FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: RAY OF LIGHT EDITION.

Heard this in a restaurant -- you remember this?
I don’t and I don’t know how I missed it.

I missed ‘Round-The-Horn last week, and I’ll let you know in advance that this one isn’t going to be an all-timer. But like Groucho says in one of my favorite bits from Animal Crackers, they can’t all be good, folks,  you've got to expect that once in a while.

But the news is good (sorta) even if I’m not! On Tuesday the Republicans got slapped around, hard enough to strongly suggest a trend beyond the electoral. The Democratic Virginia Governor and legislature margins beat the spread; ditto in New Jersey and points west. Voters just piled on the repudiation. One of my favorite accounts is Popular Information’s “Six election results that didn’t make the headlines,” which tells stories like… 

In Bucks County — Pennsylvania’s largest swing county, which Trump narrowly won in 2024 — Democrat Danny Ceisler was elected county sheriff after the Republican incumbent signed a deal to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year…

For the first time in 13 years, Democrats in Mississippi have broken up a GOP supermajority in the state Senate…

Etc. Apart from the political power shifts, the wipeout had the effect of forcing the Prestige Press to relent for a few minutes from their usual Dems in Disarray routine. The press lords have been talking about Trump and his Republicans ass-lickers as if they were invulnerable, even as polls show general violent disapproval of their misgovernance. A lot of what people call “doomerism” is really the effect of the media’s failure to acknowledge the reality we all observe, like Trump’s lunatic economic policy driving up prices and throwing small businesses into chaos while his rich asshole friends prosper.  Hell, they don’t even seem to notice his swift, steep mental decline, even as they point cameras and microphones at it. No wonder a lot of people came to think resistance was futile! But the election broke the spell. 

Of course the big news is Mamdani getting elected Mayor of New York despite the unified opposition of the Prestige Press -- or maybe in part due to it, because his victory was a massive refutation of several kinds of stand-pat bullshit. Cuomo’s ham-handed campaign, and the refusal of many major New York Democrats to endorse him -- and Cuomo’s attempt to threaten the city with Trump’s wrath unless they voted for him -- really hit every New Yorker’s fuck-you button. And I’m guessing the unusually literate New York electorate also noticed the press’ hard-on for Mamdani and didn’t like that either. No wonder he got a majority! 

And in honor of that great victory, this week’s two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies are on that theme: First, the election-night summary, and second, an add-on about the continuing self-embarrassment of his enemies in Pundit- and Poobah-land. Enjoy!