And the Ghost of William Jennings Bryan Preaches Every Night

On Saturdays or on most Saturdays I should say one of our newspapers offers on their editorial page a 'left' opinion and a 'right' one on some previously agreed-upon (I assume) topic of interest to someone even if it's not me. 

In the last couple of months the conglomerate that owns the paper, and hundreds across the country, has, and I find this amusing, actually eliminated having an actual editorial on its editorial page believing that people don't really need or care for them. 

In light of how much of our lives far too many of us spend in a variety of states, politically and philosophically, (not to mention Denial, or is that only the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in DC?) I am disquieted by synthetic lines of demarcation that will, ultimately, do nothing to help us build the bridges we need throughout this country, but will, instead, speed the expansion of walls we keep erecting.

If you're waiting for a point, I'll cut to the chase.  Nationally we have too much 'my mind's made up, don't confuse me with facts' already, so folks like Fox News and MSNBC, both recently admitting they had 'mistakenly' used crowd shots from other events in the reporting of stories that underscored their reportorial perspectives, need to stop helping now. Folks like NewsMax and OneAmerica News Network need to step on a Lego and go away entirely. 

And at the local level and we need a LOT more local news than we're getting in most places across the country (thanks internet aggregators)  we must get better at distinguishing a good person from a good elected official and people who mean well from this who do well.

Sometimes they are very much one and the same and sometimes they are two very different people. All ducks are birds but not all birds are ducks. And sometimes, there are things other than birds.
-bill kenny