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Articles written by Bob Franken


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  • Photo Ops

    Bob Franken|Nov 10, 2021

    New T-shirt slogan for Democratic members of Congress as President Joe Biden headed out for the G-20 and U.N. climate change summits: “My Grandpa Joe went to Europe, and all I got was this lousy framework.” Last week, when Biden flew off to conquer the economic, climate and pandemic worlds, he left Congress behind to fill in the blanks of his own domestic economic social program. Now, with a price of $1.75 trillion (that’s with a “T”!), it can hardly be called bare bones. But it had already been stripped from $3.5 trillion by abandonin...

  • Human Cicadas

    Bob Franken|Jun 2, 2021

    Think of us as cicadas, the insects you’ve heard about ad nauseam, that live underground for 17 years and then surface to get it on. Well, we humans in the U.S. have sheltered in place for 17 months, give or take, tucked away from the ravages of COVID. And now we are about to find out how bawdy our bodies have become. Now millions of hibernating Americans will emerge, courtesy of the vaccine, to discover how the world has changed. The absence of masks — prima facie evidence of a return to “normal” -- might reveal a metamorphosed society...

  • SLAPP Schtick

    Bob Franken|Nov 11, 2020

    Through his entire life, Donald Trump has been a SLAPP master. What is SLAPP, you ask? Good question. It stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” For our purposes, it means frivolous legal action, usually by someone with deep pockets, designed to use the court system to intimidate someone else who doesn’t have deep pockets. SLAPPs are against the law in 30 states and D.C. But how does one prove that the litigation crosses the line? The misuse of the legal system is one of the sleaziest tactics available to lawyers and their...