Democratic primary coverage is why WE cancelled OUR New York Times subscriptions.

Given the results on Super Tuesday, the following critique -- published almost a month ago -- obviously doesn't take the most recent Democratic primary evolution into consideration (read: it preceded the DNC's recent "Dim-pire Strikes Back" pro-Biden shenanigans).

However, as an explanation of why I recently severed our household's ties with the New York Times after more than a decade of subscribing, this essay does a fine job, indeed.

We're just one of many, and I really enjoy reading a tactile Sunday newspaper, but I could no longer in good conscience give money to a newspaper prone to running "hit pieces" (the author's term) against Bernie Sanders. One can only speculate about the newspaper's activities behind the scenes.

The author appears to have had a digital subscription. Our was Sunday delivery with digital access included. That's $12 a week, or a honking $624 a year. I can think of far better things to do with that kind of money than pay Thomas Friedman to write his dirtbag bilge.

For now, here's David Blass: Why I just cancelled my New York Times subscription: Democratic primary coverage as “fit” to print as Trump is to serve.

... Unfortunately, though some of the examples I’ve cited are particularly transparent, this type of reporting is the rule rather than the exception for Sanders in both the press and in cable news coverage. I used to think the New York Times was above the journalistic chicanery I saw elsewhere in the media, but the facts speak for themselves.

Coming to terms with this made me a more cynical person. Perhaps that’s a good thing; seeing grays between black and white can make us more tolerant and empathetic. But for now, my biggest unanswered question is for the Times’ board of directors: Is this your best attempt at self-preservation? ...

... I’ve subscribed to the New York Times since 2016. That might not sound like a long time, but it’s most of my adult life. As of today, I’ve lost my trust in the Times and have neither a use for its coverage nor a desire to support a thinly veiled purveyor of the propaganda Noam Chomsky described in Manufacturing Consent. In fact, in a 2010 interview, six years before the New York Times would all but write off Trump’s chances at the presidency, Chomsky offered the following:

If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? […] [That enemy] will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. […] I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.

Before abandoning all hope, our clairvoyant also had some thoughts about Senator Sanders:

Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower.

And in the wake of the 2016 election, he offered an antidote:

[If] the Sanders movement offered an authentic, constructive program for real hope and change, it would win […] Trump supporters back.

R.I.P. Orson Bean, killed by two drivers using their cars as weapons.

First, all due respect to the late Orson Bean. He was a ubiquitous figure back in the day, a half-century ago, when I actually watched television.

Yesterday Bean was killed by a driver, maybe two of them, although Hollywood Reporter can't decide for sure.

Seriously, I can't make up these things. Small wonder that outrage over drivers killing non-drivers is lacking when we can't even speak clearly about the facts.

Orson Bean was struck by car (in the headline).

Then he was hit by a car (body of the story).

Then he was hit by a vehicle (same car; first vehicle, body of story).

Only then was he struck by a "second driver," which police say was the fatal act of homicide, and you think for a brief moment maybe the style guideline says one must attribute death to drivers and simple non-fatal maulings to cars, but then the authors write both drivers remained on the scene.

So ... which is it? Drivers, cars, vehicles? Why weren't the attacks on Bean ALL attributed to drivers, who happened to use their cars as murder weapons?

Orson Bean, 'Dr. Quinn' Actor, Dies at 91 After Being Struck by Car by Mike Barnes and Duane Byrge

He was a standout on Broadway, played Mr. Bevis on 'The Twilight Zone' and was related to Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Breitbart.

Orson Bean, the witty New Englander who starred on Broadway, was a longtime panelist on To Tell the Truth and played the dour owner of the general store on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, died Friday night after being hit by a car in Venice, authorities said. He was 91.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office confirmed Bean's death to the Associated Press, saying it was being investigated as a "traffic-related" fatality. It provided the location where Bean was found, which matched reports from local news outlets.

L.A. police told The Hollywood Reporter a pedestrian in his 90s was walking eastbound in the area of Venice Boulevard and Shell Avenue at 7:35 p.m. when he was hit by a vehicle.

A second driver then struck him in what police say was the fatal collision, and both drivers remained on the scene, L.A. Police Department Capt. Brian Wendling initially told local stations, which identified Bean based on eyewitness accounts.

Examples from the News and Tribune illustrate how "Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers."

Read the headline again.

How Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers

It has been my contention for quite some time that the News and Tribune is a prime and persistent practitioner of this bias. These lapses may or may not be intentional. They just are.

First, the article explaining why.

I urge you to suspend your own biases for just a moment and read what Richard Florida has to say. After the article's conclusion, I'll paste recent examples from Facebook of the News and Tribune's (at best) inconsistent scattershot approach -- at times proper, at others ridiculous.

Note that the research referred to by Florida describes "pedestrians and cyclists collectively as 'vulnerable road users,' or VRUs."

---

How Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

Safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars. Research suggests they’re right.

Since 2013, deaths among pedestrians and cyclists on U.S. roads have risen by nearly 30 percent and 14 percent respectively. Yet the public reaction to this spike in deaths has been fairly muted. Why?

One possible reason: road safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars. A paper published earlier this year in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board offers proof that they’re right.

snip

News stories overwhelmingly (but often subtly) shift blame onto pedestrians and cyclists, the researchers found. “Coverage almost always obscures the public health nature of the problem by treating crashes as isolated incidents, by referring to crashes as accidents, and by failing to include input from planners, engineers, and other road safety experts,” they write.

Despite its suggestion of inevitability and faultlessness, ‘‘accident’’ was the most commonly used term for crashes, occurring in 47 percent of sentences in articles’ body text and 11 percent of titles across the sample. News reports were also much more likely to use phrases like “a pedestrian or cyclist was hit by a car” instead of “a driver hit a pedestrian.”

(Journalists, it should be noted, have legal obligations to avoid placing blame on either party without an official determination by police or other authorities.)

Sentence structure and word choice matter. “A pedestrian was hit by a car” centers the victim getting hit—and as the authors note, “[p]eople tend to place greater blame on the focus of the sentence,” i.e., the victim. This kind of language de-emphasizes the agency of the driver. Additionally, many news reports used what the authors call “object-based language.” They explain:

Reports may describe a vehicle doing something rather than a driver (‘‘a car jumped the curb’’ versus ‘‘a driver drove over the curb’’). Object-based language obscures the driver’s role in the incident, thereby reducing blame. Observers tend to refer to people in cars using ‘‘object-based’’ language (e.g., car, traffic) but typically describe people walking or using bicycles with ‘‘human-based’’ language (e.g., bicyclist, pedestrian, person). This practice assigns unequal agency among the two groups.

Across the 200 articles that the researchers analyzed, 65 percent of sentences did include an agent—but that agent was the VRU in a full 74 percent of cases. And when a driver or vehicle was mentioned, sentences used object-based language (“A car hit a cyclist”) 81 percent of the time. “In other words, sentences overwhelmingly referred to an inanimate object as the actor [in a crash] rather than a driver,” the authors write, adding: “The use of object-based language was particularly jarring in the case of hit-and-run collisions where ‘the vehicle drove away.’’’

More than a quarter of the articles did not mention the driver at all, and some seemed to blame the victim for “darting” in front of a car.

News reports rarely mention the broader context behind car crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists. Safety advocates are right to be alarmed. Last year, more than 6,000 pedestrians were killed on roadways, up 3.4 percent from the previous year and the highest number since 1990. The fatality rate for cyclists jumped even higher (by 6.3 percent). This was during a period when overall traffic deaths (that is, including drivers) actually fell by 2.4 percent.

Very few of the articles in the sample brought up the role of road design or framed crashes as a public health issue, and none quoted experts knowledgeable in urban planning or traffic engineering. “This pattern of coverage likely contributes to the limited public outcry about pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities,” the authors observe.

Journalists are falling into common linguistic traps rather than consciously victim-blaming. But the problem is exacerbated by the shrinking of local newsrooms, so there are fewer seasoned reporters out there covering our deadly roads.

There are several steps journalists can take to cover road crashes more accurately. First and foremost, they should avoid referring to them as “accidents” and use “crash” or “collision” instead. “Because of the undue neutrality that ‘accident’ conveys, the editors of the British Medical Journal banned the use of the word” in 2001, as the paper notes.

Journalists should also be mindful of the tendency to blame the victim and to attribute agency to inanimate objects (cars). They should not let drivers off the hook, especially in cases of hit-and-run deaths. And they should look for patterns in pedestrian and cyclist deaths and contextualize their stories accordingly. Articles should probe issues such as road design, local failure to act on traffic safety initiatives (for example, Vision Zero policies), and broader public health. Experts can be helpful by acting as a resource for local news outlets covering this topic.

Ultimately, the study finds evidence for what many urbanists and safety advocates have been saying: The media is complicit in the growing American crisis of death by vehicle drivers. Better reporting practices are an indirect but important way to get to Vision Zero.

---

Before listing examples of muddled News and Tribune usage, allow me to offer all requisite condolences to the families of the child and woman from Pekin, both killed by drivers the past month. Anyway you cut it, they're awful losses.

Permit me also to add that one way to help avoid future occurrences is to be precise in the way we refer to the situation, something the newspaper currently is struggling to achieve. Without knowing what exactly we're talking about, how can we move forward to make it better?

As an aside, what does the woman being a transient have to do with anything?

So: Crashes or accidents?

The newspaper gets it right ... often, though not always.

Hit by a car, or hit by a driver? Interesting that in the case of two walkers being struck, both were hit by a car, not a driver. But twice when two vehicles were involved in a mishap, drivers/humans are mentioned as having been involved.

When I brought this up on Facebook, something on the order of 15 comments were hurled at me to the effect that walkers are always to blame because they shouldn't be located where drivers are operating.

However the way I can recall being taught in driver's ed, the driver bears a responsibility to be proactive above and beyond all minimum standards. Now it's almost never the driver's fault; that's not the newspaper's doing, of course, but there's a great deal of complicity on the part of the nation's prosecutors, perhaps owing to an inadequate statutory structure.

Back to Florida's case. When's the last time you heard anyone locally -- newspaper, prosecutor, police, elected officials -- do any of this?

"They should look for patterns in pedestrian and cyclist deaths and contextualize their stories accordingly. Articles should probe issues such as road design, local failure to act on traffic safety initiatives (for example, Vision Zero policies), and broader public health. Experts can be helpful by acting as a resource for local news outlets covering this topic."

Our milieu at present is a sort of societal imperialism afforded by automobile centrism. As I've noted previously, driving is the last acceptable vestige of such imperialism in American life. Society properly frowns on the "N" word, sexual harassment and ableism, to name a few.

But we still willfully and almost proudly choose our words to absolve drivers who kill walkers, bikers and other non-automotive users of our planet.

Where does it say that drivers have MORE rights than non-drivers? Was that in the Declaration of Independence somewhere, and I missed it?

This narcissistic imperialism is the way most of us treat the undisputed hegemony of cars, isn't it?

My point, then: If media generally (and I believe lazily) phrases driver and walker/cyclist interaction as the former's interests invariably outweighing the latter's, then at the very least media is doing nothing to help resolve the problem.

The preceding placards clearly indicate that the News and Tribune could do better in every way cited by Florida's report.

Whether it cares to do so is something I wouldn't be willing to bet actually happens.

"We’ll know we’re making progress when we stop blaming children and their parents for winding up underneath pickup trucks."

Our increasingly cloistered and clueless "local" newspaper's answers to questions about the way it misrepresents driver-inflicted collisions with non-automotive street users betray an indifference to the value of real-world thinking.

The city compounds the issue by blithely painting sharrow symbols on pavement and declaring victory, or as Orwell might note, merely masking their abject concession of defeat with meaningless words and symbols.

If we wish to make streets safe for all users, then drivers must be slowed, inconvenienced and in many instances awakened. Full stop.

online.com/2391240/guilty-until-proven-helmeted">
Guilty Until Proven Helmeted, by Eben Weiss (Outside)

When a driver hits a cyclist—even a child on a bike—the victim is almost always the one who gets blamed, unless they're wearing a helmet

When it comes to automotive violence and mayhem, we’ve become more desensitized than a perineum after a Gran Fondo on a maladjusted saddle, as is apparent from the way we report on incidents in which someone in a car drives into someone on a bike.

News stories about drivers who hit cyclists often implicitly absolve the driver and blame the victim. First, there’s almost always a lack of agency coupled with the passive voice: it’s never “a driver hit a cyclist.” Instead, it’s usually something like “a cyclist was hit by a car.” (Yet you never read about how a shooting victim “collided with a bullet.” Go figure.) Then there’s generally some insinuation that it must have been the victim’s fault, often along the lines of “It’s unclear whether the victim was wearing a helmet.” And despite a big push to change this, it’s also fairly typical to refer to the collision as an “accident,” even before anybody knows what really happened; in journalism, the oxymoronic “police are still investigating the accident” is reserved almost exclusively to incidents involving cars.

It’s not just reporters who write this way, either. When it comes to drivers hurting or killing people on bikes, this kind of unconscious victim-blaming permeates every aspect of our discourse ...

The conclusion.

Yet it’s essential to hack away at the gigantic blind spot that allows us to see the actual problem, which is people driving into other people with their cars. We’ve got a long way to go in that regard. But we’ll know we’re making progress when we stop blaming children and their parents for winding up underneath pickup trucks.

Car-centrism: Why does the news media always let human drivers off the hook when non-driving humans get killed?

Can any human (as opposed to his or her word processor) connected with the news media, now or in the past, explain why other humans walking, biking or skateboarding invariably are hit, injured and sometimes killed by vehicles, and not by the humans driving them?

Is this stated somewhere in a style guide: Thou shalt not trouble a driver when a vehicle can be blamed?

Greenville councilman fatally struck by car, by Aprile Rickert (Tom May Unlimited)

Alan K. Johnson was struck Saturday on U.S. 150

GREENVILLE — The Town of Greenville is mourning the loss of a community staple and council member who died Saturday after being struck by a car.

Alan K. Johnson, 66, was crossing the road in the 9600 block of U.S. 150 when he was hit by a 1996 Toyota Rav4, driven by Constance Sue Huber, 69, of DePauw, according to a news release from the Floyd County Sheriff's Department.

First in the title, then in the opening paragraph -- and for a third time in the opening clause of the second paragraph, it's the car that killed Johnson. Only in the second paragraph is the driver identified.

Wait -- the driver was identified?

Has the driver who killed Matt Brewer in August yet been identified?

Has the Combined Accident Reconstruction Team, the prosecutor's fanciful name for "here in Floyd County we don't prosecute drivers for killing non-drivers," released the report on Matt's death?

In May of 2016, Chloe Allen was killed by a driver named Terra Lawrence while trying to cross Spring Street at the suburban chain hellscape of Vincennes and Spring. The late Branden Klayko wrote about it at Broken Sidewalk.

I'm reprinting Branden's commentary in its entirety, with highlighting of crucial passages.

Woman killed by motorist in New Albany

Chloe Allen, 83, is dead after being struck by a motorist in downtown New Albany over the weekend.

The collision took place at Spring Street and Vincennes Street in the Southern Indiana city at 2:00p.m. on Friday, May 13. Allen was crossing the street in the crosswalk when struck by Terra Lawrence, 42, who failed to observe Allen in the street. Lawrence was driving a 2013 Dodge Ram truck and turning left onto Spring from Vincennes, according to police reports. Allen died after being transported to University Hospital in Louisville.

The incident was reported by the WLKY, WDRB, WHAS11, and the News & Tribune.

While a great deal of information was rendered by an investigation, it’s unfortunate that for the sake of a catchy acronym, the unit is labeled the Floyd County Combined Accident Reconstruction Team. As we have discussed many times, crashes and accidents are very different things and should not be mislabeled.

All of the local news reported that the pedestrian was struck “by a vehicle” rather than the driver of that vehicle. Cars and trucks don’t drive themselves—people crash them into things. Both WDRB and WHAS11 labeled the crash an accident, with WHAS11 going as far as to include a large “Accident” graphic complete with cracked windshield illustrating its report.

Each report duly noted a police statement that said speed nor alcohol are suspected in the crash. From a witness account, the motorist simply was not paying attention when turning, although none of the reports cited that the driver was errant or that charges were due.

New Albany has really let itself go at this intersection, allowing an anti-urban Walgreens, White Castle, and Rally’s to be built behind moats of parking that make walking unsafe. Low visibility crosswalks are clearly worn away by vehicle tires, compounding the walkability issue.

But the city should have seen this one coming. Back in 2014, urban planner Jeff Speck issued a report on the streets of downtown New Albany in which he identified Vincennes Street as “clearly oversized for its traffic.” Speck wrote of the three-lane street: “At no point do car accounts approach the number that would require a third lane. This condition is supported by the fact that the third lane, rather then (sic) being striped for left turns, merely provides northbound redundancy with no southbound counterpart.” He recommended a reconfiguration to improve safety.

Speck had also recommended making Spring Street west of here, among other local streets, a two-way thoroughfare (Spring is two-way to the east). He labeled Spring Street’s design as it moved from a grid to a highway layout as dangerous:

This four-lane section of Spring Street also feels very much like a highway, and experiences a large amount of speeding while creating an environment that is dangerous to walk along or live near. The ideal solution for this street would be to calm the traffic and create an environment of greater safety, without significantly changing its capacity, beyond perhaps a slight lowering of volume to match current demand.

Further, KIPDA has ranked two segments of Spring Street in New Albany—including this intersection—as among the most crash-prone in all of Southern Indiana, spurring plans for design changes on the street. Most of those changes call for lights making driving through the area easier, but buffered bike lanes are also part of the plan, which will be under construction this summer. Even these minor changes were challenged by area trucking companies in court, citing they make driving big rigs through the area more difficult.

New Albany has a long way to go on street safety.

By the way, as City Hall dithers about radar displays to tell them what the man in the moon already knows -- drivers drive too damn fast on Spring Street -- dead man's curve remains a killing waiting to happen.

ASK THE BORED: Faced with 75 signatures on a petition, Nash, Summers and the clueless BOW non-safety board can't muster a single empathetic response.

Dead Man's Curve has killed, and it will kill again unless our cowardly ruling clique does its job.

They're not going to do anything to promote public safety, are they?

"Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict."

I'll be perfectly honest with you.

My 40th high school reunion took place earlier this year. I had a previous commitment one of the two nights, and I was busy the other night but might have been able to be there for a little while had I chosen to expend the effort.

I didn't, because my preference is to remember my high school classmates as they were, not as they've become, at least some of the ones with whom I was closest, because I'd rather not listen to higher-income white guys have a few too many drinks and begin prattling on about the wonders of Trump.

That's bullshit.

In fairness, I know for a fact that many of my old friends from school don't feel this way, and of course not all of them are higher income. Yes, I know it's very complicated. But Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and to insist that this disease emanates solely from working class Americans when the national Democratic Party has itself promoted trickle-down economic inequality for decades, while merrily cashing checks from the same donors as Trump's, is bullshit on top of bullshit.

Sorry about my better-heeled pals from days of yore. At the same time, nothing much occurred prior to the advent of Trump to suggest their outcomes would be any different. I've no clue how I managed to escape the contagion. Travel? Core values? Plain dumb luck? I'm just grateful I did.

Now, please read this article in its entirety.

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans, by Sarah Smarsh (The Guardian)

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

 ... Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.”

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education, gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.

These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

Jackie Green on the ghettoization of independent candidates for Louisville mayor: "A form of media censorship — not censorship OF, but censorship BY the media.”

Before stealing a glance at the exclusion of independent candidates from the final Louisville mayoral debate, I'm turning to Jeff Gillenwater to articulate the crux of it.

I’ve spent decades now watching more thoughtful, compassionate people attempt to run for office under the Democratic banner in local, state, and national races. Over and over and over quite consistently, party officials at all levels have intervened, using the full force of their financial and political clout to defeat those candidates, to weaken those voices, and to make sure that their discourse and concerns, no matter how well documented and supported by evidence, do not become the center of policy debate, do not become a legitimate choice that voters can make. The idea that the Democratic Party in this country is an eager and effective agent or vehicle of significant social change simply isn’t true. When you donate to the party, you’re supporting the silencing and defeat of more thoughtful, compassionate voices. There’s no way around that so, if you’re going to do it, you need to own it and call it what it is.

It needed to be said. Now, let's look at yet another way media reinforces the two-party duopoly.

Independent candidates won’t share stage with Fischer, Leet in final mayoral debate, by Joe Sonka (Insider Louisville)

Independent mayoral candidates Jackie Green and Chris Thieneman say they were surprised and disappointed to learn last week that they will not be allowed to participate in the final televised mayoral debate next week, as only Mayor Greg Fischer and Councilwoman Angela Leet have been invited to participate in the live broadcast.

Pat Murrell, the president of the League of Women Voters of Louisville, told Insider Louisville last week that while all nine candidates for mayor were invited to its candidate forum to be broadcast on WAVE3-TV on Oct. 16, organizers recently decided to split the forum into two: one aired live on television and WFPL at 7 p.m., with the second one at 8:15 p.m., which will only be livestreamed on wave3.com and archived online on wave3.com and wfpl.org.

Only Fischer and Leet will participate in the forum that is broadcast live, while the independent candidates will participate in the second forum.

I'm troubled and distressed. Maybe it's time to forsake Bill.

At the risk of belaboring the point ...


ON THE AVENUES: On a wig and a prayer, or where's the infidel gardening column?

... I find it enduringly odd that the News and Tribune promotes multi-culturalism in its editorials, and yet runs only Christian advocacy columns like this on -- and sometimes others like it.

Media bias?

MAY: Troubled by violence, by Tom May (Flailburger)

About a year ago, several outbreaks of violence occurred one right after the other. On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was shot several times at close range while being held on the ground by two Baton Rouge police officers. The incident was recorded on a bystander’s cell phone. Twenty-four hours later, Philando Castile was shot and killed by officer Jeronimo Yanez in a Saint Paul suburb after being pulled over. On the final day of the trinity of terror, Micah Johnson ambushed and fired upon a group of police officers in Dallas, killing five and injuring nine other officers and two civilians. Johnson later said he was angered by the recent police shootings.

Dallas pastor and best-selling author, Tony Evans, posted words on his blog the next day that were reprinted with permission by The Washington Post and several other papers. His thoughts have been seared on my mind since. “Unless the Church steps forward collectively to fulfill its God-given role of influencing the conscience of our culture, our country will keep spiraling downward into the depths of fear and hate.”

There is an intriguing verse of Scripture in the Old Testament book of 2 Chronicles. The nation of Israel, God’s people, had wandered from their faith. Their religious leaders failed to teach people sound doctrine, watering down the truth so as not to offend anyone. Their government authorities no longer held the Law as the standard for behavior. “In those days it was not safe to travel about, for all the inhabitants of the lands were in great turmoil. One nation was being crushed by another and one city by another because God was troubling them with every kind of distress” (2 Chronicles 15:5-6 NIV). The passage concludes that if you forsake God, He will forsake you.

Have we become a troubled, distressed society? ...

... Tom May is a freelance writer who provides content for newspapers, magazines and websites. He is an adjunct instructor in the Communications Department at Indiana University Southeast. He has held paid and volunteer ministry positions at several churches in the tri-state area. Reach him at tgmay001@gmail.com.

Waxing self-congratulatory, the 'Bama newspaper's Susan Duncan lauds her government watchdog, which never seems to bark here in New Albany.

The News and Tribune's new editor took time this weekend to praise her team's heroic performance, and it sent me scurrying to the thesaurus to find synonyms for "delusional."

Among them: deception, fantasy, hallucination, illusion, and pipe dream.

Unfortunately, we don't see much of Duncan's imagined watchdog here in Floyd County, especially in New Albany. Furthermore, we recall the entire year that passed without a reporter in New Albany to ask questions like these.

Duncan's words merely reinforce the perennially Clark-centric performance of Bill Hanson's advertising vehicle. We're left to surmise that it's all about the money, so allow me to extend my smudgy alms cup to Duncan as she passes on the street:

"Excuse me, ma'am, but mightn't we get just a few farthings of your fierce watchdog commitment for the starving New Albanians?"

DUNCAN: Clark County Council shuffle deals residents a bad hand

... Our forefathers, wary of government overreach and oppression, also noted the importance of a freely functioning press in the First Amendment. As your local newspaper, we embrace that responsibility first among all others.

The story that appeared at the top of Friday's News and Tribune is a prime example of our commitment — and why it's important.

Tony Bennett cannot — at this time — serve on the Clark County Council, despite being tapped by a GOP caucus Wednesday to complete the unexpired District 2 term vacated by Brian Lenfert.

Bennett is ineligible; he doesn't meet the residency requirements outlined in state statute. The law says officeholders must have lived in the district they represent for at least six months and within the county for at least a year. Bennett falls short on both counts. He's only lived in Clark County since early September, something he readily admitted when the newspaper asked him the question.

Had we not fulfilled our role as a watchdog over government by educating ourselves on the legality of Bennett's appointment and inquiring as to his residency, I suspect Bennett would still be a councilman.

Miss Representation: "You can't be what you can't see."

Watch the video. I'm embarrassed to learn that it's six years old.

Then, learn more ... and thanks to J for posting the link.

The Representation Project

Wikipedia

Miss Representation is a 2011 American documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. It explores how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in influential positions by circulating limited and often disparaging portrayals of women. The film premiered in the documentary competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Yes, please: "Induced demand" as necessary corrective to road-building lobbyists' Goebbelsian propaganda.

Wouldn't it be nice if perhaps once in a person's lifetime, a conventional local news outlet -- News and Tribune, Courier-Journal, Business First, WDRB, Insider Louisville -- would accompany the breathless transcribing of an equally breathless press conference or news release from an eternally breathless corporate-financed, road-building lobby group with a simple explanation of induced demand?

Which in these instances, would act as the antidote to the breathless propaganda being dispensed by the usual paid-up suspects?

Have an opinion about traffic? You're entitled, but henceforth, when you air it, I'll be asking you if you're familiar with induced demand.

It's going to be on the test, folks.

What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse, by Adam Mann (Wired)

... As a kid, I used to ask my parents why they couldn’t just build more lanes on the freeway. Maybe transform them all into double-decker highways with cars zooming on the upper and lower levels. Except, as it turns out, that wouldn’t work. Because if there’s anything that traffic engineers have discovered in the last few decades it’s that you can’t build your way out of congestion. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic.

The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads. These findings imply that the ways we traditionally go about trying to mitigate jams are essentially fruitless, and that we’d all be spending a lot less time in traffic if we could just be a little more rational.

I'm not exactly certain why we should take seriously a trucking and logistics lobby group with key personnel that includes a former Clark County GOP party chairman, although it's obvious that the group's announcements have Ron "Fluff the Wealthy" Grooms billing and cooing like a teenager in love with a pin-up girl.

Perhaps we can expect Ron to introduce vital legislation: The Auto-centric Freedom Restoration Act, or some such drivel.

Let's do this drill one more time. When the talking point proposes laying asphalt to solve problems:

"A new report aimed at reducing transportation bottlenecks."

Remember induced demand:

"The fundamental law of road congestion: New roads will create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same."

I'm not picking on the reporter Finley; his was the first link I copied. No area news outlet did itself any favors with coverage (see Riefenstahl, Leni for historical antecedents).

Plan calls for expanded I-65, I-64 and new Sherman Minton bridge, by Marty Finley (Louisville Business First)

A new report aimed at reducing transportation bottlenecks and improving logistics channels for business calls for the widening of Interstate 64 and I-65 in Indiana and the reconstruction of the Sherman Minton Bridge.

Those three major regional priorities were outlined among 63 needed infrastructure initiatives in "Regional Links: Global Connections," a strategic plan that has been under development for two years by the Southeast Regional Logistics Council. The plan was released during a news conference in Jeffersonville Tuesday morning.

"Really do it right": Transue rebuts Morris's street grid confusion.

You knew it was coming, and when it did, I could almost hear Chris Morris say: "Padgett has been at its location for more than 50 years. What is Padgett suppose to do, close?"

Only Chris Morris could transform 80,000 lbs of speeding metal into a victim.

Chris Morris's "opinions" rarely surprise. We know he'll defend the status quo right down to the last at bat, but to make matters worse, he now has chosen to conflate criticism of his own persistent editorial ineptitude with an entire body of complete streets evidence that proves him mistaken, yet again.

Naturally, the same argument was being made by numerous southerners in the year 1861: We've had slaves for 200 years. What are we supposed to do, pay a fair wage to free men?"

It bears repeating, again and again, so often that even Irv Stumler might be compelled to listen: At no point anywhere within Jeff Speck's downtown street network proposals is there the slightest suggestion to eliminate city streets as an option for heavy industry and trucking firms.

Rather, there are hundreds of fruitful suggestions for making city streets better for everyone, not just industrial users.

As before, I suggest that Morris do the unthinkable and actually read the proposals. However, as a safety measure, I'll refrain from holding my breath.

Until then, News and Tribune reader William Transue is spot-on with this jeer, providing further testimony to what Morris and others continue to willfully and maliciously miss -- and what the bureaucratic likes of Warren Nash keeps buried at the command of City Hall.

READER JEERS

... to Chris Morris, assistant editor at the News and Tribune for his opinion as it relates to the problems that would result if the one-way streets are converted to two-way.

After his ride with “Uncle Mike” from — I bow my head when I mention this name — the Padgett Group, he said how difficult it would be to turn onto East Spring Street from Fourth Street. He would have to turn into the far lane and tie up traffic in two lanes. Isn’t that what would happen now when his turning holds up traffic going west on Spring Street? Does Mike not have any problems on any other one-way streets that he travels after he leaves New Albany?

What Morris fails to include in his editorial is how frequently does a Padgett crane leave the yard and go on the aforementioned route? In order to be unbiased, Chris should have parked his vehicle on East 11 Street and East Elm — which by the way is a little more than 100 feet from a stop street — on any day or two between the hours of 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. and see how much speeding actually occurs during that time. This, by the way, can be slowed down with two-way traffic. East Elm Street is actually a main entrance into New Albany the last time I checked.

As far as Warren Nash wanting to “really do it right,” he should have started the feasibility study months ago after receiving the Speck report. Again, as Mr. Nash stated, “we really need to do it right” and convert East Spring and East Elm to two-way streets and bring lower speeds, elevation of home values and safety to the residents of these streets.

— William Transue, New Albany