Showing Tag: "politics" (Show all posts)

"All animals are equal, but Trumps are more equal than others"

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, November 12, 2020, In : Commentary 
Ran across a post a little while ago in which a friend’s observation that “the ‘radical left’ just wants everyone to have food, shelter, healthcare, education and a living wage” was met with a stern rebuke by an obvious Trump supporter who states that such ideals are “the same ideals that Vladimir Lenin used and ended up killing 60 million. Same views as the Nazis.”
(An aside: This right-wing tendency to lump Nazism and Communism together always makes me chuckle; the fact is t...

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THE MISSION IS CLEAR

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, April 9, 2020, In : Opinion 

And then there was one...


Bernie Sanders has dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. As much as I hate to say it, I kind of saw it coming. That's not a diss of the man; I liked most of what he had to say and was thoroughly prepared to support him had he won the nomination.


But I also had serious doubts that he would earn that nomination, for one reason: the "socialist" label, which unfortunately even some Democrats (especially here in this neck of the woods) view as ...


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A PLEA TO MY FELLOW DEMOCRATS

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, March 5, 2020, In : Opinion 

Looking over a variety of Facebook posts today in the wake of the latest exit from the Democratic race, and the ongoing debate over whether Biden cares about young people or if Sanders is too far left for party moderates, and what I'm seeing is what I stated last week to be my biggest fear: too many people saying "If the candidate I support isn't nominated, then I'm not voting." 


At the risk of sounding like a broken record: We simply CAN'T allow ourselves to respond that way. If we do, we'r...


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DRUMRIGHT COLUMNIST IS ALL WRONG

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, September 11, 2019, In : Opinion 

Apologies in advance for the following rant:


In the northern half of Oklahoma, about 42 miles southwest of Tulsa, is the small town of Drumright. (It is the hometown of one of the co-publishers of the newspaper where I work here in Tishomingo.) One of the regular features in their local newspaper, the Drumright Gusher, is a weekly column by a non-apologetic right-wing Trump-supporting Neanderthal by the name of Ed J. Lebeau III. 


Mr. Lebeau devoted one of his recent columns to a tedious com...


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A Propaganda Victory Of Historic Proportions... for Russia

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, July 18, 2018, In : Opinion 


“What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we’ve been fighting to destroy?”
(Senator Padme Amidala, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith)


The above snippet of dialogue was one of the most thought-provoking to be found in this series of science fantasy films that, for all its success, people all too often tend to dismiss as (in the words of a friend of mine who never has warmed up to the Star Wars movies) “mindless...


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Latest Tragedy Strikes Close To Home

Posted by John Allen Small on Tuesday, July 3, 2018, In : Opinion 

NOTE: The following is the text of my newspaper column for July 5, 2018, written in response to last week’s mass shooting in Annapolis.)


Another week, another mass shooting.


That’s America in the 21st century.


“The new normal,” some people are calling it. But there’s nothing normal about it. 


Not one blessed thing.


There’s nothing “normal” about the average American leaving home to go to work, or to school, or church, or a movie or concert or the shopping mall, and wondering as the...


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May The FIRST Be With You...

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, May 2, 2018, In : History 

Something occurred to me the other day, as I was trying to wash the bad residue of the day’s national news cycle from my psyche by going back to the stuff I loved as a kid…


George Lucas (or maybe it was Alan Dean Foster) predicted the rise of Donald Trump.


Way back in December of 1976, roughly six months before the movie actually debuted in theaters, Ballantine/Del Rey Books released the novelization of the film Star Wars. The book carried the byline of the film’s writer-director, Geo...


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HAIL TO THE CHIEFS...

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, October 28, 2016, In : Pop Culture 


By this time next week it will all, at long last, be over. The American people will have spoken, and - barring any last-second temper tantrums, court challenges or some other kind of monkey wrench thrown into the works - we will know who the 45th President of the United States will be and, for better or worse, we’ll be getting our first real glimpse into what the next four years may hold for our nation.


But I don’t want to talk about the election or the candidates anymore. It’s just go...


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DID HE REALLY SAY THAT?

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, October 27, 2016, In : Opinion 

Something rather... disquieting, I think, would be the most appropriate word in this particular instance... occurred to me last Wednesday night as I was in front of the TV watching the latest episode in this sitcom we are rather euphemistically calling the Presidential Campaign of 2016.


I have been alive now for just shy of 53 and a half years... a little more than half a century as the eagle flies. During my lifetime, America has seen one president assassinated, another president resign, a ...


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IT'S MORE THAN JUST A RIGHT; IT'S A RESPONSIBILITY

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, August 24, 2016, In : Opinion 

Believe me, nobody will be more happy than I will to see this current campaign season - with all its circus atmosphere and a cast of characters that makes me wonder sometimes if both major party candidates are being funded by Mad magazine -  finally come to an end.   


People complain about “election fatigue” in pretty much every campaign cycle, but I can’t remember a time when my own sense of fatigue has been so pronounced and, at times, downright painful to bear. More than once in rec...


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TIME FOR A HISTORY LESSON: OUR FAMILY'S BEST KNOWN BLACK SHEEP

Posted by John Allen Small on Tuesday, July 30, 2013, In : History 
(Above: Illinois Gov. Len Small and the newspaper page announcing his 1921 indictment)


Every family has its "black sheep." Sometimes while researching family history on various occasions over the years, I've often wondered in perhaps my family hasn't had more than it's share. 


But none of them can hold a candle to the man who served as Illinois' Republican governor during the same period that saw Al Capone establish himself as the King of Chicago. Indeed, I often wonder if my familial kinship...


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IF THE SHOE FITS...

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, In : Opinion 

I received a nasty message earlier today from someone who seemed to take angry exception to my support for President Obama. I'm still not sure why my support of any particular candidate should have engendered such vitriol on the part of someone I have never and likely will never meet. After all, I don't take exception to his supporting his particular candidate of choice; I may not agree with that choice, but neither would I treat him with such venomous disrespect because of it. People CAN dis...


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HATE TRANSCENDS LOGIC

Posted by John Allen Small on Monday, October 31, 2011, In : Opinion 

There was a news story I ran across today about how competition between pizza restaurants in Lake City, Fla., had gotten out of hand to the point that two managers of the local Domino's had been arrested for burning down a nearby Papa John's location.


Stories like that tend to get my attention anyway, because they so clearly illustrate that my father has been right all these years about stupidity running rampant. In this case, however, what bothered me even more than the story itself was one...


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About Me


John Allen Small John A. Small is an award-winning newspaper journalist, columnist and broadcaster whose work has been honored by the Oklahoma Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, the National Newspaper Association, and the Oklahoma Education Association. He and his wife Melissa were married in 1986; they have two sons, Joshua Orrin (born 1991) and William Ian (born 1996). Mr. Small is the News Editor and columnist for the Johnston County Capital-Democrat, a weekly newspaper headquartered in Tishomingo, OK. He obtained his nickname, "Bard of the Lesser Boulevards," from a journalism colleague - the late Phil Byrum - in recognition of the success of his popular newspaper column, "Small Talk." (In addition to the many awards the column itself has received over the years, a radio version of "Small Talk" earned an award for "Best Small Market Commentary" from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1998.) John was born in Oklahoma City in 1963; lived in the Bradley-Bourbonnais-Kankakee area of Illinois for most of the next 28 years (with brief sojourns in Texas and Athens, Greece, thrown in to break up the monotony); then returned to his native state in 1991, where he currently resides in the Tishomingo/Ravia area. He graduated from Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in 1981, and received his bachelor's degree in journalism from Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais in 1991. The years between high school and college were a period frought with numerous exploits and misadventures, some of which have become the stuff of legend; nobody was hurt along the way, however, which should count for something. In addition to his professional career as a journalist he has published two short story collections: "Days Gone By: Legends And Tales Of Sipokni West" (2007), a collection of western stories; and "Something In The Air" (2011), a more eclectic collection. He was also a contributor to the 2005 Locus Award-nominated science fiction anthology "Myths For The Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Universe," edited by Win Scott Eckert. In additon he has written a stage play and a self-published cookbook; served as project editor for a book about the JFK assassination entitled "The Men On The Sixth Floor"; and has either published or posted on the Internet a number of essays, stories and poems. He has also won writing awards from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the National Library of Poetry. He is a past president of the Johnston County Chamber of Commerce in Tishomingo; was a charter member and past president of the Johnston County Reading Council, the local literacy advocacy and "friends of the library" organization; served as Johnston County's first-ever Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator in 1994-95; served two terms as chairman of the Johnston County (OK) Democratic Party; and has taught journalism classes for local Boy Scout Merit Badge Fairs. He is a member of the New Wold Newton Meteorics Society.

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