The Manchester Union Leader has gone downhill...

it used to be the farthest right of the dailies available in the continental USA.
Whacko publisher William Loeb used to muse in the public prints as to the relative contagiousness of homosexuality. He also was an early exponent of using harsh invective on local and national liberal democrats thus paving the way for Jay Severin and Laura Ingraham.
Bill was a mad caution to put William Randolph Hearst to shame...a fervent Granite State nationalist, he nonetheless lived over the border in the hated Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Loeb didn't care though, thanks to the New Hampshire Primary he had national platform every four years...and by ghod he made the most of it.
Always an iconoclast, he backed only the craziest and made it a paying proposition.
Locally he was a big backer of Meldrim Thompson's successful gubernatorial bid in 1976. Purists will recall Thompson's doomed bid to arm the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons.
Alas the paper's magic didn't alway work or else "Mad" Sam Yorty's bid for the Presidency would've come to something back in 1972.
Yup...Bill Loeb was indeed a big crazy fish in a very small cold windswept pond...what could be better?
Alas, in 1981 Loeb died, and for a while his equally demented wifey carried on as publisher providing a warm refuge for Pat Buchanan's column and calling for the txes to go down to below zero or some such nonsense.

The Union Leader's letters to the editor page was must read material for anyone studying the ultra-right in USA. Back in the mid 1980's the paper routinely ran letters from all over the country. Most of these missives were fanatical screeds no doubt written with a crayon firmly wedged between the toes (the writer's arms being unsportingly straitjacketed)...deunciations of Jimmy Carter, the U.N., flouridation of water, and the flying monkeys were a daily event.

All gone now alas...these days the Union Leader is still decorously right-wing but the country has caught up to Loeb's paper in conservative lunacy...so the spark of counter cultural defiance is gone.
The letters have all become safely provincial in character and where once ran blazing epistles denouncing Walter Mondale's socialistic leanings now crabby notes on the traffic in Epsom Circle can be seen.
Moreover the paper has gone with the whole "USA Today" look...with graphs and charts and pretty pictures all meaningless in extremis.
I miss the olde timey Union Leader.
It was a rag with the ethics of a crack house...but it was a laugh riot to read.
Today's super patriots and ultra conservatives just aren't fun anymore...they've ruled the Firmament too long and become self conscious and boring.