Worst corporate drivel ever as the newspaper's parent company plans a garage sale.

Leave it to a chain newspaper entity to unleash dolt-speak in announcing almost nothing at all apart from a desire for corporate bigwigs to make even more money.

People who write this badly should be in prison camps -- not children. Passages highlighted in bold scarlet represent particularly egregious spoutings of nonsensical gibberish.

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CNHI explores sale of newspaper company, by a robot at the CNHI NEWS SERVICE, live from the sand trap of a Bobby Jones golf course somewhere in sweet home Alabama

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – CNHI, LLC, one of the country’s leading providers of local news and information, said Monday it is exploring the sale of its newspaper properties in 22 states.

The announcement was made after its parent company, Raycom Media Inc., reported it has signed an agreement to be acquired by Gray Television group, a public company headquartered in Atlanta.

The News and Tribune is owned by CNHI, a subsidiary of Raycom.

Donna Barrett, CNHI’s president and chief executive office, said the company has retained the newspaper brokerage firm of Dirks, Van Essen, Murray and April to handle the sale of its newspapers.

“We’re excited to open the next chapter in our commitment to top-flight community journalism,” said Barrett. “We are looking for a transaction or transactions that will carry on CNHI’s rich tradition of public service through award-winning journalism.”

CNHI is a 20-year-old newspaper company that has grown from a few community newspapers at the outset to more than 100 papers today. They are located in the Midwest, Southwest, Southeast and Northeast.

Raycom Media Inc., which owns or operates television stations in 65 markets, acquired CNHI nine months ago.

“As we undertake this exploration process, we cannot say that any particular transaction will or will not take place,” said Barrett. “What we can say is that we will consider various options as we work to find a partner or partners that share our dedication to community newspapers and the vital journalism they produce to serve local audiences.”

Voting: Financial security, illiteracy and moral framing.

Frequent reader S introduces the topic of voting (and non-voting) patters of the financially insecure with this comment.

This probably says a lot about New Albany. It surely affects local elections even more, I would guess. Perhaps a different kind of "Get out the vote" campaign strategy is called for ...

Perhaps the most noteworthy revelation to be drawn from the survey is the very existence of Americans who feel financially secure.

Study: Financially Insecure Americans Less Likely to Vote (Associated Press)

Less financially secure Americans lean toward the Democratic Party, but are also less likely to vote, especially in midterm elections, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

The survey released Thursday by the nonpartisan Washington-based research group looked beyond income to measure economic security, instead considering such factors as whether people are employed, have difficulty paying bills or possess a retirement savings account.

Those who Pew ranked as the most "financially secure" were almost certain to be registered to vote, with Pew classifying 63 percent as likely to vote in November. But among the bottom 20 percent, only 54 percent are registered and only 20 percent were likely voters in the midterms.

In this excerpt from Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Henry Giroux takes it a step further: Illiteracy isn't just about being unable to read words on a page. Rather, it describes the loss of a filter by which one translates "private troubles to broader social issues."

The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy, by Henry Giroux (Moyers and Company)

Wright Mills argued 50 years ago that one important measure of the demise of vibrant democracy and the corresponding impoverishment of political life can be found in the increasing inability of a society to translate private troubles to broader public issues ...

... It is not that we have become a society of the spectacle — though that is partly true — but that we have fallen prey to a new kind of illiteracy in which the distinction between illusion and reality is lost, just as the ability to experience our feelings of discontent and our fears of uncertainty are reduced to private troubles, paralyzing us in a sea of resentment waiting to be manipulated by extremists extending from religious fanatics to right-wing radio hosts. This is a prescription for a kind of rage that looks for easy answers, demands a heightened emotional release and resents any attempts to think through the connection between our individual woes and any number of larger social forces. A short list of such forces would include an unchecked system of finance, the anti-democratic power of the corporate state, the rise of multinationals and the destruction of the manufacturing base and the privatization of public schooling along with its devaluing of education as a public good. As the public collapses into the personal, the personal becomes “the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence,” the formative educational and political conditions that make a democracy possible begin to disappear. Under such circumstances, the language of the social is either devalued, pathologized or ignored and all dreams of the future are now modeled around the narcissistic, privatized and self-indulgent needs of consumer and celebrity culture and the dictates of the allegedly free market. How else to explain the rage against big government but barely a peep against the rule of big corporations who increasingly control not only the government but almost every vital aspect of our lives from health care to the quality of our environment?

Depressed yet?

Let's not neglect George Lakoff, whose work was considered in this space a few weeks ago. Added to a variable consciousness borne of financial insecurity, and illiteracy as launching a crisis of democracy, there's the familiar but now modeified "illiterate and impoverished chicken who when bothering to vote at all opts for Colonel Sanders," owing to unconscious "strict father morality.

Lakoff: " Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth."

... George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

Unless the school corporation referendum brings out municipal voters in May, there'll almost certainly be another historic low in turnout.

Who'll be the ones pulling those metaphorical levers?

ON THE AVENUES: You can call me Che.

ON THE AVENUES: You can call me Che.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

The sensation of which I speak isn’t an irrational state like paranoia, which in the case of our New Albanian milieu is a condition monopolized to such an impressive degree by the founder of the Cracked Kitchen Linoleum Blog that it might as well be patented as a brand name – perhaps Yvonnanoia?

No, what I mean is the suspicion that you’re being toyed with, prompted and set up, suddenly confronted with a situation so weirdly surreal that a hidden camera surely must be aimed your way, primed to capture your dumbfounded, flailing reaction for speedy editing into a video, and posting on YouTube, where it will be greeted virally with the guffaws of the uneducated, addled masses.

My former manager at Scoreboard Liquors must have felt this way on that infamous day thirty years ago when a stranger walked in, pointed at the door to the rear office, and asked, “Do you mind if I go back there and change my pants?”

YouTube obviously didn’t exist back then, but Lloyd “Duck” Cunningham’s unprintable reply would have played well on Candid Camera, with Allen Funt suffering the brunt of the beeped-out epithets.

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As the first week of the New Year unfolded, my inbox disgorged a question.

A little while ago I noticed there was a room that had pictures of several mass murdering, genocidal, tyrannical dictators on the walls. As a customer what meaning should I take from that? In my opinion it seems to show support from the owner of New Albania of these tyrants?

I enjoy the pizza at NABC but I don't enjoy the thought of supporting someone that idolized people like the pictures and posters you seem to proudly display. Maybe I misunderstand their meaning.

My initial reaction was anger: Who’d gone and pulled down my Commie posters, and replaced them with fascists like Hitler, Mussolini and Idi Amin? Then I realized he was referring to Red Room stalwarts like Lenin, Castro and Gus Hall. Well, fair enough, because it all depends on where you’re standing.

Here’s what I told him in reply.

It isn’t necessarily a misunderstanding on your part, but what I can tell you with certainty is that there is no idolatry on mine.

I remain a leftist, broadly speaking, and I traveled in the East Bloc and USSR as a young man in the 1980s, but while I found these countries fascinating from a number of standpoints, they were not places where I ever wished to live.

Your question is asked every now and then, and my answer always has been the same: The Red Room means whatever the observer wishes for it to mean: Kitschy poster art emporium, as spoils of Cold War victory or a shrine of reverence.

However, the primary intent for me is for it to serve as a talking point to help keep a piece of still-recent history living, in the sense that with each passing year, fewer (mostly younger) customers have any idea what the era even was about.

The verdict of history is fairly clear when it comes to the legacy of Stalin and Mao, and I have confidence that interested parties will reach that conclusion, as you and I surely have. But they must first be interested, and motivated to investigate. In my view, the Red Room periodically serves that purpose.

To the best of my knowledge, the preceding explanation is true. As for what I might have been thinking twenty years ago with regard to the space now known as the Red Room, it’s also true that my prime motivation at the time was to have a place to display the many period propaganda pieces hauled home from travels abroad. One thing led to another, and there it was.

I’m the first to admit there is as little to idolize on Stalin’s part as Hitler’s, but to repeat, the point lies elsewhere. Now that decades have passed and the older generations have departed, precious little discussion takes place about the “-isms” dominating the entirety of the 20th century … and sorry tea-baggers, but loud ranting amid voluminous spittle about communism in the context of “Obamacare” does not suffice as earnestness.

Forgetting history begets repeating it, as either Santayana or Carlos Santana once said. It is my intention not to do so.

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But my favorite example of work- and history-related consumer behavior occurred not at the Public House, but at Bank Street Brewhouse not long after we opened in 2009.

One of our servers was asked to explain Roger’s political beliefs in light of the red stars and leftist images on the shiny new brewing equipment visible just past the window.

Our man on the floor at the time, who’d studied some history and poli-sci, made a game effort to interpret these complex threads of geopolitics, economics and the art of brewing, and to phrase them in snappy sentences reproducible on bumper stickers for a Lexus, and yet the customer remained unimpressed, writing this on his charge card receipt:

“Tell your Commie boss to share the wealth.”

In order to accentuate his displeasure with my cheeky political proclivities, this rather boorish scion of an identifiably Falangist regional family left the gratuity column empty, thus stiffing the server while doing me no harm whatever.

Classy.

Not only that, but the customer was utterly mistaken; in fact, I share the wealth of my knowledge every day, as teachers are wont to do, and in this vein, permit me to repeat my advice to the server should such a question ever be asked again:

“We don’t care what sort of ‘ist’ Roger is, just as long as he keeps signing our paychecks.”

Rep. Bob Morris: The conspiratorial face of domestic douchebaggery.

I have it on the best authority that Rep. Bob Morris was born in rural Paraguay, the illegitimate and illiterate son of Maj. Frank Burns and an escaped Nazi spy named Greta, and served as a professional misogynist in Ft. Wayne before turning to selling used cars to John Birch Society members. Morris’s birth certificate, driver’s license and elementary school diploma were forged on Photoshop. How do I know all this? I saw it on the Internet, and until Rep. Clere tells me otherwise, you can’t convince me.

Roger A. Baylor

I use this word so seldom, but what an asshole!

Lawmaker opposes Girl Scout honor » Recent Local News » News and Tribune

newsandtribune.com

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana lawmaker won’t support a resolution celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts because he believes it is a “radicalized organization” that supports abortion and promotes homosexuality. Rep. Bob Morris of Fort Wayne has sent a letter to fellow Indiana House Repu...

Like when I used to throw them out for drinking Miller Lite.

Erika's teapartying: Obama's a muslin! Obama's a muslin!

Erika's taken to writing Top Ten lists in her sleep, which is to say, during every waking hour. I came up with one, too.

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FREEDOM TO SCREECH TOP TEN LIST

10. I’ve lied to readers for five years by pretending to be a guy with a history degree when I’m not, and don’t.

9. I have changed my family dog's name to "Roger’s Patio," and am kicking him harder than I did before.

8. Black is black, white is white, muslin is a type of cloth, and I know less about world religions than Steve Price.

7. I would appoint David Brambleberry (“under God”) to replace my sister who fired me, except he doesn’t live here and hers is a county, not city, job.

6. If Maria Granger thinks she’s getting the Woman of the Year this time around, she has another thought coming.

5. If Hillary would have won, and not the black guy, I’d enthusiastically support her policies, which would have been precisely the same as his – but I’m not a hypocrite or anything.

4. I hate those pointy headed people who’ve come downtown and actually gotten things done. How dare they prove us wrong!

3. I recommend all Americans invest in big damned dogs, because we can’t afford to pay the police to protect us.

2. Before I leave this blog, I will belch even more lies about people and ideas that I hate.

1. Don't worry, little people. I’ll continue to fight the modern world even as you get poorer and increasingly marginalized. Just don’t say my real name out loud, or anything like that.

Wonderfully and delightfully us: The photographic evidence.

Couldn't help it.

Okay, so we're driving to the supermarket to get ingredients for my world-famous sauerkraut/mushroom/bean/smoked beer/doppelbock soup (there's no room left for the potatoes, so I'll have to dill them) when I see this marvelous sign at the stop 'n' rob on the southeast corner of Silver and Spring:

Acept food stamp

"Adept food stamp" would make more sense. I wonder why they only take one at a time?

Geography as the study of yokel mouths agaping.

My wife is a social worker.

For the uninitiated, here is a random web definition of her job: “A social worker is a professional trained to talk with people and their families about emotional or physical needs, and to find them support services.”

Upon returning to the office after our recently concluded holiday, D. noted that we’d just come back from a trip to Europe.

Came the immediate reply: “Did you fly or drive?”

No, not from a client ... from a co-worker.

I’m trying to imagine a European with an elementary school education working in a similar position and making a similar comment, but I can’t. It’s simply inconceivable. All of which reminds me of Bill Maher’s comments in his most recent contribution to Rolling Stone magazine, cleverly entitled “Dickheads of the Year”:

#7: The Solid Quarter

That twenty-five percent of America who would not desert George Bush if he ran over Dakota Fanning with his pickup truck on the White House lawn. Is it a coincidence that twenty-five percent is also the number of people who, in an AP poll of predictions for 2007, said they expect Jesus Christ to return this year!? I don't think it is.

Has anyone ever figured out why it is the case that we Americans so often accept insufficient education as a birthright? My guess has always been that we need an inadequately educated populace to be susceptible to sales pitches so that the consumer economy can continue to hum, but maybe there's more to it than that. After all, we elected Dubya -- not twice, but once.

Here's what Maher has to say about the lame duck in chief:

Who will tell this president what everyone but him already knows? The theory of evolution. And the times tables. And where the sun goes at night. And that Iraq is going to be three different countries. And that everyone hates us and we've run our military into the ground and the Taliban is back and we still haven't caught bin Laden and the economy is tanking and we wasted eight years blowing the oil companies while the Earth is melting. We had a pretty nice house when this Cat in the Hat of presidents came in and made the mess of all time. And who's going to clean it all up — Rudy Giuliani?

Readers, just remember that nothing's so bad that it can't be cured with a few Progressive Pints, and have a wonderful holiday ... even those of you who are cursing me at this very moment.

Conceptual incongruity?

Of all the municipal candidates for office who have established blogs, only two do not permit comments, which is another of saying that only two have a problem, even if oblique, with engaging in genuine dialogue on-line. Yep, they'd be Steve Price, the accidental 3rd district incumbent, and Professor Erika, aka Vickie Denhart. We've not seen her campaign signs, but it seems that CM Price is “standing up for you,” just so long as he isn’t burdened with “communicating with you,” or troubling his ghostwriter with pursuing the same aim.

An amazing photo, eh?

Politics sometimes makes bedfellows straight out of Bizarro Land, but this is ridiculous. The "org" proposes to spend less money for the greater good, while the "pol" seeks to spend no money, for no good, at any time. Doesn't sound like a strategy for growth, but only your inner Jethro knows for sure.

By the way, "standing up for you" returns 13,400 hits on Google. Originality? That's just a song title from a "cover" band, like "Silence Is (a) Golden (shower)."