I canceled Newsweek and Time Magazine

I thought about it over the weekend, and then I told myself it’s now or never. Canceling Newsweek was pretty easy because recently it went to digital format only, so with a simple notation at iToons, I was able to complete my mission. I received the print and digital version of Time, for the same price, so I went online and instructed them not to renew my subscription, thereby killing two birds with one stone.

I’ve always preferred weekly magazines because they normally went into more detail, and I liked some of the authors who wrote articles exclusively for the magazine. I developed a habit of  posting a reference link to an article, but I couldn’t do that if a story resided on my iPad. That’s when I found out that these author’s articles were posted on-line for free, so “why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” For example,every Sunday Fareed Zakaria will start his CNN show by repeating the article he just wrote for Time. Then again, people in this day and age don’t care about the details because their mind are made up by the time they are finished getting their filtered news.

I’m embarrassed to see what passes for news nowadays. Congressional  hearings used to be a serious venue;well there were the McCarthy hearings but overall senators, and representatives would do their homework and then ask serious questions. I ‘m sure by now you have heard about this story.

Breitbart News editor-at-large Ben Shapiro reported:

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.”
“There was, it turns out, a problem with the story: Friends of Hamas does not exist, and never has.” This piece of garbage was never vetted, but it was repeated by GOP senators as a reason Hagel should not be nominated.

If only this was an isolated case because one that really blew me out of the water was the one about the seasoned minority leader of the senate,Mitch McConnell asking the pentagon  to confirm or deny a story about detainees getting G.I. benefits. Is McConnell that naïve or is he that stupid?

I can’t imagine Walter Cronkite,Tedd Koppel,Peter Jennings or Edward R. Murrow putting up the internet nonsense we sometimes take for news. We still have some outstanding journalists but they are being overshadowed by partisan bloggers in our 24/7 hourly news shows.

Despite it being in the days before the 24/7 news cycle I don’t remember all the pity parties being thrown for democrats when President Reagan won 49 states and started a 12 year dominance.This morning one of my favorite political characters,James Carville,said Democrats should use non-liberal language when talking about guns or their fellow Democrats will suffer in the red states. Who am I to argue with Carville but why do liberals always have to give conservatives the home field advantage? If the tables were turned, the conservatives would just double down on their message. The daily conversation is about the GOP makeover but tune in to CSPAN  on March 14-16 and you will see the same old party shouting the same rhetoric at their annual CPAC summit.