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APR
05
Stormier weather ahead
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
05
ON 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. 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 m
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AUG
15
How Kansas changes everything: Republican overreach as a Democratic force multiplier
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
15
EVERYTHING 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. 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 Pan
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AUG
09
The evolution will be televised
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
09
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. 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. Refreshingly, for those millions of Americans, the antic dysfunctions of a presidency, and the chronology of that dysfunction,
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JUL
13
Mitt Romney dips a toe in The Atlantic
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
13
Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney makes a range of observations and criticisms in his latest essay, “America Is in Denial,” published in The Atlantic 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. 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 a
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JUL
13
Ladies and gentlemen, the Resistant Grays
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
13
It’s better to burn out than it is to rust. — Neil Young 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 Exile on Main Street, before the down-market street-vendor flash of their name on Some Girls, before more recent years when the font didn’t seem to matter, the Stones affixed their name to a classic — Beggars Banquet — 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. 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,
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MAR
31
The 5 Blunders of Vladimir Putin
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
31
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. 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
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MAR
18
Trump, Putin, Ukraine, and the future of the GOP
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
18
THAT 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. 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. 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
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SEP
23
Melvin Van Peebles: Praisesong for the s**t disturber
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
SEP
23
“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.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, Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadassss Song (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.” ... Read the full piece at Medium
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SEP
15
Total recall failure: 4 reasons why Newsom survived
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
SEP
15
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.” 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. More specifically, Newsom beat back this bid to oust him mostly for four reasons ... Read the full report at Daily KosImage credits: Newsom: Still from MSNBC video. Daily Kos logo: Kos Media LLC.
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SEP
11
American Makeover
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
SEP
11
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. 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
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JUL
04
Juneteenth, January 6th and July 4th
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
04
IN 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. 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. 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
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JUN
24
The Zoom where it happens
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
24
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. 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. Fast forward to this minute ... Read the rest at LinkedIn
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JUN
12
Swiss Army knife + AR-15 = A tragic false equivalence
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
12
ON 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 94-page ruling that upends the delicate discourse on guns and gun violence in the nation’s most populous state. “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. “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. ◊ ◊ ◊ Never mind the casual conflation of an everyday too
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JUN
11
Trump, Facebook and the longer goodbye
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
11
AT 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. In a blog post, 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. 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. ◊ ◊ ◊ We all know Trump’s bee
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DEC
19
2020 - The postwar world: An election's truth and consequences
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
DEC
19
THE PREVAILING wisdom in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election is that, by accident and 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. 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.Mainstream Republicans in Congress have been in lockstep with Trump, only sometimes reluctantly, for the las
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DEC
12
Getting out of line: A growing number of Republicans won’t sing from the Trump hymnal anymore
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
DEC
12
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. 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. No one back then war-gamed for the impossible. No one expected the party’s standard-bearer t
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NOV
04
Nov. 3, 2020: The moonshot referendum on America
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
NOV
04
“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. 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. 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 seemingl
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AUG
09
A house of many basements: Biden's ad strategy and why it's working
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
09
IT'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. 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. What may have started as a
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AUG
04
Trump and the boogeyman in the mail
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
AUG
04
Mail-in voting has lately emerged as the bête noire 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. 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. . . . Read the full piece at Daily Kos Image credits: Mail: Shutterstock. Daily Kos logo: Kos Media LLC.
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APR
11
Changes of mind in the cadres of Bernie
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
11
We knew 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). “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. 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 w
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APR
05
Once upon a time in another world
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
05
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. 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
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MAR
26
The trouble with Bernie Sanders
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
26
“A movement that wins is a movement that grows.” — Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders campaign manager THE COVID-19 pandemic made its brutal trajectory into our world and our lives with monstrous irony and equally monstrous bad timing, injecting itself into the 2020 Democratic nomination. 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. 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 — &ldqu
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MAR
18
Ghost-town world: Coronavirus and the new abnormal
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
18
AS WE confront the velocity of the Wuhan novel coronavirus into modern life, there’s been a timed-release shutdown of the events and gathering places that are sites of our intersectionality as fans and worshippers and citizens — as human beings. 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.” 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. 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 hoo
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MAR
07
Roll away the stone: Joe Biden bounces back
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
07
THE 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. Except ... there was a slight problem: Nobody told the guest of honor he was supposed to be dead. 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. ◊ ◊ ◊ Biden’s bid for the White House was considered largely fin
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