Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Subscription Drive

Rich Galen

Sunday September 30, 2012

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We're almost to October and that means � Ta Da � I am going to bug you for the next month to participate in the annual MULLINGS Subscription Drive.

The suggested retail price is $30 for which you will receive each and every edition delivered to your e-mail in-box every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday night.

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Since its inception in 1998 as a service of GOPAC, Mullings has provided insights, amusement, information, and mistakes on a more-or-less regular three-day-a-week schedule.

The "more" issues are when there is a special, multi-day event. National political conventions, for instance, are often the subject of daily MULLINGS.

The "less" examples occur when I'm on the Federal payroll for a limited amount of time (six months as a DoD employee in Iraq, or three months on the U.S. Senate payroll) or during the month of August when two-days-a-week seems to be an agreeable sufficiency.

For those who have been following along for the past 14+ years, you know there are some annual columns with which I have fallen in love. The "Back to School" issue is the annual Labor Day column. Coming up is the Thanksgiving column titled "Rainbow Shiny." Memorial Day and Christmas are among the others in this category. Judging from the mail they generate, many of you have come to see them as old friends as much as I do.

For the most part, though, MULLINGS is topical and reflects my view of current events - usually political events, but not always.

Attached to almost every edition of MULLINGS is the "Secret Decoder Ring" page. On that page there are links to news stories to which I have referred in the column, a daily "Mullfoto" which is a photograph of something which amused or annoyed me (or caught the eye of a reader who sent it along and was deemed "Mullworthy").

MULLINGS began as a one-page fax to reporters in an attempt to soften their largely negative opinion of GOPAC. When I say "largley negative" I mean to say many national political reporters (with whom I have enjoyed an excellent relationship for, in some cases, several decades) would generate little tiny white flecks in the corners of their mouths just by typing those five dreaded letters: G.O.P.A.C.

As an added incentive here's the link to that very first MULLINGS from March 11, 1998.

Over time Hill staff and donors found out about it and asked to be added to the list. At end of 1998 e-mail became ubiquitous enough so we saved a bunch of money on faxes and MULLINGS became, maybe, the first blog.

In 1999 when I left GOPAC I was permitted to take MULLINGS (and the approximately 1,000 names on the e-mail list) with me and it has been a going commercial concern ever since. If I had any business sense at all, the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post would be subsidiaries of MULLINGS; but I don't, and they're not.

The database is now at just over 40,000 but not all of the e-mails are active at the same time. Still, MULLINGS has a broad national reach with a particular depth here in Washington, DC.

Anyone can sign up to get MULLINGS via email or go to the website to read it there. In the early days of subscription drives a reporter for a major national publication asked why anyone would pay to read something they could read for free.

Knowing my audience I asked, "Do you donate to NPR?"
She said she did.
"Do you get to hear any more having donated to NPR than would do if you hadn't?"
She said she didn't.
Then the light went on and she wrote me a check.