Border to border and ocean to ocean, I still look for her everyplace.

 I really need to write these when they come. I was full of piss & vinegar about a subject yesterday morning and equally full about an entirely different one last night. Now, I can't remember the former and have gone back to "that's why you ignore them" on the former. I mean, Blogger allows you to schedule posts and keep some in the draft section. Ah, well.

 While everything was of modest length and nothing was too in-depth, the News was pretty good this week, I think. Three days of pretty decent old-school blogging on the news of the time. Monday was a look into how the Mississippi government's ignoring of the COVID issue is biting us in the ass this week and Wednesday was how the federal government continues to bumble along. We gave the final presidential debate a quick look Friday, plus a little on how Trump really, really needs to stop bringing up China. Like I said, nothing special but well done all around.

 I was busy on Tumblr this week, writing a lot of posts for my Jukebox In The Mind series. That's what I'm calling it, by the way. I wrote about AC\DC, Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, Waylon Jennings, Tommy Cash, and finally a little bit on how the Kipsigis people of Kenya thought Jimmie Rodgers sounded like a man-antelope hybrid. I thought it was kind of neat and writing about music is always fun, as is writing about the ties that bind humanity that we may not see. When I can write about both, boy, that is killer diller.

 Anyhow, the thing I got wound up about yesterday that I can remember is this latest round of dumbassery with The New York Times. Long story short, a reporter named Elaina Plott wrote a story about how white suburbanites around Atlanta were still in the Trump congregation despite the rest of Georgia leaning towards Joe Biden. Okay, fair enough, but nothing worth a story in the Times. If anyone's spent any time in some of the suburbs around Atlanta this comes as no shock at all. That's Trump's base, right there.

 The problem, though, was her two sources were supposedly average white folks from the Atlanta suburbs and turned out to be hip-deep in GOP national politics. One was a former state Republican strategist and the other was the son of Trump's ambassador to Luxembourg. Even worse, this wasn't the first time that Plott had used dubious sources for a fluff piece on the Trump Administration nor the first time those two folks were used as sources claimed to be "jes' plain folk." Salena Zito has made a career out of doing just this.

 Anyhow, she gets called out, the Times does a half-ass explanation, she gives a half-ass apology, and so-called "professional journalists" who bring down big money writing dull stories about the story they want American politics to go on a crusade to defend her honor against us filthy plebes who dared criticize of one of theirs. That was last night's political Twitter.

 It's almost comical how predictable this sort of thing is. You can set your watch to something like this every time the consumers criticize the big-time media. And they don't seem to get how bad it makes them look. Even worse, Plott describes herself as a "recovering (Ann) Coulter fangirl" from high school and since she's in her late 20s, that means she was a fan of Coulter after that nasty thing said we need to forcible convert the Muslim world to Christianity. And this was at least a good decade after anyone with a functioning soul acknowledged Ann Coulter's role as a public asshole.

 So, that happened, and once again, the big-time press defended someone who carries water for a guy who calls them "the enemy of the people." He stirs up his faithful to hate them like the press is the devil, and there have already been threats against the media for being mean to Trump. What's worse is how hard the rest of the big-time press gets severely knotted up when they get the least bit of criticism or appropriation. Every time.

 You won't find a bigger defender of journalism than me, but things like this happen and it's understandable why people rail against the "mainstream media." It's a fine example of why local journalism and alternative publications should be supported and the first go-to for your news. Don't follow The Washington Post or CNN for what goes on in Portland when the Rose City has several fine local news sources and The Portland Mercury is a great example of a community-focused alt-weekly.

 As always, all of my journalism experience is with local papers and alt-weeklies, so grain of salt. It's a drag, though, that good sources on Washington, D.C., politics are thin on the ground. Not sources that reporter on the news about American politics, we've got plenty of those. But straight news reporting that doesn't eventually get sucked into the Mainstream Morass.

 But little will be done about it at a level that could actually fix anything and we'll probably play the whole passion play all over again sooner than later. So I wonder if it's worth getting too bent out of shape over. In any event, I finished Jennifer Government last night and I recommend it. I don't want to give anything away, so all I'll say is everyone who thinks they've got what will keep everyone else under their thumb really needs to study up on their chaos theory when setting up "the perfect society."

 You can't predict people. They will always surprise you, sometimes painfully. And that's all I have to say about that.