Even older than the cars we drive, and they're old (but still reliable). We drive our vehicles till the wheels fall off. Of course they require maintenance, but that's cheaper than payments.

We only bought one new car in our life, a Toyota truck in '86, which we still have and use around the homestead. It has over 400,000 miles on it.

One of our music buddies died of cancer on Monday. We plan to gather today and play a few songs for him.

Hope all is well, and your weather is pleasant. We're headed to the 80's today. Guess I brought home some Mexican weather. Take care.

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Feb 22
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Jeff Gerth on the failure of the U.S. press to report the true story during the Trump-Russia saga.
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  Chris Hedges      

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Walter Lippmann in his 1920 book Liberty and the News warned that when journalists “arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable.” Perhaps no other quote sums up the debacle known as Russiagate, the hundreds if not thousands of stories and news reporters that falsely painted the Trump administration as a tool of Russia and Vladimir Putin. The flawed reporting is an example of the steep erosion of journalistic ethics and standards and a lack of transparency and honesty on the part of the press. The Trump-Russia reporting has contributed to the steep decline of trust in the media and the bifurcation of the press into antagonistic tribes, neither of which are concerned with the truth but intent on catering to a particular demographic. The nation’s most reputable news organizations, as the investigative reporter Jeff Gerth points out, were guilty of egregious lapses. The New York Times, for example, in January 2018 ignored a publicly available document showing that the FBI’s lead investigator didn’t think, after ten months of inquiry into possible Trump-Russia ties, that there was much there. This omission, Gerth notes, disserved Times readers. The lie of omission is still a lie. And, to put it bluntly, in its eagerness to discredit Trump the lie of omission, combined with reliance on sources that peddled fictions designed to cater to Trump haters, as well as a failure to seek out those being attacked, dominated the liberal media landscape for four years of the Trump presidency. Hiding behind the wall of anonymous sources, frequently identified as “people (or person) familiar with” -- the Times used it over a thousand times in stories involving Trump and Russia between October 2016 and the end of his presidency – any rumor or smear was picked up in the news cycle with the source essentially unidentified and the information unverified. A routine, Gerth notes, soon took shape in the Trump-Russia saga. First, a federal agency like the CIA or FBI secretly briefs Congress. Then Democrats or Republicans selectively leak snippets that bolster their narrative. Finally, the story comes out, using vague attribution. The typical reader or viewer is clueless. This erosion has seen trust in the press plummet, with 86 percent of American saying they find press reports biased. The U.S. media has the lowest credibility – 26 percent – among forty-six nations, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Stunningly, the decline has been accompanied by a lack of self-criticism and introspection by journalists and press organizations that month after month, year after year hyped a lie. To date, none of these press outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Mother Jones have provided a postmortem look at their coverage. Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter who worked at The New York Times from 1976 until 2005, spent the last two years writing an exhaustive look at the systemic failure of the press during the Trump-Russia story, authoring a four-part series of 24,000 words that has been published by The Columbia Journalism Review. Joining me to discuss his investigation is Jeff Gerth.

Ashes? THE Ashes? It's a test.

Otherwise, Aw Faw Dow

be well and have a good one

the whales at the shoreline of Maui with it.

I have no car, so I can't have ashes in my trunk.

Anything else you need to know?

We have full bloom of flowers in our garden. Looks nice, but it's completely off for this time of the year.

But what is not Off these days.

Enjoy life as long as you have it. Bye.

celebration in N.O.;

from N.O.

Thanks for the OT QMS.
Old cars...we got em...

Looks like we have skipped spring, gone straight to summer.
The old cars are so damn cool!
When we attended a concert this past Sunday in the Beaumont area, the band and their crew gave me 6 or 7 Mardi Gras necklaces. Not sure what to do with them, but I may find a way to display the sparkly things on a wall somewhere.
I hope everyone enjoyed their day, or at least made a good memory.