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Tactics v. Strategy, an ongoing series

So… who ever thought The Cossacks Work for the Czar would become a literal trope? If you are keeping score at home, and really should be, the skullduggery looks like this. A campaign received election assistance from a foreign government, discussed potential policy changes as recompense for the successful assistance [ON TELEPHONE CALLS THAT WERE MONITORED], publicly complimented and assured the leader of the same foreign government, and blames enemies and the media (Venn diagram available) for existence of, as well as attempts to call out, this treason.
Not unrelated, continued efforts in the only actual work the administration is currently pursuing consists entirely of working the refs:

While the administration is battling a large swath of the media, the fight with CNN has special intrigue because its parent company has a massive piece of business awaiting government approval: a proposed $85.4 billion sale to AT&T Inc. Messrs. Kushner and Ginsberg, who have been friends for a decade and whose discussion covered a variety of issues including Israel and the economy, didn’t discuss the merger in their recent meeting, said the people familiar with the matter.

If you know where to jump in here, please do. In the trumped up [ugh] dispute with CNN, its president’s relationship to the reality show that launched this whole fiasco is only mentioned in passing. But there it is.
Image: Painting by Ilya Repin, The Zaparozhe Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan

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See It Now

First of all Happy New Year and apologies for going blank for a while. We were hacked! And I’m not naming Russians names, but THANK YOU to someone special for getting this thing back up and running.
So… when the FCC gave licenses to stations to broadcast advertisements beginning in July 1941, they negotiated public service programming commitments as a requirement for a license. These were initially 15-minute current events recaps. But when Pearl Harbor was bombed later that year, the national emergency gave way to extensive special reporting that led to everything form newsreel theatre to interview and expose shows – John Cameron Swayze and Camel News Caravan to, eventually Edward R. Murrow himself and See It Now, the first program with live simultaneous transmission from coast to coast.
So the public affairs arena became profitable and something happened to it. We can connect other phenomena, and we should (the advent of Pop art), but all this happened in a way that seemed positive, fortuitous and in many ways divine. But we weren’t nearly savvy enough to keep the news boring enough to keep ourselves informed long enough to figure how we should treat these new information delivery systems that were so engrossing we would just sit down and watch… anything.
Now they have become useless for informing us – but they didn’t start out that way! The diminution has been deliberate, but informing people could be a viable business model! But, and this is serious, the quarterly profit expectations will have to be vastly curtailed. And this is only part of the problem. But let’s begin.

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