June 25, 2025
THE LIFE AND IMMINENT DEATH OF NEWSPAPERING -- 1919 TO PRESENT
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” baseball sage Yogi Berra opined. For Mike Kaage, owner/operator of the Edison Park Kaage newsstand, it will be over on June 29. That’s the day he shutters the newspaper stand at Northwest Highway/Oliphant after 82 years. He’s not selling it because nobody wants to buy a business that sells what nobody buys anymore – like newspapers. In the post-WWII days and through the 1950s and 1960s newspapers were the fount of news. There were four dailies, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times published in the morning with yesterday’s news and the Chicago Daily News and Chicago American (later renamed Chicago Today in the 1970s) published in the afternoon with overnight and AM news and a rehash of yesterday’s news. Kaage’s newsstand was once open until 9 p.m., sold well more than a thousand copies a day (plus magazines) and was a very profitable enterprise. Television was very much in its infancy. None of that 24/7 cable news. The major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) had their daily national/world news at 5:30 p.m. and the local channels (9, 7, 5, 2) had their news at 10 p.m. I’m dating myself here obviously, but people primarily got their news by reading it on a piece of paper. THIS COLUMN: There are a whole lot of readers of this column who fervently wish I would just croak, retire or get devoured by some predator in my backyard. I intend to be around for at least another year, and this month marks the commencement of my 53rd year of writing this stuff. I should quit, but why quit now, when the Left and the Right top themselves daily in terms of ridiculousness. Full Article...
June 18, 2025
DEMOCRATS, LEFT NEWS MEDIA NEED TO JUST SHUT UP ABOUT TRUMP
Any person who has gone through the dating scene, as I did long ago, understands the timeless adage that what you don’t say you don’t have to explain later. And believe me, girlfriends (and spouses) remember EVERYTHING you say. That’s why silence is golden. But I better shut up now. And so should the Democrats and the anti-Trump news media. The 2028 election is 40 months away and Trump will not be running. Trump will be president for another 43 months, and that’s about 1,300 more days of absolute apocalyptic catastrophe in the eyes of the Left. And normal voters have just tuned out. Mark Twain once opined that there are “Lies. Damn lies. And statistics.” Some statistics don’t lie. I spent considerable time researching the facts on the CHART attached to this article and I was stunned at some of the numbers. Here are my takeaways. A humongous $2.5 billion was spent in the 2024, $1.5 by the Harris-Walz Democrats to villanize Trump, and yet the Democratic base vote declined by 6 MILLION over 2020. And turnout in 2024 over 2020 actually DECLINED by 3.2 million. How can that be? The simplistic answer is two words: Harris-Walz. But this column will be more sophisticated and look at the 21 presidential elections over the 80 years since 1944. There is a distinct ebb and flow, a granular turnout increase almost every cycle, and a hardened party (R and D) base which never fluctuates and remains about 45-47 percent each. Attached is an election CHART which chronicles results and turnout in the 21 presidential races from 1944 to 2024. Full Article...
June 11, 2025
NO ARTICLE THIS WEEK
June 4, 2025
NO ARTICLE THIS WEEK
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