The dishonest fakers at the Amazon Washington Post ($) and the failing New York Times ($) are again attacking your favorite president, this time for playing golf while a Category 5 hurricane took aim at the United States.
Bad people! (Free) Everybody knows the best way to prepare for a hurricane is by playing golf.
Beating a Category 5 is nothing if you can birdie a par five (the 590-yard 12th hole (Free) on Trump National Golf Club’s Championship Course is “monstrous” (Free). Though recent hurricanes have been (Free) some of “the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water,” they are less intimidating after you’ve survived the eighth hole of the Riverview Course: not one but two merciless water hazards blocking your approach.
Hurricanes are best weathered from bunkers, and you can bet Trump spent time in those this weekend with his sand wedge. Think high winds are a threat during hurricanes? They’re even more hazardous to your handicap; it wouldn’t surprise me if, in true emergencies, Trump has resorted to a 2-iron to reduce loft. And not even a meteorologist studies rotation as closely as a golfer; just one slice and all models project you’ll make landfall in the deep rough.
Here’s one more excerpt so you can see how he skewers Trump with a generous and effective use of the overstrike.
While some people have decided to find ways
to get around paywalls, most people find that they’d just as soon use up their free clicks and then find articles by their favorite writers on sites which publish excerpts and some commentary like
AlterNet and
RawStory.
Bloomberg, my former employer, is reportedly moving to a paywall. If that turns out to be true, I can’t say I’ll be surprised.
When I announced that I was leaving Bloomberg View for the Post Opinion section in February, many longtime readers gently reproached me for moving my writing behind a subscriber paywall. Some of them were not so gentle. How could I cut myself off from readers like that? Was I really so arrogant as to think they ought to pay for the privilege of reading me?
I couldn’t blame them for being miffed; some of them, after all, had been reading me since I was a young(ish) blogger writing from Ground Zero. The open Internet literally gave me my career, and for years, I’ve repaid that gift by seeking out employers that kept my writing free to readers. I really believed in the motto that “information wants to be free.”
Even The Daily Beast is trying a subscription service where select articles and opinion pieces often featured as their main story tempt you with a photoshop and headline but when you click you find the that only the first two paragraphs are readable but then the third blurs out and you have to subscribe to continue.
The Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and many local papers now charge for clicks in excess of a certain number per month.
Obviously the Internet is in part a business and various websites have to make money. Some are trying to do it with ever more intrusive ads. One popular site has a full page ad for an expensive resort that slides from the right the moment you click on a story and takes over your entire screen.
HuffPost didn't pay their contributors until recently, but now they do. Like Politico, Slate, Vox and many other excellent news and opinion websites they manage to get by with unobtrusive ads on their webpage, as does Daily Kos. Axios and Buzzfeed even have investigative reporters who sometimes break national stories.
How long the current mixed model will survive before more and more of these free websites charge for content remains to be seen.
I subscribe to the New York Times and the Post in part to keep informed but also because sometimes I want to write articles like this. I know many people who are as interested in politics as I and can’t afford subscriptions.
I don’t know what the answer is.