Last year's word of the year for Merriam-Webster was "gaslighting". It is still going full force in this year's election season. Politicians and their parties are working to persuade us
to doubt ourselves…
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That 81-year-old Joe Biden shows intermittent signs of cognitive decline is not in dispute. There's no denying that he has worrying lapses. Leftwing media has touched on such incidents gingerly;… Read More »
Donald Trump was confident that the booming economy for which he takes credit will bring him re-election in November. Then Covid-19 struck. Not only is the economy so suddenly devastated by lockdown, with the unemployed percentage
nearing that of the 1930s Great Depression, but he is undergoing severe criticism for his slow response and blame for the added deaths resulting.
He is pressing… Read More »
It is "the single greatest threat to our constitutional government in our lifetime", Fox's Sean Hannity proclaimed the night before it was released. Once out, others called it "underwhelming". Most of all, it was a monumental distraction from the work that needs to be done by Congress with immigration, the DACA decision and the debt ceiling roaring down the track, and a government that has done nothing to combat Russian interference in our elections.
But the memorandum written by House Intelligence… Read More »
The "tax gap" — the amount of taxes Americans owed but failed to pay — reached almost half a trillion dollars a year for the years 2008 through 2010 — an average annual loss of $458 billion, according to an analysis by the Internal Revenue Service.
That led Republicans in Congress to go… Read More »
Just as Jeb Bush moves to have brother George play a supporting role in his campaign, the Robert 
Redford film "Truth", about the Dan Rather fiasco at "60 Minutes" in 2004, has sent the rightist media into fits.
The "60 Minutes" segment was intended to expose George W. Bush's sketchy service record in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war, but as evidence it featured memos supposedly written by Lt. Bush's commanding officer in 1972, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, that were quickly pronounced frauds. They were clearly produced on typewriters with… Read More »
"It is my responsibility to locate and be assigned to another Reserve forces unit...If I fail to do so I am subject to involuntary order to active duty for up to 24 months."
He had eight months to go to fulfill his service obligation. The Boston Globe, which uncovered this pledge, reported on the same day of September 2004 as Dan Rather's "60 Minutes II" exposé (adjacent story) that Bush then never signed up with… Read More »
If Republicans regain the Senate and increase their majority in the House, that will partly accrue to the dismal ratings of President Obama and his administration. But the other deciding factor is expected to be how many Democrats have been made to give up on voting because of the deliberate attempt to make it difficult.
Republicans have waged a campaign… Read More »
In their rush to take their five-week August vacation (on top of their weeklong 4th of July break), the House finally voted the funds needed for roads, bridges and mass transit but only enough to last through May of next year, when they can look forward to arguing all over again the larger issues of a long-term transportation bill.
The Highway Trust Fund was about to run entirely out of… Read More »
Eleven states have enacted new laws that require a citizen to show a government-issued identification in order to vote in the coming election, and similar laws have been instituted in five other states. On its face, it may seem 
perfectly reasonable to require that we prove who we say we are, and most states are…
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It took a neighborhood killing in Florida to make the American public aware — only somewhat aware, it should be said — of a stealth political process that has been underway for decades across the… Read More »
The Senate had just passed an exception to the filibuster rule, permitting a simple 51-vote majority to increase the debt ceiling. So there was logical surmise that a similar exception would be fitting, not for matters of general policy, but… Read More »
Over the past year we began filling a file of incidents, statements, policies in the Trump ambit that had seeming fascist overtones. Charlottesville, of course, Trump's signaling the Proud Boys… Read More »
Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly had told us, "This president has said from the beginning, I want everything out...I want the American people to know the truth". White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders then told us “the administration will follow the same process and procedure" with the Democratic rebuttal to the controversial memo by Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes.
Alas, neither statement was true. Instead President Trump blocked release of the… Read More »
The weapon was and is a 41-year-old bearded Kansan who towers over 6'2" Donald Trump named Brad Parscale. When interviewed by Lesley Stahl on CBS's "60 Minutes" in early October,
Parscale with the President
some of the techniques he divulged about his work as digital director of the Trump campaign had the seasoned Ms Stahl reacting with "Whoa, wait a minute!" and "You're kidding".
Working out of his house in San Antonio, he says… Read More »
Our earlier suspicion proved true: that Donald Trump's White House orchestrated the plot for Devin Nunes, the House intelligence committee chairman, to discover documents that would prove — although they did nothing of the sort — that former President Obama… Read More »
In the second debate when Hillary said, "It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country", he… Read More »
By guest columnist Al Rodbell
As part of the Donald Trump pivot, his new Campaign Manager, Kellyanne Conway, was interviewed by Chris Mathews introducing the “New kind and gentle” candidate, previously made famous by leading a mob of acolytes that he boasted, without rebuttal, would support him if he killed an innocent stranger on a busy street.
He is right, as leaders of street gangs or organized crime gain power by ruthlessness that is never met with objections, but rather increased fealty to the leader, be it of a gangster mob or a national dictator. Trump won the Republican nomination with this persona, but realized last week that he not could win the national election, where… Read More »
By guest columnist Al Rodbell
When Donald J. Trump made this comment, it was aimed at his largest demographic, those who need constant feeding of their inchoate contempt for this country. Trump is the man who… Read More »
With his hour-and-fifteen minute acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Donald Trump's promises to fix everything that is wrong in the country — and fast — say that he's in the race to the end.… Read More »
By guest columnist Al Rodbell
Trump's recent meeting with hundreds of leaders of the Christian Right was closed to outsiders, but somehow much leaked out, including this covert video that begins with words to the effect of...“There's nothing out there about Hillary’s religion, nothing. I think it will be an extension of Obama. At least with him we know what we were starting with and could be alert”.
Interpretation in plain English: “There is no evidence that Hillary is a Christian, and could well be a Muslim, like we know Obama is. But at least we were on the lookout for him, while Hillary is “passing” as Christian. So she could be anti-Christian like that other deceiver.
Evangelists relate… Read More »
It was the day after the bombing in New York and New Jersey, and the ultimate shoot-out in New Jersey that within 24 hours nabbed and wounded the assumed perpetrator, a naturalized American citizen from an Afghan family.
We all know there will be continued terrorist attacks in the U.S. but Donald Trump believes he is the only clairvoyant. On "Fox and Friends":
"I was criticized for calling it correctly. What I said was exactly correct. I should be a newscaster because I called it before the news. But what I said was exactly correct. Everybody said, 'While he was right he called it too soon'. OK. Give me a break."
He can't believe that we are pampering this "suspect", taking him… Read More »
What are we to make of the Supreme Court's overturning the conviction of Virginia's former governor, Bob McDonnell, at the end of June? Kaine on the Take: August 4: Corporations and lobbying firms gave then-Virginia governor Tim Kaine free rides around the country on private jets and gifts worth more than $160,000 at the same time that their business interests were before the state government. So much for the squeaky clean image the Democrats portray of Hillary Clinton's pick for vice president.
unanimous — 8-0. True, the court ruled on grounds specific to this case, saying that the instructions to the convicting jury were overly vague. True also that the court remanded the…
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Hillary Clinton clearly believes that rules do not apply to her, and "this is precisely the kind of governance" we can expect were she to be elected president, warns a Wall Street Journal editorial.
That was deserved, given her use of a private server for e-mail while secretary of state. In the face of a scathing report from the State Department's inspector general, she would only acknowledge that using a private server was "a mistake". She had refused to hand in that server, holding back 32,000 e-mails she decided were "personal". She had said she would cooperate fully with the investigation, but she and several of her top aides refused to be interviewed by the IG.… Read More »
Always witless, but after Orlando the semantic red herring over the phrase "radical Islam" turned moronic. Since the rise of ISIS and President Obama's pledge two years ago the coming September that, "We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL" (his preferred acronym for ISIS), those on the right have seized on the president's failure to utter those two words alongside 
each other as the reason ISIS still exists. It is clear that the word went out to Republicans in Congress, the Wall Street Journal, and of course Fox News, where this gripe is almost daily program fare, that all should be making the case that Obama is unaware of the threat because he won't…
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Into March, on the second Saturday of multi-state primaries, a New York Times article could still say the Donald Trump phenomenon is "a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite". Their bewilderment all along has…
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How has it come to this?: Two presumed candidates for the presidency of the United States who are both deep in legal problems, the one accused for misdeeds deserving of prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917, or so Republicans would have it, the other awaiting a court date in which he and his company have been accused of swindling a few thousand people. That Hillary Clinton's State Department e-mail has been serially served up in batches, re-awakening the story every few weeks, has made for a multi-course feast for the media, particularly at Fox News. When the story is not blaming Hillary for Benghazi, which has been running at Fox for three and a half years, the "news" hosts… Read More »
By guest columnist Al Rodbell
I watched the entire event with the ten leading candidates, and the other major force on the screen, the "media" in the form of CNBC who… Read More »
This is apparently from 2012, but we'd never seen it. If the approval rating of the Senate is 10%, as he says, it will be near 0% after you've watched. (4:08 minutes).
Bruce Bartlett, one of the early proponents of trickle-down economics with a long history of service to the Republican party, 
working for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, stirred up controversy with a paper published in May that says Fox News creates what others have called "an echo chamber" that lulls viewers and the Republican Party into the "wishful thinking" that its far right views enjoy greater support with the public than is actually the case.
Unlike its liberal counterpart, MSNBC, which has much lower viewer ratings, Fox "became the dominant — and in many cases,… Read More »
Americans want to see Congress and the President "get stuff done", as Obama put it, but the opening sentences of press conferences expressing earnest desires to do so quickly turned to threats.…
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Republicans are savoring the opportunity in the 2014 elections to bludgeon Democrats with the Obamacare debacle. Of the 33 Senate seats in play next year, 21 are currently held by Democrats. Republicans need a shift of only six seats to
Gary Varvel, Indianapolis Star
win majority control, and seven of those Democratically held…
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In a democracy, citizens get to vote and who gets the most votes, wins. That's how it's supposed to work, but that is less and less the case in our heavily compromised “democracy”.
There has always been tampering with the electoral machinery — the practice of reshaping election districts called “gerrymandering” is named for a law signed by governor of Massachusetts back in 1812 — but the last few years have seen concerted campaigns to rig elections and to make voting difficult for targeted groups.
The 2010 census was central to the process. The Constitution… Read More »
