with some of the peculiar behaviors which transpired, unexplained, during the Biden years.

Will we do better this next time around? We know of no reason to assume that we will, but the attention which will get paid to this giant mess will give us a chance to find out.

Final point:

On Fox, this scandal is presented as the inevitable result of Blue America's surrender to DEI and to the kinds of behaviors which get ridiculed as "woke." It's routinely said that the votes of the Somali community were in effect being bought off, and that no one wanted to complain about what was happening for fear of being called racist.

In our view, this:

Sadly, this interpretive framework makes too much sense to be rejected straight out. By the way, do you ever see this giant mess reported and discussed on our own Blue American "cable news" channel?

Fox News suppresses embarrassing facts. Does our channel ever do that?