[ Posted Friday, March 18th, 2016 – 17:00 UTC ]
That's a pretty ambitious subtitle, but we're not going to get to the deconstruction project until the talking points, we should warn everyone up front. And we could never hope to deconstruct all of the GOP's absurdities in one column, so we'll be focusing just on their all-over-the-map reasoning on why they're not going to do their constitutional jobs in the Senate on President Obama's Supreme Court nomination. So we'll have all that to look forward to. For now, let's quickly review the week just to see where things stand.
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[ Posted Thursday, March 17th, 2016 – 13:22 UTC ]
George Orwell would be proud of Senate Republicans. Or maybe he wouldn't be "proud," but he certainly wouldn't be surprised. This is because he coined the word "doublethink," which is precisely what these Republicans are now revealing to the world. In fact, the Republican position is fast becoming "triplethink," an even more jaw-dropping feat of mental contortion.
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[ Posted Friday, March 11th, 2016 – 17:58 UTC ]
Another week of presidential primary season has slouched by, which means we personally have been watching way too many debates and staying up way too late watching election results come in, once again. Well, actually, that last one was really just a taunt, since living on the Left Coast means we don't have to stay up nearly as late to find out what happened in Hawai'i as everyone to our east. Heh. Every once in a while, being three hours behind works to our advantage!
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[ Posted Friday, March 4th, 2016 – 17:09 UTC ]
It's been a wild and crazy week -- so much so, in fact, that we're going to start with a quote we never thought would become appropriate to use in a column about politics. It's from the movie Taken, where Liam Neeson's character utters the classic line: "Now's not the time for dick-measuring."
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[ Posted Friday, February 26th, 2016 – 18:23 UTC ]
That title, of course, refers to the most recent Republican debate, where in a fit of frustration the caption writers at CNN just gave up and ran "Unintelligible yelling" as the caption. Yep, that about sums it up, doesn't it?
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[ Posted Friday, February 19th, 2016 – 19:35 UTC ]
It's not often during a presidential election season that the campaigns get shoved aside in the political universe because something bigger happened, but that is what took place last week with the unexpected death of sitting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The implications for the future of America run deep, which is why it has already become a monumental and historical political fight.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 16th, 2016 – 17:34 UTC ]
Because the death of Supreme Court Justice Scalia is such a monumental political event, I'm going to spend a second day speculating about how the nomination process is going to play out. In specific, there are two last-minute options that might get a lot of scrutiny in the coming months.
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[ Posted Monday, February 15th, 2016 – 18:16 UTC ]
With the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the November election may decide the fate of all three branches of the United States government. That's a pretty unique situation, and it may boost turnout on both sides of the aisle. In most presidential elections, there's a wonky argument to be made about Supreme Court picks, but it's not usually so front-and-center with most of the voting public. Hardcore partisans tend to care deeply about this kind of thing, but the average voter usually doesn't think about it all that much in the voting booth. This year, things will obviously be different.
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[ Posted Friday, February 12th, 2016 – 18:15 UTC ]
For those readers who weren't alive (or old enough) to experience the 1960s, this week we had somewhat of a history lesson, packaged as a Democratic debate. Now, part of why this happened is that the Democratic presidential campaign has entered into a "convince the minority voters" phase, since the upcoming two states to vote have a lot of Latino (Nevada) and African-American (South Carolina) voters. So there was quite a bit of attention spent on the Civil Rights era, which will continue right up to Super Tuesday, at the very least. We keep waiting for Bernie Sanders (or a moderator, for that matter) to bring up the term "Goldwater Girl" in a Hillary Clinton question, and last night would have been a dandy opportunity. But PBS held a much more "polite" debate, meaning lots of softball questions and ignoring any unseemly discomfort for the candidates (at least, for the most part).
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016 – 17:46 UTC ]
Maybe I'm just loopy from staying up late to watch the Iowa returns trickle in, but this morning I had a pretty radical idea, after reading a statistic that several pundits pointed out in their post-caucus articles. Jeb Bush apparently spent $14 million in Iowa to receive a little over 5,200 votes. According to many pundits today, that works out to roughly $2,800 spent per actual vote (it's actually under $2,700 when you run the numbers, but whatever). Which caused my epiphany -- why not just hand that cash over to the voters themselves, and eliminate all the middlemen?
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