Goodbye ... to "Only A Game."

In the early years of home ownership, we used to awaken on Saturday mornings to the clock radio emitting the dulcet tones of Charles P. Pierce as he commented about the week in sports on "Only A Game" at public radio. We'd stay in bed and listen to the show before making coffee. That's loyalty.

At some point the habit waned. It happens; I started following Charlie Pierce at Esquire, when he graduated (?) to writing about politics. The show kept going, and as this farewell essay notes, it was Bill Littlefield's retirement in 2018 that suggested the end was near.

But I look back on it fondly.

After 27 years, WBUR’s ‘Only A Game’ — a show about stories you never wanted to end — is coming to an end, by Chad Finn (Boston Globe)

For 27 years, “Only A Game,” the sole sports program on National Public Radio and WBUR, told the kind of compelling, satisfying stories that a listener never quite wanted to end.

Somewhere along the way, it became one of those stories itself.

So it is with a sense of distinct accomplishment, but one of some melancholy too, that the people behind the program prepare to sign off for the final time, the show a casualty of budget cuts at WBUR in the economic maelstrom of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Only A Game” is one more lovely story ending.

The final original hourlong program will air Saturday at 7 a.m. on WBUR and on more than 250 NPR stations nationwide.

Naomi Kresge and Arne Delfs

The other side of Cokie Roberts, beloved regurgitator of the status quo.

I understand why the late Cokie Roberts was valued by her readers and listeners on the basis of being a woman in a man's game who broke through the glass ceiling. However, as with so many other aspects of our existence, there comes a time when actual content matters, and not merely the outer appearances. It's important to have another, deeper point of view. Read it, then decide for yourself.

Nostradamus of the Obvious, by Mark Dery (The Baffler)

On Cokie Roberts

WHEN SHE DIED THIS PAST SEPTEMBER at seventy-five, Cokie Roberts, political commentator for NPR and ABC News and well-connected member of D.C.’s “little village,” as it’s known to Washington’s inner circle, was lauded as a pioneering female journalist who gate-crashed the boys’ clubs of broadcast news and political punditry. Her friend and fellow NPR reporter Nina Totenberg remembered her as “always polite” yet “willing to ask the impolitic question if necessary”—“impolitic” questions being the equivalent, in NPR’s ASMR-inducing atmosphere of timorous “civility,” of the caning of Charles Sumner.

To be sure, she was a tart-tongued observer of the misbehaving schoolboys in Congress, armed with the sort of inside-baseball knowledge of Capitol Hill you’d expect from someone whose parents both served in the House of Representatives. (Her father, Hale Boggs, a Democrat from New Orleans, made it to majority leader; when he was presumed dead in office, Roberts’s mother, Lindy Boggs, ran for his seat, won it, and held onto it for nine terms, from 1973 to 1991.) But she was also a Nostradamus of the Obvious, a mouthpiece for conventional wisdom who channeled the worldview of the D.C. elite for drive-time audiences. As such, she provides an invaluable civics lesson. Putting the class loyalties of the strenuously non-partisan pundit on full display, Roberts showed us how the commentariat heads off challenges to the status quo: by policing the boundaries, in public discourse, of what’s reasonable and what’s beyond the pale.

When Totenberg eulogized her colleague, multimillionaire, A-lister at Sally Quinn’s dinner parties, and fond friend of Bush Senior, as “always the voice of people with less power,” listeners familiar with Roberts’s reliably smug, often snide dismissal of any candidate or policy proposal a millimeter to the left of D.C. orthodoxy rolled their eyes so hard they could barely dislodge them. Roberts “never met a liberal to whom she could not condescend,” asserts Eric Alterman in What Liberal Media?, a critique of the conservative canard that the media tilts left.

For a “founding mother” of “liberal” NPR, Roberts had an incurable addiction to uncritically swallowing and regurgitating conservative bunkum ...

Deaf Gahan says housing vouchers are the panacea. An NPR and PBS investigation bursts the mayor's bunker bubble.

Perhaps Adam Dickey believes that between them, Jeff Gahan, David Duggins and Dan Coffey can solve a nationwide voucher problem right here in Go Away (Poor People) City.

It's just another reason why New Albany's drooling class is unfit for command.

When Housing Assistance Fails, by Tanvi Misra (CityLab)

An NPR and PBS investigation puts two housing assistance programs under the microscope—and finds fraud, discrimination, and wasted taxpayer dollars.

Section 8 vouchers were created in 1974 to help poor residents move to neighborhoods with more jobs, better schools, and less crime. But only one in four households that need rental assistance, including Section 8, actually receives it. It’s not an entitlement as many would think, Urban Institute’s Erika C. Poethig explains—it’s a housing lottery.

But the lucky winners are often relegated to neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, thanks to the program’s design. Even if these vouchers cover the entire rent, landlords in high-opportunity areas will often refuse to take them. And even if they do, people who receive housing assistance face discrimination in their new neighborhoods. As Emily Badger explained in The Washington Post, “Section 8” has become “a racial slur” over time.

At NPR: "Guess Who's Fighting To Keep Indiana Dry On Sundays?"

"Indiana is the only one where you can't buy packaged beer, wine and liquor on Sundays."

Wrong.

In fact, even reporters based in Indiana invariably miss a key point: You most certainly can get cold beer to go on Sunday in Indiana ... from the state's 65+ small craft breweries. The first day for such sales was July 4, 2010.

Indiana's small wineries have been able to sell their wine to go on Sunday for many years, too.

Guess Who's Fighting To Keep Indiana Dry On Sundays?, by Sara Wittmeyer (NPR)

When you think summer, you might think of cold beer at a barbecue, maybe a bottle of wine with a Sunday picnic. A lot of people take it for granted that they can just go to the store and pick up alcohol.

Not in Indiana.

While many states have laws restricting liquor sales, Indiana is the only one where you can't buy packaged beer, wine and liquor on Sundays, and it's the only state that regulates alcohol sales based on temperature. Only liquor stores can sell cold beer.