[ Posted Friday, October 21st, 2016 – 17:01 UTC ]
So we had the final presidential debate this week, and Donald Trump went right on being Donald Trump, which should have surprised precisely no one by now. Our subtitle today, of course, refers to the two most amusing (or horrifying, take your pick...) things Trump said during the debate. Since then, both "bad hombres" and "nasty women" are trending online. Hey, when bad hombres and nasty women unite, anything could happen, right?
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[ Posted Wednesday, October 19th, 2016 – 22:10 UTC ]
Tonight was (finally!) the last presidential debate of the 2016 election season. I thought it was a better debate (if less entertaining) than the first two, personally. A lot of actual policy positions were discussed, the candidates interacted with each other without so much of the "everyone's screaming at once" interludes, and the moderator kept the subjects moving along at a good clip. So my overall impression of the final debate was that it was a lot more like a normal presidential debate than the previous two.
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[ Posted Friday, October 7th, 2016 – 17:09 UTC ]
Hoo boy. Every Friday morning, we sit down and review all the news stories from the past week, in preparation for writing this column. After spending a few hours reading and taking notes and copying URLs, the writing begins. But we've learned, over the years, to do a last-minute check on the headlines right before we stop reading the news and start typing. Because every so often, a big bombshell lands that simply cannot be ignored. This is, to put it mildly, one of those times we're glad we checked, because a bombshell just exploded all over the presidential race.
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[ Posted Friday, September 30th, 2016 – 15:57 UTC ]
Our subtitle today is not original, so we've got to start by giving credit where credit is due. David French, a writer for the ultraconservative National Review (and a man once so horrified by Donald Trump's candidacy that he considered running himself), had the funniest metaphor for Trump's performance in Monday's first presidential debate:
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[ Posted Tuesday, September 27th, 2016 – 15:51 UTC ]
As startling as it is to those of us who obsess over politics, last night's presidential debate was actually the first time millions of Americans paid any attention whatsoever to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. For millions, the first debate is the first time they tune in at all, both literally and figuratively. Even more astonishing, most of them haven't made up their minds on which candidate to support, even this late in the race.
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[ Posted Monday, September 26th, 2016 – 22:27 UTC ]
Well, the first presidential debate is a done deal, and as always I like to quickly type out my own personal reactions before reading everyone else's, to give you an opinion uninfluenced by the herd mentality of the rest of the media.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 21st, 2016 – 16:32 UTC ]
As I write that headline, I have to wonder why we all haven't been using the neologistic verb "Donald ducking" by this point in the presidential race. After all, a large part of Donald Trump's campaign has been built on the foundation of him ducking questions and issues that he doesn't want to talk about. He's a master at the art, in fact. Consider just the birther issue -- up until last Friday, Trump's been successfully ducking the issue for the entire campaign. He never answered the basic question of Barack Obama's birthplace, saying quite bluntly that he just didn't want to talk about it. He got away with not talking about it for almost a year and a half. Donald ducked, and it worked.
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[ Posted Friday, September 16th, 2016 – 15:42 UTC ]
The media got played by Donald Trump this morning, once again. Picture Charlie Brown lying flat on his back, wondering why he keeps falling for the old kick-the-football bit. That was cable television, after they had carried -- live -- a full hour of an empty podium (Trump didn't start on time), then a full-on advertisement for Trump's new D.C. hotel, then some surrogates saying how wonderful Trump was. At the very end, Trump uttered the 30 seconds of soundbite the cable channels had been waiting for, and then even though it was billed as a press conference, Trump walked off and refused to answer any questions.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 14th, 2016 – 16:18 UTC ]
There was some rather important economic news yesterday, which could be summed up as "things are getting better." Incomes are rising, unemployment has stayed low, the number of uninsured Americans has now dropped by half (thanks to Obamacare), and all of these things are happening at historic rates. The Great Recession is finally over, in other words.
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[ Posted Tuesday, September 13th, 2016 – 17:06 UTC ]
You could call this whole article an open letter to Lester Holt, I suppose. But it's really directed towards anyone at all in the media, because from what I've seen so far they all are missing the chance to ask Donald Trump a painfully obvious followup question, and instead are following Trump down a rabbit hole of his own making.
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