Nice, liked the quote enough I wanted to see it on the page. (For those successfully attracted by the text, see meme above).

We don't appreciate the good things until they're gone, and our free press has been battered and starved to within an inch of its life. I agree it's a matter of patriotism to wake up fast and put real support behind the press. My news palette includes NYT and Wapo and The Guardian, Politico and The Hill, HuffPo...a liberal core, but I'm pushing myself to graze around for new sources constantly, exploring new sites I find via links, etc. Some sources come and go; just added the the NY Daily News for a short tour of duty, for something off the elitist beaten path.

The abuse of the free press is deliberate, as we all know, designed to unmoor voters from reality and make them easy marks for anti-democracy snake oil; one of the pillars of the anti-democracy movement. Seriously deliberate: Just finished "Democracy in Chains" by Nancy MacLean, the story of James Magill Buchanan, who was, it turns out, Charles Koch's first and most serious economist-crush. More after I absorb it and fit it into my "Story of The Conservative Movement"--I feel like one of the blind guys feeling up the elephant, painstakingly fleshing out the picture of the beast, one fragment at a time. As MacLean documents, the obscurity itself is deliberate, because they know full well that most Americans would be repulsed by their "Public Choice" economics, which is the formal argument that democracy is the enemy of capitalism, and must be restrained before it's too late. These are the people trying to orwell the language to define "freedom" as strictly economic freedom, all other freedom be damned.

What lovely people they are.