Pro-Obama bias emains 2 years later/pblakeney.com

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S NOT FIT TO PRINT: How much nonsense can we tolerate? A responsible newspaper might say, “Americans need jobs and the President is a fool, squandering America’s future, under the direction of an ex-Israeli soldier ready to move back to Chicago to replace Al Capone.”  But not the NYT. As the nation dissolves, the New York Times and their resident genius, Arthur Sulzberger, continue to patronize us; if this were a high school J course (Goodman article below) would flunk; but so would the entire paper -- which Arthur has personally destroyed. I once left him drunk in a gutter on Fleet Street in London – where he was pretending to be a foreign correspondent-should have dropped him in the Thames in the best interests of our nation. Priceless reality, miles of gibberish which goes on for pages. And blah, blah, blah by someone from Harvard who tripped in an airport. No wonder nobody reads that trash anymore. NYT “All the Tripe Fit to Print.” No editors or judgment in sight. Just read the compendium of drivel below.

By Dennis Mullin

The Great Rupture

By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: July 2, 2010

“In a musty coffee shop in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., a dozen people occupying scruffy couches peer into laptop computers, their screens casting a blue glow across pasty faces. They scroll through online job listings, availing themselves of free Wi-Fi, as they pass another drizzly afternoon in the temporary office of the age.

Antonio Moore of San Mateo, Calif., once a $75,000-a-year consultant, now earns $10 an hour. You run across this scene in town after town these days, from doughnut shops tucked into strip malls in Charlotte to vegan cafes in Austin. It has become commonplace, along with possessions piled curbside in front of foreclosed homes. Here is gloomy evidence of a national hunger for paychecks, fresh sign of the everyday calamity coloring much of the American experience.

And yet the same scene suggests the endurance of a psychic strength that Americans like to claim for ourselves, at least in the mythologized version of our history: Hard times create a collective response. The worst economic downturn since the Depression, its depth underscored by weak job numbers released Friday, has turned coffee shops into grassroots unemployment offices. People exchange tips on who is hiring and where to post résumés. They watch one another’s belongings. They share limited electrical outlets, rationing resources in the sort of mutually beneficial fashion that typically eludes elected representatives in Washington.

A great many people have lost faith in powerful institutions, from Congress to Goldman Sachs. Yet beneath the bitterness coloring national affairs — down at the level of neighborhood, family, coffee shop, tavern — a tenuous belief in the collective good remains, perhaps moderating national dismay.

Who are we? This question has grown resonant as Americans try to secure satisfying answers for themselves, reclaiming identities stripped by the downturn. The recession turned creditworthy homeowners into delinquents and commuting professionals into the jobless.

“I just want to get my life back.” Different versions of this sentence have landed frequently in my notebook — in Cleveland, where a former homeowner told me of camping in her car after she lost the place to foreclosure; in Newton, Iowa, where a man who had earned middle-class wages turning steel into refrigerators broke into tears as he described his inability to provide medical care for a sick child after he lost his job; in Portland, where an unemployed marketing executive struggled to imagine how she would send her teenage daughter to college.

Another regular notebook entry: “I never saw myself as the sort of person who would land on public assistance.” So said a laid-off sales clerk in Tucson who was thinking about applying for welfare. She echoed a former mortgage consultant now frying bacon bits at a Red Robin restaurant in Northern California.

So much is so clearly in disarray that disaster seems almost banal. In front of vacant Southern California strip malls that once held furniture showrooms and mortgage offices, people in gorilla suits wave signs at passing cars, advertising the lone growth industry: CASH FOR GOLD. In Phoenix, freeway billboards advertise BANKRUPTCY BY PHONE, the expunging of debt apparently as unexceptional as ordering a pizza.

In Boise, Idaho, Elias Campos, a laid-off carpenter, remembers getting a call from his bank last year promising to lower his credit card’s interest rate. He just needed to provide a recent paycheck. “I say, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ ”

In Cape Coral, Fla., where irrepressible marketing (Heard of the Clintons’ order that banks give away unsecured loans so as Hillary said “every American can own his/her own house” (and now nobody does) ....unsecured loans aimed to turn hundreds of miles of canals into a modern-day Venice on the Gulf of Mexico. This will stop with a crunch the first Tuesday in November.