STOP The (USIP Building) STEAL!




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NOTE: “Corruptio optimi pessima” = Corruption of the best is the worst of all.
I can’t remember when I started reading the Washington Post. I was following it through the Watergate years, but was a mostly broke rookie trying to find my footing as a writer to afford a subscription. By the early ‘80s, though, when I lived inside the Beltway, it was slapped down outside my front door every morning. After detours in Pennsylvania and then a move into North Carolina, I became a regular again. I was not an early adopter of the digital edition, but soon got used to it.
When Bezos killed the Harris endorsement, I didn’t like it, but mostly shrugged. After forty years as a working writer, I knew that endorsements rarely move the needle and understood the Golden Rule of Journalism (& the rest of corporate America): Them With the Gold Make (& Break) the Rules. I was more upset by watching the once-titanic paper shrink and shrivel with the wasting disease of internet competition.
But now we’ve turned the page into the wilderness of Project 2025, and anyone can see its progress, like a rapidly-metastasizing tumor. The Post’s bending of the knee is tragically just about on schedule.
There are other news sources, mainly in the half-underground of Substack. But the loss of the Post is gall and wormwood, a bitter pill.
And not the last one.
I’m still not making predictions about the election’s outcome. And I’m so over searching for the hidden meanings in polls. My record of not answering the non-Hurricane flood of robocalls remains unbroken. Not least, I voted two weeks — seems like two months — ago.
So now there’s only one big question hanging over the official end of this endless campaign season, namely:
What am I gonna do when we have a winner?
I think I’ve found my answer. It’s in a compact box in the cupboard, that turned up at a nearby market: the key ingredient for a forbidden feast.
It’s something I’ve been waiting for a long time. So if the post- voting wrangling lasts til January 19, 2025, I think I can hold out that much longer. (After that, we’ll have to see.) Or if I get trapped in a hundred-hour traffic backup between Niagara Falls and the Canadian border, all bets are off.
But enough of such catastrophizing: time for a bit of untrammeled fantasy: Continue reading My Secret Post-Election Plan: Celebration?? Or Consolation??
[NOTE: the CNN Business report cited below deals with an abortion rights vote coming in Florida. But this blog post, while not discounting the importance of that issue, is focused on a judge in a related lawsuit. More specifically, on a ruling he issued last week. Even more, on a five-word summary of the basis for the decision, which echoes like a thunderclap. The rest is needful context, but the aphorism will, I believe, be what is remembered long after the details have receded into the mists.]
. . . “It’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
That’s what a federal judge wrote Thursday (October 17) as he sided with local TV stations in an extraordinary dispute over a pro-abortion rights television ad. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida granted a temporary restraining order against Florida’s surgeon general after the state health department threatened to bring criminal charges against broadcasters airing the ad.[/caption]
Continue reading Quote of the Month: “It’s the First Amendment, stupid”
Biden lays into Trump during New Hampshire stop
By MATTHEW MEDSGER mmedsger@nullbostonherald.com | Boston Herald
PUBLISHED: October 22, 2024
President Joe Biden was in New Hampshire on Tuesday to spread the word about his administration’s work to lower the price of prescription drugs, but he also used the visit as a chance to offer a stark warning about a potential second Trump White House.
Biden joined Vermont’s Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders at NHTI Community College in Concord, for an invite-only afternoon event where the president laid out his thoughts on the choice that voters face this November.