You probably have never been in a street fight or a barroom brawl. Neither have I. At school and later at the YMCA, I used to box. Big gloves, Marquess of Queensberry rules, that kind of thing. And I’ve been in a few harmless fist fights over the years. But a no-holds-barred brawl is […]
Continue reading…
I rarely open Facebook. At best, it’s boring and banal. At worst it’s ugly and dangerous. I don’t have a Twitter account. I’m too old to tweet. I’ll leave that to the birds – and bird brains like Donald Trump. It’s not that I don’t want to keep up with friends and family. But I […]
Continue reading…
Freedom of speech is one of America’s most hallowed traditions, but it is becoming a dangerous one. Like any freedom, it must have limits. We are not free to do any number of things – murder, robbery, assault – even trespassing on a neighbor’s lot. Why should speech be different? Free speech has been […]
Continue reading…
Could this really be goodbye for Alex Jones? The conspiracy theorist has just been banned by Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify. And my response is: What took you guys so long? Alex Jones is a bad joke. A dangerous bad joke. He is the kind of hazard Oliver Wendell Holmes obviously meant when he […]
Continue reading…
When White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refuses to walk back Trump’s rant that the press is “the enemy of the people,” warning bells should be ringing across the land. Thomas Jefferson observed that: When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a a tyrant. Attacking the independent media […]
Continue reading…
The hate filled attack on “the media” by my Tampa Bay neighbors yesterday leaves me stunned and dismayed. I cringed as I watched a video of the pro-Trump crowd heckling CNN’s Jim Acosta. Faces I might encounter in Publix, as we exchange polite smiles and “excuse me’s,” are contorted in rage. Folks who might […]
Continue reading…
No interruption so far in access to the blog site, so I’ll keep blogging until I hear something more from Xavier… It’s another day in Trumpistan… The Trump faithful may be taking comfort from Rudy Giuliani’s rambling interview on TV yesterday, but the rest of us are left wondering what that was all […]
Continue reading…
If you don’t see any blogs in the next few days, don’t worry. Trump’s minions have not come for me. Webmaster Xavier is making improvements. Here’s the email I got this morning: They started work on the blog consolidation; however they are not done. It is taking a little longer than expected. I am […]
Continue reading…
You might think social media is the salvation of democracy, but I think it’s a blight. As a former newspaper editor, I deplore the mob mentality I come across on web sites like Twitter and Facebook – and in those odious chat rooms Call me an elitist if it scratches your itch, but I […]
Continue reading…
Ed Schultz is dead. To paraphrase Shakespeare, we’re probably not going to see his like again .Not on TV, anyway. There used to be more people on TV like Ed, people who stood for something, who spoke their minds, without sugar coating what they had to say. Now – left or right – it […]
Continue reading…