Michigan

Not long ago, I accepted an invitation to attend a gala dinner in Washington, DC, celebrating what Caketoppers.co.uk informs me is the “emerald” anniversary of AnOther magazine. Ten years ago, as an unpaid intern with the same publication, I used to sign up for these things indiscriminately: House Freedom Caucus luncheons “catered” by Chick-fil-A, panels at the Brookings Institution on the debt-to-something-or-other ratio, symposia on the threats to cybersecurity faced by entrepreneurs in suburban Uzbekistan. As long as you showed up and at least pretended to listen (which meant, in practice, taking no more than two cigarette breaks per speaker), you got a free meal and an evening’s worth of drinks in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

Are you a man? Need a job? Well, former labor lawyer and current Michigan congresswoman Hillary Scholten would really rather you didn't apply to be her new senior communications director in DC, according to a job posting obtained by The Spectator.  The job posting stipulates that “our office deeply values staff diversity (both because we recognize we are a better office for it and because we know that it is objectively the right thing to do!)” “We strongly encourage women (and all individuals who do not identify as male), people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, veterans, and members of other underrepresented communities to apply,” the post continues.

In the past three weeks, two small communities in two Dairy Belt states have seen tragedy — and, of course, two very different media reactions. In Oxford, Michigan, Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old student, opened fire with a handgun at his high school on Tuesday. He killed four students and wounded eight and was taken into custody. After a brief search, both of Crumbley’s parents were arrested on manslaughter charges, for purchasing the firearm and gifting it to him. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with twenty-four different felonies including terrorism. Shortly before the shooting, a teacher identified disturbing signals in classroom, including his drawings depicting suicide, mass death, blood and firearms.

Cockburn has always been suspicious of politicians who don't drink. The track record there isn't very good: Hitler, Biden, Trump, Che Guevara, the grand old Duke of York Prince Andrew. Contrast that to history's legions of statesmanlike squifflers, from Winston Churchill to George Washington to Vaclav Havel. Hence why Cockburn is struggling to understand why Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel is under fire for getting a bit tibbly. Nessel, a Democrat, apologized on her Facebook page Wednesday for having had too much to drink at a tailgate party before a college football game. She admitted that she'd been imbibing on an empty stomach, and said she'd later felt sick and had to leave the stadium so as to, as she put it, "prevent me from vomiting on any of my constituents.

Did you hear the news? Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer broke the virus rules! No, it’s not about that time her husband tried to use her position to get their boat in the water earlier over Memorial Day. Or that time Whitmer flew to Florida right before warning the public that traveling to Florida was dangerous because of all the virus variants it could spread. Or that time Whitmer ignored all her own social distancing decrees to join the 'racial reckoning' over George Floyd. Nope, this time Whitmer is in trouble because she met a dozen friends for dinner at a bar in East Lansing. That violated Whitmer’s order to cap dinner groups at a maximum of six people, and her other order that tables be spaced out. Whitmer has trotted out to do the usual fake penance.

To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America's democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what. First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent.

The 2020 election has already kicked up myriad allegations of fraud. From dead people voting in key states to late Biden ballots magically showing up, recounts and the courts will determine fact from fiction. Along with those issues, there were other five outcomes that should cause reasonable people to scratch their heads.First, Colorado. Just a few years ago, Colorado was considered a purple battleground state. Donald Trump even vocalized a belief he could win there in 2020. But this month's results should end Republican dreams of winning statewide top-of-the-tickets races in Colorado for the foreseeable future. As a former Coloradan who ran a congressional campaign and served as a deputy on Sen.

Within the last year, election officials and judges in a few key swing states reduced the Green party’s erstwhile ballot access to write-in only. They likely intended to reduce the Greens’ vote share to the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.Voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might have noticed the unusual absence of the Green party’s presidential ticket from their 2020 ballots. Democrat-controlled courts and Democratic election officials denied Green presidential candidate Howie Hawkins and his VP pick Angela Walker a place on those states’ ballots.

Let’s face it: under the best of circumstances governing is a tricky and difficult task. This is particularly true in a democracy such as ours with its clashing interests, roiling ideological divisions, partisan passions, and a system of government that often places rank amateurs in charge of career civil servants. This is not a recipe for sound decision-making. Perhaps that explains why Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is mandating implicit bias training for all Michigan healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic?Even for experienced politicians genuinely motivated by the common good, 2020 has offered up daunting challenges. The arrival of COVID-19, the teetering instability of our economy, and a ratcheting up of racial divisions would cause a seasoned professional many a sleepless night.

One of the largest obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s re-election is his weakness in every big city in America. Some cities produce such large vote advantages for the Democrats that a Republican simply can’t make up those votes across the rest of the state. That disadvantage is a write off in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago because Trump is guaranteed to lose the deep blue states those cities are in. It will matter, however, in nine battleground states that will decide who wins the 2020 election. Specifically, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the vote totals in the big cities and counties could make it nearly impossible to win those states in the suburban and rural areas.

Despite telling a Michigan auto worker to his face that he was ‘full of shit’ about gun rights and lampooning some weapon called an AR-14 (which is an assault rifle used by fake country the Republic of Surea and not the beloved, American semi-automatic sporting rifle, the AR-15) earlier Tuesday while campaigning, Joe Biden soared ahead in the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders in states Sanders swept from under Hillary Clinton in 2016. Michigan, and Biden’s victory there, is perhaps the only interesting primary story we'll see this election cycle and reveals more about the 2016 election than it does 2020.