Remembering when the New York Times was a real newspaper

The morning after the heroic former Mayor of New York called the New York Times one-sided and biased, the bombastic old newspaper-turned-DNC-operative is still out there, trying to be accepted as a real newspaper.  Fewer and fewer are buying it, and by "buying it" we mean either the line or the product.  Around the rest of the country, dozens of old guard papers who have followed the Times lead and allowed leftist opinion to leak off the editorial page and onto the news pages are blazing the trail for the Times down the path to bankruptcy.

I remember the days when the New York Times was the dream job for a young journalist.  It wasn't that long ago.  I used to purchase it three or four times per week and wouldn't throw it out until I'd read the whole thing.  Everybody knew the editorial page was pretty far out there, but who cared?  And wasn't the editorial page enough for the far left?  Here they got their opinion out there in a publication that millions of people read and held in high respect.  But like some little kid seeing a jar of candy on the counter, a bunch of idiots decided that far left opinion would be "more meaningful" were it allowed to pop up in place of the news on the front page.  Did it make far left teachings more believable?  Of course not.  When somebody is telling you that no matter how hard you work, your earnings need to be reallocated to someone else, it wouldn't matter if it were wrapped in gold, it's still junk. Instead, by mixing the news with far left nonsense, the entire news industry suffered a tremendous hit.  People have stopped buying newspapers.  Newspapers are falling by the wayside one after another and the rush to oblivion is quickening.  If obama loses despite the far left using the death march of newspapers to push a total failure of a candidate, another dozen major publications will certainly shut their doors.  I was a journalism major at Maryland and I love the industry. There was no better place for an idealistic young person.  It wasn't that long ago when opinion anywhere but the opinion pages was absolutely not allowed.  In fact, we libs would jeer at the dummies who tried to slip an opinion into their news accounts.  Sometime between 1977 when I graduated and today that primary rule changed.  How ridiculous!  People bought papers to be informed.  You learned what was going on on the news pages and, if you needed cogent help in forming an opinion about the day's events, you could read the opinion pages.  Now you cannot get half a clue about important events reading the newspapers, that's how bad it has become.  I'm liberal, I love newspapers and I stopped buying the Times and cancelled my subscription to the Baltimore Sun years ago.  In the case of the Sun, it was the day after one of their far left nuts used a terrible racial slur to describe Maryland Lt. Governor and eventual RNC Chair Michael Steele.  It was a slur that was never apologized for nor retracted, and the writer was never fired.  I cancelled the next day.  Any paper that slipped that far wasn't a newspaper any more.  I'll confess to picking up the sports pages now and again.  The Sun still has fine MLB reporting, although their extreme cutbacks have slaughtered their college and prep coverage.  I used to buy the Times every Tuesday, for certain, when they ran their weekly Science section.  Then that got over-run with the Global Warming nonsense.  (I sense that the Earth is warming a bit, and I can't rule out that man either has a bit to do with it, or will at some point.  But the idea of butchering the economy on such slipshod science is absurd.  Any idea that has to do with taking the USA out of the role of World Leader, when we've proved a million times over that we are the world's last real hope, is worse than absurd and stupid, it's suicidal.  
     Newspaper people don't even have the moral courage to admit their trip down the far left highway has been the major cause of the circulation downturn.  Here in Baltimore they assigned a reporter to do a story about their declining readership and concomitant slippage in advertising revenue and, typically, his story didn't even mention the fact that many former readers quit because they couldn't stomach the far left junk on the front page day in and day out.  The sad truth is that the Sunpapers is a lot worse than the Times when it comes to far left gibberish.  During the Bush presidency, on days when the rest of the media was covering something other than Iraq, the idiots downtown would routinely run some kind of story describing another outrage in Iraq.  I'd look online and in other papers to see if they had anything like it and they didn't.  In the last four years, while Obama was butchering the domestic economy, the Sun acted like it wasn't happening and all was well in Washington.  Similarly, in Annapolis they acted like they were on the O'Malley payroll.  Here the state economy was on a downbound train, but in the Sun, all was well.  Taxes going up to the point that Maryland is one of the most heavily taxed states in the nation, but in the Sun, no word about it.  This is how bad it is:  even the Washington Post could not bring itself to endorse Governor O'Malley for re-election.  One of the Posts' editorial writers was interviewed on the local news and asked how the Post could have endorsed former Governor Bob Ehrlich over O'Malley.  The Post writer was incredulous.  How?  Have you lived here the last four years?  How?  
     Still, in Maryland, where Democratic voters out-number Republican voters by, I think, 3-1, O'Malley won a narrow victory.  Fuel taxes and other taxes are skyrocketing.  Maryland is a sanctuary state, meaning that illegal immigrants are welcomed here.  Enough residents have signed petitions to put one O'Malley-sponsored law up for a referendum vote.  it has to do with state-sponsored benefits for illegals.  Maryland has advantages in the current economic malaise that other states do not:  it has a high number of federal and state employees whose jobs and funding are unaffected by the rotten economy.  Hence, out unemployment rate is a bit lower than the country as a whole.
     On one day earlier in the week the New York Times had two front page stories about the lad out in Missouri, Todd Aikan, who made the dumb remark about rape.  Two?  Even one is a push, but two?  Readers of the times would not even know what a failure obama has been over the past four years.  they wouldn't know that china has begun threatening Japan.  they wouldn't know that obama nearly chickened out when it came time to pull the trigger on osama.  they wouldn't know about the big lies obama's campaign has been telling about Governor Romney (even the Post has been critical of this).  But Times readers know a lot about Todd Akin because the Times wants their readers to think this is typical GOP behavior.  They want that desperately.  The question is why these people are so hellbent on pushing such an incompetent - obama -on the nation for four more years?  Are they, collectively, that miserable in their lives that pulling a stunt like that gives them pleasure? The USA is the beacon of light that the rest of the world envies.  It is no coincidence that one of the biggest national problems is the overwhelming wave of would-be immigrants.  What other nation has a problem that even is one-half of the one facing this country?

 Sure, Mr. Akin has an ego problem.  he can't come to grips with the pain he is causing his party and his country by staying in the race after such a stupid mistake.  If he jumped out of the race and, two years hence, ran again for Congress, all well and good.  But he pulled his goofiness in a year the GOP can retake Congress.  The first poll that weighs his gaffe has the weak Democrat and emminently beatable Claire McCaskill up ten points (there actually was one poll that came out earlier and it showed Aikan still up by a point despite the gaffe.  But that poll over-sampled Republicans by 9.5 percent.  Every other poll over-samples Democrats.  Aikan is going to be extremely unpopular for the rest of his life if he won't pull out and M if he doesn't stop to see the forest those trees are blocking from his view.  

Correction: In Friday's post I stated that Obama had failed to join the international criticism of the jailing of three female rockers in Moscow.  In fact, while obama stayed silent, the US State Department did criticize the sentence.  The US response was tepid at best and a more competent administration would have ramped up the criticism beyond what it was in view of the fact that Putin and Russia are clearly trying to silence dissent.  Obama has declined to join the criticism, doubtlessly because he doesn't want to offend the despot when he hopes to negotiate arms reductions with him after the elections.  This is the same nonsense that kept obama from backing iranian protesters being attacked by the mullahs.  Every other western nation was having at the mullahs and backing the pro-democracy protesters, everyone, that is, except obama.  obama was hoping to talk the mullahs into ending their nuke program, so naive was he.

No corrections are necessary on the story about the umpiring embarrassment in Detroit last night.  The first base umpire called Jhonny Peralta out at first on a spectacular play by third baseman Manny Machado and first baseman Mark Reynolds.  Machado ranged behind third into foul territory to scoop a bid for an extra base hit by Peralta.  His rifle throw was slightly toward the outfield side of first, but Reynolds stretched his body while keeping his foot on the base.  Replays showed that the initial call was clearly the correct call, but the four knuckleheads over ruled themselves, going from right to wrong.  Reynolds and Buck Showalter were both ejected.  The only thing that would have ameliorated the disgrace would have been a group mea culpa, but these four lacked even that much integrity.  They were too busy writing up the two ejected Orioles, hoping to get fines piled on top of their screw ups.  It's an unwritten rule that judgment calls are never over-ruled.  Last night shows why.  If there was any justice, the fines would be levied against the four who screwed up and not the two who called them on their error.

In Detroit tonight Zach Britton stymied the Tigers and Chris Davis hit an opposite field three-run homer to spark the Orioles to a critical 3=2 win.  Davis' homer was his 19th and came in a scoreless tie in the seventh inning.  The Tigers got two back in the eighth, but Peralta, who knocked in both runs with a two out hit, was caught in an inning-ending rundown on the same play.  Jim Johnson retired the Tigers in order in the ninth, earning his 36th save.

obama's terrible foreign policy record

Mark  Levin did a lengthy talk tonight on the failings of obama's foreign policy that anyone still thinking of voting for that man needs to listen to.  obama's domestic failings, as glaring, embarrassing and terrible as they indeed are, pale by comparison to his failings in the area of foreign policy.  As obama slices the US Navy to less than 300 ships, Red China threatens the Philippines, as Iran gears up to nuke Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt and, soon, Syria, and is about to move into the Sinai in direct contravention to the Camp David Accord.  But Israel dares not share its plans with the US for fear that they will be leaked to obama's functionaries at the NY Times.  Levin also discussed the video on the internet showing a young Christian man being beheaded by frenzied Muslims.  I. myself, missed obama's reaction to this outrage.  What government permitted this without arresting the murderers?  In Russia, the increasingly thuggish Vladimir Putin and his regime has jailed three young feminist rock and rollers for the next two years.  At a show trial this week that drew hundreds of protesters in Moscow and condemnation from around the world - but not the USA - a Putin judge sentenced the three members of "Pussy Riot" to two years behind bars for hooliganism.  The three had put on an impromtu concert in Moscow's main Cathedral, with the songs protesting Putin's policies against dissidents.  Meanwhile obama gussies up to the thug and promises him that after the election the two will talk about nuclear disarmament. terrific

Sports:  No. 9 Maryland played its first soccer exhibition tonight at powerful Creighton.  The match ended in a 3-3 tie.  The Terps got goals from Patrick Mullins, John Stertzer and Jereme Raley.  Maryland broke on top early by a 2-0 score before the homestanding Blue Jays battled back to tie.  Raley's goal gave the Terps a 3-2 halftime lead.  Sunny Jane was stopped on a breakaway midway through the second half and the Blue Jays scored a tieing goal in the final 15 minutes.  The Terps play their second and final preseason game Monday night in College Park against Penn State.  Baseball:  In Detroit the four MLB umpires working the key pennant race game between the Orioles and Tigers broke one of umpiring's most time-honored traditions tonight, when they reversed a judgment call.  In the process, they made total fools out of themselves.  The first base umpire called a Tiger Jhonny Peralta out at first base after he hit a hard grounder down the third base line that rookie phenom Manny Machado fielded and through hard to first baseman Mark Reynolds.  Reynolds stretched himself heroically and managed to keep his foot on the bag while catching the Machado throw.  Replays showed that the runner was out as called.  Tiger Manager Jim Leyland came out to argue and for the first time in this observer's life, the four changed the call after talking among themselves.  No replay was consulted.  The second the call was changed Reynolds threw his glove to the ground and was immediately ejected.  Oriole Manager Buck Showalter immediately protested and was also quickly ejected.  There was no word on whether the Orioles intended to protest the game, which also included a blown call in the first inning when Nick Markakis was ruled out a home.  NFL: Raven placekicker Billy Cundiff made the pro bowl two seasons ago.  Then, after a less productive 2011 Cundiff missed a chip shot field goal in the waning seconds of the AFC Title game, costing the Ravens a berth in the Superbowl.  Cundiff is still with the Ravens, but is locked in a tight battle with Rookie Justin Tucker, the former Texas Longhorn kicker.  Cundiff uploaded a video to You Tube wherein he stated that if he kicks well in the preseason the job is his.  Don't count on it.  Tucker has been spectacular through two exhibitions.  Last night he was 2-2 in field goals, including a booming 50 yarder that would have been good from 65.  Even more impressive was the successful onsides kick he executed in the waning seconds of the game against Detroit.

obama really did slash medicare

As has been pointed out by the ones on the watchtower - Levin, Limbaugh et al - the left has been caught slackjawed in their assault of Rep. Ryan by the reality of what obama has done to medicare.  His obamamess slashes medicare to the tune of $711 billion, and in the immediate aftermath of the non-vote vote in 2009, the head of the regime told DNC functionary Chuck Todd that he would veto any legislation that tried to put that money back into medicare.  So when some of the left's most dependable functionaries - blabbermouth shultz, soulpop obrien et al went on the attack, some astute defenders of Gov. Romney fired back:  forget about what Ryan wants to do, what about what obama has done?  suddenly silence (actually, obrien, in a spasm of silliness, said he'd changed his mind or something to that effect, as if you can change your mind when you've already cut the money.)

In the meantime, word leaked out that the slimey left has put together even more lies aka ads attacking Gov. Romney and VP Ryan.  The newest disgrace has to do with Ryan meeting with a large donor.  If that were a bad thing, obama would already be most of the way to hell.  Geez oh whiz, lads, you guys are lapdogs to a bona-fide criminal in Georgie Soros! Adelman? His big crime is contributing to somebody trying to save the dear old USA from Armageddon. But untruth will not slow the far left.  That's why there were guffaws galore yesterday when obama and biden both said, on the same day but not the same place, that both Romney and Ryan are "decent fellows".  They both added, "They really are!"  There, now the mendacious media will be able to mumble something about how highbrow the two suddenly have become.  (biden kind of messed everything up when he made a racial gaff about black folk "being put back in chains".  Sadly, he really did say that.  Just think how embarassing it is to say anything negative about Rep. Ryan when your candidate is that goofball.

Word also leaked out about the jitters running up and down the far left's nimble spine when reports showed the large and enthusiastic crowds attending romney and ryan events while obama and biden continue to draw small and unenthusiastic crowds.  its tough to draw a crowd when your supporters are all dealing with their unemployment bennies.  You go get'em hussein!

Fire with Fire

He has sunk to the lowest level imaginable.  On the heels of a campaign ad that accused Governor Romney of killing the wife of a former steelworker, an ad that jammed so many lies into a short time it boggled the mind, obama has now come out with a new low=life ad that falsely accuses Romney of being a tax thief.  Like the former ad, it is jam-packed with lie after lie.  Lie after lie.  On the campaign stump, he spews nothing but lies and quarter-truths.  I believe that he thinks he has a moral right to lie because it is the only tool he has that can get him reelected.  People who believe this kind of thing about themselves are the most dangerous, because they think the ends - his continuing in power - justify the means; i.e., the bald-faced lying.

When people start to act like that they have put themselves ahead of the public good.  When honesty and nobility lose, when the ego trumps morality, the country is a certain loser.  What's worse, the media, now totally devoid of integrity, is out echoing the obama campaign's talking points, arguing that these ads are the moral equivalent of romney's ad pointing out that obama, by executive order, has gutted clinton's welfare bill that provides benefits only to those seeking work.  Now, no such effort on the part of recipients is required.  One of NBC's functionaries asked Romney if the campaigns are in a race to the bottom.  Romney was slack-jawed at the thought that there is any sort of moral equivalency to the two ads, since obama's is a collection of bald-faced lies while Romney's is a mild telling of the truth.  We haven't dredged up anything personal about him, Romney told the DNC's Chuck Todd.  Oh, OK!

There has never, in the history of this country, been such a low life holding the reigns of power.  He makes Nixon seem like an angel.  We have always been a noble people, until, that is, the current rabble took control.  This group, beginning with the drone-like obama, sees no lie or distortion they cannot embrace if it will keep obama in power.  Some have speculated from the outset that obama will not cede power.  There were, almost immediately, signs that it was true.  The governor of North Carolina said elections came too fast and the group in power needed more time to get the country on the right path.  She forgot that our willingness to change leaders regularly is what keeps us from falling into the trap that caught Germany, Italy and other western nations.

Some observers, me included, are agog at the spectre of the leaders of one party doing these kinds of things to the country, while the rest of the party sits back and watches, staying silent.  It is the mark of an individual that speaks truth to power.  But now an entire party stays silent while the leaders run as fast as they dare down the rails to an abysmal and cataclysmic new low.  How low?  Nothing is sacrosanct.  Nothing.  It has been said that the aim of obama is to convince the country that Romney is the lowest of the low.  Let me say this:  obama has proven he knows that place extremely well.  

We have gone from the country of John Kennedy to the country of the thug leader.  Thuggery is the rule of the current group, and the rest sit by silent.  The GOP nominates an honest businessman and politician who preaches a middle-of-the-road platform that has been the hallmark of both parties for over one hundred years.  Disagree with it if you want.  Believe that he has an inability to spot evil, even when it is barking at him and standing on his toes.  This is your right.  But don't do so by embracing this low-brow, low-life kind of politics.  And what kind of man allows himself to be at the top of the mob that uses such thuggery?  He is obama.