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Next Tuesday, California voters will go to the polls (unless they've already voted early). In the race for governor, two candidates will emerge from the pack and become the only two choices available to voters on the November general election ballot. And I have to admit, I am personally still undecided as to who I am going to vote for.
Does the emerging Senate "YOLO caucus" now have a new member? For those of you too out-of-touch to know, "YOLO" stands for "You Only Live Once." It is a slogan designed to urge people to do things they maybe normally wouldn't (for whatever reason). But now the term has been applied to a certain group of senators, and that group just might have picked up a new member.
Political wonks everywhere will be closely watching tonight as the Texas Republican primary runoff election returns come in. At stake is who will win the GOP nomination for a Senate seat now held by incumbent John Cornyn. Challenging Cornyn is Ken Paxton, who has now been endorsed by Donald Trump. But no matter which candidate emerges victorious, there's going to be a lot of bad blood left over, heading into the general election, which is going to require an enormous amount of money to be spent defending what should have been a fairly safe Republican seat.
The most startling development in the political world this week was that Republicans in Congress (some of them, at least) seem to be waking up to the fact that Donald Trump's poll numbers are sinking like a stone and that the only thing he cares about is building his palatial ballroom and wreaking vengeance on anyone who annoys him (including plenty of Republicans).
Is this the beginning of a wider break from Trump for Republicans deeply worried about their prospects in the midterm elections? Only time will tell, but it's rather astonishing how fast things seem to be shifting. And this pushback is happening not just on one issue, but on a whole range of them.
Tonight will mark not the passing of a torch, but instead the end of an era. Tonight, the last episode of The Late Show will air. Media historians in the future will probably look back at this as a turning point, signalling the end of the dominance of late-night broadcast television comedians to provide humor and ridicule about current events and the news. For me, this is a sad milestone.
We are now well into the primary election season, so it's time to take a look at the biggest burning question Democrats have at the moment: will they be able to ride a blue wave in November that is big enough to flip control of the U.S. Senate, or is this merely starry-eyed optimism run amok?
Can Congress manage to solve a problem that a huge majority of Americans agree exists -- but also one that people are fiercely divided on the best solution to? Or will the clock run out yet again, leaving us all in the dark?
Yes, those were intentional puns. Because the subject at hand -- once again -- is the changing of time twice a year, from standard to daylight savings and then back again. Almost everybody hates the changes -- that is the part we all agree upon. But what to do about it leaves people almost evenly divided, between those who want standard time year-round and those who prefer permanent daylight time.
This Wednesday, we will hit a political milestone which is rather grim for me to contemplate (please read this as a trigger warning: this is going to be a very dismal column, so please stop reading now if you aren't in the mood for that sort of thing). On May 20th, Donald Trump will have been in office for exactly one-third of his second term. It will mark 16 months from when he was sworn in -- but the grim part is that this means we've still got twice as long as what we've all just been through before his term will finally be over. When you consider what has already happened so far, contemplating another 32 months of it is downright frightening.
We began writing this column series lo these many years ago to help tongue-tied Democrats formulate snappy lines to use when being interviewed on television and/or to use in their campaign ads. These days, however, we have to wonder whether we should just pack it in and not even bother. We say this because Donald Trump keeps providing the best talking points Democrats could ever hope for, serving them up on a weekly basis. And this week's was an absolute doozy.
When a reporter asked Trump if Americans' financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran as soon as possible, Trump responded: "Not even a little bit... I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody."
With less than a month to go before California holds its primary election, it now looks as if the state's Democrats are going to avoid disaster. That is good news for Democratic voters in the state, who outnumber Republican voters by about 3-to-2. But even the fact that we got so close to disaster is going to spur efforts to reform the state's current primary system.