News Potpourri

So Many Choices

I decided to use the word potpourri in the title as it means rotten pot in French. Just sayin’.

Maybe you don’t read or watch the ‘news’ at all, or maybe a sly peek once in a while. I’m less inclined to these days, especially as the last four horrific years of insanity start to dim somewhat in the memory banks.

Kate Gitman posted “7 reasons I Don’t Watch the News Anymore” on Womenosophy a few months ago. In a nutshell her reasons are; It’s a creativity killer, Awareness won’t make me happier, It’s an infinite source of negativity, This negativity damages my emotional well-being, It doesn’t let me get a peaceful sleep, I don’t want to be addicted to it, and Productivity and optimism are my priorities.

I do agree with many of these reasons as ‘news’ is usually skewed to the sensational, especially major network and cable news. It’s easy to get sucked in.

On the other hand, the masthead of the Washington Post states Democracy Dies in Darkness. We are currently witness to democracy being tested, even though the former president is not as consistently in the spotlight. The racist, white supremacist, conspiracy theorist crowd across the land, who are overtly vocal about it, should be a wake-up call as democracy for all American people – Blacks, Asians, Hispanic, Native Americans, Middle Easterners, et al – can no longer be taken for granted. (I wrote more extensively about this on January 7 in a post titled Our Democracy, Part 1)

If you’re not hip to the history lessons provided (for free!) by Heather Cox Richardson, she has written that Democracy depends on the rule of law, on equality before the law, on reality-based policy, on free and fair suffrage, on the legitimacy of (at least) two political parties, and on the peaceful transition of power.

In the clearest terms, she writes daily about these very ideas and how it relates to our history as a country, and how that pertains to current events. If you haven’t done so, check out Letters From an American.

Besides Richardson’s daily email we have several online subscriptions right now; Washington Post, NYTimes, Tucson Sentinel, Charles Pierce at Esquire. I also have given money to the Guardian in the past. The Post and the Times are behind firewalls, by the way.

And one of my favorite political blogs is The Rude Pundit by Lee Papa, a professor at the College Of Staten Island, who has said, “my role in the whole discourse of bloggery is as the Fool. I’m here to drag politics back to the bar where we can talk about it while we suck down boilermakers and figure out how we can make the nation well again.”

I also check in with Democracy Now (really, really far left), Dan Rather’s News and Guts, Rolling Stone, NPR, and Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station (Wright posts almost daily on Facebook and not as often now on his blog).

If you’re going to dive into news, and I know most of you have probably seen this, here is an accurate graphic as to which direction news outlets lean. As you know, I lean quite left for reasons I’ve clearly stated over the past several years on Facebook. (FYI, I’m taking a break from that platform right now)

So, with all of that in mind, I’ll only be dishing out small doses of news, political opinions, and editorials here at Tales From the Homestead, and will pick and choose a few items of interest now and then that you can read more fully if you so choose. Go!

1. David Leonhardt, a senior writer at The New York Times, penned a piece with the title Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy? That got my attention. He went on to say, “Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.”

2. Charles Pierce’s headline that stuck out to me; Kamala Harris Is Going to Be Doing a Lot of This for the Next Two Years. He is referring, of course, to Harris breaking a 50-50 tie that gave the White House and congressional Democrats the go-ahead to pass the relief package with those same 51 votes. He went on to say, “The 2020 elections were not fought and won by the faint-hearted, or by Washington Wise Men who feel lost if they're not consulted every 20 minutes. Got a problem with that? Take it up with Madame VP. She has the hammer now.”

3. I like reading Robert Reich in small doses. He recently wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian about the impeachment predicament. He wrote, “A shocking three out of four Republican voters don’t think Joe Biden won legitimately. About 45% even support the storming of the Capitol. The crux of the problem is Americans now occupy two separate worlds – a fact-based pro-democracy world and a Trump-based authoritarian one. Trump spent the last four years seducing voters into his world, turning the GOP from a political party into a grotesque projection of his pathological narcissism.”

Many thanks to those of you who have emailed me with words of encouragement regarding this endeavor. Cheers to you all!

That’s all for today…now for some philosophy!