Posts

Showing posts from April, 2018
Image
               Comedy & The First Amendment                By Hank Silverberg       It was painful to laugh this week.      A few hundred journalists, politicians, White House staffers and friends got together this past weekend at the Washington Hilton for what is jokingly called the “nerd prom,” and formally called the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. It’s an annual event that raises money for scholarships for aspiring journalists, and hands out awards for some great work by reporters. It began in 1914 as a celebration of the First Amendment.      I have been to a few of these during my years as a Washington reporter, and I can tell you they are sometimes fun, sometimes boring.   It’s a good chance to network if you are job hunting, or socialize with people you normally compete against. You could tell which news organization is doing well financially by how many tables they reserve.    For most of its existence, only Washington insiders knew
Image
A Special Preview  by Hank Silverberg       Over the past 11 weeks I have written about all kinds of real issues facing the country or the world. Today's edition of "Time to Think" is something different. Below you will find the Prologue and part of Chapter 1 of my book, "The Campaign," which was published late last year. It's a novel. It's not #fakenews. It's fiction. It's been said, write about what you know, so my novel is about politicians, reporters and political and international intrigue.          Please read the excerpt, enjoy it and at the bottom, there will be instructions on how to order the book if you wish. It's available in hard cover, soft cover and E-book.                                                                                       The Campaign                                                                                      Prologue                                          “This is
Image
    Never Again!         By Hank Silverberg    “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it"                                                             -- George Santayana                                                            It is a startling figure. Twenty-two percent of millennials, and 11 percent of all American adults aren’t sure they know anything about the Holocaust which killed nearly 17 million people in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The figures come from a study released on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past week by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany.   www.claimscon.org         Two thirds of the millennials asked also could not identify what Auschwitz was.  And of those who did know something about the mass executions by the Nazis and their collaborators, 58 percent believed something like it could happen again.                                              (The entrance to Auschwitz)       The exact number of people wh
Image
Clear and Present Danger                                                                                                           By Hank Silverberg                                                                        I am troubled. Some of our basic rights are being threatened, and no one seems to notice or care.         Our founding fathers took more than 25 years to create a system in this country which, with a few amendments, has held up very well over the last 200 years.       It took more than ten years to dump the loosely written concepts of the Articles of Confederation and formulate a system of checks and balances for our government that became the U-S Constitution in 1789. That document set up how we choose our leaders and how much power they have. But that was not enough for men like John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.  They also knew that a centralized government needed to be checked and that the rights of individual citizens needed to be p
Image
Boycotts, Hairspray and Gun violence By Hank Silverberg       It  has  been an interesting week. The baseball season opened, the weather turned from  spring, to winter and back to spring again , and a teenage high school student became the target of an uninformed TV talk show host with political aspirations. S o after all the yelling on TV, re-arranging the coat  closet and disappointment over opening day sc o res ,  it was time for a diversion. My wife suggested that we watch a DVD of the musical ,  “Hairspray . ”    I have seen  it several times before ,  but it’s always entertaining to watch John Travolta dancing around the screen as a zaftig woman . T he movie was not a diversion this time.        If you don’t know the  storyline of “Hairspray , ” it’s about a young ,  overweight girl named Tracy, who lives in segregated Baltimore in the early 1960’s, whose only desire  in life is to dance on a local TV show sponsored by a hairspray company. Her weight has made her

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *