Harvard professor Thomas Patterson says much of the funding needed for local news and public radio will have to come from major private donors who have the financial muscle to shoulder the burden of providing a vital service to communities around the nation. Local news is as fundamental to American democracy as the Founding Fathers, many of whom were journalists writing under pen names. 

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“Nearly a billion restless people, the UN says, are ricocheting today between and within the world’s national borders. This represents the largest mass migration, forced or voluntary, in the 300,000-year story of our species,” Paul Salopek writes in a National Geographic story to memorialize the anniversary. History — as scribbled by smug homebodies — often assigns these wandering souls a glib label: losers.”

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The various sites and propaganda platforms remind me of the pamphleteers that prevailed in journalism’s early days. Would some anonymous “content” guard at Twitter or Facebook have published Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” call to arms in the dawn of our democracy? We raise delicate questions when we talk about slapping controls on the media.

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Had a vigorous local press not been sidelined by financial distress engineered by Silicon Valley, the thinking went, voters might have known about George Santos’ deception before Election Day instead of afterwards. He might have lost. The trouble with that thinking: A local paper did expose Santos, months before the election, and it didn’t seem to make a difference.

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McCarthy should have done the right thing and backed out of the race for Speaker. That would require something Kevin lacks: Integrity. Instead, he selfishly hung in there and got the job by giving the right-wingers want they wanted, more power, thereby diminishing the job he coveted. The man’s unprincipled. I can’t even begin to imagine the lies spread during the fifteen votes it took for him to win the gavel.

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Lying is nothing new on the campaign trail, but congressman elect George Santos set a new record for being a fake. About the only thing he didn’t fabricate was his imagination! The New York Times exposed Santos, an openly gay Republican, in an investigative piece that detailed the sordid history of lying during a race he ran — and won — in a district that President Biden carried by a hefty margin only two years ago.

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They are crimes for certain, taking civilian lives in a military conflict has been viewed as criminal behavior now for decades, murder in fact. But that doesn’t mean a court in The Hague or anywhere else is going to step in and prosecute the perpetrators. Even if the International Criminal Court has the will power to make a case, we may see it suffer the same fate as Serbia’s Milosevic, who died in his cell before a verdict was reached. 

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told a joint session of Congress that the war would not end soon. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with 500,000 troops, the Russian Army used some of the same scorched earth tactics it’s using today. As it withdrew toward Moscow it burned Russian crops and villages, making it difficult for Napoleon to sustain his army. Sound familiar? By the time he left he only had about 100,000 troops left.

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Reagan’s relentless drive to cut taxes set in motion an unraveling of the tax code that spanned four decades. The cuts made the fortieth president a Republican hero. Less publicized is the role those tax cuts played in the nation’s descent into inequality and the  indelible mosaic of a red and blue America. James B. Steele, a distinguished journalist and author, has documented the role that tax policy played in creating inequality in America.

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The Dems need a good, strong candidate for president, someone with executive experience. In other words, they need a governor like the one where I live in Cary, North Carolina. I like our governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat who’d make a fine candidate. He’s won two times in a state that the Republicans have sliced up in gerrymanders so badly that the state’s political map is now at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case.

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I worked at the Des Moines Register when the Iowa caucuses first appeared on the political stage. None of us really knew how to cover these eccentric gatherings. Jim Flansburg, the Register’s colorful top political reporter, sat me down and explained the whole caucus process. Then he sent me to a cover one. I didn’t find the caucus representative of much. But I was a young reporter.

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Given the nature of human curiosity, most readers will click on the “dog-floating-on-the-ice-in-Lake-Michigan” story before they open a thoughtful take on Chicago’s budget. If abused, the exercise will simply lead to a loss of respect among readers who will think editors prioritize fluff over substance. Giving readers less and charging them more for papers full of fluffy clickbait is not a winning formula.

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“I only regret,” Hale said, “that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Although no credible historical record exists to document whether Hale really uttered those words, Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary publisher of the Chicago Tribune, nevertheless found them inspiring enough to commission a replica of bronze sculpture of Hale in 1940.

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Even billionaires are not immune to the laws of economics. Musk simply paid too much for Twitter and I think he knows it. He now owns it as a private company, and can do as he pleases, being the principle shareholder. He’s also saddled the company with enough debt that it’s a prime candidate for a Zell-like bankruptcy. I wrote a book about the Zell fiasco called The Deal From Hell. It was aptly titled.

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One of the “losers” I hold in high esteem is Adlai Stevenson. He lost uphill political races twice, defeated by a true American hero, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stevenson accepted his fate gracefully with wit and humor. “I will make a bargain with Republicans,” he later quipped, “if they will stop telling lies about us, we’ll stop telling the truth about them.”

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I cringe when I hear people talk about passing laws to impose limits on speaking our minds in speech or words. I’d simply rather have that power in the hands of a private person. I understand where Musk is coming from; he wants money and power, probably more of the latter than the former. But I don’t pretend to understand the motives of the people now making our laws. Musk may be a powerful person, but he’s not immune from the law.

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A conversation with Charles Madigan about those irritating email requests that jam our inboxes before every election. Wait a minute, she also wants money! Maybe $5, $10 or $15. I once had a woman in the old Soviet Union ask me for money right on the steps of the National Hotel, and she promised me a very good time. “I’m in the Workers Paradise, ” I said. ‘I’m already having a good time!”

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For weeks now, media has been focusing on everything from the impending collapse of the economy to the potential for a “civil war” mounted by angry Donald Trump supporters still peeved about the 2020 election “theft” by slippery Democrats and their child-molesting, Communist partners in crime.

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For most readers who probably didn’t know her, Nikki Finke struck fear in the hearts of movie stars and the Hollywood hoity-toity for years. In Deadline Hollywood, her column initially published in LA Weekly, she eviscerated her subjects. At times, it seemed as if she had blood dripping from her fingers. “I can’t help it,” she once told a writer from The New Yorker, It’s like meanness just pours out of my fingers.”

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