Welcome to the "Dog Days" of summer, at the height of the political Silly Season. This year, one dog did indeed have his day in August, as 7-year-old "Duke" just won a rather bizarre election to become mayor of Cormorant, Minnesota. The strangest thing (to us) was that the "12 people in the village each paid $1 to cast a vote." Um, didn't we make poll taxes illegal quite a while back? The job (and the election) are assumably only "ceremonial" (at least we hope so), but still "Dog Elected Mayor," as a headline, is right up there with "Man Bites Dog." As for Duke's mayoralty, well, it's a "Ruff!" job but someone's got to do it, we suppose. So to speak (or roll over, or shake... good boy!)

In other news, dumping a bucket of ice water over your head is, apparently, now no longer reserved for winning football coaches, and has instead become an activity for the whole family to enjoy. Or something.

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Well, it looks like this time around, the rumors turned out to be true. David Gregory is leaving his hosting gig on Meet The Press, and will be replaced by Chuck Todd. Perhaps NBC has some sort of "only people with two first names can host" rule, or something. By this rule, it seems like Andrea Mitchell might have qualified, but Rachel Maddow would have had to have been named something like "Rachel Margaret" to really have had a shot at it.

Ahem. Sorry, that was a little frivolous, wasn't it? I apologize, but it's hard not to be just a tiny bit giddy about the news, since I've been calling on NBC to get rid of David Gregory as host for quite a while now (I've even previously devoted two entire articles to the subject). I explain my reasoning in the first of these (entitled "Please Demote David Gregory, NBC") thusly:

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President Obama is about to walk a political tightrope, on immigration reform. We know this because the White House has been hinting for weeks that Obama will be making an announcement outlining a big policy change. Obama himself will be fulfilling a promise he made earlier this year -- that if Congress couldn't manage to act before the August break, then he would. This is going to be a risky action for Obama to take, for many reasons (hence the tightrope metaphor). How it all plays out is anyone's guess, at this point.

If the White House leaks are to be believed, what the president is contemplating is deferring deportation for up to five million people. If true, this will be a significant shift in policy which will change the lives of almost half of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States.

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I realize that to call this column "premature" would indeed even be an understatement. But you'll have to forgive me, since it's one of those lazy summer days where all of Washington is off on vacation (President Obama is taking two weeks at the beach, and Congress is taking the entire freakin' month off, as usual). So it seems like a good time for some unadulterated speculation of the sheerest sort. And I'm not even going to get drawn in to all the 2016 election speculation today. I'm going to skip over it all and just jump forward to January, 2017, as we all watch the first woman inaugurated to the presidency.

OK, I do realize that a whole bunch of things might happen which could preclude this event from taking place. Hillary Clinton might not even run. A Democrat could beat her in the primaries (it's happened before...). A Republican candidate could beat her in the general election. All sorts of possibilities exist, to be sure. But just for the sake of this article, I'm going to assume nothing derails the Hillary Express, and she not only clears the Democratic field but also posts an impressive landslide in the Electoral College (over whatever hapless Republican gets the nomination).

The question I wish to explore, having posited all of that, is what kind of president Hillary Clinton would turn out to be? More to the point, how would she be different than her Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama? Now, before anyone accuses me of Hillary-bashing (or possibly even misogyny), I do think that the difference between President Hillary Clinton and any Republican who might run against her are so profoundly obvious that they don't even bear mentioning for the purposes of this column. The two parties are widely divided on almost every issue before the country, and needless to say the Republican agenda speaks for itself. So Hillary Clinton's election would be a victory against that agenda, and I would doubtlessly cheer such a victory in relief that we won't have four years of (shudder) President Cruz or President Paul -- or any other Republican. Just to be clear, up front. But the question still remains: how would Hillary be different than Barack?

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American aircraft are once again waging war over the skies of Iraq. President Obama, as many have pointed out, is now the fourth United States president in a row to order some form of military offensive in Iraq. As always, plenty of critics immediately popped up to loudly explain what the president was doing wrong. The usual characters on the right demanded a much more intensive military action, the ones on the left warned darkly about slippery slopes and possible blowback, and the American people seemed to heave a sigh of resignation, in a "here we go again" moment.

One big complaint about Obama's action (or lack thereof) was that it failed to fit into some unifying overall Middle East strategy. This can be summed up in the form of a question: "What is the Obama Doctrine?" Where is the logical, rational explanation of what American stands for in this volatile region of the world? Why can't Obama just go on television and soothe the nerves of the country by putting it all into some sort of comforting narrative?

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We've got a lot to cover today (as that headline should evince), but before we begin examining the anniversaries, elections, and politics of the week, I'd like to begin instead by promoting a video.

Yes, this is unusual for me, since I normally favor the written word above multimedia showiness, but this is a noteworthy video of a very special song. The story of the Polish band Taraka, and how their song "Give Ukraine A Helping Hand" became an unofficial anthem of the Ukrainian people's revolution earlier this year (which ran in my Wednesday column, as narrated by the band's manager and producer) is an incredibly heartwarming one, which is why I wanted to draw attention to it here before getting on with the usual weekly snark-fest. The video which accompanies the English version of the song is powerful, and the song itself sends chills down the spine. I urge everyone to take three minutes and give it a listen. You won't easily forget it.

My friends are falling, their memories are always with me
Darkness surrounds us, the stars above us are still clear,
Stand by me, your hopes and dreams will give me courage.
Ukraine is calling, so tell me will you care to hear?

Hear our voices in solitude they sorrow,
In our voices the promise of tomorrow
We made our choices, now bow our heads to pray
As a river, we'll always find our way.

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There's been a shakeup in the Montana Senate race. John Walsh, who was earlier appointed to the Senate (when Max Baucus left to become ambassador to China), has now announced he will be removing his name from the ballot. This leaves the Democratic nomination empty.

Walsh had been under fire for over a week, since it was revealed that he plagiarized significant amounts of his final paper to get a master's degree from the Army War College. His initial response was weak, as he attempted to use post-traumatic stress disorder as an excuse for his lapse in ethics. This did not go over well with veterans, to put it mildly. After ducking the press for days and taking a personal day off, today Walsh did the right thing and removed his name from the ballot (just beating a deadline to do so), putting party loyalty above personal ambition.

This, however, leaves the Democratic ballot slot empty, with very little time to nominate a replacement. This nomination will not be by primary election or caucus (Montana's has already happened), but by the old "smoke-filled back rooms" method (which, even in Montana, are probably smoke-free, these days). The party itself will name a replacement, after it has a convention of state party leaders. In other words, it'll work exactly the way those who champion getting rid of the Seventeenth Amendment would like it to.

There is one obvious choice the party bigwigs could make: draft Brian Schweitzer!

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This is a story of a song. Revolutions are often fertile breeding grounds for good music, and the song this story is about was at the heart of the Ukrainian Revolution (or "Euromaidan") earlier this year. It's easy to forget now, but the current situation in the Ukraine was preceded by an uprising of the Ukrainian people in Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in the bitter cold of last winter. This popular uprising started in November of last year, but it really exploded into revolution this February.

The song is called "Podaj Reke Ukrainie" ("Give Ukraine A Helping Hand"), and was created by the band Taraka. It became an unofficial anthem of the Ukrainian uprising. You can listen to the original Polish version sung by the band's leader Karol Kus, but to me it's this version in the English language (from YouTube) which is not only revolutionary and inspiring, but downright transcendentally haunting.

Take three minutes and listen to it yourself -- it's almost impossible not to be moved by the experience (the video clips are expertly edited, as well).

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Another bad month

President Obama had another bad month in the polls in July, although it wasn't as sharp a downturn as he experienced in June. That, and "he managed not to set any all-time or daily low points during the month" is about all that can be positively said. Without further ado, let's get to the new chart:

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

July, 2014

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It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Republicans were so confident they had devised a winning 2014 campaign strategy that they went ahead and just admitted what it was going to be, almost a year out. As 2013 ended and 2014 began, Republicans weren't shy about letting everyone know that the midterm contest was going to be a single-issue election campaign for them, and that that single issue was going to be the abject failure of Obamacare. Republicans in the House were adamant that nothing else should detract from this single-minded obsession, which (in layman's terms) equated to the House doing absolutely nothing on all the other issues on its agenda. No immigration bill would be voted upon, they said, because doing so would just take attention away from the white-hot focus on Obamacare.

That was then, this is now. Back then, the Obamacare website was still struggling and Republicans were absolutely confident that at least one of their scare stories (predicting Obamacare woe and doom among the public) would prove to be true. Disaster was assured, they all assured themselves. It was downright inevitable. They had told themselves Obamacare was doomed so many times that they all fully believed it. They were convinced that "repeal this monster" would propel them to victory in November, and, further, that this is all that it would take -- any other issue would only serve to distract the public's anti-Obamacare rage, to their detriment.

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