[ Posted Friday, January 22nd, 2016 – 18:07 UTC ]
Honestly, how often is it that you get to write such a great headline? In a week that also included a Sarah Palin speech that dominated the news cycle (to say nothing of the late-night comic cycle), writing such snarky headlines is just icing on the cake, really. Good times... yes, good times indeed for Democrats watching the horrorshow that is the Republican presidential nomination process.
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[ Posted Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015 – 21:03 UTC ]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
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[ Posted Friday, December 18th, 2015 – 19:24 UTC ]
Welcome to our year-end awards columns!
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[ Posted Wednesday, December 16th, 2015 – 17:56 UTC ]
It's that time of year when Congress actually gets things done, so they don't have to work through the holidays. This is always a powerful incentive, and this year is no different. Paul Ryan actually bargained with Democrats instead of following the hotheads in his party into another government shutdown, which bodes well for the future of the House of Representatives (and America at large). But, as with all big omnibus budget bills, this means all kinds of unrelated issues -- from health care for 9/11 first responders to whether we export oil or not -- are tossed into the giant, must-pass bill. And along with the wave of other single-issue items came some good news for marijuana legal reformers.
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[ Posted Friday, December 11th, 2015 – 17:33 UTC ]
Hillary Clinton is right. Last night, on Seth Meyers's late-night show, Clinton had this to say about Donald Trump's candidacy: "I no longer think he is funny." Earlier in the week, the Huffington Post announced that it was un-banishing Trump from the "Entertainment" section and would now properly cover him under "Politics." Arianna and Hillary are correct -- what started out as a hilarious joke is no longer even the slightest bit funny anymore.
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[ Posted Friday, November 20th, 2015 – 17:58 UTC ]
Republicans, of course, do the whole fear thing very well. Democrats cannot hope to ever stoke the public's fear as effectively as Republicans. This is a well-known fact, but this week it was on display more than usual, because there are still 14 Republicans running for their party's presidential nomination. So what we witnessed was a race to the bottom, as each candidate tried to top the lunacy emanating from all the other campaigns.
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[ Posted Friday, November 13th, 2015 – 18:05 UTC ]
Since it's such an auspicious day, perhaps it's time to have a discussion about the increasingly-real possibility that Donald Trump or Ben Carson could actually become the Republican nominee for president next year. It's a scary, scary thing for most to contemplate, but the punditocracy's inside-the-Beltway strategy of just clapping our hands real hard and hoping that Tinkerbell quietly lies down somewhere to die just doesn't seem to be working. Pretty much every pundit under the sun -- from the hard left to the hard right -- has so far written a column this year predicting Trump's imminent political demise. To date, none of them have proven even slightly true. Trump is now challenged for the lead, but he's still polling at roughly the same level of support that he has pretty much ever since he got in the race. Ben Carson has risen to Trump's level in the polling much more than Trump has fallen back. The "Trump (and now, Carson) is going to fade -- it's inevitable" line of thinking is getting more and more divorced from the polling realities. So perhaps it's time to start thinking the unthinkable: either of these two men could actually become the Grand Old Party's nominee for the highest office in the land.
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[ Posted Wednesday, November 11th, 2015 – 17:41 UTC ]
Last night I wrote down my snap reactions to the fourth Republican debate. Today, rather than looking backwards again, I'm going to instead look forward (both literally and figuratively) to the upcoming Democratic debate which will be held this Saturday night.
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[ Posted Friday, November 6th, 2015 – 17:44 UTC ]
winnow vb -- 1 : to remove (as chaff from grain) by a current of air; also : to free (as grain) from waste in this manner 2 : to get rid of (something unwanted).
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[ Posted Thursday, October 29th, 2015 – 17:08 UTC ]
I haven't done one of these types of column in a while, but figured it was a good time to do so, since I punted on writing yesterday to get interviewed on HuffPost Live and since tomorrow is our annual Hallowe'en column, with a scary nightmare story for both left and right. Because of all this, there's been a lot of political news made this week and I have nowhere else to talk about it all than here.
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