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The Albert Lea Tribune is not one to shy away from taking a cheap shot at someone who doesn't have a lot of money. This is the perfect example of media elitism.

Can you imagine the sneer on the face of the person who wrote this? Can you imagine how small-town high and mighty one would have to feel about themselves to put this in the newspaper?

A car with dents in it? In Albert Lea? Oh, my goodness. And the person who owned it is too poor to keep it highly maintained? Heavens.

Instead of rushing to judgment, why not step back for a moment and consider that someone who has to rush into a preschool probably has some sort of emergency on their hands, something more important than worrying about being picked on by their hometown newspaper.

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Today marked the seventh or eighth time someone said to me, "why didn't you call your blog "The Albert Lea Tribune Sucks?"

Really, it's not about what sucks. It's about why things suck and what can be done about it. If the suckage along the way is identified, discussed, analyzed, and put in the proper context, people are, hopefully, more informed. More and better information leads to a society that knows more and can, hopefully, make better decisions.

Other times, people just like to laugh.

Why, in the name of all that is pure and holy, is the Albert Lea Tribune publishing a letter to the editor from some crank in Canada (isn't that where Hamilton, Ontario is?) about Rick Santorum's war against pornography? And, why does anyone care?

Rick Santorum's war against pornography is inherently un-American and hypocritical, pretty much all at the same time and wrapped in a brown piece of paper.

You see, Rick Santorum is a conservative who used to be a paid contributor to a little thing called Fox News, which is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation is a purveyor of pornography. News Corporation actually owns hardcore pornography channels and has never been shy about it. News Corps ties to hardcore pornography are so prevalent, it would be miraculous to search the Internet and find "safe for work" examples of how deeply embedded they are in this world. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find links that don't take you to smut sites when you search for News Corporation's ties to the hardcore pornography industry?

Now, just so we're clear--you have a Canadian writing a letter to the editor to a small Minnesota newspaper about Rick Santorum and his campaign against pornography and nowhere is it mentioned that Rick Sanoturm used to accept money to give his commentary to Fox News, which is owned by one of the world's leading purveyors of hardcore pornography channels. One would think that even a Canadian or a small-town newspaper would see the irony in all of this.

Wait a minute--was it tongue in cheek? Those Canadians are sneaky that way.

How can you reconcile an American politician who calls for the end of pornography with who he was working for just last year? I don't get it. But, perhaps a better newspaper would be able to "connect the dots" and provide this sort of information to its readers. Perhaps.

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Bless his poor heart, this man thinks he knows what he's talking about. The fact that this was published in a newspaper is a shame. I can understand the argument--letters to the editor should be published no matter how crazy they are. But, Lord. This one is cray-zeeeee.

What's not to like, though? It reads like a Fox News crawl. The writer thinks that if the Mexicans stop coming to this country, we will have a thing called "harmony." Really? I've seen how people in Albert Lea live, and, brother, the kind of harmony this man seeks comes from living in a place where people stay out of the business of other people. And that's most emphatically what does NOT happen in Albert Lea. Everyone knows everyone else's business and that doesn't lead to a whole lot of harmony.

Do you know what is a bigger threat to "harmony" and "prosperity" than the Mexicans? Crystal methamphetamine. Why don't we dedicate the same negative energy towards eliminating the problem of crystal meth? Nobody, and I mean, nobody, thinks we should legalize it except for the tweakers who stand to make another billion from the debris it causes across the American social landscape. And, you can say whatever you want about the Mexicans, but who does a better job of raising their kids? The meth head who burns up his house on a frenzied Monday night of cooking or the Mexican family that works hard, goes to church, and doesn't bother anyone?

You see, when someone starts cooking and selling meth, this has a definite impact on a community. And, when a Mexican family moves into a house, that has an impact as well. Family A starts dealing meth out of their home. Their kids end up being neglected. The chemicals cause the house to become a toxic waste dump. Nefarious people start coming around at all hours of the day. Guns, porn, and tweaking are the stew served up by this lifestyle. And when Family A starts seeing the money, and starts to consume goods conspicuously, well, all that's left is for the neighborhood busybody to tap into that feeling of "harmony" and drop a dime to the drug task force.

Meanwhile, Family B works, goes to school, tries to learn the language, and live a decent life. And, what confounds their detractors so much is the fact that they worship God, have healthy extended families, and eventually educate themselves and rise above their situation quickly. Quickly. What's not to hate about people who do well for themselves in a country founded on the principle of multicultural values?

I know what you're thinking--yes, there are people who come here from foreign lands to make and sell drugs. They're called Russians. And they're white, you know. So put that back in your pocket and hold on to it for another argument.

Seriously, though, this is the divide which people who are obsessed about illegal immigration cannot see--the class divide between the wealthy and the poor. The wealthy aren't creating jobs. They're hoarding their wealth. They use the media to tell the poor whites who vote for their white trash politicians that the reason why there aren't any good jobs out there is because the Mexicans took them all. And that's patently false.

Ask the vegetable growers in Alabama how this worked out for them. Alabama thought that, by driving out thousands of workers with brown skin, they would see unemployment for whites go down. Well, what it did was, it conspired greedily to satisfy the blood lust of a lot of politicians who don't care if they end up leaving a lot of farmers with no one willing to bend over all day and pick food by hand. Somehow, all of this "harmony" did not conspire to create a perfect nation full of white people who will work for peanuts in the cucumber harvesting industry. It's hard to keep your iPod working when there is sweat rolling in your ears from having to spend ten hours separating the food from the good Mother Earth, and white people are too cool to wear sweat bands, you see.

Next year, they're going to let a lot of their land lay fallow. What a great metaphor for hating and being ignorant, right?

So, to kind of wrap up what turned into another long-winded attempt at me saying "quit hating poor people, numbnuts," what got published was a fraud. An ignorant, misinformed piece of garbage.

This is a screed of pure, unadulterated racism. Saying that "multiculturalism" leads to the destruction of our common culture and values is another way of saying that anyone who comes here and doesn't look and sound like a small-town racist crackpot is plainly dumb. Pure, slack-jawed stupidity. It's the sound that the racist dog whistle makes when someone blows it often enough; a way of repeating, ad nauseum, what they are thinking in their pitiful little heads, over and over again: everything in my life sucks because of the people who aren't white.

And that's the fallacy of this whole argument. The people who think that their life sucks because of "mass immigration" have been tricked into not looking when plants close, when banks take their homes away, when wages stagnate, and when taxes on capital gains receive yet another cut. They've been sold the flim-flam of resenting poor people just like them, pure and simple.

A responsible newspaper would know when to file letters like this in the trash can.

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When someone has the gall to say "I did not care to have him be released," it means one of two things--either the manager didn't believe the woman's story or the manager didn't care what his employee did.

This happened in Austin. Hence, Austin sucks. Right?

Well, perhaps not. But it just goes to show you--this sort of nuttiness is universal.

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Do you know what is a bigger threat to "harmony" and "prosperity" than the Mexicans? Crystal methamphetamine. Why don't we dedicate the same negative energy towards eliminating the problem of crystal meth? Nobody, and I mean, nobody, thinks we should legalize it except for the tweakers who stand to make another billion from the debris it causes across the American social landscape. And, you can say whatever you want about the Mexicans, but who does a better job of raising their kids? The meth head who burns up his house on a frenzied Monday night of cooking or the Mexican family that works hard, goes to church, and doesn't bother anyone?