141 Comments
Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

I am 68 now and remember when it was FCC law that commercials could only take up seven minutes of every hour for advertisements. I gave up my TV when "advertisers were allowed 22 minutes of every hour to commercials.

You go online now and the advertising can almost go endlessly unless you either skip the ad or turn off the volume. I am NOT paying almost $15 a month for ad blockers THAT SOMETIMES WORK--not just work for a week. If anyone has a recommendation, would you please let me and everyone else on here know.

Thank you in advance of all the political ads that are about to arrive. Just remember that ANYTHING Joe Biden claims is a lie.

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Like Don said and we read him for a reason, use the Brave browser. Go download it, tell it to import all your links, passwords and such and enjoy the world without ads.

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AdblockPlus is a freebie and very effective. Donations appreciated. Youtube just noticed mine yestereday.

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I use Adblock as well and have for many years. Seems like, almost daily, another news site which I frequent joins the list of those who “just noticed”. Still, I refuse to turn it off. I haven’t watched television since the late 90’s so that doesn’t affect me.

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They are crazy if they think I'm going to turn it off so their ads can destroy what's on my computer screen. FY, Daily Mail. FY, Fox-NY Post. FY to all of you.

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I use (and donate to) AdBlock for the computer. Does it work on TVs as well? (Rhetorical question. I stopped watching TV when Genghis Khan was hired by ESPN.)

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Not there yet, Don, but Robert Mitchum was my hero back in the day. Watched Thunder Road and Out of the Past on youtube. And there were no commercials or else adblock was blocking them.

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I was in high school in Asheville nc where he made that movie. I remember watching them film a couple of scenes. The moonshiners were real. My father was in the auto repair business and built some hot rods for some of them.

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My dear late wife's movie star was Robert Mitchum when we first dated in 1964.

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And Instagram is just one ad after another- it’s hardly a social media site anymore

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I actually enjoy the ads and appreciate the fact that they subsidize programming. I used to spend hundreds of dollars per year on papers and magazines. Now I'm down to $5 a month for Don Surber. I occasionally watch Fox News but I don't pay for it. Both my daughters have added me to their accounts, one for YouTube TV and another for HBO. I switch it off whenever our current President or his minions come on.

I'm in a state of mourning because of the death of my second wife. My emotions are subdued. I'm grateful for every day and the loving support of my family and I appreciate you, my friends. God's grace comforts me.

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Been there. Take the time to mourn and grieve. You don't need to rush thru it but also don't let it consume your every waking thought. Like does get better, not the same as before, but it does get better. Helps to get involved in things you like to do, hobbies, etc. Good luck to you.

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There is no right or wrong way to handle death. Take it slow, my friend.

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Dang, Tony, I bated you w/poles and 433 reps. Your becoming better w/ you're corrections.

Hop u relized it was rud.

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Missed you and Schlong-I feel your pain.

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What happened to Schlong ?

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Not a clue-anyone know?

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I was wondering about that myself. That's what's so illusionary about the internet. Relationships simply vanish. Your next-door neighbors don't (my condolences to whomever lives next to Prince Harry The Bald and Meagan Markle!).

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He'll be back, I just believe that. He's busy and hopefully NOT for a bad reason.

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I too had noticed the recent absence of both Schlong and Revmaddog. Hope all is well?

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

Why not popcorn AND toasted marshmallows?

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

Calories! (Buttered popcorn is mandatory at Casa Reed).

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Coco nut oil here.

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I put a little honey and molasses (yes, both) on popcorn when I eat it. Gotta use a spoon; it's too sticky to handle. Also, it's good with a cup of coffee, kinda like a cinnamon roll.

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Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023

Submerging a honey-molasses popcorn-roll into a cup of coffee?

"Esmond ended by putting pepper in his iced coffee and spluttering it all over his pale grey Nassau suit and a good dollop over Mrs Laddie Sanford's white beach dress."*

When socializing, BYOU (bring your own umbrella!).

*The Letters of Ann Fleming (p. 64).

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Popcorn balls made with marshmallows.

And a recliners. I fall right out of a hammock.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

Don, I grew up outside NYC reading the likes of the Herald Tribune, Journal American, etc. Eventually the newspaper unions killed them all and the only broadsheet left was NYTimes. I didn’t like it, but it had the best international reporting available. I left NYC in the early 70s and continued to seek out the Sunday edition of the NYT until sometime during the Reagan admin when it became unreadably biased.

Your daily column is a breath of fresh air in a fetid moldering media swamp. Keep it up!

More popcorn please!

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If you are patient (it's a huge book), you might enjoy "The Paper, The Life & Death of The New York Herald Tribune," by Richard Kluger [1934- ]; Alfred Knopf (1986).

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

Today's Poll: I've never really been clear on why Drudge flipped. I voted blackmail. Drudge spawned Andrew Breitbart and I think Greg Gutfield. I read Matt's site first thing everyday. He had millions of readers one of the largest (maybe the largest) news aggregates on the planet. Rush Limbaugh referenced him regularly. Then poof one day he became a lib. I figured they must of have found pictures of him having sex with animals. Maybe his family was threatened. I can't even remember now how long it's been since I've read it.

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I was a long time reader of Drudge. Then poof. I wasn't. He surely lost a lot of readers like us Surberites that gave Drudge the poof treatment.

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I remember rumors going around that Drudge was a closeted homosexual and that he had a new boyfriend who pulled him to the left. No idea if it was true.

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Must have come out of the closet, cause I heard the same thing. NTTAWWT> My bet's on $$$

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Well, we can't blame it on Meagan Markle, can we? (we can't?! Why not?)

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Sex with animals? Would the Bidens go even THAT low? Did Hunter pretend he was Elsie?

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Yeah, it was something like that.

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I have used Brave for a couple of years now. I also switched from Verizon to Patriot Mobile and started saving money two years ago. Memo to Verizon: I was with your company when it was GTE (remember them?). Never had a real complaint about your service, but why give money to companies that hate me?

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Thanks for the Patriot Mobile tip.

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Nothing against Patriots but if you get a good T-Mobile signal be sure to check out Tello.com too. Very cheap and flexible plans.

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"Gee!"

"No, GTE!"

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T-mobile-$10 a month-I hate telephones.

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Same here. And this/ours is not irrational behavior. Cell phones have destroyed this country. More specifically, a very high percentage of people who live in it.

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To add to your comment and be a little more specific, social media has decimated this country, especially the youngsters who live on it. It is solely responsible for the boom in kids thinking they are another sex, they are gay, they are binary, they are meta sexual, blah blah BLAH. This crap thinking did not exist before demonic social media. And it’s too late.

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Especially on the highway while driving. Can it get any crazier? Driving on the interstate is like driving bumper cars at the amusement park. . . . except your life is at stake on the highway.

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I figure 25,000 deaths will finally get their attention.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

My stint in the newspaper industry brings back many memories. My first capitalist venture was as 1 14yr old arriving at 4:30am under a theater marque to deliver the Detroit Free Press to me in excess of 100 subscribers. God forbid if I was late. Even at that hour I often was greeted by my customers with expectant arms. Unbeknownst to me then I was delivering papers to what Tom Brokaw later tagged as the greatest generation. Sunday papers and comics were killer. Even having front and saddle bags at times required me to make a return trip to under the marque to retrieve those left behind. Collecting money from my customers is another story. Fond memories of invites to have cookies, milk and tea sometimes. My older brother would stand near an open wood lit barrel hawking newspapers on Saturday night, where I had no idea other then I went with Dad somewhere to pick him up. Geees, what fond memories. Don't get me wrong though. The heavy snow or the pouring rain, reflecting now, was a hell of a time. Today, I go to the library and rip out the crossword sections of scrapped old papers, as you describe as comic book sized and worthy of a bird cage. I can afford thank God but its trash mostly. Thanks. What fond memories you've evoked. and again thanks for writing all the news that fit to print.

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Thank you for your news service. My dad was a newspaper man and when I complained about the paper's liberal slant, he told me to hush, that the newspaper was keeping me in pretty little shoes I adored! Purses to match.

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I've wondered why one of the struggling mainstream news channels - especially CNN - didn't adjust its target market away from serving the crowded left wing view to go after the 50% + in the under-served conservative/independent sphere. Usually, marketers rush to profitable unserved markets and the markets without competition are especially juicy. Since Fox clearly abandoned center-right viewers in 2020, isn't it ripe for the picking?

This has been particularly vexing as the proof of government manipulation and blatant disinformation has been documented. After all, don't they have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to get them returns on their investments? Wouldn't one stand on the moral high ground to proclaim they were under duress, never wanted to lie, are so relieved to come clean and don the "I've sinned but been saved" mantel?

My conclusion is that it's not about market share and profit. They hate us. Truly hate us. They think our spirit can be crushed into oblivion if they ignore and program against us. They believe we won't have a source of information without them and will shrivel away (as does the RNC).

They discount the reach of competitors like Substack and Locals as well as streaming channels like Real America's Voice, RSBN, Epoch News and Daily Wire. They ignore Citizens Free Press and discount the impact of podcasts by Lou Dobbs, Don Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson. They ignored Rumble until in-their-face metrics measured thousands more tuning into a Rumble event than watching MSNBC or Fox. Their response was to deploy the old sex abuse canard against Rumble's biggest draws - that should destroy their credibility with the hillbillies.

Losing one of their own like Twitter was a black swan they never could have imagined. That rebellion must be quelled. Go after all Musk's companies until he hires the correct political ideologues.

No, it's not about profit. It's not about having the best product. It's not about following in the journalistic footsteps of an Edward R Murrow, Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley.

It's about pulverizing you and me. Crushing our spirit. Making us disappear. And they're all agreed on it. Corporate news execs, federal bureaucrats, our elected officials.

They never see the insurgency coming. Ma Bell never thought their landline business would diminish. The Post Office never thought they'd lose their monopoly on transmitting documents.

This is another battle in the never ending war of good vs evil.

Maybe we'll triumph. Maybe they'll blow us away with the dust.

Say a prayer for the good to triumph. Prayer is powerful. Prayer is our secret weapon.

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Because their business model is no longer driven by the consumer end-user.

They negotiate the ad revenue up front and it is paid up front as well - little different than the professional and "amateur" entertainment sports leagues - they negotiate multi-billion $ deals for presentation rights (paid up front) with networks and other platforms and couldn't care less about Joe Schmoe who pays through the nose for two or three tickets so he and his kids can sit in a nose-bleed section, and have wokeness rubbed in his face and jammed down his sons' throats as they view the game through binoculars. There WAS a time when the gate mattered.

In turn, the networks and platforms negotiate several sub-billion $ deals with cable companies, other platforms for projected ad revenue (also paid up front).

As downstream business models collapse, the content rights owners will eventually be affected, and they will have no choice BUT to respond to market forces, but that is a ways off.

The implosion of click-bait ad revenue just may be a harbinger of what's to come, and perhaps sooner than anyone realizes.

We can but hope.

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Brilliant, Tex-you are one of the sharper knives in Don's tool holder; however, your avatar reminds me of a poem I learned in speech 101: 'In the fell clutch of circumstance,

I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning's of chance, my Head is bloody, but unbowed.' Later in life, I learned that I was neither the master of my fate, nor the captain of my soul.

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Thank you! High praise, indeed!

The pic is Steve Hanson in the movie, "Slap Shot" after the pre-game brawl...

https://youtu.be/VHMi-j7W2gM?si=FNyBpDlFXEg7Ho4a

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There's also the cable news funding that reflects a Marxist business plan rather than merit. Cable companies force subscribers to take a pre-determined package and distribute the revenues to those companies via "carriage" fees. It matters little if CNN or MSNBC have fewer viewers than the Productive Cough Channel. They all get a set number of dollars each month from cable subscriptions that pay their costs and executive bonuses. Ad revenue is Christmas stocking stuffing.

But these people are so short-sighted. They're killing their own revenue model with streaming. They thought streaming would bring them increased revenue but it's encouraging people to abandon cable subscriptions for a cheaper method that gives the consumer a choice of product.

Duh.

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Amen-By Any means Necessary is not just a slogan.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

NBC’s Today show opened today with the heroism of the Biden Administration action waiving 22 federal laws so that walls on the border can be built

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Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023

What angers me is the same Biden administration SOLD the un-used wall sections left over from Trump at probably pennies on the dollar. Now, they can allocate more of our tax dollars to RE-DO what they had in-hand six months ago.

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It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Xiden bought all of those supplies to build that new wall around his Wilmington mansion, at about 2 cents on the dollar.

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Who said crooks are dumb. Sniffy tells the government to sell Wall material (to Hunter?) for 2 cents on the dollar. Then the buyer (Hunter?) sells the same material back to the government for $1.10 on the dollar. Then Hunter(?) sends “The Big Guy” his 10%. America, what a great country!

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Confiscate the entire neighborhood ("national security!").

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“The Big Guy” didn’t get his 10% from the first batch so it only makes sense he’d do that.

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Of course. Because Bidet's (not a typo) pals will sell the materials to the gumnit.

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I don't understand how the Executive can waive laws passed by the Congress that forbid wall construction. Dems should have to take a recorded vote in the House and Senate, acknowledging honestly how much their Trump hatred damaged their own districts. Big city Democrat mayors should have to show up on Capitol Hill to convince their representatives to vote for a wall. A good public spanking would work wonders.

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Frank, Dems never let the Constitution get in the way of their wayward schemes.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

The thing about “news” and this government’s effort to control it is that they don’t want there to be news, just the recitation of their daily bullet points.

For example, if you happen to watch TV “news” you’d be hard pressed to find anything reported on international affairs, and even if you did, it would be for about 2.5 seconds, and then on to the next bit of fluff that has zero mental nutritional value.

The end game here is to keep everyone as much in the dark as about as much as is possible.

The internet, for now, is the thorn in their flesh, as it enables the resourceful to find “uncontrolled” outlets of information the MSM don’t want you to know about.

But that is extremely vulnerable in our current dictatorial climate to being totally taken over by the powers that be. They just took over all the phones, TV’s and radios in the country yesterday, blocking access, momentarily for now, to that very internet.

The MSM is totally in the pocket of the government, and only remains on life support because of their interest in subsidizing it, to broadcast what they want, when they want and how they want it.

The end game is the takeover of the internet and the destruction of any news or information source outside of their purview. Total control. And it will be done in the name of National Security.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

While I despise everything about our liberal friends and try to limit all purchases from these communists and pedophiles, it is possible something else may be at play: our economy is crashing worse than Pravda and the politburo report. Inflation may be in the hyperinflation stage. Costco goods are up a staggering 70% over 1 year ago. In my realm, healthcare supplies if you can get them are 50% higher. I went online to look to take my family on vacation to a resort near me: rooms up a staggering 3000% over a year ago.

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Bring 3000% fewer relatives along with you.

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Don, very funny.

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Mark, No offense, but 3000% is huge. Can you provide numbers? I can't believe that calculation. I know my vacation prices have gone up significantly, but under 100%. Please share numbers. Thanks.

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Aman resort(Amangiri) was $800/$1000 per night including all food and spa treatment. Now 1 year later $3700/$4500 per day. No one can afford. Btw $800 night very expensive

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Don, thank you for your chapter and verse explanation of the media's downfall. The blood-sucking leeches are learning that what goes around, comes around. Do unto others, and before long they will do unto you. May the media rest in pieces.

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Just quizzed Tex about his avatar-what's with the hacker's ball?

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Don, that's not a pole, just a distinction w/o a difference. Your post/article/column/blog/op-ed was so good, it was posted on several sites, beside Instapundit. We in Suberville adore you. However, some on other sites took umbrage with one statement. 'A bipartisan majority decided enough was enough with McCarthy who had promised to allow congressmen to read an appropriations bill and wait 72 hours before holding a vote'. I assumed that it was just your subtle sarcasm. Others did not make that assumption, since not a single Dem voted for Kev.

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The L-Dotters missed the sarcasm

Sigh

I should have said Gaetz and 7 other Republicans

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Can't knock the L-dotting since that is how I met The Mighty Surber. That used to be my first get-on of the day until this present company of cyber friends brought me aboard. (red heart emoji goes here).

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Mine too, Laws-still is-Don's in my email-sad her son became such a disappointment.

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Me too, Lawsy0. After 25 years of it being my #1 go to, L-dot is now the second site I visit each morning.

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Pray tell, what is "L-dotter/dotting"? Or am I so along in my dottage that the explanation would be Trig 201 by Steve King?

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I had a friend put this on Facebook. "Apparently, Kevin McCarthy isn't right enough."

Liberals think MAGA is right wing extremism, because they are told this, 24/7, by the news readers. MAGA, is about raising up the largest group of Americans, in our country. The Middle Class, 'minus' Federal and most state employees, Union Bolsheviks, Academia, Healthcare, single Mothers and the non working class, including illegal aliens and the elite 1%, which are the liberal voting block. I'm hesitant to classify these 2 groups as right or left. I prefer Takers and givers. Leftist voters, in the US, take the money the Middle Class gives to the country, and to the whole world, as consumers. Yes this is a lopsided arrangement, but with a tweak or 2, this arrangement can work for everybody. The big loser in the changes, would be easy money.

Easy money, is who supports keeping McCarthy speaker. Democrats want that easy money for themselves. Money does 'not' grow on trees.

8 Representatives, voted for the people who fund, this lopsided arrangement.

God Bless them!

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Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023

I loved that ‘did you see what I did there’. Driveby Media ALWAYS do that when Miss Lindsey, dead McCain, carpetbagger Romney, 2A Cornyn would get cover on anti-MAGA votes for ‘Root & Branch’ FreezeFrame Chynaboy McConnell.

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Just this week Piers Morgan did a lengthy interview with Jordan Peterson who spoke at length about misinformation and disinformation. Just who are those who claim there is such a thing...who makes them the arbiter? Very worthwhile discussion, available on youtube.

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Drudge got paid. Bigly. By democrats which is either confounding or ironic.

I stopped reading our Minneapolis Star & Sickle 20 years ago opting for other sources such as this where you actually learn things.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

Ditto Dallas Morning News. Stanford Maroney grandson killed it w help from OpenBordersRINO Pete Sessions.

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Ditto Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Of course, I haven't lived there for decades, but still . . .

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Ditto the NY Daily News; of course, The NY Times; and all non-sports pages of the NY Post.

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The DMN and FWST have become douche rags and worth the online print they use.

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Oops sorry. I mean to say not worth.

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The three faint dots at the bottom right of your message: clink once on them. It opens the edit function. Then you can add or delete missing/wrong words.

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I wonder if his favourite cocktail is a stinger - see the last ~45 minutes of the film, "Gorky Park" for the reference.

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Oct 5, 2023Liked by Don Surber

i loved reading the newspapers from childhood until November 1992 when i saw how badly the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News did in covering a story i had personal knowledge of. i kept reading newspapers with a jaundiced eye for just a few years after that.

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Damn, it's true, the poison started seeping into the newspapers that long ago --- almost exactly when we were all foolishly celebrating the "end" of Communism in Europe. HA!

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