[ Posted Wednesday, November 18th, 2020 – 17:15 UTC ]
President Donald Trump is the lamest of lame ducks right now. He is so lost in his fantasy that he somehow didn't lose the election to Joe Biden that he has almost completely stopped even any pretense of doing his job. He rouses himself out of his funk to occasionally fire someone who has annoyed him in some way, but that's about it, really. Otherwise his time is consumed by all the sour grapes served up at his giant pity party.
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[ Posted Tuesday, November 17th, 2020 – 17:27 UTC ]
President Donald Trump has spent the past two weeks tweeting from his basement. If you ignore these tweets, he hasn't done much of anything else at all for that entire period of time. He laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for Veterans Day, and he gave a very halfhearted announcement on the progress of the vaccine trials... and he's also played a lot of golf. So much golf. But you know what? Trump golfing or sulking in the basement is actually a lot better than Trump in a fit of rage, trampling things all over the place like a deranged Godzilla.
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[ Posted Wednesday, November 11th, 2020 – 17:47 UTC ]
Let me be clear from the start -- that headline is not meant to be metaphorical in any way. And I'm not even being figurative or quasi-metaphorical, in the "I get sick to my stomach when I think about politics" sort of way. Also, this title does not refer to the presidential election or what's going on in Washington at all. Sadly enough, that headline is meant to be taken completely literally. Because politics is sickening people across the country, period. On average, the chances of you catching COVID-19 are now clearly greater if you live in a red state than if you live in a blue state.
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[ Posted Monday, November 2nd, 2020 – 18:55 UTC ]
Here we are, the end of a very long and exhausting road. Election Day is tomorrow. But 100 million Americans may have already voted before Tuesday even dawns. Voting in the time of COVID-19 has been just as different as everything else we've been living through.
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[ Posted Thursday, October 29th, 2020 – 16:38 UTC ]
In 1973, baseball legend Yogi Berra uttered the immortal line: "It ain't over 'til it's over." He was speaking about the playoffs, but it's really a universal statement that has particular relevance right now. Because tens of millions of Americans just want the election to be over. Many have wanted this for months. And we've still got five more days to go.
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[ Posted Tuesday, October 27th, 2020 – 16:46 UTC ]
So it has come down to this. Do you want to live in a fantasy world for the next four years, or would you prefer reality? President Donald Trump's White House science office put out a press release today that should really go down in history right next to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner. It lists Trump's accomplishments while in office, and prominently features the statement that Trump is responsible for "ending the COVID-19 pandemic."
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[ Posted Monday, October 26th, 2020 – 18:38 UTC ]
Welcome to our penultimate Electoral Math column. Next Monday, I will post my own final picks for the 2020 presidential election, for better or for worse. And I promise, in the final column, there will be no tossup states at all -- I'll make a prediction even for those I've got to flip a coin to decide.
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[ Posted Thursday, October 22nd, 2020 – 21:48 UTC ]
The second (and final) presidential debate tonight was as different from the first as it could possibly be. That will likely be the biggest takeaway for both the press and the public. President Donald Trump -- for the most part -- actually behaved himself and didn't try to dominate every single minute. Joe Biden debated the way he really wanted to in the first debate. It was, in a word, normal. Which is why this will be the big headline tomorrow, because whenever Trump does anything even halfway normal, it is big news.
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[ Posted Monday, October 19th, 2020 – 18:14 UTC ]
Once again, it is time for our Monday rundown of the state-level polling in the presidential race. Since last week, Donald Trump has returned to the campaign trail in a big way, after his quick recovery from COVID-19. His rallies are (as usual) packed shoulder-to-shoulder with nary a mask in sight, even though we're on the leading edge of the next big wave of infections across the country (indeed, in many of the states Trump is travelling through).
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[ Posted Friday, October 16th, 2020 – 16:56 UTC ]
The second wave of the pandemic now appears to be upon us. Yesterday, over 60,000 new coronavirus cases were reported in the U.S. That number has been heading upward all week, in fact. And it's higher than it has been since the last wave hit (some call the impending wave the third wave, due to the two previous spikes, we should point out). And we are less than three weeks away from the presidential election.
This, more than any other factor, may become the key reason Donald Trump loses. Sure, we're all tired of hearing about the pandemic (and have been for quite some time). But then Trump caught it, which relaunched it back onto center stage in the political arena. Although he quickly recovered, for once Trump could not manage to change the storyline. And now it looks like the fall/winter wave is here. This will mean COVID-19 will, once again, lead most news coverage. For the next week (at the very least), stories will again appear about overwhelmed doctors and hospitals. It will be on everyone's mind.
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