tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36891676424223291152024-03-13T10:28:11.705-07:00Short Sharp Shock.Politics. Culture. Race. Technology. National affairs. Attitude.Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.comBlogger1682125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-14369554818963752472023-04-04T17:02:00.015-07:002023-07-12T17:31:02.609-07:00Stormier weather ahead<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJFvhRzYkxbirULZO0QBgk-oWP4yMfMRD4T8uzG0gRmtc3gl9xd3qIIvEte-N5Re8hgb5RSBK1J6bnxdsI9UJeRNTHU921sk4o_yxAzdxvDUptUh81dzEj3BSlFvbqUUNzwAb-Zl40P5jDGrd442tyAs44ZygPcFS2oQloCO-yfl4wjzcgCWtvKDgK74s/s2684/Trump%20at%20NYC%20arraignment%20April%202023%20(WABC).png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1624" data-original-width="2684" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJFvhRzYkxbirULZO0QBgk-oWP4yMfMRD4T8uzG0gRmtc3gl9xd3qIIvEte-N5Re8hgb5RSBK1J6bnxdsI9UJeRNTHU921sk4o_yxAzdxvDUptUh81dzEj3BSlFvbqUUNzwAb-Zl40P5jDGrd442tyAs44ZygPcFS2oQloCO-yfl4wjzcgCWtvKDgK74s/w400-h243/Trump%20at%20NYC%20arraignment%20April%202023%20(WABC).png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">O</span><span style="font-size: medium;">N TUESDAY afternoon, Donald John Trump, the 45th president of the United States and the greatest carnival barker in history, presented himself at the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan, and was formally arraigned after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him following a probe into a hush-money payment of $130,000 made during the 2016 presidential campaign on Trump’s behalf to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, in order to conceal a 2006 Trump affair. Trump pleaded not guilty. </span></div><div><br /></div>
The 34 felony counts of the indictment include the charge of falsifying business records in the first degree — recording that hush-money payment as a business expense. The charge, ordinarily a default misdemeanor, is elevated to a felony if the act is committed in the furtherance of another crime.
The New York Times laid out the ways in which the seemingly small potatoes of a payout to hide a personal dalliance could backfire on the former president: “While hush money is not inherently illegal, the prosecutors could argue that the $130,000 payout effectively became an improper donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, under the theory that because the money silenced Ms. Daniels, it benefited his candidacy,” The Times reported March 9. <div><br /></div><div> It’s become almost fashionable to dismiss the importance of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case, calling it the weakest of any Trump investigation. But those analysts and others who’d walk over the Bragg case may be missing the overall. It goes without saying that the Manhattan D.A. wouldn’t waste time prosecuting a case he knew or believed he couldn’t win. Still, there’s value in the Stormy Daniels case and its outcome beyond the zero-sum metric of winning and losing. <div><br /></div><div> <b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/4/2161990/-Stormier-weather-ahead-1st-Trump-case-a-likely-roadmap-for-return-trips-to-Indictmentville">Read the full analysis at Daily Kos</a></i></b></div></div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-6363897699771369652022-08-15T11:36:00.013-07:002023-07-12T17:02:09.116-07:00How Kansas changes everything: Republican overreach as a Democratic force multiplier<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI-KzxsDZD43vY19VzroMh9AkSWGHIMwxgQ237o45rcQXPSlb-V5-OMz_MFO9ehR0BfDBCBDKCSsoqtzpIsOnI7SWeo1c15hDEqFA3niUkpfCh0ydf_tuSJY-9Q_112zfmXQ-2S0_LzycjZl2sVV8fldMHAd5f9SmQY6ulTAG6VAbznks1J0dWMEWpnCs/s1874/Screenshot%202023-07-12%20at%204.43.30%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1014" data-original-width="1874" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI-KzxsDZD43vY19VzroMh9AkSWGHIMwxgQ237o45rcQXPSlb-V5-OMz_MFO9ehR0BfDBCBDKCSsoqtzpIsOnI7SWeo1c15hDEqFA3niUkpfCh0ydf_tuSJY-9Q_112zfmXQ-2S0_LzycjZl2sVV8fldMHAd5f9SmQY6ulTAG6VAbznks1J0dWMEWpnCs/w400-h216/Screenshot%202023-07-12%20at%204.43.30%20PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">E</span><span style="font-size: medium;">VERYTHING was going according to plan. Consistent with American political history, and therefore expectation of events’ outcome forever, the Republicans (the party outside the White House) would wipe the floor with the Democrats (the party in the White House) in the 2022 midterms. The groundwork was already observed: an economy on the edge of a recession, if not partway through one; a stubborn supply-chain bottleneck contributing to higher prices for anything and everything; a president whose mein and optics were uninspiring, and at times flat-out dispiriting; and a general malaise hanging over the country, stinking like a burn pit in Iraq. The Dems would pay the price this November, the GOP leadership strategized, and they’d pay it again in 2024. </span></div><div><br /></div>
Well, sometimes, the best laid plans get flattened by reality. The people guiding the electoral destinies of those within the Republican Party know this firsthand, thanks to the seismic Aug. 2 election results from the Pantone-red state of Kansas. In the first test of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court’s let-the-states-decide overturning of Roe v. Wade, the people of Kansas voted by a resounding margin (58-41) not to end the state constitution’s extant protections of a woman’s right to abortion on demand. <div><br /></div><div> Because SCOTUS reversed Roe on June 24, effectively washing its hands of abortion as something worthy of the protections of unifying federal oversight, Kansas voters’ decision to stand pat on its current constitution repudiates the contraction of personal rights approved by Dobbs, the SCOTUS decision that overnight created a patchwork of states whose laws on abortion access literally change from one state borderline to the next. ... Kansas just kicked the partisan rulebook to the curb. ...<hr /><b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/15/2116879/-How-Kansas-changes-everything-Republican-overreach-on-abortion-is-a-Democratic-force-multiplier">Read the full analysis at Daily Kos</a></i></b></div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-47029065317295432642022-08-09T05:53:00.001-07:002022-08-18T06:10:23.956-07:00The evolution will be televised<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho-fcAhLyuRZEqRkD8I6aU04EsOjGPSRgaOT8UaIH7Zi3tYyn63xvmHqFt2I5iRmZbDQMRDEti9hyHvjdHjKRHTGU91alnS-HFdtdh2GH9M68jMECvArxEtSpFe_ltECjacRibwXBU5kTV-Lt6aVUeThvMszzmQY2hjpKvtexw0acjqeyEhqa7kFFA/s4088/Rep.%20Liz%20Cheney,%20August%202022.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2380" data-original-width="4088" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho-fcAhLyuRZEqRkD8I6aU04EsOjGPSRgaOT8UaIH7Zi3tYyn63xvmHqFt2I5iRmZbDQMRDEti9hyHvjdHjKRHTGU91alnS-HFdtdh2GH9M68jMECvArxEtSpFe_ltECjacRibwXBU5kTV-Lt6aVUeThvMszzmQY2hjpKvtexw0acjqeyEhqa7kFFA/w406-h240/Rep.%20Liz%20Cheney,%20August%202022.png" width="406" /></a></div><p></p>
C-SPAN may not be your go-to for prime-time drama. You probably wouldn’t drop it in the same sentence as Peacock or Hulu or Amazon Prime as a source of gripping destination viewing. But there’s good reason to believe that could change — that it’s already changed — by way of a fresh, comparatively bold approach to the way congressional hearings look and feel on today’s TV. <div><br /></div><div>Capably borrowing from series television’s dynamic, and with a pace and timing scriptwriters would do well to emulate (and a penchant for surprises Aaron Sorkin is surely enjoying), the House Select Committee hearings into the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, have become our latest form of Must See TV.
Some 18 million people watched the eighth insurrection hearing on Thursday, July 21, more than watched either the 2021 or 2022 Academy Awards. </div><div><br /></div><div>Refreshingly, for those millions of Americans, the antic dysfunctions of a presidency, and the chronology of that dysfunction, have become a highly civic form of prime-time TV obsession. And stay tuned, the committee has the opportunity to lock that viewership down even more: Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the hearings chairman absent due to COVID lockdown, but appearing in a video, announced that more hearings will be held in September. That’s right, folks, cliffhangers! Easter eggs! The Popcorn Hearings: Season II is In Production! </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i><a href="https://medium.com/the-omnibus/the-evolution-will-be-televised-e01d5f363830" target="_blank">Read the whole piece at The Omnibus</a></i></b></div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-18107012687430773142022-07-13T06:31:00.005-07:002022-07-13T06:33:58.392-07:00Mitt Romney dips a toe in The Atlantic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhJinNkUZVj7-_1CMETs2juK3pTGtgPOc4pGCG-NX4umrihAGA6hFHLfxToRAb7xtPE8X95elYy-FeKrEdCmlA-Ft_inrtjND94NFX_MINCQTNOlL4V9lDEaizWafb7s_wmY4Z41QHQbZjpsBGHPA0ecB2CZjzzkl4KwC4WrZKKnTj5uL7SkAxzaX4/s2112/Mitt%20Romney%202022%20(Al%20Drago:Pool%20Photo).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1240" data-original-width="2112" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhJinNkUZVj7-_1CMETs2juK3pTGtgPOc4pGCG-NX4umrihAGA6hFHLfxToRAb7xtPE8X95elYy-FeKrEdCmlA-Ft_inrtjND94NFX_MINCQTNOlL4V9lDEaizWafb7s_wmY4Z41QHQbZjpsBGHPA0ecB2CZjzzkl4KwC4WrZKKnTj5uL7SkAxzaX4/w385-h218/Mitt%20Romney%202022%20(Al%20Drago:Pool%20Photo).png" width="385" /></a></div><p> Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney makes a range of observations and criticisms in his latest essay, “America Is in Denial,” published in <i>The Atlantic</i> on July 4 — commentary that’s just panoramic enough, with only one individual called on the carpet by name, that the senator from Utah might be seen as appealing for something like a national consensus on solving the problems we face. Not least among them, the fact that we can’t seem to find a national consensus about anything.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3mEzYsZfgfknlSYny2T-f8n94bJ3MhN4wwp5wiFLTSp_5su-JN0sv6w4L6bz8hp7MqN0qlFjdINvgoz4QKClYGo32d3viMtP9yclCbNAVlZXvt8fjOMZKnRzCFcQ5pF1bx2onyabu1JCjV0piM691i23p7tiKOa3PpZaVkWq3HOAvkxAuHDe3k57F/s234/Daily%20Kos%20logo%202020%20(Kos%20Media%20LLC).jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="46" data-original-width="234" height="46" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3mEzYsZfgfknlSYny2T-f8n94bJ3MhN4wwp5wiFLTSp_5su-JN0sv6w4L6bz8hp7MqN0qlFjdINvgoz4QKClYGo32d3viMtP9yclCbNAVlZXvt8fjOMZKnRzCFcQ5pF1bx2onyabu1JCjV0piM691i23p7tiKOa3PpZaVkWq3HOAvkxAuHDe3k57F/s1600/Daily%20Kos%20logo%202020%20(Kos%20Media%20LLC).jpg" width="234" /></a></div>Fair enough — reach should exceed grasp, right? But in the current gridlock backdrop, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Romney’s comments — relatively benign, mildly reproving — could also be the genial opening overture for a 2024 Romney campaign. He’ll vigorously deny this, of course, pro forma that’s to be expected. Some of Romney’s essay observations go out of their way to position him as a nonentity in any serious talk about the 2024 derby.<br /><br /><div>It’s still early days in the discussion of the next presidential campaign; a lot of names will be floated in the months to come. Most of those names will sink. But Romney’s essay contains not only a sweeping overview of where we are, but also the slightest, tantalizing hint of where we could be going, in 2024 and further, depending on the breaks, of course. And the candidate. . . .<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/12/2110056/-Romney-dips-a-toe-in-The-Atlantic-addressing-America-in-denial-Is-he-a-prospect-for-2024" target="_blank">Read the full essay in Daily Kos</a></i></b></div><hr /><i>Image cxredit: Romney: Al Drago/Pool photo via The Associated Press. Daily Kos logo: Copyright 2022 Kos Media LLC.</i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-73378705507611911792022-07-13T06:16:00.005-07:002022-07-13T06:42:45.971-07:00Ladies and gentlemen, the Resistant Grays<i>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha2JKrwvi6clXw2Kg7nFbjoqzP1mtKQceiHTw6av6JPW6UBHNVtWP2NVOqhyDgRVybbhcxQxCfVICu1BIxcjRYMiiDAedRnLpLn-f4s94kh30H8t-WGGjwzhziFO3JvD6Nuh8F0kfyt61BgK1lWJ9mQk_w4fRV8hE5IMkC7YMPkL_6hnwP-Uf1O7pR/s2560/Rolling%20Stones%20stamp%20(Royal%20Mail%20Group).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1542" data-original-width="2560" height="243" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha2JKrwvi6clXw2Kg7nFbjoqzP1mtKQceiHTw6av6JPW6UBHNVtWP2NVOqhyDgRVybbhcxQxCfVICu1BIxcjRYMiiDAedRnLpLn-f4s94kh30H8t-WGGjwzhziFO3JvD6Nuh8F0kfyt61BgK1lWJ9mQk_w4fRV8hE5IMkC7YMPkL_6hnwP-Uf1O7pR/w411-h243/Rolling%20Stones%20stamp%20(Royal%20Mail%20Group).png" width="411" /></a></div><br />It’s better to burn out than it is to rust. — Neil Young</i><br />
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The Rolling Stones gave us typographical insight into where they are today, decades ago. Before the nervous speed-scrawl of their name on the cover of <i>Exile on Main Street</i>, before the down-market street-vendor flash of their name on <i>Some Girls</i>, before more recent years when the font didn’t seem to matter, the Stones affixed their name to a classic — <i>Beggars Banquet</i> — in a typestyle befitting an older, more elegant, more classical era and identity. It was no accident; they used the same script font on stationery sent to commission the tongue-and-lips logo that shorthands the band for the world to this day.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiten9dzXDzP3iHBnoi6nR8OB-ns3oLjLtquXiQ32-kWelMrMbJmcaa7VAqMsDIsWH1oFSZ-js5HhgN3lLTDp-zaGBwIRH_1Zh8hmw6tDCYUd8MMVT0srBTn3b-dXScZ9cA6QG87wNtKS1bfKrwFfBowZCEO3yPt2TTvqtVfSLgLbqMmEE8Q0Ole2Ca/s176/The%20Omnibus%20logo%20bug%20(RKO).jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="138" data-original-width="176" height="116" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiten9dzXDzP3iHBnoi6nR8OB-ns3oLjLtquXiQ32-kWelMrMbJmcaa7VAqMsDIsWH1oFSZ-js5HhgN3lLTDp-zaGBwIRH_1Zh8hmw6tDCYUd8MMVT0srBTn3b-dXScZ9cA6QG87wNtKS1bfKrwFfBowZCEO3yPt2TTvqtVfSLgLbqMmEE8Q0Ole2Ca/w157-h116/The%20Omnibus%20logo%20bug%20(RKO).jpg" width="157" /></a></div>The firebrands who once railed at the servants of the ruling class have morphed into pillars of society, employers of numerous servants of their own. The Stones, one of the most British of institutions, needed the blues, that most American music, for its initial inspiration, its enduring history, and much of its emotional currency. ...<br />
<br /><b><i><a href="https://medium.com/the-omnibus/ladies-and-gentlemen-the-resistant-grays-c4d5bc6a0fc3" target="_blank">Read the full piece at The Omnibus (Medium)</a></i></b><hr /><i>Image credit: Stones stamp: Copyright 2022 Royal Mail Group Ltd.</i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-78356262441594552352022-03-31T16:11:00.003-07:002022-04-30T02:12:13.425-07:00The 5 Blunders of Vladimir Putin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2BHbCkNIuaf8FZ-eijNKOsJW73j6SFXfTB9sOcYvDl2vquN8uTDlIN5s7BmjagOKxanTLSzjbeRtr3k75F47wuEI5e1svEcuWsh4GS2hk8hkT5nPz-qRSIYbYCI0F8icqdz60opFakglxlhHLbMSyTEnoaAcom06wA9lqKDDhzyruKE1q1oo1s3y3/s640/Putin%20effigy%202022%20(Vadim%20Ghirda,%20AP).png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="640" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2BHbCkNIuaf8FZ-eijNKOsJW73j6SFXfTB9sOcYvDl2vquN8uTDlIN5s7BmjagOKxanTLSzjbeRtr3k75F47wuEI5e1svEcuWsh4GS2hk8hkT5nPz-qRSIYbYCI0F8icqdz60opFakglxlhHLbMSyTEnoaAcom06wA9lqKDDhzyruKE1q1oo1s3y3/w400-h261/Putin%20effigy%202022%20(Vadim%20Ghirda,%20AP).png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The war in Ukraine is a month along, and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s dangerously quixotic quest to restore the geography and influence of the old Soviet Union is not going well. According to various news reports, Russian forces have lost control of Kherson, a major city in southern Ukraine, within recent days. News reports and analysis from the Pentagon say Russian troops are deeply demoralized, undersupplied, and confused as to the nature of the mission.<p>
And for all the fear and teeth-gnashing concern over the Russian military’s potential to conduct scorched-earth warfare in Ukraine, and the equal or greater fear of Russia using chemical or tactical nukes against Ukraine’s people, there are five mistakes – substantive, hand-to-the-forehead blunders – that Putin committed, five unforced errors the dictator made that effectively lost this war before the first shot was fired, errors that will end it sooner rather than later, and not on Putin’s terms.</p><p>
<a href="https://vocal.media/theSwamp/the-5-blunders-of-vladimir-putin-ctklmo0sht"><i><b>Read the complete piece at The Swamp</b></i></a></p><p></p><hr><i>Image credit: Putin: Vadim Ghirda, Associated Press</i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-23841809464891581042022-03-17T19:55:00.006-07:002022-03-23T04:59:29.287-07:00Trump, Putin, Ukraine, and the future of the GOP
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">T</span>HAT RELATIVE radio silence we’ve observed from Team Trump recently is not an accident. Well, it’s partly unintended consequences; the instant faceplant of Trump’s Truth Social website did keep the former president from elevating his profile in his usual bellicose fashion. Still, despite being just seven months from the midterm elections, there’s a sense that the Trump 2024 campaign is in hunkerdown mode, planning, negotiating, gathering nuts and dry powder for the fall.<p></p><p></p>
And there’s likely another explanation for the comparative quiet of Donald Trump, his enablers and minions. It’s an explanation evolving – exploding – half a world away.<p></p><p>
Thanks to the expansionist antics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, war is on the march in Europe, for the first time since World War II. Putin’s scorched-earth war against neighbor Ukraine has led to the deaths of thousands since the war started on Feb. 24, and the displacement of more than 3 million Ukrainians fleeing into other countries, the fastest such transition of human beings to refugee status in history.</p><p>
But however long this criminal action takes to play out, sooner or later Putin loses. The global community has closed ranks against the invasion with a refreshing solidarity, with initiatives from world governments, the private sector, and millions of everyday people worldwide. And while Putin will eventually take his place in the pantheon of the defeated, there’s already one certified loser in all of this right now: Donald Trump.</p><p>
◊ ◊ ◊ </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiK0MRicQOGNSL_zI88xYmdr3o3t41rb_6DNzaSLaecy244ntvtM9WvZ8oJ0IwyqaqDQJw-O08LKCBal70RSoGaLvtfvArWOrL7VauYLmulJkT5yvovy17fzGpyd-2Rn0Vr1fuPCQC32MZSgqR6j7pl0nIPQInMT1SQMYXKRGhYmRXZg0HrvHsXKcU_=s298" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="237" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiK0MRicQOGNSL_zI88xYmdr3o3t41rb_6DNzaSLaecy244ntvtM9WvZ8oJ0IwyqaqDQJw-O08LKCBal70RSoGaLvtfvArWOrL7VauYLmulJkT5yvovy17fzGpyd-2Rn0Vr1fuPCQC32MZSgqR6j7pl0nIPQInMT1SQMYXKRGhYmRXZg0HrvHsXKcU_=w254-h320" width="254" /></a></div>You don’t have to go that far back into American history to find numerous examples of Trump’s rhetorical dalliances with Russia’s maximum leader. From <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/03/politics/trump-putin-russia-timeline/">at least 2013</a> -- well before his candidacy -- and throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump had many favorable things to say about Putin, praising his toughness and style of leadership (do klepto-autocrats really <i>have</i> more than one style of rule?) and going out of his way to make Putin sound like the greatest thing since sliced governance.<p></p><p></p>
Fast forward to now. With much of the country behind him on this (if nothing else), President Biden has been the direct and incidental beneficiary of an array of unexpected global events. Biden – an old hand at foreign relations going back to the ‘70’s, during his early years in the Senate -- has been praised for having a steady hand in navigating the situation (certainly compared to the geopolitical chaos of the Trump administration), and for not rushing into stopgap solutions that satisfy in the short run without achieving real and targeted progress longer-term. The intelligence community under Biden has been similarly praised for getting it right on Putin’s intentions well before the invasion.<p></p><p>
And nothing breeds success like success. Apparently, “Sleepy Joe” –- Trump’s phrase for the president -- wasn’t so “sleepy” after all. Biden’s straightforward, collab approach, already gaining him <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084463809/biden-approval-poll-ukraine-economy">traction with voters after the State of the Union</a>, has won him more support throughout the country and on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers of both stripes have had no problem identifying Putin as the villain of the piece. All of which is a problem for the presidential asterisk and Putin apologist from Mar-a-Lago.</p><p>
When you unabashedly praise a dictator like Putin, when you call into question the veracity of your own intelligence services, when you give aid and comfort to a manifest enemy of the United States – and then a shooting war breaks out thanks to the recklessness of that enemy – you got some ‘splaining to do. At least if you want to be president of more than the Mar-a-Lago Chamber of Commerce.</p><p>
◊ ◊ ◊</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNKtfR1Sqt9nAyFNpg439xjLxTJ2lgtLPxGM5fUmiyHohHL5lZLwuWuwAGHmsDTiN_HHzjUXdPxjl4uz_i8V90mMH6CiUuQmwl_R0GEoGOxj_LfQOlj-RYb3PiB6xj0fOkTQyBsIh9LS6cHX6eZAd5m4cnHkbJLovzfayBcF6wiKQF1Q_SCBQU3Up5=s320" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="178" data-original-width="320" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgNKtfR1Sqt9nAyFNpg439xjLxTJ2lgtLPxGM5fUmiyHohHL5lZLwuWuwAGHmsDTiN_HHzjUXdPxjl4uz_i8V90mMH6CiUuQmwl_R0GEoGOxj_LfQOlj-RYb3PiB6xj0fOkTQyBsIh9LS6cHX6eZAd5m4cnHkbJLovzfayBcF6wiKQF1Q_SCBQU3Up5=w320-h178" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">O</span>F COURSE, TRUMP isn’t well-known for explaining anything to anyone, least of all himself. Anathema to impulse control, Trump has a history of shooting from the hip in business and in politics. He did it again between Feb. 24, the day of the invasion, and Feb. 27, before party activists and donors at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Miami, rekindling the old Putin bromance by calling the tyrant “smart” and a “genius” for orchestrating the deadly and needless incursion into a neighboring country.<p></p><p>
Speaking at CPAC, Trump attempted to modulate his praise for Putin with an obligatorily human response to the tragedy unfolding in Kyiv, Mariupol, and other cities in a beleaguered Ukraine – while incredibly, at the same time, blaming Western leaders for forcing Putin’s hand. "The problem is not that Putin is smart, which, of course, he's smart," Trump said. "The problem is that our leaders are dumb... and so far, allowed him to get away with this travesty and assault on humanity."</p><p>
Back in the day, in the first blush of his presidency, Trump’s bon mots for Putin at least had the imagistic advantage of being a novelty, something fresh -- that cherished asset in American politics. Trump got some bizzarro-world brownie points for daring to say what he said on behalf of a once and future adversary – most notably at the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44852812">2018 press conference in Helsinki</a>. It was, of course, dangerously provocative, globally disrespectful, and blindingly disloyal; it was also cheeky and unique, and one hell of a way to stand out from all the other American presidents that preceded him.</p><p>
It’s different this time. And bigly. The man who would incinerate Europe is more of a danger than he was in 2014, the last time Ukraine unceremoniously ushered Russian forces out the door after an invasion. And Putin’s inamorato in statecraft – the man who damn near incinerated America – is more of a known political quantity now than in 2014. We know more about Trump. We know more about Putin. And we know more about ourselves. We all do. Even those in Trump’s own party. And as Europe deals with war, we can see power brokers in the GOP quietly wrestling with an identity disconnect they didn’t war-game for: What to do when the leader of the GOP has a bromance with a clear and present danger to the national security, and the security of a world threatened by a war the GOP leader’s pal started?</p><p>
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</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg5ltkylcw-52iybgd__jXgwOP6RMxMwEPdvc33TV7xd6DVz0A-Ex0z5KoBCwiwyPhDw0jTeMBBF1ZrQo8pcscLzeLGS_7qWTINUdFwqSeSPlDyn3B90CHD0hPmFSmlHNi4KT8TNRLPyjPkuO0LFgFIbl__x3cMQnBfGGq7T73L4PnnshooizxZcMZp=s302" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="213" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg5ltkylcw-52iybgd__jXgwOP6RMxMwEPdvc33TV7xd6DVz0A-Ex0z5KoBCwiwyPhDw0jTeMBBF1ZrQo8pcscLzeLGS_7qWTINUdFwqSeSPlDyn3B90CHD0hPmFSmlHNi4KT8TNRLPyjPkuO0LFgFIbl__x3cMQnBfGGq7T73L4PnnshooizxZcMZp" width="213" /></a></div>Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the reigning Prince of Darkness and John Calhoun’s deputy on earth, is nonetheless a captive of good political sense. Before the invasion, McConnell told Fox News that there “should be no confusion about Vladimir Putin. He’s a thug. He’s a killer,” McConnell said. “He’s been on the rampage and this will not end well for him.”<p></p><p>
In this moment of deep global uncertainty, McConnell may or may not have known what to do, but he sure as hell knew what <i>not</i> to do. What horse <i>not</i> to ride.</p><p>
So did Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president once loyal to a fault. At a dinner for GOP donors on March 4, Pence offered a full-throated defense of NATO, and a spirited pushback against Trump orthodoxy. “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” he said, according to his prepared remarks, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-campaigns-foreign-policy-4625a28e59996ff16085fdf30910a449">as reported by AP</a>. “There is only room for champions of freedom.”</p><p>
Even a reliable Trump mouthpiece like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said, in full throat before a microphone, said Putin was “the bad guy” in the scenario, driving his own wedge, large or small, between himself and the man who would be America’s king. It’s other little cleavages, small rhetorical carve-outs like these that Trump should be concerned about. They’re evidence of political fault lines starting to appear. They’re the fissures of the future.</p><p>
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">I</span>N WAYS NO one wants to talk about out loud for attribution, they signal that the Republican Party is just so <i>over</i> Donald Trump. This is that stage in a relationship when one party <i>knows</i> it’s history but either can’t work up the nerve to say so to the second party – or the first party hopes the second party will be self-aware enough to see it’s over without being told.</p><p>
</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj3eb3xi8kCZ9v3rNJ5xuP8_LoRwSFY9iMjPn626GA1ndeFIbMEH98IhAm8LagwvLmBZ8FVV7XS02w4w57R6oGolAVALqeannA3CIqHWJ1-xjb7MAtoH3cn1o9Nb48eCEKVacrB6Kt-xySZi7_k7Gr2pbLzXVEBb1On575QuA2ZzJ9EqgdzBaDozvig=s188" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="55" data-original-width="188" height="94" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj3eb3xi8kCZ9v3rNJ5xuP8_LoRwSFY9iMjPn626GA1ndeFIbMEH98IhAm8LagwvLmBZ8FVV7XS02w4w57R6oGolAVALqeannA3CIqHWJ1-xjb7MAtoH3cn1o9Nb48eCEKVacrB6Kt-xySZi7_k7Gr2pbLzXVEBb1On575QuA2ZzJ9EqgdzBaDozvig=w320-h94" width="320" /></a></div>Look at the yawn of a response to the soft launch of Truth Social. <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-cant-stop-whining-about-his-failing-social-media-app-truth-social?via=newsletter&source=Weekend">The Daily Beast</a> reported on Friday, March 4: “The Daily Beast reviewed analyses of visits to Truth Social’s performed by SimilarWeb, which tracks website traffic from public and private sources. The company’s figures for the MAGA social network—while only an estimate based on incomplete data — are nonetheless anemic. Trump’s own social media platform is doing either worse or the same as other MAGA social sites like Gab — another pro-Trump competitor website that’s especially beloved by, well, Nazis — and Gettr, a platform fronted by one of Trump’s former top political aides, Jason Miller.<p></p><p>
“SimilarWeb’s estimates show a sharp spike of around 2 million daily visits to the site when it first debuted, before traffic dipped to an average of approximately 300,000 visits each day, putting the site on par with Gettr. Meanwhile, the far-right Gab has averaged around 650,000 daily average visits in the same time period,” the Beast reported. “As of Friday, Truth Social was the 72nd most popular free app in Apple’s AppStore, a far cry from Facebook (5th) and his formerly beloved Twitter (22) ...”</p><p>
◊ ◊ ◊</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNb4zeQ22kuy50j9sq_kO4PdkMny94svsmCa9DegVlf31xc9dEd0YlUWIMnl8qIfFhvS3nZBoROIvy2QaPya_796i6wlZf-4NXbi6fOs7sDw7D_osJqibv3NkdTfgxnrOkdE-XmjY0hfPVLQpEiAA_ipvVweU3oq0gWeS3t37s7Bv5K3oITcQVwJ5Z/s360/Caption%201.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="360" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNb4zeQ22kuy50j9sq_kO4PdkMny94svsmCa9DegVlf31xc9dEd0YlUWIMnl8qIfFhvS3nZBoROIvy2QaPya_796i6wlZf-4NXbi6fOs7sDw7D_osJqibv3NkdTfgxnrOkdE-XmjY0hfPVLQpEiAA_ipvVweU3oq0gWeS3t37s7Bv5K3oITcQVwJ5Z/s320/Caption%201.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">P</span>UTIN IS TRUMP’S problem, and Trump is the Republican Party’s problem. The GOP’s identity crisis, already the stuff of political and psychoanalytic legend, has an unwelcome fresh dimension. A Republican party susceptible to the winds of change and the tide of public opinion is now in the position of reflexively bending the knee to Trump, the party leader, who just as reflexively shows at least rhetorical loyalty to the dictator trying to enslave the Ukrainian people with the deadliest, most ruinous brandishing of military force in Europe since World War II.<p></p><p>This is a wall-sized dilemma for the party that was once reliably a bulwark against Russia, Communism, and all, uh, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Committee#:~:text=The%20House%20Committee%20on%20Un,part%20of%20private%20citizens%2C%20public">un-American activities</a>. Some Republicans, realizing the scope and breadth of this vein-popping conundrum in progress, have stopped talking about Trump or the January 6 Insurrection altogether if there’s any suspicion of linkage with Putin and events in Ukraine. </p><p>But that blithe silence isn’t nearly good enough from the Repubs months before an election, even the historically advantageous occasion of a midterm election. At this dire global moment, before a restive domestic audience, the contradictions for Trump and the GOP are inescapable, especially the one they can’t outrun or spin:</p><p>
The longer the war in Ukraine continues, the clearer it is that Putin is already guilty of the implicit war crime of <i>starting</i> a war in the first place (never mind other war crimes to come), the worse it reflects on former president Trump, his character, his judgment, his patriotism, his grasp of political optics, and his talent for picking his friends. And the worse Trump looks specifically, the worse, the more politically desperate the Republicans look in general for dutifully standing by his side.</p><p>
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</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjt6Ci7tlMVsmZ1ePlMsAQ0dUbVGR7zQHuVQxDdHJrj9mr4aKUaWn7epBge7zw1m2FT5F_RJ641jmDhtpX_zXsUdWEZBqeVjxwUe4aQNcOndN2Fv9ADNfPO7u7YToLhiDSRu952NdxgblSDwFpDjnIkFw2nZPStCU4OTGcjxiuRYeQD8zOyPaYdgHjH=s223" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="223" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjt6Ci7tlMVsmZ1ePlMsAQ0dUbVGR7zQHuVQxDdHJrj9mr4aKUaWn7epBge7zw1m2FT5F_RJ641jmDhtpX_zXsUdWEZBqeVjxwUe4aQNcOndN2Fv9ADNfPO7u7YToLhiDSRu952NdxgblSDwFpDjnIkFw2nZPStCU4OTGcjxiuRYeQD8zOyPaYdgHjH=w200-h167" width="200" /></a></div>That’s why GOP lawmakers have started to pivot toward their more traditional, anti-Russian posture – and toward common ground with the Democrats. On March 2, in a rare senatorial expression of joint outrage, Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski joined with West Virginia Democrat and Build Back Better executioner Joe Manchin in releasing a statement on Putin, the war in Ukraine, and the ways Putin is leveraging Russia’s formidable oil and natural gas reserves against a European continent that needs them badly.<p></p><p>
“Vladimir Putin has used energy as a weapon of war. Russia’s actions demand a fundamental rethinking of American national security and our national and international energy policy,” the senators wrote.</p><p>Trump's sadly automatic praise for Putin shows a man who's missed the moment of this moment. The bipartisan, supportive reaction to a groundbreaking address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is the latest example of Trump out of step with the party he purports to lead. <br /><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhB5QASeKeCKpE0yEKFn02iDEb-9Spri9tZmsA6XfoEd9K5qGUsR7vr1MbNibnt8dIqJ2NIZK-3wszYE2Ij2yjBhaFrABNkGi-VxExsbT3ehhei6YlK265Ji7WgUkz0bxOo4i28Uuk-gk7uwH4XiybkH9vOdnpKc-0ODxtnP3yHnGJFebXiPKsBtf4v=s298" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="273" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhB5QASeKeCKpE0yEKFn02iDEb-9Spri9tZmsA6XfoEd9K5qGUsR7vr1MbNibnt8dIqJ2NIZK-3wszYE2Ij2yjBhaFrABNkGi-VxExsbT3ehhei6YlK265Ji7WgUkz0bxOo4i28Uuk-gk7uwH4XiybkH9vOdnpKc-0ODxtnP3yHnGJFebXiPKsBtf4v" width="273" /></a></div>Zelensky spoke March 16 in a virtual address to the U.S. Congress, making what some have called a Churchillian defense of Ukraine, an oratorically ringing stand in pursuit of more involvement, more skin in the game, from the NATO powers -- especially the United States. Zelensky's address was warmly received on both sides of the aisle.<p></p><p>
When the times demand that such bipartisan overtures be the exceptional rule rather than the comfortable exception, Republican leadership will be hard pressed to persist in obstruction as political reflex, for its own sake. Never mind the childish antics of presumptive GOP barometers and braying embarrassments Lauren Bohbert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, acting the fool at the State of the Union address. The rank-and-file gets it: in this climate, the stakes are too high for the ritual sniping Washington is used to. Too high for not taking the right side. </p><p>None of which is good news for Donald Trump. Even with the prospect of winning seats in the midterm -- likely but by no means a guarantee -- it’s all hands on deck for a Republican party that doesn’t really want the leader it’s saddled with, a leader who breaks more furniture than he builds, one whose current stance athwart the party’s own geopolitical history, and its needs in the here and now, make the work of the GOP finding its identity <i>today</i> that much harder to achieve.</p><hr /><i>Image credits: Putin and Trump: Evan Vucci/Associated Press. Biden: Saul Loeb, Getty Images. Truth Social logo: Copyright 2022 Truth Social. CPAC logo: Conservative Political Action Conference. Mitch McConnell: Reuters. Zelensky: Poll image from Ukrainian government video.</i><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-65272856421459788312021-09-23T10:12:00.001-07:002021-09-23T10:15:43.159-07:00Melvin Van Peebles: Praisesong for the s**t disturber<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IHA1Ds9VwDA/YUyzkSwXhyI/AAAAAAAAV98/pUMARyFwy6seDfd87UHKBMnXy8DdfXa5wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1134/MER%2Band%2BMVP%252C%2BSeattle%2B2009%2Bcropped.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="743" data-original-width="1134" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IHA1Ds9VwDA/YUyzkSwXhyI/AAAAAAAAV98/pUMARyFwy6seDfd87UHKBMnXy8DdfXa5wCLcBGAsYHQ/w357-h239/MER%2Band%2BMVP%252C%2BSeattle%2B2009%2Bcropped.png" width="357" /></a></div><p></p>“Never meet your heroes,” the old warning goes. “You’ll only be disappointed.” Whoever came up with that was someone no doubt chagrined by the look, the creative output or the personal behavior of one of the icons he or she once revered. But it ain’t necessarily so. Some of us manage to keep moving, in the time-honored tradition of a shark; some of us push back against the expected lethargy of the tide of years.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JSEJ2ijBN2I/YUy1IbeiJCI/AAAAAAAAV-E/8Pm3zrtPgVwRaEt-8jUDNNuZFiZ5t0DPQCLcBGAsYHQ/s177/Medium%2Blogo%2B2020.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="46" data-original-width="177" height="46" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JSEJ2ijBN2I/YUy1IbeiJCI/AAAAAAAAV-E/8Pm3zrtPgVwRaEt-8jUDNNuZFiZ5t0DPQCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Medium%2Blogo%2B2020.jpg" width="177" /></a></div>Melvin Van Peebles was one such baadasssss. The filmmaker, writer and native of Chicago exploded into the mainstream popular culture in the volatile, unpredictable early ‘70’s with his first independent feature, <i>Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadassss Song</i> (1971), a raw, wild film that pushed every button in the finger-wagging majoritarian culture, a motion picture created by a filmmaker determined to tell a story “about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass.” ... </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i><a href="https://medium.com/the-omnibus/melvin-van-peebles-praisesong-for-the-s-t-disturber-bceb18898902">Read the full piece at Medium</a></i></b></div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-34939745326294343552021-09-15T03:22:00.017-07:002021-09-16T21:57:31.748-07:00Total recall failure: 4 reasons why Newsom survived<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qmYnQ5qApjU/YUPJvKPqi6I/AAAAAAAAV9M/ILjIiNXMDcgdzLbEwQ3sTzq5SSNkmVlOwCLcBGAsYHQ/s925/Newsom%2BSept%2B14%2B2021.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="584" data-original-width="925" height="249" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qmYnQ5qApjU/YUPJvKPqi6I/AAAAAAAAV9M/ILjIiNXMDcgdzLbEwQ3sTzq5SSNkmVlOwCLcBGAsYHQ/w375-h249/Newsom%2BSept%2B14%2B2021.png" width="375" /></a> <br /><br /></div>It took an actor, a doctor, a former corrections officer, a store clerk, and a conservative radio megaphone (among others) pursuing control of the fifth-largest economy on earth to convince the citizens of the biggest American state that “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” <p></p><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LH_5s_mrqps/YUPLKhjJ4yI/AAAAAAAAV9U/0wyudWkCUv4jp1YPreKC_eH3djoIIRtaACLcBGAsYHQ/s234/Daily%2BKos%2Blogo%2B2020%2B%2528Kos%2BMedia%2BLLC%2529.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="46" data-original-width="234" height="46" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LH_5s_mrqps/YUPLKhjJ4yI/AAAAAAAAV9U/0wyudWkCUv4jp1YPreKC_eH3djoIIRtaACLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Daily%2BKos%2Blogo%2B2020%2B%2528Kos%2BMedia%2BLLC%2529.jpg" width="234" /></a></div>On that basis, Gavin Newsom survived an effort to recall him from the governership of California by a wide margin, with Californians voting “no” (to retain him in office) by almost 2-1, with mail-in votes giving him an early commanding lead. Newsom escaped recall thanks to a variety of unforced errors by the Republican Party that has fiercely opposed him since he took office. </div><div><br /></div><div>More specifically, Newsom beat back this bid to oust him mostly for four reasons ... </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/15/2052352/-Total-recall-failure-Four-reasons-why-Newsom-survived" target="_blank">Read the full report at Daily Kos</a></i></b></div><i><hr />Image credits: Newsom: Still from MSNBC video. Daily Kos logo: Kos Media LLC.</i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-15883140995871325542021-09-11T14:55:00.031-07:002021-09-16T22:00:14.867-07:00American Makeover<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E9cOapziGAE/YUPAAKB4Z-I/AAAAAAAAV9E/QFgi8iXEfkAEPHcWmlh28iSe9msjcizRACLcBGAsYHQ/s1340/Robert%2BE.%2BLee%2Bstatue%2Bremoval%2BSept.%2B2021%2B%2528Generic%2BNews%2B%2526%2BInformation%2Bstill%2529.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="1340" height="179" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E9cOapziGAE/YUPAAKB4Z-I/AAAAAAAAV9E/QFgi8iXEfkAEPHcWmlh28iSe9msjcizRACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Robert%2BE.%2BLee%2Bstatue%2Bremoval%2BSept.%2B2021%2B%2528Generic%2BNews%2B%2526%2BInformation%2Bstill%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>It had been expected for weeks and months, but its arrival on August 12 – a chronicle of an evolution foretold - announced itself like a thunderclap: According to results of the 2020 census, the United States of America is experiencing unprecedented growth in its minority communities, with black and brown populations showing robust growth, and numbers of white Americans growing more slowly, so much so that the nation’s white majority is the smallest it’s been in more than 200 years. </div><div><br /></div><div>Data from the official U.S. Census 2020, the decennial survey of the nation’s people prescribed in the Constitution, finds that the United States experienced panoramic change in its demographic makeup, with its white non-Hispanic population dropping to 57.8 percent (191 million), an 8.6 percent decline since the 2010 census (196 million), and the lowest percentage of white Americans since 1790. In addition to that, the Hispanic population of the country has grown to 18.7 percent, African Americans grew their numbers to 12.4 percent, and the Asian population increased to 6 percent. <div><br /></div><div> ◊ ◊ ◊ </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EYcC8ijdg6w/YUO_hWRaWnI/AAAAAAAAV88/c629Gt9AVyMnRMuwFm1vLiN6az0AXhtMgCLcBGAsYHQ/s190/Swamp%2Blogo%2B%2528%25C2%25A9%2B2017%2BJerrick%2BVentures%2BLLC%2529%2B.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="74" data-original-width="190" height="74" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EYcC8ijdg6w/YUO_hWRaWnI/AAAAAAAAV88/c629Gt9AVyMnRMuwFm1vLiN6az0AXhtMgCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Swamp%2Blogo%2B%2528%25C2%25A9%2B2017%2BJerrick%2BVentures%2BLLC%2529%2B.jpg" width="190" /></a></div>The census data reveals how, now more than ever, American life is shot through with diversity as an increasingly baseline experience. The major unknown is whether the nation is prepared for the browner, blacker diversity it can’t escape. </div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, in the run-up to the data release and in the weeks after, we’ve seen powerful pushback against the data’s implications, with concerted resistance to voting and reproductive rights, and hysterical pronouncements against critical race theory by legislators around the country. ... </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://vocal.media/theSwamp/american-makeover" target="_blank"><b><i>Read the full report at The Swamp</i></b></a></div></div><hr /><i>Image credits: Lee statue: Still from Generic News & Information video. Swamp logo: Copyright 2021 Creatd.</i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-18192625322598822602021-07-04T04:15:00.005-07:002023-07-10T22:20:18.686-07:00Juneteenth, January 6th and July 4th
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tbAET1t--Zo/YOGXysuYhuI/AAAAAAAAV5A/-KPOTnFy_U0_qZGu-XSZiRbKjkRCJcdWwCLcBGAsYHQ/s548/Better%2BUSA%2Bflag.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="548" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tbAET1t--Zo/YOGXysuYhuI/AAAAAAAAV5A/-KPOTnFy_U0_qZGu-XSZiRbKjkRCJcdWwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Better%2BUSA%2Bflag.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">I</span><span style="font-size: medium;">N HIS celebrated 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” If that part of the author’s confessional wisdom was true in the Thirties, it’s just as true today, for America and Americans. </span></div><div><br /></div><div>Holding two opposed ideas at the same time has also been the preoccupation of this country in matters of race. We’ve long navigated that duality, performed the social gymnastics of a racially divided nation, juggling contrary mindsets and principles. The observance of Juneteenth is a towering case in point. </div><div><br /></div><div>At almost the moment the unexpected happened June 15th – when Congress overwhelmingly voted to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday, marking the centrality of June 19 in the African American experience – Twitter obliged us with a snapshot of irony that put everything in our untied states in perspective:
Juneteenth has become a federal holiday at practically the same moment that educators in a number of states are blocked from explaining the reasons why Juneteenth has become a federal holiday.</div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ts-9wzEGRSU/YOT_YqPtBII/AAAAAAAAV5M/3EgVcSyQ10ERJpXMl3xDqz-x6vvlyfQ_wCLcBGAsYHQ/s332/Maj.%2BGen.%2BGordon%2BGranger%2B%2528public%2Bdomain_Wikimedia%2BCommons%2529.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="332" data-original-width="262" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ts-9wzEGRSU/YOT_YqPtBII/AAAAAAAAV5M/3EgVcSyQ10ERJpXMl3xDqz-x6vvlyfQ_wCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Maj.%2BGen.%2BGordon%2BGranger%2B%2528public%2Bdomain_Wikimedia%2BCommons%2529.jpg" /></a></div>Let’s try anyway. On June 19, 1865, a group of Union soldiers led by Major General Gordon Granger briefly took command of a home in Galveston, Texas, for the sole purpose of delivering a message, his General Order No. 3, a statement whose brevity ably disguises its power and reach. </div><div><br /></div><div>From Granger’s order:
<i>The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of personal property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>
There was joy, and certainly a barely submerged outrage, when slaves in Texas thus discovered that the powers and permissions of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – enacted in January 1863 – had been denied them for two years, six months and 18 days. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊</div><div><br /></div><div>Juneteenth has vaulted into the national calendar with a full historical narrative behind it, albeit one most Americans know little or nothing about. Ironically, and somewhat like the slaves of Civil War-era Texas, many Americans were surprised to discover Juneteenth, 156 years after the revelation that made its observance possible in the first place. </div><div><br /></div><div>Irony piles on irony: Texas, where Juneteenth began, has taken point in renouncing critical race theory, the long-practiced but recently reviled academic pursuit of explaining the systemic relationship -- connecting the dots -- between racism and our national institutions, between our past and the present day.
Juneteenth joins two other dates in a broad chain of disappointments, in showing us both how far our nation has come and how far it has to go. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, announced the American brand to the world. What was codified on the original July 4th was reinforced in the unambiguous language of Granger’s order.
July 4th. Juneteenth. The principles of American democracy were upheld on those points on the calendar. But the process of making them a reality has always been under siege, never more directly than on Jan. 6, 2021, during a deadly violent insurrection by domestic terrorists against the duly elected government of the United States. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P_1vho_Ph9o/YOGQl_VWWVI/AAAAAAAAV4g/_VZvGfb0yfUKWSl47i065ucl2IwrMHtrwCLcBGAsYHQ/s523/Juneteenth%2Bflag.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="523" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P_1vho_Ph9o/YOGQl_VWWVI/AAAAAAAAV4g/_VZvGfb0yfUKWSl47i065ucl2IwrMHtrwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Juneteenth%2Bflag.png" width="320" /></a></div>That insurrection, powered to great degree by white supremacists and their apologists, was one of the latest disconnects of our values and our politics. The very latest: The Senate’s tireless efforts to prevent the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from gaining the legislative traction it needs to become law. </div><div><br /></div><div>Juneteenth. Jan. 6th. The Fourth of July. The connection between those dates is less tortured or tenuous than one might think. They form what may be the most consequential triad of American observances: Even as one celebrates the genesis of American democracy, and a second marks the resilience of that democracy’s promise (even if deferred for years), the third date, the most recent, indicates the fragility of that democracy, and how it’s no automatic, no given, nothing to be taken for granted. </div><div><br /></div><div>The message for cynics – those who look at Jan. 6 and see just another tourist day in Washington, the ones for whom July 4th is a backdrop for mattress sales and baseball, the ones who look at Juneteenth and see nothing at all – is irrefutable. Symbols matter. They represent the best of what we are. In our flag-draped, image-besotted American culture, there’s substance in symbolism. A lot of it. <hr /><i>Image credits: Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger: public domain/Wikimedia Commons.</i>
</div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-42889505365217739802021-06-24T04:55:00.001-07:002021-07-04T04:02:04.716-07:00The Zoom where it happens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mHI-8gewlsE/YNRxxkkouYI/AAAAAAAAV34/Tbc0qsNSsrgH9sFX8BAUMAKbZEHxVZ8ZQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1066/Zoom%2Bgreenscreen%2Bframe.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="519" data-original-width="1066" height="226" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mHI-8gewlsE/YNRxxkkouYI/AAAAAAAAV34/Tbc0qsNSsrgH9sFX8BAUMAKbZEHxVZ8ZQCLcBGAsYHQ/w472-h226/Zoom%2Bgreenscreen%2Bframe.png" width="472" /></a></div><div><br /></div>
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It was the bane of my existence back in the day: working the graveyard shift at a Major American Newspaper; enduring a commute that had me pushing against a human tide, moving toward my job when everyone else in the city seemed to be moving in the opposite direction; toiling in an office a long way from home, performing tasks that could have just as easily been done from the comfort of my own apartment.<div>
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At that time there were few other available options, and the top-down structure of American work was still very much intact. No one but the managers had the option of working from home, and even they were at the end of the short leash of the prevailing workplace culture.<div>
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Fast forward to this minute ... </div><hr /><i><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/zoom-where-happens-michael-e-ross/" target="_blank">Read the rest at LinkedIn</a></i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-20313635315117245832021-06-12T15:57:00.001-07:002021-07-04T04:03:45.020-07:00Swiss Army knife + AR-15 = A tragic false equivalence<br /><div></div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">O</span>N JUNE 4, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez overturned California’s assault weapons ban, calling one of the country’s most stringent measures against assault-style guns unconstitutional, in a <a href="https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Decision%20--%20Miller%2020210604.pdf">94-page ruling</a> that upends the delicate discourse on guns and gun violence in the nation’s most populous state. <div><br /><div>“Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle,” Benitez said in his ruling’s introduction, writing what reads like a product description in a gun-shop brochure. </div><div><br />
“This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of 2nd Amendment protection. The banned ‘assault weapons’ are not bazookas, howitzers, or machine guns. Those arms are dangerous and solely useful for military purposes,” his ruling said.</div><br /><div>
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Never mind the casual conflation of an everyday tool used a thousand innocent ways with a weapon whose primary reason for being is the high-volume destruction of human beings in seconds. In the right hands – or the wrong hands – an AR-15 can be as deadly as a bazooka or a machine gun, and deadly more quickly than a howitzer. </div><div><br /></div><div>“This is an average case about average guns used in average ways for average purposes,” the judge’s ruling said. “One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter.”
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But California’s assault weapons ban, and those of other states as well, were enacted before and after AR-15s became widely available. The point of such laws was to prevent more rampant proliferation – the better to keep an anomaly from becoming a problem, to keep a problem from becoming a catastrophe.
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Gun control has already been a challenge in California. A gunman identified as Carlos Lopez killed two people and wounded two others in a rampage in downtown Los Angeles on April 27. Authorities <a href="https://ktla.com/news/local-news/gunman-in-deadly-l-a-shooting-rampage-had-cache-of-weapons-at-home-possessed-ar-15-sources/amp/"> discovered several weapons at his home, including an AR-15</a> Lopez bought legally, law enforcement sources reported.<br /><br />◊ ◊ ◊<br /><br /></div><div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">L</span>OPEZ (fatally shot by police) didn’t use the AR-15 in his attack in downtown L.A., but he could have. The damage done with one handgun was bad enough; what he could have done if he’d exercised the choice to go postal with a fully-loaded AR-15 is too chilling to contemplate. Thanks to Judge Benitez’s ruling, contemplation of any such future horrors in the Golden State may not be enough.
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Benitez’s June 4 ruling argues that it isn’t “about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits” of the Second Amendment, but a study of gun-violence history proves that wrong. In incident after incident, AR-15 rifles -- or similar, rapid-fire-capable weaponry operating in similar fashion -- have been implicated in mass shootings in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting">Parkland, Fla.</a> (2018), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting">Las Vegas</a> (2017), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting">Orlando</a> (2016), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_San_Bernardino_attack">San Bernardino</a> (2015), Boulder (2013), <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-look-at-the-aurora-shooters-guns-including-the-ar-15">Aurora</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting">Sandy Hook Elementary</a> (2012), and other shooting locations. The <a href="https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/">Gun Violence Archive</a>, an online source of information from multiple sources, defines “mass shooting” as four or more people injured or killed in one incident.
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There’s nothing “average” about a gun with this much firepower. AR-15 style weapons aren’t at the periphery of America’s ballistic experience; the pandemic of shootings, in California and elsewhere in recent years and decades, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/health/ar15-rifle-history-trnd/index.html">only prove just how dangerously popular, and central to the debate, they really are</a>.
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Benitez is no stranger to the gun-control debate in California. The state appealed his 2017 decision lifting a ban on sale or purchase of magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, and his 2020 ruling that stopped requirement of background checks for people trying to buy ammunition. Both were the hallmark of Proposition 63, a ballot measure overwhelmingly approved by voters in November 2016.
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This latest ruling doesn’t go into effect immediately. Benitez stayed its enforcement for 30 days; California Attorney General Rob Bonta is expected to appeal. But California is already reeling from frightening incidents of gun violence in 2021. The May 26 VTA railyard shooting in San Jose -- nine died, including the shooter -– was the 18th in the state so far. There were 39 total mass shootings in California in 2020 and 49 in 2019, according to Gun Violence Archive.
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Not all of them involved an AR-15. But it’s safe to say none involved a Swiss Army knife.
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Someone should tell it to the judge.<hr>
</div></div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-83153535677057189092021-06-10T19:39:00.007-07:002021-09-19T12:15:33.189-07:00Trump, Facebook and the longer goodbye<br /><span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">A</span>T FIRST BLUSH, it read like a corporate reaction to a dangerous force of nature, or a response to some other clear and present danger. On June 4, Facebook announced its extending of the suspension of former president Donald Trump’s social-media account until at least January 2023. <div><br /></div><div>In <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/facebook-s-responses-to-the-oversight-board-recommendations-in-the-trump-case/d96655d0-34d0-4381-b628-24772313c0e8/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4">a blog post</a>, Facebook said it will only reinstate the former president’s social media presence if “the risk to public safety has receded,” the kind of phrase you’d expect from FEMA officials in the aftermath of a hurricane. </div><div><br /></div><div>While we might expect Facebook’s decision to resonate widely in social and political circles, and even though the decision on Trump was part of a wider policy governing behavior of public figures, it’s hard not to believe that Trump’s comments fomenting the violence of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection wasn’t first among numerous reasons for Facebook’s decision. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jFbkeW-5wqM/YMLF2yakMbI/AAAAAAAAVzE/qHtNscoT3rg8oMewU9X-blqz454Q_QFMQCLcBGAsYHQ/s221/Facebook%2Blogo.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="90" data-original-width="221" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jFbkeW-5wqM/YMLF2yakMbI/AAAAAAAAVzE/qHtNscoT3rg8oMewU9X-blqz454Q_QFMQCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Facebook%2Blogo.jpg" /></a></div>We all know Trump’s been eager to return to the social mediasphere. After Trump’s comments on Jan. 6, the former president was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/technology/facebook-trump-ban.html">blocked from Facebook</a>, You Tube, Snapchat and – unkindest cut – Twitter, for exercising his vein-popping brand of social media. </div><div><br /></div><div>Before his bad behavior came to a head, Trump was a fixture of daily life on Twitter, his social megaphone of choice. Afterward, he endured his exile from social media gamely, for a while. CNN reported that Jared Kushner, Trump son-in-law, advised against Trump going to other conservative media platforms like Parler and Gab – a move that would have secured the former president an instant audience on a platform he didn’t have to build from scratch himself. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vBGxAqKrfWw/YMLIizVZJBI/AAAAAAAAVzc/RDtK-M9THmYwrXHX0KgkQXCsHJJhMzVMACLcBGAsYHQ/s358/Trump%2B%2528Reuters%253AJoshua%2BRoberts%2529.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="358" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vBGxAqKrfWw/YMLIizVZJBI/AAAAAAAAVzc/RDtK-M9THmYwrXHX0KgkQXCsHJJhMzVMACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Trump%2B%2528Reuters%253AJoshua%2BRoberts%2529.jpg" /></a></div>The May launch of the From the Desk of Donald J. Trump blog page -- a project whose name managed to sounds avuncular and imperious at the same time -- indicated how far he was prepared to go to get back in the game. It had promise: His Trumpiness weighing in with his trademark pithy opinions and rhetorical indictments of those outside the church – all of it tailored to the 70-odd million people who voted for him in 2020. </div><div><br /></div><div>They pumped it up the best they could. Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser, <a href="https://twitter.com/JasonMillerinDC/status/1389685960036737025">
tweeted</a> about a Trump portal set to precede the actual social-media site: “President Trump’s website is a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office, but this is not a new social media platform. We’ll have additional information coming on that front in the very near future.”</div><div>
<br />
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">T</span>HE COLLAPSE of the blog-page project on June 2 -- 29 days after it started -- points to how far he has to go to find a platform big enough to contain his ego. Facebook’s continued resistance to his reappearance on its platform indicates an understanding of both Trump’s increasing desperation, and its own willingness to push back on the historical entitlement of the presidential office. </div><div><br /></div><div>The threshold shouldn’t be hard to determine: Trump shouldn’t be allowed to get away with any more, or less, on Facebook than any other ordinary citizen. Full stop. The fact of his being the 45th president of the United States shouldn’t be the thumb-on-the-scale factor that mitigates on his behalf. Nor should any reflexive invocation of the First Amendment as a defense for shouting fire in a crowded theater (while bringing in the gasoline and matches). </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i0v5vA2zERE/YMLJhPbIPoI/AAAAAAAAVzk/54nVGhNOo0UcrBUXRocQtM9ps8pFQNoXgCLcBGAsYHQ/s348/Pew%2BResearch%2BCenter%2Blogo%2B2017.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="84" data-original-width="348" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i0v5vA2zERE/YMLJhPbIPoI/AAAAAAAAVzk/54nVGhNOo0UcrBUXRocQtM9ps8pFQNoXgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Pew%2BResearch%2BCenter%2Blogo%2B2017.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The American public didn’t tip its hand for Facebook on how to handle Trump in the future. In April, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/05/americans-divided-on-whether-trump-should-be-permanently-banned-from-social-media/">released a report</a> that found an almost-even split between those who want Trump reinstated and those who don’t. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vyObsp5Pz9c/YMLMfsXFADI/AAAAAAAAVzs/qk65K0xQ08wPZCj11nYfOgpBChNAS5S_QCLcBGAsYHQ/s365/Facebook%2Bpullquote.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="365" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vyObsp5Pz9c/YMLMfsXFADI/AAAAAAAAVzs/qk65K0xQ08wPZCj11nYfOgpBChNAS5S_QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Facebook%2Bpullquote.png" width="320" /></a></div>It’s a gut-check moment for the Facebook Oversight Board. With the June 4 decision, the independent 20-member panel created by Facebook has proven it has the courage to make a decision that rightly disregards the trappings of office and the mesmerizing power of celebrity. Now comes the board’s next challenge: sticking to its ethical guns as political pressure increases. Which it certainly will, the closer we get to the 2022 election. </div><div><br /></div><div>Facebook isn’t imposing a penalty on Trump that hasn’t been imposed by others. But Facebook’s footprint, and imprint, is bigger than the others. With almost 3.5 billion users around the world, Facebook isn’t so much a social network as it is a social utility, ubiquitous and inescapable. That fact elevates the need for vigilance of its users and what they create. </div><div><br /></div><div>That’s what makes the decision by the company’s oversight board so important, now and in the future. The board understands that Trump’s use of his status as a former president as a basis for social-media reinstatement shouldn’t in and of itself be enough to justify special favors. With democracy hanging in the balance, the board decided something that was obvious all along: The rhetoric in Donald Trump’s posts and public commentary deserved to be subject to the same scrutiny – and the same penalty for violation – as anyone else.<hr /><i>Image credits: Facebook logo: Facebook. Trump: Reuters/Joshua Roberts. Pew Research Center logo: Pew Research Center for People and the Press.</i></div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-7981815788854982742020-12-18T23:21:00.010-08:002021-09-19T12:44:07.937-07:002020 - The postwar world: An election's truth and consequences<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gcjXedN1NyM/X94B70AYilI/AAAAAAAAVkI/XFTOyk1q8CwOTGBK4djeDlr6o0D4GuJYACLcBGAsYHQ/s524/Trump.%2B%2528Reuters%2529.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="524" data-original-width="382" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gcjXedN1NyM/X94B70AYilI/AAAAAAAAVkI/XFTOyk1q8CwOTGBK4djeDlr6o0D4GuJYACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Trump.%2B%2528Reuters%2529.jpg" /></a></div><span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">T</span>HE PREVAILING wisdom in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election is that, by accident <i>and</i> on purpose, Donald John Trump remains the black-hole sun at the center of the Republican party universe. Within the GOP, there’s no credibility without him. And a large number of party loyalists – not just the 126 House Republicans who signed on to Trump’s fatal gambit to overturn the outcome of the election – are irreversibly subservient to the soon-to-be former president. Donald Trump is the isolationist, white-supremacist hill they will die on. <div><br /></div><div>And for a party whose identity was already in turmoil – witness the desperation of leadership that helped make Trump the 2016 Republican nominee in the first place – the GOP’s fealty to Trump could be the sign of a party facing that next worst existential crisis: having no future at all.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mainstream Republicans in Congress have been in lockstep with Trump, only sometimes reluctantly, for the last five years. He’s never been more politically vulnerable than now, and their window of opportunity – to stand up conclusively and decisively, on the behalf of the nation they represent – may never be this wide-open again. It’s time for Republicans in and out of office to take their party back from Donald Trump. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EcWQIkb9EbI/X92nVWXwxkI/AAAAAAAAVjw/JzwlmqMV-S4oYygCRo90LK7kuc-ojlNJwCLcBGAsYHQ/s301/Bobby%2BJindal%252C%2BJanuary%2B2013.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="301" data-original-width="206" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EcWQIkb9EbI/X92nVWXwxkI/AAAAAAAAVjw/JzwlmqMV-S4oYygCRo90LK7kuc-ojlNJwCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Bobby%2BJindal%252C%2BJanuary%2B2013.jpg" /></a></div>What a difference eight years didn’t make. It was in the sobering postmortem of the 2012 presidential election securing Barack Obama a second term, that then-Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal famously warned Republicans against turning into the deeply partisan, weaponized confederacy of dunces it has since become. </div><div><br /></div><div>In remarks to Politico within a few weeks of the 2012 election, and again in comments made at the Republican National Committee Winter Meeting in Charlotte, N.C. in January 2013, Jindal (at that time considered a contender for the 2016 nomination) was spot-on in an analysis of the GOP in 2012, and downright prescient about challenges to the party that were eminently superimposable on the events of 2020: </div><div><br /></div><div>“We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. I’m serious. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and our vision for America in real terms. ... We’ve got to stop insulting the intelligence of voters. We need to trust the smarts of the American people.” </div><div><br /></div><div> “We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal said eight years ago. “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.” </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ <br /><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q37lAZfrGpQ/X94CpwUhgTI/AAAAAAAAVkQ/LrJp4jJuR-AhUm26EEWzBboziZSaaRExQCLcBGAsYHQ/s309/GOP%2Blogo%2Btilted%2Bcopy.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="309" height="183" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q37lAZfrGpQ/X94CpwUhgTI/AAAAAAAAVkQ/LrJp4jJuR-AhUm26EEWzBboziZSaaRExQCLcBGAsYHQ/w200-h183/GOP%2Blogo%2Btilted%2Bcopy.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">I</span>T IS NO secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Simply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work,” he said. “You can’t beat something with nothing. The reality is, we have to be a party of solutions and not just bumper-sticker slogans but real detailed policy solutions.” </div><div><br /></div><div>There was game talk of a reinvention of the Republican brand; other GOP lawmakers paid at least lip service to the idea that the party of Lincoln was overdue for a retrofit. But the intervention never took hold. By 2014, the Republican identity had re-hardened around its more reliable partisan tendencies, as the Obama era began its natural, term-limited decline. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Iz3_07KI4AQ/X94EXEIR1SI/AAAAAAAAVkc/ypOrvwhHVHUlxEK9CHQY6iI9GxxxtAgIQCLcBGAsYHQ/s509/Trump%2Bdescends%252C%2BJune%2B2015%2B%2528C-SPAN%2529.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="509" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Iz3_07KI4AQ/X94EXEIR1SI/AAAAAAAAVkc/ypOrvwhHVHUlxEK9CHQY6iI9GxxxtAgIQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Trump%2Bdescends%252C%2BJune%2B2015%2B%2528C-SPAN%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>By June 2015, the restive Republican spirit was again hungry for empire.
The GOP, sensing an opportunity with the vacuum created by the absence of Obama on the ballot, let a thousand contenders for the nomination bloom. Everything was fair game, and that meant anything could happen. One man believed that, with outsize determination and a belly full of simmering correspondents’-dinner rage.</div><div><br /></div><div>One man believed that on a day in June 2015, when he took an escalator ride into the Stygian underworld of American politics.
And in November 2016, anything <i>did</i> happen: the ascension of Donald Trump, the crown jeweler of complaint, the greatest carnival barker in history, to the presidency of the United States. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OvO1XjvpGp0/X958I1nl3dI/AAAAAAAAVks/egUnM5PTT7Y3iW3VBgI-0JKPY5UEmr6ewCLcBGAsYHQ/s342/loser%2Bpullquote.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="316" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OvO1XjvpGp0/X958I1nl3dI/AAAAAAAAVks/egUnM5PTT7Y3iW3VBgI-0JKPY5UEmr6ewCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/loser%2Bpullquote.jpg" /></a></div>Less than a year later, we’d learn how the Trump mindset would solidify in the rank and file — and how, to borrow the phrase, elections have consequences, the painfully unsettling kind. In October 2017, Jonathan Martin and Jeremy W. Peters of <i>The New York Times</i> reported, “the president’s brand of hard-edge nationalism — with its gut-level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his adopted party, and those uneasy with grievance politics are either giving in or giving up the fight.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Fast forward to now, and not a damn thing’s changed. Or at least not enough. Since then, Trump’s incoherently pugnacious style of rule became deeply out of step with the popular opinion of him as president; the average of his favorable opinion-poll rankings was generally somewhere between 40 and 43 percent; that range has been more or less a statistical fixture of his administration. </div><div><br /></div><div>But even with the bedrock of The Base, polling like that couldn’t get him over the finish line on Election Day 2020. At long last, Trump had to face the consequences of being what he fights against body and soul, every day of his life: A Loser. The presidency of the United States may be the ultimate zero-sum-game event. Someone decidedly wins, someone else just as decidedly loses. The finality of that is something Trump and his noisy acolytes, acting the fool in the streets, are having a really hard time getting their heads around. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ <br /><br /></div><div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">B</span>UT REPUBLICAN lawmakers and those who hope to be don’t have to march off that cliff. We’ve already seen the post-election emergence of relative senatorial pragmatists like Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander. They and some others in the (for now) Republican-led Senate expressed a salutary if ultimately symbolic willingness to recognize Joe Biden as the 46th president. </div><div><br /></div><div>Others have followed suit, including that father of all holdouts, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It was ultimately a pushback against Trump made not out of pique, or even out of purpose, but out of political practicality, an acknowledgement of knowing the difference between a look through the windshield and one through the rear-view mirror. </div><div><br /></div><div>From the perspective of POTUS 45, there will apparently be a lot of time for more of that jousting and parrying, that agreeing to disagree, in the months to come. That’s because the nearly-former president already has his mind set on remaining in the news and media spotlights as much as possible, through the launch of his own conservative media ecosystem a la Fox News ... or by fully following through on freshly-bruited plans to run for the White House in 2024. </div><div><br /></div><div>◊ ◊ ◊ </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5RnEISAMKAY/X96Aak_93RI/AAAAAAAAVk4/bQDkaWGzS6USvXni3DGWSaPV0_NNCCQrACLcBGAsYHQ/s623/Churchill%252C%2BFDR%2Band%2BStalin%252C%2BYalta%2B1945%2B%2528BBC%2529.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="367" data-original-width="623" height="189" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5RnEISAMKAY/X96Aak_93RI/AAAAAAAAVk4/bQDkaWGzS6USvXni3DGWSaPV0_NNCCQrACLcBGAsYHQ/w320-h189/Churchill%252C%2BFDR%2Band%2BStalin%252C%2BYalta%2B1945%2B%2528BBC%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Either way, the former president* has already committed himself to locking down the Republican party as his own personal property – the first successful hostile takeover of an American political party. Either as a media kingmaker or a candidate, Trump freezes the Republican field of presidential contenders in amber for the foreseeable future. Trump to GOP: Thou Shalt Have No Future Except Through Me. And <i>that</i>, that consequence of losing the 2020 election, should properly keep the GOP leadership awake and gnashing teeth for many nights to come. </div><div><br /></div><div>The reason why is obvious: The very, very last thing the Republican party wants or needs after a bruising election in the midst of a ruinous pandemic, a vicious consumer economy, and a corrosive racial climate is the announcement that the man responsible for some of those crippling events wants another chance to finish the hostage crisis he started, resuming his role as captor in chief. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now like at the end of World War II, a postwar world exists, one defined by the cessation of hostilities between belligerents, and the emergence of frictions between former allies. It presents itself as both a crisis and an opportunity. The crisis of the victory of former Obama president Joe Biden is the inescapable nightmare Republicans can’t get away from, something the Trump administration can’t help trying to make as awful as possible. </div><div><br /></div><div>So the need for reinvention, and the work needed to achieve it, falls largely to the Republicans, those everyday people everywhere on the ideological spectrum. Their party — a hollow, sclerotic shell of its former self; a captive of its own xenophobic impulses; a movement lashed to monochromatic identity and outdated demography; a body on the verge of willful irrelevance — needs all the help it can get.<hr /><i>Dual Trumps: Reuters. Image credits: Trump and Melania descend: C-SPAN. Churchill, FDR and Stalin at Yalta, 1945: BBC.</i>
</div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-85814099051144384682020-12-11T19:58:00.006-08:002020-12-11T20:07:04.754-08:00Getting out of line: A growing number of Republicans won’t sing from the Trump hymnal anymore<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Uyl_NfTmtfo/X9Q-rEUuW0I/AAAAAAAAVjI/wl55Be4kY8wBMnHCp4I07GAnDQJ2WJZGgCLcBGAsYHQ/s366/Mitt%2BRomney%252C%2BNovember%2B2020%2B%2528romney.senate.gov%2529.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="279" height="273" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Uyl_NfTmtfo/X9Q-rEUuW0I/AAAAAAAAVjI/wl55Be4kY8wBMnHCp4I07GAnDQJ2WJZGgCLcBGAsYHQ/w217-h273/Mitt%2BRomney%252C%2BNovember%2B2020%2B%2528romney.senate.gov%2529.jpg" width="217" /></a></div></div>It was all going according to plan a year ago. The Republican party would build on its successes, ignore its failures and win again, with a triumphant second term for Donald Trump as president, a second term that would, pretty much by its very existence, signal the triumph of conservative values, and the advance of those values across the country. <div><br /></div><div> Trump would either win the election outright or, failing a victory at the polls where it counts, he’d throw the election results into chaos with a staggering wave of lawsuits and challenges presided over by judges Trump appointed. And if everything went south in the lower courts, why, Trump would just elevate the matter to the House of the Supremes, where three of his own hand-picked Justices would end the unpredictability and — ultimately, in spite of everything — make him the winner of the 2020 election. </div><div><br /></div><div> No one back then war-gamed for the impossible. No one expected the party’s standard-bearer to disintegrate like a timed-release aspirin. No one, or very few, anticipated the worst public-health emergency in a century exploding on these shores like a million wildfires. And while racism is as predictable as the sunrise, no one could have envisioned the 8-minute, 46-second execution of George Perry Floyd, or the national paroxysm of protests in his name and honor and memory. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N0V3ZoxUopc/X9Q_KxReYHI/AAAAAAAAVjQ/QV7AMOhoT9EU_FhL_xHYBUTfibXeKTHBQCLcBGAsYHQ/s234/Daily%2BKos%2Blogo%2B2020%2B%2528Kos%2BMedia%2BLLC%2529.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="46" data-original-width="234" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N0V3ZoxUopc/X9Q_KxReYHI/AAAAAAAAVjQ/QV7AMOhoT9EU_FhL_xHYBUTfibXeKTHBQCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Daily%2BKos%2Blogo%2B2020%2B%2528Kos%2BMedia%2BLLC%2529.jpg" /></a></div>The tragically peculiar blend of calamities we’re trying to survive in 2020 has been unpredictable, to say the least. President Trump, the avatar of unpredictability, faces more of it from the same people most predisposed to support him. This “base” of supporters includes (among others) those amber waves upon waves of GOP voters, judges and politicians who believe in American government, and who place faith in that government above and ahead of the individuals elected to lead it. ... </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/12/3/1999637/-Getting-out-of-line-A-growing-number-of-Republicans-won-t-sing-from-the-Trump-hymnal-anymore#comment_79570399">Read the full piece at Daily Kos</a></i></b>
</div>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-6094251137241071552020-11-03T16:02:00.018-08:002020-11-06T21:34:10.138-08:00Nov. 3, 2020: The moonshot referendum on America<div><div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TtHDBZTlIMQ/X6NChmxu3FI/AAAAAAAAVgo/-AYOg-x_plECf2NrvO9VIXnkXTdyKDyfACLcBGAsYHQ/s333/JFK%2Bat%2BRice%2BUniversity%2BSept%2B12%2B1962%2B%2528NASA%2529.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="230" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TtHDBZTlIMQ/X6NChmxu3FI/AAAAAAAAVgo/-AYOg-x_plECf2NrvO9VIXnkXTdyKDyfACLcBGAsYHQ/w141-h200/JFK%2Bat%2BRice%2BUniversity%2BSept%2B12%2B1962%2B%2528NASA%2529.jpg" width="141" /></a></div>“Elections have consequences.” Those three words, deployed with acid and venom in recent years by loyalists of either Democratic or Republican parties, convey a truism that’s run through the length of our national history, by turns for better and for worse. You can imagine that sentence, or something like it, being said in 1860 by northerners and southerners alike when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency –- each for vastly different reasons. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the phrase itself has a punitive modernity that makes it, more probably, an invention of the last twenty years, some earlier period preceding the high dudgeon of our current politics, the Age of Smashmouth. </div><div><br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xjo1cuT_Cvs/X6NCKCRoeFI/AAAAAAAAVgg/1806eUrOH1EkL04IM8nLVIWEFLprBAf1gCLcBGAsYHQ/s177/Medium%2Blogo%2B2020.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="46" data-original-width="177" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Xjo1cuT_Cvs/X6NCKCRoeFI/AAAAAAAAVgg/1806eUrOH1EkL04IM8nLVIWEFLprBAf1gCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/Medium%2Blogo%2B2020.jpg" /></a></div>For America, one consequence of the 1960 presidential election — the choice of the young, vibrant, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy to be the 35th president of the United States — was a willingness to indulge the nation’s new chief executive in his quixotic expressions of seemingly impossible dreams. Like the one he expressed in a timely, and ultimately timeless speech that began our serious flirtation with space, that final frontier. ... </div><div><br /></div><div> <a href="https://medium.com/the-omnibus/nov-3-2020-the-moonshot-referendum-on-america-cbc8d9bc989a" target="_blank"><b><i>Read the full essay at The Omnibus at Medium</i></b></a></div></div></div><hr /><i>Image credit: JFK: NASA/National Archives (public domain). Medium logo: Copyright 2020 Medium.</i>Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-2457296173486385542020-08-08T19:14:00.001-07:002020-08-08T19:14:18.425-07:00A house of many basements: Biden's ad strategy and why it's working<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">I</span>T'S BEEN more than briefly fashionable to dismiss or distill the current pandemic-driven style of former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign as a war being waged from his basement in Delaware. The Trump 2020 re-elect campaign, denied the chance to go after Biden on traditional campaign turf (the country itself), has doubled down on the Biden-in-the-basement meme, alleging that Biden’s phoning it in, taking shots at President* Donald Trump from the equivalent of a bunker in New England.<br />
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But the cheap shots didn’t take for very long. The basement-bunker myth was wrong, of course: Biden's been on the road for months, in various small-scale campaign events at towns in Iowa and Pennsylvania, and others besides. But the Biden 2020 team took the lemons of a challenge – seeking common ground with a bitterly-divided American people in an election year, amid a raging pandemic – and made some potent political lemonade.<br />
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What may have started as a one-off campaign video has yielded dividends as a memorable, ongoing 21st-century gloss on the fireside chat, one that’s helped make the former Obama vice president a prohibitive favorite in the race for the White House. </div>
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Trump has been flashing around the country, the guest of honor at various sparsely-attended rallies, carpet-bombing supporters with the pomp and panache of the presidency. Biden has countered with a quieter, more measured, more circumspect campaign style, one that dovetails with the pace of American life during COVID-19. Why’s it been working so well? </div>
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<a href="https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-house-of-many-basements-biden-s-media-strategy-and-why-it-s-working"><b><i>Read the full piece at The Swamp</i></b></a><br />
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<i>Image credits: Biden: Jim Bourg/Reuters. The Swamp logo: Copyright 2020 Jerrick Media LLC.</i> </div>
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Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-43408697308333841272020-08-03T21:50:00.003-07:002020-08-08T19:21:16.110-07:00Trump and the boogeyman in the mail<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Mail-in voting has lately emerged as the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">bête noire</em> and whipping boy of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, with the president extolling its vices every chance he gets, in person and in increasingly unhinged, exclamation-point-laden tweets.<br />
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President* Donald Trump has thus connected at least some of his re-election hopes to the wagon of mail-in voter suppression. But a look at opinion polls going back months shows a public less focused on how votes are counted in November and more focused on furthering the trend of opposition to Trump’s re-election. . . .<br />
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<b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/3/1966261/-Trump-and-the-boogeyman-in-the-mail?_=2020-08-03T17:20:20.561-07:00#comment_78148036">Read the full piece at Daily Kos</a></i></b></div>
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<i>Image credits: Mail: Shutterstock. Daily Kos logo: Kos Media LLC.</i><br />
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Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-75831453360382548962020-04-11T00:44:00.003-07:002020-04-11T01:13:20.311-07:00Changes of mind in the cadres of Bernie<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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We <i>knew</i> it was coming, and now that it’s finally here — the start of the general election season — we can enjoy one giant exhale (masks or face coverings in place, of course).<br />
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“It” was the much-expected suspension of the presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, “suspension” the operative word for pulling the plug on a bold, influential campaign. On Wednesday, in a video from Burlington, Vt., the irascible, disciplined Democratic socialist senator ended a bid for the presidency that had early strength and acquired more over time, thanks to the broad popular support of the Bernie or Bust crowd, which Sanders held mostly intact from his 2016 campaign.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B3TuN9XYHo0/XpF7jrQF11I/AAAAAAAAVSU/TO_tcpXicUc0163FI3ZiyeumEvHe1jJDgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Daily%2BKos%2Blogo%2B2020%2B%2528Kos%2BMedia%2BLLC%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="46" data-original-width="234" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B3TuN9XYHo0/XpF7jrQF11I/AAAAAAAAVSU/TO_tcpXicUc0163FI3ZiyeumEvHe1jJDgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Daily%2BKos%2Blogo%2B2020%2B%2528Kos%2BMedia%2BLLC%2529.jpg" /></a>But despite a strong start to the year, the Sanders campaign never gained sufficient traction in the primaries, actually losing ground in terms of actual support, and committing numerous unforced errors, ultimately making Sanders’ 2020 bid more and more quixotic as the year went along. ...<br />
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<b><i><a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/11/1936346/-Changes-of-mind-in-the-cadres-of-Bernie-Sanders-and-Biden-closing-ranks-and-maybe-opening-minds">Read the full piece at Daily Kos</a></i></b><br />
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Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-85518088996685214802020-04-04T18:19:00.000-07:002020-04-04T18:32:44.581-07:00Once upon a time in another world<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The great brake started almost imperceptibly, freezing the world slowly, then suddenly. Its random swiftness swept through as if a death angel passed in silence over the planet, all at once. Before we fully realized what was under way, the agent of a vast deceleration was everywhere, a ubiquitous virus on the air, microns in size but capable of disrupting lifestyles, businesses, economies, governments, lives.<br />
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The tally of the viral specter, case load and body count, grew exponentially. The virus traveled like the weather; the pundits and analysts charted its movements on maps similar to the ones they used for benign local forecasts. Wave after wave was predicted, and those waves arrived, continent by continent. Over time — days stretching to weeks — the natural world and the animal kingdom did what should have been expected. They returned, abiding by an irresistible law: Whenever a displaced species finds the opportunity to return to the wider habitat it was once a part of, that species flows back in.<br />
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Thus liberated by the profound and tantalizing absence around them, coyotes strolled the streets and alleys of San Francisco with impunity. Wild boars wandered the urban centers of Italy; sika deer were discovered in the streets and subway stations of Nara, Japan; monkeys held meetings in a plaza in Thailand. The environment made its own comeback. Satellite images showed the skies over Europe cleared of pollution; the water in the canals of Venice was said to have been completely refreshed, thanks to an absence of the city’s legendary boat traffic.<br />
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The world of humans was something else again ... <br />
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<b><i><a href="https://medium.com/the-omnibus/once-upon-a-time-in-another-world-90f2218415e">Read the full essay at The Omnibus at Medium</a></i></b></div>
Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-83378401946678657572020-03-25T21:37:00.000-07:002020-04-19T15:56:05.546-07:00The trouble with Bernie Sanders<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i><br />
</i> <i>“A movement that wins is a movement that grows.”</i><br />
<i> — Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders campaign manager</i><br />
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For the campaign of Vermont's Democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, it was the worst that could happen: a deadly viral outlier that short-circuits the retail populism of a candidate desperate to catch up to his opponent; a disease that, among other things, demands that an already cerebral aspirant for the White House must campaign at a serious remove from the crowds that have given his presidential bid oxygen since it started in early 2019.<br />
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Sanders and his campaign brain trust recently decamped to Burlington, “Burlington” being the shorthand for the home of Bernie and Jane O’Meara Sanders. I forget the shorthand word they used to explain it — “reassess” or “recalibrate” or some other mechanically therapeutic descriptor — but you know what it means. We <i>all</i> know what it means to a campaign that’s already in trouble.<br />
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With serial primary losses on Super Tuesdays, March 3, 10 and 17, the derailing of the Sanders Inevitability Express accelerated. In breathtakingly swift fashion, his campaign for the Democratic nomination and the presidency has lost the illusion of momentum (maybe the only momentum it really had to begin with) and certainly that of inevitability. <br />
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One after another after another, unforced errors have hobbled the Sanders 2020 campaign, mistakes and blindsides you wouldn’t expect of such a well-oiled campaign operation — one that never completely went dark after 2016 — or such a presumably seasoned presidential contender. Let us count the ways:<br />
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Example: Despite an historically cool relationship with black voters, and an opportunity to improve that, Sanders, the presumptive leader of a multi-racial political movement, chose this year to forego an appearance at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, a site that spiritually resonates for black Americans, and an obligatory walk for any serious presidential candidate seeking black voter support.<br />
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<i>The New York Times</i> explains: “Instead of spending money on ads and ground operations to compete across the South, Mr. Sanders would all but give up on those states and would focus on winning states where he was more popular, like Colorado and Minnesota, which would at least give him some victories to claim.<br />
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“The reason: Mr. Sanders and his advisers and allies knew that black voters would be decisive in those Southern contests, but he had been unable to make significant inroads with them.”<br />
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Those two paragraphs weren’t written in 2020. They were written for <i>The Times</i> by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/politics/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton.html">Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor in April 2016</a>. It should therefore be alarming AF to Team Sanders how superimposable one election misfire has been over another. Those graphs might as well have been written yesterday, presaging another Sanders surrender of the vote-rich lode of African Americans in the South — the most reliable bedrock of the Democratic electorate. <br />
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Bernie Sanders, the champion of campaign transparency, refused to release the full medical records related to his October 2019 heart attack — a decision that screams for Sanders to justify in comparison to Trump’s refusal to release his tax records, which Sanders called for <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/lara-trump-bernie-sanders-fox-news-tax-returns-1397768">last year</a>. “I think we have released a detailed medical report, and I’m comfortable on what we have done,” he told CNN in February, not long after it was revealed that Sanders hid the heart attack from the media for days, and waited until the end of 2019 to release testimonials from three doctors attesting to his overall condition. <br />
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In April 2019, Sanders, friend of the working class, announced his participation in the moneyed class — the 1 percent of Americans he spent months slagging on the campaign trail. It was there in his tax returns for 2018: Sanders and his wife Jane earned $561,293 in adjusted gross income, largely from money from book sales. <br />
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Their income exceeded $1 million in 2016 and 2017, again from book sales. It wouldn’t be so ... unfortunate if Sanders hadn’t spent so much time trashing “billionaires and millionaires” on the stump. It’s just another disconnect, another disjunction of message and messenger. So was his response to a reporter’s observation of his fresh millionaire status — typical Sanders, tone-deaf and headstrong: “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too."<br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">B</span>UT YOU know what? Something else isn’t right and you can see what it is. It’s in his campaign appearances, in his mien at the debates and TV interviews, in the picture of himself that he shows the world. This is a man whose private aspect is at odds, maybe even at war, with his avowed aspirations. <br />
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He’s not incapable of showing upscale emotion. <a href="https://time.com/longform/bernie-sanders-2020/">Anand Giridharadas</a> of Time magazine reported: “Along our 6,000-mile journey, when Sanders came upon a voter in an airport or on a sidewalk and the situation demanded a smile, he gave the smile my 4-year-old gives when he knows that greeting our dinner guests nicely is the price of staying up.”<br />
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For much of the time he’s visible, though, the senator from Vermont doesn’t look like he’s having an especially good time running for president. He often presents to the American people the countenance of a curmudgeon. He looks unhappy, not just situationally unhappy, but foundationally sour and cross, the neighbor always telling people to get off his lawn, even when they’re walking on the sidewalk across the street. <br />
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Look at his face as he moves around in public; observe the tension there, his generally unsmiling demeanor, the tightness in his jaw muscles. More recently, coincident with his rise to frontrunner status, he smiles in some smartly-produced campaign ads. But over the long arc of the campaign, Bernie looks like he swallowed some bad beef at the holiday table and he’s doing all he can to not embarrass his guests by bringing it back up. He looks like he’s holding something in. It looks as if he’s holding something back.<br />
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He looks like he’s trying not to explode. He looks like he’s hiding something. <br />
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There’s another basic kind of withholding going on. In his Time profile of Sanders, Giridharadas writes of a candidate willing to deflect attention, “a candidate who is himself so emotionally inaccessible, reluctant to share more than the barest glimpses of his own history and inner life. “Not me. Us.” is his 2020 campaign slogan, and he means it.”<br />
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And that’s a problem. As egalitarian as that three-word creed seeks to be, it lets Sanders skip out on the personal revelations that have a way of endearing a candidate to an electorate. Coming clean about who and what you are, not as a politician but as a human being with a family and a history, is one of the most nakedly honest decisions you can make in presidential politics.<br />
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Some, like Barack Obama, make that leap in stunning fashion, as anyone who’s read <i>Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance</i> already knows. Sanders, though, has worked hard to play down that very back story that could wed him to more than his Bernie Bro legions. It’s a kind of, uh, social distancing he can ill afford if his campaign plans to soldier on. <br />
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The campaign’s been plagued with other missteps, the latest and most likely terminal of these on March 18. CNN reporter Manu Raju had the audacity to ask Sanders about his likelihood of dropping out of the race for the White House, given the back-to-back-to-back cratering of the campaign's delegate hopes. Sanders, no doubt expecting the question (or tired of answering it before), didn’t hold back. <br />
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“I’m dealing with a fucking global crisis,” Sanders said. “You know, we’re dealing with … Well right now, right now I’m trying to do my best to make sure that we don’t have an economic meltdown and that people don’t die. Is that enough for you to keep me busy for today?”<br />
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Statements like that don’t leave a lot to the imagination. You don’t have to be the most avid student of political science to make sense of a campaign in the midst of imminent collapse. Sanders is clearly navigating his own political meltdown; his frustration with Raju was just a distillation of what’s been brewing, what’s been coming, for weeks.<br />
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Because break down what Sanders said in that blast of rage. <i>I’m</i> dealing with a fucking global crisis. <i>I’m</i> trying to do my best to make sure that we don’t have an economic meltdown. This is Bernie Sanders as the center of his own universe, the source of gravity, in full messianic mode. This is Bernie as a legend in his own mind. Which is consistent with what detractors have been saying about him since 2016.<br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">I</span>N THOSE comments, and others, Sanders exhibits nothing so much as a sense of entitlement, imparts the idea that he’s all but owed the nomination because he’s been after it the longest, he has the best ground game, the most passionate supporters, the most thoroughly articulated rationale for governing, the most money to keep going ... it’s a numbers-centered, metrics-based argument for his being granted the nomination by some kind of acclimation by exhaustion. A lot of the numbers that matter do line up for Sanders. Except those that are the pertinent currency right now. States. Primary victories. Voters. Delegates.<br />
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Ironically, the trouble with Bernie is he’s offering the American electorate too much of what it’s had since 2016. President* Trump has brandished that same sense of entitlement, that same my-way-or-the-highway approach to leadership that Sanders has shown, intentionally or not, since his campaign began. Like Trump, Sanders refuses to grow his church too, going out of his way to pick fights and cultivate enemies, and confuse mainstream America what it is (besides universal health care) he could possibly stand for.<br />
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Sanders’ earnestness can’t be contested; for years he’s been laser-focused on transforming health care and attaining the American presidency, and he’s been generally unwavering in his message and his methods. That single-mindedness is a trait Americans generally admire, and reward. But Sanders faces a singular challenge, one he has no answer for. While much of his defining message is something Americans can buy into, his role as the messenger is at odds with the direction of the country, and the proven inclination of the voters still reckoning with the revolution we got in 2017, when Trump assumed the White House, waging war on competence and civility every day since. <br />
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Sanders’ signature issue resonates with the public, but as an <i>adjunct to what already exists</i> — the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare — rather than its outright replacement. Sanders wants, of course, to make universal health care the law of the land. Achieving that has been his prime directive, both for the 2016 campaign and for this one. Public opinion be damned. <br />
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That could be problematic for the candidate: A <a href="https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/">Kaiser Family Foundation poll</a> from Feb. 21 found that “more Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would prefer voting for a candidate who wants to build on the ACA in order to expand coverage and reduce costs rather than replace the ACA with a national Medicare-for-all plan ... <br />
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“And while partisans are divided on a Medicare-for-all national health plan, there is robust support among Democrats, and even support among four in ten Republicans, for a government-run health plan” — aka the public option.<br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">T</span>HE RISE of former Obama vice president Joe Biden in the polls and (where it counts) in the delegate count hasn’t been a matter of exotic political levitation; there’s no Svengali behind Biden’s building momentum. Big Biden wins on serial Super Tuesdays this month were a matter of voters seeking and validating the familiar, something both grounded and grounding, at a time of relentless, unprecedented upheaval. <br />
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“Especially now with the coronavirus, with everybody terrified that President Trump is lying every minute of the day and they just need some normalcy and safety in their life, Biden is that loyal, comfortable politician,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb, to <a href="https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/489049-biden-is-comfortable-candidate-to-dems-says-party-leader-in-nebraska">The Hill</a>.<br />
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What voters seem to be saying: “You say you want a revolution, Bernie? That’s curious. You don’t even pay proper homage to the revolutionaries who preceded you, at risk of their lives. <i>Oh</i>, except for your propers paid to Fidel Castro, which'll make you a <i>big hit</i> in south Florida. You want Medicare for All, which sounds great, but we shouldn’t have to get rid of Obamacare to do that. You say you want a revolution? Go head. That’s not where it’s at for us right now. No more frickin’ revolt, thanks. We’re full up here. Have been for three years.”<br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">W</span>ITH A THIRD OF the country effectively locked down, the campaign of 2020 is suddenly a low-attention-span event, under accidental quarantine from greater public scrutiny. That shift in the political television landscape — one that’s probably a fact for the foreseeable future — changes the dynamic of the race, and underscores the increasing gravitational pull of the Biden campaign. <br />
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Politics goes on, of course, but it's still there, bubbling under the surface like never before. More than a dozen states have pushed back their primaries to allow for COVID-19-related uncertainty. At least three of those have opted for voting completely by mail. The postponement of several big primaries does put a damper on the combustible, man-the-ramparts urgency of Sanders’ stump-speech message. But at the end of the day, that's not his big challenge. He can’t get past a fact that hobbles his campaign’s future as surely as it’s hampered his campaign’s past:<br />
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For the millions of Americans who’ve already rejected him as the Democratic nominee — and maybe for the millions still to vote in the remaining primaries — the most revolutionary idea in the 2020 campaign is restoring the American democratic experiment to something closer to its original intent. <br />
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For those voters, the biggest revolution they can imagine is America running the way it should, on behalf of all its citizens, according to the Constitution that now and forever defines this nation to the world — more or less the way it was running before Jan. 20, 2017. For them, that’s revolution enough. And Bernie Sanders’ revolution couldn’t improve on that.<br />
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<i>Image credits: Sanders top: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters. Logo: From the Sanders campaign web site. N.Y. Times nameplate: © 2020 The New York Times Company. Sanders #2: via The Hill. Super Tuesday state-by-state tally: Politico. Sanders angry: via The Palmer Report. Sanders voting results chart: Daily Kos. KFF logo: Kaiser Family Foundation. Biden: Reuters/MSNBC/NBC News.</i></div>
Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-15290572911878995062020-03-18T16:07:00.000-07:002020-03-18T17:16:17.747-07:00Ghost-town world: Coronavirus and the new abnormal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Health-care professionals have issued various pronouncements intended to give people the best possible advice to stay healthy in this time of contagion. Among the advisories is the imprecise advice to maintain “social distancing.”<br />
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In general terms, it means to create physical space between you and other people of at least six feet. Specifically, though, it’s meant creating the kind of space that’s forced the closure of any number of public events. <br />
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As COVID-19 rampages around the world, social distancing has meant postponement of the NBA and NHL seasons; a pushback to the start of the Major League Baseball season (mid-May at the earliest); a cancellation of the NCAA’s March Madness college hoops tournament; and a cancellation of MLB spring training games. Formula One canceled the Australian Grand Prix, and the Mormon Church has canceled services worldwide, as have mosques and synagogues.<br />
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For now there are no activities at landmarks, theme parks, casinos, classrooms, and other wide-scale venues; conferences, symposia and other events rescheduled; the networks have suspended live-studio production, rendering late-night a wasteland; K-12 public schools have been closed in at least 33 states; sports from soccer to golf have ended competitions ... and there’s darkness on Broadway — no live theater in the district that defines theater to the world.<br />
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The fact of social distancing is relative. Despite the epidemiological frisson currently surrounding the phrase, the experience behind the phrase is hardly new. ...<br />
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<b><i><a href="https://vocal.media/humans/ghost-town-world-coronavirus-and-the-new-abnormal">Read the full essay at Humans.</a></i></b><br />
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Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-28567747480623621292020-03-06T17:51:00.001-08:002024-02-16T00:56:52.746-08:00Roll away the stone: Joe Biden bounces back<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">T</span>HE PINE BOX was tailored and ready for the 2020 presidential campaign of one Joseph Robinett Biden Jr. The campaign was on a respirator. The undertaker was ready for this new shovel-ready project. The padre was gonna read over it, directly. Everything was all arranged; the events of Super Tuesday would be a grand sendoff into the history books of political laughingstock events. <br />
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Except ... there was a slight problem: Nobody told the guest of honor he was supposed to be dead. <br />
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Thus misinformed about what was supposed to be happening to him, the former vice president wandered into the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries on March 3 and ran the table, rewriting the playbook of how to wage a presidential campaign that makes full and effective use of the vice-presidential brand -- and in the process conducting what is, to this point, the most cost-efficient presidential campaign in American history. <br />
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Biden’s bid for the White House was considered largely finished as recently as Feb. 29. The candidate’s serial lackluster showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and the Nevada caucuses made a Super Tuesday death knell for Obama’s vice president almost inevitable. <br />
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South Carolina, however, just turned out to be another matter entirely. The South Carolina primary, on Saturday, was considered the first real canvass of the national mood by people that looked like the national population. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the state’s revered Democratic congressman, put it all together when he publicly endorsed Biden in a 21st-century speech that resonated in a brilliantly old-school way.<br />
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With that speech, Clyburn wielded the defibrillator paddles that shocked a moribund Biden campaign back to life. <br />
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<br />But Clyburn did more than that. He was the first in the 2020 campaign to wield the collective objectives and aspirations of African Americans on behalf of Biden. What Clyburn tapped into was bigger than South Carolina. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Coming before Super Tuesday, his speech was ready to be deployed to achieve at least a regional objective, and it was. But it had a deeper, wider resonance; its reach for the homiletic rafters of the civil rights era was as inescapable as it was undeniable. <br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">I</span>T READS LIKE music. A dozen words, four measures of three notes each. “I know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us,” he said. With those 12 words, Clyburn certainly set the stage for resetting the race for the Democratic nomination, and possibly relit a fire under the Obama-Clinton coalition of voters that prevailed in 2008 and 2012, and whose younger, more progressive cohort kicked ass in the 2018 midterms. His statement reflected a serious grasp of retail politics at its basic level.<br />
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The questions “Who do you trust?” and “who do you know?” have been asked and answered; they’re foundational to much of how politics works. Clyburn’s statement answered the questions we don’t ask often enough in our elections: “Who knows us, and how well?” “Who gets me, and my life, where I live?”<br />
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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had gone to lengths greater and lesser to yoke Biden and his campaign to rich donors, the billionaire class, and “the establishment” writ large. But that’s not what people took into the voting booths in 14 states and American Samoa on Super Tuesday, March 3. They remembered what Clyburn said. And they mostly remembered the best of the previous 11 years of their lives, and what Joe Biden had to do with those years, and what Joe Biden had to do with the last president they could get their hearts around. <br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;">W</span>HEN THE smoke cleared, Biden had cornered the Lazarus franchise. He was the comeback kid on steroids. Ten out of 14 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — went for Biden over Sanders; former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg won American Samoa. Biden convincingly beat Warren in her home state, an embarrassing defeat.<br />
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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-results/super-tuesday/"> Biden won panoramically</a>, in the west and the north, and sweeping the southern states. Biden won on Super Tuesday with the kind of broad, ecumenical, expansive support that could legitimately form the basis of — what’s Bernie’s favorite word? — a <i>movement</i>.<br />
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Its origins are populist enough. For all the billionaires that Sanders claims are aiding Biden’s campaign, the ones who put him over the top on Super Tuesday were everyday people, ordinary taxpaying citizens who signed on to something they could believe in. Like the people who just dropped $9 million on the Biden campaign.<br />
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And Biden won another victory March 3: a win over the expectations of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/sabbath-gasbags-speak-up.html">Sabbath gasbags</a> and others in the punditburo who equalized money and electoral credibility. Credibility is often its own currency, and maybe the best there is. Biden won on Super Tuesday in states he didn’t even campaign in. No offices. No field people. No ground game. No interns gobbling takeout pizzas and mainlining lattes.<br />
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Biden did it all with next to no money in a highly competitive tranche of crucial primary states. For example: According to <a href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/03/03/super-tuesday-npr-liveblog-updates-analysis">WBUR</a>, Biden only spent about $89,000 in Texas, “compared with more than $3.7 million from Sanders.” <br />
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It was an amazing levitation, but one that wasn’t based on smoke or mirrors or magic. Biden soared over the field because, in a time of vast uncertainty about who and what our leaders are, what they claim to stand for, Biden was that most comfortable thing for voters: a Known Quantity. They knew him. And Joe knew them too.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Image credits: Biden: Reuters/MSNBC/NBC News. Clymer: CBS News.</i></div>
Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3689167642422329115.post-10823173304900682952020-03-03T11:41:00.000-08:002020-03-14T02:56:53.186-07:00Chris Matthews’ short goodbye<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">I</span>T’S A STANDING truism of our lives: Things happen fast after taking forever to happen at all. Chris Matthews knows this firsthand. The longtime student of and reporter on American politics is, lately, an accidental victim of the evolution of our sexual politics, and the way men and women relate to each other — the way we live now. Not all those halcyon years ago.<br />
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Matthews’ political program, <i>Hardball</i>, was for 20 years a program that hard-wired Washington’s cutthroat political culture to the eyes and brains of a wide cable audience, first on CNBC, then later on MSNBC, where the program Matthews hosted was a mainstay of weekday programming. Matthews’ breathless, take-no-prisoners style was a fixture of the program, whose early iterations revealed his healthy bipartisan delight in skewering windbags and those with pre-packaged agendas. <br />
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Matthews’ show was suddenly, unceremoniously canceled on Monday, March 2, on the eve of what was expected to be his characteristically cranky, panoramic analysis of the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries. It was the swiftest fall from grace in recent television history, and its very suddenness was what made it so immediately, palpably surreal. <br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">E</span>VERYTHING on MSNBC programming seemed fine on Monday at 4 pm West Coast time (7 pm ET). Ari Melber had just signed off from his program, <i>The Beat With Ari Melber</i>, handing off to Matthews, as he’d done hundreds of times before. Matthews came on the screen ... and a minute and 50 seconds later, a career was over:<br />
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The whole thing thoroughly unsettled Steve Kornacki, MSNBC’s resident numbers guru, who was hastily thrown in to follow Matthews’ disappearing act right after it happened, with no warning at all:<br />
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The Matthews vanishing was the merciless nature of the digital age made instantly plain. Despite the speed of events, though, there were many signs that we should have seen all of this coming. Coming from a long way off. A story by veteran journalist Lloyd Grove and other reporters, in <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/chris-matthews-msnbc-boss-phil-griffin-went-to-dc-to-plead-with-him-to-quit?ref=scroll"><i>The Daily Beast</i> on Monday</a>, reveals how the <i>Hardball</i> host has been pushing the behavioral envelope for years. <br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">F</span>ROM THE <i>Beast</i>: “According to sources at MSNBC, Kathleen [Matthews, former Washington local news anchor and Chris Matthews’ wife] had communicated concerns over the past several months to network chief Phil Griffin, Chris’s long-ago <i>Hardball</i> executive producer when the show aired on CNBC. She expressed worry that her husband’s on-air controversies would become more frequent, more embarrassing, and more damaging to his legacy.<br />
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“For months, it was known to some inside the network that Kathleen had pushed for her husband, now 74, to have a more limited schedule. Instead, the MSNBC anchor found himself on TV during more major events than he had since the 2016 election cycle. <br />
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“And while acting as a fixture of MSNBC’s Democratic primary coverage, Matthews continually came under fire for on-air comments including likening Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Nevada caucus victory to Nazi Germany overtaking France during World War II, a comment for which Matthews later apologized; and asking Sen. Elizabeth Warren why she would believe a woman over Michael Bloomberg regarding accusations that the ex-mayor told a pregnant employee to “kill” her unborn child.”<br />
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Making matters worse, the Friday before he quit, Matthews managed to mix up the identities of Jaime Harrison, a South Carolina Democrat pursuing Lindsey Graham's seat in the Senate, and Sen. Tim Scott. Both Harrison and Scott are black men.<br />
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But there’s been history more ancient than that, and more problematic. Matthews has been previously taken to task for making inappropriate comments about women. <i>The Daily Beast</i> reported that exposés of Matthews' bad behavior, reported on <i>The Daily Show</i> and in <i>GQ</i>, finally forced the hand of MSNBC brass, which almost certainly gave Matthews a Hobson’s choice scenario: Jump or be pushed. Resign or be fired.<br />
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“After my conversation with MSNBC, I decided tonight will be my last <i>Hardball</i>,” Matthews said Monday. “So let me tell you why. The younger generations are ready to take the reins. We see them in politics, the media, and fighting for their causes. They’re improving the workplace.” Matthews then apologized for his history of making “compliments on a woman’s appearance some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK.”<br />
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Matthews' legacy precedes him. He volunteered for the Peace Corps at the age of 23, serving as a trade adviser in Swaziland. He later worked for House Speaker William P. (Tip) O’Neill, wrote speeches for President Jimmy Carter, and went on to be Washington bureau chief for the <i>San Francisco Examiner. </i>In 1988 he published the book “Hardball: How Politics is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game,” his collected observations of the workings of Washington. He brought the title, and the free-wheeling perspective, to TV in 1997.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cp19I-PcsHY/XmxKuT48JDI/AAAAAAAAVNU/zelww2qwOxY1GOyRwtj1NobXCS0c-0EsACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Chris%2Bpullquote.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="353" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cp19I-PcsHY/XmxKuT48JDI/AAAAAAAAVNU/zelww2qwOxY1GOyRwtj1NobXCS0c-0EsACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Chris%2Bpullquote.jpg" width="319" /></a></div>
<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">B</span>UT ANOTHER legacy precedes him too. Matthews has, over the years of <i>Hardball</i>, revealed a hardly-submerged reverence for the era of John F. Kennedy ascendant, its mores and mystique. His Peace Corps service can fairly be laid to his embrace of JFK’s ask-not social agenda.<br />
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In the repartee with numerous guests in years of TV interviews, he revealed (perhaps by accident) his own emotional subscription to the clubby, towel-snapping, boys-will-be-boys ethos of white males of the Camelot era and after, the denizens of the world of <i>Mad Men</i>, wannabe masters of the universe. But that indelible part of Matthews’ past wouldn’t stay in the past; that’s what led to the events of March 2.<br />
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Setting aside the controversies that lit a fire under his career implosion, Matthews has been a challenge to watch on television for a long, long time. On the air, his relative discomfort with the discourse of television comes through. Example: For some time now, before cutting to a news video, Matthews has moved from looking directly and naturally at the camera to squinting hard at ... <i>something</i> in front of him — in the same shot.<br />
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And when he got people in on-set interviews, watching a guest answer a Chris Matthews question was something you did while holding your breath. You wanted to see how far the poor bastard got into answering before Matthews barged in with another question -- or a statement. What was the over/under? Would the guest make it five seconds in? Ten seconds?<br />
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It was, of course, the sign of his restless, irrepressible curiosity. But keeping interview subjects on tenterhooks was something Matthews always held up as a point of pride in and of itself. It was his red badge of toughness, his way of saying that on <i>Hardball</i>, the usual rhetorical courtesies didn’t apply, even when they desperately needed to, and no one gets away with anything. <br />
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Unless you’re Chris Matthews.<br />
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<span style="float: left; font-size: 60px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 65px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;">W</span>ELL, THAT getting away with things is over. MSNBC leadership is deciding what to do with the hour-long hole in the schedule that Matthews’ exit has created. Joy Reid, former editor at TheGrio, author and a rising network star (host of <i>AM Joy</i>), has been mentioned as a possible replacement. Kornacki has been tapped to fill it in the short term.<br />
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But that hole in the schedule is nothing compared to the coming gaps in the coverage of as important a presidential campaign as we’ve ever witnessed, the gaps of Matthews’ missing perspective. It felt strange, oddly incomplete, watching the Super Tuesday returns without Matthews on air, firing impossible questions at unsuspecting guests, or adding the historical overview that we can’t get enough of — because we don’t get enough of it.<br />
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Until he lands another gig, and he almost certainly will, we’ll miss that ruthless ability to cut to the chase, to reveal a politician’s spin for the bullshit that it often was, and often is. And yeah, we’ll look ruefully at the way he wore his liberal heart on his sleeve, and the way his leg tingled, and that mad bray of a laugh.<br />
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And we’ll lament his absence from the political conversation when we need it most, the absence of a man who was in other ways, willful and accidental, turning himself into a dinosaur before our very eyes.<br />
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<i>Image credits: Matthews: MSNBC. The Daily Beast logo: The Daily Beast Company LLC. </i></div>
Michael E. Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03582722853347797792noreply@blogger.com2