Monday Mood [DOT 30/12/24]

It’s the doldrum days of the holiday season. Blech.


RIP to a real one

Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100, his son says
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/12/29/jimmy-carter-president-dead

Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president, dies at age 100
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/jimmy-carter-death-news-12-29-24/index.html


Scary

Two survive and 179 are killed in a South Korean plane crash, the year’s deadliest
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/28/jeju-air-crash-south-korea


Name suggestion: Hippo McHippoFace (vote here)

New year, new pygmy hippo: A naming poll for this Virginia zoo baby is underway
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/28/g-s1-40219/name-baby-pygmy-hippo-virginia-zoo-moo-deng-haggis


Turtle News:

A sea turtle plagued by ‘bubble butt’ condition is helped by a 3D printer
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/28/nx-s1-5238294/sea-turtle-bubble-butt


Have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

13 Comments

  1. Carter’s presidency will hopefully get a reevaluation someday. He was the prototype of Democrats inheriting a screwed up economy, taking the blame for what he inherited, implementing fixes, then watching his GOP successor get the credit.

    The curdling of the political press really took root during his term. The press corps took exactly the wrong lessons from the scandals exposed during the mid to late 1970s. They decided that the gaslighting of the looming disaster in Vietnam, Watergate, and scandals exposed in the FBI and CIA all meant that the role of the press was to dump on everyone. Reformers needed attacking as much as people like Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, and possibly more, all in the name of neutrality.

    Billy Carter was embarassing, not a real scandal, but a press corps that didn’t know how what to do with a reformer president decided he had to be at least as bad as Spiro Agnew.

    This attitude was ripe for exploitation by Reagan’s skilled PR team after Carter, who conned news execs into believing that they were biased against conservatives and the savvy thing was to actively promote conservative ideas as a corrective. The goal stopped being the truth and became “balance” with a growing emphasis on tactics completely divorced from results. And it’s gotten so much worse over the next 50 years.

    • …forget where but I definitely saw something under the heading “carter: the president that made reagan necessary”…so…maybe don’t hold your breath…but there’s been some pretty decent retrospectives, too…bit like maggie on the sense that they’ve had that stuff waiting on the day for a fair while now?

Leave a Reply