Having taken note of of the pummeling endured by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for showing all the backbone of two clawless fiddler crabs when it came time to take a stand in the 2024 pestilential erection, Mother Times struggles up out of her rocker on the Saturday before Election Day, squeaks out a fart, and plops back down.
“That’ll show ’em,” she mutters before falling back into a fitful snooze.
Mad Blog Media 
Pathetic
That’s it in a nutshell, Libby. Like yelling “Hit the dirt!” after the bomb goes off.
So lame. Presenting a non-endorsement as an “endorsement”. No! Reminds me of “All the President’s Men” when Ben Bradlee, (Jason Robards, Jr), hollers “When will someone go on the record!”.
PO’G: As a “trust but verify” kinda person, I was hoping there’d be a link to that editorial in the spirit of full and open journalism. But I’ve tried a lot of Mother Times Google searches and have been, thus far …. and at my age of 77+ and IT-savvy lacking …. thwarted in finding it.
Is Mother Times a nonprofit or for profit? How do they publish? How do they receive/generate their funding to do so? Do they get any? That would perhaps explain their “tardy” position on the upcoming election?
You know …. the old “follow the money” tension between survival of journalism and profits needed to do so and espousing one’s views/opinions. NOT UNIQUE TO JOURNALISM dare I say.
Or are they, like you, a self-motivated … and welcome … pro bono cycling-passion-focused website that also encourages commentary on a variety of contemporary topics de jour/rigeur?
Meanwhile …. as an older and now “retired” (as of last year) High School MTB Coach … please remember that “RULE #1 IS FUN!”
Hey, JD, long time no see. “Mother Times” is an old newsie alias for The New York Times. I sometimes forget that not everyone espeaka da newspaper lingo.
I dropped a link to the homepage editorial at “squeaks out a fart.”
You retired from coaching? I hope you haven’t retired from riding. Remember Rule No. 1!
PO’G: Thanks for the lifelong, continuing education of this derelict and journalism ignoramus! 🙂
Re the coaching ….. I had to accept reality a year ago when I couldn’t keep up with the JV Team. I’m still riding my MTB, but my risk/reward ratio continues to evolve towards the “stay safe and ride/enjoy for another 15 years”. approach. I used to go long and fast; then just long; now it’s just try to go!
Gotta embody the “Rule #1 is FUN!” principle. Smiling and laughing are good for the body, mind, and soul. As Oscar Wilde said: “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” 🙂
Yeah, the ol’ risk-reward ratio is uppermost in my mind when on a two-wheeler these days. It’s already been proven to me that I’m not nearly as fast as some of these people, so I mostly decline to push the envelope.
This is a lot easier on my main road bike, the New Albion Privateer, which has 46/30T chainrings and a 13-34T cassette. On a quick descent I’m spun out so fast that I can’t really get too carried away. And in the dirt I’m almost always on a cyclocross bike, the limitations of which encourage the fabled Moderation in All Things.
That’s too little, too late, and preaching to the choir. Like Libby said, it’s pathetic.
And the crowd snores!
Another friend observed: “Hmm, late, since millions have already voted, but they didn’t punt.”
Taking bets that it’s taken down by Sunday morning?
Shoot, I’m surprised it’s still there at lunchtime.
Seems pretty blunt to me. About the only thing they forgot in that list of things that makes Mr. T unfit for office was that if Trump is re-elected, he might use telepathy to vindictively bring an asteroid down onto California.
These deep-thinkers on the editorial boards are starting to remind me of the Paul Reiser character in “Aliens.”
You will recall what happens to him, of course.
I finally got around to reading Jeff Bezos’ op-ed in the WaPo. He makes a valid point that no one votes a particular way because of an endorsement. So point to AmazonMan. But he whiffs on the rest. That’s not the point of an endorsement.
It’s to validate a decision already made. Remember how Trump made it okay to be overtly racist and fascist? The NYC endorsement makes it okay to stand up for the right thing to do. We live in a deep red congressional district. So red that our congressmember is Sedition Scott Perry, living embodiment of “Democracy for me, but not for thee”. We put up signs for the Democrat and our neighbors do as well. My wife is also the local Democratic precinct committeeperson, which pretty much means going around the neighborhood and making sure all the like-minded people get their asses to the polls. I go along, and the general tone of the conversations is that they like seeing other people putting up yard signs for Democrats so that they don’t feel alone. In other words, to validate their position. Endorsements do the same thing.
He also whiffs on the importance of newspapers. Critical? No. Important? Yes. If he really gave a rat’s ass about preserving democracy, he’d use his bazillions to get the Fairness Doctrine restored. If that happened, Fox News, OAN, and their ilk would evaporate overnight. That would really juice up the revenues from WaPo.
So we’re keeping our WaPo subscription along with our NYT subscription, but AmazonPrime is going away at the next renewal.
By the time the various newspapers print their endorsements, I’ve generally read enough articles that I have already decided who the bigger stinker is. To me, that is print journalism’s job: reporting, not telling me how the Editorial Board thinks I should vote. Of course in this POTUS election, I really cannot see how anyone can be undecided but that’s where we are today. I don’t agree with some of what the Donks want to do, but Mr. T is a clear and present danger to the Republic. Not to mention, that party has lost its mind. This election is kinda like that movie Airplane. Both choices might be airplane food, but one of them would kill you. And don’t call me Shirley.
Frankly, if someone has not made up his/her mind before the various newspapers make endorsements, then I really wonder if we are dealing with low information voters, regardless of whether they fill in the red or the blue dot on the ballot form. I like to read the endorsements to see what the Editorial Boards think, and then I leave snide remarks in the comments. Even when I agree.
One of the things we forget about newspapers is that mostly they no longer exist as such. They’ve been snatched up by gazillionaires, vulture capitalists, and soulless corporate whorehouses, their newsrooms decimated, printing presses and buildings sold, websites turned into cookie-cutter cartoons with all the news value of a fart behind a closed door in a public toilet.
With a few exceptions they simply no longer have the manpower or the expertise to tell us what we are too stupid and lazy to learn for ourselves about business and government, which these days are basically the same thing.
One of the first things a successful invader or revolution does is seize control of communications. You can do this with guns or money. Money is quieter.
“a fart behind a closed door in a public toilet.” Oh great…another thing to keep me up at night wondering how mankind can survive. It’s something I’ve not given much thought to and now see how poorly informed I am. About farts that is. As for media nowadays you are of course right POG. Money controls the message we blighters get 24/7.
I think I need to change the oil in my brain-case. Smells funny up there.
“… they simply no longer have the manpower or the expertise to tell us what we are too stupid and lazy to learn for ourselves…”
Of course that is a Catch-22, as how the hell are we supposed to figure it out without an honest and competent Fourth Estate to do the hard work? Most folks are dependent on it, as we all can’t be raking the muck ourselves. With billionaires and investment bankers buying up the media, it ceases to be “all the news that’s fit to print” and becomes “how do we maximize the profit and minimize the expense on generated content?” Alternative media has its own gigantic biases, as each tribe marches to the beat of its own bullshit artist. “Content” can just as easily describe what I cleaned out of the cat’s litter box a while ago. Or as you say, that “…fart behind a closed door in a public toilet.”
I hate to think what this country is going to look like in 30 years. Fortunately, I won’t likely be around to find out.
The complexity of the relationship — the world, the press, the people — is mind-boggling.
As all y’all know, I came up in the Seventies, just as The Game was starting to go sideways post-Woodstein & Bernward. But even then a two-newspaper town was not a rara avis. Ideally they kept their readers informed and their competition more or less honest.
In a pinch, say, a printing-press breakdown, the Fury-Fiddler might print the rival Foghorn-Fulminator’s edition for them, knowing that next week the situation could be reversed. Some readers would subscribe to both papers in hopes of getting two perspectives on what the day’s news was and what it meant. You could watch the TV news, too, but they were mostly talking heads doing rip-and-reads on the local papers.
And printing the news was more service than scam. Sure, the idea was to turn a profit — and many newspapers did, for a good long time.
But just think about what a massive pain in the ass it would be for the average resident of Bongwater County to find out just what in billy hell was going on around there while he was busy attaching gizmos to widgets at the Gizmo Widget Attachment Co. if he didn’t have at least one halfway decent local newspaper.
In his spare time he’d have to attend school-board meetings, City Council fistfights, County Commission yawners. Drop by the cop shop to read the reports, see if the gunfire he heard around dinnertime last night took out a neighbor. Ring up the funeral home, see when and where the services are scheduled. Email the Health Department to see if he got the shits at a local beanery because the place has more red flags than May Day in the old Soviet Union.
Newspapers had people who could stand in for you at those things, with the expertise to understand what was important and what was basic maintenance. And there were people looking over their shoulders to make sure they got it as close to right, without bias, as was humanly possible.
Sure, you can get a lot of “content” from Facebook and NextDoor. But those “journalists” are unpaid amateurs and hoo-lawd, ain’t nobody to stop ’em from getting it wrong and grindin’ their axes.
Local journalism was one of those services we all took for granted, until it was mostly gone, or dialed down to AM-radio level by vulture capitalists stripping it for salable parts. A good local reporter was like a checker at the grocery who could tell you what aisle the rutabagas were on. Or a IT support type running on A.I. — Actual Intelligence, gained in MeatWorld — not a bot that cheerily proposes the same “solution” you’ve already told it three times doesn’t reboot the computer.
Sheeyit, I remember when newsrooms and libraries were the Google of their time. People would ring them up to find out who won the big fight or whatever happened to that beautiful old building that’s suddenly a parking lot.
Arrgh. Some real old-guy shit* going on here. …
-30-
*Extra credit to anyone who knows what “-30-” means.
No extra credit for me. I had to look it up.
It is a downward spiral. Less real reporting, so people increasingly in the dark without knowing it. No one trusts anyone but their own echo chamber. I don’t think we are even close to the bottom of this barrel.
We had two newspapers in Honolulu in the ’90s, the morning Honolulu Advertiser and afternoon Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Both pretty good papers and both had been in business well over 100 years. Subscribed to both. I still recall Dave Shapiro, the editorial editor at the S-B, who had his own column, called Volcanic Ash.
Back then it was a challenge to get a letter published. It had to be good, had to be hardcopy mailed to the paper, and had to pass Dave’s somewhat critical eye. I think he probably shitcanned 75% of them. I was always happy when one of mine appeared in print.
They got downsized to one paper after we left. Now owned by Carpenter Media Group, whoever that is.
These billionaire punks are really getting on my nerves, especially the orange bloviator and his cultists. And,I don’t think he is a billionaire now or for a long time, decades maybe. A flimsy house of Ponzi cards is what.
One thing which has not been mentioned this election cycle was Trump’s suggesting abolishing term limits for President. While I know it takes an act of Congress to do so, mark my words; if he gets elected, he WILL shoot for the moon.
Be afraid; be very afraid.
It’s a very complicated case, man. …
A constitutional amendment is what it takes to change or nullify the 22nd amendment. Ratified by 3/4 the state legislatures within in seven years of proposal in congress. Them assholes can’t even pass a budget. Not likely at all. As bad as dumpster is, the system will hold.
There’s another way to amend the Constitution, according to an old poli-sci text of mine — a national convention called by Congress upon the application of two-thirds of state legislatures. Amendments may be ratified either by the legislatures of three-quarters of the states or by specially called conventions in three-quarters of the states.
A new national convention hasn’t been tried yet. Amendments have been proposed by Congress only. And there’s some doubt that Congress can be compelled to call a convention it doesn’t want.
So, lots of guardrails, yeah. But these dudes don’t care about that shit. Their practice has been to do what they want and let the courts hash it out. Thus they pack the courts with friendly faces.
Also, they pack the state legislatures wherever possible, which is another good reason for paying attention to down-ballot contests. There have been rumblings about a national constitutional convention for some years now.
An Article 5 federal congressional convention is worrisome for sure. Especially when funded by the same billionaire brats that always start such shit storms when their power and wealth are threatened. But, the product of such a convention is still a proposal which must be ratified by 3/4 of the states. Even in republican states, that is a high bar. Especially for a change to presidential term limits. One for a balanced federal budget would be more likely to pass, but probably wouldn’t. I think the 3/4 of all state legislatures to ratify is a high bar and will hold. Dumpster is still a serious threat to be sure. He could start wars and forever damage foreign relations. The rest of the world doesn’t trust us as much as in the past. When confidence in our government declines around the world, people and governments will be less likely to buy US government securities. If we can’t sell our debt, financial chaos will be the result.