[ Posted Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 – 17:17 UTC ]
Up until now, congressional Democrats have been smart to merely stand on the sidelines and watch Republicans flail on their "repeal and replace Obamacare" efforts. This follows the sound political theory of: "When your opponent is digging his own grave, don't interrupt him." But at some point in the near future, Democrats are going to have to offer up their own better ideas for what to do next on healthcare. There are already many pushing for single-payer or (as Bernie Sanders likes to call it) "Medicare for all." This, however, is quite likely a bridge too far -- even within the Democratic Party. Instead of such a radical change, Democrats would do much better to rally around a more transitional idea that was jettisoned during the drafting of the Obamacare law: the public option.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, June 23rd, 2017 – 17:26 UTC ]
Every so often, we have a certain reaction to a bit of political news. We then fully expect at least a few other political commentators to have the same reaction, only to be surprised when it seems that nobody else read things the way we did. This is precisely where we find ourselves over President Donald Trump's recent tweets, where he supposedly put the issue to rest of whether secret audio recordings were ever made in his White House. Everybody seems to be buying his spin, and nobody questioned the obvious loophole he left himself. Because if you read what he wrote and take it at face value (not reading more into it than he actually says), Trump still has not answered the question of whether such tapes exist or not. Not even close.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, June 16th, 2017 – 17:00 UTC ]
President Donald J. Trump turned 71 years old this week. He held a party and invited all his cabinet members, who were all allowed to sing his praises in a manner one reporter summed up as: "honestly this is like a scene from the Third World." The internet, of course, had a field day afterwards. But it's pretty easy to understand why Trump felt the need to hold a public ass-kissing event to celebrate. After all, pretty much all of his other birthday presents were stinkers.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Tuesday, June 13th, 2017 – 17:08 UTC ]
This is going to be a disappointing column for some, since I'm not really going to get into my thoughts on the testimony Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered up this afternoon to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Before I feel ready to comment on that particular subject, I've got some research into the history of executive privilege to do (and I suspect I am not alone in that, I might add).
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Monday, June 12th, 2017 – 17:11 UTC ]
There are three separate court cases which are making news today, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to take a quick look at all of them, to see the potential impact they might have. The three cases are in very different stages of completion. One was just filed in federal court. One got a just got a ruling from the Ninth Circuit of Appeals. And one is about to be ruled on by the Supreme Court. So let's take them one at a time.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, June 9th, 2017 – 17:20 UTC ]
President Donald Trump and former F.B.I. chief James Comey engaged this week in an extended game of "Liar, liar!" Or, more properly: "Liar!" "No, you're a liar!" Yes, it was "Super Bowl" week in Washington, folks!
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Tuesday, June 6th, 2017 – 17:25 UTC ]
That'd have to be my sum-up of Trump's polling numbers since the last time I looked at them. Trump has lost roughly a point in job approval, and has lowered his own floor to 39 percent from 40 percent. But once the initial slide happened, Trump has had one of the most stable polling periods he's ever seen -- his polls for the past few weeks are almost perfectly flat, with both his job approval number and his job disapproval rating falling within a range of a single point for the whole time. For Trump, that's an achievement.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Monday, June 5th, 2017 – 15:25 UTC ]
Kellyanne Conway is right -- the media obsesses over presidential tweets from Donald Trump. What she fails to understand, though, is that there's a very good reason for this obsession. Trump tweets make news because they are newsworthy. If Trump tweets were bland and boring repetitions of White House policy, pre-vetted by the communications team, then it's likely nobody would pay any attention to them. But they're not. They are, as one interviewer pointed out to Kellyanne this morning, Trump's preferred method of communication to the American public. And what he's got to say makes news because nobody else in the administration can speak for Trump.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, June 2nd, 2017 – 17:45 UTC ]
Yesterday, Donald Trump finished off a two-week stretch of diminishing America's standing in the world by announcing he was pulling out of the historic Paris climate agreement. In Trumpian terms, this means we're all covfefeed now.
Read Complete Article »
[ Posted Friday, May 26th, 2017 – 17:22 UTC ]
President Donald Trump went on a tour of foreign countries this week, and World War III did not erupt. So things could have been worse.
Read Complete Article »
