BY RICH GALEN
NOV 28 | Reprinted from Mullings.com
As if we needed even more evidence that the system has been fractured like a giant egg having fallen off a wall, both major candidates in the November 8 elections are demonstrating bad form in the aftermath.
Donald Trump is a poor winner. Hillary Clinton is a sore loser.
If third graders exhibit this behavior they are sent to the back of the classroom for a time out. And deservedly so.
Hillary Clinton – Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 26
This Thanksgiving occurred in an unusually negatively-charged atmosphere. It seemed harder for some to open the chest cavity and let the heart breathe, tell friends and family you love them, pause long enough to be thankful, forgive and forget.
Not even for a day. This condition was particularly acute near the epicenters of American politics, where people seem more entitled to be angry and righteous in their indignation against others. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 22
“As a general rule of thumb, the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to corporate media…The less significant it is to ordinary people, the more attention the media pays.”
Vermont Senator and socialist Bernie Sanders, quoted in the Washington Post in his new book, Our Revolution.
The media never translated the story. This was the first time media went without attribution. Panel members on news shows are no longer analysts but propagandists. Will the media change? No. Look at the numbers. Profits are up.
Paraphrasing the assessments of a former broadcast journalist now a university faculty member, whose comments were not for attribution.
BY RICH GALEN
NOV 17 | Reprinted from Mullings.com
I did a post-election panel for a telecommunications group earlier this week during which the Democrat, former Congressman Rick Boucher of Virginia, talked about how he foresaw bipartisan cooperation in the House to update the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Not to worry. This is not a column about Title II or Section 706.
I conceded that the Congressman – a long-time expert on telecoms – knew more about that than I did, but I knew a lot about how political parties act when they’ve been knocked on their collective butts and, like Oliver Twist, meekly holding out a bowl asking for more gruel wasn’t in the playbook. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
NOV 15 | Reprinted from Mullings.com
The demonstrations against the results of last Tuesday’s election are the grown up equivalent of a child screaming and kicking at the Chinese restaurant because they don’t have fish sticks and ketchup.
Act out all you want. Ain’t gonna make over-battered, pre-formed fish and a bottle of sugary tomato sauce show up at your table.
The anti-Trump protesters can act out all they want but it’s not going to cause the election to be re-run. At least not for the next four years. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 14
“And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” — President Richard Nixon, November 9, 1969
‘Silent majority’ is a term used to describe people who do not speak out, do not make themselves known and whose opinions are overshadowed by those who do. President Richard Nixon coined the phrase in defense of his Vietnam policies and generated favorable ratings above 70 percent.
And, today, it turns out there is a silent majority in this country and it, they, just elected the next President.
A good many of those locked inside the Washington beltway or high up in Rockefeller Center or in Hollywood or in any number of college faculty lounges did not get or did not want to acknowledge the silent majority, so to them Trump’s election was a shocker. The loudest voices of mainstream media, pollsters, pundits, American liberalism, and a community of ‘establishment’ Republicans, instead produced, directed, and sold a narrative that Trump was unfit for office, a clown, a charlatan, a liar and a cheat, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, and sexist, and also really uncouth. Not since Andrew Jackson has a candidates’ wife been dragged Continue reading