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With the third Democratic presidential nomination debate looming, it's time once again to check the polls and see how the field is doing. This week's debate will be hosted by ABC, so we'll all get a chance to see what sorts of questions they'll ask, in the first debate that will feature all the qualified candidates on one stage for only one night.
On yesterday's Sunday morning political shows, you might not have even realized it was Labor Day weekend. There was a big hurricane to cover, and yet another shooting to argue about. What with all of that going on, Labor Day was barely mentioned, except on one network. Much to my surprise, Fox News Sunday was the only show to have an actual Union leader on as a guest. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, spoke on all sorts of topics near and dear to Labor's heart: the trade war with China, the plight of farmers who are paying the price, the minimum wage, health insurance, and the politics surrounding all of them.
You know things are getting bad in Trumpland when Our Dear Leader is openly attacking Fox News for not being servile enough.
In a series of angry tweets, Trump this week called Fox News "HOPELESS & CLUELESS" and ended his rant with:
The great fear of those who did not support Donald Trump's election in 2016 was that if America hit a crisis point -- a virtual certainty, over a span of four years -- Trump would prove to be dangerously unstable and not know how to deal with it. The consequences could be alarming, as Ted Cruz joked about on the campaign trail at the time:
In today's episode of "Irony Is Dead," we have a president who not only just committed the same sin he is accusing another of, but who then went on to flirt openly -- twice! -- with the concept that he should be deified.
Sigh. Just another day in Trumpworld....
The mainstream media does a good job on some things, I'd be the first to admit. But admitting they were wrong is simply not one of them.
Case in point is Elizabeth Warren's DNA test. Back when she revealed the results of the test, the inside-the-Beltway punditocracy jumped to a rather overblown conclusion: Warren's DNA test had been such a monumental and fundamental error that her campaign for the presidency was over before it began. Warren's chances were completely written off by just about every pundit banging on a keyboard. She was toast, they all told each other at their cocktail parties, and they shared this conventional wisdom with their readers and viewers, confident that it was an accurate read of the situation.
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Trump, for some strange reason, now wants to try to buy Greenland again. The Washington Post later followed up on the story:
The 2020 Democratic presidential field shrunk today, as John Hickenlooper dropped out of the race. He becomes the fourth such candidate to do so (after Richard Ojeda, Eric Swalwell, and Mike Gravel), but even with four gone there are still a whopping 23 candidates left in the running.
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Will anything actually change this time around? Will these mass shootings finally spur the politicians to act, when all the others didn't? While it's easy to be pessimistic, since it is rare indeed that anything happens after such tragedies, perhaps this time is different. We couldn't say why this time seems to have had more of an impact than the other 250 times it has happened this year, but so far it has. Perhaps it was the fact that there were multiple mass shootings in a single day or perhaps it was the high body count or perhaps it was the El Paso gunman's obvious racist motivation, but for whatever reason this time could be different.