I almost did a Virtual Front Page, but that would have been the third in just eight days! I don’t want to spoil y’all, so we’re going for an Open Thread instead. They’re easier: I don’t have to come up with a lede and rank the items in importance, and I can pull in opinion, which is more in my wheelhouse anyway. (I was the front page editor at two papers in the ’80s, but that was a long time ago — or so everyone keeps telling me and Joe Biden.)
The hard thing about VFPs is, there are a lot of rules. Things are looser in an Open Thread:
- A Dishonorable Senate — This is an NYT editorial, and my only beef with it is that “An.” What, like we have an array of Senates, like multiple universes, and there’s just this one bad one? No. Until we work out the quantum inter-universal travel thing, this is the only Senate we get. And it has shamelessly, blatantly, without any pretense of doing anything else, completely abandoned its constitutional duty. More than abandoned, spat upon it. Look, we knew they were going to acquit, but we did have a right to expect an actual trial first. Is this it, folks? Is the loss of our republic now inevitable? Has it happened already? I didn’t think I’d live to see this…
- Why don’t we all just ignore Iowa and New Hampshire? — Not a bad idea, particularly given that Iowa is caucuses, not even a primary. Have you READ the rules of this insanity? People standing around in groups, and then if their group is less than 15 percent of the total in the room, they regroup and the losers gravitate to second choices? It’s like ice-breaker games at that team-building retreat the soulless corporation you work for made you go to. (See what I did there? Two dangling prepositions in one sentence! Can I write, or what?)
- Joe Biden: A Really Nice Guy for President — This is a column by Frank Bruni, which means it’s the third opinion piece in a row from the NYT. But hey, they had some good pieces today. There’s only one cure for Trump, one thing to set this nation back on course: Replace him with a really nice guy. Last thing we need is to replace him with another one of those angry people out there — you know, the ones who can’t string two sentences together without saying “fight” at least once?
- Senate hears closing arguments — Switching over to news now… and can you imagine that they’re still going through the motions as though this were still an actual trial being conducted by an actual credible deliberative body. I don’t see how the House managers made themselves get up this morning and do this. But at least they are doing their duty, so my hat’s off to them.
- Super Bowl halftime show was ‘sexual exploitation,’ Franklin Graham says — Really? Ya think? I knew that and I didn’t watch it. Has Graham been doing a Rip Van Winkle for the last five or six decades? Has he been somehow walled off from popular culture? Why the news flash at this particular point?
- Earth Fare grocery chain closing all stores, including in Columbia — This just in, and it kind of blew my mind. It suggests a lot of questions: Why now, instead of back when Whole Foods opens? Do we think Whole Foods will last since Amazon has taken it over and corporatized it? Couldn’t Earth Fare have hung on a little longer to see what happened there? How do small local shops like Rosewood Market and 14 Carrot hang on while Earth Fare can’t? Business and the way it works is just such a mystery to me…
- Super Bowl Ads 2020: Strange, Serious, Smaaht, And So Very Expensive — Some of y’all probably watched this, so tell me: Were there any really good ones, ones I might want to go watch on YouTube?