We’ve once again made the finalist list for the Frederick News Post’s Best of the Best awards. Since we don’t make any money doing what we do, we can’t afford to buy any of the fancy ads to promote ourselves. Therefore, we rely on you, our dear readers, to get the word out and vote! Go ahead and follow this link!
We are counting on you!
Who wouldn’t have wanted to be a fly on the wall in the office of the opinion editor at the Frederick News Post when this gem of an LTE dropped into his mailbox. Billy Shreve was criticized for missing school board meetings, and penned a lengthy screed detailing the ways in which he is actually dumb as a stump. A man who engaged in a weeks long drama about a lost key also accused the editorial board of engaging in a third grade spat. The miracle of the internet visited this memory upon us, and as we were not publishing in 2014, we thought it only fair that we douse it liberally with our attentions.
It’s hard to pick a favorite part, but here’s a highlight.
The editors of The Frederick News-Post have surprised me. They have spent so much time confusing attendance with action and results. Generally, that type of evaluation is considered in leadership circles to be a “rookie mistake.”
For a person making such a bold statement about action and results it does seem like most of what he does is moan and groan and little else–then, now and forevermore! (One does wonder what will be inscribed on his tombstone, since he admits it isn’t going to be, “Never missed a meeting.” May we offer “King of the Deplorables” as a suggestion?) It’s in his bones to make a lot of noise and do a lot of nothing, and you can tell by the “leadership circles” he admires.
Can you imagine if students were allowed to just decide that attending some parts of the school day were beneath them the way Shreve approached his responsibility to the BOE? What an example, speaking of leadership.
And then there is also this part:
One might ask, “What constitutes a meeting?”
One might also ask, “Did this really happen?” Ladies and gentlemen of Frederick County, lets not reelect the Bart Homer Simpson of local politics to any other offices. His track record is abysmal, and he does not need to fail up the ladder.
What can we say, y’all. We must be running low on our stupid quotient, since it’s been awhile between council meetings, so we dug into the archives. Frederick County is back in business next week. Brace yourselves.
It is hard to stay away from our very own local reality show, even when on vacation.
We were only able to catch a few snippets so we are going to share RALE’s update for you to enjoy. It includes a link to the FNP summary of the Urbana votes as well.
Back to vacay for us.
The Frederick News Post is once again taking nominations for their annual Best of the Best contest! Up until July 9th you can vote for your favorite Frederick restaurant, camping site, school, and of course your favorite local blog…US! So, if you would be so kind click on over to their contest page, scroll down to the entertainment section, and then under Local Blog enter: Frederick Local Yokel!!! Show us some love!
The Frederick News Post’s opinion page has really jumped the shark lately. There are some unbelievable thought dumplings in both op-ed pieces and letters to the editor so far this week.
Today we have Rick Blatchford doing his own think piece on humorless comedy with a Bye-Bye Birdie parody about The Libs, who allegedly have no funny bones. It’s a variation not unlike that stupid meme that goes around with all the straw man positions that liberals hold, and then says at the end that if you don’t find yourself wetting your pants laughing that you must be a liberal with no sense of humor. It fails at being even remotely clever or inventive. The similarities continue in that if it were intended to be so benignly amusing to all, it would probably not be so one-sided in its mark. Sure, we find mockery of stuff we disagree with hilarious and if we ever get to meet Frederick Douglass IRL we know he agrees with us about the power of mockery, but we aren’t so dumb that we think people who disagree with it would laugh at it, too. We sure aren’t so inexperienced with what constitutes a sense of humor that we think that’s the litmus test.
A highlight from yesterday though: the LTE about Starbucks, which is incomprehensibly linked to hipsters. Starbucks is for people who love the bland uniformity of franchises and coffee roasted so dark burned so badly that it still tastes like coffee if you melt a Snickers bar into it. It is not a coffee shop. It is a Baskin Robbins with coffee as a condiment. If you ever see a hipster drinking a Unicorn frap, we want to be the first to hear about it. You get the feeling this thing about Starbucks was written by someone who has only purchased coffee from two places: Starbucks and Denny’s. Spoiler alert: He prefers Denny’s because they have free refills. By this standard The Golden Corral is the best restaurant in Frederick. Might we suggest doing some exploration in the hipsters’ natural habitat–it should probably be a local business–and making some comparisons. NOLA or Gravel & Grind spring to mind. Possibly Dublin Roasters (although they do offer free refills on coffee if you’re hanging out, so maybe they are too much like the exalted Denny’s to get hipster bona fides derision). It’s hard not to feel ridiculous saying this, but the artisanal toast at Gravel & Grind is actually delicious. And yes, THAT is hilarious.
And because Denny’s has come up, everyone should direct their attention to this classic from The Onion for a taste of the Starbucks/Denny’s dichotomy: Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals for America After Visiting Denny’s
Oh and ICYMI: That family famous for hilariously abusing their kids on YouTube is local in Ijamsville. You can see the Fredneck population vigorously defending a sense of humor in the Frederick News Posts’ comments section/marketplace of free speech ideas on that article. Holy. Hell.
The dreary weather yesterday got us hunkered down and brooding, especially after reading a couple of things about media bubbles having been created out of the decline of the local papers. There’s a problem with how people find out about what’s important if they don’t live in a big city. This all seemed poignant, living in a small city where the hometown, local-family-owned paper just got swallowed up by a company nobody seems to think much of (oh great gravy, they published a headline last week with the word “tree” misspelled)! THESE are the times that try mens’ souls.
After we pointed and laughed about Delegate Afzali going all Girls Gone Wild (via email) on her NyQuil, this leapt out from the AV Club. The piece focuses on the lasting effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which brought us Clear Channel hell on the radio, offensively mindless crap on the television news, and is (party bonus!) also the reason that either Comcast or Verizon is taking actual years from people’s lives as hostages of their monopolistic services. All the good news that’s fit to print, eh?
…once corporations realized they could make money off the news—rather than just viewing it as a public service—they started “making that a joke, too.” As he notes, the move made it so “they could still put on what’s called a news show, but it’s mostly just fluff and trivia and 23-year-olds spewing out talking points that they read on a teleprompter, having no idea what the [redacted!] they’re talking about, fortunately for them.”
-Communications scholar Robert McChesney (AV Club, August 11, 2016)
Furthermore…AV Club goes on to provide this explanation:
That kind of mindless newsreading has real consequences, too. As Common Cause notes in its position paper, “In 2002, more than half of TV stations in the nation’s top 50 markets completely ignored state and congressional elections in their highest rated local news programs in the weeks leading up to those elections, with large station owners offering the least election coverage of all.” McChesney takes it further, saying, “What little coverage there is, is mostly gossip, spin, and speculation, or basically what’s spoon-fed to them by party elites and insiders and big shots accepting all their biases as the appropriate way to view the world. It’s impossible to exaggerate just how nutritionless this so-called journalism is.” In other words, viewers of most stations get lots of Donald Trump news, but almost nothing about city council elections or even state representatives.
The mention of gossip and spoon feeding from party elites seemed so stinkin’ much like what we were just roasting Afzali for in her silly email. Y’all know we are the first to acknowledge that we are A.) not journalists and B.) not unbiased. We have concerns about where the flow information is coming from. We did before the troll news revolution, but looking at all this we hope people will expand their number of reasons to be skeptical about the quality of their information.
As for Local Yokel’s role in the scene, we were delighted by a fantastic discussion on 1A yesterday about censorship and speech on college campuses. The 1A topic also has local pertinence just at the moment since the Hood College Republicans made a story board of the least sophisticated conservative talking points they could brainstorm, allegedly as some sort of PR misfire. Fly your freak flags, we always say! Better the devil you know… However, the highlight from 1A that made our little Local Yokel hearts swell was when Frederick Douglass’s thinking was cited on how to best attack terrible ideas:
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
Well, we’re on board with that. And we are grateful that The Frederick Extra is up and running to keep us informed.
As reported by The Frederick Extra, our coverage of this week’s meeting and today’s edition of Political Notes, Kirby is irate over the county’s reimbursement to the Chamber of Commerce for a lobbyist. In both The Frederick Extra and the FNP, it is reported that Kirby was only sharing part of an email to show everyone how corrupt our County Executive really is. And you know what people? Just because you are against the public funding of the hotel (which is curious from Kirby’s point of view since in 2014 the BOCC was all for it!) doesn’t mean it’s corrupt to advocate for it! Both the city and the county used a lobbyist to advocate for funding because they believe it would be beneficial to the city and county’s economy to have a conference center and hotel. In addition, the County Executive, per the charter, is allowed to write checks without council approval up to $20,000. So whether or not you agree with the use of public funds is a SEPARATE issue from it being a corrupt and nefarious act!
What’s even more curious to us, besides the many times that the old BOCC used funds for a lobbyist for causes THEY believed in, is that for the past two years Kirby was advocating that the council spend up to $25,000 to send a lobbyist to Annapolis. Leaping back through the old Yokel archives we found this post from 2015 and this one from 2016 in which Kirby was trying to get money to secure this lobbyist. Since he didn’t couldn’t identify a clear purpose for this lobbyist, his fellow council members did not think this was a sound use of money. And we have trouble listening to someone who thought it was fine and dandy to send $25,000 to a firm to investigate how to privatize our county services get irate over a check for over less that half of that amount that advocates for a conference center and hotel.
If it pleases the rabble, we would like to direct your attention to a masterpiece of comedy published as an op-ed in today’s Frederick News Post by Monsieur Harry Covert, Esteemed Confrere of Galahad Sweetbottom of the Cotswolds at The Tentacle The Slippery Noodles Blogging Coterie. It is some fan fiction in which Mssr. Covert suggests ways in which an unconstitutional travel ban might be achieved by Orange POTUS. Ah, if only…if only…if only…the administration were not the Trumpster fire that it is.
First and foremost, we regret to inform Mssr. Covert that El Jefe does not have a reputation for reading. Thank you, though, for penning a romantic vision of what we are not even close to experiencing in real life. Rather than exhaust precious time, it might preserve hours and dignity if he were to package these slippery ideas into some sort of Covert extrasensory messaging format and convey them by mental telepathy. Also, if the Scrambled Noodle in Chief can take time out of watching Fox and read, Cotswold’s words at the FNP are abysmally far below the golden toilet pay grade. That said, it’s not like the man is reading the Wall Street Journal, either.
Speaking of scrambled noodles, unless the toddler in the highest office in the land has had a lobotomy we don’t know about, the complete personality transplant Covert imagines wherein he exits campaign mode (literally his only talent) and turns into a magical diplomat capable of speaking softly and carrying a big stick is tragically unthinkable.
There’s been some hand wringing about what could happen to the quality of the Frederick News post if the sale from the Randall family to Ogden Newspapers occurs. Hopefully the critical analysis of President Trump from our local political analysts of Dame Noonington’s caliber–those who just want him to free that noble genius and master of decorum that he is hiding within–shall never be deterred!
This morning’s Political Notes is chock full of good information. First off, Governor Hogan is commanding each school system come before the next Public Works meeting to beg for school construction money! If the school districts dare not appear then screw all the students in your district! Hogan said if they do not appear “..they won’t be getting any money”. Even though lawmakers and school officials have asked for this annual “Beg-A-Thon” to stop the governor is going to continue to make you grovel before his divine presence.
Here’s how State Treasurer Nancy Kopp has characterized these meetings:
Kopp said she agreed with her colleagues about the board’s ultimate authority to approve the school construction funds, but also said the Beg-a-Thon has turned into a “political barrage” and “bullying” in recent years.
Sounds great! Next up in the column is Kirby. At the last council meeting Kirby tried to characterize Jan as some greedy land confiscator. He had a whole list of offenses Jan had committed against the poor citizens of Frederick County. However, he appears to have exaggerated those claims. On the accusation that Jan gobbled up all the land along Route 15 the County Executive had this to say:
She said the 2001 rezoning action was at the Frederick County Planning Commission, and though she was the county commissioners’ liaison to the board, she was at another political event when the U.S. 15 rezonings were voted on. That move by her colleagues on the planning commission ultimately had unintended consequences and was rolled back, she said.
Huh. Well, Kirby can’t be right all the time can he? The new recommendations (that’s right recommendations not a law or Executive Order) concerning the Monocacy River and water buffer zones is what has gotten Kirby all in a pinch. The Monocacy Scenic River Citizens Advisory Board has recommended that properties along the river have a protected water buffer of 300-500 feet. You know to prevent the Monocacy from becoming a simmering cess pool of chemicals and pollutants. Some potentially affected landowners are understandably upset. Nobody likes having to part with their property. And when they have to they should be justly compensated. We need to protect our waterways, even when it upsets some. All interested parties should lay their arguments before the government and said evidence should be weighed with the public good as the ultimate goal. In case you want to read up on the science of what water buffers do here is an informative joint study by Virginia Tech and Virginia State University. We need good, educated discussion with a result that is fair as possible to all parties involved. Not knee jerk statements like this, from someone whose only goal it seems is to be outraged about everything all the time:
“Environmentalism is the new socialism. You know, if you want to take something, just call it environmental. Just call it somehow environmental and everyone’s got to bow down and give up all their rights for that. It’s ridiculous,” Delauter said.
Hey, so we already had words for y’all about local press and freedom of press and what Kirby thinks and how he and his pal Trumpet can stick their Twitter fetish where the sun don’t shine. Please indulge any liberties with the paraphrase. We grow monumentally impatient with these super special teaflakes.
If you didn’t catch it, Sam Bee’s latest Full Frontal (the one with Glenn Beck!!!!) has some harsh to dish out on people who can’t be bothered to notice a local issue because it doesn’t scroll under their nose with their social media headlines (a mission we’ve been endeavoring to remedy). And truly we do recommend that you check out Kirby’s social media. What on Uhhhhrth would we do without that?
And we have called upon you to pay attention to the legitimate media. We believe in being localvores–especially with regard to media consumption. They can’t be the best they can be if you expect them to do their jobs for free. This is our hobby, yo. And as such, we don’t have to do it if we don’t wanna, and we are certainly prepared to say we are not sitting around dreaming up ways to view Shrelauter’s behavior in a kinder light. They are idiotic, petulant children. That’s our story. We’re sticking to it. (Although that does sound like a fascinating mental exercise, trying to put a human [legislative] speed bump up on a pedestal.)
We have a fun suggestion we hope you will like: please make a donation to Katherine Heerbrandt’s web based media outlet, The Frederick Extra. She has years of experience as a journalist, and a great reputation as a fair and competent reporter. Of news. Locally. And we all know through the forces of market competition, the more people out their competing, the better the services should be (to view a contrasting example, note that Comcast has the same user interface it did in 1997). To make it the best possible treat, you could even make that donation in the name of one “esteemed” #kirbydelauter. He’s a national treasure, after all!
That last one’s a link sure worth revisiting, given today’s circumstances…
Way to go, Kirb-o. Never start learnin’.
frederick local yokel 