You're not alone, Ken. Many of us cannot sleep soundly as we hear and see what Trump says and does as his minions applaud him. If Trump does get elected, many of those minions will then be his henchmen and will fulfill any decree he issues no matter how cruel or immoral they may be.
And many will be horrified that any sly humor about Trump or Vance or the cabal will see them being followed by the Stasi-like secret police. I give it a year at most before some of the cult become, shall we say, woke?
I remain hopeful that inside that booth most of us will side with our love for democracy and a sense of a normal life. In contrast with an increasingly deranged Trump, I see Rep. Liz Cheney and former President Obama speaking courageously about a future for a two party system working together under soon to be President Harris. Let's vote 💙🙏
I've always been very cautious about using comparisons to Hitler and Nazis having family (by marriage) who were Holocaust survivors. It can diminish the severity of the real history. But, increasingly as Trump and his cult become more unrestrained in their rhetoric, I no longer can avoid it. The similarities to the rise of Fascism is cause for nightmares. His followers are indeed cult like. I fear for both outcomes - his winning and the reactions of Trump and his followers if/when he loses.
I also shy away from those comparisons because it seems like an overreaction, like you are sensationalizing what is going on, but that is not the case at all. But it is not at all, especially when you read about how Hitler started out and gradually became the monster he became with the story of Dachau.
I thought I was alone with my increasing anxiety. Apparently not! I have said all along that I am cautiously hopeful. But that pit in my stomach cannot be denied.
Billionaire Hoffman seems to be a brave soul to buy up a five percent stock position in Lee Enterprises, Inc....in a company that is floundering in red ink and $500 million in debt and losing millions every month. Perhaps the reality is that local print journalism has gone the way of the dodo bird. Daily local newspapers are on their way out soon to be relegated to the heap of nostalgic but useless things from the past such as AM radio, eight track music tapes, VHS and Betamax movies. The new thinking is to invest time, talent and money in electronic journalism such as Substack and similar electronic news and media outlets. We need to look forward and not long for an old fashioned printed daily newspaper being delivered to your doorstep every morning before sunrise. They’re not coming back. As an old fashioned morning newspaper delivery boy who long ago used to get up early everyday and deliver a daily printed newspaper to every house on my route before sunrise and in rain, snow, sleet ....and at the risk of being chased and bitten by every neighborhood dog that seemed to be on the hunt for newspaperboy flesh....I state this with a heavy heart.
I too had a newspaper route, but mine was in the afternoon M-F and early Sunday morning. My brothers had the morning routes. I remember many a cold Montana Sunday morning, sitting in front of the furnace vent trying to get warm waiting for the papers to be delivered to my door. Then putting them all in my delivery bag, sticking that across my shoulder and heading out through the snow to deliver them before the lights came on in the homes. Such fond memories.
Wow, Rene - delivering papers in the winter in Montana must have been quite the experience! Remembering what the winters USED to be like here in NY - you had to be one dedicated kid!!!!
“Newspapers” are the product, whether in print or electronic.
The history is that the number and size of papers flourished under Gilded Age millionaires who bought or founded papers to be their personal mouthpieces. George Hearst is the easy example, but there are hundreds of others. Hearst was a miner. He founded newspapers to compete with the news of competitors who had different ideas. Some of those papers -on both sides - were in Montana and were eventually consolidated and bought up by - wait for it - Lee Enterprises!
We see similar stuff going on today with billionaires. The money is often not the point. Elon Musk bought Twitter and lost the equivalent of the value of a small country just so that he could push his opinions on the world. If you’re a billionaire you can lose a few million every year on pet projects and it makes effectively no difference to your net worth or lifestyle. In fact, if you use your platform to effect political change to your advantage it is money well spent.
Lee bought Howard Publications in 2002 and it owned not only The Post-Star but the Billings Gazette in Montana. The Howard brothers were in the oil and gas business. Post-Star former publisher Jim Marshall's father was a banker who was a partner with the Howards in the newspaper business.
I find it interesting that I am bombarding by digital ads to buy the local newspaper "ad free" which tells you something about the money they are making on advertising. It is not only sad but dangerous for our community to not have a news source that everyone reads.
I too am feeling anxious about this election however there is still work that can be done. Go to Postcards To Voters and you can still get addresses to write to. There are candidates that would appreciate your help in canvassing like Carrie Woerner, Chloe Pierce, Alvin Gamble and Josh Riley. Sometimes it is best to just put your head down and continue to focus on what you can do. Don’t wake up on November 6th and say, “If only I would have…”. There can be no regrets. And maybe even read this piece from Tim Miller. If you know a more moderate Republican that might be swayed, send it to them.
Many good points in today’s column to speak to, I’ll consider the problem with newspapers - it was greed. There was too much profit in newspapers, and they were old and laden with assets such as real estate which made them a target for vulture capitalism. Lee, for example, tried to become too big a fish to be eaten and became laden with debt. The alternative should have been to make the employees owners or at least part owners. A good example of that sort of thinking is Stewart’s which has for many years had an employee ownership program. Stewart’s is a bad takeover prospect because there are too many employee-owners. Many of those owners are now stock millionaires and the Dake family is planning on divesting of the corporation over the years and turning it entirely over to employees.
With the tens of thousands of reporters across this country surely some of them realized that the business model of their employers was doomed by ownership/investor greed and could have rallied to convince management that it was in everyone’s best interest that the corporation made only modest profit while at the same time increasing pay scale for employees or at least providing stock in the corporations as part of a benefit package. Under such an arrangement it is likely we would likely have lost far fewer newspapers.
Newspaper companies thought the gravy train would last forever and never reacted to the digital threats that stole their revenue. But all the corporate big shots kept getting their bonuses.
It kind of reminds me how Sears failed to read the writing on the wall about internet commerce, and squandered the customer loyalty of over 100 years. What is Amazon if not essentially a digital Sears Roebuck catalog? Coulda, woulda, shoulda!
Mike Stewart's Shops is a privately held company by the Dake family and the employees through an employee stock ownership plan do not offer equity interests in the form of publicly traded stock shares.
Lee Enterprises is a publicly traded American media company.
Making the employees of Lee Enterprises part owners of Lee Enterprises would accomplish what?
Stewart's Shops employees own a little over 40% of the company according to Stewart's Shops web site.
A hostile takeover is an acquisition strategy requiring that the entity acquire and control more than 50% of the voting shares issued by the company. Stewart's Shops employees own a little over 40% of the company according to Stewart's Shops web site.
Stewart’s is a bad takeover prospect because it is a privately held company not because of too many employees. The Dake family control the ownership of the stock its not traded on the open market,
The nightmare that threatens us happened 90 years ago in another highly "civilized" nation. The methods are always the same. Demonize "Other" and then destroy him/her. "They're coming for our jobs and our women." "We'll send our sons to school and they'll come home as daughters." "They're diluting the blood of our nation." Concentration camps? Ovens?
And the Trumpies stay silent. Elise stays silent. Their yard signs say it all. The only "real" Americans are White and Christian, and Republican, and it's best if they're male.
Me too. Please copy and paste this text to as many swing state news facebook pages, anywhere in a comment. Preferably in a feel-good post, so as to not diminish the tragic ones. This is akin to the notes from "Alone in Berlin."
I am awake most nights by 3 a.m. - a friend says I have to disconnect myself from the news. I feel I must read as much as I can about our current situation even though I feel much is beyond my control.
We need to remember that at least half the country still supports our values of democracy, free elections, and a peaceful transfer of presidential power. We have a voice. We need to use it now and in the current election. And if need be, we’ll use it in the years going forward.
Wow, and just think, journalist Mark Frost's big worry is if the Democrats won't accept a Trump victory. I hope that doesn't keep him awake at night. The last thing that he should have to worry about is another Dachau.
I know I sound ridiculous, but with Great Meadow could you imagine a scenario where it is reopened to house immigrants and then, well, anyone else who shoots there mouyth off. Yes, Ken is unhinged after reading "It can't happen here."
You are not unhinged, Ken. Great Meadows, Mount McGregor, other abandoned prisons could become lucrative detention camps for greedy contractors financed by Trump/Elon Musk/other gazillionaires looking to make more $$$ "housing" innocent people. Bannon gets out of prison in a few days...he probably has plans already drawn up.
Like you, I will never forget the images within Dachau Concentration Camp from my visit there in October,1972. The museum's larger-than-life stark black and white photos of the Nazi's unimaginable inhumanity toward men, women and children...walking into the gas chambers and crematoria...imagining the horrors which those sites continue to represent. And the blackened bronze sculpture created in 1968, depicting human figures entangled with barbed wire...with an engraving near it that translated "NEVER AGAIN..."
It changed me forever, as it should have.
When I moved back here to GF 22 yrs. ago, I was privileged to meet a Dachau survivor, Abe Rudnick, who became my landlord, along with his wife Clara, also a Holocaust survivor. They treated me like family, and because I had cared for combat veterans they began to share stories they had kept to themselves for decades. Clara, at 100 yrs. old, is my most treasured elder "girlfriend," still as sharp and mentally tuned-in to local, national and world events. But my heart breaks that she continues to experience on a very visceral level what Trump has perpetuated in his hateful Hitler-like verbage/behavior ever since he descended down his gold elevator. She sensed early on, before he was elected, that Trump was evil, telling me this was how Hitler started out. For her to see the war scenes in the Ukraine, and in Gaza, and Israel and elsewhere is further trauma for her to endure. Yet, she feels a responsibility to continue to speak her Truth about the Holocaust of the past... and what's happening in the present. She is my hero.
When Mark Frost, as a Jewish man who grew up in Glens Falls, published and refused to repudiate Stefanik's labeling of Jan. 6th convicted insurrectionist prisoners as "hostages" - when he knew full well that Mrs. Rudnick was still alive...and that she and millions of Jewish children, teens and adult concentration camp survivors had been True hostages...along with the hostages then being held in Gaza...it sickened me. But I realized then, as I do now, that some publications will print anything to satisfy their advertisers and subscribers.
It never ends...yesterday, I was told of a particularly offensive campaign lawn poster locally and I drove over to the site on 88 Meadow Drive, Qsby. There in bold blue and white letters were the words... "TIM AND THE HOE GOTTA GO..."
with TRUMP in bold letters under that despicable racist, sexist sign.
This is a neighborhood with young children...and within walking distance of the home of the Ward 2 GOP candidate for The Queensbury Town Council, Scott Gushlaw...
I wrote to a Post Star reporter today to see if they would do a story on this, since the Meadow Drive property owner obviously was looking for attention.
Sleepless nights because Mein Kampf seems like Project 2025. The enemy within as stated is any one who oppses Trump.
Want some fun facts look up Milo Yiannopolis read a bit. He's like a ghost who appears pissing off colleges stirring up racial hatred. Then reapears at Marlago having some sway over the dinner plans gone embarrassing for Trump.
You're not alone, Ken. Many of us cannot sleep soundly as we hear and see what Trump says and does as his minions applaud him. If Trump does get elected, many of those minions will then be his henchmen and will fulfill any decree he issues no matter how cruel or immoral they may be.
Well, there goes sleep again tonight....
Sorry :-(
And many will be horrified that any sly humor about Trump or Vance or the cabal will see them being followed by the Stasi-like secret police. I give it a year at most before some of the cult become, shall we say, woke?
It seems fantastical to think these things, but it is possible. Most will be afraid to be woke because of the consequences.
Terrifying and all too possible. But I believe that he will fail. Strap in.
I remain hopeful that inside that booth most of us will side with our love for democracy and a sense of a normal life. In contrast with an increasingly deranged Trump, I see Rep. Liz Cheney and former President Obama speaking courageously about a future for a two party system working together under soon to be President Harris. Let's vote 💙🙏
I've always been very cautious about using comparisons to Hitler and Nazis having family (by marriage) who were Holocaust survivors. It can diminish the severity of the real history. But, increasingly as Trump and his cult become more unrestrained in their rhetoric, I no longer can avoid it. The similarities to the rise of Fascism is cause for nightmares. His followers are indeed cult like. I fear for both outcomes - his winning and the reactions of Trump and his followers if/when he loses.
I also shy away from those comparisons because it seems like an overreaction, like you are sensationalizing what is going on, but that is not the case at all. But it is not at all, especially when you read about how Hitler started out and gradually became the monster he became with the story of Dachau.
I thought I was alone with my increasing anxiety. Apparently not! I have said all along that I am cautiously hopeful. But that pit in my stomach cannot be denied.
So many believe, well, it will be over on election night. Nope! It will go on for months afterward.
Yes, it will. And no matter the result, what follows is going to be ugly. Anxiety all around.
It frosted here in Washington County.
Remember that Trump did set the IRS on a few of his perceived “enemies”.
My head is spinning too. Thanks for the shred of potential good news about the changes at Lee. The rhetoric is heating up. Let's save our freedoms.
Billionaire Hoffman seems to be a brave soul to buy up a five percent stock position in Lee Enterprises, Inc....in a company that is floundering in red ink and $500 million in debt and losing millions every month. Perhaps the reality is that local print journalism has gone the way of the dodo bird. Daily local newspapers are on their way out soon to be relegated to the heap of nostalgic but useless things from the past such as AM radio, eight track music tapes, VHS and Betamax movies. The new thinking is to invest time, talent and money in electronic journalism such as Substack and similar electronic news and media outlets. We need to look forward and not long for an old fashioned printed daily newspaper being delivered to your doorstep every morning before sunrise. They’re not coming back. As an old fashioned morning newspaper delivery boy who long ago used to get up early everyday and deliver a daily printed newspaper to every house on my route before sunrise and in rain, snow, sleet ....and at the risk of being chased and bitten by every neighborhood dog that seemed to be on the hunt for newspaperboy flesh....I state this with a heavy heart.
I too had a newspaper route, but mine was in the afternoon M-F and early Sunday morning. My brothers had the morning routes. I remember many a cold Montana Sunday morning, sitting in front of the furnace vent trying to get warm waiting for the papers to be delivered to my door. Then putting them all in my delivery bag, sticking that across my shoulder and heading out through the snow to deliver them before the lights came on in the homes. Such fond memories.
Wow, Rene - delivering papers in the winter in Montana must have been quite the experience! Remembering what the winters USED to be like here in NY - you had to be one dedicated kid!!!!
“Newspapers” are the product, whether in print or electronic.
The history is that the number and size of papers flourished under Gilded Age millionaires who bought or founded papers to be their personal mouthpieces. George Hearst is the easy example, but there are hundreds of others. Hearst was a miner. He founded newspapers to compete with the news of competitors who had different ideas. Some of those papers -on both sides - were in Montana and were eventually consolidated and bought up by - wait for it - Lee Enterprises!
We see similar stuff going on today with billionaires. The money is often not the point. Elon Musk bought Twitter and lost the equivalent of the value of a small country just so that he could push his opinions on the world. If you’re a billionaire you can lose a few million every year on pet projects and it makes effectively no difference to your net worth or lifestyle. In fact, if you use your platform to effect political change to your advantage it is money well spent.
Lee bought Howard Publications in 2002 and it owned not only The Post-Star but the Billings Gazette in Montana. The Howard brothers were in the oil and gas business. Post-Star former publisher Jim Marshall's father was a banker who was a partner with the Howards in the newspaper business.
I find it interesting that I am bombarding by digital ads to buy the local newspaper "ad free" which tells you something about the money they are making on advertising. It is not only sad but dangerous for our community to not have a news source that everyone reads.
I too am feeling anxious about this election however there is still work that can be done. Go to Postcards To Voters and you can still get addresses to write to. There are candidates that would appreciate your help in canvassing like Carrie Woerner, Chloe Pierce, Alvin Gamble and Josh Riley. Sometimes it is best to just put your head down and continue to focus on what you can do. Don’t wake up on November 6th and say, “If only I would have…”. There can be no regrets. And maybe even read this piece from Tim Miller. If you know a more moderate Republican that might be swayed, send it to them.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/a-message-for-haley-voters-still?r=85dg&utm_medium=ios
Many good points in today’s column to speak to, I’ll consider the problem with newspapers - it was greed. There was too much profit in newspapers, and they were old and laden with assets such as real estate which made them a target for vulture capitalism. Lee, for example, tried to become too big a fish to be eaten and became laden with debt. The alternative should have been to make the employees owners or at least part owners. A good example of that sort of thinking is Stewart’s which has for many years had an employee ownership program. Stewart’s is a bad takeover prospect because there are too many employee-owners. Many of those owners are now stock millionaires and the Dake family is planning on divesting of the corporation over the years and turning it entirely over to employees.
With the tens of thousands of reporters across this country surely some of them realized that the business model of their employers was doomed by ownership/investor greed and could have rallied to convince management that it was in everyone’s best interest that the corporation made only modest profit while at the same time increasing pay scale for employees or at least providing stock in the corporations as part of a benefit package. Under such an arrangement it is likely we would likely have lost far fewer newspapers.
Newspaper companies thought the gravy train would last forever and never reacted to the digital threats that stole their revenue. But all the corporate big shots kept getting their bonuses.
It kind of reminds me how Sears failed to read the writing on the wall about internet commerce, and squandered the customer loyalty of over 100 years. What is Amazon if not essentially a digital Sears Roebuck catalog? Coulda, woulda, shoulda!
Exactly.
Mike Stewart's Shops is a privately held company by the Dake family and the employees through an employee stock ownership plan do not offer equity interests in the form of publicly traded stock shares.
Lee Enterprises is a publicly traded American media company.
Making the employees of Lee Enterprises part owners of Lee Enterprises would accomplish what?
Stewart's Shops employees own a little over 40% of the company according to Stewart's Shops web site.
A hostile takeover is an acquisition strategy requiring that the entity acquire and control more than 50% of the voting shares issued by the company. Stewart's Shops employees own a little over 40% of the company according to Stewart's Shops web site.
Stewart’s is a bad takeover prospect because it is a privately held company not because of too many employees. The Dake family control the ownership of the stock its not traded on the open market,
Do you know Stewart’s never considered going public?
The nightmare that threatens us happened 90 years ago in another highly "civilized" nation. The methods are always the same. Demonize "Other" and then destroy him/her. "They're coming for our jobs and our women." "We'll send our sons to school and they'll come home as daughters." "They're diluting the blood of our nation." Concentration camps? Ovens?
And the Trumpies stay silent. Elise stays silent. Their yard signs say it all. The only "real" Americans are White and Christian, and Republican, and it's best if they're male.
Of course we can't sleep. But we can VOTE!
Me too. Please copy and paste this text to as many swing state news facebook pages, anywhere in a comment. Preferably in a feel-good post, so as to not diminish the tragic ones. This is akin to the notes from "Alone in Berlin."
I am awake most nights by 3 a.m. - a friend says I have to disconnect myself from the news. I feel I must read as much as I can about our current situation even though I feel much is beyond my control.
Trump’s “enemy within”. In psychology it is called “projection”—attributing to others one’s own negative traits, thought, and/or actions.
Who are the real enemies within? Who are the real enemies of democracy?
We need to remember that at least half the country still supports our values of democracy, free elections, and a peaceful transfer of presidential power. We have a voice. We need to use it now and in the current election. And if need be, we’ll use it in the years going forward.
Wow, and just think, journalist Mark Frost's big worry is if the Democrats won't accept a Trump victory. I hope that doesn't keep him awake at night. The last thing that he should have to worry about is another Dachau.
I know I sound ridiculous, but with Great Meadow could you imagine a scenario where it is reopened to house immigrants and then, well, anyone else who shoots there mouyth off. Yes, Ken is unhinged after reading "It can't happen here."
But hey, what are you going to do about it? You have an audience, but you need an organization.
You are not unhinged, Ken. Great Meadows, Mount McGregor, other abandoned prisons could become lucrative detention camps for greedy contractors financed by Trump/Elon Musk/other gazillionaires looking to make more $$$ "housing" innocent people. Bannon gets out of prison in a few days...he probably has plans already drawn up.
Like you, I will never forget the images within Dachau Concentration Camp from my visit there in October,1972. The museum's larger-than-life stark black and white photos of the Nazi's unimaginable inhumanity toward men, women and children...walking into the gas chambers and crematoria...imagining the horrors which those sites continue to represent. And the blackened bronze sculpture created in 1968, depicting human figures entangled with barbed wire...with an engraving near it that translated "NEVER AGAIN..."
It changed me forever, as it should have.
When I moved back here to GF 22 yrs. ago, I was privileged to meet a Dachau survivor, Abe Rudnick, who became my landlord, along with his wife Clara, also a Holocaust survivor. They treated me like family, and because I had cared for combat veterans they began to share stories they had kept to themselves for decades. Clara, at 100 yrs. old, is my most treasured elder "girlfriend," still as sharp and mentally tuned-in to local, national and world events. But my heart breaks that she continues to experience on a very visceral level what Trump has perpetuated in his hateful Hitler-like verbage/behavior ever since he descended down his gold elevator. She sensed early on, before he was elected, that Trump was evil, telling me this was how Hitler started out. For her to see the war scenes in the Ukraine, and in Gaza, and Israel and elsewhere is further trauma for her to endure. Yet, she feels a responsibility to continue to speak her Truth about the Holocaust of the past... and what's happening in the present. She is my hero.
When Mark Frost, as a Jewish man who grew up in Glens Falls, published and refused to repudiate Stefanik's labeling of Jan. 6th convicted insurrectionist prisoners as "hostages" - when he knew full well that Mrs. Rudnick was still alive...and that she and millions of Jewish children, teens and adult concentration camp survivors had been True hostages...along with the hostages then being held in Gaza...it sickened me. But I realized then, as I do now, that some publications will print anything to satisfy their advertisers and subscribers.
It never ends...yesterday, I was told of a particularly offensive campaign lawn poster locally and I drove over to the site on 88 Meadow Drive, Qsby. There in bold blue and white letters were the words... "TIM AND THE HOE GOTTA GO..."
with TRUMP in bold letters under that despicable racist, sexist sign.
This is a neighborhood with young children...and within walking distance of the home of the Ward 2 GOP candidate for The Queensbury Town Council, Scott Gushlaw...
I wrote to a Post Star reporter today to see if they would do a story on this, since the Meadow Drive property owner obviously was looking for attention.
Yes, I saw that sign on Facebook. This is what is passing as civil discourse?
Sleepless nights because Mein Kampf seems like Project 2025. The enemy within as stated is any one who oppses Trump.
Want some fun facts look up Milo Yiannopolis read a bit. He's like a ghost who appears pissing off colleges stirring up racial hatred. Then reapears at Marlago having some sway over the dinner plans gone embarrassing for Trump.
Yeah hang on.