The New Hampshire primary has confirmed that the United States is on the way to a disastrous fall election. Unless a health crisis forces withdrawal from the presidential race, either Donald Trump or Joe Biden is headed for a second term. The electoral outlook is now dystopian.

 President Biden’s role as party boss worked out well for him in New Hampshire. No doubt mindful that he finished fifth in the state’s 2020 primary with a dismal 8 percent of the vote, Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to decertify New Hampshire’s historic first-in-the-nation primary, and he kept his name off the 2024 ballot. Yet pro-Biden forces ran a write-in campaign that got him nearly two-thirds of the vote on Tuesday.

 The story might have been quite different if a credible progressive candidate for president had stepped forward to give Biden a run for his money. But the closest competitor, Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips -- whose overall record is to the right of Biden -- finished with 20 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote. Progressive candidate Marianne Williamson, who has never held elective office or led a social-justice movement, received just 5 percent.

Wednesday, January 24, 1-2pm, Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission [MORPC], 111 Liberty St.

All Aboard Ohio is thrilled to announce that the Whistle Stop Tour is coming to Columbus, Ohio! Join us and the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) for an informative session where we will provide updates on our progress in the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) process, which is a crucial step in securing funding for passenger rail service. We are confident that we are making great strides in this area and will continue to do so. We will share our plans for the future and discuss the next steps in the FRA process and our efforts to bring passenger rail service to Ohio. We are confident that we can make this a reality and are excited to have you join us on this journey!

Additionally, we will discuss the outcomes of our 3C&D [Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton] Economic Impact Analysis, which was conducted to evaluate the potential economic advantages of initiating passenger rail service in Ohio. The analysis findings are positive, and we look forward to discussing them in detail.

“To make the organization of propaganda possible, the media must be concentrated, the number of news agencies reduced, the press brought under single control, and radio and film monopolies established. The effect will be still greater if the various media are concentrated in the same hands. When a newspaper trust (ie, monopoly) also extends its control over films and radio, propaganda can be directed at the masses and the individual can be caught in the wide net of media.” – Jacques Ellul (1965)

 When Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous 1928 book, Propaganda, he titled the first chapter of the book “Organizing Chaos”. The quotes below are taken directly from that chapter.

What was strikingly obvious to me in reading the book is that Bernays – in the year before the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 - wasn’t making any effort to sugar-coat the fact that he actually believes that propaganda is an essential and desirable fact of modern life.

Mystic Pizza is a thoroughly enjoyable, consummately unoriginal musical play, from top to bottom. This retread of the 1988 movie is essentially a coming of age story about three young women in the eponymous Mystic, a seaside town in Connecticut. The trio – Daisy Arujo (Krystina Alabado), her sister Kat (Kyra Kennedy) and their friend Jojo Barboza (Gianna Yanelli) – are searching for romance and their pathways in life, yearning for a more fulfilling life than mere housewifery and drudgery in proletarian Mystic. This timeworn plot is, however, set in a fairly novel social milieu, namely a community with many residents of Portuguese descent, a minority group that doesn’t get much attention in U.S. pop culture.