North Shelby Times

I haven't visited the "little paper that could," the North Shelby Times, in a while, so I made a visit to their website. Whoa! What a change. Gone is the PDF front page of the newspaper's content, replaced with a lot of syndicated stuff from WorldNetDaily and PoliticsOL. In frames. I don't know. WND seems a world away from the unabashedly liberal and Democratic NST.

The paper version I picked up is still the same, though a tad more professional looking. There was a cover story about the Terry McAuliffe visit where he touted the Kerry Middle Class Misery Index. The author fell prey to the very problems I wrote about down below, of not knowing or reporting the junk economics the MCMI uses. The story seems to confues the MCMI with the real Misery Index, even to talking about the MCMI, which is only a month or so old, in historical terms. This is a pure example of not knowing the subject. I will credit the writer with explaining the makeup of the MCMI, though.

The editorial from Editor in Chief Frank Holland is incoherent. Disjointed doesn't even begin to describe it, nor would "confused." Since they still publish online in PDF format, I'll have to transcribe for you from the opening:

I got a letter from one of my republican party friends that insinuated that if you were a democrat you had a low IQ. This just shows how uninformed some of my friends are. Case in point, Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, George Bush was a Cheerleader. Both went to good colleges. Clinton probably went on a scholarship or democratic funded grants.

Bush on old oil money. Consequences, Clinton left a 5 billion surplus. After 3 1/2 years, Bush has a 5 1/2 billion deficit. Starting with Roosevelt, the democratic party has, and is the party of the people. Under Roosevelt, the republicans which were the ultra rich lived like kings and the masses were starving.

That's exactly how he wrote it. It only grows worse from there. I am not making this up.

But like I said, the look of the paper has improved noticeably.