By Robert Reich – Trump and his White House don’t argue on the merits. They attack the credibility of the institutions that come up with facts and arguments they don’t like. They even do it preemptively. Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer warned that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office couldn’t be trusted to…
By Robert Reich – Early Saturday morning, March 4, the 45th president of the United States alleged in a series of tweets that former president Barack Obama orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap Trump’s phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election. Trump concluded that the former president is…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — Partisan political prosecutions have a long history in the system of jurisprudence in the United States, in spite of what judges, lawyers and politicians want the public to believe. Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of it. Although over the past couple of decades,…
By Robert Reich – As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically do 7 things: 1. They exaggerate their mandate to govern – claiming, for example, that they won an election by a “landslide” even after losing the popular vote. They criticize any finding that they or co-conspirators stole the election. And they repeatedly claim…
By David Underhill – PACE, Fla. – The dapper dude in a dark suit entered with a surrounding shield of so many uniformed cops that he looked like one of those football coaches who can’t cross the field at game’s end to shake the opposing coach’s hand without a body guard of troopers. But this…
EDITOR’S NOTE: Republican legislators in Montgomery are monkeying around again and turning more public education funding over to private schools. They claim 5,793 scholarships have been awarded under the Alabama Accountability Act, but numbers from the Department of Revenue show that only 127 people have asked for the tax credit allowed when a child is…
By E.J. Dionne Jr. – Let’s not mumble or whisper about the central issue facing our country: What is this democratic nation to do when the man serving as president of the United States plainly has no business being president of the United States? The Michael Flynn fiasco was the entirely predictable product of the…
Joe Reed and the Democrats are no better: It’s time for an independent third party to emerge. The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Little Jeffry Beauregard Sessions of Alabama has made the big time. No, it’s not just because a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate held their noses and confirmed him as…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Since television celebrity businessman Donald J. Trump shocked the world and became president of the United States, the news has become so dissonant it’s hard to find a place to enter the conversation with facts that matter. This is especially true since it doesn’t seem to matter…
EDITOR’S NOTE: During the turbulent 1960s when the civil rights movement made Selma and Birmingham Alabama infamous, turning Martin Luther King Jr. of Atlanta and other activists into household names, including Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, there were other activists in other cities who never became so well known. The political and business establishment of Mobile,…
By Robert Reich – With congressional Republicans in the majority in Congress and unwilling to cross Donald Trump, the job of containing Trump’s incipient tyranny falls to three centers of independent power: the nation’s courts, its press and a few state governments. Which is why Trump is escalating attacks on all three. The Judiciary After…
By Robert Reich – Donald Trump has reorganized the National Security Council – elevating his chief political strategist Steve Bannon, and demoting the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bannon will join the NSC’s principals committee, the top inter-agency group advising the President on national security. Meanwhile, the…
The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – The mainstream, corporate news media in America is in a quandary over what to do about the new U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. He calls them all “horrible people” and “liars” and purveyors of “fake news.” So what do they do? The broadcast media, so far, has…
By Garrison Keillor – What we know so far is that the man is who he is. There is no larger, finer man inside him trying to get out. Everyone who is paying attention knows this. Flags flying at the Capitol, the U.S. Marine Band, gray eminences in black coats, and He Who Is Smarter…
By Bernie Sanders – MEDIA SHAPES OUR VERY LIVES. It tells us what products we need to buy and, by the quantity and nature of coverage, what is “important†and what is “unimportant.†Media informs us as to the scope of what is “realistic†and “possible.†When we see constant coverage of murders and brutality…
By Robert Reich – Donald Trump is such a consummate liar that in coming days and years our democracy will depend more than ever on the independent press – finding the truth, reporting it, and holding Trump accountable for his lies. But Trump’s strategy is to denigrate and disparage the press in the public’s mind…
By Robert Reich – Tyrants don’t allow open questioning, and they hate the free press. They want total control. That’s why, according to three senior officials on the transition team, the incoming Trump administration is considering evicting the White House press corps from the press room inside the White House and moving them – and…
By David Underhill — Associate Editor – MOBILE, Ala. – The fervent thousands who streamed in Mobile’s football stadium for a campaign appearance by quirky celebrity candidate Donald Trump in August 2015 surprised even his vain self. That was his first mega rally, and it showed he might actually be running for president rather than…
Oh, and Alabama’s Jeff Sessions is about to be U.S. Attorney General – The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Let me start this morning by repeating the two key words guaranteed to make the Facebook home page news feed and the FB trending news feed: This column is about fake news and golden…
The mainstream, corporate news media sacrificed democracy for ratings. By Thom Hartmann – AlterNet – The media are engaged in an orgy of navel-gazing about the Trump presidency, but they’re totally, utterly, absolutely, no-way-in-hell willing to gaze at their own navel. Did Russian hackers revealing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile had put their…
